Memory and History in the Works of Michael Ondaatje :: Biography Biographies Essays

Memory and History in the Works of Michael Ondaatje In the Canadian social context, the issue of identity can be a fraught one, and the question of what it means to be Canadian is notoriously sticky, particularly given the wide variety of social and cultural backgrounds claimed by Canadians and the heterogeneity of their own experiences. This paper deals with the ways in which the Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje works with issues of understanding and accessing memories and histories outside of one’s personal lived experience. Ondaatje’s The English Patient opens with an epigraph culled from the minutes of a Geographical Society meeting in London in the early nineteen-forties. It reads: â€Å"Most of you, I am sure, remember the tragic circumstances of the death of Geoffrey Clifton at Gilf Kebir, followed later by the disappearance of his wife, Katherine Clifton, which took place during the 1939 desert expedition in search of Zerzura. â€Å"I cannot begin this meeting tonight without referring very sympathetically to those tragic occurrences. ‘The lecture this evening†¦Ã¢â‚¬  The passage introduces a number of key themes in the text, and is worth dealing with at some length. The first issue I want to examine is the opening line. Memory is arguably the most important issue at play in this novel, and its positioning here draws attention to its recurring significance throughout the text. The context of its usage is of particular interest. A later passage notes the attitude of disinterested objectivity, of scientific detachment, that pervades the lectures’ setting, and the uneasiness of the speakers as they struggle to readjust to the urban and urbane environment. ‘Someone will introduce the talk’, it notes, ‘and someone will give thanks †¦ [t]he years of preparation and research and fund-raising are never mentioned in these oak rooms †¦ losses in extreme heat or windstorm are announced with minimal eulogy. All human and financial behaviour lies on the far side of the issue being discussed — which is the earthâ€℠¢s surface and its â€Å"interesting geographical problems†Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ (134). The tension between the impersonal detachment of the lecture’s atmosphere and the terminology in the epigraph is one that operates through much of Ondaatje’s work. That tension is in the text that holds together two opposing forces — personal, lived memory, and cultural memory. Susan Sontag, in her recent book Regarding the Pain of Others, makes the somewhat contentious claim that ‘there is no such thing as collective memory †¦ all memory is individual, unreproducible — it dies with each person.