In his Michael Ondaatje’s “Well-Told Lie”, Matthew Bolton disagrees with critics like Mukherjee who labels Ondaatje as “race blindness” because he believes that we can’t accuse Ondaatje of making a sacrifice of the authenticity by the usage of a creative form of narration—memory. In other words, there’s no clear boundary between memory and history. The memoir, usually treated as subjective and emotional, is rarely associated with the “real history”, which is always tagged as objective and accurate. Almost everyone who reads a memoir or autobiography has already adopted a stance that the boundary between the personal account and the real history is clear and indisputable; writers who make a connection between them will definitely receive accusations.

Ondaatje, mixing up the limitation mentioned above, creates a new way to accomplish his Running In The Family. In this “historiographic metafiction”, Ondaatje narrates his return to Ceylon to discover the “tracks” of his father as well as the history of his family. The book, in my perspective, is made up of pieces of information, and there are huge gaps between different chapters; in other words, its casual and personal style make it almost unrelated with the “real history” that he seeks for. In fact, Ondaatje may make most of his audiences frustrated because his organization and writing style totally contradicted with their previous recognition of “what a memoir should be” or “what the history is not”. However, it is the exceptional feature of Running In The Family leads us to develop a new conception of the real relationship between memoir and history. The history consists of numerous events, while the writers were subjects and witnesses of the whole bunch of incidents; in other words, it is quite difficult to tell the boundary between a personal account and the real history, that is, the memoir is not the just memoir but a part of history. Moreover, I believe that the former sometimes can be more accurate than the latter because most authors who compose the history materials that today treated as indestructible Bible haven’t experienced what they write about. In this case, our reliable access may come from people who are “real memory owners”. Moreover, it could be even worse if the authors are controlled by the ruler, like what happened to the incomplete or extinct records related to the Insurgency in 1971 in Ceylon. Without the account from Ian and those unbroken spirits who actually experience the Insurgency, People will never get to know about the real history that the ruler tries to cover.

I remember last time when we talked about the Cultural Revolution from1966 to 1976 in China, my grandmother sighed with grief because she viewed it as a nightmare. She still remembers that working as one of the Red Guards whose mission was to protect the country and our president, she rushed into the house of landlord and destroyed the kitchen with the spade in order to find out those “hidden treasure” underground. She also witnessed how many historic attractions were destroyed without any reason at that time. When I sat in front of her and listened to the account, I suddenly realized that I was discovering the history rather than a memory. My grandmother has a strong feeling towards the revolution because she experienced it. However emotional her memory could be, it’s the product of real history and experience. Rather than being limited to a bunch of boring references, we could find more than we want through the subjective but reliable memory. It is the emotion makes audiences like us have the chance to touch the real history by ourselves with no intervention.

In The Lover, Marguerite Duras employs her memory of her pubertal love with a Chinese guy to illustrate people’s life and social classes in Vietnam, where was still a colony in the 20th century. Although always considered as an autobiography, The Lover shows the audiences not only a personal love story but also the reality behind the impossible love. Here, Marguerite uses the first person “I” to tell us her experiences, memories and feelings as a pubescent girl who almost lost in love. By connecting these subjective pieces together, she accomplishes a “memoir”, which is filled with her own life and seems like has nothing to do with the historic background at that time. However, readers can clearly receive the information of the related social conduct, traditions or ideologies. With the use of narrating the reality beneath the love story, Marguerite successfully shows that the history consists of memory, and that makes the memoir no longer just a memoir itself.

What we cannot deny is that nowadays the main source for people to look up for history is a bunch of serious and scholarly bibliographies. But with the appearance of historiographies such as Running In The Family and The Lover, we can also explore another kind of history through these personal accounts. Taking the same position as the writer and acting as a witness of the writer’s surroundings and experiences, we can easily get the perceptive comprehension about what was actually going on at that given time. As my classmate Zach suggested in class, the history which is visible may not be true. Similarly, I want to argue that just like “what we think of the memoir is not the real memoir”, what we think of the history is not always the authentic one, and we need some emotional accounts to make it complete. For example, if people are willing to learn more about the First Nation people in Canada, they need to read memoirs of the First Nation writers rather than the current writers or mass media, who can be seen as winners and are capable of distorting the real history which we are looking for.

Concisely, the memoir cannot be treated as history, but the history without the account like memoir will definitely be incomplete.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Recently I’ve been reading Running In The Family written by Michael Ondaatje who talked about his return to his native home Ceylon, an island named Sri Lanka now. The book, in fact, looks like the combination of pieces of information. With the use of various literature types including logs, poems, and dialogues to accomplish his “travel journal”, Ondaatje also implied his identities in numerous ways; in other words, we cannot define and tell which role Ondaatje really plays in certain section of the narration. In the chapter named The Karapothas, from the excerpts such as “ Heat disgraces the foreigner.” and “I’m the foreigner”,  it’s obvious to tell that he acted as a traveller who stepped on this island purposely in order to discover his family’s history. On the other hand, the identity as a “local one” is also shown in some other chapters. Although we read the book through the perspective of “I”, no one can make sure who the “I” really refers to. If we change it into a question: does the “I” indicate the Ondaatje with the colonialist heritage or Ceylon’s background, the answer can be “YES” because the point is not about the choice between “either” but of “both”.

It would be quite interesting if we apply the paradox above to the poem The Cinnamon Peeler. Here, Ondaatje described the cinnamon peeler’s eager love for his wife, and there are plenty of plots related to desire, sex, and belonging. From the first stanza “If I were a cinnamon peeler…on your pillow”, we can feel the strong desire of the cinnamon peeler make sure the belonging of his wife. He wants to leave the “yellow bark dust” or, as we can say, to leave anything he could to take hold of her and offer her a label that “you are mine”. In my perspective, instead of assuming that both the cinnamon peeler and his wife are real “people”, maybe we can suppose that the relationship of the couple, to some extent, is also the connection between Ondaatje and Ceylon. The latter is full of stories and history that the former was seeking for. It seems like that Ceylon, as a cinnamon peeler, tries to leave something on Ondaatje’s body or mind. The culture of the island worked as the yellow bark dust: trivial but obvious and cannot be erased easily. Playing as the “cinnamon peeler’s wife”, Ondaatje is quite passive because of his half-Ceylon identity, and Ceylon with its history kept flowing around him, cannot be caught but just there and left him a significant mark.

The same discovery can be made at the end of the poem as well. It’s quite obvious that the pronoun changes from “I” to “You” here, and the inversion makes the cinnamon peeler’s wife, who acts as an object in the previous stanzas, win the initiative. “I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife. Smell me” implies a confirmation of the identity, that is, the woman admits that she is the cinnamon peeler’s wife but nobody else. That’s the key sentence referring to the belonging. We can assume that during the travel of seeking for history, Ondaatje, who was left a mark of Ceylon’s culture and spirit, began to be conscious of his own belonging. Surrounded by the “yellow bark dust” all the time when he travelled as a “foreigner”, Ondaatje realized that he was also the “Ceylon’s wife” even though he cannot identify himself as a hundred percent Sri Lankan biologically. In this case, the last sentence “Smell me” can be treated as Ondaatje’s fervent longing to be accepted as a part of Ceylon.

We cannot just tell the character just from the disguised one made by the writer purposely. Even a little change of representation can lead us to a completely new world where we can find more than we have thought about. I still remember how I was impressed by Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain!, a poem composed to memorize Lincoln’s contribution to the country. And I guess this can be an easy but typical example of altering the representation of characters in literal works. Although Walt Whitman didn’t mention his objects straightly in the whole passage, audiences can still get the point that the Captain is not just a captain, and the ship is not just a ship at all. With the knowledge of American background and history at that time, we can find that what the writer was willing to show us is a picture that Lincoln acted as a great Captain who went through hard times and brought America to “a new era”. Hence, avoiding to be blind is quite important when we read literature works especially poems because there can be a lot of invisible but essential information beneath each symbol.

What we cannot deny is that the identity in Running In The Family is pretty hard to be defined because of its broad range. However, just like my analysis in The Cinnamon Peeler, if we can think about the “I” critically and treat it not just the “I” but the half-Dutch Ondaatje, half-Sri Lanka Ondaatje or even Ceylon, I believe that we will find more than what we perceived at the first time. Briefly, the representation sometimes can be everything but the ostensible meaning in Ondaatje’s “fever dream”, and it’s necessary to take advantage of the method to discover his real identities in the book.

Thanks for reading! : )

Reference:

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/O_Captain!_My_Captain!