Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family is often categorized as a post-modern memoir, though it relays much more of Ondaatje’s parents’ lives than his own. The narrative intersperses personal memories, contradicting accounts, and magical realism to convey as much of Ondaatje’s familial history in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) as Ondaatje can piece together, especially regarding his father, Mervyn, whom he barely knew. Although Ondaatje’s stated goal is to rediscover his Ceylonese ancestry and understand who his father truly was, the author openly admits that his memoir is “not a history but a portrait or ‘gesture,’” and takes many creative liberties to communicate what he believes is the truth. To uncover the past, Ondaatje’s memoir blurs the lines between memory, history, and story. Ultimately, the book suggests that “history”—in the Western sense of a single, authoritative record of the past—is subjective and unreliable, ignoring others’ perspectives. Instead, the past is preserved in personal stories and memories, both true and untrue.
Ondaatje intersperses his memoir with various outdated historical observations that have since proven to be inaccurate. By including these details, Ondaatje suggests that Western “history” is unreliable as a singular record of the past, since it often romanticizes colonial actions and ignores the grievances of colonized peoples. For example, Ondaatje’s brother hangs various “false maps” of Ceylon in his home, drawn by venerated European explorers and cartographers before the country was colonized. Each map was drawn after seeing Ceylon at a distance from a passing ship, without a complete understanding of Ceylon’s geography. The maps’ creators variously describe the island’s shoreline as an “amoeba,” a “stout rectangle,” and other shapes until successive attempts draw closer and closer to its true form. The succession of false maps that developed over time symbolize how the past cannot be accurately understood through a single account from a fixed perspective, which is as likely to be wrong as the mapmakers were about Ceylon’s geography. Although many European explorers viewed Ceylon as a wonderful “paradise,” romanticizing their experiences on the island, Ondaatje includes a Ceylonese poem that reads, “Don’t talk to me about Matisse […] / where the nude woman reclines forever / on a sheet of blood […] / To our / remote villages the painters came, and our white-washed / mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.” The native population’s memory of violence contradicts the romanticized tale that Europeans told of their arrival. This contradiction demonstrates the manner in which “history” as told by the Europeans is unreliable, one-sided, and incomplete.
Rather than lean on historical records, Ondaatje shapes his understanding of his family’s past from friends and relatives’ memories which, though imperfect, build a rich and multifaceted record of the past. This suggests that rather than a singular authoritative history, the past is better preserved through the various memories and personal accounts of individual people. Ondaatje spends much of the narrative recording dialogues with family members and old friends of his father, and their conversations loop and swirl around various events, often contradicting one another but always revealing something new. He recounts, “No story is ever told just once […] we return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgments thrown in.” Later, describing the way that his aunts’ stories create the past, Ondaatje states, “They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong.” The manner in which Ondaatje uncovers his family’s past through numerous personal memories suggests that the past is better preserved through collective remembrance, rather than a single account written down by an authoritative figure. Although many of the memories contradict each other and thus cannot all be true, by listening to so many, Ondaatje is able to circle closer and closer toward the truth. Just as the iterations of false European maps gradually reflect the true geography of Ceylon (after seeing the island from many angles), the many perspectives of his family’s history give him a dynamic, many-sided understanding of his forebears. Although this approach depends on unreliable, subjective memories, the author’s earlier criticism of a fixed, authoritative view of history suggests that memory is no less reliable than officially-recognized history.
Along with memories, Ondaatje intersperses his narrative with nonfactual stories (the author admits this in his “Acknowledgments”) which still provide insight into the past despite being fictional. The value of these tales suggests that even fanciful stories can help to preserve and reveal the past better than a reductionist historical narrative could. One particular story unsettles Ondaatje while also giving him insight into his father’s depression and anxiety. Ondaatje has already heard the story of his father drunkenly diving headfirst off a train, but another family member tells it differently. In this alternative account, Mervyn instead dives into the jungle and emerges hours later, stripped naked, holding a handful of stray dogs in front of him at arm’s length, hanging them by their leashes. The dogs are powerful, and Mervyn is holding them to protect himself from them, as if “he had captured all the evil in the regions he passed through and was holding it.” Even after a friend cuts the hounds free, Mervyn holds his arm out straight, holding the ends of the leashes. Although the story is told to Ondaatje as fact, he “cannot come to terms with” it and doubts its veracity. Even so, the image of his father emerging dazed from the jungle, focused only on holding evil at bay from the world and himself, reveals to Ondaatje a yet-unseen element of the severe anxiety Mervyn struggled with throughout his life. This revelation demonstrates how even stories that are not factual may still be useful for understanding the truth of the past. Ondaatje’s memoir presents a concept of history that spurns a single, authoritative voice in favor of a complex interweaving of memories and stories, most of which are only partially true, but together form a dynamic, many-sided understanding of the past.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory, History, and Story ThemeTracker
Memory, History, and Story Quotes in Running in the Family
I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realize gradually that I am part of a human pyramid. Below me there are other bodies that I am standing on and above me there are several more, though I am quite near the top. With cumbersome slowness we are walking from one end of the huge living room to another.
[Mervyn] bought Doris a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account. His father refused to pay and my father threatened to shoot himself. Eventually, it was paid for by the family.
The waste of youth. Burned purposeless. They forgave that and understood that before everything else. After Francis died there was really nowhere to go.
Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. The remained wild and spoiled.
Humorous and gentle when sober, [Mervyn] changed utterly and would do anything to get alcohol. He couldn’t eat, had to have a bottle on him at all times. If his new wife Maureen had hidden a bottle, he would bring out his rifle and threaten to kill her.
On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The results of sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much they seem to be translations […] growing from mythic shapes to eventual accuracy.
I witnessed everything. One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses.
I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner.
Ceylon always did have too many foreigners…the “Karapothas” as my niece calls them—the beetles with white spots who never grew ancient here, who stepped in, admired the landscape, dislike the “inquisitive natives” and left.
Don’t talk to me about Matisse
[…]
Talk to me instead of the culture generally—
How the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.
How I have used them … [Aunts] knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong.
Memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way [Aunt Dolly’s] tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace.
Eccentrics can be the most irritating people to live with. My mother, for instance, strangely never spoke of Lalla to me. Lalla was loved by people who saw her arriving from the distance like a storm.
Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear. After the spaces of India and Canada it is so small. A miniature. Drive ten miles and you are in a landscape so different that by rights it should belong to another country.
[Mervyn and Doris] were both from gracious, genteel families, but my father went down a path unknown to his parents and wife. She followed him and coped with him for fourteen years, surrounding his behavior like a tough and demure breeze.
Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humor, and the fact that both them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.
It is the only photograph I have found of them together.
“[Doris] belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an example of someone’s strain of character. If anything kept their generation alive, it was this recording by exaggeration.
[Mervyn and Doris] had come a long way in fourteen years from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon: my father now owning only a chicken farm at Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.
Words such as love, passion, duty, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning—except as coins or weapons […] I never knew what my father felt of these “things.” My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being “a father”? He died before I even thought of such things […] I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words.
The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man [Mervyn] who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. […] He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it.
[Mervyn] would swing wildly, in those last years—not so much from sobriety to drink but from calmness to depression. But he was shy, he didn’t want anyone else troubled by it, so he would keep quiet most of the time. That was his only defense. To keep it within so the fear would not hurt others.
I keep thinking of the lines from Goethe… “Oh, who will heal the sufferings / Of the man whose balm turned poison?”
“You must get this book right,” my brother tells me, “You can only write it once.” But the book is again incomplete. In the end, all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced.
