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

Memory and History in the Works of Michael OndaatjeIn the Canadian social con school text, the issue of identity can be a fraught one, and the question of what it means to be Canadian is notoriously sticky, curiously 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 whole kit and caboodle with issues of understanding and accessing memories and histories outside of ones personal lived experience.Ondaatjes The face Patient opens with an epigraph culled from the minutes of a Geographical Society meeting in London in the early nineteen-forties. It readsMost of you, I am sure, regain 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.I cannot take this meeting tonight with out referring very sympathetically to those tragic occurrences.The lecture this change surfaceThe flight introduces a number of key themes in the text, and is worth transaction with at some length. The first issue I want to understand 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 substance 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 readapt to the urban and urbane environment. Someone will introduce the talk, it notes, and mortal will give thanks the years of preparation and research and fund-raising atomic number 18 never mentioned in these oak rooms losses in organic heat or windstorm are announced with minimal eulogy. All adult male and financial behaviour lies on the far side of the issue being discussed which is the earths surface and its interesting geographical problems (134).The tension among the impersonal detachment of the lectures atmosphere and the terminology in the epigraph is one that operates through much of Ondaatjes work. That tension is in the text that holds together two opposing forces personal, lived memory, and cultural memory. Susan Sontag, in her recent make Regarding the Pain of Others, makes the somewhat contentious claim that there is no such(prenominal) thing as collective memory all memory is individual, irreproducible it dies with each person.