Michael Ondaatje's book Running in the Family is a memoir and essay/travelogue that is catalogued both as literary and as biographical. However, in an article entitled "Archives and Anecdotes: History and Auto/biography in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family" published in Volume 26 of New Literatures Review, scholar Greg Ratcliffe suggests that the narrative fragments, poetry and photographs of Running in the Family prevent it from being an autobiography in genre or authority.
What Is History?
According to Ratcliffe, history is a narrative selected and composed by dominant groups. It excludes the stories and experiences of minority groups and is often dependant on the survival of texts. In Running in the Family, history is selected and excluded so to better serve the narrator's goal of finding a family trait that links him to his father. It is individual rather than collective or official, and it illustrates the impact history has on an individual's sense of belonging.
Michael's History
The narrator, Michael, whom Ratcliffe distinguishes from the author, Ondaatje, is like a historian in that he relies on archive material, interviews, photographs and memories of friends in order to recreate the past. However, the accuracy and the authenticity of his narrative is questionable because the memories are fading and unreliable and the archives are either crumbling or destroyed. Furthermore, Michael's search to find links to his father leads him to ignore certain histories and to pursue only the genealogical paths that link him to people with the same last name, i.e. men, who were able to write.
Ratcliffe suggests that this results in a "biased, patriarchal history" that serves to comfort the narrator rather than preserve the past. Michael's decision to attribute his sister Susan's personality to Mervyn rather than to her mother further illustrates the phallocentrism of his narrative that seeks to establish an intellectual link between him and his father at the expense of an inclusive and accurate narrative.
Autobiography
Ratcliffe argues that the narrative fragments, poetry and photographs prevent Running in the Family from being an autobiography in genre or authority. He says they remove the "distinction between fiction and history." They also permit the unquestioned inclusion of surviving stories about Mervyn that are more about how he fit into the lives of others rather than about him. Such factless representation suggests that Mervyn had no civil influence over others, and this suppresses him from the "official' history.
Photography
Ratcliffe does not view the photographs as historical documents that can be understood by themselves. They need contextualization or an interpretation in order to convey the stories behind the captured moment. Such is the case with the photograph of Michael's parents: in it the narrator finds proof that the couple was compatible and loved each other. The fragments and photographs thus allow Michael to re-interpret, re-write and construct a version of his father and of the past from other texts.
Ratcliffe's Conclusions
Ratcliffe holds that Running in the Family is plagued by "inconsistencies, contradictions and disruptions." He finds that Michael's use of questionable archival sources highlight "the inadequacy of [the book] as both history and autobiography." Nonetheless, he concedes that they allow the narrator to find what he was looking for: a trait, scholarship, that he shares with his father.
Bibliography
Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.
Ratcliffe, Greg. "Archives and Anecdotes: History and Auto/biography in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family." New Literatures Review 26 (1993): 19-30.
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