Scrapbook Memories: History and Memory in Michael Ondaatje's Postmodernist Fiction

Abstract

The fragmented structures and stories of Michael Ondaatje's postmodernist fiction reflect our perception of the past as we view it through both personal memories and public documents of history. The mnemonic theories of F.c. Bartlett, Ulric Neisser and Roger Schank delineate the ways in which the human mind assembles and reassembles these fragments into useful realizations of the past. Combined with Ondaatje's historiographic metafiction, these theories describe the mnemonic workings of the mind as they reveal themselves in literature. Inherent in the view of the past which underlies the fiction and psychological theories invoked by this thesis is the realization that gaps and distortions are unavoidable in the reconstruction of the past. Working primarily within a theoretical framework provided by Linda Hutcheon and Roland Barthes, this thesis examines the way Ondaatje embraces these areas of ambiguity in the past as the primary locus of his imaginative writing in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, coming Through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion, and The English Patient. Ultimately, the psychological and literary views of memory and history describe and predict Ondaatje's ability to re-animate the past into a living performative existence in the present.