“Touching Them into Words”: Running with Michael Ondaatje among the Dead

Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family makes the claim, however obliquely, that the author can speak with his dead father. This contact relies on shifting pronouns that in writing, unlike in speaking, can be attributed to more than one person in different contexts. The text cannot reach out directly and touch the dead, but it makes room for the dead to enter, much as wild animals invade human spaces. The dead exist in the depths of the flat page, and writing allows them to communicate with the living. Writing can do so because the living and the dead are both readers. The article seeks to extend this kind of communication beyond Ondaatje and his father to include Ondaatje’s readers, specifically the author of the article and the Sri Lankan-Canadian critic Chelva Kanaganayakam.