Rites of Passage: Moving Hearts and Transforming Memories in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

In his latest novel, The Cat’s Table (2011), Michael Ondaatje continues the project, started in his memoir, Running in the Family (1982), of understanding his childhood and mapping a space that he can call home by revisiting, from the remove of decades and another continent, the unforgettable three-week sea voyage from Colombo to London that he undertook in 1954. This essay explores the interplay between two modes of memorial expression—the first “sensory, perceptual, affective, and automatic,” the second “verbal, purposeful, and reflective” (Pillemer 100)—and the implications they carry for the narrator’s self-perception both as a boy and an adult (writer). Contributing to the emotional waters Mynah navigates in the course of his voyage is his fascination with the “ex-centric” (Hutcheon) individuals he encounters onboard the Oronsay and whose stories become intertwined with his. Over and against the power relations that structure modern society and that too often bespeak a “cold-blooded self-sufficiency” (Cat’s Table 257), Ondaatje pits those intimate bonds forged across differences of age, class, gender, race, and nationality that challenge the autonomy of the feeling self by foregrounding its deeply intersubjective nature.