On Tuesday, the tall TA, who we’ve been told is an expert in Victorian literature, Katherine Magyarodi, was the guest lecturer. She is the TA for group B, which she said stands for the “best” group. The professor sat in the back and only made a couple of comments through the whole two hours.
The lecture was called, “Encoding and Decoding Violence in ‘Code Name Verity’” This was about Elizabeth Wein’s young adult novel, “Code Name Verity”. I had only made it through one-third of the book by the time of the lecture but I don’t think most of the other students had gotten that far. Brian, the student I know from the Irish songs that he sings at the Tranzac, was up to page fifty.
Katherine began by asking what moral lessons we learn by reading literature about World War II. It turned out that not a lot of people have read World War II literature. I commented that I’ve noticed that literature written at the time of the war portrayed Germans as evil and there was a gradual softening of that view as the years passed afterwards.
She asked us what defines children’s literature. My answer was that the characters are children, and the target age of readers tends to be the age of the characters in the stories. She asked why “Code Name Verity” would be classified as a young adult novel. Aside from the fact that the characters are in their late teens, I said that there is a sense of the military as replacing school. The characters develop as they gain more knowledge.
We talked about the British literature that we’ve covered so far expressing colonial attitudes, such as when the Redskins in Peter Pan refer to him as “the great white father”. Hitler made the British stop thinking they were the centre of the universe.
“Code Name Verity” communicates a process of cultural negotiation. Though the book is not about the Holocaust, it is about the world that caused it. Britain did not declare war on Germany in order to save the Jews. One of the two main characters of the book is a female Jewish pilot.
I was thinking around this point that Katherine Magyarodi is kind of cute.
In the first part of “Code Name Verity”, the character, Julie, is a prisoner of war who has been tortured to the point where she has agreed to tell her interrogators all she knows about the British war effort. She writes her confession in the form of a story about her relationship with Maddie, from how it began to her point of capture.
Because of the war, there is a limited amount of stationary to write upon and so the Gestapo has to salvage various types of paper, the symbolism of which guides a different phase of the narrative. Julie’s prison is what was once a high class hotel in France, and so she begins by writing on the hotel stationary, representing a lost time of prosperity. When that runs out she is given the prescription forms of a Jewish doctor who has already probably been taken away to a camp. Julie naively envisions that the doctor will probably be breaking rocks until the war is over. The next paper that is found for her is the backs of sheet music of songs that were popular around the time that the war began. Finally she writes on recipe cards acquired from a cook in the hotel who she allowed to fondle her in exchange for the favour. As she writes, she notes that all of the people who had once owned the stationary are dead. The stories of the dead continue in their possessions.
There is a quote from Admiral Nelson repeated throughout the book. “Kiss me Hardy” is what Nelson is reported to have said to his best friend on his deathbed after the battle of Trafalgar. A parallel is made between England’s being threatened by napoleon and by Hitler. Julie, at the time of her own death, repeats the phrase, but adds, “Kiss me quick!” The kiss being the bullet that kills her, as a kind of reverse fairy tale ending in which the kiss puts the princess to sleep.
There are a lot of references to Peter Pan in the novel.
I commented that the way in which Julie’s death at the hands of her interrogators keeps getting postponed as she promises more information, has a touch of Scheherazade. Katherine said that it does and her interrogator actually calls her that later on, so I was embarrassed about having only finished a third of the book.
After class I went to Staples to buy a pack of pens and a 2016 appointment calendar.
Then I rode up to Yonge and St Clair. On St Clair, just east of Yonge, I had stopped at a light when a young man on a bike pulled up beside me and asked if he could ask me a question. He asked what I thought of pharmacies, but the real question was what I thought of pharmaceuticals. I said it depends on the drug. I told him that millions of lives have been saved by pharmaceuticals since World War I but that some drugs might have little value. He said that he was in an ethical dilemma because he was in his second year of biology, leading up to the four-year program of study to become a pharmacist. He wasn’t sure if any of the drugs he would be pushing as a pharmacist are actually good for people because he leans towards a more natural approach. He said he’s thinking about becoming a doctor instead but that would be a lot more work. I told him that, if he becomes a pharmacist, he’ll have to work for a pharmacy and he won’t have a lot of control over what drugs people take, but if he becomes a doctor, in private practice, he will have more independence. Since either way he has to finish his second year of biology to go in either direction, I told him he has a year to think about it.
Alternatively though, I suggested that he could always take some time off after that second year and either travel or work. I told him about my friend, Pat Rockman, who was almost thirty when she decided to start studying to become a physician. She’s now Dr. Rockman, so it’s not too late to wait a few years. I was trying to find out if there was anywhere he’d like to travel while he’s getting his head together, but he didn’t know. He was born in the Ukraine but we agreed that that’s probably not the greatest vacation spot these days. He’s nineteen and I told him he’s got lots of time.
I asked him why he’d chosen to ask me about this, but he didn’t really know, other than that he was bursting to talk to someone.
I rode up to Davisville and Mount Pleasant and then went east to Bayview. On one of the side streets there was a couple of guys from a small road crew, probably building a driveway, taking a nap against a couple of trees, while the guy in the little road roller was happily talking on the phone.
I watched two Buster Keaton short films. In “Two Weeks” a couple who’ve just gotten married drive to the location of their new home where the unassembled house is delivered to them in a crate, with numbered directions as to how to put the home together. When they aren’t looking though, the vengeful guy who wanted to marry the bride switches the numbers, so that the house comes out ridiculously lopsided, with the roof on the wrong way around. A big storm comes along later that causes the building to spin like a merry-go-round. After the weather clears the house looks even worse. Then someone comes along to tell them that they had built their house on lot 99 when it should have been lot 66, across the railway tracks. So they jack the house up and roll it on barrels but it won’t go over the tracks. A train smashes it to pieces, then he puts a “for sale” sign on the wreckage and he and his bride walk away.
The second film was “The Scarecrow”. The first part was very clever, as Buster and another man share a one-room house where they must economize on space. At dinnertime, all of the condiments and portable table items are lowered from the ceiling on strings and they have a very clever pulley system for passing things they need back and forth. In the end they pick up the tabletop, that turns out to have all the plates glued to it, and hang it on the wall to hose it down above the sink. It looked like a pretty good system to me.
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