Canadian Literature

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the third verse of “Barcelone" by Boris Vian.

            I started working out the chords to “Baby Lou” by Serge Gainsbourg but I had a hell of a time keeping my B string in tune. It seems to be a fairly common complaint but other people seem to be able to get through a song without the B going off. Maybe I just need a new string.

            At 11:00 I went online for my second Introduction to Canadian Literature lecture. When there were only a few minutes before the lecture was supposed to start there were only about five of us in the digital classroom until someone told us we were in the wrong room.

            Professor Kamboureli started by reminding us how important the tutorials are.

            She took questions about the syllabus.

            The calendar is on the left side of the course menu.

            The last part of the syllabus has the schedule but the focus may change over time.

            The CanLit debates refer to scandals in Canadian literature that made the news.

            She said that ideally we should read the whole book by the first lecture, but I remember that in the previous lecture she told us that we didn’t have to have it all read before this one.

            She quoted Thomas King. It was interesting that she said that Thomas King is Cherokee-Greek. I've never heard anyone mention the Greek part before. To paraphrase King, all anyone is are stories. Without stories we don’t exist. Stories define us. This is why literature is important.

            Canadian Literature is the literature of the Canadian nation. But a nation is not a stable category. It is the result of complex negotiations that involve inclusions and exclusions. A nation is an imagined social construct. It is not the same as a community because there is no daily interaction between its members.

            Benedict Anderson wrote in 1983 that a nation is created via print.

            The Canadian nation is shaped by settler culture and the normativity of whiteness. It’s invisible because we take it for granted.

            National literature is a conjugation of nation and literature.

            The national imaginary is a relation between literature and the body politic. The way the nation expresses and controls distinctiveness. How we exercise the dominant self identity of the nation articulates the image of what is a nation. The nation does not spell it out but it is subliminal.

            Who doesn’t reflect the national character? Whose voices are silenced?

            Literary tradition is simultaneously the result of identification and differentiation. There is differentiation from other outside traditions. Literary tradition establishes what authors hold in common and the patterns that are expected from Canadian books.

            Canadian literature is a product of the body politic. It plays a mimetic role to mirror the nation state which originally was politically exclusively white. Canadian literature functions as a sphere of public debates but not harmonized with it.

            There are two heritage nations in the settler history of Canada and this is reflected in the literature. The history is not really white.

            The literary canon is a collection of books that are considered to be the best of the nation. The word canon comes from the church and refers to the right things to read. The literary canon is the cultural capital of a nation and defines the nation’s identity. The formation of the canon is selective and exclusive but not stable. It reflects the politics of representation.

            Until the 1970s what was considered to be good poetry rhymed. The good writers were those such as Robertson Davies and Margaret Lawrence.

            Literature reflects but challenges the state.

            From the 1980s on there was a shift from CanLit to Canlits to include all the other voices that were previously excluded. It imploded from within. CanLit managed the other voices. Multiculturalism is good but it fetishizes otherness.

            We looked at the poem Can.Lit. or (them able leave her ever) by Earle Birney.

since we’d always sky about

when we had eagles they flew out

leaving no shadow bigger than wren’s

to trouble even our broodiest hens

too busy bridging loneliness

to be alone

we hacked in railway ties

what Emily etched in bone

we French&English never lost

our civil war

endure it still

a bloody civil bore

the wounded sirened off

no Whitman wanted

it’s only by our lack of ghosts

we’re haunted

            The last two lines are the most famous lines in CanLit. The lack of ghosts adds a gothic element.

            We took a break while people commented about the poem. I still don’t know how to write comments during the lectures.

            The poem is ambivalent and haunted by the anxiety of our short literary history.

            Our settler literary history is affiliated with empire but wanting to be different. Holding on to European traditions while at the same time trying to disassociate from them. Trying make the literature about the new home and writing about the wilderness and the taming of the land. The wilderness is an important trope of Canadian literature. There was a wilderness in the mind as well. A cultural wilderness

            Birney was a professor at U of T.

            Colonialism has a civilizing mission based on the idea that the colonizers are superior.

            The goal of CanLit is to tame the land.

            We began the second part of the lecture on Thomas Wharton’s Icefields.

            The book is set between 1859 and 1923. It begins before Canadian Confederation and continues into a period before the west was part of Confederation.

            She shows pictures of the Angel Glacier and Jasper. The Columbia Icefields are on the border between Alberta and British Columbia.

            Ice moves and has its own character.

            She shows the photo I sent her of the bride and groom posing on the glacier but says she thinks it’s photoshopped. It's not. These are carefully planned adventure weddings called helicopter elopements.

            The Enlightenment was from the 17^th to the 18th Centuries. Kant was a prominent spokesperson.

            In Icefields Byrne invents Glaciology.

            There is a conflict between culture and nature.

            The Enlightenment was anthropocentric and male oriented.

            The stages were:

            The French Revolution

            The French Enlightenment featuring Voltaire, Dideroy and Descartes.

            Modernity is about the dream of progress.

            In the story the initial goal of the exhibition is to prove or disprove that Mount Brown exists, since it was only seen once by Europeans and placed onto a map.

I used my mic to comment that it was reflective of the scientific method as opposed to the tendency to just believe things such as the existence of god.

            Some of the characters like Collie, the explorer are real. He represents science over rumours.

            Swift and Chalifoux are real.

            Lord Sexsmith is based on James Carnegie, the 9^th Earl of Southesk.

            The accident of Byrne’s fall deglamourizes the imperial project. While upside down he deconstructs the Enlightenment and sees an angel.

            I commented that he would have to be upside down to see an angel while in a scientific expedition.

            Where does the novel begin?

            The book pits localism against the imported. The scientific approach is marred by blindness.

            Byrne encounters the sublime but reaches for his notebook in a parody of science. The angel results from his encounter with the sublime.

            Next week she will talk about the aesthetic elements of the novel against modernity.

            The lecture finished just before 13:00. For lunch I had potato chips and salsa.

            After a siesta I worked until evening transcribing my lecture notes.

            For dinner I had a potato and a chicken leg with gravy while watching an episode of The Count of Monte Cristo.

            This story is mostly a flashback. The count receives a letter from the Sicilian ambassador Antonio Cavalcanti who had vowed when he was an officer to arrest the count and Jacopo, who does not know he is now the Count of Monte Cristo. The count tells Rico how after he escaped from prison he was picked up by smugglers, one of whom was Jacopo. This was before Edmund Dantes became the Count of Monte Cristo and for a while he joined the smugglers. Jacopo lost his tongue to safeguard the secret of Edmund’s escape. One day their boat was wrecked near Catania in Sicily. Four of them took shelter in an abandoned shack. Of the four, Alfredo had a father with a farm on the island and he went to see him to get help acquiring a boat. But Alfredo returned to report that his father had been dispossessed of his farm and thrown into jail. Edmund plans to break Alfredo’s father out of jail but one of the four, Benedetto wants nothing to do with it. The jailbreak is a success and once back in the shack Alfredo’s father explains who he was put in jail. He borrowed money from the banker Montevido and offered to deed a portion of the farm to Montevido to pay the debt but Montevido tricked him with two sets of papers and took possession of the entire farm. The sailors just happen to have a trunk of fancy clothing that washed ashore from their shipwreck and so Edmund uses them to disguise himself as Baron Duval and forges some papers to announce his arrival to inspect Montevido’s bank. Montevido's niece Eugenia is there when the baron arrives, along with her betrothed, Major Cavalcanti. When Eugenia meets the count she gives him a funny look and asks him how Mercedes is. She then invites him to dine with them. The baron impresses Montevido with amount of money he might like to keep in his vault. Montevido opens the vault to show him and just then Jacopo, Benadetto and Alfredo come through the window to rob a chest from the safe. Later they open the chest and not only recover the deed to the farm but also enough evidence to have Montevido arrested. There are jewels in the safe that Benedetto wants to keep but Edmund insists that those must be returned to the bank. Benedetto challenges Edmund with a knife but Jacopo disarms him and Benedetto winds up splitting from his companions. Jacopo goes to return the chest to Montevido’s bank but Benedetto is waiting for him and knocks him out. Benedetto has already stabbed the night watchman and places the knife in the hand of the unconscious Jacopo. That night when Edmund and Eugenia are alone in the garden  she reveals that she knows who he is because Mercedes, the woman he loved before he was imprisoned, was a good friend of hers. Suddenly Antonio comes in with Benedetto to arrest as a smuggler, but Eugenia pretends to faint and causes a distraction so Edmund can escape, after a little sword fighting. Montevido is expecting Edmund to break Jacopo out of jail and so an ambush is prepared. Edmund forces Benedetto to ride a horse through the streets past the bank while wearing Edmund’s clothes. The soldiers shoot and kill him. Meanwhile Edmund enters the jail disguised as the cloaked old man that brings the prisoners their food and releases Jacopo. Alfredo’s father presents Antonio with the evidence against Montevido and he is arrested. Many years later Antonio is now the Sicilian ambassador. He comes with Eugenia and gives the count the highest Sicilian order of merit for his charitable donations to the people of Sicily.

            Montevido was played by Alexander Gauge, who played Friar Tuck throughout The Adventures of Robin Hood. This was the first time I'd seen him play a character outside of that series. He committed suicide just after Robin Hood ended.

            Eugenia was played by June Rodney, who by the time she was sixteen had appeared uncredited in several films. She co-starred in "Assassin for Hire".