Faith Domergue

            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords for the first two verses of “Barcelone” by Boris Vian. 

            I finished memorizing "Privé" by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. Since nobody had posted them I started figuring them out myself. 

            Just before 11:00 I logged onto Blackboard for the Introduction to Canadian Literature lecture.

            There were 39 students when Professor Kamboureli started speaking but more came later. There were at least ten students less than last week though. 

            Based on the student survey she has eliminated some of the required reading, including Jacques Cartier and two of Pauline Johnson’s poems. The lecture recordings will now be posted for two weeks rather than one. 

            She said that during the pandemic there may be financial assistance from the university for students that need to upgrade their internet service. 

            Some people had said in the survey that they find the two hour lecture with only one break too much and so she had us take a poll to vote for or against an extra break in addition to the one at half time. I voted "No" but the vote was almost split down the middle with a slight majority favouring a break. She said we would have an extra one this time but we didn’t. 

            She asked us for feedback on our meeting with Thomas Wharton last week. 

            She said that authors after writing a book approach it as a reader. He had to re-read the story before our interview with him and was surprised. 

            After a certain point stories write themselves. 

            We began the lecture looking at the Postmodern elements in Thomas Wharton’s Icefields, which she says are echoed in Robert Kroetsch's "Stone Hammer Poem". 

            Postmodernism consists of a wide range of reactions to the assumed certainty of science and objectivity as being able to explain reality. Reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding. Postmodernism throws into doubt assumptions and cultural codes. It’s a response to assumptions about values. Postmodernism is aware that all systems of meaning are constructed. There are no universal values and there is a plurality of meanings. There are no single interpretations. Postmodernism moves from Truth to truths. It engages with and subverts conventions. It denaturalizes what we assume to be natural. It questions the messianic faith of Modernism. Progress is not automatically a good thing.

            Questioning universal values automatically questions authority and stresses self reflexivity. 

            She asks us for examples of Postmodernism from the novel. 

            I raised my hand and started speaking but she pointed out that there is something wrong with my microphone, that there is a lot of static and she has trouble hearing me. She said that this was a problem last week as well. When I checked later with my sound recorder the mic sounded fine. I’ve yet to listen to the lecture recordings so maybe there’s an incompatibility between my equipment and Blackboard. There were other students whose mics were very bad. 

            On the subject of postmodernism in Icefields I asked if the moment when we learn that Sara is not Indigenous but Indian was postmodern. But Professor Kamboureli seemed to misunderstand my question and talked about Sara drawing attention to the making of stories being postmodern.

            Postmodernism doesn’t necessarily come out of modernism as there are writers from before modernism that could be considered in retrospect postmodern. 

            Postmodernism began in architecture. Old looking buildings were designed but with new elements. Old styles are reproduced in a different context and denaturalized. 

            Postmodernism is self conscious and often uses metafiction. Metafiction is fiction that talks about its own fictionality. Language constitutes and creates reality rather than only reflecting it. 

            The author is no longer the authority. The author does not authorize the meaning of the work. The author has become a writer. It is the reader that creates the meaning. The author is also the reader.

            Text comes from the Latin “tissue" and the word earlier related to that which was woven such as textiles. From product to text. 

            Postmodernism is intertextual and citational. Icefields contains text inside of text. 

            I asked that if in postmodernism it’s the reader that creates the meaning, doesn’t that make interviewing a postmodernist author a useless activity? 

            Postmodern texts are polyphonic, with many voices. 

            Are parody and satire the ultimate postmodern literatures? 

            The aesthetic devices of postmodernism are: collage, parody , irony, self reflexivity, story making, a synthetic approach (with political implications). 

            Postmodernism is preoccupied with history. 

            Historiographic metafiction. Metafiction plus historic novel - (Linda Hutcheon). Knowledge of the past transmitted through language. 

            Postmodernism as literature cannot be fully divorced from postmodernism as philosophy.

            Parody and irony are the two most important tropes. Parody- repeating to make fun serves to unsettle. Irony parodies nations of single understanding. Self reflexivity is a way to parody and ironize. It draws attention to story making. Collage and synthetic approach are similar. There is always more than one point of view. 

            I offered a quote from my Psychology 101 professor from ten years ago: “Reality is a story the brain tells itself”. 

            We started looking at Robert Kroetsch’s "Stone Hammer Poem", but first Professor Kamboureli revealed that Kroetsch was her husband. She and the prairie writer met in the United States where he was teaching and she came to Canada because of him. He also taught in Manitoba. They separated but remained close. He died in a car accident in 2011. 

            The stone hammer is in his archives. 

            Linda Hutcheons called him “Mr Canadian Postmodernism". 

            His grandfather was a Bavarian pioneer to the Prairies. He had a strong sense of local pride like William Carlos Williams. 

            He had a comic vision. 

            “No name" is my name (channelling Homer?). Writers tend to have the Adamic impulse to be namers and to create boundaries. 

            I said that all writers are namers. When not naming they are readers.

            Writers create a new world. 

            Giving a name could be an act of forgetting. 

            Kroetsch parodies archaeology in his collection called Field Notes. He echoes the post modern but his approach is also archaeological. Archaeology can be a method of reading and coming to terms with the limits of official history. “Field" can refer to location but also the field of language or page. Knowledge from found fragments has to be recreated. Official histories have to be uninvented. He draws attention to the complexity of memory. 

            In section six of the “Stone Hammer Poem" he asks "?What happened" but puts the question mark at the beginning.

            He looks at the patriarchal history of inheritance. 

            In the title: “Stone Hammer Poem" each word has its own materiality. The stone as stone object; the stone as stone hammer tool; the stone hammer as textual poem. I think the poem also serves as a metaphorical hammer. 

            He begins with the demonstrative pronoun “This”. 

            He creates ambivalence. 

            I said that he deliberately makes the poem primitive like the stone hammer itself with simple language and words but she didn’t agree with the word "primitive". I don’t know if she thought referring to an Indigenous stone hammer that’s thousands of years old as “primitive” was politically incorrect or if she didn't think the poem tried to emulate the primitiveness of the hammer. Certainly a similar hammer found in Europe would be considered primitive. 

            He does not say the stone became a hammer but “become hammer". 

            The references to skulls and bone reflect the skeletons in Canada’s closet. 

            Paperweight. Paper refers to materiality. Weight. 

            Writing is an archaeological moment. Non linear postmodern logic says that there is always something missing. 

            For lunch I had roasted seaweed and potato chips with salsa. 

            I spent the afternoon finishing transcribing my British Literature notes and starting my Canadian Literature notes. 

            I had a potato and two chicken drumsticks with gravy for dinner while watching The Count of Monte Cristo. 

            This story was set in 1834 when the count’s companion Mario is still alive. An old friend of the count named Morrell holding three Napoleon coins meets a man in a remote location to learn the details of a plot against the king of France to replace him with Napoleon III and is surprised that the man is his daughter’s fiancé Paul De Villefort. The coins serve as a secret password between the members of the plot and Morrell hopes to use them to expose the leaders of the revolt. Paul reveals that he is the leader and then stabs Morrell. As Morell is dying he places the three coins in a small musical snuff box. Morrell’s daughter Renee brings the box to the count because that is what he had instructed her to do if anything were to happen to him. But the count denies having known her father. After she leaves Jacopo and Mario are puzzled. The count explains that letting Renee know that he is really the Edmund Dantes that her father used to know could cost them all their heads. They convince him that he should again defend the victims of injustice. They ride to an inn where the count asks the landlord for three bottles of Chateau Dubree. The innkeeper is surprised but tells the count that perhaps he would like to come to the cellar to select the bottles himself. The landlord leads him downstairs and leaves him there. The count goes to the wine rack and calls for Dubree, who comes out through a secret passage. The count reminds Dubree that he once saved his neck and so Dubree tells him that the three coins are a password among the rebellious nobles. He says that a Baron Von Stupen is coming to Vichy from Strasbourg late that afternoon. The count and his friends intercept the baron’s carriage and tie him to a tree. The count takes the baron’s papers introducing him to Paul De Villefort and assumes the baron’s identity. Paul receives the count as the baron and says that the plans will be revealed at a party for his honour that night. Meanwhile Paul introduces the “baron” to his fiancée Renee and of course they are surprised to see each other. That night when they are alone Renee insists on an explanation from the count and threatens to expose him. She does not believe that Paul would be behind her father’s murder but the count convinces her to wait the night for him to provide proof. Meanwhile the real baron has gotten free and arrived there. The baron meets with Paul who tells him that the impostor is obviously after the papers containing their plans and the names of their co-conspirators. He removes the papers from a chest to show the baron just as the count appears, catches the plans with his sword and then leaves by the window. He jumps into a wagon driven by Mario but as they are driving away Mario is seriously injured. The count takes Mario to the inn and gives the papers to Jacopo to take to the authorities. Meanwhile the count tries to save Mario’s life by removing the bullet. Paul arrives with three men and the count fights them and is winning when the police arrive. The count asks the captain to allow him to deal with De Villefort personally and so they duel until Paul is disarmed. 

            Renee was played by Faith Domergue, who just after her high school graduation, in the days before seatbelts her face was slammed into a windshield and she had to spend 18 months receiving reconstructive surgery. By the age of seventeen had signed with Warner Brothers. That year she met Howard Hughes at a party on his yacht. He immediately bought out her contract with Warner Brothers and signed her to his own studio RKO Pictures. The movies that Hughes put her in didn't do well and so he lost interest in her. In the 1950s she began to freelance and is most remembered for three science fiction movies: “This Island Earth”, "It Came from Beneath the Sea" and "Cult of the Cobra". 

            Before bed while I was flossing my teeth I started bleeding as if I'd cut my gums with a knife. There was so much blood that it became too messy to spit and so just swallowed it until I stopped bleeding.