Canadian Identity

            On Wednesday morning the B string on my guitar was particularly difficult to tune and at one point it took about ten minutes. I would like to try changing the string to see if that helps but I’m so busy with school work that I don’t feel like I can spare the time. 

            Just before 10:00 I logged onto Blackboard for my Introduction to British Literature tutorial. I asked Alexandra if there is a grace period for Assignment #1 Short Response that is due next week. She said there isn’t but something could be worked out for individuals upon request. 

            She said we should respond to the prompts and avoid summary. Read the text and think about the meaning and how genre and style affects it. We don’t need an overarching thesis but we must make original claims based on analysis with textual evidence in a flowing, clear, stylish grammatically attentive argument. The rubric is on Quercus. 

            We did a sample analysis of the role of the host in The Canterbury Tales. He says for the stories to short and plain but neither the pilgrims nor Chaucer are following his rules. He wants each story to have both a moral and entertainment value. Chaucer excuses himself for recounting stories that readers may find offensive by saying that it would be unethical to not report all that was said. But the pilgrims are all fictional and the stories are chosen by Chaucer. 

            I said that Chaucer is testing a wide range of morals. I added that the host is a negative example of the kind of rulemaking editor that stories are supposed to work against. 

            The narrator is not necessarily Chaucer. 

            There is explicit but also implicit evidence in quotes. Multiple levels can be drawn from inference. 

            Of the Wife of Bath I said that I think that Chaucer is saying that marriage is a power play and to the winner go the spoils. In this case the Wife won. Chaucer seems to sympathize with her side and he gives her good arguments. Her claim that the fact that she has had five husbands makes her the equivalent of a scholar who has graduated from five schools is funny but it’s also a good argument. The very fact that she is on this pilgrimage without her husband shows that she is independent. 

            Someone asked if there is any significance to her being from Bath. I found that Bath was known as the "Wool Town" and one scholar argues that the Wife represented the rising class of wealthy clothiers. Chaucer says that her cloth was better than that of Flanders. Prominent surnames relating to the trade that came out of Bath were Dyer and Tucker. The town's patron saint is Catherine of Alexandria, whose symbol is the wheel. 

            I said I was particularly interested in the Pardoner. Chaucer's narrator says "I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare". What are we to make of Chaucer’s intention in presenting the Pardoner as possibly being transgender, especially where he declares that his uniqueness as a pardoner is indicated by his possessions rather than by his sexuality? 

            Alexandra suggested that society in Chaucer’s time might have been a lot more liberal than we imagine it to have been.

           Chaucer had a lot of unfinished work. 

           Someone mentioned Chaucer’s poems about dreams. 

           How are the variety of genres used in Canterbury Tales? 

           For lunch I had rice crackers with cheddar. 

           In the afternoon I worked on my response to our weekly Canadian Literature tutorial question. I didn’t finish it until after dinner so I might have gotten carried away and spent more time on it than it was worth in terms of marks, but this is what I came up with: 

            In Margaret Atwood’s “Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” the tension between the settler and his environment plays like a reversal of the encounter between Odysseus and Polyphemus in Homer’s Odyssey. The nameless pioneer can be seen as Odysseus imprisoned by the overwhelmingly gigantic frontier in which he has settled, uncomfortably “unenclosed”. As “a point on a sheet of green paper proclaiming himself the centre” of an “ordered absence” in “the middle of nowhere” he is the hero of this epic but some characteristics are switched. It is the Ulyssean pioneer who is a miniature cyclops squinting at his surroundings with the vision of one weak eye. He does not know how to sign this monstrous landscape because he has lost his own identity in the face of a vast, imposing subject that renders him “random”. This new world refuses to be named on his terms and tries to escape from the captivity of definition by replying with incomprehensible “aphorisms”. 

            The pioneer in the poem is the personification of the Canadian identity crushed by the weight of an imposed meditation on something more empty than Zen could achieve. But just as Polyphemus thinks that the term for a non-existent person is the name of his prisoner, the insane pioneer sees this absence of a name as a signature in frost forming on the window of his identity crisis. It is unreadable until he lets it sink in to glory in the literate illiteracy of namelessness. The unlabeled leviathan of Canadian non-identity becomes part of the pioneer’s consciousness. 

             But as an epilogue to Atwood’s poem did the illusive Canadian identity scream so loudly that it couldn’t be heard until it was seen years later in labels on yellow packages with the appellation of “No Name”? 

            I had a hot Italian sausage on a kaiser bun while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In Vienna an opium dealer named Sukru meats with a distributor named Ritter and convinces him that he can safely send him a million dollars worth a year from Turkey. Meanwhile the labs of Interpol are able to determine from what country any sample of opium originated. The most recent influx is from Turkey. We see Duval practicing his judo when he learns of this. Apparently Interpol officers don’t carry guns. Another thing they don’t do is make arrests and so they have to coordinate with local police organizations. Duval goes to Istanbul and meets with police Captain Omar. They figure their best bet for who is selling the opium would be Sukru but he runs a legitimate trading business and they can’t prove any criminality. Duval goes to Sukru and poses as someone interested in distributing opium but Sukru has him arrested. Duval learns that a possible distributor of Sukru’s opium might be a street vendor of peanuts. While checking his licence the police find opium among the nuts. He is followed to a rooftop where he is attaching capsules of opium to the legs of carrier pigeons bound for Vienna. He is arrested and Duval replaces the opium with milk powder, plus an extra chemical that visibly bruises Ritter’s hand with a black scar. When Ritter goes to a doctor about it the doctor reports it to the police. Ritter heads for Istanbul to confront Sukru about sending him milk powder. When Sukru produces the opium to prove the stuff is real Duval and the cops arrive that have been following Ritter. Duval gets to use some of his judo in the ensuing fight. 

            Sukru was played by the great Patrick Troughton who would later become famous for his role as the second Doctor in Doctor Who.