Charles Korvin

            On Tuesday morning I think I worked out all of the chords for “Barcelone” by Boris Vian but I still have to position them with the text. 

            The heat is still not on and so I started song practice with a long sleeved shirt on. But my guitar strap tends to slide over the fabric and so the position of the guitar keeps moving in the middle of songs, thus throwing my playing off. Even though it was a little chilly I went back to playing in my undershirt and once I got going I warmed up a bit. 

            A little before 11:00 I logged onto Blackboard for my Introduction to Canadian Literature lecture. Professor Kamboureli was there already because this morning she started a new plan to just hang out with the students for ten minutes before class. She asked me to put my camera on, which I did, but it seems the mic doesn’t work so I augmented it with my own microphone. 

            She thanked me for all of my comments in class. I told her I was a big mouth and she said that can be a good thing. I asserted that it works in English but not in Indigenous Studies. She asked if I was taking Indigenous Studies and I told her that I took it last year and that it was the most intellectually stifling course I’d ever taken. I recounted how associate Professor Kevin White came from the United States to teach the course, not knowing anything about Canadian Indigenous Studies. When the students complained he said he would try to catch up and I told Professor Kamboureli that it reminded me of a Simpsons episode when Marge said she was going to make money by teaching the piano. When her kids remind her that she can’t play the piano she declares that she only needs to stay one lesson ahead.

            She had hoped that the other students would turn on their cameras but I was the only one that did. This year has been a surprise for me in that regard as well. I had really expected my fellow students to be hardcore into video chatting because of their young age. 

            I asked her why she doesn’t have French Canadian Literature in this course. Her first response was that it’s because this an English course but I told her that I’ve studied French works in translation in English courses. She said she used to do it when she taught at another university but the administrations tend to resist it. Also the French department at U of T wants French Literature to be under their control.

            She reminded us that our close reading assignment is due on Thursday. We have to write on why we find the passage compelling. I still haven’t started it yet. There’s a one week grace period and so we won’t be penalized if we’re late but she advised us not to fall behind too much. 

            There’s another assignment later on called “Ask the Author” for which we have to be in teams. I’m dreading that one because it’s so hard for me to relate to these kids and for them to relate to me. If we were in a lecture hall I could simply turn to some people and ask if they want to be in a group with me. 

            The lecture was on exploration narratives. 

            Exploration narratives recorded the first images and impressions of the new world. They articulate the experience of entering this land. They offer a record of first contact. They reveal the conscious and unconscious workings of colonialism and imperialism.

            Since the 1960s people have been interested in exploration narratives. 

            George Bowering’s Burning Water reimagines the narratives of George Vancouver.

            John Steffler wrote “The Afterlife of George Cartwright”. 

            Exploration narratives are the foundation of the Canadian Literary imagination that has given shape to settler culture. To be supplanted, questioned, and re-written by Indigenous and other histories.

            The old world versus the new world. The old world is established. The new world was seen as empty and awaiting discovery. 

            The exploration routes: 

            Overland from Montreal and Hudson’s Bay. 

            Attempts to find the Northwest Passage. 

            Up the Pacific coast. 

            The explorer narratives consist of various records such as maps, field notes, logs, journals, reports and transactions by military people, botanists, cartographers, doctors, businessmen and missionaries. 

            Joseph Banks wrote The Plants of Madeira.

            Narratives are seen as objective and accurate. 

            The points of view can be autobiographical, often in the second person plural and not only personal; the ability to personify a culture’s idealized image of itself; organizing diverse difficult experiences; provide validation through personal experiences; construct a single, uncontested point of view. 

            The structure and contents of exploration narratives can be a master narrative with a distinct plot focused on the goals, the weather, the terrain, duration, human contact, plants, animals and social and physical conditions. 

            Hybrid texts are visual elements consisting of maps, illustrations of people, terrain, structures, vehicles and life; and appendices. These are designed to feed the curiosity of the people in the explorer’s homeland. 

            Visual elements to place in curiosity cabinets; fata Morgana/ land mirages; adventurers cast themselves in heroic light; breathtaking audacity; awareness of the interests of readers; and financial interests. 

            She shows a Cartier map decorated with artistic vignettes, portraits of explorers, views of towns, buildings, natives and their clothing, hunting scenes, waves, birds, trees, and sea monsters. 

           18th Century maps had no decorations, they were more carefully measured and had detailed legends. 

           The representational crisis of exploration narratives is the challenge of representing the unknown as familiar. There are no words for new things and misrepresentations and mistakes are inevitable.

           Exploration narratives reflect the limited intellectual abilities, the emotional disabilities, the shock of extreme experiences, and the limitations of language of the explorers. 

           Exploration narratives move towards being a literary genre but are limited or expanded by editors and ghost writers. Notes are turned into exotic flowing narratives by those not in the field and then serialized and commercialized for public consumption. 

           In first contact, if one culture is technologically ahead of the other the relationship is unequal. Seeing the other culture as savage renders the difference absolute. 

           Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism coined the term “contact zone” to describe the social space where cultures meet. Within contact zones there can be asymmetrical relations. 

           Exploration narratives as contact zones. I don’t get how the narrative can be a contact zone since the cultures don’t actually meet in the narrative. In the narrative the cultures are fictional characters even if accurately portrayed. 

           Familiar paradigms are used to translate the strange. I talked about how first contact peoples are given power to define second contact peoples and in how the Micmac named the Maliseet and the Cree named the Eskimo. 

           There are different first contacts. 

           George Cartwright (1740-1819) wrote Journals of Transactions and Events. He was a soldier, a diarist, an entrepreneur and a trader. The work contains personal and intimate details written in a stream of consciousness style, making it unusually modern. There are details about Indigenous fishing, trapping, hunting and food curing and preparation techniques. He was not just an explorer but also a settler who preferred hunting and fishing. He was unaware of his impact on those with whom he came in contact. He reflects the moral ambivalence that allowed the empire to flourish. 

           He brought Attuiockis and his family to London where they were guests in his home and yet also put on public display. They were impressed by the number of boats but thought Cartwright was joking when he told them that the buildings were not natural formations. They contracted smallpox. 

           Trade was diplomacy. He said that the natives had “no stimulus to industry”, perhaps implying that they were lazy. He responds to thief with corporal punishment. This could be discerned as treating other like a child. 

           The professor says that she would prefer running the classes in Zoom because it’s more user friendly. 

           We looked at the journals of Knud Rasmussen. He wrote five volumes. There is now also a film by Isuma Productions. 

           He was not an explorer but rather an ethnographer. 

           Professor Kamboureli is writing a book about Inuit culture, which will include a chapter on Rasmussen. 

           He was part Inuit and part Danish. He used his double identity as a passport to both worlds. 

           He was a celebrity traveller. He was the first man to cross the continent on a sledge. His fame was useful for making money to pay for his expensive journeys and research.

           A biography of Rasmussen is entitled White Eskimo. 

           He wrote for an international audience.

           He casts the Inuit as uncultivated. 

           His records of Inuit traditions are now used for reclamation by many Inuit. 

           His description of the women walking as he viewed them from a hill is that they were part of the landscape as in a mirage. He evokes the sublime. She says his gaze creates distance. 

           He is disappointed to hear the Inuit chief Igjugarjuk playing Caruso. As a specimen he has been tainted for study. 

           At the banquet the dessert is the maggots from inside the deer, which was a major source of protein. There is tension between Knud’s desire to meet the uncivilized and his ability to partake of their traditions. His rhetoric of disgust renders his hosts barbaric. 

           He has a sense of self irony and includes the chief’s response to his disgust, that whenever one eats venison one is eating the eggs of those maggots anyway. 

           For lunch I had potato chips with salsa and sour cream. 

           I spent the afternoon typing my lecture notes but wasn’t quite finished by dinnertime. 

           I had two small potatoes, a chicken leg and gravy while watching the first episode of the 1950s British TV series “Interpol Calling”. 

           The intro shows someone from the viewer’s perspective smashing through a border barricade and the narrator talks about how crime knows no frontiers and so that’s why Interpol exists. The headquarters is in Paris and there are 63 nations that contribute police officers to its staff. 

           The story begins with Dutch mining engineer Martin Becker working at the top of the shaft of a diamond mine in Angola. After the shift changes he tapes four diamonds to his stomach and sets off an explosion in the shaft. When the emergency crews arrive he pretends to be unconscious and is carried away. He escapes from the ambulance and heads for South Africa to sell the diamonds. The South African police can’t touch him and the country is not a member of Interpol and so Interpol must find a clever way to apprehend him. Inspector Duval goes to Johannesburg and decides that the best way to catch the clever Becker is to try to buy the diamonds from him. Once they have the diamonds they will need to have them analyzed in a lab to determine whether these are the diamonds from the Angolan mine. Apparently can determine what part of the world any diamond was mined. Duval wants the diamond expert Maher to buy the diamonds and so it is arranged for the other potential buyers to bid lower. Becker bites and gets the money. The diamonds are analyzed before Becker can catch his flight to Iraq and it is determined that these are indeed the ones from the Angolan mine. They cannot arrest Becker on South African land but he is sent down a corridor thinking that he is going to his plane but it leads him onto property that belongs to the diamond company where he can be legally arrested for theft and murder. 

           I assume someone with the name Duval was supposed to be French but he was played by Hungarian the born and sounding actor Charles Korvin. He studied and worked in photography at the Sorbonne for ten years. He was blacklisted for ten years in Hollywood for refusing to testify for the Un American House Activities Committee. He was Julia Child’s favourite amateur chef and claimed to have been Greta Garbo’s last dance partner.