Monkey Beach

As a Giller Prize finalist and a Governor General Award nominee in 2000, Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach comes well recommended. The first-person narrative style brought me alongside the inner thoughts of a teenage protagonist, Lisamarie Hill, as she was forced to deal with the eventual deaths of her new found uncle Michael and her Grandmother Ma-ma-oo. However, this is much more than a coming of age story; in fact, it asks us to consider at what point we have "come of age"? While we come to see that Lisa's personal troubles are also rooted in the fading of her family's native Haisla tradition, and that as a result there is a gaping disconnection between Haisla and European culture where Lisa is constantly pressured to indulge one set of customs over another creating a truly unsatisfying and conditional life for her, Robinson describes a world where it appears impossible for two worlds to co-exist. In such a place, what are the opportunities for reconciliation?

I enjoyed the new perspectives Ma-ma-oo offers to understanding the world, both in a spiritual and bodily sense. For me, having spent a childhood exploring along coastlines, in wooded lands of lakes, under starry skies, and often around a campfire, the overarching imagery of nature bound the narrative together. The Haisla proverb that introduces Monkey Beach uses nature to belittle our vindictive capacity and to suggest that unity is possible, but it is a unity found outside of the imagination:

It is possible to retaliate against an enemy,
But impossible to retaliate against storms.

What do you make of this proverb?

Pitter Pater

Like footsteps of imagination tracing my mind, Walter Pater encourages me to think outside the box.

"Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little curious of the thoughts of others."

While I don't like the idea of being "confined," this seems to be the general trend to meet the ends of Victorian progress. It might be the result of popular philosophy of economic specialization bleeding into the world of aesthetics: an assembly line of ideas, any takers? Pater seems to be ahead of his time in 1873 foreshadowing the multifariousness of post-modernism. I can see how this statement could be seen as lacking any recognizable position other than chaos, and to me Pater is presenting an entirely different way of looking at the world, a way of existing outside of dogma and doctrine.

"For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

Pater tells me the moment is a deep well of pleasure, that art should be accepted as honest and rejuvenating, and as I rethink his words, I contemplate how in return I can best reciprocate the favour.

Charging Up "The Electrical Field"

Book publisher W.W.Norton & Company has a web-site designed to help spur discussion and interest in their authors.

This link takes you to a "Reading Group Guide" for the The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto. The site presents an interview with Sakamoto concerning her novel and further questions to help give the book some depth to individual readers.

Questions asked of Sakamoto largely revolve around the effects of internment camps not only on those who experienced them, but also on those of future generations; differences in internment camps between USA and Canada; personal responses to writing an emotional historiography and choices in character and narrative style; and, Sakamoto tells about the imagery of her novels title, The Electrical Field.

I liked the discussion questions afterward because they left me with a sense of ownership of the novel that is all mine...greedy, maybe, but satisfying.

Here is that link:
http://www2.wwnorton.com/rgguides/electricalfieldrgg.htm

All that is not silence is the voice of man.

In "Woman's Secret," Elizabeth Robins seems to present a fair account of the Victorian woman's struggle to assert her voice. I think by considering the roots of the patriarchal tradition, Robins tries to understand the perspective of men; at least, she seems to attempt to empathize with the socialization that Victorian men were left to deal with. In essence she sets up her essay in a way that it can revolve around culture rather than gender: "we begin to inquire into the origin of the order under which we live."

However, when I read that men and women alike are equally "victims of circumstance," I begin to wonder about Robins' writing style. I would guess Robins is trying to create an even playing field so that Victorian men are not dumbfounded in a defesive haze or made to feel as though they are being objectified, and that her rhetorical approach is excellent for the era. Even if Robins doesn't believe everything she writes in "Woman's Secret," she certainly knows her audience and knows how to rally support for such a major shift in sensibility by drawing on anthropological/historical (male sphere) and emotional/empathetic (female sphere) arguments.

For me, "Woman's Secret" reaches beyond a treatise for equality between the sexes. When Robins writes about writing style comparing the content of autobiographical versus imaginative prose, she hits on contemporary issues of narrative. This is not to say by any stretch that equality of gender is not an issue in the twenty-first century, it is to instead intended to express that Robins knew that the "Woman's Secret," and by implication man's "reflections," will be ever-present.

However, Robins seems to be asking too much for the patience of men in allowing for women to catch up in "his game," and not enough for women, as individuals, to establish themselves in their own method. This is, I suppose, because of a fear Victorian men would denounce "the other half" as unsubstantiated and incongruous with mainstream discursive patterns. If it doesn't fit, it must be wrong...right?

Half-devil and half-child: The Other Side of Burden

Reading Kipling from the other side of the coin. From the perspective of those "captive" rather than the "captor": what a great way to approach "The White Man's Burden."

I like this point of view because reading both sides allows me to better situate imperialism and colonization from a distance. Here, the view of one side or the other doesn't take the fore, but instead the "burden" itself takes presidency.

However, in reading this speaker as though he (he because of "Man's," "sons," "manhood") is part of those being colonized, I am forced to read the poem as being entirely sarcastic: who would promote taking up the burden of an oppressor? This would seem to undermine the credibility of the speaker to the extent that the poem becomes silly.

Further, if Kipling is writing in the voice of the colonized, then isn't he assuming to know the emotions and mind of the colonized, and isn't that showing a type of egoism and perhaps "racist" behaviour?

History

I think about the importance of studying history a lot, partly because people are always asking me, "why study early Canadian literature? isn't it all crap?" One of the things that I think history does, (or archaeology, for that matter, viz our novel Fugitive Pieces), is to preserve the traces of "otherness" in the past -- to point out that people really did think differently than we do, that what seems "normal" now was not always considered normal, and what we think is natural is actually cultural. History preserves the choices that faced people in the past, the options they did not choose as well as the ones they did, and reminds us there are different ways of thinking about things like love, and the self, and the family as well as politics and the natural world. This helps me remember that things can be different, things can be changed, by acting in the present. This is a cheerful thought.

386 Ancient and Modern

Landon's essay got me thinking about the value of looking to history as an appropriate model of comparison for "today." Yes, she falls into a space between the Romantics and Victorians, but is she, or anyone else, justified looking into the past for moral standards? Really, if civilization is about progress, especially for the Victorians, why be looking backwards?

I think if there is scientific, technological, and social advancement then poetry should be looking into the future and trying to prepare a moral/ethical footing for culture. Otherwise we get things like Internet, or biotechnology and people aren't prepared to deal with their individual problems that morph with the changing world; instead, people are left struggling with Medieval maxims in the modernized world of the 19th (or 21st) century.

I guess we could leave it up to corporations to dictate our morals in the future. They sure as hell plan out what their market will be in the future and how to develop it. So, why aren't poets, like Landon, doing the same?

451: Sakamoto's confusing conclusion

Why would Sakamoto choose to end her novel like this? It seems a little quick, rosy, and all together too nicely packaged considering all the effort she put into building inner turmoil and stigma in Asako: "Girls here, boys there. It was simple, really." Having said that, I was glad the novel ended when it did.

Other than that, some of the parts that stand out for me are the repeated imagery of stains of all sorts, a crazy and disorienting synaesthesia through smell, and the note on there being no photographs ever since the internment camp (the camp little discussed).

A bit choppy, some awkward phrasing and reaching metaphors, but unique and overall enjoyable.

Word is born, c'nest pas?

Hello everyone, and thank you for coming to the Blog.

If you're here you probably heard about the site at UVIC in an English class, but the site is here for any literary musings of any sort. While you'll probably see a lot of correspondence surrounding class work, as it is a great way to get scholastic ideas stirring informally, you are more than welcome to use "the Word is too much with us" to contemplate anything from harlequin romances to newspaper columns.

Get acquainted with hyper-links, photo-up loader, and other stylistic features if it suits you: there is lots here to work with. You can join a conversation under way, or go off on your own.

While classes run only until the end of June, you are welcome to see what's up or drop a line on what is peaking your literary interests. Who knows what someone else's comment might spark.