An outline of what I'll say

Following on from David’s points about metaphor: The elusiveness of the metaphor is central to Michael’s histographical vision. That even in the present, in the waking experience truth, the nature of a woman, can be looked at, compared to, understood in a hundred different ways. And is flooded by memories of the past. And what Meira Cook sees as a flaw in the technical aspects of Michael’s poetic form, the denseness of the poetic prose, is central to her view on history. There is no one truth to be captured by one metaphor, instead it is a process of language, gradually refining but then challenging itself, attempting to capture reality, whatever that may mean to the thinker.

Which brings me onto what I’ll briefly talk to you about, which is mainly an overview of the critical reading and a discussion of Fugitive Pieces as post-Holocaust literature. And more interestingly as second generation post holocaust literature, written from someone who never lived where the troubles occurred. A spectator out of place and time, attempting to connect to apparently unrepresentable tragedy.

'When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation' (page 52)” We have briefly mentioned “Blood memory”

Levi says this is the most important element of the holocaust. He likens it to war trauma that the father comes home from war, these memories experiences change him. In turn projects these memories onto his children, his behaviour is altered. His Children grow up in the shadow of these memories and so pass it onto their children. That the Holocaust was not a carbonized scream frozen in time, but a “gift” that those who have no relation to such events pass on. Fugitive pieces tries to communicate history as memory, which is a state we are submersed in throughout our lives, that we live both in the now and the past.

Why not the preserve the humanity of the Jews? When Cook criticises Michael’s inaccuracy and sentimentalism for imaging the Jews of the Zakynthos ghetto turning into still coral, she misses another key aspect of fugitive pieces. Which is recreating History with language, overcoming suppression. Making them human, beautiful, even poetry, making them myth, denying the Nazi’s world view and imprinting one’s own. One of resonance.

On the other hand Levi does state that poetry in such a situation is ego, lyrical poetry makes the author’s plays on language more about supremacy and intellect than respect and honouring. Thomas Carew Poem. Talking about how happy he is that his son is dead, because he can now write a great poem and read it at his funeral and everyone will think he’s awesome.

Also Fugitive Pieces is not so fragmented. Metaphor exists a method of connection, between times, places, people, events. The world is a cohesive poetic vision of Jacob, of Ben. The protagonists use language to make sense of their lives.

Primo Levi in his book “The drowned and the saved” told the story of the Jews of the Soviet Union. Especially in Leningrad. Pure white snow. if you bury the dead of history under the past and put a virgin white factual gloss on it, you obscure the dead. The children.

Redemption, especially by the force of self will, and healing in the face of unimaginable terror is the greatest victory over the oppressor. As Jesus.

Much has been said about Fugitive pieces being about the Holocaust, but not being about the holocaust. That it deals with it in vague and unfocused way. I would argue that it is entirely about the holocaust, but not just the event, the date, the amount slain, but about the echo of the past through every action of one’s life, it’s spreading into other lives, it’s all persuasive power even when the memory is jagged and faded. Not really experienced. It is the history of the trauma not through textbooks, but the individual.

The fascists themselves stopped the Jews of the ghetto from writing poetry. From trying to escape their position in song or flights of linguistic fancy. The Nazi’s saw the danger, the potential of mental release and cultural survival in the words of these young intellectuals.

Memory

Memory In Fugitive Pieces (in draft)

So, I thought I should post something before the night draws in. Need to tidy this up and add some reference to this week's reading.

I'll make this stuff sound good, but I think I need to cut it down, so let me know what you think should go, my lovely group.

• Memory is a vitally important yet unreliable lens through which we make sense of the past

• As a novel fixated with history, identity and the consequence of devastating events, almost every page of Fugitive Pieces is heavily influenced by the processes of memory.

Memory: clarity and obscurity

• One frustration throughout the book is that memory is a process that is largely seen to work according to it’s own rules (this seems tied to the concept of ‘vertical time’).

• Jakob at times is sorrowful and frightened of his past being lost forever as he is ‘contaminated’ by the ‘hallucinogen’ of new experiences, particularly learning new languages, but it’s clear that his past, his memory, is always there at his foundation.

• Athos reveals that one learns ‘new songs in foreign places’, and Jakob does just this in Toronto. When he sees all the immigrants in the darkness, he sings louder, perhaps realising he is singing for all of them, he is stirring their memories of home.

• The mind makes links which could not be make conciously... connects dots which would otherwise be impossible to connect. Jakob spends much of the first four or so chapters dreading the decay of his memories of Bella – but he is haunted by her throughout the rest of the book.

Memory as a vault

• Athos’s memories freeze with him – Jakob’s catalogue of what Athos’s death meant for him is a list of all the outward expressions of the man’s inner life, but he suggests that the most important elements of Athos are locked in his memory – idea that ‘a man’s life is never complete’.

Memory as burden

• Some memories (history) cannot be communicated or dealt with – Ben’s section is largely centered around

• A) how his father’s memories haunted his father, could not be expressed, could not be resolved conciously – Ben talks about specific memories which seem to have stayed with his Dad as a psychic scarring from the Holocaust, and how

• B) his Dad, in his treatment of Bed, creates psychological bruises patterned after his own. See the 'Eat the rotten apple' scene. Michaels staggers the account of this memory over an entire passage, in choppy sentences, to show how this one incident has claimed so much territory in Ben's memory. It still has a painful resonance.

Memory as insubstantial

• Jakob says early on that 'I did not witness the most important events in my life', and this is a huge issue in his life throughout the text. Not seeing his family slaughtered, not knowing fully where they went, creates a gap in his psychology which becomes a fertile space for his imagination to create new meanings. He dreams of Bella, wonders about the treatment of his family by the Nazis. As Jakob says, ‘the key is not to find the right answer but ask the right questions’ (especially when the answer is unbearable).

History, biography, memory

• Biography, recollection of history cannot assume authority because in laying down events in linear order you miss out vital parts of the story. As Athos says, we have more control over the big picture than we realise, but it’s the little moments and unexpected events that define us.
• Biography is a grandiose medium which assumes that memory, and the 'bare facts' of history, can tell us the whole story. In 'Fugitive Pieces' Michaels adopts a FRACTURED and long-range narrative to show how everything is connected, the past bleeds into the present and our memory is infused with our emotions and state of mind in the moment.
• A man's mental, inner life often develops along different lines to his tangible exterior life, and memory is too often represented as a 'record' of the external life. Michaels uses elaborate metaphors to show how memory binds the two, and the picture presented by this union is elliptical, at times refusing to come together as a whole.

Language in Fugitive Pieces

[Hey guys, I have a fondness for writing out a bullet-pointed presentation in dodgy faux-spoken just to see how it works. Hence this. Also - what's happening with this handout? David - are you sorting it out, and we can photocopy tomorrow morning? I'm fine with the order]

I’m going to talk about the theme of language in the novel.

Language appears in the novel in many forms, both positive and negative. The primary set-piece in which language is discussed is Jakob’s learning of Greek and English. This action is presented as both an escape of the past horrors, and a loss of identity. As Athos tells Jakob stories, his memories are ‘diluted’ – but at the same time the melody of Yiddish is ‘gradually eaten away’ (p28).

This isn’t to say that this is merely a passive loss – Jakob actively embraces the language – English is described as food, Jakob is ‘hungry for it’ (p92). He longs ‘to cleanse [his] mouth of memory’ – this is a preservative tactic. The loss of identity is just part and parcel of escaping trauma.

This escape, however, eventually creeps up on Jakob, and he realises that he may have forsaken his deceased family, his heritage, by taking up English and Canadian traits – ‘How will [Bella] ever find me here, beside this strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?’ (p126)

That’s spoken language – written language is also presented in the novel. Written language can be destructive – two of the more resounding images from the novels are single letters – either the J stamped on Jewish passports (p207), or the anti-fascist Graffiti (p78). I think this in microcosm shows the dichotomy of written language in the novel – one is imposed, destructive, reductive, dangerous and genocidal, the other is a display of courage, of defiance. Language accommodates tyranny and resistance.

Writing is also beautiful, it closes gaps and offers opportunity. Poetry and translation are shown as acts of immigration – language is presented as a bridge between two lives, two cultures (p108-109). Also, when Jakob comes to write his childhood memoirs – language, English, is represented as empowerment, as opportunity – it is ‘an alphabet without memory’ (p101).

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Related Quotes

p28: 'Athos's stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence'

p92 –‘Athos instructed me in the subtleties of English at the kitchen table on St. Clair avenue. The English language was food. I shoved it into my mouth, hungry for it. A gush of warmth spread through my body, but also panic, for with each mouthful the past was further silenced.’

p126 – ‘Bella, who is nowhere to be found, is looking for me. How will she ever find me here, beside the strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?’

p207: 'Who knew that even one letter - like the "J" stamped on a passport - could have the power of life or death'

p78: 'A single letter was a matter of life and death'

p108-9 – ‘This was my first introduction to translating. And translating of one sort or another has supported me ever since. For this intuition, I will always be grateful to Kostas. “Reading a poem in translation,” wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing / two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.’

p101: 'And later, when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.'

my section

I think it should be ordered Mike->Jason->Me->James

Here's my segment... It might be a little short. If you've any ideas on how it could be bulked up a bit, that'd help:

Metaphor – more precise medium for representing memory
-> Meaning is elusive, buried in text
Use a metaphor to demonstrate:
137. ‘On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory’
- The elusive, the barely visible; metaphor operates in the same way

Multifaceted metaphor
-> Several diff. metaphors applied to indiv. objects
-> Multiple perspective seen through multiple equation

-> Goatly/Halliday perspective of grammatical metaphor as more vs. less suitable for representing scientific abstractions

Criglington – demonstrates the focus of the metaphor
-> Interdisciplinary and academic – e.g. geology, physics, archaeology

Geological example:
p86 – ‘in xenetia – in exile,” said Athos on our last night with Daphne and Kostas in their garden, “in a foreign landscape, a man discovers the old songs. He calls out for water from his own well, for apples from his own orchard, for the Muscat grapes from his own vine’

- The idea of blood history/memory; comparison with the well of NGM
- Metaphor relates to narrative drive – the return to their origins

Archeological metaphor:
279. 'They dug the bodies out of the ground. They put their bare hands not only into death, not only into the syrups and bacteria of the body, but into emotions, beliefs, confessions. One man's memories then another's, thousands whose lives it was their duty to imagine...'

- Relationship between body/soul (literal/metaphorical)
- Visceral/visible vs. Elusive

Meira Cook – accuses metaphorical over-usage – Nazi restriction of the figurative
-> Michaels demonstrating the adaptability of language – its resilience over oppression

Questions for Discussion

Ok, here is what I have down for our discussion questions (the brackets are our implied discussion):

(1) Discuss Fugitive Pieces in relation to other texts studied so far in its portrayal of Memory (psychology, bloodmemory, heritage, permanence of grief, collapsing of time)

(2) Discuss FP in relation to other texts studied so far in its portrayal of Language (immigration and immigrative action, language as exclusion, language as freedom, reflection and expression, identity)

(3) Discuss FP in relation to other texts studied so far in its portrayal of History (stylistic - historiographic metafiction, representation of marginalised or lost stories, subjectivity/objectivity, history vs narrative)

Does this look alright?

Extracts for discussion.

Hello there!

I present to you my suggestions for the extracts to use in class discussion. Voila!

(I took some from mine, and one or two from David's... feel free to chop some)

I'VE GOT - 1 on immigration, 1 on biography and its relation to history, and all 3 are related to silenced or hidden narratives. WE NEED ONE ON BLOODMEMORY and others. Ace.

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(1) THE PREFACE (the hidden narratives, the silenced stories, use of preface or other extra-narrative materials to present the characters...)

During the Second World War, countless manuscripts – diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts – were lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden – buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floors – by those who did not live to retrieve them.

Other stories are concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken. Still others are recovered, by circumstance alone.

Poet Jakob Beer, who was also a translator of posthumous writing from the war, was struck and killed by a car in Athens in the spring of 1993, at age sixty. His wife had been standing with him on the sidewalk; she survived her husband by two days. They had no children.

Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. “A man’s experience of war,” he once wrote, “never ends with war. A man’s work, like his life, is never completed.”

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(2) PAGE 89 (immigration, the hidden spaces in Toronto, the hidden stories, big links with Skin of a Lion here)

Like Athens, Toronto is an active port. It’s a city of derelict warehouses and docks, of waterfront silos and freight yards, coal yards and a sugar refinery; of distilleries, the cloying smell of malt rising from the lake on humid summer nights.

It’s a city where almost everyone has come from elsewhere – a market, a caravansary – bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs. A city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell.

It’s a city of ravines. Remnants of wilderness have been left behind. Through these great sunken gardens you can traverse the city beneath the streets, look up to the floating neighbourhoods, houses built in the treetops.

It’s a city of valleys spanned by bridges. A railway runs through back yards. A city of hidden lanes, of clapboard garages with corrugated tin roofs, of wooden fences sagging where children have made shortcuts. In April, the thickly treed streets are flooded with samara, a green tide. Forgotten rivers, abandoned quarries, the remains of an Iroquois fortress. Public parks hazy with subtropical memory, a city build in the bowl of a prehistoric lake.


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(3) PAGE 222 (biography, lost 'gaps', Alias Grace, the unspoken tales, Ana Historic)

The hindsight of biography is as elusive and deductive as long-range forecasting. Guesswork, a hunch. Monitoring probabilities. Assessing the influence of all the information we’ll never have, that has never been recorded. The importance nor of what’s extant, but of what’s disappeared. Even the most reticent subject can be- at least in part – posthumously constructed. Henry James, who might be considered coy regarding his personal life, burned all the letters he received. If anyone’s interested in me, he said, let them first crack “the invulnerable granite” of my art! But even James was rebuilt, no doubt according to his own design. I’m sure he kept track of the story that would emerge if all the letters to him were omitted. He knew what to leave out. We’re stuff with famous men’s lives; soft with the habits of our own. The quest to discover another’s psyche, to absorb another’s motives as deeply as your own, is a lover’s quest. But the search for facts, for places, names, influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances – all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by.

More From Mike (coursepack reading for this week)

[I posted a comment to Jason's post]

Hey guys,

I read through the coursepack reading over the weekend, so I'll throw up some of my notes.

At the Membrane of Language and Silence: Metaphor and Memory in Fugitive Pieces (Meria Cook, Canadian Literature 164, Spring 2000)

-This essay, like the others, only refers to FP in relation to the Holocaust.. One thing I've disliked about the articles given (and what I've seen of other articles online) is that critics focus mostly on the Holocaust aspects of the novel, and the discussion of other elements is tightly wound around discussion of Jewish issues. Interesting aspects, but considering that we don't want to focus too much on that, I was frustrated.

Quote - Literature: 'in the wake of the Holocaust it must
find new ways to represent the elisions and failures of grief when it is used as
a system of discourse. The problem of writing after is also the problem
of how to represent the impossible event faithfully while avoiding a betrayal
both of history and of the victim' (p12)

-The above quote is a perfect example. What is essentially a discussion of historiographic concerns is tied in with issues linked with the Holocaust. I know I read this element of book along the lines of others in the course, as a 'simple' discussion of grief, remembrance and representation. The 'sidelined' or 'hidden' stories - like in Alias G, Ana Historic, and certainly Skin of a Lion..

-The same is also seen in relation to fragmentation and memory - 'her arrangement of memory and history as necessarily fragmented' (p12) and:

Quote - 'Constructed as a narrative that cannot be fully captured in thought,
memory, or writing, that cannot even be adequately retransmitted from writer
to reader, Michaels' FP is a sustained exploration of memory, represented
through imagery and metaphor, on the understanding that such writing is
constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence' (p13)

- The above quote also brings in metaphor. I know I brought up the use of geological terms in the meeting. The article brings all the instances of metaphor (again, something I didn't focus on too much in my own reading).

- There is also the point that narration has a pacifying, mollifying effect on the narrated actions: 'both Jakob and Ben are aware of the paradox that, once narrated, the horror or obscenity is no longer either horrifying or obscene: instead it is essentially narratable, representable' (p16).

-Also:

Quote - 'Michaels' lush, poetic discourse jars uneasily with the horrors she is
narrating and so contributes to our discomfort as readers, at the same time that
it provides a way of thinking about metaphor and metonymy as figurative devices
that alternatively reveal and conceal the materiality of the event... When brutality, lovemaking, and the pragmatism of daily living are all described in Michaels' habitual mode of high lyricism, a prevailing flatness results.' (p16)

- I'd like to think that this is going a little far. Again, these points are interesting - and might be useful for discussion - but they did not occur to me as I read the book. Actually, I'm more inclined to think that this is the critic writing their own opinions ('I didn't like the style', 'how dare the book be about the Holocaust yet not') into the analysis. Pages 16-17 read like a person putting personal hangups into critical language in the framework of a structured, argued, pointed analysis (and it doesn't really fulfil much of a purpose in the article).

- There is a lot of discussion of the use of metaphor (p18-19). This is good stuff, and useful in our discussion of cultural memory. 'The grave-diggers who assimilate the cultural and individual memories of the corpses they disinter are no different in kind to Jakob', 'blood knowledge', 'the cultural imprint of the dead upon the living' (p19).

- One possible link with other novels (Green Grass and No Great Mischief) is the homeward impulse. Athos' father returning to Zakynthos, Jakob returns to the ghetto (in writing) and Idhra, Ben (who is Jakob's 'son') goes to Idhra as well. Here's a quote I like (and you can see how FP avoids the sentimental returns of GGRR and NGM):

Quote: 'The male characters in Michaels' novel compulsively return to the place
of origins but their returns are never sufficient because in the journey
something is always lost in translation, forgotten, erased, misrecognised or
elided.'

- Towards the end of the article, Cook quite succinctly explains the use and function of metaphor in the novel:

'Like memory, the metaphor gestures toward the unseen, the invisible, to what is
not available upon the surface of the text or within a superficial reading but
which may be discerned upon careful excavation' (p26)

"Afterbirth of Earth", Messianic Materialism in Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces (Annick Hillger, Canadian Literature 160, 1999)

- This article brings in a lot of Derrida and Marx. There's a paraphrase of Derrida - 'In describing the impossibility of deconstructing justice, he urges us to take responsibility for the past as present and to relate to the dead as living' (p28)

- This idea is good for the discussion of grief and its relation to memory.

- Again, this article mostly discusses the issues presented by FP within a Jewish-Holocaust framework (although I think there is more to salvage):

'Benjamin writes within a specifically Jewish tradition of remembrance... he revises the marxist dialectical conception of history by departing from a linear, continuous concept of time and introducing a notion of the present which brings the dialectics of historical materialism to a standstill... Rather than conceiving of the historian as someone who merely gathers the facts about the past - as certain ersions of historicism would have it - Benjamin envisages the historian as someone who finds traces of hope in the past in order to achieve a redemption of the present.' (p29)

- [sidepoint on materialism] I didn't know about this, so I looked it up - here's the Oxford Online Dictionary low-down (dictionary.oed.com):

materialism n. - Philos. Originally: the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications. Now also more narrowly: the theory or belief that mental phenomena are nothing more than, or are wholly caused by, the operation of material or physical agencies.

- [back to the article] It is around this area that the article starts speaking in both theological and philosophical realms. I get lost a little, especially because not much of it is incredibly applicable to our points. But maybe some of the more philosophically (religious-side) will be interesting to others.

- The idea of mourning or grief being inherent is linked to a 'Jewish tradition':

'Rather than distancing themselves from the past by referring to the dead as "they," those who speak in the present are called upon to "collapse time" by using the communal pronoun "we," thus including what a linear conception of time would by definition exclude from the present... Michaels formulates an ethics that transgresses the mere now and she speaks of the "responsibility of the past" as a legacy handed down to the living by the dead. In practical terms, this ethics consists in telling and retelling the story of those who can no longer speak for themselves, for the past and the present are parts of an ongoing communal story and cannot be told once and for all' (p30)

- This article also brings up a recurring image, which might be useful for our analysis and presentation. As we've already said - Athos is a geologist, and there is a great deal of geological terms used. Hillger says 'Athos is a geologist and archeologist, someone who digs the earth in order to find traces of the past' (p30). There is a lot of discussion of the metaphoric relevance of Biskupin - 'a site of historical silencing and recuperation' (p31). There is reference made to the Nazi appropriation of the site, and how the Ahnenerbe 'deliberately misread [the findings] for ideological reasons, namely in order to prove the supposed superiority of the German people':

'Clearly, the Ahnenerbe's aim was to impose one reading onto the past and silence other possible interpretations... Throughout his life Athos makes a point of setting right the distortions of historiography... He starts writing a book called Bearing False Witness, for to bear witness is a moral responsibility he feels towards those who either have not had the opportunity to speak or whose testimony has been erased.' (p31)

- There is more discussion of Greek and Judaic philosophy on p31-35, discussion of wordplay and suggestion, as well as a healthy dose of Kabbalah and Lurian teachings. I didn't take too much from these pages, as it's not tied in with our points, or my interest/knowledge. It might be interesting to use in essays, though. Actually, I didn't take much from the rest of the article itself, so what follows are some quotes/notes that relate to what we've mentioned earlier.

- Geological analogy: 'Images of geological rupture echo notions of social rupture. Moments of radical social change are like events that have radically altered the course of natural history' (p33)


The City as a Site of Counter-Memory (Meredith Criglington, Essays on Canadian Writing 81, 2004)

- This article draws reference to both Fugitive Pieces and In the Skin of a Lion - this is useful for cross-text reference. Criglington discusses monuments and objects as informing and perpetuating memory. It starts with the dual image of the two official memorials for 9/11 - The Sphere and Ground Zero:

'Like all public monuments, these memorials are ideologically charged representations of national and communal identity, and as such they invite different interpretations... In any case, these memorials remind us not only of the tragedy of September 11 but also, more generally of the imaginary and material significance of the city as a site of power and resistance and of history and memory.' (p129)

- There is a really good description of the (narrative) form of memory in relation to historiographic metafiction:

'As the monuments to the World Trade Center attest, linking past and present through a specific place is a common feature of memorial and elegiac forms. Memory's relative or chronotopic structure provides a critical model for examining representations of the past. The shifting, mediated, and constructed nature of memory challenges more traditional historiographic modes that tend to appear static, transcendent and naturalised... Moreover, that memory is partial, in the double sense of being incomplete and subjective, creates slippages and gaps through which contesting voices, or even silences, can emerge' (p130)

- The idea of 'counter-memory' is introduced, and a fellow called Lipsitz is quoted:

'Counter-memory is a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward towards a total story... counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past' (p131)

- This is very much in line with the engagement with traditional linear, exclusive, and objective history that we've seen so far in the couse.

-There is discussion of In the Skin of a Lion between pages 133-140. There are some good points, but I'll leave out quotes, because this post is already long and we're focusing on FP, after all.

- The discussion of FP starts on p140, so I'll go on from there. There are echoes of the previous articles in this quote:

'In FP, Michaels explores Holocaust memory and history in relation to the counter-monument of the buried city. She uses this symbolic site to question how one might speak for those whose histories have been lost or destroyed and how one might represent the Holocaust without aestheticising and thus redeeming it. Michaels uses chronotopic metaphors drawn from fields such as archaeology, geology and physics in order to explore the relative, shaping perspective of a person who witnesses, remembers or researches the events of the past.' (p141)

- I must admit that I don't have much else left. I think that the rest of the article repeats itself.

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The final article, Universals, by Arun Mukherjee, is very interesting, especially in its discussion of universality in philosophy, history and human understanding. I think it's a really good essay to finish the course on, and it articulates arguments that we have had throughout (objectivity/subjectivity etc), but as it does not directly engage with FP, I'll leave it out of this post.

I hope this post has been helpful.

Mike

Presentation

So here is our plan as laid out in our meeting:

- Write up all our ideas on this super-blog (all our badass quotes), for each other's reference.

- Put together a structured presentation from all these ideas - ideally, each of us talks about the element of the novel which most interests us.

- We'll do a conventional handout, then clean up this blog so that it's only got A) things that we're happy to share with the rest of the group, and B) resources (like videos, links). We'll put up an anti plagiarism warning to stop people nicking our precious ideas, and using it to create Skynet.

- For the group discussion:

* Use the whiteboard to write up cool ideas? (JG)

* Split the class into groups, briefly, and ask questions which relate Fugitive Pieces to the other books on the curriculum, to help with writing essays.

* Concentrate on the THEMATIC LINKS of the book - we don't want to get dragged down into a vulvacentrism / postmodernism slough of despond.

* JG fancies doing some work on the linguistic technique of the book.

Also, I suggest we TIME our presentations.

Another idea - why don't we tell the class that we will put the **full** transcript of our presentation on the blog - then they don't have to get absorbed in their note taking, and they can properly LISTEN to our presentation. It makes the "oral presentation" a valuable teaching tool, rather than a crappy way of relaying detailed theoretical analysis.

more quotes (now w/pt. 2)

Here are a few more quotes I picked up on. Mike's covered it pretty thoroughly (particularly crucial is the translation segment in 108-9), but here are a few more that can be added to our library.

(absence of sound vs. absence of sight)
pg 11: 'I can't hear. This is more frightening to me than darkness, and when I can't stand the silence any longer, I slip out of my wet skin, into sound.'

(existence in/separation from history)
pg 17: 'I did not witness the most important events of my life'

(transmitted histories)
pg. 20: 'Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history'

(same)
pg 28: 'Athos's stories gradually veered me from my past. Night after night, his vivid hallucinogen dripped into my imagination, diluting memory. Yiddish too, a melody gradually eaten away by silence'

(egocentricity and other selves)
pg 60: 'His touch felt natural to me, though all else was like a dream. And it was his touch that kept me from falling into myself too far'

(atrocities exploited)
pg 70: 'Send the tourists to the burnt-out chorios. These are our historic sites now. Let the tourists visit modern ruins'

(language as constructive and destructive)
pg 78: 'A single letter was a matter of life and death'

pg 79: 'I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate. But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me'

(humanity's active ability to shape history - not deterministic)
pg 84: 'There was luck in the islanders sailing to the mainland for safety, but first they had to heed the signs... There was luck in our meeting, Jakob, but first you had to run.'

(geological identity)
pg 86: "What is a man," said Athos, "who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides"

(language)
pg 101: 'And later, when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.'

(interpersonal absence)
pg 115: "When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone"

(research)
pg 120: 'In his research, Athos descends so far that he reaches a place where redemption is possible, but it is only the redemption of tragedy.'

(murder as denying access to the future)
pg 120:"Murder steals from a man his future. It steals from him his own death. But it must not steal from him his own life."

this is interelated to a quote from earlier on:

pg 24: 'The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexity of desires eternally denied'

(theoretical vs. the practical - tied into the feminist fiction/theory concept? marlatt vs. michaels - male protagonists)
pg 132: 'How could I discuss their upper-class communism with them, those who shone with certainty and had never had the misfortune of witnessing theory refuted by fact?'

(interpretation)
pg 136: 'One can look deeply for meaning or one can invent it'

(history and memory existing as one)
pg 140: 'Every moment is two moments'

(the inevitability of the fictional in biography)
pg 141: 'Never trust biographies. Too many events in a man's life are invisible. Unknown to others as our dreams. And nothing releases the dreamer; not death in the dream, not waking.'

(construction of self through memory)
pg 144: 'But each time a memory or a story slinks away, it takes more of me with it.'

(history shaping ideology)
pg 160: 'History is the poisoned well, seeping into the groundwater. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the past we know.'

(ephemeral nature of memory)
pg 170: 'I long for memory to be spirit, but I fear it is only skin.'

(the tangible, touchable nature of her skin operating in the present allows the past, his memories, to be silenced momentarily... Michaela's ability to shape the present separates her from the dead)
pg 180: 'Instead of the dead inhaling my breath with their closeness, I am deafened by the buzzing drone of Michaela's body, the power lines of blood, blue threads under her skin'

and
pg 181: 'But there is no tinge of death in Michaela's skin'

(violent separation from past - affirmation of the corporeal)
188: 'This is where I become irrevocably unmoored... suspended in the present'
189: 'Now, inside Michaela yet watching her, death for the first time makes me believe in the body'

(scent, microhistories, piecing together a day)
191: 'I search Michaela for fugitive scents... I trace her day'

................
II.

(silence, physical/emotional divide)
204: 'We slept close, knowing we could not have such pleasure without such muteness'

(post-holocaust relief, affirmation of life/faith)
205: 'Every thing belonged to, had been retrieved from, impossibility - both the inorganic and the organic - shoes and socks, their own flesh'

(power of language - tie in to graffiti pt.I)
207: 'Who knew that even one letter - like the "J" stamped on a passport - could have the power of life or death'

(memory - physical, shared history)
211: 'A forest shares a history which each tree remembers even after it has been felled'

(holocaust photographs/bog people - leading up to this moment... The historical unknowns preserved in fragments)
221: 'I can see now that my fascination wasn't archeology or even forensics: it was biography. The faces that stared out at me across the centuries, with creases in their cheeks like my mother's face when she fell asleep on the couch, were the faces of people without names. They stared and waited, mute. It was my responsibility to imagine who they might be'

(approaches to history)
222: 'The quest to discover another's psyche, to absorb another's motives as deeply as your own, is a lover's quest. But the search for facts... all this amounts to nothing if you can't find the assumption your subject lives by'

233: 'But I was born into absence. History had left a space already fetid with undergrowth...'

242: 'She knows as well as I that history only goes into remission, while it continues to grow in you until you're silted up and can't move. And you disappear into a piece of music, a chest of drawers, perhaps a hospital record or two, and you slip away, forsaken even by those who claimed to love you the most'

(traces of past existence)
265: '...in the knit of atoms, their touch is left behind. Every room emanated absence yet was drenched with your presence'

(true meaning, true identity - unification of body and soul... bit of a nod to the ideas of In the Skin of Lion here)
267: 'Your poems from those few years with Michaela, poems of a man who feels, for the first time, a future. Your words and your life no longer separate, after decades of hiding in your skin'

(shaking the past from the present)
278: 'I shook myself free of a million lives, an unborn for every ghost, over Petra's firm belly and brown thighs...'

(reshaping history: fictional/imaginational)
279: 'They dug the bodies out of the ground. They put their bare hands not only into death, not only into the syrups and bacteria of the body, but into emotions, beliefs, confessions. One man's memories then another's, thousands whose lives it was their duty to imagine...'

(body vs. memory...)
285: '...I can't tell you what her wrists look like, or the knot of bone of her ankle... I know what she makes of her memories. I know what she remembers. I know her memories.'

Some quotes and concepts

I read through my notes in the novel, and here are some quotes I liked at the time, and some general ideas/concepts:

------------------

Fugitive Pieces Quotes:

[Preface]

“During the Second World War, countless manuscripts – diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts – were lost or destroyed. Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden – buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floors – by those who did not live to retrieve them.

Other stories are concealed in memory, neither written nor spoken. Still others are recovered, by circumstance alone.

…Shortly before his death, Beer had begun to write his memoirs. “A man’s experience of war,” he once wrote, “never ends with war. A man’s work, like his life, is never completed.”

[[re-presentation of stories, hidden stories, importance of memory]]

p5 – ‘Time is a blind guide’

p22 – ‘slowly my tongue learned its sad new powers. I longed to cleanse my mouth of memory’

[[language]]

p25 – ‘when I woke, my anguish was specific: the possibility that it was as painful for them to be remembered as it was for me to remember them; that I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.’

[[persistence of loss, memory]]

p53 – ‘we long for place; but place itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents and river sediment’

[[identity, immigration, memory, geology]]

p86 – ‘in xenetia – in exile,” said Athos on our last night with Daphne and Kostas in their garden, “in a foreign landscape, a man discovers the old songs. He calls out for water from his own well, for apples from his own orchard, for the Muscat grapes from his own vine’

[[immigration, memory, identity]]

p89 – ‘Like Athens, Toronto is an active port. It’s a city of derelict warehouses and docks, of waterfront silos and freight yards, coal yards and a sugar refinery… It’s a city where almost everyone has come from elsewhere – a market, a caravansary – bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs. A city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell.

[[in fact, 89-90 is a very good section on Toronto and postcolonial identity, as well as geological memory/consciousness, could be good for discussion]]

P92 –‘Athos instructed me in the subtleties of English at the kitchen table on St. Clair avenue. The English language was food. I shoved it into my mouth, hungry for it. A gush of warmth spread through my body, but also panic, for with each mouthful the past was further silenced.’

[[language, identity]]

P95 – ‘Language. The numb tongue attaches itself, orphan, to any sound it can: it sticks, tongue to cold metal. Then, finally, many years later, tears painfully free.’

[[ditto]]

P102-3 – ‘these weekly explorations into the ravines were escapes to the ideal landscapes; lakes and primeveal forests so long gone they could never be taken away from us. / On these walks I could temporarily shrug off my strangeness because, the way Athos saw the world, every human was a newcomer.’

[[geology and its relation to identity, and immigration]]

P108-9 – ‘This was my first introduction to translating. And translating of one sort or another has supported me ever since. For this intuition, I will always be grateful to Kostas. “Reading a poem in translation,” wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing / two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.’

[[another good section – immigration – immigrative action of the poet/translator, crossing boundaries, defamiliarisation ???]]

P111 – ‘I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only in silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished. The moment I failed to see Bella had disappeared.’

‘I thought of writing poems this way, in code, every letter askew, so that loss would wreck the language, become the language.

If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Otherwise history is only a tangle of wires.’

P119 – ‘he often applied the geologic to the human, analysing social change as he would a landscape; slow persuasion and catastrophe. Explosions, seizures, floods, glaciation. He constructed his own historical topography.’

[[geology, obviously]]

P126 – ‘Bella, who is nowhere to be found, is looking for me. How will she ever find me here, beside the strange woman? Speaking this language, eating strange food, wearing these clothes?’

[[loss as two-way process, the dead are present in memory, still living through mourning. The stasis of the remembered while the rememberer will always be changing, growing]]

--

---[I really like the section which in my edition is 127-128, in the music library, in which cultures, countries, people and history all link together in wordplay, communication and language… postmodern play and breaking of borders in speech:

P128 – ‘Ceylon! Abyssinia Samoa. Can’t Roumania; Tibet. Moscow!’]---

--

P132 – Alexandra – ‘in her mouth, English was dangerous and alive, edgy and hot’

P137 – ‘Maps of history have always been less honest. Terra cognita and terra incognita inhabit exactly the same coordinates of time and space. The closest we come to knowing the location of what’s unknown is when it melts through the map like a watermark, a stain transparent as a drop of rain. On the map of history, perhaps the water stain is memory’

P138 – ‘history is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers’

P193 – ‘there’s no absence, if there remains even the memory of absence. Memory dies unless it’s given a use. Or as Athos might have said: if one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.’

Is Nothing Sacred? Chasing the almighty $

FUGITIVE PIECES THE MOVIE