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.