Medicine River: Book Talk # 2

Medicine River

By Thomas King

Toronto: Penguin, 1989

261 pages

Recommended Grade Level: 12

The Quest for Identity in Thomas King's Medicine River

The Analysis:
Medicine River is the story of Will Sampson's homecoming to Medicine River, the town where he grew up. We follow Will as he comes to terms with who he is, in both flashback and present day first person narrative. Through Will's quest, we see varying degrees of what it means to be a brother, a father, and a First Nation's person.

Half white and half Blackfoot, the precarious nature of First Nations identity, as restricted by the Canadian government (the flashback sequences occur in the 1950s - 1960s) is problematic for Will's identity. Because of his white father (who Will never knew), Will's mother losses her Indian status (although First Nation's men could marry non-First Nation's women and retain their status, First Nation's women could not marry non-First Nations without losing their status and their children's status).

As a result, Will and his little brother James grow up just outside the Blackfoot reserve in the town of Medicine River. As Will and his brother grow up they move further away from the Blackfoot reserve and their Blackfoot heritage. While James becomes a world traveller, Will ends up working as a photographer in Toronto. Only two things connect Will to Toronto: his job and his lover, Susan.

Susan is one of the two complex relationships that Will has with women (excluding his mother) in the novel. The other relationship is with Louise, with whom Will assumes the father role with her daughter, South Wing. With Susan, Will is the other man in an affair. With Louise (back in Medicine River), Will is a consumate companion and surrogate father to her daughter, although neither title is formalized through marriage.

Will's return to Medicine River is sparked by a number of events. The first is the death of his mother. On returning for her funeral, Will meets Harlan Big Bear who sells him on the prospects of opening a photography shop in Medicine River. Harlan, throughout the novel, acts like a brother to Will, by offering him advice and support over a plethora of events and relationships as they come up. Will's decision to return to Medicine River is solidified by the dissolution of his relationship with Susan (she returns to her husband) and the loss of his photography job in Toronto.

With the help of Harlan Big Bear, Will reintegrates himself into the community of Medicine River, finding a new brother (Harlan), a daughter (South Wing), and deep connection to the Blackfoot community.

Recommendation:

I highly recommend Medicine River for Grade 12 students. The book covers a number of subjects that are ripe for discussion and further inquiry: First Nations rights, cultural identity, and gender rights. On top of this, the structure of the novel (juxtaposing past and present scenes) allows students the opportunity to experiment with comparison arguments (there is an essay just waiting to be written)!

Resistance is futile, or to quote an old television commericial, "why be you, when you could be me?"

"Even though Timmy didn't know it at the time, he had little choice but to fit in."

To me, Jeffery D. Wilhelm and Bruce Novak's discussion of the True Self and the False Self drew immediate comparisons to Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. In a nut a shell, the mirror stage is a process of objectification initiated by an infant, wherein the infant creates an ideal image of him or her self (subsequently ratified by those around us). Effectively we have two selves: the outer and the inner. For the purpose of this blog entry, I am connecting the Outer Self to the False Self and the Inner Self to the True Self.

In Wilhelm and Novak (chapter 7), the point is made that the False Self is the product of an individual trying to comply with the rules and expectations of a parent or a teacher figure. Under the guise of the False Self we either are slaves to the Other's wishes, or we pretend to be slaves in order to manipulate the Other to do what we want (see 152). Either way, it is not a very healthy relationship.

What Wilhelm and Novak recommend is for students to find a balance where they can manipulate the tools they are given in a way that does not make them carbon copies (or clones) of their instructor. Hopefully, as teachers, if we can effectively engage our students to develop their own opinions and positions, we can help them recognize the things in their life that are trying to manipulate them (such as television advertisements). I know this must all sound rather idealistic, but the better equipped they are in truly expressing themselves, perhaps the better able they will be in recognizing the importance of being who they are and not what others want them to be.

We can all recognize the consequences of idealizing the False Self. Self image is a particularly troubling subject for many teens. Clearly there are objectives that must be meet in the classroom. Even so, on top of all the other pressures they are facing, teens should not feel ashamed to be who they are in class.

Remarkably I found the old Concerned Children's Advertiser Ad on YouTube:

If I focus on myself hard enough, nobody else exists...

Returning to the focus of my posting, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Love the Author, is the topic of this week's Critical Encounters' reading: the reader response movement.

In my previous posting, I argued, through the invocation of Roland Barthes, that the text has no meaning to the reader until he or she gives it meaning. Deborah Appleman notes that while the reader response movement began as "a friendly antidote to the tyranny of the text" (2009, 49), where the readers (i.e., the students) were the meaning-makers of the text, the movement has since become "not just a way, but the way, of reading texts..." (2009, 49). Hence, if poorly utilized, it merely replaces one form of authoritarian meaning with another.

The most problematic issue in the abuse of the reader response movement, as brought up in class, is the centralization of all meaning within the reader. This is much different than my Barthian argument that a reader creates meaning. On the one hand, the reader creates his or own meaning upon reading the text (possibly through the influence of another's opinion, while remaining open to other perspectives after the fact). On the other hand, the reader formulates his or her own absolute meaning (rejecting other perspectives).

This sort of reader response abuse is antithetical to the learning I would hope to foster in the future English classroom I hope to teach. It is vitally important to allow students to create their own opinions. But there must be checks and balances. The student who harbours his or her's ideas as being the only ones that matter is an introvert. Without a recognition of diverging ideas, the student would certainly fail to grow... and if they will not grow, can they really learn (especially in the English course setting)?

Spider's Song: Book Talk #1

Spider's Song

By Anita Daher

Toronto: Penguin Books, 2007

213 pages

Recommended Grade: 7-9






Will anybody find me somebody to love? The Anatomy of the Victim in Spider's Song

The Summary:

AJ, the protagonist of Anita Daher's Spider's Song, is a victim. Living in Yellowknife with her grandmother, AJ laments the loss of her parents: her dad seemingly taking off when she was a little girl and her mother pursuing a Bachelor of Education in Edmonton. With no friends, and a crippling sense of lonliness (although she exchanges emails with her mother), AJ, to ease her pain, goes "to her special place, an abandoned shack, and [does] things [cuts herself]" (13). AJ's life starts to turn around when she enters the school division's year-end photo contest. Teaming up with classmate and eventual friend, Mark, AJ initially joins to beat class rival Alex Murdock. While taking photos at a festival in Yellowknife, AJ meets a travelling musician, named Ed, who suggests that he is her long lost father. Overjoyed, AJ shares her thoughts on her blog (Cherry Blossom) and proceeds to take pictures of Ed for the contest, although he is less than enthusiastic. In a dramatic twist, Ed is revealed to be jilted lover from AJ's mother's past, who faked his own death in order to put AJ's father behind bars for murder. Ed, who wanted AJ to go away with him, is eventually caught and AJ is reunited with her father who is released from prison.

The Analysis:

AJ's vulnerability is pronounced throughout the novel. She feels completely alienated and alone. Mark says it best, when winning over AJ's friendship, in proclaiming, "freaks of the world unite" (9). Feeling that she has no one to talk to, AJ begins blogging about her life. Seemingly oblivious to the potential worldwide audience, AJ reveals her lonlieness and her desire to have a closer relationship with her mother and father.

Armed only with the name of AJ's mother (Cherry James), a "vaguely familiar face" (37), and an old photo of himself, Cherry and another man, Ed utilizes AJ's vulnerability to get close to her. Presented with these three items, AJ proclaims that Ed must be her father and immediately fantasizes a close relationship with the man he thinks his her father.

Clearly the novel highlights the dangers of identity and the internet. Ed fosters in AJ the idea of running away with him. Enthralled with Ed, AJ turns against her mother, writing on her blog that she is "unfair," "not so perfect," and at fault for how AJ's life developed (138). Even when Ed's true identity is revealed, AJ is oblvious to the fact that Ed used her blog to get information and get close to her.

While the novel presents several serious issues: self-mutilation and internet predators, it glosses over them to get to the next plot point. The novel begins with AJ cutting herself, but the scars from her affliction go unnoticed and her habit is hardly mentioned from there on out. The importance of AJ's blog for Ed is also glossed over. Ed uses AJ's blog to get close to her and nearly abduct her. The issue is dropped, however, in favor of nourishing an elaborate plot of a staged murder (which landed AJ's father in prison and out of her life).

Recommendation:

Spider's Song is a suitable read for teens between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. While the plot may be engrossing for teens of this age range, I do not think that the novel offers enough depth to be studied in school.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Love the Author

"Just as much of the emotional power that teddy bears and security blankets have come from their tacitly evoking the caring presence of those who have given them to us, so likewise much of the emotional power of art comes from their tacitly evoking the caring presence of authors" (Wilhelm and Novak, 2011, 96).

Chapter 5 of Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom is all about love. The love that we the readers apparently have for the authors who provide us with our literary nourishment.

While I agree that studying the author of any given text may open avenues of interpretation that were unavailable before, I feel that the idea that "the caring presence of authors" is necessary to generate the "emotional power of art" is simply not the case.

In Roland Barthes' seminal 1967 essay, The Death of the Author, it is argued that assigning a text to an author, and restricting interpretation through an analysis of him or her, sets a limit on the text. Barthes goes on to argue that a reader must separate a text from its author in order find meaning. As such, each of us "kills" the author by interpreting his or her text under our own lenses. We become the authors of meaning.

The analogy provided by Wilhelm and Novak, in which the emotional tethers of teddy bears and security blankets are tied to the relationship of author and book to reader, is ripe with error.

First, the problem of the analogy itself: The emotional tether created by a loved one giving you a teddy bear or a security blanket does not correspond with the author releasing a text for the world to read. Obviously without the author there is no text, but just because the author created the text does not mean I have an emotional connection to him or her. For instance, if my mother gave me a teddy bear, it is a connection between my mother and I that is being strengthened, not one between myself and the child laborer who stuffed the bear.

Second, any emotional power attributed to art is reliant on one's personal experiences. The words provided by the author have no meaning to me until I give them meaning. I can do this without the tacit knowledge of the author's origins or identity.

All that knowledge of the author can supply me is another perspective - one that may effect my emotional connection to the work, but not one that creates it.

Dropkicking the Canon

I always get a little bit of a raised eyebrow when I tell people that I wrote my Master's project paper on satire in Fallout 3. Having spent a year in a digital literature class ingesting arguments that relegated the videogame form as inferior, I decided to stand up for a form that I knew was capable of far more than it was being given credit for.

What does this have to do with anything?

In class today, we discussed how children's reading habits evolve (from Goosebumps to Stephen King, for example). We discussed how you might use a text that students might find enjoyable to transition them into something out of the Canon, such as King Lear. All important topics.

Popular art, found in its multitude of forms (videogames, film, comics, magazines, etc.) is a great resource to use to "frontload" a class to prepare them for Canonical works of literature. It is important to note, however, that the frontloaded work may be as complicated as the Canonical piece you are trying to open up to them.

During my time as GTL for the Department of English in 2009-2010, I used film quite often to "frontload" a difficult text. In one case, my class and I watched Apocalypse Now before diving into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. We spent considerable time analyzing Willard's encounter with Kurtz at the end of the movie, as it baired considerable resemblance to Marlow's encounter with Kurtz at the end of Heart of Darkness.

While I used the film to setup the novel, I found many students much more engrossed with the film. Apocalypse Now opened up a whole barrell of questions. As a result, I gave them the option of writing a comparative essay between the two.

The success of bringing in popular culture raises an important question: should we stick to the Canon? Can a piece of popular art not stand on its own in the classroom? Must it be tied to something in the Canon?

Certainly the human condition is not only tied to works deemed important by the literary elite.







Note: My MA project paper is available at: http://library2.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-09202010-095750/unrestricted/StevensonProjectPaper.pdf

And what exactly just happened...

In chapter seven of Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher discusses the importance of using metaphor to deepen comprehension. Gallagher argues that getting students to think metaphorically provides them with two benefits: 1) "students are more readily able to reach deeper levels of comprehension," and 2) "repeated practice recognizing and analyzing metaphor enables students to generate their own metaphorical connections to the text and the world, thus sharpening their higher-level thinking skills" (Gallagher, 2004, 125).

I agree with Gallagher's position.

Imagine, if you would, that you lack the capacity to recognize figurative language. How does that change how you view your world? Do things suddenly became more bland? Does your world suddenly possess a serious dramatic tone? A basic understanding of sarcasm requires a basic understanding / awareness of metaphor (even if you don't quite know the term for it).

Of course, on some level, everyone is aware of figurative language. These levels vary. As such, our understanding of particular texts are directly limited by our understanding of how metaphors are used. Maybe we can recognize that a metaphor is being used, but do we know what it means?

The English language, like all communication, is an elaborate code. As teachers, it is our responsibility to provide our students with the tools necessary to decrypt this code. The greater our comprehension of the code, the greater our ability is to find deeper meaning.

The following is a clip from Pink Floyd's The Wall. What are the metaphors? What do they mean?



Obviously it is important for students to recognize metaphors in the written word, but metaphors obviously transcend the page.