Literature Notes

link to back cover

Some quotes:

• "The programs were aimed at elderly viewers with little or no experience of paints and brushes, and the words that cropped up most frequently in Ross's titles for his works - Serenity, Solitude, Golden, Quiet, Retreat, Hideaway, Seclusion, Lonely, Autumn, Winter - were all descriptive of the state of retirement itself." [p. 107]

I can relate to this.

• "In this fictional tempest, the steamer is going by the lead and making the correct signals, while the artist, bound to the mast, is going about his usual business with pencil and sketchpad. This is how the world is. We live with chaos as the encompassing condition of our lives. We learn to work through it. With luck, we emerge from it." [p. 187]

These are the only sentences in the entire novel, other than quotes from historical journals, that are in italics.

• "The Indians were equally impressed by the arts of the visitors - especially by the carved and painted figureheads on their ships, whose meaning and totemic power were much discussed. Interestingly, no one on the Vancouver expedition mentioned seeing a totem pole, nor is one shown in any of the midshipmen's drawings of native villages, though carved house-posts were observed almost everywhere. ... By the 1820's, totem poles were seen everywhere along the Inside Passage: a product of fur-trade wealth and leisure, iron chisels and gouges - and possibly the example of figureheads on white men's ships." [p. 197]

Lovely. Seems like a strong argument to me.

• "The point, surely, is that these compositions [of west coast native art] are infinitely amenable to interpretation, no version of which can be counted final and authoritative. With marvelous stylistic assurance and control, the Indian artists have rendered a world inherently fluid, fragmentary, elusive and chaotic. Look, it's a bear; look again, it's a halibut.This is nature as one meets it in the distorting mirror of the water." [p. 205]

In just a few pages I have learned more about west coast native art than in all of the art books I have seen on this topic.

• "The trouble is that the Indians' oral literature has been systematically eroded by several generations ... starting with the first late-Victorian collectors, who tended to flinch at the stories' bawdy relish for the details of sex and evacuation." [p. 215]
  
  
• "The world of these stories is turbulent and random: again and again, they show the Indians as creatures moving through a landscape full of powers - hapless babes in the malevolent wood." [p. 218]

• "Too often, Indian life on the Northweat coast was pictured as an idyll - the tribes living at one with nature, in a region of unparalleled abundance - until it was violated by the white intruders. Nothing in their own art or literature gave credence to that guilty, sentimental notion." [p. 219]

Now the same comment applies to literature. This novel is packed with insightful commentary, much of it at variance with established scholarship.

• "You were constantly made aware of your own physical insignificance by the girth of the fir, the rearing bulk of the grizzly, the crash of the whale, the massive turmoil of the tide." [p. 220]

  This is one of the main reasons why I like hiking in the mountains in Canada and watching the surf in Australia.

   

SUMMARY of the session: This is a much more powerful book than one realizes!