In the Skin of a Lion (2): --Immigrant Workers vs. Urban Planners-- Patrick’s Education

City Vision and History

http://www.toronto.ca/archives/skin_of_a_lion2.htm

Construction workers, Bloor Street viaductCity of Toronto ArchivesSeries 372, sub-series 10, item 430

Outline Plot Summary and Starting Questions Some Quotes Palace of Purification

The workers R. C. Harris Patrick’s Education

Alice Hana In the Library

Remorse

In the Skin of a Lion: Plot “Palace of Purification” -- Patrick works as a

tunneller, R.C. Harris’s vision of the plant and the workers;

-- P goes to a party at the half-finished waterworks, where he sees a puppet show and meets Alice again.

-- Alice and Patrick’s discussion of politics (122 -), Conrad, Cato (140-42)

-- at the tannery & the other workers; Alice’s discussion of “the rich” (132)

-- Patrick with immigrant workers (133)

-- Patrick the re-searcher 143 at Riversale Library

In the Skin of a Lion: Plot “Remorse” Alice’s death (165; 239) ”He

had wanted to know her when she was old. … As if, having travelled all that distance to enter the castle in order to learn its wisdom for the grand cause, he now turns and walks away” (163-64) bombing the Muskoka Hotel (167) Communicating with Elizabeth at the Garden of the Blind the cook on the Cherokee

Questions

In the chapter "Palace of Purification" we get to see more types of workers: tunnelers, tanners, dyers, cooks, waiters, those working food processing (131). How are they presented—similarly to or differently from those in Bk 1?

How is Patrick related to Alice, Hana and the Macedonians? How is the theme of love and violence continued here?

Is the title "Palace of Purification" allegorical in any way?

Wickett and Craig tannery toronto, c1900

Questions: Meanings of the following quote?

“Patrick never believed that characters lived only on the page. They altered when the author’s eye was somewhere else. Outside the plot there was a great darkness, but there would of course be daylight elsewhere on earth. Each character had his own time zone, his own lamp, otherwise they were just men from nowhere.” (143)

Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become. (145)

Questions: Meanings of the following quote? “Dye work took place in the courtyards next to the

warehouse. Circular pools had been cut into the stone – into which the men leapt waist-deep within the reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently slaughtered animals. In the round wells four-foot in diameter they heaved and stomped ensuring the dye went solidly into the pores of the skin that had been part of a live animal the previous day. And the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their own bodies. They had leapt into different colours as if into different countries. (129-30)

Palace of Purification

Patrick as a Tunneller as a tunneller 1930 working under Lake

Ontario; also a dynamiter Dangers and darkness pp. 106; 108 (like

the mules) The party of different nationalities 115

Patrick as a Tanner & the Other Workers Works in a tannery 129- The other workers’ hardships 131 The community of workers

the party Patrick an alien among them 133 “Hey Italy!” “Hey Canada!” (135) at the Oak

Leaf Steam Baths

R. C. Harris’s Vision Ideal city (see images in next slide)

Water Treatment Plant

A palace Byzantine city gate

(Art Deco style); Inside: an ideal city

Water Treatment PlantA Tour here

-- Brass elevator, -- ornament iron,-- Art deco clock, -- friezes depicting -- stylized impellers…

Water Treatment PlantUnfloored windows looking over filter pools…

Tunnel as an Unfinished World "In those photographs moisture in the tunnel appears

white. There is a foreman's white shirt, there is white lye daubed onto rock to be dynamited. And all else is labour and darkness. [...] An unfinished world." (111)

Not the exact photo described

(source)

Photographs of Lewis Hine Text 145 (source)

Harris -- “The form of a city changes faster than the

heart of a mortal,” quoting Baudelaire (110)

Realizes his dream with the support of the companies (with names) and those anonymous and silent workers (of which Patrick is one).

Patrick’s Education

1) As an Adult Worker Always an outsider, joining the

Macedonian group reduced himself almost to nothing 113 Getting to know Macedonians 112- (on

Finnish coat) Waterworks at 8:00 (a political meeting and a

party)

Macedonian (p. 122)Macedonia (region), a wider geographical and historical region covering Republic of Macedonia, Macedonia in Greece, as well as parts of Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo and Serbia

With Alice Patrick and the puppet show 116 –

recognizes the large puppet as human Finds himself like a puppet (120) Connecting with Alice – cleaning her eyes “so that it was not Alice

Gull but something more intimate” (121)

Discussion with Alice about social justice P – passive, protecting friends A -- Why leave the power in his hands? (123); tells him about

Ambrose (as predator) about “they.” A – Name the enemy and destroy their power (124); you are

mongrel like me.

Alice: With a Clear Agenda and Non-Graspable/Grasping You name the enemy and destroy their power.

Start with their luxuries – their select clubs, their summer mansions. (124-25)

Let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of all objects. (135); “I’m not big enough to put someone in a position where they have to hurt another.”; “I feel she’s[Hana’s] loaned to me. We’re veiled in flesh” (125)

Alice: Non-Graspable/Grasping Who was she … (151) She has delivered him out of nothing. As if a fabulous heron in flight has fallen dead at

his feet and he sees the further wonder of its meticulous construction. (152)

he can never conceive how she leaps from her true self to her other true self.

Patrick the two women Patrick comfortable in someone else's

landscape 138 Clara--dissolve and disappear from him,

Alice-- came to him in a series of masks or painted faces. Live in silence 128

Patrick Learning Patrick learning: “It is her reading of a

Conrad letter that provokes Patrick to tell Alice that the 'trouble' with ideology 'is that it hates the private. You must make It human’ (135)” (Hutcheon 98)

Patrick’s Education Searching in the library

"Once a searcher for the disappeared, he becomes a re-searcher for the re-appreared." (Hutcheon 98-99)

His new awareness of his role in history: “His own life was no longer

a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices.. (143-45)

restores memory to Temelcoff (149) Cato murdered in the winter of 1921 p. 157

Patrick and Hana Hana—always careful pp. 137- ; Always practical Hana initiating Patrick’s research: -- the Geranium Bakery 138 148 (Alice)

He[Temelcoff] is a tentative man, even with his family. That night in bed shyly he tells his wife the story of the nun.(149)

Nicholas “sewn into history.”

-- 139 -- shows Patrick her mementoes (3 photos, rosary, etc.) –Cato’s letter (154-)

Cato’s Letter flint-hard and unemotional in the midst of the

inferno of Cato’s situation (155) Patrick has clung like moss to strangers, to the

nooks and fissures of their situations… a watcher, a corrector. “A gap of love.”

Alice’s story: a woman with an animal skin for other women to wear (“In the skin of a lion”): ”Each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story.”

Cato’s Letter a Love Story P wants to take care of Hana. “This is only a love story. He does not

wish for plot and all its consequences. Let me stay in this field with Alice Gull.” (160)

Remorse

Set fire to Muskoka Hotel 168

Discussion Questions Pay attention to the temporal transition and

how Alice’s death revealed? Which is more significant, setting fire to

Hotel Muskoka or talking to the woman at the Garden of the Blind, and being helped by the cook?

Quote (163-64) He had always wanted to know her when she

was old. Patrick sits in her green room, in front of leaves and berries in the old river bottle – a bouquet of weeds collected by Alice the day before her death. Sumac and valley grasses that she picked under the viaduct. When night comes he lights the kerosene lamp which throws a shadow of this still-life against the wall so it flickers dark and alive. …

Now there is a moat around her he will never cross again.

Next time:Caravaggio Maritime Theatre

NO by Robert Lepage