Reading Rebecca reading the battle for Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe can’t fight right now. He’s too ill and Rebecca’s tending to his wounds and his illness with her special physic skills (passed down through generations of Jewish women). And there’s a vibe goin’on between the two though they both know it’s a vibe that cannot be. Yikes! So, it’s bound to create future tension in the story as an experienced reader will know…For now, though, in the moment of the story, it’s interesting how a scene in which Rebecca looks out the window (carefully as the Front-de-Boeuf’s castle where she and Ivanhoe and others are being held captive is under attack) and describes the details and progress of the battle to Ivanhoe can be filled with that potential. It also implicates the reader in a more active way. An interesting approach to narration…where it’s actually more exciting to have the scene filtered through Rebecca than to read a description direct from Scott.

In a sense reading to someone else always has that potential. It’s intimate even when you read to your child or your rat or when someone reads to you on the radio like the other week when CBC reran that Al Purdy dramatization and Gordon Pinsent in the character of Al Purdy read “The Country North of Belleville” and “Wilderness Gothic” to me!* ( I did have the weird, unpleasant experience of listening to someone reading to their child from an adjacent campsite when we were away a couple of weeks ago. I found it incredibly irritating like listening to a radio with the sound turned down too low but even more irritating than that because it was a children’s story and it had that singsongyness to the reading. I went for a walk just to escape it.)


*(I love both of those Purdy poems –

from “The Country North of Belleville” :

This is the country of our defeat

and yet

during the fall plowing a man

might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows

and shade his eyes to watch for the same

red patch mixed with gold

that appears on the same

spot in the hills

year after year

and grow old

plowing and plowing a ten-acre field until

the convolutions run parallel with his own brain ---



From “Wilderness Gothic”:

An age of faith moving into transition,

the dinner cold and new-baked bread a failure,

deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant,

double yolked eggs and the house creaks a little —

two shores away, a man hammering in the sky.

Perhaps he will fall.)