The topic is to discuss binary oppositions in P.K. Page’s “Unless the Eye Catch Fire,” and explore how the narrative also works to break down those oppositions. Your thesis will address not just how, but also why, the story takes this approach, and will consider concepts (e.g. there-here, self-other, life-death, etc.) as well as how people are opposed to one another.
Attached lecture PowerPoint for the poem if needed.

Write an informative title that indicates the focus of your essay and identifies the text and author.
Draft a detailed, well-thought-out first paragraph that provides the full name of the text(s) and the author(s) and that begins with a general discussion of your topic and then introduces the narrower concern of your own essay and your plan of argument.
End the paragraph with your thesis statement — the hypothesis you intend to argue.
Format the page exactly as you will in your essay, modeling it on the sample page attached here.
— the title centered over the first paragraph
— all text, including the identifying information and title, double-spaced and in plain 12-point type (no boldface) with 2.5 cm margins.
On a second page, attach a list of your Work or Works Cited, in the correct MLA style. “requirements-for-essays” (section 9) includes how to cite.

“Unless the Eye Catch Fire…” (1979)

First stanza of Page’s “glosa.” See her
read the entirety of “Planet Earth” here.

the end of the world or of humankind and speculates on how that would happen and how humans would respond.
“Engaged works of speculative fiction may present other realities, but their alternative
worlds will comment on this world—negatively to satirize its shortcomings, or positively to
provide a model for emulation, as in some utopias.” — R. B. Gill, “The Uses of Genre and the Classification of Speculative Fiction”
Is this story an example of Climate Fiction (Cli–Fi)?
• An independent, stand–alone genre, restricted to those works of fiction that consider the specific problem of human–made climate change, including global warming. May take place in the world today or the near future.
• Term coined in 2013 and promoted by writer Dan Bloom.
“The whole point is to reach people with emotions, not just preach to the choir.”
Bloom, “How to wake up people with climate fiction novels: A climate activist finds inspiration in ‘cli–fi’” Jan. 6 2017
Historical contexts: Rise of environmental movements in 1960s–1970s; concerns about pollution, deforestation, greenhouse gases, global warming, rising water levels, etc.
Literary predecessors and context:
“The City of the End of Things” (poem), Archibald Lampman (Can. 1894)
Kim Stanley Robinson, “Venice Drowned” (U.S. 1981)
Carol Shields, “Words (Can./U.S. 1985)

Title and Epigraph
• Identified as taken from 1972 book Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and
Transcendence in Postindustrial Societies by American scholar Theodore Roszak (b.
1933); about disastrous effects of industrialization and technology.
• But in Roszak, these words are epigraph to ch. 9, and are taken from poem by
early Romantic poet William Blake, 1757–1827, visionary poet interested in
transcendence; work was about vision, but not physical vision: instead, seeing
with the eye of the imagination.
Pentecost (excerpt)
By William Blake (1757–1827)
Unless the eye catch fire
The God will not be seen
Unless the ear catch fire
The God will not be heard
Unless the tongue catch fire
The God will not be named
Unless the heart catch fire
The God will not be loved
Unless the mind catch fire
The God will not be known

Characteristics of story:
1. Diary form (“I” narrator; first–person); entries dated, sometimes provisionally.
2. Highly metaphoric language: on first pages, metaphors of light, water, music,
technology, almost like extended prose poem.
Prose poem: written in prose (in standard units of sentence and paragraph, rather
than line and stanza), but retains characteristics of poetry, such as repeated
metaphors and other figures of speech.
3. Repeated breakdown of binary oppositions.
Binary opposition: a pair of seemingly opposite terms or ideas, that are in fact
fundamentally related because they depend upon one another for meaning.
E.g. on second page: there/here, I/they
Other examples include:
outer – inner; self – other; eternity – moment
without – within (189); subject – object (190); we – they (197); individual – world (198); self –
other (201)
future – past – present (198)
humans – animals (202); inanimate (house) – animate (self) (204); organic – inorganic (207)
life – death (195, 197, and esp. 205)

“Unless the Eye Catch Fire”: possible interpretations that you will be asked to
debate in your Tutorials/Seminars.
1. If this is an apocalyptic narrative, is it cli–fi that serves as an ecological warning
about the effects of human–caused environmental damage to the planet? Does
the story’s epigraph support this interpretation?
2. Does the story serve as a representation of the social construction of difference
or “otherness,” with the “others” identified as scapegoats? In which ways?
3. Is the story a meditation on transformation, especially through vision or
visionary imagination? Does the story’s epigraph (on a second look) support this
interpretation?
Farouk Mitha in his essay “Catching Fire: Allegories of Alchemical Transformation in the Art of P.K.
Page,” Journal of Canadian Studies vol. 38, no. 1, 2004, refers to the story’s “processes of
transmutation through fire.”
4. Is the story an exploration of new, post–human modes of communicating or
being?

1. Ecological warning in apocalyptic narrative: earth heating up
(193), melting ice caps (195), rising sea levels (203), drastically
increasing air temperatures (202–03); no birds sing, hideous hot
dawn, haze of dust, leafless trees (202).
• Possible ecological reasons are listed on 195, ending with blaming
“mankind at large — improvident, greedy mankind” and our
“polluted, strike–ridden (sic) world.”
Apocalyptic narrative: last line of this paragraph refers to the
“fabled flames of hell,” and the next paragraph moves to a
discussion of prophecy (195).

2. Division through creation of scapegoats; other works of literature focus on
how people othered in terms of “race,” gender, social class, etc.; here Page
creates fictive imagined group of “others.”
• “Seeing” does not just create unity between those who see (narrator and
Dexter, Sidney); also creates divisions between those who see and those who
don’t.
• Those who “see” called “shake freaks,” denounced as “shakers”; “shake–
baiting” brings memories of witch–hunts in Salem, Mass. (192).
• Narrator knows it might be dangerous for others to know of her abilities (192–
93). J. thinks “shake freaks” cause of earth heating up (194); needs to find
someone at fault.
• Since “man likes a scapegoat,” “the ‘shake freaks’ are considered lunatic
fringe” “held responsible for the escalating heat”; “one or two nasty incidents”
(195).
• The seeing divides families, the heat menaces all (194).
• When narrator doesn’t reveal she can see the colours, says “felt faithless,” “as
if I had not borne witness to my God” (191).

3. Transformation, of two types:
i. of earth into a burning and uninhabitable place: a “self–cleaning oven,” ridding
itself of humans (204), and
ii. of people by new way of seeing. Narrator transformed by colours, becomes one
with the other.
• Narrator uses word “epiphany” (189), “transfiguration” (191), says “seeing the
colours seems to change one” (197), that it is, “Dizzying. Transforming. Life–giving”
(198). World as others see it “untransmuted” (200). In contrast, she “shine[s] in the
dark” (196).
Vision emphasized throughout story, but in the entry “Noon” (204), “I” equated
with “eye,” “the perceiving organ.” She and Dexter become light, are dissolved by it.
Could tear people apart, and in fact does, but because of this other type of
transformation, also brings people (and animals, and other parts of the natural
world) together.

4. Is this type of communication, of oneness with others, post–human: beyond
what humans can realistically do now?
• “a whole community changes, is able to see, catches fire” (192).
• Are as “related to one another as the components of a molecule.” Are “we.”
“Like the quails, we share one brain – no, I think it is one heart – between us”
(197).
• Narrator says she is “part of this vibrating luminescence.” Time no longer
passes (simultaneity) (198).
• No longer gangs of angry, desperate people: “We seem at last to understand
that we are all in this together” (199).
• With Sidney, “your right hand hasn’t much to say to your left, or one eye to
the other” (201).