blake 3:17
19th January 2012, 16:27
Most folks here won't have heard of him. He was an ardent Althusserian literary theorist, who on retirement became a full time activist with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee. I met Norm through OCAP at a picket line at 5:30 or 6 in the morning. I didn't know he was sick until the rally of June 15, 2000 when an OCAP speaker asked the crowd to yell as loud as possible so Norm could hear us from his hospital bed. He died later that day or very early on 16th.
The first obituary is by Bryan Palmer, the second by John Clarke.
On 15 June 2000 another advocate of Canadian workers, especially those incarcerated in homelessness and poverty, Norman N. Feltes, died. Feltes, a marxist literary theorist with an acute sense of the significance of an Althusserian reading of "texts," was one of many dissidents who left the United States in the 1960s to take up residence in Canada as a protest against their society’s politics and culture. A former US Marine, Feltes served in Korea before utilizing the GI Bill to pursue graduate studies in English at Dublin and Oxford. Returning to the United States, Feltes began what would prove a life of protest, marching in southern civil rights campaigns and turning his opposition to the imperialist policies of the United States in Vietnam. In 1969, convinced that the country of his birth gave him no other option, Feltes came to Canada where he found a niche in York University’s English Department. There he produced two rigorously terse texts on the production of the Victorian novel, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1986) and Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (1993), before retiring in 1996. He then commenced a labour of love, an exploration of determination and historical process, This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 (1999). It was a reflection of Norman’s intellectual venturesomeness that he shifted scholarly gears so seemingly effortlessly, crafting a brilliantly iconoclastic ‘reading’ of an event well-known in Canadian historical and literary circles – the tale of the ‘Black Donnelly’ murders near Lucan, Ontario – in ways that totally recast the meaning of what had taken place in that quintessential central Canadian locale, Biddulph Township.
3
Writing was not all that Feltes did in his retirement years. Outraged by the ways in which Mike Harris’s Tories were assailing the poor, Feltes was drawn to the protest politics of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), and he lent his analytic insights, his Marine training and discipline, and his considerable compassion and openness to new perspectives to the cause of the homeless, in whose interests he gave his boundless energies and enthusiasm. He organized, he rubbed shoulders with new friends and became a common site in new parts of Toronto frequented by the poor, he travelled to protests, he was arrested. And he thought, and struggled to write in ways that would force people to consider OCAP’s significance. We offer here a tribute to Norman from John Clarke, a leading figure in OCAP, as well as one of Feltes’s last intellectual undertakings, an important paper first written for a conference in Cuba, and published posthumously in this issue. "A New Prince in a New Principality: OCAP and the Toronto Poor," will no doubt prove a controversial statement, and we regret that Norman is no longer alive to engage those who might disagree with his views. But the essay has already struck chords in some quarters, where its message of alternative ways of organizing on the left, and its implicit demand to rethink how we conceptualize "labour" has proven stimulating. 1
and
Norman Feltes:
An OCAP Appreciation
John Clarke
SOON AFTER NORM discovered that he was dying, he told me that he was quite ready for the event and intended to "die like an historical materialist." He admitted that he would have to work up some notes on just what that involved, but one tentative notion was to "go" on the same day as our June 15 March on the Ontario Legislature. He actually died in the early hours of June 16 with the dust having barely settled on an event he realized would be a turning point for us.
Norman N. Feltes
1932-2000
28
During the last few years of his life, taking a route not exactly standard for retired English Literature professors, Norm threw himself into the work of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). The members of OCAP loved and respected him more than I can say. He valued his place in the organization because he found in it the serious struggle that he saw as the vital factor necessary to translating theoretical insights into meaningful practice. Because of his academic background, Norm agonized far too much about the legitimacy of his contribution. This uncertainty was utterly groundless because we all appreciated him as a comrade and respected greatly his courage and determination.
29
This is not to say that Norm’s background never showed. We all laughed a great deal at his expense at the time when the police were called to intervene at one of our actions and he held the door open for them. On the bus to and from our Parliament Hill Ottawa protest, Norm was beside himself at the raucous behaviour of some ‘squeegee kids,’ whom the driver complained were going to cause an accident or worse. Norm, his sense of disciplined protocol violated, tried to quiet the crowd, and was teased mercilessly by the rowdy ranks. He took it all in stride, and with the return trip to Toronto, the homeless hungry and destitute, Norm bought the bus lunch at a roadside stop. He was the only one with a credit card.
30
One of our members once told Norm that he was too polite and should learn to tell people to "Fuck off." After he had been diagnosed with cancer and was in the hospital, a social worker came by and suggested he should think positively about the possibility of recovery. Norm explained that his condition was obviously terminal and his ability to face this was far more important to him. When she persisted with her stupid advice, Norm looked her in the eye and said, "I’m told that my social conditioning makes it almost impossible to tell people to ‘fuck off’ but today could be the day."
31
The truth is that Norm, by way of his own modesty and the admiration he had for the poor people around OCAP, did actually underestimate the contribution he was able to make exactly because of his academic training. He brought a body of knowledge and a method of analysis into our activism that was enormously important. His study of the "housing question" in the downtown east area of Toronto armed us in our struggle against developers, yuppie colonists, and the forces of gentrification. Once he had decided to betray his own class, the skills he brought over with him came in very useful.
32
Without taking away anything from what I have just written, however, Norm’s greatest contribution was the degree to which he embodied courage and compassion. He cared about the victims of the war on the poor, he hated those waging that war, he loathed the system that produced them, and he was ready to stand up and be counted when the time came to fight back. When our "Safe Park" for the homeless was broken up by the cops, Norm intervened to defend another OCAP member. He was taken to the 51 Division, where he spoke out against the overtly racist treatment of a black prisoner. Though his charge was relatively minor, and would have usually resulted in a quick release, the police relatiated to Norm’s accusations of their racist misconduct with the vindictive claim that he had refused to sign his conditions of release. They shipped him off to the Don Jail in an act of retribution. Norm had never seen conditions like those in the decrepit Don, and he found the experience quite disturbing. Visibly upset and irate in his protests, Norm was judged at risk by the jail’s medical staff, who worried about his blood pressure. They tried to convince Norm, whom they recognized as someone with the wherewithal to "pull some strings" through lawyers and the like, to do what he could to get himself "sprung." Norm insisted that he would "come out when his comrades did."
33
At a Memorial for Norm last summer, his son Nick said that he hoped we would not be offended if he let it be known that the "starting point for me is the love between my father and my mother." It was not very surprising that someone raised by Norm Feltes would feel that way. His desire to contribute to working-class struggle and social revolution could find its expression in justified confrontation and could prompt painstaking analysis. At root, however, it was compassion, love, and a desire to elevate the human personality that shaped Norm and his life. That life points the way forward and, in OCAP, we will never forget him or lose sight of those things that he left us.
Source: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/48/01obits.html
The first obituary is by Bryan Palmer, the second by John Clarke.
On 15 June 2000 another advocate of Canadian workers, especially those incarcerated in homelessness and poverty, Norman N. Feltes, died. Feltes, a marxist literary theorist with an acute sense of the significance of an Althusserian reading of "texts," was one of many dissidents who left the United States in the 1960s to take up residence in Canada as a protest against their society’s politics and culture. A former US Marine, Feltes served in Korea before utilizing the GI Bill to pursue graduate studies in English at Dublin and Oxford. Returning to the United States, Feltes began what would prove a life of protest, marching in southern civil rights campaigns and turning his opposition to the imperialist policies of the United States in Vietnam. In 1969, convinced that the country of his birth gave him no other option, Feltes came to Canada where he found a niche in York University’s English Department. There he produced two rigorously terse texts on the production of the Victorian novel, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1986) and Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (1993), before retiring in 1996. He then commenced a labour of love, an exploration of determination and historical process, This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 (1999). It was a reflection of Norman’s intellectual venturesomeness that he shifted scholarly gears so seemingly effortlessly, crafting a brilliantly iconoclastic ‘reading’ of an event well-known in Canadian historical and literary circles – the tale of the ‘Black Donnelly’ murders near Lucan, Ontario – in ways that totally recast the meaning of what had taken place in that quintessential central Canadian locale, Biddulph Township.
3
Writing was not all that Feltes did in his retirement years. Outraged by the ways in which Mike Harris’s Tories were assailing the poor, Feltes was drawn to the protest politics of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), and he lent his analytic insights, his Marine training and discipline, and his considerable compassion and openness to new perspectives to the cause of the homeless, in whose interests he gave his boundless energies and enthusiasm. He organized, he rubbed shoulders with new friends and became a common site in new parts of Toronto frequented by the poor, he travelled to protests, he was arrested. And he thought, and struggled to write in ways that would force people to consider OCAP’s significance. We offer here a tribute to Norman from John Clarke, a leading figure in OCAP, as well as one of Feltes’s last intellectual undertakings, an important paper first written for a conference in Cuba, and published posthumously in this issue. "A New Prince in a New Principality: OCAP and the Toronto Poor," will no doubt prove a controversial statement, and we regret that Norman is no longer alive to engage those who might disagree with his views. But the essay has already struck chords in some quarters, where its message of alternative ways of organizing on the left, and its implicit demand to rethink how we conceptualize "labour" has proven stimulating. 1
and
Norman Feltes:
An OCAP Appreciation
John Clarke
SOON AFTER NORM discovered that he was dying, he told me that he was quite ready for the event and intended to "die like an historical materialist." He admitted that he would have to work up some notes on just what that involved, but one tentative notion was to "go" on the same day as our June 15 March on the Ontario Legislature. He actually died in the early hours of June 16 with the dust having barely settled on an event he realized would be a turning point for us.
Norman N. Feltes
1932-2000
28
During the last few years of his life, taking a route not exactly standard for retired English Literature professors, Norm threw himself into the work of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). The members of OCAP loved and respected him more than I can say. He valued his place in the organization because he found in it the serious struggle that he saw as the vital factor necessary to translating theoretical insights into meaningful practice. Because of his academic background, Norm agonized far too much about the legitimacy of his contribution. This uncertainty was utterly groundless because we all appreciated him as a comrade and respected greatly his courage and determination.
29
This is not to say that Norm’s background never showed. We all laughed a great deal at his expense at the time when the police were called to intervene at one of our actions and he held the door open for them. On the bus to and from our Parliament Hill Ottawa protest, Norm was beside himself at the raucous behaviour of some ‘squeegee kids,’ whom the driver complained were going to cause an accident or worse. Norm, his sense of disciplined protocol violated, tried to quiet the crowd, and was teased mercilessly by the rowdy ranks. He took it all in stride, and with the return trip to Toronto, the homeless hungry and destitute, Norm bought the bus lunch at a roadside stop. He was the only one with a credit card.
30
One of our members once told Norm that he was too polite and should learn to tell people to "Fuck off." After he had been diagnosed with cancer and was in the hospital, a social worker came by and suggested he should think positively about the possibility of recovery. Norm explained that his condition was obviously terminal and his ability to face this was far more important to him. When she persisted with her stupid advice, Norm looked her in the eye and said, "I’m told that my social conditioning makes it almost impossible to tell people to ‘fuck off’ but today could be the day."
31
The truth is that Norm, by way of his own modesty and the admiration he had for the poor people around OCAP, did actually underestimate the contribution he was able to make exactly because of his academic training. He brought a body of knowledge and a method of analysis into our activism that was enormously important. His study of the "housing question" in the downtown east area of Toronto armed us in our struggle against developers, yuppie colonists, and the forces of gentrification. Once he had decided to betray his own class, the skills he brought over with him came in very useful.
32
Without taking away anything from what I have just written, however, Norm’s greatest contribution was the degree to which he embodied courage and compassion. He cared about the victims of the war on the poor, he hated those waging that war, he loathed the system that produced them, and he was ready to stand up and be counted when the time came to fight back. When our "Safe Park" for the homeless was broken up by the cops, Norm intervened to defend another OCAP member. He was taken to the 51 Division, where he spoke out against the overtly racist treatment of a black prisoner. Though his charge was relatively minor, and would have usually resulted in a quick release, the police relatiated to Norm’s accusations of their racist misconduct with the vindictive claim that he had refused to sign his conditions of release. They shipped him off to the Don Jail in an act of retribution. Norm had never seen conditions like those in the decrepit Don, and he found the experience quite disturbing. Visibly upset and irate in his protests, Norm was judged at risk by the jail’s medical staff, who worried about his blood pressure. They tried to convince Norm, whom they recognized as someone with the wherewithal to "pull some strings" through lawyers and the like, to do what he could to get himself "sprung." Norm insisted that he would "come out when his comrades did."
33
At a Memorial for Norm last summer, his son Nick said that he hoped we would not be offended if he let it be known that the "starting point for me is the love between my father and my mother." It was not very surprising that someone raised by Norm Feltes would feel that way. His desire to contribute to working-class struggle and social revolution could find its expression in justified confrontation and could prompt painstaking analysis. At root, however, it was compassion, love, and a desire to elevate the human personality that shaped Norm and his life. That life points the way forward and, in OCAP, we will never forget him or lose sight of those things that he left us.
Source: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/48/01obits.html