Knights of Faith: The Soldier in Canadian War Fiction Zachary Abram Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a doctoral degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Zachary Abram, Ottawa, Canada, 2016 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT...………………………...………………………………………………….iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………….v INTRODUCTION – A Force That Gives Us Meaning: Twentieth-Century Canadian War Fiction…..……...…………………………...……………………………….............1 CHAPTER ONE – From Crusaders to Cannon Fodder: Cultures of Militarization in Canadian War Novels, 1900-1930……………..…………..…………………...…...27 A Real Holiday: Civic Militarism in the Patriotic Canadian War Novel…..........31 Cannon Fodder: Generals Die in Bed and the Ethics of the Anti-War Novel…...52 CHAPTER TWO – The Pilgrim and the Prophet: Canadian Second World War Fiction and Midcentury Existentialism………….…..………………..…………….....83 Doubtful Intelligence: Turvey and the Politics of the Absurd……………...........88 On the Money: Existentialism and Imperial Semiotics in A.M. Klein’s The Second Scroll………………..……………….…………………………………109 CHAPTER THREE – The Vulture Fear: Christian Existentialism in Colin McDougall’s Execution…………………………….……………………………….....130 CHAPTER FOUR – From Memory to History: Timothy Findley’s The Wars..….155 CHAPTER FIVE – Heritage vs. History: Monuments and Memory in Contemporary Canadian War Fiction…….………………………………………....187 Broken Promises: Veterans and the Nation in Broken Ground…………......….190 A Work of Architecture That Has No Meaning: Monuments Intentional and Unintentional in The Stone Carvers……….…………………………………....206 iii CONCLUSION – Never Forgotten, Never Remembered: The Canadian Soldier at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century...………………………………………..221 APPENDIX…………………………..…………………………………………….......235 WORKS CITED........................................................……………………………….....238 iv ABSTRACT The war novel is a significant genre in twentieth-century Canadian fiction. Central to that genre has been the soldier’s narrative. Canadian war novelists have often situated the soldier’s story in opposition to how war has functioned in Canadian cultural memory, which usually posits war as a necessary, though brutal, galvanizing force. This dissertation on how novelists depict the Canadian soldier represents a crucial opportunity to examine Canadian cultures of militarization and how Canadian identity has been formed in close identification with the mutable figure of the soldier. The most sophisticated Canadian war novels engage with how militarism functions as a grand narrative in Canadian society, while enabling Canadians to speak about issues related to war that tend to be over-simplified or elided. This dissertation examines emblematic Canadian war novels – The Imperialist by Sara Jeanette Duncan, Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison, Turvey by Earle Birney, Execution by Colin McDougall, The Wars by Timothy Findley, Broken Ground by Jack Hodgins, The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart, etc. – in order to trace how the representation of the Canadian soldier has shifted throughout the twentieth-century. Canadian war novels are culturally cathartic exercises wherein received notions of Canadian moral and military superiority can be safely questioned. The Canadian soldier, often characterized in official discourse as the personification of duty and sacrifice, has been reimagined by war novelists throughout the twentieth century as a site of skepticism and resistance. In many Canadian war novels, the soldier affords the opportunity to claim counter-histories, reject master narratives, and posit new originary myths. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is my privilege to thank the many people who contributed to this dissertation. My time at the University of Ottawa has been immensely rewarding, and I owe a debt of gratitude to those who have helped me along the way. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor, Professor David Staines, for his steadfast support throughout every stage of the dissertation process. His resolute commitment to intellectual rigour is something I hope to emulate. I’d also like to profusely thank my four reviewers: Drs. Tim Cook, Janice Fiamengo, Chad Gaffield, and Gerald Lynch. Their careful and diligent engagement with my research deepened my understanding of the topic and provided innumerable critical avenues for future work. I must extend my sincerest thanks to my colleagues at the University of Ottawa. In particular, I’d like to thank Jennifer Baker for her friendship during my entire graduate school career. Kja Isaacson, Nick Milne, and Krista Murchison all deserve my thanks as well for the time we spent commiserating with one another. I also must thank my Master’s thesis supervisor, Peter Webb, for starting me down this road. I would be nothing without my family. Therefore, I must thank my parents, Stephen Abram and Stephanie Smith Abram, for their immeasurable support. Completing this disseration would not have been possible without them. My sister, Sydney Abram, inspires me everyday with her spirit and joie de vivre. Finally, special thanks must go out to my partner, Jessi MacEachern, whose love and support mean more to me than anything. Nothing would make me happier than a future of reading and writing with her. Amos, Amas, Amat. 1 INTRODUCTION A Force That Gives Us Meaning: Twentieth-Century Canadian War Fiction In a 1916 article published in The Atlantic Monthly, Samuel Crothers coins the term “bibliotherapy” to describe a supposedly ancient practice of prescribing particular literary works for therapeutic effect. The article, “A Literary Clinic,” describes a church basement that has been transformed into a “bibliopathic institute” by an acquaintance of the author named Bagster. Bagster explains, “Bibliotherapy is… a new science… A book may be a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do something to you, and you ought to know what it is” (292). Typically, he counsels his patients to read more novels: “Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels” (296). Not all novels, however, are salubrious to their readers. One particular patron of the institute has “taken an overdose of war literature,” and Crothers wonders what type of books might cure him: books that would “put new life into us and then set the life pulse strong but slow” (301). If Canadian readers must detoxify from any particular genre in Canadian literature, it might be the war novel. David McGimpsey’s satirical poem “My Canadian Novel,” from his Governor General’s award-nominated collection Li’l Bastard (2011), lightheartedly skewers several clichés of the traditionally solemn and thoughtful Canadian novel. Amid images of a “Newfoundland orphanage” or a woman’s garden that is “a metaphor for love and loss” is “the story of a woman’s courage and how a war wound kept a man alive” (11). The well-worn tropes of Canadian war fiction are famous enough to be ripe for parody. Furthermore, in a review written for the Globe and Mail, Robert Wiersema diagnoses himself with a condition he dubs “premise fatigue”; he 2 cannot bear to read “another book about the Great War from a Canadian serviceman’s perspective” (D10). This malaise should not be surprising given the glut of war novels that have been published in the last twenty years: Kevin Major’s No Man’s Land (1995), Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter (1997) and The Stone Carvers (2001), Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground (1998), Mary Swan’s The Deep (2002), Frances Itani’s Deafening (2003), Alan Cumyn’s The Sojourn (2003) and The Famished Lover (2006), Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005), Michael Poole’s Rain Before Morning (2006), Daniel Poliquin’s A Secret Between Us (2007), and Allan Donaldson’s Maclean (2007) to name just a few. Yet, Canadian critics of war literature remain as truculent as ever. In critical discussions of Canadian war novels, it is customary to begin by lamenting the extent to which scholars have neglected the corpus of Canadian war writing. Dagmar Novak begins her study of the Canadian war novel, Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel, published in 2000, by promising to fill a crucial gap in Canadian studies: “The impact of the First World War upon Canada’s political and social institutions has been the subject of many studies. Its impact upon the country’s intellectual and cultural development, however, has been largely ignored” (1- 2). Peter Webb’s dissertation, “Occupants of Memory: War in Twentieth Century Fiction,” completed in 2007 at the University of Ottawa, similarly cannot resist this rhetorical strategy: “[Canadian war novels] form a tradition of Canadian war fiction in the twentieth century, a tradition that is largely overlooked in Canadian criticism” (6). Writing as far back as 1981, Eric Thompson acknowledges, “The war novel is a significant genre of Canadian fiction,” but also bemoans that Canadian war novelists “deserve to be better known” (81). 3 In 2015, given the extent of renewed interest in Canada’s relationship to war – the centenary of the First World War brings with it a raft of new texts both literary, such as the aforementioned novels, and critical, such as Neta Gordon’s Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian First World War Narratives (2014) and Sherrill Grace’s Landscapes of War and Memory: The Two World Wars in Canadian Literature and the Arts, 1977-2007