Imagined Innocence, Endlessly Mourned: Postcolonial Nationalism and Cultural Expression in Timothy Findley’s The Wars

A postmodern incredulity toward master narratives has been celebrated as a sign that Canadian literature and letters not only survived the paraphrase of thematic criticism and arrived at a new stage of cultural maturity but did so on an international footing. Timothy Findley's work has played a significant role in the making of postmodernism in Canada, yet such apparently "ex-centric" texts as Findley's can also tell some very centric stories when read not for their play between historiography and fiction but for a material unconscious encoded in the figural level of the text. The Wars, a fictional biography of the reluctant coming-of-age of one Canadian soldier, encodes the story of Canada's initiation into the rights of nationhood and state power through the rites of military, technological, and familial participation in the Great War. The "evolutionary narrative of historical continuity" that Homi Bhabha theorizes as necessary to the pedagogical reproduction of the nation is questioned by the novel's narrative method (and amply documented in scholarship on historiographic metafiction). More specifically, however, the consolidation of the narrative of "Canada" as a sturdy colonial youth in world affairs, seeking independence and maturity by participation in a "world" war, is also questioned through the novel's reliance on figures of innocence, childhood, and a pastoral, pre-industrialized world.

The figurative register of the text subtly represents the predicaments of a colonial desire to be modern in ways that limit both the novel's thematic and formal critique of progress. Childhood as a space and time before bildung, and the pastoral as a space and time before industrialization, are scripted in Findley's novel to play "other" to the nation's progress, but they also figure an innocence that "Canada" as a nation-in-the-making could never have, an innocence that is "lost" at origin, available only in the space between vehicle and tenor, and in the temporality of mourning and melancholia. Figures of childhood and the pastoral perform a contradiction that structures not only the story of Robert Ross's loss of innocence but also the needs and expressions of a second-world (Slemon 30) post/colonial cultural nationalism and its "settler subjects" (Lawson 20). Following Diana Brydon's early worry that postmodernism's universalizing tendencies would obliterate important Canadian specificities (5), a worry revisited at intervals by Larry McDonald (39) and Renée Hulan (441–42, 456–57), among others, this essay illustrates how the rhetoric of development and maturity, embraced and espoused in the colony's desire for public statehood and cultural independence, is both part of the script of modernity that defines Canada and that which makes the nation's development continuous with empire.

Canada's youthfulness in world affairs and the desired progression from colony to nation occur in the same historical space and time as the nation's building through such uniquely Canadian forms of modernity as the Canadian Pacific Railway. Glenn Willmott has demonstrated for us how the bildungsroman itself signals Anglo-Canada's particular relation to modernity (15–39), but there is a further specifically Canadian manifestation of modernity in this novel that is far less mythologized than the CPR and that has yet to be excavated from Findley's work: this buried sign figures both an inheritance and amnesia that need to be decoded in Robert Ross's biography insofar as his story allegorizes a story of Canada's development. I refer here to what was, by the time of the Great War, the world's largest manufacturer of agricultural implements, the Massey–Harris (and later Massey–Ferguson) company, a sign of the direct passage in Anglo-Canada's development from "a pre-modern resource economy to a modernized agricultural and industrial one" (Willmott 24). Both the CPR and Massey–Harris were crucial to the war effort that led to Canada's recognition among "mature" nations, and both are written into the story of one Canadian Soldier, Robert Ross, in particular ways. I want to look in detail at how these two Canadian...