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Huckleberry Findley SYLVIA SODERLIND FROMTheLastoftheCrazyPeople(rejectedbyCanadian publishers on the grounds that "these things don't happen in Canada"), through The Butterfly Plague, with its coast a la Nathanael West, to Famous Last Words, with its Ezra Pound connection, Timothy Findley's stories have often been said to have an unmistakably American air about them. Yet,I will argue, it is in his most "Canadian" novel that he comes closest to revealing the true nature of whatis considered an American archetype. In The Wars, as in his other novels, Findley's postmodern suspicion of master narratives is very much in evidence, and there is little doubt that much of his criticism is directed against classic war stories. On the voyage across the Atlantic, Captain Ord prepares for battle by reading all of the Boys' Own Annual accounts of wars, from With Wolfe at Quebec to With Clive in India, even as he sends Robert Ross to face the first real horrors of the war in the business of killing a horse. "With Ross in Flanders" would hardly make the Boys'Own Annual, to which it constitutes an attempted corrective. For all its critique of standard narratives of war and the metanarrative impulse, though, Findley's novel does offer a possible counter-model to such master texts. Ironically, it is a model frequently placed—I wouldsay, misplaced—in the very category that Findley attacks. It must be significant that the last time Mrs. Ross is close to her son—at the railway station in Montreal—her husband is reading Huckleberry Finn to her. Although at first sight the analogies between the two novels are not immediately clear, they are surely substantial.Both Findley and Twain are out to set things right, to correct the errors of their predecessors; it could even be argued that The Wars is to With Wolfe at Quebec as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is to The 76 Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In Twain'scase, the corrective manoeuvre is particularly ironic and, without a doubt, more painful for the author, since it is his own earlier text he has to refute. It is in Huckleberry Finnthat Twain had to face his own misanthropy; the book, begun in a spirit of benevolence, twisted and turned like the Mississippi that impels the plot, and when Twain returned to the work, after hitting a snag in chapter sixteen, which kept him away for four years, it was to find that the tale had reversed its course. It might not be too fanciful to suggest that the epigraph Findley chose for his novel, von Clausewitz's assertion that "in such dangerous things as war the errors which proceed from a spirit of benevolence are the worst," may be applied to the writer's task as well. Twain's own denouncing of his earlier book implies as much. It is those who see it as their task to "help" others (soldiers, for instance) prepare their part in the human drama byproviding scripts who might be the most dangerous. To suggest a parallel between war and writing may seem far-fetched, but there is no question that both novels pit conflicting discourses against each other. After all, for Findley as for von Clausewitz, war is not an aberration but an extreme version of human interaction: in the words of the military strategist , war "is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from other conflicts" (85).' War does not figure overtly in Huckleberry Finn, but when Twain returned to his manuscript, leaving the "boy's book" behind for uncharted waters, he began anewwith what Michael J. Hoffman describes as "a model of wars as they are begun and sustained" (36), the bloody feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, which is, among other things, a commentary on the Civil War and the dangers of romanticizing a horrible reality. Wars are what books are about. The first time Huck tries to escape from Pap, who has traced him to the Widow Douglas', he hides behind a book, "something about General Washington and the wars" (39). Rather than providing protection from Pap's brutality, the book provokes it: the drunkard uses it to whack his son. The conviction that reading about wars is no shield against violence is corroborated by the fate of Levitt, Robert's pragmatic fellow officer, whose belief in the printed word—thatof von Clausewitz in particular—drives him mad when reality refuses to conform...

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