In this Book
- Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I
- Book
- 2014
- Published by: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Catching the Torch examines contemporary novels and plays written about Canada's participation in World War I. Exploring such works as Jane Urquhart's The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers, Jack Hodgins's Broken Ground, Kevin Kerr's Unity (1918), Stephen Massicotte's Mary's Wedding, and Frances Itani's Deafening, the book considers how writers have dealt with the compelling myth that the Canadian nation was born in the trenches of the Great War.
In contrast to British and European remembrances of WWI, which tend to regard it as a cataclysmic destroyer of innocence, or Australian myths that promote an ideal of outsize masculinity, physical bravery, and white superiority, contemporary Canadian texts conjure up notions of distinctively Canadian values: tolerance of ethnic difference, the ability to do one's duty without complaint or arrogance, and the inclination to show moral as well as physical courage. Paradoxically, Canadians are shown to decry the horrors of war while making use of its productive cultural effects.
Through a close analysis of the way sacrifice, service, and the commemoration of war are represented in these literary works, Catching the Torch argues that iterations of a secure mythic notion of national identity, one that is articulated via the representation of straightforward civic and military participation, work to counter current anxieties about the stability of the nation-state, in particular anxieties about the failure of the ideal of a national "character."
Introduction"Contemporary Canadian World War One narratives: Remembering Canada'sBest Self"
Neta Gordon
Gordon discusses the way literary texts participate in the forging of a national collective memory, and argues that contemporary nostalgia for Canada's participation in WWI relates to an anxiety about how the workings of the nation-state are increasingly obscure, at least in terms of the way citizens might enact agency.
Chapter One
"The Dead Speak: Considering the use of prosopopoeia in Dancock's Death, Mary's Wedding, and The Deep"
Neta Gordon
Gordon begins with an analysis of the way "In Flanders Fields," has been used in current commemorations of Canadian involvement in WWI, suggesting that many of these choose to ignore or to contain the potentially unsettling voice of the dead. Next, she looks at the way the voice of the dead has been incorporated into three contemporary works: Vanderhaeghe's Dancock's Dance (1996), Massicotte's Mary's Wedding (2002), and Swan's The Deep (2002).
Chapter Two
"The war and concepts of nation in Jack Hodgins' Broken Ground and Frances Itani's Deafening"
Neta Gordon
Gordon compares the two texts' divergent attitudes towards nation building. Broken Ground (1997) is critical of Canada's World War One myths, representing the war as morally problematic. Deafening, published five years after Broken Ground, is coming-of-age narrative. Itani represents the war insider – Jim – as embodying the national spirit and representing such Canadian character attributes as dutifulness, loyalty, and decency.
Chapter Three
"Commemorating the war insider and outsider in the World War One novels of Alan Cumyn and Jane Urquhart"
Neta Gordon
Gordon argues that Cumyn's novels about the Canadian soldier-artist affirm war work as duty and represent art not as a kind of "truth-telling" tool but as a means to privately confirm the brotherhood of subaltern soldiers. Urquhart considers the work of commemorative artists, representing them also not as "truth-tellers," but as meddlers in the lives of war insiders. Both authors suggest that public, commemorative practice should concern itself with building narrative that are shared and emblematic, as opposed to historically accurate.
Chapter Four
Neta Gordon
Gordon examines portrayals of the myth of the Canadian collective. Thiessen's Vimy (2007) depicts diversity and tolerance as culminating in a narrative that undermines cultural specificity, while Kerr's Unity (1918) (2002) suggests that only deaths that can be situated within a collective sacrificial narrative are deemed significant. Boyden's Three Day Road (2005) explores the way stories of a previously marginalized community can be productively written into a living history, while Poliquin's A Secret Between Us (2007), takes up the subject of "other Canadians" to query whether historical remembrance serves any real political purpose.
Table of Contents
Additional Information
Copyright
2014