Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I

1. The Dead Speak: Considering the Use of Prosopopoeia in Dancock’s Dance, Mary’s Wedding, and The Deep

1 The Dead Speak: Considering the Use of Prosopopoeia in Dancock’s Dance, Mary’s Wedding, and The Deep “We are the Dead”: Troubling Elegy and the Sacrificial Narrative John McCrae’s iconic Canadian First World War poem, “In Flanders Fields,” uses the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia—the impersonation of an absent speaker—in order to more forcefully stipulate a pact between “the Dead” and the living “you”: In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.1 27 28 CATCHING THE TORCH Since the poem’s 1915 publication in Punch, after which it immediately became, in John Prescott’s words, “the poem of the British army,”2 the interpretation of what is meant by keeping “faith” with “the Dead” has fluctuated . Thus, the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia is important to consider as it operates not only in McCrae’s poem but also in more recent Canadian literary responses to the war in which the chief distance lies between the contemporary writer and the war dead he or she has chosen to impersonate. This chapter begins with an analysis of the way McCrae’s famous poem has been deployed in current national performances that commemorate Canadian involvement in the First World War, suggesting that many of these choose to ignore or to contain the potentially unsettling voice of the dead. Next, I look at the way the voice of the dead has been incorporated into three contemporary works: Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Dancock’s Dance, Stephen Massicotte ’s Mary’s Wedding, and Mary Swan’s The Deep. While the reanimation of First World War voices in these texts functions to trouble the possibility of identifying with, commemorating, and/or elegizing a victim of war lost to temporal distance, the ghosts in this corpus, paradoxically, tend not to disturb the myth of a cohesive national character. Rather, the recourse to the prosopopoeiac voice serves to hide the dead behind a disfiguring mask, a fiction that approves of participation in the war as a productive site for articulating citizenship. Dancock’s Dance, first performed in 1995 and published a year later, focuses on the experiences of an officer, Lieutenant John Carlyle Dancock, who has been committed to the Saskatchewan Hospital for the Insane following the war. During the 1918 outbreak of influenza, Dancock must overcome his own demons and lead the patients in the hospital as they work to combat the spread of illness. In Vanderhaeghe’s play, the potentially disruptive elegy for the dead soldier breaks down in favour of celebrating a fairly conservative code of masculine honour and the valorizing of duty. Mary’s Wedding, another play, was published and first produced in 2002, and it continues to be produced throughout Canada and the United States. The action in Mary’s Wedding all takes place within a dream space over the course of single evening, as Mary recalls her pre-war relationship with a young man named Charlie and gains access to Charlie’s war experiences . Massicotte makes use of a counterfeit prosopopoeiac mask, burying beneath a fictional voice the historical personage of Lieutenant Gordon Muriel Flowerdew, who is a character in the play and whose actions during the charge at Moreuil Wood are cited as the historical anchor for the drama. Mary Swan’s 2002 novella The Deep presents the story of twin sisters who drowned themselves on their way home from serving as nurses in France. The Deep is one of the most radical of the current crop of Canadian THE DEAD SPEAK: CONSIDERING THE USE OF PROSOPOPOEIA 29 First World War narratives in that it provisionally challenges the project of collective elegizing, representing dead voices that refuse to be placed in a sacrificial narrative. Even in Swan’s narrative, however, the recourse to prosopopoeia indicates a desire to bury anxiety about the dead through a kind of affirming erasure. In all of these texts, what prosopopoeia usually...