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2. The War and Concepts of Nation in Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground and Frances Itani’s Deafening
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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2 The War and Concepts of Nation in Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground and Frances Itani’s Deafening Forging the Nation In the Part One of Imagined Nations, David Williams provides a dense genealogy of theories of nationhood, focusing on how “the mode of communication and the form of community have been linked in relations of mutual dependence.”1 He argues that even distrust in the concept of nation cannot overwhelm “language’s power to mediate the nation...to gather people into a profound sense of communion.”2 Williams’s genealogy provides a useful framework for the comparative analysis of Hodgins’s Broken Ground and Itani’s Deafening and the way each text works through the relationship between the First World War and the myth of the birth of the Canadian nation. Published in 1998, Broken Ground represents the lives of the settlers of Portuguese Creek, a section of land on Vancouver Island given to First World War veterans. The motley community, whose attempts to farm the unforgiving land are mostly disastrous, is almost destroyed when a forest fire sweeps through the area. The immediate and long-term effects of the fire are explored, often in juxtaposition with the memories of one settler’s—Matthew Pearson’s—wartime and postwar experiences. The basic “plot” of Broken Ground is difficult to summarize, as Hodgins’s representations of Matthew’s wartime experiences, and of life on the settlement before, during, and after the forest fire, are often achronological and always highly mediated, as particular incidents are recounted from varying, usually second-hand perspectives. Deafening, published in 2003, focuses 57 58 CATCHING THE TORCH on Grania O’Neill, a deaf woman born on the day of the Great Fire of 1896 that destroyed much of Deseronto, Ontario, who grows up in neighbouring Belleville and whose husband Jim joins the war effort as a stretcher bearer. After describing Grania’s childhood and school years, in particular her experiences at a school for the deaf, the novel moves between representations of Jim’s wartime experiences and scenes of life on the home front and the effect of the war on those in Canada. Thus, in comparison to Broken Ground, the plot of Deafening operates primarily as a straightforward Bildungsroman , recounting the story of Grania’s childhood, her schooling, her wartime work on the home front, and her relationship with Jim; Jim’s experiences overseas are juxtaposed with scenes set in Belleville in a way that maintains a sense of strict chronology. Hodgins’s novel—one of the earliest texts in the corpus under consideration , and one of the most overtly critical of Canada’s First World War myths—represents the war as morally problematic, ultimately suggesting that the ideals of inheritance and progress are potentially unrealizable in its wake. Hodgins, for the most part, holds the paradigm of the essential nation in contempt as the diverse community of soldiers on the settlement can rarely find common cultural ground. Furthermore, Broken Ground explores stories of various kinds of desertion in order to interrogate whether the First World War can operate within a narrative of emerging national unity. Even in Hodgins’s critical model, however, the work of rehabilitating the father figure and of community building is endorsed, as Broken Ground explores the uneasy development of the cultural nation, the ideal of which is social consensus over time. Thus, to connect back to Williams ’s point, the cultural nation that Hodgins imagines manifests itself in the work a community does in collating its most socially productive stories about itself, even if those stories are geared toward reception rather than truth telling. Itani’s coming-of-age narrative—published five years after Broken Ground—invests heavily in the myth of national progress; it renders the events of the First World War only temporarily threatening because they disrupt the normal pace of familial continuity, an ideal that is chiefly exemplified in the marriage of Grania and Jim. Itani constructs the war insider—Jim—as embodying the national spirit and representing such Canadian character attributes as dutifulness, loyalty, and decency, all of which are made manifest as part of his war experience. An examination of Itani’s representation of the way the war is figured as a necessary stage in the development in a national romance, despite temporary threats to familial continuity, reveals Deafening’s reimagining of the war as straightforwardly socially productive. In avoiding entirely some of Hodgins’s more trenchant critiques of the narrative of the moral “rightness...