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3 Abandoning the Archivist: Commemorating the War Insider and Outsider in the First World War Novels of Alan Cumyn and Jane Urquhart “Post”-Historiographic Metafiction In Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel, Dagmar Novak enumerates three classes of Canadian fiction about the First World War. The first class includes the idealistic and heartening works written during the war years, such as Ralph Connor’s The Sky Pilot in No Man’s Land (1919) and Basil King’s The City of Comrades (1919). These are greatly indebted to the romance tradition and have a tendency for uncritical patriotism toward Canada and—to an often greater degree—England. Such work has prompted little critical response except regarding its reflection of Canada’s political naïveté and literary crudeness.1 The class of “realistic” Canadian war fiction, written in the late 1920s and 1930s by First World War combatants, has received more attention. In his article about Peregrine Acland’s All Else Is Folly (1929), Charles Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed (1930), and Philip Child’s God’s Sparrows (1937), Eric Thompson asserts that, in each, the literary protagonist is identified with the combatant author, especially as the protagonist’s status as a hero is based primarily on having simply endured the horrors of war. Harrison’s novel is examined also in Evelyn Cobley’s Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives, an extended analysis of combatant fiction the central argument of which denies the simple correspondence between historical referent and literary text, as well as the objectivity of reproduction by the war insider. The third class that Novak indicates is made up of only one work: Timothy 85 86 CATCHING THE TORCH Findley’s The Wars, published in 1977. For Novak and Thompson, writing in the 1980s, and Cobley, writing in 1993, Findley’s novel represents a mature stage of Canadian First World War writing and not just because it was, at the time, one of the only contemporary works to take up the subject. In it, according to these critics, the traditions of romance and realism are combined ;2 the “drama of personal heroism” is more explicitly articulated;3 and the self-consciously constructed documentary format serves to undermine the potentially misleading truth claims of combatant fiction.4 Cobley, who is interested in the way combatant fiction falls short of succeeding as convincing protest literature, reads The Wars as a more trustworthy anti-war tract than those written by war insiders; Findley’s experiential distance from the war itself keeps him from unwittingly diluting his novel’s ideological position in an attempt to exonerate the combatant. Cobley’s analysis of the way the figure of the archivist in The Wars highlights the novel’s self-consciousness—its position that “all truth claims are necessarily suspect”5 —is not new. As noted in the introduction to this study, many critics, including Lorraine York, Martin Kuester, Diana Brydon, and Simone Vauthier, have pointed out that the complex form of Findley’s novel—its juxtaposition of archival fragments collected by a researcher and scenes that an anonymous narrator constructs about Robert Ross’s life—serves to undermine the distinction between fact and fiction and disclose how meaning is ideologically assembled. In turning away from the figure of the archivist, a figure so important to examinations of The Wars as a historiographic metafiction, both Alan Cumyn and Jane Urquhart signal their relative disinterest in sorting through the problem of how to confront a historical record. Rather, Cumyn’s The Sojourn and The Famished Lover and Urquhart’s The Underpainter and The Stone Carvers depict the figure of the artist. Cumyn’s novels are about the Canadian soldier-artist, especially as he is distinct from British representations of the soldier-poet, in that Ramsay Crome affirms his war work as duty and uses art not as a kind of “truth-telling” tool but as a means to privately confirm the brotherhood of subaltern soldiers. Urquhart explores the work of commemorative artists, representing them also not as “truth tellers” but as meddlers in the lives of war insiders. Both authors thus promote the idea that war insiders have a private narrative, one that they either wish to protect from outsiders, or to forget. Alan Cumyn’s First World War novels, The Sojourn and The Famished Lover, were published in 2003 and 2006, respectively, and feature as their protagonist Ramsay Crome. Set during the first half of the war...

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