The Exploding Frame: Uses of Photography in Timothy Findley’s The Wars

The Exploding Frame: Uses ofPhotography in Timothy Findley's The Wars EVA-MARIE KROLLER When Cartier-Bresson pickt up a small, fast camera for the purpose of snapping art, he changed the course & meaning of photography throughout the world. The picture-frame gone, & the 'decisive. moment' here when we can enter it, the art said goodbye to its parent, came out & changed the way we look at the world, & the way we think about it. ...Part of the reason why we think that Victorians were so stiff is that their cameras sat with slow shutters on tripods. -George Bowering, Fiction of Contemporary Canada (1980) At the end of Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977), the chronicler of the narrative quotes "the Irish essayist and critic Nicholas Fagan" as writing: "the spaces between the perceiver and the thing perceived can...be closed with a shot. Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it." I The Wars ends with a brief description of one such shot, a snapshot, "Robert and Rowena with Meg: Rowena seated astride the pony - Robert holding her in place. On the back is written: 'Look you can see our breath!' And so you can" (p. 191). The final sentence - ''And so you can'' - matches in ambiguity that of another highly regarded Canadian novel, Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, in which Mrs. Bentley completes her diary with the entry, "That's right, Philip. I want it so," leaving the reader to decide whether her tone of voice is decisive or wishful. ''And so you can'' has a consoling quality about it as if, indeed, life had been palpably preserved in Rowena and Robert's photograph, as if they had been salvaged from death. In its reassuring effect, the photograph resembles the use of a still at the end of a tragic film, frequently by means of a 68 picture from an earlier, happier period in the protagonists' lives, to halt and, as it were, to reverse the tragedy depicted, thereby providing the spectator with a psychologically comforting frame. Yet, the very structure of The Wars is informed by the chronicler's increasing doubtfulness about the ability of fiction (and, for that matter, of writing in general) to recreate reality from the traces it has left behind in the form of maps, letters, cablegrams, newspaper clippings, and masses of "snapshots and portraits" (p. 11). The scene at the beginning and near the end of The Wars is not that of a reassuring family snapshot , but the narrator's mental picture of Robert, the distraught deserter, trying to counteract the chaos "the wars" have inflicted on natural existence , by salvaging a black mare and a dog. The entire novel may be understood in terms of the chronicler's attempt to grasp what led to this scene. At first he, like the reader, only knows the barest details; by the time it is repeated, however, he and the reader are familiar with a number of crucial factors that contributed to its formation. Still, what remains inescapably vivid is the horror of the chaos Robert is battling against. Thus, the scene assumes the quality of a "traumatic photograph," in which "the sudden vanishing of the present tense, splitting into the contradiction of being simultaneously too late and too early''2 becomes unbearable. The following is an attempt to analyse Timothy Findley's uses of photography in The Wars, uses the novel shares in varying degrees of intensity with other Canadian and international post-modernist novels, such as Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark (also entitled Camera Obscura), Cortazar's Rayue/a, Kroetsch's Badlands, Wiebe's The Temptations ofBig Bear, Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and Atwood 's Surfacing, to name only a few.3 Photography appears to be one of the typical metaphors and devices employed by post-modernist writers to expose the restrictions of any prefabricated aesthetic order in rendering truth. While such an exposure seems imperative in any postwar Western literature, it is of special importance in a colonial context where the imposition of Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 16, Nos. 3&4(Automne-Hiver1981 Fall-Winter) European aesthetics often...