Ulyssean Influences on Postmodern Identities: Revisiting Timothy Findley's The Wars

The Wars or, perhaps, Ulysses II

Timothy Findley's The Wars received immediate critical acclaim, winning the Governor General's Award for fiction in 1977. Most criticism situates The Wars in the context of what Linda Hutcheon (The Canadian Postmodern) has called postmodern "historiographic metafiction," or a retelling of history through fiction. As a result, critics from Eva-Marie Kröller to David Williams have preoccupied themselves with the role of photography in the novel, since photographs in The Wars and their self-reflexivity are integral to piecing together Ross's story and to understanding his character. Others, such as Shane Rhodes and Shelton Waldrep, interpret the rape of Robert Ross in the novel by fellow soldiers as symbolic of the violation of young Canadian soldiers by the Great War. In seeing the novel from this self-reflective perspective, critics posit The Wars as challenging the prominent notion that the First World War was a positive event for Canada's national development. What makes the novel so striking, as Jack Beatty explains in his review, is the reimagining of a familiar subject: "The time is 1915, the place is the Western front, and the subject is the slaughter of the innocent. All too familiar? Certainly. Yet … Mr. Findley has made it new" (36). The novel's self-reflexive retelling of such a pivotal moment in Canadian history—by telling the story of history—thus offers a new angle in which to see the Great War and its effect on the country. As a result, Findley's novel continues to garner critical interest in the context of Canadian postmodernism.

The Wars is also compelling because of its parody of modernist James Joyce's Ulysses, recalling similar characters, events, and places with postmodern aesthetics, although without the usually attached comedic effect and with a darker tone in its place. The link between these two works, therefore, primarily rests with content, represented in a new form, akin to Joyce's own parody of Homer's Odyssey. In fact, two details in The Wars point directly to Ulysses: the first is that Ross's alleged treason takes place on 16 June, the same day that the entirety of the Ulysses narrative takes place. The second detail is a direct mention of the protagonist Leopold Bloom when the narrator compares Ross's gun to Bloom's traveling bar of soap: "Its fate, like the fate of Leopold Bloom's bar of soap, became a minor Odyssey" (35). Instances such as these are compelling; however, more evidence shows that Findley was familiar with the modernist writers and with Joyce, specifically, and this familiarity adds a significant amount of credibility to the idea of The Wars containing Ulyssean traces. Findley's familiarity with the modernists and with Joyce is discernable for several reasons. Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence comes from Findley's Inside Memory, a non-fiction work about his own writing experiences. He says of The Wars: "I had written it not only under the influence of what was passing, then, as my life—but also under what I believed to be the influence of Ulysses, by James Joyce. I had read this book in a single sitting (it took me just over twenty-four hours) and I guess, for whatever reason, I had decided I was to be the second coming … Ulysses II" (145). Findley, however, not just wanting to experiment with style, burned this first manuscript before going on to rewrite his war novel. In his acknowledgements for The Wars, Findley notably thanks Joyce's wife, Nora, as a nod to the modernist's muse as well as his own for creating his postmodern epic. Findley was also familiar with another modernist writer and friend of Joyce's, poet Ezra Pound. Pound wrote his own modernist, epic poem, The Cantos, which was published over a span of almost forty years and completed in 1962. Pound and Joyce were long-time friends, Joyce asking Pound for advice in the writing of several of the chapters of Ulysses. Although Pound would be sent to a mental...