CHAPTER SEVEN
Skips in a Broken Record:
Intertextual Schizophrenia in Headhunter

In Headhunter, Findley continues his complex interrogation of the relations between readers and texts. However, while in The Telling of Lies, the reader is susceptible to the narrative machinations of a sympathetic and likable narrator, in Headhunter, the reader is drawn into relationship through her love for and familiarity with narrative itself. Headhunter begins in the intertextual setting of the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library. The reader soon discovers that she has entered a ‘mad’ world where literary characters are accidentally released from the pages of literary and historical texts into the outside world. The ‘outside world,’ though, is a Toronto which resembles literature, not any sort of extra-textual reality. As the novel progresses, we discover that Emma Bovary, Jay Gatsby, and Moby Dick are living, in slightly altered but recognizable form, in Rosedale. Susanna Moodie still burrows in the underground hideaway where Margaret Atwood last imagined seeing her. Most importantly, the setting of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been transposed from the interior of Africa to the crowded and diseased Toronto urban landscape. Despite its literary setting, however, Headhunter is not "just a story‘'’ (HH 440), an intertextual, postmodern word game, but a serious examination of a postmodernist text’s connection with its reader and reality.

Although in The Last of the Crazy People it is possible to argue that the whole Winslow family is mentally ill, it is still possible to discern how Hooker misreads his world and to see his murderous act as delusional. In Headhunter, it is no longer possible to make such a distinction. How can we tell which is the real world and which is the mad world inside Lilah’s head? Does Dr. Kurtz actually arise from page 92 of Lilah Kemp’s copy of Heart of Darkness or has he lived in Toronto for years before Lilah notices him in the public library? Ever since her abused childhood, Lilah has retreated into the world of literature until “books were her centre, and from them she drew the majority of her companions” (22). Not surprisingly, then, the world which she experiences is mediated by literature and the man whom she sees, as she looks up from reading Heart of Darkness, is Kurtz. Yet, it is difficult to discount Lilah’s version of events and to read Kurtz’s name and presence in the story as a mere coincidence—as does Dr. Marlow, when he discovers that he will be a colleague of Dr. Kurtz. Instead, Kurtz is both the director of the Parkin Psychiatric Research Institute, with a history which predates his appearance before Lilah in the public library, and a metaphorical representation of Joseph Conrad’s maniacal character. Kurtz in Headhunter is even more sinister and evil than his earlier incarnation and this heart of darkness even darker. We, as readers, are no longer given the consolation of distance given to Marlow’s audience aboard the Nellie because the dark world which Kurtz inhabits and controls is one which resembles the world we live in, and the wilderness and unknown foreigners who charm and are charmed by Conrad’s Kurtz are now our neighbourhoods and friends. In Headhunter, Kurtz is not the leader-in-waiting, hidden in the African wilderness, but is the head of the most important psychiatric institution in Canada and is known for his research throughout the world. The power he wields is welcomed by a society which admires and congratulates him with enthusiasm. Conrad’s Marlow may have had trouble seeing Kurtz in the fleeting light of jungle bonfires, but Findley’s Marlow has even more difficulty seeing Kurtz in the blinding light of social and academic brilliance. As the novel unfolds, we discover that Kurtz is responsible for unspeakable atrocities, all committed in the admirable service of scientific research and advancement.

More interesting than such similarities of character and plot, however, are structural and thematic links between Headhunter and its primary intertext, Heart of Darkness. Unlike Not Wanted on the Voyage, in which the central intertext is parodied, Findley’s repetition of Conrad’s novel does not involve parodic ridicule or critique. Instead, Heart of Darkness functions as a model for the content, structure and theme of Headhunter and provides possible ways of reading and understanding its intertextual constructions and relationships. Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot that, in spite of the fact that the narrative of Heart of Darkness is filled with voice—Marlow’s storytelling voice, Kurtz’s voice of summation—the narrative ultimately points “to the unsayable dumbness of the heart of darkness and to the impossible end of the perfect narrative plot” (252). When Marlow begins telling his tale aboard the Nellie, he promises a story of enlightenment: “It was the furthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts" (HD 7). Yet, he immediately qualifies his assertion; it seems he can guarantee only a clouded enlightenment: “It was sombre enough too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light” (7). In spite of his cautionary introduction, however, as his story progresses Marlow’s listeners anticipate that moment at “the furthest point of navigation,” waiting to hear how Marlow’s life is changed forever by his encounter with Kurtz. We want enlightenment; we want to know, finally, the meaning of Kurtz’s life and the meaning of his effect upon Marlow. However, Kurtz’s final words, “The horror! The horror!”, which seem so meaningful to Marlow, fail to translate into meaning for the listener. We are left wondering what Kurtz has “summed up.” Do his words make judgment upon his own soul? Do they, instead, judge the African wilderness and what he has witnessed here? As Brooks contends, Kurtz’s words are inadequate to Marlow’s purpose and the listener’s desire for understanding:

‘The horror! The horror!’ is more accurately characterized when Marlow calls it a ‘cry.’ It comes about as close as articulated speech can come to the primal cry, to a blurted emotional reaction of uncertain reference and context. To present ‘the horror!’ as articulation of that wisdom lying in wait at the end of the tale, at journey’s end and life’s end, is to make a mockery of storytelling and ethics, or to gull one’s listeners ... (250)

Marlow’s tale, according to Brooks, ultimately gains its meaning not in its summation, but in its ongoing attempt to do so. In fact, his tale aboard the Nellie is at least his third repetition of Kurtz’s story, the first being his own journey which retraced Kurtz’s movement upriver and the second being his lie to the Intended. What is both important to and also insufficient for real meaning in Heart of Darkness is the process of telling the story, of attempting to overcome the silence at the heart of darkness.

I have briefly reiterated Brooks’ reading of Heart of Darkness because, it seems to me, that such repetition is key to understanding the intertextual structure and meaning (or lack of meaning) in Headhunter. Although there are several significant differences between Heart of Darkness and Headhunter, the repetitive structure of Heart of Darkness is reflected in the intertextual structure of Headhunter. Not only is the main plot of Headhunter a revision of Heart of Darkness in a new setting and time, but the subplots of the novel are also repetitions of other well-known and beloved classics of European, English, American and Canadian literature. Marlow’s repetition of Kurtz’s voyage and story metaphorically represents how the intertextual relationships work in Headhunter. Like Marlow, who promises his listeners a story of enlightenment, the narrator of Headhunter implies that readers will be able to find understanding through the repetition of old stories. The presence of so many overt intertexts encourages the reader to decipher the connections between this new story and prior ones in order to achieve understanding. Headhunter is a mystery story on both the level of plot and that of theme. While Marlow must solve the mystery of Purvis’s suicide, the reader attempts to resolve the intertextual tensions and contradictions into a coherent, meaningful whole.

However, while some of the intertextual connections seem transparent—for example, those between Emma Berry and Emma Bovary—others are much more opaque, creating more confusion than clarity. The ultimate opacity of intertextual connection is common to all metaphoric and analogous relationships. The appearance and rhetoric of similarity can be sustained only for as long as difference is suppressed. When difference overwhelms similarity, then the linguistic cover-up is revealed for what it is. Like Marlow’s repetitious narrative, intertextuality can provide only a temporary illusion of meaning, while actually leaving the absence which it covers unspoken. Ironically, in the proliferation of texts, which make up the plot, setting, character, and theme of Headhunter, what becomes important is not what texts say but what they leave unsaid. Although intertextual connections help to make much of the heart of darkness visible, much still remains inarticulate and silent.

Throughout Findley’s novels, we have seen how texts—whether they are historical, economic, social, scientific, political or literary—silence those people and stories society prefers not to acknowledge as legitimate or real. Mrs. Noyes and her friends are silenced by the linguistic authority of Noah; Robert Ross by the stupidity of war; Hooker by the Victorian repression of his family; Lily, Vanessa and Meg by the Secret Service; and so forth. Generic conventions also threaten to silence or undo the revolutionary potential of several of Findley’s novels. In The Butterfly Plague and Famous Last Words, it becomes clear that fascist and modernist texts performed the greatest cover-up of our century. Through the strength of a ‘beautiful’ idea, the Nazis were able to systematically, and quite openly, kill millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and other ‘undesirables.’

Findley’s interest in linguistically enforced silence is still evident in Headhunter. Through Kurtz’s authority as chief of psychiatry at the Parkin Institute, he is able to use both language and silence to further his own research ambitions. His research assistants, Dr. Shelley and Dr. Sommerville, conduct several experiments, all of which involve silencing the memories and thoughts of various patients deemed expendable, using either white noise or illegal, untested drugs.¹ Kurtz, himself, does little hands-on research and is occupied mainly with fundraising, which “ha[s] already made him a legendary figure. Other institutions fear[] him for these successes, monies for research being so notoriously hard to come by” (HH 66). His success depends, to a large degree, upon his ability to manipulate the immoral and unethical (not to mention illegal) desires of his wealthiest patients. By silently giving his permission and allowing these men wish-fulfilment, Kurtz has no need to blackmail his patients with his knowledge. Instead, finding fulfilment through his acquiescence, they give substantial donations of thanks. The result of such ‘fundraising,’ besides being a betrayal to Kurtz’s scientific calling, leads to the horrors of the Men’s Club where fathers routinely rape, and sometimes even kill, their own children. Their children’s ‘willingness’ to participate is also made possible by Kurtz, who silently provides the Club with the drug Obedion in order to facilitate events. The Men’s Club’s activities are a safely kept secret as Kurtz gradually purloins patients and files from Austin Purvis before any connection between Eleanor Farjeon’s children and the men of the Club can be deciphered. When one of the children almost succeeds in castrating himself in front of Kurtz, while others are present, his carefully constructed veil of secrecy is threatened. However, the threat is quickly dispelled. Calling upon his colleague to keep a collective lie, Kurtz tells McGreevey, “T was not here'” (52). Seconds later, when Lilah asks McGreevey for Kurtz’s name, McGreevey claims that no man had been standing beside her and Kurtz’s lie changes reality.

Kurtz is partially responsible for the silence of the sturnusemia conspiracy as well. Although he believes the story of Smith-Jones, the Paranoid Civil Servant, Kurtz silences him, by labelling him paranoid schizophrenic, by including him in Dr. Sommerville’s White Mind experiments, and finally, by having him moved to Penetanguishene, the hospital for the criminally insane. Like Kurtz, who creates and maintains silence in order to finance his research, the Canadian government and its various research agencies also maintain silence about the true causes of sturnusemia, so that drug companies can continue to make big profits in return for protecting the government from exposure. Kurtz and the government cover up unspeakable atrocities with language, using the language of science, as the company manager and accountant in Heart of Darkness once used the language of imperialism. Although the Paranoid Civil Servant believes scientific truth is “pure in the sense that scientific truth is not burdened with moral issues” (545), his own story belies his attempt to separate science from morality. He is part of a research team, spending huge amounts of time and money searching for a scientific cure for sturnusemia, even though the ‘scientific truth’ of the disease makes such research completely useless. When he confronts a few colleagues with his discovery, he convinces them of the truth, but he fails to shake their belief that “they are doing ‘the right thing’” (544) and cannot “convince them they are doing A TERRIBLE WRONG” (545).

Thus, science is not driven by the pursuit of truth, but by a complex mix of political and economic forces which use the cover of scientific truth as a hiding place. Ironically, both the general public and scientists believe that the ‘purity’ of scientific truth guarantees its moral goodness. At his death, Kurtz still seems to believe that the aims of his scientific research do justify everything. He explains that he is “on the threshold of great things” (613) and that his ideas are to be “his gift to society” (615). Even though he openly admits that various “business propositions” support his scientific ideas, Kurtz appeals to Marlow’s scientific side, in hopes that science will supersede and excuse his unethical tactics: “‘Don’t malign me, Marlow.... I‘m a scientist. So are you. We should not malign one another’” (617). Kurtz’s appeal suggests that if Marlow reveals Kurtz’s activities, the real victim will be science and this would be a far greater tragedy than any of those already perpetrated against the children of the Men’s Club. When Marlow lies to Fabiana, as Conrad’s Marlow lies to The Intended, it seems that perhaps science will remain a survivor, as does Kurtz’s imperialistic essay in Heart of Darkness. At the end of Headhunter, Marlow prepares to confront Kurtz’s ‘clients’ and research fellows, but we are not reassured that Marlow will unveil Kurtz or the sturnusemia hoax publicly; if he does not, then ’science' will be saved.

Science, however, is not saved from critique in Headhunter, and the reader is certainly challenged to re-examine the scientific and other ‘truths’ which inform our everyday lives. Likewise, the silences that Kurtz creates are often undone through the intertextual connection between Headhunter and Heart of Darkness. Knowing the details of Conrad’s novel, the reader expects Kurtz to be horrible. As we read, we look for and are prepared to find evidence of the darkness in his heart. We try to find correlatives to both his abuse of native Africans and his hold over them. Like his intertextual predecessor, Findley’s Kurtz controls the desires and behaviour of his ‘savages,’ his ‘mad’ patients, using them to gather his illicitly procured ‘ivory.’ As in Conrad’s novel, the reader expects to find a dark wilderness where social restraints fall away, endangering the mental and physical health of all who enter. Thus, although the Toronto Headhunter describes hardly resembles the geographical one except in its landmarks, the reader is not surprised or shocked to discover a city lost in a thick fog, where people and birds die by the thousands because of a deadly plague, where gangs of Moonmen wander vandalizing property, and where children are seduced by drugs and money into pornography. The intertextual expectations raised by our prior knowledge of Heart of Darkness facilitate Kurtz’s undoing, at least in the minds of the reader and of Lilah. While Marlow flounders for weeks in his attempts to uncover the cause of Purvis’s suicide, we grow impatient at his inability to recognize Kurtz for who he is. It seems that we, like Lilah, do believe that Rupert Kurtz, head of the Parkin Institute, is Conrad’s Kurtz, inadvertently released from page 92 of the Penguin edition of Heart of Darkness.

However, while Headhunter succeeds in giving the reader much more information about the darkness of Kurtz’s heart than Heart of Darkness ever did, many silences and mysteries remain at its core. For example, one might wonder why a plague novel written by a gay writer in 1993 does not deal directly with AIDS, but only approaches it indirectly through a fictional (and also faked) plague called sturnusemia. Why does Findley leave AIDS out of the text? There are other important absences from the text as well. The victims of the Men’s Club are speechless, unable to tell their stories and expose the Club. They also decapitate the one person who genuinely cares for and loves them. Why is Purvis driven to suicide rather than speech when he discovers the truth about Kurtz and the Men’s Club? Why does Julian Slade, Findley’s version of Conrad’s verbose Russian harlequin, remain silent at the opening of his show? Headhunter is filled with characters who either refuse or are unable to tell their own stories. As Barbara Berry observes: “People rarely talk about what really happens to their sisters—mothers—fathers. And they never talk about what really happens to themselves. By some unnamed agreement—to which Barbara herself adhered—it wasn’t done” (248). Timothy Findley, one of Marlow’s new patients, argues that what “isn’t done” in reality is the special domain of both fiction and psychiatry. Writers “ climb[] down inside other people’s lives to see if they're telling the truth or not” (202-3) and, more often than not, discover that most people are telling complex lies about themselves. Putting himself into his own novel and overtly becoming an intertext, Findley emphasizes the intertextual construction of writer, character, and reader. We are made up of the stories we tell about ourselves, and, in the event that we are speechless, as so many in Headhunters are, we are constructed by stories others tell about us and stories in which we find ourselves reflected. As Conrad’s Marlow repeatedly tries to “reweave the seamless web of signification” (Brooks 255) by narrating Kurtz’s story, Headhunter fills its own textual silences with intertextual repetitions in an attempt to (re)construct what people cannot say for themselves—the truth about what really happens to them.

As the reader negotiates the gaps between Headhunter and its intertexts, trying to connect the various texts together, she becomes directly involved in this reconstruction. In The Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser argues that all texts have ‘blanks,’ or what he calls, “negations.” These blanks “designate a vacancy in the overall system of the text” (182) which function metonymically within the narrative:

They indicate that the different segments of the text are to be connected, even though the text itself does not say so. They are the unseen joints of the text, and as they mark off schemata and textual perspectives from one another, they simultaneously trigger acts of ideation on the reader’s part. (182-3)

These acts of ideation, according to Iser, reveal the absent presence of what he labels the text’s “unformulated double” which has no material existence but is a crucial part of the reader’s awareness of the text’s various meanings. Narrative blanks can take a variety of forms, ranging from unrepresented periods of ‘real’ time between events to absent generic conventions. Whatever their form, blanks encourage the reader to formulate the text’s “unformulated double” since the reader tries to fill in the blanks and, in doing so, actively creates the text’s unstated meanings.

In Headhunter, there are several kinds of blanks within the narrative, but the most interesting are those between text and intertexts. Although Headhunter uses the conventions of realism, conventions which presuppose the possibility of representing a real world in literature, there is a rent in this relationship with the world. It is not possible to determine the reality of seemingly unrealistic events, such as Lilah’s various meetings with ghostly characters, since these seemingly unreal events affect the outcome of the supposedly real events. In addition, as already mentioned, the ‘reality’ reflected in the novel is textual rather than actual. Perhaps the events of the novel occur only within Lilah’s head. Headhunter, then, both plays by and defies the conventions of realism. Iser suggests that textual blanks and the text’s “unformulated double” can become more difficult to unravel when the reader’s knowledge of what has happened is further destabilized by “a deliberate omission of generic features” (208) within the text. In such cases, the reader is urged to resolve structural and generic gaps, which, in turn, complicate gaps in characterization, time, setting, and plot. These omissions, while still encouraging the reader to make connections, often thwart the reader, until it seems that the primary meaning of the text is its lack of coherent meaning.

While Headhunter’s intertextuality destabilizes its meaning, it is primarily offered as an avenue leading to comprehension. In contrast to many of Findley’s other novels which emphasize the parodic gap between text and intertext, Headhunter stresses the similarities between texts over their differences. The blanks created by intertextuality between Headhunter and other texts encourage the reader, as Iser contends, to formulate Headhunter’s “unformulated double.” As I have already shown, similarities between Heart of Darkness and Headhunter suggest important themes in Findley’s novel. Like Marlow’s repetition of Kurtz’s story, Findley’s repetition of Conrad promises and at least partially delivers the meaning of his own text. The return of other intertexts within Headhunter also encourages the reader to make connections, suggesting that the similarities between, for instance, Emma Bovary and Emma Berry or between Jay Gatsby and James Gatz will explain their actions and motivations within Headhunter.

To some extent, but no more than within Heart of Darkness, this promise of meaning is fulfilled. Knowing Emma Bovary, the reader has a greater chance of understanding Emma Berry’s self-destructive desires and actions. Like Emma Bovary, Emma Berry passively identifies herself with and thus reconstructs herself from her literary experience. As she tells Marlow:

Between my bouts with Madame Bovary and movie stars, I had no life at all... . So I began to make it up. From the very first moment I was conscious, I wanted to be anyone but who I was. I called myself Emma. Not my real name ... ( 149)

She marries surgeon Maynard Berry, as Emma Bovary once married her doctor, in order to gain prestige through association. Luckier than Flaubert’s character, Emma Berry chooses a husband who is extremely successful and rich, although not in the way Emma desires. Like Emma Bovary, she is not satisfied because the world she desires is not real: “That no such world existed did not occur to her. She had got it out of biographies and cut it out of magazines where the lives of actresses and presidents’ wives were written about and photographed in living colour” (232-3). She searches for romance and love, riding with her various lovers through the streets of Toronto in her white limousine, as Emma Bovary once rode through French villages in her transom cab. More self-conscious than Emma Bovary, Emma Berry has fewer delusions about romance and knowingly prostitutes herself. However, she still longs to find fulfilment through love, as did Emma Bovary, and can think of no other way of finding it except by answering the calls to her limousine.

Significantly, her limousine is known as the Great White Whale, recalling Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. A sperm whale of a different sort to Melville’s, Emma’s limousine is the place where men fulfil their sexual desires, having sex with The Surgeon’s Wife, the most beautiful woman in the city. In contrast to Captain Ahab, who fails in his quest for revenge and victory, Emma always delivers her men back home completely fulfilled: “she had learned, over time, that her job in the Great White Whale was to bring her lovers back full circle to themselves. All the way out into danger and all the way home, like a lunatic passing the phases of the moon, to safety” (287). Emma, though, is less like Captain Ahab than she is like the Pequod. She is the vessel which reflects and carries the dreams and desires of men and is smashed to pieces in the process. They do not desire her for herself, but rather, for what she represents and where that representation can transport them. James Gatz takes after Captain Ahab, making love to Emma with such violence and passion that he nearly destroys her. What remains untouched in the aftermath of their lovemaking and Gatz’s murder is the Great White Whale, still roaming the streets of Toronto.

Although intertextual links between Headhunter and Madame Bovary or Moby Dick appear to explain who Emma Berry is, they ultimately only cover-up what Emma lacks, an identity. Emma Berry’s ‘identity’ is constructed from layers of faked identity; not only is Emma Bovary a fictional construct, but she is also constituted by the various romantic heroines she reads about in penny novels. Similarly, Emma Berry constructs herself through the multiple representations of Emma Bovary, plus those of various famous women seen in movies and magazines. In spite of the intertextual density of Emma’s personality, she suffers from an absence of self. Marlow notes the paradox of Emma Berry; she is at once a “woman of substance” and “an ethereal being” (255). Although “she sat there before him—living and real,” “someone else had to prove she was alive” (255). In the absence of such proof, Marlow fears that Emma Berry is nearly dead. Even though her intertextual make-up steadily constructs Emma’s identity over the course of the novel, physically and mentally she simultaneously unravels, an unravelling suggested by the trail of blood she leaves behind with each departure.

James Gatz’s identity is also ultimately intertextually inexplicable. All that people know of him is his name:

Gatz was a figure of such great mystery that his name had taken on a kind of legendary status. Few could tell you what he did—but everyone could tell you who he was. Nobody got it right—but that is how it always is where riddles are concerned. (230-1)

The reader, however, feels certain that she will solve the riddle correctly, having immediately recognized him, through his name, as a remake of Jay Gatsby. Reading for similarities between Gatz and Gatsby, the reader sees connections between the two men’s rise to financial success through suspect means. Like Gatsby, Gatz is an aloof figure, living in a grand house all alone, never really connecting with the neighbours even though he throws large parties. The intertextual riddle of who James Gatz is seems easily solved. However, these intertextual similarities hide differences between the two characters which complicate the riddle. How does Gatz’s Texan past and riotous relationship with his father fit in? Who are Marianne’s and Anne Marie’s intertextual precursors? Gatsby was obsessed with Daisy—only vaguely repeated in Headhunter in Emma Berry—not with missing his wife and daughter. Instead of dying at the hands of a jealous husband, as does Gatsby, Gatz is murdered by his father. These details simply are not explained by intertextual connections between Headhunter and The Great Gatsby. In fact, the reader’s presumed knowledge of Gatz, through his name, may cover up these differences; the reader, in other words, simply might not notice that most of the information in the narrative about Gatz does not relate to Gatsby at all because, in the reader’s mind, his name supersedes everything else. As the narrator says, “few could tell you what he did—but everyone could tell you who he was. Nobody got it right” (231).

Significantly, the reader is not the only one trying to solve the riddle of identity through intertextual readings. When asked by Kurtz to write an essay in answer to the question “Who Am I?”, Fabiana Holbach supplies an intertextual essay in response. Arguing that the question can never be answered, Fabiana goes on to suggests that you can only find yourself in the texts written about you, that identity can only be viewed from outside; the subject can only see herself as object. As she tells Kurtz:

Who am I?

Who do you think is writing this?

I'll tell you.

It is my writing friend who saw me, once, in an unguarded moment. (342)

This outside view, however, is even more complicated when the perspective of the viewer or writer is taken into account. As Fabiana points out: “All you have to remember is, the person who saw me was looking at me through a moment in his own life, too. Otherwise, I don't think he would have seen me at all. He would have seen someone else” (342). Fabiana’s identity is entirely based upon the texts others write or paint about her. If she is not seen from the viewpoint of some other person, she “can no longer see [her] self. [She has] vanished from view” (343). Like Emma Berry, although alive and breathing, Fabiana is empty, starving and fearful of dying. Fabiana suggests in her essay that subjectivity and identity can only be attained when one’s idea of oneself parallels the mirror reflection in other texts. Both she and Emma Berry descend into depression and contemplate suicide because they cannot find themselves in the text. Their mistake, as the failure of intertextuality to fully explain identity suggests, is not their inability to see themselves in the text, but in their belief that identity resides there in the first place.

In contrast to these female characters, several of the male characters are not alienated from themselves by various texts but instead find their selves intertextually completed and fulfilled.² This completion, however, is delusional and dangerous. As I noted in discussing The Butterfly Plague, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy argue that a fascistic sense of identity and subjectivity is formed when the mythic subject, which serves as an abstract (although textual) model for identity, is actually confused for real identity. The gap between the myth and the reality is covered up by the subject’s false identification with the ideal model. In the case of the Nazis, the state provided a racial text of identity in which each individual falsely confirmed their subjectivity. In reality, the ideal of a pure Aryan race was an impossibility, but the Nazi myth erased this impossibility through the illusion that real Germans actually embodied racial purity, and thus each was the perfect Aryan subject. In The Butterfly Plague, characters seek self-perfection in similarly faked versions of reality. Letitia Verdun, who sees her virginal youthfulness perpetually recreated and confirmed on film, believes that she is the perfect embodiment of American purity and innocence in spite of her age and sexual maturity. Through her surreal connection with Race, Ruth believes in the possibility that she will mother a racially and biologically perfect son; such belief defies reality and her pregnancy turns out, of course, to be a hoax.

Kurtz, in contrast to Emma or Fabiana, descends into irrationality and madness precisely because he eventually finds his self perfectly reflected in Julian Slade’s triptych, The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs. When Kurtz first views the painting, though, he is “mortified” (98) by his reaction; he is quickly “in full erection” (98). On second look, he is able to maintain intellectual distance, seeing it as a product of Slade’s schizophrenic imagination. This distance is facilitated, however, by his conversation with David Shapiro. Wanting to distinguish his own reactions from those of Shapiro, Kurtz refuses to identify with a man he finds contemptible. Left on his own again, Kurtz can no longer maintain such distance. Instead,

Kurtz was mesmerized. Somehow, the painting soothed him. It verified his fears. But it also informed him that fear was wonderful. It told him there was nothing in the whole wide world of madness that was not the property of sanity as well. The figures told him that—with their golden skin and their tangible flesh. Their inflammatory nakedness was an open invitation to join in what could only be seen as the beauty of madness—and the gift of power that madness bestows. (102)

Kurtz’s response to the painting is complex, and in several significant ways, connected to fascistic notions of self and aestheticism. The painting paradoxically verifies Kurtz’s fears and soothes him because although it reveals his fears to be real, it enables him to master those fears and turn them into a source of power. By turning his fears into an aesthetic object, the painting not only beautifies madness, but also Kurtz himself. Although Kurtz is objectified by the painting, he misreads this objectification as confirmation of his subjectivity, of his empowerment. Seeing his self reflected in the painting gives substance to his identity, fusing a mythic sense of self with his actual self and filling him with a sense of mastery. As the painting confirms, his actions are not only reasonable, in light of the fact that sanity and insanity are now the same, but also beautiful, and thus completely justifiable within whatever text he makes of his self and his world.

At the end of his life, when Marlow goes to hear his confession, Kurtz, unlike his Conradian precursor, is never able to see through this illusory self-mastery to the horror of self-deception. Instead, he continues to argue for the lightness of his ideas which sustain the textual and aesthetic illusion pictured in Slade’s painting. Kurtz, according to Marlow, can no longer see reality as it is; he can only see reality filtered through the ‘beauty’ of the painting:

Kurtz could only see the gestures of it, now—the words that described it, but not the thing itself. All along, it now seemed, Kurtz had been standing in front of his beloved triptych, watching Slade’s horror unfold in perfect order—the savage men—the feeding white dogs—the severed heads high up on their poles. (616)

Kurtz’s version of reality is perfected in the text of the painting which, in turn, reflects the ‘reason’ of the other scientific and economic texts which Kurtz writes in order to project and confirm his own great “gift to his society” (615). He will be the creator of a “new people” (615) arising from the fires and ashes of his metaphoric, psychiatric kiln. In his view, his Sleep Project reveals the possibility of eradicating human frailty and imperfection and replacing it with a strength as yet unknown. Kurtz’s dying words are an echo of Griffin Price’s conversation at Slade’s opening. Price pronounces Slade “the Mengele of art” (86), the precursor of Kurtz. As Price suggests to Kurtz,

‘my vision was that we are ready for another version of the human race. The final honing.’ ... ‘Isn’t that sort of what our pal Julian meant when he tore things to shreds? All those paintings of people flayed—torn away from who they were‘ .... ’And this is where you [Kurtz] come in—the king of psychiatry. I mean—if there are new forms of human beings, then it follows there must be new forms of madness... Yes?' (87-8)

The allusions here to the Holocaust are unmistakable and telling. Slade and Kurtz are seduced and empowered by a fascist aesthetic which hides away the horror of their activities under the madly reasonable rhetoric of beauty and strength. As the narrator tells us, “[Slade] fell in love with Kurtz—aesthetically—and became, in this way, his disciple” (85).

The shrunken heads on poles represented in Slade’s triptych also reflect Kurtz’s intertextual identity. Just as the African wilderness mirrors Conrad’s Kurtz’s horrible madness, Slade’s painting reflects the darkness of Kurtz’s heart in Headhunter. This reminder of Kurtz’s ‘original’ intertextual identity further emphasizes the unreality of Kurtz’s sense of both subjectivity and agency. Kurtz is doubly cut off from reality: first, because the beauty of the idea—whether it is imperialism or science—conceals the real effects of his experiments and second, because he is a fictional character and thus has no real existence. The intertextual and metafictional elements of Headhunter suggest that reality is finally a linguistic construct. All that we can know of ourselves and our world is within language and expressed in written texts. Normally, according to Iser, the “unformulated double” of a text points to a real world beyond the pages of the fiction. In Headhunter, though, the novel’s blanks are intertextually generated and so end up pointing to the unreality of both the text and the outside world. It could be argued that Headhunter, to use Jean Baudrillard’s term, is a hyperreal world, where the reflection of ‘reality’ is actually a reflection of literary signs rather than any sort of material reality. As Umberto Eco suggests and as is illustrated in The Butterfly Plague, in a hyperreal world, myth collapses into reality, as the sign collapses into the referent. Kurtz’s intertextual referent, or ‘real self,’ for instance, is, like Emma Bo vary, actually not real at all but only another fictional representation. The unreality of Headhunter is reminiscent of the faked gardens in The Butterfly Plague where faked nature becomes more desirable, and thus more real, than actual trees and flowers. In Headhunter, however, what is faked is not nature but identity and culture—in short, those things by which we identify ourselves as human.

In contrast to both The Butterfly Plague and Famous Last Words, in which the relationship between textual and extra-textual knowledge is also questioned, Headhunter has no stable intertextual reference to extra-textual or material events, except for a few brief references to AIDS or to various buildings scattered throughout Toronto. In the two earlier novels, the Holocaust serves as the test case of the dangers of denying material reality. In Headhunter, however, there is no example of material evidence conflicting with textual versions—as is illustrated in the conflicting accounts of the fire at Alvarez Canyon in The Butterfly Plague or in the contentious debate about Mauberley’s narrative between Quinn and Freyberg in Famous Last Words. Instead, because so much of Headhunter consists of characters and events which refer to literary referents, there is no extra-textual reality which serves as a comparison.

Headhunter, by leaving out any significant reference to a extra-textual reality, focuses upon intertextuality and considers the ramifications of a completely textualized reality. As the characterizations of Emma Berry and Kurtz suggest, textual identity either covers up the inability of narrative to fully express identity or creates an illusory and masterful subjectivity. Both are destructive, although one leads to suicidal tendencies while the other gives way to genocidal tendencies. Throughout the novel, texts rob people of their humanity. The essays Kurtz urges his patients to write, for example, seem to give them a chance to express their individuality and humanity. Instead, the writers of the essays are objectified by Kurtz, who either uses their secrets for his own profit or deems them mad and seals them away from society. Rather than being given a voice, they are woven into the fabric of Kurtz’s texts—his files, his experiments, his research essay. Even before these people become his patients, Kurtz views them primarily as potential sources of funds, rather than human beings. At Slade’s opening, he surveys his friends and patients, thinking of their stories; throughout this scene, Kurtz’s thoughts provide the biographies of Griffin Price, Peggy Wylie, and Ben Webster. Quite explicitly, their biographies become textual products which Kurtz files away for future exploitation. Maynard Berry, one of Kurtz’s few friends, also views his patients as texts to be revised. Accusing her father of erasing her mother’s identity when he reconstructed her face, Barbara Berry suggests to her father that “‘as long as it makes a good story, you don’t care what happens to anyone‘” (560). Taken aback by his daughter’s attack, Maynard tries to defend his actions: “’I made her better—not just different. It was an improvement‘” (560). However, this ’improved‘ version of Emma Berry does become a good story, as the numerous tabloid articles written about her life and various public appearances illustrate. The text of his wife’s face, written by his surgeon’s hands, also advertizes Maynard’s renovation skills, making it possible for him to ’improve‘ the narratives of other patients’ lives. Emma, objectified by her husband’s remodelling, can no longer author her own story, but is subsumed into his as The Surgeon’s Wife.

The children of the Men’s Club are also objectified through narrative. When Arnie and Steven are led before the masked audience of the Men’s Club, John Dai Bowen instructs the boys, whispering “the bones of a story” (163) into their ears. As the session continues, John Dai unobtrusively moves the plot forward, quietly encouraging Arnie and Steven to play their assigned roles. Ironically, although the shape of the narrative is determined by the members’ written requests, this narrative, which assigns Arnie the starring role, creates the illusion that Arnie is in control of what occurs, enabling the men to believe “that a boy could force them to perform those acts they were otherwise ashamed to consider” (162). Similar to Kurtz’s reaction to Slade’s triptych, these men both face and master their fears and desires as they view Arnie and Steven. They do not see them as real boys but as models in a photography shoot who are exercising their freedom to earn money exhibiting their own bodies. The men, on the other hand, are simply innocent viewers, unable to resist the beautiful and seductive charms of these ’powerful‘ boys. Steven, assigned the role of the seduced in the story, is not fooled by the fictional set of power relations created by John Dai Bowen and the Men’s Club. He realizes that “to be chosen was to lose his right to choose. In his dreams, he was a rapist—but in these strangers’ dreams, he would be raped” (162). Objectified by John Dai Bowen’s photographs, their fathers’ and other men’s desires, and Kurtz’s fundraising, the children of the Men’s Club become completely silent, inarticulate and, in many ways, inhuman. Ironically, the only access we have to their experience is in the files and photographs contained in Purvis’ box—the very things which silenced them in the first place.

This repeated emphasis on how various texts objectify their subjects corresponds to the novel’s critique of capitalism and Canada’s consumer society. Wealth permeates the pages of Headhunter. Except for the groundhog and her babies and, perhaps, Amy Wylie, no one in the nove goes hungry or lacks for creature comforts. Most, in fact, live in Rosedale —even Lilah—and fill their homes with luxurious furniture, original paintings, and leather-bound books. Teenagers roam the streets in Nikes and Reeboks, initially seduced into the Men’s Club with promises of money. These material goods, however, are not all that is consumed in Headhunter, they are the mere precursors of a much more devastating consumption of humanity. Seeing his patients as clients, Kurtz no longer considers their medical needs when he treats them, but instead, conducts their ‘therapy’ according to his fund-raising needs. Emma Berry envisions her husband’s medical practice in terms which even more clearly suggest that doctors do not care for their patients but consume them. As she and Barbara eat their dinner,

the Surgeon operated. Clocks were always ticking through these hours—clocks and watches—the clicking of knives and forks and spoons—the endless dripping of saline solutions—the cutting of veal or chicken or beef—the layering of grafted skin. Emma too often imagined this juxtaposition—the table where Maynard operated and table where she ate, afloat side by side in the same pool of light. While his hands powdered, she dusted salt across her plate. (233)

Although many scenes in Headhunter are set at various dinner parties and kitchen tables, people rarely eat with one another without also metaphorically eating one another. Kurtz, for example, enjoys eating alone at Arlequino’s because, while he lunches, he can look across the room and “consume” Fabiana, “one of his greatest aesthetic pleasures” (583). When Amy Wylie arrives on Marlow’s doorstep just as he is about to sit down and eat, Marlow plays two roles throughout the meal—gracious host and doctor. As they eat, he views her clinically, making his diagnosis. At the OTlaherty’s party, guests are seated together according to reputation and fame, with the most famous clearly on display at the head table and the least remarkable tucked away in another room. After attending the OTlaherty’s party, Fagan writes a fable about Jean Paul Sartre in which Sartre is invited to a party attended by various people who admire him only for his fame. In this environment, Sartre can only imitate himself, playing a role “as if he had been rehearsed” (268). When he discusses existentialism, it has become a philosophy in which “being” is commercialized since we only “exist in terms of [someone’s] need for [our] services” (269). Eventually, Sartre is killed by the waiter serving him, implying that the commercialization of Sartre’s existentialism is the cause of his death. Making Sartre a consumer product, Fagan suggests, is tantamount to killing him.

Headhunter’s critique of consumption also extends to the relations amongst the artist, artwork and audience. In Slade’s Golden Chamber of the White Dogs, bodies are consumed on a number of levels. For instance, the parallels between his chamber of horrors and a butcher shop are unmistakable. Tables are covered with halved and quartered bodies, while body parts hang from meat hooks in the background. White dogs hover everywhere either savouring a bit of ‘meat’ or waiting hungrily for the next scrap. Slade, like Maynard, has revisioned reality. He unveils “savage acts which have been done too long in the darkness” and brings them “inthe light” (95-6), just as Maynard beautifies the faces of victims of violence. Slade not only addresses savagery as a subject needing exposure, he also, like Maynard, reforms an ugly subject into a beautiful object. “All the people in [the gallery] were touched with a golden hue,” the light emanating from the gold leaf embossed onto every canvas (97). As Kurtz decides, Slade’s paintings reveal the “beauty of madness” (103).

In spite of, or because of the torture and degradation pictured, Slade’s paintings are also “overwhelmingly sexual” (97). Although none of the men in the paintings are fully aroused, Kurtz notes that “every penis and nipple, every folded, curving buttock was exposed as if prepared for manipulation or consumption” (98). Kurtz’s diction is revealing. The paintings do not picture men poised for and desiring sexual intercourse, but bodies prepared for something more akin to rape. Their bodies will not be touched or loved, but manipulated and consumed. Kurtz does not describe the figures as whole, but as a collection of body parts; this descriptive fragmentation prefigures the literal dismemberment represented in his favourite painting, The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs. Such dismemberment completely objectifies the men; they are no longer human beings but merely torsos, arms and legs which literally are manipulated and consumed. As viewer and buyer, Kurtz also consumes the painting as object, so that the literal consumption of bodies within The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs metaphorically reveals the relationship between spectator and painting, a relationship which ultimately empowers the viewer-consumer, even if the power seems to reside within the figures represented.

The novel’s critique of how artists and viewers consume their subjects also reflects upon writers, readers and narrative. Influenced by both Freud and Walter Benjamin, Brooks argues throughout his book that narrative is driven by a desire for death. At the moment of a character’s death, both the character and the reader are no longer faced with the unknown, and as a result of knowing the end, they can look back in retrospect and bring all the pieces and bits of life into one meaningful whole. To use Benjamin’s term, in that moment of death, the meaning of life and narrative becomes “transmissible.” Even in novels where characters do not actually die, Brooks argues that the end of the novel is a metaphoric death which enables the reader to find meaning. The reader’s desire for such meaning provides the motor of narrative. Paradoxically, it is a motor which both fills and drains the narrative, since, as the reader reads, the narrative “diminishes] as it realizes itself, leading to an end that is the consummation (as well as the consumption) of its sense-making” (Brooks 52). Consuming the narrative, the reader metaphorically also devours character in her search for meanings which can only become communicable with the death/"death" of both character and narrative. In Slade’s paintings, the sexual tension and embarrassment aroused in Kurtz by the virility of the naked male subjects changes to wonder and fulfilment when he stands before The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs. At the moment of death, of consumption, Kurtz is able to resolve his discomfort and sexual anxiety and turn it into power through his act of interpretation. There are significant parallels between Slade’s painting and Headhunter‘^ own structure, which itself has cut up and swallowed various other texts into its own ’belly' in an attempt to create meaning. Is the reader of Headhunter, then, in danger of becoming like Kurtz?

This question along with the thematic emphasis placed upon a critique of consumption point to an interesting and significant difference between Heart of Darkness and Headhunter. Marlow, in Findley’s novel, is no longer the storyteller of Kurtz’s tale. Instead, like most of the other characters, he is written into the plot of an omniscient narration which has no identifiable source except that of the intertext, Heart of Darkness. The absence of a first-person narrator shifts the narrative focus in Headhunter from how the story is told, as in Heart of Darkness, to how the story is consumed. The person who begins this narrative is not, like Conrad’s Marlow, a story-teller, but rather, is a reader. Reading Heart of Darkness, Lilah inadvertently releases Kurtz from his literary place and gives occasion for this representation of Conrad’s novel. In contrast to a storyteller, Lilah has no control over the direction of the narrative. Once a librarian, Lilah was in charge of a collection of texts but unable to regulate the circulation or interpretation of the books which left the library. Now, rather than being head of the library, Lilah’s head becomes the library, out of which various characters and historical figures pop. Like any reader, she watches events unfold, trying to predict what is to come and interpret what has passed.

More precisely, Lilah is a metaphor for the reader of this particular novel, Headhunter. Lilah is paradoxically one of the most realistic and unrealistic characters in the novel. On the one hand, her ability to raise fictional characters from the pages of books is certainly unusual and her conversations with various ghostly apparitions is uncanny and unreal. On the other hand, even though she suffers from schizophrenic delusions, her compassion, kindness, and tenacity make her the most human, and humane, of characters. In contrast to most of the other characters, Lilah has no intertextual ancestor and as a result, seems simply to be herself and free to act without the constraints of intertextual limits. Lilah’s freedom, however, is an illusion. She is no more real or free than the other characters; she is still constructed within and by the narrative of Headhunter. Although she may not descend from another text, she still carries intertextual baggage, exemplified by the tattered copy of Wuthering Heights hidden away in her baby buggy. Since she thinks of the book as her own child, Lilah’s bonds to literature may appear to be external to her identity but are actually very much a part of who she is; “her world was entirely ... the insides of books” (28). With such deeply held connections to literature, Lilah can only see an intertextual world. Similarly, while the reader may be able to more or less distinguish herself from textual influences, she, like Lilah, cannot help but interpret ‘reality’ through the filter of various narratives. This intertextual relationship between reader and world is metaphorically represented in the experience of reading Headhunter. The reader cannot read Headhunter directly—the intertexts come in between the reader and the novel and the reader and reality.

Paradoxically, throughout Headhunter, intertextuality both gives the reader agency because it enables the reader to create the text’s double, and frustrates that agency because the text’s double is already intertextually written. Likewise, Lilah feels compelled to act, knowing what damage Kurtz is bound to cause. However, she is also powerless against the intertextual demands of the story. She can only vainly “pray[] that Kurtz [will] go away” (14), until Marlow arrives to stop Kurtz. When she realizes that Marlow is failing to live up to his intertextual role, Lilah decides to act. Whether or not her act of refusing Modecate actually affects the course of events, though, is not clear. Kurtz’s death, although unexpected (in terms of his current life in Toronto), is not unusual since sturnusemia has already claimed thousands of victims; Marlow finally does become Kurtz’s deathbed accuser and confessor. Lilah, at least on the surface level of plot, is not involved in the events of Kurtz’s death and so the reader can only assume she did not affect the course of events. In fact, Lilah is not even, apparently, capable of the readerly act of interpretation. When next we see her, she is reading a letter from Fagan, who sums up the meaning of both Heart of Darkness and Headhunter. Lilah immediately accepts his interpretation as sufficient for understanding and thus, melds her own to suit his. Does Fagan’s letter also close off the reader’s ability to produce the text’s meaning? At the very least, the presence of his letter stresses, once again, that all of the reader’s activities and thoughts are mediated through various intertextual layers, which restrict the reader’s interpretation in significant ways, if not completely overdetermining it.

Throughout Findley’s novels, madness and reading are often interconnected. In The Last of the Crazy People, bodies become textual signs to be diagnosed while characters’ reading habits become textual signs for the outside reader’s diagnosis of their insanity. Findley’s other novels also examine how ’insanity' is a text, rather than a biological disease, defined in relation to a supposedly stable ideal of normal behaviour which is itself another socially-constructed text. Often, by reversing traditional hierarchies or conventional social views, Findley’s novels argue that it is the norm which is actually insane. In Headhunter, however, it is no longer a question of whether or not characters really are insane. Lilah Kemp is schizophrenic. The world into which she frees various literary characters is also sick: “Civilization—sickened—had itself become a plague. And its course, in Marlow’s world, could be followed by tracing the patterns of mental breakdown” (271). Findley’s Toronto is, itself, schizophrenic and so is the text that embodies it.

The notion that Toronto is schizophrenic also has its intertextual referent. The Susanna Moodie Lilah meets underneath the Queen’s Street Mental Health Centre does not come directly from Roughing It in the Bush, but via Margaret Atwood’s mediation. In the afterward to her Journals of Susanna Moodie, Atwood argues that “the national mental illness ... of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia” (62). Atwood imagines Moodie as a sort of female groundhog, occasionally erupting into the streets of Toronto, reminding its citizens of their divided selves. The Toronto pictured on the pages of Headhunter is also reminiscent of Moodie’s own earliest impression of her new country. Plagued by cholera, the coast of Quebec is permeated by death which takes away Moodie’s freedom to explore. Contrasted to scenes of death, however, are the chaotic dances of immigrants quarantined upon Grosse Isle. The exuberance and lack of self-control exhibited by Irish immigrants, in particular, threaten Moodie’s sense of moral and social order. In Headhunter, the city is plagued, physically, by sturnusemia, and socially, by descendants of the Irish. John Ireland is the focal point of the Men’s Club while the O‘Flahertys corrupt culture with their new money and corresponding intellectual superficiality. Significantly, when Marlow goes into the O’Flaherty’s library, he discovers Gatsby-esque bookshelves, in which beautiful leather bindings cover paperback, abridged, and unread versions of the very classics that constitute Headhunter.

Atwood’s commentary on schizophrenic Canadian culture not only corresponds to Headhunter’s setting but also to its intertextual construction. Several structural ’schizophrenic‘ paradoxes result from intertextuality. Although filled with many textual voices, there remain significant absences which these texts cannot completely fill. Intertextuality offers the reader an avenue of interpretation and understanding and then thwarts it through confusing and obscure intertextual riddles. In the gap between text and intertext, a ’blank‘ is formed which encourages the reader to produce her own meanings, but the intertext hovers with such a strong presence that the ’blank‘ becomes overdetermined by prior stories and robs the reader of agency. While the ’blanks’ in the text suggest that the novel, ultimately, cannot represent reality and thus points to an extra-textual reality, the reality outside the text is so informed by intertexts that the world becomes completely textualized.

There is yet another paradox to address. In my introduction to this book, I discuss a central difficulty in intertextual practice. On the one hand, by blurring the boundaries between literary texts and other social and cultural texts, intertextual criticism puts the text back into history. The literary text is no longer viewed primarily as a work of art which transcends history, but is read instead as one among many cultural texts which infringe upon and shape one another. Thus, intertextuality can be revolutionary, challenging bourgeois, capitalist notions of self, text, and history. On the other hand, critics of intertextuality have argued that intertextuality is in fact an ahistorical practice in which all texts exist simultaneously within text, author, and reader. If this is the case, then intertextuality’s revolutionary potential is thwarted as all aspects of history and culture are subsumed within the literary and thus, once again are taken out of their time and place and out of the political arena.

Headhunter focuses on this intertextual paradox. Within the plot of Headhunter, all of the intertexts exist simultaneously, creating an ahistorical fictional world. Emma Bovary (1857) and Jay Gatsby (1926) make love in the ‘belly’ of Moby Dick (1851). Meanwhile Marlow and Kurtz (1899) wander through the same streets as Michael Jackson imitators (Moonmen, 1980s) and Susanna Moodie (1832-85). At the same time, the novel clearly laments and criticizes society’s loss of historical knowledge. The youth, for example, are especially susceptible to the government’s propaganda about sturnusemia because they do not know history:

It depended on what one knew about the past—and the young, for some time, had been sheltered from all history containing episodes of chemical warfare—the dawning of the atomic age—the news of the holocausts of any kind involving the gassing of victims—the First World War—Vietnam and Desert Storm. Auschwitz. The yellow flags were raised in behalf of human survival and none may disparage them. By law. (270)

Thus, it could be argued that, by bringing classic texts to the fore, the novel attempts to remind the reader of her cultural history. Nicholas Fagan and Marlow certainly warn against historical ignorance and attempt to argue that knowledge of literary history might cure culture’s schizophrenia. Like Lilah, Fagan is able to “‘raise up persons from the page’—though he never left them stranded as Lilah did, among the living. Back they went and stayed between their covers until he called them forth again—in his role as teacher and critic” (28). The difference between Lilah’s uncontrolled power to raise characters and Fagan’s interpretative conjuring is Headhunter’s allegorical attempt to distinguish between a ‘real,’ historical world and a textual world. While Fagan spends his life teaching the lessons to be learnt from literature, he never confuses literary worlds with reality. Instead, he uses fiction as an avenue to truth, but never confuses fictional truth for reality: “What he did was create an imagined setting for truths, where they could be seen in ways that life did not present them” (256). Fagan’s Kurtz, in contrast to Lilah’s Kurtz, remains in historical context, retains his metaphoric meaning, and becomes, for Fagan, a sign, not an actual agent, of the twentieth century’s will towards self-destruction (98).

However, Fagan’s words have a context of their own which calls into question his cultural cure. He, too, has a intertextual history. First heard from at the end of The Wars, where he delivers another meaningful summation of fiction and life, Fagan is now a fully formed character. He is, though, just that—a fictional character wandering through history with as much life in the 21st century as he had in 1916. His arguments, then, are something of a con, reminding us of another fictional conman, Fagan from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. In spite of Fagan’s call to keep literature and history in context, Headhunter clearly displays an ahistorical world. Fagan’s potentially therapeutic insights about literature seem to be a weak response to the horror which fills the novel’s pages. Page after page, the reader is confronted with various forms of violent abuse and exploitation made possible through texts which objectify and make people consumable. As a result, the violence within Headhunter demonstrates both the dangers of ahistoricism and literature’s responsibility for perpetuating these dangers.

Perhaps one of the most telling of schizophrenic narrative slips is the narrator’s choice to call Kurtz’s unscrupulous research sidekick, Dr. Shelley. The name Dr. Shelley immediately suggests the evil ambitions of the character. By calling her Shelley instead of Frankenstein, however, the narrator confuses the demonic ambition of the monster’s creator, Frankenstein, with the author, Mary Shelley, who supposedly wrote the novel in order to reveal the dangers of scientific ambition. The result is that rather than reminding us of Frankenstein’s monstrous ambition, the narrator suggests that Frankenstein, the novel, is itself monstrous and that Mary Shelley, not Frankenstein, sets the precedence for Dr. Shelley’s evil psychiatric experiments. This intertextual confusion, however, will only arise if the reader has actually read Frankenstein. In popular culture, the monster is repeatedly mistaken for Frankenstein. Perhaps what is monstrous, then, is not Mary Shelley or her novel, but the ignorance of the reader which allows for the constant repetition of misreading.

The narration ofHeadhunter is profoundly split between its desire to repeat and remind readers of texts which have been forgotten and its fear that these very texts have taught readers violence. In Headhunter, as in Findley’s other novels, the troublesome connections between violence, narrative, and interpretation are examined. For instance, Maynard Berry, “waving his knife,” glibly tells his daughter, Barbara, “‘That is the nature of tragedy. People die, but death is never the winner’” (394). Considering the intertexts in Headhunter, one might wonder if Maynard is right. Significantly, The Great Gatsby, Emma Bovary, Moby Dick, Beowulf, Heart of Darkness, and Wuthering Heights end in tragedy and death. In Headhunter, James Gatz, like his literary precursor, is killed just when he rediscovers happiness. Emma Berry slowly kills herself, as did Emma Bo vary one hundred years earlier, even though Maynard has tried to intervene and prevent the tragedy. All literature, as Benjamin argues, is driven by death. Even Fagan cannot make his critical point in his fable about Sartre without presenting Sartre’s bloody assassination.

Throughout Findley’s novels, the meaning of murder and death is ambiguous. Death is rarely peaceful and is usually the central mystery of the narrative. Resolution of these mysteries is always double-edged. On one hand, Hooker’s murderous act can be read as merciful and loving, Meg Riches’s as just, Robert Ross’s as heroic, and Mauberley’s as forgivable. On the other hand, Findley’s novels simultaneously reveal the implications of such readings—implications which seriously question Benjamin’s and Brooks’ argument that meaning can only become transmissible at the moment of death. Lilah may “inadvertently” (3) release Kurtz into the world, but she feels, nevertheless, responsible for doing it: “It is not every day that a person gets the chance to change the course of human affairs. It was not a sensation Lilah Kemp appreciated” (14). Lilah’s feelings of responsibility parallel the reader’s own implication in the horror of Headhunter. As the novel repeatedly demonstrates, on both the level of plot and of interpretation, written texts erase, silence, and objectify human beings. Narratives, paradoxically, objectify and master even those people who write the stories. Why? Because, as the intertextual constitution of the novel suggests, the stories have already been told and ’reality' has merely become a stultifying and maddening intertextual repetition.

In his reading of Heart of Darkness, Brooks differentiates between Freud’s use of repetition and recollection. Repetition, in contrast to recollection, indicates an inability to recognize the past as past. As Brooks writes,

repetition appears to be a product of failure in the original telling—Kurtz’s failure to narrate his own story satisfactorily, Marlow’s lying version of Kurtz’s story to the Intended—just as, in Freud’s terms, repetition and working through come into play when orderly memory of the past—recollection of it as past—is blocked. (259)

Unable to put a memory into a comprehensible context, which would involve putting the memory into its historical moment, the patient, like Conrad’s Marlow, can only keep repeating the story without coming to any meaningful conclusion. The patients in Headhunter, as the intertextual reference to Atwood suggests, are the text, the reader, and Canadian society. Repeating various intertexts, in hopes of eliciting some satisfactory meaning, the novel suggests that part of the horror in its pages is its own inability to explain itself and to come to terms with its own past. Although Lilah, herself, is compassionate and kind, she, as I have already said, cannot control which characters she raises from the pages of literature and almost all are violent and dangerous—Jack the Ripper, Otto the Arsonist, Grendel’s monstrous mother, Kurtz. Unfortunately, although an avid reader, Lilah’s reading abilities often fail her. Like Hooker Winslow, she is often unable to distinguish between metaphor and reality, until metaphor is mistaken for reality and is no longer interpretable within the context of literary conventions or history. Her Kurtz becomes literal, out of time and place, re-enacting the exploitation of various ‘inferior’ groups of people for his own gain.

Is this society’s illness: that we can no longer distinguish reality from the various metaphors used to explain it and thus are doomed to repeat the metaphor in the absence of our recognition of reality? The plotline concerning sturnusemia certainly suggests this is so. Before he has read The Paranoid Civil Servant’s file, Marlow has periodic doubts about sturnusemia, wondering why there has never been “a purely scientific rendering of sturnusemia” (519). In place of a scientific account, the government uses propaganda to warn the public to stay away from potentially contaminated birds and animals. Although he has serious doubts and is critical enough to realize the slogans are propaganda, Marlow finds himself shying away from a squirrel which crosses his path, ashamed that ‘'’Propaganda works ... even as you repel if (519). Propaganda functions effectively because it tells stories that take familiar forms and thus appear to make sense. Because the symptoms of the disease include the speckling of the skin, the government names it sturnusemia, creating the “complete fiction” (544) that starlings are the hosts of the disease. Unable to see the name as metaphor (speckling skin is like markings on a starling), the people easily accept the fiction that the spots marking a starling can in fact be transferred onto the skins of humans as reasonable and real. Readers, in Headhunted are literalists, believing metaphoric, propagandist folktales to be actual and true.

Once Marlow reads the Paranoid Civil Servant’s file and comes to fully realize the metaphoric hoax played upon him and the rest of the public, the positivist language of propaganda is destabilized. Instead of reading “speckling” in only one way, he ponders the multiple meanings and forms of the word and its etymological relatives:

He was considering the word speculation. Even as his mind was thinking it, his brain was giving the word a new and—in the light of sturnusemia—a very interesting spelling:

Speckulation.

The phrase speckled with doubt also occurred.

And specktator—specktacle—specktacular. And specktral.

And specktre. (548)

Marlow’s musings suggest important similarities between how viewers and readers react to both propaganda and art. Kurtz, as discussed earlier, is a spectator at Slade’s opening, an event which always promises to be something of a spectacle; “Has someone been hurt? Are they dead? These were the hallmarks of Julian Slade’s art” (75). Slade’s paintings are spectacular—in their size and violent subject matter—and also spectral. As spectator, Kurtz feels exposed; the painting has ’seen' his heart and exhibits its secrets on the canvas. Although the painting, by representing Kurtz’s soul, objectifies its spectator, Kurtz, as spectator, also feels immense power. He sees, in the painting, a perfected and aesthetic self which falsely confirms and infuses his own subjectivity with feelings of mastery. Propaganda provides its spectator with similar feelings of mastery. Although a visual and oral reminder of the spectator’s fears, paradoxically, by confirming those fears as real, propaganda enables the spectator to objectify and master those fears. They are no longer cause for doubtful, internal speculation, they are now externalized objects which can be seen and then eradicated without endangering the lives of those who see the dangers. The extermination of birds and animals in the fight against sturnusemia is not simply accomplished with D-gas. First, it is made possible through fictions which subtly change people from speculators to spectators—from those who question the meanings of signs and words to those who are, instead, mastered by them.

In Heart of Darkness, language and narrative are both masterful and insufficient. Narrative is masterful in the sense that, even when confronted with the absurdity of imperialism, Marlow and the others still believe the idea or script of imperialism is meaningful and admirable (HD 7). However, Marlow’s attempt to explain Kurtz’s meaning and value through narrative is insufficient since Kurtz, or at least his meaning in Marlow’s own development, perpetually eludes explanation. The emphasis is upon language’s insufficiency, as Marlow verbally repeats his tale and tries again to tell Kurtz’s story properly. In Headhunter, in contrast, the emphasis falls upon language’s mastery. Marlow, now, is just another reader, who has no story of his own to tell. Instead, his story has already been told, as have the stories of most of the other characters. In fact, the plot of this novel has also already been read, heard, or seen many times before. Why do we keep reading and watching it over and over again? Is it because, like Marlow, we feel compelled to confront our own dark fears and desires in an attempt to make a worthy summation of our lives? Or, is it, as Fagan suggests, because we long to be returned to the light?

This process is played out over and over—and with every journey up the river, we discover that Kurtz has penetrated just a little farther than his counterparts before him. Poor old Marlow! Every time he heads upstream, he is obliged to a longer journey, through darker mysteries. Well, we might wonder, why does he always agree to go? For myself, I would guess it is because he is beholden to Kurtz for having provided him, after darkness, with a way to find new light. (HH 624)

As a summation to Headhunter, Fagan’s words seem trite and thus as inadequate as Kurtz’s “The horror! The horror!” in Heart of Darkness. His words betray weariness. Poor old Marlow has to do it all over and over and over again.... After so many repetitions, what can the reader and critic say? Fagan’s earlier commentary on Heart of Darkness, written decades ago and recorded in Lilah’s tattered copy of the novel, is, in contrast to this final, fatigued summation, a far more urgent appeal to the human race to recognize its will to “self-destruction” (139) and to change course. Now, there is no changing course, apparently; instead, we are doomed to repeat the same pattern over and over. We, readers, are relegated to being spectators to this repetitive course of events—a role which Headhunter reveals to be killing the minds and bodies of both the seer and the seen.

Fagan’s cliched reference to a “new light” is also troublesome and something of a con. In contrast to Heart of Darkness, where the action of Marlow’s tale seems always to be shrouded by shadow, fog and darkness, most of the action in Headhunter occurs in bright light. Lights blaze in offices, labs, operating theatres, art galleries, and parties. Emma Berry and the Wylie Sisters are caught by the flash of cameras. The children of the Men’s Club are illuminated in John Dai Bowen’s photography studio. Eddie Ellis nimbly tap dances his way out the window on a lovely sunshiny day. Ben Webster admires how the Shapiro boy can so plainly exhibit his lustful sexuality outside on the beach front. The darkness, as Slade suggested, is now clearly on display. What are the effects of putting it on display? Ironically, even though the darkness is now visible, we remain lost. As Marlow observes: “We are lost... because we savour to keenly the brightness of the moment as it reflects upon ourselves” (380). The reader reading Headhunter, like Kurtz viewing Slade’s triptych or a Torontonian examining a propaganda poster, is able to objectify and master her fears and her own dark desires. The light she emerges into is not an enlightened awareness of her own darkness, but rather an illusory lightness of being which falsely confirms her own perfection and purity since the darkness is not within her, but over there—in the picture, in the story. Just like the men in the club who project their own sexual desires onto the actions of their victims and leave the club feeling secure and fulfilled, the reader, seeing Kurtz put into his proper place on page 93 in Heart of Darkness, is reassured once more that the darkness is over there, in the story, and closes the book.

This does not mean, though, that the reader has translated the repetition of Heart of Darkness or any of the other intertexts into recollection, to return to Freud’s terminology. Rather it suggests that the reader prefers the reassurance of familiarity and forgetfulness to the discomfort which recollection would cause. After all, putting the past into context would involve coming to grips with the meaning of the past and one’s role within its horrors. It is much easier to simply live by the cliche that ‘the past always repeats itself because then the horror becomes external and inevitable—there is nothing one can do to stop it, as Fagan’s words imply. The intertextual, ahistorical repetitions in Headhunter reveal that fiction, itself, can similarly be protected from historical and political interrogation. Having heard the story before, the reader is encouraged to read this version in its relation to other versions, rather than in relation to extra-textual time and space. Fiction is ’just a story,' with no actual connection to any reality outside of various intertextual relations, and, as a result, has no real impact upon extra-textual reality and certainly cannot be held responsible for what occurs outside of the text.

Perhaps this critique of readerly responsibility explains why Headhunter focuses upon a fictional plague rather than confronting AIDS directly. Through the creation of sturnusemia, Findley emphasizes how our understanding of AIDS has become more textual than real. As I have already remarked, scientific explanations about sturnusemia strongly resemble folktale and biblical myth. Like sturnusemia, AIDS has become loaded with cultural parables which all allow ‘innocent’ bystanders to feel safe from threat of contagion. All explanations concerning the origins and spread of AIDS—while perhaps linked to scientific research—are nevertheless filled with cultural ‘lessons’ which far exceed the research. Up to this point, haemophiliacs and their families seem to be the only victims of AIDS considered completely ‘innocent.’ Other AIDS sufferers, whether gay or straight, all in some way ‘deserve’ their fate, since their contamination is the result of some sexual indiscretion or ‘abnormality.’ Even the infection of haemophiliacs is now being traced to morally (perhaps criminally) negligent decisions at the Krever inquiry. The public’s desire to blame someone (else) may indicate a new unwillingness to remain in the dark, but it also illuminates a deeper desire to distance ourselves from the disease—to safely contain it within moral parables which both protect us from infection and confirm our own moral (and by extension, physical) purity. Headhunter makes this narrative containment explicit since sturnusemia is a textual lie on at least two levels; it is a bureaucratic hoax on the diegetic level and it is an fictional representation of a extra-diegetic disease.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ultimately reveals that at the heart of Marlow’s repetitive narration there is an “unsayable dumbness” (Brooks 252), which is filled in with various texts—Marlow’s story, the accountant’s paperwork, the manager’s reports, and Kurtz’s imperialistic essay. By relentlessly focusing upon the violent effects of such linguistic cover ups, Headhunter goes one step further than Heart of Darkness. Not only does it illustrate how Kurtz and other unsavoury characters silence others through texts, but through its intertextuality it also reveals that fiction, itself, silences readers, making them willing accomplices in the heart of darkness.

As this reading suggests, recognizing the ‘con’ of linguistic and narrative games enables the reader to see her own implication in the endless repetition of intertexts and the violence associated with such repetition. If the reader plays with the multiple meanings of light, as Marlow speculates on “speckulation” and its multiple linguistic forms, she may uncover the ironic possibilities of Fagan’s words. However, as Headhunter demonstrates, recognizing Fagan’s word con is extremely difficult. The predominance of intertexts in Headhunter does not differentiate this novel from Findley’s previous work. However, in the other novels, the primary relationship between text and intertext emphasizes difference in order foreground Findley’s social, political and economic critique of social structures as well as literature and its various generic forms. Throughout this book, I have illustrated how this primary focus upon intertextual difference is complicated by subtle, but significant subtexts which suggest that intertextual similarities threaten to undermine, if not completely undo, the revolutionary potential of the primary thematic structure. The result is a profound ambivalence which complicates the moral vision of all of Findley’s fiction.

Indeed, there is a pervasive pessimism running throughout Findley’s work, suggesting that although political critique is possible in fiction, real structural transformation is not. In spite of the desire for political transformation, each of the novels ends in a paradoxical space, where revolutionary possibility is limited by the confines of the cultural and aesthetic forms which precede it. The revolutionary ‘feminist’ war against Noah in Not Wanted on the Voyage can only occur when the community below decks begin to behave like ‘men.’ Ruth and Dolly Damarosch in The Butterfly Plague, both victimized by a society which excludes them as Germany excluded the Jews in the 1930s, nevertheless are attracted to and pursue a dream of perfection akin to National Socialism’s quest for racial purity. In The Telling of Lies, Vanessa Van Home fights against a variety of governmental barriers and injustices, only to ‘join her enemies’ and consider murdering one of her friends in order to preserve a class system she cannot recognize. Famous Last Words criticizes the links between fascism and modernism but also reveals how readers continue to love and admire fascist texts. The Last of the Crazy People and Headhunter both suggest that literature can be an avenue of rebellion and escape but can also violently confine and define characters and readers in endlessly repetitive patterns.

In the chapter on The Last of the Crazy People, I argue that Hooker’s murderous act is a result of misreading; unable to differentiate between the metaphor and reality, Hooker enacts the metaphor, killing his family out of a delusional sense of love. In contrast to Hooker, a more competent reader, I argue, avoids such misreadings. According to Iser, a reader must first identify with the text, by passively embodying the T of the text, before the reader can then ‘wake up,’ so to speak, and interpret that meaning of the text as a whole and act upon the knowledge of this new meaning (154). During the course of passive reading, the ontological security of the reader is threatened, but in active and creative reading, the reader’s subjectivity is clearly defined against the objectivity of the other—in this case, the text (154). The result is a productive reading, in which the reader performs the action of interpretation. A passive reader, such as Hooker too closely identifies fictional representations with reality while an interpretative reader, passing through the stage of identification, is incited, as is Fagan in Headhunter, to the action of interpretation, avoiding the conflation of fiction with reality. However, performing the act of interpretation within the intertextual and aestheticized world of Headhunter is complicated and threatened by our familiarity with and love for old stories. By emphasizing intertextual similarities, rather than differences, Headhunter lulls the reader into a sense of security which is hard to escape; she already knows the outcome and meaning of the story and so does not need to repeat another act of interpretation. Even when she attempts to do so, she finds herself caught in an intertextual jungle.

When she ‘wakes up’ from Headhunter, she finds herself in Heart of Darkness or one of the other intertexts which constitute the ‘reality’ of the text. There seems to be no exit from the text—no river leading out, only many tributaries taking her back in.

Fagan is possibly the only way out because he leads us back into Findley’s other novels. When read in context with all of Findley’s fictions, it becomes possible to see how and why Headhunter has conned the reader. In the final part of my discussion of Famous Last Words, I suggest that Freyberg’s arguments against Quinn not only challenge the modernist assumptions which prize Pound’s poetry by avoiding his politics, but also postmodern assumptions which completely textualize literature, history, and theory. Freyberg’s scepticism of art and literature and his warnings against historical relativism could provide the reader with a possible reading model for Headhunter. As I have pointed out throughout this final chapter, extra-textual reality is strangely absent from the narrative of Headhunter. This absence suggests that we have entered the world which Freyberg feared, where ‘truth’ is completely indeterminate, history (especially the Holocaust) is forgotten, and propagandist fictions are mistaken for reality. In such a world, readers—as did the Germans under fascism—become active participants in the consumption and slaughter of children, the insane, animal species, etc. Why? Because in a world where there is no difference between the text and reality, readers fall under textual illusions which make violence and death comprehensible and meaningful and thus, aesthetically pleasing and possibly even beautiful.