Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Facism

NOTES

Chapter One

1. Throughout this book, I will use the term “outside reader” to differentiate the reader of Findley’s novels from various readers inside the fictions. When there is no chance for such confusion, I simply use the “reader.”

2. Lorraine York notices a similar slippage of time in her examination of the function of military intertexts in The Last of the Crazy People. She argues that the appearance of Lee’s Lieutenants in Gilbert’s collection makes a telling connection between the warring factions within the Winslow household and those of the American Civil War. Interestingly, she suggests that Lee’s Lieutenants is also a family history: “how appropriate that Gilbert should read and have on his tell-tale bookshelf a work which studies military relationships much as a family therapist might study a domestic unit” (26).

3. For a sample overview, please see: “Frankie and Johnnie” in Best Loved Songs of the American People, ed. Denes Agay. New York: Doubleday, 1975; The Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. W.H. Auden. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1935; The New Oxford Book of American Verse, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1976; American Folk Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Emrich. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974; and “Frankie” in The Folk Songs of North America, ed. Alan Lomax. New York: Dolphin Books, 1975.

4. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch and Elizabeth Langland, in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, along with Esther Labovitz in The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century, note this limitation in Buckley’s study. Abel, et al, remark that “even the broadest definitions of the Bildungsroman presuppose a range of social options available only to men” (7), while Labovitz shows the discrepancy between what would have been acceptable “development” for females versus that of males:

Insofar as the nineteenth century woman in Europe was concerned, her ‘apprenticeship’ as an unmarried, single woman was assumed to be spent in serving the family group and, if middle class, in entertaining or being entertained; an apprenticeship she could end by ‘accomplishing her masterpiece, making a “good marriage.”’ To reach for self-culture or self-expression placed her in the category of a potential lawbreaker. (4)

5. In his examination of Great Expectations, for example, Buckley does not consider the effect of Pip’s various ‘mothers’ on his choices, even though it is possible to argue that Pip’s desires to become a gentlemen are generated mainly by the women in his life, not the men. In fact, while Buckley may assert that “Pip must find a substitute father” (49), Pip’s actions, ranging from his submission to Miss Havisham to his decision to marry Biddy, his first teacher, suggest instead that he is actually searching for a mother.

Chapter Two (1)

1. See Arendt, Benjamin, Casillo, Golsan, Herf, Hewitt, Kaplan, Mosse, Schnapp, Sternhell.

2. See The Wonderful Horrible Life of Lent Riefenstahl.

Chapter Two (2)

1. All references will be to the second edition of The Butterfly Plague published in 1986. Although significant revisions were made to the original text, these changes do not essentially affect my argument. Where they do, I mention them in the chapter.

2. This image of Bruno as baby-killer is also reminiscent of Boris Volkoff who used to create beautiful ballet with his stick:

His presence sat there with us [years later in Findley’s kitchen]—glowering at us, stick in hand—the whole two days. I kept remembering the way, in a ballet class, he would strike us with that walking stick. It had a silver handle—round. This stick was black. Boris, the Ballet Master. (IM 113)

3. The “Chronicle of Evelyn DeFoe” also supports this point. She is an example of the new breed which is squeezing the characters in The Butterfly Plague out of the movie industry. Her gum-chewing and other oral vulgarities remind the reader of the opening scenes of the novel, in which Dolly persistently tries to rid Myra of similar faults. The narrator clearly finds the Evelyn DeFoe’s of the world disgusting.

4. Can the same accusation be levelled at The Butterfly Plague itself? There is a certain irony in the fact that of all his novels, Findley chose to revise this one. In his Preface, he explains that in 1968 when he first wrote this novel, he had not yet learned the craft and technique of writing. As a result, his first version was uncontrolled, full of too many words, too many characters, too many events. “I tend to think,” he writes, “that if you’re going to leave a book on the shelf, you had better leave it there in the best rendition of which you are capable” (BP ii). Findley’s comments point to the crux of the art versus fascism debate raised in the pages of his novel. Is artistic revision similar to racial hygiene? Is making “a thing ’right'” (BP ii) akin to purging the “wrong” people out of the world? There are no easy answers to these questions.

5. In a recent critique of postmodern historiography in the Times Literary Supplement, Gertrude Himmelfarb summarizes the postmodern dilemma:

It is to the credit of post-modernists that they have not shirked what may be the hardest case in modem history, the Holocaust. With much sensitivity and agonizing, they have considered the implications of their theories and techniques, trying to avoid the suggestion that they are casting doubt on the narratives and ‘emplotments’ of the Holocaust, still more on the reality of the Holocaust itself. Above all, they want to dissociate themselves from the ‘revisionist’ school that denies both the evidence and the reality of the Holocaust. Yet committed as they are to a theory that repudiates any ‘realist’ or ‘essentialist’ notion of facts, that sees history (the past itself as well as the writing about the past) as inevitably ‘fictive’, it is only by an ‘inordinately circuitous and abstract’ mode of reasoning (as [Hayden] White describes it in a related context) that they can elude the most relativistic consequences of their theory—if not a denial of the fact of the Holocaust, then a denial of any objective truth about it. (13)

Chapter Three

1. According to Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin, the term ’settler colonies’ designates several English-speaking colonies such as Australia and New Zealand as well as Canada My use of the term, however, should not suggest that Canadian experiences in World War I are paradigmatic of all other colonies. Canada, for instance, did not undergo an equivalent calamity to Australia’s Galipoli, a contrast in experience which led to much different consequences for each country after the war.

2. See Simone Vauthier.

3. Simone Vauthier examines these narrative stances in her article 'The Dubious Battle of Story-Telling: Narrative Strategies in Timothy Findley’s The Wars." She delineates three narrators and one scriptor: describing the activities of a You-researcher is an I-narrator; fictionalizing the life of Robert Ross is a third-person narrator; and controlling all the narrative levels is the scriptor who arranges all the narrative threads into a prologue and epilogue, five parts, and several smaller sections.

4. Donna Pennee suggests that Juliet’s discourse, along with Marion Turner’s, creates a counter-discourse which is particularly feminine:

if the narrative is seen as a 'counter-Clausewitz on War? it is only recognizable as such because it, too, is a system that frames, but frames otherwise, for it is a feminine one. It seems unmistakable to me that the principal narrator, then, is also feminine, and that she has learned to articulate her version of history in large part by adopting the rhetoric of Lady Juliet and Marion. (52)

Pennee’s characterization of counter-discourse as always feminine does not take into account that Graves and Sassoon also provide a counter-discourse and do so from a masculine perspective. In fact, I will show that the main narrator seems to depend on these memoirs and the conventions of war literature in general (all of which is authored by men) for his rhetoric, more than the voices of Juliet and Marion. As a result, I choose to refer to the anonymous, third-person narrator with the masculine pronoun.

5. See Lorraine York, Front Lines for a comparison of The Wars to Siegfried Sassoon’s The Memoirs of George Sherston.

6. York’s research reveals this quotation is not actually in On War (Front 34).

7. These precursors and makers of modernism present an interesting set of ‘extras’ in the drama of The Wars. Robert Ross is the link which brings this unlikely cast together. As Carol Ann Howells astutely notices, Robert Ross is the name of one of Oscar Wilde’s homosexual lovers (50). However, Robert Ross’s connection to the cast of modernists does not end with Wilde. According to Richard Ellmann, Ross was acquainted with Henry James (179), the author one of Juliet D‘Orsey’s favourite novels, The Turn of the Screw. Long after Wilde’s death, Lady Ottoline Morrell, a patron of the avant garde, notes in her diaries that “Robbie Ross was the happiest of us all, for he has great humour and enjoyment of the scene of life and loves conversation and of that we had plenty” (110). The “we” she is referring to here is a long list of artists and conscientious objectors, who came to her home at Garsington to farm instead of going to the front to fight, many of whom appear in the margins of The Wars. Robbie Ross, significantly, is also the one to introduce Lady Ottoline to Siegfried Sassoon (Ottoline 121), a poet who not only has a great impact on Lady Ottoline but also on young Juliet D’Orsey. Not surprisingly, Robert Graves also knew Robert Ross.

8. There are several allusions to Woolfs novel, Jacob’s Room, throughout Findley’s novel. Early in Woolfs novel, Jacob discovers a skull on the beach; this skull turns up in Robert’s hands in one of the final photographs of the novel. Like Robert, Jacob is an absent presence, constantly eluding definition by his family, friends and lovers as well as the narrator. He, too, dies as a result of the First World War.

9. Although the third-person narrator is often denied access to Robert’s emotions, he finds it much easier to probe Mrs. Ross’s psychological deterioration. The symbiotic relationship between Mrs. Ross and her son, while he is fighting in the trenches, is reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway’s mysterious connection to Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. Thus, elements of Woolfs psychological realism are also evident in the third-person narrative.

10. Findley’s intertextual reference to Oscar Wilde functions much differently here than in The Telling of Lies. While Wilde’s aesthetic reveals the shortcomings of Vanessa Van Home’s narrative manipulations, the historical narratives of The Wars reveal some of the possible weaknesses of Wilde’s aesthetic.

11. Coral Ann Howells, in “‘History as she is never writ,’” is responsible for this discovery (50).

12. Frank Davey, in his chapter on The Wars in his book Post-National Argumerits, also notes Robert’s likeness to Gulliver. Davey suggests that Robert’s identification with the horses not only completes his divorce from industrialized society but also reveals a similar detachment from society in the novel itself. Similar to Robert, rejecting “basic contemporary institutions” by aligning itself with the animal world, the novel becomes silent: “This silence can... be read as an absence of a sufficient number of positively marked signs to allow the text to enter into the social debates of the culture it condemns” (125).

13. See McKenzie and Klovan.

Chapter Four

1. For a good comparison of historical information and Famous Last Words, see: E.F. Shields, “Mauberley’s Lies: Fact and Fiction in Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words.” Journal of Canadian Studies 22 A (1987/8): 44-59.

2. The interplay between history and fact has been the subject of most of the articles written on the novel to date. E.F. Shields provides a good review of the facts of the novel and discusses how historical and documentary accounts correlate to the events of the plot. Dennis Duffy discusses the mythological structure which gives meaning to the historical facts of the novel, while Martin Kuester briefly notes and outlines the many events in the novel which have real referents. Brenda Marshall is less concerned with the accuracy of Findley’s history but nevertheless is interested in his postmodern construction of it. If not focused on the relationship between fact and fiction, articles on Famous Last Words discuss the relationship between the novel and Pound’s poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: Life and Contacts. Stephen Scobie and Martin Kuester develop the connections between the two texts first noted by Coral Ann Howells. All of these articles illustrate the intertextual concerns of Findley’s novel. However, while I am also interested in the interplay between texts, I not only want to consider the effect the texts have on each other but how they construct the interpretation of the intended readers of these texts.

3. Dennis Duffy identifies three narratives: “Mauberley’s wall diary; the account of Mauberley’s earlier life and the activities of Quinn and Freyberg after his death; scenes appearing alongside the diary passages but which Mauberley could never have known of or witnessed” (191). E.F. Shields and Martin Kuester both consider whether what Duffy calls the third narrative are written by the narrator or by Mauberley. However, as Shields notes in “‘The Perfect Voice’” (85), since Quinn and Freyberg obviously also read these scenes, they must be narrated by Mauberley. I agree.

4. Although I focus on the life of Wallis Simpson in the body of my chapter, I could make a similar argument about the lives and deaths of the Duke of Windsor, Rudolph Hess, Sir Harry Oakes, Charles Bedeaux, Adolf Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Walter Schellenberg. Please see the bibliography for the range of texts available on these people’s lives.

5. It is very interesting to note that all historical accounts which focus on a possible fascist connection between the German government and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were published after Famous Last Words. The resemblances between them and Findley’s novel are extremely remarkable, and I wonder whether these historians read the novel and were influenced by Findley’s fictional version of the events. I suspect that Findley’s account is indebted to Geoffrey Bocca’s two books written in the 1950s on the lives of Wallis Simpson and Sir Harry Oakes.

6. See E.F. Shields, “Perfect Voice.”

7. See Shields, “Perfect Voice,” for remarks on how the quote illuminates Quinn’s role as interpreter. As Shields observes, Mauberley not only alludes to the writing on the wall of the palace in the biblical account but also to “the human process of interpreting evidence, forming judgements, and dispensing retribution” (“Perfect Voice” 92). Shields suggests that Quinn is an ironic counterpart to Daniel whose reading of God’s condemnation of Belshazzar is not an interpretation of God’s actions but a exact representation of them. There is no gap between the words and their referent in the biblical account; Belshazzar is found wanting and is later killed in spite of his repentance. In contrast, Shield argues, “Quinn is not a modern-day Daniel, and we cannot blindly rely on him to tell us how to interpret Mauberley’s writing on the wall .... Quinn is simply a fallible human being like the rest of us” ( 94).

8. I am indebted to my student, Laura Slater, for discussing her ideas about mirrors in Famous Last Words with me and renewing my interest in this part of the narrative.

9. Yeats and Lewis, although not mentioned by name, are alluded to in Famous Last Words. Wyndham Lewis is alluded to in the figure of Diana Allenby’s father, known as Lord Wyndham, who is married to Italian fascist, Admiral Ciano’s niece. The scene in which Findley’s Pound feeds the cat on the roof refers to a similar anecdote in W.B. Yeats’ “A Packet for Ezra Pound” (5-6). [I am indebted to Dr. Stephen J. Adams drawing my attention to this intertext.] Also, the two verses quoted from W.H. Auden on page 157 of the novel are taken from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” In a section of this poem, Auden, like Famous Last Words, comments upon forgiving or forgetful critics who admire fascist sympathizers, like Paul Claudel and perhaps even Yeats, because they “wrote well”:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lay its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well. (242-3,11.5-16)

These lines seem prophetic. In 1970, Harold A. Waters writes in his book on Paul Claudel’s life and work the following “pardon:”

During Vichy [Claudel] accepted Petain, dedicating to him the poem 'Paroles au marechar .... A good case could be made that [Claudel] was a reactionary. But this matters little, given his stupendous appreciation of the unity of the universe, and his great success in enabling others to partake in his vision. (32-3)

10. Although he agrees with Howells, Scobie and Kuester that the novel “reifies the ‘triumph’ of beauty over truth” (260), Williams does not see this conclusion positively. Convinced that Findley validates Quinn’s aestheticism over Freyberg’s materialism, he argues that the novel does not provide any critique of aestheticism or of Pound. Instead, “by letting the aesthete speak,” he writes, “the novel which began as a parody of Pound’s attack on the aesthete makes itself a belated target of Pound’s great poem” (260).

Chapter Five

1. As Lloyd R. Bailey remarks, “Noah is one of a very few biblical characters concerning whom contemporary hearers would have sufficient knowledge in order to understand a good joke [at his expense]” (3).

2. All biblical quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible. Philadelphia: AJ. Holman, 1977.

3. As Tiffin notes, Noah’s power is sustained through “textual authority and appropriation of the means of communication and interpretation” (49).

4. My students and I have often puzzled over why Findley represents Noah’s dead children’s and Lotte’s deformity as ape-like. Does he literally mean that they are apes or is his description metaphorical, implying that Noah and the others are incapable of seeing a disability such as Down’s syndrome as human? If the former, then Noah’s refusal to accept his ape-child not only represents his inability to admit natural imperfections, but also might be a comment on a fundamentalist Christian view which resists evolution in favour of creationism.

5. See Michael Foley’s article, “Noah’s Wife’s Rebellion: Timothy Findley’s Use of the Mystery Plays of Noah in Not Wanted on the Voyage”

6. See also: Foley, Michael: 175-82; and Nicholson, Mervyn. “God, Noah, Lord Byron—and Timothy Findley.”

7. York argues that “all of Japeth’s warrior imitations seek to outstrip, outmilitarize the original acts” (117), while Pennee characterizes him as a savage murderer (81).

8. In “The Dream of Tory Origins: Inventing Canadian Beginnings,” Diana Brydon argues that Not Wanted on the Voyage harkens back to “tory beginnings” because of its “dream of an organic, decent society with a reverence for what is and a tolerance for difference that Noah’s Americanstyle imperialism denies” (42). This dream originates, however, not in the biblical myth but in the society which precedes Noah’s, the society which is found amongst the animals and the community outside of the Noyes’ homestead. Thus, in spite of the fact that Brydon’s argument might appear to suggest that Not Wanted on the Voyage is a conservative parody, it too privileges the values associated with the revolt against Noah, not the values Noah represents.

9. My experiences teaching Not Wanted on the Voyage often confirm this argument. In spite of the fact that brief quotations from Genesis only appear at the beginning of each the four books and the prologue, some of my students have argued that these brief quotations serve to highlight how ridiculous Findley’s version of the flood appears in comparison to the real one.

Chapter Six

1. Please see Donna Pennee, Lorraine York, and Lorna Irvine.

2. Lorna Martens, in her work The Diary Novel, also has a double triangle model with slight variations from Raoul’s model. The smaller triangle explaining the diegetic level includes the diarist, his or her reader (often him/herself) and the fictional world of the journal while the larger triangle superimposed upon this triangle delineates the relationship among the author, outside reader, and novel (created by the journal).

3. See The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem.

4. If Calder Maddox is murdered on Friday, then Vanessa goes to the Pine Point Hotel Saturday evening, and the following day, Sunday, goes to Mercedes Mannheim’s home and Lucy Greene’s party. That night, she listens to the tape and knows that Meg is the murderer of Calder Maddox only two days after the time of the murder.

5. It is possible to examine Vanessa’s narrative and develop a structural reading. Each episode in Vanessa’s diary is numbered as though it were a photograph in sequence. In fact, each episode resembles a photograph since each usually pictures only two or three characters, in dialogue, in one location, and with little movement. Movement usually occurs in the blank spaces of the page, between segments. The reader is reminded that Lily Porter gave Vanessa the book to write something “to go with” her photographs (TL 4).

Vanessa’s numbered and carefully organized episodes are controlled by one central idea, image, or character. Therefore, one action or event can continue through several episodes, just as Vanessa’s series of photographs capture only one image at a time of the continuing action on the beach. The larger sectional breaks, designated with a Japanese symbol, separate the episodes into groups which are also drawn together with a controlling idea and/or image. The first four sections in the novel provide a good example. In the first section, each episode juxtaposes the decay of the past with the disruptive or surprising nature of the present and future. The overall theme of the section is summed up in Colonel Norimitsu’s saying at the end— “Death before life” (8). In the second section, each episode deals with fear and the presence of evil and again, the group is summed up by Colonel Norimitsu’s words, 'Wo one is totally monstrous: not even the monsters" (15). The third section presents images of incongruity and anarchy, from the mismatched pair of Calder Maddox and Lily Porter to Nigel Forestead’s masturbation to the appearance of the iceberg. The fourth section sets the stage for the entire novel. A pervasive atmosphere of death is created, the heroine and the murderer are introduced, the suspects gather on the beach, the “Supreme Court” is ready to pronounce judgement and the victim is murdered. It is all presented on “THE DAY THAT CALDER MADDOX WAS MURDERED” (TL 48).

6. Even as recently as 1993, Riefenstahl’s continues to defend these claims. See The Wonderful, Horrible Life ofLeni Riefenstahl for her complete story.

7. Stephen Tani, author of a study of postmodern detective fiction, The Doomed Detective, might classify Vanessa’s narrative as an “innovative anti-detective” novel, since the “solution does not imply the punishment of the culprit” and “the conventional rules of detective fiction are freely used or twisted but not subverted; some partially satisfying solution is still present” (43).

8. Diana Brydon suggests that the green shade denotes hope: “Green the colour of the natural world. Green the liturgical colour of hope. Is this a reorientation of personal priorities to effect a new alliance with the forces of nature and morality, a retreat to focus the powers of concentration before resuming engagement?” (586) I would answer, “no.” Throughout the novel, green is associated with the green skin of Calder Maddox’s dead body, the green color of the secret service uniform, the lime-green underbelly of the iceberg, and many other negative images. The green shade ultimately seems to suggest ground cover or cover up rather than rebirth.

9. Richard Terdiman is responsible for coining the term “counter-discourse.” In Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France, Terdiman defines counter-discourses as “alternative discourses which would contest the stability of [the dominant discourse’s] stabilizing norms” (15). Unlike Pennee, who suggests that counter-discourses can “make normative” difference, Terdiman argues that this is not possible. Instead, he argues that

Counter-discourses inhabit and struggle with the dominant which inhabits them. But their footing is never equal.... By their nature, ... counter-discourses are never sovereign. And they are least so when sovereignty is the claim they most insistently assert. (18)

10. See: White, Richard. “Love, Beauty, and Death in Venice.” Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 53-64; Apter, T.E. Thomas Mann: The Devil’s Advocate. London: Macmillan, 1978; Cadieux, Andre. “The Jungle of Dionysus: The Self in Mann and Nietzsche.” Philosophy and Literature 3 (1979): 53-63; Ezergailis, IntaM. Critical Essays on Thomas Mann. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988; Hatfield, Henry, ed. Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

11. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse illustrate this rhetorical violence in their reading of Jane Eyre:

For this self [Jane Eyre’s] to become fact, it first had to dominate the different modes of identity present in the novel, just as Jane had to overcome certain Others in order to be a heroine. To earn the status of narrator, she must overcome Blanche, Mrs Reed, Mr Brocklehurst, virtually everyone and anyone who stands in her way. This is the violence of the productive hypothesis: the violence of representation. To be sure, every mode of identity contending with Jane’s identity as a self-produced self poses a threat to that self. But in order for her to emerge as the knowledgeable spokesperson of other identities, these differences must be there and reveal themselves as a lack, just as Blanche ceases to be another person and become a non-person. The same process that creates Jane’s ’self positions ‘others’ in a negative relationship to that self. The violence of re- presentation is the suppression of difference. (8)

Chapter Seven

1. Their experiments remind the reader of real-life psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron, the main historical intertext in The Telling of Lies, who used similar methods to obliterate the minds of various ’schizophrenic' patients.

2. A consideration of how male and female characters read and view texts differently could lead into an interesting feminist reading of Headhunter, involving a complex discussion of female subjectification by the male gaze. Fabiana and Emma are clearly subjectified by and within the text; Kurtz and the members of the Men’s Club are instead empowered with a sense of mastery while in control of the male gaze. Overall, the novel suggests that literary and other artistic discourses have historically been masculinist in both content and structure. That such structures subjectify both women and men becomes evident when Gatz is inexplicably killed by his father and Kurtz reveals his ultimate motive to be his desire to be his father.

Conclusion

1. See, for example, York and Brydon.