The idea of a cohesive “us” that constitutes Canadian participation in the First World War is common to many critical responses that, at least provisionally, take a shorthand approach to the issue of “our” experience in the war. This focus on the collectivity of the Canadian experience in the First World War allows contemporary writers, critics, and historians a conduit for working through the paradox that what Canadians gained conceptually through their participation was somehow worth the catastrophic human cost associated with, as Sandra Gwyn puts it, “the most monumentally stupid of all wars, [which achieved] nothing more than to make certain another ‘great war’ would succeed it.”1 In short, Canada’s participation in the First World War might be considered a success, simply because that participation brought the populace together as Canadians, even if the general Allied military experience is to be considered a failure. This chapter focuses on what the idea of being “brought together” means, and on how the idea of “Other Canadians”—those Canadians with a somehow complicated ethnic, cultural, or even regional status in the Canadian collective—is dealt with. The point here is not to collapse the particularities of experience of all those participants in the First World War who were not part of the Central Anglo-Canadian community; nor is it to claim, for example, that First Nations communities had the same response to the war as Quebecers, or German-Canadians, or Newfoundlanders (who were not, at that point in history, Canadians at all); rather, the point is to examine how a number of texts explore the myth of the homogenizing Canadian collective, either to challenge or to uphold that myth, by analyzing the work that goes into representing that collective. The discursive work of imagining a common national cause pervades contemporary Canadian literature about the First World War, and largely accounts for some of the perhaps puzzling nostalgia among contemporary writers for a time when Canadians were involved in “the most monumentally stupid of all wars.”
Vern Thiessen’s play Vimy, published in 2007, is an ensemble piece set in a field hospital in which four soldiers and one nurse recall events from before the war that influenced their respective enlistment, as well as, in the case of the soldiers, their experiences training for and participating in the April 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge. The characters in Vimy, who are all to a greater or lesser extent based on historical counterparts, include representatives from various cultural or regional groups in Canada, and the main action of the play explores each character’s distinct response to the war in general and to the battle in particular. Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918), published in 2002, is a play set on the home front, in a small prairie town, during the height of the so-called “Spanish flu” epidemic. The play juxtaposes the townspeople’s response to word of the war—including their response to a recently returned soldier—to their reaction to the new enemy: illness. Joseph Boyden’s 2005 novel, Three Day Road, focuses on Xavier Bird, a member of the Cree nation, who enlists and takes part in various battles alongside his childhood friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack, a soldier who seems to relish his wartime experience. The novel weaves together portrayals of Xavier and Elijah’s military activities and descriptions of Xavier’s journey back to his home community after he has returned from war, wounded, addicted to morphine, and traumatized by his experience. Finally, Daniel Poliquin’s A Secret Between Us, published in French as La Kermesse in 2006 and translated into English by Donald Winkler in 2007, examines wartime and postwar francophone Ottawa from the point of view of Lusignan, former member of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry, who becomes infatuated with his fellow officer, Essiambre d’Argenteuil, a staunch federalist from Quebec who is eventually killed at Passchendaele. When Lusignan returns from the war, an unemployed alcoholic, he begins corresponding with a young woman, Amalia Driscoll, who had been a lover of d’Argenteuil.
Each of these works approaches the myth of the Canadian collective differently, some more optimistically than others. Thiessen’s concern with diversity and tolerance culminates in a narrative that undermines cultural specificity by making all stories equivalent, mitigating complex political and historical tensions with the representation of a naturally cohesive fighting unit. In Unity (1918), Kerr suggests that deaths that cannot be situated within a collective retrospective sacrificial narrative are not deemed significant; the play interrogates how conceptions of “unity” are discursively constructed, especially when a community feels itself under threat by something it cannot control physically. Boyden’s Three Day Road is less cynical than Kerr’s play, in that it explores how stories of a previously marginalized community—in this case a First Nations community—can be productively written into a living history. Poliquin’s A Secret Between Us takes up the subject of “Other Canadians” as a bit of a trick; the ostensible story of francophone Canadian participation in the First World War turns out to be a query into whether historical remembrance serves any real political purpose.
The complex weighting manoeuvre surrounding the use-value of Canada’s participation in the war often plays out in the work of Canadian historians. In Granatstein and Morton’s introduction to their 1989 study, Canada and the Two World Wars (republished in 2003), they boldly assert that “the single biggest impact of the First World War on Canadians was our evolution from British colonials to citizens of a sovereign nation.”2 In their overview of the political events and popular response leading up to the war, through Canadian wartime activity (in training, on the battlefield, and on the home front), to the war’s political and cultural aftermath, they provide a narrative of ironic progress. In the chapter “Doing Your Bit,” they point out that “a national crusade is more natural if a nation is united”3 and that Canadians were not necessarily so; for example, French Canadians had little interest in the war, and Canada’s German community was alienated. Yet in Chapter 6 of their study, “A National Crusade,” the narrative explains the “triumph” of Vimy Ridge: “Canadians then and later knew that they had done a great thing and that on such deeds nations are built.”4 Granatstein and Morton conclude the section on the First World War with the chapter “Counting the Costs,” in which they draw attention to the consequences of the country’s “broken dreams, broken bodies, and broken families,”5 but also to Canada’s autonomous status at the League of Nations. With regard to Quebec’s sense of the war’s cost, the historians assert that “there were no more illusions about a Bonne Entente between Quebec and Ontario, although, in 1926, an Ontario Conservative government discreetly buried Regulation 17.”6
More recently, some historians have inquired further into the narrative that Granatstein and Morton present. Jeff Keshen, for example, has examined how messages from the front, whether in censored letters or in various kinds of wartime journalism, “tended to confirm romantic stereotypes,”7 especially regarding the uniquely Canadian brand of rugged heroism. Though Keshen acknowledges up front that “the link between this conflict and the flowering of Canadian nationalism is undeniable,”8 his analysis of wartime (and some postwar) popular discourse shows that it “continued to depict superior, courageous, and noble soldiers who were … portrayed as being motivated by the highest ideals … and, as such, romanticizes events and distorts the past.”9 Donald Avery points out that recent scholarship surrounding the “ethnic and class conflict in western Canada during the First World War”10 highlights a range of experiences for immigrant groups, most of whom were treated with hostility by Anglo-Canadians in that period. In Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada’s Great War, Robert Rutherdale considers the various ways in which the war generated divisions rather than unity: “The separations created between civilians and soldiers, between civilian men and women, between enemy aliens and the host society, or between conscription’s supporters and opponents made collective action possible, but only through exclusionary practices that engendered distinct roles, patterns of social interaction, and modes of signifying social differences that linked past identities with present engagements.”11 Rutherdale concludes his study, however, by acknowledging that as early as December 1918, discursive cultural work was being done to “displace the realities of the carnage overseas with the narratives of an ideal past, stories of the war as a great and noble sacrifice.” He posits that as a consequence, even those distinctive social identities that had become articulated because of the war lost their meaning and “became eclipsed by the effects of cyclical production and consumption of [the] most persuasive symbols and usable commemorations.”12
Rutherdale’s notion of the “usable” is explored even more fully in Vance’s Death So Noble, which seeks to explain the stakes involved in mythologizing the meaning of the nation’s collective sacrifice. Vance considers not the events of the war but rather the way “contemporaries conceived of the war, how they represented it, and how they accommodated it into their collective consciousness in the 1920s and 1930s.” He argues that “Canadians remembered their first world war in terms that sometimes bore little resemblance to its actualities.”13 Through his examination of cultural artifacts such as newspaper reports about and photographs of Armistice Day and Peace Day celebrations, First World War memorials, articles about the war in local newspapers (including Church publications), amateur poetry and fiction, and materials about the war circulated to schoolchildren, Vance develops his argument that the myth of the war was to be used to instill a unified, nationalist spirit among Canadians: “that memory could sweep across the country like the north wind, purifying the nation’s life, clarifying its true goals, and uniting the people in a common cause.”14 As Vance asserts in his conclusion, this idealistic vision proved a failure in the decades following the war:
The memory of the Great War never realized the high promise that its most vigorous proponents saw in it because it was so obviously assimilationist … the myth of the war was to become a substitute for cultural diversity. It would give ethnic minorities the opportunity to surrender their own identities in exchange for membership in an imagined community that was homogenous in belief and outlook. For too many Canadians of non-British stock, it was a bad bargain at best.15
Thus, the decades following the war included the entrenchment of divisions among cultural, social, and political communities.
In his preface to Sounding the Iceberg, one of the first sustained critical attempts to survey the field of Canadian historical fiction, Dennis Duffy distinguishes true historical novels from fiction that simply presents “historical aspects of present-day settings”: “The historical novel … emphasizes overtly or implicitly the otherness of [the] past … The reader is somewhere different, stepping out of a time machine. The point of the novel may be to teach readers that what they thought was temporally distant is morally contiguous, but that message begins in remoteness.”16 Duffy goes on to argue that Canadian writers in the nineteenth through the early and mid-twentieth centuries put the criterion of the “remoteness” of the past to various uses. Remoteness can offer a distant yet highly constructed, almost allegorically conceived space in which to put forward a utopian ideal, an ideal often having to do with the forging of nation. Remoteness can be used to delineate with quotidian detail an ostensibly “neutral” background for moral testing, especially as such testing relates to questions of social reform or entrenchment. Finally, a sense of remoteness can initiate an inquiry into our relationship to the established historical record, often in service of political redress and/or ideologically charged revision. Duffy thus suggests that the remoteness of the past operates simultaneously as a bridge and as a barrier for the writer and reader of historical literature, both of whom must negotiate vacillations between continuity and discontinuity. A crucial, and complicating, feature of historical literature is that, no matter how meticulous the author’s research, or apparently seamless the presentation of a coherent world, or sensitive and comprehensive the use of documentary material, it will never present a totalizing picture, and thus its gaps as much as its fortifications will constitute its comprehensibility.
In their introduction to a special issue on historical fiction titled “Past Matters/Chose du passe,” the editors of Studies in Canadian Literature point out that, particularly in the twentieth (and now the twenty-first) century, Canadian writers of historical fiction have ever more explored “the darker corners of Canadian history … draw[ing] attention to the mechanics of historical representation.”17 Wyile further notes in Speculative Fictions that much contemporary Canadian historical fiction entails a shift toward different political goals from those emphasized in nineteenth-century historical literature, as Canadian writers increasingly work to recover “previously neglected or marginalized histories, underlining that what is historically significant has been narrowly defined and ideologically overdetermined,” and that “rather than serving to reinforce nationalist myths … [such work] has been inclined to deconstruct those myths, revealing their excluding effects.”18 Editors Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic note in their introduction to National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada that several critical essays in the collection “explicitly respond to the notion that a pervasive Eurocentrism has shaped the writing and reception of Canadian historical fiction.”19 As Canadian historians, literary critics, and writers display increasing self-consciousness of the past’s “darker corners,” however, they may also express anxiety as to what we are supposed to do with the our past, especially if deconstructing the traditional historical record results in an inability to make the past meaningful, or of clear utility.
The texts explored in this chapter make use of the mythical idea of the Canadian collective to test the idea of constructing a usable past out of the gaps in the historical record. Interestingly, the failure of that myth to gain a foothold in immediate postwar social practice does not appear to have diminished its force as a defining mythical framework for the Canadian collective remembrance of the war. In Vern Thiessen’s play Vimy, a privileging of the Canadian collective is necessary in order to celebrate Canada’s past. Though Thiessen declares in his playwright’s note and elsewhere that his goal is to generate knowledge, the myth of the collective enterprise he presents primarily seeks to provide comfort for the Anglo-Canadian regarding the war’s cultural meaning. In Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918), the matter of the “Other Canadian” is raised in terms of its emphasis on those who died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Kerr, however, also seeks to challenge the myth of the Canadian collective response to the war by interrogating how ideals regarding cultural or national unity are communicated, and how the home front response to the combination of the war and the epidemic produces conflict between the cultural insider and the cultural Other. Like Unity (1918), Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road focuses on the work of recovering lost histories, as the narrative follows the experiences of two Cree Canadians who participate in the war. Boyden’s novel, though, reworks the deconstructive impulse of some recent Canadian historical fiction in order to imagine how First Nations communities can make productive use of a past that has been discursively marginalized. Conversely, Daniel Poliquin’s A Secret Between Us undermines the ideal of widening the scope of the Canadian collective via the work of historical recovery. Though at first glance, Poliquin’s novel seems to highlight the contribution of the francophone soldier to the Canadian First World War effort, the novel’s depiction of Lusignan, one-time member of Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry, as well as its allusions to the historical figure of Talbot Papineau, the notable francophone Canadian nationalist, prove to be a ruse. Poliquin’s novel ultimately skewers almost every sacred myth associated with the Canadian First World War experience, doing so in order to question how such myths become a matter of mere narrative convention. Together what these texts seem to suggest is that even though the national collective is an illusion, it is still—for better or worse—an ideal, as only via an enlarged, superficially heterogeneous conception of the collective can acts of citizenship be realized. This idealization is borne out of a contemporary anxiety about finding appropriate ways to articulate and activate civic service, which in turn produces—in some texts—an oddly nostalgic portrait of war activity as uncomplicated, meaningful service to a stable national collective.
Vern Thiessen’s play, Vimy, premiered at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton in 2007. In much of the press surrounding the opening, the focus of discussion among journalists and those interviewed (including the playwright, the director of the Citadel production, James MacDonald, and individual actors) is the tension between the play’s concern with public events on the one hand and with private matters on the other. The author’s stated impetus for writing the play is the sheer scope of Canada’s involvement in the battle at Vimy: as Thiessen notes, “there were 100,000 people involved in that battle, 100,000 Canadians. That’s bigger than the population of Vancouver at the time.”20 In describing his own attachment to the project, MacDonald says, “I love it because of the idea that the battles and history might make the audience say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’ I hope they run home and look it up … We should be telling our own stories, know our history.”21 At the same time, however, those involved with the play are equally keen to point out that, though the play refers to Canadian history and should ideally make its audience aware of that history, the thematic focus of the drama is the individual’s response to memory and how that response relates to the operation of collective remembrance. Thiessen explains in interviews that “I’m curious how memory operates in our lives. Does it heal us? Does it give us nightmares?”22 Furthermore, in much of the press and in the playwright’s note included in the published version of the play, Thiessen asserts that the play is not about war, but rather about how particular events come to be mythologized as part of a nation’s collective memory. He asks: “Is there a gap between our memory as a country and our recollection as individuals? What is the no-man’s-land between reality and memory, truth and dream, history and mythology?”23 Thus, those involved in the production of Vimy are faced with a typical logical incompatibility. In order to make a case for the status of a historical event like the Battle of Vimy, it is necessary to show how that event has broad, enduring, and conspicuous significance. At the same time, in order to retain some kind of emotional and thematically resonant core to the imaginative depiction of historical events, it is usually necessary to tighten one’s focus and, often, to dwell on individual responses to an event that have no bearing on that event’s historical significance. This is what it means to write a fiction that depends to a greater or lesser extent on the events of a particular military event for its setting and for many of its story elements and still continue to declare: “This is not a work about war.”
Thiessen’s dramaturgical decision to write his play so that he could better highlight theme rather than historical event is not in any way unusual; in fact, it is probably inescapable, as should be clear by now in this study of the various ways authors have tried to negotiate the problem of producing historical literature. Vimy, though, is interesting in terms of the way the tension between public and private matters relates to an ethical issue raised (though quickly quelled) in the playwright’s note: while Thiessen asserts that his play “does not ask whether a battle like the one fought at Vimy Ridge is worth the tremendous commitment and profound sacrifices made by the men and women involved,”24 the very phrasing of this assertion provides an implicit response, one that operates as a tacit framework for the ensuing drama. The playwright’s reference to “tremendous commitment and profound sacrifices” reveals that Thiessen has already decided that Canadian military activity is “worth” something. As discussed in Chapter 1 of this study, the narrative of meaningful sacrifice is always conceived retrospectively, and in Thiessen’s play, this narrative is not even provisionally challenged. Unlike in plays such as Dancock’s Death and Unity (1918), the question of what constitutes productive military sacrifice is rarely raised in Vimy, except as it pertains to the issue that lies at the core of this play, which is the issue of national unity. In other words, Thiessen’s play does not ask: was the horrendous human toll associated with the Battle of Vimy worth the gaining of particular military objectives or even the expression of a righteous cause, such as the promotion of codes of honour or duty or fortitude? Rather, Vimy is concerned with whether or not the horrendous human toll associated with the battle was worth its function as a catalyst for unifying the disparate ethnic and regional communities of a young nation. And, to an overwhelming extent, the play asserts that, yes, it was worth it.
As a text that is primarily concerned with the issue of national unity among Canadians, Vimy engages with a familiar paradox noted by various Canadian literary critics: in order to celebrate the particularly Canadian brand of unity, a Canadian literary text must concurrently celebrate cultural difference. In his 1989 essay “Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy,” Robert Kroetsch asserts that “Canadians cannot agree on what their metanarrative is … [and], in some perverse way, this very falling-apart of our story is what holds our story together.”25 Kroetsch further declares that the multiplicity of Canadian stories emerges from “the energy of the local, in the abundance that is diversity and difference.”26 More recently, and more cynically, Len Findlay has argued that Canadian literature is “construed from above as profoundly but sedatively social, in the sense of harmoniously socializing citizens, activating commonalities, and ‘permitting’ or ‘respecting’ differences.”27 Or, as Kit Dobson argues in reference to the implications for Canadian writers of the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, “difference need no longer be a disruptor of the national project—quite the reverse, in fact: the celebration of difference has become a part of Canadian nationalism … By articulating different bodies that seek recognition, writers assert their place within Canada and are frequently approved of for seeking inclusion (reform) rather than radical disruption (revolution).”28 In the case of Thiessen’s play, the unambiguous concern with the ethnic and regional diversity of those who participated at Vimy, to say nothing of gender difference—as Vimy’s inclusion of a female nurse among its ensemble reflects a wish to show women’s involvement in military activity—is dramaturgically connected with the playwright’s stated interest in focusing on individual responses to the war, and his concern with exploring how distinct individuals might still celebrate their commonality.
In his acknowledgements, Thiessen notes his research into the lives of such men and woman as Sid Unwin (1882–1917), who worked as a Canadian Rockies guide before entering the war; the Quebecer Jean Brilliant (1890–1918); Mike Mountain-Horse (1888–1964), a member of the Blood tribe; and Nova Scotia native Clare Gass, who served as a nurse in France during the war. The characters who make up the ensemble cast include Sid, “a construction worker from Winnipeg, Manitoba”; Jean-Paul, “a butcher from Montreal, Quebec”; Mike, “a Blood Indian from Standoff, Alberta,” and Clare, a nurse from Nova Scotia. Rounding out the main cast are Will, “a canoe maker from Renfrew, Ontario,” and Laurie, a mining engineer originally from Nova Scotia. These characters seem to have emerged from Thiessen’s research into the lives of William Alexander and Laurence Gass but are less clearly connected to historical counterparts.29 Thus, Thiessen appears to have built his play as a kind of “tapestry,” to use the term Sandra Gwyn adopts for her own Tapestry of War: A Private View of Canadians in the Great War, a book that “recounts the Great War experiences of ten Canadians … of what they were doing and what they were thinking and feeling at the time.”30 Vimy includes various flashback scenes to reveal what motivated each character to join the Canadian war effort and what each character experiences leading up to and during the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
As much as every character in Vimy is an individual, more or less based on a historical personage, so too is he or she a type. Thiessen appears dedicated to include a representative from each of the “diverse” communities that made up early-twentieth-century Canada: we are met with a Westerner, an Ontarian, a Quebecer, a First Nations representative, a Maritimer, and a woman. Thiessen even goes so far as to include a scene in which Sid reaches out to Will in a moment charged with homoeroticism. Each representative figure, in particular those who are typically marked as Other (that is, the Quebecer and the First Nations representative), acts in a very representative way. The first act includes flashback scenes in which Jean-Paul argues the merits of joining the war effort with his friend Claude:
J.P.: You wanna wait ’til the Huns come sailing down the St. Lawrence?
CLAUDE: This is an Anglo war. Everyone knows that. You know what they’re doin’ in Ontario? French: banned in schools. You wanna fight for that, Jean-Paul?
J.P.: No, I wanna fight against it, If we don’t fight now, we’re all gonna be talking German, never mind English.31
In Act II, Jean-Paul is ordered to take part in a firing squad charged with executing a man tried and convicted of cowardice and missing battle. The man turns out to be Claude, who prays in French before being shot, while Jean-Paul begs, “Ah, Claude … pardonne-moi.”32 By collapsing the cowardly-soldier-shot-for-insubordination plot into his dramatization of the ambivalence of the Quebec francophone response to the war, Thiessen oversimplifies the political, demographic, and cultural contexts of that ambivalence. Furthermore, though Jean-Paul expresses remorse for taking part in the execution of his friend and worries about how he is going to explain what transpired when he goes home, he, not Claude, is ultimately portrayed as the true Canadian soldier, craving the taste of a Labatt’s and a bowl of saskatoons along with Will and Mike.
Mike’s backstory also commences in Act I, in a scene where he and his brother, Bert, wait for a sacred vision; when they see the Northern Lights, they interpret them as a fire with a message:
BERT: Flames licking the top of Chief Mountain. It’s like they’re saying:
MIKE: “Go to the fire, boys.”
BERT: “Go fight under a sky of fire.”
MIKE: “Be warriors.”
BERT: Then that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna be brave. You and me. Right?
MIKE: You and me.33
While the first scene between Jean-Paul and Claude depicts their argument about joining a Canadian military expedition, the two First Nations characters show no hesitation, a dramatization in keeping with a point Thiessen makes in his Historical Notes: “One in three Native men (Aboriginal, First Nations, Métis) volunteered to serve in the Great War. In total, approximately four thousand Native men served overseas.”34 Furthermore, Mike’s story as it is presented in Vimy coheres very closely in terms of facts to what Mike Mountain-Horse relates in My People, the Bloods, picking up on such elements from Mountain-Horse’s autobiography as the death of his older brother, who also fought in the war and died of tuberculosis on his way home from the front, and that he was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal.
Vimy’s structure, however, undermines the distinctiveness of Mountain-Horse’s history. Act I presents a succession of flashbacks to introduce the backstory of each main character within the ensemble, and in each case, the backstory revolves around a main character and his or her relationship with another. In Act II, each backstory is successively revisited, this time to portray the effect of the war on the relationship that has been introduced in Act I. This structure, together with the play’s cast of representative figures from various Canadian “communities,” makes each particular story an equivalent to every other story presented in the play, diminishing the sense that such stories should resonate as real or even particularly diverse, except in the most superficial way. Jean-Paul’s struggle with his allegiance to English Canada and the guilt he feels for executing a fellow francophone who has questioned this allegiance is made structurally equivalent to Mike’s story of his pact with his brother and the disillusionment he feels when his romantic concept of First Nations bravery is destroyed, as well as equivalent to Clare’s story of her love affair with Laurie and Will’s story of his homoerotic connection with Sid. The potential anxiety produced by difference, which the play ostensibly deals with, is structurally contained because each story is “harmoniously … permit[ted]”35 and tends toward the desire for “inclusion.”36
The ultimate effect of making individual stories structurally equivalent is to expose the focus on individual stories as a false front for a play that privileges the collective experience and the myth of the war’s role in unifying the country. Such privileging is further revealed by the repetition of a section of dialogue that becomes a type of refrain for the characters in Act I. In the first moments of the play, Will and Mike have the following exchange:
WILL: Who you with?
MIKE: 10th Battalion.
WILL: 1st Division?
MIKE: Yeah.
WILL: How you fare?
Pause.
MIKE: Don’ know.
Pause.
WILL: What happened?
Pause.
MIKE: Not sure. Can’t remember.37
Mike and Will go on to repeat this piece of dialogue, this time with Mike initiating the questions, and later Jean-Paul and Sid repeat it as well. Significantly, in each version of the exchange, the character initiating the dialogue is able to confirm the particular division the other character belongs to, which suggests a sense of commonality among the various Canadian military units. In the last scenes of Act I, the characters describe the three months of training Canadian units went through to prepare for the attack on Vimy Ridge, for as Tim Cook points out, the offensive “would include all four of the [Canadian] divisions attacking together for the first time.”38 As both the backstory scenes of Act I and the revisitation scenes of Act II show, however, every character is entirely clear on “what happened.” The memories of each character might be upsetting, but no one seems to have trouble accessing them. Thus, the “plot” of Vimy hinges less on the problem of the shell-shocked soldier who is unable to remember and come to terms with his experience, so much as it concerns how individual soldiers become part of a collective offensive, a collective that succeeds even if the individuals involved in it feel as if they have failed. In the final scene of the play, the actor playing Laurie gives voice to a letter he wrote to Clare before being killed in the battle, thereby putting on a prosopopoeiac mask similar to the one adopted by the character Charlie in Mary’s Wedding. Laurie announces to Clare, “when I come back, I’m gonna have some story to tell … I’m gonna tell you the story of Vimy over and over and over.”39 Though the moment itself has a dramatic irony to it owing to Laurie’s death, the overriding aim of the prosopopoeiac mask has in fact been met: “the story of Vimy” intrudes into the potential for an individual elegiac narrative. The play does not ultimately present a tapestry of stories but rather “the story” of that mythic collective enterprise.
The question then becomes: Does the myth of a meaningful collective enterprise emerge from an actual collective? In other words, once the individuals Vimy presents are recognized as types whose function is to represent the various regional, ethnic, and gendered groups implicated in a single story, does the story itself still manage to reflect diverse perspectives? Despite the ensemble cast of diverse types, the perspective that Vimy articulates is fairly unitary because the implied audience member for the play is singular. Just as Jean-Paul forms a pact with Claude, and Mike forms a pact with his brother Bert, so too does the play form a pact with its implied audience member, who is implicated as Anglo-Canadian. The audience member Thiessen writes to will ideally be only temporarily destabilized by the periodic use of French and Mi’kmaq, as is indicated by the fact that only the first three lines of the backstory scene between Jean-Paul and Claude are in French; after this, they converse in “character” English, as in “You know what they’re doin’ in Ontario? French: banned in schools. You wanna fight for that, Jean-Paul?”40 Clare’s few lines to Mike in Mi’kmaq are similarly staged to denote the audience as the unmarked not-Other, an Anglo-Canadian who is comfortable with his own twenty-first-century sense of tolerance for unproblematic difference.
The representations of difference in Vimy make such straightforward tolerance easy; the implied audience member is confronted with a socially adept Indian, a guilt-ridden francophone, the vaguest hint of a homoerotic relationship, and a multilingual, charismatic, hard-working woman who clearly deserves the right to vote. The political, historical, and cultural tensions among the various “communities” are expressed mainly in a scene in which an argument among Clare, Jean-Paul, Will, and Mike over who invented hockey devolves into an exchange of ethnic insults. Furthermore, this scene precedes the staging of the way all four Canadian divisions train to become a cohesive fighting unit. The military enemy, by contrast, is portrayed as an unproblematic “them”; Thiessen makes liberal use of such tags as “Hun” and “Fritz” throughout the play. Will’s experience during the battle includes his stabbing a German soldier, who dies before his eyes, yet the play does not seriously engage with the theme of the commonality among all First World War soldiers. To do so would undermine Vimy’s mythologizing of the war’s function as a unifying experience for Canadians. The Germans have to remain a “them,” so as to set a cohesive “us” in greater relief.
Canadian participation in the First World War, and particularly in the iconic Battle of Vimy Ridge, must be figured in terms that heighten the war’s importance in an origin story of building a functional national identity. The fantasy Thiessen offers to the implied audience member is that superficial ethnic differences can be transcended given a suitable unifying opportunity to participate as a collective, and thus can be viewed as mostly irrelevant whinging: as Clare remarks to Jean-Paul and Mike—whose argument about whether the francophone or the Blood Indian is braver has devolved into a fist fight—“You think you’re the only ones want to do good? … You think you’re the only ones who gave up something? Well you’re not. I see dozens of ya every single day.”41 Furthermore, even before Clare has a chance to scold Jean-Paul and Mike, each representative of a community whose differences must be tolerated by the implied purveyor of the unmarked Canadian identity is portrayed in the act of fighting over who has best shown himself to be committed to national service. Thus, Thiessen’s note that “Vimy is not a play about war” is sincere; rather, his text is about an ideal—that Canadians of all backgrounds long to prove their national allegiances, if only the present moment could offer a straightforward opportunity for activating citizenship.
Like Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Dancock’s Dance, Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918) is set during the final months of the war, when the “Spanish flu” was sweeping parts of the globe. Eventually, the pandemic would claim 50,000 Canadian lives. Also like Dancock’s Dance, Kerr’s play is set in a small town in Saskatchewan, though not because Kerr wants to draw attention to a particular historical event, as in Vanderheaghe’s play; rather, he sets his play in Unity, Saskatchewan, in order to provoke a sense of irony. The play focuses on various citizens of Unity as they grapple with the way the town’s epidemic both unites and divides them. Those citizens include the sisters Bea and Sissy and their friend Mary, each of whom also worries a lot about love; Sunna, who takes over as the town’s mortician after her uncle Thorson dies (of drink, goes the rumour); Stan, a farmer whose wife has recently died giving birth; and Michael, a young farmhand born in a nearby town with whom Sissy is in love and who becomes Unity’s first victim of the pandemic. The ensemble cast also includes Hart, a blinded returned soldier who arrives in the town to stay with Thorson, his father, not having heard that Thorson is dead; Hart remains an outsider in the town of Unity throughout the play.
In his Note on Events that prefaces the published version of the play, Kerr asserts that
largely forgotten now, this was the deadliest outbreak of infectious virus in recorded history.42 Although it is uncertain exactly how many people died, estimates range from twenty to fifty million people worldwide. The flu reached every corner of the globe and was aided by the movement of troops at the tail end of World War I. It was an especially unusual strain of this otherwise common sickness, as victims were mainly young adults … In Canada, where per capita war causalities were particularly severe, more people died in four weeks of the flu than did in four years of fighting.43
Vanderhaeghe in his play makes use of the influenza epidemic as historical background so that he can explore the plot of the damaged First World War officer who must learn to celebrate his inherent honorability and heroism, despite having been traumatized by his struggle to lead his men in the trenches. The patients in the North Battleford asylum become a proxy military unit that officer Dancock can lead to victory over the disease. Conversely, Kerr’s note suggests that his subject is not primarily the war but rather the epidemic. Vanderhaeghe periodically dramatizes a trench setting via Dancock’s hallucinations and memories, whereas Kerr’s setting is decidedly the home front; his characters deal with receiving news of casualties from the front, with putting together care packages, with trying to reintegrate returning soldiers Hart and Glen back into the community, and with celebrating the armistice amidst the flu epidemic. It is only via a single speech of Hart’s that the overseas experience is described directly. The point of his speech is to disparage the “stupid stor[ies]”44 of extraordinary Canadian heroism, such as those encouraged by the office of Canada’s official press representative, William Maxwell Aitken, and to contrast them with a short account of trench warfare that sounds many familiar notes, describing the mud, the corpses, and the infantryman’s fear. Hart’s speech draws attention to the disconnect between what is communicated and what is true, and in fact the issue of how things (mail, news, germs, social expectations) are “communicated” is the play’s central concern.
Kerr’s Note on Events rehearses an idea that has become another trope associated with the pandemic: that it was returning soldiers who brought the flu home to Canada. In “The Horror at Home: The Canadian Military and the ‘Great’ Influenza Epidemic of 1918,” historian Mark Humphries notes that “Canadian historians generally agree that the disease had a European origin and was brought to Canada by soldiers returning from the First World War.”45 But he then argues that this idea is “inconsistent with the evidence,”46 pointing out, first, that not enough soldiers travelled from Europe to Canada in the summer of 1918 to connect the spread of the disease with returning soldiers, and second, that statistics relating to the number of influenza cases in Canada indicate that the Canadian pandemic followed the American one, not the European one. In other words, “while the disease and the military had a significant relationship, it was different than is often thought. At Niagara-on-the-lake, St. Jean, and Sydney, influenza had arrived in Canada with American military recruits on their way to support the allied offensive in Europe.”47
I am not suggesting that Kerr’s Note on Events reflects a lack of thorough research: as it happens, Kerr’s play was published three years before Humphries’s article came out in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. What is interesting about Humphries’s research as it relates to Kerr’s play is that, like the many Canadian historians who were influenced by Dickin McGinnis’s 1977 paper, “The Impact of Epidemic Influenza: Canada, 1918–1919,” which Humphries calls the “most important source on the origins of the pandemic in Canada,”48 Kerr is consumed by an almost mythic idea that Humphries articulates: “The pandemic is thus seen as a consequence of the war’s end where the evils of war were brought home to the civilian population by soldiers returning from the front. The innocent civilian population was therefore ‘contaminated’ by the returning soldiers not only with disease but also with the horror of the trenches.”49 At several points in Unity (1918), this idea of “contamination” is explored. When Hart arrives unexpectedly in Unity, Bea comments: “We all wanted from him something we had been waiting so long for—contact with that other world. A story. A war story. But instead he just talked about how everyone in Halifax had the flu.”50 Thus, the flu first enters the town through the blind soldier’s talk. As Bea later articulates: “Word of the flu is spreading quickly. Like the flu itself.”51
Kerr further explores the notion that influenza is a “communicable” disease in Act I, Scene 12, titled “Contagion,” which represents Rose and Doris, the town’s telephone operators, engaged in conversations, the first about the importance of reporting on cases of the disease and the second explaining why a fine has been imposed on spitting in public. The two conversations take place simultaneously, although the audience only hears one half of each conversation, for Rose and Doris are speaking on telephones. This staging highlights Kerr’s interest in the interrelations among stories, rumours, and facts, as well as the problem Bea refers to in her desire to hear a story from “that other world,” which is the problem of dialogue that seems to flow in only one direction. At one point, Rose insists to Gerald, the man on the other end of the line, that “you can’t catch the flu over the phone,” and tries to prove her point by blowing into the telephone and asking him, “Feel this wind?”52 Though Rose is exasperated by Gerald’s insistence that, indeed, he can feel her blowing into the telephone, her response to a telegraph reporting three more dead in a nearby town is that “the wind is blowing in from the east.”53 Kerr is not suggesting that mere talk causes disease, but rather that mere talk can become as powerful in social effect as disease.
Kerr’s interest in the social effects of talk is observable in two of the play’s objectives. In the first place, Kerr wants Unity (1918) to operate as a kind of memorial for the 50,000 (Other) Canadians who died in 1918, but whose deaths have been “largely forgotten now” because they were not directly associated with the war. In the first scene of Act I, while preparing her uncle’s corpse for viewing, Sunna ruminates on the idea that one can never experience one’s own death: “Someone might witness my death, but I never die.”54 The conditional phrase “someone might” makes clear the play’s concern with how acts of collective remembrance are selective and discursively constructed: talking about the flu and its casualties is precisely what gives them meaning as historical occurrences. After Mary learns that Richard, her sweetheart who had been fighting overseas, has died of flu, she decides to hold a “burial” service for him, even though all such activity has been banned in the town. Speaking over an imitation grave, Mary declares: “We are gathered here today to pay respect to a brave soldier, a devoted son, and a dear friend who gave his life to protect us from the tyrant … Richard died fighting for his country—the greatest sacrifice, the greatest love after the love of God.”55 The irony of Mary’s speech is noted by Bea, who suggests to herself that such a speech is only possible because Richard died “far enough away to imagine him carrying a flag as he coughed and sneezed his way across enemy lines.”56 Richard’s own words are literally turned to ashes; his last letter home is accidentally burned when Rose and Doris try to disinfect it in an oven. Also significant is that the town, led by Stan, becomes increasingly hostile toward Hart, whom they blame for bringing the flu to Unity, even though Hart, in Bea’s words, is a hero with a medal to prove it. Hart, however, refuses to talk about his war experiences, downplaying the fact that he has a medal by telling Bea, “they were just tossing these things out like jelly drops at a parade,”57 and cutting short Bea’s attempts to engage him on the subject by giving her a brief description of the trenches.
Kerr’s point is to make visible the process by which a community will place death within a sacrificial narrative—that is, how the narrative of dying for one’s country helps the citizens of Unity make sense of their own problematic responses to the epidemic. The townspeople take up the rhetoric of battle as they impose a quarantine, asserting that “Unity will not be victim to this disease,” as well as the importance of “[k]now[ing] the enemy.”58 When Michael falls ill with the flu, he is quickly transformed from a town favourite, a young farmhand whose laughter and charm are called “contagious,”59 to the “enemy … in our midst,” struck down because, according the Stan, “he wasn’t local.”60 Michael is packed onto a train and sent home, but then sent back to Unity because his family in Yorkton has all died. He rides back and forth on the train until he dies, after which his body is dropped off, “rolled in a gray blanket and dead.”61 Later in the play, it becomes clear that Stan has infected Hart with the flu, thus inverting the paradigm that Humphries refers to. Like the Michael-plot, this inversion suggests that the binary between “us” and “them” providing the framework for conceptions of “unity” is discursively constructed solely to fulfill social functions. As Kerr suggests, the citizens of Unity are able to rationalize death in the context of war, but not disease, because the war dead can be retrospectively defined within a narrative of meaningful collective sacrifice, a narrative that relies on a clear distinction between “us” and “them.”
Thus, Unity (1918) explores the relationship between discourse and social effect by examining how the use of war rhetoric among the townspeople of Unity allows them to privilege the homogeneous community. Hart and Michael are explicitly marked as outsiders when the town begins to fear contagion and seek reasons for untimely deaths. The young mortician Sunna is also marked as an outsider, because her job is considered distasteful and also because of her immigrant status. In the play’s Prologue, Bea and Mary gossip about how “strange” it is that a fifteen-year-old woman would take up the work of the town mortician, and Sunna’s detached sensibility toward her work is strategically marked throughout the play. In one scene, Sunna arrives at the mortuary with a young man’s body in a blanket and “a makeshift satchel slung around her shoulder”; when asked by Bea, “What’s in there?”, Sunna answers, “That’s his head.”62 Thus, it is not simply that Kerr wants to show the way the town accuses Sunna of being strange; he also deliberately constructs her as strange. Rose’s accusation that Sunna is a type of “flu-profiteer” is clearly unfair, revealing Rose as a xenophobe who dislikes Sunna because she is an outsider, “just like her uncle was.”63 Yet Kerr does represent Sunna as concerned with making as much money as she can so that she can leave Canada. Sunna also instructs Bea to realize the value of the work women must often do, work that need not be rationalized within a narrative of collective sacrifice:
SUNNA: You’re the only nurse in town.
BEA: I’m not a nurse.
SUNNA: But it’s what you’re doing.
BEA: I’m trying to help win the war. What are you trying to do? You help the enemy.
SUNNA: War?
BEA: The war against the flu.
SUNNA: I don’t have a war. Or an enemy. But this is my work. And it’s all I have. It’s what I can do.64
On the one hand, this scene articulates a theme that runs throughout the play: that the response to widespread social calamity—like the war and like the flu—is the purview not only of heroic male soldiers, but also of typically unsung women, whose work on the home front must be recognized. On the other, this scene reveals Sunna’s rejection of the war rhetoric that has defined Unity’s response to the flu, for to accept such rhetoric would also require her to accept her part as enemy outsider.
Sunna herself is acutely aware of the way the town’s “talk” functions to define difference. She is the one who points out to Hart that he will likely be blamed for bringing the flu into Unity because “people need excuses.”65 However, like Jean-Paul and Mike in Vimy, Sunna must be constructed as Other in order for Kerr to articulate his critique of the town’s fear of difference. In Act I, Scene 10, titled “Family,” Sunna is introduced to Hart:
STAN: It’s your cousin.
HART: My cousin?
STAN: Yes, it’s … well tell him your name girl.
SUNNA: Sunna Gudmundsdóttir.
HART: From Iceland?66
Sunna’s foreignness is emphasized not only because Stan cannot pronounce her last name, but simply because she announces it. Though some of the other full names are mentioned in the play—for example, Richard Stone and Beatrice Wilde—only Sunna introduces herself in this way. Kerr’s “othering” of Sunna continues when she tells Hart her emigration story and when she admits to him that, though she arrived in Unity “a long time ago,”67 she does not really know anyone in town. It is also significant that Stan takes Sunna as a wife, as Kerr explores the way hostility toward difference can manifest itself as sexual desire. Stan makes it clear in a conversation he has with Mary that he is on the lookout for some woman, any woman really, to help him take care of his house and his new baby, grumbling, “Don’t know what’s the matter with girls these days”68 at the realization that Mary has turned him down. Stan, however, is also extremely vocal about his distrust of anyone who is not local, and his passionate embrace of Sunna at the gravesite of his baby makes this conflict within Stan clear; he kisses Sunna over the top of her mask. In Act II, Scene 7, titled “Anatomy,” Stan groans under Sunna’s touch, while Sunna deliberates on the patterns to be found in every body. The stage directions point out that Stan “does not hear her speak,”69 further revealing the way Sunna functions as an incomprehensible body.
Kerr’s goal in marking Sunna as Other is similar to Thiessen’s goal in constructing Jean-Paul and Mike as representatives of particular communities: the presence of these characters allows each playwright to signal his interest in exploring the myth of the collective experience as it relates to Canada’s participation in the First World War. Whereas Thiessen’s play ultimately wishes to affirm the myth, Kerr’s play wants to challenge it, the representation of Sunna notwithstanding. The final scene in the play consists of a song that ostensibly celebrates the nation’s “day of reckoning” and “coming of age,” defining that progressive narrative in relation to the way the First World War has become “everybody’s fight … everybody’s victory … everybody’s misery.”70 The kind of self-conscious theatricality Kerr makes use of with this inclusion of a song is consistent with his overall attempt to echo many of the dramaturgical techniques developed by Caryl Churchill in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, techniques that include the use of overlapping dialogue; very short, sometimes lyrical episodic scenes; and non-realistic characters and scenarios (such as the dream sequences in Act I, Scenes 4 and 13). Such echoes in Churchillian dramaturgical technique highlight Unity (1918)’s function as a political play that, like Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Mad Forest, examines critically, often satirically, the mechanisms of political energy. Thus, when the cast of Unity (1918) sings “A hundred years of progress / A Century for us / Oh, Canada! / Oh, Canada! / Oh —,” the cutting short of the final apostrophe to the nation reinforces the song’s irony: the play’s representation of the cultural outsider has undermined any simplistic notion of just who constitutes “everybody.”
In Act II, Scene 16, titled “Hart and Bea,” however, Kerr provides a somewhat hopeful metaphor for the act of confronting difference. As Bea nurses Hart, he tells her the story of an encounter he had overseas with a French prostitute, divulging his belief that he lost his sight after looking at the prostitute’s vagina and seeing a flood of light. As he explains to Bea, “I saw through to the other side,”71 by which he means that he was able to produce a moment of authentic self-recognition for himself and recognition of the woman via their erotic encounter, an encounter that opposes Stan’s sexualizing of Sunna’s difference. Bea, who has before this conversation primarily tried to see and conduct herself according to the terms set by the homogenous community, decides to take off her mask and kiss Hart, thus inviting in contagion; the stage directions, which call for a “very bright light,”72 indicate that this act allows Bea to “[see] through to the other side.” The potential for political optimism implicit in this image, however, is countered by the fact that Bea dies of the flu, leaving behind a diary that speaks only of her personal experience as opposed to what that experience might suggest about the way the people of Unity have responded to calamity. Kerr leaves it to his audience to listen to the words of the final song and see through it to the other side, a side that remains skeptical of a national narrative that can uncritically reiterate the myth of “everybody’s fight.” Yet by announcing his skepticism, Kerr also signals his belief in the ideal of a tolerant and civically minded collective—of real unity—and of the type of cataclysmic moment, such as a battle, when difference is transcended via the opportunity to act as one.
More than three quarters of the way through Three Day Road, a novel portraying the fictional experiences of two Cree men fighting for Canada during the First World War, the historical figure Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibwe soldier known for his success as a First World War sniper, finally makes an appearance. Rumours of Pegahmagabow’s feats have reached Boyden’s protagonist, Xavier Bird, and his best friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack; Elijah in particular is keen to compare exploits with “Peggy,” especially to weigh his own kills against those of the now famous “Indian,” rumoured to be “the best hunter of us all.”73 An important objective of this encounter between fictional and historical figures is to emphasize an extratextual function of Three Day Road that recalls both Thiessen’s and Kerr’s author’s notes, in terms of framing the function of the text as a vehicle to recall lost histories. In Boyden’s own acknowledgements, he states: “I wish to honour the Native soldiers who fought in the Great War, and in all wars in which they so overwhelmingly volunteered. Your bravery and skill do not go unnoticed.”74 Boyden’s use here of a helping verb phrase of negation—“do not”—draws special attention to the main part of the predicate “go unnoticed,” and thus reveals the irony of his claim: the scene featuring Peggy proposes that First Nations soldiers were not at all “honoured” for their service in the First World War, and that this service went quite aggressively “unnoticed.” As Boyden himself admits in an interview with Herb Wyile: “I think my acknowledgements were more wishful thinking than anything.”75 Peggy frankly asserts: “You know that the wemistikoshiw [the white men] do not care to believe us when they hear about our kills in the field … We do the nasty work for them and if we return home we will be treated liked pieces of shit once more.”76 Xavier and Elijah are repeatedly treated as second-class citizens: before they enlist for service they are, for example, made to sit in a separate train car for “Indians”; on the field of battle, their superiors are at once dismissive of traditional Cree beliefs and practices and pettily resentful of how bush hunting skills translate into military success.
Boyden’s representation of such treatment itself serves “notice,” proposing the novel’s case for retroactive “honouring.” The term “honour” is usefully flexible so as to suggest both the act of conferring high public regard and the act of acknowledging and paying a debt. Boyden creates what Laura Groening might call a “healing aesthetic,” in which attention to “remote” cultural myths and the historical record transforms into a narrative that also looks forward and that is constructive. As Boyden asserts in his interview, “there’s no question this is a war novel, but just as importantly this is a novel about the healing power and love of family and how that can save you.”77 Groening points out that, in defiance of cultural critics, especially non–First Nations critics, who expect fiction by First Nations writers to wallow in bitterness or primarily engage in “social and political analysis,”78 writers such as Daniel David Moses and Basil Johnston have endorsed the writing of healing texts that transcend portrayals of First Nations characters as victims, and that depict “a culture alive and well.”79 Boyden’s text seeks to recover a marginalized history, but not simply to point out the need to redress an iniquitous historical record, or the fact that, as Peggy asserts, “we do the nasty work for them and if we return home we will be treated liked pieces of shit once more.”80 Three Day Road is, paradoxically, a celebratory novel, whereby First Nations contributions to Canada’s First World War effort are commemorated and given constructive meaning as part of a living community’s narrative. Boyden’s defamiliarizing of tropes associated with the First World War and assaults on First Nations culture operate in the context of his insistence on a genealogical plot that suggests familial continuity beyond the historical frame of the novel. Thus, his historical fiction is established on an ethic of constructive deconstruction and a forward-looking inclination toward healing and hope. His goal of reclaiming a marginalized history, however, is predicated on accepting the myth that the First World War operated as a series of events to define the distinctively Canadian collective.
After giving his assessment of wemistikoshiw prejudice, Peggy instructs Elijah—who doggedly seeks both official recognition for his many kills as well as legendary status among the men—to “think of me as your conscience … And you can be mine.”81 At the end of this chapter, Elijah admits to having contemplated murdering Peggy during their late night encounter, demonstrating his reluctance to be guided by conscience. Earlier in the chapter, Elijah points out to Xavier that the circumstances of war afford them a “freedom … [that] will not present itself again … this freedom to kill.”82 Xavier’s choice to disavow Elijah’s idea of freedom, even while fulfilling his duty as a soldier, indicates that the term conscience denotes the double consciousness that is necessary to maintain the ethical framework of the bush in a world almost entirely suffused with detached violence, as well as the negotiation between “yours” and “mine” that an ethics of conscience demands. Conscience further describes the ethical prerogative that Boyden’s historical fictionalizing follows, in that his freedom as the author of contemporary historical fiction to emphasize the retroactive claims of redress and “kill” the established record is circumscribed by his duty to the symbolic meaning of the First World War that has been negotiated by Canadians, and by his decision to commemorate that meaning.
Three Day Road is filled with structural and figurative doublings that reiterate the complex idea of conscience, as Boyden explores how the First World War’s status as a war of attrition becomes a rich site of oppositional comparison for a narrative of cultural genocide. The doubling of the term “medicine,” for example, is clearly meant to set the dangerously addictive effects of morphine against the power of the traditional matatosowin, or sweating tent; whereas morphine merely numbs its user to physical pain and fear, the matatosowin encourages the natural excretion of bodily toxins and, more importantly, offers the opportunity to confront and move beyond barriers that impede psychic healing. Boyden’s depiction of the healing matatosowin is charged, signalling the novel’s partial objective to deconstruct cultural myth; Xavier and his aunt Niska’s ceremonial measures do not result in a neo-romantic revelation of self customary in non-First Nations representations of First Nations spiritual rites, in which First Nations culture “is simply a stereotype against [which] the white man can assert the values of his own culture.”83 Rather, Xavier’s lengthy and painful sweat coincides with an agonizing course of detoxification; the ceremony is more a physical necessity than a subject-oriented choice, as is demonstrated by its focalization by Niska rather than Xavier. Furthermore, the climactic realization that Xavier and Niska experience in the matatosowin is of Elijah’s presence; notably, Boyden shifts the scene’s emphasis from Xavier’s healing to include the complicated mourning of his childhood friend, whom he still “cannot forgive,”84 but whose death he must confront.
An even more convoluted deconstructing double emerges in Boyden’s descriptions of hunting, on the one hand for game in the bush, and on the other hand for the enemy on the field of battle. During the war, Elijah constructs a “rabbit run,” in which he snares a single German soldier by the neck with a piece of thin wire stretched across a trench opening, in part simply to be amused by the sight of the confusion produced by the “floating” dead soldier among his comrades.85 This scene is a perverse doubling of the prologue’s description of the snaring of a marten for its meat and fur. Elijah is convinced that both incidents show him to be a “great hunter,”86 though, as the war continues, his hunting ability and his procedure of scalping his victims are shown to indicate a sort of bloodlust reminiscent of that of the windigo, the creature whose consumption of human flesh has triggered a descent into bloodthirsty madness. When Niska meditates on the tragedy of the human-turned-windigo, her conclusions are equally pertinent to the novel’s representation of Elijah as a soldier gripped by the violence that surrounds him: “to know … that you have done something so damning out of a greed for life that you have been exiled from your people forever is a hard meal to swallow.”87 While this doubled representation of bloodlust appears at first glance to confirm the opposition of bush and battlefield, it jars against the novel’s reputed commemorative function. At the very point in the novel when mounting evidence indicating that Elijah has turned windigo seems conclusive, Boyden disrupts such a reductive response to his character by having Elijah himself lucidly assess the commonplace paradox of military heroism: “I’m not crazy … What’s mad is them putting us in trenches to begin with. The madness is to tell us to kill and to award those of us who do it well.”88 Elijah’s success as a killer is, in fact, officially recognized: he is awarded a Military Medal. Significantly, Francis Pegahmagabow is known as the most decorated First Nations soldier, having been awarded two Military Medals.
Boyden’s concurrent representation of Elijah as both a cruel, morphine-addled killer and a brave, decorated tribute to his people indicates a desire to construct structural and figurative doubles that are not merely oppositional, privileging bush over battlefield, but also dialectical, whereby doubled terms must be reconciled within an ethical paradigm, a framework of healing and conscience that makes constructive meaning out of First Nations’ experience in history. Furthermore, his interest in exploring the differences between Elijah and Xavier undermines any sense of a simplistic binary narrative that seeks solely to add to what Wyile calls the “proliferation of revisionist historical fiction.”89 Boyden’s desire to honour manifests itself not simply as a form of commemoration or even a call for redress for Other Canadians, but also as a provocative expression of cultural recuperation. By exploring First Nations participation in this mythologized narrative of national birth and the forging of a collective, Boyden interrupts what Groening refers to as “the most dangerous trope in Canadian literature: the Indian as the member of a dead and dying people.”90 The double paradox of Elijah’s death is that because it occurs on a French battlefield, it accrues the public currency of progress via noble sacrifice, as opposed to the taint of assimilation. Yet at the same time, because the death occurs at the hands of a tribal fellow, it does not constitute a sign of cultural subjugation. Here and elsewhere, via structural and figurative doubles, Boyden makes visible the mythmaking process that romanticizes both Canada’s participation in the First World War and stereotypical representations of First Nations representatives that reduce the Other to a type.
As one side of the novel’s oppositional representation of time’s movement, historical time is clearly meant to operate as a negative term. Though the novel’s structure deviates wildly from a chronological ordering of story events, Boyden identifies by name each battle that Xavier and Elijah’s company, the fictional Southern Ontario Rifles, participates in so that their military experience might be followed in sequence.91 The battle scenes are portrayed as Xavier’s memories, recalled in a morphine haze over the course of his three-day canoe trek back into the bush with Niska, whose own memories from even further in the past are retold to Xavier as a healing story; the two sets of memories are juxtaposed in a double, echoing narrative. However, Boyden’s use of time and location identifiers for the battle scenes, such as “We spend our first months in and near Saint-Eloi,”92 “Now that the spring fighting along and around Saint-Eloi has died down, the men talk of being shipped to another place where a great summer battle is building,”93 “Late in June our battalion is moved near a place called White Horse Cellars [near Ypres],”94 and so on, as well as his inclusion of such well-known First World War occurrences as the use of chlorine gas and flame-throwers by the German army, ultimately mark the progression of the war as a crucial structuring principle of the novel. Significantly, Boyden draws attention to well-documented instances of specifically Canadian military strategy, fiasco, and success in the war—for example, the invention of the “creeping barrage” at Flers-Courcelette in the Somme and the apparent waste of subsequent months of attritional fighting, as well as the major victory at Vimy Ridge. In the chapter following the description of the taking of Vimy Ridge, Xavier assesses the implications of this success; in doing so, he parrots the same conventional mythology about Canada’s birth in the trenches of the war that inspires Thiessen’s play Vimy: “We’ve taken the place where hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and Englishmen died in their attempt to do the same these last years. We are an army to be reckoned with suddenly, no longer the colonials, as the Englishmen call us.”95 Boyden, however, ironically undercuts the myth by following Xavier’s almost publicly voiced assessment of Canadian heroics with a description of an injury sustained by a Canadian soldier referred to as Fat, which is either self-inflicted or simply the result of his own clumsiness.
Even more than it confronts national mythology, the historically informed, ostensibly progressive time structure of Three Day Road ironically traces a series of regressions. Juxtaposed with chapters describing a succession of battles are retroversions describing the deterioration of Niska and Xavier’s community. First Niska’s father and then her sister, Xavier’s mother, fall victim to wemistikoshiw encroachment and law, and Niska’s way of life in the bush becomes increasingly unsustainable. The historical battle scenes are the context for the decimation of Elijah and Xavier’s original unit, as well as the background for Elijah’s personal degeneration and Xavier’s loss of faith in his friendships and himself. By the time Xavier awakens in an English hospital to find that the war is over and that his leg has been amputated, he has even lost his name: the identity tags he pulled from Elijah during their final encounter are taken to be his. Xavier fails to rectify the mistake, thinking “there is something calming in the idea that I am Elijah. There is something appealing in being the hero, the one who always does the right thing, says the funny thing.”96 Xavier’s willingness to assume the identity of the decorated First Nations soldier, a model of historical progress, reveals Boyden’s suspicions about this time structure, as it is a discursive construct.
In confronting and toying with the nationalist myth of Canada’s special role in the First World War, especially as it is associated with the way the forging of national community involves the decimation/assimilation of a marginalized cultural group, Boyden participates in deconstructing the notion of an objective history. His deconstruction, however, must proceed with a difference if it is to function simultaneously within the framework of commemorative honouring. Boyden’s project of illuminating First Nations contribution to national events necessitates that his writing of progression, though structurally convoluted, not be wholly destabilizing. Three Day Road insists on challenging an absolute reliance on a progressive time structure that can only explicate an inevitable regression of First Nations culture. The project of protest requires that historically grounded instances of cultural devastation be marked; at the same time, the project of cultural commemoration and recuperation forces Boyden to remain wary of simply participating in another sort of “othering,” which may be the representation of a progressive (regressive) unfolding of the dying people trope. His wish to “honour” First Nations participation in the First World War must therefore promote a progressive and—to some extent—homogenizing ideal.
Xavier’s provisional adopting of Elijah’s name is a culmination of the novel’s thematizing of the way names are associated with a sacred time structure, a structure that seeks to mitigate, but not do away with, the problematic paradigms associated with historical time. Xavier and Elijah are introduced as such in the prologue, and are referred to by these names by Niska in the opening chapter, though this scene of Niska’s meeting with her nephew at the train station upon his return from the English hospital initiates the mystery of how and why the two young men’s identities have criss-crossed. Niska assumes that she will be meeting Elijah, having heard official word that Xavier was killed in action; Xavier too is surprised, having had word from a family friend that his aunt was dead. This initial scene of resurrection, occasioned by a series of miscommunications, sets the stage for several scenes that deal with the process of sacred renewal, and how that process depends on the assuming of one’s true name. The various names assumed by or assigned to Xavier and Elijah signify to what extent their identities transcend or fall victim to categories imposed by the progressions marked by historical time and the conception of a homogenous national community.
Elijah, perhaps because of his relative comfort and success with wemistkoshiw language and culture, has forgotten that the name assigned to him, Elijah Whiskeyjack, is a mispronunciation of his Cree name Weesageechak. He begins to inhabit an assigned identity, misconstruing in the process the appropriate path for his own sacred renewal. Weesageechak, Xavier’s narration reports, “is the trickster, the one who takes different forms at will,”97 and Elijah as the Weesageechak is indeed seemingly able to transcend the burden of historical progression, as well as its twin, cultural regression. He adapts well to trench life, using an English accent to mark his protective transformation and, as becomes clear quite late in the novel, has with humour and charm tried to distance himself from the sexual abuse he sustained as a child at the hands of a nun in a residential school. When Elijah jokes to Xavier about eating the flesh of a German, the narrative draws attention to “the gleam of the trickster [that] is in his eyes.”98 The Weesageechak here makes fun of Xavier’s great fear of turning windigo and mocks his friend’s attempts to make sense of seeming madness.99
But even the powerful trickster cannot experience a sacred renewal once he begins to behave in keeping with the name assigned to him in the context of historical progression. Elijah Whiskeyjack starts to believe that he is a type of bird, a chattering whiskeyjack jay bird, who is talkative, bold, and, most importantly, meant to fly. Elijah’s fervent wish to fly in an airplane, “like a bird,”100 proves a costly embracing of an assigned identity, as he realizes after his one flight that he “lost something up there.”101 More significantly, his addiction to morphine is represented in terms of his wanting “to leave my body and see what [is] around me.”102 The use of morphine makes Elijah Whiskeyjack the perfect soldier, fearless and deadly, but his dependence on it to give him an “osprey’s vision to spot the enemy”103 undermines his opportunity to experience sacred renewal. Elijah’s imposed identity—as the Whiskeyjack bird—operates as a version of the non–First Nations representative who superficially exploits First Nations myth to his own cultural ends. Over the course of his battlefield experiences, Elijah increasingly revels in the idea, expressed by his military comrades, superiors, and allies, that it is his “Indianness” that gives him “the charm” for military activity;104 that, as even the despised Lieutenant Breech asserts, Elijah’s success is a consequence of “our Indian blood, that our blood is closer to that of an animal than that of a man.”105 Elijah Whiskeyjack, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his success on the battlefield, is the kind of First Nations Other whose behaviour can be rationalized via a patronizing tolerance and inclusion of difference. Problematically, the Military Medal that Elijah receives posthumously allies him with the historical personage Francis Pegahmagabow, as if to suggest that such inclusion warrants honouring, even in a context that reaffirms First World War mythology.
The distinction Boyden wants to make between sacred and assigned names is made evident in Xavier’s name story, which is plotted in such a way as to highlight a sacred name’s function. The name Xavier, used in the prologue and the first chapter, is promptly supplemented by the name “Nephew,” which Niska begins to use once the first resurrection has been enacted, once her relative is again “home.”106 The significance of Niska’s use of the name “Nephew” is clarified several chapters later during a scene in which Niska recalls Elijah questioning his friend about her use of the name “Nephew”:
“Why does she call you Nephew and not your real name?” he asked.
“Nephew is my real name,” you answered. “I am her nephew.”
“Does she ever call you by your Christian name?” he asked.
You shook your head, looked at me nervously. “My name is Nephew.”
“Your name is Xavier,” your friend answered.107
The juxtaposition of Niska’s notion of a name with Elijah’s reveals Boyden’s contention that names do shift according to perspective and that the bearer of those shifting names must carefully negotiate between ones that offer the opportunity for sacred renewal—as does the name “Nephew” in its capacity of marking a loving familial connection—and ones that produce an externally motivated, potentially exploitable, sense of identity.
The name “Xavier Bird,” in fact, serves to reconcile this character’s most false and most sacred names, and in another ironic doubling, each of these names is assigned during the celebration that follows a display of individual prowess. The almost ceremonial assigning of what will constitute Xavier Bird’s most false name occurs following a marksmanship contest that takes place during combat training in Toronto: Xavier is the only soldier able to light a match placed twenty paces away with a shot from his rifle. The sergeant in charge of Xavier’s winning company pronounces: “From now on you will no longer be called Xavier. You have a new name now. Your new name is simply X.”108 Though this name is meant to function not only as a well-meant honour but also as a marker of Xavier’s absorption into a new community (a community he will, as the war progresses, come to think of in familial terms), it also constitutes a radical effacement, one that the narrative ironically makes note of. Xavier reflects in the moment that his new name ensures that “none of these who are here today can call me a useless bush Indian ever again. They might not say it out loud, but they know now that I have something special.”109 The ensuing narrative, however, proves his assessment problematic on two counts: first, his status as a bush Indian is repeatedly deemed a hindrance by commanding Lieutenant Breech, and second, his more sacred and special bush identity, gestured toward in the surname Bird, is obliterated by his newly found eagerness to inhabit the name “X.” Much later in the novel, in the chapter immediately preceding the description of the identity tag swap, Niska recalls the ceremony during which her nephew received his sacred bush name, “Little Bird Dancer,” given to celebrate Xavier’s first solo hunt, as well as his witnessing of the rarely seen circle dance of the grouse. That this scene, redolent with life and laughter, occurs so late in the narrative demonstrates that the sacred name functions to invoke a circular sense of time as well a viable sense of identity; Niska’s retrospective account is a critical though painful part of sacred healing, and the near-death state her nephew falls into after hearing the account marks the resumption of the sacred name as prerequisite to renewal.
What is potentially problematic, however, about a wholesale privileging of sacred time over historical time is the way such a paradigm appears to dispense with the systemic cultural recuperation that must occur in “real” time; the mythologizing of the sacred name is its own kind of empty “respecting” of difference that Len Findlay derides. Ultimately, what Boyden fashions may be likened to what Groening refers to as a “healing aesthetic,” an aesthetic that neither exclusively calls attention to stories of “victimhood”110 nor provides comfortingly symbolic applications of “the red man’s myths [as] important to all Canadians in search of ‘home.’”111 Boyden does not, therefore, allow portrayals of historical time and sacred time to culminate in opposition; rather, he offers a genealogical sense of time as the scheme via which healing may occur. Contemporary recourses to tracing genealogy in literature often depend on locating a sense of familial continuity even when strict linear succession has been disrupted. Boyden’s genealogical plot differs somewhat from Frances Itani’s conservative deployment; in her plot, the crisis of genealogy is temporary. In Three Day Road, Boyden engages the contemporary sense of genealogical time in several significant ways, all of which operate, in the first place, to trouble the progressive–regressive time structure that links national progression with the dying First Nations culture, and in the second place, to indicate how sacred renewal is not a spiritually discrete, non-threatening process that occurs “out of time” but rather is associated with tangible cultural recuperation, as well as with the ideal of the functioning collective.
Early on in her narrative, Niska declares that she is “the second to last in a long line of windigo killers. There is still one more.”112 Niska’s father was a windigo killer who was arrested by white lawmakers for killing a Cree woman, along with her child, who had thrice broken with the community: first, in wasting a piece of meat from a sacred bear feast; second, in leaving the starving tribe along with her husband to search for their own sustenance; and third, having failed to find game, for feeding on her husband’s corpse and developing an incurable taste for human flesh. Boyden thus represents the windigo killer as a custodian of tribal values and collectivity, rather than as the purveyor of a particular bloodline or consecration, and it is acknowledged that the expression of such values, as well as the circumstances defining collectivity, will change over time. The role of windigo killer is taken on because it fulfills a community need, and in the case of both Niska and her nephew, Xavier, it is taken on rather inadvertently and somewhat reluctantly. Niska’s explanation to Xavier that “sometimes one must be sacrificed if we all are to survive”113 seems to refer to both the windigo and his or her killer, as first Niska’s father, then Niska, and finally Xavier are removed from the physical and psychic borders of their community in order to fulfill the task of protecting the tribe from the “sadness … at the heart of the windigo;”114 from the place, as Xavier tells Elijah, from where “there is no coming back.”115 Though Niska’s original sense only refers to herself and “one more” windigo killer, the adaptability of this unfortunate role holds promise for the difficult yet necessarily ongoing process of guarding the developing community.
Boyden further relies on the more open and adaptable sense of familial continuity that is in keeping with the contemporary genealogical plot in his decision not to render birth scenes, which might invigorate a sense of bloodline importance and discrete succession, and in his rendering of the brotherhood that exists between Xavier and Elijah, who are not actually related by blood, as well as in Niska’s adopting of her nephew and his friend as her own. In the final chapter of the novel, which depicts the painful process of Xavier’s physical and psychic detoxification in the matatosowin, Boyden offers a culminating scene that suggests cultural continuity that does not depend on discrete familial succession, and in which the dialectic of historical time and sacred time is resolved. The final vision that Niska receives in the matatosowin is, as she asserts, a “good vision”: “Children … They are two boys, naked, their brown backs to me as they throw little stones into the water. Their hair is long in the old way and is braided with strips of red cloth. But this isn’t the past. It is what’s still to come. They look to be brothers. Someone else besides me watches them. I sense that he watches to keep them from danger.”116 Though Niska deduces that this vision depicts her great-nephews, Xavier’s sons, its many allusions to the past relationship between Xavier and Elijah implicate a genealogical future that moves beyond the limiting time structures of commemoration and redress. The boys look forward to the circular patterns emerging from stones dropped into water, even as their naked “backs” come into focus; the braiding of hair with red cloth not only implies a return to tradition, but also suggests the way the colour red, signifying earlier blood and loss, interweaves with what “is still to come”; the boys “look to be brothers,” demonstrating that bonds forged out of a sense of community, continuity, and conscience make sacred renewal possible. The custodian figure, who “watches to keep them from danger,” is also there, signalling that the requirement for a windigo killer may yet resurface, and that an eye to the often painful process of cultural recuperation and growth remains.
Niska’s good vision of genealogical continuity ensures the health of her relation—his ability to make peace with his anguished past, to progress through what remains of his as yet uncharted history and to enact a sacred return to his name, his role, his home. In adopting historical fiction to his own recuperative ends, Boyden has rendered a First Nations history that is not bounded by what Groening refers to as the “field of opposition that consistently renders those once savage people as dead and dying, a thing of the past.”117 Though the Cree community that Three Day Road depicts is often under physical and psychic attack by encroaching wemistkoshiw culture, the violence included in this narrative is not strictly oppositional; more important, it is not depicted in the elegiac terms of a “last stand.” Boyden is surprisingly optimistic in that Three Day Road explores how the stories of a previously marginalized community—in this case, a First Nations community—can be productively written into history. To that purpose, however, Boyden must reaffirm not only the myth that the First World War produced the Canadian nation, but also the idea that tolerance of diversity within the collective depends on such reaffirmations.
As is the case with the other texts explored in this chapter, the acknowledgements in A Secret Between Us draw attention to an extratextual agenda that has, apparently, provided the author with the impetus for writing. Daniel Poliquin describes an objective similar to Thiessen’s stated intention to explore “why … we pass over some moments in our history yet mythologize others”; to Kerr’s, which is to bring to light the 1918 influenza epidemic, which he claims is “largely forgotten now”; and to Boyden’s, which is to “honour the Native soldiers who fought in the Great War.” For his part, Poliquin asserts that A Secret Between Us “is the literary expression of a collective memory that is slipping away more than it is spreading around.”118 Here he is referring to the memory of Ottawa, particularly the neighbourhood known as the LeBreton Flats, during the early twentieth century. Like the authors of Vimy, Unity (1918), and Three Day Road, Poliquin delineates his novel as at least partly devoted to the work of recovery, whereby the literary representation of historical events and/or personages and/or social patterns will renovate the reading public’s sense of which particularities of history are worth acts of remembrance.
There are, however, differences between Poliquin’s concern with this work of recovery as it manifests itself in his novel and the way such interest operates in the other texts. First, his atypical use of historical personages as anchors for the novel obfuscates the record instead of illuminating or enlarging it; as discussed below, no English-speaking reviewer of the novel seems even to have noticed exactly how the book makes use of historical research, and this obliviousness is likely not a matter of a lack of attention but rather a product of Poliquin’s own reservations about the work of recovery. Second, in a move similar to Kerr’s, Poliquin draws on the First World War context in order to explore something else. While Kerr makes use of both war rhetoric and the idea that it was soldiers returning from war who brought influenza germs to Canada to explore the way flu deaths might also be made socially meaningful, Poliquin’s references to the war, exceptional in their flippancy, are juxtaposed with his descriptions of inhabitants of the Flats who have done nothing particularly memorable or historically meaningful. Poliquin’s writing of the First World War is distinct from representations that are a means to the end of historical recovery work. His writing of the war is a trick; the book’s use of tropes associated with the Canadian historical novel, including irreverent references to Canada’s mythic war, demolishes the idea of sacralized collective remembrance, especially as such collective remembrance depends on an arbitrary elevation of the representative individual who is supposed to stand for his or her distinct, though tolerated, community.
Most reviewers of Donald Winkler’s 2007 translation of Poliquin’s novel (originally published in 2006 as La Kermesse) more or less explicitly affirm the novel’s surprise nomination for the 2007 Giller Prize as the impetus for their attention. Reviews by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, writing for the Globe and Mail, T.F. Rigelhof, writing for Books in Canada, and Melora Koepke, writing for the Vancouver Sun, make note of the novel’s “dark horse” status,119 while commenting on the way Poliquin works to reinvent the historical novel. Kuitenbrouwer asserts that A Secret Between Us “plays broadly with the term ‘historical novel’ … [as] Poliquin is not interested in historical veracity,”120 while Rigelhof praises the novel for being such a remarkable “sendup of the earnestness, the self-importance, the whining, the pretentiousness that passes for artistic seriousness and social responsibility among the generality of those who write historical novels in this country.”121 Indeed, notwithstanding Poliquin’s stated claim regarding the passing away of collective memory, his novel makes no attempt to honour the lives and/or deaths of those whom the historical record may have marginalized or overdetermined, or whose story might be retrospectively incorporated into a narrative of sacrifice.
In the first chapters of A Secret Between Us, Poliquin’s satiric tone becomes clear in his invocation of the Battle of Vimy Ridge and in his description of the life and death of Private Léon Tard, a subaltern who worked with the protagonist and narrator—Lusignan—as a gravedigger in France. Tard is introduced when Lusignan must explain to him the reason for his gloom during one of their digging sessions: Lusignan has heard word via telegram that his mother has died, the news coming “just before the battle of Vimy.”122 The narrator’s mention of Vimy here, coupled with the news of his mother’s death, might, in a different Canadian literary text revisiting the First World War, have crucial symbolic significance. One might argue that Lusignan’s mother represents the mother country, an idea all the more problematic because of Lusignan’s status as a francophone Ontarian, and that her death before the momentous battle signals a painful but necessary turning point in Canada’s maturation. Conversely, Poliquin’s narrative follows up the stark report of the death with Lusignan’s account of how he “sought out my warrant officer, hoping that my loss might garner me a two-day leave that would free me to go and ask Nurse Flavie from the Vendée if she might one day love me.” The warrant officer rejects the appeal because Lusignan has already used his mother’s death as an excuse to be granted leave on four previous occasions, recommending he “should try doing in [his] father for a change.”123 Tard, however, is overcome with sadness at the news about Lusignan’s mother and feels compelled to tell the story of his own mother’s death and of his unhappy childhood, which the narrator describes in two short paragraphs that primarily relate the abuse Tard suffered at the hands of his uncle and aunt, who “accused him of taking up too much space and eating like a pig.”124 In the next chapter, after Lusignan has described the arranged marriage of his lunatic mother to his simpleton father, he relates the story of Tard’s death: “The next day, while I was delivering a message to headquarters, a German mine blew up the bunker. All I saw when I got back, in the place of Tard’s face smiling serenely at the thought of pancakes in a lukewarm bed, was a smoking hole. There was nothing to do. The lice had already deserted his corpse.”125 The irreverence with which Poliquin represents the First World War soldier’s life and death in these early chapters is merely a hint at what is to come; the novel goes on to poke fun at several conventions governing the writing of the Canadian First World War novel, from the subaltern’s progression from innocence to experience in the war, through the representation of the war’s horrors and the bravery of individual soldiers at the front, to the representation of how difficult it is for returning soldiers to return to their lives at home.
Like Rigelhof, Koepke is keen to emphasize the satire at the heart of A Secret Between Us, going so far as to point out how Poliquin’s “detailing of the vices and negligible virtues of the First World War era” operate in contrast to “the vast library of earnest self-important historical novels about great Canadians and their important deeds.”126 The protagonist of A Secret Between Us is not a great Canadian, but a coward, a liar, a lecher, and a drunk. Furthermore, these vices are not in any way connected to his war experience—he is not, for example, a suffering postwar morphine addict like Xavier Bird or Augusta Moffat in The Underpainter—as he was blameworthy of all his vices well before he enlisted. As Lusignan explains to a young woman who has propositioned him and who wants him to “tell her about the war,”127 he represents quite the opposite of what a heroic war insider is meant to be:
Look, for example, I never killed anyone. The only men I killed were already dead. When we were alone, my friend Private Léon Tard and I, we discharged our guns into the corpses … Once, on our way back from our chores at the cemetery, we almost soiled ourselves when we came upon the cadavers of German soldiers raised from the mud by the last downpour of shells. They were erect there, eyes vitreous, skin green, and we rekilled them to the last man … When the Princess Pats arrived in France in 1915, I’d already been demoted to private, and I took no part in the first battles that killed off half our men. After two weeks I had to undergo a medical inspection because I was feverish. The doctor discovered a virulent syphilis I’d caught from an Englishwoman whom I’d been too eager to sleep with, just because she was English.128
Lusignan’s speech, which goes on in a similar vein for another full page, not only challenges the First World War’s mythic status but also displays the extent to which the writing of these events from Canadian history has become entirely a matter of convention; his war stories are shocking only because excessively iterated stories of heroism and sacrifice, and of Canada’s rejection of its status as a mere colony of Britain, have become all too familiar.
The war’s link to discursive conventions is also made visible when the narrator explains his work writing official condolence letters to the families of soldiers who have been killed. Lusignan admits that writing such letters is no more than “a stylistic exercise” and that “to save time I copied some letters and sent them to several families, making sure they lived far enough away from one another that no one would doubt the sincerity of my sentiments.”129 Here, Poliquin’s novel draws attention to the paradoxical relationship between convention, which depends on reiteration, and the discursive illusion of sincerity. As Cobley explains, part of the work of the war narrative is to create a frame for interpretation, so that the details of that narrative can ultimately be read symbolically.130 Poliquin goes on to provide an example of one of Lusignan’s “stylistic exercise[s],” a letter he writes to the family of Private Blondeau that waxes poetic about the soldier’s heroism and nobility, in order to highlight further the degree to which our frame of interpretation for the war narrative depends on the ceaseless repetition of semiotic codes that are meant to signal “truth.” And, in a final blow to the idea of the Canadian soldier’s mythic status, the narrator concludes his mention of Blondeau with the flat assertion, “Private Blondeau was even more of a thief than my friend Tard, and he cheated at cards to boot. The third time he was recaptured after deserting, the non-commissioned officers quarrelled over who would command the firing squad. They played a little poker, and the winner had the honour of shouting ‘fire.’”131
The parody of the official condolence letter is significant in A Secret Between Us not just because the form has been incorporated into other Canadian literary responses to the First World War, including Broken Ground, Deafening, The Sojourn, and Unity (1918), but also because of the distinctive object of Poliquin’s critique. While both Frances Itani and Alan Cumyn make use of the form without irony, whereby the rhetoric of duty to Empire is upheld so that the personal grief of the soldier’s family can be emphasized, Hodgins and Kerr draw attention to condolence letters precisely to criticize the artificiality of that rhetoric. Poliquin, however, is less interested in the relative truthfulness or otherwise of military discourse than he is in challenging the very idea of the sacredness of truth. The description of Blondeau provided after Lusignan’s overwrought condolence letter is not meant to register as a counteracting “realism” in the way that Itani’s portrayal of Jim’s experiences as a military medic or Hart’s description of the front to Beatrice are meant to. The sheer hyperbole and profanity of Poliquin’s depiction of Blondeau’s actual death, which also lampoons the almost ubiquitous soldier-shot-for-cowardice plot, reflects the novel’s absolute rejection of the idea that “truth” is ever anything but a discursive illusion, as well as its challenge to the idea that certain myths—for example, the myth of the dutiful First World War soldier—need to be respected.
Lusignan’s brief stint as a letter writer also gestures toward a key plot of A Secret Between Us, which is Lusignan’s intervention into the love affair between Essiambre d’Argenteuil, a military officer with whom he shared a single sexual encounter and whom he is infatuated with, and Amalia Driscoll, an Ottawa society woman who writes long, involved letters to d’Argenteuil after their own sexual interlude has ended. Lusignan steals Amalia’s letters from d’Argenteuil, a theft that goes unnoticed as “Essiambre hated writing and never read his mail,”132 and begins corresponding with her as d’Argenteuil. This act of impersonation is only one of many that Lusignan engages in, as he tries to live up to the “glorious ancestors”133 whose name he bears by posing as others. After playing dress-up as a child and imitating a friend from school, he moves on to writing novels in a variety of styles, proving that he is “a master at toadying,”134 and then pretending to be a series of literary critics responding favourably to the work. Poliquin also represents Lusignan’s experiences as a returned soldier as a kind of impersonation; his wearing of the Princess Patricias’ officer’s uniform masks the fact that he was demoted from his position. Finally, the three central characters in A Secret Between Us are also impersonations: Poliquin’s Lusignan, Essiambre d’Argenteuil, and Amalia Driscoll are more or less thinly veiled versions, respectively, of the Montreal journalist and novelist Rodolphe Girard, whose novel Marie Calumet (1904) was publicly condemned for its bawdy representation of Quebec society and the Church; Talbot Mercer Papineau, a lieutenant with the Princess Patricias from Quebec who argued against Henri Bourassa in favour of Quebec’s involvement in the war; and Ethel Chadwick, a young woman who left a diary describing wartime Ottawa.
No English-language reviewer of A Secret Between Us seems to have detected the use the novel makes of Sandra Gwyn’s Tapestry of War, despite Poliquin’s citation of this work in his acknowledgements, which specifically mention Talbot Papineau and Ethel Chadwick.135 In a few cases, this unawareness is made all too clear by specific references to the epistolary voice of Amalia Driscoll. In Michel Basilières’s unfavourable review of A Secret Between Us, published in Quill & Quire before the announcement of the Giller Prize long list, he writes that Amalia’s letters contain descriptions of “social graces, events, and attitudes bearing no relevance to us, Lusignan, or the plot [which] are detailed at length in Driscoll’s pretentious and whining manner, making it easy to see why her fiancé would choose to leave her for the front.”136 Rigelhof takes Basilières to task for the sheer nastiness of his review, accusing him of “obtuseness” and “arrogance,”137 yet he too remarks on a problem associated with Amalia’s letters, asserting that “Poliquin is almost too good a mimic: the letters from Amalia to d’Argenteuil that interrupt Lusignan’s reveries are seemingly so true to the underfed mind and straight circumstances of a gentlewoman of the era that it’s all too easy to fall blindly into them and lose track of the larger sense of the novel” (10). Like Rigelhof, Koepke praises Poliquin for his rendition of Amalia’s letters, calling “her lively epistolary voice … Poliquin’s finest achievement in this book.”138
But Amalia’s letters are not exclusively Poliquin’s achievement; he depends heavily on Gwyn’s text in writing them. Like Chadwick, for example, Amalia is an upper-class immigrant from Ireland whose father works at McGill University, and who never quite recovers from the failure of the family fortune; also like Chadwick, Amalia makes use of her skating ability to garner attention from Ottawa’s inner circle, in particular the Governor General, Prince Arthur. As much as Poliquin makes use of Gwyn’s research and the style gleaned from Chadwick’s diary, he is at the same time not particularly careful about remaining faithful to the historical record: while Amalia gains work as an advertising artist, “earn[ing] a real weekly salary, like a man,”139 Ethel Chadwick “decorated lamp shades and tea trays in floral motifs to sell on consignment at local gift shops”;140 Chadwick lived out her life as a “provincial and circumscribed” spinster,141 while Amalia takes lovers and becomes a painter of nudes. Poliquin’s portrayal of Amalia is clearly not an attempt at historical veracity, but neither does it represent his own creative attempt to reconsider the role of the individual as he or she relates to the mythology of the collective. In her final letter to d’Argenteuil, Amalia admits to him that she no longer needs to write because she has taken up sex again, noting that “voluptuousness induces oblivion. The carnal act is the universal solvent of regret.”142 Yet while Amalia can give up her individual commitment to acts of witnessing and remembrance, it is supposed that the collective cannot because of its responsibility to keep the past from “slipping away.”143 Poliquin might reasonably have balked at the tone of Basilières’s review; that said, his novel does seek to explore the problem of compulsive and compulsory remembrance of “events and attitudes bearing no relevance to us.”144 Ethel Chadwick’s habit of writing a diary during the war years, even a diary devoid of “brilliance or wit,”145 has afforded her a place in the historiographical record, whereas Poliquin’s Amalia is juxtaposed with the character Concorde, who, despite having crossed paths with every figure in the novel who leaves some sort of historical trace and despite having risen in class, is destined to “[pass] her entire life unnoticed.”146
Poliquin’s play with history is thus distinct from Boyden’s in that the point of A Secret Between Us is not to augment the scope of what is considered worthy of remembrance, but rather to consider whether the “spreading around” of history serves any useful purpose. Poliquin’s d’Argenteuil is a version of Talbot Papineau, the francophone army captain who in 1916 famously tried to counter Henri Bourassa’s anti-recruitment campaign in an open letter that queried “what mattered the why and wherefore of the war, whether we owed anything to England or not, and whether we were Imperialist or not, or whether we were French or English? The one simple commanding fact was that Canada was at war and Canada and Canadian liberties had to be protected.”147 Papineau’s anchoring within the historical record connects to this public declaration of his Canadian nationalist perspective, as well as to the massive archive of letters to his mother and to an American woman, Beatrice Fox, that he left behind in which he described his wartime experiences. Though Gwyn cites Papineau’s francophone background as the reason for referring to him as “the most unlikely Patricia of all,”148 she is able to hone in on his voice as one of the distinctive and representative “prisms of history,”149 mostly because of the extant material record. D’Argenteuil, in contrast, “hated writing and never read his mail.”150
Poliquin’s version of Papineau is directly associated with the historical record. He is a proud Canadian francophone with ancestral ties to eighteenth-century Quebec, a brilliant Ottawa lawyer, an inspiring military officer and noble soldier, and a figure “as authentic as a character in a novel”151 in terms of the way he is popularly remembered. But Poliquin’s d’Argenteuil is also a cad, a man who makes a habit of cementing the loyalty of his under-officers via sexual seduction and who ignores the letters from those who love him. Furthermore, at no point in A Secret Between Us does the issue of francophone loyalty to the Canadian nationalist enterprise come up, as it does, for example, in Thiessen’s play, and this makes Poliquin’s thinly veiled references to the famous Canadian nationalist francophone seem like a red herring. Poliquin’s point here is to imagine the iconic historical figure as he is defined by fictional discourse, “as a character in a novel,” rather than by the archival record; the implicit suggestion is that neither construction is any more trustworthy than the other, though one construction might have more mythical power. In other words, it is not just the historical record that Poliquin questions, but the narratives that emerge from it, including the one that would locate the source for current tensions between English and French Canada in the French-language laws of 1912 and the Conscription Crisis of 1917, thereby simplifying those tensions.
Poliquin’s own relationship to francophone Canada is complex. Early in his career as a novelist and translator, this Franco-Ontarian was celebrated in Quebec; however, the 2001 publication of his In the Name of the Father: An Essay on Quebec Nationalism, a book that fiercely condemned Québécois nationalism as “the political embodiment of adolescence,”152 set him at odds with Quebec nationalists.153 However, Poliquin’s refusal to write a healing narrative for francophone Canada (or perhaps for anglophone Canada) is not simply associated with his contempt for the viewpoint that Quebecers have been victimized by so-called English Canada and the “cartoonesque” notion that “Quebec’s history is an endless darkness that lifts only when [the separatist intelligentsia] arrive[s] on the scene.”154 In taking on the issue of the competing Anglo- and Franco-nationalisms associated with the First World War in A Secret Between Us, Poliquin indicates his distrust of the very concept of redressing a necessarily reconstituted past via an increasingly convention-ridden set of narratives. This distrust is most apparent in his portrayal of the central character Lusignan. In a 2002 interview with François Ouellet, published in Voix et Images, Poliquin discusses his use of the historical figure Rodolphe Girard, focusing mostly on Girard’s writing of “anti-imperialist novels,”155 his work in the Senate, and, along with Jules Fournier and Olivar Asselin, his part as a “dissenter” who believed in the importance of Quebec nationalism.156 In the novel, details about Girard’s work as a novelist are reimagined in service of Poliquin’s desire to call into question our sacred historical narratives and to rethink the practice of collective remembrance and its dependence on discourse.
In “Indigestible Stew and Holy Piss: The Politics of Food in Rodolphe Girard’s Marie Calumet,” Susan Kevra explains that Girard’s novel, which “mocked rural Quebec society, with its harshest attacks levelled against the Catholic Church,”157 was received with outrage; so harsh were the critical responses—which accused the writer of moral and aesthetic perversion—that Girard’s career as a novelist was ruined. As Kevra describes, “he exiled himself to Ottawa, where he remained for the duration of his professional life, working primarily as a government translator.”158 During Lusignan’s spree as a writer, he too writes a novel, titled Franchonne, that “instead of celebrating the French race and its sacred soil … [focuses] on mocking Father Lajoie, his servant … the churchwardens and the notary Poitras,” all figures from Lusignan’s own rural Quebec upbringing.159 Like Girard, Lusignan is faced with the material repercussions of critical disapproval: “All the critics who had praised me earlier recommended that the book be banned. My lucrative freelance work vanished, and I lost my job as a proofreader for La Presse.”160 What Poliquin adds to the tale of Girard’s disgrace as a novelist is the playful description of the way Lusignan’s own pseudonyms turn against him. Lusignan has invented Oscar Petit and Samuel Legris, reviewers who not only praise Lusignan’s early novels, The Knight of Malartic and The Fiancés of the Scaffold, but who also argue with each other in print about whether or not Lusignan is meeting his potential as a writer. After Franchonne is published, “Oscar Petit said that he had never read such a piece of trash. Samuel Legris challenged me to a duel for defaming the Mother Church.”161 Lusignan admits that he “will doubtless never know who commandeered my bylines to turn them against me.”162 Poliquin’s point here is to show how inherently pliable public writing is and to interrogate the absurdity of the idea that certain ideas are so dangerous that they should not be circulated.163
Arguably, the most profane idea circulating in A Secret Between Us is that Lusignan is a lousy soldier. Crucially, it is not because of the war’s horrors that Lusignan loses his moral compass, his sense of honour, his work ethic, and so on; in fact, the novel has very little to say about the war’s horrors, except in terms of the way descriptions of those horrors have become conventional. Describing the last impersonating letter he writes to Amalia, Lusignan notes that he “added three or four pages on the cold, the mud, the blood in the trenches, things of which I cannot speak but that I managed to write about with ease.”164 As Cobley notes, the descriptive detail of soldier narratives “is assumed to be the most objective window into phenomenal and experiential reality.” While Cobley goes on to argue that the reliance on description makes first-hand accounts of the war “no less constructed, and hence open to distortion or ideological manipulation, than poetic and narrative strategies,”165 Poliquin’s narrative emphasizes the extent to which the descriptive list has become formulaic, a set of semiotic codes that contemporary authors can “write about with ease.”
The upshot of Poliquin’s refusal to consider the deficiencies of Lusignan’s character in relation to the horrors of war is the startling implication that Lusignan is simply ignoble, lazy, and cowardly all on his own. That a Canadian First World War soldier can be presented in this way seems positively blasphemous, as it calls into question the most sacred of Canadian First World War myths: that, despite the repulsiveness of war, despite all of our fervent desires for peace, the Canadian soldier himself was honourable, and that his war work represented not only a necessary sacrifice but an enactment of all that is noble, pure, and good. As Vance points out, this myth of the Canadian soldier’s transcendent virtue was not solely—or even primarily—a matter of considering the individual soldier’s role in the war; it was mainly an outlet for defining the Canadian collective: “he was the nation’s past, present, and future, and the embodiment of all its aspirations and potential.”166 The texts written by Thiessen, Kerr, and Boyden all attempt to add the stories of ever more individuals—individuals from increasingly diverse cultural communities—in such a way as to augment the idea of a collective, national enterprise; Poliquin, however, is unwilling to write the individual as anything more than a figment of imagination and passing records. In undermining the myth of Canadian First World War soldiers’ noble sacrifice, Poliquin’s novel challenges the notion that Canada’s participation in the war operated as a testing ground to define particular national traits. The refusal to construct an emblematic figure—whose function is to represent dutifulness, earnestness, moral bravery, a rejection of Old World class systems, or the special inclusiveness of Canada’s national collective—also culminates in a refusal to valorize an uncomplicated conception of civic participation or action. In this way, Poliquin signals his skepticism, not of official history, but rather of attempts to revisit history according to a particular political agenda, as doing so forces the same overdetermination and reiteration of myths as are ostensibly being written against.
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Poliquin’s narrative is startling because it seems to be the only contemporary Canadian First World War reimagining that does not culminate in a confirmation of the way in which remembering the war serves a useful purpose. Vimy, for example, tries to make the story of soldiers from diverse communities coming together for a single military objective communicate something to contemporary audiences about shared ideals among a tolerant, varied, but unified nation. Similarly, Boyden’s Three Day Road attempts to widen the scope of participation in the war, not just to augment the historical record but to suggest that First Nations communities will continue to play a vibrant role within the collective known as Canada. Kerr’s play, though perhaps more doubtful about how genuine expressions of tolerance are, especially when they only function to mark certain people as Other, places the story about “seeing through to the other side” in the mouth of a blinded returned soldier in a way that recalls the myth that Canadian First World War participants represented the best of Canada, in part because of the insight borne of experience.
What, then, can one say about A Secret Between Us? In the first place, Poliquin’s skewering of the emblematic image of the noble, brave, and dutiful Canadian First World War soldier operates as a clear challenge to the homogenizing force of that image. Yet for all the satire and blasphemy in his novel, it should be noted that it is also a great deal of fun. The sheer exuberance of A Secret Between Us might be associated with Poliquin’s admission that we need not be ashamed of attempts to hold on to our cultural myths, as long as we acknowledge that we do so because we need them. By drawing attention to the fact that the reiteration of cultural narratives is a matter of selection and choice, Poliquin signals an awareness of current anxieties about agency and citizenship. The mythology of the First World War—a set of narratives that so many writers have shown they can “write about with ease”—is proved to be amenable to the type of national self-fashioning required in an age when the very concept of the nation is in crisis. Thus, even in Poliquin’s text, the return to the subject of Canada’s participation in the First World War reflects an awareness of current nostalgia for a particular cultural code, one that equates Canadian nationalism with demonstrations of the tolerance of difference, with a confidence in the righteousness of collective action, with pride in dutiful service, and with a basic belief in cultural progress. Such expressions of “pride” in seemingly outdated conceptions of cultural heritage constitute an anxious attempt to “[shape] the future and [set] the terms of [a community’s] encounters with the world.”167 In this sense, the idealization of cultural homogeneity that provides a stable foundation for the national collective—and even the satiric challenge to that idealization—reflects a climate in which restless citizens show their unease about having to confront their own powerlessness in confrontation with the faceless global imaginary. Thus, the nostalgia for myths associated with Canada’s participation in the First World War, especially the myth of the working collective, emerges from a desire to re-entrench narratives that figure “everyday” citizens as meaningful contributors to the work of inventing the nation.