War Is Here: The Vietnam War and Canadian Literature 9780773551671

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Politics of National Personification
2 Self-Defence Lessons
3 The TV War and Intermedial Critique
4 Queering Canada
5 A Thousand Vietnams
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

wa r i s h e r e

WA R I S H E R E The Vietnam War and Canadian Literature robert mcgill

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© Robert McGill 2017 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-5158-9 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5159-6 (paper) 978-0-7735-5167-1 (epdf ) 978-0-7735-5168-8 (epub)

Legal deposit third quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McGill, Robert, 1976–, author War is here: the Vietnam War and Canadian literature / Robert McGill. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. i s b n 978-0-7735-5158-9 (hardcover). – i s b n 978-0-7735-5159-6 (softcover). – i s b n 978-0-7735-5167-1 (epdf ). – i s b n 978-0-7735-5168-8 (epub) 1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 – Literature and the war.  2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 – Influence.  3. War in literature.  4. Canadian literature (English) – 20th century – History and criticism.  I. Title. p s 8101.v 5m 34 2017

c 810.9'358597043

c 2017-901881-7 c 2017-901882-5

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 11/14 Garamond.

For Clive Card and Howard Schmidt, and in memory of Joyce Knowles – teachers who first sparked my interest in Canadian politics, Canadian history, and Canadian literature.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1  The Politics of National Personification  35 2  Self-Defence Lessons  67 3 The t v War and Intermedial Critique  113 4  Queering Canada  168 5  A Thousand Vietnams  196 Conclusion 242 Notes 251 Bibliography 283 Index 305

Acknowledgments

Many friends and colleagues have provided aid, encouragement, and camaraderie as I worked on this book. Special thanks to Donna Bennett, Alan Bewell, Nicholas Bradley, Shawn Brady, Ellen Ellerbeck, Ron Fitzpatrick, Megan Frederickson, Joshua Gang, Marlene Goldman, Marco Gualtieri, Todd Jackson, Robert Juricevic, Jenny Kerber, Lynne Magnusson, Julia Markovits, Nick Mount, Dragana Obradovic, Grace O’Connell, Reecia Orzeck, Siobhan Phillips, Elaine Scarry, David Staines, Paul Stevens, Cheryl Suzack, Lawrence Switzky, John Thieme, Karina Vernon, Blake Williams, and Luke Williams. During a research trip to the University of Calgary Special Collections, Annie Murray, Alison Wagner, and the other staff were helpful and hospitable. Meanwhile, I have had the privilege of working with excellent research assistants. Thanks to Amanda Bertucci, Katie Mullins, Angelo Muredda, Michael Prior, Mathura Sabanayagam, and Joseph Thomas. I am especially grateful to James Hahn and Katherine Shwetz, whose work was fundamental to the book’s completion. It was at Harvard that I first began to think seriously about Canada and the Vietnam War. Thanks to the Society of Fellows for giving me the time and space in which to work. Since then, I have benefitted from the financial support of a Connaught New Researcher Award, a Connaught Start-up Grant, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant. Thanks to Linda Hutcheon, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, and Vinh Nguyen for their feedback on parts of the manuscript, to Russell Brown for his feedback on all of it, and to the two anonymous reviewers engaged

x Acknowledgments

by McGill-Queen’s University Press for their insights and generosity. Finally, I am indebted to Mark Abley for his role in bringing the book to publication, and I am ever grateful to Fiona Coll for many things. permissions

“The War in Viet Nam” by Milton Acorn, copyright © 1965. Reprinted by ­permission of Mary Hooper. Excerpt from “News” by George Bowering, copyright © 1966. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpt from “Welcome to these lines” by Leonard Cohen, copyright © 1972. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Excerpt from “From a m e r i c a ” by Victor Coleman, copyright © 1969. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpt from Our Man in Utopia by Douglas Fetherling, copyright © 1971. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpt from “American Girl: A Canadian View” by George Jonas, copyright © 1968. Reprinted by permission of Barbara Amiel. Excerpt from “Like a Canadian” by John Newlove, copyright © 1968. Reprinted by permission of Chaudiere Books. Excerpt from “Popular Song” by bpNichol, copyright © 1973. Reprinted by permission of Coach House Books. “In Our Time” by Alden Nowlan, copyright © 1967. Reprinted by permission of Claudine Nowlan. “Picture Layout in Life Magazine” by Al Purdy, copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission of Harbour Publishing. Excerpts from unpublished materials by George Ryga in the University of Calgary Special Collections. Reproduced by permission of Tanya Ryga. Excerpt from “The Dream of the Guerillas” by Tom Wayman, copyright © 1993. Reprinted by permission of Harbour Publishing. Part of chapter 3 was previously published as “Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and 1960s America.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 76 (2015): 57–80. Reprinted by permission of Canadian Poetry.

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Introduction Welcome to these lines There is a war on but I’ll try to make you comfortable Leonard Cohen, “Welcome to these lines” “If I went and got a gun, then what would I be saying? That Vietnam was okay? That I might as well have gone to Vietnam?” “You’re not an American.” “You’re not going to rile me.” Alice Munro, “Gravel”

Canadian journalist Michael Maclear recalls in his 2013 memoir, Guerrilla Nation, that during the Vietnam War, whenever he suggested to his superiors at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (c b c ) that he visit North Vietnam to report on the conflict, he was told, “It isn’t our war.”1 They were technically correct: Canada’s military was not fighting in ­Vietnam. Canadian life, however, was intimately tied to the war. Canadians consumed endless news reports and commentary on the conflict, while thousands of American draft dodgers and deserters were crossing the border into Canada to claim refuge.2 Many Canadians took part in protests and teach-ins, many contributed to humanitarian aid for victims of the war, and more than a few Canadians worked in factories manufacturing weapons for the American military. Canadians worried that their country was both the United States’ accomplice and its victim, and they feared what would happen if America ever found reason to oppose itself to Canada as it had to North Vietnam. The war was also a catalyst for Canadians to reimagine their country in an idealist manner while taking pride in Canada’s differences from the United States. In 1965, the literary

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critic Northrop Frye claimed that the question “Where is here?” was paradigmatic in contemporary Canadian literature, partly due to the disorienting, globalizing effects of electronic media.3 In the years that followed, the Vietnam War increasingly caused such disorientation, as graphic images of the conflict flooded North American homes, blurring the border between “here” and “there.” Canadians were liable to feel doubly disoriented, consuming US media coverage that was neither for them nor about their country, while Canadian writers reflected the times by dramatizing situations in which everyday Canadian life was interrupted by apprehensions of violence in Vietnam. Writers also published fictional scenarios in which Canada itself became the site of war with the United States. To make the scenarios seem more plausible, the writers pointed both to Vietnam and to past Canada-US military conflicts. The implication was that Canada should always be figuratively on a war footing, resisting and defining itself in contrast to an imperialist America, and that a battle for national survival was a trans-historical condition of Canadian identity. In view of the question “Where is here?,” Canadian literature intimated a startling answer: “War is here.” The location in question was not just Canada but also Canadian writing itself. Even today, ideas about what being Canadian means, or should mean, show the Vietnam War’s influence. The war remains “here” in Canada as a reminder of important reasons for protecting the country’s sovereignty and maintaining its differences from America. In this book, as I focus on Canadian literature in English from the war era – and, in my final chapter, on recent novels revisiting the war – I explore the conflict’s enduring importance to Canadian nationalism and literature. I do not think it coincidental that the emergence of the “new nationalism” – a nationalism bent on establishing Canada’s political, economic, and cultural independence from the United States4 – occurred during the period between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964 and the communist takeover of Saigon in April 1975, the years of what the Vietnamese call “the American war.”5 As the new nationalists grappled with the conflict, they developed a mythology of Canada that continues to have influence whenever people describe the country as liberal, peaceable, humanitarian, hospitable, and harmoniously multicultural. One reason for the Vietnam War’s enduring influence in Canada is that the conflict still powerfully resonates in the United States. Not least, Americans evoke the war every four years during presidential election

Introduction 5

campaigns when, dependably, more than a few progressive-minded citizens threaten that they will move to Canada if the Republican candidate wins. Just as dependably, the Canadian news media report those threats and recall the precedent of US emigration during the Vietnam War. In the summer of 2016, for instance, as Globe and Mail writer Elizabeth Renzetti imagined “new waves of refugees” arriving in Canada from the United States if Donald Trump were elected president, she offered her own column-length, updated version of a bestselling Canadian publication from the war, Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, in which she emphasized that Canada was “enviably peaceful.”6 In such ways, media coverage reflects and reproduces a myth of Canada-US difference that the Vietnam War inaugurated. That has been especially clear in relation to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The US involvement in drawn-out guerrilla warfare in both countries, the Canadian government’s decision not to contribute troops to the Iraq war, and the eventual appearance of US deserters seeking refuge in Canada led many commentators to recollect the Vietnam War and reiterate the myth of Canada as a sanctuary for dissidents. At the same time, there was a resurgence of Canadian literary interest in the Vietnam War era. In 2006, my own awareness of the period’s contemporary significance led me to start work on a novel, Once We Had a Country, about young Americans who move to Canada in 1972. By the time the book was published in 2013, eleven other Canadian novels addressing the war had appeared, including no fewer than three Giller Prize winners. As these novels have revisited and renovated myths of Canada established during the Vietnam War, they have offered further evidence that the war is here in Canada still, pressing at the country politically and culturally, reminding Canadians of their country’s fraught relationship with the United States and the rest of the world while compelling them to examine what kind of country Canada has been and should be. Scholarship addressing the war and Canada has tended to focus on draft dodgers or Canada-US governmental relations;7 there has been comparatively little discussion of the war’s ramifications for Canadian culture. In this book, I investigate the preoccupation with the war manifested by Canadian writers, whether in fiction, poetry, and drama or in periodical commentary and books of nonfiction. The war years were a seminal period for Canadian literature. As Canadians came to believe that US actions in Vietnam were imperialist and unjust, there was a

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deeply felt impetus to articulate an independent Canadian identity, and literary authors were at the forefront in doing so. But although there has been a spate of recent historiography addressing Canada in the period sometimes called the “long sixties,”8 the war itself has not received much attention from scholars of Canadian literature.9 It is as though they have heeded a criticism that literary nationalists levelled at anti-war activists during the conflict: that a Canadian preoccupation with Vietnam was a symptom of colonization by the United States. In a November 1969 Maclean’s article, for instance, Jon Ruddy claimed that “Vancouver hippies” demonstrating against the war would not be doing so but for US media reports of American hippies doing likewise.10 In 1972, Margaret Atwood similarly listed “marches on Ottawa (!) to stop the war in Vietnam” as among the “values and artefacts flowing in from outside” Canada.11 But then, Canadian literary criticism may be simply slow to historicize at all. It is striking that although there has been much critical attention to Canadian literature published during the war years, little of that criticism has been historicizing in any respect. Perhaps it is because so many of the critics producing that work were alive during the war and see the influence of that iconic era on Canadian literature as too obvious to merit discussion. From my perspective as someone who entered the field more recently, however, the relationship between the war and Canadian writing is extraordinary. As a result, this book is not only the first one about the Vietnam War and Canadian literature but also one of the first ­volumes devoted primarily to Canadian literature of the long sixties. Examining canonical Canadian literature such as Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), and Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977), along with bestselling pulp fiction such as Richard Rohmer’s Ultimatum (1973), I attend to the ways in which those texts channel the war and connect it to Canada. I also investigate how newspaper and magazine pundits evoked the war when discussing Canadian identity, and I revisit literary anthologies published in the war era to consider the ways in which other writers depicted the conflict.12 Although these texts did not always reach a large readership or have much of an afterlife, they collectively reveal significant patterns of discourse involving the war and Canada. In my final chapter, I go on to discuss recent novelistic responses to the war as evidence of the

Introduction 7

conflict’s lasting impact on Canadian culture. In fact, given that Earle Birney’s poem “Looking from Oregon,” possibly the first Canadian literary text about the Vietnam War, was written in August 1964 as a response to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and given that the most recent warrelated Canadian novel I address, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things, was published in 2014, we can say that Canadian literature of the Vietnam War has entered its second half-century. Throughout this book, my focus is not on writers’ lives during the war but on the writing they produced and its treatment of the conflict with respect to Canada. I argue that the language and concerns of the war were crucial to the new nationalism and fed into the Canadian imaginary: that is, the reservoir of stories, concepts, imagery, symbols, and slogans that people use to make sense of Canada’s history and identity. Participation in maintaining and replenishing this reservoir pulls people into what Benedict Anderson famously called the “imagined community” of the nation.13 It is a reservoir with a complex, dynamic relationship to what Charles Taylor describes as the “social imaginary”: that is, “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”14 During the Vietnam War, imaginings of Canada were bound up not only with the war but also with discourses of gender, sexuality, and race that were themselves likewise involved in the discourse of Vietnam. And although the Canadian imaginary was and remains ­heterogeneous, containing elements that contradict and compete with one another, certain motifs became prevalent during the war, including the use of sexualizing personifications to describe Canada-US relations, imaginings of Canada-US military conflict, and the alignment of US mass media with violence. I take the appeal of such motifs to lie partly in their ability to marshal in readers what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling” – ways of feeling that, as Williams puts it, “exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.”15 Although there were creditable reasons to be a Canadian nationalist during the Vietnam War, nationalism did not bank on reason alone. Instead, it depended on fostering citizens’ affective attachments to the nation so that those people would have feelings about the country and feel part of the country. In this book, I demonstrate how metaphors and imagery

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played a part in developing people’s feelings along those lines. By connecting Canada to things such as gender, sexuality, and violence, literature worked to associate the nation with the considerable affect often attached to those things. In the war era, Canada was repeatedly imagined as a sexually assaulted woman, a guerrilla, and a “peaceable kingdom.” Each of these metaphors had the potential to strike at citizens’ self-conceptions and resonate in terms of people’s relationships to social norms. Each metaphor was liable to stimulate emotions, positive or negative, in ways that could be at once propagandistic and pedagogical, teaching people how to feel about Canada. More specifically, each metaphor brought feelings about the Vietnam War to bear on conceptions of Canada, inviting readers to think of Canada in relation to the United States, in particular. While the metaphors often insisted on the two countries’ similarities, they also served to popularize a conception of Canada as a progressive alternative to America. By tracking the role that the war and Canadian writers played in shaping that conception, we can better understand why the war remains a touchstone in Canadian literature and nationalist myth. Moreover, we can better appreciate Canadian literature’s historic and continuing influence on the national imaginary. t h e v i e t n a m wa r a n d t h e n e w n at i o n a l i s m

While the Vietnam War has played a unique role in the Canadian imagination, it must be said that several wars have had transformative effects on notions of Canadian identity. It was the American War of Independence that effectively created Canada, establishing the international border that has been at the forefront in many Canadians’ conceptions of their country ever since. Moreover, the settlement north of that border by British Loyalists who had lost the war provided generations of Canadians with an originary myth of their country as a nation of losers, refugees, and obedient children who did not reject their imperial parent as had the rebellious Americans. Later, the War of 1812 cemented the idea of Canada as vulnerable to, opposed to, and – against the apparent odds – capable of militarily repelling the United States. The American Civil War, meanwhile, has stood in Canadian mythology as the kind of domestic

Introduction 9

cataclysm that Canada, for all its own internal conflicts, has managed to avoid. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Boer War foreshadowed the Vietnam War in its radicalizing effect on Canadians, many of whom felt that Great Britain had embroiled itself and Canada in an unnecessary conflict; as historian Ian McKay observes, the war “propelled many ­middle-of-the-road Canadians into unimagined territories of left anti-­ imperialism.”16 As for twentieth-century wars, the First World War is still often considered the conflict in which Canada “came of age,” given that it featured Canadian soldiers fighting together under the national banner for the first time and achieving impressive battlefield victories, while the Second World War and the Cold War produced an unprecedented degree of military cooperation between Canada and the United States, contributing to Canadian concerns about a loss of sovereignty. At one time or another during the war in Vietnam, Canadian nationalists evoked each of the conflicts I have just mentioned, often as evidence of obdurate American warmongering or as proof that Canadians had the patriotism and military wherewithal to resist what the nationalists saw as the US empire. Philip Resnick characterizes the decades prior to the Vietnam War as an era of continentalism in Canada, claiming that until 1965, “all ­Canadian classes continued to identify with American leadership in the political, economic, and cultural fields.”17 That identification was abetted by the fact that Canada-US economic integration after the Second World War coincided with prosperity for both countries. However, some commentators in Canada spoke out about the dangers of North American integration even before the Vietnam War began. As early as 1947, Harold Innis declared that Canada had moved “from colony to nation to colony.”18 Four years later, the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, better known as the Massey Commission, fretted in its influential report about the inundation of Canada by US media. In 1957, Liberal politician Walter Gordon produced his own report claiming that there was too much foreign investment in Canada, and in 1960 a bestseller by James M. Minifie with the provocative title Peacemaker or Powder-Monkey went so far as to argue that Canada should free itself from US influence and declare itself neutral in the Cold War. But traditional Canadian nationalism also suffered ­setbacks, including the 1963 federal election defeat of the Progressive

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Conservative government led by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who had traded in anti-American rhetoric during the campaign. The decision by his Liberal successor, Lester B. Pearson, to accept US nuclear launch sites on Canadian soil seemed a decisive turn toward continentalism. A similar augur was the fate of the 1963 nationalist federal budget introduced by Gordon, who had been named Pearson’s minister of finance: it was quashed after protests from the Canadian business elite and Gordon’s fellow Cabinet members. That year, F.R. Scott would suggest in his poem “National Identity” that at the heart of Canadian identity was the phrase “c o u r t e s y o f c o c a - c o l a l i m i t e d .”19 In doing so, he anticipated the frequent association during the Vietnam War of the United States with global capitalist hegemony. Political philosopher George Grant saw things much the same. In his preface to the 1970 edition of his book Lament for a Nation (1965), he observed, “The central problem for nationalism in English-speaking Canada has always been: in what ways and for what reasons do we have the power and the desire to maintain some independence of the American empire?”20 Yet in Lament for a Nation itself, Grant had declared that Canadian difference from the United States was an impossible dream and that figures such as Diefenbaker had been fighting futilely against the rise of a technologist, liberal modernity embodied by America. Grant wrote Lament for a Nation just as US president Lyndon B. Johnson was beginning to send American combat troops into Vietnam. By the end of 1964, there were 23,000 of them there; a year later, there were 184,300 and the first Canadian teach-ins about the war had been held. As late as 1966, a majority of Canadians surveyed in a public opinion poll said they wished for the United States to maintain or even increase its attacks in Vietnam.21 However, the war made Canadians newly skeptical about their relationship to America and increasingly defiant of the notion that absorption by the United States was inevitable. Even if Grant was right that Canadians had become irrevocably Americanized, there was still the question that George Martell identified in 1970 as an important one facing Canadians: “What kind of Americans are we going to be?”22 Grant considered such questions trivial compared to the larger issue of Canada’s commitment to the American way of life, but other Canadians insisted that there were significant differences between different versions of being American. Previously, Canadian

Introduction 11

commentators had been wont to see their country as more socially and politically conservative than the United States. During the Vietnam War, they increasingly celebrated Canada as comparatively progressive, and they did so in ways that suggested the war’s influence. They construed Canada as a country in which citizenship involved an implicit or explicit choice not to be American; in which there was a need for vigilance regarding the influence of American imperialism, capitalism, and technologism; and in which national identity did not conform to traditional norms of gender and sexuality. They described Canada as welcoming to refugees, multicultural without racialized violence, internationalist rather than xenophobic, peacekeeping rather than bellicose, and protective of individual freedoms, not least insofar as there was no military draft. Such an idealized picture was troubled by the actuality of abundant racism, various forms of complicity in the Vietnam War, and the imposition of martial law during the October Crisis of 1970. Nevertheless, the ideal continued to be rehearsed, and it gained popularity in concert with shifts in perceptions of the Vietnam War. The idea of Canada as more progressive than America had a genealogy that predated the war. For instance, Canadians had long pointed to the Underground Railroad as a sign that Canada possessed a better history of race relations than did the United States. Also, Pearson’s 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the formation of a United Nations (u n ) Emergency Force during the Suez Crisis of 1956 had inaugurated the notion of Canada as a peacekeeping country. Likewise, the Vietnam War was hardly the sole cause of the new nationalism’s rise in English Canada. Stephen Azzi, who identifies the earliest known use of the term new nationalism as occurring in a 29 November 1969 Toronto Star article by Anthony Westell, describes this nationalism as characterized by a “growing feeling of distress over American influence in Canada” in a variety of regards, from the economy and military to culture and education.23 The threat of Quebec’s separation was also a catalyst, demanding that anglophones as well as francophones revisit their views of the country, and the province was a hotbed of intellectual thought about Canadian federalism, with the journal Cité libre leading the way until its demise in 1966. The next year, the Centennial celebrations and the hosting of Expo 67 in Montreal added to nationalist sentiment. Meanwhile, the situation in the United States that spurred Canadians to see their own nation in a relatively positive light

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was not limited to the war. Rather, the civil rights movement illuminated US racism, inequality, and state violence, while the assassinations of political leaders from President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to his brother Robert in 1968 cast doubt on the stability of American democracy, and the Red Power movement drew attention to America’s genocidal history with respect to Indigenous peoples. Moreover, dubious US military interventions in Cuba and the Dominican Republic eroded beliefs in the benevolence of American foreign policy. In the eyes of many North Americans, the years of the war would come to constitute what Gerald Ford referred to in 1974 as America’s “long national nightmare.”24 For all the problems of the time, the Vietnam War enjoyed unmatched popularity as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the United States. The war exposed the country’s militarism, while the murderous and environmentally deleterious effects of American technologism were evident in the US military’s use of napalm, white phosphorus, and the defoliant Agent Orange. The staggering number of Vietnamese casualties – especially among civilians, and particularly among children – seemed to bespeak a monstrous, racist disregard for life, as did the overrepresentation of African Americans among US conscripts. Many people were further angered by the American government’s use of the draft to fight what was seen as an unnecessary war. Meanwhile, the successes of the Vietnamese communist forces in resisting the United States provided inspiration for the increasing militancy of “liberation” movements in North America, from the Black Panthers to Québécois separatists.25 The war became a rallying point of the American counterculture and the focus of political dissent; the emergence in the 1960s of the New Left was closely tied to the anti-war movement through organizations including Students for a Democratic Society (s d s ) in the United States and the Student Union for Peace Action (s u p a ) in Canada. Although an organization such as s u p a might be taken to be merely a Canadian imitation of s d s , anti-war activism in Canada was uniquely tied to a domestic nationalist movement, as protesting the war often went hand in hand with celebrating Canada. New nationalists lauded the Canadian government’s refusal to contribute combatants to the Vietnam War, along with the government’s eventual acceptance of US war resisters. Northrop Frye’s 1965 description of Canadians as seeking a “peaceable kingdom” was not made with any explicit reference to Vietnam, but

Introduction 13

it gained resonance in light of the conflict, and the phrase rapidly gained currency as Canadian dissent regarding the war became a nationalist cornerstone.26 In a 1967 issue of Canadian Dimension, Gad Horowitz declared that “Canadian nationalism … leads away from Vietnam” and that Canada could build “a society which is better than the Great Society.”27 By the end of the decade, a solid majority of Canadians were against the war; in 1970, new nationalists Gerald L. Caplan and James Laxer would even call Canada a “counter-America” populated by “a more relaxed and humane people.”28 And while the most vociferous Canadian nationalists often had ideological affinities with the New Left in the United States, the new nationalism occupied a broad range of the political spectrum. On the one hand, it received strident articulation by the Waffle movement, a socialist splinter group in the federal New Democratic Party (n d p ) that was led by figures including Laxer, Caplan, and Melville Watkins. Watkins, a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, attributed his transformation from a free-market continentalist into a nationalist and socialist to his having been “radicalized” by the Vietnam War.29 On the other hand, the new nationalism also found expression at the political centre in the Committee for an Independent Canada, established in 1970 by Walter Gordon, University of Toronto economics professor Abraham Rotstein, and writer-editor Peter C. Newman. For these figures, too, the war was galvanizing: Newman, for one, wrote in the November 1972 issue of Maclean’s that the “Vietnamization” of the United States had “finally brought about the Canadianization of Canada” by making Canadians “wary witnesses” of the war’s “senseless horror.”30 Such invocations of Vietnam in discussions of the Canada–US relationship need to be understood in the context of shifts in that relationship after the Second World War. Previously, Canadian nationalists had tended to put considerable stock in Canada’s ties to Britain, which were seen as a counterbalance to US influence. However, with events such as the North American establishment of the Joint Board of Defense in 1940, the creation of the North American Air Defense Command (n o r a d ) in 1958, and the Auto Pact of 1965, as well as the increasing US ownership of Canadian corporations, not to mention the growing dominance of Canadian airwaves and newsstands by American mass media, Canada seemed to be moving into an ever more dyadic relationship with the

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United States. In that context, Vietnam came to serve Canadian nationalists as a vehicle for re-triangulating the Canada–US relationship. By introducing Vietnam to discussions of North America, nationalists could distinguish US imperialism and militarism from Canadian multilateralism and peacekeeping. Vietnam also became a point of comparison with Canada as another small country in a fraught relationship with the United States. New nationalists saw America as oppressing Vietnam in ways that paralleled the US economic and cultural domination of Canada, and they suggested that the parallels might grow even more alarming if the United States ever decided Canadians were a security threat. As the war went on, nationalists could also point to the Vietnamese communist forces’ military victories as evidence that American primacy was waning and could be successfully resisted by a small country with a sufficiently committed citizenry. Canadian nationalism of the period was predicated foremost on the notion that Canada was and should continue to be different from the United States. In 1970, William Kilbourn remarked, “The new sense of conviction and purpose to Canadian nationalism derives in part, of course, from strong feelings about the direction of American society.”31 In other words, the new nationalism was dialectical and differential; its conception of what Canada should be was based strongly on condemnatory assessments of the United States and a belief that Canada needed to avoid making America’s mistakes. With Britain no longer prominent in Canadian life, aspirations for the maintenance of a distinct Canadian identity depended increasingly on the identification and establishment of differences from the United States that did not involve pointing to Canada’s place in the Commonwealth. The Canadian decision not to commit troops to the Vietnam War became important in this respect, especially once Canadians began bearing witness, via American and domestic mass media, to US failures and misdeeds in the conflict. As they did so, it became evident that they were in a privileged position to study the United States. New nationalists would come to share the hope articulated by the narrator of Atwood’s Surfacing: that “the Americans” could “be watched and predicted and stopped without being copied.”32 Whether or not Canadians could “stop” the United States militarily in the way that Vietnamese communists had managed to do, they might at least stop America from subsuming Canadian distinctiveness. In that regard, many

Introduction 15

Canadians came to believe that Canadian difference needed to be progressive difference. Kari Levitt, for example, wrote in the influential 1970 book Silent Surrender, “If there does not exist in Canada a value system basically different from that prevailing in the United States; if private consumption is accepted as the guiding principle of social policy, and the protection of the individual and his community from manipulation by bureaucratic private profit-making complexes is not considered to be an important aim of national policy; if Canadian nationalism is … nothing more than a composite of provinciality of outlook, a sense of inferiority, and an anti-Americanism born of greed and envy of our neighbours, then the nationalists have no case.”33 Levitt was not alone in echoing Grant by aligning Canada with the possibility of ideological difference from US capitalism; when it came to views of America, Canadian writers cited Grant more often than any other compatriot. But new nationalist commentators infrequently shared Grant’s conservatism or his pessimism about the prospects for maintaining Canadian difference. Nationalist rhetoric sometimes tipped over into simplistic, hyperbolic oppositionalism, advocating for Canada to be everything America was not, treating the United States as though it were the cause of every Canadian affliction, and cautioning against the infiltration of Canada by all things American, as in the case of Atwood’s concern about the anti-war movement. Nationalists also had a tendency to generalize grossly about the United States, as though it were a homogenous entity rather than home to enormous cultural and political diversity. For instance, it was uncommon for Canadian nationalists to acknowledge publicly that many Americans shared their critical views of the United States, even though US dissenters often gave speeches north of the border and influenced Canadian thinking. Instead, more than a few new nationalists spoke derogatorily about “the Americans” as a whole. If Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane are right to define anti-­Americanism as “a psychological tendency to hold negative views of the United States and of American society in general,” then it is fair to say that new nationalists could exhibit anti-American proclivities.34 Whenever Canadians refused to give credit to any element of American society, they demonstrated an irrationally reductive, totalizing view of the United States. As I suggest in chapter 1, such totalization was an especially frequent constituent of Canadian artists’ personifications of the United States, which presumed to ­

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emblematize America in its entirety. Yet if such representations sometimes instantiated and cultivated anti-Americanism, Canadian nationalists also often showed a canny self-awareness with respect to their anti-American leanings. Consider writer Heather Robertson’s remark in the April 1975 issue of Maclean’s: “I confess to a desire to toss a hand grenade into every American camper I pass on the highway.”35 Robertson is parodying anti-Americanism as much as rehearsing it, exaggerating the way in which Canadian nationalist sentiment often invoked the Vietnam War in order to cast the Canada–US relationship in outlandishly antagonistic terms. New nationalists were also scrutinous of Canada itself. In the twentyfirst century, it has become commonplace for critics of nationalism to foreground the ways in which the myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom with a flourishing multicultural mosaic fails to recognize serious problems with Canadian government and society. To a significant extent, such critics are following in the footsteps of the new nationalists, who frequently condemned those who celebrated Canada’s differences from the United States while ignoring the ways in which Canada shared America’s failings. For many new nationalists, the Canada for which they advocated was a largely unrealized ideal, and their activism often took the form of castigating the nation for its shortcomings in realizing that ideal. They were especially critical of Canada with respect to the Vietnam War. As Grant put it in 1967, Canada’s “fate” grew “most evident in the light of Vietnam,” because what was “being done” by the US military in Vietnam was being done by a society that was “in a deep way” Canadians’ own.36 For Grant, Canada’s refusal to fight in Vietnam was a superficial difference in the face of a broader, overwhelming Canadian embrace of US-style liberal technologism. Other new nationalists emphasized the more concrete facets of Canada’s complicity in the war. As early as the autumn of 1965, anti-war protesters in Toronto declared in print, “The War in Viet Nam is Canada’s war. Canadian materials and supplies support the American war structures.”37 Subsequent commentators drew attention to the fact that Canadian manufacturers were selling munitions to the United States for use in Vietnam and testing chemical warfare agents on behalf of the American military. One critic, John W. Warnock, noted in 1970 that from 1965 to 1967, Canada’s sales to the US military had accounted for $874.3 million in trade. Among the commodities sold

Introduction 17

were ammunition, rocket and artillery components, missile components, explosives for bombs, small arms, aircraft, army boots made by Canadian shoemaker Bata, whiskey made by Hiram Walker, and the famous US Army Special Forces green berets, which were furnished by Dorothea Knitting Mills in Toronto.38 Such a close accounting of Canada’s involvement in the American war effort had the nationalist effect of exposing Canadian complicity in Vietnam while reminding compatriots of their country’s hazardous economic dependence on US trade. Anti-war activists also berated Canadian politicians for failing to speak out against the US prosecution of the war, attributing their silence to their membership in a comprador class that identified itself with US interests. Critics pointed to the fact that the Canadian government, despite its official neutrality, was providing aid to South Vietnam but not to North Vietnam. And although Canada’s claim to neutrality was supported by the country’s membership in the three-member International Control Commission that had been established in 1954 to monitor the situation in Vietnam, the Canadian mission was condemned for providing covert support to the United States. Meanwhile, Walter Stewart’s “The Forgotten Children,” published in the 1 April 1967 edition of the Toronto Star Weekly, depicted federal secretary of external affairs Paul Martin as leading government efforts to stonewall Canadian organizations’ attempts to help South Vietnamese children maimed by the war. In making the case against Martin and the government, Stewart quoted American child-education guru Benjamin Spock, who said, regarding the lack of North American humanitarian aid in Vietnam, “You go step by step until you are at a level of barbarism no different than Hitler’s.”39 Stewart concluded his article by observing of Canadians, “As long as we remain so polite, timid and diplomatic, the children of Viet Nam will go on bleeding and dying without aid or comfort and we cannot pretend, even to ourselves, that we really care.” The comparison of Vietnamese civilian deaths to the Holocaust and the emphasis on Vietnamese ­children as innocent victims were rhetorical devices that would prove to be popular in Canadian anti-war discourse, as commentators sought to heighten Canadians’ affective relationship to Vietnamese suffering by triggering their established responses to more longstanding, uncontroversial figures of victimhood. For instance, Dennis Lee’s speaker in the poem “The Children in Nathan Phillips Square,” published in a 1968 anthology

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and appearing as one of the meditations in Lee’s Civil Elegies the same year, compared the US killing of civilians in Vietnam to the Holocaust, while likening Canadians who went on about their lives during the war to Germans who did the same while hearing the “interminable racket of the trains” bearing people to Nazi death camps.40 Reminding readers of the quiescence and wilful ignorance that had allowed the Holocaust to occur, Lee’s poem invited Canadians to see themselves as complicit in Vietnam and to take an active stance against US actions there. Accusations of Canadian complicity in the war made their way into literature as early as Earle Birney’s poem “I Accuse Us,” which Birney framed as a speech he had given at a Toronto anti-war rally in 1967. The poem goes about deconstructing Canada-US difference from the beginning, using its title to hint at the affinities of “us” with “US.” Birney moves on to decrying the Canadian manufacture of American munitions, and he alludes to the controversy identified by Stewart, declaring that “our doctors / werent [sic] allowed to sew new eyelids & skin / on little gooks that get in the road / of free enterprise.”41 The detail of sewing eyelids on a child was included in a companion piece to Stewart’s article written by William F. Pepper and published in the same issue of the Toronto Star Weekly. Birney also reports of his country: We are the boys who put delegates on the United Nations’ commission to keep real peace in Vietnam & secretely [sic] told them not to report the shiploads of arms the U.S. unloaded weekly in Saigon42 If Birney’s ironic use of an offensive epithet to describe Vietnamese children earlier in the poem serves to accuse his fellow Canadians of racism, his reportorial language in this later passage indicates his desire to educate his compatriots, too, by foregrounding actions that Canadian politicians and arms manufacturers would have been glad to keep out of the public eye. Moreover, Birney’s insistence on identifying himself and his audience with the villains of his poem through the use of the inclusive pronoun we militates against audience complacency. The actions for

Introduction 19

which he indicts himself and his fellow Canadians are hardly ones for which most of them could feel directly responsible, but he invites them to meditate on the nature of their complicity in the scandals he reports. Lee does something similar in “The Children in Nathan Phillips Square”: likewise showing the influence of Stewart’s article, Lee evokes Vietnamese children burned by napalm while presenting Martin as a paradigmatically quiescent Canadian politician. The title of Lee’s poem demonstrates a further debt to Stewart’s article, as it parodies the phrase “the children of Vietnam,” which is used repeatedly by Stewart and Pepper. And Lee’s repeated, caustic references to Martin as an “honorable man,” parodying Julius Caesar while ironizing Martin’s title as a member of Parliament, may have been inspired by the caption below a photo of Martin accompanying Stewart’s article; the caption identified the politician as “Hon. Paul Martin.”43 Whether intentionally or not, Lee’s satirical use of the word “honorable” points readers of Stewart’s article towards recognizing the same irony, if more subtly rendered, in the caption’s use of the honorific. Such affinities between “The Forgotten Children” and “The Children in Nathan Phillips Square” indicate the close relationship between literary and periodical texts in Canada during the Vietnam War. Not only did literary authors seek to join journalists in using writing as a vehicle for anti-war didacticism, blending the dissemination of facts – often taken directly from news reporting – with the cultivation of affective responses, but they also frequently deployed similar rhetorical strategies and figurative language. The Vietnam War became a reference point for Canadians wishing to foreground other failures on Canada’s part, too. For instance, Harold Cardinal’s influential 1969 book, The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians, observed that although television had “brought into our homes the sad plight of the Vietnamese” and “intensified the concern of Canadians about the role of our neighbour country in the brutal inhumanity of war,” there was “little knowledge of native circumstance in Canada and even less interest.”44 With this observation, Cardinal raised the possibility that electronic mass media, capable of transmitting sounds and images around the globe with near simultaneity, might turn Canadians into modern-day versions of Mrs Jellyby in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, devoted to ameliorating privation abroad while oblivious to

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suffering at home. At the same time, Cardinal sought to attach anti-war sentiment – common and powerful among Canadians by the end of the 1960s – to the plight of First Nations peoples. Other writers would use US police violence against anti-war protesters as a point of comparison after Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government implemented the War Measures Act during the October Crisis. For some Canadians, the invoking of the Act was an indication that their government was no less draconian than its American counterpart. Al Purdy, for one, would write in his poem “The Peaceable Kingdom,” composed during the crisis, that Canadians had joined “the mainstream of history / with detention camps and the smell of blood / and valid reasons for writing great novels.”45 A few years later, in the poem “Canada: Case History: 1973,” Birney would go so far as to call Quebec “the future Vietnam.”46 Such lines exemplified the tendency of literary writers to be among Canada’s most ardent critics, even while they were among its most vociferous nationalists. In Purdy’s case, the two roles went hand in hand: although his poem disparaged the notion of Canada as a peaceable kingdom, his rehearsal of Frye’s phrase in the poem’s title preserved the notion as an ideal. Simultaneously, Purdy’s wry claim that events such as the October Crisis would provide Canadian writers with the material for “great novels” was an implicit rejoinder to Birney’s well-known 1962 poem “Can. Lit.,” which contrasted the Canadian “bloodless civil bore” of French-English relations with the galvanizing force of the US Civil War on American authors such as Walt Whitman.47 Even while Purdy attacked Ottawa for its violent authoritarianism, he admitted – if with bitter irony – the possibility that the period might have a salutary effect on Canadian literature. As Canadians watched the United States struggle through “race riots,” political assassinations, and war in the former Indochina,48 many continued to believe that Canadian difference could still be meaningful difference by virtue of progressive state policies and a vigorous defence of national sovereignty. In fact, the early 1970s saw a greater degree of consensus – both among the federal political parties and among the Canadian populace – about the need for robust governmental nationalism than at any time since. A significant reason for that consensus was a related agreement that the US war in Vietnam was a disaster, unjust both to the Vietnamese and to the American soldiers conscripted into fighting. A

Introduction 21

sovereign Canada promised no draft in the nation’s future, no Canadian version of the My Lai massacre. New nationalists did not necessarily see the nation-state as an ideal or natural expression of human community, but they were willing to use Canadian nationalism as a tool to create a space in North America that was comparatively conducive to fairness, freedom, and non-violence. Although Canada has never satisfyingly managed to realize these ideals, the new nationalism’s immediate ­influence was evident in the creation of federal institutions meant to promote Canada’s cultural and economic independence: the Canadian Film Development Corporation and the Canadian Radio-television Commission in 1968; the Canada Development Corporation in 1971; the Foreign Investment Review Agency in 1974; and Petro-Canada in 1975. Soon afterwards, the new nationalism subsided, and it is less than coincidental that it did so at the same time as the end of the Vietnam War; the US defeat symbolically rendered America a less potent threat.49 Nevertheless, just as the Vietnam War has continued to influence North American politics and culture, the myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom remains prominent in the Canadian imaginary. f i g h t i n g w o r d s i n c a n a d i a n l i t e r at u r e

There is a good case to be made for seeing the years of the Vietnam War as Canadian literature’s golden age. When the Literary Review of Canada named the hundred “most important” Canadian books in 2006, thirty of them were ones that had been published between 1964 and 1975 – an astonishing number, given that the list stretched as far back as 1545.50 But the number is less surprising if one considers that the decade was one in which Canadian authors enjoyed unprecedented support from the Canada Council for the Arts, which had been established in 1957, and that there was a surging interest in all things Canadian as a result of the country’s centenary. Moreover, advances in printing technology made publishing easier and cheaper than it had ever been. As a result of such factors, Canada in the late 1960s experienced an unprecedented boom in its number of publishers, the volume of books published, and the number of people buying them, while there were innumerable underground newspapers, newsletters, and pamphlets. Many of these publications were explicitly nationalist, self-consciously for and about Canadians, in

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part to compensate for the historical paucity of such publishing. A similar impulse in education led to Canadian literature proliferating as an object of study in high schools and universities, further increasing the demand for Canadian books and helping to create a climate in which, as Frank Davey points out, for the first time in history “an entire generation of writers remained in the country to write and publish.”51 That climate also produced an unprecedented number of books about Canadian literature, including ones that sought to distinguish the nation’s literature from America’s. For example, in Survival, Margaret Atwood’s popular 1972 study of Canadian literature, she identified a Canadian preoccupation with survival and victimhood, in contrast with an American obsession with “The Frontier,” and she further opposed Canada to the United States by asking rhetorically, “Could it be that Canadians have a will to lose which is as strong and pervasive as the Americans’ will to win?”52 Atwood did not explicitly associate this “will to win” with the Vietnam War; in 1972, the association went without saying, as did the war’s frustration of that will. Consequently, Atwood’s contrast carried a pointed irony: if the Canadian “will to lose” was unenviable, the war had shown that the American alternative was hardly any better. Canadian artists of all kinds addressed the Vietnam War directly in their work, from musicians such as the Guess Who, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Gordon Lightfoot to visual artists including Claude Breeze, Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe, and Joyce Wieland.53 Likewise, the first documentary film to be made about the war was Canadian Beryl Fox’s The Mills of the Gods, which was broadcast in 1965 on the c b c program This Hour Has Seven Days. As Ryan Edwardson observes, however, in Canada it was writing that “reigned supreme as the medium of the intelligentsia,” not least because there were so many newspapers, magazines, journals, and book publishers through which authors could disseminate their work.54 The large number of literary anthologies published during the war was just one sign of how much easier it was for most people to publish a poem or story than to create and widely distribute a song, painting, or film. The fact that such anthologies, by and large, were produced by liberal-minded editors and catered to niche markets meant that writers with strong anti-war views did not face the kind of resistance to their work that television journalists such as Michael Maclear encountered. As a consequence, war-related texts were

Introduction 23

published with impressive frequency. Among the many Canadian small presses established at the time, several produced anti-war material, including Prairie Fire, n c Press, and Steel Rail. Commentary on the war appeared regularly in periodicals such as Canadian Dimension and Books in Canada, while the House of Anansi’s Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada was the publisher’s first bestseller, with over 45,000 copies sold and six editions printed from 1968 to 1971. Anansi benefitted from the war in other ways, too: its first employee was the American war resister and author Douglas Fetherling, and another US war immigrant, Ann Wall, ended up funding the press for a crucial period in the early 1970s when it was on the brink of foundering.55 Canadian writers’ impulse to speak out against the war was especially evident in anthologies. The most prominent volume in this regard was the 1968 book The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., edited by Al Purdy. The titular idea of America as a new Rome was hardly new, but the notion gained a new connotation during the Vietnam War, when it came to suggest an empire that was in decline, partly because it had overextended its military.56 And indeed, most of the opinions about the United States expressed in The New Romans were negative. What is more, most of the contributors addressed the war in making their assessments,57 including Purdy himself, who claimed in his introduction to have produced the book with the intention of discovering, among other things, whether Canadian writers felt “that the U.S. [was] pursuing a just and honourable policy with its military presence in Southeast Asia.”58 As it turned out, not a single contributor expressed support of the US war effort. The New Romans went on to become a number-one national bestseller that sold 35,000 copies in paperback. Subsequently, anti-war literary voices figured prominently in other Canadian anthologies. Purdy proved to be particularly influential in this regard, including war-related poems in other anthologies he edited. For instance, Fifteen Winds: A Selection of Modern Canadian Poems, published in 1969, featured Tom Wayman’s “The Dow Recruiter,” a poem about a recruitment agent from the napalm-making chemical company. Purdy chose that poem again for his 1971 anthology, Storm Warning: The New Canadian Poets, a book that also included Lee’s “The Children in Nathan Phillips Square,” David Helwig’s “After the Deaths at Kent State,” and David McFadden’s “For Dwight D. Eisenhower on His Death,” which begins by quoting

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Eisenhower as saying, “We can’t let those Communists take over in Viet Nam.”59 The inclusion of such poems devoted to critiquing the US government risked exposing Purdy and the poems’ authors to the charge of being preoccupied with US politics at the expense of attending to Canada. In the face of that risk, Purdy’s inclusion of the poems constituted a tacit declaration that critiques of America were an important, salutary part of Canada’s literary culture. The war also had a massive impact on Canadian literature by way of the writers and other literati who moved to Canada from the United States during the period.60 But this book is not about them, at least insofar as it is neither a history of writers’ lives nor a study of the publishing industry. Nor am I engaging directly with the everyday nationalist articulations and practices of the non-publishing Canadian majority. Instead, my focus is the discourse of the war that circulated in Canadian literature and periodical commentary, affecting articulations of Canadian nationalism, even as that nationalism conversely influenced Canadian views of the war. In the latter respect, a striking characteristic of war-era Canadian writing about Vietnam is that so much of it was concerned with the war’s implications for Canada. This concern, which some might take to indicate parochialism, if not narcissism, is especially conspicuous in virtue of the fact that there was little fiction, poetry, or drama that evoked the war without referencing Canada in some way. Given the postwar proliferation of North American literary and cinematic narratives about US veterans of the conflict, it may be especially surprising that there was virtually no war-era Canadian literature featuring US combatants as protagonists, to say nothing of Vietnamese protagonists. Nor was there much writing set in Vietnam. Instead, Canadian authors were preoccupied by Canada’s complicity in US militarism, Canadians’ witnessing of the war via mass media, the need for Canadians to speak out against the war, and the possibility that Canada might one day face US aggression akin to what was on display in Vietnam. By dwelling on these matters, writers managed to discuss the war while honouring the nationalist imperative to avoid merely reiterating the concerns of the US anti-war movement. Vietnam may not have been Canada’s war militarily, but there was a common authorial impulse to make it Canada’s war in a discursive sense. In that impulse, one can see the utility of war in articulations of nationalism. A country does not need to be involved in combat for a war to have a role

Introduction 25

in shaping the national identity; Canadian writing about Vietnam illustrated how a nation might construct an identity for itself equally through its non-participation, its complicity, and its critique. War-era writing ­further demonstrated how a nation’s literature might distinguish and consolidate itself by leading the way in articulating such an identity. While Canadian literature of the war era was rife with references to Vietnam, I also wish to examine the ways in which war-related concerns and language suffused nationalist literary discourse less explicitly. That suffusion is evident, for instance, in the popularity that certain critical ideas about Canadian literature attained during the period. Consider the influence of Northrop Frye’s 1965 Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, in which he articulated not only the conception of Canada as a “peaceable kingdom” but also the notion of a “garrison mentality” in Canadian culture extending back to the early days of colonialism. Frye’s timing was impeccable, as his essay found a nationalist audience eager to embrace the idea that there was a distinctive Canadian identity. And even if his positing of a Canadian “mentality” made that identity seem neurotic, it was a more sanguine characterization than was Grant’s view of Canada as dead before its time. But the popularity of Frye’s garrison thesis in the subsequent work of literary critics can also be attributed to his fortuitous use of a military figure. Whether or not he was right to describe early Canadian literature as commonly depicting fragile communities imperilled by and providing refuge from a lurking external menace, the description applied eminently well to nationalist constructions of Canada during the Vietnam War that emphasized the country’s acceptance of US war resisters and warned against the dangers posed by US domination, even invoking the possibility of military conflict with America. Of course, that invocation risked seeming hyperbolic, if not outright silly. In contrast, the metaphor of the garrison mentality had the advantage of allowing nationalists to evoke a militarized Canada without committing to the literal advocacy of one. A similar topicality attended Atwood’s muchquoted declaration in her afterword to her 1970 book of poetry, The Journals of Susanna Moodie: “If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.”61 By the time Atwood wrote those words, critics of the Vietnam War had already been using the language of insanity and overreach to describe US policy and military actions. Moreover, Canadian writers had begun to

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court charges of paranoia by publishing fantasies of US attacks on Canada, drawing unsubtly on the precedent of Vietnam, while critics of Canada’s complicity in the real-life war were attributing hypocrisy and ambivalence to the country, thus suggesting that it suffered from a kind of pathological internal division. As a result, Atwood did not need to mention Vietnam for her diagnosis to resonate in terms of the war. Likewise, although her identification in Survival of a Canadian preoccupation with victimhood was one that she made in trans-historical terms, her characterization applied particularly well to recently published literature that had aligned Canada with Vietnam as a victim of US imperialism.62 Despite the profusion of Canadian writing that addressed the war, critics of the time did not devote much attention to the conflict’s impact on Canadian literature. However, awareness of that impact occasionally surfaced in the literature itself. An example is Tom Wayman’s 1973 poem “There’s a Kind of Hush.” As the poem’s speaker takes a break from marking papers late at night in order to write a poem, he declares in the final lines that he is writing the poem for himself and for all those frightened and lonely dying tonight: in pain and in fire or little by little here and in Asia that my coffee should be warm, the lights burn, the pen move, these hours be still for the marking.63 The evocation of violent deaths in Asia is pointedly delayed and disruptive, demanding that readers resituate the poem’s earlier lines in a political milieu that previously went unarticulated. Doing so, readers are liable still to find it unclear how, exactly, the speaker takes actions in Asia to be safeguarding his warm coffee and electricity supply. He may be alluding ironically to the US government’s “domino theory” that the war in Vietnam needed to be fought in order to prevent the spread of communism to other countries. He could also be suggesting that the war serves as a kind of muse, securing the domestic comfort necessary for him to

Introduction 27

write – and perhaps even augmenting his sense of comfort by offering up violence in Asia as a foil for it – while catalyzing his literary meditations. With that possibility in mind, it should be noted that the poem’s last line, which refers literally to the speaker’s marking of papers, might further suggest that he is being marked in turn by the war. Indeed, given that the phrase “the marking” also evokes the speaker’s writing of the poem, the last lines corroborate the implication that the war has been a necessary condition for the poem’s composition. In the same way, much Canadian literature of the period was marked by the conflict in Vietnam, which galvanized authors into producing what one poet would call, with substantial irony, the “lovely lines of war.”64 Those lines were published in 1974 by George Bowering, who, by that time, had been a central figure in an internecine, strictly cultural battle waged between writers of different regions in Canada. During the Vietnam War, authors from southern Ontario were among the most vociferous nationalists. Their voices’ considerable volume was due partly to the fact that the area was home to a plurality of the Canadian population and a majority of the national publishers. Also, southern Ontario was Canada’s wealthiest region; Stephen Azzi argues that this affluence made the area a hotbed of the new nationalism because wealthy Canadians “could most afford to be discriminating about future investment” – for instance, by favouring economic protectionism.65 Given the degree to which southern Ontario was saturated by US mass media, war immigrants, and branch plants, it was also arguably the most “Americanized” region in Canada. That intimacy with the United States was another reason why, even though there were new nationalists in every province, Ontarians were often most obstreperous about the putative threat of Americanization. The threat included one to Canadian literature; writers looking west to the Tish group in Vancouver – a group of which Bowering was a member – were alarmed by what they saw as the undue influence of the Black Mountain poets in the United States. The idea that the Tish poets were agents of American cultural hegemony claimed the spotlight most distinctly when, in 1970, Bowering won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, while Warren Tallman – a University of British Columbia professor, US citizen, and Tish mentor – was a jury member, leading Robin Mathews and other authors from central Canada to cry foul. As the Vietnam War went on, however, Bowering and other

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Vancouver writers would increasingly voice nationalist concerns themselves. For instance, bill bissett’s poem “l o v e o f l i f e , th 49th p a r a l l e l ,” collected in his 1971 book, Nobody Owns th Earth, recorded a shifting attitude toward the United States, identifying an initial influx into Canada of America’s teachers, poets, and intellectuals in the 1950s – people who were “far out, helpful” – and bemoaning the more recent tide of American arrivals, observing, then came ther businesses also their monoplies, ther cars ther tv shows, now they have control so much of our educational centres, th media, now there is no academic freedom here now they have th place to control th minds of our children66 In such a complaint, there was little to separate bissett from nationalist poets in other provinces. Likewise, Bowering would declare in a 1972 Maclean’s article that he had become a “convert” to Canadian nationalism, citing his antipathy toward the violence he saw as endemic to US foreign policy, including in Vietnam.67 In 1974, he would publish At War with the U.S., a book that featured on its cover a line drawing by Greg Curnoe of a Canadian fighter jet shooting down a US plane. Like Bowering’s title, the image was clearly ironic, but because the United States had recently withdrawn its combat forces from Vietnam, the idea that the American military might be defeated by such a minor fighting force as Canada’s was not quite so far-fetched as it had once been. Although my scope in this book is limited principally to the examination of texts in English, it is worth noting that the Vietnam War played a part in Québécois literature of the long sixties, as well. Roch Carrier’s novel La Guerre, Yes Sir!, for instance, may be set during the Second World War, but its story of war resistance and a soldier’s corpse being repatriated had a contemporary resonance when the novel was published in 1968. Similarly, Anne Hébert’s novel Kamouraska, published in 1970, features an American-born man fleeing Canada for the United States after committing murder, a conspicuous inversion of US draft dodgers’ and deserters’ border crossings to freedom in Canada. And Louis Caron’s novel L’Emmitoufle, published in 1977 and later translated into English as The Draft Dodger, involves the eponymous American protagonist reflecting

Introduction 29

on the similarities between his draft resistance and that of his Québécois uncle during the First World War. As such examples suggest, the Vietnam War had a distinctive timbre in Quebec, especially among separatists who saw the Vietnamese as a fellow colonized people struggling to liberate themselves. Michèle Lalonde’s influential poem “Speak White,” first performed in 1970, explicitly compared the oppression of the Vietnamese to that of the Québécois. Accepting the comparison’s validity, more than a few Anglo-Canadian nationalists felt obliged to support Quebec separatism, too. But notwithstanding efforts to bridge English and French literary cultures in Canada through translation efforts, the two cultures operated with a significant degree of mutual independence. In this book, accordingly, I treat English writing in Canada as contributing to a discrete national conversation, if by no means a complete or hermetically sealed one. I begin by focusing in the first chapter, “The Politics of National ­Personification,” on the pervasive feminization of Canada by war-era writers who deployed metaphors of the Canada–US relationship. Personifications of Canada as an impotent man or a sexually assaulted woman, for example, construed the country as similar to Vietnam in terms of being a potential or actual victim of American hegemony. Such figurative language made the human body a site where discourses of international relations, sexuality, and disease were complicatedly interconnected. Often personification was used to suggest the need for Canada to become more normatively masculine, even as writers challenged norms of martial ­masculinity by associating them with US aggression in Vietnam. A few authors went so far as to align Canadian nationalism with women’s liberation. In all cases, personification had the function of attaching to nationalist discourse the feelings that people had about the era’s volatile sexual politics. While discussing the use of such figurative language in literature and periodical commentary, I focus on two key texts of the war era. It is hard to overstate the influence of the first, Grant’s Lament for a Nation, on the new nationalism. But although countless commentators have analyzed Grant’s ideas about Canada, virtually no one has discussed his use of figurative language and rhetorical devices to express those ideas. I examine how Grant invokes politicians’ bodies and gender identities, along with his own, in order to make his case. The second text is Atwood’s Surfacing, which owes a clear debt to Lament for a Nation

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for its conception of Canada, and which is fascinatingly similar to Grant’s book in its rhetorical strategies. Especially remarkable is the protagonist’s status as emblematic of Canada. The novel’s representation of her facilitates a questioning of gender norms and bespeaks a progressive politics, but I argue that by representing the nation through a particular character dealing with a particular situation, Surfacing threatens to skew views of Canada in problematic directions. I also argue that although Atwood never names the Vietnam War in her text, Surfacing channels the war in its tropes and imagery in order to redirect readers’ affective responses from Vietnam to Canada. This rhetorical device runs the risk of instrumentalizing Vietnamese people’s suffering, even as it depends for its efficacy on the reader’s empathy with their plight. In chapter 2, “Self-Defence Lessons,” I discuss Canadian texts of the war era that addressed anxieties about American imperialism and Canadian vulnerability by imagining armed conflict between the two countries, effectively positioning Canada as another Vietnam, and often doing so in such a way as to stoke militancy in Canadian readers. These fantasies of conflict had didactic ends, as they sought to educate their audiences about US domination and Canadian difference. Associating this didacticism with an educative impulse in the New Left, I suggest that Canadian authors during the war conceptualized literature as both a kind of weaponry and a tool of instruction in national defence. I pay particular attention to a cluster of war-era novels: Bruce Powe’s Killing Ground (1968), Ian Adams’s The Trudeau Papers (1971), and Richard Rohmer’s Ultimatum (1973) and Exxoneration (1974). By staging US invasions of Canada and Canadian resistance to them, these novelists worked to foment a nationalism in which the protection of sovereignty was of paramount importance and Canadians felt their personal fates were intimately tied to the nation’s. To that end, the novels depended for their affective charge on presenting Canadian readers, usually distanced witnesses of the conflict in Vietnam, with scenarios in which Canadian territory – and, thus, the readers themselves – faced a physical threat. These novels also characterized martial masculinity as a Canadian ideal, and they repeatedly used the conceit of guerrilla warfare to indigenize European Canadians by presenting white characters who have masterful, intimate relationships to the wilderness. With those problematic elements in mind, I turn to considering George Ryga, best known for his

Introduction 31

play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1967). Although Ryga’s writings from the war era share the didacticism, the anti-imperialism, and the land-based nationalism of Powe, Adams, and Rohmer, Ryga invoked the spectre of war for very different ends, depicting it not as a scenario in which martial masculinity and Canadian nationalism could be heroically actualized but as a horrific potentiality giving urgency to debate and political action in the present day. For Ryga, whose plays represent and model education as a dialectical process, war was a phenomenon in which dialectic ceased to be productive and tipped over into mutual destruction. In this regard, Ryga suggested, the Vietnam War was cause for Canadians to rouse themselves from complacency into dialogue with each other. In chapter 3, “The t v War and Intermedial Critique,” I address Canadian responses to the relationship between the war and mass media. Literature of the period often considered the media’s role in the conflict: writers foregrounded Canadians’ acts of mediated witnessing, and they mulled the ethics of spectatorship. Attending to the ironic self-­ consciousness evident in this writing, I historicize Linda Hutcheon’s ­seminal assertion in The Canadian Postmodern (1988) that postmodern Canadian literature is distinctly ironic and self-reflexive. I contend that these qualities have their origins substantially in the distanced yet intimate engagement with the Vietnam War that mass media facilitated. The postmodern Canadian fascination with photographs is also evident in writing about the war; poetry, in particular, frequently took an ekphrastic turn by engaging with visual representations of Vietnam in newspapers, magazines, and t v reports. Early in the war, poets modelled a highly visceral response to such images, positing a Canadian humanitarian ­subjectivity while following on from the work of Marshall McLuhan in exploring media’s bodily and psychological effects. As the war went on and poets continued to examine how mass media worked, they increasingly condemned the media for complicity in the US war effort. Identifying such a condemnation in Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, I argue that the book establishes links between the violence of the Wild West and that of the Vietnam War era in order to assert the mass media’s longstanding role in promoting and perpetuating US aggression. Chapter 4, “Queering Canada,” returns to the terrain of chapter 1 by once more considering how authors have evoked gender and sexuality

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along with the war when discussing Canada. While war-era texts often took Canada’s figurative nonconformity with normative masculinity to be a sign of the country’s inferiority, subsequent writers have more frequently articulated and advocated a Canadian identity bound up with a resistance to social norms. Investigating the sources of such articulations, I examine Morton Redner’s Getting Out (1971) and Mark Satin’s Confessions of a Young Exile (1976), two novels about young Americans facing the draft. The novels bear consideration for the ways in which they depict the draft dodger, a figure who was seen by Canadians as both an object of identification and an emblem of American imperialism. In Redner’s and Satin’s novels, the potential draft dodger confronts a crisis of masculinity and sexuality equivalent to the one repeatedly staged for Canada in war-era texts. I argue that as the two novels connect war resistance to sexual nonconformity, they associate queerness with Canada. Then, turning to The Wars, Timothy Findley’s 1977 Governor General’s Award–winning novel about the First World War, I discuss how it builds on those associations. Observing that the figure of the Vietnam War resister stands behind the novel’s fictional protagonist, I also contend that The Wars goes further than any previous text in inviting Canadian readers to identify with queerness. In chapter 5, “A Thousand Vietnams,” I examine the Vietnam War’s legacy for Canadian literature of the twenty-first century. I begin by investigating what I call “the veteran turn” in Canadian fiction about the war, discussing six recent novels that dramatize the postwar experiences of traumatized US soldiers. Although these novels rehearse Hollywood’s fixation on US combatants when representing the war, they display a nationalist bent insofar as they repeatedly bring their protagonists to Canada, which is presented as an ill fit for men unable to escape their involvement in violence. I then consider a second group of novels that depict Vietnamese refugees in Canada, thus challenging the North American mainstream’s preoccupation with white protagonists in narratives of the Vietnam War. As I compare the narratives of refugee life to each other, I contrast Kim Thúy’s novels Ru (2009) and Mãn (2013) – which present Vietnam as a violent, patriarchal foil for a peaceable, emancipatory Canada – with the critical views of Canadian society in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things (2014). Both of these novels condemn Canadians’

Introduction 33

impulse to treat refugees’ experiences as though those experiences corroborate sanguine nationalist myths. Finally, I examine how three novels set principally in Vietnam – David Bergen’s The Time in Between (2005), Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement (2010), and Vincent Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager (2012) – decentre Canada as an object of focus by telling stories of Vietnam that draw attention to the self-serving, myopic elements of mainstream North American perspectives on the war. At the same time, these novels speak with a double voice, making Canadian nationalism a subtext of their narratives, not least by nodding to nationalist touchstones of Canada-US difference. I argue that such covert references to Canada serve as a way for the novelists to achieve their not-entirely-congruent goals of confirming their nationalist credentials for Canadians while appealing to international readers who are, by reputation, uninterested in all things Canadian. The strategy of focusing readers on Vietnam while encouraging a few of them to notice the narrative’s implications for Canada distinguishes recent novels from their war-era predecessors, but it also suggests the ways in which the Vietnam War has, since its beginning, pulled Canadians in contrasting directions: on the one hand, toward intensely scrutinizing Canadian identity, especially in relation to the United States; on the other hand, toward an engagement with the world beyond North America. Simultaneously, the war made it abundantly clear how inex­ tricable from each other the two activities are for Canadians. The fact that contemporary novelists are still rehearsing the war-forged new nationalist conception of Canada, even if sometimes only to critique it, further shows the war’s continuing influence. And the fact that the conception involves a picture of Canada as dialectically related to the United States indicates the continuing significance of America in Canadian culture. Although some commentators have taken a notion of Canadian identity as built on difference from the United States to constitute a superficial or knee-jerk form of nationalism, the Vietnam War continues to be an important cultural symbol of the importance of attending to that difference. The Canada-US border’s usefulness to Canadians was seldom clearer than during the war, even as debates about Canada’s relationship to Vietnam made it evident that the border’s mere existence hardly vouchsafed Canadian sovereignty and peaceableness. The war also proved the usefulness of the border’s permeability, as both progressive ideas and

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progressive-minded people crossed into Canada from the United States. Those people, along with Canadians’ responses to them, were extraordinary catalysts for Canadian literature and for a progressive Canadian politics, allowing Canadians to see the ways in which they themselves were American, the ways in which they were not, and the ways in which they might wish to stay different. In the Canadian literary imaginary, the Vietnam War has carried on to serve that purpose into the present day.

1 The Politics of National Personification See not her battleships but hear her battlecries, And melt (perhaps with a wistful smile) Before the native napalm of her eyes. George Jonas, “American Girl: A Canadian View” About the only position they have ever adopted toward us, country to country, has been the missionary position, and we were not on the top. I guess that is why the national wisdom vis-à-vis Them has so often taken the form of lying still, ­keeping your mouth shut, and pretending you like it. Margaret Atwood1

On 7 November 1967, the University of British Columbia student newspaper, the Ubyssey, published a single-panel political cartoon by John Kula that depicted a naked man lying atop a naked woman, his mouth pressing between her breasts, her hand on his back, both their expressions impassive. On his arm was the label “u s a .” On her arm was the label “v i e t n a m .” The caption read, “Reluctant to pull out.” The cartoon was immediately condemned by readers for misrepresenting the Vietnam War as a consensual act, and Kula sought in the next issue to clarify what he had meant, asserting, “The u s a is not having sexual intercourse with Vietnam, the u s a is fucking Vietnam.”2 But Kula’s interpretation was by no means the only viable one. Rather than making a simple point about America’s treatment of Vietnam, the cartoon turned out to raise difficult questions. At one level, it drew attention to the question of what the people of South Vietnam wanted: to receive support in fighting communism? to be freed from US influence? At another level, the cartoon

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foregrounded the matter of sexual consent, which was gaining public notice as the women’s liberation movement emphasized the imbrication of sex, power, and violence. Yet the sexual politics of the cartoon were not straightforward; it was highly problematic, to say the least, to associate Vietnam’s putative vulnerability with the position of women in relation to men and to instrumentalize sexual assault in commenting on the Vietnam War. By depicting international relations as sexual ones, the Ubyssey cartoon touched two political nerves and disturbingly sutured them together. At the same time, the cartoon raised questions about Canada. Where was Canada in the picture? Who was Canada in the picture? Was its position moralistic or voyeuristic? Was it also going to have sex with Vietnam or, as Margaret Atwood might have imagined, with the United States? In political cartoons as far back as the nineteenth century, Canada had been portrayed as a young woman dealing with the romantic advances of a male America. In the 1960s, the Vietnam War inspired several Canadian writers to reimagine the personified relationship as one in which America’s interest in Canada led to a threatened or actual sexual assault. Accordingly, Kula’s depiction of the United States as assaulting Vietnam deployed a common rhetorical strategy of the day. His cartoon is a case of personification in the strictest sense, as the governing premise is that a nation can be emblematized by a human individual. Other commentators made use of personification by comparing Canada and the United States to people in brief metaphors and similes or through extended allegorical treatments in which particular characters figuratively embodied particular nations. The use of a single body to stand in metaphorically for a country is bound to be reductive, given that nation-states are heterogeneous, mutable entities made up of different peoples, cultures, regions, institutions, documents, ideologies, memories, fantasies, etc. Yet discourse often encourages us to imagine nations as individuals: as animals such as the bald eagle and the beaver, or as people such as Uncle Sam and Johnny Canuck. Frequently, the personification of countries is so conventional and casual as to go virtually unnoticed, as when commentators refer to the “birth” of a nation. By drawing on what Elaine Scarry calls “the sheer material factualness of the human body,” personification makes nations more easily imaginable.3 They become entities that speak and act, are injured, bleed, have virtues and vices, might be loved or hated. Many



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people will not react viscerally to the news of a trade treaty being violated, but they will respond in that way if they hear about a physical assault on a human being. Hence a usefulness of national personification: it abets a nationalism that is not merely intellectual but also affective, instinctive, corporeal, even erotic and sexual – what I have elsewhere called a “somatic nationalism”: “a normative model of national belonging rooted in citizens’ bodily attachments to their country.”4 Sara Ahmed argues that affective attachments have a “rippling effect,” transferring from one object to another through association.5 By giving a nation the qualities of an individual, personification encourages people to transfer to that nation the affective attachments they have to those qualities. It also makes it easier for them to feel that, as Otto Bauer once wrote, “if someone slights the nation they slight me too.”6 The personified nation need not necessarily represent citizens as they imagine themselves to be; indeed, it would be difficult for any one personification to do so, especially in a country such as Canada that has no phenotype, language, or religion common to all. But a personification can still succeed as a nationalist device when it depicts the nation as embodying characteristics that citizens accept as nationally typical. For instance, the Mountie has long been a popular personification of Canada because of the figure’s association with national ideals of civility and fair-mindedness. If no single trope could ever adequately represent the actuality of something so complicated as a nation-state, it is equally impossible for any single metaphor to depict comprehensively the relationship between Canada and the United States, given the two countries’ countless, changing points of similarity, difference, contact, and mutual influence. It is partly for this reason that the metaphors used to depict the Canada–US relationship are so interesting: inevitably, they foreground particular aspects of the relationship while eliding others. For example, in nineteenth-­ century Canadian political cartoons that portrayed Canada as an innocent maiden, “Miss Canada,” being wooed by her male American cousin, the gendering and sexualizing of the countries, along with the assigning of ages to them, were clearly intended to establish a hierarchical relationship between them: power and assertiveness were associated with the male, while the female was aligned with passivity, vulnerability, and immaturity.7 Moreover, the metaphor of Canada as a maiden trapped the country rhetorically by offering it only the limited choices facing a

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genteel nineteenth-century young woman: to remain chaste, unattached, and marginalized, aging into a “spinster” by snubbing the United States, or to join the heterosexual order by aligning itself with America. Neither option promised a Canada that was powerful and sovereign. Meanwhile, the metaphorical kinship between Canada and its “cousin” the United States was a way of acknowledging their close relations and of simultaneously implying, via the threat of incest, that political union between the two would be distasteful, if not a form of abomination. The trope of a male America desiring a female Canada recurred through the twentieth century into the Vietnam War era, at which point artists began using the personification to associate US desire explicitly with the threat of sexual violence. As they did so, they demonstrated that heterosexualizing depictions of the Canada–US relationship have remained popular partly as a result of their ability to take topical concerns regarding sex and gender and to channel them into binational politics. After all, for representations of a female Canada and a male US to appear cogent, one must also accept the personifications’ depiction of men and women at some level. By compelling readers into such an acceptance, sexualizing personifications of the Canada–US relationship are liable to attach to the nations the affect already attached to sex and gender. Simultaneously, the personifications have the potential to reinscribe social norms. Consider the use of Uncle Sam to represent the United States: the figure of a stern patrician “uncle” calling on citizens to do their duty rehearses norms of white authority, patriarchy, familial obligation, and intergenerational hierarchy. Meanwhile, the trope of Miss Canada being courted by Cousin Jonathan – another personification of America that was popular in the nineteenth century – facilitates an oppositional view of Canada and the United States by filtering North American relations through the lens of gender binarism and heteronormativity. Acts of national personification thus betray the social mores and power relations informing and often motivating their production. By the start of the Second World War, Canada had become sufficiently aligned with the United States that metaphors of courtship were replaced by connubial ones, as in the case of historian Arthur R.M. Lower’s 1939 remark that Canadians and Americans “resemble a married couple, who must take each other for better or for worse.”8 A decade later, novelist Hugh MacLennan used the same trope in both nonfiction and fiction,



The Politics of National Personification 39

but with greater ambivalence about the union. In his essay “The Psychology of Canadian Nationalism,” first published in Foreign Affairs, he asserted that Canada was “feminine” and that in her relations with the United States she had acquired “a good woman’s hatred of quarrels, the good woman’s readiness to make endless compromises for the sake of peace within the home, the good woman’s knowledge that although her husband can knock her down if he chooses, she will be able to make him ashamed of himself if such an idea begins to form in his mind.”9 As ­Russell Brown has observed, the passage offers a gloss on MacLennan’s Governor General’s Award–winning novel of the previous year, The Precipice.10 That narrative baldly allegorizes the Canada–US relationship by depicting the marriage of a reticent, virginal Canadian woman, Lucy Cameron, to a brash American businessman, Steve Lassiter. The turning point in the marriage is the Second World War, which indirectly leads Steve into an affair seemingly related to his inability to be the masculine hero of his ­ideals. The novel also depicts the US use of nuclear weapons against Japan as an insane act, propelled by America’s technological drive, that tips the United States over a figurative precipice. Thinking of Hiroshima, Lucy reflects on Steve and decides, “The frame of mind which had produced this bomb was the frame of mind in which he had been born and raised. The skills which had made it were the only skills he really valued.”11 In contrast, the novel presents Canada, via Lucy, as both stifled by a ­legacy of Loyalist conservatism and protected by it from the excesses of the modern age. In that regard, The Precipice anticipates George Grant’s 1965 book, Lament for a Nation, which similarly contrasts American ­technologism with a dwindling Canadian conservatism. Likewise, MacLennan’s emphasis on the bombing of Hiroshima as symbolizing the violence and moral bankruptcy of US hegemony anticipates later Canadian nationalists’ focus on US actions in Vietnam. But MacLennan does not simply make these points in an essay. By dramatizing them through the traits and actions of Lucy and Steve in The Precipice, he suggests that national character and individual character are closely entwined. In this chapter, I consider what it means that Canadian literary and nonfictional discourse during the Vietnam War era so often personified Canada and the United States in the ways it did. Scarry, observing that national personification is common in wartime, asserts that the device has “the virtue of bestowing visibility on events which, because of their

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scale, are wholly outside visual experience.”12 Complicated military strategy and diplomatic manoeuvring can be dramatized simply and concretely through, say, the metaphor of David and Goliath. During the Vietnam War, the Canada–US relationship demanded such simplifying, vivid representations, partly because the perceived US threat to Canada had so many political, economic, and cultural elements, more than a few of which were intangible and diffuse. Considering war-era Canadian uses of personification, I begin with the evocations of bodies in Lament for a Nation. Grant, who repeatedly characterized Canada as insufficiently masculine, was not alone in deploying a conservative gender politics to galvanize readers into nationalism. Such motives and strategies were similarly evident in commentators who represented Canada as susceptible to sexual violation by the United States. These commentators’ apparent ideals were women and countries able to defend their chastity through force, if need be – unlike Vietnam in Kula’s cartoon. But in an era in which America was associated both with masculine dominance and with rapine behaviour in Vietnam, the very gender norms invoked to castigate Canada were being destabilized, and the war became complicatedly bound up with how people imagined Canada-US relations. Meanwhile, the power of personification to convince people that Canada was abnormal had as much to do with the nature of personification as with the country. National personification’s reductive, reifying character meant that whenever the traits of disparate Canadian constituents were ascribed to one human being, the person was bound to seem at least a little weird. That effect of national personification is pervasively evident in Atwood’s 1972 novel, Surfacing. The book betrays Grant’s influence not only in the novel’s depiction of Canadians as beleaguered by American imperialism but also in the use of tropes, imagery, and narrative strategies, which include a gendering and sexualizing of Canada. Surfacing joins nationalism to feminism by associating Canada’s subordination to the United States with patriarchy’s subordination of women to men. By illustrating this point through the situation of the female narrator-protagonist, however, Surfacing demonstrates the problems of using an individual body to stand in for a country. For one thing, there are serious challenges in imagining a nationalist political, economic, or cultural program for Canada based solely on the narrator’s options for selfliberation. For another, even as Surfacing depends on readers’ empathy



The Politics of National Personification 41

for the protagonist translating into feelings about Canada, the novel evokes the pain of Vietnamese people for similar purposes, with their oppression serving as a benchmark for Canada’s putative oppression by the United States. Surfacing thus instrumentalizes the Vietnam War, seeking to utilize readers’ outrage about the conflict to spark their passionate engagement with Canada. The dependence of the novel’s affective economy on using Vietnamese suffering to bind Canadian readers to the allegorical body of Canada further reveals national personification’s troubling political stakes. fa i l e d m a s c u l i n i t y i n g e o r g e g r a n t ’ s l a m e n t f o r a n at i o n

Although Lament for a Nation makes few references to Vietnam,13 George Grant’s book was arguably the volume with the greatest influence on Canadian attitudes toward the Vietnam War. That influence is most recognizable in anti-war activists’ adoption of Grant’s view that America was a modern-day empire defined by its fetishization of technology and its embrace of a capitalist liberalism lacking any commitment to human values. Less obviously influential but also significant is the manner in which Lament for a Nation describes the American threat to Canada: by casting Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker as a national tragic hero, US president John F. Kennedy as the villain, and Grant himself as a secondary protagonist. In Grant’s characterizations of these politicians and himself, hegemonic masculinity – that is, an idealized heterosexual masculinity embodying strength and patriarchal authority – is a key constituent of national identity, yet it is unavailable to Canadians.14 Although Grant lamented this unavailability, his identification of Canada with non-normative alternatives to an American subjectivity opened the door for other writers during the Vietnam War to treat Canada’s “feminine” character as a positive thing. After Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, diplomatic friction arose between Canada and America, partly as a result of Diefenbaker’s dislike of the president. The friction peaked with the Defence Crisis of 1962– 63, which began with Diefenbaker’s slowness to abet the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then escalated when US Air Force General Lauris Norstad publicly accused the Diefenbaker government

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of indecisiveness regarding whether it would accept US nuclear missiles on Canadian soil. The Defence Crisis was a key issue in the 1963 federal ­election that brought down Diefenbaker’s Conservatives and installed the Liberals in power under Lester Pearson. Diefenbaker’s defeat was, in turn, a catalyst for Grant to write Lament for a Nation and to argue that US hegemony had become unstoppable. As Grant saw it, the drive toward what he called a “universal and homogenous state” left no room for Canadian sovereignty or Canadian difference.15 Grant claimed that although Canada had previously harboured the possibility for a conservatism grounded in Christian, communitarian, and classical values, the country had never enjoyed the conditions for that conservatism to flourish, and a conservative Canada would only ever be an unrealized dream. Grant’s argument was especially compelling to Canadian new nationalists, who saw the Vietnam War as further evidence that US hegemony was disastrous, even if they did not share Grant’s conservatism or fatalism. While Lament for a Nation was most obviously influential in its ideas, its persuasiveness was augmented by Grant’s rhetoric. In the book, he explicitly rejects “personalized” approaches to politics, insisting that “biography is not the purpose” of his writing.16 Nevertheless, he devotes the volume’s first three chapters to relating the story of Diefenbaker’s political defeat, and later he endorses a “great men” theory of history that emphasizes the consequences of individuals’ ideas and actions, remarking, “Historical necessity is chiefly concerned with what the most influential souls have thought about human good. Political philosophy is not some pleasant cultural game reserved for those too impotent for practice. It is concerned with judgements about goodness. As these judgements are apprehended and acted upon by practical men, they become the unfolding of fate.”17 In keeping with this view, Grant names various fi ­ gures whose ideas he holds responsible for the rise of liberalism, from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Marx and Darwin.18 With regard to Diefenbaker, then, Grant is not simply out to prove the inefficacy of individuals. Rather, he hopes to show that no single individual, not even a prime minister, can hope to turn the ideological tide generated by centuries of others’ accreted words and actions. At the same time, by associating Diefenbaker’s defeat with the downfall of Canada, Grant works to make nationalism a phenomenon experienced viscerally via readers’ sympathy for a single figure.



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Grant also works to make that experience visceral by making it highly gendered. In that respect, his choice of the word “impotent” in the passage quoted above is notable. Although Grant never explicitly associates power with masculinity, the association is clear in his language and his choice of dramatis personae. As he describes the Defence Crisis and the 1963 election, his focus is exclusively on men: his protagonists are Diefenbaker and his secretary of state for external affairs, Howard Green, while the villains are Pearson and Kennedy. No woman appears by name anywhere in Grant’s book. If his focus on men is unsurprising, given that his subject is governmental politics in the early 1960s, it is more remarkable that he repeatedly construes Diefenbaker, along with other Canadian entities, as bullied and emasculated. For example, Grant calls the Canadian military “mostly an errand boy for the Americans” and deems Canadian socialism “too flaccid to provide any basis for independence,” while he describes Diefenbaker and Green as “impotent in the face of their disappearing past.”19 Moreover, Lament for a Nation begins, “Never has such a torrent of abuse been poured on any Canadian figure as that during the years from 1960 to 1965. Never have the wealthy and the clever been so united as they were in their joint attack on Mr John Diefenbaker.”20 The contrived formality involved in Grant’s use of the appellation “Mr” draws attention to Diefenbaker’s masculinity, even while the description otherwise undermines that masculinity by representing the prime minister as a victim of bullies. The characterization carries over into Grant’s representation of the Diefenbaker government in relation to America: Grant approvingly quotes Green’s reference in Parliament to the United States as “the biggest fellow in the school yard,” and he calls Kennedy a “master in the use of power for personal and imperial purposes.”21 Here, the masculinizing word “master” is hardly incidental; Grant wishes to align America with hegemonic masculinity and the leaders of other countries with femininity and weakness. In fact, Grant represents such leaders as literal “mama’s boys,” linking British prime minister Winston Churchill’s belief that “the British future lay in its alliance with the United States” to the fact that Churchill’s mother was American, while connecting Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s pro-American policies to his mother’s influence.22 The implication that a strong maternal influence fosters a pro-US ­position might seem surprisingly ad hominem for Grant, a thinker

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committed to the thesis that assimilation into the American empire is Canada’s destiny, regardless of any individual’s actions. But his quasiFreudian evocation of mothers’ power in producing male politicians who lack the fortitude to protect their nations’ sovereignty is another expression of his masculinist nationalism and evidence that, for Grant, masculinity is more than simply a metaphor for power and sovereignty. In his view, individual failures of masculinity contribute to national emasculations. This line of thinking is one in which, as the international relations theorist J. Ann Tickner puts it, “The most dangerous threat to both a man and a state is to be like a woman” because, according to the chauvinist stereotype, “women are weak, fearful, indecisive and dependent,” in contrast with the power, assertiveness, and autonomy ascribed to successfully masculine men.23 In Lament for a Nation, this gendered opposition is evident when Grant claims that Green emblematized a tradition of “international morality” that “had little attraction for the new Canada, outside of such unimportant groups as the Voice of Women.”24 Even while Grant implies that he may be sympathetic to such a morality, he suggests Green’s lack of efficacy by aligning it with the putative powerlessness of the women’s group. Likewise, by using the language of impotence, flaccidity, and bullying to emphasize Canada’s subordination to the United States, Grant encourages Canadian readers under the sway of hegemonic masculinity to infer that their country’s apparent gender inadequacies, afflicting not only the Canadian body politic but also the bodies of the nation’s leaders, might be taken to reflect on their own bodies. In other words, Grant’s rhetoric seeks to trigger anxieties that readers might have about their personal non-adherence to gender norms and to connect those anxieties to the nation. To render nationalism further corporeal, Grant draws on norms of sexuality, too, depicting Canada as slipping dangerously away from the maintenance of such norms. In particular, he invokes homosexuality, warning that a liberal society lacks the common values that would allow it to adjudicate matters of sexuality on a moral basis. In such a society, Grant suggests, “Nobody minds if we prefer women or dogs or boys, as long as we cause no public inconvenience.”25 Grant’s heteronormativity is clear in his homophobic association of homosexuality with bestiality, and such heteronormativity is hardly incidental to his national project. He seeks to make nationalism visceral for his readers by encouraging in them



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a variety of “homosexual panic”: that is, a fearful reaction to the possibility of a radical destabilization of heterosexual normalcy.26 In this way, he once more renders issues of nationalism intensely personal, linking the fate of Canada to its citizens’ intimate lives. Meanwhile, Grant presents himself as no less defeated and marginalized than Diefenbaker, going so far as to assert that for many people, his questioning of “the assumptions of this age” might “seem the work of a madman.”27 Indeed, there is more than a little of Hamlet in Grant’s selfcharacterization. He is a scholar in mourning, compelled to remember, investigating the death of a national father-figure whose fall was accompanied by the loss of the kingdom to a usurper – the United States, playing the role of Claudius – who has laid claim to masculine primacy. Grant is left isolated and in a state of seeming madness, grieving while everyone else celebrates the new continental union. For Grant to represent himself in this way is implicitly for him also to cast himself as failing to embody hegemonic masculinity, of which self-possession and rationality are key traits. Grant makes his failure in this regard explicit in his 1969 book, Technology and Empire, where he observes that holding to classical and Christian ideals renders one “an impotent stranger in the practical realm of one’s own society,” and where he remarks that to find oneself “hostile or indifferent to a society may be a necessary discovery, but it is always an emasculating one.”28 In such moments, Grant models a nationalism that writers such as Margaret Atwood would also embrace: one in which the true nationalist is grieving and isolated, with the effect that the loss of the nation is a profoundly individual, affective experience. As the Vietnam War went on, new nationalists embraced Grant’s view that US imperialism was a fundamental threat to Canada and that Canadian nationalism needed to be a political nationalism grounded in ideological difference from America. But just as importantly, they followed him in emphasizing the affective dimension of nationalism while drawing on the discourse of gender and sexuality to discuss Canada, not least with reference to the Vietnam War. In this respect, it is worth noting that a majority of Canadian print commentators on the war were white, straight, and male, despite the fact that women and minoritized people were also prominent in anti-war campaigning.29 This domination of warrelated print discourse was in no small part a product of white, straight men’s broader, longstanding domination of Canadian literary culture

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and, indeed, of Canadian society. Because such men were not, as a group, in a socially subordinated position within Canada, they were free to focus on cultivating and expressing a sensitivity to Canada’s subordination by the United States, even while eliding and rehearsing forms of oppression from which they themselves benefited. Often enough, such writers also privileged hegemonic masculinity in the same way that Grant did, using it as a standard by which to judge Canada. For many of these writers, however, hegemonic masculinity became inextricable from what they saw as an aggressive US mindset that was responsible for atrocities in Vietnam and threatening to Canada. As a result, alternative forms of gender identity, sexuality, and national identity gained an unprecedented attractiveness. p e n e t r at i o n a n d pat h o g e n s

Lament for a Nation was written just as protests against the Vietnam War were beginning and a few years before the full flowering of the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, and the gay and lesbian liberation movement. Each of these phenomena unsettled the norms of gender and sexuality that Grant so freely invoked, and each affected Canadian nationalist discourse. For one thing, they generated rhetoric that was no less reactionary than Grant’s. In 1966, for instance, political commentator John Holmes warned fellow Canadians against their country isolating itself on the world stage and “standing guard over a sovereignty that leaves us impotent.”30 Farley Mowat, speaking out against the Vietnam War in a 1967 issue of Canadian Dimension, condemned “the u s a and its flaccid, parasitic allies,” among which Mowat named Canada.31 The next year, in Mowat’s contribution to the anthology The New Romans, he accused Canada of refusing to stand up to the United States, attributing to Canadians an unwillingness to “risk cutting off rich Uncle’s dole by assuming the posture of a Man.”32 Such rhetoric was a feature of 1960s anti-colonial discourse around the world, which sometimes involved a fantasy of the colonial male reclaiming his manhood by responding to his political and social servitude in a manner that was at least figuratively, and often physically, aggressive and muscular. In Canada, another example was offered by a 1968 article in the Globe and Mail arguing that the country should assert its autonomy by accepting American deserters



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from the Vietnam War as refugees. In making this case, Jack Ludwig expressed his concern that Canada might otherwise become a “kept woman” with regard to the United States, “keen to anticipate demands long before they are even formulated.” In contrast, Ludwig wrote, “a man must be master even in his own small house.”33 While there was some irony in an Anglo-Canadian nationalist echoing the Quiet Revolution slogan “Maîtres chez nous,” Ludwig was following Mowat in enacting what Cynthia Enloe has called “masculinized humiliation”: a strategy of galvanizing men, in particular, into nationalist action by appealing to patriarchal ideals of masculinity and suggesting that threats to the nation are also threats to one’s manhood.34 Ludwig was hardly alone in rehearsing the trope of the Canada–US relationship as heterosexual, but other commentators during the Vietnam War cast the relationship in more violent terms by representing Canada as a woman subject to American sexual assaults. Early in the war era, references to the US “penetration” of Canada were common, if not always overtly sexual; for instance, in the April 1964 issue of Maclean’s, federal minister of trade and finance Mitchell Sharp was quoted as referring to America’s economic “peaceful penetration” of Canada.35 The previous year, Bruce Hutchison had asserted less sanguinely in Chatelaine, “Probably no community, except some primitive colony or communist satellite, has ever been so deeply penetrated as Canada has been by foreign economic power – all this by our own enthusiastic consent.”36 If Hutchison’s tying of penetration to consent left little to the imagination regarding the physical actions he meant to evoke, later references were even starker. In 1967, Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists (a c t r a ) president Henry Comor observed of US television programs in Canada, “We invited our neighbours to the south, who had had experience with this new medium, to come into our house and share that experience with us. But we did not just invite them into our parlor, we invited them to come upstairs with us into our bedroom. We took off our chastity belt, lay on the bed and invited rape. And we have been raped.”37 Such explicitness was abetted by the sexual revolution, which brought greater licence to public discourse, while the language of sexual assault echoed descriptions of the Vietnam War: for instance, a year before the publication of the Ubyssey cartoon discussed at the outset of this chapter, United Church of Canada minister Ray Hord made a series of speeches

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around the country on the topic of “The American Rape of Vietnam.” Thus, the trope of the United States sexually attacking Canada corroborated a wider pattern of American behaviour. The link between US violence against Canada and in Vietnam was made explicit in Earle Birney’s poem “Way to the West,” written in 1965, in which the speaker drives to Sudbury and passes “3 Manhattan-size stacks” that are “ejaculating essence of rotted semen.”38 The comparison of the stacks to an American metropole is hardly incidental; as the poem goes on, it becomes clear that the “way to the west” is the American way, and the speaker declares that it leads not only to “gold” and “the moon” but also to “Vietnam.”39 These lines confirm the stacks’ status in the poem as symbols of an American empire that violates allies and enemies alike in its capitalist, technologist drive. Various commentators followed Hutchison and Comor by suggesting that when it came to sexual congress between Canada and the United States, Canada was a willing partner. Robin Mathews’s poem “Centennial Song,” published in Canadian Dimension in 1966 and reprinted in The New Romans, went so far as to call Canada “a tired prostitute beyond her prime.”40 Sterling Slappey’s October 1968 Maclean’s article on the possibility of free trade with America characterized Canada as “an old maid who is afraid she might be raped and yet is afraid she’ll never be kissed.”41 In the 1970 book Partner to Behemoth, John W. Warnock suggested that the “American domination of Canada” had not been a case of “America forcing herself on Canada.”42 In 1971, John Holmes worried about punitive action that the United States might take against Canada for resisting American domination, asserting, “There is the nagging feeling that this may be an experience which we should relax and enjoy. The complacent idea, however, that the rape would be entirely non-violent must now be questioned.”43 And in an August 1972 Maclean’s article, Christina Newman wrote of Canadians with regard to the United States, “We’ve been awakened from a deep sleep, shocked to discover that while we slept we embraced our rapists with open arms, almost tenderly.”44 Comments such as these risked rehearsing – without bothering to defend – a view that sex workers are objects of disapproval; that women who say “No” really mean “Yes”; that women are subject to the twin pathologizing diagnoses of “frigidity” and “nymphomania”; and that there can be such a thing as “non-violent” rape. In seeking to make visceral Canada’s



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complicity in US domination, the authors ended up promoting a conservative sexual politics. It is not incidental that such tropes proliferated at a time when the women’s movement sought to normalize female sexual desire, to expose the oppressive elements of male sexual power, and to make violence against women a political issue. In Canada, not only were people reading Gloria Steinem and taking the Pill, but there was also an unprecedented number of women at universities, changing the gender dynamics on campus and leading to the creation of women’s advocacy groups. Feminists were successful in lobbying the federal government to establish in 1967 the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which toured the country and received significant media coverage. At the same time, feminists were arguing that power imbalances in heterosexual relations were part of a wider story of oppression. As a 1967 s u p a manifesto put it, “The submissive role of women in the sexual act is inseparable from the values taught to people about how to treat one another … Woman is the object; man is the subject. Women are screwed; men do the screwing.”45 Accordingly, when commentators on Canada-US relations evoked a female Canada who was both desirous and victimized, they were touching on a contentious social debate about gender and sexuality. The frequency of the rape metaphor in nationalist discourse, along with its use to describe the Vietnam War, indicates how forefront and unsettled norms of heterosexual relations had become. Use of the rape metaphor promised to provoke in some readers a patriarchal desire not to be associated with women’s putative vulnerability, while the metaphor was liable to stimulate in others a feminist impulse to oppose male violence against women. If readers could be convinced to view Canada’s and Vietnam’s relations to the United States as homologous with women’s relations to men, then that homology would underscore the importance of anti-war activism and Canadian nationalism. The war’s imbrication with Canadian nationalism, gender, and sexuality during the period is emblematized by an article in the October 1970 issue of the Canadian tabloid Tab International with the headline “Phoney Rochdale College Spreads Dread Asian v d !” The article claims that the Toronto college, an experiment in alternative education that quickly became notorious for its residents’ drug use and run-ins with the police, was responsible for “a nation-wide (and now international) e p i d e m i c

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o f v e n e r e a l d i s e a s e !” The articles goes on to blame US deserters for the “Asian type venereal disease,” implying that they acquired it in Vietnam, although the article then sacrifices its own causal storyline for the sake of ideological scapegoating by suggesting that draft dodgers – less likely to have spent time in Southeast Asia – also imported the disease to Canada. Adding voyeuristic titillation to the mix, the article dwells for a time on the “female teenagers” at the college who are “sexually fulfilled (they think) with the experience of going to bed with a real live American deserter” and who end up spreading the disease “to points east or west.” After wandering from its focus somewhat to castigate the draft dodgers for not having “the guts to enter the service for their country,” the article proceeds to suggest that the police are themselves “c h i c k e n” for not dealing with Rochdale properly, as though the dodgers’ alleged cowardice is infectious, too. Later, the article tells of a Rochdale resident who brandished a gun in Yorkville and “bragged that he knew where there was a supply of M-16’s, the automatic rifle used by U.S. Forces in Vietnam.” By including this detail of militarized US aggression on Canadian soil, the article hints that it is not just disease and guns that are crossing the border but, in a sense, the war itself. Indeed, the war appears to have infected the very discourse of the article, which manifests a variety of militarism in the form of a directive that appears in block letters above the headline: “b l o w t h e j o i n t u p !” By scaremongering about US weaponry while advocating violence, the article reflects an ambivalence about the war that was common to Canadian nationalist commentary of the time: nationalists often dissented from US foreign policy but also cast US dissenters as threatening to Canada and used militarist language to advocate for a robust defence of Canadian sovereignty. Although the majority of commentators who invoked norms of gender and sexuality to address Canada-US relations and the Vietnam War did so in a seemingly unreflective, conservative manner, there were exceptions. A standout was an article published in a 1970 issue of a m e x , a journal for US war immigrants in Canada, by the journal’s publisher, American draft dodger Charles L. Campbell. In the article, later revised and republished in the 1972 anthology The New Refugees: American Voices in Canada, Campbell recognizes a fear among Canadians “that the Canadian alternative will be ‘penetrated’ … by American capital and thus sufficiently raped of her culture as to leave her permanently barren or,



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worse, impregnated with the death-oriented American dream of possessive individualism. Miss Canada is seen in this context as a whore, allowing herself to be ravaged by American imperialism.”46 While Campbell’s synopsis of nationalist sentiments is canny, even more noteworthy is his subsequent feminist reworking of the trope of Canada as female: “Canada is symbolically feminine, and, like the women who have grown tired of being defined negatively as men’s help-mates, she is struggling for a positive definition of herself. Moreover, like these same women in search of liberation, she must not reject her nature in the process but must realize what it means to be feminine and affirm that rather than accept the doctrine that only maleness has identity and thus destroy herself trying to match phalluses with Uncle Sam.”47 Although Campbell’s emancipatory rhetoric involves a problematic gender essentialism, his emphasis is less on embracing a gender binary than on rejecting patriarchal gender norms, making his gendering of Canada significantly more progressive than earlier commentators’. The characterization of Canada as an oppressed woman became increasingly popular, especially among female writers. For example, in Beth Harvor’s short story “A Day at the Front, a Day at the Border,” published in her 1973 collection, Women & Children, a Canadian woman who is working as a counsellor to draft resisters takes part in a consciousness-­raising session with a group of female friends and declares “that the United States is like the Male – aggressive, power-mad, authoritarian, exploiting – and that Canada, with her long history of welcoming fugitives to the maternal bosom (fugitives running all the way from United Empire Loyalists and slaves to draft resisters and deserters), passive, motherly, dependent, exploited and taken for granted, Canada is the Female.”48 Just as the title of Harvor’s story aligns Canada with Vietnam against America by evoking both the war’s battle lines and the Canada-US border, the counsellor’s words oppose Canada to the United States through the gendering of each country, as well as through an emphasis on Canada’s “motherly” harbouring of war resisters. This recourse to the war and gender in order to contrast Canada and America risks overstating the countries’ differences from one another, but Harvor does not allow the posited binary opposition to remain simplistic. Instead, as the story goes on, the narrator, who has been part of the anti-war movement, admits that during sex with her husband, she cries out things such as “Screw

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me!” and “Rape me!”49 Although her motivations for doing so are never identified, her utterances call to mind nationalist recriminations about Canada’s consent to US domination. To be sure, Harvor’s story is not only allegorical; it has a realist cast that compels readers to treat the narrator’s psychology as her own and not merely as symbolic of Canada’s. By encouraging readers to view women’s situation as homologous with Canada’s, not just as a metaphor for it, the story invites its audience to take seriously the ways in which psychological elements such as ambivalence, masochism, and internalized subordination might be at play for both women and Canadians. At the same time, the narrative’s foregrounding of its female characters’ work in the anti-war movement points to the war as another situation involving oppression and suggests that it is connected to the others. While many commentators sought to stimulate readers into a visceral response by casting American relations with Canada and Vietnam as heterosexual, I have not yet encountered a case of a writer explicitly imagining those relations to be homosexual. The closest thing to it occurs in the version of Ray Smith’s short story “Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Center of Canada” published in The New Romans. The story references the “American economic domination” of Canada and then features an anonymous narratorial voice saying to an unidentified addressee, “You mean you like getting bum-fucked by bald eagles?”50 This moment is not a clear-cut instance of someone personifying the Canada–US relationship as homosexual, insofar as the addressee’s gender is unclear, while the assaultive nature of the eagles’ act – with its emphasis on power, not sexual desire – means that it would be improper to take it as expressing a particular sexuality. Nevertheless, the question posed to the addressee rehearses a homophobic trope of anal penetration as emasculating and encourages a form of homosexual panic in Canadian readers. The implied choice facing them is to take a forceful stand against the United States or to face a degrading assault. Derogatory references to the US “penetration” of Canada in other warera texts left it to readers to imagine same-sex relations if they wished. Otherwise, there was a taboo against depicting countries as gay. I take the primary reason for that taboo to be obvious and pernicious: commentators sought to personify Canada in such a way as to suggest not only what Canada was but also what they wanted it to be. Casting Canada as



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impotent implied that the country should and could, as Mowat put it, assume “the posture of a Man.” Casting Canada as a female sex worker implied that Canada would be better off as a “proper” woman or, as Campbell suggested, a liberated one. In contrast, the depiction of Canada as engaging in homosexual acts did not allow for any imagined national rehabilitation, given the period’s homophobia. Such acts between consenting adults may have been decriminalized in Canada in 1969, but, as Tom Warner observes, most members of Parliament who supported the decriminalization still “took the view that homosexuality was repugnant and homosexuals were sick deviants who required psychiatric help.”51 Likewise, mainstream society was still sufficiently homophobic that there was little possibility of imagining a gay, socially acceptable Canada. And there were international dynamics to consider. If Canada and the United States were to be imagined as having a male homosexual relationship, what of the United States and Vietnam? To configure Vietnam as a man assaulted by a male America would have confused the symbolic economy of victimhood at a time in history when male victims of sexual assaults were likely to have their own adherence to norms of sexuality called into question. The absence of homosexualizing metaphors to describe Canada, the United States, or Vietnam – along with and in contrast to the prevalence of heterosexualizing metaphors – further indicates how deeply norms of sex and gender influenced thinking about international politics. Not least, such thinking was shaped by a desire to avoid evoking matters of sexuality that were too socially fraught to be rhetorically effective. As the Vietnam War went on, Canadian commentators had comparatively little problem declaring America to be sick, using the metaphor of communicable disease to emphasize the danger that the country posed to Canada. In a 1967 issue of Canadian Dimension, for instance, F.H. Knelman described Canada as avoiding “the political rabies of vociferous nationalism.”52 Earle Birney was less sanguine about Canadians’ ability to maintain a cordon sanitaire between themselves and the United States; in his poem “I Accuse Us,” he criticized Canada for selling napalm to America, and he declared to his compatriots, “Hell Vietnam was just a symptom / we’ve got the disease!”53 And Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing repeatedly invokes the notion of US ideology as a transmissible illness. In the novel’s first paragraph, the Canadian narrator-protagonist refers to birch trees in Canada dying as a result of a “disease spreading up from the

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south.”54 The reference anticipates a later moment when the narrator, imagining a US invasion of Canada, decides that American forces “wouldn’t even have to defoliate the trees”55 – an allusion to the US spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange on Vietnamese forests to deny cover to enemy combatants. In the narrator’s eyes, such actions would be unnecessary in the case of Canada because resistance to the United States would be comparatively anemic. Her earlier reference to the birch disease further implies that defoliation would be superfluous because America has already had a damaging influence on the Canadian environment. The point is reiterated when the narrator observes of a Canadian friend, David, who repeatedly parrots lines from US popular culture, “Secondhand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen.”56 While the reference to mange promotes the idea of American culture and ideology as a communicable disease, the comparison to lichen echoes her earlier references to the birch disease and Agent Orange to suggest that the US ideological contamination of Canada is longstanding, pervasive, and related to the US presence in Vietnam. Such rhetorical work reimagines the Vietnam War as something not distant from Canadians but affecting them directly. As I will discuss in the next chapter, other Canadian writers during the war similarly made use of it by writing stories in which the United States attacks or invades Canada, turning it into another Vietnam. The trope of contagion differs from the trope of military conflict – but is similar to the trope of rape – in configuring America as an intimately invasive threat to Canadian bodies. In suggesting that Canadians were turning into Americans pathogenically, writers such as Atwood and Birney exploited the intensely visceral quality of the “body horror” narrative, in which characters are overtaken by grotesque corporeal transformations. By using the language of bodily vulnerability to describe Canada-US relations, commentators were able to emphasize the physical contiguity of the United States to Canada, the porosity of the countries’ shared border, and the invisible but powerful threat of American ideology. The trope of contagious disease was less strident than the rape metaphor in attributing malevolence to the United States or willing victimhood to Canada. Nevertheless, a moralizing attitude was prominent in the Tab International article and other texts that combined the motifs of illness and sex by expressing concern about the possibility of Canadians’ sexual relations with American veterans leading to an epidemic. Notably,



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the Tab International article followed a series of media reports over the course of the war about the increasing rates of venereal diseases among US servicemen in Vietnam. As the war went on, the media also reported concerns that the diseases were making their way to North America. In June 1968, a Wall Street Journal article reported on “new strains of gonorrhea being brought back from Asia by servicemen” that were “especially tough to kill.”57 In March 1969, an article in the Globe and Mail referred to gonorrhea’s “viciously high attack rate” on US troops in Vietnam “defeating considerable medical efforts to contain the spread of venereal disease.”58 The rhetoric of killing, attack, defeat, and uncontained proliferation echoed the increasingly pessimistic language used in US press coverage of the war. And for Canadians, who were used to suggestions that their country was copulating with the United States, to associate the American war effort in Vietnam with venereal disease was also to imply that Canada might become infected, too. Indeed, the Tab International article’s scaremongering about “Asian v d ” in Toronto had a factual antecedent in a November 1969 article in the Globe and Mail that identified the presence in the city of a particularly antibiotic-resistant disease known as “Vietnam gonorrhea.”59 Thus, the Tab International article was merely connecting the dots by blaming US deserters for the virus. Moreover, in suggesting that Canada was figuratively susceptible to the American disease that was the Vietnam War, the article participated in a discursive trend that rendered international relations intensely corporeal. In that respect, it is notable that the narrator of Surfacing describes David as infiltrated by mange-like Americanness just after she has rejected his invitation to have sex with him. Without directly raising the possibility of venereal disease, Atwood’s juxtaposition of a sexual threat with a communicable illness implies that intimacy with the United States involves exposure to contagion. Consequently, without even mentioning the Vietnam War, Surfacing deploys a complex of nationalist tropes that popular writing had closely tied to the conflict. vietnamizing canada i n m a r g a r e t at w o o d ’ s s u r fa c i n g

Although Surfacing does not share George Grant’s fondness for hegemonic masculinity, the novel’s picture of Canada-US relations owes much to Lament for a Nation, as it depicts a Canada subsumed economically,

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culturally, and ideologically by a capitalist, technology-driven society in which the United States is dominant. Moreover, Grant’s and Atwood’s books share an impulse to personify Canada. Surfacing, for its part, addresses Canada’s relationship to American hegemony via the experiences of the novel’s unnamed narrator-protagonist, a young woman in the early 1970s who travels from Ontario to Quebec with her lover, Joe, and two friends – David and his spouse, Anna – in search of her father after he disappears from his wilderness cabin. While there, she experiences a stark sense of alienation from the local Québécois and, increasingly, from her companions, whom she comes to see as Americanized in their rehearsal of victim-oppressor relations with each other and the natural world. In the process, she gains a mournful, marginalized position not so different from that of Grant in Lament for a Nation, embracing values seemingly so out of step with those of the people around her that she situates herself at the brink of intelligibility and sanity. While Grant worries about appearing to be a “madman,” Atwood’s narrator actually suffers a bout of psychosis that leads to her fleeing her companions into the forest. Well before her flight, Surfacing works persistently to identify the narrator with Canada. She does not personify the nation in the strictest sense, as she is a comprehensively realized character whose every trait cannot be neatly read as representing an element of Canada, but elements of her characterization carry allegorical shadings. For instance, she follows the Miss Canada of nineteenth-century political cartoons in facing a seduction attempt by David, who is Canadian by birth but entirely Americanized in his cultural reference points. As he repeatedly puts his hand on her knee, despite her pushing it off, she thinks of him as “invading.”60 She gains a similar affinity with the feminized Canada of earlier Vietnam War–era commentary when she has to fight off a sexual assault by Joe. In other respects, too, she emblematizes war-era notions of Canadian identity. For instance, she grew up in the country but now lives in the city, reflecting Canada’s increasingly urban character. At one point in the novel, moreover, an American man – whose name, Malmstrom, conspicuously echoes the name of a real-life US Air Force base – turns up offering to buy her father’s land, thus evoking war-era concerns about the US ownership of Canadian resources. And her psychotic episode, which involves paranoiac fantasies, recalls Atwood’s 1970



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diagnosis of Canada’s “national mental illness” as “paranoid schizophrenia.” The narrator’s status as, in part, a personification of Canada is further confirmed when David jokingly suggests that the national flag should be “a split beaver,” a remark that both feminizes Canada and calls attention to the narrator’s sense of self, divided as it is by rampant ambivalence and by blocked memories of the abortion she once had.61 This gendering of Canada is one more way in which Surfacing follows on from Lament for a Nation. But whereas Grant casts Canada as insufficiently masculine, Atwood shares with Charles L. Campbell in characterizing the country as a woman oppressed by patriarchy. In this regard, the narrator’s decision at the end of Surfacing to “refuse to be a victim” aligns her simultaneously with Canadian nationalism and with the women’s movement.62 Like Campbell, Surfacing suggests that instead of taking on the traits of their oppressors, women and Canadians alike should repudiate dominant ideologies. If the nationalism of Surfacing is more palatable than Grant’s to progressively minded readers, they must still contend with the ramifications of Atwood’s choice to emblematize Canada through her narrator, a choice that carries the same limitations of reductiveness and reification identified earlier in this chapter with respect to other acts of national personification. Especially problematic is the fact that as Surfacing dramatizes the narrator’s increasing resistance to social norms, the novel seeks to make that resistance more resonant by suggesting the narrator’s and Canada’s affinities with the Vietnamese. Although Surfacing never settles the question of how ironic these affinities are, the fact that it posits them at all shows the novel to be deploying a common new nationalist device of “Vietnamizing” the nationalist struggle in Canada by using the war as a touchstone to emphasize Canada’s victimization by and complicity in American imperialism. Surfacing never mentions Vietnam explicitly, but the war repeatedly informed Atwood’s writing during the latter half of the long sixties,63 and the conflict is a conspicuous source of her novel’s imagery. In fact, imagery of war in general pervades Surfacing; as Janice Fiamengo observes, “The language of warfare, territorial occupation, and dispossession forms a recurrent figurative pattern in the novel.”64 For the book’s narrator, much of this language emerges from her childhood during the Second World War, which encouraged her to adopt a Manichean world view in

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which, as she puts it, “There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything.”65 In the narrative present, she sees an analogous binary opposition playing out in gender relations, and she herself rehearses the cliché of the “war between the sexes” by using martial language to describe relations between men and women. With regard to herself and Joe, her language more particularly evokes historical conflict between Canada and the United States, as she declares her desire for the “borders” between him and her to be “restored to where they’d been” – a result, readers might recall, of the War of 1812.66 Likewise, Surfacing alludes to Canada-US political conflict in its opening scene: as the narrator and her companions drive to Quebec, they pass by a place that was once home to what she calls “rockets.”67 Presumably, this is the site near North Bay, Ontario, once housing US Bomarc nuclear missiles, which the Pearson government allowed onto Canadian soil after Diefenbaker had refused to permit them. The recognition by Atwood’s narrator that the missiles are no longer there suggests that Surfacing is set in the early 1970s, given that Pierre Trudeau’s government ordered their removal by 1971. At the same time, by gesturing to the US military withdrawal from a foreign country, Surfacing was, for many readers in 1972, inevitably evoking not only the Bomarcs but also the still-raging debate about Vietnam. The importance of the Vietnam War to Surfacing has not been much noted by critics, although Valerie Broege has identified echoes of the war in the narrator’s description of characters whom she takes to be American as having “sniper eyes,” as well as in her description of camping in “occupied territory.”68 At other points in the novel, the narrator similarly sees her environment through the lens of war, comparing things to bazookas and grenades.69 While her childhood memories of the Second World War are doubtlessly informing her frame of reference, her perspective likewise bears the influence of Vietnam. That much is clear in her sense of her dilemma with regard to male-female conflict; she believes her only choices are to “join in the war, or to be destroyed.”70 Although an analogous belief regarding armed conflict may have been plausible in the case of countries opposed to fascism in the Second World War, such a belief had been scrutinized considerably in North America by 1972, as people questioned the necessity of the US involvement in Vietnam. Similarly, the narrator evokes both the Second World War and Vietnam when asking, “Are the Americans worse than Hitler”?71 Such a seemingly outrageous



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comparison was, as I noted in the introduction to this book, repeatedly made by Canadian authors during the Vietnam War, especially when they reflected on the numbers of Vietnamese civilians killed by US forces and on the North American public’s apparent complacency about those numbers. A condemnation of the United States for its actions in Vietnam and of Canada for its complicity is evident in the representation of the two countries in Surfacing. For example, the frequent attention in war-era media commentary to America’s technological superiority on the field of battle is echoed in the narrator’s characterization of two men whom she takes to be Americans as “friendly metal killers” and, later, in her belief that other Canadians, having been Americanized, are “halfway to machines.”72 The Vietnam War also provides a template for David as he goes about imagining a situation in which the United States, in need of Canada’s water, invades the country, sparking a guerrilla resistance movement. His musings lead to the narrator’s reflection that the American military “wouldn’t even have to defoliate the trees.” In this moment, not only does the Vietnamese resistance to the United States become a benchmark for Canada’s, but the hypothesizing of a Canadian guerrilla movement foreshadows the narrator’s flight into the forest – described early on as “a jungle” – and her growing conviction that Americans are “advancing, they must be dealt with.”73 Before her flight, Surfacing evokes Canadian complicity in Vietnam via a scene in which the narrator and her companions encounter a heron, killed pointlessly and strung from a tree by people she believes to be American. Given that there had been significant media attention by 1972 to US atrocities in Vietnam, as well as to the use of Canadianmanufactured materiel by US forces, there is a contemporary resonance in the narrator’s response to the sight of the dead bird, which is to feel “a sickening complicity, sticky as glue, blood on my hands.”74 That sense of complicity ironizes her earlier self-identification as a “small, neutral country” in marriage matters.75 The reference might be taken as an allusion to the Second World War – one thinks of Switzerland, for instance – but it also had a more current resonance in 1972, given that Canada was a member of the ostensibly neutral International Control Commission in Vietnam. As Atwood was sure to have known, Canada had been revealed to be violating that neutrality by aiding the United States and South

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Vietnam in various respects. Similarly in Surfacing, it becomes clear that the narrator’s “neutrality” on marriage masks her increasingly assertive resistance to patriarchal norms. Accordingly, her identification as a neutral country shows Surfacing to be using the Vietnam War as a silent byword for the complicated forces tying people to power structures and sparking rebellions against them. As Surfacing gestures to Vietnam, its perspective on the war has particular affinities with Grant’s in Technology and Empire. Grant took the war to legitimize his fears about American imperialism and Canadian complicity in it. Addressing his fellow Canadians, he wrote of Vietnam, “What is being done there is being done by a society which is in some deep way our own.”76 But he also declared his alienation from that society, claiming that “the events in Vietnam push one towards that divide where one can no longer love one’s own – to the point where the civilisation almost ceases to be one’s own.”77 This dual sense of membership in and estrangement from a violent society is shared by the narrator of Surfacing. Although she starts out as a passive witness to David’s bullying of Anna and to the violence inflicted on the heron, she finds herself ever more alienated from her companions and resisting participation in their dynamics, to the extent that she is called “inhuman” by Anna and, later, identifies herself as something other than “a human being.”78 Her estrangement becomes complete as she flees into the forest and hides while her companions look for her. As she does so, she becomes a figurative version of the guerrilla fighters whom she and David have earlier imagined. At the same time, the fact that her flight is an individual one leading her away from direct interpersonal conflict, not into battle, aligns her less with Vietnamese communists than with US deserters and draft dodgers. That alignment also resonates with the fact that her trip to Quebec has been both a trip north and a trip across a geopolitical border. The border may have been interprovincial rather than international, but it recalls the Canada-US border that so many Americans crossed to avoid serving in Vietnam. Given the proliferation in Surfacing of elements related to the Vietnam War, the absence of the word Vietnam from the novel is conspicuous. The narrator’s reference to the US military defoliating trees demonstrates her awareness of the conflict, but she never thinks of it directly. A hint as to the way in which the war might be otherwise present for her occurs when



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she reflects that she remained largely ignorant regarding details of the Second World War during her childhood, even though that war was ongoing. “At the time,” she recalls, “it felt like peace.”79 Nevertheless, it becomes clear that the war touched her in manifold ways, not least by inculcating in her a tendency to see the world in terms of binary oppositions. Through this example, Surfacing suggests how the Vietnam War may be similarly impinging on her world view, though it remains just below the surface of things. Meanwhile, the fact that the war goes unnamed adds an uncanny quality to the resonance of her border-­ crossing trip north, her sense of bloody complicity in the killing of the heron, and her hiding in the woods. If the war were to be named outright, the uncanniness would be dispelled and the affective charge running from Vietnam to the narrator would be returned to the war and its countless victims, decentring her. As it stands, the charge carries an unsettling irony. In one sense, the war’s violent power struggles are being reconstituted on Canadian soil, just as David has imagined they might be in the case of a US invasion. In another sense, Canada in the early 1970s was hardly at war with America, whatever the Canadian nationalist rhetoric of the day suggested, and there is an enormous disparity between the narrator’s situation and the carnage of Vietnam, with its millions of people dead, maimed, displaced, deprived, and traumatized. This disparity goes some way in explaining why the Vietnamization of Canada in Surfacing happens only obliquely. Direct, explicit comparisons of the country with Vietnam would make any simple equation of the two seem as ludicrous as David’s imagined invasion scenario. As a foil for Canada in Surfacing, Vietnam also draws attention to the limitations of the narrator’s dissent as an individual and of the narrator as an emblem of her country. Her flight into the forest, along with her subsequent decision to live a life opposed to the forces of American hegemony, is wholly solitary. There is little possibility identified of her becoming part of a nationalist movement such as the one David has imagined arising in response to a US invasion. Moreover, as a white, anglophone Canadian, the narrator remains estranged from the Québécois in the nearby village, whose religion and language she does not share, and from the First Nations peoples who appear in Surfacing in a manner that is only slightly less spectral than that of the Vietnamese. Indigenous peoples exist in the novel as no more than traces, via petroglyphs dotting the

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lakeside near the cabin, and via the narrator’s memory of seeing an Aboriginal family picking blueberries when she was a child. In depicting the Québécois and First Nations as alien to the narrator, Atwood follows Grant, who associates the groups with traditional value systems that are alternatives to techno-capitalism. In Lament for a Nation, he sees French Canadian nationalism as a “last-ditch stand” against modernity.80 In Technology and Empire, he remarks of non-Aboriginal Canadians, “When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object.”81 Surfacing ends on a strikingly similar note: after having Manitou-like visions, the narrator declares that the “gods” she saw will “never appear” to her again, while the natural environment stands before her as a static object, “asking and giving nothing.”82 Surfacing insists that seemingly indigenizing visions have not ultimately liberated the narrator from the problems she faces as a modern Euro-Canadian subject; they have also failed to enter her into a broader community of like-minded individuals. Thus, while Paul Cappon has accused Surfacing of “the common liberal trick of psychologizing social phenomena” and of suggesting that “more enlightened” individuals can resist imperialism individually,83 one should note that the novel depicts the narrator’s resistance as unsustainably and unsatisfyingly solitary. As Atwood put it in her other book of 1972, Survival, “In an oppressed society, of course, you can’t become an ex-victim – insofar as you are connected with your society – until the entire society’s position has been changed.”84 In this regard, too, Atwood follows Grant, who declared in Technology and Empire that although “finding that one is hostile or indifferent to a society may be a necessary discovery,” and although a “retreat from loyalty to one’s own has the exhilaration of rebellion,” there remains the problem that “rebellion cannot be the basis for a whole life.”85 Surfacing ends with the narrator not yet having returned to her companions, not yet joining with other people to undertake collective action. If her solitude indicates the limits of her political efficacy, it also self-reflexively acknowledges a limitation of a synecdochic figurative strategy in which an individual stands in for a diverse collective such as a nation-state: to represent that person as moving toward personal liberation is liable to suggest misleadingly that the



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whole of the nation-state can likewise change merely through individual transformations. Surfacing concludes with the narrator in sight of Joe, finally acknowledging her love for him, if only to herself, while contemplating a return to society with him that would involve them seeking out a non-­ oppositional, non-oppressive way of being with others. At the same time, she anticipates her and Joe’s probable failures in this regard. By ending on such an unsettled note, Surfacing once more echoes Lament for a Nation, which concludes with unsatisfied desire and unrealized possibility, as expressed in a quotation from the Aeneid that Grant translates as “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.”86 In Surfacing, this positionality has occurred earlier, too, in the narrator’s last glimpse of Anna and David as they depart in a boat with Joe after the narrator’s flight. She describes the scene as one in which Joe and David, in the boat ahead of Anna, “reach out hands to her and lift her in, a gesture that looks from a distance almost like love.”87 The recurrence of the tableau at the end of the novel – with the narrator on the brink of reaching out in love to Joe, whom she decides “isn’t an American”88 – cements the allusion to Grant while corroborating the connection between nationalism and interpersonal affect established in Grant’s book. Just as Grant insists on the importance of love, so too Surfacing uses the narrator’s attitude toward love as a way to signal the limits of individual isolation. In Grant’s case, his self-positioning as alone and lamenting is a key element of his self-portrait as Canadian nationalism personified; his solitude reflects the ideological margin that he takes his nationalism to inhabit. Surfacing rehearses this trope of solitude but also responds to it by taking up Grant’s association of nationalism with love and giving it an interpersonal elaboration. The narrator’s imagining of a life with Joe in which they parent a child together recognizes possibilities for Canadian community, even if that community is no more capacious or unconventional than that of the nuclear family. Surfacing associates the future of Joe and the narrator with Canada’s future by having the narrator say optimistically of him, “He isn’t an American, I can see that now; he isn’t anything, he is only half-formed.”89 This description echoes earlier nationalist writing of the Vietnam War era that advocated for the possibility of Canada growing into an alternative to the United States. In fact, the description may be alluding to a 1968 essay by William Kilbourn in

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The New Romans that declared of Canadians, “We still have the chance, in this open, half-formed, dimly identified society of ours, to make something new, even marvellous, out of our American heritage.”90 If it seems unlikely that Atwood could have had this particular passage in mind as she wrote Surfacing, it should be recalled that she, too, was a contributor to The New Romans. By aligning the narrator with the possibility for Canadian counterhegemonic community, Surfacing demonstrates one of national personification’s attractions: it encourages identification with the nation by readers, who may see some aspect of themselves in the personification and feel a connection to the nation through her, her situation, and the affect it involves to a greater degree than they would by engaging with an abstract set of national characteristics and values. At the same time, inviting readers to identify with a character’s situation comes with the risk that they will find doing so difficult. That risk is evident in the umbrage that certain critics of Surfacing have taken at the heteronormativity of the novel’s conclusion. Cinda Gault has gone so far as to suggest a possible life for the narrator that she herself does not consider: a “return to the city alone, demonstrating that she does not need any man to raise her child.”91 It is likely that Surfacing does not raise such a possibility because Atwood wishes to emphasize the need for the narrator to pursue communitybuilding. Still, one might be troubled by the fact that the community Surfacing posits is emblematized by heterosexual coupling. What is more, if the novel is compelled to moot the narrator’s potential reunion with Joe in order to escape the trap of aligning Canadian nationalism with individualism, then the trap is one the novel has created for itself by presenting a nationally emblematic protagonist. Indeed, the narrator’s realization that she cannot live by herself in the wilderness might be taken to reflect the novel’s belated recognition that the narrator alone is not a sufficient stand-in for Canada; that a nation constituted by millions of people, in all their diversity, cannot possibly be well represented by a single body in all its specificity. But if one person alone cannot be satisfyingly emblematic of the nation, why should two be? As a potentially representative pair of Canadians, the narrator and Joe – who is as white, straight, and anglophone as she is – are still strikingly reductive. The idea that reaching out to Joe should be the narrator’s next step in seeking to live free of



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oppressive ideologies risks endorsing the monocultural communitarianism promoted by Grant, who saw love of “one’s own” – “this particular body, this family, these friends, this woman, this part of the world, this set of traditions, this country, this civilisation” – as foundational to understandings of the good.92 Joe and the narrator’s togetherness would not, per se, do anything to address her alienation from Canadians who are culturally different from her, nor would it remedy her failure to engage directly and meaningfully with the Vietnam War. In Technology and Empire, Grant’s concerns regarding the war involve its implications for Canada and the United States, not for Vietnam. In Surfacing, likewise, the narrator evokes Vietnam only while discussing matters involving Canada. Consequently, she instrumentalizes Vietnamese suffering rather than recognizing it as a matter to be considered in and of itself. The narrator’s limitations as an allegorical figure for Canada and as someone modelling an engagement with the Vietnam War make her a character to be treated skeptically. Nevertheless, Surfacing’s feminist alignment of Canada with a woman seeking liberation, while relatively novel in 1972, has proved to have staying power. In 1983, the protagonist of Susan Swan’s novel The Biggest Modern Woman of the World would declare that “to be from the Canadas is to feel as women feel – cut off from the base of power.”93 In 1987, literary critic Lorraine Weir asserted that “women’s texts are to the texts of patriarchy as Canada is and was to America and Britain.”94 By 1996, political commentator Richard Gwyn could go so far as to claim that “Canada represents the feminine principle in North America.”95 This attribution was due in no small part to the overlapping rise of the feminist movement and the new nationalism in the later 1960s and early 1970s; it was easy for people committed to both movements to see affinities between them. But the fact that commentators would, even decades later, continue to describe Canada as a woman in relation to the United States was also partly thanks to the Vietnam War, which was a prime catalyst in leading people to link US violence with male violence and to celebrate Canada as a sanctuary offering its “maternal bosom” to exiles. During the war itself, it was more common for authors – male authors, in particular – to share Farley Mowat’s attitude that Canada needed to adopt the “posture of a Man.” As will be discussed in the next chapter, such writers repeatedly characterized that masculine posture as involving

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military engagements with the United States akin to those undertaken by Vietnamese communist forces. One might see the advocacy of a martially masculine Canadian identity as a response to the repeated war-era derogations of Canada as emasculated and effeminate. Yet Grant, for one, despite suggesting that Canadian politicians were insufficiently masculine, did not clearly endorse Mowat’s remedy, no doubt because of his repugnance at the way in which hegemonic masculinity was enacted politically by the United States. While Grant treated femininity as weakness, he also cast American politicians as bullies and rascals, and this depiction laid the conceptual groundwork for Atwood’s feminist reworking of Canadian personification in Surfacing, as well as for Charles L. Campbell’s and Beth Harvor’s positive associations of Canada with femininity. The Vietnam War played its part in this development, too, as the unprecedented media attention to stories of US soldiers raping and murdering civilians undermined the valuing of martial masculinity while making Canada’s maternal bosom look comparatively attractive. As we shall see in chapter 4, this association of Canada with an alternative to hegemonic masculinity would also eventually lead people to associate the country with queerness.

2 Self-Defence Lessons The guerillas are coming and you must go with them. Tom Wayman, “The Dream of the Guerillas” Occidents can be prevented. Victor Coleman, “From a m e r i c a ”

The assertions in Wayman’s and Coleman’s Vietnam War–era Canadian poems stand in contrast with George Grant’s fatalism in Lament for a Nation regarding Canada’s susceptibility to the American empire. While Grant insisted that nothing could turn the tide of US hegemony, the new nationalist position was that something could and must be done. A similarly imperative mode is evident in the closing pages of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, as the narrator-protagonist decides that “the Americans” are “advancing, they must be dealt with, but possibly they can be watched and predicted and stopped without being copied.”1 The passage is an indication that although Survival, Atwood’s other book of 1972, is more explicitly a pedagogical text, Surfacing also seeks to teach readers about the colonized mind and paths toward decolonization. In Survival, Atwood describes Canadian nationalism as though it were a form of selfhelp therapy, complete with “positions” akin to the steps of a recovery program. The first position is to deny one is a victim; the second is to see one’s victimhood as inescapable. The third position, “To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable,”2 is a position articulated more succinctly by the narrator of Surfacing when she declares her intention “to refuse to be a victim.”3 As she goes on to imagine that her alternative life of ­non-­victimhood “will have to be invented,” she implicitly anticipates

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occupying what, in Survival, Atwood identifies as the fourth position: “To be a creative non-victim.”4 By dramatizing the narrator’s movement through these positions as she faces challenges, gains knowledge, practises her own guerrilla tactics while hiding in the wilderness, and transforms in her understanding, Surfacing models for Canadian readers their own possible development as guerrilla-nationalists. By reading the novel, they are able to participate vicariously in a process of learning and acting. In that regard, it is notable that the narrator of Surfacing does not anticipate becoming a politician or activist upon her return to society. Instead, she imagines raising a child in such a way that it will avoid passively rehearsing oppressive power relations as the narrator herself has rehearsed them. Through the narrator’s anticipation of this approach to parenting, Surfacing foregrounds the importance of education – education that echoes, but also crucially differs from, the education in woodcraft that the narrator received from her own parents. Their teaching does not seem to have been intentionally nationalist, but it effected a close connection between the narrator and the land that helps her to survive in the wilderness as an adult. In contrast, the teachers in her grown-up life are pointedly problematic educators. Her friend David is a communications instructor whose uncritical regurgitation of bits of US pop culture undermines his nationalist rants and suggests an unselfconsciousness about the effects of mass media that is troubling for someone in his field. Likewise, the narrator’s art instructor continued to grade her work even after becoming her lover, and he subsequently pressured her into having an abortion, thus standing as another indicator in the novel that teachers should be treated with suspicion. As Surfacing examines educators with a critical eye, it evinces a skepticism about teaching that was, by 1972, common in North America. A cultural focus on education came about partly because of the surge in university enrolments as the baby boomers reached college age, causing the North American student population to double in the 1960s. Then, as campuses became hotbeds of anti-war activism, the same anti-­ authoritarianism that arose in reaction to the Vietnam War and the draft took hold regarding the education system. Many young people came to view schools and universities as establishment structures that preserved the status quo for the military-industrial complex by teaching students to embrace corporate capitalism. In 1966, McGill University history



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professor and This House Has Seven Days co-host Laurier Lapierre drew an audience of 1,500 people at McGill with a talk addressing “the road to fascism” at the university.5 The same year, while giving the Massey Lectures, US intellectual Paul Goodman warned Canadians that as “mass compulsory education stretche[d] for longer years,” there was the danger that the young would be “regimented like conscripts and processed as things.”6 In 1968, Marshall McLuhan, whose bestselling Understanding Media (1964) had its beginnings as a textbook for schoolchildren, characterized education as a kind of “aggression that we exert on our youngsters.”7 The anti-war movement, feminists, and the New Left all challenged the authoritarianism of traditional teaching while promoting an ideal of education as a process that liberated people from conformism. These groups also made education a key part of their activities, whether through consciousness-raising sessions or through newsletters and pamphlets. Alternative universities were founded, from Rochdale College in Toronto to the Vancouver Free University, the latter of which included courses such as “Creative Lovemaking.” And one of the first large anti–Vietnam War activities was a three-day teach-in at the University of Toronto in 1965. Titled “Revolution and Response,” the event drew 6,000 students and 120 journalists, as well as one million listeners by radio. Subsequent Canadian teach-ins would focus on topics such as the American threat to Canada and feature speakers including George Grant and Walter Gordon, along with literary authors such as Irving Layton and Hugh MacLennan. Meanwhile, the movement to reform education took on the terminology of armed dissent; for instance, a working group for the Ontario Association of Curriculum Development Conference concluded in its 1968 report that a “good teacher is a revolutionary,” someone who “must be ready to question established values, the system and himself.”8 Canadian authors exhibited their own didacticism by writing texts that sought to educate readers about Vietnam, whether drawing attention to US misdeeds or to Canadian complicity and inaction. An example I have already discussed is Earle Birney’s poem “I Accuse Us,” which baldly states facts about the Canadian government’s support of the United States in Vietnam. Another example is Pat Lowther’s 1968 poem “A Lullaby Not to Be Sung,” which parodies the song “Hush, Little Baby” in order to emphasize the geographical and existential distance from

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Vietnam that allowed many Canadians to pay minimal attention to the war. As the speaker puts it, the Canadian child addressed in the poem is “snug and calm, / Eight thousand miles from the nearest napalm.”9 After the dissonance of mentioning napalm in a lullaby, a further dissonance is created by the speaker’s ironic declaration: Hush little baby, you’ll stay free, Long as you think just the same as me. The lines suggest that forces of education are a key issue in the war and that there is the danger of social structures indoctrinating young people into conformity. The poem’s parodying of a lullaby to identify this danger indicts an older generation, in particular, for teaching youth to be quiescent. There is an implication that such indoctrination happens from birth and occurs by pervasive, almost invisible means. The insistence in the poem’s title that the conformist lullaby is “not to be sung” further implies a need for readers to avoid rehearsing the lullaby’s pedagogy. The poem’s own pedagogical mode is to render conformist forces visible through hyperbolization, thereby startling readers into reflecting on the repercussions of their own and others’ actions and inaction. Lowther’s poem does not mention Canada, but other Canadian texts tied their anti-war didacticism to the advocacy of Canadian nationalism, treating the two issues as connected by American imperialism. The imagining of Canada as a peaceable kingdom depended heavily on the view that the United States was anything but peaceable. As the sixties ended, however, a growing strain of Canadian literature displayed a militancy at odds with the characterization of the country as nonviolent. This militancy owed something to the successes of communist forces in Vietnam, which challenged the myth of US invincibility. Those successes helped to breed militancy in the New Left more broadly, as groups such as the Weathermen sought to “bring the war home” through anti-government violence. In Canada, the Front de libération du Québec likewise stepped up the violence of its activities, leading to the October Crisis, while political protest as a whole grew more confrontational. In January 1969, a building at Sir George Williams University in Montreal was ransacked



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and burned after accusations of racism against a professor. In May 1970, in response to President Richard Nixon’s announcement that he was ordering US troops into Cambodia, the nationalist Vancouver Liberation Front organized a march in which a thousand protesters crossed the border into Blaine, Washington, before returning to Canada. One protester called it the first “continental invasion” since the War of 1812.10 Writers, meanwhile, began to align themselves with anti-US militancy while imagining their work to be an extension of political activism. In Patrick Lane’s 1971 book, Mountain Oysters, for instance, Lane characterized the “poet / outlaw” as someone “who would throw a beer bottle full of paint at the American Embassy because the name of the paint was Chinese Red.”11 Other writers wrote fiction involving scenarios of Canada-US military conflict, effectively depicting Canada as another Vietnam. In such cases, literature became a form of instruction for the sake of national defence. The idea that Canadian literature might be both educative and militarizing was articulated by various writers. For instance, theatre critic Don Rubin, who moved from the United States to Toronto in 1968 and became a strident Canadian cultural nationalist, wrote in Maclean’s in 1973 that “a culture in the process of finding and realizing itself needs critical voices on the front lines as much as it needs them in the darkened theatres.”12 Rubin’s deployment of the metaphors of war and national self-discovery in describing theatre criticism insinuated that fighting, writing, and education were compatible, if not synonymous. The idea that knowledge might be an armament was made explicit the next year by Barry Lord in his History of Painting in Canada, in which he wrote of Canadians, “Knowing the history of our art as a part of the heroic struggles of our people is a powerful weapon in the hands of a colonial people. It helps us to understand what we are fighting for. This book is intended as such a weapon.”13 Lord, a Marxist, was concerned as much with class inequality as with Canada’s domination by the United States, but in his book he is no more critical of Canadian painting than when identifying what he takes to be an artist’s inability to escape American influence. Just as Surfacing works to expose David’s mental colonization by the United States, so too does Lord aim to teach his audience how to detect the culturally colonized artists in their midst. A similar critical mode is evident in Keith Richardson’s Poetry and the Colonized Mind: Tish (1976) and Robin Mathews’s Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution (1978),

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both of which didactically model a sensitivity to evidence of US influence on Canadian writers so that readers, too, might learn to recognize the fifth column in the nation’s artistic ranks, not to mention in the readers’ own minds. A shared premise of the books by Lord, Richardson, and Mathews is that Canadians who have the requisite knowledge to identify their own and others’ subjugation by America will be more willing and able to rise against it. During the Vietnam War, nationalist writers took it as their role to make that knowledge available. In the case of Mathews, a worry about the enemy within extended to classrooms. Because the Canadian post-secondary education system’s expansion in the 1960s outpaced the production of Canadians qualified to teach in that system, universities seeking new faculty courted candidates from other countries, especially the United States. With so many men south of the border facing the draft upon leaving university, there was an abundance of qualified Americans willing to move north. The number of US citizens hired as faculty at Canadian universities caused alarm among nationalists such as Mathews, who worried that American professors would, however unwittingly, indoctrinate their students into an American world view. Mathews and James Steele, both faculty members at Carleton University, led the fight to stop such indoctrination by campaigning to limit the number of non-Canadians in post-secondary teaching and administrative posts. As they did so, their argument for the “Canadianization” of campuses evoked the Vietnam War, ironically echoing Richard Nixon’s rhetoric of “Vietnamizing” the war via the withdrawal of US combat troops.14 Other commentators on the issue of Americans teaching in Canada followed suit in deploying military metaphors, with periodical coverage of the campaign framing the situation as one of “invasion” and “take-over.”15 By casting the classroom as a figurative battleground, such terminology encouraged readers to transfer to Canadian education their affective response to US military actions in Vietnam. It is not coincidental that virtually all of the writers who urged greater literal or figurative Canadian nationalist militancy were men, nor is it a coincidence that when they took to dramatizing violent Canadian resistance to the United States, the protagonists were almost always men, too. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at a time when North American armed forces neither conscripted women nor allowed them to fight, the writers



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exhibited an assumption that militancy, masculinity, and nationalism were mutually inextricable. In the previous chapter, I discussed how warera Canadian nationalists construed the US domination of Canada as a feminizing force. One response, evident in Lament for a Nation, was to resign oneself to emasculation. Another, evident in Surfacing, was to take up a feminist view of Canada as a woman on the verge of liberation. In this chapter, I examine yet another response by Canadian writers: to advocate for Canada’s adoption of a militant masculinity. The male writers who did so also often co-opted for themselves the task of educating the nation, even as they rehearsed sexist notions of what Canadian men and women needed to learn. In the May 1972 issue of Maclean’s, for example, Ray Smith asserted, “The job of the writer in Canada is not only to tell the housewife in Saskatoon that Citadel Hill is in Halifax, but to tell her why and in what ways she is different from a housewife in Denver. And why it is worth staying different. He must tell her what a Canadian husband wants from life, what their children will want, why she wakes up at three in the morning and what to do about it. He must tell her that a great love story is possible in this land, a love different from all other loves, a love that is the same.”16 If Smith’s comment is remarkable for its insistence that writers in Canada should pursue nationalist goals through their work, the chauvinism of his idea that a woman needs to be taught about love, her identity, and her family by a male novelist must also be observed. At the same time, Smith’s claim that nationalist literature should dwell equally on the nation and on love indicates a telling belief that literary nationalist didacticism must be grounded in the personal. This conception of nationalist writing’s goals and strategies sheds light on much of the literature discussed in this chapter. The literature is ostensibly very different from the kind described by Smith, insofar as it focuses not on domesticity and desire but on men engaged in military conflict. Nevertheless, this writing, too, turns out to be preoccupied with connecting the nation to affect via the depiction of gender roles. The writing often has an explicitly didactic component, emphasizing rational argumentation and the provision of information, but it also involves the use of narrative to produce arational, affective responses in readers, especially responses that involve readers’ relationships to masculinity, with the consequence that the texts tie nationalist politics to the politics of the body. Adopting the perspective of the US military in Vietnam, Canadian

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nationalist authors saw the path to success as one that involved winning both hearts and minds. As this chapter focuses on how Canadian writers sought to teach the nation by publishing fantasies of US military aggression against Canada, I argue that the fantasies associate being a nationalist with a readiness to protect Canada’s sovereignty in the most extreme situations. Moreover, the fantasies put the Vietnam War to pedagogical uses: they treat it not only as a model of successful resistance to the United States but also as evidence of US aggression, thus giving scenarios of Canada-US conflict greater plausibility. Even while various narratives depicting such scenarios work to establish that plausibility, though, it becomes clear that they deploy war as a trope, one distilling the threat of US imperialism down to something urgent, concrete, and resistible. Considering these texts, I pay extended attention to Richard Rohmer’s political thrillers, which were critically disparaged but immensely popular, with particular notoriety attaching itself to his first novel, Ultimatum (1973). Ultimatum hyperbolizes the didactic impulse of new nationalist writing; at the same time, the book’s bestseller status in Canada indicates a national desire to be taught. Meanwhile, Rohmer’s sequel, Exxoneration (1974), provides an entry point into considering war-era Canadian literature that imagined not just US aggression against Canada but also a robust Canadian military response. In Exxoneration, as well as in Bruce Powe’s novel, Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War (1968), and Ian Adams’s novel The Trudeau Papers (1971), literature functions as a manner of war game, anticipating how a viable defence of Canada might proceed. In contrast, the war-era writings of the dramatist George Ryga evoked the spectre of war in order to imagine how it might be avoided. Ryga’s writing, which enjoyed significant popular and critical success, repeatedly insisted that the militarism evident in the Vietnam War was spilling over into the North American intergenerational conflicts of the long sixties, and that if such conflicts were to be productive, they needed to privilege communication over violence. As Ryga dramatized scenarios in which baby boomers and members of their parents’ generation edge toward learning from each other, not least with respect to Canada’s vulnerability to the United States, he joined other Canadian writers in using the trope of war to lend a sense of urgency to nationalist education and action. At the same time, his work emphasized that dialectic is crucial to the didactic function of



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art, granting it the potential to become a manner of teach-in leading people toward anti-war and anti-imperialist perspectives. i m a g i n e d i n va s i o n s a n d u l t i m a t u m s

The war-era notion of Canadian nationalism as a defensive response to the possibility of US aggression had an extensive pedigree. As Robert Fulford put it in 1974, “Every Canadian, since about 1812, has suffered from the feeling that somebody might attack us; and every Canadian has had the feeling he knows who that somebody might be.”17 In drawing attention to past conflict between the two countries, Fulford nodded to a historical pattern of American militancy of which the Vietnam War could be seen as a part and which granted legitimacy to Canadian fears about the US threat to Canada’s sovereignty. In particular, if one recognized that Americans had long harboured an annexationist impulse toward Canada, then it was plausible to imagine that the United States might some day act on that impulse. Likewise, Fulford’s gesture to the War of 1812 served as a reminder that Canada had previously managed to maintain its borders in the face of US aggression, establishing a precedent for success in some future conflict. Early in the Vietnam War, Al Purdy’s poem “Homo Canadensis” presented readers with a figurative case of a present-day American invasion. Collected in Purdy’s 1965 book, The Cariboo Horses, the poem tells the story of an American at an Ontario bar who boasts of having bagged “a nice buck” while hunting near Bancroft and who beats a Canadian patron of the bar in an arm wrestle.18 These details serve the purpose of casting the United States as a gun-loving, violence-loving country that does not shy from flexing its muscles abroad. But the poem gains another dimension from the fact that the man reveals himself to be American only after his victory. Until that point, he has seemed to others at the bar to be an outspoken Canadian nationalist, lecturing them about the US ownership of Canadian industry and warning them, “We’ll belong to the States / in another 10 years.”19 While the fact that he refers to Canadians as “we” indicates an intentional deception on his part, corroborating a longstanding Canadian stereotype of Americans as con artists, the fact that his ruse is successful plays on a Canadian anxiety that US domination had rendered Canadians and Americans virtually indistinguishable from one

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another. In the Vietnam War, a common complaint by US soldiers was that there was no way of distinguishing enemies from allies among the civilian population; “Homo Canadensis” observes that Canadians faced a similar challenge in distinguishing each other from Homo americanus. The poem’s tip that they should simply look for the arrogant loudmouth in the crowd may smack of further stereotyping, but by drawing attention to the passivity of the bar’s Canadian patrons in the face of the American interloper, the poem seeks to teach its Canadian readers that they need to develop vigilance regarding US aggression. As the Vietnam War continued, and as the US military also carried out controversial activities in the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, and Laos, authors began to imagine Canada becoming similarly subject to US attack or occupation. In the section of Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies published in 1968 as “The Children in Nathan Phillips Square,” for instance, the speaker claims to have had a vision in which “across the fabled horizon of Bay Street they / came riding, the liberators, the deputies of Jesus, the Marines, / and had released bacterial missiles over the Golden Horseshoe.”20 The speaker’s vision is self-consciously ironized by the description of Bay Street as “fabled” and by the echoes of the biblical Apocalypse, but Canadian commentators’ invocations of a US invasion were not always so tongue-in-cheek, especially after the 30 April 1970 announcement that the United States had invaded Cambodia, which had been officially neutral in the Vietnam War. News of the invasion confirmed critics’ belief that America had no respect for international law and no compunctions about advancing US interests through military force. In an ironic rehearsal of the “domino theory” that predicted a US defeat in Vietnam could lead to the further spread of communism, some Canadian nationalists implicitly cast Vietnam and Cambodia as dominos in a line leading to the US takeover of its northern neighbour. Consider the following examples: •

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Interviewed by Maclean’s for its March 1968 issue, Farley Mowat declared, “The only situation I can think of that would send me out with a gun to risk my neck is if the Americans were to invade this country … I would die almost happily – physically fighting Yanks.”21 In an essay in The New Romans, William Kilbourn imagined a nearfuture situation in which socialist governments in Ontario and



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Quebec would expropriate US branch plants, leading the Marines to invade “at the invitation of our old power elite.”22 In the March 1970 issue of Maclean’s, an article by Walter Stewart about the US demand for Canadian water began by describing a hypothetical scenario in which an aide at a White House meeting reacts to the prospect of Canadian protectionism by raising the ­possibility of invading the country.23 In the April 1970 issue of 20 Cents Magazine, John B. Boyle’s article “Continental Refusal / Refus Continental” speculated that “if Canada were to opt for independence” from America and close the Canada-US border, “there would at best be a total economic collapse here, at worst, an American invasion to stop the advance of communism.”24 In the 1970 book Gordon to Watkins to You, Melville Watkins wrote of his nationalist proposals, “A pretty common question put to me when I make a speech is ‘If we do those things, won’t they send the marines?’ Just to have the question asked is the important thing, for it shows a clear grasp of the reality of American imperialism.”25 In a contribution to the 1971 book The Star-Spangled Beaver, former Ontario n d p leader Donald C. MacDonald, still a member of the provincial legislature at the time, wrote that the American ownership of Canadian companies presented “a threat no less real, though more subtle, than if a division of Marines were marching across our borders.”26 In the same volume, essayist and University of Saskatchewan political scientist Norman Ward warned that “Canadians who are concerned about our vast water resources, or our far northern reaches, may some day have to watch anxiously as a revivified party of War Hawks, no doubt calling itself something like Defenders of Continental Peace, forms south of the border.”27 In a February 1972 article in Maclean’s, fellow writer and University of Saskatchewan faculty member Edward McCourt characterized America as “the big kid next door” who “is finding his own yard too small to play in and is getting ready to move into ours.”28 Milton Acorn’s essay “What Are the Odds?,” published in his 1973 book, More Poems for People, considered the likelihood of Canadian military success if the United States were to invade Canada in

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retaliation for the Canadian nationalization of US-dominated industries, sparking a “War of National Liberation.”29 Acorn enthusiastically imagined that the Canadian resistance would include First Nations peoples, whose colonized position within Canada he saw as making them ripe for militant action. Acorn went so far as to compare them to the Degar in Vietnam: indigenous, mountain-dwelling people who had been recruited by US forces to fight alongside them. (Strangely, given his belief that colonization breeds insurrectionary potential, Acorn did not consider the possibility that the First Nations might be as inclined to fight the Canadian state as the American one.) Robin Mathews’s poem “The Ballad of Peter Trudeau,” collected in the 1974 anthology Poets of the Capital, depicted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau as a traitor whose final “victory” would be to lead the US army into Ottawa.30

One might be tempted to see these fantasies and suppositions merely as puffed-up anti-Americanism, a way to cast the United States as a country so unscrupulous that it would attack an ally posing no threat to it. That was, indeed, one rhetorical function of imagined US invasions, but they had other uses, too, making them a popular conceit in the war years and one that has continued to attract Canadian writers in the twentyfirst century. The most notorious war-era fantasy of US aggression was Richard Rohmer’s novel Ultimatum. A political thriller set in 1980, the narrative has the unnamed US president, facing a natural-gas shortage in his country, issue an ultimatum to the Canadian government according to which it must agree to a continental resource-sharing plan and related conditions within thirty-three hours or face severe economic sanctions. When, at the novel’s end, Parliament unanimously rejects the ultimatum, the president moves swiftly and without warning to annex Canada by sending in an invasion force. Ultimatum was the first novel by Rohmer, a real-estate lawyer and Progressive Conservative Party insider. When the book was published in 1973, Rohmer had also just chaired the Royal Commission on Book Publishing. His belief in literature’s socially educative function was evident in the commission’s report, which asserted that a healthy publishing culture in Canada would be distinguished not only



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by books’ “literary soundness” but also by their “pedagogical soundness.”31 Rohmer had published his own educative nonfiction book, The Arctic Imperative, earlier in the year, urging the exploitation of Canadian energy resources in the North. When that book failed to have the impact he sought, he turned to writing Ultimatum, making a similar argument in fiction. Consequently, didacticism is never far from the surface of Rohner’s novel; much of Ultimatum takes the form of briefings and speeches laying out information about Arctic resources and the state of Canada-US relations. Partly for that reason, reviewers did not admire the book. Fulford, for one, characterized it as “a dull, brief little novel with cardboard characters.”32 By the end of the year, Ultimatum was the bestselling novel in Canada. Rohmer’s book was very much of its moment, as the recent energy crisis in the United States had drawn attention to America’s resource needs and to Canada’s attractiveness as a supplier. A fear that Canada would lose its sovereignty in the face of the US demand for such resources had become common among new nationalists. In the 1970 book The Energy Poker Game, James Laxer had warned against Canadians’ energy needs taking a back seat to “the requirements of U.S. military security and economic power in the world.”33 Vietnam lay not far from the surface of Laxer’s remarks as a symbol of the more belligerent side of the American empire. The Vietnam War had been similarly subtextual in Canadian coverage of the 1969 and 1970 attempts by the US oil tanker Manhattan to navigate the Northwest Passage, attempts to which Rohmer would repeatedly refer in Ultimatum. The ship was ultimately stymied by pack ice, but its efforts caused a political uproar because Canada claimed key portions of the Northwest Passage as territorial waters, while the US government insisted they were international. For Canadian nationalists, the Manhattan’s voyages had the markings of an actualized US takeover, and as the ship was making its 1970 attempt, the House of Commons responded by passing the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act, which extended Canada’s territorial claims from three to twelve miles from its coasts, based on what the government called the “right of self-defence” against pollution.34 Building on such militarized language, Rohmer claimed in The Arctic Imperative that if the United States had insisted on sending oil tankers regularly through the region, it was “quite possible that Canada would indeed have had an armed confrontation with the

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United States at the eastern entrance into the Northwest Passage.”35 By the time he dramatized Canada-US conflict in Ultimatum, the possibility seemed less far-fetched as the result of a further chilling of binational relations, especially after Richard Nixon briefly instituted a 10 per cent surcharge on Canadian imports to the United States in August 1971, leading to what Maclean’s called “The Week of the Great Ultimatum.”36 The next year, Nixon went so far as to announce the end of any special relationship between Canada and America. Such events meant that by 1973, even though the majority of Canadians were still liable to think it unlikely that their country would ever become another Vietnam in the eyes of the United States, Rohmer could count on titillating readers by exploring the idea. Well before the president announces his plan to annex Canada, Ultimatum plays on early-1970s fears about the US threat to Canadian sovereignty by having him decide, right after issuing his ultimatum, that he should travel to a station on Melville Island in the Northwest Territories to witness a test run of an experimental underwater plastic pipeline. He secures permission from the Canadian government to do so, but his presence in the Canadian north at such a volatile moment serves as an echo of the Manhattan voyage and reminds readers of US ambitions regarding the Arctic. Meanwhile, the flimsiness of the president’s justification for his trip – “I’m the one that has to deal with the energy crisis,” he says, “and I’ve got to know what I’m talking about”37 – betrays the novel’s didactic method, which is to teach readers via dialogue between characters that conveys pertinent information. Not surprisingly, given that method, the president turns out to be amazingly knowledgeable about resource extraction in northern Canada. Moreover, the recently elected Prime Minister Porter’s insistence that Parliament be “fully briefed on the state of Canada’s relations with the United States” and about other salient issues before voting on whether to accept the ultimatum further emphasizes education’s importance to the novel’s nationalism.38 Ultimatum proceeds to dramatize the briefings, presenting several speeches verbatim and, thus, implying that a robust Canadian nationalism requires the education not just of politicians but also of the general populace as represented by Rohmer’s readers. And the fact that Parliament ends up voting unanimously to reject the ultimatum implies that anyone who is educated properly about a particular matter will agree on the appropriate



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course of action in response to it. By positing this conception of learning, Ultimatum suggests that the education of the nation plays a key role in establishing national unity and in facilitating action that will secure Canadian sovereignty. Ultimatum does not expend much effort teaching readers why Canadian sovereignty is so important in the first place. In a 1968 interview, Rohmer explicitly identified reasons to be a Canadian nationalist, observing, “In my view the United States is a dead loss, with its racial violence in the core of every major city and its imperialistic posture in Vietnam.”39 In Ultimatum, there is no mention of US racism. In fact, there is remarkably little justification for Canadian independence given by any character, even though virtually all of the Canadians who speak about the ultimatum wish to reject it. The clearest rationale for the maintenance of Canadian sovereignty is uttered by Porter before Parliament. Explaining why Canada has not entered into a resource-sharing agreement with America, he declares, “If Canada is to remain an independent nation with its own goals and objectives and a political and judicial system quite different from that of the United States, then it is clear that we must be as free as possible to plan our own economic development.”40 But he never explains what those goals and objectives are, nor does he identify why an independent political and judicial system is a good thing. Instead, he implies in his final speech that Canadian sovereignty is important primarily because America has gone off the rails. First, he complains, “The United States has permitted dangerous and unrestrained expansion of its population and its industrial complex. Per capita, the American people are by far the most prolific consumers in the world.”41 Then he points to the ultimatum itself as a sign that America is deeply flawed, deeming the action “unworthy of the fundamental precepts of freedom, justice and liberty upon which that country was founded.”42 Through this complaint, Ultimatum gestures to a new nationalist critique of the United States as failing to live up to its own ideals. It is a complaint that the minister for external affairs echoes in his briefing of Parliament, during which he observes that “in the case of Vietnam, and before that in Korea and elsewhere in the world, the United States has never hesitated to use, or to threaten to use, military force if it felt that its own national interests or security were threatened.”43 This reference to the Vietnam War is the only explicit one in Ultimatum, but it points to the war’s status

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as a motivating force for the narrative’s dramatic scenario and, especially, for its conclusion, as it becomes clear that the US government is willing to invade Canada to secure American interests. More troublingly, Ultimatum also seeks to teach Canadian readers to place their trust in male politicians, on whom the novel focuses relentlessly. In particular, it depicts Porter as something of an epic hero, a canny leader who embodies hegemonic masculinity in every way, from his coolheaded demeanour and sense of fair play to his recreational pursuits, which are listed at the novel’s outset as “riding, fishing, snowshoeing.”44 When Ultimatum mentions women at all, they tend to be secretaries who take notes, get coffee, and stay silent. The novel does invent an acting female premier of Nova Scotia, which might seem progressive, given that when Rohmer wrote his story, no woman had yet held such an office in Canada. But the narrative undermines its seemingly feminist gesture by keeping the premier at an objectified distance and emphasizing that Porter finds her “tremendously attractive physically.”45 Ultimatum also manifests a worrying elitism by paying little attention to ordinary Canadians. When they are invoked at all, it is as a homogenous mass that votes 80 per cent in favour of rejecting the ultimatum. Moreover, the novel depicts Porter as having a longstanding acquaintance with an Inuit leader principally, it seems, so that the novel can contrive to have the Inuit man cooperate readily when Porter asks him to halt protest actions against a Mackenzie Valley pipeline while the situation with the United States remains precarious. In this particular fantasy, a chain of friendships between male leaders secures the nation’s unity, trumping serious political differences. Likewise, Porter gets his way easily when he insists that the parliamentary motion regarding the ultimatum be tabled jointly by the federal party leaders. In Lament for a Nation, George Grant claimed that even a prime minister such as Diefenbaker was virtually helpless in the face of US hegemony; in contrast, Ultimatum suggests that a few Canadian men working together at a key moment might marshal the nation into successfully rebuffing an aggressive America. This fantasy of Canadian concord and efficacy depends on the elision of all manner of heterogeneity and political disagreement in the country. Given that Ultimatum concludes with the president announcing the invasion and annexation of Canada, the novel’s portrait of parliamentary unity is hardly the narrative’s most unlikely element. But however



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far-fetched an imagined US takeover seemed, fantasies of such a possibility that were published during the Vietnam War rendered the American threat to Canada more vivid and concrete than did talk of cultural domination or lost sovereignty. As historian Ramsay Cook notes, the rhetoric of “invasion” had been prominent in Canadian political commentary since the early twentieth century, but it had been used figuratively to characterize America’s existing cultural and economic dominance.46 In contrast, invasion scenarios during the years of the Vietnam War made the defence of the Canada-US border a literal undertaking. The scenarios reduced the challenges of North American relations to a single, totalizing danger that jeopardized the entire Canadian population, and not just in terms of people’s incomes or choice of t v programs but – when all-out war between the countries was imagined – in terms of their very lives. Thus, fantasies of Canada-US military conflict charged the relationship between the two countries with immediacy and emotion, gave Canadians personal reasons to be invested in their country’s fate, and tied them to everyone else in the nation-state. Indeed, imagined war with the United States implicitly brought with it the expectation that citizens be willing to sacrifice their well-being, even their lives, for their country. By connecting Canadians’ prospects so intimately and directly to Canada’s, fantasies of war worked in a manner similar to the invocations of Canada being raped by America discussed in the previous chapter: they nationalized a situation of bodily and psychic trauma, making Canada’s wellbeing a visceral thing. The spectre of Canada at war likewise rendered national belonging visceral by foregrounding Canada’s role as a political unit preserving citizens’ lives, thus tying their survival to that of the country. As John T. Woods observes, “In wartime, virtually everything depends on preserving the nation, and national identification becomes a paramount organizing principle for the people.”47 In Ultimatum, the titular threat serves as a useful fiction in just this manner, rendering more plausible a fantasy of Canadian unity in which the First Nations, the Québécois, and other constituents of Canada set aside their disagreements with the nation-state in the face of a common enemy. This fantasy aligns Rohmer’s novel with other literature of the war era that imagines US aggression against Canada. Valerie Broege observes that often in such literature, “the strongest defense envisioned is for Canadians to present a staunch, united front, transcending their usual regional and political

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antipathies.”48 The corollary of such imagined unity is a fantasy of complete and clearly delineated Canadian opposition to the United States – a fantasy helpfully simplifying a binational relationship that was anything but straightforward during the Vietnam War. Oppositionalism was particularly useful to the new nationalism because Canada and America shared so much demographically, culturally, economically, and ideologically. Imagined US attacks foregrounded and hyperbolized Canada-US differences. Rather than inviting Canadian readers to consider their complicity or quiescence with respect to US actions in Vietnam, the fantasies offered Canadians the vicarious, exculpating, subversive thrill of considering themselves akin to Vietnamese communists as targets of American aggression. Imagined invasions also served nationalist interests by exploiting the considerable anti-US sentiment that had already accreted in terms of Vietnam. Even as invasion fantasies such as Rohmer’s often had a didactic component, they worked at an affective level to cultivate a nationalist structure of feeling by attaching to Canada the emotions that readers felt regarding the real war. Imagined US invasions of Canada, for all their apparent implausibility, served as reminders that America was already exerting itself abroad militarily to protect its interests. The spectre of US invasion allowed Canadian nationalists to frame American actions, policies, and investments with respect to Canada as the thin edge of a wedge that could – and, in the fantasies, would – lead to Canada becoming another Vietnam. And if fictional invasions courted debates about their plausibility, that was also part of their nationalist function: for such debates to transpire, readers needed to inform themselves about the actual political landscape involving Canada, the United States, and Vietnam. In the course of so educating themselves, they would be starting – intentionally or not – on the path towards the state of national preparedness that invasion narratives advocated. As fantasies of US invasion brought concerns about Vietnam to bear on the new nationalist cause, they reciprocally brought new nationalist concerns to bear on Vietnam, serving the anti-war movement by encouraging Canadian readers to see the war as having ramifications for themselves. In the course of imagining Canada as under attack by the United States, writers suggested that the conflict in Vietnam was not simply a foreign war but a manifestation of the same aggressive US imperialism



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that was imposing itself on Canada culturally, politically, and economically and that could one day impose itself on the country militarily, too. In this respect, the popularity of references to possible Canada-US conflict especially stands out when contrasted with the almost complete absence of Canadian literature depicting the experiences of American or Vietnamese soldiers in Vietnam. It cannot be said that this absence reflects a lack of knowledge about the war; periodicals and television were providing abundant information. In 1965, for instance, the c b c aired Beryl Fox’s documentary The Mills of the Gods, which did not flinch from showing mutilated Vietnamese children, dead US soldiers, living US soldiers posing for photographs with dead Vietnamese, and a sequence in which an American pilot in the middle of a bombing run euphorically declares his wish that he could see the effects of his munitions close up. If Canadian authors were loath to write about the war directly, it may well be because they agreed with Margaret Atwood and Robin Mathews that Canadians’ preoccupation with Vietnam was a sign of their colonization by America. In that light, fantasies of the United States invading Canada had another advantage: they allowed authors to channel concerns involving the Vietnam War without being accused of neglecting Canada. f i c t i o n s o f c a n a d i a n r e s i s ta n c e

After Richard Rohmer’s Ultimatum concludes with the US president announcing the annexation of Canada, the novel’s sequel, Exxoneration, begins by depicting the resultant invasion and, shockingly, its successful repulsion, as a force constituted largely by Canadian reservists subdues American troops who did not expect a hostile reception. The abundant detail with which Rohmer describes the Canadian defensive strategy, its execution, and the technology involved has its own didactic quality. Although there is hardly sufficient information in the novel to transform its audience into military experts or an effective fighting force, the emphasis on the logistics of the Canadian operation teaches readers to think militarily and demonstrates the considerations involved in military undertakings. Moreover, Exxoneration works to convince readers that the real-life Canadian military of the time – including Rohmer himself, who was an honorary officer in the Canadian Air Force – had the know-how and sang-froid to direct a defence of the nation. Simultaneously, by

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showing the American military to be ill prepared for the situation on the ground in Canada, Rohmer echoes concerns about the US failure to understand the situation in Vietnam. As the novel’s narrator puts it, the American invasion operation “had been based on the thesis that the Canadians had no real defence force and that, in any event, Canada would welcome the Americans.”49 That rhetoric conspicuously echoes the language used to justify the US military efforts in Vietnam as a war of liberation undertaken on behalf of a Vietnamese citizenry wishing to be saved from the threat of communism. By showing up such rhetoric’s false presumptions, Rohmer comments critically on the Vietnam War under the cover of imagining Canada-US conflict. In narrating a vigorous Canadian self-defence against the US military, Rohmer was not alone during the Vietnam War. Repeatedly, authors who imagined Canada as another Vietnam in its susceptibility to US aggression also imagined Canada putting up a fight. An early, ironic example is Ray Smith’s 1967 story “Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Center of Canada,” which offers a fragmentary narrative about a guerrilla resistance movement forming in response to a US takeover of Canada. Smith juxtaposes that trope of war with a different conceit in which a narratorial voice addresses Canada, telling the nation, See, the way I look at it, your problem is that Joe Yank is the biggest kid on the block. Now I know you’re pretty friendly with him – he being your cousin and all – but someday he’s going to say, “Johnny Canuck, my boot is dirty. Lick it.” Now then, are you going to get down on your hands and knees and lick or are you going to say, “Suck ice, Joe Yank”? Because if you do say, “Suck ice,” he’s going to kick you in the nuts. And either way, you’re going to lick those boots. It just depends on how you want to take it. Of course, you can always kick him first.50 By turning international antagonism into a scene of bullying between boys, Smith is able to propose a variety of Canadian aggression against the United States that would likely seem absurd if imagined via the trope of war. What would it mean for Canada to “kick” America first? How plausible and successful would such an act be? Because Smith posits the action



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through personification, he does not need to answer those questions; the figurative language allows him to rehearse macho posturing without committing to the advocacy of any literal action. Farley Mowat did something similar in a 1968 essay when he expressed his hope that Canada would “muster the guts to really kick Big Uncle in the backside.”51 The vagueness of his metaphor’s tenor meant that his comment, like the remarks in Smith’s story, was liable to resonate with a wide range of Canadian nationalists – even those disapproving of violence – because readers could imagine their own literal equivalents to Mowat’s figure without having to agree about what he meant. The figure’s irony also allowed some readers to treat Mowat’s comment as insincere, while others could embrace its sentiment. And although Mowat’s and Smith’s irony distinguishes their imagined scenarios from more earnestly presented ones such as that in Exxoneration, it might be said that irony was fundamental to imagined scenarios of Canada-US conflict as a whole: because they were hypothetical situations, they were under no obligation to be entirely plausible or to offer concrete, clearly delineated calls for real-life action. Instead, readers were free to determine how likely the scenarios were, how sincere they were, and what moral to draw from them. The ironies of Smith’s advocacy are compounded by his story’s ending, in which the narrator makes a startling suggestion to readers: “For Centennial Year, send President Johnson a gift: an American tourist’s ear in a matchbox.”52 The imperative is no less ironic than the earlier suggestion that Canada could “kick” Joe Yank, but there is a stark shift from the vagueness of what kicking the United States would entail to the grotesque literalness of the final suggestion, which acknowledges what violence between nations can actually involve. Cynthia Sugars reads the end of the story as “a savage satire on US imperialism during the Vietnam War,”53 and it is true that the allusion to Vietnam is a crucial aspect of the narrator’s imperative: readers are invited to think of US soldiers cutting off dead enemy combatants’ ears as souvenirs and to reflect on the barbarity of the US war effort. At the same time, the ending ironizes the story’s own imagining of Canadian resistance to the United States by putting Canada in a disjunctive relationship to Vietnam, emphasizing the lack of fit between the two countries’ situations: in real life, Canadians did not have to deal with their ears being cut off or with other US atrocities being committed within Canada’s borders. Just as importantly, the story’s

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ending ironizes the text’s impulse toward nationalist moralizing. By presenting an imperative to readers that is patently absurd, Smith points to and mocks a paternalism, stridency, and rhetorical excess attending the new nationalism. There is the suggestion that nationalists’ harnessing of militarist language recklessly risked endorsing the very sort of cruel violence that nationalists condemned when it was perpetrated by the United States. By identifying the problematic nature of such militarist language, Smith’s story stands in ironic judgment of the very nationalist sentiment that the story’s conceits would seem to inflame. Irony proved an attractive mode for other writers who imagined Canadian military responses to US aggression, as it allowed them to give readers the thrill of dramatized national strength without having to endorse the plausibility of hypothetical scenarios. In a 1972 issue of The Last Post, for instance, Mark Starowicz offered a tongue-in-cheek plan for a defence of Canada against a US invasion. According to the plan, the Canadian military would move not against the United States but against Canadian sites, destroying or otherwise incapacitating the nation’s own industries.54 His caustic point was that those industries were, in the present day, already serving American interests. Starowicz also exploited Canadians’ feelings about the Vietnam War, declaring that in order to boost Canadian morale during the hypothetical conflict, the Canadian military should “conduct limited attacks against non-strategic but highly symbolic American targets,” and observing that “the attack on the American Embassy in Saigon by n l f troops in 1968” was “a case in point of small, commando-based action of this kind.”55 Even if most readers were liable to interpret the Vietnamese example as ironically underscoring the comparative inefficacy of Canadian forces and Canadian nationalism, others could treat the example as actual evidence that armed resistance to the United States was not necessarily doomed. The fact that some Canadians sincerely took inspiration from the National Liberation Front is clear in Milton Acorn’s essay “What Are the Odds?,” in which he points to communist victories in Vietnam as proof that “any people on Earth, fighting a just cause, using correct ideology, … can accomplish military feats which astound the world.”56 Acorn’s embrace of Vietnam as a model for Canadian nationalists was abetted by the fact that he was a member of the Canadian Liberation Movement, a Marxist organization in agreement with the communists’ cause.



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The politics of Bruce Powe’s Killing Ground, published in 1968 under the pseudonym Ellis Portal, are less clear as it evokes Vietnam in the course of imagining military conflict in Canada. While Killing Ground does not shy from suggesting that Canada could become another Vietnam, the novel provocatively speculates that during such a conflict, Canadian combatants might end up resembling American soldiers more than communist ones. What is more, the novel implies that such a resemblance might not be an entirely bad thing. Setting the narrative in what was, at the time, the near future, Powe imagines the separatist movement in Quebec leading to a full-fledged civil war between Québécois forces and the Canadian military. The novel’s protagonist, a Canadian military officer named Alex Hlynka, has previously served in Vietnam, and although he was a u n peacekeeper there, he has come to adopt practices more commonly attributed to US soldiers in the country: in Quebec, his tactics include throwing uncooperative prisoners out of airborne helicopters while their comrades watch, and at one point he seriously considers using napalm on separatist combatants. Although readers may question whether Canadians would be so quick to commit atrocities against one another as Powe imagines, the characterization of Hlynka as a soldier whose peacekeeping background does not detract from his ruthlessness stands as a suggestion that Canada’s nascent status as a peacekeeping nation in the late 1960s was not at odds with its historic stature as a nation proficient in war. Rather, Killing Ground implies, peacekeeping prepared the Canadian military for contemporary guerrilla warfare, with its flexible rules of engagement and hazy ethics. The novel underscores this point after a twist near the novel’s end in which the United States, motivated by Quebec’s blocking of the St Lawrence Seaway and the Canadian government’s inability to defeat the separatists, moves militarily to take control of the province. Faced with this violation of Canadian sovereignty, Quebec’s provisional government and Ottawa forge an alliance to repel the occupation. Hlynka, informed of this partnership, asks another Canadian military officer with regard to the US forces, “How’re you going to stop them?” The officer replies, “Ever hear of the Viet Cong or the Pathet Lao?” After Hlynka rejoins, “You’re talking about jungles thousands of miles away,” the officer insists, “We’ve got bush and darkness and the will to fight.”57 In this moment, Killing Ground cannily gives voice to readers’ own doubts about the plausibility of Canadian resistance

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and aggressively rebuts them. The novel further emphasizes Canada’s military capabilities by providing appendices that include a chart of the Canadian Forces’ senior chain of command along with a list of infantry and artillery units. Like the minutiae of military logistics in Rohmer’s Exxoneration, the appendices in Killing Ground serve an educative purpose that is significant less in terms of the specific information they disseminate than in terms of how they orient Canadian readers toward conceptualizing and valuing Canada as a military power. Ian Adams’s novel The Trudeau Papers, published in 1971, follows Killing Ground by presenting a scenario in which the United States occupies Canada and faces a fierce Canadian resistance movement.58 As it does so, it seems more than coincidental that Adams had covered the Vietnam War while working as a journalist, especially given that his narrative, like Powe’s, unsubtly connects the imagined Canada-US conflict to the war in Vietnam. The novel’s opening pages describe US helicopters firing on Canadians, “dropping napalm and strafing with Gatling guns,” something that the Canadian narrator-protagonist, Alan Jarvis, characterizes as “a familiar sight” from his own days as a reporter in Vietnam.59 Now serving with a Canadian guerrilla unit, Jarvis learns that many of the American troops positioned at the Canada-US border are Vietnam War veterans, and he is told that a group of these troops has fired indiscriminately on Canadians trying to swim across the Red River to the United States. During the massacre, one of the troops is reported to have said, “Look at the way they’re dying, just like the slopes in ’Nam.”60 The soldiers’ willingness to commit atrocities against Canadian civilians stands as a suggestion that real-life US troops’ experiences in Vietnam might have conditioned them to be similarly cavalier about killing. In making that suggestion through a report of Canadians being massacred, The Trudeau Papers simultaneously indicts the US involvement in Vietnam and redirects feelings about the war toward the cause of Canadian nationalism. And rather than disavowing its fictional Canada-US conflict as an unlikely fantasy, The Trudeau Papers repeatedly makes the case for its plausibility. First, the novel anticipates and rejects skepticism about the possibility of US atrocities against Canadians by having Jarvis remark of himself and a colleague who witnessed US military actions against the Vietnamese, “We never thought then that a few years later we would be hunted down in the same way in our own



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country.”61 Later, he claims that because the impetus for the occupation of Canada has been a US hunger for natural resources, the occupation makes “far more sense” than has America’s “series of wars and invasions of southeast Asian countries.”62 Long before critics claimed that US-led wars against Iraq were motivated by America’s need to secure its oil supply, novelists such as Rohmer and Adams were using fiction to offer lessons about the imbrication of US energy demands and military actions. While The Trudeau Papers has affinities with Rohmer’s novels in its critique of US foreign policy, its vaunting of the Canadian resistance also anticipates Rohmer’s books by evincing a conservative attitude toward gender and sexuality. The Trudeau Papers is perhaps most blatantly patriarchal during a set piece at a Toronto strip club catering to Marine officers among the US occupiers. Female members of the Canadian resistance go about planting a bomb to kill the American patrons, even as Canadian women who work at the club obliviously entertain the Americans. After the bomb explodes, a stripper who has been teasing a US colonel is described as lying dead and naked on her back, “legs spread open,” the tableau suggesting a Canada that is fatally willing to consort with the United States.63 The contrastive pairing of her with the female resistance members rehearses the conventional trope of Canada as a woman who is attractive to America and has the choice of resisting or acquiescing to American desire. The set piece thus manifests a reactionary gender politics by associating sex work with national betrayal. At the same time, the set piece foregrounds an appeal of US invasion narratives for Canadian nationalists: the narratives starkly divide patriots from sellouts and draw clear moral boundaries between them, in contrast with real life, in which most Canadians occupy a more complicated middle ground. The fact that most of the individuated members of the resistance in The Trudeau Papers are men further indicates the imbrication of the novel’s nationalism with a conservative gender politics. More particularly, The Trudeau Papers posits as the paradigm of Canadianness an indigenized white, masculine identity marked by military prowess and mastery of the natural environment. The novel instantiates such an identity in Jarvis, who, after leading Canadian forces in a successful battle against the Marines, helps a female character, Angelica, to evade capture. Along the way, he becomes a teacher to her, showing her how to survive in the wilderness. He recalls, “I showed Angelica how to pick and

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chew rosehips; only the vitamin-filled skin covering is valuable. I also identified for her the edible wild plants. At mid-day we supplemented a cold can of beans with a dandelion-leaf salad; the leaf being more nutritious than most vegetables. For dessert we ate the blueberries that grew in the batches of bushes where we had sat down to eat.”64 There is a selfreflexive didacticism here on the part of the novel. It does not go so far as to provide readers with a full-fledged guide to edible plants in Canada, but it is pointing them in that direction by observing that the country offers nourishment – figurative, perhaps, as well as literal – to those who would educate themselves about its riches. At the same time, there is a dubious gender politics at work. It is not enough, apparently, to make Jarvis effective in battle and an expert in local flora. He needs to demonstrate his expertise in the presence of a woman who is dependent on him, thus establishing both his masculine authority and his patriarchal beneficence. In this respect, The Trudeau Papers is undertaking the nationalist literary project articulated by Ray Smith in Maclean’s the year after Adams’s novel was published: a project in which male authors burnish their nationalist credentials by teaching women how to go about being Canadian. But the fantasy in Adams’s novel is not only sexist; Jarvis’s intimate knowledge of the natural environment also suggests a quasiIndigenous white relationship to the land that implicitly justifies his fight to maintain Canadian sovereignty. In this respect, The Trudeau Papers further suggests that the Canadian resistance movement as a whole has an advantage over the US forces, thanks to its greater knowledge of the local environment; at one point, as the Marines attempt to hold a hill north of Sudbury in the course of a “savage winter,” we are told that they do not “have a chance” against their Canadian antagonists, who have “spent the past five years training for combat in the Arctic.”65 By representing the Canadian fighters as at home in the natural environment, and by suggesting that their knowledge of the land distinguishes them from the US military, The Trudeau Papers depicts them as equivalent to Vietnamese communist combatants in terms of rootedness and effectiveness. In Adams’s novel, one might say, a Canadian is someone who knows how to make war in a canoe. At the level of political policy during the Vietnam War, the idea that Canadians needed to embrace militarism in response to American imperialism remained a radical position advocated principally by farleft groups such as the Canadian Liberation Movement. More often,



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commentators valued the ideal of Canada as a peaceable kingdom and saw militant nationalism as intrinsically at odds with Canadian identity. For instance, in a column in the November 1971 issue of Maclean’s, Peter C. Newman observed of Canadians, What we tend to say when we’re exhorting our countrymen to stand up for Canada is that we need as a people to be more energetic in tackling our trade problems, to develop a stronger technology, to be less timid in our patriotism, more aggressive in pushing our own point of view – to be, in other words, more like the Americans. But surely what we have that’s ours, the quality that makes us special as a nation, is almost antithetical to all of these admonitions … The Canadian character by definition displays a reticence, a disdain for xenophobia, a dislike of bombast, and a genuine desire to let each other be. In part, it comes out of being small, out of not having to be first, out of being able to encompass the indigenous and very different cultures of the regions without having to savage them in the name of some monolithic concept called pan-Canadianism.66 Newman’s view of Canada as a harmonious, peace-loving, multicultural mosaic stood the country in clear opposition to America, with its “race riots,” assassinations, and war in Vietnam, and it was a view that had considerable traction among Canadians. Nevertheless, narratives that imagined Canadian military resistance to the United States were bound to appeal to those who thought that Newman’s vision of Canada, if embraced, would leave the country excessively vulnerable to America. Invasion narratives also appealed to those who associated a nation’s strength with military power and hegemonic masculinity. For such people, fictions of Canadian resistance served a consolatory function by ascribing to Canadian characters such martial values as courage, physical strength, and tactical acumen. What is more, at a time when the women’s movement was challenging traditional gender roles, narratives of Canadian resistance celebrated those roles, depicting men as warriors, commanders, heroes, and saviours, while consigning women principally to the status of helpmates and sex objects. Since the end of the Vietnam War, fantasies of US invasion have continued to surface. In 1981, Margaret Atwood observed while discussing Americans’ antipathy to domestic ownership of the Canadian publishing

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industry, “They haven’t yet sent in the Marines and if they do it won’t be over books, but over oil.”67 In 1993, Floyd W. Rudmin published a book arguing that the American establishment of the Fort Drum army base near the Canada-US border raised “the disturbing possibility” that the United States was “preparing for military contingencies against Canada.”68 Tom Omstead’s self-published novel of 2011, The Red Wing Sings, features a scenario in which, after the intentional crashing of a plane into a nuclear reactor in Michigan causes devastation across the Midwest, the United States blames Canada for the attack and invades. A protracted occupation ensues, along with a significant Canadian resistance movement characterized by guerrilla fighting and the rebel control of wilderness areas. The United States revives the draft and, at one point, has half a million soldiers stationed in Canada, even as US draft dodgers also head north of the border, college students protest the occupation, and US troops desert in increasing numbers because they doubt the US administration’s justification of the war. As with The Trudeau Papers, the unambiguous message is that the Vietnam War could repeat itself in Canada and that Canadians, under pressure, would show a resilience and military aptitude equal to that of the Vietnamese communists. At the same time, the fact that the plane crash catalyzing the conflict echoes the real events of 11 September 2001 shows Omstead to be unsubtly attributing to the contemporary US government a bellicose imperialism equal to what new nationalists imputed to America during the Vietnam War. A year after Omstead’s novel was published, two very similar books were released. One of them was a self-published graphic novel, u s n a : The United States of North America, written by Canadians David Longworth, Harry Kalensky, and Allan Stanleigh. The near-future narrative imagines that Canada and the United States have amalgamated into the titular nation-state, which is controlled by the military and has begun drafting young men to fight a war in Central America. As with The Red Wing Sings, the draft leads to increasing numbers of draft dodgers, and a militant Canadian resistance movement also develops, with the rebels exploiting their knowledge of the wilderness in order to succeed. In one sequence, they even travel by canoe. This act of indigenization is compounded by the book’s fantasy of Québécois, First Nations, and Inuit participation in the rebel movement, eliding political differences within Canada; as Gillian Roberts puts it, the identities of the “ethnic-minority”



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groups depicted as part of the resistance “are entirely subsumed within a Canadian nationalist cause.”69 Meanwhile there are both explicit and implicit references to Vietnam. At one moment, a government operative excuses his team’s defeat at the rebels’ hands by saying, “We weren’t expecting anyone. They’re farmers, for Chrissakes.” His superior replies, “Who do you think we fought in Vietnam?”70 Later, the superior shows his ruthlessness by throwing a man from a helicopter in flight. The other book similar to Omstead’s was the novel Faultline 49 by Joe Mackinnon, who published it with the small press Guy Faux Books under the pseudonym David Danson. As in The Red Wing Sings, a 9/11like terrorist attack leads to the US occupation of Canada and a ferocious guerrilla resistance. Also like The Red Wing Sings, Faultline 49 repeatedly compares the occupation to the American presence in Vietnam, while Canadians’ resistance efforts, which include a series of tunnels to evade detection, similarly recall the war. Moreover, Mackinnon makes canny allusions to his novel’s Vietnam War–era novelistic predecessors: for instance, his fictional Canadian prime minister’s surname, Potter, recalls that of Prime Minister Porter in Rohmer’s novels, and at one point in Mackinnon’s book the United States considers issuing an “ultimatum” to Canada.71 Meanwhile, just as the protagonist in Killing Ground is a Vietnam veteran who committed atrocities there, so too is the leader of the Canadian resistance in Faultline 49.72 The intertextuality is even more explicit when, in a reference to Exxoneration, the premier of Alberta in Mackinnon’s novel considers “sending an armed welcoming committee to seize US hostages Rohmer-style at the Edmonton airport.”73 The selfreflexive joke here is that Mackinnon’s own novel could well be described as “Rohmer-style.” Through such references, Faultline 49 presents itself as a nostalgic palimpsest of Vietnam War–era militant nationalism prompted by the putative neo-imperialism of the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The novel even rehearses the masculinism of its Vietnam-era predecessors: the combatants, political players, and other major characters are almost exclusively men, and at one point Danson identifies the threat of Canada being “emasculated.”74 One reason why The Red Wing Sings, u s n a , and Faultline 49 did not enjoy the success of their Vietnam War–era predecessors is that they were not published in a similar national climate. To be sure, there were frictions between the Canadian and US governments during the presidency

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of George W. Bush, and political commentators have not failed to notice echoes of Vietnam during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the fact that Canada participated from the beginning in the war in Afghanistan made it difficult for Canadian nationalists neatly to oppose Canada to the United States in the same way that their forbears could during the Vietnam War. Also, the number of American dissidents arriving in Canada as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hardly approached the number who crossed the border in the Vietnam years. For various reasons, moreover, mainstream anxiety about the US domination of Canadian industry and culture had largely subsided, as had the zeitgeist of the Vietnam War era that romanticized militant resistance to authority. However, the fact that narratives such as The Red Wing Sings, u s n a , and Faultline 49 continue to be written, along with the fact that they are so similar to their Vietnam War–era predecessors and to each other, indicates that the invasion narrative has a certain ongoing appeal. For one thing, the novels’ emphasis on men’s military heroics demonstrates that fantasies of war continue to provide a vehicle for writers who wish to associate national strength with martial masculinity. What is more, the novels’ use of the war story to represent Canada-US relations allows for the putative US domination of Canada – a multifaceted, complicated matter – to be dealt with in a straightforward, plot-driven way and construes the actions necessary for the recovery of Canadian sovereignty as no more difficult or complex than the execution of military manoeuvres. Likewise, fictions of resistance continue to facilitate fantasies of a united Canada, in contrast with the ongoing reality of regional, political, and cultural differences. And as Faultline 49 especially makes clear with its allusions to past invasion narratives, contemporary versions of such stories permit their writers to express a nostalgia for the Vietnam War era, a time when there was a vociferous nationalist movement in which authors were among the leaders and a considerable audience was willing to learn from them. d i a l e c t i c a l e d u c at i o n i n t h e w o r k s of george ryga

George Ryga was as much concerned with resistance to the United States and educating his Canadian audiences into a more vigorous nationalism



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as any of the writers discussed in this chapter. In these respects, the Vietnam War was an important touchstone for him. His play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which was an enormous commercial and critical hit when it debuted in 1967 at the Vancouver Playhouse and in 1969 when it was the first play in English to be performed at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, contains no explicit references to Vietnam; as a story about an Indigenous woman in Canada who is repeatedly assailed by institutional and individual brutality, the play is very much about the legacy of colonialism and its continuing injustices toward First Nations peoples. At the same time, a note from Ryga in the program for the Vancouver production declared that Rita Joe’s situation echoed that of the oppressed peoples in “the Congo, Bolivia, Vietnam.”75 Yet Ryga was not someone to suggest that the First Nations, other Canadians, or anybody else should follow in the footsteps of the Vietnamese by taking up arms. Rather, the prosecution of war in Ryga’s plays and fiction is repeatedly depicted as the point at which dialogue stops irreversibly and an educative dialectic – an antagonistic relationship between two parties that transforms both – tips into mutual destruction, rendering values such as justice impossible to achieve. The Vietnam War’s importance to Ryga is evident in a short prose piece never published in his lifetime but included in Summerland, a collection of his writings released five years after his death in 1987. In the piece, Ryga relates an encounter that occurred at his home in British Columbia in 1967, at which point the house was a stopover in a network of Canadian residences sheltering American draft dodgers. According to Ryga, one group of dodgers stayed with him at the same time that his conservative American in-laws were visiting, and neither group comes off well in his story. Ryga, a socialist and pacifist who was born in 1932 and, thus, of an older generation than the baby boomers who dominated the New Left, is as keen to condemn the dodgers for their “youth-fascist” views, their “pseudo-Marxist logic,” and their “American middle-class” privilege as he is to paint his middle-American in-laws as “unthinking supporters of Nixonian policies and morality.”76 He heaps special scorn on the draft dodgers for their plan to go “into the mountains of the Interior to buy a farm and set up a permanent base” – a plan that Ryga characterizes as ridiculous.77 If he sees Rita Joe as a symbol of the oppressed peoples of Vietnam and elsewhere, he sees the draft dodgers

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not as fellow victims but as representatives of US imperialism, and it is hardly a careless phrasing when he describes them as wishing to “set up a permanent base.” Even as they were resisting the war by moving to Canada, he suggests that they brought with them the same imperialist mindset they ostensibly opposed. Later in the story, revealing that their efforts north of the border failed and that they returned to the United States by October, Ryga not only anticipates the eventual US withdrawal from Vietnam but also partakes in a triumphant Canadian nationalism of the sort seen in US invasion narratives. Particularly notable in Ryga’s story is his ascription of the draft dodgers’ failure to their lack of education regarding Canada and their refusal to be taught. In his account of speaking with them, a key dramatic moment occurs when they tell him that although they have taken courses on farming in southern Oregon and California, they have no expertise or experience with respect to the b c climate. He recalls telling them in turn “that what they had studied was sub-tropic agriculture, that, in this country, winter was a powerful economic and cultural obstacle, that all training would have to be adapted to coping with the northern reality, and that there was no room even for one misjudgement.” Ryga further remembers that “both the older and younger Americans dismissed this as a backwoods point of view,” believing that “with sufficient funds and determination to succeed, there would be no problem.”78 Once more, the echo of Vietnam is conspicuous, as the Americans’ self-confidence evokes US war hawks’ claim that the most important thing America needed to claim victory was the will to win – a claim belied by the difficulties faced by US forces while waging guerrilla battles in a tropical climate. Meanwhile, in Ryga’s narration of his attempt to teach the draft dodgers about “northern reality,” he implicitly depicts himself as having an affinity with Alan Jarvis in The Trudeau Papers: like that character, Ryga possesses expertise regarding the Canadian environment, along with an inclination to share his knowledge. The problem, as he represents it, is the Americans’ unwillingness to learn. These moments in Ryga’s story manifest a concern with education that was evident throughout his career and had roots in his early life. His own conventional education had finished with the eighth grade, the most senior grade offered by his small school in northern Alberta. After that, Ryga took courses from the Alberta Correspondence School and reached



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grade eleven, but the school did not offer all of the courses necessary for him to complete his high-school education. Another path became available to him after he won an essay competition that awarded him a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts Summer School on Creative Writing. The next year, he won the scholarship again and returned to Banff. While there, he published a poem speaking out against the Korean War in a student broadsheet, to the displeasure of his scholarship’s sponsors. Eventually, he found work at a radio station in Edmonton, where, in 1953, his persistent anti-war stance caused him to be put on probation. By that time, he had joined the Canadian Communist Party and supported the Canadian Peace Council, and he oversaw an Armistice Day edition of the radio program he produced that included anti-war music and poetry. Clearly, his pacifism was not just a matter of conscience; rather, it compelled him to provoke others toward a similar consciousness through encounters with art. By the time Ryga wrote The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, he was having success as a novelist and playwright, the Vietnam War had begun, and collective challenges to the North American education system were underway. His dramatic works in the period kept pace with the times by manifesting a concern that young people were not getting the education they needed. He often depicted youth as misguided or otherwise lost, preoccupied by their own welfare to the exclusion of a rigorous engagement with social justice. His plays also exhibit a suspicion about young people’s ability to learn the right things independent of help from members of an older generation. At the same time, Ryga repeatedly suggests that the older generation has not done its educational duty. Moreover, his works insist that no generation has a monopoly on truth or knowledge and that both the baby boomers’ generation and their parents’ might be educated through dialectical confrontations with the other. Even when characters in Ryga’s works fail to learn, and even when they do not manage to effect social change directly, there is an implicit faith that the real-life audience engaging with those characters will be educated and empowered by witnessing their dialectical encounters. In that respect, Ryga’s plays share the desire of agitprop drama and the New Left guerrilla theatre of the 1960s to transform the stage into an extension of revolutionary movements. But Ryga’s work departs from agitprop conventions by steering clear of straightforward didacticism. He was particularly keen to distinguish his

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plays from those of Bertolt Brecht, observing, “Brecht was out to teach very specific things but not to allow you to teach yourself.”79 Ryga’s dialectical conception of education meant that the lessons to be learned were open-ended, not ones for an instructor to determine in advance. Dialectic also entailed mutual engagement that was often painful and conflictridden, involving argumentation and outright opposition, a process that could feel and look like war. For Ryga, however, an educative dialectic crucially differed from war in bringing about mutual transformation for the better, not least through an increased understanding of oneself and others. Such a dialectic is evident in Just an Ordinary Person, a teleplay scripted by Ryga that was produced in c b c ’s Vancouver studios and broadcasted on c b u t ’s Studio Pacific program in 1967. The next year, Just an Ordinary Person was performed as a play at Vancouver’s Metro Theatre. The teleplay, like the stage version, features only two characters: a poet and the titular “ordinary person,” both unnamed. After a public reading by the poet, the ordinary person approaches him and presses him about the purposes of literature. In doing so, he implicitly attributes to the poet the role of educator. After the poet claims that what he read at his performance emerged from a mere week of writing, his interlocutor observes, “Only a week’s work, and already a hundred people are thinking your thoughts! And soon it will be a thousand, and then ten thousand.”80 But as the play goes on, the ordinary person increasingly takes up a position of authority over the poet, as when interpellating him with the term child. Expounding on his own view of art, the ordinary person ascribes to literature a pointedly educative, ameliorative role, declaring, “The way I see it, the purpose of literature is to help man to know himself. To support his striving for the truth. To discover the good in people and root out the ugliness.” At the same time, he rails against the education system, declaring, “Our schools manufacture people who are alike, even to the cut of their hair, the length of their skirt or pant-leg. They graduate as the equipment for industry.” He also challenges the poet, complaining, “Your words teach me nothing, make me ashamed of you … When will your words speak or inspire rebellion of the spirit?” By having the ordinary person draw the poet into a new consciousness regarding his art, Just an Ordinary Person models a pedagogy of reciprocity in which teacher and student both need to learn from each other. Moreover, they do so not



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simply through the mutual provision of knowledge but through disputation. In fact, when the poet seems to become overly agreeable, assenting to the ordinary person’s definition of God, the ordinary person protests, asking, “Why do you agree so easily? Are you afraid?” Implicitly, he privileges dialectic over tidy concordance. War plays a part in the teleplay’s modelling of dialectical education by standing as a limit to how conflictual a dialectic can be while remaining productive. After a series of scenes in which, in a break from realism, the ordinary person and the poet continue their conversation while shifting seamlessly through symbolically suggestive situations and roles – for instance, the poet becomes a teacher in a classroom, and later the ordinary person becomes a scientist studying slides through a microscope – the ordinary person appears holding a rifle while dressed in an infantry uniform and helmet. He declares to the poet, “See how the nations have clipped my wings, child, and enslaved my heart and thought with this!” He then holds up his rifle as evidence. By presenting this climactic vision of the ordinary person as taken up by war, Just an Ordinary Person echoes the narrative structure of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which Ebenezer Scrooge is given a vision of his future ill-attended funeral and left to wonder whether he is being presented with a scene that is destined to transpire or that can be avoided. In Just an Ordinary Person, although Ryga leaves it ambiguous as to whether it is too late for the poet to take up the kind of writing that might save the ordinary person from soldiering, what is remarkable is the invocation of war as the horizon that must be avoided. The teleplay suggests that when a dialectic is usurped by war, the time for productive dialogue ends. In this regard, it is notable that the poet has also transformed in the scene, his hair having turned white, suggesting at once the trauma of war and – via the association of white hair with old age – the approaching, annihilating horizon of death that war represents. Just as notably, the teleplay does not depict any combatants opposing the ordinary person, with the consequence that there is no possibility for audience catharsis and the illusory promise of “victory” through the depiction of enemies being defeated. In leaving out such antagonists, Just an Ordinary Person foregrounds war itself as the danger and uses the threat of it to prompt its audience out of complacency, suggesting they need to undertake action before Canada becomes embroiled in another Vietnam – perhaps even in Vietnam itself.

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In that last respect, it is striking that the c b c production script for Just an Ordinary Person includes certain lines omitted from the broadcast version, lines in which the ordinary person tells the poet, “A great president was shot hours ago and you remained silent! … A pacifist burned himself to death before the United Nations building and you read about it in the morning and continued eating your cornflakes and homogenized milk!”81 If included in the teleplay, these lines would have given the diegesis an explicit setting in time by pointing to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the self-immolations that occurred in the 1960s in response to the Vietnam War. With the lines omitted, the narrative is less obviously related to the politics of the day, and the teleplay’s final scene can be more easily taken as a statement against war in general, not just against the one in Vietnam. However, the ordinary person’s claim that he has effectively been conscripted into war creates an uncanny resonance with Vietnam – one all the more uncanny for not being expressly articulated, such that viewers are liable to dwell on the possibility of the connection. The ambiguity furthers the teleplay’s goal of educating its audience through the same dialectical process it models in the interactions of the poet and the ordinary person. Rather than presenting viewers with a specific moral about the Vietnam War, the appearance of the ordinary person as a soldier compels them to find their own meaning in his transformation. Just an Ordinary Person does not demand agreement with a stated political position, but in dramatizing the unsettling effects on the poet of the ordinary person’s interlocution, the teleplay suggests the kind of effects it seeks to achieve with its audience. As though working through the problems of creating an effectively didactic drama, Ryga’s work could be highly self-reflexive about its pedagogical elements. That much is clear in a feature-film proposal that he and collaborator Don Eccleston submitted to the National Film Board in 1967. Titled “Drummer of the Second Silence,” the film’s protagonist was to be a character named Tim Melgrave, a history professor at Simon Fraser University who was a conscientious objector during the Second World War but forced into military service by “beatings, humiliation and threats by officers and men in the camp where he was stationed.” Now, the proposal asserts, Melgrave seeks to “vindicate his capitulation” by conversing with “a new generation of students who he feels hold a new value system.” As he does so, the discussion features “an intellectual



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ping-pong game for the student activists [in his class] in opposition to campus reactionaries, and Melgrave’s quest for a hearing become[s] sidestepped in new passions with which he has less familiarity.” The proposal characterizes the “lecture hall confrontation” as one attending to “the thin line of human compassion that can link generations and totally opposed people for a brief moment.” In that phrasing, Ryga admits his hopes for the theatre as an educative space of dialectical encounters. If the description of “Drummer of the Second Silence” as involving an “intellectual ping-pong game” suggests a non-productive antagonism in which two sides act in mere opposition to each other, the anticipation of a moment in which a “thin line of human compassion” connects generations telegraphs Ryga’s belief in the possibility that engagement between opposing sides can have a positive, mutually transformative effect. In this regard, it is also notable that “Drummer of the Second Silence” shows Ryga to be looking once more to the spectre of war – in this case, both in the present and in the past – as the impetus for such a dialectic. By putting memories of the Second World War into dialogue with debates about the Vietnam War, Ryga was certainly not alone; as I indicated in the introduction to this book, commentators on Vietnam were especially prone to compare US actions there with the actions of Nazi Germany. But while those commentators implicitly appealed to and shared a ­popular belief that the Second World War had been a “good,” necessary war for the Allies, Ryga sought to unsettle that belief. In so doing, he once more showed his preference for dialectic: rather than leveraging the conventional wisdom about the Second World War to argue for opposition to the war in Vietnam, he aimed to put ideas about the two wars into conversation with each other so that understandings of both might change. Ryga’s next hit play, Grass and Wild Strawberries, not only further meditated on intergenerational dialectic in the context of the Vietnam War but also came to foreground that dialectic in virtue of the play’s reception. Produced at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre in 1969, it was a made-in-Canada version of Hair, which had been a hit on Broadway the previous year. As Christopher Innes describes it, the production of Ryga’s play took the form of “a multi-media, synaesthetic happening with rear and split screen projection, strobe lights and black light, incense and elaborate choreography.”82 A debt to Hair was especially evident at each

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performance’s conclusion, as the cast invited the audience to join them in dancing onstage. Grass and Wild Strawberries also followed Hair in focusing on a counter-cultural group – in Ryga’s play, a group led by a man named Captain Nevada – and in featuring several rock songs. These were written by Ryga in collaboration with the Collectors, a band that went on to fame after renaming themselves Chilliwack, and their playing onstage during performances of Grass and Wild Strawberries was, by all accounts, a large part of the production’s commercial success, as the play drew the largest mainstage audiences of the Playhouse’s season. However, the audience response was divided generationally; there were claims that the production boasted “135% attendance” because young people filled the seats of older playgoers who walked out midway in reaction to the sexually explicit dancing that featured throughout.83 The reception of Grass and Wild Strawberries thus reflected a generational divide that was further emblematized in Vancouver by conflicts between hippies and municipal authorities led by law-and-order mayor Thomas “Tom Terrific” Campbell. The same divide was prominent in the debate regarding Vietnam, given that it was older American leaders who had made the decision to prosecute the war and young Americans who were being drafted to fight in it. The play’s narrative foregrounds intergenerational division and depicts it as involving a violent, warlike antagonism. At the beginning of Grass and Wild Strawberries, a film collage presents what the stage directions call “impressions of the generation confrontation” and of “campus revolutions,” as well as “sounds of battle, violence,” while a blend of recorded and live voices includes voices from an anti-war protest that turns violent, as a chant of “One, two, three, four – we don’t want your filthy war” gives way to a police dispatcher sending out cars, a shouted command to bring out dogs, and then a girl screaming, “Jesus, they knocked out her eye!” Soon afterward, another voice declares, “Man has more capability than to barbecue other men.”84 For anyone who misses the allusion to Vietnam, the play later features film projections of “war footage of air and ground assault, fires, etc.” while a song is performed that includes the lyrics: The warbird keeps gliding Like a storm in the sky And my children of pity Are destined to die85



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Insofar as the play connects this war imagery to intergenerational dispute, it is further notable that the opening scene’s cacophony emphasizes people of different ages speaking without apparent responses, thus calling attention to a lack of dialogue between the generations. In that respect, it is striking that one declaration by a young person in the scene, “We must liberate ourselves, or we will be liberated by outsiders,” offers up those binary alternatives while failing to recognize a third possibility: that liberation might be accomplished through efforts undertaken in conjunction with “outsiders” – in particular, through young people working with people of their parents’ generation.86 In contrast, the play itself goes on to explore that very possibility. The protagonist of Grass and Wild Strawberries is a young Vancouverite named Allan who faces the prospect of parenthood with his pregnant girlfriend, Susan, while adrift in his life. Although he attributes his recent dropping out of school to the fact that his instructor was “old and out of touch,” Allan’s apparent inability to connect with the teacher is paralleled by his past inability to communicate with his father, now dead, whose ghost literally haunts him at the start of the play, saying to him, “Come on and talk! We never did much talking.’”87 Despite that invitation, Allan and the ghost fail to enter into a proper dialogue with each other, causing Allan to plead with his father in vain: “Listen to me!”88 Allan’s principal alternative father-figure is his uncle, Ted, a long-time labour activist who repeatedly argues with him, trying to win him over to socialism, while Allan struggles to communicate his cynicism regarding the labour movement and political gradualism, not to mention his own libertarian, revolutionary, counter-cultural ideals. The play never brings Ted and Allan into a mutual understanding; in fact, it ends with Ted standing “alone, broken and withered” while Allan dances with his friends.89 But by dramatizing the two men as having engaged in impassioned and compassionate dialogue with one another, Grass and Wild Strawberries models an intergenerational dialectic that stands in contrast with other moments of diegetic conflict in which the elder generation merely imposes discipline on the younger one. For instance, when Susan’s father finds her in the company of hippies, his first impulse is for the police to deal with them; his second is to fight them himself. He ends up speaking with them and Susan briefly, but afterwards she describes talking with him as having been “like talking down a grave,” a phrasing that evokes Allan’s failed

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dealings with his ghostly father.90 The play’s broader suggestion is that for meaningful political change to occur, the generations need to listen to each other. In that regard, Grass and Wild Strawberries models the engagement it advocates, giving over substantial passages of self-expressive speech to characters from each generation. Meanwhile, Grass and Wild Strawberries follows Just an Ordinary Person in ascribing urgency to the need for engaged dialogue by suggesting that the alternative is militarist violence. That much becomes clear when Allan, seeming to have a drug-induced vision, sees himself as a soldier confronted by a barracks officer. The officer demands mindless conformity upon pain of corporal punishment, declaring, “You stop thinkin’ them thoughts or I’m gonna bust you wide open.”91 The situation of a young person finding himself suddenly, frighteningly in the military owes something to the climax of Hair. By giving the vision of the barracks officer to a Canadian character, Ryga is also evoking an Americanized future that threatens young Canadians. Late in the play, an anonymous, disembodied, conservative voice inveighs against campus activists, warning, “They want control of universities in Vancouver, San Francisco, New York … Governor Reagan recognizes an international conspiracy of great danger in this and has suggested opening classrooms at bayonet point.”92 As the play anticipates a moment in which ideological conflict will lead to the use of force and education will be replaced by violence, it is not incidental that there is a reference to Ronald Reagan, then governor of California. Long emblematic of American utopianism, California is also the state that Allan’s father has previously expressed an enduring, unfulfilled desire to visit. Ryga’s contrasting evocation of it as a place on the verge of authoritarian violence stands alongside the vision of the barracks officer to suggest a broader indictment of American bellicosity in the Vietnam War era. If Grass and Wild Strawberries was a happening, Ryga’s next play, Compressions, was more like a teach-in. Ryga was commissioned to write it for Playhouse Holiday, the Vancouver Playhouse Company’s performance group for young people, which was to tour secondary schools in 1969–70. Playhouse Holiday often presented issues-oriented theatre, and Compressions was no exception. Ryga biographer James Hoffman characterizes Compressions as a “morality play” that “directly asks student



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audiences to ponder the larger questions of identity and purpose in their lives.”93 More particularly, Compressions corroborates the anti-war sentiments of youth while condemning their elders’ militarism. Early on, the protagonist, a teacher named Hal, gestures to Canada’s complicity in the Vietnam War in such a way as to educate the audience but also to underscore the existence of intergenerational antagonism; breaking the fourth wall, he tells playgoers, “At Suffield, in Alberta, napalm was perfected to burn the homes and skins of children of Vietnam. The work of deathfor-sale goes on in Suffield at this very moment.” Then, alluding to King Richard III, Hal says the Canadian production of napalm indicates that Canadians’ “democratic blood” still holds “a remnant of the English king who killed his brother’s children.”94 The notion of an older generation harming a younger one returns when Hal excoriates another Canadian character, Bert Sheffield, for having invited pilots of US fighter jets “fresh from plowing up Vietnam” to perform an aerial show at the local summer fair.95 Bert’s indifference to his invitation’s implicit endorsement of the Vietnam War resonates with the fact that he struck his teenage son, Larry, on the face after Larry dared to ask him about rumours of his dubious practices as a lawyer. Bert, who is now running for the local mayoralty and seems intent on pursuing leadership without any concern for ethics, would appear to be a modern-day version of Richard III. And although a blow to the face is less horrible than the killing of English and Vietnamese children, Compressions suggests through its depiction of Bert that there is a connection between the two kinds of violence. With the failings of the older generation in view, Compressions envisions an educational process in which youth might serve as instructors to people of their parents’ age. The play signposts that ideal early on when Hal tells the audience, “I am now a teacher, you, my students. The roles can be reversed at once, had you the courage to reverse them.”96 Later, he further asserts that “young idealists have to confront their own fathers and mothers before they can reconstruct the social order they inherited.”97 The play provides a negative model for such confrontations in Larry, who is drawn to revolutionary politics rather than to dialogue. Hal expresses his concern that Larry “will become like” Bert, unwittingly imitating the militarism that Bert has tacitly legitimated by organizing

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the air show.98 In the meantime, it is left to Hal to model in his talking with Bert the sort of confrontational dialogue that Hal advocates. Even so, Compressions does not pretend that such dialogue is always successful; toward the end of the play, Hal worries that Bert has become “unreachable,” and he envisions “violence in the streets.” That said, he quickly changes his mind, deciding that there is “still time to talk and argue.”99 In contrast, Larry starts to imagine himself as a “barefoot guerrilla moving through the trees” but then apprehends that “nobody seems to care” what he does, undermining his previous assertion that it is “better to be silent and deadly” than to speak.100 Accordingly, although Compressions does not involve characters inviting audience members onstage to dance, it concludes by implicitly advocating audience activity beyond the theatre. Fellow British Columbia author Tom Wayman would assert in his 1973 poem “The Dream of the Guerillas” that “the guerillas are coming and you must go with them”; contrastingly, Ryga insists that the guerrilla’s path is neither ideal nor necessary. For young Canadians, he suggests, the best defence against being c­ o-opted into oppressive violence is not merely to resist or to turn away from the generation holding the reins of power but, rather, to engage with it in dialogue. By repeatedly depicting the cut and thrust of characters debating with each other and with themselves while the possibility of war hangs over them, Ryga ­models for audiences an effort to tolerate difficult arguments rather than to seek resolution through violence. In Ryga’s work, dialogue is often antagonistic and painful, but it is part of a pedagogy in which disagreements are the catalyst and vehicle for questioning beliefs and learning from others. For Hal in Compressions, a dialogue with his past also turns out to be necessary. Recalling Tim Melgrave in “Drummer of the Second Silence,” Hal doubts the morality of his participation in the Second World War, particularly his killing of five enemy soldiers with a grenade. Looking back, he asserts, “I didn’t have to kill. I could have retreated. I could have dropped my gun. I could have spent all my energies in my own country, begging to be heard, explaining that war was madness, that each of us was responsible for it happening.”101 Even in 1969, a pacifist perspective on the Second World War was very much a minority view. As Hal recognizes, however, young people in the Vietnam War era were eminently skeptical about war in general, and he speculates that if his own students



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had been in his place during the Second World War, they “wouldn’t do what we did without first asking a lot of serious questions.”102 By having Hal utter such words in front of the high-school students for whom Compressions was performed, Ryga is both flattering his audience’s political views and prodding them into more fully embracing an anti-authoritarian, anti-war politics. He is also presenting Hal as a bridge between generations, proof in the flesh that at least some people over thirty are worth trusting. In that regard, Hal’s name is notable: given the allusion in Compressions to Richard III, as well as references in the play to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,103 it is difficult not to hear in Hal’s name an allusion to King Henry V, depicted as Prince Hal in the two parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Ryga’s decision to align his protagonist with the young gadabout Hal rather than with his older incarnation as the warring Henry means that young people watching Compressions are further invited to identify with the protagonist. The allusions to Shakespeare in Compressions also comment on the role of theatre in Canadian education. Ryga was a vocal critic of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, which he saw as perpetuating a colonial Canadian preoccupation with foreign drama at the expense of Canadian-written plays.104 Yet Compressions itself is remarkably Shakespearean: aside from its allusions, it features characters who declare that “all the world’s a school” and “all the players are unwitting students,” and it concludes in a Shakespearean manner, as Hal addresses the audience with a rhyming couplet on behalf of the play’s characters, announcing the end of “our moment with you.”105 On the one hand, such elements suggest a belief in the power of drama, Shakespearean or otherwise, to teach people about politics and history. For instance, Ryga’s allusion to Richard III stands as a recognition that most Canadians are liable to know about the monarch principally via Shakespeare’s depiction of him. Compressions thus acknowledges that Shakespeare has played a significant role in Canadians’ education. On the other hand, Ryga’s parodying of Shakespeare establishes a critical distance between himself and the Bard. In that respect, Ryga’s allusion to Henry V via the figure of Hal is especially notable. Ryga was probably aware that Shakespeare’s play, as filmed by Laurence Olivier during the Second World War, had served the British war effort and the cause of militarist nationalism by paralleling the war against the Nazis with Henry V’s efforts on the battlefield of Agincourt. By having Hal

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doubt the morality of his actions in combat during the Second World War, Compressions stands in opposition to the spirit of Olivier’s film, drawing audiences toward pacifism, instead. In a 1974 essay, Ryga asserted that the Vietnam War had been significant not only for him but also for Canadian theatre culture, calling the conflict “the turning point in our theatre awareness – when we realized we did not want to be identified with the United States or its cultural values.”106 As Canadian theatre began to find its feet in the early 1970s, however, Ryga’s relationship to mainstream Canadian theatre culture grew hostile. After his play Captives of the Faceless Drummer, a fictionalized take on the October Crisis, was rejected in 1970 by the Vancouver Playhouse as too controversial, Ryga struggled to find prominent Canadian theatres that would produce his work, and he increasingly turned from drama to other writing. In 1980, he began work on a novel, In the Shadow of the Vulture, which he published in 1985, and which won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. As the book focuses on a group of Mexicans forced into slavery on a contemporary American farm, it also considers US injustice by telling the story of a Vietnam War veteran named Sandy Wade who is afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder.107 In the Shadow of the Vulture follows Canadian texts of the Vietnam War era in condemning the United States as violent, racist, inequitable, and corrupt, but it stands apart from them in featuring a US veteran of the war among its principal characters and in representing him sympathetically. Indeed, the picture of Sandy as a traumatized veteran has more in common with Hollywood films such as The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) than with war-era Canadian fantasies of US invasion, which depicted American veterans of the Vietnam War as villains, not victims. One might take Ryga’s sympathetic representation of Sandy to bespeak a greater postwar willingness in Canadian writers not to treat all Americans as malevolent imperialists. But as with veterans in Ryga’s earlier work, Sandy also plays a crucial role in the author’s anti-war pedagogy, insofar as the character’s combat experience grants him authority in testifying to war’s horrors. In that regard, it is notable that although the recurring focus on male protagonists in Ryga’s texts indicates a preoccupation with masculinity similar to that of Powe, Adams, and Rohmer, Ryga’s antipathy to war involves a refusal to endorse martial manhood. Instead, Sandy joins the ordinary person in Just an Ordinary Person, Tim



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Melgrave in “Drummer of the Second Silence,” Allan in Grass and Wild Strawberries, and Hal in Compressions in being a man whose imagined or actual military experiences are sources of angst and suffering, not expertise and assurance. While Powe, Adams, and Rohmer imagine the conditions in which Canadians might display their masculine virtues in a “good” war, Ryga seeks to undermine the notion that a good war is ever possible.108 For him, the key lesson of the Vietnam War is not that the United States can be defeated by a determined national resistance movement; rather, he sees the conflict’s traumatic effects as demonstrating why war is always wrong. Thus, In the Shadow of the Vulture shows Ryga to be interested in the war less as an emblem of Canada-US difference than as a disaster from which all North Americans might learn. Sandy models that learning process by coming to view the United States as a country that has entered “the throes of world empire”109 – and he develops this view, significantly, through an engagement with literature, as he reads John Berger’s 1972 book, Ways of Seeing. While Ryga’s dramatizing of the volume’s transformative effect on Sandy suggests a faith in books’ educative potential, it might also be taken to constitute a self-reflexive defence of Ryga’s shift away from drama. As though sensitive to the individual nature of reading and writing books, in contrast with the directly interpersonal, collaborative qualities of theatre production and spectatorship, Ryga characterizes Sandy’s solitary reading as nevertheless involving its own form of dialectic. That involvement is apparent when Sandy imagines what Berger would say if describing him. Sandy decides that Berger would write, among other things, “This man … might have lived a full life if the war had not twisted something inside of him.”110 While the self-portrait serves as a further condemnation of the war, Sandy’s imagining of himself through Berger’s eyes underscores the fact that reading involves an engagement with another person’s perspective and, moreover, that this engagement can challenge and change one’s own views. In attending to how people respond to different media in different ways, Ryga demonstrated a high degree of self-awareness about his own intermedial shifts between writing plays, teleplays, essays, and novels. His desire to teach people through his writing entailed self-reflexive explorations of how people would encounter his words, depending on whether they were printed on a page or uttered by characters onstage. Similarly,

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Ryga’s intertextual considerations of authors such as Shakespeare and Berger functioned as critical commentary regarding writing’s impact on people’s perceptions of themselves and of phenomena such as the Vietnam War. But Ryga was by no means unique in considering literature’s relationship to other media; as I will demonstrate in the next chapter, that relationship frequently preoccupied Canadian authors during the war era. Other writers shared Ryga’s hopes that literature could play a role in transforming people’s views of the war; at the same time, they expressed skepticism about the political role of mass media. For some writers, the US media were an extension of the American empire, and the media’s threat to Canada was as profound as the military threat imagined in novels dramatizing US invasions. As writers articulated such concerns, they manifested the same didactic impulse evident in invasion narratives and in Ryga’s texts, and they followed that impulse by seeking to teach their readers how mass media worked.

3 The TV War and Intermedial Critique We are now in the midst of our first television war … The public is now participant in every phase of the war, and the main actions of the war are now being fought in the American home itself. Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village What does a person want out of life: images? John Newlove, “Like a Canadian”

In Lament for a Nation, George Grant repeatedly associates mass media with American liberalism. He blames the media for the Canadian electorate’s capitalist, continentalist sympathies, complaining, “Where can people learn independent views, when newspapers and television throw at them only processed opinions?”1 He also connects mass media to Lester Pearson’s Liberal Party, which he views as highly Americanized. For instance, he asserts that “the c b c made misty-eyed television programs about Pearson’s return to the United Nations as the true Canadian internationalist, at a time when he was negotiating with the United States for the spread of nuclear arms to Canada.”2 In contrast, Grant observes Conservative leader John Diefenbaker’s inability to master visual media, referring to the politician’s “prairie rhetoric murdering the television,” even while praising his speech in Parliament during the 1962–63 Defence Crisis.3 By characterizing Diefenbaker as a man of words, not images, and as someone who suffered politically for his ill fit with television, Grant implicitly opposes him to his American antagonist, John F. Kennedy, whose success in the 1960 presidential election debates had been widely attributed to the fact that he was more telegenic than his opponent,

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Richard Nixon. In Grant’s eyes, television is an important political weapon, but it is also an Americanizing one. Accordingly, it is perhaps not a surprise that Grant allies himself with Diefenbaker as a man of words by calling attention to his own act of writing Lament for a Nation. Early in the book, for example, Grant associates his composition of the text with optimism and agency, insisting, “The situation of absolute despair does not allow a man to write.”4 In the claim that his writing proved he was not altogether without hope, Grant aligned the written word with a resistance to technologist hegemony, as though any fight for Canada’s survival would need to be a literary endeavour, carried out in a medium that was, in the new electronic age, no less traditional, marginalized, and endangered than Grant took Canada to be. By adopting the position of a literary Canadian critiquing a contemporary North America dominated by mass media, Grant was undergirding his political nationalism with an anti-technological one. His embrace of Canada together with writing was liable to seem a rearguard action, but other Canadian authors during the Vietnam War would similarly write as though writing itself were anti-imperialist. Canadian nationalists as a whole tended to be concerned about US mass media.5 Canada was more intensively saturated by those media than was any country apart from America itself – by 1967, half of the Canadian population could receive US television signals, while almost 40 per cent of anglophone Canada received at least three US channels – and nationalists bemoaned the effects of such immersion in US culture. As Pearson put it in 1968, “The industrial and economic and financial penetration from the south worries me, but less than the penetration of American ideas, of the flow of information about all things American; American thought and entertainment; the American approach to everything.”6 Nationalists also worried about the US influence on Canadian massmedia producers, who were often seen as imitating the style and content of American programming. That concern obtained, not least, with regard to the Vietnam War. The c b c television news program This Hour Has Seven Days did offer critical coverage, as when it broadcasted the hardhitting documentary The Mills of the Gods in 1965. As early as August of that year, however, Edwin R. Black complained in Canadian Forum regarding Canada, “Our news pages are almost entirely American in



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spirit. One symptom may be seen in that only a tiny handful of the Canadian newspapers failed to echo the twistings and turnings of the American press in reporting the Dominican fiasco and the Vietnam tragedy.”7 Consequently, when Marshall McLuhan made his famous 1968 declaration that the war in Vietnam was “being fought in the American home,” it followed that the war was also being fought in Canadian ones. For some commentators, Canadians’ consumption of US television did not doom them to passive indoctrination. In the course of American public intellectual Paul Goodman’s 1966 Massey Lectures, for instance, even though Goodman characterized the media as “brainwashing” people into becoming “personnel of a mechanical system” preoccupied with the development of military technology, he told Canadians that they might avoid America’s fate.8 Goodman declared, “You people are not yet so wrongly committed as we. Your land is less despoiled, your cities are more manageable, you are not yet so sold on mis-education. You are not in the trap of militarism. A large minority of you are deeply skeptical of American methods and oppose the unquestioned extension of American power. Some of us Americans have always wistfully hoped that you Canadians would teach us a lesson or two, though, to be frank, you have usually let us down.”9 In identifying Canadians as skeptical of the United States as a result of their different living conditions, and in claiming that they had the potential to teach Americans, Goodman imagined a binational relationship characterized not by conflict, as the writers discussed in the previous chapter did, but by a studious, critically distanced Canadian attention to the United States. Rather than only teaching their compatriots how to resist America, Goodman implied, Canadians might offer lessons that could be learned by Americans, too. During the Vietnam War, some Canadian writers would come to embrace this critical perspective on the United States, taking it to be both nationally distinctive and morally imperative. Moreover, their work suggested a link between that perspective and an engagement with US media. One of the first such commentators was Melville Watkins, who wrote in 1966, “American television programmes while blanketing the world also awaken it; they may yet turn out to be the most effective technique imaginable for creating anti-Americanism.”10 In Canada, media consumption during the Vietnam War did sometimes foster anti-American sentiment, but it also

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sparked a more ironic viewpoint that recognized the ways in which Canadians were American themselves. As Canadian literature gave voice to this ironic consciousness, it anticipated and gave credence to McLuhan’s 1977 pronouncement that Canadians as a whole possessed a “philosophic attitude of comparison and contrast and critical judgement” because they enjoyed “instant access to all American radio and television” while experiencing those media in the “alien milieu” of a different country.11 If such Canadian difference existed, it had been cultivated partly by media attention to issues of the Vietnam War era, as reports of US political assassinations, riots, protests, and military actions confirmed that Canada was significantly distinct from America. The notion of Canadian identity as involving an ironic double vision is one that Linda Hutcheon has influentially associated with Canadian postmodernism in her book The Canadian Postmodern (1988). As Hutcheon discusses literature from the 1970s and 1980s, she suggests that the postmodern valuing of “difference and ex-centricity” can be explained partly by political and scholarly trends of the time. In terms of Canadian postmodernism, she points to the “challenges to authority” made by the new nationalism and the women’s movement.12 In terms of international postmodernism, she notes the influence of things such as “studies of post-colonial racism.”13 Extending that line of argument, I would observe that Canadian postmodernism, like postmodernism elsewhere, was influenced by de-colonization movements such as the one in Vietnam. As these movements challenged Eurocentrism and imperial authority, they fostered what Jean-François Lyotard famously called postmodernism’s “incredulity toward metanarratives.”14 In the case of Vietnam, the National Liberation Front’s assertion that they were fighting to secure national independence challenged the myth of the United States as a country that always supported the freedom of oppressed peoples. Likewise, mounting civilian deaths in Vietnam, brutal US military tactics such as the use of Agent Orange and napalm, and reports of atrocities committed by American soldiers undermined the myth of the United States as a country that stood for justice and fair play. The power of this myth for Canadians, along with the role of the Vietnam War in disabusing them of it, received articulation in George Bowering’s 1974 poem “Stab,” in which the speaker admits to his past belief that “we are all Americans” and that Americans



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never start wars or torture prisoners or use gas, the enemy does all that, they start it & we, Americans, we finish it, honestly, cleanly, we never stab from behind, we shoot the guns out of their hands.15 The speaker goes on to describe his subsequent realization that “there is no such thing” as the sort of idealized American in whom he used to believe and with whom he once identified.16 Over the course of the Vietnam War, similarly critical voices around the globe cast the United States as a country with a history of aggression that included the violent, even genocidal treatment of racialized others, from Indigenous North Americans and enslaved Africans to the Vietnamese. Canadians were especially alive to this view of US history and conscious of their ironic relationship to it: they were liable to see their country as one of America’s victims even while recognizing that Canada was also home to racial injustice. The irony was heightened by Canada’s status as an ostensibly neutral observer in Vietnam that was, as critics pointed out, abetting the US war effort in myriad ways. Canadians’ ironic consciousness was further fostered by their massmediated relationship to the Vietnam War. The media provided close-up, sometimes graphic images of a war that was being prosecuted half a world away, and the irruption of such images in domestic spaces could be unsettling. The fact that Canadians were often engaging with US coverage of the war had a further ironizing effect, as the reportage neither strictly involved them nor was produced for them. Instead, US coverage framed the conflict in American terms, whether focusing on the perspectives of US soldiers or reporting on the American anti-war movement. Thus, Canadians had an intimate but alienating acquaintance with another nation’s reporting on and for itself. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Hutcheon’s association of Canadian postmodernism with a manner of double consciousness was anticipated during the war by William Kilbourn, who in 1970 attributed to Canadians “a divided vision, sometimes paralysing, sometimes detached and ironic, always multiple, and useful for living in the electronic age’s global village.”17 In pointing to the “electronic age,” Kilbourn recognized that Canadians’ ironic identity was bound up with their relationship to mass media. While many Canadian

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nationalists at the time saw those media as a threat to their nation, Kilbourn suggested that media consumption might make Canadian identity only more distinctive. And although he was not the first commentator to characterize Canadians as having a divided vision, he offered something new in his assessment of it: while others such as Margaret Atwood diagnosed Canada as pathological by describing the nation’s dividedness as a form of schizophrenia, Kilbourn cast that dividedness as something that could be advantageous.18 In doing so, he offered an early articulation of what Hutcheon would later identify as Canadian postmodernism’s ironic, “constructively contradictory” character.19 Attention to Canadian writers’ interest in mass-media images of the Vietnam War also helps in providing a historicizing answer to a question Hutcheon asks: “Why have so many Canadian writers, in particular, turned to the notion of taking photographs for their analogue of literary production?”20 One reason is photography’s complicated status during the war. On the one hand, several photographs of the conflict became iconic by virtue of their emotional power and their ability to emblematize ideas about the war. For instance, the 1972 photograph of young Kim Phuc running naked down a road, seared by napalm, was viewed as evidence that the war was a horrific error with a terrible cost. On the other hand, the war era brought about a popular recognition that photographs were not transparent historical records; rather, they could be staged or doctored. Accordingly, photographs became an impetus for considering the relationship between cultural representations and political persuasion. They also became a foil for literature, which did not offer the same apparent referential immediacy but often aspired to its own sort of historical truthfulness. Meanwhile, as never before, visual media became associated with violence, not least because they so frequently brought images of violence into North American homes. In that respect, one might identify a reason why, as Hutcheon observes, Canadian literature often represents film and photography as “death-dealing”:21 as we shall see, the Vietnam War era fostered a close association of cameras with guns. In what follows, I begin by considering literary depictions of Canadians’ relationship to the war. As I have previously noted, very little warera Canadian literature focused directly on American or Vietnamese combatants. Instead, a copious amount of writing represented Canadians’ engagements with the war via radio, television, newspapers, and magazines. Writers repeatedly emphasized that these engagements were



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uncanny and phantasmagorical as they brought Canadians into a shocking awareness of their country’s separateness from and connections to violence across the globe. These encounters also raised a pressing question: What constituted a proper response to such intimate but alienated witnessing? In this regard, it is notable that just as texts discussed in the previous chapter bolstered their didacticism by cultivating readers’ affective relations to Canada, so too did texts discussed in this chapter. In particular, they often modelled emotional reactions to mass-media war reportage with the aim of normalizing those reactions, whether they involved horror at suffering, guilt, or gladness at Vietnam’s distance from Canada. In virtually all cases, there was the suggestion that mass media had created a global village in which it was impossible to be wholly detached from the war. Repeatedly, literature depicted characters’ views of Canada becoming suffused by their awareness of Vietnam. Guy Debord defines a spectacle as not just “a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”22 Canadian writers during the Vietnam War imagined the spectacle of the conflict as one that would stimulate an anti-war consciousness in Canadians and a humanitarian orientation toward Vietnam. Early in the war, writers tended to see the mass media as playing an important role in fostering anti-war sentiment. They evinced a hope that Susan Sontag identifies as first arising in people in response to war images many years earlier: “if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war.”23 As the conflict in Vietnam continued, however, there were increasingly condemnations of the media for their complicity with the US government in its prosecution of the war. I argue that such condemnations modelled a Canadian identity involving an active, critical response to US media. In this respect, poets took a leading role. Anticipating Sontag’s arguments in On Photography (1977), they emphasized that images can serve ideological purposes; that rather than speaking for themselves, photographs are always subject to interpretation and can be either passively consumed or met by a skeptical eye.24 In doing so, poets built on the history of poetic ekphrasis – poetry that goes about describing and commenting on a ­representation in another medium – by deploying it for the purpose of intermedial critique.25 Canadian poets wrote ekphrases about mass-media texts with remarkable frequency, and they often focused not on what was unique to any one text but on problematic elements that they construed

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as typical of mass-media representations. After discussing examples of such poems that undertake what I call “typical” ekphrasis, I turn to examining the similarly critical approach to media in Michael Ondaatje’s 1970 book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. I argue that Ondaatje smuggles references to the Vietnam War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy into the narrative, with the effect that the book’s portrait of the Wild West expands to characterize American history as marked by a longstanding relationship between violence and mass media. h u m a n i ta r i a n w i t n e s s i n g in the global village

During the Vietnam War, writers often depicted the war’s irruptions in Canadians’ everyday lives as disrupting people’s relationships to their immediate surroundings and rendering the home an uncanny space. In the anthology Poets of Canada 1969, for instance, M.E. Howell’s poem “Nightmare” presents a speaker awaking from a dream of armed combat to find that “the hollow thud” made by slain oneiric bodies is actually “the friendly fall of drops, / The patter of the rain.”26 In the prose poem “Take What We Can” in the same volume, Penny Ann Hayes describes a character enjoying the sensual delights of a summer night in Canada, then suddenly asks, “What of Viet Nam?”27 Such rapid shifts of focus were not unusual in war-era writing. As Howell moves from spectral dream to waking life and Hayes from waking life to the spectre of Vietnam, both poets model an apprehension of two worlds overlapping dissonantly. The poems’ shared dramatic strategy is implicitly to answer Northrop Frye’s question “Where is here?” by asserting, “War is here.” Vietnam was thousands of miles away, but it was not far from Canadians’ minds. For Howell’s and Hayes’s speakers, thoughts of the war come seemingly unbidden; in other Canadian literary texts of the period, the chaos and suffering of Vietnam entered everyday Canadian life via mass media. In fact, authors who described Canadians’ mediated experience of the war took part in establishing a new genre: mass-media ekphrasis. As Barbara K. Fischer observes, ekphrasis’s rise to prominence in Western poetry earlier in the twentieth century followed on from an increase in the number of museums that presented art for viewers’ scrutiny.28 That connection between ekphrasis and museums helps to explain why so



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much mid-century ekphrasis focused on high art. During the Vietnam War, the ubiquity of televisual and photographic news coverage contributed to the emergence of Canadian poetry that commented ekphrastically on war images – images experienced not in museums but in the home, transforming the domestic sphere into one charged by the conflict. In dramatizing people’s reactions to these images and other massmedia representations of Vietnam, writers emphasized that Canadians’ relationship to the war was – or should be – not just spectatorial but also visceral. Like the writers discussed in previous chapters who sought to invest Canadian nationalism with emotion and physicality by personifying the country or imagining Canada-US conflict, the writers of massmedia ekphrases looked to cultivate affect in readers by dramatizing individual reactions to spectres of the war. In doing so, those writers also often sought to depict and foster a Canadian identity that was distinctly humanitarian, involving a witness subjectivity distinguished by compassion and a desire to act in view of others’ pain. From the beginning of US combat operations in Vietnam, Canadian poets dealing with the war emphasized the matter of seeing as they grappled with the fact that Vietnam was at once remote from North America and profoundly connected to it. An example is Earle Birney’s poem “Looking from Oregon.” The poem is dated August 1964 in Birney’s Collected Poems, and that date, along with a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin, encourages readers to believe that the text was written directly after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that prompted the United States to send troops into Vietnam.29 The poem begins with an epigraph from the American poet Robinson Jeffers: “And what it watches is not our wars.” Those words are the final ones in Jeffers’s 1948 poem “The Eye,” which, like “Looking from Oregon,” features a speaker gazing west from America’s Pacific coast, and which imagines the Earth as an eye that is indifferent to humanity’s conflicts. In “Looking from Oregon,” the speaker is less than confident about his ability to take up the blithe, nonhuman perspective that Jeffers’s poem imagines. Instead, Birney begins with the line “Far out as I can see,” foregrounding the speaker’s limited point of view. Subsequently, as the speaker observes a friend and the friend’s two sons racing each other across the beach until they collapse, he imagines that they have run all the way “from Tonkin’s gulf / on the bloodshot edge.”30 The phrase takes Jeffers’s notion of the Earth as an eyeball in a sanguinary direction, suggesting that both the seeing self and

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the entire world have been stained by the bloodshed in Vietnam. The speaker then reiterates the limits of his vision, referring to “unimaginable Asia” and, thus, underscoring the disjunction between the bucolic scene immediately before him and the dimly apprehended war.31 But despite his emphasis on what he cannot see, the speaker is able to identify and be affected by what is absent from the manifest scene, such that the collapsing bodies of his friend and the friend’s sons evoke the bodies that have fallen in Vietnam. By depicting the war as fostering the speaker’s double vision, “Looking from Oregon” stands as a meditation on how perceptions of the visible world are mediated by one’s political consciousness. Milton Acorn’s poem “The War in Viet Nam,” also dated 1964 and published in the November 1965 issue of Blew Ointment, likewise addresses the challenge of reckoning with a war that is physically distant. Here is the poem in its oddly laid-out entirety: The star above my head ’s a baby burning, hopelessly beyond my blessing. If I kissed him we’d both scream, but at least the flame ’d touch us both … one reality perceived . As it stands only he knows he exists by pain’s present virtue, and all I can do is acknowledge the vanishment of light he radiates ( my brainpan’s transparent to it ’s needles … and as for the strange animals of my imagination, they’re harried on , made to disappear if they want to lie still) .



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In a poem in which even punctuation marks and letters sharing the same words are not always proximate to each other, the matter of propinquity is conspicuous. Acorn’s speaker might imagine victimization by the war more directly than does Birney’s, but the same concern about the limitations of perspective presses at him, even as the description of him perceiving light’s “vanishment” emphasizes that something invisible can still be registered as significant. The speaker struggles with his recognition that distance is an obstacle to empathy: observed remotely, a painful flame may appear harmless, as tranquil as a star in the night sky. Moreover, the speaker’s implicit casting of the “harried” Vietnamese as “strange animals” is an act of ironic domestication, insisting that the victims of war are the speaker’s fellow creatures, closer to him and better understood than stars, yet also, troublingly, more easily “made to disappear” and ignored. In expressing a concern about how simply the Vietnam War might drop from North Americans’ consciousness, Acorn’s poem reflects the fact that in 1964, mass-media images of the conflict had not yet grown so profuse as they would later in the decade. Nonetheless, the speaker’s imagining of a moment in which he and the burning baby might experience “one reality” via shared bodily suffering anticipates later Canadian writing that would dramatize moments of identificatory pain in order to shock readers out of passive spectatorship and stimulate their empathy for the Vietnamese. As though assuming that Canadians and Americans had a common orientation toward the Vietnam War, neither Birney’s poem nor Acorn’s explicitly marks itself out as Canadian, and one could imagine the speakers to be American. In contrast, Al Purdy’s poem “News Reports at Ameliasburg,” dated 1964 and published in the 1968 edition of his collection Poems for All the Annettes, foregrounds Canada in order to celebrate the speaker’s distance from the war, even while recognizing the ironies and fragility of that distance. The poem begins with the speaker reporting on conflict throughout the world, including the United States and Vietnam. Regarding Canada, he declares, “Hannibal drives his elephants into Toronto.”32 This evocation of the city as overtaken by a contemporary version of the Roman Empire suggests that Canada cannot escape the currents of global politics. Nevertheless, the speaker contrasts the reports of violence with the pastoral idyll of his situation in Ameliasburg,

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Ontario, a place that he characterizes as inhabited principally by groundhogs, goldfinches, foxes, and squirrels. In this place, he reports, “I have unbuckled my sword and lay there beside them.”33 If Toronto represents a Canada overtaken by empire, Ameliasburg represents the Canadian “peaceable kingdom” that Northrop Frye evoked in 1965. Frye was alluding to the title of a series of paintings by nineteenth-century American artist Edward Hicks that depicted William Penn signing a treaty with Indigenous Americans while an array of animals – carnivores and herbivores together – stand placidly in the foreground. The paintings’ own allusion is to the Book of Isaiah, in which it is prophesied that the wolf “shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”34 As Purdy describes his speaker lying among the animals in Ameliasburg, he corroborates Frye’s notion of Canada as holding the potential for such harmony; the speaker’s local environment would appear to be an Edenic space offering the modern equivalent of prelapsarian bliss. But Purdy’s speaker is not entirely detached from the broader world; he is still aware of the poem’s titular news reports from elsewhere, and he still carries a sword. In this respect, the poem’s last line is striking: after the speaker describes lying with the animals, he declares that “the sun has gone down in my village.”35 The identification of a “village” is ironic, evoking not just Ameliasburg but also the global village, a village on which the sun never sets and of which the speaker is also a member. Given that membership, the speaker’s averral that he has unbuckled his sword and lain down with the animals might be taken less as a sign of complacent detachment than as a form of retreat, even desertion. Accordingly, although Purdy joins Frye in perpetuating the myth of an idyllic, peaceful Canada, he simultaneously undermines that vision, recognizing that it is predicated on an illusory turn away from Canada’s imbrication in world history and global suffering. In focusing on that turn, Purdy implicitly engages with a famous ekphrastic text, W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938). Auden’s poem stands as a model for Purdy in its meditation on the human tendency to ignore others’ pain and on the role played by artists in drawing attention back to suffering. “News Reports at Ameliasburg” is less conspicuously ekphrastic than Auden’s poem, which considers Pieter Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca 1558), but Purdy’s opening description of the titular news reports constitutes a form of mass-media ekphrasis in its recognition that the media follow the Old Masters by attending to



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pain that the speaker might prefer to ignore. At the same time, Purdy aligns himself with the media by relating their news, thus suggesting that his poetry has a similar role in reminding readers of rural Ontario’s connections to global conflict. David Lewis Stein’s short story “The Night of the Little Brown Men,” written in 1965 and first published in the March 1967 issue of Saturday Night,36 shares Purdy’s recognition that Canadians are connected to the Vietnam War, but Stein more extensively explores what line of action they should pursue in light of that connection. The protagonist is a male Canadian composer and music teacher who has spent a restless night haunted by images of the titular men, Vietnamese communist fighters in “black pyjamas blending into the dark muck of the jungle floor.”37 These phantasms are described predominantly in visual terms, suggesting that Canadians’ relationship to Vietnam is primarily that of spectators. The story further suggests that this spectatorship is framed by the stereotypes of US mass-media narratives: in particular, the protagonist imagines the fighters “lying there waiting for the Americans, Glenn Ford, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, walking single file up the jungle trail.”38 Through this description, Stein’s story gains the dimension of intermedial critique, implying that even as the US military has intervened in Vietnam, US cultural products have figuratively occupied the Canadian imagination. They have not contributed anything, however, that would grant richness or complexity to the protagonist’s vision of the “little brown men,” as there is little to distinguish the figures individually or to suggest that he has more than a cartoonish understanding of them. Consequently, as he struggles to decide whether he should support the Vietnamese communists in some way, there is every indication that he lacks a sufficiently nuanced understanding of them to make an informed choice. In that respect, Stein challenges readers to ask themselves whether their own understanding of the war is any sounder than the protagonist’s and whether it might likewise be mediated by Hollywood tropes. “The Night of the Little Brown Men” suggests that this colonization of Canadian minds by Hollywood narratives leaves Canadians passive witnesses to the undertakings of American heroes rather than political actors themselves. In the case of Stein’s protagonist, his desire for political involvement turns out to be a mere velleity. After adducing various ­reasons why his participation as an anti-US combatant or an anti-war protester might not be a good idea – from his need to focus on his music

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to his expectation that he would be unable to influence the US government – he decides to “surrender” to the “little brown men” in his mind, but this capitulation proves to be highly ironic, as it involves him putting aside thoughts of the war altogether, absolving himself of responsibility.39 In other words, he “surrenders” not to the communists but to quiescence. He falls asleep contentedly at the story’s end, suggesting that the Vietnamese have become, for him, like the harried animals in Acorn’s “The War in Viet Nam”: out of sight and, thus, out of mind. Whether or not readers agree that Stein’s protagonist need not concern himself with the war, it is notable that the story’s dramatic material is not the war itself but the protagonist’s political agonizing. Lying in bed, he is immersed in the private sphere, ostensibly as removed from politics as he can be, but his situation there as he ponders his relationship to the war implies that the politics of the conflict do have a place in the bedrooms of the nation. The protagonist may be able to sleep by surrendering his hopes of political agency, but his insomnia as a result of his mental convolutions in the lead-up to that surrender shows the war to be already involving him – and, implicitly, others like him – physically and affectively. By modelling the process of assessing Canadians’ responsibilities with respect to Vietnam, Stein’s story encourages readers to engage in a similar process. A comparable point is made in James Reid’s poem “Saturna Island as Vietnam,” published in the 1966 anthology New Wave Canada, which presents the titular British Columbia island as a place where the war is invisible but omnipresent. From the poem’s beginning, Reid describes the island as a place of danger and confusion: The sheep trails are trials, fateful to strangers, a kind of a puzzling. They lead to the cliffs, & the cliffs to the sea. On the way back they seem to disappear behind you & in front. With nowhere to go, you forget where the road was.40 In the wake of the poem’s title establishing the trope of the island as Vietnam, the fairy-tale-like dramatic situation has a clear political



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resonance, characterizing the war as a morass of martial and moral hazard. The hazard becomes even more emphatic when the speaker declares, “Somewhere in the mind there are heaps of dead ones, / piled up.”41 Literally, the “dead ones” seem to be deer, which are earlier described as populating the island, but the poem’s title encourages readers to recall the dead of Vietnam. The text’s anti-war stance is clear; what is more remarkable is Reid’s rhetorical strategy of seeking to render the Canadian space uncanny, saturating it with the blood of Vietnam, and to present the addressee as a model for readers, someone dealing with the same emotional and cognitive disturbance that the poem seeks to create in its audience. Other Canadian poetry would characterize the consumption of war reportage as producing a sense of guilt. That shift coincides with media commentators’ growing preoccupation – as documented in the introduction to this book – with Canada’s complicity in the war. In George Bowering’s 1966 poem “News,” for instance, the speaker’s feelings of guilt are bound up with his sense of having become inured to media reports about the conflict. The poem begins, Every day I add an inch to the pile of old newspapers in the closet. In that three foot pile now a dozen airliner crashes, one earthquake in Alaska, seventeen American soldiers face down in Asian mud. I could go on enumerating like newsprint – we record violent death & hockey scores & keep the front room neat.42 The speaker is clearly uncomfortable with death and disaster being reduced to inches of newsprint and compiled statistics, but the accretion of papers in his closet emblematizes his desire and ability to shunt the war

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and other catastrophes to one side of his life, while his shift from “I” to “we” in the third stanza potentially implicates readers in this regard, as well. Yet his inability to discard the newspapers entirely suggests a feeling of responsibility for the news they disseminate; there is the implication that this material needs to be dealt with eventually. A sense of guilt as a result of engaging with reportage is similarly prominent in Margaret Atwood’s poem “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” published in her 1968 collection, The Animals in That Country. Atwood’s speaker engages with the war in an intensely affective, if mediated, manner and takes herself to be devastatingly bound up with the conflict. Reflecting on a world in which “the jungles are flaming” while she sits in a chair “quietly as a fuse,” the speaker alludes to the controversy over the Canadian manufacture of napalm and other materiel for the US war effort when she declares, “I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical / toys.” She goes on to assert, “I reach out in love, my hands are guns.”43 In this self-description, she parodies the quotation from the Aeneid that concludes George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, which Grant translates as “They were holding their arms outstretched in love toward the further shore.”44 In Virgil’s text, the people in question are the dead in the underworld, and Grant uses the quotation to suggest that his own position is of someone condemned to lamenting the loss of “the older traditions of Canada,” as well as the classical values that the Aeneid embodies.45 In Atwood’s poem, in contrast, the speaker is reaching toward neither the classical world nor the Canadian past but, implicitly, toward the Vietnamese present, and her reach is frighteningly at odds with itself, loving but harmful, emblematic of a Canada that feels horror at suffering in Vietnam but remains complicit in it, such that the speaker characterizes her “good intentions” as “completely lethal.”46 Undermining the ascendant myth of a peaceable Canada, Atwood’s speaker counterpoints good intentions with murderous effects. As the title of “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” suggests, the speaker’s engagement with mass media is also troublesome. The media keep images of the war forefront in her mind, and they make it impossible for her to enjoy a detachment like the one Stein’s narrator achieves. That much becomes evident when, after referencing the childhood conceit that stepping on cracks in a sidewalk will have violent consequences for others, the speaker reveals that although she is “grownup / and



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literate,” she continues to indulge in magical thinking, believing that whenever she presses a key on her electric typewriter – even when she is writing of “peaceful trees” – “another village explodes.”47 Notably, her self-description as “literate” recalls Marshall McLuhan’s declaration in Understanding Media, “In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.”48 “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” can be read as a poetic reiteration of McLuhan’s claim. Although the speaker sits quietly in her chair and writes on peaceful topics, mass media involve her viscerally in a milieu of exploding villages and burning jungles. Her belief in her responsibility for that violence may appear paranoiac, but it reflects the ambiguities of causation and culpability in a globalized society of complicated interrelations. When the speaker says a village explodes every time she hits a key on her typewriter, her phrasing does not insist on causation per se, only correlation. Indeed, although she fears that her every action leads to violence elsewhere, it is more apparent that the violence elsewhere has had an impact on her. If it is truly dangerous for her to read newspapers, it is less clearly because doing so causes Vietnamese suffering than because newspapers make her hyperbolically sensitive to her geopolitical interconnectedness, such that, as she claims, her “passive eyes transmute” everything she looks at into “the pocked / black and white of a war photo.”49 By otherwise leaving it indeterminate as to how the mechanisms of causation might be operative, Atwood encourages readers to reflect on what responsibility they have for the Vietnam War as members of a global society. In that regard, the poem’s concluding evocation of a village exploding, while primarily connoting villages in Vietnam, can be taken as another nod to the global village and to the ways in which actions in one part of it can cause trauma in others. “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” manifests an ambivalence about mass media’s involvement in these global interconnections. On the one hand, the poem’s last lines hint that writing might be used to speak out against violence, despite the speaker’s concerns about doing so. Although the most obvious reading of her claim that “another village explodes” each time she hits a key is that she believes she is causing the explosions,

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she might also be taken to be rehearsing a rhetorical move that is common in political advocacy: the assertion that some unfortunate thing occurs with a certain startling frequency. For instance, the 2014 documentary Every Three Seconds takes its title from a statistic declaring that one person dies of starvation every 3.6 seconds.50 Given that possible interpretation of the speaker’s claim in Atwood’s poem, the ending of the poem can be seen as gesturing to the potential for writing – whether in newspapers or in a book of poetry – to have a salutary political role by ensuring that violence does not fall out of the public consciousness. Such a role is further suggested in the speaker’s claim that her eyes “transmute” what she looks at into the “black and white of a war photo.” One might infer that mass media, by presenting her with such photos, have conditioned her to recognize echoes of the war around her in the same way that the addressee of Reid’s “Saturna Island as Vietnam” does. At the same time, Atwood’s portrait of the speaker as someone traumatized by her engagement with mass media raises the possibility that the media bear some responsibility for her trauma; that as they represent violence, they are also enacting a kind of violence on their audience. Consequently, while Atwood’s poem stands as one of the first to corroborate McLuhan’s notion that the Vietnam War was distinguished by the North American public’s mass-mediated intimacy with it, “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” is also an early example of a Canadian literary text suggesting that mass media have their own violent character. In keeping with McLuhan’s notion that media are extensions of a person’s “central nervous system,” Atwood’s poem expresses concern about the media’s power to condition people into particular affective responses. Tom Wayman’s poem “The Dow Recruiter,” which appeared in the 1969 anthology Fifteen Winds: A Selection of Modern Canadian Poems, follows Atwood’s text in gesturing to the affective power of mass-media war coverage. Wayman’s titular speaker is an employee of Dow Chemical, which manufactured napalm in Canada for use in Vietnam. Early on in the poem, the recruiter complains about anti-war youth who show him what he calls “those photographs of the children” – presumably, photographs of Vietnamese children maimed or killed by napalm.51 He does not directly mention the photos again, but their impact on him is evident when his mind later turns to the “red flowers” that are “growing in the lane” at his home. The flowers appear to evoke for him the spilled blood



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of the Vietnamese, because he next admits that “the bodies crowd in sometimes” – the bodies featured in the photographs, one infers. Just as Atwood’s speaker has come to see everything as though it were a war photo, the image of the maimed children suffuses the recruiter’s perception of his domestic space. In this way, even without describing the photographs, “The Dow Recruiter” functions as an extension of them, seeking to provoke a reaction in its audience regarding Canada’s complicity in the war that is similar to the speaker’s reaction to the images. Wayman’s poem is especially remarkable in its implicit assumption that its readers do not need to have the photographs described for them; the poem manifests a confidence that mass media have sufficiently disseminated images of Vietnamese suffering – and sufficiently unsettled those who have seen them – for Wayman’s readers to need only a glancing mention of such images in order to call them to mind. Thus, the poem acknowledges the power of mass-media images even while attempting to amplify that power by casting the images as touchstones and dramatizing the response of being disturbed by them. A faith in the power of images to affect people’s views of the Vietnam War was further evident in Peter Stevens’s surreal poem “Warming Up, Tuning In,” also published in Fifteen Winds. In the poem, the speaker’s experience of watching television leads to a vision of the war that ends with a homunculus-like Buddhist “priest” in the speaker’s mind immolating himself.52 Through the 1960s, self-immolation had become an increasingly common act of anti-war protest, and its political efficacy depended to no small extent on mass media transmitting images of it. The first and most iconic self-immolation to catch the North American public’s attention was that of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc; the image of his fatal 1963 act of protest in Saigon appeared on the front pages of newspapers worldwide, leading John F. Kennedy to remark of it, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”53 As other self-immolations occurred in the United States and Vietnam, their power lay partly in the cognitive dissonance they created, leaving people to wonder how extreme the situation in Vietnam must be that human beings would do such things to themselves. At the same time, self-immolation gained power from the visceral, sometimes traumatic experience of witnessing its spectacle, even via mass media. By referencing self-immolation, authors such as Stevens could

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further amplify its effects – and harness its visceral power for their own work – in the same way that Wayman did by discussing photographs of war victims in “The Dow Recruiter.” Sharing the tendency of other Canadian poems to dwell on the experience of witnessing the war from afar, “Warming Up, Tuning In” focuses not so much on the priest’s self-immolation as on the North American viewing of such acts. At first, the speaker is described as looking at his reflection on the screen of his television set while it warms up, the blending of screen and self-image anticipating his identification with what appears in the broadcast he subsequently watches. As he describes that broadcast, he finds his “gross body” suddenly in some small nameless village where my children weep by the burning huts huddling thin and frightened by these grey phantoms from another world carrying fire on their backs jumping down from whirling spiders to melt the living room.54 The speaker’s self-insertion into the Vietnamese scene means that the “grey phantoms from another world” might be read as his doppelgangers, thus confirming his complicity in the war, just as the juxtaposition of his “gross” body with the children’s “thin” ones damns him for enjoying a life of abundance that is unavailable to many people in Vietnam. Yet the fact that he sees the children as his own suggests how television has promoted an intense identification with the Vietnamese. As the flame-throwers in his vision literally “melt the living room,” television figuratively does something similar by blurring the boundaries between Vietnam and his domestic space. The warming up of the television is the catalyst for an intense, if vicarious, experience of war’s savage heat. And as the poem continues, that experience becomes even more intimately corporeal: the speaker discovers his flesh being turned to “molten bubbles,” until all that is left is the “chamber” of his skull. In that chamber, the poem’s final lines declare, “a Buddhist priest sits / and calmly sets himself alight.” The priest’s location in the speaker’s skull suggests that the preceding



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televisual phantasmagoria, while experienced by the speaker corporeally, has also been psychically transformative, such that the war is now central in his mind. The trope of the hollowed skull further suggests that his mind has become a memento mori – one that is a reminder less of his own eventual death than of the ongoing deaths in Vietnam. Thus, while the speaker’s virtual experience of the war recalls similar experiences in Howell’s and Stein’s texts, “Warming Up, Tuning In” distinguishes itself by depicting its phantasmagoria as directly sparked by mass media. Television has brought the war home, as it were, by involving the speaker’s physical sympathies as much as his mental ones. Discussing the rise of the humanitarian narrative as a genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thomas W. Laqueur observes that such narratives emphasized close, detailed description of the suffering body, which became “the common bond between those who suffer and those who would help.”55 Particularity created the illusion of proximity, encouraging readers to feel a kinship with those described as suffering, and that feeling fostered an urge to act. Stevens’s poem, like Wayman’s, takes a somewhat more circuitous route in cultivating such a response. Just as Wayman’s speaker does not provide any ekphrastic description of the photographs he is shown, neither does Stevens dwell on describing the act of self-immolation; instead, he counts on readers being sufficiently familiar with images of the act to imagine it for themselves. “Warming Up, Tuning In” focuses on reconnecting its audience to those images affectively by modelling a highly empathetic, corporeal, identificatory reaction to them. In doing so, the poem seeks to establish a bond not only between readers and the suffering Vietnamese but also between readers and the speaker, whose humanitarian sensitivity they are called upon to share. The witnessing of self-immolation is likewise an experience of visceral identification in Eugene McNamara’s poem “Decency Is the Final Trip for Those Who Believed in Henry Fonda Movies,” published in the 1970 anthology Soundings: New Canadian Poets. The poem features a young, male American speaker remembering the happiness of his high-school days before finding himself in the present and “staring out a window” at trees that are “dead” and “unleaved.” Then the poem takes a startling turn, as the speaker declares,

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i burst into flames the air around me is blue my watch is melting my shirt glooms in the dark like a corpse in a river56 There is no moment in which the speaker is watching television or looking at a photograph, but the burning is described primarily in visual terms, emphasizing it as spectacle and aligning it with mass-media images of self-immolations. Moreover, it is the act of looking at dead trees that seems to trigger the speaker’s fantasy of being on fire, in the same way that the North American landscape is suffused with reminders of war in Reid’s, Atwood’s, and Wayman’s poems. Accordingly, McNamara’s poem follows the others in implying that the viewing of images can constitute a kind of trauma, catalyzing flashbacks. Yet none of the poems unambiguously criticizes mass media for traumatizing people in this way. Rather, the poems more neutrally limit themselves to dramatizing mass media’s effects. In doing so, they might be considered to have a postmodern character, insofar as postmodern literature has been distinguished from modernist works in its emphasis not on the production of art but on its reception.57 As the poems focus on the reception of mass media, they tacitly endorse the media’s effects by highlighting their role in combating North American complacency about the war. An ambivalence about North Americans’ impulse to identify with the Vietnamese is evident in Pat Lowther’s poem “The Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi.” Collected in the 1973 anthology Mountain Moving Day: Poems by Women, the poem describes the speaker’s witnessing of an anti-war performance by a street-theatre group outside a US consulate. The group includes a girl wearing a “black body / stocking and a mask” who “represents / the Vietnamese people.”58 The line break after “represents” draws attention to the word, encouraging readers to note its dual connotation of political representation and artistic mimesis, and both meanings are operative in the poem. Through the figure of the girl, “The Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi” suggests that artistic depictions of suffering might give a political voice to suffering peoples. As the street-theatre performance goes on, though, the speaker throws into doubt the matter of whom, exactly, the girl’s costume depicts, deciding that her mask, with “its broken eyes / immovable,”



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becomes “a perfect image / for us all.” The first-person referent is importantly ambiguous: does “us all” include the Vietnamese or only the crowd at the performance? Are the mask’s “broken eyes” emblematic of some failure by the crowd regarding the Vietnamese? The word “for” in the phrase “a perfect image / for us all” also functions ambiguously, perhaps suggesting that the image is instrumental for the crowd rather than representative of it. Through these ambiguities, Lowther presents the street theatre as art that foregrounds the need for identification with those who suffer, even as she draws attention to the kinds of distance that complicate identification, as well as to the possibility that the audience could be more concerned with its reaction to the war than with the war itself. Although “The Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi” troubles the notion of an easy unity involving Canadians and the Vietnamese, the poem’s final lines move toward affirming the potential for solidarity. The text concludes with a moment of pathetic fallacy, as the speaker refers to the wind outside the consulate producing “screams” and to the earth itself as singing “Mi-Fa-Mi.” Given that the poem’s epigraph, from Joannes Kepler, refers to “Misery” and “Famine” reigning on the earth, the notes “Mi” and “Fa” in Lowther’s poem constitute sobering puns, insofar as they are abbreviations of those two words. Lowther’s depiction of the earth as lamenting for Vietnam would seem to license a feeling in the theatre group and the others gathered that they are connected to Vietnamese suffering. The earth’s keening also appears to license and even demand a broader response such as the speaker imagines when she joins the performers and others in singing and expresses her hope that “our soft noise / will spread outward.” The street-theatre group thus models the possibility for art to produce a chain of identification in which the dramatization of bodily suffering triggers sympathetic outcries that are practically somatic. As “The Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi” describes the street theatre’s effects on its audience, the poem comments implicitly on its own political mechanics. In this respect, it is notable that Lowther’s speaker refers to herself in the first-person singular only once before shifting to the use of “us” as she joins the singing. By narrating this shift from an individual response to collective action, the poem nods to its own efforts to stimulate acts of solitary reading in which identification with the speaker and the group in the poem might stir readers into figuratively joining the anti-war movement.

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In presenting a progression from an individual response to a communal one, Lowther’s poem demonstrates a self-consciousness about a problem attending all of the war-era texts that dramatized mediated witnessing of the war: they ran the risk of cultivating a narcissistic focus on the war’s meaning for Canadians. To be sure, the modelling of empathetic responses to the mediated witnessing of violence may have helped to cultivate a humanitarian subjectivity in readers, too. But although the texts I have discussed have much to say about North Americans’ responses to the spectacle of Vietnamese suffering, the texts say comparatively little about Vietnamese subjectivity and Vietnam’s political reality. In most of the poems, Vietnamese people remain radically other, defined primarily by the fact of their suffering. And in most of the poems, it is North Americans’ identificatory suffering that becomes the object of focus. The poems thus participate in what Sylvia Shin Huey Chong has called “the oriental obscene”: the cultural construction of an “imagined set of relations that create not only orientalness but also particular forms of whiteness” in response to the Vietnam War.59 In that respect, it is notable that although the race of the North American protagonists in the texts I have discussed is never explicitly identified, several of the texts encode racial difference between the protagonists and the Vietnamese. For instance, it is not incidental that Stein’s story refers repeatedly to Vietnamese communist fighters as “little brown men”; the emphasis on their “brownness” substitutes for but also evokes a more conventional racializing colour scheme. Likewise, the implicit comparisons of Vietnamese people to harried or dead animals in Acorn’s and Reid’s poems construes the Vietnamese as fundamentally alien and fails to grant them a human complexity, even while treating them sympathetically. Daniel Coleman observes that “the central organizing problematic” of white, English-Canadian nationalists “has been the formulation and elaboration of a specific form of whiteness based on a British model of civility.”60 Because the texts I have discussed allow readers to assume that the protagonists are white, the texts’ preoccupation with norms of witnessing can be situated in the tradition that Coleman identifies. Indeed, the texts show little interest in depicting feelings about the Vietnam War in North Americans who were, for instance, members of First Nations or Southeast Asian diasporic communities. That said, the humanitarian subjectivity modelled in the texts is not explicitly exclusionary, either. Rather, there is a common assumption that



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because North Americans shared both geographical distance from the war and access to news coverage of it, they also shared both the potential to grow complacent about the conflict and the ability to adopt an engaged, humanitarian perspective. By repeatedly modelling intense responses to mass-media representations of Vietnam, literary texts emphasized the importance of not turning away from those representations, despite the discomfort they might produce. Moreover, by depicting visceral individual reactions, the texts manifested a rhetorical strategy that was likewise evident in the texts discussed in previous chapters: one of making political issues more compelling by connecting them to individual experiences and by relocating the Vietnam War so that it was not simply happening elsewhere. Rather, it became a conflict in which Canadians were uncannily and corporeally immersed as satellite members of the American empire and as citizens of the global village. poetry as media studies

While the texts discussed so far in this chapter tend to emphasize the importance of responding to the suffering depicted in mass-media coverage of the Vietnam War, another strain of war-era Canadian literature offers intermedial critique by focusing on the inadequacies of the coverage itself and of the media conveying it. Given the popularity of ekphrasis in earlier twentieth-century poetry, poets who wrote during the Vietnam War had an obvious model for this manner of critique, and, indeed, it was poets who most frequently engaged in it. War-era Canadian poetry repeatedly featured speakers who encounter a mass-media representation of the war and meditate on the representation. By writing ekphrases of this kind, poets were departing from ekphrastic convention, which was for a speaker to engage with a work of fine art. In fact, the increased popularity of ekphrasis in the early decades of the twentieth century might itself be understood as a response not just to museum culture but also to the rise of mass media and the middle-brow tastes they cultivated. Through ekphrasis, poets could ally their work with other high art such as painting and sculpture, creating an artistic ecology that catered to a cultural elite. Such cultural conservatism is further evident in the fact that some of the most famous examples of ekphrasis in the early twentieth century – from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”

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(1908) to Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” – reflect on art created at a ­significant historical remove from the reflecting poet. In contrast, Canadian poets who wrote about mass media during the Vietnam War made contemporary representations their objects of commentary. Often, the text sparking ekphrastic reflection was a newspaper article, photograph, or radio broadcast about the war. Such poets were not straight­ forwardly connecting themselves to a mass-market ecology; indeed, they tended to assert their critical distance from mass media, thus continuing to preserve for poetry a cultural niche as high art. But the poems frequently betrayed an interest in reaching the popular audience that mass media had shaped, deploying the same accessible diction and bald didacticism that were s­tereotypical features of mass-media communications. Accordingly, although ekphrasis has been seen as involving a turn away from the world to focus on matters of art,61 Canadian ekphrastic poetry about the Vietnam War pointedly turned back to the world by engaging with the media that were pervasive in people’s lives and crucial to their understandings of current events. Indeed, such poetry suggested that the dichotomy of looking at the world and looking at mass media was false, given that for many North Americans, looking at things such as the Vietnam War could happen only through mass media. The media’s necessity in this regard did not render them immune to critique, though, and Canadian poets modelled a skeptical engagement with them, teaching readers how they might reconsider their mass-media consumption and habits of perception. The seeds of such skepticism were evident in an ambivalence toward war photography expressed in Canada periodicals, even as those periodicals included photographs for anti-war purposes. For instance, a 14 February 1967 editorial in the Ubyssey titled “Burn, Baby, Burn” addressed readers who “were unconvinced of the Vietnam horror” by presenting them with three photos of maimed children.62 The editorial instructed readers with respect to the first photo: “Look at the picture. It is of an eyelidless boy whose chin was melted into his neck by burning napalm. Napalm is a jelly-like gasoline-polyethylene compound that sticks to skin and burns white-hot, searing flame.” On the one hand, the editorial implies a conviction that photographs are invaluable political and ethical instruments; that they are direct, physical traces of the real – what Marianne Hirsch calls “the index par excellence”63 – and that merely



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looking at them will produce a transformative realization of the war’s “horror.” On the other hand, the editorial’s ekphrastic description of the photograph betrays a belief that the image does not communicate sufficiently on its own and that words are needed in order to make sense of it in a way that is politically galvanizing. Text was similarly used to supplement photographs in a pair of articles about the war by Walter Stewart and William F. Pepper published in the 1 April 1967 issue of the Toronto Star Weekly. These articles – which, as I observed in the introduction to this book, influenced Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies and Earle Birney’s “I Accuse Us” – draw attention to the number of Vietnamese children killed or disfigured by the war, and they castigate Canadians, along with their government, for their ignorance and complicity regarding those casualties. In doing so, the articles rely substantially on visual evidence. The cover of the issue in which they appear features the portrait of a Vietnamese girl with one eye bandaged and the skin below the other horribly wounded. An accompanying headline promises a story about “how Canada turned its back on Viet Nam’s maimed children,” while a quotation taken from Pepper’s story declares, “Perhaps most heart-rending of all are the tiny faces and bodies scorched and seared by fire.” Inside the issue, Pepper’s story includes a photo essay that depicts burned children, and his article describes such injuries, detailing the facial wounds of one child and observing, “Napalm, and its more horrible companion, white phosphorus, liquidize young flesh and carve it into grotesque forms. The little figures are afterward often scarcely human in appearance, and one cannot be confronted with the monstrous effects of the burning without being totally shaken. Perhaps it was due to a previous lack of direct contact with war, but I never left the tiny victims without losing composure.”64 Pepper concludes his article by observing what his photographs corroborate: “Any visitor to a hospital, an orphanage, a refugee camp, can plainly see the evidence of [a] reliance on amputation as a surgical shortcut.”65 Even as Pepper describes visual evidence as a guarantor of the war’s affective power, his description of his response to the evidence suggests to readers what their reactions to the photographs should be; he is providing the same sort of model reaction to witnessing that is offered by the poems discussed earlier in this chapter. In the same way, the cover’s identification of the sight of burned children as “heart-rending” does not just describe Pepper’s response; it also tells

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readers how they should respond. The cover and article thus manifest a shared ambivalence about whether photographs are intrinsically transformative of those who see them or whether they need to be framed interpretively in order to have such an effect. A similar ambivalence regarding mass media is evident in Margaret Laurence’s essay “Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass,” published in The New Romans. After Laurence describes the birth of her son in Ghana, she recalls looking at a recent newspaper photograph of Joe Bass, an African-American child shot by Detroit police. Then she remembers another newspaper photo: “It was of a North Vietnamese woman. Some marvellous new kind of napalm had just come into use. I do not understand the technicalities. This substance when it alights flaming onto the skin cannot be removed. It adheres. The woman was holding a child who looked about eighteen months old, and she was trying to pluck something away from the burn-blackening area on the child’s face. I wondered how she felt when her child newly took on life and emerged.”66 Laurence’s position as a mediated witness is complicated. Perhaps most obviously, she foregrounds her trans-racial, trans-geographic bond of maternity with the North Vietnamese woman and Joe Bass’s mother, suggesting that a mother’s grief over the loss of her child is universal. Insofar as Laurence’s description of the photograph of the North Vietnamese woman implicitly underscores the image’s unsettling, parodic restaging of the Pietà and the Nativity, Laurence further suggests the situation’s commonality. In other words, Laurence aligns herself both with the woman in the photograph and with an artistic tradition of evoking emotion in one’s audience by appealing to the figure of the victimized child and the caring, grieving mother. In this respect, Laurence tacitly recognizes the power of images to create affective bonds through association and identification, as conventions of representation establish codes demanding an empathetic response. Yet Laurence also identifies a sense of unreality that accompanies witnessing another’s pain via mass media, observing, “People with actual names and places of belonging are killed, and there is increasingly little difference between these acts and the fake deaths of the cowboys who never were.” She goes on to ask if it is “necessary to feel pain in our own flesh before we really know” whether another’s suffering is real, and she concludes, “More and more, I think that it probably is.”67 In Laurence’s



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own case, she suggests, the pain of childbirth and her subsequent “guts of ice feeling” during her son’s illnesses have helped her to recognize the reality of the suffering in the photographs. Laurence’s belief that meaningful engagement with the pain of another requires feeling pain oneself is implicitly shared by the poems discussed earlier in this chapter as they depict traumatic North American responses to mass-media representations of the war. But Laurence insists that the ability to engage empathetically with those representations emerges from one’s earlier personal experiences of suffering, not from the act of witnessing alone. In this insistence, she draws readers’ attention to the diversity of responses that mass-media images can engender. Laurence’s peroration in “Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass” identifies the importance of language as a means of helping people “to know the reality of another.”68 She argues that although language is not as “personal and individual” as other forms of human contact such as sex and physical comfort, it is useful because it is humanity’s only “general” form of communication.69 Laurence leaves off explaining why she does not consider photography to be a similarly “general” communicative form, but the earlier content of her essay might be taken to indicate her line of reasoning: as she details her engagement with the newspaper photographs, which involves her personal history, thoughts, and feelings, she is describing things that photographs could not communicate so precisely as words can. Photography, Laurence implies, can be a prompt for interpersonal connection, but that connection deepens when language is used to explore it. In this regard, Laurence’s essay echoes the implication in the Ubyssey editorial and the articles by Stewart and Pepper that images, while powerful, require the supplement of writing if one wishes to convey an intended meaning through them. The openness of photographs to interpretation is a key theme of Margaret Atwood’s poem “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier,” collected in the 1970 anthology Made in Canada. The poem describes an encounter with the slideshow image of a soldier who is, indeed, unknown in many respects, not least in terms of what war he is fighting. The description of his skin as “wet / with heat” and the detail that the leaves around his face are “perhaps tropical” hints at the Vietnam War as a possibility.70 The word “perhaps” is significant, however; as the poem describes the photograph ekphrastically, offering a parodic blazon that

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attends to the soldier’s eyes, nose, upper lip, teeth, and skin, it repeatedly pays attention to details that cannot be seen clearly: his clothes are “invisible,” his eyes “hidden.” His mouth is open, but it is uncertain whether he is engaged in a “call” or a “howl” and whether his mouth’s openness indicates “agony, ultimate / command or simple famine.” Meanwhile, the description of the leaves around his face as “a slippery halo” suggests the image’s broader semantic slipperiness while pointing to a moral ambiguity that was, in 1970, very much operative in discourse of the Vietnam War. Was the soldier a saintly figure or a villain? For many people, the answer depended on whether the combatant was a volunteer or conscripted; whether he was fighting for the US, South Vietnam, or the communist side. But Atwood’s poem is notably silent about the soldier’s nationality, race, and political affiliations, just as it withholds a clear moral judgment of him. As a result, readers are figuratively in the position of the US soldiers in Vietnam who complained about the difficulty of distinguishing allies from enemies among the civilian population. Stripped of identifying information, the projected image of the soldier becomes a screen onto which people can project their beliefs about war combatants. While Atwood’s earlier poem “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” describes one particular reaction to media representations, “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier” emphasizes the possibility of divergent responses. Not knowing for whom or where the soldier is fighting, readers are left to consider the degree to which their engagement with war photographs is shaped by the moralizing, oppositional rhetoric that attaches itself to any armed conflict and encourages people to see some soldiers as heroes, others as villains. In contrast with such rhetoric, the poem’s parodic blazon models a studious, critical engagement with visual media that is sensitive to their subtleties and indeterminacies. By ekphrastically modelling such formalist close reading, the poem implicitly identifies for poetry a role in performing critical intermedial work. As Atwood undertook that task, she followed earlier Canadian commentators and writers who had scrutinized mass-media images of the Vietnam War and expressed skepticism about the ideological uses to which war photographs were put. There was a particular concern that the media were insufficiently critical of the American government’s policy and actions with respect to Vietnam.71 In the January 1965 issue of Saturday Night, for instance, David McReynolds noted the “many



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photographs of torture” performed by South Vietnamese forces that had been “widely published in the U.S. press, almost always without comment.”72 For McReynolds, this lack of commentary tacitly endorsed torture, and he bemoaned the fact that “the American people now accept pictures of torture and accept the very idea of torture.”73 While Atwood’s poem suggests that a lack of contextualization for a photograph opens it to disparate interpretations, McReynolds recognizes that a lack of commentary can equally do rhetorical work in fostering a certain response. In the May–June 1967 issue of Canadian Dimension, Farley Mowat commented similarly on the US publication of photographs from the war, claiming, “This may be the first war in history which has seen the aggressors publish, in their own press, such candid pictures of atrocities being committed on the enemy by their own troops. It is a development that bears thinking about. As a commentary on the ethics which seem to motivate the United States in its actions in Vietnam, it speaks all too clearly.”74 In drawing attention to the implications of the mere publishing of certain photos, Mowat is encouraging readers not to be passive consumers of the news. At the same time, the moral to which he alludes is not necessarily so clear as he suggests. Perhaps it is the one McReynolds identified in Saturday Night: that the US government hoped and expected its citizens would become complicit in the war by growing so accustomed to images of US atrocities as to grow indifferent to them. Or perhaps Mowat thinks that the photos’ publication bespoke an American public already so insensitive to Vietnamese suffering that it tolerated such images and the atrocities they depicted. But other, more charitable views of the photos’ publication are possible; for instance, one might take it to demonstrate that the US government accepted a free press and was, thus, upholding a principle of the democracy for which it claimed to be fighting in Vietnam. Regardless of what point Mowat takes the publication of such photos to be making, though, what is remarkable is that he expects his readers to identify the point for themselves. As he engages not with the war directly but with representations of the war in US media, he treats Canadian readers as critical observers of those media while establishing himself as such an observer, too. Sharing McReynolds’s and Mowat’s emphasis on the media’s complicity and callousness with respect to the war, Alden Nowlan’s poem “In Our Time,” collected in his book Bread, Wine and Salt (1967), adduces

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even more glaring examples of newspapers normalizing brutality. As the poem critiques the newspapers, it conspicuously uses the same techniques of ironic editorialization that it attributes to the papers themselves, thus suggesting that the problem is not the media per se but the ideological uses to which they are put. The entirety of the poem reads as follows: The newspapers speak of torture as though it were horseplay. This morning a picture of a Congolese rebel being kicked to death was captioned the shoe is on the other foot and a story from Saigon told of a Viet Cong prisoner who complained of thirst being overwhelmed by the hospitality of his captors who cheerfully refreshed him and also his memory by pumping a generous quantity of water through rubber tubes into his nostrils. There is an ironic tension in Nowlan’s criticism, given its rhetorical similarities with the captions he condemns. First of all, insofar as the captions are descriptions of and commentary on visual media, they are themselves ekphrastic, such that Nowlan’s poem is a parodic extension of them – a characteristic to which he draws attention by integrating his own phrases into the same sentences that contain quotations from the newspapers. Moreover, Nowlan rehearses the captions’ technique of ironic undercutting. For instance, the first two lines of the poem model the use of line breaks to create ironic contrast: when one reads the phrase “The newspapers speak of torture,” one probably does not expect the follow-up phrase to be “as though it were horseplay.” This surprising turn, coming after the line break as it does, imitates the way in which the newspaper captions ironize the photographs beneath which they appear. Near the end of the poem, the use of the word “generous” to describe the amount of water used to torture the n l f prisoner similarly parodies the captions by



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deploying the same sort of ironic language they do. Nowlan thus indicates the insidious ease with which a single word-choice can have an editorializing effect on what might otherwise seem to be simply a descriptive account. By rehearsing such rhetorical techniques, he draws attention to and encourages critical reflection on them. In the manner of a found poem, “In Our Time” does further such work to encourage critical reflection by offering mass-media representations to readers in a context different from that of the representations’ original ones. Removed from the newspaper, stripped of their accompanying photographs, and juxtaposed with each other, the two captions in the poem gain valences different from those they originally possessed. They no longer provide a manner of relief from the horror of the images they accompanied. They can no longer be quickly passed over as readers’ eyes move on to an article or ad. Placed together, they can be less easily excused as single instances of bad taste and more easily identified as executing a political strategy of normalizing torture. Situated on the page with line breaks to isolate certain phrases and emphasize other phrases’ ironic relations to one another, the captions become things to be studied as rhetoric, not simply words to be passively consumed. At the same time, in the poem’s final description of the prisoner being deprived of air, “In Our Time” evinces a desire to return readers to the immediacy of a reportage that is free of editorializing. That desire is evident in the way the description comes at the end of a long sentence that, if read aloud, creates an increasing breathlessness in the reader. It is as though the poem aims to bypass the layers of photographic and written mediation to connect readers bodily and empathetically with the experience of being tortured. A triptych of poems by George Bowering published in the February 1967 issue of The Open Letter similarly modelled the critical consumption of US war coverage. The first poem, “Even Los Angeles,” focuses on reporting’s unvoiced implications and its complicity in injustice. The poem begins, Watching U.S. television we hear about patriotic duty in Vietnam fighter plane factories in Los Angeles & the women make good money.75

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After establishing the conceit of the speaker watching television, Bowering has him shift into essayistic critique. For instance, he points out that the same planes “making holes in Hanoi” are “making jobs in Los Angeles,” including in Watts, a predominantly African-American neighbourhood with a high unemployment rate that had been the site of “race riots” in 1965. In Bowering’s poem, Watts becomes a symbol of how the American state’s failures abroad are linked to its failures at home. But although the speaker’s condemnation of the United States is clear, what is more remarkable is Bowering’s depiction of television viewing as a spark for that condemnation. By establishing at the outset that the speaker’s reflections are spurred by a negative reaction to a television report, the poem suggests that media consumption does not necessarily result in passive complicity; instead, it can catalyze political critique. While the television report appears to focus narrowly on a feel-good, pro-war story about job-­ creation, the speaker models an ability to ironize the story by recognizing its unspoken implication: that the US government seems able to address racialized poverty at home only through warmongering in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the fact that the speaker identifies the news report as a product not just of television but of “U.S. television” works to distinguish the watching “we” as Canadian, thus nationalizing the poem’s critical distance from America. After “Winning,” the second poem in Bowering’s triptych, castigates the United States for its hypocrisy in claiming to desire peace while perpetuating violence in Vietnam, the final poem, “The Late News,” returns to television and again foregrounds a Canadian subjectivity that is critical of the media – this time, by having the speaker castigate Canadian radio broadcasts. The poem begins, Well the national news on the radio is that depressing United States bullshit about Vietnam, how much can the ear take? It is after all Sunday night, t v night of hilarity, of a world, staged for the man in the armchair, wrested from the U.S. State Department for the hours seven oclock till late news.



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In the opening observation that the “national” news is about Vietnam and rehearses the US position on the war, there is an unsubtle suggestion that Canadian media have been effectively subsumed by US hegemony. Bowering leaves aside describing the broadcast at length and, instead, focuses on the speaker’s reaction to it. The speaker’s assertion that the broadcast rehearses “United States bullshit” constitutes a refusal to accept the news at face value, while his exasperation at the sheer amount of war coverage contributes to Bowering’s picture of a Canadian viewer who is critically attentive to US media, even as he is grudgingly in their thrall. In that vein, it is notable that later in “The Late News,” the speaker announces, “Time magazine’s Man of the Year is Mister Death / dressed in jungle green, nattily decked out / with torpedo necktie.”76 The illustration and the granting of the title to “Mister Death,” both of which seem to be Bowering’s invention,77 suggest that Time is unable to separate sober political commentary from an impulse to entertain with cartoonish personifications, offering the print equivalent of television’s “night of hilarity.” Moreover, Bowering’s invocation of Time is especially pointed insofar as the magazine had been at the centre of controversy earlier in the 1960s, when pressure from the US government had led to an exemption for the magazine from Canadian tariffs meant to protect the Canadian periodical industry. Consequently, Time continued its dominance of Canada’s news-magazine sector, despite the fact that it offered little Canadian ­content. By foregrounding Time while identifying the US influence on Canadian radio, Bowering emphasizes that American perspectives on the war had come to pervade the Canadian media landscape. A remarkable commonality of the poems discussed so far in this chapter is that – Bowering’s reference to Time excepted – they do not identify the specific mass-media sources they describe, even when purporting to quote directly from them. That lack of attention to specificity has a certain verisimilitude, insofar as people often fail to recall where they have heard or seen a news item they otherwise remember. But the lack of specificity in the poems also suggests that the poets’ prevailing interest was to recognize what was typical of mass-media news, not what was unique about any one report. That interest is clear, for example, in Nowlan’s decision to juxtapose an article about Congolese torture with an article about Vietnam. When Atwood’s “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier” does describe a particular representation at length, it

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does so primarily to identify the representation as an exception to a typical practice: one in which published images of soldiers are supplemented by information that shapes people’s interpretation of the images. The frequency with which Canadian poets of the Vietnam War era commented on mass-media representations without identifying them specifically leads me to propose a new category of ekphrasis. The poetcritic John Hollander has distinguished between “actual” and “notional” ekphrastic poems, the former dealing with real works of art, the latter with imagined ones, as in the case of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”78 Canadian mass-media ekphrases of the Vietnam War deserve to be placed in a third category: “typical” ekphrasis. In “typical” ekphrasis, the reality or fictitiousness of the work being described is less significant than readers’ recognition that the work is representative of a type of text they have encountered. Readers may recognize the work’s typicality, or the poem may seek to convince them that there is a typicality in evidence. In a poem such as Bowering’s “The Late News,” the typicality is treated with disdain – the speaker grows weary of “that depressing United States bullshit / about Vietnam” – and it becomes part of the poem’s mandate to expose typicality as something promulgated by hegemonic forces. Along with Bowering’s reference to Time in “The Late News,” another notable exception to the emphasis on typicality in Canadian mass-media ekphrases is Al Purdy’s poem “Picture Layout in Life Magazine.” The poem, collected in his book Sex and Death (1973), is dated 8 May 1970, a date corresponding with the issue of Life featuring the two articles that Purdy’s poem discusses. Consequently, however much Purdy wished for his audience to see the articles as typical, he made it easy for readers to identify the specific texts in question. Here is the entire poem: The Cambodian war in six pages: the latest foreign war for US consumption temple bells silent in Angkor Wat: and thrown into the Mekong River clothes ripped and torn bodies of three dead Vietnamese On the home front: pretty cutout dresses in the next four pages



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of the US President’s three little Nixon women smiling about their new wardrobe paper dolls for nice American children to clip with blunt scissors and paste over the bodies of the dead Vietnamese Purdy is not inventing this juxtaposition or any of its details: the issue of Life did devote six pages to coverage of the war in Cambodia, including a photograph of three dead Vietnamese, and those pages were immediately followed by a story about a dress-buying trip to New York by US First Lady Pat Nixon and her two daughters. The latter article included cut-out images of dresses they purchased, along with cut-out illustrations of the Nixons themselves. Accordingly, as with Nowlan’s “In Our Time,” much of the work of intermedial critique that Purdy’s poem performs happens simply by virtue of it drawing attention to what has been published and provoking thought about its implications. “Picture Layout in Life Magazine” also echoes Nowlan’s poem by deploying parody in order to put the Life articles’ formal qualities under interrogation. Purdy’s two paratactically juxtaposed stanzas mirror the stories’ juxtaposition in Life, while the first line of each stanza functions as a manner of headline, and the first stanza’s six lines echo the first article’s six pages about the Cambodian war. A key effect of these parallels is to create for Purdy’s readers a vicarious experience of the two articles, an experience that the poem then punctures with its last lines, which refuse to allow the dissonance of the articles’ juxtaposition in Life to stand without editorialization. Although the final lines are definitely editorializing, it is unclear exactly what they mean. The gruesome cut-and-paste job that the speaker imagines American children undertaking could be considered an act of respect for the dead: a restoration of dignity to them. The appropriation of the Nixon family’s clothes for the purpose might stand as an assertion of the Nixon administration’s responsibility for the deaths. The imagined covering of the Vietnamese could also be considered an effacement, a further indignity, even a further act of violence, as is implied by the fact that the scissors are “blunt.” And by drawing attention to the fact that Life has created the possibility for such a grotesque collage, Purdy would seem to indict the magazine for its insensitivity in running the two stories together. But then, perhaps the editors of Life were themselves engaged in

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political commentary by juxtaposing the articles, facilitating an awareness of the ironies that Purdy foregrounds. Whether or not that is the case, Purdy’s poem is also condemning American society: first, for having such a detachment from the war that its First Family can enjoy bourgeois privilege while the Vietnamese die; second, for taking part in the mere “consumption” of war images. In that respect, the imagined cutting and pasting parallel Purdy’s poetic labour as he removes the articles from their original context and brings them into dialogue with one another. Moreover, in contrast with the issue of Life, which invites readers literally to turn the page on the war and move on to matters of fashion, Purdy’s poem ends with the words “the dead Vietnamese,” insisting that the war’s victims should remain the object of focus. Purdy thus suggests that poetry has a role as a counter-form, doing what mass media do not and calling attention to their workings, not to mention their failings. And just as Bowering marks out “The Late News” as Canadian by referring to the “bullshit about Vietnam” on the radio as “United States bullshit,” Purdy’s references to “US consumption” and the “US President” do similarly nationalizing work, identifying the speaker as a foreigner – someone who, in nevertheless having access to an American magazine, occupies a paradigmatically Canadian position. As Purdy and other poets addressed mass-media coverage of the war from a self-conscious, doubly marginal position as Canadians and as writers, and as they implicitly celebrated that position, they manifested attributes that Linda Hutcheon has since identified with the Canadian postmodern. Not least, Canadian poetic condemnations of the media for normalizing problematic views of the Vietnam War accord with what Hutcheon, in The Canadian Postmodern, calls postmodernism’s “challenging of ‘what goes without saying’ in our culture” – a challenging that puts the writer in “a marginal or ‘ex-centric’ position with regard to the central or dominant culture.”79 Hutcheon claims that the ex-centric perspective is “a mirror of Canadian marginalization – but as more a privileged than a denigrated position.”80 By repeatedly recognizing the power of US mass media, and by critiquing those media, Canadian poets embraced their own marginalization. The Canadian poetry discussed above does not conform to Hutcheon’s description of Canadian postmodernism in certain respects; for instance, it does not exhibit a “delight in complicity,”81 tending instead to be anxious or angry about it.



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Nonetheless, the ironies of complicity are often at the forefront, and the poetry also expresses what Hutcheon calls the postmodern “refusal to pick sides, the desire to be on both sides of any border,”82 at least insofar as most Canadian poets neither sided with the United States regarding Vietnam nor went so far as to back the communists explicitly. Likewise, although Canadian poets generally seemed content to be in Canada rather than America or Vietnam, they repeatedly staged moments of postmodern paradox in which the spaces they described were – often in the course of encounters with mass media – uncannily both Canadian and Vietnamese, “here” and “there” at once. Moreover, as poets such as Atwood, Nowlan, and Purdy drew attention to the ironies of mass-media war coverage, they engaged in that characteristically postmodern technique of parody, rehearsing mass-media rhetoric in order to critique it.83 And as poets wrote their mass-media ekphrases, their frequent emphasis on the reception of war coverage aligned their work with postmodern metafiction, which, as Hutcheon observes, is distinct from its antecedents in attending to the reading process, not just the writing process.84 Consequently, although there is a humanitarian drive in many of the poems that results in them using irony to more determinate ends than does the Canadian literature identified by Hutcheon as quintessentially postmodern, it is clear that Canadian poets’ engagement with massmedia coverage of the Vietnam War drew them in the direction of postmodernism and set the stage for postmodernism’s broader efflorescence in the country through the next two decades. After the end of the war and, along with it, the end of its particular impetus for Canadian writers to engage in political critique, they would continue to create literature featuring a self-conscious duality, a vaunting of the marginalized, challenges to master narratives, and parodies of mass-media representations, if often in a more playful manner than during the war. As they did so, they developed a postmodernism that had its origins not merely in the cultural logic of late capitalism but also in Canadian responses to the Vietnam War. The recognition of biases and manipulation in news coverage of the conflict had eroded a faith in the truthfulness of representation, paving the way for the broader skepticism about authenticity and universal truth that characterize postmodernism. But the postmodernist emphasis on the discursive nature of reality and the totalizing quality of discourse did not emerge simply from attention

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to the forms and media involved in cultural representations. Rather, that emphasis was also a result of attention to those representations’ content – content that, during the long sixties, frequently involved the conflict in Vietnam. h i s t o r i e s o f v i o l e n c e i n m i c h a e l o n d a at j e ’ s the collected works of billy the kid

The war-era literary text that best exemplifies the connections between the Vietnam War and a nascent Canadian postmodernism is Michael Ondaatje’s 1970 book, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. It offers no explicit mention of the war, but the conflict lurks resonantly as Ondaatje writes about a young American who is on the run from the law after participating in an armed conflict commonly referred to as a “war” and who crosses the border into Canada. If Billy the Kid is a book preoccupied by American violence – both its history and its myths – it is not surprising, given the time in which Ondaatje was writing. In North America, the social discourse about US violence had been prominent and charged ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and it had become only more so with the escalation of the Vietnam War. Billy the Kid both deploys and interrogates this discourse, offering a view of American history as involving fraught connections between law, government, killing, media, and technology. In the course of this interrogation, both the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War are detectable in the text’s imagery, in its narrative methods, and in its very choice of figures on whom to focus. Attention to these traces of 1960s America in Ondaatje’s portrait of the nineteenth-century American outlaw Henry McCarty, who was also known as William H. Bonney but is best known as Billy the Kid, helps one to appreciate the ways in which Billy the Kid is distinctively Canadian. The lore of Ondaatje’s book has long included the tidbit that his focus on an American figure was cause for concern among certain Canadian politicians after the text won a Governor General’s Award; as Ann Mandel recalls, in that post-Centennial, hyper-nationalist period, Billy the Kid was condemned by members of Parliament “for dealing with an American hero and outlaw.”85 A view of the book as pointedly non-Canadian has had some resilience among academics. For example, in a 2008 survey of



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Canadian poetry, Nicholas Bradley observes – if without evident complaint – that “there is little that is identifiably or stereotypically Canadian about Billy the Kid.”86 This characterization is true enough in the sense that the book’s personages and setting are almost entirely American. Moreover, there are only two explicit references to Canada, both brief.87 Nevertheless, the book’s critical approach to American history and culture marks the text as very much Canadian, especially when one considers the kinds of attention to the United States that distinguished Canadian writing of the Vietnam War era. Ondaatje’s book models a Canadian engagement with America that neither straightforwardly rehearses a dichotomous understanding of the two countries nor settles for the erased border of continentalism. Instead, it challenges readers to imagine Canadian identity as one marked by a simultaneous intimacy with the United States and critical detachment from it. Taking up a self-consciously mediated perspective on an American story, Billy the Kid features the detached, “ex-centric” sensibility that Linda Hutcheon would later identify as both quintessentially postmodern and paradigmatically Canadian. The preoccupation in Billy the Kid with violence and mass media suggests that in Ondaatje’s case, at least, such a sensibility was not merely the product of the aesthetic and philosophical currents of international postmodernism. Rather, it was also fostered by distinctively North American issues of the 1960s. These issues informed signature concerns of Ondaatje’s oeuvre that are prominent in Billy the Kid: among them, the flaws of historiography, the power of insanity, and the moral ambiguities of outlaws. In 1968, Al Purdy pronounced on the “personal violence which seems to be a national characteristic of Americans.”88 That description emerged, in no small part, from Purdy’s awareness of the forms of violence that had recently afflicted and been perpetrated by the United States: not only the Vietnam War and other foreign conflicts in which America was involved but also the police suppression of anti-war protests, the brutalities of the civil rights era, and the string of assassinations of American leaders that led back in time from Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr to John F. Kennedy. Such violence had been brought intimately into North American homes via television and photography. Indeed, many acts of violence had become iconic by virtue of having been captured on film, including the assassination of President Kennedy, the

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killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, and the execution of a North Vietnamese agent by a South Vietnamese general on the streets of Saigon in 1968. Given such a history, it is less than surprising that Billy the Kid should repeatedly draw parallels between guns and cameras, as it does on its very first page when it has an unnamed photographer talk of “the line of fire” and shooting “from the saddle.”89 As Ondaatje goes on to present photographs of graves and to depict ambushes as though filming multiple takes of them, he is not only making a theoretical point about the violence of artistic representation;90 he is also rehearsing an association of violence with mass media that had been well established in the previous decade, while hearkening back to what were, in 1970, recent political events, thus giving Billy’s story vivid contemporary resonances. That hearkening is especially evocative of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s death cast a long shadow over the Vietnam War, leaving many to wonder whether the president would have allowed the United States to become mired in the conflict as his successors did. Many also felt that his assassination had degraded America – a feeling that increased when his brother Robert was likewise murdered during the 1968 presidential campaign. Accordingly, repeated references in Billy the Kid to Pat Garrett as an “assassin” are hardly innocent; in 1970, the word had an outsized currency. Similarly, while it is a coincidence that historians had identified Billy the Kid’s birthday as 23 November,91 one day after the date on which John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it is perhaps less than coincidental that Ondaatje mentions this date not once but twice in his book.92 The date signposts Ondaatje’s interest in tracking North American violence both in the Old West and in the wake of Kennedy’s death. Although Ondaatje’s Billy cannot be seen simply as an allegorical j f k , Billy the Kid presents parallels between the two figures that encourage readers to think about patterns of American violence, as well as about the role of visual media in the consumption of that violence. Certain parallels between Kennedy and Billy the Kid are obvious: both figures were Americans killed by guns at a relatively young age and subsequently mythologized, held up by many as heroes and as victims of violence but condemned by others for fostering violence themselves. Moreover, fundamental details of the men’s deaths remain disputed, and their respective identified killers, Lee Harvey Oswald and Pat Garrett, are



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both men whose own positions with regard to the law / outlaw divide have been questioned.93 Less obvious but equally notable are parallels between the repeated forensic mode of Billy the Kid and narratives of President Kennedy’s assassination. Those narratives appeared as early as a week after the killing, when Life magazine published a series of frames from Abraham Zapruder’s notorious film footage of the assassination. These images facilitated a public forensic analysis of the killing. The next year, such analysis was much more extensively facilitated by the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, better known as the Warren Commission. Its report, a bestseller, included autopsy records, photographic evidence from re-enactments that traced the paths of the bullets fired at the president, and frame enlargements from the Zapruder film – including, most sensationally, a frame showing the spray of blood and brain-matter from the president’s head as the fatal bullet struck him.94 This image brought the graphic representation of violence into the mainstream of American civic discourse. The report further foregrounded the relationship of film to violence by featuring images of a camera mounted to a rifle that had been used to re-enact the killing for forensic purposes. This camera put the commission – and, eventually, readers of its report – in the spectatorial position of Kennedy’s assassin. Consequently, by the time Billy the Kid was published, much of the North American public had already imbibed the association of cameras with guns rehearsed on the first page of Ondaatje’s book. Billy the Kid also recalls the Warren Report in terms of the texts’ shared forensic attention to records and evidence. Early in Ondaatje’s text, Billy identifies himself as speaking from beyond the grave, reflecting on his life in the wake of his death at Garrett’s hands. Billy’s narration of his death and of the events leading to it mark him as a figurative coroner investigating his own murder, one who gathers testimony and stages multiple reenactments of the event from different angles and perspectives. Billy even pays attention to the paths of bullets, slowing them down to track their trajectories and effects. For instance, as he remembers firing mindlessly into a mass of rats well before his death, he describes “the long twenty yard space between me and them empty but for the floating bullet.”95 The description halts time in the same way that the Warren Commission did when analyzing the Zapruder film, as the commission’s members attempted to track the changing flight path of the “magic bullet” that,

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they concluded, wounded Kennedy non-fatally and injured Texas governor John Connally. The forensic mode of Billy the Kid is even more apparent when a third-person narrator describes the scene of Billy’s death as though providing courthouse evidence, observing, “This is a diagram then of Maxwell’s, Pete Maxwell’s, room. Bed here against the wall, here’s the window where he put his hand through.”96 Ondaatje also imagines an exhumation of Billy’s body, along with an autopsy-like examination of it.97 Moreover, there are references to photographs being taken of the bullets that killed Billy, a phenomenon that similarly occurred with the bullets that struck Kennedy.98 And at one point Billy describes his shooting by Garrett in this manner: (watch) bullet claws coming at me like women fingers part my hair slow go in slow in slow leaving skin in a puff behind and the slow as if fire pours out red grey brain the hair slow99 The word “watch,” set off from the rest of the poem, serves as a punning pointer. Insofar as the word denotes a timepiece, it signals the poem’s deceleration of time. As an imperative to look, the word emphasizes the scene’s status as a spectacle and the reader’s position as figurative witness. After this pointer, the pursuant short lines break up the instant of death as though we are to observe it frame by frame. Returning to this scene later, Billy describes his “brain coming out like red grass.”100 It is difficult not to notice that Ondaatje’s representation of Billy’s death at the hands of the “assassin” Garrett has strong affinities with the graphic violence of the Zapruder film’s most notorious moment, in which the president was struck in the head. Likewise, the representation of Billy’s death rehearses the slow-motion scrutiny to which the moment of Kennedy’s death was subjected. Scrutiny of the evidence from the Kennedy assassination infamously failed to end with the Warren Report. Rather, documents including photographs and film footage were second-guessed by endless commentators,



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thus drawing attention to the interpretability and possible falsifications of visual media. The Warren Report was viewed with special suspicion; by 1968, a sufficient number of condemnations of the report had appeared that an anthology of excerpts from them, The Weight of the Evidence, was published. It became clear that abundant documentary evidence did not necessarily lead to a single, obviously true finding about the assassination. Instead, many people came to believe that pieces of evidence had been cherry-picked, manipulated, disregarded, or destroyed in order for the Warren Commission to reach the politically expedient conclusion that Oswald had acted alone. In a 1966 bestselling book titled Rush to Judgment, for example, Mark Lane claimed that the commission had suppressed photos of the crime scene, and he made much of the fact that an incriminating photograph of Oswald with a rifle in his hand and a pistol on his hip was retouched prior to publication.101 In Billy the Kid, Ondaatje similarly draws attention to the unreliability of photographs by subtitling his book “Left-Handed Poems.” The subtitle alludes to what was understood at the time to be the sole extant photograph of Billy the Kid; by virtue of a holster apparently situated on his left hip, the photograph seemed to establish that he was left-handed. In fact, however, the photograph had been printed in reverse.102 By nodding to a falsehood about Bonney established by deceptive historical evidence, Ondaatje’s subtitle implicitly admits from the outset to his book’s own historiographic impostures. Moreover, by gesturing to a case of photographic misrepresentation, the subtitle announces Ondaatje’s fascination in Billy the Kid with the limitations, contradictions, misleading qualities, and occasional outright falsity of photographs and other documentary materials. Such a fascination is further evident on the first page of Billy the Kid, as the photographer whose voice it presents tells an addressee about his latest photographs: “I will send you proofs sometime.”103 Manina Jones has pointed out that the word “proofs” has an ironic connotation in this instance, given the book’s concern with matters of narrative inauthenticity.104 That connotation is echoed later when Billy remarks to an interviewer, “I could only be arrested if they had proof, definite proof, not just stories.”105 Billy the Kid thus exhibits an interest in the problematic use of photographs as evidence, casting doubt on the putatively transparent referentiality of visual media in a way that was virtually mainstream in the wake of the Warren Report. While T.D. MacLulich is right to say that

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“‘The camera never lies’ is a popular misconception which Billy the Kid challenges,”106 the misconception was previously challenged by those who scrutinized photographs related to the Kennedy assassination. Indeed, one 1967 book questioning the Warren Report includes a chapter bearing the title “Pictures Can Be Made to Lie.”107 Billy the Kid’s casting into doubt of photographic evidence helps to qualify the text as “historiographic metafiction,” a category of postmodernist texts that, as Hutcheon observes, pay attention to things such as the emphases and exclusions in stories about history, even while the texts themselves go about narrating history.108 Recognizing that Ondaatje’s selfreflexive attention in Billy the Kid to the vexed relationship between historical events and narratives about them had an antecedent in the public scrutiny of the Warren Report, one might also recognize that Ondaatje’s insistence on the fragmentary, partial, and contradictory nature of narratives about Billy the Kid likewise matches a popular refusal in the 1960s to accept the report’s findings. More generally, there was a refusal to accept handed-down narratives that seemed designed to reassure the American people about the presence of rational order and security in the face of destabilizing violence. Accordingly, one can situate Billy the Kid in a stream of North American thought during the 1960s that was skeptical about celebratory master narratives of American society. Whether or not Ondaatje was conscious of the ways in which his representation of Billy – and, more particularly, of Billy’s death – echoes the assassination of President Kennedy and the subsequent investigation, those echoes consolidate a sense that although Billy the Kid dwells on violence in nineteenth-century America, it is also channelling much more recent events. In that regard, there was a certain irony in the fact that Kennedy himself had evoked the mythology of the Wild West when, in his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, he had declared that the new decade constituted a “new frontier” in the United States. As he did so, he implicitly cast himself in the role of the cowboy hero.109 Kennedy sought to establish a continuity between the pioneer spirit and his own aspirational politics; in contrast, people reacting to his murder a few years later were liable to see less salutary patterns in American history. In the 21 August 1964 edition of Time, for instance, it was reported that a list of ostensibly remarkable coincidences between the assassination of Kennedy and that of Abraham Lincoln had been



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circulating.110 As Billy the Kid draws on the imagery and forensic mode that became widespread after Kennedy’s death, it similarly encourages readers to consider the shared violence of stories that had been repeated across generations of American life. The skepticism about master narratives of American history that took root with the Kennedy assassination came into full flower during the Vietnam War, as casualties grew and reports surfaced of atrocities committed by US soldiers. Most notorious among them was the 1968 My Lai massacre. When that event became public knowledge in 1969, North Americans also learned of efforts by the US military to cover up the atrocity. Such revelations undermined the American government’s claim to the moral high ground in Vietnam; the government’s discourse of righteous action was, increasingly, taken to mask the promotion of US self-interest. And although some American officials attempted to justify the war effort by making what Richard Slotkin calls “Western-movie and frontier references,”111 others invoked America’s frontier history in ways less flattering to the country. As early as 1967, American historian William Appleman Williams encouraged Canadian readers to consider the contemporary United States in terms of its long history, asserting in Canadian Dimension, “The history of the American empire is the history of the famous frontier thesis: that hallowed but false syllogism by which Americans have traditionally asserted that their prosperity, freedom, and security – and that of other peoples – is the inexorable production of the expansion of the US.”112 The next year, in an essay published in The New Romans, Edward McCourt observed, “American folk heroes are almost without exception gunmen.” Naming Billy the Kid among them, McCourt went on to declare that “the code they lived and died by is still with us” and that now, “gunmen rule the Pentagon and a gunman sits in the White House.”113 In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which had been created by US presidential order after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, connected contemporary violence to the Wild West in a negative manner when it concluded that “America has always been a relatively violent nation” and that this violent streak could be traced, in no small part, to the country’s frontier history.114 In the same year, the news of the My Lai killings prompted commentators to identify a frontier antecedent for them: a letter to the editor in Life, for instance, compared the

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massacre to the one at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890.115 As a result, when Ondaatje published Billy the Kid, the Wild West had already been well established as a touchstone by the Vietnam War’s apologists and opponents alike. Perhaps most prominent in this respect was Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 film, The Wild Bunch, which introduced new levels of graphic violence to the Western and has frequently been taken to be indicting the Vietnam War’s violence.116 Notably, Peckinpah followed up The Wild Bunch in 1973 with another Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Likewise, Ry Cooder released his recording of the traditional song “Billy the Kid” in 1972, and Billy Joel released his song “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” in 1973. To my knowledge, there is no evidence to suggest that any of these artists was familiar with Ondaatje’s book. Indeed, Ondaatje’s friend and fellow Canadian poet bpNichol was initially unaware that Ondaatje was working on a book about Billy the Kid, even while Nichol was writing his own short volume of poems about the figure, published in 1970 as The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid.117 Nichol would also publish a short story about Billy called “Two Heroes.” Accordingly, while critical attention to intertextuality with regard to Bonney in Ondaatje’s book has focused on antecedents such as the film The Left Handed Gun and Jack Spicer’s “serial poem” Billy the Kid, both of which appeared in 1958,118 there was a remarkable synchronicity of artistic interest in Bonney during the early 1970s.119 By that time, US government-directed brutality in Vietnam and at home had led to the formation of increasingly militant resistance groups such as the Weathermen, making Billy the Kid – imagined as a heroic outlaw who had been both a perpetrator and a victim of violence – an especially attractive figure. In Nichol’s “Two Heroes,” a link between Billy and Vietnam is all but explicit: as the narrative describes Billy fighting with a friend in the Boer War, readers are told that the two characters “took to killing people just to make the pain less that was there between them but people didn’t understand. They tried to track them down, to kill them, & they fled, north thru the jungles, being shot at as they went.”120 This fictionalized version of South Africa, with its jungles and its nameless enemies, is pointedly reminiscent of Vietnam as it occupied the American imagination. Given this context for Ondaatje’s book, there has been remarkably little critical interest in the text’s relationship to the war. Even in 1972,



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when Stephen Scobie published a review examining both Ondaatje’s and Nichol’s books about Bonney, he noted evocations of Vietnam only in Nichol’s text.121 However, Ondaatje was certainly attentive to the conflict. For one thing, he wrote explicitly about the war in “Pictures from Vietnam,” a poem that was published in The New Romans and shares several themes with Billy the Kid along with other war-era Canadian poetry discussed earlier in this chapter. After the poem’s title hints at a relationship between violence and representation, for instance, the text goes on to describe a “boy with gun” in Vietnam who might be taken to prefigure Ondaatje’s Billy, another “kid” with a gun.122 Indeed, the conspicuous lack of an article in the phrase “boy with gun” anticipates the appearance of a similar locution in Billy the Kid during a moment in which a figure who has shot someone is said to embrace “the moral of newspapers or gun.”123 In “Pictures from Vietnam,” the boy “with gun” is not described as having shot anybody; rather, he is watching a woman as she holds and feeds her child. The ethics of such watching – and the ethics of readers’ own “watching” of the scene – are called into question in the poem’s next stanza, which is composed entirely of the words “Beautiful photography / that holds no morality.” The phrase is ambiguous: does it suggest that photography is amoral or that it is immoral? Reading across Ondaatje’s texts, one might associate photography’s lack of morality in “Pictures from Vietnam” with “the moral of newspapers or gun” in Billy the Kid, which, in that book, is described as one in which “bodies are mindless as paper flowers you dont [sic] feed / or give to drink.”124 The statement suggests that newspapers and guns both reduce bodies to objects for which one has no responsibility – a dubious morality, to say the least. In “Pictures from Vietnam,” the moral dubiousness of watching is evident as the poem goes on to describe an aerial bombardment that leaves the woman’s child with “its side unlaced like tennis shoes.”125 The startling simile reflects Ondaatje’s recognition of the difficulty that attends writing about war from the distanced position of the affluent West, where a good many people are likely to witness or participate in “battles” only figuratively at events such as athletic contests. The simile thus draws attention to Ondaatje’s mediation of others’ suffering, to readers’ position as spectators of that suffering, and to the possible harm that such mediation does by aestheticizing violence. In other words, the poem displays a

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sensitivity to the fact that most Canadians and Americans were engaging with the Vietnam War primarily through mass media. Marshall McLuhan might have been right, in a sense, to suggest that “the entire public” in North America was a “participant” in the war, but Ondaatje’s poem insists on how limited that participation was. Such concerns in “Pictures from Vietnam” have marked corollaries in Billy the Kid, which repeatedly draws attention to Billy as a figure who moves between being a participant in violence and an observer of it. For instance, he is someone who, at the book’s outset, testifies to having killed many people, but his presence at the murder that was deemed to spark the “Lincoln County War” – fought by rival commercial factions in New Mexico in 1878 – is that of a mere witness: he watches the killing from a “distant hillside.”126 Ondaatje’s previous work aside, it is difficult to avoid recalling the Vietnam War when contemplating Billy the Kid if one considers that the text characterizes Billy as a twenty-one-year-old American who is goodnatured but caught up in violence and traumatized by watching friends be gunned down, someone who has fought in a seemingly senseless conflict and been driven to the edge of sanity. These characteristics strongly echo the depictions of US soldiers in Vietnam that were circulating by the late 1960s. Likewise, the book’s list of people killed by Billy includes friends along with enemies, thus resonating with war-era reports that in Vietnam “it was not uncommon for Americans to shoot each other.”127 Meanwhile, Billy has conspicuous affinities with certain American deserters from Vietnam as he goes on the run from the law, is apprehended and badly treated, then escapes – not to mention the fact that he crosses the Canada-US border.128 And insofar as Ondaatje’s version of Billy is a criminal who casts himself as unfairly singled out by the law, he is liable to engender an ambivalent response in readers similar to the ambivalence that greeted American deserters and draft-resisters in Canada. Ondaatje’s depiction of Pat Garrett, the Lincoln County sheriff, similarly recalls the war. In Billy the Kid, Garrett is an “academic murderer,” someone who “had decided what was right and forgot all morals.”129 The characterization is notable, given that anti-war critics in the late sixties explicitly cast the US government as prosecuting a lunatic war under the guise of rationality. For instance, in the account of the My Lai massacre published in the 5 December 1969 issue of Life, there was an emphasis on the war’s insanity, including a description of the dissociated, almost



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mechanical manner in which the US soldiers went about killing Vietnamese villagers. Photojournalist Ronald Haeberle, who had been present at the massacre, was quoted as recalling, “There was no expression on the American faces … They were destroying everything. They were doing it all very businesslike.” Haeberle also observed that after shooting a Vietnamese child, an American soldier had “simply got up and walked away.”130 This description bears a close resemblance to the characterization of Garrett in Billy the Kid as someone who has “the ability to kill someone on the street walk back and finish a joke.”131 Billy the Kid depicts Garrett as rational, calculating, and dispassionate to the point of madness. At one point, the narrator calls him a “sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane,” running the words together to suggest that Garrett’s particular brand of dispassionate, calculating sanity might, in fact, be a form of insanity.132 Moreover, the book emphasizes his masochistic relentlessness, as when it describes his project of building a tolerance for alcohol, a process that he intended “to last only two years” but that resulted in him becoming “addicted, locked in his own game,” so that the process “continued into new months over which he had no control.”133 Given the other echoes of the US military in Ondaatje’s representation of Garrett, it is difficult not to hear in this depiction of Garrett’s project a further evocation of the Vietnam War, a nod to the way in which the war became a much more prolonged and devastating conflict for America than anticipated. If Ondaatje’s Billy emblematizes the American veteran of Vietnam, Ondaatje’s Garrett serves as a reminder that veterans were not the only ones responsible for the war’s insanities and violence. In that respect, a statement that Billy makes about his involvement in the Lincoln County War recalls self-defences that US soldiers in Vietnam offered for their participation in atrocities such as the one at My Lai. Billy remarks, “There was no criminal punishment that could be genuinely brought against me without bringing it against everyone connected with that war.”134 Moreover, Billy the Kid consolidates its implicit commentary on the Vietnam War through its telling of a story about a man named Livingstone, who is said to have been exempted from military service in the American Civil War because of a limp, and who then insanely attempted to breed a race of mad dogs. The story’s narrator, John Chisum, claims that Livingstone became so apparently stable in the attempt that “now they

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probably would accept him in the army.”135 Here, even as the emphasis on an exemption from military service once more evokes the Vietnam War, with all its controversies regarding the draft, Ondaatje reinforces his depiction of the military as an insane institution. Ondaatje’s choice to deploy the Western as a vehicle for an anti-war critique also constitutes a historiographical intervention, characterizing the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination alike as parts of a pattern of violence in American history. At one point in Billy the Kid, an anonymous narrator asks if there is “some reasoning we can give to explain all this violence.”136 Ostensibly, the question refers to the violence in Billy’s life, but because the referent of “this violence” is left decidedly ambiguous, the question encourages readers to consider connections between the Wild West and more recent violence. As Billy the Kid makes such connections, it identifies recurring tensions in America: perhaps most conspicuously, between the pursuit of “what [is] right” – to borrow from Ondaatje’s description of Garrett – and the enactment of violence in that pursuit. If the Western frequently wrestles with the paradox that, in order to maintain peace, agents of the law rely on the use or threat of violence, it is not surprising that the Western found a new currency during the Vietnam War, when the American state was often using force both in Vietnam and domestically. By connecting the war to the frontier, Billy the Kid presents a damning view of American history and identity as bound up with technology and violence from the nineteenth century through to the 1960s. Ondaatje’s book reads the Vietnam War through the lens of that long history while also reading the Wild West through the lens of Vietnam. The identification of such violence as closely imbricated with technology serves to distinguish Billy the Kid as a Canadian text, insofar as that identification echoes similar ones by Canadian nationalists of the era who, following George Grant, frequently castigated what they saw as the violent techno-capitalist drive of the American empire. In 1968, for instance, Farley Mowat called the United States “a machine for greed,”137 while the Guess Who sang of the US “war machine” in their 1970 hit song “American Woman.” In Nichol’s “Two Heroes,” the narrator declares, “Billy was in love with machines. He loved the smooth click of the hammers when he thumbed his gun.”138 Ondaatje’s Billy is not so different from Nichol’s, given his fascination with the mechanical and



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with his own machine-like body. In one poem, Ondaatje’s Billy refers to his penchant for watching “the stomach of clocks / shift their wheels and pins into each other”; in another, he marvels at “the clean speech of machines / that make machines” and at those machines’ potential for violence, believing that “one altered move” could “make them maniac.”139 Ondaatje’s Garrett, himself committed to machine-like self-discipline, corroborates a view of Billy as mechanical by claiming once to have noticed Billy’s “left hand churning within itself, each finger circling alternately like a train wheel” as Billy performed finger exercises for his gun hand.140 Accordingly, in contrast with American popular films of the late 1960s such as Easy Rider and Cool Hand Luke that idealized young, antiestablishment characters, Billy the Kid deconstructs the apparent opposition between Billy and Garrett, suggesting that the problem is not a conflict between two Americas – in the terms of 1970, between the establishment and the counter-culture – but rather one of violent technologism pervading all of America. Meanwhile, Canada finds a figurative incarnation in Billy the Kid in the ranch house of John and Sallie Chisum, where Billy takes refuge for a time after being injured in a fire. Judith Owens observes that Billy represents the ranch as “a pastoral world” that sometimes appears “Edenic.”141 It remains to be pointed out that although the Chisum house is literally in the American Southwest, it is aligned with Canada insofar as the book depicts the house as a figurative counter-America. In particular, the tranquillity and sanctuary that the house offers to those affected by American violence have affinities with Canada as it was increasingly imagined during the Vietnam War. Indeed, when Billy remarks that “every animal that came within a certain radius of that house was given a welcome,”142 he echoes Pierre Trudeau’s declaration that Canada, in accepting war resisters, would be a “refuge from militarism.”143 Just as Canada not only declined to join the United States militarily in Vietnam but also harboured American dissidents, the Chisum house is represented in Billy the Kid as set apart from violence; as Scobie notes, Ondaatje even abandons the historical record to represent John Chisum as a “peace-loving man.”144 What is more, the Chisum house in Billy the Kid is a place where people tell stories of insane violence – such as the story of Livingstone and his dogs – but treat those tales in a detached, critical manner: for instance, Sallie Chisum simply calls the narrative about Livingstone “a nasty

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story.”145 In that regard, Ondaatje’s representation of the house reflects a growing view among Canadians during the war era that their country was, indeed, a peaceable kingdom – what William Kilbourn called in 1970 “a way and a hope, an alternative to insanity.”146 Ondaatje depicts the Chisum ranch as a locus of natural rhythms, joyous sexual congress, and bodily healing, a place that has “nothing near [it] for almost a hundred miles” and so is both literally and figuratively apart from the violence of the American West, as well as from the industrial American East with its “machines / that make machines.”147 The implicit Canadianness of the house is underscored by the reproduction in Billy the Kid of a photograph ostensibly representing Sallie and John Chisum that is, in fact, a photograph of two of Ondaatje’s friends, Canadian residents Sally and Stuart Mackinnon, in period dress.148 Moreover, John Chisum’s claim in the book that he was once a singer aligns him with the “Canadian group, a sort of orchestra,” for which Billy expresses a fondness.149 While Dennis Cooley has observed that the “orchestra” reference is a nod to the Canadian sound poetry group the Four Horsemen,150 the Four Horsemen themselves are paralleled in Billy the Kid by Billy’s group of four American fugitives with “four horses outside” their hideout that is ambushed by Garrett and his men.151 Standing in contrast to this group and its participation in American violence, the Canadian “orchestra” and John Chisum evoke peaceful Canadian artistic production. If Canadian critics have been unable to see Billy the Kid as a Canadian text, it may be because the book follows Grant in raising the possibility that Canadian identity and American identity are not necessarily oppositional. While Ondaatje’s book plays on the trope of Canada as a peaceable kingdom in depicting the Chisum ranch, it otherwise leaves open the question of whether its diagnosis of a recurring American penchant for violence might also be applied to Canada. Ondaatje’s Billy is, after all, a murdering border crosser with a taste for Canadian music. What is more, the book’s fascination with an American mythic figure and his legacy risks fostering, if not rehearsing, the Canadian obsession with US life and media that new nationalists of the war era attributed to their compatriots. Simultaneously, though, Billy the Kid manifests an ethos that McLuhan would celebrate in 1977 when he identified a Canadian as someone who is “intellectually detached and observant as an interpreter of the American destiny.”152 This statement set the stage for Hutcheon’s



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identification, a decade later, of Canadian marginality and irony as signs not of national inferiority and psychological disunity but of a flourishing postmodern ethos. In that regard, Billy the Kid’s ironic focus on America is what most conspicuously distinguishes it as Canadian. Ondaatje’s Billy is distinct from the literally Canadian figures in other war-era literature discussed in this chapter in that he does not usually witness, commit, or suffer physical violence in a mediated fashion; for him, such violence is very much immediate. However, Billy the Kid emphasizes that its readers’ relationship to the historical Billy the Kid is itself highly mediated, constituted by engagements with innumerable historiographic and fictionalizing accounts. In making this point, Billy the Kid joins other Canadian texts of the time in positioning Canadians as distanced observers of violence, with the Western genre standing as a key layer of mediation in Ondaatje’s book. But Billy the Kid also deploys the Western in order to suggest that American violence has a long history and that mass media have played a role in mythologizing such violence. Consequently, Ondaatje’s book is yet another instance of war-era Canadian literature functioning as intermedial critique.

4 Queering Canada This country offers an alternative life style to people who do not want to share in the benefits and deficiencies of mass society. Hugh Hood, “Moral Imagination: Canadian Thing” I turned over and went to sleep, dreaming a dream picture of all the cops in the United States in their blue uniforms and all the Army guys in their green uniforms, all of them lined up at the border, looking across into Canada and wondering just what was going on in there anyway. Allen Morgan, Dropping Out in 3/4 Time

For Canada to be explicitly identified as queer is, for the most part, a twenty-first-century phenomenon. In 2001, for instance, literary critic Terry Goldie declared of the country, “We are a queer nation, whether because of Quebec or because of many other things.”1 Two years later, playwright Brad Fraser made a more detailed case, pointing out that Canadians share with gay people in being an invisible minority in North America – as Fraser put it, “We can go anywhere, do anything and no one will know we’re Canadian unless we announce it” – and in being forced by that minoritization to question their identity.2 In 2006, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce went further, claiming, Canada is itself a queer state, not only as the fey, red-headed stepchild of our lumbering, macho-patriarchal neighbour to the south but as the repository of all things sissified: our socialized medicine and strong history of socialist policies in general (always a sign of weakness, if not downright limp-wristedness), our various attempts to decriminalize marijuana and legalize gay marriage (reliable political



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signifiers of the soft and the swishy – let’s not even get into softwood lumber!); our image as international “peacekeepers” as opposed to unilateralist war-mongers (surely only the boast of a milquetoast), our dependence on government institutions and funding (beware of those smothering mothers!), even, or perhaps especially, our predilection for figureskaters [sic], curling (men with brooms indeed!), kilts, quilts, and a suspicious dedication to the House of Windsor.3 These associations of Canada with queerness – broadly defined as nonconformity with heteronormativity and traditional gender roles – partly reflect a de-stigmatization of homosexuality in the North American mainstream that gained momentum in the 1990s both culturally and legally. Canada earned a claim to being marginally ahead of the United States in this respect after the national legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005. Moreover, a 2004 survey found that 69 per cent of Canadians, compared to 51 per cent of Americans, agreed with the statement “Homosexuality should be accepted by society.”4 At the same time, Canadian commentators who identified Canada as queer were ironically echoing the rhetoric of American conservative pundits in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. For instance, Jonah Goldberg had caricatured the Canadian government’s reaction to new American ­border-security regulations as a “hissy-fit” and, with tongue at least partly in cheek, encouraged the United States to launch a military attack on Canada, claiming it would take such action for Canada’s “neurotic antiAmericanism” to be “transformed into manly resolve.”5 Goldberg insisted that national strength required displays of hegemonic masculinity; in contrast, commentators such as Goldie, Fraser, and LaBruce were happy to align Canada with a rejection of that masculinity. One might think of Canada’s figurative queerness as, in part, stemming transhistorically from its relationship to the United States. It is not just that Canadians are an invisible minority; as LaBruce suggests by characterizing America as “macho-patriarchal,” Canadian queerness also follows on from the association of the United States with a hegemonic masculinity that Canada is not taken to share, militarily or otherwise. As discussed in chapter 1, the notion of Canada as failing to embody hegemonic masculinity once found expression in the personification of the country as Miss Canada. The threat that she might marry her American

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cousin heterosexualized her, but her refusal of that marriage and of the normative life it would grant her meant that Miss Canada had an implicit queerness about her. Canada’s queerness is also part of Canadians’ ironic consciousness as described in the previous chapter. Laura Mulvey has discussed how women watching films are interpellated by them as members of the male viewership for which the films are intended; consequently, Mulvey argues, women learn to make a “trans-sex identification.”6 For Canadians consuming US mass media, there can be an analogous sense of not being the intended audience. Consequently, as José Arroyo observes, Canadians engaging with US media “see them both differently and the same as Americans. That is to say we not only know the meaning that Americans are supposed to create, and share it with them, but we can also create a different meaning that may or may not be shared nationally.”7 As Canadians consume US media products that associate America with hegemonic masculinity and implicitly feminize other countries, they may find themselves both identifying with Americans and repudiating that identification. During the Vietnam War, when identification with the United States was especially repugnant to many Canadians, there was an added impetus not to identify with the hegemonic masculinity that America was depicted as embodying. As I observed in chapter 1, Canadian nationalist discourse during the Vietnam War was shot through with a highly normative discourse of gender and sexuality. For instance, the popular trope of Canada as a woman who was vulnerable to or sexually active with a male America frequently expressed a patriarchal anxiety regarding female sexuality, while the repeated concern about Canada’s “penetration” by the United States carried a homophobic undercurrent. In this regard, the Vietnam War’s role in shifting sexualized conceptions of Canada needs to be understood in the context of the Cold War period’s rigid social norms. In the anti-communist mindset, communism and homosexuality were explicitly linked, as was evident during the “Lavender Scare” that attended the “Red Scare” of the McCarthy era.8 Gay people’s loyalty to the state was seen as questionable simply as a result of their sexuality, and the Canadian Immigration Act was changed in 1952 to ban homosexual people from the country. Beginning in 1958, the Royal Canadian ­ Mounted Police (r c m p ) also investigated more than 9,000 confirmed or suspected homosexuals in the federal civil service. Meanwhile,



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psychological theories of the time gave credence to homophobia and patriarchal values: for instance, by perpetuating the belief that mothers who worked outside the home while raising their children might arrest their sons’ development and cause them to become gay. Such theories underwrote assertions by commentators that Canada had suffered from its decreasing ties to Great Britain and subordination to the United States; Earle Birney’s poem “Canada: Case History: 1945,” for example, characterized Canada’s “parents,” Britain and France, as “unmarried and living abroad” while describing Canada itself as “dead-set in adolescence.”9 In 1966, Charles Hanly remarked that Canada faced the “real danger of failing to achieve national maturity” because it was treating the United States as a parent substitute.10 And in 1973, Robert Fothergill claimed that Canada had grown up as a younger brother living in the shadow of a “dominant,” historically “adventurous and enterprising” America, with the consequence that Canada had a “sense of himself as inescapably diminished, secondary, immature.”11 Although these commentators did not explicitly identify Canada as gay, they were trading in a discourse of arrested development that pathologized homosexuality. However, the new nationalist penchant for defining Canada in contrast with the United States, along with the Vietnam War–era tendency to see America as problematically masculine, pointed the way toward the possibility of celebrating Canada’s non-alignment with normative masculinity. As I observed in chapter 1, some writers did so during the war itself by associating Canada with a woman on the verge of liberation. More recent claims about Canada’s queerness are indebted to such representations, kin to them if not advances on them. Those recent claims also have antecedents in war-era literary novels featuring male protagonists with a vexed relationship to heterosexual masculinity – protagonists whom the texts connect to Canada. In this chapter, I consider the particular role that US draft dodgers played during and immediately after the war as queer figures who could also be taken to be emblematically Canadian. I focus on two novels, Morton Redner’s Getting Out (1971) and Mark Satin’s Confessions of a Young Exile (1976), both of which feature American protagonists who struggle to achieve a stable gender identity, sexual identity, and national identity while dealing with the possibility of being drafted. In these novels, I argue, the draft is depicted as effectively queering the protagonists,

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unsettling their relationship to master narratives of sex, gender, and the nation while undermining those narratives. I then shift to considering Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars (1977), a book that I treat as a similar story of war resistance with a greater debt to the Vietnam War than critics have recognized. Especially striking is the way in which The Wars ties war resistance to queerness and queerness to Canada. In this respect, Findley anticipates the emphasis of Goldie, Fraser, and LaBruce on the queerness of the nation. Given that The Wars was published at a time when homosexuality was still widely seen as pathological and immoral, the novel is all the more remarkable insofar as it subtly encourages its Canadian readers to align themselves with a queer identity – and it does so, not least, by exploiting their inclination to align themselves with an anti-war stance. This strategy in the The Wars demonstrates a key way in which the new nationalist politics of the Vietnam War came to inflect queer politics in Canada. t h e a l t e r n at i v e a m e r i c a in draft-dodger novels

Even before Morton Redner’s Getting Out and Mark Satin’s Confessions of a Young Exile were published, the tens of thousands of Americans who came to Canada during the Vietnam War were queer figures insofar as they resisted not just the war but also easy categorization.12 Some were dodging the draft and some were deserters, while others were simply against the war, and it was not always clear to Canadians who was whom. War immigrants were liable to be cagey about their reasons for being in Canada, at least partly because they faced suspicion or outright hostility; a 1968 Gallup poll found that 51 per cent of Canadians were opposed to welcoming US war resisters into the country.13 Later in the war, as discussed in chapter 2, Canadian nationalists such as Robin Mathews and James Steele went so far as to accuse war immigrants of being imperialist invaders who were laying claim to Canadian jobs while imposing American ideals and ways of being on Canada. But many US war immigrants were staunch anti-imperialists, and surveys showed that almost all of them were strongly against the US ownership of businesses in Canada.14 In fact, US war immigrants could seem more Canadian than Canadians. Not least, their choice to leave the United States aligned them with a



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longstanding notion of Canadians as people who had consciously rejected life in America – a notion perpetuated, for instance, by the prominence of the British Loyalists and the Underground Railroad in Canadian popular history. Canadian-born nationalists during the Vietnam War would similarly foreground Canadian identity as involving a conscious decision, as when Margaret Atwood declared in her afterword to The Journals of Susanna Moodie, “This country is something that must be chosen.”15 Atwood did not need to identify the country to which it was easiest to decamp. By refusing to take up arms for America, draft dodgers and deserters were also implicitly repudiating a martial, hegemonic masculinity. Participation in the US military was a de facto confirmation of a young man’s heterosexuality, partly because gay people were excluded from service. In avoiding service, draft dodgers were thus liable to seem less than “properly” masculine in many people’s eyes. By accepting draft dodgers, meanwhile, Canada was opening itself to being seen as queer by association, especially given that the country was not fighting in Vietnam, either. As the war went on, there was also the fact that gay and lesbian liberation groups did not shy from aligning their political goals with an opposition to the US war effort. In a 1971 editorial describing the previous year’s establishment of the Gay Liberation Front (g l f ) in Vancouver, the editors of the Body Politic observed that g l f members believed “gay liberation had to consider itself a part of a wider revolutionary movement, rather than concerning itself with problems of the gay community only. Being a member of the g l f meant that you considered yourself a ‘gay Vietcong.’”16 Two years later, Toronto’s Gay Alliance Toward Equality (g at e ) similarly made opposing the war part of its political stance. That opposition rendered explicit an already existing, largely implicit connection between opposition to the war and resistance to heteronormativity. Just as the war literally and figuratively conscripted people into opposing sides embroiled in violence, heteronormativity was taken to conscript them into performing gender roles within patriarchal, homophobic hierarchies, leading to their involvement in all manner of literal and figurative violence – including the violence of war itself. War immigrants’ imbrication with the politics of gender and sexuality is evident in Getting Out and Confessions of a Young Exile. Neither novel was a bestseller or award-winner, and neither has had much of an

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afterlife, but both are remarkable for the ways in which they associate Canada with queerness. Each book features a white, middle-class, young American man during the Vietnam War who navigates sexual relationships while trying to decide what to do about the draft, and each narrative ends with the protagonist heading for Canada. Neither novel presents the protagonist’s choice to immigrate as an unambiguously positive thing. Moreover, Getting Out cannot be said to be clearly queer-positive. Nevertheless, both novels diagnose war-era America as a coercive environment that produces a violent masculinity. Both narratives also suggest that Canada might provide a viable alternative space for the pursuit of more ethical interrelations. And while the novels’ shared decision not to narrate their protagonists’ lives as immigrants in Canada means that the narratives underscore the characters’ persisting attachments to the United States, the shared absence of a substantial portrait of Canada also invites readers to script their own endings for the characters, aligning themselves with them by imagining what the characters cannot. Morton Redner is an American who was exempted from the draft and whose novel Getting Out was released by a US publisher. Nevertheless, I consider the novel significant as an example of war-era discourse that connects Canada to queerness. The book does so by associating the country with an alternative to the US government’s influence on young Americans’ sexual and gendered behaviours. The novel’s narrator-­ protagonist, Danny Mordl, is unambiguously straight: he has a female romantic partner, he desires and has sex only with women, and he demonstrates no erotic interest in men. He is also conventionally masculine, at least insofar as he shows little sign in resisting norms of gender – unless one counts his desire not to serve in the military. But Getting Out depicts the draft as pushing Danny toward what are, for him, unusual performances of gender and sexuality. The novel signals this development in its first sentence, as Danny declares, “I was an ordinary young person, deciding what I wanted to do in life, when the letter came” – a letter asking that he report to his local draft board for a physical.17 Getting Out proceeds to show the ways in which the draft disrupts Danny’s “ordinariness.” For instance, because of the exclusion of homosexual men from military service, he actually gains an incentive to be labelled gay, which he unsuccessfully attempts to arrange when called before his draft board. Likewise, because the board grants deferments to fathers, Danny has



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unprotected sex with various people, even while maintaining a long-­ distance relationship with a young woman named Grania, who goes by the nickname “Granny.” Accordingly, when the critic Rachel Adams claims that in draft-dodger novels such as Getting Out, “the liberation of sexuality becomes a way of subverting the authoritarian intervention of the state,”18 she is making a claim that does not quite hold true for Redner’s narrative. In Getting Out, the state is not simply a socially ­normative force; more surprisingly, it turns out to be itself subversive of Danny’s own normative impulses, as it elicits from him a declaration of homosexuality and a series of infidelities after what seems to have been a monogamous relationship. When Danny’s father repeatedly suggests that Danny is not “acting stable,” there is the implication that state pressure has intervened in the younger man’s normality and made a virtuous, hegemonic masculinity impossible for him. On two occasions, others remind Danny that serving in Vietnam would entail “burning women and children” – a horrific inversion of the masculinist trope of chivalry.19 And when Danny ends up in a violent confrontation with his draft board, it turns out that even rebellion involves the same inversion, as he injures two women in the melee. Getting Out thus suggests that Danny has no good option to lead the “normal comfortable life” in the United States that another character foresees him desiring.20 From a normative viewpoint, the only options demean his masculinity. One way in which Danny attempts to recuperate an “ordinary” American life for himself, even while envisioning a move north of the border, is by casting Canada as a frontier space. Among US war immigrants, this characterization was popular; as Adams notes, there is a tendency in draft-dodging narratives to “invoke a literary tradition in which a male protagonist lights out for the territory” in the manner of Huckleberry Finn.21 War immigrants who invoked this tradition could, thus, view themselves not as anti-American but as paradigmatic Americans whose time in Canada would allow them to engage in the quintessential frontier activities of self-fashioning and proving their manhood. In Getting Out, Danny associates the prospect of moving to Canada with conventional masculine adventure and heteronormativity. Picturing a flight north, he imagines “Miller High Life pictures, fish jumping out of lakes, Americans coming north, cutting through vast woods instead of getting drafted.”22 Moreover, friends in Toronto – a heterosexual couple

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– send him a postcard telling him: “The country is virgin and beautiful.”23 The description promises that Danny will be able to express a virile heterosexuality through the conquest of a feminine landscape. And, indeed, when he visits, the friends seem to have an entirely ordinary life of straight coupledom. What is more, when Danny makes his final decision to move to Canada, Granny accompanies him, suggesting that the two of them will be able to live together in a way that was not possible in the United States, where they would have been separated by the war or prison or coerced into hastily becoming parents. In one sense, perhaps, heterosexual monogamy with Granny in Canada stands as a liberated sexuality for Danny. In another sense, however, it represents a return to social normativity. Getting Out imagines Canada not as a place where coercive sexual norms fall away but as a place in which people who conform to those norms are free to enjoy normalcy. Accordingly, Adams generalizes too broadly when she identifies Getting Out along with other draft-dodger novels as one in which “sexual perversion is closely aligned with the decision to go to Canada, since both represent the capacity to resist ‘the system’ by leaving it altogether.”24 It would be more accurate to say that Redner’s novel depicts Canada as absent of pressures that lead to “perversions” of one’s habitual public performances of gender and sexuality. In Getting Out, Canada becomes a viable option only once it is clear that “normalcy” in sex and gender is impossible in the United States. But Getting Out also promotes a queer picture of Canada via a curious plot twist in which Danny, having been put on trial for draft evasion, announces that he now wishes to enlist, leading to the charges against him being dropped. His enlistment draws considerable press coverage, which is welcomed by army officials for whom Danny is useful as a model convert to the war effort. Once in service, however, Danny uses the threat of negative publicity to blackmail his superiors into letting him leave the military without punishment. As a result, he seems to regain the option of living an “ordinary” life with Granny in the United States. Still, he worries that the army might “just decide to come” for him, so he sets out for Canada with her.25 He makes the decision to head north even though his one brief trip to Toronto prior to his trial left him less than impressed by the city. While there, he focused on the presence of things such as trolley wires and cobblestones, and he meditated on the place’s association with Queen Victoria. To him, Canada appeared less “virginal” than



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matriarchal. Thus, a future north of the border with Granny comes to be shaded not just by heterosexual normalcy and the reproductive futurity implied by her nickname but also by an antiqueness, a sense of time thrown out of joint. His final departure for Canada implies a bright American future abandoned for the anachronism of the hinterland; it connotes the non-normative masculinity of a man committing himself to life with a grandmotherly woman. As a young American, Danny has expected a path toward conventional success; in contrast, the Canadian cobblestones emblematize an arrested development that people in the Vietnam War era often associated with queerness. Danny does not actually narrate his arrival in Canada alongside Granny, with the result that Getting Out presents the country predominantly as a spectre, a place that has to be entered because the United States is unable to offer young men such as him the range of choices that they have come to associate with America. Canada stands as a queer frontier in the sense that it replaces youthful male American vitality with staid Victoriana. It is a country where one can have a life, but it will not be a normal life because the territory is not American and, as Danny sees it, the United States – or, rather, a certain ideal of the United States – is synonymous with normalcy. Rather than enthusiastically endorsing Canada as an alternative to America, Getting Out simply recognizes that Canada exists as an alternative. Moreover, the novel suggests that having alternatives is paramount for someone such as Danny, who associates his American identity with freedom more than with patriot love, and who is frustrated by the US government’s impairment of his ability to make free choices. Redner’s choice to end Getting Out just as Danny is on the brink of moving to Canada reflects the novel’s positioning of its protagonist as someone at the limits of American normalcy. For the novel to describe his life after he moves to Canada would transform Getting Out from a story of possible emigration into a story of immigration, decentring America in favour of Canada.26 As it stands, Canada is most important in Getting Out as a choice that, in being chosen, demonstrates Danny’s ability to choose. By proving his autonomy, he confirms that he retains at least a partial hold on a normative American masculinity, even as he is compelled to renounce America. In Confessions of a Young Exile, the rejection of the United States more clearly involves a rejection of heteronormativity. The novel’s protagonist,

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Mark Milland, is queer from the beginning; early on, the narrative includes a scene of him as an adolescent, masturbating while thinking about girls and his friend Michael; later, he does not understand his father’s anger when Mark gives him a plant for his birthday; and later still, although most of Mark’s sexual relationships are with women, he also has sex with a man. Moreover, as Mark grows up in Moorhead, Montana, he feels alienated from others. Introverted and literary, he believes that there are few people like himself – a feeling that recurs even after he leaves Montana and works for various social-justice groups across America. The cumulative effect is to suggest his estrangement from the norms of his social milieu. Moreover, his eventual decision to move to Canada aligns his difference with that country. The notion that Mark has a Canadian orientation, as it were, is suggested at the novel’s beginning when he identifies Moorhead as situated on the only river in the United States that runs northward, a proleptic nod to his own move northward at the novel’s end.27 If Canadian readers in 1976 were liable to identify with Mark’s sense of being an American who does not quite fit in with Americans, they were also liable to recognize an affinity between the novel’s picture of him and a broader cultural notion of Canada as a nonhegemonically masculine space. Implicitly, then, Confessions of a Young Exile encourages Canadian readers to see in the draft dodger an image of themselves. Confessions of a Young Exile further insists on Mark’s estrangement from America by offering a national allegory in which his trajectory toward moving to Canada is paralleled by his struggle to end his relationship with his romantic partner, a young woman named Marcie, whose name is a near-anagram of “America.” In other ways, too, Mark’s relationship to Marcie evokes his relationship with his country: for instance, he struggles to live up to her political expectations of him, and he agonizes over the idea of whether to leave her, declaring, “I can’t bear the thought of being with her forever … And yet I can’t bear the thought of losing her.”28 He also blames her for his feeling that he must immigrate to Canada, declaring, “She won’t be satisfied until I’ve martyred myself for her.”29 In an era when the US government was demanding that young Americans risk their lives overseas in service to their country, the political resonance of Marcie’s apparent demands are hard to miss. So, too, is the resonance of Mark’s belief that the only way of freeing himself from



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Marcie is for him to “walk out.”30 It is a pointed joke that the couple’s birth control method of choice is early withdrawal. Just as Getting Out presents Danny Mordl’s violence against women as a version of the kind of violence that he could end up committing in Vietnam if drafted, Mark in Confessions of a Young Exile comes to manifest violent tendencies toward women. At the figurative level, these tendencies imply that war-era America had produced a dangerous masculinity in its male citizens, even those in the anti-war movement – and perhaps especially those in it, as they were liable to have taken on certain characteristics of the military to which they were opposed. That much is suggested when Mark identifies his “militant enthusiasm” for his initial work with Students for a Democratic Society.31 It is even more evident, and disturbingly so, at moments when he imagines acting violently toward women. For instance, after Marcie accuses him of being more politically conservative than he pretends to be, he recognizes that his “deepest impulse is to shoot her through the head.”32 Not long afterward, he is aggressive with another girl during a romantic encounter, suddenly reaching under her bra in such a manner that she breaks away from him and leaves. Soon after that, while he is playing catch with a female friend, she ends their session abruptly and he finds that he “want[s] to throw a couple more ‘fast ones’ right at her head.”33 And when another female friend, to his surprise, publicly declares her opposition to his proposals at an s d s meeting, he feels betrayed and realizes, “I want to run up to her and smash her in the face with my fists.”34 If these moments carry a hint of national allegory, with the women’s betrayal of Mark suggesting America’s betrayals of its young men and his violence suggesting the increasing militancy of the New Left, not to mention the atrocities committed by US soldiers in Vietnam, the moments also feature a troubling psychological realism: Mark appears to be problematically redirecting his negative affect, such that his political frustrations with the United States find expression in frustrations with women. Treating them as though they are responsible for his thwarted sense of efficacy, he joins in the traditional patriarchal practice of viewing women as an emasculating threat. But whether one foregrounds the allegorical or psychological element of Mark’s violent impulses, those impulses suggest an America in which heterosexual relations have become toxic, and performances of masculinity have become inseparable from violence. If the American

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Dream for young, straight men has always been partly heteronormative, promising that women will serve as lovers and helpmates, Confessions of a Young Exile presents that dream as having been soured by the violence of the war era, while exile in Canada promises a liberation from problematic heterosexual entanglements. In that respect, Confessions of a Young Exile goes much further than Getting Out in identifying Canada with queerness. Because Mark associates Canada with a retreat from Marcie and not with any further romantic possibilities, the country is also not quite the site of sexual liberation that Adams sees it as being in draft-dodger novels. Rather, Canada in Mark’s mind carries the promise of solitude and a satisfaction of his anti-social impulses. But as he finally makes the decision to move there, he also continues to yearn for fraternity, as he begins to plan “a communal city of ‘draft resisters’ in Canada.”35 More specifically, he expresses a desire throughout the novel to connect with people who are, as he repeatedly puts it, “like me.” He is never quite clear about which affinities are most important to him, but evidently he anticipates finding such similarities among the people residing in the homosocial environment of his imagined city. In this regard, it is notable that not long before he decides to move to Canada, he considers relocating to San Francisco, observing, “People ‘like me’ are heading there from all over the country.”36 Given San Francisco’s associations with queerness, this moment in Confessions of a Young Exile stands as a further insistence that Mark’s difference includes sexual difference. The fact that he ends up in Canada suggests that it, too, is a site of queerness, one offering a more complete escape from Marcie / America than San Francisco would. Like Getting Out, Confessions of a Young Exile withholds a view of its protagonist’s life in Canada. However, Satin, who was a draft dodger himself, ends his novel with a record of the places and period in which the narrative was composed: “Vancouver – Prince Rupert – Winnipeg – Toronto – Vancouver 1973–1976.”37 By locating Satin in the country to which Mark Milland has immigrated, this record encourages readers to identify the author with the character and to assume that Milland, too, remains in the country after moving there. Meanwhile, if Satin’s choice not to represent Mark’s life in Canada suggests a melancholic refusal – by the protagonist and perhaps by Satin – to fully redirect his attention and affection from the United States to Canada, the non-representation of



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Canada also means that Canadian readers are able to imagine their own narrative of Mark Milland’s life north of the border. His last words in the novel involve him reassuring himself that “Canada is supposed to be a better country …”38 While the ellipsis suggests that he has reached an aporia, stuttering to a halt at the physical and conceptual border of America, it functions as a further invitation to readers to fill in the blank, even to script a happy ending for him in Canada. In this respect, it is notable that the name “Milland” echoes “my land.” By the end of Confessions of a Young Exile, it is ambiguous as to which land, if any, Mark might claim as his own, but the fact that the novel concludes with a list of Canadian places suggests that by 1976, for Satin if not for his protagonist, the land in question had become Canada, even as the multiplicity of cities listed also suggests a restlessness that might be read in a number of ways: as the movement of someone eager to explore the breadth of a new territory and make it his own; as the pacing of a prisoner behind bars; or as the refusal of a protean subject to be pinned down. The record of places further provides a manner of template with which readers might script their own narrative sequels for Mark. As Confessions of a Young Exile implicitly invites readers to do so, it also requires them to identify with him, putting themselves in his shoes. In 1976, readers on both sides of the Canada-US border would have been aware that draft dodgers such as Mark and his author were still unable to return to the United States without risking prosecution; by that time, President Gerald Ford had offered only a partial amnesty to draft dodgers, requiring them to swear an oath of allegiance and work for two years in public service. Accordingly, American and Canadian readers were, respectively, in quite different places when imagining Mark’s life in Canada. American readers were likely to be in the position of Allen Morgan’s fantasized police and soldiers in his 1972 memoir of draft dodging, Dropping Out in 3/4 Time: “looking across into Canada and wondering just what was going on in there anyway.” In contrast, Canadian readers were being invited to imagine Mark in a country that they, too, might call “my land.” Whether or not they identified with his queer sexuality, they were bound to identify with his sense of being different from most Americans. Through this association with difference, there was also the possibility of them coming to apprehend Canadian difference as having affinities with queer difference.

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identifying with queerness i n t i m o t h y f i n d l e y ’ s t h e wa r s

Vietnam never appears by name in Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars, but the book’s similarities to Getting Out and Confessions of a Young Exile make the war’s influence hard to miss. The fact that there are affinities between the novel’s protagonist, a fictional Canadian First World War deserter named Robert Ross, and the protagonists of Redner’s and Satin’s books becomes clear early on in Findley’s narrative when a character named Marian Turner looks back several decades from the 1970s to Robert’s life and says, “Well – it was just so tragic. When you think that nowadays, so many people – young people especially – might’ve known what he was all about.”39 The Wars offers no further explicit elaboration on the contemporary moment to which she refers, but, given that Findley began writing his book in 1974 and published it in 1977, it is not difficult to guess at the affinities she has in mind. Although The Wars, perhaps the most canonized of Canadian war novels, contains a bare handful of outright references to its own historical present, concerns of the Vietnam War era pervade the narrative. To consider the novel as grappling indirectly with Vietnam, even as it deals directly with the First World War, casts new light on its anti-war sentiments, its queer politics, and its rehearsal of the popular myth of the First World War as the conflict in which Canada “came of age.” In presenting Robert as Canadian, queer, and a war dissenter, The Wars construes him as a remarkable emblem of the nation. What is more, the novel works in manifold ways to foster readers’ identification with him, to imply Canada’s queerness as a country, and to suggest that such queerness has a genealogy stretching at least as far back as the First World War. By the time Findley wrote The Wars, the First World War had long been mythologized as a conflict involving brutal conditions for the fighting men, a seeming interminability, and intergenerational friction between the soldiers and the older men who sent them to pointless slaughter. Moreover, Charles Yale Harrison’s novel Generals Die in Bed (1930) had depicted Canadian soldiers looting an abandoned city, shooting at their own military police (m p s), and killing captive enemy troops in cold blood. During the Vietnam War, these elements of the First World War had a clear topicality, such that when Findley revisited similar



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horrors in his novel, he was implicitly suggesting that the war had been, as it were, Canada’s Vietnam. Indeed, the pluralizing title of Findley’s book invites a consideration of the two conflicts’ parallels. In that regard, it is striking that in The Wars, a character named Lady Juliet d’Orsey declares, “‘Every generation has a war – except this one.’”40 Juliet, who is British and speaking in the narrative present about the 1970s, seems to be referring in her last phrase to Britons who came of age during the Vietnam War. But her statement also conspicuously begs the question: to what extent did the baby boomers in Canada and Britain “have” a war? They may not have fought in Vietnam but, as Marian Turner’s comment suggests, awareness of the Vietnam War was a significant part of adolescence and early adulthood for most, and it was likely to inform their ideas about war in general. While Findley’s view of the First World War accords with earlier literary representations of the conflict in certain regards, it is also distinctive in ways that signal the Vietnam War’s influence. Particularly notable is Findley’s depiction of Robert Ross as someone whose violent conflict with his superiors emerges from both a principled anti-war stance and a traumatized psyche. In this regard, The Wars might be contrasted with Generals Die in Bed. As the enlisted men battle with m p s in Harrison’s novel, the fighting does not happen for any clearly moral reasons, and the enlisted men fight the m p s together. In The Wars, Robert’s violent revolt takes the form of his shooting and killing two fellow officers in defence of mules and military horses that he wants to save from bombardment, and he carries out this revolt almost entirely alone. Through his acts of defiance, Robert joins a raft of anti-authoritarian counter-cultural heroes of the Vietnam War era, from Cool Hand Luke to Billy Jack. Insofar as Robert actively protects the conscripted animals, seeking to help them flee the war, he also recalls Canadians during the Vietnam War who provided support to US draft dodgers and deserters. And insofar as Findley’s narrative repeatedly evokes the image of Robert on fire after trying to free the horses in his company from a burning barn, The Wars evokes the iconography of those Vietnam War protesters who immolated themselves in a bid to save others’ lives. When the novel introduces the image of Robert aflame, its status as image is forefront: it appears in the thoughts of a researcher who is investigating Robert’s life and whose efforts are related using second-person narration. We are told, “You lay the fiery

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image back in your mind and let it rest. You know it will obtrude again and again until you find its meaning.”41 By thus insisting on the power and ubiquity of such an image, Findley nods to the way in which photographs of self-immolations became haunting images for many during the Vietnam War. Robert’s actions to save the horses and mules are also in line with views about Canadian soldiery during the Vietnam War, when Canadians increasingly thought of their country as a peacekeeping nation. Robert’s own views in this respect are tellingly anachronistic. Near the novel’s beginning, before he enlists and while he is still living with his family in Toronto, his sister, Rowena, dies. It is reported that when Robert subsequently sees his other sister’s boyfriend, an enlisted man in uniform, standing idly while another man goes about the task of killing Rowena’s rabbits on her mother’s orders, Robert yells “something like: ‘you bastard! Bastard! What are soldiers for?’”42 As the critic John F. Hulcoop observes, Robert “obviously expects the answer, ‘To protect the defenceless.’”43 Robert’s idea of a soldier’s function seems unlikely for a Canadian in 1915 but less unusual for one in 1977, when the myth of the Canadian peacekeeper had been inaugurated with Lester Pearson’s invention of the u n peacekeeping force during the 1956 Suez crisis, consolidated by the presence of Canadian peacekeeping troops in Cyprus in 1964, and confirmed by Canada’s decision not to participate militarily in Vietnam. Moreover, Robert’s outrage at the enlisted man’s indifference to violence against innocents parallels Vietnam War–era concerns about the suffering of Vietnamese civilians as a result of US military actions. That said, one would not want to associate Robert too simplistically with the more peaceful manifestations of the anti-war movement in the Vietnam War years, as David Williams risks doing when he asserts that The Wars presents “an image of a soldier whose conformity with his era is kept at a distance, but whose contemporary pacifism is portrayed in extreme close-up.”44 Rather, Robert’s aversion to killing must be weighed against the fact that he is not straightforwardly a pacifist: his climactic armed resistance to the military in order to save the horses and mules aligns him with such Vietnam War–era groups as the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and, for that matter, the n l f , as well as the American soldiers involved in “fragging” attacks on their superior officers.



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While Robert brings to mind the notion of the Canadian as a peacekeeper and giver of aid to the conscripted, he is depicted as emblematically Canadian in others ways, too. For instance, he undertakes a quintessentially Canadian cross-country train journey early in the narrative, travelling from Ontario to Alberta and back via the Canadian Pacific Railway. It is tempting to say that the novel sends him on this journey primarily to nationalize him further by giving him pan-­Canadian experience. He has another national valence because, as the critic Donna Palmateer Pennee observes, his family’s farm-implement company, co-owned with another family, recalls Massey-Harris, the iconic Canadian machinery manufacturer.45 The Wars thus associates Robert’s family with the Masseys, a Canadian family prominent not only in the business world but also in national politics and culture.46 Moreover, Robert’s experiences in the First World War perpetuate longstanding myths of Canada in relation to the conflict. Diana Brydon points out that in the novel, Robert’s “lost innocence” stands in for the “lost innocence of a Canada compelled to participate” in the war.47 Likewise, Pennee takes his development to reflect that of “a youthful nation growing up in service of an ageing empire,”48 while Anne Geddes Bailey characterizes Robert as “the archetypal Canadian solider who eagerly signs up to serve the British Empire in the First World War and is subsequently sacrificed to the greater imperialist cause.”49 Robert’s national valence grows even clearer when, after his mother reacts to the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa by declaring that “her country was being destroyed by fire,” Robert himself suffers catastrophic injuries due to fire.50 And his status as national emblem is consolidated at a moment during the war in which, after he is accused by a Flemish farmer of being a “Maudit anglais,” he decides that “if he could identify himself, it might explain his innocence.” Robert then tells the farmer, “Je ne parle pas français! Je suis canadien!”51 Robert’s hope that his national self-­ identification will endear him to a foreigner makes him stereotypically Canadian; it also further aligns him with Canadians of the Vietnam War era, who took the war as an impetus to make their citizenship known to all while visiting other countries. In 1971, Douglas Fetherling noted this phenomenon in his poem “Young Canadians Abroad,” remarking of the titular travellers,

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It is a fairly recent development that all of them wear little maple leaf flags on their sleeves and on their backs and on their duffles to avoid confusion with the paladins of a neighbouring nation.52 In The Wars, it is the English, not Americans, from whom Robert seeks to distinguish himself, but the significance of his effort in terms of the Vietnam War era gives a transhistorical valence to his status as emblematically Canadian. Robert is depicted not only as representative of Canada but also as queer, insofar as there are conspicuous ways in which he does not conform to norms of sexuality and gender. I am not the first person to identify him as queer;53 in the novel itself, a character refers to him as “a queer young lad,” albeit without any apparent intention to identify Robert’s sexuality.54 But the identification of Robert as queer needs some elaboration. Any description of his sexuality, for instance, must reckon with the fact that he has a girlfriend in Canada before he leaves for the war. Later, he has an affair with Juliet d’Orsey’s sister, Barbara, who is, as Lorraine York puts it, a “figurehead” for the forces of “heterosexual conscription” in the novel.55 These forces are further evident earlier in The Wars, when Robert’s girlfriend urges him to fight another man simply because the man loves her, and later, when Robert accompanies fellow soldiers to a brothel in Alberta because, he realizes, “If you didn’t go, you were peculiar.”56 Throughout the narrative, The Wars attends to social forces coercing men into violence through what Thomas Hastings calls the “militarization of masculinity”:57 that is, the cultivation of a masculinity expressing martial values and attributes, often through acts of violence against others, and suppressing alternative values and attributes – such as a desire for other men – that might lead one to be associated with femininity. Robert, for his part, aspires to prove himself on the field of battle. In the same way that he chafes at his girlfriend’s wish for him to fight, however, he later resists military masculinity, showing himself to be, as Terry Goldie puts it, a “non-phallic male.”58 For instance, Juliet eventually speculates that Robert was in love with a fellow soldier, Harris.59 Meanwhile, The Wars connects Robert’s queerness to his status as a Canadian by giving him the name of a real, queer Canadian figure from



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the First World War era: Robert “Robbie” Ross, who was Oscar Wilde’s literary executor and linked to the war, not least via an acquaintance with figures such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It has been reported that Findley claimed not to have had Robbie Ross in mind when he created his character,60 but the claim is hard to credit. Regardless of Findley’s conscious intentions, the echo of Robbie Ross in Findley’s Robert significantly ties the story of The Wars to a real-life figure in the history of modern homosexuality, while the allusion brings the real-life Robbie Ross back into the conversation regarding Canadian history, encouraging readers to recognize a queer presence in that history. The depiction of Robert in The Wars as an emblematic Canadian and also as queer was a bravura move in 1977, given the homophobia of the time. The fact that The Wars garnered such widespread, immediate acclaim might be read as a sign of liberalism among the Canadian literary establishment, but I would argue that it was also a result of Findley’s skill in presenting Robert as a figure with whom readers are encouraged to identify. In that regard, a key scene in the novel depicts Robert at a brothel in Alberta not long after having been introduced to Canadian war hero Eugene Taffler, who has returned from the front. In the brothel, Robert is compelled by a female sex worker to peek through a hole in the wall of her room into the room next door. Robert looks, and we are told that what he saw so confused him that he stood there of his own volition – desperately trying to comprehend. There were certainly two naked people – but all he could see at first was backs and arms and legs. Whoever it was who was there was standing in the middle of the floor hitting whoever else was there – striking out with all their force. Robert turned aside and leaned with his back against the wall. He’d never even dreamed of such a thing – of being hit and wanting to be hit. Beaten. Or of striking someone else because they’d asked you to. At school they’d done strange things but nothing as strange as this.61 It is remarkable that this scene so neatly rehearses Sigmund Freud’s conception of the primal scene: the memory of oneself, as a child, witnessing sex between one’s parents but mistaking the act for an act of violence.62 It is also remarkable that Robert, for all his apparent confusion, seems to

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have an understanding of the scene as involving mutual consent, even though nothing in the description of what he sees necessarily warrants it. There is an implication, then, that Robert is not just the innocent child of the primal scene – the child who is not, in fact, wholly innocent under Freud’s conception but, rather, brings Oedipal investments to the act of witnessing. Robert, for his part, understands sadomasochism better than he thinks he does. The Wars thus implies that when it comes to violence, Canadians are not so innocent as they might like to imagine themselves. In that respect, the scene calls attention to the dynamics of witnessing in a manner not dissimilar to that of texts I discussed in the previous chapter: in particular, those that addressed North Americans’ mediated witnessing of the Vietnam War. In fact, Findley’s scene uncannily recalls a description of such mediated witnessing offered by Michael J. Arlen in his 1969 book, Living-Room War. There, Arlen construes Americans’ viewing of the war via television as a manner of primal scene, asserting, “They look at Vietnam, it seems, as a child kneeling in the corridor, his eye to the keyhole, looks at two grownups arguing in a locked room – the aperture of the keyhole small; the figures shadowy, mostly out of sight; the voices distinct, isolated threats without meaning; isolated glimpses, part of an elbow, a man’s jacket (who is the man?), a part of a face, a woman’s face.”63 In the brothel scene in The Wars, Findley similarly stresses Robert’s distanced, fragmentary view of the apparent violence he witnesses, along with his failure to understand even such elementary things as the figures’ identities. In this orientation toward the spectacle, Robert evokes the dynamics involved for Canadians – and, as Arlen observes, for Americans – in witnessing the Vietnam War from afar through the reductive channels of mass media. But while Arlen presents the Vietnam War figuratively as a conflict between a man and a woman who are presumably in a sexual relationship with each other, the brothel scene in The Wars ties such witnessing to queerness. Not long after Robert has moved away from the peephole, the sex worker calls him back to look again, and we are told, Since Robert could only use one eye, everything was flat and undimensional. The bed appeared to be stuck against the wall like a picture. And on it there were two undimensional people – one as pale as the other was dark. One was lying on his back with his back arched



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off the mattress while the other sat astride his groin exactly like a rider. The one who played the horse was bucking – lifting his torso high off the bed … The rider was using a long silk scarf as reins and the horse was biting into the other end with his teeth. The only sound was the sound of breathing and of bedsprings. The rider held the reins in one hand and, using a soldier’s stiff-peaked cap, beat the horse on the thighs – one side and then the other. And the two – both horse and rider – were staring into one another’s eyes with an intensity unlike any other Robert had ever seen in a human face.64 In response, Robert’s mind starts “to stammer the way it always did whenever it was challenged by something it could not accept.” He then picks up a leather boot, is “appalled” by its “human feel,” and throws it across the room, shattering a mirror.65 Only after this point does the narrator reveal the gender of both people and the particular identity of each: the rider is the man called “the Swede” who works at the brothel, while the other person is Eugene Taffler.66 Some readers have viewed the sex between Taffler and the Swede as a “homosexual attack,” to use Brydon’s phrase.67 In contrast, Goldie and Shane Rhodes recognize a significant ambiguity regarding who is the “top” and who is the “bottom” as the Swede “rides” Taffler while Taffler, presumably, penetrates the Swede.68 Reviewing the scene, readers might also notice that certain details emphasize not power but pleasure, even playfulness: most notably, Taffler is not bound by the scarf but, rather, holds it with his teeth. Also, the fact that he and the Swede are “breathing in tandem” and “staring into one another’s eyes” anticipates positive moments later in the book: the last lines of the novel, for instance, describe writing on the back of a photograph of Robert and Rowena that reads, “Look! you can see our breath!”69 Meanwhile, the detail of Taffler and the Swede’s reciprocal gaze stands the brothel scene in stark contrast with the scene of Robert’s rape by fellow soldiers later in the novel, a scene that ends with the statement, “He never saw their faces.”70 So one might take the sex between Taffler and the Swede to betoken not a degraded, brutal sexuality but a ludic one, with the men engaging in, as it were, horseplay.71 The pun is the text’s own implicit one, and it identifies a quality in the sex that Robert is unable to recognize. Moreover, the fact that such non-normative playfulness occurs not in the theatre of war

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but in Alberta, along with the fact that it occurs between a national hero and a character distinguished only by his nationality, cues readers to begin thinking about Canada as a space for queerness. The Wars is, thus, nationalizing acts of non-normativity. In that regard, it is notable that Sweden, along with Canada, was known during the Vietnam War as a destination of choice for Americans wishing to avoid the draft. By having a Canadian and a Swede undertake an apparent parody of violence together, The Wars establishes a further link between the First World War and Canada in the Vietnam War era. Meanwhile, the ambiguity of what is happening between Taffler and the Swede is crucially due to and underscores the significance of Robert’s limited, unreliable perspective. That unreliability is indicated by Findley’s parody of the primal scene, with all the mistakenness on Robert’s part that the allusion to the primal scene implies. Robert’s unreliability is also emphasized by the fact of his partial, one-eyed view, which gives the scene its “undimensionality” and monochromatic cast, and by the fact that in his first act of looking, he seems unable to register the couple’s gender, never mind their individual identities. He does not even indicate – and perhaps does not even apprehend – who is hitting whom. Accordingly, while readers of The Wars are aligned with him as viewers of the scene, the novel encourages them to identify dimensions in it that he misses. Insofar as his response stands as a foil for readers’, they are also invited to revisit their own reactions to what he sees. In that respect, one reason the novel presents Robert’s revulsion is to anticipate the response of many readers, to mirror that response, and to show it to be problematic, at the very least in terms of its own lack of dimension. Readers are further invited, through the example of Robert’s reaction, to consider their sexual response to the scene and to revisit their own normative or queer desires. And by leaving the exact nature of Robert’s reaction open to interpretation, the novel facilitates readers’ identification with him, insofar as they are able to project their own responses onto him. A desire for Canadian readers, especially, to identify with Robert is evident throughout The Wars, particularly in the novel’s presentation of him as emblematically Canadian. Yet the novel also shows a self-­ consciousness about the complications attending an urge to identify with others. Those complications are evident, for example, in Robert’s own impulse to identify with First Nations peoples. As a boy, he so idolizes the



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famous Onondaga long-distance runner Tom Longboat that he wishes to be Aboriginal himself.72 But as the scion of a white family, Robert has limited affinities with Aboriginal peoples, just as the same pedigree makes him problematic as a stand-in for the whole of Canada. And when he actually ends up encountering First Nations people, it is at a distance, as he spies a group of them standing by the tracks, wearing blankets “held against the winter wind,” while he is travelling comfortably by train from Alberta to Ontario. We are told that “Robert wanted everyone to wave an arm in greeting,” but neither he nor anyone else does so.73 Through this scene, The Wars reminds readers of a history of colonization that makes Robert’s boyhood identification troubling. At the same time, his desire for everyone to wave suggests his desire for mutual recognition, a first step in a politics of inclusivity. That same politics is evident in the novel’s strategy of encouraging readers to identify with queerness, even if they do not identify as queer. As The Wars pursues this strategy, a key technique is second-person narration, which is used not only to describe the researcher investigating Robert’s story in the 1970s but also Robert himself, and which ties readers to both figures. For instance, the sentence “If you didn’t go, you were peculiar” refers ostensibly to Robert with regard to the Alberta brothel, but the sentence implicitly hails readers, too, identifying them as susceptible to the same heteronormative pressures facing Robert. Later, when he enters the brothel, second-person narration similarly encourages readers’ identification, as we are told, “Directly opposite the door, there was a wall that was covered with paintings of Odalisques and mirrors, so that the first thing you saw was yourself, intermingled with a lot of pink arms and pale breasts.”74 While the use of the second person once more encourages readers’ identification, the passage also has a self-reflexive aspect in that regard, as the narratorial attention to the mirrors nods to the possibility of readers treating Robert as a mirror of themselves. Simultaneously, the description of the wall as involving paintings alongside the mirrors is a canny reminder that Robert is not just a reflection of readers but also a fictional representation, a figure of identification who is nevertheless liable to unsettle readers’ senses of themselves. At a later moment in The Wars, Juliet asserts, “No one else can ever live your life and no one else will ever know what you know.”75 Her use of the second person ironically both confirms and undermines her assertion, insofar as it creates a

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discursive space in which one is able to imagine oneself and others as though they all occupy the same subjectivity – a space that risks eliding important differences between people but that also holds the possibility for them to apprehend affinities with each other. Equally important to the novel’s identificatory politics is the use of second-person narration to describe the researcher in the 1970s, as well as the novel’s refusal to provide any biographical details about that person. Readers are liable to assume – as I do, given the dearth of contradictory evidence – that the researcher is also the novel’s narrator; that the “you” investigating Robert’s life is the same person who describes the “you” undertaking that research and who describes Robert’s life at length. At the same time, because the novel provides no biographical information about the narrator-researcher, it is easy for readers to read about the researching “you” and identify themselves with the figure as vicarious investigators.76 Consider, for instance, the moment when the narrator declares regarding the image of Robert with his clothes on fire, “You lay the fiery image back in your mind and let it rest. You know it will obtrude again and again until you find its meaning.” Hulcoop, assuming that the researcher and narrator are the same person, rightly notes that the narrator may be “addressing the reader directly and casting him in a role parallel to the narrator’s own.”77 The possibility that readers might put themselves in the narrator-researcher’s place is recognized with subtle self-reflexivity on the final page of The Wars in a passage that describes the character examining archival materials in a reading room. The narratorresearcher observes, “The archivist closes her book … It is time to tell us all to go.”78 The word “us,” jarringly inconsistent with the use of the ­second-person-singular voice to describe the researcher up until this point, literally denotes the people in the reading room, but it also hints that the “you” described throughout the novel as investigating Robert is to be understood figuratively as including readers of The Wars. The strategy of encouraging readers to identify themselves with the narrator-researcher is significant because of the ways in which The Wars characterizes the figure. For instance, readers who allow themselves to be interpellated, at one level or another, by the second-person narration of the researcher’s activities are allowing themselves to be located with the figure in the 1970s. As such, they can be expected to have an acquaintance with the anti-war movement and the rebellious spirit of the



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counter-culture and, thus, to know – as Marian Turner puts it – what Robert “was all about.” And while The Wars situates the narratorresearcher in time, it also subtly nationalizes the figure. One way in which it does so is in the way that Marian speaks to the researcher while being interviewed. Talking about the wood near which she was stationed during the war, Marian says, “Now, I say Mag-daleen Wood if I’m speaking what you might call Canadian; you know, North American. But the English say it’s Maudlin Wood.”79 Her assumption that the researcher needs to be told how the English say “Magdalen” would suggest that she is speaking to a fellow North American, while the narrator-researcher’s general frame of reference in The Wars suggests a principal familiarity with a Canadian milieu rather than an American one. The narratorresearcher describes Toronto neighbourhoods in intimate detail and rehearses precise details of Canadian history with little explanatory apparatus: for instance, when referring to Sir Sam Hughes making a speech at a rally, the narrator-researcher does not identify him as Canada’s minister of militia and defence during the First World War or provide any further clues as to who he is.80 In this way, The Wars further nationalizes its narrative and further encourages Canadian readers to identify themselves both with the narrator-researcher and with Robert. The novel’s encouragement of Canadian readers to identify with the narrator-researcher is also significant because the figure is decidedly queer, as well as anti-war.81 I identify the narrator-researcher as queer only partly because the figure’s investigation of Robert’s life echoes the writing of The Wars by Findley, who was openly gay when the novel was published, and only partly because the depiction of the narrator-researcher as a Canadian born after the First World War teasingly evokes Findley, who was born in Toronto in 1930.82 Even if one leaves aside these autobiographical inflections, the narrator-researcher’s queerness is implied by the figure’s attention to the history of queer sexuality: in particular, the narrator-researcher seems wholly to imagine scenes such as the one involving Taffler and the Swede, which is not described as having any basis in the historical record that the narrator-researcher is investigating. That willingness to fabricate such scenes demonstrates the narrator-researcher’s interest in attending to non-normative identities and behaviours. Moreover, the figure does so with a sympathy that shades into identification. For instance, Laurie Ricou notes that in moments in The Wars representing Robert’s “faltering

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mental speech,” the novel also presents “breaks and pauses, involuntary repetition, and occasional complete stoppage of words,” suggesting that “the narrator shares his subject’s confusion.”83 By presenting Robert as an emblematic Canadian who is queer and a dissenter from military masculinity, and by encouraging readers to identify with him as the narrator-researcher does, The Wars moves in the direction of positing and fostering a queer, anti-war Canada while pursuing a rhetorical strategy that, in previous chapters, has been observed in Canadian literature of the Vietnam War era: the encouragement of readers to identify themselves with Canada by identifying with a character who is depicted as embodying the nation. Much of the literature discussed in previous chapters enacts that strategy by playing on readers’ presumed desire to embrace hegemonic masculinity. In contrast, The Wars aims to coax readers out of normativity by engendering their sympathies with someone who sought to protect innocents in wartime. Exploiting readers’ skepticism about war, The Wars suggests that such a skepticism needs to go hand in hand with a skepticism about norms of gender and sexuality. Interestingly, Findley himself claimed in 1988 not to like the word gay because he found it “confining.” The “point,” he asserted, was “to join the human race.”84 In The Wars, Canadians in particular are invited to align themselves with an imagined community of like-minded individuals who, while not exactly the “gay Vietcong” posited by the Gay Liberation Front, similarly conjoin a queer politics with an anti-war position. It bears emphasizing how radical such an invitation was in 1977, when many readers of The Wars would not have been sympathetic toward queerness, much less likely to identify with it. Only two years previous, in an issue of the Body Politic, writer Ian Young had complained that Canada was a “prissy provincial backwater” in which the Metro Morality Squad raided Toronto bookstores, Maclean’s refused to publish articles on gay liberation, and major Canadian publishers showed no interest in publishing an anthology of gay poetry or a book of poems featuring homoeroticism.85 Yet in recent years, Findley’s strategy of yoking Canada to a queer identity has been taken up by others who, while not necessarily identifying as homosexual, have demonstrated the kind of identificatory politics evident in The Wars by avowing their own queer Canadianness. For example, in a 2008 interview with Canadian comedian Jason Jones,



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then a correspondent for the American television program The Daily Show, Jones was asked if his co-workers knew he was Canadian. Jones replied, “I’ve already slipped up a few times and outed myself. I believe I referred to myself as a member of Canada, the world’s best gay friend.”86 Jones’s comment is not without its ironies. In particular, it draws attention to a continuing popular ambivalence regarding homosexuality: the stereotype of the “best gay friend” normalizes the presence of queer people in society by relegating them to the role of straight protagonists’ nonthreatening companions. In employing this stereotype to describe Canadians, Jones further recognizes that America’s cultural dominance has involved the persistent maintenance of US identity as the normative national identity in North America, not to mention the persistent association of that identity with hegemonic masculinity. In the normative American imagination, Canadian difference is bound to involve queer difference, and that difference is prone to be taken as a sign of Canada’s inferiority. But the Vietnam War created the conditions for the association of queerness and Canada with inferiority to be challenged by encouraging people to recognize the pernicious, sometimes violent elements of normative masculinity. Consequently, each individual crossing of the Canada-US border, whether by war-era draft dodgers or by present-day comedians, has come to involve an implicit invitation for people to consider the ways in which their sexuality and gender identity are bound up with their national identity and their relationship to violence. As will be discussed in the next chapter, that invitation is often at the forefront in twenty-first-century Canadian literature revisiting the Vietnam War, which rehearses the trope of border crossing partly to scrutinize the social norms that wartime both reinforces and exposes as harmful.

5 A Thousand Vietnams Once there was a war that went on for years and years, and no one went unscathed, neither the side that lost nor the side that won. It went on and on, and some say still lingered in smaller ugly ways, passing from generation to generation. Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, All the Broken Things How could they forget Vietnam? Away from Her, directed by Sarah Polley

The line quoted from Away from Her, the 2006 film adaptation of a story by Alice Munro, is spoken by a Canadian character named Fiona while she is watching a television broadcast about the US-led war in Iraq. The fact that Fiona, who is dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, has sufficient acuity to remember what the American government has putatively forgotten stands as a suggestion that for Canadians more broadly – including the film’s writer and director, Sarah Polley, who was born after the Vietnam War ended – Vietnam continues to be a cultural and political touchstone. Such a suggestion is confirmed by twenty-first-century Canadian literature, which has included a wave of novels addressing the war. This resurgence of interest in the conflict can be attributed partly to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel, What We All Long For, a Vietnamese character, apparently anticipating those wars, predicts not long after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States that “the Americans will rampage the globe like thousands of Vietnams.”1 The prediction parodies North American militant dissidents’ calls during the Vietnam War for “a thousand Vietnams” – a call that itself borrowed from Ché Guevara, who declared in his 1967



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“Message to the Tricontinental,” “How close we could look into a bright future should two, three, or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world.”2 In What We All Long For, the character also foresees that because of the 11 September attacks, the story of his own travails in the wake of the Vietnam War will be forgotten. If anything, however, the post-9/11 era brought the war in Vietnam back into focus for Canadians, just as the war itself had been a spur for North American artists to revisit the Wild West and other earlier sites of American violence. In the introduction to a 2008 anthology of poetry, Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada during the Vietnam War Era, Allan Briesmaster and Steven Michael Berzensky noted the “irony” that in the twenty-first century, “a costly military adventure continue[d], with seemingly no end in sight, not dissimilar to the one which changed these poets’ lives four decades ago.”3 Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, other echoes of Vietnam were similarly hard to miss: there was a prolonged ground war distinguished by guerrilla fighting, reports surfaced of atrocities committed by US troops, anti-war protesters marched in the streets, and the word quagmire was uttered with increasing frequency.4 Moreover, the war in Iraq was a conflict to which Canada was not contributing combat troops, even while, as Jennifer Welsh points out, “Canada was indirectly providing more support for the US in Iraq than most of the members of the ‘coalition of the willing’” that took part in invading the country.5 When, in 2008, the ruling Conservative Party refused to allow US deserters to remain in Canada, protesters pointed to the more hospitable position on war resisters taken by Pierre Trudeau’s government during the Vietnam War. But the protesters were not invoking political precedent so much as an ideal of Canada that precedent had helped to construct. In that regard, the epigraph from Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s novel All the Broken Things, with its fairy-tale phrasing “Once there was a war,” is canny in its recognition that the Vietnam War has passed into Canadian myth – a myth that contemporary writers such as Kuitenbrouwer have both rehearsed and interrogated. There have been so many post-9/11 Canadian novels addressing the Vietnam War as to warrant a scholarly volume devoted to them alone. In chapter 2 of this book, I discussed three examples – The Red Wing Sings, u s n a , and Faultline 49 – that imagine Canada-US conflict, evoking Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan along the way. Although those novels

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received little fanfare, others dealing with Vietnam have been bestselling award-winners written by prominent Canadian authors. In this chapter, I offer an overview of the ways in which such novels revisit, develop, and abandon approaches to the Vietnam War that were evident in Canadian literature published during the war. With the exception of Faultline 49, contemporary Canadian novels do not engage with Vietnam War–era Canadian fiction in an explicitly self-conscious fashion, but nationalist myths circulating in the earlier fiction continue to be identifiable. At the same time, recent Canadian novels tend to show a wider range of interest in the Vietnam War than do their forbears. In particular, there have been significant efforts to depict American and Vietnamese experiences of the war, suggesting authors’ desire to move beyond a parochial Canadian nationalism and to foster a transnational perspective on the conflict. That approach stands recent novels in contrast not only with war-era literature but also with Canadian literature in the first decades after the war’s end. While Hollywood films such as The Deer Hunter (1978), Coming Home (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Platoon (1986) told stories of US soldiers in Vietnam, Canadian novelists who evoked ­ Vietnam usually focused on draft dodgers: those figures appeared in Keith Maillard’s Alex Driving South (1983), Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (1993), Linda Spalding’s The Paper Wife (1994), Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version (1997), and Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief (1999). It is not coincidental that all but one of these novels were published in the 1990s;6 the draft dodger became newly resonant in the wake of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement of 1988 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) of 1994. As Rachel Adams comments regarding the figure of the draft dodger in Atwood’s and Richler’s novels, he “may be a fugitive, but he is also an invader who demands the attention of his Canadian saviors and steals the affections of Canadian women.”7 For Canadians in the nafta era, the draft dodger was a reminder that Americans had a long history of crossing the border and exploiting Canada. Since 9/11, draft dodgers have continued to make appearances in Canadian novels such as Elizabeth Hay’s Garbo Laughs (2003), Grace O’Connell’s Magnified World (2012), and Anthony De Sa’s Kicking the Sky (2013), but Canadian novelists addressing the Vietnam War have focused more often on American combatants or on Vietnamese civilians and their



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children. While the emphasis on combatants has allowed authors to comment on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is also tempting to view the emphasis as a response to the efforts of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, after it gained power in 2006, to abandon the myth of Canada as a peacekeeping nation in favour of celebrating the country’s military history: for instance, by spending lavishly to commemorate the bicentenary of the War of 1812.8 In the face of those efforts, Canadian novels about the Vietnam War have reminded readers of war’s costs and of a history in which Canada’s decision to refrain from military engagements overseas was to the country’s benefit. At the same time, the growing frequency of Vietnamese protagonists in Canadian novels demonstrates an increased authorial interest in Canadian multiculturalism, with its attendant history of inequality and racism, along with an increased authorial skepticism regarding sanguine nationalist myths – not least myths of Canada’s relationship to the Vietnam War. That said, the twelve novels I discuss in this chapter vary widely in how they approach Vietnam. Their protagonists range from an American participant in the My Lai massacre to a young woman born in Canada after her parents left Vietnam during the “boat people” crisis after the war, and the settings are as varied as Vietnam in the 1930s, the Northwest Territories in the 1970s, and New Mexico in the early twenty-first century. This diversity of approaches means that Canadian literature has begun, if only at the figurative level, to enact the call for “a thousand Vietnams.” But just as that call reductively treats “Vietnam” as a war, not a country, Canadian novelists have continued to give the war pride of place when depicting Vietnam, even if some of them have worked against that reductive view by drawing attention to the country’s history before and after the conflict. I address the novels in three groups, each reflecting a particular approach to the war. The first group includes six novels – David Bergen’s The Time in Between (2005), Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air (2007), Kuitenbrouwer’s Perfecting (2009), Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists (2009), William Kowalski’s The Hundred Hearts (2013), and D.W. Wilson’s Ballistics (2013) – featuring American men who have been involved in violence during the Vietnam War. All but one of these men are literal veterans, while the exception is a veteran in a figurative sense. In several of the novels, the men also suffer from post-traumatic stress

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disorder: they experience flashbacks to the war; they are haunted by acts they committed; they drink to excess; and they impulsively, even unconsciously commit further violence. In the majority of the narratives, moreover, these characters have loved ones who, in the face of the veteran’s refusal or inability to speak of his experiences, struggle to understand what he has gone through. These intimates serve as stand-ins both for their authors and for readers who, by engaging with the novels, likewise participate in a collective effort to reckon with the Vietnam War’s legacy. Meanwhile, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of what might be called “the veteran turn” in Canadian novels addressing the war is that the narratives almost inevitably have their veteran-protagonists move to Canada, the representation of which rehearses a new nationalist view of the country as different from the United States by virtue of neither cultivating nor celebrating martial masculinity. Nevertheless, the protagonists are unable to find a peaceable refuge north of the border because they bring with them the very history of violence they are trying to escape. The other two groups of novels that I consider turn away from stories of white North Americans to present the perspectives of Vietnamese characters. One of these groups – constituted by Brand’s What We All Long For (2005), Kim Thúy’s Ru (2009) and Mãn (2013), and Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things (2014) – focuses on Vietnamese people’s forced migration to Canada as a result of the war. These novels attend to intergenerational relations in Vietnamese-diasporic families, including the suffering and silences that inform such relations. But while Thúy’s novels do little to undermine the myth of Canada as a hospitable sanctuary, What We All Long For and All the Broken Things present highly critical takes on it, emphasizing systemic inequities and everyday racism in the country.9 In contrast, the final group of novels that I examine ­sidelines Canada, at least at the manifest level, in order to consider the war’s consequences for Vietnam. After revisiting Bergen’s The Time in Between, which broke ground in Canadian fiction by representing contemporary Vietnam, I also discuss Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement (2010) and Vincent Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager (2012). Bergen’s and Gibb’s novels are especially close kin, as both feature North American protagonists visiting present-day Vietnam and searching for information about their missing fathers. By setting their stories in the present day, both novels insist that when it comes to Vietnam, North



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Americans must stop fetishizing the war era. The Headmaster’s Wager, for its part, does make the war the centrepiece of its narrative, but in its depiction of Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese populace, the novel stages a remedial intervention, too, emphasizing a demographical diversity in the country that is often elided in Western representations. Meanwhile, perhaps the most intriguing connection between Bergen’s, Gibb’s, and Lam’s novels is that even as each tells a story of Vietnam, each discreetly gestures to Canada, often through references that non-Canadian readers might easily ignore. These references, along with their unobtrusive presence, suggest contemporary Canadian novelists’ desire to court two audiences at once: a domestic readership intimately familiar with the Canadian mythology of the Vietnam War, along with a global audience reputed to be not much interested in Canada. the veteran turn in post-9/11 novels

Although contemporary Canadian novels dealing with Americans in relation to the Vietnam War vary in how explicitly the texts connect the conflict to the recent US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they all focus on men who remain marked by a relationship to violence long after the war has ended. The representation of traumatized Vietnam War veterans in films such as The Deer Hunter meant that such veterans were already familiar cultural figures by the time Canadian novelists began to represent them after 9/11, but the passing of time had created an opportunity for those novelists to do something new by investigating how p t s d has continued to affect veterans of the Vietnam War in the twenty-first century.10 Leaving aside the concerns in earlier cultural representations with things such as veterans’ political protests during the war and the reception of veterans by fellow Americans upon returning from Vietnam,11 the novels focus on veterans as victims of the conflict who, decades after the war’s end, continue to suffer privately. In treating such veterans with ­sympathy, even while dramatizing their inflicting of damage on others during the war and in the following decades, the novels perpetuate a view of Vietnam War veterans as traumatized victims that became ­established in the United States over the course of the 1970s.12 In postwar twentieth-century American literature, it grew conventional to present the veteran’s experience as, in Maureen Ryan’s words, “too bizarre and

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horrific to be understood or shared,” and as having left the veteran with “a private legacy of secret pain,” whether involving “a debilitating physical or emotional trauma, the often suppressed memory of committing an atrocity, or both.”13 By emphasizing that this legacy has carried over into the current century, Canadian novels participating in the veteran turn suggest that what US president George H.W. Bush famously called the “Vietnam syndrome” still has not been “kicked,” as Bush claimed it was by the quick US victory in the first Gulf War.14 Instead, the novels depict veterans’ situations as emblematizing the lingering national trauma of the Vietnam War for the United States. In that respect, the novels also imply that the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are bound to entail similarly protracted costs. Moreover, the novels’ depiction of veterans’ relations with their loved ones – especially younger family members – facilitates the texts’ consideration of the Vietnam War’s significance for a generation of North Americans who were born after the conflict ended and whose knowledge of it is likely to be minimal. In this respect, the novels distinguish themselves from twentieth-century American memoirs and novels about Vietnam War veterans, which, as Ryan notes, have an “almost universal obsession” with the veterans’ fathers.15 Aside from one exception that I will discuss, those fathers are absent in recent Canadian novels; instead, the novels repeatedly depict the veterans themselves as fathers and foreground the men’s relationships with their children. Marianne Hirsch has given the name “postmemory” to the process by which traumatic memories are transmitted from one generation to the next; most paradigmatically, Hirsch claims, postmemory involves “survivors of cultural or collective trauma” passing on narratives of their experiences to their children. Hirsch argues that these narratives are “so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” for the children, too. She notes, however, that postmemory “need not be restricted to the family, or even to a group that shares an ethnic or national identity marking: through particular forms of identification, adoption, and projection, it can be more broadly available.”16 Canadian novels taking part in the veteran turn often feature young protagonists for whom the Vietnam War is something that was experienced by their parents or grandparents. Repeatedly, the novels present those experiences as articulated to the younger family members only in oblique, cursory ways, with silences



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speaking as loudly as words. As the novels work to articulate histories that the veterans are unable or unwilling to communicate, the texts become vehicles for the construction and perpetuation of a broader postmemory. Consequently, it is important to consider which elements of the war the novels foreground and how they construe the war’s legacy, not least for Canada. In that respect, it is remarkable that most of the novels depict US veterans coming to Canada either during or after the war. As the ­narratives dramatize these relocations, they identify the war’s differing national consequences: while frequently corroborating the myth of the US veteran as a tragic, traumatized victim, they also reiterate a new nationalist myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom that is simultaneously hospitable to Americans and susceptible to their violence. The novel that inaugurated Canadian literature’s veteran turn was David Bergen’s The Time in Between, which won the 2005 Giller Prize. The book tells the story of Charles Boatman, a Vietnam War veteran whose move from the United States to Canada after the war recalls and reworks the familiar narrative of the border-crossing draft dodger. Charles immigrates after his wife’s confession that she has been having an affair, but he is also dealing with having been traumatized by the war, especially by his shooting of a boy whom he mistook for an enemy combatant. He attempts to confront this trauma by returning to Vietnam twenty-eight years after having left it, spending some weeks there. Then, he commits suicide by drowning. In the weeks before his body is discovered, his children Ada and Jon – born in the United States but raised by Charles in Canada – travel to Vietnam in an attempt to solve the mystery of his disappearance. While these elements of Bergen’s novel recall the film The Deer Hunter, which similarly includes a search for a missing, traumatized US veteran in Vietnam and that veteran’s death,17 they also constitute a significant departure from previous Canadian literature about the Vietnam War, which seldom addressed US soldiers in any individuating manner. As I have argued in previous chapters, books such as Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Timothy Findley’s The Wars did evoke Vietnam War veterans’ traumatic participation in violence, but these books did so only indirectly by depicting protagonists in earlier historical moments. Moreover, neither Billy the Kid in Ondaatje’s book nor Robert Ross in The Wars lives long enough to suffer through p t s d in middle age or to grapple with telling his story to younger family

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members. Meanwhile, George Ryga’s In the Shadow of the Vulture was ahead of its time in focusing explicitly on a Vietnam War veteran’s struggles with p t s d , but the veteran in the novel lives hermitically, so there is scant attention to postmemory with respect to close relations. In contrast, as Ada and Jon search for Charles without success in The Time in Between, and as we discover that he spoke little of his wartime experiences, Bergen attends to the ways in which the trauma of war can produce lasting, unbridgeable gulfs between loved ones. While Ada struggles to understand Vietnamese people she meets in the face of her cultural differences from them, The Time in Between insists that her father’s foreignness to her is no less profound. Elizabeth Hay’s novel Late Nights on Air, which won the Giller Prize in 2007, might seem something of a throwback after The Time in Between, insofar as Hay’s fictional American veteran of the Vietnam War, Eddy Fitzgerald, is hardly sympathetic; instead, he is very much in keeping with the new nationalist characterization of Americans as violent villains. The sole significant US character in Hay’s novel, Eddy is an employee in the mid-1970s at the c b c radio station in Yellowknife, where he works in “master control.”18 That job becomes symbolically loaded after he enters a romantic relationship with Dido, a Dutch-Canadian announcer at the station, then manipulates and physically abuses her before drawing her to America with him. The fact that he previously worked in the “communications corps” of the US army also gains a metaphorical significance, insofar as he goes on to commit acts of representational violence, too, taking photographs of half-naked young Dene women who appear to be high, then exhibiting the photographs as art in the United States.19 He claims to do so in order to draw attention to the plight of First Nations peoples, but a former colleague asserts of the exhibition, “It’s art and politics as a cover for – you know. His dick.”20 This association of an American with visual mass media and violence is one that – as I established in chapters 1 and 3 – was a key motif of Vietnam War–era Canadian literature. In fact, Eddy’s abuse of his lover, his background in communications, and his seemingly exploitative photography make him a direct descendant of David in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, who is not only a communications teacher with a predilection for American popular culture but who also coerces his wife into appearing naked in a documentary film that he is shooting. In Late Nights on Air, the anti-American



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depiction of Eddy is consolidated by the fact that he is the most prominent character whose focalized perspective the novel never offers, even while it delves into the minds of several Canadians. Moreover, he is the only character who endorses violence, publicly comparing the poor living conditions in parts of the Arctic to those in Vietnam, then declaring that he supports “the Dene taking control” of the region “by whatever means necessary.”21 Although his rhetoric might suggest a laudably anti-colonial politics, his subsequent departure for California to pursue a career in the film industry suggests that he is more invested in macho posturing and his own prospects than in furthering a political cause. There is little evidence that Eddy’s behaviour might be a result of p t s d . Instead, his army background serves principally to align him further with the violence of US militarism. In that regard, he serves as a foil for the novel’s generally positive picture of the role played in the North by the Canadian nation-state: Late Nights on Air celebrates the c b c station’s promotion of Aboriginal culture and languages, and it devotes significant attention to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry led by Justice Thomas Berger, which, after extensively soliciting the views of Indigenous peoples, was instrumental in the federal government’s decision not to go ahead with constructing a proposed natural gas pipeline in the valley. Although Eddy insists on likening areas of the Canadian North to Vietnam, Late Nights on Air presents the Arctic in the 1970s as standing in contrast with Vietnam: it is a space where agents of the white-­dominated nation-state pursue its objectives through respectful collaboration with local peoples, not in conflict with them. Such a picture of things is, needless to say, highly selective and politically contentious, but the fact that Hay’s novel deploys the figure of the villainous Vietnam War veteran in service of that picture – portraying him as emblematic of American violence – shows the enduring power of the war as a marker of Canada-US difference. The Time in Between and Late Nights on Air leave it to readers to make connections between the novels’ depictions of Vietnam War veterans and twenty-first-century US military involvements. In contrast, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s novel Perfecting explicitly links Vietnam to more recent wars. Like Late Nights on Air, Perfecting features an American man moving to Canada in the 1970s and entering a relationship with a Canadian woman, but the man in Perfecting, Curtis Woolf, is not literally a veteran; rather, he poses as a draft dodger while on the run from the law after

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having shot – and, he thinks, killed – his half-brother Edgar at the behest of their father, Hollis. Having thus engaged in armed violence while following orders, Curtis is a veteran at the figurative level, and Perfecting further emphasizes the parallels between his experiences and combat in Vietnam by presenting Hollis as an authoritarian who compels his sons to commit armed robberies during the war years while using the proceeds to keep the bank from foreclosing on his gas station. When it seems that Edgar is going to betray Hollis to the police, Hollis orders Curtis to kill Edgar. Such a paternal–filial relationship recalls the American nationstate’s relationship to young American men during the same period, as the government went about conscripting them to do violence in Vietnam. Hollis even thinks of his sons as “a growing army” that he will “train” to become “shining examples of his strength of will,” and he gives each of them a pistol upon their turning eighteen.22 His success in transmitting militarist values to them becomes evident when Edgar joins the Marines, while another son, Aubie, eventually voices his belief that “a double barrel” and a “trigger” are the “only one good way to solve international problems.”23 The possibility of reading Hollis as emblematic of a predatory, violent America is heightened by the fact that his prospects are tied to fossil fuels and by the fact that Perfecting elsewhere draws attention to US military involvements in the Middle East. In other words, the characterization of the Woolf family not only functions as an allegory of US militarism but also serves to connect Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. Perfecting cements this connection by having the violence of the Vietnam War era recrudesce in 2004, as Edgar, after serving in the Middle East, returns to the United States, finally encounters Curtis again, and kills him. In chapter 3 of this book, I noted how The Collected Works of Billy the Kid suggests a genealogical chain in US history linking the Vietnam War to earlier periods of violence. Perfecting engages in a similar commentary by connecting the war in Vietnam to more recent conflicts overseas and by suggesting that if successive US governments have been overeager to engage in foreign military action, the persistent popular American support of those governments can be explained by the intergenerational transmission of a militarist mentality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Perfecting’s echoes of Vietnam War–era critiques of the United States, the novel also represents Canada in such a way as to rehearse new nationalist myths of the country. Paralleling the



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movement of Vietnam War deserters as he seeks refuge in Canada after shooting Edgar, Curtis founds a commune-like religious community there called Soltane, hoping to create his own miniature version of the peaceable kingdom. He enjoys a measure of success: Soltane becomes a site of bucolic, artisanal activity, as the residents garden, make beeswax candles, and publish a monthly newspaper. Curtis thinks of Soltane as “a restoration of Eden,”24 thus underscoring the parallel between his shooting of Edgar and Cain’s killing of Abel in the Bible. But Curtis faces the prospect of losing Soltane as the result of unpaid taxes, a situation that pointedly echoes his father’s one-time financial difficulties and thus suggests crossing the border has not freed Curtis from his family’s legacy. Moreover, when his Canadian lover, Martha, happens upon the gun with which he shot Edgar, her discovery is staged as the equivalent of Eve meeting the serpent in the Garden; Martha thinks that the gun’s “smell of steel and oil suggested evil.”25 The discovery drives her from the figurative Eden of Soltane, as she heads south to the United States to investigate Curtis’s history. In having brought the gun with him across the border, Curtis has ironically become the American contaminant of the idyllic Canadian community he has worked to create. By extension, Canada gains an ironic valence in Perfecting: the country is depicted as a refuge from the United States that is also an extension of the US frontier. As a site of American efforts to build utopia, it is freighted by US history, and those efforts seem destined to fail just as similar efforts in America have failed. The dimness of Soltane’s prospects is suggested not only by the impending bank foreclosure and by Curtis’s death at the end of the novel but also by the metaphorically portentous fact that Martha, after conceiving a child with him, has suffered a miscarriage. Accordingly, although Curtis is not so malevolent as Eddy in Late Nights on Air, Perfecting depicts his relationship with Martha in such a way as to suggest an allegory of fraught Canada-US relations in the wake of the Vietnam War. The continuing resonance of the war in Canada was underscored by the awarding of the 2010 Giller Prize to Johanna Skibsrud’s novel, The Sentimentalists. Like The Time in Between, The Sentimentalists involves a Canadian daughter reckoning with the war’s long-term traumatizing effects on her father, an American veteran. Like Charles Boatman in The Time in Between, the father, Napoleon Haskell, eventually moves to

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Canada after returning from the war, and decades pass without him discussing the atrocity with his family, such that when he dies, his warrelated history is still largely obscure to his daughter, who is the novel’s unnamed narrator. Like Ada in The Time in Between, the daughter is also a border-crosser: she is a US resident who has spent substantial time in the fictional town of Casablanca, Ontario, with her father, staying at the childhood home of his friend Owen. Owen fought and died in Vietnam, and his presence in The Sentimentalists reflects the fact that there were, indeed, Canadians who fought for the United States in Vietnam, making the war’s legacy in Canada more complicated than a simple focus on US veterans and war resisters would suggest.26 Because of this legacy, Skibsrud’s novel implies, Canada does not offer an uncomplicated escape from the war; rather, Owen’s home is figuratively haunted by him. The Sentimentalists diverges from The Time in Between, however, in terms of the possibilities for reckoning with the war’s legacy that the books associate with Canada. In Bergen’s novel, Charles evidently establishes no new relationship to his memories of combat while he is living in Canada. In The Sentimentalists, it is at Owen’s house that Napoleon finally speaks with his daughter about his war experiences. In this respect, the name of the town, Casablanca, is significant, especially given Napoleon’s penchant for quoting from the 1942 Hollywood film after which the town is named. In Casablanca, the titular city is a place at once removed from and bound up with war; the film’s tavern-owning protagonist, Rick, believes that in Casablanca he can stay neutral with regard to the Second World War, but he finds himself ultimately compelled to take sides. Likewise, the Ontario town in The Sentimentalists ends up less a sanctuary for Napoleon than a way station in which he is drawn into confronting his traumatic past. Consequently, The Sentimentalists picks up on and reiterates the notion of Canada as a site of critical reflection on America that, as I observed in chapter 3, gained traction during the Vietnam War. While The Time in Between, Late Nights on Air, Perfecting, and The Sentimentalists all rehearse a key motif from new nationalist mythology by narrating an American man’s move to Canada during or in the wake of the war, it is striking that none of the men is identified as a draft dodger or deserter. As a result, none of them except Curtis in Perfecting has a clear legal or political reason to move to Canada. In Late Nights on Air, Eddy’s impetus for being in Canada is unclear, as the novel shows



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little interest in his psychology; playing up his allegorical status as a figure of American imperialism, the novel emphasizes not why he is in Canada but the harm he does there. With regard to Charles in The Time in Between and Napoleon in The Sentimentalists, in contrast, readers are encouraged to consider the characters’ relocation to Canada as reflecting a desire for psychological refuge from their wartime memories. In these narratives, Canada implicitly holds the promise of a space that is, at least initially in the American characters’ imagination, untainted by the war. But in none of the novels does Canada prove to be a place of contentment for the veteran: Charles suffers flashbacks in British Columbia, then eventually leaves for Vietnam; Eddy returns to America to pursue his career; Curtis faces insolvency at Soltane, and he eventually follows Martha to the United States, never to return. Only in The Sentimentalists does the veteran ultimately end up in Canada, but even in that novel, lyrical descriptions of a town near Casablanca long ago submerged by flooding and still there beneath the surface serve as a metaphorical suggestion that Napoleon’s experiences in Vietnam likewise persist in the present, despite the apparent tranquillity of his life in Canada. The motif of the veteran leaving Canada after moving there is especially remarkable, given that a majority of the real-life Americans who migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War did not move back, even after the war. By staging fictional veterans’ departures from Canada, the novels elide the historical fact of US war immigrants’ integration into Canadian society in order to suggest, instead, that Canada and America are fundamentally incompatible because the United States – as represented by the veterans – is irremediably marked by wartime violence. As the novels have it, Canada for the veteran is less a place than a time, one that might reasonably be called “the time in between”: in particular, a time between wartime experience and a reckoning with that experience. Canada in the novels is primarily not a locus of political difference but a site of existential purgatory distinguished by the vertiginous temporality of the traumatized subject, who does not live fully in the present but is mentally compelled back, over and over, to the moment of traumatization – a compulsion that, in The Time in Between and Perfecting, is literalized in the form of Charles’s and Curtis’s eventual departures from Canada. The point in these narratives is not that Canada has let the characters down in failing to be the utopia for which they once hoped; it is that, in an

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important sense, they never left the site of their traumatization in the first place. Such a portrait of these veterans stands as a sobering take on the difficulty of recovering from p t s d . At the level of political allegory, the portrait manifests a profound pessimism regarding the ability of the United States to recover from the national trauma of the Vietnam War. The Time in Between, Late Nights on Air, Perfecting, and The Sentimentalists have an even more remarkable similarity to each other: in each one, the male character who moves north of the border has a female intimate whose characterization is driven principally by her relationship to him.27 In all cases but The Sentimentalists, moreover, she is Canadian – and even The Sentimentalists suggests that Napoleon’s daughter is, as it were, a veiled Canadian by encouraging readers to treat her as a fictional version of Skibsrud.28 These male–female relationships recall the familiar Canadian device of personifying the United States as male and Canada as female, while the representation of the pair as romantic partners in Late Nights on Air and Perfecting has a similar pedigree.29 In contrast, the depiction of the pairing as a father and daughter in The Time in Between and The Sentimentalists suggests that contemporary Canada is a legatee of Vietnam War–era America. Perfecting makes the same suggestion by having Hollis, that embodiment of war-era US authoritarian violence, meet Martha and tell her, “You’re this pure thing, and I as good as made you … [T]here ain’t no you without me.”30 His remark echoes a longstanding notion that Canada owes its very existence to happenings in the United States, whether it was the War of Independence sparking the Loyalist migration or the Civil War serving as a catalyst for Confederation. What is more, the remark tacitly recognizes that Canadians often use America as a foil for defining their country. Given Hollis’s history of criminality during the Vietnam War years, which led to Curtis meeting Martha and founding Soltane, Hollis’s comment might also be taken to imply that contemporary Canada has been shaped by the dynamics of American history during the war era. Likewise, in The Time in Between and The Sentimentalists, the respective depictions of Ada and Napoleon’s daughter as learning things about their American fathers suggest that neither of the two women is simply the “intellectually detached … interpreter of the American destiny” that Marshall McLuhan once described Canadians as being.31 Rather, powerful affective bonds distinguish the characters’ relationships to their fathers. Meanwhile, the fact that neither Ada nor



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Napoleon’s daughter is straightforwardly Canadian – Ada was born in the United States, while Napoleon’s daughter is a US citizen – undercuts the possibility of reading into the novels a neatly oppositional binational allegory and suggests, instead, that Canada has significant American qualities. Also remarkable is the fact that in all four novels, the veteran-figure’s move to Canada is paralleled by a subsequent border crossing by his female intimate. In all cases but Late Nights on Air, she makes the crossing with a clear desire to learn more about the man: Ada goes to Vietnam in search of Charles, Martha travels to the United States to learn about Curtis’s past, and Napoleon’s daughter goes to Canada to spend time with him. Why does the international dislocation of the veteran require a parallel, responsive female dislocation? For one thing, the female reaction carries the burden of patriarchal conventions: women are expected to go along with, care for, and labour to understand their male loved ones. At the same time, this self-subordination corroborates the national allegory at play in the novels, further suggesting that Canada continues to be influenced by and subordinated to America. But the staging of the female characters’ border crossings can also be read as a case of the novels militating against a parochial Canadian identity that involves huddling within national borders. And although the Canada-US border became less porous in certain regards in the wake of 9/11, both male and female characters in these novels cross the Canada-US border with apparent ease. In most cases, descriptions of their border crossings are absent altogether. When such crossings are dramatized in The Sentimentalists and Perfecting, there are the briefest moments of tension: in Perfecting, Curtis anticipates trouble when returning to America but faces only a “routine inspection”;32 in The Sentimentalists, after Napoleon falsely tells a border guard that he is just visiting Canada, not moving there, he is accepted into the country without significant hassle. Thus, the novels insist that the Canada-US border is permeable and that the two countries remain tightly interconnected. Implicitly, this interconnection includes literary culture, given that one can view the novels’ border-crossing female protagonists as avatars of their authors, who seek to reach audiences not only in Canada but also abroad – especially readers in the United States, the world’s most lucrative literary marketplace. In this respect, the motif of the Canadian woman gaining intimacy with her American loved one by

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learning more about his story stands, in part, as a self-reflexive allegory of Canadian literature’s veteran turn. Given such precedents, William Kowalski’s novel The Hundred Hearts, published in 2013 and the winner of the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, is notable for eschewing a representation of Canada and Canadians entirely as it depicts an American veteran who took part in the My Lai massacre and continues to suffer from undiagnosed p t s d in the twenty-first century. The Hundred Hearts mentions Canada only once, at a moment when the veteran, Al Merkin, thinks dismissively of “the draft dodgers who fucked off up to Canada to play hockey and trap beaver.”33 Self-consciously setting aside the story of the US war immigrant, Kowalski focuses on linking Vietnam to contemporary US wars, giving Al a grandson, Jeremy, who is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Al prefers not to talk or think about what happened at My Lai, but a single brief comment about Vietnam by his daughter triggers nightmares and leads him to commit narcoleptic violence against his wife. Jeremy, meanwhile, has suffered physical and psychological injuries as a result of his military service, which included his torturing and killing of an enemy combatant. Al and Jeremy both think that serving in Afghanistan has “ruined” Jeremy, while Al’s wife declares of her husband, “The Al I married went away to Vietnam and never came back.”34 To cement the implication that multiple generations of Americans have been traumatized by US militarism, The Hundred Hearts also features a teenager who suffers from a mental illness that she blames on her father’s service in the Gulf War, claiming that it led to him passing on “messed-up genes.”35 Regardless of whether her theory has scientific validity, her mental illness and her attribution of it to her father’s war experience confirm a thesis that another character in the novel articulates: that war “spreads damage. Long after the fighting is over, the damage is still being done.”36 The Hundred Hearts goes some way in linking the United States, in particular, to war by creating a picture of the country as intensely militarized. For instance, Jeremy notes people’s tendency to hail all US soldiers as “heroes,”37 while the renaming of a school in his town for a soldier who died in the course of serving abroad implicates the US education system in military culture. Moreover, the novel blames Al and Jeremy’s racism and misogyny on their participation in that culture by having Jeremy attribute his own “indecorous” thoughts, as he calls them, to his service background; he reflects that “he learned to think this



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way while in the army, and though he’s been a civilian for almost five years, he finds it a hard habit to break.”38 Through such details, The Hundred Hearts shares with other war-era and post-9/11 Canadian literature in viewing militarism as complexly bound up with American society as a whole. Although The Hundred Hearts departs from earlier Canadian novels taking part in the veteran turn insofar as it does not represent Canada, it follows almost all of them in dramatizing the twenty-first-century death of its Vietnam War veteran.39 In The Time in Between, Charles kills himself; in The Sentimentalists, Napoleon dies of lung cancer; in Perfecting, Curtis is killed by Edgar; in The Hundred Hearts, Al chooses to walk into the Mojave Desert, effectively committing suicide, after Jeremy asks him about his relationship to My Lai. These deaths configure Americans’ participation in the Vietnam War as a tragic act leading to a life of suffering and an untimely demise, even as the deaths enact a variety of closure with respect to the war. By granting the men no living release from the trauma of wartime violence, and by refusing to stage some kind of reconciliation between them and the American society they have abandoned, the novels steer clear of what scholar Yen Le Espiritu has called the “‘we-win-evenwhen-we-lose’ syndrome” evident in popular postwar US accounts of the Vietnam War that characterize the conflict as contributing to the “progress of freedom and democracy.”40 At the same time, the veteran deaths in The Time in Between, The Sentimentalists, and Perfecting are accompanied by the continued existence of the veterans’ female intimates, who have gained new knowledge of the men’s experiences. If the deaths proclaim that a chapter of American history is ending, the women’s survival suggests a new chapter is being written: one in which a reckoning with the war’s legacy has been achieved, and one that is associated with Canada. In this regard, The Hundred Hearts is a telling outlier: not only does it lack a representation of Canada and an investigating female intimate, but the novel’s equivalent to such an intimate, Jeremy, also dies as a result of his war injuries after dealing with increasingly torturous back and head pain. While the novel’s refusal to emblematize hope in a surviving protagonist would seem to make The Hundred Hearts a bleaker book than the others, that refusal also aligns the novel with the others more closely than if The Hundred Hearts were to depict Jeremy as a figure embodying optimism about the future. Such a depiction would suggest hopes for the United

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States that none of the novels conveys. By making both protagonists American veterans and by ending with their deaths, The Hundred Hearts remains consistent with the other texts in their pessimism about the afterlife of the Vietnam War for America. D.W. Wilson’s Ballistics, also published in 2013, is another novel depicting a Vietnam War veteran who moves to Canada, but it complicates things by making him a deserter. The veteran, Archer Cole, has served twice in Vietnam and balks when called up for a third tour, making his way from the United States to British Columbia in 1969 with his teenage daughter, Linnea. North of the border, two love triangles develop. First, after befriending a Canadian named Cecil West, Archer begins having an affair with Cecil’s fiancée, Nora. Second, Linnea has a child, Alan, with Cecil’s son, Jack, and then runs off with Crib, a young American whom Archer takes to be in Canada to pursue draft dodgers and deserters but whom Cecil thinks is probably a deserter himself. Although Crib’s actual reason for moving to Canada is never determined, he is more like Archer than either of them recognizes. Among other things, both men are given to escalating interpersonal conflict into violence; for instance, the two of them engage in a bloody fistfight on the eve of Crib leaving with Linnea. Thirty years later, in the summer of 2003, they encounter each other once again while Archer and Alan are looking to find Jack, who has been estranged from Cecil since the Vietnam War era. It turns out that Linnea and Crib are now married and that Crib, having changed his name to Colton, is now an r c m p officer. When Archer and Crib come face to face, Archer shoots and kills him. Ballistics thus presents yet another intergenerational story about the lasting effects of the Vietnam War. Moreover, in depicting Canada as a space turned into a metaphorical war zone by the Americans’ arrival, Wilson’s novel follows on from Vietnam War–era fantasies of a US invasion of Canada. Alan reflects guiltily on Archer’s murder of Crib, thinking, “He’d killed a man he didn’t need to, and I’d had a hand in it.”41 This concern with an American’s violence on foreign soil, along with the identification of that violence’s needlessness, channels a Canadian anxiety – pervasive during the Vietnam War and reawakened in the twenty-first century – about Canada’s complicity in and victimization by US violence abroad. In this respect, a key motif in Ballistics is what Cecil and Archer each refer to at different moments as “friendly fire.”42 The most literal instance of friendly



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fire in the novel has occurred in Vietnam: Archer has scars from napalm accidentally dropped on him and fellow US soldiers by their own side. More figurative kinds of friendly fire appear throughout the narrative, as friends and lovers repeatedly do physical and emotional harm to one another: for example, Alan recalls that his girlfriend once broke three of his ribs, and he himself unintentionally hits his dog with his truck. Other instances develop the theme even less subtly: after Linnea aids Crib in his fistfight with Archer by striking her father with a bottle, Archer refers to what happened as a case of friendly fire.43 The war in Afghanistan is never mentioned in Ballistics, but it is hard not to identify that conflict as an impetus for the novel’s focus on friendly fire, especially given the highprofile case in which four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed and eight others were injured on 18 April 2002 by a bomb dropped on them by a US plane mistaking them for enemy combatants. The incident especially resonated with critics of Canada’s participation in the war, who worried that Canada was becoming both an accomplice and a victim of US imperialism. For example, in the 2007 book Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire, Linda McQuaig cited the war in Afghanistan when claiming of Canada, “We’ve moved from being a nation that has championed internationalism, the United Nations and u n peacekeeping to being a key prop to an aggressive U.S. administration operating outside the constraints of international law.”44 McQuaig went on to characterize the United States as Canada’s “powerful boyfriend,” and she argued against the notion that, as she put it, Canada “should quietly stand by her man.”45 Ballistics rehearses this trope of the heterosexual binational couple by pairing Archer with Nora, whose attraction to him keeps them together from the Vietnam War era into the narrative present. Her choice of him over Cecil is one that the novel questions, however, by repeatedly emphasizing Archer’s violent sensibility. There is an element of truth in reviewer David Annand’s assertion that all of the male characters in Ballistics, not just the American ones, subscribe to a “Hyper Macho” model of masculinity.46 The new nationalist contrast of US violence with Canadian peaceability is especially undermined by the representation of Jack, who strikes Archer after being goaded by him and later sets fire to his home. Ballistics also seems to challenge the idea of Canada-US difference by giving Alan a dual American and Canadian genealogy: he is Canadian by birth, citizenship,

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and residence, but he has an American mother and grandfather. At the same time, Crib’s transformation from an American roughneck – one who drives a Ford Fairlane with the Stars and Stripes painted on it – to a Canadian peace officer would seem to uphold stereotypes of national difference. Moreover, there is a remarkable conversation near the end of the novel, as Alan and Jack are reunited after several decades and strain to make small talk. Jack asks Alan what he thinks about the invasion of Iraq, and Alan replies, “They say it’ll be like Vietnam again.”47 This peaceful reunion of the Canadian men stands in stark contrast with the recrudescence of Archer and Crib’s mutual enmity. The two Canadians have been caught up in the other male pair’s violent penumbra but survived it, and Jack is presumably headed toward a reconciliation with Cecil, too, while the American characters are now absent from the scene. The shift from the climactic violence of Crib’s murder by Archer to a moment of Canadians amicably discussing US violence suggests a now familiar national allegory. Likewise, although Cecil’s stoicism, beer-drinking, and gun-owning associate him with hegemonic masculinity, there are important differences between him and his American foil, Archer. Cecil is much slower than Archer to commit violence against others; when faced with the seeming threat of Crib, Cecil remarks, “Violence isn’t always the answer to these things.”48 He also refuses to fight Archer upon learning of Archer’s affair with Nora. And although Cecil is a war veteran like Archer, he served in the Second World War, still conventionally seen as a “just” war, in contrast with the dubious morality of the US involvement in Vietnam. Moreover, as someone who repeatedly looks out for Archer in Canada, Cecil exhibits a hospitality and care that Nora, similarly concerned with protecting Archer, explicitly ties to being Canadian, saying that looking after him and Linnea is not only “the right thing to do” but also “the Canadian thing to do.”49 Archer, meanwhile, rehearses national stereotypes in a different manner: by deriding Canadians. At a point when he finds himself apologizing to Nora, he worries that he has “sounded like a goddamned Canadian.”50 Soon afterwards, he describes Jack and Cecil as having “an inferior Canadian way of shooting.”51 Archer’s status as an American is further emphasized in his final, homicidal confrontation with Crib: first, Archer’s voice gains “an accent, a drawl distinctly south-of-the-forty-ninth”; then, after he shoots Crib, the dying man calls him a “f-f-fucking American.”52 It is a striking series of



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events, as an act of violence elicits a nationalizing interpellation that is also, implicitly, a self-interpellating identification of national difference. It is as though Archer’s shooting of Crib confirms the gunman’s identity as American and the victim’s identity as Canadian. Another reviewer of Ballistics, Brett Josef Grubisic, condemned the fact that the novel’s two first-person narrators, Archer and Alan, sound “virtually indistinguishable” in their “vocabulary, speech patterns and outlook.”53 However, Ballistics insists that if Archer sounds like Alan, the men are importantly different from each other in their respective nationalities, which – as the novel has it – carry different attitudes toward violence. Archer sees things in a highly militarized way and makes comparisons between Vietnam and Canada, as when he chastises himself for not paying enough attention to his daughter, asserting, “You can’t be complacent in a combat zone.”54 Likewise, when he claims that there is “always an answer” to problems, Nora responds, “God, that’s so military.”55 By having her rebut him in this way, Ballistics implies that Archer is an unreliable narrator. Indeed, he is also highly suspicious of others, quick to construe their actions as intending violence, and quick to react aggressively. While ice-skating with Cecil, for instance, Archer loses his balance, then hits Cecil when the man reaches out to him, even though Archer recognizes that Cecil may be attempting to catch him rather than knock him to the ground.56 Moreover, the novel suggests that Archer’s bellicosity can be linked to his experiences in Vietnam. He does not clearly suffer from p t s d , and he recalls the war only infrequently and briefly, but there are hints of his having been traumatized by the conflict: twice, in moments of violence, he has flashbacks to being “in the jungle.”57 Just as The Time in Between, The Sentimentalists, and The Hundred Hearts pull back the curtain of silence surrounding veterans’ combat experiences to reveal the war’s traumatizing effects, the reference in Ballistics to Archer’s having been hit by friendly fire offers an explanation for his hypersensitivity to the possibility of being further wounded and for his willingness to take first-strike aggressive action, even when it is not clearly warranted. At the psychological level, Ballistics is making a point about the way in which war colours veterans’ subsequent lives. At the level of national allegory, the novel is characterizing the United States as a country that believes it faces existential threats, especially in the wake of 9/11, and that has responded to them by attacking other countries in the name of self-defence.

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While Ballistics follows other Canadian novels in suggesting that US militarism has turned American men into irrevocably damaged and damaging goods, it also rehearses a characterization of Canadians as legatees of that damage and witnesses to it. In that regard, it is notable that Alan watches Archer kill Crib, just as Martha watches Edgar kill Curtis in Perfecting. And although Canada is a destination of choice for the veterans in almost all of these novels, none of the veterans is described as integrating happily into his new Canadian milieu. This absence of integration could be taken to suggest that Canada is not the idyllic space the veterans hoped it to be, except that the novels do not portray the veterans as ever explicitly having illusions about the country or what they will accomplish there. It is part of the veterans’ character as damaged men that they are not compelled by grand ambitions or ideals. In one way or another, it is the war that still seems to drive them, whether to harm others or to live isolated lives. Either way, they end up confirming a new nationalist myth in which Canada is a refuge but also very different from and vulnerable to the United States precisely because its hospitality involves rejecting the aggressive, militarized masculinity that Americans have embraced. Accordingly, the veteran turn in Canadian novels has served the North American postmemory of the Vietnam War by emphasizing the tragedy of the US veteran while perpetuating a Canadian conception of Americans as incompatible with the civil society north of the border. refugees in the not-so-peaceable kingdom

With the exception of The Time in Between, which is set primarily in Vietnam and features several significant Vietnamese characters, the novels discussed above focus almost entirely on white Americans and white Canadians as they consider the legacy of the Vietnam War. At most, Vietnamese people are evoked briefly as non-individuated victims of atrocity. It may be that the novelists participating in the veteran turn have considered themselves to lack the expertise and cultural authority to depict Vietnamese protagonists. But whatever the reason for the absence of such characters, an unfortunate consequence has been that the novels are vulnerable to the charge of contributing to what Yen Le Espiritu calls America’s “organized and strategic forgetting of the Vietnamese people.”58 That said, while 2005 marked the start of the veteran turn in Canadian



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novels, a different wave of novels began the same year with the publication of Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For. This wave involved narratives featuring Vietnamese characters in Canada, and it would also come to include Kim Thúy’s Ru and Mãn, as well as Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things. In each of these books, there is at least one fictional representative of the 130,0000 Vietnamese who immigrated to Canada in the wake of the war, whether directly after the conflict’s end or during the “boat people” refugee crisis that came to a head in 1978–79. What is more, with a single exception that I will discuss, there is no mention in these novels of US draft dodgers or veterans. In that respect and others, the novels draw attention to and compensate for the preoccupation with white protagonists evident in Vietnam War–related Canadian fiction. In the face of such a preoccupation, Brand’s, Thúy’s, and Kuitenbrouwer’s books insist that different stories of the war’s afterlife need attention. But as the novels tell such stories, they turn out to have compelling affinities with novels participating in the veteran turn, insofar as they likewise insist on the ways in which the war has caused damage across generations and created a postmemory distinguished by intergenerational silence. And just as novels focused on US veterans revisit the myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom, so too do novels about Vietnamese families in Canada. That said, there is a considerable disparity in how critical they are of the myth of Canada as a hospitable, equitable, multicultural society. Nevertheless, they share an implication that one longstanding Canadian injustice has been a dearth of mainstream narratives about Vietnamese people in Canada, especially narratives addressing racism toward Vietnamese communities and showcasing the successes that their members have achieved. As What We All Long For focuses on four Canadian friends of different ethnic backgrounds living in Toronto at the start of the twenty-first century, it invites readers to think about the Vietnam War in very different ways than does previous Canadian literature. For one thing, the novel refuses to dwell on the war alone and risk fetishizing it. Nevertheless, the friend whose family receives the most narrative attention is Tuyen, who was born in Canada after her parents and two eldest siblings left Vietnam as refugees during the boat people crisis. Tuyen’s next oldest sibling, Quy, a young child when the family left Vietnam, was separated from the rest while they were in transit, and his parents have been trying to find him

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ever since, writing and sending money to people in Southeast Asia who might help them. In the present day, Tuyen’s other brother, Binh, manages to locate a man with Quy’s name who may or may not be the longlost brother and who has recently made his way to Canada after living in Asia for most of his life. In telling this story, What We All Long For neither dwells on Canada’s complicity in the war nor celebrates the country’s military non-participation in the conflict. Instead, readers are encouraged, as Marlene Goldman puts it with respect to Brand’s earlier writing, “to remember and re-map complicated transnational diasporic communities whose broken histories and transnational connections repeatedly challenge the bounded, progressivist narratives of nation-states.”59 In this regard, What We All Long For importantly juxtaposes Tuyen’s family with those of her friends, each of which has a transnational history: Oku has parents from the Caribbean, Jackie is a Black Nova Scotian, and Carla has Jamaican as well as Italian ancestry. Through this juxtaposition, What We All Long For calls attention to the similar ways in which the characters are affected by racism and racialization. For instance, Larissa Lai argues that as the novel describes the perilous journey of Tuyen’s family from Vietnam, Brand purposefully evokes the Middle Passage – the transatlantic shipping of enslaved Africans to the New World – in order to establish “a kinship between Black and Asian diasporas.”60 In doing so, What We All Long For shifts the discourse of the Vietnam War so that the conflict stands not as a long-suppurating wound for white America but, rather, as one geo-historical node among others to be considered in the comparative analysis of diasporic communities. Featuring not a single principal white character, What We All Long For insists on the import of Tuyen and her friends as members of communities that are significant in their own right, not merely as instruments for assessing or fostering the humanitarianism of the white Canadian majority. What is more, the novel demonstrates a self-consciousness about its remedial emphasis on such communities’ histories and present-day situations, as when describing the friends’ shared frustration at the fact that “nothing … was about them” in their high-school curriculum.61 As What We All Long For depicts the lasting trauma of the loss of Quy for his family, the novel insists on the importance of examining the war’s legacy for the Vietnamese diaspora. Tuyen herself understands her parents’ traumatization principally through her discovery of old letters and



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her interpretation of other familial artifacts, not because of anything her parents have told her directly. For instance, she remembers copies of the family’s two photographs of Quy, one from his infancy and one from his boyhood, on “every mantel, every surface” of the house when she was young.62 These photographs are among the sole constituents of a fragmentary postmemory with which she wrestles. Tuyen’s situation has affinities with the struggles of Ada in The Time in Between, Napoleon’s daughter in The Sentimentalists, and Jeremy in The Hundred Hearts, none of whose progenitors speaks much about his traumatic wartime experiences. Like those characters, Tuyen is a figure for the novel in which she appears, which works toward the articulation of a marginalized, suppressed private history. In this respect, the attention in What We All Long For to the photographs of Quy reflects the novel’s remedial impulse. The photos, kept confined to the home and undiscussed, stand in contrast with iconic photographs of the war that continue to inform the mainstream North American postmemory of the conflict. Brand’s novel nods to this contrast by dramatizing a moment in which the adult Quy remembers that his one-time employer claimed to have been a friend of Thich Quang Duc, whom Quy describes as “the monk who had doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in Saigon.”63 No mention is made of the famous photograph of the self-immolation, but none is needed, given the photograph’s notoriety. That photo stands in juxtaposition with the family photos of Quy as a child to underscore the comparatively unheralded nature of the family’s loss. As What We All Long For goes on, the family photos gain a further counterpoint in a photograph that Tuyen takes of the adult Quy on the street in Toronto before she has been introduced to him, when she does not yet know who he is. It is only when she develops the image that she identifies him as her lost brother. In her failure to recognize him on the street, the novel suggests the importance of thinking about the Vietnam War not simply by engaging with records of the Vietnamese past but also with present-day Canadian reality. Tuyen, an artist, imagines reproducing her photo of the adult Quy and including the copies in an installation piece she is creating. This possible inclusion echoes the emphasis on Quy in What We All Long For, which gives him pride of place as the novel’s only first-person narrator. In doing so, the novel gestures toward the need for a counter-archive of the war attending to both the present and the past experiences of the

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Vietnamese diaspora – an archive that serves the needs of the Vietnamese community in Canada while also, like What We All Long For, working to educate the broader public about that community. One lesson offered by What We All Long For is that Canada is hardly a multicultural utopia but, rather, a site of racism and class divisions. That portrait of the country echoes what critical scholarship has established; for instance, a 2001 study found that no fewer than 26 per cent of Southeast Asian Canadians who had been refugees during the boat people crisis reported experiencing discrimination in Canada.64 In What We All Long For, rather than presenting Tuyen’s parents as welcomed to Canada and helped to succeed, the narrator observes that their Vietnamese professional accreditations are not recognized by the state, leaving them to open a restaurant because of “the way the city saw them: Vietnamese food.”65 Through such details, the novel challenges what Naava Smolash and Myka Tucker-Abramson call “the gratitude script that circumscribes migrant existence within Canada.”66 If neither Tuyen nor her parents express much thankfulness for being in Canada, they are shown to have good reasons not to feel grateful. The difficulties of Canadian life for diasporic, minoritized people is underscored at the novel’s conclusion, when Quy is brutally assaulted by Carla’s brother, Jamal, in an attempted carjacking. What We All Long For ties Jamal’s history of arrests to a racist police culture that makes it dangerous for a black person to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”67 The novel also connects his criminality to his immersion in a racist society in which imprisonment is a “rite of passage for a young black man.”68 In becoming a criminal, Jamal ends up in a role he has been pre-assigned. For him and Quy, Canada turns out to be something other than a peaceable refuge from the world’s violence and injustice. Like What We All Long For, Kim Thúy’s 2009 novel, Ru, tells a story of a Vietnamese family moving to Canada after the war’s end. Also like Brand’s novel, Ru’s narrative stretches into the twenty-first century and features a female protagonist who reflects on how her experiences in Canada have differed from her parents’. In Ru, however, the narrator, Nguyễn An Tịnh, is ten years old when her family leaves Vietnam and, thus, a member of the “1.5 generation” that was born and grew up in Vietnam, then immigrated to North America before adulthood.69 Consequently, as she reflects on her life after having reached middle age



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and become a parent, she is not living with postmemory but with her own recollections of Vietnam and refugee life in Southeast Asia. As for her portrait of Canada, it is much more sanguine than the portrait in What We All Long For, even though the Nguyễns do not enjoy the same material success in Canada that Tuyen’s family does. To be sure, Ru depicts Canada as a place of initial privation for the Nguyễns: Tịnh’s parents, having enjoyed an upper-class lifestyle in Vietnam, labour as janitors in Quebec, while Tịnh does illegal after-school agricultural work in the Eastern Townships to earn extra money. There is also a nod to racism in the country, as Tịnh refers to a Montreal newspaper article “reiterating that the ‘Québécois nation’ was Caucasian, that my slanting eyes automatically placed me in a separate category, even though Québec had given me my American dream, even though it had cradled me for thirty years.”70 Otherwise, though, Tịnh’s emphasis is on that “cradling”: repeatedly, she emphasizes the generosity of Québécois people toward her and other Vietnamese refugees. For instance, she recalls that dozens of people “showed up at our doors to give us warm clothes, toys, invitations, dreams.”71 She also remembers a Québécois priest who cared for all five of a Vietnamese doctor’s children until the doctor was able to travel to Canada himself. Likewise, there is Tịnh’s first teacher in Canada, who led her and other young Vietnamese refugees “to the haven where we would be children again, simply children.”72 Another teacher taught Tịnh, as she puts it, “how to free my voice from the folds of my body so it could reach my lips.”73 Even Tịnh’s parents are presented as enjoying the possibility for self-transformation in Canada; Tịnh’s mother has begun to take dance lessons and “started to live, to let herself be carried away, to reinvent herself at the age of fifty-five.”74 Moreover, Tịnh never seriously undermines her own initial childhood impression of Canada as “a place of delights, an idyllic land.”75 In other words, Ru presents Tịnh as what critic Vinh Nguyen calls “a grateful refugee” – one who expresses “a sense of thankfulness, a belief in the benevolence and generosity of the Canadian nation for providing the opportunities and the conditions for the possibility of life and ‘success.’”76 To some Canadian nationalists, the most disconcerting thing about Ru might be Tịnh’s view of people in Quebec as personifying the “American dream,”77 as well as her belief that she has come to be positively affected by that dream. Recalling her return to Vietnam in

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adulthood for a period of work, she asserts, “The American dream had given confidence to my voice, determination to my actions, precision to my desires, speed to my gait and strength to my gaze.”78 Given that she has acquired these attributes in Canada, readers are left to consider the extent to which Quebec and Canada may be “American” in their ideals and ways of life. Vinh Nguyen argues that “Thúy’s usage of the blanket phrase ‘American Dream’ in a French-Canadian context … points to the way American culture and ideology have become transnationally pervasive in the era of globalization.”79 Yet Ru also draws attention to negative aspects of America in ways that target the United States without also condemning Canada. For instance, there are references to American ­soldiers cruelly abandoning Vietnamese women during the war after impregnating them, while Tịnh relates the story of an American g i ’s Vietnamese daughter who, having been granted residence in the United States some thirty years after the war, was found “wandering the streets of the Bronx,” and who told Tịnh of her wish to return to Vietnam.80 Such examples do not suggest that the United States is a place where one might realize the American Dream of self-determination and material success. Rather, when juxtaposed with the flourishing of Tịnh in Canada, the examples perpetuate the new nationalist belief that the American Dream had become more realizable in Canada than in America. Ru also rehearses the new nationalist use of Vietnam as a foil to establish Canada’s peaceableness. The novel parallels the two countries explicitly when Tịnh, referring to the differences between the North and the South in Vietnam, declares, “Like Canada, Vietnam had its own two solitudes.”81 As she describes Vietnam, she associates its particular solitudes with violence and privation, characterizing the country as “ripped in two,”82 while detailing the seizure of her family’s home after the communist victory and the forced sharing of it with police officers and government soldier-inspectors. Moreover, the horrors of the communist re-education camps stand in contrast with the series of kind teachers she encounters in Canada, while the lives of her cousins in postwar Saigon, where they were compelled to perform sex acts for food, stand in contrast with their training as engineers in Quebec. And the novel ends with a strikingly nationalist image, as Tịnh describes having arrived at a place “where the deep red of a maple leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby.”83 Not only



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does the maple leaf evoke Canada, but its “deep red” also echoes and counterpoints an image from the opening page of the novel, in which Tịnh recounts her birth during the Tet Offensive of 1968 and imagines that “firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered throughout the villages and cities.”84 Ru risks offering its own lullaby about Canada, insofar as it generally leaves aside the troubling elements of the country’s record on the former Indochina and immigrants from the region. Emphasizing the positive does not seem to have hindered the novel’s reception in Canada: after becoming a bestseller in Quebec and winning a Governor General’s Award, the book was published in English translation by Random House of Canada in 2012, with Thúy headlining the publisher’s New Face of Fiction program, and it went on to win the 2015 Canada Reads competition. Thúy’s second novel, Mãn, published in French in 2013 and in English translation the following year, represents contemporary Vietnam as a country still suffering from the aftermath of the war, a place that people – and especially women – must leave in order to flourish. Much of the novel’s focus is on the ways in which the eponymous war-orphan protagonist is socialized in postwar Vietnam into a life of self-effacement and stoic service to others. Even after Mãn arrives in Montreal following her arranged marriage to a Vietnamese man who came to Canada as a boat person, she lives a life of self-subordination to her husband and children. However, she also begins to find fulfillment as a chef, running a restaurant and co-authoring a successful cookbook with a Québécoise friend who models for her an assertive, entrepreneurial femininity. And while Mãn associates Canada with professional success, it further associates it with the production of writing: not only Mãn’s cookbook but also the work of writers who converge on her restaurant, where “books were launched and texts regularly read by their authors on nights when the moon was full,” in contrast with a Vietnam where, readers are told, books were routinely banned and confiscated when Mãn lived there.85 After Mãn’s adoptive mother, Maman, immigrates to Canada, Mãn buys her ruled notebooks with the hope that, as Mãn puts it, “she would write our story, hers and mine before she was mine, and that she would leave her words as a legacy for my children.”86 Insofar as Mãn itself takes the form of Mãn’s memoir, her hopes for Maman’s writing are also implicitly hopes

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that she has realized in writing her own story. By emphasizing the role that such writing can play for subsequent generations, Mãn unintentionally offers something of a response to a critic such as Vinh Nguyen, who worries that narratives of immigrant success have an “ideologically reaffirming function,” insofar as they are “easily digested by mainstream readers and state structures alike.”87 Nguyen is right to suggest that such narratives can be problematic when they uncritically attribute hospitality and multicultural egalitarianism to the nation-state while reinforcing what Isabelle Thuy Pelaud calls the “model minority paradigm” in which Vietnamese immigrants, along with other East Asian immigrant communities, are celebrated as hard-working and assimilating well into North American society.88 In Mãn, moreover, the protagonist’s escape from Eastern oppression into professional achievement and individual fulfillment accords neatly with a neo-liberal narrative of Western capitalism’s emancipatory character. However, the novel is not only serving “mainstream readers.” It also offers members of the Vietnamese diaspora a story of one of their members finding professional and personal fulfillment – a story that is, unfortunately, difficult to find in North American literature. Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s 2014 novel, All the Broken Things, shares with Brand’s and Thúy’s books – as well as Kuitenbrouwer’s own Perfecting – in exploring the Vietnam War’s legacy by presenting characters who immigrate to Canada during the conflict. Its protagonist is a teenage boy, Bo Ngô, who leaves Vietnam with his father and pregnant mother during the boat people crisis. Bo’s father dies at sea, while his mother gives birth to a daughter whose Vietnamese name means “orange blossom” and whom Bo calls Orange.89 As All the Broken Things dramatizes the family’s experiences in Toronto, its depiction of immigrant life is more in line with the damning picture of Canada offered by What We All Long For than the one in Ru and Mãn. For instance, although the Ngôs receive kindness from the Catholic church group sponsoring them in Canada, that kindness has pointed limits, as when the church decides to sell the home it has been renting to them, even though the family is struggling financially and Bo’s mother – whose name is Thao but who calls herself Rose in Canada – is seriously ill. Bo, meanwhile, finds himself in daily fistfights with a schoolmate who hurls racial slurs at him while other children watch without intervening and bet on the fights’ outcomes. After Bo is hired by a man named Gerry Whitman to perform in an



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Ontario bear-wrestling circuit, Bo is similarly subjected to racist epithets by spectators. Moreover, Gerry comes to employ Bo by exploiting the fact that the Ngôs are living in poverty, with Rose recently unemployed and behind on the rent. Equally exploitative is Max Jennings, a sideshow owner whom Bo meets through Gerry. Upon learning that Orange is disabled, Max shows an interest in adding her to his show as a “freak,” and soon he begins to court Rose, eventually marrying her. After Rose dies, Max professes to have loved her, but it was clearly his interest in Orange that drew him to Rose in the first place, and he succeeds in putting Orange to work as an exhibit. By presenting both Gerry and Max as so manipulative, and by emphasizing the limits of the church group’s generosity, All the Broken Things offers a picture of Canadians as people whose offers to help refugees come with significant strings attached. At one point in the novel, while training his own bear – which, in a fit of inspiration, he names Bear – Bo finds himself abandoned to Gerry’s custody by Rose, who disappears with Max and Orange. Rather than staying with Gerry, Bo flees with Bear to hide in Toronto’s High Park. After several weeks, Gerry finds him, only to tell him that his mother has ­committed suicide and that he is now legally Max’s son. Soon afterward, Bo once more seeks refuge with Bear in Toronto’s parklands. In these moments, All the Broken Things intriguingly parodies the trope of Canada as refuge by suggesting that it is isolation from Canadian society, not immersion in it, that offers Bo a manner of sanctuary. At the same time, there is no sense that his time in the parks grants him anything beyond a reprieve from dealing with Max and Gerry. All the Broken Things thus reiterates the dilemma facing the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing at the end of that novel: although solitude in nature may protect a person from social victimization, it is not represented as a viable longterm option. At the end of All the Broken Things, a more sustainable refuge for Bo and Orange emerges in the circus sideshow community. As one member of that group puts it, the sideshow offers “a kind of sanctuary among the freaks, at least for freaks.”90 That community, however, remains both apart from the mainstream and at the service of mainstream voyeurism, confirming exclusionary, hierarchical social norms. Consequently, neither the parklands nor the sideshow can be neatly identified with the idyllic sanctuary of Canadian nationalist fantasy. Rather, the fact that Bo is driven to seek refuge in them exposes the fantasy as such.

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All the Broken Things also draws attention to the Canadian manufacture of the defoliant Agent Orange for the US war effort in Vietnam. It does so, in part, by presenting a backstory for the Ngôs in which the chemical was dropped on the area of their home in Vietnam, with the result that Bo’s father died from the exposure, Rose remains seriously ill from it in Canada, and Orange has been disabled and disfigured after having been affected in utero. What is more, it turns out that Bo’s gradeeight teacher, Ann Lily, who is a member of the church group sponsoring the Ngôs, once worked in an Ontario factory that produced Agent Orange. Through these details, All the Broken Things manifests the didactic impulse of Vietnam War–era Canadian writing that drew attention to Canada’s complicity in the conflict, especially by foregrounding the manufacture of materiel.91 Underscoring the novel’s didacticism, Kuitenbrouwer observes in a prefatory note that the Canadian producers of Agent Orange knew it was carcinogenic and mutagenic. Kuitenbrouwer further asserts that “the legacy of Agent Orange continues, as the chemical works its way through a third generation of exposed Vietnamese citizens,” while she notes that “Canada has never admitted any responsibility for this.”92 After that historical framing, much of the novel’s subsequent didactic work in dramatizing Bo’s story might seem redundant. However, the diegesis furthers Kuitenbrouwer’s political agenda by developing readers’ sympathies for the Ngôs. That much is especially clear in the narrative’s emphasis on Ann’s guilt and subsequent anti-war activism. Her guilt models for readers a moral and affective orientation toward Canada’s history regarding Agent Orange, while her activism models a drive to atone for that history. Likewise, by presenting Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange who are living in Canada, by showing Bo to be further victimized by Canadians’ racism, and by depicting Orange as someone labelled a “freak” for the sake of Canadians’ voyeuristic pleasure, All the Broken Things insists that the Canadian production of Agent Orange should not be considered in isolation but with an eye to a broader context of Canadian injustice. All the Broken Things extends its critique by identifying a problematic desire among Canadians for refugees to testify publicly about their traumatic experiences in order to satisfy Canadians’ own emotional needs. In the novel, Ann repeatedly turns class lessons into exercises in prompting testimony from Bo about his memories of the war and fleeing Vietnam.



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For instance, she singles him out in the middle of a history lesson to ask him whether he has ever been on a boat; then she asks if he can tell the class about it.93 Later, she shows the class an anti-war film. Afterwards, worried that watching it has been traumatic for Bo, she apologizes to him while claiming that the screening was demanded by the curriculum.94 Nevertheless, the fact that she did not say anything to him about the film in advance suggests that she was once more hoping to provoke him into wrestling with his past. Such efforts might be excused as well-meaning, if misguided, except that Ann is so clearly eager to make up for her participation in the manufacture of Agent Orange that her eagerness, as much as a concern for Bo, seems to be what prompts her attempts to help him. The possibility that she is driven by guilt about the past rather than by a recognition of Bo’s situation in the present is highlighted by her seeming ignorance of his daily fistfights, even though they sometimes leave him visibly wounded. At the end of the novel, when Ann and Bo happen to encounter each other in her hometown and she shows him the factory where she made Agent Orange, she demonstrates that she continues to slot him into a role in her narrative of personal atonement, telling him, “I thought you should see.” His response, “I don’t need to see,” stands as a rebuke of her presumption that her demons are also his.95 Thus identifying the danger of pigeonholing others in roles scripted by one’s own concerns and assumptions, All the Broken Things suggests that the danger particularly obtains in terms of the Canadian mainstream’s instrumentalization of Vietnamese-Canadians, whether to consolidate a myth of the peaceable kingdom or to emphasize past Canadian misdeeds while neglecting problems in the present. Kuitenbrouwer’s novel further challenges readers’ possible desires regarding narratives of the Vietnam War by depicting a character known to Bo only as Soldier Man. The character appears while Bo and Bear are hiding in High Park, and he comes to be their intermittent companion there. Claiming to be a Vietnam War veteran, Soldier Man appears to suffer from p t s d , and he has a facial disfigurement that – if he is to be believed – resulted from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. His fleeting, spectral appearances at various points in the novel, along with the minimal characterization of him, conspicuously echo the shadowy, caricatured role that communist combatants have so often played in North American fiction about the Vietnam War, from David Lewis Stein’s 1965

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short story “The Night of the Little Brown Men” through to Hollywood films.96 In that light, the inclusion of Soldier Man as a peripheral figure in All the Broken Things underscores the novel’s rejection of a conventional North American cultural focus on US veterans. Indeed, given that All the Broken Things was published some years after The Time in Between and The Sentimentalists had appeared and earned laurels for their depictions of traumatized US veterans in Canada, Soldier Man might be taken as a nod to those books’ protagonists and an indicator that Kuitenbrouwer has chosen to tell a very different – if by no means unconnected – story about the war’s long-term traumatic effects. The novel further thematizes its work in this respect through its portrayal of Orange’s development. Early on, Bo thinks of his sister as “unspeakable and unspeaking.”97 By the end of the narrative, she is communicating via sign language and voluntarily presenting herself to the world: the novel concludes with a description of her participating in a county-fair parade through the small town of Elmira, the very location of the factory that produced Agent Orange during the war. When the townspeople see her on one of the floats, they are flustered by her disfigurement and avoid looking at her, but she continues to wave at them. The novel’s final sentence, “Orange waved and waved,” self-reflexively underscores the narrative’s own efforts to draw attention to the Vietnam War’s victims.98 By representing the townspeople’s discomfort, the novel also furthers its argument that Canada is one of the broken things of the book’s title, a nation that has failed to come to terms with its role in atrocity. Reviewing All the Broken Things, Emily Donaldson rightly observed that it is implausible for the only person Bo encounters while living for weeks in High Park to be Soldier Man, “a homeless, flash-back prone Vietnam vet.”99 The thematic neatness of these encounters sits uneasily alongside their enormous coincidence. But the novel self-consciously ­gestures to their departure from realism; for instance, at a moment when Soldier Man suddenly appears, Bo thinks of his arrival as “a kind of magic.”100 Such self-reflexivity is further evident during Bo’s time in the parklands and eventual reunion with Orange: the novel parallels those narrative elements with references to the medieval poem Sir Orfeo, which relates a similar wilderness journey and reunion. The poem, a reworking of the Orpheus myth and the basis in All the Broken Things for a school play in which Bo plays the hero, is a text that Ann describes as “a fairy



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tale,”101 yet the narrative has resonant parallels with Bo’s relationship to the Vietnam War. For example, there is the passage that he recites about Orfeo in the underworld: “Some stood without heads, and some had no arms, and some had wounds through the body and some lay mad, bound, and some sat on horses, and some choked as they ate, and some were drowned in water, and some were all shrivelled with fire.”102 One can hardly miss the echoes of the Ngôs’ wartime experiences. Indeed, given Ann’s penchant for introducing texts to her class that might cause Bo to reflect on the war, it is abundantly clear why she has chosen Sir Orfeo for the students to perform. But the echoes of the Vietnam War in the poem also reflect Kuitenbrouwer’s interest in telling a story that registers as myth, not just as a realist narrative. Although it is implausible, for instance, that a man who runs a freak show would happen to hire a boy whose sister has been disfigured by Agent Orange, such a coincidence is more acceptable at the figurative level, suggesting as it does the ways in which Canadians’ relationship to the Vietnam War has long had a voyeuristic, exploitative element. Kuitenbrouwer’s departure from realism in order to make this point distinguishes All the Broken Things from virtually all of the other post-9/11 Canadian novels about the Vietnam War, which share a commitment to what could be called humanitarian realism, carefully grounding their stories in a recognizable history and largely sticking to plausible plots while insisting – in accordance with Smaro Kamboureli’s characterization of humanitarian narratives – on “the norms of what constitutes human dignity and ethical responsibility.”103 For Kuitenbrouwer’s part, she acknowledges in her prefatory note that her story of a Vietnamese boat person wrestling bears in Canada is impossible, given that – according to Kuitenbrouwer – Ontario outlawed bear wrestling after the mauling of a trainer’s fiancée in 1976.104 By identifying her narrative’s unlikelihood at the outset, Kuitenbrouwer draws attention to the fact that her novel is working in a mythic mode as much a realist one. Moreover, through the representation of figures such as Soldier Man, All the Broken Things suggests that the Vietnam War has already achieved a mythic status in Canada, with the consequence that Kuitenbrouwer’s novel is not creating a fairy tale so much as rewriting one, turning the peaceable kingdom into a manner of underworld that Bo must navigate. By doing so, All the Broken Things demonstrates that although it eschews strict realism, it is

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committed to the humanitarian narrative’s goal of changing readers’ orientation toward the real world. q u i e t c a n a d i a n s a n d n a r r at i v e s of vietnam

For all of the ways in which What We All Long For, Ru, Mãn, and All the Broken Things work to shift Canadians’ focus regarding the Vietnam War from Canada-US relations to the Vietnamese diaspora, the novels are still set primarily in Canada. In fact, other than The Hundred Hearts, all of the novels discussed so far in this chapter feature Canada as a setting. Several of them feature characters remembering their time in Vietnam, but only The Time in Between sets a substantial part of its narrative in that country. However, two other recent Canadian novels have followed Bergen’s example by setting their stories in Vietnam and narrating events that occur there both during and after the war. The narrative of Camilla Gibb’s 2010 novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, takes place principally in Vietnam in the twenty-first century, and it has characters recount their experiences there as far back as the 1930s, while Vincent Lam’s 2012 novel, The Headmaster’s Wager, surveys decades of Vietnamese history up to the boat people crisis as it tells a story set primarily in the vicinity of Saigon.105 Moreover, neither of these novels features a major Canadian character, much less a Canadian protagonist. This absence frees the texts to pursue takes on the Vietnam War and its legacy that are very different from what other Canadian novels have offered. That said, I wish to consider the ways in which Canada remains quietly part of Gibb’s and Lam’s stories. Both novels, along with The Time in Between, stand as evidence of a Canadian literature that has developed a covert nationalist voice: a way of speaking doubly that provides recognizably Canadian references for domestic readers while telling stories that will satisfy international audiences without risking their disinterest due to the appearance of a parochial focus on things Canadian. As these novels criss-cross Vietnam, they do so with a discreet Maple Leaf sewn on to their backpacks, signalling to Canadian readers that the narratives are not entirely disavowing their national affiliations. Bergen’s and Lam’s novels, in particular, demonstrate that the nationalist practice of using the Vietnam War to affirm Canada-US difference remains in operation.



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The Time in Between confirms that difference through its depiction of Charles Boatman’s children Ada and Jon, whom it positions as nationally emblematic. It does so in various ways: by making them the two principal Canadian characters; by having Ada twice identify her nationality to others while in Vietnam;106 and by giving her a name that is literally a part of the nation’s: “Can-Ada.” Ada’s status as emblematically Canadian is heightened by the fact that her situation as a young woman searching for her missing father – who turns out to have drowned – rehearses the plot of Atwood’s Surfacing, a novel that itself is not shy about suggesting the presence of national allegory. By making Ada a woman, Bergen perpetuates Atwood’s and others’ association of Canada with the feminine. But Ada’s name, as half of “Canada,” might be taken to suggest that she is just one half of Canada, while Jon’s own three-letter name echoes – if more subtly – the other half of “Canada.” In that respect, the fact that Jon is gay can be read as Bergen’s suggestion – in keeping with the scholarly assertions discussed in the previous chapter of this book – that Canada is not only figuratively feminine but also figuratively queer. As Charles’s children, moreover, Jon and Ada allegorize a Canada that is a legatee of the American experience in Vietnam and must deal with that fraught inheritance. For Canadian readers, The Time in Between is bound to seem most conspicuously and conventionally nationalist in its depiction of a married American couple named Jack and Elaine Douds who live in Vietnam and stand as foils for Jon and Ada. The Douds are updates of the figure of the imperialist American in Vietnam, a character first popularized by Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American. In Greene’s narrative, a US government operative named Alden Pyle is driven by political idealism to further his country’s interests covertly in Vietnam, with disastrous results. In The Time in Between, Jack Douds has a Pyle-like zeal for transforming Vietnam; he is working to establish a church there, and he exhibits a troubling superciliousness, as when summoning a Vietnamese servant by clapping his hands or when making sweeping, patronizing statements about the country, such as his claim that Vietnam is “aimless.”107 In case readers miss the allusion to Pyle in this characterization, Bergen signals his debt by having Charles reading “a Graham Greene novel” while in Vietnam.108 Further adding to the indictment of Americans abroad, Elaine observes damningly that Jack is a man “much

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given to grand plans” who “likes to trample on other people’s space.”109 But for all her acuity regarding him, she exhibits certain stereotypically American traits herself, especially an entitled acquisitiveness that she manifests in her attempts to start an affair with Charles. Resisting her, he grows alarmed by her “expectation that she should get what she wanted.”110 In that regard, there is a telling joke when, later on, Ada remembers a scene with her family in which the song “American Woman” was playing:111 Elaine represents just the sort of predatory American that the Guess Who evoke in their song. Accordingly, although the representation of Charles shows greater sensitivity to the nuances of US soldiers’ experiences in Vietnam than does most war-era Canadian literature, The Time in Between still trades in new nationalist stereotypes. Yet many of the nationalist elements of Bergen’s book are easy enough for non-­ Canadians to overlook as such. Ada’s limited understanding of Vietnam, a prominent theme in the novel, makes her a stand-in not just for Canadian readers but for Western readers in general, and even though she identifies herself as Canadian, she never articulates the significance of that identification. What is more, although she lives in Canada, there is little detail about her life there. In other words, Bergen’s novel practises a rather quiet Canadianism, offering nationalist dog-whistles in lieu of substantially considering what Canadian nationalism might entail. Canada recedes even more thoroughly from the picture in The Beauty of Humanity Movement, which is set entirely in Vietnam and features nary an individuated Canadian character. Although Gibb claims to have avoided reading The Time in Between while writing her book,112 the two novels are very similar in certain respects: both feature a North American woman in Vietnam who seeks to learn about her dead father’s history in the country, encountering Vietnamese artists along the way while aided by a young male Vietnamese. In Gibb’s novel, the woman, Maggie, was born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese family and, as a girl in 1975, left for the United States with her mother during the evacuation of Saigon while her father stayed behind and was killed. Now, returned to Vietnam to work in Hanoi as an art curator, Maggie wishes to learn more about her father’s experiences there in the 1950s, when his circle involved a group of artists who ran afoul of the communist state for not toeing the party line. As Gibb has recognized in an interview, Maggie’s North American background and consequent estrangement from Vietnam mean that the



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novel’s “Western audience” is liable to identify with her as she engages with the country.113 Yet a key strategy in the novel is to orient those readers away from their conventional interests in Vietnam and to recognize that Westerners have been reductive in their treatment of the country, fetishizing the years of the US war there, as though Vietnam were not a place so much as a few years in history. The Beauty of Humanity Movement suggests that such reductiveness can transpire even when Americans go so far as to travel to Vietnam – a phenomenon that the scholar Renny Christopher identified as a “new movement” soon after the US trade embargo on Vietnam was lifted in 1994.114 While Christopher noted that accounts of such journeys tended to focus on positive themes of “healing and reconciliation,” Gibb treats Americans’ desire for those things with skepticism, suggesting that they rehearse an obdurate national narcissism. In The Beauty of Humanity Movement, Maggie’s guide in Hanoi, Tư, refers to US veterans who arrive in the country and, on guided tours with him, are “generally only interested in the story since 1965.” In contrast, we are told, “If Tư said ‘China Beach’ to an ordinary Vietnamese person, even one who had lived through the war, they would think he was talking about a beach in China. If he said, ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ they would think first of a hotel.”115 Tư observes that the Vietnamese are unlikely to treat the war as a national trauma in the way Americans do because “the Vietnamese beat the Americans. It wasn’t like the Chinese, crushing the Vietnamese for a thousand years, or the French who tortured and killed for decades.”116 By situating the years of the US military involvement in Vietnam as a brief period in a long Vietnamese struggle against colonial rule, Tư – and, by extension, Gibb’s novel – challenges the reductiveness of the North American perspective on Vietnam. In telling a story about the country that encompasses the US war but also stretches from the 1930s to 2007, The Beauty of Humanity Movement similarly models a more comprehensive approach to Vietnamese history. Gibb herself has said that when she began working on her novel, she wanted it not “to be a book about the Vietnam War”; instead, she wished to go about “exposing histories or telling stories that have not been part of our Western literature,” remediating the fact that “everything our generations know about Vietnam has come through American film.”117 For Gibb, such remediation involved abandoning the convention of representing Vietnam by telling stories in which white Americans’

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relationship to the country is the primary subject of interest. Just as All the Broken Things dramatizes brief episodes involving a US veteran of the Vietnam War in order to emphasize the fact that the novel is not making such a figure the centre of attention, The Beauty of Humanity Movement does similar work by having Tư serve as a tour guide for an American war veteran. The veteran insists on being taken to a Buddhist temple where, presented with the opportunity to offer a written prayer, he says he wishes to write Tư’s name so that the two of them can pray to “forgive each other.” Faced with this demand to offer absolution, Tư finds “he cannot give [the man] what he wants.”118 Tư does not articulate clearly the reasons for his resistance, but they evidently do not involve anti-­Americanism or lingering resentment about the Vietnam War, given that “in his opinion, an opinion shared with most of his friends, everything great was invented in the US.”119 It is more likely that Tư is reacting to the way in which the veteran’s demand has laid bare the exploitative dynamics of the tour, in which, as Tư thinks of it, he must “understand and respond to the needs of his clients,”120 while they have the privilege of ignoring his. The veteran’s attempt to stage a reconciliation, however well-meaning, hyperbolizes this dynamic, instrumentalizing Tư and treating him – and, by extension, Vietnam – only in terms of the American’s relationship to the war. In contrast, Maggie ends up developing mutually caring relations with Vietnamese people that are independent of her investigation into her father’s past, modelling for readers an ideal of reciprocal respect and non-subordination of the other to one’s own preoccupations. Gibb’s attention to Americans’ problematic engagement with Vietnam might be said to be typically Canadian, insofar as a critical orientation toward the United States with respect to Vietnam has been a hallmark of the new nationalism. However, The Beauty of Humanity Movement is even more quietly Canadian than The Time in Between. A single, telling reference to Canadians comes early in Gibb’s novel when Tư considers people from that country who have been his clients, reflecting, “They are generally kind, though it always amuses him how they introduce themselves with variations of: Hello, nice to meet you, we are from Canada, see the maple leaves sewn onto our knapsacks? Our country might be right next door, but it’s a world apart from its southern neighbour; in fact, we offered refuge to a great many draft dodgers who did not believe the Americans should be in Vietnam – horrible, horrible war, horrible, horrible U.S.A.”121



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The passage, with its implicit indictment of the Canadians for so reflexively contrasting themselves with Americans, serves as an implicit rebuke of Canadians’ responses to the Vietnam War, especially their knee-jerk invocations of the conflict to celebrate Canadian difference. Gibb suggests that Canadians, no less than Americans, are liable to visit presentday Vietnam with a self-serving agenda: in Canadians’ case, to confirm and even to disseminate the myth of the peaceable kingdom. By holding that agenda up for scrutiny near the beginning of her novel, Gibb encourages Canadian readers to see in her narrative a less simplistic approach to Vietnam. At the same time, given that references to Canada subsequently drop out of The Beauty of Humanity Movement, Tư’s early meditation on Canadians reassures Canadian readers that even though the protagonist of The Beauty of Humanity Movement is American and most of the other characters are Vietnamese, the novel has been written with Canadians at least partly in mind. Vincent Lam’s novel The Headmaster’s Wager, published in 2012, is seemingly distinct from the rest of the novels surveyed in this chapter in that much of its narrative focuses on Vietnam during and immediately after the war years. Its protagonist, Percival Chen, is the Chinese-born owner and headmaster of an English-language school in Cholon, an ethnic Chinese community bordering on Saigon.122 On the one hand, by making the war its centrepiece, The Headmaster’s Wager could be taken to task for catering to the Western preoccupation with the conflict. On the other hand, Lam presents the war from a Vietnamese perspective. Moreover, by featuring a protagonist who is ethnically Chinese, Lam recognizes a cultural complexity in Vietnam that Western representations of the country often elide. But complicating matters is that fact that Percival is not exactly a sympathetic protagonist. Rather, he is racist, moneydriven, politically blasé, emotionally withdrawn, and objectifying of women. Consequently, Lam has been accused by reviewer Philip Marchand of creating “almost a caricature of a Chinese businessman.”123 However, the fact that Percival is such a flawed person encourages readers to question the justice of his good fortune as he prospers in the war while others suffer. Through his example, The Headmaster’s Wager emphasizes the unfairness of a society in which citizens are left vulnerable to the vicissitudes of chance and the free market – a society that the novel associates both with South Vietnam and with the United States. In contrast, the

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novel implicitly endorses a celebratory view of a Canadian social safety net that mitigates the excesses of capitalism. A new nationalist politics is evident in The Headmaster’s Wager’s emphasis on the injustices of a free-market economy. That economy allows characters such as Percival to thrive during the war, thanks to their ability to pay bribes and buy scarce material goods, even as others endure privation and persecution. And although the novel’s primary geographical setting is wartime South Vietnam, the novel pointedly extends its critique to the United States. For example, in the course of a conversation with an American named Peters, Percival identifies his interests to be only business-oriented, not political, and Peters declares his understanding by saying, “Making money is the American way.”124 Elsewhere, too, The Headmaster’s Wager suggests that problems afflicting South Vietnam have affinities with and are even causally connected to problems with the United States. For instance, there are repeated nods to the American military draft and its parallels with the draft in South Vietnam. As Percival and his ex-wife, Cecilia, consider how to help their son Dai Jai avoid military service, Cecilia imagines sending him to the United States, and Percival responds, “They can draft him there, too.”125 Soon afterward, Cecilia is similarly told by Americans in Vietnam that “they had enough problems in America with their own draft dodgers.”126 And the novel further shows its new nationalist stripes in the way it depicts South Vietnam’s cultural colonization by the United States, with Percival objecting to the “cheeseburgers, French fries,” and “growing stack of American comic books” that Cecilia supplies to Dai Jai as a boy.127 The new nationalist ideal of Canada lying behind the novel’s critique of South Vietnam and the United States is confirmed by the text’s representation of health care.128 A skepticism about the US-style application of free-market principles to medicine is clear in the novel’s depiction of Dr Hua, the physician who treats Dai Jai after he has been incarcerated and who later examines Percival’s younger son, Laing Jai, upon his birth. Percival identifies Hua as the “most expensive doctor in Cholon,”129 but although Percival apparently takes this fact to mean that the man must be an excellent physician, the novel works to undermine that assumption. For instance, Hua manages to diagnose Dai Jai’s brain as “intact” without even inspecting his head, and his examination of Laing Jai produces the rather superficial declaration that “everything is in order – ten fingers,



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two testicles, and all the appropriate portions are present.”130 After each exam, Hua is also quick to sell a medication to Percival. In the case of Laing Jai, the doctor offers a vitamin syrup, despite the fact that the baby is apparently in perfect health. Hua tells Percival, “I happen to have a vial of this excellent medicine with me, and will offer it to you at a good price. Only fifteen thousand piastres for a full month’s supply.”131 The implication that Hua is a quack and an opportunist serves as a reminder of the rationale for separating medical care from commerce. Later, Percival hears that Hua has fled Vietnam for the United States to open a private practice; in the same breath, the bearer of the news derisively calls Hua a “rich bastard.”132 For many Canadian readers, the condemnation of a physician for fleeing to America and the suggestion that the move accords with pecuniary self-interest are familiar ones, given the Canadian media’s frequent interest in Canadian doctors moving south of the border to gain financially from its for-profit health-care system.133 Hua’s move further corroborates a Canadian prejudice against the American system by aligning it with the flawed South Vietnamese system that Hua represents. This alignment is corroborated near the end of The Headmaster’s Wager, after the US military withdrawal from South Vietnam, when a Vietnamese doctor complains about the lack of available medical supplies by saying, “It’s not like before, when we had plenty of American supplies that I could sell to you. Back then, it was just a question of money.”134 The phy­ sician explains that the Americans have not kept their promise to send additional supplies after their withdrawal. In this moment, the novel associates commercial health care with a particularly American failure of compassion. Consequently, although Canada goes unmentioned during such moments, a Canadian nationalist orientation toward the United States is very much in evidence. Canada’s role as the implicit foil in the novel’s socio-political critique is confirmed by repeated references to the country as a safe haven for those seeking to escape the war.135 The novel also makes reference to Canadian peacekeepers in Vietnam, reinforcing the myth of Canada as a peaceable nation.136 But if The Headmaster’s Wager perpetuates a progressive view of Canada, it simultaneously leaves Canada at the periphery of its narrative. The novel does not feature any individuated Canadian characters, nor does it depict Percival or his family members reaching Canada. That non-depiction stands the novel in contrast with the story “A Long

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Migration” in Lam’s 2005 short-fiction collection, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, which features a similar character named Percival Chen. In that story, Percival successfully flees Vietnam, and his grandson becomes a Canadian doctor. In The Headmaster’s Wager, Lam’s technique of directly referencing Canada only in passing facilitates a bifurcation of reading experiences. While the novel’s critique of US-style free-market risk, along with the narrative’s few explicit references to Canada, encourages readers familiar with new nationalist discourse to recognize the text’s Canadian nationalism, other readers may miss it entirely and take the novel to be about only Vietnam and the United States. In this manner, The Headmaster’s Wager shares the covert nationalism of The Time in Between, facilitating a remarkable interpretive pluralism. To put it another way, the novel hedges its bets: while wagering that certain readers will register the narrative’s Canadian nationalist sentiment at some level, the novel gambles that the rest of its audience – especially non-Canadian readers who are, by reputation, incorrigibly uninterested in Canada – will be satisfactorily engaged by a narrative rehearsing a familiar focus on Vietnam’s betrayal by the United States. Thus, the Canadian social safety net lauded by The Headmaster’s Wager gains a parallel in the novel’s own risk-minimizing approach to communicating its political investments. The Headmaster’s Wager, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, and The Time in Between are not alone in practising a quiet Canadianism. In fact, none of the six novels I have earlier discussed as participating in the veteran turn features characters who pay extended, overt attention to things such as Canadian politics or identity; Archer’s two anti-Canadian remarks and Crib’s dying anti-American barb in Ballistics are exceptional in baldly calling attention to Canada-US relations. Even What We All Long For, which is clearly critical of Canadian society, does not make the nationstate its explicit target, instead emphasizing societal attitudes that are attached most directly to Toronto, although they are not characterized as exclusive to that city. These novels are very different from Canadian literature published during the Vietnam War, which often paid ample, unambiguous attention to Canada-US difference. The twenty-first-­ century Canadian novel dealing with the Vietnam War that is most explicitly concerned with the Canadian nation-state is All the Broken Things, and it may not be a coincidence that it is one of only two novels considered in this chapter that, despite strong reviews and domestic book-club success, has not found a publisher outside Canada.137



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For contemporary Canadian writers seeking to capture both domestic and international markets, the Vietnam War has proved to be a subject with strong appeal. Looming large in the memories of many Canadians, it is also a subject that audiences elsewhere continue to find compelling. The same cannot be said for Canadian nationalism. Indeed, the apparent risk of Canadian literary texts seeming too narrowly national in their focus may be another reason why draft dodgers have been generally ignored in recent Vietnam War–related Canadian fiction. The figures simply do not have the significance elsewhere that they have had in Canada. More broadly, there is a longstanding perception among Canadian authors that American readers, in particular, are uninterested in books dealing with Canada. Atwood, for one, discussing her US publisher’s refusal to publish Survival, has claimed that the publisher told her, “Listen, sweetie, Canada is death down here.”138 More recently, the author Judith Thompson has remarked of writing for the stage, “I think that all of us as Canadian playwrights, as we write and hope for productions across the US, we unconsciously or semi-consciously adapt our own work and often remove – or have a conversation with ourselves about removing – specific cultural references, Canadian references … And yet I feel I’m betraying where I live, who I am, what this country is becoming, if I do erase those references.”139 With such concerns in view, quiet Canadianism clearly has strategic advantages. It allows writers to meet a domestic demand for distinctively Canadian content while avoiding the risk of seeming “too Canadian” in the eyes of audiences abroad. But another risk is that novels articulating nationalism covertly will give the impression that any manner of affection for Canada is, in literature, a shameful thing, a love that dare not speak its name, a thing that one can voice only with dog-whistles that reach and reassure those able to hear them but that do little to articulate, explore, or interrogate what might make Canadian nationalism meaningful. Such novels risk trading simplistically in the tropes of the new nationalism while failing to advance the new nationalist project of educating Canadians about the need for progressive Canadian polices. In fact, such novels risk articulating their nationalism so esoterically that no one even apprehends it as such. In that regard, it is notable that not a single reviewer of The Headmaster’s Wager – including reviewers in Canada – has commented on its evocations of Canada.

Conclusion WarBLED WARbled bpNichol, “Popular Song” We’re a different people from you and we’re a different people partly because of you. Pierre Trudeau1

By identifying war and bleeding in the word “warbled,” bpNichol recognizes in his 1973 poem that the popular discourse of his time was saturated by the Vietnam War. One way of reading the poem, which consists only of the word “warbled” repeated, is to see Nichol as sardonically deriding North American singers – and perhaps poets, whose works could also be considered “popular songs” – for blithely “warbling” about a terrible conflict from which they enjoyed a comfortable distance. But the title “Popular Song” likewise evokes the voices of the anti-war movement in general, and Nichol may well be expressing solidarity with that movement, not denigrating it. At the same time, the title evokes the American leaders and commentators who “warbled” in favour of the war while enjoying significant popular support, especially in the conflict’s early days, and whose pro-war position contributed to the bloodshed. By inviting these disparate interpretations, Nichol’s poem stands ironically as both an anti-war text and a critique of anti-war discourse; it is both a ludic poem that plays on words and a serious text in which the blood of war all but literally soaks through the page. This ironic character is something that “Popular Song” has in common with much Canadian literature of the Vietnam War era, which was liable to take an anti-war stance

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but also to express militant aggression toward America; liable to be preoccupied by the war but also to suggest that such a focus was a sign of Canada’s colonization by the United States. Indeed, war-era Canadian nationalism was often an ironic nationalism, describing Canadians as those who chose not to be American, even while recognizing that Canadians irrevocably shared many aspects of American identity. The Vietnam War years were freighted with ironies for Canadians, who were wont to see themselves as oppressors, yet victims, too; peaceable, yet part of the military-industrial complex; distant from the war, yet intimately connected to it. Eventually, irony would be identified as a defining element of Canadian identity. In fact, it was during the war itself that the phrase “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances” originated: it was the winning answer in a 1972 contest run by the c b c Radio program This Country in the Morning, after host Peter Gzowski asked listeners to propose a Canadian equivalent to the phrase “As American as apple pie.”2 The phrase’s spirit was abundantly evident throughout the war years, when the war itself was one of those circumstances, and such a compelling one that Canadian literature of the period was shot through with its concerns. Even when the war was not the explicit subject of focus, it appeared in texts in more intangible, sometimes fleeting ways – as a subtext, a touchstone, a haunting presence – whether the texts were imagining the Wild West or near-future US invasions of Canada. As those texts demonstrate, Canadian understandings of the Vietnam War were – and still are – almost inevitably comparative, examining the war in relation to other conflicts. It is often through such acts of comparison that people decide whether a war is just, whether it is being waged successfully, and what counts as success. This comparative approach is conspicuous in recent Canadian novels such as Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Perfecting and William Kowalski’s The Hundred Hearts, which – as was discussed in chapter 5 – suggest that the Vietnam War and the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are linked by the involvement of a reckless, thoroughly militarized America. The novels reflect a popular conception of the Vietnam War as a conflict that inaugurated a new era in American history marked by dubious, sometimes disastrous overseas military ventures orchestrated for the sake of protecting US interests while carried out under the pretence of liberating people from oppressive regimes. During the Vietnam War itself, however, Canadian writers were unlikely

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to treat the conflict as something entirely new. Instead, they identified antecedents both for the war and for Canadian resistance to America, whether pointing to the War of 1812 as evidence of Canada’s ability to defeat the United States in combat or invoking the Holocaust when accusing the US military of indiscriminate, racist slaughter in Vietnam. Canadian authors also used Vietnam as a foil to shed new light on previous conflicts, as when George Ryga’s play Compressions leveraged its audience’s anti-war feelings with respect to Vietnam in order to challenge conventional justifications of the Second World War. In the same way, as Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid presents a violent ­nineteenth-century American frontier that echoes both the Vietnam War and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the book makes it difficult for readers to maintain a cheerful, Hollywood-style satisfaction regarding how the West was won. For Canadian authors, the Vietnam War has never been meaningful just as the Vietnam War. From the beginning, they took it to be part of a pattern of American violence that reflected transhistorical facts about the United States and that had transhistorical implications for Canada. Canadian literature of the Vietnam War era serves as a reminder that conceptions of Canadian identity are frequently comparative, too, and that the foremost point of comparison has always been the United States. While that was the case even before the war began, attention to the c­ onflict gave Canadians new reasons to consider their affinities with Americans, their differences from them, and the case for preserving or augmenting those differences. The notion that Canadian identity is inexorably constituted, in no small part, through a sense of difference from the United States has consternated some commentators. For instance, historian J.L. Granatstein suggests that because Canadian nationalism has emphasized such a sense of difference, it is a feeble nationalism. “Only when Canadians begin to understand their land and their origins,” Granatstein claims, “will the Canadian identity become truly defined.”3 But Granatstein fails to appreciate the ways in which a differential nationalism can be productive and valuable, not just a form of compulsive anti-Americanism. The value of differential nationalism was evident during the Vietnam War, when Canadian nationalists used the example of US failures at home and abroad to articulate an ideal of Canada as comparatively progressive, not least in terms of the nation’s humanitarian orientation toward other

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countries. Recognizing that Canadians were uniquely and irrevocably tied to the United States by virtue of sharing a continent, nationalists nevertheless expressed a belief that a politically sovereign Canada could learn from America’s mistakes in order to constitute a fairer, more humane version of it. Such a nationalism, grounded in the possibility of a collective political commitment, is a more viable nationalism than that imagined by Granatstein, which would tie Canadians’ nationalism to “their land” and “their origins,” highly problematic concepts in a country that has a history of displacing Indigenous peoples from their territories and that is home to many recent immigrants. The Vietnam War produced a nationalism predicated not on looking back through the lens of some exclusionary, romanticized myth of beginnings but on looking sideways at the United States and looking forward to the possibility of a progressive North American alternative to it. At the same time, Canadian literature of the Vietnam War demonstrates that the Canada–US relationship has never been straightforwardly dyadic, never comprehensible simply by reference to the two countries alone. Rather, people have made sense of the relationship through triangulation. During the war, Vietnam was a conspicuous element in considerations of North America, and US relations with North Vietnam and South Vietnam became foils for America’s relationship to Canada. The war helped some Canadians to think of themselves as akin to the Vietnamese in being victims of US imperialism; simultaneously, the war provided a limit to Canadian nationalist rhetoric, insofar as it offered daily reminders that, whatever that rhetoric sometimes suggested, Canada was not literally on a war footing with the United States. As Canadians writers apprehended that their country was, instead, complicatedly bound up with the US war effort, they were also reminded that the Canada–US relationship was part of a broader nexus of international relations. An awareness of that fact is frequently evident in Canadian literature from the war era, which provides early examples of Canadian authors considering Canada’s place in a globalized world of complex, often morally murky political, economic, and cultural transactions. As I have argued, Canadian authors were quick to take up Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the “global village,” to situate Canada in that village, and to consider the relationship between the village – with its seemingly disembodied electronic glossiness – and the war-torn, body-strewn villages of

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Vietnam. The blurring of the borders between “here” and “there” also blurred the lines of identification for Canadians, who identified themselves with Americans as Westerners yet opposed themselves to the US war effort, and who were generally aligned against communism in the Cold War yet prone to identify with the communist Vietnamese in their struggle against an imperial oppressor. Insofar as Canadian identity had such a triangulating aspect that split Canadians’ lines of identification, the Vietnam War was further conducive to the development of an ironic Canadian sensibility. For many Canadian writers during the long sixties, protesting the war and articulating Canadian nationalism came to be congruent, even synonymous. For one thing, Canada’s non-involvement militarily in Vietnam became an important sign of Canada’s difference from the United States. But for most nationalists, that non-involvement was insufficient, especially given the ways in which Canadians were complicit in the war. Accordingly, the creation of a Canadian literature that was distinct from American literature came to seem doubly important. First, literature had the potential to articulate a distinctive Canadian character. Second, such literature could stand performatively as evidence of that character. Canadian authors who wrote about Canada while considering the war produced a literature that, as we have seen throughout this book, was marked by its critical view of violence and the United States; by its selfpositioning as freer than the news media to criticize the military-­ industrial apparatus; by its identification of mass-media images’ anti-war potential and of reasons to view the images skeptically; by its modelling of a humanitarian response to such images; and by its fantasies of Canada-US military conflict, which created a sense of urgency regarding the need for Canadians to embrace nationalist policies. Accordingly, Canadian discourse about the Vietnam War was seldom just about the war. In some cases, as I argued in chapter 1 with respect to Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Canadian literature that alluded to the conflict while treating issues such as Canadian nationalism risked instrumentalizing Vietnamese pain, evoking it principally to give Canadian nationalist concerns an added affective charge. But there were also good reasons why authors drew attention to the war when addressing other issues. Not least, the war and those other issues were often interconnected in important ways. For example, it is not just happenstance that

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certain writers linked the war to gender, some of them castigating Canadians for lacking the putative masculine assertiveness of the American and Vietnamese forces, while other writers condemned the US promotion and normalization of a militarized masculinity. That masculinity was not simply a metaphor for American dominance; it was an ideal that drew young men into the war and informed their behaviour while in uniform. The image of the courageous, muscular, noble American soldier also provided an emblem for the US war effort that helped to maintain popular support of the war. As time went on, reports of atrocities committed by American combatants undermined that image, while Canadian writers such as Atwood observed the ways in which a commitment to the image produced and implicitly condoned forms of violence inflicted both on the Vietnamese and on North American women, while texts such as Timothy Findley’s The Wars recognized the harm that martial masculinity did to men, as well. These texts also encouraged readers to appreciate the significance of the figurative language used to describe wars and nations. Such language is seldom merely ornamental. Rather, it functions to connect seemingly disparate issues and to extend the feelings that people have about one issue over to others. During the Vietnam War, discourse about the war foregrounded such matters as sex, gender, and mass media partly because authors sought to leverage readers’ affective relations to them in the process of cultivating readers’ feelings about the war and Canadian nationalism. At the same time, authors sought to leverage readers’ feelings about the war and Canadian nationalism in order to shape how those readers felt about sex, gender, and mass media. To take the example from chapter 4 of the Gay Liberation Front in Vancouver referring to its members as “gay Vietcong”: the appellation worked bidirectionally to influence how people thought about both the war and gay rights. On the one hand, references to gay Canadians as “Vietcong” encouraged people to see gay liberation groups as a puissant form of resistance to oppressive power. On the other hand, the term suggested that the Vietnamese fighters’ efforts were significant not simply in terms of Vietnam but in terms of political efforts elsewhere. In chapter 5, I argued that recent Canadian novels related to the Vietnam War have worked to remediate the failings of North American popular discourse about the conflict: for instance, by criticizing

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Canadians’ reductive preoccupation with the war’s significance for Canada. Yet contemporary Canadian novels have been reductive in a different way by generally ignoring issues that were prominent during the war: in particular, Canadian complicity in the conflict and Canadian resistance to US hegemony. The lack of attention to Canadian complicity – excepting Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things – is especially striking, given the prominent criticisms of Canada’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan, and given that those criticisms strongly echo critiques of Canada during the Vietnam War. As for representing Canadian resistance to US hegemony, the most that contemporary Canadian novels about the Vietnam War offer is a recurring picture of Canada as a peaceable destination for traumatized American veterans; there is little attention to political differences between Canada and the United States. The possible reasons for that lack of attention are many, from the increased scholarly criticisms of nationalism in past decades to the Canadian government’s abandonment of nationalist policies in favour of continentalist ones, as in the case of n a f t a , greater Canada-US cooperation on security issues, and the dismantling of the Foreign Investment Review Agency. If Canadian novels addressing the Vietnam War have not examined the shift from war-era nationalism to continentalism, it is perhaps because the novelists in question believe Canadian political nationalism is futile, unimportant, or even unattractive. As I argued in chapter 5, contemporary novelists have continued the war-era tradition of viewing the war as an expression of US imperialism and martial militarism, but they show little interest in exploring Canada’s potential as a North American political alternative to the United States. As these novels send their American veteran-protagonists north of the border, they depict Canada as a place symbolizing psycho-social alienation, not ideological difference. Were George Grant alive to consider such literature, no doubt he would see it as confirming his assertions during the Vietnam War that Canada had become American in all the ways that mattered and that any criticisms of the United States launched by Canadians were being made not by outsiders but by members of the empire. Contemporary Canadian novels about the Vietnam War also fail to reflect the ways in which most North Americans experienced the war via mass media. Indeed, recent novels’ focus on Vietnamese civilians and American veterans suffering from p t s d suggests a desire to tell stories of

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the war that television cameras and war photographers did not capture. In doing that remedial work, however, contemporary Canadian fiction has left behind the self-reflexive intermediality that was at the forefront in much war-era literature and that, as I argued in chapter 3, helped to give Canadian literature a distinctive character. Perhaps authors nowadays assume that North American readers possess the skepticism about mass media that war-era literature sought to foster. Regardless of the reason for the authors’ lack of attention to mediated wartime witnessing, a consequence is that there are few catalysts in recent novels for reflection on the relationship between media engagement, war, and national identity; little recognition of how the media have played a part in conditioning people into particular attitudes toward the Vietnam War and subsequent conflicts; little interest in how encounters with mass-media representations of the war helped Canadians to reconsider Canadian identity; little attention to how literature, by telling stories about the war that are different from those featured in US mass media, might have a special cultural value and a special value for Canadians. Since the US withdrawal of its last combat troops from Iraq in 2011 and the withdrawal of the last Canadian combatants from Afghanistan in 2014, North American headlines about Iraq and Afghanistan have dwindled, and it may turn out that the number of Canadian novels about the Vietnam War falls accordingly. Yet as the Vietnamese-American novelist and critic Viet Thanh Nguyen observes, the Vietnam War continues to live in American discourse because there is still no consensus in the United States about how to understand the conflict. “Americans,” Nguyen writes, “cannot awaken from this war’s history, which Americans continue to evoke whenever the United States again ventures abroad.”4 It has been one of my key contentions in this book that Canadian identity is dialectically connected to Canadians’ perceptions of America and what is going on there. Consequently, as long as the Vietnam War continues to provoke the American consciousness, it will have a place in Canadians’ minds, too, and it is almost certain to persist in Canadian literature. Because understandings of any war are comparative, further conflicts involving the United States – as well as ones involving Canada – are sure to spur new perceptions and new literary narratives of the Vietnam War, and the war is bound to be instrumentalized in new ways. Because the conflict was, from the beginning, a highly ironic one for Canadians,

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signifying both complicity and resistance, registering as both immediate and distant, fostering sympathy and revulsion with respect to both sides, evoking a peaceable kingdom that was also a manufacturer of materiel, it is a war with slippery meanings that refuses a neat consensus about its significance, while it supplies material for a range of political arguments. As a consequence, it will continue to be Canada’s war for a long time.

Notes

introduction

 1 Maclear, Guerrilla Nation, 18. Throughout this book, because my subject is Canadian writing about the Vietnam War, not the war itself, I follow the convention in that writing of referring to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as “North Vietnam” and to the Republic of Vietnam as “South Vietnam.” I also follow the prevailing English-language conventions of spelling Vietnamese place-names as multisyllabic words – e.g., “Vietnam” rather than “Viet Nam” – and of presenting Vietnamese names without diacritics. I make an exception regarding names that appear with diacritics in the texts I examine: e.g., when discussing Kim Thúy’s novel Mãn in chapter 5.   2 Although some people use the term draft dodger as a pejorative, I follow those who use it as a non-judgmental descriptor of those who left the United States during the Vietnam War to avoid the draft. Draft dodger is more precise than the most common alternative term, draft resister, which – because it does not imply geographical movement – could be taken equally to describe people who resisted the draft in various ways without leaving the United States.   3 Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 222.   4 For discussions of the new nationalism, see Azzi, “Foreign Investment and the Paradox of Economic Nationalism”; Azzi, “Nationalist Moment in English Canada”; Azzi, Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism; and Palmer, Canada’s 1960s.   5 That difference in names is significant, serving as a reminder that the US military involvement in Vietnam was only one period in a broader history of conflict for the Vietnamese that began with the 1946–54 anti-colonial revolution

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against France and was followed in 1955 by the advent of war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Thus, to speak of “the Vietnam War” when referring only to the years of US involvement risks privileging an American perspective. It also risks eliding the fact that Cambodia and Laos were part of the war, too, to say nothing of the fact that Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand fought alongside the United States. I refer to “the Vietnam War” throughout this book because that term was and remains the most common Canadian one for the conflict, and Canadians’ mediated engagements with the war are my principal focus.   6 Renzetti, “Welcome to Canada, Americans!”   7 For scholarship on draft dodgers and the anti-draft movement, see Churchill, “Ambiguous Welcome”; Churchill, “American Expatriates”; Churchill “Draft Resisters”; Dickerson, North to Canada; Hagan, “Class and Crime in WarTime”; Hagan, Northern Passage; Haig-Brown, Hell No, We Won’t Go; Joseph Jones, Contending Statistics; Kusch, All American Boys; Rodgers, Welcome to Resisterville; Squires, Building Sanctuary; and Squires, “Very Major Wheel.” For discussions of intergovernmental relations, see Levant, Quiet Complicity; Muirhead, Dancing around the Elephant; Preston, “Balancing War and Peace”; and Ross, In the Interests of Peace.   8 See Campbell, Clément, and Kealey, Debating Dissent; Early, “Canadian Women and the International Arena”; Henderson, Making the Scene; Mills, Empire Within; Palaeologu, Sixties in Canada; Palmer, Canada’s 1960s; and Vipond, “Civil Rights Movement Comes to Winnipeg.” For a discussion of the “long sixties” as an object of study, see Campbell and Clément, “Time, Age, Myth,” 6.   9 Exceptions include Rachel Adams, who has done valuable work in examining the figure of the draft dodger in fiction; and Edwardson, who has attended to anti-American elements of war-era Canadian literature and music. See Adams, “‘Going to Canada’”; Edwardson, Canadian Content; Edwardson, “Kicking Uncle Sam Out”; and Edwardson, “‘War Machines and Ghetto Scenes.’” 10 Ruddy, “How to Become an American Without Really Trying,” 60. 11 Atwood, Survival, 18. 12 Although I occasionally discuss texts that appeared in regional newspapers and in literary journals, I have not conducted a comprehensive survey of such publications, instead focusing on texts that had a greater chance of finding a sizeable national readership. 13 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities.



Notes to pages 7–16

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14 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. 15 R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 16 McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 101. 17 Resnick, Land of Cain, 143. 18 Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History, 405. 19 Scott, “National Identity.” 20 Grant, Lament for a Nation, lxix. 21 See Ziedenberg, “Canada’s Vietnam Legacy,” 24–5. 22 Martell, “What Can I Do Right Now?,” 294. 23 Azzi, Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism, 246n3, 167. 24 Ford, “Remarks on Taking the Oath of Office,” 2. 25 Here and throughout, I use the term Vietnamese communist forces to refer collectively to the People’s Army of Vietnam (the regular army of North Vietnam) and to its ally the National Liberation Front (also known by Westerners as the Viet Cong), which operated primarily in South Vietnam. That said, it is important to acknowledge that although the US government sought to cast the war simplistically as a battle against communism, many Vietnamese fighting under the communist banner were motivated more by a desire for a reunified, decolonized Vietnam than by communist ideology. 26 Frye, “Conclusion,” 251. Ironically, Frye borrowed the phrase from the title of a series of paintings by an American artist, Edward Hicks. For further discussion of this phrase’s influence, see chapter 3. 27 Horowitz, “On the Fear of Nationalism,” 7–8. The Great Society was an expansive program of social-welfare initiatives introduced by US President Lyndon B. Johnson. He articulated his goals for the program in a 1964 speech, declaring, “We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.” 28 Caplan and Laxer, “Perspectives on Un-American Traditions in Canada,” 309. 29 Quoted in Steed, Ed Broadbent, 73. 30 P.C. Newman, “Our American Godfather,” 25. 31 Kilbourn, Introduction to Canada, xii. 32 Atwood, Surfacing, 201. 33 Levitt, Silent Surrender, 34. 34 Katzenstein and Keohane, “Varieties of Anti-Americanism,” 12. 35 Robertson, “Confessions of a Canadian Chauvinist Pig.” 36 Grant, Technology and Empire, 64, 74. 37 Quoted in Moffat, History of the Canadian Peace Movement until 1969, 165.

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38 Warnock, Partner to Behemoth, 247–8. 39 Stewart, “Forgotten Children,” 4. 40 Lee, “Children in Nathan Phillips Square,” 146. In the same anthology, Farley Mowat declared in “Letter to My Son,” “Observe, if you dare, the fantastic and fearful similarities between the way the United States is behaving in [Vietnam] and the way Hitler behaved in his heyday” (4). Likewise, Grant wrote in “From Roosevelt to l b j ,” in the same volume, “At least we did not see Auschwitz till it was over, and anyway it was not English-speaking people who were doing it” (38). The next year, the titular speaker in Tom Wayman’s poem “The Dow Recruiter,” an employee of the chemical company that made napalm for use in Vietnam, would describe anti-war youth “playing tricks on me, by / telling me their name is Eichmann, or / they’re really interested in our / gas project – the one for Zyklon-B” (111). 41 Birney, “I Accuse Us,” n.p. 42 Ibid., n.p. 43 Stewart, “Forgotten Children,” 4. 44 Cardinal, Unjust Society, 3. 45 Purdy, “Peaceable Kingdom,” 105–6. 46 Birney, “Canada: Case History: 1973.” 47 Birney, “Can. Lit.” 48 Here and throughout, I use the term the former Indochina to refer to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, which gained political independence from France in 1954, while I use Southeast Asia to refer to the region more broadly. Notably, although Canadian commentators during the war did sometimes refer to Cambodia and Laos, an overwhelming majority of the Canadian writing about the area during the war focused on Vietnam, as has most subsequent Canadian literature dealing with the region during that period. 49 Stephen Azzi also attributes the new nationalism’s decline in the later 1970s to the aging of the baby boomers, who had been among the movement’s leaders but who, “once they held mortgages and children to support, became much less willing to take economic risks, either with their personal finances or in how they voted,” especially when the Canadian economy began to flag. See Azzi, “Foreign Investment and the Paradox of Economic Nationalism,” 78. 50 The list was spread over two issues: see “A 460 Year-Long List” and “The Second Fifty.” 51 Davey, From There to Here, 18. 52 Atwood, Survival, 31–2, 35.



Notes to pages 22–4

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53 Musical examples include Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier”; Mitchell’s “The Fiddle and the Drum”; The Guess Who’s “American Woman”; Young’s “Ohio,” first released as a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young single; and Lightfoot’s “Summer Side of Life.” For examples of visual art, see Breeze’s Homeviewer #1; Chambers’s Hybrid; and Wieland’s Rat Life and Diet in North America. Curnoe’s 1968 mural at the Dorval Airport in Montreal, which featured a likeness of Lyndon Johnson dropping bombs from an airplane, was removed after US customs officers objected to it. 54 Edwardson, “Kicking Uncle Sam Out,” 138. 55 For an account of this period, see MacSkimming, Perilous Trade, 184. Meanwhile, note that here and throughout, I use the term war immigrants to refer to Americans who moved to Canada in response to the Vietnam War, whether they were deserters, draft dodgers, accompanying a deserter or draft dodger, or simply opposed to the war. I take war immigrant to be a more precise term than, say, war resister, which applies equally well to Americans who remained in the United States and dissented in other ways. Although the term immigrant may seem presumptuous with respect to the question of whether the people in question stayed in Canada after the war’s end, it has been estimated that no more than 15 per cent of draft dodgers returned to the United States for good, even once they were offered a full amnesty in 1977. See Granatstein, Yankee Go Home?, 191. 56 Azzi points out that another book titled The New Romans, written by one John Keats, was published in the United States a year before Purdy’s volume appeared. See Azzi, “Nationalist Moment in English Canada,” 329n16. 57 Those who did so included Henry Beissel, bill bissett, George Bowering, Hugh Garner, Dave Godfrey, Cy Gonick, George Grant, David Helwig, George Jonas, Lionel Kearns, Laurier LaPierre, Margaret Laurence, Dennis Lee, Barry Lord, Jack Ludwig, Edward McCourt, James M. Minifie, Farley Mowat, Alden Nowlan, Michael Ondaatje, Desmond Pacey, Mordecai Richler, Ray Smith, Raymond Souster, Peter Stevens, John W. Warnock, Phyllis Webb, George Woodcock, and Larry Zolf. 58 Purdy, introduction to The New Romans, i. 59 McFadden, “For Dwight D. Eisenhower on His Death.” 60 The more prominent figures include literary critics Donna Bennett and Russell Brown, who have edited several editions of Oxford University Press’s popular Canadian literature anthology; writer Clark Blaise, founder of Sir George Williams University’s Creative Writing program in the late 1960s; Governor

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General’s Award–winning poet E.D. Blodgett; literary agent Denise Bukowski; Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, a poet laureate of Toronto; Trillium Prize–winning writer Mark Frutkin; bestselling science-fiction writer William Gibson; urban planning guru Jane Jacobs; Ethel Wilson Prize–winner Keith Maillard; literary journalist Philip Marchand; Grain editor and Tommy Douglas biographer Dave Margoshes; Eugene McNamara, who founded University of Windsor Review in 1966; science fiction writer and Rochdale College organizer Judith Merril; Jearld Moldenhauer, who opened Glad Day Bookstore, Canada’s first bookstore serving the gay community, in 1970, and the next year founded the Body Politic, one of Canada’s first gay periodicals; Griffin Prize–winning poet A.F. Moritz; Joyce Carol Oates, who co-founded Ontario Review in 1974 and wrote about war immigrants in her 1976 story collection, Crossing the Border; Lieutenant Governor’s Award–winning writer Stan Persky; writer, editor, and publisher James Polk; Don Rubin, founder of the nationalist Canadian Theatre Review in 1974; Governor General’s Award–winning translator Fred A. Reed; novelist Mark Satin, who cofounded the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and wrote the first edition of Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada; A.M. Klein Award–winning poet Norm Sibum; writer and York University professor Richard Teleky; Fiddlehead editor Kent Thompson; journalist, memoirist, and novelist Jack Todd; and J. Michael Yates, who co-founded Canadian Fiction Magazine in 1971. This list necessarily leaves out not only other writers but also hundreds, if not thousands, of other US war immigrants who were highly educated, civically engaged, and keen on contributing to the cultural life of their new home, thus enlarging and transforming the national literary scene. 61 Atwood, Journals of Susanna Moodie, 62. 62 Atwood’s identification of survival as the principal theme of Canadian literature followed similar identifications by other war-era critics. For instance, the title of a 1969 essay by George Woodcock on Canadian literature of the 1960s was “Getting Away with Survival.” In the introduction to the 1970 book Canada: A Guide to the Peaceable Kingdom, William Kilbourn wrote of Canadians, “Images of survival abound in our popular mythologies” (xiv). And in the same year, Cy Gonick observed, “Survival has been an historical obsession in Canada – although concern has shifted from sheer physical survival to one of halting the cultural and economic absorption of Canada into the United States.” See “Foreign Ownership and Political Decay,” 44. 63 Wayman, “There’s a Kind of Hush.” Here and throughout, when discussing lyric poems in which the speaker’s gender is indeterminate and the poem does



Notes to pages 27–41

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not discourage the reader from identifying the speaker with the poet, for the sake of stylistic convenience I treat the speaker as sharing the poet’s gender. 64 Bowering, At War with the U.S., 24. 65 Azzi, “Foreign Investment and the Paradox of Economic Nationalism,” 76. 66 bissett, “l o v e o f l i f e , th 49th p a r a l l e l ,” 65. Such a view might seem so extreme as to signal bissett’s ironic distance from his speaker, but the poem’s conclusion suggests that the author shares the speaker’s concerns. The poem ends with the note, “(written end of april / 70,2 days befor th united states invaded / cambodia declaring war against th world)” (69). 67 Bowering, “Confessions of a Failed American,” 79. chapter one   1

Quoted in Granatstein, Yankee Go Home?, 259. Quoted in “Wakey, Wakey.”   3 Scarry, Body in Pain, 14.   4 McGill, “Somatic Nationalism and Spectacle in Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising,” 214.   5 Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 120.   6 Bauer, “Nation,” 63.   7 There are several such cartoons in J.W. Bengough’s 1886 collection of his work, Caricature History of Canadian Politics.   8 Lower, “United States through Canadian Eyes,” 111.   9 MacLennan, “Canadian Character,” 5. “The Psychology of Canadian Nationalism” was reprinted as “The Canadian Character” in MacLennan’s 1949 book, Cross-Country. 10 Brown, “Search for America,” 678. 11 MacLennan, Precipice, 348–9. 12 Scarry, Body in Pain, 71. 13 In one instance, Grant cites the fact that John Diefenbaker’s secretary of state for external affairs, Howard Green, “publicly questioned American actions around the world, not only in Laos and Vietnam,” as an example of the Diefenbaker government’s naïve assumption that the United States would ­tolerate substantial Canadian political difference (28). Later, Grant alludes to North Vietnam along with other communist countries when noting the continentalist argument that Canada should “be part of a tightly unified empire” due to “the hostile forces of Asia” (50).   2

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14 Connell and Messerschmidt, in “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 832, describe hegemonic masculinity as a set of practices and expectations that entrench patriarchy and that are normalized through “culture, institutions, and persuasion.” They also note that models of hegemonic masculinity need not “correspond closely to the lives of any actual men”; instead, those models “express widespread ideals, fantasies, and desires” (838). 15 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 52. 16 Ibid., 43–4. 17 Ibid., 91n36. 18 Ibid., 92. 19 Ibid., 9, 74, 33. 20 Ibid., 3. 21 Ibid., 29, 33. 22 Ibid., 61, 50. 23 Tickner, Gender in International Relations, 39. 24 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 32. Responding to the threat of nuclear war between the United States and the u s s r, the Voice of Women (v o w ) began as a peace group in Toronto in the summer of 1960. By the end of 1961, there were thirty-five branches representing every Canadian province. Among its anti-war activities, v o w sent a leader to North Vietnam to report on the war, it participated in a project of knitting for Vietnamese children, and it arranged for Vietnamese women and North American peace activists to meet in Canada. In May 1965, a v o w delegation in Ottawa called on the Canadian government to speak out against US actions in Vietnam. 25 Ibid., 56. Lest one think Grant is evoking only pedophilia here, not homosexuality, note that he says “boys” rather than “girls” or “children.” In a later book, Technology and Empire (1969), Grant derides liberalism’s acceptance of private difference with a similar line that less ambiguously references homosexuality, gesturing to a society in which “some like pizza. Some like steaks; some like girls, some like boys” (26). 26 For a discussion of “homosexual panic,” see Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 19–21. 27 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 92. 28 Grant, Technology and Empire, 37, 77. 29 For a discussion of how women’s roles in the anti-war movement have generally been marginalized by historiography, see L. Campbell, “‘Women United against the War,’” 345.



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30 Holmes, “Nationalism in Canadian Foreign Policy,” 207. 31 Mowat, “Farley Mowat Speaks Out on Vietnam,” 32. 32 Mowat, “Letter to My Son,” 3. 33 Ludwig, “Why We Should Not Desert Sovereignty.” 34 Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, 44. 35 Quoted in P.C. Newman, “Despite the Budget, Gordon Is Still an Economic Nationalist,” 5. 36 Hutchison, “Is Canada Worth Saving?,” 83. 37 Comor, “American t v ,” 6. 38 Birney, “Way to the West,” 51. 39 Ibid., 52. 40 Mathews, “Centennial Song,” 17. 41 Slappey, “Free Trade.” 42 Warnock, Partner to Behemoth, 23. 43 Holmes, “Lines Written for a Canadian-American Conference,” 94. 44 C. Newman, “Left with Ourselves.” 45 Quoted in Owram, Born at the Right Time, 272. 46 C.L. Campbell, “Canadian Dream,” 35. 47 Ibid., 36. 48 Harvor, “Day at the Front,” 114. 49 Ibid., 125. 50 Smith, “Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Center of Canada,” 18–19. Curiously, the line appears neither in the original version of the story published in the Tamarack Review in 1967 nor in the version headlining Smith’s 1969 story collection, Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada, nor does it appear in the 2006 edition of the collection. It is tempting to infer that Smith removed the line because he grew concerned about the line’s homophobic quality. 51 Warner, Never Going Back, 46. 52 Knelman, “Anti-Nation and Canadian Identity,” 20. 53 Birney, “I Accuse Us,” n.p. 54 Atwood, Surfacing, 3. 55 Ibid., 100. 56 Ibid., 158. 57 Leger, “v d on the Increase.” 58 Doyle, “Medics Losing Battle with v d in Far East.” 59 D. Anderson, “v d Clinic Doctors Pay for Drugs.”

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60 Atwood, Surfacing, 156. 61 Ibid., 123. 62 Ibid., 203. 63 In chapter 3, I discuss Atwood’s evocations of the war in her 1968 poem “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” and her 1970 poem “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier.” One might also recognize the war as playing a part in Atwood’s characterization of the United States in her poem “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,” which was published in The New Romans. 64 Fiamengo, “Postcolonial Guilt in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing,” 142. 65 Atwood, Surfacing, 35. 66 Ibid., 95. 67 Ibid., 5. 68 Ibid., 125; Broege, “Margaret Atwood’s Americans and Canadians,” 124. 69 Atwood, Surfacing, 141, 154. 70 Ibid., 201. 71 Ibid., 135. 72 Ibid., 135, 196. 73 Ibid., 47, 201. 74 Ibid., 136. 75 Ibid., 90. 76 Grant, Technology and Empire, 74. 77 Ibid., 76. 78 Atwood, Surfacing, 160, 195. 79 Ibid., 14. 80 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 74. 81 Grant, Technology and Empire, 17. 82 Atwood, Surfacing, 201, 205. 83 Cappon, introduction to In Our Own House, 50. 84 Atwood, Survival, 38. 85 Grant, Technology and Empire, 77. 86 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 95n38. 87 Atwood, Surfacing, 179. 88 Ibid., 204. 89 Ibid. 90 Kilbourn, “Some Feelings about the United States,” 57. 91 Gault, “‘Not Even a Hospital,’” 21. 92 Grant, Technology and Empire, 73.



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93 Swan, Biggest Modern Woman of the World, 274. 94 Weir, “Toward a Feminist Hermeneutics,” 68. 95 Gwyn, Nationalism without Walls, 49. chapter two   1 Atwood,

Surfacing, 201.   2 Atwood, Survival, 37   3 Atwood, Surfacing, 203.   4 Atwood, Survival, 38.   5 See Owram, Born at the Right Time, 239.   6 Goodman, Moral Ambiguity of America, 75.   7 McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, 140.   8 Ontario Association for Curriculum Development, Reconciliation of Means and Ends in Education, 45.   9 Lowther, “Lullaby Not to Be Sung,” n.p. 10 Quoted in Verzuh, Underground Times, 169. 11 P. Lane, Mountain Oysters, n.p. 12 Rubin, “Theatre,” 92. 13 Lord, History of Painting in Canada, 9. 14 Steele and Mathews, “Universities,” 177. 15 Cormier, Canadianization Movement, 37. 16 Smith, “Ray Smith’s Canada,” 44. 17 Fulford, “Care and Feeding of Canadian Paranoia,” 7. 18 Purdy, “Homo Canadensis,” 95. 19 Ibid., 94. 20 Lee, “Children in Nathan Phillips Square,” 145. 21 Mowat, “Maclean’s Interviews,” 64. 22 Kilbourn, “Some Feelings about the United States,” 55. 23 Stewart, “Water,” 42. 24 Boyle, “Continental Refusal / Refus Continental,” n.p. 25 Watkins, “Getting to Democratic Socialism 4,” 134. 26 MacDonald, “New Mercantilism,” 137. 27 Ward, “Where but in Usania,” 4–5. 28 McCourt, “Ed McCourt’s Canada,” 42. 29 Acorn, “What Are the Odds?,” 102. 30 Mathews, “Ballad of Peter Trudeau,” 103.

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Notes to pages 79–88

31 Royal Commission on Book Publishing, Canadian Publishers & Canadian Publishing, 49. 32 Fulford, “Care and Feeding of Canadian Paranoia,” 7. 33 Laxer, Energy Poker Game, 2. 34 See Rohmer, Arctic Imperative, 51. 35 Ibid., 45–6. 36 Stewart, “Week of the Great Ultimatum,” 19. 37 Rohmer, Ultimatum, 104–5. 38 Ibid., 23. 39 Quoted in Sagi, “Idea-Man Rohmer Set to Tackle New Horizons.” 40 Rohmer, Ultimatum, 189. 41 Ibid., 231. 42 Ibid., 232. 43 Ibid., 173. 44 Ibid., 10. 45 Ibid., 122. The novel’s masculinism gains a weirdly self-reflexive dimension with the introduction of the prime minister’s close friend, a senator named John Thomas, who stays alongside Porter during key meetings to provide counsel. It is possible that Rohmer is borrowing the senator’s name from that of a US general during the American War of Independence who oversaw the US retreat from Quebec after the failed invasion of Canada. However, as Porter repeatedly – and with little evident contribution to the plot – introduces people to John Thomas, one wonders whether Rohmer knows that “John Thomas” is a slang term for the penis, in which case he may be making a self-conscious joke about his novel’s thoroughgoing endorsement of hegemonic masculinity. 46 Cook, Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism, 128. 47 Woods, “Cultural Approach to Canadian Independence,” 94. 48 Broege, “War with the United States in Canadian Literature and Visual Arts,” 35. 49 Rohmer, Exxoneration, 302. 50 Smith, “Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Center of Canada,” 52. 51 Mowat, “Letter to My Son,” 2–3. 52 Smith, “Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Center of Canada,” 75. 53 Sugars, “Worlding the (Postcolonial) Nation,” 38. 54 Starowicz, “Canadian Plan to Attack the United States,” 28. 55 Ibid., 31. 56 Acorn, “What Are the Odds?,” 95.



Notes to pages 89–100

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57 Powe, Killing Ground, 326. 58 It bears noting that all of the war-era novels imagining US invasions of Canada were marketed as thrillers, not literary fiction. Observing this fact in 1974, Robin Mathews argued that “real novelists” in Canada had not addressed such subject matter because they were part of a comprador class that had embraced “the sensitivity and art of the U.S.A.” and that did not “look fondly upon works concerned with the fight for cultural and political independence.” See Mathews, “Facing up to a Military Occupation of Canada,” 28. However, it is just as likely that authors of literary novels shied from writing about hypothetical Canada-US conflict for generic reasons as much as ideological ones, given that literary fiction of the day generally did not trade in such speculative scenarios. It would have been an enormous gamble for a literary author to devote months or years to writing a novel associated with genre fiction, risking not only the book’s commercial failure but also the author’s reputation as a “serious” writer. 59 I. Adams, Trudeau Papers, 8. 60 Ibid., 26. 61 Ibid., 8. 62 Ibid., 47. 63 Ibid., 84. 64 Ibid., 92. 65 Ibid., 81. 66 P.C. Newman, “View from Here.” 67 Atwood, “Amnesty International,” 395. 68 Rudmin, Bordering on Aggression, 9. 69 Roberts, Discrepant Parallels, 229. 70 Longworth, Kalensky, and Stanleigh, u s n a , 101. 71 Danson, Faultline 49, 138. 72 One might see Mackinnon’s use of a pseudonym as a further homage to Powe, given that he also used one. 73 Danson, Faultline 49, 200. 74 Ibid., 138. 75 Ryga, “Author’s Program Notes.” 76 Ryga, “Story Outline,” 171, 170. 77 Ibid., 171. 78 Ibid., 172. 79 Ryga, “Interview with George Ryga,” 116.

264   80

Notes to pages 100–10

Here and subsequently, I quote from the recorded, broadcasted version of Just an Ordinary Person.   81 Ryga, Just an Ordinary Person, 29, original ellipsis.   82 Innes, Politics and the Playwright, 76.   83 See ibid., 77; and Superstar, “Culture-Creator.”   84 Ryga, Grass and Wild Strawberries, 73–4.   85 Ibid., 101.   86 Ibid., 74.   87 Ibid., 76, 75.   88 Ibid., 76.   89 Ibid., 105.   90 Ibid., 89.   91 Ibid., 90.   92 Ibid., 100.   93 Hoffman, introduction to Compressions, 107.   94 Ryga, Compressions, 109.   95 Ibid., 119.   96 Ibid., 110.   97 Ibid., 114.   98 Ibid., 122.   99 Ibid., 122–3. 100 Ibid., 123, 119. 101 Ibid., 118. 102 Ibid., 113. 103 At one point, for instance, Larry declares, “It is embarrassing and stupid to be affected by Romeo and Juliet. Eldridge Cleaver writes the literature of n o w ” (122). Given the depiction of Larry’s revolutionary tendencies as wrongheaded, it is unlikely that Ryga means for audience members to agree with this assessment of Shakespeare’s play. 104 In 1974, for example, Ryga complained that “there is no Canadian theatre I know of. There is a lot of transplanted English and American theatre of illusion.” See Ryga, “Theatre in Canada,” 195. 105 Ryga, Compressions, 111, 123. 106 Ryga, “Theatre in Canada,” 199. 107 I have yet to discover any evidence that Ryga was familiar with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which I discuss in the next chapter, but it is tempting to think that Ryga’s depiction of Sandy was



Notes to pages 111–14

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influenced by it. Like Ondaatje’s Billy, Sandy is subject to hallucinations in which bodies become grossly distorted, as when he goes to a veterans’ bureau in Tulsa and watches two workers there begin “distend[ing] before his eyes, their nostrils flaring like those of two startled brood mares, their bodies swelling and breaking open their tunics and blouses” (50). Sandy is also like Ondaatje’s Billy in having been effectively automatized by his experiences of violence; at one point, he is referred to as a “mechanical man capable only of mechanical thought and motion” (22). And like Ondaatje’s Billy, Sandy twice crosses the border into Canada while going on to commit crimes and becoming a wanted man. If one takes these parallels to be intentional, then one might read In the Shadow of the Vulture as insinuating what I argue in chapter 3: that Ondaatje’s representation of Billy the Kid pointedly evokes the figure of the Vietnam War veteran. 108 The closest thing Ryga wrote to a story of Canada-US conflict was a half-hour teleplay, “Kamloops Incident,” produced in 1967 for Where the Action Was, a c b c Vancouver program about events in b c history. Based on a true story from the period before b c joined Confederation, the teleplay features a British magistrate in the Osoyoos Valley who intervenes when a group of American cattle drivers attempt to hang an accused thief. The men promptly – and surprisingly, if the viewer is expecting a Hollywood-style shootout – heed the magistrate when he insists that the hanging must not be carried out because he will not “allow American frontier justice to be exercised in British territory.” This affirmation of the rule of law rehearses the Vietnam War–era myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom while, in keeping with the times, indicting a US proclivity for violence in the name of righteous action. 109 Ryga, In the Shadow of the Vulture, 51. 110 Ibid., 48. chapter three    1   

2 3     4     5   

Grant, Lament for a Nation, 41. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 4. Such a concern was by no means new. In 1887, for instance, novelist Sara Jeannette Duncan worried about the proliferation of US publications in Canada: “Once Canadian minds are thoroughly impregnated with American

266



Notes to pages 114–19

matter, American methods, in their own work, will not be hard to trace.” See Duncan, “American Influence on Canadian Thought,” 381. In 1951, the Massey Report claimed that “a vast and disproportionate amount of material coming from a single alien source may stifle rather than stimulate our own creative effort; and, passively accepted without any standard of comparison, this may weaken critical faculties” (18). The report went on to suggest, “Our military defences must be made secure; but our cultural defences equally demand national attention; the two cannot be separated” (275). In 1961, the report of the Royal Commission on Publications, also known as the O’Leary Report, followed suit in adopting a militarist rhetoric regarding the threat of US media to Canada, insisting, “The communications of a nation are as vital to its life as its defences, and should receive at least as great a measure of national protection” (4).   6 Quoted in Peers, “Oh Say, Can You See?,” 136.   7 Black, “Current Comment,” 100. A 1980 study of c b c television coverage of the war found that Black’s complaint largely held true for the whole of the war in Vietnam, with coverage often “parroting the line taken by most American correspondents about the morality and progress of the war.” See Trueman, Smoke and Mirrors, 17.   8 Goodman, Moral Ambiguity of America, 75, 14.   9 Ibid., 4. 10 Watkins, “Technology and Nationalism,” 298. 11 McLuhan, “Canada,” 247. 12 Hutcheon, Canadian Postmodern, 11. 13 Ibid., 108. 14 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, xxiv. 15 Bowering, “Stab,” 73. 16 Ibid., 74. 17 Kilbourn, Introduction, xv. 18 Atwood’s ascription of paranoid schizophrenia to Canada in 1970 was not the first such diagnosis; over two decades earlier, Earle Birney had made the same one in his poem “Canada: Case History: 1945.” 19 Hutcheon, Canadian Postmodern, 11. 20 Ibid., 46. 21 Ibid. 22 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, para. 4. 23 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 12.



Notes to pages 119–29

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24 Sontag, for her part, would claim in On Photography that photographs are “a tool of power” (8). 25 In using the term intermedial, I share the common critical understanding of intermediality as involving, in Irina O. Rajewsky’s words, “relations between media.” See “Border Talks,” 51. These relations can range widely. Ekphrasis, for instance, participates in two kinds of intermediality that Rajewsky identifies: first, it offers “intermedial references,” insofar as it gestures to a “source” text in another medium; second, it involves “medial transposition,” insofar as it usually involves representing non-linguistic elements of the “source” text in words (55). 26 Howell, “Nightmare.” 27 Hayes, “Take What We Can.” 28 Fischer, Museum Mediations, 3. 29 The poem was previously published in Memory No Servant (1968), where it is dated simply “1964.” It is this version of the poem that I quote. 30 Birney, “Looking from Oregon.” 31 Ibid. 32 Purdy, “News Reports at Ameliasburg,” 70. 33 Ibid., 71. 34 Isaiah 11:6. 35 Purdy, “News Reports at Ameliasburg,” 71. 36 The time of the story’s writing is identified in Stein’s 1978 book, City Boys, in which the story was reprinted. I quote the story as it first appeared in Saturday Night. 37 Stein, “The Night of the Little Brown Men,” 29. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 31. 40 Reid, “Saturna Island as Vietnam,” 146. 41 Ibid. 42 Bowering, “News.” 43 Atwood, “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” 30. 44 Grant, Lament for a Nation, 95n38. As noted in chapter 1, Atwood would eventually parody this quotation in Surfacing, too. 45 Ibid., 94. 46 Atwood, “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” 30. 47 Ibid., 31. 48 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 4.

268

Notes to pages 129–45

49 Atwood, “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” 31. 50 A popular joke points to the way in which such awareness-raising rhetoric can be ironically taken to suggest magical thinking. As the joke goes, the musician Bono starts clapping his hands slowly while onstage at a concert, then announces, “Every time I clap my hands, a child dies of hunger.” Someone in the crowd calls out in response, “Then stop clapping your hands!” 51 Wayman, “Dow Recruiter.” 52 Stevens, “Warming Up, Tuning In.” 53 Quoted in Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin, 149. 54 Stevens, “Warming Up, Tuning In.” 55 Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” 177. 56 McNamara, “Decency Is the Final Trip,” 119. 57 In her book Narcissistic Narrative, Hutcheon identifies an attention to the reading process along with the writing process as one thing distinguishing postmodern metafiction from its antecedents (27). 58 Lowther, “Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi.” 59 S.S.H. Chong, Oriental Obscene, 12. 60 D. Coleman, White Civility, 5. 61 See Clarridge, “Why They Are Not Painters,” 95. 62 “Burn, Baby, Burn.” 63 Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 14. 64 Pepper, “So Great Is the Pain,” 9. 65 Ibid. 66 Laurence, “Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass,” 35–6. 67 Ibid., 36. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 37. 70 Atwood, “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier.” 71 Contemporary scholarship addressing mainstream US mass-media coverage of the Vietnam War confirms that the concerns were well founded; historians have determined that prior to the Tet Offensive of 1968, in particular, little ­coverage was clearly antagonistic to the US position. See Wade, “‘Degree of Disillusion,’” 20. 72 McReynolds, “Why the Americans Should Get Out of Vietnam,” 19. 73 Ibid., 20. 74 Mowat, “Farley Mowat Speaks Out,” 31. 75 Bowering, “Even Los Angeles.”

  76

Notes to pages 147–56

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Bowering, “Late News.” In fact, the Time “man” of the year in 1966 was “the inheritor”: that is, the generation of Americans under twenty-five years of age. Ironically enough, given Bowering’s invented man of the year, this same group was the American generation most at risk of dying in Vietnam.   78 Hollander, Gazer’s Spirit, 4.   79 Hutcheon, Canadian Postmodern, 3.   80 Ibid., 175.   81 Ibid., 42.   82 Ibid., 162.   83 I allude here to Hutcheon’s influential definition of parody in A Theory of Parody as “repetition with ironic critical distance” (xii).   84 Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 27.   85 Mandel, “Michael Ondaatje,” 276.   86 Bradley, “English-Canadian Poetry from 1967 to the Present,” 362.   87 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 17, 88.   88 Purdy, Introduction to The New Romans, ii.   89 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 1.   90 Clarke observes that Ondaatje’s repeated insistence on the similarities between the respective “shootings” perpetuated by cameras and guns reminds readers that “to take artistic aim at anything is to line it up within the cross-hairs of a gun sight.” See “Michael Ondaatje and the Production of Myth,” 6.   91 Other historians have thrown the accuracy of this date into doubt; see Nolan, Lincoln County War, 4.   92 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 59, 84.   93 Popular stories in the nineteenth-century American West maintained that Garrett and Billy had once been friends, while various commentators have speculated that Oswald was working for the c i a or f b i . For an example of the latter speculation, see Joesten, Oswald, 129.   94 President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Report, 108.   95 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 15.   96 Ibid., 96.   97 Ibid., 101.   98 Ibid., 109.   99 Ibid., 76. 100 Ibid., 99.   77

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Notes to pages 157–60

101 M. Lane, Rush to Judgment, 344, 357–62. 102 The reversal was pointed out in an article in the 4 August 1941 issue of Life. See “Billy the Kid,” 66. 103 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 1. 104 M. Jones, “Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” 33. 105 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 84. 106 MacLulich, “Ondaatje’s Mechanical Boy,” 108. 107 Marks, Murder Most Foul, 99. 108 Hutcheon, Canadian Postmodern, 66. 109 For a discussion of Kennedy’s speech, see Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 2. 110 “Compendium of Curious Coincidences,” 21. 111 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 524. 112 W.A. Williams, “Natural History of the American Empire,” 12. 113 McCourt, “The Preacher and the President,” 104. 114 National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, To Establish Justice, to Insure Domestic Tranquility, 1, 8. 115 Water, Letter to the editor, 46. 116 See, for instance, Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 591–613; and Galperin, “History into Allegory.” 117 This book would, along with other poetry published by Nichol, win him the 1970 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, while Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid won a specially created Governor General’s Award for Poetry and Fiction in the same year. Nichol and Ondaatje had discovered in 1968 that they were both writing about Billy the Kid, and they subsequently shared their manuscripts with each other. See Rae, From Cohen to Carson, 119. 118 Vadde is one critic to reference The Left Handed Gun, while Rae mentions Spicer. See Vadde, “National Myth,” 263n7; Rae, From Cohen to Carson, 20. 119 In the documentary Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda claim that Billy, one of the modern-day protagonists of their 1969 film, Easy Rider, was named after Billy the Kid. Similarly, it is tempting to think that the fictional cinematic outsider-hero and Vietnam veteran Billy Jack, first portrayed by Tom Laughlin in the 1967 film The Born Losers, was given his name in part to evoke Bonney. Another text of the day to feature Billy the Kid was Beat writer Michael McClure’s 1965 play, The Beard, which made headlines when performances were shut down by police in California, then again in Vancouver in 1969, sparking a court case. For an account of the case, see Page, “Vancouver’s The Beard.” The Beard is significant with regard to Ondaatje’s text



Notes to pages 160–6

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not only because McClure’s play put Billy the Kid in the Canadian public’s eye but also because it paired him on stage with a fictionalized Jean Harlow, anticipating Ondaatje’s character Angela D, whom Ondaatje presents as Billy’s lover and whose name echoes that of Hollywood actor – and Western star – Angie Dickinson. 120 Nichol, “Two Heroes,” 198. 121 Scobie says of Nichol’s book, “Parallels to the VietNam war may be drawn at each reader’s personal political discretion; but it does seem clear that Nichol is fully conscious of political applications.” See “Two Authors in Search of a Character,” 46. 122 Ondaatje, “Pictures from Vietnam.” 123 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 7. 124 Ibid. 125 Ondaatje, “Pictures from Vietnam.” 126 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 55. 127 Neufeld, “… They Are Coming to Our Chapel Looking for Jobs,” 80. 128 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 17, 88. In 1970, for instance, deserter John Webb recounted being arrested for going aw o l , being beaten with a rubber hose, then escaping and fleeing to Canada. See “… The Jails Are Already Too Full,” 45. 129 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 25. 130 Quoted in “‘The Order Was to Destroy Mylai,’” 41. 131 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 25. 132 Ibid., 27. 133 Ibid., 26. 134 Ibid., 86. 135 Ibid., 63. 136 Ibid., 55. 137 Mowat, “Letter to My Son,” 5. 138 Nichol, “Two Heroes,” 197. 139 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 7, 40. 140 Ibid., 43. 141 Owens, “‘I Send You a Picture,’” 134–5. 142 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 35. 143 Quoted in Epp, “… My Own History Allows Me No Escape,” 9. 144 Scobie, “Two Authors in Search of a Character,” 49. 145 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 64.

272

Notes to pages 166–72

146 Kilbourn, Introduction, xi. 147 Ondaatje, Collected Works of The Billy the Kid, 41, 40. 148 Ibid., 28. Rae confirms this identification in From Cohen to Carson, 118. 149 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 61, 88. 150 Cooley, “‘I Am Here on the Edge,’” 226. 151 Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 20. 152 McLuhan, “Canada,” 227. chapter four   

1 Goldie, “Queer Nation?,” 25.     2 Quoted in Hays, “Canadians in the Closet.”     3 LaBruce, foreword to The Romance of Transgression in Canada, xv–xvi.     4 M. Adams, “Canadian and American Values Divergences,” 47.     5 Goldberg, “Bomb Canada.”    6 Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 33.     7 Arroyo, “Bordwell Considered,” 77.     8 For a detailed account, see Kinsman, “Canadian Cold War on Queers.”     9 Birney, “Canada: Case History: 1945.”   10 Hanly, “Psychoanalysis of Nationalist Sentiment,” 316.   11 Fothergill, “Coward, Bully, or Clown,” 244.   12 No one has determined authoritatively how many Americans moved to Canada because of the Vietnam War. Harvey noted in 1999, “A conservative 30,000 is the figure most frequently cited among published estimates, for the draft dodgers and deserters alone.” See Harvey, Americans in Canada, 21. That number leaves out the romantic partners and family members who emigrated with them, as well as others who made the move because of their disillusionment with the United States. Harvey observed that exact numbers, even for draft dodgers and deserters alone, are impossible because immigration documents do not identify war resisters as such and because many resisters came illegally, so that there are no records of their arrival. Despite these limitations, other commentators have made educated guesses: David S. Surrey puts the number in the 60,000–100,000 range; John Hagan estimates in his book that it was over 50,000. Joseph Jones argues that an estimate of 60,000 war immigrants is justified and that one could “credibly” put the number as high as 100,000 with regard to all Americans who moved to Canada during the war. See Surrey, Choice of Conscience, 5; Hagan, Northern Passage, 35; Joseph Jones, Contending Statistics, 34.



Notes to pages 172–85

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13 See Ziedenberg, “Canada’s Vietnam Legacy,” 26. 14 See Emerick, War Resisters Canada, 52. 15 Atwood, Journals, 62. 16 “Vancouver Gay Liberation.” 17 Redner, Getting Out, 9. 18 R. Adams, “‘Going to Canada,’” 411. 19 Redner, Getting Out, 41, 96. 20 Ibid., 105. 21 R. Adams, “‘Going to Canada,’” 425. 22 Redner, Getting Out, 119. 23 Ibid., 52. 24 R. Adams, “Going to Canada,” 418. 25 Redner, Getting Out, 159. 26 In that respect, Getting Out stands in contrast with postwar memoirs by American war immigrants to Canada: each of Douglas Fetherling’s Travels by Night (1994), Jack Todd’s Taste of Metal (2001), and Mark Frutkin’s Erratic North (2008) devotes at least half of its narrative to its author’s life in Canada after immigrating. 27 Satin, Confessions of a Young Exile, 3. 28 Ibid., 153, original ellipsis. 29 Ibid., 197. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 142. 32 Ibid., 133. 33 Ibid., 156. 34 Ibid., 179. 35 Ibid., 201. 36 Ibid., 197. 37 Ibid., 209. 38 Ibid. 39 Findley, Wars, 16. 40 Ibid., 103. 41 Ibid., 13. 42 Ibid., 25. 43 Hulcoop, “‘Look! Listen! Mark My Words!,’” 33. 44 D. Williams, Media, Memory, and the First World War, 170. 45 Pennee, “Imagined Innocence, Endlessly Mourned,” 90.

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Notes to pages 185–9

46 Not least, Vincent Massey was Canada’s first Canadian-born governor general and headed the influential Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. 47 Brydon, “Devotion to Fragility,” 83. 48 Pennee, “Imagined Innocence,” 103. 49 Bailey, Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism, 79. 50 Findley, Wars, 136. 51 Ibid., 73. 52 Fetherling, “Young Canadians Abroad,” 47. 53 Brian Peters is one critic previously to have done so; see Goldie, “Canadian Homosexual,” 133. 54 Findley, Wars, 20. 55 York, Front Lines, 39. 56 Findley, Wars, 19, 37. 57 Hastings, “Into the Fire,” 14. 58 Goldie, “Canadian Homosexual,” 137. 59 Findley, Wars, 103. By giving Harris his name, Findley is making a particularly Canadian joke: if The Wars teasingly parallels Robert Ross’s family with the Masseys, then the Ross–Harris relationship is, by implication, a Massey–Harris relationship, and the Massey-Harris Corporation itself becomes figuratively queered. 60 Cobley, “Postmodernist War Fiction,” 122n11. 61 Findley, Wars, 44. 62 For Freud’s best-known discussion of the primal scene, see his “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis [The ‘Wolfman’].” 63 Arlen, Living-Room War, 83. 64 Findley, Wars, 44–5. 65 Ibid., 45. 66 A possible inspiration for this scene is a moment in American writer Frank Conroy’s celebrated 1967 memoir, Stop-Time, in which a high-school teacher who served in the First World War rants about the corruption of society, declaring, “They show us one man riding another, riding him like a horse, like a beast of burden. That stuff gets through. They call it art. They spit on the nobility of the human body. They lower themselves to the level of animals. Below animals. A man riding a man is going too far.” See Conroy, Stop-Time, 152. Whether or not Findley had the passage in mind when writing The Wars, it is notable that he, like Conroy, focuses on an affective response to the spectacle



Notes to pages 189–92

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of “riding” as much as on the spectacle itself. And although the teacher’s reaction in Stop-Time seems straightforwardly to be one of disgust, the fact that he adduces the example himself and then returns to it in the course of his rant might imply an unconscious attraction to it that makes him not so different from Robert in The Wars. 67 Brydon, “‘It Could Not Be Told,’” 78n14. 68 See Goldie, “Canadian Homosexual,” 135; and Rhodes, “Buggering with History,” 42. 69 Findley, Wars, 44, 190. 70 Ibid., 169. 71 Peter Dickinson is one critic similarly to have recognized the playful – what he calls the “performative” – quality of the sex between Taffler and the Swede. See Here Is Queer, 49. 72 Findley, Wars, 48. 73 Ibid., 46. 74 Ibid., 38–9. The identification of the arms as “pink” anticipates a moment a few pages later when readers are told that in Robert’s childhood he thought of his own skin colour as pink and wished “that he was red. Or black. Or yellow. Any colour but pink” (48). While his desire stands as a further suggestion of his limitations in emblematizing the whole of Canada’s diverse population, it also further connects him to queerness. In the early twentieth century, pink had not yet come to represent homosexuality in the popular imagination, but by 1977 the pink triangle had become a symbol of gay liberation, so Findley could expect at least some of his readers to interpret Robert’s self-described pinkness as hinting at the character’s queerness. In the brothel scene, the description of the pink arms intermingled with Robert’s reflection offers another such colour-­ coded hint. 75 Findley, Wars, 56. 76 Not even the researcher’s gender is entirely clear to all readers. Late in The Wars, the person conducting an interview with Marian Turner is referred to as “him,” but the reference comes late and fleetingly, allowing readers to miss it entirely (188); Pennee is one critic who seems to have done so, given that she makes the case for identifying the narrator as female. See Moral Metafiction, 52. But then, it is not certain that the man conducting the interview with Marian is the same researcher described elsewhere in the novel. Indeed, by having the transcript of the interview with Marian refer to the interviewer only in the third person, in contrast with the second-person narration elsewhere, The Wars

276

Notes to pages 192–7

leaves open the possibility that multiple researchers are involved in investigating Robert’s life (189). 77 Hulcoop, “‘Look! Listen! Mark My Words!,’” 33. 78 Findley, Wars, 191. 79 Ibid., 186. 80 Ibid., 12. 81 Rhodes has gone so far as to assert that the narrator is covertly gay. See “Buggering with History,” 50. I make the case for the figure’s queerness, instead, because queerness involves a non-normative relationship to gender and sexuality that – I argue – is manifest on the part of the narrator, in contrast with the figure’s sexual orientation, which can only be inferred. 82 The Wars hints that the researcher is approximately Findley’s age when Juliet remarks, “You cannot know these things. You live when you live … That was then. Unique. And how does one explain? You had a war. Every generation has a war – except this one. But that’s beside the point. The thing is not to make excuses for the way you behaved” (103). The comment “You had a war” might be taken as suggesting that the researcher was alive during the Second World War. At the same time, the italicized You is ambiguous: Juliet could be referring to herself, not the researcher, as she is doing more clearly two sentences later when she speaks of making excuses for behaviour. But she also uses the second person to make generalizations about humanity in her claim “You live when you live.” Given the shifting, elusive referentiality in Juliet’s use of the pronoun “you,” her comments stand as another example of Findley’s use of the second person to blur the borders between subjects and invite readers’ maximal identification with disparate figures. 83 Ricou, “Obscured by Violence,” 133. 84 Findley, “Return of the Crazy People,” 20. 85 Young, “Pigs & Fishes,” 16. 86 Jason Jones, interview by David Godsall. chapter five   1 Brand,

What We All Long For, 74.   2 Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” 176.   3 Briesmaster and Berzensky, Preface to Crossing Lines, 16.   4 For discussion of these echoes, see Dumbrell and Ryan, Vietnam in Iraq; and Gardner and Young, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam.   5 Welsh, At Home in the World, 18–19.

  6

Notes to pages 198–204

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The publication of the one exception, Alex Driving South, over a decade before the other draft-dodger novels might be explained by the fact that Maillard was himself a US war immigrant and, accordingly, had recent personal experience as an impetus for his narrative.   7 R. Adams, “‘Going to Canada,’” 412.   8 For an account of the Conservatives’ drive to depict Canada as a “warrior nation,” see McKay and Swift, Warrior Nation.   9 Although they do not deal with the Vietnam War directly, two recent Canadian novels about the legacy of the war and genocide in Cambodia, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared (2009) and Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), have similarly challenged the myth of Canada as a peaceable kingdom while considering violence in the former Indochina. Troeung observes that both ­novels “mobilize an aesthetics of entwined responsibility to work against the idea of the Cambodian genocide as a ‘foreign’ trauma, as an event that ­happened solely ‘over there’ and that has nothing to do with the lives of Canadians at the time or the Cold War foreign policy of Western nations such as the United States and Canada.” See “Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared,” 152. 10 p t s d was introduced as a diagnosis in the wake of the medical treatment of Vietnam War veterans, entering the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. In 2016, a study indicated that 10–15 per cent of such veterans continued to suffer from p t s d . See Corry et al., “Forty Years after the War,” 5. 11 For a discussion of the stereotype of the scorned veteran, see Dean Jr, “Myth of the Troubled and Scorned Vietnam Veteran.” 12 For an examination of how that view became prevalent, see McClancy, “The Rehabilitation of Rambo,” 507–9. 13 Ryan, “Breakdown Territory,” 19. 14 Bush, “Remarks to the American Legislative Exchange Council.” 15 Ryan, “Breakdown Territory,” 25. 16 Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 9–10. 17 In case these parallels are insufficient for readers to notice the intertextual relationship between Time in Between and The Deer Hunter, Bergen’s novel also includes a moment in which Charles shoots a deer, as well as a sequence in which he goes on a hunting trip. See Bergen, Time in Between, 23, 98. 18 Hay, Late Nights on Air, 195. 19 Ibid., 61. 20 Ibid., 336.

278

Notes to pages 205–14

21 Ibid., 177. 22 Kuitenbrouwer, Perfecting, 96. 23 Ibid., 74. 24 Ibid., 31. 25 Ibid., 21. 26 For accounts of Canadians serving in the Vietnam War, see Gaffen, Unknown Warriors; and Arial, I Volunteered. 27 In this respect, the novels have an antecedent in the 1989 Hollywood film In Country, based on Bobbie Anne Mason’s 1985 novel, which focuses on the relationship between a young American woman, Samantha, and her uncle, Emmett, a psychologically scarred Vietnam War veteran. As the film foregrounds Samantha’s struggle to connect with Emmett, it is tempting to think it not coincidental that the film’s director was a Canadian, Norman Jewison, and that as a Canadian, Jewison was well disposed to explore the perspective of someone who is an intimate but distanced witness of an American with war experience. 28 Over and above the novel’s coy refusal to name the daughter, not to mention its presentation of her first-person narration, the implication that The Sentimentalists is autobiographical is clearest in Skibsrud’s acknowledgments at the end of her book, where she identifies her father as the model for Napoleon (221). 29 For a discussion of such personifications, see chapter 1. 30 Kuitenbrouwer, Perfecting, 273. 31 McLuhan, “Canada,” 227. 32 Kuitenbrouwer, Perfecting, 147. 33 Kowalski, Hundred Hearts, 258. 34 Ibid., 61, 76. 35 Ibid., 275. 36 Ibid., 276. 37 Ibid., 117. 38 Ibid., 7. 39 The sole exception is Late Nights on Air, in which Eddy is still living at the end of the narrative. In that respect, it seems pertinent that he is a less prominent character than are the veterans in the other books. Because he is thinly sketched, his death would not have the tragic quality of the other veterans’. 40 Espiritu, “About Ghost Stories,” 1702. 41 Wilson, Ballistics, 320. 42 Ibid., 29, 111.



Notes to pages 215–23

279

43 Ibid., 288. 44 McQuaig, Holding the Bully’s Coat, 1. 45 Ibid., 55–6. 46 Annand, Review of Ballistics. 47 Wilson, Ballistics, 372. 48 Ibid., 112. 49 Ibid., 60. 50 Ibid., 158. 51 Ibid., 161. 52 Ibid., 315, 317. 53 Grubisic, Review of Ballistics. 54 Wilson, Ballistics, 63. 55 Ibid., 272. 56 Ibid., 108. 57 Ibid., 13, 334. 58 Espiritu, “About Ghost Stories,” 1701. 59 Goldman, “Mapping the Door of No Return,” 27. 60 Lai, Slanting I, Imagining We, 203–4. 61 Brand, What We All Long For, 19. 62 Ibid., 266. 63 Ibid., 202. 64 See Beiser et al., “Southeast Asian Refugees’ Perceptions of Racial Discrimination in Canada.” 65 Brand, What We All Long For, 67. 66 Smolash and Tucker-Abramson, “Migrants and Citizens,” 182. 67 Brand, What We All Long For, 35. 68 Ibid., 46. 69 Chan further defines this generation in terms of the fact that “they retain their ability to speak, if not always to read and write, the ancestral language as well as Asian values and norms.” See Chan, Preface to The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation, xiv. 70 Thúy, Ru, 79. 71 Ibid., 22–3. 72 Ibid., 9. 73 Ibid., 57. 74 Ibid., 63. 75 Ibid., 8.

280   76

Notes to pages 223–31

Vinh Nguyen, “Refugee Gratitude,” 22. Among the nonfictional examples of the Vietnamese-Canadian “grateful refugee” narrative is Minh Tanh Nguyen’s memoir Leaving Vietnam (1996), which includes the declaration, “I would not think of living anywhere but Canada” (370). Similarly, Denise Chong associates Canada predominantly with peace and good health for Kim Phuc, who in adulthood defected from Vietnam to Canada via Cuba. Chong observes that Phuc and her husband “became citizens of Canada in early 1998. Their second son, Stephen, … has a Vietnamese name, Binh, meaning ‘peace.’ Both pregnancies, but for Kim’s diabetic tendency, were healthy. For the most part, Kim’s health has been strong. The asthmatic condition that began in Cuba vanished upon arrival in Canada.” See D. Chong, Girl in the Picture, 368.   77 Thúy, Ru, 71.   78 Ibid., 77.   79 Vinh Nguyen, “Refugee Gratitude,” 21.   80 Thúy, Ru, 82.   81 Ibid., 79.   82 Ibid., 1.   83 Ibid., 140.   84 Ibid., 1.   85 Thúy, Mãn, 74, 51.   86 Ibid., 109.   87 Vinh Nguyen, “Refugee Gratitude,” 18.   88 Pelaud, This Is All I Choose to Tell, 13.   89 Kuitenbrouwer, All the Broken Things, 12.   90 Ibid., 253.   91 For further discussion of such writing, see this book’s introduction.   92 Kuitenbrouwer, All the Broken Things, n.p.   93 Ibid., 16.   94 Ibid., 97.   95 Ibid., 325.   96 For a discussion of Stein’s story, see chap. 3.   97 Kuitenbrouwer, All the Broken Things, 12.   98 Ibid., 327.   99 Donaldson, review of All the Broken Things. 100 Kuitenbrouwer, All the Broken Things, 311. 101 Ibid., 20. 102 Ibid., 166. A modern verse translation of the same passage provides an epigraph for Kuitenbrouwer’s novel, further emphasizing the passage’s thematic significance.



Notes to pages 231–7

281

103 Kamboureli, “Writing the Foreign,” 112. Another apparent exception is Vincent Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager, which includes plot twists that, as reviewer Paul Gessell put it, “defy credulity.” See Gessell, “A Rogue’s Fate.” Those twists aside, however, Lam’s novel moves its protagonist through a timeline of events that carefully follows the historical record. Likewise, if the coincidence of Carla’s brother assaulting Quy at the end of What We All Long For is unlikely, it stands in contrast with the novel’s general commitment to narrative plausibility. 104 Curiously, the incident to which Kuitenbrouwer appears to be referring took place not in 1976 but in 1978. Kuitenbrouwer’s seeming mistake may, in fact, constitute a sly nod to a literary antecedent for All the Broken Things, Marian Engel’s novel Bear, which was published in 1976 and includes a scene of a bear mauling a woman. 105 In a 2013 interview, when Gibb was asked to consider why Canadian novelists have begun to set stories in Southeast Asia, she observed that her generation enjoyed a “luxury of travelling” unavailable to earlier writers, remarking, “It wasn’t really tenable to go to Vietnam probably until the 1990s as a tourist and as an outsider.” See Gibb, “‘Throw Yourself into the Deep End,’” 261. Indeed, she, Bergen, and Lam all spent time in Vietnam while researching their novels. 106 Bergen, Time in Between, 21, 58. 107 Ibid., 108. 108 Ibid., 44. 109 Ibid., 190, 142. 110 Ibid., 147. 111 Ibid., 177. 112 See Barber. “Full Speed Ahead into the Unknown.” 113 Gibb, “‘Throw Yourself into the Deep End,’” 269. 114 Christopher, The Viet Nam War / The American War, 298. 115 Gibb, Beauty of Humanity Movement, 172. 116 Ibid., 16. 117 Gibb, “‘Throw Yourself into the Deep End,’” 269. 118 Gibb, Beauty of Humanity Movement, 174–5. 119 Ibid., 16. 120 Ibid., 174. 121 Ibid., 16. 122 Percival is born Chen Pie Sou and then adopts his Anglicized name while ­studying in Hong Kong. I follow the novel in referring to him as Percival throughout. 123 Marchand, “From Short Stories to an Epic Novel.”

282

Notes to pages 238–49

124 Lam, Headmaster’s Wager, 164. 125 Ibid., 105. 126 Ibid., 106. 127 Ibid., 97. 128 Lam’s attention to health care may be unsurprising, given that he is a physician who, prior to publishing The Headmaster’s Wager, wrote a biography of Tommy Douglas, nowadays known primarily as the “father” of universal health care in Canada. 129 Lam, Headmaster’s Wager, 93. 130 Ibid., 93, 218. 131 Ibid., 218. 132 Ibid., 305. 133 For a recent study of this phenomenon, see Phillips Jr et al., “The Canadian Contribution to the US Physician Workforce.” 134 Lam, Headmaster’s Wager, 313. 135 Ibid., 62, 333, 371. 136 Ibid., 276. 137 The likelihood of the non-coincidence is indicated by a US editor’s response to All the Broken Things. In an email correspondence with me, Kuitenbrouwer recalled that the editor, although full of praise for the manuscript, declined to publish the novel, believing that a US audience would not “connect” with a story about the shame and guilt of Agent Orange being produced in Canada. 138 Atwood, “Canadian-American Relations,” 387. 139 Quoted in Thompson et al., “Turning an Elephant into a Microphone,” 51. conclusion   

1 Quoted in Pope, The Elephant and the Mouse, vii. 2 For an account of the contest, see Bowman, “Fill in the Blank.”    3 Granatstein, Yankee Go Home?, 286–7.     4 V.T. Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies, 200.   

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Index

Acorn, Milton: More Poems for People, 77; “The War in Viet Nam,” 122–3, 126, 136; “What Are the Odds?,” 77–8, 88 Adams, Ian, 31, 110–11; The Trudeau Papers, 30, 74, 90–2, 94, 98 Adams, Rachel, 175–6, 180, 198, 252n9 Aeneid (Virgil), 63, 128 affective attachments, 37, 63 Afghanistan, invasion of (2001), 5, 95–6, 196–7, 199, 201, 206, 212, 215, 243, 248–9 African Americans: overrepresentation of among US conscripts, 12 “After the Deaths at Kent State” (Helwig), 23 Agent Orange, 12, 54, 116, 228–9, 231, 282n137 agitprop drama, 99 Ahmed, Sara, 37 Alex Driving South (Maillard), 198, 277n6 All the Broken Things (Kuitenbrouwer), 7, 32–3, 196, 197, 200, 219, 226–31, 232, 236, 240, 248 Ameliasburg (Ontario), 123–4 American Civil War, 8, 20, 163, 210

American Dream, 223–4 American Indian Movement, 184 Americanization, 113–14 American War of Independence, 8, 210 a m e x , 50 Anderson, Benedict, 7 anti-Americanism, 16, 78, 84, 115, 175, 204, 236, 244 anti-authoritarianism, 68–9, 183 anti-colonialism, 46, 205 anti-communism, 170, 246 anti-draft movement, 252n7 anti-imperialism, 75 anti-war: activism/protests, 12, 17, 24, 45, 49, 52, 68–9, 75, 84, 117, 135, 153, 173, 179, 192, 197; consciousness, 119; critique, Western as vehicle for, 164; discourse, critique of, 242; material, 23, 138; pedagogy, 110; stance, 172, 182, 242, 244; youth, 130 Apocalypse Now, 110, 198 Arctic Imperative, The (Rohmer), 79 Arlen, Michael J.: Living-Room War, 188 arms manufacturing. See weapons manufacturing

306 Index

Arroyo, José, 170 At War with the U.S. (Bowering), 28 Atwood, Margaret, 6, 15, 35, 36, 45, 85, 93–4, 118, 247; The Animals in That Country, 128; “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,” 260n63; “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers,” 128–31, 134, 142, 260n63; The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 25–6, 173; “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier,” 141–3, 147–8, 151, 260n63; The Robber Bride, 198; Surfacing, 6, 14, 29–30, 40–1, 53–4, 55–66, 67–8, 71, 73, 204, 227, 233, 246, 267n44; Survival, 22, 26, 62, 67–8, 241 Auden, W.H.: “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 124, 138 Australia, 251n5 authoritarianism, 20, 69 Away from Her (Polley), 196 Azzi, Stephen, 11, 27, 254n49, 255n56 “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy” (Atwood), 260n63 Bailey, Anna Geddes, 185 “Ballad of Peter Trudeau, The” (Mathews), 78 Ballistics (Wilson), 199, 214–18, 240 Barney’s Version (Richler), 198 Bass, Joe, 140 Bauer, Otto, 37 Bear (Engel), 281n104 Beard, The (McClure), 270n119 Beauty of Humanity Movement, The (Gibb), 33, 200–1, 232, 234–7, 240 Beissel, Henry, 255n57 Bengough, J.W.: Caricature History of Canadian Politics, 257n7 Bennett, Donna, 255n60

Bergen, David: The Time in Between, 33, 199–201, 203–5, 207–11, 213, 217, 218, 221, 230, 232–4, 240, 277n17 Berger, John: Ways of Seeing, 111–12 Berger Inquiry (Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry), 205 Berzensky, Steven Michael, 197 Biggest Modern Woman of the World, The (Swan), 65 Billy the Kid (aka Henry McCarty; William H. Bonney), 152, 159–61 Billy the Kid (Spicer), 160 Birney, Earle: “Canada: Case History: 1973,” 20, 171, 266n18; “Can. Lit.,” 20; Collected Poems, 121; “I Accuse Us,” 18, 53–4, 69, 139; “Looking from Oregon,” 7, 121–3; Memory No Servant, 267n29; “Way to the West,” 48 bissett, bill, 255n57; “l o v e o f l i f e , th 49th p a r a l l e l ,” 28; Nobody Owns th Earth, 28 Black, Edwin R., 114–15 Black Mountain poets, 27 Black Panthers, 12, 184 Blaise, Clark, 255n60 Blew Ointment, 122 Blodgett, E.D., 255n60 Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (Lam), 240 “boat people” refugee crisis, 199, 219, 222, 226, 231, 232 body horror narrative, 54 Body Politic, 173, 255n60 Boer War, 9, 160 Bomarc nuclear missiles, 58 Bonney, William H. See Billy the Kid Books in Canada, 23 Born Losers, The, 270n119

Index 307

Bowering, George, 27, 28, 255n57; At War with the U.S., 28; “Even Los Angeles,” 145–6; “The Late News,” 146–8, 150; “News,” 127–8; “Stab,” 116–17; “Winning,” 146 Boyle, John B.: “Continental Refusal / Refus Continental,” 77 Bradley, Nicholas, 153 Brand, Dionne: What We All Long For, 32–3, 196–7, 200, 219–20, 222–3, 226, 232, 240 Brecht, Bertolt, 100 Breeze, Claude, 22 Briesmaster, Allan, 197 British Loyalists, 8, 173, 210 Broege, Valerie, 58, 83–4 Brown, Russell, 39, 255n60 Bruegel, Pieter: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, 124 Brydon, Diana, 185 Bukowski, Denise, 255n60 Bush, George H.W., 202 Bush, George W., 96 Cambodia, 71, 76, 251n5, 254n48, 277n9 Campbell, Charles L., 50–1, 57, 66 Canada: as alternative to United States, 63–4; assimilation into American empire, 44; bans on homosexuals, 170; colonization by United States, 6, 243; complicity of in US militarism, 24, 49, 59–60, 107, 127, 150–1, 214, 220, 228, 248, 250; conservatism of, 11; consumption of US media, 115, 118, 138, 146, 170; as counter-America, 13; difference between United States and, 5, 10, 18, 22, 30, 33, 116, 171, 205, 209, 215–18, 237, 240, 244, 246, 248;

divided vision of, 118; domination by United States, 71–2, 75, 96, 115, 171, 211; economic integration with United States, 9; existence owed to United States, 210; exploitation of, 51, 198; feminization of, 29, 39, 56–7, 73, 170, 233; and First Nations, 20, 97; as frontier space, 175, 207; garrison mentality in culture, 25; as guerrilla, 8; homosexuals in federal civil service, 170; as hospitable sanctuary, 200, 207, 219; identity of, 6, 8, 25, 33, 41, 46, 56, 66, 93, 116, 118, 153, 168, 173, 243–4, 246, 249; ideological contamination by United States, 54; Immigration Act, 170; independence of from United States, 4; and inferiority, 15, 32, 167, 195; internationalist nature of, 11; as invisible minority, 168–9; Liberal Party, 42, 113; military, 43, 85, 88–90; military conflict with/invasion by United States, fantasies of, 7, 24, 26, 30, 54, 71, 74, 75–85, 121, 169, 214, 243, 246, 263n58; military cooperation with United States, 9; military history of, 199; multicultural nature of, 11, 199, 219; multilateralism, 14; myth of Vietnam War, 197; myths/ mythology of, 4–5, 8, 16, 21, 33, 124, 128, 182, 184–5, 197, 199, 200, 206, 208, 218, 219, 229, 231, 237, 239; “national mental illness” of, 57; neutrality of, 17, 59–60; North of, 205; obsession with US life and media, 166; oppression by United States, 41, 46, 50–1, 57; as “peaceable kingdom,” 8, 12–13, 16, 21, 25, 70, 93, 124, 128, 166, 203, 215,

308 Index

218–32, 237, 239, 250; and peacekeeping, 11, 14, 89, 184–5, 199, 230; political conflict with United States, 58; as “prissy provincial backwater,” 194; as progressive alternative to United States, 8, 11, 244–5; and psycho-social alienation, 248; as queer frontier, 177; queering of, 168–95, 233; quiet Canadians, 232–41; racism of, 11, 199, 200, 219, 228; as refuge, 207, 218–32; regional cultural battles, 27; relationship with United States, 3–5, 7, 13–14, 16, 37–40, 47, 96, 115, 153, 207, 240, 244–5; resistance to United States, 30, 54, 74, 86–96, 244, 248; sexual violation of by United States, 40, 48; similarities with United States, 75, 84; social safety net, 238, 240; as space untainted by war, 209; stereotypes of, 185–6, 190, 194, 234, 236; United States as foil for defining, 210; US “penetration” of, 46–55; US television programs in, 47; US threat to, 41–6; Vietnamese migration to, 200, 219, 223; vulnerability of, 30; as welcoming to refugees, 11, 207; as whore, 51, 53; as woman, 8, 36–41, 47–57, 65, 91, 169–70, 210, 233 Canada: A Guide to the Peaceable Kingdom, 256n62 “Canada: Case History: 1973” (Birney), 20, 171, 266n18 Canada Council for the Arts, 21 Canada Development Corporation, 21 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, 198

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (c b c ), 3, 22, 85 Canadian Communist Party, 99 Canadian corporations, US ownership of, 13 Canadian Dimension, 23, 46, 48, 53, 143, 159 Canadian Fiction Magazine, 255n60 Canadian Film Development Corporation, 21 Canadian Forum, 114 Canadian Liberation Movement, 88, 92 Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution (Mathews), 71–2 Canadian Peace Council, 99 Canadian Postmodern, The (Hutcheon), 31, 116–18, 150–1, 153, 158, 166–7 Canadian Radio-television Commission, 21 Canadian Theatre Review, 255n60 “Can. Lit.” (Birney), 20 “Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Center of Canada” (Smith), 52, 86–8, 259n50 capitalism: American, 11, 15; corporate, 68; cultural logic of late, 151; excesses of, 238 Caplan, Gerald L., 13 Cappon, Paul, 62 Captives of the Faceless Drummer (Ryga), 110 Cardinal, Harold: The Unjust Society, 19–20 Cariboo Horses, The (Purdy), 75 Caron, Louis: L’Emmitoufle [The Draft Dodger], 28 Carrier, Roch: La Guerre, Yes Sir!, 28 Casablanca, 208

Index 309

“Centennial Song” (Mathews), 48 Chambers, Jack, 22 “Children in Nathan Phillips Square, The” (Lee), 17–19, 23, 76 Chilliwack, 104 chivalry, trope of, 175 Chong, Denise, 280n76 Chong, Sylvia Shin Huey, 136 Christopher, Renny, 235 Churchill, Winston, 43 Cité libre, 11 City Boys (Stein), 267n36 Civil Elegies (Lee), 18, 76, 139 civil rights movement, 12, 153 class inequality, 71, 222 Cohen, Leonard: “Welcome to these lines,” 3 Cold War, 9, 170 Coleman, Daniel, 136 Coleman, Victor: “From a m e r i c a ,” 67 Collected Works of Billy the Kid, The (Ondaatje), 6, 31, 120, 203, 206, 244, 264n107, 270n117; histories of violence in, 152–67 Collectors, 104 colonialism, 25 Coming Home, 198 Committee for an Independent Canada, 13 communicable disease, metaphor of, 53–5. See also venereal disease communism, 76, 86, 246; and homosexuality, 170 Comor, Henry, 47–8 Compressions (Ryga), 106–12, 244 Confessions of a Young Exile (Satin), 32, 171, 172–4, 177–81, 182 Connally, John, 156 Conroy, Frank: Stop-Time, 274n66

conscription, 20–1, 173, 206; heterosexual, 186; of women, 72 contagion, trope of, 54–55 continentalism, 9–10, 113, 153, 248 “Continental Refusal / Refus Continental” (Boyle), 77 Cooder, Ry: “Billy the Kid,” 160 Cook, Ramsay, 83 Cooley, Dennis, 166 Cool Hand Luke, 165, 183 counterculture, 12, 104–5, 165, 183, 193 counter-hegemony, 64 Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada during the Vietnam War Era, 197 Crossing the Border, 255n60 Cuba, 12 Cuban Missile Crisis, 41 Curnoe, Greg, 22, 28 Cyprus, 184 Danson, David. See Mackinnon, Joe Darwin, Charles, 42 Davey, Frank, 22 “Day at the Front, a Day at the Border, A” (Harvor), 51–2, 66 Debord, Guy, 119 “Decency Is the Final Trip for Those Who Believed in Henry Fonda Movies” (McNamara), 133–4 de-colonization, 67, 116 Deer Hunter, The, 110, 198, 201, 203, 277n17 Defence Crisis (1962–63), 41–3, 113 De Sa, Anthony: Kicking the Sky, 198 deserters, 3, 28, 46–7, 172–3, 183, 197, 207–8, 214, 255n55 dialectic, 74–5, 111; and education, 96–112

310 Index

diaspora/diasporic communities, 136, 200, 220, 222, 226, 232 Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio, 255n60 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House, 19; A Christmas Carol, 101 Dickinson, Angie, 271n119 didacticism, 79, 84–5, 92, 99, 112, 119, 138, 228; anti-war, 19, 69–70; and drama, 102; literary nationalist, 73–4 Diefenbaker, John, 10, 41–3, 45, 58, 82, 113–14, 257n13 Disappeared (Echlin), 277n10 Dogs at the Perimeter (Thien), 277n9 Dominican Republic, 12, 76 Donaldson, Emily, 230 Douglas, Tommy, 282n128 Dow Chemical, 130 “Dow Recruiter, The” (Wayman), 23, 130–4, 254n40 Draft Dodger, The (Caron), 28 draft dodgers, 3, 5, 25, 28, 32, 50, 94, 97–8, 171, 183, 198, 203, 205, 208, 214, 219, 241, 252n7, 255n55; as imperial invaders, 172; novels about, 172–81; and politics of gender and sexuality, 173; use of term, 251n2 draft resister, use of term, 251n2 “Dream of the Guerillas, The” (Wayman), 67, 108 Dropping Out in 3/4 Time (Morgan), 168, 181 “Drummer of the Second Silence” (Ryga/Eccleston), 102–3, 108, 111 Duncan, Sara Jeanette, 265n5 “Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi, The” (Lowther), 134–6 Easy Rider, 165, 270n119

Easy Rider: Shaking the Cage, 270n119 Eccleston, Don, 102 Echlin, Kim: Disappeared, 277n9 ecology: artistic, 137; mass-market, 138 Ecstasy of Rita Joe, The (Ryga), 31, 97 education, 68–70, 81, 98–101, 108–12; dialectical, 96–112; post-secondary expansion, 72; reform of, 69 Edwardson, Ryan, 22, 252n9 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 23–4 ekphrasis, 119–21, 124, 137–9, 141, 144, 148, 151, 267n25; actual vs notional, 148; mass-media, 120–1, 124, 148, 151; and museums, 120, 137–8; ­typical, 148 electronic age, 117 elitism, 82; cultural, 137 emasculation, 43; anal penetration as, 52; national, 44, 66, 73, 95; women as threat of, 179 energy crisis, 79 Energy Poker Game, The (Laxer), 79 Engel, Marian: Bear, 281n104 Enloe, Cynthia, 47 essentialism, gender, 51 Eurocentrism, 116 “Even Los Angeles” (Bowering), 145–6 Every Three Seconds, 130 Exxoneration (Rohmer), 30, 74, 85, 87, 90, 95 “Eye, The” (Jeffers), 121–2 fascism, 58, 69 Faultline 49 (Mackinnon), 95–6, 197–8 femininity, 43–4, 66, 170, 186 feminism, 40, 49, 65, 69, 73 Fetherling, Douglas, 23; Travels by Night, 273n26; “Young Canadians Abroad,” 185–6

Index 311

Fiamengo, Janice, 57 Fifteen Winds: A Selection of Modern Canadian Poems, 23, 130, 131 Findley, Timothy: identifying with queerness in, 182–95; The Wars, 6, 32, 172, 203, 247 First World War, 9, 182, 185, 190; mythologization of, 182 Fischer, Barbara K., 120–1 Fonda, Peter, 270n119 Ford, Gerald, 12, 181 “For Dwight D. Eisenhower on His Death” (McFadden), 23–4 Foreign Investment Review Agency, 21, 248 “Forgotten Children, The” (Stewart), 17, 19 Fothergill, Robert, 171 Four Horsemen, 166 Fox, Beryl: The Mills of the Gods, 22, 85, 114 France: independence from, 254n48; Vietnamese revolution against, 251n5 Fraser, Brad, 168–9, 172 free-market economy, 238 Freud, Sigmund, 187–88 friendly fire, 214–15 “From a m e r i c a” (Coleman), 67 “From Roosevelt to l b j ” (Grant), 254n40 Front de libération du Québec, 70 Frutkin, Mark, 255n60; Erratic North, 273n26 Frye, Northrop, 4, 12–13, 20, 120, 124; Literary History of Canada, 25 Fulford, Robert, 75, 79 Garbo Laughs (Hay), 198 Garner, Hugh, 255n57

Garrett, Pat, 154–6, 162–4 Gault, Cinda, 64 Gay Alliance toward Equality (g at e ), 173 gay and lesbian liberation movement, 46, 173 Gay Liberation Front (g l f ), 173, 194, 247 gender, 7–8, 31–2, 38, 43, 45–6, 49, 91, 247; binarism, 38; essentialism, 51; identity, 46, 171, 195; master narrative of, 172; and national identity, 195; normalcy in, 176; norms, 11, 40, 43, 50–1, 169, 170, 174, 186, 194; politics, 40, 91; public performance of, 176; relations, 58; roles, 73, 93, 173 Generals Die in Bed (Harrison), 182–3 genocide, 12, 117, 277n9 Gessell, Paul, 281n103 “Getting Away with Survival” (Woodcock), 256n62 Getting Out (Redner), 32, 171, 172–7, 179–80, 182 Gibb, Camilla: The Beauty of Humanity Movement, 33, 200–1, 232, 234–7, 240 Gibson, William, 255n60 Glad Day Bookstore, 255n60 globalization, 4, 129, 245 global village, 117, 119, 245; humanitarian witnessing in, 120–37 Godfrey, Dave, 255n57 Goldberg, Jonah, 169 Goldie, Terry, 168–9, 172, 189 Goldman, Marlene, 220 Gonick, Cy, 255n57, 256n62 Goodman, Paul, 69, 115 Gordon, Walter, 9–10, 13, 69 Gordon to Watkins to You (Watkins), 77

312 Index

Granatstein, J.L., 244–5 Grant, George, 69, 164, 248, 255n57; “From Roosevelt to l b j ,” 254n40; Lament for a Nation, 10, 15–16, 25, 29–30, 40, 41–6, 55–7, 62–3, 66, 67, 73, 82, 113–14, 128; Technology and Empire, 45, 60, 62, 65, 258n25 Grass and Wild Strawberries (Ryga), 103–6, 111 Great Britain, decreased Canadian ties to, 171 “great men” theory, 42 Great Society, 13, 253n27 Green, Howard, 43, 257n13 Greene, Graham: The Quiet American, 233 Grubisic, Brett Josef, 217 Guerrilla Nation (Maclear), 3 guerrilla warfare, 5, 30, 59, 86, 89, 94–5, 108, 197 Guess Who, The, 22; “American Woman,” 169, 234, 255n53 Guevara, Ché: “Message to the Tricontinental,” 196–7 Gulf of Tonkin, 121–2; resolution (1964), 4, 7 Guy Faux Books, 95 Gwyn, Richard, 65 Gzowski, Peter, 243 Haeberle, Ronald, 163 Hair, 103–4, 106 Hanly, Charles, 171 Harper, Stephen, 199 Harrison, Charles Yale: Generals Die in Bed, 182–3 Harvor, Beth: “A Day at the Front, a Day at the Border,” 51–2, 66; Women & Children, 51 Hastings, Thomas, 186

Hay, Elizabeth: Garbo Laughs, 198; Late Nights on Air, 199, 204–5, 210–11, 278n39 Hayes, Penny Ann: “Take What We Can,” 120 Headmaster’s Wager, The (Lam), 33, 200–1, 232, 237–41, 281n103 health care, 238–9 Hébert, Anne: Kamouraska, 28 hegemony: American, 27, 29, 39, 42, 56, 61, 67, 82, 147, 248; global capitalist, 10; technologist, 114 Helwig, David, 255n57; “After the Deaths at Kent State,” 23 heteronormativity, 38, 44, 64, 173, 175, 180, 191; non-conformity with, 169; rejection of, 177 heterosexuality, 176; and normalcy, 177; participation in military as sign of, 173; as toxic, 179 heterosexual normalcy, 49, 52; destabilization of, 45 Hicks, Edward, 124, 253n26 Hiroshima (Japan), 39 Hirsch, Marianne, 138, 202 History of Painting in Canada (Lord), 71–2 Hobbes, Thomas, 42 Hoffman, James, 106 Hollander, John, 148 Holmes, John, 46, 48 Holocaust, 17–18, 244 “Homo Canadiensis” (Purdy), 75–6 homoeroticism, 194 homophobia, 44, 52–53, 170–1, 173, 187, 259n50 homosexuality, 44, 168–95, 258n25; bans on, 170; and communism, 170; decriminalization of, 53; destigmatization of, 169; equation of

Index 313

Canada–US relations and, 52–3; exclusion of from US military, 173; in federal civil service, 170; history of, 187; and loyalty to the state, 170; pathologization of, 171–2; popular ambivalence regarding, 195. See also queerness homosexual panic, 45, 52 homosociality, 180 Hood, Hugh: “Moral Imagination: Canadian Thing,” 168 Hopper, Dennis, 270n119 Hord, Ray, 47–8 Horowitz, Gad, 13 House of Anansi, 23 Howell, M.E.: “Nightmare,” 120, 133 Hulcoop, John F., 184, 192 Hundred Hearts, The (Kowalski), 199, 212–13, 217, 221, 232, 243 Hutcheon, Linda: The Canadian Postmodern, 31, 116–18, 150–1, 153, 158, 166–7; Narcissistic Narrative, 268n57 Hutchison, Bruce, 47–8 “I Accuse Us” (Birney), 18, 53–4, 69, 139 identificatory politics, 192, 194 identity: Canadian, 6, 8, 25, 33, 41, 46, 56, 93, 116, 118, 153, 168, 173, 211, 243–4, 246, 249; gender, 46, 171, 195; indigenized white masculine, 91; martially masculine, 66; national, 171, 249; queer, 172; sexual, 171; US, 195, 243 imaginary, Canadian, 7–8, 21, 34 “imagined communities,” 7 imagined invasions, 61, 74, 75–85, 87–8, 90, 112

immigration, 177, 219, 225, 226, 245. See also war immigrants imperialism: American, 11, 14, 30, 32, 40, 45, 51, 57, 60, 70, 74, 84, 92, 94, 98, 110, 209, 215, 233, 245, 248 In Country (Mason), 278n27 indigenization, 94 Indigenous/First Nations peoples, 12, 20, 61–2, 83, 94, 97, 117, 124, 136, 190–1, 204–5, 245 Indochina, former, 20, 254n48, 277n9 inequality, 12, 199; class, 71, 222; systemic, 200 Innes, Christopher, 103 Innis, Harold, 9 “In Our Time” (Nowlan), 143–5, 149, 151 intergenerational relations, 104–5, 107, 182, 200, 214, 219 intermediality/intermedial critique, 113–67, 249, 267n25 International Control Commission, 59 intertextuality, 95, 112, 160, 277n17 In the Shadow of the Vulture (Ryga), 110–11, 204 Iraq, invasion of (2003), 5, 95–6, 196– 7, 199, 201, 206, 216, 243, 249 ironic consciousness, 31, 116–18, 170, 246 irony, 87–8, 151; Canadian, 167, 243 “It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers” (Atwood), 128–31, 134, 142, 260n63 Jacobs, Jane, 255n60 Jeffers, Robinson: “The Eye,” 121–2 Joel, Billy: “The Ballad of Billy the Kid,” 160

314 Index

Johnson, Lyndon B., 10, 253n27, 255n53 Joint Board of Defense, 13 Jonas, George, 255n57; “American Girl: A Canadian View,” 35 Jones, Jason, 194–5 Jones, Manina, 157 Journals of Susanna Moodie, The (Atwood), 25–6, 173 Just an Ordinary Person (Ryga), 100–2, 106, 110 Kalensky, Harry: u s n a : The United States of North America, 94–6, 197 Kamboureli, Smaro, 231 “Kamloops Incident” (Ryga), 265n108 Kamouraska (Hébert), 28 Katzenstein, Peter J., 15 Kearns, Lionel, 255n57 Keats, John (American writer): The New Romans, 255n56 Keats, John (English poet): “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 148 Kennedy, John F., 41, 43, 113, 131; assassination of, 12, 102, 120, 152–9, 164, 244 Kennedy, Robert, 12, 153–4 Keohane, Robert O., 15 Kicking the Sky (De Sa), 198 Kilbourn, William, 14, 63–4, 76–7, 117–18, 166, 256n62 Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War (Powe), 30, 74, 89–90, 95 Kim Phuc, 118, 280n77 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 153, 159 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 43 Knelman, F.H., 53 Kowalski, William: The Hundred Hearts, 199, 212–13, 217, 221, 232, 243

Kuitenbrouwer, Kathryn: All the Broken Things, 7, 32–3, 196, 197, 200, 219, 226–31, 232, 236, 240, 248; Perfecting, 199, 205–8, 211, 213, 218, 226, 243 Kula, John, 35–6, 40 LaBruce, Bruce, 168–9, 172 La Guerre, Yes Sir! (Carrier), 28 Lalonde, Michèle: “Speak White,” 29 Lam, Vincent: Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, 240; The Headmaster’s Wager, 33, 200–1, 232, 237–41, 281n103 Lament for a Nation (Grant), 10, 15–16, 25, 29–30, 40, 55, 62–3, 66, 67, 73, 82, 113–14, 128; failed masculinity in, 41–6 Lane, Mark: Rush to Judgment, 157 Lane, Patrick: Mountain Oysters, 71 Laos, 76, 251n5, 254n48 Lapierre, Laurier, 69, 255n57 Laqueur, Thomas W., 133 Last Post, The, 88 “Late News, The” (Bowering), 146–8, 150 Late Nights on Air (Hay), 199, 204–5, 207–8, 210–11, 278n39 Laurence, Margaret, 255n57; “Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass,” 140–1 Lavender Scare, 170 Laxer, James, 13; The Energy Poker Game, 79 Layton, Irving, 69 Leaving Vietnam (Nguyen), 280n76 Lee, Dennis, 255n57; “The Children in Nathan Phillips Square,” 17–19, 23, 76; Civil Elegies, 18, 76, 139 Le Espiritu, Yen, 213, 218

Index 315

Left Handed Gun, The, 160 L’Emmitoufle (Caron), 28 “Letter to My Son” (Mowat), 254n40 Levitt, Kari: Silent Surrender, 15 liberalism, 258n25; American, 113; capitalist, 41; rise of, 42 liberation movements, 12. See also gay and lesbian liberation movement; women’s liberation movement Life, 148–9, 155, 159, 162 Lightfoot, Gordon, 22; “Summer Side of Life,” 255n53 “Like a Canadian” (Newlove), 113 Lincoln, Abraham, 158 Lincoln County War, 162–3 Literary History of Canada (Frye conclusion), 25 Living-Room War (Arlen), 188 long sixties, 6, 28, 57, 74, 152, 246, 252n8 Longworth, David: u s n a : The United States of North America, 94–6, 197 “Looking from Oregon” (Birney), 7, 121–3 Lord, Barry, 255n57; History of Painting in Canada, 71–2 “l o v e o f l i f e , th 49th ­p a r a l l e l ” (bissett), 28 Lower, Arthur R.M., 38 Lowther, Pat: “The Earth Sings Mi-Fa-Mi,” 134–6; “A Lullaby Not to Be Sung,” 69–70 Ludwig, Jack, 47, 255n57 “Lullaby Not to Be Sung, A” (Lowther), 69–70 Lyotard, Jean-François, 116 MacDonald, Donald C.: The StarSpangled Beaver, 77

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 42 Mackinnon, Joe: Faultline 49, 95–6, 197–8 Mackinnon, Sally and Stuart, 166 Maclear, Michael, 22; Guerrilla Nation, 3 MacLennan, Hugh, 38–9, 69; The Precipice, 39; “The Psychology of Canadian Nationalism,” 39 MacLeod, Alistair: No Great Mischief, 198 MacLulich, T.D., 157–8 Made in Canada, 141 Magnified World (O’Connell), 198 Maillard, Keith, 255n60, 277n7; Alex Driving South, 198, 277n6 Mãn (Thúy), 32, 200, 219, 226, 232 Mandel, Ann, 152 Manhattan oil tanker, 79–80 Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, 5, 23, 255n60 Marchand, Philip, 255n60 marginality, Canadian, 167 marginalization, 38, 56, 150–1, 221 Margoshes, Dave, 255n60 Martell, George, 10 Martin, Paul, 17, 19 Marx, Karl, 42 masculinity: and authority, 92; conventional adventure of, 175; crisis of, 32; dangerous, 179; failed, 41–6; hegemonic, 41, 43–6, 55–7, 66, 82, 93, 169–70, 173, 175, 194–5, 216, 258n14, 262n45; heterosexual, 41, 171; “Hyper Macho” model of, 215; martial, 30–1, 96, 110–11, 173, 186, 194, 200, 247; militancy, nationalism, and, 73; militarization of, 186, 218, 247; non-normative, 177; normative, 32, 171, 174, 195; rejection

316 Index

of, 32, 169, 194; violent, 173, 179, 186 Mason, Bobbie Anne: In Country, 278n27 Massey, Vincent, 274n46 Massey Commission (Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences), 9, 265n5 Massey family, 185, 274n59 mass media, 7, 13–14, 31, 113–67, 188, 246–9; brainwashing and, 115; Canadian consumption of US, 170; complicity of, 119; critique of, 137– 52; and violence, 154, 204 Mathews, Robin, 27, 85, 172, 263n58; “The Ballad of Peter Trudeau,” 78; Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution, 71–2; “Centennial Song,” 48 McCarthy era, 170 McCarty, Henry. See Billy the Kid McClure, Michael: The Beard, 270n119 McCourt, Edward, 77, 159, 255n57 McFadden, David: “For Dwight D. Eisenhower on His Death,” 23–4 McGill, Robert: Once We Had a Country, 5 McKay, Ian, 9 McLuhan, Marshall, 31, 115–16, 162, 166, 210, 245; Understanding Media, 69, 129–30; War and Peace in the Global Village, 113 McNamara, Eugene, 255n60; “Decency Is the Final Trip for Those Who Believed in Henry Fonda Movies,” 133–4 McQuaig, Linda: Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the U.S. Empire, 215

McReynolds, David, 142–3 media studies, poetry as, 137–52 Memory No Servant (Birney), 267n29 Merril, Judith, 255n60 metafiction: historiographic, 158; postmodern, 151, 268n57 metanarratives, 116 Middle Passage, 220 militancy: American, 75; Canadian literature displaying, 70, 72; masculinity, nationalism, and, 73 militarism, American, 12, 50, 205–6, 212–13, 218, 243; embrace of, 92; martial, 248 military-industrial complex, 68, 243, 246 Mills of the Gods, The (Fox), 22, 85, 114 Minifie, James M., 255n57; Peacemaker or Powder-Monkey, 9 minoritization, 45, 168, 222 misogyny, 212 Mitchell, Joni, 22; “The Fiddle and the Drum,” 255n53 Moldenhauer, Jearld, 255n60 More Poems for People (Acorn), 77 Morgan, Allen: Dropping Out in 3/4 Time, 168, 181 Moritz, A.F., 255n60 Mountain Moving Day: Poems by Women, 134 Mountain Oysters (Lane), 71 Mowat, Farley, 46–7, 53, 65–6, 76, 87, 143, 164, 255n57; “Letter to My Son,” 254n40 multiculturalism, 11, 199, 219, 222, 226 Mulvey, Laura, 170 Munro, Alice, 196; “Gravel,” 3 “Musée des Beaux Arts” (Auden), 124, 138 My Lai massacre, 21, 159, 162–3, 199, 212–13

Index 317

napalm, 12, 19, 53, 70, 107, 116, 128, 130, 138–40, 215 narcissism, 24, 136; national, 235 Narcissistic Narrative (Hutcheon), 268n57 nation, master narrative of, 172 national allegory, 178–9, 211, 216–17, 233 national identity, 171 “National Identity” (Scott), 10 nationalism, 4, 7, 24–5, 28, 31, 33, 37, 49, 57, 70, 73–4, 88, 96, 98, 121, 136, 170, 173, 223, 232, 234, 239–41, 243–7; anti-technological, 114; and conservative gender politics, 91; as defensive response, 75; feeble, 244; and feminism, 40; FrenchCanadian, 62; governmental, 20; guerrilla, 68; and individualism, 64; and interpersonal affect, 63; masculinist, 44; militancy, masculinity, and, 73; militant, 93, 95; and moralizing, 88; myths of, 206, 208, 218; new, 8–21, 65, 84, 116, 236, 238, 241, 254n49; parochial, 198; political, 114; scholarly criticism of, 248; and self-discovery, 71; as self-help therapy, 67; skepticism about myths of, 199; somatic, 37. See also personification nationalization, 146, 150, 185, 193, 217; of acts of non-normativity, 190 National Liberation Front (n l f ), 116, 184, 253n25 n c Press, 23 neo-imperialism, 95 neo-liberalism, 226 New Democratic Party (n d p ): Waffle movement, 13 New Left, 13, 30, 69–70, 97, 179; guerrilla theatre, 99

Newlove, John: “Like a Canadian,” 113 Newman, Christina, 48 Newman, Peter C., 13, 93 New Refugees: American Voices in Canada, The, 50 New Romans, The (Keats), 255n56 New Romans, The: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S. (ed. Purdy), 23, 46, 48, 63–4, 76–7, 140, 159, 161 “News” (Bowering), 127–8 “News Reports at Ameliasburg” (Purdy), 123–5 New Wave Canada, 126 New Zealand, 251n5 Nguyen, Minh Tanh: Leaving Vietnam, 280n76 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 249 Nguyen, Vinh, 223–4, 226 Nichol, bp, 270n120; “Popular Song,” 242; The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid, 160–1; “Two Heroes,” 160– 1, 164 “Nightmare” (Howell), 120, 133 “Night of the Little Brown Men, The” (Stein), 125–6, 133, 136, 229–30 Nixon, Pat, 149 Nixon, Richard, 71, 72, 80, 114 Nobody Owns th Earth (bissett), 28 No Great Mischief (MacLeod), 198 non-normativity, nationalizing acts of, 190 normalcy: heterosexual, 45, 177; sex and gender, 176 Norstad, Lauris, 41–2 North American Air Defense Command (n o r a d ), 13 North American Free Trade Agreement (n a f t a ), 198, 248

318 Index

Nowlan, Alden, 255n57; Bread, Wine and Salt, 143; “In Our Time,” 143– 5, 149, 151 Oates, Joyce Carol, 255n60 O’Connell, Grace: Magnified World, 198 October Crisis (1970), 11, 20, 70, 110 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 148 O’Leary Report (Royal Commission on Publications), 265n5 Olivier, Laurence, 109–10 Omstead, Tom: The Red Wing Sings, 94–6, 197 Once We Had a Country (McGill), 5 Ondaatje, Michael, 255n57; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 6, 31, 120, 152–67, 203, 206, 244, 264n107, 270n117; “Pictures from Vietnam,” 161–2 On Photography (Sontag), 119, 267n24 Ontario Association of Curriculum Development, 69 Ontario Review, 255n60 Open Letter, The, 145 “Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass” (Laurence), 140–1 oppositionalism, 15, 84 “oriental obscene,” 136 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 154–5, 157 Owen, Wilfred, 187 Owens, Judith, 165 Pacey, Desmond, 255n57 pacifism, 99, 108, 110, 184 Paper Wife, The (Spalding), 198 parochialism, 24, 198, 211 parody, 16, 19, 70, 109, 149, 151, 190 Partner to Behemoth (Warnock), 48

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Peckinpah), 160 patriarchy, 92, 171, 173, 179, 258n14; anxiety about female sexuality, 170; and authority, 41; norms of, 60; and subordination of women, 40, 49, 57 peaceable kingdom, Canada as. See under Canada “Peaceable Kingdom, The” (Purdy), 20 peacekeeping, 11, 14, 89, 184–5, 199, 215, 239 Peacemaker or Powder-Monkey (Minifie), 9 Pearson, Lester B., 10, 11, 42–3, 58, 113–14, 184 Peckinpah, Sam: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 160; The Wild Bunch, 160 Penn, William, 124 Pennee, Donna Palmateer, 185, 275n76 People’s Army of Vietnam, 253n25 Pepper, William F., 18–19, 139, 141 Perfecting (Kuitenbrouwer), 199, 205– 8, 211, 213, 218, 226, 243 personification, 87, 121; national, politics of, 35–66; sexualizing, 7, 38; of United States, 15–16 Philippines, 251n5 photography, 118–19, 121, 130–2, 134, 138–9, 142–3, 145, 154–8, 161, 184, 204, 221 “Picture Layout in Life Magazine” (Purdy), 148–51 “Pictures from Vietnam” (Ondaatje), 161–2 pluralism, interpretive, 240 poetry, as media studies, 137–52 Poetry and the Colonized Mind (Richardson), 71–2

Index 319

Poets of Canada 1969, 120 Poets of the Capital, 78 political assassinations, 12, 20, 153. See also Kennedy, John F. Polk, James, 255n60 Polley, Sarah: Away from Her, 196 “Popular Song” (Nichol), 242 Portal, Ellis, 89 postmemory, 202–4, 218, 219, 221 postmodernism, 116–18, 134, 150–1, 153, 167 post-traumatic stress disorder (p t s d ), 199–200, 203–5, 210, 212, 217, 229, 248, 277n10 Powe, Bruce, 31, 110–11; Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War, 30, 74, 89–90, 95 power: imbalances of in heterosexual relations, 49; as masculine, 37; sex, violence, and, 36 Prairie Fire, 23 Precipice, The (MacLennan), 39 “Projected Slide of an Unknown Soldier” (Atwood), 141–3, 147–8, 151, 260n63 “Psychology of Canadian Nationalism, The” (MacLennan), 39 Purdy, Al, 153; The Cariboo Horses, 75; “Homo Canadiensis,” 75–6; The New Romans anthology, 23; “News Reports at Ameliasburg,” 123–5; “The Peaceable Kingdom,” 20; “Picture Layout in Life Magazine,” 148–51; Poems for All the Annettes, 123; Sex and Death, 148; Storm Warning anthology, 23–4 Quebec: alienation from, 61–2; as “future Vietnam,” 20; literature

from, 28–9; Québécois, 83; separatism in, 11, 12, 29, 89 queerness, 32, 66, 168–95; history of, 193; identifying with, 182–95; war resistance and, 172. See also homosexuality queer politics, 172, 182, 194 Quiet American, The (Greene), 233 Quiet Revolution, 47 race, 7, 136, 142; relations, 11; riots, 20, 93, 146 racial difference, 136 racialization, 220 racialized others, 117 racism, 11–12, 18, 71, 81, 199, 200, 212, 219–20, 222–3, 226–8, 244 Rajewsky, Irina O., 267n25 rape, metaphor of, 47–9, 54, 83 Reagan, Ronald, 106 realism, 179, 230–1 reciprocity, pedagogy of, 100 reconciliation, 235–6 Redner, Morton, 174; Getting Out, 32, 171, 172–7, 179–80, 182 Red Power, 12 Red Scare, 170 reductiveness, 15, 36, 40, 57, 64, 188, 199, 235, 248 Red Wing Sings, The (Omstead), 94–6, 197 Reed, Fred A., 255n60 refugees, 8, 11; American, 47; in ­not-so-peaceable kingdom, 218–32; Vietnamese, 32–3, 222–3 Reid, James: “Saturna Island as Vietnam,” 126–7, 130, 134, 136 reification, 57 Renzetti, Elizabeth, 5

320 Index

resistance: draft, 29; fictions of Canadian, 85–96; guerrilla, 59, 86; to power, 247; to social norms, 32, 57, 60, 173; to United States, 30, 54, 74, 86–96, 244, 248; Vietnamese, 59, 111; war, 28, 172 Resnick, Philip, 9 Rhodes, Shane, 189 Richard III, King, 107, 109 Richardson, Keith: Poetry and the Colonized Mind, 71–2 Richler, Mordecai, 255n57; Barney’s Version, 198 Ricou, Laurie, 193–4 Rilke, Rainer Maria: “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” 137–8 Robber Bride, The (Atwood), 198 Roberts, Gillian, 94–5 Robertson, Heather, 16 Rochdale College (Toronto), 49–50, 69 Rohmer, Richard, 31, 84, 91, 95, 110– 11; The Arctic Imperative, 79; Exxoneration, 30, 74, 85, 87, 90, 95; Ultimatum, 6, 30, 74, 80–3, 85 Ross, Robert “Robbie,” 187 Rotstein, Abraham, 13 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (r c m p ), 170 Royal Commission on Book Publishing, 78 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 49 Ru (Thúy), 32, 200, 219, 222–6, 232 Rubin, Don, 255n60 Ruddy, Jon, 6 Rudmin, Floyd W., 94 Ryan, Maureen, 201–2 Ryga, George, 30–1, 74, 96–112; Captives of the Faceless Drummer,

110; Compressions, 106–12, 244; “Drummer of the Second Silence,” 102–3, 108, 111; The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, 31, 97; Grass and Wild Strawberries, 103–6, 111; “Kamloops Incident,” 265n108; In the Shadow of the Vulture, 110–11, 204; Just an Ordinary Person, 100–2, 106, 110; pacifism of, 99; Summerland, 97 sadomasochism, 188 Saigon, takeover of (1975), 4 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 22; “Universal Soldier,” 255n53 same-sex marriage, legalization of, 169 Sassoon, Siegfried, 187 Satin, Mark, 180, 255n60; Confessions of a Young Exile, 32, 171, 172–4, 177–81, 182 Saturday Night, 125, 142, 267n36 “Saturna Island as Vietnam” (Reid), 126–7, 130, 134, 136 Scarry, Elaine, 36, 39–40 Scobie, Stephen, 161, 165 Scott, F.R.: “National Identity,” 10 Second World War, 9, 28, 39, 58–9, 61, 103, 108–9, 208, 216 self-immolation, 131–4, 154, 184, 221 self-reflexiveness, 31, 111, 158, 191–2, 212, 230, 249, 262n45; and didacticism, 92, 102 Sentimentalists, The (Skibsrud), 199, 207–11, 213, 217, 221, 230 September 11 attacks, 94, 95, 169, 196–8; veteran turn in novels after, 201–18 sex, 38, 247; normalcy in, 176; power, violence, and, 36 sexism, 73, 92 sexual identity, 171

Index 321

sexuality, 7–8, 31–2, 45–6, 49, 53, 91; brutal vs ludic, 189; crisis of, 32; liberated, 176; and national identity, 195; public performance of, 176; queer, history of, 193; traditional norms of, 11, 50, 170, 186, 194 sexual politics, 49 sexual revolution, 46, 47 sexual violence, 36, 38 Shakespeare, William, 112; Henry IV, 109; Henry V, 109–10; Richard III, 109; Romeo and Juliet, 109 Sharp, Mitchell, 47 Sibum, Norm, 255n60 Silent Surrender (Levitt), 15 Sir George Williams University, 70–1 Sir Orfeo, 230–1 Skibsrud, Johanna: The Sentimentalists, 199, 207–11, 213, 217, 221, 230 Slappey, Sterling, 48 slavery, 51, 117, 220 Slotkin, Richard, 159 Smith, Ray, 73, 92, 255n57; “Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Center of Canada,” 52, 86–8, 259n50 Smolash, Naava, 222 social imaginary, 7 socialism, Canadian, 43 social justice, 99 Sontag, Susan, 119; On Photography, 119, 267n24 Soundings: New Canadian Poets, 133 Souster, Raymond, 255n57 South Africa, 160 Southeast Asia, 254n48; diaspora, 136; discrimination toward refugees from, 222

South Korea, 251n5 sovereignty, Canadian, 81 Spalding, Linda: The Paper Wife, 198 “Speak White” (Lalonde), 29 spectacle, 119, 136 Spicer, Jack: Billy the Kid, 160 Spock, Benjamin, 17 “Stab” (Bowering), 116–17 Stanleigh, Allan: u s n a : The United States of North America, 94–6, 197 Starowicz, Mark, 88 Star-Spangled Beaver, The (MacDonald), 77 Steele, James, 72, 172 Steel Rail, 23 Stein, David Lewis: City Boys, 267n36; “The Night of the Little Brown Men,” 125–6, 133, 136, 229–30 Steinem, Gloria, 49 stereotypes: American, 234; Canadian national, 185–6, 190, 194, 216, 234, 236; chauvinist, 44 Stevens, Peter, 255n57; “Warming Up, Tuning In,” 131–3 Stewart, Walter, 77, 139, 141; “The Forgotten Children,” 17, 19 Stop-Time (Conroy), 274n66 Storm Warning (ed. Purdy), 23–4 Stratford Shakespeare Festival, 109 “structures of feeling,” 7 Students for a Democratic Society (s d s ), 12, 179 Student Union for Peace Action (s u p a ), 12 subjectivity, Vietnamese, 136 Suez Crisis, 184 Sugars, Cynthia, 87 Summerland (Ryga), 97

322 Index

Surfacing (Atwood), 6, 14, 29–30, 40–1, 53–4, 67–8, 71, 73, 204, 227, 233, 246, 267n44; Vietnamizing Canada in, 55–66 Survival (Atwood), 22, 26, 62, 67–8, 241 Swan, Susan: The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, 65 Sweden, 190 Switzerland, 59 Tab International, 49–50, 54–5 “Take What We Can” (Hayes), 120 Tallman, Warren, 27 Tamarack Review, 259n50 Taste of Metal (Todd), 273n26 Taylor, Charles, 7 teach-ins, 3, 69, 75, 106 techno-capitalism, alternatives to, 62 technologism, American, 11, 12, 16, 41, 114 Technology and Empire (Grant), 45, 60, 62, 65, 258n25 Teleky, Richard, 255n60 television, 113–67. See also mass media terrorism, 95 Tet Offensive, 224, 268n71 Thailand, 251n5 theatre: New Left guerrilla, 99; role of, 103, 109–10; street, 134–5 “There’s a Kind of Hush” (Wayman), 26–7 Thich Quang Duc, 131, 154, 221 Thien, Madeleine: Dogs at the Perimeter, 277n9 This Country in the Morning, 243 This Hour Has Seven Days, 114 Thompson, Judith, 241 Thompson, Kent, 255n60

Thúy, Kim, 225; Mãn, 32, 200, 219, 226, 232; Ru, 32, 200, 219, 222–6, 232 Tickner, J. Ann, 44 Time, 147–8, 158 Time in Between, The (Bergen), 33, 199–201, 203–5, 207–11, 213, 217, 218, 221, 230, 232–4, 240, 277n17 Tish group (Vancouver), 27 Todd, Jack, 255n60; Taste of Metal, 273n26 Toronto Star Weekly, 139 transnationalism, 198 trans-sex identification, 170 trauma: bodily and psychic, 83; and mass media, 134, 141; of war, 32, 101, 111, 201–4, 210, 212–13, 217, 230, 248 Travels by Night (Fetherling), 273n26 Trudeau, Pierre, 20, 58, 78, 165, 197, 242 Trudeau Papers, The (Adams), 30, 74, 90–2, 94, 98 True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid, The (Nichol), 160–1 Trump, Donald, 5 Tucker-Abramson, Myka, 222 20 Cents Magazine, 77 “Two Heroes” (Nichol), 160–1, 164 Ubyssey newspaper, 35–6, 47, 138, 141 Ultimatum (Rohmer), 6, 30, 74, 80–3, 85 Underground Railroad, 11, 173 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 69, 129–30 United Nations, 184, 215 United States: alternative to in draftdodger novels, 172–81; anti-war movement, 24; as Canada’s

Index 323

powerful boyfriend, 215; Canadian independence from, 4; Canadian resistance to, 30, 54, 74, 86–96, 244, 248; Canadian skepticism of, 115; condemnation of for actions in Vietnam, 14, 59, 110; as corrupt, 110; cultural dominance of, 195; difference between Canada and, 5, 10, 18, 22, 30, 33, 116, 171, 205, 209, 215–18, 237, 240, 244, 246, 248; economic integration with Canada, 9; emigration from, 5; failure to understand Vietnam situation, 86; and fetishization of war era, 201, 235; foreign policy, 12, 28, 50, 91; generalizations about, 15–16; identity of, 195, 243; impossibility of sex and gender normalcy, 176; Indigenous peoples in, 12; inequality in, 12, 110; invincibility, myth of, 70; as macho-patriarchal, 169; masculine nature of, vs feminized Canada, 36–41, 169–70, 210; militarism of, 12, 14, 24, 205–6, 212–13, 218, 243; military conflict with Canada, 7, 24, 26, 30, 54, 71, 74, 75–85, 121, 169, 214, 243, 246, 263n58; military cooperation with Canada, 9; myth of as supporting freedom, 116; National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 159; and normalcy, 177; ownership of Canadian corporations, 13; ownership of Canadian resources, 56; personifications of, 15–16; political conflict with Canada, 58; racism in, 12, 110; relationship with Canada, 3–5, 7, 13–14, 16, 37–40, 47, 96, 115, 153, 207, 240, 244–5; sexual

violation of Canada, 40; similarities with Canada, 75, 84; state violence in, 12; stereotypes of, 234; as threat to Canada, 41–6; as violent, 110, 209, 215–16; war as national trauma, 235 universities: alternative, 69; Canadianization of, 72; enrolments at, 68; US faculty in Canada, 72 Unjust Society, The (Cardinal), 19–20 u s n a : The United States of North America (Longworth et al.), 94–6, 197 utopianism, 106 Vancouver Free University, 69 Vancouver Liberation Front, 71 venereal disease, 49–50, 54–5 veterans: as fathers, 202; fathers of, 202; myth of, 203; traumatized, 32, 201–4, 210, 217, 230, 248 “veteran turn,” 32, 200, 201–18, 219 Viet Cong. See National Liberation Front Vietnam: anti-colonial revolution, 251n5; Canadian preoccupation with, 6; civilian/child deaths in, 17–19, 85, 116, 139; comparison of with Canada, 14, 19, 26, 29–30, 51, 54, 71, 80, 84, 86–8, 205, 217, 245; consequences of war for, 200; diaspora, 220, 222, 232; identification with, 134; narratives of, 232–41; nationalist use of, 223; political reality of, 136; suffering in, instrumentalization of, 30, 65, 246; subjectivity, 136; women in, 225 Vietnamese-Canadians, 200, 219, 222–3; instrumentalization of, 229 Vietnamization, 55–66, 72

324 Index

“Vietnam syndrome,” 202 violence, 7–8, 117–18, 129, 163, 167, 180, 200, 206, 213; aestheticizing, 161; attitudes toward, 217; Canadians and, 188; endorsement of, 205, 247; indifference to, 184; interpersonal conflict and, 214; masculinity and, 173, 179, 186; and mass media, 154, 204; militarist, 106, 205; needlessness of, 214; normalization of, 144; parody of, 190; racialized, 11; sex, power, and, 36; sexual, 36, 38, 40; state, 12; traumatic participation in, 203; US, 152–3, 166, 204–6, 209, 215–16, 244; US, as male, 65; against women, 49, 60, 179 Voice of Women (v o w ), 44, 258n24 Wall, Ann, 23 war: costs of, 199; imagery/metaphors, 57, 71, 74; images of, 119, 121, 123, 130–2, 138–9, 142, 145, 150; legacy of, 203, 208, 213, 218, 220; resistance to, and queerness, 172; skepticism about, 194 War and Peace in the Global Village (McLuhan), 113 Ward, Norman, 77 war immigrants, 172–3, 175, 209, 256n60, 272n12; use of term, 255n55. See also draft dodgers “War in Viet Nam, The” (Acorn), 122–3, 126, 136 War Measures Act, 20 “Warming Up, Tuning In” (Stevens), 131–3 Warner, Tom, 53 Warnock, John W., 16, 255n57; Partner to Behemoth, 48

War of 1812: 8, 58, 71, 75, 199, 244 Warren Commission, 155–8; The Weight of the Evidence, 157 Wars, The (Findley), 6, 32, 172, 203, 247; brothel scene in, 187–91; identifying with queerness in, 182–95; second-person narration in, 191–2 Watkins, Melville, 13, 115; Gordon to Watkins to You, 77 Wayman, Tom: “The Dow Recruiter,” 23, 130–4, 254n40; “The Dream of the Guerillas,” 67, 108; “There’s a Kind of Hush,” 26–7 Ways of Seeing (Berger), 111–12 “Way to the West” (Birney), 48 weapons manufacturing, 3, 17–18, 250 Weathermen, 70, 160, 184 Webb, Phyllis, 255n57 Weir, Lorraine, 65 Welsh, Jennifer, 197 Westell, Anthony, 11 “What Are the Odds?” (Acorn), 77–8, 88 What We All Long For (Brand), 32–3, 196–7, 200, 219–20, 222–3, 226, 232, 240 white phosphorus, 12 Whitman, Walt, 20 Wieland, Joyce, 22 Wild Bunch, The (Peckinpah), 160 Wilde, Oscar, 187 Wild West, 31, 120, 158–60, 164, 197, 243 Williams, David, 184 Williams, Raymond, 7 Williams, William Appleman, 159 Wilson, D.W.: Ballistics, 199, 214–18, 240 “Winning” (Bowering), 146

Index 325

women: advocacy groups, 49; in antiwar movement, 258n29; situation of as homologous with Canada’s, 52; subordination of, 40; suppression of, 40, 49, 57; in Ultimatum, 82; in universities, 49; on verge of liberation, 171; violence against, 49, 60, 179; vulnerability of, 49; watching films, 170 Women & Children (Harvor), 51 women’s liberation movement, 36, 46, 49, 57, 93, 116 Woodcock, George, 255n57; “Getting Away with Survival,” 256n62

Woods, John T., 83 Wounded Knee massacre, 160 X, Malcolm, 153 Yates, J. Michael, 255n60 York, Lorraine, 186 Young, Ian, 194 Young, Neil, 22; “Ohio,” 255n53 “Young Canadians Abroad” (Fetherling), 185–6 Zapruder, Abraham, 155–6 Zolf, Larry, 255n57