Pablo Maestu Sánchez

María Jesús Hernáez Lerena

Facultad de Letras y de la Educación

Grado en Estudios Ingleses

2015-2016

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TRABAJO FIN DE GRADO

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A study towards ethical criticism in a postmodernistcontext: Making meaning in Timothy Findley's novel The

Wars

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A study towards ethical criticism in a postmodernist context: Making meaningin Timothy Findley's novel The Wars, trabajo fin de grado

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Trabajo de Fin de Grado

A STUDY TOWARDS ETHICAL CRITICISM

IN A POSTMODERNIST CONTEXT:

MAKING MEANING IN TIMOTHY

FINDLEY’S NOVEL THE WARS

Autor:

PABLO MAESTU SÁNCHEZ

Tutor/es:

Fdo. MARÍA JESÚS HERNÁEZ LERENA.

Titulación:

Grado en Estudios Ingleses [601G]

Facultad de Letras y de la Educación

AÑO ACADÉMICO: 2015/2016

Abstract.

In this essay, fiction and imagination are explored in its capacity to overcome

the breakdown of the values of the 20th century, through the study of Timothy’s Findley

The Wars. Through the analysis of an overview of the major changes in postmodernist

approaches to knowledge, the essay will provide supporting arguments to expand on

ethical criticism on the grounds of the possibility to achieve a positive and constructive

dialogue with the literary text. The representation of the character of The Wars, Robert

Ross, will guide us in our ethical journey towards understanding and moral insight. This

essay will also explore the connectedness of fields of human knowledge such as history,

historiography, photography and fiction and their needed cooperation in order to make

meaning.

Resumen

En este ensayo, la ficción y la imaginación serán exploradas dentro de su

capacidad para sobrepasar el desglose de valores del siglo 20, a través del estudio de

Las Guerras de Timothy Findley. A partir del análisis de una visión de conjunto de los

mayores cambios con respecto a los enfoques postmodernistas sobre el conocimiento, el

ensayo aportará argumentos a favor de expandir la crítica ética en base a la posibilidad

de conseguir un diálogo positivo y constructivo con el texto. La representación del

personaje de Las Guerras, Robert Ross, nos guiará en nuestro viaje ético hacia el

entendimiento y la iluminación moral. Este ensayo también explorará la interconexión

de campos del conocimiento como por ejemplo la historia, la historiografía, la

fotografía y la ficción así como su necesaria cooperación para crear contenido.

INDEX:

1.-INTRODUCTION............................................................................................p.5

1.1.-Introduction to the Essay.....................................................................p.5

1.2.- Plot of The Wars...............................................................................p.6

1.3.-Adjusting the Focus............................................................................p.6

2.-THE BREAKDOWN OF VALUES OF 20TH CENTURY....................................p.9

2.1.-Clash within the Historical Canon........................................................p.9

2.2.-Ethical Breakdown: Plurality of Approaches .......................................p.10

2.3.-Exploring Fiction Inwardly………………............................................p.12

3.-THE WARS THROUGH THE LENSES OF THE CAMERA..............................p.15

3.1.-Conception and Role of Photography. Photography’s Relevance

regarding History and Fiction………………………………….…………......p.15

3.2.-Photography in Ethics.......................................................................p.18

4.-THE RESEARCHER’S AMBITIOUS ATTEMPT OF MAKING MEANING.....p.21

4.1.-Fiction and History at Ethics’ Service.................................................p.21

4.2.-Robert under Tension.........................................................................p.24

5.-CONCLUSION………....................................................................................p.31

6.-BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................p.33

5

1.-Introduction.

1.1.-Introduction to the Essay.

World War I –‘The War To End All Wars’– was for Canada one of the most

tragic events in its history. Even though some argue that it helped the country reassure

its own identity and establish itself as an independent nation no longer under the yoke of

the British Empire, the damage and devastation of such a distant conflict –and yet so

closely lived, both at home and in the trenches–, produced a profound and deep wound

in the core of the country. The casualties accounted for more than fifty thousand who

perished in the conflict, of whom most of them were young men: Canada’s future

generation who sacrificed its life for this war, in an attempt to ascertain the importance

of the country within the crumbling British Empire. Evidently, this painful event still is

extremely vivid in Canadian memory, as “172,000 wounded veterans were a constant

reminder, in scarred flesh, blinded vision, missing limbs, and lasting psychological

trauma, of the ongoing cost of war” (Cook, 2014:418).

This essay is an attempt to explore the memory of the I World War by means of

Timothy Findley’s The Wars, a revision of this tragedy as “[m]ore and more people

want to be remembered. Hundreds–thousands” (Findley, 2001:5). And they need to be

remembered and, most importantly, placed into perspective. Just as Kevin Major argues,

the remembrance of such terrible events “is done with the hope that we learn from past

mistakes, that we wouldn’t allow such tragedy to unfold again” (2016). Findley

recollects the pieces of that memory to recreate a greater picture, composed of a mixture

of questionable historical awareness through literary exploration and the uncertainty

regarding the future, all woven together under the reconstruction of the figure of one

(extra)ordinary man, Robert Ross. This essay is an attempt of making meaning out of a

story that uses literature as a common thread to explore the different fields of

knowledge of the social sciences whose capacities of achieving results had suffered the

demolishing consequences of postmodernist scepticism. The objective of this essay is to

provide evidence of the power of fiction to raise questions, reconsider established

values and produce a positive and constructive dialogue among writers, readers and

characters.

6

1.2.-Plot of ‘The Wars’

The Wars is a novel that deals with the figure of a researcher in an attempt to

reconstruct the past of a man, Robert Ross, who died consumed by violence and hatred

in the midst of World War I. The researcher writes Ross’ life based on photographs and

witnesses, and, over all, based on his own imagination. The researcher thus,

fictionalizes Robert Ross’ life. Therefore, there is another plotline drawn besides the

one of the researcher which is an account of Robert Ross’ life. Robert was a little boy

growing in a small town in Canada. Eventually, after the death of her sister, he decides

to enrol in the Canadian army. Robert Ross’ life is full of misery in the process of

becoming accustomed to that new reality. He suffers as he confronts the calamities of

war and struggles throughout his life, both physically and mentally.

There is one moment of Robert Ross’ life that is key to the understanding of the

novel and, more particularly, of this essay. In an act of alleged madness, Robert Ross’

disobeys his superior and breaks the chain of command in order to save some horses

that are caught in the cross-fire. He then kills the superior and runs away with the

horses, leaving behind the burning field where the horses were supposed to have been

killed. Afterwards, Robert Ross is persecuted and cornered into a barn that also ends up

burning, though this time Robert cannot escape on time for the door is blocked. He

finally manages to jump with a horse through the fire, but he barely makes it out alive.

This last occurrence is known as ‘the fiery image,’ and represents Robert Ross’ act of

rebellion.

Robert Ross is transported to a hospital where he is attended until he dies due to

the burns in his body.

1.3.-Adjusting the Focus.

Beforehand, this essay will be focused on literary criticism, not on historical

knowledge, although there must be some background that would ultimately explain the

complexity of the fiction in question. Therefore, this is not an essay on history precisely

because the novel dealt with on this paper is not a work of pure historiography, nor of

proper history. In fact, “if we do not find ourselves able to rise to this ‘subjectivity’ of

7

thought, we shall produce poetry and not history” (Croce, 1921:37), which is precisely

the objective of the novel; it is not a matter of capability in our overcoming subjectivity,

but a necessity to understand these events through the scope of poetry. And it is

Benedetto Croce in fact that reassures the righteousness of poetry and feeling as of

being poured into writing in order to express the macabre and the tragic or the

magnificence and the grandeur of an epoch or an event; but always considering it what

it is: not history, but poetry –factual imagination and imagined factuality. Poetry is not

to be dismissed when dealing with philosophy and sentiment, except within the realm of

history, because as Croce understands, poetry is “a necessary form of the spirit and one

of the dearest to the heart of man” (1921:39), although not acceptable as historical

discourse. It is then true that the novel explores and expands on the issues of history

evoking The Great War’s memory and it truly gazes our past so as to learn from it and

reconsider our values in the aftermath of this conflict.

Furthermore, the analysis of The Great War through the scope of poetry will

produce in this essay an association with the ethical elements of fiction writing. The

novel as a whole dwells in moral dilemmas, both from the perspective of its

composition, that is, the actual creation of the fiction, and from the perspective of its

plot. Thus, The Wars makes one of the finest objects of study regarding its complexity

on that aspect. Therefore, the breeding ground for ethical judgement in this essay will

be explored according to the point of view of several philosophers and literary critics,

who support the need of the idea of ethical criticism, which, in the context of

postmodernism, is not completely agreed upon.

8

9

2.-The Breakdown of Values of the 20th Century.

2.2.- Clash within the Historical Canon.

History and historiography had achieved in the 19th century a respectability in

the fields of the social sciences that is not easily attainable for many other dimensions of

human knowledge. With historians such as Leopold von Ranke, the objectivity and

accuracy of historical discourse gained an overwhelming approval as historiography had

superseded the previous writing of history. They had substituted the previous one for a

model that lacked in subjectivity and rooted for a universal history based on local and

regional accounts filled with factual discourses and without a philosophical backbone.

As it was believed, it would ultimately surpass the subtle line between the facts and the

actual events. As Benedetto Croce explains on his Theory and History of

Historiography, the already cited historian Leopold von Ranke elevated the status of

history to a new level as “he was not able to accept the grave charge of judging the past

or of instructing the present as to the future, but he felt himself capable only of showing

‘how things really had happened’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen)” (1921:291).

Nevertheless, the ‘objectivity’ achieved by this historian and his followers was

drastically overthrown on the next century for, as Dagmar Krause explains, “[t]he

situation at the end of the 20th century was marked by particular insecurities and a

widespread breakdown of values, as changes in the perception of reality and history had

exposed these concepts to be constructed rather than given” (2005:19). Ronald Hatch

also supports the idea as he believes that the vision of the past faltered in favour of the

new conception of history as “human invention and intervention, arranged in narrative

form […] and in continual need of reshaping” (1986:93).

Timothy Findley understood this problem in history and used it to his advantage.

He knew that he was not writing history, but nevertheless he explored those

uncertainties. In fact, he playfully suspends from the very beginning the veracity of the

facts, whether photographic or witness-wise accounts, as he dismisses their existence in

the real world for they are all encapsulated in a work of fiction. Furthermore, he

understands the complexity of truthful history and non-biased historiography. As can be

seen, choice is always involved in the process, a process through which the readers

10

grow and a process in which they are obliged to participate. “The interest that stirs us

[in poetry] is not that of life which becomes thought, but of life which becomes intuition

and imagination” (Croce, 1921:37). What Findley does is expand that concept into the

field of historiography by giving the narrator the task of recomposing history from

original sources, but always having in mind that the process is deliberately altered by

imagination. Findley fictionalizes our past to a greater extent, consciously choosing not

to be objective.

2.3-Ethical Breakdown: Plurality of Approaches.

As we have seen in the field of history, postmodernism impacted against the

core of the established edifice of knowledge and something similar occurred in the

realm of ethics. According to Dagmar Krause, “true to the postmodern spirit of diversity

and heterogeneity, there are as varied approaches to postmodern ethics as there are

different concepts of postmodernism itself” (2005:31). The problem with ethics when

dealing with that plurality of approaches is the reaction that this plurality may produce.

As a matter of fact, Antor Heinz posed a question that described perfectly the said

reaction to that conundrum: “[a]re we caught up in between fundamentalist war-

mongers and the arbitrariness of absolute relativism?” (2011: 8). Heinz Antor

understands that the destruction of certainty may produce both the establishment of an

essentialist fallacious Truth, as a futile response to the lack of a better approach, on the

one hand; and the expansion of postmodernist indifference towards critical thinking, in

favour of the “anything goes” (2011:8) attitude, on the other hand. Heinz Antor, thus

argues that “the practice of writing and reading literature and of literary criticism, if

understood and engaged in as an ethical undertaking, can take us a long way towards an

attitude that makes […]” a “vision of peace possible” (2011:8). He believes in the role

of literature as an ethical tool that can become beneficial to dispel doubts regarding the

plurality brought by postmodernism. It is mostly through fiction and imagination that

we can recreate and relive that plurality and construct a versatile and mutable set of

values, which can extend to understand the causes of different acts of doubtful moral

validity. In The Wars, the continuous effort of the narrator to bring us closer to Robert

Ross’s surroundings and personal experience is an attempt to explore the causes that

drove him to perform the said act of rebellion. Nevertheless, before going any further in

the ethical dimension, we must understand some ideas that will ultimately connect

11

fiction and ethics. That way, we will be able to understand the implications of the one in

the other, and vice versa. For this theoretical approach, I will be following the work of

Wayne C. Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum and Antor Heinz to explore the main ideas in

The Wars that can be read in connection to the novel’s relationship to ethics.

As said before, there are several ideas that are relevant for the understanding of

this approach to ethics. The first key concept needs to be understood from its

etymological origin and it is the basis for this particular idea of ethical criticism, which

is the word ‘ethos,’ understood as character. Following this train of thought, ethical

criticism “must cover all qualities in the character, or ethos, of authors and readers,

whether these are judged as good or bad” (Booth, 1988:8). This idea promoted by Booth

is adequate for our purposes, as “[t]he formation of character is […] profoundly

influenced by stories. These stories influence the reader through the exposure to a

different ethos embodied in the characters” (Krause, 2005:38); as we saw before, the

plurality of ethical approaches finds in literature the perfect tool for ethical dialogue. In

our particular case, there are different ethos combined within the novel and in

opposition, which stimulates the dialogue among conceptions of the world. The novel

presents different characters, realities, levels of narration, etc. In addition, the reader

incorporates its own ethical horizon to the whole and, in that way, s/he actualizes the

implied moral questions in the fiction and confronts them.

These world views are called ‘horizons,’ and we use them to make sense of the

world and to understand our place in a particular time and space; not until we evaluate

our surroundings can we “determine […] what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be

done” (Taylor, 1989: 27). In addition, the concept of dialogue has to do with our

capacity of interaction with a text, whether oral or written, and it could possibly said to

be the focus of ethical criticism, as it “attempts to describe the encounters of a story-

teller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener” (Booth, 1988:8). In the field of ethics,

we need to understand the stance in which we are found to properly judge; thus, in The

Wars, the narrator focuses his attention on creating an atmosphere similar to the one in

which Robert Ross lived to allow the reader to grasp the essence of the period and to

immerse into the circumstances of the main character.

12

2.4.-Exploring Fiction Inwardly.

Following this train of thought, Findley uses “a form of knowledge which

involves both historical awareness and imagination: and that form of knowledge is

called fiction” (York, 1990:29). There nevertheless is an intertwining of layers in

Findley’s composition that goes beyond the usual mixture of historical awareness and

imagination, which is relevant to this study. He seeks to induce the reader into a search

for truth through subtle and incomplete glimpses of the past. It is not exclusively a

search for historical truth, but also a search towards ethical insight. As it can be

perceived in Findley’s work, this search can only be achieved through imagining and

feeling. Purposefully, his fiction looks inwards, both in its historical reconstruction and

in its fictionalization of brute facts. To explain this idea we must introduce and bear in

mind Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafiction which would read as follows,

“Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and

systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about

the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods

of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative

fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary

fictionality text” (1984:2).

Literature too reacted in its own manner when those uncertainties and the

breakdown of values came along. It produced its own journey of self-evaluation, an

introspective reconsideration of its own (un)reality by means of different techniques.

This already mentioned term of metafiction helps understand Findley’s writing process

when dealing not only with the fictionalization of historical events, but also with the

consciousness of that fictionality. The rupture with certainty in our relationship with

reality, brought with it a completely new conception of the fictional world. The work of

fiction is now aware of its own fictionality and the author imbues power to that work to

question the rooted notions of real-unreal, historical-imagined, etc., which will

ultimately examine the authenticity of the whole set of values of this dimension we call

reality. The intertwining of those spheres provides the novel with an enormous depth

that challenges our conception of historicity and facts: the historical or real is

challenged by fiction as we are tricked into accepting as true the realism of non-fiction

13

(research), within a broader fictional scope (the novel), when, actually, they are both

imagined. Donna P. Penne argues that “The Wars in its multiplicity of forms, narrators,

and references offers many texts within texts within itself as novel. In other words, we

recognize a fully metafictive text here” (1991, 40); and precisely those methods that

acknowledge fictionality are exploited through the novel, as this subjective arbitrariness

of metafictional writing is pervasive and constantly recalling the unreliability of

historical discourse.

As seen, the past becomes irretrievable, “[t]hen was then. Unique. And how does

one explain?” (Findley, 2001:114). The problem emerges as we cannot answer that

question, a question that goes beyond the factuality and into the essence of that unique

past, for “[t]he past can never be available to us in pure form, but always in the form of

‘representations’; after poststructuralism, history becomes textualized” (Selden,

Widdowson and Brooker, 2005:181), that is: what was received were “not events

themselves, but facts, i.e. textualized remains of the past” (Krause, 2005:20) which

undergo a process of selection that destroys the whole authentic picture of reality.

Therefore, fiction and imagination hold together different human aptitudes of

making meaning and encourages the reader to question those faculties. In this way, we

are producing a new plurality to the whole novel, in our ethical dialogue with it. Our

realization that the narrator cannot produce a single, unified and exclusive response to

the past or to the moral grounds that must have been in place is very important in this

context. Diana Brydon suggests that “there can be no omniscient narrator because there

can be no omniscience, only tentative approaches to knowledge through a variety of

routes” (1986:77). And the novel explores those tentative approaches in a combined

effort to making meaning. The novel in itself is an attempt of expressing the

pervasiveness of criticism and the interconnectedness of fields such as history, ethics

and literature.

The novel poses a question, but neither the author nor the narrator have an

answer. We, readers, must enter the world of fiction and choose our answer. We must

put ourselves in Robert Ross’ context and explore the motivation for his choices.

Fiction imparts feeling and that feeling brings us closer to the character’s dilemmas. In

her defence of the power of emotion in fiction, Martha C. Nussbaum emphasizes the

need for fiction. As she states,

14

“Schematic philosophers’ examples almost always lack the particularity,

the emotive appeal, the absorbing plottedness, the variety and indeterminacy, of

good fiction; they lack, too, good fiction’s way of making the reader a

participant and a friend; and we have argued that it is precisely in virtue of these

structural characteristics that fiction can play the role it does in our reflective

lives” (Nussbaum, 1990:175)

It is through fiction and imagination that we create the appropriate construct for

the exploration of moral dilemmas and conundrums. The necessity of literature to

explore ethics supported by Nussbaum is also agreed upon by J. Hillis Miller, as he

argues that “[w]ithout storytelling there is no theory of ethics. Narratives, examples,

stories [...] are indispensable to thinking about ethics” (1987:2).And, precisely, that

fictional construct is built in The Wars by a narrator-researcher with the intention of

achieving a moral insight. Nevertheless, before studying her/his role within the novel,

we must understand the importance of photography that underlines Findley’s fictive

work on its three levels: historical, fictional and ethical. Indeed, photography will gain a

new value in the accounting for actual events, and fiction will explore that dimension of

our pictographic past. David Williams argues that The Wars goes beyond narrative and

deals with “the hidden connections between history and photography, so reminding us

of why history as a modern discipline would attend the advent of photography”

(2007:55).

15

3.-The Wars through the Lenses of the Camera.

3.1.- Conception and Role of Photography. Photography’s Relevance regarding

History and Fiction.

The visual power of photography entered the sphere of history’s process of

knowledge from the moment of its birth and new theories have since emerged so as to

explain the phenomenon of photography and its relation to the past. Eduardo Cadava

argues that “[p]hotography names a process that, seizing and tearing an image from its

context, works to immobilize the flow of history” (1997:xx), which is explained as the

‘Medusa effect’ that is the “capacity to arrest or immobilize historical movement, to

isolate the detail of an event from the continuum of history” (Cadava, 1997:59). The

visual of the photographic world opens a new reality in the present, that is, the

decontextualized past. Thus, “[r]elated to both the future and the past, the photograph

constitutes the present by means of this relation to what it is not” (Cadava, 1997:62), to

what it is no longer: the unique, the ‘then.’ Photography as the proof of the existence of

something that otherwise would only weigh as much as the historicity of a statement;

that is, historical account of facts that are clouded by the process of choice and

interpretation. As a matter of fact, “[p]hotographed images do not seem to be statements

about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality” (Sontag, 2005:2). They

represent a time and space that is no longer but that somehow has been retained in the

photograph as a small portion of that past reality. It is the materialization of past time

whose essence is captured in the visual.

History is challenged once again by a new dimension dealing with the past and it

will need to accept the new photographic paradigm and expand its processes of

recollection, as “the ‘force of arrest’ in the photographic technique literally disrupts the

organic continuity of older notions of temporality” (Williams, 2007:59). Therefore, the

sphere of photography will become a new formula to engage in a dialogue with our

past, a dialogue of the visual that will find in fiction an unexpected ally, which will

boost its meaningfulness with imagination. Accordingly, it is the fiction that focuses its

efforts on the memory of past events that has resorted to the usage of this media in an

attempt to arrest the past in a moment of discontinuity. As Lorraine M. York observes,

16

“[p]hotography in recent Canadian fiction is most often associated with ancestry,”

where a character usually appears “contemplating the photograph […], as though

conducting a search for the connection between the shadowy past and the present”

(1990:7). It is that shadowy past that the photographs can illuminate as they ultimately

do refocus the lenses through which we gaze at the past.

Precisely the ‘Medusa effect’ previously mentioned is the element that suspends

“the temporal continuity between a past and a present. This break from the present

enables the rereading and rewriting of history” (Cadava, 1997:59). Concerning the

creation of fiction, photography provides the connection between past and present as it

interrupts their continuum and allows the author to rewrite events that would need to be

re-contextualized. In this sense, both the photographic capability of arresting time and

the consequent interruption of history allow the researcher to restructure the narrative of

historical discourse. Nevertheless, the process of creating a new structure and context

for those images is playfully emphasized in The Wars. In fact, the usage of photographs

halts the narrative and highlights its own constructiveness. “The literary text has yet to

be integrated with this extra-textual image in ways that reveal the larger significance of

photography as a force of interruption, which is to say a force of mutation, in the novel”

(Williams, 2007:54-55). Timothy Findley uses the power of interruption that

photography provides to explain the labour of reconstruction that has to be done. The

researcher shuffles these photographs as though they were cards and lays them out for

us to see history in the making; we, readers, are witnessing the brute data that hint at our

past and we are embarking in a journey to make meaning out of those scraps of time and

“only when reading undoes the context of an image is a text developed, like a

photographic negative, toward its full historical significance” (Cadava, 1997:65). When

speaking of photography as distance and as decontextualized pieces of present-past, we

can relate them to unfamiliarity. The pictures are as stranded from the continuum of

history and Ross’ life as the objects that they represent are strangely remote to Ross’

perception of reality.

The photographs are vestiges of events that need to be reconstructed in our

minds to rekindle the hidden continuum that they are arresting in themselves; Findley

powers that potential, the light of those memories, through fiction, thus creating a

powerful narrative that projects itself in two levels: Robert Ross’ war experience and

17

the researcher and reader’s quest for meaning (partially, out of photographs).

Therefore, the importance of photography in this metafictive text resides in the fact that

“[p]hotographs furnish evidence” (Sontag, 2005:3); they represent the “incontrovertible

proof that a given thing happened” (Sontag, 2005:3) which gives the fiction the power

to overcome its own unreality and appear concrete, tangible, even real. Particularly in

The Wars, that power is used to a finer degree as it perfectly opposes the fictionality that

underlies the whole novel; it creates a paradoxical account of the reality and actual

past’s existence of a given event captured by a photograph while, at a different level, it

is described in an interpretative fiction narrative. As Susan Sontag explains, whereas “a

prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a

photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency” (2005:3-4), and thus,

from that paradoxical collision of both interpretation (fiction) and transparency

(photograph within fiction), we encounter the metafictive quality of the text,

challenging reality and authenticity.

Furthermore, Findley’s mastery of the narrative technique achieves the degree of

what has been called “photo-narration” (Williams, 2007:54); the novel’s cadence

participates in the overall effect of photographic recollection. John F. Hulcoop perfectly

describes the style and its purpose as follows,

“The short sentences and abbreviated paragraphs are characteristic. They

function in a number of ways: they isolate actions, events, thoughts, emotions, images,

or whatever Findley wants to focus on; by isolating an "object" and forcing the reader to

focus on it in a single sentence […], in a single paragraph, the reading process is slowed

down […].When the process is slowed down, the reader's attention is intensified”

(1981:41-2)

Findley imitates photography through his narrative and, thus, fiction is

graphically represented. Findley is continuously asking the reader to “pay attention!”

(Findley, 2001:3). There are moments in the novel where a sentence encapsulates the

arrest that the photograph produced; for instance, Rowena’s death is shocking for its

directness, the image projected into our minds in different flashes. “Jesus./ She fell. / It

was Sunday./ Robert wasn’t there” (Findley, 2001:15). Findley’s researcher is

18

struggling to produce “an ‘album’ of fragmented instants” (Williams, 2007:59) in order

to illuminate the past with the flashes of his narration.

3.2.- Photography in Ethics

The interconnectedness of fields allows me to argue that photography imbues a

great amount of ethical content to the fictional world. Thus, not only is photography

important in the field of history but also in the realm of morality. “Photographing is

essentially an act of non-intervention” (Sontag, 2005:8) as the photographer distances

himself or herself from the main action exclusively to take the shot of an event. By

doing so, he or she chooses not to intervene, not to stop or interrupt the action that is

being photographed, and, ironically, he or she is actually interrupting history by

arresting the moment in the picture (‘Medusa effect’). We must understand that the

manner in which we capture reality with the shot of a camera is, in a way, deliberate; we

consciously choose what to photograph and how to do it. When I refer to ‘act of non-

intervention,’ I intend to mean not-intervention regarding the actual action in the present

that is being photographed. It is ‘act of non-intervention,’ as in its separateness and

distance from the action taking place.

Once that is understood, we see how Findley goes beyond both levels and

explores the conception of the photographer. Being Robert Ross’ fictional, we need to

understand that the photography presented could not have existed. For that reason, the

notion of non-intervention is invalid here, just as the notion of ‘act of photography’ is

invalid. If there was not an act of photography, the photographer could not have neither

interrupted the event (intervention), nor taken the picture (non-intervention). In our

case, Findley acknowledged that the photographs from which this fiction emerged were

real. Nevertheless, he actually acts on the pictures as soon as they are described,

validating the act of non-intervention of the photographer, and reassuring the

intervention of the narrator. The depiction, which pays attention to particular details, has

been intervened and, at the same time, has the undeniable purpose of making others

participate in the intervention. This process will be carried out by the narrator-

researcher and, also, by the reader.

19

Therefore, through fiction, Findley imagines a portion of Robert Ross’ life out of

non-existent pictures precisely to intervene; he imagines them in that particular way to

mediate in what he wants to emphasize. We, readers, are able to imagine the

photographs and, unlike the photographer, we are obliged to read –rather than observe–,

interpretatively for the understanding of the actions described. Fiction uses

photography, an ‘act of non-intervention,’ to intervene morally. Nevertheless, in a

deeper layer, for the researcher those pictures truly exist –he touches them, feels them,

makes them textual–, and they are, together with the witnesses, the most valuable

evidence that confirms Robert Ross’ existence in his dimension, but fictional in ours.

Nevertheless, the narrator turns to “photographs to assist [her/]him in his search for

historical certainties, but finds there, too, only doubt and tentativeness” (York, 1990:9).

The importance of the description of the ‘fiery image’ in this context resides in

the fact that by adding that layer of fictionality to the narrative, it presents the previous

descriptions as if they were describing something real not only for the researcher, but

also for us. The ‘fiery image’ actualizes the intervention carried out by the researcher,

but renders the other pictures ‘less fictional,’ even real. The italics, through which the

‘fiery image’ appears, emphasizes its imaginary nature making the reader question the

whys and hows of that particular fictional narrative –created by the researcher–, and

deviates the focus from the external circle of fictional narrative that constitutes the

reality of the researcher describing photographs –created by the actual author, Timothy

Findley. Thus, Findley achieves to focus the attention on the fictionality of the ‘fiery

image,’ which vaguely reminds us of the prologue, and sets the ambience for the

construction of the rest of the fiction towards that moment of moral intervention. It is

true, nonetheless, that the existence of these two levels contributes to the dialogue

between the researcher (narrator) and the reader, as John F. Hulcoop states,

“[T]he almost continuous presence of the narrator in The Wars […] keeps

pulling the reader's attention away from what Frye calls ‘the internal fiction’ […] and

making him refocus on the external fiction, the relationship established by writer with

reader, which ‘cuts across the story’ and is of primary interest in thematic modes of

literature” (1981:38)

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I would argue that the effect is supplementary, rather than unidirectional. The

comments of the narrator render the ‘fiery image’ fictional, and, at the same time, the

imagination of the ‘fiery image,’ just as the descriptions of photographs, empowers the

veracity of the researcher’s external fiction. It obviously creates the tension that was

previously mentioned, as it all contributes to that paradoxical opposition of real and

fictional; an opposition that is ultimately embedded in a work of fiction, and, thus,

theoretically inexistent. Laurie Ricou argues that “the narrator is repeatedly and

uneasily trying to establish his distance from Robert Ross,” not only through

annotations and comments to break the continuity of the story, but also with his

narrative technique (structure) and a “stammering interrupted syntax” (1981:133).

Continuing with the idea of historiographic metafiction and photography, the

past and the memory through the data in the archives, we must focus on the figure of the

researcher, leaving aside for the moment the embedded plot that reimagines Robert

Ross’ life, motifs and dilemmas. As Lorraine M. York states, there is in fact “deep

affinity between the photograph and memory, the past, and even the act of writing

itself” (1988:154), and that is why the figure of the researcher becomes as prominent in

this novel. S/He is the one trying to reconstruct the past, s/he is our nexus to this

imagined past of the novel.

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4.-The Researcher’s Ambitious Attempt of Making Meaning.

4.1.-Fiction and History at Ethics’ Service.

The ‘external fiction’ tells the story of a researcher whose main purpose is to

make meaning out of the story of a man who died in World War I “obscured by

violence” (Findley, 2001:3). S/He is trying to piece together his life so that s/he can

understand the figure of Robert Ross and the motivation for the action that condemned

him. At the same time, we, as readers, are working on our level and trying to make

sense as well of this researcher’s quest for meaning. Once the reader enters the

narrative, s/he has already carried out her/his research and we accompany her/him

through the process of recollection. A recollection that presents us with the ‘internal

fiction,’ that is, Robert Ross’ story. As we have previously seen, the novel dwells in the

idea of interpretation, whether of reality, history and photography or fiction, we must

always choose to know. Donna P. Penne argues that The Wars “foreground[s] and

dramatize[s] precisely this process of interpretation and choice. But it will also

foreground and dramatize how difficult that process is: […] the desire to know and act

on knowledge” (1991:37).

In The Wars, the narrator is, after all, another interpreter of Robert Ross’ past

who tries to create a pattern that would provide the necessary conditions so as to

approximate herself/himself to the figure of Robert Ross. The researcher is desperately

trying to grasp the essence of Robert’s life and to experience his dilemma and that is the

reason why s/he writes. We human beings are “pattern-building animal[s]” (Antor,

2011:40) and literature constitutes one of the most effective tools to engage on ethical

dialogue. The narrator is continuously struggling with the creation of a fiction that

would give her/him the necessary horizon to penetrate into the motivation of Robert’s

act. Once the act is observed from an adjacent moral stand, we can proceed to produce

ethical statements of value.

The theory of photography, previously explained regarding history, can be seen

as the firm basis for the imagination to emerge. Within this fictional world, we are

presented with several photographs that are given to us as a description of the researcher

and they are ultimately “silenced at the edge of wharves and time” (Findley, 2001:5).

22

Among that set of pictures that deal with the public archive of snapshots, we both,

researcher and reader, move through the year 1915, which “looks sepia and soiled–

muddied like its pictures” (Findley, 2001:4). We journey with the description from

peacefulness and progress to, suddenly, war; in the middle of the year, “something

happens. April. Ypres” (Findley, 2001:5). We observe through the eyes of the narrator

how the troops are prepared and how they move forward, as “thousands crowd into

frame” (Findley, 2001:5). The researcher presents their physicality and the reader is

invited to believe in their existence as he handles, for instance, the photography of the

Soldiers of the Queen and says, “you turn them over–wondering if they’ll spill”

(Findley, 2001:6).

As sudden as the change from peacefulness to war preparation, there is a

paragraph that appears in the same fashion as the rest, but strongly disagrees with the

main ideas of the previous ones. It is not that city in Canada that we are watching, but

we are transported into France, as “Robert Ross comes riding straight towards the

camera. […] His hands are knotted to the reins. They bleed. […] long, bright tails of

flame are streaming out behind him” (author’s emphasis; Findley, 2001:5). The ‘fiery

image’ that was evoked in the prologue is once again remembered here; remembered in

a photographic manner, although we know that this precise photograph was never taken,

never allowed to be displayed along with the rest. If we look closely, in the

photographic representation of the ‘fiery image’, we find Robert Ross as “[h]e leaps

through memory without a sound” (Findley, 2001:5), which is mimicked afterwards

through the fictive recreation as “Robert turned the mare and she leapt through the

flames” (Findley, 2001:213). The researcher fills the silence of Ypres with the imagined

photographic memory that s/he can create as “we are made aware of how much of our

typical reading experiences have to do with filling gaps with our imaginings” (York,

1990:31).

Robert Ross’ reconstruction is a journey towards maturity, and the experiences

that he undergoes cost him dearly. Robert Ross suffers a sudden shift in his own

conception of the world for “war causes an inversion of social mores—what used to be

frowned upon is now encouraged, what used to be considered wrong is now considered

right, and what used to be labelled insane is now viewed as normal” (Weiss, 1993:93).

Findley goes to such strenuous efforts in order to recreate Robert’s life, not only for

who he would have been, but for what he would actually represent. He becomes a

23

symbol: he is the man who would question his own values through our imagination,

making us challenge the past and confront ourselves in his future, our present. His acts

will be analysed in an instable context and will be re-focalized. As John F. Hulcoop

focused on the way the narrative asks the reader to ‘pay attention,’ we find that Susan

Sontag finds a similar idea in the photographic dimension, as she suggests that,

“photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we

have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of

seeing” (emphasis mine; 2005:1). That role of moral judgment that photographs impart

–among many other elements within the fiction–, is what Donna P. Penne considers to

be “the metafictive quality of The Wars […]: we cannot read The Wars without

engaging in ethics, without participating in a moral act” (1991:40). In fact, to

understand the search for meaning, we must approach the novel through ethics. And the

researcher’s description enhances to a greater extent the moral disposition with which

the reader must inevitably face the facts in the archives. The reader is now the

researcher and must understand that the novel is not asking him to exclusively follow

the process of reconstruction of this past; in fact, “The Wars does not ask the reader to

observe history but to confront it” (Hatch, 1986:93).

Therefore, we, as readers, must, on the one hand, suspend our disbelief, take

Robert Ross’s story as a documented and real; we must embark into a journey through

imagination to become Robert Ross and judge accordingly. On the other hand, we must

step back and contemplate his whole world as fictional. They are all a complex of

knowledge that, even though each tackles the issues at hand from a different angle, they

all need of each other to create the bigger picture. And accordingly, in so doing, we

extrapolate Robert Ross’s life and context to a wider concept and we transcend his

figure to reach the tension that he represents.

Thus, Robert incarnates the tension of the novel, as he experienced humanity’s

fate in his own flesh and blood and witnessed and suffered the collision of different

worlds, spheres of human understanding that would irredeemably fall upon him to

challenge his persona. He will dwell in the frontier, the trench under cross-fire, both

literally and figuratively. As John F. Hulcoop convincingly argues, Findley takes the

novel into “that borderland between sanity and insanity, between the beautiful and

sinister, between political issues and private problems, between social satire and

psychological exploration, between dramatic spectacles and lyrical revelations, between

24

story-telling pictures and silent images, between prose and poetry” (1981:43); and

places Robert in the eye of the tornado, there to be observed as he evolves through life.

4.2.-Robert Ross under Tension.

Robert Ross appears in the novel as the fictional figure that will process the

clash of values and principles between his peaceful Canadian childhood and the turmoil

of the belligerent present and future. This fictionalization is an attempt to bring us closer

to Robert’s context, experience and horizon. In that way, we will be able to observe,

hear and judge from a different perspective. Imagination is used here as an ethical tool,

to appreciate the life of Robert Ross and his final act.

The first dichotomy in place is that of the public and the private aspects to life,

which is completely dissolved by the war. It is precisely through photographs that this

first idea is presented, which hints at the change in Robert Ross’ world. In 1915, we can

see in the narrator’s descriptions how everyone looked at first “timid–lost–irresolute”

(Findley, 2001:4), still maintaining a “public reticence” (Findley, 2001:4). Nevertheless,

as the months pass by, the presence of the war is increasingly conspicuous, until, as in

the flash of a camera, “something happens” (Findley, 2001:5). The battle of Ypres

completely overturns young people’s reticence and transforms it into the need to be

captured in images, the desire to be remembered. It represents a time when “[m]ore and

more people want to be seen” (Findley, 2001:5), for more and more people dreaded

dying in the war, unknown and forgotten. Robert observes this from a distance as his

reticence for war maintains him unconcerned with the public sphere. In fact, in the

pictures, he is still invisible even for our researcher, who struggles to find him in the

streets among the celebration of the soldiers’ departure.

It is in a whore house in Lousetown that Robert loses his idea of privacy once he

is “coerced into going against his better judgement” (Findley, 2001:34). The

awkwardness of the scene and the uncomfortable silence and seriousness of a young

soldier still not ready to become a man proves too extreme for Robert. Furthermore, the

thought “now someone knows about me” (Findley, 2001:42) terrorizes him. He realizes

then that the walls are too thin and that he could be heard and be publicly expose to the

world. However, Robert does not understand the meaning of truly losing one’s privacy

25

until he is in the S.S. Massanabie, where “[t]he makeshift latrines and showers were

virtually open forums where privacy was unheard of” (Findley, 2001:57).

In Canada, back home, Robert thought that her mother was too public, for she

understood what war implied. Nevertheless, once Robert is gone, Mrs. Ross quits her

façade of the perfect contributor to the cause of war and defies the futility of its

appearance. She walks out of Church and questions the validity and usefulness of that

public ceremony; “[w]hat does it mean–to kill your children? Kill them and then…go in

there and sing about it!” (Findley, 2001:54). In this connection, Alan Weiss, for

example, understands the war as “an elemental situation that eliminates our ‘civilized’

notions of what is properly private and what is acceptably public” (1993:99).

There is also a dissolution of the conceptions of sanity and insanity that

percolates throughout the novel. Robert Ross’ act of defiance is the highest point of

judgment in the novel: he revels himself against a higher rank and ultimately kills him,

so as to save the lives of the horses that had been caught in the cross-fire. What the

narrative suggests is the idea that Marian Turner exposes in her interview, “[i]t was the

war that was crazy […]. Not Robert Ross or what he did” (Findley, 2001:10). Donna P.

Penne agrees with Marian Turner and argues that if “Robert’s action seem[s]

depersonalized and horrifying, that’s probably because it is if we neglect the context of

that action: to Robert, it is not as depersonalized and horrifying as war” (1991, 49).

Lady Juliet d’Orsey also appears as one of the sources for the recollection of Ross’ life

and understands Robert’s position, as her interview is an attempt to make sense of the

war in its madness. Penne’s and Turner’s arguments are invigorated by d’Orsey’s. For

Lady Juliet, on her testimony, the past is past and “[t]he thing is not to make excuses for

the way you behaved […] but to clarify who you are through your response to when you

lived” (Findley, 2001:114). She understands greatness or goodness in context, in the

moment, unique. She understands the war as the monster that made “[a]ll their original

credos and expectations vanished” (Findley, 2001:114). In this sense, Lady Juliet’s

perception of war mirrors Weiss’ comment on public and private notions.

Robert burns Rowena’s photograph in an “act of charity” (Findley, 2001:195)

for her memory not to be corrupted by this mad world. It is a moment that we see

repeated as Marian Turner offers Robert Ross an easy way out of this life –“I will help

you, if you want me to” (Findley, 2001:215). But he refuses to be burned out of

memory. Sister M. L. McKenzie argues that the act of rebellion of Robert springs as “a

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spontaneous response to his sudden recognition of the insanity of destruction”

(1986:408), which is seen as a revelation that transcends his reality, as he had awakened

from a nightmare.

The researcher struggles with the concept of madness related to Robert Ross,

and tries to find a new vision of his action. This vision cannot be seen by the character

of Major Mickle, the soldier in charge of Robert Ross’ arrest, who realizes that “he was

dealing with a man gone mad [Robert] and that he must act in accordance with that

interpretation” (Findley, 2001:211). The narrator questions Mickle’s validity to judge

madness as “what he did next cannot be interpreted as being any less ‘mad’ than what

Robert had done” (Findley, 2001:211). Thus, we, readers, are witnessing the conscious

choice of Mickle to follow his interpretation. Robert Ross’ act is for Mickle an act of

madness, rather than an act of charity or benevolence. The tension of these two

approaches creates a moral obligation in the reader to judge and choose.

Following the idea of madness, In the scene of the rape, in the showers of

Desolé, we encounter with that despicable act (rape) of a group of soldiers that are

considered to be sane. This scene complements Mickle’s, and questions once again the

stability of the concept of madness in the world of war. Robert comes to understand that

“[h]is assailants, who he’d thought were crazies, had been his fellow soldiers” (Findley,

2001:193), thus reinforcing Marian Turner’s statement: “it was the war that was crazy”

(Findley, 2001:10). The assumption of Robert Ross is perfectly sane outside the war

context: rape is obscene and could only be perpetrated by madmen. Nonetheless, the

frontier between sanity and insanity is blurred, if not completely obscured (just like

Robert’s room).

Throughout the novel, the theme of nature is continuously present in Robert

Ross’ life. However, very much as in the previous themes, it also mutates due to war

experiences. In a sense, nature and animal life are two of the most obvious reasons that

motivate Robert Ross’ action. This particular action of rebellion in favour of animals

and nature is closely associated with the previous theme of madness. Madness and

nature complement each other, as Robert Ross distances himself from the human and

the sane, into what is considered to be the animal and the insane.

From the very beginning, we can see Robert Ross’ reluctance to the military

power and, at the same time, his coming together with the natural world (the rabbits of

her sister or the fox in the prairie, in his youth). As he gets more and more acquainted

27

with the human world –or, rather, with the inhumane aspects of the human wars–,

Robert Ross’ affiliation with animals increases (Rodwell’s animal hospital and his

sketchbooks, Harris’ animal fantasies, in the trenches). In fact Ross’s intimacy with the

natural world grows when he lives in the trenches and in this closeness we can perceive

how, regardless war, nature persists. This appreciation of the relevance of living beings

brings about his final act of defiance. As Sister M. L. McKenzie argues, “[t]he idea of

the unity and permanence of a spiritual reality embracing all that exists leads not only to

sympathy with nature, but also to an awareness of the power of the individual to say no

to destruction” (1986:407). Robert finds himself trapped in the war and needs to break

loose from the tension of human indifference towards the natural world. He uses

violence to stop violence and become one with the animal realm.

That coming together with nature is shown through the visual and the physical.

On the one hand, Rodwell’s sketchbook, where exclusively animals were drawn, shows

Ross’ human body too, but “[m]odified and mutated–he was one with the others”

(Findley, 2001;155). On the other hand, Robert comes together physically with nature,

as he leads his herd of horses out of the battlefield. At the same time, he is

(un)consciously aware of his affinity: “We shall not be taken” (Emphasis added;

Findley, 2001:212), when referring to the horses and himself.

In this breeding ground of war versus nature, we see the appearance of a new

type of hero. Taffler represents the prototypical model of war hero, as the “man to

whom killing wasn’t killing at all but throwing” (Findley, 2001:32). Robert Ross’ first

idea of the soldier was already constructed when he was a child. He understood the

figure of the soldier as a person whose mission was to protect the innocent.

Nevertheless, that image is destroyed when Teddy Budge, a strong factory worker, is

called to his private house to kill Rowena’s rabbits. When Robert starts running towards

him to stop him, he sees a soldier standing unaware of the crime and Robert explodes,

“Bastard! What are soldiers for?” (Findley, 2001:20). In that context, Robert doubts the

validity of the military men.

In the trenches, that naivety is gone and he plays the role of the killer-soldier as

he has succumbed to the darkness of war. There is in fact an opposition to the “we,” as

in Robert and the horses (previously mentioned), and the “we,” (Findley, 2001:120)

which he utters when he identifies himself as a soldier. The usage of that pronoun in

such different contexts produces a tension within the duality difficult to reconcile. In

28

conclusion, his act can be seen both as good and bad, for “Ross’s last act as a soldier,

[is] an act which signifies like so much else in the novel two very different things: that

Robert is and is not a ‘hero’” (Penne, 1991: 40). He is an anti-hero if we follow the

conventional standards ruling in any war, but he is a hero nonetheless in his act of

bravery to save the horses.

Sex also appears violently portrayed throughout the novel. In the very beginning,

at the training camp in Canada, sex is associated by Robert Ross with something

private, intimate and personal; nevertheless, the war changes that notion and Robert’s

conception of sex is as violently transformed as the act itself. The scene of Taffler being

sodomized by a Swedish mute which, ironically, functions like a prophecy of Robert’s

future, drastically impacts Robert’s innocent conception of sex as “his mind began to

stammer the way it always did whenever it was challenged by something it could not

accept” (Findley, 2001:44). War’s roughness, the inversion of ethics and the constant

fear of death transforms Robert into a Taffler-like figure –the previously mentioned

canonical war hero–. And, consequently, Robert loses his innocence in the process of

becoming a man. Sex has finally transformed into something violent as he finds himself

‘making love,’ or rather “hurting one another” (Findley, 2001:178) as he has sex with

Taffler’s ex-partner while he is tragically lying in an adjacent room, limbless and

suicidal. “Robert’s neck was full of blood and his veins stood out. He hated her. And

Barbara’s hand was in her mouth” (Findley, 2001:44); this is a gross and cruel scene

which is graphically described as if they were truly trying to hurt each other. Peter

Klovan argues that “there are no happy male-female relationships in Robert's world, and

sex is always depressing, when it is not actually disgusting. The characters are isolated,

cut-off from each other” (1981:61). To culminate the process of sexual depravation and

increased violence, the final sexual scene of the novel is the most tragic, shocking and

confusing of all. In it, Robert is raped by his own comrades, being this kind of

behaviour again closely associated with the madness of war. It is only after he has been

consumed by the fire that Lady Juliet d’Orsey declares his love for Robert and attends

to him in his last moments.

Violence is pervasive to everything. Nothing escapes violence and as such it

becomes the essential source of Robert Ross’ corruption. “Findley’s protagonists

become prepared to do violence to oppose – and however paradoxical it may seem, to

29

stop – the violence they have experienced.” (Penne, 1991:49). In this sense, violence

joins all this concepts together. Violence in sex; an act of rape that dissolves the public-

private sphere; violent acts of humiliation driving people insane; the insanity of human

wars destroying the natural world and humanity itself…

All in all, the general horrifying effect of such blurred moral frontiers woven

together into a hero’s narrative, achieves the objective in mind. The aim of the novel is,

in fact, to show the corruptive nature of human wars. The researcher’s purpose for this

exploration of Robert Ross’ clash of principles is an attempt to give an explanation to

Robert Ross’ final act of defiance. The idea of the tension among the spheres of public-

private, sane-mad, human-nature, etc. is, in a sense, the re-contextualization previously

mentioned is carried out towards an understanding of the said figure obscured by

violence, Robert Ross. The narrator satisfies her/his ambition by raising the question of

its ethical value. It is through her/his fictional account that ‘you’ struggle with her/him

seeking a moment of moral insight that would transcend the moto “[p]eople can only be

found in what they do” (Findley, 2001:3). In this overwhelming uncertainty we must

understand that “literature as the most immediately linguistic form of art is a

particularly active and conscious mode of pattern-building and of framing horizons”

(Antor, 2011:11). It is not the insight nor the solution to ethics that is given to ‘you’ in

the novel, which, plainly, is inexistent; but you are given a most precious gift: the whole

novel as a fictional construct that has been created to provide ‘you’ with “cost-free offer

of trial runs” (Booth, 1988:485), that is, opportunities to expand your knowledge

exploring the ethical horizons of different characters, narrators, authors…

30

31

5.-Conclusion.

The Wars is a fiction of a historiographic metafiction whose depth helps the

reader understand the process that is carried out consciously or unconsciously during

the act of reading. The practice of ethical evaluation comes to live in the figure of the

narrator. Her/his quest for meaning is presented to us in a supreme manner, and the

answers to the questions raised are silenced. “What the researcher stands for […] is not

the impossibility of finding answers, but rather the awareness that answers are

interpretations which we choose” (York, 1990: 32). For that reason, the importance of

the work relies in the fact that it shows the function of literature engaging in ethics,

through historiography and photography. It is not a matter of right or wrong answers,

but a question of hope left in spare for ethical criticism. As long as we are able to

maintain our willingness to expand our horizons and critically question ethics through

dialogue with the text, it will continue to exist and progress in a fruitful manner.

Lawrence Buell also agrees with this approach towards mutual understanding when he

states that “[t]he model of reading experience as a scene of virtual interpersonality that

enacts, activates, or otherwise illuminates ethical responsibility may nonetheless prove

one of the most significant innovations of the literature-and-ethics movement”

(1999:13). That is, the mere act of challenging our established values by confronting

other horizons is reason enough to believe in progress in the realm of ethics.

If we recall the aforementioned dichotomy of Heinz Antor –between

essentialism and scepticism–, we can see that the purpose of the fiction is outlined with

dexterity beyond compare in the opposition of both extreme ideas. Every aspect of the

narrative contributes to the assumption of the breakdown of values towards either side

of the dichotomy. Nonetheless, at the same time, we are also given the assumption of its

counter-part, that is, the reassurance that there exists a balance to be maintained

between both terms, arbitrariness and essentialisms. This view of hope in the future of

the field of ethics relies very much in our awareness of the impossibility of closure as

“[w]hat is important is that we do not close ourselves off against the other and his/her

frameworks. It is essential that we accept this challenge to our own explanatory

patterns” (Antor, 15). The novel in this approach to ethics is a call for peace through

dialogue and a reminder that The Wars must be remembered, understood in its tragic

implications and overcome with communication.

32

33

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