Writing in 1979, Susan Sontag included in her On Photography, the following quotation from Lewis Hine ‘If I could tell the story in word, I wouldn’t need to lug a camera’. From the very beginning of his literary life, Timothy Findley, unlike Hine, has chosen not only to tell a story, but also to create a whole new dimension of reality interspersing the impacts of the visual technique with the spell and directness of his words. In the same book, Sontag comments on photographs that ‘are, of course artifacts .But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects- unpredictable slices of the world’ (69) and on photography that  ‘inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality. From being “out there”, the world becomes to be “inside” photographs’ (80-81). As for  words are concerned, Linda Hutcheon , in The Canadian Postmodern, asserts that ‘language in a sense constitutes reality , rather than merely reflecting it ‘ (65) . Findley, in one of his most praised and known works, The Wars, sways, with commendable mastery, from those pictures or ‘slices of world’ to that constituted reality of language, elaborating a wide system of signs unique in the history of Canadian literature .
 This system of signs has captivated most of Findley’s contemporary critics , becoming the main topic of their bibliography. In support of their thesis and following the way in which these literary historians treat the text of The Wars , this essay will analyse the linguistic aspects of the novel which reflect the influence of the visual culture ,so common in the seventies, in the narrative of the text.

    As far as the fragmentation and the discourse patterns are concerned, I will confine myself to a brief comment on how they work on the overall photographic metaphor of the text for Lorraine York and M. Kuester  already provide us with a close and detailed analysis of their usage in The Wars. Timothy Findley uses these visual ‘artifacts’ as Sontag called the pictures, as the primary source of the plot of his novel  and  as the main outline for its structure. They are the basic skeleton which articulates the rhythm and cohesion of the text. The length of the paragraphs, the gaps between them, the distribution of the different sections…all these fragments cohere, like entwined threads in a net, because of the hidden presence of the photographic technique in the manipulation of the text as a work of art. From the very beginning of the prologue, the writer introduces the motif of the pictures to make the reader aware of the other language that underlies the meaning of his writing. And it is  at this stage, when the reader decodes the separate fragments of the text as pictures or images of different sizes, that the collage of paragraphs becomes a unified structure like that of an album of pictures or a film. For, as Sontag points out in On photography, ‘Because each photograph is only a fragment its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted.’(105-106).

    If this happens at this level  of the discourse analysis, it is also noticeable in the analysis of the sentence patterns of the individual paragraphs. Before getting into the topic of the influence of he visual arts in the articulation of sentences in The Wars, it would be interesting to give a brief account of the struggle between the static and the dynamic that Hutcheon or Sontag mention in their articles. Susan Sontag speaks about the difference between the stillness of  a photograph and  the movement and continuity of the images of a film. Each concept stillness and continuity has its own role in the tones of appealing to an auditorium.On the one hand, stillness and the static imply directness and surprise in a short period of time in a small space, to effectively catch the attention of an audience. On the other hand, the concepts of movement and continuity carry implicit the ideas of progression and duration in time and demand another kind of attention from the spectator. Moreover, the attitude and the appreciation of the world from the receivers and their responses to the visual stimulus are also different .

    Findley, in The Wars, plays with these games of the visual perception in the building of sentences the same way  he did with the discourse patterns . He substitutes the lens of the camera for his own view as an author or an omniscient narrator.Then, he chooses which scenes or slices of Robert Ross’ story deserve special attention and draws them with either the shape of an instant snapshot or with the format of a travelling sequence of a film. Lorraine York points out that ‘One method that Findley uses is to fix upon what he calls “one persistent image” which resembles a photograph still shot ‘(…)’More often , however , Findley describes himself as trying to record an ongoing process or conversation from a film clip rather than a snapshot ‘( 54-55).York illustrates these techniques in The Wars with the passage of Robert and his mother in the bathroom and the transcription of the conversation of Lady d’Orsey, respectively. For my part , I would take he very first image of the novel, the prologue, as the best example of usage and mixing of both techniques .The first three paragraphs of that prologue immerse the reader into the description of a snapshot  whose stillness is reflected in the sentence patterns and the verbs that fill the fragment. The dominant structure on the passage is SUBJECT + VERB + COMPLEMENTS. In this construction  the subject is usually an object , which lowers down the dynamics of the action, and the verb is a static verb because of the tense (past = finished action) , voice (passive) or meaning (not movement verbs). Moreover, Findley, still imitating the form of the photographs, impregnates these paragraphs with a set of short and direct sentences like ‘his lips were slightly parted ’(1) or ‘He was absolutely still’(1) that produce on the reader the same effects that the snapshots on the spectator. The fourth paragraph of this section serves as a bridge from one manifestation of the visual arts, the photograph, to another, the film. The writer introduces here, still in short sentences, the first verbs of movement of the novel ‘stood up’ and ‘walked ‘ that bring to the action that derives from the image. In the next three paragraphs Findley completely changes the style of his description. Though the action is still set in the past, the verbs that construct it are semantically verbs that indicate a kind of movement or process like ‘approached’, ’raised’  ,’slipping’ , ‘moved’ or ‘riding’. In addition, the subjects of the sentences are no longer unanimated objects but real persons, ‘Robert’, ‘he’, or animals, ‘the horse’, ‘the dog’. Another feature that dynamizes the images shown in this fragment is the length of the sentences. Findley describes actions with long sentences, almost as long as the actions themselves, so that the reader, aware of the visual “sublanguage” that underlies the novel , is also able to reconstruct  the events through his or her own experience. And this brings us to highlight section number three of the book in which this stylist resource is highly developed. In this section , the author devotes most of his narrative to describe the events set on 28 February  1916 , an essential date in Robert Ross’ story which also becomes important for the reader for it deals with a whole section of the novel.

    Following the analysis of the sentence pattern, there is the related question of the verb tenses that deserves special consideration. We have already analysed the ways in which the semantics of the verb and its setting on the past give reference to a specific type of image. However, Findley, aware of the importance of this grammatical class to build a literary space, still creates many other games of words focusing on verbs to put emphasis on the visual characteristic of the text. One of them, and in my opinion the most effective, is the travelling from past to present in the one same sequence or all through the book. Imitating the zoom of a camera, Findley brings back and forward in time the moments that he feels to set closer to the reader to fill in different temporal gaps of the same story.

    Finally, to conclude with the sentence pattern analysis, I would like to consider how Findley uses the individual phrases to create a complex photomontage of his writing. Let us take as an example the fifth fragment of section five of the novel. Here the author transmits Robert’s feelings after having been sexually attacked through a series of anaphoric sentences that describe his actions after the happening. Each of the sentences  gives reference to an image that , in my opinion , acts as the objective correlative of the overall meaning of the paragraph. Though it is true that there is no object that represents a reality tat can also be perceived by the reader, there is a series of visual impacts, snapshots, that together evoke in the receiver the sense of rupture and despair that the “hero” of the novel experiences.

    Another approach in the study of influence of the visual arts in this novel is by focusing on the vocabulary and powerful imagery that Findley uses to give colour to his text. Linda Hutcheon asserts in The Canadian Postmodern that ‘[in] a metaphorical conception of the language (…) the word evokes the thing and there is no clear separation between subject and object , for they are linked by a common energy , by a concept of plurality of gods, or of embodiments of nature’(55).Lorraine York draws our attention to the fact that ‘Novels such as The Wars (…) consist of a series of short scenes which are unified by interlocking patterns of vivid imagery such as animal and fire imagery ‘(53).These two pints of view, while focused on different topics (language and image), are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are totally compatible in The Wars. A single  but striking example of the communion of these approaches is fragment twelve of section number one. In this scene, Findley builds up an important feature of the hero of the novel through the metaphorical conception of the language. First he chooses one of the ‘mind movies’ (York 54) that inspire his writing, the running of a coyote through the Canadian prairies.Then, he puts it into words, always bearing in mind the photographic metaphor, and builds a  “fictional reality” through language. Finally he structures the scene drawing a parallelism between the natural instinct of the coyote and the spirit of Robert Ross using again the technique of the correlative object through images.

    After this analysis of the linguistic aspects of The Wars that show the influence of the visual arts in its writing we are able to draw several conclusions from the novel. It is not at all a coincidence that some critics consider it already a manifestation of the postmodern in Canadian literature. Its challenge to traditional boundaries of paragraph construction, the importance of the reader in building a meaning from the visual images given by the author and of course the introduction in a literary work of an art ,“photography”, many times related to popular culture cannot be denied and separated from its postmodernist character. However, it is also true that, though the reader is extremely important in the act of decoding the text, we must not forget that the “sender” of the written message is the author. Findley himself is the “mind” that manipulates the sent fragments through his own perspective to produce a specific effect on his audience, so we cannot talk here about the “postmodernist death of the author”. But, leaving this polemic of genre to the real theorists, what inescapably emerges after  reading The Wars  is that when two or more artistic manifestations melt together in a single work of art , the results are usually far more striking than when trying to separate them. Then, when photography, filming, documentaries, transcripts, diaries… and of course novel play together in a single book , the result is the birth of an extremely complex literary work which leads to a number of interesting discussions such as the limits between a modern or a postmodern novel.
 
 

About The Wars:
http://ace.acadian.ca/english/morriso/findley/findley2.html
http://plato.acadian.ca/courses/engl/young/e 1106ce/findley/art/art.html
http://cmm.nfb.ca/E/titleinfo/index.epl?id=152868recherche=simple&coll=on
 

WORKS CITED LIST
Hutcheon, Linda . The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Oxford UP1988.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography.Penguin Books1979.
Findley, Timothy. The Wars. Penguin Books1996.
York, Lorraine. The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Munro, Findley, Ondjaate, Laurence.

SECONDARY SOURCES
Findley, Timothy. Inside Memory :Pages from a Writer’s Notebook. 1990.
Kuester, Martin. “Timothy Findley’s Metafictional Histories:  Modernist Parodies or Parodies  of Modernism?” Framing Truths: Parodic Structures In Contemporary English-Canadian Historical Novels. 1992.
Pennee, Donna Palmeteer. Moral Metafiction: Counterdiscourse in the Novels of Timothy Findley. 1991.
York,Lorraine. Front Lines : The Fiction of Timothy Findley. 1991

© Copyright Laura Monrós Gaspar.
Creada: 08/08/01 Última actualización: 08/08/01
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