Title: Vimy, Gallipoli, trauma, and the poetics of grief : re-reading the myths of the First World War in Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers and Brenda Walker's The Wing of Night
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2020, vol. 46, iss. 1, pp. 91-108
Extent
91-108
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2020-1-4
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/142602
Type: Article
Language
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
The article is a comparative analysis of The Stone Carvers (2001) by Canadian author Jane Urquhart and The Wing of Night (2005) by Australian writer Brenda Walker, which explore the First World War and its aftermath. My purpose is to demonstrate how the two novels engage with the foundational myths of Vimy and Gallipoli by representing the two battles from unusual perspectives. Instead of celebrating the violent crisis seen as the birthplace of their respective nations, Urquhart and Walker foreground violence as the foundation of the nation-state. Using trauma theories, I explore Urquhart's and Walker's representation of war injuries, as well as the traumatic impact of national ideologies on personal and collective identities. While both texts offer an insightful re-reading of the myths of the Great War, Urquhart creates a vision of harmony resulting from the tragedy of the past, whereas Walker's gesture of revision is more radical, as she insists on the impossibility of post-war reconstruction.
Note
This research was supported by grant DEC–2013/11/B/HS2/02871 from the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki).
References
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[42] Spittel, Christina (2014) Nostalgia for the nation? The First World War in Australian novels of the 1970s and 1980s. In: Löschnigg, Martin and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds.) The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 255–272.
[43] Stevenson, Randall (2013) Literature and the Great War 1914–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[44] Urquhart, Jane (2001) The Stone Carvers. London: Bloomsbury.
[45] Urquhart, Jane (2012) Our lost and found memories of Vimy Ridge. Globe and Mail 8 April. Available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/our-lost-and-found-memoriesof-vimy-ridge/article4098920/ (Accessed 13 December 2017).
[46] Vance, Jonathan F. (1997) Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
[47] Walker, Brenda (2005) The Wing of Night. Victoria: Viking.
[48] Winter, Jay (1996) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[49] Winter, Jay (2006) Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.
[50] Zacharias, Robert (2012). 'Some great crisis': Vimy as originary violence. In: Kamboureli, Smaro (ed.) Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 109–128.
[2] Berton, Pierre (2001) Marching as to War. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.
[3] Bongiorno, Frank (2014) Anzac and the politics of inclusion. In: Wellings, Ben and Shanti Sumartojo (eds.) Nation, Memory and Great War Commemoration: Mobilizing the Past in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Bern: Peter Lang, 81–79.
[4] Bourke, Joanna (1999) Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War. London: Reaktion Books.
[5] Branach-Kallas, Anna and Piotr Sadkowski (2018) Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977–2014). Leiden: Brill and Rodopi.
[6] Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.
[7] Butler, Judith (2010) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London – New York: Verso.
[8] Capdevila, Luc and Danièle Voldman (2006) War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Trans. Richard Vease. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
[9] Caruth, Cathy (1995a) Introduction to Part I: Trauma and experience. In: Caruth, Cathy (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12.
[10] Caruth, Cathy (1995b) An interview with Robert Jay Lifton. In: Caruth, Cathy (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 128–147.
[11] Caruth, Cathy (2013) Literature in the Ashes of History. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
[12] Coates, Donna (2018) Happy is the land that needs no heroes. Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies 27 (3), 111–142.
[13] Coates, Donna (unpublished) Demilitarizing a military culture: Brenda Walker's The Wing of Night. Unpublished manuscript. Courtesy of the author.
[14] Cook, Tim (2003) Immortalizing the Canadian soldier: Lord Beaverbrook and the Canadian War Records Office in the First World War. In: Busch, Briton C (ed.) Canada and the Great War, Western Front Association Papers. Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press, 46–65.
[15] Cook, Tim (2006) Clio's Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
[16] Edkins, Jenny (2003) Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[17] Edkins, Jenny (2014) Time, personhood, politics. In: Buelens, Gert, Sam Durrant, Robert Eagelstone (eds.) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 127–139.
[18] Evans, Suzanne (2007) Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
[19] Fahey, Alicia (2014) Voices from the edge: de-centering master narratives in Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers. In: Löschnigg, Martin and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds.) The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 411–426.
[20] Gana, Nouri (2014) Trauma ties : chiasmus and community in Lebanese civil war literature. In: Buelens, Gert, Sam Durrant, Robert Eagelstone (eds.) The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 77–90.
[21] Gordon, Neta (2014) Catching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War I. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
[22] Grace, Sherrill (2014) Landscapes of War and Memory: The Two World Wars in Canadian Literature and the Arts, 1977–2007. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.
[23] Grayzel, Susan R. (1999) Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.
[24] Horne, John (2015a) The living. In: Winter, Jay (ed.) The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol. 3: Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 592–617. Cambridge Histories Online. http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ (Accessed 25 July 2015).
[25] Horne, John (2015b) The Great War at its centenary. In: Winter, Jay (ed.) The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol. 3: Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 618–639. Cambridge Histories Online. http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ (Accessed 25 July 2015).
[26] Kaplan, Ann E. (2005) Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press.
[27] Keshen, Jeff (2003) The Great War soldier as nation builder in Canada and Australia. In: Busch, Briton C. (ed.) Canada and the Great War, Western Front Association Papers. Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen's University Press, 3–26.
[28] LaCapra, Dominick (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.
[29] Lake, Marylin, Henry Reynolds, Mark McKenna, Joy Damousi (2010) What's Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
[30] Leed, Eric J. (1979) No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[31] Lifton, Robert Jay (1996) The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life. Washington and London: American Psychiatric Press, Inc.
[32] Meyer, Jessica (2011) Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
[33] Reynaud, Daniel (2014) National versions of the Great War: modern Australian Anzac cinema. In: Löschnigg, Martin and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds.) The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 289–303.
[34] Rhoden, Clare (2015) The Purpose of Futility: Writing World War I, Australian Style. Perth: UWAP Scholarly.
[35] Rothberg, Michael (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
[36] Rutherdale, Robert (2004) Hometown Horizons: Local Responses to Canada's Great War, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
[37] Scarry, Elaine (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York – Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[38] Scates Bruce and Rebecca Wheatley (2015) War memorials. In: Winter, Jay (ed.) The Cambridge History of the First World War. Vol. 3: Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 528–556. Cambridge Histories Online. http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/ (Accessed 25 July 2015).
[39] Seal, Graham (2004) Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
[40] Shaw, Amy (2008) Crisis of Conscience: Conscientious Objection in Canada during the First World War. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
[41] Sokołowska-Paryż, Marzena (2015) Re-imagining the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in contemporary British writing. In: Branach-Kallas, Anna and Nelly Strehlau (eds.) Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 92–109.
[42] Spittel, Christina (2014) Nostalgia for the nation? The First World War in Australian novels of the 1970s and 1980s. In: Löschnigg, Martin and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds.) The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 255–272.
[43] Stevenson, Randall (2013) Literature and the Great War 1914–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[44] Urquhart, Jane (2001) The Stone Carvers. London: Bloomsbury.
[45] Urquhart, Jane (2012) Our lost and found memories of Vimy Ridge. Globe and Mail 8 April. Available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/our-lost-and-found-memoriesof-vimy-ridge/article4098920/ (Accessed 13 December 2017).
[46] Vance, Jonathan F. (1997) Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
[47] Walker, Brenda (2005) The Wing of Night. Victoria: Viking.
[48] Winter, Jay (1996) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[49] Winter, Jay (2006) Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.
[50] Zacharias, Robert (2012). 'Some great crisis': Vimy as originary violence. In: Kamboureli, Smaro (ed.) Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 109–128.