Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism: Intertextual Collaboration and Resistance

By Anne Geddes Bailey

Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism: Intertextual Collaboration and Resistance investigates the troubling relationship between narrative meaning and representations of violence within Timothy Findley’s novels, throughout which writing and reading literature are portrayed as dangerous and political acts.

Findley’s novels often expose the ideological underpinnings of the cultures in which they exist, compelling their readers to become politically active social critics. However, reading and writing can be dangerous acts not only because of their revolutionary potential; they can also be dangerous because of their conservatism. The conservative and often dangerous need for narrative unity and closure is nowhere more evident than in Findley’s continued intertextual returns to the historical period of Modernism and Fascism. By re-presenting these historical moments and texts, Findley’s novels simultaneously arouse and critique both the artist’s and the reader’s desire for aesthetic resolution and completion when confronted with various kinds of narrative ruptures.

Although Findley clearly admires the modernist texts that appear in his own fiction, his novels also reveal how the modernist search for metaphoric unity and meaning in the face of real social and political fragmentation often reflects, and often enacts, an aesthetic akin to that of fascism. The disturbing and seductive power of this fascist aesthetic haunts Findley’s novels, and even in those not focused on that historical period, justifies and energizes various social and literary structures of power which seek to impose metaphoric meanings upon disjunctive realities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Sep 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780889228702

Anne Geddes Bailey

Anne Geddes Bailey is the author of Paying Attention: New Perspectives on Timothy Findley and Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism: Intertextual Collaboration and Resistance.

Book preview

Anne Geddes Bailey

Timothy Findley

and the Aesthetics

of Fascism

Timothy_0002_001

Acknowledgements

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There are a number of people who have helped to make this book a reality. I would like to thank Frank Davey, Alison Lee, and Diana Brydon for their generous and constant support of my work. I am also grateful for the many stimulating, and frustrating, conversations that I have had with my colleagues and friends, in particular Michael Sider and Grant Williams, who provided me with a much needed chance to share ideas, theories, and doubts when this book was first taking shape. My parents, Robert and Sibyl Geddes, have also always encouraged my love for literature and my academic pursuits. I am especially indebted to my mother; I can still remember the day when she suggested to me in the adult section of Shaganappi Library that I might enjoy Famous Last Words. Little did she know what she had begun! Finally, I thank my husband, Peter Bailey, whose unfailing belief in me and this book has sustained me throughout its production, and my children, William and Claire, who arrived just in time to put this book into perspective.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

for my mother

and

for my husband, Peter

Contents

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List of Abbreviations

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BP - The Butterfly Plague

DV - Death in Venice

FLW - Famous Last Words

HD - Heart of Darkness

HH - Headhunter

LCP - The Last of the Crazy People

NWV - Not Wanted on the Voyage

TL - The Telling of Lies

TW- The Wars

Introduction

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Reading ... is a political act. The more you read, the more political you become. The more you read, the more dangerous you become. (Timothy Findley, 1992 Spry Lecture)

Throughout the novels of Timothy Findley, writing and reading literature are dangerous and political acts. His novels, filled with intertextual references, engage in dialogue with the literary tradition and challenge the socio-economic culture in which it exists. These novels often expose the ideological underpinnings of various social, cultural, economic, historical, and literary representations, compelling their readers to become politically active social critics. However, reading and writing can be dangerous acts not only because of their revolutionary potential; they can also be dangerous because of their conservatism. This paradoxical view of literature’s power is one of the most intriguing features of Findley’s novels. On the one hand, literature is dangerous because it can be the avenue of challenge and rebellion, while, on the other, it is dangerous because it is the producer of repression and violence.

Subversively, Findley’s novels react against, among other things, the repressive tactics inherent in psychiatry in The Last of the Crazy People and Headhunted the military in The Wars, organized religion in Not Wanted on the Voyage, and fascist governments in The Butterfly Plague and Famous Last Words. In general, Findley’s work reveals how the authority of various kinds of institutions controls personal and public meaning, interpreting individual acts and events in ways which silence alternative possibilities. His critique of authority is complex, uncovering various levels of authority and authoritarianism which exist even in seemingly free societies. Political tyranny is, perhaps, the easiest form of authoritarianism to identify, but Findley’s novels also illustrate how the words of experts—whether they are medical, military, or literary experts—exert a powerful, often authoritarian, influence over the ways in which actions and events are read and understood in the wider society. In addition, Findley’s attack against authoritarian structures applies not only to institutions outside of the text, but also to literary traditions and conventions which exert powerful controls on the shape and meaning of fictions.

Because of these sustained critiques of institutional authoritarianism in his fiction, the name, ‘Timothy Findley,’ has become a text in itself, one which connotes various political stances. His name has come to be associated with pacifism, environmentalism, and feminism. ‘Findley’ is known as the champion of animal rights, the protector of abused children and women, a vocal anti-fascist, and a gay writer. The intertext of Findley’s name exercises powerful control over readings of his work. Yet, time and time again, readings which cohere with the public image of ‘Findley’ can only be constructed by overlooking textual details which challenge the ideal and complicate both the text of ‘Timothy Findley’ and the texts with his name on the cover.

For instance, a troubling observation which many critics ignore is that all of Findley’s protagonists, at one time or another, side with the ‘enemy’ and become themselves perpetrators of violence. Hooker Winslow kills his family, Robert Ross murders two men, Vanessa Van Home decides that she will murder her friend if necessary, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley arranges the assassination of Sir Harry Oakes, Ruth and Dolly Damarosch embrace the fascist dream of perfection, Mrs. Noyes and her crew below decks eventually violently attack those above decks, and Lilah Kemp inadvertently releases malevolent characters from novels into the world where they kill people. Because they are themselves fictional representations, these characters’s violent complicity not only demonstrates the complexity of human experience but also the problems of historical and aesthetic representation. Findley’s work shows that issues of authoritarianism are as much linked to the authorship of those who write history and fiction as to the ideological power of social institutions. When a gap between the text of ‘Timothy Findley’ and the texts of his various narrators is maintained, the moral vision of these novels becomes complex and often ambiguous. Even while the novels react against established social and literary structures, they are also often locked within or nostalgic for patterns from the past. Rewriting various popular generic forms, ranging from detective fiction to biblical myth, Findley’s novels show how representation—narrative construction—is often in itself a violent act, one which ruthlessly eliminates those elements which do not ‘fit’ a thematic, rhetorical, or aesthetic pattern. Findley reforms his own fictions by unravelling such patterns. Yet, paradoxically, by repeating these generic patterns, he also shows how potentially subversive narrators inadvertently rewrite structures of violence.

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Often centring on intertexts from the modernist period, the novels play upon the reader’s desire for modernist wholeness when faced with textual fragmentation. However, although Findley clearly admires modernist texts, his novels also show how that modernist desire for unity reflects, and sometimes even enacts, an aesthetic akin to fascism. In an interesting article entitled A Devotion to Fragility, Diana Brydon examines the aesthetic she perceives in The Wars, an aesthetic which exposes the beauty of fragility through the violence which surrounds it (82). Brydon is disturbed by this aesthetic, concluding that Findley, like Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen, and Phyllis Webb, is a connoisseur of chaos (83). She suggests that this fascination with violence reveals a tendency towards ... a ‘fascist aesthetics’ (78). Although Brydon does not define this term, the argument of her article implies that art which makes beauty visible by revelling in violence is fascist. Before beginning my discussion of Findley’s three World War I and II novels, I define fascist aesthetics much differently than Brydon, but I am indebted to her for provoking my study in this area. I argue that fascism defines beauty in terms of strength rather than fragility; under fascism, for example, the human body became beautiful, not in juxtaposition to violence which crippled it, but through genetic and racial purification. Brydon’s definition remains far too humanistic to denote a fascist aesthetic. Representations of violence which reveal beauty in crippled and broken forms evoke an emotional, human response. In contrast, violence in fascism was used, literally and figuratively, to ‘cleanse’ humanity of the crippled and broken, in order to make an abstract and metaphoric perfection real.

While Findley’s specific critique of a fascist aesthetic is most evident in Famous Last Words and The Butterfly Plague, this fascistic drive toward racial perfection has disturbing connections with narrative desire in all of Findley’s novels. Peter Brooks in Reading For Plot uses a telling metaphor which implies a similar connection; his description of bundles of meaning reminds the reader that bundle is the root meaning of fascism. Brooks suggests that narrative functions by creating usable ‘bundles’ of repeated textual moments. This bundling is necessary since textual energy, all that is aroused into expectancy and possibility in a text, can become usable by plot only when it has been bound and formalized (101). In The Butterfly Plague and Famous Last Words both meanings of ‘bundle’ come into play. While fascist characters kill their perceived enemies in the attempt to rid the world of its imperfect elements, various artists—poets, journalists, film-makers, novelists— simultaneously also strive to create perfect works of art filled with ‘bundles of meaning’ which will rise above the sordidness of history and political movements. Mauberley, for example, in Famous Last Words, creates several metaphorical ‘bundles’ which will enable his readers to excuse his fascism in the name of Art.

The reader’s desire to create metaphorical bundles is both fulfilled and challenged in all of Findley’s novels. The Last of the Crazy People, The Wars, and Not Wanted on the Voyage, for example, all begin with a prologue, or ‘textual moment,’ which is repeated later in the novel. Each prologue provokes the reader’s desire to know the whole story, but that knowledge always ends up to be a story of senseless violence. Yet, each narrative also strives to make meaning out of these violent moments. The reader eventually discovers that the creation of meaning involves a sort of violence of representation. Only by repressing—sometimes violently —those narrative moments which will not be bundled can these stories present a unified and meaningful end.

While evoking the reader’s desire for a modernist sense of wholeness, Findley’s novels simultaneously disturb the reader’s sense of security by persistently revealing the price of such desire. In The Telling of Lies, for instance, Vanessa Van Home and Arabella Barrie are convinced that Meg Riches has committed a ‘just’ murder when she killed Calder Maddox, but this ‘justice’ might only be maintained at the cost of Lily Porter’s life should she ever threaten to reveal Meg’s name to the authorities. Robert Ross’s heroism becomes a possibility when the fact that he kills two men is repressed by various narrators of his story. Similarly, Hooker’s irrational act at the end of The Last of the Crazy People can only seem right if the reality of his parents’ murder is incorporated into a ’textual bundle' of metaphoric meaning. By simultaneously creating the reader’s desire for a unified, meaningful narrative and critiquing it, Findley’s novels end ambiguously—wanting to create meaning but also aware of the dangerous links between reading, narrative and violence.

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My avenue into these issues is intertextualiry and its function in Findley’s novels. Intertextual references abound throughout Findley’s work from epigrams and quotations, to borrowed characters and plots, to parodies of well-known biblical myths and literary genres, and to representations of historical persons and events. Indeed, it is not difficult to recognize most of the numerous intertextual references in Findley’s texts, and the discovery of intertexts is not my main concern. More interesting, to me, is the question of how these intertexts function within the thematic structure of the novels, and how they function within readers’ various acts of interpretation. My consideration of these questions, however, will not be limited to those intertexts which we identify as literary or historical. I will also examine how broader cultural discourses, such as history, psychiatry, capitalism, etc, function as intertexts in Findley’s fiction. I am aware that this move from a more traditional, formalist intertextual study, which focuses upon specific reference to literature from the past, to a post-structuralist understanding of how cultural and social texts relate to one another creates potential contradictions and paradoxes in argumentation. However, Findley’s novels invite both readings simultaneously and in themselves reveal that such contradiction and ambivalence pervades all postmodern, intertextual practice.

Indeed, intertextuality as a critical methodology is full of pitfalls. Even to call intertextuality a critical methodology creates a set of assumptions which undermines the anarchic, revolutionary potential Julia Kristeva envisions in the concept. Arguing that literary texts are spatial or dialogical—terms she finds in M.M. Bakhtin’s writings—rather than linear or monologic, Kristeva develops a three-dimensional theory of the text which inserts the text horizontally into linguistic practices, and vertically into history (39). The poetic word, she contends, no longer has a fixed, one-to-one relationship with its writer and reader, but is, instead, an intersection of textual surfaces (36). Every text is intertextual, without definite origins or ends: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another (37). Rejecting the New Critical concept of the literary text as a closed, self-sufficient system, Kristeva and Roland Barthes argue that the text is not only a set of pages between two covers, but is a linguistic phenomen[on], a fragment of language, itself placed in a perspective of languages, and a signifying practice (Barthes, Theory of the Text 35-6). The text is identifiable, not necessarily by its materiality, but by its ‘relation with different utterances, anterior to or synchronic with it’ (Barthes, 36). Thus, a text is no longer defined as a book or physical artifact but is any concept, event, or discourse, which is more or less distinguishable from other discourses or texts which infringe upon it. If, as Kristeva and Barthes suggest, all of human experience and knowledge is textual, then it becomes possible to analyze cultural practices as texts and, as Thais Morgan remarks, literary criticism is broadened to include the structural relations among ... any of the disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences (246). Literary texts and literary criticism can no longer claim to be exempt from the taint of wider cultural and ideological concerns or critiques which intertextually invade literary texts (and vice versa.)

Along with this challenge to the text’s autonomy is Kristeva’s and Barthes’s attack on the bourgeois subject, whether that subject is author or reader of the text. Autonomous subjectivity is as untenable as autonomous textuality. The reader, according to Barthes, is a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost) (S/Z 10) while the Author as the origin of the text is dead, since he or she is also a text made up of the traces of other texts (Death of Author 142-48). With the death of the author and the end of the text as an autonomous work of art, traditional paradigms for relations between texts, such as an influence and source criticism, not only become superfluous but impossible to determine. This is precisely what makes intertextuality a liberating form of critical practice, but this is also precisely where the impossibility of post-structural intertextual practice arises.

Although Kristeva’s and Barthes’s redefinition of the text and intertextuality offers the literary critic access to an inter-disciplinary critical practice and makes political critique possible even within poetry and fiction, practical application of these terms questions their very definitions. As Jonathan Culler notes about Kristeva’s own attempt to give an intertextual reading: Kristeva’s procedure is instructive because it illustrates the way in which the concept of intertextuality leads the critic who wishes to work with it to concentrate on cases that put in question the general theory (107). The problem with Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality is its lack of boundaries; if every text refers to an infinite number of intertexts and if the reader and author are both made up of an infinite number of textual traces, then the idea of applying an intertextual method to any particular text seems ludicrous. As Heinrich Plett remarks,

the intertext runs the risk of dissolving completely in its interrelations with other texts. In extreme cases it exchanges its internal coherence completely for an external one. Its total dissolution makes it relinquish its beginning, middle and end. It loses its identity and disintegrates into numerous text particles which only bear an extrinsic reference. It is doubtful that such a radical intertext is communicable at all. (6)

Critics of intertextuality raise the spectre of the disintegrating text to suggest that the term is not only completely unworkable, but also not helpful in describing how texts actually function. While theoretically, intertextuality describes the breakdown of the autonomous text into infinitely regressing connections between texts, in practical terms, we still do recognize texts as more or less unified, at least to the extent that we can generally agree that any one fictional plot has a recognizable beginning, middle, and end, which differs in identifiable ways from other fictional plots. We can also generally agree that parts of some fictional plots have explicit connections to other identifiable texts, especially when those parts are pointed allusions to or direct quotations from past texts. Should we ignore such intertextual relations simply because they are identifiable and thus suggest a textual autonomy belied by post-structural theories of intertextuality? If, instead, we choose to examine the function of explicit and identifiable intertexts, must we also abandon the post-structural project of breaking down the autonomous artifact and inserting it ‘into history’ as Kristeva urges?

One way out of this difficulty is to return to the roots of post-structuralist intertextual theory found in M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. Bakhtin argues that the discourse of the novel is dialogic since "no living word relates to its objects in a singular way (276). However, although no word or language functions in a singular way, Bahktin also acknowledges that novelistic language pretends to a sort of unity, by conforming to the normative rules of grammar and generic convention. This pretense does create what Bakhtin calls a centripetal linguistic force through which the novel achieves a unitary language, but at the same time within the unitary language of the novel, there is diversity creating a centrifugal linguistic force: Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces) (272). The interaction between the heteroglot, or those ever-shifting set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would under any other conditions" (Bakhtin 428), and the unitary language system results in dialogism, or a dialogue between the word and its alien environment, or its intertexts. A Bakhtinian dialogic model of intertextuality makes it possible for the critic to refer to an identifiable text—Famous Last Words, for example— and also examine how and why this particular novel extends into various, but also more or less identifiable, texts and discourses which exist outside of it in other, ‘alien,’ historical and literary texts. It does not, admittedly, resolve the contradictions inherent within positing both formalist (centripetal) relations between texts alongside post-structuralist (centrifugal) ones; instead, this model suggests that it is through this conflict that the text develops any sort of meaningful relationship with both the literary tradition out of which is arises and the social, political, and cultural reality it attempts to represent.

In spite of the paradoxes generated by such intertextual critical practices, I will illustrate over the course of this book that intertexts within Findley’s novel also function in ambiguous and often contradictory ways. As I have already mentioned, Findley’s novels are full of explicit references to other literary texts and historical people and events. These references are always self-conscious, overtly highlighting the textual construction not only of literary history but of human identity and knowledge. Throughout Findley’s novels, the reader is reminded of the textual consistency of social and cultural discourses such as history, fascism, psychiatry, war, aesthetics, medicine, capitalism, gender, and the family. Because of this, these discourses function very specifically as intertexts, in ways which are very similar to literary intertexts. The intertextual dialogue between the literary and non-literary intertexts reveals the ideological underpinnings of both literary and social discourses. As a result, I not only consider the formal effects of the inclusion of various references to other texts, but also the wider ideological implications, drawing apparently ideologically neutral formal discussions into broader social and historical contexts.

However, bringing the literary aspects of Findley’s texts into historical ideological context underscores yet another difficulty with intertextual critical practice: that of chronology. On one hand, as Heinrich Plett notes, intertextuality can be viewed as synchronic since all texts possess a simultaneous existence. This entails the levelling of all temporal differences; history is suspended in favour of the co-presence of the past (25). On the other hand, however, if intertextuality is a revolutionary practice, as Kristeva asserts and as Findley’s texts aspire to, intertexts must exist within history and react against what has preceded them. Interestingly, this problem of chronology reveals the potentially conservative tendencies of post-structural intertextual theory and the potentially revolutionary tendencies of formalist theories. Formalist intertextual theorists, such as Michael Riffaterre and Laurent Jenny, contend that intertextual transformation can only occur within history. Jenny suggests that intertextuality is ultimately not unrelated to source criticism because, in practice, intertextuality always involves the transformation and assimilation of various texts (39). Transformation, as Jenny’s comments suggest, implies a chronological, historical relationship between text and intertext—a relationship which contradicts the intertextual theory that all texts occur synchronically within the reader as he or she reads. If all texts exist simultaneously, then how can intertextual attack against authority occur? Kristeva and Barthes would both argue that it is the recognition that no text, author, or reader is the originary, authoritative text that challenges textual authority, but, once again, this recognition cannot be translated into a critical practice without some kind of presupposition of readerly, authorial, or textual autonomy, a presupposition which contradicts the very definition of intertextuality. Thus, in theory, post-structural intertextuality, as envisioned by Kristeva and Barthes (although not as practised by either), threatens to have absolutely no impact upon what precedes it, and so many critics, such as Fredric Jameson, have argued that intertextuality is ultimately conservative.

Owen Miller proposes that the chronological priority essential to revolutionary intertextuality can occur without turning to a formalist intertextual practice, by describing the relationship between text and intertext (whether pre- or post-text) in terms of figure and ground:

To see the figure we must have secured the ground; thus the security of the ground can be seen to be prior, in a sense, to seeing the figure. If we speak, however, of figure/ground relationships in spatial terms with the framework of a psychology of visual perception from which it originates, we are confronted by the phenomenon of reversibility: figure becomes ground and ground figure. Intertextuality viewed in this light takes on a new sheen. For if we speak literally of a focused text, we must envisage a reversal between figure and ground, between text and intertext as we reverse focus. (35)

Miller’s model of intertextuality allows the critic to make choices of emphasis without disputing the basic flexibility of poststructural intertextual theory. It becomes possible to choose a text as the figure of a particular critical discussion without denying that at another time, that same text could become the ground and another text become the figure. It also becomes possible to consider questions of chronology or history as long as there is he understanding that the chronological constraints we place on the choice of intertext are not a necessary or constitutive feature of [intertextuality]" (30).

Miller’s theory, though, does not undo the paradox inherent within all intertextual relationships. Instead, his model of figure/ground intertextuality accentuates it, because figure and ground can flip back and forth simply through a change in perception, creating an arbitrariness which threatens the revolutionary potential of chronological intertextual relations. In one instance, one text will have priority over the other but in the next, the opposite will be emphasized and the authority of the prior text will be reasserted. As Jenny has observed, even when chronology is preserved in order to emphasize change, the prior text tends to exercise ideological and aesthetic authority over the transformative text which is difficult to overcome and is never completely erased (Jenny 45). As a result, on one hand, after reading the transformative text, the reader’s understanding of the prior text will be revised. Yet, on the other hand, as Riffaterre writes, the text cannot cancel or upset the intertext without compelling the reader to refer back to that intertext’s authority and to acknowledge its pertinence (43). This argument between transformation and authority characterizes the postmodern, which, according to Linda Hutcheon, is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges (The Poetics of Postmodernism 3). Findley’s novels, often a mix of realistic and self-reflexive narrative technique, illustrate Hutcheon’s thesis. Paradoxically, the very structures which are used to construct each novel are vigorously questioned and undermined, while at the same time, their dependence upon such structures undermines any critique of them. Because of this intertextual paradox, the overt thematic meanings in Findley’s novels, which are often revealed through intertextual connections, are threatened by intertextual practice itself. However, an intertextual study of Findley’s novels is nonetheless extremely productive because it demonstrates the complexity of Findley’s work and of its relation to both the literal tradition and political context it often interrogates and challenges.

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As my title and this introduction suggest, this book will be shaped by two main forces: formal and thematic considerations of fascist aestheticism and intertextuality. These two forces are inseparable within Findley’s novels. As I have already briefly discussed, throughout his novels, fascism gains its authority both politically and aesthetically; thus, Findley draws pointed parallels between the aesthetics of fascism and those of artistic representation and readerly desire. The relation between fascism and Findley’s novels is, in other words, intertextual. Connections between fascism, history and literature are also intertextual and these intertextual associations reflect back upon the textual construction of Findley’s own novels. Throughout my book, I will argue that traces of Findley’s critique of fascist aestheticism is evident in all of his novels. However, a detailed definition of it can be found in the first part of Chapter Two on The Butterfly Plague while a thorough consideration of several aspects of fascist aesthetics occurs in the second part of that chapter along with the chapter concerning Famous Last Words.

However, the overall thematic focus and structural organization of this book is more dependent upon intertextuality than upon fascist aesthetics. My intertextual method is the central link between chapters. Each chapter considers the function of a variety of intertexts, ranging from specific literary allusions to broader literary conventions to identifiable cultural discourses. I have purposely chosen to range widely throughout this book in order to try to maintain the spirit of a dialogic intertextual practice. Such an approach, while rife with paradox, reveals Findley’s fiction to be multi-levelled, rewarding multiple readings and interpretations.

CHAPTER ONE

Reading Mad Bodies: Intertextual Signs in

The Last of the Crazy People

Throughout Timothy Findley’s work, definitions of insanity are questioned and revised. Robert Ross in The Wars is judged insane by a military court for committing an act which the text and many of its readers consider humane and heroic. Famous Last Words abounds with characters either condemned as mad or driven mad. Mrs. Noyes is crazy not to get onto the ark in Not Wanted on the Voyage while Michael in The Telling of Lies is permanently brain-damaged after receiving treatment for a breakdown. These novels reject conventional definitions of sanity and suggest that revolutionary, transgressive behaviour is often misunderstood and silenced under the rubric of ‘madness.’ Findley’s concerns echo Michel Foucault’s ideas in his influential study, Madness and Civilization. Foucault argues that social definitions of madness have enabled society to confine and control transgressive behaviour by erecting walls, both physical and metaphysical, between what are considered acceptable, natural, and sane acts and those which are ideologically unacceptable, unnatural, and insane (Foucault 70). In delimiting madness by defining it, medical and moral discourses have made a text of insanity. These ‘mad’ texts are important social intertexts throughout Findley’s fiction. In his first novel, The Last of the Crazy People, the discourse of madness is the main focus of the novel. In this novel about crazy people, Findley challenges various definitions of mental illness by suggesting that diagnosis is an act of interpretation. The patients’ bodies, in this case, Jessica’s and Gilbert’s, are read and judged insane by other characters in the novel, in spite of evidence that their ‘madness’ can be seen as an act of social rebellion.

The members of the Winslow family are paralyzed by their inability to understand and know each other. The question, Do you understand?, the accusation, You don’t understand, and the lament, I don’t know, are repeated in almost every conversation of the book. Unable to communicate verbally, these characters exhibit hysterical and schizophrenic symptoms through their bodies which silence them long before Hooker’s shots ring out across the backyard. Like a fictional utterance in which what is meant can never be totally translated into what is said (Iser 59), language in the Winslow household becomes connotative rather than denotative, necessitat[ing] interpretation (Iser 59). As a result, the act of reading becomes directly related to the ‘craziness’ which Hooker decides is part of his inheritance.

Reading actually occurs within the drama of the novel in two significant ways. Firstly, the bodies of characters judged ‘sick’ or ‘mad’ within the social and historical context of the narrative are ‘read’ by other characters in the novel. For example, Jessica and Gilbert both display socially unacceptable behaviour and this behaviour is diagnosed as mad by the rest of the family and by their social milieu. Rosetta’s name, recalling the Rosetta Stone, both alludes to the importance of interpretation and ironically undercuts such activity since Rosetta Winslow, herself, fails as the ‘key’ to understanding. Secondly, these characters themselves are also readers of books. Gilbert Winslow has a large library filled with texts ranging from the works of the Romantics, F. Scott Fitzgerald, P.G. Wodehouse,