More specifically, however, the consolidation of the narrative of "Canada" as a sturdy colonial youth in world affairs, seeking independence and maturity by participation in a "world" war, is also questioned through the novel's reliance on figures of innocence, childhood, and a pastoral, pre-industrialized world. The "evolutionary narrative of historical continuity" that Homi Bhabha theorizes as necessary to the pedagogical reproduction of the nation is questioned by the novel's narrative method (and amply documented in scholarship on historiographic metafiction). The Wars, a fictional biography of the reluctant coming-of-age of one Canadian soldier, encodes the story of Canada's initiation into the rights of nationhood and state power through the rites of military, technological, and familial participation in the Great War. Timothy Findley's work has played a significant role in the making of postmodernism in Canada, yet such apparently "ex-centric" texts as Findley's can also tell some very centric stories when read not for their play between historiography and fiction but for a material unconscious encoded in the figural level of the text. A POSTMODERN INCREDULITY toward master narratives has been celebrated as a sign that Canadian literature and letters not only survived the paraphrase of thematic criticism and arrived at a new stage of cultural maturity but did so on an international footing.
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