Moral Metafiction: Counter-discourse in the Novels of Timothy Findley

Alan Thomas is an associate professor of English at the University of
Toronto.

This work of criticism has its genesis in contemporary theory—but in a
revanchiste spirit. It claims back for fiction the territory of moral
meaning seemingly lost in the sweeping advances made by those theorists
whose work undermines the supposed truth-claims of texts. Jacques
Derrida and Paul de Man are specifically referred to in the author’s
preface, in which she explains the beginnings of her project as “a
resistance to theory.” In the relatively brief discussion that
follows, Findley’s novels are surveyed, from The Last of the Crazy
People (1967) to The Telling of Lies (1986) with perhaps most emphasis
being placed on The Wars (1977). This was Findley’s third published
fiction and the one that brought him considerable fame. Pennee’s
interest lies in form in relation to theme: a variety of discourses,
with shifting narrators, and a deliberate cultivation of enigma—a
prevailing manner in the recent novel. In the judgment of Pennee and
others, this makes The Wars a “metafiction,” a work that calls
attention to its own fictiveness. Pennee argues that, despite this
self-conscious construction of itself, the novel advances a serious and
coherent moral position, a “counter-discourse” to conventional texts
(that is, war stories): hence her term “moral metafiction.” Few will
disagree with the view that a work can be a demonstrated artifice and
also have a serious meaning. The only surprise, perhaps, is that
contemporary criticism can doubt the possibility.

Pennee’s basic argument—that Findley invites the reader to
construct a profoundly antiwar novel on the bones of earlier kinds of
war stories—will raise no eyebrows. Indeed, if readers did not respond
in this fashion, the novel could hardly be said to have been read.