Jubilee of Death: The Raid on Dieppe

Lorne Bellamy was a graduate student in the English Department at the University of British Columbia.

In more than twenty volumes of poetry published since the 1940s, Souster has concentrated on the short lyric. An important departure from his previous work, Jubilee of Death is his first sustained experiment with the long line and his first book-length documentary narrative.

The narrative’s four sections — “Preparation,” “The Landing,” “Withdrawal,” and “Surrender” — are framed by two brief, but very important, meditations. In the first, Jean Coté returns to Dieppe after forty years and tells of his unexpected release from numbness: I suddenly felt myself at peace /with this place of death.” In his brooding awareness of death, Coté acts as a model for the reader, who makes his own peace with the horrors associated with Dieppe indirectly, by reading through the narrative reconstruction of the event.

The second meditation, or epilogue, establishes the monologue as the basic structural unit of the narrative. Souster enters as one speaker among many in the book, hinting at his mortality while clearly opposing the omniscient, impersonal stance of the traditional narrative. The monologue is important, then, because it emphasizes each speaker’s human limitations.

The monologues also have a mythic resonance. The title of the second meditation (“Poet”) shows that Souster, despite his humility, has assumed the public responsibility of the epic poet, who tells a story of national importance; less like Homer than Ulysses, he has summoned the ghosts of dead men from a dark underworld to speak of the past. Thus the series of monologues in this book is the structural equivalent for a mythic descent into hell in Homer’s Odyssey.

Scattered images of darkness give the events and minute details of the narrative almost their only resonance. At Dieppe, darkness takes the form of communication that is “sketchy, inaccurate, misleading,” and of smokescreens that prevent commanders on ships from achieving even a distant, visual contact with soldiers fighting on the beaches. The image of thousands of men dying in combat is an image of the darkness of hell, which encompasses the desire to kill and the blindness of military planners, who barely recognize that their insecurities and shallow self-justifications endanger the lives of others.

According to Northrop Frye, “the test of the great narrative is its ability to give the flat prose statement a poetic value.” Jubilee of Death does not pass this test, because the resonances generated by the framing meditations and the few images of darkness are attenuated and dispersed by the abundance of documentary material. In the preparation section particularly, the language and style come very close to expository prose. The speakers lack all but the barest traces of feeling, as though reduced to dull uniformity by a relentless pressure to conform, to put on a good show.

The dramatic impact of landing and combat is also obscured by documentary detail — by the names of 25 or more officers, and their ranks, regiments, and assigned objectives; by the codenames for eight beaches; and by details of the precise times and movements of different landing forces in relation to each other. Even more bewildering are apparent errors blurring the documentary detail. A commando unit headed for Yellow Beach is attacked either soon after 0500 hours (supposedly the point of no return) or at precisely 0347 hours. Other inconsistencies creep in among references to the Royal Regiment, which lands at Blue Beach, near Puys: on three occasions these troops appear at or near Puits; and, in one monologue, a commander first says that no Beachmaster landed with the Royals, but soon reports that the Beachmaster with the Royals signalled, “Impossible land troops.” Thus times and locations which normally function as signposts turn into the equivalent of a minefield, and the reader is tempted to send his own urgent message: “Impossible read further.”