Deafening

Frances Itani's Deafening shares a number of themes with an earlier Canadian WWI historical novel, Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers: wartime trauma, as experienced both by the soldiers and those they leave behind; the difficulties of communicating and memorializing such trauma; the shaping of Canadian national identity; and the redemptive power of romance.   But whereas The Stone Carvers almost entirely avoids WWI horrors, focusing instead on how civilians and soldiers deal with the war's emotional and physical after-effects, Deafening shuttles back and forth between the grotesqueness of the battlefield and the growing privations at home.

Recent writers of WWI historical fiction find themselves in implicit or explicit competition with Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, especially the trilogy's explorations of WWI's psychological effects and its ultimate denunciation of the war's senselessness.    Deafening doesn't altogether manage to carve out its own narrative turf.  The novel establishes and, predictably enough, deconstructs, a series of binary oppositions: deaf/hearing, silence/sound, stillness/motion, Canadian/German, civilian/soldier, peace/war, and so on.  The heroine, Grania, develops a kind of occult strength out of her apparent handicap:

What Jim saw in Grania's face was strength.  A strength so still, it was possible she did not know it was there.  Her skin was pale and clear, her eyebrows furrowed slightly, giving her face a quizzical expression, as if she were figuring things out.  Her eyes were brown, and when he looked at her he felt that she knew something, perhaps something peaceful, or wise, that no one else could possibly know.  (109)

The novel lays heavy emphasis indeed on Grania's quality of "stillness," which turns her into the narrative's moral core.  Stillness hints at self-control (Grania trains herself not to cry, for example) and containment, but also stability and depth.  She is also the character most overtly concerned with ways of knowing and communicating, something both logical--after all, she cannot function in a hearing world without being attentive to clues--and symbolic.  A deaf woman who both signs and speaks, Grania crosses and recrosses the boundaries between the worlds of silence and speech.  (In a touch of redemptive irony,  she teaches a physically mutilated and shell-shocked veteran how to speak again.) 

Grania's ability to master her responses to the visual and tactile cues she receives from the world of sound--"'It's easy to let things fall away.  To choose what to attend to and what not'" (137)--contrasts with the soldiers' sensory overload in the battlefields.  Her hearing husband, Jim, survives by learning a kind of voluntary deafness, cultivating a memory-ornamented interior space as protection from the horrors without.  The novel's insistence on this need for inattention, as opposed to attention, goes hand in hand with its equal insistence that some experiences forever remain beyond communication.  Just as Grania cannot truly share her experiences at "School," Jim cannot share his experience of "War": "She would never know where had been.  Nor would he know where she had been" (377).  This cloud of unknowing paradoxically enables love, instead of disabling it; the act of sharing a life encompasses both heightened communication (including private languages) and the mutual awareness that some experiences must escape representation. Nevertheless, if the trauma of war cannot ever find its way into speech, it can be healed by love: "He is different, she said to herself.  But some things are the same.  For now, we will live in the present.  That will have to be enough.  Until we are better" (378).  Present togetherness, with no thought of either past or future, offers the only measure of hope.

In a number of ways, the novel is more interesting in concept than in execution.  Pull quotes, of course, are pretty meaningless--except, perhaps, as sources of unintentional humor--but I thought it was telling that the front cover proudly features O: The Oprah Magazine's claim that Deafening is "[a] gorgeously moving, old-fashioned novel."  What on earth could that possibly mean? (Is Dickens old-fashioned? Eliot? Woolf? Steinbeck? After all, they're all "old," so did they write "old-fashioned" fiction?)  Certainly, one real problem with the novel is that it makes claims for Grania's unique worldview without actually conveying them through any formal elements in the text.  There's no difference in Grania's "difference."  On a more basic level, the narrator doth explain too much, usually without shedding much light on the situation at hand:

Grania understood why Grew had stayed up here to stare at the horizon.  Just as she understood why the few remaining people on the platform of the Belleville station stayed, long after the troop train departed.  Jim had been on that train and she'd been among those few.  The ones who lingered stared into the vanishing point that swallowed the train.  When, finally, she had turned away, it was to turn towards a change in her life. (193)

Now, this may just be personal taste talking, but I'm always frustrated by "hyper-conscious" characters--the ones who always seem aware that Something Really Big Has Happened, or things of that nature.  This novel compounds the problem with moments like that last sentence, which elicits an "well, yes" as opposed to an "that's an interesting insight."  There are a few too many unintentional slides into bathos.

The novel also feels unsatisfactory in its handling of the WWI scenes themselves.  Like most WWI novels and poems, whether historical or contemporaneous, Deafening emphasizes the simultaneous grotesquerie and unfunny ludicrousness of the battlefield.  Landscapes are dotted with human and animal remains, mud is everywhere, and orders make no sense; the whole enterprise sags under the weight of sheer pointlessness.    (The film Gallipoli's "over-the-top" scenes achieve something similar.)  As Paul Fussell argues in The Great War and Modern Memory, everything is dominated by the rhetoric of "irony." But given the extensive accumulation of literature devoted to the position that "WWI was useless," it would have been nice if Itani had rethought these scenes, at least in a way that acknowledged their literary heritage.  Jim's experience training for gas attacks and his acknowledgment that soldiers fear gas poisoning above all else, for example, invite comparison to Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est," but never achieves Owen's terse nightmarishness.