The Englishman's Boy
Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy (Picador, 1996) is a parallel-plot historical novel that pits the West against the "Western," the word against the cinematic image, the fantasy of a "pure" America against its insistently mongrel population. It is also a violent novel, both literally and figuratively. In the earlier plot, set in 1873, the unnamed "Englishman's boy" is an adolescent drifter caught up in a raid against an Indian tribe in "Whoop-Up country" (the border between Montana and Alberta). In the second plot, set in the 1820s, a young Canadian (who has also drifted, this time into the film industry) named Harry Vincent is called on by Mr. Chance, a megalomaniac studio owner, to take down the story of Shorty McAdoo--the first plot's boy. For Chance, McAdoo's story offers up the possibility of representing the very essence of US history and, in so doing, constructing a viable national mythos capable of knitting the country into a powerful whole. Harry, initially seduced by Chance's post-D. W. Griffith vision, discovers too late that all is not quite well.
From the reader's point of view, we know and we don't know Shorty's story. Vanderhaeghe divides his plots between a third-person limited narrator who sees almost entirely through Shorty's POV, with occasional exceptions, and a first-person narrator. When Shorty finally tells Harry Vincent his story, his voice quietly vanishes into Harry Vincent's description of the storytelling act itself:
It was a long, long night. Several times I asked if we couldn't continue tomorrow but he said no, this was like amputating a leg, you didn't stop in the middle, pick up the saw in the morning. He never permitted himself a rest; even when he stood at the window watching Wylie his voice went on, growing slightly frayed and raspy, hoarse from hours of talk. He talked as he made coffee at the stove to keep me awake. He talked as he paced up and down the room. (204)
All we learn from this phase of Shorty's confession is that something happened with a teenage girl. The reader, noting the extent of Shorty's guilt and the agony involved in the act of speaking it, might logically conclude that Shorty did something. In fact, as we eventually discover, Shorty failed to do something--namely, save the girl (taken captive during the raid) from rape and death by burning--and it is there that his guilt lies. For Shorty, confessing to Harry doesn't appear to hold out much hope of absolution; as Harry notes later, "[h]e looks no lighter despite his confession" (211). But then, part of the problem is that, as confessions go, this one is already tainted by cash.
Having sold his story to Harry for $4000, Shorty is furious to discover, first, that it is being turned into a film instead of the promised book, and second, that the girl's story is being altered beyond recognition: "'I sold the girl, too...I got no right to sell him the girl if he ain't going to do right by her'" (278). Both Chance and Shorty regard the story (and the girl) as "property," but, as far as Chance is concerned, his (deceitful) contract with Shorty grants him the right to rewrite history for his own purposes. In Shorty's eyes, however, fictionalizing history simply violates the girl again; Chance's "artistic license" becomes a raid on history, a violent act that figuratively repeats the raid of Shorty's confession. Yet, as Shorty himself has to acknowledge, he isn't innocent either--he participated in the raid, he didn't save the girl, and he sold the story to Chance. It's hard to draw the line between cashing in and selling out.
As my gentle reader has no doubt gathered by now, the novel turns a decidedly glum eye on the Hollywoodization of American history. It's important that Chance wants to turn Shorty's story into a quintessentially US tale, since the actual raid takes place in border country. Chance's blindness to the territorial ambiguities involved--not to mention Harry's own Canadian origin--indicates that something is askew here. So too does his faux gentlemanliness. Harry discovers at one dinner that Chance eats like the proverbial pig; later, a party of supposed Hollywood stars turns out to consist of look-alike prostitutes. (Harry's refusal to use the young woman provided for him echoes Shorty's refusal to rape the girl.) Chance's understanding of "America," however, turns out to be the most serious problem--and the most dangerous threat.
Chance initially tells Harry that "I want to make pictures rooted in American history and American experience" (16)--films that would not just embody American heroes but that would also be produced by Americans. At this point, Chance's attempt to eject Europeans and their culture from American filmmaking sounds rather similar to Herman Melville's reflections on Hawthorne's artistry: "The great mistake seems to be, that even with those Americans who look forward to the coming of a great literary genius among us, they somehow fancy he will come in the costume of Queen Elizabeth's day,--be a writer of dramas founded upon old English history, or the tales of Boccaccio." (In fact, the Europe-educated Chance claims to be profoundly influenced by Henri Bergson [19-20] and later reveals himself to be obsessed with Germany's post-WWI identity.) But Chance, anticipating the success of the Da Vinci Code, also observes that "You mark my words, Harry, there'll come a day when the public won't swallow any of our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do" (19). It's no wonder that Chance has no problem rewriting Shorty's story--after all, in his model of history for the masses, claims to factuality swamp the facts themselves.
More importantly, however, Chance situates his theory of history in the context of a new visuality:
Because there's no arguing with pictures. You simply accept or reject them. What's up there on the screen moves too fast to permit analysis or argument. You can't control the flow of images the way you can control a book--by rereading a chapter, rereading a paragraph, rereading a sentence. A book invites argument, invites reconsideration, invites thought. A moving picture is beyond thought. Like feeling, it simply is. The principle of a book is persuasion; the principle of a movie is revelation. Martin Luther was converted in a lightning storm, a conversion accomplished in the bowels and not the mind. A lesson for all of us in this business to remember. (107)
At one level, this passage is loaded with dramatic irony; after all, those of us reading this novel in the age of the VCR (and, since its publication, TiVO and DVDs) are accustomed to controlling the moving picture. Moreover, Chance is speaking in the age of the silent film, where text is minimized. Nevertheless, and more worrisomely, Chance clearly conceptualizes the film medium as both the ultimate in stealth propaganda and a new secular scripture; notably, Chance is not Martin Luther, but the man in charge of the "lightning storm." The producer as God, in other words, communicating to man through a medium that displaces textual forms of "revelation" because it shuts down the possibility of interpretation altogether.
But "lightning" brings with it an unspoken allusion to something else: blitzkrieg. When Harry challenges Chance's decision to rewrite the script so that the girl destroys the building (and herself with it), Chance explains that "[t]he judgements of nature and history are impersonal. . . But the weak refuse to accept them. Think of all those quixotic lost causes of history. The Jews furnish a perfect example. All those futile, petulant rebellions against the Romans. A sick resentment drove them to become the authors of their own destruction" (251). In Chance's new narrative, the strong do not exterminate the weak; the weak exterminate themselves by refusing to "face facts" (252). Shorty McAdoo's guilt thus not only goes for naught but also becomes naught--the "strong" bear no responsibility, Chance implies, in what amounts to one long historical suicide by vanquished peoples. The purpose of Chance's new American history is to "[c]onvert the strangers with lightning" (253), but the Jews remain outside of this utopian (or dystopian) vision. Chance, in traditional anti-Semitic fashion, sees the Jew as the permanently stiff-necked outsider, the eternal Other in a land of otherwise proudly nationalized souls. The Jews make films, but somehow resist their power.
It is not quite clear what Chance intends to do with the Jews. A different kind of lightning, perhaps. But, as Harry Vincent ruminates at the end, "[f]or thirty years I've stood at the back of my theatre watching men like him in the newsreels. Hitler ranting like some demented Charlie Chaplin; Mussolini posturing on a balcony like some vain, second-rate Latin screen star" (325). Does film make history, or is history just an exceptionally bad film?