Missing Men: Canadian Prisoners of War in Alan Cumyn’s Great War Novel The Famished Lover

Abstract

This article focuses on the representation of Canadian prisoners of war in Alan Cumyn’s Great War novel The Famished Lover (2006). Relying on historical sources, I attempt to show how the experience of captivity, marginalized for a long time in historical research, alters our understanding of the First World War and the evolution of forced labour in the twentieth century. I approach Canadian POWs as missing persons, disappeared in the biopolitical regime of the POW camp, the post-war discourses of commemoration, and the gaps in cultural memory. The article explores Cumyn’s representation of the camp as a biopolitical space and the production of the POW as Agambenian bare life. Central to the analysis are issues of trauma, masculinity, and heroic defiance. I also engage with the long-lasting sequelae of captivity, as well as the difficult reintegration of the returned POW, based on the example of the protagonist of the novel.