“ A S H O U T O F R E C O G N I T I O N ” : “ L I K E N E S S ” A N D T H E A R T O F T H E S I M I L E I N T I M O T H Y F I N D L E Y ’ S T H E W A R S LORRAINE M. YORK McMaster University I n the course of an elaborate description of Ypres in 1916, in which physical landmarks, geographical location, and historical details all play a part, the narrator of Timothy Findley’s The Wars suddenly stops short, realizing the utter incapacity of language to describe the hell which he is contemplating: “The mud. There are no good similes.” 1 This measure of awareness on the part of Findley’s narrator of the effects and limitations of language is apparent in Findley’s own reflections on his art. “Words,” he once claimed, “are the vocabulary of literate gesture. And the combinations of your words have to be as precise as the combinations of gestures used by a dancer to make an articulate statement in dance.” 2 The simile, in particu lar, is deftly manipulated by Findley, in order to impress upon his readers the bewildering interplay between horrific and ordinary experience, and individual and collective tragedy which lies at the very heart of every war.3 The interplay between the particular and the general, between Robert Ross’s experience of the First World War and “ the wars,” has been noted by critics such as Eric Thompson.4 What is less recognized, however, is the extent to which a literary device such as the simile may actually accentuate this interplay. The narrator’s conviction that “many men have died like Robert Ross, obscured by violence” (5) may seem trite at first glance, but one gradually discovers that this “likeness” is the concept upon which the emotional appeal of the novel is based. Just as Marlow in Conrad’s Lord Jim repeatedly insists that Jim is “one of us,” various characters in The Wars come to perceive the “likeness” of their situation to that of countless others. “ I suppose you’ve come down here like all them others to join with the Field Artillery, hunh?” is the first unsympathetic comment we hear directed at Robert Ross on his journey to the wars (16). Later, the bookish Levitt’s thirst for action at the front draws a similarly wry comment from the narrator: “ In this he was much like everyone else who’d just arrived. You weren’t a real soldier unless you were in jeopardy” (86). Still later, when Robert undertakes to show Levitt “just how real the enemy was” (93), he, too, is visited by this sensation of “likeness” and develops a parE n g lish Stu d ies in C anada, x i, 2, June 1985 ticularly penetrating psychological explanation of it: “ It gave the war some meaning if you knew that the men who took your fire (and returned it) wore blue scarves or had grey mittens like your own” [emphasis mine] (93). Here, then, we witness the way in which the human urge to seek out like nesses binds together the particular and the general, thus giving meaning to an unbearable chaos. The way in which Findley exploits the simile’s power to make likenesses is of particular interest in The Wars. The simile may operate in two basic fashions: it may compare an event or object to the familiar or ordinary (as in the above-cited comparison which reformulates “ the enemy” as a man who quite possibly wears scarves and mittens similar to your own), or it may relocate an experience in an undreamt-of or fanciful context. That Findley is aware of other twentieth-century experiments in rendering the mundane exotic is revealed in one of the explicit literary references in The Wars: the fate of Robert’s pistol, we are told, “like the fate of Leopold Bloom’s bar of soap, became a minor Odyssey” (35). A contemporary of such experiments, the Russian Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, coined the term ostraneniye...