Transcription, Transmission, and Transgression of World War I Battlefield Experience in Three Mid-twentieth-century Canadian Novels

Personal accounts of unutterable and unimaginable war experiences that Canadian soldiers lived through on European battlefields during World War I contrast rather sharply with heroic – yet somewhat emotionally detached (though statistically and technically precise) – reports and accounts of the deeds of Canadian troops in history books and other official documents. Mid-twentieth-century fiction inevitably tried to focus on these encounters with the abominable in order to make it possible for authors (as well as readers) with immediate experience to process psychologically – and make a final closure of – what they endured in the battlefield. There is a surprisingly high number of post-WWII novels published from the 1940s to the 1970s that deal, at least in part, or even indirectly, with topics and experiences linked to WWI. While, as suggested above, the war experience tends to be described with astonishing precision that almost overlaps with diaristic obsession, the psychological treatment of the trauma that had arisen in the war had, on the other hand, a tendency to be neglected. This interesting thematic niche of post-WWII, mid-twentieth-century novels revolving around WWI will be analysed from two theoretical perspectives. The first one – a rather general and decidedly literature-oriented triad of transcription, transmission, and transgression of the battlefield experience – will be a point of departure of the analysis, including some of the classic theories of trauma. This primary triad will beoverlapped (yet not necessarily replaced) with the seven stages of grief that psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed originally in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. This second theoretical layer will thus both fill in the aforementioned void in the psychological treatment of the issue, and will be also used to assess to what extent individual texts, and their protagonists, were able to transcend their individual psychological scars and traumas.