The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe - Essay Example

? The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe National Identity is a very important part of our personality. The formation of national identity is a process of comparing and contrasting the values of our own nation with the values, principles and beliefs of other nations. Certainly, not all the people have an opportunity to travel, thus we have got another reliable and valuable source of information that help us form our views and got different feelings. This is an art. We see films and beautiful pictures, read poems and novels created by our ancestors and also modern artists. Studying the masterpieces of art, we receive valuable information about our history and this helps us form our own identity. We can learn about what is good and what is bad from different examples provided by the pieces of art. Art also serves as a reflection of our own feelings and thoughts. However, not all the information we receive is true and it is important to understand what to absorb and what to ignore. The novel The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe tells about the problems on the way of formation of national identity and impact racial intolerance has on this formation. When the Great War was over, a new important period started began in the life of America. Actually, this period predetermined the future of the United States and its reputation of the most developed country in the world. It was a period of thriving, the time of economic development. There were many new opportunities opened for Americans that time and it is natural that this made the United States attractive for immigrants. The myth of American Dream appeared and many people from different countries in the world left their motherland to come to the United States seeking for better life. The United States became multicultural that caused many problems for immigrants. Instead of American Dream they faced terrible racial intolerance. Guy Vanderhaeghe tells us the story of Harry Vincent, a young scenarist, and his boss, a rich man Damon Chance, who wanted to create a special movie. The main purpose of the Damon Chance is to create a real “American” movie, which would reflect namely American spirit. Chance thinks that the main problem of Americans is the lack of national identity. Here we can trace the attitude of Chance towards immigrants. It seems that he accuses multiculturalism caused by mass immigration of the lack of national identity in The United States. He respects real American nation and is sorry that it does not have its own art. He wants to create a real American masterpiece: “The Germans gave the world their music. The Romans their architecture. The Greeks their tragedies. We recognize the soul of a people in their art" (Vanderhaeghe 108). Chance is irritated by European’s domination and wants to help form separate American national identity. He criticized Griffith: “It was pure genius on [Griffith’s] part to advertise [The Birth of a Nation] as fact. Americans are a practical people, they like facts.… 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.… Facts are the bread America wants to eat. The poetry of facts is the poetry of the American soul” (Vanderhaeghe 19). Damon paid Harry Vincent for creating a scenario about a history of a cowboy. The book is divided into two parts with parallel plots and this makes the novel unique. The second half tells us about a boy who is travelling to Cypress Hills. This was done by the author to demonstrate the different interpretation of the same story. We have a chance to trace the process of movie making and compare it with the story of a real boy. The reader can see how the both Harry and the Englishman boy try to resist the actions of their common opponent Damon Chance and how this forms the plot of the book. At first, Harry was impacted by Damon Chance’s aspiration to create a movie and was going to do his best to assist him. Harry was sure that Chance is directed by good intentions. It is not surprising as billionaire says: “You see, Harry, I want to make pictures rooted in American history and American experience “(Vanderhaeghe 16). Harry shares Chance’ s desire to create a movie that will bring much profit, he is not against it. He wants to help to reflect the real American life story and can’t see anything bad in this intention of billionaire. However, later the real intention of Damon Chance becomes clear. By means of art he wants to reflect his neglecting attitude towards immigrants, towards those people who came to the United States in order to improve their life, but their dreams failed. He seems to be crazy in his desire as he states “this picture is about psychological truth, poetic truth. Poetic truth is not journalism “(Vanderhaeghe 252). The plan of Damon Chance is terrible: by means of art he wants to inspire Americans to repress immigrants. His cruel crazy plan shocks Harry and he refuses to help Damon. He even becomes afraid of his boss. However, he does not want to give up his fight against the boss. After the disclosing of Damon’s real plans, a new plot starts. Harry’s reaction to bosses’ intentions makes him go against Damon, but unfortunately, he can do nothing and has to go back to Canada only in order to stay alive. Notwithstanding that the efforts of Harry were useless, he could not change the scenario, but only the fact of his fight helps the reader understand that nothing can prevent people from telling the truth. Harry was really unable to fight Damon, he was too week, but he wrote the story and gave it to Damon. The story showed how people can do anything to get profit, even to present false facts to the whole nation. Here we can see how people can interpret the facts differently. Damon and all the individuals like him want to create narrations, which show immigrants as enemies of the whole American nation and inspire people to fight against them to become heroes. From the very beginning Damon did his best to make people think that it is very important to be “American” and finally his intentions turned into false. He said that he wanted to create a life story but finally lied by showing a young Indian girl as an enemy. Damon wanted to convince everybody that the United States is the best country and immigrants represent a threat to American identity. “The time has come to rewrite history [...] of the foreigner, erase completely those sentimental flowers of memory and light their minds with the glory of American lightning” (Vanderhaeghe 279). Walter Benjamin asks the question: “how can the historian claim access to truth, even provisional truth? Do not the ceaseless production and proliferation of linguistic, hence irresistible, meanings simply submerge all possibility of a stabilized perspective?” (Benjamin 15). The both Harry and Damon presented different interpretations of the same events. Really, how can we distinguish between the true and false? What should we treat as our own history? What can help us understand what is good or bad? Maybe, this was one of the most important topics raised by Vanderhaeghe. Harry failed to stop Damon and this was predictable. But he still managed to reach his goal by writing a new story that reflected the truth about the Englishman’s boy, who was not a hero. Really, Damon and Harry had different views from the beginning, but Harry realized it too late: “Chance believed character didn’t count for much in history. But, looking at the river, I remind myself the map of the river is not the river itself. That hidden in it are deep, mysterious, submerged, and unpredictable currents. The characters of all those wolfers, Canadian and American, cast longer shadows than I had any inkling of that endless night in which McAdoo made his confession, crouched on a cot in a desolate bunkhouse, an old man reliving his pain and guilt thousands of miles from an obscure dot on the Saskatchewan prairie (Vanderhaeghe 326).”And the Chance’s story did not become a masterpiece and did not have as great success as he expected. He failed to realize his plan and this is a good side of the story. Still, the world is full of good and honest people like Harry who can tell us the truth about our history. This testifies that the art can present us with the truth as well as with false facts and it is very important to be able to distinguish between the lie and the truth. National identity is important but we should not forget that we all are humans and the discrimination should not exist in our world. There are certain rules for every nation, but also there are common rules, which should be followed by all the people not depending on their nation and these rules have not changed over time. Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Englishman’s Boy. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. Read More