Knights of Faith: Christian Existentialism in Colin McDougall’s Execution (original) (raw)

2013, Studies in Canadian Literature Etudes En Litterature Canadienne

ince winning the Governor General's Award in 1958, Colin McDougall's only novel, Execution, has been neglected, despite the richness of a text that provides ample critical avenues into Canadian war literature. Peter Webb calls the novel the "only masterpiece among Canadian Second World War novels" (163). Dagmar Novak praises Execution as "arguably the best Canadian novel about the Second World War" (112). Yet little has been made of the novel's complicated representation of wartime ethics. Even less has been made of its existential underpinnings. In the novel, Padre Doorn, a military pastor, comes face to face with a quintessential existential realization: "The Padre stared unremittingly at the sky, waiting for the parley to openand nothing happened. Nothing except air burst" (145). Furthermore, McDougall's allusions to existentialists like Franz Kafka seem to indicate that he wished Execution to be read within the complex and multifaceted tradition of existential fiction. The novel's ending, however, which features a proxy crucifixion, complicates this interpretation since novels within that tradition, such as Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) or Albert Camus's The Stranger (1942), do not typically allow for any kind of spiritual transcendence. Understanding this seemingly irreconcilable tension means eschewing the dominant form of mid-century existentialism characterized by Sartre and Camus in favour of one of existentialism's foundational figures. A close reading of Execution, considering the formative texts of existentialism and a comparative reading of works by its international influences, including Kafka, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner, reveals a valuable theoretical matrix for parsing the difficult philosophy of this neglected novel. For Execution accords with an earlier form of existentialism, one that predates the school's consensus atheism and is articulated primarily by Søren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling.