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Articles

Volume 20, Number 1 (1995)

Reading as Collaboration in Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words

  • Jamie Dopp
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1995-01-01

Abstract

Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words uses formal innovations, such as the framing story of Freyberg and Quinn, to position the reader as an active and critical agent. The framing story turns the reader's tendency to identify with Quinn and Mauberley into an object of critical inquiry; it invites the reader to examine the Mauberley-like tendencies in him/herself. The ambivalence of imagination -- either "our greatest gift" (Findley) or a means to envision perfection, with its accompanying tendency towards fascism -- and the foregrounding of the element of "story" in history forces the reader to "collaborate" in the text, with all of the associated negative and positive connotations of that word. Famous Last Words, like a piece of Brechtian theatre, presents a complex play between confident assertions about the truth of history and a recognition that all analyses of history are limited by their historical and ideological origins.