ABSTRACT
A Canadian debate about the Second World War recapitulates some of Hartman 's anxieties about the education of memory. The assumption was doubly significant in the case of The Valour and the Horror because, as a social text, the public history of the Second World War in Canada is commonly narrated through the prism of the family. From the outset, the filmmakers consciously played on, and to, the theme of family values. Before the approving eyes of the reading nation the education of social memory about the war is both enacted, and rendered somatic, by a child's patriotic embrace of a monument to the dead. Yet while the intensity of Susan Purcell's epiphany attests to the cultural power of visual imagery as a source of prosthetic memory about the war, it is also important to acknowledge how susceptible such images of transgenerational reconciliation are to the cheapening banality of cliche.
