8 Hockey as a Gateway to the Underworld in Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans

The Not-So-Divine Ryans

Draper’s story, like all human stories, begins with family. Draper’s is comparable to Catholic royalty in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The family nickname—the Divine Ryans—reflects the number of Ryan “priests and nuns,” as well as the nature of the family’s empire, which consists of a virulently Catholic newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, a funeral home, and the local orphanage and convent, which have been run for ages by someone named Ryan (Johnston 1998, 12). The family is ruled by an unholy Trinity composed of three siblings: Father Seymour (orphanage), Sister Louise (convent), and Aunt Phil (professional widow and self-appointed family C.E.O.). The Trinity is opposed by Uncle Reginald, the disinherited oldest son, who turns out to be Draper’s guide and ally.

By the year of the story—1967—the family’s power is waning. The description of The Daily Chronicle at the beginning of chapter 7 suggests why: “The problem with The Daily Chronicle was that while other papers in the city had changed with the times, toning down or disguising their biases, it had stayed the same, continuing to denounce those who, as its editorials often put it, were of the ‘wrong’ politics or the ‘wrong’ religion” (65). Unknown to Draper, the death of his father has exposed the fragility of the Ryan empire and has thrown the family hierarchy into crisis. Because there have been so many priests and nuns in the family, Draper is now the only remaining male who might produce a male heir with the family name, just as his father was before him. As a result, Aunt Phil tries to force his path in life: he must marry, have lots of children (especially sons), and take over the family business.

To bend Draper to her will, Aunt Phil wields the twin authorities of family and religion—authorities that, in the case of the Ryans, are inextricably linked. She stresses how everyone in the family has to sacrifice to preserve the empire. The house in which Draper, his mother, and sister live must be sold, just as Uncle Reginald’s house was sold years before (1). The official story about Donald is that he worked himself to death as editor of the Chronicle, just as his father had before him, the implication being that Draper must embrace this fate as well (26, 69). Donald also made another personal sacrifice. It turns out that he had wanted to enter the priesthood, “but his father, irony of all ironies, had prevented him from doing so” (130). Despite his calling, Donald was forced to accept marriage as “his vocation,” and, in compensation, was allowed to go to Oxford “to pursue a layman’s course in Latin and scholastic philosophy” (131).

The oppressive possibilities of religion are on full display in The Divine Ryans. Guilt, shame (particularly about sexuality), and the threat of eternal damnation figure prominently in Draper’s childhood. Two controlling tactics by Aunt Phil are particularly noteworthy. One is her forcing Draper to attend wakes, which he has had to do since he was five (115). Wakes, from Aunt Phil’s point of view, are reminders of mortality that help to enforce obedience. “A boy’s pride had to be broken,” she believes, and “there was nothing like the sight of a corpse to instil humility” (115). The other tactic is her forcing Draper to take confession with Father Seymour, her brother and ally. Draper is forced into confessing intimate details about his life and afterwards can’t be sure how Father Seymour will use the knowledge (58).

Oppression takes a creepy turn in the character of Father Seymour. When Draper persists in his visions of his dead father, Aunt Phil gets the idea of having him join Father Seymour’s Number. Father Seymour, it turns out, directs a select group of one hundred boys at the orphanage trained “in the arts of dancing, singing, and … boxing” (14). The motto of the Number is muscular Christian—“Toughness of body, soundness of mind, purity of soul” (14)— though Uncle Reginald, in his jokey-serious way, captures the reality, describing the Number as “a cross between the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the Hitler Youth” (14). The oppressive environment is illustrated by the “frequent strappings” given by Father Seymour, during which he maintains “a kind of joviality” that has more than a little creepiness about it (34). When, inevitably, it comes Draper’s turn to be strapped, the description of Father Seymour capturing him and attempting to do it is like a sexual assault: “Father Seymour was now hugging me to his chest, now to his stomach, now to his crotch.… [Now] he lay there, on his back with me belly-up on top of him, rising and falling on his chest each time he breathed” (176). Fortunately for Draper, his mother has by this point been roused to action, and she saves him (178).

To a reader in 1990—especially a reader in Newfoundland—the portrait of Father Seymour would be made more sinister by the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal, which broke into full view the year before. The Mount Cashel Boys’ Home (popularly known as the Orphanage) was a St. John’s landmark, founded in 1898, and run by Irish Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic lay order. Beginning in the 1980s, multiple criminal investigations revealed an extensive pattern of sexual and physical abuse of the residents dating back decades, as well as complicity on the part of police, government, and religious authorities in hiding or downplaying this abuse (Higgins 2012). A Royal Commission, the Hughes Inquiry, held hearings in 1989 and 1990 and ultimately reported on the abuse of the boys, and the betrayal of the overseeing authorities, in excruciating detail (Hughes 1992). The Mount Cashel scandal bears an uncanny resemblance to the Residential Schools scandal involving First Nations children that was the subject of The Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015.

The Church of Hockey

Hockey has a contradictory role in the Ryan empire. Aunt Phil thinks of the game as trivial. She scoffs at Draper’s vision of his father by declaring that people do not come back from the dead “to throw pucks up in the air” (Johnston 1998, 7). None of Aunt Phil, Sister Louise, or Father Seymour have any real affection for the game. Yet the family gathers on Saturday nights to watch and cheer for the Montreal Canadiens. So regular is this ritual that Draper recalls it as one of only two things the family does on “a regular basis,” the other being “to go to early mass on Sunday morning” (72). Of special note are games against the Toronto Maple Leafs. Then, according to Draper Doyle, the contest becomes “not a hockey game, but a holy war, a crusade carried on nationwide TV, Rome’s Canadiens versus Canterbury’s Maple Leafs” (77–78). The extreme nature of the family’s investment in the Canadiens is lampooned by Uncle Reginald in a series of over-the-top claims about the Catholic identity of the team. According to Uncle Reginald, “the real coach of the Montreal Canadiens was the pope, who was sending Toe Blake instructions from the Vatican”—and so on (78).

Uncle Seymour’s behaviour during the broadcasts magnifies his creepiness. He knows “almost as little” about hockey as Aunt Phil and Sister Louise but affects to be an expert. Worse, he tries to use hockey to ingratiate himself with Draper: “Father Seymour sat down on the floor beside me. I knew what was coming. It was his make-contact-with-the-boy-routine” (80). After taking a drink of Draper Doyle’s Pepsi, Father Seymour makes a lame joke about the “CH” on the Canadiens’ uniform being the first letters of the word “Church,” but that the word “means nothing unless ‘u r’ in it” (81). His attempt to ingratiate himself is a thinly disguised attempt to usurp the role of father left vacant by Donald Ryan’s death. This is part of a pattern in which he tries, Claudius-like, to usurp the place of Draper’s father with gifts and “innocent” flirtations directed at Draper’s mother, Linda. Draper, wise (if troubled) child that he is, recognizes Father Seymour’s behaviour as a “routine.”

One last point about the family’s use of hockey. The Ryan Saturday night gatherings have the appearance of a family ritual so often celebrated in hockey lore. In the case of the Ryans, however, this ritual is only an act—a “routine.” Jason Blake, in his excellent analysis of the varieties of play in The Divine Ryans, points out that Father Seymour’s view of sports “is radically instrumentalist,” and as a result, he uses sports as “a mirthless means to an end” (2018, 50). The Divine Ryans emphasizes the gap between the outward appearance of the Ryans’ world and its underlying reality. The “routine” nature of the hockey watching is like Aunt Phil’s choice of Christmas movies. Each year she forces the family to sit through Boys’ Town, Going My Way, and The Bells of St. Mary’s, the three classic Hollywood movies about priests, nuns, and orphans (Johnston 1998, 85). Obviously, the members of the Trinity like to see themselves in these movies, just as they like to imagine their family as defined by the hockey-watching ritual. The novel, however, makes clear that these are both sentimental façades. The gap between appearance and reality suggests something hollow at the core of the Ryan Trinity’s power. Draper, it turns out, discovers the nature of this hollowness, and how to exploit it, during the climax of the novel.

The Dodge Ball School of Goaltending

Draper is a true hockey fan. His sister, Mary, says that his passion for the Montreal Canadiens is “not normal” (16). The text, however, implies that Draper’s love for the Canadiens represents something normal in him, that despite the weirdness of his family, a part of him remains an ordinary boy, a good Canadian kid, and thus worthy of being the novel’s moral centre. Nine-year-old Draper’s identification with the unbeatable Montreal Canadiens is, in fact, comparable to ten-year-old Roch Carrier’s identification with the unbeatable Montreal Canadiens in “The Hockey Sweater.” Such identifications, as Carrier explains in Our Life with the Rocket, are what “all the peoples of the earth do when they feel small in the face of a world that’s too big” (2001, 156).

In addition to being a fan, Draper is a player, though not a good one. He has played in goal since the age of six, “not because I preferred it, but because I couldn’t skate well enough to keep up with the other boys” (Johnston 1998, 16). Draper’s lack of physical prowess suggests that he does not conform to the masculine type of the young hockey player, and that, during his quest, he will have to depend on other means to succeed. A clue about what these other means might be comes from his description of his shrine to Montreal Canadiens goalies. The row of pictures, he says, has a strange effect; it looks like “one of those charts that show the evolution of some species over time. From cro-magnon goalie to goalie erectus in a mere one hundred years” (17). The joke hints at Draper’s intelligence and wit—those favoured weapons of the weak. There is also something contrarian about the shrine. That Draper’s imagination leads him to a comparison with evolution hints at a subversive streak for a child raised in a conservative Christian home.

Draper attributes the badness of his goaltending to the fact that he subscribes to “the little-known dodge ball school of goaltending, which was founded on the economy of pain principle, which stated that if it would hurt more to stop a shot than to let it in the net, you should let it in” (17). Besides reinforcing the idea of Draper’s physical weakness, this comic description has a metaphorical purpose, for at the beginning of the novel, Draper’s amnesia—his missing week—is a consequence of him repressing painful memories. Faced with a reality too painful to bear, his psyche has employed “the economy of pain principle” in much the same way as Draper does when playing goal. The reference to goaltending also sets up a key feature of Draper’s dream journey at the end. In the dream, pucks are falling from the sky (the “Apuckalypse” described in the epigraph to this chapter), and, as Uncle Reginald says, Draper needs to save three of them for use during his descent into the underworld. “Only a goalie can do it,” Uncle Reginald explains (195). Left unexplained is the fact that, in order to make the necessary saves and thus to have the means to learn the truth about his father’s death, Draper has to overcome his previous avoidance of pain.

The appearance of the puck-carrying ghost at the beginning of the novel implies that Draper and his father share a traditional father-son bond related to hockey. The evidence of the text is that Donald Ryan has not been very involved in his family, but he does share an interest in hockey with Draper. Draper remarks that his father knows “so much about hockey” (79). One way in which father and son connect is the ritual they use to communicate the Hockey Night in Canada scores when Draper is too young to watch games to their conclusion. During this time, Donald would etch the score into the black, laminated copy of The Cartoon Virgil, one of a series of kids’ classics that he has given Draper, and in the morning, Draper would “put a sheet of paper over the book and shade it with a pencil” until the score emerged (75). The father’s comment on this ritual foreshadows the novel’s conclusion: “ ‘Here it comes,’ my father would say [about the etched in score], ‘here it comes, emerging from the underworld’ ” (75).

As the novel goes on, and what is hidden below the surface in Donald’s life is brought to the surface, the father-son relationship becomes ironic. The fundamental irony is that Donald Ryan did not want to be a father. He is, in fact, gay (one of the novel’s key secrets), and it becomes clear that he was forced into marriage and fatherhood by his family. His desire to become a priest had been an attempt to escape the impossible bind posed by being gay in a family like the Ryans. His whole life, including his part in the traditional rituals of father and son over hockey, has been a façade (another “routine”). As evidence for Donald’s gay identity builds in the text, the exchanges he has with Draper take on double meanings. When he describes the expression “fire on ice,” for example, he explains that although many people think the expression captures the essential nature of hockey, there is a second meaning that comes from the mythic literature he and Draper have read. The reference is to Satan in The Cartoon Dante, how he is trapped “[Within a] block of ice, frozen for all eternity, caught forever in the act of committing mortal sin” (135). The context makes clear that Donald is trying to tell his son in coded fashion how he feels about his own life.

Uncle Reginald and Oralysis

In her classic study, Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points out that “[the] ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness” (Herman 1997, 1). This response poses a challenge in helping traumatized individuals. Children, because of the state of their development, are especially prone to a “wide array of psychological defenses,” including the ability, sometimes, to “[wall] off” abuse or trauma “from conscious awareness and memory” (102). To help trauma survivors, then, requires a series of steps. Herman describes three fundamental ones: “establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community” (3).

Draper begins The Divine Ryans as a traumatized child. Much of the action of the novel has to do with how he reconstructs his “trauma story.” Before the reconstruction can begin, however, Draper Doyle must establish a place of safety. At the beginning of the novel this appears to be an impossible task. The Ryan Trinity seems to have totalitarian power. Yet a place of safety does appear, and from a seemingly unlikely source: Uncle Reginald.

Uncle Reginald is the odd one out when it comes to the Ryan empire. Upon his death, Reg Ryan Sr. left ownership of the empire to Aunt Phil, an act of disinheritance that prompted Uncle Reginald to joke: “Well, at least he let me keep his name” (Johnston 1998, 2). The joke hints at why his father thought him unsuitable to head the family: he is the family jokester, and he extends his comic attitude to the empire. Uncle Reginald works at the funeral home but is “not involved in the actual running” of it (22). When need arises, he drives the hearse, picking up “customers” and delivering them later to the cemetery for burial. To perform these tasks, he dons an all black costume with a very high top hat (24–25). The costume accentuates his unusual height and thinness, which, along with the “mournful grace” of his movements, gives him the appearance of a “dapper Grim Reaper” (25).

Uncle Reginald’s appearance and manner create various mythic resonances. His comic style brings to mind the fool or court jester, who speaks truth to power, but in an entertaining way so as to avoid direct confrontation (since he has no real power). Sometimes he is a trickster. When he names the elevator connecting his apartment to the rest of Aunt Phil’s house the “devil ex machina” he could just as well be referring to himself (24). Tricksters are both godlike and fallible: they work by playing pranks, but, like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, are often the victims of their own pranks. Tricksters are also associated with breaking taboos and mocking rigid categories of mind or society, and, for this reason, they often appear at crossroads and borderlands—the very places Draper needs to navigate to fulfil his quest. As the driver of the hearse, Uncle Reginald also brings to mind Charon, the mythical ferryman in Virgil’s The Aeneid, who takes the souls of the dead across the River Styx to the underworld. He recognizes this affinity himself with the joke he makes when transporting a body to the graveyard: “Another ferry to the mainland” (25). Finally, as Méira Cook has pointed out, Uncle Reginald plays Virgil to Draper’s Dante in the final dream sequence, guiding Draper to the metaphorical ninth circle of Hell to rescue his father (2004, 144).

Though Uncle Reginald has a tricky manner, he turns out to be a true mentor and guide. The beginning of his assistance is a course of “oralysis” he gives to Draper. Oralysis is a humorous inversion of Freud’s talking cure, in which Uncle Reginald, as the oralyst, does all the talking. Instead of taking the patient seriously, as an analyst would, the oralyst goes off “on tangents entirely irrelevant to the patient’s problems … thereby confusing the patient and having fun at his expense” (Johnston 1998, 29).

Uncle Reginald’s comic takedown of psychoanalysis turns out to have an ironic effect: it works. The weekly hour in Uncle Reginald’s apartment, surrounded by walls of books, becomes a time of safety for Draper. Soon the sessions become “the highlight of [Draper’s] week” (30). Not only that, but Uncle Reginald’s jokey method helps Draper gain access to his unconscious. For example, Uncle Reginald’s riff on Sister Louise’s “paraline” (she was paralyzed in an accident as a child; this is the line on her body where paralysis begins) leads, by association, to the formation of “Momary,” Draper’s nightmare creature representing female sexuality. Momary is made up of Linda’s “big-breasted torso waddling about on Mary’s skinny legs”—that is, half “mom” and half “Mary” (42). The nightmare causes Draper to wet the bed—a nine-year-old’s version of a wet dream—which, in turn, leads to a comic subplot of him buying stacks of underwear to hide the evidence. The mock epic of Draper’s underwear buying, as Cook points out, is a comic subplot that counters the high seriousness of the main story dealing with “a father’s haunting, a son’s grief” (129). But it also has a serious purpose. Draper’s bedwetting is a classic hysterical symptom, his body speaking what his mind cannot consciously acknowledge, which is that the circumstances of his father’s death relate to sexuality. The wet dreams are also his body’s response to the accelerated maturation he has been forced into by his traumatic experiences; they could be interpreted as him having a premature adolescence or attempting to return to the safety of early childhood—or both at the same time. In any case, the Momary nightmares, as terrifying as they are, represent a loosening of Draper’s unconscious, a primary goal of therapy, and this loosening is made possible by Uncle Reginald’s oralysis. In oralysis, as Uncle Reginald says, “the patient … [is] treated like a child”—a treatment that Draper finds comforting and reassuring, and that gives his unconscious the freedom to begin its work (29).

As important as the “analysis” that occurs in the weekly sessions is the bond of trust that develops between Uncle Reginald and Draper. The bond between therapist and patient is the foundation of therapy. Irvin D. Yalom, the great American therapist and writer, puts it this way: “A great many of our patients have conflicts in the realm of intimacy, and obtain help in therapy sheerly through experiencing an intimate relationship with the therapist” (2017, 11). Like many of the patients Yalom describes, Draper begins the novel with a terrible secret and needs to achieve a state in which he can reveal this secret without fear of rejection or condemnation. Achieving this state depends on the caring relationship he develops with Uncle Reginald. This relationship turns out to be crucial in the novel’s climactic sequence, when Draper must trust the advice of Uncle Reginald about how to navigate the perils of the underworld.

Zee Resistance

The Divine Ryans distinguishes good and bad characters by whether they have a sense of humour or not. The oppressive nature of the Ryans is signaled by the portraits of the male ancestors on Aunt Phil’s dining room wall, which Uncle Reginald labels “Grandpa Stern, Grandpa Cross, Grandpa Grim, and Grandpa Disapproving” (Johnston 1998, 26). Throughout the first two-thirds of the novel, Linda, Mary, and Draper use humour to bolster their spirits. Their early efforts at resistance, however, are ineffective. When Aunt Phil shames Mary about developing breasts, for example, Mary dons one of Aunt Phil’s bras outside her sweater stuffed with “most” of that week’s laundry (43). Linda then joins in by putting various other taboo laundry items on like “some court jester,” and Draper, Mary, and Linda laugh together until tears stream down their faces (44). Then Aunt Phil appears. The hilarity stops. And Aunt Phil uses her power to shame them back into submission.

By chapter 14 Linda has become strong enough to form what she calls “Zee Resistance.” She meets nightly with Mary and Draper for a session of “group oralysis,” sometimes in mock-French accents, in which the three of them tell funny stories about anything that comes to mind—including themselves (165). Though he doesn’t attend, the idea for the sessions has come from Uncle Reginald, who gives them the mission “to locate and destroy the enemy’s ‘dehumourizer’ ”—an imaginary machine designed to remove laughter from the environment (166). So empowering are these sessions that one night Linda informs Aunt Phil of her plan to return to school and thus to leave St. John’s with Draper and Mary (169). Unfortunately for her, she does not have enough real power yet, and Aunt Phil is able to quash her plan by threatening to have the children taken by legal force (169).

The setback of the resistance at the end of chapter 14 illustrates both the possibilities and limitations of laughter. Laughter makes Linda, Mary, and Draper more resilient, and gives them some ability to resist Aunt Phil, but it is not enough in itself to free them from their situation. Laughter—like oralysis—helps Draper to gain access to his unconscious. To truly solve the mystery, however, he needs to apply the techniques of oralysis and laughter to the clues left by his father.

The Apuckalypse

Religion, laughter, and hockey come together in The Divine Ryans in the chain of associations that resolve the mystery. This chain begins with the puck carried by Donald Ryan’s ghost. How to interpret this puck? The necessary method, I think, is suggested by Donald’s explanation of the origins of the word: “The word ‘puck,’ my father had once told me, originally meant ‘demon.’ For a time, it had even been used interchangeably with ‘hobgoblin.’ I made a mental note of thanks to that anonymous inventor of hockey who had had the good sense to opt for ‘puck’ ” (3).

This etymology is false. Although the origin of “puck” in hockey is obscure, most historians believe the word evolved from the verb to puck (a cognate of poke) used in the game of hurling for striking or pushing the ball, which in turn is related to the Scottish Gaelic puc or the Irish poc, meaning “to poke, punch or deliver a blow” (Oxford English Dictionary; Fitsell 2012, 112). At some point, the verb used to describe striking the ball became associated with the ball itself. As hockey evolved from precursor games like hurling, the name was attached to the object made from cutting the top and bottom off a rubber ball that we know today as a “puck.” At no time did early hockey players associate the object struck by a hockey stick with the hobgoblin-like creature alluded to by Donald Ryan. This “puck” has a different etymology.

One way to read the false etymology is as a joke. Parents have been known to tease their children this way. A good example is the father in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes (modelled on Bill Watterson’s own father), who does it habitually. When Calvin asks how people make babies, for example, his father explains that “Most people just go to Sears, buy the kit, and follow the assembly instructions” (Watterson 1995, 53). Teasing like this may be a parent’s way of subtly venting the frustration that is part of parenting, a harmless bit of “revenge” on the child who, despite his or her smallness and naïveté, has such a powerful claim over you. Perhaps there is a bit of this motivation in Donald Ryan’s joke. The joke is also significant for what it reveals about the teller. Donald’s reference to the other “puck” hints at his educated background. The impish creature of folklore he refers to is most famously represented as the character Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Donald’s educated background, in turn, supplies additional clues to the mystery of his death, since one set of clues leads to his time at Oxford, and the final revelation comes from The Cartoon Virgil, which he has given to Draper. The stress Donald puts on the demonic aspect of Puck also hints, by association, at his own dark secrets. There is a doubleness in his use of “demon” similar to his evocation of “fire on ice”: in both cases, he is indirectly revealing how he feels about himself.

Seeing his father’s ghost is a hint that what Draper needs to know is buried in his own unconscious. The false etymology of puck suggests how clues about this knowledge will need to be read, not with reason, but through the logic of jokes (in wordplay, puns, reversals, and so on). An important insight of Freud’s was that the language of dreams is very much like the language of jokes. Elements in dreams, Freud points out, are often linked by “assonance, verbal ambiguity, temporal coincidence without connection in meaning, or by any association of the kind that we allow in jokes or in play on words” (1965, 568). In order to interpret a dream, then, you need to attend to the way the contents of the dream are transformed by these joke-like elements. As Freud puts it, in dreams “no joke [is] too bad, to serve as a bridge from one thought to another” (568–69).

After its introduction on the opening pages, the puck acquires various meanings, often through joke-like associations. To Draper, as a goalie, a puck is his “nemesis” (Johnston 1998, 3). To Donald, in another association with a double meaning, it is an image for sin, which, he explains, leaves a mark on the soul like the “black mark the puck leaves on the board” (51). In a dream, Draper associates the puck with the wafer given during communion, a surreal image in which the black oval of the puck substitutes for the white oval of the wafer, the embodiment of sin substituting for the embodiment of redemption (83). This “hockey liturgy” dream suggests that religion and hockey together contain clues about Donald’s death. Later, the puck is associated with Bobby Hull’s slapshot, which, according to Uncle Reginald during his “Mid-season Review” oralysis sessions, is so hard that it is “faster than the speed of light,” travelling back in time to alter the outcome of games long over (125–26). The association of the puck with time is reinforced by Draper in a memory of his father describing a star as “a hole made when a puck had been punched out of the night sky” (134). The puck-time associations link imaginatively to Draper’s missing week and Donald’s missing year—those missing pieces of time that have to be recovered to solve the mystery.

The existence of Donald’s missing year is a key revelation in the novel. Draper learns about it when he remembers the souvenir puck his father gave him. Taped onto this physical puck is a piece of paper explaining that it was “Caught by Donald Ryan” in overtime during a National Hockey League (NHL) game on April 16, 1953. Nineteen seconds later, “Elmer Lach scored to win the Stanley Cup for Montreal” (152). Draper takes this puck to Uncle Reginald to entice him to talk more about hockey. When Uncle Reginald sees it, he realizes it is from the year after Oxford when Donald failed to return home. He explains what happened. The revelation about the missing year leads Draper to the only photograph of his father at Oxford, with a group called the Rhodes Blades, who pose like “turn-of-the-century … gentlemen hockey players” (157). Draper recognizes the ironical posture of the players, and realizes “there was some further, private joke involved,” which he eventually learns has to do with a play on words. “The Rhodes Blades,” it turns out, is a disguise for “The Gay Blades” (184).

Various associations come together in Draper’s climactic dream of the Apuckalypse (a pun that illustrates Freud’s dictum about no joke being “too bad to serve as a bridge from one thought to another”). The Apuckalypse occurs in the second half of chapter 16. The first half of the chapter, significantly, recounts the loss of the 1967 Stanley Cup finals by the Montreal Canadiens. This loss is experienced by Draper as an apocalypse: “The notion that, although the Habs had just lost the Cup, the world was going to go on as usual was more than I could bear.… [Surely], it seemed to me, there would be no next week” (192). The proximity of Draper’s apocalyptic feelings about the Canadiens’ loss and his dream of the Apuckalypse suggests an association between the two—a good example of what Freud calls the “overdetermination” of dream elements, which is to say that “the elements … [are] determined by the dream-thoughts many times over” (Freud 1965, 318). In this case, the Apuckalypse is “determined” by Draper’s response to the Canadiens’ loss, by his own readiness to undertake the journey into the underworld, by earlier hints from Uncle Reginald, and by various associations that have accumulated around the puck.

The Apuckalypse itself, as various critics have noted, echoes elements from Book VI of Virgil’s The Aeneid, in which Aeneas journeys into the underworld to find his father, Anchises. Draper faces a series of obstacles on the journey that echo those faced by Aeneas. Aeneas, for example, must get by Cerberus, the three-headed Hound of Hell. He does this when the dog is tossed a “lump of honey and drugged meal / To make him drowse” (Aeneid VI: 568–69). Draper must get by Tom the Doberman, a neighbour’s dog with an aggressive manner and engorged penis (three penises, actually!). He does this by tossing him a puck (Johnston 1998, 196). The puck as dog biscuit links by association to the holy wafer of the “hockey liturgy” dream.

The fathers in The Aeneid and the Apuckalypse have affinities but also play importantly different roles. Anchises, though an immaterial spirit Aeneas cannot embrace, is walking about in a state of honour and offers prophesies that bolster the ultimate goal of Aeneas’s quest—to return from Troy to found the city of Rome. In this, Anchises performs one of the traditional roles of the dead in stories of descent, which is to provide knowledge that only the dead can have. As Margaret Atwood puts it, “Because the dead are outside time, the dead know both the past and the future” (2002, 168–69).

Donald Ryan, in contrast to Anchises, is frozen in the posture of his death. Draper’s description of finding him contains a number of important details:

I could see against the wall a sofa on which my father was laid out, his hands clasping what looked like a prayer book to his chest. The pose was the same as in the Morenz dream, as if they were waking him on the sofa instead of in a casket. He was even dressed the same, in a tuxedo with a ruffled front, and had his hair slicked back. (Johnston 1998, 198)

In the Apuckalypse dream, Draper finds his father in the “red room,” the room in Reg Ryan’s Funeral Home in which he had been waked (118). The act of entering this room represents an overcoming of the pain of remembrance necessary for Draper to learn the truth. That he finds his father on “a sofa” indicates that the image comes from Draper’s memory of finding his father after his suicide. The whole memory comes to him soon after—how he had woken up, gone downstairs to the living room, and found his father on the sofa “staring in what might have been wide-eyed amazement at the ceiling” (205).

Draper has two tasks in the dream. The first is to put pucks on his father’s eyes, thereby keeping them closed and letting him rest in peace (198). Pucks are the proper objects to do this, not only because they visually echo the coins traditionally put on the eyes of corpses to pay the Ferryman for the journey across the river Styx, but, as we have seen, they represent lost pieces of time. The pucks restore the proper order of time, in which the dead are dead and remain in their proper realm (the past), and thereby put a stop to how the father’s ghost haunts the son. The second task is to take the “prayer book” from his father’s hands. This turns out to be The Cartoon Virgil, the black book upon whose cover Donald used to etch hockey scores. Donald, it turns out, was holding this book when Draper found him (205). Upon waking, Draper realizes he needs to do a tracing of the cover like he used to do when he was little—and, when he does, he finds his father’s suicide note (207).

The revelation of his father’s suicide allows Draper, like the returning hero in a quest narrative, to act on behalf of his community. For the world to know that Donald Ryan had committed suicide—and why—would be a scandal from which the Ryan family would never recover. The power of this knowledge allows Draper to confront and defeat Aunt Phil and to lead his mother and sister to a new life away from St. John’s.

One last thing about how Draper finds his father. Why the Howie Morenz-like pose? This detail harkens back to a dream Draper has in chapter 10, in which he is at Morenz’s 1937 funeral in the Montreal Forum. The earlier dream is triggered, most immediately, by Aunt Phil forcing Draper to attend the wake of a child (in the first half of chapter 10). The imagery of Morenz’s funeral, however, comes from Uncle Reginald: Morenz was Reginald’s favourite player, in part because of the grandeur of his laying in and service at the Forum, and he has told Draper about these events in detail (123). In the chapter 10 dream, Aunt Phil tries to force Draper to kiss the corpse, which is laid out for viewing at centre ice—a continuation of her tactic of using death to enforce obedience. The corpse turns out to be not of Morenz but of Donald. Draper realizes that he is “the one person who could bring [his father] back to life” and instinctively recoils (124). The implication is that if Draper gives in to Aunt Phil’s macabre demand, he will be trapped forever in a situation in which his father is “alive” to haunt him—because, presumably, he will have assumed his father’s place in the line of human sacrifices required to maintain the Ryan empire.

The Morenz imagery—overdetermined as dream elements usually are—probably also comes from the part of Draper’s unconscious that still, despite everything, wants to revere his father. The imagery confers a dignity, even a heroic quality, upon the memory of the man, perhaps even elevates him to a status akin to Anchises. Remember also that the mythologized version of Morenz is that he died of a “broken heart” when he realized he couldn’t play hockey anymore. Draper has plenty of reason to feel angry and betrayed by his father’s suicide. By associating his father with one of the greatest of hockey heroes, however, Draper seems to have decided to concentrate his grief on the “broken heart” that was the ultimate cause of his father’s death.

Hockey Liturgy

The Divine Ryans illustrates very well the complex imaginative space occupied by hockey in Canada. In one sense hockey is implicated in the oppressive religious regime that contributes to Donald Ryan’s suicide: his gay identity is not part of the traditional masculinity projected by the game any more than it is part of the “family values” of the Catholic church. At the same time, hockey is shown to be a potential site of resistance to that regime. The possibility of resistance is indirectly a product of how strong the myth of hockey is: forming a hockey team at Oxford (The Rhodes/Gay Blades) was probably excellent cover for a gay men’s club in the 1950s. More directly, though, resistance is made possible by how the meanings attached to the game are not natural to it; the meanings are never fully fixed but are part of an ongoing process of imaginative response. Similarly, from one point of view, the hockey-defined relationship between Donald Ryan and his son is a way to avoid talking about difficult issues; but from another point of view, it offers a way to talk, obliquely, about those very issues—and, in particular, a way to speak in the only way possible about what is taboo in Donald Ryan’s life. The very obliqueness of hockey talk makes it the right vehicle to open the doors to the underworld of hidden truths.

There are two last lessons from The Divine Ryans.

The first has to do with the importance of loss. I mentioned earlier that the Apuckalypse is preceded by the loss of the Stanley Cup final by the Montreal Canadiens in 1967. Draper’s feelings about this loss inspire his climactic dream. The loss itself, though, also points to important lessons. Not only does the world go on after your team loses in hockey, Draper discovers, but no team is unbeatable in the way he thought the Canadiens were. The Canadiens are not superhuman but made of “body stuff.” Though the text doesn’t make it explicit, there is a sense that Draper’s disillusioning is necessary to the insights he receives in his dream. There is a parallel here to Roch Carrier’s childhood attachment to Maurice Richard. As I argued in chapter 5, Carrier understands the psychological need served by such attachments (a little person’s need to feel bigger), but also the need to restore the history made invisible by the creation of such mythic figures as the Rocket. Growing into adult awareness requires acknowledging history. Draper’s resistance to history, in the form of the truth of his missing week and the truth behind his father’s missing year, must be overcome for him to work through the trauma he has experienced. The defeat of the Montreal Canadiens helps to prepare him for this.

Another hockey loss is also important. This occurs in chapter 9, when Mary defeats Draper in her final Fleming Street game. The sibling rivalry between Mary and Draper, acted out as opposing goalies in the neighbourhood hockey game, is a charming bit of comic relief in the middle of the novel, but, like other comic elements, serves a serious purpose as well. The turning point of the game is when Mary instructs her team to aim for the bullhorn with which Draper is doing play-by-play. With the bullhorn, Draper sounds like a combination of Danny Gallivan and Foster Hewitt, and as a result, his play-by-play energizes his own team and demoralizes the opposition. Without the bullhorn, Draper has to use his own voice, which is “so absurdly puny that everyone laugh[s]” (Johnston 1998, 110). The loss of his bullhorn voice is, of course, painful for Draper; but it also illustrates, symbolically, a key aspect of the journey of self-understanding he is on: he needs to learn to speak with his own voice.

The loss to Mary also exposes the sexism that has affected both Mary and Draper. What does it mean to grow up in an environment in which “most grownups of either sex agreed that boys were … ‘better’ than girls”? (105). After her victory, Mary gets to enact the ritual of “One Last Rush,” in which she stickhandles the length of the ice, in slow motion, while all the other players pretend to try to stop her. By the time she reaches the other goal, she has “ten of them draped all over her, à la Maurice Richard,” and ritually fakes Draper out and scores (112). The ritual subtly insists on the need to challenge the rigid gender roles of the time (a girl as Maurice Richard?). Challenging these roles takes on additional urgency as it becomes clear that the father of Mary and Draper has also been a victim of them.

The second lesson has to do with the body. So many of the interconnections between religion, laughter, and hockey in The Divine Ryans are mediated through the body. There are, as I’ve already suggested, bodily implications to laughter. Underlying comic elements is always, ultimately, what Fisher and Fisher call “body stuff” (Fisher and Fisher 1981, xi). “Body stuff” leads inevitably to mortality, which leads to human responses to mortality, which leads to both hockey and religion.

Less obvious, perhaps, is how hockey and religion are connected though the body. At first glance they seem to inhabit separate realms, religion dealing with the spiritual, hockey with the physical. The humour created by the religion-hockey coupling is based on the seeming incongruity of the two. Yet muscular Christianity provides a clue about their underlying connection. Remember the motto of Uncle Seymour’s Hundred, “toughness of body” is supposed to lead to “purity of soul,” which, as we saw in the analysis of Glengarry School Days, links back to some of the earliest meanings projected onto hockey. Muscular Christianity is rooted in the belief that a well-disciplined body contributes to a spiritually upstanding self. But how is this religious?

An important lesson from the philosophy of religion, relevant to the cultural study of hockey, is that what defines a religion is as much—or more—about rituals as it is about metaphysical beliefs. The American theologian James A. K. Smith has written about this in Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. To understand how religions work, according to Smith, you have to go deeper than “beliefs or worldviews” to examine “formative practices”—which is to say, “liturgies” (Smith 2009, 24). The way religions work day-to-day is by embedding their vision of the good life surreptitiously, in the body, through their practitioners’ participation in repeated rituals. They do this, Smith claims, because “we are the sorts of animals whose orientation to the world is shaped from the body up more than from the head down” (25). For this reason, liturgies “aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies” (25).

With this in mind, Draper’s “hockey liturgy” dream becomes a rich, jokey-serious distillation of many of the key themes in The Divine Ryans. The dream takes place at the end of chapter 8. Draper, worn out by staying up to watch the Montreal Canadiens’ season opener (which they lost), finds himself dozing off the next morning in church.

As a result, Father Seymour’s droning sermon begins to mix in his mind with “the play-by-play of both Danny Gallivan and Foster Hewitt” (Johnston 1998, 83). This mythic combination leads to a vision of a referee who, at a face-off, breaks the puck above his head and gives “one piece to each player” (83). The referee intones the words of the Eucharist, “Do this in memory of me,” which is itself a quote of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper, as reported in 1 Corinthians 11:23–25 and Mark 14:22–24. The invocation of memory reinforces the demand implied by the ghost of Draper’s father: remember me. Not spelled out explicitly, however, is that the bread and wine consumed in the Eucharist symbolically represent Jesus’s body and blood, and to consume them is to affirm the promise made by Jesus for human salvation. The broken puck in the dream, then, in addition to its other meanings, represents the body—the very place Draper must seek the truth about his missing week and find his own salvation.

Works Cited