Disenchanted Modernity in Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man: Eugenics, Contraception, and BioIntervention

Abstract

Citing Max Weber, sociologist John MacInnes has described twentieth-century condition as of and the process whereby responsibility for fate of world is accepted as a human rather than divine endeavour and its order seen as a social rather than natural or supernatural one (MacInnes 3; Weber, Disenchantment). As a result, the means chosen to pursue given ends, and even choice of which ends to pursue, came to be determined by logical and rational calculation (MacInnes 3)--or, might add, calculations that were seen by their proponents, with varying degrees of earnestness and cynicism, as rational or logical, and indeed beneficial. In twentieth century, as many observers have noted (see McLaren, Trombley, Haller, and Fontana), both progressive left and right embraced rationalization that followed upon disenchantment with natural and divine order; both left and right were products as well as agents of modernity, and they adopted similar measures to achieve their goal of taking control of human, social order. Robert The Studhorse Man, a novel published in 1969 and set in Alberta in last days of World War II, is an exemplary case of novelist's sensitivity to full life of his time, which on reading of it is emphatically an era of disenchantment, rationalization, and social engineering of kind described by Weber and MacInnes. Although The Studhorse Man has, in nearly forty years since its first publication, been discussed mainly in light of postmodern and deconstructive literary theory, other voices have been heard which have questioned adequacy of that approach, and gone on to both describe and challenge engagement with historical, social, and scientific realities of twentieth-century life. Nearly twenty years ago, Peter Thomas suggested that postmodernist criticism had failed to draw out and address moral implications of fiction: wonder, still, if postmodernism is not much too soft on Narcissus (Robert Kroetsch and His Works 256). Echoing Thomas, Peter Cumming has recently taken issue with postmodernist and poststructuralist critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Susan Rudy Dorscht for celebrating what they see as Kroetsch's destabilization of sexual identity and identity itself (Cumming 118), and, taking their cues from own influential criticism, for tending more toward adulation than (116) of their novelist. Reading The Studhorse Man as a self-declared heterosexual, male, feminist reader (115) concerned with of gender (115), Cumming concludes that Kroetsch is patriarchy's man (115), and that his novel is politically reactionary (129) and subject to bankruptcy (124). I am in sympathy with Peter Cumming's not unprecedented challenge (1) to major trend in criticism of fiction, and with his willingness to grapple with its moral content, though I am less happy with his castigation of his author for bankruptcy (124) merely because he finds that The Studhorse Man does not conform to what he regards as proper positions on his of gender. Such issues have been defined by protagonists operating in a particular time and climate of opinion--the mid-1990s world of academic criticism--and they might not be so clear-cut or so apposite as Cumming assumes when he intrepidly labels not only his author, but also himself as critic, something better left to others. At best, such ideological interrogation is a heuristic tool, application of which needs to be guided by an awareness of historical and broadly cultural context of novel. In The Studhorse Man, as a number of early critics noticed, (2) facts of history are insistently referred to, even by novelist's self-consciously allusive literary method. …