In Memorium: Robert Kessler Martin 1941-2012

Abstract

Few PROFESSORS OF LITERATURE WERE AS WIDELY CONNECTED, as deeply respected, and indeed as cherished, as Robert K. Martin, who died in February 2012 of complications arising from Parkinson's Disease--a malady of insidious and inexorable cruelty that had held him in its grip for over a decade and that had rendered him silent for the last few years, unable to speak or to pick up a pen. To grieve over Robert's final passing is, as Derrida asked us to do for Roland Barthes, to mark and to mourn his successive deaths. It is also to remember and to revalue who he was and who he is, to attend to the contours of his perceptive and playful voice. It is to speak before, and of before. Robert arrived in Montreal in 1967 before finishing his graduate work at Brown University, as was the custom in those days, to teach at Loyola College, before it was merged with Sir George Williams to become Concordia University. Physically and spiritually, Robert never really left Loyola; if he remained stubbornly attached to its humanist traditions, he was also a vital participant in Concordia's effort to build what is among the very best of Canada's English Departments. Given Robert's great love of Montreal--he was fond of pointing out that this bilingual, culturally rich and diverse, old and new, entirely liberal city is the only place in Canada where Canada really exists--it was perhaps inevitable that he would take up in 1990 the direction of the Departement d'etudes anglaises at l'Universite de Montreal, where he developed an impressive graduate program almost from scratch, fostered the department's research profile, and cultivated its implication in a French institution. English, he liked to explain, with a French accent. It's ironic that Robert, who came from an affluent family of Philadelphia bankers steeped in a Quaker heritage, should have found such a congenial home in universities that were essentially Jesuitical and that he should have been such a passionate advocate for the marginalized. But then again, perhaps not: long before the era of what came to be called queer theory, Robert's pioneering work on the homosexual thematics in American literature was audacious and courageous but expressed the secular after-life of the Quaker voice, born of common sense and delivered in a plain style. First with The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) and then with Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (1986), and in about sixty essays that ranged from Hawthorne to Forster, Robert started something. …