Robert Kroetsch Research Articles

Zo(o)graphies: Darwinian ‘Evolutions’ of a Fictional Bestiary

The essay puts to the test Darwinian evolutionist theories, especially the key concepts of adaptation, natural selection and survival of the fittest, in the reading of several plots and fictions (some of them Ark-related animal fictions) concerned with evolution, trauma, adaptability, mimicry/mimesis and survival: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Weaving its critical argument with reference to several of Derrida’s reflections – on the impossibility of a pure origin, the proximity between commencement and commandment, the logic of obsequence, or relation between being and following (je suis), applied deconstructively to the traditional hierarchy between the human and the animal, mastery and monstrosity, and logos and bêtise, etc. – ‘Zo(o)graphies’ is structured in a series of interlinked tableaux, bestiaries as well as insets (Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Jacques Derrida’s Glas). Following from the opening evocation of Peter Greenaway’s Vermeer-themed film A Zed and Two Noughts, which introduces the joint semantics of zographein: to paint from life, and zoon: animal, discreetly at work throughout, this study will eventually attempt to recast the problematic of the evolution of literature and literary forms as involution and regression.

"I Admit to a Slight Ambiguity": Reflecting upon Canada's Creative and Critical Literary Inquisitors

"I Admit to a Slight Ambiguity":Reflecting upon Canada's Creative and Critical Literary Inquisitors Matthew Cormier The Search, Then and Now Acclaimed Canadian writer and scholar E.D. Blodgett wrote in 1985 that "one of the reasons the Canadian literatures are looked upon with a kind of benign diffidence by those unacquainted with them derives from our failure of imagination as critics" (63). Perhaps the "failure" to which Blodgett points lies in a matter of critical perspective: due to Canada's complex layers of colonial, postcolonial, transnational, multinational, and plurilingual cultural memories, to name but a few, its literatures have always been catalysts for questions instead of answers. Namely, the "search" in Blodgett's "In Search of a Canadian Literature" links to an idea of ambiguity (60) and is always the area of critical value for Canada's literatures, an area that should be celebrated rather than condemned. Since the establishment of a "postmodern condition" in the late 1960s (Lyotard) that still resides in Canada's literatures, the self-reflexive nature of Canada's writers of all cultural origins has proliferated and done immense work in posing, precisely, questions that attempt to understand-and, in doing so, construct-what being Canadian means in various respects. Other than Blodgett, the sheer number of well-known Canadian authors who have taken up these questions both creatively and critically speaks to the importance of "ambiguity," as Blodgett claims: Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Nicole Brossard, and Thomas King are but a few of numerous authors of Canada's literatures that have written in both genres-critical and creative-to take up the ambiguous literary sites that they occupy. Each of these writers has enjoyed prolific careers that often span decades of work. Alongside their creative productions that are perhaps best known to public readership, these authors have also, throughout the years, contributed significantly to the [End Page 57] development of critical thought on literature in Canada. Blodgett wrote the influential Configuration: Essays in the Canadian Literatures in 1982 and returned to such broader critical strokes in 2003 with Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada. Atwood, among other works, wrote the popular Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature back in 1972 before writing Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature over twenty years later in 1995. Kroetsch made an impact in the Canadian literary imaginary with his poetic criticism in 1982 with Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch and again in 1989 with The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Nicole Brossard has been a constant in the areas of postmodernist and feminist articulation in Québec and abroad in works ranging from her collaborative La Théorie, un dimanche in 1988 to Et me voici soudain en train de refaire le monde in 2015. King has been more critically active in the twenty-first century, beginning with the significant compilation of his Massey Lectures in The Truth About Stories in 2003 and more recently even in 2012 with The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. This essay reflects upon some of the authors mentioned here-Blodgett, Atwood, Kroetsch, Brossard, and King-in a survey that looks back and compares their creative and critical bodies of work to understand the questions they pose, how they pose them, and how they relate to one another and contribute to our understanding of and ongoing search for the literatures of Canada. Blodgett the Historian: An Account of Canada's Literary Ambiguity During the 1980s, postmodernism in English Canada was firmly established as a literary force. Postmodernism's focus on aesthetics such as self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and fragmentation allowed writers in English Canada, from Margaret Laurence to Timothy Findley, to explore, as a particularly popular theme, the ambiguity of history. Linda Hutcheon famously studied this trend in her 1988 watershed critical text, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction, in which she called it "historiographic metafiction" (122); as a fictional retelling of history, Hutcheon argued that historiographic metafiction "often points to the fact by using the paratextual conventions of historiography...

An Experimental Documentary: Making a Case for Baird’s Modernism

The refutation and the obliteration of the modernist era in Canadian literature by Robert Kroetsch and reasserted by Glen Wilmott makes it imperative to look at highly experimental literary works in the first half of the 20th century in Canada. The purpose of this paper, thus is to make a case for the inclusion Irene Bird’s Waste Heritage in the repertoire of modernist works in North America. The various criticism of Canadian literature as not having a modernist era needs to be debunked. The false assertion that Canadian literature moved straight from the Victorian era to a postmodernist face is probably due to the difficulty of defining what modernism is. The evolution and the expansion of the term modernism makes it imperative for one to reappraise the creative works of Irene Bird (Waste Heritage) and Sheila Watson (Double Hook) as modernist. An attempt to include Waste Heritage in the new modernist discourse of global literature by looking at the experimental way by which Baird used documentary modernism. The sustainability of a growing modern society vis-à-vis modernism, and the resistance of capitalism in Baird’s narrative would be used to make a case for Baird’s modernism.

The Home Place: Essays on Robert Kroetsch's Poetry by Dennis Cooley

"The Home Place: Essays on Robert Kroetsch's Poetry by Dennis Cooley." University of Toronto Quarterly, 87(3), pp. 404–405

Oxbows and Artists: A Conversation with Margaret Sweatman

Oxbows and ArtistsA Conversation with Margaret Sweatman Peter J. Miller (bio) In the fieldmy grandfatherthoughtwas his my fatherthought was his —from “stone hammer poem” by robert kroetsch, completed field notes: the long poems of robert kroetsch When I met with Canadian novelist, poet, and playwright Margaret Sweatman in Winnipeg on May 14, 2018, she ended our discussion by referring to Robert Kroetsch’s “Stone Hammer Poem.” “In three pages,” Sweatman said, “[the poem] says everything that we’ve been talking about . . . the madness of the tools of writing over land.”1 Sweatman and I had been speaking about the phenomenon of “section lines,” the surveyor’s marks that delineated large swaths of land and continue to shape land—sometimes without regard for geography—across North America but especially in the Prairies. Louis Riel, Métis leader during the Red River Resistance of 1869–1870, in Sweatman’s When Alice Lay Down with Peter, observes the impracticality of surveyor’s marks and their incompatibility with the experience of people: “These Canadians, they do not follow the contour of the land with their bizarre maps. It is a madness to place their lines so.”2 [End Page 27] Geography and history shape much of Sweatman’s writing. The Red River, a 550-mile-long waterway snaking its way from Minnesota, through Manitoba, to Lake Winnipeg, and thence to the Nelson River and Hudson’s Bay, looms large. The Forks of the Red and the Assiniboine, the site of present-day Winnipeg and a traditional First Nations meeting-place, is at the center of a diverse geological and ecological region, encompassing the Canadian Shield and the Prairies, the leftover remnants of great glacial movements. The low-lying Red River defies the boundary between land and water since the river’s meandering pushes land and water together. More deadly, the river’s shallow depth—it is too young to have carved a substantial valley—produces great floods, some of which, such as in 1950 (described in Sweatman’s When Alice Lay Down with Peter), create temporary lakes 550 square miles in size. In this liminal space of watery land and oxbow islands, the home since time immemorial of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dené peoples, important parts of Canadian history have played out. For Sweatman, a writer inspired by particular spaces and time, this local history structures much of her writing. Rebellion and resistance have shaped Manitoba’s history, even before the European settlement of Canada. In The Players, Sweatman found herself driven by the “malarkey of the purity of our origins.” Indeed, the Canadian narrative of noble French fur traders and passive Indigenous assimilation has been challenged in recent years as treaty rights are recognized anew and reaffirmed. Sweatman’s fiction thus exists in the past of settlement and the present of resistance and reconciliation. The Métis Resistance resulted in Manitoba’s entry into Canada and its uneasy—and oft-violated— guarantees of land and language rights and religious freedoms. When Alice Lay Down with Peter demonstrates the contest over Riel’s legacy; the title characters are enthralled by “this great man . . . looking directly into their souls.”3 Alice, enraged by English Protestant encroachment on the traditional lands of the Métis, participates in the execution of Orangeman Thomas Scott, the act for which Riel would hang in 1885. For Alice and her descendants, Scott became one of several ghosts that haunted their “property.” The oxbow, a sinuous near-island, a transitory space between water and land, with the ever-present threat of flood and the complete metamorphosis [End Page 28] that comes with a deluge, stands as a potent metaphor for understanding Sweatman’s fiction. Rather than absolute delineations and identities based on ownership (mine/yours) or reification (settler/indigenous)—the surveyor’s map of straightedge and compass—the appreciation and acceptance of eternal contradiction and contingency generates a kind of individual essence and the possibility of actual interaction. In these truly human interactions, which are played out across land and over boundaries, creativity and art emerge. ________ Sweatman is deeply connected to land. Or, as she might put it, in love with it...

From Friction, Heat: Kroetsch, Spanos, and boundary 2

Canadian poet, novelist, and critic Robert Kroetsch co-founded the journal boundary 2 with American critic and philosopher William Spanos. The editors' relationship, marked by sympathy and difference, informed this endur-ng publication's early history.

Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions by Jon Gordon

Reviewed by: Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions by Jon Gordon Nicholas Bradley Jon Gordon, Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2015. 290 pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $36.99. An immense wildfire consumed Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the spring of 2016 and interrupted industrial activity in the Athabasca oil sands. Images of the conflagration suggested apocalypse; the effect on the provincial economy was cataclysmic. The oil sands themselves are utterly distant from Ottawa and Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but their importance to Canada was expressed powerfully in the televised scenes of the evacuation of Fort Mac: the disaster was a national crisis, one that exacerbated the perpetual controversy that attends bitumen mining in Alberta. "Bitumen is central to the current narratives of Alberta and Canada," Jon Gordon writes in Unsustainable Oil, an examination of the political, economic, and cultural assumptions that sustain industries of extraction (1). Undoubtedly he is correct. He seeks to demonstrate that the phenomenon of the oil sands is not merely the result of technological capability or economic necessity but instead a consequence of ideology: "The industrialization of the bituminous region of Northern Alberta is a manifestation of a cultural belief in limitless progress and endless expansion" (xxxiv). To analyze the rhetoric of oil—"to contribute a new line of critique to the ongoing resistance to bitumen extraction" (lv)—he surveys an assortment of "bituminous narratives" (xxix): political statements, news reports, industrial and environmentalist propaganda, scientific findings, and literary works by such authors as Warren Cariou, Robert Kroetsch, Marc Prescott, Richard Van Camp, Rudy Wiebe, and Rita Wong. Because "literature can and has re-presented the necessity of ecological coherence and the threats posed to it by industrial capitalism" (2), it provides "one place to look," Gordon proposes, "for alternative narratives that reveal what is left out of [End Page 219] progressive and teleological myths" (3). He also writes affectingly about Laurier Lake, a wild place of "deep personal connection," now threatened (177). Gordon interprets the "nation's petroculture" (45) with the assistance of Bruno Latour and Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Prominent too are the ideas of Canadian intellectuals who may be less familiar to an international readership than les grands penseurs: he draws on the philosophical writings of George Grant, who "has, arguably, thought through the consequences of a fully realized technological society in the Canadian context more completely than anyone else" (10), and of Jan Zwicky, whose notions of lyric perception are understood to challenge capitalist convictions. Gordon is generous in his estimation of literature's capacity to sway hearts and minds. He contends that "literary texts can help us to see, in a new way, the myth of liberal capitalism that we are living within; they can help us to wake up, to see that even those of us who may think we are benefitting from extraction capitalism are threatened by it" (148). But as his book attests, it is not only literature that exposes the myth: Unsustainable Oil is primarily a work of cultural criticism, not literary inquiry. The public effects of literary works are difficult to discern and measure. I share Gordon's faith—I choose the word deliberately—in the transformative powers of the literary arts, but I am skeptical of an inherent connection between the effects of poems and novels upon the reader, which are above all private and unruly, and the social and political arrangements that license ecological abominations. "Reading poetry, reading literature," he observes, "can help us pause and think, … can interrupt the smooth functioning of a system that claims scientific knowledge in the service of maximizing profit, can wake us from the dream of limitless growth" (142). Would that it were so. But how literature attains these ends—when and under what conditions—it is hard to determine. Yet of course, as Gordon knows, habits of mind shape the world. The argument is stated cogently and with some urgency in another recent volume, Jedediah Purdy's After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015): [End Page 220] far from being frivolous make-believe, imagination is intensely practical. What we become conscious of, how we see it, and...

“An autobiography in which I do not appear”: The Seductive Self in the Poetry of Robert Kroetsch

ABSTRACTThe article discusses selected works by the Western Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch (1927–2011) within the context of the biography battles which peaked during the 1990s. Kroetsch played a critical role in the formation and honing of a distinctive Prairie literary tradition in Canada, and we discuss a series of his poetic and other works published from the 1970s to 2010 which resonate with concerns raised within life-writing and life-writing criticism in the nineties. We focus on the almost obsessive concern with the relationships between self and other, and the seemingly contradictory denial of a stable self which mark the life writing debate of the decade; both evident in all of Kroetsch's writing. Raising the relation between space and selfhood to the fore, the article argues that Kroetsch's work not only questions our ability to know another through writing, but even to know the self. At the same time, we argue that the glimpses of a seemingly stable, autobiographical self that emerge in his writings speak to the seductiveness of gaining insights into the machinations of another person's mind, tempting Kroetsch again and again to ponder writing “an autobiography in which I do not appear”.

“In all things, a slippage in the works”: Reading Place, Gender, and Genre in Michael Helm’s In the Place of Last Things

“In all things, a slippage in the works”:Reading Place, Gender, and Genre in Michael Helm’s In the Place of Last Things Ian James MacRae He said the best art was most beautiful in those places where necessity broke out of the form. He told them to consider the shapes they’d drawn of their lives and asked if there weren’t lines that would be truer if they were broken. Michael Helm In the Place of Last Things Russell littlebury, the protagonist of Michael Helm’s second novel, is a 230-pound former hockey hooligan with hands that fold naturally into fists. He has returned home to Colliston, Saskatchewan, and is grieving his father’s death as the novel opens, a young man accustomed to death and cold and the irruption of a sudden, invariably “masculine” violence.1 Against his father Mike, a war hero and local legend, Russ “measured himself and all others,” and “he and they together fell short” (6). These are taciturn men who share “the unspoken agreement that just [End Page 65] about everything went without saying” (39). This doubly encoded, entirely complicitous silence says much about Russ’s relationship with his father, which is deeply committed and loving but also repressive and emotionally inarticulate.2 It speaks also to Helm’s version of the Canadian “prairie novel” as a familiar and received tradition that treats disappearing hamlets and foreclosed farms, big skies and emptied places, what Robert Kroetsch once called “unassuming people and an assuming environment” (213). With an ambivalence that characteristically oscillates between a learned, critical intelligence and a sensitive, more compassionate empathy, “At times Russ regarded this code as so much gender-locked horseshit, but usually he found it beautiful” (39). Helm figures the northern prairie as a “featureless” landscape with few markers for memory, a land of “all-effacing snows” (20), and an ideal place for “forgetting” (6). In Colliston when things warms up it is still -20°c; in “The last five-week stretch there’d been thirteen funerals, the usual winter kill” (5). At least since the work of Laurie Ricou (1973) and Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country (1977) up until at least the late 1990s, the English literature of the Canadian Prairies has been constructed “as if landscape dominates culture and geography effaces history” (Calder and Wardaugh 8).3 These familiar and generic forms are clearly present in Helm’s work and are etched quite close to the surface of things. This baldness of presentation is in fact the point, or at least one of them, such that we cannot miss the novel’s method. As this paper suggests, the principal subject of this novel is not genre itself but how genre is read, how the reading and rewriting practised by Helm mobilizes familiar elements in a range of regional and generic traditions, and how in making these visible also makes them vulnerable, to contemplation, analysis, and critical revision. Helm’s writing transforms a range of regionalist traditions, and associated masculinist subjectivities, into sites of metamorphosis, loci that can be productively tapped: deformed, disparaged, ultimately dispersed. The prairie novel is in the end only one of at least five genres that Helm’s novel will reimagine, recontextualize and reinscribe: a familiar form to be constructed, supplemented, and partially dissembled in the place of last things. [End Page 66] In the Place of Last Things (2004) moves from a prairie novel of sons and fathers, dying towns, and repossessed farms to an urban campus novel, with Russ as professor of liberal arts at Wellington College and familiar questions of pedagogy, ethics, social justice, academic activism, and careerism at its core to an urban metropolitan romance, with conventions of courtship and labyrinths of desire finding expression in art galleries, bookstores, and on public transportation, as Russ becomes involved with a mixed race, trilingual, bisexual fellow professor named Tara Harding. Then the novel crosses the border into the United States and a species of travel literature opens up, a road novel of seedy bars and high plains drifting, with Russ as a capable and intrepid individual, isolated and adrift, unencumbered by social obligations or domestic relations on the “frontier...

Robert Kroetsch and Archival Culture in the Canadian Long Poem

Dans le sillage d’une forte tradition narrative en litterature canadienne, il sera examine l’incidence du poeme long sur la relation entre la memoire et la formation d’une identite culturelle au moyen de l’ecriture. A travers la poetique de l’archive chez Robert Kroetsch il sera question de la rencontre d’une vision postmoderne du provisoire et d’un projet epistemologique qui creuse les structures du langage, dans laquelle se nouent des ecritures contemporaines aux accents poetiques et documentaires. Notre argument s’appuiera sur le questionnement que pose le poeme long chez Robert Kroetsch dans son articulation entre les ecritures de l’imaginaire, du mythe et de la memoire.

A Defense of Publicity

1. A minimum responsibility of academics as citizens of a national and a global society, I suggest, is to respond to off campus when asked about matters for which we have proven expertise--in my own case to respond to a request to speak to a Canadian literature reading group, to serve on an awards jury, to answer invitations to speak to Canadianists abroad, to investigate a pedagogy question for a government ministry, to comment on a book or an author's death or construction of a news story if telephoned by a newspaper or radio station. Those outside academy don't necessarily view us as especially objective, but they often believe that we have information they may not have or questions they have not thought to ask. And what about those occasions when one is not asked but one suspects that one's knowledge might change events outside academy were it disseminated there? Don't we still have a responsibility to educate--not necessarily to change minds but to enlarge them? The expertise which most qualifies me and many others to speak out on public issues is interpreting images, situations, promises, and various speech acts. It also qualifies some of those off campus, such as CBC's Terry O'Reilly, host of program Under Influence. U.S. poet Charles Bern stein has repeatedly argued that it is only through a society's intellectuals being willing to contribute to the education of public at that a society can be innovative, vibrant, and socially responsible (Poet 28) and its politics avoid stagnation. It was a similar thought that motivated me in 1990s to write books on Kim Campbell and Adrienne Clarkson and on Mahaffy-French murder cases. I doubt that these books by themselves did a huge lot of good. Education is necessarily a collaboration. Yet some accurate understandings of once complex academic concepts--constructedness, situatedness, discourse, deconstruction, representation--have, surprisingly to me, penetrated parts of popular culture. Possibly that's an effect of our on-campus teaching once our students go back out into wider society. And once they are out there, possibly they read some of few books or articles we send out after them. 2. Does such academic outreach constitute activism?--a word panel organizer Clint Burnham foregrounded in offering parameters for this discussion. Activism doesn't always involve scholarship any more than scholarship must involve activism. It can be a method of disseminating scholarship but can also be, unfortunately, a way of diluting it. The two are usually directed toward different audiences, at different intensities and with different social aims. At its intellectually least substantial, activism can be mere lobbying. Being an activist, that is, says nothing about quality of one's research or one's worthiness as a citizen--only that one wants to address a large audience and hopes to cause societal change. Charles Darwin didn't intend to be an activist, although he was perceived as such; his work led indirectly to explicit activisms such as those of Fanon and Martin Luther King. It also led to State of Tennessee's explicitly activist Butler Act, which prohibited teaching of evolutionary theory. Rachel Carson on writing Silent Spring intended to be an activist but remained much more a scholar than has David Suzuki. Activism can be as scholarly or unscholarly as scholarship itself. Back in 1969-71 activist scholarship of Robin Mathews and his Carleton colleague James Steele resulted in legal requirements that Canadian universities advertise academic job vacancies and make them open to Canadian candidates. It was a well-argued citizenly intervention for which most of us should be grateful. In 1995 Mathews published The Treason of Intellectuals in which he accused Northrop Frye, Linda Hutcheon, George Bowering, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Robert Kroetsch, and others, including myself, of being treasonous Canadians whose ideas in some cases had descended from Derrida and Heidegger and therefore from those of Nazi Germany (11, 67-69, 77, 102). …

Canadian popular classics : Recycling Homer’s Odyssey in novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Robert Kroetsch and Margaret Atwood

L’objet de la présente étude est l’analyse de la réception – souvent sous-estimée – des classiques, et de l'Odyssée d’Homère en particulier, dans les ouvrages de trois romans canadiens : Over Prairie Trails (1922) et A Search for America (1927) de Frederick Philip Grove, The Studhorse Man (1969) de Robert Kroetsch, ainsi que The Penelopiad (2005) de Margaret Atwood. Le dialogue avec les classiques que présentent ces textes semble suivre une trajectoire que Walter Pache a déjà mise en évidence dans la poésie canadienne et qui va de l’imitation à la parodie en passant par la citation. Cet essai a pour but de montrer que les romans en question présentent une réflexion métafictionnelle sur les potentialités et les dangers inhérents à la récupération des classiques et le difficile équilibre entre culture «populaire» et culture «sérieuse».

Vārua Tupu

Vārua Tupu Robert Sullivan (bio) for Albert The equivalent Māori phrase to the Tahitian is wairua tupu, spirit of growth. Beautiful beautiful Mā‘ohi people, tāngata whenua. I see their images in a journal, a photo of Henri Hiro who calls on the tāngata to write! Write in English! Write in French! Write in Tahitian! Which reminds me of Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o’s challenge to change the world and of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoni star dancing in the blackness of heaven and of Haunani-Kay Trask’s sharkskin rhythms calling out Pele in her people and Albert Wendt’s spiraling caul of liquid fire. We connect ourselves with poems of struggle, hearts hammering like Martin Espada’s father, fear embraced and set free by Joy Harjo. I serve Cervantes. He sat down on his back step near 60, one-armed, two whole teeth in his head, and began to write Don Quixote, said W S Merwin as he began a reading here. Allen Curnow recited to me “I the poet William Yeats” and Robert Kroetsch read with the heart of a young man, while Margaret Atwood’s eros poems rested their wings with me. Write out the lives, write them alive, write till the fire strikes, another fire, a torch, a whakaaraara warning cry kia hiwa rā! kia hiwa rā! kia hiwa rā ki tēnei tuku! kia hiwa rā ki tēnā tuku! 1 Watch every terrace of the fortress, there’s an enemy climbing up, a blaze from heaven, kia hiwa rā! my friend. [End Page 283] So I light a fire here in this stanza, my small room with large windows, carried from the fires on the hills and the haka fires in the poets from the processions of mysteries and lamped freeways, from history sourced in gin of the Fleet Ditch and Gordon Riots, and James Cook’s golden narratives to our own kōrero neherā, our oral bodies caressed tuku iho tuku iho down to present hands cupped to mouths as we plunge and rise in the ancestor ocean shield our eyes from bullet-train rays and think of our father Māui who planted himself and his brothers in the East who caught Tamanui the Sun after the night at the crater of the creator our mother the Earth. Poet Henri Hiro in brotherly spirit I embrace you. Je t’embrasse. Ka awhi au i a koe e te tuakana. Moe mai moe mai moe mai rā e te tama manawawera, te tama ngākau mārie hoki. He waiata aroha, he mihi mīharo nā te kitenga o ō waiata, ō whakaaro painga mō ngā tāngata moutere. Ka haka! I turn back to the flame of life. Ka oriori au: tīhei mauri ora! 2 This poem also appears in my latest collection, Shout Ha! To the Sky (London: Salt Publishing, 2010). Vārua Tupu is the name of the French-Polynesian special issue of the American literary journal Mānoa (17:2, 2006) in which the late Henri Hiro’s work, and other indigenous Mā‘ohi writing, can be found. Robert Sullivan Robert Sullivan (Ngā Puhi / Kai Tahu / Galway Irish) has published seven books of poetry, a graphic novel (illustrated by Chris Slane), and a children’s book. He coedited with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri the award-winning anthology Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poetry in English (2003). He is Head of School for Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand. Translations 1. Be alert! Be alert! Be alert at this terrace! Be alert at that terrace! 2. I embrace you. I hug you older brother. Rest here, sleep here hot-hearted son, son of peace. A song of love, an astonished greeting at the sight of your songs, your blessed thoughts for island peoples. I haka! I turn back to the flame of life. I chant the breath of life! [End Page 284] Copyright © 2010 University of Hawai‘i Press

Messing with the Archive: Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces in Robert Kroetsch’sThe Hornbooks of Rita K

Messing with the Archive: Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces in Robert Kroetsch’s<i>The Hornbooks of Rita K</i>

Messing with the Archive: Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces in Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K

Messing with the Archive: Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces in Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K Catherine Bates (bio) In March 2005 I visited the Robert Kroetsch Fonds in the University of Calgary Special Collections. This consists of almost twenty linear meters of material, including letters to Kroetsch from writers, publishers and academics, letters to and from family members, multiple drafts of his major works and unpublished works, print-outs of e-mails he sent and received, plane and train ticket receipts, conference outlines and drafts of papers, photographs, course outlines, pizza menus, notes written on the backs of postcards, and more.1 Sifting through this material, I felt a mixture of excitement, voyeurism, frustration, and embarrassment. Dry academic correspondence sat beside intimate notes, which nestled next to what in other circumstances would be considered junk mail. In the first few days I tried to take it all in and to be as comprehensive as possible, close reading letters and poring over drafts. When running out of time, I developed a more ruthless, utilitarian approach, dismissing potentially interesting, intimate details if they did not seem immediately relevant, acutely aware of the time limit I had. I became conscious of my role as selector and producer—attempting to turn the exciting chaos into coherent stories, stifling the excess of the archive. To look at the archive I needed funding and references from two esteemed academics. The formality and relative inaccessibility of the archive bestows an importance on its contents, making the pizza menus and drafts, which could well be designated rubbish and thrown out, into valuable items to be handled with care, interpreted thoughtfully and—within academic convention—objectively. They also become objects at risk of being defined within deterministic narratives designed to gain academic and financial approval. In this way, the archive can be understood as performative, rather than representative; it does not represent what is important, rather it constructs what is important. As Foucault argued, the archive is “the system that establishes statements [End Page 8] as events and things” (79). The hours spent sifting through them to develop a theory, which could have been perceived as a waste of time (being as messy as I have described), were made valuable both by the funding that enabled me to be there in the first place, and by the relatively restricted “open” hours of the archive. This mixture of formality and informality in the Robert Kroetsch Fonds becomes particularly interesting when read alongside Kroetsch’s 2001 poetry book, The Hornbooks of Rita K, in which Rita K is a missing poet whose poems are being archived in her house by Raymond, who claims to be both archivist and lover, and talks of preparing her “remains” for the University of Calgary Special Collections. According to Raymond, these “remains” consist of “neat stacks of scrawled notes, manuscripts, partially filled notebooks and, yes, unfinished (or unfinishable?) poems,” which he describes as “hornbooks” (8). The epigraphs tell us (via the Canadian Oxford Dictionary) that a hornbook is “a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, etc., mounted on a wooden tablet with a handle, and protected by a thin plate of horn,” and can also be “a treatise on the rudiments of a subject: a primer.” Thus Raymond is directing us to read Rita’s poems less as timeless literary pieces and more as transient instructional summaries, undercutting their literary durability. Moreover, the process of archiving, normally associated with officialness and academia, becomes imbricated with the informality and messiness of lover, friend and failed poet, while the poet’s work becomes metonymically linked with her body, emphasizing the connection between archiving and death. The rubbish becomes less easy to distinguish from the valued; each provides a context for the other. In fact, this article will show that Kroetsch uses the notion of the back door in The Hornbooks to help us question what we value and what we throw away or fail to notice, by presenting a text in which the boundaries between finished poetry and notes, between the archivist’s notes and his own thoughts, between the casual and the deadly serious are mixed together in a way...

Poet Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah (review)

Reviewed by: Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah Russell Brown (bio) Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah University of Alberta Press. 197. $34.95 Author interviews have been an important element in Canadian literary criticism, no doubt because ours is a young literature in which the contemporary plays a substantial role. Collections of interviews began to be published in 1973 with Donald Cameron's Conversations with Canadian Novelists, and Graeme Gibson's Eleven Canadian Novelists, and since then perhaps a volume a year has been published. In Poets Talk, the most recent, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy interview seven Canadian writers about their poetry. Five of these writers are well known (Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, and Fred Wah); two may be somewhat less familiar: the Native author Marie Annharte Baker and the politically engaged Jeff Derksen. Because several of the poets in this volume are also authors of fiction, the focus is not everywhere so strict as the title of the collection might suggest. If you are interested in the authors being interviewed, these conversations are all of real value – but the volume is not without its weaknesses. Though the book obscures the fact, the time of these interviews has largely passed, and they feel somewhat dated. Poets Talk was published in 2005, but these interviews (which can be located in time only by internal evidence) took place as much as fifteen years earlier. Two (those with Kroetsch and Marlatt) are quite evidently from 1990; two are from a few years after that (the interview with Mouré dates from around 1993; Brand from around 1995). Several of these pieces are printed with dingbats, which suggest they have been spliced together from separate occasions: thus the first part of the Baker interview seems to date from the early 1990s but the last section is from 2003. Nothing else is that recent: no part of the Derksen interview (which also appears to have been assembled) is later than 2001; the interview with Wah is at least two years earlier than that. My second reservation concerns the interviewers. In the four interviews they conduct jointly, they sometimes get in one another's way, and whether working together or separately (Butling with Brand and Baker; Rudy with Wah), their questions and responses are shaped by their own agendas as much as by their interviewees' concerns. Fred [Wah]: It's a performative poem ... It's kind of jazzy and ... Susan [Rudy]: And really angry! Fred: Yes, but it's jivey, this is a jivey poem. On the other hand, the up-to-date prefaces to these interviews serve as valuable introductions to the writers and both they and the interviews [End Page 618] feature ample selections of poetry, enough to give readers unfamiliar with these writers a sense of what's at stake. As well, Butling and Rudy have brought together highly articulate writers – theoretically informed about the problematics and poetics of their craft – so their conversations are studded with interesting observations. Kroetsch, arguing that his writing is characterized by comic excess, observes: 'you can't argue inside the cosmology and win; it's got you beat ... But over and over every cosmology that gets defeated is defeated by excess.' Brand describes building her life around what she now calls 'struggle work' and contextualizes that project by explaining that, in writing for 'an immigrant Canadian audience,' she has also felt the need to resist her readers' desires 'to hold things static, the way they were back home' – meaning that 'I had to, as Langston Hughes, says, not simply represent but also break, violate.' The interview with Baker surprises when it shows how this indigenous writer constructed a literary tradition drawn partly from canonical sources: 'if I told you which writers interested me you'd think it was strange. I think of it as funny now. I liked anything to do with humour, so one Canadian writer I liked was Stephen Leacock.' Derksen's ideas about hyper-referentiality in...

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

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. …

History, literature, and the writing of the Canadian prairies

The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary identity, and reconfigures prairie as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time. The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries ; the impact of Aberhart's Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch's postmodernism; the role of document in long poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton's Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.

Canadian Citizens as Postcolonial Subjects? Reading Robert Kroetsch's The Lovely Treachery of Words

Canadian Citizens as Postcolonial Subjects? Reading Robert Kroetsch's The Lovely Treachery of Words

Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (review)

Fourteen years after its original publication, Rudy Wiebe's Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic has been republished by NeWest Press as the inaugural text in its series 'Landmark Editions.' According to the new afterword by Robert Kroetsch, this series seeks to bring back into print 'important books by western Canadian writers, books that have become a part of the Canadian canon.' Given the growing number of publications on the North since the early 1990s, evidenced by more than a dozen entries added to Wiebe's updated bibliography, this new edition is timely. Playing Dead reminds us that Wiebe is one of the key writers in Canada who, like Kroetsch, has been fascinated and haunted by northern narratives of nation for decades. In the five essays that constitute Playing Dead, including a new Prelude and Coda, Wiebe repeatedly reminds us that his main goal is to understand the North and its history, to learn its secrets and mysteries, and to comprehend it as both a physical region and an idea in his own head: 'I desire [End Page 333] true NORTH, not PASSAGE to anywhere.' Wiebe examines how the Arctic is tied up with questions of national identity. More specifically, he seeks 'to understand why Canadians have so little comprehension of our own nordicity, that we are a northern nation and that, until we grasp imaginatively and realize imaginatively in word, song, image and consciousness that North is both the true nature of our world and also our graspable destiny we will always go whoring after the mocking palm trees and beaches of the Caribbean and Florida and Hawaii.' If we know about our northern past, Wiebe suggests, we can avoid 'the stupidities of our ancestors.' We can do better in the future. Everyone has a story, says Wiebe in Playing Dead, but not all stories are being told or heard. The personal essay is the ideal form for Wiebe to reflect on how stories act as repositories of memory, how they are never just about individuals but about relationships, and how they are our primary tools of education, maybe even survival. By quoting extensively from prose, poems, and songs, as well as adding eleven illustrations to the earlier two, Wiebe also makes us realize that stories about the North derive from a wide range of sources. In each essay, Wiebe quotes at length from the writings of European explorers such as George Back, John Franklin, Robert Hood, and Samuel Hearne. He helps us appreciate their accomplishments at the same time as he enables us to see the biases of their perspectives. For effective juxtapositions, Wiebe turns to northerners who are telling their own stories. On one occasion, he quotes from George Best's record (1576) of Martin Frobisher's encounter with the Inuit and follows it with the Netsilik Inuit story of how the Native people of the Boothia Penninsula met Sir John Ross in 1829. Another time, he draws on Joe Nasugaluaq's diary to provide details about Vilhjalmur Stefansson's relationship with Pannigabluk, the Inuit woman who remains absent in Stefansson's own texts. Wiebe's carefully orchestrated essays show rather than tell us how stories are shaped by perspective. In fact, he insists that our own perspectives need to be re-examined. The upside-down map of the Canadian Arctic (updated and retitled) urges us to do so right at the beginning of the book. It places the North at the centre, giving names to northern rivers and places, while southern Canada remains a white empty space at the top of the page. A contemplation - that is how Wiebe describes Playing Dead in the subtitle. The term fits beautifully. These essays do not give answers to questions; they are neither hypotheses nor accusations (even though Wiebe holds many strong opinions). They are thoughtful observations that convey both Wiebe's deep knowledge and his unfaltering love of the North. As a reader...