Identity Crises / Cries for Identity: Claiming the Canadian Prairie in the Novels of Robert Kroetsch.

HENRY, RICHARD

By accident of history I was born into a gap in [the] narrative world. As a child I had that really strong feeling that I was living in a place that had no story to explain it and so I suppose one of the things I wanted to do was to tell that story of nothing to tell. - Robert Kroetsch, in Labyrinths of Voice (186-87)

Since 1961, Robert Kroetsch has been filling the gap in the narrative world with series of novels, poems, essays, and interviews that tell the "story of nothing to tell." His work has spawned a small industry of criticism that claims him, in the words of Linda Hutcheon, as "Mr. Canadian Postmodern," and, consequently, claims that the "story of nothing to tell" he has been writing is the story of Canada in the postmodern age.

Kroetsch was born and raised in Alberta. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Alberta and did his graduate work in the United States. For the next seventeen years (with occasional writer-in- residencies at midwestern universities in Canada), he taught at the State University of New York at Binghamton. In the late seventies he returned to Canada, eventually settling at the University of Manitoba. Despite the fact that he spent nearly one half of his professional life working in the United States, in many ways he is Mr. Canadian Postmodern, for he is the country's foremost and best-known practitioner of postmodernism.

One might go so far as to argue that Kroetsch is Mr. Canadian literature, given Robert Lecker's analysis of the literary history of Canada in his study, Making It Real. Lecker notes that even by the end of World War II, the public schools did not (generally) teach Canadian literature, that the New Canadian Library wasn't founded until 1957, and that it was not until the mid-1960s that the first literary history of Canada appeared. The 1965 "explosion" of Canadian literature coincided with the publication of Kroetsch's first novel. His fiction includes But We Are Exiles (1965), The Words of My Roaring (1966), The Studhorse Man (1969), Gone Indian (1973), Badlands (1975), What the Crow Said (1978), Sundogs: Stories from Saskatchewan (1980), Alibi (1983), The Puppeteer (1993), and The Man from the Creeks (1998). He is also a prolific and distinguished poet, as can be seen in collections such as The Stone Hammer Poems (1975), Seed Catalogue (1977), and Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch (1989).

Such nationalist claims are difficult to sustain, however, given the history of Canada, the peculiar conjunction of poststructuralism and Canadian literature, and Kroetsch's own literary and critical interests. Lecker argues that the development of Canada as Nation with a Literature and the poststructuralist movement occurred at the same time, with the poststructuralist movement undermining the developing sense of nation, where "nation" is defined by the narrative one's people tell about themselves. Hutcheon's sense of Canada, too, shows how difficult it is to maintain the claim to nation: Kroetsch is a Canadian writer because Canadian writers write from the margins; they do not avow a "center" if the center is the colonial power that once commanded so much power. This is a familiar story for all postcolonials and, therefore, is not unique to Canada. Certainly Canada bears the stamp of two colonial powers, as Malcolm Ross has observed, a stamp that has left the country divided between being Canadian and being Canadien/Canadienne. Hutcheon also advances a not-quite-contradictory and traditional perspective that the nation is perhaps better conceived as a collection of regions, each with its own defining interests. In short, Canada-as-Nation has no center.

Kroetsch's own interests are decidedly and simultaneously regional and West European. He evinces little concern for "Canada" per se. One can find in his work the occasional references to Louis Riel and others of national importance, but these references are significant for how few they number. Kroetsch is less interested in Canada as a nation than in the prairie as a region, for his attention is rarely directed to the Maritimes, to Quebec, to Toronto/Ottawa, or to the west coast. The world Kroetsch writes is the world of the prairie, of the Canadian Midwest, and yet it is wholly informed by two and a half millennia of Western literary history and criticism. He laments the lack of prairie writers, so to speak, but they are simply not within his field of vision, a field wholly informed by the postmodern. Because he completed his public education during World War II, we can understand how he himself might identify "a gap in the narrative world," a gap that could be described as a literary history of Canada. At least early in his career, he does not recognize the prairie as it is presented in realist or naturalist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Frederick Philip Grove, W. O. Mitchell, Martha Otenso, Gwen Ringwood, Sinclair Ross, Laura Goodman Salverson, R. J. C. Stead, and Adele Wiseman concern themselves with stories of emigration and the rural life (often from the perspectives of North Europeans, Swedes, Norwegians, and Ukrainians, who made their way to the upper prairies of Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, and North and South Dakota). Nor is the narrative gap he perceives of the sort that concerns his contemporary, Margaret Laurence, who interrogated the interactions of native and new peoples on the plains and who is now considered in the vanguard of postcolonial Canadian authors.

The narrative gap Kroetsch perceives is that between the prairie experience (the "place that had no story to explain it") and the (im)possibilities of telling that experience (the "story of nothing to tell"). This is the essential disjunction in Kroetsch's novels, that between experience and story, between doing and saying. The disjunction is made all the worse with the terrifying possibility that things can be decontextualized by being "said" again and again. The rupture is characterized by a pervasive sense of powerlessness, especially once one recognizes that the power rests in the mouths of the sayers who can determine what has been and will be done with little regard for actual experience. This rupture insinuates itself into how he tells his stories. Appropriately, Kroetsch himself exhibits something of this disjunction: he is a prolific theorizer who offers considerable commentary on Kroetsch the writer, even as Kroetsch the writer is himself a ruptured sayer/doer. The distinction between saying and doing risks some confusion and is used here only because the more traditional literary distinctions among entities such as narrators, narratees, characters, and implied authors do not cover the distinction, or the full panoply of relationships found in his novels. Saying and doing invoke distinctions between language and experience, where language includes the full range of things that people use it for: to name, to represent, to question, to direct, to command, et cetera, as well as the organizing principles of sentences, conversations, and narratives. Insofar as these uses are themselves experiences, we might propose that the fully individuated person has (generally) synthesized saying and doing. Problems arise when the division between language and experience grows so wide as to rupture. Kroetsch is acutely tuned to this rupture.

Two novels, The Studhorse Man and Alibi, demonstrate the rupture well, and offer a view of the Canadian prairie that is fraught with victimization and a general lack of responsibility and authority. In Kroetsch's world, those who do are the victims of those who say, and those who say are crippled by the organizing structures of their own words. Moreover, neither doer nor sayer is well. The experience and the story are fraught with deformities and dysfunctions. Physical and mental health is constantly called into question.

The Studhorse Man concerns Hazard Lepage, who for twenty-four years has traversed the countryside with a series of stud horses. After a momentary lapse of attention, he finds himself outside his familiar range. The novel follows his attempt to return to his familiar tromping grounds and to his fiancee, along with his continued pursuit of mares in an ever-worsening stud market. The quest is marked for its similarities to the Odyssey, and for an incessant doubling of characters and events. There are numerous interludes: Hazard is dragged unconscious by his horse, Poseidon, and "rescued" by P. Cockburn (sex ensues). He is imprisoned by nuns. He is arrested for being on a beach with his horse, and sentenced to slaughtering hogs and processing sausages for the widow Mrs. Lank (sex ensues). He is "captured and detained" by Maria Eshpeter (more sex ensues). Fires, near drownings, and other catastrophes abound. The story is told by Demeter, Hazard's self-proclaimed biographer and heir, who increasingly makes his presence known as both character and narrator. Where Hazard is the doer, Demeter is the sayer, and the novel culminates in two meetings wherein we find that the doer and the sayer cannot coexist-the rupture is too great.

Alibi offers a quest of a different sort, that of William William Dorfendorf, agent for Jack Deemer, a collector of strange and wondrous things. Deemer's current desire is for a natural spa with healing waters. Dorf's travels take him from Banff to Europe and back. Unlike Hazard, Dorf has little personal stake in the general quest, and so he has to invent his own interests and amusements within the highly circumscribed circumstances. Clearly, Dorf is the doer of this novel. There are a number of candidates for the role of sayer, including Dorf himself (who writes a journal) and Karen Strike (a filmmaker, who, unbeknownst to Dorf, is documenting his search). But the key sayer of the novel is Deemer, whose behind-the-scene directives determine what Dorf, as his agent, does. As in The Studhorse Man, Alibi culminates in a demonstration of the irreconcilability of the doer and the sayer when they come together at the end of the novel.

"The place that had no story to explain it." The story of place in Kroetsch's world is the story of the characters who occupy the prairie and the mountains that border it. But these characters, as Peter Thomas has observed, "don't have the freedom to choose their own stories" (2). Worse, they don't have the freedom to choose their own experiences. Both The Studhorse Man and Alibi are marked by abrupt changes in direction: characters will change course with little or no motive as if they have no wills of their own. Hazard moves aimlessly across the plains, blown here and there by circumstance. Dorf is directed by the will of Deemer as he searches for the perfect spa. When the characters do exhibit some free will, the results are nearly deadly. When Dorf postpones his trip to Europe so that he can pursue his personal interest in Julie, he is nearly killed in an avalanche. Later, his brief but unscheduled interlude with Julie on the southern coast of Portugal results in her death.

Hazard and Dorf also share a number of features, among them displacement, sickness, victimhood, and a general lack of responsibility for their actions. Hazard's physical displacement is exemplified in his relations with the land and his wanderings over its surface. The initial crisis of the novel is Hazard's being blown off course, so to speak, and out of his familiar circle. Even this familiar circle, however, is marked by its transience: although Hazard has a place in the world, a house, it has been vacant and boarded up for over two decades as he wanders the prairie. The final crisis in the novel occurs when Demeter claims the house, thereby permanently leaving the studhorse man homeless. The land and Hazard's relations with it are but a backdrop for a more pervasive kind of displacement: the relationships people have with each other are temporary and inauthentic. In the majority of his "interludes," he is a "substitute" for someone else; that is, he has taken their place (not his place). Likewise, these women are substitutes for Martha Proudfoot, his virginal fiancee of thirteen years. Perhaps his status as a substitute is the reason why none of these sexual encounters results in conception. The implication that there is a "rightful" sexual place is given even greater play in the adventures of the stud horse Poseidon, whose only two reported sexual encounters are with "substitutes." The first comes early in the novel when Hazard and Poseidon happen upon two mares. Poseidon is drawn to the older mare, who is in heat. Hazard, however, uses the older mare to tease Poseidon into mounting the younger, less receptive mare. In the second instance, unbeknownst to Hazard, Maria Eshpeter is collecting the stud's sperm by having him mount fake horses. Not only is the sperm not going to be used to bring more foals into the world, but it will be used in the production of birth-control pills for humans.

Many of these issues of displacement, sexual and other, come to a head with Demeter, who has no place in the story he is telling other than his desire to take Hazard's place, a desire that begins to see its fulfillment as he figures more and more as a character rather than as a storyteller in the novel. Midway through, Demeter attends a wedding as best man. Tradition has it that the wedding guests will follow the happy couple as they escape their reception, in an effort to interrupt their connubial bliss. One of Demeter's duties as best man is to leave the ceremony with the maid of honor; together they function as decoys for the bride and groom. Demeter and the young girl fulfill this function by leading the revelers on a merry chase through the countryside. When at last the "substitute" couple have left the revelers strewn about the landscape in crumpled and disabled cars, they themselves embrace. The substitute bride and substitute groom quickly find their substitute sexual encounter interrupted, unintentionally, by Hazard, who wakes up, having slept through the merry chase in the back seat. This interruption foreshadows Demeter and Martha's near sexual encounter; and so we see the young girl functioning as a double substitute, for she takes the place of the bride and of Martha, Demeter's self-proclaimed "true love." At the end of the novel, Demeter begins to assume Hazard's place in the world, first by moving into the boarded-up house, and then by kidnapping Martha. When Demeter and Martha are about to consummate their relationship, Hazard, having gained the house in an attempt to rescue his fiancee, is attacked by Poseidon. The attack forestalls the successful assumption of Hazard's place by Demeter, even as Demeter assures its vacancy by shooting and killing Hazard.

In keeping with the general premise that characters do not have the freedom to choose their own experiences, both events highlight Demeter the character's (as opposed to Demeter the sayer's) lack of intention or motivation. As the surrogate groom at the wedding, he careens about the countryside in an effort to confuse the merry revelers who follow. It is the young woman, however, who directs his every turn. As Poseidon savages Hazard, Demeter is only able to shoot under the steady prodding of Martha. Whether Demeter aimed at all, and if he did, whether he was aiming for the horse or the man is left unresolved, leaving open the possibility that "aiming," with all its intentional undertones, is itself irrelevant to the prairie experience.

Ultimately, the displacements add up to little more than an aimlessness: the characters, specifically the male characters, have no guiding force of their own. They drift about at the will of others.

In Alibi the displaced substitute takes on a slightly different cast. Where Demeter "distorts" Hazard's life by writing his biography, Deemer actually tells Dorf what to do. Dorf functions as Deemer's agent, his embodied self, so to speak. This frees Dorf from any sense of responsibility for his actions. Like Hazard, Dorf has been traveling for years. Unlike Hazard, who has been busy disseminating Poseidon's services, Dorf has been collecting objects for his boss. As an agent with little direct contact with Deemer, Dorf does have the ability to make small decisions at the local level, but these decisions are rarely the result of a conscious or intentional thought process, motivated instead by blind desire. Perhaps the penultimate example of pure doing comes at a spa in Greece. The spa turns out to be a giant mud bath overseen by "the Smelly Woman," the resident doctor. Men and women take turns in the mud, washing before and after, and immersing themselves in the healing earth. Dorf violates the rules by leaving the spa without washing: the mud feels so good that he is overcome by its pure sensory aspect. He leaves, naked, but covered with mud. This sensory aspect reaches its peak when, approached by those who would prefer not having naked men about on the streets, he dashes back to the spa and dives back in. It is the women's turn in the mud bath, however, and chaos develops, followed quickly by the caressing touch of twenty hands that massage his body until he has the best and final orgasm of his life. For these violations, he is banned from the spa. Throughout the novel, capitulation to desire is counterposed with the dissociated state that comes from always being under the direction of others.

The novel concludes with an intentional but "deniable" act. Dorf, banished to a cabin in the woods, wallows in his isolation. When Manny, his sometime friend and doctor, approaches in a canoe with new directives from Deemer, Dorf fires his gun. As the canoe sinks and Manny drowns, however, Dorf renounces any possibility of responsibility for the drowning. It is suicide for someone to stand when in a canoe. Manny was standing in the canoe. Therefore, Manny's death is not his responsibility.

Not surprisingly, in Alibi, experience, or doing, has one redeeming quality over story, or saying-and that quality is touch. Nor is it surprising that touch is in constant battle with language. Dorf's ultimate experience in the mud bath, immersed in mud and caressed by twenty hands, is contrasted with a similar scene of chaos in the spa he has bought for Deemer. Deemer arrives with a small entourage, and they enter the waters deep inside the cave. Karen Strike's attempt to record the event with her cameras and flashes blows the fuses. In the resulting darkness, everyone begins touching everyone else. Here, however, amid the touching, the bathers also call out names. The mixture of language and experience leads Dorf to comment later that he had been violated. Pointedly, the touch's "win" over language comes early in the novel, and is only temporary. More to the point, this "win" came in Greece. Western Canada finds touch ruined by language. The prairie experience is defined by an essential powerlessness, for the experience, the doing, is largely controlled and thereby corrupted by saying.

"The story of nothing to tell." If those who do are powerless victims of those who speak, what fates await those who speak? Peter Thomas, among others, has noted the overarching importance of language in Kroetsch's novels, so much so that one can argue it is foolish even to attempt to separate experience from the stories that create it: "Kroetsch has claimed that 'in a sense, we haven't got an identity until someone tells our story'" (Thomas, 2). As foolish as this separation may be, both language and story are separated from experience in at least two ways. First, where the experience in question is nominally another's, the storyteller exerts his or her influence by deciding which of the innumerable events that constitute "experience" are worth recounting. Second, the organizing principles of story are not the same as the organizing principles of experience.

We have already noted that The Studhorse Man features a teller who is intimately involved in the story and who therefore has vested interests in what is told and what is not. To a small degree, his motivations are to establish himself as the rightful heir to the blue stud, to establish himself as the rightful consort of Martha Proudfoot, and to establish a defense for his short-lived accession to the privileged roles. Alibi's "tellers" are multiple, including Dorf and Karen Strike, but Dorf's story is determined by Jack Deemer, a largely disembodied presence in the novel, but a presence whose shaping influence is evident in the directives he issues. Dorf's story is shaped by the needs, desires, and whims of his boss. In one potent example of the limited sphere of Dorf's ability to determine his own plans, midway through his search for the spa, Deemer sends him "to dicker for a collection of teeth behind the Iron Curtain" (104). It is a brief interlude and unnecessary to the action of the novel, other than to reinforce how little say Dorf has in his own movements.

The organizing principles of story come from a number of sources. In The Studhorse Man Kroetsch retells another well-known story: Homer's Odyssey and Odysseus' difficulties returning home after the Trojan War. The correlates between the novel and the epic are numerous, though decidedly not of the sort that Derek Walcott invokes in Omeros, his Caribbean version of the blind poet's masterwork, or that Joyce employs in his Ulysses. The sea becomes the prairie, Odysseus becomes Hazard Lepage, the blind poet Homer becomes Demeter (who is also a suitor to Martha/Penelope). In The Studhorse Man the episodes frequently reprise something of those found in the earlier epic, with pointed but skewed references. For example, Circe turns Odysseus' men into swine. Kroetsch invokes and twists this reference by having Hazard participate in the slaughtering of Mrs. Lank's pigs. Not only does Kroetsch attend to the "plotless" episodic nature of the epic, but he reprises the Homeric attention to characterization: he presents little to no interior life in his characters other than Demeter's. But Demeter himself is subject to the overwhelming voice of Homer, whose Odyssey begins to control the choices Demeter makes as he writes Hazard's story. Homer's influence is debilitating, for Odysseus' story is not the same as Hazard's life, and Demeter must work hard to give semblance of resemblance-but to what? Hazard's life? His own? Odysseus'? And what principles will operate? Epic? Novel? Biography? Hazard is delicately poised between the arbitrariness of signs and a deterministic universe, a universe that can only end in death. Demeter is delicately poised between the organizing principles of story and madness. We find a literary model, deeply ingrained in European culture, "emigrated" to the plains of Canada. In the transfer, however, we find the story of the Canadian prairie to be full of gaps. The Canadian prairie is decidedly not the Mediterranean Sea, Hazard is not Odysseus, Demeter is not Homer, and so on. The prairie is, ironically, wholly marked by the empty spaces these intersections leave.

Odysseus wandered for years, in part because he offended the gods. Hazard wanders because of the capricious relationship between language and the world. And so the novel presents an overt demonstration of poststructuralist critical thought about language and its relation to the world. The novel traffics in one metaphor for language: language as the arbitrary play of signs. What makes this play possible is the absence of a center that will secure a relation between signs and sense, or meaning. Indeed, it is the absence of a center that allows the endless series of duplications of events and characters in the novel. This doubling is everywhere in the novel, and culminates when Demeter moves more and more into the world of doing, until Demeter/ New Hazard assumes Old Hazard's place in the world as owner of the blue stud horse. In the novel, there is a center, Hazard's house, but it is one that has been boarded up and abandoned. Once it is reclaimed, and two "signs" try to occupy it at the same time, one dies and the other goes mad. The crisis comes when the two Hazards meet-that is, when two signs meaning the same thing meet, appropriately in the "center" of Hazard's circle. As long as the two signs (Hazard and Demeter) occupy separate spaces, they can suffer an uneasy coexistence in the world. The first meeting of the two merely presages the second, where Demeter and Martha are about to engage in intercourse. The interruption is fatal to Hazard, but the intercourse cannot have been fruitful because Martha has already been impregnated by Hazard.

Although Martha's child is fathered by Hazard, we do not quite find a resurrection of doing over saying. Martha immediately reclaims saying, for she names her baby girl Demeter. With the child's namesake tucked away in an asylum, however, this reclamation is undermined: Martha marries Eugene Utter. If there is a reconciliation between language and the world, it comes at the expense of both, leaving only the speaking voice, the utterer.

With the introduction of the utterer comes another model for language and its relationship to the world. This model is played out in Alibi, where the controlling influence is named, appropriately, Deemer, who is both a sayer who changes the world with his utterances, and a collector of the world he speaks. Rather than countering the representative mode of language with langue, Kroetsch plays with parole and the speaking subject.

With the fully embodied, three-dimensional speaking subject, Kroetsch adds a third dimension to his landscape: depth. He uses depth as a dominant metaphor for death or chaos. As in The Studhorse Man, the meeting of speaker (Deemer) and the spoken (Dorf) results in violation, at least for Dorf. His subsequent banishment is also a banishment of the representative function of language. Dorf has kept his own journal through the quest-to some extent he too is a speaker, but his speaking has been limited to merely representing his own actions. Moreover, at the novel's end, he is reduced to being a "sayer"; but this role of sayer has been severely reduced. He no longer has words of his own, only the ability to copy his earlier words. At the end, he spends his days "copying, even as a monk of old must have copied, words from one book into another" (234). He is copying that journal, even as he tosses some pages into the fire and puts others to use in the outhouse. The exercise is a frivolous one. The real power of language remains with the deemer.

The postmodern condition may be summed up with a peculiar conjunction of attitudes: Salman Rushdie's concern with "how newness enters the world," the specific kind of doubt entertained by Jorge Luis Borges, the disillusionments explored by Robert Coover, and the ironic play in the comedies of Donald Barthelme as his characters struggle against language. Kroetsch finds the Canadian prairie version of the postmodern condition to be inherently tragic. It is difficult, however, to ascribe the blame to any one person or thing: is it the European influence? Is it language itself? Is it the landscape, the flatness of the land that allows for its inhabitants to inscribe themselves, but only for a season, before the next plow, or the next winter storm that will white out the page? And yet, perhaps it is a peculiarity of the region that, despite the lack of human agency, there is always the need to construct an alibi, and, with it, an identity.

SUNY, Potsdam

Works consulted

Hutcheon, Linda. "Seeing Double: Concluding with Kroetsch." In The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Don Mills, Ont. Oxford University Press. 1988. Pp. 160-87.

Kroetsch, Robert. Alibi. New York. Beaufort Books. 1983.

---. The Studhorse Man. New York. Simon & Schuster. 1969.

Lecker, Robert. Making it Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature. Concord, Ont. House of Anansi. 1995.

Neuman, Shirley, and Robert Wilson, eds. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Edmonton, Alb. NeWest Press. 1982.

Ross, Malcom Mackenzie. The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions: Reflections on Canadian Literature. Toronto. McClelland & Stewart. 1986.

Thomas, Peter. Robert Kroetsch. Studies in Canadian Literature, 13. Vancouver, B.C. Douglas & McIntyre. 1980.

Richard Henry is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York in Potsdam. He is the author of Pretending and Meaning: Toward a Pragmatic Theory of Fictional Discourse (1996) and the editor of Blueline, a literary journal devoted to the spirit of the Adirondacks and the shaping influence of nature. He is currently investigating parody and other transgressive acts.