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Robert Kroetsch and Aritha Van Herk on Writing & Reading Gender and Genres

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Robert Kroetsch and Aritha Van Herk on Writing & Reading Gender and Genres J'nan Morse Sellery Robert Kroetsch and Aritha van Herk o n Writing & Reading Gender and Genres An Interview Introduction Knowing each other as creative writers, teachers, critics, and performers, and both coming from families who immigrated to w e s t e r n Canada to farm in Alberta near the B a t t l e River, Robert Kroetsch and Aritha van Herk write about each other's intertextual allusions, disguises, and voices inviting us to remember other tales, expressions, and c u s t o m s that extend their stories with our o w n . In a consistent effort to avoid confession or autobiography, they keep the p e r s o n a l private and the public connected to texts and c o n - texts. They question the a s s u m p t i o n s of m a s t er narratives while leaving lacunae—of what goes without saying—with the i n t e n t to test and text themselves. In answering his own question of "how do we live a life and be a writer," Kroetsch suggests the writer has to make a b a r g a i n with him or her- self.1 Who does the writing, and who the living? Their stories implicate other stories revealing the c o m p l e x i t y of their writing lives. Their work emphasizes contemporary western Canadian themes a n d tropes of m a p s , geography, travel, landscape and how the m e n and women confront life in these physical and mythical territories. Among their tropes are animal tricksters such as t h e f e m a l e Grizzly bear in van Herk's The Tent Peg, or t h e t a l k i n g crow in Kroetsch's What the Crow Said, or the f e m a l e p i g goddesses in van Herk's Judith. Ready to exploit myth and magic realism, they call upon animal tricksters, cross-dressers, clowns, and female mas- querades such as D e e m e r , shaved, dressed, and parading through town on a Greek Island in a wedding gown in Kroetsch's The Puppeteer. Consider also Kroetsch's passive male mad-biographer, misnamed for t h e f e m a l e goddess, 2 1 Canadian Literature iyo/1711 Autumn/Winter 2001 Kroetsch & van Herk Demeter Proudfoot who plans to w r i t e Hazard Lepage's biography in The Studhorse Man, or v a n Herk's active picara, Arachne, who travels through the Canadian West and North in No Fixed Address. Kroetsch creates Anna Dawe, the female speaker of her father's male quest story in Badlands, so, van Herk recognizing the powerful male tellers of t a l l tales from the West, and the need to keep the story going without an e n d i n g , inverts Scheherazade's storytelling through Dorcas who calls for h e r own end by hiring a m a n to kill her in Restlessness. Instead of p o n d e r i n g death, Kroetsch creates Peek, the narrator and actor in The Man from the Creeks who rewrites the experiences of the Northern Gold Rush outlined in R o b e r t Service's poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew." Peek comments: "We suffer and die, we are told. But we also suffer and live."2 Meeting in t h e morning for t h i s three-way conversation, I suggested we divide the three-hour taping into different segments, and invited Robert and Aritha to r e s p o n d to t h e questions by commenting about either's writ- ings, or t o t h e western prairie or g e n d e r connections in e a c h other's work.3 The conversational themes are: writing, reading, and interpreting the Canadian West and the North; gender difference: bodies, minds, and sexu- alities; and reading and writing story: voices, genres, and criticism. I. Writing, Reading, and Interpreting the Canadian West and the North J'NAN I would like to b e g i n this conversation on w r i t i n g and reading gen- der, genres, and criticism with the observation that your writings and stories reflect the cultural concerns of western Canada through character disguises, narrative deceptions, and parodie humor. It seems that t o transform the actual into the fictive, and to a c c o s t the cultural constraints made on g e n d e r , you often write to a n d from each other's standpoint, calling upon many of the same techniques: irony, metamorphosis, humor, the tall tale, the grotesque and the absurd. How have these atti- tudes developed between you? What are the current intellectual and criti- cal challenges of writing, reading, and interpreting the Canadian West and the Canadian North? Writing from the West and the North, you recognize the metaphoric power of l a n d , space, and myth. In t h e 1978 article on " T h e Fear of Women in P r a i r i e Fiction: An Erotics of S p a c e , " Kroetsch asked how t o create an " e r o t i c s of s p a c e " so that the "book and the world have inter- course." Is your emphasis to m o v e readers into a l o v e of t h e actual west- ern Canadian world through your books? 22 Canadian Literature 170/171 /Autumn/Winter 2001 ROBERT Mine is, yes. I want people to l i k e i t . ARiTHA You are never going to e s c a p e fear of women as an e r o t i c s of space, Robert. It will always haunt your footsteps. J'NAN What exactly is erotic about space? The unknown, the loneliness, the fantasy? ROBERT The possibility, the endless possibilities, the desire to encounter that possibility. What do you think, Aritha? ARiTHA Do you shape space, do you see it shaping your desire? ROBERT It's an e x c h a n g e . Exchange between—the self and the landscape. I do think of l a n d s c a p e as physical, geographical, and geological, but it's also that landscape for m e is w h e r e human beings, and what we mean by nature, interact. J'NAN HOW do the world and the book have intercourse? ROBERT I believe strongly that a b o o k has a subject. And the problem is to find a discourse that gets that world into the book. That speaks the world. ARITHA That's important. That speaks the world. J'NAN DO readers grasp that van Herk's "erotics of space" narratives are acts of doing, of lovemaking, and of a n t i c i p a t i n g ? How do you entice readers to see that act, or b e that act, or c o m e into that act? ARITHA It's a difficult palimpsest because a w r i t e r writes with multiple sur- faces. Like Robert, I believe that books have subjects and have narratives. They are driven by a p a r t i c u l a r trajectory even if i t s outcome isn't always what is e x p e c t e d . I'm not very fond of closure, but there are layers and levels that I want the reader to g o through: the reading act is an e r o t i c occupation as much as the writing act, because there must be a w i l l i n g - ness to e n g a g e in s u b t e x t , the skin beneath the skin of the text, of a story, of a character not necessarily reduced to e l e m e n t s of fiction b u t to t h e texture of language, the contamination of one phrase with another. So that ideally, and I don't think I have achieved this very often, the reader will be participating in t h e kind of perplexity that you as a w r i t e r con- fronted when you were struggling with that text. Which I see as an e r o t i c activity. I think perplexity is the most erotic of all of our responses. J'NAN The concept of perplexity is important. I sense that concept in h o w you say things. For instance, perplexity pervades Restlessness. ARITHA Well I think puzzlement should make us curious, not frustrated. Most people think of being.puzzled or p e r p l e x e d as being a frustrating thing. I find puzzlement intriguing. It opens a d o o r. J'NAN I thought when you were talking about the world as intercourse, you 23 Canadian Literature 170/171 /Autumn/Winter 2001 Kroetsch & van Herk were suggesting less that the world is the text, but that those in the world engage with the text sexually. Not mere sexuality but the density and archaeology of eroticism as it recites a text, a real getting under the skin.
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