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Antimodernism in the Novels of Robert Kroetsch

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Antimodernism in the Novels of Robert Kroetsch “MUDDILY HUMAN”: ANTIMODERNISM IN THE NOVELS OF ROBERT KROETSCH Bronagh Clarke, BA (Hons.), MA. Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy February 2007 Abstract For many years the novels of Robert Kroetsch have been canonized as paradigmatic Canadian postmodern and postcolonial texts. This thesis argues that Kroetsch’s texts are antimodernist works which reveal his reaction against modernity. I explore each of Kroetsch’s novels in chronological order, from the unpublished text When Sick for Home to his most recent novel The Man from the Creeks, arguing that Kroetsch’s novels should be viewed as texts that demonstrate his antipathy towards modernity, which is manifested in Kroetsch’s nostalgic idealization of the imagined organic wholeness of a world existing prior to modernization. Throughout this thesis I discuss the parallels between the writings of Robert Kroetsch and Marshall McLuhan, emphasizing the antimodernism that underpins their works. I argue that their antimodernism signals their participation in a tradition of the critique of modernity. By foregrounding the idea of the modernist critique of modernity, which comprises an important element of artistic modernism, I question the privileging of the qualifier “post-” in constructions of the Canadian postmodern canon. In foregrounding the antimodernism evident throughout Robert Kroetsch’s fiction, I interrogate the construction of Canadian postmodernism in his own works and those of other Canadian critics including Linda Hutcheon. Through my analysis of the recurring motifs of the wilderness and the rural environment in Kroetsch’s work, I locate his fiction within Western antimodernist tradition, interrogating cultural nationalist constructions of Canadian postmodernism as an autochthonous phenomenon. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people and organizations which provided me with help and support while researching and writing this thesis. My supervisors Susan Billingham and Peter Messent, Apollonia Steele and the staff at the University of Calgary Special Collections, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Foundation for Canadian Studies, the University of Nottingham School of American and Canadian Studies, the International Council for Canadian Studies, and the British Association for Canadian Studies. Alan Gibbs, and Dan, Mona, Connor, Daniel and Patricia Clarke. Many thanks to Robert Kroetsch for giving me permission to quote from unpublished materials in this dissertation. Contents 1. Introduction .................................................................................................1 2. When Sick for Home ..................................................................................39 3. But We Are Exiles and The Words of My Roaring ....................................73 4. The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian and Badlands .....................................105 5. What the Crow Said.................................................................................144 6. Alibi and The Puppeteer………………………………….…………......170 7. The Man from the Creeks……………………………….………………208 8. Conclusion: Mr Canadian Antimodern…………………………………235 Bibliography: A: Works by Robert Kroetsch .................................................................248 B: Works by Other Authors…………………………………….……….251 Chapter 1: Introduction As a poet, novelist and critic, Robert Kroetsch has for many years been associated with Canadian postmodernism and postcolonialism. Novels such as The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian and Badlands have become paradigmatic texts in the canon of Canadian postmodernism, 1 and indeed, following the rise of interest in Canada as a postcolonial nation, these novels have been read by many critics as postcolonial texts.2 Readings of Kroetsch as a “postmodern” and “postcolonial” writer emphasize the idea of “post” as temporal progress, ignoring the way that Kroetsch’s novels demonstrate his distaste for the contemporary world, and his desire to retrieve a pre- 1 Among the critical essays and books exploring Kroetsch’s postmodernism are (listed chronologically) Louis MacKendrick’s “Robert Kroetsch and the Modern Canadian Novel of Exhaustion” (1978), Stanley Fogel’s “‘I See England, I See France…’: Robert Kroetsch’s Alibi” (1984), Karen Germundson’s “Reentering the Wasteland: Robert Kroetsch’s Postmodern Fiction” and Walter Pache’s “‘The Fiction Makes Us Real’: Aspects of Postmodernism in Canada” (1985), Ian Adam’s “The Home Triptych Via Modernism and Post-Modernism: Naipaul and Kroetsch” (1987), Robert R. Wilson’s “The Discourse of Museums: Exhibiting Postmodernism,” and the concluding chapter of Linda Hutcheon’s The Canadian Postmodern (1988), Neil Bessner’s “Beyond Two Solitudes, After Survival: Postmodern Fiction in Canada” and Martin Kuester’s “Kroetsch’s Fragments: Approaching the Narrative Structure of his Novels” (1992), Frank Davey’s “American Alibis: a Search for Robert Kroetsch’s Postmodernism” (1996), W.F. Garrett-Petts and Donald Lawrence’s “Thawing the Frozen Image/Word: Vernacular Postmodern Aesthetics,” and Marie Vauthier’s New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction (1998), Simona Bertacco’s Out of Place: the Writings of Robert Kroetsch (2002), and Russell M. Brown’s “Robert Kroetsch, Marshall McLuhan, and Canada’s Prairie Postmodernism: the Aberhart Effect” (2005). 2 Critical works discussing Kroetsch’s writings as postcolonial texts include (listed chronologically) Stephen Slemon’s “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse” (1988), Aritha Van Herk. “Crowb(e)ars and Kangaroos of the Future: the Post-Colonial Ga(s)p” (1990), Peter W. Sinnema’s “Quest(ion)ing Gone Indian’s Dialectic: Subversive Repetition and the Possibility of a ‘Centred’ Indigene” (1990), Dorothy Seaton’s “The Post-Colonial as Deconstruction: Land and Language in Kroetsch’s Badlands” (1991), Sylvia Söderlind. Margin/Alias: Language and Colonization in Canadian and Québécois Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, (1991), Lee Spinks’s “Kroetsch’s Narcissus: Alienation and Identity in But We Are Exiles” (1993), Gunilla Florby’s The Margin Speaks: a Study of Margaret Laurence and Robert Kroetsch from a Post-Colonial Point of View (1997), and Luca Biagiotti’s “Bees, Bodies, and Magical Miscegenations: Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said.” (1999). In contrast, David Williams compares what he sees as Kroetsch’s postmodernism with Rohinton Mistry’s postcolonialism in “Cyberwriting and the Borders of Identity: ‘What’s in a Name’ in Kroetsch’s The Puppeteer and Mistry’s Such a Long Journey” (1996). Several of Kroetsch’s essays have also been republished in anthologies of postcolonial criticism: “Unhiding the Hidden” has been anthologised in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s Post-Colonial Studies Reader (1995), and “Disunity as Unity” has been reprinted in Cynthia Sugars’s Unhomely States: Theorizing English- Canadian Postcolonialism (2004). 1 modern existence based upon life on the soil and/or in the wilderness: a desire for the elimination of what he sees as the corrupting influence of modernity. This thesis explores each of Kroetsch’s novels, from the early, unpublished text When Sick for Home to his most recent novel, The Man from the Creeks. My belief is that Kroetsch’s novels should be viewed as texts that reveal the author’s reaction against modernity, expressing his nostalgic longing for the organic wholeness of a world existing prior to modernization. In this introduction I will explore the concepts of modernity and antimodernism, briefly touching on debates about modernism and postmodernism which were current at a crucial stage in Kroetsch’s career. Secondly, I will relate Kroetsch’s antimodernism to the concept of postcolonialism. Finally, I will discuss the little-studied short story “That Yellow Prairie Sky,” written by Kroetsch in the 1950s and therefore predating the novels explored in the main body of the thesis. Looking back over Kroetsch’s fiction, it is clear that his novels were written over the course of a period when issues about the boundaries of the terms modernism and postmodernism were under debate. Kroetsch embroils himself in these debates through his own criticism. For example, in his introduction to the 1974 “Canadian Issue” of the journal boundary 2, Kroetsch states that “Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern. Morley Callaghan3 went to Paris and met the Modern writers; he, for Canada experienced the real and symbolic encounter; he, heroically and successfully, resisted. The country that invented Marshall McLuhan 4 and Northrop Frye did so by not ever being Modern” (1). The trouble with this 3 Morley Callaghan (1903-1990) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and broadcaster. 4 In later works Kroetsch indicates that Frye is a modernist in his “trying to assert the oneness, the unity of all narrative” (“Disunity as Unity” 24). Russell M. Brown reports that Kroetsch contrasts McLuhan and Frye in an unpublished 1970 lecture. According to Brown’s account, Kroetsch argues that Frye is “a late spokesman for Modernism, reconstructing the Modernist project of containing and synthesizing through myth, while McLuhan provides an alternative direction – one that leads into what, from our current vantage point, looks like a deconstructive postmodernism, in which coherence gives way to multiplicity, and synthesis and meaning become elusive” (“Robert Kroetsch, Marshall McLuhan, and Canada’s Prairie Postmodernism”, 125). It is significant
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