Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives

Home , Man Descending, Thomas Wharton (author)

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository

Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations

2019-08-01 Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives

Bolay, Jordan

Bolay, J. (2019). Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/110704 doctoral thesis

University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Questions of Trace:

Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives

Jordan Bolay

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2019

ABSTRACT

Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary

Archives excavates the documents, both archival and published, of politically-inclined works by

Guy Vanderhaeghe, Katherine Govier, and Robert Kroetsch to examine depictions of progressivism and agrarian socialism in 20th-century western Canada. The fonds serve as case studies to theorise archival presence, absence, and trace. I conclude by unpacking the politics inherent to the archive and the practice of academic collection. Specifically, I examine how digitisation radicalises the archive’s spatiality and alters the relationship between author, text, reader, and archive to serve a necromantic function: it raises the author as an uncanny simulation, a revenant coming back to the text, the selection, the present. Drawing on the works of Jacques Derrida and others, I show how this evocation deconstructs the archive’s own nature, becoming a mystical enunciation that haunts the ecology of the digital environment.

Poems and flash fictions introduce each of the thesis’ chapters, adopting the style and/or subject matter of the primary texts to reflect the themes that will be discussed and to engage with the discourses that will be employed in the critical writing that follows. My project employs a creative, conceptual, practice-based, and meta-cognitive approach to research that re-collects authors’ texts and characters, but also interpretations thereof, blurring the boundaries between genres of academic writing.

PREFACE

Parts of this study’s Introduction and Notes Toward a Conclusion were published as “From Hay

Fever to Archive Fever: A Meta-Cognitive Reflection on the University of Calgary’s Canadian

Literary Archive” in Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 154-170.

Regime was originally published as “Rest” in ti-TCR, vol. 17, pp. 41-44 and was an honourable

mention for The Capilano Review’s Translate and Transform Contest.

Excerpts from Would-Be Dr. Me and Nicknames were published as “Skeena Drive” on Rejected

McSweeney’s Lists and “A Case of Cider and a Cat Hair Allergy” in NōD, vol. 21, pp. 30-37.

Leaving Ajawan was first published under the same name in Obra/Artifact, no. 3, n.p., and then in Folklore, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 26-29.

Sections of “Same Old Ed, … Uncommitted” are under second review for Text Matters, vol. 9.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my supervisor, Professor Aritha van Herk. Your continual encouragement

of experimentation lead to my inclusion of creative interjections, while your judicious editorial

hand tempered my playfulness into a structured final draft.

Thank you to my internal committee members, Dr. Jason Wiens and Dr. Jon Kertzer. I

appreciate the feedback you have both provided me over the last two years for various chapter

drafts. Thank you also to my external committee members, Dr. Daniel Coleman and Dr. Tom

Langford. The breadth of your collective perspectives and experiences rounded out this project.

Thank you to the other faculty members, fellow students, and artists who have guided me

throughout this process: Dr. David Sigler, Dr. Jacqueline Jenkins, Dr. Anthony Camara, Will

Best, Joshua Whitehead, Jess Nicol, Tom Sewel, Celiese Lypka, Taylor Skaalrud, Ben Groh,

Paul Meunier, Chris Kelly, Nikki Sheppy, and Marc Lynch.

Thank you to my parents, Eric and Lori, and my siblings, Kiara and Loïc, and to my

many friends back home, who, despite their bafflement at claims that the “archiving archive … determines the structure of the archivable content,” supported me unyieldingly throughout my studies, research, and writing.

To my partner Allie, I don’t have the words to thank you properly—I “cannot say what

[I] mean, [I] can only say what [I] say.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... ii

Preface...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

List of Figures ...... vii

Epigraph ...... 1

Regina Manifesto ...... 2

Introduction: From Hay Fever to Archive Fever (A Regionalist’s Journey) ...... 17

Every Place Must Have Its Monuments...... 46

The Pursuit of Placelessness ...... 46

good land, badlands, Grasslands ...... 50

Home/Place ...... 54

“A Case of Automatic Handwriting”: Characters Crafting Archives in Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch (The Presence of Presence) ...... 59

Shepherds Play in the Dustbowl ...... 77

“Taking the Credit”: Backstrom’s Pursuit of Politics in The Words of My Roaring ...... 87

“My Dear Friends, Rain”: Backstrom’s Myth-Making and Metanarrative ...... 89

Rain, Voice, and Text, Becoming Trace ...... 105

Would-Be Dr. Me ...... 112

“Same Old Ed, … Uncommitted”: Progressivism in Vanderhaeghe’s Early Fiction ...... 122

“Non-Violent Shit-Disturbers”: Social Critics and Criticized Socialists ...... 126

Ed, a Man Descending on BMW Socialists ...... 135

Ed, a Post-Rogue Avoiding the Present Age...... 144

Becoming Lost: Rediscovering Absence Through the Vanderhaeghe Fonds...... 152

Nicknames...... 166

“They Don’t Like ‘Local’ History”: Tracing Political Intersections in Govier’s Between Men 178

Suzanne Veil: Between Men and Discourses ...... 181

Suzanne Veil: Between Haunted History and Narrative Intervention ...... 199

Becoming Found: Recovering Hi/stories Through the Govier Fonds ...... 207

Leaving Ajawan ...... 221

“Trying to Put the World Back Together”: The Politics of Dorf’s Pursuits in Kroetsch’s Alibi 227

“A Trace of the Discarded World”: History, Myth, Text, and Water in Dorf’s Narrative ..... 231

Rethinking Remnants Through the Kroetsch Fonds—Becoming Trace, Continued ...... 248

Interlude (In Which the Characters Interrupt Their Investigation) ...... 256

Notes Toward a Conclusion: The Present Archive as Politics (Textual Topology and Virtual

Necromancy) ...... 266

“I Suppose It Is My Job to Close that Gap Now”: The Question of Digitizing States of

Becoming ...... 266

Digitization & Digital Remodification: The Politics of Presence in Digital Exhibits and

Archives, a Case Study...... 274

“The Archive Evolved into a New and Distorted Form”: Spectral Archives and Digital

Collections ...... 284

Works Cited ...... 294

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 – MsC 27, 6.5.2, p. 09999 ……….…………….……………………………………. 109

Figure 2 – MsC 27, 7.1.2, p. xxxx 204 ……….…………….………………………………… 110

Figure 3 – C. J. Grant’s “The March of Roguery,” 1830 ………….………….……….……… 136

Figure 4 – 591/96.6, 40.1, p. 195+1 ……….……………….……………….………………… 251

vii

EPIGRAPH

The question is always a question of trace. What remains of what does not remain?

Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K

REGINA MANIFESTO

(an erasure of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Programme, 1933)

Exchange human needs not profits.

Replace the present.

Domination of class unregulated private enterprise chaotic waste of Power to predatory interests.

Habitually sacrificed private stimulus oscillates speculators and profiteers accentuated evils controlled and operated by the people.

Order is not one crushed by a system a richer citizen.

Political Commonwealth supported by the people.

In violence we consider interests superficial differences bound to government with big business constitutional appeals to far-reaching policies.

Planning Socialized income a task of balance consuming capitalist magnates but the public responsible as a whole.

Socialization Effective currency of Finance purposes itself to thwart or corrupt authority.

Socialised unused surpluses desired by Insurance Companies provide channels for organization.

Social Dominion essential Ownership day to day interference for private profit.

The same methods the extension of regime accruing from coal exploitation waste malpractices taking over the equitable.

Call for conscription of wealth recognise deadweight unremunerative debt functionless evils of patronage.

Agriculture Failure of the tariff burden the operations of cooperatives.

Commodities export tenure for disastrous conditions the greatest Canadian industry depression in agriculture workings of nationalism by monopolistic corporations.

Deflation to counteract purchasing power state substitution.

External Accordance through import Trade supply raw fitted strangling protectionists obsolete flow of licences enabled processing marketing the establishment.

Co-operative Wholesale state legislation Institutions of adequate credit.

Labour Code The spectre of poverty haunts technological developments community resources progressive state wages.

The undisputed right trade collective agreements control industrial democracy.

Socialized Science has become function Health freely educational but private Services prohibitive illness extended in enterprise. et al.

B.N.A. Constitution infringing upon minority rights Act upon the abolition of the Canadian Senate safeguards of power reasonably flexible.

The pioneer brought into line consequent centralisation of the last two generations.

The Fathers of Confederation failed into a bulwark of capitalist interests.

External Disarmament of the League of Nations Relations a League of capitalist Great Powers cooperation is incompatible with regime.

Taxation Glaring inequalities envisage the disappeared and Public articles of general consumption Finance drastic publicity given to uncontrollable expenditures.

The perpetuation of the parasitic class.

Freedom Repeal Fascist tendencies among governmental authorities and the inhuman propaganda of liberty.

Social Humanize the law. Justice Our archaic concept of human relationships based upon vengeance and fear left in hands steeped in outworn tradition.

An The present is a sign of mortal sickness Emergency the untouched cancer is eating Programme at the heart of our economic system.

Rest content it has eradicated the programme which lead to the establishment of the Cooperative Commonwealth.

INTRODUCTION: FROM HAY FEVER TO ARCHIVE FEVER (A REGIONALIST’S JOURNEY)

I am a prairie boy, a Westerner, and, in Barry Cooper’s words, “To put this point abruptly: when someone says, ‘I am a Westerner,’ he or she means something” (94). Robert Kroetsch reminds us in The Hornbooks of Rita K “that you cannot say what you mean, you can only say what you say” (60). However, Cooper insists that “the person is making an imaginative or metaphorical identification of place and meaning,” in his case through anti-federalism and a push for deconfederation, “answering the question: ‘where is my here?’” (94, my emphasis). This notion

of imagined identification with sayings and geography personalises, regionalises, and innately

politicises Northrop Frye’s notion that Canadian literary identity is rooted in the question,

“where is here?” (220). My here and its politics—the Canadian prairies and the rise and fall of

agrarian socialism—can be traced through writings on and of this place, mapped from

fragmentary archives through an archaeology of reading.

I first met Guy Vanderhaeghe not as a best-selling, Governor General’s Award-winning

author, but through a rare copy of The Trouble with Heroes, housed in the University of

Saskatchewan’s Special Collections. I first encountered Katherine Govier through a performance

of The Shoe Project, Govier’s “writing and performance workshop where immigrant women tell

the stories of their arrival in Canada – through a pair of shoes” (The Shoe Project). And I first

discovered archives through the actual stone hammer from Robert Kroetsch’s homestead. Yet, in

2014, when I moved to Calgary to pursue / exhume / excavate Western Canadian authors’

fonds—“the entire body of records of an organization, family, or individual that have been created and accumulated as the result of an organic process reflecting the functions of the creator” (Pearce-Moses, my emphasis)—at the University of Calgary, I had never set foot in an

archive, despite its prominent role in my proposed research. I had a background in special

collections, but that generally involved determining if a book should be archived, and then

sending it off, never to be heard from again, or so I thought. I expected the archive to be a cold,

dry, dusty place, and, having come from Saskatchewan, felt I would be at home. I anticipated a

prairie gothic experience, straining my eyes in the dim light, reading Vanderhaeghe’s

Saskatchewan, Govier’s historic Calgary, and Kroetsch’s Battle River valley as I absorbed pages that smelled like an empty grain bin.

This was not the case. Nor was the archive a collection of “stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are in fact close to us are already growing pale,” as Michel Foucault promised (129). Instead, the archive proved to be a far more ephemeral place—one that I have yet to enter—for all materials are fetched from the vaults and brought to the reading room: a naturally-lit, climatized space with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the Bow River and encourage one to gaze out to the Rockies. Furthermore, many of the archive’s materials are in the process of being digitised for online access, or exist exclusively in audio or video form, requiring otherwise obsolete technologies to ‘read.’ These facilitations of readership conceal the politics of archival access and navigation, what Max Saunders calls “a whole series of barriers and controls” that “are placed between the archived object and the person trying to access it” (169). Still, romance disillusioned, sublime instilled, at the boundary between ‘real’ and cyber space, I felt the “need of archives … burn[ing] with a passion … searching for the archive right where it slips away … right where something in it anarchives itself” (Derrida, AF

91). I caught the fever.

Throughout this study I play with different definitions of “archive,” from a conventional material repository to a Foucauldian partitioning of enunciative fields to a more creative sense of

text-as-archive. The latter is embodied in “Regime,” the erasure poem that precedes this

Introduction, and in the other creative works that introduce each of this study’s chapters. My

inventive responses to 20th-century prairie politics, like those I will unpack from the other

authors, engage with and complicate the multiple notions of history and archive through trace:

“what remains of what does not remain” (Kroetsch, Hornbooks 8). In the case of “Regime,” the

Co-operative Commonwealth Federation no longer remains; it exists only through

geographically-restricted archival documents and a digital repository that fails to mimetically

represent the broadsheets’ structure (Socialist History Project). In re-presenting this manifesto

within the contemporary movement of erasure and constraint-based poetry, I demonstrate the

persisting relevance of radical socialist thought in Canada 85 years after these ideas were first

presented (notions like livable wage, equal rights to wages and benefits, and co-operatives, such

as the now-defunct Wheat Pool and the more tenacious crown corporations of Saskatchewan).

However, in putting the manifesto itself under erasure, I simultaneously, and paradoxically, point

out the “glaring inequalities” that arise from “superficial differences” which have plagued the

history of social democracy and continue to occur in our contemporary liberal state. My project

employs a creative, conceptual, practice-based, and meta-cognitive approach to research that re-

collects texts, but also readings of history and literature, blurring the boundaries between genres

of academic writing.

The arguments within the more traditionally scholarly chapters that follow are themselves

recursive, reflecting Alanna Carlene Fero’s postscript: “A thesis is a unified argument. / Some

theses are unified. / This thesis is not unified. / So much for that” (232).1 My study has a

1 Fero’s poem, “Sketches of a Thesis,” adopts the structure and puns off of Robert Kroetsch’s anti-ekphrastic poem, “Sketches of a Lemon.” 19

rhizomatic, or at least aspen-like structure;2 the arguments grow, but as much into one another as toward a desired or required goal, and even then, simultaneously in opposite directions, like trees seeking both sunlight and water-rich earth. I do not merely adopt the “archival turn,” “the transition from the archive as source for research to the archive as the subject of research”

(Danielle Cooper 446), as theoretical a priori. Rather, my readings of Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch’s texts and fonds embody the shift cyclically: first the texts are read as

metanarratives of the archive, then each is read through its archive, then the archive through the

texts it contains, and finally the digital collection and the acts of textual production and

preservation are read through the re-collected texts. The ‘turn’ occurs repeatedly, regressing and

progressing as I re-begin reading each text a/new. My cyclical readings extend to the level of the

study’s grammar: when I present a series of nouns or phrases separated by commas, it is not a list

unless accompanied by an “and” and / or “or”; instead the words are permutations of one

another, alternatives existing within one another, instances of différance. Like the creative

interludes interspersed between chapters, this use of language invites a close reading rooted in

post-structuralism: a reading and speaking around the unsaid to glimpse different meanings. This

approach is central to illuminating the ebb and flow of archives—their liminal existences within

and between states of becoming trace, lost, found, and trace again—and their textual topology.

The geography and spatiality of an archive, and the fever it induces, are inextricably

connected to the way we read that archive. Of course, the question of how region inscribes its

politics upon a text—both published and archival—and how that text represents the politics of its

geographical space is far more interesting than the inscriptions and representations themselves.

Munroe Eagles notes, regarding regional politics, that “each of the ‘competing’ factors, such as

2 Perhaps unbeknownst to Deleuze and Guattari, aspen grow in clonal colonies and have rhizomatic root systems, rendering them the perfect paradoxical blend of the theorist duo’s arbor / rhizome binary from A Thousand Plateaus. 20

culture and economics, has its own associated geographic dimension” (9). He defines

regionalism as “a form of political mobilization best understood as a specific expression of the

relationship between human beings and their environment” (8-9). Harry H. Hiller emphasises the

distinction between a region, which, he says “is produced by people who share a territory,” and

regionalism, or “the politicization of … local traits into a consciousness of a kind” (33). In his

study on discourse and Canadian identity, Borderlands, W.H. New writes: “boundaries seem to

me to be metaphors more than fixed edges: signs of limits more than the limits themselves” (4).

And while these signs do include “territoriality,” New draws on Russell Brown to elaborate that

“[t]here is a borderline … and there is a borderland. The one names and divides; the other is

psychic, indeterminate” (4). For New, regional literatures “emerge from specific social contexts”

(Land Sliding 152), which Kroetsch calls “dangerous middles” (The Lovely Treachery of Words

71), suggesting that we retreat from our edges and centre ourselves through regional—and

potentially problematic—social identities. This regionalist consciousness, this ‘I am a

Westerner,’ is often “seen as a form of peripheral region political alienation” (Henry, S. 87), an

“amalgam called Western alienation” (79). However, “those with Western alienation are not

withdrawn from their politics as would be expected” (85); the West is deeply interested in

questions of politics, place, and their representation. Engagements with, re-presentations and re- constructions of place are so central to the writings of the West that a reporter once famously asked Kroetsch: “Now, Robert. Tell me. This Alberta that you write about. Is it a real place or did you make it up?” (van Herk 339). Of course, the answer to this question is both, and like all questions, it is one of trace, of the gaps that speak through the silences within the discursive hegemony of history, and within the archive.

In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault states that “history, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend

speech to those traces” (7).3 And “trace,” he writes, “is the opening of inscription, the gap of

deferred time” (121). The history of the Western Canadian prairies is full of monuments: inactive

grain elevators still bearing the emblem of the Wheat Pool, freeways in Calgary named after and

following the traditional trails of Indigenous Peoples of the Bow and Elbow river valley, and the

‘greatest outdoor show on earth,’ the Calgary Stampede. The literature of the West lends speech to and attempts to commemorate, rather than memorize, as Foucault suggests—to communally rather than individually bring into memory—the politics of these monuments, their moments and movements, but also their invasions. Terry Eagleton writes in “Marxism and the Past” that

“history is always in crisis; that an event becomes ‘historical’ retroactively, in the conjectures it forms with its consequences” (281). Thus, the hegemonic archive, while fractured (as I will discuss), documents the traces of monumental crises and their consequences, and is itself a consequence of a certain crisis in history—a need to collect, preserve, commemorate—a consequence of historification. The contemporary archive, as cultural construct and discursive space, and repository archives, such as the University of Calgary’s Special Collections, are postmodern in Jean-François Lyotard’s sense. They do not simply document monuments, but document documents of monuments—research notes and drafts of novels on the Social Credit party, the Stampede, the Dustbowl, and the Oil Boom. They contain layers of trace, wherein the narratives of the West collapse, are backgrounded, become another layer only hinted at, seen through fragments. By excavating the documents, both archival and published, of politically- inclined works by Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch, I intend to examine and explicate

3 All emphases are original unless otherwise stated. 22

depictions of and reactions to “progressivism,” or trans-generational, provincial, and national

socially progressive movements that actively oppose or ideologically challenge economic

inequality and laissez-faire capitalism.

James Doyle notes in his study of radically leftist Canadian literature, Progressive

Heritage, that the term “progressive” inevitably raises questions of terminology. Undesirable binaries arise when we ascribe the term to a movement, whether it be political or literary, and the same can be said of “progressivism.” Doyle cites opposition between the terms “progressive” and “radical” and points out that “Socialist” and “Marxist” “can raise similar problems” as can

“Socialist realism,” “critical realism,” “proletarian,” and even familiar genres such as “political novel,” and “realism,” broadly defined (14). I align myself with Doyle, with his place on the political spectrum of terminology, and his claim: “Ultimately, … I am no more interested in reducing Marxist terminology and ideology to a single definitive meaning than in placing the work of Marxist creative writers in a fixed position in any literary canon” (14). A notable difference between Doyle’s study and my own is that his focusses on the explicitly, intentionally radical: literature that emerged from the Communist Party of Canada and directly rejects

Northrop Frye’s notion that “the poet’s heart is no longer so far on the left side” (7). Doyle demonstrates that a “substantial body of poetry, fiction, drama, and discursive literary prose relevant to the traditions Frye mentions had appeared in Canada before 1929, and continued to be published after 1939” (2). On the other hand, I will investigate works that are not explicitly

Marxist but that nevertheless engage critically in socioeconomic discourse, particularly within the context of the rise and fall of progressive politics in the Canadian West. These early writings by Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch may be related to what Doyle calls the New Left— works by authors who “accepted ideologies and literary forms that were more or less inspired by

or related to Marxism, but they accepted other ideas and techniques as well” (293), namely

“methods and themes adapted from postmodernism” (265)—or, in some cases, perhaps even an

‘unintentional left.’ My approach to these authors therefore differs considerably from those of

previous academic readings.

Scholarship on Vanderhaeghe almost exclusively examines his later historical fiction,

with emphasis on masculinity (LeGier) and new historicism, particularly with regards to

representations of the Old West (Calder, Kuester, McLean, Wang). On the few occasions that his

widely overlooked early works of social realism and metafiction are read, they are generally

approached from a narratological perspective, focussing on storytelling (Kruk), biblical allegory

(Sorenson), and, in a couple of refreshing cases, metanarrative (Zichy) and Kierkegaardian

philosophy (Dunning). Stephen Dunning is one of few to comment on the “dialectic between Ed

and his age,” noting that Vanderhaeghe’s series of works on the character “not only elaborates on

Ed’s personal decline, but also locates it within a larger cultural descent, most immediately from the elevated idealism of the 1960s” (38). While Dunning is more interested in the contrast of

Kierkegaardian “aesthetes” and “ironists” in the Ed narratives, his insights, as well as those presented in a recent article on Man Descending by Francis Zichy, will lay the foundation for my interpretation of progressivism in Vanderhaeghe’s early fiction. Govier’s early political novel,

Between Men, has been almost entirely disregarded by critics and is no longer in print. The only formal engagement with the text is Dermot McCarthy’s, which focuses on characterisation in relation to the postmodern rejection of absolute truth and singular history. McCarthy’s article, which considers an author who has been “much reviewed” yet has “such a hard time being taken seriously” (107), will be central to my reading of Between Men as both meta-archive and precursor to intersectional politics, but its singularity is equally telling of Canada’s literary and

academic politics. Criticism on Kroetsch’s early works examines engagements with patriarchy

(Cvetković) as well as postmodern narrative voice and identity (Ball, Florby, Jennings, Sellery).

Jonathan Ball notes that for both Kroetsch and his characters “writing springs from a sense of place” (21). And while Ball, Florby, and others study how these characters (un)invent their voices, themselves, and their world, those worlds are politicised, regionally conscious, and commented upon by—sometimes unknowingly—socially-inflected voices.

Often in contrast and occasionally in conjunction with previous scholars’ investigations, I concentrate on Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch’s social perspectives through the lenses of

Marxist literary criticism, class criticism, and their intersections with discourses of the archive.

Terry Eagleton writes in Marxism and Literary Criticism that “Marxist criticism is not merely a

‘sociology of literature,’ concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully … to account for literary works in terms of the history which produced them” (3) and to unpack “the struggles of men and women to free themselves from certain forms of exploitation and oppression” (vii). However, it is noteworthy that this seemingly historicist approach is grounded in the notion that “the object of historical knowledge is some complex conjecture of past and present, rather than some autonomous region of antiquity quite unmodified by the contemporary gaze” (“Marxism and the

Past” 271). I will employ the above notions of regionalism and make use of Marxist, post- structuralist, and narratological theories (Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva) to unpack the neglected social commentary at play in Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch’s works and counter the historicist, nationalist, and anti-nationalist readings of these authors (Graham,

Harrison, Klein, Thieme, and Wright, “Making History”).

This methodology and its intersection with history renders inevitable the injunction of the

spectre. In his reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Jacques Derrida writes that “everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the spectre as apparition for the first time” (4). Marxism haunts the prairie politics of the 1930s in much the same way: “References to

‘socialism’ became less frequent in party [Co-operative Commonwealth Federation] literature by

the late 1930s” and an entire body of art reacts to the rise of that party despite its intentional

distancing from the Communist movements of Europe (Brown et al. 17). Thus, it is in the

literature responding to the politics of the 1930s that the spectre of Marx first speaks of Western

Canada, for “haunting implies places, a habitation” (Derrida, AF 86). Marxism continues to haunt the nation through the success of agrarian socialism in Saskatchewan, disrupting the

Liberal / Conservative binary at the federal level with the rise of the NDP. It haunts Calgary in the 1980s boom, which becomes ritualistic capitalism, keeping the spectre at bay with its own ghosts, such as the recurring Stampede and the elusive millionaires-turned-collectors, for “the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back” (Derrida, SoM 31). And as Eagleton notes, “for Marxism it is the present which is read off from the future, not vice versa” for “to suggest that the future may be inscribed within the present is hardly such a metaphysical assertion after all, if one thinks for example of Raymond Williams’s discrimination between residual, dominant and emergent elements of a culture” (“Marxism and the Past” 272-273, drawing on Williams 121-127). These post-structural approaches to history are reflected in contemporary Western Canadian literature but, more importantly, are paralleled by the works’ production and publication during the postmodern period.

Vanderhaeghe’s Ed stories, “Man Descending” and “Sam, Soren, and Ed” from Man

Descending, as well as the uncompiled “He Scores, He Shoots!” and the novel My Present Age,

Govier’s Between Men, and Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring and Alibi, were published in

the second half of the 20th century, during the period of what Linda Hutcheon calls

“historiographic metafiction” (61). According to Hutcheon, “to write history (or historical

fiction) is (equally) to narrate, to re-present by means of selection and interpretation” (66). In

historiographic metafiction “language in a sense constitutes reality, rather than merely reflecting

it” and therefore “readers become actual and actualising links between history and fiction, as

well as between the past and present” (65). While Marxist literature is most associated with the

social realist movement of the 19th century’s second half, postmodernist notions of reality and

rejections of history’s master narratives in historiographic metafiction overlap notably with

Marxist literary movements: to “‘reflect’ or ‘reproduce’ social reality … has been a deep-seated

tendency in Marxist criticism, as a way of combating formalist theories of literature which lock

the literary work within its own sealed space, marooned from history” (Eagleton, Marxism and

Literary Criticism 49). Works of historiographic metafiction behave much like archives, which I

will demonstrate in “A Case of Automatic Handwriting.” These texts document specific

instances and lend voice to traces, yet become themselves new instances of the monuments they commemorate. The writer, reader, archivist, and critic become the actualizing links between the historical realities re-presented and re-constituted in language and the contemporary perspectives on those texts’ politics.

The works are set, apart from the 1889 passages in Govier (which will receive their own consideration), between the 1930s and mid-1980s and are located explicitly in Saskatchewan and

Alberta. Jonathan Ball argues “the writing that comes from a place (such as the prairies) will be

the writing of that place” (21). Livianna Tossutti writes that during the 1960s and 1970s—at the emergence of historiographic metafiction—“economic and political modernization had paradoxically generated decentralist demands” resulting in a “new localism, which refers to the resurgence of … regional movements” and “represents a postmodern escape from the ‘alienation and identity loss’ engendered by modernization” (222-223). Contrastingly, Eagleton writes that as “the social and the individual are increasingly torn apart by the ‘alienations’ of capitalism, … great art combats the alienation and fragmentation of capitalist society, projecting a rich, many- sided image of human wholeness” (Marxism and Literary Criticism 28). But the regional postmodern novel is not ‘great art’ in the Victorian or High Modernist sense. It is aware of and depicts fragmentation and alienation, both regional and social. These expressions are many- sided, resisting master narratives of unification and totalization. While Eagleton argues that literature “does not … know itself as a product of a particular ideological crisis” and “needs to translate that crisis into universal terms—to grasp it as part of an unchanging human condition”

(16), regionalist postmodernism inverts these notions. The works examined in this study self- consciously engage with the ideological crises and socioeconomic conditions of a particular time and place. Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch’s postmodern aesthetics lend their work to regionalism, raising questions of identity, representation, and preservation, which are as much questions of geography and the archive as they are literary questions. For Tossutti,

“Postmodernity refers to a climate of rebellion against rationalism, and against a belief in the superiority of Western values and the existence of one … political centre” (223). This rebellious decentering, its aesthetic movement, and its underlying invitation to Marxist literary criticism are rooted, as all modern Western notions are, in capital. I will trace postmodern engagements with regionalism—geography, culture, and the archive—through the socioeconomic histories of the

regions that make up the Canadian West. The gaps between all these histories and the narratives

that retell them are notable: the works do not present History but particular permutations of

regionalist politics4—the unique literary representation of Social Credit / the fall of the

Saskatchewan NDP / the oil boom and bust, which blur the lines between literary and social

politics, as well as within (historio)graphic (meta)fiction.

While “Regime” both anticipates and embodies this blurring of literary and social politics

through its transformation of the Regina Manifesto, the next creative intervention, “Every Place

Must Have Its Monuments,” blurs personal and regional narratives as well as literary genres in a

suite of non-fiction poems. The section’s title, drawn from a line in “good land, badlands,

Grasslands,” connects to Foucault’s reading of archives and my own analysis of commemoration

in contrast with monumentalisation. The suite’s first poem, “The Pursuit of Placelessness,”

examines regionalism through a self-reflexive consideration of settlement and geography,

paralleling the more theoretical engagement presented above. The poem unpacks what it means

to write in / of a region and maps a relationship between language and landscape, a textual

topology that I revisit in the Conclusion. The second poem “good land, badlands, Grasslands”

elaborates on this relationship, tying in the role of capital through an exploration of Grasslands

National Park in southern Saskatchewan. The non-fiction poem also explicitly blends these

commentaries with the seemingly ‘true story’ of a personal narrative, embodying what Saunders

calls “autobiografiction”: “works that use the form of autobiography, but that fictionalize some

4 Now, reading myths and fictions of history within / through Marxist discourse might seem counterintuitive, given the field’s inherent connection to history and “the history of class struggles” (Marx & Engels 62), but my approach is Marxist in a poststructuralist sense, in a post-Derridian sense. Derrida, in “Maintaining now the specters of Marx … Plus d’un” (SoM 3), allowed us not only to be haunted by a Marx—one of many that is no longer ‘one’—but also to haunt Marxism. To imprint onto it and bring it into contemporary discourses. To queer it, to decolonize it. To imbue it with a pluralistic notion of history. And so, it is through this spectre of Marxism, which is itself haunted, and for which “it is the present which is read off from the future, not vice versa” (Eagleton, “Marxism and the Past” 272), that I read the textual mirages—historical and literary—of the Canadian prairies. 29

of the content, so that the narrator’s story is not the same as the author’s” (175). This concept

becomes central to the chapter that follows the suite, “A Case of Automatic Handwriting,”

wherein I examine instances of archival production, preservation, and re-presentation in

Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch’s political works before undertaking more extensive

readings of each work individually. “Good land, badlands, Grasslands” sets the stage for these

meta-archival readings by commenting on the modes through which the poem’s central narrative

is documented. The suite’s final poem, “Home/Place,” combines discussions of region, personal

history, historical politics, contemporary readings, and re-documentation through a five-part engagement with Prince Albert National Park, my own homeplace.5 The poem unpacks the

layers and traces of history held, found, and lost within that place by deconstructing different

spaces therein through the figure of Archibald “Grey Owl” Belaney. These poems’ engagements

with regionalism, autobiografiction, and the unearthing and (re-)documenting of trace, serve as a

Derridian exergue “to cite before beginning” and “to give the tone …, the meaning or form of

which ought to set the stage” for the scholarly chapter to come, “capitalizing on an ellipsis”

between arguments (AF 7). In this sense, each creative piece haunts that which follows it and is simultaneously haunted by that which follows.

“Shepherds Play in the Dustbowl” embodies hauntology in a more temporal sense, highlighting parallels between disparate times linked by similar socioeconomic situations. The poem / closet drama is modernised and adapted from The Second Shepherds’ Play by the

5 In his recent book on Robert Kroetsch’s long poems, Dennis Cooley—who refers to the “home place” in contrast with my “homeplace”—provides “three different ways of naming” the phenomenon through Seed Catalogue. “The definitions begin with deracinated emblems of science and technology,” latitudes and longitudes, data. “The naming shifts to include the language of recognizable local markers” and then “arrives at a place measured by social relationships …, worn in memory of the human body, felt in the pressure of bare-bone elements” (138-140). My poetic engagements with the “homeplace”—a single noun of two inextricable parts—through “Home/Place”—a grapheme expressing the two words’ interchangeability, but also the slippage and tension between them— recontextualizes the term within a place that cannot be a home, and that is defined by collected / collective cultural and historical memories in addition to personal and geographical ones. 30

Wakefield Master (circa 1500 CE) as it appears in The Towneley Plays, Vol. 1, edited by Martin

Stevens and A. C. Cawley. I set the adaptation during the Dustbowl—the Great Depression of

the Dirty 30s—in the southern Canadian prairies—think of a small farming town like Esterhazy,

Saskatchewan—for two reasons: the underrepresentation of that time and place in literature and its economic and ecological parallels with SSP. The shepherds’ early laments about England’s weather and class system allow for the play’s anachronistically doubled setting—both biblical and 15th-century England in the original text—to be transferred to the Canadian prairies and

become triplicate. The social commentaries made about low pay, unfarmable lands, and general

hunger and destitution are strongly paralleled in the hardship of farm life in the 1930s, further

lending to the play’s adaptability. The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama, edited by

Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian, provides historical and literary context, as well as

translations and explanations of key lines, as indicated by footnotes. Other notes provide

definitions for slang from the 1930s, incorporated into the text to foreground the narrative’s altered time and place but also to contribute to a unique shift in genre, from medieval pageant play to a postmodern poem of social fabulism. This play with time, setting, and genre lead into a discussion of Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring, itself set in the Dirty 30s and deeply invested in the religiosity of oration, postmodern textuality, and the seemingly supernatural characteristics of nature.

Johnny Backstrom and William William Dorfendorf, the respective narrators of their tall

tales—Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring and Alibi—are products of a particular history.

They both roar: about the economy, about their time and place, regionally and religiously. They

roar about rain and mud and mineral water. Most of all, they roar about themselves. But they also

produce fictionalizations of history; they speak into being socio-political climates that reflect real

events while simultaneously seeming to exist only within the texts, and of course, within the archive. These narrators mythologise disparate political moments in Alberta: the Dustbowl and the Oil Boom. Despite their differences in form (oral story-telling and journal), time (1930s and

1980s), and place (rural and urban, stationary and traveling), Backstrom and Dorf are kindred spirits, foils for one another. Both exploit nature—specifically water—for personal gain and advancement, Backstrom through his ludicrous platform based on the promise of rain in his bid for a seat as a Member of the Legislative Assembly, and Dorf through his search for the perfect spa for his wealthy and enigmatic employer. The men are in turn exploited by nature—by their dependence on nature—and are rendered helpless by their own narratives, unable to talk or write their way out of the troubles that their pursuits have caused. However, these parallel narratives diegetically occur at opposite ends of agrarian socialism’s chronology, around which this study’s structure is centred, and therefore my readings of Roaring and Alibi will frame my investigations of Vanderhaeghe and Govier.

Indeed, Backstrom and Dorf reflect the character types found in Vanderhaeghe and

Govier’s political fiction: they are the very sort of men Suzanne criticizes and finds herself amongst in Between Men, and they seek power and capital through commoditization like the

“BMW socialist[s]” Ed critiques in Man Descending (241). The promise of rain “Right after the election, … if [the people] vote for Johnnie Backstrom” originates as a simple misunderstanding between a farmer and Backstrom, who merely asks if people would “like some rain” (Roaring 8).

Yet, his statement is widely believed as a promise, as if to repudiate the actual state of drought.

As Aritha van Herk notes in her incorrigible history of Alberta, Roaring “explores the carnivalesque element of Social Credit that was its most appealing feature—it promised hope. It promised a dime for a glass of beer, it promised a green tomorrow, it promised rain” (Mavericks

244). The people do not care what Backstrom says about the rain, only about the implications of

what is said; he “didn’t say [he]’d make rain. [He] said it would rain” (Roaring 47). And despite

the misunderstood origins and the economic and environmental context of his incredible

promise, Backstrom gradually appropriates the tall tale as his political platform, for “in the end it

was the same old story” (114): one of rhetoric, “promising relief” to the listeners / readers, just as

incumbent Doc Murdoch does at the novel’s opening, “pack[ing] them in and … laying them

out” (4). Roaring combines an exploitation of the environment with Backstrom’s self-serving

capitalistic drive, for he “wanted to be extravagant” (119) and was running in the election largely for the sake of financial security during the tough times of the Depression (39-40). However,

Backstrom’s individualism unintentionally lends itself to progressivism. The town rallies and

becomes more communal in response to his promise, forming a weather-based collective, a ‘rain

pool’ that parallels the Wheat Pool, in direct opposition to the “high muckie-mucks” and

“plutocrat millionaires from the East” (109). Rain haunts the entirety of Backstrom’s narrative.

At the end of the novel, he is in fact rehearsing his election victory speech, sitting in his wagon,

in the rain that has begun to fall (210). The rain returns after a long absence on the prairies, but

for the first time in the narrative—a revenant, a ghost with no previous body. Rain is anticipated

throughout the novel, but as a haunting presence, for the entire tale is told in the past tense with

foreknowledge of the downpour at its end. Another specter is Applecart, the leader of

Backstrom’s party and a thinly veiled stand-in for the historical politician William “Bible Bill”

Aberhart, a disembodied voice haunting Backstrom’s political and moral ideologies (92-96),

leading him to reflect upon and allowing us to unpack the power and consequence of words and

the voices that shape them at the novel’s close (210-211). This underlying preoccupation with

the power of putting-into-words—the politics of literature—carries on into each primary text,

both those that this study contains and that it closely reads.

“Would-Be Dr. Me” adopts the narratological play of Kroetsch’s Roaring and adapts it to a setting and political motif that reflects those of Vanderhaeghe’s early fiction. As an Ed-type character, James rails against the phony progressivism of Saskatoon’s middle class, both from a downtown park bench and in the online blog from which the section takes its name. The story uses a combination of first- and third-person narration—between the blog posts that span months and the description of a single afternoon—to undermine James’s commentaries and highlight his hypocrisy. The story recontextualizes Vanderhaeghe’s paradoxical character-type from the Tory victory of the 1980s to the Saskatchewan Party’s upset of the NDP in the late ‘00s and from historiographic metatext to hypertexts that simulate a born-digital narrative (i.e. one for which there is no material draft or publication). This modernized form and setting allows the piece to comment on the more pressing politics of archiving in the digital era, which I unpack in this study’s Conclusion. Through its two inter-woven narratives, “Would-Be Dr. Me” anticipates the dual-layer commentary central to Vanderhaeghe’s Ed stories.

In turn, “Same Old Ed” discusses Vanderhaeghe’s works’ portrayal of late-20th century

social ideologies and their textual genetics within the archive. Zichy argues that if the typed characters (the Charlies, Billys, and Eds) “have been caustically critical of the implications of the progressivism to which they have been exposed, … they have also been co-opted by that culture, and have themselves exploited it” (57). By pointing out the duality of social awareness and political commentary, the Ed stories draw attention to issues that are greater than the characters they delineate. Vanderhaeghe deploys layers of social criticism through the duality embodied by

Ed: both a “non-violent shit-disturber” (MD 94) and a pathetic fool, immobilised by

circumstance and subverted by his own narrative. One layer of criticism comments on the new

urban progressive generation, those Ed refers to as “BMW socialist[s]” (241). However, beyond

the simple hypocrisy of buying into a system under critique, another layer manifests a counter-

criticism that comments on those who challenge social progress, questioning their motives and

credibility through sub-textual and dramatic irony.

But what is a BMW socialist? A socio-political chameleon hiding behind pre-tense? Ed

describes such a creature as a former “nay-sayer and boycotter” who “intended to dedicate his life to eternal servitude in a legal-aid clinic,” but then “affluence did him in” and now “his ass

[is] cupped lovingly in the contoured leather seats of his BMW” (237-238). While

Vanderhaeghe’s treatment of progressivism, like his ambivalent reading of masculinity, reveals a

“very confused business” (Faieta 264), the Vanderhaeghe fonds lack significant variants

pertaining thereto in the incomplete holograph, or hand-written, drafts. Comparably, despite the persistence of Ed’s disposition toward BMW socialists in My Present Age—his political characterisation appears to reset and recur at the outset of each subsequent work—there is relatively little construction / development of this perspective in the archive, and what little there is curiously contains absences of its own. One small change is a clarification, wherein the

“Waffle branch” to which a BMW socialist offers to donate money as coercion (MPA 85) is specified as a branch “of the NDP” (503/91.1, 11.2, p. 85).6 The Waffle was “an organized

caucus within the NDP” that “argued for massive public ownership” in their manifesto “For an

Independent Socialist Canada” (Brown et al. 23). However, these faint traces are clearly

insufficient for a successful genetic criticism—a textual genealogy—of Ed’s political coming-

6 Fonds are cited by [accession number], [box number].[folder number]; page numbers will follow when applicable / available. 35

into-being. This initial failure eventually led me to meta-cognitive reflections on my experiences with each author’s fonds, which led to new considerations of archival characteristics.

Within each scholarly chapter’s analysis of progressivism in works by Kroetsch,

Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch again are sections on what I have tentatively called

“archival states of becoming,” which draw on those authors’ fonds as case studies to explicate

absence, presence, and trace. In Vanderhaeghe’s case, we know, based on Horava’s bibliography

of publication history, which stories were likely completed first, but not the order in which the

drafts were produced, or the characters conceived. We know of archival absences—drafts,

revisions, and fragments missing from the fonds—that we can infer through genetic criticism and

assume existed in some form. The fonds demand consideration as to what extent these absences

are significant, and how an absence of politics in the archive complicates and brings into

question a reading of politics in the text. As Kroetsch predicts, it is “always a question of trace”

(Hornbooks 8). Although we cannot analyse absent material itself, the knowledge of absence

allows for a consideration of the gaps within an archive and for an investigation of texts that

become lost as we pursue them, for we contribute to their erasure as much as their material

absence does. Only when we seek a presumably present draft—a trace that we believe ought to

be in the archive—does its absence become actualised. This is what I will call the becoming lost,

the process by which investigations into the archive reify its erasures and gaps. This shift, this

archival turn, will parallel Foucault’s enunciative analysis in the Conclusion as I unpack the

implications of archival politics and their production.

The short story “Nicknames” wrestles with these challenges of naming and writing-into-

being from a writerly perspective. The piece continues a motif from Vanderhaeghe’s My Present

Age: the writer who relates to their fictional character while struggling to produce a metafictional

text within their own diegesis. “Nicknames,” as a pivot point to Govier, pushes metanarrative a

step further: the third-person narrator acts as the authorial voice struggling to plot the diegetic

narrative and characterize its protagonist Natalie, who is in turn the author of the metatext. This layering of narrators, combined with a close focalization that at times fails to distinguish

Natalie’s thoughts from the narrator’s, reflects the narratological techniques used to disrupt archived historical narratives in Between Men. In Govier’s novel, a focalized third-person narrator presents Suzanne, who in turn writes / adopts the narrative voice of the somewhat historical yet mostly fictional Murphy in her own historiographic metafiction. “Nicknames” takes a more playful approach to characters crafting characters within their fictions than Between

Men. The short story about narrators struggling to connect with their protagonists highlights the slippage inherent to any putting-into-words, but also identifies the power dynamics present within acts of writing. Through these same narratological devices, and amidst their political implications, Katherine Govier’s Between Men engages with the diversity, or more so the difference within discourses of late-19th and late-20th century Western Canada.

Suzanne Vail finds herself, as the title suggests, between men: her bourgeois ex-husband

Ace and the up-and-coming policy man from the East, Simon. The semi-focalised third person

narration allows the novel to comment on Calgary’s socioeconomic state through Suzanne’s interactions with these men. Objects of this commentary include the class disparity and poverty caused by the oil boom (16), the idea of “Calgary [as] a club,” the ideological tenets that the city maintains (77), and the Stampede as simultaneously democratising and practicing classism (97).

But beyond these critiques of economic advancement, echoed in Vanderhaeghe and Kroetsch,

Govier’s narrative challenges the field of academic history and its discourse, as well as specific and individual hi/stories as the “story of men” (39). This criticism extends to history’s treatment

of race—specifically Indigenous Peoples—and gender, exemplified in Suzanne’s analysis of

“Women and Indians” (160-161) and her commentary on single female academics as a class- segregated nation (183). Suzanne herself is a history professor obsessed with the story of Rosalie

New Grass, a Cree woman who was sexually assaulted and murdered by William “Jumbo” Fisk on February 28, 1889 (historically and diegetically). Suzanne’s semi-fictionalised account of

Fisk’s trial and the events surrounding the night of the murder are delivered in the first person through Murphy, a newspaper editor of ambiguous historicity. This interspersed metanarrative allows Suzanne to inject her social commentaries into a history centered on colonialism and patriarchy, evident when her narrative voice (through Murphy) foregrounds and undermines the squaw / Indian Princess binary (214). Suzanne and her narrative thus become spectral, haunting the class and gender dynamics upon which history is built. Rosalie is more literally spectral, rising from the bed where her body lay in the hotel and reportedly seen around town during the trial (218). Rosalie also visits Suzanne, in her own time and place, and delivers to the historian- turned-author the side of the story Suzanne has been pursuing and anticipating in her writing

(280); Rosalie is the specter that speaks for and lends voice to race and gender, silenced and erased from the archive of Calgary’s history.

The extensive and detailed historical contents of Govier’s fonds contribute to this intersectional reading of social politics in Between Men, allowing the archive to be read as both a source for and a genealogical history of the novel. The fonds contain everything from newspaper clippings about prostitution, real estate, the “corporate man,” and the oil boom in Calgary, to historical accounts of Rosalie’s murder, including Robertson’s “Policing Calgary” (1983) and a photocopy of the original “Statement of the Accused” from Alberta’s provincial archive

(658/99.15, 19). These materials allow for a deeper understanding of the discursive practices

against which Govier and Suzanne write than textual analysis alone. The fonds validate a

hauntological reading of the text, as one of the witnesses cited in the “Statement” claims “the

person on the bed raised up and looked at [them]” (15). However, the research materials in the

fonds also direct readers toward certain types of politics, historically present as opposed to being

fabricated or inserted by Suzanne / Govier. For example, the prospective buyer of the Turf Club,

Lowry (Between Men xii), is absent from the archive. Furthermore, the “Statement” makes brief

mention of a “Murphy” (9), but little information about his role in the case or the community is

given, allowing Suzanne to reconstruct the traces within the fragmented history of Rosalie’s

story. Finally, Govier’s novel raises questions about the politics of the archive itself: what

happens when we find racism and injustice in the archive, and how do we represent these events

in literature, reconciling their under-/mis-representation in both creative and historical

narratives? Thus, the archive once again allows for as much insight into its own functioning and

politics as it does into those of the work whose genealogy it contains, and Govier’s fonds

therefore help to unpack the politics of presence—of re-finding erased hi/stories, of pasts becoming found.

“Leaving Ajawan” reconnects the becoming found to notions of trace, history, and myth.

As James’s ‘final’ blog post, the story ties back to “Would-Be Dr. Me,” and, indirectly, to

“Nicknames” through Natalie and James’s previous relationship, creating a loosely entangled through-narrative as the study’s central chapters return to the framing engagements with

Kroetsch. The spectre of Grey Owl also returns after having haunted a different speaker in

“Home/Place,” anticipating the spectres of Deemer and the healing water of hot springs, which haunt Dorf’s quest in Alibi. “Leaving Ajawan” adopts the historiographic metafiction of

Suzanne’s nested narrative in Between Men—as well as its racially charged politics through the

depiction of a man who feigned Indigeneity, in part to promote conservation, but mostly to sell

books—and shifts that genre back toward the fabulism of “Shepherds Play in the Dustbowl” and

Kroetsch’s Roaring. The invented story of Belaney’s final days employs mythical elements— conversations with beavers—to dispel the myth of the man. Finally, and ironically, through this demystification of history, James fails in his textual quest to complete a thesis, just as Dorf fails to negotiate his own textuality in relation to his Odyssean pursuits.

“Find me a spa, Dorf” (Alibi 7): this message from Deemer initiates a plot of capitalistic

pursuit. Dorf must undertake a transatlantic quest to fulfill his employer’s demand. The spa, the right spa, is eventually found, purchased, and, of course, operated for profit (200-202). Even

Dorf’s mythologization of the water commoditizes it: in anticipation of Deemer’s visit,

“Deadman Spring [is] about to fulfil its promise, nature itself awaits the moment” (222). Nature, both in Alibi and in The Words of My Roaring, becomes an object of men’s desires and a catalyst for their personal political projects. Nature is a means to an end, simultaneously sought after yet feared: Backstrom does not know how he will address the voters now that they have their rain

(Roaring 211), and Julie threatens Dorf with death if he succeeds in his quest (Alibi 15). Despite the socioeconomically disparate settings of Roaring and Alibi, both novels feature narrators who simultaneously depend on and exploit nature for profit. However, Kroetsch’s narratives are undermined in different ways, yielding distinct commentaries on the pursuit of wealth through nature. Dorf, in contrast to Backstrom, attempts to live in communes in Cos, Kamares, and Laspi in Greece; however, he always does so in the service of his employer and thanks to Deemer’s deployment of excessive wealth. Even Dorf’s awareness that Deemer “thinks it’s his money and his silent manipulation that make the collection,” when in fact it’s Dorf’s “scrounging and snooping and … talking, talking, talking that make his famous collection” (195), is undermined

by the untold thousands that Dorf spends on travel, gambling, alcohol, and other carnivalesque

indulgences. The collector plays at communal life yet relies on Deemer’s financial control over private collection (and its production) to live out the extravagances of which Backstrom dreams.

While similar politics are present in both Alibi and Roaring, their sub-textual presence results in a dichotomous representation of prairie socioeconomics akin to Vanderhaeghe’s. Finally, there is the specter of Deemer, who, unlike the “specter … haunting Europe” (Marx & Engels, quoted in

Derrida, SoM 4), is one of the ghosts of capitalism. He is the enigmatic figure, always at the margins, so wealthy that he disrupts the proletariat / bourgeois binary by facilitating the conflation of the two within Dorf.

The Kroetsch fonds complements these readings of politics and the larger endeavor of reading the idea of trace in politics, not through absence (as is the case with Vanderhaeghe), or through presence (as seen with Govier), but through ambiguity. On the one hand, newspaper clippings, pamphlets from spas, and research on provincial elections, as well as research notes and annotated drafts, encourage the genetic criticism of Kroetsch’s novels’ engagements with prairie politics that I had hoped to find in Vanderhaeghe’s fonds. On the other hand, many of the notes for Kroetsch’s “political novel” are indecipherable (MsC 27.6, 3), and Deemer remains a specter even in the archive. None of the notes or outlines connect him to Eric Harvie beyond interpreted allegory, and Deemer bears little characterization beyond mystery and opaqueness prior to the first draft (591/96.6, 38.16). Through Deemer’s spectral presence in both the text and the archive, Alibi and the Kroetsch fonds comment on the role and function of trace and the politics of collections; both the collection of words into discourse (Foucault, Rancière), and the

collection of texts into canons and institutional archives (Davey, Hunter).

The Interlude captures the culmination of these textual and archival investigations in

ficto-criticism. This series of flash fictions adopts the style and characters of each work analysed

in the preceding chapters, collating the motifs and discourses that run through this study as a

whole. The piece ends with a scene in which the characters come together and disrupt their

authors, who have in turn gathered / been assembled in the archive. The concept of assemblage is

central to my approach to creative writing, this study’s structure, and the various notions of

archive unpacked in each chapter. “Regime” is assembled from words and phrases in the Regina

Manifesto; “Every Place Must Have Its Monuments” assembles memories—personal, familial,

geographical; “Shepherds Play in the Dustbowl” assembles disparate times, places, and dialects;

“Would-Be Dr. Me” assembles inter- and hyper-texts; “Nicknames” assembles disparate and

disparaging narrative voices; “Leaving Ajawan” re-assembles a fictionalized history into myth;

and the Interlude, this study’s final interjection, assembles all of the studied texts’ characters and

commentaries into a politics of language. As a lead-in to the Conclusion, the Interlude performatively demonstrates this study’s central argument: all writing, all collection and preservation of text, all putting-into-words is not only political but is itself politics.

Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch’s socially engaged works and their respective fonds

allow us to examine some of the roles of, functions of, and reactions to progressivism and capitalism in Western Canadian literature. More significantly, these works also serve as case

studies for an investigation into the politics of presence—the ideological apparatuses that trace

lines around the sayable and attempt to parse events into historical discourse, inevitably yet

unintentionally sketching specters of the vanished. The Vanderhaeghe fonds are almost

exclusively literary and seemingly depoliticized despite the commentary that resounds

throughout his early works, like the Beast’s voice on the radio in My Present Age, interpellating

us with convoluted ideologies, appearing like magic, from the ether. Govier’s fonds are deeply

historical, foregrounding her novel’s politics by reaffirming the voices of historical figures and the erasure of others’. And Kroetsch’s fonds are intensely personal, containing private letters, journal entries, and spontaneous declarations of love amongst the nearly indecipherable notes on his novels. Each of these archived fonds represent a different form of trace: absence in

Vanderhaeghe’s case, presence—the re-presentation of that which had previously been

silenced—in Govier, and concealed or forgotten over-presence in the case of Kroetsch.

Comparing these fonds facilitates a cumulative examination of their distinct insights into the functionings of the archive and of the interrelations of personal politics, literary politics, socioeconomic politics, discursive politics, and archival politics.

An incorporation of the fonds into literary analysis recognizes the remnants, absences, and decisions at play within the writing process, archivization, and the study of both practices.

The purpose of this reading is not to lead readers into a neo-liberal trap of early perspectives on deconstruction—throwing our hands in the air and lamenting “its undecidable, it can’t mean anything!”—but to recognize that an inherent politics unfolds in the question of what is deemed worthy of archiving. What material is privileged and by which hegemonic structures? While archives are generally perceived as institutionalized, Kathy Fergusson argues that they are also

“to some degree, counter-hegemonic; they position themselves more or less defiantly as archons of anarchist resistance” (sec. 3). Eagleton argues that the “true bearers of ideology in art are the very forms, rather than abstractable content, of the work itself” (Marxism and Literary Criticism

24). Much like the literature whose genealogies they contain, archives can have radical, destabilising contents that are nonetheless enveloped in hegemonically and institutionally

structured containers. However, Fergusson writes that an archive “can be counter-hegemonic in

its practices as well as its holdings: it can be inviting, not forbidding; welcoming, not controlling;

its archons can offer interpretations while also letting materials have their excess” (sec. 3).

Through their engagements with social, gender, racial, and academic politics, the Vanderhaeghe,

Govier, and Kroetsch fonds function, to varying degrees, counter-hegemonically within the structure of a university library collection and contemporary Canadian literary movements.

There remains the persistent question of privilege, of who can access an archive, and

therefore of the authority held by the librarian, the researcher, those who fund a university’s

special collection, and the public. Thus, this study spends its (notes toward a) Conclusion on the

politics inherent to archival practices of preservation and dissemination, particularly within the

ever-evolving realm of digitisation. What becomes unique in the case of a public digital archive

is that the text, or even a specific selected permutation of a fragment thereof, can be accessed by

multiple people in multiple places at the same time, creating a plurality of objects that

simultaneously contribute to the collection’s dialogue while still individually inscribed by their

own space and place. The digitised, often remodified archive also lends itself to a rebirth or

ghostly visitation of the author through the unearthing of creative process and private

correspondence. This discursive multiplicity challenges the archive’s function as “first the law of

what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events”

(Foucault 129). The archive does, however, still define “the mode of occurrence of the

statement-thing” (129), although the time, space, and place of that occurrence have radically

shifted and multiplied through the application of digital technologies. Digital re-selection within a textual collection and the author’s hauntological return to the work radicalises archival space, yielding a post-Barthesian relationship between author, scholar, text, and archive, which I call

“virtual necromancy,” this study’s endgame.

Sitting in the reading room, rereading / rewriting a fragment from “Sam, Soren, and Ed” on the University of Calgary Class Projects’ website, wondering who else might be reading it, writing it anew, a new it, I look down at the Bow River. I realize that the river has become part of this object, this text, this archive. It takes part in “that which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies them in their own duration” (129). It has become part of the archives’ textual topologies, the seemingly placeless spaces that we perpetually pursue.

EVERY PLACE MUST HAVE ITS MONUMENTS

The Pursuit of Placelessness

I spent years in pursuit of placelessness I drove to the ends of roads sought an edge to the central prairie province a place I couldn’t quite put my finger on a space blank on every map not realizing that the emptiness is never empty that my inability to imprint on a place did not indicate my absence but its presence of hi/stories and Peoples and the idea of a void as invented as a map that is not penned.

When my father first moved to the prairies it wasn’t the flatness that got him it was the bigness.

Someone from mountain country he was overwhelmed by the size of space how little it appeared to occupy the openness filled in by sky by traces of forest and fescue bison and bison-hunters.

Those gaps didn’t weigh down press in as they do now quartered on the compass stretched across the horizon.

My mother’s mother came to these prairies from other prairies parsed by an invisible line whose medicine is now under guard patrolled by border police splitting states that meant nothing to the lines of my grandfather’s last name a Protestant from a Catholic Irish town.

Nana was drawn in by the land’s immensity wide eyes in the back of a milk wagon the New York of landscapes expansive and audacious.

And every street in Pile-of-Bones named measured purposed a gridded page of busyness spread across the plains.

My father my mother’s mother came to this place specifically by name but when they arrived it was so sprawling its name could not fill the map’s manila.

They found and settled upon place in the gaps of history and mapping after years of travel without the folly of pursuit.

I found myself trapped finding place everywhere where I thought I wanted none.

Being born of a place constructed as placeless I was brought up to bear witness to names taught to find my bearing by landmarks and monuments even if they were only run-down hotels abandoned beer parlours or new silver silos overstepping emaciated grain elevators still bearing the Pool’s faint wheat-gold emblem.

I was born into a world of place of place’s insistence that here really was Here that we really were Where.

I was too close to this place to realise its presences I needed to be where I cannot ask where?

good land, badlands, Grasslands

He picks you up from work van loaded with camping gear it’s already 16h00 over 600 km to go.

He does all the driving.

They’ve been fighting again she’s angry that he’s here with you with others with out here without her.

You’re an hour late stop to watch the Lights they dance over the border never seen them so far south before so vivid.

Try to take a picture camera can’t capture too much movement not enough exposure time archive with a would you look at that.

Arrive after midnight realise you have to hike at least 2 km before setting up the tent Saskatchewan law.

Make it to the top of a butte probably less than a kilometer in figure it’s good enough for a night try to find a spot to sleep. Cactus. Rock. More cacti. Takes forever.

Finally settled rock edging out of the hillside kneads into your hip good enough for a night.

The Park is a patchwork of prairie plots you’re told some ranchers don’t like the feds reclaiming their land not realising neither of them has any claim.

Some complain it isn’t a fair price you’re giving us it’s good land you know.

Treaty 4 $750 per annum for the bottom fourth of Saskatchewan a ‘fair price’ in 1874.

Some haggle the next Parkie I see on my land I’ll shoot them.

Mindful of local hospitality you stick to the Park boundaries drive down Ecotour Road watch the bison wallow spot a burrowing owl it spooks easily hops into the air flaps hard against the strong wind lands right where it left looks at you spooks. Repeat.

No wonder they’re endangered if only in Canada.

Hike the Frenchman River Valley climb Seventy Mile Butte spot one of the three naturally occurring trees in the Park.

Every place must have its monuments.

East Block the next day

setup camp in the valley above Rock Creek.

Parkies at the East Centre ask you to sign in every time you leave and re-enter more visitors more funding friendly competition with the West Block.

Into the unexpected badlands a fossilised Triceratops skull out in the open eroding the wind and rain touch layers unseen for 66 million years.

It is unlawful to remove wildlife vegetation or minerals from National Parks ‘they are protected for public understanding appreciation and enjoyment maintained in an unimpaired state.’7

Storm’s blowing in return to the Centre where’s your camp?

You point to steep dale slopes tent swallowed within stay with us tonight.

Us includes only the Parkie and his dog he’s French-Canadian but tells you to call him Jeff.

His dog stinks.

All night no rain just lightning your tent doesn’t burn down no wildfire no stampeding buffalo tearing down the fence breaking the boundary between West and East the grasslands and badlands of Grasslands

7 Parks Canada www.pc.ga.ca 52

that the ranchers assure you are good lands.

If the Park can last this long with minimal funding they’re doing something right.

But how long will they last with the money now that the people are coming?

Home/Place

Grey Owl Trail, Prince Albert National Park, SK a line through a place leading to a home cutting along Kingsmere Lake but beginning for some of us along another at the annual bonfire on Emma’s shores so when are we doing the Grey Owl hike someone asked pulled from my reverie a little drunk and a little longing it soon became clear we’ll just have to do it in a day waking up at 6 in Waskesiu taking the Kingsmere Road passed the Heart Lakes not knowing any of their old names attempted this hike some call it a pilgrimage just a few weeks prior we planned this trip together so let’s do it she’d said hands on hips holding a pack that weighed half of her we didn’t get far into the swamp and woods twice as deep and half as passable then I thought I could do this tears streaking my hot face and I thought of Grey Owl the woman who left him on that trail as we drove back to Waskesiu my childhood homeplace cramped in my parents’ old motorhome fell asleep in new dry clothes lying next to one another and I wondered where she had gone

Beaver Lodge, Ajawan Lake, SK a home a place but not a homeplace neither for Archie Belaney nor Anahareo not even for Jelly Roll & Rawhide born in Riding Mountain & living more for the lake the rough-hewn cabin logs overhanging the shore too permanent—the cast iron stove too heavy & prone to rust the cabin floor unfamiliar no beaver feces & spruce needles to mask the scent of snow mould the invasive new stove recently paddled & portaged for a sense of authenticity like Archie himself we make it to this outpost this high point of prairie hiking on our second attempt the guesthouse has not been maintained sunken roof & heavy chains on the door broken windows through which we glimpse dusty fragments of the solitary space the real home where the real Sajo was relegated away from her beavers & the lakefront away from the front Archie presented to pilgrims that the Park now presents through the tributary postcard placed on the polished stovetop

Grey Owl’s Cabin, Waskesiu, SK a simulated home prohibited from being a homeplace an exact replica of Grey Owl’s cabin reproduced for those unable to make the pilgrimage an arduous journey but the stove is in the wrong corner too large for the small space Friends of the Park Bookstore & Local History Museum the smell too dry & clean as curator I leave windows open during summer storms refuse to sweep the dust left by dozens of curious visitors trudging through in their unblemished hikers the buckskin jacket hanging on the coat rack wasn’t his there never was a coat rack in Beaver Lodge the buckskin belonged to Sam who donated it his family moved just south of the Park when the government reallocated the land for ‘protection’ taking care away from the caretakers close enough the blanket’s from Hudson’s Bay the bracers in the glass cabinet were his beaded by Anahareo as ceremonial wear brought back not bought or even borrowed after she was buried next to the allegedly empty grave Archie supposedly at the bottom of Ajawan Lake the devil’s deerskins indefinitely on display

Town Site, Prince Albert National Park, SK a homeplace in a place that cannot be home cabin dwellers may not spend more than seven months a year in the Waskesiu Town Site all lands are leased from the Crown at 99-year intervals Park employees are granted shared or family housing seasonally based on need and availability I’ve lived in almost every mobile on Elk street the third road and fifth landmark of the same name lake town road trail campground Waskesiu an anglicization of wâwâskêsiw Plains Cree for the red deer the wapiti we wrongly call elk among the many fixtures stands a solitary teepee static & uninhabited except for stories told only in Canada’s two official languages portable camping units made permanent plastered onto the earth in what some affectionately call the ghetto a temporary town site of settlement and annual abandon a centre where settlers like me are stationed then become nomadic sent out into the peripheral place to find a home outside of this homeplace

Grey Owl Centre, Waskesiu, SK not a home and barely a place a space in the homeplace the old visitor information centre stripped and gutted now a bike shop a gym a longboard drop-in bearing the name and face of the federal Park’s first fraud not as captured by Karsh or crafted in autofiction but stamped in a stencilized and photoshopped attempt at an image that imagines iconoclasm the shop neither a centre nor a margin a node in a web of capital as dozens of quadracycles weave through the town their triangular yellow flags blazing Belaney’s name down streets already named after his namesake advertising a myth worse than the man that he’d trade standing in his birch bark for sitting between bike bars

“A CASE OF AUTOMATIC HANDWRITING”: CHARACTERS CRAFTING ARCHIVES IN VANDERHAEGHE,

GOVIER, AND KROETSCH (THE PRESENCE OF PRESENCE)

I sit at my desk, writing a story about archiving, for a paper on archiving, for a book that

will serve as archive.

What I mean to say is that I am archiving my thoughts on writing.

What I mean to say is that I am struggling between passive and active archiving.

What I mean to say is that when I write a story with pen and paper, it archives itself, passively. Everything is put down; everything is imprinted. When I write a born- digital story—foolish millennial that I am—I must archive it actively. With track changes turned on. Save each version every hour. Never delete. Strike-through. Save my trash.

Treat my keyboard like a pen with 101 tips. But when I tell a story—orally, verbally—the listener archives it passively, and might choose to also archive it actively. They inevitably

‘get it wrong,’ but so did I.

Google Docs would be easier. Too bad. Techno-peasant of a millennial that I am.

A journal would be easier. A to-do list would be easier. A hornbook would be easier. People don’t keep them in their kitchen anymore, they are kept in pockets. @B—

B—: “the transformative power of books. Lovely. #hornbook”8

What I mean to say is that recording this would be easier.

What I mean to say is that saying this would be easier.

8 Twitter, 2017. 59

Beyond the relationship between text and fonds, many Canadian narratives engage

actively with the archive and, in some cases, with their own archives. For example, Alice

Munro’s “Home” and “Wood” were both rewritten and republished decades after their first

appearance, after Munro revisited and repurposed her fonds, and so the stories re-became found.

By contrast, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic constructs character and the plot around her from minute traces in an historical archive, shifting the becoming trace into a fictionalization of the becoming found. Texts can also reflect archival processes: modes, functions, and consequences of selection and assemblage. Erin Mouré’s Pillage Laud “selects from pages of computer- generated sentences to produce lesbian sex poems” ([v]) and thereby seemingly eclipses the author’s role of selection (Presswell). However, selection and the author’s hand’s hauntological presence can never be fully erased. Rather, the “intriguing aspect of Pillage Laud, a book of poems supposedly ‘written by a computer’ (back cover), is that ‘Erín Moure,’ the so-called

‘biological product in the usual state of flux’ (109), not to mention in big scare quotes, is not alone in her little writer’s garret dreaming up these sexy mechanized cantigas” (Zolf 231, quoting Mouré). Although the text and its project description attempt to conceal the author’s involvement in the mode and process of production, the very nature of that process, namely its existence as an archive, reveals a new relationship between author and text, one that unveils the former. Diegetically and meta-textually depicting the construction of archives—as repositories, discourses, and textual re-selections—offers new commentaries on the author’s role therein, especially when the authors / archivists are themselves fictional characters or fantastical constructs.

I argue that, in addition to engaging with the archive, the texts central to this study are archives. Danielle Cooper states that “the work [postcolonial and queer feminists] create

constitutes an archive in and of itself,” a metaphorical archive (451). I would now expand the application of this notion to postmodern writers who engage with and challenge notions of archive. Danielle Cooper reminds us “that metaphorical archiving is also a highly privileged activity imbued with its own authority” and that “Although these theorists’ work may challenge

what constitutes knowledge within academia, their methods are not necessarily accessible for

those located outside of academic contexts” (454). However, novels about archiving and those

that contain archived narratives (i.e. metanarratives of the archive) democratize this intellectual

activity by disseminating their archival practice to a much broader audience: a public readership.

Contrary to Saunders, who claims that “a novel is not an archive” (181), Brozgal writes

that “novels themselves operate as repositories where myriad elements are brought into contact

with one another, caught up in a synchronic but non-hierarchical web that is available for

hermeneutic activity” (49). Narratives themselves are a form of archive, selecting specific events

(plot) and people (characters) and signifiers (words) to put into print, to speak into being. Stories

behave as archives, keeping narratives—personal and fictional, traditional and contemporary—

but also traces of languages, cultural practices, histories. Thus, they blur the boundaries of the

nomative archive, they complicate “the question of the archive”—“where does the outside

commence?”—and its follow-up—“does one need a first archive in order to conceive of

originary archivability? Or vice versa?” (Derrida AF 8, 80). Vanderhaeghe’s texts especially

function as an archive of Ed’s meta-textual Cool, Clear Waters; Govier’s text unearths and re-

archives historical materials; and Kroetsch’s texts hybridize orality and textuality and play with

notions of authority / authorship, editing, and collection. In each case, the question of what

constitutes an archive and how / from what it is created—mitigated—is explored through

metaphorical engagements with states of archival becoming. Each of the works discussed in this

study comments on the idea of the archive and the politics interwoven therewith.

This is not a novel notion. Much has been written about the roles and representations of

archives in fiction. Saunders says of “fictions about the archive – what [he] shall call ‘archive

fiction’” (169), which can lead to “archive fictions within the archive fiction: stories the archive can be made to tell in this story about the archive” (170), such as the various retellings of Rosalie

New Grass’s story—the Preface, news article, and Suzanne’s metanarrative—in Between Men.

He concludes that “if the archive leads to secrets in these literary works, it is the literature that

lets one understand what the archive means” (173). I would posit that archival fictions also yield

insight into the function of archives, how they operate through trace and partitioning, and how

they invoke and reflect archival theory. Cooper refers to textual engagements with archiving as

“metaphorical archives” and provides the example of “Kate Eichhorn’s poetry collection Fond,

which depicts a fictive, fragmentary interplay between an archivist, poetry remnants by the

archivist in a dumpster, and the finding aid framework the archivist uses in a vain attempt at

organizing the poetry remnants according to archival standards” (444). “Metaphorical archives

that aim to aggregate, record, discuss, and share ephemera are sites for accepting how loss is part

of the process of historicizing” (455); however, these texts also foreground the politics at play in

preservation, i.e. which narratives and traces are most often and easily lost. I would further argue

that what Cooper calls metaphorical archives are metanarratives of the archive in addition to

being literal textual / material archives themselves, and not merely ‘metaphors.’ Meredith

Benjamin takes the notion of “metaphorical archives” in a more etymological direction: “What I

mean by archives in this case [within feminism] is not official repositories for documents and

materials deemed worthy of conservation, but rather, histories of lives and experiences, found in

documents, histories, and writings, but also in more banal and ephemeral traces” (630). Finally,

Brozgal most closely approaches what I will call metanarratives of the archive in describing

novels that “perform what [she] propose[s] to call an archival function. The term denotes the way

in which a novel (or any cultural text) may be understood as functioning like an archive” (45),

“through the representation of fictional archives” (47), “evoking an historical reality that would,

… later, be verified” (47). This last point is essential as it relates to the becoming found and the

idea that the document from the past will simultaneously impact its future—our present—and be

shaped, or haunted, by that future. Brozgal adds that “fictionalized elements of the work … also

participate in creating a text that functions like an archive” (48), accounting for creative

engagements with a historical archive, such as Govier’s; however, the idea of verification fails to account for the becoming trace and the becoming lost. Kroetsch’s and Vanderhaeghe’s meta-

archival narratives reflect and depict these archival functions.

Derrida famously asserts that “There is no meta-archive” (AF 67). But Hunt writes that

“when one writes about the archive, one necessarily and unavoidably creates an archive in the process (via endnotes, footnotes, bibliographies, works cited lists)” (28). And so, while this study is itself an archive, the works discussed within it—as well as the archivo-fictional Interludes partitioning its chapters—are story-archives and metanarratives of the archive: texts that comment on archiving while simultaneously being archives, products of archiving, and small pieces of larger literary archives. Derrida persists: “By incorporating the knowledge deployed in reference to it, the archive augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains auctoritas. But in the same stroke it loses the absolute and meta-textual authority it might claim to have” (AF 68). However,

it is precisely this lack of authority that metanarratives of the archive—story-archives—

acknowledge, play with, wrestle with, and unpack, as I will briefly demonstrate with each of this

study’s primary texts.

Vanderhaegue’s Ed stories can be read as an attempt at / gesture toward a “Big Book” of

Ed / Vanderhaeghe’s generation. As Zichy notes, the Ed stories “constitute, for Vanderhaeghe, as far as an intelligent, sensitive Saskatchewan writer (and man) can get in writing that [Big] book”

(56). The texts’ engagements with the idea of the Big Book, rather than the meta-textual presentation of the book itself, embody the becoming trace, for we cannot find the big book in print or in any archive, only traces of it within the book-as-archive. Furthermore, “Sam, Soren, and Ed” functions as a literal archive for the Sam Waters metanarrative, the western novel Ed writes in place of / after the failure of his “Big Book,” for the story extra-diegetically presents excerpts of the text that otherwise only exist diegetically, beyond the reader’s grasp (MD 251-

253). My Present Age then re-presents the first paragraph Ed wrote about Waters (70-71). This re-archiving of the opening passage to Cool, Clear Waters reflects the politics of re-selection and recontextualization unpacked in relation to the remodification, digital collection, meta-data, and interpretation that I discuss in the Conclusion.

The recurring excerpt, first presented in Man Descending, is faithfully reprinted in My

Present Age, and the passage itself is unchanged. Instead, what changes are Ed’s reactions / responses to the writing. In “Sam, Soren, and Ed” he describes the process as follows: “I edged forward in my chair and began to scribble in a white heat of composition. No more Flaubertian search for the bon mot. It flew fast and furiously. I was tapping some strange vein in my psyche, and pressing on for the mother lode” (MD 252). Ed embodies at this moment the impassioned writer, but also the anti-elitist writer, capturing in his character the masculinist values of the previous centuries: chivalry, strength, capability (253-254). This is the anti-progressivist Ed,

rejecting the institutional teachings of literature from the “College of Knowledge” where he

taught, crafting and reflecting himself as an outlaw who fills those he sees as the true knaves of

society with lead. Contrarily, when he re-presents the same passage, Ed comments: “I will not comment on the deficiencies of this passage. I will only say I wrote these words with a sense of exhilarating release … But even then I felt a prickly uneasiness linger. I could not shake the feeling that I knew this man. I believed we shared a history” (MPA 71). We see here a more reflective and self-aware Ed, an inkling of Waters’ autobiografictional elements and of the text’s

hauntological relationship to the author. Most importantly, the text reveals an awareness that

goes beyond self-irony, one that anticipates silence and a retraction from discourse, a transition—here meta-textually depicted—into the post-rogue. The re-presentation of the excerpt without changes also reflects the becoming lost in the notion of “automatic handwriting” (MD

251 & MPA 69) whereby Sam “came to the page too easily, fully formed” (MPA 70), suggesting an absent, earlier draft, a lost trace of creative process and de-cision.

Indeed, Ed (re)discovers “pages [he] wrote in the bad time, in that dusky room” resembling an archival vault (MPA 218). He feels the archival jolt when he “begins at the beginning with a surprise, the name of an old friend. Sam Waters” (ibid.). Ed believes he has found “Sam Waters’s first appearance,” explaining the “case of automatic handwriting” and the feeling that “something had taken possession of [him]” while writing (220). He concludes that

“Waters hadn’t been obliterated by electricity, by shock treatment. He had just gone deeper into

[Ed], into hiding” (ibid.). The novel functions not only as an archive of Ed’s meta-text and as a re-selection of Ed’s narrative arc, but also comments on the nature of archives and the process of archiving. Through this, My Present Age anticipates the necromantic nature of reading an author’s fonds, possessing the writer, (re)animating them and making them speak outside of their

own volition. The passage further comments on the levels of becoming lost that occur through

layers of selection, and the role of others’ agency and of technology in the cutting away and burying of trace.

Just before reading the end of this early iteration of Waters / Waters, just before rewriting

and (re-)archiving it in the extra-diegetic text, Ed has an epiphany: “What I am reading has to be the final copy. There are no alterations, no scratchings out, nothing added. The drafts which I scribbled in solitude, day after day, are gone, destroyed. I can only guess what was in them, for what I finally arrived at has the appearance of being willed” (MPA 220). Ed adopts the role of

the archivist or the genetic critic, one affronted with the absence that the act of finding can incite.

In other words, Ed as the meta-critic within a metanarrative of the archive anticipates, or perhaps

through a tongue-in-cheek Vanderhaeghe, predicts the experience of reading the Vanderhaeghe

fonds—a discovery of gaps. Through Ed’s realizations, the novel acknowledges the impossibility

of archival and textual origin, the notion that a presence is simultaneously also a trace of that

which is or has been rendered absent. The novel is a metaphor for the archive but also a creative

enunciation of archival theory.

My own creative engagements with the archive and the primary texts under consideration

in this study strive to underscore this embodiment of archival theory. In the way that Ed’s

narratives reflect certain experiences of archival pursuits, my poetic and prosaic interjections

evince characteristics of loss, discovery, and trace through the erasure, assemblage, and re-

selection of both material and fictional archives.

Like Vanderhaeghe’s Ed stories, Govier’s Between Men invents an archive in and of

itself, speaking it through Suzanne’s notions of archive and history: “She would have to make

assumptions, to invent” (41). However, the novel also adopts and repurposes a historical archive

in service to those inventions, as with the Tribune article excerpt (37)—an archival counter-part

to the novel’s Prologue and other retellings of Rosalie New Grass’s story. Further repurposings of the archive include a quoted excerpt from the “Statement of the Accused” of the original trial

(170), various letters such as Fisk’s mother’s to Justice Rouleau during the trial (270-271), and many anecdotal stories derived from these and other documents. These archival asides find their way into the contemporary narrative that centers on Suzanne. In one case, the focalized narrator tells us: “Jennifer was always given the worst cases in her office; this one involved a bawdy house called Pharoh’s down by Electric Avenue. The police had tapped the owner’s phone for months and were about to get him for living off the avails” (68). This sub-plot is based on an actual case documented in newspaper clippings and even photocopied transcriptions of the tapped phone conversations found among Govier’s research materials (658/99.15, 19.1). In fact,

Jennifer appears to be the only fictionalized element, the only invention around these events. But as with Murphy in the case of Rosalie’s death and Fisk’s trial, the insertion of this single new voice inflects the scene with a new politics: “Jennifer worried that the hookers had nowhere to go. Meanwhile, the men in the office had fun watching her tortured conscience as she twirled around trying to find the perfect moral position on the issue” (69). There are clear parallels with

Rosalie’s story, constructed by Govier’s scriptor through the focalized third-person narrator.

Many characters—historical / diegetic—believed Rosalie was a prostitute and therefore brought the circumstances of her death upon herself (this is particularly clear in Chapter 15 of the novel, which functions as an archive of the “third day of the trial” (211)). The parallel between these events, one historical and one contemporary, both built out of the material history of Calgary, suggests that little has changed, that history is still a “story of men” (39). Furthermore, Jennifer reflects Suzanne’s, and by extension Govier’s, struggle to find an ethical position from which to

work / write; both women are in positions of nomological power, using the word to establish the

law of who gets to speak, whose voice is present within discourse. Finally, like Rosalie’s story, buried in the annals of the historical archive, this sub-plot is only reported in relatively ephemeral newspapers and is easily lost to time, but the narrator’s focus on it allows it to be archived anew, to become found.

As Meredith Benjamin says of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, in Govier’s novel “engaging with archives—looking at traces of past women’s lives and recording contemporary lives to create new archives—[is] also an important strategy … in her practice of ‘re-vision,’ another ‘act of survival’” (629, quoting Rich’s On Lies). Suzanne-as-Murphy conducts similar practices, revising the historical traces of Rosalie’s life so that her story survives, so that her death is not

“the only recorded part of her life” (160). In turn, the scriptor creates an archive of an academic woman’s (fictional) contemporary life to revise perspectives on women’s roles in academia.

Suzanne engages on a more theoretical level as well, commenting on archival practices: “I have to weave my way through the sources, visiting the living, the dead, sifting the detritus” (85). Her approach is self-reflexively hauntological, anticipating the novel’s climax and the necromantic role of the analyst in relation to authorship and the re-partitioning of the archive’s narrative. The novel presents an exchange that relates to an archeological approach to archiving / history / creative expression. Simon asks, “‘Does Michelangelo ask the stone what it wants to be?’ ‘Well yes,’ [Suzanne] said … ‘He couldn’t make the sculpture on his own. He had to find out what was in the stone, didn’t he?’” (153). Suzanne must find what was in the archive—has to bring traces into a state of becoming found—then invent around it, just as Govier did, just as I have done in this study’s Interludes. Thus, Between Men reflects the becoming found and facilitates it: the novel not only brings to light lost / erased stories from an historical archive to re-present them in

a story-archive, but shows the very process it embodies, dramatizing the becoming found through Suzanne’s engagements with and commentaries on writing / archiving.

Curiously, one aspect of this dramatization is that Suzanne constructs Murphy as an active self-archivist: “I kept copies of everything, too, in a specially made book with carbon sheets after every page” (174). In doing so, Govier draws attention to the discursive nature of history, the politics of not only what is said around an event, but what is not said, what is saved, and what is discarded. This focus ties directly to the idea of (re-)writing when reading an archive

(Cornis-Pope & Woodlief; Kirschenbaum): to document is to interpret, to create anew, even if the document appears materially to be the same. This notion is reflected in turn in Govier’s photocopies from provincial archives, newspapers, books, etc. By inventing an archon who actively preserves alternate writings about the events, Suzanne constructs a notion of that which could have become found, most particularly Murphy’s plainly written explanation of the events of Feb. 28, 1889 (300-303), as revealed to Suzanne by Rosalie’s ghost (279-280). Suzanne is aware that the archive is inherently trace-based, that it always begins as a becoming trace: “there was nothing to give a comprehensive picture, only the oblique and random viewpoints given by diaries, newspapers, photographs” (161). However, she does not rely solely on material trace to guide the historical narrative’s recovery: “Rosalie had walked on this street, had stopped in this place, as Fisk walked up from the station. There, by what was now the hotel entrance, she had stepped forward, alone” (163). Her engagement with trace in / as place relates to the geospatial context of reading and archiving that I unpack in the Conclusion. In the passage, place itself, the landscape and cityscape, functions as archive, recording the boom and bust economy—the half- built buildings serving as Foucauldian documents / monuments—suggesting histories that are more felt than seen. Archival archeology is not merely an excavation of buried traces to expose

discourse around that which was lost / erased / silenced; the becoming found combines discovery with the necessity of being haunted by a place and witnessing the haunting of that place.

We re-call, re-visit the specter that haunts Between Men, that haunts the history of

Calgary, its archive, and theorizations of an historical archive: Rosalie New Grass. In the

Prologue, the men see her “sit, gather the red shawl around her shoulders, separate herself from the form on the bed and stand” (xx). In the meta-textual re-telling, “Rosalie’s ghost had risen from the bed, passed by the men and out the door” (163). And in Suzanne-as-Murphy’s invented experience “Rosalie stood before the window. She wore some light garment, it was the only way

I [Murphy] could see her” (218). Rosalie’s haunting, like the people and narrative she haunts, is based on the historical archive, around which the fiction of who and how she haunts, rather than the haunting itself, is fictionalized: “I went into the room where Jumbo was | the person on the bed raised up and looked at me” (testimony of one G. Nightingale, “Statement of the Accused”

15). The haunting presence blurs the lines between / within material truth (i.e. the historical narrative validated by material in the archive) and narrative invention. The historical archival validates Rosalie’s apparition within the fictional contemporary narrative and the unsilencing that the specter’s arrival facilitates, namely the verification of Suzanne’s alternate story-archive of Rosalie’s death. The novel thereby captures the hauntological relationship between history, text, author, and critic, intrinsically linking them to the enunciative field, to the politics of putting-into-words. The archon engages with these politics when they enter the archive and incite the becoming found.

Like Between Men, Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring functions as an archive of

Backstrom’s tall tale. The tale comprises the entirety of the story-world, and so, like Ed’s recording of excerpts of Cool, Clear Waters, the book-as-archive is the archive of this alternate

narrative of political history. The Kroetsch fonds therefore becomes the archive’s archive, documenting the reselections that the text underwent in becoming a novel; the relationship between an archive and its own genealogy, between product and process, reveals the meta- archival function of reading archival fictions. Roaring also captures archival remediation—“the representation of one medium in another” (Bolter & Grusin 45): it records a tale, an oral account of a permutation of Alberta’s 1935 election, that only ever exists diegetically in voice, but presents it extra-diegetically as printed text. Kroetsch’s scriptor begins to blend two traditions of story-telling and archiving, a practice that subsequent scriptors pursued for decades. Within his tale, Backstrom constantly cites the past: his baseball days and going East, but only refers to that which he has told; he retells the telling, not the tales. Thus, Roaring captures a paradox of recording and preservation: the tale contains the entirety of the story-world—the book-as-archive is ‘complete’—yet much of it exists only as trace, impeding our ability to truly know the occurrence, leaving only the enunciation, or an enunciation referring to an earlier enunciation.

While this narratorial play is more present in early drafts that feature more indirect dialogue, the published novel invests deeply in the idea of trace, and the process by which a text or event becomes trace. For example, the chapter “Wednesday Following” opens as follows:

“Let me say I was a roaring success for the six days from that stampede to the following

Wednesday … But Wednesday came, as predicted, the second last day before the election.

Wednesday came, but the inevitable rain did not” (111). The tale presents itself as an archive of the diegetic events, and the book functions as an archive of the tale, but in this passage, as with so many of the retellings within the narrative, Backstrom only orates trace—remnants of and references to events, rather than the events themselves. Pointedly, the day itself is only

“predicted” while the rain is “inevitable.” In the same way that readers have only heard tell of the

last six days, they can only predict that the narrative will arrive at this climax, knowing the

conventions of story-telling. The rain on the other hand is inevitable because, as we later learn,

Backstrom has been orating the entire tale from his drenched wagon on the eve of the election. In

the spectral rain to come, always already coming, Roaring diverges from the approach to an

historical archive that Between Men employs in the becoming found, and leads us to the

becoming trace. For, simply put, the rain does not come. On the eve of the “real” election in

central Alberta it rained at most 1.3 mm, and on the day of the election, not at all (Government of

Canada). In this indiscretion of ‘fact,’ the novel captures the essence of becoming trace. The

novel does not depict the 1935 Alberta provincial election, but an election of an Alberta, one that

is figured only in the traces of historical semblance archived in Kroetsch’s ‘Out West Triptych.’

Roaring is therefore a collection of traces that become further traces as we attempt to read them,

as we compare them to an historical archive. The novel evades Derrida’s notions of both material

and historical truth (AF 59) in the remediation from spoken word to set type and in the rejection

of known and recorded quantitative data. Through these evasions, the novel disrupts our ability

to read history-as-narrative, the kind of found history that Govier’s novel facilitates. This

disruption parallels our inability to read the narrative’s history in Kroetsch’s fonds that are

perpetually becoming trace.

The spectrality and historical discretion of the rain in Roaring relates it to the gap between Alibi’s Deemer and the historical Eric Harvie—also largely constructed and

fictionalized. According to Read, “what Kroetsch’s Alibi demonstrates is how the life and work

of Harvie as a collector is its own historiographic metafiction and can itself be considered and

read as a collection” (380). In turn, by showing the trace nature of Deemer’s collection, its

collecting, and its relationship to Harvie’s historical archive, as well as the nature of Deemer

himself, the novel becomes a meta-fiction of archival construction, a direct commentary on the practice and politics of rendering something trace. Cushman points out that cultural material must be rendered trace to be collected and archived: “the item needed to be made into a dead object, an ‘artifact’” and so it was damaged by being “taken from its context of use; … no longer understood in relation to the stories that place the item in its context” (120). Alibi depicts this process at first, paralleling practices of collection and preservation, and then inverts those practices: Dorf / Deemer attempt to collect living nature—a body of life-granting water—which in turn leads to human death rather than the death of the ‘artifact.’ Dorf incites this death drive both by carrying out Deemer’s desire to collect—to render objects into traces—and by archiving himself in his journal, recollected into a story-archive, first by Karen and then by Kroetsch’s scriptor. Karen tells Dorf: “you’d rather talk to yourself than to anyone else. You’re fascinated.

You invent yourself, each time you sit down to make an entry” (61). The journal functions as an archive of the self, but it is also a fiction. Rather than invent around an historical archive as

Suzanne does in Between Men, Dorf attempts to invent a new notion of self by editing the archival record of his quest. But in entering passages that fascinate him, Dorf only manages to construct a textual self-as-other, a mere trace or impression of self. This practice reflects the fiction of the archive, of the notion that a text can have a material truth and document a historical truth. Self-invention also reflects the fiction of writing the self: “Why else write what can only sound like autobiography, when I do not believe the autobiographical is possible?” (A Likely

Story 60). The impossibility of reliably narrating the self, in combination with Deemer’s parallels to Eric Harvie and Dorf’s own parallels to Kroetsch, ties to Saunders’ observations on autobiografiction.

Alibi, clearly skeptical of the idea of archive, critiques objectivist notions of truth and history, a practice that “is especially prominent in ‘autobiografiction’” (Saunders 175). Saunders claims that the genre is used as “a distancing device, in other words, which allows an author to write as another, to fictionalize the first person, and use another fiction, of the editor or transcriber, to hold it at a distance” (177). Given Kroetsch and Saunders’ positions that the autobiographical is always a fiction, Alibi may in turn be read as an autobiografiction with inverse characteristics, i.e. a fiction with elements of autobiography. Kroetsch traveled to Dorf’s

destinations in anticipation of him, visited spas as part of his lengthy research for the novel

(“Robert Kroetsch Places”). Kroetsch haunts Dorf as much as Deemer and the spa do: the author

returns in / from the archive—appearing in letters, journal entries, drafts, and, finally, meta-

textually in the novel itself. Furthermore, Dorf’s writing mimics autobiography through the form

of the journal, and the novel itself adopts this form as its final chapter (229-239), demonstrating

“a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to

the origin” (Derrida AF 91). Alibi is a postmodern take on autobiografiction: Karen plays the role

of the “friend who edits the journal into a novel” from Edwardian times (Saunders 175-176),

although in this case both Karen and Dorf are personae of Kroetsch, the writer and the archivist.

Saunders claims that “The archive is not especially relevant here [in Edwardian

autobiografiction], and what is sought in the reader is credence rather than scepticism” (177).

However, Kroetsch’s scriptor, through its construction of the infinitely unreliable Dorf, inverts

this search for credulity to incite and reflect our skepticism of archives. Dorf writes, “I must let

this entry stand as I originally wrote it, in the interest of making clear my own integrity” (Alibi

100), prior to presenting the allegedly unchanged journal excerpt. But has Karen altered it? Has

the scriptor? The answers to these questions are unknowable. This single trace reveals that the

entire novel is a compounded series of textual unknowables. The novel’s becoming trace, its

function as archival aporia, reflects the Kroetsch fonds, which do not permit a clear decipherment

of draft orders or even the order of pages and fragments within a given draft or folder. The text,

as a whole, then becomes a metaphor for and a textual embodiment of the way that gathering

texts—or artifacts—into an archive and attempting to order them not only reveals their chaotic,

unreliable, and constructed / selected nature, but incites and creates that very unreliability

through the act of selection and the drive to construct.

Dorf, at one point, becomes self-aware of the nature of archives and the folly of an

empirical approach to constructing history and the present, and although to no avail, attempts to

reject Deemer’s collecting spree. Dorf writes that “Deemer thinks he can take the law into his

own hands … just because he’s managed to collect a trace of the discarded world into his

warehouses” (195). As noted by Cushman, the trace is not discarded but a lost or stolen

component of a lived and continued (although often under threat of erasure) cultural narrative.

Nor are the traces that make up Alibi and the Kroetsch fonds discarded; they are merely deferred

as they are cycled back into the becoming trace. But Dorf is a fool to think that Deemer can not

make the law, or at least shift discursive space, by collecting, archiving, and causing presences to

become trace. These are the politics of partitioning that Kroetsch’s oeuvre, and any metanarrative of the archive or any meta-archival fiction is truly concerned with. This concern can be extrapolated back up to the macro scale, to Rancière’s politics of literature, which he describes as a “partition of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate

[experiences, data] and speak about them” (10). Rancière is describing the nomological function of literature on an epochal scale—the ways in which Victorian literature, compared with

Romantic literature, partitioned discourse. The question of which archives survive in / from the

Canadian literary tradition, and in what form they survive, has been intrinsically linked to

colonial ideologies of historical and material truth. Cushman notes that “through institutions such

as archives and museums, Western knowledge is enunciated, that is, brought into being, codified,

legitimized, and reproduced as knowledge” (119, citing Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience”). It

becomes urgent then to deconstruct and complexify the notion of the ‘enunciated’ by examining the modes and moments of enunciation, the inherent politics of all putting-into-words. This investigation begins with oration, the most literal speaking-into-being, and the attempt to capture orality as text, in the form of two works that play with the documentation of the spoken:

“Shepherds Play in the Dustbowl” and Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring.

SHEPHERDS PLAY IN THE DUSTBOWL

(a modern take on The Second Shepherds’ Play by the Wakefield Master)

Characters

First Shepherd Second Shepherd Third Shepherd

The set is sparsely lit and even more sparsely decorated—a shrub, a tumbleweed, a background suggesting a wheat field, though there are no stalks as it is the middle of winter, despite the near absence of snow. Rear stage right there is a wooden archway, like the entrance into a small barn or a large shack. The structure is leaning up against an old Model-T that probably has not run in two or three years. On the wall opposite the car hangs a dusty lamp that paints the entire set in a faint monotonous sepia; it stays lit at all times of day, even high noon, for the dust storms greatly reduce visibility. Thus, the stage floor is also dusty, as is the hood of the car, as are the walls of the shack. As someone from behind the archway turns up the lamp, FIRST SHEPHERD, dressed in worn high boots, rough brown wool trousers with suspenders, a dusty ivory shirt, and a poor vest or light jacket enters from stage rear left.

FIRST SHEPHERD

Lord! These weathers are windy! And I am ill-clothed. My hands are near numb, so long have I napped; 5 my knees they knock, my lips are chapped. Would that I could they weren’t, for I am all wrapped in sorrow. 10 In storms and tempest, now down East, now out West, woe is he who never has rest, mid-day nor tomorrow.

He looks at the lamp, then at the sky.

But we poor farm workers 15 that walk on the moor, in faith, we have nearly been put out of doors. No wonder, as it stands, if we be poor, 20 for the tilth of our lands

lies fallow as the floor, as you know. We are so hamstrung, oft’ tested, for-taxed, o’erburdened, and oppressed,9 25 we’re made tame and stressed by the high winds and the high muck-a-mucks,10 attest!

Thus, they rob us our rest, curse them Our Lady! These men that are well-dressed, 30 they cause the plough to tarry; what men say is for the best— we find it contrary. Thus, are farmers oppressed, so far as to miscarry 35 in life. Thus, do they hold us under, thus, do they bring us to blunder; it were great wonder if ever should we thrive.

40 For, if any fine thief gets a satin suit today, woe that gives that man grief or naysays! Dare no man reprove him, 45 or the laws he makes; and yet may no man believe one word that he says— not one letter. He could feed the whole county, 50 he boasts bombastically; and all is through the ‘charity’ of men that are greater.

There shall come a patron, as gratified as a grouse; 55 he will take my wagon, my plough also; then I must feign full fain to grant it before he go. Thus, we live in pain, 60 anger, and woe,

9 Translation provided by Fitzgerald & Sebastian (p. 158 n. 6). 10 A bigwig; colloquial and frequently depreciative. 78

by night and day. If a debt he is owed, he must have it— even if I must do without it.11 I were better to be hanged quick 65 than once to him say nay.

It does me good, as I walk thus by my own, of the world to talk, to myself bemoan. 70 To my sheep I will walk and hearken anon there abide on a balk, or sit on a stone full soon. 75 For I think, by golly, true men if they be, we get more company before it be noon.

Enter SECOND SHEPHERD, dressed like FIRST SHEPHERD. He does not see the other, who is backgrounded.

SECOND SHEPHERD

Benedicto and Dominae! 80 What might this mean? Why fares this world thus? Oft have we not seen. Lord, these winds make a fuss and the cold full keen, 85 and the dust so hideous, dry are my eyes as a sheaf. Now in cold, now in heat, now in mud, now in sleet, 90 when my shoes glue to my feet there’s no relief.

But as far as I know or yet as I go, we poor married men 95 suffer great woe:12 we have sorrow then and then,

11 Couplet informed by Fitzgerald & Sebastian (p. 159 n. 1). 12 Couplet informed by Fitzgerald & Sebastian (p. 159 n. 5). 79

it falls oft so. Silly patootie,13 our hen, both to and fro 100 she cackles; but if she begins to croak, to groan or to cluck, woe is he, our cock, for he is in shackles.

105 These men that are wed have not all their will; when they’re pressed in a stead, they sigh full still. God knows they are led 110 full hard and full ill; in bedroom nor in bed all speech leads downhill, this tide. My part have I found— 115 I know my lesson: woe is he that is bound and must abide.

By now late in our lives— a marvel to me, 120 that I think my heart rives at such wonders to see, whatever destiny drives, so it should be! Some men will have two wives, 125 and some men three, in store (but not at once!). Some are woeful that have any; but this much know I, woe is him that has many, 130 for he feels sore (in every ounce).

Direct address:

But young men, from wooing hath God you brought, be well aware of wedding, and think in your thought: 135 “had I known” is a thing that serves nought.

13 Attractive woman. 80

Much steady mourning14 has a wedding home brought, and griefs, 140 with many sharp dolors; for you may catch in an hour that shall grieve you full sour all your life.

For, as surely as I read th’Espistle, 145 I have such a companion.15 As sharp as a thistle, as strong as an onion; she is browed like a bristle, and sour looking; 150 had she once wet her whistle, she could full clear sing her Lord’s Prayer. She is as great as a bale,16 smells like a barrel of ale; 155 by Him before whom we fail, I would I had run till I lost her!

FIRST SHEPHERD

God look over the row! Full deafly ye’re sitting.

SECOND SHEPHERD

Finally noticing FIRST SHEPHERD:

Yea, the devil in thy belly 160 for so you tarry. Saw thou anywhere of Dawson?

FIRST SHEPHERD

Yea, on the fallow farming Heard I his holler (he’s no canary17); He comes here a’singing, 165 Not far; Stand still.

14 Translation provided by Fitzgerald & Sebastian (l. 94). 15 Couplet informed by Fitzgerald & Sebastian (p. 160 n. 1). 16 I.e. of wheat. 17 Talented female vocalist. 81

SECOND SHEPHERD

Why?

FIRST SHEPHERD

For he comes, hope I.

SEOND SHEPHERD

He will tell us both a lie Unless we beware.

Enter THIRD SHEPHERD, half humming and half singing a 1930s radio tune in a cracking off- key voice. He is younger and even more poorly dressed than the others, whom he does not notice.

THIRD SHEPHERD

170 God give me speed, and Saint Nicolas! Thereof have I need, it is worse than it was. Whoso could, take heed, 175 and let the world pass: it is ever in dread and brittle as glass, and always away, sliding. This world fared never so, 180 with marvels more and more, now in well-being, now in woe, and all things keep turning.18

Like water at Noah’s flood, never such drought was seen, 185 winds and dusts so rude, and storms so keen; some stammered, some stood in doubt, as I’ve been. Now God, turn all to good! 190 I say as I mean. For ponder: this dust so it drowns both in fields and in town and bears all down,

18 Couplet informed by Fitzgerald & Sebastian (p. 160, n. 6). 82

195 and that is a wonder.

He sees the others but does not immediately recognise them.

We that walk in the nights, our cattle to keep, we see sudden sights, when other men sleep. 200 Yet methinks my heart lights— I see villains peep. Ye are wraith-like! I will give my sheep a turn. 205 But full ill will will I sheath; as I walk on this heath, I may lightly bequeath repentance for my spurn.

Ah, sir, God save you, 210 and master of mine! A drink fain would I have, and somewhat to dine.

FIRST SHEPHERD

Christ’s curse, my knave, thou art a wicked aide to that farmer!

SECOND SHEPHERD

215 What, the boy likes to rave!

To THIRD SHEPHERD:

Abide unto later; already have we had food. Ill luck on thy head!19 To FIRST SHEPHERD:

The rascal came for bread, 220 and he is in a state to dine, how crude.

19 Translation for key words in these three lines provided by Fitzgerald & Sebastian (l. 150, p. 160 n. 9). 83

THIRD SHEPHERD

Such servants as I, that sweat and labour, eat our bread full dry, 225 and that upsets my humour; we are oft wet and weary while mastermen snore, yet come very slowly both dinners and liquors. 230 But thoroughly both our butter and egg man,20 when we have run in the dung, they grift us on our income, and pay us not full lately.

235 But hear my truth, egg man: for the dough that ye make it shall go sour after, when I my leave take; I shall do little, sir, 240 and soon tracks shall I make;21 for never have I ate till my stomach aches in the fields. Whereto should I complain? 245 From my staff should I abstain? Men say “a little pain a little pleasure should yield.”

FIRST SHEPHERD

Thou were an ill lad— to ride on wooing 250 with a man that had but little spending.

SECOND SHEPHERD

Peace, boy, I bade; no more chattering, or I shall make thee afraid, 255 by the heaven’s king, with thy pranks!

20 Money man, payroll. 21 To make tracks is to leave in a hurry. 84

Where are our sheep, boy? We scorn—

THIRD SHEPHERD

Sir, this same day at morn I left them in the corn, 260 when they rang to give God thanks.

They have pastured good— they cannot go wrong.

FIRST SHEPHERD

That is right. By the rood,22 these nights are long! 265 Yet, before we went, I would one gave us a song.

SECOND SHEPHERD

So thought I as I stood, to mirth us along.

THIRD SHEPHERD

I grant.

FIRST SHEPHERD

270 Let me sing the tenor, aye.

SECOND SHEPHERD

And I the treble so high.

THIRD SHEPHERD

Then the mid will I let fly; Let’s see how ye chant.

They sing as they exit together. The words are those of a 1930s radio tune, but the melody feels more like a medieval hymn.23

22 Middle English, “the cross.” 23 See Appendix A for a sample tune that I arranged into a three-voice choral piece. 85

Appendix A: “I Got (Medieval) Rhythm”

“TAKING THE CREDIT”: BACKSTROM’S PURSUIT OF POLITICS IN THE WORDS OF MY ROARING

The 1930s, as is well known, saw the Dustbowl devastate the agrarian economy on all levels:

regional, provincial, national, and international. Perhaps none were affected more than the

agrarian communities of North America’s great plains, amongst which we find the farm towns of

Kroetsch’s early life. In his own words, the “drylanders … had bet on a one-crop economy …

The soil and the wind and the absence of rain had made an agricultural society aware of new dimensions of daily despair and ultimate hope” (Alberta 56). Many people turned to politics or to religion, searching for that hope, and in 1935 most of Alberta turned to both at once. The

Depression sparked a new breed of politics, including the birth of the Co-operative

Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and leftist Canadian movements as well as radical evangelical movements such as that ignited by William “Bible Bill” Aberhart. Agrarian socialism flourished as early as 1927 in Saskatchewan, with the Wheat Pool securing 100 per cent of Canadian wheat marketing control (Lipset 102); it fortified itself both provincially and federally when Tommy

Douglas won his House of Commons seat for the CCF in 1935 (Archer 235-236). By contrast,

“most Alberta farmers, who had bathed in the political and economic thought of [Henry Wise]

Wood since 1916, were shocked by the radical socialist elements of the CCF platform” (Banack

98). But as the number of agricultural producers in Alberta increased, “the concerns of farmers required greater political representation,” resulting in the formation of the United Farmers of

Alberta, or UFA (11). The UFA signalled a progressive movement in prairie politics, rejecting

Canada’s two-party structure on the assumption that neither represented farmers’ interests (11-

12). The party established Alberta’s Wheat Pool and won three consecutive provincial elections:

1921, 1926, and 1930, despite the steady decline in wheat prices, which the government tried to

compensate for by guaranteeing the Pool’s debts (12-13).

But as the Depression wore on, the UFA lost more of its already dwindling popularity

and a new movement began to sweep the Albertan prairies and cities alike: Social Credit.

Spearheaded by evangelist William “Bible Bill” Aberhart, “Social Credit in Canada started as a

voice from the radio” (van Herk, Mavericks 243). After the device’s introduction, the “focus of

political communication shifted from the local community as radio allowed voters from different

parts of a region … to listen to a single speech at the same time. The governments of the day

used radio as a campaign tool to support their approach to governing, which centered on strong

regional representation” (Cross 118). Aberhart’s voice “proclaimed, with rising intensity, that he was a true apostle who had an infallible system by which the world ought to govern itself” (van

Herk, Mavericks 243). His “system” proved to be a loose interpretation of Major C.H. Douglas’ proposed economic policies. Social Credit’s political upset ushered in a new era of agrarian politics in Alberta, the origins of which were not unlike the radicalism of the CCF. As with

Saskatchewan’s precursor to the NDP and “[i]n spite of their collectivist sentiments and condemnation of the existing system, the Alberta movement, like C.H. Douglas himself, was anti-socialist” (Bell 71). Ironically, according to James Doyle, “Canadian Communists wanted to emphasize the theme of the ‘life of social struggle’ of the working class against imperialistic and capitalistic power” (3). Johnny Backstrom, the working-class undertaker in The Words of My

Roaring who struggles to make ends meet and rails against imperialistic federalism—as I will explore in this chapter—has communist inclinations, as does the anti-socialist party for which he is running. Social Credit historically aimed to “replace Canadian currency” with “Alberta credit” so that all “wages and salaries [would] be paid ‘as now, but in credit, not money’” (Bell 65,

quoting Aberhart). Despite the parallels between the CCF and Social Credit, the latter’s ideology proved to evolve along a gradually differing path.

Despite repeated snubs from the UFA, who refused to support or collaborate with

Aberhart, and despite policies ironically similar to those of the CCF, Social Credit swept the

1935 election (Bell 18). As a result, Aberhart was named premier of Alberta and proceeded to

“shap[e] Alberta’s political culture” with a platform based on Major C.H. Douglas’ idea of

Social Credit followed by “growing oil revenues and a stern anti-socialist message” (Banack

103). Douglas, a British engineer, “argued that the Depression could be solved by the state issuing individual citizens additional credit to enhance their purchasing power” (103). However, while “Aberhart and his followers were very successful in promulgating the Douglas Social

Credit philosophy in Alberta, … they evidently misunderstood some aspects of it and also presented various themes and ideas under the Social Credit rubric that were foreign to Douglas”

(Bell 61), including unexpected progress for women’s rights (73). These progressive externalities became more intentional and more central to partisan politics as the prairies pushed left in the following decades. But before turning to the long-term consequences of the rise and fall of agrarian socialism, Kroetsch examined the politics of oration, rhetoric, and mythology— personal, prairie, and Christian—central to the Social Credit Party’s first victory.

“My Dear Friends, Rain”: Backstrom’s Myth-Making and Metanarrative

Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring is full of it. “Six-four in [his] stocking feet, or nearly so, a man consumed by high ambitions, pretty well hung, and famed as a heller with women” (8), Johnnie Backstrom’s self-portrait paints him as the epitome of tall tale tellers.

Thomas Wharton notes in his introduction to the novel that Roaring “doesn’t only contain tall

tales; it is one. In Kroetsch country, prairie politics, like so much else, take on mythic

dimensions” (vii). And Kroetsch himself acknowledges that he was “mythologizing Social

Credit” in the novel, “mythologizing ordinary reality” (Labyrinths 122). This mythologizing of

the mundane not only permits Kroetsch’s text to comment on party politics and ideology, but

also constructs a new iteration of Social Credit and the Dustbowl, an oral / textual iteration

existing diegetically as Backstrom’s story-world and extra-diegetically as the novel penned by

Kroetsch’s scriptor. Innately mythic, this permutation relies on prophecy and revelation—in the literal and biblical senses—and exists uniquely in the text and voice of the novel. As Robert

Lecker notes, Roaring’s “title, setting, and first-person narrative perspective point to Kroetsch’s

growing interest in capturing a sense of ‘local pride’ by concentrating on, and frequently inventing, a voice and landscape appropriate to his notion of West” (35). Key to this claim are the ideas of “inventing” and “his [Kroetsch’s] notion,” which connect the novel’s setting and

narration to myth-making and, more importantly, to politics, to a particular form of Social Credit

in a particular representation of west, rather than the ‘H’istory of the West. Like Gabriel García

Márquez, who significantly influenced Kroetsch’s later work and who “had to invent Macondo to give voice to his version of his particular corner of the Americas” (Thieme 9), Kroetsch had to

invent Notikeewin to give voice to his version of a West, to represent “the complexities and

mysteries of Prairie experience” (10). Kroetsch writes that “authorized history, the given

definition of history, was betraying us on those prairies” (“On Being an Alberta Writer), from

which Linda Hutcheon claims his “ambivalence about history stems” (167). His approach is as

much a postmodern suspicion of master narratives as it is a regional and localizing response to

Laurentian discourses.

The novel’s commentaries on prairie politics are facilitated by its narratological structure and format. According to Carolyn Brown, the tall tale is “an atmosphere in which the line between fact and fiction is hazy and the manipulation of that boundary is a source of humour”

(9). It is a “fictional narrative, told as fiction” although it “masquerades as a true narrative, for it is told in the form of a personal narrative or an anecdote, and … it is sometimes heard as true … by the design of the narrator” (10). Of course, Kroetsch complicates the genre because Roaring centres on an event that is ‘true,’ or that is part of an accepted and documented history; Social

Credit really did sweep the election and the drought really did come to an end. That may be why the reader and Backstrom himself (who is his own primary audience) are tempted to hear / read the tale as true. Brown elaborates that “the writer who would successfully adapt the tall tale to print must make his tale-teller not just a type or a dialect-speaking voice, but a realizable character. And he must evoke … an implicit set of values and a common experience which can be stretched and exaggerated, creating that tall world which exists at the border between the credible and the incredible” (39). Backstrom evokes the values of Social Credit and the citizens of a prairie town during the Dustbowl. Or, at least, he evokes a certain notion of Social Credit, one that rails against the “high-muckie-mucks, … the plutocrat millionaires from the East” and the “Fifty Big Shots who milk the country dry” (Roaring 89-90). Backstrom’s complaint parallels Macpherson’s readings of the Social Credit’s perspectives on federalism and echoes the

Crediters’ notion that “the modern banking system ‘was established by deceit and trickery’”

(Bell 67, quoting a pamphlet, “What is Social Credit,” circa 1940). Roaring has all the hallmarks of a tall tale: local dialect, repetition (a story about Johnnie’s heroic baseball days is rehashed several times), and an oratorical style of delivery (“Let me say for once and for all…” and “I should add that…” as examples).

However, if we look to the Kroetsch fonds in the archive, we find that the novel is less of

a tall tale in its published form than in previous iterations. An early typescript draft (MsC 27,

6.4) reads more like an oral tale, containing more paraphrasing and significantly less dialogue

than later drafts. For example, there is much more said about Doc Murdoch, Backstrom’s Liberal

opponent in the election and “the one thing worse than a high-muckie-muck … a minion of

same” (Roaring 91), particularly during Backstrom’s lunch with Helen (MsC 27, 6.4 pp. 70-77,

pub. 50-54).24 By contrast, most of Murdoch’s speech, which opens the novel, is delivered

paraphrastically through Backstrom in the earlier draft, whereas it is overtly quoted in the

published novel (pp. 4-5, pub. 7-8). The shift across drafts, which moves away from the more

traditional format of the tall tale, allows the text to enhance its self-reflexive and meta-textual

approach: it deliberately fails at its own genre by revealing the nature and construction of the

novel as tall tale. Just as Backstrom ultimately fails in his telling, which, ironically, nonetheless

leads to his success in the election.

His outrageous promise of rain—“Right after the election, … if [the people] vote for

Johnnie Backstrom” (Roaring 11)—proves to be true. Proves to have always been true, as he is

narrating his story from a wagon in the rain, driving to speak to the voters who will cast their

ballots in the morning—an anticipatory victory speech. At the novel’s close, we realise, because of the use of the conditional tense in reference to the speech he would have to give, that

Backstrom is talking only to himself on a wagon in the rain and thus, meta-textually, to the reader (168). There is no audience to be duped into believing the story save him and a reader; for the former, the story is lived experience, for the latter, it is fiction. The novel further blurs the line between the credible and incredible, collapsing the binaries of truth and lie, history and

24 Where relevant, I have included the equivalent page numbers of the texts’ published version for the sake of comparing that edition to various drafts in the fonds. 92

fiction, by juxtaposing paradoxical perspectives with the very act of putting the tale into writing.

Backstrom speaks the ‘truth’ of his story as though it were a tall tale, and the reader reads a

retelling of history as though it were fiction. The shift to the present moment at the novel’s end

blends the character of Backstrom with the voice narrating his tale; as John Ball has argued:

“there is an association of the two I’s [Backstrom the narrator and Backstrom the character] in

the same way that there is an association of the levels of story and its telling: on both levels, and

for both creator and created, the same essential process is described by this book” (6). However,

this shift further deconstructs the novel’s function as exemplary tall tale. Backstrom, the tale-

teller, is no longer in control of his narrative; his voice can no longer appropriate and reshape

events into folklore, as he did with the baseball game, because he has arrived at the present

moment. Without a credible character delivering a personal narrative to a present audience the

novel evolves from a tall tale into a metanarrative of tall tale-telling.

The novel demythologises the story-telling mode through a metanarrative that depicts the origins, invention, adoption, proliferation, and consequences of tall tales; it reflects upon their social and narrative significance in relation to accident and circumstance, and, more importantly, in relation to agency, political power, and natural forces (i.e. rain). As John Thieme notes, “For

those to whom the Prairie world is still ‘new’—the non-Indigenous descendants of settlers—the inherited forms of European writing,” especially the realist novel, “seem inadequate vehicles for depicting landscapes where stereotypically the eye has been seen to have an uninterrupted vision to the horizon” (11). Consider the novel’s closing sentences: “I have never been so alone. But I had a duty and I couldn’t stop; somehow I would have to begin, ‘My dear friends, rain…’”

(168).25 These lines re-contextualise the story within the novel’s regional politics, reflecting

25 Ellipsis is original. 93

upon the power and consequence of words, the voices that shape them, but also their limitations.

Ball argues that “Words is in fact about … the bringing together of normally separate things, the resolution of dichotomies or dualities,” evidenced by the collapse of fact / fiction discussed above, but he claims too that “in doing this Kroetsch has undone his own interpretation of prairie

mythology” (6). By demythologizing the tall tale itself, Roaring allows its own mythologies to

stand next to the equally mythic recordings and documentations of ‘H’istory: Applecart next to

Aberhart, the Cree River next to the Battle River, Social Credit next to Social Credit— permutations of the same myth rather than myth derived from fact. This layering of the discursive playing field allows the novel to make its commentaries, within myth, on the nature of politics and the politics of nature.

Lecker notes, “One of the book’s central ‘mythologies’ is the Social Credit Party itself: as a political candidate Backstrom comes to embody a heightened expression of this party’s support for the Prairie farmer / little guy / underdog oppressed by the ‘dirty Eastern millionaires, the financial racketeers’” (36, quoting Roaring). Unlike Bell’s extensive arguments against

Macphersonian readings of Social Credit demographics and ideology, Backstrom’s iteration is anti-centrist and anti-federalist; the “election lines are therefore clearly drawn between Ontario- born ‘Doctor Murdoch, minion of the Eastern high-muckie-mucks and front of the Fifty Big

Shots,’ and Backstrom, the local boy” (ibid.). Lecker later writes that, “In destroying the old order (of politics and story) Backstrom announces the creation of a new order (of prophecy and myth). It is appropriate that as the demythologizer who undermines the system that threatens to define him, Backstrom becomes the remythologizer who undertakes the task of making speech”

(39). But despite Backstrom’s unnaming of the old order, both the politics of language and the language of remythologized prairie politicians play a perpetual role in the novel’s commentaries.

Kroetsch set out to “uninvent the world” (“Unhiding the Hidden” 43), and the first step to such

an undertaking “is to represent [that world] symbolically through some form of unnaming

engaged in by a character” (Ball 16); “a process that repudiates the past in order to affirm the present” (Graham 178). Backstrom is “the Depression’s dream of potency and freedom, ‘making himself’ into the fiction of flight from time’s bondage” (Thomas 45), but the novel’s delivery as tall tale necessitates an (imagined) escape from history as well. The question then becomes: what is this present? A significant distinction must be made between the present the novel depicts

(Alberta, circa 1935), the present of the storyworld (a two-week span in a fictional Albertan

depression town), and the present moments of the text (its composition in the mid 60s and its

various permutations as they currently exist in the archive).

In terms of textual genetics, Backstrom has always been the roaring underdog,

representative of the little guy, beginning with Kroetsch’s holograph fragments sketching ideas

for a “Rain Novel” and a “Political Novel” (MsC 27, 6.3). One note refers to the “ill-gotten gains” of politicians (ibid.), demonstrating the central role of irony and hypocrisy in the narrative. While Murdoch—the local doctor and reigning MLA—is characterised by Backstrom as the minion of the East who profits from poor farmers’ labour, Johnnie himself, an undertaker, hopes for “one man who was rich enough to die” so that he might “campaign Murdoch right off the dirt roads” and enjoy “Five solid years of good green indemnification” (Roaring 10). In the end, it is only through nature’s deliverance of rain that he secures his position. Kenneth Graham remarks that “Backstrom enters his campaign as a political opportunist, and, while never ceasing to be an opportunist, becomes, despite himself, a focus of his community’s hopes and values”

(179), even if that focus is simultaneously exploitative, dependent on the people’s desperation as much as their hope. Backstrom “cannot suppress his impulses toward compassion for a people

abused by conditions out of their control and understanding” (Graham 180), and therefore he exploits nature and people’s credulity for political power, rather than exploiting people’s wealth or labour directly. By basing his platform on the rain that the farming town desperately needs, he links his fate to the community’s. However, he also epitomizes “an alienation that rises from the inexplicable workings of economics and nature” (181). The connection between alienation and nature is most evident in the original idea for the novel: “We stopped the sun!” (MsC 27, 6.3).

This premise directly references agency (and its illusion), foreshadowing the consequence of man’s attempt to exert power over nature in the novel.

Another holograph fragment states that “people left [the] East—a kind of running away as well as a seeking” (ibid.). While Murdoch is notably from the East, Backstrom spent a decade there, “free and running,” and only returned to Notikeewin to take on the role of undertaker because of a conversation with Helen, Murdoch’s daughter, with whom Backstrom later has an affair: “Maybe it was her voice that caused it [his return]” (Roaring 25). Of course, Backstrom puts a different spin on his “short visit to the East” in his “hind tit speech,” claiming it revealed to him “how you get to be a high-muckie-muck. By stealing and robbing, that’s how” (90-91, my emphasis). Backstrom and Murdoch are paralleled in their flight from the East; both seek out the

West, but early iterations of the characters were less clear-cut in their dichotomies of East / bourgeois and West / working-class. Because of the lack of direct dialogue and political rhetoric

(on the part of Murdoch and Aberhart, who had yet to be mythologised into Applecart in the draft fragments), Backstrom and Murdoch are, in the early drafts, contrasted mostly by their relationships to death. Murdoch comes West seeking life, given his profession as a doctor and his

Edenic garden, while Backstrom seeks a career in death, a binary that persists through to the published version. Fittingly, in the original outline for the novel, it is Death himself who brings

the rain (MsC 27, 6.3). The shift away from fable, toward a natural or at least narratological

source of rain, emphasises the role of myth-making within the mundanity of rainfall and regional elections.

While the “country doctor” is characterised as a member of the “ruling class / old order” in the early notes, one who “defends eastern interests and says ‘blame ourselves,’” he also

originally had huge debts (MsC 27, 6.3). This aligned Murdoch more with the people of

Notikeewin and further opens the uncertain gap between the East and West from which the novel

originates. The mythic battle between East and West continues to modulate through the text’s

variations, with a version labeled “toward draft #2” (MsC 27, 6.5) containing a paragraph about

westerners being “skinned alive” by the East, which is subsequently marked for deletion in the

next draft (MsC 27, 7.1 p. Mon.2.7, pub. 49).26 While it may seem that this variant undermines

the novel’s politicisation, it steps toward a more layered and nested oral style than that of the

early drafts. Rather than having Backstrom narrate his opinions about Murdoch and Easterners

(as he does in the draft), the published novel delivers his judgements in the oratorical hind tit

speech, paralleling Johnnie with his verbose and charismatic party leader. The removal of an

early reconciliation between Backstrom and Murdoch further serves to oppose the two men and

demonstrate how a myth is made from prairie politics (Mon.3.12). At the edge of Wildfire Lake,

at the scene of Jonah Bledd’s suicide by drowning, Backstrom atones to Murdoch and vows to

run a clean campaign. The passage’s deletion reinstalls vigour in the political clash, deferring

Backstrom’s ethical uncertainty and his desire “to make amends” and “apologize” to the point of

no return at the novel’s end, after the rain has come and secured his victory, making him a more

indefensible character.

26 Some drafts restart pagination for each chapter and each section within the chapter. In those cases, citations are formatted [chapter].[section].[page]. 97

The draft’s editor asks in the margins at the end of the section if there could “be a more

vital issue between them [Backstrom and Doc]” (MsC 27, 7.1, p. 226), and Lecker argues that

“Kroetsch is not concerned primarily with the outcome of the election—with its closure. … [He]

is much more involved with the Murdoch / Backstrom dichotomy, and with exploring the

mythological and fictive tensions this dichotomy implies” (37). However, Kroetsch does write an

outcome to the election, and key to the complex relationship between the two men is the lack of

agency that either can claim for the outcome of both the election and the narrative. What the

editor and other critics who read the election and the novel’s party politics as unimportant do not realise is that this issue of Social Credit versus national capitalism is vital—even if it is pursued through a ridiculous platform—because it connects directly to the novel’s postmodern structure and deconstructive narrative. As Lecker notes, while “Murdoch reflects a central Canada that

‘speaks out of its sense of history,’ Backstrom roars for a western Canada that ‘speaks prophetically out of its sense of myth’” (40, quoting Labyrinths 135). This is the seminal ‘issue’

between Backstrom and Murdoch: the tension at play opposes myth and history, which the novel

complicates by retelling history as prophecy—as a myth already deconstructed—and by

manipulating the presence of rain. But returning for a moment to the novel as meta-tale, “What

the reader hears is Johnnie’s performance of the image of Doc’s performance” (Hariharan 90), or

what Bakhtin calls the “novelistic image: the image of another’s language” (44). This performative image applies also to Applecart’s speeches when quoted and paraphrased by

Backstrom, especially when he adopts Applecart’s style (such as in the hind tit speech) and even more so in the early drafts where Applecart is never quoted (MsC 27, 6.4-5).27 “Moreover,”

continues Hariharan, “Johnnie repeats the performance, lives it a second time, by narrating it …

27 Applecart’s evangelical speech is only fully quoted in 7.2, which is at least the 5th draft since 8.1 can be shown to have been written between 7.1 and 7.2, given the progression of editorial changes. 98

Johnnie then doubles his performance (and his fun) from a re-citing of past events into a projection of future possibilities” (91). This motif of deferral, repetition, duality, and recitation evidences the novel’s immersion in the discourse of spectrality.

The novel’s performances and events return, and are retold, but are conjured “as apparition for the first time” (Derrida, SoM 4); they exist only in Backstrom’s telling, only as specters. It is worth noting that this hauntological approach does not diminish the novel’s political commentary. As has already been argued, the novel embraces myth, and demonstrates the mythological nature of history; any tale about prairie politics is inevitably a ghost story, and this one is simply more self-aware than most. Applecart is doubly spectral, existing, like Social

Credit, as a “voice from the radio” within a narrative that is itself already hauntological (van

Herk, Mavericks 243). His “Who-er of Babylon” speech, on “the nature of dividends” and the

“dirty Easterners who were gouging the West,” in which “the Whore, it turned out, was Toronto,

and all her high-muckie-muck millionaires” (Roaring 30-33), is one of the novel’s most

aggressively anti-federalist moments. A regionalist political platform has become the

Heartlanders’ Old Testament, delivered as radicalism through new technology—a radicalism that

Backstrom opportunistically endorses. Applecart is the ghost in the machine while Backstrom is

the ghost in the book, speaking to us from a time and place that we cannot identify but know we

must anticipate prior to our arrival at the end of the novel. Hariharan writes that “Johnnie roars

and thunders across the breadth of the book, creating Coulee Hill and Notikeewin and himself in

the process” (46); Backstrom “creates himself in relation to his community by the act of

speaking, beginning with the words, ‘Mister, how would you like some rain?’” (Ball 5). Lecker

agrees that “Backstrom literally voices himself and his world into existence, … allow[ing] him to

create an open-ended universe predicated on chance and absurdity … Backstrom becomes a self-

conscious destroyer and renamer whose existence is defined by his ability to mythologize

himself and his community” (38). But if we accept that Backstrom is the destroyer of one

world—the world of fact and history—and the renamer and therefore creator of an alternate yet fictional, oral, and textual permutation of the same world—one of myth and prophecy—then that new world is limited to what he has spoken into being, to what Kroetsch’s scriptor has penned.

Backstrom’s open-ended universe is simultaneously constrained: it exists only to the extent that he has (re)named his story-world and to the extent that the text and archive document that naming. The narrative’s future possibilities are simultaneously irrelevant and inevitable. The only diegetic future is determined by other texts (namely The Studhorse Man and Gone Indian, which both refer to Notikeewin and Backstrom’s victory), but which have yet to be written, and by a rain that is hauntingly present during the telling, despite the orator’s supposed control over the tale he tells. The prophet, then, is right when he declares, “Tomorrow she will end” (152), for the following day is the novel’s, and therefore the storyworld’s last. Backstrom’s voice is a spectre of revelation, narrating the ‘truth’ and the end of his world from a prophesised future.

And yet, while he is in many ways the unlikely / unwitting messiah and God of his world

(as Graham argues), Backstrom is also an object of its creation: narratively, he speaks himself into being, and meta-textually, he is written into being by the scriptor. Kroetsch himself has pointed out that, “The author is not creator but created—by genre, history, convention” (Bessai

& Jackel 206). Backstrom embodies this confusion of creator / created: he is the narrator of an autobiographical tale and puts his world into words, bringing it into being, yet is simultaneously a helpless victim of that world and of his own narrative’s plot. “Johnnie wants the world, so he sets out to create it,” Lecker writes. “By promising rain, he becomes the prime mover in a fertility myth centered on the notion of prophecy rather than causality” (42). Despite being the

100

orator of a supposed tall tale, Backstrom cannot stop the rain from coming, cannot prove that he

“could have done it without the rain” (Roaring 166). “It could have simply waited” (163), he laments, reminding the story that he is as much the wall-eyed farmer at the weather’s mercy as

he is the prophet delivering promises. He explains to himself / the reader: “earlier I had believed

it would rain … Now I knew it would rain. There’s a terrible difference” (151). This gap between

belief and knowledge, and the collapse of the space between the two, parallels the novel’s

approach to history / myth, fact / fiction, and destruction / creation. Backstrom is created by the

rain—for it makes him a politician and validates his platform—and by the mythologisation of

Alberta’s history, of one version of Alberta, as much as he is its diegetic creator. Richard Henry

argues that “power rests in the mouths of the sayers … 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” (290). While the latter is true, Backstrom is largely powerless within his own space

of saying / said. Nature does what Backstrom says, but he is ultimately its victim, unable to

unsay what is already happening, unable to absolve himself of inventing rain or defeating

Murdoch. In the end, Johnnie is the victim / victor, fool / prophet, destroyer / creator, but also

destroyed / created: the “phallic hero, priapic god, is plagued with mortality” (Sullivan 169). By

contrast, Henry argues that “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 organizing principles of

experience” (293). In the former, Henry does not consider how this assumed gap changes in a

first-person narration. Second, Roaring challenges both of Henry’s claims: Backstrom’s story, as myth, is the entirety of the novel’s storyworld and of Johnnie’s lived experience therein, just as

101

the short text of Genesis comprises the entire scriptural narrative of creation within the Bible.

Furthermore, Backstrom’s narrative is organised as it was ‘experienced,’ chronologically,

beginning with the imprudent offer of rain.

As Hariharan notes, “the very promise that Johnnie makes during his campaign that it

would rain by election day is a western yarn now turned into auto-biography” (144). The

prophecy of rain evolves from a misunderstanding (“‘Mister, how would you like some rain?’ …

‘Right after the election … if we vote for Johnnie Backstrom.’ … ‘That’s not what I said.’

(Roaring 10-11)), to a running joke in the hind tit speech (“‘You’d be bigger clowns yourselves for voting for me—unless it rains by election day’” (92)), to a political platform, future-to-come, and, meta-textually, the basis for a novel (“All day I preached rain, and by five o’clock I was watching the sky for fear a cloud would blow up” (127)). Backstrom shifts from self-deprecation to adopting an impossible promise as his platform, allowing the myth to resonate with ‘real’ socio-political consequences in the story-world, echoing how the myths of history and their documents have consequences in the ‘real’ world. After the hind tit speech, Backstrom says,

“I’ve never been quite sure I intended to say that” (92), and promptly contradicts himself. He claims that despite the context of the promise, “in the end it was the same old story” (94), a story of perpetual promise. Graham writes that the “speech is an emotionally complex one. It is an expression of his ties of compassion and identity with the community, and a calculated expression of political opportunism” (182). Unlike Murdoch, whose “ill-gotten gains” are the result of, as Backstrom and Applecart believe, an exploitative domination of over-respectful, uneducated, and gullible westerners by wealthy eastern policy-makers and bankers, Backstrom’s success (politically speaking) comes from exploiting people’s dependency on the natural environment. Although he is not gaining a seat in the legislature by promising a strip mine or

102

pipeline, the prophecy of rain capitalises on drought, commodifies a weather phenomenon, and

grants him access to political power on the whim of an unpredictable force of nature and a

predictable plot point.

The ecocritical and political satire woven into the novel’s events is perhaps obvious on the surface, yet significant in its implications. Social Credit’s legendary sweep of the UFA was as unlikely and inevitable as rain during the Depression. Backstrom invents a platform promising rain and then ‘creates’ the rain—speaks it into being. He sows political seeds by representing

Social Credit as self-absorbed, opportunistic, anti-federalist, messianic (in the case of

Backstrom), and spectral (in Applecart’s case), but also political in Rancière’s terms.

Backstrom’s narrative creates a “partition of the visible and the sayable” (Rancière 10), for only the opinions and perspectives that he roars at us exist in Notikeewin. For all the narratological power that Backstrom seems to exert, he remains helpless at the consequences of the plot, driven by rain, and by the text. Social Credit’s evangelical promises of revelation and pastoral renewal were as doubtful as the politicians themselves; both Backstrom and Aberhart were certain of their defeat until faced with victory. It is this uncertainty, and the ethical dilemma that it instigates for Backstrom, that deepens the political capacity of promising rain within the novel.

As much as Backstrom exploits his rash promise in the pursuit of political power, he is also exploited by that promise when he tries to relinquish power to Murdoch and realises that he will be unable to do so (167). After the rain comes, Backstrom exults that “[he]’d done it, [he] knew” (151), but shortly retracts his statement and claims he “had nothing to do with the rain”

(154), though he also admits that he “do[es]n’t like to think the rain came without [him]” (155).

In an early draft of the novel, Backstrom says “My rain. My fool rain” (MsC 27, 6.4, p. 226). He believes he can control nature, own it, and profit from it; the rain is simultaneously foolish and

103

for fools: it is a fool for fulfilling his prophecy and granting power to his prophetic voice, but

Backstrom is also a fool for tempting the rain, thinking he can use it to accelerate a myth without

bringing another to an end. As Thomas argues, “the source symbolism of water, already parodied

in Backstrom’s promise of rain, is absorbed in the paradox of his death role [as mortician].

‘Beginnings and endings’ merge in the Eternal Mother” (41, quoting Roaring) and Backstrom becomes the “upside-down saviour of his community” (Hariharan 44). Thus, the rain robs

Backstrom of his agency, both as a character in and as the narrator of his tale, although it gives him illusory power as a politician. However, this power is empty as the story ends before he takes his seat as an MLA.

Rosemary Sullivan argues that Roaring ends with Backstrom’s “total paralysis of will”

(167); however, this paralysis is not a matter of the novel’s “oppositions cancel[ling] each other out” at its conclusion (Graham 178) as much as a resignation / acceptance / confession that

Backstrom is at the mercy of nature and the nature of storytelling. Graham writes that “Johnnie seems to be addressing his confessions mainly to God” (183), but he also addresses the reader, spectrally present on the wagon, as Backstrom has been for the entire tale. He addresses himself too—in one draft Backstrom even refers to himself in the third person on the final page of his confession (MsC 27, 8.1), emphasising his attempt to control the narrative and his role within it.

Thomas notes that Kroetsch’s characters “are baffled in their attempts to choose their own stories” (2); Backstrom admits to himself that despite his role as orator he has no power over his narrative’s outcome. Thomas argues that “Backstrom’s gestures can readily be seen as antihistorical, a refusal of historic determinism” (44) and Lecker agrees (43); instead rain serves as a prophetic, mythic, and post-structural counterpart to determinism. Backstrom wins, and

Social Credit wins, not the Social Credit that won historically, but an alternate myth of that party,

104

does not go on to flourish but flourishes backward as the tall tale of that which is to come.

Despite being the one who creates the rain narratologically, Backstrom cannot escape it. Both his

narrative and the rain are simultaneously chaotic and deterministic, characteristics reflected in

the novel’s metatextual engagement with form.

This oral picaresque, rehearsed aloud diegetically, is also a constructed text appearing in

print extra-diegetically with the rain as a force of nature whose symbolic and narrative functions

are equally essential to the novel’s plot. The spectral rain-to-come, rain that is always-already coming, robs Backstrom of his narrative agency even as it fulfills his prophecy. Lecker writes that the “question Johnnie addresses to Applecart is therefore imperatively directed at himself:

‘But what in the Christly hell will you do?’ What he does is to tell the story” (45, quoting

Roaring). The doer and the sayer are conflated in Backstrom, yet neither has power, only consequence. In the face of rain, which gives significance to the values that the fool / prophet / messiah / politician / narrator orates into being, what can Backstrom do other than tell the tale?

Rain, Voice, and Text, Becoming Trace

What does it mean to become trace? Trace can be conceptualized as a liminal state of existence between presence and absence, as “What remains of what does not remain” (Kroetsch,

Hornbooks 8). In The Words of My Roaring, traces of the rain-to-come run through the novel. In

Alibi, Deemer collects traces of civilizations, leaves traces of his crimes for Dorf to piece together and is himself trace: a specter of wealth haunting Dorf’s narrative. But how do these remnants and revenants become trace? By what process are they rendered spectral? The becoming trace enters that space of liminality, a change of state from (an assumed) presence or

105

absence (back) into one of uncertainty. This entrance mirrors, parallels, and correlates to the

collection of materials into an / the archive.

An author’s fonds, particularly their papers for a written work, is merely a collection of

fragments—a highly unreliable one, as with Kroetsch, a telling one, as with Govier, and a

selective one, as with Vanderhaeghe. However, “‘Archive’ is only a notion, an impression associated with a word” (Derrida 29). The archive not only contains trace but is itself trace—an impression rather than that which leaves the impression, the idea of a signifier, a pen or typewriter marking the page, but without ink. The archive is a figment or figuration of the author’s process, the text’s genealogy, the remains of a work’s alternate and unpublished permutations. It is a gathering of “material whose status is as yet indeterminate … which has not been read and researched” (Featherstone 594), a collection of traces, the yet-to-be-found, but also the yet-to-be-lost. The becoming archive then is a gathering of the unreadable, the unresearchable, the indefinitely indeterminate. And these states of becoming, the transitions between them, are always driven by the author / collector / archivist / critic’s drive to ascertain and interpret trace, their feverish attempt to render it present.

The Kroetsch fonds exists within this state of becoming archive, its contents moving from one node of uncertainty to another. The materials begin, like all archival gatherings, as unread, save by the author, who cannot lend them intentionality (Barthes). The archival holdings are “as yet indeterminate,” but the time of determination is often already lost or, at the very least, itself undefinable. The Kroetsch fonds are full of ambiguity, unreadable documents, paradoxically named and ordered drafts, etc., embodying a liminal textual existence between findable and readable that reflects the archive’s own “peculiar, ambiguous status, as something open or potentially open … yet also closed” (Saunders 169). In attempting to read these documents and

106

find answers to previously determined questions in them, we underscore the present texts—all those read in the present moment, archival and published—as trace. The published novels can only signal their own production; the archival material can only signal the presence of a textual genealogy, but it cannot serve as lineage. In the case of countless unclear holograph and even typed fragments in the Kroetsch fonds, signifiers cannot readily be deciphered and translated into signified, and so only signify that there is something that was written, something that can be partially read, with uncertainty, which can only indicate that some signification has been lost.

The always already present gap between signifier and signified marks the aperture between textual traces and the notion of archive. Attempting a genetic criticism of Kroetsch’s political novels reveals the becoming trace of his fonds and that state’s centrality to the nature of archives.

As I have already discussed, certain legible holograph fragments, such as the “ill-gotten gains” of politicians (MsC 27, 6.3), foreground and anticipate central content and motifs that run through the text and writing process of Roaring. However, far more revealing are the mounds of illegible matter. For example, “toward draft #2” of Roaring (MsC 27, 6.5.1-2) includes a holograph draft of a new opening with quoted dialogue, rather than the indirect dialogue that gave early typed drafts their oral quality. Here seemingly resides a presence of textual genealogy, but its near unreadability renders it only pseudo-present—a trace of indication rather than the presence of one—the identifiable ticks of quotation marks saying more than the words between them. Within the same draft is page 09999 (see Fig. 1), the page number itself an unclear / indeterminate referent. The heavily annotated page, correlating to 139-140 in the published text, hybridizes the typescript with the holograph draft, the latter rendering the former ironically less legible. A further irony is that the first paragraph on 09999, the one untouched by an editorial hand, has changed drastically in the novel’s published version, becoming a quoted repetition

107

followed by abrupt, truncated lines: “No rain. Win anyhow. I was staggered” (Roaring 139). The unmarked differences between “toward draft #2” and later iterations of the text are clearer, though less material, than the illegible scribblings that indicate other changes. The absent editorial passes: ghosts of the texts’ evolution.

108

Figure 1 – MsC 27, 6.5.2, p. 09999

109

Figure 2 – MsC 27, 7.1.2, p. xxxx 204

110

Massive editorial feedback written in a more decipherable hand, possibly an external editor’s, appears in a photocopy of a later typescript of Roaring (MsC 27, 7.1; see Fig. 2).

However, very few actual changes are made between this draft and the published version. This example provides the clearest evidence of presence in the Roaring section of the Kroetsch fonds, yet it only functions to indicate the trace nature of alternate potential permutations of the novel.

All these annotations are for changes that were never pursued or realized; they are remnants of different Roarings that could have existed, but no longer do and likely never did, save in the form of lost scribblings, midnight musings, and beer parlour ramblings. Finally, the most

‘complete’ and lengthy outline of the “Rain Novel” is scrawled with at least three different writing utensils, one of which is almost entirely faded, on the back of a large-scale map of

“Europe and the Near East” (MsC 27, 6.3). The outline appears to be organized by chapter— unhelpful as Roaring was later organized by days of the week leading up to the coming rain and evening of the election—and features extensive scribbling and crossing out, arrows, giant brackets, and question marks, all penned in Kroetsch’s hybrid of long-hand and chicken scratch, at best challenging, at worst indecipherable. In this needlessly complicated outline for what is perhaps Kroetsch’s most straightforward and linear plot, we find not only a trace of Roaring, but a pre-trace of Alibi: a convoluted voyage crafted across continental Europe. Kroetsch would later use this journey to return to prairie politics, just as Dorf uses it to return to Alberta, but not before the winds on the bald prairie substantially shifted the political climate surrounding leftist and progressivist movements.

111

WOULD-BE DR. ME

“BMW socialists,” mumbles a man sitting casually on the bench beside a busy parking lot.

Friday afternoon, the cusp of the pre-weekend rush hour.

“Pardon?” asks a passerby in a business suit.

“That’s right, you heard me,” he barks at the woman. “That’s all you people are. You

think the Sask Party is bad. You think it’s your imperative to be social justice warriors, mowing

down ‘the man’ in your BMW battle tanks. You think of yourselves as new democrats? As

labourers? Women in this city, in this neighbourhood, have laboured maybe 2.1 times in their life

each. On average. And the men, not at all. You’ve coasted on success your whole lives. Give

failure a try for once, you might learn something” If he were less distraught, the man would direct his audience to read his blog post . Instead, he stands and surveys the people in the park. Those walking slow their pace, curious, in the way people are curious about car accidents.

“You think you’re ‘fucking the system’ or ‘showing the man’ when you give a homeless guy half what you spent on that soy latte?” His rant turns personal, though he doesn’t address anyone specifically. The initial woman has left the vicinity, though several people continue to gawk. No one interrupts, and the man continues his tirade. “You think your 8-oz. low fat warm beverage donation makes your head-banging, raging against the machine, fourteen-year-old self proud—don’t you?” A tie-clad man stands near the bench, looks down at his black coffee and then stares questioningly, confusedly at the people around him; he doesn’t understand half the

phrases he’s just heard.

“There you go, this guy’s got the right idea.” The orator has noticed the lost little man

with the black coffee. “Just look at yourselves. Just, just look around at each other.” He climbs

112

onto the bench. “Bunch of walking hypocrites…” he sounds exasperated, like he’s been doing this every day for years. “Look at how grubby your manicured fingers have gotten. Look at your diamond rings, your gold cuff links, your compostable coffee cups, and your chrome-trimmed side view mirrors. Can’t be bothered to ride the bus. Might if there was business class seating.

Too bad there isn’t, we could use the tax dollars. BMW socialists man… I keep saying it, and you probably don’t even know what it means.”

A couple of beat cops approach the small group that has formed around the makeshift concrete soapbox. “All right Jimmy,” one of them mumbles, “show’s over.”

“Yeah,” James replies, stepping down from the bench, “it’s been over since Tommy died.”

“We know.”

James walks along the street to the downtown transit terminal. He catches the first eastbound bus, flashes an expired pass from the University of Saskatchewan, bullshits the driver into letting him ride for free—filled with the conviction that no populism-spouting mayor was pocketing his loose change. He hops off at the campus stop—not wanting to raise suspicion, though no one is looking for him, no one cares about a bus fare scam. He cuts through a throng of what he’d call ‘lazy academics,’ and before he leaves the Place Riel Loop he hastily slaps up a poster promoting his blog and the post < How the World Sees Grad Students >. He walks briskly across College Drive, then zig-zags up the streets and avenues hap-hazard. He glances over his shoulder, makes sure no one is watching him, and pulls out his fob. He climbs into a brand new, sleek, silver BMW, gets back onto College, and takes Highway 5 East out of town.

***

113

< How to Fail a University English Course, www.wouldbedrme.blogger.com/2007/11/17/how-

to-fail

Failing an undergraduate English course is surprisingly difficult. As long as you hand in

something roughly the right length that at least kind-of-sort-of-deals with the assigned topic, you’ll pass every time. And usually you’ll even score above D-range. Trust me.

I know, I know, you’re probably asking your monitor. I can hear you through the screen, with your index finger quavering in the air like a timid first-year, “why would I want to fail an

English class?”

Great question! Failure builds character, or so my old man tells me, and failing an

English class has its own added merits, such as being able to take a different class in the same category. Who the hell wants to take ‘South African post-colonial lit’ when they can take

‘shipwreck narratives’ a year later? (Spoiler alert: most of the shipwreckees ended up being pretty colonial.)

Also, many of the more respectable colleges outside of A+(S)S won’t even let you into their program unless you’ve failed at least one English class. Engineering even has a hierarchy for rating students’ applications. You will not be considered if you have not failed at least one

English course, preferably one of the first-year fundamental courses. Students who failed both terms of first year English are one step up. Next come the students who managed to fail a full- year course within the first term. Finally, special honours are reserved for students who manage not to fail an English course, but who are asked, after critiquing every asinine assignment, to leave and never return. This, my avid young learners, is what I managed to accomplish. And I wasn’t even trying to get into engineering. I was a history major. >

***

114

< How the World Sees Grad Students, www.wouldbedrme.blogger.com/2008/02/27/seeing-grad-

students

Hey, are you thinking about going to grad school? If so, get ready to have a bunch of

conversations like this one:

“Dude, you’re like getting paid to go to school, stop complaining!”

This is the motto, the anthem of the skeptic layman. And Tanner—or was it Taylor?

whatever, one of the two swingers that The Ex befriended under suspiciously vague

circumstances—chanted this particular pot-infused version as we drove through northern BC

(The Ex was, at this time, my lover, my nothing-serious-but-I-know-I’m-not-seeing-anyone-else, my “fuck buddy” as she would put it).

“We seem to have differing opinions on what ‘getting paid’ means,” I replied.

Then the predictable exchange followed: “Are you going to school?” “Grad school, yes, but—” “Are you getting paid?” “Yes, but—” “Then, dude, you’re getting paid to go to school!”

“Technically, I get paid to research historical archives on Grey Owl at the university (see my post on < How to Flunk out of Grad School >)—and that money’s from the feds—then I pay to take classes while doing that work.”

“Huh?”

“OK, let me lay it out for you. Where do you work?”

“At Starbucks.”

Here we go, I thought, swinging stoners from Starbucks. She sure knows how to pick ‘em.

But this was perfect. The stars aligned and I delivered my best allegory yet:

“Cool. Now, let’s say you’re one of the best at your job, and Starbucks pays you better than most of the other baristas—” “We’re called ‘partners.’” “Whatever, they pay you well. But,

115

for a half hour every shift, you have to go door to door to nearby businesses and say ‘Hi, I’m the barista at Starbucks who made you an awesome macchiato last week. Starbucks is wondering, if you appreciate the work I’m doing making coffee and whatnot, if you could cover my wages for the next few months.’ And they’d look at you like, ‘Doesn’t Starbucks pay you to work there?’

And you’d reply, ‘Oh yeah, for sure they do, but you know they figure if someone else really likes my work maybe they’ll pay my wages for a while so that Starbucks can spend its money on…’ shit I don’t know, ‘inventing a new frap’ or something.”

So that’s it, that’s the secret to getting paid to go to school. Basically, you have to beg the university and the government, and between all the bureaucrats, eventually you’ll find someone who will pay you. Unfortunately, all the nuance of my allegory was lost on the guy, and he circled back to:

“But you’re still just getting paid to go to school, I actually have to work.”

I should have realised this would be his response. I looked over at The Ex, then looked down at my lap, a caramel macchiato held between my thighs. >

***

James walks into his home—his micro home, of which he is equally proud and defensive.

He believes he has documented the key features to owning a micro home in < On the Virtues of

Micro Homes > but, like many of his blog posts, it reads more like a treatise against contemporary Western society more generally. His home had taken him an extra three months to move into. He had utterly failed at building it from the provided materials himself and had refused to seek help from any former friend who worked in the trades (whom he saw as traitors to the humanities). When he finally rationalised the collectivist value of hiring help, he’d been utterly broke and therefore unable to find someone until he received his mandated raise at the

116

rural school where he works as a janitor. A man with an impressive resumé but a questionable amount of time on his hands finally built the tiny house on a half-acre of land outside a small town East of Saskatoon. A failed garden occupies a third of the land. Due to the longer-than- typical construction time for his micro home (which meant James had to rent a basement suit in town and commute a half hour each way to water his onions) and to the fact that as a born-and- raised Calgarian he was completely incompetent with simple herbs, let alone a 15,000 square foot garden, all James’s best efforts died before they could even sprout. The rest of the land lays bare. An empty, yet-to-be-finished green house addition leans against the miniature box-shaped home as well as a matching shed a few yards back and another, non-matching shed a few yards further yet (the first could not hold everything and the home has limited closet space).

James walks in and throws the Beamer’s keys on the coffee table, which is the only table.

It sits in front of a pullout couch from Ikea, which serves as the home’s only bed (the loft space, intended to serve as a bedroom, is used as an office, for James is suspicious of anyone who would ever keep their books and their work where they eat).

James sees he has a voicemail. He had insisted on having a land line installed on the lot after buying it and the boxes containing his tiny house. In James’s opinion, all cell phones should be for personal use only. He picks up the receiver and doesn’t bother listening to the message.

He has a hunch who it’s from and dials the only number the home phone has called in the several weeks since he has moved in: his mechanic (see < Why You Should Never Buy Imports >).

“Barry’s Auto.” A sharp Irish accent.

“Hi Maebh, I got your message.”

***

< On the Virtues of Micro Homes, www.wouldbedrme.blogger.com/2008/04/11/micro-homes

117

When in the market for a micro home, it’s best to do your research, and you are in luck

because I did mine. Except for the questionable naming convention (which I will get to

momentarily) the “Vagabond 123” is by far the best model on the market. “Vagabond 123”—

they should’ve gone with a more rustic name like “Nomad,” but maybe they thought it had too much of a Genghis Khan vibe. But the “123” should definitely be “12^3.” It’s 12’ by 12’ by 12’,

how did they miss this opportunity?! Were they worried it would make it too hard to Google? Or

are they suggesting it can be assembled like 1, 2, 3? Because that’s a load of shit! It took me

three months to get into this thing! And the space is really the selling point anyways—it takes up

so little. It’s honestly perfect. Everything you need but scaled down to the average person’s

garage. Just you wait, these will replace trailer parks without turning the residents into suburban

pigs in a gentrified corral. Hell, if I can afford it—and I’m working as a shit cleaner for a crappy

public school made out of those trailer add-ons—then anyone willing to sell themselves for base labour can afford it. Plus, they’ll be stackable soon, the Vagabonds I mean. Personally, I’m done with the downtown high-rise high muckie-muck lifestyle, but for those of you who need the concrete jungle more than the forest and carry the 21st century around like an I.V. bag, at least

you’ll have something affordable that you can actually live in. Oh and the greenhouse modules, those will be on the roof and sprinkled on the south face of every tower. People will be able to

grow their own groceries in-home (because god knows you can’t grow anything beyond wheat and canola in this province!). >

***

< Why You Should Never Buy Imports, www.wouldbedrme.blogger.com/2008/06/03/never-

import

118

Never buy an imported vehicle. Especially a make and model not supported in Canada,

purchased from a specialty import shop in another province that requires you to drive 2000 km

return every time it needs service. In particular, don’t buy a right-hand-drive miniature Japanese

4x4 to match your tiny new house (though the house itself is great, see my post from a few weeks back). Notably, if you do buy such a vehicle, do not allow the shop to provide you with a

German sports car as a loaner vehicle when your trusty all-terrain Side Kick inevitably breaks down despite its 3.5 auction grade and extremely low mileage for a fifteen-year-old manual transmission. Finally, and chiefly, when you wind up in this situation because the failing car shop only has a Beamer left to offer as a loaner, don’t continue your campaign as an independent extreme-left politician—someone will find you out and blemish your credibility.

For the arts, humanities, and otherwise mechanically-non-inclined, know that age does not provide wisdom in cars, that tiny motors suck at towing and Beamers—while equipped with turbo—suck at tilling. Know that a car can only crawl without a catalytic converter and that at least six major motor problems can cause them to fail. Know that after each repair, the car will drive perfectly on the road test and won’t send out a single error code until you drive out to retrieve it, at which point it will die, again, 30 km from the shop. Just far enough to both get your hopes up and require a tow truck. Know that if you buy a specialty import to complement the praxis of your neo-agrarian socialist life, you may end up putting more mileage on a mobile class marker.

Please understand, I’m not suggesting everyone go out and buy a GMC just because they’re ‘Canadian.’ They may be the general motors of Canada, but Oshawa might as well be an

American city and the Sierra trucks they make have more in common with the Andes than the

Rockies. >

119

***

“I’m sorry I broke the news over the answerphone, but Barry wants our affairs in order as soon as possible,” Maebh continued.

After six weeks with his car and every diagnostic test conceivable it seems odd to James that they’d rush now. “So, obviously, replacing the starter after the third new converter didn’t do

the trick?” replies James.

“What? No, we never got the starter. Didn’t you get my message?”

James flushes at the end of his coiled phoneline, remembering his favorite proverb about

the word “assume.” “No, sorry, I saw I had a message and figured it was you with more of the

same news.”

“I’m sorry, James—do you mind if I call you James? I feel like we’re casual friends who only ever meet for coffee at car shops to complain about catalytics,” she chuckles to herself.

“Anyway, I’m sorry but we can’t fix your car.”

“Incapable or giving up?” He wondered how he would ever get a garden going without the car he had expressly bought for self-sustainable living. Last year had been a complete write- off, and while summer had yet to start, once it did, there would be only two months of anything resembling warmth and growth.

“James,” she paused a beat to drop her mothering tone. “We’re going out of business. I,

I’m moving back home.”

“Great. And what about Barry? He planning on driving out here to repossess my Beamer?

He better be ready to work on my farm ‘til he’s reimbursed me for the SideKick.”

“James, please.” She had hoped he would listen to the message first. “We won’t leave you high and dry but there’s nothing we can do for the little jeep.”

120

“But I’m guessing you don’t have a huge surplus inventory if you’re going under.”

“We’ll buy your SideKick back for a dollar—”

“Don’t oversell this transaction to me now.”

“—just for the purpose of legality and record-keeping. Then we’ll sell you the Beamer for a dollar.”

“So I can be one of those prick janitors—sorry, custodians—who shows off that he’s got

it better than the teachers?”

“It’s the best Barry can do, and he’s already taken a considerable loss on the little

beasty.”

“Maybe he should have offered a crappier warranty? Well, like I said, he’s always

welcome on Farm Flunkout.”

121

“SAME OLD ED, … UNCOMMITTED”: PROGRESSIVISM IN VANDERHAEGHE’S EARLY FICTION

During the 1960s and 70s, because of social democratic movements in the United Kingdom and

Western Europe, progressivist politics reached their peak nationally, and particularly in

Saskatchewan. Brown, Roberts, and Warnock state in Saskatchewan Politics from Left to Right

‘44-’99: “During the 1970s the NDP completed the transition, which had begun modestly in the

1960s, from a rural party with an urban wing to a predominantly urban party with some rural

support” (26). They note a decline in rural population from the 60s through the 80s and that

“[a]mong farmers right-wing populism was quickly replacing left agrarianism” (25), in part

because neo-liberalism “gained increasing legitimacy as the 1970s advanced” (30). This

transformation set the stage for Vanderhaeghe’s politically volatile and socially conscious cast of

characters, led by Ed; these characters question the hypocrisy of progressivism and the

concomitant double message concealed therein.

Born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan in 1951, Guy Vanderhaeghe grew up in decades

characterized by major social movements and political change in the prairies. In his interview

with Nicola Faieta, “Guy Talk,” he says: “there was one set of beliefs that I was raised with that

was challenged by another set of beliefs through the 1960s and 1970s” (264). While

Vanderhaeghe does not explicitly use the term, I label this set of beliefs as progressivism, which

became popular when the “labour movement, organized farmers, women, students, Aboriginal

people, Canadian and Quebec nationalists were on the upsurge from the mid-1960s” and

“political culture was moving slightly left” (Brown et al. 23), at least in urban centres. In

response to this progressive shift, rural ideology moved from a paradigm of the old left—the co-

operative views of the Douglas days and the Pool—to a new right—the populism that was

122

“quickly replacing left agrarianism” (25). The ‘cooperative’ nature of the CCF might be assumed

to foster progressivist politics; however, through the early and mid-twentieth century “Marxism

was tainted in the social-democratic lexicon because the communists had appropriated it, and

equated it with the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (Penner 142).28 The lingering conservatism

of the Canadian prairies is tied to the geography and social stasis of rurality, for as Munroe

Eagles notes, “Geographic features often provide evocative and powerful anchors for group

identity and symbols of group unity” (19). Wendy Griswold argues that if shared “common

ground, which is typically geographic, political, and/or economic, gives rise to shared forms of

cultural expression,” the “inverse is true as well; shared cultural features may encourage political

or economic linkage” (13). Eagles elaborates how geographic features in fact often “serve as

nothing more than a metaphor for the common features, shared history, or ways of life that

define [a] region” (19). This anchoring of metaphorical identity and imagined community, what

Eagles calls the “Sense of Place” (19), is central to the complex politics of Vanderhaeghe’s 20th

century Saskatchewan. Mid-century rural Saskatchewan’s sense of place revolves around the region’s distinctiveness as rooted in the agrarian socialism that carried it through the Depression; it arises in response to what Doug Owram notes as “the disappearance of traditional mythologies

and the impossibility of holding to earlier utopian promises of the West as agrarian Eden” (351).

This “working-class identity” defines the economically caged as “minority communities” in

Vanderhaeghe’s fiction (Kruk 9), which serves as “a local response to the international social

and political situation of the 1960s and 1970s” (Zichy 42). It is this “part of Saskatchewan’s

28 This tainting has clearly persisted in Canadian literary studies as well. Robin Endres notes that “Within the confines of Canadian literary criticism there is little explicitly Marxist theory and analysis of works of Canadian literature” (110), and with the exception of James Doyle’s Progressive Heritage and a few scattered articles, little has changed since Endres made that claim in 1978. For further evidence, one need only note the absolute absence of the CCF, NDP, and agrarian socialism in general in David Carpenter’s The Literary History of Saskatchewan. 123

distinct political culture—the continuous vigor of major party sentiments” (Smith 41) and

regionalist identification with the tenets of the CCF—that causes Grandma Bradley of “The

Watcher” in Man Descending and other believers of the old left to rail against the new left and its

expression by the 60s generation.

Then came the Waffle, the 1969 manifesto that rejected the “communist and Trotskyite

infiltration” of the CCF (Waffle Manifesto 1) and demanded “an independent socialist Canada” lead by a radicalised New Democratic Party charged with dissociating the nation from American corporate capitalism (8-9). Norman Penner notes, “As far as the communists in Canada were

concerned, their fight against capitalism included the fight against social democracy” whereas

the Wafflers “wanted a much greater emphasis on socialism” (vi-vii). This schism within the

Canadian left clashed with the emerging right from the United Kingdom and United States, and

in the early 1980s Grant Devine and his colleagues championed the provincial Tories with “no

grand design of what they meant to do besides get rid of the ‘socialists’” (Brown et al. 33). The

Tories won the 1982 election, at least in part thanks to that platform, and “the new Tory

government believed that it could declare Saskatchewan done with ‘socialism’ and ‘open for

business’” (35). As Gerald Friesen writes, in the 1980s the “farmer’s replacement as the focus of

prairie social mythology was the business leader” (436); as an agrarian economist Devine

embodied both the farmer and the businessman, intersecting the ideologies of the old left and the

new right. This was the political climate—a socio-economic blizzard on the progressively balding prairie—in which Vanderhaeghe was writing his first short stories.

Vanderhaeghe’s first two collections were published during the lead-up to the election of

Grant Devine’s Saskatchewan Tories in April 1982 and in the wake of “two imposing figures

[who] emerged to champion neo-liberal ideology” internationally: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald

124

Reagan (Brown et al. 32). These trends in rural politics and Vanderhaeghe’s upbringing in the

southern Saskatchewan town of Esterhazy provide context to understand the variety of politically

inflected and socially critical voices in his early work. Throughout his career, starting with his

master’s degree in history, Vanderhaeghe has examined political dynamics and social

reconstruction in Western Canada and the United States. I will assess how Vanderhaeghe

criticizes these class-based and civil movements in post-1960s Saskatchewan through character-

types who epitomize the contaminated and seductive gestures of these influences and enterprises.

At the same time, these characters’ ironic positioning undercuts that critique with a sub-textual

counter-narrative, resulting in a fascinating appraisal of social ignorance, immobility, and

unproductivity.

Ed is a knave to socialites, a socio-political rogue, what one of Vanderhaeghe’s early

characters would call a “non-violent shit-disturber” (Man Descending 93)—although he is

occasionally prone to violence as well. What he disturbs are the self-righteous values and

discourses of a group that he labels “BMW socialist[s]” (241). But Ed is also a hypocrite, a

pathetic hypocrite, socially static and economically immobile. He is the epitome of politics, of

the political putting-into-words, through his rants, tirades, and metanarratives. He is the truest

embodiment of Vanderhaeghe’s dual-layer commentary on progressivism—hyper critical and

hypocritical—the culmination of character types at once critics and criticized: hyperactive and

interpassive. Ed is a post-rogue who feigns scoundrelism and in turn reveals the subterfuge of social commentary.

125

“Non-Violent Shit-Disturbers”: Social Critics and Criticized Socialists

At the beginning of Man Descending’s “Drummer,” the first of two stories about Billy

and Gene, sons of a coal miner in a small Saskatchewan town, Billy criticizes Miss Clark, “the

only teacher who maybe believes all that crock of stale horseshit about principles” (MD 93). He

says she

pretty nearly wallpapered her room with pictures of that Negro, Martin Luther

King, and some character who’s modelling the latest in Wabasso sheets and looks

like maybe he’d kill for a hamburger—Gandhi is his name—and that hairy old

fart Tolstoy, who wrote books you need a front-end loader to lift. From what

Clarkie tells us, I gather they’re what you call non-violent shit-disturbers. (94)

Billy is clearly raised by the fading generation, the pre-progressive left lingering in the 1960s, that of “the hapless father figures, unable to keep up with the changing times, that recur in the early stories with a Saskatchewan setting” (Zichy 46). Billy unabashedly reveals his ingrained sentiments toward the progressive views disseminated by his teacher, who is of the new, urban generation, despite being significantly older than he is. Billy’s pejorative notion of “non-violent shit-disturbers” suggests that violence is an inherent and positive element of his social perspective, “accepted if not expected” (Kruk 8); to be non-violent is to threaten the status quo in a distasteful or unbecoming way. The “cage of male violence” is one of the title’s many references (Kruk 7), and this metaphor ties into the thread of masculinity—central to

Vanderhaeghe’s work, as other critics have noted (see Gerry, LeGier). Violence, the manly

response to societal problems, opposes the cowardly approaches of pacifism, oratory, and

literature. And yet, despite his criticism of progressivists and activists, Billy’s commentary

pointedly demarcates the gap between the old and new left through a response to the “fact that

126

the existence of different classes is the overwhelming reality of the lives of Canadians [and] is

consistently disguised and mystified by the media, the educational system and the government”

(Endres 90). Billy’s materialism—an expression of his lived class experience—questions the

idealism of the 1960s, allowing the text to demonstrate that the education system, while leaning

left, still functions as an ideological state apparatus that propagates class concealment.

Billy is more telling of the disparate and class-based opinions of progressivism and

public social services in “Cages” when he narrates: “I don’t need this social worker woman. She

can’t tell me anything I haven’t already figured out for myself” (113). Despite being largely

established by agrarian socialism and the foundation of the CCF, Billy has an intense distrust of

social programs, demonstrating the complex and often anti-socialist convictions that sprang from the seemingly communistic prairie politics of the early twentieth century (Brown et al. 17).

Billy’s criticism in both “Drummer” and “Cages” is also pointedly gendered, targeting professional women—members of the labour movement invested in the culture of the 1960s’

idealised left. After being told by the worker that he is not a victim of his father’s favouritism

towards Gene, he tells us: “I can get bullshit at the poolroom any time I want it ‒ and without

having to keep an appointment” (113). Billy sees the social worker as yet another “non-violent

shit-disturber,” a representative of the new era of progressivism, equality, and sentimentality. But

his negative opinion of social systems is not entirely a Freudian fatherly issue, but, in part, a

suspicion of and a lack of respect for the educational and political structures that led to leftist

culture, as seen in the example of Miss Clark’s class and evidenced by the NDP’s movement

away from rural politics at the time (Brown et al. 26). However, despite his clever and revealing

opinions, Billy is by no means an innocent critic.

127

Ironically, over the course of “Cages,” Billy takes on the role of those he criticizes. While

being interrogated by police for suspected assault, which his older brother Gene committed, Billy

“never said one word about not being the guy who hopped Marvin” (131). He thinks to himself:

“I’ll play along with this. Let the old man come down to the cop shop over me for once. Me he takes for granted. Let him worry about Billy for a change” (131). Despite his attempts to qualify

as the violent masculine disruptor endorsed by his father, Billy’s interruption of the investigation

instead aligns him with the political leaders and thinkers first categorised as “non-violent shit-

disturbers.” And yet, another level of criticism plays out here: the figures that Billy criticizes are

disruptive for the sake of certain principles—a lesson Miss Clark clearly failed to impart—

whereas Billy’s disturbance is “the nuttiest idea” rather than an intentional or purposeful action

(131). His internal narrative also suggests anxieties concerning his worth in his father’s eyes, ironically providing evidence for the sessions with the social worker toward whom Billy is dismissive. Thus, through the story’s plot and the dramatic irony of its protagonist’s internal narration, Billy becomes the object of his own criticism. As Zichy notes, the “fine phrase, ‘non- violent shit disturbers,’ an amalgam of progressive ‘Social Studies’ doctrine and Billy’s teenage editing, perfectly captures his dependence on the very language and values he is disparaging”

(47). Billy shows us the two faces dominating the socio-critical landscape of the prairies—the old generation and the new, the subject and the object of political commentary—and how they become complicated and confused by the youth of the 1960s. Finally, Billy’s inaction introduces an important binary between violent and non-violent disturbers. Gene assaults Marvin while

Billy takes the fall for it. Both actions disrupt balance, but on different levels, the former on a physical and legal one, the latter on a level that blends personal and social politics. Billy’s action, or lack thereof, is reminiscent of pacifistic protest—an interpassive, Bartleby-esque preference to

128

neither confess nor condemn—but this ‘activism’ functions for purely personal reasons. The continuing relationship between violent and non-violent disturbers recurs and develops throughout Vanderhaeghe’s contemporary fiction.

The first-person narrator and his friend Diddly in “The King Is Dead” from The Trouble with Heroes present us with a parallel to Billy and Gene. Early in the story it becomes apparent

that Diddly is the primary disturber, given his “reputation for petty thievery and fighting,” which

“made him irresistibly glamourous” (9). Meanwhile, the narrator fills the role of envious beta

destined to take the fall, much like Billy is to Gene. Diddly provides cigarettes at recess while

the narrator “cast[s] a quick glance over [his] shoulder” because he is “afraid of being caught

smoking on the school grounds” (9). Diddly is further paralleled to Gene when he orchestrates

the break-in at the ice rink and picks a fight with the rink attendant’s dog, claiming: “I’ll break his neck ... I’ll knock the snot out of him. I’ll smash his head like a pumpkin” (16). However, it is ultimately the narrator, until this point the submissive follower, who takes the initiative and kills the dog when the boys risk being caught by the attendant, drawn by the dog’s yelps. This act suddenly parallels the narrator with Gene rather than Billy. Furthermore, Diddly’s response to a current affairs class assignment with “colourful articles published in his father’s Police Gazette”

(10) substantiates this role-reversal, aligning him more with the non-violent Billy who challenges institutional education through written political commentary despite his seemingly alpha position as ill-intending leader in the pair.

The misalignment of roles and characteristics in “The King is Dead” complicates the binary established in “Drummer” and “Cages.” The narrator’s violence reverses the trope of the leader, the masculine alpha, as disruptor, expressed not only in Billy and Gene, but also King and his brother from “King Walsh,” Bernie and Norman in “The Master of Disaster,” and Myles and

129

Wayne from “Teacher,” published in the later collection Things as They Are? Of all the pairs, the

narrator of “The King Is Dead” is the only one who performs violence out of necessity, for the

sake of self-preservation, while all other disturbers do so out of sheer malice, like Diddly, or in response to a situation they intentionally created, like Gene. By shifting physical revolt to the sympathetic and intelligent follower and social criticism to the dim-witted bully of a leader,

Vanderhaeghe’s stories undercut the validity of commentaries made by the Diddlys of the world.

This shift actually occurs in reverse order, as “The King Is Dead” was likely written before the

Billy stories, given that it was published in 1978, whereas “Drummer” and “Cages” first appeared in 1981 (Horava). The collections’ publication order evidences an evolution of the character type despite its apparent regression; Vanderhaeghe’s stories shift from a discredited critique of progressivism delivered through dim-witted Diddly to complex commentaries layered with irony and hypocrisy delivered by the Billys of Man Descending and Things as They Are?

The genealogy of the Billy type explicates the direction and evolution of a socially critical voice in Vanderhaeghe’s early work—and I shall return to this question of textual genetics. However, Billy’s embodiment of the non-violent disturber are the stories’ most revealing moments. Vanderhaeghe’s engagement with the dichotomy of old and new generational politics is further complicated by a complementary character type, the direct object of Billy’s scorn: pathetic fools of social immobility. These characters are progressivists of the new generation who represent social mobility yet fail to adapt. Ironically, their failures are facilitated by the cultural context that privileged them in the first place. They are heavily criticized by the old generation and its progeny while meta-textually undercut by the narrative in which they are placed. The depiction and treatment of this character type in Vanderhaeghe’s

130

early stories contributes to his fiction’s overall response to socialist movements of mid-late twentieth century Saskatchewan.

The pathetic fool of social immobility first appears in “The Watcher” from Man

Descending as Robert Thompson, whose brutal treatment at the hands of Grandma Bradley concisely affirms rural perspectives on progressive changes in the late 1950s. Robert is

immediately distinguished by the narrator, a young boy named Charlie, as an ‘other’ by “his beard – the first [Charlie] had ever seen. Beards weren’t popular in 1959 – not in [their] part of the world” (11). This first impression immediately regionalises the story’s politics, putting them at odds with contemporary urban fashions and ideas—the CCF had yet to dissolve and reform as the more city-centric NDP and rural Saskatchewan was still largely rooted in the ironically anti- socialist discourse of agrarian populism. Charlie continues, in words that verge on physiognomy, to describe Robert: “He appeared to have been racked and stretched against his will into an exceptional and unnatural anatomy” (11). The word “unnatural” places Thompson in sharp contrast with the rural environment of the story. Grandma Bradley emasculates Robert when she takes control of Evelyn—Bradley’s daughter / Charlie’s aunt / Robert’s lover. Bradley tells

Evelyn to “shut up!” in response to an anxiety attack, causing Robert to look “as if he had it in mind to protest, but in the end he meekly acted as a flanking escort” (12). Upon learning that

Thompson is a “graduate student of American Literature,” Bradley criticizes him as being

“hoity-toity,” despite his humble origins, and only interested in “push[ing] the button” of

Evelyn’s “elevator panties” (13). Bradley’s suspicion of education measures the contempt for social mobility expressed a decade later by Billy. Charlie aligns with his grandmother through his othering of Robert and his unsympathetic delivery of the narrative. As Zichy notes, “the story must, on the evidence of its language, be told from the point of view of an older Charlie” and,

131

perhaps ironically, “we can speculate that he would be very much like Ed” (43). This temporal

gap in narration anticipates the embitterment and disillusionment toward progressive politics

seen later in the Ed stories, and depicts the anti-progressivist push in rural communities in response to the urban left of the 1960s.

Grandma Bradley exemplifies the latent conservatism of the rural old left, but she also

introduces a sub-textual counter-criticism when her negative opinion of Thompson escalates into

a violent response to his presence on her farm. Tired of Thompson’s idealism and his influence

on Evelyn, which is at times as abusive as her own, Bradley hires local thugs to ‘send him a message’ that it was time for him to leave her farm and her daughter. Thompson goes to the police and tries to call on Charlie, who has witnessed the incident, for support, but the narrator betrays him, narrating: “[Thompson] had forced me into the game, and now that I was a player and no longer a watcher he didn’t like it. The thing was that I was good at the game. But he, being a loser, couldn’t appreciate that” (41). Bradley’s reaction metaphorically critiques the urban shift represented by Thompson. While clearly an aggressive rejection of early progressivism, it also measures hostility to a man who wants social mobility—an aspiring professor—and therefore echoes the all but faded economically equalising values on which the

CCF was founded. Charlie’s betrayal of Thompson demonstrates the trans-generational nature of political views within rural regions. Charlie may even be read as a stand-in for Vanderhaeghe himself, a ghostly visitation of the author, who grew up in a small community and would have likely been surrounded by many people like Grandma Bradley. However, as with the previous aspersions, a counter-criticism plays out in this scene. Charlie sees Thompson as the loser in the game of social power, but in the long run he will be the winner in the larger game of life, for “it is his progressive psychology and socio-politics that have increasingly prevailed in the last

132

twenty years” (Zichy 43), during the time when the New Democrats led Saskatchewan into a

more urbane-based democratic movement. The most significant aspect of this bi-layer of

criticism and counter-criticism is that Thompson is only ever characterised as a pathetic fool

trapped in a context where he does not belong, where his philosophies have no value, and where

he cannot exert power, not even the power of his education, dismissed by Bradley, who holds

discursive power within the space of her farm. Despite granting voices to the economically

marginalised, Vanderhaeghe’s story still emphasises what Robin Mathews calls “the prevailing

(and, therefore, ruling) philosophy, or ideology, or accepted set of principles in the society”

(138), or what Williams calls the dominant culture that governs and is governed by class

concealment. Unique to Vanderhaeghe’s fiction, this ruling ideology is agrarian socialism, a

materialist Marxist, if anti-progressive approach to community and its values. Thompson only

ever has power extra-diegetically, historicistically, and meta-narratively, as the embodiment of

urban ascendency to come. Thompson’s narrative and character type are innately critical of progressivism; however, the subtext of that narrative and the postmodern element of its

constructedness complicate the story’s otherwise one-sided commentary.

The Thompson type, its criticism and counter-criticism, recurs multiple times in

Vanderhaeghe’s short fiction, but the character who most intensely links social ideologies, their drawbacks, public perspectives, and the individual experience, is Wesley Willis Harder, the narrator from the title story of The Trouble with Heroes. Like Thompson, Harder is made to look pathetic; he says: “I cry a good deal more than any time since I was seven” (1). While this emotion is likely a result of post-traumatic stress resulting from his military service, information to support this theory comes only a page later. Unlike Thompson, who is undermined by

Grandma Bradley’s actions and Charlie’s narration, Harder, as his own narrator, undermines

133

himself, evidenced by the fact that he considers his medical problems “the least of [his] troubles”

(1). Harder is a teacher, a profession that he claims “demands [that he] never abandon hope” (1).

Yet, he disparages his profession, and by extension the entire educational establishment. He

contrasts the hope that teaching requires with the paradox that “the sons of bitches expect [him]

to be the measure of all things” (1) even though “there is no more opportunity for heroism” in the

modern world (2). Harder, in many ways, is the disillusioned counterpart to Robert Thompson.

While Thompson sees opportunity and a self-righteous satisfaction in being a learned man,

Harder recognises education as another social structure—like war—that has been over-idealised.

His professions demand much, only to reveal that they are not heroic, that heroism and

patriotism are old ideologies now being replaced by new ideals of progress. Harder, and by

extension Vanderhaeghe, further develops this observation through the example of Albert

Schweitzer, the early-twentieth century French-German philosopher.

Harder compares himself to Schweitzer, who becomes an emblem for the impossibility of

heroism, and who evaluates the retrospective effects of progressivism. Despite being a harsh

critic of colonialism, Schweitzer is denounced as a “paternalistic, meddling, Christ-peddling,

native-ass-kicking, bwana of the old imperialistic stamp” by the education board curriculum-

setters of the (1). Harder’s definition of ‘hero’, embodied in Schweitzer, is no longer considered

‘socially acceptable’ or ‘forward thinking’: the “bastards won’t even let [Harder] have him as a hero” (1). This is the ‘trouble with heroes’ that Harder faces: knowledge that he will decline from war hero to villain as society advances and looks at its past with a critical, revisionist eye.

Here Vanderhaeghe’s text struggles with social valuation on the level of metanarrative. His story chastises revisionist critics through its retrospective and empathetic yet also self-deprecating depiction of Harder, his position, and his role in WWII. The war itself must be considered, how

134

it shaped a new politics by overthrowing fascism and Nazi-socialism, the aftermath instigating an

era of globalisation and free exchange. Despite progress, despite his disillusionment, Harder has

trapped himself within an ideology of heroism that cannot be mobilised into Thompson’s idyllic

futurity, as seen in Harder’s conclusion: “Without a belief in the possibility of heroism and

endurance, what is left? The last scrap of dignity, a good death, is beyond reach” (2). Utterly

hopeless, yet romantic about heroism and endurance, and in complete social isolation, Harper

embodies those characteristics, and their conflicting commentaries. And so Harder is precursor to

the epitome of Vanderhaeghe’s socially critical characters: Ed.

Ed, a Man Descending on BMW Socialists

Ed combines elements of the “non-violent shit-disturber” and the pathetic fool, distinguishing him, like Billy and Harder, as both a critic of progressivism and the object of counter-criticism. I will discuss the Ed stories—“Man Descending,” “Sam, Soren and Ed,” “He

Scores! He Shoots!,” and My Present Age—in diegetic chronological order so as to trace Ed’s narrative evolution as a character and a critic, from rogue to post-rogue.29 The rogue motif,

within the English literary tradition, is first associated with the Early Modern period—the

womanizers in John Donne’s poetry, the comedic and villainous knaves in Shakespeare’s drama.

But the rogue category is a site of aporia, embodying the traditional figure of the Early Modern vagrant, but also a metaphorical representation of the upper class as cutpurses, particularly during and after the Industrial Revolution, as depicted in “The March of Roguery” by C. J. Grant

(see Fig. 3). This character type frequently appears in the picaresque, a mode that has persisted

29 While most literary critics ignore the uncompiled “He Scores! He Shoots!”—and at least one has called it “deservedly excluded” and “pathetically unconvincing” (Zichy 59-60 n. 12)—I will demonstrate its centrality to a reading of the recursive nature of Ed’s character across his narrative arc and the ways by which this recursion destabilizes previous readings of this character. 135

into the postmodern era with works such as Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man. In North

America, the socially critical rogue is perhaps best embodied by Mark Twain’s Huck Finn.

Notably, Sam Waters, the protagonist of Ed’s meta-textual western novel, Cool, Clear Waters,

meets the legendary drifter in a passage recounted in My Present Age (220-223). In the way that

Huck was used to critique the Old South, Ed—reflected in both the moralistic Sam Waters and the embittered middle-aged Huck—provides a voice that comments on a particular political climate. However, he also serves as a self-reflexive lens through which we may examine the pitfalls of social commentary and the dualism of roguery.

Figure 3 – C. J. Grant’s “The March of Roguery,” 1830

136

When we first meet Ed in “Man Descending,” he is a “fat, lazy, emotional, unemployed

intellectual” (Forceville 53) who requires scotch as a “social lubricant” and yet whose “grievous

faults of character could be remedied” if he were to make any effort (MD 214-215). Thirty years

old and living in the urban center of Saskatoon in the late 1970s, Ed is a seemingly ideal

candidate to represent the new generation of progressive Saskatchewan. And as Stephen

Dunning notes, “despite his vigorous ethical denunciation of his age, [Ed] also represents his

culture” (31). However, the narrative’s undermining of Ed, the commentary on his culture, is not a treatise against a particular milieu, but a commentary about the immobility within it. Ed’s wife

Victoria and her civil servant friends constantly harangue him about finding work (219, 222) for

he is a graduate school drop-out who cannot hold a job in an “adult extension program” at what

he calls the local “College of Knowledge” (218-219). Ironically, Ed is faulted by middle-class

‘leftists’ for not partaking in capitalism, for failing to be indoctrinated into a system that

masquerades as socialist under the guise of progressivism while it is decisively on its way toward

neo-liberalism and the Devine-lead Tories of the 1980s.

Ed fully embraces this sub-textual commentary on progressivism; he incorporates it into

his narration and his interactions with the other guests at the New Year’s party he attends,

drunkenly taking on the role of the knave and thus the dual role of critic and criticized. When Ed

joins two civil servants in an argument over Chilean refugees, he claims: “I know nothing about

politics, but then neither do any of the people I am arguing with. … In no time several people

have denounced me as a neo-fascist” (223). Ed does not give himself enough credit here; he is

aware of the hypocrisy inherent in the civil servants’ anti-individualism and phony—or at least

self-aggrandising—concern for disenfranchised Chileans. Ed is not ignorant of the politics at

play. Rather, he is less entertained by those politics than by his heightened awareness of human

137

nature and his ability to manipulate people based on their ignorance. Charles Forceville writes

that “despite frequent misjudgements, [Ed] is capable of surprisingly perceptive and profound

comments” (53). He quotes Vanderhaeghe himself, who said in an interview with Forceville that

Ed is “capable of telling truths that more admirable people cannot tell” (54). Ed sees himself as

‘the watcher’—Vanderhaeghe’s original choice for the collection’s title (Hillis 24)—a voyeur of and commentator on social interactions, yet he is as much a chameleon as those he criticizes. “Ed is, on one level in the novel, the almost nameless witness, the chronicler of his ‘present age,’”

but on the other hand, he “is incapable of dealing in any practical sense with what this ‘present

age’ confronts him with” (Forceville 55). Ed’s paradoxical insight and obliviousness, combined with his unwillingness to change and his belief that he is “not capable” of finding a job, telling the truth, or treating his wife differently because he is “a man descending” (MD 226), allows him

to be both disturber and pathetic fool, drifting between pariah and preacher, the embodiment of

Vanderhaeghe’s commentary on progressivist politics.

Ed’s social roguery and simultaneously self-induced immobility are escalated in “Sam,

Soren, and Ed.” The story opens with Ed’s observance of “the truly representative figures of

Western decadence,” noting that he does not “presume to except [him]self from that company”

but that he is also “not the only degenerate dotting the landscape” (229-230). The narrative

resumes the tone established in “Man Descending,” giving Ed a voice that at once condemns

what he sees as the sins of modern, urban, life—a “mass of gluttony, lechery, sloth and violence”

(229)—and implicates him as part of that life, when he “gnaw[s] a chicken leg” (229), ogles

frisky teenagers (230), harasses his now-estranged wife (233-235), and picks a fight with “Mr.

Kung Fu” (235-236). In his refusal to acknowledge his own faults, Ed has become more pathetic

in his immobility than in the previous story. He no longer wears the subtext of an anti-

138

ideological Marxism as support: Victoria does not press him about finding work when they interact, and there is no philosophical vendetta to be had against a roomful of civil servants.

Dunning notes that “Sam, Soren, and Ed” “not only elaborates upon Ed’s personal decline, but also locates it within a larger cultural descent, most immediately from the elevated idealism of the 1960s” (32). No longer able to critique progressivist ideals without implicating himself—for no matter how immobile he has made himself within this paradigm, he is inescapably representative of the same—he shifts his commentary from what he sees as failing institutions

(i.e. the “College of Knowledge”) to a fallen ideologue: his former friend and estranged wife’s lawyer, Benny.

Ed tells us that “During the late sixties and early seventies Benny was a priapic, hairy activist … a great nay-sayer and boycotter … with a millennial light in his eyes” who “had nothing but contempt” for Ed’s “uncommitted ways.” Ed “loved him for it,” but then “affluence did him in …, Benny knocked up money and then, in a rare interlude of common sense, married it” (237-238). As Dunning notes, “Benny has betrayed more than personal loyalties: he has abandoned the idealism of a quintessentially idealistic generation, an idealism that Ed salutes and cherishes even though he could never make it his own” (32). To Ed, Benny is a scoundrel who has abandoned the noble leftist cause, yet “Ed was an outsider who could not assent to the self- righteously radical politics of his student days, … he felt guiltily inadequate about this and, … he

‘loved’ Benny for despising Ed’s ‘uncommitted ways’” (Zichy 53). But Benny also embodies the disillusionment of the 1960s, and in many ways serves as a stand-in for provincial aspirations, particularly with regard to his education and the contrast between his university and post- university ideals. Ivan Avakumovic writes that the provincial universities in the prairies, “after a period of rapid expansion in the 1960s, discovered that the NDP when in power was less

139

generous than many university socialists had expected” (255). Benny is the opportunistic

Saskatchewan of the late 70s—no longer a rogue in the sense of rejecting societal rules, but a

member of “The March of Roguery” (Grant), a caricatured procession of cutpurse professions,

including the lawyer. A leftist ideologue with a right-inclined wallet, Benny plunges headlong toward the Tory upset of 1982. As David Smith notes, the results of that election “revealed a latent weakness of governments committed to social-democratic ideals—which is that they appear, because of the goals they seek, to be insensitive to and distant from immediate public concerns” (48-49). Ed, to be contrary, has adopted the Marxist subtext from “Man Descending,” idealising the ‘actual’ left to which he had been “uncommitted” during his university years (MD

237), growing late into the role of the sociopolitical rogue. Unlike Benny, a radical in the late 60s

whose vigor faded like the Waffles’ did, Ed is representative of the average member of the new

generation, who “joined cooperatives … but … did not respond to any trumpet call to build a

new world order” (Fairbairn 165). It is only in the provincial left’s twilight that Ed’s potential for

rejection of social conventions emerges. He does not oppose progressivism, but the phoniness of

those who claim to practice it: the “BMW socialist[s]” (241), in other words, those who have

internalised an ideology which “hovers between ‘a system of beliefs characteristic of a certain

class’ and ‘a system of illusory beliefs’” (Williams 66), concealing the disparity between classes

and the hegemonic function of the “values and beliefs which a dominant class develops and

propagates” (110). Ed in turn attempts to completely remove himself from capitalism. He does

not sell his labour for income and does not appear to be dependent on welfare or other

governmental economic supports, approaching what Gramsci called sub-proletariat. He resides in

an in-between space of independence and outlaw. As Forceville notes, it is Ed’s “position as an outsider—emphasized by his unemployment—which allows him to stand back and comment on

140

his society” (55), particularly its political and economic direction, in “Man Descending.” And

yet, in “Sam, Soren, and Ed,” Ed uses his position to blackmail Benny for Victoria’s address.

And as his socioeconomic situation declines, his commentary shifts to align more with his personal desires than a set of political beliefs.

While this shift at first appears to be oddly positive or at least beneficial, Ed’s apparent social progress is undermined by the subtext of his actions. His use of political commentary to extract information about Victoria allows him to confront her, resulting in the “positively medieval” challenge in which he intends to “giv[e] proof of his valour to his lady love” by competing in the upcoming River Run (MD 255-256)—a seemingly genuine attempt to play the knight or the Donnian courtly lover rather than the rogue. Ed’s shift from ideological to personal politics is further depicted in his attempts to write a “Big Book” (244). After deciding that the position of author was “socially unproductive enough” to appeal to him (243), Ed begins a novel on the ‘lost generation’—his generation, new progressives (244-245). But after that book and a second idea both die, Ed begins writing a western about Sam Waters, ironically drawing on him as inspiration for masculinity. Once again Ed has failed at and fled from any radical political discourse in favour of personal interest. And while he parallels himself with Waters when training for the River Run, “his alter ego serves only to underscore the gap between Ed’s ethical ideality and his reality” (Dunning 34). Any personal progress made through Victoria’s challenge is undercut by the fact that Ed chooses not to enter the race despite believing that he could have completed it (MD 261)—a delusional belief given that he was running less than half the length of the race during his practices. After romanticising his training through the metanarrative of Sam’s trial of manhood in the Old West, Ed doubles back on his ambitions, relinquishes his agency, and returns to his most comfortable position, the socially immobile and ironically hypocritical

141

watcher. He fails at playing the political knave—falling into the base scoundrelism of personal manipulation—and fails at playing the courtly lover. His only retribution at the story’s end is that he has finally “found [him]self a job” (261), brought back into the fold of capitalism through what must have been one of Benny’s most boycotted businesses: Eaton’s department store.

Vanderhaeghe’s uncompiled story, “He Scores! He Shoots!,” takes place shortly after the

events of “Sam, Soren & Ed” and depicts Ed as a bachelor slowly recovering from divorce. He

remains socially critical, yet gradually discovers the empowerment of overcoming a life of irony

and immobility. Ed holds his job as a salesperson in Eaton’s china department, but employment

has not relieved him from being mocked by his co-worker Carmichael, who constantly refers to him as the “bull in the china shop” (3). Ed continues to live a life of relative immobility and irony despite his return to the world of employment, depicted by his transparent claim that he is buying hockey equipment for a nephew to mask the shame of his lack of athleticism and his embarrassing “nom de hockey” from his adolescence (4-5). Also persistent is Ed’s role as a judgemental watcher. He resumes his sly observations, this time hybridising personal criticism with social commentary: he describes his colleague Sheila, “who belongs to a group of professional women … who foregather to ventilate their considerable grievances against society and the uppity cleaning ladies. These lively lasses refer to themselves in toto as The Collective.

A name which always makes [Ed] think of Uncle Joe Stalin” (6). Word choice is revealing in this passage, as “professional women” suggests any woman working for a living but conveys a subtext of prostitution. Ed distinguishes the category as “lawyers, civil servants, chartered accountants, social workers, teachers, ‘communicators’ etc.” (6). In other words, they are middle-class women in unionised workplaces and crown corporations, or what Ed regards as feminist BMW socialists. While their “grievances against society” at first seem harmlessly, if not

142

hypocritically leftist, akin to Victoria’s civil servant friends, many members of The Collective

could be found in a gender-swapped “March of Roguery” given their condescension toward the

working-class women in their employ. Finally, the reference to Stalin reflects the political

disposition that characterised Ed in the previous stories. He still possesses the insight to

comment on large-scale social ironies and the left’s shortcomings, yet his own politics remain

personally inflected, a site of irony.

Despite his duality as social rogue and pathetic fool, he does escape from one layer of his

immobility over the course of the story: self-irony. Using several hockey-related plot devices, Ed takes Linda—one of the new members of The Collective—home with him and has adulterous sex with her after having his “resolve stiffened” by the fact that her last name matches his workplace’s bully’s (14). The next day, Ed is aware that “life is never as rich and rewarding ... as

we would like to imagine it” being that “there are seven Carmichaels listed in the directory” (14).

However, the experience gives him the confidence to retort to his co-worker’s snide question of

“How did the game go, big shooter? Did you score?” with the “cold, unflinching” response of “A hat trick” (15). Through this macho conclusion, Ed overcomes some of his social obstructions.

His intercourse with Linda is a step away from the obsession with Victoria depicted in the other stories and his response to Carmichael measures his emergence from uncaring apathy. Most importantly, Ed is aware that his victory, like The Collective, is not all that it seems. His awareness of personal surroundings frees him from Carmichael’s criticism and prevents him from being undercut by his own narrative. From a more radically Marxist perspective, social mobility might make Ed more complicit in and subordinate to hegemony—the “domination [of] relations between social classes” (Williams 108)— and therefore arguably reduce his roguery.

However, it frees him from the self-effacing irony of the pathetic fool. Ed’s transition indicates

143

that sociopolitical rogues have the potential to free themselves of irony through awareness and

agency. I argue that this balance of irony and agency, commentary and self-subversion, personal politics and party politics, which culminates in a critique of ignorance and apathy, is the primary political deployment of Vanderhaeghe’s early contemporary fiction. And as with all things spearheaded by Ed, this message is once again complicated by the addition of a final work related to that character.

Ed, a Post-Rogue Avoiding the Present Age

When we revisit Ed for the last time in My Present Age, he has quit his job at Eaton’s, although, as Dunning notes, he does so “rather than wait to be fired because of his rudeness to customers” (36); a rudeness brought on, in classical terms, by his “alienation of labour” (Endres

87). Ed is living in an apartment in near-sub-proletariat condition—quickly approaching the vagrancy of his meta-textual persona, Sam Waters, and his childhood icon, Huck Finn—a recursion of his situation at the beginning of “Sam, Soren, and Ed.” He is haunted by The Beast, a right-wing radio talk show host, and McMurtry, the senior citizen living in the apartment directly below his. The Beast roars at Ed and his ilk through McMurtry’s cranked speakers, and one day, at the novel’s opening, the old man himself roars at / about Ed through the call line.

After McMurtry’s complaint about “bums,” The Beast proclaims that there are “just too many unemployment benefits and welfare rip-off artists” who are committing “fraud, … just a highfalutin name for stealing” (10). McMurtry is clearly one of the old, pre-progressivist left, and The Beast serves as a mouthpiece for the incoming new right, exploiting the parallels between previous rural politics and contemporary urban ones. Both align Ed with the rogue, not in the sociopolitical sense, but in the image of the Early Modern cutpurse. Yet, rather than

144

returning to his judgement of capitalism in “Sam, Soren, and Ed,” Ed attempts to clarify and

justify his living situation: “I have phoned the open-line show to explain to him [The Beast /

McMurtry] that I receive neither unemployment insurance nor welfare, but live on the capital I

raised from cashing in my life insurance policy” (13). While he is perfectly content as a social

outlaw, he resists being categorised as their kind of rogue. Driven to remove himself entirely

from the socioeconomic system, rather than serve as an outlier who moves against the current

from within, he does not sell his labour for profit, but rejects all financial support. In cashing in

his life insurance policy, Ed embodies the Marxist notion of life under capitalism—trading your

years for money—and brings to light what Mathews calls the “false consciousness of a colonial

dependency in a bourgeois, capitalist, imperial system” (146). Ed’s repudiation of social and

economic convention illuminates the “drugged, dragooned, down-trodden, dominated, and nearly

drowned” state of the lower class (146), and anticipates his total rejection of politics—his

transcendence to post-roguery—that occurs at the novel’s conclusion. However, his behaviour in

this scene and his avoidance of social support suggest a fear of being (what he would perceive

as) pitied by the middle class, the civil servants he derided in “Man Descending.” The irony is

that Ed is (even if largely by his own doing) legitimately in need of welfare; he is in an economic

position for which the activists of his university days would have rallied.

Dunning argues that “Vanderhaeghe resolves the ambiguity surrounding the authenticity

of Ed’s reformation in the previous story [“Sam, Soren, and Ed”], for he has visibly declined,

beginning the novel in worse shape than ever” (36). However, this reading ignores the intermediate events of “He Scores! He Shoots!” Ed has not simply transitioned from a position of potential growth and maturity to his former immobility; he has returned abruptly to the role of the pathetic fool, to the ironic narrator devoid of agency, a role he shed at the end of the

145

uncollected story. This gap in the canonical Ed narrative, this trace of a missing part of the story

between Man Descending and My Present Age, haunts the genealogy of Ed’s characterisation as

much as it does Dunning’s reading. While My Present Age may be read as an independent work,

a cohesive reading of Ed’s character, such as Dunning’s, Zichy’s, or my own diegetically chronological reading, is troubled by the disparity between the narrative’s chronology and that of the texts’ production. “Man Descending” was the first Ed piece to be published, appearing in

Aurora in 1978, followed by “He Scores! He Shoots!” in Matrix in 1981, then “Sam, Soren, and

Ed” later that year, while My Present Age first appeared in its full-length form in 1984 (Horava).

It is likely that the uncollected story was written before Vanderhaeghe considered a novel featuring Ed, resulting in the disconnections within the character’s developmental arc.

Furthermore, the lack of a significant gap between the publication of the second and third Ed story suggests that Vanderhaeghe was wrestling with how much closure to give the character.

The fact that “Sam, Soren, and Ed” appears in Man Descending and that “He Scores! He

Shoots!” does not, canonises Ed’s ambiguity and allows him to languish in the ‘gap’ leading up to My Present Age. Only when all the published Ed works are considered within their diegetic chronology does this characterisation collapse. We end up with recursions of the “same old Ed”

(MD 239), each embodying their present age while being critical of its politics, each having the potential to rise or fall within their situation, each needing to escape the irony of their narration, each struggling with the fact that they are always already depictions of a man descending.

One of the saving graces for this atemporal, recurring character is that the Ed from the

novel, like all others before him, “provides more than a parable on modern life: he also analyzes

the forces at work in his culture” (Dunning 36). This analytic approach is particularly evident when Ed shouts “Free Balzac!” in front of a downtown legal office and comments: “It is a sign

146

of the present age that no one joined in … Fourteen years ago someone would have” (MPA 102).

Ed again blends personal and social politics; his protest is not for the liberation of an individual, but for a collection of his books that his estranged wife Victoria refuses to relinquish in their divorce proceedings. And yet, his social disruption reveals an astute commentary: the ignorance shown in response to his shouts is indicative of ever-declining progressivist engagement, now a mere relic of the 60s and 70s as the province winds up for Devine’s Tories (who have already won the election by the time Vanderhaeghe is writing the novel). Ed recursively embodies both the roles of critic and criticized, cunning rogue and foolish knave. For example, after providing extensive commentary on Marsha’s bourgeois father, Ed happily accepts her offer of his favorite drink, the gentleman’s drink, Scotch (78), yet claims he “never went in for that heightened- awareness crap” in university (79). Ed distances himself from the leftist paradigms that he idealised in “Sam, Soren, and Ed,” despite the fact that he continues to judge people by those standards.

Perhaps Ed’s, and by extension Vanderhaeghe’s, strongest socioeconomic commentary in

My Present Age is found in Bill, Marsha’s ex-husband, who has converted to an extremist

Christian subset or what Ed calls “an unpopular lunacy,” in contrast to the progressivist

“atheist’s liberalism” (33-34) that the couple previously practiced. As in Donne’s knave poems, religion, sanity, and social politics are interwoven and contrasted, encapsulated within a single character. This parody culminates when “Marsha’s Pop offered to write a thousand-dollar cheque and donate it to the Waffle branch of the NDP if Bill would get his hair cut and be married in the

United Church” but now “it seems that Bill’s political expediency is having unforeseen consequences” (85). This scene is thick with political ironies. The Waffle emerged in 1969, more than a decade before the novel’s setting of Saskatoon’s rightward shifting politics, and while it

147

“stood as the embodiment of the left” in Saskatchewan, it “precipitated its own demise by

abandoning the NDP in 1973” (Avakumovic 265-266). Like Ed or Thompson, who at first

attempt to impose their social insights on those around them, the Wafflers “tended to lecture.

Unfortunately for them, the NDP was not a captive audience of undergraduates who had to put

up with what was being said to them” (237), just as the conservatives and BMW socialists

surrounding Bill and Ed remain relatively unchanged by their counter-cultural practices.

Ironically, it is the coerced wedding that allows Bill to find his own faith and lunacy or, as Ed

sees it, to recognise that “He was always crazy” and that his choice of a particular religious

‘lunacy’ is in accordance with his “fundamental nature” (33-34). Bill is the reductionist’s equivalent of Ed, suggesting that little sanity can be found in the decline of the present age and the mirrored descent of one’s own life. Ed claims that Bill is the “ultimate simplifier” (34), and

Dunning applies Kierkegaardian philosophy to read both men as ethicists, claiming that everyone else falls into the “aesthetic sphere” and that they “could be regarded as another version of

Benny” (37). However, this approach—lumping characters into a philosophical binary— collapses when they are considered through the lens of class. Benny, as we remember, is a

“BMW socialist,” while Stanley Rubacek, Ed’s obsessive student, hopes to get rich by writing a best-seller: an over-wrought redemption novel that he transparently tries to pass off as creative non-fiction. Both characters are similarly situated as aesthetes according to Dunning, and both are practicing capitalists; however, they are distinguished by their socioeconomic status, and as a result, interact differently with Ed, who himself disrupts the Kierkegaardian binary.

While Ed utterly rejects Benny for succumbing to affluence and joining “The March of

Roguery,” he tolerates Rubacek. The middle-aged writing student does not show “any sign of ethical seriousness” (Dunning 37), but his presence allows Ed to distance himself from

148

roguery—at least in his own eyes—and resume his allegedly chivalric quest for Victoria, thereby

straying from the path of simplifier. For example, Rubacek takes shifts on watch and provides Ed

with (unwanted yet necessary) company while Ed stakes out Victoria’s potential hide-out motels.

Dunning writes that “Kierkegaard identifies this boundary condition as irony” (38), the very condition from which Ed was emerging in “He Scores! He Shoots!” For Dunning, “both reflective aesthetes and ironists escape real self-knowledge, aesthetes by abandoning themselves to speculation and fantasy, ironists by pointing their fingers” (38). This is the culmination of the canonical Ed—the Ed of the collected works, the chivalric knight who believes he can complete the River Run but never does, the knave who blames socialites for social decline, and the narrator ironically undermined by his own narration. Vanderhaeghe thus explores “the dialectic between Ed and his age” (Dunning 38) in which, despite his frequent criticisms, “Ed represents rather than rebukes his culture,” a culture lost between ethics and aesthetics, witnessing “the price of bringing ideals into connection with reality” (40-41). However, as with the stories, the character and the novel’s politics shift at its conclusion, inviting us to rethink our response to the modern condition, its political climate, and our notion of sociopolitical roguery.

At the end of the novel, Ed retreats from both personal and social politics, from knavish personal critiques and self-perceived knightly pursuits. He tells us: “When the bank opens I’m

withdrawing all the money I have left in my account. I’m not even going back to the apartment

for my clothes and the rest of my things … I’m running away” (248). He has seemingly become a true vagrant; in the final scene he has “disappeared” to a “new, simpler life” (249). We might read this as Ed’s final descent into the role of the fool, since “beneath his ironic disillusionment with society lies a deeper disillusionment with himself for failing to live up to his ideals”

(Dunning 41). Indeed, Zichy argues that Ed’s “uncommitted ways” (MD 237) lead him to his

149

“final position,” which is “the only relation to society he can muster’” because “[w]hen Ed claims that in not running in the marathon he is following the model of Kierkegaard rather than

Sam Waters, … he has gotten Kierkegaard’s message exactly wrong” (Zichy 54). But these readings fail to account for the entirety of Ed’s narrative—the former omits “He Scores! He

Shoots!” and the latter engages predominantly with Man Descending. As a result of these omissions, arguments that Ed is an emblematic character do not consider Ed and his narratives’ recursive nature, or the significant departure from that trend which occurs at the novel’s end.

Ed’s retreat from roguery, from ridiculing the dominant narrative and idealising the leftist political under-dog, into seeming passivity, is in fact one of his most active expressions of agency—and a commitment to politics. At Marsha’s brother’s wedding shortly before Ed’s disappearance, he gives an inebriated speech about the dysfunctions of marriage: his last swing at being a non-violent shit-disturber. Someone from the audience yells at him to “‘Sit down and shut up!’” (247), and this is what he does, on the scale of his entire life, in a very Bartleby-esque style. He would prefer not to be found, prefer not to engage with the people or politics of his past

(250). His vanishment is not a forfeiture, but a rejection of all social convention, dominant and emergent, sanctioned and counter-cultural. It is through this disintegration that Ed transcends roguery to become post-rogue, for he has abandoned the social structures that permit “The March of Roguery” as well as his position as an outlaw commenting thereon. The post-rogue is outlaw to all politics, including the politics of putting-into-words, he exists outside of both the dominant culture and the critiquing yet undermined counter-culture and therefore exists outside the politics inherent to textual construction by ending his own narrative.

Slavoj Žižek writes that “in much of today’s progressive politics, the danger is not

passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active and to participate” (“The Interpassive

150

Subject”). For most of his narrative, Ed is driven by an urge to speak and play politics, to be the

villain in a recurring game that always, sometimes inexplicably, returns to the start with each

new episode. At the outset of each subsequent text, Ed returns, or, more accurately, is returned— sometimes by his own hand, but always by Vanderhaeghe’s scriptor’s—to a state of social immobility and of liminality between critic and fool. Ed’s inability to be active, to subvert systems of power and enact change, is caused by his near-perpetual self-irony, his self-critical narrative voice, and the undermining metanarrative of the stories where he finds himself. He is always limited by his duality—as rogue and fool—and the duality of roguery—the outlaw who challenges social convention versus the scoundrels who establish and exploit it. Only in “He

Scores! He Shoots!” does Ed become active rather than remaining trapped in a becoming active, achieved by overcoming his irony and coming to terms with his disillusionment. Žižek claims that “the truly difficult thing is to step back and withdraw from it [the urge to participate],” which Ed does achieve at the end of My Present Age. He finds himself in a time where civil servants, lawyers, academics, and writers interpassively save the world—talking about Chilean refugees but doing nothing for them, forming a women’s collective that excludes and looks down on other women, fabricating creative ‘non-fiction’ rather than living a life. Ed himself defers most of his action to his western novel’s protagonist, Sam Waters, and even his composition of the book is interpassive: his “process of creation [is] … a case of automatic handwriting” (69).

This “interpassive mode,” ingrained in our present age, keeps us “active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change” (Žižek). As an ideological mode of being, therefore, “the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and refuse to participate” (Žižek). In response to

Saskatchewan’s political cacophony in the early 1980s—the new right, overlapping with remnants of the old left, both at odds with progressivist BMW socialists who were too pseudo-

151

active to prevent the decline of socialism—Ed finally can do nothing but remove himself from discourse. By doing so he “clears the ground for true activity” (Žižek). The Ed texts circle around agency, commentary, and roguery, but they do not always demand activity.

Vanderhaeghe’s contemporary short stories culminate in a message against apathy and irony, My Present Age concludes with a warning against unproductivity, against over-speaking and under-hearing, against the roaring of The Beast’s voice, which opens the novel, destroying our “brief peace” (1). Ed, as a post-rogue, transcends the motif’s dualism to ultimately reject the progressivist stagnancy of interpassivity and the ideological constructs of contemporary social convention.

Becoming Lost: Rediscovering Absence Through the Vanderhaeghe Fonds

What does it mean to become lost? In Guy Vanderhaeghe’s early fiction, family dynamics cage Billy. Thompson is lost in a rural, regional, socio-political culture disparate from his own. Harder loses himself between heroism and pathos, between the expectations born of idealisation and the disappointment of reality. And Ed often appears always already lost within his diegeses: he is lost within his generation and losing himself in fantasy or within the fiction of his own meta-novel. Readers, in turn, may lose themselves within the fictions of these characters’ lives. But the material traces of the texts in the archive, in each fonds, presuppose presence as an a priori, and an erasure or self-erasure is perpetually and inextricably linked to the becoming found, to preservation and documentation, as well as to trace—the remnants of those practices. Just as Ed became lost in the cacophony of Saskatchewan’s politics in the 1980s, readers become lost by seeking out the archive and encountering its plurality of voices, multiple answers to unasked questions, and silence or absence in response to asked questions. Researchers

152

lose themselves in a labyrinth of drafts, whose chronology can seldom be determined and whose

walls have ambiguous gaps (as was evident with Kroetsch’s fonds). In the case of each text, we wonder: was there another draft before the ‘first,’ or a third between the ‘first’ and ‘second’?

Readers (re)visit the text through its archive, proliferating uncertainty through the attempt to impose determinacy. Scholars and archivists, as archons, find a presence of politics within an author’s fonds, which they then repurpose for literary analysis in what Daniel Ferrer calls

“genetic criticism.” In their pursuit of archived text, presences are becoming found as researchers repurpose a text’s genealogy. But researchers also find unanticipated absences, traces of texts that ought to exist. By seeking such documents, expecting them, and making demands of them under the assumption of their presence, scholars incite their becoming lost—reify their absence.

This inevitable failing, this always already failing genetic criticism, heightens the presences pertaining to Vanderhaeghe’s early engagements with progressivism, with what can actually be read in his fonds. My Present Age appears in the archive in five distinct forms, likely produced in the following order: a folder of holograph fragments, a holograph draft conveniently labeled “DRAFT I,” a typescript draft, a hybrid holograph / typescript draft (I will explain the reasons for which I believe it should be dated later), and a ‘final’ typed draft with minor hand- written edits, likely from a publisher (503/92.1, Boxes 11.2, 12.3-5, 13.1).30 These drafts contain

significant variations that contribute to our reading of progressivism in Vanderhaeghe’s early

regional fiction—a reading that takes into account “the entire range of documents” (Ferrer 49)

that make up a text. For if we do not value the author’s intention, as Barthes has taught us, why

value their editor’s in elevating a particular version of the text, a partition of the work? To do so

is always a political act, a discursive de-cision that privileges the work over the text, but in

30 As all the archival material discussed in this section is from the same accession, parentheticals from this point forward will simply cite the box and file number, and the draft’s page number when applicable / available. 153

Vanderhaeghe’s case, it also links to the sociopolitical. For example, in the holograph draft,

Marsha tells Ed / the reader about her marriage with Bill, rather than having the event narrated

by Ed, as occurs in the published version. Marsha emphasises Bill’s “principles,” connecting him

with Miss Clark from “Drummer,” and in this permutation her father’s cheque is for “the

Defence Fund for the Chicago Seven” rather than the Waffle (12.3, p. 74). It is not until the next

draft that an editor, presumably someone other than Vanderhaeghe, given the handwriting,

suggests that “somebody else” should receive the cheque, and thus in the hybrid (half hand-

written, half typed) draft, the “Defence Fund” becomes “the Waffle” (13.1, p. 79), which is then

clarified to “the Waffle branch of the NDP” in the final draft (11.2, p. 85). This progression

demonstrates the increasing regionalisation of the novel’s political engagements. While the

Chicago Seven are connected to more radical progressivism and anti-authoritarianism than the

Waffle, they are less connected to the cultural climate of 1980s Saskatchewan.

In my attempt to trace each author’s engagements with prairie politics and social progressivism through early drafts in their fonds, it quickly became clear that my reading

depended on the “multiple decisions that were taken” over the course of the entire “process of

writing” (Ferrer 49). This dependence connects to Derrida’s notion that the archive “names at once the commencement and the commandment” (AF 1). Even though I do not begin my study with the archive, the fact that I will use it to write on Vanderhaeghe (or Govier, or Kroetsch) denotes the archive as the commencement, the starting point, and the reason for this writing.

Thus, as with the hauntological specters of Marx, “the archive should call into question the coming of the future” (34). The archive is simultaneously the source of commencement—the fonds that lead to this study—and of the texts to come—the chapters and creative intertexts within this study. While the archive, on a material level, comprises a collection of texts and

154

objects created in the past, it always exists in a future of different analyses. Critics bring a

formulated literary criticism to the archive to see if it is validated by the entire range of the

work’s documents, to see if the reading is genetically valid. As the coming before, as the already existing (if yet to have been found), the material archive functions as the exergue to any study that incorporates it (and the discursive archive functions as exergue to all study). The archive

“give[s] the tone” of the work to come, “capitalizing on an ellipsis” and “preparing the surplus

value of an archive” (7). In seeking Marxist traces in the Vanderhaeghe fonds, I give the archive

surplus value (the irony of this bequeathal is not lost on me), for “the technical structure of the

archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming

into existence and in its relationship to the future” (17). In other words, the archive containing

Vanderhaeghe’s drafts may suggest Marxism, but it is not Marxist until I interpret it as such,

until I bring its future potentiality into being through the archivisation of its contents, for even

historicist Marxists recognize that “the future exists in potential rather in the way that the past

exists in consequential” (Eagleton, “Marxism and the Past” 272). The archive also performs as

commandment, “there where authority [and] social order are exercised” (1). As exergue it

“give[s] the order … naming the problem” (7): the question of “What remains of what does not remain?” (Kroetsch, Hornbooks 8). Namely, the relationship between presence and absence, the

false notion of origin.

While Vanderhaeghe’s textual treatment of progressivism is complex and stratified, my

plan to map these layers through the archive and to investigate the evolution of Ed’s social

politics across drafts and through the writing process of multiple, potentially simultaneous works

was subverted by the archive itself. I return to the holograph draft of My Present Age for an

example. In addition to Benny the BMW socialist, the draft briefly mentions another friend,

155

Tony, who is economically down on his luck, but “Tony’s a phony. He’ll be back in a business

suit within a year” (12.3, p. 22). In this version of Ed’s lunch with Victoria, in which he also

defends / explains Bill’s lunacy, Ed’s politics shift toward personal issues far earlier in the scene

than in the published version. Rather than elaborating on his treatise of simplifiers and

complicators, which Dunning reads as ethicists and aesthetes, this Ed retreats from his beliefs

and instead lashes out at Tony’s character and his socioeconomic position, a recursion of his

technique from “Sam, Soren, and Ed.” The draft also features a sprawling—graphemically

speaking—and seemingly hastily written first draft of the “Free Balzac!” scene (p. 92), which, in

its ‘origin,’ is nearly identical to the published version. Curiously, Vanderhaeghe himself appears

to suffer from a “case of automatic handwriting” (MPA 220), his fonds simultaneously contain a

point of textual ‘origin’ and a near total lack of process or development—the origin lacks origins,

lacks a chain of signifying drafts, further disrupting the possibility of genetic criticism.

Both the holograph draft and an early typed draft of My Present Age contain overt

references to prairie socialism. During his lunch with his estranged wife Victoria, Ed complains:

“I’m tired of voting NDP because I’m from the generation that’s supposed to have a social

conscience … Just call me Mr. Phil T. Bourgeoisie” (12.4, pp. 24-25). This passage directly

addresses Ed’s disillusion with the failing ideals of progressivism and his own inability to

commit to them. However, the scene is heavy-handed and self-reflexive, undermining some of

Ed’s nuanced and sub-textual adoptions of disparate ideologies. The early drafts also feature an entirely different ending for the novel and Ed’s narrative arc, complicating my own Marxist interpretation of the novel’s conclusion. Chapter 18 ends with Ed driving to an empty arena in the winter and imagining himself as a father (12.3, pp. 244-245) rather than vanishing from the world as he does in the published version. The chapter where Ed has vanished and imagines

156

himself speaking to his father at the published novel’s close is completely absent from the holograph draft and the first typescript. Thus, my Žižekian reading of Ed’s transcendence into

the post-rogue figure at the novel’s end is dependant on the textual permutations selected for

publication, while other drafts, alternate permutations that were once considered equally viable,

might in fact be complementary to Dunning’s reading of Ed as a man caught between ethics and

aesthetics.

Each of these key scenes and significant variants engage with and express a level of

absence, each one embodies an aspect of “becoming lost.” There is no indication of Ed’s lunch

with Victoria being contentious; it is present in one draft and absent in the next, the trace of an

intermediary draft or an editorial pass never archived. While a researcher expecting to find this

draft may seem anticipatory, many authors’ fonds contain such details—for example, Govier’s

fonds contain two copies of each draft: one clean and one annotated by her editor—and the

fictional notion of a ‘complete’ record—textual or historical—requires and demands this

inclusion. As Derrida notes, a “spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and

ties it … to a very singular experience of the promise” (AF 36). This promise is the “obligation

of the archive,” the “unconditional affirmation” of a reading, which “bases its authority … on the

precedence of an archive” (75). By bringing such expectations to an archive, the critic virtually

obligates an affirmation of their reading, an authorisation of their explication. The archive’s

inability to do so politicises its gaps, gaps whose significance become more complex as absences

expand. When key scenes from Vanderhaeghe’s early drafts are found missing, the archival

promise of affirmation turns out to be one of nothing, a politics of absence. In other words, the

becoming lost of archival traces, incited by critical anticipation, upends the promise and even

obligation of affirmation, alongside its very possibility. Readerly pursuits then dispel the

157

archive—erasing its textuality and mysticism—and cause the potentiality of spectral traces to

vanish when faced with our need for presence.

Like Tony, there is no editorial or genetic marker indicating that Marsha’s wedding

should be recounted by Ed, or that Ed’s comment about voting NDP should be cut. These politics

are present in the archive, but the process that lead to their later modulation or excisement is

itself absent—a trace of politics governing the presence and absence of politics. More

confusingly, the ‘original’ ending, which is replaced by the published ending in a later draft, is

accompanied by the editorial note, “absolutely excellent!” (12.4), raising the unanswerable

question of why it might have been cut. The new ending first appears as a holograph fragment

folded between a disorganised Xerox copy of the ‘final’ draft (13.2). Was this the original ending, discarded in favour of the imagistic musings on fatherhood, and in turn re(in)stated?

Ferrer writes that in archives the “earlier documents, the more inchoate traces, are as interesting as the ultimate corrections; or rather, they are interesting in relation to the late variants” (49). I would argue that the fragments, traces, and indecipherable connections between them are in fact more interesting and more telling than their relationship to a ‘finished’ work. In the

Vanderhaeghe fonds, the absence of textual evolution speaks. Derrida asks: “How can [one]

claim to prove an absence of archive? How does one prove in general an absence of archive…?”

(AF 64). The trace of assumed or anticipated presence allows scholars to theorise archival

absence, but these presumptions also cause the futurity and the potentiality of the archive’s contents to vanish, to become lost. More important now is the question: what is the function of these inscribed absences, both within an analysis that reads the archive and within a theory of how the archive is conceptualized? To begin unpacking this question, it is useful to examine a

158

part of the Vanderhaeghe fonds dominated by absence: the folders related to his early short

fiction.

There is a near total absence of socio-politically significant variants in the Man

Descending drafts. The fragments of “Sam, Soren, and Ed” suggest a focus on metanarrative and

on the potential for development (or lack thereof) in Ed’s characterisation. Ironically, while the

Ed stories and other works from Man Descending and The Trouble with Heroes are deeply

political, a fully genetic investigation would be heavily limited by the themes and topics

prescribed by the archive’s traces of text. For example, one of the most significant variants

between the holograph fragments and later drafts of “Sam, Soren, and Ed” is that the former are

written in the past tense, which is not adopted until the published story’s final two pages (MD

261-62), facilitating reflection and anticipating closure sooner and more extensively in the earlier

permutations. Ed states in the fragments that “It was my mess, not Victoria’s” (14.5, [1f3]) as opposed to “All this is my mess, not Victoria’s” (MD 257)31 in the published version. In that

draft, Ed reflects on his past, whereas in the published story he experiences his epiphany in the

present moment. The former suggests that Ed has changed and is different from the Ed he

reflects upon, while the latter suggests a potential for change or a change that is in progress.

Thus, the earlier draft anticipates closure for Ed while the published story merely suggests its

possibility and raises more ambiguity.

Comparably, the variants between versions of Ed’s running practice demonstrate a shift

away from an evolving character, and instead undercut the progress that Ed claims to perceive in

himself. In one fragment, Ed describes the “hard looks, some of which registered concern, of

31 Unmarked holograph fragments are cited by item and feuille number in addition to box and folder. Square brackets are used, as these page numbers have been inferred as opposed to recorded by an archivist. Digitisations of many of these fragments are also available through the University of Calgary Digital Collections website: www.omeka.ucalgary.ca. 159

passing motorists that brought [him] to realize [he] was sympathetically unsteadily weaving [his]

way homeward” and that he “oddly enough … felt safe” upon completing the run (14.5, [1f2]).

In another fragment, likely written later as it more closely resembles the published text, he

describes himself as a “public spectacle” and speculates that the children watching him have the

“intent to rifle [his] pockets for change when [he] collapse[s]” (14.5, [1f6]). In the first fragment,

Ed appears to have shed his earlier paranoia and is optimistic about his endeavour, apparently

oblivious to the irony that he thought he had run “a long way, a mile” (14.5, [1f2]), less than a

twelfth of the distance for which he is training. This liberation from judgement and the influence

of the other, to which Ed seems particularly vulnerable, parallels his progress in “He Scores! He

Shoots!” and anticipates his running away in My Present Age, foreshadowing the recursion in his

character. The later Ed is more akin to the hopeless self-ridiculing Ed of the story’s first half, aware that he must better himself, but still largely unable to do so. This change is likely related to a realisation—either Vanderhaeghe’s or a reader’s—that the story would take place before “He

Scores! He Shoots!” / My Present Age and therefore needed a more open-ended conclusion. The published version, which changes the tense of the scene to the present, renders this self- perception more immediate. As Dunning notes, Ed “hyperbolizes his suffering” (35); “too perceptive to remain blind to his despair, and too weak and frightened to face it, he instead treats himself as a jest” (34). Thus, the shift from past tense to present tense results in more showing and less telling within the narrative, as well as a more consistent characterization of Ed and a decline in closure: Ed cannot reflectively change or react to his story as easily when it is told in the continuous present tense.

Finally, a typescript draft ends with a paragraph designated for deletion and not present in the published version. It reads: “I suppose it is my job to close that gap now. Without Victoria.

160

But not entirely alone. Perhaps Sam will help give me the imagination to will, and Soren the

courage to understand” (11.1, [1f28]). The word “gap” in the first sentence refers to the distance

between understanding and will that Kierkegaard describes in the quote Ed has chosen as his

epigraph, which is the final paragraph of the published version (MD 262). However, an earlier

publication of the story in the Journal of Canadian Fiction retains a single sentence of the final

paragraph: “It is my job to close that gap now” (31). When this passage is deleted, the text limits

Ed’s ideological self-examination and self-interpretation, an editorial practice that progresses throughout the writing process. The Ed in the final publication is less aware of and engages less directly with his own philosophies than in earlier drafts; he becomes a subject for readers’ analyses rather than the object his own. Dunning notes, with regard to the story’s end, that in a

Kierkegaardian reading, “Ed can only blind himself to something he sees, only flee from freedom through freedom” (35). The removal of the last paragraph from the draft characterises

Ed as having the potential to “blind himself” and “flee” rather than close the gap in his life, reiterating the ironic undermining nature of his character in earlier fragments. This deletion also removes the finality of Ed’s resolve to live without Victoria and thus removes closure from the narrative, facilitating potential future works, from which My Present Age emerged, and ironing out the transition between “Sam, Soren, and Ed” and “He Scores! He Shoots!” which was published by the time the Journal of Canadian Fiction version of the former was published

(Horava). As the text’s permutations move away from self-reflexivity and from tempering Ed, they relinquish closure, allowing for new readings of character, philosophy, and meta-textuality, as well as allowing the generation of new texts that elaborate upon these concepts. Thus, the text’s evolution portrays Ed’s progression from a volatile character (as seen in the drafts) toward one who is more static (as seen in the published version) and therefore less active in his

161

engagements with Victoria and his situation. The text’s genealogy provisions a more consistent

and philosophical reading of Ed, such as Dunning’s, since the archival traces, and therefore, by

extension, the scriptor and the collector, seem to disregard Ed’s political inclinations.

The quote marked for deletion—one of the few indications of erasure in the early

drafts—also embodies what the researcher must do: close or at least negotiate the gaps in the

archive, identify the absence of any holograph drafts or fragments containing the sociopolitical

origins of the opening to “Sam, Soren, and Ed.” Other stories from Man Descending, namely

“The Watcher,” “Cages,” and “Drummer” are even more devoid of political genealogy; the few

fragments that exist focus on Charlie’s formation of Grandma Bradley, a minor character named

Zipper, and the drummer himself, but none of the pivotal scenes on which I have focussed my

readings (15.2-4). Finally, there is no archive of The Trouble with Heroes, Vanderhaeghe’s other

early collection, only a gap, only absence to investigate. To parallel Derrida’s ponderings at the

end of Archive Fever, “We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he may have burned”

(101).

What do these gaps do? In the Vanderhaeghe fonds they deny a genetic criticism of

progressivism in his early works and therefore ask us to consider the process of genetic criticism

itself and the functions of absence in the archive. We are working within what Foucault might

call a “limited system of presences” and therefore we may use the constraints of this system to

study “the limit that separates [statements] from what is not said, in the occurrence that allows

them to emerge to the exclusion of all others” (119). What allows certain statements—drafts, fragments, notes—to emerge is a combination of politics, what Rancière calls the “partition of the visible and the sayable” (10), but on the microcosmic level of authors, editors, archivists, and scholars, rather than the epochal level of literary traditions. The author is, at least mechanically,

162

responsible for the putting-into-words of each draft, as the editor is responsible for each

comment, as I am for each interpretation. The archivists or collectors are responsible for

bringing-into-preservation selected documents. And the scholars, the geneticists who make

requests of the archive, seeking simultaneously its authority and its approval of their authority

over readings of the text, are responsible for the becoming found, but equally, the becoming lost

of specific yet selective traces.

Earlier I quoted in part a question from Derrida: “How does one prove in general an

absence of the archive, if not in relying on classical norms…?” (64). What he refers to here are

“the classical norms of knowledge, of scholarship, … the objectivity of the historian, of the

archivist, … the reference to stable themes and concepts, … an archive determined as already

given, in the past or in any case only incomplete, determinable and thus terminable in a future

itself determinable as future present” (51). Finding absences, discovering the becoming lost of

texts, of archival fragments, challenges these norms. Any notion of objectivity or completionism

falls away, both in the case of textual criticism and genetic criticism, for while the politics of the

published text privilege certain readings, so does the archive’s range of documents, and to suggest that this range is “full” (Ferrer 49) is as problematic as suggesting the author’s or editor’s choice of text is authoritative. An archive cannot be “already given” and static in its past if parts of it disappear, are taken away, by future inquisitions. As Stephen Scobie notes, it is an “absence, or lack, in” (and of) “the so-called ‘original’ text which makes possible the movement of différance” (60). Without gaps in the archive, there would be no slippage of readings, no chronological slippage of version order, and therefore less slippage of the social constructions that present the text and its archive as static and objective. Ferrer argues that the pluralism and slippage of drafts and their chronology within the process of writing that is documented by the

163

archive—the “avant-texte”—“has many of the characteristics of an electronic hypertext” (55).

However, when we include absence—the documents that have become lost and those that may

have never existed—in our model of the archive, the multiple versions of a text function as

supplements for one another: “In speaking of a text and its supplement, then, it is difficult to

speak of an ‘original’ text at all” (Scobie 60). Because “the text and its supplement are equally

derivative, equally caught up in the play of inter-textuality” (60) no avant-texte exists, only an

exergue capitalising on the ellipses between permutations of the text.

A failed genetic criticism allows readers to come to terms with the failure of genetic criticism, paralleling the failure of literary criticism that came before it. These failures do not denote a loss of purpose, but a disillusionment with transcendental truth and textual origin—“in the end I have nothing new to say … why archive this?” (Derrida AF 9). The absences within the

Vanderhaeghe fonds allow the researcher to step away from the archive. Rather than make demands in hopes of finding a key to the works, the gaps allow us to use the texts as a case study, “to take up the related themes of sleep, oblivion, and lost origin” (Foucault 123) within the archive itself. This shift into the methodology of Foucault’s enunciative analysis enables us “to rediscover not the moment or trace of [the statement’s] origin, but the specific forms of an accumulation” (125). We uncover neither the ‘original’ text, nor its absence, but its becoming lost through our engagements with the archive. We find neither a presence nor an absence, but a form of accumulation and dissipation that functions through and is dependent on investigations of trace. Thus, in absence, we find Foucault’s notion of “positivity” (125)—an archeological approach to discourse (re)applied to the archive.

By contrast, the nested narrators of “Nicknames” and the meta-critical investigations of the similarly stratified narrators in Govier’s Between Men dig through the sedimentary layering

164

of discourse, of who is allowed to speak, and spoken-into-being by whom. More importantly, these texts wrestle with the putting-into-words: to whom does a story belong and whose is it to tell? Between Men and the Govier fonds invert the queries raised by Vanderhaeghe’s, addressing the problems of presence: the partitioning and preservation of textual permutations. While representing absence raises technological and theoretical conundrums, the de-silencing of victimized individuals raises ethical concerns. An archeological approach to the archive takes on another layer of significance when it unearths marginalized voices, which we must then decide how to name.

165

NICKNAMES

Natalie is not going to be homeless.

She considers this a great success. Especially for a writer. And she has published a story.

So why does she hang her head in shame as she walks across the 14th Street bridge in downtown

Calgary?

That’s where the story is, isn’t it? In the slope of Natalie’s hunched shoulders? I begin to see her, walking across the concrete bridge on a concrete day. Almost a year off work—not so bad in this economy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Today, Natalie got a job. In her field—sort of. And it’s the ‘sort of’ that weighs on her as she crosses the bridge. Not that it’s anything scandalous, don’t misunderstand me. She just figures that someone with an MA in creative writing, who worked under a renowned author and has been published multiple times in her department’s journal, would amount to more than a junior copywriter for a sports magazine by the time she was pushing thirty.

Is she thirty? Perhaps that’s a bit old for this stage in a career. Then again, people take their time with school these days, they travel—did Natalie travel? I suppose 27 is more likely, and it has a nice factor of threes—some deep significance there, I’m sure. Yes, Natalie is 27 as she walks across the bridge on 14th.

And now she’s a sports writer. Not so bad. She’s watched sports (once or twice), even played a few. Does chess still count? She’s pretty sure bowling does. Actual sports were as far as possible from her mind when she applied for the job. Natalie only considered the fact that she needed to not be homeless.

She had bullshitted her way through the interview well enough—as a writer and a master

(mistress?) of English she would have called it “selective disclosure.” She had spent the three

166

days between scheduling the interview and arriving at the office memorising sports terminology, team names, key players, play styles, and logos. And now she knows the Stampeders, the new draft for the Flames, and why the Jays lost last night. She’s been crossing this bridge for a while now.

Natalie is walking home to a cider (or six). To her cats, dog—animals various family members have dumped on her when they died (the family members that is, not the pets). This is useless—I can’t find the story to get on with. It’s about Natalie, the pets are just background fodder to flesh her out. The story. It’s about a writer. Probably one who can’t figure out her own characters.

***

Natalie nibbles her pen, glances down at the journal that has rested in her lap for the better part of the evening. There is only a name on the otherwise blank page. Charles. She sighs.

She goes back to gnawing her pen and drinking her (fourth) cider. She bites off a piece of plastic and grates the shards off her tongue with her teeth, chews her words. It’s good to see Natalie in action, but that sentence is awkward. That’s what second drafts are for. The pen and the words she can’t write are her dinner, in a sense, but that doesn’t mean she has to swallow them.

Just one name on the page. Charles. Charles who? Charles what? I can empathise. I was the same way with Natalie. Until the bridge, where her crushed look told me she was walking home from a new job on a grey day.

“Charles, Charles, Charles…”

“Hey now, you’re way too young to be talking to me like you’re my mother.”

Natalie opens her eyes. She lowers her fingers from their resting spot on her temples and glances over her shoulder. “Charles?” She looks back ahead of her.

167

“What are you looking around for? You aren’t on a train, I’m not sitting across from

you.”

“Is that how it’s supposed to work?”

“I don’t know, ask Mrs. Brown. Or Harry Potter, for that matter.”

Natalie scrunches her eyebrows. “Writing isn’t supposed to work this way either.”

“Oh?”

“None of my other characters just appeared out of thin air and started chatting.”

“Obviously they weren’t very good characters.”

“And they did not give me sass.” She points her pen accusingly, first at the journal, then at the cat on the back of the couch. No. Back at the journal.

“Mmhhmm? Definitely flat characters,” replies Charles, amused. “Nothing like Charles the rodeo clown.”

“Rodeo clown—you work at the Stampede?”

“Nah, you think too highly of yourself to write anything that could be stamped

‘Western.’”

“I think the cider and the cat hair is getting to me.” Is she allergic to half the pets she’s

inherited? “My other characters did not sass, and they sure as hell didn’t lie.”

“Whatever you say, dear.”

Natalie frowns. “Well, since I have you here, Charles,” she lets her pen hand drop heavily

onto the page, hoping it might rattle him, “where are you from?”

“Saskatchewan.”

“Saskatchewan. That’s it?”

“You tell me.”

168

Her frown deepens. “Charles from Saskatchewan… Charles the farmhand?”

“If you say so.”

“Well, what else is there to do in Saskatchewan? And what do farmhands do?”

“Lots of stuff I imagine.”

“You imagine? You’re the farmhand!”

“You imagined me imagining. And I can’t know what I do as a farmhand if you don’t

know what they do.”

“Fine. I just won’t write your story.”

***

But Natalie can’t avoid Charles. She tries to use him—his name—as a coaster for the last cider in the box, but his ink runs, taunting her with his elusiveness. Natalie moves from the living room to her bedroom, journal in hand and the dog between her feet. She sits in the overly wide chair at her writing desk and tries to imagine a less romanticised description of rural

Saskatchewan, but instead continues dreaming about the trip to B.C. she’s planning—a reward for finding employment? Though perhaps a little premature.

***

“I love you.”

Oh shit, thinks Natalie.

James stands on the mauve and white carpet of the motel with a helpless grin on his face.

Natalie tries to smile, sheepishly she hopes, and pulls him in for a hug. Not a “condescending pat-on-the-shoulder” kind of hug, but a “oh, hun, it’s cute that you think so” sort of hug.

Definitely not the “I love you, now we’re face-sucking” hug James goes for.

169

“Mmm,” manages Natalie after some backing-away-but-not-into-a-wall-for-you-to-pin- me-against manoeuvres. “That was uh, that was nice. I’m going to grab a smoke.”

“What?” She’s a smoker?

“Yeah, smokes. You know, to yeah, smoke. Ok.”

She leaves the room, takes the stairs at the end of the walkway two at a time, jumps into her Jeep, and begins to drive in the opposite direction of the only corner store she’s seen since arriving in Port Edward.

“What the hell was that about?” She mumbles around the end of a cigarette that she tries to light with one hand while shifting gears with the other and holding the wheel between a knee and an elbow. She considers tracking down Tanner and Taylor, but they’ll likely be high, or having sex, actually probably both. God, why couldn’t she and James have stayed with them?

High and horny one minute, chill and sated the next.

“It’s the damn bears!” Natalie yells, slamming her palm on the top of the steering wheel.

“Who the hell puts a campground near a bear sanctuary? Who the hell puts a bear sanctuary—a grizzly bear sanctuary!—next to a fucking town? What do they even need to claim sanctuary from? They’re god damned grizzlies! And what kind of assholes charge five-hundred bucks for a boat ride to the only place that has a worthwhile beach within four-hundred clicks?”

The four of them were supposed to be spending the better part of the week in Gwaii

Haanas National Park Reserve. Supposedly, there was walk-in radio-free ocean-front camping.

They were going to lie naked on the beach, smoke up, go down and apparently escalate our casual road-trip hook-ups to bold romantic declarations, ponders Natalie. She had been hoping to do some writing on the island, some real writing. Three months with a no name magazine in

Calgary, trolling out the same old story of who wasn’t sportsing hard enough and who sportsed

170

right this time had earned her some time off and the right to a proper story. Guy thinks girl thinks sex equals love, there’s an original one. Natalie snorts in an attempt to seem more disgusted than

she can be bothered to be.

She realises that she is heading back to Prince Rupert and drives halfway into the

shoulder to make a U-turn and head back towards Port Edward.

“Nope,” she states, remembering all three of the hours she had spent in the town the

previous day. After realising they couldn’t afford the ferry to Haida Gwaii, or at least that it wasn’t worth the price for only four days (Tanner’s delicate flat ass meant that it took them three days to reach the end of the line from Calgary), they had gone in search of another beach to camp on.

“What do you mean, ‘no beach’? We’re on the coast!” James had said to the bored- looking kid at the visitor’s centre.

“Sorry man,” the kid said, “there’s just the port, and it’s like closed unless you’re taking a ferry or whatever.”

“So, there isn’t say a nice island or something where we could camp on the beach?”

James had insisted. Natalie clues in. This had not been a spur of the moment declaration. He planned this, and wouldn’t be deterred when his scheme went to shit. The bastard.

“There’s like, this one little island,” the kid struggled to recollect, “and you can probably camp there, no one’s really gonna come out to ticket you, but you’d have to paddle there, so like, you’ll need kayaks or something.”

“Hah. Nope,” Natalie said. Last thing she needed was to be toppled into the ocean by some orca. It’s like the damn bears hanging out by the campground. No thank you.

171

Natalie drives past the motel, continues through town, and follows the road heading

south. This is a port, there’s got to be a beach with a wooden arm chair—preferably one with

arms wide enough to double as a writing desk—somewhere, right?

***

Bears, whales, and no beaches. No wonder no one ever comes out here. Natalie has been

driving down the same windy, bumpy, barely-one-car’s-length-wide road for over twenty minutes now, and still no sign of sand or fabled writing desk beach chairs.

“Where the hell am I?”

“GPS would probably be handy right about now,” James taunts from the back of her mind. “If only they made little portable phones with screens on them that worked the same way…”

“Nah,” muses Tanner from so far back that he might as well be in the seat behind her.

“You just follow the road, it knows where it’s taking you.”

She did only smoke tobacco, right? She might be wondering the same thing.

“I don’t think this road knows shit,” she spits at the dash board. She considers turning the

Jeep around. It would take quite the three-point turn. More like six-point, the way this boat turns.

Perhaps the next time the road widens. And then what? Back to town. James. Lover Boy. Doofus.

Maybe at the next intersection then. After the other roads have been followed.

There is no intersection. Natalie comes over a hill and sees the end of the road. It looks

like it just comes to a stop at the trees—a sign pointing back at her declares SKEENA DR.

Thrill-seekers will find northern BC’s pointless yet well-named roads particularly appealing. But

as she approaches the terminus the trees part on the right-hand side and a small gravel road

materialises, leading to what looks like a fishing community that hasn’t had outside contact in at

172

least sixty years. A large gate bearing PRIVATE PROPERTY bars the way. Natalie parks on the

grassy shoulder, gets out of the car, and looks down the single lane that runs parallel to the

waterfront. The houses look like tin foil. Probably a bunch of Y2K nutjobs. Charles might fit in

just fine.

“Can you read?” Natalie jumps at the sudden nearness of the voice.

“What? Yeah, of course.” She looks up to see a man whose head is surprisingly not

wrapped in tin foil and whose stained fishing jacket is at most only ten years old. So, they do

deal with outsiders. Natalie is already taking notes on Charles’ home town.

“Sign says private property.”

“I know. I’m just curious, what is this place?”

“You a reporter?”

“No.” Technically she is, but that isn’t why she’s here. “I’m Natalie.” She holds out her

hand. A gamble, praying against all odds she’s found herself a Charles. What does it matter? I

can call him whatever I want.

“My knowing your name doesn’t make you welcome here. Go back the way you came.”

He turns towards dirt lane, leaving Natalie with her hand slowly dropping. She gets into the car and turns around.

Why does it matter if I’m a reporter? Why does it matter if she’s a reporter? Maybe it isn’t actually a fishing village. There was some sort of factory at the end of the lane, right on the edge of the peninsula, with a couple of docks jutting out into the bay. Maybe they make things, ship things. Drugs stuffed in little ceramic dolls or wooden Haida statues. We aren’t so far from the cities, and who’s going to check the conspiracy theorists for a drug conspiracy? I’ll bet that’s what Charles is running from, why he went to Saskatchewan.

173

She has it all laid out by the time she gets back to the hotel. James is sitting on the bed,

still looking mopey.

“Hey,” she says, ruffling his hair. Don’t mom him, but don’t wife him either. You got this.

“Hey,” he mumbles, half a syllable. “Sorry.” Half a question. Is this what she wants?

“Look, let’s not worry about it now, we can figure shit out back in the city,” she bites her

lip. “Let’s just fuck this one out for now and get back to being on vacation, or whatever this is

supposed to be.”

James’ eyes widen.

This is why Tanner and Taylor work so well.

***

Charles is still lying to Natalie. I’m pretty sure that isn’t even his real name. And I

thought I had it bad. Probably for the best though. This is her story, not her story’s story. But what now? We’re back home, so what? The big questions. Natalie sits at her writing desk, pen in mouth, trying to get some answers out of Charles.

“Why haven’t you seen him since Prince Rupert?” he asks. Good question, why hasn’t she?

“Who?” James, obviously.

“James, obviously.”

“Piss off, Charles,” she flips the page in the journal over. And shouldn’t you know why?

“Come on Natalie, I thought you guys,” he pauses, she sees a silhouetted smirk,

“‘worked’ that one out.”

***

Hours later, Natalie looks up from the page. Charles is lying to me again, she thinks.

174

“I took a job on the island,” he tells her.

“What island?”

“The island.”

“In B.C.? You said you were a farmhand in Saskatchewan.”

“You’re the one who said I worked on a farm.”

“But you said Saskatchewan.”

“Did I?”

“You are so unreliable! Maybe you should stop talking.”

“Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the intrigue?”

“Hey asshole, I’m the one telling the story here.”

“No, you’re not, that narrator of yours is. And he (she?) knows way too much and says even more. It’s all too blunt, too showy, too... ‘PoMo.’ You and that narrator of yours need to work on your subtlety.” He pauses. Natalie can see a smug grin on the otherwise blank silhouette. “Are you imagining that you’re hearing this conversation or visualizing it? Can you see me winking at you or does it only happen if you draw a winky face?”

Natalie stands, leaving her journal on the desk, and crosses the room. She refuses to admit that she saw the wink, that she was beginning to visualise Charles. And she certainly will not give him the satisfaction of drawing—writing—one of those stupid faces of Frankensteinian punctuation that her sister is always sending people on social media. “You are unbelievable!” she bursts, startling a cat off the dresser.

“No, I’m not. I’m a well-formed three-dimensional character that you are refusing to

render justly.”

“Oh, so now I’m what—misrepresenting you?”

175

“At the very least you’re misunderstanding me. And it isn’t that hard. Just write about me.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Charles.”

“And?”

“And...” Another pause. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Natalie, Natalie… Nat. Yeah,

Nat (see how nicely I personalize your character with a nickname?). Ok Nat, here we go. My

name’s Charles, I’m a struggling writer in Calgary who can’t visualize her—sorry, his—

characters.”

“I think you’re lying again, Charlie.”

“Are you sure? They do say to write what you know after all. And look, you know my

friends call me Charlie.”

“So, you have friends. With an attitude like yours?”

“I’m choosing to ignore that comment. Do you know how much you and your readers can infer from a nickname like Charlie? Especially at my age! Everyone’ll say I must be a bachelor, probably divorced, a real laugh with the socialites and hardly ever seen with my kids around.

They’ll say I seem like I get on alright, though they can’t imagine how, writer’s wage and all—

maybe a bit of a plot hole there, the picky ones will say. But most of all they’ll say you can’t trust a damn word out of my mouth, that I’m less reliable than a narrator who lies and more confusing than one who tries to make sense of it all.”

“Well, are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Any... All of those things?”

176

“You tell me.”

“Charlie, I think we should stop seeing each other.” This seems to be the standard approach.

“What are you talking about, Nat? I’m right he—” She picks up her journal and strikes his name, his two names, from the page.

She stares at the next blank sheet, nibbles on the end of her pen (a new pen, not the one she bit through), and writes: “Charles is lying to me again.”

But am I sure that I can believe you, Nat?

177

“THEY DON’T LIKE ‘LOCAL’ HISTORY”: TRACING POLITICAL INTERSECTIONS IN GOVIER’S

BETWEEN MEN

Unlike Saskatchewan’s shifts and schisms within the political left in the 1980s, Alberta was

reaching its pinnacle of fiscal conservatism after decades of veering to the right with the Social

Credit party. After Aberhart’s death, his protégé Ernest Manning succeeded him, and steered the

province “further and further right, navigating resource wealth and prosperous times to set

Alberta firmly on its populist but pragmatic feet” (van Herk 256). Manning led the party to seven

consecutive majorities through to his retirement in 1968 (Banack 133), in no small part thanks to

the oil that was struck on Atlantic no. 3 in 1948 (van Herk 259). After Manning, Peter Lougheed

defeated the Social Credit party for a conservative provincial win in 1971, and over the following

fifteen years created a legacy of “energy and economic opportunity” that withstood the

provincial-national strife between Alberta and the federal government, resulting in a massive

boom for the region (van Herk 266-74). The boom led Calgary into a Bakhtinian revel, a carnival

of capitalistic glory, yielding titans and tycoons (see Diehl). Govier’s Between Men attempts to commemorate—to collectively remember rather than merely document or monumentalise—this

Calgary, this West, and the novel does so through the perspective of a woman between social classes, between men of different social classes, and between movements of gender politics.

Between Men is deeply entrenched in Calgary’s cultural and socioeconomic history circa the 1880s and the then contemporary 1980s. Although the novel was initially set in the spring and summer of 1981, evidenced by specific time and date stamps that accompany every scene in early drafts (658/99.15, 21.1), the manuscript underwent major revisions in the mid-80s

(658/99.15, 24-25) and was not published until 1987. All specific time and date indicators have

178

been removed from the published version; its temporal setting simply becomes a spring and

summer during a low point in Alberta’s boom-and-bust cycle (Govier 7), allowing the novel to encompass and therefore comment on Alberta’s constant socioeconomic roller-coaster.

After the initial success of Lougheed’s suspicion-inducing cease-fire with Pierre Trudeau and the signing of the 1981 Oil Agreement, oil prices began to dip significantly while interest rates seemed to climb in an inverse proportionality, resulting in a “nationwide bust” (van Herk

Mavericks 273). According to Perry and Craig, “Amidst the downturn in July 1984, the

Lougheed Government endeavoured to promote economic diversification through a comprehensive White Paper” (536). Lougheed “presided over a newly burnished Alberta pride and a massive boom that increased the province’s population” (van Herk 274) and his

“government’s priorities continued to feature the improvement of market conditions for Alberta petroleum” in 1984 and early 1985 (Perry & Craig 536). However, his successor, Donald Getty, was “disadvantaged by low, low oil prices” (van Herk, Mavericks 274) in a province that had

“enjoyed unprecedented wealth” (275). And unlike Lougheed, who had worked to diversify

Alberta’s economy, Getty “set about trying to reverse the fortunes of a failing economy” (Perry

& Craig 568) but “reacted slowly; it took him almost a year to respond to the oil patch crisis, and then his solutions depended on waiting until the price of oil went back up” (van Herk, Mavericks

275). Because of this sluggishness, the mid-late 80s played out like a disheartened rerun of the dirty thirties in Alberta: banks failed, economic activity was stunted and stifled, unemployment skyrocketed, billions of investment dollars were lost, and a mass exodus took place at the time that Between Men was written and is primarily set.

The novel’s second setting, the winter and spring of 1889, is centered on more ambiguous and even more politically inflected histories. One year after Between Men was published, Govier

179

wrote a more traditionally ‘historical’ account of Rosalie New Grass’s death and Wilson Fisk’s

trial for This Magazine, reprinted in the anthology of feminist writing Twist and Shout (76-77).

An important distinction between the two accounts—the meta-fictional and the historical—is the difference between the language Govier uses, reflecting on Calgary’s colonial history at the time of the 1988 Olympics, and Suzanne, who narrates the events from the perspective of a semi- fictionalised news writer named Murphy. Rosalie is “a Cree” rather than a “squaw” or “Indian” in Govier’s later text and is the “first and, to [Govier’s] knowledge, only martyr of Calgary”

(76). “Fisk is charged with murder” (76) and “finally convicted of manslaughter” by a “French

Canadian named Rouleau” though “he needed three trials to get it” (77). Suzanne-as-Murphy’s account of the trial is far less objective than the historical articles, despite being placed within the discourse of academic history and within the events themselves through metanarrative. Govier gives an historical account of another narrative delivered meta-textually in Between Men, that of

“Deerfoot, the native runner, who was challenged by an Englishman named Stokes. Deerfoot beat him once, which they said didn’t count … Deerfoot beat him twice which didn’t count either … he beat him finally a third time and got the prize” (77). The tone of both events is casual, seemingly non-judgemental, letting the atrocities and injustices stand for themselves. And yet there is still hesitation in Govier’s second account—even for an essay published in a radical feminist magazine—for when Rosalie seeks Lovingheart, Calgary’s first abortionist, she is merely “waiting for the man she hoped would save her from her predicament” (76). Despite writing characters who reinterpret the past and challenge what is meant by ‘H’istory, both as academic field and ideological discourse, Govier writes a year after her novel that “while we hold our breath everything happens the way it happened because this is the past we are writing

180

and not the future” (76). But what Govier and her protagonist (re)write is a past, a particular

history, much like Kroetsch and Dorf and Backstrom, writing too in/to the future.

Suzanne Vail is a focal point searching for a voice—her voice—and searching for her

story while caught between men, between the cycles of a boom and bust economy, and between

competing narratives of history and fiction. The novel’s primary narrative is largely filtered

through her. Gérard Genette’s concept of narration “centers on degrees of narrational

information, with … internal focalisation restricting the narrator’s access to information provided by one or several characters” (Hostkotte and Perdi 332-333). This narrational filtration allows the novel to comment on Suzanne’s liminal position. She is between men—her estranged husband turned once again lover Ace and her newly found grand love affair-seeker Simon—and the class politics and economic ideologies they represent. Suzanne is also a professor—she studies the

‘unimportant’ and ‘unworthy’ topic of local history, an area of research which her Department

Head often attempts to dissuade her following. She is caught between discourses, between notions of history. Finally, Suzanne is the diegetic author of the novel’s nested historiographic meta-fiction: a retelling of Rosalie New Grass’s rape and murder at the hand of William

“Jumbo” Fisk, and the trial that followed, part history, part invention, part archival trace.

Suzanne is caught between narratives, as the main character of one and the scriptor of another, between her story and the incomplete history that haunts both narratives, as well as the city of

Calgary.

Suzanne Veil: Between Men and Discourses

As the novel suggests before it begins, Suzanne’s narrative ends with her occupying a space “Between men … finished with one and not yet on to the next” (66). However, for much of

181

the narrative, Suzanne finds herself in the opposite situation: not quite through with one, yet

already on to the next. Ace, Suzanne’s occasional lover and almost ex-husband, embodies the

West and the remnants of Lougheed’s boom years: “Ace and the city [Calgary] were tuned, engineered, bright with progress. He belonged to the good times, and hadn’t been hit by the bad.

When it seemed the oil boom would end, the family company had diversified” (3). He is a “right- wing entrepreneur, making a fortune out of … Shuttlecocks” (247). The novel aligns Ace with the province’s economic progress, and while the city of Calgary is a character as much as Ace, they are not one and the same, for he came out of the oil bust economically unscathed. Ace is the unaffected element against whom Suzanne’s upbringing contrasts. This gap allows the novel to comment on Calgary’s economic state in the 1980s, as emphasised through the depiction of public and economically-inflected spaces, and on the consequences of the province’s boom and bust cycle. These spaces confine and idealize nature, especially when it is exotic—a trend that I will unpack at length when discussing Kroetsch’s Alibi. For example, Suzanne’s time away at an eastern university “had been marked by a conspiracy of local millionaires to endow miniature jungles in public spaces. Every hotel and shopping centre had its solarium, … kept its modest pseudo-tropic, or tried to keep it” (4). The boom brought new commodifications of nature to the city, brought the tropics to the prairies, but those ersatz “jungles” could only be kept while the boom lasted. This example points out the ephemeral nature of new money and its spatial impact.

The state of the city itself reflects this cycle: “Suzanne looked up at a sky pocked with half-built skyscrapers started in the boom and now stunted by recession” (7). Despite the inevitable bust that follows every boom, the novel depicts the city’s economy as a shotgun, front-loaded, ready to go off as soon as money returns, painting the sky with as much development as the brief eruption of energy will allow.

182

Suzanne defines her own economic identity partly in terms of housing. When she first meets Simon, the policy-maker from the East and her soon-to-be-lover, Suzanne “could have told him about the little row of houses called Poverty Flats and the house owned by the gas company … But of course now you couldn’t buy a place in Poverty Flats for under two hundred thousand dollars … She guessed she’s lost the right to tell it” (16). One of the consequences of a sudden injection of new money is gentrification; in this passage, poverty and class are linked directly to the oil and gas industry, but Suzanne feels she can only make this comment to readers, and only indirectly, through a focalised third-person narrator. She is caught between the object of her class criticism—the oil and gas industry—and her own subject position as a middle-class woman who has benefitted from being married to a man whose wealth comes from the very industry she wishes to expose. The narrator, through Suzanne, provides an eco-critical commentary well ahead of the protagonist’s times and tells us that oil companies “operated like large patriarchal families,” although the industry was ultimately a “dull, uncertain business, not far removed from farming, another way of being dependent on the ground under your feet”

(124). The companies’ hierarchies reflect that structure of resource extraction. Darlene from

Meca Oil “was promoted to vice-president, the first woman to be one. Subsequently Darlene was feared and hated, as if witchcraft were the issue” (128). A woman cannot hold power in the resource industry without being othered beyond the always-already othered position as the

“second sex” (de Beauvoir). Only a witch—a woman with uncanny power—could rise in the ranks, but only by evoking wrath and terror, publicly wearing a medusa’s face, and turning all others, including other women, away from her if she wishes to climb this ladder.

In addition to being a collective of businesses largely centred on oil and gas, “Calgary was a club. Membership meant holding dear a few tenets: the mountains were beautiful, and

183

business was good. These two tenets periodically came into conflict … When this happened, business won” (77), although “anyone could do business in Calgary … until you’ve lived through a bust and lost your money and started again, you wouldn’t belong” (77-78). Thus, as a woman who moved away for her education and now holds a stable academic position, Suzanne can never fully belong to the Calgary club. Nor can either of the men between whom Suzanne finds herself: Ace diversified so that business would continue to be good, but his is no longer a

Calgarian business; and Simon is from the East and “was never going to be part of the club”

(78). Suzanne then occupies a liminal position between regional and economic ideologies that allow her to unveil the paradox that Calgary’s tenets present. The city depends on a boom / bust economy, yet holds, unflinchingly, to the belief that business must be good.

A different paradox can be found in another consecrated element of Calgarian culture, the epitome of the old / new west, the Stampede. The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth is presented as simultaneously democratising and ideological: “Stockbrokers and waitresses and courtroom lawyers would also be wearing their cowboy outfits. It was obligatory; the obligation came with citizenship … Everything was fake; none of it had ever been worn on a ranch, except for

[Suzanne’s] boots” (97-98). The Stampede seemingly places all celebrants on common ground, within the equalising uniformity of cowboy outfits, but this same custom, through a masquerade of equality justified by the bawdiness of carnival, conceals the very real class discrepancies between Calgarians. The Stampede, for most, is simulacrum, a “tribute to the past, demise staged as recurrence,” a “space for the less rugged to pretend, … a vanishing world memorialized” (van

Herk Stampede 57, 72). Simulation has replaced the real, and even become the real, an urbanised and commoditised notion of ‘West,’ like Ace, the rich man who plays at being the face of west.

It is Ace who takes Suzanne to the Stampede, and through her relationship with him, through her

184

position beside him, between him and other men, her narrative can deliver these observations on

the implications of the city’s cyclical and cynical economy.

As a politicised subject and object of Suzanne’s appraisal in his own right, Ace expresses

views utilitarian but also Randian. “‘The only way the world will work … is when people put

their own needs first … If you save yourself, you save others … sacrificers are never rewarded’”

(58-59), he tells Suzanne, “‘We’re lucky. We should do grand and foolish things. We owe it to

the world. If we don’t, who’s going to get the chance?’” (208). Ace views capitalism in relation

to merit rather than opportunity. He follows the laissez-faire mentality, born of the American

Dream ideology that he and his family earned their wealth through hard work, talent, and

innovation—in his father’s case within the oil industry, in his through badminton and his

invention of a shuttlecock launcher (the name itself a tongue-in-cheek barb from the scriptor)— and are therefore worthy of a lavish lifestyle. He does not consider what structures have enabled his success and instead subscribes to social Darwinism, believing it is his responsibility to make the most of his position at the top of the economic food chain, a position into which he was born, and which he believes is prescriptive. Ace continues: “‘I’m arguing for an ecology of human happiness, OK? … by looking after myself I provide the world with a good example’” (208).

Here he presents ideological rhetoric under the guise of utilitarianism. He preaches that people ought to enjoy the positions their fortune has granted them rather than question class hierarchy or work to improve / change others’ situations. But Suzanne, and by extension Govier / her scriptor, uses Ace to challenge these bourgeois viewpoints. Suzanne asks, “‘Are we so special? So privileged? Maybe you are … How nice it must be to believe oneself enfranchised for extraordinary pleasures’” (208). Through Ace, the novel questions class delusion and privilege.

Within the context of a narrative predominantly focalised through Suzanne, which offers

185

frequent commentary on the oil industry and its consequences (both positive and negative),

Ace’s views, the views of the rich playing with the notion of being ‘western,’ are read as objects of criticism even before Suzanne points them out. These modes of passive and active commentary persist as she moves between men to her new lover, Simon.

A federal policy maker and newcomer to Calgary, Simon embodies the East and

Laurentian thinking—“that gigantic east-to-west thrust which historians regard as the axis of

Canadian development, the ‘Laurentian’ movement that makes the growth of Canada

geographically credible” (Frye 216). In this model, eastern Canada, particularly southern

Ontario, rules as the centre of cultural and economic production while the North/West is the

margin that funnels resources into that centre and can only define itself in relation to that centre.

Simon’s thoughts and goals are Ottawa-centric; he came west to “[t]each the oilmen how to manipulate the laws [he] wrote” (17), but as has been noted, he cannot quite fit into the club.

Although he hopes to make an independent fortune by consulting in the West, his policy is written in the East, by their economic principles, for the benefit of that centre, making him only able to consider the West within eastern terms. He cannot comprehend a non-Laurentian model, or that Calgary oilmen might define themselves by the city’s tenets—a margin thinking in terms of itself rather than in relation to a centre. This disparity in regional thinking is evidenced by

Simon’s social blunders at the oil company barbeque, which get him tossed in a hot air balloon, literally: “he probably thought that once they’d had fun with him, he’d be in, that the balloon was the Trojan Horse. But the Trojan Horse was brought into the city, not blown out” (131). After failing to recognize the social decorum of Calgary as a club, he further fails to identify the impossibility of his rapid acceptance within that circle.

186

Representative and representation of the East, Simon ought to provide a stark contrast, an

opposing force to Ace, but he claims he’s “not big on Crown Corps” and that “Going out is going up” (23), i.e. that expansion, particularly economic and urban expansion are the truest form of progress. Like Ace, Simon wishes to gain wealth and power from the private sector rather than the public. However, again like Ace, this economic notion of progress privileges those seeking personal gain and status over general well-being. While visiting Ace’s mother,

Suzanne notes “The dishwasher, the double oven, the range top all had chrome buttons and tiny dials. It was a work of art, thought Suzanne, like Simon’s legislation, with buttons and knobs, buttons and knobs” (140). Through this passage, the narrator clearly parallels the audacious Miss

Amy with the self-aggrandising Simon, facilitating a character-based class commentary. For example, when Simon takes Suzanne camping, the “picnic basket had in it smoked salmon and caviar, … a bottle of champagne” (145). Simon’s approach to camping is too elegant; he is perpetually out of his element with Suzanne, doubly alienated by his class and his Laurentian training.

The novel emphasizes Suzanne’s position between what Simon and Ace represent to make larger commentaries on the dynamics of East / West, the Laurentian theory, and how these perspectives address the question of “Who am I?” more than “Where is here?” (Frye 220).

Suzanne “wasn’t an untutored westerner after all but someone who had been in the centre, who had learned the proper order of things” (16); her PhD dissertation was completed at a university in the East. Despite her criticisms, she tentatively agrees with Simon’s model of the East as centre and the West as margin, the centre as stable in contrast to the margin’s erratic boom and bust search for character.

187

Govier explores this issue further, outside the realm of fiction, and writes in a non-fiction

article for This Magazine that in 1988 “Calgary discovered a centre, and the world discovered

Calgary” thanks to the Olympic games and in spite of the fact that “Western Canadian cities are

different. They seem to have no heart, no centre. In pure form, they are different because they

grew up alongside railways. In Calgary everything was parallel lines and intersections” (Twist

and Shout 74). The implication is that after 1988 Calgary was no longer a western Canadian city

but shifted toward becoming a different centre, one that might disrupt or dissociate from the

Laurentian model. This perception is mirrored in Between Men when Simon claims, “‘The west will never get power. Power doesn’t travel east to west,’” to which Suzanne responds, “‘Power went from England to America,’” but Simon insists, “‘That’s not growth, that’s revolution …

Revolutions are reactionary things anyway; they’re aimed against the main power base. Growth is only useful in the direction that is of greatest benefit to all … redistributing wealth, fostering the needy. Is it cheating to shape the future?’” (151-153). Simon’s points are telling: while

Calgary might never reverse the direction of power perceived by tenants of the Laurentian theory, the city can destabilise the fact of this flow. Simon fears that the city, later called the

“Heart of the New West,” could become its own spatial hub, rather than a place from which resources move outward. His utilitarianism, his BMW libertarianism, and his innate reflection of

Ace’s economic politics disillusion Suzanne about the East’s centrality; her new perspective is evidenced by her return to a local history research project after their relationship falls apart.

The very name of the novel and the fact that the men’s political soapboxes are placed within Suzanne’s narrative, prescribes their failure. But through Suzanne’s relationship with

Simon and with Ace, the novel can comment on more than socio-economics. Responding to

Suzanne’s desire to have a child, Simon says: “‘It’s more than psychological … It’s biological.

188

Female’” (245). Simon’s perspective is clearly essentialist, but it is also essentializing, imposing on Suzanne the notion that her desire is a biological product of her sex, that ‘woman’ is defined categorically by this drive rather than socially structured by men’s psychological interpretations of certain women’s desires or pre-scripted behaviours. This reinforcement of gendered rhetoric is responsible for Suzanne’s internalisation of certain aspects of class concealment, which I will discuss shortly.

Suzanne is caught between Simon and Ace’s squabbles, their socially-determined contests of masculinity. “‘I had you first,’ he [Ace] said. ‘Had me?’ Her [Suzanne’s] voice rose.

‘I’m not a thing to be had.’ (‘It’s a wonder you weren’t taken already,’ Simon had said. ‘I was,’ was her answer. She had been truly taken, staked, mined.)” (114). Later Ace says, “‘I gave it my best shot. And I lost you. You know, I can’t remember when I ever lost anything before’” (204).

Both men are agents who embody Luce Irigaray’s notion of woman as commodity traded between men (171-172). To them, and the economies, industries, and governments they represent, a woman’s value is not in her or of her. Her value does not come from a direct comparison to another woman, but rather from a measure of her “current price in gold, or phalluses” (175). Irigaray elaborates, “It is only her measurement against a third term that remains external to her, and makes it possible to compare her with another woman, that permits her to have a relation to another commodity in terms of an equivalence that remains foreign to both” (176). Simon and Ace, as phallic value setters, are the terms against which Suzanne is measured to create her economic relationship with the men’s other women, i.e. Simon’s previous partner and the woman with whom Ace had an affair while he and Suzanne were still together.

According to Irigaray, “In order to have a relative value, a commodity has to be confronted with another commodity that serves as its equivalent” (176). Through most of the

189

novel, Suzanne has “Two men … Pursuing her when she didn’t want it … she was responsible

for this herself … Two men being less than one man; two men equaling no men … ‘You realize

it’s nothing to do with you,’ [Gemma] said. ‘It’s between the two of them. Competition, you know. They’re probably much more interested in each other than you.’” (116). This passage highlights the question of agency in relation to responsibility. Suzanne is deprived of the former while feeling the latter; she internalizes responsibility for the value system created and enforced by men while simultaneously realising their lack of inherent value, summarizing “no men.”

Gemma’s comments reflect Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s own Between Men, in which she theorises the homosocial bond that forms between men when they compete for the same woman or, more so, the pre-existing homosocial desires that are on display during this competition (1-5). Miss

Amy tells Suzanne, “‘I wish my son could have kept you.’ Suzanne thought that for her whole life she had been listening to women tell her they were helpless, they were victims, men had done them in. She was forewarned. It would not happen to her” (143). In this depiction of intergenerational gender politics, men have agency, keep or lose women, and on the other end of the spectrum, abuse and murder women. Suzanne is determined to claim agency but is unable to do so until she breaks free from her position as a pivot between men.

“‘When someone wants you so much,’” she tells her friend Jennifer, “‘you lose the right to yourself. You become a kind of property of the love affair. I was tired of having myself to myself’” (238). Suzanne is providing justification for the affair, not within a moral context, but a perspective which ironically falls into the woman-as-commodity dilemma, losing the right to herself when she becomes tradable. However, in providing this explanation to Jennifer, she also recognizes the state of becoming-property and the self-commoditisation that comes from internalising a male value system. By contrast, after Suzanne’s divorce goes through, Simon is

190

less happy with the affair because it is less of an affair. He tells her: “‘You feminists have

forgotten something. You don’t respect the intricacies of the power balance. Everything has been

disrupted now … you’ve changed. You’re different … You’re available …We’ll buy a house,

I’ll put you in it’” (186-188). Once again, he reads her as a commodity to be bought, traded, stored, and displayed, like a piece of furniture in a new home, the process of exchange presented as a delicate balance that should not be disrupted. After the affair ends, Simon believes “he might have even made her into a great scholar, or writer, anything” (252). Like Ace, he considers her an article to be crafted and then shown off and lent out to other men, men like Suzanne’s

Department Head, who uses her to produce a certain male-controlled knowledge.

Simon does not believe she can obtain power or meaning of her own volition, through her own merit and capabilities. But after the affair, Suzanne begins to “believe that there never was a

Simon. He was not a person, he was action, a reaction. He was what-happened-to-Suzanne- when-she-was-with-Simon” (265). This adjustment depicts a reversal of her position and function within the ‘exchange’ of inter-gender relationships. Not until she ends the affair is she finally “Between men … finished with one and not yet on to the next” (66)—no longer being traded between them, but rather free from both Simon and Ace, acting on her own agency.

This freedom, this withdrawal from a system of patriarchal exchange, is captured in

Suzanne’s seemingly paradoxical decision to have a child with Ace as the father: “she wanted him to participate” but “she wouldn’t marry him” (308). This may be read as a compromise of a woman’s radical being-for-self, such as Monique Wittig’s contemporaneous call for women to form a “lesbian society” that destroys the “artificial (social) fact constituting women as ‘natural group’” and thereby deconstruct the classist binary of man / woman (103). However, Suzanne’s decision is also at odds with the values of the novel’s fictionalized women’s group, SWARM—

191

“Single Women After Rich Men” who believe “the only thing that will get women up there

enjoying life the way they deserve to is money” and the “safest way” to get it “is to marry it”

(66). In a direct inversion of Irigaray’s writings, SWARM considers marrying money as a form

of socialism, as the only way to democratise wealth across gender lines. Gemma, Suzanne’s friend and the group’s founder, presents an alternate notion of success, economic success rather than educational or autonomous success. She sees wealth through marriage as a pragmatic arrangement within the constraints of gender, in opposition to the seemingly naïve or radical notions of independence that rely on the idealistic, revolutionary, and, to her, unlikely tenets of second wave feminism. In Raymond Williams’ terms, SWARM represents an adoption of residual culture—marrying rich—in response to a growing concern that the emergent culture— radical feminism—is either being eliminated by or assimilated into the dominant culture—the male-centric boom economy. Hilda, a devout member of SWARM, defends Gemma against the claim that “This is retrograde” by suggesting, “‘it’s all about choice. If Gemma has seen that a rich man is what she wants and has also seen that her need can spur action to meet the needs of other women, who are we to criticize?’” (71). This defence presents a definition of feminism that hybridises residual culture with the first wave drive for equality.

Gender is a “strategy”; it is “a project which has cultural survival at its end” (Butler 139).

The women of SWARM declare that they will pursue wealthy men because “Men go after what they want … Now we’re doing the same” (BM 72). Such deliberate actions anticipate Judith

Butler’s notion of gender performativity, but instead of recognising “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discreet and polar genders” (140), the women emulate masculine gestures and enactments so as to gain access to the structures of capitalism, resuming their position as other, members of the second sex. The members of SWARM “see

192

love as an exchange … [they]’re just making sure [they]’re in the right market” (BM 72). They

ironically hybridise first wave feminist goals of ‘equality’ with residual gender roles in a utilitarian drive for capital gain. Like the life Ace tries to promise, this “is a false resolution, a way forward from [a woman’s] unhappiness which is really a regression to the past which has caused it” (McCarthy 124). The notion of love as exchange mirrors Irigaray’s writings (171-

172), but the members of SWARM see this exchange as a monetary transaction in their favour, without awareness that a woman-as-commodity’s body “becomes, for another such commodity, a mirror of its value” (Irigaray 179). By subscribing to a system of love as exchange, the

members of SWARM perpetuate the notion that they have use value and exchange value, but

reinforce their exploitation and exchange as commodities, as a class whose function is simply to

(re)produce the means and conditions of gender exploitation, in terms of both ideology and

genealogy.

Suzanne’s position in relation to genealogy and childbearing is neither essentializing nor

entirely dependent, not explicitly subordinate to a man. “The women began to have babies,” the

focalised narrator tells us, “Suzanne too. Her baby weighed a pound and a half, took one breath,

and then died,” in response to which Ace, her then-husband, says: “‘Maybe it’s just as well …

You can go back to university. You’re not cut out for a mother’” (57). In this early passage, womanliness correlates to motherhood; education is presumed an alternative to motherhood and therefore to being woman, as though parenthood and education are mutually exclusive for women. In response to these views, expressed by Ace and supported by her parents, Suzanne points out that, “Marlyss and she would always be related, but she and Ace were only married”

(57). To Suzanne, motherhood is a permanent state, regardless of whether her child survives or not: “I cannot be childless … I don’t have a baby but I am a mother; the baby I want is here, a

193

large emptiness in my belly … the woman, the mother this baby had made of Suzanne was not

gone … Once a mother, always a mother … She, Suzanne, was a childless mother. She must

have a child to be complete” (191). This perspective complicates the claim that motherhood can

be equated to womanhood, relating it to the novel’s questions about independence and agency.

Suzanne claims motherhood regardless of her marital status, anticipating her decision to mother a

second child outside of marriage. Despite the child’s death and the limitations another child

would place on her career, for “As mother, woman remains on the side of (re)productive nature

and, because of this, man can never fully transcend his relation to the ‘natural’” (Irigaray 185), she identifies as a mother. By pursuing her doctorate and divorcing Ace, Suzanne demonstrates that the either / or of being woman / mother and being educated / professional can be an “and.”

By the end of the novel, Suzanne is no longer being traded between men and does not define herself as a mother within the context of marriage. Irigaray writes that man’s “relationship to productive nature, an insurmountable one, has to be denied so that relations among men prevail. This means that mothers, reproductive instruments marked with the name of the father and enclosed in his house, must be private property, excluded from exchange” (185). Suzanne upends this system by keeping her name when she first marries Ace and then by wanting to have a child with Ace outside of marriage, in a woman-weighted partnership, limiting Ace’s paternal role in social production. By removing herself from the conventions of marriage, Suzanne deprives Ace of nomological ownership over herself and the child and therefore of the ability to possess her within the system of male-to-male exchange. Over the course of this shift from being traded between men to being free between them, Suzanne seeks her place, her position, and her own story.

194

Suzanne is “the first woman hired to teach full time in the [history] department, the first home-grown Albertan … She had been hired to stave off an order to comply with equal- opportunity regulations” (5). The gender politics at play in Canadian institutions at the end of the

20th century manifest themselves immediately; the History Department, faced with the rising movements of equity and political correctness, hires Suzanne out of obligation rather than choice. In academia, as in all hierarchical systems, women are not only commodities—

“utilitarian objects and bearers of value”—but a “woman has value on the market by virtue of one single quality: that of being a product of man’s ‘labor’” (Irigaray 175). A woman, in “her socially valued, exchangeable body, … is a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values”

(180). Suzanne is permitted to be a professor, but expected to be the product of man’s thinking, of the phallocentric reproduction of what Dorothy Smith calls “the means of mental production”

(235). She is expected to perform as an academic, but her interest in fringe topics is seen as a failure to perform the role of a particular kind of academia, resulting in her course on local history being cut. She is manipulated into producing mental work deigned worthy by her male

Department Head and colleagues. When her class is removed from the printout of upcoming courses, Suzanne takes it out on the secretary, Nola. She “was telling Nola that she was stupid.

Suzanne was just as arrogant and high-handed as the other professors” (102), i.e. the men. For the sake of seeming appropriately professional as an academic, Suzanne performs masculinity.

In the single peer-reviewed article on this under-discussed and academically all-but- forgotten novel, Dermot McCarthy points out that Suzanne is trapped in the “phallogocentric thinking in her view of her occupation,” but “finds a way out of the phallogocentric maze by appropriating the very principles that would keep her trapped ‘between men’” (110-11). She escapes this maze by appropriating the voice of a male historian within her historiographic

195

metanarrative. Despite her field of specialisation being so patronized, Suzanne carries with her

early in the novel the lofty, self-important, new critical notion of the History and the Text, from which the insightful academic produces a great Work. This perception demonstrates that certain institutional principles are ingrained in Suzanne, principles that break down as she discovers her narrative and adopts a position of liminality in her work as well as her life.

Despite her position in the department and her personal convictions, Suzanne at times fails to uphold the very feminist principles that she preaches to her friends and enacts in her relationships. Consider the following exchange:

“Girls,” he [the Head] said pleasantly …

“Dr Vail if you don’t mind,” Suzanne snapped.

He swung his astonished face towards her.

“Or Suzanne, if you’d rather.” She giggled, her face flaming …

“Damn!” said Suzanne … “I blew it.” She’d waited for a whole year to tell him

she wasn’t a girl. (29)

Prior to asserting her agency through narrative invention and freeing herself from men, Suzanne is caught between the perceived need to perform as a male academic does, the desire to resist the male-dominant structure of academia, and the sentiment of being subordinate within that structure. She faces resistance to her place in the academy, both from the Head and her parents:

“‘Local history’ … was first of all a contradiction in terms. If she insisted there was such a thing he [the Head] might concede that it could be a useful hobby for members of Women’s Institutes”

(30). Smith reminds us that in academia “Men attend to and treat as significant only what men say … What men were doing was relevant to men, was written by men about men for men”

(233). Barbara Bagilhole points out the resonance between the position held by academic women

196

and Ryan and Haslam’s “concept of a glass cliff, where women on breaking through the glass

ceiling find themselves in precarious … positions, where they are left to tackle impossible tasks

that men do not want to face, until they fall off the glass cliff” (57). The men in Suzanne’s

department do not want to pursue Rosalie New Grass’s story or the history of any women in the

region, a disregard presented under the guise that such research is beneath them. Of course, such

investigations are also difficult, for the archive preserves primarily the men’s side of the

historical story. And so, although the Head condemns Suzanne’s pursuits, he does not outright

forbid them, knowing they will not meet any academic journal’s standards, and thus leaving her

to fall off the cliff by her own choice.

McCarthy describes “history as the violated female body, buried and hidden, and a cult

object of phallogocentric historiography” (120). Like any study not concerned with an objective

notion of truth or that does not have material evidence supporting it, the histories of women,

particularly Indigenous women and ‘fallen’ women, do not exist for the men who control the

means of textual production. Suzanne says, “‘The men—emphasis on men—who wrote history

don’t like to guess,’” and in response “‘You work by instinct,’ said Simon. ‘How very female of

you.’” But Suzanne retorts, “‘Men do it, too. They just have fancy names for it’” (85). Simon’s

“remark is patriarchal and patronizing but also true … her [Suzanne’s] approach is intuitive and her own” (McCarthy 116). More notably, Suzanne’s approach is post-structuralist in the

Foucauldian sense. It takes “what has been done before … for false evidence” and thus Suzanne has to “weave [her] way through the sources, visiting the living, the dead” (BM 85).

Hauntological and pluralistic, Suzanne’s approach disregards the notion of objective truth, that a nugget or master signifier exists, one that the academic must isolate and then demonstrate as a singular answer to a known question, an a priori hypothesis. Ultimately,

197

through the help of her Indigenous student and unlikely friend Asp, the fate of Suzanne’s course is reconsidered. Asp is an example of “support from below when little was forthcoming from above in the [university] hierarchy, what Eveline called ‘ivory basement leadership’” (Bagilhole

58). By contrast, Suzanne’s own mother “said a woman needed a profession but Suzanne was

taking it too far” (BM 31). Her mother thinks: “You got training in the event of a disaster but

ought not put the cart before the horse. You needed a man to look after you … Two degrees had

been tolerable, but the upcoming third would eliminate the last possible mates from the field,

[her father] implied” (31). Despite the forewarnings of victimisation and helplessness from older

women, Suzanne’s advanced education, her drive toward self-sustainability, is undermined because of its perceived negative impact on her personal life.

Of course, the novel presents a commentary on these gendered academic politics beyond merely establishing Suzanne’s position and characters’ reactions thereto. When her divorce certificate arrives in the mail, the focalised narrator writes: “Here was her diploma. Proof of citizenship in the country of free women, women with lives of their own and self-sufficient definitions, definitions which did not rely on or include someone else” (183). This passage relates education to independence and freedom, presenting single women as a class, but not necessarily as a second class as theorised by earlier feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and

Hélène Cixous. Rather, the idea of ‘single woman’ as a nation contains the singular class of

‘woman’ and overrides prior notions of loyalty. Suzanne’s neighbours, however, “didn’t like the drop in prices that had allowed a single woman to buy a house on the street … a career woman”

(9). “Then it had been the weather, jerking them around. Now it was politics” (9), probably the politics of second wave feminism, the idea of women “taking a job” and “beg[inning] to take themselves seriously” (10). For Suzanne, a house of her own, in that neighbourhood, “was what

198

prosperity had bought, this flatness, silence, this ordered vacancy” (144). Unlike Ace’s family, who buys things, or Simon, who tries to buy friends and business partners, Suzanne tries to buy absence, solitude, and the freedom that those gaps allow. This pursuit of voids, this willing facilitation of trace, parallels Suzanne’s methodology in her study of history—that is, her ficto- critical approach, her pursuit of her own narrative and Rosalie’s through the process of invention and archeology.

Suzanne Veil: Between Haunted History and Narrative Intervention

While Suzanne actively negotiates and overcomes her position between men, the novel employs narratological devices to inflect her relationship to other politicised discourses. The novel’s narrator tells us that “Indian blood was OK as long as you didn’t have too much of it and as long as you had got it in the previous century. Now everyone had to have one red antecedent”

(16), explicitly demonstrating the focalised criticism of both tokenism and romanticised colonial history. Suzanne does at times fall into an idealised settler-colonial notion of pre-contact indigeneity: “She’d wanted to be an Indian before the white men came. A wild Indian woman on horseback … ‘Indians were untrammelled … they didn’t have to wear makeup and entertain the business friends of their husbands,’ she said” (103). Of course, the narrator’s statement is ironic because the horse came to North America through Spanish colonialism, but it also tellingly relates to the horse / house binary that Kroetsch writes about in The Lovely Treachery of Words

(76). Suzanne wishes to be free of the stasis that her relationship with Simon threatens to impose, and so imagines, problematically and reductively, an alternate, idyllic perspective of indigeneity.

Yet, her narrative is socially aware enough to comment that the flats in Bowness “had been a poor little village of displaced Indians and blacks, … until five years ago when townhouses with

199

cedar-shake roofs had been built into the valley. Gentrification had only gone halfway, however;

a mini-boom must have busted while building was half way through” (105). Feminism is often

contrasted with, yet also serves as a precursor to intersectionality (see Ahmed); ultimately, the

narrator’s statements fall into an ethos of sympathy filtered through a privileged subject position.

“Sadder yet according to Suzanne’s mother was the Indian village” at the Stampede, but

“Suzanne didn’t see how it could be that sad” (98-99). This comment raises one of the central

questions asked about the Stampede: “The participation of First Nations people; celebration or

exploitation?” (van Herk, Stampede 65). Can a settler-colonial narrative offset appropriation with acknowledgement? These questions are heightened by Suzanne’s narrative about Rosalie New

Grass and, meta-textually, by Govier’s novel. Govier claims in an article that the Glenbow in

1988 “recognize[d] no responsibility to portray current native culture but s[aw] itself as paying a debt to natives in another way. The exhibit [“The Spirit Sings”] is about pride, celebration of diversity, integration of European and native histories. But the position is hard to maintain without a certain forced naïveté” (Twist and Shout 78). Suzanne’s student Asp calls Rosalie

“Everyone’s victim. Yours [Suzanne’s], too” (BM 108). Is Rosalie Govier’s victim? These are the politics at stake when history is unearthed, the archive is reassembled, and someone else’s

story is taken over by an author, whether they be diegetic or ‘real’.

The narrator of Between Men notes that Rosalie’s “death was the only recorded part of

her life” (160). The archive contains details about her only in relation to white men, within the

context of sexual violence. Suzanne reads about “The Pochantas Perplex” in a book called

Women and Indians: “It was all about the two myths of Indian womanhood—the pure princess

myth, and the corrupted ‘squaw’ myth. Theories from the academy, definitive, removed, yet it

held a certain truth. Hadn’t the town been divided, after Rosalie’s death, on whether to call her a

200

whore or a saint? She was never just an ordinary hungry, frightened young girl” (161). Within

this perplex we find the culmination of academic, gender, and racial tension: Rosalie New Grass,

as human / victim, woman / Cree, has been historically read as only one or the other half of each

binary. She exists as nothing more than shadowy words, a princess or squaw to anyone except

Suzanne, and Asp. The fact that it ‘falls’ on Suzanne to tell her story raises once again the issue of privilege and creates a paradox within the academic who is at once the white saviour, the post-

colonialist attempting to create a professional reputation out of the story of a marginalised

individual, and the scholar who has a responsibility to a suppressed and ignored history. Dermot

McCarthy writes that “Govier braids … fiction and history into a composite narrative, a ‘story’

that blurs the boundaries between the discourses” (108); it is in the space between those stories

that the discourses of race, gender, history, narratology, and academia intersect.

For both Suzanne and Asp, and especially for Rosalie, history and the official record is “a

story of men” (BM 39). As a historiographic intertext that draws on the archive to record and

rewrite Rosalie’s murder, the novel’s nested narrative inevitably becomes entangled with but re-

contextualises a story of men within a discourse of Marxist feminism and post-structuralist

history. Suzanne’s meta-text draws on the archive for the trial and testimonies, like the

persecutor’s claim that “William Fisk feloniously, willfully and of his malice aforethought did

kill and murder one Rosalie” (170), which is taken from the trial proceedings recorded in the

Statement of the Accused (658/99.15, 21.1). Irigaray reminds us that “A commodity—a woman—

is divided into two irreconcilable ‘bodies’: her ‘natural’ body and her socially valued,

exchangeable body” (180), but as a Cree woman Rosalie has no exchange value within

patriarchal-colonial late-19th century Canada. Her only tradable value to the white men is that of

her ‘natural’ body, and she only has sign value after her murder, when her body is exchanged

201

between other white men as a piece of evidence in the judgement of other men’s actions. Rosalie is widely perceived as a prostitute, amongst whom the “the break between usage and exchange is

… less clear-cut” because the qualities of her body are “useful. However, these qualities have

‘value’ only because they have already been appropriated by a man” (Irigaray 196). As Suzanne later discovers / invents, Rosalie’s body had been appropriated by Murphy because she was pregnant with his child and therefore she serves as “the locus of relations—hidden ones— between men” (196, my emphasis). Irigaray explains that “the properties of a woman’s body have to be suppressed and subordinated to the exigencies of its transformation into an object of circulation among men” (187). This suppression is taken to the point of violently destroying

Rosalie’s body: she is sent to an abortionist to suppress her ‘natural’ production and the birth of a child without official paternity, and Jumbo Fisk literally destroys the female properties of her body in his act of murder, consuming her physical value since she had no social value for him to claim or exploit.

Suzanne uses her position between discourses to create a meta-text that arraigns the valuation of women’s bodies and the story of men through the remnants of a historical sexual crime against a woman. Central to her elucidation is Murphy’s spectrality: “He was always there but never mentioned, the invisible man” (BM 39). Murphy’s trace enables Suzanne to infiltrate the dominant narrative, “to project her reading of those events into the present” (McCarthy 112), and to create an alternative narrative that flows into and alongside the historical accounts.

Suzanne “could use him [Murphy], but only by breaking the rules of her kind of scholarship”

(BM 41), for he is pointedly “her appropriation of a male voice” and there is a “writing / righting in this … not in the naïve sense of ‘correcting’ the record, … but rather in the sense of righting an off-balance” (McCarthy 109-10). Thus, “Suzanne appropriates patriarchal power and …

202

breaks the rules that would limit her power” (111). Govier cuts the following claim from Murphy in an earlier unpublished draft of the novel: “I was not guilty. I did nothing myself. It was something that happened between men. I only knew more than others” (658/99.15, 21.4, pub.

303). In this passage, Murphy excludes himself from affairs that happen “between men,” and attempts to remove himself from the violence born of patriarchy while retaining an authoritative position as a historical voice. But as the novel hones in on its subversion of historical discourse,

Govier removes this scapegoating. Suzanne’s appropriation of the male voice draws attention to the fact that “Men are invested with authority as individuals not because they have as individuals special competencies or expertise but because as men they appear as representative of the power and authority of institutionalized structures which govern society” (Smith 245). Murphy has authority because he is a representative of the press, and so Suzanne subverts the source of that authority by adopting Murphy’s voice and revealing the extent to which it and the narrative it delivers are fabricated. Suzanne uses Murphy to deploy an alternative narrative of history that gives voice to a victim marginalized and silenced because of her race and gender.

The largely invented narrator of the meta-text serves as a vehicle for Suzanne to challenge the doxa of masculinist academia dominated by notions of fact and teleological truth.

Irigaray notes that “commodities speak. To be sure, mostly dialects and patois, languages hard for ‘subjects’ to understand” (179). Suzanne speaks in a domain where ‘subjects,’ namely men, can and will hear her by (re)appropriating a male voice within a historical narrative. By fabricating parts of the story, by offering a hybrid archive / fiction, she challenges their understanding of ‘H’istory and the role and place of women therein. Notably, a man named

Murphy actually existed in 1889 Calgary; references to him exist within the archive (658/99.15,

19.1). Thus, Govier’s scriptor simultaneously adopts and invents the archive: the narrator’s

203

writing hand retells historical events recorded in the archive through the Prologue and direct

citations from documents found in the fonds, then retells them again, this time meta-textually,

through Suzanne-as-Murphy’s nested narrative. It is at this intersection of haunted history and

narrative invention that the novel is most political.

In her discussion of the politics of academia and academic writing, Dorothy Smith states

that

Works of many kinds may serve to order, legitimate, and organize social relations

and the socially relevant aspects of experience. It is this function which is

identified as ideology here. Insofar as these works are produced by that section of

a ruling class known as the intelligentsia; in so far as they present as generally

valid and authoritative the view and sense of the world from the specific position

of its ruling class. (236)

Suzanne’s meta-text, her historiographic metanarrative, which subverts ‘H’istory, opposes the

pre-scripted rules of mental production imposed by the intelligentsia. Her feminist ficto-

criticism, her écriture feminine—to use Cixous’ famous though not unproblematic term—

functions counter-ideologically by rejecting the discourses of static history and of standardised

academic journal publications alike. Smith cites Ellman, who describes “a distinction between

women and men in intellectual matters, ‘which is simple, sensuous and insignificant: the male

body lends credence to assertions, while the female takes it away’” (245). However, it is not

“merely the male body, but rather the male body literally clothed in the trappings of his class

which ‘lends credence to assertions’” (247); authority is both gendered and class-based. Smith concludes, “In developing forms of thought and knowledge for women, academic women must offer a major critique of the existing disciplines and theoretical frames” (253). Smith provides an

204

academic recontextualization of écriture feminine and of the idea that women ought to write of

women’s experiences for women from Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” (875). While anti-

authoritative, feminist histori-fictional writing also reveals history’s lack of inherent authority.

Rather, power lies in the social construction of authority—in putting a narrative into words, whether it be academic or creative.

Suzanne’s reinvention of Rosalie’s historical narrative embodies Smith’s subversive approach to academic writing and the theoretical frames that defined history as a discipline in the

1980s. Simon tells Suzanne that “‘It’s not an academic paper … It’s a fabrication; it’s part true and part you’” (BM 166); McCarthy writes that the “historian’s words braid past and present, are her own invention as well as her appropriation of the words of the past” (109). What both have yet to realize is that the academic paper and the fabrication are one and the same in a post- structural sense, which is where history and other disciplines within the humanities were heading at the time. It is the “inter-connections between Suzanne’s own story and her archivo- imaginative reconstruction of this nineteenth-century ‘mystery’ that leads to the third narrative line in Between Men, the story of the story-making” (108), and, of course, of history-making and archive-making. To exemplify and simultaneously dismantle the politics of this practice, Murphy writes two versions of the trial’s story for the Tribune: “In the first version, the guilty version, I used phrases like ‘deformed fiend’ and ‘more animal than man.’ In the second I called Fisk ‘that unfortunate citizen who got himself caught in a sordid affair.’ Similarly, Rosalie was ‘a young girl of blameless reputation’ in one draft, and ‘the type of lost woman who frequents these spots’ in the other” (BM 216). McCarthy notes that this scene “is the ultimate debunking by Govier /

Suzanne of the kind of objective ‘history’ that passes itself off as based on authoritative historical records” (121). Specifically, Suzanne, through Murphy, points out the constructedness

205

of the princess / squaw binary and the way women—like history—are traded between men, both textually as well as physically.

Suzanne uses Murphy’s voice and her position between narratives to comment on the events that took place a century prior. At the funeral, Murphy “watched New Grass [Rosalie’s father] and his wife … This was not their law, not their Queen” (BM 173). In this passage, nation—in the sense of First Nations—is placed in opposition to the nationalist notion of a unified Canada, with the Queen’s law, demonstrating that Suzanne acknowledges pre-settler world views in her meta-text. Murphy continues: “My mind went to New Grass … Their story was done. History had consumed them. They knew it; the knowledge was obvious in their eyes.

The end. Amen” (179). Suzanne-as-Murphy refuses to condone the way history consumes the narratives of the marginalized; she simultaneously rejects that practice by telling their story and inserting them into a history, even if it is fabricated and they are ghosts within it, traces of a largely erased Indigenous and cultural memory, haunting the discourse of singular history.

While Murphy haunts the archive as well as the history Suzanne is extrapolating / fabricating, no character in the novel is more spectral than Rosalie New Grass, whose “ghost had been seen in town” (51). Her spectrality is archivally acknowledged: according to Kelsey’s testimony in the Statement of the Accused, “the person on the bed raised up and looked at [him]”

(658/99.15, 19.1 p. 15). She haunts ‘H’istory, haunts the archive, haunts the novel, and haunts

Suzanne’s very composition of the historiographic metafiction nested within her own narrative.

At the end of the novel, “for the story to continue, Suzanne had to find out the truth about

Rosalie” (278). While this is a self-reflexive comment, the solution is found in Murphy, “always in the middle” (278), the invented character at the heart of Suzanne’s fabricated archive, the mouthpiece that allows Suzanne to pass between narratives. But Rosalie too passes between

206

narratives. She resides in the ‘historical’ record of the 1889 events, is present in Suzanne’s

version of that history, and enters Suzanne’s own narrative: “She [Suzanne] felt the presence rather than saw it … The ghost rose up the steep clay bank, her body outlined in a grayish lustre”

(279). Rosalie’s ghost confirms Suzanne’s version of the story, that she was pregnant with

Murphy’s child and went to Fisk thinking he was Lovingheart, the abortionist, and thus died at

Fisk’s hand (279-281). Her spectre speaks for the race and gender that are absent / erased from

the archive. Ultimately, Suzanne’s metanarrative serves as an archive for Rosalie’s story, a

presence opposing the erasures and absences conducted by colonial and patriarchal approaches to

history.

Becoming Found: Recovering Hi/stories Through the Govier Fonds

What does it mean to become found? To use an old adage, Suzanne finds herself in

Govier’s Between Men, at first in her titular position, but also through her discovery and

development of her own voice and her meta-text on Rosalie New Grass. Between Men, like other

archive fictions, “is not just an account of the facts being discovered,” but a developing idea

“that those facts change the lives of the detectives,” making the archive become “that which can

bring [stories, mysteries] into being” (Byatt 173). Rosalie’s story is found—her voice

unsilenced—through Suzanne’s pursuit of the archive and an alternate notion of history. An

author’s return to their archive or re-purposing of a text from their fonds might cause the work to

re-become found, as I suggested was the case with Munro in “A Case of Automatic

Handwriting,” and the same can be said of someone visiting an historical archive or another

author’s fonds. Researchers enter an archive, discover texts / narratives previously thought to be

lost or destroyed, previously forgotten, and we make them resurface, re-introducing them into

207

discourse. In a literal or material sense, becoming found transitions from a state of trace to one of presence. Repurposing documents in a published work makes their contents and politics public, affirmatively reifying archival monuments. The becoming found then takes on a form of survivance; “Survivance in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death” (Derrida, The

Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II 130-131). Michael Naas ties this “notion of survival or living- on” to the idea of “flourishing,” which led Derrida to “a new conception of life in relationship to writing, the trace, and the archive” (19-20). In a similar vein, Beckman describes the archive as

“a place not only of burial but also of reanimation, a place where objects considered obsolescent or historical artifacts in their own time find new life through the inquiring imaginations of future generations” (188). The critic incites the becoming found of old / new / re-memories, narratives, histories, and meanings. Researchers do not merely facilitate a document or narrative’s survival, but resuscitate it, serving a necromantic function, sustaining that material somewhere between life and death, memory and erasure. While the becoming found departs from trace and indeterminate uncertainty, it occupies, temporally and materially, a liminal space within the present. That which is found anew and that which will be found by future critics and archivists haunts the present text, and by calling those ghosts into being, invokes contemporary politics in the discourse of (forgotten / erased) history and memory.

Like the archival and historical traces that it discovers (renders found), the Prologue to

Between Men occupies an in-between space. It belongs neither to Suzanne’s focalized third- person narrative nor to the first-person narrative fabricated by Suzanne, evidenced by a third- person reference to Murphy (Govier x). Govier’s / the scriptor’s unfocalized voice, rather than a diegetic character’s, narrates the novel’s opening, creating a meta-textual commentary on the

208

practice of archiving and the formation of an archive’s contents. Derrida’s reading of the

“Monologue” in Archive Fever applies to the Prologue of Between Men: “the entire book is in advance contained, as if carried away, drawn in, engulfed by the abysmal element of … a kind of long preface, an exergue, a preamble, or a foreword” (40). As exergue, it “give[s] the tone … which ought to set the stage” (7, my emphasis), but the stage is not set as events ‘were’—it intentionally distances itself from the established record. The Prologue offers an historical account, much like those found in the Govier fonds and her later retelling of the night of

February 28, 1889 in the collection of feminist essays, Twist and Shout. The novel’s unfocalized account within the Prologue, the intermediary between archive and fiction (as I have argued, are somewhat synonymous), ought to be the most historically ‘objective’ telling as it is not filtered through a character, ought to be the moment when the historical record becomes found, but instead embellishes and constructs a particular version of history. While Fisk rapes Rosalie in

Kelsey’s room, “one of the owners [of the Turf Club] and a prospective buyer were inspecting the premises. Kelsey didn’t need to lose his job, did he? He prayed they hadn’t heard the groans, although he didn’t know how they could not” (xii). In exchange for money, Kelsey subjects himself to Fisk’s wishes—prostitution and assault are acceptable so long as they promote rather than limit business and personal advancement. But in the historically-based “Policing Calgary,” along with all other records of that night, found in the Govier fonds among folders of research materials for the novel (658/99.15, 19.1), nothing is said about a prospective buyer and no such witness exists, nor does any mention that the Club might have been for sale. Thus, class and financial gain are largely absent from, or at least unarchived in the historical record of this story.

Instead, they are a politics that has been added to the novel, seemingly becoming found when they may not have been historically present—ghosts from the future added to an already haunted

209

past. The Prologue also inverts racialized language to condemn the murder: “Fisk had killed this

squaw. Fisk was an animal, an animal” (xvii). The historical slur “squaw” is maintained, yet it is

Fisk who is dehumanized. This word choice introduces the novel’s pervasive concern, that

humanity is neither gendered nor racialized, although the crimes committed against Rosalie—

including her erasure from history—are both.

In the novel’s contemporary narrative, Suzanne’s Cree student, Roberta Asp, performs as a foil to Rosalie New Grass by perpetuating the becoming found of traditional narratives while questioning Suzanne’s and therefore by extension Govier’s scriptor’s role in unsilencing

Rosalie’s life and death. Asp herself is spectral, “show[ing] up in a different incarnation” with every encounter, wearing a mask that intentionally renders her indigeneity ambiguous (34). Like the Prologue, Asp disrupts notions of history: “‘Why do you have to call it that [history]?’ Asp said crossly. ‘It’s like you’re putting it away, in a box’” (33). Concerned with the objectification and subsequent disregard of history—particularly a largely erased history of Indigenous

Peoples—and with notions of singular and static narratives of ‘H’istory, Asp challenges “the fantasy that the stories of all history’s victims, the forgotten, the disappeared, are there somewhere in the archive” (Saunders 172). Ellen Cushman notes, “One particular way archives and museums help to structure, establish, and maintain modernist thought is by training visitors

[and in this case scholars] to view artifacts along a singular, linear concept of time in which

Western modernity can invent tradition (in the singular)” (119). This concern relates to Govier’s

contention that “It is convenient to believe that native ways are history. But they are not. Not

yet” (Twist and Shout 79), in turn reflected in Suzanne’s awkward misrecognition of Asp’s

ancestry (34-35). McCarthy observes, “For Asp as a Cree, ‘the west’ is an alien concept, a

fabrication of the European imagination” (122); it is therefore fitting that both Asp and Suzanne

210

engage with history through creative expression, through storytelling. Their exchange

acknowledges the power of the word over the power of event—the Derridian “material truth”

over the “historical truth” (AF 59)—and so challenges the “naïve epistemological or empiricist

position” that “We only have to find the source, the document, the object [within the archive],

and we will know the secret, solve the murder, crack the code” (Saunders 170). Smith contends that patriarchal power over history exists in the Symbolic, as words put to paper (233); men, in signing their names on historical documents, such as the trial proceedings for Fisk, archived as the official record, as the material truth of history, create “a discreet and ineffaceable virility: we

the fathers, we the archons, we the patriarchs, guardians of the archive and of the law” (Derrida,

AF 48). ‘Facts’ are logocentric, for the archival nomos is the collection of facts as written / remembered and constructed / permeated and in Canada’s case, predominantly constructed by white men.

Appropriately, the novel’s nested historical narrative, after the Prologue, is introduced through the archive, in a newspaper article concerning the murder of 1889 (37), a clear instance of historical information becoming found through the novel. Diegetically, the passage is a transcription from a newspaper article, “Murder Most Foul,” which appeared in the Calgary

Tribune on March 1, 1889, which can be found in Govier’s fonds (658/99.15, 19.1). As with the

French archival fictions that Lia Brozgal unpacks, “The headline … haunts the remainder of the text, even as the actual events … fade from the pages” (46). Suzanne states: “History is the headline. The rest is forgotten. It’s what’s forgotten that interests me” (BM 229). Between Men

reveals and revels in the nomological nature of history, the notion that, like any text, like any

archive, history is a narrative limited by, yet also interpretively multiplied by the polysemetic

nature of language. The novel engages with this narratological approach to history both through

211

its composition and on the level of grammar. In the earliest drafts, the novel is told in the first- person, shifting between the contemporary story narrated by Suzanne and the historical scenes narrated by Suzanne-as-Murphy. In a later, fragmented draft (658/99.15, 21), the contemporary narrative shifts to the third person, and the personal narrative reads more like an historical account while the historical narrative reveals a more personal, subjective ethos. Notably, the unfocalized Prologue is absent from both the early first-person and third-person drafts, respectively titled The Last Frontiersmen and Whiteman’s Burden. Both early titles are male- centric, reflecting the ways men create history and then abandon it—placing it in a box—or impose it upon others through the dissemination of colonial narratives.

Between Men comments directly on the becoming found, reflecting on the politics of calling history into being through the textual transformation of repurposed documents. Suzanne recognizes that after Simon looks over her papers “something had changed. The archives were the same, so it must be her” (168), but this is a false assumption. The archive changes each time it is read; every reading is a rewriting, an added transformation of the text and its relationship with other texts. As the narrator writes, “The words had taken on further dimension. The words were the same but they had more depth. Eyes had been on them” (165). The narrator identifies text as observable and observed subject, one altered by perception, by how other subjects read it.

Comparably, when Fisk’s conviction becomes less assured during his trial, Murphy notes: “We’d been trying to tell a straight tale. But Fisk’s high-paid actor had succeeded better by making what had been clear, murky” (213). Each account of Rosalie’s murder and Fisk’s trial—the Statement of the Accused, Tribune articles, police newsletters, etc.—(re)invent history, create versions of a history through language, versions where Rosalie’s side of the story never appears. Derrida claims that “the wealth of these novelties [new archives, i.e. texts that have become found] has to

212

do in particular with the fact that certain of these documents, until now hardly visible or inaccessible, secret or private, have been newly interpreted” (AF 39). This statement is ironically true of the becoming trace, on which I will elaborate in the next chapter. Future interpretations will be made possible as technology renders handwriting more legible and as the restrictions on closed boxes and folders expire. In the case of the Govier fonds, the archival traces that are becoming found are neither a source of wealth nor one of novelty. A wealth of information may be uncovered (and this is likely the pun Derrida intends), but it is neither new—evidenced by the number of rewritings of the murder story in Govier’s research materials alone—nor valued, given that the story was largely forgotten, re-found, told anew and, ironically—or tellingly— forgotten again as Govier’s least-discussed novel. Between Men is an archival fiction that depicts and comments on archiving while also serving as archive, as repository for a narrative alternative to the historical record. Its purpose in preserving and re-presenting silenced and forgotten hi/stories, as well as its lack of critical or popular attention, reveals the violence and erasure in

Calgary’s history and the disregard toward recording alternative commemorations to the past.

Suzanne’s creative-critical engagement with and response to the historical record—her ficto-archival meta-text—creates a “felt archive.” Million defines this sub-category as “a narrative that appeals as a history that can be felt as well as intellectualized” to break “down the barriers between the personal and the political” (59). Notably, “felt scholarship [of the archive] continues to be segregated as a ‘feminine’ experience” (54), paralleling it with Suzanne’s diegetic specialization of local history, dismissed as a “useful hobby for members of Women’s

Institutes” (BM 30). But Suzanne embraces this affective mode of archival creation, “breaking the rules of her kind of scholarship” and inventing Murphy to serve as her eyes and ears in the history / storyworld after trying and failing to “invoke” Rosalie (41, 278). Suzanne “felt the

213

presence rather than saw it” when Rosalie finally appears as a ghost to her, visiting Suzanne in her time, and reversing the hauntological role that Suzanne has been playing in Rosalie’s narrative throughout the meta-text (279). This sensation allows Suzanne to simultaneously unify and transcend her personal and political narratives: “she wished she could be Rosalie again.

Only this time she would walk away from the hotel door!” (283, my emphasis). Only through the felt archive, through the creative act of constructing / adopting Murphy’s voice, is Suzanne able to enter Rosalie’s story, able to relate to it as the becoming found. Suzanne recognizes her inability to alter the archive’s historical events, i.e. what occurred, namely Rosalie’s death, but by inciting the becoming found of an alternate ficto-archival narrative of history she can seek to alter the material truth, the textual iteration of a constructed notion, and the predictable discourse surrounding events.

As she arrives near the end of her retelling, after her theories are confirmed by Rosalie’s ghost (279), Suzanne-as-Murphy writes in the form of a letter “What more is there to tell?”

(300). To whom is s/he writing? The letter is neither addressed, signed off, nor is it based on any extant archival material in the Govier fonds. It is invention made found, a fabricated trace brought by fiction into the discourse of Calgary’s first murder. The letter might be addressed to the Calgary Tribute, to amend the erasures and mis-reportings that Rosalie’s story has undergone. To Suzanne, or Govier’s scriptor, it might be addressed to the reader, providing a more material yet still indeterminate trace for the haunted and felt archive. But despite its relieving effects for Suzanne-as-Murphy (303), the letter, like the entire metanarrative, like the entire novel, is for Rosalie. This address, this repurposing and retelling of a history, anticipated in the Prologue, becomes then the novel’s exergue or apostrophe. Derrida notes: “the apostrophe is addressed to a dead person, to the historian’s object become spectral subject, the virtual

214

addressee or interlocutor of open letter. Another archive effect … this apostrophe enriches the

corpus it claims to treat but which it enlarges and of which, in fact, it is henceforth a part” (AF

39-40). Govier’s scriptor’s / Suzanne’s texts address and are addressed to a dead person. Rosalie

is the subject of Suzanne’s and, meta-textually, Govier’s investigation / narrative, but she is also

recipient of its retelling. “[I]t seemed that Rosalie slept now,” Suzanne concludes after the

ghostly visitation (283). The becoming found resurrects the past—the forgotten, erased, lost

past—giving it a new life while laying old lives to rest. The archival newspaper article from the

novel’s opening (37) functions as literal apostrophe and does as Derrida claims, but so does the

Preface between the narratives, which enriches and complicates a corpus that is initially

‘historically,’ i.e. as ‘objective’ intellectualized archive rather than felt and figurative archive.

Comparably, the closing scene, featuring Murphy in Calgary on the day the city first turned on

electric street lights (310-312), acts as a “postscript of sorts” and “retrospectively determines

what precedes it” (Derrida, AF 40). Once again, the novel’s structure plays with the presentation of facts and plays with contemporary assumptions and prejudices about authenticity. The scene reaffirms the novel’s genre as ‘historical’ and re-presents the narrative as authentic, emphasizing the having become found of that which precedes it. Like Freud, who for Derrida “is no longer treated as a third person represented by his written works,” Suzanne-as-Murphy, and by extension Govier, or at least her scriptor, “is no longer treated as a witness in the third person” but rather “called to witness as a second person” (AF 40-41). Suzanne calls Murphy to witness the injustices done to Rosalie, just as Govier’s scriptor calls Suzanne to witness Rosalie’s ghost, who brings into presence the unknowable aspects of her narrative. Finally, the meta-text calls the reader to witness the erasure that Rosalie’s narrative has undergone in the historical, colonially driven archive.

215

Through these strategies of invocation, calling-to-witness, and blending archival trace

with narrative invention into a becoming found, Govier’s text responds to and challenges “the

tendency to address colonial elisions by incorporating well-known Indigenous people into the

‘great men of history’” (Hunt 26). While Govier writes from a settler position and draws from an inherently settler-colonial archive, her novel complicates the politics of a hi/story that has been hitherto only told from the perspective of the perpetrator, law-makers, and the people re- inscribing those perspectives. Hunt notes that “In the archives of settler nation-states like

Canada, Indigenous people are often either absent, depicted as ciphers of the real individuals they are meant to represent, or presented as always already disappearing from the landscape”

(26). Between Men challenges these tendencies with Roberta Asp and the reminders of presence that she provides in the form of oral retellings of Indigenous histories, especially that of Deerfoot

(229-232). The novel avoids elision by not making Deerfoot its primary focus and instead uses the retelling of his three races against Stokes to demonstrate the continuation of oral traditions among urban Indigenous Peoples in contemporary settings.

In Suzanne’s re-telling, Rosalie is not a cipher, nor does she disappear; she reappears by becoming found, and she haunts the narrative as a ghost of the colonial violence and archival erasure that she underwent. Govier’s text might at first appear to ‘complete’ Rosalie’s story or at least gesture toward completionism, falling into “‘second wave’ feminist archival discourse, as defined by Eichhorn, [which] views conventional archives as collections that can be rendered

‘complete’ through increased female representation” (Cooper 447). However, venturing into the fonds, conducting comparative and genetic criticism of the text and its source material, reveals the text’s function as an alternate to the historical archive and the very notion of a ‘complete’ story.

216

Cooper notes that “Critically and creatively reading pre-existing archival sources

represents a particularly meaningful response to the archival turn” (449), a turn around which

each chapter of this study oscillates. Suzanne, and by extension Govier’s scriptor, responds to

this turn within third wave feminism and anticipates radical directions in intersectionality. And

while Govier still stores her drafts in a material, institutionally-governed archive, whose methods of vetting and selection for storage and digitization are inherently political, her novel functions metaphorically as an archive of hauntological history, and also serves a meta-critical function, commenting on the nature of archives and their production. According to Hunt, “Historical accounts often purport to document events as they unfold linearly through time and space. This tendency projects an inevitability, a history of the present that could not have been any other way, foreclosing a critical examination of colonialism as an active and ongoing project” (36).

The Preface and closing scene of Between Men might at first appear to reinforce a linear and static approach to history. However, Suzanne and Govier’s scriptor’s narratives challenge these notions by disrupting historical accounts—the contrast between the Preface, the newspaper article, and Suzanne’s metanarrative—and showing their constructed colonial inflections:

Murphy writes two articles for the Tribune, one chastising Rosalie in the event of Fisk’s acquittal, the other sanctifying her in the event he is found guilty (BM 216). The logocentric notions of history and archiving are further disrupted by Rosalie’s hauntological appearance that reshapes the reader’s figuration of the past and by the two writers’ (Suzanne and Govier’s)

hauntological approaches to the ficto-archival retelling of Rosalie’s narrative / history. Beckman

notes, “feminist and queer reconfigurations of temporality raise the question of how those of us

contributing to an archive of the future position ourselves, and our imagined beneficiaries, in

time” (190), and Cushman echoes that “Decolonial archives operate through an understanding of

217

time immemorial” (116). Govier’s own reconfigurations of temporality and her reliance on

hauntology to repartition the discourse surrounding an Indigenous woman’s murder demonstrate

how she was ahead of her time and that her archives (both her fonds and the novel itself)

anticipated and opened the door for the important intersectional discussions of today.

Archives “provide a means to trace how colonial ‘space is produced and productive,’

thereby enabling readers to ‘unbury the generative roots of spatial colonization and lay bare its

concealed systems” (Hunt 26, quoting Goeman). Thus, the becoming found can serve a

decolonial function, but “Given the conditions of their production [i.e. according to colonial logics of history], the decolonization of these latter [colonial] archives may only ever be partial”

(27), for “To ‘decolonize’ means to understand as fully as possible the forms colonialism takes in our own times” (Million 54-55). Govier, as a settler colonizer, is working to decolonize the historical record and archival holdings surrounding Calgary’s first murder through the becoming found of a multiplicitous narrative. Like Sodbusters, which Hunt unpacks at length, the historical accounts of Rosalie’s story function as “an archive that consolidates settler claims to the territory and [its] history” to “naturalize colonization and settlement” (31). Hunt elaborates that

“Settlement, in the archive, is often presented as something that is always already coming into being, just as Indigenous peoples are presented as always already disappearing” (35). Govier’s novel fights this trend by shifting Rosalie’s narrative from becoming trace to becoming found, just as critics in turn attempt to use the author’s fonds as support for genetic criticism and to theorize states of becoming. According to Eichhorn, “being in time and history differently is integral to fostering not only new forms of political alliances, including those that appear to defy temporal constraints, but also new narratives about feminist history and feminist futures” (54).

Suzanne defies temporal constraints through her connection with Rosalie; Govier’s scriptor in

218

turn does this with Suzanne and Asp, fostering political alliances between times, across

discourses and within space and place.

Cushman notes, “Telling only the story of remaining … fails to decolonize the very

concept and practice of archiving” (118). Govier’s novel and fonds invoke ghosts not so that they relive their trauma, but so that we may be called to witness it; Asp invokes Deerfoot not as a rem(a)inder of loss but of “indigenous peoples’ longstanding resistance to imperialist oppression” (ibid.). Rather than “offer a fantasy that every traumatic memory can be retrieved and preserved,” that “the repressed can be made to return … as incontrovertible historical evidence” (Saunders 171), Govier’s text, with its creative depiction of history nested as a metanarrative, challenges the very notion of ‘incontrovertible’ evidence and the imperial / empirical history built on that notion. Like Adrienne Rich’s poems, written concurrently and in the preceding years, Between Men reflects “a desire for the (potentially) lost archives of women’s lives” and offers a creative “medium in which such archives can be both recovered and created anew” (Benjamin 629). The becoming found foregrounds how some narratives were lost or erased—whether intentionally by or as a symptom of settler-colonialism—and demands that they be (re)considered in the present. Just as “we may wonder which aspects of our lives will make space for the hungry ghosts of a future that has failed to accommodate at least some of its people” (191), we must acknowledge which aspects of the past have failed to make space for the specters haunting our present and construct archives, discursive spaces, texts, that work to accommodate them. Govier’s texts as ciphers of Suzanne’s narrative and research make this space for Rosalie. More important, Govier’s fonds and the text-as-archive, the becoming found of alternatives to the historical record, prompt readers to make space for Rosalie and other displaced voices, as well as narratives that might otherwise become lost. By contrast, we may

219

discard one archive in favor of another and adopt trace to deconstruct a mythologised or over- represented figure, as “Leaving Ajawan” does with Archibald Belaney and Roaring / Alibi do with Applecart / Aberhart and Deemer / Harvie.

220

LEAVING AJAWAN

< How to Flunk Out of Grad School (Excerpts from “Grey Owl’s Final Voyages,” the last chapter of the would-be thesis Archibald Belaney: A Narrative Biography), www.wouldbedrme.blogger.com/2007/05/18/archie

The autumn daylight faded into the trembling orange leaves of the aspen in Prince Albert

National Park. The man known to most as Grey Owl sat on a bench near the fireplace in the

Waskesiu beer parlour. He pushed away his whiskey and stood slowly, leaning against the familiar table for stability.

“Going somewhere?” asked Mingan, the innkeeper, the only other soul in the building.

The disappeared crowds mark the end of another season of pilgrimages to Beaver Lodge.

“I need to get back to Ajawan,” said Grey Owl. “I need to check up on Jelly Roll and

Rawhide, make sure they’re set for winter before I leave for that damned tour, and Yvonne too.”

“You need to take care of yourself, Wa-sha-quon-asin,” Mingan replied.

“You need to take care of yourself.” That’s what Anahareo always said to him. He had once famously replied: “I must take care of those who cannot care for themselves and are not cared for by others, those who have broken the rules of all the furtive fold and are now hunted,” although he had not said that to her. But where is she now? he wondered. Where is my Sajo?

“Wa-sha-quon-asin?”

“I need my paddle,” said Grey Owl.

“You need rest.”

“Do you know how many times I have paddled Waskesiu, Namêkosis, and the Lake-

Where-the-Hearts-Were-Hung in rain and wind?”

221

“And do you know how many men have been sent to the bottom of those bottomless

lakes?”

Grey Owl frowned, the scar above his right eyebrow creasing heavily.

“Morning then,” he said.

Mingan replied: “Morning.”

And Grey Owl, half-skunked, lay his head on the bar.

He awoke early the next morning, retrieved his long oar from Mingan, and went to the docks. He climbed into his birchbark canoe and began to paddle, standing—as the Ojibwe had taught him—across Waskesiu Lake, named after the Red Deer. He wove through the Narrows, portaged the Kingsmere River, and put in at the South End warden station, where he collected a bottle of whiskey for his cabin. At the river’s mouth, he found Jelly Roll and Rawhide, his famous beaver friends. Jelly Roll, the subject of several films, and named after his favorite treat, was loved by all. Rawhide was another story; the mother of Jelly Roll’s kits and the matriarch of

Beaver Lodge, named because she was still ‘naked’ when Grey Owl and Anahareo adopted her, did not enjoy the same public attention as her mate.

The beavers climbed into the canoe. “Hello friends,” smiled Grey Owl.

“Hello,” Rawhide replied with the voice of a young woman.

“Anahareo?”

“Why did you leave us, Shapian?”

“Chilawee? Chikanee?” he paused. “Sajo?”

“Why do you think you are Meegwon? Why do you leave us alone in the woods and travel to the villages like Meegwon when you know you are Shapian?”

222

Grey Owl stood frozen in his canoe. He knew why he had left, why he would leave

again. Just as he knew why he had traded the isolation of Beaver Lodge for the company of

seasonal pilgrims. But he could not tell Sajo why he was no longer her Shapian, just as he had

not been able to tell Anahareo why he was no longer Wa-sha-quon-asin, even though, more than ever now, people the world over called him Grey Owl.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Only a distant loon replied.

Grey Owl continued to paddle up the East coast of Kingsmere Lake, standing in his birchbark canoe, his beavers resting on the bow.

His hard eyes scanned the horizon and he wondered, where is my Sajo?

***

It was a spring afternoon, or at least it was supposed to be. Winter had persisted well into

April. The man known to most only as Grey Owl wondered whether that winter would ever end or whether his beavers would be trapped in their lodge, under snow and ice, forever. He would never know the answer. He was returning from his final tour. He had lectured about the Beaver

People and the Pilgrims’ responsibilities to preserve nature. He had left his last wife, sick with fever, at the hospital in Regina, to make his final journey alone.

“Jelly Roll! Rawhide!” he called out.

He snowshoed from the end of the winter road, where the warden truck left him, over the still-frozen surface of Ajawan Lake. He did not know if his beavers would reply this time. He had been gone several months, and worried that his friends had lost faith in his return.

“Lazy buggers!” His dialect had a tendency to slip when he was alone or absent-minded.

He trod wearily toward his cabin. He thought he noticed something on the grey horizon, or just

223

under the grey sky, or just above the grey snow—one can never tell which, up north—but he started towards it and staggered for some time before realising it was a rock on the shoreline.

He breathed haggardly, his face taut with concern. “Rawhide? Jelly Roll?” he paused, recalling his last return. “Sajo?”

Still, no response. The landscape was barren, save for the rock now near his feet, the copse of trees in the distance, and the handsome log building nestled amongst them, hanging over the edge of the shore with countless sticks bundled underneath: Beaver Lodge.

He made it home. In a cold sweat—he had not been allowed to drink at the warden’s cabin or in their truck. He stabilised himself on the rough hand-hewn logs as he leaned over, searching for a whiskey bottle in the low carved-out pantry. The floor, he noticed, was surprisingly clean: most of the strewn branches, wood chips, pine needles, and beaver feces coated in a layer of dust that veiled the smell of home he had come to welcome, and longed for while on the road. He found a bottle, mostly full, under the heavy cast-iron stove. After only six years of use it was beginning to rust from the humidity let in through the open floor that lead out of Beaver Lodge, straight into the lake. At that moment, the lodge was silent; Grey Owl sat on his bed waiting for the true season of spring to be announced by the slapping of beaver tails on open water.

He considered checking the guest cabin, the first ‘pilgrims’ (he often used the word sarcastically while in private company during his later years) would be arriving within six weeks and there would likely be much work to do after a long winter of disuse. But he simply sat in bed, nursing his bottle. His notebook lay on the small rough-topped desk, where it had sat untouched for the better part of two years. He had not expected the cabin to remain empty for so long, or for it to tell so few tales.

224

Eventually there was too much silence and he called out to his beavers once again: “Jelly

Roll! Rawhide! You can’t sleep and get fat on bark forever. Spring is coming and this place stinks of dust and soggy wood.”

He received no answer. He sat in silence, holding his bottle, staring at his notebook.

“Maybe they’ve gone and left without me,” he wondered aloud. “Maybe they’ve gone and died without me.”

***

Three days later Grey Owl’s fever was so severe that he knocked his last bottle of whiskey off his desk, spilling it across the dusty floor that still bore only tracks from the door to his bed. At that moment he picked up the direct line to the warden cabin and called for help.

He was mumbling and slurring his words, blending his British and Ojibwe accents, dialects, and languages into an incoherent babel.

“What the hell did he say?” one warden asked the other.

“Something about either a flower or the floor, and something called an Oh-moo-day… maybe?”

“Totally wasted! Probably burnt himself on the stove and now he’s crying for help.”

“Kind of figured this day would come sooner or later, though. Best just to get to it.”

They went and got him, those two park wardens. With a half-ton truck and a dog sled loaded in the back. They drove up the winter road, mushed across Ajawan, and loaded the man they suspected was not born Grey Owl onto the cargo bed. Back to the truck they mushed, then lifted his semi-limp dead weight into the back seat and left Ajawan.

He mumbled to them. All the way from the north end of Kingsmere—then called

Namêkosis, or Big Trout—to the townsite of Waskesiu. He told them of his trials, his beavers,

225

his journeys, his returns. He told them of Jelly Roll and Rawhide, of Sajo and Chilawee and

Chikanee, and of how he was Meegwon and not Shapian.

And while the wardens thought that all they were hearing were the ramblings of a man left too long in isolation, of a ‘drunken Indian’ one of them would have said, still they listened.

Listened to every sentence he said. And found later that they could recite every last word that he had pronounced on his final journey.

Upon arriving at the townsite it became obvious that Grey Owl required medical attention, and so the wardens drove him to the hospital in Prince Albert, unconsciously absorbing every word he said about his voyages. Along the way they asked if there was anyone they should contact for him, knowing that his most recent wife was in Regina and unfit to travel.

“Sajo,” was his only response. Sadly, the wardens, one new to the Park and the other hostile to the man, were unfamiliar with Grey Owl’s works and did not have the faintest idea as to who Sajo was.

The man known to all but one of his lovers as Grey Owl died of pneumonia in the hospital the next day. Anahareo had not come to visit, and no nurse was present to record his final words, though they could only have been, “Where is my Sajo?” >

226

“TRYING TO PUT THE WORLD BACK TOGETHER”: THE POLITICS OF DORF’S PURSUITS IN

KROETSCH’S ALIBI

After over a decade of recovering from the Depression, Aberhart’s Social Credit party was delivered a gift that would ensure their political power for nearly another quarter century.

Kroetsch writes that when “Imperial No. 1 blew near Leduc on 13 February 1947, oil became the panacea the leader [Aberhart] had prophesised and the people had waited for. From beneath the soil rather than from heaven came black gold” (Alberta 56). After promises of rain and pastoral renewal, it was the black gold of oil, growthless below the earth, rather than the gold of wheat growing above, that restored Alberta’s economy and incited a flourishing of population and populism. Sudden prosperity went hand-in-hand with shifts in the party’s political position.

Ernest Manning, Aberhart’s “figurative son, the young man who had been his right-hand, who in

1935, at the age of twenty-seven, as provincial secretary became the youngest cabinet minister in the British empire, was anointed Bible Bill’s successor” after his death in 1943 (van Herk,

Mavericks 256). However, “Social Credit became the agent of the forces it had opposed” when

Manning took over, and “almost overnight moved the party from the tradition of prairie radicalism to a reactionary position” (Kroetsch, Alberta 79). This inversion is ironic given

Manning’s overwhelming “nostalgia for a lost pastoral world,” and his desire to “recover and preserve a rural paradise” in the present moment (213). Kroetsch’s Alibi reflects this paradox of wanting to collect and conquer the natural world while also believing that man is at its mercy.

Like Social Credit in 1935, Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservative party took

Alberta by storm in 1971, and after three consecutive wins, swept Social Credit from the house entirely, taking 75 of 79 seats in 1982. Similarly to Aberhart, when he was first elected,

227

Lougheed appeared shocked by his own victory; he “hardly seemed to know what to do” (van

Herk, Mavericks 266). But over the next fourteen years he led Alberta through a transition period

as “governance policies and initiatives were realigned towards the fulfilment of Alberta’s

economic, cultural and social potential as a full partner in Confederation” (Perry & Craig 526).

This notion of partnership strikingly demonstrates the province’s political shift, given Social

Credit’s anti-federalism and anti-imperialism as perceived by Macpherson and depicted by

Kroetsch in Roaring. But Alberta’s cooperation was frequently tested by a “protracted conflict” between Lougheed and Prime Minister Trudeau over policies pertaining to the energy industry

(526)—the “lollipop that everyone fought for” (van Herk, Mavericks 267). Despite the battles for revenue and tax distribution, “sharp increases in world oil prices substantially increased

Alberta’s resource revenue, producing the potential to realize Alberta’s long-term economic diversification,” which “explored an interventionist fiscal policy, including direct public ownership and investment” (Perry & Craig 526-527). This interventionist approach certainly did not prevent public ownership from exploding into tycoonery, for regionally controlled resources and trickle-down economics are the heart and soul of globalisation and late-capitalism. In 1981, two years prior to the publication of Kroetsch’s Alibi, the Oil Agreement was signed by

Lougheed and Trudeau, affirming “Alberta’s ownership of its own resources” and increasing both the price of oil and the return that Albertans received on its sale (535).

It is telling, both from an economic and an ecocritical perspective, that Kroetsch’s novel on materialism and collection, Alibi, is set and was written during the aftermath of the Oil

Agreement, providing a contemporary foil to Govier’s novel, even if the tycoon around whom the fictional action is built was active fifteen years prior. Deemer, the oil tycoon, the Eric Harvie figure, the eccentric collector of traces from around the world, a man who revelled in his

228

dubiously gained wealth, is the shadowy subject of Kroetsch’s Alibi. Harvie was “an enigma

from the old school” and “a character in the true sense of the word” who was widely speculated

upon by those who “claim[ed] to have known him” (Diehl 1). Like Deemer, he is always the

object of inquiry and curiosity, yet ever the subject of mystery. Both characters, historical and

historiographic, have a “difficult to analyze … insatiable compulsion to collect” (2). But while

Harvie established the Glenbow foundation and donated some 88 million dollars to make public

his extravagant and often peculiar collections (157-158), his fictional counterpart, Deemer, is covetous, his collection coveted, even by those who contribute to it. He is an emblem of stockpiling, the hoarding of unrelated fetishized commodities at the height of the 1980s’ boom

economy.

Eric Lafferty Harvie, the philanthropic millionaire collector upon whom Kroetsch based the mysterious employer in Alibi, “is Mr. Calgary to many people” (Kroetsch, Alberta 178). He

opened the Glenbow Museum in 1966 but ironically, in recent years, the curators have been

“forced to decide what the museum can afford to keep” and have “developed several initiatives

to ensure that the museum could remain afloat despite being weighed down financially by its

abundance of artifacts” (Read 378). Harvie’s wealth was so great that its yields have become a

paradoxical burden. He was also a very private man and his spectre, “the inspired and inspiring

ghost of the ‘eclectic collector,’ haunts the province” (van Herk, Audacious 94), just as Deemer’s

ghost haunts Alibi. Robyn Read observes that the Kroetsch fonds contains holograph fragments

in which Kroetsch “debates whether Deemer should turn out, after all, to be just a ‘floating

head’” (388, quoting 591/96.6, 38.15), anticipating the collector’s ideological role as figurehead

and his narrative role as myth. Kroetsch writes that Harvie “gave every man a history” (Alberta

181) by focussing much of his collection on artefacts from rural and early settler Alberta. He

229

created a singularly curated archive, one containing the monuments themselves—including

textual traces—rather than documents or impressions or simulacra thereof. Harvie constructed a

physical containment of a particular history. And so, returning the archive to the realm of the

document becomes one of Dorf’s functions in Alibi.

While Harvie’s philanthropic hoarding is a source of history and charity for the city of

Calgary, it becomes the epitome of commodity fetishism, especially when mythologised in

Kroetsch’s novel. As Read notes, “the capitalist complicities to his collecting have been critiqued

less directly—most likely because Harvie’s intentions were benevolent ones” (384). But

Kroetsch’s mythologisation of the collector reopens that figure, the carnivalesque boom of the

Albertan oil industry, and the rise of globalised capitalism to Marxist literary criticism. Both

Harvie and the fictional collector based upon him impart what Marx calls “metaphysical

subtleties and theological niceties” on objects, granting them sign-exchange value (Capital). The act of collection brings with it the aristocratic business of collecting, further inflating the

“mystical character of commodities” (Marx), for as Diehl notes: “when the world found out there was a buyer in Calgary the world came to his door” (160). Diehl quotes Jim Fish—possibly the namesake for another of Kroetsch’s characters—who says Harvie “would get involved with and cultivate people in the business of collecting” (159). Dorf becomes one of these people when

Deemer begins to expand his collection beyond objects and, evolving parallel to Harvie, beyond people. Like his alibi—his double, his allegorical figure—Deemer, “Harvie tested the possibility

that he could collect a place itself” and “the transplantation of place plays a large part in who

Harvie was and what he was capable of as a prosperous possessor” (Read 383). Harvie

“resurrect[ed] the past in the present” with the settler village of Heritage Park to “outwit an end

to things and perhaps, in a sense, death” (384). Deemer, on the other hand, attempts to collect the

230

natural world and its very limitations: a spa that will keep him from death. Kroetsch’s novel, told

through Dorf, mythologises the figure of the collector, the act of collecting, and, like

Backstrom’s tale, the role of water in man’s pursuit of power and simultaneous flight from death.

“A Trace of the Discarded World”: History, Myth, Text, and Water in Dorf’s Narrative

Like Backstrom, Dorf is full of it. Full of desire, full of language, full of ambiguity, and

full of shit. Many critics have read Robert Kroetsch’s Alibi as being “concerned with quests, gods, myths, plots, and symbols … while others see its concern with antiquests, profane depths,

tall tales, deconstructions, fragmenting signs” (Lecker 107). The novel has been read through

Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival, through Barthes and Kristeva as desire in language, as god-

game, and as “carnivalesque deconstructive gymnastics” (Dorscht 81), but never to my

knowledge through a Marxist analysis of postmodernism, which, as Robert Wilson notes, “points

rather differently to the obsessions of international capitalism and the illusory delights of

commodity fetishism” (98). But these ‘obsessions’ are no less interested in the aesthetics,

structure, and function of the text within the discourse and discord of late capitalism. Kroetsch’s

scriptor, along with Dorf as his alibi, “will decreate, demythologize, uninvent, unhide, undo,

while he creates, remythologizes, invents, hides, puts on, covers up. Cover up: alibi” (Lecker

109). As Hutcheon notes, “there is always a postmodern tension between the implied ‘universals’

of mythic story and the ‘anecdotal texture, narrativity’ of fiction. The interchange here is what

deconstructs myth and allows a way out of the ‘entrapping’ tendency of myth to want to explain

everything one way. For Kroetsch the response is to ‘retell it’ and retell it differently” (165,

quoting Kroetsch in Labyrinths of Voice). By contrast, Rosemary Sullivan claims that the

“prevalent interest in myth is … axiomatically a corollary of the quest for a coherent

231

environment” (165). But Kroetsch’s postmodern deployment of myth does not long for a

coherence of place or space; instead, his writing relies on that coherence so as to disrupt it.

Kroetsch’s approach to myth allows his narratives to depict chaotic and dissonant places and

spaces, carnivalesque spaces, mythologisations of historical spaces. His novels pretend to aspire

to coherence, but their quests are always futile, always ironic, the novels themselves not quests

for concordance, but self-reflexive acknowledgements of the impossibility of unity in any

specified, localised space. Sullivan continues by drawing on Northrop Frye, who writes that, “As

society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling” (232).

Kroetsch, however, subverts structural principles—undermines and dis-/re-assembles his own

forms—to create myths out of the modern rather than modern stories out of myth.

Alibi as an anti-novel collects the modern collector and his search for the perfect spa.

While intrigued by the notion of perfection, Kroetsch’s writings expose that ideal as a dangerous motivation leading to disastrous pursuits (as seen when rain serves up the perfect victory for

Backstrom). Alibi epitomizes this subversion in its very structure. Key to the novel’s myth- making and political commentary is the text’s layered structure, beginning with the journal, which, as Kroetsch writes in early notes, “destroys or mocks the idea of narrative time: the mere time of a journal: the way it gives the appearance of connection—while in fact jumping huge sections of time: dismissing the basic assumptions of the fiction we ordinarily call a novel:”

(591/96.6, 39.3).32 “Dorf’s journal entries frame endless multiplication of context” (Hariharan

103), including an unknown number of revisions and reproductions of his own journal: “I made

my precious notes, up there in the Atlantic sky, for later transcription into a more coherent form”

(Alibi 193). Dorf writes and re-writes his journal entries—how many times, we cannot know for

32 Original punctuation has been preserved in this and other quotes from the fonds. 232

sure—before Karen Strike ‘inherits’ them, gives them chapter headings (231), and presumably edits them—again, to an uncertain degree. Through the journal’s rewritings, Dorf, and by extension the novel, “engag[e] in complex play where the rules are generated by narrative and by different tellings” and “the seriousness with which the original entries were made is undercut by the way in which the manuscript is conceived” (Hariharan 104, 139). Like Roaring, Alibi demythologizes its own origination; it is “a text that dissolves as it is formed” (Lecker 122). A new version of Alibi’s narrative in The Puppeteer further doubles and demythologises the journal and its attempts at ‘truth,’ thereby “undercutting the narrative power of Alibi” (Vauthier 177) and providing a “satiric reversal” of Dorf’s construction of an alibi (Hariharan 142). As a sequel, The

Puppeteer is somewhat of a “deflation of the old” (Vauthier 177), unmasking Deemer, Dorf, and

Karen as spectres whose bodies and politics haunt the first novel and re-appear in the flesh in the sequel.

Because of this chapter’s focus on spectral politics and socio-economics in relation to the pursuits of a collector and his agent, I will discuss only Alibi. And while the constructedness of the text has been examined nearly to death (Florby, Hariharan, Hutcheon, Lecker, Read,

Tiefensee, Wilson; I catalogue, I collect these critics), I will return to this aspect later to examine how form complicates power relations within the novel. As with his fulmination of tall tales in

Roaring, Kroetsch deconstructs our notion of the mystery novel through the structure of Dorf’s journal to create more than a mere postmodern commentary on literary genres. The un-/re- making of these textual forms comments on history-made-myth and reveals the extent to which both are textually and socially constructed. But first, I will examine the overlooked economic commentary at play in Alibi, along with its connections to nature and the culture of extravagance during Alberta’s oil boom of the early 1980s.

233

At the novel’s opening, during “DORF’S PRESENTIMENT,” Deemer is first presented to the reader as a “millionaire Calgary oilman whose pastime it was to collect anything that was loose” (7), for “It is not a matter of what to collect. He has that kind of money” (13). This announcement and Dorf’s presentation of himself as Deemer’s agent, “a completely free man … left alone to pursue assignments, to travel, to dicker, to bribe if necessary; [who] need deal with no one except in financial terms” (7), introduces the materialism attendant on Deemer as nouveau riche. In contrast to Deemer’s stasis is Dorf, constantly in motion. In The Lovely

Treachery of Words, Kroetsch famously reads the oppositions of movement and stillness,

“Horse: house” and “Masculine: feminine” in prairie literature (76). Despite this explicit creative

expression of Kroetsch’s own literary theory, the opening passage of Alibi opts instead for an

allusion to class—in the form of monetary privilege. The stationary house gathers the collection-

based materialism of the haute bourgeoisie while the actively moving horse represents the

servant/labourers who facilitate the collection: Dorf is the means of production to Deemer’s repository of collection. And although Dorf believes himself a free man, left to his own devices, he is free only within the strictures of his obligations as agent. He is free to travel the world, but must visit predestined places at set times for specific purposes to benefit his employer. When we first meet him, Dorf’s entire existence revolves around the dollar, not even his dollar, but that of a man he has “never once met” (7). The bourgeoisie has become spectral, and not simply in the sense that class-concealing ideology is an invisible form of class domination (Althusser). As an embodiment of an upper-class desire to own, Deemer is also spectral, haunting the narrative by governing its plot, his directives setting in motion the ultimate pursuit: “Find me a spa, Dorf” (7).

At times, Dorf resists his employer’s avarice, contributing to an appraisal of the laissez faire attitude encouraged by the discovery of Albertan oil in the late 1940s and the Oil

234

Agreement of the early ‘80s. Dorf writes that Deemer “thinks it’s his money and his silent

manipulation that makes the collection … [but] it’s my scrounging and my snooping and my

talking, talking, talking that make his famous collection” (195). This passage ties the

dichotomies of speech and silence into the house/horse dialectic. It is here that the question of

agency relates to collection and, by extension, to the archive: who / what makes a collection?

what makes it someone’s collection? and what is the role of speaking / writing in and from the

formation of a collection? These questions will be revisited in depth. But when Dorf asserts his

agency in acquiring the collection, he is also expressing a desire for recognition, and a mixture of

disdain and envy. This conflation occurs within the thesis he “wrote on cash registers as works of

art … Beauty and money become each other’s alibis; and it was that same thesis … that landed

[him] [his] first real curator’s appointment” (184), which in turn led to his employment under

Deemer. The passage capitulates to neo-liberal idealism through the notion that a monetary

system can be artistic, that the beauty of a collection not only has value but is value, and not merely in the sense of intrinsic artistic value, but in the sense of capital, collectible/collected beauty as money. Beauty and money are each other’s alibis, figures whose existence rationalizes one another’s innocence (in legal terms), doubles for one another. Dorf’s thesis is a Warholian blend of art and economy, superstructure and base. And despite being the one who obtains

Deemer’s artefacts, Dorf feels alienated from the product of his labour: the collection.

Deemer’s collection is more than mere product of Dorf’s labour, but a metaphor for the drive to possess and partition both the material and the immaterial world. According to Robert

Wilson, “A collection symbolizes all other human activities that attempt to fasten handles upon, to grasp and hold onto the slippery groundlessness of, ‘reality’” (98), attempting as well to grasp language and literature, especially literary traditions such as realism, against which the

235

postmodern novel writes. It is fitting that the slippage of “reality” be evoked through a collector

and collection who mythologize themselves. “The ‘fictionality’ of collections is emphasized by the comic readiness with which any one of Deemer’s collections, however fantastic, is incorporated into the story,” argues Gunilla Florby (204). However, Deemer’s fictional collection strikingly resembles Harvie’s actual collection, which shifts attention to the act of collecting, emphasizing process rather than product (Hutcheon), and therefore the means—the wealth required—to reproduce that process ad nauseum. Deemer has “collected not only a wide variety of collectible ‘things’ but innumerable complete collections; … recollected for an even larger, more encompassing collection” (Wilson 102-103): he “internalizes the mad impulse to collect” (103). Deemer also reflects “Harvie’s ultimate philosophy of acquisition: the constant and effervescent inquisition into what can be collected,” which “is a continual process that, in many ways, resists conclusion” (Read 379). Like Applecart, the historical inspiration for Deemer contrasts with his fictional depiction to reveal the extent to which we mythologise history and historicise myth. The novel comments then on the process by which both individuals and their collections are made myth. And just as a narrative collects fragmentary scenes, Deemer collects shards of a world to produce an iteration o f the world that is his own, patched together as it might be.

The spectral role of the collector figure within the narrative extends far back into the archived drafts. In an early note, Kroetsch writes that the collector collects “the proof of evil” through “theft, illegal digs—to get objects” and play “the god-game” (591/96.6, 38.9). Rumors of Deemer’s foul play persist in the novel, suggestions that he commits murder to cover up illicit actions (36), a definite contrast to the charitable and benevolent, although similarly enigmatic

Eric Harvey. Deemer is spectral, even in early notes; “Deemer: God is a voyeur” (38.14). Mr.

236

Deth (sic.), who in later drafts becomes Fish, “claims to have gone to school with him—but can say nothing specific about him” (38.14). Hutcheon observes that in Alibi “the collector becomes a discoverer figure ... and a conqueror ... And it is the collector’s agent who makes these roles possible” (177). Deemer is compared to Philip II (Alibi 174), linking him to imperialism; and collecting within the novel is “lethal” (Hutcheon 177). Kroetsch wonders if “Maybe he [Deemer] was trying to put the world back together again” (591/96.6, 38.15). “Like the writing of history,

... collecting is a way of coping with time past” (Hutcheon 177) both driven by a will to preserve a particular historical period of class and colonial dominance.

Dorf’s narrative too tries to put a world (back) together but does so from the perspective of an employee who has learned to be astute at collecting fragments. As Florby notes, in his quest for a spa “Dorf initially rejects Banff, a part of Canada that has become inauthentic, a place reserved for the foot-loose well-to-do, whether Japanese or indigenous. The hotel has shops flaunting a crazy colonial mélange of moccasins and tartans” (205, referring to Alibi 19). This disparagement is reflected in the archive: among Kroetsch’s notes and research materials is a newspaper article titled “Indians oppose spa” (591/96.6, 38.14), about resistance to the development of spas near Ainsworth, the analogue for Deadman Springs, for fear that they will become tourist sites akin to Banff. Shops in Banff reveal how commodification has been boiled down to racial trinkets: “Siwash sweaters for Japanese tourists. Moccasins. Tartans. An antique shop. The row of paintings of famous Indian chiefs” (19). Ironically, the commodities’ surplus value, their “mystical character” (Marx), renders Banff’s spa inauthentic—a mere simulation of a spa, a fitting anticipation of the present, as Upper Hot Springs now uses municipal water during winter months to make up for a lack of natural flow (Parks Canada Web Archive). Later, Dorf writes: “I began to recognize the hotel itself, the Banff Springs Hotel, as another kind of

237

collection. It offended me, the sheer deliberation that had gone into the collecting” (Alibi 46).

Dorf’s reaction to such a calculated collection parallels my own; the Banff Springs Hotel

presents an image of history curated by the rich for the rich. Florby rightly reads Deemer’s and,

by extension, Dorf’s pursuit as a “vain hope of finding an antidote for the colonial’s sense of

displacement” (205). However, the colonialism that Dorf rejects—reflecting Kroetsch’s frequently disclosed sentiments—is one of fetishized commodity; Banff is a gaudy and inauthentic parody of worldly material collection.

Although Dorf finds fault with his employer and the more capitalistic aspects of collecting, he too is a subject of the novel’s class-conscious perspective. He spends time in

Greece, living communally, “shar[ing] a stone windmill” with Karen and some fellow

Calgarians: “they are friends, a family, and each summer they know what their summer will bring, what horrors it will enable them to escape” (150, my emphasis). The homestead-like living arrangements, the “abandon[ment] … of knowledge” (150), and the collective activities enable escape from the responsibilities and social doctrines of the big city, from what Williams calls dominant culture. However, Dorf is able to live in this micro-commune only because of his employer; Deemer paid for his flight to Greece so that he might investigate the mud baths in

Laspi. Deemer reimburses Dorf’s travel expenses, from luxury in Banff to holidaying in Bath to gambling in Greece. As Kroetsch scribbled in his early notes, Dorf “has so confounded his life that he is ‘poor’; but, as a collector’s agent, he lives with the rich—especially, now, in his search through spas” (591/96.6, 38.14). Dorf ironically becomes the object of his own class exclusion, much like Backstrom, who campaigns for the anti-currency Social Credit party so that he might enjoy a secure salary as an MLA.

238

Deemer is so rich that he destabilises class disparity: he gives his agent a taste of upper-

class pleasures, compromising Dorf’s stance, but doubling up on the novel’s. Dorf writes, once

again of Banff: “Deemer could buy the place, I knew, and ask everyone to bugger off. For a

moment I was on his side, hating all those people and their hearty appetites and their laughter

and their confidence and their intimacies” (28). Deemer’s blurring of class lines, facilitated by

his immense wealth, makes Dorf momentarily take sides with him against those who purchase

pleasure. Dorf catches himself briefly in favour of trickle-down economics, provided the man

with the most money has the sense to use it well. This perspective reflects Ace’s social

Darwinism in Govier’s Between Men as well as Read’s explanation for why Harvie’s collection

went unscrutinised (Read 384). But as Tiefensee contends, “Deemer is the collector, but Dorf is

the agent; Deemer desires and pays for the items and collections constituting his collection, but

Dorf seeks out the desired objects and makes transactions through which Deemer gains property”

(61). Despite his criticism of Deemer, Dorf himself is the object of his narrative’s commentary, just as Ed is undermined by the hypocrisy of his social commentary in Vanderhaeghe’s early

works. Tiefensee continues, “Dorf is the double or even alibi of Deemer, who may be seen as

representing the ordering impulse we find in professorial or writing-oriented characters such as

Demeter, Madham, and Liebhaber” (61). Writing in Alibi then becomes a form of collecting too, while both writing and / as collecting become forms of alibi-making (one covering for the other),

myth-making, archive-making, and world-making. Lecker writes, “Dorf wants two worlds at

once” (119): he wants the world and the one he creates. And a desire for the world leads to

wanting to control the natural world, which Deemer, with Dorf as his alibi, both undertake.

Fish (formerly Mr. Deth) describes Deemer’s desire for a spa: “He [Deemer] wasn’t satisfied to have the rights of the oil, way down below the surface; he wanted the surface too”

239

(Alibi 57). A hot spring links geological depth with the surface; a spring comes to the surface but is fed by a source deep below. A spa-like spring is made possible by specific geological conditions—as are the oil sands through which Fish makes the analogy. But the spring, as a water resource, (self-)renews, as does its heat, which serves as an energy source, a geothermal

alternative to oil. As hybrids of earth and water, both oil deposits and springs “are sources of life

and death—mythically and in specific plot terms within the novel,” and while the former wins

Deemer his fortune, he “appears to seek some fountain of youth through healing waters” rather

than the wealth or political power that oil might afford him (Hutcheon 178). As with Roaring,

realism seems to give way to the fantastic as Dorf must find “the perfect spa—the place of

healing and wholeness, the source” (Florby 205). Deemer’s belief in the mythical properties of

water drives Dorf’s pursuit of a death cure, and therefore his pursuit of death, for Julie Magnuson

has promised to kill Dorf if he succeeds in his quest (Alibi 15). According to Dorf, Deemer

searches for a way to put his world back together—to keep it whole and skirt around death—by

buying everything: “promise him one forgery in a collection and he would buy it all” (187). He

seeks the source of longevity, of eternal life, and an escape from De(a)th, who has ironically

become Fish, an animal that can only survive in water—that can be found in the very streams

that meld with the spring’s water—and a Christian symbol of eternal life. Deemer wants une

source, the French for source (of water), and the French word for hot spring.

Cultural theorist Walter Benjamin writes that the collector’s existence is connected to a

“very mysterious relationship to ownership … a relationship to objects which does not

emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves

them as the scene, the stage, of [the objects’] fate” (60). In Deemer’s case, his own fate becomes

intertwined with that of the ineffable eternal life he is trying to collect—or at least Dorf and

240

Karen speculate as much (Alibi 21). The spa’s utilitarian value is its promise of healing

properties; it has been stripped of its exchange value through the act of collection and exalted to

the magical value—the signification—of the product itself. Yet, Deemer and Dorf’s attempts to

exploit spring water for its mythic value are made possible only by abusing the economic plight

of others. Deadman Spring is for sale because “the owner was going belly up … in debt up to his

ears” (200). Despite the spa’s location impeding profits “for the succession of poor devils trying

to make a living” (201), under Dorf’s management, Deadman Spring begins to turn a profit. The

spa’s success is in part thanks to Dorf, who discovers he has “something of a knack for this water

cure business” after healing a nameless man by gifting him one of his names (205). He is “able

to talk to the bruised and hurting people who come to these waters” (205), doubling as a shaman

and a salesman, a water-worker who works the crowd, “getting people to let the water take hold”

(205). Once again, we see parallels with Backstrom: Deemer and Dorf do not exploit the sick and

lame directly but take advantage of their desperation with the promise of healing water.

Deemer’s “desire to handle the world, to bring it within the scope of a personal collection,

transcends ordinary, merely physical, limitations” (Wilson 103); “he wants to collect, possess,

some special and immovable part of the earth itself” (Alibi 58). Wilson continues, the “desire to

reassemble the world—to shape its contours, give it fresh emphasis, transform it into a mosaic of

emblems—must lie hidden, always and already, within the desire to collect” (106). Comparably,

the apparatuses of ideology are always-already hidden, as seen in commodity fetishism: a desire to purchase or hoard conceals the disparity between different classes of collectors. The culture of

capitalism also conceals certain collections’ capacity to redefine systems of value, to put the world back together, but only in a certain way.

241

Linda Hutcheon notes that “to gratify Deemer’s desire for health to match his wealth,

Dorf must search for curing waters from Alberta to Bath to Portugal and, finally, to Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, as the cliché would have it” (179). When he ‘completes’ his journey, Dorf tabulates animals from the surrounding natural environment: “Here in this monkish place of mine: two porcupines, a black bear, rumors of a grizzly, a rare glimpse of a pine marten” etc., etc. (Alibi 202). The catalogue of fauna is anticipated by a prose-poem from the Kroetsch fonds about Deemer’s home, dated June 17, 1980: “much cotton from cottonwoods; many trees, many spruce, weeping birch … the glimmer of poplars in the sun, Russian poplar, balsam, cottonwood” (591/96.6, 38.9). Dorf collects nature because he cannot do so physically, as Deemer does, instead he collects textually. He documents the monuments that make up

Deemer’s collections; his secondary archive echoes the warehouses and the spas. Dorf’s quantification of the natural world is his way of alleviating “the dangers of unabridged nature”

(Alibi 202). The environment must be partitioned, squared off into neat little packets like any other commodity, like drafts placed in archive boxes, like language itself, parsed into discourse.

The mythic water of the spa must be kept separate from lakes and streams; nature must not be left unattended. One of the final chapter headings (written by Karen), reads “DEADMAN

SPRING ABOUT TO FULFIL / ITS PROMISE, NATURE ITSELF / AWAITS THE

MOMENT” (222). In addition to having use value and exchange value, nature must wait on man, and it is expected to pay out on its promises in Alibi through the rejuvenation of the spa. Nature, along with its owners, must anticipate the event, must fulfill its duty. Nature personified can reflect the narratives ascribed to it. At this point, the tone shifts, and the novel explicitly lays out the paradox of man controlling / depending on nature, emphasizing the tension between nature’s chaos and man’s desire to impose order and to achieve (narrative) closure. The heading also

242

reveals that some of the novel’s eco-nomic/logical commentary comes from Karen’s

emendations to the text, foregrounding Dorf’s lack of agency in and on the narrative.

Lecker writes that Dorf’s “quest for the perfect spa may be initiated by [his] desire to

satisfy Deemer, … but it soon becomes his own dream, one that introduces him to the possibility

of spiritual (and narrative) rebirth” (112). The ‘quest’—if we want to imbue venture capitalism

with this chivalric term—is initiated by the inevitability of a natural death and the supernatural

potential of externally applied water.33 Despite the plot’s quest for sources, the novel is built on accretion: Deemer’s in the warehouses, Dorf’s in his gathering of experiences and desires, the narrative itself as a collection of texts / voices / myths. These myths are about the curative properties of water: for Deemer, the smelly woman, and even Dorf himself. As Karen tells him:

“You invent yourself, each time you sit down to make an entry” (Alibi 61). Thus, the text of

Alibi, as a collection of writerly agencies, is itself an invented myth—modernity made myth.

Like Backstrom, despite (or perhaps because of) his attempts to exploit nature in his

narrative, Dorf finds himself at the mercy of the natural environment and of his text. As in

Roaring, a significant shift in the novel’s politics occurs when Dorf relinquishes his agency and

transfers it from the water-wielder to the water itself. Read writes that within Dorf’s narrative

the spa is a different kind of collected being: in Alibi it retains agency. It can be

collected but not entirely claimed, as it brings the collector to its location rather

than the other way around. In a way, it collects and contains the collector … It is a

spa that has character. (389-390)

Deadman Spring—a delightful oxymoron—combines the mythic figure of the collector with the

mystical properties ascribed to water. The spa is the meta-collector, gathering those who collect:

33 Smollett’s An Essay on the External Use of Water, an 18th-century piece on the medical benefits of Bath and other water treatments, is among the research materials for Alibi in Kroetsch’s fonds (591/96.6, 38). 243

Deemer and Dorf (not to mention cameo appearances by Rudy Wiebe and Kroetsch himself, who are temporarily collected by the spa and evicted by Dorf (Alibi 210-211)). When the lights go out in the spa at the end of the novel, an “orgy of naming” takes place (Florby 201), an orgy cataloguing collectors—including emerging writers from the ‘New World’ and mythic ones from the Old—who have been in turn collected by the water. According to Kroetsch’s notes and holograph fragments, this list originally included Mackenzie King, Mr. Deth, Smollett, and a floating head—which, we recall from a previous fragment, could have been Deemer, although not Deemer in person, for he explicitly “never comes into the mountains” in the early drafts

(591/96.6, 38.16). Only in a later iteration does the spectre become corporeal, visiting the novel at its end—read “beginning,” since Karen has yet to compile the narrative from Dorf’s journals—only to be shrouded in mystery once again, this time by a power outage that plunges the hot spring’s entire cave into darkness. In the climactic scene, water melds the bodies in the cavernous spa: “The all embrace of all of us. The meet and parting of pubic hair, the water’s lap, the hands … We traded limbs” (Alibi 227). The original ending was outlined as a fight “with an unseen force in the dark” after which “Dorf goes out the other side … He vanishes” (591/96.6,

38.14). Instead, the water and the darkness create a riparian body of shared pain and pleasure, of naming and narration. As a complex, interconnected body, the water and those who bask in it share in the agency of speaking those named into being. Dorf writes in his recounting of the carnivalesque event, “The cave permitted us” (227), it becomes the active agent of his narrative.

Through the characters’ own yielding, the cave, the hot spring, the water, allow them to enter the depth of nature, which also allows them to exist.

After this experience, Dorf loses the corporeal desire that has defined him for much of the novel. For Dorf, “the ultimate dream becomes the fiction-making process itself” (Lecker 112), a

244

dream that recalls Walter Benjamin, who “collected quotations, fragments of discourse, slivers of

a mythic totality, waymarkers towards a reconstructible whole” (Wilson 99). While formulating

this writer-as-collector narrator, Kroetsch writes about Dorf’s “realization that he can put

together his own self, he can collect from other people, from books, from imagination, from the

past” (591/96.6, 39.2). However, he cannot ever complete this collection, for “while Dorf may

seek source he is equally involved in a dream of completion that will never be real” (Lecker

113). Dorscht relies on Dorf’s comment that “the story [of Julie’s death] had no doubt been dictated by Jack Deemer himself” to argue that the narrative is not Dorf’s own but Deemer’s, for

the “‘self’ of Jack Deemer’s is, as all written selves, the selves of all writers of messages are,

‘simply a name. And a legend of course’” (82, quoting Dorf’s description of Deemer in Alibi 13).

Dorscht’s approach is reductive, boiling Deemer down to a name and a legend despite his perpetual spectrality and the multiplicity of “written selves” that make up the text’s inscriptions.

And while Hariharan agrees that “Even though Dorf has the agency in performing the

illocutionary act of his alibi, the agency shifts with his disappearance to Karen” (105), neither

critic pursues the question of agency far enough. Dorf’s agency has always been contested

because the only record of it is not his own. He is, in fact, more created by the narrative than he

is its creator—as Kroetsch often felt, Dorf is “absolutely self-conscious, self-aware; and yet … absolutely at the mercy of the muse” (Creation 58). He is at least as much an object of the novel’s commentary as he is an active commentator, and his desires and actions are governed as much by his rendering of nature as myth as by the nature of Alibi as constructed text. Dorf’s

“identity is both a product of these inherited codes [of language, subjecthood, and storytelling] and a matter of choice” (Hariharan 177); he is both a written (i.e. by a scriptor) and a self-writing

245

narrator. However, in the case of the latter he is as much a helpless pawn as he is co-creator of

his diegetic myth-world.

The very act of writing in Alibi distances Dorf from his narrative agency. Kroetsch writes

that “the body writes the book” (quoted in Twigg 116), and Dorf undergoes a “regeneration of

the body” through his experience at the mud bath in Laspi (Hariharan 73-76). Ultimately then,

water exhorts Dorf to write about water, to become “something on the order of a subject” that

“can be discerned on the recording surface” (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 16). Water, as imagined source of salvation, as mythologised through text, is simultaneously a mirroring surface that reflects Dorf and his storyworld as well as a disjunctive and seemingly divine force that destabilises the text as process, as “production of recording” (ibid.), and therefore as achivization-in-progress. When the water shifts Dorf’s desires at the end of the novel, it interrupts his writerly agency, his process of textual collection and (re)production, and his perpetual pursuit on Deemer’s behalf. It also causes what we expect of textual production to misfire. While the body writes the book, Dorf’s will is not his own. His body is an agent / tool for Deemer, and a force he cannot control in the novel’s various bawdy scenes. Thus, his narrative is not his own, cannot be wholly his own, for on the one hand he is not his own scriptor and on the other hand he is a scriptor for more than himself. Deemer “deems what people will do. He sets the stage. He operates through agents. His narrators perform” (Lecker 121); Dorf even scribes on Deemer’s behalf at the same time as he criticizes the collector. Deemer is “a

(vanished) symbol of the conventional author selecting and arranging his fictional world”

(Lecker 121); he is a spectre haunting the narrative, driving the action, sending Dorf on his journey to uncover that which Deemer desires. But when these forays to collect, label, and catalogue ironically (perhaps inevitably) lead Dorf to his miraculous interaction with water at

246

Deadman Spring, Dorf disappears, both diegetically and from the texts that make up the novel.

Deemer, as the narrative’s orchestrator, is a myth, just as the notion of source is a myth: death-

defying water and textual origin are equally illusory.

In Kroetsch’s writing, especially in Alibi, “There is no authorized text, only a kind of

Bakhtinian dialogue, ruling out the privileged story, allowing one interpretation to stand beside

another” (Florby 198). Deemer, as a spectre of authority written-into-being by Dorf, a conglomeration of second and third-hand impressions, reflects Bakhtin’s novelistic image,

embodying the dialogic approach to narrative and textual truth that was central to the theorist’s

writings. “Like Johnnie Backstrom, Dorf lives his desire a second time when he writes it in his

journal … He even lives it a third time when he rewrites his alibi” (Hariharan 53), i.e. when he

converts the journal into narrative. But the spectre of Karen, who has edited the manuscript and

devised its chapter titles, complicates these complications even more. Karen and Dorf’s versions of the text are “parasitical”: each text “reinterprets the situation depicted in the journal and integrates it into the new frame of an alibi” (Kuester 154). That can only mean that the origins of

Alibi’s mythologisations are uncertain. The different versions include lived experience (of which we have only textual trace), Dorf’s journal (versions one and two, and we do not know which we read at the novel’s end: his narrative, or Karen’s editing of both narrative and journal). Hariharan notes that “as readers, we never know what further emendations Karen has made in Dorf’s alibi”

(104) and thus the “text becomes an alibi concerning an act that has taken place” (Lecker 110).

Dorscht claims, “There are no ‘events’ apart from texts that account for them. The narrator is a

textual construct, as vulnerable as the pages on which s/he is written” (83). Like Backstrom’s

textual roaring, the myth-making comes from a re-iteration of words, even if they are told or

written or re-written. The process of telling and re-telling, as much influenced by the natural

247

environment that the men try to exploit as by the nature of a postmodern text’s construction,

becomes its own text. The Words of My Roaring and Alibi, through the haunting acts of speaking

/ writing and hearing / reading, are both ghost stories of their time and place, of money and

power, of voice and agency, of nature’s commodification and its unnatural consequences. And as ghost stories, alternate permutations of persons and histories, textual hauntings in and of the archive, these novels operate predominantly through trace, through the ebb and flow into and out of this liminal state of becoming.

Rethinking Remnants Through the Kroetsch Fonds—Becoming Trace, Continued

This intertidal space between presence and absence, as figured in Alibi’s climax,

encourages a return to the Kroetsch fonds, to the material space of trace. A typescript draft that

can only be definitively labelled as earlier than the “final” draft of Alibi (591/96.6, 40.5-41.1)

provides a few clear pieces of evidence for genetic criticism while also highlighting the novel

and the fonds’ engagement with trace. The draft adds the “evidence” that Deemer left of his

crimes: “Two corpses” (ibid., p. 33; pub. 25). This hint of the writing process reveals Deemer’s

transformation from specter to hobgoblin,34 from a haunting figure who at first seems not to

exist, to a murderer stalking the narrative’s physical reality.35 And yet, he is still only present

through the remnants left behind—those of his collection in the novel, and the scraps of his

characterization in the fonds. The corpses are never pursued further, no charges are laid; they

become little more than an indication of the “merely human” elements that Deemer’s

transformation “seemed to leave out” as he made his fortune and began “collecting collections”

34 Both “specter” and “hobgoblin” are accepted translations of “Gespenst” in the opening line of The Communist Manifesto (Findlay 44-45). 35 Both “haunting” and “stalking” are accepted translations of “umgehen,” the opening verb of the Manifesto (ibid.). 248

(Alibi 25). Notably, from this draft forward, every major passage concerning Deemer is nearly untouched. He (his spectre) is what remains of all the partial drafts and the novel’s unrealized alternate narratives. He is the disembodied trace that haunts the materiality of the text’s genesis as much as the narratives contained within the final story.

The same draft features numerous rewrites of pages and scenes, further complicating and disrupting archival readings of its textual genetics. Kroetsch used the formula [page number]+X to indicate page rewrites, where “X” denotes the version, the highest number generally being the closest to the next draft / published version of the text. For example, page 270+1 rewrites Dorf’s description of his thesis, resisting the Warholian approach to “cash registers as works of art” and the implication that art can be found in economics (Alibi 184). The page replaces these engagements with a simple, yet barely legible, explanation that Dorf’s graduate degree led him to

“two jobs” (270+1). However, the ‘original’ iteration (270) appears in the published version.

And so, it is with a revisionist eye that Kroetsch sustains Dorf’s commentary, or perhaps there is a missing 270+2 or a page from an intermittent draft that manifests the re-rewriting. Once again, the materials in the Kroetsch fonds are only traces of trace; they do not directly indicate revisions or processes, but merely indicate changes in the process. Contrastingly, the scene in which

Kroetsch himself along with his colleague and friend Rudy Wiebe make a metatextual appearance (Alibi 210-211) is rewritten three times from the first draft of this middle draft (370,

370+1, +2, and +3). Each attempt bears increasing resemblance to the published version, a rare example of sequential revision, if also frustration. But these nuggets should not tempt us into an

“archeology of hope” (Alibi 168); the evidence found in the Kroetsch fonds serves only to emphasize the stark contrast between the occasionally clear presences and most of the collection’s contents, which are present yet illegible, and therefore becoming trace.

249

Another early typescript of Alibi (591/96.6, 39.8-40.2) embodies the chaotic ambiguity of

the Kroetsch fonds in both form and content. The draft’s pages are out of order and often upside-

down and / or doubled. For instance, page 181 appears twice, either photocopied (although there

are no other traces of a second extant copy of the draft) or retyped, perhaps with the intention of

becoming a modified +1. On the other hand, the folders contain a page 217+1 but no 217. Some

holograph and typescript fragments are written / typed on the backs of photocopies of other

works / drafts, including a spare final draft of What the Crow Said. What should an archivist or a

critic struggling to explore an author’s fonds do in such cases? Should the documents be left as

they were found, under the assumption that they monumentalize the author’s process of self- archivisation? Or do we attempt to order and straighten, imposing interpretation on the collection while blaming whoever used it last as the presumable culprit of disorder? (I will admit, I am guilty of dropping a folder from the Kroetsch fonds—I will not reveal which one—strewing its

contents across the carpeted floor and attempting to hastily reorder them first as they should be,

then as they were, both in vain. How will my blunder lead future textual geneticists astray?) I

will consider the implications of these pragmatic concerns in this study’s Conclusion. But to

return to the typescript, some of the draft’s pages feature so much cutting that they border on erasure poetry, with new lines of text inserted between old ones, indented and enjambed, ending suddenly and subsequently X’ed out (see Fig. 4). The process of X’ing out is still a form of creating trace: remnants of the original presence within the now unreadable, the indeterminably inaccessible new presence that is intended to signify absence present themselves as palimpsest.

The ‘original’ ink is still there; it cannot be ‘erased.’ Of course, digital imaging technology can isolate and reveal the lower layers of ink, returning the text to a readable state and rendering it found rather than absent, but it is important to remember that the collection’s initial state is one

250

of becoming. The archive remains a gathering of pages, a fluid and liminal space until the researcher approaches, questions, and interprets it. The Kroetsch fonds is then a trace becoming trace, suggesting and indicating that which we cannot see / read / research.

Figure 4 – 591/96.6, 40.1, p. 195+1

Of course, an archive’s becoming trace will not prevent the critic from trying to find presence, from attempting to read and fathom the fonds, as I myself have done in this section and

251

in the preceding chapters attempting genetic criticism. In fact, how might a researcher come to

realize a collection is becoming trace without first exploring its entire space and attempting to

find a way to interpret its uncertainty? One of the foremost readers of Kroetschian ambiguity is

Dennis Cooley, who spent countless hours exploring the remains of Kroetsch’s long poems for his book-length study The Home Place. In a personal e-mail to Kroetsch, Cooley writes:

I’m having a great time rummaging in your notes on The Ledger. There’s the odd

word I can’t make out, true, but I won’t let that get in the way. See, here’s what it

says, I’ll say. And who could be the wiser? Who could dispute? Would it help

anyone actually to have seen the manuscript? That’s my theory at least, relieved

to have found someone else who is chirographically challenged. (Cooley, e-mail,

27 Apr. 2010)

While Cooley’s comments, which have notably yet to be incorporated into the Kroetsch fonds, are playful and joking, they are also fittingly revealing. In telling us “here’s what it says,”

Cooley demonstrates the critic’s authority and authoriality; reading, or interpretation, gives the fragments new meaning, creates a simulation of presence out of uncertainty. In ascribing signifiers to ambiguous graphemes, Cooley shifts the material’s state from trace to becoming found. And yet he will not reveal the document, which then remains unseen, despite being ‘read’; it returns to trace even after having been found, made to answer an analytic question, and serve an interpretive function. Cooley, like Derrida’s stand-in for the reader and therefore the critic, has “invented an original proposition” and “will have to have found something new” (9). The academic need for presence from which to draw meaning, clear signifiers to interpret, leads researchers to invent text, or at least invent its decipherment. We write and thereby re-archive

252

these ambiguities, create a new archive of created presences rather than presenting the archival

contents and therefore the archive itself as trace.36

I attempt to counter these practices—a vain project given the archive’s scope and my own

role as selector—through a self-awareness of my project’s limitations and by revealing scholars’

complicity in the becoming trace. This study then would foreground the textual unknowability of

Kroetsch’s documents rather than offering distinct answers and readings based upon them.

“There is no authorized text” in Kroetsch’s writing (Florby 198), a reading which applies most broadly to the Kroetsch fonds, for texts are not ‘authored’ there either, but co-authored: “every unearthing is problematic, tentative, subject to a story-making act that is itself subject to further change as the ‘dig’ goes on” (Kroetsch, Treachery 24). In response to Cooley’s question, “Who could dispute?” only the fonds can answer, only the material traces themselves. The indecipherable graphemes alone can dispute when the site of aporia is the signifier itself rather than la barre between it and the signified. Cooley is correct that it would not help anyone to have seen the manuscripts (which is why I include some examples of them as figures, or more so as figurations of uncertainty). Cooley’s e-mail to his friend, Kroetsch, is itself another form of trace, on another level of archive. Part of the Kroetsch archive in Foucault’s metaphysical discursive sense, it falls under “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (129), but is not yet part of the fonds37—the more material notion

of archive as repository. As Derrida notes, when discussing the “belonging to an archive,” we must ask, “which archive?” (AF 20). The Cooley e-mails have not been institutionalized or

36 Please note, I am not accusing Cooley or singling him out in this practice; all readings of archives—whether they be material repositories or partitions of discourse—involve de-cision, cutting away other meanings through assumed readings of graphemes and interpretations thereof, creating new archives in the form of books that encase selections from selected fonds. 37 I came across the email while working as a research assistant on the Robert Kroetsch Places website. 253

formally collected into the material archive yet impress upon the archive known as the discursive

sphere surrounding Kroetsch’s writing. These contrasting categorizations reveal the tiers of

(un)knowability at play in the idea of Kroetsch’s archive(s) and the paradoxically destructive

implications of trying to preserve an author’s documents in a singular collection.

This destructive drive, or more accurately ‘erasure drive,’ which Derrida calls “the

archiviolithic drive,” is “never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects. It leaves no

monument, it bequeaths no document of its own” (11). And yet it leaves remnants, or is at least

embodied therein, such as the X’ing out on 195+1: a pictographic depiction of the will to erase.

Here we see active erasure, an intentional and intentionally documented attempt to make gone

the original signifiers and meanings through the layering and overwriting of graphemes, not a passive redaction leading to loss and oblivion over time. But with this active erasure comes an active archiving: the documents were not burned and then retyped as the ‘correct’ text, they were

modified and kept in their illegible state, preserving the changes that, when pursued at an

indeterminable time, would enter into what remains.

Derrida’s “second citation” of the exergue “maintains a reference to the graphic mark

and to repetition, indeed to printing of the typical sort. Recurrent and iterable, it carries literal

singularity into figurality” (20). Dorf’s repeated rewriting of his manuscript, Karen’s re-editing

thereof, and the scriptor’s re-scribing of it into a published if not fragmented novel ultimately

relates to all authors’ fonds, but especially Kroetsch’s. Repeated printing and re-writing/typing of

drafts that inscribe changes and de-cisions made about them, these multiple drafts become the

figurative plurality of ‘the work,’ which has been classically presented as singular when

published but is in reality a “fragment of substance, … the Text’s imaginary tail” (Barthes 57-

58). The drafts in an author’s fonds, particularly unreadable and indeterminable versions, trace

254

the experiential “activity” and “production” of “the Text” (58). This work further renders cryptic

“numerous state-controlled archives … [which] are subject to administrative injunctions that

prohibit consultation of documents deemed ‘sensitive’” (Brozgal 34). Much like the restricted boxes and folders within special collections, of which some of Kroetsch’s correspondence and

“Miscellaneous personal documents” from the 1960s through 80s are ideal examples (591/96.6,

6.27 & 15.33), the archons enforce the law Foucault references, the Rancièrian partitioning of power / knowledge, for “There is no political power without control of the archive” (Derrida AF

4). The politics of archival access—the resistance against seeing / reading traces and determining them as becoming trace or, more concerningly, becoming found—attempts to disengage with

“the enigmatic difference … between ‘material truth’ and ‘historical truth’” (Derrida 59).

Scholars must confront those differences, lose themselves in the enigmas of trace, and compound the uncertainty between and within those ‘truths’ by examining the countless hi/stories within the

‘true’ text, i.e. the published text, that serves as material truth and retells / recreates historical truth. As with the master narratives of history, no true text exists unless one story is privileged over another, or one publication over an archive of that publication’s creation.

255

INTERLUDE (IN WHICH THE CHARACTERS INTERRUPT THEIR INVESTIGATION)

Ed stands under a great oak triangulated by the Thorvaldson Building, Arts Tower, and Murray

Library at the University of Saskatchewan. If the fondly named Bowl—an open field that people

claim was once green, now almost perpetually under construction, despite its lack of structures—

serves as the campus’s heart, then Ed firmly finds himself in the bowels. The asphalt intestines

weave back and forth between buildings and bike paths. Students carry heavy bookbags like

kidney stones.

Ed hunches in a blind bored stasis, holding a stack of neon papers in one hand, listlessly waving a single sheet at passersby with the other. At regular intervals he says “Tired of high tuition costs? Wish you were having more fun in your classes? Why not take creative writing with a published author?” Each enunciation has identical cadence, as though the message is pre-

recorded for a call centre’s hold line.

The occasional student stops to listen. A handful grab pamphlets out of curiosity. “See

you at the library this evening,” Ed says to them, and, to the more committed-looking ones,

“Someone please book a study room for seven, my USask ID has been redacted.” The pink,

green, and blue pages flutter against early spring browns as the young minds—burgeoning

patrons, as Ed thinks of them—resume their paths.

Near the end of his promotional shift, two people in windbreakers approach him. His

hunch becomes more rigid as he attempts to avoid eye contact with campus security.

“What have you got there, sir?”

“Oh,” pretending he hadn’t noticed them, “just pamphlets for student extra-curriculars.”

“Mind if we take a look?”

“Why?”

256

“We’ve had complaints about some of the materials handed out on campus lately.

Apparently, some folks were handing out free copies of On the Origin of Species with creationist

introductions on Darwin Day, and the scientific community was pretty upset.”

“Well that’s what happens when you make a book open-access,” Ed replies.

“Anyway, if we can just get a quick look,” the other security person grabs the top sheet

from Ed’s stack and reads aloud: “Free creative writing course with a published novelist—

doesn’t say who, and below in a smaller font—tuition by donation, Ground Floor, Murray

Library, 7 p.m.”

“You can’t offer unaccredited courses on campus, mister,” the other officer picks up.

“Like I said, it’s an extra-curricular.”

“Then you can’t charge money for it.”

“I can’t stop someone from making a donation, the same way you can’t stop someone

from tipping their waiter.”

The first security officer shakes her head, “Go home, man.”

“That’d be disappointing to a lot of creative students.”

“We’ll let them know the class is cancelled so that you can head home,” says the second,

“I was planning on patrolling the library around seven anyway.”

Ed throws his stack of pamphlets into the air, a quick gust of wind catches them,

dispersing them among the oak. Drawn to the sudden flurry of colour, students start gathering

them up. “More kids for you to bar from knowledge,” Ed barks as he saunters off.

Walking across the campus bus loop, Ed notices a man—short brown hair, plaid shirt, sweater vest; scholarly type meets small town. The man observes him, scribbles, seemingly automatically, in an old journal. Ed ducks into a group of university students to escape the man’s

257

gaze, bee-lines to the edge of campus, and jaywalks across University Drive, nearly getting

clipped by a Volkswagen Beetle. He doesn’t even look up to see if it’s Victoria’s.

He glares hatefully at a Starbucks, winds through the gridded neighbourhood, and slips into the basement suite of a tiny old house. Ed lies down on his couch, and passes out, perhaps never to be heard from again.

*** Dr. Suzanne Vail sits in her small, cramped office in the Department of History, one hand on the phone’s receiver, the other twirling the tangled corkscrew of cable that runs to the wall.

She is speaking with a gentleman caller. Her gentleman caller. The one on whom the new blonde office secretary keeps trying to eavesdrop—as though Suzanne can’t hear the click on the line or

the soft brush of fingers covering the microphone.

He is treating her to a particularly enamoured poetic outburst—“Love is the intersection of inner beauty. Love is the intertwining of two souls. Love is the entanglement of two bodies!”—when an uninvited second gentleman knocks.

“Sorry, gotta go. I’ll call you later. Or see you tonight.” She hangs up hastily as the

Department Head walks in, preceded only by his two tell-tale taps at the door.

“Suzanne!” he exclaims, as though surprised to find her here. “Have a minute?” He is

already standing full stature in front of her desk.

“It’s still Dr. Vail, if you don’t mind. And actually, I’m quite busy at the moment.”

“Mmhhmm,” the same response offered to nearly any comment. “Tell me, what is this?”

He takes a seat in the chair facing her desk, places a small, stapled stack of paper in front of her,

and turns it to the third page.

She examines it briefly. “I believe it’s my end-of-year report.”

258

“Obviously. I meant, what is this.” He points to a paragraph under the heading ‘Current and Future Research.’

“That,” she replies, adopting his tone, “is my current research.”

He picks up the paper and reads aloud, as though neither are familiar with what she has written, “‘The Life and Legend of Eric Lafferty Harvie.’ You have got to be kidding me,

Suzanne.”

“Harvie is a huge local figure,” she offers, hoping to dodge the topic of beer parlour legends. “People are fascinated with him.”

“It’s already been done. Some bookworm at the University of Manitoba beat you to the punch.” He has clearly done his homework.

“But that was fiction.”

“And what would you call this?” He shakes her report, which outlines her plan to tell

Harvie’s life through found and fabricated letters written by his wife, Dorothy Jean Southam.

Suzanne does not reply.

“I thought we agreed you would give up these… writerly inclinations.”

“And I thought we agreed that after the success of my last piece I would have free reign

over my research.”

“Yes, but research, Suzanne! Not these historical fantasies. Or if you must debase the

department’s standards at least throw in an Indian somewhere. People love those stories lately.”

“Are you done?” Suzanne asks, leaning forward over her folded hands.

“This will come up again if you do not improve your practices,” warns the Head as he

picks up her report and walks out of the office, leaving the door ajar.

259

Suzanne sighs and pulls a leathery journal out of her desk’s bottom drawer. She turns randomly to a blank page and begins to write:

Well Suze, you might read it in the papers before this letter

reaches you, but we struck oil in Leduc a couple days back and we

are to become dreadfully rich. Eric is as ecstatic as you might

expect. I suppose this means we will not be coming back East for

some time, but one thing is for certain: this cow town is about to

become a gas town.

-Excerpt from Mrs. Dorothy Jean Southam’s Letters to one

Mrs. Susan S---, posted 15 February 1947

***

William William Dorfendorf romps through the Battle River valley in heavy Gore-Tex hip waders. His crotch sweats and itches. His thighs and pelvis are constricted, the rubbery material a giant octopus sucker latching on to his nethers. He waddles through the shallows and the muddy river beds with a sluice and pan, occasionally stopping to sift through a mound of muck.

Find me some arrowheads, Dorf, his new employer had written. Not some common drab from Porcupine Hills, everyone has those. Find me something polished but primitive, forged by hand and reformed by the land, weathered but pristine. The perfect Alberta arrowhead.

Jack Deemer. Enigmatic megalomaniac. Millionaire and murderer. Dorf has never met the man, but the stories are too bombastic not to be true. Deemer, who holds the whole world in a northwestern warehouse, somehow hasn’t found the perfect arrowhead.

260

Between the gently running river and the moist floor of the shallows, Dorf hears nature’s call and feels the need to relieve himself. They say you aren’t a true Canadian until you learn to shit in the woods but squatting on the side of a coulee is a particularly Albertan rite of passage.

He slips behind some cattails for privacy and peels off the waders. After doing the deed, his foot slides on some sediment and he lands ass-first in the river bed, soiled by his effluent. He laps himself with handfuls of fresher flowing water, relieving some of the pent-up heat, and shimmies back into the Gore-Tex. But silt that has found its way into his supposedly waterproof trousers and chafes his already irritated bas ventre as he makes his way up the ravine and back to his beat-up Dodge Dart.

Dorf drives to the nearest town, checks into the hotel, and takes a shower, nearly freezing off his chilled toes as he discovers the shower faucets are mislabeled. Notikeewin is a three- grain-elevator town, although two of the structures now stand derelict (the oil boom has done little good for wheat country), and the only accommodations to be found are a few rooms floating above the beer parlour.

After his shower, Dorf descends to the smoky saloon; the terrycloth covers smell of malt and the pool table looks like an oversized ashtray. He discovers that for a dollar a drink he can become a temporary member of the community.

“J.J. Backstrom used to drink in that chair,” says a man, taking a seat next to Dorf. He’s in his sixties, with short, wavy, greying hair, a full beard, and thin-rimmed aviator glasses.

“Sorry, who?”

“Backstrom the Rain-Bringer. Big Johnnie B. Won himself a seat in the big house on the hill by giving away so much beer that the sky felt its job being encroached upon and unleashed a downpour of biblical proportions on the balding prairie. Near saved the county, that man.”

261

Dorf listens bewilderedly as the local tells his tall tales.

The next morning, Dorf meanders through town, wondering about Big Johnnie B, the

man of myths. He finds himself on the outskirts, near the cemetery. He hops the fence and walks

among the tombstones, looking for the most audacious. Deemer will want a record, as it will

surely set the bar for his own headstone. He finds the monolith in the middle of the field; so

heavy that it has sunk partway into the soft earth.

Dorf reads the inscription below the dates: UNDERTAKER, BRINGER OF RAIN, &

The last line has been consumed by soil and grass, only the very tops of the letters

visible—a couple of dots, a few short lines. Dorf falls to his knees and paws frantically at the

ground, trying to unveil the words.

“But could he have been an MLA?” He does not cry so much as roar at the sky.

Cloudless, it provides no alibi for the rain-bringer.

*** William William Dorfendorf, Suzanne Vail, and Ed—just Ed—fly through the fore-

range, hurtling down into the valley of Bow Flats on the Trans-Canada Highway in Dorf’s beat- up Dodge Dart. They speed toward the city, the Heart of the New West.

They met in Banff, at the Upper Hot Springs. Dorf tried to seduce Suzanne; Ed chivalrously defended her honor, and then tried to seduce her in turn; Suzanne caught the eye of a European tourist in a briefs-style speedo, then remembered her gentleman caller.

They got to talking and, over the course of an exceptionally profound long weekend, came to realise that they were characters under erasure. Sure, they were all eccentric, each one had been called a “character” by at least one friend or smirking rival. But they were literally characters. Nothing else could explain their chance encounter, the plot-like paths their lives had followed outside of any personal agency. What had struck them all, had led to these discoveries,

262

was a mutual sense of fading. The three felt as though they each had multiple, overlapping

memories, alternate versions of the same events, playing over one another simultaneously and

then diverging. Yet these pathways met at the Hot Springs and then evaporated. A point of

decondensation.

The little green Dodge hollers through the foothills, races past the hospital of the same

name, and squeals around the wide bus loop after passing under the giant red arch that frames the

southern entrance to the University of Calgary campus.

The archive. They reckon it is the only possible place in which their pluralities can persist, and from which they are now vanishing. All three have experience working with archives, contributing to them, producing them: love letters and lists, research notes on napkins, drafts written on the backs of other drafts.

Heedless of the time or day, the unlikely trio storms the Taylor Family Digital Library.

Dorf and Suzanne vault up the stairwell, with no patience for the impossibly slow elevators. Ed opts for waiting; minutes later the mechanical doors open to reveal his winded companions, much to his satisfaction. They stalk along the length of the fifth floor, unaware of how ridiculous they look to students who glance up and see the trio fuming with rage, yet conscientiously library-silent.

To their surprise, the Special Collections reading room is open; it must in fact be a reasonable and civil hour. They hear babel from within, and momentarily eavesdrop.

“This is far too historically accurate, especially for politics,” says an old man’s voice;

soft, yet carrying.

“It’s for a historical fiction,” replies a woman. “It’s better than his. His politics are

absent, but that’s all he writes!”

263

“I have the story, or the parts of it worth keeping,” replies a third, younger yet more

aspirated voice. The man resumes: “Besides, what are you after me for? You can’t even read his

notes.”

“They’re poetry, they aren’t meant to be read.”

The three on-listeners turn, sharp, around the doorway, step through, and are

immediately distracted by the floor-to-ceiling view looking out at the Rockies. They stop, and

stare at the three figures, now frozen before them.

“You,” all six people in the room say in a disjointed chorus.

“You,” says Ed, to the man with short brown hair—the one from the University of

Saskatchewan bus loop.

“You,” says Suzanne, to the blonde woman who, she now presumes, was only playing

the new department secretary.

“You,” says Dorf, to the old man from the Notikeewin beer parlour.

Loose leaves from boxes worth of manuscripts sprawl before the authors, each armed

with a pencil in one hand and an old pink eraser in the other. They gesture threateningly, first at

one another, then at the amorphous mass of paper.

“They’re erasing us!” cries Ed.

“We’re establishing you.”

“Concretising you.”

“I might have been doing a little erasing, a little tracing,” mumbles the older man, sheepishly.

The characters jump into action, swiping sheets, research materials, travel souvenirs, love letters, postcards, hot spring brochures, maps, road reports, and parking passes.

264

One author looks on, aghast; one begins taking furtive notes; one does a slow jig in the corner, on stiff knees. The library attendant, returning from a coffee break, calls security.

No security arrives; it is a library after all, not a bank, despite the vault—no author has been paid more than tax receipts (which, remember, are useless without income) for their fonds in decades.

The Special Collections reading room expels the characters. The archive self-mitigates, repartitions its own enunciative field to exclude this Dorf, Suzanne, and Ed.

A figure appears. Plain white t-shirt under a red silk tie under a black blazer, black cargo pants, and a black canvas military cap. The Critic enters the reading room and promptly incites the authors’ deaths, and collapses—he forgot that he himself also author(ize)s text.

The archivist, previously mistaken for a library attendant: sole survivor in the room. The archivist scoops up an armful of holograph fragments and carries them to the scanner, which, coming to life, casts a green light on the stoic face. The digital pages flutter across unwavering eyes, a spell book flipped through by an acolyte. The archivist begins to chant, the authors’ bodies stir. They no longer debate the texts they were so ready to rewrite, privileging one version over another. Now the words, those very words, command them; the incanted inscription guides the ghouls’ hands as much as the authorial necromancer’s. The Critic—remains.

265

NOTES TOWARD A CONCLUSION: THE PRESENT ARCHIVE AS POLITICS (TEXTUAL TOPOLOGY AND

VIRTUAL NECROMANCY)

“I Suppose It Is My Job to Close that Gap Now”: The Question of Digitizing States of

Becoming

Sitting in the Special Collections’ reading room a few weeks after moving to Calgary, I dug through my first boxes of the Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch fonds from the Canadian literary archive. I began to take preliminary steps toward amending the academic oversights of these author’s significant and socially-inclined early works. In preparation for my work with the

University of Calgary’s Class Projects (UCCPs hereafter), I began crafting genetic criticisms that

later formed parts of this study’s scholarly chapters. After holding each text—I should say

texts—in their multiple permutations, after trying to sort and trace their evolutions and

regressions, I selected key drafts and fragments to digitise, to share with and preserve for other

readers, focusing on the passages that underwent the most substantial changes between versions.

In the process, I became aware of the unique role that place plays in my practice. I read

Kroetsch’s scriptor’s Calgary, filtered and re-filtered through Dorf, then edited by Karen. I read

Govier’s scriptor’s Calgary, focalized through Suzanne, her ficto-archival writings, and the half-

invented voice of Murphy. And I read about Sam, the meta-fictional protagonist of

Vanderhaeghe’s Ed stories, who runs toward a “cold grey river flecked with ice floes” as he is

chased through his imaginary Old West (MD 258), while Ed himself runs along the South

Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon, circa early 1980s. I imagined Vanderhaeghe looking down at

the river from his office at the University of Saskatchewan or from the very bench on which Ed

sits at the beginning of “Sam, Soren, and Ed.” This river symbolizes potential salvation after a

266

long struggle, though we are never told whether Sam reaches the water’s safety in Ed’s metanarrative, and Ed chooses to withdraw from the River Run that would—he believes—prove his commitment to his estranged wife. The South Saskatchewan is inscribed on Vanderhaeghe’s text just as the Bow River in Calgary, seen from the reading room, is inscribed on my interpretation of the text. The spaces in which we read and write, and the places that surround those spaces, affect how we read and write texts, the places themselves, and ourselves as texts inscribed on and decoded by the landscape.

Herein lies an urgent question on digitisation, one that I could not have arrived at without reading social and archival politics in specifically regional and place-based literature. If a scholar were to access digital versions of these drafts online, what kind of inscription would their space and place have on their reading? Sally Evans asserts that “Derrida emphasises the significance of the arkhē … physically, as the site which the archive occupies … a place of consignation” (2), but does this site need to be physical? All digital collections are still stored / housed somewhere—their servers and hard drives have a physical location—but they can be accessed virtually from anywhere. Furthermore, the physicality and geospatiality of these holdings can be plural and widespread, for like any hypermedia, digital archival documents can be linked, accessed, downloaded, and housed pluralistically as both temporary and ‘permanent’ files on multiple servers in multiple places. I would argue that the reader and the relationship / contrast between them, their place of reading / re-writing, and the places of the collected documents— material and digital—becomes the place of consignation. Had I read Vanderhaeghe’s drafts in the cold, dusty, Saskatchewanian cellar I expected the archive to be, how would my reading of the Ed narrative and, for that matter, this reading of my experience with archiving been shaped differently? How will the globalization of regionalised archives shape future generations of

267

cybernetic scholars? Holding a holograph fragment of “Sam, Soren, and Ed,” smelling its less- than-wheaty smell, squinting to make out the tiny letters written in soft lead on manila paper, evokes another question on digitisation. Entering the archive, examining and handling the drafts of a work, foregrounds what Bill Brown and many others call the “thingness of the thing.” In this case, attention is drawn to the material reality of the text—that ephemeral thing—beyond the bookness of books. Of course, the majority of books are now merely simulacra, digital imitations or remodifications of set type, for “almost all print books are digital files before they become books” and in the case of recent writings, “this is the form in which they are composed, edited, composited, and sent to the computerized machines that produce them as books” (Hayles 43).

But by ‘holding’ drafts—whether in material or cyber space—written by hand or mechanically typed, draft after draft existing on separate leaves, it is important to remember that before—and even after—the death of the author, the text itself has a life. These fragments and traces demonstrate the text’s lifespan, in contrast with the perceived spontaneous birthing or publication of a fully formed work; by excavating and digitising authors’ fonds, we give these texts new lives.

The archive, in the sense of a material repository, is fixed in space, located in a particular place; its documents “are only kept under the title of the archive by virtue of a privileged topology” (Derrida, AF 3). Digitisation radicalises the archive’s spatiality—an online, open- access presence weakens its inherent “institutive and conservative” bonds (7) by allowing institutionally-affiliated scholars, independent academics, and hobbyists alike to read the documents without the expense of travel and the permission of gatekeepers. To adopt W.H.

New’s terminology from Borderlands and apply it to the archive: the “borderline” of archival space, which “names and divides,” partitioning texts by institution, becomes, through

268

digitisation, “a borderland,” “psychic,” or in this case virtual, and “indeterminate” (4). The repository’s topology, the geospatial presence, that had previously “necessitate[d] … the full and effective actuality of the taking-place, the reality, as they say, of the archived event” (66) begins to crumble when the virtual replaces the ‘real.’ Evans argues that “the hypertext forms an alternative virtual archive because digitisation negates Derrida’s principles of commandment, consignation and commencement” (3). However, access to certain online databases and search engines is determined by library membership; members of the general public who are not registered at universities may have no way to find the fonds’ catalogues, demonstrating that the gates are not entirely unkept. Furthermore, the hypertext also becomes a simulation of the archive—a digital stand-in for the material. It is the “archiving archive” that “[re]determines the structure of the archivable content” (AF 17). That is, the digital archive becomes, for most users, not only the alternative, but the only extant archive, because those who access it from afar never engage with the print archive on which it is based. The digital collection gradually replaces physical documents and becomes the reality thereof, as simulacrum. The digital archive records its own history (i.e. through metadata) and thereby redefines the notion of what can be recorded—every instance of access is inscribed on the document rather than recorded in a paratext such as a library’s logbook. But what happens when the ‘actual, real’ document does not exist, not as a result of simulation, but as a priori state of being, or becoming?

The final sections of the four previous scholarly chapters, as well as, more indirectly, their accompanying creative counter-parts, drew on literary analyses of politically-inclined meta- archival works to present many theoretical implications of pursuing and producing archival absence, presence, and trace. I would now like to consider the more pragmatic concerns and political reverberations centered on these states of becoming within practices of digital

269

collection. These considerations draw not only on my own experiences with digitising excerpts

from the above-discussed fonds for the UCCPs, but on the very nature of each fonds and the

unique insights that these collections’ forms and contents have facilitated. In the words of Diana

Marsh, “I move here not only from the ‘archive-as-source’ to the ‘archive-as-subject’ but to the source and its history as a kind of critical subject” (112). To broaden this investigation, I expand my scope beyond the fonds of the three authors whose works I have been unpacking and using as case studies thus far and will consider evidence from the larger collection of the University of

Calgary’s Canadian literary archive. As I’ve suggested, the Vanderhaeghe fonds were the extent of my original scope for this project, and my original plan was to use the drafts as a case study to examine his early works’ treatment of progressivism, to map the collection’s layers of social commentary through the archive, and to investigate the evolution of Ed’s social politics across drafts. I would then digitise the relevant passages, making the foundation of my research openly available in an online collection, allowing new discussions to be born of the text’s genealogy.

This goal and my very methodology were ironically subverted by the archive itself. The holograph fragments of “Sam, Soren, and Ed”—the key story that establishes Ed’s criticism of progressivism and his undermining or self-deprecating voice—are exclusively set in the story’s final six pages, wherein his estranged wife, Victoria, has challenged Ed to prove that he has changed his behaviour, his habits, and his tendency toward sloth (593/92.1, 14). This focus suggests that Vanderhaeghe might have been particularly concerned with constructing the shift in

Ed’s characterisation at the story’s end, encouraging a focussed reading of the creative process behind characterisation and closure, rather than a discussion of social progressivism. Although engagements with socio-political ideologies are prevalent in the story’s first half, the incomplete holograph draft found in the Vanderhaeghe fonds lacks significant variants pertaining to politics.

270

Thus, the archive facilitates a ghostly visitation of the author that limits scholarly investigations to particular motifs and topics prescribed by the archive’s textual traces.

More important, these gaps in the archive raise the question of how absence can be represented in a selected and selective collection that has undergone a change in form and media, such as a digital exhibit. In the case of Govier, how do we depict all the connections and transformations between research materials, drafts, and published narratives—how do we demonstrate the process of Rosalie New Grass’s narrative becoming found—bearing in mind issues of copyright and of faithful representations of document organization? And in the case of

Kroetsch, how do we negotiate mounds of traces; how do we select from and decipher the illegible, not knowing what might someday be rendered found and significant, whether by new accessions or machine-learning? These questions relate to the inherent spectrality of the archive.

As Derrida writes: “the structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent …, neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met” (AF 84), aligning it with the “visor effect” experienced when confronting a specter

(SoM 7). We seek the archive after we have read a text. We bring an a prioi reading to the archive and then what we discover confuses and complicates that reading with its presence or absence of evidence. Knowing that we will call on the archive to lend our reading further voice, the archive haunts analyses, affecting our present reading of the past with the potentiality of what might be found in the future. Adina Arvatu challenges this notion of the spectral archive within the context of scholarly methodology by asking, “what happens when scholarship is no longer defined by the long hours spent in the archives, … when that askesis is replaced by … an interview with a ghost or spectre, who is … silent, even mute?” (149). But the hours spent in the archive are interviews with spectres—the ghosts of texts, of monuments and documents, of

271

times, of conceptualisations, of a place and its politics. Even the authors themselves, including those still living, can exist only spectrally to the reader of an archive. Whether reading an indecipherable holograph fragment, a ‘completed’ draft, or a personal letter, the researcher only ever engages with one of the many Vanderhaeghes / Goviers / Kroetschs who present themselves through their fonds, just as Derrida only ever engages with a certain Marx amongst the “specters of Marx … Plus d’un [More than one / No more one]” (SoM 3).38

But how do we digitise absence? If “all digital objects, regardless of the locations of servers, authors or programmers, are experienced by the reader as present” (Evans 3)—both temporally and materially—then how to we represent and conceptualize absence and trace, even the becoming found within these spaces? How do we simulate, within a digital environment, what Ted Bishop calls “the Archival Jolt,” the “physical shock” across time “that collapse[s] the intervening decades,” the discovery that a “note [i]sn’t a record of an event” but rather “the event itself,” and an “assurance that we have connected with something real” (33-36)? The Modernist

Archives Publishing Project’s gallery of works has a feature that displays a random selection from the digital archive on their website that can be reloaded to repeat the randomization

(Battershill). This feature facilitates unexpected encounters with the digital collection, placing texts within new contexts and re-orienting them via methods outside of human agency or categorization, encouraging new connections and interpretations. These connections engage with the real in a digital sense and yield opportunities for the becoming found. But how do scholars know what is missing from this new collection? How do we represent the not-necessarily- obvious gap in a new digital archive or exhibit? Or, as Derrida asks, “How does one prove in general an absence of archive, if not in relying on classical norms (presence / absence of literal

38 Square brackets are original and indicate the translator’s note. 272

and explicit reference …; how can one not, … take into account unconscious, and more

generally virtual archives)?” (AF 64). Evans refers to the digital archive as “a matrix of data

which, at any moment, can be altered, added to or reshaped to form an entirely new

configuration without necessarily retaining traces of the old” (4), but trace is always present,

even if unseen, whether in metadata or the experiential memory of the archivist. We can, of

course, explicitly depict this trace, put a note in the metadata indicating intermediary materials

not selected for inclusion, or indicate a particular draft / fragment absent from the digital

collection because it was missing from the material archive upon which the exhibit is based.

However, this enunciation of absence deprives the archive of some of its nomological power.

Directly informing scholars about an absence rather than allowing them to find it (or to note the presence of that absence) causes the textual trace to be lost, as a priori, rather than become lost. This pre-erasure dispels the ghost before it appears, limiting our hauntological analyses of the fonds. For example, pre-knowledge of the absent holograph fragments pertaining to Ed’s politics in the Man Descending drafts might have dissuaded me from pursuing Marxist readings of Vanderhaeghe’s early fiction, or at least may have prevented the initial trips to the archive that stimulated my research on the becoming lost and, subsequently, this question of digitising absence. Such metadata, indicating absence, would serve as exergue to the collection, for “To cite before beginning is to give the tone through the resonance of a few words, … naming the problem” rather than allowing the archive to function as the name and the law

(Derrida AF 7). It is within this conundrum that the digital simulacrum becomes unstable.

Although the virtual simulates the archive and its function as the archiving archive, it yields a different form of reading and exploration because the contents have undergone an additional tier of selection. Thus, through the act of selection, not only do we re-inscribe the collection with the

273

politics of privilege, but our notion of the virtual remains “limited by the traditional

philosophical opposition between act and power” (67). Furthermore, there are consequences to

how we digitise what is present and included in an exhibit. We do not simply convert texts from

‘real’ or ‘material’ to digital. Evans refers to the “digital world” as “not physical but physicalized: a network of intangible virtual information accessible via physical means (the hardware interface)” (1). But as a series of positive and negative electrical charges, data still have mass—however minute—and take up ‘material’ space on a hard drive, in a server encased in a vault, warehouse, or library that itself serves as repository. Additionally, hypertexts / digital documents are physicalized in different ways; we transform documents from textual objects into images of texts. By remodifying excerpts from the Vanderhaeghe, Govier, Kroetsch, and other authors’ fonds, both for this study and the broader readership and pedagogical functions of the

UCCPs, I unearthed the humanistic interactions born of digitisation and their implications for how we read authorship and archive.

Digitization & Digital Remodification: The Politics of Presence in Digital Exhibits and

Archives, a Case Study

In 2015, a group of undergraduate and graduate students in the University of Calgary’s

Department of English, myself included, constructed the first iteration of the UCCPs: an exhibit

of digitised archival materials from western Canadian authors whose fonds are housed in the

university’s Special Collections. The authors selected for the project’s first iteration included

Earle Birney, bpNichol, George Ryga, Rudy Wiebe, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Aritha van Herk.

Notably, the UCCPs have since been expanded by subsequent seminar students to include Robert

Kroetsch, amongst others, and it is my goal to incorporate my own findings from the Kroetsch

274

and Govier fonds, particularly those described in the previous chapters, into the collection.39

Having read key texts from each author, we pored over box after box of research materials,

holograph fragments, and early drafts, selecting ideal passages to demonstrate aspects of the

texts’ genealogies. We then worked with library technicians to scan the selected documents, upload them to the UCCPs’ digital exhibit, and input the relevant metadata.

After we premiered the exhibit, Jerome McGann’s claim that a digital collection’s

“historical backwardness” begins to show as soon as the collection is completed came to mind

(189). As a result, the UCCPs serve as a case study not only to examine what McGann calls the

“social and conceptual limits of the digital ecology that spawned” the collections (189), but also

to reflect on the politics of digitisation practices. Furthermore, the UCCPs allow us to engage

with Johanna Drucker’s concern that, “After decades of digital work, the question remains

whether humanists are actually doing anything different or just extending the activities that have

always been their concerns, enabled by advantages of networked digital technology” (85). A

metacognitive reflection on the project investigates whether “the humanities [have] had any

impact on the digital environment” (85). I posit that there is a distinct difference between a

digitised text and what I call a digitally remodified text. Using the UCCPs as an example of

technologically, socially, and conceptually limited remodification that nevertheless facilitates

metacognitive reflection, I argue that a fully digitised artefact—in this case text—not only allows humanists to do new work but also affects the direction, function, and consequences of the digital environment, resulting in a new hauntological relationship among author, scholar, and archive.

39 Notably, none of Govier’s materials, including those from Between Men, have been digitized, nor has it been the topic of subsequent seminars, limiting its ability to become (re-)found and highlighting the fact that much “archival material is only secret because no one has discovered it, or, if someone has, because that person has not taken the trouble to publicize—or to digitize—it” (Saunders 170). 275

Digitised texts—products of digitisation—and digitally remodified texts—products of digital remodification—are distinct from one another in that they produce different files that mimic their original forms on different levels, shaping the types of work that can be done with them. When I refer to a digitised text, I speak of a file that functions digitally as a text, whereas a digitally remodified text refers to a file that represents text but exists in another form, such as an image. Remodification differs from what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call

“remediation,” which “ensures that the old medium cannot be entirely effaced” (47).

Remediation refers to shifts in media, whereas remodification refers to different modes within different media, such as standard PDFs versus text-searchable ones. Evans, drawing on George

Landow, argues that “‘everything [in a hypermedia system] is mediated, represented, coded,’ simply in order that it can be ‘read’ and transmitted digitally” (3). However, not always everything, and sometimes more than everything, is mediated in a digital collection—a reproduction might be unfaithful, or a re-presentation might be presumptive. For example, retyping an author’s text in a Microsoft Word document would be a form of digitisation, since the words would then exist digitally in the form of text. However, the mimetic representation of the original form of the text on the analogue page will not be photographically exact and might in fact differ drastically, as with transcribing Kroetsch’s scrawled long hand or Govier’s research annotations into typed text. By contrast, a digital photograph or standard PDF of a text mimics the structure of the text on the analogue page but cannot be digitally interacted with on a textual level since it is an image file; therefore, such files perform as remodified texts. Finally, a text-searchable PDF that simultaneously mimetically represents a holograph fragment contains more than everything on the material page: assumed readings of graphemes may have been imposed on it, incorporating the theoretical issues surrounding Cooley’s e-mail into the object itself. Each form

276

of digitisation introduces technological limitations on a digital exhibit or an archive, in addition

to presenting independent conceptual and social limitations. The creation of digitally remodified

texts for the UCCPs facilitated the examination of the functions and limitations of these file

types from a humanistic perspective.

The UCCPs’ Vanderhaeghe collection exemplifies the technological limitations of digital

remodification. The exhibit’s first iteration contained five excerpts from the twenty-seven

holograph fragments of Vanderhaeghe’s “Sam, Soren, and Ed.” These excerpts were originally

scanned as .tdi image files, then converted to .pdf files and uploaded to the UCCPs, and can be

viewed at omeka.ucalgary.ca. The process of remodification is self-evident in this example; not

only have the excerpts been remediated from analogue objects to digital sites, but they have also

undergone modular changes from text to image and from one type of image to another. The files

do not function on the textual level since their contents cannot be searched or analysed by a

computer, they cannot be ‘read’ by a machine. This feature limits the possibility of large-scale

research projects such as Michael Ullyot’s “Python script that uses regular expressions to find

[rhetorical figures]—first in Shakespeare’s works, and then in a 400-play corpus” (“Language

Use and Cognition”). But the digitally remodified texts do provide what Drucker calls the

“advantages of networked digital technology,” namely “easier access to primary materials” (85).

This advantage facilitates human-based research on archival materials, such as genetic criticism.

However, because of social limitations imposed on the project, these studies are also limited by

the exhibit’s lack of completion.

The UCCPs serve as a case study for a McGannian examination of several conceptual

and social influences on the project’s digital ecology and their effects on archival research

practices. First and foremost, Dr. Jason Wiens, the collections’ editor, selected the authors and

277

texts that would be the subject of the exhibit prior to student engagement. There was the

consideration, for both Wiens and the student participants, of which objects and documents

would best benefit from or complicate notions of digitisation, for as Cooper notes, “Derrida

introduces the concept of ‘archivization,’ which suggests that the archival medium, or, ‘methods

for transmitting information’ determine the scope and character of knowledge production” (446,

quoting Manoff). These aspects of selection pre-establish the varieties and extents of studies that can be conducted on the exhibit and enforce the “principle of choice,” the act of “try[ing] to determine in advance which are the most representative elements” of a study, one of many

“methodological problems” of archiving (Foucault 10). In the case of the Vanderhaeghe fonds,

for example, permission was obtained to work only with the collection of short stories Man

Descending. Thus, a study of the relationship between all the Ed stories’ drafts and their

production, such as the one I conducted, is not possible through the UCCPs.

Second, there were issues of copyright: in the case of Wiebe’s “The Angel of the Tar

Sands,” the publisher prohibited the digital reproduction of entire drafts because they were too

similar to the story’s published version and would therefore be considered an infringement of

facilitates a genetic criticism of the key scene and synergises with the exhibit’s technological

limitations, i.e. not being able to make the text searchable. However, it prevents larger studies

that consider the entire piece’s evolution from being undertaken by external scholars who only

have access to the online collection. My reading of the becoming found in Govier’s Between

Men might have been similarly limited by a digital archive, given that many of the research

materials cited in my analysis would likely infringe on copyright if made publicly available

online. More important, these politics of selection add a second layer to the “archontic injunction

278

to guard and gather the archive” (Derrida, AF 77), for it has now been gathered into a specific selection of texts and then an even more specific selection of files. Evans claims that “In comparison to the archival site, which has physical limitations on how much material can be archived or stored at any given time, the hypermedia archive can be exponentially larger” (3).

Ironically, while a digital collection might hyperlink to others and connect with a larger digital archive, the collection itself is simultaneously smaller as another round of selection occurs when considering what to digitize from an author’s material fonds. Where an online, open-access exhibit should liberate a text from its institution, allowing it to be read outside of a specifically- located library, this second tier of collection instead “[re-]institutes the archive as it should be, that is to say, not only in exhibiting the document, but in establishing it” (Derrida, AF 55). The exhibit, as re-selection, allows for new reading, but obliges reclassification and re- institutionalisation. Yet, Foucault tells us that the “never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the archive forms the general horizon to which the description of discursive formations, the analysis of positivities, the mapping of the enunciative field belong” (131). This metacognitive examination of the UCCPs would not be possible without the—ultimately inevitable—limitations placed on and the lack of completion of our exhibit. Both elements allow us to examine the relationship among humanistic theory, forms of digital production, and practices of collection.

Digitally remodified texts encourage, even obligate, computer-human interactions

(CHIs), allowing for the insertion of humanistic theory at the analytical level. Because of the files’ lack of textuality, they cannot be analysed computationally by methods akin to Ullyot’s project on Shakespeare’s gradation. Digitally remodified texts require CHIs, which limit objective and positivistic approaches to the texts, allowing scholars to “cast an interpretive gaze

279

on these instruments from a humanistic perspective, and … build humanities content at their

base” (Drucker 86). For example, the holograph notes of preparatory work for Rudy Wiebe’s

“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” were consciously digitally remodified, as opposed to non-

mimetically digitised (i.e. transcribed). According to David Kang’s presentation on the Wiebe section of the exhibit, this remodification maintains the ambiguity and allows for the multiple interpretations of Wiebe’s unclear handwriting—a practice that I carried into my re-presentations

of Kroetsch’s drafts to unpack the becoming trace. Comparably, when I digitally remodify

excerpts from Govier’s Between Men that I plan to add to the UCCPs, I will exclusively draw

from holograph drafts and typescripts that are heavily annotated and edited by hand, even though

there are at least two copies of nearly every draft within the Govier fonds. I make this decision

knowing that the project’s products will not be text-searchable and therefore the annotated

versions will both resist true digitisation—as only the typed text and not the annotations will be

searchable—and facilitate more humanistic studies, such as genetic criticisms, by depicting the

passages’ evolution rather than their fixed versions. In turn, I hope to contribute illegible and

undecidable examples from the Kroetsch fonds, such as those included as figures in previous

chapters, to foreground the becoming trace of those fragments and depict / facilitate the

discovery of this phenomenon within a digital environment. These applications of humanistic

theory at the analytical level shift drastically when digitised texts are compared to digitally

remodified texts.

The ability to interact with texts in digital environments allows for distinctly humanistic

representations of and engagements with those texts in spite of the mechanical analyses and

problematic positivistic approaches that digitisation appears to promote. Drucker asserts that

“visualisation and processing techniques” are “Positivistic, strictly quantitative, mechanistic,

280

reductive and literal,” and they “preclude humanistic methods from their operations because of the very assumptions on which they are designed: that objects of knowledge can be understood as self-identical, self-evident, ahistorical, and autonomous” (86). However, archives exist paradoxically: they are hegemonic yet also, “to some degree, counter-hegemonic” (Fergusson, sec. 3). In the same vein, an exhibit can contain materials that subvert the positivistic processes by which they are created and represented. For example, bpNichol’s Absolute Statement for My

Mother was digitally remodified as part of the poetry component of the UCCPs’ first exhibit, but the group in charge of this remodification realised that an accurate digital representation of this poem could not be carried out with a two-dimensional scanner.

The concrete poem, constructed as a booklet that folds out to resemble an accordion with text on both sides, could be rendered in a mimetic digital form through video footage of a reader interacting with the textual object or through a three-dimensional rendering (Rafael). A true digitisation of the poem would only serve to replicate a physical engagement with the analogue textual object within a digital space and therefore would only facilitate humanistic interpretations of that textual object. Having a text-searchable model of Absolute Statement would not privilege quantitative positivistic analyses of the poem any more than the analogue version does because of the simplicity (linguistically speaking) of its contents: a series of pages that repeat “I / AM / I /

MA” (UCCPs, Doc. 28). Thus, digitally exhibiting such texts separates them from their topology and “remove[s] the concept of virtuality from the couple that opposes it to actuality, to effectivity, or to reality” (Derrida, AF 66). The geospatial context of Absolute Statement—the physicality of its archival holding—becomes irrelevant, and only the spatiality of interaction with the text, whether it is analogical or virtual, is significant. Remodifying the poem invites a non-binary notion of the virtual, a way of thinking about it beyond a reductive opposition to

281

materiality. Remodification presents virtuality as an alternative materiality rather than its

antithesis.

Although remodification allows for subjective interpretations of digital texts and

undermines or even subverts many of the “hostile” values of positivism and quantitative analysis,

it does not allow us to “creat[e] computational protocols grounded in humanistic theory and

methods,” which Drucker sees as “essential if we are to assert the cultural authority of the

humanities in a world whose fundamental medium is digital” (86). However, placing digitised

text within a digitally interactive and therefore evolving environment creates multiple possible

connections that refute objective quantitative analysis and representation. The University of

Saskatchewan’s The Grub Street Project, edited by Allison Muri, embodies such an

environment, anticipating the potential for qualitative computational techniques. The project is a

“digital edition of eighteenth-century London” that attempts to depict Grub Street as “both a real

place and an abstract idea” in which location and metaphor represent “the print culture of

eighteenth-century London (both high and low)” and its construction as a “network of textual

representations” (Muri). The project’s numerous maps feature clickable key locations

accompanied by informative hyperlinks, virtual tours of historical records, and citations from

literary works that refer to the location. By including maps from various time periods, the project

depicts the evolution of perspectives and representations of historical sites. Furthermore, all

reader-text interactions are recorded for future metacognitive interpretations by mining meta-

and micro-data. Thus, the project exemplifies one of the elements of Drucker’s proposed

“humanistic spatial modeling” in which “space is constructed as an effect, rather than a basis, of experience” on both a historical literary level and a contemporary academic one (92). The project also deconstructs historicity through its multiple and at times ambiguous temporalities, as seen in

282

the map of London as it “was” in 1553-59 (Muri). These ambiguities result in graphical

representations of what Drucker calls the “experience of temporality … the temporal dimensions

of narration and mutabilities of duration” (93). In time, The Grub Street Project will also

deconstruct positivistic representations of ‘fact’ through the multiple connections and references

among the sources of varying levels of fiction. The next phase in humanistic digital methodology

might well be multi-temporal four-dimensional exhibits that depict potential interactions among

texts over their timelines as well as within our own. Projects such as the UCCPs and The Grub

Street Project could be developed to depict plausible genetic timelines of texts’ production,

edition, and then reproduction within the exhibit, re-subjectifying the texts originally objectified

through digitisation or remodification. These steps could ultimately lead toward what Lee

Hannigan alluded to in his talk “In/Audible History”: a plurality of media and interpretations

functioning together in a socially prescribed space. These writings and readings result in new spectral and humanistic presences in the digital ecology, enhancing our awareness of the political

context of texts.

Theories regarding the rereading and recreation of texts further challenge the perceived

positivism of digital reproduction and representation. Marcel Cornis-Pope and Ann Woodlief, using Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism as a theoretical framework, write that “Hypertextual

criticism stimulates interactive authorship” and that “Textual interpretation becomes thus an act

of ‘rewriting,’ both individual, in which a particular reader mediates the relationship between

text, author and culture, and collective, in which an interpretive community negotiates not only

its reading of a particular text but also its interpretive habits and ideological views” (“The

Rereading/Rewriting Process”). By extension, when a user interacts interpretively with a

digitisation or digital remodification of a text, that user contributes to its authorship and the

283

construction of the cultural and ideological contexts of the text. The ideologies and

methodologies of the reader (in this case a humanist) will be imprinted on the text and its context

through such a reading. Matthew Kirschenbaum applies Jameson’s theories to texts and other

files on the digital level. He writes that “the preservation of digital objects is logically

inseparable from the act of their creation—the lag between creation and preservation collapses

completely, since a digital object may only ever be said to be preserved if it is accessible, and

each individual access creates the object anew” (Kirschenbaum). Accessing a text within a

constructed digital context foregrounds the subjectivity of that context and the impossibility of a

single objective reading of the text; this is signalled through metadata and microdata, which

record the countless re-readings/writings that the text undergoes, yet are incapable of quantifying

what those readings yielded. Thus, regardless of how objectively, mechanically, or

positivistically a digital text is produced or represented, it is always reproduced and reread on a

subjective humanistic level through reader-text and computer-human interactions.

“The Archive Evolved into a New and Distorted Form”40: Spectral Archives and Digital

Collections

Although it is not my aim to impose a radical revision of the terminology surrounding

archival and preservation practices, we must recognise the different procedures, products, and

their implications for both the materials being modified and the scholarly activities based upon

them. Just as each of the fonds unpacked in this study’s chapters contain a different form of trace, each one partially represented in the UCCPs embodies an element of de-cision. Derrida writes that the web of a text “indefinitely regenerat[es] its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the

40 This quote is taken from Robert Charles Wilson’s science fiction novel about galactic archiving, Darwinia; it haunts this study as the only extant trace of an unrealized chapter. 284

decision of each reading” (Dissemination 63), which determines a meaning for the text, but does

so through caesura, through a cutting off or pruning of other potential meanings. Any reading of

a text that ignores the evidence within its fonds maintains its validity only through a collective

agreement to disregard the archive, to choose the published version or perhaps even one

particular published version among the many other permutations that make up the rest of the

text’s web. Furthermore, decisions evident within the fonds of any text and within any archive

limit or encourage different readings, depending on what is present—on what our pursuits have

rendered present, trace, or lost. Thus, just as the texts analysed in this study comment on and

partake in the politics of collection and re-presentation, the creative and critical writings brought

together in this study evince the collector’s politics at play in an exhibit’s, archive’s, or text-as-

archive’s construction. We find the politics of partitioning in the obsessive accumulation of

particular authors, particular works, and particular personal, historical, and artistic documents

and monuments (see Glazier). A collection’s contents are “things of which [the collector] is the

meaning” (Baudrillard, The System of Objects 85). As with the allusion to Harvie’s collection in

Alibi, the collection’s meaning is doubled: the collector “preserve[s], and ultimately present[s]” but the “collections also reflect certain preferences, choices, and desires: that is, [the collector’s]

agency in the gathering act” (Read 381).

The author’s politics (personal and public) also intercede—some, like Kroetsch, chose at specific points to preserve their personal letters, just as Govier chose to reproduce material from the Alberta provincial archive, just as Vanderhaeghe chose to document his literature almost exclusively—haunting our interpretations decades after “The Death of the Author.” The result of this haunting is a Derridian survivance, for the “collector, in this way, lives on in his or her collection” (Read 381). And, of course, the critic’s agency cannot be ignored: what have I

285

decided to focus on? What have I pruned away in my own readings of the archive despite my best intentions to foreground that very process and its consequences?

Embedded within the inherent politics of choice are also questions of hegemony, privilege, and access, for through the act of selection “the archive prioritizes particular knowledges and ideas about space and belonging over others” (Hunt 28). Ferguson claims that

“Even the grimmest assessments of archives recognise the political potential of broadening access to archival space” (sec. 3). Although Derrida writes that “There is no political power without control of the archive,” he also recognises that “democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (AF 4). Archives “bring order to flows,” and thus “always some kind of governing voice or central point of view in archives,” although radical new approaches to archiving can “function as ‘aspiration rather than recollection,’ anticipating and enabling fresh possibilities for collective memory” (Ferguson, sec. 3, quoting Appadurai). New approaches to archiving can aspirate, breathe life into old hi/stories, such as Rosalie New Grass’s. But we have also seen how aspirations lead to new notions of archive inciting the becoming lost. The absences in the Vanderhaeghe fonds invite scholars to recontextualize digital depictions of creative process and textual genealogy, as they embody the inherently political question of what is deemed worthy of archiving. Joel Salt and Craig Harkema point out that this is a question of

“ownership vs use,” and of authority over the word and the ways it is organized.

In a recent conference paper, “Towards a Poetics of Exhibition Catalogues,” Alicia Fahey argued that an exhibition catalogue creates an illusion of art’s presence and remediates it, much like a finding aid or a set of metadata. The catalogue / finding aid / metadata preserves through remediation, but that act creates its own new event. The catalogue creates new and different

286

memories, for it seeks to be both archive and re-creation (Fahey). The finding aid for the Govier fonds indicates this becoming found that her research materials and novel-as-archive parallel.

These texts respond to “pedagogical anxieties about canons and intellectual inheritances” that

“the specter of the feminist archive provokes”: “How do we receive, preserve, but also reanimate the legacies of the past?” (Beckman 187-188). It is through these acts of re-presentation and remediation, of becoming found and bringing into intersectional discourses, of creating new memories and narratives, that Between Men and the Govier fonds unsilence Rosalie New Grass, but also reanimate Govier’s intention to do so. Digitising excerpts from these texts, archiving them, and affixing them with metadata would in turn facilitate new events of reanimation and memory creation, a becoming found within new digital / textual contexts and environments. As

James Purdy writes, “the life of knowledge production, particularly in the academy, depends upon digital archives as the texts we study and produce—and that define the discipline— increasingly live in these spaces” (27). However, as Cushman argues, from a decolonial perspective, “scholars need to understand the troubled and troubling roots of archives if they’re to understand the instrumental, historical, and cultural significance of the pieces therein” (116). I have endeavoured to trouble the historical archive with the becoming found of Rosalie New

Grass’s story in the Govier fonds. Now scholars must acknowledge and then complexify and problematize the ways in which the catalogue / finding aid / metadata is itself another level of selection, one that parses the information surrounding and constructs a new narrative around the archive’s contents. Fahey argues that for many viewers, the remediation is the only version of the exhibition they experience. This virtual experience creates an external metanarrative of the archive built from trace-based simulation. Comparably, for any user who interacts with a digital exhibit rather than the material archive upon which it is based, the digital collection becomes the

287

simulacrum and therefore the extant version of the text’s genealogy and the author’s creative process.

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, these processes of archival simulation and reader-archive interaction have been questioned and re-/un-veiled through literary works that directly engage with and comment on archives and practices of archiving, as I demonstrated in “A Case of Automatic Handwriting.” In turn, bpNichol’s “Studies in the Book

Machine” provides a brief case study that parallels Kroetsch’s meta-archival engagements. The poems were added posthumously to the collection, Truth: A Book of Fictions, by editor Irene

Niechoda (Cox). For example, Study 8 appears as a footnote to the editor’s appended note after the text proper, yet it is composed by the book’s nominal author. Ryan J. Cox argued in his recent conference paper, “Is this a page? Making the Invisible Machinery of the Book Visible in bpNichol’s ‘Studies in the Book Machine,’” that putting a text in a book erases its process of composition, erases the instances of labor tied to how we receive text and that Nichol’s text brings this back into view. Kroetsch’s novels serve similar functions within the genre of the tall tale and the form of the novel. As discussed, we not only see the construction—the putting-into- words—of Backstrom’s oratory but are made consciously aware of its selective power: only that which is spoken, and thereby orally archived, exists diegetically. Backstrom is simultaneously the archivist and the creator of a particular historical narrative and its prairie politics. Likewise,

Alibi foregrounds the selectivity of authorial and editorial processes, showing and self- reflexively commenting on the text’s rewritings, the versions to which we are not privy—those un-archived drafts that have become lost or trace through the very process of archivisation, through the destructive desire to preserve material in a repository. Within the book-as-archive,

288

Kroetsch, like Nichol and Niechoda, explores the politics of selection and the discursive function of contextual data that now carry forward into the digital era.

Acts of selection inscribe on the archive a politics that mirrors Rancière’s politics of literature and their epochal partitioning of discourse (10). I would posit that the same principles apply to the archive and, even more, to the digital exhibit. Each tier of selection—the author’s, the archivist’s, the scholar’s—further partitions the enunciative field of a particular web of texts.

Like Marsh’s case study of sculpting, my study of political and meta-archival texts, states of becoming, and layers of textual de-cision “shows how records reflect (1) the idiosyncratic (and affective) desires of collectors, currators, and institutional leadership; and (2) shifting epistemologies” (127), especially regarding the relationship between author, text, archive, and scholar. More importantly, my study reveals the desires and consequential implications of collection through creative pieces that embody and demonstrate the literary engagements and archival theories that my chapters explicate. In doing so, I show, rather than merely tell, that all literature is politics, all putting-into-words is inherently political in the Rancièrian sense. All text is selective, all textual formation is a de-cision that parses language and therefore partitions and brings to light (and conceals) different etymologies, discourses, and histories. The consequences of this inescapable practice (for it is impossible to save everything and to retransmit all that was saved) are significantly multiplied when a selection of texts is digitised or remodified and made public, especially when accompanied by revelatory metadata and preview images, as is the case with the UCCPs. Indeed, “people’s embodied encounters and idiosyncratic preoccupations [are] formative in the histories of records and yet obscured in them” (Marsh 127). The UCCPs’ virtual previews and catalogues do not merely anticipate the traces users will interact with; they serve as more than exergue, creating new events of discovery in advance of the becoming found, creating

289

an a priori notion of presence that at once compounds and conceals the absence of that which

became lost or trace.

The stratifying layers of selection in a digital collection foreground—force into

presence—particular authorial practices, certain “Chaînes opératoires” of creative processes

(Gosden & Knowles 19). These intersecting chains are meant to not be “singular sequences of actions unfolding in one place, but [to] connect into many times and places in a manner determined by the nature of their social embeddedness” (ibid.). However, the nature of their

repartitioning runs the risk of uncoupling potential directions that exist only through trace or

absence. Thus, archival selection, particularly in the case of a virtual archive, serves a

necromantic function, reanimating interpretations aligned with suppositions or at least

suggestions of authorial intent. An interaction between the collected digital text and the

eschewing writer / compiler does not undo Barthes’ “Death of the Author” (or the largely unacknowledged death of the editor), but raises the writer from the dead and puts uncanny simulation on display. Derrida notes, “Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment on, is a living-dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, a bookstore, in cellars, urns, drowned in the worldwide waves of a Web” (The Beast and the

Sovereign 131). As the author’s drafts and the genealogical evidence of their process from Work to Text are drowned in the web of digital collections, particular authorial and editorial choices— those that survive each round of selection—are brought to the surface as “a dead thing that resuscitates each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it” (ibid.).

Authors continue to haunt the text and the archive, but they are now less disconnected from their

290

bodies (of work). No longer mere ghost, the author has been made into a revenant, coming back to the text, the selection, the present.

And who is the necromancer? The archival scholar, who re-selects and remodifies pieces of the re-animated creature. But the magic’s source is as much the author—the point of commencement—and the archive—the textual topography—as the critic—the site of commandment, demanding that the ghoul yield insight. The necromantic relationship between author, archive, and archivist remediates, re-collects, and reinvents the digital collection to subvert assumptions of stasis—that the collector alone selects for the archive, that the selected materials alone make up the archive’s contents. The digital archive takes textual ghosts—the ones Arvatu was so opposed to interviewing (149)—from Vanderhaeghe, Govier, and Kroetsch’s early political works and puts them in a machine. Notions of recording, memory, book, and history are thereby condensed—in Freudian terms—within an archive that is simultaneously digital and material. The works examined in this study facilitate ghostly visitations from cyberspace that estrange our notions of authorship, intentionality, and agency within the conceptualisation of the archive—visitations that we now experience in constructing digital collections and exhibits.

The trifecta of inter-textuality and inter-authoriality, facilitated by the construction of a digital exhibit, challenges the singular authorship of the text and the authority of the archive, which, according to Foucault, is “first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (129). “This authority to modify the archive,” writes

Evans, “to both read and write it, suggests that once again the traditional figures of power within the publication machine do not play the same role in a digital publication system. The reader and author are in a fluid, interactive relationship of textual creation and interpolation that does not

291

require an intervening authority to sanction publication” (7). The notable exception to this

decentralization of power is the institutionalized digital archive—the academic collection—

which attempts to maintain authority / authorship despite the fluid relationships of multiple authors at play, for “authorship is intrinsically connected to ownership” (Evans 6). Through a necromantic approach to the archive, we may begin to “move beyond the dominant Romantic definition of the individual author and to recognize … alternative formulations or experiences of authorship” (Hirschfeld 615). The Rancièrian political act of re-partitioning the sayable

deconstructs the archive’s own “eco-nomic” nature of “making the law (nomos)” (Derrida, AF

7). The archive is no longer solely “the commencement and the commandment” (1). The

“moment proper to the archive, … the instant of archivization” (25), is no longer singular or

static but has occurred many times and is continuously re-occurring. The event is not a

“prosthetic experience” (25), but an uncanny inscription, a mystical enunciation of data.

We must ask “who and when, why and where knowledge is generated … to shift the

attention from the enunciated to the enunciation” (Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western

Modernity 119). This analytic shift to discursive de-cision parallels Kirschenbaum’s theory of

digital inscription in “The .txtual Condition” and Evans’ notion that “any comment left on a blog entry will be inscribed upon that entry for subsequent readers, meaning that the commenter has entered into the ‘authorial’ and authoritative role” (8). Digital collections, and their representation of this incorporation through pluralised authorship, reveal that texts, authors, and editors haunt all archives, and that all readings / repartitionings of an archive are necromantic practices. The raising of the author allows it to become “Plus d’un [More than one / No more one]” (Derrida, SoM 3). Thus, the tiers of selection inherent to the drive to preserve / destroy and disseminate / authoritate a collection give rise in turn to the hauntings that allow the very

292

deconstruction of static and complete archives. We—readers, writers, authors, scholars—must

not silence the specters our collecting has conjured; we must rely on their half-presence to

answer questions of trace: to re-member that which has become lost for the present, to re-

imagine the ghostly chains that we may have erased. We re-assemble “an aggregated structure

dominated by ‘[p]rinciples of connection and heterogeneity’ in which ‘any point … can be connected to anything other, and must be’” (Evans 9, quoting Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus). Again, the digital reveals and makes plain the nature of all archives: drafts and even fonds are not sequential but a web or rhizome of interconnected fragments and permutations, of which one only appears to be the ‘end point’ or the final ‘Work’ because it is socially elevated as such by the collector—whether they be the archivist, editor, critic, or publisher. Thus, humanistic necromancers and their author-creations haunt the ecology of the digital environment, but also the politics of publication, of all putting-into-words. The relationship among author, scholar, and archive created through a digital exhibit conjures humanities content at its base. The digital collection’s political function, the very politics of presence, is built upon virtual necromancy.

293

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Sara. “A Willfulness Archive.” Theory & Event, vol. 15 no. 3, 2012. Project MUSE,

muse.jhu.edu/article/484421.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” “Lenin and Philosophy” and

Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. Accessed 17

June 2017.

Archer, John H. Saskatchewan, A History. Western Producer Prairie Books, 1980.

Arvatu, Adina. “Spectres of Freud: The Figure of the Archive in Derrida and Foucault.” Mosaic,

vol. 44, no. 4, 2011, pp. 141-159.

Avakumovic, Ivan. Socialism in Canada: A Study of the CCF-NDP in Federal and Provincial

Politics. McClelland and Stewart, 1987.

Bagilhole, Barbara. “Shaping an Academic Belonging: The Interloper Syndrome by Gender and

Class.” Generation and Gender in Academia, edited by Barbara Bagihole and Kate

White, Palgrave, 2013, pp. 46-64.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist,

translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas Press, 1990.

Ball, John Clement. “The Carnival of Babel: The Construction of Voice in Robert Kroetsch’s

‘Out West’ Triptych.” Essays on Canadian Writing, vol. 39, 1989, pp. 1-21. MLA

International Bibliography. Accessed 8 Feb. 2015.

Banack, Clark. God’s Province: Evangelical Christianity, Political Thought, and Conservatism

in Alberta. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016.

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977.

294

Battershill, Claire. “Modernist Archives in the Classroom.” Paper presented at the 61st Annual

ACCUTE Conference, U of Regina, 2018.

Battershill, Claire, editor. Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Simon Fraser U and U of

Reading, 2017–, https://www.modernistarchives.com/.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser, U of Michigan Press,

1994.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict, Verso, 1996.

Beckman, Karen. “The Archive, the Phallus, and the Future.” Camera Obscura, vol. 22, no. 1,

2007, pp. 186-193.

Bell, Edward. Social Classes & Social Credit in Alberta. McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993.

Benjamin, Meredith. “Snapshots of a Feminist Poet: Adrienne Rich and the Poetics of the

Archive.” Women’s Studies, vol. 46, no. 7, 628-645.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated

by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1988.

Bhabha, Homi K. “The Commitment to Theory.” new formations, vol. 5, 1988, pp. 5-23.

Bishop, Ted. Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books. Viking Canada, 2005.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press,

1999.

Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. U of Chicago Press,

2004.

Brown, Carolyn S. The Tall Tale in American Folklore and Literature. U of Tennessee Press,

1987.

295

Brown, Lorne A., Joseph K. Roberts, and John W. Warnock. Saskatchewan Politics from Left to

Right, ‘44-’99. Hinterland Publications, 1999.

Brown, Russell. Borderlines and Borderlands in English Canada: The Written Line.

Borderlands, 1990.

Brozgal, Lia. “In the Absence of the Archive (Paris, October 17, 1961).” South Central Review,

vol. 31, no. 1, 2014, pp. 34-54.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Calder, Alison. “Unsettling the West: Nation and Genre in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The

Englishman’s Boy.” SCL, vol. 25, no. 2, 2000, pp. 96-107.

Carpenter, David. The Literary History of Saskatchewan. Coteau, 2013.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen,

Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875-893.

Codebo, Marco. Narrating from the Archive. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2010.

Cornis-Pope, Marcel and Ann Woodlief. “The Rereading/Rewriting Process: Theory and

Collaborative, On-line Pedagogy.” Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing

Classrooms, edited by Marguerite Helmers, Lawrence Elbaum, 2003, Virginia

Commonwealth University Archive,

http://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/ReReadingTheorychapter.htm. Accessed 27

September 2015.

Cooley, Dennis. E-mail to Robert Kroetsch, sent April 27, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2018.

Cooley, Dennis. The Home Place: Essays on Robert Kroetsch’s Poetry. U of Alberta P, 2016.

296

Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. “Regina Manifesto: Programme of the Co-operative

Commonwealth Federation, Adopted at the First National Convention, Held at Regina,

Sask., July, 1933.” s.n., 1933.

Cooper, Barry. “Regionalism, Political Culture, and Canadian Political Myths.” Regionalism and

Party Politics in Canada, edited by Lisa Young and Keith Archer, Oxford UP, 2001, pp.

92-112.

Cooper, Danielle. “Imagining Something Else Entirely: Metaphorical Archives in Feminist

Theory.” Women’s Studies, vol. 45, pp. 444-456.

Cox, Ryan J. “Is this a page? Making the Invisible Machinery of the Book Visible in bpNichol’s

‘Studies in the Book Machine.’” Paper presented at the 61st Annual ACCUTE

Conference, U of Regina, 2018.

Cushman, Ellen. “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive.” College

English, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 115-135.

Cvetković, Tanja. “Unhiding the hidden: uncreating female characters in Robert Kroetsch’s out

west triptych.” The Central European Journal of Canadian studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2008,

pp. 7–17.

Davey, Frank. Canadian Literary Power. NeWest, 1994.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H.M. Parshley, introduction by

Deidre Bair, Vintage Books, 1989.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Viking Press, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

297

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, U of

Chicago Press, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington,

U of Chicago P, 2011.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, U of Chicago Press, 1981.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1993.

Diehl, Fred M. A Gentleman from a Fading Age: Eric Lafferty Harvie. Devonian Foundation,

1989.

Dorscht, Susan Rudy. Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference. Wilfred Laurier UP,

1991.

Doyle, James. Progressive Heritage: The Evolution of a Politically Radical Literary Tradition in

Canada. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2002.

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship.” Debates in the Digital

Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, U of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 85-95.

Dueck, Nathan. “Robert Kroetsch’s Verbal Parody of The Studhorse Man in Seed Catalogue.”

Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2012, pp. 154-171.

Dunning, Stephen. “What Would Sam Waters Do? Guy Vanderhaeghe and Søren Kierkegaard.”

Canadian Literature, vol. 198, 2008, pp. 29-45.

Eagles, Munroe. “Political Geography and the Study of Regionalism.” Regionalism and Party

Politics in Canada, edited by Lisa Young and Keith Archer, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 9-23.

Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. University of California, 1976.

Eagleton, Terry. “Marxism and the Past.” Salmagundi, vol. 68-69, 1986, pp. 271-290.

Eichhorn, Kate. The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order. Temple UP, 2013.

298

Endres, Robin. “Marxist Literary Criticism and English Canadian Literature.” In Our Own

House: Social Perspectives on Canadian Literature, edited by Paul Cappon, McClelland

& Stewart, 1978, pp. 82-129.

Evans, Sally. “Archive Fever in a Typingspace: Physicality, Digital Storage, and the Online

Presence of Derek Motion.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian

Literature, vol. 11, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-11.

Faieta, Nicola A. “‘Guy Talk’: An Interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe.” SCL, vol. 35, no. 1,

2010, pp. 256-272.

Fairbairn, Brett. “Canada’s ‘Co-Operative Province’: Individualism and Mutualism in a Settler

Society.” Perspectives of Saskatchewan, edited by Jene M. Porter, U of Manitoba Press,

2009, pp. 149-174.

Featherstone, Mike. “Archive.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 2-3, 2006, pp. 591-596.

Ferguson, Kathy E. “Theorizing Shiny Things: Archival Labors.” Theory & Event, vol. 11, no. 4,

2008, Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/article/257578.

Accessed 17 December 2015.

Ferrer, Daniel. “Production, Invention, and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism.”

Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, edited by Elizabeth

Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat, U of Wisconsin Press, 2002, pp. 48-59.

Findlay, L.M. “A Note on the Text.” The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels, edited by L.M. Findlay, Broadside, 2004.

Florby, Gunilla. “Self-Reflections in a Mirror: A Reading of Robert Kroetsch’s Alibi through

The Lovely Treachery of Words.” Study Meophilologica, vol. 67, no. 2, 1995, pp. 197-

208.

299

Forceville, Charles. “My Present Age and the ‘Ed’-stories: the Role of Language and Story-

Telling in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Fiction.” External and Detached: Dutch Essays on

Contemporary Canadian Literature, edited by Charles Forceville, Free UP, 1988, pp. 53-

61.

Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.

M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, 1972.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan,

Vintage Books, 1995.

Friesen, Gerald. The Canadian Prairies: A History. U of Toronto Press, 1987.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden. Anansi, 1971.

Gerry, Tom. “Violence and Narrative Metalepsis in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Fiction.” SCL, vol. 12,

no. 2, 1987, pp. 199-211.

Glazier, Kenneth M. Confessions of a Collector. s.n., 1977.

Gordon, Spencer, and Tyler Willis. “‘Speaking Personally’: An Interview with Guy

Vanderhaeghe.” The Puritan, vol. 6, 2008, pp. 71-80. www.puritan-

magazine.com/6/Issue_6_Speaking Personally.pdf. Accessed 13 November 2016.

Gosden, Chris, and Chantal Knowles. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial

Change. Berg, 2001.

Government of Canada. “Daily Data Report for August 1935.”

http://climate.weather.gc.ca/historical_data/search_historic_data_e.html. Accessed 10

November 2018.

Govier, Katherine. Between Men. Viking, 1987.

300

Govier, Katherine. “The Calgary Time Machine: In Olympic City the contest between winners

and losers is as old as the town itself.” Twist and Shout: A Decade of Feminist Writing in

This Magazine, edited by Susan Crean, Second Story Press, 1992.

Graham, Kenneth W. “Picaro as Messiah: Backstrom’s Election in The Words of My Roaring.”

Mosaic, vol. 14, no. 2, 1981, pp. 177-186.

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg, Columbia UP, 1992.

Grant, C.J. “The March of Roguery.” Hogarth to Bruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire,

by Dorothy George, Allen Lane, 1967, p. 172.

Griswold, Wendy. Regionalism and the Reading Class. U of Chicago Press, 2008.

The Grub Street Project. Edited by Allison Muri, 2005 to Present, U of Saskatchewan,

http://grubstreetproject.net/. Accessed 18 May 2015.

Guy Vanderhaeghe Fonds. 1992, Canadian Literary and Art Archives, University of Calgary,

Calgary.

Hannigan, Lee. “In/Audible History: Developing a Literary Audio Archive at the University of

Alberta.” Digital Textualities / Canadian Contexts. 2016, U of Alberta.

Hariharan, B. The Carnival World of Robert Kroetsch. Creative Books, 2012.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. The University of

Notre Dame Press, 2008.

Henry, Richard. “Identity Crises/Cries for Identity: Claiming the Canadian Prairie in the Novels

of Robert Kroetsch.” World Literature Today, vol. 73, no. 2, 1999, pp. 289-294.

Henry, Shawn. “Alienation and Political Behaviour in Western Canada.” Regionalism and Party

Politics in Canada, edited by Lisa Young and Keith Archer, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 77-91.

301

Hiller, Harry H. “Region as Social Construction.” Regionalism and Party Politics in Canada,

edited by Lisa Young and Keith Archer, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 24-40.

Hillis, Doris. Voices & Visions: Interviews with Saskatchewan Writers. Coteau, 1985.

Hirschfeld, Heather. “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship.” PMLA, vol.

116, no. 3, 2001, pp. 119-224.

Horava, Tony. “Guy Vanderhaeghe: A Bibliography.” Essays on Canadian Writing, vol. 58,

1996, pp. 241-65.

Hunt, Dallas. “Nikîkîwân: Contesting Settler Colonial Archives through Indigenous Oral

History.” Canadian Literature, vol. 230-231, 2016, pp. 25-42.

Hunter, Lynette. Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology,

Writers/Readers and Publishing. Talonbooks, 1996.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian

Fiction. Oxford UP, 1988.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke,

Cornell UP, 1985.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991.

Jennings, Rosalind. “Disappearing Doubles and Deceptive Landscapes in the Writings of Robert

Kroetsch.” The London Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 12, 1996, pp. 20-34.

Kang, David. “UCCPs Presentation: The Wiebe Collection.” 2015, U of Calgary.

Katherine Govier Fonds. 1999, Canadian Literary and Art Archives, University of Calgary,

Calgary.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and

the Future Literary.” DHQ, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013,

302

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000151/000151.html. Accessed 23 April

2015.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Leon

S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia

UP, 1980.

Kroetsch, Robert. Alberta, 2nd Edition. NeWest, 1993.

Kroetsch, Robert. Alibi. Stoddart, 1983.

Kroetsch, Robert, ed. Creation. New Press, 1970.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Hornbooks of Rita K. U of Alberta Press, 2001.

Kroetsch, Robert. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. NeWest, 1982.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Oxford UP, 1989.

Kroetsch, Robert. “On Being an Alberta Writer.” Open Letter, vol. 5, no. 4, 1983, pp. 69-80.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Red Shale Hornbooks. Pachyderm Press, 2000.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Words of My Roaring. U of Alberta Press, 2000.

Kruk, Laurie. “Storykeepers: Circling Family Voice in Stories by Thomas King, Olive Senior,

Alistair Macleod and Guy Vanderhaeghe.” Journal of the Short Story in English, vol. 47,

2006, pp. 111-126.

http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/mlaib/docview/53599247/8741CB978

C044F07PQ/1?accountid=9838. Accessed 26 June 2017.

Kuester, Martin. “Kroetsch’s Fragments: Approaching the Narrative Structure of his Novels.”

Restant, vol. 20, no. 3, 1992, pp. 137-160.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization.

John Hopkins University Press, 2005.

303

Lecker, Robert. Robert Kroetsch. Twayne Publishers, 1986.

LeGier, Nadine. “‘You Saw Me Cross the Bar’: Masculinity, Disability, and the Western in Guy

Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy.” SCL, vol. 35, no. 1, 2010, pp. 244-55.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. Agrarian Socialism: The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in

Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology. U of California Press, 1950.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by

Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” portal: Libraries and

the Academy, vol. 4, 2004, pp. 9-25.

Marlatt, Daphne. Ana Historic. Anansi, 2013.

Marsh, Diana E. “Trace Ethnography, Affect, and Institutional Ecologies in the Distributed

Records of a Plaster Model.” Museum Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 2, 2016, pp. 111-129.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Translated by Samuel Moore

and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, Progress Publishers, 1887.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/, 1999. Accessed 5 May 2017.

Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. Edited by L.M. Findlay,

Broadview, 2004.

Mathews, Robin. “Developing a Language of Struggle: Canadian Literature and Literary

Criticism.” In Our Own House: Social Perspectives on Canadian Literature, edited by

Paul Cappon, McClelland & Stewart, 1978, pp. 135-147.

McCarthy, Dermot. “The True and False Guide: Characterization in Katherine Govier’s Between

Men.” SCL, vol. 21, no. 1, 1996, pp. 107-130.

McGann, Jerome. “On Creating a Usable Future.” Profession, vol. 10, 2011, pp. 182-195.

304

Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial

Options. Duke University Press, 2011.

Mignolo, Walter D. “Delinking.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2-3, 2007, pp. 449-514.

Mignolo, Walter D. “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto.”

Transmodernity, vol. 1, no. 2, 2011, pp. 45-66.

Million, Dian. “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History.” Wicazo

Sa Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 2009, pp. 53-76.

Mouré, Erin. Pillage Laud. Book*hug [formerly Bookthug], 2011.

Munro, Alice. The Progress of Love. Random House, 1986.

Muri, Allison, editor. The Grub Street Project. U of Saskatchewan, 2005–,

http://grubstreetproject.net/.

Naas, Michael. “Derrida Floruit.” Derrida Today, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-20.

New, W.H. Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada. UBC Press, 1998.

Nichol, bp. Absolute Statement for My Mother. Seripress, 1979.

Nichol, bp. Truth: A Book of Fictions. Edited by Irene Niechoda, Mercury Press, 1993.

Owram, Doug. “Uncertain Promise: The Prairie Farmer and the Post-War Era.” The Prairie West

as Promised Land. Edited by R. Douglas Francis & Chris Kitzan, U of Calgary Press,

2007, pp. 335-355.

Pearce-Moses, Richard. “Fonds.” Society of American Archivists Glossary of Archival

Terminology. Society of American Archivists, n.d.

https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/f/fonds. Accessed 25 December 2018.

Penner, Norman. From Protest to Power: Social Democracy in Canada 1900-Present. J. Lorimer

& Co., 1992.

305

Perry, Sandra E. & Craig, Jessica J. The Mantle of Leadership: Premiers of the North-West

Territories and Alberta 1897-2005. Edited by Philip A. Massolin, Legislative Assembly

of Alberta, 2006.

Powell, Malea. “Dreaming of Charles Eastman: Cultural Memory, Autobiography, and

Geography in Indigenous Rhetorical Histories.” Beyond the Archives: Research as a

Lived Process, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, Southern Illinois University

Press, 2008, pp. 115-128.

Presswell, Lindsay. “Alienation, Empowerment and Authority: Understanding Erín Moure’s

Pillage Laud as Cyborg Writing.” Paper presented at the 61st Annual ACCUTE

Conference, U of Regina, 2018.

Purdy, James. “Three Gifts of the Digital Archives.” Journal of Literacy and Technology, vol.

12, no. 3, 2011, pp. 25-49.

Radin, Paul. The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Knopf Doubleday, 1972.

Rafael, Andrew William. “UCCPs Presentation: The Nichol & Birney Collection.” 2015,

University of Calgary.

Rancière, Jacques. “The Politics of Literature.” SubStance 33.1 (2004): 10-24. Print.

Read, Robyn. “Eric Harvey: Without and Within Robert Kroetsch’s Alibi.” The West and

Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region. Edited by Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter,

and Peter Fortna, Athabasca UP, 2010, pp. 375-396.

Riegel, Christian et al., eds. A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and

American Writing. U of Alberta Press, 1997.

Robert Kroetsch Fonds. 1975-2006, Canadian Literary and Art Archives, University of Calgary,

Calgary.

306

Salt, Joel & Harkema, Craig. “The Al W. Purdy Digital Archive: Archival or Scholarly?” Digital

Textualities / Canadian Contexts. 2016, U of Alberta.

Saunders, Max. “Archive Fiction.” Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 8, no. 2-3, 2011, pp. 169-

188.

Scobie, Stephen. Signature Event Cantext. NeWest, 1989.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire,

Thirtieth Anniversary Edition. Foreword by Wayne Koestenbaum, Columbia UP, 2016.

Sellery, J’nan Morse. “Creativity and destruction: Robert Kroetsch’s Notikeewin Trilogy.” West

Virginia University Philological Papers 53 (2006): 72-80.

The Shoe Project. Directed by Katherine Govier, 2015–,

http://www.theshoeproject.online/index.htm. Accessed 16 Sept. 2018.

Smith, David E. “Saskatchewan: A Distinct Political Culture.” Perspectives of Saskatchewan.

Edited by Jene M. Porter, U of Manitoba Press, 2009, pp. 37-56.

Smith, Dorothy E. “An Analysis of Ideological Structures and How Women Are Excluded:

Considerations for Academic Women.” Women and Education, Second Edition. Edited

by Jane Gaskell and Arlene McLaren, Detselig, 1991, pp. 233-256.

Socialist History Project: An Online Archive of Canadian Socialist History and Thought.

Directed by Ian Angus, 2004–, https://www.socialisthistory.ca/index.htm. Accessed 14

Feb. 2019.

Stegner, Wallace. Wolf Willow. The Viking Press, 2000.

Sullivan, Rosemary. “The Fascinating Place Between: The Fiction of Robert Kroetsch.” Mosaic,

vol. 11, no. 3, 1978, pp. 165-176.

307

Thieme, John. “Writing Region: Robert Kroetsch and the Poetics of Prairie Space.” Margins,

vol. 3, 2013, pp. 7-31.

Thomas, Peter. Robert Kroetsch. Douglas & McIntyre, 1980.

Tossutti, Livianna. “Regionalism in an Age of Globalization.” Regionalism and Party Politics in

Canada. Edited by Lisa Young and Keith Archer, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 222-241.

Twigg, Alan. “Male.” For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian Writers. Harbour, 1981,

pp. 107-116.

Twitter. 2017. https://twitter.com/BarbaraBietz/status/887840903204806656.

Ullyot, Michael. “Language Use and Cognition: Shakespeare’s Gradation in Context.”

UCalgaryBlogs, 2015, http://ullyot.ucalgaryblogs.ca/2015/04/04/shakespeares-gradatio-

in-context/. Accessed 2 April 2015.

University of Calgary Class Projects. Edited by Jason Wiens, 2015 to Present, U of Calgary,

http://omeka.ucalgary.ca/. Accessed 7 September 2017.

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. “He Scores! He Shoots!” Matrix, vol. 13, 1981, pp. 3-14.

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. “John Buchan: Conservatism, Imperialism, and Social Reconstruction.”

University of Saskatchewan Theses Collection, 1975.

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. Man Descending. McClelland & Stewart, 2000 (1982).

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. My Present Age. McClelland & Stewart, 2000 (1984).

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. “Sam, Soren, and Ed.” Journal of Canadian Fiction, vol. 31-32, 1981, pp.

5-31.

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. Things as They Are? McClelland & Stewart, 2004 (1992).

Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Trouble with Heroes: and Other Stories. Borealis, 1983. van Herk, Aritha. Audacious and Adamant: The Story of Maverick Alberta. Key Porter, 2007.

308

van Herk, Aritha. Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta. Penguin, 2001.

van Herk, Aritha. Stampede and the Westness of West. Frontenac House, 2016.

Vauthier, Simone. “Resisting Narrative: Robert Kroetsch’s The Puppeteer.” TNQ, vol. 18, no. 1,

1998, pp. 174-185.

The Waffle Manifesto. Canadian League of Rights, 1974 (1969).

Wang, Mei-Chuen. “Wilderness, the West and the National Imagery in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The

Englishman’s Boy.” British Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 2013, pp. 21-38.

Warkentin, Germaine. Canadian Exploration Literature. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Wiens, Jason. “‘letter as basic form right now’: Kroetsch’s Epistolary Poetics.” Robert Kroetsch

Symposium. U of Ottawa, 29 Apr. 2017.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977.

Wilson, Robert Charles. Darwinia. Orb, 1998.

Wilson, Robert R. “The Discourse of Museums: Exhibiting Postmodernism.” Open Letter, vol. 7,

no. 1, 1988, pp. 93-110.

Wittig, Monique. “One Is Not Born a Woman.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Edited by

Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, Routledge, 1993, pp. 103-

109.

Zichy, Francis. “Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the ‘Big Book’ of His Generation: Man

Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s.” American Review of

Canadian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 41-62.

Žižek, Slavoj. “The Interpassive Subject.” JL, 2009, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-pompidou.htm.

Accessed 21 March 2017.

309

Zolf, Rachel. “‘Like plugging into an electric circuit’: Fingering Out Erín Moure’s Lesbo-Digit-

O! Smut Poems.” Canadian Literature, vol. 210/211, 2011, pp. 230-41.

310