Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives
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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 Questions of Trace: Presence, Politics, and Virtual Necromancy in Canadian Literary Archives (Unpublished doctoral thesis).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 by 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 © Jordan Bolay 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. ii 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.” iv 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 v 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 ...............................................................................................................................