Going Native in Robert Kroetsch's Gone Indian

Document generated on 10/02/2021 10:12 p.m. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne Going Native in Robert Kroetsch’s Gone Indian Justin D. Edwards Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 2001 Article abstract While many readings of Robert Kroetsch's Gone Indian focus on the text's URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/scl26_1art05 postmodern structural devices, there is yet no reading that concentrates on Kroetsch's representation of Jeremy's "Nativeness." Such a focus allows one to See table of contents explore the way Gone Indian exposes the falseness surrounding the rhetoric of ethnicity by dismantling binary oppositions and challenging the stable norms upon which processes of ethnic categorization rely. Gone Indian can be read as Publisher(s) a post-identity quest narrative through which Kroetsch can resist the fixity of ethnic identities without erasing the politics of identity altogether. It is The University of New Brunswick essential to ask, what is invested in the blurring of ethnic identities? By emphasizing the performative quality of ethnic identities, Kroetsch suggests ISSN the impossibility of any individual's claim to an authentic ethnic identity. This suggestion further complicates colonial rhetoric. 0380-6995 (print) 1718-7850 (digital) Explore this journal Cite this article Edwards, J. D. (2001). Going Native in Robert Kroetsch’s Gone Indian. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne, 26(1), 84–97. All rights reserved © Management Futures, 2001 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ Going Native in Robert Kroetsch’s Gone Indian JUSTIN D. EDWARDS IVEN THE TITLE of Robert Kroetsch’s 1973 novel Gone Indian, it is surprising that critics have not read it as a text about the G process of “going native,” a process whereby the traveller of the narrative disrupts polemical notions of ethnic difference by moving between various cultural identities. Although Linda Hutcheon’s, Peter W. Sinnema’s and John Clement Ball’s groundbreaking work on the insta- bilities of identity in Gone Indian touches on the text’s breakdown of stra- tegic essentialism,1 there are no comprehensive readings that treat Kroetsch’s novel as an exposure of the falseness surrounding the rhetoric of ethnicity. In fact, Kroetsch’s text focusses on Jeremy Sadness, a New York graduate student who travels to Alberta where he puts on the cloth- ing of a North American Native and adopts the stereotypical traits of “Indianness.” In doing this, Jeremy illustrates the performative nature of identity. But he is also limited by the fact that although he is, at times, aware of the posturing of his disguise, he is not always conscious of its effects. Jeremy does not always see his identity as a performance; he be- lieves that he can use his disguise to seek out the essence of a “true” Na- tive self, and then take on the imagined qualities that might embody pure “Nativeness.” Kroetsch, however, parodies Jeremy’s search, suggesting that the quest for an essentialist notion of identity will lead to a dead end. More often than not, critics have ignored Jeremy’s identity performance in favour of an emphasis on the text’s postmodern structural devices, particularly its lack of closure.2 I do not want to suggest that Kroetsch’s novel resists postmodern narrative playfulness, but I would like to con- centrate on Kroetsch’s representation of Jeremy’s “Nativeness” to suggest that it subverts essentialist notions of ethnic difference, thus questioning the authenticity of ethnic identities. Central to my reading of Gone In- dian is the assumption that the novel erodes distinctions between binary oppositions, which in turn subverts stable norms and collapses dichoto- mies based on ethnic categorization. Through its postmodern view of ROBERT KROETSCH 85 identity, Kroetsch’s text offers a reflection upon the political tensions that arise out of distinct ethnic differences and provides a critique of the in- heritance of European-Indigene conflicts: as it warns us of the dangers of ethnic divisions, Gone Indian poses questions about historical attitudes that are based on the perceptions (or social constructions) of ethnic vari- ations. The Post-Identity Quest Narrative Gone Indian, I would suggest, can be read as a post-identity quest narrative in that Kroetsch’s novel frames the narrative search for identity in the form of a question. In other words, finding an identity in Gone Indian is not achieved by a plumbing of depths or an exploration of consciousness; an identity is located within the fantasized production that is performed and played out on the level of language. Truth as depth, as expressive inner essence, is reformulated as a fantasy spun from a reading of surfaces. By deconstructing the quest for identity, Kroetsch can resist the fixity of ethnic identities without erasing the politics of identity altogether. His narrative achieves this by reversing the conventional location of value in the depth/surface opposition, and surface is newly valued as the side that provides possibilities for self-invention and movement in the face of ethnicities that have been historically framed as essentialist modes of identity. This de-ontologizing reversal is present in the narrative structure: the quest formula that Kroetsch parodies is ultimately replaced with a mul- tiplicity of shifting identities. From a position that focusses on the corporeal surfaces of ethnicities — costume, performance and other modes of self-styling — Jeremy Sad- ness produces a fantasized inner depth for himself and for the other char- acters passing through the space of the imagined Western frontier. This self-styling is filtered through two highly questionable sources: the narrative is reconstructed through Jeremy’s tape recordings — a form of technology that enables Jeremy to create numerous selves through the possibility of erasure and editing — and the “explanation” of these recordings by Professor Madham, who attempts to impose logic and tele- ological order upon his student’s experiences (2). The polyphony and parody arising out of these varied voices may be seen as an exploration of two narrative traditions, one textual and one oral. Those sections of the text composed by Madham exist in the epistemological regime of the hermeneutic narrative; he is implicated in the Euro-American perspective that seeks out ontological certainties in textual form. His “transcription”/ 86 SCL/ÉLC translation of Jeremy’s oral story into textuality looks for a transcenden- tal subject that would serve as the source of meaning and thus reproduce stable, continuous identities and “truths” (1). Jeremy’s tapes are, however, inextricably intertwined in the performance of identity, for they express a recognition that uncertainty pervades narrative and that identities must be conceived as unstable and discontinuous. This oral performance of narrative — his “inability to get things down on paper” (1) — is linked to Jeremy’s performance as Indigene in that it connects him to a tradition of indigenous storytelling, a tradition that, as Peter Dickinson points out, is always caught up in “tricky negotiations” of identity (177).3 For Madham, the written text is everything: he wants Jeremy to write his dissertation and provide a narrative that would fix Jeremy in a stable position. But Jeremy resists this and opts instead for the common equa- tion that conflates orality with the natural. That is, he adopts the oral tradition, in part, because he assumes that it will put him in touch with the untamed natural life that he is searching for in the northwest. The assumption here is that “oral speech” is natural and that “writing is artifi- cial” (Ong 82), an assumption that, as Terry Goldie points out, leads to the myth that orality produces “a different order of consciousness, one which makes the Indigene so clearly Other” (110). Here, Kroetsch once again parodies the fact that Jeremy buys into this myth of orality in his search for an essential (natural) self. But Kroetsch’s experimentation with the inscription of orality into text is also a reaction to the profound gulf that is often present in the distinction between textual and oral communication. For example, at the level of narrative development, Jeremy’s oral testimonies show a recognition that speaking has a much more subjective presence than writing, for the spo- ken word is not “bound up directly with ‘reality’” (Goody 46). Here, the language associated with orality — “bound up” and “reality” — suggests that the oral resists fixture in reality, and as such provides an alternative to fixed notions of identity. This fluidity associated with the oral tradition, then, opens up a space from which Jeremy can explore various subject positions under the rubric of many names and guises. Jeremy’s oral stories, which destabilize the outmoded mythic structures inherent in the ontological fixity of “authentic” or “essential” representations, force us to reimagine both narrative and cultural communities. Kroetsch’s text plays allusively with a narrative genre that is organ- ized around the gradual elimination of hesitation, the establishment of the truth-value of Jeremy (the witness’s) oral discourse and Madham’s desire to textually inscribe “what really was.” The quest narrative — a composite ROBERT KROETSCH 87 of the generic qualities associated with travel writing and adventure fic- tion — would perhaps be a logical route for a narrative investigating, as Gone Indian does, the allusiveness of the imagined frontier.

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