Disguise and Masquerade in Canadian Literature: The Works of Frederick Philip Grove and Robert Kroetsch * Verkleidung und Maskerade in der kanadischen Literatur: Die Werke von Frederick Philip Grove und Robert Kroetsch INAUGURAL-DISSERTATION zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie im Fachbereich II der Universität Trier vorgelegt von Markus M. Müller, M.A. Trier, im April 2002 i Content List of Abbreviations Preface 1 1. New Takes on Identity: An Affair of / in Stages 1.1 On a Genealogy of Identity Concepts: From Unity of Self to Performance as Other(s) 9 1.2 Disguise and Masquerade in Literature: A Motif in Brief Survey and Its Transfer to North America 30 2. Two Canadian Authors: An Immigrant from Germany and an Albertan in New York State 2.1 Alias Greve, Alias Grove: FPG and the Process of Personal Palimpsest 54 2.2 Robert Kroetsch: Western Canadian (Postmodern?) Poetics as Archaeology / Genealogy 91 3. FPG Relocated: The European Prelude and Transfer to the New World 3.1 Tailoring (to) Her Very Needs? Grove's City, Fanny Essler, and Sartorial Enterprises 119 3.2 A Melancholic Scripting of Felix and Elsa? Appearances, Sexuality, and Catharsis in Settlers of the Marsh 145 4. From Grove to Kroetsch: The Imperatives versus Playfulnesses of Masquerades 4.1 The Masks of Odysseus: Heroic and Narrative Roles in Over Prairie Trails and The Studhorse Man 167 4.2 The New World Dressing-Room: Vested Quests for Self from A Search for America to Gone Indian 191 4.3 Confessional Eccentricities: In Search of Myself and Alibi as Textual Masquerades 218 ii 5. Kroetsch's Transgressions: Crossing / Reversing Gender and Text 5.1 (Cross)Dressing, Performance, and Iconicity: The Puppeteer's Shift from Disguise to Guise 247 5.2 Fractal Structures in The Hornbooks of Rita K: Traces of Autobiography and Poetological Transformations of Gender and Genre 260 6. Afterword 275 7. Deutsche Zusammenfassung 279 8. Bibliography 285 9. Appendix: Interviews with Robert Kroetsch i-lvii iii List of Abbreviations and Notes on the Referencing System Works by Frederick Philip Grove ASA A Search for America (1927) FE I Fanny Essler, Vol. I (1905; 1984) FE II Fanny Essler, Vol. II (1905; 1984) FTAE "Flaubert's Theories of Artistic Existence." (1904; 1986) FTE Fruits of the Earth (1933) INTBS It Needs To Be Said (1929) ISM In Search of Myself (1946) MM The Master of the Mill (1944) MMH The Master Mason's House (1906; 1976) OPT Over Prairie Trails (1922) TY The Turn of the Year (1923) SM Settlers of the Marsh (1925) A crucial memoir by FPG's German partner, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: BE Baroness Elsa (1923-26; 1992) Works by Robert Kroetsch A Alibi (1983) ALS A Likely Story: The Writing Life (1995) BAW "On Being an Alberta Writer" (1983) BL Badlands (1975) BN "Beyond Nationalism: A Prologue"* BWE But We Are Exiles (1965) CFN Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch (1989) CJ The Crow Journals (1980) CP "The Continuing Poem" (1984) CS "Contemporary Standards in the Canadian Novel"* CV "Carnival and Violence: A Meditation"* CW "The Canadian Writer and the American Literary Tradition"* DU "Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy" (1989) EP "The Exploding Porcupine" (1989) FW "The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space" (1989) GI Gone Indian (1973) iv GS "The Grammar of Silence" (1985) HRK The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001) LH "Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye" (1989) LS Letters to Salonika (1983)** LTW The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New (1989) MD "The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues" (1989) MFC The Man from the Creeks (1998) NN "No Name Is My Name" (1989) P The Puppeteer (1992) PE "For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem" (1989) PRK "The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart" (1995) PRK2 "from 'The Poetics of Rita Kleinhart'" (1996) RSH The Red Shale Hornbooks (2000) SC Seed Catalogue (1977)** SHP Stone Hammer Poems (1975) SHM The Studhorse Man (1969) SP The Sad Phoenician (1979)** TL The Ledger (1975)** UH "Unhiding the Hidden"* WIW "Why I Went Up North and What I Found When He Got There" (1995) WCS What the Crow Said (1978) WMR The Words of My Roaring (1966) *Essays that originally appeared in Robert Kroetsch: Essays. Special issue of Open Letter 5th ser. 4 (Spring 1983) and are reprinted in Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New (1989). All references are to this new selection (LTW). **Reprinted in The Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch (1989). All references are to this new edition (CFN). LV Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Maze "Tr(e)ading Traces in a Maze: Robert Kroetsch in Dialogues." Interviews with Robert Kroetsch. By Markus Müller. v Acknowledgements Writing is a brutally solitary act and at the same time a communal enterprise. The process of working on this doctoral dissertation has forcefully demonstrated that paradox to me; without the help and support of a number of people and institutions, the innumerable hours of lonesome reading and taking notes, of drafting, revising, editing and re-editing various manuscript versions would have been unendurable. This is the time to acknowledge my debts and gratefulness. First of all, I would like to thank the following institutions for their support over the past years: GKS (German Association for Canadian Studies) for repeated travel grants; Landesgraduiertenkolleg an der Universität Trier for a "Promotionsstipendium" (Ph.D. Grant); the Government of Canada and the International Council for Canadian Studies for an Award to carry out research in Canada and for an invitation to talk about my involvement in Canadiana; everybody at the Institute for Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa for providing wonderful research facilities and a homely atmosphere; the staff at the Special Collections Archive at the University of Calgary (especially Apollonia Lang Steel); the staff at the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Manitoba; all participants of the 'Kroetsch Symposium' at Niederbronn les Bains, May 9-12, 1994, especially the impeccable organizers, Simone Vauthier and Héliane Ventura; the students in my seminar on "Robert Kroetsch: Novels, Bio-Texts, and the Canadian West" in the winter term 2000 / 2001; and, of course, our Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Trier for many years of enthusiasm about things Canadian under the guise of shared labour. Individually, I would like to thank the following people who were somehow crucially involved in the processes of thinking, talking and writing about Robert Kroetsch as well as Frederick Philip Grove: Dennis Cooley, David Arnason, and Douglas Reimer; Fred Wah & Pauline Butling; Gaby Divay; Claire Omhovère; Paul Morris; Aritha van Herk; B. Hariharan; Konrad Gross; Ulla Amsinck; Gunilla Florby; André Lapierre, Anke Friedrich; Wiebke Böse; Ron Smith; Maria Jesús LLarena-Ascanio; Robert Christian Thomsen; Martin Schneider; Mareike Therheyden; Katrin Schönig; Linda Jones; Janet Inksetter; Lutz Schowalter. vi Special thanks to my German "Doktorvater," Wolfgang Klooss, and my Canadian supervisor, David Staines, for their many words of guidance and their endurance of my chaotic disorientations over the years. Special thanks to our always reliable and cheerful secretary at the Canadian Studies Centre, Annekatrin Metz. And more gratefulness and appreciation for my partner at the time, Ina Schmidt, for all her patience and help. Big big thanks to my parents, Franz and Marianne Müller, for all their support from the beginning. Their relief over this project's termination will outlast mine and is well- deserved. My gratefulness to Robert Kroetsch: his patience, his generosity, and his writings which never cease to amaze me. Go on, Bob, and tell it one more time. Markus M. Müller vii "Where does the self begin and end?" Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel »Penser la métamorphose, c'est penser la Vérité.« Edmond Jabès, Un Étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format "A man never coincides with himself." Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Jeder tiefe Geist braucht eine Maske: mehr noch, um jeden tiefen Geist wächst fortwährend eine Maske, dank der beständig falschen, nämlich flachen Auslegung jedes Wortes, jedes Schrittes, jedes Lebens-Zeichens, das er gibt. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse I speak in figures, well enough, the dresses you wear are figures also, we could not meet otherwise. William Carlos Williams Disguise marks a discourse through which ideals of ethopoetic origins and goals and theories of social and individual interaction confront each other. In this view, disguise works as a central motif for representing the cultural dialogism, rather than any particular thesis, of selfhood. Lloyd Davis, Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance viii Preface This doctoral dissertation goes back to my being puzzled by the presence of specific clothing, unusual garments, and a variety of disguises as well as role-plays in the works of Robert Kroetsch (*1927). I wanted – and still want – to learn more about the relevance of that particular presence for his writing, especially in the context of a Canadian literature seeking to emancipate itself from oppressive models. The first provisional result of my interrogations was submitted to the English Department (Faculty of Arts) at the University of Trier on 23 December 1996 as an M.A. thesis titled "Disguise and Masquerade: On a Genealogy of Identities in / of Robert Kroetsch's Texts." Generally, that study is informed by current theories of postmodernism and, to a lesser degree, postcolonialism and poststructuralism. In particular, it takes recourse to some of the acknowledged influences on Kroetsch and his thinking, notably Michel Foucault (archaeology / genealogy), Roland Barthes (erotics of text and performative reading), Jacques Derrida (speech as a form of writing and language's being impregnated with traces), and Mikhail Bakhtin (the subversive power of the carnivalesque and the dialogic).