SOURCE: “The Carnival of Babel: The Construction of Voice in Robert Kroetsch’s ‘Out West’ Triptych,” in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 39, Fall, 1989, pp. 1-22.

[In the following essay, Ball examines the place and meaning of silence and voice in Kroetsch’s ‘Out West’ series of novels.]

From one so concerned with the multiplicitous nature of voice and the elusiveness of meaning, Robert Kroetsch’s work has displayed a remarkable cohesiveness. As a writer whose many voices include those of poet, novelist, postmodern theorist, and intensely nationalistic critic of Canadian literature, he is also his own best explicator. A Kroetsch essay about an Atwood or Ross novel works equally well as commentary about the author’s own fiction, because of the way ideas echo back and forth. Likewise, his fiction can help unravel his often puzzling theoretical statements.

Kroetsch began his writing career as a novelist, and his most clearly formative period comprised the years 1966 to 1973, when the three novels of his “Out West” triptych—The Words of My Roaring, The Studhorse Man, and Gone Indian—were published. Most of his critical writings and interviews have been produced since then, and almost without exception their themes and assumptions can be traced back to problems tackled by Kroetsch in those three books. The “working-out” process so evident in the triptych is what allows Kroetsch the sure-footedness of the stances that he takes as a critic.

One of the many refrains that echoes through the text of The Words of My Roaring concerns what the novel’s narrator, Johnnie Backstrom, calls “the old dualities” (94). “We confuse beginnings, endings,” he says. “They are so alike so often” (7). The opposition, or duality, of beginnings and endings frustrates Johnnie, as do other dualities. He says to the disembodied voice of Applecart on the radio: “Always the old dualities. When you’re in a tight fix: mind and body, right and wrong. Fill the old grab bag with something for everybody. When you’re cornered: good and evil, black and white, up and down, damnation—” (94). Kroetsch as a critic often expresses concepts in terms of dualities. The two most important of these are founded on the opposition of horse and house, and of Coyote and God. In describing the two pairs, Kroetsch implies that the two sides are necessarily always separate and distinct; the very nature of the oppositions they embody demands it.

The horse-house duality is described in Kroetsch’s essay, “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction”,:

The basic grammatical pair in the story-line (the energy-line) of prairie fiction is house: horse. To be on a horse is to move: motion into distance. To be in a house is to be fixed: a centering unto stasis. Horse is masculine. House is feminine. Horse: house. Masculine: feminine. On: in. Motion: stasis. A woman ain’t supposed to move. Pleasure: duty.

(76)

As a metaphor for oppositions or dualities that occur at the level of plot and characters—that is, on the level of story—horse-house can be called the duality of story.

Kroetsch’s other duality, Coyote-God, can be called the duality of writing, or the duality of book, because it is a metaphor for two different approaches to the creation of a work of art, to the writing down of story. In “Death Is a Happy Ending: A Dialogue in Thirteen Parts (with Diane Bessai),” he proclaims:

the artist him/her self:

in the long run, given the choice of being God or Coyote, will, most mornings, choose to be Coyote:

he lets in the irrational along with the rational, the pre-moral along with the moral. He is a shape-shifter, at least in the limited way of old lady Potter. He is the charlatan-healer, like Felix Prosper, the low-down Buddha-bellied fiddler midwife (him/her) rather than Joyce’s high priest of art.

(209)

Coyote, by letting everything into his art—that is by making it inclusive rather than exclusive, unpredictable rather than familiar, an embodiment of chaos more than order—allows his text to exist “not as artifact but as enabling act” and permit “not meaning but the possibility of meanings” (208). Kroetsch puts the Coyote-God duality into the context of other, specifically Canadian dualities, later in the Bessai dialogue:

The double hook. The total ambiguity that is so essentially Canadian: be it in terms of two solitudes, the bush garden, Jungian opposites, or the raw and cooked binary structures of Levi-Strauss. Behind the multiplying theories of Canadian literature is always the pattern of equally matched opposites.

Coyote : God
Self : Community
Energy : Stasis

(215)

Coyote’s artistic stance becomes one of personal vision (self) as opposed to group vision (community), of energy over stasis. This final pair is significant in its similarity to the motion-stasis element of the horse-house duality. There appears to be some connection between the duality of story and the duality of book.

The most important duality to the story of The Words of My Roaring is established in the opening scene, where Johnnie is set in opposition (both on a real political level, and on a number of symbolic levels) to Doc. The two figures are contrasted through a number of details of appearance and behaviour:

Johnnie : Doc
holes in sleeves : “looks like a million”
parched throat : more water than he needs
perfect teeth : gold teeth
son (first-born) : father
death-manager (endings) : birth-manager (beginnings)
clown : hero
butt of jokes : maker of jokes
big : small
destroyer (Jonah, later) : healer
heavy drinker : light drinker
no money : lots of money
not talking (speechless) : talking

The last of these oppositions, the fact that throughout most of the chapter Doc is talking and Johnnie is silent, is notable in that it introduces Johnnie as a character whose natural state is speechlessness. There are dozens of occasions throughout the novel on which Johnnie is either “struck dumb,” “silent,” or “speechless.” As an undertaker, he says, “Silence is my business, I deal in silence” (23). At one of the many points that he is rendered silent by the presence of Doc’s daughter, Helen, he philosophises, “Speechless we come into this world; speechless we go out. What a hell of a state, to be speechless in between” (56).

However, although Johnnie can be seen as a character whose essential mode is one of speechlessness, he is also a character who grows into speech. When he finally does speak in the opening scene, he promises that it will rain. He has spoken where previously he was silent, given himself a platform where he had none before. He has by these few spontaneous words—and this is borne out by the events of the novel—turned himself from a nobody into a somebody. Throughout the story he is variously struck dumb by large crowds, Helen, Jonah’s death, people’s expectations of him; nevertheless, he also makes several significant speeches to large crowds, at least one to Helen, and manages to speak volumes by silently nodding at the auction for the Model-A. When the prophet speaks and commands a crowd just prior to that auction, Johnnie participates, heckling and asking him to elaborate, speaking quite comfortably instead of awkwardly remaining silent, as he did in the first scene until Doc put him on the spot. Likewise, a comparison of the first of Applecart’s radio speeches, at which Johnnie is the silent link between Applecart’s disembodied voice and the ears of the community, with the second of these, at which Johnnie’s own words are so filled with antagonistic energy that he smashes the radio, cuts off Applecart’s words, and replaces them with his own, reveals Johnnie as a character becoming increasingly less speechless. If he is speaking against the words of others much of the time, he is also speaking against his own silence.

If this is what Johnnie the character is doing on the level of story, it is also what Johnnie the storyteller is doing on the level of book. On this level he is not speechless at all: he speaks the entire book. The style of prose and the rhythms of the language that Johnnie uses to tell his story are those of oral speech. He repeats things, especially descriptions of himself, over and over. A passage like “I’ve got these huge hands. Huge. Positively huge” (162), especially when it comes after countless other passages about the size of his hands, feet, nose, chin, and so on, owes its origin to an oral model of storytelling. Recurring connectives such as “let me tell you” and “I must confess” also encourage the reader to hear Johnnie’s voice as an aural voice. The book can be read as a spoken confession, and as with any confession, the telling of story is as important as the content of the story itself.

In a 1972 interview with Donald Cameron, Kroetsch speaks of “the oral tradition which is the stuff of literature.” This oral tradition, which in Canada often emerges as a regional voice, is “where writers find liberation. What we have to do in Canada is concentrate on hearing this voice that is within us, and trusting it” (85). In Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, he tells how his bilingual parents stopped speaking German the day he was born so he would “be assimilated and totally English-speaking.” As a result, “there’s a sense of guilt in me about that silence that my birth occasioned” (141). When asked in what way language is an ongoing problem for him, Kroetsch says:

I started out with an interest in what I suppose we’d call voice—though it’s a hell of a difficult word to define—voice as a grounding in a speech model as opposed to what I learned to do as a writer of language. … I was very quick at learning this writing-it-down, and again I felt almost guilty at my ability to write out my own speech patterns or voice.

(141–42)

Further in that conversation, Kroetsch returns to the subject:

I have a particular faith, still, in the occasion of speaking, and I have, maybe, more trust of that occasion than the writing I engage in. And, yet, I go on writing, so why? … I suppose I write against systems. … And I write against silence too.

(160)

If writing against silence is what Kroetsch the author is doing, speaking against silence is what his hero, Johnnie Backstrom, is doing, narrating and confessing his story in place of the silence that would be there if he had not done so. On the level of book—the level of telling of story—speaking or writing in place of silence is the same as speaking or writing against silence, since silence is destroyed by that act. That act is also a creation of the self out of silence, which is the same creative act that Johnnie the character performs on the level of story. He creates himself in relation to his community by the act of speaking, beginning with the words, “Mister, how would you like some rain?” (8). There is an unusual correspondence, then, between the level of story and the level of book. On both levels the main event is a voice speaking against silence and creating a self.

This does not mean that the I-creator (Johnnie as narrator) and the I-created (Johnnie as character) have for the first time in the history of first-person narrative become identical. Not only is this theoretically impossible, but Johnnie is not even a particularly reliable narrator. He creates an exaggerated, larger-than-life version of himself, and there are some obvious dislocations between what he tells of himself and what his self-described actions show us, as when he describes himself as “seldom speechless” (73). However, there is an association of the two I’s 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. Words is in fact about this very kind of unity—the bringing together of normally separate things, the resolution of dichotomies or dualities—and in doing this Kroetsch has undone his own interpretation of prairie mythology.

In “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction,” Kroetsch uses horse-house as a metaphor for a duality at the cornerstone of prairie writing. The separateness of horse and house is nothing short of the difference between man and woman—between the male’s typical role of orphan, cowboy, and outlaw, and the female qualities of domesticity, stability, and nurturing. This pairing is never satisfactorily resolved in a way that does not make the man “the diminished hero” and the woman “the more-than-life figure” (80, 81). Two metaphors are used in prairie fiction to represent the failure of male-female unity: the failure of sex and the failure of the dance.

The failure of the male protagonists, at the centre of each book, to enter into the dance, is symptomatic of what is wrong. The women can dance. Their appropriate partners cannot. The harmony suggested by dance—implications of sex, of marriage, of art, of a unified world—all are lost because of the male characters. The males are obedient to versions of self that keep them at a distance—the male as orphan, as cowboy, as outlaw.

(79)

The masculine-feminine (horse-house) duality has another important aspect in Kroetsch’s essay:

We conceive of external space as male, internal space as female. More precisely, the penis: external, expandable, expendable; the vagina: internal, eternal. The maleness verges on mere absence. The femaleness verges on mystery; it is a space that is not a space. External space is the silence that needs to speak, or that needs to be spoken. It is male. The having spoken is the book. It is female. It is closed.

(73–74)

Words breaks down the dualities in a number of ways. Johnnie comes together with Helen through the dance and through sex. As a dancer he is one of the best and most popular in town; and the sex takes place every night for a week in a beautiful, Eden-like garden. Moreover, Johnnie does not need a corresponding female character to speak his silence; he does it himself. In this context he is an embodiment of both male “silence” and of female “having spoken” and “book.” In these various ways Kroetsch is bringing horse and house, male and female, together, and in ways that do not diminish the man’s heroic stature or threaten the integrity of his role as cowboy, orphan, and outlaw. By unifying elements that he has said are not unified in prairie fiction, Kroetsch is writing against the prairie mythology (the “systems”) that he himself has identified.

This is a suitable project for the author, according to Kroetsch in Labyrinths of Voice:

Neuman: The telling of a particular myth in a Kroetsch novel then must be analogous to the act of deconstructing myth itself. It would not be unlike the turning of a particular myth, say the quest myth, into the activity of the writer. …

Kroetsch: That’s right. You tell your way out of the story, in a sense. I think what it really comes down to is that we are entrapped in those mythic stories; we can surrender to them or we can tell our way out. …

(96)

Kroetsch’s purpose in Words can be seen as the deconstruction of the systems that have defined prairie literature, through the integration of dualities that have always defined a separateness. The horse-house duality of story breaks down when we have a male character achieving union with the feminine world through dance, sex (albeit on an illicit level) and, most importantly, by speaking his own silence. This process of constructing a voice out of silence is accomplished by Johnnie as a character (on the level of story) and as a narrator (telling his story on the level of book); form and content are thus neatly aligned. What about the duality of book? Kroetsch presents Coyote-God as a metaphor for two choices, two different artistic stances, but a degree of integration occurs here as well. Johnnie, by the end of the novel, has found a way to integrate the anarchy of self with the order of community. Remaining himself, he has moved from the periphery to the centre, from outlaw to hero. As teller of his own story, he is both the trickster as author and the author as high priest (in the sense of proclaimer). And by turning the rhythms of oral storytelling into words on a page, Kroetsch and Johnnie have both integrated the ephemeral, spontaneous spoken word with the permanent, ordered written word.

As for Johnnie’s favourite duality of beginnings and endings, at the end of the book (which is also the end of his existence on the level of book), he is at the beginning of a speech. That closing speech begins where his opening speech ended, with the word “Rain” (211). On the level of story, Johnnie is, at this point, at the true beginning of speech—full, confident, resolved speech (even if the speech he is making is still in his head, and is therefore silent). On the level of book, the end is the first time since the beginning that Johnnie has stopped talking and become silent. The end is thus both the beginning of speech and the beginning of silence.

There is a neatness to Words, an order brought on by this knitting together of dualities, that Kroetsch undoes in the second and third novels of his “Out West” triptych. Writing and speaking, protagonist and narrative voice: these pairs of ingredients are as likely to form a violent concoction as a smooth and tasteful blend in The Studhorse Man and Gone Indian. In “The Exploding Porcupine: Violence of Form in English-Canadian Fiction,” a 1980 essay that can be read as a postmodern manifesto, Kroetsch writes:

The theory of answers, for us, is a dangerous one. We must resist endings, violently. And so we turn from content to the container; we turn from the tale to the telling. It is form itself, traditional form, that forces resolution. In our most ambitious writing, we do violence by doing violence to form.

(191)

If Words is the closest the triptych comes to “traditional form,” and Johnnie’s beginning-into-speech an ambiguous but nevertheless definite “resolution,” a comparison of Kroetsch’s treatments of two parallel incidents in Words and Gone Indian suggests what he might mean by more “ambitious” writing.

A tragic accident occurs in the first novel when the rodeo clown mistimes his jump away from a charging bull, gets caught, is severely mangled, and dies. In Gone Indian a similarly carnivalesque occasion (the ice festival) is the site of the cowboy’s ski-jumping accident; he lands on his head, but all we are told of his fate is three rumours: he’s dead, he’s in hospital and “silly in the rafters” (78), or he’s fine but being paid to keep a low profile. Kroetsch gives the clown scene in Words a definite resolution, the ultimate closure of death. He also gives it meaning: it becomes the motivation for Johnnie’s “first major speech” and the first time he shows himself “a leader” (108). In Gone Indian, however, the cowboy’s accident is both unresolved and without a clear significance: we are not told its outcome, and the sum total of its related effect on Jeremy is that he is “left alone again” (77). It happens, and then is over, forgotten, because something else is happening. It becomes just another incident, no more or less meaningful than any other. We ask, “What happened?” but where we look for resolution, Kroetsch has given us silence; where we look for a single voice, a single answer, he has given us several. “The ultimate violence that might to done to story is silence” (192), Kroetsch says in “The Exploding Porcupine.” The cowboy’s ending has not been, and never will be, spoken in terms of traditional narrative. Jeremy’s fate at the end of the novel is likewise unresolved.

Using Kroetsch’s ideas and language, this resistance to closure might be called the silence of the ending that is not spoken. But this would assume that a definitive ending does exist, and has simply not been put into words. Alternatively, the endings that are put into words—the three rumours about the cowboy and Madham’s speculations regarding Jeremy’s disappearance—can be considered to be all that really exists. This is to accept the primacy of text and the inseparability of story from its manifestation as text. Kroetsch often refers to Babel in critical writings and conversations; a world whose language has been confounded into languages he sees as a desirable dwelling place for a Canadian writer.¹ In Labyrinths of Voice he calls the Babel myth “a great thing, one of the greatest things that has happened to mankind. From the Tower of Babel all of a sudden, we gain all the languages we have” (116). Further on he says:

I have learned a little more clearly that to go from metaphor to metonymy is to go from the temptation of the single to the allure of multiplicity. Instead of the temptations of “origin” we have genealogies that multiply our connections into the past, into the world.

(117)

In the context of Babel, Kroetsch’s multiple-choice endings are a natural response to a chaotic world whose meaning is not reducible to single answers, to simple resolutions. There are too many voices to be heard. Where Words presents a single voice, a single character, in a process of becoming that can be traced back to a single origin (“Mister, how would you like some rain?”), the older Kroetsch of The Studhorse Man and Gone Indian does real violence to traditional form not so much through silence as through an increased willingness to let loose the voices of Babel.

These voices creep in innocuously enough in The Studhorse Man. The novel’s opening reads like third-person narration focusing on a protagonist, but in the fourth paragraph the voice is revealed as an I-narrator. At this point the reader’s incipient sense of story is displaced; by definition this will be more than just Hazard’s story. And while this I-narrator, later identified as Demeter Proudfoot, self-appointed biographer of Hazard Lepage, remains the voice that speaks to the reader directly, this apparent singularity is deceiving. For unlike the simplicity of Johnnie Backstrom telling his own story with his own voice, Demeter is a man of many voices, and the story he tells is both his own and that of an other.

Demeter has a strong voice but not a consistent one. As a biographer he simultaneously believes himself to be presenting an “extremely objective account of the life of one good man” (145) and, now and then, “straying from the mere facts” (12), allowing himself, “of necessity, [to] be interpretive upon occasion” (18). He prides himself on research that enables him to list every object on Hazard’s bookshelves (9–10) and finds him measuring railway ties at a railway station (24); yet he admits, at one crucial point, that “I have not the foggiest notion how the two men got out of their fix” (99), and at another that he must infer material at a point “where I neglected to make notes, having somehow lost my pencil” (113). Such apparently contradictory approaches to his biographical “obligation” (61) highlight both Demeter’s own deficiencies as narrator, and the impossibility of any biographer presenting a complete, truthful, and “objective” account of someone’s life. The difference between Demeter and most biographers is that Demeter speaks not only in the voice of storyteller but also as commentator on the necessarily creative act of storytelling that biography is.

A number of other people’s voices speak through Demeter’s unifying voice. On the level of story, just as Doc Murdoch, Helen, and others speak through Johnnie’s narrative in Words, Hazard, Utter, and Martha are voices speaking through Demeter’s narrative. But while, on the level of book, or telling of story, Johnnie’s only research is his own experience, Demeter’s research is eclectic, and is affected by a number of voices both inside and outside the story of Hazard’s life. Demeter’s primary research appears to be several conversations he had with Hazard on the Eshpeter Ranch, most of which are preserved in note form. Other voices that inform Demeter’s narrative are those of Lady Eshpeter (who, being blind, describes scenes based on what she remembers overhearing), Martha, and of course Demeter’s own voice describing his experiences in the sections where his life overlaps with Hazard’s. Even the doctor who steals the chapters on Demeter’s theory of nakedness (98) is a voice: while only present as an absence, his is a censoring voice that nevertheless affects the way story becomes book.

Demeter’s narrative style also reflects a multiplicity that Johnnie’s, rooted as it is in oral confession, does not. Demeter’s voice is flexible, allowing him to sound on one page like a dreamy philosopher (“Is the truth of the beast in the flesh and confusion or in the few skillfully arranged lines?” [134]), and on another like a precision-minded scientist (“The space between must be filled with water that has been heated to a temperature of not less than 105°F. and not more than 115°F.” [137]). When describing Martha’s naked moonlit body his writing is so full of stock phrases (“the round perfection of her belly,” “her long and creamy thighs,” “my hard longing,” “my savage pleasure” [65]) that Demeter seems, for a page or two, to have co-opted an entire language, one drawn from an established subliterary tradition. Likewise a chase scene is described by Demeter (who was not there) with all the hilarious detail of a comic Keystone Cops-style film, blatantly copying that story model with all of its usual conventions fully intact:

The chase was on. Hazard galloped his horses through the city streets, yelled at, pursued, condemned, the milkwagon jumping over sidewalks and streetcar tracks, the load of milk bottles spilling out to become white telltale blotches on the snow. Policemen appeared from nowhere, a pair at this corner, a pair in that doorway. Streets became blind alleys. A track through the snow became a snowbank. “Stop! Stop him! Stop!” people yelled, standing motionless in swirls of powdered snow. “Stop that man!” a policeman ordered to a poor chap who had just driven his car into a lamppost. “Stop him!” two women pleaded when he galloped over their grocery cart behind a Safeway store. But, luckily, Hazard ran into a troop movement. The column of marching soldiers came between him and two dozen pursuers, and the soldiers, lacking a command, would not break rank. They would not stop.

(43–44)

Typically, Demeter drops this borrowed voice after the one paragraph, but not before the reader has been shown that his narrative owes as much to a fictional storytelling tradition as to a biographical one.

Other voices used in the text include the archaic and intrusive “Dear reader” addresses, the hockey-announcer voice that Demeter briefly tries on (122–23), and the voice of a biblical genealogical tradition that informs the history of the Lepage stallion (71–72). This jumble of languages and voice that Demeter employs, and that speaks through him and his research, is revealed gradually throughout the novel. The reader begins with no awareness that there is a narrator; once he makes himself known, the narrator is assumed to be reliable. Even his early discussions of the necessity to combine recording of facts with interpretation sound innocent enough. But as the elements of memory, on-the-spot research, note-taking, interviews with different participants, censorship, interpretation, guesswork, omissions, borrowed languages, and personal theorizing become apparent, the reader is forced to recognize contradictions. As the central figure and primary source of research, Hazard, next to Demeter, has the most prominent voice in the book, yet when Hazard’s memory of P. Cockburn differs from what Demeter’s study turns up (31), the reader must confront the unreliability of memory, and therefore of many of the “facts” in the book. Hazard, who tells his story to Demeter, is an unreliable narrator: his memory is inaccurate, and occasionally during their sessions he is so unwell that he can only “grunt and shake his head” (108–09). Demeter, who tells the story to us, is unreliable by definition if Hazard is, but he is also writing the story with incomplete and eclectic research, some twenty years after the events it describes, and from a madhouse.

Kroetsch, in a Canadian Fiction Magazine interview (1977), was asked if he liked unreliable narrators:

I might take the extreme position that there are no “correct” accounts. My narrators are simply like people in life—each one is of necessity an unreliable narrator. I—and the reader—have to hear something of the nature of that unreliability.

(44)

For the reader of The Studhorse Man, hearing that unreliability involves more than just accepting that the traditional unity of narrative has been undermined by a proliferation of voices. The reader must also witness the complete subversion of biographical form. The first major passage in which the rules of biography are broken occurs when Demeter abruptly shifts from Hazard’s story back some years to the erotic description of his own personal experience of spying on a naked Martha. This scene has nothing to do with Hazard, but has profound significance for Demeter himself. It is an event that, at the time, made him speechless: “I could find no voice to answer with. My very wanting had choked me into silence” (65). Like Johnnie in Words, however, Demeter is here giving voice to his own silence, speaking his own speechlessness. Significantly, this is the point in the novel at which he first tells the reader his name. As such it is a turning point: throughout the rest of the novel Demeter increasingly brings himself into the story, and describes from his own perspective incidents involving both himself and Hazard, to a point where, as Kroetsch puts it, “He starts to see himself as the hero as he sits in the bathtub writing the book” (“Interview” 39).

Demeter writes against the silence that his relatives, by institutionalizing him, have imposed. By turning the story of another man’s life into the story of his own, he defines himself, not just as a being, but as a kind of coyote trickster figure who achieves a peculiar version of integration completely different from Johnnie Backstrom’s speaking himself into union with his community. Demeter, alone in his bathtub, is both the epitome of house (stasis) as opposed to horse (motion), and of self (nonconformity, isolation) as opposed to community (integration). The old dualities have remained separate; yet, as Kroetsch explains, “Demeter literally gets himself together by putting those two figures—Hazard and himself—together” (Labyrinths 173). By speaking himself into existence as “D. Proud-foot, Studhorse Man” (156), he achieves a personal integration that is completely self-contained, and he does it through nothing more or less than an act of narrative.

Kroetsch has said one of his interests in writing the “Out West” triptych was the “questioning of narrative itself” (“Interview” 44). Narrative in The Studhorse Man turns out to be a slippery, often deceptive thing: omnipresent, its origins and purposes are not always apparent, and as a tool its powers can be employed towards virtually anyone’s personal agenda. While Demeter’s manipulation of narrative is both more obvious and more benign than Madham’s in Gone Indian, the fact that he usurps the hero’s role and deconstructs the reader’s expectations of the biographical form makes his use of narrative powerfully disarming. As an inheritor of the post-Babel world, the reader must recognize the multiplicity of voices and languages that may speak through a single voice, and the fuzziness of the boundaries between fictional and factual storytelling. When Kroetsch, through Demeter, says that Hazard is “terrified of history” (33), the reader may be tempted by the double entendre of history: his story. When story and history blur together and narrative forces an “objective account of the life of one good man” off the rails, the discomfited reader may indeed find the process terrifying.

For Kroetsch, this is the challenge that he sets the reader, the challenge of participation:

I’m interested in sharing with the reader the fact that I’m making a fiction. One of the assumptions of the old style realism is that the novel isn’t a fiction. Verisimilitude, the text-books demand. And I’m no longer interested in that. I want the reader to be engaged with me in fiction making. I work a reader pretty hard, I guess, in that I want him to enter into the process with me.

(“Interview” 42)

The reader in effect becomes another voice informing the narrative, which is an appropriate role given Kroetsch’s belief in the ubiquitousness of the storytelling impulse:

Go to any kitchen table at which there are more than three people assembled—People tell stories and in that sense use narrative to construct a reality. … Of course, they work in a very short form. The oral story-teller probably has less impulse to “deconstruct” his inherited conventions. … I think some of the conventions of fiction control too much our way of seeing the world. It starts to get interesting when you take those conventions and both use them and work against them.

(“Interview” 39)

Kroetsch’s development of this deconstructive approach through the “Out West” trilogy can be examined in the context of the relationship between oral and written storytelling. In Words, there is a direct correspondence between Johnnie’s spoken confession and the words on the page; there is one narrative and one voice. In The Studhorse Man, Demeter uses oral accounts of Hazard’s life provided by several people as part of his research, but these reminiscences often prove incomplete or inaccurate. Ultimately all such material must be filtered through the writer’s memory, his ability to take notes, his tendency to pursue tangents, and his personal reasons for writing the story in the first place. For this reason, the oral raw material and the “portentous volume” (175) that results from it may in some places directly correspond and in others deviate wildly, but with only one source of information (i.e., Demeter), and a fictional one at that, the reader cannot investigate the “truth” of such matters. In Gone Indian the oral raw material is presented directly, in the form of transcriptions. However, the primacy of Jeremy’s version of events is undercut in a number of ways. He takes the tape recorder on his journey not to fulfill a storytelling impulse—after all, he is talking to a machine, and therefore more to himself than to his absent audience of one—but rather acting on “instructions” from Madham and as a substitute for writing, because of “his inability to get things down on paper” (1). Upon transcription his oral account—his voice—is edited, commented upon, criticized, speculated upon, and roughly half of it is completely rewritten. Madham, who admits from the outset that he feels “under no obligation to explain anything” (1), takes possession of Jeremy’s story and uses it as a vehicle to construct, or at least reinforce, his own reality. By abandoning even the illusion of a single voice, Kroetsch takes his deconstruction of the conventional novel even further than he did in The Studhorse Man.

The purpose of this deconstructive approach is not, however, to do violence to form for its own sake. For Kroetsch it is part of a grander scheme in which the artist in a new country must, as he has most recently expressed it, “relate that newly evolving identity to its inherited or ‘given’ names” by holding “those names in suspension, to let identity speak itself out of a willed namelessness” (“Canadian Writing” 127). The concept of unnaming in order to name, first articulated by Kroetsch in his 1974 essay, “Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction,” is necessitated by the absence in Canada of an indigenous literary tradition:

The Canadian writer’s particular predicament is that he works with a language, within a literature, that appears to be authentically his own, and not a borrowing. But just as there was in the Latin word a concealed Greek experience, so there is in the Canadian word a concealed other experience, sometimes British, sometimes American.

(43)

If our language is inherited from elsewhere, then so must be the forms in which our language is ordered, expressed. Establishing a new literature requires not only finding a new language but new forms and structures to house it. The first step, however, for the writer setting out to “uninvent the world” (“Unhiding” 43) is to represent it symbolically through some form of unnaming engaged in by a character. In the three novels examined in “Unhiding the Hidden,” Atwood’s Surfacing, Davies’s The Manticore, and Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear, the process is represented in story as, respectively, a stripping away of the earthly artifacts (including clothes) that contain the past, a retreat into a cave, and the victimization of a native tribe. On the level of book, Kroetsch as storyteller increasingly deconstructs traditional (and therefore inherited) novelistic forms in the three “Out West” novels. On the level of story he demonstrates the complete cycle of unnaming and renaming only in the final book of the triptych, Gone Indian.

Unlike the initially silent Johnnie Backstrom who creates himself out of nothing by telling his own story, and unlike Demeter who creates himself out of someone else’s story, Jeremy Sadness must go through an unnaming—a loss of a previous identity—before he can be renamed. He begins his journey (paradoxically) as an American graduate student, with a name, an identity, and a two-part mission: to attend a job interview in Alberta, and to follow an innate impulse toward the frontier. Immediately upon arrival in Edmonton he loses his suitcase, a physical loss of identity that is also psychological: “Just for a moment, Professor, I couldn’t remember my name. For a fatal moment my stumbling, ossified, PhD-seeking mind was a clean sheet” (7). The sheet-cleaning process continues as Jeremy accepts the new identity thrust on him, misses his job interview, and buys a new set of clothes even after he has found his own suitcase. But the renaming that goes on initially—Jeremy as Roger Dorck, Jeremy as Winter King—only creates interim identities, as Jeremy becomes even further removed from his former self. The final abandonment—the final unnaming—occurs during the snowshoe race, and is symbolized by Jeremy’s discarding his jacket (and his keys). Just prior to this he has begun renaming his environment to suit the new identity he is preparing to take on, unhiding hidden things that he wants to see:

I dodged around a crater in the snow; a dip, I decided, that must conceal a buffalo wallow. A lone tree in the distance was a rubbing tree. I decided that too. Buffalo trails, deep ruts in the hidden earth, came down through the coulees, down to the slow river and the salt licks and the water. I swear I could smell the blood of a buffalo jump: right there in those hills the Cree and Blackfoot drove the unknown herds to a fatal leap.

(85)

At the end of the race Jeremy is mistaken for an Indian, and cannot identify himself otherwise because “I would not speak. For if I had tried, it would have been a tongue I did not understand” (93). Having unnamed himself, he has lost language; at this point in the cycle all of the languages of Babel are possible, but none has been claimed. Jeremy then meets Daniel Beaver and his wife, who assist him in his transformation into Indian (he already has braids at this point) by supplying moccasins and a leather jacket with fringes. In a dream Jeremy sees himself as an Indian warrior, and undergoes a renaming by Poundmaker, from “Antelope Standing Still” to “Has-Two-Chances.” In another dream he becomes a buffalo. So obsessed is he with his new identities that when called upon to fulfill a previously named role, that of beauty contest judge, he deconstructs the entire ritual by naming Jill, instead of one of the contestants, as Winter Queen.

The renaming of Jeremy Sadness into a multitude of identities—Roger Dorck, Has-Two-Chances, Buffalo, Grey Owl, and even vestiges of the former self that he never completely leaves behind—suggests that the uninvention of the world can open up a number of possibilities. Madham defines this as a “consequence of the northern prairies” and calls it “the diffusion of personality into a complex of possibilities rather than a concluded self” (152). In terms of Canadian literature, this means that a writer who peels away the layers of inherited languages and literary traditions to get to the silence of an unnamed world can build in a number of directions of top of that foundation. The languages that emerge may be as multiplicitous as those of Babel, but they will be the writer’s own. In “Canadian Writing: No Name Is My Name,” a recent essay that continues the work of “Unhiding the Hidden,” Kroetsch says:

It may well be that the villain (namelessness) turns out to be the hero in the story of the Canadian story. The nameless figure who seems to threaten us may in fact be leading us to high ground. To avoid a name does not … deprive one of an identity; indeed, it may offer a plurality of identities.

(128)

To what does this world of multiple possibilities lead? In general, it leads to an avoidance of simple answers or conclusions, to an approach to writing that “resist[s] endings, violently” (“Exploding” 191). In Gone Indian specifically, it means resistance to closure, resistance to an ending that would force more precise definition. Jeremy’s trip to Notikeewin does not so much end as become displaced from the present into the past, into history. Jeremy, in all of his various identities, moves from being a voice (or voices) present on the open prairie to being a silent absence. The writing down of a world of possibilities involves the recognition and expression of chaos, resisting the usual tendency of narrative to act as an ordering mechanism upon the chaos that is out there in the world of experience. When narrative itself evokes chaos, a number of changes must be made to the traditional roles of reader, writer, and text. What a world of multiple possibilities leads to, then, on the level of book, is a breaking down of established orders, of traditional roles and hierarchies. On the level of story Kroetsch has a metaphor for this: the carnival.

In a 1982 essay entitled “Carnival and Violence: A Meditation,” Kroetsch takes his interpretation of the carnival from the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin:

“One might say that carnival celebrated liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.”

(111)

In the world of carnival, the division between performer and spectator breaks down, and without the distancing properties of established order, a kind of chaos reigns. The carnival is a communal, participatory event, allowing “‘the free, familiar contact among people’” (114). Without hierarchies, identities are lost; the participants are temporarily unnamed and may create whatever identity they like and wear it as a mask. For Kroetsch,

carnival rejoices not in our completeness but in our incompleteness; the mask allows us to partake of several possibilities; we are allowed to cross boundaries; we can at once be serious and mocking, be ourselves and caricature other, be others and criticize ourselves.

(“Carnival” 116)

In all three “Out West” novels a version of carnival serves as a focal event, and as a turning point in the progress of the central character. In Words Johnnie moves from confused speechlessness during the search for Jonah’s body, even though “A compulsion to talk was storming inside me,” (75), to the confidence of his first big speech where “I didn’t so much speak as roar” (108), by finding himself at the centre of attention at two successive carnivals. The auction, where he heckles the prophet’s speech but does nothing more constructive than bid ＄128 that he does not have for the Model-A, is a kind of prelude to the next day’s rodeo. (Later that day he talks back to Applecart on the radio, and makes brief stabs at speeches, but to an audience of none.) The second and more important carnival-like event is the rodeo, at which the clown’s accidental death motivates Johnnie’s highly successful “hind-tit speech” (114). Johnnie, who has recently been saying “Sometimes it seems that chaos is the only order” (101), uses the bewildered chaos of the crowd after the accident as an opportunity: he orders the crowd behind him with a spontaneous speech that will unify them, and him with them. He creates his own role, and fulfills it, undergoing a kind of renewal in this carnivalesque environment.

In The Studhorse Man the wedding is the carnival. Traditionally a symbol of unity, order, and renewal, the wedding in this case is also Demeter’s first appearance in the main plot (i.e., the story of Hazard), and the first time Hazard and Demeter have come together in the same place. Apart from the one earlier diversion where he describes his peeping-tom experience with Martha, this is the first extended scene in which the story is told from Demeter’s perspective. It is, therefore, the beginning of Demeter’s transition from biographer to subject, and of the transition in narrative method from a researched story to a lived one. The further integration of Hazard and Demeter that has occurred by the end of the novel is begun here; this is where Demeter really starts to wear the mask he has been playing with off and on.

The carnival as event and metaphor is most prominent in Gone Indian. It is during the winter festival that Jeremy discards his jacket and keys, symbolically reducing his identity to a void from which he can recreate himself freely. Identities that are imposed on him, especially the identity of Dorck and the consequent role of beauty contest judge, he now has the ability to reject: given a choice of three identical possibilities he steps outside and makes up his own rules, thereby reinventing the roles of Winter King and Winter Queen. The identities that he embraces are those he chooses, and in a carnival world he not only can do that, he can get away with it.

While rodeos, weddings, and festivals are the most likely sources of the carnivalesque spirit, the environment of liberation from order and rebirth into multiple possibilities is itself situated within a larger place. In “Carnival and Violence: A Meditation,” Kroetsch says: “I grew up in a rural part of Western Canada, where a trace of carnival, if not the carnivalization of literature, was vital and alive. We measured time by wedding dances and sports days and rodeos” (120). The prairie, as the setting for the “Out West” novels, is the home of their carnivals. Kroetsch comes close to identifying the carnivalesque with the prairie itself when he quotes Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The significance of the Frontier in American History” as the epigraph to Gone Indian: “For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant.” If the prairie as frontier—as new place, as the boundary between known and unknown—is a natural location for the becoming world of carnival, it also is a natural metaphor for the larger place of which it is a part: the new, becoming country of Canada with its new, becoming literature.

In the essay, “On Being an Alberta Writer,” Kroetsch discusses his disillusionment when, as a young boy, his father told him that the place he was playing in was a buffalo wallow:

What buffalo? I asked. … When? From where? … Even at that young age I was secure in the illusion that the land my parents and grandparents homesteaded had had no prior occupants, animal or human. Ours was the ultimate tabula rasa. We were the truly innocent.

(218)

This experience, Kroetsch says, was “how I first began to be skeptical of the writing that I read” (218). That writing, suddenly, was rendered less pure when the land was revealed as being contaminated by previous users. Neither the place called home nor the writing that came from it had been formed from first principles. This early realization indicates two important assumptions of Kroetsch’s own writing. First, writing springs from a sense of place: the writing that comes from a place (such as the prairies) will be the writing of that place. Second, a tabula rasa, or blank slate, is a solid and desirable place to begin putting something—a home, an identity, a literature. These assumptions form the intuitive foundation upon which Kroetsch as critic and novelist derives many of his concepts: Jeremy’s need to strip off old identities before taking on new ones, the notion of unnaming in order to name, the attraction of carnival with its promise of renewal through the abandoning of structures. But perhaps most important, the reality of the prairie and the attraction of the blank slate that he thought he knew taught Kroetsch about the significance of silence, a silence that, he says, is most noticeable when it stems from an absence, an abandonment: “I responded to those discoveries of absence, to that invisibility, to that silence, by knowing I had to make up a story. Our story” (“On Being” 219).

Note

1. For example, see the last paragraph of Kroetsch’s “Beyond Nationalism: A Prologue.”

Works Cited

Kroetsch, Robert. “Beyond Nationalism: A Prologue.” The Canadian Literary Scene in Global Perspective. Spec. issue of Mosaic 14.2 (1981): v-xi. (Rpt. in Essays 83–89.)

———. “Canadian Writing: No Name Is My Name.” The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels: Contemporary Canadian Perspectives. Ed. David Staines, Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1986. 116–28.

———. “Carnival and Violence: A Meditation.” Essays 111–22.

———, and Diane Bessai. “Death Is a Happy Ending: A Dialogue in Thirteen Parts.” Figures in a Ground: Canadian Essays on Modern Literature Collected in Honor of Sheila Watson. Ed. Diane Bessai and David Jackel. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie, 1978. 206–15.

———. “The Exploding Porcupine: Violence of Form in English-Canadian Fiction.” Violence in the Canadian Novel Since 1960. Ed. Terry Goldie and Virginia Harger-Grinling. St. John’s: Memorial U of Newfoundland, 1980. 191–99. (Rpt. in Essays 57–64.)

———. “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space.” Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature. Ed. Dick Harrison, Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1978. 73–83. (Rpt. in Essays 47–55.)

———. Gone Indian, Toronto: new, 1973.

———. “An Interview with Robert Kroetsch.” With Geoff Hancock. Canadian Fiction Magazine 24–25 (1977): 33–52.

———. “On Being an Alberta Writer: Or, I Wanted to Tell Our Story.” The New Provinces: Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1905–1980. Ed. Howard Palmer and Donald Smith. Vancouver: Tantalus, 1980. 217–27. (Rpt. in Essays 69–80.)

———. “Robert Kroetsch: The American Experience and the Canadian Voice.” Conversations with Canadian Novelists. Vol. 1. With Donald Cameron. Toronto: Macmillan, 1973. 81–95. 2 vols.

———. Robert Kroetsch: Essays. Ed. Frank Davey and bp Nichol. Spec. issue of Open Letter 5th ser. 4 (1983).

———. The Studhorse Man. Toronto: Macmillan, 1969.

———. “Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 3.3 (1974): 43–45. (Rpt. in Essays 17–21.)

———. The Words of My Roaring. Toronto: Macmillan, 1966.

Neuman, Shirley, and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Western Canadian Literary Documents Series 3. Edmonton: NeWest, 1982.