SOURCE: “There's No Business Like Snow Business: Narrative Voice in Robert Kroetsch's Gone Indian,” in Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction, edited by Jeanne Delbaere, November 29-December 1, 1989, pp. 202-16.

[In the following essay, Thieme discusses Gone Indian as a post-modernist retelling of the frontier story.]

In Gone Indian (1973), the second novel in Robert Kroetsch’s ‘Out West’ triptych, an American graduate student, Jeremy Sadness, journeys to Edmonton for an interview for an academic post, which he never attends. On arrival at Edmonton Airport he is immediately confronted by a notion of alternative identity and what is referred to as ‘the possibility of transformation’,¹ when he finds that the suitcase he has claimed is not his own, but that of one Roger Dorck, a barrister and solicitor resident in a town called Notikeewin. Strip-searched along with a character he initially labels ‘the world’s most beautiful blonde’ (p. 8), but who proves to be a transvestite, Jeremy quickly concludes ‘This is a peculiar land. … Illusion is rife’ (p. 8) and this episode proves to be a pattern for his numerous subsequent encounters with fluid or overlapping identities. The switching of suitcases suggests that Roger Dorck may be an alter ego for Jeremy, but this is only one of a number of possible alternative roles available to him. Accepting a lift to Notikeewin from a returning rodeo-circuit rider, Jeremy is struck by the white emptiness of the terrain through which he is driven and it seems that the signifying systems of his eastern academic upbringing are being confounded by the mirage-like quality of the prairie winter landscape. On arrival in Notikeewin his habitual modes of perception are further dislocated as he is plunged into the carnivalesque world of the town’s annual winter festival, at which Dorck (the name is slang for ‘phallus’,² suggesting a Rabelaisian carnivalesque subversion³), who has suffered a snowmobile accident and is now comatose in the local hospital, was to preside as king.

Jeremy speculates that Notikeewin may be a Cree or Blackfoot word (p. 12) and in fact the name derives from the Cree ‘nolnigiwin-sipi’ which means ‘fighting river’.⁴ This is highly appropriate as the setting for a text which not only accords the mock-epic games of the winter festival (a kind of northwestern equivalent of Homeric or Virgilian games) a central role,⁵ but one which locates itself at the site of conflicting discourses. Jeremy is himself torn between different discursive systems: he is a product of his scholarly training, in which myth criticism appears to have played an important part, but frequently rebels against academe, opposing its language with a youthful, phallogocentric discourse; and he has ‘dreamed northwest’ (p. 6), availed himself of a particular version of the Frontier myth centred on the figure of the Englishman Archie Belaney who reinvented himself as ‘the truest Indian of them all’ (p. 80), Grey Owl.⁶ Inherent in Belaney’s transformation of self is the notion of the journey west as a journey to new beginnings⁷ and it is no coincidence that some of Jeremy’s abortive attempts at writing his doctoral dissertation have begun with a focus on the archetypal westward journey to the Americas, that undertaken by Columbus himself. The myth of western freedom and renewal is further underscored by Gone Indian’s epigraph, ‘For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant’ (p. [vii]), which is taken from the classic American text in the formulation of the myth of the Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’.⁸ Within the novel a Tristan and Iseult parallel—Jeremy is sent to Edmonton by his supervisor, Professor Mark Madham, just as Tristan is sent to Ireland by King Mark⁹—provides another variation on the pattern of westward journeying.

However, in this latter-day version of the Columbus quest, Canada has become the Promised Land, has taken over the role of the place of potential renewal and references to western mythologies are compounded with allusions to polar exploration: at various points Jeremy’s journey is likened to those of Scott (p. 40), Ross in search of the lost Franklin (p. 57) and a member of Shackleton’s expedition (p. 124). The Canadian northwest is envisaged as the contemporary Frontier, the place where ‘the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant’ and Edmonton is referred to as ‘that last city on the far, last edge of our civilization’ (p. 6). Such a conception is, of course, like all versions of place, no more than a mental construct, but it is not one which is peculiar to the text. It can be related to a contemporary collective perception of the city, which is most evident in the coming together of those two quintessential latter-day expressions of the American Dream, the shopping mall and the theme park, in the form of West Edmonton Mall, reputedly the world’s largest shopping centre and a place of northwestern pilgrimage on the Canadian ‘far, last edge’ which even includes a replica of Columbus’s ship the Santa Maria as one of its central exhibits.

Gone Indian is, however, concerned with far more than a simple cultural re-reading of the myth of the Frontier in which the Canadian northwest has become the borderline place where new beginnings are possible. It is, even more obviously than the two previous volumes in the ‘Out West’ triptych, The Words of My Roaring (1966) and The Studhorse Man (1969), a postmodernist work which foregrounds signifying practices and constructs the Frontier as much as a site of liberation from prevalent discursive systems, among which academic analysis and legal and quasi-legal judgement are particularly prominent, as an actual geographical locus at which some kind of physical emancipation occurs. In Aritha van Herk’s words, Gone Indian is ‘a novel about the transformation of the novel, what happens to the old (academic) order when the postmodern writer attacks it’.¹⁰ Jeremy Sadness’s journey into the Alberta park lands becomes an initiation into a blank tabula rasa-like world, in which language breaks down and the text repeatedly associates the snow-shrouded landscape with death and silence, with a pre- (or post-?) linguistic world in which the distinctions of language that create the sense of discrete identity, whether for people, objects or concepts, dissolve into an undifferentiated primeval (or apocalyptic?) mass. As in other Kroetsch novels’,¹¹ this world is associated with animal identity—particularly with the buffalo, but also with several other Canadian animals such as the beaver, bear, rabbit and owl; it is associated with Plains Indian identity, with a pure, Edenic-like lovemaking¹² and, most prominently of all in Gone Indian, with the all-enveloping snow in which Jeremy repeatedly finds himself immersed.

‘Snow’ is a signifier that particularly characterizes the northern, Canadian world, and comments in two other Canadian novels of the 1970s provide an interesting context for the way in which it is used in Gone Indian. Both Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) stress the importance of words for ‘snow’ in Inuit culture. In Surfacing the unnamed narrator/protagonist bemoans the inadequacy of the English word ‘love’ for describing the complex range of emotions evoked by it and reflects that ‘the Eskimoes had fifty-two names for snow’,¹³ which has a similar, central importance in their culture. The Diviners echoes this, putting the count of ‘eskimo’ words for ‘snow’ at a more modest twenty-five and attributing this number to the Inuit need to be able to distinguish between different varieties of the substance in order to survive.¹⁴ One might argue that even in the English-Canadian context there is a need for a range of signifiers to provide some kind of account of the multiplicity of forms that the element can take: the blanket term ‘snow’ offers no opportunities for making distinctions amid this plurality. On one level, then, ‘snow’ provides an index of a complex, polymorphous phenomenon being strait-jacketed within a single, monolithic pattern of signification; ‘snow’ reduces multi-voiced disparate identity into univocal simplism. On another level Gone Indian suggests that this abnegation of differentiation offers liberation from ‘the old (academic) order’. Jeremy Sadness’s entry into the snow carnival world can be read as involving a loss of identity, a symbolic death, but such a death simultaneously offers the possibility of rebirth into a new identity—comparable with Archie Belaney’s metamorphosis into Grey Owl—and an alternative universe of discourse, which is associated with a Plains Indian sensibility. A comment by Kroetsch in Labyrinths of Voice, his book-length, deconstructed interview with Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, elaborates on this:

To go Indian: an ambiguous phrase: to become released or wild in the carnival sense. And I was playing that off against the professor (Madham) and graduate student (Sadness)—people who are into the whole notion of control … ordering, explaining. It is their extreme movement from the professorial stance into carnival that interested me. Sadness arrives in a carnival: he is both released and realized by that: he is completed by that, even by the loss of identity and the shift into a new identity by accident, by the mixing of life and death that takes place, the kind of phallic connection. So the carnivalization is what? It’s happening to the characters and it’s happening to the novel. It’s double.¹⁵

According to one possible version of Jeremy’s eventual fate, offered in the closing pages of the text, he actually succeeds in finally realizing his Grey Owl fantasy. This account is disputed, but even the main alternative possibility has him dying/disappearing into a new identity as he leaps from a high-level railway bridge in the middle of a snowstorm.¹⁶

So ‘snow’ functions in Gone Indian both as the prime element of the winter festival world and as an index of the process of carnivalization which the novel itself is undergoing, the process in which the ostensible plot, a comic reworking of the ‘monomyth’ quest paradigm, outlined by Joseph Campbell¹⁷ and others, is being subverted. But ‘snow’ is also important in another sense: the narrative is a protracted snow-job, a labyrinth of suspect, if not downright unreliable traces, among which Professor Madham’s frame-narrative is the most elaborate piece of sleight-of-hand, and it is this aspect of the text, the playful, postmodernist use of narrative voice, which I wish to concentrate on as the main focus for the rest of this paper.

In Labyrinths of Voice a passage from Julia Kristeva, quoted immediately after the Kroetsch comment just cited as one of the many intertextual traces that productively disrupt the narrative flow of the three-way interview, draws attention to the unstable focalization of carnival discourse: ‘The scene of the carnival introduces the split speech act: the actor and the crowd are each in turn simultaneously subject and addressee of discourse.’¹⁸Gone Indian works in just this way with first-person narrators also occupying the role of second-person narratees—thus Madham both receives Jeremy’s tapes and mediates them by offering his own account of what happened to his protégé—to a point where authority is completely undermined, and with readers finding themselves in analogous situation to Jeremy Sadness as they are forced to cross a frontier of signification beyond which conventional conceptions of narrative coherence and unitary signification no longer obtain. Even the notion of stable, autonomous character collapses: towards the end of the novel Madham comments that the northern prairies frustrate normal ‘human definition’, because they make for ‘the diffusion of personality into a complex of possibilities rather than a concluded self’ (p. 152) and elsewhere Kroetsch himself has referred to the reader as:

a character out of one of the novels the novelist is deconstructing. He expects certain consolations: of plot, of motivation, of characterization, of conclusion. … And he, the old reader, must slowly unlearn concepts of character. Of motivation. Of plot and ending. He must, to sum it up in one expression, acquire Negative Capability. He has entered a world where possibilities not only co-exist but contradict.¹⁹

So the act of consuming the text propels its readers into the position of having to author their own versions from the incomplete clues that are on offer. As one critic has put it, Gone Indian ‘could be read as a detective novel where the intrigue takes place on the level of language, the suspects are words and the victim is identity’.²⁰ In such a scheme the reader is consigned to playing the part of detective and, while this may always be true of the reading experience, it is a role which assumes a particular urgency in the consumption of a postmodernist prairie text.

The process of detection has to come to terms with the novel’s puzzling use of a polyphonic narrative method. Superficially there are only two narrative voices: those of Professor Madham and Jeremy Sadness. Madham is the main frame-narrator and he purports to offer an edited version—an edited version which suggests a kind of academic hatchet-job—of the audio-tapes Jeremy has been making during his time in Alberta. Sometimes Madham appears to be giving a verbatim transcription of the tapes—such is the level of narrative uncertainty associated with his voice that one hesitates to say categorically that these are Jeremy’s utterances; at other times he provides his own summary of Jeremy’s oral reports, freely admitting that he is only ‘transcribing a few passages’ (p. 1) and has ‘had to select from the tapes, in spite of Jeremy’s instructions to the contrary: the mere onslaught of detail merely overwhelms. We grasp at something else’ (p. 13). His account is, then, a doctored version and the particular nature of this doctoring is fairly clearly associated with the ‘old (academic) order’—on one occasion he even offers an academic footnote (p. 144)!²¹

So, on the surface, the text offers its readers a dialogue between two voices: between professor and student, between scribal and oral discourse, between academic control and youthful iconoclasm, between a westerner come east (Madham confesses his origins were in Alberta) and an easterner gone west, gone Indian. However, the element of split-speech does not stop here. Both voices exhibit tensions and inconsistencies which are centred on the dialogic aspects inherent within them: Jeremy makes his tapes for Madham and Madham’s narrative is similarly informed by the prominent presence of an addressee—he writes to Jill Sunderman, a young woman with whom Jeremy has become involved in Alberta.

Jeremy’s oral account is mainly narrated in the genre of confession. Chapter 16 of the text, in which he visits a priest and confesses his inability to be unchaste (‘Father, listen … I can’t get a hard-on in bed’, p. 35) is a clear parody of this mode of utterance, and more generally his monologues are a form of confession to Madham, against whose authority he frequently rebels. All Kroetsch’s earlier fiction, from But We Are Exiles (1965) onwards, is founded on a struggle between a patriarch and a young pretender who would usurp this older man’s power, and Gone Indian continues this pattern. Jeremy’s narrative, despite supposed censoring from Madham, is liberally dotted with undeleted expletives, many of which are directed against his mentor. So, although the version of his tapes that Madham offers shows him on one level to be a product of his eastern, academic upbringing, an element of western, carnivalesque subversion looms larger. Jeremy’s narration can be seen as representative of a new generation’s attempt to rid itself of the language of the Father,²² the old (academic) order’, but significantly Madham remains a necessary addressee for him until he chooses silence at the end of the novel. There is no overt Oedipal attempt, on his part, to dislodge the Father, though one could argue that the procedures of the text, which are themselves carnivalesque, involve just such a patricide.

While it is clear that Jeremy’s tapes exhibit the interplay of conflicting discursive codes, it is perhaps less obviously so where Madham’s narration is concerned. Madham may appear to write in a unitary unfragmented, academic mode, to act as a mediating voice for what he refers to as ‘the inconsistencies and contradictions’ (p. 5) of Jeremy’s recordings. Such a reading is, however, I would suggest, untenable. It is within Madham’s account that the real fragmentation, ironies and discontinuities of the text reside. He is both the ultimate puppet-master who pulls all the narrative strings and a chameleon-like trickster whose every word involves a kind of double-speak.

Gone Indian opens with a letter written by Madham to Jill Sunderman from an address in Binghamton, New York, which is the same as that at which Robert Kroetsch was living at the time of writing Gone Indian²³ (another level of postmodernist play is at work here). Although Jill remains the addressee of all his subsequent utterances, the epistolary form is only used in this initial section. Its effect is to foreground her second-person presence as the recipient of his narrative. While Jeremy confesses to Madham, he is in a sense confessing to Jill Sunderman. Since the account he provides for her frequently records events in which she has been directly involved, some readers of the novel have objected to this method on the grounds of implausibility. Why should he be telling Jill what she already knows?²⁴ There are, however, various possible justifications for such apparent recapitulation. Throughout Madham speaks in the avuncular tones of a professor who is used to having the last word. He is the possessor of the tapes and, within the dialogic structure of the novel, has the last word since he is able to comment on Jeremy’s account, a process which, needless to say, does not operate in reverse. His Christian name, Mark, suggests one of the most important ways in which academic authority is exercised and, from this first letter, which concludes with his assertion that he is ‘unfallen’ (p. 3), onwards, he displays little modesty or sense of self-doubt. Jeremy, in contrast, is constantly forced to come to terms with fallen identity—a fall into carnivalesque chaos is a major motif of Gone Indian on both thematic and discursive levels²⁵—and finally he appears to find freedom through a fortunate fall into darkness, a void of signification.²⁶

Madham’s relating to Jill what she may already reasonably be expected to know can also be justified in other ways. On one occasion he tells her that she may wish to square Jeremy’s account with her own recollection (p. 38), thus explicitly casting doubt on the reliability of the supposedly definitive narrative he is retelling. Most significantly of all, though, Madham’s own identity is not unitary. His name, like all the names in Gone Indian,²⁷ is richly suggestive and among the possibilities it evokes are those of crazed professor (mad-ham); first man (Adam), fallen or unfallen; and gender bender (madam). Even more markedly than Jeremy, Madham is a split subject and his claim to perfection, enacted on a formal level by his attempt to encase Jeremy’s diffuse outpourings within the framework of his bland, superficially monolithic academic voice, can be read as the ultimate snow-job of the text.

While Jeremy has gone west, Madham has, many years before, come east, transforming himself from an Albertan frontiersman into a professor. So a role reversal is clearly implied, with Jeremy and Madham as obviously foils to one another as any pair of Conradian or Dostoyevskyan doubles. However, again more is involved than just this and the most satisfactory explanation of why Madham tells Jill what she already presumably knows is that he is, unbeknown to her, her father, and is consequently engaged in another kind of confessional discourse, albeit a veiled one. The evidence for such a reading is extensive, if not completely conclusive²⁸—the open-ended nature of the novel’s postmodernist practice allows nothing to be finalized. After Jill’s father, Robert Sunderman, died/disappeared, he phoned his wife Bea, with whom Jeremy also becomes involved and with whom he ultimately dies/disappears, and so appears to have faked his death by drowning. Madham’s narrative offers several clues that he may be the former Robert Sunderman,²⁹ among them a reference to his having been a hockey-player in his youth (p. 37), his remark that he has ‘come to love [Bea Sunderman’s]’ old house as well as if it were [his] own’ (p. 154) and, most suggestive of all, an apparent slip of the tongue close to the end of the novel when, speaking of Robert Sunderman’s disappearance, he says ‘I shall never forget it’ (p. 155). So the burden of evidence points towards a solution of the mystery in which Sunderman is seen as having killed off his old identity by sundering³⁰ himself from his prairie roots and reinventing himself as Madham. Yet in important respects his past remains with him and this helps to explain inconsistencies which are prominent in his own behaviour. Although he criticizes Jeremy for his phallic obsessions, he is usurping his role by sleeping with his wife, Carol. Although he has repudiated the West by coming east and donning the mantle of a professor, he nonetheless engages in animal-like lovemaking with Carol beside the buffalo enclosure of a zoo on a hillside near Binghamton (p. 3).

So the role-exchange pattern cuts both ways, with neither character fully possessed of the identity to which he aspires. However, whereas Jeremy’s voice—as reported by Madham—moves away from a fixed position and finally at the end of his last tape surrenders itself to silence, as he lies in bed with Bea Sunderman vowing never to get up until, in a new ice age, he is enveloped by a glacier, ‘the primal stuff in primal motion’ (p. 150), Madham’s academic pontifications attempt to impose an enclosing univocalism, which is only transcended in the last moment of his account, when he envisages Jeremy and Bea leaping into nothingness from the railway bridge. The freeze-frame quality of this ending leaves the narrative open, with the kinetic lovers immortalized, but not finalized, in a moment of stasis reminiscent of those on Keats’s Grecian Urn.

The confusion and transformations of identity within the text are multiple: the transvestite youth Jeremy encounters at Edmonton Airport thinks he is a buffalo, as does Jeremy himself later on; Jeremy’s wife Carol is compared with Jill Sunderman; Madham is very probably Robert Sunderman. Jeremy, who throughout the action of the novel has been unable to make love while lying down (a curious example of vertical man unable to function in a horizontal world—to borrow Laurie Ricou’s terminology³¹) finally achieves regeneration in Robert Sunderman’s bed, as Bea sleeps with him, thinking he is her lost, young husband returned. And Jeremy’s identity is blurred not only with Sunderman/Madham’s, but also with that of the comatose Dorck. In a dream in which the Plains Indians repossess what is now the city of Edmonton, Jeremy is renamed ‘Has-Two-Chances’ (p. 106) and at the end of the novel may have fulfilled his Grey Owl fantasy. In short, Gone Indian is saturated with references to possible transformations of identity to a point where the very notion of discrete, separate selfhood withers away.

A central scene—it is anticipated more than once before it actually occurs—takes place when Jeremy is drafted into judging a beauty contest to find a queen for the annual Notikeewin festival. This reads like a bizarre parody of the Judgement of Paris, since there are three contestants who are identical in every respect, another instance of the winter carnival world’s confounding the academic urge to differentiate. Again the suggestion is that the northern plains render such activity meaningless and finally the text subsides into the silence of the snow-covered world, as Jeremy stops talking and Madham imagines him jumping into emptiness.

At the beginning of Gone Indian Madham presents his narrative as a response to Jill Sunderman’s request that he “‘explain everything”’, but says he feels ‘under no obligation to explain anything’ (p. 1). Despite his unreliability as a narrator, this comment can be seen to foreground the novel’s procedures: as a postmodernist text it resists transparent reading and notions of unitary and completed signification. However, the collapse of discrete identity and sharply individualized narrative voices in a world where snow is the Great Leveller is not simply a process of negation; it opens up multiple possibilities for transforming personality and cultural and discursive codes.

Gone Indian occupies a unique place among the cluster of revisionist texts that reshaped attitudes towards North American Indians in the late 1960s and early 1970s.³² Unlike such works as Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964) and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1971), it is only incidentally involved in promulgating a new Indian historiography. It is less concerned with celebrating the return of the vanishing American than with the potential Plains Indian culture offers for WASP self-renewal. Its Indian characters, Daniel Beaver and his wife, function primarily as the repository of an alternative mode of discourse—one which is associated with silence and a lack of competitiveness that is the antithesis of the American Dream. The Cree Daniel Beaver emerges as an archetypal Canadian beautiful loser, when he subverts the heroic ideal of the quasi-epic winter games in which he is competing by throwing a dog-sleigh race he has virtually won just before the finishing line (p. 79). Jeremy’s abandonment of his academic career and his tape recorder, his descent into silence, exile and cunning, involves a similar abnegation of language and the success ethic, and completes the process of surrendering autonomous selfhood in which he has been engaged from the moment of his arrival amid the snow of the winter carnival world. The text’s subversive use of narrative voice and carnivalization of the form of the novel involves a parallel movement away from definitive, unitary signification. Both character and novel have gone Indian.

Notes

1. Gone Indian (1973; Nanaimo: Theytus, 1981), p. 7. Subsequent references are to this edition and are included in the text.

2. Robert Kroetsch, letter to Jim Bacque, 28 November 1972, University of Calgary MsC 27.1.13.33.

3. Kroetsch discusses carnivalization, with reference to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, in ‘Carnival and Violence: A Meditation’, Robert Kroetsch: Essays, eds. Frank Davey and bpNichol, Open Letter, 5, 4 (Spring 1983), pp. 111–22. See also Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, eds. Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1982), pp. 35–7.

4. Hugh A. Dempsey, Indian Names for Albertan Communities (Calgary: Glenbow Museum, revised edn., 1987), p. 15, gives this as the derivation of the name of the village of Notikewin, which is further north in Alberta. The Battle River, the area in which the ‘Out West’ triptych is set, was once known as the Notikeewin. I am indebted to Robert Kroetsch for this information.

5. Funeral Games was a working-title for the novel: an alternative title for an early draft entitled Buffalo Woman, University of Calgary MsC 27.12.1–3; and the first of eight possible titles which appear on the title-page of a second draft, University of Calgary MsC 27.12.4–6.

6. Belaney was born in Hastings, England in 1888 and went to Canada in 1906. There he associated with the Ojibwa, married an Iroquois wife and, claiming in the first of his books, The Men of the Last Frontier (1931), that he was the son of a Scot and an Apache, began calling himself Grey Owl. In 1931 he began to lecture on conservation. In the same year he went to live in Western Canada where he wrote three very popular books, Pilgrims of the Wild (1934), Sajo and the Beaver People (1935) and Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936). His true identity was only discovered after his death in 1938.

7. Kroetsch stresses the importance of the western quest for new beginnings in his review of Dick Harrison’s Unnamed Country, ‘The Disappearing Father and Harrison’s Born-Again and Again and Again West’, Essays on Canadian Writing, 11 (Summer 1978), pp. 7–9.

8. Turner’s thesis was first delivered as an address to the American Historical Association in 1893. It is included in his The Frontier in American History (1920).

9. Cf. Robert Kroetsch, letter to Ingrid Cook, New Press, Toronto, 17 November 1972, ‘… from Tristan to Columbus to Trudeau, men have gone west in search of new loves, new worlds, new identities’, University of Calgary MsC 27.1.13.32d; and letter to Patricia Knox, New Press, Toronto, 13 April 1973, describing Gone Indian as ‘a novel about going west; not just my going, no, the going of Columbus from the Old World in search of the New, the going of Tristan in search of a new lay for the old king, the going out of and into that produced Canada, the Canadians, the change, the metamorphosis, ideally represented by and in the transubstantiation of the body and dreams of the English boy, Archie Belaney (fatherless, and seeking a father) into the Great Canadian Indian, Grey Owl … ’, University of Calgary MsC 27.1.13.40c.

10. The Robert Kroetsch Papers First Accession: An Inventory of the Archive, eds. Jean F. Tener and Apollonia Steele (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1986), p. xxvi.

11. Particularly Badlands (1975). See my discussion of this aspect of the novel in ‘Beyond History: Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands’, in Re-visions of Canadian Literature, ed. Shirley Chew (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1985), pp. 71–87.

12. See particularly p. 147.

13. Surfacing (1972; London: Virago, 1979), p. 106.

14. The Diviners (1974; Bantam-Seal: New York and Toronto, 1975), p. 407.

15. Labyrinths of Voice, pp. 36–7.

16. Earlier in the novel a high level bridge has been associated with the possibility of a fall from language and fixed identity, when Jeremy makes love to Jill Sunderman in a cloud of snow on the High Level Bridge across the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, p. 59. Jeremy’s first encounter with Plains Indian identity, in the form of Daniel Beaver, a ‘Pied Piper’ or spirit-guide in the process of his initiation into an alternative mode of discourse, also takes place on this bridge, p. 63.

17. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 30, Campbell identifies the ‘formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return’ as the ‘nuclear unit of the monomyth’. Jeremy’s journey frustrates completion of this ‘formula’, when his initiation leads not to return but disappearance. Gone Indian also employs the pattern of shamanistic descent outlined by Campbell, op. cit., pp. 98–101, an aspect of the novel which is discussed by Peter Thomas, Robert Kroetsch, (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1980), Ch. 4.

18. ‘The Bounded Text’, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 46. Quoted in Labyrinths of Voice, p. 37.

19. Labyrinths of Voice, pp. 176–7.

20. Sylvia Söderlind, ‘Identity and Metamorphosis in Canadian Fiction since the Sixties’ in A Sense of Place: Essays in Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Britta Olinder (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 1984), p. 82.

21. In an earlier draft of the novel Madham’s comments appear as footnotes, University of Calgary MsC 27.12.1–3.

22. Kroetsch discusses paternalistic models of influence in Labyrinths of Voice—see particularly, pp. 19–24.

23. 48 Lathrop Avenue, Binghamton, New York 13905.

24. See Robert Kroetsch, letter to Jim Bacque, 28 November 1972, University of Calgary MsC 27.1.13.33.

25. The text uses the fall metaphor to suggest an attempted escape from the anxiety of influence. Cf. Labyrinths of Voice, pp. 25–6.

26. Again an archetypal American theme, that of the felix culpa (see R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), is displaced from a modernist, mythic reading to a postmodernist reading which foregrounds signifying practices.

27. Jeremy has been named after Jeremy Bentham, by a lost father who wants him ‘to grow up … to be a professor’ (p. 52); he blames much of his ‘irrational need to seek out the wilderness … on the accident of his name: that one portion of identity which is at once so totally invented and so totally real’ (p. 51). The names in Kroetsch’s novels up to Badlands are discussed in W. F. H. Nicolaisen, ‘Ordering the Chaos: Name Strategies in Robert Kroetsch’s novels’, Essays on Canadian Writing, 11 (Summer 1978), pp. 55–65.

28. In an earlier draft of the novel, it is conclusive: after visiting the comatose Dorck in hospital, Jeremy sees Madham walk by and realizes that he is the ‘dead and gone Robert Sunderman’, University of Calgary MsC 27.12.1–3.249.

29. See Arnold E. Davidson, ‘Will the Real Mark Madham Please Stand Up: A Note on Robert Kroetsch’s Gone Indian’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 6, 1 (1981), pp. 135–9.

30. Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern (Toronto: OUP, 1988), p. 171 considers the implication of the name Sunderman in relation to Jill and Bea and suggests that ‘while there are indeed images connecting women to enclosure in Kroetsch’s novels … the notion of “sundering man” may well be a positive, in the sense of both a breaking-up of male hegemony and a contesting of the notion of single, coherent subjectivity’.

31. Laurence Ricou, Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973).

32. The novel’s title can, of course, also be taken to refer to the contemporary situation of the Indian.