SOURCE: “Kroetsch’s Fragments: Approaching the Narrative Structure of His Novels,” in Postmodern Fiction in Canada, 1992, pp. 137-60.

[In the following essay, Kuester presents an overview of the narrative techniques used in Kroetsch's novels.]

In this age of postmodernism, the belief in a coherent world governed by logically derived laws of causality has given way to a cosmology seeing man in a shattered world of fragments. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the concept of postmodernism stressing the disorientation of the individual (and the artist) in such a fragmented world, was applied to literature by American critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Richard Wasson. For Wasson, the postmodernists represent a new sensibility: whereas for some modernists, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, “experience was full of paradoxes and contingencies which the great poet ordered through metaphor,” postmodern writers are no longer able or willing to create such all-encompassing metaphors. They rather “desire to get back to particulars, to restore literary language to its proper role which for them means revealing ‘the raggedness, the incompleteness of it all’” (Wasson 462, 476).

Among those contemporary Canadian writers who have taken an active part in the theoretical discussions regarding postmodernism, Robert Kroetsch certainly holds the top position. As a professor of English who taught for over fifteen years in the United States, Kroetsch has always been in close touch with American theories of postmodernism, all the more because he was co-editor, with William Spanos, of the only journal completely devoted to the study of postmodernism, Boundary 2. His interviews and essays are among the most important statements of a postmodern Canadian position, so that it cannot come as a surprise that Canadian and European critics alike have referred to him as “Mr Canadian Postmodern” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 160) or “Canada’s postmodernist extra-ordinaire” (Lernout 137).

Much of Kroetsch’s interest in his postmodern narratives centres on experiments with perspective and point of view and, above all, on mythological and archaeological patterns of postmodern writing. Frank Davey sums up Kroetsch’s philosophical position as one implying “radical suspicion—ultimately denial—of the existence independent of temporal embodiment of idea, archetype, essence or Platonic form, and its rejection of traditional systematic philosophy in which all being is to be harmonized and explained” (Davey, 8). The word deconstruction becomes the key term in Kroetsch’s aesthetics, describing his attitude towards all convention, tradition, or cosmology. It is based on his “deep suspicion of all referential frames, myth, fictions, the sensory world” (Thomas, RK 14–15). For example, Kroetsch is obsessed with one of the first conventions that human beings are confronted with: that of naming. He is all in favour of uninventing the word (and thus the world), of the un-naming of place before it can be re-named in a noncolonial, non-European, truly Canadian way: “The Canadian writer must uninvent the word. He must destroy the homonymous American and English languages that keep him from hearing his own tongue. But to uninvent the word, he knows, is to uninvent the world” (“A Canadian Issue” 39). However, he does not only apply the principle of deconstruction in a nationalistic and thematic way: “Kroetsch’s compulsion to deconstruct is contained in this wish to strip down complex narrative forms to elemental story” (Thomas, RK 120). In the following pages, I want to have a closer look at the way in which the incoherent cosmology of postmodernism is reflected in Kroetsch’s work, especially in the narrative structure of his novels. References to his theoretical statements, most of them collected in a special issue of the journal Open Letter or in his Selected Essays, The Lovely Treachery of Words, will be made in passing.

Kroetsch’s first novel, But We Are Exiles (1965), is still in many regards a very conventional novel. Peter Guy, a young student, loses his girlfriend, Kettle Fraser, to Michael Hornyak, whom he had thought of as a friend. Smarting, he heads up north, away from civilization, and takes a job as a riverboat pilot on the Mackenzie River, but then his boat is ironically bought up by Hornyak. The latter dies in an accident that Peter might have prevented, and—like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner—Peter has to carry the burden of guilt until he replaces Hornyak’s corpse in his canoe and/or coffin in a snowstorm on Great Slave Lake. Whereas the novel is, generally speaking, a third-person narrative told from Peter’s perspective, there are also situations resembling that of the author lost in the postmodern world. Peter, the pilot, is the only person who can make any coherent sense out of an almost postmodern mass of details: “These were his secrets. … An order maintained as precariously as that maintained by the hands on the wheel. The chaos held in check …” (18–19). In this description of Peter Guy as the centre of the world that is “held in delicate and fluid balance by the pilot” (18), traditional narrative structure is ‘exploded.’ While at first, Guy’s thoughts are still rendered through the voice of the narrator, soon his views are expressed in first-person narrative without any conventional notation of direct speech: “Here the pilot’s eyes and hands were in isolated yet absolute command. Pure. He wanted to shout the word. This is mine. Storm, ice, wind, rock—those can challenge me” (19). In the end, he loses that challenge.

Morton Ross’s criticism of Exiles, that “Kroetsch’s choice of method leaves the more profound dimensions of his material in the realm of chaos—provocative, but in the last analysis unclear” (Ross 104), is looking for a certainty and clarity that Kroetsch is simply not willing to give him. But whereas the world described and its chaos have already postmodern overtones, the writing is still rather traditional. Postmodernism does not extend to the structure of his writing yet, and the same might also be said of Kroetsch’s second novel, The Words of My Roaring. Published in 1966, it is the first of three novels set in a fictional part of rural Alberta. Words depicts the region of Notikeewin, Coulee Hill and Wildfire Lake in the 1930s, at the beginning of the era of the Social Credit movement, whereas the second part, The Studhorse Man, shows it towards the end of World War II, and the third, Gone Indian, is set in the author’s present in the 1970s. One might say that the trilogy approaches the future constituency of John Backstrom MLA from three different narrative perspectives.

Backstrom, undertaker and candidate for public office, is the hero and first-person narrator of The Words of My Roaring. Highly aware of the implications of his use of different narrative structures and perspectives, Kroetsch explained his changing over from the third-person narrative in Exiles to first person in Words as “a change in our view of what we know and how we know it,” because “we’re reduced to private visions in our time—there’s no longer a trust in the shared, the community vision” (Cameron 89). Nevertheless, this kind of community vision exists in Kroetsch’s work, even in first-person narrative, when he falls back on the tall tale tradition of the prairies and its deconstruction of notions of realism: “The people in the beer-parlour, they both know that they’re lying and that they’re telling the truth. They know they’ve stretched it and it’s fun to stretch it but they’ve also said something” (Neuman and Wilson 237). The voice of Words is clearly such an orally conceived one with overtones of the tall tale and carnivalistic exaggeration, of beer-parlour bragging and electoral campaigning: “Our endless talk is the ultimate poem of the prairies,” Kroetsch claims, “In a culture besieged by foreign television and paperbacks and movies, the oral tradition is the means of survival” (“One for the Road” 30). Backstrom introduces himself in this very style: “My name, let me say once and for all, is Johnnie Backstrom, and I am six-four in my stocking feet, or nearly so, a man consumed by high ambitions, pretty well hung, and famed as a heller with women” (4). His political leader, William Applecart, has a simple message for the drought-stricken farmers: “He just ripped loose about everything. It made us all feel a lot better, even me” (33). Whereas his rival Doc Murdoch stands for the old order, Backstrom’s only true belief is in chaos: “Sometimes it seems that chaos is the only order. The only real order … I needed chaos, the old chaos …” (101). In the end, his prophetic election promise of rain comes true in the scorched region.

Peter Thomas calls Johnnie Backstrom’s an “expansive, hyperbolic subjective voice which ‘explodes’ the fearful, repressed symmetries of Kroetsch’s first novel.” But he has to admit that, although “The Words of My Roaring is not a formally innovative novel, it opened the way to what was to come” (Thomas, RK 39, 50). So once more, as in But We Are Exiles, most of the postmodern aspects of the novel are to be found in its content—the apocalyptic vision of William Applecart and Johnnie Backstrom—rather than in its form, but Backstrom’s kind of reasoning and of structuring his fragmentary thoughts by free association already points in a certain direction: Kroetsch has given up on the modernist’s structuring metaphor which was all-encompassing and replaced it by a new way of reading the world that has strong affinities with the cosmology of the postmodern. This new way of reading the world finds its appropriate epistemology in the anarchistic randomness of knowledge envisaged by Paul Feyerabend, for whom knowledge has become “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into a greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of completion, to the development of our consciousness” (Feyerabend 30). This kind of knowledge resembles in its structure the bricolage of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s myths that often “look more or less like shreds and patches, if I may say so; disconnected stories are put one after the other without any clear relationship between them” (Lévi-Strauss 34). Just as, according to the above quotations, knowledge is randomly assembled, mythical thinking builds narrative that is loosely structured around the “odds and ends” of history.

The modernists had used ancient myths in order to give a formal structure to their narratives: T. S. Eliot saw the “mythical method” as “simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot 188, 187). While thus at least in certain kinds of modern literature a definite mythical structure can be found, control and order are often the very notions rejected by the authors of postmodern literature: classical myths used in Joycean fashion cannot express the incoherence of the postmodern world. The myth of the bricoleur is a much better structuring device in postmodern works of literature. Kroetsch, who himself points to his indebtedness to Lévi-Strauss’s theories (Neuman and Wilson 92), claims that “the Modernist was tempted by the cohesive dimension of mythology, while the Postmodernist is more tempted by those momentary insights that spring up here and there” (112). “We have sought out the decentering rather than the centering function of myth” (130), and here myths are no longer God-given but rather man-made, avoiding meaning as well as closure.

Even though The Words of My Roaring as a whole does not yet have this kind of bricolage mythical structure, it contains scenes in which Backstrom gets carried away in his anecdotes and approaches and becomes a bricoleur constructing new myths. Before the background of a (postmodern?) chaos of furniture and household goods, Backstrom encounters a prophet, a man for whom any causal relationship, any logical way of arguing is nonexistent. The prophet’s car becomes an example of the creation of a tale, or a bricolage:

Right before my eyes, people started making up stories about it, guessing where it came from, what kind of speed it was good for. “Doesn’t run on gas,” somebody said, “runs on water.” “Where would you get the water?” somebody asked him. “That old coot is well over a hundred,” somebody said. “Shouldn’t be driving to begin with.” Then an argument developed over the prophet’s age; some people insisted, give him a bath and he’ll look like a young man. “Give that car a good scrubbing,” somebody said—he bent and spat on a fender and rubbed the dirt—“and it’ll look like new.”

(85)

A similar bricolage structure also works in the second Out West novel, The Studhorse Man, even on the level of its contents: it depicts the victory of technology over nature, and its ending foreshadows one of the most revolutionary developments in human society, the invention of the birth control pill. As in a bricolage, relics from the past are here put to new use in the present: the horse—whose old function has become superfluous in the agricultural structure of the modern world—is now integrated into its pharmaceutical structure. But the first-person narrator in The Studhorse Man, Demeter Proudfoot, is certainly unaware of this structural peculiarity of this complex narrative in which he proves to be even less reliable than Backstrom was in his wildest election speeches. Demeter Proudfoot re-constructs the biography of Alberta’s last studhorse man, Hazard Lepage. His reliability as a biographer is not necessarily enhanced by his being confined to a mental institution. He controls the narrative and can do as he likes, unhampered by any rational pattern. His metafictional remarks illustrate the reader’s dependence upon him, even when unfortunately Demeter often finds himself “straying from the mere facts” (12). And he, the scribe “long[ing] for a whole image of the vanished past” (34), does not have anything but fragments from which he reconstructs Hazard’s odyssey. Working in his bathtub, he sorts his material on filing cards. Every now and then he feels the urge to restructure the past in order “to suggest an order that was not necessarily present in Hazard’s rambling conversation” (40). His contemplations regarding the order of the world are relevant to a postmodern view: “I myself prefer an ordered world, even if I must order it through a posture of madness” (61).

Kroetsch has often used the image of the archaeologist for his technique of writing, and this is also the technique that Demeter uses: like an archaeologist, he relies on single specimens, found objects, “so called real situations” (Hancock 36) and real persons. These found objects are of course only fragments, in no order whatsoever, but as Kroetsch says, “I like the sense of fragment and what fragment does: the demands fragment makes on us for shaping, for telling, for imagining” (Neuman and Wilson 167). A good example of the construction of a whole story (and history) around a found object is the stone hammer in Kroetsch’s Stone Hammer Poems, in which the process of imagination starts from the position of the observer and leads to a “weblike” structure of association in which “each separate strand … is finally perceived to be part of a pattern” (Wood 30).

The shaping of a narrative out of fragments also involves the reader, since it is not only the author who is engaged in this process. Kroetsch knows, however, that sometimes readers are not willing or able to take part in the “archaeological act” (Kroetsch 1989, 69) of reestablishing the connections and missing links between the objects found on the site, because they are used to seeing them in “the museums where it’s all carefully assembled and tagged and explained” (Neuman and Wilson 167): “Archaeology allows the fragmentary nature of the story, against the coerced unity of traditional history. Archaeology allows for discontinuity. It allows for imaginative speculations” (“On Being an Alberta Writer” 76).

In The Studhorse Man, Demeter’s view of the world from the asylum, a peculiar perspective, is made possible through a special contraption enabling him “to see out of my window without leaving my bathtub. A mirror is so placed above my sink that I have been able to sit for hours, attempting to imagine what in fact did happen (allowing for the reversal of the image) exactly where I imagine it. It is the time that I must reconstruct, not space” (85). Unfortunately Demeter himself, whose credibility has been shown to be more than questionable, often does not trust Hazard’s own account of his life. But if he has to admit to some weaknesses in his hero’s character, he relativizes those by alluding to other historical figures: “It is not easy to admit of weaknesses in one’s hero. Sir John A. Macdonald tippled, let his biographers quibble as they will. Hazard Lepage was a man of inordinate lust” (31).

Through Demeter’s metafictional remarks, The Studhorse Man becomes of course more overtly postmodern than the earlier novels. Peter Thomas remarks for example that it “is Kroetsch’s first novel where the self-conscious demonstration of narrative technique, the book’s reflection upon its own process, is a predominant interest” (Thomas, RK 121). One may even, with Brian Ross, “find in Hazard Lepage’s quest an allegory of the writer’s search for the future of his art” (B. Ross 67). The novel’s metafictionality and the problematization of its narratorial voice turn The Studhorse Man into the first of many texts that justify Linda Hutcheon’s calling Kroetsch Mr. Canadian Postmodern.

Whereas in The Studhorse Man a biographer reconstructs another character’s life, thoughts, and motivations, in Gone Indian the narrative structure is even more complicated: in this third novel of the Out West trilogy, we see a narrator editing another person’s narrative. For the first time in Kroetsch’s novels does the subject of a ‘biography’ have a chance to speak for himself. An eternal Ph.D. candidate in literature, Jeremy Sadness is sent from New York State to Edmonton by his thesis supervisor, Professor Mark R. Madham, who is from this very part of the world. Due to a sequence of chance events, Jeremy does not go to the University of Alberta for a job interview but rather ends up judging a beauty contest at the Notikeewin winter festival and disappears into the Albertan winter together with a woman who has long been waiting for her vanished husband. This husband in turn, as Arnold Davidson convincingly argues, has re-surfaced in the States as Madham, Jeremy’s supervisor. Madham’s explanation and interpretation of Jeremy’s Albertan odyssey—a framed first-person narrative—is addressed to Jill Sunderman, the above-named lady’s daughter, and it is based upon the thoughts and insights that the not very eloquent graduate student had to confide to a tape recorder because he cannot bring enough order into his thoughts to be able to write them down. Madham, the professorial narrator in the frame narrative, denies any responsibility for his story and feels “under no obligation to explain anything” (1). Far from trying to transcribe the tapes in a scholarly manner that aims at establishing the truth, he is guided by personal prejudice and sexual interest in Jeremy’s wife, even if all this is disguised as belonging to the “professor’s domain: the world of reflection, of understanding. The insight born of leisurely and loving meditation” (13). That is why he is “transcribing a few passages from those same tapes, simply that you might better appreciate the kind of rascal you found yourself involved with” (1–2). Madham’s assertion that Jeremy’s tapes “can be taken at face value” is undermined by Carol Sadness’s assertion that her husband “was faking everything from the moment he spoke the first sentence into the recorder” (2).

Gone Indian is the first of Kroetsch’s novels to overtly have two narrators. Both of them share the postmodern world-view, so that Madham should know better than to try and establish a coherent argument out of Jeremy’s fragmentary tapes. Kroetsch himself claims that “Madham is a very devious character and I think he is also acting out the reading act, he is taking fragments … and he is imposing an order: that’s what readers do” (Neuman and Wilson 176). Of course, Madham’s point of view is far from impartial since he wants to establish Jeremy’s death as a fact in order to legalize his affair with Jeremy’s wife, Carol, but the last small fragment in his jigsaw puzzle is missing, and thus his universe does not cohere. While Demeter in The Studhorse Man said that “I myself prefer an ordered world, even if I must order it through an order of madness …” (61, emphasis added), the narratorial posture in Gone Indian is broken up into the two narrators Madham and Sadness.

Many critics regard Badlands as Kroetsch’s best novel. This judgment may also have to do with the fact that, at first sight, Badlands is less experimental than its predecessor and thus comes close to being a traditional novel in the realistic vein. Set in the Alberta badlands, it goes back to the time of the First World War, William Dawe’s first archaeological expedition and the recovery of Albertan (pre-)history by—and on behalf of—(Eastern) Canada. What is clearer than in the other novels is the distinction between the two time-levels, that of the original Red Deer River expedition in 1916 and that of Dawe’s daughter Anna coming to Alberta in 1972 in order to do research on the spot. This latter narrative is a first-person narrative, whereas the rest, the report of the original expedition, is a third-person narrative.

A ‘chronology,’ a list of events at the beginning, gives the novel a quasi-factual dimension as it seems to establish a verifiable and reliable structure underlying the narrative: among them most importantly Dawe’s 1916 expedition and, in the summer of 1972, Anna’s attempt at ‘reconstructing’ her father’s history and at freeing herself from the grip that her father still has on her. Anna has only her father’s field notes, the conversations before his death, and the memories of her native friend Anna Yellowbird, who had accompanied her father, to rely on when trying to form her own picture of the expedition. His field notes prove to be less than accurate and reliable sources for the expedition report that Anna pieces together. In Robert Wilson’s words,

The parasitical relationship to the story which shows up already in Demeter also shows up strongly in Badlands where Anna is parasitical upon a slender and stunted story of her father’s but tells it and then comments upon it so that she does create herself through a parasitical relationship to the story which is both retelling and interpreting it.

(Neuman and Wilson 175)

The difficulties that “a reader accustomed to the conventional, modernist handling of narrative angle” has in assessing the narrative structure of Badlands are summarized by Laurie Ricou, who claims that “Badlands, by having no explicit fiction about the narrative angle, expresses Kroetsch’s own frustration with the demand for consistency” (Ricou 120).

Anna’s introduction to the novel situates her as the narrator and archaeologist of her father’s biography as well as of her own material. She had never received a personal letter from her father, only field notes: “God help us,” she sighs, “we are a people raised not on love letters or lyric poems or even cries of rebellion or ecstasy or pain or regret, but rather on old hoards of field notes” (8). The field notes integrated into the novel are from the start commented on and criticized, and thus relativized, by the narrator:

Tuesday, June 27. Arrived Trail Creek shortly before noon. Climbed up out of the valley in order to find a farm or ranch, buy some fresh food, send off some letters. And then, either to amplify his heroic endurance or to underline his disappointment, he added: Encountered a pitiful young squaw who seemed to think—He broke off the enlarging sentence, surprised at his own unscientific noting of the world. He scratched, righteously, pompously, in his cramped hand on the next line: she would accompany my expedition.

(11)

Anna Dawe’s report differs from her father’s male narrative. She does not rely, like Demeter or Madham, on “the curious little narrative tricks of a mad adventure: the lies that enable the lovers to meet, the mystery of who did the killing, the suspense before victory.” Men “have their open spaces, and translate them into a fabled hunting.” Women, however, “have only time to survive in, time, without either lies or mystery or suspense; we live and then die in time” (27). Commenting on a tall tale, she dismisses its author as a “total and absurd male” assuming “an omniscience that was not ever his, a scheme that was not ever there” (76). Whereas male authors and narrators are striving to establish an order out of their fragments, however chaotic it may seem, Kroetsch’s first female narrator, Anna Dawe, has finally developed the better strategy: she patiently awaits the further development of the story. This is what Anna Yellowbird, the incorporation of the old native as well as the postmodern spirit, has taught her: “the possibility of harmony, of accepting inconsistency and opposites. … one exchanges the comfort of absolutes or absolution, for life which is a mixture of darkness and glory that resists our attempts to order it” (Grace 33). And Anna Dawe, after reconstructing her father’s story, but before having written anything down, arrives at a moment of release from the gathering of documents, from the (male) obsession to find an order, to “fill the gap.” High up in the mountains, having read Dawe’s rather pompous final entry—“I have come to the end of words” (269)—she “took that last field book with the last pompous sentence he ever wrote, the only poem he ever wrote, a love poem, to me, his only daughter, and I threw it into the lake where it too might drown” (270). She must, one is forced to conclude, have quoted the field book from memory in the version that she tells in Badlands. The loss proves to be no loss at all because it gives her the possibility to create “a woman’s form for a woman’s view of the west” (Ricou 120), and because “in the act of telling itself, she creates an unexpected empathy with her father writing which helps to proclaim her own identity, and even, perhaps, to bridge the great divide of death” (Williams 236).

What the Crow Said is Robert Kroetsch’s flirt with magic realism, in which he leaves behind not only the demands of realism that he had seemingly come to accept in Badlands. Big Indian, a little town straddling the border of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, is confronted with fantastic events that take place during a time span of several years. Everything starts with the impregnation of the virgin Vera Lang by a swarm of bees, and the story culminates in a great flood. The events include a talking crow, prophecies correct and false, memories of things past and future, unbelievable success stories, and an apocalyptic war between earth and sky. The story is told by an omniscient narrator, a community voice, that can no longer rely on a more or less factual background or on “the hard core of detail.” This and the laws of causality and realist fiction have been left far behind in the magically realistic realm of Big Indian. The hero of Crow is Gus Liebhaber, typesetter, printer, and sometimes editor of the Big Indian Signal, who—since Gutenberg’s invention made remembering the past superfluous—has acquired the art of remembering the future. What the Crow Said has moved away from the dualism of narrative perspectives, which is often also the dualism of “creative characters” and “ordering interpreters” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 160), that was dominant from Exiles (Michael Hornyak/Peter Guy) through Words (Backstrom/Murdoch), The Studhorse Man (Hazard/Demeter) and Gone Indian (Sadness/Madham) to Badlands (William Dawe/Anna Dawe). Liebhaber, though certainly an important figure who sometimes would like to become the scribe of his community, is only one among many characters. Although chronological, the plot of Crow is fragmented into many directions, so that it is difficult for a casual reader not to lose his orientation. Sam Solecki even had the impression, “erroneous probably—that Kroetsch wrote What the Crow Said simply by writing one extravagant episode after another until his creative energy and imagination gave out,” and he finally calls it “an assembly of brilliant parts that fail to cohere into a significant whole” (Solecki 327). Equally disappointed, Peter Thomas states that “it would be unproductive to summarize the ‘plot’ of a novel which is clearly part of the war against plot (to adopt the title of one of Jeremy’s abortive theses)” (Thomas, “RK and Silence” 38).

In spite of his knowledge of the future, Liebhaber is no longer able to compose a coherent story when he is confronted with “the heaped scrawls and scratches and guesses and advertisements” that his boss leaves to him with the instruction to compose a newspaper: “He couldn’t finish the story; he couldn’t complete the page and add the quoins, check the footstick, the sidestick, lock up the form …” (16). Chaos confronts him in the form of his collection of wood type, an “intricate knot of language that bound him to death” (54). He tries to ‘deconstruct’ language but is still confronted with the presence of letters that have a residual meaning. At one point, trapped under his boat, he seems to have worked out his philosophical problems and frees himself from Gutenberg’s curse: “Yes, he was writing his own story, at last.” He has found the key to chaos:

He could account for event, announce the presence of design, under the apparent chaos. … [N]ow he had escaped, he had recovered the night, and dream, and memory. He would compose a novel one sentence long, a novel anyone could memorize. You in my arms.

(163–64)

Consequently, Liebhaber knows now that “Gutenberg, too, was only a scribe” (216), and finds refuge with the women of the Lang family: “Liebhaber is happy. He cannot remember anything” (217).

What the Crow Said no longer can or even tries to establish its own reliability by means of reference to sources, fragments (or in Kroetsch’s terms, excerpts) from the real world; its universe is isolated from any outside civilization. Here we have what Robert Wilson describes as the goal of many fabulists: “to replace reality, to find in the emergent literary alternative a self-contained and independent structure that cannot be judged by the actual world but may judge it” (Wilson 38). One may wonder, however, to what extent it is possible to judge the world from an independent structure that is totally cut off from the real world. Robert Lecker argues that whereas Kroetsch’s earlier “mythological fictions” “blend larger-than-life meanings and relationships with a recognition of daily, local, ritualized occurrences” (Lecker, RK 99), such a recognition is no longer possible in Crow. Normally, although Kroetsch believes in the “uninvention of the world,” the deconstructive activity is for him not purely destructive but rather “implies, for all its attraction to disorder, a recovery of order, control” (Kroetsch 1989: 109). Or, as David Creelman (77) has it, “unlike the American deconstructionists who are distinguished … by their refusal to reassemble the discovered textual disorder, Kroetsch is tentatively willing to embark on rebuilding projects.” In Kroetsch’s own words, “to go into pure chaos is to vanish” (Neuman and Wilson 25), and in order to keep himself from slipping into this chaos, he normally hangs on to some basic facts, some non-literary structuring devices around which he constructs his narrative: found objects, texts, a ledger, a seed catalogue, snapshots, lists, genealogies. In Crow, he leaves these behind, and challenges his readers to come to terms with a Kroetsch novel without a binary structure to fall back on.

In Alibi, his latest novel, Kroetsch returns to the binary structure of “creative characters” and “ordering interpreters.” Still, it is his most experimental novelistic work in that he shows us a narrative in the process of being written and revised much in the way that an alibi sometimes tends to need revision. At the end of the novel, the alibi is still under revision: he leaves us alone with a series of notes. The dualistic structure between underlying notes and a parasitic new version produced on the basis of them provides us with a similar relationship as that between subtexts and supertexts in Gone Indian or Badlands. Here, the underlying text is William William Dorfen’s expedition report. Dorfen—or, for short, Dorf—works for the oil baron Jack Deemer, for whom he travels all over the world acquiring obscure collector’s items. In Alibi, he searches England, Wales, Portugal, and Greece for a spa that he finally finds close to his home town of Calgary in the Rocky Mountains. While in Portugal, Dorf is suspected of having murdered Julie Magnuson, his own and his employer’s mistress. He claims, however, that Julie must have stolen his car and driven, or have been driven, down a precipice. This version of events, Dorf’s alibi, suggests that another one of Julie’s lovers, dwarfish Dr. De Medeiros, might be responsible for her death (145).

Whereas the reader at first has the impression that he or she is reading Dorf’s entries in a journal that his sometime companion Karen Strike had given him for his birthday, one realizes towards the end that the chapters composing the main part of the book are not Dorf’s original entries but revisions. Only the appendix, “Dorfendorf’s Journal,” is the “true” underlying text, giving us entries that have not yet been transcribed and end abruptly on August 13. As these are the notes that Dorf took while transcribing the older entries, they are full of metafictional comments.

The very last entry describes an event which may explain the sudden end of the journal and novel: Dorf has retreated to a solitary cabin by a lake in order to finish his literary work in close contact with nature. Trying to keep the approaching De Medeiros from disturbing two newly hatched ospreys, he makes no effort at saving the doctor from the danger of drowning, so that his sudden disappearance is not surprising.

The “parasitical” commentary on the underlying text just summarized is given from Karen Strike’s perspective. She is supposed to be finishing the process of editing that Dorf had started, of giving the text a presentable form: “Let Karen put in some headings, some chapter titles to trap the unwary eye and lure the customer; she with her gift for compromise” (231). That is what she has done: her headlines are partly synopses of the contents, partly cryptic allusions that can only be understood in a second reading, such as the mention of a “Journal that William William Dorfen Kept but Did not Keep” (168), and partly ironic devices by means of which the omniscient editor keeps her distance from Dorf’s comparatively ignorant text.

At first sight, Karen’s headlines seem to be the only editorial intervention in Dorf’s expedition report and “unedited” notes. Considering Madham’s manipulation in Gone Indian and Anna Dawe’s in Badlands, however, one may doubt Karen’s reticence: not only translators can be traitors—editors also have the opportunity to manipulate texts or to deconstruct them and use them parasitically to further their own purposes. Whereas Karen’s visible influence seems to be limited to “some headings, some chapter titles,” it may well reach much further than Stanley Fogel assumes when he comments upon the last, “autobiographical,” entries in Dorf’s journal: “He remains, after all, at the end of Alibi, writing his own alibi, the journal that is the sign of his continuing condition” (Fogel 92). Robert Lecker is fully aware of the novel’s ambiguous narrative structure: “Although Alibi first appears to be a relatively conventional narrative presented by Dorf, it is in fact a highly contrived story presented via Karen, whose role as editor and editorializer is only revealed at the end of the book through what is presumably Dorf’s ‘authentic’ journal” (Lecker, “Con/Texts of Desire” 92). Lecker’s analysis does more justice to the complexity of Alibi, but Fogel’s “continuing condition” is also an important element of the novel: writing as process. As in the case of Badlands, different interpretations are not only possible; they are even encouraged by the ambiguous narrative structure. Ambiguity is part of the novels themselves.

While Dawe’s field notes in Badlands, the truthfulness of which was severely doubted by Anna, were notes written in the distant past, Dorf himself starts the process of writing and editing his own notes. The main part of the novel consists of his own revisions—or emendations, as he calls them—but the text underlying his revisions is the diary: “The original notes, Karen’s birthday journal, to me are only the negatives which now I develop” (232). The text edited by Karen thus is not at all the original journal, the original event, and consequently the reader is one step further removed from the “truth.”

On the other hand, Dorf’s metafictional comments in the appendix afford an insight into the process of writing. This time the comments are not those of an editor who is removed in time and space, but those of the writer himself who—through the writing process—distances himself from the original events and consciously prohibits or impedes the suspension of this distance: “I transcribe the notes from my journal into a proper manuscript. I tear out the transcribed page from the journal” (229).

It is hardly surprising that Dorf, who is after all composing his alibi, destroys his original notes. Madham and Anna Dawe had done the same. The revised version replaces the underlying original text, and it is factually and temporally removed from the original situation. Writing is a process of re-telling by means of signs, a process that involves differences and manipulation. This mode of distancing is comparable with Derrida’s principle of différance. In Derridean theory the text, which is composed of signs, is temporally and spatially different from the original event:

… the substitution of the sign for the thing itself is both secondary and provisional: it is second in order after an original and lost presence, a presence from which the sign would be derived. It is provisional with respect to this final and missing presence, in view of which the sign would serve as a movement of mediation.

(Derrida 138)

Derrida’s concept of the différant text as a provisional arrangement is also applicable to Alibi, as the underlying text was destroyed and one can no longer find out what (and if) anything was changed. The semiotic indeterminacy of the text is even more apparent in our case because the narrative point of view of the first-person narrator cannot be pinned down. The tense of his reports shifts between present and past, and sometimes words like now seem to refer to the time of the entry into the journal, whereas at other times they relate to the moment of transcription. When the remark “last Wednesday” (8) at one point seems to qualify him clearly as a narrator “in the midst of things,” he also has information at hand that he can only have as a narrator reminiscing in hindsight. For example he concludes at one point, “In sum, I was a happy man. And I might have remained such, had Deemer not sent me that unfortunate message” (7).

Not only Karen Strike’s commentary is parasitical in (probably) using Dorf’s text in a way that differs from his original intention; Dorf’s own text is also parasitical, as it re-interprets the situation depicted in the journal and integrates it into the new frame of an alibi. Karen is right when she points out to him that “You invent yourself, each time you sit down to make an entry …” (61), and “You do these real ‘takes’ on this Dorf guy that you’re trying to put together” (62).

Dorf admits that the construction of his text has involved manipulations, when he insists on the reliability of one particular self-quotation: “I must let this entry stand as I originally wrote it, in the interest of making clear my own integrity; I have emended and summarized elsewhere only to establish a narrative account whose clarity matches my insight …” (100). At other instances, Dorf also refers to the important function of his own commentary, for example when he comments on the collections that he acquires for Deemer: “The collection itself only confirms the discontinuity of this scattered world; it’s my talk that puts it together. I rave the world into coherence for Deemer” (195). But there is one collection of fragments that Dorf has to re-interpret and make coherent for himself: “I am trying to make sense of my journal, since I was sometimes remiss, sometimes left little gaps here and there. I make a correction, where necessary” (231). What makes up the special character of Alibi is that both processes of editing—Dorf’s editing of his journal and Karen’s comment upon his text—take place at the same time (even though one after the other) and that both have not come to a conclusion at the end of the book:

Yes, today, even while I tear out sheets from the front of the journal, I write new notes on the sheets at the end. The journal itself was intended to cover a mere calendar year. Even with those first pages vanishing, a handful each day, I have too many blank sheets remaining.

(230)

The transcription of the journal is thus an unfinished process: as Fogel put it, a “continuing condition.”

In Alibi, Kroetsch has integrated the parodic process of self-editing into his novel. The reader realizes that Dorf’s writing about himself and Karen’s editing result in texts shaped and determined by certain purposes; even if Dorf pretends to have written them for nothing else than self-knowledge: “I will show my journal to no one …” (135). Both textual levels are “deconstructive” as they re-interpret old relationships and embed them in new contexts. Dorf correctly realizes that many events only make sense in hindsight, when they are embedded in new and all-embracing interpretations: “Yesterday made sense, I can see it all now, but today doesn’t. Maybe that’s what journals are about” (39). Past occurrences only make sense in the present context, new texts only in comparison with old ones. That is why diaries have to be rewritten. The revised texts are parasites feeding on the energy of the original text and redirect it by embedding it in a new context, whether it be by adding many lines (like Dorf) or by just inserting a few titles (like Karen). If this technique is reminiscent of the technique of parody mentioned at the beginning, that is no coincidence. Linda Hutcheon once remarked in an essay that “parodic art both deviates from a literary norm and includes that norm within itself as background material” (Hutcheon, “Parody without Ridicule” 204). In Alibi, the norms parodied are that of the diary (Dorf’s birthday journal is parodied in his expedition report or alibi) and that of the expedition report itself, which is parodied by Karen’s comments.

While a novel such as The Words of My Roaring displays this act of parody or—in Lévi-Strauss’s terms—bricolage on the autobiographical level of Backstrom’s reminiscing about his own life, and while Badlands is an example of the use of such techniques on the biographical level of Anna Dawe’s reconstruction of her father’s life, Alibi unites in itself the characteristics of both strategies. Dorf writes his version of the search for the lost spa as an autobiography dominated by his endeavour to construct an alibi. Karen, who had warned him that his alibi “had better be airtight” (219), adds a biographical level to Dorf’s autobiographical one.

The alibi constructed by Dorf is double: alibi is defined by Webster’s as “a plea of having been at the time of the commission of an act elsewhere than at the place of commission.” This refers to Dorf’s involvement in Julie Magnuson’s mysterious death in Portugal. On the other hand, alibi can also mean “an excuse usually intended to avert blame or punishment (as for failure or negligence),” and if we understand the word in this sense, it would refer to Dorf’s responsibility for Medeiros’s death. Here, as well as concerning the narrative structure of his book, Kroetsch leaves us in doubt. The only thing we as readers can understand and ‘trace’ is the act of writing, not the events to which the text refers, an insight already won from historiographical metafiction. Alibi sketches what happens when we write alibis, and in a sense all human memory tends to be selective and becomes a kind of alibi, especially historical writing. There is always a difference between a written text and the truth, because the purpose for which a text was written frames its views and our views of it. The construction of alibis was already part of Kroetsch’s earlier novels, witness for example Demeter Proudfoot’s version of Hazard Lepage’s story, or Mark Madham’s version of Jeremy Sadness’s tape. In order to render past events plausible in hindsight, one has to go beyond pure description and documentation. Kroetsch’s writers and editors all do what Dorf suggests to Karen when she starts to film a documentary: “Fake the real” (52).

Reading and tracing the narrative structures of Kroetsch’s novels from the relatively simple third-person perspective of Exiles through the tall tales of Johnnie Backstrom, Demeter Proudfoot, and Mark Madham, through Anna Dawe’s female version of her father’s story, to the magically coherent incoherence of What the Crow Said and the Derridean trace of an alibi in Alibi, the reader participates in the endeavours of an author who again and again lives up to his claim that “I work a reader pretty hard, I guess, in that I want him to enter into the process [of fiction making] with me” (Hancock 42). Kroetsch’s interest in and production of writerly structured narratives rather than traditionally formed ones shows that he, too, believes that traditional narrative is dead if we mean by that a narrative relying on “a social order of meaning, a political economy and collective psychology.” The writer of a postmodern text can no longer rely on such a firmly established world-view, and this is Kroetsch’s message to his readers. Thus—and more radically so than most of his Canadian colleagues—he does what Richard Harvey Brown defines as the task of the postmodern writer: he “tries to invent a new way of reading the world. Instead of reconstructing the world in terms of an earlier, conventional code, he deconstructs conventional experience through a new form of encoding” (R. H. Brown 545, 546).

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