SOURCE: “Puppets and Puppeteers: Robert Kroetsch Interviewed by Lee Spinks,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, 1994, pp. 13-22.

[In the following interview, Kroetsch discusses his fiction and poetry.]

The following conversation took place in Hull on 24 October 1993 over a period of two hours. Robert Kroetsch speaks slowly and deliberately, often pausing to revise a word or qualify a phrase or statement. His sentences are frequently punctuated by a staccato burst of laughter.

[Lee Spinks]: Perhaps we might begin, Bob, with your most recent novel. Why did you return in The Puppeteer to the landscape and characters of Alibi? Was it from a sense of unfinished business, or did the earlier novel continue to nag away at your imagination?

[Robert Kroetsch]: No, I had originally planned a much more ambitious story. I was going to look at this group of characters every ten years or so and see what happened to them, to treat them as human beings in a certain way. But after the second volume I think I’ve abandoned the idea. It was a wonderful idea [laughs]. But somehow it just isn’t working for me.

So the characters were going to be periodically picked up, dusted down, and reintroduced into your fiction?

Well I was going to pick up different characters at different stages. In the next volume I had planned to pick up on that young woman Karen Strike and see how she looked at the story. That was my idea.

Is there any connection here with the cyclical narrative model of, say, Updike’s Rabbit novels in which the repetition of a character becomes an index for the state of a nation?

Well I thought it would reflect that and also I thought it would reflect what I thought about the novel at the time from a stylistic point of view. I wanted to get a changing record of my different opinions about the novel’s styles and possibilities. But that’s off the agenda now. It was wearing me out.

So The Puppeteerwasn’t originally conceived simply as a sequel?

Oh no! You see I had never really intended it as a sequel because you might be given a narrator in later novels who takes you back into earlier times. I had, in a certain way, thought of the novels as a diptych: the notion from art of two facing pictures. As my larger scheme collapsed, the notion of a diptych became more attractive.

The idea of a family of interconnected novels, with characters floating across different times, appeals to you, doesn’t it?

Yes, that’s right. I think that’s because I write short novels—or shorter novels at any rate—but I’m always attracted to the idea of a larger novel and the idea of a group of stories was my way to get at it. I think in some literatures—I think Chinese is one—the shorter novel and the longer novel are different genres. The same distinction between forms holds for me: I think of the short story as a very different form from the short novel. I have very little understanding of the short story. I think that the short novel is my form in a way [laughs] … 230 pages or whatever.

One interesting feature of The Puppeteer is your decision to introduce the narrative voice of Jack Deemer. What was the reason for this?

I was interested in Jack Deemer’s impulse to collect everything, to collect the world in a sense. This obsession of his had several consequences: one was that he would want to collect other peoples stories and, ultimately, other people. I had planned that in a vague way all along. But the dialogue he gets into with that third person came as a surprise.

The figure of the collector recurs frequently in your fiction: Demeter Proudfoot collects the smallest details of Hazard Lepage’s life, William Dawe collects dinosaur bones, Jack Deemer collects unusual cultural icons. What attracts you to the type of the collector?

Well, first of all, I’m not a collector in any way myself. I’m fascinated by it though because collecting functions as a model for what culture is in a way, even in a basic activity like education. It’s a very long story, I know, but even by the time you move from a culture of hunting and gathering to whatever comes after, collecting becomes possible and ultimately significant. And the idea of collecting as a metaphor for this kind of development is very interesting to me.

Is there a sense in which the collector functions as an encyclopedic realist novelist in contrast to the imperatives of our “postmodern” age?

Oh, I think so. I think he has a strong impulse to make the world cohere in any way possible. In a certain way, he’s a modernist, I suppose, in my sense of what a modernist is. Collecting also throws up interesting interpretative problems because it insists upon taking things out of context. Nowadays we tend to believe that context is so important; but by taking things out of context and placing them in a museum, or whatever, it’s possible to radically alter their meaning. And that makes us uneasy. Just look at our contemporary unease about past archaeological and anthropological studies. We live in an age of enormous doubt and the urge to collect is an interesting expression of this condition.

There’s contradiction in Deemer’s position, though, isn’t there? In Alibihe collects to escape time, but in The Puppeteer he collects versions of eschatological narratives, plural interpretations of the end of the world. Doesn’t he seem to hesitate between univocity and polyvocality?

Sure, although we shouldn’t put the whole blame on Deemer; this is, after all, partly my fear of a single story [laughs]. There’s an important point here though about the paradox of narrative: the storyteller, by writing the story down and arresting time and story makes it possible for interpretation to function. Deemer’s different narratives or collections rely to some extent on the notion of a single narrative; but then the single story opens out into a number of different narratives. His activities as a collector, in a sense, almost violate the principle of story. And that’s why he’s positioned as both reader and writer in the text, looking over Maggie’s shoulder as a reader but also intruding all the time to the point where he starts believing that it might be his story that he’s writing down. And let’s not forget: there’s a question all the time about how well he can really see. He exploits the notion that he can’t see and he exploits the notion that he can. Which is itself a version of an old, rather classical, conceit: the blind man seeing.

The Puppeteer, it seems to me, is organized around two central images: Julie Magnusson’s wedding dress and the figure of the puppeteer. What attracted you to these images?

Well, in a way I began from the notion of icon; I was interested in discovering exactly what the contemporary icons are. That’s why I got interested in pizza: it looks like an icon to me. I first got interested in the great Byzantine icons because of the traditions behind the painting. There’s a certain kind of resistance to perspective that interested me; the trick of perspective that we get in the renaissance is, after all, a trick: you get tired of it after a while. And as a consequence of resisting the depth of perspective, the notion of surface gets to be so interesting. We have become so adept at seeing depth that we can hardly recognize surface anymore. We can hardly see a cup of coffee. I can’t remember exactly how I got interested in the wedding dress, but once she put on that wedding dress I was away; it was a very important moment for me in the story. She put it on and it enabled her to talk. I have no idea where it came from. In some way, I suppose, it’s got elements of Magic Realism, especially since what’s on the wedding dress keeps changing. The emergence of the puppeteer image is a little more defined. When I was over in Greece I became interested in the idea of the shadow puppets, who seemed to enjoy a certain advantage over our string puppets; the mechanics were different: you could use those lovely bright colours, and shadows, in a different way. And then I began to study the puppet figures that they were using, and Karaghiosi was a trickster-tricked figure and I’m always a sucker for that idea [laughs]. So I got, interested in that. And also the whole notion that the Greeks used these puppets as a rather subversive method of telling stories when they were occupied by the Turks; and then behind that the entire unravelling story that goes back to China and Indonesia or wherever the shadow puppets come from.

This seems to link up with those scenes in Maggie’s attic where characters go to see a show but then become so implicated in or consumed by the events they witness that these stories take over their lives.

Absolutely. And this raises that whole question of how we enter the story. Instead of separating the characters from the action by the arch that you might find in some theatres, I was much more interested in the idea of carnival where you can be looking around, enjoying your distance, while being at the same time part of the spectacle. I was excited by the possibility that these characters could start off outside the story, almost in a critical position if you like, and then gradually become seduced into entering the story. And carnival also has those other aspects—the subversion of order and the overturning of hierarchies—that have always attracted me.

Both the image of the wedding dress and the puppeteer are bound up in some way with the endless reproducibility of story and the human need to keep shuffling between versions of identity. Might The Puppeteer be described as a modern Shakespearean romance in which people have to adopt different disguises to become what they really are?

Yes, I’m sure it could. Frye’s book on Shakespeare was a very instructive book for me because he showed me what Shakespeare was up to. Insofar as I’m really far more attracted to a comic rather than a tragic vision, the comparison with romance is a fascinating one. I’m interested in doubles; and the book plays with the idea of moving between genders. It’s a complicated question where I stand in relation to romance, but one connection is that I like the outrageousness of the storytelling. To tell a story is, after all, already a slightly preposterous thing to do: the world is already too jumbled to accept a single narrative structure. And that’s also the idea in romance, that people need to accept disguises to discover more about their real self. That appeals to me: I’m totally opposed to the notion that underneath my mask there’s a true self, because the masks are, in an important sense, what I really am. That idea that we’re fooling anybody with our disguises is to fool ourselves, especially since the masks we pick for ourselves are so revealing. I think the book says “The Pizza Man. That was her first name for him.” So as she goes through names it’s not a question of one being wrong and another being right; it’s a far more complex problem. It’s the idea that identity is actually found through narrative or story. And this is linked to a very contemporary resistance to the idea of a bounded self: the idea that this, here and now, is what I am and that I have to be consistent with it, when it’s the gaps and contradictions that enable me to be alive in the world. There’s an obvious connection here with the discontinuities of the postmodern novel and what I’m saying here about identity. But then I think that postmodernism, with its whole set of illogical responses and contradictions, is a much better guide to how we live than most.

The plots of both Alibi and The Puppeteer oscillate between Canada and Europe, and between the Old and the New World. Are you conscious of this tension elsewhere in your work?

Yes, although I was much more conscious of this binary when I was younger. I call it a binary, and it is, but it’s much more than that: it gave me permission to write in an important sense. The whole experience of the new place demanded a new telling of the story. Mind you, my whole notion of story was different then. In later years I’ve become more and more intrigued by—this is probably not true [laughs]—the way the act of telling becomes part of the story. I always was though, wasn’t I, from The Studhorse Man onwards or even before then? So I probably have to take that back [laughs].

Any discussion of the relationship between the Old and New World must include the various effects of linguistic and cultural colonialism. Do you consider yourself a post-colonial writer, and if so how has this perception influenced your work?

Well, first of all, let’s remember that the phrase “post-colonial” wasn’t around very much when I was a younger writer. I wish it had been, because I think it’s a very useful phrase for me. I suppose at an early stage a lot of what’s now called post-colonial thought was based upon the model of margin and centre. I think there’s a danger in making that a very stable or static model because what, after all, is the “centre” or the “margin”? These things are very fluid and we need forms that are able to accommodate that fluidity.

You have written of the Canadian experience of inhabiting a “mandarin language” that doesn’t have its roots in the New World landscape. Was this mis-match between the world you perceived around you and the codes available to represent it one reason for your abandonment of realism as a literary mode?

That’s a good question. It touches on some issues that are really important to my conception of the act of writing but that I haven’t really resolved. Perhaps I write because I haven’t resolved them. Could you say some more? It really fascinates me, this question of the relationship between realism and a mandarin language.

Well, it could be said that one of the defining features of realism as a mode of address is that it eliminates the space between experience and representation in the name of discursive transparency. But this makes realism a problematic mode for the post-colonial subject which defines itself by the difference between the landscape it inhabits and the codes available to represent it.

Gee, that’s great; I really like that. That really explains things for me. And this is exactly why I can’t be a realist; it’s all tied up with this notion of difference and language.

This ambivalence about realist fiction has always been present in your work, hasn’t it? I’m thinking of even those early stories like “That Yellow Prairie Sky” which juxtapose mimetic description with dislocated paragraphs of highly charged poetic discourse.

That’s right; God, it’s weird to see these connections. But you’re right. I remember the editor of the journal in which that particular story was placed was a little uneasy about it—that distance from or distrust of a realist frame. But it’s certainly there: that desire to break down any semblance of a coherent discourse, even in that story, which was actually one of the first longer pieces I ever wrote. God, I’ll have to think about this more; I had never fully made the connections in my mind.

This whole question is bound up, though, with the problem of writing a new country in an old language, isn’t it?

Oh, yes, without doubt. I just today read an article in The Times Higher Education Supplement about Mark Twain and how apparently when he was working on Huckleberry Finn he had heard a young black boy speaking and he picked up some linguistic clues from there on how to tell a story by breaking up a certain conventional kind of realism. And this distrust of realism runs right through North American writing: they embrace it but they also buck against it.

Probing this question of writing in a mandarin language, one of the most remarkable features of your fiction is that each of your novels adopts a different style: one is written in a realist mode, another in a kind of postmodern pastiche, a third borrows from Magic Realism. What motivates your continual experimentation with literary form?

Well, I’m not sure that this should even be called experimentation; I think it’s a manifestation in the writer of the things I’m talking about in the stories. One keeps changing, redefining oneself, and there isn’t a secret centre, although this loss of a centre has its attendant freedoms. It enables you to say one thing, shift your voice a little, and then you can say another thing. If you shift the story form you can always say something else and explore different angles. It also makes sense that given what I’m saying about narrative and identity in a single novel that I would begin to write a group of interrelated novels out of this method. This kind of constant metamorphosis is also a strategy for survival: if you think you’re on the margin you keep shape-shifting; this stops you being caught or at least defined against your own wishes.

It’s a very different idea of survival from the Atwood thematic, isn’t it?

Oh, absolutely. And make no mistake: it’s often very tough on the reader, because they have to keep entertaining new possibilities. An Atwood reader is offered a certain kind of security; at least they have a ground or footing that they can feel sure about. I’ve gone the other way; perhaps some of my readers have fallen off the edge [laughs]. I was talking to an agent in London a week or so ago, and he said I go too far in a certain way: you lose readers like this. I have to admit that’s not just a possibility; it’s probably a fact. On the other hand, one hopes that it’s rewarding to the reader in the long run.

Do you see any similarities between the themes and concerns of Canadian writing and those of writers from the other former colonies: Australia, West Indies, India for example?

Sure, I’m fascinated by an Australian writer like Peter Carey, for example. His work is very instructive to me. This term “post-colonial” is necessarily very broad, though; I learned a lot from nineteenth-century American writing, where the American writer still felt that he or she was in what we would now call a post-colonial situation. So you get, as in Twain, their railing against Europe but their running off towards Europe, or Hawthorne literally going to live in Europe for a long time. Or even the heavy-duty argument you get running through the Modernist poets about what to do about Europe: Eliot and Pound going to Europe, and Williams and Stevens saying “That was fatal; you never should have done that”. Australian writing interests me: Illywhacker is a form of Magic Realism, I suppose, which delights in this outrageous making of story out of this marginal world. I think that with the writers on the margins there’s this sense that the hierarchy’s broken down so you can use what you please; you don’t have to say “This wouldn’t be proper in a novel,” or “This would violate the rules”. It’s all just material sitting out there. This happened more, I think, for the Australians than the Canadians because they’re so far from the world, in a way, and we’re always so close to America. So I feel a great sympathy with the Australian fiction writers, although I must say that their poetry often seems a little old-fashioned to me.

Moving on to your poetry, one of the things that interested me when I first read it was the phenomenological impulse to get back to the bedrock of place and identity before the land was written. Do you recognize this impulse in your work?

Oh yes. In fact I was very much taken by the concept of phenomenology earlier in my life—I’m thinking of Stone Hammer Poem in particular—and the challenge of making it an active, not a fixed concept. The challenge of getting back before the land was written by anything else, something that exists prior to language or writing. But at the same time feeling it slip away on you as you try to write it down. The same thing happened to me when I went to see the Rosetta Stone: the fact that here was a language that no one could read; it would just drive you mad to try. And so surface becomes engrossing once more.

The poetry that you wrote in the 1970’s, though, seems to inhabit a deconstructive vocabulary. Were you consciously aware of this transition?

Very much so. Although I didn’t read the notion of “deconstruction” and then systematically apply it to my work. I was doing it, getting it often from American poetry, I think. But deconstruction gave me a way to talk about the tensions and contradictions that I had already experienced. It also gave me a more solid theoretical base, I suppose. I was just ready for that theory to strike [laughs]. The whole notion of writing language against itself fascinates me. And there’s a whole extended notion of the post-colonial there: what is the mandarin language concealing or not concealing? Which brings us back to how you write in the language that you were given. For me it was a matter of going to sub-literary sources: using the ledger, for example, which hadn’t been thought of as a literary tool. Or the seed catalogue, which seemed totally unliterary and gave me a new way to go back to the language I had inherited.

Are the Field Notescontinuing or has The Puppeteer consumed all your time and energy?

Well, I’m working on a novel right now which I think is independent of the Field Notes. It’s a kind of anti-autobiography. Its anti-autobiographical in the sense that I think “autobiography” is a fairly fraudulent notion although a fascinating one: it trades on the belief that a statement must be true because the author said it, when the person least likely to tell the truth is the author. It trades on a fraudulent discourse of truth. The Field Notes, it seems to me, was a genuine attempt to write a long poem which I’ve now either finished or abandoned. This anti-autobiography that I’m working on now could conceivably have some poetry in it, but it’s difficult to insert poetry into an autobiographical form. At the moment I’ve written four or five essays that may go into it. One of my strategies is to take a small event and read it very hard to see if it might have had consequences for my thinking, like my going up North, for example, which I’ve written an essay about: it’s called “Why I Went up North, and What I Found When He Got There.” So the genres will get a little bent once again. But it’s probably bad luck to say too much about the new book. You’ll have to wait and see.