"The novel of exhaustion," a contemporary literary term with several synonyms, describes fiction whose subject is fiction in the making, the creative process in action. It is often manifested in parodic forms and an indulgence in private fantasy which threaten to become precious. But in its sophisticated examples this species of reflexive writing sports with and flaunts the mechanics of the imagination and the devices of expression. "Novel" becomes a descriptive adjective rather than remaining an unquestioned noun; the form becomes a quality, justifying its claim to novelty. Its motives still reverence the light-bearers, Apollo and Prometheus, but its patron is the self-regarding, echo-haunted Narcissus. Robert Kroetsch's novels The Studhorse Man and Gone Indian reflect this postmodern approach to the house of fiction…. (p. 10)

[Kroetsch] has often commented on his practice in writing, and one sees that a particular approach to his work necessarily involves its techniques as an adjunct to its themes. The epigraph to Gone Indian, from Frederick Jackson Turner—"For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant"—is appropriate as theme and stylistic metaphor. However, Kroetsch's unrestraint is more of idea than performance, for he retains all the virtues of story and storytelling while imitating their conventions and parodying their devices.

It is difficult to avoid Kroetsch's comic perspective, one closely associated with his interest in the mythic Trickster figure, the "irrational amoral impulse at work," the abuser of order and yet the moving force behind the new cultural patterns emerging from the egocentric anarchy. Kroetsch writes of and as Trickster in his collection, The Stone Hammer Poems, and has spoken of this roguish independent as a richly metaphoric possibility…. To Kroetsch, any system, be it of thought or language or literary practice, is contrary to "the demands of authenticity," a shibboleth to be tested…. (p. 17)

As a corollary of such play, Kroetsch's disaffection with one specific mode is frequently heard. As he has said,

I'm fascinated right now by the effects of moving away from realism—the kinds of freedom you get, and the kinds of truth you get at, by departing from the sterner varieties of realism…. it's a literary convention to begin with, the notion of realism.

However, this is merely a symptom of a more fundamental problem…. [Perhaps] the most consistent object of his critical address has been the tyranny of language, the grandest convention in sight or voice. Kroetsch supports the practice of, in his words, demythologizing, deconstructing, unnaming, uncreating, or uninventing: breaking free of the word's received meaning and absolutes into a contemporary world of fresh usage and implication, so that the full resonance and suggestion inherent in language is released. The "reality" once thought to be captured or imitated in words is not now obvious; language has replaced its nominal subjects and does not challenge vision. "Capturing process" is what Kroetsch attempts to do with language: his constant speakers or compulsive babblers are unwittingly giving tongue to the processes of how and what to see and name for themselves, what forms to follow or abuse, what new ones to advance. John Backstrom, in The Words of My Roaring, is just one such voice, continually straining the resources of his perception, his language, and seeking the real franchise of the word.

The theorists of postmodernism have emphasized the element of play in literature as a way of exposing the possibilities in language, recreation as re-creation. Kroetsch has spoken of the concepts of "game theory and of picture theory in language. Game theory is the conception of language as a serious game, picture theory of language as identical with reality."… Kroetsch's ultimate purpose is a creative involvement that readers have confused with "identification" in literature:

… I'm interested in sharing with the reader the fact that I'm making a fiction. One of the assumptions of old style realism is that the novel isn't a fiction. Verisimilitude, the textbooks demand…. I want the reader to be engaged with me in fiction making, I work a reader pretty hard, I guess, in that I want him to enter into the process with me.

Here is the open structure, the dissolved frame that characterizes the novel of exhaustion, the peculiar intimacy of the postmodern.

In The Studhorse Man, its principal voice, Demeter Proudfoot, is a writer whose subject, a biography of Hazard Lepage, becomes himself, and who becomes his subject, the studhorse man. His style is the boy-man himself, and he demonstrates the often introverted, precious, and personal nature of the postmodern…. Even as "biography" Demeter's work is imperfect; not only does it become autobiography, but it has little to do with a chronological life. Instead, the life-perspective is severely limited, and much of the book is hypothesized incident with dialogue, or fictional narrative. (pp. 17-19)

The point about The Studhorse Man is … related to the whole theory of postmodern perspective and the rendering of an actuality in a dislocated form…. Here in essence is the insistence of the novel of exhaustion on its reconstitution of chronology as much as of fact, its reflections of an image of reality, the freedom of imagination, and the creation of a personal, custom-made structure, the invention of the world.

Gone Indian is Kroetsch's careful version of the multimedia aspect of some postmodern fiction; one of its voices has been "taped, then transcribed, edited and partially interpreted" by the other, and as John Moss adds, "The result is comic distortion of an already distorted perception of an absurd world built from the norms of our own."… As anarchic sport was made of biography in The Studhorse Man, so Kroetsch sees another mode re-examined and mocked in Gone Indian: "Critical method is interesting to me. So … I take the idea of the critical act and treat it as a way to write fiction." Here, however, criticism is both literary and personal; like Demeter, the critic is locked in bitter competition with his deceased subject, and is judging both expressive style and life style…. [There is a pile-up of literary inference] in Gone Indian, and it is the obviousness and clarity of its motifs that stress the artifice of its construct. Ideas of falling, judgement, buffalo, dreams, metamorphic change, silence, and nothingness are pervasive…. The novel is a series of explicit literary patterns, making an order that never was. In addition, the thesis that Jeremy Sadness is trying to write achieves pointedly postmodern definition in several prospective titles: "The Terrors of Completion," "The Theory of Consequence," and "The Plot Against Plot."

Despite a pretense of editorial objectivity, Mark Madham, Jeremy's thesis director, is a mad ham always betrayed, like Demeter, into becoming the real subject of his summaries and comments on his student's tapes. His transcription is selective, not entire…. (pp. 22-3)

He is by turns lyrical, formal, rhetorical, cynical, rhapsodic, vindictive, and merely squalid. (p. 23)

As Madham vies with Jeremy his superiority, which is at best editorial, is invariably given in terms of language, not action. The element of play simply confirms professorial control and a usurpation of the central role in another's story…. Madham continually draws attention to himself, even in criticizing Jeremy's often florid style. (p. 24)

Though Madham's last attention-getting device is his own variation on the translation of the hero, it is Jeremy who, unaware that he would be turned into a fiction, has the last word. At first mistaken for a dead man, which in many ways he has been, Jeremy's final self-mastery, the achievement of an erection and beyond when he is horizontal, is represented in terms of the endgame of language. The compulsive voice is figuratively silenced…. In discovering the failure of the word and the educational constructs represented by Madham, Jeremy rejects the kinds of evasive rhetoric each has resorted to, the mask of metaphor. Things fall apart; traditional centers no longer hold. Language in particular is simply seen to disguise reality and received forms are counter-productive, dysfunctional. "One of the functions of honest writing is to make language reveal again," Kroetsch believes and demonstrates, returning confidently to the groundwork of the literary imagination. In his hands the possibilities and improbabilities of the novel of exhaustion, a second wind rather than a last gasp, have an exciting life. (p. 25)