Kroetsch a Golden Voice When

Kroetsch

A Golden Voice

When one thinks of writers who have helped to define the mythos and reality of the West, the names that tend to come to mind are American writers. But while the American West holds a place of prominence in the world at large in terms of westward colonial and imperial expansion and the ways in which native peoples and immigrants interacted in the lands of the west, there are other important voices as well.

Robert Kroetsch is one of these as he has defined the experience of the west as it has occurred in Canada. This paper examines his most important works and how he has helped in them to help his readers learn new ways to think about what happened once people of European descent lifted their eyes to the sunset and began to stake their claim to the other end of the North American continent.

Probably his most compelling vision of the West is spelled out in a triptych of works that he wrote several decades ago: The Words of My Roaring (1966), the Studhorse Man (1970), and Gone Indian (1973), a set of novels that he collectively calls the "Out West" triptych. He blends the myths of the West and particularly of the Canadian western plains with classical myths, blending these different narrative traditions to help make meaningful the ways in which this part of the world and the people who live in it changed from the Great Depression through the 1970s. His works take up entrenched moral issues of the characters and the times in a way that bypasses traditional sectarian discussions: He takes a view of religion that can come off as both tolerant and yet also gently dismissive (Simpson-Housley and Norcliffe 78).

Kroetsch is, unlike most writers about the west, a post-modern author. This simply means that he calls into question many things that other writers take for granted. His work is ironic, questioning and even undercutting the ways in which the West is generally lionized and made into Romanticized icons. Kroetsch's works are far indeed from the kind of images that are far too common in American renditions of the West in which the reader is all-too-likely to be given representations of the lonesome cowpoke as he sits around the fire drinking his coffee out of his bent can. He both rejects these images and yet acknowledges them as well. For while these images may have little to do with the life as actually lived in the North American West in the 19th century, they have everything to do with the ways in which people in the 20th and 21st centuries believe the West was won and lived (Cronon).

There is no way in which a contemporary writer can talk about the West without acknowledging its stereotypes, which Kroetsch does, even as he undermines them. In this sense, he is very much a postmodernist:

Postmodernism is also concerned with the search for the hidden, including questions not normally asked, with games and systems, with becoming rather than being, with playfulness, with a refusal of meaning. Its being is a perpetual critique, leaving assumption after assumption dissected, displayed in its forlorn misappreciation for all to see. Indeed -- and here we go postmodernistly -- is there anything other than an intellectual game involved in the linking of the Great Plains to postmodernism or postmodernism to the scholarly study of regionalism? (Kaye and Thacker 167-8).

There are important ways in which Kroetsch is like other chroniclers of the West. For him, the physical geography of the West is an essential character in his novels. His sense of place is vital in his works, and in this his novels mirror many of the literary works of other writers about the West (Luebke 28). Kroetsch describes how the open spaces of the West, and especially the prairies of Canada, have shaped the lives of the peoples who have lived there, both the people who lived there at first and the people who came later. Kroetsch describes the prairie as lovingly as a lover would describe the object of desire.

Kroetsch writes about Western Canada in a way that suggests both the perspectives of an insider and a foreigner. Lane describes this quality of Kroetsch's writing as being mazelike, a way in which the author seeks to understand his own path as well as helping the reader to empathize with the complexity of this dual identity (19). This passage from his novel Alberta demonstrates that blend of ease and constant surprise: