Messing with the Archive: Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces in Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K

In March 2005 I visited the Robert Kroetsch Fonds in the University of Calgary Special Collections. This consists of almost twenty linear meters of material, including letters to Kroetsch from writers, publishers and academics, letters to and from family members, multiple drafts of his major works and unpublished works, print-outs of e-mails he sent and received, plane and train ticket receipts, conference outlines and drafts of papers, photographs, course outlines, pizza menus, notes written on the backs of postcards, and more.¹ Sifting through this material, I felt a mixture of excitement, voyeurism, frustration, and embarrassment. Dry academic correspondence sat beside intimate notes, which nestled next to what in other circumstances would be considered junk mail. In the first few days I tried to take it all in and to be as comprehensive as possible, close reading letters and poring over drafts. When running out of time, I developed a more ruthless, utilitarian approach, dismissing potentially interesting, intimate details if they did not seem immediately relevant, acutely aware of the time limit I had. I became conscious of my role as selector and producer—attempting to turn the exciting chaos into coherent stories, stifling the excess of the archive.

To look at the archive I needed funding and references from two esteemed academics. The formality and relative inaccessibility of the archive bestows an importance on its contents, making the pizza menus and drafts, which could well be designated rubbish and thrown out, into valuable items to be handled with care, interpreted thoughtfully and—within academic convention—objectively. They also become objects at risk of being defined within deterministic narratives designed to gain academic and financial approval. In this way, the archive can be understood as performative, rather than representative; it does not represent what is important, rather it constructs what is important. As Foucault argued, the archive is “the system that establishes statements as events and things” (79). The hours spent sifting through them to develop a theory, which could have been perceived as a waste of time (being as messy as I have described), were made valuable both by the funding that enabled me to be there in the first place, and by the relatively restricted “open” hours of the archive.

This mixture of formality and informality in the Robert Kroetsch Fonds becomes particularly interesting when read alongside Kroetsch’s 2001 poetry book, The Hornbooks of Rita K, in which Rita K is a missing poet whose poems are being archived in her house by Raymond, who claims to be both archivist and lover, and talks of preparing her “remains” for the University of Calgary Special Collections. According to Raymond, these “remains” consist of “neat stacks of scrawled notes, manuscripts, partially filled notebooks and, yes, unfinished (or unfinishable?) poems,” which he describes as “hornbooks” (8). The epigraphs tell us (via the Canadian Oxford Dictionary) that a hornbook is “a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, etc., mounted on a wooden tablet with a handle, and protected by a thin plate of horn,” and can also be “a treatise on the rudiments of a subject: a primer.” Thus Raymond is directing us to read Rita’s poems less as timeless literary pieces and more as transient instructional summaries, undercutting their literary durability. Moreover, the process of archiving, normally associated with officialness and academia, becomes imbricated with the informality and messiness of lover, friend and failed poet, while the poet’s work becomes metonymically linked with her body, emphasizing the connection between archiving and death. The rubbish becomes less easy to distinguish from the valued; each provides a context for the other. In fact, this article will show that Kroetsch uses the notion of the back door in The Hornbooks to help us question what we value and what we throw away or fail to notice, by presenting a text in which the boundaries between finished poetry and notes, between the archivist’s notes and his own thoughts, between the casual and the deadly serious are mixed together in a way...