Visions of Heidegger in Dennis Lee and Robert Kroetsch

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 ISAÍAS NARANJO Visions of Heidegger in Dennis Lee and Robert Kroetsch >Why is it Being and not rather the void?= is the first of all questions. Martin Heidegger [I]nward colonization is a serious thing; it means that we are now exCanadians B or to put it at its most recklessly hopeful, that we are notyet -Canadians. Dennis Lee Canadians do not ask themselves who they are. They ask, rather, if they are. Robert Kroetsch I Martin Heidegger exerted a decisive influence both on the existentialism that serves as background for Dennis Lee=s poetry and on that vastly complex and contradictory field called postmodern thought with which Robert Kroetsch has been associated in Canadian literary and academic circles. For Heidegger, concerned with Being, it was clear that we cannot have direct access to something called >Being= per se, but to the >Being-there,= a dichotomous union between Sein and Dasein. While, in principle, his Sein and Dasein opposition may look like Plato=s separation between the sphere of perfect Ideas and their imperfect realization in our everyday world, Heidegger thought that Plato (and with him, the whole of Western philosophy) erred in turning away from the pre-Socratic philosophers. When those philosophers talked about φvσις, they were not referring merely to material (physical) entities but to reality in general; consequently, their reflections μετα-τα-φvσικα did not lead >beyond the physical world,= but were reflections >about reality,= about what-is, about Being. Believing that the Platonic notion of metaphysics has direct consequences over the whole of our vision of reality, Heidegger felt that it had especially shaped our model of language, sanctifying the distinction between λoγoς, as selfhearing , self-perpetuating Voice, and γραφια, a secondary and derived sign (or, more generally, between signified and signifier). Heidegger found himself in the contradictory situation of trying to subvert this structure of 870 isaías naranjo thought (producing his sense of de-struction) while using tools provided by that system, a subversion or destruction from within that would entail, among other things, questioning our system of hierarchies (as far as was possible given our inability to move outside the system) and thereby initiating a strategy of resistance that he never completed. Concerned by the way our languages are deeply conditioned by the metaphysical mode of thought, he longed for some sort of originary language or more elementary words B Urwörter B that expressed Dasein in a more accurate manner. We will never know what those Urwörter would actually look like: Heidegger could not simply invent another language ex nihilo. (His exploration of Being was the preliminary draft, we might say, of a project continued by Jacques Derrida and by the notion of deconstruction more generally.) Nevertheless, though we might not be able to articulate them, we should keep those Urwörter in mind: they are essential to our understanding of Dennis Lee and Robert Kroetsch. For Heidegger, understanding Being as a self-existing idea made no sense. We are aware of Being (or Being is aware of itself, which is the same thing) because it comes into existence, it comes into being, it be-comes. (At the beginning of Kroetsch=s What the Crow Said, the character of Vera Lang experiences an apocalyptic orgasm thanks to a swarm of bees, which is pretty clearly a Kroetschian bee-coming B but that is, as Kroetsch would say, another story.) At the same time, the Being-there >goes back= to its origin, to Being, to its foundation, just as it >knows= that Being-there funds Being. We live in the middle of this uncanny and eternal dialogue between Being and Being-there, and the difference between the two (to which Derrida=s différance is directly indebted) is a consequence of as much as it is the cause of their possibility. To put it simply, we could not talk about the calling forth of Being into Being-there and the >invocation= of the Being-there to Being without the existence of that difference. Difference creates the illusion of identity (the existence of >something= by and for itself) and objectivity (we, as subjects endowed...