Robert Kroetsch by Peter Thomas (review)

462 LEITERS IN CANADA 19B1 our age.' Expressions of melancholy grow more frequent as the international situation degenerates, Canadian centralists tighten their throttle-hold, and old friends, those 'scattered points of light,' pass on: 'We're getting into apocalyptic times, and I suppose I'm catching the spirit: Woodcock laments in a1976letter. Sombre reflections like these are not typical. however, and the overwhelming impression given by these highly readable letters is one of commitment, solidarity, and buoyant affirmation. Despite its shortcomings (a chronological list instead of an index, too few pre-1970 letters, too many misprints), Taking It to the Letter is an entertainingand instructive selection; it gives a frank and engrossing look at one of our most versatile authors and at the 'points of light' to whom he wrote. (JEFFREY HEATH) Peter Thomas. Robert Kroetsch Douglas & McIntyre, 1980. 139· $5.95 paper For critics the work of Robert Kroetsch is especially inviting, but it also presents special problems. His novels are rich with meaning (he once described the excitement of composition as 'seeing how it all fits in'), for he works with allusion and symbol. with myth and meaningful event, with biographical material, and with allegorical naming, until his writing becomes thickly 'layered: to use the term Kroetsch has borrowed from Joyce. It is this plenitude of meaning in Kroetsch's fictions that makes the critic's task a formidable one. Once when he was asked whether he was aware of a certain essay on the Odyssey before writing The Studhorse Man, he replied: 'I read absolutely everything I could get my hands on about Odysseus when I was working on that book.' Perhaps one job for Kroetsch's critics is, therefore, to do some comparably extensive reading. But the act of interpreting Kroetsch is tricky in other ways as well. His novels are not only comic-bawdy (a form notoriously hard to get serious about) but also parodic - and among their objects of parody are the activities of the scholar (particularly as embodied in the biographer Demeter Proudfoot in The Studhorse Man), of academics and literary critics (in the portraits of Professor Mark Madham and his graduate student Jeremy Bentham Sadness in Gone Indian), and throughout Kroetsch's later work of the writer himself. 'I have a sense of irony which threatens to destroy me: Kroetsch once said (a remark Peter Thomas quotes at the beginning of his study and again in the middle and at the end): one sometimes wonders if Kroetsch means to take his critics with him. Thomas is well aware of the critical difficulties in reading Kroetsch's texts, for the opening line of his book is 'A critically self-conscious writer both anticipates the responses of his readers and is tempted to betray HUMANITIES 463 them' - yet he is undismayed, and he gives us an elegant and intelligent survey of Kroetsch's achievements in this the thirteenth of the 'Studies in Canadian Literature' monographs. This is a sympathetically written work, one that strives 'to be true to Kroetsch's imagination, as I understand it, and to make its emphases mine' (p 120), but Thomas can also be tough-minded within the bounds of sympathy, as when he talks about the 'great withdrawal from intimacy' that, he feels, mars What the Crow Said, Kroetsch's most recent novel. In general Thomas's approach is through the use of illuminating contexts - contexts which not only inform individual novels and poems but also give meaning to the author's larger themes and patterns, even to his career as a whole. Since Kroetsch is a compulSive myth-maker in both his fiction and his life, Thomas's contexts are primarily mythic ones: the story of Narcissus, the North American trickster tales, the whole tradition of Orpheus. To these the critic adds the lore of shamanism (chiefly as found in Mircea Eliade's and Joseph Campbell's studies) and the ideas of contemporary critical theory that so engage Kroetsch as teacher. Never forced, these contexts are both appropriate and clarifying. The figure ofNarcissus, for example, is invoked by Kroetsch in the epigraph of his fIrSt novel, But We Are Exiles (an epigraph oddly lacking in the recent paperback...