Forget Heidegger; or, Why I Am Such a Clever Postmodernist

The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Robert Kroetsch. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989. x + 206 pp.

A new classical age will be reached when the dogma, or ideology of the critics is so modified by contact with creative writing, and when the creative writers are so permeated by the new dogma, that a state of equilibrium is reached.

— T.S. Eliot

In a whimsical passage from Repetition that Heidegger no doubt remembered, Kierkegaard's narrator ridicules those thinkers who pretend to celebrate the noisy flux of human becoming while covertly returning philosophy to the quiet consolations of metaphysics: as "Constantin Constanius" says, these philosophers always "find an excuse to sneak out of life again."¹ Against this subtle treachery, whose name is philosophy, Kierkegaard asserts a radical existentialism that Robert Caputo describes as "the first 'post-modern' attempt to come to grips with the flux, the first try not at denying it or 'reconciling' it in the manner of metaphysics."² Kierkegaard has Hegel chiefly in mind when he criticizes philosophy for its clandestine idealism, but his general point is clear: theoretical talk about escaping metaphysics and affirming the flux can be cheap. It is thus Kierkegaard, as much as the more usually cited Lyotard, who has important things to say to Canadian postmodernist criticism, which too often announces itself as a philosophy of becoming without rigorously theorizing the question of the sheer difficulty of escaping the master narratives of Western metaphysics. Robert Kroetsch's recent collection of essays, The Lovely Treachery of Words, is an especially vivid case in point.

In a most unpostmodernist fashion, Kroetsch's collection is a powerfully thesis-driven book. That fact is no more apparent than in the second chapter, entitled "Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy," where Kroetsch cites Lyotard's polemical description of the postmodern as an "incredulity towards meta-narratives" (22).³ By Lyotard's definition, Kroetsch concludes, "Canada is a postmodern country," in a phrase that has assumed the force but also the depthlessness of a slogan. The bulk of the remaining essays are taken up with identifying a selection of postmodernist literary tropes and themes, including: "the recurrence of major fictional characters who have no names" (41), as in Haliburton's The Clockmaker and Ross's As For Me and My House; the celebration of "the renewing energies of the carnivalesque" (104), as in Moodies's Roughing it in the Bush and Carrier's La Guerre, Yes Sir!; heroes and heroines who "uninvent the world" through "the radical process of demythologizing the systems that threaten to define them" (58), as in Atwood's Surfacing and Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear; and, finally, the recognition and exploration of "our disbelief in belief," "our distrust of system, of grid, of monisms, of cosmologies perhaps, certainly of inherited story" (118), as in contemporary long poems like bp Nichol's The Martyrology and Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. As one can see from even this brief list, Canadian postmodernity is a term with extraordinarily wide powers of arrest; but as Kroetsch says, "That's the way it is, in Canadian writing" (181).

Let me say from the start that I am finally unconvinced by Kroetsch's representation of the postmodern, for all of the sprezzatura which enlivens his book (reminding readers that he is among the country's most interesting writers of fiction and poetry), and for all of the magnanimity and enthusiasm he displays for contemporary Canadian literature. Defined almost exclusively in oppositional terms, as "hauling down" (191) modernism, however, Kroetsch's postmodern too easily falls into the trap of avant-gardism, or what Hal Foster calls "the ideology of the transgressive."⁴ In The Lovely Treachery of Words, Canadian literature has the appearance but not the critical impact of radical transgression primarily because the notion of the postmodern as a relatively simple structure of reversal is itself never transgressed. Here the post-modern neatly supplants the modern through a series of carefully maintained binary oppositions: diacritic over dialectic, fragmentary over unified, archaeology over history, each pair regulating the dismissal of the old to the precise degree that it stabilizes the apprehension of the new. Kroetsch thereby shelters his critical work from the more truly tumultuous productions and reproductions of a postmodernism where the theoretical efficacy of such oppositions is thrown into question. The Lovely Treachery of Words thus falls short of endorsing a "postmodernism of resistance," which, as Foster notes, "arises as a counterpractice not only to the official culture of modernism, but also to the 'false normativity' of a reactionary postmodernism."⁵ In other words, a "postmodernism of resistance" resists, especially, a stable notion of the postmodern: it refuses not only easy caricatures of the Other — the "Modern," the "meta-narrative" — in which it claims to discover its mirror opposite, but also idealized representations of itself.

The notion of "archaeology," which functions as Kroetsch's master-trope for both Canadian literature and his reading of it, is perhaps the most subtle instance of this kind of idealization in The Lovely Treachery of Words. "Archaeology allows the fragmentary nature of the story, against the coerced unity of traditional history," Kroetsch writes in the opening chapter; "Archaeology allows for discontinuity. It allows for layering" (7). Kroetsch acknowledges that "it is the great French historian Foucault who has formalized our understanding of the appropriateness of the archaeological method," but it is unclear how that understanding has determined the methodology of the essays in The Lovely Treachery of Words. For Foucault, the notion of the archive brings out how the positivities of any epoch are discursive effects, the results of the circulation and percolation of power through systems of language and representation. But one of the things that makes Foucault difficult and radical is his insistence on the irreducible absences and limitations of archaeological knowledge, of the fact that "it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say . . . its modes of appearance, it forms of existence and coexistence, its system of accumulation, historicity, and disappearance."⁶ For Foucault it is not the size or complexity of the historical field that resists totalization, as if there was too much material with which to work; nontotalization is rather an expression of the nature of the field, whose irreducibly differential and discontinuous quality makes comprehensiveness — including the comprehensiveness of a history, literary or otherwise, written in the name of the "archive" or the "archaeological" — provisional and inherently unstable. The positivities against which the archivist writes thus include not only history "itself," but notion of the archive as obtaining any kind of stable critical leverage on the "historical," since the historicity of the archive recedes even as it is approached. Nothing of this negative insight, the very heart of Foucault's "historical" project, governs Kroetsch's analyses in any meaningful way: as he says, "we reject the meta-narrative and assert the validity of our own stories" (24), as if this process of rejection followed by assertion were not the replacement of one form of history for another, and as if the idea of the autonomous, knowing subject grounded out in the "validity" of his or her "own" story were not precisely the effect of an identifiable "historical" moment. In Kierkegaardian terms, Kroetsch employs the trope of archaeology to "sneak out of life" at the same moment that he claims most to be immersed within its interminably "fragmented" complexities.

For all the emphasis on the stratified and discontinuous nature of Canadian postmodernist life, on the "fragments, traces, possibilities, remains, [and] shards" (182) making up "our experience and . . . our psyches," Kroetsch's narrative is massively, even anxiously, characterized by a host of totalizing impulses and designs, all of them working to recentre Canadian literary history around what could only be called the new epoch of the postmodern. Even while derogating unity as "modernist" or "Romantic" or "illusory," Kroetsch openly sublates postmodernist difference into higher forms of identity, as when he describes the Canadian paradigm of fictional characters who "act out the disunity that becomes our dance of unity" (29). Similarly, the conflicting interpretations of the endings of certain postmodernist novels amount to their own version of unanimity: "the debates themselves," as Kroetsch puts it, "create" 'unity' " (25). How this "unity" is different from its demonized counterpart is neither theorized nor demonstrated, since it is illusory. Notwithstanding the scare-quotes, which in any case are inconsistently applied, it would be difficult to conceive of a more obvious indication that in Kroetsch's hands disunity is in fact a real possibility within quite conventional notions of unity: "Disunity as Unity" — to cite the title of the second chapter — carries out the work of unification and totalization in its own way.

In Reading Canadian Reading, a volume which is strikingly similar in scope and methodology to The Lovely Treachery of Words, Frank Davey has recently described this theoretical error as the "idealization of the dialogical."⁷ Davey's volume is not without its own significant problems, including those problems for which he rightly faults his peers.⁸ But his point is especially germane to Kroetsch's argnment, which everywhere affirms "the abundance that is diversity" (23) at the risk of flattening out the genuine and mutually disruptive differences between distinct positions. The "idealization of the dialogical" leads naturally to the outright erasure of difference, as is clearly the case in Kroetsch's pervasive use of first person plural pronouns — "we," "us," "our:" "our dance of unity," "our psyches," "our best poets," (29, 182, 133), to cite only a few of the dozens of examples of the possessive case alone. This is neither a stylistic quirk, nor simply the rhetoric of authority, but a ubiquitous mark of Kroetsch's stake in the sorts of meta-narratives that his text denounces as insufficiently postmodern. Using these pronouns, he takes for granted the very ideas to be proved: not only that there is a distinctly "Canadian" form of experience and writing, but that it is in some self-evident way available to and shared by all of "us." It needs to be emphasized that it is by no means obvious what "we are" and what "ours is"; moreover, this kind of precritical, liberal pluralism is always instantly available to do specifically ideological work, as the current political climate in this country suggests, in ways that can be as lurid as they are unreflective. That Kroetsch refuses to put his notion of a literary citizenry into question is the strongest indication that it functions primarily as a transcendentalizing and coercive concept masked in the guise of a concern for the historical specificity of writing in Canada, and this, it cannot be emphasized enough, at the same time that he insists on the dissolution of the individual into "fragments, shards" and the decentring of the social body into "the play of surfaces" (ix). The plural pronouns are only one example in a field of terms having to do with essences and identities that forms a metaphysical buttressing to Kroetsch's essays: "The archetypal Canadian artist is Tom Thomson . . . [He] is the paradigm . . . (56); "Grove is the paradigm . . . (61); Tay John . . . elaborates the paradigm" (182); "The place of Canadian fiction is a house, an isolated community, and Sheila Watson in The Double Hook (1959) announces both as paradigmatic" (67). The fact that Kroetsch so readily resorts to the rhetoric of paradigms betrays his nostalgia for the assurances of an underlying Hegelianism: by asking the question, "What is the common Spirit?," he seeks to reconcile the dissonant sounds of the carnival to the noiseless hush of the concept. The very shape of Kroetsch's argument serves similarly totalizing ends: all too often his prose devolves into single-sentence summary paragraphs that reduce individual novels to postmodernist exemplars;⁹ at other points, Kroetsch resorts to lists of authors and titles that presuppose a postmodern identity so self-evident as to eschew critical discussion. "Consider the secrecies of Callaghan, of MacLennan, of Livesay, of Lampman, of Crawford" (189). Or: "One must read again Suknaski Mandel . . . Mitchell . . . Wiebe" (15). These imperatives reduce "reading" to a simple matter of recognizing a stable postmodern epoch (which in turn makes the positing of lists like these possible), and circumvent the altogether more vertiginous negotiation with the diverse textual strategies, intended audiences, material circumstances, philosophical provenances, and literary backgrounds that all the texts cited in The Lovely Treachery of Words demand as the minimal condition of their critical reception. Surely the study of literature in this country has had quite enough of this kind of thematic cataloguing, this studied refusal to attend, text by text and word by word, to the task of actually reading Canadian writing.

Nor is the gap between Kroetsch's postmodernist assertions and his totalizing rhetoric the only inconsistency rendering the theoretical basis of The Lovely Treachery of Words partly unintelligible. On the question of the status of the knowing self, for instance, Kroetsch is at once critical and idealistic. In the context of a discussion of Surfacing he suggests that the "old notion of identity, of ego, is itself a spent fiction" (63), but this only a few pages after characterizing the narrator's uninventing of the world as one of "giv[ing] birth to her true identity" (60). Moreover, Kroetsch's denunciation of "inherited story" (118) does not prevent him from describing Atwood's "heroine" as "an Everywoman figure come to an archetypal confrontation with parental figures, with garden and forest" (49) — surely the material for a meta-narrative if ever there was one. Although Kroetsch draws a potentially valuable theoretical distinction between "a quest for a fixed and knowable identity in the labyrinth of the world" and the postmodernist "idea of identity itself as labyrinth" (50), his critical practice remains conspicuously idealistic. "We are free, always," he writes, "to salvage ourselves . . . by the lovely treachery of words" (160), as if the notion of the self as an autonomous, willing agent of choice and meaning were an irreducible fact, rather than the "fictitious atom of an ideological representation of society,"¹⁰ as Foucault, among many others, has pointed out. Kroetsch's underlying humanism would account for his attraction to a relatively limited number of Canadian fictions which are themselves conspicuously divided over their putative postmodernity, and, indeed, probably should not be characterized as postmodern at all. It is as if Kroetsch intends on articulating a radical position but ends up turning repeatedly to a group of novels and poems which in fact resemble his residually humanistic position more than his stated postmodernism. "In Canadian writing," Kroetsch argues, the "self is not in any way Romantic or privileged," yet the texts which he cites most often — by Sinclair Ross, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence — are clearly subject-centred in form and in content: the self remains the unshakable locus of intelligibility in stories of heroic or tragic or comic self-discovery, in stories of inward, dialectical progress towards self-knowledge, in portraits of failed or successful artists, in stories of cultural alienation, personal estrangement, survival, temptation, and metamorphoses, in stories shaped by the stern "demands of authenticity," and by the movement toward what Kroetsch calls, without a trace of irony, "the Easter of recognition" (62). The very fact that these stories are recognizable as stories at all, which is to say, as more or less consistently representational narratives revolving around identifiable characters and themes, puts to us just how "privileged" the self has been and continues to be in certain kinds of Canadian writing. The degree to which Kroetsch's credal texts remain not only captive to phenomenological questions of identity and desire, but resistant to a wholesale critique of aesthetic representation is perhaps most strikingly evident by comparing them to postmodernist writings from outside the Canadian context: to the attenuated fictions of Beckett, for example, which explode all notions of emplotment and characterological depth, and which constantly throw into relief the naivete and the virulence of the desire to make writing into stories "about" the self; or to the work of Robbe-Grillet, whose choisme posits the subject as one object among objects, and for whom even Nietzsche remains too much of a metaphysician."¹¹

At issue here is not whether the displacement of the human subject in fiction is possible or even desirable. My point is that Kroetsch's unreflective adherence to easy claims about the decentring of the self and the dismantling of "joined story" into "abrupt guesswork, juxtaposition, flashes of insight" (119) finds remarkably little proof in the texts he examines. And in the case of texts which do more closely resemble his modelling of postmodernism, Kroetsch's response is revealingly conserving. For example, although Kroetsch acknowledges Audrey Thomas' Blown Figures to be a "radical experiment in form," he quickly recuperates it as an example of "the quest . . . for a missing person" (111). Composed largely of bits of "found" text scattered across barren pages, it seems to me that the real difficulty of Thomas' text lies in its steadfast renunciation of the concepts of "quest" and "person." A similarly palliative strategy characterizes Kroetsch's analysis of a passage drawn from Bowering's A Short Sad Book, described as "a novel, a collection of short stories, a history, an autobiography, and a critical study" (179). Kroetsch deftly brings out the ambiguities and slippages that characterize the passage's unalloyed mixture of styles and positions, but then leaves its most difficult feature undiscussed: the radical nature of Bowering's text lies not in whether it is "assertion" or "parody" (180), but in the impossibility of distinguishing with any certainty between the two. What makes this bizarre text vertiginous, and , I would argue, "resistantly" postmodern, is that it hovers indeterminately in a region "beyond" parody, that is, beyond the interpretive stability that a parody tacitly provides by being the translated remembrance of that which is parodied. This indeterminacy redounds strangely upon Kroetsch's determinedly analytical stance, and may explain why the passage from A Short Sad Book triggers the close reading that Kroetsch provides, the most sustained in his book. The problem is that some of Bowering's statements sound weirdly like Kroetsch's claims about Canadian writing, and this echo-effect raises some potentially destructive questions: in what way is Bowering's partly non-sensical statement that " 'Canadian literature is under the ground' " (179) different from Kroetsch's similarly huge claims that "the place of Canadian fiction is a house" (67), or that "Canadian writing is sun literature" (54)? Once it cannot be determined whether Bowering's observations about " 'Canadian literature' " or " 'American literature' " are quasi-academic gimmicks or, as Kroetsch concludes, "a serious statement . . . about the place where he finds his stories" (180), the reader is released into a realm that is neither playful nor "serious" but, exactly, a suspension of the ability to distinguish in any meaningful way between these two possibilities. In that region of radical indeterminacy, Bowering's paraliterary tactics risk extinguishing the possibility of critical reading itself.

These are not the kinds of dizzying questions that the essays in The Lovely Treachery of Words raise or address, carefully holding the literary postmodern at a safe analytical distance in order to obtain a form of happy mastery over it. The result is that Kroetsch's postmodernism is not nearly dangerous enough. It affirms and enjoys the freedom of play, but shrinks back from the spectre of subject-lessness or even illegibility that the disintegration of narrative necessarily raises as its limit case: Kroetsch's analyses consistently make Canadian fictions readable, all-too-readable. Nor does his modelling of the postmodern account for the texts that are heterogeneous because incredulous towards their own postmodernity. In these cases, the postmodern is not an achieved fact, but more properly a "figure of understanding"¹² within the text of contemporary writing, itself subject to difference and displacement, and exposed to the dissent of competing figures. Even a text as disseminative in nature as bp Nichol's The Martyrology, for example, would seem large enough to contain "postmodernism" rather than be contained by it. In theory, the sheer size of Nichol's poem exemplifies the playful potentialities of language; but in practice, the text's spaciousness ends up accommodating the palimpsestic reinscription of conspicuously humanistic concerns and themes: the death of the saints, the abandonment by the father, and the pathos of a writer almost overcome by the monstrous power of his own writing, to name only three cases in point.

The unreflective tendency to celebrate notions of difference and discontinuity in Canadian writing without examining the consequences of this disruptiveness is, it seems to me, the sign of Kroetsch's commitment to an aesthetic ideology. By that I mean that his book mostly treats difference and dialogism as if these were purely formal concepts, rather than terms which also evoke the distribution of power within sexual, economic, social, and psychic economies. From this perspective, Kroetsch's master-tropes of play, performance, and dance do not enter into his essays without consequence: they work to represent postmodernism as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon of unconditional freedom, a lawless, self-generative opportunity for play among surfaces with no depths. But this is so much easier said than done, precisely because Kroetsch's incipient formalism carefully separates out saying from doing, words from material actions. As a result, a strange immateriality invades his postmodernism, often with distressing results. In The Journals of Susanna Moodie Atwood compares the self-division of "Canadian consciousness to paranoid schizophrenia, but in Kroetsch's hands the sense of destructive and disabling estrange ment that Atwood seeks in the choice of that grim metaphor is drained away; when he has Canadians enjoy the "wonderful state of schizophrenia" (155) the vehicle of Atwood's metaphor is carelessly, jarringly, beautified. (Has Kroetsch ever met a schizophrenic? How could the terms "wonderful" and "schizophrenic" be used in the same sentence? One might as well say the "wonderful state of cancer.") In a similarly disembodying way, Kroetsch writes of "the exciting predicament of the artist who works on the periphery" (35). At the edges of the world's master-narratives, Canadian artists, like their counterparts in Australia or Japan, effortlessly render all inherited " 'images equivalent, interchangeable, scaleless, and surface-less' " (35). Perhaps only in the bloodless world of art can marginalized existence be experienced wholly as a space of pleasure, though my suspicion is that this is mostly true of art seen from the two-dimensional perspective of a bloodless postmodernism. Conceived as quixotically utopian in nature, Kroetsch's postmodernism ignores not only the sheer difficulty of writing on the periphery, but, more important, the ways in which different peripheries — sexual, racial, as well as geographic and geopolitical — generate wholly different kinds and degrees of difficulty. Moreover treating the margin as a kind of conceptual free trade zone seems to me to be doubly complicitous with the forces that marginalize, for it deflects the critical eye from the origins of this marginalization in acts of exclusion and acts of violence, while also reducing the work of resistance to so much ineffectual play: the postmodernist fiddles with equally interchangeable images, as it were, while Rome consolidates its power and extends its reach. Thus when Kroetsch idealizes the marginalized conditions of "namelessness" and "invisibility" as an openness to "a plurality of identities" (52) and a freedom to "uninvent the world," he consistently fails to register the human cost of these deprivations, no matter how brutally evident it is in the fictions that he considers. In Rudy Wiebe's "tribe of Crees," for instance, he sees "the epitome of our Canadian selves being extinguished into existence," as if the annihilation of an aboriginal civilization were a moment of transmutation, an exchanging of masks, along the happy path towards postmodernity — rather than a gruesome fact of Canadian history and the central source of the pathos of Wiebe's novel.

The bizarre notion of being "extinguished into existence," like that of "servicing the target" in the recent Gulf war, amounts to a dream of inconsequentiality in which murderous violence is refigured as harmlessly beneficial to both perpetrator and victim. The title of Kroetsch's volume names the aestheticizing effect of this hallucination as its insistent concern: the "treachery" of words is never a real treachery, but always a "lovely" one. Kroetsch's indiscriminate affirmation of difference fosters the illusion of a libertarian democracy, each person responsible solely for securing the "validity'' of his or her own "story." Under the auspices of this utopian postmodernism, differentiation is reduced to a kind of negligible agitation, "the play of surfaces against and with each other" (ix); what, then, of the difference that is not negligible, but the result of techniques of subjection, rules of exclusion? What of those voices which dispute not every other voice equally, and thus "differ" from each other to no net effect, the way opposite wavelengths cancel each other out, but, precisely, the voices that resist the single voice invested with power? What of the commanding voice that doesn't merely differ, to be listened to or ignored at will, but the voice that determines other voices as different, the voice that supervises and regulates what the body will look like and feel like, what the mind thinks and values and desires and fears, penetrating to every corner of this "abundant world of difference," articulating, organizing, making of it a mercilessly sustained panorama of discipline and punishment? In this happy, happy world what of the voice that is not mere babble but efficacious, consequential, revolutionary? Kroetsch must of course acknowledge the importance of such a voice, as he does when he evokes the disruptive power of a "female energy" (38). But his awkward psychobiological jargon leaves this "energy" conspicuously inarticulate; and, in any case, its "threatening" impact on the patriarchy is summarized with what I find to be a dismissive cuteness: "Hey, guys," Kroetsch writes, "Empires end" (38). Kroetsch may well mean his clubby aside to his buddies to be jauntily ironic and politically correct, but in the context of the volume's aestheticized postmodernism it only comes off as trivializing: he could be talking about the end of a game of hockey. Empires end, it is true, but what is missing here is an acknowledge ment of how they end, or even of the fact that Kroetsch's readers live here, now, in an age in which that end is by no means secure, and, indeed, can seem appallingly distant.

Perhaps the more pertinent question is: who is Kroetsch, and what is his position within the "empire," so to speak, such that he can make such safely familiar pronouncements to the "guys," and in this glib manner? The book's concluding chapter, tellingly entitled "My Book is Bigger Than Yours," provides the most revealing answer to that question when he considers his "personal" "experience" of the making of A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, a collection of feminist essays edited by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. I read the opening paragraph of this chapter as a little allegory in which Kroetsch reveals a certain embarrassment about the aestheticizing force of his postmodernism. As he says, while the book was in progress, he was "sometimes politely, sometimes blushingly, endured" by the editors. "Blushingly endured?" Here Kroetsch would seem self-conscious about the distance between the "feminist enterprise" and his own thinking, tacitly aware of the gap between his postmodernism and what he calls the politicization of "the aesthetic question" by his feminist acquaintances: Kroetsch concedes that it is out of the "anxiety" of this space that he writes the closural essay for his book. Yet it is Neuman and Kamboureli who are made to blush, not Kroetsch, in a move that feminizes the feminists while at the same time projecting his own self-consciousness upon them. Perhaps the passage should be interpreted in this way: standing around watching the women at work brings home the inconsequentiality of his postmodernist project. As the title of the essay baldly states, Kroetsch suffers from a kind of performance anxiety, a fear that his critical activity cannot measure up to the more difficult — because less naively utopian — work of "deconstructionist[s]" like his "wife." But this recognition offers Kroetsch nothing in the way of critical leverage on the aestheticizing nature of the volume's other essays, and, in any case, it proves too difficult to sustain. Feeling the parthenogenetic threat of A Mazing Space, Kroetsch is compelled to reinvent his relationship to it before the end of the paragraph: no longer the embarrassed spectator ab extra on the margins of the feminism, he imagines himself to be much more intimately involved with the "enterprise" — as the "father" of the project, no less, and thus indispensable to its conception.

By aestheticizing the postmodern, Kroetsch succumbs to what Paul Smith sees as a "certain difficulty in contemporary theory": "namely, its inability to think a materialist politics without the rather hackneyed — and, not to put too fine a point on it, naive — notion of the liberatory 'free play of the signifier' and the always consequent claim that 'the revolution at the level of the signifier' is on hand."¹³ If the aesthetic offers Kroetsch a way to "sneak out of life," it is Heidegger who opens the door back into metaphysics. Admittedly, for better or for worse, Heidegger can be a hard man to forget — or so it would seem in a certain strain of Canadian postmodernist criticism. The German philosopher's ideas and language insinuate themselves into contemporary Canadian critical writing as early as Dennis Lee's Savage Fields: An Essay in Language and Cosmology (1977), whose rhetoric of "world" and "earth" is drawn from an early, influential lecture, "The Origin of the Work of Art." In his footnotes, Lee acknowledges the significance of Heidegger for his own work, but leaves the precise nature of this inheritance, not to mention his highly idiosyncratic adaptation of it, almost entirely undiscussed, in sharp contrast to the more rigorously critical Heideggerian analyses that were then emerging in studies of American poetry by William Spanos, Joseph Riddell, and Paul Bove. Kroetsch was certainly exposed to this work while he was associated with boundary 2 and the circle at SUNY Binghamton, as his opening acknowledgment to Spanos indicates.¹⁴ But like Lee, Kroetsch is extremely reluctant to discuss in any theoretically cogent way the precise role that Heidegger plays in his postmodernist critical practice, even though "The Origin of the Work of Art," in addition to the late essays on poetry and language, more than match Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as the relevant pretexts for The Lovely Treachery of Words.

That Heidegger is not cited by name in the index to The Lovely Treachery of Words belies his multiple significance for Kroetsch's argument. Sometimes he lends a darkly Germanic ambience to the discussion: "In Canada at times, in disguises . . . as various as trade schemes and international wars, death is the beloved, the sweet other that mothers, mutters, out being in the world" (159). (At best, this conflation of Sein-zum Tode with In-der-Welt-sein is weak philosophy; at worst, it is so much Euro-jive.). More reminiscent of Heidegger is Kroetsch's fondness for rhetorical constructions which attribute a post-humanistic performance to language: Timothy Findley's fiction, for instance, lets the "fragments of story speak their incompleteness" (24), just as "our language, our story, only uses the poet in order to speak itself" (18). But without reflecting upon what claims like these might actually mean, either in their original Heideggerian or in their Canadian context, Kroetsch's large assertions quickly deteriorate into what might be called "Heideggerianisms," that is, into a kind of inconsequential mimicry of the philosopher's technically precise language. Generally speaking, however, Kroetsch is most attracted to Heidegger's reconceptualization of the primordial nature of truth, and to the radical hermeneutic that that rethinking demands. For Heidegger, the apprehension of truth is not a matter of matching a proposition with its object, as is the case in classical metaphysics. Briefly put, truth is rather a structure or a motion of revelation that "itself" remains necessarily un-revealed, perpetually withdrawing so that beings might appear: a-letheia, or un-forgetting, names through negation the concealedly revealed essence of truth. Truth is irreducible to being-unhidden or unconcealed, in the way that light, itself invisible, appears only in what is lit. Through the language of metaphysics, philosophy represses this flickering structure of appearance/disappearance as its inaugural gesture. But Heidegger's radical hermeneutic claims to sound out this language, to re-call from its depths another, more archaic history: namely, the history of Being.

Kroetsch remains explicitly Heideggerian insofar as he identifies art with a Canadian form of a-letheia. Moreover, he consistently characterizes the postmodernist destruction of meta-narratives as analogous to Heidegger's attempt to dismantle the Western metaphysical tradition and to return it to the fundamental question of what "is." For him, Canadians are naturally Heideggerian, not only reviving the Seinsfrage or Being-question as the forgotten theme of the country's literary history, but living it as the condition of their postmodernity: "Canadians do not ask who they are," Kroetsch writes; "They ask, rather, if they are" (55). Like Heidegger's a-letheia Canadians are not, in or of themselves, for the simple reason that their "identity states itself in, by, acts of concealment" (188). Kroetsch contends that he discovers this fundamental hiddenness in the language of contemporary fiction because it is there that it is most spectacularly forgotten and remembered. Canadian literature thus behaves the way that the language of Holderlin's poetry does for Heidegger, performing the task of "Unhiding the Hidden" (58) by concealedly divulging a primordial experience of Being.

No doubt postmodernism is a great deal less effortlessly compatible with Heidegger's project than Kroetsch makes it seem. It would take a separate essay to demonstrate the extent to which Kroetsch's wholesale importation of Heideggerian philosophy into the Canadian literary scene serves both poorly. If the efficacy of Kroetsch's alignment with Heidegger is unclear, however, the reasons for his seeking it are not. Simply put, Kroetsch resorts to Heidegger as a way of ontologizing the postmodern. Kroetsch's explicitly Heideggerian description of truth as "un-concealing, dis-closing, [and] dis-covering" (63) is the most obvious sign of his desire to return postmodernism to the closure of metaphysics by re-inscribing it within the horizon of Being. The conservation of postmodernism in the name of ontology would explain Kroetsch's large-scale and deeply idealistic use of tropes of listening and voice: "the great-given sounds, not over, but in your unique speaking" (19) he writes, describing the successful artist. "[T]o listen is to recover our story, is to dwell at the centre again" (17): here and elsewhere, Kroetsch echoes the most conservative elements of Heidegger, where truth is a matter of Rede or speech, and the thinker's relationship to it thus naturally one of audition, of returning to the centre by being summoned to Being's call. But as Derrida has demonstrated, the "natural" preference of speech over writing, and of hearing over reading, embodies an incorrigible desire to think of truth in terms of self-presence and proximity rather than difference and deferral. Western metaphysics, including its putative "end" in Heidegger, is underwritten by this phonocentrism. At his most unguardedly metaphysical, even the German philosopher could long to hear the "unique word" [das einzige Wort] in which essence and existence coincided in a moment of pure thought-fullness. For all his insistence on "the importance and the failure" of the "connection between the name and the named" (2), Kroetsch similarly succumbs to the temptation to idealize immediacy over textuality, at one point going so far as to imagine the annihilation of language itself: "Now [the signified]. . . can be joined again with its signifier," Kroetsch writes; "name and object come together, the new life is possible" (94). With this hallucination, Kroetsch revives the oldest and best dream of Western metaphysics.

At a telling moment in The Post Card, Derrida relates the story of receiving a collect phone call from one "Martin Heidegger." He refuses to accept the charges, arguing that "no telephonic communication links me to Heidegger's ghost . . . [M]y private relation with Martin does not go through the same exchange."¹⁵ Derrida cannot forget Heidegger, as the Geist call suggests; but he cannot simply remember him either, preferring the contingencies of reading the texts to the false surety of hearing his master's voice. Kroetsch's "exchange" with Heidegger is revealingly different on this point, providing as it does the chief means by which the scandalous productions and reproductions of postmodernism are made safe by ontology, contained within the solemn task of un-concealing "the Canadian identity." Rather than remembering Heidegger in order that he might be radically rewritten, as is the case in Derridean post-structuralism, Kroetsch preserves him so that he can provide postmodernism with the ultimate "excuse to sneak out of life again." Leaving this flight from postmodernist play to the abiding concerns of ontology almost entirely untheorized, Kroetsch in effect represses Heidegger, forgetting him precisely so that he can be clandestinely recalled to do metaphysical work.

Notes

Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, by Constantin Constanius, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 131.[back]

Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987) 12. [back]

All references to The Lovely Treachery of Words will be cited in the body of the text. [back]

"Postmodernism: A Preface," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays onPostmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983) xii. [back]

"Postmodernism: A Preface" xii.[back]

The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) 129.[back]

Reading Canadian Reading (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1988) 2. [back]

See my "Disfiguring the Post-Modern," Canadian Poetry: Studies, Document, Reviews 26 (1990): 75-86. [back]

See, for example, 188.[back]

Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979) 171.[back]

See For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965) 58-61.[back]

I borrow this phrase from Tilottama Rajan. The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990).[back]

Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 134.[back]

Kroetsch writes: "It was Bill Spanos who invited me to read Heidegger against my own story of a Canadian prairie childhood" (ix).[back]

The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) 21.[back]

David L. Clark