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of Rita K"
Author(s): Catherine Bates
Source: SubStance, Vol. 37, No. 2, Issue 116: Waste and Abundance: The Measure of Consumption
(2008), pp. 8-24
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25195168
Accessed: 07-12-2015 19:03 UTC
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Messing with the Archive:
Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces
in Robert Kroetsch's The Hornbooks of Rita K
Catherine Bates
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
narratives
objects at risk of being defined within deterministic designed
to gain academic and financial approval. In this way, the archive can be
understood as performative, rather than representative; it does not
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9
Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K
as events to
and things" (79). The hours spent sifting through them
a as a waste of time
develop theory, which could have been perceived
as messy as I have described), were made valuable both by the
(being
me to be there in the first
funding that enabled place, and by the relatively
restricted "open" hours of the archive.
This mixture of formality
informality in the Robert Kroetsch
and
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,
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10 Catherine Bates
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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 11
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12 Catherine Bates
investigation both comic and stimulating" (1-2). She also suggests that
Kroetsch here, as elsewhere, "strives productively for an exchange of
ideas between the several parts of his powerful personality: the academic,
the poet, the prairie bullshit artist, the lover, the preserver of the material
details of the intimate and familiar" (2). In the process of this
anatomization of Kroetsch's personality she asserts his powerful
authority (a notion problematic to The Hornbooks, whose central writing
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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 13
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14 Catherine Bates
forget would be the ultimate archival tragedy," for then there would be
no need to create a place for people to salvage material and remember
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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 15
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16 Catherine Bates
of your friends can come to the back door and walk in or something,
you don't have to go through the formality of going to the front
door and ringing the bell and being greeted, there's a kind of intimacy
about the back door, (private interview)
All the messy but necessary bits of life are included in this idea of the
back door, which involves the embarrassing
details of the accidental
everyday in all its intimate a way
clutter. The back to door
provides
think about the problematics of presence and death as part of our lives;
friends come in through the back door, rubbish and remains go out of the
back door?and perhaps most important, we expose our rubbish to our
friends when they walk past the back door.
Consistent with this focus on the back door, rather than associating
the poem with the words the poet would want to preserve, as an ordered
archive, Raymond and Rita continually consider the poem a waste
the discards of the mind. Rita writes "each line of a poem is a
product,
provisional exactness/ we write by waiting for our mind to dispossess"
(3), and later Raymond continues: "Poetry is excrement, a discharge of
our body" (44). Bodily bodies and words are
discharge, wasted brought
up and avoided in the discourse around poetry and back doors in The
Hornbooks. Take Hornbook #12:
way, the peeling white paint, the smell of rotting wood, the
worn
pathways of ants?and at the same time she loathed
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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 17
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18 Catherine Bates
Rita feels
ghostly, and no wonder, with Raymond's continual
attempts to bring her into some kind of presence through his needy
of her This of can bring us to the
reading poems. feeling ghostliness
version of self that involves both presence and absence, home
multiple
and away, and relies upon the responsiveness of other people's readings.
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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks ofRita K 19
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20 Catherine Bates
He waits for the triangulation that will tell him how far she
is from speaking. He waits for the spoken word that might
erase the need for the poem.
Importantly, she also gets a voice ifwe note the material goods she has
left behind. The traces of her previous life that shine in the spotlight of
this hornbook become more than cans, in the way Kroetsch's pizza menus
and printed off e-mails become valuable archived items in the Robert
Kroetsch Fonds.
The poem, in this hornbook, seems to stand as a poor substitute for
the spoken word that would signify Rita's presence and return. But if
Raymond would allow it, he could find Rita with the poetic fragments
he cites, if he began to play with the ambiguity, to enjoy the indelible
traceries of the finite, and to let the dialogue begin.
Conclusion
Derrida once said in an interview he had never been able to write the
kind of book he had wanted to write:
As for a book project, I have only one, the one I will not write, but
that guides, attracts, seduces I read. Everything I read is
everything
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21
Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K
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22 Catherine Bates
which involves accepting the mess around the back door and the
abundance that accompanies this, rather than only acknowledging the
"acceptable."
Susan Rudy suggests that Rita does return in The Hornbooks (124).
This could happen inHornbook fragment B, the "Back Home Hornbook."
This hornbook also implies, however, that Rita has been there all along.
We are told (presumably by Raymond):
When I heard her key in the lock of the back door of her/ranch
house, I covered my face with a volume of her/poems. I was lying
on the couch in front of the TV, now and then sipping a very small
scotch. [...] I am always waiting. She is always returning,
even
when she is here. [...] Ray, she said, after our gentle embrace, you
love your loneliness. It protects you from self-knowledge. Hello, I
Notes
1. This information was obtained from Robert Kroetsch's own archivist Appollonia
Steele, to whom I would like to dedicate this article. Her devotion to Kroetsch's
work and to archiving in general means the Robert Kroetsch Fonds are a treasure
trove for any Kroetsch scholar, and her friendliness and enthusiasm offset the off
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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks ofRita K 23
in the past. Her translation of Jules Michelet sums this up, also emphasizing
usefully
the connection between archives and death to which I will return later. "Yes, every
one who dies leaves behind a little his memory, and demands that we care
something,
for it. For those who have no friends, the magistrate must provide that care. For the
law, or justice, is more certain than all our tender forgetfulness, our tears so
swiftly
dried. This magistracy, isHistory. And the dead are, to use the language of the Roman
law, those miserabiles personae with whom the magistrate must preoccupy himself.
Never in my career, haveI lost sight of that duty of the historian" (Dust, 39; this quote
is Steedman's translation
from Michelet's "Jusqu'au 18 Brumaire" [1872-74], Oeuvres
Completes, XXI [Paris, Flammarion, 1982], 268.)
3. For Roland Barthes the writerly text is productive rather than representative, and
wrould defy any critical attempt to reduce it to a single in the
theory, remaining
perpetual present of being read, since it cannot be explained away. He states "the
writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as
(Bishop, 56).
8. Colin Winborn plays productively with the word refuse in a way useful for rubbish
studies, in his as-yet unpublished discussion of J. H. Prynne's poem "Refuse Collec
tion." "For rather than being a mere sentimental what is actually
commonplace, (or
also) being articulated in these lines is a question which goes to the heart of Prynne's
work: 'How can I re-fuse them?' According to the OED, to 're-fuse' is 'to fuse or melt
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976.
Bates, Catherine. "Postcolonialism, Unofficial Stories and Archival
Play: A Conversa
tion with Robert Kroetsch," unpublished interview, Oct. 22, 2005.
Calgary,
Bishop, Edward L. "From Frass to Foucault: Meditations on the Archive."
Virginia Woolf
Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual on
Conference Virginia Woolf. New7
York: Pace University Press, 2001. 52-58.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Budde, Robert. "Robert Kroetsch and Dawne McCance: Different Ways to Keep Warm
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24 Catherine Bates
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.
Edwards, Brian. "Of Traces: A Deconstructive Poetics. Robert Kroetsch. The Hornbooks
of Rita K." Writing in Our Time: Process Poetics and Radical Poetries in English Canada
1957-2003, ed. Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier Press,
2005. 115-125.
Sorenson, Sue. "Review of The Hornbooks of Rita K. Prairie Review of Books.
www,prairiefire,mb,ca/reviews/kroetsch_r.html (accessed 29.01.2003). 1-2.
Steedman, Carolyn. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.
Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Ox
Thompson,
ford University Press, 1979.
Winborn, Colin. "'Derangement from Deep Inside': J. H. Prynne's 'Refuse Collection.'"
PN Review. 33:5. May/June 2007. 55-58.
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