Messing with the Archive: Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces in Robert Kroetsch's "The Hornbooks

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

Catherine Bates

InMarch 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his major works and unpublished works, print-outs of e-mails he sent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
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

represent what is important, rather it constructs what is important. As

Foucault argued, the archive is "the system that establishes statements

8 ? Board of Regents, of Wisconsin System, 2008

University

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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,

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 away impossible to separate. In other words, we are presented
with a work that asks us
to think about the arbitrary nature of the
archive and of literary value, by engaging with the process of archiving
within the text, rather than allowing for a separation between finished,
published text and archival activity.
Archives have
to do with traces left behind by people considered
important enough to study.2 In The Hornbooks, Rita says, "The question is
always a question of trace. What remains of what does not remain" (8).
She recalls Derrida's theory of trace in Of Grammatology: "The trace is in

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 10 Catherine Bates

fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying

that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is difference
which opens appearance and signification" (65). Both draw attention to
the problems of ever understanding sufficiently the distinction between
absence and presence; they help us to remember that there was always
somebody there before us, and something left that we can choose to

ignore?attempting to think of ourselves as the origin?or else to

acknowledge and to engage with. Something will remain that is both
us and discarded else. In other words, we can
part of from somewhere
or abandoned or
understand that rubbish? rejected matter?is part of
our identity. Our lives include the unordered and the left-behind.
As mentioned, the archive performs a process of selecting and
rejecting. Cultural theories of dirt, dust, rubbish and junk have begun to
expose the hegemonic structures in society that control selection and
rejection, showing "rubbish" to be a constructed, wilful category rather
than a natural one. For Mary Douglas, is the by-product
"Dirt of a
systematic ordering and classificationof matter insofar as ordering
involves rejecting inappropriate elements" (48). She argues, as Jonathan
Culler notes, that "dirt is vital evidence for the total structure of thought
in a culture because it is an omnibus category for everything that is out
of place. To investigate what counts as dirt helps to identify the categories
of the system" (Culler 5). Douglas's structuralist approach to

"inappropriate" matter is supplemented by Michael Thompson's seminal

work on rubbish, in which he divides objects into three categories:
transient, durable and rubbish, arguing that economic and social forces,
rather than the physical characteristics of an object, determine where it
is placed. A vase could be counted as transient, durable or rubbish,

depending on whether it is considered to be second-hand, antique, or

unable to perform its use and taking up space. Thompson argues
that these categories are controlled by the people with
convincingly
economic power in society. Culler, using Dean MacCannel's book The
Tourist, argues that souvenirs, often as junk, confer
holiday designated
value upon the places they represent and memorialize, if the souvenirs
are valued and kept, rather than discarded (4-5). The subtext of all three
theories is that the categorization of junk and rubbish is tied to societal
pressure to "keep up appearances," and involves damaging, deterministic
ordering. Erving Goffman has demonstrated the liberating potential of
spaces in which one's guard can be let down and appearances do not
have to be kept up. He argues that everyday life consists of front and
back regions of everyday life:

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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 11

When one's activity occurs in the presence of other persons, some

are
aspects of the activity expressively accentuated and other aspects,
which might discredit the fostered are It is
impression, suppressed.
clear that accentuated facts make their appearance in what I have
called a front it should be just as clear that there may be
region;
another region ?a "back region"
or
"backstage"?where the
facts make an appearance. A back region or backstage
suppressed
may be defined as a relative to a given where
place, performance,
the impression fostered by the performance is
knowingly
contradicted as a matter of course [...]. Obviously, control of
a role in the process of "work control"
backstage plays significant
whereby individuals attempt to buffer themselves from the
deterministic demands that surround them. (114-115)

The Hornbooks attempts to escape "deterministic demands" of genre,

academic and literary value by mixing the back
archiving, region and
the front region. Thus we can understand Kroetsch to be questioning the
systems that the theorists
expose by creating a chaotic text that
purposely places Douglas's "inappropriate," Thompson's "transient,"
Goffman's "back region," and Culler's dispensable "junk" next to the
valued, selected and durable.
Kroetsch's text ismessy, gesturing toward the autobiographical while
defying any straightforward, autobiographical reading?calling itself a
book of poetry while asking us to reread the archive. Both
radically
Raymond and Rita share Kroetsch's initials, and as Susan Rudy has
observed "like Kroetsch, [Rita] lectures internationally [...]. But unlike
Kroetsch she still lives on the site of Kroetsch's childhood home, a ranch
overlooking the Battle River in Central Alberta" (115). Moreover,
Raymond speaks of putting Rita's "remains" in the University of Calgary
Special Collections, precisely where The Robert Kroetsch Fonds reside.
In a conversation with poetsfellow Dawne
McCance and Robert
Budde, Kroetsch claims to have attempted to sidestep being
or a poet
autobiographer by "inventing awoman poet" who, even though
he "had quit [writing poetry], continued to write" (Budde, 123). But this
"woman poet" Rita Kleinhart does end up being a "certain part of
[Kroetsch's] self." She is only a part, however, in conversation with, partly
constituting and partly constituted by the other critic
"parts"?the
Raymond and "a guy named Robert who appears once in a while as a
kind of incompetent friend" (ibid., 128). For Kroetsch, the interaction
between these three characters (or fragments or aspects of self)
gives
this (non) autobiography, (non) poetry book a sense of the communal
that moves away from the notion of the lyric "which gave us such a
narrow definition of poetry" and which is potentially autocratic and

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 12 Catherine Bates

tyrannical if adhered to unquestioningly (ibid.). The Hornbooks continually

expresses objections to the individual credit a poet receives;
traditionally
for example, here is a typical Raymond rant:
As poets we to ourselves
attribute the poems we record on paper.
The of
the is one of technology's
presumption poet petty triumphs.
Should we not say that every poem is "attributed" to the poet named
in small print under the title? What rapacious need makes the poet
claim the multitude by the small ordering of a signature?/Does it not
take a bundle of texts, a blather of lives, to tumble out one poem out
of one acquisitive poet? (43-44).

A more communal poem, inwhich

these irritated questionings from
Raymond can sit alongside Rita's more
enigmatic "hornbooks," and in
which one poetic self cannot be identified, ismore difficult for the reader
to place, and a different interplay of meaning is enabled. Kroetsch's
with the ways in which remains, death and rubbish are
preoccupation
part of the constitution of a textualized
self, escapes system by
acknowledging is presented
discard. through the relationship
This of
and Rita?in each there is a trace of the other. By examining
Raymond
the relationship between them, which is only enabled through traces
(discarded words), the reader can begin to develop a more intimate

relationship with Rita-Raymond-Robert than a less heterogeneous text

would allow.

The Hornbooks as Heterogeneous Text

Reviewers of The Hornbooks have focused on the mixing of citations,
which can be understood as heterogeneous, recalling Barthes's notion of
a writerly text.3 Brian Edwards calls the book "a magical mystery tour,
a book of poetry and prose that is [...] a fragmented narrative, biography,
autobiography, fiction, reminiscence and critical study" (135), while Sue
Sorenson notes that "poet, poem, reader, and critic dissolve into an

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

subject has disappeared but is sent up, perhaps, by the portrayal of

but also his enjoyment of "bullshit" and the importance he
Raymond),
puts upon the material and familiar. The different parts of the personality
become, to a certain extent, a separate, alternative personality?both
like and unlike Kroetsch.

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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 13

Budde and McCance each note the political nature of Kroetsch's

heterogenous text. The former says to Kroetsch: "Your poems are

fragmented into various voices or move very quickly between different

speech acts and that poetics leads to something" (126). McCance begins
to articulate what that "something" is, arguing that the unsettling generic
and stylistic ambiguity of The Hornbooks engages with the political by
helping the reader question his/her own expectations. She says to
Kroetsch:
To readdress the lyric "I" seems to me to have to do with
something
genre?your writing always crosses genre boundaries. Look at Rita
Kleinhart [Rita K of The Hornbooks]: you have to ask?what makes
this poetry? This crossing is one way I think your writing connects
to the political, rather than through some kind of dictum ?you connect
some kind of form in your work.
through (Budde, 126)
Iwill now unpack how this ambiguity works, by focusing first upon
Raymond as unprofessional and irritating archivist, then by moving on
to the back door as a alternative to traditional
potential archiving
processes, and finally by demonstrating how the juxtaposition of different
language acts allows Kroetsch to produce a text that constitutes an
intimate relationship with the reader, by breaking down hierarchies
and letting the rubbish in.

Messing with the Archive

On one level The Hornbooks to be an archiving of Rita K's poems,
claims
with minimal commentary from
the archivist, Raymond. In his first
archivist's note (set off in large square brackets,4 perhaps to indicate that
we should not count it as an official tells us to
part of the text) Raymond
think of him as a voice without so much as a last name,
thereby both
inserting his voice as part of the text and his desire to seem
pleading
unobtrusive. He says he has proposed "simply to add a footnote, a scrap of
data,5 the slightest anecdote, at most a word, to Rita's dense poems" (7).
On the next page, entitled Hornbook #99, we are
ostensibly presented
with two lines of poetry from Rita, followed by four paragraphs of
commentary from Raymond.
The performance of archiving in the text intrudes upon the
performance of the poems, and the performance of as Rita's
Raymond
some-time lover intrudes on his performance as archivist. Each role seems
to work as a "back to the other roles, destabilizing their
region"
performances; indeed, showing them up as performances, by showing
us what we are not to see. For example, in the first archivist's
supposed
note, after asking us to consider him an archivist (as indicated by the

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 14 Catherine Bates

title: "Archivists's Note") he also "confesses that they were], by way of

an explanation, intimate friends" (7). While it is quite common for the
archivist to be in intimate contact with the writer,6 it is not within the
conventions of the archive for the archivist to emphasize this intimate
connection and to use it as any kind of explanation or legitimation of the
text produced.

Raymond does refer to traditional archiving practices, however, but

in an unconventional way. He says he likes the "tick and tock of a
poem"
and "with that in mind [has] examined each hornbook as it comes to
hand" (7). The "tick and tock" could imply chronology, with Raymond
seemingly prioritizing his own reading chronology. Edward L. Bishop
notes that "provenance" is considered ?
good archiving practice
archivists aim to find something meaningful by keeping notes in the
order in which they come to demonstrate their origin (56)7 To show the
archiving process within a book that calls itself The Hornbooks
published
of Rita K (implying tenet of the text is to present Rita-the
that the central

poet's poems, not the archivist's

musings) defies expectation, however,
and blurs the boundaries between the production of the poems and the
interpretation of the archivist. Kroetsch uses this strategy to question
the authority of the archivist, who by using "provenance," the claim of
origin, appears to be attempting to assert some kind of authentic reading
of the texts, but is actually revealing the constant mediation in any
presentation of a text.

The Back Door as Symbol of Heterogeneity.

It becomes clear that the unconventional nature of Raymond's
archiving stems from his use of it to both order and communicate with
Rita's "remains." By doing so he effectively highlights her absence, and
his own anxiety about whether he can bring her back through poetry
and memory. In Archive Fever Derrida argues that the archive occurs at
the breakdown of memory. It is at the moment of forgetting that we
archive: the archive symbolizes memory and the fact that we do forget
it both to and reminds us that we
things; attempts replace memory
As Peter notes, absence and loss are necessary for the
forget (11). Krapp
construction and ordering of an archive; he argues that "to be unable to

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

again (163). Although archiving is a system of cataloguing and ordering,

the archive produced often has only a veneer of tidiness, and cannot
remember it is the researcher who renews the archived
coherently;

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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 15

a coherent narrative. Kroetsch,

material by using it to produce through
Raymond, reveals the alibi in this traditional archival narrative; it is
a cover the mess of the archive tidy. For Kroetsch
merely story, making
"any coherent story is a lie" in that it precludes other meanings (1980,
42). Therefore, perhaps Raymond's rather unprofessional archiving of
Rita unwittingly avoids the coherence of this alibied thinking by
continually exposing his bias, thus invoking Rita in a more intimate
way than the official archive would allow.
The notion of the back door that runs throughout The Hornbooks can
be considered as a new kind of process,
figuring archiving avoiding
sanitized, alibied thinking. We are told that Rita was attempting to
produce "a collective biography [...] which could not be located in a

system of beliefs or a narrative of origins. It could only be located, literally,

momentarily, in back doors" (10). Back doors are pitted against coherent
systems of belief (of which traditional archiving practices could be
considered) and indicate something more messy and inclusive. Archives
represent the official; back doors represent the unofficial.
Raymond-as-archivist tells us that Rita sometimes worked from
photographs:
She would snap a picture
not until she saw7 a person entering
or

exiting fromthe back door in question. The subjects I hasten to sav,

survive in those as so much as blurs
photographs nothing
surrounded, often, by unintended or even detail.
embarrassing (11)

We have no reason to trust the archivist, however; in his will to both

catalogue and be with Rita, he is likely to foreclose the interpretation of
the photograph before it has begun. It could be that for Rita, all the detail
in the photograph is important. The photographs are not there to
contribute to a coherent subjectivity, but rather to a blurry one in a
context of other details coming out of the back door, which for Kroetsch,
as said in an interview, is associated with casual
familiarity, "prairie"
welcomes, rubbish and functionality:
Well, the back door is in opposition to the front door, first of all. The
front door is pretension, you want to look like you are successful or
proper or whatever you are trying to achieve with the front door. At
the back door you think you're not going to be seen. [...] So you're
out of can be...or you can your beer cases out
sight. So you stack
floor mops or whatever. And can put
there, you things out there, put
out there and that's one is
your bicycle thing. The second thing
there's less sorting going on at the back door, it's pretty random, it's
not schematized the way the front door is. And then the question of
comes in, and the of course that's another What's the
junk question.
our lives and what
junk in isn't? You could put your junk at the back
door. And then another thing is that it's a sign of friendship that some

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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:

Somewhat fascinated by prairies cemeteries, Rita was ever

attracted to the bare wooden crosses she found in those
small rectangles of fenced sod. She worshiped, in her own

way, the peeling white paint, the smell of rotting wood, the
worn
pathways of ants?and at the same time she loathed

anything those crosses might, as the

expression has it,
It was the stolid, dumb, wooden from
signify. repetition,
to graveyard, that fascinated her.
graveyard
She found that same stolid, dumb, fascinating repetition in
back doors.

Backdoors are the very locus of discharge and

communality. Kleinhart mentions at least three times in

her notes a particular occasion when, injured at play,
muddy, crying, she was told by her mother to go around
the house to use the back door.

What is more precious in our collective biography than

those that we elect to conceal or discard?
very things
Discard is the most enduring version of circulation;
Discard, not retention, constitutes the materiality of trace.

In her questioning of notions of the unique and singular

self, Kleinhart turns often in her work to the slippage
between the words "I" and "It". On one sheet of paper in
the stack I have designated the Battle River Mound
she writes, almost confusingly:
He was standing at the back door.
It was late in the afternoon. (12-13)

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Robert Kroetsch's Hornbooks of Rita K 17

This whole hornbook dances around the idea of "death," with

on back doors as the locus of the
Raymond focusing discharge, pointing
reader to the analogy with cemeteries as preserving the discharge of life.
Raymond presents his interpretation of Rita's poetic remains,
postulating that the very things we elect to conceal or discard are what
constitute our collective Here, again, he asks us to consider
biography.
what the archive and poem retain, what they discard?which words do
we wish to save? And which become discard? Is the poem made up of the
words the mind does not hold to any more and so gives away to the
page?
We are forced
to remember, however, that this is Raymond's reading
of Rita's work, which becomes problematic when he says that "Kleinhart
turns often in her work to the slippage between the words T and Tt.'"
What seems to follow is an illustration of this point, but one that does
not satisfactorily fit his theory: "He was standing at my back door./ It
was late in the afternoon." Are we supposed to think here that she could
have written "Iwas late in the afternoon"? This does not seem the obvious
choice over "it," but does perhaps insert Rita into the text. Raymond is
trying to extrapolate a in order to
apparently theory from Rita's work,
remember and preserve her through his readings of the poetry in a way
that seems perversely to misread her, emphasizing his struggle to find
coherent explanatory meaning in her work, and hence highlighting the
inappropriateness of reading for this kind of meaning. Can he preserve
her or bring her back into some kind of presence if he ismisreading her
work? Can the trace ever lead back towhat left the trace? Or is the reading
that tries to lead back to what left the trace always going to reveal more
about the reader than the origin he is looking for? Here we begin to be
more and his need to find his own
intimately acquainted with Raymond
in Rita's words.
presence
Moreover, with the idea of discard and remains, this whole passage
refers to death, while back doors, as Raymond says, have also to do with
communality, since it is a of or to let people
sign friendship neighborliness
in through the back door. The archiving process death and end,
signifies
through its association with the breakdown of memory, but it can also
be a way for someone to continue, the
through readings of others?a
way for that person to become re-fused, rather than refuse,8 if the
motivations and emotions of the researcher in the archive and the
archivist are allowed to play a part. The Hornbooks to show how
begins
the consideration of poetry as remains can gesture towards an evasion of
the threatening finality, by letting the reader develop some kind of
relationship with the poet?in this case through the mediation of the
invasive but needy and loving archivist.

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 18 Catherine Bates

It is Raymond in Hornbook #52 (perhaps), who reveals that it is he

who makes the correlation between the writer's work and her/his life:
To take poetry into one's own hands is to take one's own life
into one's hands. Surely Rita understood this when she
asked me, late one evening, if I would, should the occasion
arise, organize her papers and have them deposited in the
vaults of the University of Calgary Special Collections

Library. When I told her next morning that, yes, Iwould be

happy to make her remains secure, she asked me what I

was
talking about. (45)

HereRaymond makes the jump between depositing Rita's papers

and "making her remains secure," a connection Rita does not seem to
follow. This could mean that she does not remember asking him to
organize her papers (after all, why the time lapse, why not say yes at the
time, rather than the next day?), but it also implies that she does not
think of her papers as her remains, or her remains. Raymond seems forced
into reading them as literal "real" remains, since he is in her house with
her absence, and the papers and his memories are all he has. The poems,
therefore, can be understood by the reader-as-archivist to be the remains
of the poet if the reader is searching for some sign of the poet in the
poems. Again this pushes Raymond beyond the role of archivist to that
of lover, for the archivist's conventional role would be to consider the
poems as remains, valuable in themselves, not for their role in
only
the poet in any personal or intimate sense.
"finding"
Indeed, Raymond is constantly trying to conjure up the poet from
the remains. In the same hornbook he "wonder[s] [...] if Rita is in the
house where [he], in her absence, [is] supposed to be ordering her papers.
What if her disappearance was a clever way of getting [him] into her
home?" (45). He reads her disappearance (her absence as an authorizing
as a decoy luring him into her home, to search her
figure in her poems)
life for clues, at which point she will feel vindicated, validated, and alive,
and will reappear, becoming present. The hornbook ends, however, with
us know second-hand what Rita feels about the
Raymond letting
(un)certainty of her own presence to herself:
Hornbook #52 makes mention of a that Rita claimed was
ghost
somehow herself; when she of its presence in her
caught glimpses
house, there on the edge of the Battle River coulees, she
sprawling
had the sensation that the ghost,
not she, was Rita Kleinhart. (45)

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

Back Door Speech Acts

The principle of the back door is that you constitute an
intimacy by
inviting your friends in through the back door in which they walk past
your rubbish and mess into the less official kitchen where gossip and
cooking and eating take place ?in the prairie world of Kroetsch's
childhood?and see all the clutter, rather than
officially inviting them
through the front door to sit quietly in the clean, neatly arrange parlour
from which all disorder is excluded. Reading The Hornbooks is like
walking
through the back door, into the kitchen, occasionally into the parlour,
then back around the porch with the rubbish. An intimate
relationship
is further constituted through the juxtaposition of casual and enigmatic
speech acts with which the reader must grapple.
As Susan Rudy points out, for Kroetsch, The Hornbooks and poetry in
general is on one level a love story, and Raymond is trying to bring Rita
back through different levels of language function (115).9 We are
presented
with numerous philosophical questions and statements that stand alone,
such as "Why is it that, without for amoment seek out and
believing,/we
visit the bones of the saints?" (4), "Is not the poet ever a a
forgery of
poem?" (59) and "traceries of the finite are so indelible" (69). In addition
to these are reminders of the material
everyday, which contextualize the
high-minded philosophies differently, and allow a different side of Rita
to come through in spite of (or because of?) comments. One
Raymond's
example is a request (for Raymond?): "Would you mind watering the
plants in the living room?" (59).
These reminders suggest Rita's unghostliness, her materiality, and
the possibility that she will return. InHornbook #2 we read: "He finds in
the cellar her jars of canned plums and mustard
pickles and rhubarb
jam. She is a poet, and therefore must return" (69). In this hornbook it is
particularly to discern
difficult who is writing. It becomes an
unattributed on the traces of Rita.
trace reporting there seems to
Again,
be a wilful reading being performed, or a double at One
suggestion play.
notion is that she must be returning because there are homemade canned
foods in her cellar. The cans are, in this case, imbued with value, evidence
for the loving archivist of his poet's certain return.
Layered onto this
suggestion, however, is the idea that she is actually returning because she
is a poet; this fact helps the archivist value and read the canned
goods as
meaningful signifiers rather than discarded objects. Raymond seems to
want to read more into the material than is,
everyday perhaps,
warranted, causing an imbalance or rupturing of the text, which signifies
to us his neediness and love, and which in passing tells us something
about Rita.

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 20 Catherine Bates

As I reread this passage carefully and thought about Raymond's

reading of Rita's "remains," I discerned a dialogue that brings Rita closer
through these temporarily discarded objects. Here is the whole hornbook:
[Hornbook #2]
Traceries of the finite are so indelible.
He starts a fire in the barbecue up a column of
pit, sending
smoke. See, I am not here. If you seize what Imean.

He finds in the cellar her jars of canned plums and mustard

a and therefore must
pickles and rhubarb jam. She is poet,
return.

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.

Either Rita or Raymond could begin this hornbook, as

reflecting,
Rita does at the beginning of The Hornbooks, on the question of trace, and
the permanence of remains. It seems to move to Rita reporting on
or Raymond writing of himself in the third person. The "See
Raymond,
I am not here" could be Rita talking to Raymond, directly speaking to
the preceding idea of the indelibility of trace. She is not here, if you seize
what she means, thus making her absent through attempting to take
her meaning. Meanwhile, traceries of her are always here, if you allow
for her ambiguity?she may not respond directly to the smoke signal,
but she is there, always. This set of my own readings is the beginning of
a conjuring up of Rita through the traceries; she begins to get a voice if
we work with the ambiguity and play with the possibility provided by
the mesh of language acts and generic suggestions in the text.

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

either or else stored up in view7 of this book [...] It would

forgotten
be at least a crossing of multiple genres. I am looking for a form that
would not be a genre and that would me to accumulate and to
permit
mobilize a very number of genres,
large styles, languages,
levels....That's why it is not getting written. (1995, 142)

Derrida's ideal text is impossible, since no text can be without genre.

Yet the mixing of genres and language acts that occurs in The Hornbooks
comes close: with a poet who has disappeared from her poems trying to
escape the role of a poet, and with an archivist who combines waste
with production his own poems
by flushing down the toilet, while

multiple readings of the poems in order to try to make his

performing
lover return. Alice A. Parker, applying Judith Butler's analysis of the
performative to Nicole Brossard's work, says:
Often overcharged with meaning, words and gestures overflow
their performative limitations as (re)citations,
discharging unexpected
energy into the text [...] the force of the utterance is secured when it
is severed from established contexts. "[...Ujnmoored from prior
context," the name may become "an instrument of resistance in the

redeployment that destroys the prior territory of its operation."

(Parker 63-83, citing Butler 163).

And so she argues: can create a 'future of language'

"The writer (and
of subjects) by exploiting 'the presuppositions of speech' which constitute
the normativity that produces us as (legitimate) subjects" (Parker 83,
citing Butler 163). Affiliating Kroetsch's text with this analysis of
Brossard's writing helps us to understand the potentially radical and

liberating nature of the performative in The Hornbooks which exploits

"the presuppositions" of speech and of genre, inviting us through the
back door, to walk past the mess and enter into a new understanding of
our relationships with literary texts. Or as Rita/Raymond says, again
pointing to the inevitable juxtaposition of waste and production:

We come to the end of autobiography. Our lives

abandon us.

We are bemused by traces that suggest that once we wrote

one of the
poems. Here in Kyoto I become signs I cannot read.

If you can't find me you know7 where I am.

We are and never ever, end even then, the same.

always,
Our lives choose other genres.
do I feel such sorrow7 when I feel
Why joy?

Earlier in The Hornbooks Rita/Raymond suggests "We write as a way

of inviting love. Each text is a request that says, please, love me a little"
I
(19). would argue that we also read as a way of trying to find love,

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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

responded, by way of refutation. (103)

When she comes back he covers his face withher poems, as if he

cannot face the radical everyday reality of her presence when he can
hide within the limitations of her poetry. She recognizes this need for
him to stay in the place within which he has defined himself ("loneliness").
But then he rejects her theorizing and communicates with her on a

stubbornly phatic level: "Hello." Here, he needs her theorizing to

acknowledge the other genres his life has chosen?to see the back room
of abundant, unorganized archive in his own life.
The Hornbooks of Rita K includes these other genres and the radical
everyday reality that is continually constituted by other people walking
into the room, disturbing our reading, and asking us to read ourselves?
and our waste?differently
University of Leeds

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

putting, official nature of the archive.

2. I am referring to the archival about a novelist and poet, which is one kind of
holdings
archive. Of course, as Steedman out in her insightful book on the
Carolyn points
archives are associated with social in preserving the traces
subject, equally history,
of live of worthy of study since they are sufficiently
"ordinary people" designated

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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

function) intersected, some Ge

stopped, plasticized by singular system (Ideology,
nus, Criticism) w7hich reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the

infinity of languages'" (S7Z, 5).

4. These brackets echo, perhaps, the shape of the hornbook itself, as James Ward has

pointed out to me.

5. Raymond invokes the dialogue between "rubbish durable,
?undervalued/literary,
valued" almost every time he intervenes; the referred to here works as a
"scrap"
decoy.He is implying that he will hardly intervene, while us a lot
already giving
more than a scrap.
6. Leonard Woolf as archivist of Virginia Woolf s work, John Middleton Murry archiving
Katherine Mansfield's work?both of them being the life-long partners of the wrriters.
7. "Provenance" is the place of origin, the "pedigree of previous For the
ownership."
archivist "provenance is all, and the inclination is to keep things in the original order"

(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

again,' and is 'the act of pouring

'refusion' back.' Almost all of Prynne's work, as
critics such as David have noted, is concerned with the 're-fusing' of
Shephard
incommensurate or discourses; it turns also on the 'refusion'
seemingly incompatible
of self into other" (55).
9. "Continually positing and then displacing author and reader, lover and the beloved,
The Hornbooks of Rita Kleinhart reconfigures what Kroetsch calls 'the desperate love
story that poetry is"' (letter to Susan Rudy, quoted in Rudy, 115).

Works Cited
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