Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference

Kelly L. Green is a freelance writer living in Ajax, Ontario.

This reworking of University of Calgary English professor Susan
Dorscht’s doctoral dissertation provides a feminist, poststructuralist
“reading” of the works of Alberta poet/novelist/theorist/critic
Robert Kroetsch. Dorscht, who considers herself a feminist in the
“Western liberal” tradition, precariously balances her feminist
cultural and political perspective with the intellectual theory of
poststructuralism, which she describes as “the undermining of
representation, [the] exploitation of the plurality of meaning in words,
[and] the plurality of sexuality in identity.”

Dorscht attempts to read this poststructuralist perspective into
Kroetsch’s works. Her “project” is “to locate, in Kroetsch’s
work, textual moments at which the possibility of ‘sending oneself,’
of speaking as a unified, gendered, male or female subject is dissolved,
or at least deferred.” She does this by exploring the feminist and
psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity—i.e., the individual as
subject, subjective, other (feminine), divided (as opposed to coherent),
multidimensional. She applies these concepts to Kroetsch’s poetry,
novels, criticism, and unfinished autobiographical poem “Field
Notes,” to develop her thesis that “a(-)woman” can
deconstructively read the works of the biological male Kroetsch as
feminist literature.

Dorscht is most convincing when she moves away from her self-proclaimed
“uneasy” theoretical balancing act, as presented in Chapters 1 and
2, to dive directly into Kroetsch’s writings. A particularly
fascinating chapter explores and analyzes the underlying subjectivity of
Kroetsch’s ostensibly realistic first novel, But We Are Exiles.
Dorscht maintains that even in this early work, Kroetsch creates a male
character with multi-dimensional feminine characteristics, reflecting
literally and metaphorically conflicting mirror images of himself and
those close to him.

In her discussions of Kroetsch’s later works, Dorscht successfully
deconstructs metaphorical language and stories to persuade the reader
that Women, Reading, Kroetsch contribute(s) significantly to the
discussion of feminism in Canadian literature.