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Article Excerpt
Citing Max Weber, the sociologist John MacInnes has described the twentieth-century condition as one of "rationalization" and "disenchantment," "the process whereby the responsibility for the fate of the world is accepted as a human rather than divine endeavour and its order seen as a social rather than natural or supernatural one" (MacInnes 3; Weber, "The Disenchantment"). As a result, "the means chosen to pursue given ends, and even the choice of which ends to pursue, came to be determined by logical and rational calculation" (MacInnes 3)--or, one might add, calculations that were seen by their proponents, with varying degrees of earnestness and cynicism, as rational or logical, and indeed beneficial. In the twentieth century, as many observers have noted (see McLaren, Trombley, Haller, and Fontana), both the progressive left and the reactionary right embraced the rationalization that followed upon disenchantment with the natural and divine order; both left and right were the products as well as the agents of modernity, and they adopted similar measures to achieve their goal of taking control of the human, social order. Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man, a novel published in 1969 and set in Alberta in the last days of World War II, is an exemplary case of the novelist's sensitivity to the full life of his time, which on Kroetsch's reading of it is emphatically an era of disenchantment, rationalization, and social engineering of the kind described by Weber and MacInnes.
Although The Studhorse Man has, in the nearly forty years since its first publication, been discussed mainly in light of postmodern and deconstructive literary theory, other voices have been heard which have questioned the adequacy of that approach, and gone on to both describe and challenge Kroetsch's engagement with the historical, social, and scientific realities of twentieth-century life. Nearly twenty years ago, Peter Thomas suggested that postmodernist criticism had failed to draw out and address the moral implications of Kroetsch's fiction: "I wonder, still, if postmodernism is not much too soft on Narcissus" ("Robert Kroetsch and His Works" 256). Echoing Thomas, Peter Cumming has more recently taken issue with postmodernist and poststructuralist critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Susan Rudy Dorscht for celebrating what they see as "Kroetsch's destabilization of sexual identity and identity itself" (Cumming 118), and, taking their cues from Kroetsch's own influential criticism, for tending "more toward adulation than interrogation" (116) of their novelist. Reading The Studhorse Man as a self-declared "heterosexual, male, feminist reader" (115) concerned with "issues of gender" (115), Cumming concludes that Kroetsch is "patriarchy's man" (115), and that his novel is "politically reactionary" (129) and subject to "ideological bankruptcy" (124).
I am in sympathy with Peter Cumming's not unprecedented challenge (1) to the major trend in the criticism of Kroetsch's fiction, and with his willingness to grapple with its moral content, though I am less happy with his castigation of his author for "ideological bankruptcy" (124) merely because he finds that The Studhorse Man does not conform to what he regards as the proper positions on his "issues of gender." Such "issues" have been defined by protagonists operating in a particular time and climate of opinion--the mid-1990s world of academic criticism--and they might not be so clear-cut or so apposite as Cumming assumes when he intrepidly labels not only his author, but also himself as critic, something better left to others. At best, such ideological interrogation is a heuristic tool, the application of which needs to be guided by an awareness of the historical and broadly cultural context of the novel.
In The Studhorse Man, as a number of early critics noticed, (2) the facts of history are insistently referred to, even by the novelist's self-consciously allusive literary method. More recent postmodernist and poststructuralist criticism, and Peter Cumming's and Diane Tiefensee's ideological counterblasts, have not paused to consider The Studhorse Man as a commentary on the life of its time, or to offer a detailed reading of a novel that, precisely in its intransigencies of representation reflecting Kroetsch's "keen sense of the difficulties in re-creating experience in language" (Ross 101), cries out for attention to its factual contents and historical setting. The events of Demeter Proudfoot's narrative, for one thing, take place in the spring of 1945, during the last months of World War II, and A. R. Kizuk (60) has observantly noted the unnecessarily precise dating of Demeter's trip by car to Marie Eshpeter's ranch on August 6, 1945 (Kroetsch, Studhorse 146). This was, of course, the day on which the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and it is a historical fact that at least some of the raw materials for that bomb came from the "uranium mine in the North" (33) of Canada, which the narrator Demeter mentions casually near the start of his story. (3)
To the critic of Kroetsch's novelistic art, the apparently casual but cumulatively insistent method of invoking the facts of history is as striking as those facts themselves, as in another glancing reference to the mass destruction of human life in World War II, when Demeter blithely uses the word "holocaust" (108) to describe the burning schoolhouse which Eugene Utter has set on fire. Although the narrator's immediate story is set in the spring of 1945, the scope of Kroetsch's novel is much wider. We are told that Hazard Lepage fought in World War I and came west to Alberta in 1921, and that the Proudfoot brothers came to the Northwest (as it was then called) a generation earlier, in time to witness the hanging of Louis Riel in 1885. And although Demeter's story ends with his commitment to an insane asylum and the death of Hazard Lepage in August 1945, the writing of his story is not completed until the late 1960s, creating a narrative arc that spans nearly a hundred years and two thirds of the twentieth century. Since the act of writing is itself a crucial matter in this novel, the period of time in which Demeter composes his narrative and the moment of its completion are especially relevant. Although Demeter's immediate focus is on the spring and summer of 1945, he is writing during a time of increasing postwar prosperity, and he finishes, as does the author Kroetsch himself, at a moment of high confidence in human achievement, especially of a scientific and technological sort, such as "the contemporary spaceship" (67) that was to take a crew of American astronauts to the moon in 1969, shortly after Demeter Proudfoot completed his "infernal biography" (68) of Hazard Lepage.
The Studhorse Man is, therefore, a novel not only of the last days of World War II, with insistently oblique references to historical events dating back to 1885 and 1914-1918, but also of the 1960s, and Demeter's concluding remarks on the development of the oral contraceptive pill can be read as a bitterly acerbic comment on an emerging culture of self-realization through sexual liberation. A suggestive parallel text in this connection is Norman Mailer's nearly contemporary essay The Prisoner of Sex (1971), with its prickly meditations on the baneful effects of masturbation, birth control, and any "genetic engineering" (Mailer 215) or "negative eugenics" (203) that would interfere with the natural order of things. Peter Schwenger has linked Kroetsch and Mailer as members of what he calls the "School of Virility" (Schwenger 89), seeing them as anxiously preoccupied with the fate of men and maleness in their time; and Mailer's declaration that "a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls" (cited in Schwenger 16) rings most resonantly, as we shall see, in connection with Kroetsch's novel. But there is more to this than male self-pity, for both Mailer and Kroetsch set embattled maleness within the wider context of scientific innovation and radical social change in the mid-twentieth century, and Mailer's observation that "the Second World War had been a centrifuge to drive technology into every reach of social life" (Mailer 182) is a pertinent gloss on the action of The Studhorse Man. The disenchanted and rationalized modernity described by Max...
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