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Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations With Robert Kroetsch
The voices of other novelists, poets, and critics participate in this series of conversations�they agree or disagree, illustrate or elaborate on Robert Kroetsch�s own words as he talks about literary influence, the importance of game theory in literature, the uses of myth, and approaches to narration.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 16, 1982
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January 17, 2024
This book, comprising Kroetsch's conversations with Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, is a groundbreaking method of discourse. The concords of an interview are fragmented with the presence of three speakers. The form itself is intermittent as it is peppered with motivating quotations from critics / discourse which interrelate with the speakers' trains of thought.
What appears is an opulent multiplicity of ‘connotation’ and ‘discursivity’ as the text crisscrosses four broad issues: a) influence, b) game, c) description and d) myth.
Neuman and Wilson declare Kroetsch an author who recurrently rereads his own writing in the background of his contemporary thinking. They share his view that 'we construct labyrinths of the airy emptiness of own imaginations', that the labyrinth 'is constructed of our voices, of rubbles of discourse, of a mouthful of air’.
Against this milieu, Kroetsch's critical declarations are charged with a knowledge of postmodern literary practice and post-Saussurean critical thought.
The first section of this book is devoted to 'influence' which Kroetsch views as engagement with the problem of artistic tradition that accentuates a writer's sense of disquiet. He says that his critical stance is derived from James Joyce's perception of the artist.
A preventive effect on the art / artist was geography around which the art / artist had to negotiate, reaching a stage of metaphoric and metonymic possibilities that grow out of physical space.
Another cause for the artist's anxiety is the notion of nationalism and its concomitant periodisation. The notion is reductive and far removed from the orbit of impersonality that should guide critical response.
Such preventive cosmologies need to be destroyed to open up the potentials of language. Games insist on fictionality and openness, thereby disintegrating modernism's notion of a single cosmology.
What troubles the reader further is the book's unconventional construction. Conversational flow is interjected relentlessly on every page by remains of other voices, a genuine chorus of glosses (or glossers) that "allude to other discourse and further possible discursiveness."
The chorus, renowned though boisterous and discordant, includes among its principal soloists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida,
Northrop Frye, Gertrude Stein, William Gass, Borges—and Kroetsch himself. The persistence of this device, these "echoes in the maze," is to remind us "of the directions we [Kroetsch, Neuman, and Wilson] and others have followed and of those that, unfollowed, are still before us."
All ‘-isms’ make Kroetsch wary; as a postmodemist, he resists enclosure and its reductive terminology of 'naming' which excludes any more interpretations of the named.
Like Derrida, he believes that a writer asserts his writerliness by doing violence with words. He advises writers / writings to tread cautiosly when negotiating custom which seeks to stamp out individualism.
What appears is an opulent multiplicity of ‘connotation’ and ‘discursivity’ as the text crisscrosses four broad issues: a) influence, b) game, c) description and d) myth.
Neuman and Wilson declare Kroetsch an author who recurrently rereads his own writing in the background of his contemporary thinking. They share his view that 'we construct labyrinths of the airy emptiness of own imaginations', that the labyrinth 'is constructed of our voices, of rubbles of discourse, of a mouthful of air’.
Against this milieu, Kroetsch's critical declarations are charged with a knowledge of postmodern literary practice and post-Saussurean critical thought.
The first section of this book is devoted to 'influence' which Kroetsch views as engagement with the problem of artistic tradition that accentuates a writer's sense of disquiet. He says that his critical stance is derived from James Joyce's perception of the artist.
A preventive effect on the art / artist was geography around which the art / artist had to negotiate, reaching a stage of metaphoric and metonymic possibilities that grow out of physical space.
Another cause for the artist's anxiety is the notion of nationalism and its concomitant periodisation. The notion is reductive and far removed from the orbit of impersonality that should guide critical response.
Such preventive cosmologies need to be destroyed to open up the potentials of language. Games insist on fictionality and openness, thereby disintegrating modernism's notion of a single cosmology.
What troubles the reader further is the book's unconventional construction. Conversational flow is interjected relentlessly on every page by remains of other voices, a genuine chorus of glosses (or glossers) that "allude to other discourse and further possible discursiveness."
The chorus, renowned though boisterous and discordant, includes among its principal soloists Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida,
Northrop Frye, Gertrude Stein, William Gass, Borges—and Kroetsch himself. The persistence of this device, these "echoes in the maze," is to remind us "of the directions we [Kroetsch, Neuman, and Wilson] and others have followed and of those that, unfollowed, are still before us."
All ‘-isms’ make Kroetsch wary; as a postmodemist, he resists enclosure and its reductive terminology of 'naming' which excludes any more interpretations of the named.
Like Derrida, he believes that a writer asserts his writerliness by doing violence with words. He advises writers / writings to tread cautiosly when negotiating custom which seeks to stamp out individualism.
Displaying 1 of 1 review