THE LOVELY TREACHERY OF - Ghent...
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Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy THE LOVELY TREACHERY OF THE PUPPETEER : FORMAL EXPERIMENTS IN A NOVEL BY ROBERT KROETSCH Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Hilde Staels Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels – Nederlands” By Ellen Roels May 2010
Transcript of THE LOVELY TREACHERY OF - Ghent...
Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
THE LOVELY TREACHERY OF THE PUPPETEER:
FORMAL EXPERIMENTS IN A NOVELBY ROBERT KROETSCH
Supervisor:Prof. Dr. Hilde Staels
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels – Nederlands” By Ellen Roels
May 2010
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................... 3
1. Introduction............................................................................................................................ 4
2. A theory of Postmodernism ................................................................................................... 6
2.1. The term ‘Postmodernism’.............................................................................................. 6
2.2. Four dimensions ............................................................................................................. 9
2.2.1. The postmodern view on the world and humanity .................................................. 9
2.2.1.1. The textual world ............................................................................................... 9
2.2.1.2. Human being as text ........................................................................................ 12
2.2.1.3. The world and human being as constructions of images ............................... 17
2.2.1.4. Understanding the fictional world and the characters.................................... 19
2.2.2. Language ................................................................................................................. 21
2.2.3. The self-conscious narrator .................................................................................... 25
2.2.3.1. The present narrator versus the absent one ................................................... 25
2.2.3.2. Level and distance............................................................................................ 27
2.2.3.3. Metafiction....................................................................................................... 28
2.2.4. Intertextuality ......................................................................................................... 33
2.2.4.1. Parody .............................................................................................................. 35
2.2.4.2. The detective story........................................................................................... 38
3. Introducing Robert Kroetsch ................................................................................................ 41
4. Analysis of The Puppeteer .................................................................................................... 46
4.1. The representation of the world and humanity............................................................ 46
4.1.1. The textual world .................................................................................................... 46
4.1.2. Human being as text ............................................................................................... 49
4.1.2.1. Characters represent fictions........................................................................... 49
4.1.2.2. Characters do not have a fixed identity ........................................................... 59
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4.1.2.3. Characters are controlled by unconscious desires .......................................... 61
4.1.3. The world and human beings as constructions of images...................................... 62
4.1.4. Understanding the fictional world and the characters........................................... 64
4.2. Language........................................................................................................................ 69
4.3. The self-conscious narrator ........................................................................................... 75
4.4. Intertextuality ................................................................................................................ 82
5. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 89
6. Attachments ......................................................................................................................... 92
6.1. Attachment A: Plot summary of The Puppeteer (1992) by Robert Kroetsch ................ 92
6.2. Attachment B: Plot summary of Alibi (1983) by Robert Kroetsch................................. 97
7. Works cited......................................................................................................................... 100
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the English Department of the University of Ghent in general and
Prof. Dr. Hilde Staels in particular for giving helpful information and advice.
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1. INTRODUCTION
Robert Kroetsch, whom Linda Hutcheon calls “Mr. Canadian Postmodern” (1988, 160),
parodically uses fictional conventions and subverts them in his novel Alibi (1983) and its
sequel The Puppeteer (1992). As Bertacco has already pointed out, Kroetsch’s novels take
“liberties with literary conventions” and explore “the potential resources of language” (146).
Both novels function as a diptych: “the notion from art of two facing pictures” (quoted in
Markus M. Müller, 247). They interact and mirror each other in a “game of ‘language writing
against itself’” (quoted in Markus M. Müller, 247).
It was The Puppeteer in particular that kindled my interest and I found myself eager to
uncover the formal experiments and different layers of meaning in this intricate novel. In
this dissertation I will focus specifically on how Robert Kroetsch incorporates traditional
novelistic conventions and subverts them to innovate the novel form. In what way does he
use the technique of parody to subvert literary conventions? And how does he break
traditional narrative frames?
Such an analysis requires a dialogue with postmodern literary theory. As the viewpoints
of postmodern literary theorists often differ and sometimes contradict each other, it is
important to first provide a brief survey of what is understood by the term ‘postmodernism’.
Subsequently, I will discuss the four dimensions derived from the reading method which Bart
Vervaeck offers in Het Postmodernisme in de Nederlandse en Vlaamse Roman. Even though
Vervaeck’s approach to the postmodern novel appears to be limited to Dutch and Flemish
literature, he refers to international theoreticians on the matter such as Brian McHale, Ihab
Hassan and Linda Hutcheon, which makes his method suitable for the analysis of Canadian
postmodern novels as well. His approach proves to be valuable for an elementary insight
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into the features of a postmodern novel and I will use it as a starting point, selecting those
concepts which are relevant to the analysis of Kroetsch’s novel and gradually giving
additional information from other theoretical sources as I go along. As a result, this
introduction to formal features of The Puppeteer is quite extensive.
A first dimension of this reading method is the postmodern view on the world combined
with that of humanity, as both dimensions address similar issues. Secondly, I will deal with
the subject of language in the contemporary novel. Thirdly, the dimension of the self-
conscious narrator will be combined with that of metafiction. Finally, I will deal with the
dimension of intertextuality and address the postmodern technique of parody, devoting
most of my attention to the transformation of the detective novel genre.
In the third chapter I will address Kroetsch’s views on literature and literary theory. In the
fourth chapter I will attempt to analyze The Puppeteer to the best of my ability by applying
the reading method presented in the second chapter. This is in no way an exhaustive
analysis, as it is a highly intricate novel.
I have also included plot summaries of The Puppeteer and Alibi to make my analysis more
accessible to readers who are not familiar with the narratives. I must also mention that I
have used the abbreviation P to refer to text fragments from The Puppeteer and the
abbreviation A when referring to Alibi.
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2. A THEORY OF POSTMODERNISM
2.1. THE TERM ‘POSTMODERNISM’
Ihab Hassan notes that the origin of the term ‘postmodernism’ is uncertain, even though
Federico de Onis already used it in 1934 and Dudley Fitts in Anthology of Contemporary Latin
American Poetry in 1942; both apply the term as a reaction to modernism (85). In the
seventies the term ‘metafiction’ was in vogue to refer to postmodern fiction. However, the
term ‘postmodernism’ gradually gained ground.
In Constructing Postmodernism, Brian McHale writes that postmodernism does not exist,
“or at least there is no such thing if what one has in mind is some kind of identifiable object
‘out there’ in the world, localizable, bounded by a definite outline, open to inspection,
possessing attributes about which we can all agree” (1). He emphasizes that it consists of an
indefinite number of constructions. In other words, we cannot assume that postmodernist
writers form a unified group or see themselves as part of a unified tendency.
Nevertheless, there have been attempts to restrict postmodernism by forming a clear
definition of the notion. Generally, literary theorists defined it in rather negative terms and
they often associated it with “discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring,
indeterminacy, and antitotalization” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 3). For example,
Fredric Jameson was strongly opposed to postmodernism, but even he noticed the
emergence of a new style of writing and saw that it needed to be aligned with new social
and economic processes (Lyotard, vii). Some critics even see postmodernist fiction as the
murderer of the novel form as we know it, because of its self-consciousness. Linda Hutcheon
asserts that we should not say the novel has died, rather that it has developed into an
extremely self-conscious form of writing, indebted to an already existing self-conscious
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mode of writing found in novels such as Don Quijote (Narcissistic Narrative 153). I agree with
Linda Hutcheon when she states that we should not see postmodernist fiction in evaluative
terms, “but as a definable cultural phenomenon worthy of an articulated poetics” (A Poetics
of Postmodernism 38).
According to Vervaeck, the prefix ‘post’ is not an attempt to situate this phenomenon in
time, as modernists authors also made use of characteristics we now label ‘postmodern’ (8).
However, in general, postmodernism is conceived as an aesthetic movement that continues
and breaks with the conventions of modernism. In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda
Hutcheon writes that modernists “have usually been seen as profoundly humanistic in their
paradoxical desire for stable aesthetic and moral values”, while postmodernism “refuses to
posit any structure or, what Lyotard calls, master narrative – such as art or myth – which, for
such modernists, would have been consolatory” (6). For the reader, these structures would
prove helpful, but that would not make them less illusory (Hutcheon, A poetics of
Postmodernism 6).
In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon also sums up what postmodernism
challenges. Firstly, she says that “institutions have come under scrutiny”(9). Secondly, the
postmodern transgression of the accepted boundaries results in “the important
contemporary debate about the margins and the boundaries of social and artistic
conventions”(9). Thirdly, one can no longer distinguish one literary genre from another (9).
Fourth, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction and, therefore, between art and life, is
crossed (10). A fifth element is the fact that most postmodern texts use the technique of
parody “in their intertextual relation to the traditions and conventions of the genres
involved”(11). And finally, traditional perspectives are frequently challenged (11). This last
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feature also means that the narrator is no longer perceived as a consistent entity generating
reliable stories.
Despite this vague definition, Linda Hutcheon believes that it is no longer possible to
discuss contemporary art without comprehending the ‘postmodern theory’ behind it, if
there even exists such a thing. Therefore, I will now turn to a discussion of the dimensions
which Bart Vervaeck distinguishes in his analysis of postmodern novels.
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2.2. FOUR DIMENSIONS
2.2.1. THE POSTMODERN VIEW ON THE WORLD AND HUMANITY
2.2.1.1. THE TEXTUAL WORLD
This first category implies that the postmodern novel revolves around the recognition of
the text as a fictional world (Vervaeck, 17). Contrary to contemporary novels, nineteenth-
century classic realist novels deal with the representation of a social and psychological
reality (Vervaeck, 17). They are more closely linked to the ‘real’ world, since the authors use
hidden literary conventions to draw the readers into a world that appears to be a
representation of the ‘real’ world (Culler, 131-160).
In other words, the world in a postmodern novel is presented as distinct from reality and
nothing more than a fiction (Vervaeck, 19). When dealing with the novelistic representation
of reality as a fiction, Vervaeck introduces the term ‘graft’, which he defines as a notion of
the world and human beings as nothing more than representations of fictive scenarios like
stories, images and films (22). We now acknowledge that reality is constructed “in and
through our languages, discourses, and semiotic systems” (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction
164). The reality postmodern authors seem to refer to is not a pre-existing entity, but rather
a discursive construction. Niall Lucy states that we should not think of reality “as coming
before textuality”, but as “an effect of textuality” (15). The reader can only create a
heterocosm, a fictive other world, by accumulating these fictive referents (Hutcheon,
Narcissistic Narrative 148).
Therefore, we may state that postmodernist fiction does not deny the referent.
Postmodernist fiction merely illustrates that the act of reference is problematic and makes
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us rethink this process. For instance, McHale argues that postmodern novels do mirror
reality, but that it is a plural reality (Postmodernist Fiction 39). In this context, Lacan
introduces a very important concept, basing his arguments on the Saussurean notion of the
sign (i.e. the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified): he believes that the
structure of language “is such that ‘language’ is always already cut off from ‘reality’” (23).
According to Lacan, any signifier may be associated with any signified, making an excess of
signification almost unavoidable.
A postmodern novel is also a commentary on the relationship of human beings to reality
as people only seem to comprehend the world on the basis of narratives. Lyotard no longer
believes in the grand narratives, the ‘metanarratives’, which are “linguistically encoded
bodies”, according to Theo D’Haen. These bodies “justify and explain bourgeois democratic
society to itself: religion, science, history, psychology, etc.” (D’Haen, 414). Hutcheon
comments on this ‘translation’ of reality as follows:
All of these issues – subjectivity, intertextuality, reference, ideology – underlie the
problematic relations between history and fiction in postmodernism. But many
theorists today have pointed to narrative as the one concern that envelops all of
these, for the process of narrativization has come to be seen as a central form of
human comprehension, of imposition of meaning and formal coherence on the chaos
of events. Narrative is what translates knowing into telling, and it is precisely this
translation that obsesses postmodern fiction. (A Poetics of Postmodernism 121)
As a result, reality looms large in a postmodern novel, albeit only in the form of a story, thus
showing that fiction is not reality and that reality is fictive. Linda Hutcheon states that
“postmodernism works to show that all repairs are human constructs, but that, from that
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very fact, they derive their value as well as their limitation”( A Poetics of Postmodernism 7-
8).
The referent, reality, can only be represented through images and language, but it can
never be shown in its full extent (Vervaeck, 27-28). McHale states that, “compared to real-
world objects, presented objects are strange and paradoxical” and they seem to have
“ontological gaps” (Postmodernist fiction 31). In other words, they remain utterly
incomprehensible.
Subsequently, Vervaeck introduces the notion of repetition, referring to Derrida. Derrida
believes that repetition is not a mechanical reiteration of a pre-existing ideal form, but that a
sign only acquires its true form through repetition (Vervaeck, 29). This implies that the
scenario in a postmodern novel settles into its true form through performance and that
every repetition has the ability to falsify and transform that scenario (Vervaeck, 29). In other
words, forgery, parody and transformation are essential parts of a performance (Vervaeck,
29). Moreover, this scenario, is not more ‘true’ than this performance. One cannot step into
a ‘real’ world from a ‘fictive’ text, because the real world is also merely a fictive text
(Vervaeck, 29).
This is illustrated by the technique of mise-en-abyme, in which one fiction is embedded in
another, without reaching a final level that can serve as ‘reality’ (Vervaeck, 29). In this
technique texts serve as mirrors which reflect the production of texts: it is an “internal self-
reflecting mirror” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 31). Thus, fictions can become “a set of
Chinese boxes or Russian babushka dolls” (A Theory of Parody 112). Musarra also points out
that “the insertion of new fictional worlds into a first fictional world will always make the
status of the latter questionable” (230).
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Mise-en-abyme is not exclusively used by postmodernist writers, but they do make
extensive use of it. McHale, indebted to Hofstadter, describes the technique of mise-en-
abyme as follows:
First, it is a nested or embedded representation, occupying a narrative level inferior
to that of the primary, diegetic narrative world; secondly, this nested representation
resembles something at the level of the primary, diegetic world; and thirdly, this
“something” that it resembles must constitute some salient and continuous aspect of
the primary world, salient and continuous enough that we are willing to say the
nested representation reproduces or duplicates the primary representation as a
whole. (Postmodernist Fiction 124)
2.2.1.2. HUMAN BEING AS TEXT
This category refers to the fact that a person is textual and that a person can change
through language. In postmodern novels, characters illustrate that human beings are a
compilation of words and texts, forced to follow a certain script (Vervaeck, 64-65).
Moreover, they are determined by these representations, as these fictions are a full-fledged
aspect of their personalities. These representations of characters are often stereotypical,
transforming them into a walking cliché (Vervaeck, 65). They have to follow a specific script
and cannot escape from it (Vervaeck, 65). The core of their scripts or fictions is presented in
such a manner that it is ultimately subverted, thus emphasizing the fictitious character of the
postmodern text once again and equating writing with transforming and, eventually, effacing
the text (Vervaeck, 26). I will elaborate on this process when dealing with the technique of
parody.
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As Waugh states, “fictional characters have no identity outside the script, and do not
ultimately have identity within the script” (120). Consequently, there is neither a ‘true’
identity nor a ‘true’ world in the postmodern novel, as they are both constructions. Lyotard
formulates this in a striking way: “A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island;
each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.
Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of
specific communication circuits, however tiny these may be” (15). Therefore, we may say
that fictional characters only have something resembling an identity when we perceive them
in their complex relationship to other characters and the fictional world.
The reader is left to construct his or her own view on the characters in a postmodern
novel, “since the various texts spoken by a character do not point to a stable unity or a
governing principle of character, the anti-mimetic thrust of the text invites the reader to
take up a series of subjectivities, to re-enact him or herself continuously” (Fokkema, 61).
Niall Lucy also sees man as a construction and considers structuralism as the cause for
‘the death of man’, because this theory says that “everyone is born into a particular
language community such that anyone’s perception of reality is predetermined by the
particular ‘grammar’ through which they come to know the world” (7).
The fact that human beings are perceived to be constructions means that postmodernists
believe that life consists of a number of embedded fictions or that a fictional person may be
a mise-en-abyme of different characters (Vervaeck, 66). Because of this nesting of fictions in
characters the notion of the paradox comes to mind once again. The characters seem to
become more ‘true’ and fuller as they incorporate more fictions, in other words, as they
become more ‘false’ (Vervaeck, 68).
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The incorporation of different fictions brings us to another characteristic brought to light
in this context: the fusion of different characters. As a complex character may consist of
various embedded stories, it is more likely that characters will represent similar scripts
(Vervaeck 69). We might even find a similar character in different novels. Umberto Eco has
dealt with this phenomenon and calls it “transworld identity”, referring to “the
transmigration of characters from one fictional universe to another” (Postmodernist Fiction
57).
Moreover, characters in postmodern novels are usually described by means of images and
these are in turn disseminated over the network of images, which ensures transformation
and eventually erasure of the character in the same way the classic realist story world is
subverted and effaced in a postmodern novel (Vervaeck, 26, 69). McHale deals with this
erasure of the world and character, saying that “projected existents – locales, objects,
characters, and so on – can have their existence revoked.” Moreover, these fictional worlds
are “‘peopled’ by (...) objects of description” (i.e. landscapes, man-made artifacts, and such).
All these objects, like the characters, are subject of erasure (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction
103-105).
However, not only the images efface the concept of the character as a unity, language
performs a similar function. On the one hand, a character does not appear to exist outside of
language and on the other hand, there is no unified character in language (Vervaeck, 69).
The narrator can only contribute to the deconstruction of the character, as he or she can
never fully represent a character who continually changes (Vervaeck, 69).
The erasure of a character is evident from the games postmodernist authors play with
language, in which proper names lose their strength. Firstly, names can appear to be ‘empty
boxes’(Vervaeck, 74). They can appear in the novel and never reappear, thus undermining
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the traditional expectations of the reader who desires an explanation for everything that is
presented in the novel. Secondly, proper names may change in postmodern novels, contrary
to classic realist novels in which names mean something to the reader through repetition
(Vervaeck, 75). As mentioned above, Derrida undermines this notion of giving meaning to
names by stating that every repetition is a transformation, rather than a confirmation. A
name does not refer to an entity, but to an individual who consists of a number of different
personalities and who continually changes (Vervaeck, 75). In short, we can say that these
games with proper names efface the individuality of the character. The proper name, much
like the world and the character, consists of fictions which makes it unoriginal and borrowed
(Vervaeck, 77).
In other words, we cannot discover a self in these characters, they are made up by
linguistic signs or systems. Fokkema shares this view and states that “the point is that there
is no self which chooses masks or (social) identities, but that varieties of discourse are
imposed on the subject. The subject consists of the discourses which happen to fill it and is
thus not unique, nor motivated by some inner essence” (64). Even though characters are no
longer represented in a conventional way and language is no longer an epistemological
instrument, Fokkema believes that “characters whose selves cannot be known still refer to
the human condition” (68).
Another explanation for the fact that the character can never be fully understood is to be
found in the existence of an unconscious reserve which is added onto human consciousness,
which we can deduce from Freud’s work. Freud believes unconscious processes have
“characteristics and peculiarities which seem alien to us, or even incredible, and which run
directly counter to the attributes of consciousness with which we are familiar” (quoted in
Malpas, 66-67). We cannot live without the unconscious:
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It acts as a repository for all those thoughts and impulses that are too disturbing for
conscious reflection and are thus repressed by the mind. It functions as a defence
mechanism that stores those impressions, experiences and desires that the conscious
parts of the mind are unable to deal with, and thus protects us from harm. Once
repressed, however, they do not cease to have effects: rather, their attempts to find
their way into consciousness are the basis of our dreams, desires and everyday slips
of the tongue, as well as the psychological problems that many people face. (Malpas,
67)
In other words, we should not discuss human beings without taking into account the
unconscious. We cannot control these unconscious forces, therefore we cannot fully
understand ourselves or others, for that matter. We are split between conscious and
unconscious, rationality and desire (Malpas, 69). Furthermore, the unconscious is often
referred to as the ‘other’ or the ‘double’, which is clear from Paul Coates’ arguments, as he
“sees the double as a sign of the ever-alienated and yet aligned unconscious” (Slethaug, 20).
Moreover, Slethaug argues that individuals are never whole. Human beings, “captives of
conflicting impulses, cultural processes, and discursive practices”, attempt “to characterize
themselves as ‘one’, though recognizing inherent polarities: heart and soul, good and evil,
mind and body”(Slethaug, 25). By recognizing “the self as ‘two-of’ or possibly many more
than two-of” we engage “in ‘the world’s play at the level of its decentering’” (Slethaug, 25).
The fact that a character incorporates numerous identities and cannot be fully known
allows us to point out some differences between modernism and postmodernism. Firstly,
modernism tries to avoid manifold identities while postmodernism embraces them
(Vervaeck, 71). Secondly, modernism assumes that there was a pre-existing centre of self
that fell apart while postmodernism rejects the notion of such a core (Vervaeck, 71).
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Postmodernists believe that the individual can only come into being through language
(Vervaeck, 71). When reading a classic realist novel, it becomes apparent that the same
name is used throughout to refer to the same character and that the characters’ actions are
understood through relationships of cause and effect, which are familiar to the reader.
However, postmodern characters are more disintegrated and it appears that a fixed identity
cannot be found.
2.2.1.3. THE WORLD AND HUMAN BEING AS CONSTRUCTIONS OF IMAGES
The unity of the (post)modernist narrative text is based on the repetition of imagery.
Postmodern authors often make use of metaphors to add a surplus meaning to the novel,
which the reader does not necessarily grasp in its entirety (Vervaeck, 37). Once again, certain
aspects of the postmodern novel remain elusive, since metaphors cannot “create a
dialectical synthesis” or reconcile different domains by combining them (Herman and
Vervaeck, 116). A postmodern novel constructs an extensive network of metaphors and
images in general in such a way that the reader is in danger of losing himself or herself in the
complexity of the narrative text (Vervaeck, 38-39).
This network of images could be further described by using Derrida’s term
“dissémination” (quoted in Vervaeck, 46). This term denotes the endless deferral of
meaning, only to conclude that the ultimate meaning can never be reached (Vervaeck, 46).
Vervaeck himself calls this the dissemination of the central figure, in which the central image
(the ‘figure’) is connected with widely divergent meanings in such a way that the central
image eventually explodes and becomes elusive (Vervaeck, 203). In other words, there is no
‘true’ core of meaning in a postmodern novel. The only core that can be detected is the
absence of meaning or void (Vervaeck, 47).
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Secondly, a human being is represented by metaphors, specifically through the use of
physical images (Vervaeck, 84). More than modernism, postmodernism presents human
beings and the world through physical images (Vervaeck, 77). This preference for the body
can be connected with the preference for the boundless world and the elusive (Vervaeck,
78). As Terry Eagleton pointed out, “the body has become one of the most recurrent
preoccupations of postmodern thought” : “mangled members, tormented torsos, bodies
emblazoned or incarcerated, disciplined or desirous”(69) are present in some postmodern
novels. Similar to the relationship between a human being and language, the relationship
between a human being and his or her body is dialectic, which means that physicality
simultaneously forms and deconstructs a personality and the world (Vervaeck, 77).
We could consider the body as a switchboard, ensuring the transformation from the
inside to the outside world (Vervaeck, 79). Most of the central images, or ‘figures’, in
contemporary fiction have a physical undertone and lead to the dissemination of figures
mentioned before (Vervaeck, 79). These physical images connect everything with everything,
until the reader can no longer find a starting point or can no longer associate them with
individual characters. This process is very paradoxical: on the one hand, the body shows the
individual in all its uniqueness, on the other hand, the body transforms the individual into a
non-individual (Vervaeck, 80). In other words, the personal and impersonal are combined in
the body (Vervaeck, 81).
This paradoxical nature of postmodern characters is connected with the fusion of
different characters, making them impersonal (Vervaeck, 81). For example, characters may
resemble one another because they share similar physical characteristics, such as a distinct
nose or a similar gait. The reader may uncover the different fictions each character
represents by paying attention to the smallest physical details (Vervaeck, 81).
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However, uncovering the different fictions characters represent is no simple task. The
different scripts or scenarios often remain impalpable to the reader, which postmodern
authors only emphasize by representing the body as unclear and something that cannot be
spoken of (Vervaeck, 82). To add to the mystery, the bodies of these characters often miss
valuable parts, which refers to the void contemporary human beings sense (Vervaeck, 82).
The postmodern character often possesses a body that is out of balance because it is driven
by uncontrollable rages (Vervaeck, 83).
2.2.1.4. UNDERSTANDING THE FICTIONAL WORLD AND THE CHARACTERS
The reader is often puzzled by a postmodern novel because he or she is familiar with
novels presenting clear ideas. Central to a postmodern novel is dynamism: the novel focuses
on the transition from reality to fiction, from outside to inside, from then to now (Vervaeck,
53). Both the fictional world and the characters are described in terms of images and
language and neither can be translated or presented in a perfect manner. Furthermore,
Vervaeck points out that critics have problems with postmodern characters who do not fit
into this image of a traditional character that can be understood (90).
Hence, we could call the postmodern novel an extreme case of “clair-obscur” (55), a
technique originally used in painting which Vervaeck uses to refer to the debunking of a
clear concept and the revealing of an obscure concept as a form of clarification. This “clair-
obscur” can be expressed in various ways.
Firstly, traditional ways of gaining knowledge of the world can be parodically used and
subverted (Vervaeck, 56). Vervaeck states that the postmodern novel refuses this traditional
knowledge because it is a form of death, referring to Derrida’s notion of ultimate knowledge
as apocalyptic (57).
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Secondly, the postmodern novel pricks the bubble of fixed ideas and favors uncertainty,
thus undermining the seemingly rigid system of the supposedly one and only reality. This is
also shown in the debunking of the scenario (Vervaeck, 58).
Another way of transgressing the borders between a clear and obscure concept is found
in the paradox (Vervaeck, 60), “a statement that sounds absurd or seems to contradict itself
but may in fact be true” (COED, “paradox”). In The Canadian Postmodern Linda Hutcheon
even calls Robert Kroetsch “the master of paradoxes, of opposites that do not merge
dialectically, of doubles that stay double”(161).
To conclude, we can say that reading a postmodern novel requires the reader’s utmost
attention as he can only try to understand the network of images through the interception
of the smallest shifts and alterations (Vervaeck, 62). Postmodern texts do not try to prevent
readers from reconstructing the fictional world, but they do “throw up obstacles to the
reconstruction process, making it more difficult and thus more conspicuous” (McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction 151). We need to attempt to understand a postmodern character in
terms of text, body and image instead of what it is not (i.e. a negative description) and
realize that the representation of a character and the world is more a process than a
product, as they continue to change in every image of themselves in the narrative text
(Vervaeck, 94).
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2.2.2. LANGUAGE
First, we need to refer to the problematic relationship between language and reality. We
must begin by stating that the quintessential postmodern slogan “everything is text” cannot
be maintained, since language and reality do not completely overlap (Vervaeck, 95). Even
though language creates a scenario for reality, reality never lives up to the demands of
language (Vervaeck, 95). On the other hand, we can say that language never lives up to the
expectations of reality, as language can never fully represent reality (Vervaeck, 96). There
are always elements which fall outside the text and cannot be put into words.
The fact that language can never encompass reality in its entirety illustrates that
language is perceived to be impotent and inadequate (Vervaeck, 97). Hutcheon states that
important things may not be put into words, “but are still intensely real”. Better yet, “they
are more real because they are not articulated or named” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism 183). However, the narrator can only use language and realizes that he is “a
prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them” (quoted in Hutcheon, A
Poetics of Postmodernism 184). Many postmodern novels foreground this inadequacy of
language to render feelings, thoughts or facts (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 29).
In other words, language can only represent itself and “every attempt at going beyond
language is doomed to fail” (Fokkema, 67). Themes of miscommunication, characters failing
to understand each other, non-communication, etc. are used in postmodern novels as a way
to vent these feelings of frustration.
Secondly, the relationship between language and subject is also highly problematic. In this
context, Vervaeck refers to Heidegger to make clear that language is the subject of speaking
and that language uses a human being, even though the latter feels he or she controls
language (98-99). The postmodern notion of language is indebted to Heidegger in three
22
ways: the belief that language speaks on its own, that the text does not have an essence and
that there is no ultimate meaning in a text.
First of all, there is the notion that language can overpower a person and lead a life of its
own (cf. Derrida) (Vervaeck, 99). Language is already present before a person chooses to use
it, enforcing its structures (Vervaeck, 99). In postmodern novels, language is often not very
original or authentic as it imposes itself in the form of stories and clichés (Vervaeck, 99).
This leads us to another presupposition of postmodernism: the fact that everything has
already been said and that we cannot be original (Vervaeck, 100). When we think this
through, we could even say that there is nothing left to say or write about (Vervaeck, 100).
However, these two conclusions need to be put into perspective, as the perfect repetition of
words and phrases is impossible for a postmodernist author. Every repetition is a
transformation because it selects and combines clichés and fictions in a different way
(Vervaeck, 101). The postmodernist novelists do not believe in a pre-existing language that
can be restaged in the exact same manner (cf. Derrida and repetition) and they challenge
this idea of a pre-existing language.
The second aspect noteworthy in the context of Heidegger’s claim is the fact that a
person can never fully grasp the meaning of a linguistic structure as language is an endless
approach to the core of the matter (Vervaeck, 103). This is inherent to the metaphorical
structure of language: when you speak of A, you can only do that in terms of B (Vervaeck,
103).
This endless approach also has consequences for the concept of meaning. Traditionally,
one speaks or writes to convey a certain message or meaning (Vervaeck, 104). However, this
is not the intention of the postmodern author. The latter continues to refer to other texts or
concepts to suspend the end of his or her search for ultimate meaning (Vervaeck, 104).
23
A third point worth discussing in this section is the relationship between language and
physicality. The postmodern preference for the representation of the body can be aligned
with the preference for the boundless world, as the seemingly separate spheres of body and
language are connected with each other through images (Vervaeck, 106). However, the two
domains cannot form a perfect fusion, as there is always some aspect of the body that
remains elusive (Vervaeck, 107). Nevertheless, postmodern authors attempt to attain that
union by creating new metaphors or expressions. By emphasizing the unspeakable of
physical metaphors, postmodern language averts itself from Wittgenstein’s theory
(Vervaeck, 112). He says that we should not speak of that which we cannot put into words:
“One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again and one
is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it” (quoted in Waugh, 27).
This metaphorical combination implies that the body is described by language but also
formed by it (Vervaeck, 108). Therefore, language becomes physical in its content as well as
in its form (Vervaeck, 109). The main characteristic of this physical language is the fact that it
must remain an image (Vervaeck, 111). A postmodern novel refuses to describe the body in
a scientific way, as that would turn it into a language based on formula and naming
(Vervaeck, 111). As mentioned above, what is named, disappears, while an image continues
to resonate through the story and enables the reader to make connections .
The use of this physical language to subvert conventional language can also be found in
the carnivalesque, in which hierarchical relationships are undermined by stressing physicality
(Vervaeck, 113). In Postmodernist Fiction, McHale states that there are resemblances
between a postmodern novel and carnivalized literature, since both show the “grotesque
imagery of the human body”, such as “the inversion of the hierarchy of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’
parts of the body” (172). Linda Hutcheon also emphasizes the connection between
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postmodern novels and carnival, saying that both exist “on that boundary between literature
and life, denying frames and footlights” (A Theory of Parody 73).
Postmodern novels also draw attention to the carnivalesque masquerade (Vervaeck, 114).
The concept is inherent to the metaphorical language of the postmodern, as the endless
referrals can be seen as a masquerade in which every image is a mask concealing another
image (Vervaeck, 115). This turns the novel into an endless masquerade without ever
revealing a ‘true’ human being or reality (Vervaeck, 116). In short, everything is a process
and nothing ever seems to coincide with an essence.
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2.2.3. THE SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATOR
2.2.3.1. THE PRESENT NARRATOR VERSUS THE ABSENT ONE
Postmodern narrators often present themselves in a very physical way in postmodern
novels and Vervaeck refers to this device by using the Russian formalist notion “skaz” (109).
This means that postmodern narrators often convert their style of narrating to make it
resemble the style of conversation. McHale also notes the frequent use of you as the
annunciation of a “presence of a communicative circuit linking addressor and addressee”
(Postmodernist Fiction 223).
Nevertheless, this oral and physical nature is merely an illusion (Vervaeck, 118). As every
reader knows, the narrator of the novel is no tangible presence and the reader is not a
listener who is physically present. Postmodern novels emphasize the problematic
relationship between the reader and the entity addressed in the story (Vervaeck, 119). The
narrator does not offer an ultimate solution to this problem, as the novel revolves around
the dynamism and tension between the reader and the addressee (Vervaeck, 119).
However, the fact that the narrator is explicitly shown as a personalized and self-
conscious figure is no novelty in the tradition of the novel (Vervaeck, 120). Moreover, the
postmodern narrator often uses the traditional and complaisant voice in such a manner that
the traditional narrator becomes the subject of irony (Vervaeck, 120). Traditional narrators
often emphasize that their story is a rendition of reality and that their characters are like
true people, while postmodern narrators do the opposite and illustrate that their story is
only make-believe (Vervaeck, 121). We can say that the omniscient narrator of the
nineteenth century novel is perceived to be reliable while the postmodern narrator cannot
26
be trusted (Vervaeck, 123). However, we can rely on his unreliability, since it exposes
traditional omniscience as nothing more than a fictional convention (Vervaeck, 123).
Another way in which the power of the traditional narrator is debunked, is by showing
that the narrator depends on the pre-existing conventions of language, society, genres, etc.,
thus exposing him as an impotent and restricted narrator (Vervaeck, 123). Many
postmodern narrators even readily admit that they are impotent and fail to represent an
event that has occurred in the past (Vervaeck, 123). Niall Lucy acknowledges that literary
language use cannot be unique or personal because it must abide the “conventions by which
language enables and constrains the indefinite possibilities for saying something”(1).
Inconsistencies in the story are a clear example of an unreliable narrator and postmodern
narrators often contradict themselves (Vervaeck, 124). A narrator is often dragged down by
his or her story, loses control and is eventually effaced from the story (Vervaeck, 125).
Gradually, language becomes more and more prominent and pushes the narrator into the
background (Vervaeck, 125). As a matter of fact, it is very misleading to label the speaking
voice as ‘narrator’, because the word suggests a subject or a fixed centre and, as we have
seen, the notion of subjectivity is often shown to be problematic in these novels (Vervaeck,
125). For example, the reader may be confronted with one manipulative narrator or with a
myriad of voices, whereby the narrative obliterates a stable point of view.
Finally, I would like to draw attention to the paradoxical nature of the narrative instance:
on the one hand the latter appears to acknowledge he or she is only a function, on the other
hand the narrator behaves like a full-fledged and very self-conscious subject. McHale also
notes this game, saying that “s/he plays hide-and-seek with us throughout the text, which
projects an illusion of authorial presence only to withdraw it abruptly” (Postmodernist
Fiction 202).
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2.2.3.2. LEVEL AND DISTANCE
Secondly, Vervaeck deals with the structuralist criteria ‘level’ and ‘distance’ (126-127).
What follows is a simplified representation of what is meant by these notions, as I will not
discuss the structuralist theory in itself. However, I need to address them to deal with the
breaking of frames later on.
The term ‘level’ refers to the relationship between the space from which the story is told
and the space in which the story is set. An extradiegetic narrator is situated outside the
story, while an intradiegetic narrator is situated in the story itself. On the other hand, the
term ‘distance’ refers to the level of participation in a story. A heterodiegetic narrator deals
with something he or she did not experience, while a homodiegetic narrator deals with
something he or she did experience. There are also focalizors, figures through whose eyes a
reader perceives the story.
However, the act of narrating in postmodern novels permeates all these different levels
and, once again, the reader cannot locate a fixed centre (Vervaeck, 129). Frequently,
characters, narrators and authors interact with each other on the same level. This
transgression of boundaries, which is referred to as ‘metalepsis’, often makes the story
rather complicated for the reader (Vervaeck, 130). Waugh states that there is no longer a
way to differentiate “the nested representation from the nesting frame” or between
“‘frame’ and ‘frame-break’” (142). This frame-breaking device can be aligned with the
postmodern desire to oppose the traditional hierarchy and combine “level (text) and
metalevel (textual analysis)” (Herman and Vervaeck, 109).
Thus, the text falls apart into randomness. Andrew Gibson, for instance, is in favour of
such a mixture of story, narrative and narration. He speaks of “narrative laterality” (212-235)
and says that the opposition between the narrator and the narrated has broken down,
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opposing clear demarcations (140). Musarra seems to agree, by saying that in postmodern
novels “the borderlines between the various narrative levels, between frame and narrated
story and between the story and ‘the story in the story’, are often obliterated” (216). Brian
McHale also points out that “postmodernist texts tend to encourage trompe-l’oeil,
deliberately misleading the reader into regarding an embedded, secondary world as the
primary, diegetic world” (Postmodernist Fiction 115).
When we think of the process of narrating as a network of lateral connections of images,
these fuzzy boundaries are no longer a problem, as the need for a fixed centre is avoided
(Vervaeck, 132). We should perceive a narrator as a compilation of texts that is expressed in
a network of images rather than a single voice telling stories (Vervaeck, 133).
2.2.3.3. METAFICTION
As I have already mentioned above, most postmodern narrators are very self-aware and
this results in metafictional statements. However, it is wrong to assume that only
postmodern novels utter metafictional statements or that they deal with metafiction only
(Vervaeck, 135). Modernist texts also show an intense self-awareness of their own
production.
Hutcheon offers a seemingly uncomplicated definition of metafiction, by saying that it is
“fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic
identity” (1). According to her, metafiction or self-conscious literature implies that
“discourse is language as énonciation, involving the contextualized production and reception
of meaning” (Narcissistic Narrative xv), turning language into an enunciative or a discursive
act. Many of these novels no longer present an authoritative ‘author’ or a human being as a
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fixed entity, restoring what Hutcheon calls “énonciation”: “The ‘author’ becomes a position
to be filled, a role to be inferred, by the reader reading the text” (Narcissistic Narrative xvi).
Patricia Waugh also elaborates on the term in Metafiction, stating that
Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and
systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions
about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own
methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures
of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the
literary fictional text. (2)
Waugh notes that there are two poles of metafiction: one pole ultimately accepts a
material reality whose “significance is not entirely composed of relationships within
language”; the other pole implies that there is no escape “from the prisonhouse of
language” (53). She says that there is an “increased awareness of ‘meta’ levels of discourse
and experience”, which results from “an increased social and cultural self-consciousness”
(3). People have come to perceive language as a means to construct ‘reality’ and we no
longer see language as a reflection of “a coherent, meaningful and ‘objective’ world”
(Waugh, 3). She also states that we can no longer describe the world or anything else, for
that matter, because the person observing the events always changes that which is
observed. The latter is an extension of the Heisenbergian uncertainty principle which says
that “for the smallest building blocks of matter, every process of observation causes a major
disturbance” (quoted in Waugh, 3).
A postmodern narrator, in expressing these metafictional statements, shows the reader
that he or she is very much aware of this problematic relationship between language and
reality. Postmodern novelists often fuse fiction and theory and Vervaeck discusses this
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blurring of boundaries between the two by dealing with the production and style of a
postmodern novel.
Firstly, the metafictional statements in a novel can deal with the production of a text, the
product itself or the consumption of the text (Vervaeck, 139-140). By drawing attention to
these contexts, the “discursive situation of fiction” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism
40) is emphasized. In all of this the reader plays a crucial role. In Narcissistic Narrative, Linda
Hutcheon states that the central paradox of self-conscious fiction “for readers is that, while
being made aware of the linguistic and fictive nature of what is being read, and thereby
distanced from any unself-conscious identification on the level of character or plot, readers
of metafiction are at the same time made mindful of their active role in reading” (xii). Thus,
the reader becomes a co-producer of the postmodern novel. More importantly, Hutcheon
argues that “in metafiction the life-art connection” has not been “severed completely or
resolutely denied”. Instead, the link has been reforged by the reader, on the level of “the
imaginative process (of storytelling), instead of on that of the product (the story told)”
(Narcissistic Narrative 3).
Production, product and consumption seem to come together by transforming the
boundaries between writer, text and reader into fictions (Vervaeck, 142). The traditional
hierarchy has transformed into a lateral mixture of different images (Vervaeck, 142). The
notion of a clear hierarchy is invalidated by presenting the author, the text and the reader as
constructs: “The producer of the text is never a real or even an implied one, but is rather one
inferred by the reader from her/his positioning as enunciating entity” (Hutcheon, A Poetics
of Postmodernism 81).
McHale also exposes the postmodern artist as a fiction, referring to the notion of mise-en-
abyme. The artist presents himself in the act of creating a fictional world, but “the real artist
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always occupies an ontological level superior to that of his projected, fictional self, and
therefore doubly superior to the fictional world”. This could suggest an “infinite regress,
puppet-master behind puppet-master ad infinitum” (Postmodernist Fiction 30). The reader
will never be able to reconstruct the ‘real’ narrator and must settle with the idea that it is a
construction. For “what prevents the author’s reality from being treated in its turn as an
illusion to be shattered? Nothing whatsoever, and so the supposedly absolute reality of the
author becomes just another level of fiction and the real world retreats to a further remove”
(McHale, Postmodernist Fiction 197). “The death of the Author” is confirmed in these
postmodern novels. In Roland Barthes’ words: “The text is henceforth made and read in such
a way that at all its levels the author is absent” (quoted in McHale, Postmodernist Fiction
199).
Secondly, we could consider the metafictional layer in a novel as a guideline, informing
the reader how he or she should read the novel (Vervaeck, 147). It also allows some
stabilization for the readers, who believe they have discovered in this account of the act of
writing itself the ultimate reality. They will soon become disillusioned. Moreover, a reader is
never truly allowed to construct his or her own interpretation of the novel, because he is
guided by codes, rules and conventions, as the narrator is guided by them (Vervaeck, 123). A
narrator can even make it impossible for the reader to ignore his comments by using two
methods (Vervaeck, 147).
On the one hand, a reader can choose to follow the narrator’s guidelines because the
story becomes obscure if he or she does not (Vervaeck, 147). On the other hand, narrators
who appear to be physically present are more difficult to ignore than absent narrators
(Vervaeck, 147). The reader often cannot avoid participating in the process of interpretation,
“for he is caught in that paradoxical position of being forced by the text to acknowledge the
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fictionality of the world he too is creating, yet his very participation involves him
intellectually, creatively, and perhaps even affectively in a human act that is very real, that is,
in fact a kind of metaphor of his daily efforts to ‘make sense’ of experience” (Hutcheon,
Narcissistic Narrative 30).
Consequently, it is no surprise to find that the style of writing is put forward in most
postmodern novels (Vervaeck, 148). Moreover, the style of writing is the connection
between language and the story that is narrated (Vervaeck, 149). As the network of images
appeared to be disseminated and without ultimate foundation, the style of writing is
disseminated as well, since it is the way in which images are tied together (Vervaeck, 149).
Therefore, we can say that the narrative style is a constant improvisation and postmodern
novels often create the illusion that story-tellers narrate on the spur of the moment,
searching for the correct phrases as they go along (Vervaeck, 149). This improvised style is
metafictional in its own way as it shows how the narrator constantly manipulates the text
(Vervaeck, 149).
This spontaneous type of style is both confusing and clarifying (Vervaeck, 150). On the
one hand, it hinders the chronological order of the story and shows that a postmodern
novel, which does not have a final meaning or resolution, can be transformed by the
narrator (Vervaeck, 150). On the other hand, the narrator also clarifies that there is no clear
distinction between deception and guidance (Vervaeck, 150). Even though the narrator
appears to be misleading the reader, he or she points the reader in the correct direction of
thinking in terms of extremes which can be connected with each other, or ‘clair-obscur’
(Vervaeck, 150).
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2.2.4. INTERTEXTUALITY
When Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ in 1969, she drew attention to the
fact that next to the fictional text one must also take into account the author, the reader and
the other inserted texts (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 87). However, we need to distinguish
the intertext from the parodied text, since the technique of parody is a way of dealing with
an intertext. Riffaterre stated that an intertext is “the corpus of texts the reader may
legitimately connect with the one before his eyes, that is, the texts brought to mind by what
he is reading” (quoted in Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 87). Brian McHale notes that “an
intertextual space is constituted whenever we recognize the relations among two or more
texts, or between specific texts and larger categories such as genre, school, period”
(Postmodernist Fiction 56-57).
Linda Hutcheon notes that the concept of intertextuality “replaces the challenged author-
text relationship with the one between reader and text, one that situates the locus of textual
meaning within the history of discourse itself”(Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 126).
Barthes has even turned intertextuality into an essential state of textuality by saying that it is
impossible to live “outside the infinite text” (quoted in Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism 128).
This dimension provides some sort of unity on the level of form and content in a
postmodern novel as the previous dimensions cannot exist without intertextuality, but it
also allows of the endless referral (Vervaeck, 172). The fictional world is presented as the
enactment of a text, the character is perceived to be an actor staging the text and the
language is a bottomless lake of fictional texts (Vervaeck, 172). The process of narrating does
not originate from a single subject, but the story is formed through a language which speaks
by itself (Vervaeck, 172). Finally, metafictional texts are full of references to a supposedly
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basic text, a continuing process which functions to delete the boundaries between the
different texts (Vervaeck, 172-173).
In this dimension of intertextuality, Vervaeck draws attention to the text trying to
legitimate itself, as every art form takes up a stance towards the tradition (173). Postmodern
novels explicitly show that they make use of the literary tradition and subvert it at the same
time (Vervaeck, 174). They ironically subvert the legitimizing power of this tradition by using
non-canonical literary genres and styles, thus blurring the boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’
literature (Vervaeck, 174). However, this does not mean they prefer marginal genres to
others; a postmodern novel is more a fusion of different styles and genres, resulting in a
hybrid and impure form (Vervaeck, 182).
Linda Hutcheon also notices that postmodern fiction bridges “the gap between élite and
pop art, a gap which mass culture has no doubt broadened”. She indicates that, “as typically
postmodernist contradictory texts, novels like these parodically use and abuse the
conventions of both popular and élite literature, and do so in such a way that they can
actually use the invasive culture industry to challenge its own commodification processes
from within” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 20).
The postmodern novel tries to justify its own text by erasing the boundaries between
canonical and previously marginalized texts. However, that does not mean they refuse to
insert themselves in the tradition (Vervaeck, 187). On the one hand, a postmodern novel
undermines the tradition by inserting popular texts and drawing attention to things which
normally remain unnoticed in classic realist novels (Vervaeck, 187). On the other hand,
intertextuality is also used to create a continuity with the tradition, by drawing on classic
realist narrative conventions and transforming them (Vervaeck, 187). Vervaeck calls this
35
“authorizing transgression” (188), as the legitimacy of a postmodern text is brought about by
transgression.
In A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon also deals with the concept of the
marginal, which she calls “the ex-centric”, referring to “class, race, gender, sexual
orientation or ethnicity”all at once. The ex-centric is given a new meaning “in the light of the
implied recognition that our culture is not really the homogeneous monolith (that is
middleclass, male, heterosexual, white, western)”. In other words, the postmodern novel
draws attention to “the concept of alienated otherness” (12), to a shift from homogeneity
to heterogeneity, rebelling against the former limited view on reality.
However, postmodernism has no desire to destroy these centralized systems: “It
acknowledges the human urge to make order, while pointing out that the orders we create
are just that” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 41). We can say that postmodernism
presents a rethinking of the former respected bourgeois values in the light of a
heterogeneity of values, an unceasing questioning of the values of liberal humanism
(Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern 108).
2.2.4.1. PARODY
As mentioned above, postmodern art forms “at once use and abuse, install and then
destabilize convention in parodic ways, self-consciously pointing both to their own inherent
paradoxes and provisionality and, of course, to their critical or ironic re-reading of the art of
the past” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 23). The conventional ‘readerly’ forms (cf.
Barthes), which make the readers simply consume the text, have been transformed into
‘writerly’ forms (cf. Barthes), inciting readers to rewrite a text and create their own meaning
(Marcus, 252). This process of reinterpretation through exposing the conventions may result
36
in “ostranenie or defamiliarization” (Waugh, 65). This is the “paradox of parody”: “It refers
both to itself and to that which it designates or parodies”. In other words, “the textual and
pragmatic natures of parody imply, at one and the same time, authority and transgression”
(Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 69).
Hutcheon describes parody as a more extreme form of intertextuality, as “the unmasking
of dead literary conventions and the establishing of new literary codes” (Narcissistic
Narrative 38). Nevertheless, we should not see the parodic novel as a “’Jig-Saw Puzzle’, in
terms of the piecing together of factory-cut parts”, because then we are underestimating its
creativity and assuming that the act of reassembling the different pieces results in the same
as the original (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 50).
Linda Hutcheon points out, once again, that the reader plays a crucial part in the
production of the novel, as a postmodern novel “invites a more literary reading, a
recognition of literary codes” (Narcissistic Narrative 25). The reader and the author can
share the pleasure of creating the textual world, as the reader is distanced from this world
because its fictionality is acknowledged. In other words, by presenting the novel as artifice,
the text parodies the readers’ expectations, their hope for verisimilitude, forcing them to
become aware of their own role in this creative process (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative
139).
When we look at its etymology, we see that the term parody is derived from the Greek
word parodia, meaning “counter-song”. The Oxford English Dictionary also provides a
definition of the term:
A composition in prose or verse in which the characteristic turns of thought and
phrase in an author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them
appear ridiculous, especially by applying them to ludicrously inappropriate subjects;
37
an imitation of a work more or less closely modelled on the original, but so turned as
to produce a ridiculous effect (quoted in Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 32).
However, Hutcheon emphasizes that parody does not ridicule, she believes parody to be a
“repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of
similarity” (A Theory of Parody 26). Parody has also been labeled as parasitic or derivative,
which suggests that the Romantic paradigm which “values genius, originality, and
individuality”(Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 4) still stands strong. Nevertheless, we should
learn to appreciate parody, because this subversion of fictional conventions often results in
new developments in the novel.
Carnivalised literature, irony and parody give writers the opportunity “to recuperate
conventional forms of expression and assumption about culture without valuing them in a
conventional way” (Slethaug, 27). Furthermore, parody “seems to offer a perspective on the
present and the past which allows an artist to speak to a discourse from within it, but
without being totally recuperated by it” (Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody 35). Consequently,
parody has become a way of expressing oneself for what Hutcehon calls ‘the ex-centric’ (cf.
above), people who have been silenced by the dominant ideology.
Theo D’Haen is aware of the fact that the technique of parody can be innovative and
states that “in-novation in literature for the postmodernists becomes a matter of re-
novation: a self-conscious exercise in the hierarchical realignment of conventions” (418).
Postmodern authors often use popular forms of fiction to subvert familiar conventions,
forcing the reader to examine his or her own norms and values, thus establishing a dialectic
relationship between the reader and the text. Theo D’Haen also points out that genres “that
hitherto occupied peripheral positions are shifting toward the center of the system”(408),
especially the genre of the detective novel.
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2.2.4.2. THE DETECTIVE STORY
The detective story is established through the image of the puzzle and has become a self-
reflexive paradigm, making the reader an accomplice of the creation of “the literary universe
through the fictive referents of the words” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 86). In
Narcissistic Narrative, Hutcheon also presents us with three characteristics of the
postmodern detective story. Firstly, these stories are very self-aware and they often present
a writer of detective stories in the novel, thereby drawing attention to the act of writing
itself (72). Secondly, the conventions of order and logic in these novels are rather rigid and
the reader expects and even needs them to be able to participate in the construction of the
case (72). Finally, the reader is expected to actively participate in these novels: they need to
gather clues to form an interpretation and solve the mystery (72).
The detective story easily lends itself to transformation because it makes use of a fixed
and conventional set of structural elements, which can be reworked and used in different
contexts through parody (Waugh, 82). First of all there is a crime, which has to be solved
with the aid of the characters’ psychological frame of mind and the genius of the detective
(Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 31). The baseline of every detective story is the fact that
the narrative transfer of information is blocked. The detective has to initiate the blocked
transmission again, by constructing a story that combines the text (the clues) with a history
(the crime) (Van der Weide, 42). The detective starts gathering clues, which are incorporated
into the text, and these small details all prove to have some importance for the plot
(Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative 31). Throughout the traditional detective story the tension,
brought about by a mystery, is heightened because the solution is delayed (Waugh, 82).
Eventually, the perpetrator is caught and justice is served in most of these detective novels.
The end clearly celebrates human rationality: the “’mystery’ is reduced to flaws in logic; the
39
world is made comprehensible” (Waugh, 82). According to Theo D’Haen, the plot of the
classical detective novel “works toward the maintenance or restoration of the established
order” and “the plot resolution underscores those norms and values the protagonist is
standing for” (413).
Van der Weide points out the importance of the genre by referring to Spanos, who says
that the traditional Western worldview is characterized by a problem-solution perspective:
“immediate psychic or historical experience is part of a comforting, even exciting and
suspenseful well-made cosmic drama or novel – more particularly a detective story” (quoted
in Van der Weide, 120). The linear narrative sequence is reassuring to the reader, as it
appears that every mystery or crime can be solved, and he or she wants to believe that the
universe can also be explained in a rational and clear manner. We can perceive the detective
story as the paradigmatic form of the positivistic worldview, while the anti-detective, in
which the conventions have been subverted, is the paradigmatic form of the postmodern
reaction to that worldview (Van der Weide,121). Spanos also argues that the anti-detective
story is the paradigmatic archetype of postmodern literary imagination and its formal
purpose “is to evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ and/or to psychoanalyse in order to violently
frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime” (quoted in Marcus, 251).
Stefano Tani discusses this phenomenon in greater detail, stating that the anti-detective is
a result of “the passage from modernism to postmodernism” (38). He summarizes the
difference between modernism and postmodernism in a very concise manner, noting that
“the main difference that separates modernism from postmodernism, then, is
postmodernism’s lack of center, its refusal to posit a unifying system. Postmodernism’s new
awareness is the absence of a finality, a solution” (39-40). Thus, the anti-detective appears
to be a typical postmodern phenomenon.
40
In his essay on the detective story, Michael Holquist says that postmodernist writers who
wanted to oppose the modernist focus on myth and psychology sought refuge in the genre
of detective stories, which was already regarded as escape literature (148). While ‘high
literature’ experimented with myth and the sub-conscious, representing a world which
threatens reason, “detective fiction reassures through its rationalism” (Marcus, 249),
offering an escape from ‘high literature’.
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3. INTRODUCING ROBERT KROETSCH
FIGURE 1: Robert Kroetsch,
<http://www.paulodacosta.com/robert.htm>
According to Barbour and Brown, Robert Kroetsch - author, poet, editor, teacher and
critic - was born in 1927 in Heisler, Alberta. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree at the
University of Alberta he went to the United States to do his graduate work. For the next
seventeen years, he was a teacher at the State University of New York at Binghampton. In
the late seventies he came back from this voluntary exile and settled at the University of
Manitoba.
During “the period of the writer’s self-chosen American exile” (Bertacco, 28) he was active
as an editor for the literary magazine Boundary 2. Boundary 2: a journal of postmodern
literature was the first literary magazine which used the term postmodernism explicitly. The
editors interpreted the word as “ a kind of rejection, an attack, an undermining of the
42
aesthetic formalism and conservative politics of the New Criticism” (quoted in Bertacco, 31).
In creating this magazine “literary” Robert Kroetsch paired up with “philosophical” William
Spanos (Bertacco, 32). However, in 1978 Kroetsch decided to focus on his writing career and
left the editorial board.
Kroetsch is mostly known for his poetry and his theoretical essays. Some of the latter
have been published in The Lovely Treachery of Words (1989), a phrase which inspired the
title of this dissertation. He is also the author of various novels, such as But We are Exiles
(1965), The Words of My Roaring (1966), The Studhorse Man (1969), Gone Indian (1973),
Badlands (1975), What the Crow Said (1978), Sundogs: Stories from Saskatchewan (1980),
Alibi (1983), The Puppeteer (1992), and The Man from the Creeks (1998). In these novels
Kroetsch usually writes about the world of the prairie or the Canadian Midwest. However,
Kroetsch believes there is a narrative gap “between the prairie experience (the ‘place that
had no story to explain it’) and the (im)possibilities of telling that experience (the ‘story of
nothing to tell’)” (Henry, 290). This dichotomy between experience and story proves to be
essential in Kroetsch’s work.
Apart from this idea that language is inadequate, Kroetsch also incorporates other
characteristics of postmodernism in his writing in general. According to Bertacco, especially
his “later works such as Alibi (1983), The Puppeteer (1992), belong to the writer’s
‘theoretical’ phase and revolve more and more around postmodernist issues of linguistic
play-fulness and self-referentiality” (21-22). Kroetsch merges the theoretical and the literary
in his novels, uses paradoxes and “his work sets up co-ordinates we recognize from realist
fiction, then proceeds to dismantle them” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 162).
Especially this latter aspect in his novels is important for my analysis of The Puppeteer.
Kroetsch even describes himself as someone playing “on the edge of convention”, because
43
he is “both using a set of conventions and subverting them: you have to hear that double
thing” (quoted in Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 163).
Therefore, it is not surprising that Kroetsch chooses to use parody as a textual strategy, as
it “is a form of authorized transgression that is paradoxically both an inscribing and a
subverting of what it inscribes” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 163). Kroetsch relies
on traditional conventions and “asks which forms and which rhetoric might infuse the
inherited word with a new energy” (Bertacco, 15). In his writing he wants to give “a new
meaning and a new performative power to the ‘old’ words” and use “irony as a tool with
which to explode the ‘old’ forms from within” (Bertacco, 15).
In the context of the analysis of The Puppeteer, it may prove to be useful to discuss the
people who have influenced Kroetsch and his stance towards different theories in general. In
his work, we notice a shift from phenomenological existentialism during his years in the
editorial board of Boundary 2 to deconstruction and archaeology, towards “a more post-
colonial (or post-European) viewpoint, symbolized by Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival”
(Bertacco, 58).
Firstly, Kroetsch was influenced by Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, which is “that
critical mode by which we explode conventional patterns of thought and by which, quite
literally, we can push logic to its limits” (Bertacco, 58). Indebted to this notion, Kroetsch
formed his theory of unnaming, which means “to uninvent the world. To unconceal. To
make visible again. That invisible country, Canada. Our invisible selves” (quoted in Bertacco,
59).
However, Kroetsch does not completely agree with Derrida’s view on the value of oral
forms. According to Bertacco, Derrida believes writing is more important than speaking in
conveying the truth about the world. Kroetsch, on the other hand, clearly foregrounds the
44
importance of oral traditions in his literary texts, showing “his preference for the oral to the
written mode” (Bertacco, 60). Kroetsch believes that the endless talk of the Canadian people
“is the ultimate poem of the prairies. In a culture besieged by foreign television and
paperbacks and movies, the oral tradition is the means of survival. The bastards (the
Americans) can’t keep us from talking” (Bertacco, 60). Therefore, Kroetsch includes informal
language and incomplete oral forms in his fiction to subvert the traditional conventions of
the novel.
This fascination with oral traditions explains his attention to gossip, which he sees as “a
decentering rhetoric” because “you can just shift all of a sudden to another person, or to
something else” (quoted in Bertacco, 225). In particular, he seems to appreciate it because it
originates inside people, whereas the author’s voice comes from above, “from a different
point of view” (quoted in Bertacco, 225). Moreover, we can link Kroetsch’s notion of the oral
tradition with fabulation. Robert Scholes defines this as “a return to a more verbal kind of
fiction (…) a less realistic and a more artistic kind of narrative: more shapely, more evocative;
more concerned with ideas and ideals, less concerned with things” (quoted in Bertacco,
146).
Secondly, Kroetsch prefers archaeology over history to investigate the past: “Archaeology
supplants history; an archaeology that challenges the authenticity of history (as a continuous
narrative) by saying that there can be no joined story, only abrupt guesswork, juxtaposition,
flashes of insight” (quoted in Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 168). Kroetsch also
draws from archaeology to describe the relationship between writer and reader, stating that
the writer has to “unearth” something and that the reader “has the task of fitting into
whatever scheme he wants to fit into” (Neuman and Wilson, 14). He believes “the very
incompleteness is part of what excites us. We may only have shards” (Neuman and Wilson,
45
10). This implies that the reader plays a highly active role and Kroetsch realizes that he
writes exacting narratives: “I work a reader pretty hard, I guess, in that I want him to enter
into the process with me” (quoted in Neuman and Wilson, 57). Apparently, he dislikes
authors who humor the reader and let the latter win:
Often the bestseller lets the reader win and he can come away incredibly satisfied
with himself, ‘Ah, there is a reference to so and so and I got it, and it means this, and
I got it.’ I respond to this just as I do when someone lets me win a game of checkers
or whatever. I get mad. (Neuman and Wilson, 60)
Once again, the process of creating is more important than the product. Reader or writer
will never arrive at a final resolution, or, as he puts it “I guess I don’t like to solve the
problem” (Neuman and Wilson, 4). Kroetsch prefers to live on the circumference to existing
in the center: “On the circumference we can defer endings and completion. (…) I want to
avoid both meaning and conclusiveness. And one way to achieve this is to keep retelling,
keep transforming the story” (Neuman and Wilson, 130).
Finally, Kroetsch is indebted to Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival. His theory of
carnivalization “enables a confrontation between high and low culture, a turning of the
world of high culture upside down through parody” (Bertacco, 63). He wants to change and
innovate literary conventions by re-telling older stories. Because of his fascination with
structures, he likes to incorporate different intertextual references: “I like inventing or
exploring new structures. I suppose what I demand of myself is that the structure not
exclude the energy of disorder” (quoted in Bertacco, 146). However, Bertacco also argues
that “Kroetsch insists on decentering only until he has created a space for his own voice and
that of his fellow writers, after which he is willing to embark on a rebuilding project” (63),
thus forming a new system.
46
4. ANALYSIS OF THE PUPPETEER
4.1. THE REPRESENTATION OF THE WORLD AND HUMANITY
4.1.1. THE TEXTUAL WORLD
First and foremost, the textual world in The Puppeteer is often presented as a fictive
scenario. The puppet show performed by Dorf (or Papa B) in the attic creates and
manipulates Maggie’s, Ida’s and Josie’s view on past events. These ‘puppets’ reenact history
as Dorf perceives it. For example, Deemer tells us that “William William Dorfendorf claimed
later that he awoke late that morning, there on the Algarve beach, only to find Julie
Magnuson gone from his suite of rooms, his rented Mercedes gone from the courtyard of
the hotel”, while “Papa B skipped all this” (P 156). The attic is the setting from which Dorf
creates his fictional world, a manipulative puppet show: “The attic itself had become part of
Papa B’s puppet show. The attic and the story he purported to tell had become one and the
same for their precious Papa B” (P 153). Moreover, Maggie’s desk “has disappeared into
some version of a banyan tree” (P 154).
Consequently, the boundaries between the various story worlds become blurred. Maggie
eventually crosses “the line into the space of the performance” (quoted in Müller, 254) by
becoming Inez, who functions as Papa B’s lover. Ida even acknowledges that the puppets
have become ‘real’ when she says that De Medeiros “is right there, alive as the smile on your
face” (P 153). De Medeiros has first been drowned by the puppet master and has been
brought back to life. However, De Medeiros can only follow a script, as he lives in a textual
world: “’I am at your service,’ he called” (P 153). Consequently, the world is often
47
represented as a stage and the characters appear to be its actors. For example, Julie and
Manny “staged their disappearances” and after that “they were staging their return” (P 185)
Secondly, the real world cannot be shown in its true form. Not only can some aspects
never be translated into language, reality may also deceive us: “The sun fooled them.
Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon the sun broke through the clouds and warmed
the cabin deck into an illusion of summer” (P 73). On the other hand, some aspects of reality
can remain utterly indecipherable. For example, a lake is described as “ a mirror that gave
back everything, allowing no penetration at all” (P 74). This elusiveness is most adequately
illustrated in the character of Karen Strike, who lugs around a lot of cameras. She wants to
record reality by making a documentary and taking photographs for Jack Deemer. According
to Fish, she is making a film of “every damned inch of the lake bottom where the corpse
might have got silted over or snagged” (P 57). However, Karen is not able to find the body of
De Medeiros. The characters have to admit that the real world remains elusive, as the
puppet show in the attic illustrates: “The light made of the white sheet a blank space, an
empty window. A frame without a picture” (P 115). The fictional world does not seem to
have a center or an essence.
Kroetsch also uses the technique of filming to represent the relationship between the
perception of the novelist and reality in his writing. For example, when Josie explains that
she made the wedding dress and “embroidered all the soft colors of the dress into the scales
of a rainbow trout, the trout in a mountain stream, the stream and its flowered banks under
a hint of mountains, the wide range of mountains under a raft of cumulus clouds, window
afloat among the clouds” (P 58). In this fragment the narrator zooms out and creates an
instance of mise-en-abyme (cf. infra).
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Karen Strike’s act of taking photographs is also an attempt to represent reality as it is:
“she just wants an exact copy” (P 80-81). However, the lens of the camera acts as a filter of
reality and a photograph can never represent the exact same light or shadow, sharpness or
obscurity of reality. When Karen tries to take a picture of Fish, he submerges in the water
and she can only capture Maggie, who is sitting on his shoulders. And when she takes
pictures of Dorf and Julie, she is able to take one photograph which only suggests that the
two lovers were having sex, due to the interference of the movements of the frightened
mules, with their bulky loads and the “impossible light” (P 247).
Finally, I will deal with the technique of mise-en-abyme to show that the novelistic world
is a compilation of embedded fictions. A clear example is given during the puppet show.
Maggie tells Deemer about Dorf, who is in the attic of the house performing another
narrative in which there is another version of Maggie in another attic in a similar house (P
116-117). In short, every puppet show is an instance of mise-en-abyme, turning the fictional
world into “a dizzying Chinese-box set-up” (Florby, 135), as Papa B invents a story which is
registered by Maggie and written down. This story is registered by Jack Deemer and told to
the reader.
The technique of mise-en-abyme is explicitly pointed out when Deemer speaks of his
“large collection of gold bracelets, each made in the form of a snake swallowing its own tail”
(P 197), making the embedded level of the narrative a part of the higher embedding
narrative. If we have to provide a survey of the various story worlds, we may argue that Jack
Deemer’s story of redemption is the primary text. He appears to be the final intermediary
between the reader and the narrative, as he states that “Maggie Wilder is writing this” (P
17). Maggie Wilder’s autobiography of the wedding dress then becomes an embedded text,
which makes Papa B’s puppet shows an embedded text in an embedded text. As Papa B’s
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shadow plays can actually bring other characters, such as Julie and Manny, back to life, we
may argue that he also has the power to change the primary text. As a result, the various
story worlds overlap, literally turning the narrative into a snake swallowing its own tail.
Even though The Puppeteer does not frequently present the fictional world as a scenario,
it does repeatedly present a person as following a certain script.
4.1.2. HUMAN BEING AS TEXT
In this section, I will illustrate that the characters are fictions, a statement which implies
that some characters consist of a number of embedded fictions and that we can also find a
fusion of different characters. Consequently, it will be shown that we cannot discover a
character’s true identity. Finally, I will state that this may be explained by the unconscious
forces or primitive desires that lurk in the characters’ minds.
4.1.2.1. CHARACTERS REPRESENT FICTIONS
Firstly, the characters in this novel all appear to be textual and are forced to follow a
certain script that is controlled by the puppet master or trickster artist. This is illustrated at
the end of the ninth chapter, when Dorf and Maggie meet each other every night in the
attic. They have both become puppets who have to follow a certain script and “that ancient
Greek shadow puppet became master” (P 126) :
It was he who manipulated their desire. His shaping hands were mysterious gifts that
fell from the dark and onto ears and nipples. Karaghiosi, that slave and fool, became
master . His mouth surprised their mouths, their thighs, with urgent raids. He was the
suddenness of teeth, the quickness of a tongue. In the blank dark his long fingers
turned pages. (P 126)
50
To understand the role of the puppet master, it is important to shed some light on the
character of Karaghiozis in the Greek shadow theatre and in Kroetsch’s novel. The name
‘Karaghiozis’ originates from the Turkish language and means ‘black eye’ (Spathario
Museum). Karaghiozis is a trickster (cf. infra) who is “poor and hungry, with a hunchback and
a large nose” (Danforth, 290). Kroetsch also admits that Karaghiozis is “a trickster-tricked
figure and I’m always a sucker for that” (quoted in Müller, 254). Furthermore, Karaghiozis is
“uneducated, unskilled, and perennially unemployed, but clever, delighting in deceit, and
always ready to risk a beating in the hope of obtaining a hearty meal” (Danforth, 290). He
appears to be restricted to this script in the novel as well, as he has a hunchback, a big arm
and Maggie seems to know enough of the scenario to expect Karaghiozis to “receive the
beating, not give it” (P 121).
Maggie is also restricted to the script of her book Trading Places as she repeats the
opening: “I’ll never tell. I promise” (P 162). She is restricted to the script on her wedding
dress as well: Ida and Josie want her to sit in an open boat, wearing her dress, going to meet
her lover. Josie explicitly says the boat needs to travel on a mountain stream, like the one on
the dress, instead of a lake (P 58). Jack Deemer and Julie Magnuson even become the
characters in the story that is illustrated on the dress, which puts forward that these two
characters also follow a script:
In the tumult of the dress we were the story that Josie Pavich had only guessed; we
were the lovers in animal form that she had so carefully pictured, the man with the
body of a fish, the horse-headed man, the woman with octopus arms. (…) We cried
out, shouted, and with our gasping mouths began again. And always the dress was
our bed and our inspiration. (P 137)
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In the context of exposing the different characters as fictions, it may be relevant to
describe the different characters and their interrelations, so as to underscore that they are
all embodied clichés.
Papa B appears in the beginning of the novel as “the pizza man” (P 1), a cliché occupation
everyone is familiar with from watching films. However, he also appears to be “Papa Vasilis”
(P 7), a “Greek Orthodox priest” (P 1) and he walks around dressed like a Greek monk (P 7)
because he wears a cassock (P 9), which is a “long garment worn by some Christian clergy”
(OED). All of these references seem to point at a connection between Papa B and Saint Basil,
the Greek version of Santa Claus. In Greece, presents are exchanged on New Year and they
are delivered by Saint Basil or Agios Vassilis (“Greek Name of Santa Claus is Agios Vassilis”).
Throughout the novel Papa B (B may stand for Basil) wants to be seen as a saint and at the
end of the novel Maggie and Deemer are writing a saint’s life in his honour. He is also
described as having grey hair and “a reddish-grey beard” (P 1), because of his red costume
shining through. He always wants to be a good man and he protects ‘his city’: “The pious
fraud. He believed in his own disguise, even if it didn’t for an instant fool another human
being. He would deliver food to the hungry and throw in consolation to boot” (P 22).
Papa B is also referred to as Dorfendorf or Billy, which could explain the use of the initial
B. Maggie is surprised to find he has “other names as well as other lives” (P 69). He is also
called Dorf and when we turn the letters around, we see that ‘Dorf’ is also ‘Frod’, or fraud.
He is often described as an “imposter” (P 7) or a “pious fraud” (P 22) and he manipulates the
past events in his puppet show, constructing others’ perception on events (cf. trickster,
infra). When Maggie sees him standing on her porch, he looks “like a magician” (P 8) who is
standing on a stage. He appears to be an actor, taking on any role he wants, which means
that he resembles the Protean trickster, who always assumes different forms. He does not
52
have a ‘true’ identity, because his core identity is a void. When he shifts into this core
identity, allowing his face to “go blank” (P 93), Maggie finally recognizes him as the man she
saw in a newspaper years before. His face, “drained of all existence” (P 94) seems to
fascinate her. Dorf’s empty face allows her to find “her own desire on his kissing lips” (P
126), implying that she can only project herself onto him. There is no real self behind the
shifting masks. In that sense, Dorf literally becomes the empty canvas he uses for the
projection of his shadow play. Maggie sees Dorf as a canvas onto which different fictions are
projected: “A criminal, a murderer, a fugitive, a fake priest, a man in a woman’s dress cutting
out paper dolls – and now on top of all that he wants to be mothered and held” (P 90).
Maggie is eventually utterly confused and does not know what his name is, “assuming he
had a name of his own” (P 89).
We may also state that Papa B is portrayed like a traditional icon because “he is flat,
lacking dimension” (Müller, 250). Byzantine icons, in particular, present in their centre a
saint figure with a beard and they “lack perspective and depth, are regarded as a
representation of patriarchal order and are objects of worship” (Müller 250). Papa B is also
associated with icons because he delivers pizzas, which replicate “his iconic flatness in a
comic union” (Müller 251).
Lastly, Papa B is also a cunning trickster figure. For example, Deemer says that Papa B
“connives” (P 124). And when Papa B narrates a story about Fish in one of his shadow plays,
Papa B manages “to invent in his pitiful charade, right there at the mine’s entrance, the
explosion of a few sticks of dynamite” (P 136). This “trick” did not fall on deaf ears: “Maggie
was frightened half to death; she rushed into the trap once more” (P 136).
According to Ballinger, a trickster is first and foremost someone who lives “at the edge of
society’s respectable environs” (21). Moreover, this figure is ambiguous because he “never
53
settles or shapes himself so as to allow closure, either fictional or moral” (Ballinger, 31).
Hyde agrees, stating that tricksters “are the lords of in-between” (6) and that the boundary
is where the trickster will be found (7). However, Hyde also states that “in spite of all their
disruptive behavior, tricksters are regularly honored as the creators of culture” (8). This
makes the trickster figure the embodiment of the paradox.
Kroetsch readily admits that he is intrigued by the trickster as a mythic figure: “Partly this
is because a trickster breaks down systems. There is no logic to his behavior, or only an
antilogic” (Neuman and Wilson, 99). He even says that the artist, “in the long run, given the
choice of being God or Coyote, will, most mornings, choose to be Coyote” (Neuman and
Wilson, 99), a well-known Native American trickster figure. As this implies that Kroetsch
chooses to be a trickster artist, we cannot trust him.
Thomas Bludgett in The Puppeteer is presented as “Mr. Lawyer” (P 40), even if he is now
inactive and pretends he is no longer a lawyer. As a lawyer, he was able to travel outside the
city, but since he went on the inactive list, he cannot leave the city. His new script involves
geographical, as well as moral, physical and emotional paralysis (P 41). We also need to state
that Bludgett is a liar, because he maintains that he does not sleep, “playing out his role as
the insomniac avoider of the world” (P 39), while he does sleep on the sly (P 162). This
illustrates that the boundaries between true stories and false ones become blurred as well.
Manuel de Medeiros is a famous Portuguese spa doctor and a dwarf (P 120). He is
restricted to this script of the spa doctor, because, “even on the day of Julie Magnuson’s
malicious return to the so-called world, he could only do what spa doctors do” (P 193).
Another male character is Fish, who did not show up on the day of his own wedding, gave
up his career as a mining engineer and looks after Deadman Spring for Jack Deemer, even
though this spa is not a full-fledged spa. He also incorporates a fiction: he is literally
54
presented as a fish on Julie’s and Maggie’s wedding dress: “Josie embroidered all the soft
colors of the dress into the scales of a rainbow trout” (P 58).
Finally, Jack Deemer is a collector who goes to extremes to get a collection of icons he
decided he wanted to purchase (P 204). Papa B used to be Deemer’s agent, informing him of
interesting collections of trivial objects all over the world. Jack seems to have a desire to
collect mundane objects such as lariats or doorways (P 72). His name may have various
connotations. Firstly, Jack Deemer is not ‘deemed’ normal by Josie as she says he is a
monster (P 52). Secondly, the narrative in The Puppeteer is built up around the need for Jack
to ‘redeem’ himself. He wants to explain his own motives and he often interrupts Maggie’s
story to put her words into perspective. For example, after Maggie has described Deemer as
a man with a limp he says that he does not “walk lame” (P 230).
All these men are presented as failures, while women are presented as powerful and
manipulative creatures. For example, Henry Ketch “was counting on his wife once again to
save him” (P 211), as he cannot save himself. Dorf also counts on Maggie to take care of him
and when he is left to his own devices he appears to become more like an animal than a
human being, because he no longer washes or shaves. Fish also depends on women,
because when Julie reappears, he “was once again, as he had been for most of his miserable
life, worshipping at the feet of his clay idol” (P 186).
Especially Julie Magnuson and Inez seem to be able to control men, because they create
manipulative scripts. Julie likes living with two men, since “one man no longer satisfied her”
(P 205), and she is able to get whatever she wants from men. While Julie can manipulate like
no other, Inez is more domineering, which is shown when she declares Bludgett can finish
the inadequate wine he ordered (P 112). She does appear to tempt men by pursing her lips
continuously, but that is merely an illusion as Inez’s private detective knows she “did not
55
have about her all the generosity that her blowing of kisses hither and yon might suggest” (P
113). Inez presents herself as a successful woman, who bought “a string of pizza places” (P
109). She admits that she likes men who are failures as they make her feel more powerful.
Inez and Thomas even have their own script for their courtship. She had a little courtroom in
her house with a “stepped platform covered in black marble that looked like a small stage”
(P 141). He had to present his case and then Inez could punish him or reward him. Later,
when he wants to make love to Maggie, he tells her to charge him “with breaking and
entering” (P 144), because he can only follow that script of ‘courting’. This does not only
illustrate a play with language in which a link is drawn between representing a case and
declaring one’s love, it also emphasizes the fact that characters have to follow a certain
script and that the world is perceived as a stage, in which the characters are merely actors
with no true identity. They are like puppets taking up different roles.
Next to being represented as failures, these men also have female characteristics. Papa B
wears a “strange, blue dress” (P 44) and he has a “small bun of hair at the back of his head”
(P 9). He becomes even more effeminate in Karen’s photograph in which
Dorf is lying with his legs spread, his face turned to the right so that he is seen in
profile. The head of a mule with its leather halter and its halter rope covers the space
where his private parts must be, but it appears his skirt has been raised right up to his
neck and beard. His arms are flung akimbo, in a gesture of surrender. (P 247)
Inez even says that she will make him eat his own “prairie oysters” (P 111) when she finds
him, hinting at his castration.
Even Jack Deemer becomes an effeminate man at the end of the novel, because he had
the wedding dress adjusted to fit him and he puts the dress on every morning. Moreover, he
wears a shawl over his shoulders and sometimes Maggie shaves him and does his hair,
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saying that he “must look the part” (P 266). Eventually, Deemer is transformed into a true
bride, because of the wedding dress. Kroetsch believes that the wedding dress is “a
remarkable example of cultural coding” because it is a “garment that you only wear once,
and how much it is associated with gender” (quoted in Müller, 248). However, this wedding
dress is merely another disguise for the characters to put on in their attempt to hide the fact
that they do not have an original identity. Therefore, the dress reflects Kroetsch’s being
“much more interested right now in what we call surface” (quoted in Müller, 249). As
mentioned above, all the characters perform different fictions, which accords with Judith
Butler’s statement that “gender proves to be performative – that is, constituting the identity
it is purported to be” (quoted in Müller, 256).
We can also say that Maggie is transformed into a masculine figure. Henry Ketch wanted
her “to wear a straight street-style suit” (P 224) and at the end of the novel she “slips into a
clean sweat suit” (P 265) every morning. This representation of men as feminine and
women as masculine can be aligned with the postmodern desire to use a traditional
dichotomy, in this case the dichotomy between ‘natural’ masculinity and femininity, and
subvert it at the same time. In this novel, Kroetsch opposes the traditional sex-gender
system that is based on binary oppositions. According to Kroetsch, this male cross-dressing is
his way of playing “with the idea of moving between genders” (quoted in Müller, 257) and
Jean E. Howard believes its effect is “putting in question the notion of fixed sexual
difference” (quoted in Müller, 257).
The main female character, Maggie Wilder, separated from her husband Henry Ketch and
moved into her cousin George’s house to write an autobiography of the wedding dress, “the
perfect account of the life she had neglected to live” (P 191). Throughout the narrative she is
presented as a woman who will eventually save her husband and is much stronger than him.
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However, she is also presented as a failure. She wanted to surprise Fish with a visit, “it was
all supposed to be a secret” (P 56), but Ida, Josie and Maggie meet Fish unexpectedly in The
Heritage Inn. And when the “ghostly white boat” (P 76) comes straight towards Josie, Ida,
Fish and Maggie on the lake, Maggie’s arm, which she raised to signal, is mistaken for a
beacon and the steersman aims straight at it. No matter what she does, she cannot get it
right.
Another female character is Karen Strike, who is always carrying cameras along and is said
to have “a little moral streak in her” because she teaches “people to stay away from water
by having them drown” (P 78). This transforms her into a harsh woman who will do
whatever it takes to serve Deemer and obtain the collections he wants. She appears to be
attached to her cameras and she is “invisible and soundless, until her camera snatched out
of the darkness its small, lightning record” (P 81).
Julie Magnuson is the original owner of the wedding dress and she was supposed to
marry Fish, but she married Deemer instead. She is very manipulative, making the rules and
expecting “the world to accommodate itself” (P 187). Her power is also suggested by her
name, as ‘magnus’ means ‘great’ in Latin.
Inez Catonio also appears to be a very dominant woman and she has become the “pizza
king” (P 38). She used to ride “herd on sagebrush and rattlesnakes” and she wants to return
to that script of hers, because she is “coming apart” (P 130) now. Consequently, she
incorporates at least two fictions.
The fact that all these characters are fictions implies two things. Firstly, there appear to
be different versions of the characters. When Maggie is with Dorf in the attic, “watching, she
knew she watched herself being watched” (P 124). And when she goes to the attic, “there
was always someone waiting, even if it was only the version of herself that was supposed to
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be at work, writing the life she would have lived if she hadn’t (…) agreed to marry a man
named Henry Ketch” (P 4). The characters seem to be constructions consisting of different
personalities. Especially Dorf combines a lot of identities and Maggie “wanted him to
explode from his own denseness. She wanted to place in his clever hands a bomb of such
exquisite complexity and workmanship that he couldn’t help caressing it while it exploded in
his face. It was his infernal damned clever hands that made him a puppeteer, a craftsman, a
shaper, a lover, a collector’s agent” (P 190).
Secondly, different characters may look alike. When Papa B impersonates Manny De
Medeiros he truly becomes this character, according to Jack Deemer:
Papa B, in his days and nights of working with his puppets, had lost every trace of his
own voice. The voice he represented was that of Dr Manuel De Medeiros. I can only
assume he managed the impersonation well, since Billy Dorfendorf’s own voice,
when he worked in my employ, was edgy, nervous, always looking for an escape. (P
154)
However, not all resemblances between different characters result from voluntary
adaptation. When Fish speaks of looking at the garden as if it were a book, Maggie realizes
he sounds like Henry and Thomas Bludgett (P 179). And Maggie even starts to behave like
Dorf, as she catches “herself sipping her coffee in his dumb, melancholy way” (P 93). There is
also a resemblance between the scenario Dorf presents and the presentation of Manny,
since the doctor is “a regular little saint, helping the sick and the terminally ill when no one
else would touch them, often taking no pay for his work” (P 207-208). There is even a
resemblance between Dorf and Deemer. Even though they hate each other, they both
incorporate the script of a priest: Dorf is a “Greek orthodox priest” (P 1) and Deemer is a
“priest” (P 119) when Manny and Dorf confess to their love-triangle with Julie.
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4.1.2.2. CHARACTERS DO NOT HAVE A FIXED IDENTITY
Consequently, it comes as no surprise that we cannot discover a true or fixed identity in
these characters. Maggie is afraid to take Papa B’s “fake cassock” (P 107) away from him and
wash it, because “it would dissolve” (P 107), proving that his disguise or his script is not real.
Papa B is said to be “a failed wreck of a human being, he doesn’t have a mind of his own or a
tongue of his own” (P 161). At one point Maggie even believes that Ida and Josie have found
the ‘real’ Papa B, that “he wasn’t that monster who had stuck his head into the attic
stairwell, that beast-man calling down from the darkness. The real Papa B had escaped from
her as he escaped from everyone else, he was there in Italy, in Rome” (P 159).
Nevertheless, the characters try to discover the true identity in other characters. For
example, Karen Strike wants to capture Fish off guard: with her camera “she wanted to
surprise him into sight, scare him into the misted, snow-filled air” (P 81). And Ida wants to
“catch the dwarf before he flung himself into the arms of his own image in the water. It
seemed he might plunge in and be lost, out of all reach” (P 176). They want to understand
each other and, above all, know each other’s motives. When a stone arch brushes against
Dorf’s tall hat and Maggie catches it, she realizes that Dorf is a monk after all: “Being a fake
monk is as close as he can get to being what he is” (P 242). However, at the end of the novel
Dorf does become “the monk he had so long pretended to be” (P 250), which implies that
perhaps a final retrieval of an identity is possible.
Deemer seems to be the character that is most obsessed with finding his ‘true self’. He
wants to explain everything to the readers and often interrupts Maggie’s narrative to do so.
Furthermore, he asks Dorf to find him the ultimate spa that would bring him “health and
renewal” (P 119), implying that he wants to be stripped down to his essence or even initiate
a transition and start all over again.
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In his novels, Kroetsch is recurrently preoccupied with the notion of the self. According to
Bertacco, “self-description, self-representation and self-obsession” (79) are crucial features
in his novels. All of his characters present themselves as fictional people wearing costumes
which they try on, keep on for a certain period in time and then replace by another costume,
thus never unveiling a core identity. In fact, we may say that Kroetsch “incorporates the
traditional question of Canadian identity” (Bertacco, 79-80) into his novels: “In particular, it
is the self as a discursive invention, as an identification fantasy, that we find enacted in his
books; even more so, Margaret Turner reads Kroetsch’s fictional characters as acting out
‘not the quest of identity as the given authentic self but the belief that the chosen fiction is
the fullest imaginative act’” (Bertacco, 80).
However, the characters will never reach an ultimate explanation for each other’s actions
as the characters seem to be unable to be themselves and unwilling to present a coherent
identity. When Papa B stages himself as a puppet in his show, “the voice of the monk was
almost but not quite that of Papa B. Papa B, trying to imitate his own voice, was hesitating”
(P 121). He does not seem to control his own personality. Maggie also does not know
herself: “One of the puppets was asking her simply to play herself, and Maggie found the
assignment impossible” (P 122). She seems to believe that there is only “one life available, at
best, to each of us” and she realizes she has to “wear it for real” (P 149). But life proves to
be more complicated than that, as these characters do not appear to have a stable, core
identity.
Firstly, we cannot discover a true identity because these characters wear disguises. Henry
points out that the wedding dress made Maggie look like “some kind of great big toy doll” (P
224), implying that she was not herself in it and that she might have been controlled by
some higher force, like Dorf’s puppets. The dress even seems to have mysterious powers,
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because Maggie and Deemer change when they put it on. When Deemer puts the dress on
simply to disguise himself at the chapel, “something precious” (P 251) happens. He says that
he is no longer simply himself when he is wearing the dress.
Secondly, we cannot find a true identity because these characters transform constantly.
At one point, Maggie senses Papa B’s shadowy presence “like a man become werewolf, up
there in her dark” (P 157). He also appears to be a different man when he is standing in a
landscape, because Maggie does not recognize him. She had become accustomed to seeing
him in the dark attic, but she “had never seen her Papa B at a distance” (P 238).
4.1.2.3. CHARACTERS ARE CONTROLLED BY UNCONSCIOUS DESIRES
Firstly, as Jack Deemer provides a biased account and cannot be trusted and Dorf
manipulates the past, we can only rely on the unconscious to reveal the past. Only Manny
and Julie appear to be able to reveal the ‘true’ past. When Manny wants to fling himself
“into the arms of his own image in the water” (P 176), to reach the unconscious behind the
mirror, Ida feels she must catch the dwarf before he plunges and becomes “out of all reach”
(P 176). For all their search for ultimate truth, Manny and Julie paradoxically try to avoid the
truth from being discovered. Kroetsch also alludes “to a Jungian reading for the characters’
unconscious being brought to light through performance” (Müller, 255). In other words, the
puppets’ shadows represent unconscious events coming to the surface.
However, this novel often represents the characters’ unconscious forces or desires as
equally controlled by the puppet master. They often hear a voice inside their heads telling
them what to do. For example, Maggie at one point hates “the adrenaline that was telling
her, do it or run” (P 140). And later she is “talking over the voice that told her, jump out of
the car, run and hide” (P 140). Moreover, Maggie seems to be unable to control her own
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body as she realizes she suddenly stops at Josie’s small house (P 125). And when she goes to
find the two muleteers she finds “herself instead on the balcony of a small café” (P 244).
These unconscious desires are put forward by the use of references to animals, monsters
and the primitive world. The drivers of Manny’s limousines “were identical, large, monstrous
twins, each with one eye and one eye patch” (P 194). Especially Julie and Maggie find
themselves fascinated by the animal world:
Maggie, to my embarrassment, insists she responds to the smell of the dung of
donkeys and mules. And horses, she adds. Julie, too, thrilled to that animal world that
offends me, that world of frank odors and acrid tastes and guttural sounds, that
world without that decency of enduring shape. They, in their jagged, animal way,
fucked, I suppose, Julie and Dorf. (P 246)
These female characters appear to be yearning for a return to primitive needs, because that
process suggests a return to the possibility of discovering a core identity that makes them
feel human.
4.1.3. THE WORLD AND HUMAN BEINGS AS CONSTRUCTIONS OF IMAGES
In this narrative text images are obsessively tied together, until these images are no
longer associated with only one aspect of the world or a character. More than once the
reader believes to have found a central image explaining the world, but soon the image
starts to disperse. One central image is the cave. George’s kitchen is said to be “a cave of
light” (P 3) and Thomas Bludgett says that being in the forest is “like being in a cave” (P 45).
Deadman Spring also has a cave (P 78) and Inez’s house even has a replica of that cave (P
142). The image of the cave might refer to a person’s unconscious desires or primitive needs
as primordial human beings used to turn caves into their homes. In this novel, the cave in
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Deadman Spring, the forest resembling a cave and Inez’s bathroom with a replica of a cave
are all connected with lust and sex. In Alibi, the cave in Deadman Spring is “the lovely maze
of our naming” and “the wet, invisible embrace” (A 227), as Dorf, Karen, Deemer Manny and
Fish are entangled in a strange sort of love making. In The Puppeteer, Bludgett wants “to
make love” (P 46) with Maggie in the forest and Maggie wants to make love to Bludgett in
Inez’s “huge tub” (P 142).
Another central image is the labyrinth, which Kroetsch often uses in his novels. By using
imagery which refers to mazes, Kroetsch makes clear that he opposes chronological
structures and states that “that traditional linear thing” in stories is “boring” (Neuman and
Wilson, 180). He argues that “the labyrinth is so much more exciting because it is life or
death. The wrong turn (…) you throw it all away. So it all comes back to the notion of
gambling, to chance, to carnival, and why deny that to the reader” (Neuman and Wilson,
180)? In The Puppeteer, the narrator continues to tell stories and to tell them in a different
manner, making the reader lose him or herself in the maze of stories and images. The novel’s
labyrinthian structure may be supported by a reference to a cafe in Rome which has a “small
maze of outdoor tables” (P 168). The cardinal’s garden is also a “labyrinth of flowering trees
and sculpted hedges” (P 181).
Secondly, the characters are also ‘grafted’ through the use of physical images and by
paying attention to these images the reader can try to recover the scripts in these bodies.
However, these scripts remain impalpable for the reader, because the body can never be
fully represented in language and the characters remain elusive. For example, Thomas
Bludgett becomes “a tall, looming shadow that had lost its body but kept one hand” (P 45).
Moreover, these bodies are far from perfect. For example, Fish “let himself walk with a limp”
(P 157) and Dorf also has a peculiar walk: “He seemed, even as he moved around the side of
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the mill, to be stealing away from something rather than toward” (P 238). Furthermore,
Dorf’s face, “in some failed way, was long and ascetic” (P 9) and his hands appear to be
“separated from his mere body” (P 11).
They are also imperfect because the body’s equilibrium seems to be disturbed due to
uncontrollable urges, like the need to eat, which is a central motif in this novel. According to
Vervaeck, this may symbolize the chaotic and everlasting interaction between the mental
world and reality, trying to make one world known to the other (57). The characters literally
incorporate elements from the outside world, thus trying to gain knowledge about it.
Maggie says that she is “overeating” (P 13) and Josie and Ida spend their time on the cabin’s
deck “eating too much, putting rum in their coffee, eating again” (P 73). This image of eating
is used because food items are tangible and can be named. By eating the characters can
literally bring the outside world inside : “The exactness of ice cream. Vanilla is not chocolate.
Names. Strawberry. Maple walnut. Words” (P 22). This need to name everything and
attempt to know the world fully, brings us to the next category.
4.1.4. UNDERSTANDING THE FICTIONAL WORLD AND THE CHARACTERS
First, neither the world nor the characters can be fully understood, which is emphasized
by repetitive references to the fact that the characters can only see a glimpse of objects or
people. Maggie can only catch “a glimpse of Mount Loki” because of “a break in the clouds”
(P 61) and when she arrives in Italy she can only catch “a glimpse of groups of apartment
houses on the far hills, a glimpse of the Tiber, of sunshine savagely bright on camellias” (P
166). The narrator even says that “the trail to the monastery was obscure” (P 243), like the
rest of the world. As I have mentioned above, characters can also never be fully known to
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another character, which is illustrated by Deemer trying to get a mere “glimpse into the
workings of” Dorf’s “treacherous mind” (P 203).
Nevertheless, this novel presents us with two ways to attempt to control the world.
Firstly, the setting is described in a very thorough, ‘realistic’ manner. For example, George’s
house and Maggie’s activities are described to the smallest detail: “She stood up from the
desk and the typewriter and turned and went down the steep stairway. She stopped on the
second floor and went into her bedroom. She changed from the dress into a sweater and
slacks and went down the second flight of stairs. The only phone in the house was in the
kitchen” (P 5). This descriptive style is Kroetsch’s way to integrate the voice of a nineteenth-
century classic realist narrator into the novel. I will later deal with the way in which he
undermines this traditional voice by presenting an unreliable narrator.
Secondly, the characters attempt to collect the world to be able to control it. Maggie tries
to regain control over the world by counting “six bottles of Heinz. She counted the high
stools ranged empty and in a row along the counter. Seven. The world was measurable,
countable, accountable” (P 59-60). This seems to reassure her. She also wants to control the
world by holding on to time:
Maggie thought of her calendars. She wanted to run down the kitchen and check all
four at once, as if some averaging of dates might fix for her not only the day but also
the moment of disaster. (…) She would become a collector of wristwatches, of
sundials. She would scour the world, if she survived this, for ways to turn the clock
back five minutes. (P 91)
However, she can never truly grasp time because time and space collapse: “The kitchen was
a cave of light hung with four calendars that didn’t agree on the month or the year, as if
George simply abandoned one point in time and moved to another” (P 3). These collections
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only allow the characters to temporarily hold on to one domain of reality. For example,
Henry lives “within boundaries” because he refuses “to think about the icons of Novgorod,
of Pskov, of Kiev, of Bulgarian villages, of Turkish museums” (P 108). He only concentrates
“on the icons of one small patch of the Byzantine world” (P 108). You can only gain a limited
amount of limited knowledge about one small part of the world.
Jack Deemer is the ultimate collector in this novel and he believes the comparison
between the image of a pizza and the world is more powerful than language because each
pizza is “an icon speaking at least one of our basic needs” (P 112). We can connect this with
the imagery of eating which I have discussed above. Food is a way to gain control over the
world, since “the rubble and design of a pizza, its ordered blur of colors and textures and
shapes” (P 112) arouses in him “the collector’s will to win” (P 112). In this context, winning
means controlling and wielding power over reality. Therefore, the will to power is equal to
the will to know. Nevertheless, Jack Deemer realizes that his desire to collect the world is
futile: “I am a collector. Perhaps to collect is to have all and nothing. It is to heap ashes on
one’s own head. It is to desire all and to embrace the emptiness” (P 120). There will always
be objects that escape comprehension.
Secondly, the images are dispersed throughout the text and they are connected to
various characters or elements of the fictional world. The images remain dynamic and
therefore elusive. When Maggie asks if she really looks bad Elizabeth, a waitress in Midnight
Pizza, says that she looks “like something the cat drug in” (P 32) and “like the Franklin
Expedition” (P 32), which ended disastrously. These comparisons never pinpoint precisely
what is meant, they merely present us with a new image. Readers might even get lost in this
endless referral to new images.
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The fictional world is also subject to constant transformation: “A flower of water bubbled
into a cup, fell away into a basin the shape of a sarcophagus, bubbled again into a cup, fell
away into a stuccoed basin, bubbled again, fell again, bubbled again, fell again, bubbled –“ (P
178). Characters are also often described as desiring fixed entities which are referred to by
means of images of icons or pictures. Jack Deemer opposes dynamism by collecting icons,
which have a static character. He says that “progress is an illusion that icons refuse”(P 198)
and that he cherishes them for that. Henry Ketch also “likes his pictures to stand still” (P
106). On the other hand, Dorf stands for dynamism because he “kept in hoping for the best”
(P 199) in his stories. He keeps hoping for a change and he manipulates events.
Even though these images are never associated with one character or aspect of reality
and are never completed, the reader needs them to come to a better understanding of the
novel. This means that the reader needs to thinks in terms of clair-obscur, which implies
three ways of representing the fictional world.
Firstly, traditional ways of gaining knowledge of the world are used and subverted. This is
most adequately shown in the use and abuse of genre conventions of the detective story
that will be dealt with in the section on intertextuality in The Puppeteer (cf. infra).
Secondly, the bubble of fixed ideas is pricked and the narrator prefers uncertainty.
Maggie seems to be obsessed with imagining possible alternative scenarios to her life. When
she discovers Papa B in her attic she thinks about what her next step should be. She realizes
that “she could go outside and get into Bludgett’s car and go to the police station”, she
“could go to see Bludgett” or she “could catch Ida and Josie getting ready for bed” (P 88-89).
She appears to be uncertain about her next step. The narrator is also prevented from
providing certainties and he clearly presents himself as an unreliable instance, as he is not
omniscient or omnipresent. For instance, he says that, “in all fairness, one must say that it is
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possible that Julie Magnuson cried out to stop Manny from firing the rifle” (P 256).
Moreover, he does not know “what happened there in that covered street with Julie and
Dorf together”, he can “at best speculate” (P 245). I will later discuss this subject of the
unreliable narrator in more detail.
Finally, the trickster narrator often uses paradoxes. This technique is a way of illustrating
that there are no clear demarcations in the fictional world and that meaning is not fixed.
Linda Hutcheon was certainly correct to consider Kroetsch “the master of paradoxes”(161) in
The Canadian Postmodern, because The Puppeteer contains many statements which are
seemingly contradictory. For example, Dorf is surprised by Maggie’s “expected and
unexpected arrival” which was “at once an irritation and a relief” (P 86). Maggie is also
incomprehensible to herself, because she is “angry at herself, for saying too much, for hardly
talking at all” (P 114). Dorf’s body is paradoxical as well and it is said to consist of “eighty-
two reasons why up and down are the same thing” and “six explanations of why stupid is
smart, and vice versa” (P 112). The world can also be paradoxical, as the cliffs lean “away
from, toward the road” (P 51).
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4.2. LANGUAGE
First, I will discuss the problematic relationship between language and reality. Not only is
there a gap between language and reality, reality can only be perceived through a limited,
distorted perspective. For example, Maggie can only look outside “through the thick squares
of distorting glass” (P 2) and while she is waiting in the car outside Inez’s house she cannot
see clearly because “the windows had begun to fog over” (P 21). Maggie can only skim “the
world for the play of drifting images” (P 42) and these images will keep drifting without ever
reaching an ultimate meaning. All this suggests that it is impossible to see or grasp the
outside world clearly. As mentioned above, all we can see are mere glimpses. Consequently,
language is also presented as inadequate and failing. For example, Maggie wants “to send
cryptic messages to Papa B and to Bludgett; messages on the backs of cards that said more
than did her words” (P 171). She even says that she is merely “scribbling down her
inadequate notes” (P 125). Moreover, in some situations language does not suffice: “One
might have expected a show of regret at the deception practiced, even a brief apology. But
we have so few ceremonies, so few handy speeches, for those who come back from
wherever” (P 185). Characters also struggle with the search for the right way of expressing
what they feel or mean. When Maggie informs Ida and Josie about Dorf’s death, Ida can only
cry and ask who will care for the body. Josie is also overcome with grief and tries to say
something about the wedding dress, but is “not able to speak a coherent phrase” (P 258).
Words are often considered to be inadequate. Moreover, naming the objects in the world
seems to be highly subjective. The rented house in Siphnos is a ‘villa’ to the agency, while
Deemer calls it a ‘mansion’ (P 210).
This inadequacy is most adequately shown in themes of miscommunication or non-
communication. For example, when Henry complains that he has “quietly been going stark
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raving mad”, Maggie ignores him by asking “what’s new” (P 214), resorting to irrelevant
small talk. And when Maggie finally sums up the courage to ask Papa B in her attic who is
after him, he does not answer. He merely responds by asking about her trip to Deadman
Spring. The characters also fail to understand each other. When Maggie says that she does
not understand why Henry is being so secretive about his escape from the island of Siphnos,
he responds that he has been trying to explain, but that she has not been listening (P 214).
And when Maggie reassures Papa B that he has not been discovered, he is “as deaf as a
post” (P 90).
Secondly, the novel deals with the problematic relationship between language and the
subject, conveying that the characters cannot control language. The puppeteer appears to
control their language. For example, while Maggie is talking to Dorf in the attic, she is
surprised by the sound of her own voice trying to keep him from leaving, as if these are not
her own words (P 97). And when Dorf enters her home for the first time “she had meant to
say, just hang on while I catch up with myself”, but instead “she was saying something about
coffee. That had not been her intention” (P 8-9).
Kroetsch also has a problematic relationship with language. In this novel, he resorts to the
use of icons to forge some sort of relationship between an image and the original: “After his
questioning of meaning and his explorations of semiology in Alibi, after repeated encounters
with signs and signifiers (…), Kroetsch seems to have felt an impulse to complement the
modish semiological coding systems with something as timeless and as undivided as these
Greek Orthodox representations of holiness” (Florby, 137).
In the theoretical second section of this dissertation I dealt with three notions indebted to
Heidegger’s theory in the context of man’s problematic relationship with language. Firstly, it
appears that language controls the person who uses it rather than the other way around.
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One night, while waiting for Henry to return, Maggie started to write a story and “then the
stories began to tell her what to do with her own precious life” (P 220). The narrator even
says that “the story got the better of him” (P 129), when Papa B is performing a puppet
show. And when Maggie, Josie, Ida and Fish are in the water in Deadman Spring, Fish is only
able to speak after he has submerged himself, “as if he had dived far and deep for a new
supply of words” (P 80). The fact that language is a pre-existing entity is also shown in the
use of the abundant amount of clichés. We might even say that there is a link between the
Byzantine icons and the clichés, as they are both flat and one-dimensional. Julie Magnuson
appears to be “fit as a fiddle” (P 187) and Maggie wants Dorf to “draw one large deep breath
– and hold it until the cows come home” (P 190). The characters also seem to rely on them.
When Dorf calls Deemer again after all these years he falls back “on an unfortunate cliché”(P
201) by saying “water under the bridge” (P 201) and repeating it. When Dorf tells Deemer
about an icon displaying the face of God “curiosity killed the cat” (P 203). Similarly, Henry
falls back on clichés when he is going over his plan to sell the icons to Deemer: he uses loose
expressions such as “safe as a church” and “crack of dawn” (P 221). By using these clichés so
often, they are ironically subverted.
However, the narrator also tries to challenge this pre-existing and conventional language
by using informal, everyday language and drawing attention to puns. Informal language is
used to present events in different words. After Ida said that the police had not found
Manny’s corpse Maggie thinks “no stiff, no murderer” (P 97). And the narrator subverts the
cliché “straight as an arrow” (P 216), turning it into “the straight and narrow” (P 216),
mocking the rigidity of language. Language’s rigid structure is also subverted when Henry
says “tomorrow morning is the beginning of the first day of my life and all that shit” (P 225).
Maggie even interprets the cliché ‘knowing something inside out’ very literally by saying that
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she did know Greece “from the inside – from the inside of small rooms in cheap hotels” (P
26). By taking these images literally, the narrator plays with the traditional conventions of
language. The narrator also uses and subverts puns. When Dorf is shot in the left ankle the
narrator says that he is “left with no leg to stand on” (P 257). Maggie also likes the pun
“personal matters” (P 18) and Papa B says that he wants to have another shot at it, “if you’ll
pardon the pun” (P 97).
Therefore, we could say that the narrator makes use of the rigid structure of language to
be ultimately inventive and witty. The narrator even invents new and more original phrases,
such as “as indifferent as snakes in a winter den” (P 190). The characters also play around
with language. When Maggie asks Dorf to leave, she uses an abundance of different ways to
make this clear: “Just you leave. Get up off that chair. Stand up. Walk. Leave. Depart.
Vamoose. Skidaddle. Just vanish” (P 92).
Secondly, a character is unable to grasp the meaning of language, because language is an
endless approach to the ‘real’ object it is trying to describe or grasp. Henry seems unable to
ask for help in an explicit manner and says instead that he needs Maggie’s advice.
Nevertheless, Maggie knows this can be interpreted “freely as, help, please help me, hurry”
(P 169). Henry also beats around the bush when he says that they can take the bus if she
does not “mind sitting on the lap of someone who is sitting on someone’s lap who is sitting
on someone’s lap” (P 213). He could have just said that the bus may be crowded. This
endless approach is addressed more explicitly when Maggie types that “every autobiography
is a decoy. Even that of a wedding dress” (P 149). The story is simply a diversion from reality.
Just like the characters floating on the black water of the lake, words can float forever,
“always just out of reach” (P 80), unable to represent their own reality.
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Thirdly, we can say that the narrator offers an endless compilation of dynamic images
instead of striving to convey a fixed meaning. Much like the masquerade, which I will discuss
later, the dynamic and endless referral to different images is more important than the
product.
Finally, I will discuss the problematic relationship between language and physicality.
Similar to the inability of language to represent reality fully, language also fails to fully
represent the body. As I have mentioned above, this novel foregrounds themes of
miscommunication and we can see that the narrator attempts to solve this by resorting to
body language instead. When Maggie fails to communicate with two Greek women, she uses
mime to explain herself. However, these signs are also incomprehensible to the two women:
The two women did not understand. Maggie, over and over, mimed her need. She
tried to pretend that she was carrying a burden of cameras. She mimed the taking of
photographs of the two old women, but to no avail. She mimed her being lame and
blind and bald. She raised in front of herself the wedding dress as if she might be
posing to be photographed with the man she had mimed. (P 228).
The novel devotes a lot of attention to body language as a surrogate for the language of
communication. When Papa B changes the subject of a conversation he does that “with an
enormous heave of his body” (P 12). When Maggie reassures Papa B that he is “hardly out in
the open” (P 90), she explains herself by gesturing “at the dark corners of the attic” (P 90).
Similarly, Dorf is only capable of narrating past events by using the bodies of the puppets to
illustrate them, even if he manipulates the truth. He says that “the Greeks figured out how
to let the puppets say what couldn’t be said” (P 106) because a puppet show makes use of
images and body language to narrate a story.
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We can link this physical language to the carnivalesque, which uses the imagery of eating
(cf. 4.1.3.) and the body in general to cross boundaries, in particular by emphasizing the
negative aspects of the body. When Dorf spends all his time in Maggie’s attic, the house
starts “to smell more like a lair than a home” (P 158) and Dorf smells “of his own sweat and
urine” (P 158). When Henry swallows Maggie’s ring the two of them even spend four days
going through “his morning stool” (P 191), “his turd” (P 192), “his shit” (P 192) to retrieve the
ring. Maggie seems to love excrements, as she likes “the pleasant, rich smell of donkey
manure in the loud streets” (P 218). She even likes “the elbowing rub of people busy with
being daily and alive” (P 218), as she is fond of being touched. Inez also likes being touched
by Papa B, because he is “a way of taking your own pulse” and “he’s even better than
masturbation” (P 110). Making love to him makes her feel alive and assures her that she is
not a ghost or a shadow in the puppet theatre.
Carnivalized literature also discusses the masquerade, an act of disguising which results in
an endless referral because every image is exposed as a mask concealing yet another image.
As mentioned above, the characters incorporate many different fictions, especially Papa B.
Moreover, the traditional Karaghiozis shadow puppet theatre, which Papa B uses and
abuses, has an affinity with the carnivalesque, “particularly with the notion of eccentricity”
(Müller, 253). Nevertheless, one can never truly know Papa B because his face “is drained of
all existence” (P 94), which means that he does not have a coherent or fixed identity behind
these disguises as he is a trickster figure. This implies that the process of referring to
different disguises and images is more important than the product, as Kroetsch says that
“process becomes more important than end” (quoted in Florby, 111).
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4.3. THE SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATOR
Before discussing the aspects brought to light in the theoretical chapter on the present
and absent narrator, the level and distance in the narrative and metafiction, I must draw
attention to the fact that Maggie Wilder wrote the autobiographical story about her
wedding dress down and that Jack Deemer appears to be guiding her: “Reading over her left
shoulder, I become a loving supporter, the champion of her need to get the story of her
wedding dress down on paper. Now and then I say a few words, joining myself into her train
of thought” (P 17). This narrative situation is mirrored by the Japanese print on a calendar:
“A man read a love letter while behind him his mistress, raising a mirror to cast more light,
tried to read over his shoulder, while under the verandah a spy read the trailing end of the
long letter” (P 6). According to Florby, “the role of the spy (…) is left to the reader” (133).
FIGURE 2: From “The Chushingura drama parodied by Famous Beauties: Act 2”, by Utamaro,
<http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/friends/exhibits/utamaro.html>
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Firstly, the narrative instance in a classic realist novel is impersonal while the postmodern
narrative instance clearly presents himself in a very physical way in this novel. The narrator
makes himself known at the beginning of the third chapter: “As you have no doubt guessed,
I am Papa B’s Jack Deemer” (P 30). He explicitly addresses the reader, thus making the
narrative style resemble a conversational style. For example, when he says that he wanted
Julie Magnuson dead, that he confessed to that, he says “I’ve told you that, if not in one way,
then in another” (P 182). He also adds “believe me” (P 30) to reinforce the illusion that the
narrator is physically present. And he emphasizes that he is telling us a story by adding “but
where was I, yes” (P 187), trying to pick up the thread from where he left off. He even forms
an oral pact between himself and the reader, emphasizing that he will only address those
matters which will help the readers to understand the situation: “Why Julie Magnuson
married me instead of the man she’d intended to marry when she ordered her wedding
dress is something we’ll touch on later, if it promises to shed any light” (P 30).
By forming a pact of sorts, putting things into perspective and taking a stance towards
events and the way other characters perceive him, Jack Deemer tries to make the readers
believe he is a reliable narrator. As I have mentioned above, Jack Deemer tries to ‘redeem’
himself and, as the story progresses, his intrusions into Maggie’s narrative become more and
more frequent, because he wants to make sure the reader hears his ‘true’ version of the
facts. When Deemer presents us with what Maggie has written down about Karen Strike
‘rescuing’ Josie, Ida, Fish and Maggie in that storm on the lake, he immediately dissociates
himself from Karen’s reaction by saying that he “didn’t pay Karen Strike to play games with
people’s lives (P 77). “Her maliciousness was her own”, not his, and “her taunting of people
with death by drowning” (P 77-78) was not his idea. He comments on Maggie’s account,
which seems to be an objective registration, thus turning it into his own subjective account.
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He also presents himself as a reliable instance by using the traditional and complaisant
voice of the narrator in classic realist novels. For example, the narrator provides a very
detailed description of where everyone sits in the boat when they head up to the cabin
where Manny was shot:
Ida was to sit across from him (Fish) in the stern of the small aluminum boat, the tiller
of the outboard motor between them. She crawled stiffly past the red gas tank and
sat down. She sat amidships, reaching to hold the shipped oars on either side of her
unsteady seat. Fish crawled past her and sat down across from Ida and asked Maggie
to give the boat a push and at the same time to hop in and sit in the bow. (P 64)
However, the classic realist narrative instance is debunked by exposing this narrator as an
unreliable one. At one point, “Josie started to speak and was interrupted” (P 34), but we do
not hear what she was trying to say. He also says that he need not bother us with the details
of the talk he and Dorf have when they meet each other again in the chapel after all those
years (P 252). Moreover, there are jumps in time in the narrative text, which implies that we
do not know everything that happens. Therefore, the narrator is a manipulator who only
presents those events or thoughts he wants. For example, the story shifts from the scene on
the lake in which the characters are rescued by Karen Strike to “Maggie and Josie and Ida,
naked in the spa pool” (P 77-78). And the scene in which Julie Magnuson invites Maggie “to
one day come and see” (P 206) her house in which Carlo Lorenzini had created Pinocchio is
followed immediately by Julie Magnuson showing her “cluttered shelves, there in her
parlour” (P 207). The reader does not even know what happened in the meantime.
Jack Deemer is explicitly exposed as the master plotter when he says that he had “to
make the rules fit the occasion” (71) in order to obtain his collection of collections. The
reader must realize that he can do that again. He readily admits that he tells lies: “We are
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told that artists tell true lies; I, there on the cliff’s edge, spoke volumes” (P 259). Therefore,
we may state that Deemer is also a trickster artist, like Dorf. For example, Josie at one point
talks about “Jack Deemer and his tricks” (P 53).
We should not trust this unreliable narrator, because he presents us with a biased
account as he wishes to ‘redeem’ himself and because his eyesight is failing. The shot fired
by Manny was surely intended for Deemer (Müller, 257), but it hit Dorf instead. Deemer
believes that Julie cried out to stop Manny from firing, as he says “what Julie did not plan for
was her emotion on catching sight of me, my life threatened” (P 256). However, Julie may
very well have cried out to signal Manny that he could shoot Deemer. Deemer also
manipulates the facts as to who pushed whom over the cliff’s edge. Henry claims he saw
Deemer push William Dorfendorf and “he made great claims as to the veracity of his seeing”
(P 256). On the other hand, Deemer insists that he did nothing of the sort: “While Dorf was
standing on his remaining foot, I, old as I am, might easily have given him a fatal push. The
absolute truth is, I did nothing of the sort. I reached to steady him. In my own stubborn way,
I loved the man” (P 257). However, the reader should not take too much of his subjective
portrayal of events into account.
The classic realist narrative instance is also debunked by exposing the narrator as a
restricted instance. Deemer explicitly admits that he cannot fully represent the events. For
example, he admits that he does not know what Maggie and Julie said to each other about
the wedding dress: “I have no idea” (P 208). And when Julie and Dorf meet each other again
in that covered street in Siphnos, he says that he can “at best speculate” (P 245) about what
happened between the two. The reader can understand why Deemer cannot know what
happened between Julie and Dorf because Maggie was not there to register it. However, if
Deemer filters Maggie’s story, he should be able to know what happened between Maggie
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and Julie. Furthermore, the reader needs to question Maggie’s story, as it is hard to believe
that she has remembered every event and every conversation in the smallest detail and that
she has written everything down meticulously. As mentioned above, people cannot possibly
grasp reality in its full extent. Consequently, Jack Deemer must have manipulated Maggie’s
story and, therefore, we cannot know what is true or false.
Finally, I need to address the narrator’s level and distance in relation to the events and
the subject of metafiction. Firstly, this narrative text offers metafictional statements about
the production of the text, the product itself and the consumption of the text. As I have
mentioned above, the reader plays a crucial role in all of these aspects and this role is also
emphasized in The Puppeteer. When Papa B performs one of his puppet shows and
Karaghiosi strikes the monk, Maggie intrudes, because she knows “enough about Karaghiosi
to know that he was supposed to receive the beating, not give it” (P 121). We can deduce
from this event that Maggie represents the reader who intrudes when certain familiar
scenarios are not respected.
Indeed, the reader becomes frustrated when he or she can no longer register a traditional
hierarchy. The first sentence of the second chapter makes clear that Jack Deemer is
narrating what Maggie Wilder wrote down. The third person narrator in the story is Maggie,
the focalizer, while the first person narrator is Jack Deemer. Therefore, we may say that
Deemer is an extradiegetic narrator in the beginning of the story, as he is not situated in the
story itself. He is also a heterodiegetic narrator, because he did not experience these events
himself. However, the narrative text proves to be more complicated than that as these clear
distinctions cannot be maintained.
In the beginning of the novel, the reader is confronted with Jack Deemer’s intrusions
which are still manageable and can still be put into the context of the story. But when
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Maggie says that Papa B would be up there in her attic forever and that “Jack Deemer had
guessed right, the world had become an attic” (P 107), the traditional hierarchy is blurred.
The narrator suddenly chooses to use his own name instead of ‘I’. And when Maggie informs
Dorf that Karen Strike is on the island of Siphnos, the narrator says “only then did Dorf
realize that Jack Deemer was on the island” (P 240), once again referring to himself in the
third person instead of using ‘I’. Jack Deemer is more clearly introduced in the narrative
when Maggie and Karaghiosi begin “to sense the presence of a stranger” (P 123) during one
of the shadow plays: “Surely I was that stranger. Had I intruded myself into their passion?
Had I been invited? Was Papa B, behind his little gang of puppets, somehow calling into
Maggie’s presence a presence that was mine? Who was the puppet, who the puppeteer?” (P
123). The narrator is as confused as the reader is. Moreover, it does not make sense that
Deemer knows the memories of other characters. He is only supposed to know what Maggie
writes down. Maggie cannot know that “the attic was as dark as the mines that Josie Pavich
visited with her father when she was a child” (P 152) because Maggie does not know her
well enough.
Another way to blur the traditional boundaries which are present in classic realist novels
is to present instances of frame-breaking. There are two important instances of metalepsis
in this novel. First and foremost Maggie’s autobiography of the wedding dress acts as an
embedded narrative. Deemer seems to have filtered her story and made it into his own
narrative. However, the reader can never be sure which of the two he or she is reading.
Sometimes Deemer explicitly enters Maggie’s account, but this is not always clear. As in
Alibi, the reader “has no way of knowing what the so-called ‘original entry’ was” (Dorscht,
84). For example, when Papa B says that the cops have been after him for years for “that De
Medeiros business” (P 92), the narrator says that “he had the nerve to call it business, a
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matter that might be settled over a pub lunch” (P 92). We do not know if this is what
Deemer thinks or what Maggie thinks. Secondly, there are the scenes in which shadow plays
are performed. For example, in one of them Karaghiosi is no longer the puppet but the
puppet-master: “They were the puppets, Maggie and Dorf, not Karaghiosi. That ancient
Greek shadow puppet became master. It was he who manipulated their desire” (P 126).
Karaghiosi crosses boundaries in this scene, degrading Dorf to a character in the shadow
play. Moreover, Dorf, the former puppet-master, now interacts with Maggie, a character in
the play.
The narrative truly shifts from one perspective to another when Deemer, disguised as a
bride, comes out of the church. He becomes the focalizer of the story and Maggie fades into
the background. This transformation can be linked to his transformation into a bride: “I had
first of all put on the dress simply as a disguise (…). And then something precious happened.
Wearing the dress, I was no longer simply myself” (P 251). This is the moment when Jack
Deemer truly steps into the story he is telling.
Secondly, this novel also presents readers with a narrative style as a guideline. This style
appears to be improvised, as if it were told on the spur of the moment, which only reinforces
the feeling that the narrator is physically present. The narrator often rephrases what he has
said, manipulating language: “Maggie despaired. She had been tempted to believe the two
old women when they phoned her. Or perhaps she had been so desperate to escape from
Papa B that she would have believed anything” (P 170).
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4.4. INTERTEXTUALITY
We can state that this novel relies on five different intertexts: the genre of autobiography,
the western duel, Greek mythology, the detective story and the Karaghiozis shadow theatre.
As I have dealt with the latter above, I will not discuss it any further.
Firstly, the narrative text clearly uses and abuses the genre of the autobiography. Maggie
is said to “pretend to write her autobiography of a dress” (P 23), her second-hand wedding
dress. Papa B even says that “in its own way that dress – it might just be talking” (P 29).
Instead of a person narrating his or her story, the dress seems to be conveying its own
narrative, thus subverting the conventions of the genre. This autobiography of the dress is
also “the life she would have lived if she hadn’t, in one reckless moment of caring too much
or caring not at all, agreed to marry a man named Henry Ketch” (P 4). However, as I have
already mentioned in the section on language, she does not seem to be able to write that
life down. Once again, the conventions of the genre are subverted, since she cannot
translate her life into language. Her writings are “her disorder of notes and guesses, her
failed attempts at telling herself her mislaid story, her cryptic wonderings at her own reasons
for believing anyone had a first chance, let alone a second one” (P 87).
Secondly, the narrative text subverts the cliché of the western duel as the conversations
between different characters are often described as battles, using words as bullets. For
example, when Maggie knows that Bludgett will ring the bell she decides to keep her
wedding dress on, because she wants to know what he will say. However, “Bludgett refused
to acknowledge that he so much as noticed the dress” (P 39). Maggie also sees the
conversations with Papa B as a battle. When Manny and Julie resurface after Papa B brought
them back to life in his shadow theatre, she wants to taunt Papa B, so she phones him and
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informs him of the news: “Take that, she thought. Listen to that, and then, if you are able, go
on being silent” (P 190).
However, the conventions of the western duel are also subverted. When Deemer,
disguised as a bride, steps out of the chapel he can only see William William Dorfendorf and
his first impulse is “to retreat into the chapel” (P 251) instead of confronting him. And later,
when Dorf and Deemer step out of the chapel, Julie and Maggie recognize their wedding
dress and one of them gives a shout, it is Manny who pulls the rifle’s trigger. He is
“concealed in a kitchen” (P 254) and is not part of the situation resembling a shoot-out.
None of the characters near the chapel possesses the qualities of a true western hero.
Thirdly, elements from Greek Mythology are incorporated into the text. Fish speaks to
Maggie about Orpheus, who “went to hell – and came back claiming a cypress marks the
spot where you do your forgetting” (P 181). Orpheus, the son of the Muse Calliope, is
famous for his singing and his handling of the lyre. When he lost his wife Eurydice due to a
poisonous snakebite, he traveled to the underworld and was able to persuade Hades and
Persephone to allow Eurydice to return to the realm of the living thanks to his musical talent.
However, there was one condition: Orpheus was not allowed to look back until they had
reached the world of the living. Unfortunately, Orpheus was unable to restrain his anxiety
and he turned around to see if she was alright. At that moment he lost her forever (Cotterell
75). Kroetsch uses and subverts this myth by mocking it. When Fish tells Maggie to “stay
away from the waters of forgetfulness”, referring to Orpheus forgetting that he cannot look
behind him, she responds by whispering “make mine scotch with a little bit of water” (P
181).
The novel also refers to Artemis, as there is a “Fountain of Diana of Ephesus”(P 183) in the
cardinal’s garden. The narrator says that the Spartans called her “Butcher”, “She-Bear” or
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“Ursa Major” and that “she nurtured everything that lived” (P 183). But “what kind of
collecting is that?” (P 183). The chapel, where the ultimate shoot-out takes place, is even
“built from the stones and over the stones of a temple to Artemis” (P 226). Moreover, the
young local woman points up towards the night sky, but all Maggie can see is “the Big
Dipper” (P 227), which is a clear reference to the animal Artemis is associated with.
According to Cotterell, Artemis was the twin sister of the god Apollo and the goddess of the
hunt. Therefore, she is depicted with bow and arrow. She was also the goddess of childbirth
and she is connected with female rites of passage, such as birth, puberty and death. In
Athens it was the custom that girls would go to Brauron, not far from Athens, before their
marriage, to serve Artemis by performing a ritual. This ritual was called ‘the arkteia’, in
which the girls had to dress up to look like bears. This ritual is said to originate from the
actual slaying of a bear, followed by the performance of the arkteia to calm the wrath of
Artemis (Cotterell, 61). This myth is inscribed in the narrative thanks to Kroetsch’s
representation of women as powerful and fearsome human beings. Julie Magnuson in
particular is connected with this goddess, as she is standing “in front of the Fountain of
Diana of Ephesus” (P 183), suggesting that Artemis’ wrath might resemble her own.
Deemer even resembles the mythological figure of Tiresias, as he is transformed into a
woman and is basically blind. Tiresias, “after having struck one of two coupling snakes,
underwent a sex-change and remained a woman for seven years before he was turned back
into a man again” (Müller, 257). After this change, Juno blinded him because he had claimed
that women have more sexual pleasure than men (Müller 257-258).
Finally, and most importantly, the narrative text uses and subverts the conventions of the
detective genre, transforming the text into an anti-detective. First of all, Maggie is
confronted with a crime which took place in the past when Josie and Ida tell her about it at
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Midnight Pizza (P 34). Apparently, Papa B shot Manny De Medeiros, but “no one has ever
produced a body” (P 34). From that moment on, Maggie decides to start gathering clues to
reinitiate the blocked transmission of information, trying to solve the mystery. She starts
asking herself questions about what happened. For example, she plans a trip to Kootenay
Lake, because she feels “the fascination of the site of the crime” (P 40). She plans to ride up
to where Fish lives, “right there at Deadman Spring, arrive in the morning, confront him, ask
questions, demand to know what happened and why and where” (P 55). And she wonders
where Julie Magnuson was going on the morning of the ‘accident’: “Going to meet a lover?
Leaving a lover? Going somewhere to be alone with her terror at her own aloneness? Going
to the site of the crime and finding the crime was her own death?” (P 50).
In this context, I should mention that Maggie seems to have all the qualities a good
detective should have. First of all, she is presented as someone who acts like a detective and
who likes danger and mystery. She likes the fact that the wedding dress she bought from a
woman “had brought disaster to its first wearer”, “she had liked the danger” (P 4). From that
purchase on, she is fascinated by the story behind the dress and she wants to solve the
mystery surrounding it. Inez even thinks of her as “some kind of schemer who sits around in
a wedding dress trying to figure out who killed that famous spa doctor up on Kootenay Lake”
(P 91). Secondly, she is very perceptive: “She does have careful eyes, eyes that miss nothing”
(P 18). And, like a true detective, she tries to observe the people around her as discretely as
possible: “She pulled a book off a shelf and opened it, then looked over the open book at
Fish. He was blocky, muscular, a biggish man with a grey beard and tanned skin. (…) For all
his size and presence, he seemed to be trying to remain inconspicuous”(P 56). Maggie even
starts to feel paranoid:
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She would go to a store and start to pick up the items on her list. Then she would
decide that someone was watching, wondering why one person needed so much
food. Or she would wonder if she had locked the door; Bludgett or Ida or Josie might
drop by, and, not getting an answer, become worried and try the knob, walk into the
house, start calling her name, start climbing the stairs. (P 101)
Thirdly, she seems to be obsessed with facts and facts alone. When she types that “the room
was impossibly dark, foreboding” (P 38), she types x’s across the word ‘foreboding’ and
types “stop inventing” (P 38). She also types “just the facts, please” (P 106) when she is
worrying about how to get Papa B out of the attic. And the phrase “obiter dicta” (P 38) is
often repeated, which can be translated as “not to the point” (P 38) in the context of her
search for the truth.
All of these characteristics make Maggie the embodiment of the reader in the novel. Like
Maggie, he or she has to gather clues and pay attention to the smallest details to come to a
better understanding of the labyrinthian narrative. The reader may also start to feel
paranoid, because he or she starts to read too much into the events, images or descriptions.
However, the conventions of the traditional detective novel are subverted as well,
because Maggie is shown to be a very incompetent detective. She struggles to keep Papa B’s
occupation of the attic a secret when Bludgett calls and she says that she is “practicing to be
a monk” (P 101). Immediately after that slip of the tongue “she wanted to kick herself for
mentioning monks, that would tell Bludgett what was on her mind” (P 101-102).
Moreover, the other characters also act as detectives. Josie and Ida are said to have
started a detective agency (P 130) and Bludgett’s “hunch” tells him that Inez called the cops
to find her missing husband “to make herself look innocent” (P 141). Especially Jack Deemer
poses himself as a detective, because he says that he “needed to stop the flow of time” so
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that he could take a closer look and find out “why the coffin that Dr De Medeiros shipped
back from Portugal”(P 78), the coffin containing Julie’s remains, arrived at his warehouse
empty. He also describes how he keeps sending Karen Strike back to the crime scene to
capture everything there is to know:
I sent her back in winter too, when the water level is down, to photograph the pilings
all over again, the nest, the lakeshore seen from the lake, the lake seen from the
cabin above. And while my sight faltered, as it sometimes does, I went on studying
the clues she brought back in cans and packages to my warehouse shelves. Sooner or
later. (P 72-73)
He is convinced that he will eventually find the crowning clue that will solve Manny’s death
or disappearance. Therefore, Jack Deemer is the embodiment of the traditional detective. In
the end, he wants to let justice and reason triumph: “All I want is to play out the show to its
consequences, with justice and truth triumphant. My notion of a happy ending might have
something to do with a hot gun barrel, happiness takes many forms, doesn’t it?” (P 86).
The novel also draws attention to a second convention of the traditional detective novel
which can be subverted: the fact that the perpetrator is caught in the end and that the order
is restored, thus celebrating human rationality. The guesswork of the detective even
becomes part of the cure in Dr De Medeiros’ spa: “For some reason many people who
imagined themselves ill liked the special attention of a doctor who might one day abruptly
make an appearance – then, the next day or that afternoon – and just as abruptly vanish” (P
206). The act of piecing the puzzle together and solving the mystery surrounding this man is
healing because it makes people believe an ultimate solution can be found and that the
world and the characters in it can be explained in a rational manner.
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In this context I also need to deal with Kroetsch’s assertion in an interview that the
wedding dress promises “the unveiling after, the notion that there’s going to be some
revelation, for the bride and for the groom or whatever” (quoted in Müller, 249). However,
these expectations are subverted because the dress has “transformative and uncontrollable
powers” (Müller, 250), thus affecting whomever wears it without ever unveiling anything.
The dress is also a mise-en-abyme. When Maggie looks at it, “she noticed for the first time,
in the intricate embroidery and beadwork on her lap, the outline in miniature of the dress
she was wearing” (P 3). Therefore, the dress can never represent a fixed fictional world or
character, as it keeps referring to the miniature dress in the miniature dress in the dress ad
infinitum.
The perpetrator, Deemer, is not caught in the end and the crime is not solved, drawing
attention to the postmodern absence of a final solution or ultimate knowledge. Towards the
end of the novel there is a symbolic reference to the possible solution coming to light,
because of the descriptions of the town “coming alive with light” and being full of
“whitewashed walls” (P 236). However, we do not gain any insights into why Papa B shot
Manny, we do not know whether Manny aimed at Papa B or Deemer, we do not know who
stole Deemer’s money, etc. In fact, the ending raises more questions than it solves.
In other words, when the reader closes the book, he or she is frustrated. The narrator
explicitly states that we cannot know anyone’s motives: “The idea of motive is difficult, one
might even say impossible, yet much of our so-called law hinges on just that impossibility.
Who would presume to describe another’s motive? Do we pretend to understand our own
motives?” (P 254).
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5. CONCLUSION
In this dissertation, I first dealt with some typical aspects of postmodern fiction,
emphasizing those aspects which are of importance for the analysis of The Puppeteer. In the
third chapter, I discussed Robert Kroetsch’s artistic views that were mainly influenced by
three domains. Firstly, his theory of unnaming is indebted to Derrida’s theory of
deconstruction. Secondly, he is fascinated by archaeology, because he wants to uncover
shards instead of presenting completed stories, leaving the reader in charge of creating his
or her story. Finally, his work can be linked to carnivalized literature, as he wants to renew
old literary conventions by confronting ‘high’ literature with ‘low’ literature, thus
incorporating different intertextual references.
In the fourth and most important section, I illustrated how Kroetsch uses the postmodern
features discussed in the theoretical chapter in The Puppeteer. In the first dimension of the
representation of the world and humanity four aspects came to light. First of all, I discussed
the textual world, stating that it is represented as a fictive scenario. This is emphasized by
the image of puppet shows, the fact that the boundaries between reality and fiction are
blurred and that the world is shown to be a stage with actors. Moreover, the textual world
cannot be shown in its true form and is shown to be a compilation of embedded fictions due
to the technique of mise-en-abyme. Secondly, I dealt with the characters who are
represented as text. All the characters represent different fictions, do not have a fixed
identity as they continue to transform and are controlled by unconscious desires. Thirdly,
the world and the characters are constructions of images. Finally, understanding the fictional
world and the characters is a rather difficult task. They remain elusive as we can only see a
glimpse of them and the images used to describe them are dispersed throughout the text.
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However, the reader needs these images to come to a better understanding of the novel by
thinking in terms of clair-obscur. This implies that the traditional ways of gaining knowledge
of the novelistic world and the characters are used and subverted, that the narrator shows a
preference for uncertain notions over fixed ideas and that the narrator uses paradoxes.
The second dimension addressed aspects relating to language. First of all, I discussed the
problematic relationship between language and reality, as language can never truly grasp
reality. Therefore, language is presented as inadequate and failing, which is shown in themes
of miscommunication or non-communication. Secondly, I dealt with the problematic
relationship between language and the subject, addressing three notions indebted to
Heidegger’s theory. First of all, language appears to be pre-existing, controlling the person
who uses it. However, Kroetsch uses informal language and puns, thus subverting the rigid
structures of language shown in the use of clichés. Secondly, the characters fail to grasp the
meaning of language as language is always an endless attempt to represent the ‘real’ object.
Finally, the narrator offers a compilation of different images instead of conveying one fixed
message. The third point in this second dimension is the problematic relationship between
language and physicality, as language cannot represent the body. Instead, the narrator
resorts to body language, as in carnivalized literature.
The third dimension I discussed is the self-conscious narrator. First and foremost, the
narrative instance clearly presents himself in a very physical way, explicitly addressing the
reader. Moreover, the narrator forms a pact of sorts with the reader, thus presenting
himself as a reliable instance, because he wants to make sure the reader hears his so-called
true version of the events. To reinforce that impression, he even uses the traditional and
complaisant voice of the omniscient narrator in classic realist novels. However, this classic
realist voice is debunked by exposing the narrator as an unreliable instance, as he does not
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provide us with the entire story and presents us with a biased account of what happened.
Secondly, I dealt with the level and distance of the narrator in relation to the fictional events
and metafiction. Firstly, the novel contains metafictional statements about the production of
the text, the product itself and the consumption of the text, which implies that the reader
plays an important role in this narrative. However, the reader becomes frustrated when he
or she can no longer register a traditional hierarchy between the different story worlds.
Secondly, the narrative style also guides the reader. This style is apparent when the narrator
appears to be narrating on the spur of the moment, which only reinforces the feeling that
the narrator is physically present.
Finally, five different intertexts in The Puppeteer were discussed: the genre of the
autobiography, the western duel, Greek mythology, the detective genre and the Karaghiozis
shadow theatre. It was shown that Kroetsch also subverts the conventions related to each
genre.
The fact that Kroetsch uses all of these postmodern aspects implies that he wants his
novels to be formally innovative. Not only does my analysis of The Puppeteer prove that his
novel is thoroughly experimental, his statements in essays and interviews also underline his
desire to play around with conventions and re-invent literary traditions. He truly is “Mr.
Canadian Postmodern” (Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern, 160).
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6. ATTACHMENTS
6.1. ATTACHMENT A: PLOT SUMMARY OF THE PUPPETEER (1992) BY ROBERT
KROETSCH
On a rainy Vancouver night a man delivers a pizza to Maggie Wilder’s door. Maggie has
left her husband Henry Ketch to be able to write an autobiography of her second-hand
wedding dress in her cousin George’s house. She believes she has met this man before and
they start talking.
The next day, this man, Papa B, takes her to meet Thomas Bludgett, who starts to talk
about the wedding dress she refers to in her book Trading Places. Bludgett seems to know
that the man who gave the dress back to the woman who made it, Jack Deemer, now wants
the dress for himself.
One day, Maggie goes to Midnight Pizza, where she meets Josie Pavich and Ida Babcock
who tell her all about Papa B. He is Ida’s nephew, who fired a shot at Dr. Manuel (Manny) De
Medeiros, but hit the canoe the dwarf Manny was standing on instead. The three of them
conclude that Papa B has to be innocent, because they never found Manny’s body. Maggie
decides to visit Deadman Spring, where Papa B got into trouble.
The following chapter begins with the departure of Maggie, Josie and Ida, heading for the
mountains. After checking into The Heritage Inn, they all have drinks in the lounge. Then,
suddenly, Fish makes his appearance. He informs them of a photographer who has been
there for four years, looking for Manny’s body. The next day they drive to Fish’s trailer at
Deadman Spring and he agrees to take them to see the place where Papa B shot at Manny’s
canoe. Fish tells them that Papa B wanted to steer Manny away from a nest of young
93
ospreys, but that the shot made Manny lose his balance and fall out of his canoe.
Afterwards, Papa B wrote the entire scene down, put a rock on the pages and disappeared.
When Fish takes them back to his trailer in his boat, they are caught in something
resembling a snowstorm. Then, suddenly, a boat appears beside them and they are rescued
by Karen Strike. Afterwards, the four of them are catching their breath in the spa pool. While
they are talking, Karen tries to take a spontaneous picture of Fish. However, Maggie climbs
on Fish’s shoulders, so that her upper body is completely out of the water and Fish’s body is
completely immersed in the water. At that moment Karen takes the picture Deemer
becomes obsessed about.
The next day, Maggie drives them back to Vancouver. When she climbs the stairs of her
rented house, she notices that the door to the attic is wide open and she stumbles upon
Papa B sitting at her desk, cutting out paper dolls. All of a sudden Maggie realizes where she
has seen his face before: his photo appeared next to an article in a newspaper about the
death of the famous spa doctor when she was in Greece with her husband Henry.
The longer Papa B is hiding in her attic, the more Maggie lives in fear of what could
happen when other people find out. She decides to confront Papa B and give him an
ultimatum. However, she discovers that he is making a shadow puppet show and decides to
help him acquire the required materials. That same night, Maggie suddenly hears strange yet
familiar music coming from the attic and she is treated to her own, private shadow puppet
show.
The following nights, Papa B keeps luring her to the attic with his music and shows. Then
one day she orders a pizza and Inez delivers it herself. She informs Maggie that Fish is in
town, planning to take Ida and Josie on a vacation to Italy, where he wants to look at some
famous spas as Deemer asked him to “turn Deadman Spring into the real thing” (P 133).
94
Before Ida, Josie and Fish leave for Italy, they stop at Maggie’s house to say their
goodbyes. They are caught by surprise when Maggie opens the door in her wedding dress.
Maggie, planning an exit, leads Ida and Josie up to the attic and Papa B presents them with
the story of Manny and Julie Magnuson in a hotel on the Algarve coast of Portugal. However,
Ida and Josie have a flight to catch and they cannot stay to hear the ending.
Some days later Ida phones from Rome, saying that they found Manny, that he is still alive
and Maggie decides to visit them. Josie, Ida and Maggie meet up at the Fenix Hotel in Rome
and they take Maggie out to drink some coffee at the same place where they saw Manny.
After hearing them out, Maggie is embarrassed that she did not travel directly to her
husband in Greece, as it is clear that the two women saw Papa B’s puppet instead of the real
Manny. While they are walking through the cities of Rome, all of a sudden a limousine bears
down on Maggie. Afterwards, Maggie is convinced that Manny was sitting in that car.
The next day Fish persuades them to visit Tivoli Spa, after paying a visit to the cardinal’s
garden. In that garden they see Manny and decide to follow him. He eventually leads them
to Julie Magnuson, who has come to retrieve her wedding dress. Frightened, Maggie runs
back to the palace and phones Papa B to deliver the good news he has been longing for: he
is now a free man. Papa B decides to come to them immediately, but Maggie says that she
will no longer be in Italy as she is meeting her husband in Greece. She tells him that Henry is
shipping icons from Mount Athos. Papa B warns her that these icons cannot but be stolen,
because icons never leave Mount Athos. The next day Fish, Ida, Josie and Maggie all leave
Italy.
Dorf informs Deemer, a relentless collector, of the great collection of icons Henry is going
to buy at Mount Athos. However, Josie and Ida “had hatched a little plot of their own” (P
95
209) and they call Deadman Spring to inform Karen and Fish of Henry’s plan to ship icons
from Mount Athos.
Karen Strike and Jack Deemer leave for Siphnos, to contact Henry about the icons. The
next day Karen tracks Henry down and speaks to him about buying them. When Maggie
arrives at Henry’s private home, he tells her of the deal he has made with Karen: he is to
receive one million dollars in exchange for the collection of fifteen icons. Henry’s original
plan was to keep the entire collection to himself and display them in his study, but Karen
wants the entire collection. Maggie strongly disagrees with Henry’s plan to exchange the
icons for money at a chapel, takes her wedding dress and storms out of the house. She finds
Deemer’s house and hangs her dress on the clothesline.
The next day Henry takes a taxi towards Faros and Maggie starts walking to Kastro. While
she is walking, she notices a column of mules with two mule drivers, packed with peculiar
parcels. She also notices that there is a monk following the party. When she approaches a
mill, she realizes the monk is there waiting for her and that it is Papa B in disguise. Maggie
tells him of Henry’s plan to sell the icons to Deemer. Then Dorf leads them to a house where
they can wait for the mules to pass. The mule drivers decide to take a break and leave the
mules in the narrow street. When Maggie searches for the muleteers but cannot find them,
she returns to Dorf, finding him “in a tangle of restless and snorting mules” (245), talking to
Julie Magnuson. Maggie decides to look for the muleteers once again and when she returns
she finds Dorf frantic and alone.
The two muleteers lead the mules towards a chapel, where Maggie, Dorf, Julie, Karen and
the muleteers are confronted with a bride coming out of the chapel. It is Deemer, who has
put on the wedding dress so that no one would recognize him. As soon as Deemer sees Dorf,
96
he retreats into the chapel, followed by Dorf. Deemer realizes he cannot physically harm
Dorf and decides to talk to him.
After talking, Dorf and Deemer walk outside and wait until Julie and Maggie recognize
their wedding dress. Then one of the two cries out, giving a command to Manny to pull the
trigger. The shot hits Dorf in the left ankle, severing the foot from the leg, which makes him
lose his balance and fall straight off a cliff.
Henry is sentenced to three years for the possession of stolen icons and his attempt to
smuggle them out of the country. Deemer is convinced that Karen Strike took the bag filled
with money. Maggie and Deemer decide to stay on the island and start working on a saint’s
life about Dorf, hoping they will have finished it by the time Dorf’s corpse is disinterred and
moved to the chapel, three years later. Maggie and Deemer spend their leisure time visiting
the four hundred and twenty-four chapels in turn to find the missing icon displaying the face
of God.
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6.2. ATTACHMENT B: PLOT SUMMARY OF ALIBI (1983) BY ROBERT KROETSCH
In the beginning of the novel Dorf receives a message from Jack Deemer, telling him to
find him a spa. Together with Karen Strike he drives up to the spa in Banf. When Dorf visits
the open-air pool, he meets Julie and he even claims afterwards that he had sex with her.
However, before disappearing into thin air, she threatens to kill Dorf when he finds that spa
for Jack Deemer.
The following day Dorf decides to stay three more nights in their hotel in Banf, but Karen
has to go back to the city. One afternoon Dorf has a beer with a bus driver, Fish, who tells
him about Big Julie Magnuson, the Julie Dorf is looking for. He tells him that she is living with
Jack Deemer.
The next chapter tells us about Karen’s plan for her documentary “The Mechanics of
Healing”. Her cameraman, Randy, arrives and the project is truly set in motion. When the
three of them find Fish in a café he informs them that Julie rented his bus and that she is
planning to do some climbing the following week with a survival-instructor.
Dorf decides to await Julie and her companion as they descend the mountain. However,
Dorf falls into Julie’s trap: a detachment of the Canadian Army fires a 105-mm howitzer to
create an avalanche and Dorf is standing right in the middle of its path. Fortunately, he walks
away with nothing but a broken leg. Dorf manages to check himself out of the hospital and
gets on a charter plane to Gatwick. Coincidently, his sister, Sylvia, is on the plane as well and
they sit together to reminisce about the past. One day Sylvia and Dorf decide to visit an old
spa in Wales and they later meet up with Karen in Llandrindod Wells.
On the morning of April 11 Dorf finally receives the phone call he has been waiting for: it
is Julie Magnuson inviting him to join her to a spa in Luso, Portugal. Dorf then travels to
Oporto, Portugal and visits the forest of Buçaco, where Dorf notices that Julie and a dwarf –
98
rather deceptively looking like a woman – are wading in a pool. The dwarf is Dr. Manuel de
Medeiros, a famous spa doctor in Portugal, and he wants to start Dorf’s treatment in the
morning, as he is convinced Dorf does not look well. He is to follow a strict regiment of
treatments and drink a lot of water.
In between those treatments he has just enough time to visit Julie and they become
lovers. During one of those visits Dorf misses a treatment and De Medeiros comes looking
for him, stumbling upon their love-making. Instead of behaving like a jealous lover, De
Medeiros is pleased to see Dorf is showing “health and vigor” (A 127). What follows is a
peculiar love triangle.
After a fortnight, De Medeiros suddenly claims that he cannot cure Dorf and that he has
to see a woman healer in Greece. Dorf asks Julie to join him to the Algarve and she agrees.
After spending some passionate days together, Dorf wakes up one morning to find that Julie
has left him and took the rented, blue Mercedes.
He contacts Karen and they travel to Laspi, where they find a spa with sand instead of
grass and there are only tents. After giving it some thought, he decides to immerse himself
in the black pit of mud and experiences a wonderful cleansing. Even though Karen is
repulsed by the living conditions, they decide to stay.
Dorf arranges for his daughters to join them and Karen drives up to meet them. The four
of them then return to Salonika where Dorf spends his days drinking ouzo, eating octopus
and appreciating mud, while Karen, Jinn and Jan run from one ruin to another, “looking for
life itself” (A 181). When he leaves the café and gets back to the hotel, cops knock on his
door and he hides on the balcony. He hears how the men interrogate Karen and decides to
seek refuge in the hammam. However, the policemen beat him to it and ask him to come
99
along with them to talk about a woman who was found dead in a rented, blue Mercedes.
However, they only want a report from him on the car.
He decides to go to the library to find out what happened to Julie and he discovers that
she missed a turn on a narrow road in the middle of the night. Dorf is able to locate Julie’s
coffin and finds two bouquets on it, one with his name and ‘Deadman Spring’ on.
He makes some phone calls and learns that Deadman Spring is a spa and that it is up for
sale. He immediately drives down there and makes a down payment on Deemer’s behalf. He
then turns it into a full-fledged spa.
One evening Deemer finally arrives. Fish, Manny and Deemer join Dorf in the cave of the
spa and they relax. But when Karen’s lights switch off, Dorf suddenly hears Julie’s name and
relives the accident that cost her life.
100
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