ROBERT KROETSCH'S, What the Crow Said: Ontological Juxtapositions and Proliferations

As we have seen in our episodes on Amos Tutuola and Lauren Buekes the depiction of interspecies ontology and the blurring of boundaries becomes a central device for establishing the equivalence between the fantastic and the real that defines magical realism. A contrastive handling of the blurring of boundaries between the human and the animal/insect worlds is provided in Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said where the description of the potentially disconcerting rape of the young Vera by a swarm of bees inaugurates a whole series of boundary transgressions between the animal and the human worlds. But Kroetsch goes much further by introducing a vast gallery of disabled characters and making it unclear whether they are simply indexical of real-life conditions in the Canadian prairie setting or rather iconic representations of a sense of liminality.
Keywords: Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said, indexical, iconic, liminality, Canada, Canadian magical realism, Canadian prairie, animals and humans, interspecies ontology
Suggested Reading
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 2004).
Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1999).
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Ato Quayson, “A Typology of Disability Representation,” Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 32-53.
Stephen Slemon, ‘Magical Realism and Post-Colonial Discourse’, Canadian Literature, 116 (1988).
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press).
Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).
Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, (London: Palgrave, 2009).
Ato Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative and History” The Novel Vol. 1 History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti, (Princeton University Press, 2006), 726-758.
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

[@annanarthur1990]

Thank you Prof.