Western Canadian author Robert Kroetsch is best known for his playful engagement with the Canadian Prairie experience. His dedication to exploring Western Canada as a narrative space has, however, led his writing to spaces that emerge only against the echoes of different master narratives, and which sometimes only exist in language. His writing is frequently geared towards lifting discursive barriers that push Prairie origins out of what claims to be Prairie discourse; yet looking into a singular, neglected space in order to validate that space has never been enough. A committed representation of a place is not created by looking at that place alone.
The problem of relating to places that are occupied by strong non-indigenous discourses and varying degrees of resistance to them is, of course, not limited to the literature of Western Canada, but frequently addressed across different regions with a history of colonisation. Against this foundation, I will in particular examine Kroetsch’s ventures into Northern spaces. These ventures do not reward the author with a universal equation to solve discrepancies between a given place and discourses that claim control over it; texts aspiring to be in the North are at times baffled as they discover themselves turning partly into texts by the North. Yet Kroetsch proposes that the greatest freedom in representing place for him may emerge against “the unspeakable white glare of what I call, metonymically, North” (A Likely Story ).