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The Literary Road Trip / "Badlands"
This project responds to the ending of Badlands, which describes the narrator's road trip to the Alberta Badlands. Trying to discover her father’s time as a paleontologist in Alberta, the narrator, Anna, encounters her father’s past, retracing his journey and meeting Anna Yellowbird, an Indigenous woman with whom William, her father, had sexual relations. Anna believes that her trip will shed light on William’s identity, but instead she comes to terms with his “sad” life spent looking for success. She then throws his field notes—the sole reminder of his existence—in a lake and looks towards the stars for guidance. My work shows my own road trip; it imitates Anna’s journey and ends with me throwing my novel in a river. Using three crafts, this eclectic project illuminates my novel’s parodic genre that satirizes the hero’s journey. It also elucidates Anna’s shifting selfhood, showing how she rejects her father to embrace sublime inspiration. JORDAN PRICE ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: In Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands (1975), road trips provoke moments of personal growth. The novel’s narrator, Anna, seeks to understand her now deceased father, William, and his time excavating dinosaur bones in the Alberta Badlands, but she has access only to his “cryptic” and “barely decipherable” field notes that detail his journey (2). At the end of the novel, Anna follows her father’s Alberta expedition, and she drives to the places he described in his notes, including “Drumheller,” “Bullpound Creek,” and “Crawling Valley” (259–60). Anna understands her father’s “sad” life spent looking “for that little ceremony of success,” and she throws his journal in a lake: “I threw it into a lake where it too might drown” (256–70). This project responds to this (anti)climactic ending, detailing my own literary road trip. My work taught me to consider my novel’s parodic genre and Anna’s identity. Kroetsch’s fifth novel, Badlands was first published in 1975 and reissued in subsequent editions in 1976, 1982, 1983, 1988, and 1991. Initial reviews of the novel highlighted both its comedic and mythic qualities. In 1975, Margaret Laurence celebrated the book for its “‘wild humour’” and ability to take “‘characters and render them into our own [Canadian] mythology.’” Critics in the 1980s and 1990s positioned Badlands as a deconstructionist text. In 1991, for instance, Dorothy Seaton argued that Badlands “deconstructs the New World myths of identity,” including tales of “heroic” masculinity (78). More recent scholars show how the novel depicts Indigenous peoples and histories; Stephanie McKenzie asserts that the text “laments” that “Aboriginal cultures have been offended and threatened” by settler imposition (145). My project uses three artistic approaches: letterpress, décollage, and photography. Letterpress is a 15th-century invention that was primarily used to publish news or books (Wilson and Grey 1–11). Especially in the 20th century, some presses used print art for activism (Johnston 68). For example, Zephyrus, a San Francisco press from the 1970s, used letterpress to promote the gay liberation movement and criticize the Nixon presidency (Johnston 68–70). Décollage emerged in France in 1961, and the craft usually communicated political messages such as anticolonialism or social anxieties post-World War Two (McDonough 75–78). In my photography prints, I used the editing function selective colouring, which involves turning an original image black and white but then revealing specific colours in the image. Selective colouring gained popularity in the early 2000s, and it was used to contrast temporal spaces, with black and white symbolizing the past and colour representing the present (Hirsch and Erf 181–214). While my chosen novel does not explicitly invoke letterpress, décollage, or selective colour photography, these approaches complement my novel. My text and literary interpretations create three temporal spaces. Badlands shifts between first-person and third-person narration; the former describes Anna’s diaries that are set in 1972, and the latter illustrates William’s time as a paleontologist in 1916. As someone who studies the novel, I create a third space: my present-day reality. Each possessing unique historical contexts, letterpress, décollage, and selective colour photography parallel my novel’s time frames as well as my embodied reality. As the oldest craft, letterpress calls to mind William’s journey in 1916. Developed in the 1960s, décollage symbolizes Anna’s diaries. Selective colour photography, which dates from the 2000s, is emblematic of my literary critical work. My project made me consider how Badlands satirizes the hero’s journey, a trope that describes a protagonist's successful struggle against a colossal obstacle and celebratory return home. Badlands retains aspects of this mythology. Anna states that William’s field notes contain stories about “male courage” (2). Anna also calls William’s expedition a “long journey, a . . . calculated casting into the unknown” that culminates in his arrival at “the greatest bonebeds in the history of paleontology” (127–28). However, William does not actualize his heroic aspirations, and his ambitions are stymied by the natural elements. In Chapter Six, for example, William and his crew travel down a river, but their boat absurdly crashes into rocks, causing their equipment to fall overboard: “They hit more rocks; the sacks of plaster of paris tumbled overboard: half of them, more, were gone” (28). While excavating dinosaur bones, William invariably falls. In Chapter Thirty, he sees a “grasshopper,” which he thinks is a “rattler,” and he falls “twenty feet down the side of a coulee” (152). Instead of relishing a victorious return from his journey, William dies en route, and his body is “never found” (269). While working on my project, I appreciated these parodic elements. Like William, I failed to achieve my intended goals. To follow William’s and Anna’s journeys, I wanted to drive to the Alberta Badlands, but my plans suddenly changed. During the only weekend I had available, this November’s “bomb cyclone” cancelled ferries to the mainland, which made me improvise and travel up Vancouver Island instead. I wanted my project to reflect the chaos of William’s expedition and my own trip. I cut the map of the Badlands, which was the background of my décollage, into four pieces and organized them randomly on my board. I haphazardly cut my photo prints in two. I took my novel and tore away pages, sticking excerpts wherever I wanted. While I was initially disappointed with the change in my plans, I realized that this discomfort led me to a deeper appreciation of my novel’s genre. When I had to change my itinerary, I became like William, who fails to achieve his desired heroic status, and my art reflected his farcical character. During my road trip, I started to appreciate how Anna constructs her selfhood once she abandons her interpretive impulse and turns to the environment as recourse. Anna draws on her father’s field notes as a source of paternal affection. She considers his notes to be the “only poem he ever wrote,” and particularly a “love poem” addressed to his “only daughter” (269–70). Anna tries to claim ownership of the journals, imposing her own meanings on William’s words. In Chapter Seven, for example, Anna illustrates her father writing terse and nebulous phrases in his notes, such as “I despite words” and “He is safe and sound” (34–37). Anna imagines his affective response to his writing, stating that his notes “freed him” and that he “stared at the sentence, enjoying it” (34). Yet at the end of the novel, Anna’s gaze shifts from her father’s field notes to the sky above. Once she throws her father’s notes in the lake, she walks “through the night,” looking at the “billions” of “stars” that provide her “light” to guide her “way” (270). While working on my project, I understood this aspect of the novel more clearly. At Goldstream Park, the first stop of my trip, I wanted to compare excerpts from Badlands with the land. While taking my photos, I wanted the text to be the key focal point. I tried using a shallow focus shot, which made the background landscape blurry and the text clear. As I did so, I had trouble reading the words on the thin page because the focusing effect only exposed the sun that shone through the paper; the backside of the page became faintly visible, which blurred the words. In response, I pulled the text closer to my camera lens, but doing so only covered the landscape and defeated the purpose. The sun, I learned, was overcoming my text. I realized that I was becoming like Anna who also imposes her subjectivity on a text but recognizes a more sublime source. While making my final project, I felt free. As I cut out and glued excerpts from my text, I felt that I had complete control of the art, putting Kroetsch’s diction wherever I saw fit. When I finished the project, I closed my eyes and touched the many different papers on my project. I noticed the glossy photo prints, the coffee-stained map, and the old edition of Badlands that I had torn apart. As I finished my work, I realized that I was oddly returning to the beginning of my novel. In Chapter One, Anna describes the tactility of her father’s journal, noting that she can feel “squashed mosquitoes, the spiders’ legs, the stains of thick black coffee, [and] even the blood that smeared the already barely decipherable words” (2). My project, I learned, was akin to William’s notes, becoming a tangible source of inspiration from which I, like Anna, try to derive literary meaning. Perhaps most importantly, my road trip taught me that scholarship can go beyond the confines of the campus classroom. As I drove alone with my copy of Badlands perched on my dashboard, I embarked on a journey with my novel, establishing a closeness between my personal life and literary knowledge. In doing so, I understood my text’s complexities more clearly. I also realized that academia and embodied space can productively coexist.