Messing with the Archive: Back Doors, Rubbish and Traces in Robert Kroetsch's "The Hornbooks of Rita K"

[...]Raymond is directing us to read Rita’s poems less as timeless literary pieces and more as transient instructional summaries, undercutting their literary durability. [...]the process of archiving, normally associated with officialness and academia, becomes imbricated with the informality and messiness of lover, friend and failed poet, while the poet’s work becomes metonymically linked with her body, emphasizing the connection between archiving and death. [...]this article will show that Kroetsch uses the notion of the back door in The Hornbooks to help us question what we value and what we throw away or fail to notice, by presenting a text in which the boundaries between finished poetry and notes, between the archivist’s notes and his own thoughts, between the casual and the deadly serious are mixed together in a way impossible to separate. (114–115) The Hornbooks attempts to escape “deterministic demands” of genre, academic archiving, and literary value by mixing the back region and the front region. [...]we can understand Kroetsch to be questioning the systems that the theorists expose by creating a chaotic text that purposely places Douglas’s “inappropriate,” Thompson’s “transient,” Goffman’s “back region,” and Culler’s dispensable “junk” next to the valued, selected and durable. Here we begin to be more intimately acquainted with Raymond and his need to find his own presence in Rita’s words. [...]with the idea of discard and remains, this whole passage refers to death, while back doors, as Raymond says, have also to do with communality, since it is a sign of friendship or neighborliness to let people in through the back door.