Treasa Levasseur on Robert Kroetsch's Badlands
Blues musician Treasa Levasseur is a veteran traveller who's spent her fair share of time crisscrossing the country to perform. The towns and cities she's visited in her real-world travels also pop up in the books she's read — in her role as a columnist for The Next Chapter, she compares the real cities with their fictional counterparts. This time, she's visiting southern Alberta through Robert Kroetsch's 1975 novel, Badlands, which was recently re-issued with photographs by George Webber.
ON A SETTING THAT DEFIES WORDS
The Badlands is something you cannot even believe exists until you enter it. The first time I saw it, we just zipped past it, and I was so taken by the hills and the otherworldliness of it. The next time, I was on tour with a band and we decided to camp in Dinosaur National Park. So you've come out of the mountains and you're driving along the prairies, and it's getting really flat, and then you descend into this orange, sandy place. The van just went silent. The place has this magnetic weight to it — there's something there that defies words.
ON CONTEMPORARY READERS AND NARRATIVES THAT SHOW THEIR AGE
The book has a poetical language that hints at the majesty of this place. Kroetsch's way with words is undeniable, and this reissue of the book features magnificent photographs by George Webber that are worth the price of the book all on their own. He goes even deeper into the place than I went, into the riverbed — his characters are floating along on this rickety raft looking for dinosaur bones in 1916. The book is about a fellow named William Dawe who's from around Georgian Bay. It's a couple of years after some of the major paleontological digs of that era, and he takes a ragtag crew up to the Badlands in search of his own fame.
The story itself, though, feels dated not just by when it happens but also by the voice of Kroetsch himself and the era in which he wrote it. The omniscient narrator reduces people to sketch characters or prototypes of themselves, he racializes people, he genderizes people and I found it troubling from a contemporary perspective. If I was reading the dime-store paperback version with the cheesy cover from 1975, that would contextualize it for me, but a 2015 reprint with these gorgeous pictures frames it in a different way.
Treasa Levasseur's comments have been edited and condensed.