ABSTRACT
Robert Kroetsch is a Canadian novelist with an overly active muse. His practice is to write a novel once, and then to 'layer' it to fold in more patterns of imagery, more ingenious catastrophes, more elliptical and eloquent phrasing. In order to understand the novel's odd mix of machismo, humour and death it is useful to get into the theory of comedy, like Kroetsch. The most useful branch of that wide-ranging theory is one which is often overlooked: the theory of the dirty joke. Because Kroetsch is a consciously masculine writer, it is tempting to explain his lapses by Woolf's notion that it is fatal for writers to be conscious of their sex. In many of his novels there is a protagonist, who is active largely in sexual ways, and a passive narrator, whose version of action is to usurp the experience of the protagonist by writing about it.
