While Aritha van Herk’s writings “do not conform to tidy labels”, the Canadian author choosing to “tak[e] up liminal positions that explode totalizing categories” (Goldman, “Go North” 32), a trademark of her work has been her interest in cartography. With Places Far from Ellesmere (1990),1 her “genre-bending prose” (Neuman 221) goes a step further than the parodic “picaresque rootlessness” (Thieme 47) of her previous novels, The Tent Peg (1981) and No Fixed Address (1986) which already give pride of place to map‑making and the fascination it exerts on their irreverent female protagonists.

Places Far from Ellesmere is structured into four “explorations on site”: Edberg where van Herk grew up, Edmonton where she studied, Calgary where she now resides and the island of Ellesmere where the narrator embarks on a feminist revisionist reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Perhaps unsurprisingly since she defines genre as “the coffin that contains form” (In Visible 17), van Herk refuses the label autobiography and, throughout the text, the narrator uses the second person singular to address her self, a pronoun which functions “almost [as] an audiential address” showing “the multiplicity of possibilities for the reader and the writer, who are the same and different” (van Herk, “Shifting Form” 87). Likewise, if the self-conscious use of the term “exploration” in the subtitle cannot but call to mind the expeditions and cartographers who mapped what was to become Canada—J. B. Tyrell (Places 14) and David Thompson (Places 66) to name but a few of those whom van Herk includes in her book—, the text is less driven by the forward impetus of discovery than by the “mutual implication of geography and fiction” (Helmes 69) indexed in van Herk’s coinage: geografictione. The term refers at once to a style of writing and to place, the reversibility of the components—“A fiction of geography/geography of fiction” (Places 40) —underscoring the impossibility of dissociating the latter from its inscription in a discursive process (Ashcroft 155).

The cover illustration by Scott Barham2 proposes to the reader a visual interpretation of a geografictione which “establishes cartography as a first framework for reading” (Heim 139) and disrupts the very model it proposes. The collage is indeed composed of several layers of maps, different scales and different viewpoints coexisting on the same page. A black and white map where toponyms are hardly legible serves as the background to a brightly coloured insert. Within its frame, a female-shaped island faces south towards a landmass which is cleft into two by a river. East of this divide, the artist has inscribed the figures 1, 2, 3, the latter superimposed on a grid map of Calgary. Fragments of maps of the Arctic Ocean and of the northern half of the globe have been pasted in the top and bottom left-hand corners. The collage’s playful non‑referentiality is a reminder that cartography does not reproduce an existing form: it functions as a modelization whose graphic language creates a space in which to locate new representations—what Christian Jacob calls “the impossible mimesis” (quoted in Besse 157). The way the collage subverts the symbolic contract of cartography as an ordering of topography providing orientation and positional information further elucidates van Herk’s own reading of Places Far from Ellesmere as “a book masquerading as a map, or more accurately, a map masquerading as a book” (“Map” 129). A paradoxical map if there is, since it “refuse[s] the epistemic classification of cartography” (van Herk, “Map” 130), yet uses the cartographic model to examine the notion of place as “transportable” (van Herk, “Shifting Form” 90). Reversing the traditional relation that posits place as the object of exploration, van Herk indeed proposes to see it as the agent of its own exploring, therefore “unfixed, unmappable” (“Map” 130).

Van Herk’s reflection, in that regard, is attuned to the contemporary reassessment of the notion of place in the humanities, notably in cultural geography and post-colonial studies (Thieme 1–3). Although Places Far from Ellesmere is informed by the contrary dynamics of the centripetal forces of “emplacement” as “entextment”, and the centrifugal drive of dis‑location striving to eschew “the boundaries of page or place, their constraints” (Places 119), it does not do away with place. The narrator’s assertion about Edberg—“This is place, inescapable” (Places 23)—bespeaks more than a sense of claustrophobia related to childhood experience; it evinces the primacy and inevitability of place, the persistence of its inscription on the writing/reading self. The excess of positional information which cartography may provide—“Canada, the West, prairie, Alberta, the south, Calgary: a house northwest, room” (Places 57)—demonstrates that to ponder this persistence, one should see place as something other than a circumscribed point on a map, or a static landmark. Underlying the narrator’s efforts to locate a home which would accommodate her restlessness is the idea that place can no longer be envisaged solely as “a pause in movement” (Tuan 6). Van Herk’s critical and poetic investigation of the “mobility” of the concept (Massey, Space 1) unsettles the limits of its definition as “a site of authenticity, singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity” (Massey 1994, 5) to write unfixed and unfixing geografictione.

“Written into place”: origins and destinations

1, 2, 3: the figures which feature prominently on the cover map appear to record the sequence of explorations, the overall structure of the book seemingly resting on a trajectory in time and space with each section corresponding to a stage in the narrator’s life. Yet, in keeping with its blatant refusal of cartographic ordering, the figures thwart the reader’s expectation for orientation.3 Likewise, the text’s “self-conscious avoidance of plot” (Goldman, “Earth-Quaking” 31) means that origins and destinations can longer be taken as the two polarities between which the narrative unfolds: defining “originary moments of departure” and locating “a definitive moment of perfect arrival” (Thieme 3 and 11) prove to be equally problematic. Faced with the difficulty of finding a circumscribed point of origin whose stability and solidity would allow her to “launch” herself and her explorations (Places 33), the narrator turns to the fixity and permanence of the burial ground, and looks for possible sites for her future grave in all four locations:

Engravement then. The home of the spirit? To dare to stay here to die, to dare to stay after death, to implant yourself firmly and say ‘Here I stay, let those who look for a record come here.’ (Places 61)

The pun on “engravement”—the inscription and the burying of the body—conjoined with the insistence on the deictic calls to mind Pogue-Harrison’s reflection on the deictic gesture of the grave marker (“here lies”) which “appropriates the ground of indication”, making it the foundational gesture of emplacement (397) and the paradigmatic example of “writ[ing] into place” (Places 39). In the narrative, the phrase always coalesces discursive process (writing into being) and textual assignation (writing into position) for van Herk’s use of the term engravement hinges on an analogy between the burial plot, the plotting of place and the plotting of fiction (Goldman, “Earth-Quaking” 31).

The reader is ushered into the meditation on Edberg as a first possible site of engravement by a series of clauses which reads as a diffident attempt to define it:

Home: what you visit and abandon: too much forgotten/too much remembered. An asylum for your origins, your launchings and departures, the derivations of your dream geographies. […] Always and unrelentingly (home) even after it is too late to be or to revert to (home), even after it pre/occupies the past tense. (Places 13)

What prevails in the succession of parallel phrases is the awareness that writing about Edberg cannot bring it to an end, the parentheses which disrupt the syntax indexing the need to engage with this impossibility. If memory is preoccupied by the past, the slash which cleaves the word in the passage re‑inscribes both the temporal and the spatial. Exploring Edberg is not an anamnesis nor is the town a repository of memory waiting to be “happily retrieved” (Places 38). As the narrator forcefully asserts, it is “without a time limit”, its exploration made up of “uneasy souviences” since it “insists on a reference, influence, empreinte” (Places 15). The irruption of foreign words upsets the assumptions of stability, fixity and durability frequently associated with the idea of imprint. Edberg as empreinte is evidence simultaneously of the contact of loss and the loss of contact (Didi-Huberman 18) in which the past, far from being foreclosed, ceaselessly works and transforms the substratum it imprinted (Didi-Huberman 14). Van Herk’s “mnemonic reading” of her childhood place (“Map” 130–131) registers “a site effacing itself, a town dis/appearing” (Places 29), the second phrase contradicting the clichés underlying the first. Although the narrator gathers evidence of the dereliction and dissolution of a small town and agricultural community forgotten by the march of modernity (Places 29, 34), loss is not experienced as a continuous progress towards erasure and absence: the double movement textually marked by the slash points to a simultaneity which makes Edberg anachronistic.

The reflection on the town dis/appearance serves as a counterpoint to the long list of “remainders”, what remains (the traces of the past in the present) and serves as a reminder (a presence which points to the future of remembering).4 When the narrator enumerates the “disappearing locations of appearances”—the cart trail, the creamery, the barbershop, the Chinese café (Places 29–32)—, more is at stake than bemoaning regrets measuring what is left in the light of what has gone. The whole section pieces together personal anecdotes, historical references to explorers and settlers, and considerations on religious differences among Edberg’s population. These snippets, however, never quite aggregate into a coherent whole. In a similar fashion, when the narrator adopts a bird’s eye view to offer a description of the town, the text flaunts its disregard for topographic charting through the insistent use of disjunctive slashes: “the school/houses/Erickson’s store/a blank-face building? shed?/the hotel/another dusty storefront with a tabby sleeping in its window/the Co-op store/across the street Nick Radomsky’s hardware and the garage” (Places 22). This resistance to ordering space and time in such a way as to allow summation is premised on the notion that memory cannot take hold of place, that the memory of Edberg cannot take place: the town does not fulfill the role of the Aristotelian periechon whose containing boundaries and stabilizing persistence hold the remembered (Casey 186). Writing cannot be envisaged as a compensatory gesture “command[ing] [Edberg] into everlasting place” (Places 37) either, the text a “receptacle […] gathering evidence of its existence” (Omhovère 103): the recurring image of the cupped hands trying and failing “to enclose this soft jumble of houses and streets” (Places 34) brings to the fore this impossibility. What the first exploration does instead is to bear witness to the unresolved paradox of the narrator’s desire “[t]o unhinge, and to carve with words” (Places 39).

Because Edberg refuses to let itself be written into a monument of the past, the narrator briefly sees it as “an Ellesmere” (Places 36), an elsewhere which is synonymous at once with escape and with “the eternal temptation of the lie that return is possible” (van Herk, “Map” 131). When, in the final section, she does escape to the Arctic island, the reflection veers away from the question of memory to probe the “male/lineated” territories of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and of Arctic maps (Places 88), the forceful emplotment of women and place into unitary definition whose static circumscribing strives to stifle their “determin[ation] to enact their own vitality” (Places 125).

As she hikes on Ellesmere, reading Tolstoy by Arctic white nights, the narrator muses on the congruences between Anna Karenina and Ellesmere: “The nineteenth-century island: the nineteenth century novel” (Places 97). In 1873, Tolstoy started to write his book, “publish[ing]/punish[ing] [his character] by instalment” until 1877 (Places 97). Meanwhile, the Arctic island was being “extensive[ly]” explored by two expeditions in 1875 and 1876 (Places 97). Beyond the sole coincidence of dates, van Herk elaborates on the summarily summed‑up equation “terror of women = terror of the north” (Places 123)5 to bring under scrutiny “the transition from boundless space to bounding pen” (Omhovère 115) characteristic of European representations of the Arctic, be they travel narratives or maps. Tolstoy’s ambition to explore the heart of female passion, whetted by his prurient fascination with “the body of an undressed and dissected young woman who threw herself under a train from heartbreak” (Places 97), participates in the same drive to chart unknown territories which sent European adventurers across the Atlantic and into the Arctic ocean in search of “the un/found North West Passage” (Places 84). The narrator debunks these figures of knowledge-seekers by presenting them as instances of “rampaging male egos” (Places 80) whose singular lack of imagination (Places 81) is on par with their desire to define and capture in language through the imposition of “[p]rescripted choices” (Places 81). While Anna Karenina, as van Herk reads it, is “a fictional mirror of a male reading of women” (Places 82), the Arctic map is a projection of male explorers’ narcissistic fantasy of writing themselves onto a landscape suitably empty (emptied) of women: “Name, name, leave names on everything, on every physical abutment, leave behind one’s father’s name, the names of other men, the names of absent and abstracted/ideal women” (Places 88). The narrator’s derisive tone when reflecting on the naming frenzy which gripped Arctic explorers does not obfuscate the fearful symmetry of the male ideology of silenced femininity which condemns Anna Karenina and Ellesmere to absence, the former killed by the murderous plot of her creator, the latter emplotted as a tabula rasa (Places 77).

Reading past these inscriptions, the narrator offers Ellesmere as “a remedy” to the plight of Anna Karenina (Places 77), its “grammar of stone and tree, water and sky” (Places 84) opening possible reading routes to upset unitary definitions. Only then can Ellesmere “float into a geografictione” (Places 87), the fluidity of the liquid element suggestive of the movement of the “puzzle‑ice” during the brief Arctic summer (Places 121), an alternative to engravement.

“Home is a movement”: un/reading place

If Anna Karenina steps out of the book into the landscape to walk and converse with the narrator (Places 103, 104, 106), ultimately, she cannot escape the plot Tolstoy devised for her. Meanwhile, the narrator refuses to choose a grave, a plot or a home. In response to the vexing question: “Where does home mean?” (Places 68), she proposes that “home is a movement” (Places 69), an aphorism which gives the lie to the notion of home as a resting place (Massey, Space 123), and sharpens the correlation she identifies in the Canadian Prairie between “historic restlessness” and its “companion”, settlement (Places 68).6 The impossibility of turning home into a fixed entity, even when she forsakes the “temptations of exile” (Places 58) and decides to stay in Calgary (Places 62), gestures towards the increasingly problematic nature of the concept in “the contemporary world, where routes versions of cultural becoming are supplanting roots notions of identity” (Thieme 27). More important perhaps than the notion that “identity has many imagined ‘homes’” (Hall quoted in Thieme 27), is the way the narrator’s restlessness disrupts “sedentarist notions of place” (Thieme 37). In that regard, one may argue that van Herk is not so much interested in the transactions through which undifferentiated space is invested with meaning and value (Tuan 6), as she is in the mobile heterogeneity of place identities which are “always in transit” (Thieme 6). The narrator is acutely aware that the four sites of exploration have already been “entext[ed]” (Places 53) and mapped by others. Edberg is “[i]nvented: textual” (Places 40), Edmonton “a reading, […] an open book” (Places 47), while Calgary is “empenned” (Places 66) and Ellesmere a “paginated presence” (Places 77): all four are “places with acts of readings as their histories, and all of them [the narrator’s] homes” (Places 36). Starting from the premise that place is “an act of text” (Places 47), van Herk ceaselessly works on the dialectical interplay between writing and reading, the reading writer always a writing reader who writes place as she reads it.

It is the narrator’s concern with the “hermeneutics of place” (Thieme 29) which prompts the “un/reading” underpinning the four explorations. Understood in the light of the epigraph from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, van Herk’s coinage signals an investigation into “discursive formation” as a “space of multiple dissensions”.7 Un/reading becomes “a means of interrogating” which pays equal attention to content and process (“Unreading” 87). The question: “What justifies place?” (Places 20), which runs through the entire book, thus calls for more than re‑reading or “de/coding” (Places 38). Significantly, it elicits differing responses. When the narrator exclaims, about Edmonton: “what’s to be expected of a fort(ress) set up to trade/skin Indians” (Places 43), the cleft textually marked by the slash makes room for a revisionist reading of the city’s foundation story and points to a correlation between the fur (skin) trading activities held at the fortified fort and the brutality to which First Nations peoples were submitted. On Ellesmere, the narrator rectifies the record about the Arctic Island: “explored, not discovered”, for the roaming bands of hunters from forty-two hundred years ago already had a name for it (Places 98). That name, however, remains unsaid, a silence to which the text draws attention: “if one only had the eyes to read it” (Places 97).8 Brief as these two references to colonial rewritings and overwritings may be, they underscore the “discursive interference of colonialism” by calling attention to “the conflicting accretions which become the dense text that constitutes place” (Ashcroft et al. 197 and 190). The narrator’s exploration of Calgary complements and complicates such un/reading. Under the heading “Denizen”, she notes the archaeological finds which testify to First Nations peoples’ originary claims: “Spearpoints found in the plowed fields east of the city (12,000 years old). Teepee rings, medicine wheels, effigies: Blackfoot, Sarcee, Stoney” (Places 66).9 The list is immediately followed by another made up of the names of explorers and surveyors (Places 66). The juxtaposition may read as an implicit contrast between the nomadism of peoples whose sense of place is not dependent on settledness and static enclosure, and the mapping of the West by agents of European imperialism which transformed place into a “topographical system” predicated on the introduction of boundaries (Ashcroft 146). One is not pitted against the other, however. In a place “[b]egun by the oldest occupation, the nomadic herding of grazing animals” (Places 68), all are “transient denizens” (Places 66): “Arriving and leaving, citizens of their own rules: Ex‑mounties, Ex‑speculators, Ex‑Metis buffalo hunters, Ex‑Arrivals” (Places 66–67). By bringing together these examples of spatial mobility, the text does not shy away from the political implications of past and present spatial practices in post-colonial Canada, but resists “the easy resolution of seeing European discovery and invasion as a defining moment, or idealizing pre‑Columbian America as a site of authenticity” (Thieme 7).

Un/reading, therefore, cannot be limited to the sole excavating and discovering of what has been ignored or dismissed by dominant discourse. In what may be construed as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Foucauldian metaphor, the narrator remarks: “It’s been said before: archaeologies are (in)formed by those who (in)vent them” (Places 58). My contention is that van Herk’s un/reading does not hinge as much on “palimpsestic layering” (Crane 52)—as tempting as the metaphor is, especially in relation to Foucault—as on a process of fragmentation “dismantling [the] text past all its previous readings and writings” (van Herk, In Visible 4). Such process is given cogent expression in her metaphoric displacements of the phrase “long division” which serves as the title of the Edmonton section. Once “dislodged from its scientific context”, Claire Omhovère points out, it “comes to designate the riving process through which the narrator elaborates her geografictione” (105). It bears on the cleft opened by the North Saskatchewan, the river which “cut[s] the town in half: north/south” and whose axis holds for the narrator the promise of evasion, of “divid[ing] [herself] from the country” and its reductive plots10 (Places 43). Out of the four explorations, the Edmonton section is the one which relies the most on fragments from a variety of texts which the narrator assembles as she negotiates reading paths through the “maze of [her] books” (Places 52). Featured in the text or quoted in free indirect discourse, these fragments are loosened from their status as archival evidence11 to allow for multiple points of entry and passages leading to shifting reconfigurations. The narrator’s remark on her “absteminous[ness]”, having “yet to see the inside of a hotel” (Places 49), introduces an advertisement for the Edmonton hotel in colonial times, at the same time as it harks back to Edberg and women’s exclusion from beer parlours (Places 14) and “the beer parlour tradition of oral narrative” which has fed the work of Prairie writers like Robert Kroetsch (Neuman 223). The content of the ad itself resonates with the society article included on the following page. Whether it be the promise that “[p]emmican and dried buffalo meat has long been a stranger at the table” (Places 49) or the reporter’s insistence on the toilettes of a ball’s attendees as proof of civility, both texts evince a desire to outgrow the pioneer past which results in awkward mimicry, as awkward as the narrator’s own efforts to “match” the “flowered blouses vaunt[ing] cashmere cardigans” of the “rich city girls” (Places 51). In between these two fragments, a jocular article about the popularity of “coffin varnish” (Places 50) follows the fluvial axis of division, and points to the South and to the North. While the bootlegged liquor travels to Wyoming—without “having had its significance or usefulness impaired” (Places 50)—, the colonial temperance movement gathers strength, intent on “press[ing] for total prohibition. On all passions” (Places 50). The pause in the formulation of the sentence signals a change of scope which can then encompass Tolstoy, that other “son […] of temperance” whose novel Anna Karenina the Edmonton student has yet to read (Places 50; see also 81).

As the narrator tries to divide herself from Edberg by “entext[ing] [herself] a city of pages” (Places 53), entextment proves to come with its own perils—after all, the neologism relies on the same affixation as engravement and emplotment, the prefix en- in each case suggestive of confinement. In the course of the second and third explorations, the motif of the maze becomes more prominent and blends with the image of the fortress. In Calgary, the narrator finds “a Jericho” (Places 57), an “enclosure” (Places 66) divided into quadrants but replete with the “crossword puzzle of street” (Places 72), interlocking bridges and malls, “labyrinths” (Places 72) in which she wanders until she becomes “enmesh[ed] in the very textual threads which should have led her out”, at once Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur (Omhovère 107): “Who can find you here, a clumsy bawling beast in the centre of a web of thread, a cat’s cradle of encapturement?” (Places 73). If un/reading and entextment might be construed as reversible polarities—one “exploratory”, the other “introverted and possessive” (Places 113)—, place does not merely wait for the reader’s probing; it is the agent of its own dis‑location when “it moves, un/reads itself again, a sly alteration leaving [the narrator] puzzled” (Places 37), a movement which van Herk’s poetics reciprocates.

“Between habitations”: dis‑locating language

On Ellesmere, the narrator finds an “awayness so thoroughly truant [she] ha[s] cut all connexion to all places” (Places 77), a place where she is “free to un/read [her]self, home, […] the rest of Canada, all possible texts” (Places 91). Reading these assertions, the critic might be tempted to interpret the movement of the book as leading towards absolute deterritorialisation abolishing “capture and cartography” (Goldman, “Earth-Quaking” 36), the striated space of the city‑grid giving way to the smooth space of the Arctic desert (Goldman, “Earth-Quaking” 32), which would finally allow the narrator to do away with the restrictions and circumscription of emplacement and entextment. But van Herk’s geografictione comes with “necessary cordons and fences” (Places 140). To write dis‑location—“the self written between habitations” (Places 118)—, she works within the constraints of page and textual enclosure against the boundedness and singularity traditionally associated with place (Massey, Space 169).

The adjective “far” in the title of the book offers a first clue. It bespeaks a “relational focus” (Helmes 69) which precludes definition through counter position—the cities of Edberg, Edmonton and Calgary v. the northern wilderness of Ellesmere12—and hints instead at “connections with the beyond, with other places” (Massey, “Conceptualisation” 64). The narrator ceaselessly measuring the temporal, geographical and imaginary distances between the different sites, each place reflects on and inflects the others: with their unfixed and heterogeneous identities, all are unique, none are singular. This porosity is translated by “wandering tropes”13 which create open and unstable networks undermining the textual enclosure of the four sections, the frame which their respective titles might seem to impose by announcing the symbolic associations attached to each place. The motifs of the train and the grave weave in and out of the text, the same way the figure of Anna Karenina drifts through the book. At times only present through seemingly incident references—to the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Calgary (Places 59), or to the necessity to arrange for a cemetery in colonial Edmonton (Places 52), for example—they assert themselves when their semantic variations serve as a vector to articulate the narrator’s relationship with place. Thus, her repressive upbringing makes Edberg a “training for departure” (Places 18), the platform of the train station the promise of an elsewhere, the possibility of launching oneself into unmapped territories—provided one could frame the image so as to leave out the reminders of Edberg’s nudging presence:

The platform stood on the lip of the world, and if you could manage to ignore the cream cans and tractor parts, the wooden baggage cart, you could imagine (an Anna in black velvet stepping down to take a breath of fresh air on her way to one of the family estates: it is the Edberg platform that nudged and gestured, peering and curious) the platform a promenade, it was that even and level and inspiring. (Places 16)

The parenthesis cleaves the sentence open to allow for Anna Karenina’s glamorous apparition, along with a metonymic displacement which lets in Edberg’s “principles of scrutiny” (Places 14), the silent crowd whose gaze no departure can seem to escape. Because van Herk continuously works on slippage, permeability and disruption, her semantic variations frustrate sequential logic. The parallelism of the railway tracks gives form to the symmetry of childhood training—“[a]llowances: forbiddedness” (Places 27)—, making it the first instance of “engravement” (Places 23) from whose iron lines14 the narrator tries to save Tolstoy’s character when the “unrailwayed joining” of an Arctic island (Places 49) prompts the un/reading of the implacable symmetry to which male fiction condemns women—“forever culpable, exiled for their visceras, eviscerated for their exiles” (Places 83). Conversely, the meditation on Calgary, “this growing graveyard” (Places 57), gives the lie to the etymological meaning of “[c]emetery. Koimeterion” (resting place) by picturing the city as “a silent freight train carrying away long rows of boxcars neatly stacked with coffins” (Places 59). This image of ordered mobility is immediately contradicted by the depiction of rabbits’ and gophers’ “unrestricted” movements among graves which “elbow […] each other awake, saying ‘move over’” (Places 59–60).

In an all‑encompassing movement, the Ellesmere section concludes on the narrator’s going through the list of possible sites for her future grave, a list which condenses the three previous sections (Places 140). But even the elsewhere of Ellesmere is given an elsewhere. The scope of the text is suddenly enlarged to other “sites of repose” (Places 141)—the coastal mountains of British Columbia, the Pacific Rim, the Australian Pacific coast—, once the narrator has pushed aside the temptation of merging with the Arctic landscape:15

But traverse on, puzzle-ice in the lake you can still see as you go higher, and the tussocks you step over eternity of continuance. The same principle: jumping from moment to moment across an abrupted space. (Places 122–123)

With its emphasis on on-going crossing, compounded with the descriptive notations about continuity and permanence on one hand, and sudden and unexpected changes on the other, the passage sheds light on Robert Kroetsh’s reading of van Herk’s writing as an instance of restless language whose recurring use of foreign words, multiple neologisms and metaphoric displacements “riddl[e] the grammar of what (almost) was” (Kroetsch 70). To the notion of accumulation which some critics have used to describe her use of tropes, I would therefore substitute that of dis‑location since her metaphorical crossings maintain an in‑betweenness, a spacing which generates destabilizing frictions and tensions. When, in the Edberg section, she borrows the British term “coppice” from J. B. Tyrrell’s description of the Parkland “scattered trees” (Places 14, 20), she refrains from elaborating on the disjunction between environment and imported language, or from retaliating with a more appropriate word, which would participate in the same aspectual logic. Instead, she preserves the spacing opened in the referential process by the impropriety to produce surprisingly disjunctive connections: “initiation coppice” (Places 15), “the germ of origin, its coppice” (Places 32). In neither phrase does “coppice” refer to a definite object, a setting in which the narrator’s experience may be seen as embedded. The dissonance caused by the instability of the signifier prevents the reading of the images from falling into “preconditioned” patterns (Places 122): far from dispelling the slipperiness and imperfection of the assignation which notions of origins make us claim as home (van Herk, “Map” 130), the word associations leave open breaches which unsettle the fixity of mental constructs.

Van Herk’s restless language, which deliberately thwarts the efforts of “the comprehensive reader” (Places 118), inscribes in the text the very possibility of its own un/reading: “The words are stirred, mixed, likes pieces of a jigsaw, broken into their separate shapes and the whole picture lost, left to be reconstructed by another, a different hand” (Places 111)—provided it accepts that such reconstruction is necessarily incomplete and provisional, and abstains from “static circumscription” (Places 118). Marlene Goldman points out how the image of the jigsaw, the “puzzle‑ice”, which runs through the exploration of Ellesmere (Places 87, 93, 111, 121), functions as a “figure for the exploratory strategy of a feminist reading of Tolstoy’s text” (“Earth-Quaking” 35). I would go a step further and argue that it informs van Herk’s poetics of place and its unsettling complexities. Underlying the metaphor is the idea of mobile fragmentation, thaw creating “open patches” (Places 93), producing unstable reading routes, new combinations which always exceed the sum of their parts. As always in van Herk’s text, the image slides into another and that of the puzzle-ice needs to be read in relation to the attention the narrator pays to “the enduring traces” shape-changing ice “leaves on the landscape” (Omhovère 105). If Places Far from Ellesmere is indeed a map, what its overt fragmentation, disconcerting displacements and destabilising dissonances give form to is the persistence of place which imprints on the writer and the reader alike its unfixing.