Harold Rhenisch, Out of the Interior
I'm not going to over-think it just yet*, but recently I've been finding myself drawn back to older books, ones that have felt something like touchstones, and it has been interesting to find which of those I've never written about.
This week, after reading it once again (while I should've been focused utterly on my traditional August course development), I realized that somehow I hadn't ever posted about Out of the Interior, Harold Rhenisch's first book of prose, if indeed it's prose, and I don't think Harold would care very much how I'd characterize its form anyway.
Some years ago, I was lucky enough to supervise an honours project on Rhenisch's book Tom Thomson's Shack, which I've seen him at least once describe as a sequel to Out of the Interior. I've written about Tom Thomson's Shack more than once (academically, but also bloggily once, twice, thrice, though without ever quite being able to say what I mean), I've recommended it often, and I've even taught it twice in undergrad classes. Somehow, though, and even though I've read Out of the Interior at least a few times, I hadn't managed to pin myself down about the earlier book.
He's bringing us out of all our interiors, in other words, so that we can confront the Interior as well as each other's interiors.
Or at least, I think that's what he's doing. On the other hand, the book's back-cover blurb says the book's engaged in the project of "Extending the form of autobiography," and while I recognize that autobiography as a genre isn't only about the self, there's often more solipsism in autobiographies than I'm excited about.
And the reason that this post is just so terribly stuffed with speculation and indirection is that even Rhenisch's very sentences are unpredictable enough that I'm tempted to call them prickly, even though his prose flows much of the time like the clouds or waters so central to his experience of the south Okanagan region, and their unpredictability is as nothing beside the structure of this book.
If I could return to form for a moment, because it's something I agonize at least mildly over when I'm thinking about Rhenisch's work, let me quote one of his own older websites: "To tell the truth, most of my writing time is spent working on essays. They make up my books Out of the Interior, Tom Thomson’s Shack, and The Wolves at Evelyn." (Mind you, I've also seen a Rhenisch bio that says this book "adapt[s] the long poem form to prose memoir"!) Essays can take the form of poetry, even of prose poetry, and a sheaf of essays could well add up to autobiography or memoir, and also memoir both is and isn't autobiography, but it's worth remembering simply that essay is un essai, a test, a trial, an attempt.
If you want to read others' thoughts about Out of the Interior, instead of waiting for me to get to the point, I'd recommend Laurie Ricou in Canadian Literature ("its people, true to themselves and their place, and their history of trapping, ranching and Empire, are out of place — denied the very time in which they live"). But 1993 was a long non-digital time ago, and it's hard at this long remove to find many reviews online.
The point:
Rhenisch's Out of the Interior, which may or may not have the subtitle The Lost Country, appearing as that phrase does on the cover and title page, but not on the copyright page, was a remarkable book, essential to BC literature in part because it refused to engage with what one might normally think of as "BC literature." There's BC in this book, but Rhenisch's refusal of "Canadian" meant that this BC wasn't going to be quite recognizable to folks from outside the Interior. For someone like me, who grew up in the Shuswap after spending my first six years in central and northern Vancouver Island, Rhenisch's prose has always been revelatory, recognizable as something core to my regional/literary identity (if you see what I mean) and yet not readily assimilable into my sense of literature.
As I've also said about the work of Tim Bowling and Theresa Kishkan, Harold Rhenisch's books are mine, and so is the world he's depicting and conjuring and falsifying and recovering.
When I say this, in part I mean his nature writing, which is never purely descriptive and yet gets deeply at the heart of what's being described:
"For two and one-half months the sky has been a strip of sheet metal, burning your retinas when you touch it with your eyes, full of the harsh scents of evaporated rock, and the air has become only a gas that has evaporated off the rock." (p131)
If that's not the Similkameen and south Okanagan, well, I don't know what is. His one-paragraph essay about yarrow here is a wee standout for me, too:
"It is the dense white flower of the yarrow that sticks to me--that flower with the scent of axle-grease and willow ash.... In the years I lived away from the valley I would sometimes wake in the middle of the night, and the stink of yarrow would flood the room, and I would know the eart was real." (p85)
I'm not telling you what's buried beneath that ellipsis, but in the context of the book, it's enough to make one paragraph into an entire capsule autobiography. Once you've spent time with Rhenisch's prose, enough time to see that the repetitions and recursions have the effect of deepening retrospectively the passages you'd thought you'd come to terms with, you can get to a point where a single page seems like it might be the whole point. It's a mistake to read that way, because there's always another recursion coming that'll shift you once again, but for someone who feels like they're the right audience, the reading experience is one of successive epiphanies, sparks, jagged little tears in your interminably but now sharply evolving sense of how to see the world.
I just used a phrase that needs flagging, though: "someone who feels like they're the right audience." I'm fully aware that some readers just don't make time for Rhenisch's work, even though I'm convinced that they'd Get It if they could only sit with it for long enough. Rhenisch writes the way he wants to write, as I said about Tim Bowling's gorgeous essay collection Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, and he seems unconcerned with how a reader might respond. The first time I read Tom Thomson's Shack, I tried to capture my halting experience of the first 60 pages, and I stand by what I wrote sixteen years ago: "I kept getting distracted. I kept tangling myself in guesses about where Rhenisch was going, whether I was going to appreciate the journey. Once I surrendered to the knowledge that the flashes would come, then the flashes came more often, and finally the light just turned on."
Not every reader will be there for Harold Rhenisch, so the light won't turn on for everyone, but I'm confident that Rhenisch isn't there for every potential reader, either. I can't imagine that he'd be overly bothered by their reading something else instead.
Writing and reading in 2024, though, the politics of the book do hit me differently now. I've always rejected utterly the right-wing politics of resentment, in part because we should all recognize it by now as mostly just a cynical urban exploitation of genuine rural grievance, an exploitation aimed at profiteering through social disruption rather than at genuinely addressing those grievances.
The thing is, Rhenisch writes convincingly about those grievances, and his phrasing isn't readily separable from the current right-wing exploitation of the rural: "We might export to the rest of the country, and to the world, fruit and lumber and gold, but our thoughts remain with us: they are from a world too far removed. Since we live with the earth, we live in the past, or an extension of the past into the present that society cannot recognize because it is not part of society" (p147). There's absolutely no way in which I understand Rhenisch's politics as resonating with (shudder) Poilievre's, and yet this kind of phrasing... I mean, the book's occasional mentions of fascism and Marxism and communism doesn't inoculate this phrasing against potential utility for someone like (shudder) Poilievre.
At heart, though, Rhenisch lives in, writes from, and writes about a BC and an Okanagan that's unique to him, and I'm here for it even when I'm left struggling with the implications:
"By ripping out all its orchards for retirement homes and motels, Penticton has destroyed the dream that brought people here. But Penticton is just pain, a cancer. In Victorian and Edwardian times we colonized the wild land; now we colonize that Edwardian image--hoping for those old attitudes miraculously to animate us, both emulating and despising them with the same strength that we once did the land itself." (p69)
A great deal rides on the identity of this passage's mentions of "we" and "us," but I don't see an avenue toward linking them up with current right-wing politicking. Rhenisch's politics and aesthetics aren't straightforward, and I don't think anyone who's made it this far into the post wants to read another thousand words on intergenerational colonization and exploitation of places like the Okanagan. But there's a worthwhile complexity to Rhenisch's writing in passages like this, vastly different from conventional politics, and I continue to argue that his work is unique to this place in a way that makes his writing irreplaceable for someone trying to make sense of BC.
And I would argue further that that's true even if you're not, to quote myself from above, someone who feels like they're the right audience. That's more or less what I wrote in my second time blogging about Tom Thomson's Shack: "our ways of seeing have been trained by the social and aesthetic structures that were only possible in a world shaped by colonialism, a shaping influence that still colours how one lives in rural BC, in all kinds of ways." If you can't make sense of Out of the Interior, you can't entirely make sense of BC, either.
As frustrating as it can be for me, the experience of reading Harold Rhenisch, somehow it remains something that defines my sense of the world, and for all its strangeness and its 1993-ism, Out of the Interior remains for me a great visit to another time and another world (or another BC, anyway) that I'll never recover but that's lodged in my interior somewhere.
* I've been over-thinking it for weeks.
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