Elusive truth as strange as fiction
Martha Baillie’s remarkable novel gets real-world heft in new exhibit at Koffler Gallery
In 1980, a young German émigré exploring the outer reaches of Baffin Island in Canada’s far north found himself in stealthy pursuit of an Arctic hare. Picking his way across the rugged tundra, the creature eventually leads him to an enormous rock formation.
It was strangely unnatural, a hulking boulder that appeared to have been neatly cleaved in two, like a loaf of bread. The creature slipped in one side and out the other, and fell still.
His attention deflected, the young man, Heinrich Schlogel, surveyed the stone channel in front of him. It was taller than him, but narrow and precise, and just the right breadth to accommodate a human body. He stepped forward and then inside, the sunlight vanishing around him.
When he emerged, 30 years had passed. He had not aged a moment. The space in between is the meat of Toronto author Martha Baillie’s remarkable recent novel, the appropriately titled The Search for Heinrich Schlogel, but the ghosts she conjured seemed too restless to confine to the printed page.
So at the Koffler Gallery, Heinrich — or rather, his absence — takes realworld form.
In the gallery, hundreds of postcards panel three walls, open to the touch. Pick one up — an image of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, maybe, or one of Lawren Harris’s powerfully static iceberg paintings; a kitschy snapshot of Atlantic City or a photo of a nesting Arctic tern — and you can read, in an increasingly familiar cursive script, a dedicated sleuth’s furtive speculation as to Heinrich’s whereabouts all those lost years.
It’s Baillie’s hand, of course, and the words and phrases are extracted directly from her novel. But in the postcards her fictional quest is given uncanny, semi-factual life. The book’s lead character, an archivist, turns over every possible stone to extract some sense from Heinrich’s possible journey, going to all corners of the Earth to track his invisible steps.
So did Baillie: she sent each and every one of the postcards — hundreds upon hundreds — with snippets of manuscript to various friends here in Toronto, giving her fictional archival project an anchor in the real world.
Or did she? The cards are here, stamped and sent, turned loose from bound pages into the very real world. Baillie’s own whereabouts, though, are as leading and as inconclusive as Heinrich’s own.
A fictional archivist somehow generates a real archive open to speculation as to the veracity of its process? It sounds a little familiar and if you know the work of Iris Haussler, whose immersive, made-up worlds probe the disconnects between fact and fiction, memory and reality, you’ll be right at home here (Baillie and Haussler are old friends; Baillie wrote an essay for her Art Gallery of Ontario catalogue for her project He Named Her Amber).
You don’t need to, though. Baillie transfers her fragmented narrative to the real world deftly enough to craft an enveloping sense of doubt and possibility all her own.
The Schlogel Archive is one of two parts of Erratics, a two-hander that also stars artist and curator Malka Greene. In her work, a found archive of photographs by Morris Resnick, a Canadian Second World War field photographer, is the starting point for his son Allan’s rediscovery of his father’s life. Images emerge — of downed Luftwaffe planes and mended bullet wounds — that don’t match his childhood memories of his father’s wartime pursuits.
Was he protected from the truth, deemed too frightening, too potentially damaging, for a child to bear? And if his father was not who he appeared to be then how, years after his death, can he piece together the real picture?
The answer, of course, is that he can’t, though he’ll never stop trying. Like Heinrich, really, the truth is as strange as fiction and, in some cases, even less precise. Erratics continues at the Koffler Gallery, 180 Shaw St., to June 14.