Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

The Jordans. Remembered and Invented Past[...] we would suffer continuous estrangement from ourselves if itweren’t for our memory of the things we have done, of the things thathave happened to us. If it weren’t for the memory of ourselves.And for the voice that assumes the task of telling it. (MC, 4)Thus, the protagonist’s painful investigation of her childhood and her society’scomplicity (the cover-ups and silences of the Third Reich as well as of postwarGermany) carries a moral weight that informs the whole novel. Growingup in a small Canadian town in the thirties and forties is a radically differentexperience. Munro’s protagonist in Lives of Girls and Women does not have todeal with the moral vicissitudes of a society’s guilty and oppressive past. How,then, can two novels of such disparate narrative framing yield a common pointof departure for a comparative study?There is a seemingly trivial detail, a “random intersection of alien orbits,” 3 inthe two novels that in itself would not justify a comparative study, but whichstrikes the perceptive reader as an intriguing textual sign: the first-personnarrators of the two novels have strikingly similar names. Della (Del) Jordanis the name of Munro’s heroine, while Wolf’s protagonist is given the (from aGerman point of view uncharacteristic) name of Nelly Jordan. Similar firstnames, identical family names in two novels written in different languages,stemming from unrelated literary traditions, yet published within five years ofeach other by female writers born two years apart 4 —should this curious detailbe dismissed as a freakish coincidence?The critical approach of intertextuality and reader-oriented theories provide amotivation for such a comparison without positing a direct influence of onewriter on the other. We may interpret the name Jordan (used as a family namein the two novels) as a textual sign “straddling two texts, two languages, twocivilizations.” 5 The secondary use of Jordan as a family name points to theprimary naming of the archetypal river in the Bible which, in our case, wouldconstitute the intertext. Having established this intertextual referentiality, thisunexpected link between two seemingly unrelated texts, an informed readermay well feel motivated to look for further parallels within the novels Lives ofGirls and Women and Kindheitsmuster. According to Stanley Fish, it is theinformed reader (possessing both “linguistic” and “literary competence”) whoproduces an interpretation of a text’s thematic and formal features, e.g. aninterpretation that does not resort to any objective criteria outside the readingexperience. 6 Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauß, the most influentialrepresentatives of Rezeptionsästhetik (commonly referred to in English asreception-theory), provide less radical, more pragmatic tools of interpretationfor the purposes of this investigation. Iser’s concept of the “implied reader”and Jauß’ term “horizon of expectation” (which will be introduced inconnection with relevant text material) will prove helpful in theoreticallyunderpinning the argument of this paper.65