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

The Jordans. Remembered and Invented PastGerman version, “denn du bist gehalten, die Fakten zu verwirren, um denTatsachen näherzukommen” (KM 77), creates a distinction between twowords (“Fakten” and “Tatsachen”) almost identical in meaning. The wording“for you find yourself forced to shuffle the facts, in order to get closer to thetruth” seems to me to convey the author’s intention more convincingly.Whereas Christa Wolf confronts the reader from the beginning with her artisticplan, presenting a past both remembered and invented, Alice Munro leads herprotagonist through a seemingly realistic sequence of rememberedperceptions and experience towards a final insight into the shaping power ofmemory:I loved the order, the wholeness, the intricate arrangement of townlife [...]. I had a sense of the whole town around me, all the streetswhich were named River Street, Mason Street, John Street, VictoriaStreet, Huron Street, and strangely, Khartoum Street. 11This is how the 14-year-old girl, Del, sees the visible pattern of her town:orderly, whole, secure. Four years later, having attempted to write a narrativefantasy, a “Gothic” novel which she will abandon as an artistic failure, 12 Delbecomes aware of the complicated process of translating reality into art:For this novel I had changed Jubilee, too, or picked out some featuresof it and ignored others [...]. The main thing was that it seemed true tome, not real but true [...]. (LG 205 f., my emphasis)Alice Munro’s narrating self grants her experiencing “alter ego” much morebreathing space than Christa Wolf’s. In the case of the latter, narration andreflection are intrinsically fused throughout the novel, with the narrating selfconstantly interfering with the experiencing self, the mature woman almostobsessively evaluating and assessing the child’s experience and perception.We must keep in mind that Wolf’s ideologically informed text moves in adifferent direction from Munro’s. Wolf sees Nelly’s history quite literally as a“model childhood,” as a kind of memory exercise for a whole nation, a literarystrategy for evoking collective memory. It is not surprising that Wolf haschosen a first-person narrator who is obsessed by self-reflection and selfexamination,moreover, a narrator twice the age of her Canadian counterpart.Munro’s ideologically unfettered heroine seems to move quite confidentlythrough her childhood and early adolescence, conveying a sense of immediacyand spontaneity. Yet having achieved the awareness of a creative artist, Delwill feel the need to reflect on the authenticity and aesthetic plausibility of herpresentation, a story “not real but true,” much in the same way that Nelly feelsshe must “shuffle the facts, in order to get closer to the truth.” Christa Wolfemploys metafiction on the level of one coherent fictional reality; AliceMunro, never self-consciously literary, hides the device of metafiction in afantasy within the novel, a parable that reveals her artistic credo.67