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

IJCS/RIÉCThe quotations referring to Nelly’s and Del’s childhood towns deserve closerexamination. Little need be said about the telling quality of the street names assuch. We perceive the all-pervading ideology of Nazi Germany’s arrogance,aggressive nationalism and belligerence manifest in Nelly’s hometown and, instriking contrast to it, the homely street names of a peaceful Canadian townwhere only “Khartoum” (registered as “strange” by the perceptive child Del)echoes a distant battle-field. Both writers convey, with considerable verbaleconomy, a universal truth: to feel sheltered, a child needs to see order in thestructure of its world. Wolf’s “network of the streets [...] as the basic model”and Munro’s “order, wholeness, intricate arrangement” evoke interchangeablevisions. The reminiscing adult, however, needs to shift and edit and recreatethe past world in his/her quest for an interpretation. People will alwaysreinvent their past lives, if such inventions make present life more tolerable.Both Wolf and Munro reflect on this universal behaviour by making theirprotagonists question their memory material: the child Nelly is proud of her“authentic memory” (MC 5), yet the adult woman, forty years older, feels“hampered by her unreliable memory” and has to resort to “Memory aids. Listsof names, sketches of the town” (MC 7 f.). But Nelly Jordan, realizing thatreconstructing the past is not the only problem, confesses: “It is interesting thatwe either fictionalize or become tongue-tied when it comes to personalmatters” (MC 8). The child Del “[...] had a freak memory. Learning a list offacts was an irresistible test [...]” (LG 56). Some twenty years later, whentrying to make lists of the buildings and streets in her hometown, 13 the maturenarrator wistfully states: “The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy,heartbreaking” (LG 210).The first person plural in the statements “we either fictionalize or becometongue-tied” and “the hope ... we bring to such tasks is crazy” deserves closerattention. Who is to be included in the “we”? Fellow narrators in texts ofsimilar literary discourse? The communities in which the quasiautobiographicalnarrative is embedded? The reading public at large, or maybea specific type of reader? In his critical study Der implizite Leser Wolfgang Iserrefers to a similar use of the first person plural: “In solchen Wendungen beruft[sich der Ich-Erzähler] auf Kollekiverfahrungen, die von allen Menschen geteiltwerden können.” 14 In his later work, Iser has developed his theory of “impliedreader” and “actual reader.” 15 The concept of the “implied reader” refers to arole assigned to the reader by the structure and strategies of the text. It denotesa kind of intermediate phase in the process of reading which will eventuallyflow into the consciousness of the actual reader, a set of notions or mentalimages (“Vorstellungen”) that will inevitably be coloured by the respectivereader’s individual stock of experience (“Erfahrungshaushalt”). Applied to thetype of quasi-autobiographical fiction represented by Lives of Girls andWomen and Kindheitsmuster, Iser’s method reveals an interesting aspect. Theconcept of implied and actual reader refers to a system of spatio-temporalorientation. The “here and now” of the implied reader and the “there and then”of the actual reader’s past experience determine the quality and intensity ofeach individual act of reading. In the case of first-person narration, such a68