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

IJCS/RIÉChard-working, small-town people. Nelly’s father, a shopkeeper, belongs to aslightly more privileged class that Del’s fox-breeding father. So the GermanJordans live in the richer part of L., “the once jubilant hometown” (MC 55, myemphasis), the Canadian Jordans in the poorer section of Jubilee. The fathers,Bruno and Ben, are both sociable and fun-loving, well liked by theircommunities, easy to get on with. The mothers, Charlotte and Ada (Addie), arestronger than their husbands, ambitious, serious, sensible. Constantly set onbettering themselves, yet frustrated by their daily chores, they live vicariouslives in the hope of preparing their children for a more worthwhile, morerewarding future. Both Nelly and Del have one younger brother, Lutz andOwen respectively, both of whom are treated more leniently and are lesssaddled with expectations than their brainy sisters. As part of the familydynamics, the boys are patronized and bullied by their sisters.Both the German and the Canadian Jordans are embedded in a network offamily relations, of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Thus Nelly and Del,fascinated and bewildered at the same time, are initiated into family legends.Some of these are celebratory, more are appalling: stories of love and betrayal,success and failure, generosity and envy — dark secrets such as an aunt’sinexplicably sinister hemorrhages, an uncle’s disgraceful behaviour duringbouts of drunkenness.Early on, the impressionable children, Nelly and Del, experience a lust for gorydetail, a fascination with things monstrous and blood-curdling. Nelly isprovided with such material by her grandfather:Shuddering at the grimace of Whiskers Grandpa miming thewoodcutter’s compulsive facial contortions, Nelly nonethelessinsatiably urged him to repeat it. It was through him and no other thatshe first learned the thrill of horror. (MC 31)Del finds her fill in Uncle Benny’s stories “that my mother would insist couldnot have happened” (LG 7) and in the back numbers of his unspeakablenewspapers:I read faster and faster, all I could hold [...]. I was bloated and giddywith revelations of evil, of its versatility and grand invention andhorrific playfulness. (LG 4)From their childhood fantasies, Nelly and Del move on to an awareness ofthings unsettling and threatening in real life, things conveyed throughlanguage imperfectly understood, through words both fascinating anddisturbing. Nelly calls them “glitter words” (MC 61), Del refers to words that“gave flashes of power” (LG 139). For both girls, such words carry a hiddensexual meaning, enigmatic and intimidating. In the case of Nelly, “glitterwords” may also contain an intimation of political obscenity and terror. Theworld, as Nelly and Del perceive it through language, has become puzzling and70