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

IJCS/RIÉCencountering an exhibitionist. Nelly is disturbed and frightened by theunexpected exposure of a grown man’s penis, “a whitish, disgusting snake thatNelly has to stare at, until she manages ten, twenty steps, and the spell isbroken.” (MC 135) The first-person narrator, Del, also employing an animalmetaphor, is both amazed and amused by what she sees as a “strong-snoutedanimal whose grotesque simple looks are some guarantee of good will.” (LG141)These experiences do indeed mark a kind of watershed in the two life storieswhich so far have yielded astounding parallels. Del will move on briskly, willshed school and home and lover to proceed unfettered into an open future tostart what she calls, with pronounced irony, her “real life.” (LG 201) Nelly, inwhose childhood the notion of “real life” plays an equally significant role, yetalways connotes something slightly vulgar, something the sensitive child shiesaway from, gets caught up in “real life” in a totally different way: she is forcedto abandon her hometown, flee from the advancing Soviet troops, undergo thehardships of a hazardous flight, see her beliefs collapse, leaving her with anexistential feeling of shame and guilt, yet also with an overwhelming will tosurvive. At the end of their respective stories, Nelly and Del are both eighteen.The thematic resemblances in Kindheitsmuster and Lives of Girls and Women,substantiated by the preceding parallels, may be summed up as follows: bothnovels evoke vivid pictures of small-town life during the thirties and forties(set against the radically different historical backgrounds of peaceful Canadaand Nazi Germany). Both novels deal with the respective protagonist’s growthfrom childhood through adolescence into womanhood. (Coming from similarfamily backgrounds, both Nelly and Del strive to assert themselves in anarrow-minded community, to distance themselves from their domineeringmothers.) Both protagonists become increasingly aware of their fascinationwith words, of their creative potential, of their desire to shape their ownmemory material. Christa Wolf’s novel is, additionally, a political, moral andphilosophical investigation of individual and collective guilt. Wolf’s artisticaim is articulated in her inversion of Wittgenstein’s famous dictum: “Wovonman nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man allmählich zu schweigenaufhören” (KM 235). 19 This is the ultimate purpose of the first-personnarrator’s painful and unsparing journey into the past. Her intent is to salvage,from both her own and her society’s history, such evidence as will be needed inan honest quest for individual and national identity.In questioning the authenticity of her own and her family’s private as well asher society’s public, institutionalized memories (that is, the way the officialGDR has decided to present its short history 20 ), Nelly Jordan’s strategy isprogrammatically subversive. Del Jordan’s seemingly apolitical privatehistory, the way Del relates to her family and to a larger community, issubversive in a much subtler way. In fact, Munro’s novel is thematicallysubversive in a highly sophisticated fashion: Ada Jordan’s inadequate butnonetheless passionate attempts to undercut some of her community’s values74