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

The Jordans. Remembered and Invented Pastare in turn, by a kind of refraction, undermined by her own daughter’s spiritedacts of rebellion. When Ada Jordan, who has embarrassed her family bypublicly advocating birth control, warns her daughter against “being distractedover a man,” Del emphatically rejects her advice:I was set up to resist it. [...] I felt that it was not so different from allthe other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumedbeing female made you damageable. (LG 147)In view of the fact that Christa Wolf and Alice Munro represent radicallydifferent artistic temperaments, it is no surprise to find that the two novels arevery different in tone and texture. The style manifest in them may in fact bedefined by oppositions. Wolf’s style is cool, dry, serious, sceptical, void ofdescriptive detail and tending towards the abstract. That of Alice Munro iswarm, celebratory, humorous, buoyant, with descriptive detail piled on in richlayers, seeking the concrete. Yet always, there is similarity in diversity: thereare comparable figures of speech and instances of poetic vision embodied inthe language that strike similar notes. Alice Munro is obsessed with theparadox of the strange and the familiar, 21 translated into language bycontradictory terms fused into an oxymoron. Christa Wolf, equally fascinatedby contradictions and incongruities, frequently employs a similar poeticdevice, as in the following example:The flat land glides past, very familiar, strange beyond recognition.Itis the hour between day and evening, the invisible sunset mirrored ina high strip of red cloud. It is one of those rare moments when youthink you know what to say and what not to say, and how to go aboutit. (MC 48, my emphasis)The tension created by a semantic contradiction like the one quoted above withits implicit irony will create a peculiar aesthetic challenge for the reader. Inaddition to that, the novels Kindheitsmuster and Lives of Girls and Women arecharacterized by a tension of a different kind, a quality that determines the toneof the surface structures of the two novels. According to F.K. Stanzel’snarratological terminology, both novels are quasi-autobiographical firstpersonnovels. One of the characteristic features of this type of fiction is “theinternal tension between the self as hero and the self as narrator.” 22 We maysay that this internal tension, though taking quite different forms inKindheitsmuster and Lives of Girls and Women, lends a specific aestheticquality to both novels.Munro follows the conventional pattern of unfolding the actions andperceptions of the experiencing self, in chronological order, from theperspective of the narrating self, an adult woman. The position of the narratingself remains, on the whole, static and undefined although—and this mayappear as a contradiction in terms—the quality of the narrating voice as such75