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

IJCS/RIÉCchanges perceptibly (from plainness to sophistication) while registering Del’ssteady growth towards fuller awareness.Christa Wolf’s structural concept marks a radical departure from theconventional first-person novel. The story of the adult woman’s journey to L.,the town of childhood (undertaken with husband, brother and daughter), isconveyed in the second person, in a kind of diary monologue. Every now andthen the narrator has to check herself when confusing the differentgrammatical forms applied to one and the same person: “But then you weresuddenly sitting—not you: the child Nelly—in your parents’ house [...]” (MC128, my emphasis). A third narratorial level, the here and now of the fictionalwriter (another version of “self,” both experiencing and reflecting over aperiod of some four years) is presented in the second person, too, but finallyflows into the first. Thus Christa Wolf signals, by means of a structural device,the final convergence of previously separate selves into one identity.Throughout the novel, the three levels of narrative presentation areintrinsically fused, so that the boundaries of time seem to melt, with the yearsof youth and the years of maturity gradually converging towards each other,chronological order being suspended.This strikingly unconventional device of holding one’s “self,” as it were, atarm’s length for the purpose of a more truthful, more objective assessment isnot really as radical as it may appear. Christa Wolf has blurred the traces of aself both autobiographical and fictional by a conscious effort. Munro hasachieved the same result, so it seems, by a feat of intuition. Her fictional, quasiautobiographicalfirst-person narrator, Del Jordan, puts in her first appearancein a number of stories preceding Lives of Girls and Women, appears again (as anameless heroine) in later stories such as “Winter Wind” and “The OttawaValley” (collected in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You), to be finallytransformed into the third-person character Rose in the story sequence Who DoYou Think You Are?, 23 a cycle of third-person tales which, it can be argued, arestructurally conceived as first-person stories. Thus, Del Jordan, in traversingsubstantial parts of Munro’s fiction, 24 takes on forms of disguise that are asscintillating and fascinating as Wolf’s forms of camouflage contained in asingle novel, fictional portraits of one and the same person who is never quitethe same.The most striking correspondence between the structures of the novelsKindheitsmuster and Lives of Girls and Women, however, lies in the respectivetreatments of memory material as a “generator” of narrative structure. Thus,the emerging writer Nelly Jordan raises the following question:Does memory prefer to store anecdotes? Something about thestructure of memory seems to lend itself to a story with a point. (MC359, my emphasis)76