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

The Jordans. Remembered and Invented PastOne of Del Jordan’s forerunners, the first-person narrator Helen in “The Peaceof Utrecht” (a short story where Del’s home-town Jubilee appears for the firsttime), expresses a similar form of mental reservation when commenting on“that version of our childhood which is safely preserved in anecdote, asinakind of mental cellophane.” 25 Both Christa Wolf and Alice Munro clearly setout to probe deeper, to resist the pull of the family legend. From the outset,Christa Wolf’s narrator Nelly warns herself of the dangers of a sentimental,nostalgic approach: “The tourist trade to half-buried childhoods is alsobooming, as you well know, whether you like it or not” (MC 7). Nelly prefersto see her journey into legend. From the outset, Christa Wolf’s narrator Nellywarns herself of the dangers of a sentimental, nostalgic approach: “The touristtrade to half buried childhoods is also booming, as you well know, whether youlike it or not” (MC 7). Nelly prefers to see her journey into the past as a sort of“‘research’ or ‘memory test’” (MC 4). She has adopted the habit of checkingher memories against the recollections of mother and brother, trying tosubstantiate them by such seemingly objective documents as the “dust coatedvolumes of [the] hometown newspaper” (MC 7 f.). They prove asunsatisfactory in the narrator’s quest for truth as her contemporaries’recollections:You’ll have to ask what would become of all of us if we allowed thelocked spaces in our memories to open and spill their contents beforeus. But memory’s recall — which incidentally varies markedly inpeople who seem to have had the exact same experience — [...] maynot be a matter of choice. (MC 69, my emphasis)So Christa Wolf’s narrator, aware of the temptation that it is so much easier “toinvent the past than to remember it” (MC153,my emphasis), can only strive topresent her story, as honestly as she can. In her eyes, the story remainsincomplete, flawed and distorted, while conveying, through its subject matteras well as through its telling, what its creator ultimately wants, subjectiveauthenticity, a method that will allow a writer to do justice to reality. Thenarrator’s final capitulation at the enormity of the task of rendering objectivetruth is explained in these words:Ideally, the structure of the experience coincides with the structure ofthe narrative. This should be the goal: fantastic accuracy. But there isno technique that permits translating an incredibly tangled mesh,whose threads are interlaced according to the strictest laws, intolinear narrative without doing it serious damage. To speak aboutsuperimposed layers — “narrative levels” — means shifting intoinexact nomenclature and falsifying the real process. “Life”, the realprocess, is always steps ahead; to catch it at its latest phase remains anunsatisfiable, perhaps an impermissible desire. (MC 272)77