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

The Jordans. Remembered and Invented Pastworld of encyclopedias, just as Nelly distrusts Charlotte Jordan’s (she nevercalls her mother) pat proverbs and clichés both for moments of celebration andmoments of disaster.Both girls strive to acquire a language of their own. Nelly, irritated by theendings of fairy tales, would like to rewrite them, yet instantly checks herselfin much the same way that Munro’s heroines, Del and Rose, find themselveschecked when showing too much self assurance: “Who was she to find faultwith the endings of fairy tales?” (MC 89, my emphasis). Wolf’s phrase “Whowas she,” used in this context, does in fact correspond to the reprimand “Whodo you think you are?,” which Del encounters after she has let down her friendNaomi (see LG 161) and which will later become the title and leitmotif of awhole story sequence, Who Do You Think You Are? Thus both writers use astandard phrase that will challenge the respective heroine’s defiance against aworld in which words are handled carelessly. Apart from that, the questiondefines, in the most economical way, both protagonists’ quest for autonomyand self reliance.Del, striving for a language of her own, feels attracted by her aunts, in whosehouse “there was a whole new language to learn” (LG 31). When Del’steacher, Miss Farris, a spinster both lovable and ridiculous, drowns in theWawanash River, Del is faced with the problem of “hanging those picturestogether” (LG 118), memories of farce and memories of tragedy, some of themdocumented, others distorted by interpretation, a sum total of memory materialthat resists definition through language. Then, finally, there is Del’s abortiveattempt at fusing fact and fiction in a book about her hometown, a fantasy fromwhich she awakes with a shock, “[...] when you have dealt so cunningly,powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it is still there” (LG 209).Christa Wolf’s narrator expresses her desire to see “the structures ofexperience coinciding with the structures of the narrative, for fantasticaccuracy,” at the same time calling such a desire “unsatisfiable, perhapsimpermissible.” Alice Munro’s narrator, at the end of the novel, expresses avery similar desire, yet worded very differently:[...] what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech andthought, stroke of light on barks or walls, every smell, pothole, pain,crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting.(LG 210)But the emerging writer, the crafts woman in the protagonist, realizes that “thehope of accuracy” (LG 210) is illusory. Alice Munro had originally planned togive Lives of Girls and Women the title Real Life. As a novel of the same titlehad just come out in the United States, the original title had to be changed. 29Munro’s novel (if we disregard the metafictional appendix “Epilogue: ThePhotographer”) ends with these words: “[...] I supposed I would get started onmy real life. Garnet French, Garnet French, Garnet French. Real Life.“ (LG79