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

IJCS/RIÉCmoment of harmony and contentment with her daughter and her husband ismeaningful. However painful and guiltridden her personal memories may be,life will flow on into an open future.In both Lives of Girls and Women and Kindheitsmuster, the importance of theriver as a carrier of meaning, is not merely incidental. It reveals aninterpretation of what initially seemed a freakish coincidence, the astoundingfact that two totally unrelated writers should choose the same family name,Jordan, for their family histories. We may assume that both Alice Munro andChrista Wolf have chosen the biblical name of the archetypal river as acomplex textual sign. Whereas the primary meaning of Jordan refers to theBible as the intertext linking the two novels, the secondary, “secularized” useof Jordan as a family name evokes a symbol of coherence and continuity inindividual lives as well as in family traditions. The religious connotation inMunro’s “Baptizing” episode is obvious. Del’s immersion in the river reflectsher refusal of being forced into a religious rite that might bind her forever. Hersurfacing signals a form of rebirth that restores her personal autonomy andintegrity.In Kindheitsmuster, the symbol “river” seems to carry a less obvious, butnonetheless significant religious meaning. We may interpret the central “riverepisode” as a crossing from guilt to innocence. (As shown in previousquotations, both “crossing” and “innocence” have been anticipated.) Thisinterpretation appears confirmed by Nelly’ experience of spirituality, reflectedin her state of inexpressible contentment and harmony. If we consider Nelly’sjourney into the past as a whole, this sensation of completeness, of a harmonyof body and soul, has brought her nearer to her professed aim, “to escape themortal sin of our time: the desire not to come to grips with oneself” (MC 406).For a theoretical grounding of an interpretation that sees Jordan as a symbol ofcoherence and continuity in family histories, Hans Robert Jauß’ criticalapproach may provide an adequate method. Whereas traditional literarycriticism used to assess a text’s inherent timeless values, Jauß’ negates thevalidity of fixed canons. His concept of “Horizontwandel” 3l sees the presentreader/critic involved in a continuous dialogue between past and present. Anyinterpretation of a text (be it poetic or non literary) will depend on thehistorically and culturally determined code of the respective reader’s/critic’shere and now. Arguably, the present day reader’s response to Lives of Girlsand Women and Kindheitsmuster, some twenty years after their firstappearance, may well disregard some of their historical or topographicalimplications and value them as exemplary childhood memories embedded infamily histories. The archetypal river and its reverberation in the family namesof the two protagonists, Del Jordan and Nelly Jordan, suggests indeed aparabolic dimension. In that sense, Kindheitsmuster and Lives of Girls andWomen may be seen as parables of universal experience. The titles point in thesame direction: “Kindheitsmuster” suggests a pattern, demanding to be reperformed in the reader’s imagination; “lives of girls and women,” a three fold82