Canadian Literature Section: Canadian Autobiographical Novels

Session Coordinator: Numsiri Kunakemakorn
Comparative Literature Program, Purdue University
kunakenu@uvsc.edu

Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands

Kroestch’s carnivalesque Badlands (1975) affirms distaff (auto)biography. As narrator Anna collects fragments of an Other’ s memories to (re-)constitute an ontological framework for her Self, she satirizes gender enculturation. Deploying Tilottama Rajan’s “autonarration,” I trace a necessary ambiguity in assumed masculine and feminine desire(s). Autonarrations “are not fictions but they are also not autobiographies,” and though not an exclusively women’s genre, they tend to put writers “in a female subject-position.” Badlands begins: “I am Anna Dawe.” Yet she instantly turns her attention to her absent father’s journal. Thus, her autobiography shifts via inheritance to transcription of his biography. She constructs a third person narrative, but always punctuated by the I-frame. A central, ambiguous idea to Anna’s narrative duplicity: “There are no truths, only correspondences” ( Badlands). Is Anna centre or margin? Both, but unstably so. With its implosion of word, time, memory, letter, and interpretation, correspondence becomes both impetus to (auto)narrate and frustrating Self reclamation. Through her father’s absurd quest, Anna successfully pursues correspondences between inheritance and (auto)biography, ‘male’ ambition and ‘female’ domesticity, homo- and hetero-social relations, false solitude and lonely family, ‘I’ and ‘We.’

Duncan Lucas
McMaster University
duncanal@interlynx.net

Interrogating the Representation and Interpretation of Historical Narrative in Alice Munro’s “A Wilderness Station”

Alice Munro notes that the inspiration for her story “A Wilderness Station” “takes off from my ancestors coming up to Huron County, except that I have completely invented a dreadful macabre incident that takes place”. Munro refers to the events surrounding the violent, mysterious death of nineteenth century Canadian wilderness settler Simon Herron and the stories about the complicity or innocence of Herron’s wife Annie and brother George in Simon’s death that are re-created in the documents that form “A Wilderness Station.”

Munro’s “A Wilderness Station” is a fictional representation that can be considered as a series of narratives portraying (in Hayden White’s terms) the “inexpungeable relativity” in representations of historical phenomena. By constructing a story that purports to re-produce a series of documentary narratives from a variety of discursive perspectives, Munro offers a story that both fictionally produces a series of conflicting notions about a specific event, but also re-produces in the reading experience of her fiction a challenge to the notion of historical narratives as ideologically neutral containers of fact. Munro’s piecing together of a multiplicity of narratives in “A Wilderness Station” emphasizes the fact that fictional as well as historical narrative is a production. Munro’s text challenges the notion that history is based on textual and factual certainty or mere discovery inscribed into a master narrative called “history.”

Paul Galante
Lehigh University
pag2@lehigh.edu