Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)
Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: Histories, Truths, Fictions. Interdisciplinary Relations of Historiography and Philosophy in the Context of Recent Western Canadian Fiction
history writing included. Bowering's view falls in with Harrison's when saying: Novelists who believe that history is a force or a law tend toward realism and naturalism —Zola, Dreiser, Hugh MacLennan. They believe that history speaks and teaches. Fiction writers who believe that history is someone's act of narrative tend toward myth and invention —Conrad, Borges, Robert Kroetsch. History comes from an old European word meaning possession of knowledge. Fiction comes from an old European word meaning the act of shaping. (Bowering "A Great Northward" 3) This fictional act of shaping provides an opportunity to shape the past through retelling stories in the course of historiographic metafiction. The relationship between history and fiction must be explored as well, "fiction of the historians and other fictions" with an "ironic awareness of the storyteller's own creative tendency to shape the past" (UC 184). Obviously, here the concept of history is not that much affiliated with scientific fact gathering about the past or the univocal presentation of memory traces but rather with a multiple perspective by the retelling of myths and legends: the creation of histories, truths and fictions —all in the plural. Other critics like Davidson, or writers Bowering and Kroetsch emphasize the distinctness of the Western Canadian notion of history present in literature that is accentuated powerfully by contemporary Fiction, as opposed to that of other regions and previous periods of Canadian literature. This distinctness —according to Harrison —comes from the fact that "Westerners tend to have rather an apocalyptic sense of time, to situate [themselves] in relation to the gigantic movements of Christian history of the world —creation, the fall, redemption, the apocalypse" (UC 190). This sense of time is "cyclic, eternal in its periodic repetition of day, season, generation, but it also shows the encroachment of the linear time of the new industrial society" (UC 191). Kroetsch explains the particular Western Canadian sense of time and concept of history as follows: "No, the West doesn't think historically. If the West accepted history, then its whole relationship to the country would have to change radically. I don't think that the West wants to move into a historical role, or to accept history. Myth is more exciting" (Neuman 134). 29
