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

general state of mind of Western Canadians Being West of History (13). In his view Canadians in general worry about being invisible for historic and political reasons. The result of their search for roots is different from that in the past. For instance Hugh MacLennan's onedimensional, realistic way of describing the past for the creation of a national consciousness opposes Wiebe's and Atwood's efforts to involve orality and other narrative versions of past experience somehow in their fiction; moreover there are fundamental differences of historical presentation in Central (Easter) and Western Canada. A basic subject, method and characteristic feature of these novels is the opposition of written history and orality, realist and modernist efforts (data-collection and reconstruction of events pretending there is only one possible truth) versus postmodern experiments to provide a multiplicity of perspectives that leave us certain questions unanswered and stories open-ended. Following J. Lyotard and the Poststructuralists in literature and philosophy, Kroetsch, Bowering and some other leading Canadian literary critics and writers tend to use the previously mentioned anti-closure strategies, i.e. multiple perspective narratives, dialogism, open-ended stories and the uncertainty of telling, along with the implied epistemological relativism. The overall aim is to dis-close the so called tyranny of narrative, to acquire freedom from the binds of unifying grand narratives given by the state, myth or religion, to create alternative histories through pushing the reader into epistemological and ontological doubts to show the necessity of a more tolerant way of thinking. The philosophical state of being west of History denotes Canadians' different concept of life as opposed to the European imagination as well as their "need to come to terms with their roots or ancestors," as another critic, Dick Harrison sees (Unnamed 183) and rediscovers the past in the course of retrospective fiction, "because it has been somehow misinterpreted, ... [bound by the] domineering colonial constrictions" (UC 184). Harrison adds that "Canadians' particular kind of national schizophrenia stems from a disparity between the historical and the mythic shapes given to their experience" (210). As it is known, the European linear concept of History is rejected in contemporary Canadian imagination, fiction and 28