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

Another distinctive feature of recent Western Canadian writing is the special sense of space, the special relationship between sense of time and sense of place; as Bowering explains: the transformation of history (his-story) into her-story and his geography ("A Great" 9). It denotes providing other versions and interpretations of the past from gender and ethnic perspectives and presenting the typical white male quest for the layers of time in stories of un-layering the ground either as archaeological search, meaning a vertical quest, or as discovery / settlement / conquest of the land, denoting a horizontal one. In the West, as Bowering adds, "the layers are layers of earth rather than tiers of written records" ("Great" 19). This un-layering of time and space is located in new forms of the Canadian Western. In Margaret Laurence's fiction the central characters are victims trying to free themselves from the past. These novels present the need to examine the past critically but on its own terms, which means "a new awareness of traditional values rather than a radical rearrangement of them" (Harrison 204). However, a new step introduced by her in the development of Western Canadian historical novel is the discontinuity of memory as a post-realist tendency. Her characters, like Hagar Shipley and Stacey Cameron, keep telling their memories in a narrative that is frequently interrupted by either their own inner thoughts and feelings, or by impulses coming from their environments. Contemporary novels are motivated by archaeology in the Foucault-ian sense of the layers of land (geography, region) and in the layers of time (history), both central ideas in these kind of novels. Archaeology in the literal sense of the word is the central motif in Badlands. William Dawe's journey, un-layering, digging down in layers of prehistoric time parallels his daughter's pursuit of archaeology to find the fragments of her father's past and self-created myth, her archaeology in the layers of time and stories in a more abstract sense. Journey on the land is a general motif in most writings referred to as historiographic metafiction, it denotes the dynamic version of the vertical-man-in-horizontal-world scheme (Ricou's term). Here the horizontal movement of man into the environment is un-layering space with different purposes such as exploration, discovery, mapping and/or conquest

—different names for the same quest for something deeper located at the core of human identity and 30