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CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO... My analysis of the short story “Five Points” will be short because I will focus on only two points of discussion: 1. Literary deployment of passive elements of culture; 2. Cultural approximation in literature. This analysis will serve as a prelude to my analysis of “The Albanian Virgin”. Literary deployment of passive elements of culture By passive elements of culture, I mean all the instances when a cultural feature is mentioned in a literary text unexplained and undescribed. A feature of a culture is used as a passive leitmotif, which is important for the development of the narration and the characters. “Five Points” provides an illustrative example of such cultural re-interpretation. When Neil remembers Maria’s family taking over the candy shop, he is not certain about the family’s origin. Neil says: “After she died, some new people, Europeans, not Poles or Czechs but from some smaller country — Croatia; is that a country? — took over the candy store and changed it.”” This example shows Munro’s masterful use of dialogues in constructing literary characters. The sentence hints at at least two important aspects of Neil’s character. Firstly, he seems to be quite a superficial or at least a careless person who does not care much about details. It is a bit surprising that Neil actually knows that both Poland and the Czech Republic are bigger countries than Croatia. Secondly, and more importantly, this example shows that Neil feels he is in the position of power. When Neil asks “is Croatia a country?” that only emphasizes his power to distance himself from all of the facts that do not directly influence his life (and this is the attitude he partially has towards Brenda). Neil’s feeling of power and, perhaps, supremacy, is only reconfirmed when he states: “... she would call for her husband in Croatian, or whatever — let’s say it was Croatian — in such a startled way you’d think you'd broken into her house..." In this way, besides explaining Neil’s mentality, Munro also sets a semantic binary opposition between the two working classes in Canada: the Canadian working class (illusion of power) and the immigrant working class in Canada (mostly shut out from or unaware of power). Besides that, Neil’s statement shows that the man in the Croatian family was regarded by his wife as the one who solves problems, and that provides yet another layer of cultural commentry. Neil mentions Croatians two more times in the story. “Croatians”, without any explanation or description, is how he refers to Maria and her family. He is using this term purely mechanically, deploringly denying members of Maria’s family any personal or cultural identity; Neil is simply saying “Croatians kept 1 Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth, London, Vintage, 1996, 25. 20 Ibid., 26. + 79 +
