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NIKOLA TUTEK
Algerian erroneous, but the notary public? goes even further expressing his
doubt that Gjurdhi is a retired terrorist. Ihese false notions about Charlotte
and Gjurdhi pretty much summarize the usual prejudice that westerners
express towards immigrants from the east.
Besides the false notions on Charlotte and Gjurdhi, Munro provides
a complex set of hints that partially point towards that part of Charlotte’s,
and especially Gjurdhi’s real attitude, which is opposed to total assimilation.
For example, in several instances Gjurdhi is described as a bit of a nervous,
energetic yet withdrawn old man with strong gesticulations and facial
expressions, clearly pointing towards a southern European mentality. The most
important, in that sense, is the instance when the narrator is invited for a
dinner by Charlotte, and the couple which live, not by accident, on Pandora
Street. Charlotte and Gjurdhi prepared a dinner typical of Albania, which they
ate with their fingers. Furthermore, Gjurdhi sat on the floor and scooped the
rice up with bread. Once more, Munro used clothing and food to point out
some crucial features of her literary characters. In the end, Gjurdhi’s attempt
to haggle with the narrator over the price of a book comes as the final, and
somehwhat blunt proof of his cultural otherness.
However, there is yet another example of assimilation in the story, namely
that of the narrator. The narrator moved to Victoria, British Columbia just
to be far away from Ontario, where the end of both her marriage and her
love affair took place. In a way, the narrator was also assimilated in the new
city, the new part of the country, a new job and lifestyle. Finally, the narrator
was significantly influenced in her perception of culture by Charlotte’s story,
adding to the complex mesh of cultural assimilation and appropriation
presented in Munro’s story.
Binary oppositions used in depictions of a culture
By binary oppositions I consider couples of opposed semantic bundles referring
to characters, places and culture created by Alice Munro to express differences
in literary worlds and emotional gains/losses, which come as a result of the
direct decisions of the characters or are part of their unavoidable destiny. This
type of parallelism is typical of Munro’s writing, and is connected to what
Loschnigg calls the deceitful “surface solidity” in the sense that almost every
Munrovian plot provides several versions of itself, none of them presented or
confirmed as the definite truth. Such binary oppositions in “The Albanian
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Interestingly enough, the Notary Public gets attacked and beaten up but not robbed, as if
from an act of revenge, by an unknown perpetrator. This leaves space for the readers to
practice their own cultural prejudice and cast doubt on Gjurdhi.
Maria Löschnigg, The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English. Continuity and
Change, Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014, 23.
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