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NIKOLA TUTEK
is undoubtedly depicted as original, sincere, honourable and truthful. On the
other hand, when the narrator describes her new home in British Columbia,
she states: “Pockets of fakery for tourists”.
Further binary opposition are the lives of the narrator and Lottar. An
Albanian village for Lottar is exactly what the bookstore is for the narrator;
a shelter and a safe port. Binary oppositions based on cultural input are
sometimes very subtle, as, for example in the names of the streets in Canada;
Charlotte and Gjurdhi live on Pandora Street, while the narrator lives on
Dardanelles street (with a strong cultural reference to the Balkans). Gjurdhi,
with his roughness and determination, is opposed to the civilised meekness
of Donald and Nelson. Finally, there is an interesting binary opposition
regarding cultural prejudice, more specifically, theft. During Lottar’s life as a
sworn virgin, she is sometimes given food by little girls. Once, the girls bring
Lottar a sheep’s head, and she wonders if they had stolen it. This is very much
the view of an outsider because the girls had no reason to steal the head, nor
would they dare to steal in the strict society in which they lived. Similar to
that, the Canadian assumed that Charlotte and Gjurdhi were stealing books
just because they looked different and, most of all, poor.
To conclude, if one wished to read an atypical Munro story but one
containing all the usual Munrovian writing techniques (switches, parallelisms,
ambiguity, unreliable narration, multiple endings, etc.), “The Albanian
Virgin” could be her or his first choice. Examples of Munro’s literary cultural
re-interpretation range from very refined and elaborated cultural comments
to much less successful examples which have quite a significant effect on
the perception and the critical acclaim of the story. The weakness of these
examples is partially redeemed by the fact that the Albanian part of the story
was told by an unreliable narrator, and then re-told by another narrator,
who might be equally unreliable. What is certain is that the short story
“The Albanian Virgin” provides deep insight into how a culture can be re¬
interpreted in a literary work and the impact of this narrative technique on
its artistic reach.
CONCLUSION
In “Five Points” and “The Albanian Virgin”, Alice Munro has shown two
diametrically opposed approaches to cultural appropriation. However, her
literary employment of elements of other cultures in the two stories share
some similarities. The table below summarizes literary techniques, semantic
layers, and functions in the development of plot of Munro’s employment of
cultural appropriation (reinterpretation) in two stories:
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