Oldal 96 [96]
OCR
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 reinterpreted 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: + 94 +
