Oldal 154 [154]
CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
conducted an overland expedition Írom the western shore of Hudson Bay to
the Arctic Ocean, and he surveyed part of the coast to the east of the Cop¬
permine River in northwestern Canada. After his return to England, Franklin
published Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years
1819, 20, 21 and 22 (1823). This work found its new reflection and reassessment
in Rudy Wiebes novel A Discovery of Strangers, first published in 1994, with
several Native points of view woven into the plot.
It is nothing new to read a fictional account of a historical event written in
the especially palimpsestic postmodern age, and due to the different historical
eras of their origin, the works necessarily exhibit divergent ideological points
of view, sometimes to the point of being termed revisionist (Birkwood 25). We
could name a few works which feature the original story reconsidered and seen
from a new point of view: Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (1853), a chron¬
icle of 19'"-century pioneer life by Susanna Moodie, an English emigrant to
Canada, rendered in Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996); Toni Morrison based Belo¬
ved (1987) on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman whose trial for infanticide
was discussed in the newspapers in 1856; Anita Diamant wrote a revisionist
history of one of the greatest stories ever told — the Bible itself. The story of
Dinah, Jacob’s abducted daughter, reappears in her novel The Red Tent (1997).
Numerous other examples could be found, ranging from Hilary Mantel to Eric
van Lustbader and Umberto Eco.
For the purposes of this research, we will consider A Discovery of Strangers
within a subcategory of postmodern narrative fiction which draws on an ear¬
lier historical text and fills its lacunae with credible, though invented storylines;
an approximate term would be “historical fiction”. The title itself may sound
ambivalent, in that it can refer to a discovery made by the anonymous narrat¬
ing subject (who discovered some strangers), or to a discovery of somebody
like the fictional narrator by certain strangers, two opposite views of one
particular occurrence. The relational matters become even more complicated
when the Canadian Natives engage in their cosmogonic story, where the first
man and the first woman, or the first bear and the first bird, initially act as
strangers to one another and then unfold the existence of hundreds of subse¬
quent generations.
FRANKLIN’S VIEW
The two-volume travelogue was first published in 1823, and it gained such
popularity that it already went into the third edition as early as the following
year. John Franklin’s historical account exemplifies the discursive practices
which pertain to the age of high colonialism, or we may even freely say, impe¬
rialism, which was reaching its zenith in the 19" century. The introduction
states that the objective was:
¢ 152 +