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OCR
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 Coppermine 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 chronicle of 19'"-century pioneer life by Susanna Moodie, an English emigrant to Canada, rendered in Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996); Toni Morrison based Beloved (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 earlier 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 narrating 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 subsequent 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, imperialism, which was reaching its zenith in the 19" century. The introduction states that the objective was: ¢ 152 +
