Seite 158 [158]
CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
apart from a plain exploratory history. In fact, A Discovery of Strangers covers
the dialogical territory shared both by historiography and fiction, and we do
not have to call it strictly “metafiction” because the narrator never breaks the
fourth wall of illusion by betraying their presence to the reader. Even the ani¬
mal minds lie wide open to the ubiquity of this psycho-narration, which never
occurs in Franklin’s historical account.
Chapter 2, “Into a Northern Blindness of Names,” throws the reader along¬
side the English explorers wading into the “inexorable” (Wiebe 1) and “unre¬
lenting land” (Wiebe 11) of the unmapped extreme north of the British Empire,
as a conquering civilisation usually has little regard for the original signifiers
and the relations they form with the so-called objective natural phenomena.
Wiebe allows for the existence of an omniscient narrator in certain chapters,
one closer to the Natives than to the invading Whites, a technique unimag¬
inable in Franklin’s writing practice. The multiple point of view of A Discovery
of Strangers sheds much light on the Native vision, through which the English
are presented with “bandy legs and ridiculous clothes” (Wiebe 16), being too
hierarchically oriented to the tribe’s taste, too selfish and always asking for
assistance and food. The English may think that they have ventured into an
utter void, a space with no identifiable elements of civilisation, but it only goes
to show their own ignorance and lack of preparation before setting out into
the Great North. For anybody immersed in the landscape, it is as natural as
an Oxfordshire countryside trail is to a Briton, but they have to be reared in
the ways of the North beforehand; semiotically speaking, the inhabitants must
learn how to read and decode the “symbols” of the surrounding world, its
figurative morphology, syntax and semantics, and only then can they use nature
for their benefit. The ill-prepared, even haughty English begin to stumble with
the provisions, logistics and deadlines as soon as they disembark from the ship,
which painfully dots Franklin’s narrative on hundreds of occasions and conveys
accurately the hardships over the protracted several seasons of mapping and
other forms of measurement for His Majesty. The Natives also know adversity,
but they view it not from an anthropocentric position, like the English explor¬
ers. They practice such communal life in the subarctic regions as eliminates
much of unbridled egoism and the perilous situations it may cause if it fails to
acknowledge the succour of nature.
A play of wolves near the tribal camp also prefigures events in the novel: a
female dances with an alpha male, refusing the advances of another male, who
gets regular serious warnings: “and the silver wolf would whirl on him, forcing
him to creep back, crouch and fawn, even to roll over on his back with paws
helpless in the air...” (Wiebe 5). The sympathy for the loser in the game is all
too evident by way of human allegory: “When the white wolf finally permitted
the silver male to mount her, the brown wolf sank down with his long, sharp
head along his paws, watching them intensely” (Wiebe 5). When the pack kills
s 156 +