Seite 158 [158]
OCR
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 animal 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 alongside the English explorers wading into the “inexorable” (Wiebe 1) and “unrelenting 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 unimaginable 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 explorers. 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 +
