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Mavis Gallant’s short fiction : history and memory in the light of imagination

University of British Columbia

Since 1944, Mavis Gallant has published over one hundred short stories. Her position as Canada's foremost expatriate writer is subsumed in her importance as a major short story writer of the postwar era: I claim that her stories enact the distortions of history and memory caused by the social, cultural, and political upheavals of the second world war. Her stories depart from their realist ground to register impressionistically these fissures in time; style and structure teach readers to discern Gallant's theme in the forms of characters' returns to and evasions of the past. As Gallant traces these returns to moments in memory and history, her fiction modulates between apparent documentary realism and transparent impressionism, between scrupulously accurate representation of a historical world and reflexive commentary on memory's processes of invention. The structure of Gallant's fiction formulates characters' returns to missed moments of insight, returns which imply time's fractured progress in their circular eddies between present and past. Studying Gallant's fiction chronologically, I trace in Chapters One through Five the articulation of a broken dialogue between history and memory which begins with characters fleeing from history's reports into memory's fictions. This dialogue develops as postwar history swamps memory, stranding individuals in an attenuated present tense, and it culminates in characters' realization of history's moment as memory's home. In Chapter Five, I examine how these dialogues between memory and history resolve themselves in Gallant's Linnet Muir stories. I show how these lines of development underscore transformations in narrative structure, in point of view, treatment of time, and creation of character, and how the stories' settings evoke an opposition between North American and European visions of history. In Chapter Six, these analyses lead to a concluding study of imagination in Gallant's stories as a light which illuminates the convergence of history with memory, enabling characters to imagine a homecoming in time. Gallant's stories invite readers to consider the ways in which memory's objective portraits and subjective inventions develop into comments on the writer's art of calling the past into being.

Text

2010-04-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/24205

English

University of British Columbia

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