Manifold Borders and Encounters: Canada and Montreal in Mavis Gallant's 'Linnet Muir'

"As my own train crossed the border to Canada I expected to sense at once an air of calm and grit and dedication, but the only changes were from prosperous to shabby, from painted to unpainted, from smiling to dour. I was entering a poorer and a curiously empty country, where the faces of people gave nothing away".M. Gallant, Home Truths, Toronto, Macmillan of Canada, 1981, p. 222.As Linnet Muir crosses the US border and enters Canada in the opening short story of the eponymous sequence by the Anglocanadian writer Mavis Gallant, the image described is far from the idea of contemporary Canadian reality, multifaceted, multicultural, modern, technological. In the summer of 1941, the border between US and Canada divided not only different economies, but also social convention, attitudes - even towards war - and cultural activities. Place as Ashcroft, Griffiths e Tiffin [1] recall, is a complex interaction of language, history and environment, and it is marked by a sense of displacement. Particularly in Gallant's stories, space and places, selected and filtered by narrator's or characters' perception, contribute to shape a complex and thorough system of meaning, where its decoding is essential for text interpretation. Besides, Gallant's is a narrative of exile(s): places, spaces of exile and their relation with characters are decisive in their being exiles. Furthermore, a simultaneous superimposition of a double past vision of Montreal reveals itself to be the strategy of search and recomposition of Linnet's father figure. Places in this 'return sequence' map the past of Linnet and the fully aware growth of her new identity as a woman, a journalist and as a writer.As Brian McHaIe suggests in one of his seminal studies, «different dominants emerge depending upon which questions we ask of the text and the position from which we interrogate it» [2]. Therefore, the six stories of 'Linnet Muir' were examined in order to make a topological dominant explicit. As a more accurate topographical grid surfaced, it was evident that places - i.e., their features and functions - directed the textual interpretation, as they provide anwers to the queries pertaining both their ontologie and their epistemological dimensions.«How did my father die?»: that is the starting query of the investigation which is the reason for Linnet to come back to Montreal, together with the desire to sever all connections with her mother. She needed the city and its public and private places to recall her memories and to seek those who witnessed the events that led to the disintegration of her family. However, the different accounts that she obtained from her father's acquantainces and from her partial and sketchy memories led her to a version of her past which is neither definite nor truthful, already at the end of "In Youth Is Pleasure". Her inquiry then shifted from an openly epistemological level to an ontologie one, because her core queries became: «Who was my father? Who am I? In relation to which worlds can I define myself as an individual?»As it was impossible for Linnet to elicit irrefutable answers from people, she shifted her search towards the places connected to her memories of her father. Her queries then changed: «Where was (and is) my father?», «Where was (and am) I?», «In relation to my worlds (past and present), how can I define myself as an individual?». A dialectic is established between the places of her childhood and the same places that she found when she returned to Montreal. Indeed, places supplied her with the only empirical data from which to start her search again.Linnet's investigations display a crossing of manifold borders. They proceed from a time contemporary to the narrating voice, where an older Linnet, presumably speaking in the Seventies, questions two other different time levels, both of them past, confronting each other on the same ground, i.e. Montreal. To the topologically overlapping childhood and young years of Linnet correspond two images of Montreal used by the narrator to recreate the complexity of her past and her identity. …