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It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
A Scottish element of Canada's diverse ethnographic history is uncovered by transformative acts of remembering family history in Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth," "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass" and "A Wilderness Station." The speaking subjects of "Friend of My Youth" and "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass" compose their narratives from Scottish-Canadian materials, thus grounding Scottish Reformation history, the kailyard genre, and the Scottish ballad in a Canadian context. These signs of Scottish culture enclosed in twentieth-century Canadian texts are attached to a variety of Canadian signifieds by their narratees; they are translated into a Canadian ground. Let me clarify what I mean by the rather slippery term of cultural translation: translation is a polyvalent process defined in part by the Oxford English Dictionary as "to bear, convey, or remove from one person, place or condition to another." This concept of movement from one locale to another lends insight into the signs of Scottish culture in Munro's stories. Scottish immigrants did not simply transpose their culture from one surface to another; they had to reshape or translate the New World into systems of meaning by bridging the gap between the Old World and the one in which they found themselves. Through this process they could begin to recognize the familiar in an alien space. The Old World signifying systems used to enact this transformation, however, are transformed themselves in a marrying of their cultural referents to new signifieds. The act of bridging a gap between two seemingly incommensurable systems, whether linguistic, temporal or cultural, necessarily creates a new entity.1Munro exploits the gap between Scottish cultural markers and their referents in her narratees' twinning of these signs with their own personal Canadian signs to construct a world.2
Scotland's is one of the many national pasts married to Canada's through immigration, and this hybridized Scottish-Canadian past must be negotiated by the narrator of "Friend of My Youth" and Hazel, the protagonist of "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," if they are to unravel their personal histories and discover who they are. As Homi...