1By interweaving multidirectional strands, Alice Munro endows the protagonists of her short stories with a rich intertextual line of descent which often reaches as far back as Antiquity. In the long short story entitled “The Albanian Virgin” from the collection Open Secrets (1994), Munro creates a series of intricate connections through which her story, initially based upon an alleged film script about the life of one character, an Albanian virgin at the beginning of the twentieth century, subsequently develops into the life story of a bookseller in British Columbia in the late twentieth century, before eventually splitting allusively into a multitude of other stories, either reclaimed from Christianity, Greek legends, literary history, fairy tales, English, American or Québécois literature. These embedded or collateral stories, issuing from overt or covert references, textually developed, or elliptically suggested, are arranged in contrasted pairings which either bear a relationship of apparent similarity or of antithesis to the originating Mediterranean story. They constitute a patchwork of competing possibilities and diverging life choices, each creating an alternative discursive universe, across vast spatial and temporal distances.

3In this essay, I will investigate some of the wealth and the workings of her explicit and secret intertexts to propose the hypothesis that the origin of her Albanian female hero can be traced all the way back to the character of Hero, a female priestess dedicated to Aphrodite who broke her vow of chastity because she fell in love with Leandros, a young Greek who swan across the Dardanelles to join her every night in her tower on a rock by the sea. Alongside the investigation of Munro’s adaptation of the Greek source and of some of its successive re-writing, I will also initiate an exploration of collateral allusions to illuminate the twists and turns she takes to problematize the notion of loyalty in this ever-proliferating and densely interconnected narrative.
 

4The convoluted plot is apparently made up of only two stories juxtaposed one to the other. The first narrative is that of a young Canadian woman named Charlotte who inherits the savings of her deceased parents and spends her time traveling to Europe, doing what is commonly known as “the Grand Tour.” When she reaches the Dalmatian coast, she goes on a horseback excursion in the mountains and finds herself ambushed. Her guide is killed, her horse rears up, she falls and breaks her leg. The brigands who killed her guide carry her on horseback to their remote Albanian village where they treat her wound. The young Canadian has witnessed a murder that would earn the brigands the death-penalty, and they are constrained to provide her with hospitality. However, they abuse the ancient law by trying to barter their cumbersome witness. They are about to marry her to a Muslim when she is saved in extremis by a Franciscan missionary who decides to protect her by having her change status. Thus, to escape further exile and forced marriage, she is compelled, as custom requires, to take an oath before the community of men in the village and to become a “sworn virgin” under the name of Lottar. Dressed in a man’s shirt and pants, with a rifle slung over her shoulder, she spends the summer alone tending sheep in the pastures at some distance from the community into which she was sworn. She learns to hunt hare and make yogurt, and she lives almost self-sufficiently.

5When winter approaches, with the prospect of food becoming scarce, the Franciscan monk suspects that the community will try to sell her again, and he leads her to Skodra in order to hand her over to the consular authorities. The rest of Lottar’s story, her return to Canada, her installation in British Columbia is passed over in silence, but the reader is led to understand that she has returned to her native land, found her original name, Charlotte, and married a stranger with a Mediterranean appearance, all of which suggests that the Franciscan monk who saved her life also followed her to Canada. The story of Charlotte and the Franciscan whom she married is therefore the story of the double repudiation of an oath. To be able to contract their marriage, Charlotte and the Franciscan both renounced the vow of chastity that they had taken separately. Their story is ultimately that of solemn vows that are not kept so that other vows can be made, and it problematizes the binary concepts of loyalty versus disloyalty by raising the question of divided loyalties and that of a hierarchy of loyalties.

6This story of a double breach of contract resulting in a new contract is juxtaposed to another story that takes place in the 1960s first in Ontario and then in British Columbia. This is the story of Claire, a young Canadian woman who is writing a thesis on Mary Shelley's lesser-known novels. She is married to a dermatologist and lives in a large house the basement of which is rented to another young couple, Nelson and Sylvia. Nelson, like Claire, is studying literature and soon engages in a passionate love affair with his landlady. By eventually revealing the adultery to the husband, he brings about the break-up of the two couples. Claire leaves Ontario and both her husband and her lover behind. With the money inherited from her parents, she opens a bookstore in Victoria, where she meets Charlotte and that is how she obliquely discovers the past of her new friend, who, however, never acknowledges this past as belonging to her, pretending it is a story she is writing for a film script. The short story ends with the parallelization of two scenes belonging to each of the two stories it juxtaposes. One scene that belongs to the future, is a hypothetic prolepsis, the other one that belongs to the past is an actualized analepsis. In the first scene, Nelson is waiting for Claire outside the door of her bookstore, no doubt, to offer to share her life. In the second scene, the Franciscan Gjurdhi is waiting on the quay in Trieste for the arrival of Lottar’s boat before embarking with her on a joint voyage to Canada.

7With these two scenes of reunion of lovers, Munro challenges the nature of vows, be them the vows of chastity in consecrated life, or the word given, the promise made in secular society. She tells the story of a marital breakdown by juxtaposing it with the story of a defrocked priest and a sworn virgin who betrayed her vow of chastity. She implicitly compares the marriage vow to the monastic or social vow; she relates the promise between a man and a woman to the solemn vows in the eyes of God or of the community. In characteristically ambivalent fashion, she highlights the truthfulness of the transgression of prohibition: Lottar and the Franciscan have broken their vow of chastity to be true to each other as Claire has broken her promise of loyalty to Donald, being true to her own deceitful nature.

8The overall story is a speculative case study: it provides a reflection on the tension between engagement and enfranchisement, allegiance and emancipation, adherence and release; it testifies to the need to consider Munro from the angle of moral philosophy and ethical questioning. Munro does not pass judgment on the transgressive behaviors of the characters she introduces; she exposes non-conformist, heterodox conducts and alternative lifestyles in order to explore a moral territory where loyalty and disloyalty are not necessarily antithetical but on the contrary coalesce or reverse into each.

9By choosing the character of a Franciscan for her first story and the name of Claire for the second one, Munro further engages in a metaphysical conceit at the same time as she connects the two plots together. The reader is invited to connect the Canadian character named Claire with another Claire, Saint Claire of Assisi (Santa Chiara), who was canonized by the Catholic Church, and is the founder of the order of poor ladies, the Poor Clares. She had a lifelong spiritual friendship with Saint Francis of Assisi, of whom she was a contemporary and, as such, she stands in diametrical opposition to the other character who is explicitly alluded to in the story, Claire Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Shelley on which novels Claire, the contemporary Canadian character, writes her thesis. Claire Clairmont, like Mary Shelley, led a very romantic life, with complex love entanglements, which incited her to chase Lord Byron throughout the Mediterranean. Through the overt and covert resonances suggested by onomastics, Munro creates a Claire triptych in which her Canadian contemporary fictional character is flanked on one side by an adventurous and footloose woman closely connected to the history of literature in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, and on the other by a saintly and sedentary nun belonging to the history of Catholicism in the thirteenth century in Italy, the two of them sharing their first name but having lifestyles and character traits which are polar opposites.

10The relationality established with Claire Clairmont extends to the cluster of women who surrounded Mary Shelley: “I loved to read about the other women who had hated, or envied or traipsed along: Harriet, Shelley’s first wife, and Fanny Imlay, who was Mary’s half-sister and may have been in love with Shelley herself, and Mary’s stepsister, Mary Jane Clairmont, who took my own name—Claire—and joined Mary and Shelley on their unwed honeymoon so that she could keep on chasing Byron” (Munro 111-12). At the same time as she enhances the sharing of her Canadian character’s name with Godwin’s stepdaughter, Munro multiplies covert allusions to Byron himself, for instance in the name that is given to the building where Claire settles upon arriving in Victoria. This building is called Dardanelles, a reminder of the feat of strength accomplished by the poet who swam across the Hellespont on 3^rd May 1810, and closely afterwards wrote a poem entitled “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” (Byron, “Written after swimming from Sestos to Abydos”). The poem clearly underlines a process of iteration and self-identification. When he “crossed the wide Hellespont” (Byron 64) Byron was re-enacting in the opposite direction a legendary crossing, that of Leander, a youth from Abydos, who had fallen in love with the consecrated virgin Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, and swam across the Dardanelles to join her every night in her tower built on a rock outside Sestos.

11As closely investigated by Julia Drobinski (139-58), this legend was originally spelled out by Virgil in Book 3 of the Georgics in six hexameters which did not name the heroine (probably because of her notoriety) but clearly established the scenario (Virgil, v. 258-263). Leander repeatedly swims across the strait to join his beloved but eventually dies at sea during a tempest, which in turn causes his beloved’s death. Ovid’s Heroids sets down a similar version which provides the protagonists with their names but remains unfinished because it is made up of fictive love letters exchanged between Hero and Leander and is necessarily interrupted by their death (Ovid, xviii, xix).

12In the fifth century, the story is notably picked up by Museus, the Egyptian poet who wrote in Greek and celebrated the secret union between the youth and the priestess, enhancing the transgression and bitter end of the heroes (Remacle et al., “Hero et Leander”). In the Middle Ages, a series of versions reemerged in various guises, and in different languages, and one can hardly hypothesize that Munro got acquainted with the versions by Guillaume de Machaux or Christine de Pisan. However, one may safely conjecture that she read Christopher Marlowe’s rendition of the legend. In 1593, in a poem he was never to finish, leaving the task to Chatman, Marlowe took up the legend providing a very sensuous rewriting of the nightly encounters between Hero and Leander:

to her tower he got by stealth.
Wide open stood the door; he need not climb;
And she herself, before the pointed time,
Had spread the board, with roses strew’d the room …
At last he came: O, who can tell the greeting
These greedy lovers had at their first meeting?
He ask’d; she gave; and nothing was denied;
Both to each other quickly affied:
Look how their hands, so were their hearts united,
And what he did she willingly requited.
(Sweet are the kisses, and the embracements sweet,
When like desires and affections meet; …) (Marlowe, l. 18-31)

There is little doubt that Byron knew Marlowe’s version and identified with Leander when he wrote to his mother from Istanbul shortly after having crossed the straight telling her that he “had no Hero to receive [him] at landing” (Byron, Self-Portrait 70).

13Unlike Byron, Lottar/Charlotte had the Franciscan “waiting for her on the dock” (Munro 128), and Claire had Nelson also standing in wait: “For this really was Nelson, come to claim me. Or at least to accost me, and see what would happen” (127). To accost signifies to approach someone but the history of the verb’s etymology is indicative of a boat drawing close to a coast: “Borrowed from Middle French accoster, going back to Old French, ‘to go alongside of, sail along the coast of, place (a vessel) beside another’” (Merriam-Webster, Accost). The use of the verb “accost” to describe Nelson’s move strikingly reinforces the parallelization with Gjurdhi waiting for Lottar as her boat draws near the coast at Trieste. It significantly reiterates the legend of Hero and Leander but, in her adaption of the transgressive reunion of lovers, Munro transforms genders and outcome. Instead of having a man perform a heroic crossing, she allows women to be the heroines on a voyage along the Dalmatian coast (Charlotte), and the CPR line (Claire) while men follow them and stand in wait to receive their beloved at landing or to accost them. And instead of having the lovers succumb to divine retribution and drown, she leaves the outcome unresolved, but not hopelessly and implacably tragic.

14Munro revises, reverses and complicates the moral stakes of the legend. Lottar, like Hero is a sworn virgin who has committed herself to chastity. By falling in love with Gjurdhi and marrying him after her return to Canada, she proves herself disloyal to her vows, but at the same time she gives expression to the truth of her emotions and disengages herself from a situation in which she was held hostage and had no agency in the governing of her life. Claire equally proves herself disloyal by committing adultery with Nelson while married to Donald. As such she stands in sharp contrast to her namesake, the Italian saint who renounced the love she bore the Franciscan to dedicate herself to God. Like her other namesake, the British adventuress, she yields to what she ironically calls (and partly repudiates) “the mishmash of love and despair and treachery and self-dramatizing” (Munro 112). Claire represents herself as fundamentally disloyal. In her fantasy of reunion with Nelson, she contemplates marrying him, but does not even envisage remaining loyal to him. She imagines having a child by Nelson and falling in love with an intern she meets at the hospital during labor (127), in the same way she fell in love with Donald after a dermatological consultation.

15“The lady is disloyal,” says Claudio about Hero in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (III, 2). The question of loyalty is as much the moot point of Shakespeare’s comedy as of the legend of Hero and Leander and both are a source of inspiration for Munro’s rewriting of the original story. In the original legend, the tragic fate of the lovers who perish at sea is a retribution that designates their common flaw. They have both transgressed the prohibition of sexual intercourse and most of the following rewritings enhance the tragic denouement of their transgression.

16Shakespeare avoids giving the legend a tragic end: he transforms the tragedy in a joyous marriage ceremony because Hero’s loyalty is eventually ascertained, and harmony restored, yet, as demonstrated by Patricia Warey (264-85), the constant turnaround undergone by the characters renders the very concept of honor and the definition of loyalty fundamentally unstable. Hero passes from the status of “modest young lady,” “sweetest lady that ever I looked on” (I, 1) to that of “foul-tainted flesh” (IV, 1, 141) back to “my Lady Hero…. falsely accus’d (V, 2, 90-91). The male characters themselves, whether Hero’s father, Leonato, or her suitor, Claudio, or the king of Aragon, Don Pedro, all discredit themselves through their inability to believe in her innocence. Their vile rebukes and the disdain with which they consider Hero stand in clear opposition to the very claims of honor that they proffer to the extent that the play has been envisaged as highlighting “the changing nature of honor” (Warey 283).

17Likewise, Munro’s story can be regarded as a re-examination of the validity of oaths and the changing nature of loyalty through the juxtaposition of similar or antithetical stories. Claire’s story is similar to Lottar’s since the former broke the marital vow while the latter broke the promise made to the community. Lottar’s story as a consecrated virgin who broke her promise is similar to Hero’s as a consecrated priestess of Aphrodite. However, the story of Lottar and Gjurdhi is diametrically opposed to that of Saint Francis and Saint Claire. The saints exemplify the orthodoxy of the promise kept, whereas Lottar and Gjurdhi testify to the heterodoxy of successive loyalties. Munro provides her Albanian virgin, with two names and a bifurcated life (Lottar’s and Charlotte’s) as a linguistic sign of her plural allegiances. She provides Gjurdhi with a trifurcated denomination. He is first referred to as “the Franciscan” (Munro 83), when living in Albania close to the village where Lottar is held hostage. Charlotte calls him “my husband Gjurdhi” (118), after they have succumbed to temptation and moved to British Columbia, in a street of Victoria appositely named “Pandora Street.” Finally, he is referred to by the Notary Public, a customer in Claire’s library, as “the Algerian”: “I call them the Duchess and the Algerian” (118). This geographic origin is worth investigating to understand the overall pattern chosen by Munro for the delineation of her characters’ moral itinerary.

18“The Algerian” is obviously a misnomer since Gjurdhi was originally born in Italy of Albanian parents (Munro 103), but his Mediterranean type might have led the Notary to mistake him for a man of Arab descent. We may ascribe a more cunning origin to this geographic reference. After implicitly suggesting that Gjurdhi and Charlotte’s story was the antithesis to that of Saint Francis of Assisi and Santa Chiara, Munro may very well have added a secret reference to another father of the Church, whose Confessions have left a deep imprint in the history of Christianity. The Algerian could be a secret reference to Saint Augustine of Hippone who was born in Algeria (then called Numidia) in the city of Thagaste. After studying in Carthage and in Italy, he returned to his native town, where he became a Bishop. His itinerary was more erratic than saint Francis’. As he revealed in his Confessions, his youthful life was dissipated and he did not easily renounce pleasure, living for a while with a concubine and fathering a child. As stated by one of his translators: “warned by his humiliating defeats, he came to realize that the libidinal drive was the most fearsome force man had to overcome during his progress on earth” (Pierre de Labriolle 42, my translation).

19In her carefully and symmetrically designed story, Munro creates a Franciscan triptych alongside her Claire triptych. With his first description as an emblematic Franciscan and with his being called the Algerian afterwards, Gjurdhi the Canadian book peddler finds himself flanked by two tutelary figures of mendicant orders, saint Francis, the immaculate and saint Augustine, the redeemed sinner. Gjurdhi was originally as blameless as saint Francis before he became a prey to temptation as saint Augustine in his youth. Gjurdhi’s discontinuous itinerary, intercalated as it is between the saints’ progress testifies once more to Munro’s questioning of the concept of loyalty from a comparative perspective and through emblematic figures drawn from the history of Christianity.

20Charlotte is equally submitted to a comparative re-examination, that remains surreptitious and behind-the-scenes. By designating Charlotte as the Duchess, the Notary Public proposes an enigmatic comparison that the story does not elucidate. It constitutes a tantalizing charade that calls for investigation and interpretation. In the duplicitous context created by a story of multiple disloyalties, Munro may easily be assumed to have turned her attention to the duality of language itself. The official languages of Canada are English and French, and under the circumstances it stands to reason that the wealth of intertextual allusions may not be limited to works written in English, but may also include representative works of Québécois literature. In the third volume of his Chroniques du Plateau Mont Royal entitled La Duchesse et le roturier, Michel Tremblay has created a memorable character, Edouard, who calls himself “la duchesse.” Edouard is a male transvestite who sells shoes during the day and transforms himself into an aristocratic lady at night. He describes himself as a commoner by day and a blue blood at night: “la roture le jour, le sang bleu le soir” (320). Edouard’s transformation is a move from one gender to another, one class to another, one country to another and his transformation is entwined in an infinite seriality because, when playing the part of “la duchesse,” Edouard is actually impersonating Antoinette de Navarreins, duchesse de Langeais, as acted out by a French actress he admires. He goes as far as taking up his favorite voice, that of Edwige Feuillère dying in La Duchesse de Langeais: “Il prit sa voix favorite, celle d’Edwige Feuillère mourante dans La Duchesse de Langeais” (321). Edouard mimicks Edwige Feuillère, who herself impersonates a duchess, who herself was a fictional character created by Honoré de Balzac in 1834 after a real life contemporary of his, la marquise de Castries. La Duchesse de Langeais is the story of an unfaithful woman which was given a filmic adaptation in 1942 by Jean Giraudoux. By allowing Charlotte to be called “la duchesse,” Munro activates an open serialization of disloyalties in which she integrates her own rendition of “la duchesse” in the wake of those created by three emblematic writers in the French language: Michel Tremblay, Honoré de Balzac, and Jean Giraudoux.

21In virtuoso fashion, Munro even juxtaposes the high mimetic with the low mimetic through the reclamation of popular songs. Michel Tremblay’s novel La Duchesse et le roturier climaxes with a show held in a grand auditorium in Montreal called Le Plateau where Tino Rossi in person sings “Je t’attendrai”: I will wait for you. The melodramatic sensational song about a deserted lover who promises to continue waiting for the one who has betrayed brings tears to the eyes of the women in Edouard’s family and to the audience in the auditorium, because they all know that the one who is waited for will never come back. It is a very emotional moment in the lives of the Québécois characters, and they will cherish the memory of this show for the rest of their lives.

22Munro turns her back on the tragic end given to star-crossed lovers. At the beginning of the Nobel Prize lecture that she gave in absentia through a pre-recorded video, she indicated that after being read “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen, she felt the urge to make up a story with a happy ending because she considered that the little mermaid deserved more than death (“In her own words”). I would go as far as saying that reversing the stakes of the original story is what Munro has continually engaged in throughout her literary career. Certainly, in “The Albanian Virgin,” she reverses the fate of Hero and Leander, because she allows both Charlotte and Claire to be waited for and eventually or possibly reunited with their loved one.

23Activating frameworks of recognition through chains of association, Munro intercalates legends, literary history, religious history, plays, poems, novels, films, songs and weaves a remarkably rich cultural web around the characters of Charlotte and Claire. With her strategy of surreptitious inclusion of intertextual references, Munro constantly appeals to the reader’s encyclopedia, and this appeal is more enriching than elitist. The width and scope of the intertextuality she deploys is such that a great part of her allusions is recognizable from all walks of life. The recondite allusions are playfully contiguous with the most well-known references. For instance, the recherché legend of Hero and Leander adjoins one of the most familiar stories from American Children Literature. In 1952, E. B. White wrote a tale entitled Charlotte’s Web. In this tale, Charlotte is a literate spider who befriends a piglet and promises him that she will find a way to save his life. To prevent him from finishing his short life on the Christmas table, she weaves compliments (for instance “Some Pig!”) on the web above his sty. She unleashes a protective aura of awe and wonder around her young friend, who is saved by the power of words. When Munro describes Lottar/Charlotte lying in a hut in Maltsia e madhe, she takes pains to describe the cobwebs that are hung over her: “She was really seeing cobwebs, all thick and furry with smoke―ancient cobwebs, never disturbed from year to year” (Munro 82). There is little doubt that Munro is opening her story to intertextual echoing and the covert allusion to Charlotte’s web cannot pass unnoticed. It is neither contingent, nor merely destined to be amusing; it is overdetermined by the fact that Charlotte, the spider, makes a promise to Wilbur, the piglet, and proves true to her promise. As a loyal friend who keeps her promise and invents life preserving stratagems, she differs from Lottar/Charlotte but proves similar to Gjurdhi. Munro transfers and complexifies ethical behaviours from one source to another, she duplicates them in part and stretches them recursively from different past and future moments in such a way that she breaks down the binary categorizations and boundaries between loyalty and disloyalty.

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both. (184)

Charlotte’s loyalty and her ability to write has ensured Wilbur’s safety, the continuance of his devotion to her, and the inclusion of her heroic feat in Munro’s own web. Through the use she makes of familiar and recherché intertextual references, Munro enhances relationality. She stresses the intertwining of stories, the common heritage they share, and the connectedness such interlacing brings about. She shows her stories to be linked to other stories, characters to other characters, writers to other writers: she creates family connections between stories She provides an account of the descent of stories by taking into consideration the similarities and the differences they have inherited from each other. Through intertexual relationality, she bridges spatial, temporal, and cultural gaps and traces new lines of descent and of evolutionary development for the short stories she produces.

25At the same time as she performs this quasi-genealogical task, she gives pride of place to a particular location: the bookstore which is supposed to contain all stories. The bookstore stands at the heart of the construction of the Claire and Charlotte story, but it also occupies a prevalent place in Munro’s life. In “March of 1964” (Munro 104), Claire opens a bookstore in Victoria thanks to the money inherited from her parents. Even though Munro did not inherit the money from her deceased parents, she also opened a bookstore in the same city one year earlier, as a joint venture with her first husband, Jim Munro (Thacker 178). Through the bookstore opened by Claire in Victoria, Munro recycles autobiographical material and creates a new type of genealogical descent for her heroine and for her own story because the fictional bookstore opened by Claire in Victoria bears a great resemblance to the referential place that she herself opened in real life in the same city. For instance, Claire’s bookstore is described as a meeting place for bohemian people in the same way the real, historical “Munro’s Books” became a small literary landmark, where people socialized. In the Nobel Prize interview, this is how Munro describes herself on the premises:

I used to sit behind the desk and find the books for people and handle all the things you do in a bookstore, generally just by myself, and people came in and talked about books a lot, it was very much a place for people to get together rather than immediately buy things, and this was especially true at night, when I’d be sitting here by myself, and I had these people come in every night, talking to me about something, and it was great, it was a lot of fun. Up until this point I had been a housewife, I was at home all the time, I was a writer as well, but this was a wonderful chance to get into the world. I don’t think we made much money, possibly I talked to people a little too much, you know, instead of getting them to buy the books, but it was a fantastic time in my life. (“In her own words”)

The description could very well apply to Claire’s life in her bookstore, but it could also apply to Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont’s who grew up in the bookstore called “The Juvenile Bookshop.” It was opened by William Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont in 1805 in London. In the words of Pamela Clemit speaking about Godwin: “Together with his second wife, Mary Jane Godwin (they married in 1801), he launched a bookshop and publishing imprint dedicated to educational books. In writing for the young, he achieved a success even greater than in his works for adults” (Clemit “William Godwin’s Juvenile Library”). Jim and Alice Munro did not set up a publishing house, but another bookstore also located on the Pacific Coast of North America undertook this task and gained international recognition. In 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened a bookstore which still exists in San Francisco: it was called the “City Lights Booksellers and Publishers” and constituted a major landmark, a place where counterculture was in the process of burgeoning. Counterculture, which would become the culture of the Beat Generation, was based on a new definition of what literature was supposed to be about. The City Lights Booksellers and Publishers accepted to publish the poem by Allen Ginsberg entitled “Howl” which became a “cause célèbre,” since the publishers were prosecuted for obscenity. Munro does not allude directly to the City Lights bookstore, but she allows Charlotte to mention the name of the bookstore’s founder when, inside Claire’s bookstore, she exclaims: “‘Here’s the new bunch, then,’ she said. ‘Oh, my,’ she said widening her eyes at the photographs of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti” (Munro 116). Similarly, Munro does not directly allude to the other famous bookstore, “Shakespeare and Co,” founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919 in Paris but she allows Charlotte to mention Paris as well as Anais Nin and Henry Miller who were regular patrons of that bookshop.

26There is little doubt that the bookstore constitutes the referential place par excellence in the short story as well as in the whole of Munro’s works. It is a self-referential place which reflects Munro’s experience, but it is also the place where all the stories in the world are indexed, the place which shelters them, embeds them, superimposes them. It could be compared to the description given by Jorge Luis Borgès of the Aleph: “one of the points in space which contains all the other points” or “the place where all the places in the universe can be found without their being mixed one for the other, seen under all angles” (660, my translation). The vast array of intertextual allusions all connected to her initial nucleus allows Munro to perform a type of spatial, temporal, epistemological expansion that transgresses the limits of ordinary ontological and ethical categories.

27With the sociological phenomenon of the sworn virgin of Albania as her starting point, Munro develops a short story which establishes links between her fictional characters, Claire, Donald, Nelson, Charlotte, the Franciscan and people who really existed like Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Lawrence Ferlinghetti or saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Claire. Simultaneously, she complicates the binary differences between those who exemplify loyalty and those who exemplify disloyalty by forcing an inquiry into the need for such a construction and by highlighting the lability of apparently clear-cut categories. Munro synchronizes the life of her fictional characters with the lives of writers from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries in Great Britain or the United States who led lives of romantic dissipation as well as with that of saints from twelfth or thirteenth century-Italy who exemplify the highest dedication to spirituality, inviting the reader to examine life choices which all find their source in human desire.

29This type of aggrandizement of experience, creating reverberations of characters across time and space, has something extra-ordinary and uncanny about it. The uncanny dimension of the merging of selves ad infinitum is set into relief by a supplementary allusion. Before setting up her bookstore, Claire was engaged in writing her thesis on the lesser-known novels of Mary Shelley, one in particular entitled Perkin Warbeck. Perkin Warbeck was a pretender to the throne of England, who was hanged by Henry VII who considered the man to be an impostor who threatened his own legitimacy on the throne of England. The young Warbeck was taken by the Irish People to be the earl of Warwick and he was used as a tool to destabilize the Tudor Monarchy (Perkin Warbeck Encyclopedia Britannica). By making this oblique and apparently innocuous reference to imposture, Munro slyly integrates the theme of usurpation of identity into her story and leads the reader to reconsider the stakes of the narration regarding loyalty and disloyalty.

30“The Albanian Virgin” is a story about assuming different identities, passing from one gender to another, from one self to another, from one commitment to another, from one country to another: it is about inventing new identities, and recognizing one’s singularity through a process of infinite, duplicate, and antithetical images whereby the self becomes other, and the other an impostor or perjurer. Among the many questions that this infinite duplication raises, the one that stands out is that of duplicity. How can the self undertake the responsibility of giving a truthful, sincere, account of his or her own self that is not bifurcated, conflicted and pluristable, when the experiences he or she undergoes entail a process of othering and when language itself opens depths that are impossible to fathom?

31The last sentence of the text provides an illuminating example of the duplicity of language. Charlotte is on the boat that takes her from Albania to Italy and she is longing for the Franciscan who rescued her: “She called him and called him, and when the boat came into the harbor at Trieste, he was waiting on the dock.” Munro plays with the polysemy of poetic language. In English the word “dock” has several meanings; it can be an area of water in a port that can be closed off and that is used for putting goods onto and taking them off ships or repairing ships but it is also “the place in a criminal law court where the prisoner sits or stands during trial” (Merriam Webster).

32By finishing her story “on the dock,” Munro assigns herself and her characters a place in court. She suggests that the function of telling stories is ultimately to allow characters to give an account of themselves. “Giving an account of oneself” is the title of an essay by Judith Butler published in 2005 from a series of conferences she gave in the department of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 2002. This essay interrogates the formation of the subject, the process of subjectification and the subject’s responsibility. Among other issues of moral philosophy, Butler interrogates the ethical violence which is done to the subject compelled to keep a single and coherent identity when it is impossible to have access to a full knowledge of oneself. She calls on the necessity to revise one’s ethical judgment according to this impossibility for the subject to fully comprehend his or her behaviour. The opacity and incompleteness that the subject is confronted to is what Munro equally emphasizes, highlighting the necessity to be humble in front of this impossibility for the self to be transparent to him or herself.
 

33Munro delineates a multiplicity of stories and a multiplicity of selves, interrelating family history and literary history with real and imaginary biography or autobiography. She sets herself the task of constituting a feminine genealogy for her transgressive bookseller and her bohemian doppelganger at the same time as she endows her story with a family network with lines of descent through Romantic nineteenth century, chaste Middle Ages, and voluptuous Antiquity. She makes it her ethical responsibility to reclaim the preceding stories that have been buried or forgotten and to make their similarity or contrast resurface in the contemporary world. More subversively, she questions the antinomy between loyalty and disloyalty to such an extent that she intimates their possible interchangeability. Her interrogation about the permeability of the frontiers between loyalty and disloyalty develops against a background of great porosity that also questions the stability of gender as much as the status of the accounts that are given of the characters. The fact that Charlotte presents what is likely to be her autobiography as a film script cast doubts on the frontier between fact and fiction just as the fact that Munro refrains from mentioning the legend of Hero and Leander while partly adapting it from autobiographical material further blurs metaleptic limits between stories and real life. Ultimately, by choosing to reveal and conceal the genealogy of her heroines strikingly descended from “Hero,” Munro is also trickily claiming and disclaiming their heroic status.