Mavis Gallant's “Virus X” is several different stories all happening at the same time: a story about two young Canadians abroad and the unlikely friendship that develops between them; a story about a sociology thesis that fails to get written due to the incapacitating but ambiguous illness of its author; a story about temporal, spatial, and conceptual dislocations; a story about split subjects that can be read as an allegory of the Canadian sense of self; an homage to Katherine Mansfield; a fairy story, or at least romance, in which the delicate heroine, pining under an evil enchantment, is rescued at the eleventh hour by the most stalwart (if stolid) of white knights. All these stories—and doubtless many others—wander like strangers through a maze, jostling one another repeatedly, but never joining forces in any determinate and definite way. In this paper I follow one of those strangers through the configurations of Gallant's textual maze. This stranger I have chosen to call, anachronistically but conveniently, multiculturalism—one of the most problematic of recent Canadian “isms,” and one which, under various other names and guises, had shaped the Canada with which Gallant would have been familiar in 1965, the year “Virus X” was first published.

The ruling principle of Gallant's text is indeterminacy, and this poses obvious pitfalls for its readers, or would-be producers of meanings. The reproach Vera aims at Lottie—“Why do you think one piece is all of everything?”—could easily be aimed at anyone trying to isolate one strain of a diffuse and variegated text. And yet in my own defence, I will point to Lottie's rejoinder: “What else can you do?”—a reply no more or less authoritative, as far as “Virus X” is concerned, than Vera's reproach itself. What I'd like to suggest in this essay is that by her exposure of the problematic role played by ethnicity in Canada's social formation, Gallant offers us a critique of what has become the ideology of multiculturalism, based as it is on the contention that this country has achieved the harmonious integration of its various immigrant communities by accommodating rather than eradicating the ethno-cultural differences that distinguish them from the established norm: White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.

In some ways “Virus X” is a Canadian version of “The Other Paris,” first published in 1953, the year in which “Virus X” takes place. Both texts deal with North Americans in postwar Europe, specifically France. Yet, whereas the earlier story deals with Americans lodged in the city of light, condescending to, resentful of, and baffled by the war-impoverished but still snooty French, “Virus X” gives us a pair of Canadians who soon quit Paris for the very margins of France: Strasbourg, a host of towns on the French-German border, and, finally, a dismal, war-scarred German village. While the American Carol Frazier and the Canadian Lottie Benz are attracted by the exotic, even squalid “otherness” of the real Europe they inadvertently discover, they are eventually rescued from foreigness and difference by the men they will eventually marry: an all-American boy and a “Conservative Canadian type” (212), respectively.

Yet, there are important differences between “Virus X” and “The Other Paris”—differences that spring from what, after Gallant, we might call a “national sense of self” (Gallant, “Home” xv). In brief, the Americans have too much of one; the Canadians far too many. Lottie Benz and Vera Rodna, the heroines of “Virus X,” spend much of their time in Europe fighting battles that began back in Canada, battles that, since they have to do with whether German Lottie or Ukrainian Vera is more “Canadian,” problematize, if they do not entirely undercut, the thesis topic Lottie has come to Europe to research—a thesis topic that reads like a succinct definition of what we now extol as multiculturalism: “the integration of minority groups without a loss of ethnic characteristics” (Gallant, “Virus” 78).

Lottie's choice of thesis can be related to Gallant's early engagement with ethno-cultural difference. Her first published stories were unsentimental yet sympathetic accounts of Austrian war-refugees in Canada; in 1947 she published an article in The Montreal Standard expressing concern about the consequences of East European immigration to Canada. This article, “Are They Canadians?,” while it does not argue that Canada's lack of a melting-pot is necessarily a bad thing, does hold out for the American method of acculturating non-western European immigrants. Newcomers to the United States, Gallant points out, are not only entitled to free instruction in English but they are also provided with a strongly defined sense of what it means to be an American—an ideological as well as linguistic education, we might observe. Immigrants to Canada, Gallant insists, must be taught that there is no place here for those violent offshoots of (old country) nationalism that had so recently led to catastrophe in Europe. As for Canadians born and bred, we must reject our long-established forms of ethnic or racial privileging and discrimination. As Gallant observes, “When you force a Canadian of European parentage to look upon other Canadians as English or French it is natural for him to cling to his own group, to worry about another country, and the conflicts, hates and prejudices of the old world” (Gallant, [“Are They Canadians?”] 6-7).

Lottie Benz and Vera Rodna are just such Canadians of European parentage, caught up in the prejudices not only of their parents and grandparents but of the dominant social group as well—the English-Canadians, or, as I will refer to them for the sake of brevity, the Anglos. Though Lottie, a graduate student on a research grant, and Vera, exiled because of a now-distant, illegitimate pregnancy, have both grown up in the same city and have even gone to the same school, all they have in common is a shared sense of difference—not so much between their Canadian selves and Europe, as between themselves as Canadians. This difference derives from the fact that they are split subjects, not simply Canadian, but German-and Ukrainian-Canadians—what in our less felicitous moments we have called “ethnics” and what current parlance terms “multicults.”

The Canadians we meet in “Virus X” are all hyphenated, or ethnically situated. Besides Lottie and Vera, we have Dr. Keller, Lottie's thesis supervisor, originally from Alsace, and Vera's current boyfriend, Al Wiczinski. “A Polish friend from home,” as Vera describes him, he ends up living in a “Right-Wing Bohemia” of Polish expatriates outside Paris (184; 201). Kevin, who becomes Lottie's fiancé by the story's end is, we are told, “probably Irish, but being a Protestant, he counted as English” (207). To be “English-Canadian,” of course, is also to be hyphenated, and perhaps this is why, once abroad, even the Anglos have problems establishing who they are. Thus Kevin's churlish diplomatic-corps cousin, whom Lottie sees briefly during her stay in Paris, bemoans his lack of Canadian identity. “He did not want to sound American,” we are told, “but looked it” (181).

Gallant's exploration of ethnicity in “Virus X”—ethnicity as a constituent of whatever it means to be Canadian—is, as one might expect, thoroughly discomforting. Lottie Benz and Vera Rodna, mere acquaintances in Winnipeg, are drawn together by a kind of fatality of circumstance once they situate themselves outside their home and native land. Back on the continent that their families had once fled, they are forced to talk to one another; in this way a discourse of difference (as opposed to silent prejudice) comes into being between them. This discourse is articulated in the text in two interconnected ways: by the creation of a binary opposition between Lottie and Vera as ethnic “types,” and by the interplay of signifiers popularly recognized as the hallmarks of ethnicity—food and dress.¹

Lottie and Vera are presented as total opposites: Lottie as small, frail, feminized; either genuinely sickly or emphatically hypochondriachal; Vera as tall, with “mechanic's hands” and a constitution robust enough to let her get by with little or no sleep, breakfasts of red wine and rock-hard cheese, and the cheapest of hotel rooms (178). Obedient Lottie has always been petted and protected by her family, naughty Vera virtually disinherited by hers. Prudent Lottie is fearful and anxious about anything that could change her established situation or condition—extravagant Vera is a “restless pilgrim” (185) and chameleon whose priority is to “feel free” (208). Lottie's primness and coldness are linked to her German father's martinet-like code of behaviour; Vera's sloppy sentimentality and impatience with decorum to the “extreme” behaviour Lottie expects from Ukrainians (202).²

These differences in “character” are confirmed by dress. Whereas Lottie wears New Look dresses her mother has copied from Vogue patterns, elaborate hats, and sensible plastic overshoes—all of which bring amused stares from French passers-by—Vera slouches or lounges about in cheaply dramatic ensembles. Though the Parisian proprietor of Lottie's hotel describes Vera as “très élegante,” “Lottie,” we are told, “couldn't help thinking how hunkie she looked” (177). Vera refrains from launching overt criticisms of Lottie's homemade chic—though she can't resist a stab at the overshoes that sum up all of Lottie's overprotectiveness, her refusal to take risks or make changes in her life—but two of Vera's most significant gestures function as oblique criticisms of Lottie's attitude to clothes—by which I mean something more than a sense of style. For whereas Vera dresses up as though to demonstrate Oscar Wilde's remark that masks are necessary for any authentic exposure of self, Lottie uses clothing to disguise an unstable and incoherent ego dependent upon gardenia bandeaus and plastic overshoes to contain it. Once struck by Virus X, Lottie becomes disheveled, her laughably crinolined skirts giving way, presumably, to limp nightdresses. The virus, in fact, accelerates and completes the process that Vera's influence has already begun—the destabilization of Lottie's sense of self, now not only split but fragmented and somehow defaced. “She was like a wooden toy apart at the joints, scattered to the four corners of the room. Each of the pieces was marred” (207). This is a significant alteration for the Lottie who begins the story as a rigidly fixed subject with no “desire to change or begin a new life” (175).

It is also an enormous threat to the future Lottie has constructed for herself, and this may explain why the convalescent Lottie, out for a walk with Vera, becomes “suddenly wildly angry” (205) at Vera's picking up and keeping a strange glove she finds on a Strasbourg street. Such a transgression of the “each to his own” code is an offence Lottie cannot tolerate because she realizes she no longer has the strength to resist its implications. When soon after Vera makes a more elaborate gesture—taking an absurdly infantile summer frock, a cast-off sent her by her Anglo sister-in-law, and launching it out the window, where it dances on the breeze to strange Arabic tunes—Lottie “range[s] herself … on the side of [the sister-in-law]” with her “one-hundred-per-cent Anglo-Saxon taste in clothes” (207). To reach for clothes that don't belong to one, to refuse to wear the clothes one's elders and betters assign to one is to declare one's personal independence, not only from restrictive social and sexual codes but from the ideology that designs and upholds those codes in the first place.

Lottie and Vera do two things in the course of their time together in Europe—travel about and eat: tepid omelettes at Fontainebleau; mountains of sauerkraut, ham, and sausage at Munster; hot chocolate and almond-stuffed croissants at Colmar; pork and cabbage and kümmel in Strasbourg. Indigenous fine cuisine, of course, is one of the things Canada is said to lack, and one of the attractions of which Europe boasts—on hearing that Al Wiczinski possesses the palate of a gourmet, Lottie remarks, “He just doesn't sound Canadian” (202). Gallant, however, uses food as more than gustatory markers on a complicated textual map. In “Virus X,” attitudes to food betray class attitudes as well. For example, the first thing Lottie remembers about Vera, who has popped out of nowhere into her life in Paris, is that in high-school cooking class, Vera “thought creamed carrots were made with real cream. She didn't know what white sauce was because they had never eaten it at home. That spoke volumes for the sort of home it must be” (176). Vera gets her revenge by inviting Lottie to lunch at an Italian restaurant on the rue Bonaparte. Vera, we discover, has turned into someone who, though she still may not know how to cream carrots, does know the merits of a Chambertin and can expertly attack a plate of rice and marrow—a dish Lottie feels is best left to dogs.

Food is also something that provokes deeply ambivalent responses in a Lottie torn between shame and affection for her German ancestry. Thus we are told that the gingerbread angel Lottie spies in a Strasbourg window at Christmas time “cried of home—not of Winnipeg but of a vestigial ceremony, never mentioned as German, never confirmed as Canadian” (189). The angel and its problematic signification of “home” gives to Lottie the first and perhaps only moment of peace and warmth she experiences in Europe.

Finally, it is through the sharing of food and drink that bear no associations of “home” or high-school cooking class that Lottie and Vera achieve a form of closeness. They first draw together in an expression of animosity towards Americans in a Fontainebleau restaurant; later, by consuming vast amounts of kümmel at Strasbourg's Café Kléber they become “drunk upon friendship” (211) and start at last to make perfect sense to one another. Significantly, Vera's parting gift to Lottie is a parcel of food, which Lottie daren't eat for fear of waking Kevin, who is spending his first night with her. Nevertheless, she opens the parcel and almost lovingly notes its contents: “salami, pickles, butter and bread, half a bottle of Sylvaner” (215).

II

By paying elaborate attention to forms and effects of food and dress, Gallant foregrounds and also transforms the standard signifiers of ethnicity, opening what I have called a “discourse of difference” in “Virus X.” As to the sites of this discourse, Canada and Europe, they are treated not as discrete entities but as palimpsests, the former inscribed by the history and prejudices brought to it by its immigrants, the latter inscribed by the emigrants's simultaneous longing for and rejection of it as the “old country.” What the displaced ex-European finds on returning to the continent she or her family abandoned disrupts her conception of the country of her birth. Thus, Canada, initially exalted by Lottie as a land of “true winter” (173)—as opposed to the indeterminate atmospherics of a Europe “unmindful of seasons” (185)—quickly loses any privileged or normative status in her eyes. Once in the city of light, Lottie comes to view Canada as located “on the dark side of the globe,” “ransacked” by wind (176).³ In the course of the story, Lottie forgets her very hometown; her memory of Winnipeg, we are told, is “obscured” by “the idea of a city she had never seen”—the idea of Québec as signified by crooked streets, old stone walls, and the dark recesses of a church in which Ursuline nuns tend Montcalm's skull (202-03). Canada is portrayed by Gallant not only as a land of distances so vast they are unthinkable to the European mind but also as a land where difference ceaselessly circulates and where otherness insists itself in any attempt to create a standard trope of familiarity, sameness, home.

This evocation of Québec, a place, like Strasbourg, in which racial, religious, and linguistic difference gives rise to violent prejudices as well as politics, helps create the idea of Canada as a page that is dubiously inscribed rather than innocently blank. If in Europe Vera and Lottie keep bumping into fragments of the Maginot line, disabled soldiers, bombed railway stations, war orphans, and “a metallic clanging that certainly had to do with troops” (186), then in Canada they had also found themselves experiencing the “mean backlash of war” (179). Thus we learn that Lottie's father's career was blocked after 1939, and that the German spoken in his home became so much a “secret language” that when his daughter, in Strasbourg, has to ask for directions in this language, she fears the words will stay engraved on her lips “to condemn her” (189). Ethnicity here becomes a source of victimization, fear, and shame, rather than a cause for celebration.

As Werner Sollors has observed, “ethnicity is typically based on a contrast. … [E]thnic, racial or national identifications rest on antitheses, negativity. … In the modern world the distinction often rests on an antithesis between individuals (of the non-ethnically conceived in-group) and ethnic collectivities (the out-groups)” (288). The constituents of the in-group, as Gallant construes them, are, of course, the Anglos, who, no matter how recent their arrival in Canada, will never count themselves as “immigrants.” Both Lottie and Vera are well aware that there is a hierarchy of hyphens in the area of Canadianness—to be English-Canadian is to be beyond suspicion of shiftless foreignness. Gallant emphasizes this by having Lottie receive a letter in which her quasi-fiancé, Kevin, mentions how his family has adopted a young English-from-England sociology student, with the unexceptionable name of Rose Perry. Like most graduate students, Rose is impoverished and accepts the offers of food and hospitality extended by Kevin's family as no more than her due. Lottie reflects that she, on the other hand, as an immigrant's child, would never dare have a “hungry winter” (208). To the Anglos of Winnipeg, a Lottie Benz will always be one of them as opposed to one of us, unless, of course, she can change her name and status by marriage. In the course of the story we learn that not only has Vera's politician-brother Stan changed his name from Rodna—itself shortened from something “unpronounceably long”—to Rodney but he has also married a woman Vera describes as a “good old United Empire Loyalist … true-blue Tory” (207).

Vera is fully aware of her inferior status as Slav. When Lottie expounds what we might call the the Easter egg paradigm of multiculturalism—that whereas in the United States the Poles quit painting Easter Eggs after one generation, in Canada they never stop—Vera declares: “You crazy or something? Do you even know what a minority is? … You don't. It was always right to be what you are” (178). The barbed delicacy with which the women refer to one another's ethnic origin—Lottie substituting “Polish” for “Ukrainian” when describing the Easter egg theory to Vera, Vera forebearing to refer to Lottie's father by his full nickname, Captain von Hook—gives way to Vera showing Lottie the manner in which Canadian soldiers slit German throats—a piece of information she has picked up from her Polish-Canadian boyfriend. Most importantly, it is Vera who insists on taking Lottie into Germany, that country “loathed and craved and never mentioned … where [Lottie's] mother and father had been born, and which they seemed unable to imagine, forgive, or describe” (195). Vera's reasons for forcing Lottie to acknowledge her Germanness in this way appear to be connected to Vera's resentment of Lottie's superior position in the ethnic hierarchy. “I always felt I had less right to be Canadian than you, even though we've been there longer,” Vera tells Lottie, whose characteristically icy composure has always made her seem far more desirably “English” than Vera could ever be.

“Virus X” constantly foregrounds the social and economic realities of ethnic difference. The following passage, which reads like an exemplum from, and a parody of, Lottie's cherished sociology textbooks, makes this clear:

Suddenly, as if it were Lottie's fault, Vera began to complain about the way streets had been in Winnipeg when Vera's mother was a girl. Where Vera's mother had lived, there hadn't been any sidewalks; there were wooden planks. If Vera's mother stepped off a plank, she was likely to lose her overshoe in the gumbo mud. In the good part of town, on Wellington Crescent, there were no pavements either, but for a different reason. When Ukrainian children were taken across the city on digestive airings—when their parents had at last lost the Old Country habit of congregating in public parks and learned the New World custom of admiring the houses of people more fortunate than they were—the children, wondering at the absence of sidewalks, were told that people here had always had carriages and then motorcars and had never needed to walk.

Vera was passionate over a past she knew nothing about. It was just her mother's folklore. Vera's mother, Lottie now learned, had washed in snow water. Vera herself could remember snow carried into the house and melted on the kitchen stove.

“Well, then, your father moved the whole family, I suppose,” said Lottie, remembering Winnipeg Culture patterns with Dr. Keller.

“That's right.” said Vera, without inflection. “To your part of town.”

(196-97)

If in Canada ethnicity and its effects are shown to involve rather more than the celebration of harmlessly colourful or delightfully exotic “difference” from the “Anglo” norm, what sort of resonances or repercussions does ethnicity have when its bearers, Lottie and Vera, are transported to Europe? The very notion of difference takes on a nebulous but invasive form, becoming the mist that gathers in Lottie's lungs the moment she touches European soil; creating the conditions in which Virus X can take hold.⁴ The virus itself—described by the newspapers as “an epidemic of grippe that was sweeping through Europe”—attacks Lottie, but not Vera, presumably because Lottie is much more vulnerable, not just to bouts of flu but also to the disjointing, dismembering effects of difference. Thus, though a second-generation immigrant, Lottie is much surer of her credentials as a German than she is of her position as a Canadian. One of the things Lottie seems most vulnerable to, in fact, is the pull exerted by the “old country,” its power to attract and repel with equal force. Lottie's eventual experience of Germany is limited but emphatic: Appenweier, whose name reminds her of those “mysterious childhood railway journeys that begin and end in darkness” (214) is a virtually deserted, “totally gray village” on a “dirty, icy highway.” Lottie and Vera meet a clergyman and a group of war orphans on the road outside the village. “The two groups,” we are told, “passed each other without a glance.” “If that was Germany,” we are told on Lottie's behalf, “there was nothing to wait for, expect or return to. She had not crossed a frontier but come up to another limit” (215).

Not bridges, but borders that turn out to be chasms—this is Gallant's iconic expression of the effects of ethno-cultural difference on hyphenated Canadians, those who do not really belong, who are made to feel like strangers in both their countries, old and new. The implications of this for multiculturalism as political as well as cultural practice are hardly encouraging. Possibilities for the acknowledgement, never mind accommodation, of difference on the part of one ethnic group towards another are variously inscribed in “Virus X”; they range from, at worst, mutual non-recognition (the war orphans and Canadian tourists in Appenweier) to, at best, the momentary perception of what it's like to be on the receiving end of racial prejudice. Near the story's end, when Kevin mispronounces the word “Ukrainian,” Lottie is able to “read” both the insulting subtext of Kevin's speech and Vera's silent response to it; thus, Lottie comes to understand that “the voice from home saying Ukarainian had reminded [Vera] of what the return [to Canada] would be” (214). Nevertheless, Lottie doesn't come to feel any particular solidarity with or affection for Vera. She recognizes that Vera is trapped inside the “labyrinth” of ethnicity, while she herself is “on her way out,” thanks to Kevin, whose barbarous mispronunciation she doesn't dream of correcting (214), for Kevin's ignorance of how to pronounce “Ukrainian” confirms his place at the top of the ethnic hierarchy, and Lottie's beside him, through the marriage that will erase the tell-tale name of Benz and transform her into someone as good, or as safe as a Rose Perry or a Mrs. Rodney.

Lottie's return to Canada strikes the reader as a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, however pyrrhic. And this is not just because of the personal defeat implied by Lottie's surrender to the egregious Kevin.⁵ Lottie is also embracing a certain kind of Canada, one defined by the borderlines of prejudice, ignorance, and discrimination. Near the start of “Virus X,” Lottie primly reminds the irreverent Vera that “I love my country … and even if I didn't I wouldn't run it down” (184). Though not perhaps that patriotism that is the last refuge of a scoundrel, Lottie's defensiveness about Canada betrays a refusal to examine critically the implications of the thesis assigned by Dr. Keller, a thesis that will feed the mythos of what we know as multiculturalism. This mythos, of course, concerns our supposed tradition of benevolent toleration and accommodation of ethno-cultural difference, a donné that Vera Rodna explodes with her first appearance on the scene.

What, then, constitutes an authentic response to the problematic reality of this kind of difference? For Gallant's answer we might turn to two moments in “Virus X” when Lottie escapes or at least revises her inscription as that artificially stable subject that Canada and her German background have tried to make her. On the train to Fontainebleau, to which Vera has dragged her off at some unholy early hour of the morning, Lottie glances out the window to find “trees such as she had never seen before, and dense with ivy⁶ … [that] shone and suddenly darkened, as if a shutter had been swung to” (181). Momentarily, Lottie forgets that she is faint, frail, cold, and hungry. She is absorbed in her perception of an otherness that doesn't threaten or intimidate her and to which she can therefore openly respond in something like a Mansfieldian moment of being. Later in the text, Lottie is given the chance not just to perceive but also to articulate difference in a way that opens conceptual shutters. At this point, a feverish Lottie is stranded in Strasbourg; in the grip of Virus X and Vera's friendship; she is unable to start work on her thesis or to pack it all in and return home. Instead, she composes letters to Kevin, letters which she never dares send, but which come to form a counter-text to her proposed thesis.

These compositions are radically ambiguous, of course: signs of Lottie's disintegration as a graduate student, they also point to her intellectual liberation from the confines of Dr. Keller's ideology, and as such intensify and complicate the discourse of multiculturalism in this story. Her first “composition” describes the opening of the European Assembly in Strasbourg—a historic event supposedly symbolizing the new political harmony possible between nations that had so recently been at war. Though she intends her letter to record an event of great moment, Lottie must admit to the “dry … dull” (199) nature of the ceremony and confesses that the effort required to make sense of the translation service was “more of a strain than just hearing an unknown language” (199). The “new prefab building” in which the Assembly is housed “looks,” she tells us, “like a shack, looks left over from the war” (199). Not surprisingly, it is in this inauspicious site of tedious, near-indecipherable discourse that Lottie feels the start of the chill that is to turn into Virus X.

In another letter written under the effect of the delirium induced by her illness, Lottie tells Kevin what she perceives to be the truth of her relationship with Vera. Read in the context of multiculturalism, with its emphasis on that tolerance, or better still, that warm acceptance we are supposed to feel on encountering ethno-cultural differences between ourselves and other Canadians, Lottie's words are charged indeed. Of Vera she comments, “She offers all the kindness she can in exchange for something I don't want to give because I can't spare it. A grain of love? … It is not my fault. I shrank into myself, cold, cold. We are all like that” (200-01). Is it some immutable indifference to one another, Gallant seems to ask, or is it our recognition that to embrace rather than tolerate difference is to risk the loss of what defines us, confirms our own superior identity? “Even when I am nice to Vera,” Lottie reassures Kevin, “… it doesn't mean anything, because I don't honestly like her.” Do we read into this last phrase the subtext or parapraxis, “Honestly, I'm not like her”?

And what if these ethno-cultural differences have to do not with the furnishings of those rooms that make up a common European home, but rather, with having no place in the house at all? As Linda Hutcheon points out in her introductory essay to Other Solitudes, most of the current discussion on multiculturalism in Canada has to do with the issue of race (7); the fact that in the true north, strong and free, many of us find it harder to accommodate or tolerate Blacks, Muslims, or Sikhs than Poles or Germans, for example. Racism, of course, is hardly a Canadian phenomenon; in Europe on the eve of 1992, grave concerns have been expressed about the upsurge of what can crudely be described as a west-is-best mentality, while exploitation of and often violent discrimination against Blacks and Asians, Arabs and Turks have become an open scandal. Gallant's fiction has consistently registered the existence of prejudice and discrimination against ethnic minorities in France; hence it is no surprise to find her drawing our attention in “Virus X” to the presence of itinerant Arab workers illegally camped outside Lottie's hotel in Strasbourg.⁷ The cathedral chimes that “evenly punctuat[e] her days and nights” are traversed, we are told, by “strange tunes” heard every night “at a dark, foggy hour,” “tunes that seemed to be trying to escape from between two close parallel lines” (198). The cultural, racial, and economic differences the Arabic music signals are registered but never addressed by Lottie—the Arabs are outside the circumference of the story in which she has inscribed herself, in which there is only room for the considerably less alien difference constituted by Vera.

We, however, are meant to “take in” the encampment of Arabs, the incontrovertible fact of a difference, even an alienness, that cannot be blithely “accommodated.” Two recent observations on the subject of cultural and racial difference may help us to read the implications of the Arab presence in “Virus X.” In an essay on ancient Mexican art, Octavio Paz declares that “the link between ourselves and the other depends not on resemblance but on difference. We are united not by a bridge but by an abyss” (22). And Leon Wiesaltier, after observing that “Toleration is a very weak form of respect, and it has a way of failing,” goes on to insist that “Minorities are not imperfections in the polity, tolerable interferences with the organic life of the nation or the state; they are the very test of the nation-state's moral validity. … [A]lienation is not a punishment or a disgrace; it is a privilege. It has its own uses, its own dignity” (32). One might see in Wiesaltier's revisioning of the concept of alienation an echo of Roland Barthes' articulation that

Au dire de Freud (Moïse) un peu de différence mène au racisme. Mais beaucoup de différences en éloignent, irrémédiablement. Égaliser, démocratiser, massifier, tous ces efforts ne parviennent pas à expulser “la plus petite différence,” germe de l'intolérance raciale. C'est pluraliser, subtiliser, qu'il faudrait sans frein.

(74)

[“According to Freud, a bit of difference leads to racism. But many differences lead away from it, irremediably. To equalize, democratize, lump together—all such efforts will never manage to expel ‘the smallest difference,’ the seed of racial intolerance. What's necessary is unchecked pluralizing, ‘subtilizing.’”]

Thus by exposing the realities of ethno-cultural difference as they affect the possibilities of two Canadian girls in Europe, and by using “street-Arabs” to signal, however elliptically, that the integration of certain bearers of difference into the dominant socio-economic formation may prove more difficult than we would like to admit, “Virus X” makes us uncomfortably aware of the problematic nature of what we've come to call multiculturalism. In “Vacances Pax,” a story published soon after “Virus X,” Gallant turns her attention to the ways in which the realities of European ethno-cultural difference are being ideologically obscured or elided. Ridiculing the notion that some kind of “jolly holidays” version of European unity can be achieved by bringing different nationalities together in a transcontinental colonie de vacances, Gallant acerbically shows how aggressive nationalistic prejudices are in fact fed by a forced togetherness that is no more than a hodgepodge of culinary and cultural custom. Her story may serve as a warning to those who are so eagerly pushing the idea of the “new Europe” that will presumably emerge after 1992, a Europe that seems increasingly to be conceived as a Europe-for-Europeans only. Ideologues of multiculturalism at home and of “One Europe” abroad would do well to heed the dissenting discourse that Mavis Gallant's fiction offers us.

Notes

1. The two most common and superficial signifers of ethnocultural difference are, of course, food and dress—these in their most exotic or colourful forms are what Toronto's “Caravan” festival purveys to its customers with their “passports” to an evening's entertaining otherness.

2. By virtue of gender, however, both women are conditioned to be passive—through Lottie has come to Europe despite Kevin's objections, all she really wants to do once she leaves Canada is to go home again and for that, we are told, she must “wait for someone to come and fetch [her]” (202). Vera, for all that she's a “restless pilgrim” (185), waits around to be summoned by Al.

3. Yet, though its weather may be barbarous, Canada is also presented as a place emotionally becalmed, in which one can be quite sure that nothing remotely discomforting or indecorous will be broached in conversation, even between intimates (193).

4. Virus X can also be construed as the tempting foreignness of Europe itself, and as Vera's otherness, too—all the more alarming because Vera represents a possibility that Lottie strenuously denies for herself: the fact that foreignness is not something to be derided, denounced, and avoided in an effort to conform to an Anglo-Canadian “norm,” but something that can be desirable, enlivening, illuminating. Not that Vera is ever presented as a model—Gallant constantly pokes fun at Vera's confusion, ignorance, sentimentality, and dependence. Vera may be the carrier for the Virus; she is immune to its effects because she has already been transformed by it—we know that she has been on her own, drifting through Europe for the past five years, financially supported by the parents who have otherwise written her off—an ironically inverted, female/colonial version of the remittance man.

5. The immediate sense of closure, the imposition of certainties that transpire with Kevin's eruption into “Virus X” strikes this reader as a calculated violence done to the tissue of indeterminacy Gallant's text has hitherto woven. Kevin arrives as a dual purpose deus ex machina, rescuing not only Lottie but “Virus X” itself from drift and undoing; authority and author, he establishes the limits of what he will and will not tolerate and takes charge by proscribing aimless wandering, imposing destinations, and offering to draw the thick black line that will draw a close to Lottie's European sojourn and a beginning to her life in Canada as Kevin's wife.

6. The ivy returns in this story rife with sinuous and protracted signifiers towards the end of the text. Vera and Lottie are strolling in the countryside of Alsace when they trip over a remnant of the Maginot line—a historical sign to which Lottie gives only the most obtuse and superficial of readings. Vera, in proper Berkeleyan fashion, ends up kicking the fragment of the Line.

7. See, too, the Turkish “guestworkers” over which Christine's lover expresses such alarm in The Pegnitz Junction.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Pluriel, différence, conflit.” Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Gallant, Mavis. “Virus X.” Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982.

———. “Are They Canadians?” The Standard Magazine. [Montreal] 11 Oct 1947: 6-7.

Hutcheon, Linda, and Marion Richmond, eds. Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Paz, Octavio. “The Power of Ancient Mexican Art.” The New York Review of Books. 6 Dec. 1990: 18-22.

Sollors, Werner. “Ethnicity.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Thomas McLaughlin and Frank Lentricchia. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990.

Wiesaltier, Leon. “Propositions for a Postcommunist World.” Harper's Dec. 1990: 31-33.