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Ethics and Love in the Aesthetics of Alice Munro

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Ethics and Love in the Aesthetics of Alice Munro Ethics and Love in the Aesthetics of Alice Munro by Tim McIntyre A thesis submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada December, 2012 Copyright © Tim McIntyre, 2012 Abstract Whether classified as realist, modernist, or postmodernist, the fiction of Alice Munro combines a strong mimetic impulse with a recognition of the limitations of mimesis. This dissertation examines the ethical dimensions of the balance between mimesis and the recognition of its limits. Chapter one provides an overview of Munro scholarship and brings particular attention to the manner in which this balance between mimesis and metafictional self-reflexivity has been analyzed since the earliest days of Munro criticism. Chapter two draws on the Munro scholarship of Naomi Morgenstern, Robert McGill, and Robert Thacker to argue that Munro’s fiction is connected, though not reducible to, her experience of reality. This connection, however imperfect, gives her aesthetics its ethical weight, particularly when the subject of her writing is the human Other. Munro’s combination of a sense of alterity with a powerful feeling of reality reflects a desire to understand and represent the Other without compromising the Other’s radical alterity. The tension that arises from this desire can find a resolution in an aesthetics of love akin to eros as described by Emmanuel Levinas and refigured by Luce Irigaray: a representation, inscribed in each story’s form, of the possibility of a subject- to-subject relationship that preserves difference and ends in mutual fecundation. Chapter three compares the ethical vision in “The Ottawa Valley,” which ends on a moment of continuing, uncompromised alterity, with the feeling of love and catharsis produced in “The Moons of Jupiter.” Chapter four reads “Material” as an oblique gesture at the possibility that literature can open a relationship to the Other that is a kind love. Chapter five examines “Deep-Holes” as an attempt to reconcile the ethical tensions inherent in writing by representing a collaborative mode of meaning-making linked to love and ii fecundity. This dissertation also, however, follows Derek Attridge and Munro herself in observing some distinction between the self-Other dynamic as a face-to-face relation and this dynamic as a problem of literary representation, even if the two cannot be neatly separated. iii Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank Tracy Ware, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Catherine Harland, Cathleen Hoeniger, Leslie Ritchie, and Robert Thacker, for their careful readings and insightful responses. My thanks also to my colleague, Sheri Benning, for her generous assistance at every stage of the process. Finally, my thanks goes to my family, Sarah Tsiang, Abby McIntyre-Tsiang, Mavis McIntyre, and Kim McIntyre, for their unflagging support. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Chapter One. Introduction. 1 Chapter Two. Reality, Ethics, and Love 32 Chapter Three. “An Appalling Rush of Love and Recognition”: Ethics and Love in “The Ottawa Valley” and “The Moons of Jupiter” 57 Chapter Four. “This Is Not Enough:” Gesturing Beyond the Aesthetics of Failure in “Material” 92 Chapter Five. “The Honour of Knowing”: Loving Creation in “Deep-Holes” 123 Chapter Six. Conclusion. 166 Works Consulted. 190 v Chapter One Introduction “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the widely-anthologized first story in Alice Munro’s 1968 Governor General Award-winning debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, ends with a negative epiphany. The young female narrator, whose meagre economic circumstances in a small town on Lake Huron mirror Munro’s own upbringing, accompanies, along with her younger brother, her father on his rounds selling Walker Brothers products door-to-door. When the father ends his rounds, he visits a woman, Nora, who appears to have been of romantic interest to him in his younger days. This glimpse into her father’s past is a revelation for the narrator, but rather than a positive revelation in which she gains knowledge of his life, the epiphany in which it appears is represented as a recognition of the limitations of her knowledge. As they drive home, the narrator reflects on what she felt: I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine. (18) The stories from Dance of the Happy Shades conform most closely to the form of the realistic, well-wrought modernist short story as defined by David Crouse: the combination of a “vivid and lifelike world” with “characters who move and change” with the change culminating in “the traditional epiphany” that stresses “a single clear moment 1 of revelation” (51). Over the course of her career, and particularly in her collections from the 1980s and 1990s, Munro moved away from such aesthetic neatness as her work became less tied to biography and more experimental in form. Even in Dance of the Happy Shades, however, there exists a strong sense of the limit of the human capacity to know and represent. Then as now, her work blended mimetic power with a recognition that the world in its plenitude exceeds our every representational and conceptual framework. This dissertation continues in the tradition of those studies of Munro that explore her ability to combine mimesis with a metafictional, self-reflexive sensibility. Its goal is to operate within and extend the rubric of ethics as defined by Naomi Morgenstern in her 2003 article “The Baby Or The Violin? Ethics And Femininity In The Fiction Of Alice Munro.” Morgenstern identifies in Munro’s work a desire to reduce the Other1 to the understanding consciousness of the self without interpretive violence. Munro’s ability to suggest a sense of alterity that escapes the capacity of fiction and language to express even while she creates a powerful feeling of reality reflects the desire to understand and represent the Other without compromising the Other’s radical alterity. The close readings that comprise the bulk of this dissertation will focus on how the tension between representing the Other and recognizing the Other’s alterity can find a resolution in an aesthetics of love: a representation, inscribed in the aesthetics of the story, of the possibility of a subject-to-subject relationship that preserves difference and ends in mutual fecundation. “The Moons of Jupiter,” “Material,” and “Deep-Holes” all gesture at the possibility that literature, or at least shared intellectual creation, can be related to a 1Following Alphonso Lingis’s translation of Totality and Infinity, this dissertation will use “Other” to refer to Levinas’s use of “autrui,” (the personal Other, the you) and “other” for “autre.” 2 loving, fecund relationship to the Other akin to the phenomenon of eros as described by Emmanuel Levinas and refigured by Luce Irigaray. This dissertation will also, however, follow Derek Attridge and Munro herself in observing some distinction between any self- Other dynamic as a face-to-face relation and this dynamic as a problem of literary representation, even if the two cannot be neatly separated. Literature Review Munro criticism began in earnest in the 1970s. The first scholarly works appeared after Dance and particularly The Lives of Girls and Women brought Munro to national attention, and by the mid to late 1970s, articles on Munro’s work were published with some regularity. Attempts to come to terms with Munro’s balance between her capacity for mimesis and her recognition of alterity stretch back to this period. Some early articles of note include J.R. (Tim) Struthers’s “Reality and Ordering: The Growth of a Young Artist in Lives of Girls and Women,” Hallvard Dahlie’s “The Fiction of Alice Munro,” and Brandon Conron’s “Munro’s Wonderland.” Struthers examines Lives as a Kunstlerroman in the tradition of and clearly influenced by James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He tracks Del, the protagonist, as she discovers the power of words and learns to order reality in satisfying fictional shapes. In the process, she recognizes the reality of what Struthers calls “the everyday world” as opposed to various and more artificial “false notions of reality” such as “the grotesque, sensational world of Uncle Benny’s newspapers [. ] her younger brother Owen’s world of cardboard hockey players; and the exaggerated world of Del’s early writings” (46). Struthers does, 3 however, assert that Del also discovers “Another reality which [. .] was her own imagination” (46). Dahlie’s analysis of Dance of the Happy Shades focuses on the basics of fiction, such as characterization, theme, and the prevalence of first-person narration, but he recognizes that “Mrs. Munro’s world is neither consistent nor readily comprehensible” and that “On the surface, much seems straightforward [. .] but there is always something gnawing at the edges of our certainties” (43). In his reading of “The Office,” Dahlie also identifies an ethical dimension. Dahlie sees the following question inscribed in the story: “how far does one’s obligation to another human being go?” (43). He further observes a parallel between the narrator, a writer, and the antagonist, Mr. Malley, who is “if not a lecherous old man, certainly deceitful and unpleasant to an extreme” (47). This parallel calls into question the ethics of writing: “the narrator, a writer, re-arranges words to create an imaginative world or experience; and is this really much different from what Mr.
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