POSSIBILITY-SPACE AND ITS IMAGINATIVE VARIATIONS IN ALICE MUNRO’S SHORT STORIES Ulrica Skagert . Possibility-Space and Its Imaginative Variations in Alice Munro’s Short Stories Ulrica Skagert Stockholm University ©Ulrica Skagert, Stockholm 2008 ISBN 978-91-7155-770-4 Cover photograph: Edith Maybin. Courtesy of The New Yorker. To the memory of my father who showed me the pleasures of reading. Abstract Skagert, Ulrica, 2008. Possibility-Space and Its Imaginative Variations in Alice Munro’s Short Stories. Pp.192. Stockholm: ISBN: 978-91-7155-770-4 With its perennial interest in the seemingly ordinary lives of small-town people, Alice Munro’s fiction displays a deceptively simple surface reality that on closer scrutiny reveals intricate levels of unexpected complexity about the fundamentals of human experience: love, choice, mortality, faith and the force of language. This study takes as its main purpose the explora- tion of Munro’s stories in terms of the intricacy of emotions in the face of commonplace events of life and their emerging possibilities. I argue that the ontological levels of fiction and reality remain in the realm of the real; these levels exist and merge as the possibilities of each other. Munro’s realism is explored in terms of its connection to possibilities that arise out of a particu- lar type of fatality. The phenomenon of possibility permeates Munro’s stories. An inves- tigation of this phenomenon shows a curious paradox between possibility and necessity. In order to discuss the complexity of this paradox I introduce the temporal/spatial concept of possibility-space and notions of the fatal. I describe the space that materializes in the phenomenal field between text and reader, and where the constitution of possibility becomes visible. This is typically seen in the rupture that is the event, where the event in itself offers a moment of release and epistemic certainty to the characters. I argue that through this release and certainty the characters obtain a radical, audacious sense of freedom and intensity of life. The stories examined have been grouped in a conceptual order that brings into view the central qualities of Munro’s fiction such as lightness, newness and sameness. These qualities are related to the act of recognition; they are elaborated through readings of a large number of stories from all the collections, including three stories published recently in The New Yorker. The dissertation concludes by highlighting these qualities in the tour de force “Post and Beam.” I argue finally that Alice Munro’s fiction recognizes life as possibility in a moment when it shows itself in its own remarkable same- ness. Keywords: Alice Munro, fate, possibility-space, compellation, phenomenol- ogy, Canadian literature, short story, realism, Alain Badiou, Maurice Natan- son Contents Abbreviations...............................................................................................ix Contents ....................................................................................................... viii 1 Introduction: “Things within Things”: Alice Munro as a Short Story Writer ............................................................................................................. 10 Theoretical Departures .................................................................................................. 21 Phenomenological Origins ............................................................................................ 37 2 Romancing Fate: The Possibility of Love................................................. 45 3 Jolted into Lightness: Epiphany without Transcendence ..................... 61 Newness: Reorienting the Ordinary .............................................................................. 83 4 Dividing Moments: The Event as Rupture and Release .................... 103 Fatal Events: Moving Beyond Coincidence ................................................................. 123 5 Clearing a Space for Sameness .............................................................. 142 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 163 Works Cited ................................................................................................. 178 Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... 185 Index ............................................................................................................ 188 Abbreviations DHS Dance of the Happy Shades FY Friend of My Youth HFC Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage LGW Lives of Girls and Women LG The Love of a Good Woman MJ The Moons of Jupiter OS Open Secrets PL The Progress of Love R Runaway SS Selected Stories SMT Something I´ve Been Meaning to Tell You WDY Who Do You Think You Are? VCR The View from Castle Rock 1 Introduction: “Things within Things”: Alice Munro as a Short Story Writer You know, we always have the idea that there is this rea- son or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about what I’ve done wrong. But I think the reason may be something not so easily dug out. —Alice Munro, “Chance” Entering the landscape of Alice Munro’s writing is an intense experience of the consanguinity between the fictional and the real. In her stories she dis- plays the possibility for reality to be transformed into fictive art, but more astoundingly she reveals how the setting of the real appears affectively mea- ningful to us. More than drawing attention to the artifice and limitations of fiction-making, her narratives uncover layers of the quite shocking business of real life. This is what I understand by “the shock of recognition” that Melville experienced in his profound awareness of Hawthorne’s genius. That is, an appearance of something that we have been unaware of so far, but that still lies hidden or dormant in us; it is something that we re-cognize in the act of discovering it. “Images,” one of the most striking stories from Munro’s first collection Dance of the Happy Shades, features a full-blown example of the uncovering of a hidden awareness that includes not only a character and a narrator, but also invites the reader. People say that they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed, as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does not surprise you, the thing you have always known was there that comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hur- ry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying. (DHS 38) This affinity and dramatic accord between the course of events and a recep- tive mind is the crucial core of signification that finally also bears on the reader and the world she inhabits. The idea of signification as arising out of the close relationship between the artistry of the text and the aesthetic re- sponse of the reader is described in Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenology of read- ing. The claim that the constitution of meaning goes hand in hand with the aesthetic effect resulting from a restructuring of experience, posits the lite- rary work of art somewhere between character, narrator and reader (20–21). 10 It will be with this effect of inbetweenness or “to-the-side-of”1 quality in mind that I explore Munro’s stories. What I refer to is a phenomenal field between text and reality that is also dramatized within Munro’s stories. In Munro’s second collection, Lives of Girls and Women (1971),2 the protagonist aspires to become an accomplished writer. All the stories in this volume follow the experiences of Del Jordan growing up in the small, south- ern Ontario town of Jubilee.3 The clichéd portrayal of the artist as something of an outsider, unsatisfied with small town life, seeking to expand her mind apart from the limited concerns of rural mentality, does not quite fit Del. Not only is she drawn to a certain spirituality of this rural surrounding, but in the people who inhabit this place she finds a heroic acceptance of life with all its startling circumstances. Del’s recognition/re-cognition of an infinite depth in people’s minds, and the secretive significance in their doings, is a well from which her story-telling springs. Even though she has an awareness of the unorthodoxy of her own family—her mother in particular wants to change the depressing life in Wawanash County—Del is amazed by the eccentric ways of the local citizens. In her attempts to write a novel, she revels in her own imagination, trying to stylize the lives of some of the townspeople. But as she transforms them into fictional characters, it is the circumstance of being brought back to reality which somehow is the occasion for a larger bewilderment. “It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there” (LGW 234). It is in this movement between fiction and reality that different ontological levels come to bear on each other. Through this presentation of Del, endowed with the perception of an artist, ordinary life is foregrounded as the potent source of infinite signification. “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen lino- leum” (236). In the much later story “Passion” from Runaway, one finds the same emphasis on undiscovered or hidden possibilities in ordinary people and their lives, and the