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Alice Munro Henry David Thoreau Ray Bradbury Alice Walker Herman Melville American Women Hermann Hesse Richard Wright Poets: 1650–1950 H.G Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African-American Geoffrey Chaucer Norman Mailer Poets: Volume I George Orwell Octavio Paz African-American G.K. Chesterton Paul Auster Poets: Volume II Gwendolyn Brooks Philip Roth Aldous Huxley Hans Christian Ralph Ellison Alfred, Lord Tennyson Andersen Ralph Waldo Emerson Alice Munro Henry David Thoreau Ray Bradbury Alice Walker Herman Melville American Women Hermann Hesse Richard Wright Poets: 1650–1950 H.G. Wells Robert Browning Amy Tan Hispanic-American Robert Frost Anton Chekhov Writers Robert Hayden Arthur Miller Homer Robert Louis Asian-American Honoré de Balzac Stevenson Writers Jamaica Kincaid Salman Rushdie August Wilson James Joyce Stephen Crane The Bible Jane Austen Stephen King The Brontës Jay Wright Sylvia Plath Carson McCullers J.D. Salinger Tennessee Williams Charles Dickens Jean-Paul Sartre Thomas Hardy Christopher Marlowe John Irving Contemporary Poets John Keats Thomas Pynchon Cormac McCarthy John Milton Tom Wolfe C.S. Lewis John Steinbeck Toni Morrison Dante Aligheri José Saramago Tony Kushner David Mamet J.R.R. Tolkien Truman Capote Derek Walcott Julio Cortázar Walt Whitman Don DeLillo Kate Chopin W.E.B. Du Bois Doris Lessing Kurt Vonnegut William Blake Edgar Allan Poe Langston Hughes William Faulkner Émile Zola Leo Tolstoy William Gaddis Emily Dickinson Marcel Proust William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway Margaret Atwood Comedies Eudora Welty Mark Twain William Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill Mary Wollstonecraft F. Scott Fitzgerald Shelley Histories Flannery O’Connor Maya Angelou William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka Miguel de Cervantes Tragedies Gabriel García Milan Kundera William Wordsworth Márquez Nathaniel Hawthorne Zora Neale Hurston Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Alice MUnro Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Munro Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alice Munro / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-587-9 1. Munro, Alice—Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series. PR9199.3.M8Z53 2009 813'.54—dc22 2009014161 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Printed in the United States of America IBT IBT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Dance of the Happy Shades: Reading the Signs of Invasion 5 Magdalene Redekop “Every Last Thing . Everlasting”: Alice Munro and the Limits of Narrative 29 Katherine J. Mayberry The Art of Alice Munro: Memory, Identity, and the Aesthetics of Connection 41 Georgeann Murphy “It’s What I Believe”: Patterns of Complicity in The Progress of Love 57 Ajay Heble “It Was about Vanishing”: A Glimpse of Alice Munro’s Stories 81 Mark Levene Getting Loose: Women and Narration in Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth 103 Deborah Heller vi Contents Searching Bluebeard’s Chambers: Grimm, Gothic, and Bible Mysteries in Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman” 123 Judith McCombs Short Fiction with Attitude: The Lives of Boys and Men in the Lives of Girls and Women 143 Janet Beer Rewriting the Frontier: Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice Munro 153 Rowland Smith Intimate Dislocations: Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 167 Coral Ann Howells Chronology 193 Contributors 195 Bibliography 197 Acknowledgments 201 Index 203 Editor’s Note My introduction praises Alice Munro for narrative exuberance and her accurate sense of what divides women and men. Nevertheless, I ponder her self-imposed limitations of scope and temperament. In a brilliant pioneering study, Magdalene Redekop outlines the pre- cise patterns of compassion and ironic distancing in Munro’s first book of stories. Katherine J. Mayberry examines some of the ways that Munro’s story- tellers discover the limits of narration, while Georgeann Murphy meditates on issues of memory, and Ajay Heble finds in Munro a “poetics of surprise.” “Survival over victory” is stressed as the choice of Munro’s womenfolk by Mark Levene, after which Deborah Heller returns us to Munro’s irony and Judith McCombs investigates mythic origins, including some biblical ones. Janet Beer turns to the subsidiary role of male characters in Munro, while Rowland Smith invokes the frontier code that Munro revises. In this volume’s final essay, Coral Ann Howells melds spatial disloca- tions with Munro’s visions of the complex relations of women with men. vii H arold B loom Introduction read through Alice Munro’s Selected Stories (1996) when that splendid volumeI appeared and have just reread all of it a dozen years later. Her more recent work is unknown to me, but the 545 pages of her culling from seven books of stories are more than enough to suggest her permanence as a writer. She joins the major artists of short fiction of the twentieth century: Landolfi, Calvino, Hardy, Kipling, Maugham, Saki (H.H. Munro), Frank O’Connor, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Mann, Walser, Andreyev, Bunin, Dine- sen, Schulz, Peretz, Singer, Agnon, Arenas, Cortázar, Gordimer, Wharton, Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Nabokov, Malamud, Ozick, Abish, Barthelme, and others. I omit the greatest: Henry James, Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, Babel, Borges, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald. Those ten stand apart, but Alice Munro is in good company in the era of the short story. She is not a fantasist or a visionary and scarcely a symbolist. Alice Mun- ro’s art is strictly mimetic yet what it imitates is the tangled yarn of that bor- der area where our drives live us. Her sense of a concluded human life avoids retrospection. No one mounts to paradise on her stairway of surprise, and no one consequential (to the reader) drives into perdition. Ordinary unhappi- ness, which in others is not colorful to us, is an achievement for most of her women and many of her men. She is, with Katherine Anne Porter and Edna O’Brien, one of the wise women of the Post-Freudian Evening Land in its long decline. That said, her narrative exuberance seems contrary to her realization “that love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any 1 2 Harold Bloom reliable way” (Selected Stories, p. 236). D.H. Lawrence’s helpful admonition— to trust the tale, not the teller—has little relevance to her stories, since their art is to tell themselves. There is a limitation but only in comparison to such as Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway, Babel: we do not feel life itself compos- ing the narrative. But Turgenev and Tolstoy are miracles at representation, as are Joyce and Lawrence. Munro keeps within her circumference, know- ing that to generalize, unless you are Tolstoy, is aesthetic idiocy. She inhabits her bookshop of the heart and generously offers her women, in particular, as volumes for sale. Munro’s fictive marriages are world-without-end bargains (Shakespeare’s rending phrase in Love’s Labour’s Lost) and she studies, not their nostalgias, but their surprising endurances. When they fail, somehow they fail and not their wives and husbands whose resurgent wills ebb in the domain of the drives. 2 Do Munro’s stories blend into one another? A friend ventures that reproach, and it is true that I have no particular favorites among the twenty-eight pub- lished together in 1996. Her tonalities may be too consistent, her characters not sufficiently distinguished from one another to allow a tale as memo- rable as Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” or Porter’s “Flowering Judas.” She seems to sacrifice singularities to her integral sense of the dif- ferences between women and men. Yet that accurate sense is of enormous human and aesthetic value, and to clearly convey it demands a subtler art than I might expect Munro to have mastered. Her stories have a touch of the triumphant slyness of Shakespear- ean comedy, from which Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf derived so much. Again, my citations are too grand: Munro has little of Austen’s or Woolf ’s uncanny, understated intricacy of phrasemaking in the service of a comic vision. Their ironies, like Shakespeare’s, can be too large to be seen (as G.K. Chesterton said of Chaucer). Munro’s ironies are palpable and enable her storytelling to apprehend “those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever” (the end of “The Progress of Love,” p. 288). Munro, immensely skilled and wisely compassionate as she is, lacks the fine madness of great literary art. One could not say of her characters what Eudora Welty remarked of Lawrence’s that they “don’t really speak their words”—not conversationally, not to one another—they are not speaking in the street, “but are playing like fountains or radiating like the moon or storm- ing like the sea, or their silence is the silence of wicked rocks.” But Munro’s people are the immanences of our daily lives whereas Lawrence’s speak for our daemonic otherness that transcends the everyday whether it wants to or not.
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