Commonwealth Essays and Studies
37.2 | 2015 Alice Munro Writing for Dear Life
Corinne Bigot (dir.)
Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/4992 DOI: 10.4000/ces.4992 ISSN: 2534-6695
Publisher SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth)
Printed version Date of publication: 1 April 2015 ISSN: 2270-0633
Electronic reference Corinne Bigot (dir.), Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 37.2 | 2015, “Alice Munro” [Online], Online since 13 April 2021, connection on 17 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/4992; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.4992
Commonwealth Essays and Studies is licensed under a Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modifcation 4.0 International. Alice Monroe : Writing for Dear Life
Vol. 37, N°2, Spring 2015
Alice Munro: Writing for Dear Life
Corinne Bigot • Introduction...... 5 W.H. New • A Note on Utrecht Allegory ...... 11 Corinne Bigot • Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life”: Reading Dance of the Happy Shades with Later Stories ...... 15 Eleonora Rao • “Home” and the Narrative of an Impossible Nostos ...... 27 Lucile Rouet-BeNtley • “I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power”: When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change” by Alice Munro ...... 35 Lynn BliN • Sweet Dissonance in Alice Munro’s “The Progress of Love,” “Friend of My Youth,” and “Free Radicals” ...... 45 Isla DuNcaN • “A Cavity Everywhere”: The Postponement of Knowing in “Corrie” ...... 57 Miroslawa Buchholtz • Alice Munro’s Legacy: The “Finale” of Dear Life ...... 69 Christine BeRthiN • Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life ...... 79 • Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company ...... 89 Reviews
Reviewed by Charles FoRsDick • Le postcolonial comparé : anglophonie, francophonie. Ed. by Claire Joubert ...... 105 Reviewed by Claire gallieN • Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine. By Anna Bernard...... 109 Reviewed by Christophe leBolD • Listening up, Writing Down and Looking Beyond: Opening the Door to Transdisciplinary, Multimodal Communication Ed. by Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy ...... 113 Reviewed by Christine loRRe-JohNstoN • Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Ed. by Charles E. May ...... 117
Contributors ...... 119
Introduction
In announcing the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Alice Munro in Stoc- kholm on October 10th 2013, the Nobel Committee noted that Alice Munro’s “texts often feature depictions of everyday but decisive events, epiphanies of a kind, that illu- minate the surrounding story and let existential questions appear in a flash of lightning” (“bio-bibliography” np). As examples of such everyday life events, one may point out that Alice Munro’s characters are depicted making, and mending clothes, or recycling them into rag rugs. Yet, they may also exhibit a dead woman’s clothes (“The Peace of Utrecht”) or hide secrets that may include loss of a child, accidental deaths, not to mention the fact that some of her characters do confess to having committed murders. Munro paints scenes that readers may identify as “scenes of life,” relying on detailed descriptions including depictions of the smallest objects, or the most trivial ones, down to their cracks; she includes feelings and sensory details, even the most intimate ones. Narrators draw attention to annoyingly resilient stains, or burrs on a good dress, or a crust of porridge that has dried on the linoleum. They describe curtain and dress pat- terns. Munro herself has admitted that she writes stories that have “an awful lot of stuff that, by [the] strict standards [of the short story], are unnecessary in them” (“Inter- view”) – an assertion which readers familiar with her fiction will greet with a smile. Yet analyses of her style show that she frequently relies on repetitions and accumulation, and that the narrative often operates on the digressive mode. Munro’s fiction is a “fic- tion of admission” that tends to “include rather than to discard,” as Helen Hoy argues in her seminal essay (5). Her landscape often features refuse dumps or refuse heaps, full of discards which characters may spend hours looking at (“Lying under the Apple Tree,” The View from Castle Rock). Munro’s depictions of women’s bodies draw attention to their visible and invisible flaws such as discharges, warts, varicose veins, unsightly growths or hidden cysts and lumps, as catalogued by one of Munro’s most famous narrators, would-be writer Del Jordan. Yet, Munro’s lists, as Thomas Dutoit argues in a recent essay where he returns to what is surely one of Munro’s most famous passages, Del Jordan’s wish list in Lives of Girls and Women,1 are bored (perforated) rather than bo- ring: “inscriptions will always be boring, bored, both insufficient and unrevealing [but] they will, simultaneously, be perforated by puncta” (86). There is no denying that gaps, rifts, cracks and silences puncture her fiction, from her representation of cracked surfaces or deep holes in her landscape, to her portraits of women (and men) who are “full of mended cracks that you could only see close up” (“Carried Away” 37), to her narrator’s accounts. In the introduction to a recent volume of essays on Munro’s début collection, Michael Toolan reminds us that “there will be gaps, secrets, mysteries and lacunae, there will be causes and reasons that never quite come clear” (11). Such gaps and silences play a key role in Munro’s fiction, as Judith
1. “And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, ever- lasting” (Lives 249). 6
Miller has argued, for Munro wants her readers to “wander into rifts, to find what might be in there,” (208) for Munro will want “to find a way to open up rifts, spaces, where she suspects story really lingers” (208). It is no coincidence that Munro’s landscape fea- tures gravel pits, gaps, mines, refuse heaps and snow-covered monstrous shapes as well as seemingly boring landscapes. In “What Do You Want to Know For?” from her 2006 collection, The View from Castle Rock, the narrator, a Munro persona, describes Ontario’s rural landscape, reminding her readers of the dangers of dismissing it as “drab” agricul- tural landscape, since it hides and reveals remnants of the glacier, and which the narrator deciphers with the help of a map: there’s always more than just the keen pleasure of identification. There’s the fact of these separate domains, each with its own history and reason […] its pull on the imagination. The fact of these little countries lying snug and unsuspected, like and unlike as siblings can be, in a landscape that’s usually disregarded, or dismissed as drab agricultural counter- pane. It’s the fact you cherish. (322, emphasis added) Munro explicitly underlines the fact that such knowledge is to be cherished, suggesting her fondness for what may, on the surface, seem just unremarkable. Reading this asser- tion, one cannot but be reminded of Del Jordan’s simile, “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – like deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum” (Lives 249). As a recent essay on “the poetics of the linoleum” by Sabrina Francesconi shows, one never tires of looking at Munro’s surfaces, from a crust of porridge that has dried on the floor ( Dance 94) and that may clearly serve a proleptic function (90), to a swept and worn linoleum in an old farmhouse (Dance 11) that reveals the double nature of life, to ill-fitting or isolated squares of linoleum that will echo gaps and silences in a story (92). These surfaces always remind us of Munro’s poetics, as they encapsulate her dialectical tensions, from the tension between the visible and the invi- sible, to that which exists between wholeness and fragmentation. To look at a landscape depicted by Munro and to read a Munro text is, as Héliane Ventura has suggested, “to take part in an archeological process which consists in recovering traces that have been abolished” (256). Michel de Certeau’s essay, The Practice of Everyday Life, may help to explain why Munro’s stories can simultaneously include ordinary objects and point to what is not there, foreground details that can be seen and recall what cannot be seen anymore. He remarks that “memory is a sort of anti museum,” it is “not localizable” and “fragments of it come out in legends” (106). Objects and places, therefore, “have hollow places in which a past sleeps” (108) while living spaces are haunted by the “presences of di- verse absences” (108). Munro’s “fiction of admission” will necessarily contain lists of ordinary objects that serve to recall someone’s past. De Certeau draws an interesting connection between places and histories, places and stories: “Places are fragmentary and inward-looking histories […], accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body” (108, emphasis added). These are the connections that the essays in this special issue trace as well. At a conference that took place at University of Paris Ouest Nanterre in April 2014, the participants were asked to consider Munro’s “art of rehabilitating the hidden, the marginal, the disregarded, the disjunctive.” They analyzed Munro’s narrative strategies, motifs and techniques, paying particular attention to ordinary conversations, ordinary 7 Introduction houses and trivial objects. In doing so, they tracked and traced the numerous faultlines, cracks, wounds, cysts and cavities that perforate her fiction. Ultimately, they showed that Munro’s fiction is not so much about everyday life, as about life or, rather, as Munro herself has so beautifully captured it, writing “for dear life.” The eight essays included in this volume show that Munro’s stories, as Christine Berthin explains, offer a reflection on the reconstructive work of language that allows life to continue and engenders the process of healing at the heart of storytelling; they show that Munro’s stories are also about defining her own material and poetics. In “A Note on Utrecht Allegory,” W. H. New offers a fresh perspective on one of Munro’s earliest and, probably, most famous stories. He shows how a mere fragment, a single page from a school girl’s composition on The Treaty of Utrecht, sheds light on the main questions the story raises, which, he posits, are about choice and absence of choice: who acts, and who cannot act? Who chooses or cannot bring herself to choose? The reference to a treaty that played a major role in Canadian history, provides an alle- gory to the story that depicts two young women from a small town in Canada who try to find a common ground after their mother’s death. “Allegory” in the story sets in mo- tion a mode of understanding, an acceptance of an order of life, with which the sisters must negotiate as they try to live their own lives. Eventually, underscoring details that reveal Munro’s interest in her fictional town’s colonial past, W. H. New argues that “The Peace of Utrecht” also offers an interesting comment on settlement, in both senses of the word. “Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and ‘the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life’” considers stories ranging from Munro’s first collection to later stories, and analyzes Munro’s various techniques for drawing attention to small, discarded or unsightly objects. Relying on Michel de Certeau’s analysis of “the practice of everyday life,” the essay considers the role played by such objects as remainders and reminders of people’s lives. The essay also considers the connections Munro draws between un- sightly features in the landscape, flawed female bodies and texts. The essay concludes on “Family Furnishings,” a story which epitomizes Munro’s reflection on her choice of material, since it foregrounds and unites the squalor of tragedy in ordinary people’s lives and world literature. Eleanora Rao devotes her essay “‘Home’ and the Narrative of an Impossible Nostos” to “Home” from the 2006 collection, The View from Castle Rock. Rao analyzes the narra- tor’s minute observations and descriptions of all the changes her father introduced in her former home, thus suggesting feelings of yearning for what is lost. Yet since hers is a gaze that defamiliarizes what was once very well known, the narrator’s view of the renovated house does not lead to nostalgia; instead, it is ironic, inconclusive and frag- mentary. Two essays pay particular attention to conversational discourse, punctuation and rhythm. In her essay “When Secrets Become Weapons,” Lucile Rouet-Bentley considers the function of secrets in “Before the Change” from The Love of a Good Woman (1998), showing that secrets are used as special weapons in the father-daughter relationship, until they deprive the male character of his power over his daughter. Secrets are rehabi- litated, Lucile Bentley argues, because as the locus of irony, they no longer constitute a weakness but represent a means to endless reversals. She shows that in Munro’s fiction, as epitomized by “Before the Change,” secrets are also special tools for creation. 8
Lynn Blin’s essay, entitled “Sweet Dissonance in Alice Munro’s ‘The Progress of Love,’ ‘Friend of My Youth,’ and ‘Free Radicals’” looks at three stories ranging from the mid-1980s to 2009. Focusing on the introductory passages, Lynn Blin analyzes their oral dimensions, drawing attention to grammatical features which are vital clues to which the reader must be attuned in order to discover how the story coheres. She examines how the story lines and the open-ended resolutions that are apparently marked by dis- sonance can, in each story, be likened to a minor chord containing most of the “notes,” echoing the jagged poignancy found in the opening pages. Several essays are devoted to stories from Dear Life, which Munro published in 2012, and which may be her last published book. Isla Duncan’s article “‘A cavity everywhere’: The Postponement of Knowing in ‘Corrie’” analyzes the various dexterous means by which Munro encourages the reader to take some (in)significant details into account – the “bits and pieces of information” that prepare her readers for the final realization that strikes the protagonist at the end of the story. Isla Duncan concludes her essay by underscoring the ambiguity of the ending, which rests on a very short word, “it,” and an ellipsis. In “Alice Munro’s Legacy: The ‘Finale’ of Dear Life” Mira Buchholtz argues that the last four pieces in the collection offer an example of legacy writing. They are to be read as examples of a writer’s legacy, since they highlight heightened perception, altered states of mind, receptiveness to voices, and instinctive love of life, as Munro’s narrators implicate themselves in the lives of others, sharing their emotions: in the “Finale” it is always other people who sing songs, write poems, leave legacies of their lives, and the narrator, holding on to her status of a wide-eyed child, becomes a receptacle for and a dispenser of other people’s stories. Christine Berthin’s essay, “Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life,” considers the collection as a whole, as if it were an album, focusing on the the- mes that run through it. Christine Berthin shows that people full of “mended cracks” form a “recognizable pattern” in Munro’s last collection, and she argues that wounds and cracks, which evoke the core of darkness that inhabits her stories, are the closest equivalent to the Lacanian Real. Particular attention is devoted to the gravel pit at the heart of “Gravel,” a story characterized by gaps and contradictions. In her final sec- tions, looking beyond the moments of destabilising pain foregrounded by the stories, Christine Berthin turns to the effects of the wounds in the construction of the subject and to various ways of mending the cracks through language. Ultimately, she demons- trates that Munro’s last volume offers a reflection on the process of healing at the heart of storytelling, and on the reconstructive work of language that allows life to continue. The volume concludes with an interview Elenor Wachtel conducted in 2004, for the CBC show, “Writers and Company,” and which she has kindly permitted us to publish here in its complete version.
Corinne Bigot University of Paris-Ouest Nanterre 9 Introduction
W orks Cited
De ceRteau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall, 1984. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2011. Trans. of L’invention du quotidien. 1980. Paris: Gallimard 1990. Dutoit, Thomas. “Literary Earth, Alice Munro’s Ontario Geolithic.” Etudes Canadiennes/ Canadian Studies 77 (2014): 77-109. FRaNcescoNi, sabrina. “Alice Munro and the Poetics of the Linoleum.” The Inside of a Shell. Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades. Ed. Vanessa Guignery. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 86-97. hoy, Helen. “Alice Munro: ‘Unforgettable, Indigestible Messages.’” Journal of Canadian Studies 26.1 (Spring 1991): 5-21. MilleR, Judith. “On Looking into Rifts and Crannies: Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth.” The Antigonish Review 120 (2000): 205-26. MuNRo, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. London: Penguin, 1982. —. “Open Secrets.” Open Secrets. 1994. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995. 3-51. —. The View from Castle Rock. London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. —. “Interview with Mariella Frostrup.” Open Book, BBC Radio Four. 16 Jan. 2005.
A Note on Utrecht Allegory
Alice Munro’s “The Peace of Utrecht” first appeared in Tamarack Review in 1960,1 eight years before it was collected as the penultimate story in Dance of the Happy Shades. Often cited as one of the strongest stories in this first collection, the story is generally read as a feminist study of sisterhood and a covert portrait of Munro’s mother.2 Few critics fasten for long on the implications of the title.3 This note comments briefly on ways in which the titular allusion to the Peace of Utrecht constitutes a substantial and even allegorical function in the story rather than functioning simply as a metaphor for the sisters’ momentary entente.
I use the term “allegory” cautiously, for I do not wish to imply any mechanical cor- respondence between the terms of the historical Peace of Utrecht (involving France, Spain, England, Holland, Portugal, and the Kingdom of Savoy) and the events that the story records: Helen’s return visit to Jubilee, from her life and family on the Coast; her awkward relation with her sister Maddy, who has stayed at home to look after their ailing mother; contemporary events in the town; memories of their mother’s behaviour as her Parkinsonism and dementia progressed; a funeral; a broken bowl; and a moment of connection (and disconnection) between the sisters that questions the possibility and indeterminacy of identity. Even Munro’s earliest stories do not rely on automatic equivalences, and Helen, Maddy, and their mother do not somehow represent England, France, and Spain or any other combination of competing nations. I am, however, suggesting that the historical Treaty of Utrecht does resonate through the story like an arching analogy or cambered metaphor, one that contextualizes the sisters’ conflict and informs their fragile peace. 1 23 Aside from the title, only one mention of “The Peace of Utrecht, 1713” appears in Munro’s story. It occurs when Helen, the narrator, mentions staying in a “strange” room with her children (a room that for them was “safe” – merely “another strange place to go to sleep,” a different order of defamiliarization from that which dislocated Helen herself). Opening a washstand drawer, she discovers a page from her own high school history notes, reading: “‘The Peace of Utrecht, 1713, brought an end to the War of the Spanish Succession’ [...] it looked as if I might have written it that day [...] I felt as if my old life was lying around me, waiting to be picked up again” (201). It is not just her adolescence she fears revisiting (details of which are mentioned elsewhere in the story: embarrassment, behaviour, schooling) but also the set of values that is epito- mized by a twentieth-century Ontario schoolbook’s preoccupation with eighteenth and nineteenth-century Imperial history. In other words, the single mention is not a casual aside in the story – details in an Alice Munro story are always more than casual – but a
1. Tamarack Review 15 (Spring 1960): 5-21. 2. See, e.g., Isla Duncan18-25; Ailsa Cox 21-2; Magdalene Redekop 50-7; and Robert Thacker 149-54. 3. The most thorough is E. D. Blodgett, who emphasizes that the peace is not lasting, however much the illusion of peace is desired. The homonyms peace and piece suggest the stylistic overlap between resolution and dissolution. See also Ajay Heble (41-2), and Coral Ann Howells (19-22), who cite “war” as an important element in the story, Heble stressing it as a central subject (peace being only a way of making the past agreeable), and Howells emphasizing that the narra- tive focus falls on domestic matters. Redekop also suggests that the illusion of control is a way of denying chaos (150). 12 way of helping to elucidate how a set of social values impinges on personal choice and private action. The details of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 are complex and not uniformly rele- vant to list here. More important is the fact that the Peace actually refers to a series of treaties, signed over several years, which were changing both the map of Europe and European control in the Americas. They were also, in more diffuse ways, negotiating shifting determinations of power. Among the most salient features of the Peace are the following: 1. The Treaty signifies the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, by which Louis XIV’s grandson Philip acquired the Spanish throne, but his other grandsons gave up any claim to it, and Philip’s progeny gave up all claims to the French throne; 2. Spanish possessions were partially redistributed, in Europe and the Americas (Gi- braltar to Britain, Sicily to Savoy, Amazon lands to Portugal, and the Spanish Ne- therlands and other territory to Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria); 3. Spanish control over the African slave trade was ceded to Britain; 4. France ceded to Britain its claims to Newfoundland, Acadia, St. Kitts, and the Hud- son’s Bay territories (Rupert’s Land), though kept other North American territories, including Quebec. 5. France recognized the right of the Protestant House of Hanover to succeed Queen Anne (of the House of Orange) to the throne of Great Britain, thus reconfirming the authority of Queen Anne’s Act of Succession (1701) and surrendering French support of the Catholic pretenders to the British throne (who were then resident in France). Early national English-language Canadian history textbooks emphasized the clauses in- volving land claims in northern North America, rather than changes in the royal houses of Europe. That these land claims were so specifically based on blatantly predatory commercial advantages (the fur trade, the sugar trade, the fish trade, the slave trade) was also less readily acknowledged. But they serve as a powerful context for Munro’s story and for the Ontario community the story portrays.4 More important than the specifics of the Treaty of Utrecht negotiations, for reading Alice Munro’s story, are the ramifications of the systems and hierarchies of power that shaped the agreements: i.e., church, state, territory, and gender, all of which continue to structure life in the sisters’ town of Jubilee. The invented place name Jubilee, for instance, implicitly speaks of Empire – the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (of the House of Hanover/Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha) having been celebrated throughout settled
4. Despite the 1713 Treaty, France and Spain remained at war with the Holy Roman Emperor, and Spain and Por- tugal continued to be formally at war with each other, until more treaties were signed. Moreover, the balance of power amongst the signatories would be repeatedly upset as further conflicts resumed over the next 250 years. The Seven Years’ War between England and France renewed hostilities, coming to a conclusion in 1763, with francophone Canada ceded to Britain, for example. Thirteen American colonies rebelled against Britain in 1776, forming the United States of Ame- rica. And Ireland became a centuries-long site of religious and social conflict after having been occupied by Protestant British forces during the seventeenth century reign of Anne’s brother-in-law, King William III. The famines of the mid- nineteenth century, the result of people being forced off the land, led to widespread Irish emigration to North America, largely Protestant in Ontario by 1814, when Irish emigrants moved north during and after the American Revolution, and largely Catholic after 1840, many to rural Western Ontario. Protestant-Catholic tensions increased in Ontario during the Fenian raids across the American border in the late 1860s. Southwestern Ontario towns were characteristically divided by sectarian adherence, as is represented in the judgmental attitudes of the older generation in Jubilee. 13 A Note on Utrecht Allegory
Canada in 1897.5 Doctrinal differences between predestination and free will govern certain strands of social behaviour and certain interpretations of gendered role. The difference between the sisters’ mother and aunts is in some measure replicated in the difference between Helen and Maddy. Their mother is a rule-breaker, acting as though outside social conventions – and is therefore considered embarrassing. Their aunts Annie and Lou6 are by contrast devoted to Protestant duty and the solemn rituals of thrift and work. They make rag rugs; they would recycle old clothes; their house “is very clean, dark and varnished, and it smells of vinegar and apples” (203). The question is: who acts, and who cannot act? Or who blames, and who suffers blame? Or who chooses, and who cannot bring herself to choose? Helen acts, to a degree, because Maddy has given her the opportunity for an education, which Helen then gives up for marriage and family and distance. Maddy would act, but resents that she feels she cannot, because accepting family responsibility has denied her the opportunities that she offered to her sister. Helen’s absent husband and Maddy’s “amiable,” “affable” friend Fred occupy the “peaceable” (193) background, but neither is an active agent of change. Nor is either sister free from Jubilee, whether in it or away. Duty and responsibility enmesh them in a system of values, and paradox dooms them to stalemate. “Allegory” in the story, therefore, does not re-enact the treaty-making process that led to the 1713 Peace of Utrecht so much as it sets in motion a mode of understanding, an acceptance of an order of life, with which the sisters must negotiate. “Treaty-ma- king” in the story takes place not solely in the talk that leads to the stiff peace between the sisters, but also in every other narrative relationship: between Maddy and Fred, between the sisters and their mother, between Helen and the Aunts, and most obviously among the players at the town party (from which Helen tries to exclude herself): “Du- ring the game [...] all the women put an article of clothing – it begins decorously with a shoe – in a basket, and then all the men come in and have a race trying to fit things on to their proper owners” (192). The adjective “proper” bristles with meaning: having to do with agreed-upon reality, with orthodoxy or convention, with property. The game turns the women into territory, each woman susceptible to trade. The 1713 Treaty had dealt in port advantages (Gibraltar, Sicily), product sources (Newfoundland, St. Kitts, Rupert’s Land, for fish, sugar, fur; and Africa, for slaves, treated as chattel, or property, in imperial trade law). Munro’s “The Peace of Utrecht” acknowledges the Imperial and commercial shape of the town of Jubilee (the Queen’s Hotel and the service station on the main street, the bottling-plant and the Tastee-Freez on the north side, 196). More devastating is the portrait of the sisters as slaves to a commodified world and the inhe- rited systems of value they cannot shed. Formally, Munro sets up this contention in the first paragraph of “The Peace of Utrecht,” when Helen as narrator begins in what sounds like the present to recount her
5. County and district name changes in Upper Canada (later Ontario) reiterate this Imperial history. In 1788, sou- thern Ontario – territory that had still been considered part of the Province of Quebec – was subdivided into districts named Hesse, Lunenburg, Mecklenburg, and Nassau (after House of Orange-Nassau). In Southwestern Ontario, these German and Dutch names gave way to such English county names as Essex, Middlesex, Kent, and Oxford in 1798. The rural Huron District, the site of the fictional Jubilee, was formed in 1838. 6. These “royal” names – after Queen Anne and Princess Louise, but reshaped as demotic nicknames here – were in common use through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Helen’s daughter’s name, Margaret, continues the royal naming practice (many twentieth-century girls were named for Princess Margaret Rose). By contrast, the names Maddy (i.e., Madeleine=maiden) and Helen (Greek=bright torch) suggest political resonances related to European tale and gendered social roles. 14 visit to Maddy and their likely failure to sort out their differences permanently: “I have been at home now for three weeks and it has not been a success” (190). The story goes on to use simple present forms of the verb, which maintain the illusion of a narrative unfolding as it is being read. But the opening paragraph uses the present perfect form: have been, indicating action already completed. Helen’s words drift into a future declared necessary (“we will have to look straight into the desert” [190, emphasis added]) before announcing rejection and drifting back into the fixed and unshared past: “each of us […] thinking […] that the other has turned alien, and forfeited her claim” (190, emphasis added). In other words, in the narrative yet to unfold, time also becomes territory. The story turns on the shifting ground of ownership over action and event, which justi- fies (at least for each claimant) agreements reached and choices made. Behind these choices lies the allegory of inheritance that the reader gradually learns to appreciate – the realization that the competitive terms of power-exchange reverberate across time, and that an apparent freedom of choice does not automatically mean freedom from rule. Resisting closure (as is characteristic of Munro’s fiction), “The Peace of Utrecht” nevertheless offers a rare comment on settlement (in both its meanings) and the social politics that brings it about.
W.H. New University of British Columbia
W orks Cited
BloDgett E. D. Alice Munro. Boston: Twayne, 1988. cox, Ailsa. Alice Munro. Horndon: Northcote House, 2004. DuNcaN, Isla. Alice Munro’s Narrative Art. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011. heBle, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994. howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. MuNRo, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1968. ReDekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns. London & New York: Routledge, 1992. thackeR, Robert. Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life”: Reading Dance of the Happy Shades with Later Stories
Relying on Michel de Certeau’s analyses in The Practice of Everyday Life, this essay considers the functions of small, trivial or discarded objects and jumble to be found in ordinary houses that pepper Munro’s fiction and, more specifically, their connection to story- tel ling and writing. The essay links them to patterns, and their metatextual dimensions. Thirdly, taking into account the attention paid to female bodies and their flaws, such as lumps, the essay considers how Munro explores connections between body and text. The corpus under conside- ration comprises several stories from her début collection; “The Beggar Maid,” from Munro’s second story cycle; “Meneseteung” from Friend of My Youth; “Family Furnishings” (2001) and two stories from her 2009 collection: “Child’s Play” and “Free Radicals.”
Munro’s interest in what is hidden, unsuspected and disregarded, is nothing new. As she describes ordinary people’s ordinary houses, she foregrounds small, disregarded, if not discarded, objects. They can be found in refuse dumps, in half empty houses, and family homes. Munro has often claimed she felt the need to mention her characters’ sur- roundings in detail, thus in a 2005 interview with Mariella Frostrup, she explained, “my stories, they don’t follow the rules of short stories, they have a lot of stuff that by strict standards are unnecessary in them”. Munro’s need to put in so many details should not be mistaken for realism. Analyses of the stories will show that she endows these seemin- gly unremarkable objects with several functions, among which, to act as (sometimes ironic) commentaries at the level of the diegesis. They also reveal Munro’s own version of what Michel de Certeau has called “l’invention du quotidien,” or “the practice of everyday life”. His study proposes we see ordinary objects and houses in connection with stories and one’s past: ordinary objects, he claims, have “hollow places in which a past sleeps” while ordinary places where people live are always haunted “by many different spirits hidden there in silence” (108). De Certeau’s analysis and his contention that places are “symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body” (108) are particularly relevant to Munro’s fiction. Another characteristic of Munro’s fiction is the attention paid to female bodies and their visible and invisible flaws, such as lumps. As a story such as “Meneseteung” shows, it is necessary to trace connections between the flawed bodies that are foregrounded in her fiction and her own art of playing with the rules of the genre. I will also consider how Munro, in “Family Furnishings,” proposes a reflection on her choice of material, uniting the squalor of tragedy in ordinary people’s lives and world literature.
Forsaken Objects and Haunted Houses Attention is often explicitly drawn to trivial objects. One technique is for the narrator to refer to unusual colors and sources of light; for instance, in “Thanks for the Ride,” the adjective “glossy” which describes a worn sofa turns it into a bright surface, setting off a Niagara Falls and a To Mother cushion on it (Dance 49). The cushions that epitomize working class Canadian bad taste are seen through the judgemental eyes of the middle- class narrator, whose prejudices are revealed. One of the best examples of how Munro 16 uses light to draw attention to an object that epitomizes social class is to be found in a passage from “The Beggar Maid” which describes a young college girl’s visit home. As the family are said to eat “directly under the tube of fluorescent light,” the neon light, like a spotlight, illumines the (new) centerpiece: “a plastic swan, lime green in color, with slits in the wings, in which were stuck folded, colored paper napkins” (The Beggar Maid 89). The plastic swan reveals the family’s poverty, and their attempts at sophistication (the napkins), but more importantly, the close-up on the illuminated, lurid plastic swan enables Munro to show Rose’s plight – her double vision. Rose’s home is both familiar and defamiliarized. Rose becomes aware of her upper middle class fiancé’s judgemen- tal eyes on her family, as she now sees them “through Patrick’s eyes” (90) but she also understands her family’s efforts. Such objects are neither simply part of the décor nor instances of social realism; they play a central part in Munro’s attempts to convey her characters’ ambivalent feelings towards their home. One of the most frequent means to draw attention to objects is punctuation, see for instance the dash in “Boys and Girls” which draws attention to the objects that have been discarded, on the other side of the square hole in the middle of the floor, in the room where the little girl and her (younger) brother sleep: on the other side of the stairwell were the things that nobody had any use for anymore – a soldiery roll of linoleum, standing on end, a wicker baby carriage, a fern basket, china jugs and basins with cracks in them, a picture of the battle of Balaclava, very sad to look at. (Dance 112) The dash both sets aside the discarded objects and brings the reader’s eyes to them. Al- though they are clearly dismissed as discards since the narrator points out that nobody “had any use for [them] anymore,” they have several narrative functions. They echo se- veral themes in the story – the wicker baby carriage may serve to evoke the birth of the brother which modified relationships inside the family since the narrator suggests she is her father’s favorite child. Later stories by Munro that use discards and wrecks as projec- tions of a character’s unspeakable fears1 suggest that as discards the objects may serve to reveal the narrator’s fear of being replaced by her brother as her father’s favorite. The “soldiery” roll of linoleum and the painting echo the representation of family re- lationships as battles. The narrator’s little brother is gaining power over her, threatening to replace her as the father’s helper, and the narrator resists her mother and grandmo- ther’s attempts to turn her into a girl. The painting that concludes the list of discarded objects may, however, have another function. It is not described, but its relevance is sug- gested by the narrator’s comment concerning its effects on her. It is said to be of The Battle of Balaclava – a reference to its depiction of the Charge of the Light Brigade, a semisuicidal charge in which over 300 horses were killed. As the high point of the story is the narrator’s rebellion, her opening the gate wide enough for the old female horse to escape, Munro uses the reference to foreshadow the narrator’s self-destructive gesture, a gesture which will move her father to say that she is “only” a girl (Dance 108). Munro thus subverts a historical reference with her female protagonist, rewriting history with a little girl as the heroic figure. The linoleum also connects with the other main theme of
1. In “Floating Bridge,” a woman who has cancer sees wrecks and discards wherever she looks (Hateship 67, 70) and eventually, as Héliane Ventura shows, equates herself with a piece of wreckage (“Secret Ort” 262). In “Five Points,” attention is drawn to the fact that a man who lost his job after an accident keeps thinking about the discarded machines that have been buried in a dead-end passage in the mine (Friend 47). 17 Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life” the story, turning the house into a prison that entraps the narrator, since, as Catherine Lanone argues: “there is always a sense in Munro in which the roll or square of linoleum may contain its own uncanny double, the space of domesticity may become reversible, home turn into a trap” (Bigot and Lanone 75). The objects upstairs also serve as the background or setting for the stories the nar- rator invents and tells herself, imagining an escaped convict hiding behind the linoleum, (113) suggesting a connection with storytelling. The connection is further demonstrated in “The Shining Houses,” also from Dance of the Happy Shades. The narrator concludes a paragraph that relies heavily on enumeration by the mention of discarded objects that lie on a back porch, and are therefore hidden out of sight. The narrator, throughout the paragraph describing an old woman’s garden and derelict house, is emphasizing abundance, in order to assert the right of the house to stand there: “The place had be- come fixed, impregnable, all its accumulations necessary, until it seemed that even the washtubs, mops, couch springs and stacks of old police magazines on the back porch were there to stay” (Dance 22). The objects on the porch of Mrs. Fullerton’s house il- lustrate Michel de Certeau’s observations in The Practice of Everyday Life, that “the places that people live in are like the presences of diverse absences,” (108) and that ordinary objects in such houses “have hollow places in which a past sleeps” (108, emphasis added). The stress on the “accumulations” being “necessary” confirms the absolute value of what is apparently discarded. Mrs. Fullerton’s husband had been missing for some time (the tale of his disappearance almost opens the story), so it is possible to imagine that Mr. Fullerton was the one who used to read the police magazines; in other words, they might be traces of his presence, or, in de Certeau’s words, the presence of his absence. Furthermore, the last item in the list introduces an ironic twist if one considers the story of this man who left the house, never to come back. As police magazines, they point to the central mystery no-one knows why Mr. Fullerton left, whether he is alive or dead, or whether he is likely to come back. The tale within the tale is like a gaping hole, through which the man fled. Considering people’s connections to houses and objects, Michel de Certeau suggests a connection with stories, which Munro’s short stories often illustrate: de Certeau posits that “places are fragmentary and inward-tur- ning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state” (108, emphasis added). Memory, de Certeau argues, is “a sort of anti-museum” and “fragments of it come out in legends” (108) – quite strikingly, de Certeau uses words such as “relics,” “debris” and “leftovers” to describe haunted places and legends (107). In many stories by Munro, jumble plays a central role. For instance, “White Dump” is built on the op- position between the fashionable “calculated jumble” (The Progress 276) the narrator’s stepmother displays and the countless unmatched, broken objects that the narrator re- members – the objects that used to be found in the house when her grandmother lived there: “the Scrabble set with the Y and one of the U’s missing [...] the unmatched plates, the cracked saucers” (279). The list shows that Munro, for all her supposed realism, is a “recorder of discontinuities.”2 Her objects often have cracks in them and they, like her old houses, conjure up stories held in reserve, that remain to be told.
2. I have borrowed the phrase from Joseph Ward’s analysis of Edward Hopper’s paintings (177). 18
A paradoxical tension is often found between presence and absence and loss and permanence. Items such as the incomplete scrabble game or the mismatched plates in the family home in “White Dump” are meant to evoke the presence of the absent objects: the missing letters or the plates that have probably been broken. These rel- ics systematically evoke lives that are gone and stories that are only partially known. In Munro’s fiction, discarded objects are always both remainders and “reminders” of people’s lives (Bigot Silences 140-1). For instance, faded dresses and a picnic hamper with a silver flask in “Oh, What Avails” are “reminders” of the family’s more glorious past that is long gone (Friend 183). In “The Peace of Utrecht,” Maddy, the daughter who stayed home and cared for her sick mother, evokes her mother’s futile efforts to sort “all sort of things”: “Greeting cards. Buttons and yarn. Sorting them and putting them into little piles” (Dance 202). Maddy obviously sees this as evidence of their mother’s state of health (advanced Parkinson’s) and as pathetic attempts to regain control over her life by introducing order. However, the objects poignantly evoke her lost social life – visits that used to be made and returned, good dresses she wore when she went out, or even a mother’s routine chores such as sewing clothes for her family. The final item, yarn, is particularly interesting as “yarn” also means a narrative or tale. It is tempting to suppose that Munro is probably suggesting here that stories can be made and told and would often necessarily be stories about what is no more and has been lost. For Michel de Certeau, “there is no place that is not haunted by different spirits hidden there in silence” (108) and “haunted places are the only ones people can live in” (108), two ideas often demonstrated in Munro’s fiction. In “The Shining Houses,” Mrs. Fullerton’s house is haunted by the presence/absence of Mr. Fullerton, and by the story that springs from it. The family home in “Oh, What Avails,” is a haunted house since there is a smell in the house that “comes from the plaster and wallpaper” (Friend 183). Another key house is, of course, the family house that the narrator of “The Progress of Love” revisits as an adult (The Progress 25-7). There, she recalls various versions of her family’s stories as she peels at the wallpaper, finding layer after layer of wallpaper (27) – the metafictional intent is quite clear. Munro’s housesare like stories held in reserve.
Patterns A more recent story, “Child’s Play,” offers an interesting instance of how Munro can use an apparently trivial item of clothing, here, a little girl’s bathing cap, to expose se- veral layers of truth in the narrative and to draw the reader in, encouraging her to read between the lines of her narrative. In the murder scene, which serves as the narrator’s confession, the material out of which the cap is made (rubber) is foregrounded, as if to insist on its insignificance: Verna’s head did not break the surface, though she was not inert, but turning in an leisurely way, light as a jellyfish in the water. Charlene and I had our hands on her, on her rubber cap. [...] We might have lost our grip on the rubber head, the rubber cap, were it not for the raised pattern that made it less slippery. I can recall the colour perfectly, the pale insipid blue, but I never deciphered the pattern – a fish, a mermaid, a flower – whose ridges pushed into my palms (Too Much Happiness 221; 222) From the moment she mentions the cap, the narrator strives to dehumanize Verna, using appositions such as “the rubber head, the rubber cap,” that assimilate the girl 19 Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life” to her rubber cap. At first there is no verb of action, the phrase “had our hands on her, on her rubber cap” describes the result, as if the hands found themselves there, without any action on the girls’ part. Not only is Verna twice reduced to her bathing cap, but the repetition of “rubber” further serves to transform the girl into a lifeless, insensible, impassive object. The narrator then simultaneously evokes Verna’s efforts to remain alive (using “rise” and “raise”) and the futility of her efforts to do so, given the other girls’ refusal to perceive her as a human being, which yet another comparison reveals: “The head of Verna tried to rise up to the surface of the water. Her head was determined to rise, like a dumpling in a stew” (221). The structure “the head of Verna” reads as an effort to place the emphasis on the body part rather than the girl, and Verna then gradually disappears as a person; she becomes “the rubber head” then “it”. In the next sentence, the remark on the color and pattern of the cap shows that she has been replaced by the rubber cap. Its color is said to be “insipid,” underscoring the insignifi- cance of the cap, and, so by metonymy, of the head, and of the girl. At the end of the passage, Verna is no more, she is turned into an object: “when the rubber object under our palms ceased to have a life of its own” (222). Thus, the narrator’s claims that she felt neither regret nor guilt seem to hold true. Yet the function of the rubber cap is precisely to suggest otherwise. As a mere material object, the rubber cap can leave no permanent trace, but the mention of its raised pattern, pushing into the palms of the narrator gives it the power to brand the murderers, leaving a stigma that evokes stigmata, in other words, the indelible trace of the crime – and guilt. It is no coincidence that the narrator indicates that she never deciphered the pattern. Self-deception is at the core of the narrative. Foregrounding her incapacity to decipher the pattern, she clearly signals its significance and encourages her readers to do the deciphering themselves. They will then work out the significance of the three possibilities, and realize that the flower refers to Verna, since her name evokes spring, the fish to Marlene, as her nickname is the Marlin, and the mermaid to Charlene, whose seducing voice has been commented upon earlier on. The three little girls, the two murderesses and the victim, seem forever trapped together in the pattern, as shown by the punctuation in “– a fish, a mermaid, a flower –” and the pair of dashes that entraps them. In Munro’s fiction, patterns can be a source of endless fascination as well as delu- sion, as in “Runaway,” the title story of the 2004 collection. Carla, who lives in a trailer home with a frayed carpet, looks at its patterns, which she sometimes finds hard to see. Munro plays on intertextuality – the nod to James’s short story is unmistakable – repla- cing James’s image with an actual frayed carpet on which the pattern of squiggles seem to multiply endlessly: it was divided into small brown squares, each with a pattern of darker brown and rust and tan squiggles and shapes. For a long time she thought these were the same squiggles and shapes […] then […] she decided that there were four patterns joined together to make identical larger squares. Sometimes she could pick out the arrangement easily and sometimes she had to work to see it. (Runaway 8-9) Since the word “squiggles” denotes hastily drawn lines or illegible scrawling, the theme of resistance to elucidation is reinforced. Carla’s episodic inability to see the pattern foreshadows the end of the story when she seems to be on the verge of inferring and admitting to herself what her husband has done (he killed their pet goat) and, there- 20 fore, the danger she is probably facing. Munro shifts from the level of the diegesis to a more metafictional dimension when she points to patterns that narrators or protago- nists fail to decipher or recognize. As convincingly argued by Sabrina Francesconi in “Alice Munro and the Poetics of the Linoleum,” Munro offered an earlier version of the metatextual pattern in “Royal Beatings,” where Flo, Rose’s stepmother, has composed a patchwork of multishaped patterns of linoleum (“The kitchen floor has five or six patterns of linoleum on it” (The Beggar Maid [16]): Flo “has achieved a creative compo- sition. It is a text, made of several units Flo got for nothing, useless fragments, small, short patterns, like short stories” (Francesconi 94).
Flawed Female Bodies In “Red Dress – 1946,” which clearly uses the motif of the sewing pattern to epitomize the difficult mother-daughter relationships, the narrator describes the various dresses her mother has made for her over the years. A central scene, a trying fitting session where the daughter tries on the dress, which the mother attempts to fix, encapsulates another central theme, that of exposure. The narrator draws attention to her mother’s body, and to her own. Munro’s fiction, as Helen Hoy has it, is a “fiction of admission,” (7) and there is no denying that “the uninhibited discussion of bodily realities” illus- trates her strategy of inclusion” (Hoy 7). As the mother tries to fix her daughter’s dress, she exposes her bare lumpy legs in the process (“her legs were marked with lumps of blue-green veins” [Dance 148]), a sight that provokes feelings of repulsion in the girl. She finds her mother’s position both “obscene and shameless,” which suggests that the girl feels the shame herself. The narrator is painfully aware that her well-dressed friend Lonnie is watching them, since she tries to take Lonnie’s attention away from her mo- ther’s legs. The lumps and the mother’s bare legs encapsulate the daughter’s humiliation. However, the next passage reveals that “the psychological nakedness of personal and social exposure” (Carrington 22) can paradoxically occur when one is dressed: “My head was muffled in velvet, my bodyexposed , in an old cotton school slip. I felt like a great raw lump, clumsy and goose-pimpled” (148, emphasis added). The girl feels that the old slip she is wearing exposes her social inadequacy and her body. Psychological and social exposure is conveyed through the image of the “raw lump,” a striking simile that suggests psychological pain as the word “raw” normally refers to bodily pain as well as exposure. Feelings, including those involving shame or complex attitudes toward home, are often conveyed through images relating to the body: in “The Beggar Maid,” the narra- tor notes that for Rose, the college girl who left home, “there was always [...] the raw knowledge of home, an indigestible lump” (The Beggar Maid 70). The words “raw” and “lump” are once more placed in close proximity, suggesting that feelings for home are so painful they might choke the character – we may think of “Executioners” whose nar- rator notes that “shame could choke you” (Something 143). Munro plays with the cliché “a lump in one’s throat,” but places the lump inside the body.3 The feelings can never leave Rose, nor can they be processed. The image of the lump also illustrates Michel de Certeau’s idea that to those who know them, “places are […] symbolizations encysted in the pain and pleasure of the
3. See also “Executioners” and the images of “greasy shame” and “indigestible bad secrets” (Something 143). 21 Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life” body” (108, emphasis added). When the narrator describes the changes in Rose’s fee- lings after the visit home with Patrick, the image of the lump is implicit. As Patrick dis- misses Rose’s home as a dump, consoling himself with the thought that Billy and Flo are not her real parents (The Beggar Maid 90), Rose is startled to feel that “a layer of loyalty and protectiveness was hardening around every memory she had, around the store and the town, the flat, somewhat scrubby, unremarkable countryside” (91). This she op- poses to Patrick’s views of mountains and oceans. He looks at vistas and landscape, but she feels her home as something that is part of her body. The passage also suggests, through the word “hardening,” that home and the conflicting feelings it arouses are the foundations of Munro’s fiction. In Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan’s depiction of her Aunt Moira’s body draws attention to visible and invisible flaws: “S”he was a woman I would now recognize as a likely sufferer from varicose veins, hemorrhoids, a dropped womb, cysted ovaries, inflammations, discharges, lumps and stones in various places, one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell. (Lives 40, emphasis added) The depiction is built on the principle of the list or catalogue (as Munro’s evocation of objects in a house often is), which enables her to suggest, as Marjorie Garson puts it, that plenitude is depicted as excess (53) since this body has swollen parts that seem to grow out of control and to keep expanding. Marjorie Garson argues that the list reveals the body’s vulnerability since it “foretells dissolution as the swollen or overgrown parts turn cancerously against the whole” (53). The paragraph, however, ends on the phrase “with stories to tell,” with the structure of the sentence suggesting that the female bo- dies the female bodies are waiting to be narrativized. Women do share stories about their ailments, as the kitchen scene in “Family Fur- nishings” suggests: “the aunts would tell about who had a tumor, a septic throat, a bad mess of boils” (Hateship 91). Many stories foreground bodily ills, and among the stories that depict sick women, several have protagonists who have or may have cancer.4 As suggested by Del Jordan’s allusion to women’s “cysted ovaries” (Lives 40) such stories are about death and life. As Héliane Ventura points out, the lump in the narrator’s body that is given such prominence in “What Do You Want to Know For?” is also one of the means through which Munro reverses fear of death into a desire for life: Munro “overturns deadly signifiers to highlight a signifying chain built around life-enhancing paronomasiae,” as in the quasi-homophony between lump and lamp, and lump and clump (Ventura “Lump” n.p.). A more recent story, “Free Radicals,” whose main protagonist is dying of cancer, of- fers another example how Munro may suggest desire for life amidst fear of death. The phrase “free radicals” would have attracted Munro for its inner contradiction – the fact that by putting these two “positive” words together, a new word denoting something harmful – an atom that can damage a body’s healthy cells – can be created. A free radical is dangerous, yet the association of these two words retains something dynamic, which the other meaning of the phrase suggests – an electron that is not magnetically paired up with another electron. Thus, “free radical” can be used to refer to someone who is
4. “Oranges and Apples” (Friend), “What Do You Want to Know For?” (The View), “Floating Bridge” (Hateship) and “Free Radicals” (Too Much Happiness). 22 independent. Nita, who has cancer, finds herself in an unusual position when she is held hostage by a young murderer. She realizes that her cancer actually frees her from danger (Too Much Happiness 127). Both Nita and the young man deserve to be called free radicals: Nita is a childless widow, and we may argue that the boy’s barbaric act has freed him the “deal” his father wanted to force on him (looking after his sick sister for the rest of his or her life). Both turn out to be killers too, at least in Nita’s tale, since she tells the young man that she killed her husband’s first wife. Free radicals, as Ulrica Skagert notes, usually provoke chain reactions (22), which is illustrated by the chain of events that starts with the love affair between a man and a secretary, leading to a divorce and remarriage, and ultimately to the intruder’s death. “Free Radicals” is one of Munro’s most radical versions of a chance encounter that “creates an impairment in the crust of someone’s existence,” (Skagert 37) and ultimately introduces renewed interest in life in the midst of death. There is no possibility for Nita’s life to be any different, her cancer has not gone away, but the meeting with the young man who might have killed her has somehow reconfigured her hopeless life into a life she tries to save. Munro’s attempts to write in and through a language that is grounded in the body has attracted attention, as Smaro Kamboureli’s analysis of Lives of Girls and Women shows (32), but “Meneseteung” (from Friend of My Youth) is equally remarkable. Its narrator imagines the life of Almeda Roth, a nineteenth-century poetess but concludes the story by admitting “I may have got it wrong” (Friend 73). The metafictional dimen- sion of the story is also suggested by the penultimate paragraph, in which the narrator evokes people who might be just like her, people who are “driven to find things out, even trivial things” (73, emphasis added), who go to libraries and cemeteries, “in the hope of making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish” (73). The narrator points to the relevance of trivial things while disclaiming narrative authority, pointing to what she does not know. Almeda Roth, as the narrator imagines her, wrote poetry by carefully neglecting and omitting unsightly scenes in her surroundings: “some things must be disregarded. Manure piles, of course, and boggy fields full of high, charred stumps” (61, emphasis added). The back of Almeda’s house faces a disreputable street, called Pearl Street, which, as the narrator notes, “is another story” (55) and lies at the edge of a boghole called the Pearl Street Swamp, which is full of refuse (55). Almeda Roth will decide on a radical change after an encounter with a dead-drunk woman there. Although Almeda is awakened by the noise in the street at the back of her house, she does not leave the house but the next day, as she looks out of the window she sees that “[d]own against her fence there is a pale lump pressed – a body” (64). The body is lying against her fence, which is an intimation that her carefully organized and controlled world has been challenged by the quasi intrusion of this body. It seems that there is no getting rid of that lump, that body that has been thrown against the fence and abandoned there. As a “lump pressed,” the body simultaneously evokes clay and the world of print, since the word “press” can also refer to a printing press. The image of this woman’s body is the first instance of several connections between women’s bodies and the world of print and stories that “Meneseteung” offers. That body, which a man has touched and abused, intrudes upon the poetess’s world, but this intrusion also marks the moment when “the body marked, imprinted by desire enter[s] narrative” (Brooks 25). What is at stake in this story is what Brooks calls the process of imprinting and inscription of the body (22). Almeda will 23 Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life” eventually go down and look at the body in the street, back at home, she will experience “the pain and fullness in her lower body,” (68) due to her period that is about to start and she will notice that the pattern of familiar objects has started to move, flow and alter. As “this glowing and swelling begins to suggest words,” (69) the “flow of words” (69) is directly connected to “her flow” which then starts (69-70). Almeda Roth then decides to try and write “one great poem that will contain everything,” from the obscene body in the street, to the polished shoe of the man who courts her and the woman’s battered body, to the detail of her blue-black bruise. The refuse heap and the back street are cen- tral places in “Meneseteung,” an idea which Dermot McCarthy underscores when he argues that the encounter in Pearl Street “leads Almeda to a breakthrough […] because the marginal world of Pearl Street, with its apogee of exclusion, the swamp […] is not periphery but alternate centre” (14). If “Meneseteung” brings together body and text, with the flow of words and the flow of blood, “Differently” (also from Friend of My Youth) suggests the same connec- tion, albeit from the opposite perspective. The main protagonist has taken a creative writing class and written a story, but is criticized by the (male) instructor for having put “too many things” in her story (216). The instructor likes her second attempt whereas she does not, so she makes “a long list of all the things that ha[ve] been left out and hand[s] it in as an appendix to the story” (216). The word “appendix” serves to rein- force the connection between text and body. The passage, which opens the story, also sheds light on the title – “Differently” may also refer to a desire to write stories diffe- rently from other writers. It indirectly echoes the lumps that proliferate in other stories, challenging the perfect shape of the classic short story – Del’s catalogue of growths concludes, one recalls, with the phrase “with stories to tell.” It is no coincidence that in “Meneseteung,” which emphasizes the connection between bodies and writing, pat- terns, when the main protagonist looks at them, “seem ready to move, flow and alter, or possibly to explode” (Friend 69). In her interview with Mariella Frostrup Munro explai- ned that her stories did not follow the rules of the short story genre because they had “an awful lot of stuff ” that, “by strict standard,” were unnecessary to them but were necessary to her; interestingly, she then went on to cite the carpet in Carla’s trailer in “Runaway.” The picturesque jumble of objects on Mrs. Fullerton’s back porch, as Mi- chael Toolan argues, can be compared to the structures of Munro’s stories (11) since the narrator remarks, “here was no open or straightforward plan, not order than an outsider might understand” (Dance 22).
Conclusion: The Squalor of Tragedy in Ordinary Life Munro has repeatedly used stories from home and foregrounded reflections on what it means to use home as material – memories, people, and stories. The story that best epitomizes this is probably “Family Furnishings” (Hateship), a story about a woman who becomes a writer. The story shows that the narrator needs to leave home to become who she wants to be, but also shows the need to listen to stories from home. As she is about to get married and leave her home region, the narrator pays her cousin a visit. The cousin starts telling her a well-known, often-told family story, which the narrator hates and she is relieved that her fiancé will be spared the story (he has not come with her): A good thing that he didn’t have to hear about Alfrida’s mother, on top of finding out about my mother and my family’s relative or maybe considerable poverty. He admired 24
opera and Laurence Oliver’s Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy – for the squalor of tragedy – in ordinary life. (Hateship 110) Interestingly, the mother’s illness, Parkinson’s, poverty and tragedies that strike ordinary people are associated, probably reflecting the fiancé’s views. The fiancé is said to have “no time” for such aspects of life: he dislikes hearing about them, and has literally no time for them (he did not take the time to accompany her on this visit). As the reference to the opera and Hamlet indicates, the passage in “Family Furnishings” is about defining literary material, which the narrator makes clear as she explains she is planning to be- come a writer. Munro is clearly being ironical, all the more so as the fiancé is said to -ad mire not Shakespeare’s Hamlet but a celluloid version of the play. The phrase that is set off by the pair of dashes reads as a comment on Munro’s choice of topics too – squalid tragedies such as the many deaths that Flo tells Patrick about in “The Beggar Maid,” the (accidental?) death of the little boy in “The Time of Death,” or the death of Lois’s father’s in “Thanks for the Ride” (which the narrator, a middle-class boy seems very reluctant to listen to). At first sight, it seems to read like an ironic comment on Munro’s own choice of material, as if “Family Furnishings” “looked back” on Munro’s writing and choice of material. Yet there is no irony, rather, “Family Furnishings” is explicitly concerned about what material a writer can use. First, the narrator seems to somehow share her fiancé’s doubts. So far, the family story has been a story that she could not stand listening to, as her mother and her aunts told it: the narrator’s feeling that her mother and her aunt’s voices were “obscene” (Hateship 110) is conveyed by a striking image that conjures up the body: “their voices were like worms slithering in my insides” (110). Alfrida, however, will tell her story and as the narrator listens to her, one sentence catches her attention: “And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head” (112). The moment is epiphanic, it is the moment when she understands how the sort of stories and real life tragedies her fiancé despises can provide her with her material, as the repetition of the pronoun “me” shows: “I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air available only to my- self ” (112). “Family Furnishings” clearly suggests that the narrator has to find her own voice by claiming these stories as her material and incorporating them in her own wri- tings (Bigot “Voices” 31). The exploding lamp may have killed the cousin, but it offers the would-be writer a moment of clarity when she sees that one can become a writer by using material from home, which, as the rest of the story points out, is no easy thing: “there was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own” (“Family Furnishings” 114). The narrator claims a family story, and the stories that circulate in her kitchen about her relatives’ digestions, kidneys, tumors, sceptic throats, and boils (91). However, as the title of the story suggests, the narrator also claims her parents’ books as her family heritage, books that had been relegated to the bookcase but were, to the little girl, “like presences in the house just as the trees outside the windows were not plants but presences rooted in the ground” (101) Quite strikingly, she brings together books and trees rooted in the ground, suggesting that her surroundings, her home ground, are part of her heritage. As the narrator indicates that these books, among which she cites The Mill on the Floss or Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, still bear her mother’s maiden name in her “beautiful lost handwriting,” (101) she shows that they are her own “family 25 Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life” furnishings” as much as the family story is. Ultimately, the story aims to show that there can be no separation between “the classics” and tragedies in ordinary people’s lives, and demonstrates that Munro’s stories are rooted in world literature as well as in family stories.
Corinne Bigot University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre / CREA 370
W orks Cited
Bigot, Corinne. “‘And Another Surfaced’: Re-Emerging Voices, Stories and Secrets in Alice Munro’s ‘Family Furnishings’.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31.1 (2008): 28-35. —. Alice Munro. Les silences de la nouvelle. Rennes: PUR, 2014. —, and Catherine laNoNe. Sunlight and Shadows, Past and Present. Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades. Paris: PUF, 2014. BRooks, Peter. Body Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. caRRiNgtoN, Ildikó. Controlling the Uncontrollable. Deklb: Northern Illinois UP, 1989. De ceRteau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall, 1984. Berkeley, Los Angeles: U of California P, 2011. Trans. of L’invention du quotidien. 1980. Paris: Gallimard 1990. FRaNcescoNi, sabrina. “Alice Munro and the Poetics of the Linoleum.” The Inside of a Shell. Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades. Ed. Vanessa guigNeRy. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 86-97. gaRsoN, Marjorie. “‘I would try to make lists’: The Catalogue in Lives of Girls and Women.” Canadian Literature 150 (Fall 1996): 45-63. hoy, Helen. “Alice Munro: ‘Unforgettable, Indigestible Messages.’” Journal of Canadian Studies 26.1 (Spring 1991): 5-21. kaMBouReli, Smaro. “The Body as Audience and Performance in the Writing of Alice Munro.” A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Ed. Smaro kaMBouReli, and Shirley NeuMaN. Edmonton, AB: Longspoon/ NeWest, 1986. 31-8. MccaRthy, Dermot. “The Woman Out Back: Alice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung.’” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 19.1 (1994): 1-19. .
“Home” and the Narrative of an Impossible NostosNostos
The article looks at the contradictory dynamics at work in the representation of a “ho- mecoming” in Alice Munro’s story “Home.” It discusses the protagonist’s changed re- lation to place and landscape as she returns to her former home as an adult. The house she lived in as a child has been renovated and is almost entirely transformed now. Her reflections suggest loss and nostalgia; it is however a nostalgia of a reflective kind which does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it does not indulge in loss. Instead it is ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary.
Representations of the narrator as an eccentric outsider who experiences feelings of nostalgia, shame and denial are frequent in Alice Munro’s texts. This essay, which focuses on the short story “Home” from the collection The View from Castle Rock (2006), looks at the dynamics of “being home” and “not being home” at play in the text, as theorized by Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty in their essay “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?” (1986). Here the authors show how this oscillation engenders longing as well as contempt. In this short story, “home” is constructed as a site of refuge and comfort that exists mainly at the level of memory, and progressively shifts to become a site of conflict, shame and denial, in a way that is reminiscent of Munro’s short story cycle Who Do you Think You Are? (1978). Likewise one notices an oscillation in the narrative between “restorative nostalgia” and “reflective nostalgia” – a distinction elaborated by Svetlana Boym: Reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time, withthe irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection suggests new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis. The focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time. [...] Restorative nostalgia evokes national past and future; reflective nostalgia is more about the individual and cultural memory. [Restorative nostalgia] ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time. Reflective nostalgia cherishes fragments of memory and temporalizes space. (49) “Home” starts with a journey involving three bus rides and includes a detailed descrip- tion of the social and geophysical scenario of the multicultural Canada the narrator encounters: “This is an area with a heavy population of German and Dutch settlers, and some of the older people are speaking in one or another of those languages” (The View 285). The narrator is obviously attached to this landscape. As critics have em- phasized, Munro is very much aware of the intimate connection between person and place. Robert McGill in particular has devoted special attention to the role of place and landscape in Munro’s texts, where, he argues, “space is not subordinate to characters but interconnected with them” (“Distance” 106; see also “Open Houses”). This is not, however, a “homecoming.” The narrator’s familiarity with the place and with the house she grew up in is almost immediately both pointed at and undermined. A hint of nos- talgia surfaces at the beginning of the story: Now that I am living only a hundred miles away I come home every couple of months or so. Before this, for a long time, I lived more than a thousand miles away and would 28
go for years without seeing this house. I thought of it then as a place I might never see again and I was greatly moved by the memory of it. I would walk through its rooms in my mind. (288) At the time of the narration, however, her feelings have changed. As Catlin Charman remarks, “now that she has returned, she sees the family home, and the changes it has undergone, with a more critical, less distorted lens” (264). What happens next, the nar- rator’s reaction to a changed scenario, is unexpected. The narrator minutely observes and describes the significant renovations made by her father, thus suggesting feelings of yearning for what is lost: In my mind, when I was far away, I would also see the kitchen ceiling, made of narrow, smoke-stained, tongue-in-groove boards, and the frame of the kitchen window gnawed by some dog […]. The wallpaper was palely splotched by a leaking chimney, and the linoleum was repainted by my mother every spring, as long as she was able. […] That ceiling is hidden now behind squares of white tiles, and a new metal window frame has replaced the gnawed wooden one. The window glass is new as well […]. Even the outside of the house, the red brick whose crumbling mortar was particularly penetrable by an east wind, is going to be covered up with while metal siding. […] So it seems that this peculiar house – the kitchen part of it built in the eighteen-sixties – can be dissolved, in a way, and lost, inside an ordinary comfortable house of the present time. (288-9) This detailed description of the house as it was before and as it is at the time of the narration, is minute, almost obsessive: “and there is light everywhere – ceiling lights and plug-in lights, long blazing tubes and hundred-watt bulbs” (289). Just after experiencing this longing for the past, she admits to herself that her feelings for this house have changed with time: “I do not lament this loss as I would once have done” (289). The narrator’s perception, her view of the renovated house, does not lead to nostalgia. It is a gaze that defamiliarizes what was once very well known. One of the consequences of defamiliarization or estrangement is that it forces one to think of home, in different, often more complex terms. When the familiar is defamiliarized or estranged, it can no longer be taken for granted. Although Shklovsky coined the term “defamiliarization” to mark a distinction between poetic language and practical, communicative language, in later years he argued it applied to all art, which ideally would force the viewer/reader to perceive the subject in a new way, outside habitualization. Here, in a well-known passage from Theory of Prose he stresses the vital importance of working against habitualization, also known and translated as “automatization”: Held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war. [...] And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “estranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.” The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to its fullest. (5-6) In “Home,” the narrator recalls how, during her first visit to her father’s house after her marriage and her move east, she had a disquieting dream. Uncanny feelings arise when something familiar (a house, a family member), starts to act a bit strange; as Freud explains it in the famous 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche,” “Death and the re- 29 “Home” and the Narrative of an Impossible Nostos animation of the dead are typically represented as uncanny themes” (153). The dream evokes a Freudian atmosphere of uncanniness as the narrator dreams she encounters her dead mother in what was once the master bedroom (but is now assigned to her). Her father has already remarried and Irlma, his second wife, is about to redecorate that room and paint it in blue and white. In the dream, the narrator finds her mother busy “painting the baseboards yellow” in order to prevent Irlma from painting the room (The View 309). The narrator ends her account of the dream by remarking that her mother was very much like her old self: “And that was exactly like her, in the old days” (309). The house and the room, however, are perceived by the narrator as alien and unfamiliar. Other scenes that go beyond received and conventional notions of reality are evo- ked at the end of the story. Defamiliarization causes notions of home and belonging to be reconsidered: […] I feel obliged to hide from him the fact that the house does not mean as much to me as it once did, and that it really does not matter to me now how he changes it. I know how you love this place,’ he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don’t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself that I loved here – some self that I have finished with, and none too soon. (290) Dynamics of “being home” and “not being home” soon surface in the text and cause longing, as well as, contempt. Home, initially constructed as a site of refuge and safety, progressively metamorphoses into a site of conflict, shame and finally denial. Often in her fiction, Munro shows a character gaining consciousness of the false comfort that home provides. The idea that home is a site of bounded safety is undermined and home, on the contrary, is shown to be very precarious, fragile, and ultimately illusionary, as in the following passage from “Royal Beatings” (Who Do You Think You Are?): “And just as there is a moment, when you are drugged, in which you feel perfectly safe, sure, unreachable, and then without warning and right next to it, there is a moment in which you know the whole protection has fatally cracked, though it is still pretending to hold soundly together” (Who 25). Lorna Hutchinson has effectively captured and summed up many of the qualities of Munro’s writing, especially the way in which it deals with different spheres what is commonly construed as “reality”: “Munro deals with the intri- cacies of human nature and a realism that develops through the extraordinary detail of place and person amidst a mire of ambiguity” (189). In her stories, “the familiar world is inextricably linked to the unfamiliar; it exists only through its darker sphere, and vice versa” (194). It is worth emphasizing that in Munro’s texts, as Robert McGill reminds us, “the realist plea is for verisimilitude […] Munro’s concept of what is ‘real’ is more complex than one might first suspect” (“Distance” 11). In “The Office,” the feeling of being “sheltered and encumbered […] warmed and bound” (Dance 61) in one’s home, is set against moments in which the protagonist steps “out of the darkness of sheltered existence” (Arendt 51). As a result, places that have a strong emotional signification change into “derangements of anonymous space” (Yeager 10). This causes the prota- gonist to feel “exposed” and to have such a harsh experience of both freedom and lo- neliness that they become impossible to bear. A more fundamental sense of uncertainty can be found in “Images,” also from Munro’s début collection. Here, disorientation and insecurity are connected to the narrator’s inability to recognize her own home: 30
“Whose house is that?” my father said, pointing. It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come round in a half-circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in the winter. (Dance 42) Munro’s short stories often display an obsession with “home” recurrent in narratives of displacement and dispossession. More often than not, home needs to be reimagined in the stories in order to enable a sense of belonging. In “Home,” the middle-aged narra- tor becomes aware of the treacherous, provisional sense of security “home” gives her. As a result, her sense of belonging is shaken. Critical theory has problematized the notion of “home.” As Rose Marangoly sug- gests, “Home is also the imagined location that can be more readily fixed in a mental landscape than in actual geography” (11). Edward Said has written extensively on the subject of place, home, and homeland and the numerous implications of these terms: “But this idea of place does not cover the nuances, principally of reassurances, fitness, belonging, association, and community, entailed in the phrase at home or in place” (World 8). In “Family Furnishing,” from the 2001 collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Love- ship, Marriage, Munro returns to the question of home as a place which fails to provide comfort and stability. Here the meaning of “home ground” as dangerous territory is twofold. On the one hand, Munro represents home as a place that at times can pro- vide false comfort and that can be also a locus of painful conflicts. On the other hand, “home ground” in the passage that follows, refers metafictionally, as is often the case with Munro, to her own work as a writer. In this story “home ground” works against “habitualization.” The narrator is compelled to “see” her life with fresh eyes. Conse- quently, her life as a writer, or more poignantly, her work as a writer cannot be taken for granted. The passage is worth quoting in full: There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting – set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder and harder to say that it was worth the trouble. (111) The risk is that writing itself becomes meaningless and useless when confronted with other, seemingly more productive activities. The first line in the next paragraph ends with a question, and thus provides an answer, at least for the time being: “Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else’s?” (111). In the same collection there is a story which borrows its title from a type of construc- tion known as “Post and Beam.” In the story, the house is not seen as a prison; on the contrary the protagonists seem to be very proud of it: It was a contemporary house, built in the West Coast style called Post and Beam […] the idea was to fit in the original forests. So the effect was plain and functional from the outside […]. Inside, the beams were exposed and none of the wood was covered up. The fireplace […] was set in a stone chimney and went up to the ceiling. (195-6) The house does look like an ideal dwelling for its owners, and indeed the male pro- tagonist, Brendan, is “very proud of their house” (195). But for Lorna, his wife, the place holds too many expectations and demands. When Lorna finds herself alone in her friend’s bare rented room, she feels at peace and would love to stay there for hours. Inside the room she experiences a momentary, longed-for sense of relief: “What she really wanted to do was […] to sit for hours not so much looking at this room as sinking 31 “Home” and the Narrative of an Impossible Nostos into it. To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her” (201). The sense of peace and freedom from the demands of family mem- bers found in the room is reminiscent of Doris Lessing’s 1963 story, “To Room 19.” Although in Lessing’s case, the protagonist’s need and desire to spend time alone in the cheap and “hideous” (980) hotel room lead to a psychotic break and, ultimately, suicide. Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty examine how subjects are constituted through their relationship with “home.” However, they question the received notions of “home” and the atmosphere of security, safety and individualism that has come to be associated with the word. The sense of bounded comfort and protection associated with “home” has been supported by a significant amount of scholarship. As an example, one could refer to the work of human geographer Douglas Porteous: Home provides both the individual and the small primary group known as the family with all the three territorial satisfactions [identity, security, stimulation]. These satisfactions derive from the control of physical space, and this control is secured by two major means. The personalization of space is an assertion of identity and a means of ensuring stimulation. (383) However, even for Porteous, the idea of home as a major fixed reference point for structuring reality is problematic. Precisely because it functions as an archetypical refe- rence point, there are other important aspects to be taken into account. First and fore- most, the division of psychic space between self and non self which has generated the essential dichotomy in geographical space between home and not home (see Bachelard 1969). For Porteous and other human geographers of the 1970s, home can only be un- derstood in terms of journeys (Lowenthal). It is likely that during the traveler’s absence both home and the individual may irretrievably change. That is why homecoming is considered impossible, and the traveler, in this view, is left with longing and unassua- geable regret. Porteous concludes his argument: “As psychic space, home paradoxically involves journey, the result of which may be the loss of the original home image and an infinitude of regret” (390). Martin and Mohanty take the dichotomy of home and not home much further in their deconstruction of received notions of “home”: “Being home” refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself. (191) In “Home,” as the narrator’s visit turns out to be longer than expected, the protagonist experiences an eerie time warp, and a denial of her actual life and achievements as an adult: Time and place can close in on me, it can so easily seem as if I have never got away, that I have stayed here my whole life. As if my life as an adult was some kind of dream that never took hold of me. I see myself not like Harry and Irlma, who have to some extent flourished in this life, or like my father, who has trimmed himself to it, but more like those misfits, captives – nearly useless, celibate, rusting – who should have left but didn’t, couldn’t, and are now unfit for any place. (312) She describes this “vision”: “I can see myself as a middle aged daughter who did her duty, stayed at home, thinking that someday her chance would come, until she woke up and knew it wouldn’t” (312). Again, in this story Munro shows how home “may smo- ther an individual who is unable to leave it for considerable periods” (Porteous 387). It 32 can easily become “a trap which first encapsulates, then submerges the ego” (Porteous 387). In the story, the protagonist, if not a social misfit, is represented nonetheless as an outsider to her own family and to the community. There is no recognition of her success as a writer in her family. For her stepmother, writing means handwriting, as the narrator soon realizes with dismay: “It took me a moment to figure out that she was talking about handwriting. That’s what ‘writing’ has always meant around here” (291). In addition, the writing of fiction is considered an activity with no use or purpose, defined as “making things up” (291). A paradox lying at the core of Munro’s texts emerges for her characters: on the one hand, an obsession with place and home, or home-place, which suggests a need for se- curity and safety; on the other hand, the impossibility of achieving a sense of belonging to a place or to a community. In a review of The View from Castle Rock, Munro is cited saying: “When you write about real people you are always up and against contradic- tions” (Mars-Jones n.p.). The reviewer then observes, “fiction thrives on contradictions. Life, though, is amateurish in its shaping. More fates fizzle than explode. […] Munro’s filling of the gaps is lovely in itself, but keeps bumping up against the implacability of the record” (Mars-Jones n.p.). Sometimes Munro’s characters escape from home and manage to dodge conventions and traditions. A very significant escape occurs in “Wild Swans” (from Who Do You Think You Are?): the train journey of the young female prota- gonist to Toronto, away from her provincial home town, could be seen as a first “line of flight” that provides the exhilarating sense of a multitude of possibilities to be explored. The train that takes Rose elsewhere becomes a pathway, a liminal space between, first of all, class and cultural differences: her working-class background, which she rejects, and the upper-middle-class setting she will eventually get to know. Rose is unaware at this stage of the invisible boundaries of class and cultural difference she is crossing. It is, however, thanks to those in-between places – those boundaries, and the act of trespas- sing them – that the movement towards a not-yet-known beyond begins. Rose’s journey could be seen as following the trajectory of a Deleuzian line of flight in the sense that it has within it Rose’s unsaid: the not-yet-articulated aspirations and desires. The line of flight is a moment, in Deleuze’s terms, of deterritorialization – that is “the moment by which one leaves the territory” (559). In this respect, Rose’s trip on that train becomes an escape route – “out of the cage of codification – codification of social practices, rules of behavior and modes of thought” (West-Pavlov 202). From now on, there won’t be any real homecoming. The gap between Rose’s supposed “home place” and the loca- tions of her successive re-settlements will widen to a point of no return: Rose was going to Toronto on the train for the first time by herself. […] She had a window seat, and was soon extraordinarily happy. She felt Flo receding, West Hanratty flying away from her, her own wearying self discarded as easily as everything else. She loved the towns less and less known. (Who 76-7) In Who Do You Think You Are? a pervasive sense of precariousness envelops the narra- tor’s perception of her world. She is represented as an eccentric, and is aware of being perceived as such. Such a nomadic existence has as its counterpart a sense of insecurity as she is at the mercy of unpredictable encounters and of risks. Nevertheless, there is something to be gained from this condition. As Edward Said has notably argued in a well-known essay: 33 “Home” and the Narrative of an Impossible Nostos
Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one […] and always to move away from centralized authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable. (Representations 63) Eventually, towards the end of this short story cycle, there will be a more positive note: the sense of shame that has accompanied Rose will lift and there will be room for crea- tivity (See Rao). Dynamics of class and cultural difference are at play also in “The Ticket,” the story that precedes “Home” in The View from Castle Rock. Here the narrator’s wedding is approaching and the entire household bristles with preparations. Two trunks are filled with presents from her own family members: linen, towels, cushions, even china. One of the trunks is a wedding present, much to her fiancé’s surprise and disappointment. For where he comes from, “a trunk was what you went out and bought, when you nee- ded it. No passing it off as a present” (256). He comes from an affluent family and the cultural difference between them is often underscored. As one can expect, the trunk’s contents are never used or displayed in the couple’s new house in Vancouver. The presents would only become a cause for embarrassment and shame on the part of the narrator. She, however, will not be able to escape feelings of shame. In “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Caren Kaplan works within and against the constructions of “deterrito- rialization” – interpreted as the “moment of alienation and exile in language and lite- rature” with the aim of describing “a new terrain, a new location, in feminist politics.” This deterritorialization, or becoming minor, requires that “[w]e must leave home, as it were, since our homes are often the sites of racism, sexism, and other damaging social practices. Where we come to locate ourselves in terms of our specific histories and differences must be a place with room for what can be salvaged from the past and what can be made anew” (187). At the very end of the story “Home” there is an episode that is salvaged from the narrator’s past and that occurred during, as she words it, “the worst winter of my child- hood, which was 1935” (315). The episode is focused on the barn and the land outside of it. In her mind she pictures her father milking the cow that will eventually die from the cold, the land outside that will be frozen, bearing no crops, and herself “sitting on the first or second step watching [her] father milk the black-and-white cow” (314). It is an image of reflective nostalgia which, according to Boym, “does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home” (50). The home to which the narrator has returned has just been renovated and gentrified. This defamiliarization and sense of distance drive her to tell her story of the relationship between past, present and future. Through such longings the nostalgic narrator discovers that the past is not merely that which doesn’t exist anymore; instead the past erupts in the present moment in unexpected ways. As a result, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities and “possibilities of historic development” since “reflective nostalgia has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness” (Boym 50). The modern nostalgic realizes that the journey in itself is what matters. Homecoming in this case does not imply a recovery of identity; to quote Boym again, a “modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, at once” (50). The narrator’s recollection of that scene in and outside the barn, as Caren Kaplan suggests, is suggestive of 34
a new terrain, a new location, in feminist poetics. Not a room of one’s own, not a fully public or collective self, not a domestic realm – it is a space of the imagination, which allows for the inside, the outside, and the liminal elements in between. Not a romanticized pastoral nor a modernist urban utopia – [the] garden is the space where writing occurs without loss or separation. (197-8)
Eleonora Rao University of Salerno, Italy
W orks Cited
aReNDt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. BoyM, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic, 2001. BachelaRD, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Trans. of La Poétique de l’Espace. Paris : PUF, 1958. chaRMaN, Caitlin. “‘Secretly Devoted to Nature’: Place Sense in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.” Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Ed. Charles May. Ipswich, MA: Salem P, 2013. 259-75. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix guattaRi. A Thousands Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 1987. Trans. of Mille plateaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Minuit, 1980. FReuD, Sigmund. The Uncanny. 1919. London: Penguin, 2003. hutchiNsoN, Lorna. “Uncovering the Grotesque in Fiction by Alice Munro and Gabrielle Roy.” Studies in Canadian Literature 33.1 (2008): 187-210. kaplaN, Caren. “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse.” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 187-98. loweNthal, David. “Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory.” Geographical Review 65.3 (1975): 1-36. lessiNg, Doris. To Room Nineteen. New York: Vintage Books, 1980. MaRaNgoly geoRge, Rose. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1996. MaRs-JoNes, Adam. Review of Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock. The Observer 5 Nov. 2006. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/05/fiction.features. Consulted 23 April 2015. MaRtiN, Biddy, and Chandra talpaDe MohaNty. “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” Feminist Studies, Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa De lauRetis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 191-212. Mcgill, Robert. “Somewhere I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Alice Munro’s Fiction of Distance.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.1 (2002): 9-29. —.“Where do you think you are? Alice Munro’s Open Houses.” Mosaic 35.4 (2003): 103-120. MuNRo, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. 1968. New York: Vintage, 1998. —. Who Do You Think You Are? 1978. Toronto: Penguin, 1991. —. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. —. The View from Castle Rock. 2006. London: Vintage, 2007. poRteous, Douglas J. “Home: The Territorial Core.” Geographical Review 66.4 (Oct. 1976): 383-90. Rao, Eleonora. “The Stranger’s Time is a Moving Train, a Plane in Flight: Alice Munro’s étranger.” Time and the Short Story. Ed. Maria Teresa chialaNt, and Marina lops. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. 211-24. saiD, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage, 1996. —. The World, The Text and The Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. shkloVsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. 1925. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1991. west-paVloN, Russell. Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. yeageR, Patricia. “Narrating Space.” The Geography of Identity. Ed. Patricia yeageR. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1996. 1-39. “I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power”: When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change” by Alice Munro
In Alice Munro’s work secrets are related to the great tragedies of our private lives. They are shameful, hidden stories that eat away at characters. Yet in “Before the Change” Mu- nro embraces the secret and transforms it into a central element, dramatizing it in order to show its reversing capacity: secrets are weapons that can change a situation for the protago- nists. The secret is then rehabilitated and becomes an element of power, all the more so as it is the locus of irony. This essay relies mostly on Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s work on the two types of secret in Munro’s fiction, as well as on the work of Deborah Tannen who has analysed gender in conversations.
The etymology of the secret (from the Latin word “secretus” which means “sepa- rated”) points to something that is put aside, discarded, relegated to the margin. It is akin to what is unseen, to what lies underground. Secrets are central to Munro’s fiction and are part and parcel of the generic affiliation of her writing to the mystery or the detective tale. A secret is often found at the centre of narrative and characters, narrators or readers try to uncover it. For example in “The Love of a Good Woman,” Enid, the protagonist, tries to find out whether Mr. Quinn actually murdered Mr. Willens (she has been told so by a delirious Mrs. Quinn), but fails to confront Mr. Quinn. In “Vandals,” it is the reader (and not one of the characters) who is facing a secret about the protago- nist: why is Liza vandalizing Bea and Ladner’s house? The secret, as a diegetic and nar- rative device, is exploited in various ways in Munro’s fiction and can lead to ambiguous endings. Secrets, consisting of a piece of knowledge or an act that has been hidden and is known to only one person or a few people, are hidden away for the very reason that they are often shameful. Adultery and murder are indeed often found in Munro’s fic- tion. I have chosen “Before the Change,” from the collection The Love of a Good Woman (1998), to explore the rehabilitation of those shameful secrets, as this short story dis- plays layer upon layer of secrets. The three principal ones are the clandestine abortions performed by the father, the child given away by the daughter and missing money (the narrator discovers that money is missing at the death of the father). The story illustrates how secrets are handled in a very special way in Munro’s fiction, and are rehabilitated as they become weapons. Moreover they are valued as special tools for creation, for the narrator and for the author. In order to analyse the rehabilitation of the secret in this story, I will first demonstrate how secrets give power, then I will show that a strategy of reversal is at work when secrets deprive characters of their power. Finally I will analyse the way in which secrets are rehabilitated as a source of creation. This short story takes the form of letters addressed to Robin, who we discover later to be the former fiancé of the narrator. As soon as the narrator arrives at her father’s house, she pictures the atmosphere as uneasy and the landscape outside becomes the mirror of this discomfort as she wonders: “why does this benevolence of landscape fade, in my father’s presence and in his territory […]?” (256) As in a detective novel, both reader and narrator have to decode elements in order to see through the enigmatic figure of the father. Secrets and vision are immediately intertwined. When she arrives, 36 the narrator describes the living room and, like a detective taking notes, she surveys the room and makes a list of elements using only nominal and non-finite clauses: Nothing new in “this room” but the television. Heavy side curtains with wine-colored leaves on a beige ground and the net curtains in between. Picture of Sir Galahad leading his horse and picture of Glencoe, red deer instead of the massacre. The old filing cabinet moved in years ago from my father’s office but still no place found for it “…”. (254) The narrator shows the importance of decoding signs when she points out the presence of the allegory of death in one of the paintings. Therefore, things are not what they seem to be, the narrator and the reader have to go under the surface to understand the secret in the house, and as in the painting, it will be a secret related to death. However this short story differs from a traditional detective tale firstly because the secrets involved also concern the narrator. Indeed she does not immediately reveal who Robin is, what type of relationship she had with him, or that she gave their child away. The reader needs to read the clues she leaves in her letters to Robin. For example the first hint at her pregnancy comes through an oblique reference: “My stomach is still a little puffy. There are no marks on it, but I can bunch it up in my hand. Otherwise I’m okay, my weight is back to normal or a little below” (262). The reference to “marks,” together with the ellipsis of “stretch” which allows the word to encompass other types of marks, indicate that the reader must decode the signs (on the character’s body or not) to understand her past. Indeed the narrator at first only makes oblique references to her past; they become clues and signs that the reader must gather and interpret. Se- condly this story differs from a traditional detective story because of the nature of the secrets. I would like to argue that the story foregrounds “Secrets” and “secrets” – the two types of secrets analysed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle who spells the former with a ca- pital S to differentiate it from the latter (27-32). Lecercle explains that the Secret is “an extraordinary event,” (27) and it is because it is extraordinary that this Secret needs to be disclosed; its disclosure is usually violent (28) and the Secret is temporary (29). As a consequence of its violence and suddenness, the Secret is “a first step in the reconstruc- tion of reality” (29) and it is something the plot builds toward (30). As for its counter- part, the secret does not need to be disclosed, its meaning lies “on the surface,” (28) it is everywhere and not subject to temporality (29). Besides, the secret is necessary in our everyday lives, on a social level, and it needs “constant reinterpretation” (30-2). To sum up, Secrets are what we commonly associate with the word “secret”; they can be used as traditional narrative devices since they can be hidden or revealed, whereas secrets are more akin to blanks in a story. Bearing this distinction in mind, it is possible to conclude from Lecercle’s essay that detective stories, more than any other genre, rely largely on Secrets. In this short story, however, the two kinds of secrets coexist. Leclercle analyses the secret in three short stories written by Alice Munro and his conclusions are useful to my article, in particular his remarks on the secret at the heart of “Miles City, Mon- tana.” Lecercle shows that this story seems to be about a Secret (the reason for the boy’s drowning or a second drowning that the narrator might reveal) but actually the story is not about a Secret so much as the sudden awareness, for the narrator, of a secret: “the mystery of otherness.” Lecercle explains that “[t]hose others whom one believes one knows, our nearest and dearest, are, in such moments of loud clarity, unknown, mysterious, secret, or else too well known, bringing disappointment” (34-5). A parallel can indeed be drawn between the epiphany of the narrator of “Miles City, Montana” 37 When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change” and the epiphany in “Before the Change.” In this story, the narrator also discovers that those who were close to her, or those she thought she had figured out (her father and Mrs. Barrie) will always remain unfathomable. In my last part, I will argue that this awa- reness will allow the transformation of the narrator into a writer. The relationship between father and daughter is fraught with animosity, the narrator describing it as an “undeclared underground war” (268). It is itself a Secret of sorts (this is marked by the prefix un- and the morpheme “under”) that the narrator will try to uncover by attempting to force her father to voice his Secrets. The secrecy is given more weight by the succession of these two trisyllabic words. As soon as she arrives, the narrator seeks a more open relationship with her father as she tries to kiss him, but something holds her back. She is already failing in her striving to have a peaceful and unobstructed relationship with her father. She will not be able to subdue the reticence she finds in her father, yet her constant trying transforms any conversation into a battle. It is no coincidence that the story should begin with a reference to the debate between Nixon and Kennedy, as this suggests a verbal opposition. And indeed conversations between the daughter and the father become battles grounded in words. As opposed to the verbal fights between Robin and the narrator, those between the father and his daughter are mainly conveyed through direct speech, allowing thus a more direct repre- sentation of the conflict. The conversations are further dramatized by the shortness of the sentences and the repetitions, making them very similar to stichomythia: And I had to say, “I think I know what’s going on here.” His head reared up and he snorted. He really did, like an old horse. “You do, do you? You think you know what?” I said, “I’m not accusing you. I don’t disapprove.” “Is that so?” “I believe in abortion,” I said. “I believe it should be legal.” “I don’t want you to use that word again in this house,” my father said. “Why not?” “Because I am the one who says what words are used in this house.” “You don’t understand what I’m saying.” “I understand that you’ve got too loose a tongue. You’ve got too loose a tongue and not enough sense. Too much education and not enough ordinary brains.” I still did not shut up. I said, “People must know.” “Must they? There’s a difference between knowing and yapping. Get that through your head once and for all.” (270) The paucity of reporting clauses makes the passage read like a jousting drama script, intensifying the confrontational nature of the conversation. The allusion to the posture of the father conveys a sense of a coming battle; on the one hand his position makes him ready for a head-on attack, on the other hand, the reference to the horse reminds one of medieval combats. It is clear here that words are used as weapons for a verbal fight: the father reuses the exact words of his daughter in order to metaphorically throw them back at her. In another conversation, the narrator even underlines the materiality of words. When her father repeats what he has just said (she wanted him to elaborate), she concludes: “‘Just a couple of Americans,’ he said, as if the words might have got by me the first time” (256). The phrasal verb “get by” suggests that words uttered by her father, just like material objects (like missiles), are supposed to “get to” her. The narrator and the reader understand that in verbal battles, Secrets are powerful allies and provide power. It is the father’s Secret that gives him such authority in his 38 house. The father indeed knows one of the most important Secrets: the Secret of life and death, which takes place inside the female body. The secrecy of the abortions the father has been performing is underlined when the narrator remembers that women who sought her father’s services used to come at night (266). Depicted as a tyrannical father, the father uses his social position and the power his Secret gives him; they give him an even greater authority to the extent that he imposes what words can be uttered or not – “I am the one who says what words are used in this house” (270) – therefore censoring his daughter. His authority goes even beyond his house since the community, instead of denouncing him, prefers to turn a blind eye: “the whole town seems to be on his side, or at least on the side of silence” (291). And as a matter of fact, the narrator is on the side of speech, she is saying the words that the father won’t say and therefore already positioning herself as an author.
Secrets Give Power The narrator understands that Secrets are maintained through language, and the father derives his authority from language, whether he chooses speech or silence. First, his words frame him as an expert. Not only does he have medical expertise, but he pre- sents himself as the figure of knowledge, posing as the figure of authority. Here again, language and communication are the tools he uses to assert his position. The following passage illustrates how language is the medium through which the battle is fought: “I said, “Oh. In Byron’s war.” “Byron’s war?” said my father. “What makes you call it that? Byron didn’t fight in any war “…” But then he calmed down and recounted for me or recalled for himself the progress of the war against the Ottoman Empire. He spoke of the Porte and I wanted to say that I’ve never been sure if that was an actual gate, or was it Constantinople, or the Sultan’s court? But it’s always best not to interrupt. When he starts to talk like this there’s the sense of a truce, or a breathing spell, in an undeclared underground war. I was sitting facing the window, and I could see through the net curtains the heaps of yellow-brown leaves on the ground in the rich generous sunlight (maybe the last of those days we’ll get for a long while by the sound of the wind tonight) and it brought to mind my relief as a child, my secret pleasure, whenever I could get him going, by a question or by accident, on a spiel like this.” (267-8) The narrator is attempting to show that she, too, has information, has knowledge and that she may be an expert. She is not interrupting her father but is trying to bond with him by providing further information. However, her father perceives her gesture as a desire to name things, that is to say, to replace him in his role. While the father can de- cide on the words, he cannot tolerate for his daughter to adopt this position. Following this remark, the father feels the need to reposition himself as the expert on the Otto- man Empire. However, communication is broken (“recalled for himself” (267, emphasis added), but for the narrator, something else is achieved: she has pacified her father in allowing him to assert his position of authority once again. Such an attitude has been shown by Deborah Tannen to be particularly feminine, that is why it is possible to say that the verbal battle between the father and his daughter is gender-coded: Since women seek to build rapport, they are inclined to play down their expertise rather than display it. Since men value the position of center stage and the feeling of knowing more, they seek opportunities to gather and disseminate factual information. (125) 39 When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change”
And indeed the narrator is politely listening to her father who gives her facts she does not really care about (it is referred to as “a spiel” [267]): she does not provide us with the information about the Ottoman Empire, and her thoughts are no longer focused on her father’s monologue since she is distracted by the view outside and is reminded of her childhood. Her lack of interest is made blatant by the different layers of digression. Her inferior position in this instance is underlined by the comparison with her position when she was a child. Once again, she is the listener, she does not want to interrupt to demonstrate her own knowledge about Porte. Deborah Tannen observes: The act of giving information by definition frames one in a position of higher status, while the act of listening frames one as lower. Children instinctively sense this – as do most men. But when women listen to men, they are not thinking in terms of status. Unfortunately, their attempts to reinforce connections and establish rapport, when interpreted through the lens of status, can be misinterpreted as casting them in a subordinate position – and are likely to be taken that way by many men. (139) It is clear that the narrator is placed in an inferior position, and that her father can assert his power in his house. Mrs. Barrie, the maid, also derives some power from sharing the father’s Secret since she helps him during the abortions. She is an aid and comes from a poorer social background, yet she enjoys some power in the house, much more than a regular maid. She even has some power over her boss: she dictates what to watch on TV (256) and what type of conversations can be had (268). Yet she does not use words as weapons. In fact she is not good with words, and does not value them. The narrator informs us that she calls an ostrich a “thingamajig” because “she won’t try to say ‘ostrich,’ or she can’t remember” (256) and that she would not admire someone for “knowing something nobody needed to know, like a foreign language” (265). Yet Mrs. Barrie is the one who benefits the most financially from the clandestine abortions.
Reversal at Work: Disclosed Secrets Deprive Someone of his or her Power However, because a Secret provides power it is also potentially connected with someone else’s loss of power. An ironic reversal of situation can take place. Jean-Jacques Lecercle points out this reversal when he writes that “the violence lies not only in the disclosure of truth, it lies in truth itself, which contaminates, threatens to subvert and overturn the society in which it appears” (25-6). This overturning of society is indeed what allows the Secret to become the locus of irony. It is the medium through which power is given and retrieved. When the narrator discovers the secret actions of her father, he is deprived of his Secret: there is a shift of power. Corinne Bigot notices that this shift of power is re- presented very soon after the narrator’s discovery, in the change in the father’s use of language (40-1). The father is forced to be explicit when he declares “I don’t want you to use that word again in this house” (270), whereas his authority used to be conveyed through silence. Such a statement is in fact counterproductive because the enforced silence underlines the very existence of a Secret and makes it more obvious. Similarly, by calling the women who come for an abortion “the specials” (272), the father, instead of concealing, makes the Secret even more apparent by calling attention to the way the noun creates a new category by leaving aside what it is premised on. 40
The narrator finds out about the abortions when she encounters Mrs. Barrie carrying a basin of blood. This encounter is analysed by the narrator as being staged: “she made a grimace of dismay. […] This was an act” (268). The mention of the grimace reinforces the fact that Mrs. Barrie is only simulating dismay since the word can refer to “an af- fected expression of countenance” (OED). As stated above, Mrs. Barrie is presented as someone who cannot use words to assert her power, and I would argue that instead she chooses to display it, as she uses actions instead of words. Even though the motivations behind Mrs. Barrie’s displaying of the basin are not known, her gesture can be interpre- ted as an assertion of her power because she feels threatened by the narrator. Ever since her arrival, the narrator has been trying to change things in the house and in her father’s practice, for example by suggesting that the waiting room needs painting (258) or by introducing perked coffee (266), but Mrs. Barrie and her father seem hostile towards these changes. The narrator will learn how to use the staged accident to her advantage, and to turn her father’s Secret into a weapon. By refusing to play Mrs. Barrie’s game, that is to say, by understanding how Mrs. Barrie uses the Secret, she gets the upper hand: “All I seemed to be concerned about was not letting Mrs. B. have it her way. No questions, no shocked realization” (269). As for the narrator’s Secret, that is, giving away her newborn baby, when she reveals it, the violence of the disclosure is almost caricatured since her father dies when he hears his daughter’s Secret, like a death on the battlefield. The narrator informs us that “he had suffered a blinding and paralyzing stroke” (284). The adjective “blinding” and the reference at the end of the paragraph to “his unseeing eye” (284) invite a literal rea- ding of the expression “blinded by the truth.” The violence of the disclosure is literal. In this short story, the violence of the disclosure is conveyed through the use of a ternary rhythm. First this formulation is found when the narrator discovers that her father performs abortions: “This was an act. The surprise, the dismay, the hurrying away” (269). Then when the narrator becomes aware that Mrs. Barrie is the one who has her father’s money, the same rhythm is used: “Then I saw the darkening flush, the tide of embarrassment, the difficulty of being grateful” (288). And finally, the ternary rhythm is used when the narrator understands her father’s motives for performing the abortions: “I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power” (285). The characteristic rhythm is used by the narrator in order to mimic the working of her mind at the time of the discovery: the shortness of the sentences and the use of noun phrases convey a sense of abruptness. Although the narrator uses a similar rhythm to convey her discoveries, the aim is different. As the author of the letters, she can a posteriori make fun of Mrs. Barrie by presenting her as a poor actor. Once more, even though it is about the same secret (abortions) the narrator represents Mrs. Barrie as a ridiculous character and her father as a dignified person. In the sentences which describe the narrator’s realisation, the use of periods (“I meant the risk. The secrecy. The power.”) instead of commas (“The surprise, the dismay, the hurrying away.” [269]) gives more weight to the authority of the father because the rhythm of the sentence is slowed down, each item is treated as a discrete element and thus gains in emphasis. The narrator’s Secret is itself ironic, considering the clandestine activities of her father, as the narrator points out: “I have been thinking how ironic that was” (281). Besides, the irony also lies in the reversal of situation. When the narrator decides to give her father a lecture by revealing her Secret, she tries to position herself as the one who 41 When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change” has the expertise. Against all odds; she, too, has an experience of Secrets and of medical processes that some women need to go through to get an abortion since she almost got one. However, as a final irony played on her, her “lecture” will never be heard. The very moment of disclosure was for her to be the climax of a reversal of power, but it is never attained. The irony does not stop here since it was the narrator’s former lover, Robin, the recipient of the letters, who wanted her to get an abortion because as a minister, he thought that having a child out of wedlock was a scandal. The reader cannot miss the irony and the hypocrisy of the situation: being frowned upon by the community for having a child just before being married was, on a moral scale, much worse in his eyes than letting his fiancée get an abortion. Finally the narrator operates an ironic reversal of situation herself by depriving her father, in a possible future, of his Secret and therefore of his power. She notices that a Secret can only remain one as long as there are some taboos: “Change the law, change what a person does, change what a person is?” (285). It is to be noted that again a ternary rhythm is used; it summarises the narrator’s thoughts and underlines the irony. A similar twist occurs when she addresses Robin to evoke a possible future in which having a child out of wedlock would not be a disgrace. In both cases, Munro also plays with dramatic irony because the law and attitudes have indeed changed – abortion was legalized in 1969 in Canada. Secrets and their consequent power, are both shown as being part and parcel of a system of ethics which is not absolute, but very contextual. Later, we understand that Mrs. Barrie took the money from her employer. This may have been the result of a secret blackmailing. If this is the case, the father is therefore further deprived of his power. The three Secrets that have been dealt with belong to the category of Secrets with a capital S. But the other secrets are secrets that do not dwell in power relations but are the ground for creation. Their power is a creative power.
Rehabilitating Secrets as a Source of Creation Secrets with a lower case “s,” those which cannot be disclosed because they are always present, allow the narrator to reconstruct herself. The very title of the short story sug- gests a life-changing event which would lend itself to a rebirth of sorts. It can be the narrator’s transformation into a writer: the events narrated are thus those that occurred before her change. As Georg Simmel claims, secrets open gaps in the narrative from which other reali- ties which differ from visible ones, and other truths can branch out. The ultimate se- crets, with a lower case “s” in this story are the father and Mrs. Barrie, and, as a conse- quence, the nature of their relationship. The narrator’s father and Mrs. Barrie remain a blank. The motives for giving his money and the motivation for performing abortions are never explained or figured out by the narrator and, as a consequence, these events trigger endless speculation. Similarly the reason why Mrs. Barrie decides, after all these years, to reveal the father’s Secret remains unexplained. Instead, other worlds are ope- ned: the narrator has an epiphany when she becomes aware of a secret, “the mystery of otherness” (Leclercle 35) just like the narrator in “Miles City, Montana.” Her father and Mrs. Barrie are not the people she thought they were, and they will remain mysteries, but the awareness of the otherness of other people will enable her to become a writer. 42
Speculation triggers creativity and allows the narrator to become a writer. Secrets and solutions are not an end in themselves; it is the speculation that stimulates the imagination and initiates the creative process since “the perception of secrecy […] constitutes the generative principle of Munro’s storytelling, opening up a space for ima- ginative transformation and fictive artifice” (Howells 39-40). The narrator speculates, and indeed the penultimate section of the story abounds in words and expressions that allow different interpretations: Since that moment I have been happy. […] The thing I can’t imagine is my father caving in to blackmail. Particularly not to people who wouldn’t be very credible or clever. Not when the whole town seems to be on his side, or at least on the side of silence. What I can imagine, though, is a grand perverse gesture. To forestall demand, maybe, or just to show that he didn’t care. Looking forward to the lawyer’s shock, and to my trying even harder to figure him out, now that he’s dead. No. I don’t think he’d be thinking of that. I don’t think I’d have come into his thoughts so much. Never so much as I’d like to believe. (291-2) Different realities are offered with the conjunction “or,” the modal “would,” the ex- pressions “I can’t imagine […] What I can imagine,” and when she reconsiders her hypothesis: “No. I don’t think he’d be thinking of that.” The narrator at the end of the story accepts secrecy; she simply states “[s]ince that moment I have been happy.” The fact that she accepts that her letters may have no recipient – and this is an echo of the revelation scene – underlines that now, the process of creation, is what matters to her. It then is no coincidence that the abortions, connected with death, became for the doc- tor’s daughter the beginning of a life of creation. The abortions are what prompt her to start writing to tell the Secrets that are present in the story. In this story, Secrets and the words of the Secrets are weapons in the battle between the narrator and the father. That is why the Secret is rehabilitated as a strength: it is no longer a weakness but a means to endless reversals. However, because it is the locus of irony, this rehabilitation is uncertain, and the weapon, the Secret, can be turned on the one who keeps it. This short story can be compared with “Open Secrets,” as the moment of epiphany is, in both cases, very sudden and has no explanation but is an intuition of sorts. However, both the narrator of “Before the Change” and the prota- gonist of “Open Secrets” decide not to disclose it, they cannot reveal it, and accept this secrecy as part of life.
Lucile Rouet-BeNtley University Toulouse – Jean Jaurès
W orks Cited
Bigot, Corinne. Les silences de la nouvelle. Paris: PUR, 2014. howells, Coral Ann. “The Telling of Secrets / The Secrets of Telling: An Overview of Alice Munro’s Enigma Variations from Dance of the Happy Shades to Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” Open Letter 11-9/12-1 (2003-2004): 39-54. leceRcle, Jean-Jacques. “Alice Munro’s Two Secrets.” Open Letter 11-9/12-1 (2003-2004): 23-37. MuNRo, Alice. “Before the Change.” The Love of a Good Woman. 1998. London: Vintage, 2000. 254-92. —. “Open Secrets.” Open Secrets. 1994. London: Vintage, 1995. 129-60. 43 When Secrets Become Weapons in “Before the Change” siMMel, Georg. Secret et sociétés secrètes. Strasbourg: Circé, 1991. taNNeN, Deborah. You Just Don’t Understand. Women and Men in Conversation. London: Virago P, 1991.
Sweet Dissonance in Alice Munro’s “The Progress of Love,” “Friend of My Youth,” and “Free Radicals”
The grammatical characteristics of the introductory passages of Alice Munro’s short stories set the tone and give the reader vital clues to which they must be attuned in order to discover how the story coheres. The seeming dissonance that marks the developments and resolution of her stories is, in fact, like a minor chord containing most of the notes, some of the chords, and echoing the jagged poignancy found in her beginnings.
A musical metaphor can be applied to any good narrative in that, as in a sonata for example, the tonal materials will be presented in an exposition, elaborated and contras- ted in a development and then resolved harmonically and thematically in a recapitula- tion. A vital aspect in the understanding of an Alice Munro story is the ability to per- ceive the oral dimension of her writing – the conversationality of her tone. Her stories are like musical scores, where every comma, full stop, bracket and dash, counts. Not only do they indicate the phrasing and key prosody necessary to be captured in order to understand what is going on at a deeper narrative level, they are occasions for Munro to slip into various narrative voices, more often than not dissonant ones. Being attuned to the cadence (the rhythm of the sentences, the modulation and fall of the voice at the end of the intonation units) the consonance and the dissonance are invitations to the reader to explore how Munro’s resolutions, which might seem dissonant, fit in perfectly with what has been announced and the way it has been developed. As regards Munro’s “The Progress of Love” (from The Progress of Love, 1985), “Friend of My Youth” (from Friend of My Youth, 1992) and “Free Radicals” (from Too Much Happiness, 2009), in keeping with our musical metaphor, the expositions begin with a reference to a death in the family — the mother of the respective narrators in the first two stories, and that of the husband of the main character in “Free Radicals.” In “Friend of My Youth” and “The Progress of Love,” the mother alive was a burden; in “Free Radicals” on the other hand, Nita, the main character, viewed through the eyes, and heard through the voice of a third-person narrator, leads herself to believe that death is something to be taken in stride. I would suggest that the omnipresence of death at the beginning of these stories invites the careful reader to pick up overtones of more complex themes of legacy and/or mourning therein: immobility in “The Pro- gress of Love” — Phemie never manages to go further than the stifling small town; guilt in “Friend of My Youth” — the narrator here has moved on, but to do so she had to abandon her invalid mother; and self delusion in “Free Radicals” — Nita’s idea that the death of a loved one can be taken in stride leads her to delude herself into thinking that she will not mourn. However, if these themes of mourning and legacy are suggested in the exposition, the development of the stories leads us elsewhere — in “The Progress of Love” it leads to the story of Phemie’s grandmother, who fakes a hanging suicide in front of her two young daughters to punish a faithless husband. She sends the young Marietta, Phemie’s mother, out to fetch him. Marietta, who becomes the adult focalizer as the story evolves, will no longer have anything to do with the father, and her scorn leads her to burn the 46
$3,000 legacy he bequeaths to her upon his death. Or, in “Friend of My Youth,” the development deals with the story of the Grieves sisters, members of a Bible beating sect called the Cameronians, and the twice-jilted Flora and her slightly mentally disabled sister Ellie whose pregnancy from her relationship with Flora’s fiancé Robert, and sub - sequent “shot-gun” marriage with him, culminates with a miscarriage. After Ellie dies of cancer, Robert does not marry Flora, as could be expected, but marries the hideous, and lustful Nurse Atkinson, who had come to care for Ellie during her illness. And last but not least, in “Free Radicals,” the development deals with Nita’s encounter with a psychopath who shows up at her door after having murdered his mentally handicapped sister and their parents. How are we expected to link the dissonant chord of these story lines (which, on the surface, resemble either sensational news briefs in some third-rate tabloid, or the story line to a True Confessions type magazine), with what has been ex- posed? The first thing to keep in mind is that for the harmony to work, dissonant chords will share some of the notes, but the end result means that they are in tension with the dominant. As Michael Ravitch explains: “[…] her stories are like spokes on a wheel stretching out in all directions at once, opening themselves up to an endless range of interpretation. Their rich ambiguity converts them from mere facts into fable” (164). I would like to suggest that if her stories are indeed like spokes of a wheel, the hub is there in her beginnings; it is in the opening passages that we will pick up the dominant tonality that will be echoed in different ways throughout the story. In “The Progress of Love,” the legacy of Euphemia, (for whom Phemie is named), the dangerously manipulative grandmother, is indirectly announced right from the first lines, in the relief that Phemie experiences in hearing of her mother’s death: I knew that “gone” meant “dead”. I knew that. But for a second or so I saw my mother in her black hat setting off down the lane. The word “gone” seemed full of nothing but a deep relief and even an excitement – the excitement you feel when a door closes and your house sinks back to normal and you let yourself loose into all the free space around you. (The Progress 4) In “Friend of My Youth” the narrator’s recurrent dream brings back her deceased mo- ther, but the long forgotten pre-Parkinson’s disease mother, the mother who was not a burden: I recovered then what in waking life I had lost – my mother’s liveliness of face and voice before her throat muscles stiffened and a woeful, impersonal mask fastened itself over her features. How could I have forgotten this, I would think in the dream – the casual humor she had, not ironic but merry, the lightness and impatience and confidence? (4) And in “Free Radicals” the bereaved widow seems to be making do, even though liver cancer is eating away at her. There is a decidedly no-nonsense, let’s-get-it-over-with tone to the whole thing — both the funeral and the mourning, not to mention the cancer: As soon as she got on with the arrangements, of course, all but the tried and true fell away. The cheapest box, into the ground immediately, no ceremony of any kind. The undertaker suggested that this might be against the law, but she and Rich had their facts straight. They had got their information almost a year ago, when her diagnosis became final. (“Free Radicals” 118) 47 Sweet Dissonance
The polite chit chat of the father in “The Progress of Love” before euphemistically an- nouncing that the narrator’s mother is “gone,”1 the gently rocking rhythm of the chant in “Friend of My Youth,” and the no-nonsense, “that’s life” shrug of Nita in “Free Radicals” establish the dominant tones of the stories and announce respectively, release for Phemie (“the excitement you feel when a door closes and your house sinks back to normal and you let yourself loose into all the free space around you” [The Progress 3]), reprieve for the nameless narrator in “Friend of My Youth” (“and the strangest, kindest thing of all to me was her matter-of-fact reply. Oh, well, she said, better late than never. I was sure I’d see you someday” [Friend 4]), and in “Free Radicals” denegation (“The cheapest box, into the ground immediately, no ceremony of any kind” [Too Much Hap- piness 119]). Yet if a synopsis of these stories were to be given, it is highly unlikely that any of the foregoing ideas would be mentioned. A summary of “The Progress of Love” will deal with Marietta burning up her legacy, the $3,000 that would have enabled Phemie to go to university, but not the one she couldn’t shake loose from – the psychologically scarred mother. A summary of “Friend of My Youth” will deal with the Grieves’ sis- ters’ story, and not the grieving of the narrator, and in “Free Radicals” a summary will deal with the frightening encounter that Nita had with the murderer, and not the more psychological questions that are at the heart of Nita’s predicament. This may give the illusion that what was announced in the exposition was itself dissonant. But, as is the case in each and every Munro story, the themes which are announced in the exposition are present in the succeeding development. Let us take, for example, the theme of abandonment in the three stories. The aban- doned grandmother, Euphemia, analeptically echoes the abandoned father in “The Progress of Love.” Abandoned, not only because he is a widower, but because Phemie did not go and live with him (“He never got used to living alone, he said. He went into the Netterfield County Home quite willingly.”2 [The Progress 3]). Or, in “Friend of My Youth,” the abandoned Flora analeptically echoes the narrator’s abandoned mother in the opening. Not to mention Ellie’s countless miscarriages and cancer, which can be heard as echoes of the sick mother. Or, Flora’s non abandonment of Ellie can be heard in counterpoint to the narrator’s abandoning of her mother. In “Free Radicals,” Bett, Rich’s first (abandoned) wife will turn out to play a predominant role in Nita’s story. Not only does Nita get rid of the murderer by pretending to be Bett, she finds herself in the same position Bett was in when Rich left her to marry Nita. Bett is mentioned in passing in the introduction: “She had not even written to people at a distance, to elicit such notes. Not even to Rich’s first wife in Arizona” Too( Much Happiness 3). But this “mentioned in passing” is linguistically interesting. When we stay attuned to these ele- ments that seem to be there in passing, we cannot help but notice how they are picked up, expanded on and arranged, just like themes in a musical score. Munro sets a tune in
1. Euphemistically “gone” here means “is dead,” but it can also be an ellipsis for “gone in the head.” Marietta’s refuge in a born-again religion, and the seeming impossibility of her wounds ever healing, may also be hinted at it in the choice of this word. 2. The first edition of “The Progress of Love” appeared in The New Yorker, Oct 7, 1985. As well as changing a third-person narrator to a first-person narrator, Munro took out or added sentences to the story when it appeared in the eponymous collection. The mention of the father having to “go to the Netterfield County Home quite willingly” is absent from The New Yorker version (The New Yorker 35). 48 our heads, so to speak, and then, through various linguistic devices, enables us to pick it up again and again. Here are some of those devices. Conversationality of tone is a feature that has been pointed out by many critics. Russell Banks comments: There is nothing exotic or off-putting in the opening paragraph or two of an Alice Munro story. The author puts her hand on your shoulder and invites you into her fictional world. She is friendly, and there is a neighborly quality to her narrative prose. She starts in a small place and universalizes characters and lives that we might otherwise overlook. It is as if you are sitting at a table, and she’s going to tell you a story of what happened a while back, down the street. Her intimate tone is interesting and immediate, and she is relaxed, calm, even inactive, almost seductive. Then, once you are in this fictional world, it becomes more threatening. (Awano 93) Thus, with the opening of “The Progress of Love,” we encounter many of the cha- racteristics which the socio-linguist Deborah Tannen qualifies as the spoken features characteristic of conversational discourse: I got a call at work, and it was my father. This was not long after I was divorced and started working in a real-estate office. Both of my boys were in school. It was a hot enough day in September. My father was so polite, even in the family. He took time to ask me how I was. Country manners. Even if somebody phones you to tell you your house is burning down they ask first how you are. “I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?” “Not so good, I guess,” said my father, in his old way – apologetic but self-respecting. “I think your mother’s gone.” (3) As Tannen, points out, spoken discourse is highly context-bound and cohesion is esta- blished through tone of voice, intonation, prosody, facial expression, and gesture: Maximal meaning and connective tissue are implied rather than stated — whereas in written literate strategies, maximal background information and connective tissue are made explicit. Similarly oral strategies depend for effect on paralinguistic and nonverbal channels, while literate strategies are those that depend on lexicalisation to establish cohesion. (4) Of course, as Tannen also points out, when discourse is of the story-telling kind both written and oral strategies combine. Whereas written strategies aim at integrating a rea- der into the text, effective spoken discourse aims to involve the listener (Tannen 13-8). Munro does both, she interrogates us as readers, but she engages us as though she were intimately confiding in us. This is the effect that Banks pointed out. Here are some clues as to how she does it. The most obvious, of course, is the direct speech signalled by the inverted commas. But if we can so clearly hear the Canadian Lake Huron region lingo, it is because she captures in the father’s need to ask his daughter how she is before announcing his wife’s death, the social necessity of not making a big deal of it. The litote in his reply to her question, “Not so good,” followed by what is termed in pragmatics the down-toning degree expression “I guess,” sets the social milieu right from the beginning. “I think your mother’s gone,” preceded by the discursive strategies used to put a listener at ease, is part of Munro’s “putting her hand on our shoulder” technique. The story could have started out, “My father called one day when I was at work to tell me my mother had died.” But the short first clause linked by the coordinate conjunction “and” plus 49 Sweet Dissonance a comma contributes to creating the impression that we are following the speaker’s thoughts, which, as Tannen points out, is another characteristic of a spoken strategy. In spoken discourse, the hearer is required to fill in the blanks. This is relatively easy to do during conversation because the gaps are filled by the context. This fragmentation effect is rendered in the text by Munro’s use of punctuation: the dash before the expla- natory “apologetic but self-respecting” and the commas, each representing intonation pauses. But there is as well, the deictic “this,” also a characteristic of oral strategies (Tannen 7). The sentence that is the most striking in this introduction, though, is “It was a hot enough day in September.” Again the litote introduced by the degree downtoner “enough,” used instead of “really/very hot,” invites the reader into Munro’s world. Ra- vitch has commented on the “modest airs” of Munro’s stories (160). The unassuming, almost embarrassed way Phemie’s father announces her mother’s death, is characteristic of the economy of words inherent of many of Munro’s characters. Even when they are confronted with the twists and turns of fate, they remain laconic and humble. But the most resounding linguistic dimension in “The Progress of Love” are her lexical surprises as in the following passage from the opening page: “The word “gone” seemed full of nothing but a deep relief and even an excitement — the excitement you feel when a door closes and your house sinks back to normal” (The Progress 3). From the oxymoronic “seemed full of nothing” to the coordinate conjunction of opposition “but” following “seemed full of nothing,” building up expectations for the word “grief,” we cannot help but be surprised to find the term “relief ” expanded by the equally sur - prising word “excitement” – “the excitement you feel when a door” not “opens” (which is what we might expect) but “closes,” and the further gloomy verb “sinks” takes on the phrasal complement “back” and not “down” to “normal.” This passage is a fine example of how Munro’s syntactic and lexical surprises sneak up on the reader. Normality is the element upon which Munro builds each of her stories. The “nor- mal and the ordinary are constants in her stories and they are key devices in the conso- nance therein. But normality implies the fears and foibles, the cowardliness, and self- deception that go into the fabric of human nature. And it includes illness and death, suffering and disappointment. The normal and the ordinary belong to what I would refer to as “life happens.” It is perhaps one of the most disconcerting aspects of Munro and why some readers have difficulty with her. Though Munro in no way makes light of tragedy and pain, she unassumingly but authoritatively establishes in its rightful place the inevitability of struggle and the way in which certain circumstances reduce choice. In all the “free space around” her (3), Phemie never goes any farther physically than the next town. Small Ontario towns are another constant in Munro. They are the equivalent to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio and her characters grapple with the same suffocating straight jackets that are the threat to intelligent, creative young women like Phemie who yearn for more. In “Friend of My Youth,” the grammatical tools that Munro so skilfully wields are the coordinate structures “and,” “or,” “but,” and the comma. In this short story, out of the 594 sentences, 294 contain one or several coordinate structures (78% of the total). “And” appears 283 times, “but” 27 times, and “or” 19 times. One of the most remar- kable aspects is the use of asyndeton, namely coordination with a comma, establishing 50 very long sentences with many intonation units that play a crucial role in the prosody.3 She alternates this with polysyndenton, giving rise to an accumulative effect where every main lexical item will be granted a nuclear focus, as for example in the extract chosen “the lightness/and impatience/and confidence?/” Or she coordinates unlike adjectives as in “strangest, kindest,” which play a major role in what I have termed Munro’s sur- prise-effect syntax. Or again, she relies on post positioning the adjectives (i.e. “not ironic, but merry”) which take on new importance because they are placed at the end of an intonation unit, which in our example is not the end of the sentence. It is to be noted that the coordination of modifiers is not a very common phenomenon in the first place. In a survey of 17,000 noun phrases Quirk et al. found the following to be true: Examining a sample of some 17,000 noun phrases in the Survey of English Usage files yielded [the following information]: a) Less than one third of the 17,000 noun phrases in the sample are ‘complex’ even within these modest limits of ‘complexity’. b) Less than one-eighth of them have multiple modification. (Quirket al. 1375) By “modest limits of complexity, they mean that, even in fiction, which rendered the highest percentage of nominal complexity, in the 17,000 sentences which the Survey of English collected, noun phrases were most often modified by one adjective or one prepositional phrase, or one relative clause. Though the passage I have selected does not sufficiently illustrate this trait, 18% of the sentences in “Friend of MyYouth” have multiple modification, 25% being linked by a comma (Hetherington-Blin 302). It is by tracing these grammatical elements which are given prominence that we become conscious of a textual coherence that leads us beyond and beneath the surface narra- tive. Here below, I have detailed in the chosen extract the number of intonation units, marking each with a slash. The result of parsing the prosody enables us to establish how her prose can remind us of a musical score: I recovered then/ what in waking life (/) I had lost/ – my mother’s liveliness of face and voice/ before her throat muscles stiffened/ and a woeful,/ impersonal mask fastened itself over her features./ How could I have forgotten this, /I would think in the dream/ – the casual humor she had, /not ironic (/) but merry/ the lightness/ and impatience/ and confidence?/ I would say that I was sorry/ I hadn’t been to see her / in such a long time/meaning not that I felt guilty/ but that I was sorry(/) I had kept a bugbear in my mind /instead of this reality/ – and the strangest,/ kindest thing of all was her matter- of-fact reply. Oh, /well, / she said, /better late than never./ I was sure I’d see you someday. (Friend 4) According to Cruttenden intonation and meaning are tightly linked (13), and in order to perceive the intonation of the English sentence correctly we have to deal with the three following degrees of stress: the nuclear accent on the kernel of the intonation group (i.e. the most important word in each intonation unit); the last lexical item of an into-
3. The prosodic dimension of Munro’s stories is essential to our appreciation of them, and may very well be lost in translation. I was invited to talk about Munro to a French book club. The members were all serious readers. They had chosen the collection, The Love of a Good Woman and no one in the book club liked the collection. This, in part, is due to the prosody. The prosody of French, which is a syllable-timed language implies that the speaker/silent reader heads for the end of the sentence to place the phrasal accent (i.e., the word that takes prominence in an intonation unit). This combined with the fact that in regards to word accentuation it is always the last syllable in the word which is accentuated leads to a much more regular prosody than English which is a stress-timed language which means the temporal duration between two stressed syllables is equal (emphasis added). This, plus the fact that word accentuation is English is complex implies that the English sentence functions much more like a roller coaster. 51 Sweet Dissonance nation group which is the default setting of the phrasal accent and word accents where the length of the word and the pitch force are called into play. In the most basic of texts, each clause is equal to one intonation unit with the phrasal accent falling on the last lexical item. But other criteria may interfere with this regularity. For example, adverbial complements – not only clausal but also phrasal can set off a unit. Thus, in the passage considered above, after “then,” a new unit can be established as well as before “in such a long time.”4 Also each coordinate clause gives rise to a new unit. And, as Quirk et al. note, if the sentence is more than ten words long, the focus will be spread over the whole sentence. Other specific grammatical elements which give the possibility of optional intonation units are restrictive relative clauses or any medial clause whatsoever. Along with the above, each dash and disjunct (i.e. “I suppose,” “meaning” etc.) can establish a separate intonation unit (Quirk et al. 13). Thus the opening passage can be compared to a sort of musical score, which when parsed re- veals itself to be a bit like a melopoeia5 (Hetherington-Blin 26-35). When this melopoeia breaks off, the incongruous way Munro uses coordination is echoed all through the development, creating a polyphony of narrative voices identified as possible unreliable narrators – the adolescent, the rumor of the town. The merry-go-round of couples comes full circle, bringing the reader back to the only couple Munro has actually ever been talking about – the mother/daughter one. In “Free Radicals,” it is the plethora of negative structures, or terms with a negative connotation (e.g., “not bothering to eat much,” “threw out any sympathy note,” “had not even written to people at a distance,” “not even to Rich’s wife in Arizona or semi- estranged brother” etc.) which predominates as the story opens. The passage (of which I have included only a short excerpt) is constructed around negation. Of the 39 first sentences in the story, 33 contain negative structures or terms with negative connota- tions. As we read through the story we realize how the terms introduced here in the exposition crop up again and again. Shortly after the story opens, we learn that Rich left his wife for Nita, and thus, Nita finds herself in the same position as Rich’s wife had been in when he left her. And though the references to her drinking are mentioned in a conversational tone, and we first interpret them as references to the social drinking typical of her social category and status, a closer examination invites us to question this first assumption. First of all, the reference to alcohol appears six times in the incipit (“make sure Nita was not eating too little or drinking too much”; “She had been such a diligent wine drinker”; “now forbidden to drink at all”; “they […] would revive her with Grey Goose”; “she can’t have wine. Or Vodka” [Too Much Happiness 119-20]). Nita gets rid of the young man who has just murdered his family, by getting him drunk on some cheap wine. Could this terrifying and spectacular encounter with the murderer be
4. The intonation units in fact correspond to the number of words I can say out loud without effort between breaths. Other intonation schemes would be possible here. But what I feel comes to the fore is the fact that even if ano- ther reader might use an alternate intonation scheme, the Canadian English text renders a much more complex musical score than its French equivalent could possibly do. This might be one of the reasons why some French readers have difficulty with Munro’s stories. 5. Melopoeia literally means to be set to melody. But it is also the term Ezra Pound chose to describe the kind of poem which prompts emotional associations by the sound and rhythm of the speech. As Peter Nicholls explains, since Pound’s use of the word, the term has referred to what happens when words are “charged with some musical property which further directs its meaning” (38). There is a lulling quality to this opening passage that can be heard again as the story draws to its close. 52 one of Munro’s smokescreens for another more indelible violence translated by Nita’s cancer and her refusal to mourn? In all three stories the narrators are survivors – survivors not of cataclysms but of life’s little disasters, and they survive because of their capacity to tell stories. They are all saved by imagination. But the imagined stories of the three protagonists are just that – figments of their imagination. And through these stories Munro’s narrator is constantly asking us to question the discrepancy between what memory imagines to be true and where the truth really lies. In “The Progress of Love,” Marietta’s story of the grandmother’s fake suicide does not correspond to the version of her sister Beryl, who remembers saying to her “Mama, how are you going to manage to hang yourself without a rope tied to the beam?” (24). The fake attempted suicide for Marietta will cut her off forever from her father, to whom she attributes the responsibility for her mother’s act. For Beryl, it was no more than an attention-getting stunt. Phemie incorrectly remembers her father standing by watching while her mother burned the legacy money in the wood stove. The narrator in “Friend of My Youth” imagines another version of the Grieves sis- ters’ story. In her adolescent version, it is Flora, the martyr, who becomes the ludicrous sister, and in “Free Radicals” Nita becomes an imaginary murderer making up a story in which she in fact changes places with Rich’s first wife, recounting how as a jealous wife, she poisoned his mistress. These dominant themes will be picked up throughout the text, contributing to the harmony, building a thematic consonance that will guide the reader to the greater depths of each narrative and on to the resolution. Even though Phemie in “The Progress of Love,” and the nameless narrator in “Friend of My Youth,” and Nita in “Free Radicals” cannot be said to be happy in the living-happily-ever-after sense of fairy tales, they are not unhappy either, and there is nothing in their closing thoughts which would induce the reader to consider them as victims. There is, however, a jagged poignancy in the resolutions of these stories – hints of difficult choices made and betrayals – the consequences of life happening such as Phemie leaving home, and then not coming back to live with her father after her mother died. How could I even say that I approved of it myself? If I had been the sort of person who approved of that, who could do it, I wouldn’t have done all I have done – run away from home to work in a restaurant in town when I was fifteen, gone to night school to learn typing and bookkeeping, got into a real estate office, and finally become a licensed agent. I wouldn’t be divorced. My father wouldn’t have died in the country home. My hair would be white, as it has been naturally for years, instead of a color called Copper Sunrise. And not one of these things would I change, not really, if I could. (The Progress 30) The compromises the mother’s burning of the legacy forced upon Phemie, the brilliant pupil, explain the “deep relief ” and “even” “excitement” (3) announced in the expo- sition. Hopes of high school and probably university have been abandoned for typing and bookkeeping and ultimately a career as a real estate agent. One should also notice the nonchalant reference to mention of her father going to the Netterfield Home, here re-announced with more drama. And the last sentence here, that starts out with such authority, “And not one of these things would I change,” is progressively deflated, first by the negative adverbial “not really,” and then by “if I could.” Things have not worked out fabulously, but they could have turned out worse. Phemie, like many of Munro’s 53 Sweet Dissonance characters, refuses to see herself as a victim. There is no self-pitying, no wallowing in regret. The narrator of “Friend of My Youth” comes to terms with her feelings of guilt about abandoning her mother and acknowledges the uselessness of the guilt: My mother moving rather carelessly out of her old prison, showing options and power I never dreamed she had, changes more than herself. She changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom – something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy. (26) Not only are the rhythm and prosody of the opening passage picked up here, there is an analeptic echo to Ellie’s tumor in “the bitter lump of love” as well as to her pregnancies in the “phantom pregnancy” of the narrator’s guilt. And it also evokes the merry-go- round of couples so present in the story (Flora and Ellie, Flora and Robert, Ellie and Robert, Robert and Nurse Atkinson) may have been foils for the only couple that really counts – the one mentioned in the story’s exposition. In “Free Radicals” the resolution can be seen in Nita’s finally coming to terms with the loss and the mourning: There’s only one person really worth telling. Rich. Rich. Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of the sky. (Too Much Happiness 138) Munro’s resolutions are harmonious, but it is not the easy harmony of a major chord. If they were she would have ended them a few lines earlier than she did. She would have ended them with the above-mentioned passages. But the stories do not end there with all the themes gleaned in the opening passages, and subsequently cannot give the reader a sense of closure. “The Progress of Love” concludes with Phemie pondering whether “moments [of kindness and reconciliation] aren’t more valued, and deliberately gone after in the setups people like myself have now, than they were in those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever” (“The Progress of Love” 30-1). It is to be noted that for Phemie it is not only grudges that were “growing underground” as the word “grudges” is linked with “love” in another surprising coordinate phrase. The resolution of “Friend of My Youth,” though, is even more disconcerting. It is a long, encyclopaedic description of the Cameronians, the strange Scottish religion to which the Grieves sisters belonged. And this passage poses a problem, because though we can trace the coherence to all the references to the Cameronian religion throughout the story, though the violence of their demise echoes the violence of Ellie and Flora’s story on another scale, one can’t help but wonder why it was included. Why this disso- nant chord at the end? Is this Munro’s tongue-in-cheek comment on how her fiction, based on the mundane lives of small town Ontario, captures the essential much more than any encyclopaedia entry can? Or as Kyle Minor suggests, is this coda the ending of endings: The ending of “Friend of My Youth” in which the narrator realizes, for the first time that her story is not just about the confinements of Ontario’s provincial cage, but is rather about a long and unbroken chain of connection among generations of ancestors and progeny during the centuries on two continents separated by an ocean – the way as it turns out, most of our stories might be. (n.p.) And “Free Radicals” does not end with Nita’s acknowledgment of mourning but with a policeman showing up at her door to announce the psychopath’s fatal accident in her car, and the enigmatic ending: 54
“I have to tell you it’s been in a bad accident. A one-car accident just this side of Wallenstein. The driver rolled it down into a culvert and totalled it. And that’s not all. He’s wanted for a triple murder. That’s the latest we heard anyway. Murder in Mitchellston. You were lucky you didn’t run into him.” “Was he hurt?” “Killed. Instantly. Serves him right.’ There followed a kindly stern lecture. Leaving keys in the car. Women living alone. These days you never know. Never know. (139) These final words of the story can spontaneously be interpreted simply as an echo of the policeman’s words. Endings, like beginnings, occupy the liminal space of the world of the story and that of the reader, widening the meaning of the sentence to include the reader. But structurally speaking, this sentence is a negative imperative of the stative verb “know” (which as a stative verb cannot grammatically be put in the imperative). In playing with the rules of English grammar, Munro revitalizes the set expression “You never know,” which resounds as an echo of the negative passages found at the begin- ning. Thus, along with an open ending characteristic of the short story form, the reader is invited to suspend their desire to conclude. In her interview with the representative of the Nobel committee after the prize was announced, Munro told the interviewer that as a child, she had been so annoyed by the ending of “The Little Mermaid,” that in her anger and sadness she had written her own ending. And perhaps it is simply that memory of her childhood turmoil that has led Munro to keep her endings open. This invitation to “never know,” can be interpreted as an acknowledgement that if a story is to be true to life we can, in fact, never know. Munro’s resolutions can thus be compared to what James Wood describes as “sweet dissonance” heard at the end of some musical compositions. In Thomas Tallis’ “O Nata Lux,” for example, Wood explains that the piece ends on a dissonant chord, which is “partly produced by a movement known as a “false relation,” in which the note you expect to hear in the harmony of the chord is shadowed by its nearest relation – the same note, but a semi-tone off ” (3). But it can also be compared to the bitter-sweet dis- sonance of a minor chord bringing to each of her stories the pathos that is so intrinsic to our reading pleasure and that remains with us long after our reading is over. It is this bitter-sweet dissonance that sends us back to the beginning of the story, inviting us to let ourselves be moved once again by Munro’s harmony.
Lynn BliN University Paul Valéry – Montpellier / EMMA
W orks Cited
awaNo, Lisa Dickler. “Appreciations of Alice Munro.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 1.3 (2006): 91-119. cRutteNDeN, Alan. Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. hetheRiNgtoN-BliN, Lynn. “La coordination en anglais: l’ambiguité des liens.” Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Université Aix-Marseille. Aix-Marseille, 18 November 2006. MiNoR, Kyle. “Let’s all fight about Alice Munro.” 10 June 2013.
—. “Free Radicals.” Too Much Happiness. New York: Vintage, 2009. 118-139. —.“Nobel Prize Interview with Stefan Asberg. “Alice Munro: In Her Own Words.” http://www. nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1973. Consulted 25 Jan. 2015. Nicholls, Peter. “A Necessary Blindness: Ezra Pound and Rhythm.” Journal of Philosophy: A Cross Disciplinary Inquiry, Vol. 6. 13 (Sept. 2010): 28-41. QuiRk, Rodney, et al. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman, 1985. RaVitch, Michael. “Fiction in Review: Hateship, Friendship, Courstship, Loveship, Marriage.” Yale Review 4 (2002): 160-70. taNNeN, Deborah. “Oral and Literate Strategies.” Language 58.1 (1982): 1-21. wooD, James. “On Not Going Home.” The London Review of Books 20 Feb. 2014: 3-8.
“A Cavity Everywhere”: The Postponement of Knowing in “Corrie”
Using the tools of narratology and literary linguistics, I argue that Munro deftly foresha- dows and prepares for the revelation her protagonist confronts at the story’s conclusion: that she has been duped and exploited by her married lover. The foreshadowing is effec- ted by the insertion of, in the words of Judith Maclean Miller, “bits and pieces of information that appear here and there, floating through the telling of the story, many of them unspoken, coded, resonating through silences.” I conclude my essay with a discussion of the three different endings of “Corrie,” which appeared in three different publications: I suggest that the diffe- rences reveal much of Munro’s narrative strategies.
In what I believe is one of the most insightful essays on Munro’s fiction, Judith Maclean Miller observes that in the many “mystery stories” Munro writes, nobody “pulls all the clues together at the end”; in fact, “there are not even really clues, just bits and pieces of information that appear here and there, floating through the telling of the story, many of them unspoken, coded, resonating through silences” (43). In stories like “Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You” and “Open Secrets,” which Miller ex- plores in the essay, there are striking details for the attentive and diligent reader to glean and reflect on, like the “small bottle of a strange liquid” in Char’s cupboard ( Something 20), and the feathered hat Theo Slater strokes in alarming agitation, “as if he were pa- cifying a scared hen” (Open Secrets 153). These pieces of information are deftly placed, perhaps isolated or disarranged in the text, or made salient by an arresting trope or scheme, marked by an instance of unusual syntax. There are several dexterous means by which Munro encourages the reader towards some significant detail, and the reward will be, in reviewer Michael Frank’s words, “a sense of excitement and surprise that comes when they finally grasp the pattern she has been working all along” (170). The reader who approaches the conclusion of “Corrie” may or may not have ex- pected the revelation in the final pages, but I believe Munro does provide several clues, reasons to suspect the motivation and honesty of the deceiving male protagonist. When Corrie finally realises she has been thoroughly duped and exploited by her lover, she feels “a cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest” (“Corrie,” Dear Life 173). Most readers would, I imagine, feel sympathy for the victim, but might also wonder why the realisation took so long, for there are ubiquitous cavities in her lover’s flimsy, hastily concocted fraud. These are discernible in the many passages of intradiegetic focaliza- tion, and traceable in various instances of foreshadowing and dramatic irony that per- meate the story. It is with how Munro traces the treachery on the other side of Corrie’s dailiness that this essay is concerned, and I draw on the disciplines of literary linguistics and narratology in my analysis. Like the female protagonist Stella in “Lichen,” Corrie Carlton is initially presented as an object of the male gaze. In the very first scene, at the dinner table where she sits with her wealthy father and his invited guest, an architect engaged to repair the Angli- can Church tower, she is at the mercy of two captious evaluations delivered by male characters (“Corrie,” Dear Life 154-6). The first is conveyed in the opening lines, in her 58 father’s pseudo-jocular, derogatory assessment of what he considers are his daughter’s dwindling marital prospects. He reminds the architect, Howard Ritchie, of the dangers of having “the money concentrated all in the one family” (154) while bemoaning the fact that Corrie is fast becoming unmarriageable because she is in her mid-twenties. The second judgement on her is revealed via free indirect discourse, when Munro switches from external focalization to internal, enabling the reader to share Ritchie’s thoughts. His judgement on the woman is quite vicious, like that of the character David on Stella, in “Lichen.” In his eyes, Corrie is plainly “Not a soft woman. Not much meat on the bone” and although he acknowledges she may have a “quick tongue,” he expects her to “have a conventional mind” (155). He concludes that she is “A spoiled rich miss. Unmannerly” (156). The irregular sentences, informal idioms and emotive descriptors are all markers of Free Indirect Speech, a device sustained for some length to leave the reader in no doubt as to the character’s unflattering opinions. Corrie is swiftly evaluated in negative terms. In the space of three pages of narrative, then, the female protagonist’s appearance, intellect and demeanour are subject to a hypercritical, objectifying male gaze. It is worth noting, too, the recurrence, in this opening scene, of vocabulary associated with the marketplace, a patriarchal marketplace where women are spoken and thought of as commodities, “as utilitarian objects and bearers of value” (Irigaray 175, italics in the original). Corrie’s father warns of the dangers of “money concentrated” in one family, clearly suggesting his daughter should be attracting the wealth of her social peers. The narrator implies Carlton has considered his dinner guest as a suitor for his daughter, but he is “already equipped with a young wife and family, as [he] had immediately found out” (155, emphasis added). The word “equipped” conveys the sense of a necessary acquisition. Further use of free indirect discourse at the end of the opening scene consolidates the impression that Ritchie sees marriage in the same light: he concedes that, as com- pensation for Corrie’s faults, “there was money, and to some men that never became tiresome” (157). Ritchie’s reductive observation is, of course, weighted with dramatic irony, foreshadowing as it does his deceitful exploitation. One could argue, moreover, that in his speculative surmising about Corrie’s future, he ironically identifies himself when he imagines that “[s]ome creepy fortune hunter was bound to snap her up” (157). This unconscious self-characterisation struck me as humorous. The reader’s sympathies are aligned with Corrie at the outset, for Munro presents her as the object of dismissive appraisal. It is reasonable, furthermore, to argue that the writer works to ensure the character of Howard Ritchie does not endear himself, for, by the use of FID, she draws attention to some unattractive attitudes and opinions he holds about women. At the end of the narrative, when Corrie and the reader come to terms with the revelations of Ritchie’s lies and his systematic theft, few readers, surely, would be taken aback. That Ritchie tends towards indirection is evident in how he reacts to Corrie’s la- meness, which he alludes to in a circumlocutory, insensitive way. Indeed, the first- ex change of conversation between the two, when Corrie leads Ritchie on a walk down to the river behind her house, could serve to illustrate how Grice’s Co-operative Principle, fundamental to normal communication, can be flouted. As she walks ahead, [H]e was able to see what he hadn’t been sure of before. She was lame in one leg. “Isn’t it a steep climb back up?” he asked. 59 “A Cavity Everywhere”: The Postponement of Knowing in “Corrie”
“I’m not an invalid.” “I see you’ve got a rowboat,” he said, meaning that as a partway apology. (156) In his discussion of conditions governing conversation, and its context, Grice points out that most talk exchanges “do not consist of a succession of disconnected remarks” but are characteristically “co-operative efforts [where] each participant recognises in them, at least to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes” (26). Grice argues that the co-operative principle is further governed by particular maxims that he distin- guishes as those of quantity, quality, relation and manner. These amount to what linguist Katie Wales describes as a “kind of sincerity principle” encapsulated in the advice, “Say what you mean and mean what you say” (84). Interlocutors should make their contri- butions as informative as necessary, and they should strive to be truthful, relevant and clear. The maxims of both relation and manner are contravened in the passage from Munro’s story. The inference Ritchie makes, that Corrie is lame, does not need to be ex- pressed at all, for it is irrelevant in the context, since the woman has led her companion down to the river and presumably intends to walk back up. Ritchie’s subsequent apology is described by the narrator as “partway,” not entirely sincere, rather oblique. The indirection suggested in this first exchange of conversation is confirmed soon afterwards. Corrie flies off to Egypt on holiday, sending to Ritchie’s place ofwork facetious postcards, to which he “did not intend to reply but he did.” On her return, he “drove to her town for an unnecessary inspection of the church steeple” (158, emphasis added). This information is conveyed by the external narrator, but in the narration are faint traces of the focalized male protagonist’s attitude towards Corrie, one not marked by affection or respect: he drives to the house aware that she has returned from Egypt, “but not knowing whether she would be at home or off on some other jaunt” (158). The noun “jaunt,” originally referring to a “tiring journey,” is now used only ironically, according to The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary (1441), and the phrase “some other jaunt” strikes me as flippant, even sardonic. That it is chosen in preference to a neutral des - cription like “another trip” suggests the character’s resentment. It is an example of “the speck of characterizing vocabulary” (Ferriss 179) which helps the reader to distinguish between instances of intradiegetic and extradiegetic focalization when they are blended so subtly in narrative. As Per Winther observes: “Sorting out which passages are rende- red through the perspective of the narrator vis-à-vis that of one of the characters can mean a lot for the interpretation of a text” (205). After they have begun their affair, Ritchie assures Corrie he is not “a regular sedu- cer,” adding that, as testimony to his virtue, he was brought up in a religious household, and “still believed in God, to some extent” (159). This fact is kept “secret from his wife” as she might mock him, “being very left-wing” (159). By Munro’s textual arrangement, punctuation and lexical choices, the sincerity of this declaration is subtly undermined. The denial of serial seduction is succeeded by two statements that betray Ritchie’s disin- genuousness: the comma after “God” somehow qualifies the already tentative belief he professes to hold, while the disclosure that he keeps this belief secret from his partner weakens his claim to trustfulness. The excuse he offers for his secrecy – that his left- wing wife would mock him – is not convincing, either. In the account of the supposed blackmail letter Ritchie’s deviousness emerges clear- ly, via those “clues that are not even really clues” (Miller 43). It is worth noting the care Munro takes to accord considerable importance to the character of the supposed black- 60 mailer, Lillian Wolfe, before Ritchie invents her role in his scheme. The reader learns first of all that she has carried out numerous chores in the Carlton house, as their maid, but has lately left to find a “city job,” encouraged by Corrie, who has given her money for typing lessons so “she could better herself ” (159). Munro lets us know Corrie thinks the girl is “too smart” for housework and tells her so. Immediately preceding the male protagonist’s account of her as blackmailer, the narrator provides evidence of Lillian Wolfe’s reliability and her smartness; she is thus presented favourably, as someone de- serving of encouragement. With regard to narrative continuation, she is a character the reader would expect to encounter again after her first brief appearance. In Narrative Progression in the Short Story, Michael Toolan asserts that evoking a central character early in the action is a key feature of narrativity; the evoking is achieved initially by iden- tifying the character, then mentioning him/her several times, by proper name and by subsequent pronoun reference (114-5). Thereafter, of course, character indices emerge, in discourse, as well as in the diegesis. Given the narrator’s positive depiction of Lilian Wolfe in the narrative’s early stages, it is strange, and hard to accept, that she should suddenly turn out to be a cunning blackmailer, unmasked, moreover, by a character whose portrayal is less than affirming. I wonder why Munro changed this character’s name for the version collected in Dear Life. In The New Yorker version, published on October 11th, 2010, and also in the version of “Corrie” included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, she is called Sadie, which is usually an informal version of Sarah. The hypocoristic1 name sounds quite homely: perhaps Munro considered the changed name more sophisticated, better suited to a young woman her employer thinks too smart for domestic work. At any rate, she is given a whole new personality, when Ritchie decides to implicate her in his scheme. The extradiegetic or external narrator explains that Ritchie is reunited with Lillian (having met her when visiting Corrie), when she appears as a maid at a dinner party to which Ritchie and his wife are invited. This account quickly becomes a passage of in- tradiegetic focalization, in which the reader can infer more of the subject’s motivation. Corrie is told that the dinner party takes place at the home of “some newly important people in Kitchener,” (Dear Life 159) and the fact that Ritchie should so specifically describe these hosts sustains the impression of him as a social aspirant, who views people from an instrumental perspective. Moreover, it becomes clear that he had not, initially, planned to tell Corrie about the occasion “because he hoped it would become unimportant” (159). In the two earlier versions of “Corrie,” the main clause preceding the above reads: “Howard did not tell Corrie about the dinner right away” (The New Yorker 96; PEN/O 397). In the passage in Dear Life, however, the assertion is qualified: “Howard said that he had not told Corrie about the dinner party right away” (159). By the insertion of the reporting clause, “Howard said,” Munro indicates that the version of events belongs to Ritchie, and does not have the authority of extradiegetic narra- tion. Charles May observes, in his online short story blog, that “Munro makes a minor change in the Dear Life version to remind us that Ritchie’s story is the only account we have” (January 7, 2013). The passage of free indirect discourse incorporates the reported imaginary writ- ten words of the character Lillian Wolfe, Ritchie’s blackmailing maid. The remarkable
1. Hypocoristic is a linguistic term for a pet name, an endearing or euphemistic name. 61 “A Cavity Everywhere”: The Postponement of Knowing in “Corrie” passage in which these different discourses are clustered reminds me of the telephone booth scene in “Lichen,” where David tries to call Dina, and, in excited agitation while waiting for the connection, invents voices he might use, and a wonderfully comic poly- phony ensues (63-4). Here, the male protagonist invents written words in a non-existent letter he claims has been sent by Lillian Wolfe to his office address. It contains, he ex - plains, her intention to tell his wife of the affair. This he presents as a question: “Would his wife be interested in getting this information?” He embellishes the account with a reference to the “silver-fox collar” on his wife’s coat, a detail he says Lillian Wolfe has particularly noted (Dear Life 160). The ellipsis Munro inserts after this account of the letter serves to draw attention to Corrie’s initial, condescending scepticism about Lillian’s ability to recognise such detail, to which Ritchie insists “I’m sure” (160). This certainty is instantly undermined by the clamorous admission that “He had burned the letter at once, had felt contaminated by it” (160) which Munro isolates in a paragraph. Now any attentive reader would ask a couple of questions at this point: why would someone immediately destroy such a threatening letter, when there is a co-accused involved? And how is Ritchie able to recall specific, strangely eccentric details when the letter is instantly destroyed? The disclosure that the letter has been burned is another cavity in this character’s credibility. Munro encourages the reader to suspect Ritchie believes the blackmail scare suffi- cient reason for ending their affair. This she does by means of free indirect discourse – the thoughts – of her female protagonist, from whose perspective events have so far been unseen. Now, in the aftermath of Ritchie’s shocking disclosure, Corrie tentatively proposes acceding to the blackmail demands with her money, fearing his reluctance: For what if he said no? No, I can’t let you. No, it’s a sign that we have to stop. She was sure that there’d been something like that in his voice, and in his face. (161) The above is a blend of what she is thinking, and what she imagines her lover might say, judging by his expression and the tone of his voice. The use of the past perfective, in “there’d been” indicates she is recalling how he looked and spoke before her offer to pay. By making Corrie the subject of focalization, Munro allows the reader to sense not only the woman’s uncertainty but her needy desperation. Once Ritchie agrees to her suggestion, he “was able to speak practically and he remembered another thing from [Lillian’s] letter” – the money had to be in bills, not checks. This casually remembered detail strengthens this reader’s suspicion of Ritchie’s duplicity, especially when the narrator explains that “He spoke without looking up, as if about a business deal” (162). The complex subordinator, “as if,” introduces another comparison a little later in the narrative, when the narrator describes how the twice yearly payment becomes a ritual to the couple. Ritchie accepts the bills from Corrie with a “sigh of acquiescence, as if he had been reminded of a chore” (163). By repeating the same syntactic construction, and by choosing analogies similar in meaning, Munro emphasises how the male protagonist regards the arrangement as nothing other than a banal transaction. And it is a business transaction, of course, as the allusions to changes in his circumstances, and his fortunes suggest. The narrator makes overt reference to these changes in the account of how Cor- rie fills her time in the years after her father’s death. His shoe factory had been taken over, then finally closed, and her plans for a small industrial museum on the site came to nothing, because she had not sought permission from the owners. The narrator ex- 62 plains that “[if] Howard had not taken his family to Europe the previous summer, when she embarked on this project, he could have looked at the agreement and she would have been saved a lot of trouble” (165). Exactly how news of this European trip is conveyed is interesting. The conditional subordinate clause is placed at the start of the sentence, preceding a second subordinate clause before the matrix clause appears; the initial clause is thus fronted, and its import is further enhanced by the commas marking the clause boundaries. The pauses they create ensure that the reader is made aware of the European holiday and also of the consequences contingent on its being taken. There are several subsequent pieces of information the reader can infer as evidence of the greater financial comfort Ritchie and his family enjoy: a holiday to Spain, a “birthday surprise” for his wife, a move from Kitchener to Toronto (165), the summer cottage in Muskoka (171), and these encourage the impression that Corrie’s payments are suppor- ting her lover’s successful, solidly respectable family life. Corrie’s world, the narrator implies, seems narrower, more humdrum, despite her wealth, and, tiring of living in her “big and empty house,” (164) she decides to occupy herself with reviving and administering the town’s library. The couple meet less often, choosing to stay overnight in motels, where the chance of detection has apparently grown less of a threat, as the external narrator explains. As in the opening scene of the narrative, when Ritchie critically assesses Corrie, free indirect discourse emerges to express the male protagonist’s pre-emptive strategies should they meet anyone in these locations: “He could have introduced her as a cousin without making any impression – a lame relation he had thought to drop in on. [...] And who would have gone after a middle-aged mistress with a dragging foot?” (166). The disrespectful vocabulary is reminiscent of the pejorative tone evident in Ritchie’s first appearance. The sentences that follow these musings are a curious blend of discourses, intradiegetic focalization and the voices of imagined witnesses to the couple’s liaison, expressed in the informal, speculative utterances typical of gossip: Nobody would have stored that information up to spill at a dangerous moment. We met Howard up at Bruce Beach with his sister, was it? He was looking good. His cousin, maybe. A limp? It wouldn’t have seemed worth the trouble. (166) In the polyphonic passage, the first sentence stands out for me. It is a significant clue for the reader to mull over. I believe it can be interpreted as an inadvertent refutation of the existence of any blackmailer, expressed with unknowing irony via the free indirect thought of the focalized protagonist. The sentence can be read, in the context, as a sta- tement of incredulity, that anyone would be foolish enough to think the couple lovers; the second, more literal meaning accords greater prominence to the pronoun “nobody,” discounting the possibility of any person likely to extort with “that information.” That person does not exist; s/he is a nobody. The narrator recounts how Corrie reads in the local paper of Lillian Wolfe’s unti- mely death at the age of forty-six; how she reacts with astonishment, and, restless with curiosity, shuts her library to watch the funeral-goers as they head back after the service to the church hall. She is spotted as she walks by, and invited into the gathering. There she learns how Lillian was cherished and adored by her fellow church members, one of whom is Lillian’s last employer, a woman wearing a “string of modest genuine pearls” (170) who tells Corrie how Lillian had always spoken highly of her. This scene performs 63 “A Cavity Everywhere”: The Postponement of Knowing in “Corrie” several functions in Munro’s narrative aesthetic: it works as a rich slice of social docu- mentary, depicting how the small Canadian town puts on “its best show of liveliness” for the funeral ceremony (168); it is important in terms of narrative dynamism, for in the substantial detail of setting, and the numerous instances of dialogue, it considerably slows the pace, so that Lillian Wolfe’s popularity in the community, indeed, her saint- liness, can be unequivocally established. It is interesting, moreover, in terms of what it reveals about the character of Cor- rie. What puzzles me about this scene is how unanimous the funeral-goers are in their surprise at Corrie’s absence from the service. This reaction suggests that Lillian Wolfe, no doubt grateful for the typing lessons, must have regularly and widely extolled her former employer’s qualities. That Corrie, without pausing or checking, should have be- lieved the maid capable of blackmail seems like a profound misjudgement of character. It is noteworthy, too, that although Corrie seems to be known and welcomed at the reception, she herself “couldn’t think of anyone’s name” and makes no attempt to es- tablish any connections (170), not even with Lillian’s recent employer, whom Corrie, it is suggested, would consider her social equal. Individual members of the church com- munity are identified by items of clothing: “the greeting person’s flowered dress” (169); the “woman with the teapot,” the “lady with the pearls” (171), the disembodied details suggesting their distance from her world and experience. The warm affirmations evident in this scene provide a stark contrast with the anxie- ties and doubts that characterize the succeeding one, when Corrie considers the impli- cations of her new-found knowledge about Lillian Wolfe. In vain she tries to compose a letter to Ritchie, telling him in a fit of forced jubilation that the “days of the Blackmail are over,” before reflecting on the “queasy feeling, the never-quite-safeness” of the payments that “had made her unhappy” (I70). But even as she agitates over the timing of Lillian’s death, whether it would have obviated Ritchie’s collection of the August payment, Corrie still does not contemplate the possibility she has been deceived. Munro postpones the realisation, inviting the reader to wonder why the protago- nist continues to resist the truth. The epiphany – when she does at last recognise and acknowledge the terrible deception – is sudden, coming to her in her sleep, and it is dramatically presented: There is no news to give him. No news, because there never was any. No news about Lillian because Lillian doesn’t matter and she never did. (173) A high proportion of the words in the passage above, more than a quarter of them, express negation. The certitude of the negation is intensified by schemes of repetition, such as anaphora and anadiplosis, and by a preponderance of monosyllabic and mainly functional words. These devices make the sentences sound starkly final, unassailable in their dismissal, recalling, for me, the earlier statement, “Nobody would have stored that information up to spill at a dangerous moment.” Agency is discounted in both instances: there is no blackmailer; Lillian was and is of no relevance. Munro uses free indirect discourse to enable the reader to see how Corrie introduces herself to “this new idea” – the idea of her lover’s long sustained deception and her own complicity in it – and how she deals with it. She feels “a cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest,” but has to introduce herself anew to “the current reality,” with the briefest letter to Ritchie (173). Charles May opines that, at this point in the narrative, the reader might reasonably ask why Corrie does not just leave her man when she realises 64 she has been deceived. He argues that, if Munro’s story were “a novel about a real-life situation,” this kind of question would be appropriate (Critical Insights 6). He maintains, however, that the story is not about “such issues” since Munro’s work is “not a realistic novel” but is, rather, “about the affair as a universal, classic phenomenon that survives on secrecy and time” (7). What kind of criteria does May think require to be met in the depiction of the “paradigm of a woman” and the “paradigmatic married man having an affair”? (7) I do not accept, first of all, his insistence on the distinctions between short and long fiction, nor do I wish to be discouraged from regarding the character of Ritchie as a deceiving “cad” (May’s term) or the character of Corrie as misguided and needy. I find it difficult to think of either in terms of abstract paradigms, representa- tive components of some “classic phenomenon.” As an engaged and attentive reader, I do want to “get inside the head of the man to see him scheme [and] inside the head of Corrie to see her suffer” (May, Narrative 241), in order to understand more fully the character’s motivation in this particularly terse, cryptic narrative. In my own research on Munro’s work, I have always set great store by reader response, reader engagement, rea- der empathy, welcoming the insights of like-minded academics who study and analyse what exactly it is in her fiction, in her use of “certain kinds of language and not other kinds, that is instrumental in the reader’s sense of emotional immersion” (Toolan, Nar- rative 211). Why do Munro’s fictive lives seem to me “so authentic, so subtle, so felt”? (Frank 169, emphasis in the original). A perusal of the numerous responses to Charles E. May’s online comments on “Corrie,” in particular on how the story ends, reveals the extent to which readers have become engaged with the characters, reflecting on the na- ture of the lovers’ relationship, and on each partner’s commitment to it in the aftermath of Corrie’s discovery. There are three different endings to the story which was first published inThe New Yorker in 2010. A second ending is found in the version of “Corrie” anthologized in The PEN/O Henry Prize Stories 2012, and a third ending concludes the story collected in Dear Life. The changes that Munro effects in these three different endings tell us much about her narrative strategies. In discussion of these three endings, I argue that the presentation of Corrie in the latest is more positive, in keeping with the generally affirmative nature of the whole collection. In the earliest version of the story, Corrie believes she is capable of “shaping up another possibility” (The New Yorker 101) after her discovery, but the possibility is limi- ted to saying and doing nothing about what she has learned: she will resign herself to continuing to pay the money, reasoning that what she and Ritchie have, namely their affair, “demands payment” which she can afford. The last sentence of the New Yorker version has Corrie descend “gingerly” to her kitchen, “making everything fit into its proper place” (101). Corrie thus accepts not only her guilt, but the burden for it, and is content to allow her lover to reap the benefits of an outrageous deceit. The fact that she proceeds “gingerly” suggests that she does not feel very confident about the strength of the new reality she is shaping. In the second version of “Corrie,” Munro makes her ending decidedly more ambiguous. Again there is the mention of “shaping up another possibility” (PEN/O 409) but what is shaped appears far from certain, and the ins- tances of modality in Corrie’s musings are notable. She thinks she “could say a thing that would destroy them” or she “could say right now, what does it matter?” She “sup- poses” that one day there “will have to be an end” to their affair, but, significantly, she 65 “A Cavity Everywhere”: The Postponement of Knowing in “Corrie” accepts that “if what they had – what they have – demands payment she is the one to pay” (409). As in the New Yorker version, there is reference to the need to make payment – to atone for her guilt, her feelings about the “never-quite-safeness” (Dear Life 172) of the affair’s continuance. Once more, Munro employs the image of “making everything fit into its proper place” with her protagonist descending gingerly into the kitchen, but then suddenly, she has her think, in the middle of her breakfast, of escaping. The eight concluding sentences of the story are brief and irregular, a mixture of questions, exclamatives and reaction signals to her thoughts, arranged in a blocked formation that looks like a set of instructions in some desperate emergency. The last three lines read: Fly away, why don’t you, right now? Fly away. What rot. Yes. Do it. (PEN/O 409) I doubt whether many readers would believe Corrie capable of flying away at this point. The fact that she is considering flight can be taken, maybe, as an indication of her anger, but it is not any kind of solution, not when there is no sign of explanation, or, more im- portantly, any justification for the flight. The desultory nature of her thoughts suggests that no firm decision will emerge from them. I believe the Dear Life ending leaves Corrie in a much stronger position in her rela- tionship. The reference to her “shaping another possibility” is gone: what follows after her introduction to the “current reality” is radically different. How Munro presents the final image of her protagonist, as she confronts the truth, and decides on how to deal with it, is stylistically distinctive, for the sentences are elliptical, even telegraphic, conveying impatience, and anger. She sends “[t]he briefest note, the letter tossed,” in- forming Ritchie of Lillian’s death, marking it “[s]pecial delivery, who cares?” (Dear Life 173). The fact that she takes less care shows she has grown bolder, and is prepared to take risks, like the prospect of not hearing from Ritchie again. But she does receive a reply, intended to reassure, “All well now, be glad. Soon.” The final sentences of the narrative read: “So that’s the way they’re going to leave it. Too late to do another thing. When there could have been worse, much worse” (173). The irregular syntax, the paucity of content-bearing words and the deliberate va- gueness of reference create the ambiguity that often characterizes the endings in Mu- nro’s stories. What, if anything, does the pronoun “it” refer to? It could be taken as a direct reference to the business of the regular payments, which will cease, when, by contrast, in Munro’s earlier versions of the story they continue to be paid. It is possible to read the word “it” as a substitute for the lover’s relationship, but that interpretation is undermined by the acknowledgement that “there could have been worse,” the “worse” being understood as the ending of the affair. It makes greater sense to read “it” as the kind of completely empty or non-referring pronoun one finds in idioms, where “it” just means current circumstances, or “life in general” (Quirk et al 349). Lillian Wolfe’s death has wrought irrevocable changes for Corrie, exposing not only Ritchie’s deception, but making her confront her self-delusion: there is no palliative for such an outcome, as it is “too late” for remediation. The conclusion, then, can be understood in terms of accep- tance, the acceptance of compromise Corrie has to reach to avoid what would be worse. By revising her ending of the previous versions of “Corrie” I believe Munro strengthens her female protagonist’s position in the relationship with her lover. She is now equipped with much greater knowledge, and who knows what bargaining powers 66 she can wield with this knowledge. There is in his brief, optimistic response to Corrie’s note evidence that Ritchie is accepting a new context for their affair, freed from the bur- den of deceit. He will continue the relationship, because he needs her. Another reason why this conclusion is the most satisfactory of the three endings is that the question of any kind of payment for pleasure is removed, and the partners are on an equal footing, with each harbouring the same secret. The reader is presented, for most of the narrative, with a female character weakened by inadvertence and ingenuousness, in thrall to a man whose systematic fraud has sus- tained his comfort and status. From the outset he is portrayed as an opportunist, whose integrity and motivation are suspect. I have argued in this essay that Munro encourages her reader to examine the authenticity of the character and his persuasive lies. This she does in “Corrie” by carefully inserting clues for the attentive reader to discern and mull over; for instance, she accords salience to textual segments so their import can be reappraised; she chooses words that are ambiguous or incongruous in their contexts, and thus invites another interpretation; she shifts the perspective to make space for the external narrator’s authoritative comment, and, more potently, she allows the uninter- rupted flow of free indirect discourse in which the male character undermines his own credibility. Corrie’s knowledge is postponed until the final pages of the narrative, but what she now knows about her lover may well sustain and protect her – “a pause, a lost heartbeat, a harsh little break in the flow of the days and nights as she keeps them going” (“Lichen” 55).
Isla DuNcaN University of Chichester
W orks Cited
FeRRis, Lucy. “Uncle Charles Repairs to the A&P: Changes in Voice in the Recent American Short Story.” Narrative 16.2 (May 2008):178-92. FRaNk, Michael. “Fiction in Review.” Yale Review 87.2 (1999): 157-74. FuRMaN, Laura, ed.. The PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. gRice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. iRigaRay, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. MacleaN MilleR, Judith. “Deconstructing Silence: The Mystery of Alice Munro.” Antigonish Review 129 (Spring 2002): 43-52. May, Charles E. “Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?” Wascana Review 38.1 (Spring 2003): 16-28. —. “Charles E. May Replies.” Narrative 20.2 (May 2012): 241-3. —.
—. “Engagement via Emotional Heightening in ‘Passion’: On the Grammatical Texture of Emotionally-Immersive Passages in Short Fiction.” Narrative 20.2 (May 2012): 201-25. wales, Katie. A Dictionary of Stylistics. Harlow: Longman Pearson, 2001. wiNtheR, Per. “Munro’s Handling of Description, Focalization and Voice in ‘Passion’.” Narrative 20.2 (May 2012): 198-209.
Alice Munro’s Legacy: The “Finale” of DearDear LifeLife
In the four final pieces of her latest (and possibly last) book – Dear Life, Alice Munro returns to the stories of her childhood that informed her early writing, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971) in particular. This essay offers an ana- lysis of the “Finale” as an example of legacy writing, and especially what might be viewed as its subgenre: a writer’s legacy.
In a life as intimately intertwined with writing as Alice Munro’s has been, the deci- sion to stop writing is a matter of life and death, which perhaps explains the tentati- veness of her declarations concerning retirement. Despite her superior narrative skills and her right to make decisions about her life, Alice Munro does not usurp the divine, or at least priestly, power to bind and to loose on earth or in heaven. Thus instead of making definitive statements, she says “probably” and “maybe.” Nevertheless, her latest book, and especially its four final pieces form a legacy of her life, her final autobio- graphical endeavour that supplements the academic and personal accounts of the two acknowledged biographers: Robert Thacker and Sheila Munro, respectively, as well as her own 1981 memoir “Working for a Living” (which is also part of The View from Castle Rock). Robert Thacker disclaims being an “official biographer,” even though he admits that his book “benefited enormously from its subject’s cooperation” (572). Sheila Mu - nro admits that the idea of her mother’s biography came from the subject herself, but the memoirist had to find an appropriate form and tone that followed emotional logic, rather than strict chronology (261-3). Although ostensibly slim in comparison with the two semi-official biographies and unadorned with visual material, the sketches in Mu- nro’s latest book, “not quite stories” and yet reminiscent in both form and content of some of her earlier narratives, constitute – as I would like to argue in this essay – the four cornerstones of both writing life and life writing. In this sense, they become a form of a writer’s legacy, highlighting such faculties as heightened perception, altered states of mind, receptiveness to voices, and instinctive love of life.
Legacy Alice Munro has been threatening to retire since 2006, but at that time her long-time editor, Douglas Gibson, dismissed the news with the claim that “Alice is a born writer, and she’s not going to stop writing” (n.p.). He was right, as he gladly recounts in his own essay. Within the six years following her first official goodbye to the writing life, Munro published Too Much Happiness (2009), New Selected Stories (2011), and her latest Dear Life (2012). Commenting on her interview with the National Post in June 2013, however, Douglas Gibson no longer felt he could disclaim her rather tentative protestation “I’m probably not going to write anymore” (Munro, “Interview with Mark Medley” n.p.). On that occasion she justified her decision with a claim that “[i]t’s nice to go out with a bang” and then gave the additional explanation: “Not that I didn’t love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you’re my age, you don’t wish to be alone as much as a writer has 70 to be” (“Interview with Mark Medley” n.p.). In the interview which replaced the Nobel Lecture, Alice Munro referred to her retirement as “a decision that I wanted to behave like the rest of the world” (“Nobel Lecture” n.p.) rather than living alternately in two worlds: the “secret” world and the “normal” one. In a short conversation with Adam Smith, following the announcement of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on 10 Oc- tober 2013, Alice Munro admitted, however, that the great honour “may change [her] mind” about retirement (“Telephone Interview” n.p.). Despite the joy and the spontaneous declaration expressed in the interview with Adam Smith, Dear Life remains Alice Munro’s latest book and thus a farewell to her readers. What gives the book its sense of finality is the last part which follows the first ten stories and especially the title “Finale,” which is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the ending of some grand artistic endeavour: an opera or a concert. This title is not mentio- ned in the table of contents, but it appears in the text itself, following the story entitled “Dolly.” The word “Finale” precedes a brief note which explains the authorial intention and defines the genre of the texts: “The final four works in this book,” Munro writes, “are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life” (Dear Life 255). What is most striking in these four pieces is their preoccupation with early life. While intense interest in childhood and youth was obvious in Munro’s early volumes, such as Dance of the Happy Shades or Lives of Girls and Women, the prominence they are given in her latest works is puzzling. Does life and life’s work indeed come full circle from childhood to childhood? Does old age become almost one with infancy, both stages in life being equally ambivalent: either gravely underestimated or else pathetically overesti- mated? Munro’s vivid recreation of early life raises other inevitable doubts as well, very much like those occasioned, for example, by Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: is it pos- sible at all to reconstruct in old age not only people, objects, and landscapes with such accurate detail, but also names, one’s innermost past anxieties and desires and one’s state of consciousness? What is truth and what is invention in such accounts? Munro’s interest in early life or her view of childhood as the time of intense experiencing of the world is by no means exceptional among ageing authors. One can find it also in Henry James’s late autobiographical texts which, like Munro’s “Finale,” do not bring the reader much further than the author’s early adulthood. It is doubtful that Alice Munro intends to inscribe herself in the age-old but ba- sically amateurish tradition of legacy writing, or writing down of deathbed thoughts, which in Anglophone cultures dates back at least to the sixteenth century. But viewing her final pieces from this perspective seems nevertheless justified by the context of her conscious and emphatic leave-taking. The tradition of legacy writing has indeed been revived during the past few decades in numerous books and on websites addressed to a very wide readership and offering practical advice on how to keep diaries as a form of therapy and as a heritage passed on to posterity. The revived tradition of legacy writing does not hinge any more on the different status of male and female authors. Old age and disability are instead the main causes of marginalization experienced by men and women alike. Like the sixteenth-century legacy writers discussed by Jennifer Heller in The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England, Munro is, however, aware of gender distinc- tions when pronouncing her last words intended for the public. 71 Alice Munro’s Legacy: The “Finale” of Dear Life
In her book Jennifer Heller studies “formal, social, and personal dimensions of the genre” of the mother’s legacy that “emerged in late sixteenth-century England and flourished in cycles through late seventeenth” (2). She admits that legacy writers differ widely in terms of social status, religious belief, and age. By the same token, their “lega- cies take a wide range of forms, including letters, prayers, translations, dialogues, family histories, and collections of precepts” (2). Heller points out further what all legacy wri- ters have in common despite their diversity: they “adopt an explicitly maternal voice,” even though they acknowledge that giving advice is basically “a masculine activity” (4). Thus, when fashioning themselves as advice-givers, legacy writers upset the accepted hierarchy of gender roles. At the same time they are careful to “create a newly confi- gured form of authority out of existing early modern discourses [humanist arguments, biblical models, and discourses of biology], even though those discourses did not gene- rally sanction feminine power and knowledge” (4). None of the genre characteristics distinguished by Heller apply fully and without qualification to the pieces included in Alice Munro’s “Finale.” One can hardly claim that “they feature a maternal voice, they are written to children, they are cast as deathbed advice, and they provide religious counsel” (Heller 2), even though elements of this definition are present in Munro’s stories in a typically fragmented, inverted, and- dis torted manner. A female infant, child and teenager do appear in her final pieces, the maternal voice is heard at different stages of the narrator’s life, and death looms large, taking away or threatening the young as well as the old. Munro dispenses, however, with deathbed advice and straightforward religious counsel, even though the last words of “Dear Life” (and therefore of the “Finale”) savour of both: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time” (319). Heller characterizes legacy writers as “liminal women,” who “[w]ithout exception [...] describe their texts as their last words” and for whom “the deathbed is a rhetorical platform” (5). The “act of composition” is thus a response to fears experienced by a writer who views herself as “a dead woman among the living” (qtd. in Heller 5). The author need not be “literally dying,” but “the logic of final words makes concrete the writer’s beliefs and wishes,” drawing on various traditions, such as the ars moriendi and the danse macabre (Heller 5). If the legacy writer fashions herself as a dying mother, the reader is cast as a vulnerable child in need of both motherly counsel and spiritual conso- lation. Even though elements of the danse macabre may be detected in the “Finale” in Sadie’s alleged posthumous wink and in Mrs. Netterfield’s investigation of the narrator’s home, even though Sadie’s juvenile words of wisdom appear in retrospect as a form of legacy and the mother’s retelling of old stories may be seen as related to the ars moriendi, Alice Munro does not assign roles to the speaker and the reader. In her “Finale,” the mother’s legacy is embedded in the daughter’s narrative, and the legacy is thus always someone else’s. In the following sections I discuss each of the pieces in the order of their appea- rance in the book, pointing to the motifs and elements that may be viewed as legacy writing. In an interview with Stefan Åsberg, Alice Munro says that she “worked in a way that comforted and pleased [her]self more than in a way that followed some kind of idea” and that she would like readers “to find not so much inspiration as great en- joyment” (n.p.). She wants “people to enjoy [her] books, to think of them as related 72 to their own lives in ways” (n.p.). The enjoyment she offers in the four final pieces of Dear Life seems, however, for both the author and the reader, to rest on the belief in the ethical responsibility for one’s life and writing alike, especially in view of the inevitable end of both.
Perception “The Eye” tells the story of a five-year-old girl who is confronted with what seems to her a sudden appearance of younger siblings, a baby boy and, a year later, a baby girl. Munro expertly captures the anxiety of the child who, on the one hand, suddenly begins to receive less attention than before and, on the other, becomes subject to aggressive socialization at home. Her mother tries to teach her not only to express but also to feel emotions that the child does not experience, such as love for her younger brother and sister, shyness in relation to Jesus, and fondness of Red River cereal (“The Eye” 258). The girl is thus taught to overcome her natural sense of jealousy and rivalry with her siblings, and to appreciate both spiritual and bodily nourishment that is no longer em- bodied, but instead recommended, by her mother. The first turning point in the girl’s life comes with the discovery of the dissociation of her feelings from their depiction offered by her mother. The way her mother describes her feelings is a misinterpretation at best and manipulation at worst. In an attempt to avoid conflict, however, the girl resolves to give up speaking her mind and correcting her mother. She also acquires the habit of making or confirming claims that she does not identify as her own (262). The relationship between mother and daughter (a prime theme of Munro’s fiction) is then complicated by the appearance of the third party. It is worth noting that at this stage the siblings do not yet count as parties. The mother’s territory shrinks when Sadie comes to work for the family. Sadie’s age remains a mystery because, as the narrator admits, “I didn’t make easy judgments about ages then. People were either children or grown-up and I thought her a grown-up. Maybe she was sixteen, maybe eighteen or twenty” (260-1). Sadie is certainly younger than the girl’s mother, and thus she stands between the two. The mother withdraws to take care of the babies and Sadie spends a lot of time with the family’s eldest daughter, filling the girl’s life and imagination com- pletely. She is all the more fascinating as she also has a life outside the house; Sadie is a celebrity in the local radio station, where she “play[s] her guitar” and sings not only “the opening welcome song” (258) and the “Good-bye” song, but also other songs “that were requested, as well as some she picked out herself ” (259). Sadie is a celebrity, but a local one. The radio for which she sings her sad songs “about loneliness and grief ” (259) is just a local station, and Sadie who speaks local dialect (e.g., “youse” [260], a substandard equivalent of the pronoun “you,” usually referring to more than one per- son) is just a country girl. Dances are a big part of her life, too, but unlike other girls, she goes there “[b]y herself and for herself ” (262), she pays her own way, and returns home alone (262). The dancing arrangements in the establishments she frequents vary between the town and the country (261-2), an observation which suggests that Sadie inhabits a liminal space between two worlds: the urban and the rural. She is a boundary- crosser in other ways as well: she seems suspended between childhood and adulthood, submissive femininity and masculine independence. The main lesson the young girl gleans from her relationship with her mother is that it is impossible to see eye to eye with an adult, which encourages her to develop the stra- 73 Alice Munro’s Legacy: The “Finale” of Dear Life tegies of evasion and mimicry. The triangulation of the mother-daughter relationship with the arrival of Sadie brings with it the next lesson about the possibility of creating a world of one’s own around a voice that has interesting stories to tell and sings sad songs on the radio. It is not necessary, as the girl is relieved to find out, to see eye to eye with others. It is no wonder that the girl’s parents are worried and then hopeful that things will change for the better when school begins. The girl is not quite sure what exactly they are talking about and the reader is not sure if they are talking to her or over her head. The reader actually shares the girl’s disorientation as one day she is being transpor- ted somewhere in her mother’s car. She is dressed as if for school, but they arrive at a house that “has no driveway or even a sidewalk. It’s decent but quite plain” (264). The narrator admits eventually that the young protagonist knew where she was going. The reader may hence assume that her fear of “any dead body” (267) was the reason why the girl preferred to be unaware and to feel confused. She knows there is a coffin in the room, but blaming her lack of experience, she chooses to take it for “[a] shelf to put flowers on […] or a closed piano” (268). The protagonist eventually overcomes her fear of a dead body and looks at Sadie in snatches, peeking at her with one eye at a time for a brief moment (269). It is no wonder that employing this strategy (a prototype of the literary point-of-view technique), she notices a movement of Sadie’s eyelid. She is not surprised. Nor does she report the discovery. She accepts the playful wink as a message that “was completely for me” (269). However, in the final sentence of the account, the narrator already announces that she will soon cease to believe in such “unnatural display” (270). Alice Munro recreates the child’s way of looking at the threatening liminality of a dead person (present and absent at the same time, ostensibly lifeless, but perhaps also still alive in some sense) and shows that perception is selective, always fraught with distortion and illusion, especially if coloured by emotion, and particularly if it is a basic emotion, such as fear. The frightened girl casts furtive glances at the corpse, looking with one eye at a time. The way she is looking allows her to see movement where none is to be expected. The imagined eye contact creates a kind of illusionary and elusive secret bond that turns the girl into a liminal figure, too. The death of Sadie coincides with the end of her own preschool interaction with her social environment. At the funeral, her perception, a cornerstone of later writing, is not yet quite the schooled (private) eye and no longer merely an element of the children’s game of “I Spy.”
Altered States The second narrative, “Night,” is set during the time of war. Although the protagonist is not directly affected by the military conflict, the reference to it intensifies the sense of gloom and oppression, and the fear of death. As usual, pain strikes the protagonist not only at night, but also during a blizzard (271). Her appendix is taken out in hospital, and along with it a growth which her mother calls just that (272-3). The girl recovers gradually, but her life changes; she cannot sleep at night. The way she used to tease and enrage her younger sister Catherine, who was sleeping in the bunk bed below hers, was anything but loving (274), but at fourteen, instead of childish pranks, she begins to contemplate far more threatening possibilities during sleepless nights, such as “[t] he thought that I could strangle my little sister, who was asleep in the bunk below me 74 and whom I loved more than anybody in the world” (277). Her driving force, as she imagines it, might be just an attack of madness. It becomes a habit for her to leave her bed and the house on tiptoe and to walk outside until dawn. On one sleepless night, she gets a sense “that there was somebody around the cor- ner” (280). She turns around and sees her father sitting on the stoop and smoking. They begin to talk and the girl confesses her fear of the possibility of being moved to strangle her little sister. Her father takes it all in calmly and admits that “[p]eople have those kinds of thoughts sometimes” (283). There is neither mockery nor alarm in his voice, and he effectively plays the role a psychiatrist would be expected to fulfill today. He puts an end to her problem by telling her at daybreak what she needed to hear then and soon forgot (284). The narrator admits in an afterthought that her father was not given to splitting hairs, and, as is all too obvious, he had other real economic and family disasters to face (285). One might argue that the threat of death (signalled in the story by pain, anaesthetics, and double surgery) becomes internalized by the teenage protagonist, whose fear of death manifests itself in visions of inflicting death on her unsuspecting sibling. The only person with whom she can discuss the problem is her father, and that only in the liminal space of the stoop and at daybreak. The climactic exchange between father and daughter has significant and far-reaching implications. For one thing, the narrator dis- covers that living one’s life means coming to terms with altered states of consciousness. For another, her father’s analytical and therapeutic effort emerges as an antecedent to her own narrative art.
Voices of Love “Voices,” the third piece, describes the ritual of going to dances. The reader knows already from the first story in the “Finale” batch that going to dances may end badly,- es pecially if the woman goes there alone. The arrangement described in this piece seems unorthodox enough as, instead of going with her husband, the mother takes with her the eldest daughter. On one such occasion, the girl is ten years old and goes with her mother to a dance in “one of the altogether decent but not prosperous-looking houses on our road” (288). The girl cannot help noticing a woman whose appearance can only be couched in a set of startling juxtapositions: “old and polished,” “heavy and graceful,” “bold as brass and yet mightily dignified” (292). She does not realize yet that the woman is known in town as “a notable prostitute” (292). Once the mother notices the prostitute, she decides to leave and requests that her daughter collect her coat from a bedroom upstairs. On the stairs, the girl witnesses “an urgent sort of communication” between two soldiers and a young woman (294). The observant young protagonist smells the young woman’s perfume and the soldiers’ cigarettes. As she rushes downstairs, she notices that the young man “kept stroking her [the woman’s] upper leg. Her skirt was pulled up and I saw the fastener holding her stocking” (296). When reporting the events to her husband, the mother does not mind the soldiers, but she does object to the presence of the old prostitute and “one of her girls” (295). In contrast to her mother, the daughter is not outraged. She remembers the young men’s voices, probably English voices, which were kind and comforting. Later she keeps imagining in her “not yet quite erotic fantasies” (298) that she might be their addressee. 75 Alice Munro’s Legacy: The “Finale” of Dear Life
Although death is not present in any straightforward manner in “Voices,” the story shares certain motifs with previous pieces that make this threat appear imminent and tangible. Sadie (in “The Eye”) seemed to like dances as much as the protagonist’s mo- ther likes them in “Voices.” War was mentioned as a parallel to the protagonist’s health problems in “Night.” In “Voices” war is signalled by the presence of English soldiers, who are on the point of leaving, though still lingering on the stairs. Their voices may resemble Sadie’s voice on the radio. Both Sadie’s and the soldiers’ voices become literally disembodied. In both cases the departure may (or does) amount to death. The narrator seems to imply that living one’s life consists of hearing voices, even though the meaning of words may be incomprehensible, and even though the words may be meant for others. The narrator intercepts, implicates herself in the lives of others, sharing their emotions in the liminal space of the staircase and of her memory long afterwards.
Love of Life The final piece in the “Finale” has the same title as the whole book: “Dear Life.” It is a rather rambling account of various events, places, hopes, and disappointments. The narrator recollects her way to school, her acquaintance with a prostitute’s daughter, her mother’s ambition to play golf, and her parents’ shared hope for success in the fur industry, her own attempt to see country life in the idealized manner of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novels (305), and the history of the house in which they lived. Names are dropped and forgotten, loose ends in the narrative are not even provisionally tuc- ked in because, as the narrator explains, “this is not a story, only life” (307). Although in previous narratives of the “Finale,” the protagonist’s parents tend to be described separately, in this one both appear in turn: her father as a farmer and foundry worker, and her mother as a story teller. Two puzzling stories of “a crazy old woman named Mrs. Netterfield” (310) figure prominently at the end of the piece. Both are narrated by the mother and both seem to illustrate the old woman’s madness: first, her aggressive behavior with a delivery boy who brought her groceries, and then her inspection of the house where the narrator’s family lived. At that time the narrator was an infant and Mrs. Netterfield was a threate- ning presence. The narrator’s mother recollects her dread of the woman and especially one episode when she managed to take her baby inside the house and hide just in time, but still fearing intrusion. Many years later the narrator discovers that the “mad” woman had actually lived in that house before her own parents had moved in, and during that frightening visitation, she was probably inspecting her former property, just as the narrator is doing in a sym- bolic sense when writing her account. The narrator pieces together all the versions of the story she heard from her mother (315), and eventually finds a conclusion on her own, which she also finds by chance, so to speak. She happens to read a local paper published in her home town, and in it she discovers a letter and a handful of poems by a woman whose maiden name was Netterfield. Through a paradoxical inversion which is only possible thanks to the magic of writing, the stranger’s life becomes familiar, in fact, identical with her own. Eventually, the poems read in a paper parallel or even echo the narrator’s own past experience (317), and Mrs. Netterfield’s frightening presence becomes an analogy to the “powdery yet ominous smell” of the protagonist’s mother 76 in “The Eye,” and to the protagonist’s own fear of her urge to strangle her sister in “Night.” Especially in view of a real or imagined danger, life becomes dear. A young mother runs to save her child, young soldiers linger on the stairs with a prostitute, daughters publish reminiscences of their parents’ and their own past lives. Being “touched by the wing of mortality” (272) is a distinction and a crucial motif in the four texts of the “Finale.” The deathbed perspective emerges as a privilege, rather than a threat. There are no literal deathbed scenes in the “Finale” pieces, and death is conceptualized instead as a winged being, whose half-secret, ambivalent presence encourages a declaration of love addressed to life: one’s own and that of others, despite the monstrosity inherent in living.
Cornerstones Alice Munro’s house of fiction has at least four cornerstones indicated in the final pieces of Dear Life. These are faculties that artists share with children: heightened per- ception, altered states of consciousness, receptiveness to voices, and an instinctive love of life. Apart from the centrality of childhood, and very much in keeping with this mode of cognition, the four pieces of Alice Munro’s life writing are strikingly devoid of references to her own writing life. They do not describe the struggles of a prospec- tive writer as do, for example, such stories as “Heirs of the Living Body” (Lives of Girls and Women, 1971) or “The Office” Dance( of the Happy Shades, 1968). In the “Finale” it is always other people who speak, sing songs, write poems, leave legacies of their lives, and the narrator, holding on to her status of a young, wide-eyed child, fashions herself as a receptacle for and a dispenser of other people’s stories. The “Finale” may well be read as a companion piece to the earlier auto/biographical text “Working for a Living,” which first and foremost pays homage to the quiet heroism of Robert Laidlaw. By the end of his busy life, the father managed to surprise his wri- ting daughter as an author of reminiscences and contributor of stories to “an excellent though short-lived local magazine. And not long before his death he completed a novel about pioneer life, called The Macgregors” (Munro, The View 167). An extensive quote from her father’s piece entitled “Grandfathers” appears at the end of her own reminis- cence: it is a scene she could have only imagined of her father as a boy among his elders, a mere observer, and like herself in the “Finale,” a receptacle for other people’s stories: “That is where I feel it best to leave them – my father a little boy, not venturing too close, and the old men sitting through a summer afternoon on wooden chairs placed under one of the great benevolent elm trees that used to shelter my grandparents’ farmhouse” (170). In the “Foreword” to her strongly auto/biographical volume – The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro insists that “[t]hese are stories” (n.p.). By the end of her writing career, introducing the four final pieces ofDear Life, she prefers the vague expression, “not quite stories,” to indicate the inextricability of life and writing, and the fluidity of self and other.
Miroslawa Buchholtz Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland 77 Alice Munro’s Legacy: The “Finale” of Dear Life
W orks Cited
giBsoN, Douglas. “Alice Munro Says Goodbye to the Writing Life.” 24 July 2013.
Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of DDearear LLifeife
This essay focuses on loss and trauma as structuring motifs in several individual stories in Dear Life. They represent privileged moments of access to the Real that disturbs and pierces the smooth surface of ordinary life and reality. But read as a whole, the volume also offers a reflection on the process of healing at the heart of story telling and on the recons- tructive work of language that allows life to continue.
There is always a danger in planning to present a “reading” of a collection of stories that were originally published singly, usually in the context of a magazine and that were gathered up in a collection only at a later stage of their life in print. John Updike, in a review of Alice Munro’s Selected Stories in 1996, reflecting on the various publishing for- mats, compared a short story collection, with its “aspiration to coherence and unity,” to “a musical album, say Joni Mitchell’s Blue,” whereas the volume of Selected Stories could only be, to his mind, “the literary (or rather publishing) counterpart to Joni Mitchell’s Hits,” a “format rather than an art form” (Robson np). Reading a collection of stories like an album, with the sense that there is a tonality, a colour or a tone shared by most of the pieces, is not without artifice. Alice Munro herself protests against the critical assumption that the stories in her collections are linked: “what on earth is this feeling that somehow things have to connect or… have to be part of a larger whole?” (qtd. in Carrington 3) Aware of this pitfall, I will nonetheless take the risk of bringing together some of Dear Life’s stories, not with the intention of finding the key to the volume, the intention of the lot, but animated by the belief that, as Ildikó de Papp Carrington puts it, “things do connect and there is a coherent whole, recognizable patterns” in Munro’s fiction (4). The texts gathered together in Dear Life undoubtedly form an organic whole and the collection is not a random aggregation of texts. On the contrary, the whole is greater than sum of its parts. My journey through the “album” is inspired by a quote from “Carried Away” where a character wonders whether the female protagonist of the story of loss and impossible love was “one of those people full of mended cracks that you could only see close up” (Munro, Selected Stories 378). People full of mended cracks form a recognizable pattern in Munro’s fiction. In “Train,” “Gravel” and “Pride,” in particular, hidden wounds, the wounds of loss, trauma, or difference leave their traces in the texts, causing disturbances in the symbolic. There are no wounds without scars, and therefore it is the mending of the cracks, and the traces of the wounds left in the very verbal texture of the stories upon which this reading will focus. But in Dear Life, which Munro presents as her last collection of stories, the author also revisits her own wounds, in the final part of the collection, the “Finale” or auto- biographical section. At the end of Munro’s life journey, and at the end of her writing career the issue of whether the mending of cracks ever becomes the healing of wounds and the issue of the power of words on the wounds of life remain vividly acute and pressing. 80
The Rawness of Life In her famous definition of “what is real” for her, Munro describes writing a story as the compulsive need to create a certain type of structure, build a house around an in- describable feeling. She explains how there is a “black room at the centre of the house with all other rooms leading to and away from it” (“What is Real” 868). Wounds, cracks and pits immediately evoke the core of darkness that inhabits each of her stories, a core of darkness which seems to be the closest equivalent possible of the Lacanian “Real.” The Real emerges in reality as that which undermines reality and shatters our symbolic constructions, our sense of being subjects in control of our world. By definition “the real cannot be experienced as such: it is capable of representation or conceptualisa- tion only through the reconstructive or inferential work of the imaginary or symbo- lic orders” (Elizabeth Grosz 34). What we experience as reality is always symbolized, constituted and structured by symbolic mechanisms. The Real is the menace that all our symbolic constructions try to keep at bay. In order to describe the uneasy relationship between reality and the Real, Slavoj Zizek uses the example of Malevich’s painting: The Naked Unframed Icon of my Time, where a white square frames a black hole. Reality is the white frame, a grid imposed on chaos. The black mass at the centre of the picture gives the white background its consistency, but also shows its frailty, as the inscrutable darkness can always overflow and disrupt the limits of the white frame (Zizek 19). Munro’s fiction recurrently rehearses these impossible moments of “encounters with the Real” where reality crumbles, like dark holes uneasily contained in the frame of the white page. Many stories are organised around a traumatic event or its long-term effects. For instance, Corrie’s sudden discovery that unbeknown to her she had been paying for her lover’s attention for over 20 years leaves her hollow, and opens up a hole in her sense of reality: “A cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest. She makes coffee and doesn’t drink it. She ends up in her bedroom once more, and finds that the introduction to the current reality has to be done all over again” (“Corrie,” Dear Life 173). Similarly, in “Amundsen,” the demise of the subject, left at the altar the day of her “bare-bones wedding” (Dear Life 57) is evoked in terms of flaying. The subject becomes raw, loses her symbolic armour, her protective skin and sense of self: “every turn is like a shearing-off of what was left of [her] life” (63). The image of the body stripped of its skin reduces to shreds our most basic phenomenological relationship to the living body, “which is based on the radical line of separation between the surface of the skin and what lies beneath” (Zizek, “Lamella” 208).1 We can only relate to the body as long as we can ignore what lies beneath its smooth surface, underneath the skin. Short fiction seems to be a privileged format for the staging of encounters with the Real beneath the glossy surface of reality. If in the house of fiction all the rooms lead to the black room, the train, in “To Reach Japan” also shows that a core of darkness remains at the heart of all symbolic constructions: Greta’s journey to love, poetry, and freedom ends up in the empty space between the carriages “where the banging and swaying reminded you how things were put together in a way that seemed not so inevitable after all” (Dear Life 25). If the carriages are the smooth spaces where stories are told and put together, where fantasies are elaborated and played out and reality is filtered, it is in the gaping
1. Slavoj Zizek reminds us that “one of the definitions of the Lacanian Real is that it is the flayed, skinned body, the palpitation of raw, skinless red flesh” (“Lamella” 208). 81 Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life hole between the carriages, on the “clanging metal plates” that Greta, “drained by fear,” finds her lost daughter, with her mouth open in silent horror (25). But there is in Dear Life a very apt symbol or approximation of the Real, which in fact is a key Munrovian topos, both place and concept, metaphor and metonymy: the image of the gravel pit. Gravel is everywhere in the collection, from the pit in the story entitled “Gravel,” of course, to the unstable gravel pile that represents the collapse of Nancy’s reason in “In Sight of the Lake.” Gravel is also what Jackson comes hard on, scraping his shins in “Train.” Gravel pits in Munro’s fiction are often the sign of a precarious existence on the edge of town, as in “Floating Bridge” (Hateship) and “Gravel.” They are naturally connected to trailers, to homes that are not houses and to drifting, fragile lifestyles. They are also always associated with the looming dangers of death. In “Turkey Season,” we encounter a gravel pit of a different sort, but carrying the same symbolic value: a young girl learns how to gut turkeys, “feeling the gravel, in the crop, the cleft between the gullet and the windpipe, her hands plunging in the cavity of the turkey’s entrails” (Selected Stories 172). Gravel, an aggregate of small water-worn or compounded stones, neither solid nor li- quid, epitomizes the way the Real can always undermine all symbolic constructions: “It was deathly cold in there, in the turkey’s dark inside” (172). Circling around the gravel pit that separates the trailer, a world of free love and il- lusory return to natural order, from the city with its solid houses, husbands and middle class ideals, “Gravel” is the story of the evisceration of a family, in the narrator’s words, and a ghost story in many respects. The ghost of Banquo, in the person of Neal arrives in the newly opened theatre of the little town to trouble family order and seduce the dutiful mother into an alternative lifestyle. But the imaginary alternative he offers is in turn emptied out by Caro’s surreptitious moves to revert to the life she had before the usurper arrived. She, more than Neal, is Banquo’s ghost in the story, the spoilsport and the bad conscience of her mother. Yet, gradually, it is the spectral presence of the pit that swallows up the fragile world of the trailer. The time frame of the text corres- ponds to the nine months of the mother’s pregnancy, from the move to the trailer to the birth of her third child. In a sinister fashion a parallel is drawn between the womb of the mother filling up with the growing foetus and the shallow pit growing everyday deeper and filling up with melted snow until it becomes not so much a pit as a womb, and not so much a womb as a tomb for Caro who hurls herself at the cold water with the scarf her mother had wound around her neck trailing behind her, like an umbilical cord of sorts (Dear Life 101). When the pit filling with water, the substance of both life and death, is foregrounded as the focal point of the story, its contours, anamorphically, become brutally clear in their lethal potential, blurring the meaningful yet fragile world of the trailer in the background, and turning it into a formless void. “Pride” offers another version of the Munrovian motif of cracks and wounds where the narrator’s physical handicap, his harelip like a black hole in the middle of his face, sets him apart from the community, rendering his access to the symbolic and to social interactions perilous. In “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein,” Denise Gigante defines ugliness as the difference that our social systems constantly try to repress. The ontological primacy of ugliness links it to the Real that disturbs our comforting sense of reality structured by symbolic mechanisms. Ugliness for Gigante is the brutal fact of existence we try to fend off. It is the mark of the monster, of the un-symbolized at 82 the heart of an elaborate symbolic network. Therefore the narrator of “Pride” is long condemned to a life on the margin, outside historical time and space, until the world around him changes, shifting the borders of what is or is not the norm, thus offering grey areas for him to be more or less accepted in the social landscape of the town. Trau- ma, difference and loss tear the veil of our daily existence and let through a glimpse of inchoate, raw life that interrupts the law-like regulated stringing together of the subject’s signifiers. Yet they are necessary moments in the construction of the subject: they derail the balance of the subject’s daily life but also serve as the support of that very balance.
Mending the Cracks: Scars in Language and the Reconstructive Work of Telling Looking beyond the moment of destabilising pain, I would like to turn to the effects of the wounds in the construction of the subject and to various ways of mending the cracks through language. As Clement Rosset reminds us, there are two forms of contact with the Real: a rough contact, when we bump into things, or a polished contact, a smooth contact which replaces the presence of things by their reflected counterpart (44). The world of signs is a mirror for and against the world of things. Like a protective layer against the roughness of the edges of things, language turns wounds into scars, creating a certain type of narrative where scars do not simply hide the gaping holes, but also show their traces. A whole range of rhetorical devices may be mobilized to perform the work of scarring, that is to say, of concealing and yet retaining a revealing trace of the cracks in reality. In “Pride,” the narrator’s harelip, obsessively present in the text, affects the form as well as the content of his narrative. The accumulation of incomplete, nominal sen- tences is a constant reminder of his speech impediment, and of the way it has maimed him internally as well as externally. Under the smooth surface of his narrative, the use of clichés is indicative of his status as an outsider: impersonal and bereft of specifi- city, clichés are not the mark of an individual subject in language. They are, rather, the disembodied, distant babble of the community. Clichés are also, by nature, anachronis- tic, today’s clichés being yesterday’s live expressions. As such they betray the narrator’s stunted subjective growth, and his inability to fit in the present. His harelip conditions his choice of self-image as a narrator: a bookkeeper by trade, he sees himself as the historian of the town, the guardian of what was transmitted by “word of mouth” (134) and he keeps count of the injuries, humiliations and wounds suffered by his neighbours. Because “all the mouths get lost, given time,” (134) he, whose mouth got lost at birth, chronicles the stories of the people “who dug a hole for themselves in that town and kept right at it digging away,” (133) like Oneida’s father. In fact the whole narrative appears as an extended cliché: time is a great healer. As the narrator points out, “[j] ust living long enough wipes out the problems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been [….]” (151) because, in the end, “everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours” (151). Narrating stories of failure closes the gap between the subject and the world around him: he is “like” the others, not different. But of course below the surface of this teleological narrative, the unbridgeable ga- ping hole remains: there can be no true repair for the subject condemned to the evi- dence of his lack. There can only be patching up. Thus, a certain balance is indeed struck 83 Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life when the physically different narrator and socially different Oneida develop a form of friendship which allows them both to reproduce the gentle rituals of their lost sheltered childhoods: they meet weekly to watch television and share a meal. Yet, when the nar- rator becomes ill and is nursed back to health by Oneida, the old wound re-opens and the compromise can no longer hold. The delirious narrator openly regresses, throwing tantrums and re-enacting with Oneida the scenes of sadistic affective blackmail through which he controlled his guilt-ridden mother. When Oneida proposes to move in with him and live as brother and sister, the narrator, emotionally still “an unfortunate child” that only a mother could love, is deeply hurt in his masculine pride. Refusing to be “a neuter,” to be castrated again and faced with his lack, he rejects her proposal violently and impulsively decides to sell his house. As they move apart, they are brought back together by chance: by an image of beauty, a typical Munrovian “queer bright moment” (Munro “Introduction,” The Moons of Jupiter xv): five little skunks, “proud of themselves but discreet,” “flashing and dancing” in the birdbath outside, in the garden. Aper - fect image of acceptance, self-acceptance, the baby skunks, proud and discreet, are the smooth doubles that allow the narrator to leave the rough solitary world of monstrosity (the monster is unique and has no other like him) and join the chain of beings. The beauty of the little white skunks, with their strip of black like a dark scar in the middle of their backs turns the narrator’s ugly scar in the middle of his face into an acceptable mirror image. If there can be no happy ending, at least in the end, there is the sense of belonging to the world at large: “we were as glad as we could be” (153). “Glad,” from the old high German glat, meaning smooth and shiny. In “Train,” mending the wounds mainly consists in running away, or more literally, walking away from any form of emotional closeness and intimacy: “Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness” (176). The plot in fact follows the random moves and chance encounters of the protagonist, from block of air to block of air. Moving from place to place whenever he gets too close to pain, com- mitment or intimacy, Jackson is a typical Munrovian outsider, but unlike the narrator of “Pride” who returns obsessively to his wound and keeps digging at it, Jackson lives on the surface of things, intent not to be affected by them, which does not mean that he travels without baggage. Emotional distance and dis-affect characterise his toneless internal voice, which is never given directly, but always dis-located, elsewhere, filtered by free indirect speech. The use of a third-person narrative and frequently of the passive form, the recurrent blanks and long ellipses in the text create the sense of a character unaffected by time, by the noises of the world around him: “it seemed to have little to do with him, to be quite far away” (193). At best, he is a mere consciousness that flatly registers and records the surroundings, or a stranger that has landed in a fairy tale, as indicated by his fascination for the little Mennonites, a “half dozen little men” (180), the doubles of the seven little dwarfs of the fairy tale, singing in their cart on their way to church. Anaesthetized, his deep wound nonetheless is clearly visible, just below the sur- face of his “phenomenal shyness and silence” (208) and while the narrative of his life unfurls in a linear and chronological fashion, albeit punctuated by extensive gaps and long-drawn silences, an alternative, retrospective narrative emerges. Splintering the text, a drama of child abuse remains unarticulated and properly dis-located. It is displaced in the story of Belle whose overt confession of incest forces him to run away after twenty 84 years of blissful oblivion, and also in the story of his failed sexual relationship with a young woman from whom he ran away in his youth. Therefore it is linked ultimately to his abusive stepmother, from whom he ran away as a very young child. In “Train,” we are reminded of “The Moons of Jupiter” where the narrator is embarrassed at the sight of her father’s electrocardiograph above his hospital bed: “the behaviour of his heart was on display, I tried to ignore it. It seemed to me that paying so close attention – in fact dramatizing what ought to be a most secret activity was asking for trouble” (Selected Stories 217-8). “Train” does allude to the traumatic narrative locked up in the crypt of Jackson’s shyness, but economically, without dwelling on it, without dramatizing what ought to remain a most secret activity, because dramatizing is “looking for trouble.” Belle’s lump in her breast is the clandestine inscription of the secret locked up in her for over 40 years that she finally gets off her chest after her operation. But her secret is the festering wound that kills her because she “could not get outside the tragedy” (Dear Life 198). Jackson on the other hand got out early. He found a way to survive: “it came to him quite easily, that a person could just not be there” (214). Jumping on or off trains is a “cancellation” (176), a way to commit neither to the present nor to the future and a way to avoid confronting the consequences of one’s past actions. Jackson stays out of trouble, away from emotions, outside of life, outside of language, following a logic of severance and emotional detachment. Choosing to remain on the margins of life, disowning all forms of affect and surrounded by loners and loonies, he has escaped the logic of desire and lack and thus has escaped pain. In “Gravel,” dealing with the wounds from the past is directly inscribed in the nar- rative situation: we have a first-person retrospective narrative, triggered by a meeting between the narrator, now an adult, and Neal, her mother’s former lover, in an at- tempt to “rout out her demons” (106). Writing down the story of what must, might or may have happened is yet another attempt at ordering reality with words. “Must have,” “might have” or “maybe” are the three modalities according to which, each in turn, the narrator’s therapist, the narrator’s companion and then Neal try to reconstruct the truth of what happened in the gravel pit, and thus help the subject reconstruct her- self in language. But the narrator opposes a grammar of melancholy to their logic of mourning: her symptomatic use of concessive and contrastive conjunctions exposes the impossibility for her of settling down in language. “But,” “however,” or “although,” are the symptoms of the narrator’s refusal of closure, a refusal she acknowledges in the text: “The counsellor was satisfied to bring me to this conclusion, and I was -satis fied too. For a while. But I no longer think that was true” (103). The constant seesaw movement of concessive and contrastive forms, of assertions and refutations is the sign of an open wound, of an impossibility to introject the loss and to accept the fact of death. Death is also suspended by the impossibility for the narrator of accepting involvement in the drama and endorsing any version of reality. Pounding the narrative, formulas like “I can’t remember,” “I can’t imagine,” and “I can’t recall” hollow out the possibility of constructing a narrative of what happened. Amnesia both muddies the waters and puts the narrator in the clear. The contrapuntal dialogue – in fact an internal monologue – between the sisters in which Caro tells the young narrator what to do and the narrator puts up some argument not to follow the orders is a clear symptom of a defect of mourning. In what can be seen as a moment of ventriloquism the narrator becomes both the voice of her four-year-old self and that of her older sister, very much 85 Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life as if she had incorporated Caro, making it impossible for the reader to disentangle the two voices in the exchange: I was to go to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something. That the dog had fallen into the water The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned. Blitzee. Drownded Drowned. But Blitzee wasn’t in the water. She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her. (102) Impossible closure in this passage is clearly related to unresolved issues of guilt and bad faith, to natural sibling rivalry and to the rebellion, at the wrong time, of the younger sister against the authority of her elder: “Caro was afraid she’d be drowned” looms, ut- terly ambiguous in the text, as the probable words of Caro to her sister, but also as the secret thought of the young sister annoyed by her bossy elder’s orders. Like an unclosed wound, the suggestion of the narrator’s responsibility in the death of her older sister remains an open possibility, a “maybe” that, like an insistent niggling, recurrent doubt will always undermine all straightforward reconstruction of the past. Therefore the three versions of the stories she rehearses incessantly, in her mind, in her dreams and in her memory can never be reconciled, leaving her unable to exist in language other than as a sum of contradictions. Caro must remain undead and the narrator, incapable of re-membering or writing the story of how she did hear the splash that changed her life, must remain a subject in pieces stranded in a past that does not pass by.
The Coda: “In Sight of the Lake” and the “Finale” According to Gabriele Schwab “in order for trauma to heal, body and self must be reborn and words must be disentangled from the dead bodies they are trying to hide” (95). The final section of the collection, or “finale” represents a renewed attempt at disentangling words from the bodies they are trying to hide, a conscious attempt to introject the dead, to speak about them objectively as separate entities and to bury them at last in words. In the logic of the volume, we have reached the end of the journey, figured in the texts by the various streaks of train tracks crisscrossing the Canadian landscape of Munro’s fiction, like so many lines on the page and so many journeys in a mindscape. The journey through space from Vancouver to Toronto in the first story and back and forth in the mindscape/landscape of South Western Ontario necessarily leads back “home” to the childhood house “at the end of a long road” (229) in “Dear Life,” the last text of the volume. There is the source, “the wound into which Munro keeps dipping her pen” in the words of Tegan Bennett Daylight (n.p.). The house is the womb of all the stories that have shaped the author throughout her career. It is the echo chamber of the stories that a mother, the first and closest storyteller, told her daughter time and time again before the tightening of the muscles in her throat stole her power of speech. The house at the end of the road is the foundation on which the house of fiction is built. And all its rooms lead to the kitchen, to the hiding place near the dumbwaiter (the place of the notorious royal beatings), in the smallest place of all: a mother’s embrace of her daughter to whom she “hangs on for dear life” (318). But this tiny room of love is also the dark hole or the tomb where the myth of maternal pleni- tude and the daughter’s infantile fantasy of a mother’s omnipotence come to crash. The 86 addition of autobiographical memories to the volume clearly shows what is at stake in writing fiction: to repeat in order to contain, and to remember in order to forget, forgive oneself and move on. Revisiting through memories and anecdotes the house of her childhood and the stories she grew up on, Munro makes an archaeological discovery: she unearths the figure of old Mrs. Netterfield and her “visitation.” Mrs. Netterfield is the true ghost that haunts the house at the end of the long road and the house of fiction, a ghost from the past but also a prospective ghost. Her story is the story of an “old woman looking in the windows of what had been her own house” (318) for what she had lost, a daughter “grown and distant” (318). It is the story of a mother gone and become distant in her madness, but also of her daughter grown and become distant in her indifference, a daughter who, like the author, writes and publishes texts about the idyllic place of her childhood but leaves the mud out2 and leaves her mother behind, locked out of her house and locked in her dementia. Re-telling stories like that of Mrs. Netterfield’s visitation makes it possible for the writer to carry on living in a world of words and doubles, containing, restraining and framing, in part, the pain of the loss of her mother and atoning in words for her guilt. But read together with another story from the volume, the story of the visitation ultimately becomes the story of a writer, grown old now, who, in turn looks in the windows of what had been her childhood home. In “In Sight of the Lake” Nancy, a double of the author in her old age and a double of Mrs. Netterfield in her dementia, travels through an unknown town in search of a doctor. At the end of the road, she reaches a house, the Lakeview Rest Home, a poor substitute for the house at the end of the long road and a pale double of the house of fiction. We see her looking in through the lofty windows of the totally empty home, just like Mrs. Netterfield peering through the windows of her old house, only to realize that Nancy is not locked out, but locked in the space of her demented mind, where time has stopped at “twelve, for noon or midnight,” (221) where, like her memory, she is condemned to err in a past that will never pass by, caught in stories that no one, not even herself, is telling. Dear Life is also about writing for dear life, about the urgency to say, again and again, and against the clock, before it stops ticking.
Christine BeRthiN University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre / CREA 370
W orks Cited
BeNNett Daylight, Tegan. “Still Life in the Hands of Canadian author Alice Munro.” The Australian 08 Dec. 2012. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/still-life-in-the-hands-of-canadian- author-alice-munro/story-fn9n8gph-1226531239057. Consulted 26 March 2015. caRRiNgtoN, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1989. gigaNte, Denise. “Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein.” ELH 67.2 (2000): 565-87. gRosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge, 1990. haNcock, Geoffrey. “An Interview with Alice Munro.” Canadian Fiction Magazine 43 (1982): 74-114.
2. “She had left out, just as I would have done, the way the spring got muddied up and soiled all around by horses’ hooves. And of course left out the manure.” (317) 87 Of Wounds and Cracks and Pits: A Reading of Dear Life
MuNRo, Alice. “What is Real?” Making it New: Contemporary Canadian Stories. Ed. John Metcalf. Auckland: Methuen, 1982. 223-6. —. Selected Stories. London: Random House, Vintage, 1997. —. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. London: Vintage, 2001. —. The Moons of Jupiter. London: Vintage, 2004. —. Dear Life. London: Vintage, 2012. RoBsoN, Leo. “New Selected Stories by Alice Munro: Moments of wonderful soft-fingered race.”New Statesman Sept. 2011.
Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, WWritersriters & Company 1
Alice MuNRo has been called a writer’s writer and many writers both in Canada and internationally do love and admire her work. But Alice Munro is also a reader’s writer. She writes with such intelligence, depth and compassion, carrying her readers with her in her explorations of character in search of some kind of understanding, no neat resolutions, just trying to figure things out, in an elegant, moving way. Whenever I see that The New Yorker has a story by Alice Munro, I save it up as a treat, a reliable pleasure, and afterwards, to talk about with friends: what is she doing now? Alice Munro has won virtually every prize available to a Canadian short story writer, from three Governor General’s Awards, starting with her very first book,Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, to the American National Book Critics Circle Award and the Trillium. She’s won the Giller Prize twice now. She was the first Canadian to win both the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction and the Rea Award for the short story. Alice Munro was born in Wingham in southwestern Ontario almost 75 years ago. She studied at the University of Western Ontario for two years, then married at twenty and moved to Vancouver. In 1976, she returned to Ontario, settling in the nearby town of Clinton. I went to Goderich, a slightly bigger town on Lake Huron, just up the road from Clinton, still in Alice Munro country, to meet with her at Bailey’s Restaurant – I would call it Alice’s Restaurant if that did not sound too much like an old song. But it’s the place where she likes to have lunch and meets friends, as well as visiting journalists, biographers, whatever. She has a regular table at the back, and a particular seat at the table. Given that she is reluctant to do interviews, she was remarkably candid, relaxed, thoughtful, and forthcoming. Here is our conversation from November 2004, just be- fore she won her second Giller Prize.1
Eleanor wachtel The title of your new book Runaway actually fits many of these stories. They’re about women in flight, running to or from relationships or ways of living. Did you feel that current underneath the stories as you were writing them?
Alice MuNRo No, I didn’t feel that. I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or any plan, and everything just falls the way it falls, usually. But I like the title, I do like it very much now. And you noticed, I suppose, that all the titles are one word. Now, that’s a reaction against the last book which, if you remember, was Hateship, Friend- ship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. And nobody could ever remember that title. Now I knew one wouldn’t be able to remember it, but I liked it so much I insisted on it. So, this time, I went back to one-word titles for each of the stories. I thought of the power of one word, and I liked that a lot, but I don’t know if I’ll go on that way.
1. The editor wishes to thank the following persons, most gratefully: Lynn Blin for contacting Eleanor Wachtel, and Eleanor Wachtel for sending us the material and granting us the permission to publish the interview in its entirety. A much shorter version of it was published in Queen’s Quarterly in 2005. 90
Eleanor wachtel Keeping with the idea of Runaway, in your 1998 collection, The Love of a Good Woman, you had a line about a woman who flees a marriage for another man, and you write, “so her life was falling forwards, she was becoming one of those people who ran away – a woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up for love, other observers would say wryly, meaning sex.”2 What is it these women run away from? Is it convention and expectation?
Alice MuNRo I think they run away from a life – they can look ahead and they can see what their whole life is going to be. I think they run away from this. You wouldn’t call that a prison exactly, they run away from some kind of predictability, and not just about things that will happen in their lives but the things that happen in themselves. Though I don’t think most of my characters plan to do this; they don’t say, “There’s a certain stage of my life when I’ll get out of this.” And in fact I think the people who run away are often the people who’ve got into things the most enthusiastically, they think this is it! – and then, they want more. They just demand more of life than (what) is happening at the moment. And sometimes this is a great mistake, of course, it’s always a little different, a good deal different than you’d expect it. But, it’s something that particularly women in my generation tended to do this because we’d been married young, we’d been married with a very settled idea of what life was supposed to be like, and we were in a hurry to get to that – that safe married spot. And then something happened to us when we were around 40, and all sorts of women then decided that their lives had to have a new pattern. And I don’t know if that will happen to women who are the next generation, or the generation after that – I can think of my granddaughters’ generation – because so many things happened to them before they’re 40, maybe enough has happened. And they pick a life and go on with it, without these rather girlish hopes of finding love, finding excitement.
Eleanor wachtel Why girlish hopes? What do you mean?
Alice MuNRo Well, they seem to me often to be rather youthful ideas – ideas that somewhere there is a passion that will last, or that there is a passion that surpasses everything else in life, that you can just tear everything apart, and pick up, and go on somehow. I think that’s rather a youthful idea. But I think women of my age didn’t hit this youthful phase until we had our middle age first. We had our kids and our homes and our husbands and our quite programmed lives. And there was this thing about – “there’s got to be more in my life than that!”
Eleanor wachtel And they were attracted to a certain recklessness.
Alice MuNRo In men or in themselves?
2. Editor’s note: “The Children Stay.” 91 Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company
Eleanor wachtel Maybe both?
Alice MuNRo I think in both. The idea that one is doing a reckless thing! The character you’re tal- king about – I can’t even remember that story you’re reading from, but I take your word for it it is from my book. [Laughter] It sounds familiar.
Eleanor wachtel Well, the one where she runs away, that one is from “The Children Stay.”
Alice MuNRo She finds that running away has considerable penalties she didn’t count on, the way she finds this is one of the things you discover. Well, runaways do find this, that’s one of the things you discover. I don’t think they find out something that they alto- gether regret, but they regret a good deal, and I think that’s maybe the thing you find out about life, that whichever road you take – I’m saying things that are so banal I can hardly believe it – which ever road you take, there are difficulties, there are pro- blems, there are things you’ll have to give up and things you’ll miss, and that’s what I’ve written about a good deal.
Eleanor wachtel Are men the main route of escape or transformation for these women?
Alice MuNRo In my generation they certainly were, we didn’t, I think, see any other things. And they are a pretty traditional one too, you know. Men for women and women for men, and falling in love is still one of the big, big ways to change your life, and to give yourself this tremendous charge of excitement, and hope, and it’s still one of the most important things we have.
Eleanor wachtel In several stories, a romantic connection is thwarted by circumstance and what seems to be leading to a sexual union turns into something else entirely. But something emotionally important, or even life-changing still happens.
Alice MuNRo Yes, I like that. I like that to work in stories. I like the change not to be the change that you thought you were getting into, and for something to come that is completely unexpected, as if life had a mind of its own and would take hold of you and present you with something you hadn’t anticipated. I can’t remember now which stories do that, but I mean I’m always hoping it will happen [laughter].
Eleanor wachtel You were telling me about the importance of falling in love, I haven’t done a count here, although one reviewer of your last book noted that infidelity, romantic encounters outside marriage occurred in seven of the nine stories. 92
Alice MuNRo What happened in the other two? [Laughter]
Eleanor wachtel What does that subject give you as a writer?
Alice MuNRo Writers are always writing about infidelity, it’s so dramatic. At least, maybe writers, again, of my generation because we just didn’t have as much adventure before we were married. And there’s all this thing of the wickedness of it, the secrecy, the com- plications, the finding that you thought you were one person and you are also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life – my God, it’s just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt if it will ever go out of fashion.
Eleanor wachtel I’d like to talk about sex.
Alice MuNRo OK.
Eleanor wachtel Canadian writers Audrey Thomas says you’re the only writer who really truly examines women’s sexuality. American novelist Mona Simpson says you’ve “done for female sexuality what Philip Roth did for male sexuality.”
Alice MuNRo Truly?
Eleanor wachtel That’s what she says, although she says “covering much the same period (though it would seem they knew vastly different women).” [Laughter] Does it surprise you?
Alice MuNRo It surprises me mightily. I wouldn’t have thought that at all. I think I write about sex just the way almost everybody I read writes about sex. I write about it with a great deal of interest, and trying to be as truthful as I can, in a way. Or to think about what people really go through, and what they think and how they feel about it. I think that every writer does that. John Updike writes a lot about sex [hesitates] who else? All of us do. It’s just a main subject, and has been for a long time. Charlotte Brontë was writing about sex. I suppose Jane Austen was too. Yes, oh she was, for Heaven’s sake – where do you get a hero like Darcy, unless you’re writing about sex? No, I don’t think about this at all. In fact, I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write, or what I am writing about, or what I’m trying to write about. When I talk to you now, I try to think about this, I try to come up with some explanation. But when I’m writing, what I do is think about a story that I want to tell. We were talking about the story “Passion,” and I wanted to tell first about the girl’s relation with the family and then about this wonderful moment when she runs away with a man who, after all, 93 Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company
is married, and has great problems of his own, and how during the course of that day, she understands what his problems are — and they’re not particularly connected with sex. They’re really connected with not being able to bear a life. And so I wanted to take her much further, into what she understands about other people. And then, of course, there’s a turn-around at the end because in my life as a young girl, and in the life of this young girl, money was so terribly important. Just to have a little money. So I wanted to bring that into what seemed to be a story about feelings. But I didn’t say these things to myself, I just thought, what happens next? And, so that was what happened next. But at the end, really, she is given a start in life, which, I think, are the last words of the story, by another person’s tragedy and by her own flightiness and inconsistency. I like it when stories turn out in an unexpected way that does not seem too forced, and that story pleased me because I thought it did.
Eleanor wachtel You take her farther than she expected is what you’re saying, because the initial attraction is sexual, and the brother is more attractive to her than her own fiancé.
Alice MuNRo This is often true with women, I think, that the man who has troubles, the man who is brooding and dark, and unhappy, and whom you could perhaps make happy, is very attractive. And so he is very attractive to her. He is full of mystery, and he is older. And so she thinks that something is going to happen, probably some sexual awakening is going to be the answer to her life, and it’s going to happen on this day. She doesn’t really think that too clearly, but her feelings are urging her that way. He teaches her to drive, which is an unexpected bonus, and so, things are not as we expect.
Eleanor wachtel Just, there is an aside on writing about sex. You are credited with getting the “F” word into The New Yorker with a short story, you were the first person…
Alice MuNRo Yes, but I can’t remember. And I can’t remember in what context it was used!
Eleanor wachtel But obviously persuasive, because you persuaded Mr. Shawn to admit it.
Alice MuNRo I was so innocent and ignorant. I didn’t know about Mr. Shawn, and everybody who knew about The New Yorker knew about Mr. Shawn, and the way he had made these rules about the things you couldn’t write about and the words you couldn’t use. And I didn’t know this. I thought that they were making Mr. Shawn up, that he was this sort of figure who wouldn’t allow these things intoThe New Yorker. But, of course he was very real. But I think it was in dialogue that it was used. And I just had to use it, and so I wouldn’t give in, and so they agreed. And then, for a while, in every story there was something like this. There was a story called “Lichen”3 which had an image of pubic hair, and that was a very dicey thing with Mr. Shawn. By this time I knew he was real. But he finally gave in on that too. So it was much more difficult in those days. But I never started out thinking that this will be unacceptable, I was always kind of surprised, because I just didn’t figure things out.
Eleanor wachtel You did say that you were terribly disturbed when you first read D.H. Lawrence, or depictions of…
Alice MuNRo Oh yes, I was awfully disturbed by his – I thought he was such a wonderful writer. He’s a very sort of purple writer – very heavy prose. But it seemed that he was trying to find out things that no one else had done, and I thought he was great. And then, one of the things he found out, as far as I can figure it, was that women shouldn’t have any consciousness. There’s this story – is it called “The Fox”? – and it’s about how the woman should always be like the reeds, washing under the water so she never breaks the water of her mind. She’s just in this stage and it sounded quite like a vegetable stage. That way, she is somehow living through the man – now I’m not saying this very well – but she is anchoring the man in her nature, her uncons- ciousness, her life-in-the-body, which the man needs. But the life-in-the-world is his. She strengthens him so that he can have it. I don’t find this at all an agreeable idea. In fact I find it just horrifying, I guess because it came from a writer whom I so admired. And it tied in with so much that I had already learned about women, about what women should be, only it seemed to go even further than these ideas did. And it just frightened me. I guess if it frightened me, what if it’s true? This is the gospel of sex that one should follow, and yet it seemed to be downright impossible. Do you remember that the woman was not to have a sexual climax, this was wrong somehow, she was just to be in this kind of readiness and floating state all the time. But she did nothing for her self, the idea of her self had to be submerged, and I found that disturbing. And I found a lot of what I read disturbing, Tolstoy’s idea of women too. Do you remember the end of War and Peace, how Natasha is so happy because she’s always wanted to be only a mother and to only think about her children, and their little childhood illnesses and so on. And even worse in Anna Karenina, Levin has the big thing towards the end, a big religious struggle – what does he believe? And how is he to exist? What is his relationship to God and man? And he goes for a walk, and he meets Kitty and the nurse maid, of course, and the baby, coming out of the woods and he thinks that she does not have to think about any of that, she accepts everything, she doesn’t have a mind that functions like his. And that means of course that she is nearer to nature and to God, and how nice for her, and that he admires her for it. But that also depressed me a lot, and other things he says in that book about how Anna can’t go into society because she is living with Vronsky, and she is an adulteress woman, she can’t go out to tea parties with other ladies. And because of this, she teaches a little girl, a little peasant girl to read, but she just does that to fill her time because, really, she is cast off from society. She too, who is one
3. Editor’s note: The Progress of Love. 95 Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company
of his most intelligent women, doesn’t have, she cannot have real interests – I’m just rattling on about this because it bothered me so much! And I think that doesn’t bo- ther women now at all, because they read this just like something from the Middle Ages. But to me it was something very real, something that was just there like claws trying to fasten me down.
Eleanor wachtel Alice Munro, in Runaway, many of the stories are quite harrowing – the threat of violence, death, suicide – loss is frequently present. There’s always been a quality under the surface of your fiction, but do you have a sense that your stories are becoming darker?
Alice MuNRo I think they are. This, again, is not at all on purpose. I would like to be writing very cheerful stories so that people felt better if they read them. But I hope that people do feel better when they read my stories. I don’t think having this content means that stories need to be, or fiction needs to be depressing. I really don’t believe that, be- cause that sort of fiction doesn’t depressme. As you become older, maybe there are more things like this, sort of coming close to your life, and things you know about. It could be that. But again, it’s nothing I intended. I am trying to think of how it would happen in some of those stories. Well, in a story that ends up with the mother losing her daughter,4 I was really trying to talk about how that could happen and how it could be a kind of almost natural thing. I think some things that are seen as tragic can also be just things people do. In that story, the daughter has a choice, I don’t know if people have picked up on this, she has a choice to live quite honestly, which means just ditching her mother, or to live with a number of conventions, and very mixed emotions, which is the way most of us live with our parents, maybe all of us do. Instead, she gets out. Not because her mother is a terrible person, not because she has any great grievance – she has a whole lot of grievance – but everybody does. She just goes on, and this is terrible for her mother. In a way, she probably doesn’t understand, because it is only when you get quite old that the bonds to your children become emotionally so central to your life. And when you’re in middle age, or a little younger than middle age, the bonds to your parents are there, but there are mostly nuisances. They’re partly nuisances, they’re extreme difficulties. They are not your major emotional gratification. And so that’s what that story was really about. And I guess that it seems such a sad story, but not to me. It seems there is sadness in it – that isn’t the same thing as being a sad story.
Eleanor wachtel It’s part of a trilogy of stories,5 and one of the subjects that runs through it seems to be about faith and the main character 6 actually has an explosive argument about the existence of God, and then her mother has faith in her, and then her daughter, apparently, goes on a spiritual search, this is described as having been raised in a house that wasn’t a faith-based home.
4. Editor’s note: “Silence.” 5. Editor’s note: “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence.” 6. Editor’s note: Juliet. The three stories are often referred to as “the Juliet trilogy.” 96
Alice MuNRo Yes, but I didn’t intend this to be central. Well, of course, it’s important, but in the story7 the mother,8 as a young woman, has an argument about the existence of God and cannot affirm her mother’s faith, because it would be denying her self, her whole being, which is still young and fragile. I feel that she has to do that. And her mother, no doubt, suffers from it. Then it happens that her daughter leaves her.9 And I think the daughter’s looking for faith is just one sign of wanting to get away, wanting to make her own life. It’s not that it’s faith that in particular she is searching for, she’s searching for whatever is there that has been explicitly denied her. Say, if her home had been very repressed and sex had been the thing that was never mentioned, she’d be going after that, I think. She’s getting away. And then she gets so far away, she can’t come back. Maybe too because [her] mother, the central character, is harder to get away from, because she’s not very repressive. But, she’s still too much.
Eleanor wachtel Alice Munro, I’m sitting with you here in Goderich, a southwestern Ontario town on the shores of Lake Huron, near the heart of Alice Munro country, as it’s come to be called. You write about a lot of places but you continue to set stories around here, where you were born and have lived for a lot of your life. How do you stand back and see the possibilities of a place, fictionally, when it is so familiar to you?
Alice MuNRo I just always feel there’s more to be discovered about this place. I don’t have to ever think that I’ve finished with it, and the changes in it and the things I know about it. And in a way I don’t like to be described as a regional writer and I’m annoyed sometimes if people think I write about a sort of idyllic [world], or a sort of pasto- ral because I’m seen as someone who writes about small towns and the country. It almost seems to me by accident that I write about those people, it’s because I know their houses and I know certain things about their lives, but I don’t think of them as particularly different from people you might find anywhere in the world. It’s just something I do without thinking about it. I don’t know if I could write as easily about someone – nearly everybody I write about has lived, or lives in a place that I have lived in. So maybe I’m not very good about imagination. Except that I once did a story about Albania,10 and I liked that a lot, and I liked writing about Albania. Yes, yes. But usually I don’t use anything exotic. I might like to, but there’s always something else that I have to do first, but isn’t exotic at all.
Eleanor wachtel How has small town life changed?
7. Editor’s note: “Soon.” 8. Editor’s note: Juliet. 9. Editor’s note: In “Silence,” the final story of the Juliet trilogy. 10. Editor’s note: “The Albanian Virgin,” Open Secrets. 97 Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company
Alice MuNRo Oh, it’s changed enormously. There’s so much tolerance now. When I went to scho- ol, people laughed at anyone who was disadvantaged. Now, everybody knows that you don’t make fun of people for their problems. At least, you don’t do it publicly, and you don’t do it in a very obvious way. But when I went to school, we did. Also nobody would ever claim to be an agnostic in a small town – no more than they would in the United States today, I believe. But, now it’s acceptable. And the rules about sex have changed completely. So that women my age live with their lovers. That’s quite amazing. And there’s just a freedom to live a pleasanter life, I think, it’s much more compassionate, much more understanding. You could probably even announce that you did like poetry. [Laughter]
Eleanor wachtel You lived in British Columbia for more than twenty years, and you still winter on Vancouver Is- land. Do different landscapes suggest different stories or characters for you?
Alice MuNRo No, no. I just put them. You see I don’t think about the whole story, that sort of comes all of one piece and when I wrote, say, “The Children Stay,” I just saw it hap- pening on Vancouver Island, and particularly at Miracle Beach, because I had to have them go away to a place, like that and there it was. So I saw them there. But I don’t know if a particular kind of story is written in those places or not, namely because I’m simply not very analytical about what I do.
Eleanor wachtel What was it like for you to move back to small-town, southwest Ontario after having been away – that was in the mid-seventies – for twenty-odd years?
Alice MuNRo Well, that did influence my writing because I had written about growing up here, and I thought I was finished with anything about this area. When I moved back, I started seeing things entirely differently. I didn’t see them right away in present-day time but I saw a lot of things that had to do with social class, and the way people behave to each other, that a child doesn’t see. So I wanted to go into it again. That’s what I did. As for me, personally, it was surprising, it was unexpected. But I liked a lot of things about it, very much, I love the countryside, that I can’t get over. And I like going skiing around, cross-country skiing in the winter, all that kind of thing. I liked living with my husband and making our life, I liked our house, I liked our backyard, all kinds of things were good. And also, I was now an independent woman. I was not someone who had grown up there and stayed there. And if people were talking about me, or judging me, I didn’t know. So that was okay.
Eleanor wachtel What about social class? Did you become aware of – that you wanted to ...? 98
Alice MuNRo Oh, I wanted to write more about the class I lived amongst when I went to school, when I started to school. In Wingham, there was an area outside of town which was full of people who were suffering from the Depression, only I did not know that at the time. And it was a very rough school, the school that I went to. And I hadn’t really thought about that for a long time. I hadn’t thought about the way these people lived and the difference between them and the people who lived in the town over the bridge, and who had marginally better lives, some of them even a good deal better. But, as a child, it doesn’t matter whether you’re growing up poor or rich, I think. You don’t take much account of the way you’re growing up, and what the rules are around you, in that way of money and the kind of job you have, and so on. So I did go into that again, and I described the school a lot, because it was pretty horrific. And it was so richly interesting, because there were boys going there until they were sixteen, or seventeen-years old because they could not get jobs. And I’m not talking about high school, I’m talking about public school, and so they were pretty well running things. There was a great deal of physical violence, and things were pretty amazing to me because I was being raised at the edge of this community as a kind of little middle-class girl. And I was an only child. And to come into this was astonishing. And probably so painful that for a long time I didn’t think about it. But then I wanted to write about it, the way it was. Because there were sort of wonderful things about it too. Our favourite game was funerals. Somebody got to be the corpse, that what the most favourite thing, and the person would be lying out and we’d pick flowers – weeds really – and go with great armfuls of flowers, and put them on the corpse. This doesn’t sound dreadful at all, it sounds rather touching. And we’d wind up and we’d all get a chance to march past the dead person, and cry and carry on. But the trouble was that the most important people got to be the corpse first, and then everybody got a turn but by the time it was my turn, everyone had lost interest in the game. And the mourners were few, and the flowers were few, and they were playing something else. We made up a lot of things like that. Oh yes, it was really pretty wild. And the teachers just didn’t come out at all. I think they locked the doors all through recess.
Eleanor wachtel When you say violence, it wasn’t violence against you?
Alice MuNRo Oh, yes. Beaten up with shingles, I remember. And I was a terrible coward. I wasn’t very good about this at all. But I did learn things. I learned things that I wouldn’t have learned so quickly any other way, about how people are. And how many people were like this because they were leading really deprived lives. Maybe that isn’t the only reason, there were like this because it was fun, but also because they were people who didn’t have enough fuel for the winter. People would stay in bed all day, and things like that. It was kind of like a Chekhov village.
Eleanor wachtel You’re saying you were an only child because you were the eldest, so at that point you were… 99 Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company
Alice MuNRo Yes, that’s dreadful, saying an “only child.” That’s how an elder child talks. I wasn’t an only child. I had a baby brother, a baby sister at home, but I wasn’t counting them at the moment.
Eleanor wachtel You do have a lot of empathy for your characters, the characters in your stories who are limited by their circumstances, whether it’s a matter of economics or societal expectations, or obligations of family.
Alice MuNRo I grew up with a lot of people like that. In fact, most people I knew. For instance, when I finished high school, I got a scholarship and I could go to university, but had I not got a scholarship. You see, to get a job in the city, you had to get away to the city, and you had to be able to support yourself for maybe two weeks before you could get a job. Impossible. So there were things that people don’t understand so well now, I think. I didn’t think of that as particularly unfair, and I still think of my life as really interesting, a great life for a writer. It gave me a lot of confidence as a writer because I was the only person I knew who tried to write when I was a teenager, and I didn’t know anybody else who read as much and so I thought I was a really uniquely gifted person; it was only going to take until I was about twenty-one or twenty-two years old before my first novel would burst on the world. And so if I’d been going to, say, Jarvis Collegiate in Toronto, I might have had a very different idea of the competition!
Eleanor wachtel What did give you the ability to pursue your aspirations back then?
Alice MuNRo It never occurred to me not to. A big ego, I would think. Because at first, when I was about eight, I planned to be a movie star, and this continued for two or three years. Then I sort of slipped into writing, a slightly downgrade because I still think a movie star would have been more wonderful. I wanted to make up stories and I was making up stories in my head. And by the time I was about eleven, I really thought that I had to write them down. That’s what you did with stories, you didn’t just let them fade, you wrote them. And it was not even the thought that people would end up reading them but the book – there would be a book with your story in it – the thing itself. It really never occurred to me until much later, when I was around thirty, that I might not be able to do this. So the confidence lasted for a long time, and then it just went with a big whoosh. So it was hard when it went. There was no problem with that at all, all the time I was growing up. And I think maybe children who grow up in an environment where they do feel strange and a bit outlawed, can develop, if they’re lucky, if there isn’t too many bad things happening to them. If they’re lucky I think they can develop this alternate world which is going to hang on for them. And I was lucky. I’ve mentioned being beaten up at school but I always had enough to eat. I was taken to the doctor when I was sick, and my mother got me into the town school, 100
so I didn’t have to go to that school more than two years. And things happened and I was allowed to go to high school – many people had to quit and get jobs. It never occurred to me. I think gifted people are sometimes quite selfish, because it didn’t occur to me that I should go and work in the glove factory, or work in Steadman’s store, do something like that, in order to help my family. No. I was going to have this magical life – I was going to do this thing that was so important.
Eleanor wachtel It also meant – going back to your theme right at the beginning of the conversation about running away, in some sense, [running away] from family responsibility, as the oldest daughter.
Alice MuNRo Yes. This is a thing that I’ll be able to feed on for guilt for the rest of my life, that I did not stay home. I did not look after my mother, I did not keep house though my brother and sister were still quite young. I just left them. And, well, I came home from university every couple of months and did major housecleaning and jobs, but I still left. And without, at that time, any qualms. My parents were really quite good. They never asked me to stay.
Eleanor wachtel When did the guilt come?
Alice MuNRo Oh, by the time I was safe. You never feel guilty while there’s still a possibility or an opportunity to make up for what you’ve done. When I could have gone back home, I didn’t feel guilty. But as soon as I was free, and nobody could make me go back, I did feel guilty. I could afford to feel guilty then. And I’ve felt guilty since. I say I feel guilty, but I’m glad I did what I did, because I think if you stay and if you’re a hou- sekeeper (and certainly no one would have married me, I was too weird)…. I would have got too frightened to leave. By the time my mother died, I would have been too frightened to go out into the world. So… so!
Eleanor wachtel This has become your subject.
Alice MuNRo This has become my subject. Yes. Writers are very economical, nothing is wasted. [Laughter]
Eleanor wachtel And your mother has become your subject.
Alice MuNRo Very much so, yes. Yes.
Eleanor wachtel What about your father? 101 Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company
Alice MuNRo Oh well, fathers and mothers had separate spheres. And my father was outside. And I was inside with my mother, doing housework. And so, all my conflicts were with my mother. And my father was allowed, by me, to be a figure outside this. And when I was older I had a great relationship with my father because he also read, and he wrote a book when he was dying. We were terribly good friends, and he was very understanding. He never criticized anything I did. And the first books were not easy for him to take, living still in a town where people didn’t read fiction and didn’t know where fiction had gone. And there was all this language, and all this sex, and he had to put up with all of this. And he never blamed me for it, he liked my books, yes.
Eleanor wachtel Did it surprise you … did you have any idea he had a book in him?
Alice MuNRo Well, I was beginning to when I was older. I didn’t know him that well when I was a child. He wrote columns for a local magazine and things like that. And then he started to write this book and he became really involved in it, and the last time I visited him in the hospital, he was sitting up in bed in his pyjamas, saying “what do you think about that character so and so?” [Laughter]. And so I told him that, if he didn’t pull out of the operation, I would make sure that the book got published and I did.11 And I was really happy about that. It gave him such delight! But I think he wouldn’t have thought that there was a connection between himself and that world where there were publishers and books were written, if he hadn’t seen that I did it. And then he really thought that it was possible for anybody to do it. I remember when I told him that Margaret Laurence was a friend of mine because he’d been reading a book of hers that he got out of the library, and he said, “But Alice, she’s a really good writer!” [Laughter] and that meant that he felt the connection, and that it wasn’t something unreal. And so he could try it himself.
Eleanor wachtel A while back you said that you didn’t know how you’d feel if your daughters wrote about you.
Alice MuNRo Did I say that? Well one of my daughters has written about me!12
Eleanor wachtel Exactly, a memoir. How did you feel?
Alice MuNRo In a way I felt very lucky because I thought that it was honest and fairly gentle. When she was doing it, I felt good too; we try to say it isn’t, but growing up the child of someone who has been successful and is sort of famous, is difficult. It is a particular difficulty, and especially if the thing the parent does quite easily could be the thing
11. Editor’s note: The McGregors, published in 1979. 12. Editor’s note: Sheila Munro. 102
you want to do yourself, or that you have a talent for. And so I thought that it was very good that she just decided to come right out with this, and write about it. I also knew that if you dish it out, you have to take it. So there we were! And we’re very good friends.
Eleanor wachtel Alice Munro, memory shapes many of the stories and that relationship between the older and the younger selves in the life of [your characters]. Grace, in “Passion” for instance, is literally revisiting the places where she spent time with the Travers family. What do you find interesting about having a character look back and reconsider her past?
Alice MuNRo In that particular story13 I wanted to show where Grace had ended up, but I also wanted to show the difference – I like to have people trying to find something of their past, and then looking at what they really find, like the whole area has changed and the house is there but doesn’t mean anything anymore. And I just thought that was a good way to get into the story. Also, if I write about the past, I suppose I’m a little self-conscious about writing about the past, so I anchor it in the present, be- cause there is a feeling sometimes that people who write about the past are writing about a time that is much easier to understand, and is safe. A reviewer did say that I chose the past to write about because I would be safe there. Now I don’t feel that I am safe there, but I know that people have this kind of, I think, quite false nostalgic idea about the past being a pleasanter, gentler time – my God, gentler! [Laughter]
Eleanor wachtel There’s a line in another story14 where there’s this older woman and her children say, be careful you don’t live in the past, and she says, no, no, what she wants to do “is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.”
Alice MuNRo This is what I want to do too, obviously, and I try to do it over and over again. But there is a sort of feeling, like the feeling her children have, that you have to go on, all the time. And I am so involved in everything that I’ve lived, that I never want to let go of it until I’ve done something with it. And that is not just to write and sell a story, but to see – to find out what I can see in it. And so I don’t suppose I’ll ever catch up with myself.
Eleanor wachtel What tense do you live in now?
Alice MuNRo Oh, I inhabit the present now, and I inhabit it with a sense of grabbing it. I don’t inhabit the future much for obvious reasons. I don’t know how much there is of it. And for the same reason, I want to – oh, this will sound very clichéd – I want to
13. Editor’s note: “Passion” in Runaway. 14. Editor’s note: “Powers” in Runaway. 103 Interview by Eleanor Wachtel, Writers & Company
appreciate every bit of life I can. It’s not that I do that all the time but I am conscious of wanting to do that. It’s almost like another “I should,” I should be perfectly happy because, after all, I’m not dying and my heart is fixed up, and I live in this nice place, things like that! But I can be just as irritable, loaded with things to do, as I ever was. So, life doesn’t really change that much. [Laughter]
Eleanor wachtel Last fall you said that that you’d decided there was not going to be another book, and then here is Runaway.
Alice MuNRo Did I say that last fall?
Eleanor wachtel It was quoted in The Guardian, October 2003.
Alice MuNRo Well, all right, I must have done that interview sooner than that. I must have been insane, I really must have been! But I guess I try to live in two realities, because I’m afraid of bringing out a book, always. I’m afraid of being responsible for all this stuff, and having to sort of stand behind it, I want to go on and write more stuff. And yet the obvious thing is to bring out a book. When I get enough stories, that’s what I do. And yet I honestly believe, like I believe right now, that except for the book that I’ve almost finished and which will probably come out in two or three years, I feel that I won’t do it any more after that. I feel that there is some kind of wonderful plateau you get to where you don’t have to write anymore, and you don’t have to go around interviewing people anymore. You’re just sort of happy all the time. This is sort of the idea of retirement. I don’t know if it works or not.
Eleanor wachtel Why do I not believe you?
Alice MuNRo Because you’ve known me for a long time, and you know I lie. But I’m not lying about this. There is a thought in me, and has been for a long time, that there’s a kind of happiness that consists in not having to work hard at something, to strive at so- mething. There is just a kind of place where you get and everything is comfortable, and you are satisfied. And you’re not trying anymore to do something. Because when to try to write you always think, this is impossible, I’m not bringing it off, it’s not working, and when I get through this, I’ll be so happy. Well then, you get through. Why don’t you stop? I don’t know...
Eleanor wachtel After 50 years of publishing – since you first published a story – 35 years of publishing books but 50 of publishing – being celebrated internationally by critics and readers as someone who never disappoints, does that help or hinder the writing? 104
Alice MuNRo Oh, it hinders it. I think, OK, wait till next time. Some time this is going to come crashing down, and I sort of hope I’ll be so old I won’t care. Or I will have got to that plateau we were talking about. Oh, what will I do there? Play golf? No, I can’t play golf, so I don’t know. Maybe go for long walks and really appreciate things. But often I’m thinking about something else. That’s it. To be not thinking. Isn’t this an ideal state that you’re only thinking and only feeling about the present, and you’re not thinking about what you have to do, or what may happen. Isn’t that a kind of Nirvana or something…?
Eleanor wachtel What a privilege to have the chance to talk to you again. Thank you very much.
Alice Munro in Goderich, Ontario in November 2004 just before she won the Giller Prize for Runaway.
W orks Cited
laiDlaw, Robert. The McGregors: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1979. MuNRo, Alice. The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986. —. Open Secrets. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994. —. The Love of a Good Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998. —. Runaway. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004. MuNRo, Sheila. Lives of Mothers and Daughters. Growing up with Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. Reviews
Le postcolonial comparé : anglophonie, francophonie. Ed. by Claire Joubert. Saint-Denis: PU de Vincennes, 2014. 288 p. ISBN paper: 978-2-84292-407-2, 20 €.
Reviewed by Charles FoRsDick
Le Postcolonial comparé is a welcome addition to recent work in the postcolonial field, actively illustrating important developments in the area that have become more and more apparent in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The collection reflects the urgency of two key research agendas. On the one hand, it reveals the increasingly constructive ways in which an engagement with postcolonialism in the French-speaking world has moved beyond initial controversy (and even antagonism) towards much more enabling dialogues across national and linguistic boundaries. On the other, the volume contributes actively to what Emily Apter called some years ago the “comp-lit-ization” of postcolonial criticism, at once challenging the alinguistic assumptions evident at times in postcolonialism’s Anglophone biases, but also indicating what might be feasible once the field has been opened up to a wider range of languages, cultures and historical contexts. As such, the collection can be seen as a return to the largely forgotten origins of postcolonial criticism, in the militant comparatism (cast as “counterpoint”) of Ed- ward Said (whose links to Fanon and Césaire, and ultimately partial engagement with the Francosphere, are studied in this volume by Dominique Combe) and in the call of pioneers such as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin for what they describe as an “inherently comparative methodology and the hybridized and syncretic view of the modern world which this implies.” At the same time, as chapters such as J. Dillon Brown’s on the ins- titutional context of Caribbean literatures in English make clear, the volume illustrates the extent to which a sustainably comparatist approach depends on translation, unders- tood as an inter-linguistic, intercultural vehicle for the circulation of new ideas. The foreword describes the “ideological and epistemological frictions”1 generated by the cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary tensions evident in genuinely open postco- lonial criticism. Focussing in particular on Anglophone and Francophone critical tradi- tions, the editors underline the importance of different linguistic and intellectual histo- ries, and of the ways in which these histories have played out in a post/colonial frame. Claire Joubert’s comprehensive overview chapter, with which the collection opens, un- derlines the linguistic, geographical and historical specificity of postcolonialism, reflec- ting on the ways in which an inaugural Indian subcontinental model has been slowly replaced by a Caribbeanization of the field (a tendency particularly evident in Michael Dash’s contribution, in which he outlines a critical practice centred on the Caribbean negotiating a path between a “narrow nationalism”2 and an “abstract universalism.”3 Joubert’s particular focus is on transcolonial approaches, and also on the increasing prevalence of plurinational co-colonialism. Reminding readers of the pitfalls of an ap-
1. The original reads as follows: “frictions idéologiques et épistémologiques.” 2. “nationalisme étroit.” 3. “universalisme abstrait.” 106
proach to postcolonial subjects that privileges the discursive at the expense of the lin- guistic, she outlines an agenda to which subsequent contributors are invited to respond: “the hypothesis of the transcolonial reminds us that the political sphere filters through languages and between languages.”4 As an indication of approaches to postcolonialism that adopt such a genuinely internationalized and internationalist frame, Joubert cites the work of Robert Young – and in one of several contributions to the volume by scholars outside the Francophone academy, it is Young himself who decries the ten- dency of scholarship (and its institutional supports) to treat literature according to fixed linguistic divisions, “following a jealously guarded apartheid system.”5 His conception is of a postcolonial critical practice, open to marginalized voices, which not only chal- lenges the reductive equation of a nation with a single language, but also acknowledges the constant interplay between linguistic traditions both within and beyond the nation. As such, Young calls for a decolonization of the assumptions underpinning scholarly practices that, at best, tend towards the linguistically mute, or at worst replicate the com- plicity of language and colonial ideology as visible here in Alice Goheneix-Polanski’s study of “the civilizing argument in the French language’s colonial doctrine.”6 Central to the postcolonial comparatism towards which both Joubert and Young gesture is an awareness of differing scholarly paradigms and practices, and Jean-Marc Moura provides a study of what he calls the emergence of pluralized “Francophone postcolonialisms,”7 elements of a tripartite project linked to the globalization of li- terary history, the development of linguistically inclusive regional literary histories, and the elaboration of a more internationalized theory of literary criticism. Christine Lorre-Johnston provides an exemplary overview of the types of exchange that such an approach might imply. She presents a comprehensive survey of “whiteness studies,” tracking its emergence and evolution, and giving a detailed reflection of its impact in Canadian literary criticism. Her conclusions suggest that such a critical approach – de- veloped in the light of the problematization of whiteness in the context of Anglophone and Francophone Canada – might be suggestive of new comparative practices, and would also permit fresh engagement with parts of the Francophone world itself (most notably perhaps the Caribbean). The volume as a whole presents comparatism both within and beyond the Fran- cosphere, demonstrating the potential of postcolonial approaches to illuminate intra- linguistic/intra-Francophone connections that have previously attracted little attention. For instance, through bringing together the biographies of Josephine Baker and Ma- yotte Capécia, in a co-authored closing chapter, Myriam Cottias and Madeleine Dobie deploy transcolonial comparatism to explore questions of race and gender. Concen- trating on a specifically Francophone frame, Martin Mégevand takes a topic central to French history and culture – Terreur – and explores this in the light of Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton’s work on the subject of terror and the postcolonial. Adopting three axes (confrontation, appearance, commemoration)8 and focussing on the theatre,
4. “l’hypothèse du transcolonial rappelle que le politique passe par les langues, et passe entre les langues” (38). 5. “selon un système d’apartheid jalousement gardé” (46). 6. “l’argument civilisateur dans la doctrine coloniale de la langue française.” 7. “postcolonialismes francophones” (87). 8. “confrontation,” “comparution,” “commémoration.” 107 Reviews he reveals the ways in which a postcolonial approach to terror contributes considerably to understandings of genericity and poetics. The second half of the volume returns, however, to the opening emphasis on the ways in which the Caribbean, as a quintessential translation zone, might play a key role in a comparatist postcolonialism – or a postcolonial comparatism. Chapters on Nancy Morejón (by Sandra Monet-Descombey Hernández) and José Martí (by Claire Henne- quet) open the volume’s purview hemispherically, to North and South America, drawing in Hispanophone material at the same time; Kathleen Gyssels, in a study of anthologies by Léon-Gontran Damas and Albert Helman, extends the range to the Guyanas as sites of exploration of the Glissantian “Tout-Monde.” Le Postcolonial comparé is a highly suggestive volume, demonstrating the critical bene- fits of a continued prying open of the postcolonial field along translingual, transcul- tural and transcolonial lines. As the contributions to the volume make clear, such a manoeuvre depends not only on translation and an awareness of differing intellectual trajectories, but also on a willingness to understand and harness the creative frictions to which the foreword alludes. The potential outcome of such an approach is underlined by Moura: “a ‘postcolonial,’ possibly global vision which could be the basis of a pluri- lingual group of ‘literatures of the South,’ rising from historical considerations and not simply from a linguistic community.”9 The volume suggests that such an active dialogue, bridging intellectual, conceptual and linguistic divides, is becoming possible.
9. “une vision ‘postcoloniale’ voire globale qui pourrait fonder un ensemble plurilingue de ‘littératures du Sud,’ à partir de considérations historiques et non plus seulement à partir d’une communauté linguistique” (93).
109 Reviews
Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine. By Anna Bernard. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. 205 p. ISBN (hb): 978-1-84631- 943-3, £75.00.
Reviewed by Claire gallieN
In the very first lines of Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine, Anna Bernard offers a summary of the scope of her publication: “This is a book about the cultural representation, transmission, and circulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It examines the ways in which Palestinian and Israeli writers whose work- achie ves the status of ‘world literature’ […] intervene in the asymmetrically waged local and international contests over the region’s political past and future.” (1) Bernard’s book also has a crucial theoretical dimension since it engages with various fields, namely postcolonial studies, comparative literature, and translation studies, which have come under duress of late. Rhetorics of Belonging addresses the Jamesonian concept of “national allegory” consi- dered by many contemporary critics as a thing of the past or as too clichéd. It also takes on the field of postcolonial studies – declared “dead” by Negri and Hardt in Empire – and promotes a literature which has, for political, institutional, and linguistic reasons, been largely side-lined by postcolonial scholars, despite the colonial genealogy and nature of the Israeli state and despite the common depiction of the Palestinian as the “abject” figure of oppression.10 Furthermore, it brings together national narratives (grounding the analysis in a dis- cussion of Jameson and Anderson) and postcolonialism (engaging with Said, Ahmad, Lazarus, Chakrabarty, Brennan, and Parry, among others), when the two appear to be based on opposite if not incompatible premises; namely a homogeneous and autotelic vision of the nation on the one hand (national narratives are supposed to be homoge- neous, simplistic and binary) and processes of hybridisation and transnationalism on the other (postcolonial novels are supposed to be complex, multilingual, meta-reflexive, and parodic). The way the author achieves this subversion is not only by focusing on the “materia- list,” as opposed to the “idealist,” branch of postcolonial studies, but also by reinvesting the very definition of national allegories as sutured visions of the nation. Palestinian and Israeli literatures of the nation are naming a problem, not a solution, i.e., how to “respond to the sense of permanent and specificallynational crisis” (24). Finally, the book offers a relational analysis of Israeli and Palestinian literary forms and imaginaries, caught as they are in a settler-native relation, while remaining careful not to confuse relationality with reconciliation. Except for chapter 1, which is a substantial theoretical addition to the introduction and provides a defence and reclamation of the Jamesonian concept of “national alle- gory,” each subsequent chapter of Rhetorics of Belonging presents fascinating and detailed analyses of the works of specific Israeli and Palestinian writers, namely Edward Said, Mourid Bhargouti, Amos Oz, Orly Castel-Bloom, Sahar Khalifeh, and Anton Shammas. While Israeli and Palestinian narratives are revisited through the postcolonial lens, post-
10. See Rebecca L. Stein, “Ballad of the Sad Café: Israeli Leisure, Palestinian Terror, and the Post/colonial Ques- tion,” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba et al. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. 110
colonialism is reconsidered, and its limitations and potential complicity with globalisa- tion and neo-imperialism fully addressed, via robust literary analysis of the primary texts. Thus, Bernard argues that dismissing national allegories as a thing of the past is tantamount to imposing a Western post-national cultural map on the rest of the globe and to being complicit with an imposed transnational global order. Furthermore, she concurs that the absence of Palestinian/Israeli texts within postcolonial literature is “troubling” given the status of Israel as a settler-colonial state (20). Another proble- matic illustration of the symbiotic relationship between criticism and geopolitics is the currency gained in academic discourse by the “two-narrative” paradigm, which clearly takes its cue from the “two-state” solution, emphasising “the intractability of all natio- nalist politics for a cosmopolitan audience encouraged to congratulate itself on its own putative post-nationalism” (32). This statement is fundamental because it later allows Bernard to develop her concept of the “demographic imaginary” as a corrective to Anderson’s “social imaginary” in or- der to address the specificity of the Israel/Palestine situation where no national consen - sus has been reached. Bernard’s “demographic imaginary” accounts for the prominence of the border – both external, between Israel and Palestine, and internal, with second- class (Mizrahi, Ethiopian) and third-class (Palestinian) citizens in Israel – and for the importance of questions related to citizenship, political rights and ethnicity. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with Palestinian autobiographical narratives, namely Edward Said’s Out of Place and Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, which constitute two opposite ways of defining Palestinian demographic imagination, the first relying on exile, and the second on grounded sensory experiences. Chapter 4 turns to Amos Oz’s fictions and traces ideological affiliations with Zionism in them when his narrators invoke the Na- kba but then undermine its power to disturb the readers. Similarly, Oz’s parodic use of racist Orientalist clichés against Arabs implies their non-relevance to the current Israeli context, thus effectively removing any sort of affiliation between Zionism, Orientalism and colonialism. Chapter 5 revisits the national allegory paradigm from an intersectional and margi- nalised perspective and details the ways in which female writers, namely Sahar Khalifeh and Orly Castel-Bloom, criticize the gender-nationalism nexus present in Israeli and Palestinian societies. Israeli land grab is couched as a masculine onslaught on historic Palestine, while misogyny and patriarchy subjugate women’s bodies and minds and re- veal a darker side to Israel’s alleged modern and progressive state. Chapter 6 on Anton Shammas’s Arabesques offers, along with the chapters on Barghouti and Oz, one of Bernard’s most inspiring analyses, one in which the narration of the nation envisions a post-Zionist state – that is to say post-ethnic and post-nationalist. Given that Bernard clearly indicates the scope of her corpus, her book does not claim to exhaust the topic of Israeli/Palestinian national narrations, but rather invites further enquiries, most notably concerning questions of reception and form. How are the works studied and received in Israel/Palestine? Would an inclusion of other genres, such as refugee, prison, or infiltration narratives, provide new insights into the topic discussed and highlight the disparity and fundamental imbalance between the two si- tuations? This being said, Anna Bernard’s book is both a challenging and a highly stimulating read for scholars working on Israeli and Palestinian literatures and more generally for 111 Reviews those working in postcolonial, comparative, and translation studies. It combines intel- lectual and stylistic clarity with insightful close readings, theoretical rethinking, and an attention to the politics of form. Her command of both English and Arabic enables her to attend to the multifarious facets of literariness and to the ways in which texts, as “worldly” aesthetic artefacts, may engage readers, actuate change, and rearticulate ideologies.
113 Reviews
Listening up, Writing Down and Looking Beyond: Opening the Door to Transdisciplinary, Multimodal Communication Ed. by Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. 380 p. ISBN hb: 978-1-55458-364-5, $63.75 CAD.
Reviewed by Christophe leBolD
Accompanied by a multi-media webpage with recordings and video stills of several of the performances studied in the book, Listening Up, Writing Down and Looking Be- yond is the outcome of a 2008 conference held at the University of Saskatchewan, in connection with a Canadian Council sponsored artistic event, The eVOCative festival of oral performance. It is also the outcome of the editors’ decades of engagement with per- formances of all kinds, mostly in postcolonial and expressive cultures contexts. In a stimulating and enthusiastic introduction, Gingell and Roy recall their purpose: to pursue, in the face of emerging new “audiocentric genres” of performance (22) – sound poetry, dub and slam among others – the pedagogical enterprise initiated by Richard Foley; to teach audiences “how to read oral poems” in ways which account for their multilayered (i.e., aesthetic, phenomenological and political) dimension. As op- posed to pioneering works by Foley, Ong and McLuhan (acknowledged here as impor- tant sources), Gingell and Roy shift the focus from strict opposition between the writ- ten and the oral to their interactions and interdependency, and the overlapping of the strictly oral/aural with the visual, the written and the social. Hence Gingell and Roy’s introduction of the term of “oral +” to emphasize the idea that orality is always more than orality; for instance it also implies bodies and specific social contexts. This vision is perceptible in the outline of the book, the seventeen contributions being grouped into three sections: “performance poetics,” “print textualizations of the oral +,” and “the oral/visual interface” – a threefold structure which seems to promise a complex investigation of performance by examining what it inherently is, what it loses on the page, and its interactions with the visual field. A major concern in the book is to keep the overall enterprise as pedagogical as possible, something that is evident when Gingell and Roy include not only a glossary of key terms in performance studies, but also an in-depth historical and bibliographical survey of theories of orality, from Hei- degger’s critique of “ocular-centrism” to contemporary “sound history,” via Ong and Ruth Finnegan’s pioneering studies of oral traditions. All this makes the book a valuable source for anyone interested in studies of orality. The editors’ central belief is that performance is first and foremost a holistic expe- rience that is both synesthetic and political: a joyful stimulation of the senses of the audience and of their social imagination. They constantly stress that performance is power because sound and movement is energy, and “orature” is nothing if not a trans- formative and empowering experience that stimulates the agency of all participants. Also central to the volume is the emphasis laid on the politics of performance. When Gingell and Roy define performance not only as an “embodied event” that includes “heightened body and verbal language,” but also as a “forum in which histories and social identities are negotiated,” (4) they set the tone for a volume largely informed by postcolonial theory, material culture and (more marginally) gender studies. The individual articles cover many sub-genres of orality, from sound poetry to Irish ballads, early modern religious sermons or dub poetry. They also include an analysis of 114
simulated oral voices in contemporary Canadian metafiction, and several texts about transcriptions of oral narratives and indigenous poetry of Yukon, Anishinaabe, Dakota and South African origin. The methodological approaches range from the purely aesthe- tic – with sound poet Paul Dutton’s definition of his art as “spiritual pursuit” (134) – to the sociological – with Helen Gregory’s transatlantic study of slam poetry contests. Some articles deal with militant versions of postcolonial studies (with professor and Dakota activist Waziyatawin’s exploration of the issue of truth-telling as an active agent of decolonization, in an article that is also a call to arms). Others assert scientificity first and foremost: didactic sciences are present in Hugh Hodges’s analysis of his experience of “teaching” Performance Poetry in a 2008 undergraduate class, and so is linguistics, in Mareike Neuhaus’s approach to texts by Cree poet Louise Bernice Halfe from the perspective of the inner structures of the Cree language (with a particular view to the “holophrases” – or word bundles – typical of polysynthetic languages). The reader is in for many moments of insight or conceptual breakthrough. For ins- tance with Paul Dutton’s idea of a “speech-music continuum,” his definition of sound poetry as “an egalitarian art” and his stimulating typology of the various forms of the genre. Or with Gugu Hlongwane’s presentation of South-African dub-poet Lesoto Rampolokeng as a “gadfly” poet (148) who writes against the dominant ANR-sanctio- ned discourse of reconciliation. Or again with Susan Gingell’s use of the concept of “sound identity” when analyzing Cree poet Neal McLeod’s attempt to “traditionalize modernity” (and postmodernity) by inserting Cree language (and the Cree worldview) into the world of the Internet or multichannel TV. A key moment in the collection is George Elliott Clark’s examination of how, in the face of both white critical pressure on the black text and of a specifically black anxiety of performance due to the socio- cultural necessity of embodying a resistant voice and adopting a “preaching function” (58), Canadian dub poets d’bi.young and Oni Joseph textualize black voices on the page, using “guerrilla tactics” – that is visual rhetoric and a mixture of literary English and hip-hop rhetoric (61). Clark shows how both poets noisily disrupt the conventions of the silent “white” page, showing in the process that “the orality of Negro poetry will always out, bursting though all stifling blandishments and attempted erasures” (71). Several contributions deal with the ethics of textual editions of oral narratives. Emily Blacker thus uses the concept of “ethics of encounter” to analyze Life Lived Like a Story, a collection of oral testimonies by three Yukon elders edited by ethnographer Julie Cruikshank. Blacker concludes that concessions to the literary market and “generic in- compatibilities” between what a “life story” is in aboriginal cultures and what the ethno- grapher expects has altered the nature and feel of the original interviews and produced a text meant to “facilitate smooth cross-cultural encounters” (255). All highpoints of the book cannot be cited here but each is sufficient to make it worthwhile. For all its merits, Listening up, Writing Down and Looking Beyond also has minor short- comings. The third section – supposedly dedicated to interactions between performed orality and visual art – fails to keep its promise: only two of the articles really engage with the visual/oral dialectics and it seems that the editors have merely grouped together the contributions that mentioned visuals. A reader interested in systematically exploring interactions between the visual and the oral is bound to be disappointed. Style can be tedious, as some contributions fall into the stylistic traps of academia (theoretical name- 115 Reviews dropping, analytical overkill and heavy prose), but, to be fair, a great – and commen- dable – thrust behind the book is Gingell and Roy’s desire to “open up the conversatio- nal circle” and expand the definition of what can be called “expert work” (15). Many of the contributors are therefore artists and performers – some with academic positions – and at times political activists. This makes for a welcome sense of urgency in many of the contributions but in some cases, the dominant mode is not so much academic demonstration as militant celebration. The reluctant reader may find limits to some ideological positions: there is at times a slightly demagogical temptation to romanticize “orality” and “folk” as inherent loci of resistance, and it is a relief to the reader when Naomi Foyle reminds us in her analysis of successive reactionary rewritings of an Irish ballad that we should be wary of equating orality with resistance. Several articles are encumbered by political politeness. The opposition Blacker sees between the authen- ticity of resistant and dignified Yukon women and white anthropologists constrained by “western concepts” and with an eye on the literary market may make the sensitive reader cringe. So does the temptation, perceptible here and there in the volume, to iden- tify a “fantasied enemy” on the white page of the supposedly hegemonical printed text, which stabilizes meaning and constructs an experience that is not multilayered or sy- nesthetic; this is what Gingell calls “the one-dimensional text experience” (305). Those of us who still love Rimbaud may feel inclined at times to remind Gingell and Roy that creativity, authenticity and rebelliousness are not prerogatives of contemporary militant performers and that some printed texts have been known to generate multilayered (and politically stimulating) experiences too.
117 Reviews
Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Ed. by Charles E. May. Ipswich, MA: Salem P, 2013. 312 p. ISBN (hb): 9781429837224, $95 US.
Reviewed by Christine loRRe-JohNstoN
Salem Press was originally founded by Frank N. Magill, who during his posting in the Panama zone in World War II imagined a publishing house devoted to the great works of literature, American and international, providing plot summaries to guide or refresh the memories of curious general readers. The “Critical Insights” series in which this book on Alice Munro’s short fiction is published is the heir of the “Masterworks” series created by Magill, which has been successful with librarians and library patrons since the 1950s. The goal remains, as it first was, to reach a wide readership, ranging, as one can read on the publisher’s website, from “the student approaching a subject for the first time, the reader trying to decide which book to read for pleasure, the teacher needing a quick reminder of a character’s name in a book read many years ago, the gra- duate student reviewing for orals, the reference desk librarian needing to quickly answer a question for a patron.” One question that comes to mind is whether the Critical Insights book on Munro will also interest a Munro scholar. My answer is yes, very much so, and this for several reasons. The fact that the volume’s editor is Charles E. May is a good omen. May has devoted his whole academic life to the genre of the short story and has produced an enduring body of theory and criticism. His Short Story Theories, first published in 1976, augmen- ted to The New Short Story Theories in its 1994 edition, is a major reference. May has successfully met the challenge of addressing the broad readership of Salem Press, as the contributions to this volume include both essential information about Munro and several important essays. The book is structured into three parts, following a set pattern – “Career, Life, and Influence,” “Critical Contexts,” and “Critical Readings” – reflecting the overall perspective of the books in the series. Following the series editorial line, the volume focuses on Munro’s “entire body of work” – that is, her thirteen original collections of short stories up to Too Much Happiness (2009), since Dear Life, her 2012 collection, and officially her last, was published after this book was conceived. Dealing with an “entire body of work” is problematic in the case of short stories, which are independent narrative units, and particularly so in the case of Munro’s stories, due to their marked singularity. In reality this book’s approach is comprehensive only to the extent that this is possible; it does not mean that all the stories are discussed, but most chapters in the book adopt an embracing approach to a given collection of stories, and not all of these are covered. An embracing approach here means that a general statement is made about a collection, and then a few sample stories are examined to illustrate that point. The first section, “Career, Life, and Influence,” comprises two pieces by May. “On Alice Munro” provides a survey of essential aspects of Munro’s stories, such as the length of her narratives and their similarities and differences with the novel, the preva- lence of the theme of the ordinary, or the universal value that the stories convey. “Bio- graphy of Alice Munro” surveys the author’s life and how it shaped her writing. There is nothing new here for the Munro scholar, but May’s two-fold survey is an excellent introduction to Munro’s work. 118
“Critical Contexts” brings together four chapters. “Critical reception,” by Robert Thacker, is not only a thoughtful, updated survey of Munro criticism (which Thacker has been consistently doing since criticism on Munro was first published), but also addresses the question of how to deal with Munro’s work, and the relevance of an “overall approach.” Thacker’s view is that “Munro’s art […] is not well served by the critical form of the single-author extended critical overview,” and that “her work is best understood at the level of the single story or by considering a small group of stories” (34, 35). This amounts to setting a challenge to the contributors to the book, given the book’s editorial perspective, but it also feeds into the reflection of Munro scholars. Ti- mothy McIntyre’s article focuses on the links between Munro’s biography and writing, in terms well-known to seasoned Munro readers. Naomi Morgenstern’s piece uses a psychoanalytical approach to read “Trespasses” and “Deep-Holes,” which leaves us to wonder about the potential and limits of this specific theoretical perspective. Carol L. Beran’s parallel reading of Munro’s “White Dump” and Atwood’s “Wilderness Tips” is spurred by her interest in the two of them being Canadian women writers – this is familiar but important critical ground. The “Critical Readings” section offers a range of articles that go from thematic sum- mary (David Peck’s chapter on theatricality in The Beggar Maid), to analysis of important themes that have been surveyed extensively by scholarship (Michael Toolan on secrets in Open Secrets), to strong argument about emerging questions – so Ailsa Cox examining Mu- nro’s “Late Style” in Too Much Happiness, detailing how “the continuity between past and present is undermined by the brutality with which one time frame supersedes another” (279). Most articles offer insightful perspectives that expand on important questions. Me- drie Purham’s “Lives of Girls and Women and the Classical Past” offers a cogent argument about cultural background in Munro’s most famous book. Mark Levene examines “the compound, layered endings” of several stories from The Progress of Love. Philip Coleman focuses on Friend of My Youth to show, by establishing links with modernist writers (Joyce, Woolf), how Munro’s short fiction “reveals the pervasiveness of stories and the processes of [what Susan Lohafer has called] storying in all areas of subjective and intersubjective experience” (173). J. R. (Tim) Struthers, through a study of “Meneseteung,” compellin- gly examines the role metaphor plays for us as readers, “for orienting ourselves” (190). Jeff Birkenstein studies the meaning of community in The Love of a Good Woman. David Crouse proposes the notion of “surrogate authors” to analyse the way “Munro’s cha- racters are always telling themselves tales and telling other people lies” (229) in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Michael Trussler deals with “Narrative, Memory, and Contingency” in Runaway, raising the crucial notion of connectedness and the way characters experience temporality. Caitlin Charman studies “Place Sense” in The View from Castle Rock, in terms of how landscape is read, how place is understood. Following Thacker’s opening article, which sets the critical tone of the volume, the strongest articles in the book expand our reading of the individual stories by raising questions about the links between life and writing, and interrogating the role of lite- rature, culture, and personal background. How does classical culture shape Munro’s outlook? What matters to readers and writers of short stories? How has age changed Munro’s writing? This is the kind of essential questions that Salem Press traditionally wishes to address. And these are questions that scholars too, especially if they want to bear the equivalent of a Woolfian “common reader” in mind, should not lose sight of. Contributors
Christine Berthin is Professor of Translation Studies and English Literature at the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre. She has published extensively on Romantic poetry and fiction and is the author of Gothic Haunting: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Corinne Bigot is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre. She wrote her doc- toral dissertation on Alice Munro’s short stories. She has published several essays on Alice Munro’s stories in CES and JSSE, and contributed to Trauma Narratives and Herstory (2013) with an essay on Alice Munro. She published a monograph on Alice Munro, Les silences de la nouvelle (PUR, 2014), and co-authored a book on Munro’s first collection of short stories with Catherine Lanone, entitled Sunlight and Shadows, Past and Present (PUF, 2014).
Lynn Blin teaches Linguistics and Translation Studies at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier. Her Ph.D. thesis was on the coordinate structures (AND, OR, BUT and the comma) in Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth. Her research focuses on the link between grammar and style. She is currently working on different Standard Englishes in diasporic literature.
Miroslawa Buchholtz is Professor of English, and Director of the English Department at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. Her research interests include Canadian literature, auto/biography, translation, and postcolonial studies. She has published six mo- nographs, including Canadian Passwords: Diasporic Fictions into the Twenty-First Century (2008), and (co)edited twelve books. She is series editor of CANADIANA (Wydawnictwo Adam Marszalek) and Dis/Continuities (Peter Lang Verlag).
Isla Duncan taught Language Education at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and English Studies at the University of Chichester, where she is currently a Research Associate. She has published essays on Canadian writers such as Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Sandra Birdsell and Margaret Laurence. Her monograph on Alice Munro, Alice Munro’s Narrative Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) has recently appeared in a second edition.
Charles ForsDick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool and AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for “Translating Cultures.” He has published on travel wri- ting, colonial history, postcolonial literature and the cultures of slavery. He is also a specialist on Haiti and the Haitian Revolution, and has written about representations of Toussaint Louverture. His publications include Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (OUP, 2000) and Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures (OUP, 2005).
Claire gallien lectures in the English Department at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier and is a member of IRCL (UMR 5186). Her research interests are anchored in the critical study of orientalist discourse, in postcolonial, comparative, and world literatures and theories, as well as in translation studies. Her first book,L’Orient anglais (Voltaire Foundation, 2011), deals with the interactions between popular and scholarly cultures of the East in 18th-century England. Her current book project, From Corpus to Canon, focuses on the construction of the category of “Eastern literature” (Arab, Persian, and Indian) in England in the early modern period and its entanglements with structures of European knowledge and power.
Christophe leBolD has published numerous articles on artists like Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen after a PhD devoted to rock songs as oral literary objects. He is the author of Leonard Cohen. L’Homme qui voyait tomber les anges (Camion blanc, 2013), a concep- tual monograph on the life and work of the Canadian singer-songwriter whom he sees as a 120
modern metaphysical poet. He teaches American literature and performance studies at the University of Strasbourg and is also an actor and stage director. Christine Lorre-Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in English at University Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research and writing focus on the short story, the literature of the Asian diaspora, postco- lonial theory, gender and cultural studies. Her publications include an issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies on “Janet Frame: Short Fiction” (co-edited with Marta Dvorak, Spring 2011) and a study of Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades entitled The Mind’s Eye (co-authored with Ailsa Cox, Fahrenheit, 2015).
William new is University Killam Professor Emeritus from the University of British Colum- bia (Vancouver, Canada). He is a specialist of Canadian and Commonwealth literature with a special interest in the short story. A literary critic, editor, anthologist, and poet, he is the editor of Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada; the author of five books for children (including The Year I Was Grounded); and the author and editor of several books of critical commentary, including A History of Canadian Literature (1989), Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence & Power in Canadian Writing (1997), and Borderlands: How We Talk About Canada (1998). His most recent book is New & Selected Poems (2015).
Eleonora rao is Professor of English Literature and Literatures in English at the University of Salerno, Italy. She has written extensively on Margaret Atwood and on contemporary Canadian women writers (Daphne Marlatt, Joy Kogawa, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Smaro Kamboureli) in international journals. Her other research interests include Bri- tish Modernism, Gender Studies, and Autobiography. She is on the advisory board of Aigne, Italian Americana, Literary Geographies, and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. She is currently President of the Margaret Atwood Society.
Lucile rouet-Bentley is a PhD student at University Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. The title of her dissertation is “The suffering body in Alice Munro’s work.” She has presented several papers on Munro’s short stories.
Eleanor wachtel is a Canadian writer and journalist; she is the host of the literary show Writers & Company, broadcast on CBC, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2010. She has interviewed major American writers, and major Canadian writers such as Mordecai Richler, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro.