Journal of the Short Story in English, 55

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Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

55 | Autumn 2010 Special issue: The Short Stories of Alice Munro

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1055 ISSN : 1969-6108

Éditeur Presses universitaires de Rennes

Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 décembre 2010 ISBN : 0294-0442 ISSN : 0294-04442

Référence électronique Journal of the Short Story in English, 55 | Autumn 2010, « Special issue: The Short Stories of Alice Munro » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2012, consulté le 03 décembre 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/jsse/1055

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SOMMAIRE

Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain et Emmanuel Vernadakis

Introduction Héliane Ventura

The Ordinary Terrors of Survival: Alice Munro and the Canadian Gothic Katrin Berndt

A Comparative Essay on the Sociology of Literature: Alice Munro’s “Unconsummated Relationships” Silvia Albertazzi

“Like the Downflash of a Wing or Knife”: Repression, Sublimation, and the Return of the Repressed in Alice Munro’s “Princess Ida” Jennifer Murray

“Eskimo,” or an Encounter with the Real of Feminine Desire

Alice Munro’s Naughty Coordinators in “Friend of My Youth” Lynn Blin

Negotiation of Naming in Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” Sabrina Francesconi

Alice Munro’s “Silence”: From the Politics of Silence to a Rhetoric of Silence Corinne Bigot

Runaway Classicists: Anne Carson and Alice Munro’s “Juliet” Stories Ian Rae

A Reading of Away from Her, Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” Agnès Berthin-Scaillet

The Skald and the Goddess: Reading “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro Héliane Ventura

Bibliography

Alice Munro: A Bibliography Corinne Bigot

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Foreword

Linda Collinge-Germain et Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 We are pleased to present this special issue on the stories of Alice Munro, one of the greatest short story writers in contemporary literature. It was put together by Professor Héliane Ventura, our guest editor, one of France’s leading scholars in Canadian studies in general and Munro’s fiction in particular. Professor Héliane Ventura is also a specialist in classical studies, European mythology and the relationship between text and image. She has a scholarly and personal approach which makes the volume both absorbing and highly stimulating. We are grateful to Professor Héliane Ventura for the quality of the issue, one which will certainly be noted, prized and quoted by general readers, Munro scholars and enthusiasts alike.

AUTEURS

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS Organisers of the Conference and Guest-Editors of this issue

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Introduction

Héliane Ventura

1 This is the first time that the Journal of the Short Story in English has entirely dedicated a special issue to Alice Munro’s short fiction, although a great number of individual stories have been examined throughout the preceding issues, with the first one (1983) already encapsulating a critical article on Lives of Girls and Women (1971) and Who Do You Think You Are (1978).1

2 By 2010, Munro has had thirteen collections of short stories anthologized, spanning more than forty years of excellence in the field. From her first published collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), to her last one so far, Too Much Happiness (2009), Munro has ceaselessly explored the Lives of Girls and Women and The Progress of Love from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship [to] Marriage in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, while resorting to the single form of the short story, of which she has become an exemplary practitioner. Her stories have themselves triggered off a bountiful critical production, from the first book-length volume by Judith Miller’s The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, which was published in 1984 and collected the papers presented at the University of Waterloo first conference on her oeuvre, to the latest critical biography which thoroughly documents the history of the publication of her stories: Robert Thacker’s Alice Munro Writing Her Lives, published in 2005. They have also been conducive to a large production of critical articles, as eloquently demonstrated by the updated bibliography included at the end of this issue.

3 This special issue collects contributions from Canada, France, Germany, and Italy and accommodates the critical examination of one or several stories from seven collections out of thirteen. From “The Peace of Utrecht” published in her first collection, the volume moves all the way up to the collection published in 2004, Runaway, while also considering The Progress of Love from 1986, Friend of my Youth from 1990, The Love of a Good Woman from 1998 and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage from 2001.

4 The volume is divided into three parts which correspond to at least three distinct methodological approaches. The first part entitled “The Complicity of Desire” focuses on the tropes of longing and belonging to expose the characters’ restlessness and unfulfilled aspirations in their respective garrisons. Katrin Berndt explores the terrors that are lurking behind the facades of small town from the perspective of the

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resurgence of Gothic elements in Munro’s prose from the earlier to the later stories. Silvia Albertazzi adopts a sociological approach to expose Munro’s scathing lucidity in the depiction of human relationship, through the analysis of two emblematic stories, “The Peace of Utrecht,” and “Royal Beatings.” Jennifer Murray concentrates on a surprisingly neglected ‘mother’ story in Munro’s criticism, “Princess Ida,” to focus on the text’s encoding of the psychological forces of repression and sublimation, in the daughter’s oedipal negotiation of her own relationship to the mother figure. Relying on the Lacanian notions of Jouissance and the Real, Claude Maisonnat reads “Eskimo” as a process of self-discovery undergone, more or less willingly, by the heroine on her trip to Honolulu for her vacation.

5 The second part of the volume, “The Erotics of Language”, concentrates more particularly on the linguistic issues which underpin Munro’s stories. Lynn Blin resorts to a linguistic approach to expose the secret strategies of Munro’s language. Through the study of coordinators in “Friend of My Youth”, she argues that the apparent merry- go-round of couples paves the way for another couple, a more transgressive one, the mother-daughter couple. Sabrina Francesconi concentrates on another story from Friend of my Youth, “Meneseteung,” to demonstrate that names are sites of negotiation for identity, as well as for historical, political, and cultural issues. From “Meneseteung,” to “Menace” and “Tongue” and the character of Almeda or possibly “Med(e)a,” Munro questions, deconstructs, and subverts monolinguistic issues and the place of the author in society. Corinne Bigot lays the emphasis on the strategic use of silence in one particular story from Runaway precisely entitled “Silence” and theorizes the development of a poetics of silence in Munro’s art.

6 The third part entitled “The Dialectics of Proximity and Distance” takes up the 2004 collection of stories, Runaway, to extend the analysis of “Silence” to the entire “Juliet” Trilogy and to the final story in the volume, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Ian Rae focuses on the influence of the classicist Anne Carson for the development of Munro’s Hellenistic background to the collection while Agnes Scaillet investigates the self-betraying distance that Sarah Polley has taken from “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” in her filmic adaptation, entitled Away from Her. In the same story, Héliane Ventura underlines the ironically distanced approach to the ravages of aging, through the ambiguous aggrandizement of the protagonists: the transformation of Fiona into the Goddess Freya and that of Grant into a Skaldic poet.

7 This volume is not a hagiographic enterprise dedicated to the praise of one of the greatest short story writers in contemporary literature. One article, in particular, echoes some of the criticism which has been sometimes levelled at Munro’s stories, highlighting Munro’s astringent vision and unforgiving lucidity. Most contributions nevertheless refrain from either extolling or condemning the stories. They concentrate on the various ways through which Munro turns life into story, on a knack or need for self-dramatization or for “calling attention” to oneself, which many people in her family seem to have “in large and irresistible measure,” as she herself declares in the first part of her collection from 2006, The View from Castle Rock. 2 These contributions lay the stress on a feminine aesthetics which is marked by its conversational mode, a vernacular ease, which is based on repetition with a difference. Most of the stories which have been analyzed here variously focus on the types of languages used in Munro’s stories. They provide evidence of means of expression which were not necessarily born of articulate language: body language, silence, or even slip of the

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tongue or slip of the pen which result in ambiguous homonymy or homophony. They differently argue that a Munro story is characterised by polysemy and heteronymy : it contains misnomers, grammatical mistakes and other happy “infelicities” which point towards another locus of meaning, secretly but intentionally encoded in between apparently ordinary language.

8 Suffice it to provide here two specific examples of Munro’s misnomers or vernacular language, the title of one story, “Eskimo,”3 and the mistaken past participle used by a nurse in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” “wore” instead of “worn”: “Old women going after the old men. Could be they’re not so wore out, I guess.”4 With the use of the term “Eskimo” the former story doubly draws attention to alterity, since it resorts to an obsolete designation to accommodate the presence of a young Inuit in the diegesis at the same time as it documents the unheimlich transformation of a white, Anglo-Saxon airplane passenger into a voyeur during her journey of self-discovery. The latter story documents the transformation of a lady into a promiscuous Alzheimer patient: in both stories the misnomer has far-reaching reverberations; it allows truths that belong to the unconscious or cannot be directly expressed to come to the surface and destabilize our understanding of characters.

9 This volume is not meant to shed light on the history of the publication of the stories or reach a definite answer about Munro’s fiction. It is meant to provide a new understanding of her oeuvre, based on attention to and close analysis of language: an understanding which is distinct from knowledge, and consequently open to debate and contestation. It reflects a different mode of understanding fiction: it demonstrates an inclination towards finding out meaning, rather than exhuming indisputable facts. It constitutes a re-assessment of Alice Munro’s achievement which is also a re-evaluation of our own understanding of the issues, discursive, ethical, psychoanalytical and sociological, which are posed by her stories, just as they are posed by life.

NOTES

1. Marcienne Rocard, “Alice Munro : à mi-chemin entre la nouvelle et le roman”, The Journal of the Short Story in English, volume 1, 1983: 103-112. 2. Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock, London, Chatto & Windus, 2006, p. 20. 3. Alice Munro, The Progress of Love, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1986. 4. Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 2001, p. 293.

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AUTHORS

HÉLIANE VENTURA Héliane Ventura is Professor of Contemporary Literature in English at the University of Toulouse-Le-Mirail. Her research interests are focused on the relationship between words and images, the resurgence of myths from Antiquity in contemporary literature in English and more particularly on theoretical close readings of the contemporary short story in the English speaking world. She will be a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in 2010, working on the filiation between James Hogg’s ballads and memoirs and Alice Munro’s short stories.

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The Ordinary Terrors of Survival: Alice Munro and the Canadian Gothic

Katrin Berndt

1 To discuss a Canadian writer in the context of a literary style that evokes the presumed aesthetics of medieval Europe is anything but an obvious choice. The Canadian maple tree with its bright yellow, or red-orange, leaves is not the sort of plant usually associated with a gloomy Gothic landscape. Although early Anglophone Canadian writers adopted aesthetic categories of Romanticism, such as the sublime and the picturesque, to appeal to a predominantly British audience, the past five decades of postmodern Canadian literature have seen the successful invention and establishment of genuine literary features and artistic characteristics. Today, distinguishing qualities of Canadian writing are motifs such as regionalism and ethnicity, and the emphasis on Canada's transcultural national identity. The significant influence of both women writers and feminist criticism is likewise striking. After all, Anglophone Canadian prose appears to be concerned with pragmatic, mundane issues rather than with Gothic “tales of the macabre and the supernatural” (Thomas 1994: 131) that intend to “chill the spine and curdle the blood” (Cuddon 1998: 356). Moreover, the label ‘Gothic’ recalls rather eerie settings such as medieval castles, feudal abbeys, and haunted graveyards – all of them steeped in a decidedly European imagery – as well as eighteenth-century British writers like Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. Their Gothic stories are usually populated by frequently endangered heroines and bloodthirsty villains, by wise women and dark, saturnine lovers. Neither of these peculiar characters seems likely to inhabit a present-day Canadian narrative. Before I begin to elaborate on the topic of my paper, I will therefore briefly outline major features of Gothic fiction, in order to identify those elements which may be located in Canadian texts as well.

2 Gothic writing, which evolved as a branch of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century as a response to the cultivation of reason in the Enlightenment, addresses metaphysical and preternatural aspects of life. It relates to the darker side of human existence, encompassing insanity, fear, cruelty, violence and sexuality. In the

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nineteenth century, writers like Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy used Gothic elements to challenge the Victorian preoccupation with utilitarianism and the civilizing progress. They exploited Gothic themes of mystery, suspense, and domestic abuse in their fiction in order to raise ethical questions about the human potential for violence.

3 Across the Atlantic, a similar tradition emerged in the United States. The short stories of writers like Edgar Allen Poe and Washington Irving exhibited Gothic-folklorist patterns (Sucur 2007: 4) such as supernatural tendencies, insanity, and domestic terrors. Poe's tales especially relied upon the grotesque, and also “aligned [...] themselves with the idea of the Gothic upon each reading, with their ambiguities and 'undercurrent[s] of meaning' (Poe's own phrase)” (Sucur 2007: 5). In the twentieth century, the legacy of the US American Civil War inspired yet another sub-genre of Gothic writing, the so-called 'Southern Gothic' associated with authors like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. Concerned with the impoverished society of the defeated US American South, their fiction relies on grotesque characters and situations to analyse such cultural attributes as self- righteousness and racial bigotry. According to Tennessee Williams, the Southern Gothic style is informed by an “emotional and romantic nature” that expresses the “underlying dreadfulness in modern experience” (Tischler 1961: 301-302).

4 There seems to be a striking discrepancy between Williams' understanding of the Gothic and 'the macabre tales to chill the spine' written in the eighteenth century. However, this seeming contrast only highlights the astonishing variety of Gothic literature, which is, ultimately, driven by ideas rather than relying on the repeated use of certain literary themes or stylistic devices. The Canadian critic Slobodan Sucur defines “intellectual tantalization” as the “only real constant” in Gothic writing, more so than fear itself. While he concedes that “the nature of the Gothic [indeed] pivots on fear, [it is] the idea that fear is possible” which inspires a Gothic poetics. Marshall Brown suggests that Gothic literature “owes most of its intricacies to the limits of Kantian thought, the limits of ideas that Immanuel Kant was carefully aware of, unsure of what lies beyond” (Sucur 2007a: 1).

5 If the Gothic is indeed concerned with the exploration of the fears which enlightened, rational understanding fails to comprehend, rather than with spooky medieval castles, its relevance for a Canadian poetics becomes apparent. After all, Canadian authors have addressed such anxieties as the fear of the unknown, and the terror that a natural surrounding perceived as hostile induced in European settlers. In her path-breaking study on Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood even suggests the use of the “multi- faceted and adaptable idea”” (Atwood 1972: 32) of survival as the central symbol for Canada. 'Staying alive' is one of the major themes of Canadian writing, often rendered as persistence when confronting a malevolent nature.1 According to Canadian critic Northrop Frye, the very inception of Canadian poetry is a response to the vast wilderness of the Canadian land, whose “terrors” produced the “garrison mentality” (Frye 1977: 342) of the settlers who dared to challenge “the riddle of the unconscious in nature” (Frye 1977: 355).

6 While physical survival tends to be a prominent topic in early Canadian texts, the spiritual survival that concerns subjective terrors or “elements in [a person's] own nature that threaten him from within” (Atwood 1972: 33) has become a motif that has informed much of Canadian writing in the past decades. It seems as if some horrors

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prefer to unleash themselves in small towns rather than in the uncivilized wilderness. One of the writers concerned with surviving self-inflicted terrors in a rural, seemingly civilized surrounding is Alice Munro. Beverly Rasporich relates directly to Gothic notions of fear and the unknown when she explores the small-town settings of Alice Munro's stories (Rasporich 1990: 136), settings whose seemingly intact civilization ought to provide refuge and safety from the terrors of the wilderness, but usually turn out to have contrived genuine horrors of their own. Munro's writing combines the Canadian motif of survival with the concealed ambitions and passions that threaten her characters in a physical as well as metaphysical sense.

7 In the context of my discussion, I define the Gothic mode as addressing the indeterminate, obscure, and subconscious spheres of life. It stresses the hidden, ambivalent meanings, expresses fears beyond logic and rational understanding, and reminds its readers that such anxieties may lurk beneath the surface of everyday, ordinary experience. This awareness distinguishes the writing of Alice Munro. Several of her stories portray the Ontario region in Canada with regard to the cruelties and horrors that hide behind the façade of a rigid, Calvinist morality. Consequently, her texts have been labelled as “Southern Ontario Gothic.” In an interview with Graeme Gibson, Munro describes the affinity between rural and small-town existence in the American South and South-Western Ontario as “the mood of suppressed violence in a hard-working and insular rural community” (Cox 2007: 3), in what may well be defined as a Gothic atmosphere. She claims to have been influenced by Southern Gothic writers like Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, and insists that “the part of the country where I come from is absolutely Gothic” (Gibson 1973: 248).

8 Taking Munro's own reference to this Gothic atmosphere as my point of departure, I would like to discuss three of her stories: “The Peace of Utrecht” (1968), “Open Secrets” (1994), and “Runaway” (2005), in order to identify those elements that have earned them the label 'Gothic.' I intend to demonstrate how Munro exploits several Gothic features to explore the “undercurrent of danger and despair” (Kritenbrink 2007: 1) that informs several of her tales about small-town life in Ontario. In addition, I propose that Munro's fascination with the ambivalences in human relationships and her focus on hidden, suppressed desires and destructive dreads are all discernible Gothic strains. They relate to the Gothic obsession with the dark mysteries in subconscious levels of experience. Another manifestation of the Gothic are literary archetypes, such as the persecuted maiden; the all-powerful mother; the dark, romantic lover; and the wise woman, who are all present in Munro's writing, albeit in subversively altered versions.

9 “The Peace of Utrecht,” published in Munro's first short story collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), is set in small-town Jubilee, and focuses on domestic battles between the female members of a family. The story is told in retrospect by the narrator Helen, who returns home to visit her older sister Maddy a few months after the death of their mother. Her first impression of her hometown introduces Jubilee as a self- absorbed place unwilling to deal with its darker sides: I drove up to the main street –a new service station, new stucco front on the Queen's Hotel– and turned into the quiet, decaying side streets where old maids live, and have birdbaths and blue delphiniums in their gardens. The big brick houses that I knew, with their wooden verandas and gaping, dark-screened windows, seemed to me plausible but unreal. (Munro 1968: 266-267)

10 The narrator notices the difference between the functional main street, represented by the service station and the reconstructed façade of the hotel, and the dilapidation that

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hides behind the surface. The side streets appear to have been neglected, and are depicted as lacking the ability to regenerate, for they are inhabited by old, barren maids. The gloomy houses convey a sense of “psychic foreboding” (Rasporich 1990: 135) that illustrates how Helen's return to Jubilee is an ambivalent experience for the narrator, who had left the town ten years ago in order to establish a life, and a family, of her own. Upon re-entering her hometown, she is confronted with a feeling of menace that is to haunt the whole story. The realistic text is suffused with glimpses of a darker subtext that seem to allude to the “underlying dreadfulness of modern experience” which Tennessee Williams defined as a main theme of the Gothic.

11 However, it is not only the somewhat bleak setting that characterizes the story as Southern Ontario Gothic. The pivot of the tale is the “Gothic mother” of Maddy and Helen –perceived by her daughters as a grotesque and monstrous creature– who has continued to haunt both their house and the town in spite of her death. The absent mother is another traditional Gothic motif (Howells 1998: 21), which Munro uses to relate to the horrors of domestic life. In the reality of the story, the mother –whose first name is never revealed– suffered from a degenerative illness and needed intensive care. This obligation had turned her daughters into their mother's keepers, until Helen got married and moved to Vancouver. She left Maddy in charge of their mother because she wanted to escape, and to construct herself an adult identity (Howells 1998: 20). She has become a mother herself – and yet, when she re-enters the house where her mother used to live, the familiarity of the place threatens to overcome her. She recalls the sound of her mother's “ruined voice” asking the same questions over and over again. Helen remembers how the sisters lived in dread of her cries and demands, which were undisguised, oh shamefully undisguised and raw and supplicating [...] A cry repeated so often, and [...] so uselessly, that Maddy and I recognized it only as one of those household sounds which must be dealt with so that worse may not follow. You go and deal with mother, we would say to each other, or I'll be out in a minute, I have to deal with mother. It might be that we had to perform some of the trivial and unpleasant services endlessly required, or that we had to supply five minutes' expediently cheerful conversation, so remorselessly casual that never for a moment was there a recognition of the real state of affairs, never a glint of pity to open the way for one of her long debilitating sieges of tears. (Munro 1968: 269)

12 Helen's memories are informed by the conflict between the daughters' sense of duty towards their mother, and their actual helplessness when confronted with a parent for whom they were forced to perform “the most frightful parodies of love, in which she tried, through her creaking throat, to plead for kisses in coy pitiable childish tones” (Munro 1968: 270). The sisters perceive their mother's needs as indecent, because she has, due to her illness, lost all restraint. The once all-powerful mother remains omnipotent in her claims, which seem to know no bounds. In fact, to Maddy and Helen, it seems as if she shamelessly demands what they cannot give. They consequently withdraw their emotional engagement, and withhold what their mother so desperately craves: love and affection. The sisters manage to maintain a disinterested, pleasant attitude, but actually recoil from their mother's increasingly wretched condition. Both yearn to escape the burden of their mother's illness. In order to evade the humiliation, the anger, impatience and disgust, Maddy and Helen begin to perceive their mother as a grotesque being, neither “intelligible” nor “quite human,” that leads a “dim vegetable life.” Time and again, however, the mother has brief periods of recovery in which her true self resurfaces. During these interludes, she desperately tries to live as intensely as

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possible. These interruptions are described as mere parodies of normal life that only make it harder for the sisters to cope with the eventually deteriorating condition of their mother.

13 After her death, the mother's looming presence continues to contaminate the life of the sisters, who are imprisoned by their feelings of guilt, pain and shame. The plot of the story “hovers around the emblematic Gothic fear that what is dead and buried may not be dead at all but may come back to haunt the living” (Howells 1998: 20). All of the sisters' attempts to get rid of their memories are doomed to failure. Their mother may be dead, but she is not absent. Towards the end of the story, Helen learns that her mother tried to escape as well, an undertaking that was likewise bound to fail. Maddy had tricked her into a hospital for a check-up, but actually left her to stay where she would no longer have to care for the mother. When the mother tries to run away, she is caught and brought back to her room, where she is henceforth restrained to her bed. Whether Maddy had expected the hospital stay to accelerate her mother's death, as it eventually does, remains unclear. However, her refusal to take her mother back home with her once she is in the hospital is a last betrayal of the daughters, who are aware that “the resources of love we had were not enough, the demand on us was too great; we were only children when the disease took hold of her” (Munro 1968: 270). But for all their rational attempts at explanation and justification, the sisters remain trapped in their guilty conscience. From a pragmatic point of view, the daughters have fulfilled their duty: they struggled hard to keep their mother as civilized, controlled, as tamed as possible. Yet from a more instinctive, humane perspective, their incapability to love the grotesque mother was a most tragic, visceral failure. In true Gothic mode, the degeneration of the mother highlights the gap between civilized surface and the primeval fears of human nature.

14 The obvious discrepancy between a rational approach and the lingering impact of disturbing impulses also seems to have inspired the title of the story. It refers to the Treaty of Utrecht, which in 1713 concluded what the British historian John Robert Seeley called the “most businesslike of all our wars” (Kinder 1995: 269). Britain defeated France and forced it to cede almost all of its North American territories, including Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Hudson Bay Colonies. The treaty established Britain as the major imperial power, not least because it included an agreement with Spain that granted Britain a monopoly over the slave trade with Spanish America. It also marked the end of French explorations in North America, and stopped the commercial skirmishes over trade monopolies and ownership of land. However, it did nothing to ease the tension between French- and English-speaking communities, which continued to affect relations between the settlers.

15 I believe that the title of the story alludes to the historical truce to show how bitterness that had been nourished for years prevails over pragmatic considerations. While the treaty temporarily ended the official fighting, an undercurrent of mistrust and tension continued to shape the lives of the settlers. In a similar way, neither Helen's escape from Jubilee, nor Maddy's decision to put her mother in a hospital, gave the sisters the peace of mind they desired. I would even go so far as to suggest that the economic, utilitarian dimension of the treaty, which was stressed by Seeley, implies an entirely selfish motive behind the sisters' actions.

16 A deep discomfort of unresolved anxieties informs both the setting and the relationships of the characters, who are trapped in their realization that decisions

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made to achieve a resolution cannot be relied upon to actually put a stop to a haunting mother and a guilty conscience. The Gothic mother is both the source of the dread, and a symbol for the suppressed levels of experience. Maddy and Helen are both accomplices in her death. According to Coral Ann Howells, “The Peace of Utrecht” is “the story of a failed exorcism, [...] a Gothic tale which figures primitive female fears – nothing less than fears of matricide” (Howells 1998: 23). The story ends with Maddy wondering why she is incapable of going away from Jubilee (Munro 1968: 284), the Gothic site where her failure will continue to torment her, and where “No peace is made” (Howells 1998: 23).

17 “The Peace of Utrecht” features such Gothic elements as a bleak setting, an archetypal Gothic mother, unresolved conflicts, and concealed desires. Last but not least, it relates to the human potential for violence. The latter characteristic is also alluded to in “Open Secrets,” which is set in Carstairs in the 1960s, and revolves around the disappearance of a teenage girl and the question of whether a crime has been committed or not. The girl, Heather Bell, gets lost while she was on a hike with the C.G.I.T. – the Canadian Girls in Training. Because of their group leader's stubborn insistence that she simply played a trick on them all and would return soon enough, a day passes until a proper search is organized. But Heather cannot be found, nor can any sign of what has happened to her. Has she eloped with an unknown man, or was she kidnapped, or murdered? The town is briefly unsettled by the case, but soon decides to invest its energy in the re- establishment of the status quo rather than in solving the mystery. In spite of being the possible victim of a crime, the girl is dismissed as “new in town,” her mother as being “away on the weekend herself” (Munro 1995: 131) and as “[e]ither divorced or never married in the first place” (Munro 1995: 136) – in short, the town's talk subtly intimates that Heather was 'different' and therefore a likely candidate to venture an ill- considered, foolish action such as running away with a man. The story's progress consequently continues to communicate the priorities of the town's people: After revealing how they portray Heather as being 'strange,' that is, as not being a local, it narrates the reactions and speculations of individual community members. An eventual solution to the mystery is never offered – a final comment only implies that Maureen, the main character, might have observed something relevant but failed to realize its importance: “an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it” (Munro 1995: 160).

18 The story derives its uneasy, and somewhat unpleasant, quality from the people's actual indifference to Heather's fate, and from their eagerness to blame the victim for whatever has happened. According to Ailsa Cox, “Open Secrets” is “less concerned with the fate of Heather Bell than with the subjective impact of her disappearance, both on the community and, especially, on Maureen” (Cox 2004: 62). In fact, Maureen's contemplations on the event suggest that she has, in true Gothic fashion, suppressed her lust for living in a social structure that is built on women's willingness to maintain the idea that marriage guarantees them ultimate fulfilment.

19 The story paints a dull, unappealing picture of the life of adult women, which is rendered as a stark contrast to the saucy and rebellious attitudes of girlhood. Adult women are described as somewhat grotesque figures, whose unattractive looks correspond to the insipidity of their lives. Maureen's cousin Frances is depicted as “a dumpling sort of woman with gray hair like brambles all over her head, and a plain, impudent face” (Munro 1995: 133), while Mary Johnstone, the leader of the C.G.I.T. hike,

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has “had polio and nearly died of it, at the age of thirteen or fourteen. She was left with short legs, a short, thick body, crooked shoulders, and a slightly twisted neck, which kept her big head a little tilted to one side” (Munro 1995: 133). The absence of feminine beauty is further emphasized in the description of Maureen's neighbour Marian, who “was a woman without one visible advantage. She had a heavy face, a droop to the cheeks – she reminded Maureen of some sort of dog. Not necessarily an ugly dog. Not an ugly face, really” (Munro 1995: 143). Only Maureen is conceded a certain attractiveness, although Frances is quick to remark that she “was getting broad in the beam and her hair did not suit her piled and sprayed like an upside-down mixing bowl” (Munro 1995: 132-133). The thickset bodies of the women, their clipped or otherwise fixed hair – all of these superficial attributes highlight how they seek to embody a rigid morality rather than, for instance, (tempting) suggestions. The women in the story have eliminated their playfulness; to serve as pillars of their community, they have become immobile.

20 In contrast to them, Heather Bell (seems to have) ventured an unexpected move. She disappears at an age that marks the turning point of her leaving adolescence behind in order to enter maturity. Therefore, her disappearance makes Maureen wonder whether the girl did not simply take the chance to escape provincial life. Maureen gives in to reminiscences of her own days in the C.G.I.T., recalling how she and the other girls, while on a hike, used to stay up all night to misbehave: The girls played cards, they told jokes, they smoked cigarettes, and around midnight began the great games of Truth or Dare. Some Dares were: take off your pajama top and show your boobs; eat a cigarette butt; swallow dirt; stick your head in the water pail and try to count to a hundred; go and pee in front of Miss Johnstone's tent. Questions requiring Truth were: Do you hate your mother? Father? Sister? Brother? How many peckers have you seen and whose were they? Have you ever lied? Stolen? Touched anything dead? (Munro 1994: 139)

21 The list of Dares reads extra-disgusting, while the Truths seem to represent a wilful challenge to some of the Ten Commandments. In fact, the girls' games mockingly parody the mottos of the C.G.I.T., which require them to “Cherish Health, Seek Truth, Know God, and Serve Others.” The girls openly disregard concerns about their health when they smoke “too many cigarettes” (Munro 1994: 139), and the Truths they seek are suggested by their playful disobedience to the Christian values of their organisation. “God” is entirely absent from the story; and the fourth motto, “Serve Others,” announces the girls’ prospective roles in their families, and their community.

22 Maureen's recollections tend to romanticize her time at the C.G.I.T., not because of the questionable pleasures described above, but because she, as a girl, had been so different from the person she has become: She remembered how noisy she had been then. A shrieker, a dare-taker. Just before she hit high-school, a giddiness either genuine or faked or half-and-half became available to her. Soon it vanished, her bold body vanished inside this ample one, and she became a studious, shy girl, a blusher. She developed the qualities her husband would see and value when hiring and proposing. (Munro 1994: 139)

23 While Maureen melancholically remembers her girlhood confidence, her longing for a change is further illustrated when she describes the trees she sees down by the river as “unruly” and as forming “hidden paths [...] where animals went, and lone humans sometimes, becoming different from what they were outside, charged with different responsibilities, certainties, intentions. She could imagine vanishing” (Munro 1994:

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139-140). Maureen's thoughts imply both her loneliness and her inclination to try a different life. In this way, Heather's disappearance becomes symbolic for the rebellious girl Maureen had once been. Like Heather, this younger, independent self got lost. Therefore, Maureen wants the younger woman to have run away, to have opposed what small town life held in store for her: I dare you to run away. Was it possible? There are times when girls are inspired, when they want the risks to go on and on. They want to be heroines, regardless. They want to take a joke beyond where anybody has ever taken it before. To be careless, dauntless, to create havoc – that was the lost hope of girls. (Munro 1994: 139)

24 The Gothic atmosphere that informs “Open Secrets” is remarkable because it illustrates how a literary style can be used to both conceal and highlight strong passions. The melancholy of the story remains, like the mystery at the heart of the plot, unresolved. Stronger sensations, hidden desires, are implied in the characters' observations, in their gestures and looks, but they are never actually verbalized – and, thus, neither consciously perceived nor acted upon. If Heather had indeed become the victim of a crime, her perpetrator would have been the only person who has failed to restrict him- or herself. But all of these probabilities are swallowed by the bleak, mundane character of the town. The inability to communicate is highlighted in another grotesque feature: all of the three men who play a major role in the story have impaired speech. A stroke has slurred the speech of Maureen's husband; the only verbal contribution of Mr. Slater, Marian's husband, is to say “please and thank you as often as possible” (Munro 1994: 144); and Mr. Siddicup, whom Marian suspects to be involved in Heather's disappearance, has stopped speaking altogether after a laryngectomy. The guttural sounds and inarticulate expressions of the men mirror the distorted images of the women. Munro's fiction often oscillates between emotional intimacy and detachment; in “Open Secrets,” however, the characters appear to be completely estranged from one another, and incapable of bridging the distance. Munro seems to mock her readers' expectations when she turns a story that began as a mystery into a delineation of a scenery that is devoid of any suspense. It is, instead, a representation of the 'underlying dreadfulness' stated by Tennessee Williams. The possible crime that briefly disturbed it eventually serves to enhance the impression of dull stagnation.

25 The human potential for violence alluded to in both “The Peace of Utrecht” and “Open Secrets” is further pronounced in the Gothic character of Munro's story “Runaway,” which also investigates hidden desires and not-so-hidden domestic terrors. “Runaway” exploits Gothic archetypes in a subversive way, and it likewise features a rather eerie, supernatural encounter. The story was first published in 2004, in Alice Munro’s identically titled short story collection. On the surface, the story narrates a young woman's failed attempt to break free from a troubled marriage with the help of an older, more sophisticated female friend. Upon closer examination, however, Carla's – the young woman's – return to her husband suggests a correlation between submission and security. Her homecoming may limit her autonomy, but it also provides her with the reassuring feeling that there is something, and someone, to care about. The comfort of a familiar unhappiness prevails over the vague temptation of freedom – or so it seems. Munro's dense and concise narration suggests a number of different explanations for Carla's eventual decision to stay with her husband.

26 I suggest reading the three main characters as ironically subverted versions of Gothic stock characters. Carla, the young wife, Clark, her husband, and Sylvia, the older friend,

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are representations of such archetypes as the damsel in distress, the dark lover, and the wise woman, respectively. All three characters are entangled in a triangle of suppressed desires and contested power relations.

27 At the beginning of the story, Carla is introduced as a person who enjoys “the rhythm of her regular chores” (Munro 2006: 5). She takes pleasure in the knowledge that she has a set occupation, and attends to her routine of tasks. These tasks include cleaning the little horse barn of their trailer park home, and caring for the tourists who come for a horse ride. Carla's third obligation serves to describe the character of her husband Clark, because Clark had fights not just with the people he owed money to. His friendliness, compelling at first, could suddenly turn sour. There were places he would not go into, where he always made Carla go, because of some row. [...] “You flare up,” said Carla. “That's what men do.” (Munro 2006: 6)

28 Clark's ill-natured demeanour defines Carla's crucial function in their relationship. Her emotional composure and quiet compliance form the counterbalance to Clark's irritable, unpleasant, and self-absorbed personality. Deeply ironic, the stability she contributes to their living is precisely the defining feature of the middle-class existence she fled when she married Clark, a surly, taciturn riding teacher whom her stepfather called a “loser [...]. One of those drifters” (Munro 2006: 28-29). Her parents' disapproval positively boosted Carla's perception of Clark as a dark, romantic rebel. He represented a challenge which appealed to teenage Carla's longing for heightened sensation. She dropped her plans to become a veterinarian and instead agreed to establish their own riding school with Clark, somewhere in the country, to lead a more “authentic life” (Munro 2006: 33). Now, after living for several years in a trailer park, she has come to realize that the romantic excitement she had felt “was probably just sex” (Munro 2006: 28). Clark turned out not to be the “gypsy rover” (Munro 2006: 28) Carla had fantasized about; his menacing attitude and his casual cruelties frighten her: “I am not going to let you off the hook, Carla.” [...] “Just don't be mad at me,” she said. “I'm not mad. I hate when you're like this, that's all.” “I'm like this because you're mad.” “Don't tell me what I am. You're choking me. Start supper.” (Munro 2006: 11)

29 Clark's speech patterns illustrate that his dominant position in their relationship springs from his complete disregard for Carla's uneasiness. Clark cannot endure defiance from anybody. In their conversations, he tries to outwit rather than communicate with Carla, forcing her to submit to his regime of domestic terror. Carla has developed means to “deflect” (Munro 2006: 14) his manipulations rather than arguing her point. She also tends to avoid direct confrontation. Her reluctance to win one of their verbal contests results from her sensing that such a defeat would impair what is left of his romantic appeal; it would also, however, further provoke his brutality.

30 Sylvia, the third person to enter the scene, is a middle-aged and emancipated college teacher who had hired Carla as a help during the long illness of her late husband. Her education and social status seem to depict her as superior to Carla, as someone Carla might consult when she is in trouble. Yet, Sylvia has developed a crush on the younger woman, who reminds her of “certain girls she had known in high school – those who were bright but never too bright, easy athletes but not strenuously competitive,

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buoyant but not rambunctious. Naturally happy” (Munro 2006: 18). Sylvia despises Clark, and when Carla breaks down in front of her, crying about her miserable marriage, she offers help. She arranges a bus trip and temporary accommodation for Carla in Toronto. Yet Sylvia's readiness to help the young woman derives from her being appalled at Carla's noisy fit rather than from an earnest desire to end Carla's obvious unhappiness: “Sylvia could not help feeling how, with every moment of this show of misery, the girl made herself more ordinary, more like one of those soggy students in her [...] office” (Munro 2006: 22).

31 It is indeed a show that Sylvia witnesses, for Carla's despair actually results from Clark's plans to blackmail Sylvia. In order to excite some passionate response from her husband, Carla had invented a bedtime story about how Sylvia's late husband had molested her – a narrative to stimulate Clark's and Carla's more intimate moments. Clark, however, has decided to use the story in order to gain some material profit as well. He forces his wife to visit Sylvia, where he wants her to repeat the tale. He expects Sylvia to pay a large sum to hush up the alleged harassment. Far from really wanting to leave her husband, but unable to reveal the truth, Carla breaks down in front of Sylvia in order to escape from the imminent danger of being revealed to be a liar.

32 In her review of the story, Angie Kritenbrink recognizes Carla and Sylvia as stock characters of Alice Munro: the young woman unnecessarily dependent on love, and the older, more intellectual woman who has her own emotional burden to deal with (Kritenbrink 2007: 1). These characters are rather sarcastic adaptations of the Gothic archetypes of the damsel in distress, and the wise woman, respectively. As far as Clark is concerned, his literary function encompasses features of both dark lover and villain: Carla has envisaged her husband as romantic lover, while Sylvia sees him as a villain who abuses his wife. Munro is darkly ironic again, when she constructs him as a jerk who lacks the capacity for either.

33 In “Runaway,” Munro resorts to Gothic elements in a story otherwise composed in a realistic narrative mode. Her subversive rendering of Gothic stereotypes, as well as the presence of an imminent danger that suffuses the narration, contribute to an uncanny, foreboding atmosphere. Gothic elements are employed as direct references to a fear that informs the characters' actions. Moreover, Munro uses Gothic features to show both that her characters rely on creative inventions, and that these imaginations are fictitious. Gothic references stress the narrative capability of the characters, as well as the fictional nature of their conceptions. Munro's adaptation of elements of a literary genre which is, after all, obsessed with a decidedly artificial and exaggerated representation of hidden fears and suppressed desires can be read as an allusion to a metafictional connection between imagination and reality. Here, Munro extends the focal point of every short story, the question of “What is it that happened?” in order to ask 'What do you believe has happened? And has it really happened, or has it been merely an idea in one of the character's imagination?'.

34 “Runaway” is very much concerned with the gap between reality and the characters' imaginative inventions. Throughout the story, reality, gradually revealed by a heterodiegetic narrator, is compared with the characters' embellished versions both of one another, and of their lives. All three characters depend on fictitious, romantic improvements of their simple routine, but romance is presented as a striking contrast to realism in Munro's stories. Sylvia and Carla struggle to overcome what critic Coral Ann Howells has called “the untranslatability of romantic fantasy” (Howells 1998: 18).

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Ultimately, they both fail. While Clark's somewhat plain idea of an extra attraction is extra money, Carla and Sylvia use fiction to add a certain glamour to their ordinary existence. Carla's invented incident of molestation is not quintessentially different from Sylvia's artificial image that draws Carla as a 'naturally happy' girl. The key to understanding their actions is the recognition that neither wants her fiction to become disclosed for what it is. Therefore, Sylvia is eager to get rid of the weeping Carla. Being confronted with the young woman's ostentatious misery threatens to destroy her vision of Carla's allegedly careless vivacity. Likewise, Carla's departure to Toronto is a flight from the unexpected results of her manipulations much rather than an attempt to take life into her own hands.

35 Therefore, the Gothic references highlight the breach between the characters' fantasies and the reality of the story. This is sometimes rather funny, for example when Carla recalls that in high school, “[s]he had been one of those dorky girls” (Munro 2006: 27) rather than the 'naturally happy' teenager of Sylvia's fancy. Likewise, there is a lot of amusement to be derived from the idea that Carla imagines her husband as a dark, romantic lover. Last but not least, Sylvia's response when confronted with the weeping Carla ironically deconstructs the image of the wise woman: Sylvia's independence of mind and her feminist ideals may have been positive assets in her own life, but these achievements become questionable when Sylvia uses them as a pretext to get rid of the desperate Carla. At this moment, the defeated, tragic dimension of the Gothic becomes apparent, because in spite of her flights of fancy, Carla does need help. Up to this point, she has relied on her creative conceptions to sustain herself, but because of Clark's plans to blackmail Sylvia, reality and fiction threaten to become confused.

36 While the ironic adaptations of literary archetypes allude to Gothic semiotics only in a subtle way, the climactic scene in “Runaway” represents an obvious reference to the supernatural, one of the distinguishing features of the Gothic genre. After Carla's return, Clark visits Sylvia in the middle of the night to confront her with the news. He also demands that she stops interfering with his life. Clark attempts to intimidate Sylvia with his physical presence, and seems to succeed when, at the height of tension, a Gothic challenge renders his threatening attitude preposterous: Not far from the house was a wide shallow patch of land that often filled up with night fog at this time of year. The fog was there tonight, had been there all this while. But now at one point there was a change. The fog had thickened, taken on a separate shape, transformed itself into something spiky and radiant. First a live dandelion ball, tumbling forward, then condensing itself into an unearthly sort of animal, pure white, hell-bent, something like a giant unicorn, rushing at them. [...] Then the vision exploded. Out of the fog, and out of the magnifying light – now seen to be that of a car travelling along this back road, probably in search of a place to park – out of this appeared a white goat. A little dancing white goat, hardly bigger than a sheepdog. [...] “It's your goat,” said Sylvia. ”Isn't it your goat?” (Munro 2006: 39)

37 The reappearance of Clark and Carla's petgoat Flora, which had run away from them in a symbolic reference to Carla's own attempt at escape, is described in terms of a mystical apparition. The scene has a particularly Gothic atmosphere, created not only by the white light and the fog, but also by the anticipation of violence that Clark's threatening behaviour had suggested. Both Clark and Sylvia, however, are frightened until they realize that it is only Flora that has come back. For a moment, they share an awkward feeling of wonder, which resolves the tension between them.

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38 At the end of the story, Munro offers yet another subtext, which casts doubts upon the notions and conclusions suggested so far. A few days after her own return, Carla learns incidentally that Flora had come back as well. The reader is left to assume that Clark had killed the goat on his way home, an act which he seems to have concealed from his wife. Reviewer Marion Arnott suggests that Carla does not want to know, that she decides not to see the truth about her husband's brutality (Arnott 2007: 1). I believe, however, that Clark killed the animal because it startled him in a moment when he was threatening Sylvia, and thus ridiculed his self-assured and menacing attitude; in short, it destroyed his fiction. Carla interprets his act of violence as one of the passionate responses from her husband that she so yearns for. To read his brutality as an act of jealousy is, within Carla's fiction of Clark, entirely credible. Therefore, his killing of the she-goat reconciles her to his intimidating demeanour, and helps her to regain the narrative authority required to fictionally improve her husband. Carla indulges in the belief that Clark's passion for her provoked him to shed blood. It is deeply ironic, again, that the sacrificial animal which is used to idolize their bond is – a scapegoat.

39 To sum up, “Runaway” derives its Gothic character from the story's subversive adaptation of Gothic archetypes, from the characters' suppressed and fictionalized desires, and from the human potential for violence as embodied by Clark. And there is another Gothic quality that links up directly with a prominent theme of Canadian literature: I am talking, of course, about the motive of survival. In Alice Munro's stories, the topos of 'survival' combines the Gothic idea that 'fear is possible' with the 'underlying dreadfulness in modern experience' once highlighted by Tennessee Williams. “The Peace of Utrecht,” “Open Secrets,” and “Runaway” all address the mundane, ordinary terror that is lurking behind the civilized façade of small towns. The garrison itself has become a dangerous place that threatens not the physical survival of Munro's characters, but their mental stability. In order to survive, they will have to transgress the limits of Kantian thought – to confront the mysteries of “what lies beyond.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnott, Marion, “Runaway”, 1-4. www.laurahird.com. [http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/ runaway.html] (accessed 26th August, 2007).

Atwood, Margaret, Survival. A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Toronto, Anansi, 1972, 287 p.

---, Strange Things. The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, 126 p.

Cox, Ailsa, Alice Munro, Tavistock, Northcote House Publishers, 2004, 113 p.

Cuddon, J.A., The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, London, Penguin, 1998, 991 p.

Frye, Northrop, “Conclusion”, ed. Carl Klinck, Literary History of Canada, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1977, vol. II., 333-361.

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Gibson, Graeme, “Alice Munro”, Eleven Canadian Novelists, Toronto, Anansi, 1973, 237-264.

Godard, Barbara, “‘Heirs of the Living Body’: Alice Munro and the Question of a Female Aesthetic”, Ed. Judith Miller, The Art of Alice Munro, Waterloo, University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 43-71.

Howells, Coral Ann, Alice Munro, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, 184 p.

Kinder, Hermann, Hilgemann Werner, dtv Atlas Geschichte, Band 1, München, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995, 287 p.

Kritenbrink, Angie, “Review of Alice Munro's Runaway”, 2004, 1-4. identitytheory.com-a literary website, sort of. [http://www.identitytheory.com/lit/angie_munro.php] (accessed 26th August, 2007).

Kröller, Eva-Marie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 292 p.

McCaig, JoAnn, Reading in Alice Munro's Archives, Toronto, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002, 193 p.

Munro, Alice, “The Peace of Utrecht”, ed. Robert Weaver, Selected Canadian Stories. Second Series, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1968, 259-284.

---, “Open Secrets”, Open Secrets, New York, Vintage, 1995, 129-160.

---, “Runaway”, Runaway, London, Vintage, 2006, 3-47.

Nischik, Reingard M., “(Un-)Doing Gender : Alice Munro, ‘Boys and Girls’”, Ed. Reingard M. Nischik, The Canadian Short Story, Rochester, Camden House, 2007, 203-218.

Northey, Margot, The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1976, 131 p.

Rasporich, Beverly, Dance of the Sexes. Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1990, 223 p.

Sucur, Slobodan, “Gothic Literature (1764)”, The Literary Encyclopedia, 2007, 1-9 [http:// www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1216] (accessed 26th August 2008).

---, “Parameters of Gothic Literature (1764)”, The Literary Encyclopedia, 2007, 1-2 [http:// www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1729] (accessed 26th August 2008).

Thomas, Jane (ed.), Bloomsbury Guides to English Literature. Victorian Literature, London, Bloomsbury, 1994, 244 p.

Tischler, Nancy, Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan, New York, Citadel Press, 1961, 44 p.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Margot Northey's reading of early Francophone and Anglophone Canadian texts, The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction, and Margaret Atwood's study Strange Things. The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature.

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article présente une analyse de trois nouvelles – « The Peace of Utrecht » (1968), « Open Secrets » (1994) et « Runaway » (2005) – pour mettre en lumière la dimension gothique de l’œuvre de Munro sous l’angle de la description de l’ambivalence des rapports humains et de la création d’archétypes littéraires que l’on retrouve sous une forme plus ou moins modifiée ou subversive.

AUTHORS

KATRIN BERNDT Katrin Berndt studied English Philology and Ethnology at the University of Leipzig, where she completed her M.A. in 1998. Berndt received her Ph.D. with a thesis on Zimbabwean literature from the University of Bayreuth in 2004. The author of Yoko Ono – In Her Own Write (Marburg, Tectum Verlag, 1999), and of Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction (Bayreuth, Eckhard Breitinger, 2005), she co-edited Words and Worlds: African Writing, Literature, and Society (with Susan Arndt, Trenton (NJ), Africa World Press, 2007). Berndt has published articles on African writing, British literature, Canadian fiction, and popular music. At present, she works as the Chair for English and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Bremen University, where she embarks on her Post-Doc project on friendship in the British novel of the long eighteenth century.

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A Comparative Essay on the Sociology of Literature: Alice Munro’s “Unconsummated Relationships”

Silvia Albertazzi

“Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.” William Faulkner

1 The major achievement of Alice Munro is to have conquered popularity and fame almost all over the world by dedicating her whole production to a rather unpopular and neglected genre: the short story. Short stories – and their longer cousins, novellas – are considered by publishers and booksellers the most difficult to sell literary products. Moreover, since the authors of fiction are preferably canonized for their novels, short stories, thanks to their brevity, find their way onto University syllabuses only as pedagogic devices, to be anthologised, read and discussed in the classroom as samples of an author’s literary craft. According to Canadian critic, Joan McCaig: The reasons for this neglect can be attributed to three factors. First, the short story has had a briefer history, as a literary form, than the novel, and thus has simply not had the time to achieve critical respect. Second, the short story is more popular than the novel, because of its marketability in magazines, and thus is deemed less worthy by critics, [...] Third, the formal properties of the novel more closely inscribe the ideology of the dominant culture, thus making it a more central form. (McCaig 86)

2 It is interesting to note that, to achieve her success, Munro had to challenge all these factors. First of all, she got critical respect for her short stories by disputing the very norms on which all the theorists of short fiction agreed, from Edgar Allan Poe onwards. Then, she took the risk of being popular and highbrow at the same time, writing for

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Canadian feminine magazines at the beginning of her career, while seeking – and eventually obtaining – the attention of the sophisticated readership of The New Yorker. Lastly, through her favorite medium she has been able to convey a lucid and certainly not always politically correct view of men and women, defying not only the ideology of male dominant culture, but also that of female and feminist minority groups. Whilst the traditional short story is concise, its action occupies a very short span of time (actually, almost always it obeys the classical unities of time and space), its plot is very difficult to summarize, being often fragmented and made up with emotions and feelings more than events and deeds, Munro’s stories are longish, their plots cover years and even decades and, even though they are mainly set in rural Ontario, they often relate the passage of the heroines from province to metropolis (and back). Moreover, though seeking the complicity of the reader through a sort of emotional stenography, that is to say the ability to inform the reader through implications and hints (see O’Faolain 144), like the short stories you find in classic collections and anthologies, Munro’s tales, besides proposing visions and provoking emotions, succeed in establishing a link with their audiences, a sort of identification that, according to such practitioners as Frank O’Connor (see O’Connor 18), it is impossible to find with the characters of traditional short fiction.

3 Yet Munro’s fiction highlights also the most peculiar characteristics of the genre, lyrical tone and fragmentation, turning them into her signature: that is to say, her ability to paint the everyday world with sharpness, and lucidity. This, I think, is what John Metcalf meant when he wrote to her: Always when I read your writing I find it operates on me in very much the same way that poetry does […] That there are levels of meaning and compression that are suddenly packed into something, yet, it always seems to flow very naturally from something acutely observed in the first place. (quoted in Martin 192)

4 The short story, which common opinion sees as a “feminine genre,” because its shortness and fragmentariness allow women writers to scribble in their spare time, without having to sustain the long concentration required by the novel, is initially a forced choice for Munro. Yet soon it becomes a way to poetically explore subaltern life – be it the feminine universe, provincial life in Canada, or the lonesome reality of the terminally ill, and the outcasts. JoAnn McCaig reminds us that, as Gail Scott observes in Shaping a Vehicle for her Use, “a woman's life is never simple; she must put aside her writing to do a million other things. Indeed, her socialization has taught her to keep her mind so cluttered with details that it is often difficult for her to concentrate for whole days at a time in order to deal with a longer work like a novel. Then too a story is easier to sell than a longer piece” (McCaig 91). McCaig subsequently explains: “Distraction, interruption, spasm versus meditation, continuity, constancy. It is easy to see how the circumstances of many women's lives do not translate too well into the ideological form of the novel” (ibid.).

5 It is Alice Munro herself who caps the point: I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out of the window. (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alice_Munro)

6 It is interesting to observe that, quite recently, Anne Tyler, another famous contemporary writer who was launched at the start of her career as the epitome of the scribbling housewife (even though she resented being referred to as such), used more or less the same words when talking about her attitude towards writing. After

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considering that she had “no secret hobbies or extra-curricular activities at all,” she concluded that this happened because she was “too busy daydreaming” (quoted in Allardice). Much earlier, when she was still “an author 8:05 to 3:30,” she had stressed the same point using Munro’s very same image: It seems to me often that I am sort of looking from a window at something at a great distance and wondering what it is. But I’m not willing to actually go into it. I would rather sit behind the windowsill and write about it. So all my curiosity has to be answered within myself instead of by crossing the street and asking what’s going on. (quoted in Michaels)

7 Yet, while Munro translates the fragments of the life she sees from her window into (hyper)realist short stories, Tyler weaves the same fragments into the complex tapestry of a novel, by way of “daydreaming” the stories they generate from. Both reclusive to the verge of misanthropy, both interested in Lives of Girls and Women, both marked by a past of housekeeping, childcare and almost secret writing, both great fans of Eudora Welty (whose influence they both acknowledge), both devoted to one place as the favorite settings of their stories (Western Ontario for Munro; Baltimore for Tyler), Tyler and Munro practice their craft in almost opposite ways, the former following the steps of Jane Austen, the latter treading in the wake of Chekhov. Therefore, confronting their different attitudes towards writing may help understand Munro’s world and her way of looking at it.

8 According to Frank O’Connor’s much quoted definition, “the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population group” (O’Connor 18): neither heroes nor heroines, but a sort of atypical humanity, whose voice can be heard only by those who deeply know solitude and isolation. This applies without difficulty to Munro’s short fiction. On the one hand, women are a submerged population in a man’s world; on the other, Munro’s long experience of provincial life gives her that “intense awareness of human loneliness” (ibid. 19) which, according to O’Connor, constitutes the essence of modern short fiction. As McCaig observes: To be a woman is to be a person whose material social relations define her as subordinate, inferior, and often inexplicable. “Unfathomable” is a word that Munro gives Del Jordan to describe the lives of girls and women; critical studies of Munro's work bear such titles as Carrington's Controlling the Uncontrollable and Miller's Saying the Unsayable. Such descriptors reflect the contradictory positions of author (“control” and “say”) and woman (“uncontrollable” as well as uncontrolling, and “unsayable” as well as unsaying or silenced). (McCaig 64)

9 In Munro’s fiction provincial life appears a locus of change and continuity, whose “submerged population” is faced with the problems of identity and fragmentation characterizing today’s postcolonial (global) reality. “In small towns [...] you have no privacy at all. You have a role, a character, but one that other people have made up for you. Other people have already made your self,” Munro told an interviewer in 1990. Yet, if it is true that many of her characters try to escape from their provincial confinement, almost always paying a hard price in humiliations and defeats, it is even truer that her stories, dealing with the utter subjectivity of truth, describe our very inability to see ourselves through other people’s eyes, that is to say, to conform utterly to the mask other people have applied to our faces. “‘Everybody in the community is on stage for all the other people’ [...] There’s a constant awareness of people watching and listening. And [...] the less you reveal, the more highly thought of you are.” Munro said,

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“There is a terrific isolation, but there are always attempts to bridge it [...]” (quoted in Rothstein). As McCaig wrote: It is possible that in placing her work alongside that of the great regionalists of the American South, such as Faulkner, McCullers, Welty, and O'Connor, Munro believes that she will transcend her own Canadian-ness, and achieve “universal” authorial status. [...] Besides, it is one of the ironies of artistic life in a small cultural milieu like Canada that “Canadian is itself all too often equated with “inferior” or “provincial” and that a Canadian artist, whether a musician, actor, or writer, does not truly achieve what Foucault calls the author function until s/he is accorded international, particularly American, acclaim. (McCaig 42)

10 In the same way, though cherishing a urban setting for her novels, Anne Tyler privileges a town that, being rather small for American standards, allows the representation of all the drawbacks as well as the advantages of provincial life. For both authors, provincial setting is essential for the reflection on marginalized lives: to paraphrase Spivak, only in the province can the subaltern see, even at the cost of her integrity and respectability. Actually, Munro likes to say that her stories reflect the lucid vision of the survivor: A subject race has a kind of clarity of vision and I feel that women have always had a clarity of vision which men were denied. And, in a way, this is a gift, it goes along with a lack of power: and I valued that very much – the value to be able to see clearly. (quoted in Wallace 53)

11 Tyler would probably agree with these opinions. Yet, instead of showing the strength of women through their sound (not to say cynical) acting in everyday life, she prefers to depict the weakness of men, their being helpless creatures, often on the verge of quiet insanity. In this way, while Munro’s stories have been found depressive by some critics, Tyler’s novels are even too light for some others’ tastes. Yet in both cases, the authors adhere to the poetics of their favourite genres: since the short story catches the dramatic event, not the totality of human life, to illuminate a situation, a concise, essential and evocative rendering of a character’s view is more valuable than many descriptive words. In short fiction, time is a global entity; it does not influence the action in a significant way because the fictional development happens at the crucial moment: the epiphany, as Joyce would say, of the story (see O’Faolain 144). Whilst in the novel the author strives to reach an identification between reader and character(s), in the short story a sort of complicity between them is sought for. Consequently, the short story does not propose a narrative complete with well-crafted facts, feelings, and dialogues, but on the contrary, it provokes emotions by telling unfathomable visions. This is what a reviewer, Nona Balakian, has described as “mov[ing] swiftly from the larger events to the evanescent turning point” (Balakian), referring to Munro’s style.

12 Munro challenges the norms of her chosen genre, she changes the cards on the table, modifying the rules during the game. As a consequence, she has been judged “hard work,” a wearing author, “because she chooses to add depth and width, to flash back and forward, to cross-reference to other stories, other incidents to tease with her little asides” (Keegan). To appreciate how Munro simultaneously uses and subverts the conventions of the short story, and to understand the manifold nuances of her lucid vision, it is worth having a look at the two stories that stand as turning points in her career: “The Peace of Utrecht” (1959), which is to be found in the collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), and “Royal Beatings” (1978) that, before being collected in Who Do

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you Think you Are? (The Beggar Maid for the U.S. reading public), was the first story of Munro’s to appear in the New Yorker.

13 Written shortly after her mother’s death, “The Peace of Utrecht” is a strongly autobiographic piece centred on the relation between two sisters, Helen and Maddy, and their mother suffering from Parkinson’s disease (like Munro’s own mother). Munro explains: I had a lot of conflict with [my mother] [...]because she had an ideal of good behaviour. She wanted her daughters to be successful but also she wanted them to be sexually pure. And ladylike [...] She wanted me to shine in a way I was not prepared to. [...] you were struggling with a sick person who, emotionally, holds all the cards. (quoted in Eidemariam)

14 Through a series of flash backs and interior monologues, the story relates the different attitudes of the two sisters towards their mother’s illness, their humiliation facing their mother’s strange behaviour and the “double-edged” shame they felt for it, a shame that, as Ailsa Cox says, is “a dialogic process [since] Munro’s heroines are alternatively mortified by their mothers’ behaviour and ashamed of their response” (Cox 24). Set in an utterly feminine universe – mother, two daughters, two spinster aunts - “The Peace of Utrecht” starts with the return home a few months after her mother’s funeral of the sister Munro identifies with, Helen, the one who escaped, because she was unable to cope with the demanding reality of her mother’s degenerative illness. As Rosemary Sullivan observes: In “The Peace of Utrecht” [Munro] creates a world of women: the fierce, tragically egocentric mother, stubbornly feeding on her daughters; the timid spinster aunts steeped in the discretion and circumlocution that leads women to search every encounter for nuance and subtext; the sisters, resisting female rituals of emotionalism, yet pitted against each other. One sister saves herself at the cost of enormous guilt; the other, never having learned to demand a life for herself, is a victim. (Sullivan XV)

15 Referring to her experience with her own mother and its rendering in “The Peace of Utrecht,” Munro confesses: If I had been a different kind of woman, with more immediate warmth, instead of this inner fire, I could have been very helpful to her – not in physical terms, but in day-to-day communication, instead of leaving her alone. (quoted in Eidemariam)

16 Blaming her “inner fire” for her unwillingness to take care of her mother, Munro reinforces the idea of the writer as an outsider, whose sensibility is no use in “day-today communication”. Actually, all her stories deal with faults of interaction, or better, with the impossibility of establishing valuable relationships for women who, like Munro, look at the world with outstanding lucidity, making no concessions either to sentiments or emotions.

17 In “The Peace of Utrecht,” as in most of her short stories, the tone is colloquial, the narration in the first person and the present tense. It is as if the woman who says “I” were talking to a friend – or a group of friends - telling the events that befell her during her return home, and digressing to the memories that her coming home unveiled. Yet you will not detect hints of nostalgia or regret in the unfolding of past situations. The narrator looks back at her mother’s terrible illness and at its unbearable consequences with dry eyes. For Munro, as for her narrative alter-ego, “[M]emory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories” (see Wikiquote). In this sense, whilst her personal experience is translated

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into a story to be read by other people (e.g. the reading public) in a fictional version, inside that very story the main character tells “a somewhat different version” of her own mother’s suffering to an unknown audience. Paradoxically, then, Munro’s much praised lucidity comes from the ambiguity resulting from this double retelling of her own story. The version told by Munro is formulated to get our complicity. In her narrator’s version, on the contrary, we find the unpleasant details that we would like to consider products of Munro’s imagination are not inherent to her autobiographic experience. The stenographic convention which is at the basis of short story writing, whilst reinforcing its central role in the constitution of the reading pact, suggests in Munro the understatements, the implications and allusions of feminine talking. This technique is apparent from the very beginning of the story: I have been at home now for three weeks and it has not been a success. Maddy and I, though we speak cheerfully of our enjoyment of so long and intimate a visit, will be relieved when it is over. Silences disturb us. We laugh immoderately. I am afraid – very likely we are both afraid – that when the moment comes to say goodbye, unless we are very quick to kiss, and fervently mockingly squeeze each other’s shoulders, we will have to look straight into the desert that is between us and acknowledge that we are not merely indifferent; at heart we reject each other, and as for the past we make so much of sharing we do not really share it at all, each of us keeping it jealously to herself, thinking privately that the other has turned alien, and forfeited her claim. (DHS 190)

18 Descriptions and characterization are suggested through meaningful details, as though the author wanted to leave the task of portrayal and depiction to her reader. Yet the characters, with their overlapping subjectivities, seem to deny representation. In the case of “The Peace of Utrecht,” illustration and characterisation are prevented and complicated by “the close identification between mother and daughter [which] confuses ego boundaries, making it relatively difficult for women to construct an autonomous self [...] The daughter’s identity is inextricably bound to the maternal; Helen doubles for her mother in the dream. Yet the mother’s inner self remains mysterious, and her image evades representation” (Cox 23). The critic Robert Martin explains: She achieves thematic richness by establishing oppositions, incongruities and paradoxes, often breaking down chronological sequences or allowing the sophisticated adult to recall the freshness and vivacity of the child's experience in order to juxtapose such contraries as the strange and the familiar and the touchable and the mysterious, or alien. She develops a dialectical interplay that defines the relation between the contending opposites in a spiral movement that involves progress and retreat, affirmation and irony; to achieve this she typically places her protagonist between two forces or loyalties, and the resulting creative friction produces the dramatic developments and solutions that we see in Del, Rose, and others, who, being intelligent and imaginative, go through sea-changes like those undergone by Henry James's Fleda, Strether and Maggie. (Martin 205)

19 As a matter of fact, with her dynamic art Munro avoids the risk of preserving experience “in anecdote, as in a kind of mental cellophane” (DHS 193), as Helen and Maddy do when they remember the same episodes of their childhood in different versions. Whilst the sisters try more or less unconsciously to put the past under diverse bell jars, Munro allows an ever changing reality to mark her reconstruction of the facts. Writing life as it unwinds itself, Munro stays away from the danger of excessive stylisation, while asking the complicity of her reader to cooperate in the composition of the story – filling up possible gaps, interpreting allusions and implications, imagining

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descriptions and dialogues. An enthusiastic reader of Munro’s, Alex Keegan relates his reading experience with these words: Munro’s stories [...] seem to challenge how I put together my thoughts, how I see or imagine the inter-connectivity of life, how I ‘construct’, but don’t construct, my constructions – where my unconscious debates with my conscious. [...] Munro likes to use my expectations against me. She knows my ‘rules’ of perception and reading/ absorption/expectation and turns them back on me like the throw of a skilled martial artist, first to disturb me [...] but then to reveal to me [...] that there are connections in life which are huge and important even when they are never seen or acknowledged, there, but simply not brought into the right kind of light, of focus, or attention to reveal them as driving forces rather than symptom. (Keegan)

20 Actually, Munro does not carve her stories of provincial mothers and daughters in an Austenian ivory chunk: her short stories are not perfectly crafted miniatures. Contrary to Anne Tyler, who has been defined as “the modern Jane Austen,” in an almost Eliot- like way, Munro substitutes the description of experience with its image, its objective correlative. “I don’t really understand a novel” Ms. Munro says. “I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story. There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away.” (quoted in Rothstein)

21 There are no proper plots in most of her stories; it is almost impossible to sum up, say, “The Peace of Utrecht.” The tension Munro looks for comes from an almost hypnotic evocative diction, the way in which, for instance, the story of Helen and Maddy, “Between observation and memoir, past and present, [the narrative] enters the timeless zone of dream” (Cox 22).

22 As is the case of most short fiction, at the end of “The Peace of Utrecht” Munro leaves her story in the reader’s hands: now more than ever, her/his complicity is required. The reader must reflect on what s/he has just read, meditate on it and eventually carry it on. Like the old story tellers used to say, “stories never end: they are just interrupted.” Munro’s open-ended stories can also be considered typical of postcoloniality. As McCaig observes: Like many post-colonial writers, Munro subverts imperial linguistic authority in a variety of subtle ways - with her digressive narratives, her choice of the “fragmentary” genre of the short story, and especially in her open-ended and paradoxical use of language. (McCaig 121)

23 In this sense, not only do we appreciate how “the genre issue has links to gender and nationality or colonial status” (McCaig 122), but we also realize that “the flexible, open- ended qualities of the short story may offer a transforming potential, an ability to ask the unspoken question, to raise new subject matter” (McCaig 95). Finally, on a personal level, if it is true that with “The Peace of Utrecht” Munro freed her mother into a “personal story”, it is even much truer that turning her experience into fictional material did not free her from her mother, who keeps “cropping up” in her stories, as Munro herself acknowledges (see Bruckner). The mother-daughter dialectic never ends: “though fraught with personal danger [it] is artistically productive” (Cox 23), since“ it mirrors the ambivalence between self and Other, intimacy and estrangement [and] is deeply implicated in the evolution of self-awareness” (ibid.). “[...] she is the one I am trying to get,” Munro confessed later, through one of her characters in the story “The Ottawa Valley”, “it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close

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[...] she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, applying what skill I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.” (SBM 197)

24 Munro has often affirmed that she did not intend to become a short story writer. Yet even her so-called novel, Lives of Girls and Women, is a series of related stories, and the same applies to The Beggar Maid, another hybrid collection where all the stories are centred around the same two characters, Rose and her step-mother Flo. Here more than ever Munro disrupts the canonical rules of short fiction: allegiance to the unities of time, space, and action; linear chronology; absence of flashbacks and flash-forwards. This leads to a sort of mock-novel that the reader can either praise without conditions or utterly dislike. On the one hand, Munro’s fans appreciate the way she “creates novels within short-stories [...], novels across her short-stories [...], novels built from single collections of short stories [...] and most importantly, her one large novel, all her stories combined, a life-time’s work, a life” (Keegan). On the other, her detractors, objecting that authors like Munro are no more than “Prize winning puppet masters and mistresses who take artifice for art, drabness for durance, and detail for deity” (Duciel), find that these short stories linked together are “a lie that perpetuates the lie: in the gloaming of human existence, all is murk and murk is all” (ibid.).

25 Known all around the world – apart from the USA – as Who Do you Think You Are?, the collection The Beggar Maid contains the second Munro’s “watershed” story, “Royal Beatings,” based on the beatings the author received from her father as a child, and, just like “The Peace of Utrecht,” written only after the death of the parent who inspired it. Here Rose, Munro’s persona, experiences, like many other characters imagined by Munro, that “lack of genuine communication between family members, friends and lovers resulting in “unconsummated relationships (a term that originates in “The Peace of Utrecht” and applies to situations in every Munro story) and the resultant sense of isolation” (Pfaus 14). If the theme is not particularly original for Munro’s standards, the story marks a breakthrough in her career being the first she ever sold to the New Yorker. It is with “Royal Beatings,” then, that Munro the New Yorker story teller was born, meaning with this “a writer that devotes her career to what we may call the New Yorker short story, that being a story of a certain length, a certain tone, a certain character, and a certain condescension” (Sikeston). Small wonder then that the collection where the story is reprinted should have had a very complicated story-line and should have faced a number of difficulties and drawbacks before seeing the light of day. In her volume Reading In: the Alice Munro Archives, Joan McCaig devotes a large section to the publishing and editorial vicissitudes of the book. Here it is enough to quote the conclusions that McCaig reaches, at the end of a very detailed archival research. Given the archival evidence I have presented, I would argue that the authoritative text is in itself a fiction, as are final creative leaps, at least leaps dissociated from cultural pressures to make money, crack the American market, write novels, think like a man, focus on the growth of the individual while subtly denouncing bourgeois values yet supporting the dominant ideology of secular humanism-all the while pretending to care only about “Art” and not at all about money. Given the struggles Munro underwent to produce this text, the irony must have been delicious: in this year of canon-formation at Calgary, from which she was excluded by genre, the Governor General's Award for the best work of fiction in English was given to a short story sequence called Who Do You Think You Are? (McCaig 109)

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26 As a matter of fact, if it is ironic to think that Munro gets the most prestigious Canadian literary award in the same year she is excluded from the Canadian Academic canon, being “only” a short story writer, it is even more ironical to note that that very award is given to a collection of stories masked as a novel (or rather to a novel composed of a series of short stories). Here again McCaig brilliantly interprets the paradoxical situation. On the one hand, “Who Do You Think You Are? is the last “linked” work Munro has produced [...] Munro’s final and glorious bow to the privileging of the novel over the short story. Once she has fully entered into her habitus and located her art in the short story form [...] she, like Flaubert in his own time, has transformed the field” (McCaig 108). On the other, “The wrangling over the book’s title provides an image of the differences between the Canadian and American literary markets; unlike Canadians, who are in the process of building a national literature, Americans already know exactly who they are” (McCaig 77).

27 From this moment on, the only novels Munro will write are only those each one of us calls her/his life in her short stories. As she explains: Everybody’s doing their own novel of their own lives. The novel changes – at first we have a romance, a very satisfying novel that has a rather simple technique, and then we grow out of that, and we end up with a very conscious, discordant, very contemporary kind of novel. I think that what happens to a lot of us in middle age is that we can’t really hang out to our fiction any more. (quoted in Rothstein)

28 This is apparent in Who Do You Think You Are, where we follow Rose’s life all through these stages, “in stories written with Munro’s characteristic use of split time with flashbacks, and flashforwards, with each ending in the present reality” (Pfaus 64). As for “Royal Beatings”, the attention to death, violence and the dismal reality of those living “straddling the river, belonging nowhere [...] on the straggling tail end of the main street” (SBM 6), whilst positively shocking the sophisticated readers of the New Yorker, annoys the detractors of short fiction, who find that Munro’s short story, every bit as cleverly constructed, is like one of those enormous color prints that Kodak hangs in public places, announcing that – whatever you may think – THIS is reality [...] Fabergé eggs that for all their golden perfection reek and reek of authorial bile and disdain. Yes, by God, I shall force these already small souls into these impossibly small spaces and then have them perform their few tricks which they know to perfection. (Duciel)

29 Yet it is at this point of her career, as we have already noted, that Munro abandons the idea of writing a novel for good, and accepts herself as a short story writer. According to JoAnn McCaig, her choice of short fiction as a privileged genre obeys precise reasons of gender and sexual politics: A novel is linear, it is a road or a rope, a form for people who think a certain way [...]. Munro's habitus, however, leads her to a “feeling”, which is her honest view of her process, but one that is not “intellectually respectable”, not “precise”. Her stories have a “soul”, and the image of their construction is, for her, the domestic image of a house. The gender implications of the opposition of these two ways of describing the genres are obvious. (McCaig 94)

30 Here McCaig is referring to a much quoted pronouncement by Munro, who, in a short essay called “What is real?”, compares the function of a story to that of a house. It is worth noting that this essay was written by Munro in 1982, in the wake of the controversy aroused in Wingham, her native small town, after the publication of Who Do You Think You Are? (particularly “Royal Beatings”). Many people were offended by the way she had fictionalized their provincial reality and, last but not least, called them

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“a community of outcasts” in an interview. In December 1981, in the Wingham Advance- Times an editorial expressed all the rage of Wingham people who felt so “mistreated” by Munro. Sadly enough Wingham people have never had much chance to enjoy the excellence of [Munro's] writing ability because we have repeatedly been made the butt of soured and cruel introspection on the part of a gifted writer, the editor wrote, “[...] It seems that something less than greatness impells her to return again and again to a time and place in her life where bitterness warped her personality.” (quoted in McCaig 115)

31 In response to this harsh criticism, Munro wrote a short essay where she defended her position as a writer of fiction, who uses “bits of what is real, in the sense of being really there and really happening, in the world” (Munro 1982, 226), and transforms it “into something that is really there and really happening in [her] story” (ibid.). To better explain how this “transformation” of reality into story works, she used the metaphor of a house: [...] I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It’s more like a house. Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to explain what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people. (Munro 1982, 224)

32 Thinking of how Henry James, and Tahar Ben Jelloun have used the same metaphor to illustrate their poetics, we cannot agree with McCaig, who sees the house as a feminine image. (McCaig 94) Conversely, comparing Munro’s construction of the house of fiction with a metaphor used by Tyler to describe her own poetics might be useful to detect the different attitudes of these two very “feminine” authors. Munro stresses the process of building up and the “Material” used: I’ve got to build up, a house, a story, to fit around the indescribable “feeling” that is the soul of the story, [...] Then I start accumulating the material and putting it together. Some of the material I may have lying around already, in memories and observations, and some I invent [...] (Munro 1982, 224),

33 Tyler speaks about populating the houses of fiction: [...] what it seems to me I’m doing is populating a town. Pretty soon it’s going to be just full of lots of people I’ve made up. None of the people I write about are people I know. That would be no fun. And it would be very boring to write about me. Even if I led an exciting life, why live it again on paper? I want to live other lives. I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances. (quoted in Michaels)

34 It is easy to note that for Munro what really matters is the structure of the story, “the house,” where she, the author, can “move back and forth, and settle [...] for a while.” The accent is on the craft of writing (which is equated to building a house) and the writer’s personality. This leads to writing about oneself, and inventing stories starting from actual deeds and characters. The house is an inner space from which she can look at “what is outside” in a different way, so that what she sees from her window is and is not Wingham: it is Wingham as Jubilee or Carstairs or Hanratty or West Hanratty. On the contrary, being mainly interested in her characters, Tyler “build[s] a house for them and then [...] move[s] on to the next house” (ibid.). Her town, though unquestionably Baltimore, is populated by imaginary people who have nothing to do with their creator’s real life. In this sense, Tyler appears as the prototype of the

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novelist whose task is creating imaginary worlds, whilst Munro is an up-to-date story teller who “takes what [s]he tells from experience – [her/]his own or that reported by others” (Benjamin 87). Both “resident” writers, according to Benjamin’s use of the term, they see different worlds from their windows – or, better, they have a different way of looking out of their windows. “I guess I work from a combination of curiosity and distance.”, Tyler told an interviewer [...], “It seems to me often that I am sort of looking from a window at something at a great distance and wondering what it is. But I’m not willing to actually go into it. I would rather sit behind the windowsill and write about it. So all my curiosity has to be answered within myself instead of by crossing the street and asking what’s going on.” (quoted in Michaels)

35 Neither does Munro cross the street and ask what’s going on. From her window, she looks at the view outside and not at a great distance. The View from Castle Rock is an exception which may signal a change in perspective since the first part of the volume from 2006 is partially narrated from the point of view of a male narrator whose father looks into the distance to try and catch a glimpse of America. In most of Munro’s collections, however, the narrator’s voice (Munro’s persona) is a woman’s, looking out of the window at what is around her. In the wake of Antonio Gramsci, Gayatri Spivak would probably call Munro’s clear gaze on what is around her a “subaltern vision.” It is this very gaze that differentiates Munro’s universe from Tyler’s. Even though Munro’s fiction has been defined “novelistic,” owing to her belief that “knowing her characters so completely is essential to creating them” (Paul Sullivan), her attitude towards her characters is radically different from Tyler’s. Whilst the latter, looking at the world from a certain distance, finds elements of mystery and surprise in the ordinary life (in a way, she fictionalises the “infra-ordinary,” as Perec would say), Munro sees reality with the precision and lucidity of a Gramscian “subaltern.” This leads, in the first case, to “a gentle reminder of the goodness to be found in the most ordinary lives” (Allardice); in the second, to a sharpness of vision that does not shun the most disagreeable aspects of human life and emotions. Tyler’s work is characterised by the feeling of a genuine love for humanity and a lively curiosity for its most peculiar aspects. On the contrary, Munro, lacking Tyler’s tendency to forgive her character’s mistakes, depicts a world of often unsympathetic people caught in the net of their ambitions and desires. A novel by Tyler always leaves you with the idea that, all in all, the world is not so bad, being full of ordinary miracles. A story by Munro tells you that behind its shiny façade the world is a weird place inhabited by people who, behind the masks they wear in society, are not to be trusted, and not capable of establishing genuine relationships with each other. Many years ago, concluding a moving piece on Billie Holiday, the poet Amiri Baraka (then still Leroi Jones), wrote a sentence that might be interpreted as a fit response to Munro’s fiction: “Sometimes you are afraid to listen to this lady” (Jones 25).

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Cox, Ailsa, Alice Munro, Tavistock, Northcote House, 2004, 113 p.

Croft, Robert W, An Anne Tyler Companion, Westport CT, Greenwood, 1998. [http:// www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=106898673] (accessed 25 July 2008).

Duciel, Temple, “Lambent Realism”, Magellan’s Log, Culture Counterculture Anticulture. [www.texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog51/munro.htm] (accessed 25 July 2008).

Edemariam, Aida, “Riches of a double life”, The Guardian, 4 October 2003.

Jones, Leroi, Black Music, New York, Morrow, 1967, 222 p.

Keegan, Alex, “Alice Munro: The Short Answer”. [www.eclectica.org/v2n5/keegan_munro.html]

Martin, W. R., Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel, Edmonton Alta, University of Alberta Press, 1987. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=54805725] (accessed 25 July 2008).

McCaig, JoAnn, Reading In: Alice Munro's Archives. Waterloo Ont, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=111905140] (accessed 25 July 2008).

Michaels, Marguerite, 8 May 1977, “Anne Tyler, Writer 8:05 to 3:30”, The New York Times.

Munro, Alice [1968], Dance of the Happy Shades, New York, Vintage Books, 1998, 224 p.

---, Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, Toronto, McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1974, 246 p.

---, The Beggar Maid Stories of Flo & Rose, New York, Vintage Books, 2004, 210 p. (1978, Who Do You Think You Are?).

O’Connor, Frank [1963], The Lonely Voice, London, Melville, 2004, 224 p.

O’Faolain, Sean, The Short Story, London, Collins, 1948.

Pfaus, B., Alice Munro, Ottawa, Golden Dog Press, 1984, 97 p.

Rothstein, Mervyn, “Canada’s Alice Munro Finds Excitment in Short-Story Form”, The New York Times, 10 November 1986.

Sikeston, Sylvia, “Love in a Field of Nettles”, Magellan’s Log. Culture Counterculture Anticulture. [www.texaschapbookpress.com/magellanslog51/munro.htm] (accessed 25 July 2008).

Simon, Linda, “Another Little Story Comes along - A Profile of Alice Munro”, World and I, 207, July 2002, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5002477379] (accessed 25 July 2008).

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Simpson, Mona, “True North: A Career-Spanning Anthology Reveals Again Why Alice Munro Is the Living Writer Most Likely to Be Read in a Hundred Years”, The Atlantic Monthly: 128+, December 2006, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5018417042] (accessed 25 July 2008).

Sullivan, Paul, “A Sense of Place: Alice Munro Has Made a Home for Herself in the World of Short Fiction”, Book: 11+, Nov.-Dec. 2001, [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000922400 ] (accessed 25 July 2008).

Sullivan, Rosemary, “Introduction” to Stories by Canadian Women, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1984, 592 p.

Wallace, Bronwen, “Women’s Lives: Alice Munro”, in The Human Elements: Critical Essays, edited by David Helwig, Ottawa, Oberon, 1978, pp. 52-67.

APPENDIXES

ABBREVIATIONS Munro, Alice, 1998 [1968], Dance of the Happy Shades, New York, Vintage Books, abbreviated as DHS. ---, 1974, Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, Toronto, McGraw Hill-Ryerson, abbreviated as SBM.

ABSTRACTS

Par l’intermédiaire d’une comparaison avec la romancière Anne Tyler, il s’agit ici de mettre en lumière la spécificité de la vision que Munro porte sur le monde. Alors que les romans de Tyler procèdent d’une sensibilité directement héritée de Jane Austen, les nouvelles de Munro témoignent d’une lucidité décapante et d’un refus de céder aux pièges de l’émotion. Son écriture astringente met en scène des personnages solitaires qui refusent de s’engager dans des relations humaines sincères et authentiques.

AUTHORS

SILVIA ALBERTAZZI Silvia Albertazzi is a professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna, Director of the Centre for the Study of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature (CITELC) and Coordinator of the Ph.D. Program in Literatures and Cultures of the English Speaking Countries.

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“Like the Downflash of a Wing or Knife”: Repression, Sublimation, and the Return of the Repressed in Alice Munro’s “Princess Ida”

Jennifer Murray

1 “Princess Ida” is a strangely neglected ‘mother’ story in Munro criticism. The centrality of the mother figure in an interconnecting web of Munro’s stories has been pointed out in recent criticism, notably by Ferri, Heller, and Thacker (“Introduction”). Collectively, these critics address the autobiographical details of Munro’s own mother and her progressive descent into the effects of her tardily diagnosed Parkinson’s disease; they have noted that the fiction which draws on this source illustrates the attendant needs both to love the mother, and to reject the debased maternal image — “Our Gothic Mother” as she is described by the narrator’s sister in “The Peace of Utrecht” (Dance 195). They have also pointed towards the ongoing revisions of the mother figure who continues to haunt Munro’s tales in collection after collection, just as the narrator in “The Ottawa Valley” predicts: “The problem, the only problem is my mother. [...] she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same” (Something 196).

2 In this context, the non-recognition in critical studies of “Princess Ida” as a key ‘mother figure’ story is surprising. This may be due in part to the fact that Lives of Girls and Women was published as a novel and its parts were therefore seen as indissociable: Munro, however, acknowledges quite directly that, although her intention was indeed to write a novel, what she actually produced was something different: I went up to the office and started to write the section called “Princess Ida,” which is about my mother. The material about my mother is my central material in life, and it always comes the most readily to me. If I just relax, that’s what will come up. So, once I started to write that, I was off. Then I made a big mistake. I tried to make it a regular novel, an ordinary sort of childhood adolescence novel. About March I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to

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abandon it. I was very depressed. Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned that I was never going to write a real novel because I could not think that way. (McCulloch and Simpson)1

3 Here, both the centrality of “Princess Ida” as a key ‘mother figure’ text in Munro’s writing, and the non-conformity of Lives of Girls and Women to the standard criteria of the novel form are acknowledged. In recent criticism, a general shift toward a more explicit recognition of the book’s identity as a “story sequence,” or “interlinked stories” (Beer) has taken place.

4 Nonetheless, “Princess Ida” has generally been left out of recent discussions of Munro’s ‘mother figure’ stories. Robert Thacker categorizes certain of these as “offer[ing] a type of ‘family resemblance’ born of their autobiographical provenance” (“Introduction” 14) where the mother figure is concerned. He notes in passing that this figure appears “emotionally if not precisely—in Lives of Girls and Women as Ida” (“Introduction” 14), a lapsus whereby part of the character’s pen name, Princess Ida, stands in place of her identity as Ada /Addie in the story.2 Heller and Ferri both point to a series of mother- daughter stories (including “The Peace of Utrecht” (Dance), “The Ottawa Valley” (Something), “The Progress of Love” (Progress), and “Friend of My Youth” (Friend)) but do not list “Princess Ida” amongst them.3 My perspective here will be to consider “Princess Ida” as the first story fully and specifically focused on the mother figure. Momentarily, in the scope of Munro’s writing, the figure of the sick, bed-ridden or dead mother present in Dance of the Happy Shades is left aside: in “Princess Ida,” the mother is restored to a greater complexity, even if, in the final stories of Lives of Girls and Women she is relegated to her bed once again (“Baptizing” 253, 263).

5 In her book-length study of mother figures in Munro, Mothers and Other Clowns, Magdalene Redekop does focus briefly on “Princess Ida,” pointing out the echoing interplay of Ida/Ada/Addie/Adelaide/Del and relating these to the Tennysonian intertext, to Faulkner’s Addie in As I Lay Dying, and to Nabokov’s Ada in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. What is of more relevance to my argument here is that Redekop qualifies the story as “the uterus out of which is born not one perfect baby or one novel but multiple offspring” and as “the place of origins,” a “place that cannot be seen or represented” (65, my emphasis). Consequently, Redekop moves on to other stories in Lives of Girls and Women.

6 While I would agree that “Princess Ida” is a story of origins, I would also argue that the text offers ways to decode the obscurity of its meaning, ways which do not clarify the hypothetical “conscious blind spot” that Redekop posits (65), but which acknowledge the workings of the unconscious in the text. There is in “Princess Ida,” as in the later, similarly structured story, “The Progress of Love,” “a cloud, a poison, that had touched [the] mother’s life” (Progress 17). 4 This cloud, the mother’s burden, takes shape in “Princess Ida” somewhere in the past, a past shaped by economic, cultural and affective poverty, a past which includes sexual abuse, religious fanaticism and patriarchal domination, but also courage, determination and hopes of social advancement. Resentful and triumphant, the voice of Del’s mother speaks of repressed pain and sublimated drives, and, in its negations, its excesses, its irony and chosen images, the story enacts the working of the unconscious and its emergence into the discourses of everyday life. By following the narrating daughter’s desire to understand her mother, and by also giving our attention to the mother’s replies, memories and actions, it is not

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so much a fruitful uterus that one returns to, but a hard core of hurt which produces effects which can indeed be seen and represented.

7 As narrator of her mother’s story, Del’s voice is split between the child’s naïve perspective and the more reflective remembering point of view of the adult, along the lines developed by Thacker: “a commingling of the remembered event, vividly described so as to lend immediacy to it, and [a] detached understanding of it, an understanding that is detached because of the time which has passed” (“Clear Jelly” 45). Thus, Del, in “Princess Ida,” is both the pre-adolescent girl still partially in the thrall of the all-powerful mother of early childhood but nevertheless beginning the process of adolescent self-differentiation, and the adult narrator trying to use the perspective of time to re-evaluate both her mother and her own expectations of that mother.

8 This intricate weaving of levels of closeness and detachment is present from the start of the story, and coheres around the mother’s enthusiasm for selling encyclopedias.5 The mother’s love of knowledge, which “was not chilly to her, no; it was warm and lovely” is shared by the young Del: “I shared my mother’s appetite myself, I could not help it. I loved the volumes of the encyclopedia, their weight (of mystery, of beautiful information) as they fell open in my lap,” (74); there is something almost sensual in this love of knowledge for Del who wonders “And who could fail to love me, for knowing where Quito was?” (75). It is when she realizes that she is not loved for such knowledge, that it is not valued in her, nor in her mother, by the community in which she lives, that Del detaches herself from the open display of her “freak memory” (75) and from the penchant for public display on her mother’s part. Yet, in spite of Del’s later distancing from her mother’s activities, throughout this early period, Del remains in a form of admiring rivalry with her mother: “Over all our expeditions, and homecomings, and the world at large, she exerted this mysterious, appalling authority, and nothing could be done about it, not yet” (77-78). The formulation of this perspective on her mother, with the oedipal rivalry of adolescence anticipated but not yet fully active, speaks of the child’s admiration, but with a sophistication belonging to the adult voice.

9 Within this realm of female identification, Del feels compelled to verify her mother’s conformity to expectations in terms of family love and attachment: I said to my mother, “Why didn’t you bring that picture in?” “What picture? What picture?” “The one over the couch.”

10 The picture in question is one that Del’s mother painted showing “sheep driven along the road by a little girl in a red shawl” (80), and which Del has romanticized into an original creation by an artistic mother in blissful early marriage, believing that the girl in the picture was actually her mother. “That one? Do you want that in here?” I didn’t really. As often in our conversations I was trying to lead her on, to get the answer, or the revelation, I particularly wanted. I wanted her to say she had left it for my father.” (80)

11 Here, the narrator speaks of her need to see her mother in a certain light, to make her conform to a model of womanhood, of being, that she, Del, will then be able to take comfort in and identify with. But the answers her mother gives fall short of the child’s expectations: “I don’t want it hanging where people would see,” she said. “I’m no artist. I only painted it because I had nothing to do.” (81)

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12 This is the first in a series of questions addressed to the mother in the same desire to find in her a positive affective model. In the subsequent instances, the same negativity which marks the mother’s answer here – “don’t want,” “no,” “only,” nothing”—is present, but, since the questions are more direct, the answers are more oblique; the curt reply, “of course” signals the mother’s refusal to answer sensitive questions. The first of these occurs in the context of Del’s childlike questioning about her mother’s relationship to her own mother, and her feelings after her death: “‘Were you sad?’ I said hopefully and my mother said yes, of course she was sad. But she did not linger around this scene” (87). Here, we note the rhythm of the formulation, where the mother’s direct speech is worked into the narration, leaving no time for further questioning, no time to “linger” and expand or reflect. It is a minimalist answer intended to reassure Del that her mother is not outside the norms of emotional response, and it functions to close down further discussion on the matter.

13 Moreover, this curt reply contrasts with the expansive force of the negative anecdotes about her own mother that Del’s mother recounts in detail, and which convey to her daughter a sense of gothic origins, an archetypal past located outside of rational time, located in the fairytale temporality of the unconscious where “In the beginning, the very beginning of everything, there was that house” (83), a house, which had “something terrible about it, enclosing evil, like a house where a murder has been committed” (84). If the house represents that place where we live, both psychologically and physically (Corelli), then Del’s mother’s representation of the house of her childhood speaks of oppression and moral disorder.

14 Within that house: the tyrannical father, who would later refuse to allow her to go to high school (87); but more importantly, the mother: “She was a religious fanatic,” declares Del’s mother, and goes on, “’Do you know what she did? I told you what she did? I told you about the money?’ She draws a breath to steady herself. ‘Well. She inherited some money’” (85). Del’s mother goes on to describe the unpardonable gesture of her mother who uses a small inheritance to buy bibles to give away to the poor, rather than to buy the basic necessities to alleviate the hardship of the family’s own poverty. Remembered as unforgivably pious, long-suffering, and unconcerned with the comforts of her family, Del’s grandmother lives on in memory as a locus of pain and resentment: “My mother’s voice, telling these things, is hard with her certainty of having been cheated, her undiminished feelings of loss and anger” (85). In this context, it is not a matter ‘of course’ that Del’s mother should have felt sad at the death of her own mother.

15 Yet a more sensitive issue for Del is her mother’s relationship to romance, love, and sexuality. Del tries to trap her mother into affirming that her marriage was a marriage of love. This, in the context of Del’s mother having taken a house for rent in town, while the father remains on their rural farm throughout the winter, is a question of some pertinence; yet, Del seems to hope, in spite of the clear independence and even distance between her parents, that there was, in the beginning, some passion, some intimate tenderness and affection. In a form which is only half-questioning, Del says, “‘But you fell in love with him’ I would remind her sternly, anxiously, wanting to get it settled for good. ‘You fell in love’” (89). As any other response to this question would require saying more than the mother wishes to reveal to her daughter, she replies, “Well yes of course I did.” Here, as above, the lack of punctuation makes of this a rote answer. Del insists,

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“Why did you fall in love?” “Your father was always a gentleman.” Was that all? I was troubled here by a lack of proportion, though it was hard to say what was missing, what was wrong. (89)

16 But Del cannot penetrate beyond this deflecting response that her mother offers her.

17 However, as narrating instance, the adult Del disseminates suggestions throughout the text that her mother’s answer is symptomatic of her rejection of sexuality. In choosing to marry a “gentleman,” Del’s mother is indirectly pointing out her rejection of those men for whom sexuality is a dominant concern. Amongst these textual insinuations is the reference to a former suitor, a “young man who remained a shadow […]. For mysterious reasons she was compelled to break her engagement. (‘He did not turn out to be the sort of person I had thought he was.’)” (89). References to the general rejection of sexuality on the part of Del’s mother also punctuate the other stories of the cycle: in “Lives of Girls and Women,” she comments on the relationship between her boarder, Fern, and Mr. Chamberlain: “‘They enjoy each other’s company,’ she said. ‘They don’t bother about any nonsense.’” And the narrating voice of the adult Del comments: “Nonsense meant romance; it meant vulgarity; it meant sex” (162). In this way, the whole question of love and courtship is held together under the label of ‘vulgarity’ for Del’s mother. Why should this be so?

18 The rejection of sexual desire is marked as a product of the childhood of Del’s mother, notably through sexual torment on the part of her brother. Again, this is stated through hints and allusions, but they are sufficiently clear to understand the force of their effect on her. In her bitter accounts of her youth, Del’s mother refers to her detested brother: It was the younger brother she hated. What did he do? Her answers were not wholly satisfactory. He was evil, bloated, cruel. A cruel fat boy. He fed firecrackers to cats. He tied up a toad and chopped it to pieces. He drowned my mother’s kitten, named Misty, in the cow trough, though he afterwards denied it. Also, he caught my mother and tied her up in the barn and tormented her. Tormented her? He tortured her. What with? But my mother would never go beyond that—that word, tortured, which she spat out like blood. So I was left to imagine her tied up in the barn, as at a stake, while her brother, a fat Indian, yelped and pranced about her. But she had escaped after all, unscalped, unburnt. Nothing really accounted for her darkened face at this point in the story, for her way of saying tortured. I had not yet learned to recognize the gloom that overcame her in the vicinity of sex. (86)

19 In her writing of this passage, the narrator enacts the unconscious deflecting strategies of her mother’s discourse at the same time as she presents the force of the unwelcome memories. The emotional intensity of the mother’s hatred of her brother can be felt in the accumulation of adjectives—evil, bloated, cruel (twice), fat—to describe him, as well as in the thrice-italicized verb “tortured.” Similarly, an accumulation of displaced actions, close to, but differing from, the act inflicted upon the mother, allows her to evoke her anger, without naming its cause specifically: is it not enough that he tortured and killed small helpless animals such as kittens to be convinced of his intrinsic malevolence? Phrases such as “Her answers were not wholly satisfactory,” “my mother would never go beyond that—that word,” and “ Nothing really accounted for her darkened face” (my emphasis) signal through their negations that the central event in the mother’s memory cannot be named, leaving the child, Del, with only the limits of

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her young imagination, to conjure up stereotypical enemies and child’s play scenes of torture.

20 Unconscious metonymy of meaning is at work in this conjuring: to make sense of her mother’s incomplete narrative and of her “darkened face,” the notion of ‘darkness’ associated with the mother’s expression and the passive stance indicated by the use of the past participle are displaced onto a scenario where her mother may have been burnt, “as at a stake.” This scenario, helped along through a fantasized image of the brother as “a fat Indian, [who] yelped and pranced about her” is simultaneously evoked and found wanting through the signifier “unburnt”; the narrator, as a child, can find no satisfactory explanation for her mother’s somber countenance. Only later, as an adult, can she re-interpret her mother’s silence; only later, once she has, in fact, “learned to recognize the gloom that overcame her [mother] in the vicinity of sex,” can she fill in the unsaid of her mother’s intense emotions. In this last phrase, the enigma of the mother’s repressed anger is largely clarified, the metonymic chain can be followed through from “tied up,” to “tormented,” to “tortured,” and finally to “the vicinity of sex.”6

21 The childhood background of Del’s mother as a time of affective misery, with its emblematic unmentionable act of her brother, is reinforced by the textual markers presenting Del’s grandmother as also having an unhappy relationship to sexuality. Indeed, Del’s grandmother is remembered as a ‘broken’ woman: “bent back, narrow shouldered in some gray or tan sweater over a dirty kimono or housedress, the back of the head with the thin hair pulled tight from the middle parting, the scalp unhealthily white. It was white as marble, white as soap” (84). This first image of Del’s grandmother shows her submissiveness —“bent back”—, her lack of attention to her appearance —“gray, tan, dirty” clothes—; it emphasizes her loss of hair through the signifier “scalp,” a signifier that picks up on the earlier “unscalped” attributed to Del’s mother, and which, unlike ‘skin’ is associated with death, as is the whiteness of the scalp which is compared to marble, evoking the cold death of the tombstone, while the word “soap” suggests the cleanliness, and, of course, ‘godliness’ which is her compensation for suffering. She is remembered “on her knees, bent down on the bed, praying,” or, at other times “is discovered flat on her back and weeping—for reasons my mother does not go into—with a damp cloth pressed to her forehead” (84-85). The central object in both remembrances is the bed, the symbol of marital sexuality, and the grandmother is seen either praying by it or crying on it.7 We have already come to understand that the narrator, in saying “for reasons my mother does not go into,” is encoding the notion of unspeakable sexuality into her own mother’s discourse.

22 The general inability of Del’s mother to see sexuality as a dynamic, productive, enriching, positive aspect of women’s lives is therefore rooted in specific biographical details which are traceable in the text, even in the enigmatic forms in which the narrator distills them. We note that both Del’s mother and her grandmother are marked by discourses of repression in relation to sexuality and we are led to see that for both of them, the sex drive becomes diverted towards other aims, or, in other words, is sublimated.

23 Both Del’s mother and her maternal grandmother are ‘fanatics,’ in the sense that they pour the greater part of their psychical energy into one specified area: in the case of the grandmother, religion receives this expenditure of energy, whereas for the mother,

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education and knowledge are the chosen fields of libidinal investment. Freud defines the way in which valued cultural aims may take the place of sexual objects: Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido [the energy directed towards an object] and consists in the instinct’s directing itself towards an aim other than, and remote from, that of sexual satisfactions; in this process the accent falls upon deflection from sexuality. (“On Narcissism” 88)

24 Freud further remarks on the way this process can attenuate the suffering produced by the “instinctual impulses”: “The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. In this, sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance” (Civilization 16). In fact, even beyond the avoidance of frustration or suffering, sublimation allows for the obtaining of pleasure by another means: “Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression” (Lacan 165). Thus, with religion, love can be invested, without restriction, in a universal object ; by giving one’s love “to all men alike” the religious believer may “avoid the uncertainties and disappointments of genital love by turning away from its sexual aims” (Freud, Civilization 39).

25 Religion is indeed viewed as the affective centre of Del’s grandmother’s life, as witnessed by her spending the family’s windfall inheritance on bibles, by the image of her praying by the bed, and later in the story, by an anecdote offered by Del’s Uncle Bill who remembers their mother directing her children’s attention to the transformation of a chrysalis into a butterfly, emphasizing the symbolic importance of it happening on Easter day. Aside from this last example, all of the details relating to this intensely Christian woman are filtered through the resentment of Del’s mother: thinking back to the inscription on the emblematic bibles—Blessed are the poor in spirit—she snorts: “What is so remarkable about being poor in spirit?” (85); concerning her enforced enrolment in bible distribution, she notes: “One thing, it cured me of religion for life” (85).

26 “Cured” of religion, finding no enjoyment in the contemplation or the anticipation of sexuality, Del’s mother is nonetheless subject to the “constant force” of the drive: “The first thing Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that is has no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall” (Lacan 165). For Del’s mother, knowledge, learning, education and cultural pursuits— the “finer and higher” directions of sublimation for Freud—become the objects of her drive. From the opening line of the story—“Now my mother was selling encyclopedias” (72) to her triumphant battle to go to high school, in spite of her father’s refusal (87-88), through the intertextual reference to Tennyson in her choice of pen name, her writing of letters to the paper, and her joining the “Great Books discussion group” (82), the story tells us unconditionally that Ada is in love with knowledge: Pure comfort even at this stage of her life to know where the location of the Celebes Sea and the Pitti Palace, to get the wives of Henry VIII in order, and be informed about the social system of ants, the methods of sacrificial butchery used by the Aztecs, the plumbing in Knossos. She could get carried away, telling about such things. (74)

27 The narrator develops the portrait of her knowledge-hungry mother in ways which verge on the absurd, emphasizing how her excessiveness makes her an outsider in their community. As we have seen, Del understands this pleasure of the intellect, but refuses to give it exclusivity.

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28 The crux of the story, linking repression, sublimation and trying to make one’s peace with who one has become, comes in the last section of the story, with the return of the repressed in the form of an unexpected visit from the hated brother, now a tall, heavy, American: “mournful, proud, sagging” (91), accompanied by an improbable femme fatale, his young wife named Nile. His status as an intruder, as someone who oversteps his rights, is signaled in the description of his approach. The narrator remembers herself as a child, outdoors: “I saw a big car come nosing along between the snowbanks almost silently, like an impudent fish.” Here, Munro’s use of simile works effectively, transforming the car moving slowly through the ‘liquid’ world of snow into the phallic shape of the fish, insolent and unquestioning in its pushy advance. The transformation of “Bill” into an American,8 underlines this sense of territorial expansion of the strong over the weak.

29 For Del’s mother, symbolically, or unconsciously, this is the visit of the torturer to his victim, the return of the past source of her still active anger into her present, the signifier of her signified: that of a robbed innocence, of a thwarted path in her development. Interestingly, Freud notes that the repressed behaves like an unwelcome guest attempting to cross the threshold into consciousness: “I must set a permanent guard over the door which I have forbidden this guest to enter, since he would otherwise burst it open” (“Repression” 152-53). Through his ‘fish-like’ unannounced approach, Bill has gained his way into his sister’s home.

30 In her typical style of deflection and affirmation of negatives, Del’s mother hails her unwelcome visitor, putting the social form of greeting over a thinly disguised rejection: “‘Well, Bill. You don’t believe in advance notice, do you? Never mind, we’re happy to see you.’ She said this with some severity, as if arguing a point” (92). The visit is a study in misrecognition, where Bill9 attempts to share with his sister memories of a childhood that he cherishes, with their mother as the saintly centre of a shining past: “[…] we had a simple life and hard work and fresh air and a good spiritual example in our momma. She died young, Addie. She died in pain.” Resentful of what she sees as an attempt to embellish the past, Del’s mother will not concede a thing: “Under anesthetic,” my mother said. “So strictly speaking I hope she did not die in pain” (97).

31 There will be no moment of reconciliation between brother and sister.10 If the brother has forgotten, or forgiven himself, his sister’s resentment remains intact, and non- negotiable. Del asks her: “Do you still hate him?” and her mother is forced into her third instance of a negatively connoted affirmation: “‘Of course I don’t hate him,’ said my mother quickly and with reserve” (101). Of the three instances of “Of course” which we have seen, this one most transparently allows its contradictory force to speak out: the affirmative ‘of course’ comes up against a negative. It is not followed up by any more affirmative statement of affect.

32 Del’s mother is thus faced with a dilemma when, on departing, her brother tells her that he has cancer, that he is dying, and that he is going to leave her three hundred dollars in his will. This ‘gift’ (perhaps an unconscious form of reparation) from the brother she hated reactivates both her resentment towards him, and the previous hurt related to her own mother’s (mis)use of her inheritance. She tries to evacuate this hurt through irony, replying to Del’s question “What are you going to spend it on?” by saying, “I could always send away for a box of Bibles” (101). Freud comments on the use of jokes and irony in lifting repression, but adds, “as a rule, the repression is only temporarily lifted and is promptly reinstated” (“Repression” 150).

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33 The text enacts this lifting of repression and its reinstatement in a densely poetic moment. The scene takes place in the kitchen, where Del and her mother are cooking, talking and working at a crossword puzzle. Sounds of Fern, the boarder and friend, and of Owen, Del’s brother, coming into the house have been mentioned. When Del’s mother makes her ironic comment about sending away for bibles, we read: Just before Fern came in one door and Owen came in the other, there was something in the room like the downflash of a wing or knife, a sense of hurt so strong, but quick and isolated, vanishing. (101)

34 In the instant at which irony allows a temporary release from the constant effort of repression, there is something like a “downflash,” a word which suggests movement, light, and speed, almost an effect of lightning. This simile is remodeled through the extension of “a wing or knife.” Associated with “downflash,” these signifiers offer both the image of a bird in movement, taking off or landing, and the metallic movement of a knife being stabbed downwards. The associations opened up here are those of flight from pain, and, at the same time, of hurt and symbolic castration, so that the image condenses the possibilities of escape and of reactivated pain and hurt to the self. Taking into account the fact that other images of birds in flight in the story cycle, such as “Alarm in my mother’s voice was like the flap of rising wings” (“Lives of Girls and Women” 167) signify distress for Del’s mother, it would seem that the positive connotation of ‘wing’ is overwhelmed by signifieds of distress, pain and being cut to the quick: the intrusion into consciousness of the mother’s hurt is consequently painful—“a sense of hurt so strong”— and the lifting of repression is therefore “quick and isolated, vanishing.”11

35 Framing this pain, the almost stage-like setting furnishes compensatory elements to provide symbolic consolation for the mother; she is in the kitchen in the company of her daughter, with doors about to open on either side, like arms, or again, wings, opening to embrace her, as her friend and her son enter. Here, Del’s mother is not merely the victim of her desolate past; she is also the affective centre of her present. As the story closes, Del’s mother is looking for the name of an Egyptian god with four letters to fill in a crossword puzzle: when Del suggests “Isis,” putting a goddess in place of the missing god, it may be seen as a symbolic gift to her mother, reinstating her as the all-powerful mother, “the priestess” of her early childhood when Del had supposed her “powerful, a ruler” (89). The mother unconsciously recognizes this gift in an emotionally paradoxical formulation: “Isis is a goddess, I’m surprised at you” (101). Firstly, she reaffirms her mastery in the domain of knowledge by correcting her daughter’s error, but this reaffirmation may also be seen as an expression of disappointment—“surprised at you.” At the same time, through the italicization of ‘you,’ it is the mark of the mother’s implicit confidence in her daughter’s intellectual potential and of her persistent belief that her daughter will, in the domain of knowledge at least, continue to take her as a role model.

36 Del’s position as witness to her mother’s moment of hurt, her role in the narrating of this moment, and the subsequent scene of sharing between them, temporarily place the budding mother-daughter conflicts under truce. It is a moment of compromise in which the daughter tries to see her mother, not only as her mother, but as a woman with a personal, sometimes painful history of her own. Having explored the emotional heritage of her maternal line, Del will begin exploring her own paths and negotiating her own libidinal investments. The story cycle does not align the daughter with the

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turning away from sexual pleasure that characterizes both mother and grandmother, but rather, develops constantly renegotiated positions between sexual exploration and artistic sublimation for its central figure, Del.

37 “Princess Ida” is only one in a long series of attempts by Munro to negotiate her relationship to the dead mother: only one, and not the first: this mother already haunts the stories of Dance of the Happy Shades before Lives of Girls and Women, and she will reappear regularly in the author’s work in “scenes that pop up anytime, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present” (“Princess Ida” 83), sometimes in disguise, as a semi-wicked (step)mother, complicit in a beating (“Royal Beatings,” Who Do You Think You Are, and again in “Fathers,” View), sometimes in dreams of forgiveness (“Friend of My Youth,” Friend), occasionally as a sideline moral commentator (“The Wilds of Morris Township,” View), or celebrated as a triumphant saleswoman, a “lady...whose offerings added a unique distinction” (“Working for a Living” 152-53, View). Nevertheless, “Princess Ida” stands as the first to give the mother her due, to see her as complex woman with a past and emotional density of her own; within this story, she is seen not only as a source of pain, embarrassment, and guilt for the daughter, but also as a woman of will, courage, tenacity, and resilience; a woman who did the best she could with who she was and who her history could allow her to be. It is one of the ironies of Munro criticism that the oedipal dissatisfaction of the daughter figure, not entirely evacuated in her adult perspective, should have influenced critical readings of “Princess Ida” so strongly that they, in turn, have reinforced the repression of that knot of pain that Del’s narrative identifies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beer, Janet, “Short Fiction with Attitude: The Lives of Boys and Men in the Lives of Girls and Women.” Yearbook of English Studies. 2001. FindArticles.com. Online.

[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb351/is_2001_Annual/ai_n28890335/] (December 27, 2009)

Blodgett, E. D., Alice Munro. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1988.

Corelli, Richard J., “Dreams and Symbols.” Online. [http://www.stanford.edu/~corelli/ dreams.html] (December 12, 2009)

Ferri, Laura, “Mothers and Other Secrets.” Open Letter; 11.9/12.1 (2004): 137-50.

Fowler, Rowena, “The Art of Alice Munro: The Beggar Maid and Lives of Girls and Women.” Critique 25.4 (1984), 189-98. Online. [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=98941965] (July 18, 2008)

Freud, Sigmund, Civilisation and its Discontents [1929], ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Rivière, London, Hogarth Press, 1973.

---. “On Narcissism: An Introduction” [1914], On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984, 59-97.

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---. “Repression.” 1915. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984, 145-58.

Heller, Deborah, “Getting Loose: Women and Narration in Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth”, Thacker, The Rest of the Story, 60-80.

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis [1973], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, London, Penguin, 1977.

MacDonald, Rae McCarthy, “Structure and Detail in Lives of Girls and Women,” SCL, 3 (1978). Online.

[http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol3_2/&filename=Macdonald.htm] (December 23, 2009)

MacKendrick, Louis K., ed. Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts, Toronto, ECW Press, 1983.

Martin, W. R., “Chapter 4: Lives of Girls and Women.” Paradox and Parallel, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1987, 58-76.

McCulloch, Jeanne, and Mona Simpson, “Alice Munro: The Art of Fiction No. 137.” The Paris Review Interviews, 131 (Summer 1994). Online.

[http://www.parisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/1791] (December 28, 2009)

Munro, Alice, Dance of the Happy Shades. 1974. London, Vintage, 2000.

---. Friend of My Youth. Toronto, Penguin, 1990.

---. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971, New York, Vintage, 2001.

---. The Progress of Love, Toronto, Penguin, 1986.

---. Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, Winnipeg, Signet, 1975.

---. The View From Castle Rock, London, Vintage, 2007.

Rasporich, Beverly, Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1990.

Redekop, Magdalene, Mothers and Other Clowns: the Stories of Alice Munro, London, Routledge, 1992.

Struthers, J. M. (Tim), “The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro”, MacKendrick 5-36.

Thacker, Robert, “‘Clear Jelly’: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics”, MacKendrick 37-60.

---. “Introduction: Alice Munro, Writing “Home”: “Seeing This Trickle in Time”, Thacker, The Rest of the Story, 1-20.

---, ed. The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro. Toronto, ECW Press, 1999.

NOTES

1. This statement from an interview in 1994 is coherent with Munro’s earlier remarks (1983): “‘Princess Ida’ was the first. It was going to be a short story. Then I saw it was going to work into a novel, and then I went on and on writing what I thought was a novel. Then I saw that wasn’t working. So I went back and picked out of that novel ‘Princess Ida’ in its original form…” (Struthers 24-25). 2. The mother is referred to as Ada but once in “Princess Ida,” pityingly, by the aunts: “Poor Ada” (73), and as Addie only by her brother, Bill. Del, hearing her uncle use this name, reflects: “No one ever called my mother Addie any more. It made her sound different—rounder, dowdier,

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simpler” (92). For Del, she is simply “my mother,” and I will follow this narrating choice throughout this paper. 3. Earlier critics who have focused on this story have generally labeled Del’s mother as “a pathetic and eccentric misfit” (MacDonald), or have blown her image somewhat out of proportion: “Like the Egyptian deity Isis...the mother is the essence of mysterious, powerful female first beginnings as well as a model of intellectual womanhood” (Rasporich 46). 4. “The Progress of Love” can, in fact, be shown to be a reconfiguring of “Princess Ida,” with a similar emotional grievance passed down along the maternal line and with many of the structuring elements of this story present in condensed or displaced form in its later reworked version. 5. Indeed, the overarching perspective of the adult Del frames the story of her mother between two seasons of “going on the road” to sell encyclopedias (72, 101). The mocking criticism of Del’s aunts, who embody the values of the larger community, therefore echoes in the background of the whole story. 6. There is an interesting instance of disavowal in relation to this passage on the part of E.D. Blodgett, who affirms that “the only clue the reader has of [the brother] comes midway in a recollection of him as a cruel, fat boy who tortures cats, it is implied, in a sexual fashion,” (45-46). The reference to sexuality has been noted, but its connection to Del’s mother has been effaced through displacement onto the cat. This leaves Blodgett in the peculiar position of noting that this anecdote is “briefly sandwiched into the story of Del’s grandmother’s death and it appears to possess no particular function” (46). 7. In the story “Baptizing,” which comes later in Lives of Girls and Women, Del’s mother is portrayed in a manner which is reminiscent of the grandmother: when Del comes in after meeting her lover in the late evening, “there would be my mother sitting up in bed, the light shining right through her hair to her tender scalp, her cup of tea gone cold on the table beside the bed […]—and she would read to me out of the university catalogues which she had sent away for” (253). Linked to her own mother by her place in the bed, the visibility of her scalp, and the coldness of the tea by her bed, Del’s mother is nonetheless given the adjectives “tender,” “shining,” and is shown to be preoccupied with her daughter’s future and with her hopes for her achievement of “finer and higher” aims. 8. The monetary connotation of the American dollar bill/Bill will also be activated as the uncle buys his welcome into the home by purchasing all the sweets and treats from the local store. Del, initially pleased, comments: “But I saw now that too much really might be too mutch” (95). 9. In an image built on the phallic symbol of the snake, Del tries in vain to find traces of the former ‘tormentor’ of her mother, but cannot detect the “cruel fat boy” in this newly discovered uncle: “He was gone, smothered, like a little spotted snake, once venomous and sportive, buried in a bag of meal” (98-99). 10. Critics who have not perceived the psychological underpinnings of Del's mother's resentment towards her brother tend to give value to the latter as being more open to the wonder of life, (Blodgett, 46) and the former as “lack[ing] altogether a sense of mystery and the capacity for religious experience” (Martin 65). 11. Fowler's comments (190) that this image of the downflash represents Del's sarcastic reevaluation of her mother; this position does not seem tenable when the scene is viewed in context.

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ABSTRACTS

Depuis une dizaine d’années, la recherche sur l’œuvre d’Alice Munro a su mettre en évidence l’importance de la relation mère-fille dans les nouvelles de cette auteure ; l’image de la mère, constamment revue et retouchée par une fille narratrice, y est récurrente. Dans ce contexte, “Princess Ida” (Lives of Girls and Women) est une nouvelle clef, trop longuement négligée par ce courant critique. Narrée à la première personne, “Princess Ida” invoque l’enfance et les influences familiales de la mère, à partir de la perspective de la fille, Del, qui doit également négocier sa propre relation œdipienne à sa mère. Cet article met en évidence le passé matrilinéaire inscrit dans cette nouvelle, en s‘attachant aux marqueurs textuels de répression et de résistance et aux éléments langagiers liés à la répression sexuelle, la sublimation et le retour du refoulé.

AUTHORS

JENNIFER MURRAY Jennifer Murray is an associate professor at the University of Franche-Comté. Her teaching and research interests focus on Canadian literature and on writers from the American South. Her forthcoming publications include a study of Margaret Atwood’s short story collection, Dancing Girls; an article entitled “Honte et humiliation: reconfigurations d’une écriture de soi chez Alice Munro,” and an analysis of recent criticism on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

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“Eskimo,” or an Encounter with the Real of Feminine Desire

1 There is no small amount of irony in the fact that “Eskimo” was first published in 1987 in the upscale fashion monthly called Gentlemen’s Quarterly, since the short story certainly contains enough food for the thoughts of this select readership on the complex relationships between men and women. Moreover, the fact that it was later included in a collection enigmatically entitled The Progress of Love, invites us to consider the story as an interrogation on the notion of love itself, raising severe doubts as to the relevance of the notion of progress when love is concerned. The text follows the usual pattern of the genre: the routine of the protagonist’s life is suddenly interrupted by an unexpected event which changes her outlook on life radically. In this particular instance, Mary Jo, the nurse working for Dr Streeter and also playing the role of the faithful mistress, is flying to Tahiti for a vacation paid for by her lover-boss. On the plane, as she is confronted with several foreign, or more or less exotic passengers, she goes through a painful experience/revelation that challenges the quiet comfort of her cosy but empty middle-class life, and creates a feeling of frustration that leads her to reconsider the small scale success story of her private life as a fraud based on lies which the dominant discourse of patriarchy covers up as thoroughly as is convenient. In more abstract terms, the repetition, the routines of her life hitherto governed by the predominance of the principle of automaton is interrupted by the intrusion of the principle of tuchè, or encounter with the real of her desire. Portentously, the key signifier representing the crucial moment of tuchè turns out to be the very title of the story: Eskimo, a word that suggests both intimacy, as the girl claims that she is a “fellow Canadian”, and extimacy, as her strange appearance and behaviour, particularly in relation to males, somehow destabilise Mary Jo to the point of producing daydreams involving a fantasy of murder. Consequently, the following reading of the short story will first focus on the ironical portrait of the self-complacent Dr Streeter, then it will consider Mary Jo’s gradual awareness of her alienation and, finally, it will explore the truly subversive dimension of the text.

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Patriarchal ventriloquism

2 The opening sequence of this wonderfully crafted short story affords us a blatant illustration of the way the discourse of patriarchy deceives Mary Jo into expressing its own pre-requisites in her own discourse. However, this double-voiced discourse appears to be the site of an ironical distance that exposes what we call the void of the phallic position, in other words it reveals the fact that the so-called male superiority inherent in the patriarchal vision of human relationships is predicated on a void, that can only be concealed if it is supported by the very discourse of women. Mary Jo does this very successfully at the beginning of the short story until the truth gradually dawns on her that she might well be a victim of her own gullibility. As a result the voice of masculinity is exposed as a perversely efficient means of control of femininity. In spite of its length it is worth quoting the opening passage to see the narrative strategy at work: Mary Jo can hear what Dr Streeter would have to say. “Regular little United Nations back here.” Mary Jo, knowing to handle him, would remark that there was always first class. He would say that he didn’t propose paying an arm and a leg for the privilege of swilling free champagne. “Anyway, you know what’s up in first class? Japs. Japanese businessmen on their way home from buying up some more of the country.” Mary Jo might say then that Japanese hardly seemed foreign to her anymore. She would say this thoughtfully, as if she was wondering about it, almost talking to herself. “ I mean, they hardly seem like a foreign race.” “Well, you seem foreign to them, and you better not forget it.” (189)

3 It is first crucial to remember that the above dialogue is entirely imaginary, it never took place in reality, it is just a fantasy made up by Mary Jo, as she is sitting on board the plane: “But he isn’t stretching his legs out beside her, grumbling and content. She is off to Tahiti by herself. His Christmas present to her, this holiday. She has an aisle seat, and the window seat is empty” (190). A present that is more like an absence is already an index of the ironical tone that will prevail in the short story, but what is striking is that her relation with Dr Streeter is introduced as a form of manipulation “knowing how to handle him” (189). For her human relationships seem to consist in a game of distribution of symbolic places whose outcome is the confirmation, the recognition of the place occupied by the locutor in the discourse of the interlocutor, and conversely. Here, however, irony is present since, if she seems to be able to control him (on the spur of the moment) it is in fact he who controls her life on a more general plane, as we shall see. The very incipit of the short story shows her in a passive position, that of the quiet listener lending an obliging ear to the speeches of her boss hacking over and over again the same old arguments, as the double value of the modal auxiliary “would,” which suggests at the same time a hypothetical realisation and repetition, testifies. Moreover, it is significant that the only subject of her silent monologue is none other that Dr Streeter himself, who occupies the whole textual space in the first half of the text to disappear virtually from the second. He is endowed with a sort of natural authority that warrants his unquestioned right to hold opinions, whereas she is only allowed a word in edgewise, as the choice of modals implies. Within the opening paragraph we move from Streeter’s “he would have to say” to Mary Jo’s “she might say” (189). It is obvious that Mary Jo is supposed to receive the good word from Dr

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Streeter’s lips and that, if she can hear his voice when he is not present, she is unable to hear the voice of her own desire.

4 Through the figure of Dr Streeter, Mary Jo idealises the masculine in a sort of process of rationalisation of her fascination for the man, even though she denies it occasionally: “Mary Jo did not defend Dr Streeter just because he was a man, and a father, not at all; it was not for those reasons she thought his wife should have instilled some respect for him from his children” (191). Here, the function of Free Indirect Discourse is quite clearly to underline the fact that the third person narrative voice does not endorse her position, even though the point of view is seemingly, that is to say grammatically, hers.

5 In this respect, the role of Rhea, Dr Streeter’s daughter, is not ambiguous. She is the one who speaks the truth about the shortcomings of her father, which Mary Jo blinds herself to or even attempts to justify, and this Mary Jo finds difficult to face. For instance, she is right to claim: Her father is not far from being the cause of all this [nuclear proliferation, acid rain, unemployment, as well as racial bigotry and the situation of women ] In Rhea’s mind. he is behind bombs and pollution and poverty and discrimination. And Mary Jo has to admit that there are things he says that would lead you to that conclusion. (190)

6 In spite of her exaggerations, Rhea does put her finger on the truth because, if he is not immediately and individually responsible for all the disasters that she mentions, the ideological positions he upholds in his discourse accuse him, and Mary Jo’s defense of her so-called benefactor: “Men have to have their opinions” (190), sounds rather lame.

7 Dr Streeter’s remarks on Japanese businessmen who buy up the country and indulge in a jouissance he disapproves of (swillling champagne), as well as his comments on the flashy and picturesque clothes of foreigners, are evidence enough of the range of his racial prejudices. What makes things more perverse is that he uses the phrase “regular United Nations” to refer to potentially conflicting race relations, when the initial purport of the phrase was to suggest peace and harmony between nations. The worst is that, in this particular context, he cannot be suspected of wanting to be tongue-in- cheek. This less than flattering portrait of an ordinary racist is further aggravated by the focus on his mysoginy. The details of his relationship with Mary Jo make it clear that for him she is merely a sexual object that he thinks he can use at his convenience. Their physical intercourse is cold and devoid of affection: “His is a fierce but solitary relish” (194) and his visits to Mary Jo’s bed are “regular though not lengthy” (191).

8 Not only does he use her body, but he also rules her life with the invisible power of his money and of his social position. Buying her a trip to Tahiti is but one way of buying her (sexual) services and, moreover, Mary Jo has to admit that she had no wish for that type of destination: Tahiti is, in fact, a place where Mary Jo never thought of going. Tahiti to her means palm trees, red flowers, curling turquoise waves, and the sort of tropical luxuriance and indolence that has never interested her. The gift has something unimaginative but touching about it, like the chocolates on St. Valentine’s Day. (192)

9 She tries to improve her physical appearance (teeth, hair, clothes) to please him, she refrains from drinking liquor because he dislikes the smell of it, but he behaves as though he owned her, as if she were an object that could be stolen from him: “It’s hard to tell how much difference any of this makes to Dr Streeter. He used to tell her not to be too glamorous or somebody would spot her and grab her away from him” (193).

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10 If Mary Jo’s “life was changed without these stratagems” (193) it does not follow that it was the sign of a liberation, quite the contrary in fact. Given this particular context, it is surprising that Mary Jo should accept so eagerly the yoke of subjection. What makes all this possible is the fact that Mary Jo herself voices the stereotypes of patriarchy, which she has internalised through her culture and social environment. Not unsurprisingly, her love for Dr Streeter whom she, contrary to his wife, believes is “the Great Healer” (191) and whom she sees as “a noble-headed giant” (189), takes the very conventional form of her unconscious desire to occupy the place of the real wife. First, this leads her to disparage his wife whom she sees as a hard-drinking would-be intellectual who failed to perform adequately her role, so that she feels in duty bound to take her place as a surrogate mother for Rhea: “Mary Jo was supposed to do the work this girl’s mother should have done – making her understand her father, and forgive and admire him” (191). It is therefore ironical that although he is a heart surgeon Dr Streeter knows so little about the workings of the hearts of women in the realm of affects, and thus finds himself in the position of the physician of the Bible (Luke 4.23). In the short story, however, irony is not reserved for Dr Streeter in a bid to denounce the evils of patriarchy, it is also leveled at Mary Jo, as it takes her a long time to see the light. And for this she will need the experience of the encounter with the Eskimo girl.

The rise to consciousness and the emergence of a feminine voice

11 Mary Jo’s dissatisfaction with her situation is inscribed quite early in the narrative, and the frustration at the root of her restlessness surfaces at the beginning of the central episode of the short story: the plane scenario. Yet, the uneventful life of a provincial nurse already contained the seeds of her repressed fret, as the reader is quickly made aware, owing to the function of Rhea in this tale of unrest. Mary Jo does not fail to notice that Rhea’s questions have the knack of unsettling her, of making her feel more uncertain about herself and her desire: “Why is it that Rhea always knows the tricky questions to ask, in spite of her predictable mockery, lectures, and propaganda” (192).

12 In point of fact as a true hysteric, Mary Jo, through the mediation of the man to whom she identifies – and there is no doubt that she identifies closely with Dr Streeter, be it only on account of their common professional competence, efficiency and dedication - tries to get the answer to the fundamental question of knowing what a woman is, or in other words, what it is that she actually wants. Thus the question of desire is at the heart of the story, and it is Rhea’s function to remind Mary Jo of the urgency of finding an answer. The symptoms of this growing unrest are perceptible in Mary Jo’s uneasy response to Rhea’s questions, because they bring a suspicion in her mind that her life may be based on a lie, and the efforts that she has to make to maintain her belief in the fairness of her position become an overwhelming task. For instance, keeping up appearances not to acknowledge her relationsp with Dr Streeter requires a lot of control which she is more and more reluctant to keep up: “Now Rhea must know all about that, but does not make direct investigations. She often seems to be probing, skirting the subject. Mary Jo remains bland and unforthcoming, but sometimes the effort tires her” (191). Psychoanalysis has taught us to realise that the refusal to comment, the refusal to have a word to say, are usually a site of resistance. Mary Jo, though she cannot yet admit it, has had enough of her relation with the doctor, and

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very soon she recognises that: “she did not feel as equal to this conversation as she sounded” (190).

13 Besides, Rhea is certain to know about the affair, as the use she makes of the double meaning of the word “devotion” to describe Mary Jo’s love of her job, rewarded by her exotic holiday, clearly indicates. As a consequence, the suspicion dawns on her that she is perhaps not living the life she had dreamed of. Rhea’s question, as well as the blatant lie about her trip that she tells to her acquaintances, show this quite well: “She had told patients, and her friends, and her sisters – whom she suspects of thinking that she does not have much of a life – how excited she is about it” (192). Consequently, Rhea’s cheeky question: “What is your world, Mary Jo?” is bound to trigger off deeper existential reflexions, the outcome of which she is not yet ready to confront, as her attitude in two later episodes suggests. The first one is her sudden escape in a flight of fancy after seeing the Greek and the Indian family who are going to be her travelling companions. Remembering a particular television programme she indulges in a typically Freudian fantasy which consists in falling under the spell of a beautiful and powerful exotic ruler – the father of the Primitive Horde - eager to acquire her into his harem. The fact that the narrative voice uses the word “ horde” where the word “hoard” would be commonly expected in the sentence: “He might have left his country, got out before the Russians came, with his rugs and women and perhaps a horde of gold, though not likely his goats and sheep and horses” (197), whether it is a misprint or not, is particularly relevant and enjoyable.

14 But this is hardly acceptable, and her final remark: “If he asks me to join his harem, I promise I won’t agree to any such weird procedures!” (198) sounds like the unconvincing denial of an unacknowledged desire, of the promise of a jouissance that has, so far, been out of her reach. The use of the verb “agree” leads the reader to surmise that her desire is to be part of it, in spite of social norms and conventions, because it holds promises of a new kind of fulfilment, but such a thought obviously has to be repressed. Later on, a feeling of betrayal crops up when she thinks of her present lover, and she feels that she must rehabilitate him in her eyes, so she reminds herself of his dedication to his job, of his sadness that she attributes to his capacity for obedience, by which she means acceptance of the world as it is, not to say staunch conservatism, so that she concludes unsurprisingly by reasserting that: “She loves this man with a baffled, cautious, permanent love” (203). Yet, the narrative does not end with a reaffirmation of her love for Dr Streeter, but with the phrase: “This is the beginning of her holiday” (207) which is obviously a holiday from Dr Streeter.

15 The turning point in the uneasy process of discovery of her need to assert her femininity in a different way, is illustrated by two incidents that occur when she meets the two foreign families sitting next to her on the plane. To her own surprise and dismay, she experiences an uncalled for reaction of jealousy when she observes them feeding their children: “Mary Jo is surprised at how ill-disposed she feels toward this harmless family” (194). Contrary to Dr Streeter’s mistrust of foreigners, Mary Jo is not repelled by their presence on board, it is rather the fact that they have children which she resents: “What a fuss, what accumulation and display and satisfaction, just because they have managed to reproduce” (194). Reproducing is precisely what she is not allowed to do because of her situation as a mistress, and thus her desire of maternity is frustrated by the social pressure she has to submit to on account of her partner. This realisation functions as a symptom that “there is something wrong with her” (195), as

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she puts it, and this something, she will soon discover, has to do with the acknowledgement of her desire and with her strange conduct during the Eskimo girl episode. She must have had a presentiment of the imminence of a revelation that might radically alter her outlook on life and the vision she has of herself, because she seems on the verge of refusing to take the problematic trip: Mary Jo looked at the slushy streets, the dirty February snow, the gray walls of these houses, a tall office block, with its night lights on, that she could see beyond the park. She wanted nothing much as to stay. She wanted to cancel the taxi, change her new suede suit for her uniform, […]. (193)

16 Leaving the comfort of her middle-class life, as unglamorous as it might be, for an uncertain future is certainly a hard decision to make, but as she says about the trip: “She can’t go back on it” (192).

The subversive function of alterity

17 The climax of the short story is undoubtedly the long sequence describing Mary Jo’s unexpected acquaintance with the nameless Eskimo girl in rather weird circumstances, as we do not know whether the latter’s destabilising dimension is her own, or whether it is constructed by Mary Jo’s fantasy. After she has already been unsettled by the Greek and Indian families showing the extent of their satisfaction and happiness, Mary Jo is further perturbed by the entrance on the scene of a most improbable couple: a corpulent, sullen and loudly dressed middle-aged man who does not look Caucasian with, in tow, a younger and drunken woman. Mary Jo seems fascinated by the couple and she begins to hypothesise about the true nature of their relationships, as their strange behaviour leads her to suspect something fishy, so that she eventually focuses her attention, principally on the girl whom she surmises to be a victim. Submitted to Mary Jo’s questioning the girl claims that she is Eskimo, while he is a Métis, and this seems to puzzle her, as she does not give her name, but defines herself through her origin, insisting that it is different from that of her companion. However, it is the very word “Eskimo” which Mary Jo finds tantalising because it contravenes the tenets of the politically correct: “She nods, but the word ‘Eskimo’ bothers her more than the fact. That isn’t the word to use anymore, is it? ‘Inuit.’ That’s the word they use now” (199). To put it differently, the signifier “Eskimo” comes to embody for her the very notion of alterity as an irreducible difference. And sure enough, the textual presentation of the girl highlights her singularity which produces a jarring effect on the closed world of the plane.

18 Mary Jo’s first reaction is one of surprise, the girl does not seem to belong to the conventional image of the traveller, she seems out ot place. For instance, she is surprised that the intruder could speak English. Then the girl turns out to be different from the first perception Mary Jo had of her, she has been taken in by appearances: “When she came along the aisle with the shopping bags, she looked middle-age – thick- waisted and round-shouldered. But now, smiling at Mary Jo around the man’s bulky shoulder, she looked quite young” (197).

19 When she finally learns that the girl is a fellow Canadian, her dimension of alterity is immediately transferred onto her attitude toward the man who travels with her. Right from the start the girl escapes Mary Jo’s attempts to define her, and things will get worse as Mary Jo fathoms the contradictions of her desire. For all that, the textual

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strategy makes it clear that the Eskimo girl must be seen as a figure of the double for Mary Jo, in so far as she embodies all the repressed, unwelcome, aspects of her desire.

20 To start with, both are concerned with drink, the girl is allegedly drunk and Mary Jo refrains from drinking alcohol because of Dr Streeter’s dislike for it, although she indulges in a Martini and vodka that makes her a little tipsy. Both are connected with authoritarian males, and the girl’s companion inevitably makes her think of Dr Streeter. Speaking of the Métis who has just made a “lordly gesture of thanks to her, she comments: “He is a corpulent man, probably older than Dr Streeter, but more buoyant. An incautious unpredictable man with rather long gray hair and new, expensive clothes” (196). Both women make a timid show of resistance to their men. Both are associated with the signifier “boss.” The girl exclaims: “‘You can’t boss me’ she says, and there are tears now in her voice and eyes. You’re not my father’” (199). A clear gesture of defiance of the patriarchal order, as Mary Jo’s man is none other than her own boss. But the word most closely associated with the two women is the word “devotion.” Rhea speaks of Mary Jo’s devotion (to her job and lover-boss), which deserves a reward. The Eskimo girl’s devotion takes on a more physical and erotic form which repels and fascinates Mary Jo at the same time. As she comes back to her seat after waiting for the girl near the toilets in the vain hope that she could help her, she witnesses her total physical abandonment and total oblivion of the other passengers: She closes her eyes but cannot keep them closed. She cannot stop herself from watching what is going on across the aisle. What is going on is something she should have the sense and decency to turn away from. But she hasn’t and she doesn’t. The whiskey glasses are empty. The girl has leaned forward and is kissing the man’s face. His head is resting against the cushion and he doesn’t stir. She leans over him, her eyes closed, or almost closed, her face broad and pale and impassive, a true moon face. She kisses his lips, his cheeks, his eyelids, his forehead. He offers himself to her; he permits her. She kisses and licks him. She licks his nose, the faint stubble of his cheeks and neck and chin. She licks him all over his face, then takes a breath and resumes her kissing. This is unhurried, not greedy. It is not mechanical, either. There is no trace of compulsion. The girl is in earnest; she is in a trance of devotion. True devotion. (204)

21 This scene is probably the true turning point of the story, to the extent that what intrudes upon Mary Jo’s gaze is an image of feminine jouissance that she has always refused to consider. She feels alien to such behaviour for reasons of social pressure and moral correctness but, in spite of her social self, she identifies with the girl who appears to have access to a specific knowledge of what constitues feminine jouissance as something that reaches far beyond phallic enjoyment. The scene suggests to her that sexuality is the domain where the condition for a human being to become a subject is the ignorance of what constitutes him/her. In short she discovers that the sexual is like a core of darkness within the subject’s conscious life. No wonder then if Mary Jo feels intimately concerned by this scene which is so far from her ordinary experience of love: “She seems to have caught something of the girl’s persistent and peculiar agitation” (204). The alterity that Mary Jo is led to feel as her own is therefore fittingly encapsulated in the signifier “Eskimo.” The very alterity inscribed in the letter of the word enigmatically represents for Mary Jo the Real of feminine jouissance which, by definition, is beyond the realm of the Symbolic, and therefore cannot be put into words. The opacity of the signfier “Eskimo” serves that purpose wonderfully, and

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furthermore, according to Margaret Atwood, in Canadian mythical lore it has faint echoes of the potential threats which the unknown areas of the Malevolent North might contain.

22 That such a revelation is deeply disturbing to her is confirmed by the final murder fantasy in which she escapes at the end of the short story, which is a textual echo of the earlier scene in the movie that Mary Jo is watching desultorily. She imagines that she finds the dead body of the Eskimo girl in the washroom of the airport at Honolulu: Mary Jo looks for the Eskimo girl and is bewildered to see her lying on the floor. She has shrunk, and has a rubbery look, a crude face like a doll’s. But the real shock is that her head has come loose from her body, though it is still attached to her. (206)

23 The metamorphosis of the girl into a broken doll is strangely reminiscent of the image of a little girl breaking her toy to see what is in it, to discover some hidden secret about the feminine body. Bearing in mind the theme of the double, this could be interpreted as a symbolic gesture through which Mary Jo divests herself of her former childish or immature personality, and the advice she gives to the Eskimo girl: “You will have to say what you want” (202) in fact applies to her. The very ambiguity of the personal pronoun “she” in the second sentence of the quotation below, which may refer either to the girl or to Mary Jo, is very eloquent: “Mary Jo can feel the heat of her skin and the tremor that runs through the girl’s fingers and her whole body. She is like an animal in an entirely incommunicable panic” (200).

24 Retrospectively then, the textual strategy implemented by Alice Munro sprinkled a number of clues to warn the careful reader of the real stakes of the tale. The dialogue is like a code which Mary Jo has to decipher to reach the conclusion that the girl’s story is symbolically her own story. Hence, the reiteration of the phrase “I am Eskimo” on six occurrences must be viewed as a signal: “What has that to do with it? She says as if it might be a code word, which Mary Jo would eventually understand” (200). And if the girl also repeats in no less than six instances, the entreaty: “Don’t tell nobody” it is because the secret that she keeps is not her age but the truth about femininity as an irreducible form of alterity, which is bound to be perceived as a constant threat to the primacy of the patriarchal order.

25 If Mary Jo subsequently experiences a feeling of guilt, it is only natural since the advent of a new self may have to entail the casting off of her former attachments. This guilt manifests itself through misunderstanding: “You’ll get a chance to choose your own,” says the white-haired woman, and Mary Jo thinks this means your own punishment. She knows she is in no danger of that – she is not responsible, she didn’t hit the girl or push her on the floor. (206)

26 This misunderstanding is completed by a linguistic game on the words “court” or “count”, which incidentally she associates with Dr Streeter for no apparent reason: “On the other hand the word “court” may refer to Dr Streeter” (207). We are later informed that the word was supposed to mean flowers, which suggests the feminine, and a happier dénouement. The meaning of the episode is, however, that femininity is an enigmatic and misleading word that escapes the narrow definition of any dictionary.

27 At one point in her daydreaming, Mary Jo mentions her desire to write a letter to Dr Streeter to tell him about her eventful journey, but supposedly, the letter will never be sent, at least not as a holiday report or card. Moreover, on account of the systematic use of Free Indirect Discourse, it is possible to maintain that instead, she writes this heavily autobiographical story as a record of her radical transformation into a woman

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who is now ready to relinquish her dependence on men, and to assume the responsibility of her own desire. In other words, the short story is the letter that she indirectly sends to Dr Streeter in the form of a fiction that speaks the truth of femininity.

28 Ultimately, Alice Munro may not be conversant with the details of the psychoanalytical theory in its Lacanian version, but as Freud and Lacan have both acknowledged, it is the privilege of the artist to have access to the complexity of the deeper workings of the human mind. It is therefore a tribute to the greatness of Alice Munro’s art that through the poetics of ambiguity which characterises her modalities of writing, she succceeds in creating a piece of fiction that illustrates the implications of the quest for an elusive femininity.

29 The ambivalent ending is a good case in point because, after all, there is no certainty that Mary Jo will sever her relationship with the patriarchal order of Dr Streeter for good. The last line: “This is the beginning of her holiday” (207) is particularly significant in this respect. It could no doubt be a new beginning for Mary Jo, but a holiday usually supposes a return home, unless her holiday is the prelude to a new start, or it could just as well be a mere interlude in her life. However, the ethical choice remains hers and hers only.

30 Whatever that may be, it succeeds in foregrounding the fact that femininity is not a fixed notion that could be enclosed in an identity, but remains for ever fluid, elusive, contradictory, and uncertain. In this perspective, the short story reminds us poetically that the inborn anarchistic impulse that is the very heart of femininity is the necessary condition to make a really great writer, whether he is male or female.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Atwood, Margaret, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, 126 p.

Bourdieu, Pierre, La Domination Masculine, Paris, Seuil, 1998, 142 p.

Chaumon, Franck, La Loi, le Sujet, et la Jouissance, Paris, Michalon, 2004, 125 p.

Green, André, La Lettre et le Mort, Paris, Denoël, 2004, 190 p.

Heble, Ajay, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994, 210 + XII p.

Howells, Coral Ann, Alice Munro, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, 184 p.

Irigaray, Luce, Être Deux, Paris, Grasset, 1997, 209 p.

Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire, Livre XX : Encore, Paris, Seuil, 1975, 135 p.

Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugénie, Partage des Femmes, Paris, Points-Seuil, 1976, 184 p.

Moi, Toril, Sexual Textual Politics, London, Routledge, 1986, 206p.

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Munro, Alice [1987], The Progress of Love, London, Vintage, 1996, 309 p.

Redekop, Magdalene, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro, London, Routledge, 1992, 252 p.

Sibony, Daniel, Le Féminin et la Séduction, Paris, Grasset, 1986, 328 p.

Zizek, Slavoj, Subversions du Sujet, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999, 249 p.

ABSTRACTS

En s’appuyant sur le concept lacanien de jouissance et de réél, cet article propose une lecture d’“Eskimo” sous l’angle d’un processus de découverte de soi auquel l’héroïne se trouve soumise lors d’un voyage en avion, sans pouvoir ou vouloir y échapper. Par conséquent, elle se trouve confrontée à la double tâche de devoir se libérer de l’emprise patriarcale qui structurait sa vie et de reconnaître la nécessité d’un nouveau rapport à la jouissance féminine. La rencontre de Mary Jo avec le Réél de la jouissance permet à Munro de promouvoir une définition de la féminité qui révèle sa dimension profondément anarchique et profondément créatrice.

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Alice Munro’s Naughty Coordinators in “Friend of My Youth”1

Lynn Blin

In the interpretation of sentences containing “and”, in order to fully understand them, it is necessary to ask ourselves if the terms thus joined form a couple which intervenes as a unity in the action, or if the coordinated terms deal rather with participants who are individually concerned by the action. Françoise Dubois-Charlier

1 What impresses me most in the work of Alice Munro is her talent for taking the reader by surprise, not once or twice but countless times during the same short story. Her narratives peel off layer after layer of the dull coat of paint which at first glance seems to be the surface background and present reality of her characters ‑ for the most part small town women, living small town lives ‑ only to reveal the deep dark intricacy of the existential tuggings and yearnings that make up the tragedy and grandeur of human existence.2

2 To the expectant reader discovering her stories in The New Yorker (which has first choice refusal on all of Munro’s stories) to the literary critic delving into the explanations of why Munro has been compared to a modern day Chekhov, not to mention the probing academic for whom her works provide veritable interpretive field days, an Alice Munro short story is always a monumental literary delight. If the job of the literary critic and the narratologist is to explain the why of Munro’s greatness, it is the job of the linguist to attempt to explain how she manages such a feat.3 This paper will deal with one of the main grammatical characteristics of many of Munro’s works in general, and “Friend of My Youth” in particular – her extensive use of the coordinate conjunctions, “and”, “or”, “but”, and the comma – the latter intervening in asyndetic coordination.

3 The “naughty” coordinators mentioned in my title are a tongue-in-cheek reference to the specific way Munro uses the seemingly innocent grammatical tool of coordination

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to weave into her narrative various narrative voices but also sexual innuendo there where we least expect it. In order to discover this aspect of “Friend of My Youth”, we will first briefly examine how this short story more specifically works. We will then examine some general grammatical rules concerning coordination. And finally, we will see how Munro while respecting the grammar makes “and”, “or”, “but” and the comma her allies enabling her to take us by surprise as deftly as she does.

4 “Friend of My Youth” is, on the surface, the rather sordid story of Flora and Ellie Grieves whom the narrator’s mother spent some time with during her first year as a young teacher. The Grieves belong to a fundamentalist Protestant sect called the Cameronians. The young teacher becomes friends with the more enigmatic of the two sisters, Flora. Ellie, though it is not clearly stated, is suggested as being mentally unbalanced. When the story opens, Ellie is married to a cousin-cum-hired man, Robert Deal, who had initially been Flora’s fiancé. But Robert gets Ellie pregnant and has to marry her. This pregnancy and all the subsequent ones end in miscarriages. Ellie gets cancer and dies and Robert marries the libidinous and grotesque Nurse Atkinson, who had come to take care of Ellie during her illness. This is the surface narrative – the one that can be summed up in a few sentences.

5 If this however was all there was to “Friend of My Youth”, we would be more likely to find it in a True Love magazine and not in The NewYorker. A linguistic analysis of some of the coordinate structures will enable us to better understand how more complicated events are constantly taking place beyond and beneath this surface narrative, which I have termed N1. The more complex narrative will be referred to as N2.

Opening Passage − Hints and Clues

6 Readers of short stories know that the opening passage will very often give them some keys and clues enabling access to another level of the narrative. Joly (2001) has pointed out that the first sentence of a literary work is the “container” to all that follows. He goes on to say that “the first sentence is a proposal of the formal shaping” and everything that follows “is a reworking of this” (151 my translation).

7 Here are the first two sentences. I used to dream about my mother, and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same. The dream stopped, I suppose because it was too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy in its forgiveness.

8 The passage goes on with this same homodiegetic narrator telling us about her dreams, where her mother always appeared “quite well ‑ not entirely untouched by that paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for over a decade, but so much better than I remembered that I would be a little astonished.” If we apply Joly’s idea, looking at one of the aspects of the form of these two opening sentences, we notice that the first sentence contains a syndetic coordinate construction with two clauses joined by “and” and the second an asyndeton with two noun phrases joined by a comma.4

9 There are of course, other grammatical characteristics in these two sentences, but if we continue to investigate this grammatical specificity of “FOMY”, we discover that of the 15 sentences making up this opening passage 78 per cent of them contain coordinate structures. And if we look at the entire short story we discover that out of 551 sentences, 294 contain coordinate structures.5 There are two interesting things about

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the whole introductory passage: it in no way deals with N1. And the first effect of the profuse use of coordination is to give this homodiegetic narrative voice an intensity which is for a great part due to the role played by coordination in the intonation of English, which I have termed the silent prosody of coordination.6

10 Though there are no sexual innuendos or violence in the introductory passage whatsoever, when they do crop up later on, a coordinate structure is systematically being used. My previous research attempted to show how the coordinate structures helped Munro to weave in other narrative voices. Not only do they enable the intimate intermingling of the homodiegetic voice of the introduction to the more detached one of the N1 story, they allow other narrative voices to surreptitiously slip their way into the narrative.

Polyphony and the silent prosody of coordination

11 When there is an implied narrative voice whose point of view is not the same as the narrator’s we have polyphony. It was Bakhtine who first mentioned how polyphony intervenes in this way in a literary text. But even at a sentence level, as Ducrot (1992, 1984) pointed out, if I say “Mary was supposedly ill”, the adverb supposedly suggests not only the utterer’s voice, but someone else’s.7

12 Polyphony is intrinsically linked with the sexual innuendo discovered in “Friend of My Youth”, because when we do detect it, it is not entirely the detached extradiegetic voice that is telling the story her mother had told her. Analysing the coordinate structures we can hear more and more distinctly as the narrative evolves: • the mother’s voice, though even when she intervenes in direct speech there are never any quotation marks. • the voice of the community • the voice of an unreliable narrator • the homodiegetic voice heard at the beginning

13 The voice of the community according to Mainguenau (1993) is the voice expressing rumour and hearsay. For Rimmon-Kenan, the unreliable narrator, though often difficult to detect, becomes perceptible thanks to the following hints and clues. This narrator either does not have all the facts, or his/ her participation is too subjective, or he/she might be too young to fully understand what is going on (2001: 101-104). When any of these other voices can be heard, it is not N1 that is being told but the deeper, more mysterious narrative, which we have termed N2.

The Basic Rules of Coordination

14 The basic rules of coordination (and the way we generally perceive them in texts) stipulate that “and” signals addition, “but” opposition and “or” alternative. The comma, used in asyndeton − where the conjunctions and and or are replaced by a comma, is used to enumerate elements:

15 And: Flora and Ellie Grieves were the two sisters left of the family (5).8 I knew what she was like and Flora didn’t (14). She had died firm in her faith, Flora said, and grateful for her release (17)

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16 When there is simple addition it is possible to inverse the coordinated elements: Ellie and Flora Grieves were the two sisters left of the family. Flora didn’t know what she was like, and I did. She had died grateful for her release, Flora said, and had died firm in her faith.

17 But we might very well wonder why in the example page 14 the second clause is in fact an opposition, and why “and” has been chosen instead of the more obvious “but”.

18 Or:

19 When “or” introduces a simple alternative it is termed “exclusive “or” (Halliday & Hasan 1985: 46, Quirk et al. 1985: 940, Curme (in Lapaire & Rotgé 1991: 317); it is also possible for the two elements thus coordinated to be inverted: …she (Ellie) sprung on them out of the bushes or sneaked up behind them so softly that she could blow on their necks. (10). ….she sneaked up behind them so softly that she could blow on their necks or sprung on them out of the bushes.

20 In the example from page 10, where there is no grammatical problem in the switching of places of the two clauses, we can’t help but notice that the end focus is not the same in the altered example. End focus is the tendency in English to relegate the important information of an utterance to the end of an information unit. This is also the case in French, but information units tend to be more systematically at the end of each sentence, whereas the English sentence tends to be broken “up into several information units giving it a more roller coaster effect (Carr: 2005). Since sexual innuendo is the topic examined in this paper, an information unit where the focus is “so softly she could blow on their necks” is more sexually suggestive than “she sprung on them out of the bushes.”

21 However even in the case of exclusive “or” we note that what is proposed in clause 1 does not exclude clause 2. In the example page 10, “or” could be replaced by “and”. Very often exclusive “or” works inclusively. But there are cases when the alternative introduced by “or” is not a real alternative but it does not work inclusively either. Sweetser (1998) points out that in the American revolutionary Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death”, or in the gangster’s threat “Your money or your life”, the choice between the two elements is not an equal; we do not interpret these utterances with the implied “either will do”.

22 Neither does the “either will do” implication work in the following: The story of Flora and Ellie and Robert had been told‑‑or all the people knew of it‑‑in various versions (8). All the people knew of the story of Flora and Ellie and Robert‑or it had been told − in various versions.

23 The switching of places of the clauses is not at all satisfactory. “Or” does not simply introduce an alternative here. It functions more like an elliptical comment in which the reader is required to fill in the blanks. What is implied in this sentence is: The story of Flora and Ellie and Robert had been told – [or even if it had never really been told] all the people knew of it – in various versions.

24 This use of what I term elliptical comment “or” enables Munro to slip in another narrative voice. The detached extradiegetic voice here gives way to the voice of the community – the one is expressed via rumour, gossip or idle chit-chat.

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But: two types, four interpretations, seven types of ambiguity

25 “But” introduces an opposition. However, there are four different interpretations of but – “though”, “yet”, “nevertheless”, and “however” – and, to borrow the expression from William Empson (1953), seven different types of ambiguity (cf. Lakoff 1971, Anscombre & Ducrot 1977, Horn 1985, Sweetser 1981, Rivara 1981, Lapaire & Rotgé 1991: 323-333, Hetherington-Blin 2006: 333-363).

26 But can be either corrective or argumentative.

27 Corrective But :

28 With corrective “but” the first clause is always negative or has a negative element in it. She would be looking quite well‑‑not exactly youthful, not entirely untouched by the paralysing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better than I remembered that I would be astonished (3)

29 “So much better than I remembered” corrects, or at least sets straight, any interpretation that the reader might have of “not exactly youthful” and the powerful “not entirely untouched by the paralysing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death”.

30 Argumentative But :

31 “But” signals that the expectations set up by Clause 1 are going to be modified by what we find in Clause 2. The modification can be direct, in which case the clause introduced by “but” (C2) is a direct opposition to the expectations set up by the first clause (C1). Oh, I just have this little tremor in my arm, she would say, and a little stiffness up this side of my face. It is a nuisance but I get around (3).

32 C1 “It is a nuisance” = expectation = it stops me from getting around

33 But

34 C2 I get around, which is a direct opposition to it stops me from getting around.

35 C1 and C2 are symmetrical and syntactically on the same level which implies that we can change the order of the two clauses without modifying either the semantic acceptability or the functioning of the two arguments: I get around but it’s a nuisance.

36 With asymmetrical “but” the two arguments are not on the same level, the order of the clauses cannot be inverted, and the opposition or contrast introduced by C2 is indirect in regards to C1: Ellie was married, to a man called Robert Deal, who lived there and worked the farm but had not changed its name to Deal’s in anyone’s mind (5). *The farm had not changed its name to Deal’s in anyone’s mind but Ellie was married to a man called Robert Deal, who lived there and worked on the farm.

37 Whether it be symmetrical or asymmetrical “but”, in the most straightforward cases, the presupposed idea being contrasted or opposed by C2 is shared by the utterer and the receiver of the utterance. For example in: They (the Grieves) had the money but they didn’t spend it (5.2).

38 It is relatively easy to imagine a C2 that conveys basically the same idea as the one found in the short story.

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Taking the reader by surprise

39 In “easier” literary works, the expectation set up by “but” carries little surprise. But Munro’s use of “but”, while not ‘naughty’ in that it necessarily introduces sexual innuendo, is one of her tools for taking us by surprise.

40 In order to test this intuition, I handed out to ten people a list of 43 sentences from “Friend of My Youth” containing clauses or phrases linked by “but”. They were given the first clause or phrase and asked to imagine what follows. For example, for the two sentences previously mentioned, the participants were given: It’s a nuisance but… They had the money but

41 As expected for sentences like this, for 100% of the participants, their answer conveyed the same idea as Munro. If for 6 of the examples, it was hard to conclude because the inventions partially corresponded and partially didn’t, out of the 43 examples used, only 12 (27%) completed by the participants corresponded almost exactly to what was actually in Munro’s text. Twenty-five others (60%) were totally different from Munro’s.

42 For example if we look once again at 5.1 Ellie was married, to a man called Robert Deal, who lived there and worked the farm but

43 We cannot guess if the opposition introduced is to pertain to Ellie, to Robert Deal, or to the farm ! And finally it pertains to none of the above, because Munro leaves the clause without a subject: But Ø had not changed its name to Deal’s in anyone’s mind (5.1).

44 The fact that the subject is left out is grammatically correct. Known as ellipsis, this phenomenon is one of the specificities of coordination as opposed to subordination. But we usually find this type of ellipsis in sentences like: I washed but Ø didn’t dry the dishes. Ellipsis is allowed because there is no doubt to who the grammatical subject could be. We can see that this is not the case with our example above. It is discoveries such as this one that led us further on the track of Munro’s deliciously devious use of coordination and helped us to discover more the ambiguity of “FOMY”.

45 Further types of opposition possible with “but” are the following:

C1 expresses intention/expectation C2 fact

46 This is the most direct type of opposition and C2 is easily guessed at. They delayed awhile, but finally the dance was held, and my mother got her report (18).

47 The verb “delay” implies an intention to not go through with the action, and C2 what actually took place.

Comment But

48 In some cases when what is announced in C2 is totally unexpected in regards to C1, “but” has the effect of commenting on it. I include in brackets the comment implied with “but”.

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She trusted fully in Robert’s patience and in her own purity. So she might. But [wouldn’t you know] in the winter a commotion started (10).

49 Of the 13 sentences containing comment but, the conjunction not only introduces a clause but begins a new sentence. As Hoareau (1997: 110) points out, when but begins a sentence it is most often because there is shared knowledge between the utterer and the co-utterer and it is for this reason that they are very often found in dialogues or in the personalized narrative parts. In “Friend of My Youth” comment “but” does indeed intervene in the personalized narrative parts, but one of the reasons the participants in my questionnaire had difficulty finding the same idea as Munro in C2, is because there is not as much shared knowledge as is usually expected for comment “but” to intervene.

New Possibilities But

50 In sentences containing “not only”, “but” is compulsory. In this case, it does not so much introduce a contrast as introduce new possibilities. Lapaire & Rotgé explain that this anti-restrictive use of “but” attenuates the adversative nature of “but” and introduces a clause which either completes or reinforces what is said in C1: God dealt out punishment for hurry-up marriages—not just Presbyterians but almost everybody believed that (11).

51 The interesting aspect of coordination in my view is that there is something so unassuming about it that it becomes the perfect tool for a writer like Munro, the Queen of the litote, to weave her narrative and catch us in its web. The intricacy of these structures cannot be dealt with within the confines of this short paper but hopefully we’ll be able to detect how Munro’s text illustrates the rules and then turns them upside down.9

Hierarchy in Coordinate Clauses

52 When we speak of hierarchy, we are referring to the fact that, unlike subordinate clauses which, as their name indicates are subordinate to a main clause, coordinate clauses are of equal rank. In symmetrical coordination, as illustrated below, it is possible to change the order of the two clauses and retain the grammaticality of the sentence as well as the original meaning. John and Marilynn are in love and live together downtown. John and Marilynn live together downtown and are in love.

53 Symmetrical coordination however competes with asymmetrical coordination where diverse relationships between the two clauses are implied. If we look at the first sentence of the text we see that it would be impossible to inverse the two clauses: I used to dream about my mother, and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same (3). *The surprise in it was always the same and […] I used to dream about my mother.

54 Not only is it not possible to change the order of the two clauses, it is also difficult to establish the exact relationship between the two clauses or even the need for the second clause. If someone starts out to tell you about their dream, there is obviously something surprising about it. In the short story genre, where the keyword is economy, one cannot help but pay attention to what is to some extent redundant. It is of course,

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the “to some extent” which is important here, for it is in the end focus of this first sentence that the attentive reader will begin to pay close attention to the end element of the coordinate structures of the entire short story.

55 When the two clauses of a coordinate sentence cannot be reversed, there are various relations that can be implied.10 Asymmetrical “and” implies an “and then” relationship or an “and so” relationship (Lakoff, 1971: 141). However, it is not possible to paraphrase our sentence by “and then” or “and so” and except for a very loose relationship between the two, the exact link is very difficult to establish.

Hierarchy, Uneasy Couples and Narrative voices

56 A study of coordination in “Friend of My Youth” leads us deeper and deeper into this question of hierarchy between two clauses. When two clauses are coordinated they can be of two types according to Quirk et al.: Noun phrases can be joined by combinatory coordination − in which case what is predicated for one is predicated for the other: or segratory coordination where it is possible to paraphrase Clause1 and Clause2 (Dik 1968; Girard 1998).

57 In John and Mary are married, the obvious interpretation is John and Mary are married to each other. But, there is nothing preventing an interpretation in which John is married to Karen and Mary is married to Donald, wherein the coordination can be interpreted as segratory. In order to disambiguate one from the other there are various devices we can use. For example a preposition like between demands a joint coordination: Instead of putting the wedding ahead, she put it back−from next spring to early fall, so that there should be a full year between it and her father's death (10). *there should be a year between it *there should be a year between her father's death.

58 Also: By the way everyone spoke my mother expected the Grieves sisters and Robert to be middle-aged at least, but Ellie the younger sister was only in her thirties and Flora seven or eight years older. Robert Deal might be in between (6).

59 The innocent reader of course is going to interpret this last sentence as. Robert Deal's age might be somewhere between thirty and thirty-seven.

60 The very unassuming way in which coordination functions fully enables Munro to set up the detached extradiegetic voice of the narrator telling the story her mother told her. However, a closer look at these structures indicates other narrative voices participating in the telling.

The case of reciprocal verbs

61 Joint coordination is required of all reciprocal verbs (i.e. verbs such as marry, correspond, link etc.) and when these verbs are employed, an implicit understanding of with one another or together is usually par for the course: Soon he and Flora were engaged [to one another] (9) “You have in all probability heard,” wrote Flora, “that Robert and Nurse Atkinson have been married” [to one another] (16).

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62 Once the couple is established by the context, in any further mention the reader can easily identify the coordination as being joint with an implicit understanding of “together” to be read between the lines. The division had been made, of course, in the expectation that Robert and Ellie would have a family [together], and they would need the room (6). The father made Flora and Robert [together] set the wedding date a year ahead, and after he died they did not move it any closer (10).

63 Since the couple Flora and Robert has already been established by the context, there is no difficulty identifying it as a joint coordination. And in the following, the characteristic 'joint' of the coordination has also been firmly established by N1. Ellie's share, left to him and Nurse Atkinson to enjoy themselves with, the shameless pair (17).

64 There is to all evidence no ambiguity in these sentences. Robert and Ellie, and Robert and Nurse Atkinson are fully established couples. Quirk et al. tell us that one thing that can help us decide whether we're dealing with one type of coordination or another is to find a cover term which includes the two coordinated elements. In the example page 17 Munro has conveniently provided us with cover terms which help us identify the jointness of the coordination - “Ellie's share” and “the shameless pair” in this last example. In 3, 4, 5, and 6 the cover term that comes to mind is in fact “couple”.

Segratory coordination or how Munro invites us to fill in blanks

65 In segratory coordination, the coordinated elements are not to be considered as a couple and it is possible to paraphrase the sentence by breaking it up into two clauses. In the case of this type of coordination, both is either present or implied in the sentence. Both, the pair, and the two are all terms that can be used to disambiguate couples: Pair identifying the coordination as joint, both and the two as segratory: Flora and Ellie were both dark-haired, dark-eyed women, tall and narrow- shouldered and long-legged (7). = Flora is dark-haired…. Ellie is dark-haired… Flora and Ellie Grieves were the two sisters left of the family (5) = Flora was one sister. Ellie was the other sister

66 It is generally the context which comes to the reader’s rescue and enables the linguist to decide which kind of coordination is being used when there is no term to disambiguate. But while the linguist is trying to determine how the grammatical couples are being formed, the Munro reader is being let in on some rather unsuspected dimensions of the couples the characters form in “Friend of My Youth”. A re- examination of the examples just mentioned will help us to clarify this view.

67 Through the context, the reader who has been following the story easily identifies the following coordination as being joint: And of course she has made over the farm to Ellie and Robert, of course he has inherited it, and now everything belongs to Audrey Atkinson (20).

68 It's by filling in the blanks – where Robert appears each time ‑ that this merry-go- round of couples, begins to come into focus and enhance the question that Dubois- Charlier and Vautherin, quoted at the beginning of this article, invite us to answer: what indeed authorizes us to talk of couples.

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69 Let us look again at the example at page 6. By the way everyone spoke, my mother expected the Grieves sisters and Robert to be middle-aged at least, but Ellie the younger sister was only in her thirties and Flora seven or eight years older. Robert Deal might be in between.

70 The interpretation of this sentence is clear enough as I suggested above. But another interpretation is also possible: Robert Deal might be in between Ellie and Flora.

71 It is perhaps pushing things a little to conclude that we are to interpret this as a tongue-in-cheek insinuation that these three were into unorthodox practices, but it is in these gaps that Munro not only enables us to play our role of active readers by inviting us to fill them in, it is in these gaps she constructs the space in her text to enable various narrative voices to be heard.

72 Even in the most unassuming of sentences, Munro is in fact taking advantage of the leeway coordinate structures give her to send her readers on what might look like a wild goose chase. Something similar happens in example page 9. Soon he [Robert] and Flora were engaged (9).

73 The interesting thing about this sentence is that it intervenes as an analepsis after the story has begun and Robert was introduced at the beginning as being married to Ellie! So when we come to this sentence we go back for a second read. Of course we do not interpret it as he was engaged to Ellie and Flora was engaged to someone else. But N1 has been telling us a completely different story up until now. This coordinate structure invites us to take a closer look. The narrator is not telling the story in chronological order; she's telling the story her way, and though this voice is not the intense homodiegetic voice we heard at the beginning of the narrative, it's not simply the detached extradiegetic narrator telling the tale her mother told her.

74 And let us look again at example page 17 Ellie's share left to him and Nurse Atkinson to enjoy themselves with, the shameless pair (17).

75 It is perhaps not superfluous to add here that this sentence intervenes near the end of the story. It is a repetition of the story we have just read. We already know all the facts related here. In a form that demands concision, we cannot help but ask ourselves what the author is driving at. Why repeat what the reader already knows? The only new detail, is that the couple Robert Deal-Nurse Atkinson is now designated under the cover term “pair”, modified by the adjective “shameless which on top of everything is placed at the end of the sentence and hereby gaining end-focus.

76 If Robert and Nurse Atkinson have attained the status of couple here, they have attained a whole new status in this sentence as being “a pair”. How does the two differ from the pair? The Oxford Dictionary of English confirms the use of the term as a possible synonym for couple; but in the examples given in the dictionary “pair” is always preceded by an attributive derogatory adjective ie silly pair, or an adverb they make quite a pair or it is used to designate objects: a pair of scissors, gloves, pyjamas etc. So when “pair” is used to designate a couple, there is always a modal quality to it.

77 The “shameless pair” is of course a blatant sexual innuendo. But what is of interest here, is how this disambiguator of couples enables Munro to introduce a trio of narrative voices. This sentence is part of a whole retelling of the story. The narrator

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tells us how she as an impatient teenager imagined her then ailing mother would have told the story if she could have:

78 What at first glance appears to be only the mother's voice is in fact accompanied by that of the narrator as she was when she was a teenager. The use of the pair − this disambiguator of joint /segratory coordination ‑ in introducing a modal commentary is in fact a subtle way for the narrator to comment on the rather close-minded way she perceived her mother to be. The narrator here becomes here the unreliable narrator, the one who didn’t have all the facts, because she was too young. So, in this passage we have: - the voice of the mother who at the same time is the mouthpiece for the community - the narrator and the narrator's rendition of her mother when she was 15 - the unreliable narrator.

79 What is of interest here is the fact that through the analysis of this disambiguator we catch a glimpse of the other narrative-N2, and it is through the uneasy relationships between Flora, Ellie, Robert, and Nurse Atkinson that the narrator lets slip in the uneasy relationship between her and her mother. If these uneasy couples peep their heads up above the surface when two clauses are coordinated, the unorthodoxy becomes clearer when we study what Munro does with multiple coordination in “Friend of My Youth”.

Multiple Coordination and the Merry-Go-Round of Couples

80 The basic rule for canonical multiple coordination stipulates that the coordinated elements are separated (or joined!) by commas and the last element is to be separated from the second to last one by “and”, such as in the example below.

A, B, and C

But she was engaged by that time, she wanted to work on her trousseau instead of running around the country having a good time, and she figured she could get home one Sunday out of three (5).

81 It is perhaps not surprising to discover that out of the 45 sentences built with multiple coordination, only five respect this rule. The remaining forty use either polysyndeton, when there is repetition of the conjunctions “and” or “or” which Pillière (2005: 139) terms “special effects coordination”, or asyndeton—coordination via the comma— which Cressot (1947: 237) designates under the term fragmentary view coordination where each of the elements joined only by a comma maintain a greater autonomy.

82 It is perhaps not surprising to discover that out of the 45 sentences built with multiple coordination, only five respect this rule. The remaining forty use either polysyndeton, when there is repetition of the conjunctions “and” or “or” which Pillière (2005: 139) terms “special effects coordination”, or asyndeton‑‑coordination via the comma‑‑which Cressot (1947: 237) designates under the term fragmentary view coordination where each of the elements joined only by a comma maintain a greater autonomy.

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A and B and C: Special effects coordination

83 The repetition of the coordinate conjunction (polysyndeton) creates an effect of accumulation such as can be witnessed in the example below. Flora, who in the eyes of the narrator’s mother has not lost out on her chance to marry, must also take on all the household chores, because the ailing Ellie cannot help her: She washed the clothes and tidied up the rooms and cooked the meals served in both sides of the house, as well as helping Robert with the milking and separating (6).

84 The special effects are produced of course by the accumulation brought on by the repetition of the conjunction.

A, B, C: Fragmentary Vision coordination

85 When a comma replaces a coordinate conjunction (asyndeton), the result is an impression of fragmentary vision or that there is “something more to be said” (Pillière 2005) such as in the example below. Houses turn black, maple syrup has a taste no maple syrup produced elsewhere can equal, bears amble within sight of farmhouses (4).

86 The fragmented vision comes from the absence of a closing conjunction thus producing the impression that something has been left out. It is when there is no hierarchy in the multiple coordination, and the coordinate conjunction separates each item, the coordination can usually be paraphrased by a general term (Quirk et al 1985): They were very backward. They didn’t have a car or electricity or a telephone or a tractor. (car, electricity, telephone, tractor = modern conveniences) (5).

87 Or the cover term can be provided by the text itself, as it is in the example below. Flora did all the work. She washed the clothes, and tidied up the rooms and cooked the meals served in both sides of the house as well as helping Robert with the milking and separating (6) (all the work = wash the clothes, tidy up the rooms, cook the meals).

88 But, when a cover term cannot be found to round them all up, or the cover term can be further subdivided into two or more cover terms, one of the elements finds itself detached from the rest and the different configurations outlined below are to be considered. In the example above, “helping Robert with the milking and separating”, though it is also part of “all the work”, is clearly detached by “as well as”. The end focus here draws our attention to the fact that Flora and Robert are paired via the farm chores. It should be pointed out, that since end focus is the normal place for focus in the English sentence, there is no intonational enhancement. This pairing off of Flora with her former fiancé and present brother-in-law thus goes relatively unnoticed and would remain unnoticed if there were not other pairings off of the couple.

89 Let us now have a look at further examples of hierarchy in the coordinate sentences. In these cases, either the first element or the last element of the coordinate structure is alone:

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A + [B+C+D]

But no – it was Flora who pressed Robert’s suit – it must have been – and got Ellie out of bed and washed her and made her presentable (10)

90 In the example from page 10 it was Flora who pressed Robert’s suit is separated from the activities which can be summed up by ‘got Ellie ready”

A + B [+C]

Her kerchief and apron and Robert’s baggy overalls, that she donned for the climbing jobs gave her the air of a comedian – sportive, unpredictable (7). Robert had to catch her and tie her up, and together he and Flora had to put her to bed (10).

91 In the example at page 7, her kerchief and apron can be resumed by the cover term women’s apparel and is separated from Robert’s baggy overalls, which of course stands out from the other two terms as “men’s apparel”. In both these examples we find Flora once again paired off with her brother-in-law. This example especially gives us food for thought. When we recall that the Grieves are members of a fundamentalist Protestant sect, we cannot help but be somewhat surprised that Flora would be daring something as intimate as getting into Robert’s overalls. A sentence like this one, of course goes unnoticed until we start looking at the hierarchy in this coordinate structure. 11Likewise in the page 10 example, when the mentally unbalanced Ellie, already pregnant (though the reader doesn’t know this yet) becomes hysterical and runs away and hides from her sister.

92 Here the last segment, where Flora and Robert who are still engaged are once again paired off, is clearly separated from the first two. The pairing off here of course is legitimate, as they are engaged.12 But not only is their pairing off end-focused as in the previous example, they are paired off putting a tied-up Ellie to bed! And what are we to think of the following: The story of Flora and Ellie and Robert had been told ‑or all the people knew it – in various versions (8).

93 Is the hierarchy of this coordination Flora and [Ellie and Robert], or [Flora and Ellie] and Robert or with no hierarchy at all [Flora] and [Ellie] and [Robert] in which case the cover term that spontaneously comes to mind is “threesome”? There is no clear cut answer to this question, but these examples give strong linguistic clues to how Munro works sexual innuendo and muted violence into her text and how this “special effects” coordination clearly merits its name.When sex is openly mentioned, we again hear the homodiegetic voice heard at the beginning of the narrative. In the following example, the narrator speaks of her own budding, teenage sexuality: I admired their wrists and their necks and any bit of their chests a loose button let show, and even their ears and their feet in shoes (22).

94 The hierarchy here is [A+B+C] +D +E. If there had only been the first three elements – their wrists and their necks, and any bit of their chests a loose button let show – the desire evoked would be quite clear-cut. The two elements tacked on at the end however − their ears and their feet in shoes − add another, almost comical note and enables us to further grasp how we are to understand what might be unreliable in the 15-year-old narrative voice when we hear it at various points in the text.13

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Asyndeton and Fragmentary View

A, B, C, D

95 We have seen above that though coordination does indeed join elements, some elements are more joined than others. With asyndeton there are two main effects. The standard one, which implies the notion of fragmentary view, implies that the description is being built as the utterer goes along. In canonical coordination, when there is enumeration, the “and” which announces the final element, announces to the reader that the end is nigh. If the list were to be read aloud, the final element would be read with a falling tone. Asyndeton is open-ended, and there is very often an impression that more can be said, or an implied etc. In both cases it is an open invitation to the reader to imagine a follow up.14 This is the case in the following examples: She demanded new medicine, reviled the doctor, nagged Flora (11). Would she get a permanent, paint her nails, put on lipstick (25)? She might rent a cottage on a lake for a week, learn to swim, visit a city (25).

96 In the asyndeton, instead of an imagined etc. we could also imagine suspension points, which are much less neutral than etc. in that etc., implies “more of the same” or “things of that sort”, while suspension points indicate that something has been omitted. This use of asyndeton, in most of our analysis (Hetherington-Blin: 2006) signals a shifting of narrative voice. Instead of the detached extra-diegetic voice, telling the story her mother told her of her time spent with the Grieves, the asyndeton enables the narrator to slip in her own less detached intradiegetic voice and to comment on it. And strangely enough, if for many sentences using asyndeton there is indeed an impression that etc. could be added to the final element, this cannot be taken as a hardfast rule. Just as in a sentence like “He came, he saw, he conquered” we have the impression that there is nothing more to be said, Munro does the same with several of her asyndeton sentences. When describing Ellie’s preparation for her “shotgun wedding” we have this: She let Flora fix her up, she let herself be married, she was never wild from that day on (10).

97 Here, even without the final “and”, we have a very clear “that’s-it-in-a-nutshell” point of view.

Couples and the Merry-Go-Round of Coordination

98 To conclude, we shall examine how Munro manages to combine within one and the same sequence several different possibilities of coordination. The intricacy of Munro’s narrative becomes all the more evident when her coordinate sentences combine different possibilities that this structure allows. In the following example, the narrative voice is once again the intradiegetic voice heard at the beginning. The narrator, comparing her generation’s view of sex with that of her mother’s gives us this: My mother had grown up in a time and in a place where sex was a dark undertaking in a woman. So she honored the decency, the prudery, the frigidity, that might protect you. And I grew up in the horror of that protection, the dainty tyranny that seemed

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to me to extend to all areas of life, to enforce tea parties and white gloves, and all other sorts of tinkling inanities (22).

99 Here again with the decency, the prudery, the frigidity one wonders what could possibly be added. It seems clear however, that what is implied here is not etc. but rather suspension points which enables the asyndeton to have a commentary effect. Commentary that is fully developed in dainty tyranny which itself is explained and commented on by the use of polysyndeton in tea parties, and white gloves, and all other sorts of tinkling inanities. The interesting linguistic phenomenon here is that with the asyndeton, Munro manages to give us the impression that there is little more to be said concerning the awesome protection from sex afforded to women at the time, thus countering the open-endedness effect that this type of coordination is supposed to give. Also, with the polysyndeton in 27 the expression “all sorts” which, as Pillière (2005) has pointed out, indicates that “there is more to be said”, we have once again an example of how Munro subtly works within and without the rules which govern these structures enabling her to orchestrate different narrative voices, the polyphony of which enables to reader to have access to a multi-layered text.

100 As “Friend of My Youth” draws to a close the merry-go-round of couples leaves way for the mother-daughter couple encountered in the opening passage. At the very end of the short story, the narrator comments on the dream of the opening passage and the experience of forgiveness. I shall quote the whole passage and underline the coordinate structures: I would have to say that I felt slightly cheated. Yes. Offended, tricked, cheated, by this welcome turnaround, this reprieve. My mother moving rather carelessly out of her old prison, showing options and powers 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).

101 To conclude we will look at this final paragraph, which is the penultimate in the text.15 The asyndeton, “offended, tricked, cheated” is of interest, because unlike the other asyndetons in the text which either imply “more to be said”, or on the other hand, “nothing more to be said”, takes on another twist here as it implies that the narrator is at a loss for words (the repetition of “cheated”; where there are good number of synonyms from which to choose introduces a note of frustration in the narrative voice.

102 The following asyndeton, this welcome turnaround, this reprieve, where the second term is introduced as an explanation of the first,16 is not only a contradiction to the impression of feeling cheated, it introduces the idea of “reprieve”, which not only has an official connotation to it, but also implies something more temporary than forgiveness. The poignant “bitter lump of love, compared to a phantom pregnancy suggests yet another couple onto this above-mentioned merry-go-round and perhaps the most unsuspected of all. As far as coherence is concerned, the phantom pregnancy rings a coherent echo to Ellie’s perpetual miscarriages and the narrator here finds herself indirectly associated with Ellie.

Conclusion

103 We have seen how Munro uses the possibilities that coordination gives the writer to have at her disposal the necessary tools to give power and depth to the story of the Grieves sisters. The study of her naughty coordinators has shown how the N1 is really a

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sort of “textual foreplay” to the far more complex N2 in which “Friend of My Youth” can be read ‑ and is read by countless scholars ‑ as a daughter-mother story. Munro’s coordinators turn out to be not simply deliciously “naughty”, but a little bit subversive, and thoroughly authoritative.

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NOTES

1. I wish to thank Beth Kaplan and Jean-Marie Merle for their careful reading and challenging questions concerning this article. 2. For treatment of the ordinary in Munro see Ventura 2002. 3. For Halliday and Hasan, it is not for the linguist to interpret a text. In their book Cohesion (1983) they explain how a literary text coheres but stipulate that thought textual cohesion does not give us direct access to the meaning of the text "what it will do is to show why the text is interpreted in a certain way" (328). "Cohesion is the set of meaning relations that is general to all sets of text that distinguishes text from non-text and interrelates the substantive meanings of the text with each other. Cohesion does not concern waht a text means: it concerns how the text is constructed as a semantic edifice" (26). 4. Syndeton refers to coordination of clauses or phrases by "and", "or", and "but". Grammarians and linguists of the French-speaking world do not always include asyndeton in comma is a coordination. This however is not the case for the English spedking world. The Polysyndeton is the multiple use of "and" and "or" to link clauses or phrases. 5. For comparison's sake, a short story of similar length but which also makes use of coordination, "The Orlov Sokolovs" by L. Ulitskya, we find only 175 coordinate structures for 405 sentences. 6. It is impossible within the confines of this paper to go into this concept of silent prosody, which I have dealt with more thoroughly elsewhere (Hetherington-Blin 2006, Blin 2008). Suffice it to say there that along with other linguists and phonologists (see notably Arabyan 2001), I believe

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that we take our intimate knowledge of the spoken language with us when we read. Good readers, even when they read silently, read with expression. The very long sentences which coordination enables, as well as the effects it has upon intonation and pitch gives large portions of this introductory passage the intonation pattern of a lament. 7. For a more thorough linguistics approach to polyphony see Gévaudan 2009. 8. The numbers at the end of each sentence indicate the page number where they are to be found. 9. See Hoareau (1997) for a detailed comparative study of how coordination works in French and in English. Pilière (2005) illustrates the different effects of canonical multiple coordination compared to that where the last element in an enumeration is not separated by "and". 10. Halliday and Hasan in their work on how a text forms a cohesive unit have this to say about "and": "We shall refer to the conjunctive 'and' by the more general term "additive" to suggest something rather looser and less structured than what is meant by coordinate" (1976: 234). For Halliday and Hasan, it's the progression of a text that is most important; therefore cohesion is concerned only with links established between sentences, and not within the sentence itself. Coordinate conjuctions are not considered to be strictly cohesive unless they are at the beginning of sentences. However, this is to neglect the specific prosody of sentences where coordination plays an important role. When what I have termed the silent prosody of coordination is analysed in the opening passage, we gain several clues to why this passage has some of the characteristics of a lament. The long sentences that coordination enables is one factor contributing to this phenomenon, but the breaths and pauses that coordination demands is another (Hetherington- Blin 2006: 23-35, Blin 2008). 11. We might also note the asyndeton of the two adjectives in postposition as the end focus of this utterance: ...gave her the air of a comedian, sportive, unpredictable. In contemporary English, sportive, means frolicsome, playful, but it also has an archaic meaning of wanton. The use of adjectives in postposition (predicative adjuncts) instead of the more canonical attributive position, plus the use of the polysemous sportive also suggests the slipping in of the intradiegetic voice of the narrator. For more on adjective phrases see Desurmont: 2003: 101-118, 2007, 2008: 74-94, Hetherington-Blin: 2006: 238-262). 12. As previously explained, we discover that Flora had been engaged to Robert prior to the latter's marriage to her sister on page 6. We also discover that it was Flora herself who put off the wedding after her father's death, instead of putting it ahead: "A year from wedding to funeral- that seemed proper to her.", p10 and, though propriety is the reason given here, the reader is left to wonder if it is Flora's fear of sex of simply her desire to remain independant which pushes her to delay it. 13. A more psychoanalytical reading of this sentence of course would imply that "feet in their shoes" might refer to a more hidden part of the mal anatomy. 14. When we consider the open endedness of "Friend of My Youth", open endedness which is the case of most great short stories, it is perhaps not surprising that Munro makes such good use of a grammatical form that is itself open-ended. 15. The last paragraph of Friend of My Youth reads thus: "The Cameronians, I have discovered, are or were an uncompromising remnant of the Coventars – those Scots who in the seventeenth century bound themselves with God, to resist prayer books, bishops, any taint of popery or interference by the king. Their name comes from Richard Cameron, an outlawed, or "field" preachers, soon cut down. The Cameronians – for a long time they have prefered to be called the Reformed Presbyterians – went into battle singing the senventy-fourth and the senty-eighth Psalms. They hacked the haughty Bishop of Saint Andrews to death on the highway and rode their horses over his body. One of their ministers, in a mood of firm rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world." The reader is obviously puzzled by this ending, but we consider that it is not only a coherent echo (in the sense that halliday and Hasan

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refer to coherence) to each and every mention of the Cameronians in the text, but that it also functions as a metonymy and rings coherently for all the violence in the text: a) the violent relation between Robert and Ellie, b) the violence of the mother's tragic destiny, c) the violence of the suffocating stifled life in small-town Ontario, and last but not least d) the violence of the narrator's sense of guilt of having condemned her mother's last paintful years to solitude when she decided to leave home. 16. Multiple modification is another feature of Munro's writing. Quirk et al. Point out that out of 17,000 noun phrases examined in Survey of English Usage files, less tha one-eight had multiple modification. In "Friend of my Youth" 98 of the noun phrases have multiple modification. We have shown (Hetherington-Blin 2006: 302) that even when Munro respects the rules concerning adjective phrase coordination, it's the unsuspected association of two (or more) adjectives which constantly takes the reader by surprise.

ABSTRACTS

Un des phénomènes grammaticaux les plus saillants dans l’œuvre d’Alice Munro est son emploi répété de structures faisant appel à la coordination. Munro utilise ces structures pour introduire des allusions sexuelles qui ne sont pas là où nous les attendons. Cet article utilise des exemples précis tirés de « Friend of My Youth » pour démontrer comment une analyse linguistique de ces structures peut être une clef utile pour comprendre la complexité de son œuvre.

AUTHORS

LYNN BLIN Lynn Blin is a “Maître de Conférences” in linguistics and translation in the English Department at the Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3. Her research is focused on the link between grammar and style.

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Negotiation of Naming in Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung”

Sabrina Francesconi

Have you no word to say? Munro, “Meneseteung”, Friend of My Youth (512)

Introduction

1 “What’s in a name?” This paper starts from Juliet’s suggestion that names carry numerous significations and implications. In Alice Munro’s stories, names are much more than labels with the function of positioning the named item – be it a person, a place, or else on a geographical map or on a civic archive. Names are, in fact, sites of negotiation for identity, and historical and cultural issues. They are never accepted as definite products, but questioned as performative and open textual units. The exploration of the naming process in Munro’s narrative is of pivotal importance to appreciate the irreducible textual and linguistic dynamics weaving short stories that have captured the attention of readers for five decades. The present paper focuses on the story “Meneseteung”, first published in the authoritative pages of The New Yorker (1988) and then included in Munro’s seventh collection of short stories Friend of My Youth (1990).

The naming process

2 Barthes (618) defines a name as “un instrument d’échange : il permet de substituer une unité nominale à une collection des traits en posant un rapport d’équivalence entre le signe et la somme”. Adopting Saussure’s terminology, we can rephrase this by stating that a signifier is asked to replace the signified. This process of substitution is far more complex than a neutral and univocal exchange. Considering psychic dynamics, Lacan inscribes naming within the symbolic order, according to which the linguistic act shapes subjectivity – to be distinguished from the ego and the self – and allows access

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to the social world. As a matter of fact, the symbolic creates reality, that order which is named by language. According to psychoanalytic theory, not only is naming implied in maturity and in the separation from the maternal, but it also involves access to and acquisition of power. Naming testifies to the power inherent in the symbolic order.

3 In the narrative post-colonial female text, naming is woven through numerous textual strategies. Their observation can reveal power dynamics functioning on psychic, political and socio-cultural levels. Of crucial significance are the subject(s) and the object(s) of naming, their mutual relation and the position they occupy within the space of narration. This constructs, in fact, the point of view from which the referent is gazed upon and, subsequently, named by the narrating stance. Obviously, the carrier of the name, that is the signifier, is to be observed in the code(s), mode(s) and form(s) in which it is articulated. It can be formulated coherently with the textual nature of the surrounding text or in a different language, register, graphic solution. These choices imply discursive acts of hegemony or subversion, of coherence or disruption, of cohesion or dissemination, and raise the question of the function(s) of the naming process. Such solutions can be only rarely retraced on a formal and stylistic plan, since they often carry psychological, social and political significances, which can ultimately help deeply question the textualization of the name. Interestingly, Carscallen devoted fifty pages of his extended analysis of Munro’s stories to the choice of names identifying semantic families on the basis of chromatic or emotional significances or with reference to a Biblical or Scottish legacy. Adopting an open and fluid perspective on naming, the present work is, instead, concerned with names as sites of continuous negotiation.

Alice Munro’s stories

4 What is at stake when Alice Munro’s narrator is the subject of naming? Munro’s short stories are definitely the artistic expression of a woman’s craft. According to various positions of the French philosophers Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, Wittig, mediated into the Canadian debate by Brossard, Godard, Redekop and Kamboureli, among others, gender is the privileged site that determines the very nature of writing and that needs to be placed at its very core. So, the pivotal question raised by Godard: “How to write as a woman?” (43) can be answered with the écriture feminine. Cixous’ essay “Le rire de la méduse”, both a political and aesthetic manifesto, explains this form of writing: [...] son écriture ne peut aussi que se poursuivre, sans jamais inscrire ou discerner de contours, osant ces traversées vertigineuses d'autre, éphémères et passionnés séjours en lui, elles, eux, qu'elle habite le temps de la regarder au plus près de l'inconscient, dès leur lever […] Elle laisse parler l'autre langue à mille langues, qui ne connaît ni le mur ni la mort. A la vie, elle ne refuse rien. Sa langue ne contient pas, elle porte, elle ne retient pas, elle rend possible. (50)

5 L’écriture féminine has to inscribe its own difference, alterity, the materiality of its own corporality, the resonance of her laughing, the rhythm of her own jouissance within the interstices of the hegemonic discourse. Coherently, Kamboureli confirms its capacity to unveil previously hidden and silenced voices and discourses: “The language of a woman writer is at once a language of necessity that exposes the fraudulent realities about her and the language of the body” (38). Redekop goes even further. Establishing a conflict horizon between the biologic and the symbolic, she warns: “[T]he challenge is to write from within a woman’s body and without trapping that body inside the old symbols”

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(1992: 222). Godard retraces in Munro’s aesthetic an attempt to come to terms with these plural stances: “Munro is in quest of a body experienced by women as subject of their desires not as object of men’s desires and of the words and literary forms appropriate to this body” (43).

6 Besides that of gender, the second parameter to be considered for tracing the identity profile of the narrator is rural small-town south-western Ontario as setting. The “entangled bush”, the “flat fields”, the “dusty roads”, the “red-brick unpainted houses” with the “bare yards” are recurring touches that Munro’s readers look for when starting a new story. This location is often selected for the profound attraction and connection the writer feels: “I am intoxicated”, she explains in the introduction to her collection of Selected Stories (xi). Kroetsch clarifies the role played by space within this narrative system: “[T]he rural or small-town setting remains the text place, the energy source” (1986: 122). Clearly, small-town Ontario is more a social community strictly embedded in the territory people live in than a mere physical site. Ross further explains that Munro’s stories “are translations into the next-door language of fiction of all those documentary details, those dazzling textures and surface, of remembered experiences” (112). Attention to details has nourished a widespread critical approach to Munro’s art as regionalist, which also motivated the adoption of referential precision as a parameter for interpretation (Balestra 1999). Curiously, the author has often had to face the complaints of Wingham inhabitants who have felt offended by the supposedly grotesque effect achieved through the representation of scenes and characters in a disenchanted and sarcastic style. This clearly shows the inability to capture and appreciate the aesthetic and non-referential value of narration and in particular of narration of space (Locatelli and Di Blasio 2006). The writer herself rejects in her narratives a documentary style and constantly warns her readers to avoid a documentary gaze; she endlessly clarifies that what she is describing is a literary space, suspended along the horizon of storytelling.

7 The same problem, as already suggested, was faced when her stories were read as pieces of an autobiographical memoir, as pages of a personal diary. This kind of reading was not only conducted by the general public but also by some critics. As Cox affirms, Munro first began to be widely published during the seventies, at a time when ‘second wave’ feminism placed special value on the notion of uncovering lives that had been suppressed or distorted by a patriarchal tradition. Personal testimony was seen as politically empowering for both readers and writers. (21)

8 The writer strenuously keeps claiming that narrated events are not autobiographical but personal (1996) and that they have been completely transfigured into the written page. No doubt, Munro is a writer. Her gaze is definitely that of a storyteller and storytelling is an obsessively recurring topic; the motivations and frustrations, the dynamics and challenges of artistic production are clearly visible throughout the pages.

9 The representation of this professional-intellectual-artistic-creative stance has been always negotiated within the short story form. For decades, Munro has been faithful to this genre, first adopted for very pragmatic motivations due to family duties and lack of time (Ross, Thacker 2005). However, her editors and agents have constantly put pressure on her to work towards a novel form. In numerous interviews, she has given the impression of justifying and apologising for her “failure”. Meanwhile, she has reached the worldwide acclaimed status of master of the short story. Even though refusing theorising about her genre solution, she has progressively developed this form

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and blurred traditional genre distinctions (Howells 9-11). Her stories have become increasingly longer, more entangled in plot and meaning, and more sophisticated in style. As a matter of fact, Munro’s short stories delineate the privileged site for the continuous re-negotiation of narrative stances and of the naming process.

“Meneseteung”

10 The present paper focuses on “Meneseteung”, first published in The New Yorker in January 1988, then included in Friend of My Youth and in the 1996 Selected Stories.1 Subsequently, the short story has often been anthologised in collections published inside and outside of Canada.2 As often happens with Munro, the The New Yorker text has been adapted to satisfy the editors’ requests but the subsequent versions show some substantial differences, in particular regarding the story’s ending. Thacker (1999: 2,3) has observed how the Friend of My Youth story positions the narrator in a less authoritative stance, adds touches of mystery to the protagonist and to the narrated events, and ultimately leaves the reader with more doubts and uncertainties. Notably, the narrator concludes the story admitting her own limits and thus questioning her own reliability: “I may have got it wrong” (514). Munro’s readers are not surprised: they never expect conclusive solutions or resolutions of contradictions. Like her narrator, the writer herself continuously rewrites and reinvents motives and plots, as well as modes and forms of the story genre.

11 This elusiveness seems to contradict the apparently documentary opening of the story, where a third-person omniscient narrator-historian tries to retrace the figure of the nineteenth-century Huron county poetess Almeda Joynt Roth. She seems to turn back and give voice to “a (literary fore)mother” (Cox 70), surely not a new effort in female literature. It responds to Woolf’s passionate words in A Room of One’s Own: “a woman writing thinks back through her mothers” (26), even though often vanished by unsuccessful research, as lamented by Barrett Browning in a 1845 letter: “I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none” (230). Several Munro researchers have been strenuously trying to find out the historical source for Roth. In her cogent volume on Munro, Redekop confessed that she: consulted various sources and got several librarians sleuthing for me in order to prove to myself that Almeda Joynt Roth is a fiction. I still have a lingering suspicion that there must really have been such a person and I would continue to suspect this even if Alice Munro herself assured me that she made up the woman. (1992: 216)

12 Robert Thacker identified “historical prototypes” in Clara Mountcastle and Eloise E. Skimmering (2005: 434), both from rural south-western Ontario. Munro’s biographer also detected the existence of a schoolteacher named Joynt in Munro’s school, when the writer was a child (ibid.). Curiously, only when the story was reprinted in the collection Best American Short Stories 1989, Munro admitted knowing the two nineteenth-century poetesses.

13 However, Almeda Joynt Roth is not a historical character; the traits of her fictional character are delineated along a narrative horizon. This discussion should thus address the fictional dynamics criss-crossing the story, more than overt denials and/or confessions of the writer herself. The narrative fabrication of the poetess should be questioned, as it is performed by the narrative stance.

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14 This narrator is more visible in the opening and closing sections of the story, the récit racontant, set in the late 1980s; it tends to disappear in the récit raconté, grounded in 1879 and in the immediately following years. While different time periods are juxtaposed, the physical setting remains unaltered: rural Western Ontario. In particular, the fil rouge is Roth’s house, where many narrated events unfold and which, the narrator writes, “is still there today; the manager of the liquor store lives in it” (495). The narrative style is far from homogeneous: factual and straightforward when describing the main character, it progressively becomes poetic and fragmented when narrating Almeda’s delirium and the mental deterioration she experiences in her last years. Complexity and irreducibility not only refer to narrating voice, style, temporal setting, but also to the representation of the protagonist herself.

15 The reader is informed that Roth lives alone in Ontario, in the house she has inherited from her parents, who have both died long before. She has also lost her young brother and sister when they were young. Like her father, she has an intense passion for poetry, which she has cultivated throughout her life. Her only book of poems is entitled Offerings and appeared in 1873, with an autobiographical “Preface”. Excerpts from that volume provide epigraphs for each of the short story’s six sections. Curiously, one of the quoted poems carries the title “Champlain at the Mouth of the Meneseteung”. The name of the Meneseteung river is significant in this story and will be here addressed in its various implications.

16 First, Meneseteung is the title of the short story. Bök argues that, supposedly, “titles entitle books to be appropriated by author(itie)s for the purpose of expressing an apparently stable position within discourse”. Quite the contrary, Munro’s title destabilises and disrupts fixed and monosemic notions of authoriality and textuality. In fact, the title of the short story is mirrored in the title of the poem: the prose narrator gives space to the poetess’ voice and the twentieth-century short story offers hospitality to the nineteenth-century verses. This hospitality is marked by the refracted title, at the same time visible as a paratext of the frame text and in the supposedly quoted poems. The story enacts, according to Wall (76), a mise en abyme of a second text, which at the same time constructs and deconstructs the first text, showing its composed and irreducible nature (ibid.). In Munro, unlinear and hybrid textuality is not only a stylistic solution but an epistemic mode, engendering a never-ending deferral of meaning. Through title reduplication, Munro makes the reader suspect canonical and definite textual borders and look for alternative and fluid modes of reconfiguring text genre and narrative stance.

17 Like Almeda Roth cannot be retraced in history books, the Meneseteung river does not appear on Ontario maps. One can only find that name associated to the bridge that crosses the Maitland River. This leads us to an (apparently) philological level of analysis. After consulting local travel magazines and travel books, Redekop gives some information on the origins and meanings of the word “Meneseteung” (1999: 21). One source she mentions states that it is the Chippewa term for the Maitland River. It could mean: “laughing water”, referring to the sound of the water running over the rocks in the river. Another document quotes the Ojibway word “menesetung”, meaning “healing water”. Being fascinated by layers of memories and layers of stories, Munro’s attention has been captured by these layers of signs. In this case, she recovers the ancient, hidden name of the river, a politically highly significant practice.

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18 The retracing of Indian place names recognises the historical importance of and gives political dignity to the First Nations. Still today, maps of Canada are scattered with duplicated UK place names, testifying to what Bourdieu (239) defines as a symbolic act of imposition which legitimates symbolic violence. When inhabited centres were founded, they were given British names to mark the arrival, the power, and the control of the settlers. In most cases, anglophone names were even attributed to pre-existing centres, or natural sites like lakes, rivers, mountains, obliterating their original names in the attempt to erase the indigenous history, culture and identity. The visible legacy of this imperialist policy can be seen through the eyes of the narrator of “Princess Ida”, one of the stories of Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women: “River Street, Mason Street, John Street, Victoria Street, Huron Street, and strangely, Khartoum Street” (59). Contemporary Canadian policies of place naming increasingly make use of non- mainstream linguistic codes and unveil pre-existing First Nations’ terms.

19 Clearly, the Meneseteung river and name inhabit more the textual than the geographical ground. It is in her stories that names are negotiated and the naming process performed. It is not surprising that Munro keeps for herself space for intervention in the recovery of the Menesetung name: she changes the spelling, adding an -e before the -u. Interestingly, in other stories she also calls the same river Wawanash River, using another Indian name. Noteworthy, Canadian writers have been adopting fictitious Indian place names for decades: a famous example is the imaginary Manitoba region of Manawaka Margaret Lawrence chose as the setting for her cycle going from The Stone Angel (1968) to The Diviners (1974) (Palusci 69). The adoption of fictitious place names deprived of a codified and recognisable referential anchorage abolishes the traditional implications of hegemony and control of the naming process itself.

20 The translation from life to narration not only occurs through the adoption of fictitious place names. As already mentioned, an intense emotional connection exists between the Maitland river and Munro’s stories, explained in an often quoted magazine article: I am still partly convinced that this river – not even the whole river but this stretch of it – will provide whatever myths you want, whatever adventures. I name the plants, I name the fish, and every name seems to me triumphant, every leaf and quick fish remarkably valuable. (1974: 33)

21 The river is far beyond offering only a source of artistic inspiration: it fulfils a mythopoietic function. It does not impose already written stories but leaves space for the you-reader to want them, to tell them, to write them down. At a certain point, the narrator seems to feel the necessity to clarify the use of the name Meneseteung in the story, in what seems a meta-narrative and meta-linguistic explanation: The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem –with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods. (511)

22 The reader is only informed of the mutual, inextricable bond between landscape and textscape. The name of the poem finds its origin in this verbal-ontological juxtaposition poem-river/river-poem. The old verses of the poem, containing the archetypal name “Meneseteung”, flow throughout the short story as the Maitland River flows throughout Huron County. Not only does the visual shape of the river iconically recall a poem, but the metaphoric image of the (river) flux will obsessively recur throughout

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the story pages. In fact, all the intense experiences the protagonist undergoes – physical, psychological, artistic – will be represented as a flux.

23 After positioning the equivalence, Munro adopts the river as a metaphor for the self, asked to delineate the fluid space of consciousness. Almeda has taken her nerve medicine and is now experiencing an “unresisting surrender to her surrounding” (510). In the poetess’ delirium, the Meneseteung occupies a suspended place in her mind: “Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating. They don’t look much like real flowers” (511). Munro goes even further and paints a kaleidoscopic narrative image refracting infinite connections. The process of introspection is first described as “looking deep into” the two-fold self of the Almeda River. Then, the self being gazed upon is reduplicated into the knitted tablecloth, which undergoes a metamorphosis. It becomes water over which crocheted roses can float, while some grape juice Almeda was preparing overflows the container (511). At this point she is overwhelmed by the intensity and unavoidability of poetic inspiration: [she] cannot escape words. She may think she can, but she can’t. Soon this glowing and swelling begins to suggest words – not specific words but a flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make known to her. Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. (510)

24 If the writing of a poem substantiates a river’s flow, it is understandable that: “the flow of Meda’s words starts with her menstrual flow” (Redekop 1992: 222). River, river-self, watered tablecloth, grape juice, words, poems, menstrual blood. Not only does Munro break a cultural taboo and write of menstruation, but as a seamstress she crochets the abject on the narrative texture-tablecloth, and makes it the very origin of writing. On this knitted tablecloth, she makes the real and the symbolic converge.

25 However, the image of the flux is not the only bond between the Meneseteung River and the poet Almeda. It is in the naming process that they can be approached. Redekop observes that: “In the name ‘Meneseteung’ there is the sound of menace as well as the sound of tongue and this conjunction directs us to Munro’s reflections on the dangers surrounding the woman who finds her tongue” (1992: 227). Again, this process of giving voice can be plurally retraced. Meda expresses her kinship with the almost murdered woman found on the street, the narrator of the story gives voice to the literary foremother Almeda Roth, and the writer Alice Munro gives voice to her own mother, Anne Clarke Laidlaw, who was not able to write her story and, due to the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, could not communicate properly. Not casually, Friend of my Youth is dedicated “To the Memory of My Mother”. The short story text subtly weaves all these “refracted and related women, a sisterhood encompassing the invisible author, the narrator, Almeda/Meda” (Cox 75). Almeda, Alice, Anne, but also Clare, Eloise, and an almost dead woman.

26 It is not surprising that, after dwelling on the river name, the narrator devotes her curiosity to the name of the poetess: we have a nameless female narrator looking for a name in order to retrace the poetess’ life. She is not interested in the official name one finds at the beginning of the story, Almeda Joynt Roth, or the normal one used throughout the pages, Almeda Roth. Her attention is captured by a humble nickname appearing in a verse of the poem “Children at Their Games”: Meda. A fil rouge unfolds along the storyline in search of significations, connecting the signifiers “Almeda Joynt Roth”, “Almeda Roth”, and “Meda”. At the beginning of the story, the narrative voice

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slows down the rhythm of narration, opens a parenthesis and formulates a hypothesis: “Perhaps Almeda was called Meda in the family, or perhaps she shortened her name to fit the poem” (494). No other traces appear to clarify the doubt. Then, at the end of the story, she reaches the graveyard and finds the nickname engraved on the stone: “That was all the name there was –Meda. So it was true that she was called by that name in the family. Not just in the poem. Or perhaps she chose her name from the poem, to be written on her stone” (514). The name “Meda” is likely to have been used in family relations and to sign her poems. Translating Lacanian positions, Kroetsch thus clarifies the relation between writers and naming: “Writers conceive of themselves profoundly as namers. They name in order to give focus and definition. They name to create boundaries. They name to establish identity” (116). Almeda had then chosen and used the name Meda to trace and to mark her own identity, both intimate and intellectual, as a woman and as a poetess. The two seem strictly connected, even mutually interchangeable. The portrait of virtue seems completed.

27 Perhaps. I may have got it wrong. Perhaps, the name Meda could and should be further explored in more subtle implicatures. To the reader, the name Meda vividly evokes that of Medea, the murderess of her own two children to revenge her rejected love for Jason. Apparently, the mild story protagonist is very far from the sinister mythological character. However, the narrator wants the reader to enter Roth’s house not from respectable Dufferin street that decent citizens take to go to church but from the back entrance, from dissolute Pearl Street where indecent individuals scream, fight, beat women almost to death. Pearl Street. It is the back side of the house that Almeda prefers for sleeping. In that place, the unmarried, childless woman often has disturbing dreams after taking bromides and a nerve medicine for her sleeplessness. In the last period of her life, she undergoes mental degradation and adopts “a rash and unusual behaviour”, thus becoming “a figure of fun” (512). She is committed to poetry. She dies of pneumonia, a disease she developed from a cold she caught in Pearl Street, perhaps being pushed into a bog. The source of these details is again the Vidette – some excerpts appear throughout the story, and the emphasis is on the level of moral indecency Roth has achieved after an entire life of “attention to decorum” (ibid.). Meneset(e)ung, Menace, Med(e)a. Again Munro questions, deconstructs and subverts what Derrida would term the monolangue, the code of power, hegemony and singularity, as he puts it, “de l’homohégémonie” (55, 56).

28 The narrator wants readers to see what lies hidden beyond the thin layer of linoleum – to use one of Munro’s recurring domestic metaphors. She wants them to go beyond covers of respectability, and look for the perhaps menacing unheimlich. Not in order to have reasons for condemnation, but in order to appreciate a more vivid and vibrant, less opaque and aseptic character. It is a never-ending search for irreducibility: far from finding and fixing a conclusive identity for Almeda, all she achieves is the questioning, deconstructing, deferring of names and naming. Locatelli rejects naming procedures when used to passively project, reduplicate and confirm the self within a wider ideological, transcendental project of a “metaphysics of presence” (13). Conversely, she argues that: “Naming and name-appropriation are not demonstrable parts of the same identity, but of a procedural construction of an ongoing identity, made possible by irreducible deferment” (ibid.). As a matter of fact, signifiers are always arbitrary and refer to the signified in a provisional, fluid and often illusory way. Thus, within the naming process, the act of signification is defined as differential, precisely as acquiring meaning through never-ending deferral. The naming process

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originates from a performative, hermeneutical procedure that positions, recognises and enhances alterity as otherness. That otherness which cannot be grasped. This implies avoiding Manichean models of perception and representation and subsequent celebratory or condemning approaches, as clearly embodied by the Vidette. Munro’s characters and names then acquire meaning within the textual borders of the short story, the privileged space where they can escape crystallisation and experience continuous appropriations, re-writing, dislocations, deferrals.

29 A name is a name is a name.

Acknowledgments

30 I would like to thank Héliane Ventura for inviting me to participate in this volume on Munro, the anonymous revisors for their comments and suggestions, Carla Locatelli and Oriana Palusci for content revision and Michelle van Kampen for language revision.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balestra, Gianfranca, “Alice Munro as Historian and Geographer: A Reading of Meneseteung.” in L. Nissim and C. Pagetti, eds, Intersections: la narrativa canadese tra storia e geografia, Bologna, Cisalpino, 1999, 119-136.

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, G. Frederick Kenyon, ed., 2 vols., New York, MacMillan, 1899, 1: 230-32.

Barthes, Roland, S/Z, in Oeuvres Complètes, Tome II, Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1995, 555-732.

Bök, Christian, “i, a mother/ i am other: L'Amér and the Matter of Mater”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1991, 16: 2 available online at:

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/SCL/bin/get.cgi?directory=vol16_2/&filename=Bok.htm, consulted in October 2008.

Bourdieu, Pierre, Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge, MA, Harvard UP, 1991, 320 p.

Buss, Helen M. “Canadian Women’s Autobiography: Some Critical Directions”, in S. Neuman and S. Kamboureli, eds, A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, Longspoon, Newest, 1986, 154-164.

Carscallen, James, The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro, Toronto, ECW Press, 1993, 581 p.

Cixous, Helène, “Le rire de la Méduse”, L'Arc 61, 1975, 39-54.

Cox, Ailsa, Alice Munro, Northcote, Tavistock, 2004.

Derrida, Jacques, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Paris, Galilée, 1996.

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Godard, Barbara, “Heirs of the Living Body : Alice Munro and the Question of a Female Aesthetic”, in J. Miller, ed., The Art of Alice Munro : Saying the Unsayable : Papers from the Waterloo Conference, Ontario, UP of Waterloo, 1984, 43-71.

Heller, Deborah, “Getting Loose: Women and Narration in Alice Munro’s Friend of my Youth”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 66, 1998, 60-80.

Howells, Coral Ann, Alice Munro, Contemporary World Writers, Manchester, UP of Manchester, 1998, 184 p.

Kamboureli, Smaro, “The Body as Audience and Performance in the Writing of Alice Munro”, in S. Neuman, and S. Kamboureli eds, A Mazing Space : Writing Canadian Women Writing, Edmonton, 1986, 31-38.

Kroetsch, Robert, “Canadian Writing: No Name is My Name”, in D. Staines, ed., The Forty-Ninth and Other Parallels: Contemporary Canadian Perspectives, Amherst, Mass., U of Massachusetts, 1986, 116-28.

Locatelli, Carla and Di Blasio, Francesca, eds, 2006, Spazi/o: teoria, rappresentazione, lettura, Trento, Dipartimento di Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Filologici.

Locatelli, Carla, “Figures of Displacement and Displacements of Figures: the Play of Autobiography in Moments of Being” in O. Palusci, ed., La tipografia nel salotto: saggi su Virginia Woolf, Torino, Tirrenia Stampatori, 1999, 11–22.

Munro, Alice, [1971], Lives of Girls and Women, Scarborough, Ont., Signet, 1974.

---, “Everything Here is Touchable and Mysterious”, Weekend Magazine, Toronto Star, 5 November 1974.

---, Friend of My Youth, Toronto, Penguin, 1990.

---, Selected Stories, Toronto, Penguin, 1996.

Palusci, Oriana, “It haunts my Imagination”: Margaret Laurence and the Wounds of Manitoba”, in L. Nissim and C. Pagetti, eds, Intersections: la narrativa canadese tra storia e geografia, Milano, Universita degli Studi di Milano, 1999, 57-82.

Redekop, Magdalene, Mothers and Other Clowns, The Stories of Alice Munro, London, Routledge, 1992, 252 p.

Redekop, Magdalene, “Alice Munro and the Scottish Nostalgic Grotesque”, in R. Thacker, The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro, Toronto, ECW Press, 1999, 21-43.

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, Alice Munro : A Double Life, Toronto, ECW Press, 1992, 97 p.

Thacker, Robert, The Rest of the Story : Critical Essays on Alice Munro, Toronto, ECW Press, 1999, 232 p.

Thacker, Robert, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2005, 603 p.

Wall, Kathleen, “Representing the Other Body: Frame Narratives in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Giving Birth’ and Alice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung’”, Canadian Literature, 1997, 154, 74-90.

Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own” in M. Humm, ed., Modern Feminisms: Political Literary Cultural, New York, Colombia UP, 1992, 23-6.

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NOTES

1. Quotations from "Meneseteung" are from the 1996 Penguin edition of the Selected Stories. Page numbers will be put in brackets in the text. 2. See The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories, P. Craig, ed., Oxford UP, 1994, in Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, L. Williford and M. Martone, eds, Scribner, 1999, in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, J. Updike and K. Kenison, eds, Houghton Mifflin, 2000, and Fiction 1000: An Anthology of Short Stories (9th edition), J. Pickering, ed., Prentice Hall College Div., 2000.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose une analyse des négociations onomastiques dans la nouvelle intitulée “Meneseteung”, tirée de Friend of My Youth en s’appuyant sur les résonances multiples de deux noms en particulier, Meneseteung, le nom d’une rivière, et Almeda, le nom de la protagoniste du récit. Le premier est analysé à travers la superposition de ses implications textuelles, prosodiques, philologiques et politiques alors que le second est envisagé sous l’angle de la dichotomie. En multipliant les stratégies polysémiques, la nouvelle échappe à la cristallisation du sens figé et s’inscrit dans la fluidité d’un mouvement continu de réappropriations suggérées et de dislocations possibles.

AUTHORS

SABRINA FRANCESCONI Sabrina Francesconi is ‘ricercatrice’ of English at the University of Trento. Alice Munro’s short stories are the topic of her undergraduate and Ph.D. dissertation, of papers she has delivered and of essays she has published.

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Alice Munro’s “Silence”: From the Politics of Silence to a Rhetoric of Silence

Corinne Bigot

1 In “Silence,” the final story of a trilogy including “Chance” and “Soon” anthologized in Runaway, the main protagonist suddenly finds herself estranged from her twenty-one- year old daughter who decides to go incommunicado. While the story brings to the foreground a theme that runs through many stories by Alice Munro—the role of silence within the network of domestic relations—it offers one of Munro’s most complex explorations of the reverberations of silence. As the young woman uses her silence as a weapon to sever the relationship with her mother, effectively wounding and punishing her, the short story first focuses on the power of silence. The reader then becomes aware that another loss, another dismissal and another silence lie at the heart of the story. Although “Silence” apparently reads like a tale of unresolved grief, a reversal of the values of silence is at work in the short story. As it weaves the fate of its heroines into a Greek tale and denies closure, the story leads us away from powerlessness to hope, from the politics of silence to a “rhetoric of silence.”1

2 In the opening scene, the main protagonist, Juliet, is on a ferry, crossing over to Denman Island to meet her daughter who has been spending six months on a retreat there. The crossing clearly signals a passage: Juliet will find Penelope gone, and this will change her life for ever. Penelope’s disappearance and subsequent silence come as a complete shock to Juliet–if the reader accepts her point of view. In the first pages, Juliet’s words to a woman she meets on the ferry and the silent speech she addresses to herself stress the strong bond between mother and daughter. She insists on Penelope’s compassionate if not angelic nature: “she has grace and compassion […] She is also angelically pretty” (128).2 Yet the silent speech simultaneously undermines the contentions it puts forward, giving the lie to this vision of Penelope. A comparison with a caryatid (“Molded, I should say, like a caryatid”, 128) apparently aims at stressing Penelope’s classic beauty; yet the association with a marble or stone pillar also suggests there is something hard in her nature. Since the word “caryatid” comes from the Greek

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Karuatis, a priestess of Karyae, a temple dedicated to Artemis, the comparison also indirectly links Penelope to Artemis, a rather revengeful goddess according to Greek mythology where she kills Acteon and Adonis for revenge. The simile, therefore, foreshadows Penelope’s metamorphosis into a hard, implacable maiden who will strike her mother by proxy.3

3 Juliet’s arrival makes it clear that Penelope has staged her absence and Juliet’s meeting with Joan, who speaks for her. Penelope sent her mother a brief, cryptic note with a map of the island to help her find the Spiritual Balance Centre. Following the map, Juliet will come to what is, literally, a stage—“found herself parked in front of an old church [...] a simple stage” (128)—and then, by assimilation, a hospital ward: “private cubicles, as in a hospital ward” (129). On this stage and in this hospital ward, Juliet meets the woman who will engage her in a battle, using Penelope’s absence and her own reticence as weapons with which to fight her. For silence in a conversation, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle points out, does not signal a refusal to communicate, it is a weapon that one can use to overpower one’s adversary (Lecercle, 13).4 However polite it seems to be, the conversation with the woman Juliet addresses “disarmingly,”5 that is to say without a weapon, turns into a fierce battle, riddled with “hostility” (131). The presence of numerous dashes shows that Joan and Juliet keep interrupting each other. Juliet’s interruptions gradually reveal her powerlessness, as she loses “control” of the contest. By the end of the battle, the “striking-looking woman”6 of the first page will have become a stricken woman who walks away in tears, having been defeated by Joan’s final silence: She had not been able to walk away with dignity. She had turned and cried out beseechingly, furiously. “What did she tell you?” And Mother Shipton was standing there watching her […] A fat pitying smile had stretched her closed lips as she shook her head. (135)

4 Penelope’s refusal to speak to Juliet is presented as deliberate, “manipulative” silence, the purpose of which is to sever the relationship with her mother and to punish her for her supposed wrongs, effectively wounding her.7 The manipulation is clearly shown by the “silent” birthday cards Penelope sends for five years. As they do not contain any written words, Juliet tries to read the postmarks—a vain attempt that mirrors her impossibility to decipher the cards’ unspoken messages. Since they are sent on Penelope’s, not Juliet’s, birthdays, they both clearly indicate there is a message to interpret, as Juliet’s friend surmises (134), and effectively conceal the meaning. They illustrate the power of manipulative silence and reticence whose purpose is to force the person who “receives” them to interpret what they mean (Lecercle, 12-13).8 The role played by Joan, who both gives and withholds information, is of paramount importance. While she claims she is Penelope’s spokesperson, voicing Penelope’s grievances—“Not so I say, Juliet. So Penelope says” (132)—precisely what these grievances are remains unclear. Joan favours general assertions, or hypotheses; she phrases her answers, when she gives any, in such a way as to force Juliet to acquiesce, if not to express the blame herself, using phrases such as “you know” or negative questions. Penelope’s absence and Joan’s reticence effectively prevent Juliet from getting any clear answers, and help to exaggerate the blame. For with manipulative reticence and silence, the supposed wrongs are exaggerated and distorted (Jensen, 252). Juliet will spend many years trying to understand the reasons for the break-up, agonisingly blaming herself. Juliet’s conversations with her friends resonate with self-

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accusatory questions, and are punctuated by modal verbs expressing either regrets or self-reproach, such as the self-punitive cry, “I should have. I should have” (137).

5 The corrosive force of the woman’s words will be made apparent when a sentence suddenly resurfaces in a later part of the story. Many years after the trip to Denman Island, Juliet sees a woman who looks like Joan: would she not have reserves of buoyancy […] Reserves of advice, pernicious advice, as well. She has come to us in great hunger. (153)

6 Italics arrest our attention, all the more so as the sentence in italics starts a new line and is followed by a blank space. In Munro’s fiction, italics, which create a visual disturbance on the page, are used to signal a different form of speech, either unspoken, “silenced” speech, or words that silently reverberate in the character’s memory. The sentence first appeared on page 132, in Roman letters. Since the words have been uttered before, Munro plays on the visual effect to evoke the verbal dimension: italics signal the resurfacing of words that affected Juliet as she first heard them. Not only does she remember the words, she hears them again in her head, they still have the power to hurt Juliet as they resurface from her memory. The blank space after the italics suggests a silence reverberating with pain and self-blame.

7 Since the reader shares Juliet’s point of view, she sees Penelope’s silence as a deadly weapon. She is also made to envision the estrangement as a death sentence for Juliet. Evoking Penelope’s six-month absence in the first pages, the narrator underlines how difficult to bear it is for Juliet—“one day without some contact for her daughter is hard to bear, let alone six months” (127). Juliet’s silent speech then prepares the reader to picture Penelope’s silence as a form of death; the water and earth imagery suggesting Juliet might die if she is separated from her daughter: “all this time I’ve been in a sort of desert, and when her message came I was like an old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain” (128). Juliet does not die but Penelope’s absence causes much loneliness for her and Penelope’s silence clearly reverberates in Juliet’s life. Juliet’s silent actions read like an answer to Penelope’s silence. She empties her flat of every trace of Penelope’s existence, first “banishing” every picture and any object associated with her from her daughter’s room, then shutting the bedroom door, as if to shut out the pain of her absence (136); she finally gathers together Penelope’s possessions into garbage bags when she moves out, storing them in a friend’s basement, effectively putting them out of sight. The narrator’s remark that “after a while the world seemed emptied of the people Penelope had known” (134-5) suggests that with Penelope’s absence, Juliet’s world has been “hollowed out.”9 Juliet also gradually loses contact with her own friends (151). Time references gradually become fewer and extremely vague, suggesting very little happens in Juliet’s life, conveying the impression of a lonely and empty life. Furthermore, Juliet is rarely shown communicating with others. The main section of “Silence”, which describes her life after Penelope’s disappearance and before she meets Heather, contains very few dialogues and few sentences in direct speech: there are only three conversations with Christa and a very brief one with her friend Larry.

8 For Juliet also refuses to talk about Penelope’s disappearance, and more radically, about Penelope, to most people, including her lovers: “she had a boyfriend who had never heard anything about her daughter” (150)—the passive voice helps convey the impression of an unavoidable, inescapable silence that is no longer the result of her conscious will. Neither Juliet nor her next boyfriend ever mention Penelope so that

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when Juliet hears about Penelope, she will not be able to tell Gary about it, their initial silence having effectively silenced her.

9 It is no coincidence, therefore, that two silent speeches feature prominently in “Silence”. The first speech occurs while Juliet is speaking to a woman on the ferry to Denman Island. They are the words she “could have said” (128) about Penelope and their relationship; its very presence foretells Juliet’s later silences. It is echoed by a second silent speech, the words Juliet “might have said” (157) if she had been able to speak about Penelope to Gary. It reinforces the vision of a woman whose secret forces her to resort to silently speaking in her head. Italics suggest that these are not so much silent speeches as “silenced” ones—the words that Juliet cannot say aloud. They remind us that Juliet is denied the possibility of speaking to and about her daughter, they suggest that she has been “silenced” by Penelope’s silence.

10 For all these silences, I would like to argue that another loss, another dismissal and another silence lie at the heart of “Silence”. The story has a very linear, chronological structure, with the exception of one flashback to the death of Eric, Penelope’s father, some ten pages into the narrative. The reader learns that Eric died by drowning, one summer “when Penelope was thirteen years old”. The linear structure of the story and the fact that there is no other flashback testify to the importance of Eric’s death, placing it at the heart of “Silence”. Interestingly enough, it reveals what happened when Juliet and Penelope were away on a visit to Juliet’s parents. The flashback in “Silence” provides the reader with the other side of the story since the visit was the main event in “Soon”.

11 Eric’s death is to be seen as the central event locked away at the heart of the story, locked away in the characters’ memories, by their silence. With one exception, when Juliet breaks down, Eric’s death seems to be a subject mother and daughter never speak about, reminding us of other Munro heroines such as Lisa (“Vandals”, Open Secrets) or Karin (“Pictures of the Ice”, Friend of My Youth), who keep silent about the tragedy in their lives. Penelope’s silence is particularly striking. The flashback starts with a mention of Penelope—“when Penelope was thirteen years old (137)”—which should alert us to the importance of this event for Penelope. Yet nothing will be said about her reaction to her father’s death or even her feelings for him, either in the flashback or in the rest of the story. The blank spaces that precede and follow the flashback remind us that what happens to Penelope in the seven years that follow Eric’s death is a blank in the narration.

12 Penelope’s silence starts from the moment she is told about her father’s death at her friend’s house. Although there is no explicit mention of her silence, it is quite clear she does not say a word since she is said to “receive the news with an expression of fright” and then of “embarrassment” (143-4). The very description of her subsequent actions indirectly reveals how silent she is. Penelope’s silence is also made apparent through the frenzy of noisy activities she engages in in the month that follows Eric’s death (144-5). It seems she only mentions Eric once, to dismiss him—“well I hardly knew him, really” (145)—probably answering a friend’s kind or anxious words about her supposed grief. When Juliet breaks down, some six months after Eric’s death, no mention is made of Penelope’s feelings. When the narrator insists Juliet tells her “everything” (“Juliet told Penelope everything. Christa, the fight, the burning on the beach. Everything.” p. 148), the reader realises how persistent Penelope’s silence and her lack of emotional reaction are. This silence will never be broken, nor will it receive any explanation.

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“Silence” does not only portray a woman who is the victim of her daughter’s deadly silence, it also reveals a young woman who will not or cannot express her feelings.

13 The significance of Eric’s death is revealed through the echoes that link the death, one summer after Penelope’s thirteenth birthday, to her disappearance, a few weeks before her twenty-first birthday— and the very fact that we are provided with these time indications suggests a link. The young woman who chooses to disappear and refuses to speak to her mother is revealed to have, earlier in her life, “dismissed” her father: “and now he was dismissed. By Penelope […] He who had filled her life. She dismissed him” (145). Not only does the repetition of “dismiss” highlight the importance of the act, so does the change from passive to active form, with Penelope becoming the subject of the second verb. Like her rejection of her mother, Penelope’s dismissal of her father remains unexplained.

14 Both Eric’s death and Penelope’s silence leave matters unresolved for Juliet. There is strong insistence on the fact that the quarrel with Eric was left unresolved: “she wanted things resolved, and they were not resolved” (138) / “nor was their last quarrel entirely resolved” (146). As pointed out by Juliet in her second silent speech, Penelope has left without saying goodbye. Both Eric’s death and Penelope’s silence have foreclosed explanations, forgiveness and reconciliation. Imagery also creates echoes, suggesting Penelope’s silence and Eric’s death are to be pictured as losses Juliet might not recover from. Listening to Joan who is telling her Penelope has left, Juliet is said to feel “dread pour[ing] through her” (130), a rather banal image which is however echoed by the image used to describe Juliet’s realisation that Eric is dead: “she feels as if a sack of cement has been poured into her” (147). In the first silent speech, Juliet’s longing for her daughter is conveyed with an earth / rain simile (128) that implies the relationship was everything to her, so that in the flashback, Juliet’s assertion that Eric’s betrayal left her “bereft of all that had sustained her” (140) strikes an echo and suggests his death will take away everything that sustains her.10

15 Juliet pictures the death of her companion in literary, pictorial and theatrical terms and later reads the fate of her daughter in Greek literature and mythology. During the ceremony of burning Eric’s body on the beach, Ailo is said to be playing the “role of Widow of the Sea”; and Juliet thinks of Eric’s death and the burning of his body as being “like a pageant she had been compelled to watch” (146). The comparison with a pageant turns Eric’s death into a play and a tableau. The nominal phrases—“the storm, the recovery of the body, the burning on the beach”—make the description read as possible titles for tableaux, and freeze the scenes into tableaux, as if Eric’s death was being etched on her memory. The whole scene then grafts Eric’s death onto a literary myth since looking at the pyre, Juliet thinks of the burning of Shelley’s body (143). For Juliet, who bears the name of Shakespeare’s most famous heroine and who gave her daughter the name of a Greek heroine,11 thinks of her life in terms of works of literature and art, from the reference to Shelley’s death (143), to the reference to Samuel Pepys’ diary (140), to her comparing Penelope with a caryatid. Juliet will later read and research a Greek novel, The Aethiopica by Heliodorus, which will also bring us back, although indirectly, or “silently,” to Eric’s death. The reader is provided with a summary of The Aethiopica, but a comparison with other summaries reveals that this summary omits what seems to be The Aethiopica’s most famous episode12 where the young heroine is about to be burned on a pyre (Book 8)—an omission which then becomes a “silent” allusion to the burning of Eric’s body,13 reminding us of the silence

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that both Penelope and Juliet maintain over Eric’s death. The Aethiopica resonates deeply for Juliet since it tells the story of the queen of Ethiopia’s lost daughter. It is therefore also reminiscent of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. All the more so as “Silence” forcibly evokes an earlier story, “Save the Reaper,”14 which, as Ildikó de Papp Carrington has demonstrated, offers a variation on the myth of Demeter. As Juliet reads and researches the Greek novel, which is said to have a “natural fascination” for her (152), her silence about her loss and her grief becomes apparent, suggesting the “fascination” silently expresses the feelings she will not voice. As Juliet considers turning The Aethiopica into a musical (152), the Ethiopian queen and Demeter become the voices that express Juliet’s grief.

16 Weaving the fate of her heroines into the Aethiopica, and so into the myth of Demeter and Persephone, Munro both reminds us that much of literature and myth deals with loss and grief and provides her story with intricate layers of reading.

17 The third part of a trilogy, “Silence” does not seem to provide an ending or a resolution to it. It ties in with the other two Juliet stories in so far as all of them can be read as tales of loss. In “Chance” Juliet is said to give up her Greek—her knowledge of Greek and her passion for Greek literature—and this is explicitly described in terms of loss: “your bright treasure (…) A loss you could not contemplate at one time” (83). “Soon” reveals a growing estrangement between Juliet and her parents, and at its conclusion, Juliet refuses to answer her mother’s cry of love, literally turning away (125). In “Silence,” Juliet is made to lose her companion and her daughter. Yet when interviewed in January 2005 in a BBC Radio 4 literary programme, Munro seemed surprised to hear her interviewer say she had “turned against” her heroine. She protested, “I don’t feel I gave Juliet a particularly hard time, she goes on living. She succeeds” (Open Book, BBC Radio 4, 16 January 2005).

18 For indeed Juliet is made to survive the death of her companion and the loss of her daughter. Juliet’s delayed reaction to Eric’s death both underlines the force of her grief and simultaneously suggests her ability to recover. A few months after Eric’s death, a nightmarish reality solidifies her body as she suddenly realizes he is dead: “So this is grief. She feels as if a sack of cement has been poured into her and quickly hardened. She can barely move.” (147) The simile forcibly recalls a passage in “The Children Stay”, a story featuring a mother who is told she will lose her daughters if she leaves her husband for her lover: A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken undeniable shape. This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. […]You don’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it.” (The Love 212-3)

19 Hearing the echo, we are encouraged to read the image as indicating Juliet will neither get free of her grief—in both passages the present tense predominates, suggesting the permanence of pain—nor die of it. While the narrator stresses Juliet’s incapacity to move, the rest of the story shows Juliet being able to move: to move on with her life, to use the cliché, or, to use Munro’s phrase, to “go on living,” surviving Eric’s death, and then Penelope’s disappearance.

20 Although she loses Eric and Penelope, Juliet recovers the “bright treasure” (83) she was made to lose in “Chance”: her passion for Greek literature. She devotes most of her time to reading and researching The Aethiopica, which is said to have a “continuing

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fascination” for her (152) and, as the narrator’s remark about her “involvement with the old Greeks” on the last page shows, her interest has not abated by the end of the story. She is also said to “keep on with her studies” (158), which both underlines the importance of her research and reminds us that “Silence” portrays a woman who has found a way to go on. Juliet is also said to find her part time job “a good balance,” a phrase that explicitly tells us that she has found some balance in her life.

21 The final page of the short story does strike a hopeful note. This is apparently due to a chance meeting with Heather, Penelope’s friend, one summer evening, some fifteen years after Penelope has left (154-5). Talking to Heather, Juliet learns that her daughter is alive and well, the mother of five children, living in one of the northwest provinces. Juliet also realizes that Penelope has been keeping track of her as she told Heather Juliet still lived in Vancouver. Juliet also understands that, like her, Penelope has been silent about the breach. The meeting with Heather plays an important role as it is followed by another silence. Joining Gary, who had tactfully moved away while the women were speaking, Juliet lies about Heather’s identity. Both Gary and Juliet keep silent, Gary either not noticing or pretending not to notice Juliet’s agitation. This very silence makes Juliet see that the fact they have never mentioned Penelope means she will never live with Gary. She understands that this silence which cannot be broken might prove fatal, a form of death—as if Penelope had never existed. This is expressed in a silent speech in italics (157), whose function is to convey the words that Juliet cannot say to her lover.

22 Yet those are also the words that Juliet is finally able to say to herself. They show her acceptance of Penelope’s character since she refers to “some rock-hard honesty in her” (158), which suggests she has come to terms with the hard streak in her daughter’s nature. Although Juliet once again refers to the break-up, the agonising questions about her responsibility are notably absent. They have been replaced by assertions and hypotheses about Penelope herself: “It is just a way that she has found to manage her life (…) It’s maybe the explaining to me that she can’t face” (157). These eventually yield to Juliet’s acceptance that the truth is not easy to get at (158). Juliet has both stopped blaming herself for the estrangement and looking for one simple explanation. Penelope’s silence means Juliet has been denied explanations, but also that no single restrictive interpretation exists. Penelope’s silence, therefore, allows numerous possible explanations, including a still unspoken desire for reconciliation, or regret for her silence, as Juliet surmises. Although Juliet accepts the possibility that Penelope may not like her enough to be with her, the very use of “maybe” in “maybe she can’t stand me” (158) necessarily implies other possibilities. Modal verbs and phrases feature prominently in the silent speech, leaving the possibility of the reconciliation open, foreclosing closure.

23 The meeting and the unspoken monologue, therefore, prepare the reader for the last section. Most prominent in the last paragraph is the verb “hope,” which occurs three times: She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort. (158)

24 Juliet is waiting and hoping, thinking reconciliation is possible even though it will not necessarily take place. By the end of “Silence,” it seems that Juliet will be able to inhabit the space of silence that was first imposed by Penelope, on her own terms. The

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silence Penelope used as a weapon to wound her has been replaced by the silence that characterises waiting, in which what one hopes for is pictured or envisioned as possible. Munro’s readers will hear the echoes of two, if not three, earlier stories from the Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage collection. Like “Floating Bridge”, “Silence” ends on the possibility of remission. Like the heroines of “Comfort” and “Nettles”15, Juliet will choose inaction over action since she decides not to launch a search for Penelope. The lovers in “Comfort” and “Nettles” remain silent in order to preserve the relationship as both stories stress the power of memory and imagination to keep their love “alive”.16 “Nettles” equates two apparently contradictory possible futures: “It would be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn’t” (Hateship 187). Analysing Open Secrets and The Love of a Good Woman, Mark Levene remarks that in these collections, “what difference”, the famous phrase from “Accident”, “becomes refracted into the immensities of the possible”(Levene, 849). This is clearly the case in these later stories. In “Silence”, there is no actual reconciliation taking place in the story, so that the Greek romance becomes the space where the reconciliation Juliet wishes for can take place. It is not so much the space in which her silenced grief is being expressed, as the space where the “immensities of the possible” are being refracted.

25 For the role of the Greek romance that features again prominently at the end of the story plays a key role in the reversing of the values of silence. Juliet devotes most of her time to reading and researching The Aethiopica and when she becomes friends with a man who teaches Greek, she collaborates in the idea of turning the novel into a musical. Not only does she make up songs for the musical, she thinks she could give it a different ending, shifting the focus away from the lovers’ marriage towards the daughter’s relationship to her mother— the daughter realising that what she wishes for is reconciliation with her mother: She was secretly drawn to devising a different ending […] the girl would be sure to meet […] shabby imitations of what she was really looking for. Which was reconciliation, at last, with the erring, repentant, essentially great-hearted queen of Ethiopia” (152).

26 Juliet’s resentment against Penelope’s involvement with the Spiritual Balance Centre surfaces when she reflects that a beautiful maiden raised among the gymnosophists “might be left with some perverse hankering for a bare, ecstatic life” (152). Since the queen of Ethiopia is the one who abandons her daughter, Juliet is also constructing a vision of Penelope as a victim and of herself as the villain. Her depicting the queen as “erring” and “repentant” almost reads like an admission of guilt: Juliet, it seems, still blames herself for having lost her daughter. The verb “devise”, however, signals a transition: she is no longer the passive observer who was compelled to watch a play17 or the helpless actress brought to a “stage” to be involved in a play whose script had been written for her. From this moment, Juliet is both reading and creating; writing or incorporating, weaving, so to speak, her own story into the Greek tale, and with the tale, into Greek mythology.

27 The Aethiopica opens onto and leads us into another space, into the world of literature and myth, reversing the movement from open space to enclosed space on the diegetic level—from the house in Whale Bay to increasingly smaller flats to a basement flat. Juliet’s life, fate and story are no longer contained in her actual life, and in actual space. In “Silence”, Munro is both weaving the fate of her heroines into a larger and ancient literary tradition, and leaving the geographical material space of her home country in

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which many critics confine her, for an altogether different space and world. With the Greek tale, reminiscent of a Greek myth, the reader is being invited to read other texts. The space of silence, at the end of the story, does not resonate with hopelessness anymore, rather, it is made to resonate with stories—stories to read, stories that go on to exist somewhere else.

28 “Silence”, as the final page makes it clear, leads us into “a multiplied and utopian space”: the space of reading (Block de Behar, 19). The final page draws the reader’s attention to Juliet’s studies and so to reading. Typography and punctuation alert us to the importance of the word “investigations”, set off by the italics and the dash: “The word studies does not seem to describe very well what she does—investigations would be better” (158). Reading is therefore defined as a process. Reading as featured in and demanded by “Silence” is indeed “a co-action” rather than a re-action, “a shared participation” (Block de Behar, 22). The final page clearly reminds us that for Munro story-telling is “an art which elicits answers without itself giving any answers” (Block de Behar, 19), and that there is a “rhetoric of silence” at work in “Silence”.

29 Silences on the diegetic level interplay with narrative reticence. Since the reader only has Juliet’s point of view, Penelope remains an entire blank and mysterious character. This point of view will prove to be partial and subjective as the story progressively questions the opposition between silence and truth that was introduced in the first pages. In the opening pages, Juliet is said to be a gifted television interviewer, she is described as adept at communicating with people. Her first silent speech opposes the reticence that characterizes both Penelope and Eric to her own outspokenness: “her nature is reflective, not all over the map, like mine. Somewhat reticent, like her father’s” (128). Juliet’s reaction to Eric’s infidelity and Christa’s betrayal shows she comes down hard on those who do not tell the truth. Some twenty years after her friend Christa slept with Eric, Juliet still blames Christa, explicitly reproaching her for not telling the truth (134). Her accusations that Eric betrayed her are phrased along the same lines as she accuses him of having “lived a lie with her” (139). Juliet also reproaches Eric for wanting to avoid the confrontation while she is said to be intent on it so that their quarrel can be resolved. The description of the quarrel, however, strikes a discordant note since it underlines the fact that she endows the argument with dramatic flourishes, to the point that her part in it seems pure theatre—from her contentions, which, as the narrator notes, contain little truth, to her goodbye kiss which is play- acting (140). Finally, the fact that Eric’s death immediately follows their unresolved quarrel, and the fact that frankness is associated with malice when Juliet learns of Eric’s infidelity (138), further questions the emphasis or value put on truthfulness by Juliet. As the story progresses, Juliet is seen to opt for reticence, silence and lies. She tells Christa about her trip to Denman Island but the narrator notes that she had “hoped perhaps not to have to tell to anybody” (133). Furthermore, while she is said to have “told Christa the whole story of the trip” (133), the concluding paragraph of the passage demonstrates the opposite: “Juliet didn’t tell her that in the end she had not been able to walk away with dignity” (135). When Juliet first considers going to the post-office in order to get information about the postmark, her fear of being recognized prevents her from doing so, suggesting she does not want people to know Penelope left (133). There is repeated insistence on the fact that only one person at a time gets to know about Penelope. Finally, Juliet resorts to lying, telling Penelope’s

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friends that her daughter is travelling (135). The only point of view the reader has is made to seem unreliable.

30 The reader is either confronted with unexplained silences—Penelope’s and Juliet’s—or offered several explanations that are all presented as valid, as in the case of Gary’s silence.18 Narrative silence and narrative reticence—which offers some grounds for the interpretative work—manipulate the reader into participating. Left with no explanations as to Juliet’s silences and lies, the reader resorts to conjectures, from shame to an attempt to protect herself from the pain. Since Penelope remains forever silent, the reader forges hypotheses as to the reasons behind her refusal to speak to her mother. The vague explanation Joan puts forward—a spiritual dimension lacking in her life—is never denied since one phrase in Juliet’s silent speech echoes a sentence uttered by the minister who reproaches Juliet for neglecting Penelope’s religious education in “Soon”: he concludes that rejecting God’s grace for Penelope is “like denying her nourishment” (120). This will be echoed in “Silence” when Juliet evokes the six-month separation: “like an old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain” (128). The simile will violently albeit silently bring us back to the first image, reversing the terms. So the reader is offered the possibility of accepting that Penelope turns away from her mother because she was denied religious education. The comparison with the caryatid and the allusion to the Greek tale, which both link Penelope to the revengeful goddess Artemis, encourage the reader to see her silence as an act of retribution. Yet, this vision does not put an end to the interpretations that can be put forward. Penelope’s leaving the Centre before her mother arrives and her refusal to speak to her, eerily echo Juliet’s silently turning away from her own mother at the end of “Soon” (125)—as if to suggest Juliet is being punished for having abandoned her own mother. It is the narrator’s very silence about Penelope’s silence over her father’s death that alerts the reader to the importance of his death. The echoes between his death and Penelope’s dismissal of her mother will therefore tempt the reader to see Penelope’s silence as an attempt to punish her mother for having sent her away at the time of her father’s death, if not for his death. However, the end of the story muddles our perception of Penelope as a revengeful maiden striking her repentant and guilty mother. The reader will eventually be presented with Juliet’s resigning herself to the fact that there might be no specific motive behind the estrangement and that Penelope may simply not like her enough to be with her. Truth systematically eludes the reader, who is refused the solace of understanding.

31 The reader is also refused closure, just as the characters of “Silence” are. Eric dies in the middle of their quarrel, leaving matters unresolved. Death has silenced the quarrel, but has prevented its resolution, foreclosing forgiveness and reconciliation. Since Juliet is refused confrontation with her daughter, since nothing is said about their feelings, both mother and daughter are refused closure—the possibility to let go of their grief or anger. The final paragraph simultaneously offers hope and, with the word “remission”, reminds us that Juliet does not emerge unscathed. In “Silence”, to quote Judith Miller’s analysis of Munro’s way of writing, “no dichotomy opens [...] between the story told and its ways of working. Neither is privileged. They are wound into one another.”19 As the characters are denied closure, the reader is constantly refused the solace that traditional closure—the certainty about the characters’ fate—offers. Although the final page is made to resonate with “hope,” it simultaneously offers the possibility that the meeting and reconciliation may not take place. Penelope’s silence has not been broken, and might never be so. At the end of “Silence”, questions and doubt linger, hypotheses

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alternate, and our reading shifts. This is what enables Munro’s story to “keep on going”, to “exist somewhere so that […] it is still happening, or happening over and over again” (Watchel, 292). The story, as Munro wishes, cannot be “shut up in the book”(Watchel, 292); it goes on, haunting. All the more so as “Silence” resonates with many literary echoes, from Greek literature and mythology to the theatre, and echoes of other stories by Munro, reminding us that her stories constantly interweave themselves with many other books, and the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Block De Behar, Lisa, A Rhetoric of Silence and Other Writings, Berlin/New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1995, 328 p.

Carrington, Ildikó de Papp, “‘Where are you Mother’: Alice Munro's ‘Save the Reaper’”, Canadian Literature, vol. 173, Summer 2002, 208 p. 34-51.

Jensen, J. Vernon, “Communicative Functions of Silence”, ETC, A Review of General Semantics, vol. 30-3, September 1973, 249-257.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, “Les aveux les plus doux sont les plus réticents”, in La Licorne 68, La Réticence, edited by Liliane Louvel & Catherine Rannoux, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004, 404 p.

Levene, Mark, “‘It was about Vanishing’: A Glimpse of Alice Munro’s Stories”, University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 68-4, Fall 1999, 841-60.

Miller, Judith, “On Looking into Rifts and Crannies: Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth”, Antigonish Review 120, 2000, [http://www.antigonishreview.com/bi-120/120-miller.html] (last accessed 17 October 2008)

Munro, Alice, [1998], The Love of a Good Woman, New York, Vintage, Random House, 1999, 340 p.

Munro, Alice, [2001], Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, London, Vintage, Random House, 2002, 323 p.

Munro, Alice, Runaway, New York, Knopf, 2004, 335 p. Open Book, 16 January 2005, BBC Radio 4, Interview by Mariella Frostrup [www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook/ openbook_20050116.shtml] (last accessed October 17 2008)

Watchel, Eleanor, “An Interview with Alice Munro”, In The Brick Reader, edited by Linda Spalding & Michael Ondaatje, Toronto, Coach House, 1991, 335 p.

NOTES

1. Cf. Lisa Block de Behar, A Rhetoric of Silence, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. 2. The passage is in italics.

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3. The comparison also foreshadows her later transformation into Charicleia, the heroine of The Aethiopica, a Greek novel Juliet will research. According to the summary the reader is provided with, the girl becomes a priestess of Artemis (151). 4. "L'absence de mots est une arme, et une arme fatale", Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 13. 5. Munro, 129. Italics mine. 6. "She is what her mother would call a striking-looking woman", 126. 7. "Silence has the power to affect us and those around us (...) silence can heal and it can wound", Jensen, 250. 8. Jean-Jacques Lecercle underlines the power of silence, reminding us that reticence offers grounds for interpretation but also forces the person who is confronted by it to do most of the interpretative work while silence effectively forecloses meaning: "Enoncer, si l'on peut dire, un silence, c'est ne pas pleinement assumer son dire, mais l'indiquer cependant suffisamment pour que l'interlocuteur puisse faire le travail d'interprétation (...) le silence est ici exercice d'un pouvoir, il a sa propre force illocutoire. Absentant radicalement le sens, au moment même où il semble vouloir le faire entendre, il le fait proliférer", Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 12-13. 9. At the end of "Save the Reaper", the main character, a mother, is about to spend one last night in company of her daughter. She envisions a "hollowed-out house". The Love, 180. 10. Two other events take place in summertime: Eric's betrayal occurred during the summer month Juliet spent at her parents, when Penelope was one year old, and Juliet will meet Penelope's friend and thus hear about her daughter "one warm night in summer", 154. 11. It is no coincidence, therefore, Juliet insists: "We're never going to call her Penny", "Soon", 93. 12. Cf. the detailed summary of the Aethiopica, provided by the Petronian Society (Montclair State University): http://www.chss.montclair.edu/classics/petron/heliodorus.html. 13. It is no coincidence, then, that when Juliet meets Joan, and tries to think of a Christian historical figure bearing the name of Joan she thinks of Pope Joan-"Juliet, later, of course, thought of Pope Joan" (129)- therefore forgetting or omitting Joan of Arc, who was burnt at the stake. 14. Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman, 146-80. In "Save the Reaper", the estrangement between mother and daughter that "Silence" explores in depth is already suggested: the mother is repeatedly confronted by her daughter's reticence and reserve and has to endure her daughter's moving away from her, both physically (she is about to go back to California) and emotionally. 15. "Silence" also echoes "Nettles" since in this earlier story, a father has lost his son, and like Juliet, feels the need to hide the tragedy from most people and to have "a person who knew": "I was a person who knew-that was all", Hateship 185. 16. "love...yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource", Hateship. 187. 17. "Like a pageant she had been compelled to watch", Runaway, 146. 18. "It was possible that Christa had told him, and he had remained silent out of a consideration that is was none of his business. Or that Christa had told him, and he had forgotten. Or that Christa had never mentioned anything about Penelope", Runaway, 157. 19. Miller Judith, "On Looking into Rifts and Crannies: Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth", Antigonish Review 120, 2000.

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ABSTRACTS

Si “Silence”, qui met en scène une mère punie par le silence manipulateur de sa fille, reprend un thème présent dans de nombreuses nouvelles d’Alice Munro – le rôle et le pouvoir du silence dans les relations humaines –, c’est en réalité à une exploration particulièrement complexe du silence, aussi bien sur le plan diégétique que narratif, que la nouvelle invite. Dans “Silence”, où se joue une réverbération des silences, et qui laisse ses protagonistes dans un silence irrésolu, Alice Munro ne se contente pas d’exposer les politiques du silence, ni même de proposer un simple renversement des valeurs du silence. Avec “Silence”, Munro nous invite à une réflexion sur la littérature et dévoile une poétique, si ce n’est une rhétorique, du silence.

AUTHORS

CORINNE BIGOT Corinne Bigot recently completed a Ph.D. thesis on Alice Munro, entitled L’espace du silence dans l’oeuvre d’Alice Munro (Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense, décembre 2007) and has written other articles on this writer. She is a “Maître de Conférences” in the English Department at the Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense.

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Runaway Classicists: Anne Carson and Alice Munro’s “Juliet” Stories

Ian Rae

1 Alice Munro’s most prolific critic, Robert Thacker, argues that the key to understanding her short stories is the fact of her “having grown up, and of having lived in, and of having left, and of having remembered, and of having returned to, and above all of having made texts out of Huron County, Ontario” (“Introduction” 2). Taking Munro’s 1974 story “Home” as paradigmatic, Thacker argues that Munro’s fiction is “patently autobiographical and metafictional; it reflects the circumstances of Munro’s return to Ontario after living in British Columbia for twenty years” (4). He thus “knowingly” conflates “the narrator/Munro” (4) and seeks to understand Munro’s narrative technique through author statements, archival drafts of stories, and maps of Huron County. Perhaps to counteract such biographical readings, Munro took the extraordinary step of distinguishing her fictional stories from her memoirs in the 2006 foreword to The View from Castle Rock. Thacker, in turn, has subsequently noted that Munro’s recent story collections “see individual lives through a wider angle of vision, introducing overarching patterns intimated through allusions to Greek myths, Shakespeare, and other literary texts, which seem to overlap present circumstances, shifting the frame of reference into further dimensions of imaginative apprehension, though with no ultimate revelation” (“Quartet” 375). Munro thereby stresses the fictional quality of even her first person narratives.

2 This essay will complicate biographical readings of Munro’s work by demonstrating that the character of Juliet, featured in three linked stories in Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway, reflects Munro’s interest in the poet and classicist Anne Carson as much as it does Munro’s biographical experience. However, since such biographical readings are highly speculative, the second half of this essay will employ formal analysis to demonstrate that scholars can profitably read the classical content of the Juliet stories through Carson’s literary criticism. In particular, the similarities between Juliet’s unfinished dissertation on the ancient Greek novel and the published version of Carson’s dissertation on desire in ancient Greek literature, Eros the Bittersweet (1986),

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offer insights into the triangulated patterns of erotic and maternal longing in the Juliet stories.

3 The danger of encouraging the autobiographical fallacy in Munro criticism is readily apparent in Jonathan Franzen’s review of Runaway for The New York Times, which resurfaces as an introduction to international editions of Runaway. While Franzen’s review performs the useful service of identifying a basic plot undergirding many Munro narratives, it also encourages the perception that Munro’s plot is a thinly veiled version of her life story. Franzen’s review thus resembles Thacker’s work in its biographical approach to Munro’s fiction: Here’s the story that Munro keeps telling: A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the girl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self- interested act. She marries young, moves to British Columbia, raises kids, and is far from blameless in the breakup of her marriage. She may have success as an actress or a writer or a TV personality; she has romantic adventures. When, inevitably, she returns to Ontario, she finds the landscape of her youth unsettlingly altered. Although she was the one who abandoned the place, it’s a great blow to her narcissism that she isn’t warmly welcomed back – that the world of her youth, with its older-fashioned manners and mores, now sits in judgment on the modern choices she has made. Simply by trying to survive as a whole and independent person, she has incurred painful losses and dislocations; she has caused harm. And that’s pretty much it. That’s the little stream that’s been feeding Munro’s work for better than 50 years. The same elements recur and recur like Clare Quilty. What makes Munro’s growth as an artist so crisply and breathtakingly visible – throughout the Selected Stories and even more so in her three latest books– is precisely the familiarity of her materials. Look what she can do with nothing but her own small story; the more she returns to it, the more she finds. (Franzen)

4 In the process of outlining “her story,” Franzen confuses the performance of Munro’s storytelling with a confessional revelation of the storyteller’s secret self (“she has caused harm”). Although Franzen gestures toward second and third wave feminism and their changing perceptions of women’s role in the home and workplace; although his abstraction of the plot suggests the mythic patterns of archetypal criticism; and although his emphasis on narcissism and the repetition compulsion points toward psychoanalysis, he abandons the rigour of these critical models for a confessional mode that conflates the author/protagonist in fiction and the author/speaker in poetry.

5 Nonetheless, Franzen’s piece has value as a general introduction to Munro’s writing. For example, his synopsis of Munro’s plot accurately summarizes the mood, the locations, the sequence of events, and some of the characters in the trilogy of Juliet stories that comprise the bulk of Runaway. However, Munro’s collection as a whole wards off such biographical readings by constantly emphasizing the literary basis of the plots, devices, and allusions in Munro’s short stories. Briefly stated, Runaway begins by updating the biblical myth of the scapegoat in the titular story about a runaway goat that symbolically bears the sins of a failed marriage. In “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence,” Munro explores Greek and Roman antiquity through the character of Juliet, a professional classicist. Munro’s allusions make a chronological leap forward to the nineteenth century in “Passion,” where Munro cites Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as a key to understanding a tale of amorous betrayal. Yet nineteenth century realism is also subject to critique in “Passion” and Munro’s subsequent story, “Trespasses,” where realist and confessional modes of narrative prove to be unreliable. The fact that nearly

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every character in Runaway is scheming, dreaming, (self-)deceiving, channeling supernatural powers, or in some way inhabiting an imagined world, compounds the reader’s suspicion of the apparently concrete quality of the depicted worlds. Munro shows her stylizing hand most explicitly in the next story, “Tricks,” which is set in Stratford, Ontario, and makes elaborate use of Shakespearean devices (twin brothers, a play within play, a tragicomic outcome). The collection’s final story, “Powers,” bears the subtitle “Give Dante a Rest,” which propels the reader back to the medieval period, even as the subtitle’s colloquial expression insists on a more contemporary attitude. To make these intertextual matters even more complicated, nearly every story in Runaway includes an allusion to the principal intertext of another story in the collection. The intricacy of Munro’s web of allusions underscores how she has tailored the form of interlinked short stories to produce overarching continuities without sacrificing her preferred focus on the decisive event, anecdote, or moment.

6 This acute focus is often closer to that of lyric poetry than to that of discursive prose. It is within this context that one can begin to appreciate Munro’s admiration for Carson, a postmodern poet who is neither realist nor regionalist in outlook, and who grew up in Ontario but writes about North America through the lens of Greek myth. Munro’s enthusiasm for Carson is writ plainly on the back cover of Carson’s 1998 novel-in-verse: “Autobiography of Red is amazing – I haven’t discovered any writing in years that’s so marvelously disturbing” (Knopf 1999). Carson’s novel consists of a series of linked poems framed by an essay, an interview, translations of ancient Greek fragments, and other academic complements to the titular romance. In the 1990s, this unusual narrative won enthusiastic support from literary heavyweights such as Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Guy Davenport, and Michael Ondaatje, which helped to propel Carson into the upper echelons of the English-language literary world. After writing in relative obscurity for two decades, and issuing one slender volume of poetry with Brick Books (London, ON) in 1992, Carson burst onto the international literary scene in 1995 with two large collections published by New Directions and Knopf in New York. She has since garnered Lannan and MacArthur Foundation prizes in the United States; the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada; the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in England; as well as a host of other prizes, fellowships, and prestigious nominations, such as an unsuccessful bid for the Professor of Poetry chair at Oxford. As a fellow recipient of the Lannan prize, Munro no doubt took a professional interest in Carson’s explosive career.

7 Yet Munro’s endorsement of Carson’s writing begs further analysis because critics typically slot Munro’s stories at the realist end of the narrative spectrum and then position the lyrical, postmodern hybrids composed by the likes of Davenport, Ondaatje, and Carson at the opposite end. Consider Franzen’s polarization of their respective styles: “Munro’s work is all about storytelling pleasure. The problem here being that many buyers of serious fiction seem rather ardently to prefer lyrical tremblingly earnest, faux-literary stuff” (Franzen). Having championed lyrical fiction in From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada, I will simply state here that Franzen’s dismissal serves Munro criticism poorly because it underestimates her interest in poetry and suggests that the pleasure of reading her short stories is somehow divorced from her manipulations of generic form. Indeed, Franzen comes dangerously close to resembling one of the pernicious small town characters in Runaway who frown on the high cultural pretensions of poets such as Leon Jamieson in Munro’s titular story. When Jamieson wins a lucrative prize for poetry late in life, the townsfolk refuse to believe in the prize money; instead, they speculate that Jamieson’s money comes from marijuana sales: “It

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seemed that people could believe in dope money buried in glass jars, but not in money won for writing poetry” (12). Rather than oppose Munro’s prose to lyric poetry, therefore, I wish to examine the affinities between Carson’s literary interests and those of the character Juliet in Runaway.

Carson and Juliet

8 The first, and least significant, connection between Carson and Juliet is their physical resemblance. Munro’s description of the young Juliet could easily be a youthful rendering of the two or three author photographs that Carson’s publishers allow to circulate (http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/carson/index.html): “She was a tall girl, fair-skinned and fine-boned, with light brown hair that even when sprayed did not retain a bouffant style. She had the look of an alert schoolgirl. Head held high, a neat rounded chin, wide thin-lipped smile, snub nose, bright eyes, and a forehead that was often flushed with effort or appreciation” (52-3). A more compelling affinity between Carson and Juliet is their career choice: “Juliet was twenty-one years old and already the possessor of a B.A. and an M.A. in Classics. She was working on her Ph.D. thesis, but had taken time out to teach Latin at a girl’s private school in Vancouver” (52). Carson earned an M.A. in Classics at the University of Toronto in 1975. She then took a job at the University of Calgary before completing her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 1981. Appropriately, much of the first Juliet story, “Chance,” takes place on the Prairies, where Juliet falls in love with Eric Porteous on the train trip to Vancouver. However, Juliet attends university a decade before Carson, so more evidence is needed to connect their biographies.

9 Juliet’s research interests mirror those of Carson. Although Juliet is known in her hometown as “the girl who talks Latin” (113), and although she has agreed to teach Latin in Vancouver, nearly everything readers learn about her research concerns Carson’s area of specialization: ancient Greece. On the train west, Juliet is preparing to teach a course on Greek Thought when she meets Eric and tries to impress him with a lesson on Greek astronomy. Juliet eventually abandons her Ph.D. to pursue Eric and raise a child, whom they give the Homeric name Penelope. After Eric’s death, Juliet returns to Classics to research ancient Greek novelists, a subject to which Carson devotes several chapters of Eros the Bittersweet (77-97), and to which I will return in the second half of this essay.

10 There are further illuminating parallels between the reception of Carson’s scholarship and poetry, and the reception of Juliet in academia and the various towns she inhabits. Reviewers of Carson’s work praise her erudite publications, but interviewers rarely fail to comment on what they perceive as a disturbing blend of high seriousness and girlish playfulness in Carson (mismatched earrings, sparkle nail polish), as well as the quirkiness of an attractive, unmarried woman who is passionate about material as recondite as ancient Greek lyric (Gannon, Hampson, Rehak; for a more balanced perspective see Aitken). Although an eccentric antiquarianism is part of the mystique of, say, Ezra Pound, interviewers (male and female) generally find Carson’s expertise intimidating. Likewise, Juliet struggles with double standards in Classics, a field dominated by male authors and academics (Doherty): Her professors were delighted with her – they were grateful these days for anybody who took up ancient languages, and particularly for someone so gifted – but they

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were worried, as well. The problem was that she was a girl. If she got married – which might happen, as she was not bad-looking for a scholarship girl, she was not bad-looking at all – she would waste all her hard work and theirs, and if she did not get married she would probably become bleak and isolated, losing out on promotions to men (who needed them more, as they had to support families). And she would not be able to defend the oddity of her choice of Classics, to accept what people would see as its irrelevance, or dreariness, to slough that off the way a man could. Odd choices were simply easier for men[.] (53)

11 Amy Richlin adds some statistical support to these observations. Richlin notes that, “[a]ccording to the lists of Ph.D. dissertations in the United States and Canada published in the Newsletter of the American Philological Association, in 1989-90, 53% of dissertations were written by women, 12.8% were directed by women, and only one dissertation had the word ‘woman’ or ‘feminine’ in the title or indicated any investigation of gender. It always seems peculiar to me to read about disciplines where everyone is wondering what to do now that they’re finished with feminism; this will not be a problem in Classics for some time” (161). While Carson eventually met with success as an academic, she struggled first with a failed tenure bid at Princeton in the 1980s and then with the closure of the Classics Department at McGill in the late 1990s.

12 Juliet’s gender position is even more marginal outside the hallowed halls of the university: “In the town where she grew up her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb, and people had been quick to point out the expected accompanying drawbacks – her inability to run a sewing machine or tie up a neat parcel, or notice that a slip was showing. What would become of her, was the question” (53). Juliet’s sense of alienation in a male-dominated milieu is a standard Munro theme, as Beverly Rasporich observes: “The feminist quest in Munro’s fiction is primarily undertaken by the dominant persona of an intelligent and mature narrator who questions society’s expectations of her as female both in past memory and present circumstance. Both outer and inner directed, this voice speaks for a collective female experience and, at the same time, dramatizes the compelling, private lives of individuals” (Rasporich 32). Yet in Runaway Munro complicates this notion of unified female experience by depicting a divisive mother-daughter relationship in which Penelope rejects Juliet’s lifestyle and refuses to fulfill her mythological role as keeper of the home fires in the absence of the patriarch. Penelope’s rejection of her mother’s life choices echoes Juliet’s own rejection of Sarah (100-1), and thus the Juliet stories do not simply polarize gender positions. Instead, Munro’s characters operate in a minefield of emotions in which situations overlap and intersect in surprising ways. The disjointed symmetries of their relationships are akin to Juliet’s dream of a cracked sheet of ice, where everything is at once symmetrical and out of context (65-6).

13 Ultimately, Juliet’s combination of intelligence and good looks lands her a job in public television “interviewing people who are leading singular or notable lives, and deftly directing panel discussions, on a program called Issues of the Day” (126). Carson, too, worked in public television. She acted as the humanities commentator on a 1995 PBS series about Nobel laureates called The Nobel Legacy, an experience that seems to have stimulated an interest in the technical aspects of the television (“TV Men” and “On Ordinary Time” in Men in the Off Hours), as well as generating a zeal for the interview as a literary device (Autobiography of Red, “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings”). Beyond these similarities, however, Juliet and Carson have little in common. There is no Carson precedent for Juliet’s experiences of childrearing, nor for Juliet’s life in British

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Columbia. Therefore, rather than using biography as a key to unlock the mysteries of fiction, I propose that critics acknowledge Munro’s general interest in Carson and use Carson’s criticism on Greek literature to illuminate formal and intertextual dimensions of the Juliet stories.

Classics and Criticism

14 Juliet’s choice of a new dissertation topic in “Silence” illuminates the trials and tribulations of her romantic and family histories: She had given up on her thesis and become interested in some writers referred to as the Greek novelists, whose work came rather late in the history of Greek literature (starting in the first century B.C.E., as she had now learned to call it, and continuing into the Middle Ages). Aristeides, Longus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius. Much of their work is lost or fragmentary and is also reported to be indecent. But there is a romance written by Heliodorus, and called The Aethiopica (originally in a private library, retrieved at the siege of Buda), that has been known in Europe since it was printed at Basle in 1534. In this story the queen of Ethiopia gives birth to a white baby, and is afraid she will be accused of adultery. So she gives the child – a daughter – into the care of gymnosophists – that is, naked philosophers, who are hermits and mystics. The girl, who is called Charicleia, is finally taken to Delphi, where she becomes one of the priestesses of Artemis. (151)

15 Here, Munro shifts into the mode of literary critic and compares the characters in the Juliet stories to those in The Aethiopica to enhance readers’ understanding of the modern characters. Heliodorus’s ancient novel holds a “continuing fascination” for Juliet because she sees an analogy between the gymnosophists and the religious cult that lures Penelope away from home (152). In turn, Juliet sees herself as “the Ethiopian queen” who “never cease[s] to long for her daughter” (151). Munro thus introduces The Aethiopica as a hermeneutic model for evaluating the contemporary story of a divided family.

16 Carson’s analysis of the Aethiopica in Eros the Bittersweet helps to explain the plot twists that produce erotic and narrative suspense on the romantic side of the Juliet stories. Carson’s book examines the works of Longus, Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, and Chariton through the lens of her thesis on literacy and erotic triangulation. For Carson, the erotic lyrics of Sappho and her contemporaries condensed and refined a literary configuration of erotic desire wherein a “circuit” is set up between three essential points: “lover, beloved and that which comes between them” (Eros 16-17). Sparks fly between the points in this circuit, but the points are never fused. The essence of Eros, for Carson, is constant movement and deferral – a deferral exacerbated by the absent presence produced by the new technology of literacy, which fashions a triangular relation between sign, signified, and reader. According to Carson, novels such as the Aethiopica develop the lyric circuit “in extenso,” and thus “[t]actics of triangulation are the main business of the novel” (79). Carson supports this assertion by quoting S. Gaselee’s appraisal of the Greek novels, which Gaselee says typically depict “a succession of sentimental and sensational episodes; the two main characters either fall in love with one another soon after the opening of the story, or in some cases are actually married and immediately separated; they are sundered time and again by the most improbable misfortunes; they face death in every form; subsidiary couples are sometimes introduced, the course of whose true love runs very little smoother”

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(Gaselee 411; Carson, Eros 79). These erotic conventions also shape Munro’s plot, and thus Juliet’s literary research becomes an enquiry into her selfhood.

17 Munro’s lovers meet early in the story but are kept apart by a series of minor, major, and fatal accidents. Her principal characters are also embroiled in love triangles fraught with erotic deferral: Eric kisses Juliet but they do not make love because Juliet claims (falsely) that she is a virgin. Moreover, Eric is married to Ann. However, Ann’s health has been ruined by a car accident and Juliet just happens to visit Eric’s house on the day of Ann’s wake. Juliet seduces Eric but then he sleeps with his old girlfriend Christa (also Juliet’s best friend) while Juliet is showing the baby to her parents in Ontario. Back east, Juliet’s parents (the subsidiary couple) are embroiled in their own love triangles – Sara, Sam, and Irene followed by Sara, Sam, and the minister – but their romance runs somewhat smoother because Sara’s poor health tempers the characters’ actions. In contrast, Eric’s adultery jeopardizes Juliet’s love affair when he confesses his infidelity years later. Their quarrel is never resolved because Eric dies suddenly in a storm at sea.

18 These erotic entanglements would be entirely conventional, were it not for three important alterations. First, Munro’s lovers do not come together on the final pages of her narrative. Whereas, in The Aethiopica, “[m]ischance and adventures continue until all the main characters meet at Meroe, and Charicleia is rescued – again – just as she is about to be sacrificed by her own father” (Munro 151), Juliet’s story lacks a crucial intervention in which chance unites the lovers, instead of separating them. Munro’s characters die and their relationships fall apart, which points to Munro’s second plot innovation: the manner in which Juliet longs for her daughter (suffering long absences and flying into fits of jealousy toward the religious rivals for the daughter’s love) mirrors the romantic plot in its triangular configuration. Munro’s third innovation is that she uses the breaks between her short stories to omit the long periods when Eric and Juliet were actually together. Juliet longs for Eric to join her in the future in the first two stories, but she also longs for the union that has disappeared into the past in the third story – a past that Munro only conveys to the reader anecdotally. This narrative ruse transforms erotic deferral into erotic elegy.

19 Elegy dominates the mood, tone, and form of Munro’s fiction, according to Karen Smythe. Smythe follows Edward Engelberg in using the term “elegiac fiction” to describe Munro’s work because many of Munro’s stories resemble “those nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts that manifest a ‘modern sense of personal loss and dispossession, and of a special kind of sadness that validates the belief that one’s life has been a series of missed opportunities’” (5). Certainly, this perception dominates Juliet’s ruminations in “Silence.” Eric’s death has made union impossible, so Juliet performs the elegiac task of devising forms of consolation. Smythe explains that “[d]eath is not a principle of closure in elegy (fictional or poetic) but provides the basis for writing itself, as well as for structural openness, for resistance to the universally thematic ‘end’ – to death itself. The principle that does structure the end of an elegiac text, then, is consolation: whether explicitly or implicitly present or explicitly denied, consolation is the driving force and the shaping concept of elegy” (Smythe 8). Juliet, being an intellectual, tries to find consolation by identifying the causes of her missed opportunities. She is earnest in this task, but also self-aware enough to recognize that she has probably embarked on an endless and fruitless quest (158). Indeed, she speculates on the ultimate causes of her loneliness until the end of the narrative, which

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remains open on the level of plot because Juliet clings to the faint hope that Penelope might return. The trilogy of stories concludes: “She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort” (158). Juliet’s hope is thus irrational and self-conscious of its irrationality.

20 A hermeneutic context for interpreting this ambiguous conclusion might be found in a different set of classical allusions in the Juliet stories. In “Chance,” Juliet is preparing for her course on Greek Thought by re-reading a text by “Dodd” (56-7) that she has covered with “an orgy of underlining” (65). Juliet’s quotations and her special interest in the section on the Maenads reveal that she is reading E.R. Dodds’s 1951 classic, The Greeks and the Irrational. This book aimed to challenge the widely held belief that the defining feature of Greek life was its dependence on rationality. Dodds demonstrated that irrational behaviour had a vibrant and crucial place in Greek life and myth (although his conclusion suggests that Western civilization must strive to suppress such impulses). Unwittingly, Juliet demonstrates the relevance of Dodds’s thesis to modern Canadian life as she begins her train trek in complete composure aboard the CPR, the rational agent of government expansion in the Canadian West (often contrasted with American Wild West). However, an awkward conversation with a socially maladroit man on the train prompts a series of irrational behaviors in both the stranger and the classicist: Juliet flees his company and forgets to bring a sweater to keep her warm in the observation car; the alienated man throws himself under the train and Juliet blames herself for his death; Eric tries to stop Juliet from blaming herself but she cannot, even when she sees the logic of his reasoning. Eventually, Juliet falls asleep while reading the following passage from Dodds, which contrasts conflicting orders of logic: “what to the partial vision of the living appears as the act of a fiend, is perceived by the wider insight of the dead to be an aspect of cosmic justice” (Munro 65; Dodds 39). By italicizing and insetting this passage, Munro hints that the seemingly random moments of panic, queasiness, and shame in the Juliet stories are in fact symptoms of a larger pattern. Although Juliet is skeptical of any notion of cosmic justice if it involves a divine power, her religious skepticism ultimately drives Penelope away from her.

21 Given that the passage from Dodds follows his discussion of Greek fears of miasma, or pollution from interpersonal contact (Dodds 35-7), I would suggest that the seemingly random (and misspelled) citation from Dodds points to a larger formal pattern in the text. One can map the connections between “random” events without resorting to theology by noting how Munro pairs irrational sentiments with abject physical attributes. As Bronwen Wallace observes of Munro’s early stories, “in Munro’s development of character, we are never far from the persistent reality of their physical bodies” (Wallace qtd. in Rasporich 70). Munro develops this awareness in the Juliet stories through the invalid status of Ann and Sara; through Christa’s multiple sclerosis; and through the errant sexual longings of the male characters. However, Munro’s corporeal consciousness takes on a particularly abject quality in “Chance.” Julia Kristeva defines the abject as something at once “radically separate, loathsome. Not me” (2). Yet this “Not me” cannot be separated from the self. Even when it is jettisoned, it never becomes a completely separate object. It is often a kind of sentiment or an emission from the body that the ego wishes to repulse but cannot relinquish. The abject

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thus evokes a range of conflicting desires in the individual by entangling rejection and desire, far and near, fear and an uncanny sense of familiarity.

22 In “Chance,” Juliet experiences a classic example of abjection when she frets over the menstrual blood she was forced to leave in a toilet bowl (after the train stopped on account of the suicide). Abjection has already connected the seemingly distinct characters of Juliet and the suicide because both Juliet and the suicide struggle to control their “leaky eyes” (55, 67), as well as their need seek solace in strangers. Yet Kristeva argues that the abject is fundamentally tied to associations with women and the maternal role, which Juliet’s story corroborates because, having left her menstrual blood behind, Juliet meets a woman whose child she babysat briefly. The mother explains the cause of the train stoppage by spelling out “b-o-d-y” so as not to alarm the young boy (63). The passengers on the train confirm Juliet’s connection to the suicide by mistaking the blood in the toilet bowl for blood from the suicide’s body (62). Overwhelmed by these connections, Juliet turns to writing to cope with her internalized shame and disgust. However, like the young boy who struggles to keep his crayon within the borders of his colouring book – “Look at the mess you made, all over the lines” (62) – Juliet struggles to keep within the ruled lines of her stationary when she begins to write a letter to her parents (64). Thus the abject works in tandem with the irrational because, in a patriarchal society, it is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4).

Letters

23 The use of letters as a recurring narrative device in the Juliet stories suggests a further connection to the Greek novelists and to Carson’s research. Carson devotes an entire chapter to epistolary devices in Eros the Bittersweet because letters are a defining feature of the early novel in both Greek and English: ‘Letters’ (grammata) can mean ‘letters of the alphabet’ and also ‘epistles’ in Greek as in English. Novels contain letters of both kinds, and offer two different perspectives on the blind point of desire. Letters in the broad sense, that is to say the floating ruse of the novel as a written text, provide erotic tension on the level of the reading experience. There is a triangular circuit running from the writer to the reader to the characteristics in the story; when its circuit-points connect, the difficult pleasure of paradox can be felt like an electrification. […] In the numerous epistolary scenarios to be found in ancient novels, letters are never used to convey a direct declaration of love between lover and beloved. Letters stand oblique to the action and unfold a three-cornered relation: A writes to C about B, or B reads a letter from C in the presence of A, and so on. When letters are read in novels, the immediate consequence is to inject paradox into lover’s emotions (pleasure and pain at once) and into their strategies (now obstructed by an absent presence). (Eros 91)

24 The Juliet stories begin and end with letters, and these letters stand at an oblique relation to the action. The first letter arrives from Eric several months after he kisses Juliet on the train. It has taken Eric months to remember the name of Juliet’s school and he still cannot remember her last name. Thus the letter might never have arrived and the re-ignited romance hinges on a chance delivery. Juliet composes the second letter after the suicide on the train, but she abandons the letter when she tires of her habitual tone as “a rather superior, invulnerable observer” (65). The third letter is sent from Juliet to Eric while she visits her parents in Ontario. The letter reprises the events

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of the preceding pages, but Munro downplays the letter’s importance, perhaps because Juliet resumes her superior tone after a somewhat more vulnerable introduction, “Dreaded (Dearest) Eric” (124). In one of those telescoping moments when Munro’s third person narration channels the first person perceptive of the female protagonist, the narrator of “Soon” claims that Juliet found the letter “years later. Eric must have saved it by accident – it had no particular importance in their lives” (124). This letter is presented as relating obliquely to the plot. However, an omniscient narrator should know that Eric strayed during Juliet’s visit to Ontario; once armed with this knowledge, the reader can easily speculate that the epistolary reminder of Eric’s family ties had a profound and shaming effect on the adulterous man, who probably saved the letter for this reason. Nonetheless, the reader does not learn the precise reason because Juliet’s perspective constrains the epistemic field of the narration.

25 The crucial letters of the Aethiopica also help to explain the names of the principal characters in the Juliet stories. In the Aethiopica, the black Ethiopian queen has written a letter to explain the extraordinary circumstances that caused her to give birth to a white child. The queen’s letter explains that, at the moment of penetration by the African king, she was looking at a painting of white Andromeda being rescued from captivity by Perseus. The names of these heroes are echoed in Runaway by Ann and Eric Porteous, thereby encouraging readers to superimpose the Queen-Andromeda-Perseus triangle onto the Juliet-Ann-Porteous one. Yet Carson notes that in the Aethiopica the crucial information contained in the letter is not read until the fourth book of the novel, and then only to save Charicleia’s life (Eros 92-3). The definitive intervention of the reading, which saves Charicleia, contrasts with the absence of a definitive intervention in the Juliet stories. In contrast, the fourth and final letters in the Juliet stories are not really letters at all, but rather blocks of italicized, undelivered, first person address that mimic the earlier letters in their visual presentation on the page.

26 Juliet’s fourth letter arises from a discussion about children with a woman on a BC ferry. Confronted with a near-stranger, Juliet struggles to abandon her invulnerable facade and to confess her emotional dependence on her daughter: “She gives me delight, Juliet could have said” (128). The paragraph then proceeds to detail the things Juliet could have said to articulate her love of Penelope to the stranger, but did not. Juliet’s expression of this love has been further stifled by the administration’s prohibition of letters or phone calls at Penelope’s spiritual retreat. Yet the italicized paragraph continues to resemble a letter because Juliet’s musings are juxtaposed across a double line break with Penelope’s short missive: “Hope to see you Sunday afternoon. It’s time.” (128). Munro thus contrasts the tender, hypothetical, but non-existent letter with the curt, ambiguous, actual one.

27 As Juliet becomes further estranged from Penelope, she increasingly develops what Carson would call a “contrafactual relation to the world” (Economy 58). In Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan, Carson describes contrafactuals as syntactic constructions that describe a world which might have been if an event in the past had not negated its possibility. Contrafactuals resemble a conditional tense (“Juliet could have said”) in which the condition cannot be fulfilled (the stranger and Penelope are gone). Carson maintains that contrafactuals are an extremely economic mode of poetic expression because they give the reader portraits of both an imagined, ideal present and a very different, actual present. Juliet’s final “letter” discusses the failure of her relationship with Penelope and with her latest boyfriend, Gary, in this

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contrafactual mode. Munro telescopes the third person narration into Juliet’s first person perspective and the narrator dismisses Gary, Christa’s brother, as “too rational” a man to function as Juliet’s partner (153). Juliet finds it impossible to confess her failure as a mother to such a man: If Gary saw that she was agitated he pretended not to notice. But it was probably on this evening that they both understood they would never be together. If it had been possible for them to be together she might have said to him, My daughter went away without telling me good-bye and in fact she probably did not know then that she was going. She did not know it was for good. Then, gradually, I believe, it dawned on her how much she wanted to stay away. It is just a way that she has found to manage her life. It’s maybe the explaining to me that she can’t face. Or has not time for, really. You know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about what I’ve done wrong. But I think the reason may be something not so easily dug out. Something like purity in her nature. Yes. Some fineness and strictness and purity, some rock-hard honesty in her. My father used to say of someone he disliked, that he had no use for that person. Couldn’t those words mean simply what they say? Penelope does not have a use for me. Maybe she can’t stand me. It’s possible. (157-8)

28 These three paragraphs exhibit the greatest degree of confusion of all the letters. The first paragraph introduces the direct expression of Juliet’s interior thoughts, but then the second paragraph introduces a quotation mark (which is never closed) as if Juliet really were speaking to someone. The second paragraph flirts with second person address (“I could tell you plenty”) even as it documents the flip-flops of Juliet’s mental reasoning. The third paragraph introduces yet another interpretation of the failed relationship. The overall effect of the letter is one of genteel, lonely madness. The erotic paradoxes that fuel the Greek novel (Carson, Eros 83) resist resolution here and Juliet nearly drowns in the contradictory possibilities of her longings. Although the short story genre makes frequent use of epiphany (Cox 30-42), the clarity and transcendence of the epiphanic moment is denied here.

29 In conclusion, I have not examined the affinities between Juliet and Carson to suggest that the key to the Juliet stories can be found in the biography of the poet, but rather to suggest that Munro’s interest in the poet and her publications points to textual clues that elucidate formal and stylistic dimensions of the Juliet stories. Many other critics have tried to steer Munro criticism away from its biographical and realist biases (Canitz 247), but Thacker dismisses these efforts with a sweeping gesture (“What” 197). I hope that the two halves of my essay will complement and challenge biographical readings, which on their own can do nothing to illustrate the value of Munro’s fiction as literature. A more profound appreciation of Munro’s skill and invention as a short story writer can be achieved by tracing the probable sources of her material and then investigating the formal dynamics of her imaginative craft.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Canitz, A.E. Christa, Rev. of The Other Country by James Carscallen and The Tumble of Reason by Ajay Heble, University of Toronto Quarterly, 1995-1996, N° 65.1.

Carson, Anne, “Anne Carson: Beauty Prefers an Edge,” interview by Mary Gannon, Poets & Writers Magazine, 2001, N° 29.2.

---, Autobiography of Red, New York, Knopf, 1999.

---, Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1999.

---, Eros the Bittersweet, Normal, IL, Dalkey Archive Press, 2000.

---, Men in the Off Hours, New York, Knopf, 2000.

---, “Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings,” Plainwater, New York, Vintage, 2000.

---, Short Talks, London, ON, Brick Books, 1992.

---, “The Art of Poetry No. 88: Anne Carson,” interview by Will Aitken, Paris Review, 2004, n° 171.

---, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Anne Carson,” interview by Sarah Hampson, Globe and Mail, 14 Sep. 2000.

Cox, Aisla, “Epiphanies and Intuitions: The Short-Story Genre,” Alice Munro, Tavistock, UK, Northcote House, 2004.

Dodds, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1951.

Doherty, Lillian Eileen, Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Franzen, Jonathan, “Runaway: Alice’s Wonderland,” Rev. of Runaway, by Alice Munro, The New York Times, 14 Nov. 2004. [http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/books/review/ 14COVERFR.html]

Gaselee, S., Ed. Achilles Tatius: Clitophon and Leucippe, London, Heinemann, 1917.

Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982.

Munro, Alice, Runaway, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2004.

---, The View from Castle Rock, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2006.

Rasporich, Beverly, “Her Own Tribe: A Feminist Odyssey,” Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1990.

Rehak, Melanie, “Things Fall Together,” New York Times Magazine, March 2000, n° 26.

Richlin, Amy, “Zeus and Metis: Foucault, Feminism, Classics,” Helios, Autumn 1991, n° 18.2.

Smythe, Karen, “Towards a Theory of Fiction-Elegy,” Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

Thacker, Robert, “Introduction: Alice Munro, Writing ‘Home’: ‘Seeing This Trickle of Time,’” Essays on Canadian Writing, Winter 1998, N° 66.

---, “Quartet: Atwood, Gallant, Munro, Shields,” in Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller (eds), The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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---, “What’s ‘Material’: The Progress of Munro Criticism, Part 2,” Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1998, n° 33.2.

ABSTRACTS

Cet article examine les affinités entre le personnage de Juliet et la poétesse Anne Carson pour suggérer que l’intérêt que Munro porte à sa personne et à son œuvre est réinvesti dans la création d’un personnage de fiction. Il ne s’agit pas de lire la fiction de Munro sous l’angle de la biographie mais de réconcilier la lecture contextuelle et l’analyse littéraire.

AUTHORS

IAN RAE Ian Rae received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of British Columbia in 2002. He held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University until 2005 and then joined the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn, Germany, as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In 2006, he returned to McGill as a Visiting Assistant Professor and as the Acting Program Director of the Institute for the Study of Canada. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario. Rae is a specialist in Canadian literature and he published From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada in 2008 (McGill-Queen’s University Press). He is presently writing a monograph on Anne Carson, as well as papers on Al Purdy, Alice Munro, and the creative economy in Canada.

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A Reading of Away from Her, Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

Agnès Berthin-Scaillet

1 By nature, the visual field inspires semantic configurations, but is also inspired by them. How does a filmic adaptation cross the spectrum of the arts? To quote Seymour Chatman, it does so by means of “spoken words combined with the movements of actors that imitate characters against sets which imitate places” (Chatman 403). In the case of Away from Her, the medium is particularly well-adapted, since the film is to be read as a reflection on and of memory. The process of filmic intellection in itself implies the perception of fragments built up into a continuum, and according to Metz’s concept of the “grande syntagmatique,” defined as a chain, it sollicits the viewer’s memory to produce meaning. Daniel Dayan makes it quite clear: “the meaning of a shot is given retrospectively. It does not meet the shot on the screen but only in the memory of the spectator. A retroactive process organises the signified” (Dayan 450). The role played by memory in the spectator-image relation is also highlighted by J. L. Schefer in his essay l’Homme Ordinaire du Cinéma: to him, the mental process of re-membering in the literal sense of the term is inherent in the very experience of viewing a film. “Beyond the duration of the experience of film viewing, images do have a power of remanence, of recurrence, which defines the transformation of an image into its mnesic double” (Schefer 120).

The text as a pre-text

2 In the cinema, evocation means invocation and memories materialize, become images. Interestingly, the first three shots of the film are memories: Grant driving to Marian’s place for the first time, a close-up of Fiona’s young face on the day when she proposed to him, and a shot of the couple skiing outside their cottage. The three shots belong to

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three distinct layers of time, to the past of the diegesis, away from the “tense” of the mainstream narrative, that is Fiona’s first steps into the inevitable “pattern of deterioration” which gradually leads her to a room in the second floor of Meadowlake, the retirement home. From the incipit, Sarah Polley resorts to the flashback. Flashbacks allow the resurgence of what Gilles Deleuze defines as “images affection,” the most striking one being a close-up on Fiona’s face as a young girl, to which the film maker adds the artefact of the slow motion of her lips uttering inaudible words. To Deleuze, a close-up equates the face. “There is no such thing as a close-up on a face: the face is, per se, a close-up,” and more particularly in Away from Her, the screen is filled with “an intensive close-up, enlivened by micro movements of expression” (Deleuze 126). This recorded image within the film, an image artificially made to look like an old celluloid, the focal point where the camera comes to a standstill after a pan skimming the surface of lake Ontario, is literally screened by Grant’s memory. Owing to the sweeping camera movement equating the movement of the eye, Fiona’s smiling face and the vast surface of the lake are united in one take and coalesce as equally still and alive. “The spark of life” (Munro 275), the expression that appears in the first page of the short story and recurs throughout the film, is precisely what the cinema can add to the still pictures memories are made of. The quest for the “spark of life” may have triggered the whole process of adaptation.

3 In the sequence where Fiona is about to cross the threshold of their house just before checking into Meadowlake, the handling of the camera proxemis is pregnant with meaning, since the sequence begins with a close shot of Fiona looking at herself in the mirror, followed by a shot-reverse shot series in which she is filmed from a distance, into a medium shot, with the door in the background. The sentence “How do I look?” gives birth to a close-up on Fiona and the next question is “How does that look?” as if to call attention to her own face as an image to be read. Off-screen, Grant’s voice operates as a kind of voice-over commenting on this “image affection”, using Alice Munro’s precise choice of adjectives: “direct and vague, sweet and ironic.” Thereby, through specifically cinematic codes, the film maker provides a sort of definition of her intent as an adaptor. She means to “come a little bit closer ” as Neil Young’s lyrics suggest, to focus (literally) on Grant’s point of view, and to translate the writer’s words into images. The way in which the text is superimposed on the picture seems to stress the very limits of the translatability onto the screen of description through the written word.

4 In the writing of the script, Sarah Polley has chosen to focus on the issue of the loss of memory. “When did we last wash that jumper?” The very first words uttered in the film dialogue are a banal question, supposedly an everyday life, ordinary, joke shared by Fiona and Grant over dinner. But the question sets the tone and sounds darkly ironic. The film, unlike the literary text, unambiguously names Fiona’s illness: Alzheimer’s disease. Critical critics might be tempted to pass judgement on the pace of the film, and to say that it makes a short story long. But although it may seem to be a slow motion picture, it is one that could arguably be defined as a picture about slow motion, that of the implacable “progress” up to “the end of things.” Fiona’s phrasing in the car driving towards Meadowlake after Christmas stresses the process that is at work; it clearly denies the stillness of the indicative: “I’m not gone”, and emphasizes the continuous form: “I’m going.” Most of the stylistic devices the film-maker resorts to are aimed at rendering a slow process of fading away.

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5 Slow motion away from Fiona is precisely what the film opens with. It sets the narrative in motion within a specific signifying system. The opening shot, viewed from the inside of Grant’s car provides an interesting visual rendering of Alice Munro’s textual editing and her organization of the textual space. In terms of narrative construction, as a reader of the literary text, the film maker may have been sensitive to the striking handling of time in Alice Munro’s writing, with a constant shift from one tense to another, where one can see the equivalent on the page of the cinematic cut. The editing of the film aims at rendering the fragmentation of the timeline at work in the short story whose discontinuities, ruptures, abrupt cuts tend to disorient the reader. The disrupted and disruptive chronology may have been read as an invitation to film making. The successive paragraphs operate like a travelling forward whereby the narrative gradually ventures into Marian’s residential district, up to the house in front of which Grant’s car stops: a scene inserted within two passages devoted to Fiona’s dismay and severe depression in Meadowlake after Aubrey has left. “In the parking lot a woman wearing a tartan pants suit was getting a folded up wheelchair out of the trunk of her car” (Munro 305). This sentence is interestingly followed by a blank space in the text of the short story; then come the various stages of Grant’s progress, each new stage initiating a new paragraph: “The street he was driving down was called Black Hawk Lane” followed by “The houses looked to have been built around the same time” the next step in the progress, the next paragraph opens with the description on which the narrative stops: “The house that was listed in the phone book as belonging to Aubrey and his wife was one of these”. It seems that in the filmic version, with the slow motion of the car inside which the camera focuses on Grant, the adaptation makes the most of the motion made possible by film making, and successfully follows the tracks of Munro’s text.

Continuity asserted through cuts and dissolves

He could hear the sound of television. Aubrey, the answer to Fiona’s prayers sat a few feet away, watching something that sounded like a ball game. His wife looked at him. She said, “you okay?” and partly closed the door. “You might as well have a cup of coffee” she said to Grant. He said “thank you.” (310)

6 The four characters closely woven together in the intricate syntactic web of the passage in the last part of the short story, with two characters facing each other across a kitchen table, and two “third persons,” passively talked about, form the core of the short story in Sarah Polley’s reading. This web is cinematized in the adaptation as the core sequence but it is dismembered, turned into various micro sequences leading to Grant’s final sacrifice. Yet beyond the apparent dislocation of the narrative components, continuity prevails in the construction of the filmic narrative through both intersequential and intrasequential editing. In terms of punctuation, the stylistic strategies aim at creating a pattern of causal links throughout the film. This is precisely what motivates the montage, which stresses the juxtaposition of images rather than the images themselves. The most striking example of such a conception of editing is the match cut that switches from Marian’s bunch of yellow flowers to the bunch of purple flowers Fiona arranges in a vase, a shot which opens up an episode belonging to a previous layer of time in the filmic narrative: “These are beautiful flowers”/ “I’ve never

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seen those purple ones before.” To cover the cut, the film maker resorts to a sound bridge: a transitional device frequently used in the film, whereby the sound over a shot comes from the space of a previous shot. With specifically cinematic codes: the cut and the nonsimultaneous diegetic sound, Sarah Polley makes up a bridge between Marian’s house and Fiona’s house. Grant alludes to Marian’s flowers while the viewer is made to see Fiona’s flowers, belonging to a preceding season. Bunches of flowers are memories one tries to keep for a while. The word “before” uttered both on-screen and off-screen by Grant brings forth an image of the pre-Meadowlake days in his memory.

7 In the sequence filmed in their car after driving from the neurologist’s, Fiona’s smiling face is shown in profile, in a close shot, while she is looking at Grant, to the right. Then, following an abrupt cut, but with a sound bridge transition, —“How is your husband doing?” the mental illness being an obvious link here — Marian’s face is filmed looking towards the left, with the very same angle and camera distance. The two shots are joined on the basis of their graphic qualities, and the editing is motivated by the association it generates: a two-faced, Janus like feminine figure that embodies Grant’s fantasies.

8 At the stage where Fiona mentions Meadowlake, she faces Grant in a two-shot, with a circular table between them. “If we think about it”, he says referring to the mental institution, “it would be a rest cure of sorts”. Owing to what could be apprehended as phonic ambiguity, a form of paronomastic sliding made possible by the actor’s voice, the expression “rest cure”, derived from the short story, (p. 279) sounds like the word “rescue”. Then follows a cut, and the same type of shot appears on the screen, picturing Grant and Marian, with the very same camera angle and character placement, with Marian’s circular kitchen table between them. There again, the cut establishes a connection, bridging the gap Grant is about to “ford” by driving his car from one house to the other.

9 In the last part of the film, Grant is seen dancing with Marian with his head resting on her cheek. Then without any transitional means of punctuation, the diegesis is abruptly brought back to Meadowlake, where Grant visits Fiona who has drifted away from him and who is secluded, utterly lost in her own sorrow. The sequence opens with Fiona’s shapeless, horizontal body filling the lower part of the screen. She looks lifeless. The viewer remembers the tale read to Fiona by Grant, in which the words “dance” and “tomb” recurred. Grant intrudes into the field, a silent stranger hardly seen in the background. The shot which follows is a close shot of Fiona’s hand painstakingly reaching for a picture pinned up on the wall, a drawing of her face as seen by Aubrey, the portrait of a different person without the “spark of life ” that has remained in Grant’s memory. The third shot duplicates the opening shot of the sequence, drawing a circular pattern that closes it down. Grant is defeated and leaves the field, as if expelled from the frame, because the distance is too great between him and the alien woman in the drawing. Incidentally, the relation of cut to lighting is worth noting in the following shot, where Grant, walking along the corridor, crosses an unlit area and is momentarily lost in the dark. This sequence exemplifies the way in which through her use of the cinematic cut and compositional parameters, Sarah Polley constructs her visual reading of the short story.

10 In cinema, the dissolve is a conventional means of punctuation: fade out and fade in smoothly succeed each other and it is clearly used throughout the film to connote the slow process of memory at work, as well as to link the various “tenses” of the diegesis.

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A most significant example is to be found in the incipit of the film: in the series of six shots where Fiona and Grant go country skiing. This series itself is linked by a dissolve to the shot showing Grant literally driving away from Fiona with his car: separate times and spaces are thereby directly connected from the start. The camera travels along the perfect symmetry of parallel tracks on the snow, then a gradual merging of two figures into the surrounding whiteness, then the man going astray and momentarily leaving the woman, then lastly the two figures side by side again. This smoothly edited series of shots dissolving into each other provides the choreography of the couple’s life in common, on a filmic scale.

11 Sarah Polley resorts to dissolve as a means of connecting episodes when Alice Munro opts for silence, in the form of a blank in her textual space. For example, when Grant is filmed from behind, leaving Meadowlake after another trying moment spent with Fiona, the sequence then dissolves to an insert shot showing a jug of milk, with Marian’s voice off-screen saying, in a soothing, feminine, motherly way while she’s pouring the milk: “You’re not feeling too well are you?” The choice made in terms of editing and the metonymic audio-visual configuration are motivated by a reading of Marian’s place as a refuge, a shelter.

The structuring function of repetition

12 The pattern of deterioration which is the backbone of the scenario delineated by the adaptor is also made perceptible to the viewer through repetition. Various motifs or particular types of shots, when repeated in different parts of the film create visual landmarks and the similarities are systematically used to point out the variations. The use of repetition is definitely one of the most remarkable stylistic characteristics of the film and it plays a powerful structuring role. In the opening sequence for example, the high angle shot showing Grant and Fiona, during what Alice Munro describes as “the five or ten minutes of physical sweetness just after they got into bed” is repeated in the sequence preceding their departure for Meadowlake, with the very same angle, but significantly, Fiona, who is turning her back to Grant, leaves the bed and the space of the frame. As the camera remains fixed, the two-shot loses its balance and the pillow on the right side is left empty, with the memory of the character still perceptible in the hollow shape. In Meadowlake, in a scene the writer does not refer to or even hint at, the same shot appears on the screen, with the same angle, the same fixed camera. When Fiona whispers “go now,” the pillow next to her is left empty. Grant goes away from Fiona’s frame. Then in the last part of the film, Marian and Grant are filmed in the very same way, in a blatant example of repetition stressing variation. This high-angle shot on the couple in bed is to be read as a sort of inverted mirror image, the most extreme expression of the reversal Grant’s sacrifice amounts to. To this extent, Marian’s placement on the other side of the bed compared to the shots previously described, is probably not gratuitous.

13 The key symptom of disruption assumes the form of a visible reversal. As Fiona reads aloud from one of her books about Alzheimer’s disease, the process which unavoidably occurs is one of complete reversal of the initial order of things. Sarah Polley uses the repetition of visual motifs to show the puzzling feeling of estrangement from his wife that Grant has to cope with. Again, the handling of the narrative calls upon the viewer’s memory. When Grant, calling Fiona “Mrs Anderson” — which sounds to her like the

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identity of a stranger — offers to drive her back to their house, to paraphrase Fiona’s own words “everything reminds” the viewer of the opening sequence and the first part of the film. Everything is repeated but inverted. For example, the wooden shed outside the house where they used to leave their skis. In the opening sequence of the film, the two characters are seen silouhetted against the sunset, shot from the back, looking in silent communion at the vast snow-covered landscape near the wooden shed. In the central part of the film, when Grant finds himself on his own in their cottage, this shot recurs with the same back lighting and he is filmed from behind, gazing at the view. The third occurrence of the shot is a visual echo, whose function is to remind the viewer of the past shot, but it assumes the form of a picture in reverse, expressive of disharmony. Fiona and Grant are filmed face on, so that the fixed camera lingers on Fiona’s bewildered eyes and on Grant’s baffled look at his wife. It is a reverse shot in the cinematic sense of the term.

14 The long white corridor inside the retirement home is deliberately used as a recurring motif in the film. The progress of the characters along the corridor is the spacialisation of the slow motion towards “the end of things”. Although the camera seems to be fixed, a slight, hardly perceptible zoom backwards makes for the sense of remoteness, and gradual loss. The end of the corridor is a dead end. We see it no less than eight times. The fact that Fiona’s muscles have become atrophied for instance is materialized through acting codes, with a distinctly deteriorating gait: it is quite simply shown, from a distance: it is cinematized. The depth of field is repeatedly used to show the characters from behind, the camera being the witness of the various stages of the diegesis. The first four shots of the corridor show Grant, a visitor in Meadowlake. In the fourth occurrence of the same type of shot, he is seen face on, walking back from the dining room, with his bunch of flowers, after realizing that Fiona no longer knows who he is. In the sequence which precedes, a striking alternation of twenty shots edited in a shot/reverse shot pattern, systematically isolating each character within one frame, has made it clear. When the corridor is filmed again for the fifth time, it is the focus of a scene where Grant encounters Fiona pushing Aubrey in his wheelchair and where she literally walks away from him. From a structural point of view, this is a turning point, a kind of fold, in the series of eight. The character placement and the movement within the frame, right in the middle of the series of repeated shots, stages the reversal the character is faced with: an extreme form of reversal that will lead him in the last sequence but one to walk along the same corridor pushing Aubrey’s chair up to Fiona’s door. This time, Sarah Polley resorts to an eloquent travelling backwards. The fact that the image of the corridor should be repeated eight times is perhaps deliberate, if read in connection with Bach’s Prelude that becomes the extra-diegetic musical theme at this point. The tempo of the Prelude is divided into recurring series of eight notes, and its conclusion is heard precisely when the travelling shot along the corridor comes to a stop.

Framing and reframing — the seen and the unseen

15 In the film’s specific formal system, careful note is to be made of such factors as framing and camera movements. Whether the form is static or dynamic, changes produce meaning. The meaning of the shot lies in what Christian Metz calls, when referring to the framing and its displacements: “the boundary that bars the look, that

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puts an end to the seen, that inaugurates the tilt into the dark, toward the unseen, the guessed at” (Metz 105). The paradigmatic choices made by the film-maker call attention to what is in the frame, and to what is off-screen, expelled from the field, from the space of the image. The gradual isolation Fiona experiences, her disappearance as a person is followed step by step by the camera. The objective of the camera is, of course, subjective.

16 When Fiona has become a regular resident of Meadowlake, the camera stops for a few seconds on the plate hanging on the wall, on the left side of her door: not quite the “nameplate decorated with bluebirds ” Alice Munro mentions in her narrative (287), but decorated in a significantly childish way, with the name “Fiona” on it. In the last part of the film, the camera frames another plate, on the right side of the door, with nothing else than the number of the room on it.

17 Grant’s loneliness is also made visible through specific choices in terms of framing. When he leaves Fiona’s room after witnessing her state of depression, which leaves her motionless in her bed, he is filmed face on, walking along the white corridor towards the camera, while in the depth of the field, neatly double-framed, the supervisor, Madeleine Montpellier is sitting in her office, “considering the second floor” for Fiona. The double framing of the glass panelled door mirrors her rigid, square presence as a watchful vigil of the place. One remembers the sequence devoted to Grant’s first visit to Meadowlake: the supervisor insists on showing him the second floor. To initiate the first shot of this scene, the doors of the elevator open like a shell and operate as a punctuation device, opening onto a white corridor peopled with ghost-like figures in wheelchairs, which provides an ironic comment on Mrs. Montpellier’s expression “they end up happy as clams!” In one shot, the film maker encapsulates the reality Grant is turning his back to, driving away from: namely, a place where patients are “inmates” as Alice Munro writes, locked up in themselves.

18 When the camera is fixed, the eye is made to concentrate on the movements of the characters within the frame and on the information conveyed in the various planes of the image. One shot seems to contain a concise visual rendering of the narrative the director has chosen to depict: Grant has left his wife in her room. He is sitting at one end of the sofa in the dining room. Marian, whom he hasn’t met yet, emerges from within the frame, sits down at the other end of the sofa. Aubrey is off-screen at the far end of the room. For a while the two characters are close to each other, united in the two-shot and yet away from each other while in the background, right between them, a wheelchair is to be seen.

19 Grant is often a passive witness in Meadowlake, watching his wife from a distance. In a remarkably composed fixed camera shot, staging one of his visits to Meadowlake, in the television room, in front of the sports channel, he is allotted the second plane in the depth of the shot, the foreground being devoted to Fiona and Aubrey. Grant’s presence within this frame, having to share the space and to sit away from the two characters is a precise cinematization of Munro’s text. “Grant did not mind watching that with them. He sat down a few chairs away” (294). The character placement mirrors the syntactic placement of “Grant” at one end of the sentence, and “them” at the other end. The word order in the text is the new order of things, a new stage in the narrative, and it is rendered on the screen in terms of framing and composition.

20 Reframing is another recurrent device in Sarah Polley’s filming style. In the dinner party sequence, at the point where Fiona’s symptoms of a pathological loss of memory

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become obvious, the camera gradually tightens the scope, from a long shot showing an ordinary dinner party (with, ironically, everybody joking about anecdotes they fail to remember), to a zoom forward which slowly reframes her as she strives to remember what to call the bottle of wine she is holding. The reframing operates here as if to get closer to the silence that isolates her from the rest of the party and prefigures the form of seclusion her mental illness is going to lead her to. As a musical backdrop for the tension brought about by the zoom, an intradiegetic sound is to be heard — the piano phrases of a Prelude by Bach: it is only a prelude…. The focal point being altered within one take, the sense of an evolution is reinforced in the viewer’s perception. Fiona is gradually altered, she is “beginning to disappear” and ends up not being the same person: the first conversation Grant has with his wife after a month spent away from her, makes it blatantly clear: “You were not there” Grant says to her, meaning she was not in her room. “Well, I’m here!” People and places are no longer reliable as such. Grant rebels at one point in the film: “We had a good life together. Those were your words. This is not your sweater”. It is grammatically plain that the past is to be reasserted and the present, which is juxtaposed with it in an incongruous way, definitely negates the person. The reality brought about by the present tense imposes itself in the negative form: it is a form of negation.

Camera movements and distance

21 There are relatively few large camera movements in the film, but some of them provide clues as to the director’s reading of the short story. In the opening part of the sequence when Fiona loses her way in the middle of the wood while skiing on her own, a spectacular crane shot, followed by a circular pan showing her from above with a bird’s eye view angle, connotes her being trapped in the blankness of her own mind, the way in which she becomes remote, the way in which people tend to look at her from a distance. She is small and vulnerable like a baby in too large a white cradle.

22 Another sweeping pan is worth quoting in this respect: after a whole month spent away from his wife, Grant phones nurse Kristie in order to inquire about his wife. In a long shot filmed in their bedroom, the initial framing is first on a framed photograph of Fiona on the bedside table, while Grant’s voice is heard off-screen; then the camera movement follows the telephone cord and the shot ends on Grant sitting on the bed and speaking about Fiona to the nurse. Fiona has become a third person, talked about, out of reach, a “no person in the dialogue” to paraphrase Emile Benveniste. Grant is “framed” between two absent beings: the memory of his wife frozen on a picture and an Alzeimer patient looked after by nurses in a retirement home. Roland Barthes comments on the significance of a photograph and the effect entailed by its stillness; “the photograph does not necessarily tell us about what is no longer there, but it actually tells us about what has been”[…] “It has been: by shifting this reality into the past, it suggests that it is already dead” (Barthes 129).

23 The sense of loss is also expressed by means of another cinematic code: the use of the focal lens, which produces interesting optical effects and manipulates the viewer’s perception of the profilmic elements. A most interesting depth of field shot is the one that closes the sequence devoted to the memory test, at the neurologist’s who is going to diagnose Fiona’s illness. A sequence that ends with the word “baby ”uttered in disgust by Fiona. The whole sequence is evocative of early childhood, with questions

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that could be asked to a little girl. The last shot is filmed from outside the neurologist’s office, so that the opening of the next shot equates the opening of the door, with, in the background, a conspicuous poster representing a foetus inside his mother’s womb. Incidentally, at the end of the dinner party, the word she comes up with, when trying to utter the word “wine,” happens to be “wain,” which is perhaps significant in this respect. The film maker was obviously keen on stressing the process of regression which is an inevitable consequence of the mental illness.

24 The use made of the various planes in the composition of shots is yet another stylistic device designed to connote the effects of the passing of time and the damage caused by oblivion. They are visually perceptible. What is about to be lost and erased, is blurred. The lit up Christmas tree, for instance in the short sequence where Fiona and Grant dance together in their cottage, the day before Fiona’s departure, is deliberately blurred: still visible as a symbol, but fading away as a symbol too.

25 During the dinner party, Fiona’s voice-over comments on her own experience, on the images she has conjured up, the verb “I wonder” sounds very much like “I wander.” She stops in the middle of a vast extent of snow, and behind her, her cottage, the focal point and landmark she was aiming for when skiing with Grant in the opening sequence of the film, is blurred too, like a memory losing its sharpness.

26 The same device is used in the forest where Fiona loses her way while country skiing. The focus is on the bare branches of the trees that surround the character, whereas she is literally lost in the background, as if she was already “going.” She can hardly be made out, so that the disappearance is somewhat optical and directly affects the viewer’s very perception.

The poetics of space

27 Motion, however slow it may be, is a most cinematic means of exposing what is left behind the characters, bearing the traces of the passing of time. In Sarah Polley’s filmic rendering of the literary text, the use made of the landscape is not that of a mere setting. Cross-country skiing is the couple’s favorite activity. The parallel tracks on the snow form a motive which will recur from the incipit to the last few shots, assume a metaphorical dimension. The Canadian landscape made of vast extents bearing the marks of previous motion, as well as the surface of the lake, the backcloth of Fiona’s young face in the memory close-up are both still and alive. The still waters of lake Ontario do run deep, in the same way as Fiona’s mental slumber may be mirrored by the seemingly still surface hiding painful images. The dialectics of motion and stillness pervades the narrative. The name Meadowlake brings these two notions of stillness and motion together.

28 Several sequences are filmed from inside Grant’s car, while it is moving. The most remarkable one is the sequence where Grant drives Fiona to Meadowlake where she is going to become a regular patient. She comments at length on her own memories, some of which even generate flashback images of Grant’s young female students. The camera angle throughout the sequence is such that the background of the image is occupied by the road they are leaving behind. Whatever is behind the couple “won’t go away”: it is kept in mind, kept in sight.

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29 When she wanders off on her skis, alone, Fiona looks back and fails to recognize the house where she’s come from. Literally so. Fiona’s house is the chief element in the topography of the text and in the film as well. It appears in the opening sentence of Alice Monro’s short story. “Fiona lived in her parents’ house. In the town where she and Grant went to university” (p. 274). Fiona’s house is the landmark, the center of a well-balanced, coherent whole. The worst symptom of all is the turning point, the point of complete reversal when she is driven back to the cottage and says she wishes to “go home.” When it comes to investigating the metaphorical dimension of the house, Gaston Bachelard’s essay, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, proves useful. Fiona’s native house materializes her inner self, her intimate space. Bachelard describes the dialectics of the immense and of the intimate, and the “reveries ” brought to life when watching from inside “the framed reveries.” “The onirically complete house constitutes one of the vertical schemes of the human psyche” (Bachelard 104).

30 Fiona’s house is her lighthouse. Back from the neurologist’s, in the car which has just stopped in front of the house, she asks the most “shocking” question. “When did we move into that cottage, was it last year or the year before?”

31 When Grant’s voice over, reading a text which, for once, is not a tale, utters the words “it is like the lighted windows of a big house flipping off one by one”, the house where they “[…] lived. Live,” appears on the screen and loses its lights one by one. When Grant is left alone after his wife’s departure for the retirement home, he is seen in a brief scene in the act of removing the festive Christmas lights that decorated the front of the cottage, as if it couldn’t “be dressed up all the time.”

32 Feeling threatened by the disease, Fiona says she doesn’t want “to chance going out.” There is something hostile about the world outside: the negative connotation of the cold, which is plainly associated with oblivion. The bear comes over the mountain after hibernating, after blankness has reigned over the cold winter. That is the order of things, apparently in Meadowlake too, “things get back to normal but it doesn’t last” the nurse remarks. The snow puts everything to sleep and makes the world hard to recognize. Fiona’s brain can hardly keep the heat inside, like the curled petals of the yellow flowers she studies during one of their walks together.

33 The landscape is mostly a winter landscape, and in this environment, the cold is definitely a disruptive element. In the opening sequence of the film, Fiona puts the frying pan in the freezer. Then, seeing Grant’s embarrassed look, she says “I’ll go and make the fire”, as if to deny the cold reality that is beginning to invade her brain. Later in the film, in the sequence where she wanders outside until it is pitch dark, Grant finds her on the bridge and rescues her in his car. Back home, she is visibly freezing cold even inside her own house. In the following sequence, when she refers to Meadowlake, she turns her back on Grant and she is filmed in a medium shot, looking off the frame at the vast extent of whiteness surrounding the house. Facing this reality, which makes whiteness synonymous with “blankness”, she says “You’re not making this decision alone, Grant, I’ve already made up my mind”. When she proves incapable of answering the questions asked by the neurologist to test her memory, she gets up and instinctively puts on her coat: “I was just feeling a little cold, that’s all,” she says. In the last sequence of the film, when things surprisingly and momentarily get back to normal, the snow has thawed outside and the viewer is made to remember “what yellow means.” Interestingly, the end of the filmic image is associated with whiteness

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too: after the ultimate fade out, after the memory image of Fiona as a young girl has looked away, towards the lake, the screen becomes white again.

The rewritten and the unwritten

34 The way in which Sarah Polley handles the question of memory and answers, by means of specific formal choices, the questions inherent in the process of adaptation, make the viewer sensitive to various points of contact between audio-visual configurations and verbal fiction. It seems however that a possible analogy to define her scenario could be found in the music of the film. The intra-diegetic “Prelude” by Bach is to be heard as part of a scene first, and is rewritten with a slightly different tempo and it is then used as the music of the film, which makes the original both recognizable and altered.

35 In Away from Her, there is no explicit exploration of the inner self of the characters, so that the diegesis remains on the surface of the short story in terms of characterization. The film fails to include the dreams in which the past collides with the present and Grant’s fantasies form a baffling scenario in his mind, leaving him unable to “separate what was real from what was not,” which is a serious sign of amnesia on the part of the film maker. Sarah Polley obliterates what belongs to the realm of dreams, and assumes the form of a revival of past images, as well as the way in which Fiona as a character in Alice Munro’s text is part and parcel of Grant’s memories, mostly seen through the filter (the screen) of his mind.

36 The opening sequence prefigures the entire movie, but it seems to handle fewer tenses than the literary text, and to simplify the handling of time in the narrative. In the film, the diegesis unfolds with the use of three different tenses: the time when Fiona is in Meadowlake, a recent past, that is the winter when the first symptoms of her illness became perceptible, and on three occasions, a more distant past, in the form of flashback images whereas Alice Munro’s narrative threads are far more numerous and the complex chronology of the short story is made of many layers of the past.

37 The adaptation is characterized by the silencing of certain aspects, including some narrative elements such as the dialogue between Fiona and the policeman in the town of Paris, a sequence that has been cut from the film version, as though the adaptor wanted to focus on the two couples at the expense of interaction with other people. Nevertheless the film suffers from what could be diagnosed as overstatement. The sequence which takes place in Meadowlake when Fiona checks in is not actually based on the short story. “Please don’t go away from me like this.” “It’s happening, now, Grant, I’m going.” There is no mention in Alice Munro’s story of such melodramatic dialogue or of the sorrow experienced by the couple on parting in Meadowlake after forty four years spent together, of their making love for the last time, or of Fiona’s tears when Grant leaves the room. The parting gives rise to an excess of pathos whereby the film stages à l’excès what the text keeps silent.

38 Overstating becomes quite patent when Marian is filmed next to Grant in a high-angle shot in a bed. In Munro’s text, with its extensive use of modals, with the question marks maintaining a distance, Grant feels the heat of Marian’s body in his fantasies only. “He had that to think of” can hardly be considered a verb of action. At that point, the film image crosses the borderline at which the paragraph stops. The word that inevitably comes to mind is the word “obscene,” in the etymological sense of the term, that is in

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front of the scene, as opposed to the back of his mind. Why should blunt, explicit film pictures of a couple in bed and of boxes piled up in a moving truck come to fill the blank offered on the page? It is the very question of the translatability from one language system to another which is at stake here: is it possible to cinematize a text with the guessed-at ambiguities it withholds?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bachelard, Gaston, La Terre et les Rêveries du Repos, Paris, Corti, 1982, 339 p.

Barthes, Roland, La Chambre Claire Notes sur la Photographie, Paris, Gallimard, “coll. Cahiers du cinéma”, 1980, 193 p.

Chatman, Seymour, “What novels can do that films can’t (and vice versa)”, in Film Theory and Criticism, Fourth edition, edited by G. Mast, M. Cohen and L. Braudy, Oxford, 1992, 861 p.

Dayan, Daniel, “The tutor-code of classical cinema”, in Movies and Methods An Anthology, Vol 1, edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press, 1976, 640 p.

Deleuze, Gilles, L’Image-Mouvement, Cinéma 1, Paris, Minuit, “coll. Critique”, 1983, 297 p.

Munro, Alice, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 2001, 322 p.

Metz, Christian, Le Signifiant Imaginaire, Paris, Christian Bourgeois, 1984, 371 p.

Schefer, Jean-Louis, L’Homme Ordinaire du Cinéma, Paris, Gallimard, “coll. Cahiers du Cinéma”, 1980, 232 p.

ABSTRACTS

Away From Her, de Sarah Polley, adaptation de la nouvelle d’Alice Munro « The Bear Came over the Mountain », est sorti sur les écrans canadiens en 2007. La lecture analytique de ce film interroge le récit cinématographique dans sa spécificité et met en évidence les choix stylistiques faits par la réalisatrice pour construire sa diégèse prioritairement autour de la thématique de la perte progressive et irréversible de la mémoire, explicitement due à la maladie d’Alzheimer. L’analyse formelle du film et des mécanismes de l’adaptation souligne en outre que ce parti pris occulte en partie la complexité littéraire de la nouvelle qui tend à se perdre dans le passage de l’écrit à l’écran. Sans être évaluative, cette lecture aboutit au constat d’une distance entre le récit filmique et la poétique singulière d’Alice Munro, comme si l’adaptation était restée « loin d’elle ».

AUTHORS

AGNÈS BERTHIN-SCAILLET Agnès Berthin-Scaillet teaches English, film analysis and film studies at the University of Orléans. Her publications include articles on Mike Leigh's Naked, Opening Night by John Casavetes, and on

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Greenaway's hybrid writing and the theatrical nature of his cinema. She has also published a monograph on Peter Greenaway entitled Fête et défaite du corps (L'Avant-Scène Cinéma).

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The Skald and the Goddess: Reading “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro

Héliane Ventura

1 Alice Munro’s short story entitled “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” was first published in The New Yorker (December 27, 1999 and January 3 rd, 2000) before it was anthologized under the same title in her tenth collection of stories, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, in 2001 and adapted for the cinema, to great acclaim, by Sarah Polley in 2006 under a different, shorter title extracted from Munro’s text: “Away From Her.” The puzzling short story title reads like a close variant from a North American Folk Song, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” while the concluding paragraph in the story features a characteristic trait from the world of childhood, which is linked with language learning, since the main female character, Fiona, strives to find the correct irregular form of the verb to forsake: “and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken” (Munro 322).

2 Nevertheless this story does not belong in children’s literature and neither does it highlight any specific events in the lives of fictional children. As pinpointed by Robert McGill “Children are virtually nowhere to be found in ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain,’ and because Fiona and Grant are not parents, the story offers no consolation in the glimpse of a younger generation's possibilities, no catharsis through a child or grandchild coming to grips with Fiona's institutionalization, no redemption through the passing on of memory. Any hope lies in the future of Fiona and Grant themselves” (Canadian Literature 197). Fiona is afflicted with a degenerative disease which is not named but presents the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and she has to leave the house in the country, near Georgian Bay, where the couple had taken early retirement twelve years before, in order to settle in a near-by nursing home. Framed as it is between a Folk Song title and the groping for the right form of an irregular verb in the last lines, the story seems to refrain wittily from pathos and self-pity in order to favour a playful, distanced, and ironic approach to the ravages of aging.

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3 This analysis will focus on the ambiguities of the uses and misuses of language on two levels, that of a Nonsense charade and that of the parodic re-writing of mythology to demonstrate that, through the enduring power of poetic language, senile dementia is momentarily deferred and, if not defeated, at least challenged with “the spark of life,” (275) as Munro resorts to the double hook of Folk Song and mock epic aggrandizement, in her reconfiguration of love at twilight.

4 At first sight, the North American Folk Song that reports the actions of the adventurous bear going over the mountain is a far cry from the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Snark or Tweedledum and Tweedledee:

5 The Bear Went Over the Mountain The bear went over the mountain, The bear went over the mountain, The bear went over the mountain, To see what he could see. And what do you think he saw? And what do you think he saw? The other side of the mountain, The other side of the mountain, The other side of the mountain, Was all that he could see.

6 The Folk Song reads like a morphological pun, a self-parodic play on words, which relies on the opening up of expectations only to frustrate curiosity with the platitude of a tautological closure. Because of its contradictory relationship with language, I would like to posit the hypothesis that “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” belongs in the tradition of “Nonsense” as evidenced in the writings of Lewis Caroll and Lear, and that, like Nonsense, it constitutes a logician’s entertainment which explores the limits but also the redeeming possibilities of language.

7 Let us compare “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” with this limerick from Lear: There was an Old Man of the Nile Who sharpened his nails with a file; Till he cut off his thumb, and said calmly, ‘this comes – Of Sharpening one’s nails with a file!’ (quoted by Lecercle, 97)

8 As demonstrated by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his founding essay on Nonsense which I will substantially quote in my analysis of Munro’s story, there is, in the British limerick, a “down-to-earth attitude,” a “refusal to be surprised” (97) by the turn of events and to yield to emotion or become a prey to a sense of pain or catastrophe. We find the same sense of restraint in the American Folk Song, a spelling out of ordinariness no matter what happens, which Lecercle shows (92) to stand in sharp contrast to the marvellous. In the wake of Propp, Todorov, and Greimas’s analyses of the structural and semiotic components of marvellous Folk Tales, we have been led to expect the bear who is engaged in a quest to come up against a number of qualifying ordeals, to reveal his heroic stature during a confrontation with a villainous character and to complete his journey satisfactorily with the discovery of the object he is looking for. But the Folk Tale Munro has selected is not marvellous; it seemingly defeats all our expectations of heroic aggrandizement and magic discovery. As theorized by Jean-Jacques Lecercle, the marvellous is ruined by parody, play on word, and platitude (Lecercle 100).

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9 The world that the bear discovers is just as ordinary as the one he has just left. He goes on the other side of the mountain and discovers the other side of the mountain. Expression is reduced to tautology, and tautology is fraught with rhetorical power. It reinforces and guarantees the ideology we live by: boys will be boys. The other side of the mountain is the other side of the mountain. The assertion is extremely sensible at the same time as it refrains from conveying meaning. It confirms the real world, the existence of which is clearly posited: the other side of the mountain exists and the bear has been able to find its location which is to be accepted as part and parcel of the real world, but this real world is simultaneously questioned because it is reduced to a self- parodic play on words. The bear indulges in an anthropomorphic quest which reveals its self-referential dimension because instead of killing the serpent or marrying the king’s daughter, it comes up against “the other side of the mountain” that is to say a self-reflexive textual construction which is the result of the constraints of a particular fiction or self-parodic verse. In the words of Lecercle : Le Nonsense utilise donc la longue tradition des jeux de langage de façon sélective : il ne retient que ceux qui prennent au piège la langue pour mieux la renforcer. Il s’agit de prendre celle-ci au pied de la lettre, de la forcer dans ses retranchements, en jouant par exemple sur les ambiguïtés syntaxiques. (Lecercle 49)

10 The literal-mindedness of Nonsense and its often tautological syntax reinforce its fictional dimension, its being circumscribed by allusions to itself or to other texts. Munro multiplies the indexes of fictionality in her own fiction. The title is a case in point but we can find several other references to fiction, for instance in the names given to Fiona’s dogs. The Russian wolfhounds are called Boris and Natasha, which reads like a wink that Munro is addressing to her readers. These names, which seem to come straight from a Russian novel, are in fact the names of fictional characters from an American animated cartoon in the 1960’s entitled: “Rocky and his friends” featuring spies called Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. The obvious puns in the spies’ names wittily expose them as “bad enough” and “lethal.” In addition to indirect, witty and self-denigrating allusions to children’s fictions, Munro also multiplies self-parodic similes which make it possible to erase the difference between the world of children and the world of senior citizens. When Fiona catches a cold, shortly after being accepted in the nursing home, the nurse called Kristy reassures Grant using a tell-tale comparison: “Like when your kids start school,” Kristy said. “There’s a whole bunch of new germs they’re exposed to, and for a while they just catch everything” (281). The nursing-home pensioners could not be more eloquently equated with children and the pragmatic nurse more eloquently ironized for her flat and unintentional put-down.

11 Once familiarized with her new life in the institution, Fiona starts developing a social network through playing cards with some of the inmates and she makes a comparison with her life at college: “I can remember being like that for a while at college. My friends and I would cut class and sit in the common room and smoke and play like cutthroats” (289). Grant’s response to Fiona’s simile is particularly remarkable because it reintegrates the young card players’ activity into the world of children’s fiction: “Wreathed in smoke, Fiona and Phoebe and those others, rapt as witches” (289). Through the play of similes, Munro blurs the frontiers between the world of childhood and the world of pensioners, the world of ordinary existence and the world of fabulous creatures. She allows her characters, and her readers, to go down the rabbit-hole and through the looking-glass as she erases the difference between one side of the mountain and the other.

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12 In particular one can notice that she erases the boundaries between human beings and animals, birds, and fish. The similes which equate the characters with creatures are inescapable and all characters seem concerned with this potential transformation. Fiona is compared with her dogs: “The dogs’ long legs and silky hair, their narrow, gentle, intransigent faces made a fine match for her when she took them out for walks” (278). Grant undergoes the same metamorphosis: “And Grant himself, […] might have seemed to some people to have been picked up on another of Fiona’s eccentric whims, and groomed and tended and favored” (278). Aubrey, the man Fiona attaches herself to in the nursing home is compared with a horse: “He had something of the beauty of a powerful, discouraged, elderly horse” (290). The inmates are said to be “happy as clams” in their new life in the nursing home (280). Fiona’s outfits, in typical Munrovian fashion, are elaborately described and the one with which she leaves home is markedly suggestive of the bird and animal kingdom: she has “a fur-collared ski jacket,” a “turtle-necked sweater,” and “fawn slacks” (275).

13 Besides, by choosing the title of the American Folk Tale for her story, Munro seems to have implicitly required the reader to compare the adventures of the bear with the actions of the main characters in the short story. Fiona, like the bear, engages in a journey which takes her to a different world called Meadowlake. The name of the nursing home inspires Fiona with a series of play on words: “Shallowlake, Shillylake,” she said, as if they were engaged in a playful competition. “Sillylake. Sillylake it is” (279). As demonstrated by Freud, puns are transgressions which create pleasure and the function of the present play on words is certainly to reduce, through playful amusement and scorn, the dramatic intensity and trauma linked with confinement in the institution. It also fictionalizes the place; it inscribes it in a nonsensical enumeration, that is to say in fictional language, at the same time as in reality, further erasing the boundaries between the two realms and the experiences of the “fictional” bear and the “real” Fiona.

14 By choosing Nonsense verse for her title Munro draws attention to the opposition between sense and non-sense and by destabilizing the boundaries between fiction and real life, between senior citizens and infants, between people and animals, Munro implicitly paves the way for a more radical equivocation, that is to say the blurring of difference between sanity and dementia, between those who are on one side of the mountain and those who are on the other. She performs this “[t]umble of [r]eason” (Heble) or radical blurring in a very subtle and ambiguous way, through Grant’s disbelief at his wife’s disease and through the impossibility of pinpointing the exact nature of the intermittent degeneration that Fiona seems to be afflicted with. The sentences expressing Grant’s perplexity abound: “It was hard to figure out” (277). “She’s always been a bit like this” (277). In his utter incredulity, Grant even goes as far as imagining that Fiona is indulging in some sort of charade and plays a game with him. He resorts to hypothetical sentences and extended modal verbs: “Or was playing a game that she hopes he would catch on to.” (277) He could not decide. She could have been playing a joke. It would not be unlike her. She had given herself away by that little pretense at the end, talking to him as if she thought perhaps he was a new resident. If that was what she was pretending. If it was a pretence. (291)

15 Grant is a professor of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature and the journey he undertakes to accompany his wife through the meanders of degeneration can also be equated with the bear’s, going over the other side of the mountain. Grant does not

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“forsake” Fiona in the institution. He phones the nurses every day during the first month of their forced separation (no visits are allowed for the initial thirty days) and finally settles for two visits a week. His repeated journeys to Meadowlake are indeed forays into the other side of the looking-glass, a descent into the world of senile dementia which, at times, mirrors in inverted fashion Alice’s journey in Wonderland. Like the young Alice, the elderly Grant is an intruder in a territory which is not his and, like her, he meets with unmitigated hostility. For instance, when he goes to the common room to try and see Fiona who is sitting at the card table with her new friends, he can easily feel their opposition: “They all looked up – all the players at the table looked, with displeasure. Then they immediately looked down at their cards, as if to ward off any intrusion” (288). The exasperation of the card players towards Grant transforms the generosity of his visits into a faux-pas.

16 The inversion of values that is characteristic of Nonsense is fully displayed in Grant’s itinerary who, from the beginning, manifests symptoms which, strikingly enough, mirror Fiona’s loss of memory. Munro embeds into the depiction of his actions a series of apparently innocent anecdotes which pave the way for a subtle elimination of the frontier between Grant’s sanity and Fiona’s dementia. For instance, we find “Grant could not remember now” (278); “Or it might have been after her mother died” (278). When he visits Aubrey’s wife, Marian, he cannot find the proper word to describe the swooping curtains she has decorated her windows with. More importantly, he himself uses the term “unhinged” to describe his behaviour: “Every once in a while it came to him how foolish and pathetic and perhaps unhinged he must look, trailing around after Fiona and Aubrey” (295).

17 Like Fiona, Grant has gone over the threshold which separates madness from sanity and one of the differences with her is that he has, so far, been able to conceal it from the rest of the world. The most eloquent sign of his potential insanity is the moment when he is represented as comparing himself with Christ through a blasphemous quotation from Luke 2, 52. After reciting and translating a majestic ode, in front of his students, he feels lionized: All applauded. […] Driving home that day or maybe another he found an absurd and blasphemous quotation running around in his head. And so he increased in wisdom and stature- And in favor with God and man. That embarrassed him at the time and gave him a superstitious chill. As it did yet. But so long as nobody knew, it seemed not unnatural. (302)

18 Munro is particularly apt at representing university professors as “bloated, opinionated, untidy men” surrounded with “soft-haired young girls awash in adoration” (Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, 24). Like Hugo from the story entitled “Material” and dating from 1974, Grant is represented, in 2001, as a narcissistic and egomaniac philanderer, with a major difference, nonetheless. Despite his having had a great many affairs, he has never left Fiona and the final act he indulges in acquires an ambiguously redeeming dimension.

19 Because of her degenerative disease, once Fiona is on her own at Meadowlake, she forgets Grant, the husband she has lived with for nearly fifty years, and falls in love with another inmate whose stay in the institution is only temporary. After this man, called Aubrey, who is afflicted with paralysis, is removed from the institution by his own wife, Marian, Fiona falls into severe depression and Grant shows himself capable of the greatest sacrifice. Because he loves his wife with the utmost selflessness, he

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sacrifices his honour and his pride in order to arrange for Aubrey to return to the nursing home and live close to Fiona. He ambiguously rescues his wife by making possible her lover’s return to her. This uncanny act of love is made even “curiouser” by an additional twist in the plot, at the end of the story. When the lover is about to be reunited to the forgetful wife by the selfless husband, Fiona temporarily regains her sanity, recognizes her husband, and suggests returning to their old farmhouse together, thus ruining the sacrificial gesture her husband had engineered.

20 Munro’s dénouement is extremely flippant and de-stabilizing because it juxtaposes the sublime and the farcical, the weird and the noble, the heretic and the pragmatic, on the threshold between life and death, in a senior citizen’s residence. This remarkably ironic dénouement could be envisaged as a self-parodic treatment of sacrificial love. By comparing himself with Christ, Grant indulges in an operation of self-aggrandizement and endorses the role of the redeemer. However, the type of sacrifice he engineers when procuring a lover for his wife turns redemption topsy-turvy since he simultaneously becomes the agent of her betrayal. Through his own selflessness, Grant confirms the reversal of her faithfulness into faithlessness. After a lifetime of skillfully managed deceptions, he proves true to himself by allowing her to reciprocate infidelity. As rightly pointed out, if erroneously spelt by Robert Thacker, Grant is eminently a “long time rué” [sic] (Thacker 502).

21 There lies the crux of Munro’s “art of indeterminacy” (Howells 85) as mentioned in many critical works about her: her highlighting of “[p]aradox and [p]arallel” (Martin), her ability to examine human surroundings and human actions as simultaneously and reciprocally “touchable and mysterious” (Munro 1974, 33, Thacker), “strange and familiar” (Martin 1), but also elevated and degraded or transcendent and immanent. One description caps the point in an unusually explicit way: “Through the window came a heady, warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields” (321). By compounding fragrance with stench, Munro conjures up a non- judgmental universe in which the absence of moralism is articulated upon an all permeating irony. The ambiguity of her moral philosophy, which has yet to be documented substantially, lies in the constant reversal of one sensation into the other and the simultaneous reinforcing and ruining of the former with the latter.

22 Grant, whose love has been freely distributed among his students and who is capable of sacrificing himself for his wife’s sake, ambiguously impersonates on the self-parodic mode the figure of Christ who died on the cross to redeem mankind. But because he is a professor of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature and reads aloud Skaldic poetry to his students, he is simultaneously allowed to cut the figure of the emblematic Icelandic poet or Skald. The Encyclopædia Britannica reminds us that, contrary to anonymous Eddaic poetry, Skaldic oral court poetry, which originated in Norway but was developed chiefly by Icelandic poets from the 9th to the 13th century, could be attributed to single identifiable characters. The magnificent Ode which is mentioned by the narrator as being read aloud in class by Grant is one of the most famous: the Hofuolausn by Egill Skallagrímsson, whose life and works are preserved in the Egils Saga attributed to Snorri Sturluson. This allusion to Skaldic poetry is worth investigating because it throws additional light on the redeeming power of language that is highlighted in Munro’s story.

23 Egill Skallagrímsson, one of the greatest Icelandic skalds was said to be “headstrong, vengeful, and greedy for gold but also a loyal friend, a shy lover, and a devoted father.”

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As a young man he “killed the son of King Eiríkr Bloodaxe (Erik I) and placed a curse upon the king, which he inscribed on a pole in magic runes. Later, shipwrecked off the coast of Northumbria, England, he fell into Eiríkr's hands (c. 948) but saved his own life by composing in a single night the long praise poem Höfuthlausn (“Head Ransom”), praising Eiríkr in a unique end-rhymed metre” (“Egill Skallagrímsson,” Encyclopædia Britannica).

24 Munro who composed in 1986 a short story which relies allusively on Old Norse mythology (“White Dump”) takes up explicitly and literally, in 2001, the theme of the redemption brought about by the power of poetry. When referring to the Hofuolausn, she highlights the miraculous transformation that poetry operates, its power to transform a death sentence into a gift of life: He risked reciting and then translating the majestic and gory ode, the head-ransom, the Hofuolausn, composed to honor King Eric Blood-axe by the skald whom that king had condemned to death. (And who was then, by the same king-and by the power of poetry-set free.) (302)

25 By reciting aloud the Hofuolausn, Egill saved his head because the beauty of his words moved the heart of the king who, in return, granted him his life. By taking up Egill’s words and reciting them in front of his class, Grant turns into the skald and, like him, he escapes scot-free, despite his repeated misconduct and improper behaviour.

26 The transformation of the character necessarily reverberates on the story which relates his adventures. Thus the allusion to the Icelandic ode reverberates on the short story and provides it with a mixed inheritance in which learned references rub shoulders with popular culture. Reflecting as it does the Great Code as well as Nordic Mythology, British Nonsense and American Folk Song, to mention some of its most prominent intertexts, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is a mise en abyme of the redeeming power of words, and of the performativity of poetic language which ensures that an action is accomplished at the same time as it is uttered. Consider the ending of Alice in Wonderland. To the Queen of Hearts who shouts to her: “Hold your tongue,” Alice replies: “I won’t.” When the Queen threatens to decapitate her, Alice finally retorts: “Who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Alice’s words do not have the majestic beauty of the Icelandic Ode but they have the same power: they reach their target and reduce the Queen of Hearts to her rightful status, that of a card which dissolves into thin air and keeps Alice from losing her head. Alice’s words, like the Skald’s are fraught with immediate efficacy.

27 It is this magic efficacy that Munro’s stories strive to recapture. In “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” Grant is endowed with the power of a Skaldic poet who casts a spell over his students and ensures the remission of his sexual sins. He ironically acquires his truly heroic stature when he undertakes to rescue Fiona from the severe depression which would ensure the further degradation of her present condition. As if in a mirror, Fiona’s fully-fledged dimension manifests itself through the use of language, in an equally ironic manner. Of her, Kristy the nurse, says “She’s a real lady” (293) and she repeats the epithet to Grant several times in a tone that does not reassure him and leads him to form conjectures. In the institution, Fiona may have turned into a wanton old lady who does not want to sleep alone in her empty room but teasingly lifts the covers of an old man’s bed: “You’d think it’d be the old guys trying to crawl in bed with the old women, but you know half the time it’s the other way round. Old women going after the old men. Could be they’re not so wore out, I guess.” [Sic] (293)

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28 The mistaken use of the wrong past participle might be taken as a revelatory “infelicity,”1 a Freudian slip of the tongue, through which Kristy unconsciously pinpoints Fiona’s nature. Neither a lady nor a whore, Fiona embodies Friia, the goddess Friia also called Frigg or Frija (in German) and Frea. She is the goddess of love, the very same goddess who is called Aphrodite by the Greeks and Venus by the Romans. It is through this tell-tale crack of language that Fiona’s goddess-like stature is indirectly established because it is powerfully “half-uttered” or “mi-dit” to use the pun that Lacan coined for such linguistic return of the repressed.

29 In Munro’s short story, the Skald is an untidy university professor and the Goddess is no longer a rosy-cheeked maiden. Fiona’s skin or her breath gives off “a faint new smell, a smell […] like that of the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water” (322). There is definitely a sense of decomposition and rottenness which invades this family Saga, a corruption which is repeatedly suggested through the simile linked to Fiona’s depiction and the heady odors wafted through the windows of her bedroom and which implicitly reverberates on Grant. The offering that Grant makes to his wife in the shape of a paralysed lover destined to comfort her is the result of a shady deal that he has engineered with the man’s wife. Grant has probably offered himself and his sexual services to Marian, in ironic sacrifice, in order to make her accept her husband’s return to Meadowlake.

30 In her adaptation of the story for the screen, Sarah Polley renders this improbable trade-off explicit by allowing the spectators more than a glimpse into Grant and Marian’s bedroom; in the short story we are not allowed to witness such rapprochement. Munro leaves unuttered the terms of Aubrey’s return. This powerful ellipsis, which seals “her art of the secret,”2 (Ventura and Condé, 2003-2004) highlights her commitment to a moral philosophy which rises above conformity to the moral values of the community and commits itself to more complex and more covert ethical principles, of which silence, restraint and reticence are significant components.

31 The sense of physical and moral degradation which permeates the story is far from being magically dispelled with the closing lines. It is simultaneously confirmed and ruined to remain in keeping with the Nonsense genre in which the story of the Skald and the Goddess is couched. In the last line of the story, there is a process of reparation of language and reparation of the self at the same time as a powerful alliterative pattern which conspicuously stresses the menacing repetition of the consonant “s”: You could have just driven away,” she said.”Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.” He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull. He said, Not a chance.” (322)

32 Kristy, the uneducated nurse and the good Christian, degrades and upgrades past participles as she keeps watch over her patients. Fiona, the victim of Alzheimer’s and the Goddess of love, repairs the irregularities of grammar, like a pink-scalped child learning language. Simultaneously, the negative last words and threatening sibilant alliterations confirm Grant’s enduring love, in the inverted mirror of Munro’s weirdly ironic writing. The word “chance,” which is to be found recurrently in her work and is used as the title of a later story in the Juliet trilogy of 2004, means a risk but it also means an opportunity: by using it negatively, Grant makes room for a rejuvenating impertinence, a challenging of fate which is also an acceptance of fate.

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33 The coming of dawn at the end of night is a topos encapsulated in many works of art, The Sun also Rises being paradigmatic of this final redemption. At the end of Jean Giraudoux’s play entitled La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, the last lines make the audience reflect on its resonance: “Cela a un très beau nom, femme Narsès. Cela s’appelle l’aurore.” Godard was particularly impressed with this sentence, which deeply influenced the films he made. In a poem by Emily Dickinson, which resembles a Nursery Rhyme and whose first line reads: “I know some lonely houses off the road” an old couple goes to sleep leaving the door ajar and the poetess, like a thief in the night, allows the reader into the intimacy of the old couple’s home, until Chanticleer screams to welcome the sunrise. In Dickinson’s poem, the sunrise is literally an offering which is made to celebrate Grace Abounding.

34 In Alice Munro’s narrative, the reader is seemingly denied the lyrical coming of dawn at the end of the journey to the other side of the mountain because the elderly heroine is undeniably in the grip of Alzheimer’s; yet the loss of language, the ruin which it entails, is itself ruined by the transgressions of the various thresholds which are enacted throughout the story. The ultimate threshold, that of life versus death, is itself destabilized in the dissolution of the boundaries between sanity and dementia as Munro stage-directs the confusion between life and illusion. Her reenactment of Calderon and Shakespeare’s Life is but a Dream results in more than a well-wrought short story. It dissolves the boundaries between metaphysical poetry and nursery rhymes to highlight a celebration of the power of language as, in the words of Jean- Jacques Lecercle, “the place and the means of freedom.” (11) Her story does not herald the coming of dawn: it orchestrates the twilight of the gods and it provides the disquieting possibility of equating it with the sunrise.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blake, Quentin, (Ed.), The Puffin Book of Nonsense Stories, London, Puffin, 1996, 287 p.

Carroll, Lewis, [1865], Alice in Wonderland, London, Dent, 1961,103 p.

--, [1933], The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll, New York, Dover, 1960, 446 p.

Dronke, Ursula, The Poetic Edda Vol 2 Mythological Poems, Oxford, Clarendon, 1997, 457 p.

“Egill Skallagrímsson”, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite, Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008.

Folk Song, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”, [www.CanTeach.ca] (accessed 26th August 2008).

Franklin, R. W., (Ed.), The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Belknap Press, 1999, 696 p.

“Frigg”, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite, Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008.

Giraudoux, Jean, [1935] La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, Paris, Lqf, coll. “Le livre de poche”, 1972, 186 p.

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Greimas Algirdas, Julien, Du Sens, Essais sémiotiques, Paris, Seuil, 1970, 314 p.

Heble, Ajay, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1994, 210 p.

Howells, Carol Ann, Alice Munro, Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1998, 184 p.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, Le Dictionnaire et le cri, Nancy, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1995, 320 p.

Martin, W.R. Alice Munro Paradox and Parallel, Edmonton, The University of Alberta Press, 1987, 235 p.

McGill, Robert, “No Nation but Adaptation ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain,’ Away from Her, and What It Means to Be Faithful” Canadian Literature/Littérature canadienne: a quarterly of criticism and review (Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver) (197) [Summer 2008]: 98-111.

Munro, Alice, Runaway, New York, Knopf, 2004, 335 p.

--, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2001, 322 p.

--, The Progress of Love, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1986, 309 p.

--, Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, Toronto, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974, 246 p.

--, “Everything Here Is Touchable and Mysterious” Weekend Magazine [Toronto Star]: May 11, 1974: 33.

Page, R. I., Norse Myths, London, British Museum Publications, 1990, 187 p.

Propp, Vladimir, 1970, Morphologie du conte, Paris, Seuil, 384 p. “Skaldic poetry”, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite, Chicago, Encyclopædia Britannica, 2008,.

Thacker, Robert, A Biography Alice Munro Writing her Lives, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2005, 603 p.

Todorov, Tzvetan, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris, Seuil, 1970, 189 p.

Ventura, Héliane and Condé Mary, (Eds), Alice Munro Writing Secrets, Open Letter, Eleventh Series, n° 9, Fall 2003 Twelfth Series, n° 1, Winter 2004, 275 p.

Waters, Juliet, “Under the Munro Influence” May 24-May 30, 2007. [www.montrealmirror.com/ 2007/052407/books1.html] (accessed August 26 th 2008).

NOTES

1. Austin, 1961, “Performative Utterances”, Philosophical Papers, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 233-252, quoted by Lecercle, 20. 2. In the title of my article: “Alice Munro’s Secret Ort,” to be found in the special issue of Open Letter dedicated to Alice Munro Writing Secrets, I use the German term “Ort” which means place to define Munro’s art of secreting secrets. The secrets to be found in Munro’s stories make their presence felt through tell-tale errors or infelicities in language.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 55 | Autumn 2010 136

ABSTRACTS

Cet article propose une micro-lecture d’une nouvelle de Munro fondée sur l’explicitation de son titre “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” En utilisant le titre d’une chanson du Folklore américain, Munro recontextualise et dédramatise l’expérience de l’hospitalisation dans une maison de santé pour cause de dégénérescence sénile. Elle accomplit une reconfiguration de cette expérience en la fictionnalisant sous forme de conte ou de légende.

AUTHORS

Journal of the Short Story in English, 55 | Autumn 2010 137

Bibliography

Journal of the Short Story in English, 55 | Autumn 2010 138

Alice Munro: A Bibliography

Corinne Bigot

I. Collections of short stories by Alice Munro

1 Dance of the Happy Shades, Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1968, 224 pp; New York, McGraw Hill, 1973, 224 pp; London, Allen Lane, 1974, 224 pp.

2 Lives of Girls and Women, Toronto, McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1971, 254 pp; New York,McGraw Hill, 1972, 250 pp; London, Allen Lane, 1974, 250 pp.

3 Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, Toronto and New York, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974, 246 pp.

4 Who Do You Think You Are?, Toronto, Macmillan, 1974, 206 pp. Printed in the USA and in the UK as The Beggar Maid, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1974, 210 pp; London, Allen Lane, 1980, 210 pp.

5 The Moons of Jupiter, Toronto, Macmillan, 1982, 233 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983, 233 pp; London, Allen Lane, 1983, 233 pp.

6 The Progress of Love, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1986, 309 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986, 309 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 1986, 309 pp.

7 Friend of My Youth, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1990, 273 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 273 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 1990, 273 pp.

8 Open Secrets, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1994, 293 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 293 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 1994, 293 pp.

9 Selected Stories, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1996, 545 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, 545 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 1996, 545 pp.

10 The Love of a Good Woman, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1998, 339 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, 339 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 1998, 339 pp.

11 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2001, 328 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, 328 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 2001, 328 pp.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 55 | Autumn 2010 139

12 Runaway, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2004, 335 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 335 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 2004, 335 pp.

13 The View from Castle Rock, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2006, 350 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 350 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 2006, 350 pp.

14 Too Much Happiness, Toronto, McClelland, 2009, 250 pp; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, 304 pp; London, Chatto and Windus, 2009, 303 pp.

15 Dear Life, Toronto, McClelland, 2012; London, Chatto and Windus, 2012; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

II. Secondary Works

a) Books about Alice Munro’s work

16 Blodgett, E.D., Alice Munro, Boston, Twayne, 1988, 179 pp.

17 Carrington, Ildikó de Papp, Controlling the Uncontrollable, Dekalb, N. Illinois University Press, 1989, 244 pp.

18 Carscallen, James, The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro, Toronto, ECW, 1993, 581 pp.

19 Cox, Ailsa, Alice Munro, Northcote, Tavistock, 2004, 113 pp.

20 Duncan, Isla, Alice Munro’s Narrative Art, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 184 pp.

21 Heble, Ajay, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence, Toronto, London, Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1994, 210 pp.

22 Howells, Coral Ann, Alice Munro, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, 179 pp.

23 MacKendrick, Louis, Some Other Reality: Alice Munro's Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, Edmonton, ECW, 1993, 112 pp.

24 Martin, W.R, Alice Munro. Paradox and Parallel, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1987, 235 pp.

25 McCaig, JoAnn, Reading In: Alice Munro's Archives, Waterloo (Ont.), Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002, 103 pp.

26 Rasporich, Beverly, Dance of the Sexes. Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, Edmonton, University of Alberta Press, 1990, 223 pp.

27 Redekop, Magdelene, Mothers and Other Clowns. The stories of Alice Munro, London and New York, Routledge, 1992, 252 pp.

28 Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, Alice Munro: A Double Life, Toronto, ECW Press, 1992, 97 p.

29 Thacker, Robert, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 2005, 603 p.

b) Collections of essays

30 Baslestra, Gianfranca, Laura Ferri and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, Reading Alice Munro in Italy, Franck Iacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, Dept of Italian Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Legas, 2008, 123 pp.

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31 MacKendrick, Louis, Ed, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 193 pp.

32 Mayer, C, Ed, Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction, 6.2, Special issue Alice Munro, Spring 2006, 171 pp.

33 Miller, Judith, Ed, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Waterloo (Ont.), University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 135 pp.

34 Thacker, Robert, Ed, Essays on Canadian Literature, vol. 66, Winter 1998, Special Issue Alice Munro. Reprinted as Thacker, Robert, Ed, 1999, The Rest of the Story, Toronto, ECW Press, 1999, 232 pp.

35 Ventura, Héliane and Mary Condé, Eds, Alice Munro. Writing Secrets, Open Letter, vol. 11.9/12.1, Fall/Winter, 2003/2004, 275 pp.

c) Articles (includes chapters on Alice Munro)

36 Allison, Paul, “A Trick of Fiction: the Progress of Memory in the Stories of Alice Munro”, Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, 1990, 15: 2738.

37 Arnason, David, “Losing and Lost Women: The Early Stories of Alice Munro”, Open Letter, 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 103-13.

38 Bailey, Nancy, “The Masculine Images in Lives of Girls and Women”, Canadian Literature, Spring 1979, 80: 113-20.

39 Balestra, Gianfranca, “Alice Munro as Historian and Geographer. A Reading of ‘Meneseteung’”, Intersections. La narrativa canadese tra storia e geografia, Liana Nissim and Carlo Pagetti, Eds, Bologna, Cisalpino, 1999, 119-36.

40 ---, “Rituals of life and Death in Alice Munro’s ‘Chance’”, Reading Alice Munro in Italy, Gianfranca Baslestra, Laura Ferri and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, The Franck Iacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, Dept of Italian Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Legas, 2008, 59-70.

41 Baum, Rosalie Murphy, “Artists and Women: Young Lives in Laurence and Munro”, North Dakota Quarterly, Summer 1984, 52.3: 196-211.

42 ---, “Snow as Reality and Trope in Canadian Literature”, American Review of Canadian Studies, Autumn 1987, 17.3: 323-33.

43 Barber, Lester, “Alice Munro: the Stories of Runaway”, ELOPE: English Life Overseas Perspectives and English, 2006, 3.1-12: 143-56.

44 Becker, Susanne, “Exploring Gothic Contextualization: Alice Munro and Lives of Girls and Women”, Gothic Forms of Feminine Fiction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999, 103-50.

45 Beer, Janet, “Short Fiction with Attitude: The Lives of Boys and Men in Lives of Girls and Women”, Year Book of English Studies, 2001, 31: 125-32.

46 Bennett, Donna, “Open. Secret. Telling Time in Alice Munro’s Fiction”/ Brown, Russel Morton, “Open Secrets? Alice Munro and the Mystery Story”, Open Letter, Fall Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 185-211.

47 Beran, Carol L, “Images of Women's Power in Contemporary Canadian Fiction by Women”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1990, 15.2: 5576.

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48 ---, “The Luxury of Excellence, Alice Munro and The New Yorker”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1998, 66: 204-31.

49 ---, “Thomas Hardy, Alice Munro and the Question of Influence”, American Review of Canadian Literature, Summer 1999, 29.2: 237-58.

50 ---, “The Pursuit of Happiness: A Study of Alice Munro’s Fiction”, Social Science Journal, 2000, 37.3: 329-45.

51 Besner, Neil, “The Bodies of the Texts in Lives of Girls and Women: Del Jordan's Reading”, Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction, Jeanne Delbaere, Ed, Sydney, Dangaroo Press, 1990, 131-44.

52 Bigot, Corinne, “‘And now another story surfaced’: Re-emerging Voices, Stories and Secrets in Alice Munro’s ‘Family Furnishings’”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Autumn 2008, 31.1: 28-35.

53 ---, “L’italique et l’inscription de la résurgence dans les nouvelles d’Alice Munro”, Bulletin de la société de stylistique anglaise, 2008, 31: 63-76.

54 ---, “Images du silence dans ‘Vandals’ et ‘Nettles’ d’Alice Munro”, Pratiques de la transgression dans la littérature et les arts visuels. Acte du colloque international “Les transgressions verbi-voco-visuelles”, Orléans juin 2007, Héliane Ventura and Philippe Mottet, Eds, Québec: Les Editions de l’instant même, 2009, 169-81.

55 ---, “D’impossibles départs en impossibles retours et impossibles interprétations: ‘Runaway’ d’Alice Munro”, Confluences, 29: Arrivées/Départs, Monique Chassagnol, Ed, Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest 2010, [publication pending].

56 Birbalsingh, Franck, “Women in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women”, Canadiana. Studies in Canadian Literature, Jørn Carlen and Knud Larsen, Eds, Aarhus, Aarhus University Press, 1984, 131-37.

57 Blin, Lynn, “Hearing Voices: Coordinate Structures and Resurging Narrative Voices in Alice Munro’s ‘Friend of my Youth’”, Bulletin de la société de stylistique anglaise, 2008, 31: 135-51.

58 Blodgett, E.D, “Prisms and Arcs: Structure in Hebert and Munro”, Figures in a Ground. Canadian Essays on Modern Literature. Collected in Honor of Sheila Watson, Diane Bessai, Ed, Saskatoon, Western Producer Prairie Books, 1978, 99-121/333-34.

59 Blythe, Hall, “Munro’s ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’”, Explicator, Winter 2007, 6.2: 115-17.

60 Bowen, Deborah, “In Camera: The Developed Photographs of Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1998, 13.1: 20-33.

61 Buchholtz, MirosŁawa, “Pseudo-longinus and the Affective Theory in Alice Munro’s Stories”, Open Letter, Fall Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 89102.

62 Canitz, A.E. Christa and Roger Seamon, “The Rhetoric of Fictional Realism in the Stories of Alice Munro”, Canadian Literature, Autumn 1996, 150: 67-80.

63 Carrington, Ildikó de Papp, “Definitions of a Fool: Alice Munro's ‘Walking on Water’ and Margaret Atwood's Two Stories About Emma: ‘The Whirlpool Rapids’ and ‘Walking on Water’”, Studies in Short Fiction, 1991, 28.2: 135- 49.

64 ---, “Rubble or Remedy? Review of Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1991, 44: 162-69.

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65 ---, “What's in a Title? Alice Munro's ‘Carried Away’”, Studies in Short Fiction, 1993, 30: 555-64.

66 ---, “Talking Dirty: Alice Munro's ‘Open Secrets’ and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men”, Studies in Short Fiction, 1994, 31.4: 595-606.

67 ---, “Double-Talking Devils: Alice Munro's ‘A Wilderness Station’”, Essays on Canadian Writing, Spring 1996, 58: 71-92.

68 ---, “‘Don't Tell (on) Daddy’: Narrative Complexity in Alice Munro's ‘The Love of a Good Woman’”, Studies in Short Fiction, 1997, 34.2: 159-70.

69 ---, “Recasting the Orpheus Myth: Alice Munro's ‘The Children Stay’ and Jean Anouilh's Eurydice”, Essays on Canadian Writing, Spring 1998, 66: 191-204.

70 ---, “Other Rooms, Other Texts, Other Selves: Alice Munro's ‘Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘Hired Girl’”, Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, Spring 1998, 30: 33-44.

71 ---, “Where Are You, Mother? Alice Munro's ‘Save the Reaper’”, Canadian Literature, Summer 2002, 173: 34-51.

72 Carscallen, James, “Three Jokers: The Shape of Alice Munro's Stories”, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, Eleanor Cook et al, Eds, Toronto, Buffalo, London (Ont.), University of Toronto Press, 1983, 128-46.

73 ---, “The Shining Houses: A Group of Stories”, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo (Ont.), University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 85-101.

74 Cencig, Elizabeth, “The Jordans: Remembering Invented Past in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women”, International Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 1992, 6: 63-85.

75 Charman, Caitlin, “There's Got to Be Some Wrenching and Slashing: Horror and Retrospection in Alice Munro's ‘Fits’”, Canadian Literature, Winter 2006, 191: 13-19.

76 Chiappini, Loredana, “La madre: desiderio e ossessione nella narrativa di Alice Munro”, Annali Accademici Canadesi, 1989, V: 69-81.

77 Clark, Myriam Marty, “Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro's ‘Carried Away’”, Contemporary Literature, 1996, 37.1: 49-61.

78 Coe, Clellan and Gerry Brenner, “Dialogizing a Narrative’s Nativity. Alice Munro’s ‘Chaddeleys and Flemings’”, North Dakota Quarterly, 1997, 64.2: 125-41.

79 Colvile, Georgiana, “Relating (to) the Spec(tac)ular Other: Alice Munro's ‘The Albanian Virgin’”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Autumn 1998, 21.1: 83-91.

80 ---, “Skunking the Reader. Alice Munro's Olfactory Discourse in Four Recent Short Stories”, Open Letter, Fall Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 151-65.

81 Condé, Mary, “True Lies: Photographs in the Stories of Alice Munro”, Etudes canadiennes, 1992, 32: 97-110.

82 ---, “The Ambiguities of History in Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman”, Etudes canadiennes, 1999, 46: 123-30.

83 ---, “Voyage toward an Ending: Alice Munro's ‘Goodness and Mercy’”, Telling Stories. Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, Jacqueline Bardolph, Ed, Amsterdam-Atlanta, Rodopi, 2001, 59-66. First published in Acqua. Realtà e Metafora. Proc of XI Convegno

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Internazionale AISC, Nov 1996, Siena, Laura Ferri, Fabio Mugnaini and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, Rome, Semar, 1998, 111-18.

84 ---, “Fathers in Alice Munro's ‘Fathers’”, Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, Autumn 2003, 41, 93-101.

85 ---, “Coded Language in Alice Munro's ‘Runaway’”, Open Letter, 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 177-83.

86 Conron, Brandon, “Munro's Wonderland”, Canadian Literature, Autumn 1978, 78: 109-23.

87 Cooke, John, The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, Lewiston (New York)/Queenston (Ont.), The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996, 69-85.

88 Crisafulli-Jones, Lilla Maria, “Il doppio femminile nella narrativa di Alice Munro”, Canada: testi e contesti. Alfredo Rizzardi, Ed, Abamo Terne, Piovan, 1983, 125-37.

89 Crouse, David, “Resisting Reduction: Closure in Richard Ford's Rock Spring and Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth”, Canadian Literature, Autumn 1995, 146: 51-64.

90 D’Alfonso, Francesca, “Cartoline del Canada: Il viaggio nella narrativa di ALice Munro”, Canada: le rotte della libertà. Proc of Convegno Internazionale dell AISC, Oct 2005, Monopoli, Giovanni Dotoli, Ed, Fasano, Scena Editore, 2006, 357-62.

91 ---, “Storie e anti storie della provincia canadese: un’analisi di ‘The Beggar Maid’ di Alice Munro”, Rivista di Studi Canadesi, 2002, 15: 185-93.

92 Davey Franck, “Class, ‘Family Furnishings’ and Munro’s Early Stories”, Open Letter, Fall Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 79-88.

93 Dawson, Carrie, “Skinned: Taxidermy and Pedophilia in Alice Munro's ‘Vandals’”, Canadian Literature, Spring 2005, 184: 69-83.

94 Daziron, Héliane, “The Preposterous Oxymoron. A Study of Alice Munro’s ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’”, Literary Half Yearly, 1983, 24.2: 11624.

95 ---, “The Dialectics of Separation and Distance: A Differential Approach to Alice Munro's ‘Dulse’”, Etudes canadiennes, 1985, 18: 69-82.

96 ---, “The Pattern of Exclusion in Alice Munro's ‘Day of the Butterfly’”, Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, 1985, 5: 9-21.

97 ---, “The Anatomy of Embedding in Alice Munro's ‘Half a Grapefruit’”, RANAM, 1987, 20: 103-07.

98 ---, “Symbols of Transformation: Alice Munro's ‘Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd’”, Open Letter, Summer 1987, 6-8: 15-24.

99 Daziron-Ventura, Héliane, “Hérésie et orthodoxie dans ‘Memorial’ d'Alice Munro”, Etudes canadiennes, 1988, 24: 99-107.

100 ---, “The Camera Eye and The De-stabilization of Reality in Alice Munro's ‘Lichen’”, Visions Critiques, 1988, V: 23-34.

101 De Luca, Anna Pia, “The Strange World of Art: Alice Munro’s Vision of the Canadian Female Writer”, Italy and Canadian Culture. Nationalisms in the New Millenium, Anna Pia de Luca and Deborah Saidero, Eds, Udine, 2001, Forum, 163-74.

102 Dhallie, Harvard, “Unconsummated Relations: Isolation and Rejection in Alice Munro’s Stories”, World Literature Written in English, 1972, 11.1: 43- 48.

103 ---, “The Fiction of Alice Munro”, Ploughshares, 1978, 4.3:56-71.

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104 Ditsky, John, “The Figure in the Linoleum: The Fiction of Alice Munro”, The Hollins Critic, June 1985, 22.3: 1-10.

105 Djwa, Sandra, “Deep Caves and Kitchen Linoleum: Psychological Violence in the Fiction of Alice Munro”, Violence in the Canadian Novel since 1960/Violence dans le roman canadien depuis 1960, Virginia Harger-Grinling and Terry Goldie, Eds, St John, Newfoundland, Memorial University of Newfoundland Press, 1981, 177-190.

106 Dombrowski, Eileen, “'Down to Earth': Alice Munro and Transcience”, The University of Windsor Review, Fall-Winter 1978, 14.1: 21-29.

107 Duffy, Dennis, “A Dark Sort of Mirror: ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ as Pauline Poetics”, Essays on Canadian Writing, Winter 1998, 66: 16990.

108 Duncan, Isla, J, “An Examination of the ‘Double Distancing’ Narrative Perspective in Munro”, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 1993, 8.1: 53-70.

109 ---, “‘It Seems So Much the Truth It Is the Truth’: Persuasive Testimony in Alice Munro's ‘A Wilderness Station’”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2003, 28.2: 98-111.

110 ---, “Disparity and Deception in Alice Munro’s ‘Lichen’”, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 2006, 19. 1: 61-75.

111 ---, “Social Classes in Alice Munro’s ‘Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘The Hired Girl’, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 2009, 22.1: 15-30.

112 Dvorak, Martha, “Alice Munro's ‘Lovely Tricks’ from Dance to the Happy Shades to Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”, Open Letter, Fall Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 55-77.

113 ---, “An Aesthetics of Breakage: A Mazing Controlled Chaos”, Open Letter, Spring 2007, 13.2: 27-39.

114 Elderedge, L. M., “A Sense of Ending in Lives of Girls and Women”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1984, 9.1: 110-15.

115 Elliott, Gayle, “A Different Track: Feminist Meta-Narrative in Alice Munro's ‘Friend of My Youth’”, Journal of Modern Literature, 1996, 20.1: 75-84.

116 Ferri, Laura, “Floods in Alice Munro’s Landscapes”, Acqua, Realtà e Metafora. Proc of XI Convegno Internazionale AISC, Nov 1996, Siena, Laura Ferri, Fabio Mugnaini and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, Rome, Semar, 1998, 155-61.

117 ---, “Mothers and Other Secrets”, Open Letter, 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 137150.

118 ---, “Crossing Borders in Alice Munro’s Short Stories”, Englishes, 2005, 26.9: 137-49.

119 ---, “Home, Homecoming, ‘Child’s Play’”, Reading Alice Munro in Italy, Gianfranca Baslestra, Laura Ferri and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, The Franck Iacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, Dept of Italian Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Legas, 2008, 93-108.

120 Fitzpatrick, Margaret Anne, “‘Projection’ in Alice Munro's Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You”, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo (Ont.), University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 15-20.

121 Forceville, Charles, “Language, Time, and Reality: The Stories of Alice Munro”, External and Detached, Canada Cahiers n°4, Charles Forceville, et al. Eds, Amsterdam, Free University Press, 1988, 37-44.

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122 ---, “Alice Munro's Layered Structures”, Shades of Empire in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures, C.C. Barfoot and Theo D'haen, Eds, AmsterdamAtlanta, GA, Rodopi, 1993, 301-10.

123 Fowler, Rowena, “The Art of Alice Munro: The Beggar Maid and Lives of Girls and Women”, Critique. Studies in Modern Fiction, Summer 1984, 25.4: 189-98.

124 Foy, Nathalie, “‘Darkness Collecting’: Reading ‘Vandals’ as a Coda to Open Secrets”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1998, 66: 147-68.

125 Francesconi, Sabrina, “Gnoseological and Epistemological Skepticism in Alice Munro’s Short Stories”, Il Canada tra modernità e tradizione. Proc of Seminario di Studi, 2000, Monopoli, Giovani Dotoli, Ed, Fasano, Schena Editore, 2001, 145-54.

126 ---, “Writing Secrets as ‘Betraying the Past’: Alice Munro's ‘What is Remembered’”, Open Letter, Fall/Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 24353.

127 ---, “‘Maps Slidings’: La narrazione dello spazio in Alice Munro”, Spazio: teoria, rapprensentazione, lettura, Francesca Di Blasio and Carla Locatelli, Eds, Trento, Editrice Università degli Studi di Trento, 2006, 183-90.

128 ---, “I and the Village: Locating Home and Self in Alice Munro’s ‘Soon’’, Reading Alice Munro in Italy, Gianfranca Baslestra, Laura Ferri and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, The Franck Iacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, Dept of Italian Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Legas, 2008, 71-82.

129 ---, “Memory and Desire in Alice Munro’s Stories”, Textus, C. Locatelli and E. Ziarek, Eds, 2009, 22.2, 341-59.

130 Frye, Joanne, “Growing up Female: Lives of Girls and Women and The Bluest Eye”, Living Stories, Telling Lives. Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1986, 77-108.

131 Garson, Marjorie, “Synecdoche and the Munrovian Sublime: Parts and Wholes in Lives of Girls and Women”, English Studies in Canada, 1994, 20.4: 413-29.

132 ---, “‘I Would Try to Make Lists’: The Catalogue in Lives of Girls and Women”, Canadian Literature, 1996, 150: 45-63.

133 ---, “Alice Munro and Charlotte Brontë”, University of Toronto Quarterly, Fall 2000, 69.4: 783-825.

134 Gault, Cinda, “The Two Addies: Maternity and Language in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women and William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying”, American Review of Canadian Studies, Fall 2006, 36.3: 440-57.

135 Gerlach, John, “To Close or not to Close: Alice Munro’s ‘The Love of A Good Woman’”, Journal of Narrative Theory, Winter 2007, 37.1: 14658.

136 Gilbert, Paula Ruth, “All Roads Pass through Jubilee: Gabrielle Roy’s La Route d’Altamont and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women”, Colby Quarterly, 1993, 29.2: 136-48.

137 Giordani, Maria Rosa, “Gustave Flaubert, Alice Munro: Due microcosmi a confronto”, Rivista de Studi Canadesi, 8, 1995, 187-94.

138 ---, “ Il quotidiano perturbante nell’universo femminile di Open Secrets di Alice Munro”, Prospettive di Cultura Canadese. Proc of Seminario Internazionale June 1998, Monopoli, Giovanni Dotoli, Ed, Fasano, Schena Editore, 1999, 255-68.

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139 Gittings, Christopher, “Constructing a Scots-Canadian Ground: Family History and Cultural Translation in Alice Munro”, Studies in Short Fiction, 1997, 34.1: 27-37.

140 Godard, Barbara, “ ‘Heirs of the Living Body’: Alice Munro and the Question of a Female Aesthetic”, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo (Ont.), University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 43-71.

141 Gold, Joseph, “Our Feeling, Exactly: The Writing of Alice Munro”, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo (Ont.), University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 1-14.

142 Goldman, Marlene, “Penning in the Bodies: The Construction of Gendered Subjects in Alice Munro's ‘Boys and Girls’”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1990, 15.1: 62-75.

143 Gonzales, Maria Luz, “Alice Munro and the Evolving Construction of the Female Self”, Insights and Bearings, Manuel Brito and Mathilde Martin Gonzales, Eds, Tennerife, Universidad de la Laguna, 2007, 179-90.

144 Grabes, Herbert, “Creating to Dissect: Strategies of Character Portrayal and Evaluation in Short Stories by Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant”, Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, Reingard Nischik and Barbara Korte, Eds, Würzburg, Königshausen and Neumann, 1990, 119-28.

145 Hampson, Robert, “Johnny Panic and the Pleasure of Disruption”, Re-reading the Short Story, Clare Hanson, Ed, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989, 69-85.

146 Hanly, Charles, “Autobiography and Creativity: Alice Munro's ‘Fits’”, Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature, Klaus Stich, Ed, Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 1988, 163-71.

147 Harris, Margaret, “Authors and Authority in Lives of Girls and Women”, Sydney Studies in English, 1986/1987, 12, 101-13.

148 Heller, Deborah, “Getting Loose: Women and Narration in Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1998, 66: 60-80.

149 Hernáez Lerena, Maria Jesús, “Modulacion de mundos imaginarios a travès de dos técnicas de presentación del tiempo en Dance of the Happy Shades”, Miscelánea, 1998, 19: 57-87.

150 ---, “Fiction as Short-Storyness: some Textual Strategies in Alice Munro’s Narratives”, Revista canaria de estudios ingleses, 1998, 36: 215-29.

151 Hiscock, Andrew, “‘Looking for a Human Climate’: Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth and the Culture of Loss”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 1997, 32.2: 17-34.

152 Houston, Pam, Fall “A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Metonymic Meaning in Alice Munro's ‘Meneseteung’”, The Kenyon Review, 1992, 14.4: 7992.

153 Howells, Coral Ann, “Worlds Alongside: Contradictory Discourses in the Fiction of Alice Munro”, Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature, Robert Kroetsch and Reingard Nischik, Eds, Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest, 1985, 121-36.

154 ---, “Alice Munro: Lives of Girls and Women; The Beggar Maid”, Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 70s and 80s, London, Methuen, 1987, 71-88.

155 ---, “Alice Munro's Art of Indeterminacy: The Progress of Love”, Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction, Reingard Nischik and Barbara Korte, Eds, Würzburgn, Königshausen and Neumann, 1990, 141-52.

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156 ---, “A Question of Inheritance: Canadian Women’s Short Stories”, Determined Women: Studies in the Construction of the Female Subject 1900-1990, Jennifer Birkett and Elizabeth Harvey, Eds, Savage, Barnes and Noble, 1991, 108-29.

157 ---, “Star Maps and Shifting Perspectives. Alice Munro’s The Moons of Jupiter”, Union in Partition, Marc Maufort, Ed, Liège, Université de Liège, 1997, 173-80.

158 ---, “Intimate Dislocations: Buried History and Geography in Alice Munro's Sowesto Stories”, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 1999, 14.1: 7-16.

159 ---, “Intimate Dislocations: Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”, Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 53-78.

160 ---, “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 Secrets, Fall/Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 39-54.

161 ---, “Alice Munro’s Heritage Narratives”, Where are the Voices Coming from? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2004, 5-14.

162 Hoy, Helen, “Rose and Janet: Alice Munro's Metafiction”, Canadian Literature, Summer 1989, 121: 59-83.

163 ---, “Alice Munro: ‘Unforgettable, Indigestible Messages’”, Journal of Canadian Studies, Spring 1991, 26.1: 5-21.

164 ---, “‘Dull, Simple, Amazing and Unfathomable: Paradox and Double Vision in Alice Munro's Fiction”, Studies in Canadian Literature, Spring 1980, 5: 100-15.

165 Hunter, Adrian, “Story into History. Alice Munro’s Minor Literature”, English: The Journal of English Association, Autumn 2004, 53: 21938.

166 Hutchison, Lorna, “Uncovering the Grotesque in Fiction by Alice Munro and Gabrielle Roy”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2008, 33.1: 187-210.

167 Ingram, David, “Contemplation of a Set of Maps: a response to Howells’ ‘Intimate Dislocations’”, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 1999, 14.1: 17-20.

168 Irvine, Lorna, “Hostility and Reconciliation. The Mother in English Canadian Fiction”, American Review of Canadian Studies, 1978, 8.1: 56-64.

169 ---, “A Psychological Journey: Mothers and Daughters in English Canadian Fiction”, The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, Cathy Davidson and E.M. Broner, Eds, New York, Ungar, 1980, 242-52.

170 ---, “Changing is the Word I want”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 99-111.

171 ---, “Women's Desire / Women's Power: The Moons of Jupiter”, Sub/Version, Toronto, ECW Press, 1986, 93-110.

172 ---, “Questioning Authority: Alice Munro's Fiction”, CEA Critic, Fall 1987, 50.1: 57-66.

173 Jamieson, Sara, “The Fiction of Agelessness. Work, Leisure, and Ageing in Alice Munro’s ‘Pictures of the Ice’”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2004, 29.1: 106-26.

174 Jansen, Reamy, “Being Lonely: Dimension of the Short Story”, Cross Currents, 1989-1990, 39.4, 391-401/419.

175 Jarret, Mary, “Women's Bodies in Alice Munro's The Progress of Love”, RANAM, 1989, 22: 83-88.

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176 Johnson, Brian, “Private Scandals, Public Selves: the Education of Gossip in Who Do You Think You Are?”, Dalhousie Review, 1998, 78.3: 415-35.

177 Kamboureli, Smaro, “The Body as Audience and Performance in the Writing of Alice Munro”, A/Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, Smaro Kamboureli and Shirley Newman, Eds, Edmonton, Longspoon/NeWest, 1986, 31-38.

178 Keith, W.J., “Alice Munro”, A Sense of Style. Studies in the Art of Fiction in English Speaking Canada, Toronto, ECW Press, 1989, 155-74.

179 Kelly, Darlene, “Alice Munro’s ‘Day of the Butterfly’: An American Source”, Ariel, 1998, 29.2: 115-28.

180 Lacombe, Michèle, “‘Strips of Rough Linoleum’ Revisited: Reconsidering Realism in the Works of Alice Munro”, Open Letter, Fall/Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 211-30.

181 Lamont-Stewart, Linda, “Order from Chaos: Writing in Self Defence in the Fiction of Alice Munro and Clark Blaise”, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo (Ont.), University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 113-21.

182 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, “Alice Munro's Two Secrets”, Open Letter, Fall Winter 2003-2004, 11.9/12.1: 25-36.

183 Lecker, Robert, “Machines, Readers, Gardens: Alice Munro’s ‘Carried Away’”, Essays on Canadian Literature, Winter 1998, 66, 103-27.

184 Le Gouic, Claire, “Myths We Live By: Alice Munro’s ‘Comfort’”, Open Letter, Spring 2007, 13.2: 62-71.

185 Lesk, Andrew, “Playing the Parts: the ‘Corps morcelé’ in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2007, 32.1: 141-53.

186 Levene, Marc, “‘It Was About Vanishing’: A Glimpse of Alice Munro's Stories”, University of Toronto Quarterly, Fall 1999, 68.4: 841-60.

187 Lilienfeld, Jane, “Skirting the Imperial Shadow: Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro”, Woolf Studies Annual, 2004, 10: 253-74.

188 Lostanlen, Claire, “Le défi dans The Progress of Love d'Alice Munro”, Défi/Challenge dans le roman canadien de langue française et de langue anglaise. Rouen, Collection de l’AFEC/ Cahiers de l'IPEC, 1994, 4: 155-62.

189 Lynch, Gerald, “The One and Many: English Canadian Short Story Cycles”, Canadian Literature, 1991, 130: 91-104.

190 ---, “ ‘No Honey, I'm Home’: Place over Love in Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are?”, Canadian Literature, Spring 1999, 160: 73-98. Revised and reprinted in Lynch Gerald, The One and Many: English Canadian Short Story Cycles, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 2001, 159-81.

191 Macdonald, Rae Mc Carthy, “A Madman Loose in the World: The Fiction of Alice Munro”, Modern Fiction Studies, Autumn 1976, 22.3: 365-74.

192 ---, “Structure and Detail in Lives of Girls and Women”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1978, 3.2: 199-210.

193 Marra, Giulio, “Recovering the Past and Story Structure in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Hack Wednesday’ and Alice Munro’s ‘Age of Faith’”, Rivista di Studi Canadesi, 1996, 9: 73-86.

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194 Marroni, Francesco, “Il metodo di Alice Munro”, Scrivere e pensare il Canada. Proc of Seminario Internazionale di Studi Canadesi, 2002, Monopli, Giovanni Dotoli, Ed, Fasano, Schena Editore, 2003, 19-32.

195 ---, “ Alice Munro e il lato ‘grigio’ della vita”, I Colori del Canada. Proc of Seminario di Studi Canadesi, Pescara 2003, Giovanni Dotoli, Ed, Fasano, Schena Editore, 2004, 23-34.

196 Martin, W.R., “Alice Munro and James Joyce”, Journal of Canadian Fiction, 1979, 24: 120-26.

197 ---, “The Strange and the Familiar in Alice Munro”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1982, 7.2: 214-26

198 ---, “‘Hanging Pictures Together’: Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You”, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo (Ont.), University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 21-34.

199 ---, “Alice Munro's Willa Cather”, Canadian Literature, Autumn 1992, 134: 42-57.

200 Martin, W.R. and Warren Ober, “Family Relations in Alice Munro’s Fiction”, New Quarterly 7, 1987, 1-2: 247-54.

201 ---, “Alice Munro as Small Town Historian”, Essays on Canadian Literature, Winter 1998, 66: 128-46.

202 ---, “The Comic Spirit in Alice Munro’s Open Secrets”, Studies in Short Fiction, Winter 1998, 3.1: 41-7.

203 ---, “Alice Munro’s ‘Hold Me Fast Don’t Let Me Pass’ and ‘Tam Lin’”, ANQ, Summer 2000, 13.3: 44-8.

204 Mathews, Lawrence, “‘Who Do You Think You Are?’: Alice Munro's Art of Disarrangement”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 181-93.

205 May, Charles, “Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?”, Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction, Spring 2003, 38.1: 16-28.

206 Mayberry, Katherine, “‘Every Last Thing…. Everlasting’: Alice Munro and the Limits of Narrative”, Studies in Short Fiction, Fall 1992, 29.4: 53141.

207 ---, “Narrative Strategies of Liberation in Alice Munro”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1994, 19.2: 57-66.

208 McCarthy, Dermot, “The Woman Outback: Alice Munro's ‘Meneseteung’”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1994, 19.1: 1-19.

209 McCombs, Judith, “Searching Bluebeard's Chamber: Grimm, Gothic, and Bible Mysteries in Alice Munro's ‘The Love of a Good Woman’”, American Review of Canadian Studies, Autumn 2000, 30.3: 327-48.

210 McGill, Robert, “‘Somewhere I've Been Meaning to Tell You’: Alice Munro's Fiction of Distance”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2002, 37.1: 9-29.

211 ---, “Where Do You Think You Are? Alice Munro's Open Houses”, Mosaic, Dec. 2002, 35.4: 103-19.

212 ---, “Daringly out in the Public Eye: Alice Munro and the Ethics of Writing Back”, University of Toronto Quarterly, Summer 2007, 76.3: 874-89.

213 ---, “No Nation but Adaptation: ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’, Away from Her and What is Means to be Faithful”, Canadian Literature, Summer 2008, 197: 98-111.

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214 McIntyre, Tim, “The Way Stars really Do Come out at Night”: The Trick of Representation in Alice Munro’s ‘The Moons of Jupiter’”, Canadian Literature, Spring 2009, 200: 73-88.

215 McMullen, Lorraine, “The Divided Self”, Atlantis, Spring 1980, 5.2: 5267.

216 ---, “‘Shameless, Marvellous, Shattering Absurdity’: The Humour of Paradox in Alice Munro”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 144-62.

217 McWilliams, Eileen, “Transatlantic Communities: The Joycian Influence in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women”, Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences, Roxanne Harde, Ed, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2007, 372-88.

218 Melsom, Ryan, “Robert’s Raspberry Bombe and Critical Indifference in Alice Munro’s ‘Labor Day Dinner’”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2009, 34.1: 142-59.

219 Micros, Marianne, “Et in Ontario Ego: The Pastoral Ideal and The Blazon Tradition in Alice Munro's ‘Lichen’”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1998, 66: 44-59.

220 Migliori Coco, Franca, “A Critical Perspective on Alice Munro’s Short Stories”, Canada Ieri e Oggi. Proc of VII Convegno Internazionale di Studi Canadesi 1988, Arcireale. Giovanni Bonanno, Ed, Fasano, Schena Editore, 1990, 111-19.

221 Miller, Judith, “‘An Inner Bell That Rings’: The Craft of Alice Munro”, Antigonish Review, 1998, 115: 157-76.

222 ---, “On Looking into Rifts and Crannies: Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth”, Antigonish Review, 2000, 120: 205-26.

223 ---, “Deconstructing Silence: The Mystery of Alice Munro”, Antigonish Review, 2002, 129: 43-54.

224 Monagram, David, “Confinement and Escape in Alice Munro’s ‘The Flats Road’”, Studies in Short Fiction, 1977, 14: 165-8.

225 Moss, John, “Alice in the Looking Glass: Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women”, Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1977, 54-68.

226 Murphy, Georgeann, “The Art of Alice Munro: Memory, Identity and the Aesthetics of Connection”, Canadian Women Writing Fiction, Michael Pearlman, Ed, Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 1993, 12-27.

227 Murray, Jennifer, “Aux difformes et aux légèrement dérangés: la figure du grotesque comme moyen d’accès au désordre du refoulé dans trois nouvelles d’Alice Munro”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2008, 33.1: 169-86.

228 ---, “Honte et Humiliation”: reconfigurations d’une écriture de soi chez Alice Munro (1931- )”. Proc. of Conference “Dynamiques de la mémoire, transmissions et reconfigurations des savoirs”, Université de Besançon [2009, publication pending]

229 Murray, Jennifer and Lee Garner, “From Participant to Observer: Theatricality and Distantiation in Alice Munro’s ‘Lives of Girls and Women’ and ‘Royal Beatings’”, Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, Autumn 2008, 51: 149-58.

230 New, W.H., “Pronouns and Prepositions: Alice Munro's Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You”, Dreams of Speech and Violence, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987, 201-10.

231 Nischik, Reingard, “Undoing Gender: Alice Munro’s ‘Boys and Girls’”, The Canadian Short Story: Interpretations, Rochester, Camden House, 2007, 203-18.

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232 Noonan, Gerald, “The Structure of Style in Alice Munro's Fiction”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 163-80.

233 ---, “Alice Munro’s Short Stories and the Art That Distrusts Art”, Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English, Jacqueline Bardolph, Ed, Nice, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1989, 141-6.

234 Nunes, Mark, “Postmodern ‘Piecing’: Alice Munro's Contingent Ontologies”, Studies in Short Fiction, 1997, 34 (1): 11-26.

235 Orange, John, “Alice Munro and a Maze of Time”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview: ECW Press, 1983, 83-98.

236 Osachoff, Margaret Gail, Treacheries of the Heart’: Memoir, Confession, and Meditation in the Stories of Alice Munro”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts. Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview: ECW Press, 1983, 61-82.

237 Osmond, Rosalie, “Arrangements, ‘Disarrangements’, and ‘Earnest Deceptions’”, Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature, Coral Ann Howells and Lynette Hunter, Eds, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1991, 82-92.

238 Packer, Miriam, “Lives of Girls and Women: A Creative Search for Completion”, The Canadian Novel: Here and Now, John Moss, Ed, Toronto, NC Press Ltd, 1978, 134-44.

239 Palusci, Oriana, “The Memory of Ghosts: Alice Munro’s ‘My Mother’s Dream’”, Reading Alice Munro in Italy, Gianfranca Baslestra, Laura Ferri and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, The Franck Iacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, Dept of Italian Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Toronto, 2008, 47-57.

240 Perrakis, Phyliss Sternberg, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl: Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women”, Atlantis, 1982, 7.2: 61-67.

241 Prentice, Christine, “Story Telling in Alice Munro’s Lives and Girls and Women and Patricia Grace’s Potiki”, Australian Canadian Studies, 1991, 8.2: 27-40.

242 Pruitt, Virginia, “Alice Munro's ‘Fits’: Secrets, Mystery and Marital Relations”, Psychoanalytic Review, 2002, 89.2: 157-68.

243 Pugliese, Cristiana, “What is Remembered: Memory and Loss in Alice Munro’s Short Stories, Canada, Le rotte della Libertà, Giovanni Dotoli, Ed, Fasano, Schena Editore, 2006, 413-19.

244 Quatermaine, Peter, “‘Living on the Surface’: Versions of Real Life in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women”, RANAM, 1987, 20: 117-26.

245 Rasporich, Beverly, “Child-Women and Primitives in the Fiction of Alice Munro”, Atlantis, 1976, 1.2: 4-14.

246 ---, “Locating the Artist’s Muse: The Paradox of Femininity in Mary Pratt and Alice Munro”, Women as Artists, Christine Mason Sutherland and Beverly Rasporich, Eds, Calgary, Calgary University Press, 1993, 121-43.

247 Redekop, Magdalene, “Alice Munro and the Scottish Nostalgic Grotesque”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1998, 66: 21-43.

248 ---, “Alice Munro’s Tilting Fields”, New Worlds: Discovering and Constructing the Unknown in Anglophone Literature, Martin Kuester, Ed, Munich, Ernst Vögl, 2000, 343-62.

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249 Regan, Stephen, “The Presence of the Past: Modernisms and Postmodernism in Canadian Short Fiction”, Narrative Strategies in Canadian Literature, Coral Ann Howells and Lynette Hunter, Eds, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1991, 108-34.

250 Ricciardi, Caterina, “Una madre, une lettera, une fotografia: appunti per una novella canadese”, Annali Accademici Canadesi, 1989, V: 45-67.

251 ---, “The Secrets of Intertextuality: Alice Munro’s ‘Picture of the Ice’”, Open Letter, 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 121-36.

252 ---, “History and Prolepsis; the ‘Museum’ in Alice Munro’s ‘The Love of a Good Woman’”, Reading Alice Munro in Italy, Gianfranca Baslestra, Laura Ferri and Caterina Ricciardi, Eds, The Franck Iacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, Dept of Italian Studies, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Legas, 2008, 35-45.

253 Rimstead, Roxanne, “‘We live in a Rickety House’: Social Boundaries and Poor Housing: Alice Munro’s Gaze—from a Distance”, Remnants of a Nation: On Poverty Narratives by Women, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001, 104-11.

254 Rizzardi, Biancamaria, “Alice (Munro)’s Adventures in Wonderland”, Canada e Italia verso il duemila: metropolis a confronto. Proc. Of IX Convegno Internazionale di Studi Canadesi, 1992, Milan, Giovanni Bonanno and Alessandro Gebbia, eds, Fasano: Schena Editore, 1994, 107-20.

255 Robson, Nora, “Alice Munro and the White American South: The Quest”, The Art of Alice Munro. Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo, University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 73-84.

256 ---, “Sense of Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction”, Literary Criterion, 1984, 19.3-4: 138-46.

257 Rocard, Marcienne, “Alice Munro: À mi-chemin entre la nouvelle et le roman”, Journal of the Short Story in English /Cahiers de la nouvelle, 1983, 1: 103-11.

258 ---, “Who Do You Think You Are?: Un titre unifiant”, RANAM. La nouvelle canadienne anglophone, 1983, 15: 45-55.

259 ---, “ L'art et la nécessité de la connexion dans ‘Connections’ d'Alice Munro”, RANAM, 1987, 20: 109-15.

260 Rooke, Constance, “Fear of the Open Heart”, A/Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, Smaro Kamboureli and Shirley Newman, Eds, Edmonton, Longspoon/NeWest, 1986, 256-69.

261 Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, “Calling Back the Ghost of the Old-Time Heroine: Duncan, Montgomery, Atwood, Laurence and Munro”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1979, 4.1: 43-58.

262 ---, “‘At Least Part Legend’: The Fiction of Alice Munro”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 112-26.

263 Ross, Catherine, “‘Too Many Things’: Reading Alice Munro's ‘The Love of a Good Woman’”, University of Toronto Quarterly, 2002, 71.3: 786810.

264 Saggini, Francesca, “Attraverso lo specchio: Lives of Girls and Women come Bildungsroman femminile”, Il confronto letterario, 1996, 13.26: 815-33.

265 Sánchez-Soto, Cristina, “Spaces between Stories”, Open Letter, 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 231-41.

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266 Scobie, Stephen, “‘Lying Under the Apple Tree’: Alice Munro, Secrets and Autobiography”, Open Letter, Fall/Winter 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 16776.

267 Sellwood, Jane, “‘Certain Vague Hopes of Disaster’: A Psychosemiotic Reading of Alice Munro's ‘The Found Boat’”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1992, 17.1: 1-16.

268 Seyersted, Peter, “‘Who Do You Think You Are?’: Alice Munro and the Place of Origin”, American Studies in Scandinavia, 1992, 24.1: 17-23.

269 Shih, Elizabeth, “Phallicism and Ambivalence in Alice Munro's ‘Bardon Bus’”, Contemporary Literature, 2003, 44.1: 73-105.

270 Smith, Rowland, “Rewriting the Frontier. Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice Munro”, Telling Stories. Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, Jacqueline Bardolph, Ed, Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA, Rodopi, 2001, 77-90.

271 Smythe, Karen E., “Shapes and Shades of Death: the Meaning of Loss in Alice Munro’s Early Stories”, Wascana Review, Spring 1990, 25.1: 41-52.

272 ---, “Sad Stories: The Ethics of Epiphany in Munrovian Elegy”, University of Toronto Quarterly, 1991, 60.4: 493-506.

273 ---, Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro and the Poetics of Elegy, Montreal and Kingston, London and Buffalo, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992, 106-52.

274 Somacarrera, Pilar, “Exploring the Impenetrability of Narrative: A Study of Linguistic Modality in Alice Munro's Early Fiction”, 1996, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2.1: 79-91.

275 ---, “Speech Presentation and ‘Coloured’ Writing in Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?”, Textual Studies in Canada, 1998, 10-11: 69-79.

276 ---, “The Codification of Uncertainty: Modality in English Canadian Fiction”, Aspects of Discourse Analysis, Pilar Alonso, Maria Sanchez, Eds, Salamanca, Ed Universidad de Salamanca, 2002, 119-29.

277 Soper-Jones, Ella, “Wilderness Stations: Peregrination and Homesickness in Alice Munro's Open Secrets”, Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction, 2003, 38.1: 29-50.

278 Stead, Kit, “‘The Twinkling of an I’ in Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth”, The Guises of Canadian Diversity, Serge Jaumain and Marc Maufort, Eds, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2004, 151-64.

279 Stewart, Ralph, “A note on ‘Executioners’ and The Fall of Troy”, Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, 2004, 42: 15965.

280 Stich, Klaus, P., “The Cather Connection and Alice Munro’s ‘Dulse’”, Modern Language Studies, Fall 1989, 19.4: 102-11.

281 ---, “Letting Go with the Mind: Dionysus and Demeter in Alice Munro's ‘Meneseteung’”, Canadian Literature, 2001, 169: 106-25.

282 ---, “Munro’s Grail Quest: The Progress of Logos”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2007, 31.1: 120-40.

283 Strass, Jennifer, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Cultural Contexts and the Quest for Identity in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women and Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bang”, Australian Canadian Studies, 1991, 8.2: 41-55.

284 Struthers, J.R., “Reality and Ordering: The Growth of a Young Artist in Lives of Girls and Women”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1975, 3: 3246.

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285 ---, “Alice Munro and the American South”, The Canadian Novel: Here and Now, John Moss, Ed, Toronto, NC Press Ltd, 1978, 121-33.

286 ---, “Alice Munro's Private Imagination”, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, Judith Miller, Ed, Waterloo, University of Waterloo Press, 1984, 103-12.

287 Stubbs, Andrew, “Fictional Landscapes: Mythology and Dialectic in the Fiction of Alice Munro”, World Literature Written in English, 1984, 23.1: 53-62.

288 Sturgess, Charlotte, “Alice Munro's ‘Progress of Love’: Secrets, Continuity and Closure”, Etudes canadiennes, 1991, 30: 105-12.

289 ---, “La représentation féminine et la mise en scène dans The Beggar Maid”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 1995, 17.2: 44-9.

290 ---, “Alice Munro’s Fiction: Female Identities as Postcolonial Discourse”, La création biographique, Marta Dvorak, Ed, Collection de l’AFEC/Cahiers de L’IPEC, 1997, 5: 85-90.

291 Suárez Lafuente, M.S., “Fiction and Reality in Alice Munro’s Short Stories”, Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English, Jacqueline Bardolph, Ed, Nice, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1989, 147-51.

292 Szalay, Edina, “The Gothic as Adolescent Fantasy: Alice Munro’s Lives and Girls and Women”, Central European Journal of Canadian Studies, 2001, 1: 5-17.

293 Tausky, Thomas E., “ 'What Happened to Marion?': Art and Reality in Lives of Girls and Women”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1986, 11.1: 52-76.

294 Taylor, Michael, “The Unimaginable Vancouvers: Alice Munro's Words”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 127-43.

295 Thacker, Robert, “‘Clear Jelly’: Alice Munro's Narrative Dialectics”, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, Louis MacKendrick, Ed, Downsview, ECW Press, 1983, 37-60.

296 ---, “Connections: Alice Munro and Ontario”, American Review of Canadian Studies, 1984, 14.2: 213-26.

297 ---, “‘So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life’: Autobiography in Alice Munro's Stories’, Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature, Klaus Stich, Ed, Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 1988, 153-62.

298 ---, “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather”, Canadian Literature, 1992, 134: 42-57.

299 ---, “Alice Munro: Writing ‘Home’, ‘Seeing This Trickle in Time’”, Essays on Canadian Writing, Spring 1998, 66: 1-20.

300 ---, “Mapping Munro: Reading the Clues”, Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story, Gerald Lynch and Angela Arnold Robbeson, Ed, Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 1999, 127-35.

301 ---, “Alice Munro’s Ontario”, Tropes and Territories, Marta Dvorak and W.H. New, Eds, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, 10318.

302 Thomas, Sue, “Reading Female Sexual Desire in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women”, Critique, Winter 1995, 36.2: 107-20.

303 Ventura-Daziron, Héliane, “Of Beasts and Stones: ‘Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd’”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Spring 1989, 11.2: 75-82.

304 Ventura, Héliane, “‘Fits’: A Baroque Tale”, RANAM, 1989, 22: 89-97.

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305 ---, “‘Walking on Water’: A Grammar of Mystification”, Etudes canadiennes, 1989, 27: 131-40.

306 ---, “Country Girls and City Girls in Alice Munro's ‘The Progress of Love’”, Etudes canadiennes, 1990, 29: 223-33.

307 ---, “Alice Munro's ‘Forgiveness in Families’: The Story of a Parasite”, RANAM, 1991, 24: 137-42.

308 ---, “Delusion, Deception and Disillusionment in the Mountains: Alice Munro's ‘Providence’”, Etudes canadiennes, 1991, 31: 107-14.

309 ---, “Alice Munro's ‘Boys and Girls’: Mapping out Boundaries”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Autumn 1992, 15.1: 80-87.

310 ---, “The Setting Up of Unsettlement in Alice Munro's ‘Tell Me Yes or No’”, Postmodern Fiction in Canada, Théo D'Haen and Hans Bertens, Eds, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1992, 105-123.

311 ---, “Iconography of Nationhood, Iconography of Womanhood”, The Canadian Journal of Rhetorical Studies, 1994, 4: 50-62.

312 ---, “The Ordinary as Subterfuge: Alice Munro's ‘Pictures of the Ice’”, Journal of the Short Story in English/Cahiers de la nouvelle, Spring 2002, 38: 73-84.

313 ---, “Alice Munro's Secret Ort”. Open Letter, 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 255-6.

314 ---, “L'implicite dans l'ekphrasis ou le crytogramme pictural dans ‘Boys and Girls’ d'Alice Munro”, L’implicite dans la nouvelle de langue anglaise, Laurent Lepaludier, Ed, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005, 157-67.

315 ---, “Le tracé de l'écart ou l'origine du monde réinventée dans ‘Lichen’ d'Alice Munro”, Texte/Image: nouveaux problèmes, Liliane Louvel, Henri Scetti, Eds, Actes du Colloque de Cerisy, Rennes, Presses de l’Université de Rennes, 2005, 269-81.

316 ---, “Traces on Sand and Lines of Descent in Alice Munro's ‘The Children Stay”, Le Canada: Nouveaux défis/Canada Revisited, Michelle Kaltenback and Marcienne Rocard, Eds, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Sud, 2005, 283-93.

317 ---, “Rewriting the Nativity Myth in Alice Munro’s ‘The Turkey Season’”, Open Letter, Into the Looking-Glass Labyrinth: Myths and Mystery in Canadian Literature, 2007, 13.2: 52-61.

318 ---, “Aesthetic Traces of the Ephemeral: Alice Munro’s Logograms in ‘Vandals’”, Tropes and Territories, Marta Dvorak and W.H. New, Eds, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, 309-22.

319 ---, “De l’image au texte. Le devenir-nouvelle de ‘The Beggar Maid’ d'Alice Munro”, Etudes anglaises, 2008, 61.1: 58-67.

320 ---, “Storia di un immagine congelata: un racconto di Alice Munro”, Guardare oltre Letteratura, fotografia e altri territori, Silvia Albertazzi, Ferdinando Amigoni, Eds, Roma, Meltemi, 2008, 251-267.

321 ---, “Dall’ immagine all testo: La vergine mendicante di Alice Munro”, Rappresentazione allo specchio. Testo letterario e testo pittorico, Donata Meneghelli, Francesco Cattani, Eds, Roma, Meltemi, 2008, 139-54.

322 ---, “The Relevance of the Chimera: Ekphrasis, Anamorphosis and Phantasy, in ‘Runaway’ by Alice Munro”, Actes du Colloque The Relevance of Theory/La résonance de la

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théorie, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense, juin 2008, Chantal Delourme, Richard Pedot, Eds, [2010, publication pending]

323 Wainwright, J.A., “Deep Caves and Kitchen Linoleum: The Tale within the Tale”, Journal of the Short Fiction in English, 1985, vol. 4: 141-9.

324 ---, “The Gate in her Head”, International Literature in English. Essays on Major Writers, Robert Ross, Ed, New York, Garland, 1991, 303-14.

325 Wall, Kathleen, “Representing the Other Body. Frame Narratives in Margaret Atwood's ‘Giving Birth’ and Alice Munro's ‘Meneseteung’”, Canadian Literature, 1997, 154: 74-90.

326 Ware, Tracy, “Tricks with a Sad Ring: The Endings of Alice Munro’s ‘The Ottawa Valley’”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 2006, 31.2: 126-41.

327 Warwick, Susan, 1984, “Growing Up: The Novels of Alice Munro”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 29: 204-25.

328 Waterson, Elizabeth, “Duncan, Munro and the Vistas of Memory”, Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001, 249-65.

329 Weinhouse, Linda, “Alice Munro's Hard Luck Stories, or, There Is No Sexual Relation”, Critique, 1995, 36.2: 121-29.

330 Wieckowska, Katarzyna, “The Corporeal Unspeakable: The Gothicized Body and Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You are?”, Open Letter, 2003/2004, 11.9/12.1: 113-20.

331 Williams, David, “Beyond Photography: Parody as Metafiction in the Novels of Alice Munro”, Confessional Fictions. A Portrait of the Artist in the Canadian Novel, Buffalo, London, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991, 193-218

332 Woodcock, George, “‘The Plots of Life’: The Realism of Alice Munro”, Queen's Quarterly, 1986, 93.2: 235-50.

333 York, Lorraine, “Lives of Joan and Del: Separate Paths to Transformation in Lives of Girls and Woman and Lady Oracle”, University of Windsor Review, 1986, 19.2: 1-10.

334 ---, “The Rival Bards. Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women and Victorian Poetry”, Canadian Literature, 1987, 112: 211-16.

335 ---, “Joyless in Jubilee?”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1987, vol. 34: 15761.

336 ---, Winter “‘Gulfs’ and ‘Connections’: The Fiction of Alice Munro”, Essays on Canadian Writing, 1987, 35: 135-46.

337 ---, “Distant Parts of Myself: The Topography of Alice Munro’s Fiction”, American Review of Canadian Studies, Spring 1988, 18.1: 33-8.

338 ---, The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Laurence, Toronto, 1988, ECW, 21-50.

III. Bibliographies

339 Mazur, Carol and Cathy Moulder, Alice Munro. An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism, Lanhan, Md/Toronto, Canada, Plymouth, UK, The Scarecrow Press, 2007, 457 pp.

340 Struthers, J.R, “Some Highly Subversive Activities: A Brief Polemic and a Check-list of Works on Alice Munro”, Studies in Canadian Literature, 1991, 6.1, 140-50.

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341 Thacker, Robert, “Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography”, The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, Ed. Robert Lecker and Jack David, Downsview (Ont.), ECW, 1984, V, 354-414.

342 ---, “‘Go Ask Alice’: The Progress of Munro Criticism”, Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1991, 26.2, 156-59.

343 ---, “‘What is Material?’: The Progress of Munro Criticism, part 2”, Journal of Canadian Studies, 1998, 33.2, 196-210.

AUTHORS

CORINNE BIGOT Corinne Bigot recently completed a Ph.D thesis on Alice Munro entitled “L’espace du silence dans l’œuvre d’Alice Munro” (Université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense, décembre 2007) and has written other articles on this writer. She is a “Maitre de Conférences” in the English Department at the Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 55 | Autumn 2010