Études de stylistique anglaise

8 | 2015 Stylistic Perspectives on Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades

Michael Toolan and Manuel Jobert (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/esa/857 DOI: 10.4000/esa.857 ISSN: 2650-2623

Publisher Société de stylistique anglaise

Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2015 ISBN: 978-2-36442-060-1 ISSN: 2116-1747

Electronic reference Michael Toolan and Manuel Jobert (dir.), Études de stylistique anglaise, 8 | 2015, « Stylistic Perspectives on Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades » [Online], Online since 19 February 2019, connection on 26 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/esa/857 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/esa. 857

This text was automatically generated on 26 September 2020.

Études de Stylistique Anglaise 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Éditorial Manuel Jobert

Why write stylistic analyses of Munro’s stories? Michael Toolan

Discontinuity, disjointedness: parenthetical structures and dashes in Alice Munro’s stories from Dance of the Happy Shades Corinne Bigot

Alice Munro’s Conversational Style Linda Pillière

Searching for Lake Huron: Songs, Journeys and Secrets in ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ Giuseppina Botta

“Here was no open straightforward plan”: Jumbled Space in “The Shining Houses” Eleonora Rao

“The text, the image and the implicit in Alice Munro’s ‘Images’ and ‘Postcard’” Linda Collinge-Germain

“What do you want me to tell?” The inferential texture of Alice Munro’s ‘Postcard’ Billy Clark

Teenage in the Ironic Mode: A Study of the Drafts of “Red Dress–1946” by Alice Munro Christine Lorre-Johnston

“Bizarre but Somehow Never Quite Satisfactory”: Storytelling in “The Office” Ailsa Cox

The Scream in Alice Munro’s “The Time of Death” Catherine Delesalle-Nancey

The Butterfly Effect in Alice Munro’s “Day of the Butterfly”. Chaos, Empathy and the End of Certainty When Literary Discourse Analysis Meets Chaos Theory Claire Majola-Leblond

Girl power in ‘A Trip to the Coast’ Michael Toolan

Style and Blending in ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ by Alice Munro Craig Hamilton

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Éditorial

Manuel Jobert

1 Ce numéro spécial d’Études de Stylistique Anglaise est le premier à porter directement sur un auteur du programme de l’agrégation externe d’anglais. L’œuvre au programme, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), est le premier recueil de nouvelles d’Alice Munro, lauréate du prix Nobel de littérature 2013 avec le titre de « master of the contemporary short story ». Ce n’est toutefois pas cette distinction qui justifie que la Société de Stylistique Anglaise lui consacre un numéro spécial. Depuis de très nombreuses années, des stylisticiens français et étrangers étudient son œuvre tant son écriture est propice à une analyse textuelle serrée. Michael Toolan en explique les raisons dans les pages qui suivent.

2 Je tiens, à cet égard, à remercier Michael Toolan (University of Birmingham – U.K.) d’avoir immédiatement accepté de codiriger ce numéro spécial. Je ne pouvais en effet pas trouver meilleur allié. Non seulement Michael Toolan est un stylisticien de renom mais il est, avant tout, un inconditionnel d’Alice Munro.

3 Bien que ce volume soit prioritairement rédigé à l’intention des agrégatifs, les auteurs n’ont pas eu pour consigne de se plier au format du concours (leçon ou explication de texte). Les études qui suivent représentent des choix de recherche individuels. La rhétorique propre au concours est tenue pour acquise et les candidats peuvent se concentrer sur le fond et, bien sûr, la forme. La seule contrainte pour les auteurs, outre les délais serrés, était de proposer des études fondées sur une analyse rigoureuse du matériau textuel. Comme l’écrivait le regretté Geoffrey Leech (2008, 8) dans language and Literature – Style and Foregrounding : « The notion of texual warranty […] is a prerequisite to literary interpretation ». Tous les auteurs, qu’ils soient stylisticiens, spécialistes de littérature canadienne ou d’Alice Munro, se sont pliés de bonne grâce à cette exigence. Cela explique que la plupart des articles de ce recueil se concentrent sur des nouvelles particulières. Les spécificités ainsi mises en lumière sont bien sûr pertinentes pour l’étude des autres nouvelles du recueil et de l’œuvre d’Alice Munro dans son ensemble. En tout, dix nouvelles sont traitées individuellement. Les deux articles transversaux qui ouvrent ce numéro s’appuient sur une observation précise du texte afin, précisément, de montrer la continuité stylistique d’une nouvelle à l’autre.

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4 On le sait, la stylistique est à la croisée de l’analyse littéraire et de l’analyse linguistique. Le présent volume penche du côté de la « stylistique littéraire » même si la théorie, linguistique ou stylistique, n’est jamais loin. Plusieurs facettes de la stylistique sont présentées (pragmatique, narratologique, stylistique de corpus ou cognitive etc.) et ce volume rend compte de la diversité des approches au sein la Société de Stylistique Anglaise et de sa société sœur, la Poetics and Linguistics Association. Ce qui compte, en définitive, n’est pas le cadre théorique choisi mais ce que son utilisation permet de mettre en lumière sur le style de l’auteur ou sur son univers fictionnel.

5 Si la tendance actuelle est de dissocier la recherche des concours, il y a en fait complémentarité et non concurrence entre les deux. L’agrégation est un concours de haut niveau qui ne peut pas se passer de l’apport de la recherche, quel que soit le domaine. De même, la préparation de ce concours est profitable au futur chercheur qui acquiert ainsi une méthode et un rythme de travail bien utiles pour la rédaction d’une thèse. L’agrégation est aujourd’hui un pont entre l’enseignement secondaire et l’enseignement supérieur et il est important que les enseignants-chercheurs continuent à contribuer à la préparation de ce concours difficile.

6 Je souhaite donc que ce recueil d’articles aide à éclairer l’œuvre d’Alice Munro et, qui sait, que les approches stylistiques proposées fassent naître des vocations de stylisticiens.

7 Bon courage aux agrégatifs et bonne lecture à tous.

AUTEUR

MANUEL JOBERT Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 Président de la Société de Stylistique Anglaise CREA – EA 370

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Why write stylistic analyses of Munro’s stories?

Michael Toolan

1 What is a stylistic approach to a literary text? It is a textual analysis and a commentary articulated in linguistic terms. It assumes that the descriptive and explanatory systems of one linguistic model or another should be a good way of enhancing our understanding of how the text works. And not just ‘should’ but ‘must’; and not just for a literary text, but any text.

2 As Michael Burke reminds us in his Introduction to the recently-published Routledge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), the origins of stylistics lie in the poetics and rhetorical studies of the ancient Greeks, but it has reinvented itself many times over to suit changing times. Within the English literary tradition, for example, the Renaissance period saw the emergence of handbooks of elegant and ‘cultured’ style. Then in the Augustan and Classical period, writers like Pope, Dryden and Johnson continually commented on the writing of the time in ways that were covertly stylistic: they expressed censure or approval of writers’ grammar and usage very much on the assumption that alternative choices of grammar and phrasing would be demonstrably better (or worse). Thus they did not aim merely to promote their subjective tastes and opinions on matters of effective writing; rather they sought arguments and evidence to support their judgements, as stylisticians do.

3 We can fast-forward to the Russian formalists (and, later, Bakhtin), to structuralist scholars of poetics like Shklovsky, Mukařovsky, and Jakobson, and then to the steady growth of interest in a loose coalition of literary-linguistic traditions over the last fifty years. Today there are many hyphenated sub-types of stylistics, most notably cognitive stylistics or poetics, but also corpus stylistics, pragmatic stylistics, (critical) discourse stylistics, ecolinguistic stylistics, and several more. Mostly, more unites these than separates them. Mostly they study, from different angles, the language of literature, so linguistic categories and methods take pride of place, albeit a substantially contextualised linguistics. By a contextualised linguistics I mean one that recognises that form, meaning, value and interpretation are open to change with change of reader,

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despite the degree of convergence or similarity, among diverse readers’ reading of a single text, which makes the idea of a shared language and textual analysis possible.

4 As has been often noted, stylistic analysis of a text aims to be explicit and accessible: it tries to talk about texts in terms which are clear and comprehensible to all. Most stylisticians would regard it as a kind of failure if the discourse of their article about a ‘difficult’ poem was comprehensible to a smaller group of readers than the poem itself was. That is the failing which, some stylisticians have argued, the more esoteric and subjective types of literary criticism are prone to, denouncing such criticism as elitist or presumptuous. If a poem is (roughly) understandable by a hundred people in a given population, while the critical commentary on that poem is understandable by only fifty of the original hundred, then there is a sense in which the commentary serves no useful purpose at all (those fifty already understood). By contrast if a stylistic commentary enables two hundred people to derive more understanding and appreciation of a poem independently roughly understood by half that number, then the readership has grown, and an effort of outreach and awareness-raising has been worthwhile.

5 How patronising, didactic, and question-begging to put the case in those terms, displaying a presumption just as deplorable as the literary critic’s, the reader may think (both critic and stylistician would seem to be in the same business, of asserting ‘the expert knows best’). But there are significant differences in the roles: the intuition- dependent, impressionistic critic is more like a judge who makes declarations without reasons, the stylistician more like an advocate, who offers reasons and proposes conclusions, for general readers (members of the jury) to accept or reject. Stylistics does not hide its teacherly tendency, seeking only to justify it by underpinning it with good arguments, clear evidence, scope for postulated claims to be tested and amended if necessary. And what does this idea that a stylistic commentary is ‘retrievable’ or ‘falsifiable’ really mean? It means that the stylistician aims to show the reader how to repeat the analysis and invites them to do so—or to apply the same method on a comparable text. In this way a ‘transfer of skills’ lies at the scientific core of stylistics: most of its practitioners do not aim to dazzle their readers, awed into intellectual silence by the brilliance and incontrovertibility of the literary-linguistic analysis. Rather, they seek to involve and engage the reader, by showing their working as they develop evidence for interpretive points (some of these may be quite pedestrian), and inviting the reader to question the steps in the argument, the strength of the reasoning, and the possibility of alternative readings.

6 I should add that as I compose these pious claims, with all their vulnerability to the complaint that they show no capacity for self-criticism, I am acutely aware of the danger of being hoisted by my own petard. Is my own article in this collection clear and comprehensible along the lines I have protested? Will it add to the ideas about the story that those who have read it already have? Will it help anyone to appreciate the story fuller? I am in the reader’s hands.

7 Why, though, is a stylistic approach appropriate in the case of Alice Munro’s fiction? I believe a stylistic approach is justified because everything about Munro’s work reveals that her writing involves the most painstaking craft, alongside exceptional psychological insight into people’s drives and emotions, their fears and desires, and their sheer bafflement at the complexities of living. Munro is not a general practitioner or a psychiatrist or a priest, she is not our wife, our husband, our daughter or

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grandmother, our lawyer or our accountant. She is not our embalmer. But it is as if she sees and hears all that these intimates and experts might see of us, and selectively discloses these insights in ‘scenes from the life’ that are as composed and weighted as a sonnet or a sonata. Her best stories are perfect structures, ‘où tout se tient’. That certainly does not mean they are texts where all is explained; certainly not, for the simple reason that not all is explicable. There will be gaps, secrets, mysteries, and lacunae; there will be causes and reasons that never quite come clear. These unnarratable things, Munro often reminds us, are the things most worth trying to tell.

8 So in these complex tellings (even in these early stories, Munro’s gifts of anachronic narration and unexpected shifts of point of view are apparent) all will not become clear by the ends of these stories, with initial lack filled or problem solved. Sometimes it is only towards the end of a story that reader and protagonist begin to discern that there is a problem, let alone its precise nature or extent. Or if story-closure of a kind is achieved, it is of a literally temporary kind: imposed by the unstoppable passage of time, the fact that at some point in texts as in exams and as in life, ‘time is up’. So Munro’s stories, by design, have little in common with the ruthless symmetry of the new subdivision of “shining houses” and yards in the story of that name, violently forced upon the old wilderness city. Munro’s story structures might be better compared to the unpicturesque jumble of objects surrounding old Mrs Fullerton’s house, of which the narrator remarks: Here was no open or straightforward plan, no order that an outsider could understand; yet what was haphazard time had made final. (“The Shining Houses”, 22)

9 Time, not design, as the arbitrary imposer of finality. In the story there can be no peaceful co-existence, let alone reconciliation, between the new order and the old disorder. There is a noticeably masculine emphasis to the new settlers’ enterprise, involving ‘competitive violence and energy’ on the path to ‘soundness and excellence’ and ‘a community’. This last desideratum is proposed, the narrator comments, “as if they [the new suburbanites] found a modern and well-proportioned magic in it, and no possibility anywhere of a mistake” (mistake, by the way, is a favourite Munro word – perhaps because they are one thing we all make). There is an almost Beckettian ending to this story, where the thoughts of Mary, the story’s focaliser, are relayed in free direct form. Mary is the only newcomer sympathetic to Mrs Fullerton, but she is outvoted by her peers, who are intent on bulldozing what is old, unmodern, dirty and smelly out of the neighbourhood. Her downbeat conclusion is “There is nothing you can do at present” (29).

10 But surely the kind of ‘micro’ analysis that these stylistic papers present, poking and prodding little oddities of wording, or repetition, or choice of phrase, will tend to cause us to neglect the larger picture? Aren’t stylisticians admiring individual trees, and thereby failing to see the forest as a whole? And could Munro have really intended all the extensive ideas and associations that these essays assert are carried by the various parts of the texts discussed? The questioner could have a point here, certainly. But these kinds of scepticism might cause us to disregard the meticulous—obsessive, even— care with which every little detail of the wording and the phrasing has been worried over, worked upon, and—yes—improved upon by Munro as she has put these stories through (who knows?), dozens of drafts. Consider how a top class chef will be a perfectionist with regard to every aspect of the preparation and the presentation of a

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dish—a dish that will be gone within the hour! How much more anxious and perfectionist is the architect, or the painter, or the literary writer.

11 You might think that once Munro had ‘got the hang of’ writing stories—say after 20 or 30 years!—she would do less polishing and revising, would know ‘at once’ when she had put things the best way she could. Or, in effect, that the tiniest details of word-choice and phrasing were of no significance, so that to keep things as they were would be as good as to change them—which is really to say that such moments are not perceptible as details at all. Some ‘details’ encountered in a reading of a Munro story may certainly be of that kind: is the story printed in Times New Roman, or Bookman Old Style? Is the initial letter of each story section in a larger font than the rest of the text, or is the initial word in small caps? Are ise/isation words spelled with s or z? Is cloakroom (in “Red Dress”, 158-9) spelled as two words, or as one word, or hyphenated? Even these variations, a multimodal stylistician would consider. My point is that all textual phenomena ‘above’ this level are significant details for Munro and therefore for the reader: each of them may trigger story-relevant inferences or implicatures that enrich, by making more complex, a reader’s apprehension of the story.

12 Consider Munro’s story called “Passion”, was first published in The New Yorker magazine in March 2004, and was then included in her collection Runaway (Knopf), which appeared later the same year. Before publication in the New Yorker, the story will have gone through multiple drafts, with comments and critique from her agent, and then from her editor at the magazine, so that the version published there was a fine one, a finished work. Except Munro wasn’t finished with it. In the book-published story, I have found over 200 changes made by Munro to the version published a few months earlier in the New Yorker: more than 200! My favourite is the last change in the story: a mention of a cheque for a thousand dollars is changed to a cheque for one thousand dollars. What’s the difference, one may ask? A thousand is one thousand, and one dozen is a dozen… But Munro is subtly exploiting a linguistic difference where grammar overlaps with pragmatics, that is, with meaning in context. Saying ‘a thousand’ of anything simply reports a quantity, but does not particularly focus on the completeness or emphasise the precise amount of the quantity. Viewed in written form or spoken aloud, a cheque for one thousand dollars cannot be read or said without paying some extra attention to the one, beyond what you would pay to the indefinite article, a. The use of one thousand implies that the cheque is for a whole thousand dollars, or as much as a thousand dollars. The altered choice better captures the point of view of the impecunious young woman (whom the story focaliser, now forty years older, remembers herself once to have been), for whom this sum is a life-changing amount of money, a passport to a new life.

13 Incidentally, on the topic of Munrovian revision there is revealing moment at the end of the Nobel Prize interview that Alice Munro gave in her own home (in November 2013), in lieu of travelling to Stockholm to receive the award and deliver an acceptance speech. The interviewer asks Do you ever go back these days and read any of your old books? and Munro replies: No! No! I am afraid to! No, but then I would probably get a terrific urge to change just a little bit here, a little bit there, and I have even done that in certain copies of my books that I would take out of the cupboard, but then I realize that it doesn't matter if I change them, because it's not changed out there.

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14 Here is another confirmation of Munro’s stylistic perfectionism which, in light of the power and depth of the work she is burnishing, is the best reason for giving her stories the stylistic attention that the following essays attempt.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BURKE, Michael. 2014. “Stylistics: From classical rhetoric to cognitive neuroscience”. In M. Burke, ed., Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London: Routledge, 1-7.

MUNRO, Alice. 2013. “Alice Munro: In Her Own Words”. In conversation with Stefan Åsberg. Transcript and video at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2013/ munro-lecture.html

AUTHOR

MICHAEL TOOLAN University of Birminghan, U.K.

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Discontinuity, disjointedness: parenthetical structures and dashes in Alice Munro’s stories from Dance of the Happy Shades

Corinne Bigot

1 Alice Munro has always paid close attention to elements that affect the surface of the text: not only typography (italics), but also dashes and ostentatious parenthetical structures. Looking at these elements on the surface of the text often proves rewarding, as Isla Duncan’s analysis of “Child’s Play” shows (Duncan 2011: 153-6). Duncan demonstrates there is nothing random in Munro’s use of parenthetical structures and the correlative punctuation marks, brackets and dashes in this first-person narrative1. A cursory glance at the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades shows that the number of parenthetical structures and dashes varies greatly from one story to the next. I would like to pay close attention to Munro’s use of dashes and parenthetical structures in the first collection as elements that disrupt the surface of the text. A parenthetical expression is a phrase or clause that is inserted within a larger structure (a phrase or a sentence) which is complete without the smaller structure. In other words, parenthetical structures are supposed to be superfluous. Yet works that have paid attention to these adjuncts have demonstrated they are nothing but gratuitous (Dürrenmatt; Authier-Revuz & Lala). Visually speaking, parenthetical brackets and dashes draw attention to themselves and Sabine Boucheron-Petillon calls these structures “ajouts montrés”, ostentatious adjuncts (Boucheron-Petillon, 2002). Refering to parenthetical dashes and brackets as “l’espace du décroché”, she suggests disjunction as well as the possibility of opening a dislocated and marginalized space. Francine Cicurel argues that within this space the narrator or even the author engages in a more intimate communication with the readers (60).

2 The visual dimension needs to be taken into account too as dashes and brackets visually disrupt the surface of the text: parenthetical structures cut into the larger phrase, and therefore introduce discontinuities. This is particularly true of the dash. In his guide to

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punctuation Eric Partridge argues that the dash “derives from ‘to dash’, to shatter, strike violently, to throw suddenly or violently” (68). Taking into account the graphic dimension, Francine Cicurel and Jacques Dürrenmatt suggest that a dash opens multiple paths (Cicurel 50; Dürrenmatt 88) while Claude Demanuelli notes that dashes suggest, if not epitomize, cracks (fêlures), resistance to closure (l’inachevé, l’irrésolu) and discontinuity (Demanuelli 108). Since a dash may break open the surface of the text Dürrenmatt posits that texts that are punctuated by dashes belong to a type of interrogative writing—one that is characterized by silences, gaps, and a resistance to closure and disclosure (88). These hypotheses are relevant for a writer whose stories often resist closure, whose narrative style has been defined as “interrogative” (Adrian Hunter 219), and who has been said to conjure up “alternate worlds” that are “positioned alongside in the same geographical and fictional space” (Coral Ann Howells 5). Cicurel argues that since ostentatious punctuation marks attract attention, they necessarily epitomize a specific kind relationship between text and reader, therefore focusing on them should prove rewarding when it comes to identifying narrative strategies and the ways in which a writer tries to engage with the reader (57). I propose to look at a few stories from Dance of the Happy Shades2— “The Peace of Utrecht”, “Images” and “An Ounce of Cure”—in order to examine how Munro uses parenthetical structures and single dashes as stylistic devices, to illustrate and illumine the major themes in each story. I will conclude with the narrative games in “The Time of Death,” where parenthetical structures allow for ambiguity and resistance to closure.

“Images”: the disquieting dash and the “eerie land”

3 Munro has often said that she constructs a story from an image or picture that, like a magnet, attracts other images (interview with Geoff Hancock 216) and she has cited the image of Joe and his axe as the central image in this story. Interestingly, a single dash directs the readers’ eyes towards the key element in the passage. Joe gradually appears through the bushes (his head, his camouflaging clothes, his legs), the narrator uses words that denote vision (four occurrences of “see”), and eventually refers to light (“gleaming”), as the sunlight strikes and illumines the object that the single dash draws attention to: “I could see [...] gleaming where the sun caught it—a little axe, or hatchet” (37). The punctuation mark inexorably leads to the weapon.

4 What the passage also suggests however is that “Images” is about vision and perception, as heralded by the opening pages. “Images” opens with the narrator’s remembering or rather pretending not to remember the time her cousin Mary McQuade came to her grandparents’ house to help nurse her grandfather (30). The narrator then evokes that summer and the room she slept in: There was no fan there and the dazzle of outdoors—all the flat fields round the house turned in the sun, to the brilliance of water—made lightening cracks in the drawn-down blinds. (31)

5 In a passage that refers to surfaces, it is tempting to suggest that the pair of dashes visually reproduces these surfaces, but more interestingly, the dash-interpolation3 describes a visual trick, due to the blinding sun: a metamorphosis as the fields “turn” into water. Munro’s usage of the dash in “Images” illustrates Dürrenmatt’s argument that a dash signals changes and metamorphosis (50). This is no coincidence in a story called “Images” which conveys a little girl’s perception of the world around her. In

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other words, the dash-interpolation summarizes the major theme of the story. The dashes also evoke the horizontal cracks in the blinds, through which the dazzling light comes in. It is no coincidence either that the dashes disrupt the surface of the text at the very moment the “lightning cracks” are mentioned. The dashes can echo the disturbance and represent the cracks through which the elements that frighten the girl will penetrate her world. All the more so as the suggestion of thunder is also introduced since “lightening” usually refers to flashes of light during a storm, suggesting that the cracks are cracks of thunder. The dash signals the intrusion of the gothic world, as these elements are enumerated after the next dash: “—under the sweating heat the fact of death contained, that little lump of magic ice.” (31) For Catherine Lanone, the room thus turns into “a surrogate Gothic jail where death lurks in the sweltering heat” (Bigot and Lanone 72), with “the disquieting dash representing its dangerous powers of connection and intrusion” (72).

6 On the contrary it seems that the several parentheticals in the first pages contain ordinary scenes of everyday life, which the narrator calls “ordinary repetitions” (31), such as the mother cleaning the white cloth and the light fixture (31) or the aunt playing the piano (31). It seems that in the opening pages, there is a distinction to be made between the parentheticals which contain ordinary scenes and the dash- interpolation signalling the intrusion of the other world. In “Images” several worlds coexist in the narrator’s representation of her memories. The other world is both a gothic world, which the shadows epitomize (35), and another world outside which I am tempted to call “the eerie land”, from an anecdote Munro told Catherine Ross. Munro told Ross that when in childhood she read Dickens’s A Child’s History of England, she began to “read about the troubles in Eerie land”—her own interpretation of “Ireland” (Interview CCC 14). One passage seems to epitomize the moment when the girl steps into the eerie land: she shatters the crust of frosted snow “like frosted glass” and steps over a fence (35). From this moment she describes the escapade with her father along the river, during which the father turns into a pedlar from pictures, the bushes turn into the bush and a neighbor turns into a fairy-tale monster.

7 The opening pages heralds this passage into the eerie land as the sentence conjuring up the dazzle of the sunlight and the lightning cracks foreshadows the later section with Joe. Describing the effect the vision of Joe and his hatchet has on her, the narrator describes herself as “transfixed, as if struck by lightning” and waiting “like a child [...] electrified against the dark noon sky” (38), which echoes the initial image, all the more so as “cracks” and “axe” share the same sound (/æks/). Both passages suggest that the story is all about vision, the capacity to conjure up images—whether we interpret the word “image” as a reference to the optical counterpart of an object produced by an optical device or as an apparition or illusion—as well as metamorphosis.

8 The escapade into the eerie land that culminates in the visit to the cellar-house ends on the top of the hill, which father and child reach after they have “come around in a half- circle” (42). They look down upon the landscape, and the narrator describes “what lay in front of [them]”: the whole basin of country drained by the Wawanash River lay in front of us— greenish brown smudge of bush with the leaves not out yet and evergreens, dark, shabby after winter, showing through, straw-brown fields and the others, darker from last year’s plowing [...] and houses set apart, looking squat and small. (42)

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9 The landscape unfolds after the dash as the enumeration runs uninterrupted for seven lines, as the narrator tries to encompass all that the girl could see. The enumeration ends on solid-looking houses. The dash completes the vision, as order and the normal world are brought back. In “Images” Munro uses dashes to suggest possible entryways and exits into a gothic world and into an eerie land, which mirrors the themes of the story, yet the single dash at the end of the story allows for a return to the familiar world.

“The Peace of Utrecht”: the resurfacing of the past

10 “ The Peace of Utrecht”, a story that depicts the narrator’s visit home, ten years after having left and one or two years after her mother’s death, is punctuated by many dashes and brackets. From the beginning, the narrator uses parenthetical structures to provide details or explanations. She might qualify what she has just written, adding “very likely we are both afraid” (190); or offering “this situation as I call it” to explain the word “this” (193). In other words the narrator seems to use these structures to suggest that she is controlling her narrative and providing her readers with a complete version of events and feelings, as the narrator of “Child’s Play” seems to do, in Duncan’s analysis (154). However in the story, dashes signal discontinuity in the narrator’s representation of the past, since as she puts it herself, the picture is not complete (200) and through the sisters’ reticence to share their feelings about the past, the story is punctuated by many gaps and silences.

11 Details such as the pavement broken up by winter “like signs of a minor bombardment” (194) and the “long grimacing cracks” (197) on the facade of the sisters’ house signal rupture, and the main function of dashes in the story is also to signal rupture and to allow for the resurfacing of the past. First, as the narrator notes the grimacing cracks on the façade (197), a dash-interpolation suggests the hesitation between past and present: “there was—there is—a little blind window” (197). The parenthetical structure does not simply qualify the narrator’s first assertion, as the previous adjuncts did; as the parallel phrases “there is/ there are” are placed next to each other, present and past coalesce. Once in the hall, Helen looks at herself in the mirror and another image surfaces after a single dash: Then I paused, one foot on the bottom step, and turned to greet, matter of factly, the reflection of a thin, tanned, habitually watchful woman, recognizably a Young Mother […] a look of tension from the little sharp knobs of the collarbone—this in the hall mirror that had shown me, last time I looked, a commonplace pretty girl [...] (198)

12 The narrator’s position, one foot up on the step, the other foot on the ground, emblematizes her hesitation, if not stasis. The single dash functions as a pause, and sets off the final elements. It draws attention to the surface of the mirror that serves to conjure up and capture the two faces. Helen has entered an empty house (Maddy is away) only to find that it is haunted by ghosts. In the next paragraph the narrator describes herself waiting for her mother to call her (198) and uses gerunds (“drinking cups of tea”) and the past tense (“she lay”) so that the time when the mother was alive is described with the same tense as the events of the visit home, generating ambiguity. The whole passage relies on a hesitation between past and present which results in the resurfacing of the past. The paragraph ends on an italicized phrase representing the

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mother’s voice, calling—a voice from the past that resonates in the present. Dürrenmatt argues that the dash necessarily signals changes and displacements, including spatial and temporal displacements (50), and it is tempting to suggest that the dashes (both the single dash and the dash-interpolation) evoke the cracks through which the past resurfaces for the narrator.

13 In the next paragraph, although past and present are envisioned together, the dash- interpolation serves a completely different function: “As I talked to my children I was thinking—but carefully, not in a rush—of my mother’s state of mind when I called out” (198). The parenthetical structure contains a perfectly balanced structure with a perfectly balanced rhythm (four syllables with two stresses) on each side of the comma, so that ultimately the pair of dashes also helps to slow down the rhythm as the narrator allows herself time to remember her mother. Interestingly, the next dash- interpolations, two of them inside the same sentence, introduce a different rhythm, and seem to serve yet another function: “I was allowing myself to hear—as if I had not dared before—the cry for help— undisguised, oh, shamefully undisguised and raw and supplicating—that sounded in her voice” (198).

14 Disrupting the larger structure by two dash-interpolations creates an interesting visual effect as the phrase “the cry for help” is not so much between the dash-interpolations as inside a visually-suggested third space, which isolates and sets off the cry. In this sentence the dashes create a halting rhythm, as the narrator accumulates adjectives. As the narrator describes feelings she would not admit to, these parenthetical dashes and the very particular halting rhythm they create help the narrator inscribe subjectivity and affect, one of the functions of the dash that Eric Bordas identifies: “il renforce l’inscription d’une subjectivité énonciative et presque d’une émotion, dont la diction matérialise le souffle conducteur” (np).

15 The parenthetical structures also create an intimate space, which I am tempted to call a space for confession, in which the narrator allows herself to admit to the cruelty that was hers at the time when her mother was still alive. Cicurel argues that a parenthetical structure creates an intimate space, in which the narrator speaks to the reader in a different tone of voice, a whisper, therefore engaging in a more intimate relationship (59). This clearly holds true of this parenthetical where the narrator confesses the brutal and ugly truth: “she must have wept and struggled in that house of stone (as I can, but will not, imagine) until the very end.” (199) The parenthetical is nothing but superfluous; on the contrary, the adjunct is crucial to the whole passage as the narrator who has confessed to having been deaf to her mother’s cries for help and fears, now confesses she will not imagine her mother’s last days. She will express the same reluctance when her aunt describes her mother’s final struggle on her coffin-like bed: “The snow, the dressing gown and slippers, the board across the bed. It was a picture I was much inclined to resist.” (208) Yet the play on sounds (the almost perfect rhythm) and the italics suggest otherwise, turning the haunting image into sounds, an echo that will resonate in the character’s mind and body–there is no escaping the image (see Bigot and Lanone 202-203). At the end of Helen’s visit to her aunts, a single dash reinforces the haunting quality of the visit: “Is this the function of old women, beyond making rag rugs and giving us five-dollar bills—making sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without?” (209).Visually speaking, a dash can also attach the final element to which the reader’s eyes are drawn to the rest of the

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clause. The passage illustrates what Partridge refers to as a “cunning” use of the single dash “to emphasize very strongly a final member” (73). Dürrenmatt argues that a single dash usually introduces a brief pause and disruption in the sentence that sets off the final element (41). In the story, the function of this dash seems to epitomize the narrator’s fate—being haunted by her mother and her guilt.

16 Recalling the single dash that enables the narrator to conjure up the image of Helen as a little girl in the mirror (198), it is possible to see these single dashes as entryways into the “alternative” worlds that, Coral Ann Howells suggests, are “positioned alongside in the same geographical and fictional space” (5). Thus, Howells argues, “realistic street maps of small towns are overlaid or undermined by maps of characters’ inner lives” (5). For “The Peace of Utrecht” is a story of entrapment, with the family home turning into a gothic space and inner jail: “Munro takes us into the haunted house of a domestic horror story where two grown-up sisters are tormented by memories of their dead mother.” (Howells 19) Whether we see the dashes that punctuate the story as a sign that the narrator’s attempts at controlling her narrative fail, cracks through which the past resurfaces or cracks signalling the intrusion of the gothic world, it seems safe to suggest that in “The Peace of Utrecht”, the high number of dashes and parenthetical structures are part of narrative strategies to convey the haunting dimension of the story and to resist closure. The story shows that, as Demanuelli suggests, dashes epitomize cracks and resistance to closure (108).

“A Trip to the Coast” and “An Ounce of Cure”; losing and regaining control

17 “A Trip to the Coast” opens with a description of the hamlet which echoes both Carson McCuller’s world (the opening page of “The Ballad of the Sad Café”) and paintings by Edward Hopper, such as Capron House (1933) or Gas (1040). In other words, the opening suggests the possibility of the almost empty hamlet turning into a gothic space. This is soon confirmed when the narrator describes the trees, gradually introducing changes, until a single dash draws attention to their metamorphosis into ghosts: Harmonious woodlots of elm and maple give way to a denser, less hospitable scrub- forest of birch and poplar, spruce and pine—where in the heat of the afternoon the pointed trees at the end of the road turn blue, transparent, retreating into the distance like a company of ghosts (172).

18 With the trees that are compared to ghosts, the family home turns into a gothic space, a world not of fairy tales but of monsters, ruled by a dominating, verbally abusive grandmother. As the day progresses, the little girl’s “premonition of freedom and danger” (175) that hits her in the dark courtyard turns into a strange “power” after the fight with her grandmother: she had felt as if [...] something had cracked; yes, it was that new light she saw in the world. And she felt something about herself—like power, like the unsuspected still unexplored power of her own hostility… (185).

19 It is no coincidence that the word “cracked” should occur in the passage that describes the surfacing of her repressed emotion. The dash-interpolation illustrates Demanuelli’s argument that a dash emblematizes cracks (108) and I suggest that the dash that sets off the final elements in the sentence visually represents the cracks in the surface that allow these powerful emotions to arise and disturb the character. The passage also

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epitomizes what Ildikó de Papp Carrington identifies as “sudden splits in the surface” when an unexpected event or experience threatens a character’s control (38). However, the story ends not on the grandmother’s death but on a vision of May sitting on the step of the store, revealing stasis and intimating inability to act and move, even after the death of her grandmother. In this story, the cracks in the surface are not exploited since May’s new power or empowerment is cut short by her grandmother’s death.

20 By contrast, in “An Ounce of Cure”, powerlessness is mitigated by the narrator’s attempts to regain control. A first-person narrative, “An Ounce of Cure” is the story with the highest number of parenthetical structures and ostentatious punctuation marks in the collection. It is quite clear that throughout the story, Munro shows what Carrington has identified as the split between observer and participant (3-32; 13-108). The narrator describes the humiliating experience of being in love with the boy who jilted her, getting drunk and finding herself half-naked in front of her employers. Dashes, commas, semi-colons and even exclamation marks punctuate the passage where the narrator describes her plight at the Berrymans’, for instance the results of her having drunk too much and too quickly: My head sank back; I closed my eyes. And at once opened them, opened them wide, threw myself out of the chair and down the hall and reached—thank God, thank God!—the Berrymans’ bathroom, where I was sick everywhere, everywhere, and dropped like a stone. (81)

21 These punctuation marks and the repetitions create the rhythm that mimics the girl’s panicked feelings, the surge of sickness, and the rush to the bathroom. They create a vivid and, more importantly, comic scene. The dash-interpolation in the passage differs from previous instances as it belongs to the scene.

22 By contrast when the narrator describes the arrival of the Berrymans she uses two dash-interpolations that convey her comments as narrator: And there—oh, delicious moment in a well-organized farce!—there stood the Berrymans, Mr. and Mrs., with expressions on their faces [...] I don’t think I ever knew what brought them home so early—a headache, an argument—and I was not really in a position to ask. (84)

23 The first pair of dashes introduces a pause as she stops to let the reader see the picture she paints. The punctuation marks, the comma and the exclamation mark, insist on the drama and the narrator seems to be calling on her readers, asking them to imagine the absurd farce. Thus the narrator offers the readers “a glimpse of the shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity” (Munro 87), as when she describes the Berrymans’ unexpected arrival, resulting in her powerlessness. “An Ounce of Cure” illustrates what Carrington calls “the most central and creative paradox of Munro’s fiction”, that is to say “repeated but consciously ambivalent attempts to control what is uncontrollable, to split in half to control a suddenly split world” (5). The narrator splits her own self into two, the protagonist who fell victim to her infatuation and who was humiliated when the adults came home, and the observer who can depict her plight with humor, and also comment on her folly.

24 The narrator will tend to use dashes to convey the contrast between her two selves, but will sometimes use both parentheticals and dash-interpolations in close proximity, which reinforces the effect of her speaking with two voices and about two selves: I remember Joyce […] saying that I had become terribly sick from eating—I think she said sauerkraut—for supper, and that I had called them for help. (When I asked her later what they made of this she said, “It wasn’t any use. You reeked.”) (85)

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25 Other dash-interpolations or parentheticals introduce direct contact with the reader, as the narrator adds details that she deems ridiculous, pointing to and admitting to the absurdity of her conduct then: I day dreamed endlessly; in fact if you want to put it mathematically, I spent perhaps ten times as many hours thinking about Martin Collingwood—yes, pining and weeping for him—as I ever spent with him; (77) [...] in order to keep the impact of those kisses intact. (I showed the most painful banality in the conduct of the whole affair, as you will see.) Two months and a few amatory stages later, he dropped me. (76)

26 The narrator is therefore also attempting to assert control over her narrative, as she points to the differences between her former self and her adult self, in particular when she uses the past and present tenses to emphasize distance. As the direct addresses to the reader show, the parenthetical does represent a privileged space of intimate communication with the reader, which Cicurel identifies as one of the main functions of a parenthetical structure.

27 Furthermore, “An Ounce of Cure” is not simply about a girl who underwent a humiliating experience, it is also about a girl who is turning into a storyteller, and ultimately, about the writing process itself. The narrative is characterized by many commas and colons as well as dashes and brackets that all draw attention to the act of composition. At times the narrator seems to be honing her style, looking for the right word as she qualifies her assertions: “I was extremely backwards—or perhaps eccentric —in my emotional development” (86). She tends to introduce several verbs or adjectives to add texture to the story, as when she qualifies “thinking”, replacing it with “pining and weeping for him” or adds an adjective in a less visible parenthetical structure, using commas: “Now here is where my ignorance, my disastrous ignorance, comes in.” (79). Towards the end of the story a single dash sets off her explanation: But the development of events on that Saturday night—that fascinated me; I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvised. (87-88)

28 The verb “fascinated” after the dash mitigates previous words such as “terrible”, “disaster” or “exposure”. Through its ternary rhythm (three adjectives all beginning with a stressed syllable) the passage manages to convey a sense of empowerment, as the girl becomes aware that she might and will use such plots in life to become a writer. Although she depicts a humiliating experience, she is also reminding us that she is learning to transform a painful experience into material. Eventually, the final sentence of the story which is split into two parts, with a semi-colon, epitomizes her humorous attempt at revenge through style and a pun: “I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.” (88) The effect is that of balance, with on the one side of the semi-colon, the narrator as subject, and on the other side, the man as object. Perfect balance for an ironic ending in which, as Catherine Lanone puts it, “the self- possessed narrator is capable of escaping the scenario written by the male gaze” (129), ultimately, the self-composed narrator is in control.

29 “Walker Brothers Cowboy” offers a somewhat similar vision of a character who can change positions and turn from victim into storyteller, with an additional dimension as the storytelling scene is narrated by someone else: After a while he turns to a familiar incident. He tells about the chamberpot that was emptied out the window. “Picture me there,” he says, “hollering my heartiest. Oh lady, it’s your Walker Brother’s man, anybody home?” He does himself hollering,

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grinning absurdly, waiting, looking up in pleased expectation and then—oh, ducking, covering his head with his arms, looking as if he begged for mercy (when he never did anything like that, I was watching), and Nora laughs [...] (192)

30 The single dash draws attention to the father’s histrionics, which are expressed through a series of gerunds, and introduced by the exclamation “oh”; while the bracket is an aside, a comment the narrator adds, for the reader's benefit. She is therefore drawing the readers’ attention to the discrepancy between her father’s version and the scene she related in a previous passage. The father’s position as a storyteller who can change reality in order to turn an unpleasant episode into a funny story is thus highlighted. As in “The Shining Houses”, where the narrator comments on changes that occur when one tells a story many times over (19)—changes or discrepancies give a story “a pure reality”. The narrator indicates that discrepancies are a necessary component in storytelling.

31 Yet the story that emblematizes Munro’s poetics as a poetics that relies on discrepancies and gaps and disjunctedness is one of her earliest stories, “The Time of Death”.

“The Time of Death”: breaking open the surface of the text

32 From the opening pages, the layers of narratives are quite complex as a combination of parenthetical structures and single dashes introduces gaps and discrepancies in the embedded stories and the accounts of the day on which a child died. “The Time of Death” opens in medias res, or rather after the event, as the first word of the story is the adverb “afterwards”: “Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch” (89). The child’s death is not mentioned in the opening paragraph, furthermore, the mother’s story (the narrator introduces the mother’s words without inverted commas, but with two verbs and a colon that indicate that the words are hers) is soon interrupted: Leona […] talked, beginning like this, in a voice that was ragged and insistent but not hysterical: I wasn’t hardly out of the house, I wasn’t out of the house twenty minutes—

33 The function of the dash is to represent an interruption which, however, does not occur in the dialogue on the level of the diegesis, rather, it is a trick on the narrator’s part. The narrator interrupts his narrative and introduces a dissenting voice: (Three quarters of an hour at the least, Allie McGee thought, but she did not say so, not at the time. [...] Leona was there in her kitchen going on about Patricia. Leona was sewing this cowgirl outfit for Patricia on Allie’s machine [...] Never was ascared once, Leona said, plunging forward with a jerky pressure on the pedal [...] and my aunt that died—)

34 Within the brackets, a silent voice surfaces and comments on the mother’s words, silently setting her right. We may assume that the parenthetical simply indicates that this is a silent comment. However, the bracketed adjunct also serves as a space in which another story is presented: the aside contains a flashback which describes the scene that took place earlier that day. It also contains Leona’s words as remembered by her neighbour.

35 Allie McGee’s silent comment contradicts the mother’s version, and more precisely the estimated time given by the mother, “twenty minutes”, the last two words before the

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dash at the end of the first paragraph. Interestingly, the mother’s grammar, the double negative of “wasn’t hardly”, also challenges her version of events. The difference between the two versions is critical if one considers the title of the story. The function of the first dash, then, may be more complex than to signal an interruption. A gap between the two versions is opened when the narrator chooses to interrupt the mother’s tale and to let the other version, the other time estimate, surface.

36 After the closing bracket (90), the mother’s narrative is resumed and telling her side of the story she turns herself into a tragic heroine, depicting herself stopping dead in her tracks, looking very white, struck by a premonition (90-91). Not surprisingly, the narrative is punctuated by several single dashes representing her interruptions (89, 90, 91), they express the halting rhythm of her story, and convey her emotion. Furthermore, the story is interrupted by yet another dash followed by another silent comment by Mrs. McGee. A single dash reproduces Allie McGee’s interruption when she starts telling George and Irene about their brother’s death (96), yet I propose that the function of all these dashes is not simply to reproduce the interruptions, rather, they signal disjunction as they create further gaps in the narrative.

37 Secondly, the parenthetical and the vignette it contains are crucial to the understanding of the whole story as the picture of the mother in the passage proves to be very different from the picture offered by Leona herself. The flashback whose focalizer is Allie McGee portrays Leona as a careless woman who “raced the sewing machine and [...] pulled the thread straight out to break it” (89). In the context of the child’s death, the actual thread evokes a metaphorical thread, the thread of life. In other words, in the space of the parenthetical, a suggestion that the careless mother is responsible for the death of her child suddenly arises.4

38 However a later passage suggests another hypothesis when the story moves backward, to the time before the accident, when the children were playing: “George and Irene had been playing their cut-out game, cutting things out of the catalogue” (92). The determiner “the” conveys the ordinariness of the scene since any Canadian reader would understand the reference to be to Eaton’s catalogue. But the ordinary scene and the innocent game are given a sinister dimension through repetition—there are eight occurrences of the word “cut” (“their cut-out game”, “cutting things out of the catalogue”; “this family they had cut out of the catalogue”; “they cut out clothes for them”; “the way you kids cut out!”; “you didn’t even cut any fold-over things”) in a passage that culminates in Patricia’s decision to pick up the scissors: “she took the scissors and cut very neatly” (92). If the mother is depicted as likely to break the needle and breaking the thread, the second passage shows Patricia taking charge of the scissors and the absence of grammatical object in the phrase “cut very neatly” is striking. Secondly, “neatly” is one among several adverbs such as “competently” (93) and “expertly” (93) that generally describe Patricia’s gestures and which suggest that Patricia is usually competent and efficient when she acts, which now casts doubt as to the version of a purely accidental death. In other words, the passages show conflicting versions and possibilities, alternately suggesting that the mother and the girl are to be held responsible.

39 The ambiguity in the story is made possible by the fact that the accident has been edited out, which is materialized on the page by the blank space that separates the moment when Patricia decides to boil water in order to scrub the floor and the decision to send the children to Mrs McGee’s (94). In other words, the cut out game is mirrored

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by the narrator’s own narrative game, his having cut out the accident in his narrative. The opening pages which combine two single dashes and a pair of brackets have introduced a disruption in the narrative flow, opening gaps through which different versions of the story surface, and introducing the ambiguity which is compounded by the silence surrounding the accident itself. The narrative is full of holes, most notably the gaping hole of the time of death itself, a hole through which the story of a death by murder, doubling the story of a death by accident, may emerge.

40 Francine Cicurel argues that dashes can be seen as visible traces (stitching marks) of what the French critic Michel Charles calls “ghost texts” (Cicurel 61; Charles 170; 178). Michel Charles proposes that for some readers ghost texts (textes fantômes) are hidden behind the text written by the author. Ghost texts only exist in the reader’s imagination although they are undoubtedly triggered by elements in the text itself (Charles 208). The high number of dashes in “The Time of Death”, as cuts in the surface of the text, and the editing out of the child’s death make it possible for the reader to imagine that Patricia killed her brother. Furthermore when one considers Munro’s entire oeuvre, it is also tempting to see the dashes as opening gaps through which later stories by Munro may surface in the memory of the reader who is familiar with these stories. “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” (The Progress of Love) tells the story of an accident endangering a child who is surely learning-disabled (the child’s brother shoots a gun during a children’s game, either by accident or by intent). “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” exposes the boy’s desire to be rid of his impaired brother, but there is no certainty as to what happened. By contrast, the narrator of “Child's Play” admits to having conspired with her best friend in the death of a “special girl” when she was a child. Verna, one of the “special” children at summer camp, drowned after a wave caused the three girls to lose their footing in the water, when the two friends placed their hands on Verna's head, effectively preventing her from rising to the surface. Although the narrator states “[t]his could have been an accident” (221), she describes Verna’s struggle and points to how difficult it was for the girls not to lose their grip on Verna’s head. Verna was not the narrator's sister but was believed to be, which horrified the narrator: “the other girl said a horrifying thing to me. She said, “I used to think that was your sister.” (199) The narrator’s horror at being mistaken for Verna’s sister speaks volume in the context of Munro’s stories such as “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” and “The Time of Death”.

41 Interestingly, the word “afterwards” also features in the opening sentence of the latter story5. These later stories shed a disquieting light on Patricia’s actions. Many of Munro’s later stories about murder rely on the technique of multiple versions that prevents disclosure and closure6 and “The Time of Death” proves to be an interesting early instance of Munro’s refusal to disclose the truth. She clearly uses parenthetical structures and dashes as a means to introduce ambiguity and resist closure.

Conclusion

42 I have attempted to show that Munro uses ostentations adjuncts and punctuation marks in very specific ways in each story, as devices which enable her to emphasize the effects conveyed by other stylistic devices. A story such as “An Ounce of Cure” shows that first-person narratives tend to use dashes to convey the split between narrator and character. Dashes proliferate in stories where emotions and loss of control arise, as

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well as in stories where the presence of another world is suggested. In “Images”, dashes are clearly used to intimate changes and metamorphoses while “The Peace of Utrecht” suggests that parenthetical structures may very well be used to express confessions that challenge the surface and composure of the character but can indicate entryways and exits, allowing the past to resurface. “The Time of Death” gives intimations of what Adrian Hunter calls Munro’s interrogative narrative style, with punctuation marks and parenthetical structures that emphasize the gaps in the story. Dürrenmatt argues that texts that are punctuated by dashes belong to a type of interrogative writing—one that is characterized by silences, gaps, discontinuities, and a resistance to closure and disclosure (88), and this holds true of Munro’s early stories.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AUTHIER-REVUZ, Jacqueline & Marie-Christine LALA (éds). Figures d’ajout. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002.

BIGOT, Corinne. Alice Munro: les silences de la nouvelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014.

BIGOT, Corinne, and Catherine Lanone. Sunlight and Shadows, Past and Present. Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades. Paris: Puf.

BORDAS Eric. “Fantaisie ponctuante de tirets ponctuels dans les essais et nouvelles de 1846-& 1848 de Charles Baudelaire.” Revue La Licorne: La ponctuation (2000) vol. 52 En ligne: http:// licorne.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/document5706.php (last consulted 24/12/2014).

BOUCHERON-PETILLON, Sabine. “Parenthèses et tiret double : une autre façon d’habiter les mots”, La Licorne (2000) vol. 52: 179-87.

BOUCHERON-PETILLON, “Parenthèse et double tiret : remarque sur l’accessoirité syntaxique de l’ajout montré”. in J. Authier-Revuz et M.-C. Lala (eds) Figures d’ajout. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002, p. 123-130.

CARRINGTON, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable. Dekalb : N. Illinois University Press, 1989

CHARLES, Michel. Introduction à l’étude des textes. Paris: Seuil, 1995.

CICUREL, Francine. “ Le texte et ses ornementations”. J. Authier-Revuz & M.-C. Lala (éds), Figures d’ajout. Paris : Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002, p. 51-63.

DEMANUELLI, Claude. Points de repère. Cahiers du Cierec. Saint Etienne: Université de Saint Etienne, 1987.

DUNCAN, Isla. Alice Munro’s Narrative Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

DÜRRENMATT, Jacques. Bien coupé mal cousu. De la ponctuation et de la division du texte romantique. Saint Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1998.

HOWELLS, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

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HUNTER, Adrian. “Story into history: Alice Munro’s Minor Literature” English (2004) vol. 53 (207): 219-238.

MUNRO, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) London: Vintage, 2000.

MUNRO, Alice. The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986.

MUNRO, Alice. Interview with Geoff Hancock. Canadian Writers at Work, Interviews with Geoff Hancock. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 187-224.

MUNRO, Alice. Interview with Catherine Ross. Canadian Children Literature (1989), vol. 53: 14-24.

MUNRO, Alice. Too Much Happiness. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009.

NUNBERG, Geoffrey. The Linguistics of Punctuation. Stanford, Calif. : CSLI, 1990.

VENTURA, Héliane. “The Ethics of Responsibility from Accident to Murder in Alice Munro’s ‘The Time of Death’ and ‘Child’s Play’” Conference “The Inside of a Shell: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades”. 6-7 November 2014, ENS Lyon.

NOTES

1. Duncan argues that the unusually high number of parenthetical structures in “Child’s Play” corresponds to the narrator’s desire to be in control. I have subscribed to this reading, adding however that in one key sentence the function of the dash-interpolation is to contradict the narrator’s version (93-94). The sentence that claims that after the murder she and her friend simply resumed their old lives contains a parenthetical structure that disrupts fluency and, in doing so, gives the lie to this claim. 2. Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades, London : Vintage, 2000. 3. Geoffrey Nunberg uses the word ‘parenthetical’ to refer to the parenthetical bracket and calls the parenthetical dash a ‘dash-interpolation’. I will use these words when comparing the structures. 4. At a recent conference devoted to Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, Héliane Ventura showed that the parenthetical paragraph contains the words ‘liable’ in connection with ‘break’: “it’s liable to break the needle” (89), which suggests the mother’s responsibility in her child’s death, due to the polysemy of the word “liable”. Conference The Inside of a Shell, Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades”, 6-7 November 2014, ENS Lyon. 5. “I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards.” 6. “The Love of a Good Woman” (The Love of a Good Woman) and “A Wilderness Station” (Open Secrets) would be cases in point, while a story such as “Fits” (The Progress of Love) reveals gaps in the protagonist’s version of events.

ABSTRACTS

The essay looks at Munro’s use of dashes and parenthetical structures in four stories from the collection Dance of the Happy Shades. As stylistic devices they often illustrate the major themes of a story, and as they disrupt the surface of the text, they create entryways and exits; as they

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epitomize discontinuities, they are also elements that explain the interrogative quality of Munro’s style.

INDEX

Keywords: punctuation, parenthetical structures, dash, discontinuity

AUTHOR

CORINNE BIGOT Corinne Bigot is Senior Lecturer (MCF) at the University Paris Ouest Nanterre. She received her PhD from Paris Ouest Nanterre in Canadian Literature with a dissertation on silence in Alice Munro’s short stories. Her areas of specialization include Canadian Literature and narrative studies, and the representation of landscape. Her publications to date have focused on the Canadian writer Alice Munro with particular emphasis on the use of typography and reticence as a narrative strategy. She recently published essays on gender and colonial space and nineteenth- century Canadian women writers. She is currently working on several projects on Munro’s most recent collections, and has just published a monograph on Alice Munro’s stories with Presses Universitaires de Rennes, entitled Alice Munro les silences de la nouvelle. She published an essay on Alice Munro’s use of italics with the Bulletin de la société de stylistique anglaise (vol 31) in 2008.

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Alice Munro’s Conversational Style

Linda Pillière

1 One of the features of Alice Munro’s style that has been remarked upon by the critics is the conversational tone of her short stories. Toolan, in his study of the short story “Circle of Prayer” remarks upon its “’conversational’ tenor” (2010, 316), Duncan, in her study of a different short story, “Passion”, draws attention to Munro’s colloquial style (2011, 109) and Howells (1998, 15) goes as far as to label Munro’s “mode of storytelling as gossip”. These remarks refer, of course, to later stories by Munro, yet I would argue that in the collection of fifteen stories that were published under the title Dance of the Happy Shades, we can already perceive those features that were to become the hallmark of her style. One of her editors, Daniel Menaker is quoted as saying that he never edited her style because “her style was her voice, her natural way of speaking at its very best” (Thacker 2005, 447). How exactly Munro achieves this conversational style is one of the questions I wish to examine in this article.

2 Obviously, a written text, such as the short story, cannot reproduce conversation per se. However much we may think that we are hearing a speaking voice, it is of course an illusion. At the most obvious level, speech contains a whole host of extralinguistic and paralinguistic devices, such as gesture, intonation and rhythm that will be absent from a written text, and although the narrator may create the illusion of directly speaking to an addressee, there will be no spoken response from the addressee or reader, no turn- taking will occur. But to insist on the irreconcilable differences between the two modes is to miss the point. What is important here is that Munro’s short stories contain a sufficient number of the characteristics of prototypical speech for literary critics and readers alike to identify her style as being conversational.

3 So how exactly do we identify a conversational tone or style, and what light might this shed on Munro’s writing in general? In order to answer these questions, I shall be adopting a stylistic approach. In other words, I will seek to demonstrate that textual meaning is created through the use of language and specific language patterns and that a close study of these patterns can help explain how a literary effect is created.

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A Conversational Style

4 When we think of the differences between spoken and written language, one difference that immediately springs to mind is the use of contracted forms in speech: My parents didn’t drink. They weren’t rabid about it. (75)1

5 Yet this distinction, however well-founded, will not reveal all the complexities of Munro’s conversational style. A more profitable approach would be to examine the extensive research that has been carried out, over the last thirty years or so, on the relationship between spoken and written language. The different strategies involved have been studied by linguists such as Beaman (1981), Biber (1988), Chafe (1982) Tannen (1982) and Carter and McCarthy (2006), though this list is far from exhaustive. Biber (1988, 1995) has attempted to identify the characteristics of spoken and written English through the analysis of several corpora, based on the hypothesis that the co- occurrence of certain linguistic features corresponds to a specific discourse function. In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al., 1999) a whole chapter is devoted to the grammar of conversation. While stereotypically narrative texts are composed of “past tense verbs, 3rd person pronouns, and communication verbs controlling that-clauses” (Biber 2004, 22), interactive discourse contains present tense verbs, contractions, private verbs such as assume and believe, and that deletions. Although conversation may contain patterns of variation, when compared to written registers it is “distinctive in being extremely interactive, involved, focused on the immediate context and personal stance, and constrained by real-time production circumstances” (Biber 2004, 30). For Chafe (1981), the fundamental characteristics of spoken language can be categorized under the dimensions of involvement and fragmentation, whereas the dimensions of integration and detachment cover the various features of the written mode. Chafe was aware that this distinction really refers to two extreme points on a continuum and that the distinction between written and spoken modes may not always be so clear-cut, and linguists such as Ochs have been quick to point out that a “novelist trying to recreate a casual situational context will use many of the features […] of unplanned discourse, so that the basic dichotomy may not always hold” (1979, 77). Moreover for Tannen, “the difference between features of language which distinguish discourse types reflects not only – and not mainly – spoken vs written mode, but rather genre and related register growing out of communicative goals and context” (1982, 18). She also argues that literary language in the written short story generally makes use of the features of spoken discourse “to create the kind of knowing (…) basic to oral performance: subjective knowing, established through a sense of identification between audience and performer or audience and characters in the text” (1982, 1).

6 Nevertheless, Chafe’s dimensions of involvement and fragmentation offer us a useful basis for analysing conversational style and I shall begin my analysis of Alice Munro’s short stories in the light of these two dimensions, with the hypothesis that certain choices of linguistic structures are functionally motivated.

Involvement

7 Involvement can be understood at three different levels. There is “self-involvement by the speaker; interpersonal involvement between speaker and hearer; and involvement

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of the speaker with what is being talked about” (Tannen 1989, 27). Eleven of the fifteen short stories in the collection entitled Dance of the Happy Shades are written in the first person, so it is hardly surprising to discover that they illustrate these levels of involvement to varying degrees.

8 The speaker’s involvement with the addressee is illustrated most clearly through the use of the second person pronoun in such a way that it could denote the actual reader: “I showed the most painful banality in the conduct of this whole affair, as you will see” (76); “I would get a feeling of love, if that is what you want to call it” (134); but also through the use of direct questions: “If someone asked her where she got it, and she told them, what would I say?” (106); “For instance, if I hadn’t been in a stupor over Ted Forgie, would I have taken a different view of Clare? Not likely” (135). There is even the occasional imperative: “Never mind the Malleys,” the narrator tells the reader, in “The Office” (63).

9 The speaker’s personal involvement, in the sense of disclosure of self, is marked through naming herself as the subject of discourse, through the use of the first person pronoun as subject “I”, object “me”, and in the possessive forms “my” and “mine” (as well as the first person plural “we”, “us” and “our/s”). It is also marked through the choice of lexical verbs such as “think”, “feel”, “know” in the main clause, where these denote mental operations that the speaker alone is at liberty to comment on. While in written discourse these verbs of cognition tend to be followed by “that”, it is striking that in the first person narratives “that” tends to be omitted: “I knew it would be” (106); “I decided I had better work hard” (123); “I know it serves me right” (129), which corroborates Biber’s findings regarding subordinator that deletion (2004).

10 Personal stance is also illustrated through a number of discourse markers such as “well” : “If there was anything he couldn’t explain, well, he would just forget about it” (145); “but I might think well, awful as it is its (sic) something happening and its been a long winter” (141). Discourse markers serve to “bracket units of talk” (Schiffrin 1988, 35), thus signalling to the addressee how what follows or precedes should be interpreted. “No” also functions as a discourse marker, correcting a preceding statement: I (…) walked into the kitchen and decided to get drunk. No, it was not like that. I walked into the kitchen to look for a coke or something. (79) and through degree adverbs that serve to emphasize, such as “really”: “It was really the sound of the word “office” that I liked” (60).

11 The first person narrator in Munro’s short stories is both the young girl in the story and the older more reflective adult. Although there are moments when the older narrator’s voice seems to break through, most of the time the narrator refuses to bring to the fore her superior knowledge of events, preferring to hide behind the epistemic stance of uncertainty such as “perhaps”, “I do not know” (107), or ‘hedging’ perception copular verbs such as “appear” and “seem”. Such comments on the utterance itself, or on the context of utterance, correspond to the third level of involvement.

12 Ochs (1979) identifies the preference for deictic modifiers, as opposed to the use of the indefinite or definite articles, as also being a characteristic of informal spoken discourse. Several examples of the use of deictic this instead of the definite article are to be found in the short stories: “I thought, not for the first time, well reading this letter any fool can see there is not going to be another” (135). The use of “this” can also

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be related to greater speaker involvement with the context of utterance, as the deictic “this” serves to situate the referent within the sphere of the speaker in terms of space and time (Fraser and Joly, 1979). Its use is not just in opposition to the use of the indefinite or definite article, as it can also be used instead of the zero article, as in the following example, or even on occasions the pronoun “it”, serving to focus on the referent, to foreground information: “This Mason Williams was one of the heroes of the school” (153); “This did not prove to be a concrete hardship at all” (87). In the first instance, the rest of the paragraph describes the boy in question; in the second, the reason why not going out before her sixteenth birthday was not considered a hardship by the narrator is expanded upon in the passage that follows. In both cases, “this” serves to introduce the topic which the narrator has decided to focus upon.

13 Although Chafe distinguishes three levels of involvement, Tannen underlines that these levels often intertwine (1989, 138). The use of “fuzzy terms” or indefiniteness, also equated with the mode of speech, is one example where several levels of involvement are present. These expressions of vagueness occur in varying forms in the short stories. There are nouns such as something and hedges such as sort of, kind of: I walked into the kitchen to look for a coke or something. (79) Then my father and I walk gradually down a long, shabby sort of street. (2) a kind of wretchedness and shame spread through me. (33)

14 While from one point of view these expressions can illustrate the speaker’s involvement with the context, it can also be argued that they have other discourse functions (Overstreet 1999), including creating a rapport with the listener, inviting them to fill in the blanks as it were. When such expressions occur at the end of the sentence, as in the first example above, they extend the sentence beyond its grammatical completeness, thus suggesting a link between the linguistic strategy at the microtextual level and Munro’s lack of closure and indeterminate endings in her short stories at the macrotextual level.

15 In spite of these similarities between the use of imprecisions in Munro’s short stories and in conversation, there are important differences, which we should not lose sight of. In conversation there is a shared context, which allows the speaker to be far more imprecise, as the addressee is presumed capable of reconstructing what is missing. Thus, there is likely to be far more referential vagueness in ordinary conversation than in a short story. In the latter, an excessive use of imprecision would render the story difficult to read, as the reader would end up with no clear picture of what was happening. Imprecision can also play a different role in written narrative. It may be the mark of an unreliable narrator or it may be used to reflect the specific mind-style of a character. Semantic imprecision, for example, may be a sign that the narrator or character is unable to identify what s/he is describing, as in the case of a young child (Pillière 2001), while epistemic modality, the use of could and might may reveal the narrator’s stance towards the information given.

16 The use of imprecision can also be linked to the circumstances of conversation itself: conversation takes place in real time, thus preventing the speaker from being able to plan their utterances in advance. This brings us to the second dimension outlined by Chafe: fragmentation.

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Fragmentation

17 Biber underlines that in conversations, the “words and grammatical organization [are] composed on the spot, as the conversation itself unfolds. There is little time to plan ahead, or to edit afterwards” (1995, 3). In fact there are three principles of online production for spoken English grammar: “keep talking”, “limited planning ahead” and “qualification of what has been said” (Biber et al. 1999, 1066-7). These factors have inevitable repercussions on the syntax. When we converse, we can only hold so much information in our memory at one specific moment, and the speaker can only plan so far ahead in what s/he wishes to say. As a result the subject of a spoken sentence tends to be simple, while the predicate may be more elaborated. Lack of advance planning can also result in the message being modified or elaborated retrospectively.

18 The typical linguistic features that result from these pressures of online production are hesitations, repetitions, and incomplete sentences. However, once again, how these features are represented in a literary text may vary. In everyday speech, hesitation is often marked through conversation fillers such as “er” and “um”, expressions that rarely figure in the reproduction of speech in literature. It is, however, possible to leave utterances incomplete, to change thought mid-sentence or to include parenthetical structures, to create the impression of the speaker elaborating their thoughts as they speak: But it really doesn’t make me feel very gay – worse still, it doesn’t really surprise me – to remember all the stupid, sad, half-ashamed things I did. (77)

19 Perhaps the most striking aspect of Munro’s style in this respect is the constant way the message is elaborated upon retrospectively. This is achieved in a number of ways. Firstly, adjectives are frequently postposed instead of being fully integrated into the noun phrase. Chafe (1994) identifies the use of attributive adjectives as being one of the features of written texts, illustrative of the dimension of integration. In Munro, the various adjectives, far from being integrated, are frequently juxtaposed after the noun phrase, appearing to be an afterthought, as if the narrator is exploring the description, the meaning of what she is saying, or revising what she has just said: a good dress, navy blue with little flowers, sheer, worn over a navy-blue slip. (5) The grain boats, ancient, rusty, wallowing. (2)

20 Chafe remarks that when people are talking they “proceed to express one idea after another until they reach a point where they suddenly decide they have come to some kind of closure” (2008, 10). Once again, there is a link between the linguistic strategy and Munro’s narratives where “the message has no end, always woven into another message” (Blodgett, 84).

21 In such re-elaboration, the adjectives are not coordinated by a coordinator such as “and”, but simply separated by commas, thus presenting the details in a fragmentary fashion (Pillière 2005); they do not form a synthetic, unified whole. The list of modifiers could be extended ad inifinitum. In the second quotation, note how the final adjective “wallowing” introduces a comment on the scene and belongs to a different lexical field than the first two, which simply characterise the boats’ state of repair. “Wallowing” has two possible meanings: floundering in water, but also self-indulgence (especially in despair). In the second instance, we would have a case of hypallage, the adjective being semantically accurate of the mother’s behaviour, and such a comment could only belong to the older narrator. This may be a little far-fetched but it would confirm Blin’s

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analysis of asyndeton in Munro’s fiction as signalling a shift of narrative voice (Hetherington-Blin 2006). Hooper commenting on the following sentence from the opening of “Walker Brothers Cowboy”: “sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful” (1), remarks that “the word ungrateful suggests an adult view of events; that the narrator is recalling this incident as an adult (2008, 2). Again the reader is left with the impression that the narrator’s reflections are being constructed as the text unfolds, rather than existing prior to it. This gives the text a spoken feel.

22 At times, the sequence of noun phrases creates a crescendo effect: with dignity, with bitterness, with no reconciliation. (4) with the final prepositional phrase containing both a negation and a higher number of syllables. Yet, once again, the nouns form a strange collocation, introducing varying levels of interpretation of the mother’s reaction to being “flung onto a street of poor people” (4). The final noun phrase “no reconciliation” introduces a temporal dimension, describing both the present state of affairs and the state of things to come. In so far as it expresses a judgement through hindsight, we can discern the voice of the older narrator, contributing to the multi-layered perspective of Munro’s style. But these multilayers are not woven into an integrated whole On the contrary they are added, a step at a time, as the narration progresses, thus once more creating a conversational tone to the passage.

23 Another characteristic form of elaboration to be found in these short stories is the elaboration of a noun phrase, which frequently involves repetition of the initial noun preceded by a modifying adjective or followed by postmodifiers: I noticed the smell in the house, the smell of stale small rooms, bedclothes, frying, washing, and medicated ointments. (50) flat land, a wide flat plain. (3) Bush lots at the back of the farm hold shade, black-pine shade. (7) a suffiency of good feeling, old-pal feeling. (46)

24 Frequently, there is a movement from a noun phrase whose head contains a general reference or superordinate to a series of noun phrases that narrow down the range of reference, suggesting the narrator is seeking to be more precise: We had our own business, a fox farm. (4) I have a little car Clare gave me a year ago Christmas, a little Morris. (142) or seeking to specify an object’s use: There is one bench with a slat missing on the back, a place to sit and look at the water. (2)

25 In each case we have a clarifying function. Rather than integrating all the information, the narrator prefers a more incremental approach, layering the details, so that each piece of information is added to the clause in a loose fashion. The narrator seems to be adding information as an afterthought as if she realizes the addressee does not possess all the necessary information in order to have a clear grasp of the situation, or a clear picture of what is being described, or is in danger of misunderstanding what has previously been said: In fact, she disliked the whole pelting operation – that was what the killing, skinning, and preparation of the furs was called – and wished it did not have to take place in the house. (111) People are sitting out, men in shirtsleeves and vests and women in aprons – not people we know. (1) We enter a vacant lot, a kind of park really. (2)

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26 If Munro makes frequent use of asyndeton and juxtaposition, she also uses the coordinating conjunction “and”, another feature of spoken language according to Chafe and Ochs. In Pillière 2005, I draw attention to two possible coordination structures that have different stylistic effects. The first is the structure A and B and C, where the speaker chooses to isolate the different elements that constitute the whole. This structure will be preferred when the speaker is constructing a whole or unity – it is less the unity that retains the speaker’s interest than the parts or, to put it a different way, the parts are considered to be greater than the whole and are usually distinguishable one from another. This structure enables the speaker to separate, to dissociate the elements belonging to the whole.

27 The structure A, B and C, on the other hand, associates the different elements and does not bring into play their differences. What counts here is the unity of the group, and it is a structure often used in fixed phrases or in clichés such as “tall, dark and handsome”. These two structures are different ways then of apprehending a unit or group. One is analytical, focusing on the elements that compose the unit. The other is synthetic, underlining the points of resemblance, the shared properties. When a speaker uses A and B and C, she opts for a dissociative point of view and invites her addressee to consider the different elements that make up the whole individually. When she uses A, B and C, the speaker invites the addressee to see the association between the different elements, or considers that the addressee is capable of seeing the shared properties. Given what we have observed of Munro’s syntax so far, it is perhaps only to be expected that she prefers either A and B and C or A, B, C in these short stories, a fact which is confirmed by Blin’s study of “Friend of My Youth” (2012). In Dance of the Happy Shades, the following examples illustrate Munro’s predilection for these dissociative structures: These days our back porch was piled with baskets of peaches and grapes and pears, bought in town, and onions and tomatoes and cucumbers grown at home. (116) These days our back porch was piled with baskets of peaches, grapes and pears, bought in town, and onions, tomatoes and cucumbers grown at home All the houses in darkness, the streets black, the yards pale with the last snow. (142) All the houses in darkness, the streets black, and the yards pale with the last snow. a slightly overcast sky, no sunsets, the horizon dim. (2) a slightly overcast sky, no sunsets, and the horizon dim.

28 Interestingly enough, the final example is flagged by the Microsoft grammar checker with a wiggly line because and is missing, underlining the fact that it is not common in written English.

Conversation – a digressive mode

29 Although these short stories are skilfully put together, the style actually seeks to create an impression of improvisation, thus imitating a casual conversational tone. If canonical word order is SVO in English, there are a number of hanging constituents in Munro’s prose that do not form part of the main clause, creating the effect of being produced with little preplanning. A classic example is the participial clause, even though for Chafe (1985) such clauses are usually associated with writing rather than speech, and used when there is a considerable degree of integration. In Munro, participle clauses are often postposed, introducing additional information about a noun phrase, and correspond to what Quirk et al. call ‘supplementive clauses’ (1985, 1123):

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Children, of their own will, draw apart, separate into islands of two or one under the heavy trees, occupying themselves in such solitary ways as I do all day, planting pebbles in the dirt or writing in it with a stick. (2)

30 The connection between these –ing clauses and the main clause is often loose, and the fact they are often preceded or followed by a comma means that they may contain foregrounded information. The postposition of a participle clause can sometimes be interpreted as a reduced version of a non-restrictive relative clause: we wake my brother and eat it at once in the dining room, always darkened by the wall of the house next door. (5) we wake my brother and eat it at once in the dining room, which is always darkened by the wall of the house next door. These days our back porch was piled with baskets of peaches and grapes and pears, bought in town, and onions and tomatoes and cucumbers grown at home, all waiting to be made into jelly and jam and preserves, pickles and chili sauce. (116) These days our back porch was piled with baskets of peaches and grapes and pears, which had been bought in town, and onions and tomatoes and cucumbers which had been grown at home, all of which were waiting to be made into jelly and jam and preserves, pickles and chili sauce

31 This lack of structural integration, or the explicit signalling of structural relations, is to be found also in detached constituents that are coreferentially related to a pro-form to be found either to the left or the right: That was what the Saylas did, kept a little fruit store. (103) They took the groceries out when he died, old Mr. King. (128)

32 In these two examples we have examples of right dislocation. In the second, the subject noun phrase “old Mr. King” has been moved to the right of the clause with its place being taken by the co-referential pronoun he. While such constructions may at first appear also to give the impression of an afterthought, there is some evidence that they can also serve a pragmatic function seeking to “ secure the continued attention of an addressee, i.e. to maintain a given relation between a referent and a proposition” (Lambrecht 2001, 1076). Carter and McCarthy (2006) use the general term tail to refer to the slot at the end of a clause which may be filled by various grammatical patterns, and they point out that tails are common in spoken discourse, but rare in written texts. Other variant word order that suggests informal speech includes the displacement of the direct object: My mother will sometimes carry home, for a treat, a brick of icecream – pale Neapolitan. (5) I remember a year or two ago, us going past their place. (131) or ellipsis: I never drank anything stronger, left that to Clare. (133)

Imitating the speaking voice

33 One of the ways in which Munro recreates the impression of a speaking voice is to recreate its rhythms and prosody through typography, punctuation and syntax. Munro often has recourse to italics to indicate emphasis or indignation: I had an exact recollection of everything. (77) She said, ’Are you sure everything is going all right at school?’ School! (78)

34 However, it is Munro’s use of punctuation which is most interesting. She frequently chooses to break the sentences into short units imitating how the text might be read

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aloud, but these breaks are not necessarily where you would expect to break the sentence grammatically. While the use of the comma is flexible (Quirk et al. 1985, 1615), it is far more unusual to break a sentence with a period between the main clause and the dependent clause. Take the following two passages: All the houses in darkness, the streets black, the yards pale with the last snow. It seemed to me that in every one of the houses lived people who knew something I didn’t. Who understood what had happened and perhaps had known it was going to happen and I was the only one who didn’t know. (142) We enter a vacant lot, a kind of park really, for it is kept clear of junk and there is one bench with a slat missing on the back, a place to sit and look at the water. Which is generally grey in the evening, under a slightly overcast sky, no sunsets, the horizon dim. A very quiet, washing noise on the stones of the beach. Further along, towards the main part of the town, there is a stretch of sand, a water slide, floats bobbing around the safe swimming area, a life guard’s rickety throne. Also a long dark green building, like a roofed verandah, called the Pavilion, full of farmers and their wives, in stiff good clothes, on Sundays. (2)

35 In these two extracts, we find a period before the relative clause, so that the pronoun is separated from its antecedent: “Who understood what had happened”, “Which is generally grey”. The reader is therefore forced to break the sentence flow as s/he would if reading the text aloud, so that within each section of the sentence, the information it contains is easily processed, thus imitating a frequently observed feature of spoken discourse. Punctuation marks in Munro’s narratives therefore seem to imitate more closely prosodic boundaries than is usual, in a written text, since more often than not, punctuation is also influenced by grammatical constraints. Again we have the impression that information is continually being added to the main clause, and this is underlined by the use of “also” or “and” to start a fresh sentence. Punctuation in Munro plays an important role in pacing the narrative, and in creating the illusion of a “speaking” voice.

A narrative of endless possibilities…

36 The idea that Munro’s style is conversational is often accompanied by another adjective: “discursive” (Clark, 1996), which emphasizes that the ordering of events is loosely connected. In order to examine this aspect of her conversational style, I would like to study the opening lines of the first short story in the collection: “Walker Brothers Cowboy”. As with many of Alice Munro’s short stories, the opening sentence immediately situates the reader in medias res: there is no careful scene-setting, no detailed introduction of character: After supper my father says, “Want to go down and see if the Lake’s still there?” We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda, and sometimes he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice cream cone!” but I call back “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn my head. (1)

37 At the opening of the story, the reader is situated at a specific moment in time, in relation to a preceding moment: after supper. This, then, is apparently no momentous event. At first reading, the simple present tense in after supper my father says, refers to a

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specific event. Note the difference in interpretation, had we had: “after supper my father usually says”. Note too, the clearer reference to a specific moment in the past if we add that evening; “that evening after supper my father says”. The present perfect that follows “she has ripped up for this purpose” refers to an action that has taken place before the moment of narration but which has current relevance for the narrator. From this point of retrospection, the narrative slips into describing actions that have taken place prior to the moment of narration: “she has to make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool”. The use of an adjective “endless” which clearly places the event in the iterative, followed by a noun that is in the plural, “fittings”, makes the narrative slip once more from a linear sequence of chronologically-related events into a series of described happenings that are recurrent. The following sentence, with the repetition of the verb “leave”, echoes the second, and once again appears to introduce an event that can be seen as belonging to a sequence of events, yet the presence of the adverb “sometimes” brings us back to the iterative mode, and the use of the modal auxiliary “will” in the narrator’s words to her younger brother: “You will be asleep”, can be seen both as a prediction and as a comment on habitual action, a prediction that is based on what the narrator knows of her brother’s behaviour, on what she has already observed on previous occasions. A similar use of “will” is to be found a few lines further on in the story where, once again, it first appears that a specific moment is being focused on with the use of “be V-ing”: “People are sitting out, men in shirt-sleeves and undershirts and women in aprons – not people we know”. But this initial impression is undermined by what follows: “if anybody looks ready to nod and say, ‘Warm night,’ my father will nod too and say something the same”.

38 This oscillation between the unique event and the iterative continues over the next few pages. The narrator’s activities with her mother, for example, the walk to the shop and the purchase of the ice-cream, are recounted in the iterative mode through the use of the plural “in the afternoons” and adverbs of frequency “sometimes”, “often”, terminating with the plural “my mother has headaches”, so that when the text finally slips into the story proper and the significant episode “this afternoon”, the ride in the country and the visit to the father’s old flame, Nora, the reader is taken unawares: My mother has headaches. She often has to lie down. (…) “What you need,” my father tells her, “is some fresh air and a drive in the country.” He means for her to go with him on his Walker Brothers route. That is not my mother’s idea of a drive in the country. “Can I come?” “Your mother might want you for trying on clothes.” “I’m beyond sewing this afternoon,” my mother says.

39 Then, at the end of the story, the singular event blends back into the iterative, the evening is like all the other evenings: the sky becomes gently overcast, as always, nearly always on summer evenings by the Lake. The constant movement backwards and forwards from the iterative to the specific creates the impression that the story is casually constructed (Blodgett 1988, 16). The narrative structure does not present us with a clear linear sequence of events, but then neither does the syntax, as we have just seen.

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Conclusion

40 Alice Munro’s prose is perhaps best defined by a remark made by Virginia Woolf, writing in A Room of One’s Own. She describes a text “not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades and domes” (1929, 79). It is worth noting that Woolf has recourse to architectural images to explain what she means, just as Munro herself does, when she comments on her own reading habits in her essay “What is Real”. Munro explains that she does not read a story necessarily from beginning to end, but likes to be able to pick up the story at any point: 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 explaining what a story does for me, and what I want stories to do for other people. (1982, 224)

41 Both Woolf and Munro, different though they may be in many ways, underline that meaning, “what a story does”, is constructed not through a linear sequence or the fixed order of the sentence. For Munro, it is her conversational style, with its constant digressions and elaborations that calls into question any linear sequence of events and which helps support Blodgett’s claim that Munro’s narration assumes the shape of exploration: we cannot help but sense the presence of writing that is discovering itself in the art of writing, prepared, therefore for dead ends, for spaces in its text that require adjustments to a new moment of awareness. (Blodgett 1988, 156)

42 Commenting on the penultimate sentence of the last chapter before the Epilogue to Lives of Girls and Women, Blodgett writes “as it unfolds, the sentence dismantles itself” (1988, 37). This is equally true of many of Munro’s sentences. The result is a proliferation of meaning, as detail is added upon detail.

43 The question that begs to be answered is why Munro so frequently chose the first- person narrative and the conversational mode. Part of the answer must lie with the fact that it offers her the opportunity to introduce a multi-layered perspective that resists closure within the compact space imposed by the genre of the short story; multi- layered both in the number of voices that are present in the text and in the lack of a single linear perspective. Moreover, such a mode requires greater reader participation. The attention to details, while at the same time creating a “speaking voice”, gives the short stories a note of authenticity, enabling the reader to identify more easily with the first person narrator, so that the significant event in the story, when it does finally occur, becomes significant for the reader also, not because it is a world-changing event - on the contrary it is often ordinary to the point of appearing banal - but because of the reader’s involvement with the narrator.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BEAMAN, Karen. 1984. “Coordination and Subordination Revisited: Syntactic Complexity in Spoken and Written Narrative Discourse”. In Deborah Tannen, ed., Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse, Norwood: NJ, Ablex. (45-80).

BIBER, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BIBER, Douglas. 1995. Dimensions of Register Variatio. A Cross-Linguistic Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BIBER, Douglas. 2004. “Conversation text types: A multi-dimensional analysis”. In Gérald Purnelle, Cédrick Fairon, and Anne Dister, eds., Le poids des mots: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual Data. Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain. (15-34).

BIBER, Douglas, JOHANSON, Stig, & LEECH, Geoffrey. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.

BLIN, Lynn. 2012. “Alice Munro’s Naughty Coordinators in ‘Friend of My Youth’” Journal of the Short Story in English. 55 Autumn 2010. [URL : http://jsse.revues.org/1112] (accessed 28 October 2014).

BLODGETT, E. D. 1988. Alice Munro. Boston: Twayne.

CARTER, Ronald, McCARTHY, Michael. 2006. Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAFE, Wallace L. 1982. “Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing and Oral Literature”. In Deborah TANNEN, ed., Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Norwood NJ: Ablex. (35-53).

CHAFE, Wallace L. 1985. “Linguistic differences produced by differences between speaking and writing”. In David R. OLSON, Nancy TORRANCE and Angela HILDYARD, eds., Literacy, Language, and Learning: The nature and consequences of reading and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (105-123).

CHAFE, Wallace L. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAFE, Wallace L. 2001. “The Analysis of Discourse Flow”. In Deborah Schriffrin, Deborah Tannen, & Heidi E. Hamilton, eds., The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (673-688).

CHAFE, Wallace L. & DANIELEWICZ, Jane. 1987. “Properties of spoken and written language”. In Rosalind Horowitz and S.J. Samuels, eds., Comprehending Oral and Written Language. New York: Academic Press. (83-113).

CLARK, Miriam Marty.1996. “Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro’s ‘Carried Away.’” Contemporary Literature 37.1. (49-62).

DUNCAN, Isla. 2011. Alice Munro’s Narrative Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

FRASER, Thomas, & JOLY, André. 1979. « Le système de la deixis - Esquisse d’une théorie d’expression en anglais ». Modèles linguistiques 1(97-157).

FRASER, Thomas, & JOLY, André. 1980. « Le système de la deixis (2) : Esquisse d’une théorie d’expression en anglais ». Modèles linguistiques 2(22-49).

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

HETHERINGTON-BLIN, Lynn. 2006. « La coordination en anglais: l’ambiguité des liens » Thèse de doctorat N.R. sous la direction de F. Dubois-Charlier, Aix-en-Provence.

HOOPER, Brad. 2008. The Fiction of Alice Munro: an Appreciation. Praeger: Westport, Conn., London.

HOWELLS, Carol Ann. 1998. Alice Munro Manchester: Manchester University Press.

LAMBRECHT, Knud. 2001. “Dislocation”. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher and Wolfgang Raible, eds., Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook. Vol.2. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. (1050-78)

MUNRO, Alice. 1982. “What is Real?” Making it New: Contemporary Canadian Stories, ed., John Metcalf. Toronto: Methuen.

OCHS, Elinor. 1979. “Planned and Unplanned Discourse”. In Talmy Givón, ed., Discourse and Syntax. New York: Academic Press.

OVERSTREET, Maryann. 1999. Whales, Candlelight and Stuff Like That, General Extenders in English Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PILLIÈRE, Linda. 2001. “Through the Eyes of a Child: the Language of Katherine Mansfield’s Child Narrators”, Anglophonia/Caliban 9. (143-152).

PILLIÈRE, Linda. 2001. 2005. “And et les séries énumératives”, Anglophonia / Sigma 18. (135-156).

QUIRK, Randolph, Sydney GREENBAUM, Geoffrey LEECH, & Jan SVARTVIK. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, London: Longman, 1985.

SCHIFFRIN, Deborah. 2008. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: CUP.

TANNEN, Deborah. 1982a. “Oral and Written Strategies in Spoken and Written Narratives”, Language, 58. (1-21).

TANNEN, Deborah. 1982b. “The Oral/Literate Continuum in Discourse”. In Deborah Tannen, ed., Spoken and written language: Exploring orality and literacy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. (1-16).

TANNEN, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press.

THACKER, Robert. 2005. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

TOOLAN, Michael. 2010. “The Intrinsic Importance of Sentence Type and Clause Type to Narrative Effect: Or, How Alice Munro’s ’Circle of Prayer’ Gets Started”. In Dan McIntyre, and Beatrix Busse, eds., Language and Style: In Honour of Mick Short. London: Palgrave, Macmillan.

WOOLF, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth.

NOTES

1. All page references are to the following edition: Alice Munro Dance of the Happy Shades. London, Vintage, 2000

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ABSTRACTS

The aim of this article is to explore the conversational style of Alice Munro in the collection of short stories Dance of the Happy Shades. While several critics have commented upon this characteristic trait of her style, especially in her first-person narratives, few have analysed how it is actually achieved. Using recent research on the conversational genre, Biber (1988, 2004), Chafe (1982) and Tannen (1982, 1989), I investigate which elements of the spoken mode are to be found in Munro’s writing, and how they are used in her fiction. Finally, I address the question of why Munro may have chosen to write in such a way, and the light that it may shed on her narrative technique in general.

INDEX

Keywords: conversational, involvement, fragmentation, syntax, short story, first-person narrator, Munro (Alice)

AUTHOR

LINDA PILLIÈRE Linda Pillière is Professor of English language and linguistics at Aix Marseille University. She has published in the fields of stylistics, intralingual translation and discourse analysis. Her current research interests include multimodal discourse analysis of American English and British English texts, narrative voice, and style and ideology in translation.

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Searching for Lake Huron: Songs, Journeys and Secrets in ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’

Giuseppina Botta

1 The first short story of the collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) opens with a question: “Want to go down and see if the Lake’s still there?” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’1). The lake in question is Lake Huron, which adjoins both Michigan (U.S.) and Ontario (Canada). The relevance of the Ontario province in Munro’s oeuvre has been commented on by several critics. In his 1984 article, “Connection: Alice Munro and Ontario”, Robert Thacker, for example, highlights that “in her stories […] the presence of Ontario’s past is not only recurrent, it is ubiquitous” (“Connection” 213). In Thacker’s analysis, the 1930s and 1940s Ontario country landscape is contrasted by Munro’s characters with the more metropolitan one of the 1960s and beyond. As it emerges, the geographical dimension interacts with the temporal one, and generates in the characters “moments of epiphany” (Thacker, “Connection” 213) which come to unveil their identities: “in order to understand who they are, her characters first must recognize where they have come from; almost always this is from rural Ontario, up by Lake Huron” (Thacker, “Connection” 213).

2 Such topophilia, a term with which the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes profound attachment to a specific place, has also been noticed by Reingard M. Nischick: in her works Munro “prefers to “map” a certain Canadian region: southwestern Ontario (sometimes abbreviated as “Sowesto”), more specifically the area around London, close to Lake Huron” (“Gender” 203). Nischick explains that such a predilection is for autobiographical reasons: “Munro’s longtime preoccupation with that particular region and her interest in local history and topography in her writing are linked to her own life” (“Gender” 203). Munro was born in Ontario and, apart from a long period in British Colombia between 1951 and 1972, she has spent most of her life there. Nischick begins her essay “(Un-) Doing Gender: Alice Munro, “Boys and Girls” (1964)” by answering the opening question of Coral Ann Howells’s book Alice Munro (1998), about the necessity of reference to the map of Canada to understand Munro’s production.

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Nischick’s answer is that such a reference “is not really necessary to appreciate Munro’s fictional worlds” (“Gender” 203). In my opinion, this assertion underestimates the importance of geographical connotations in the author’s production, which is interconnected with the questions of self and national identity. with an understanding of the location of story places on a cartographical representation, the reader will be better able to estimate and comprehend certain dynamics which occur in the narrative plot, including those linked to the processes of identity-formation.

3 In literature, the role of the geographical or cartographical elements, has been seen as a source of multiple possibilities for representation: “literary texts both operate within and help to shape the geography of their worlds” (Tally, Spatiality 99) and enable “the reader to generate alternative meanings” (Tally, Spatiality 99). Sheila Hones, for example, highlights the fact that literary maps “have been used […] to connect stories with places and to express in two-dimensional visual form some of the spatial aspects of narratives” (Literary Geographies 85). She goes further, and associates narrative to geography: “[…] fiction can be usefully understood as a geographical event, a dynamic unfolding collaboration, happening in space and time” (Literary Geographies 32). At this point, it will be useful to insert a brief parenthesis about the notions of space and place and their relation to time. Space and place are generally used in common language as interchangeable terms, with reference to terrestrial extensions. However, if examined through the lenses of geography and philosophy, the two terms are far from being synonymous and their relationship becomes rather problematic. Space is an unlimited, indefinite and immeasurable entity, which copes with vagueness and vastness. As Tuan remarks, “The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition” (Space and Place 6). Their differentiation occurs when a space is segmented, circumscribed, bounded theoretically or physically, generating a place. The separation between the two notions, then, becomes clear-cut: What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value […] From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for locationto be transformed into place. (Tuan, Space and Place 6)

4 In Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011), the philosopher Bertrand Westphal emphasizes the reassertion of the spatial dimension over the temporal one which had dominated the literary scenery until World War II. Prior to 1945, space was an ancillary dimension, “an empty container” (Geocriticism 7), “merely a backdrop of time” (Geocriticism 7); it functioned as a framework for the occurrence of the temporal events. According to him, the aftermath of the Second World War constitutes the turning point for the so-called “spatiotemporal revolution” (Geocriticism 13): “time and space become less ambitious, more tentative: the instants do not flow together at the same duration; in the absence of hierarchy, durations multiply; the line is split into lines; time is hereafter superficial. The perception of historical time was overtaken by the relative laws of space-time” (Geocriticism 13). Westphal sees, in the passage to the twenty-first century, a rebalance between the temporal and the spatial dimensions which become interconnected and “inextricably meshed” (Geocriticism 26). On the analytical level, he conceives that there is a strong connection between literature and geography: “If it is the nature of geography to probe the potential of human spaces, it is also in the nature of literature to touch on space, because all literature is in space, regardless of its

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thematic developments” (Geocriticism 33). He identifies maps and mapping strategies as devices to explore the net of relationships between the writer and the construction of fiction, and suggests the application of a geocritical approach to the examination of literary texts.

5 As noted earlier, the relationship between space/place and identity is one of the main preoccupations of Munro’s fiction. Each spatial dimension is endowed with an “identitarian essence” (Westphal, Geocriticism 188), through which the individual makes sense of him- or herself: “human identity […] is inextricably bound up with the places in which we find ourselves and through which we move” (Prieto, “Geocriticism” 18). In the literary context, the creation of spaces and places implies a system of confrontation in the shape of Chinese boxes: the writer becomes a sort of cartographer and traces a map according to their personal vision: “writers map the real and imagined spaces of their world in various ways through literary means” (Tally, Spatiality 79). The reader confronts the geographical component of the text, and, if possible, refers to cartographical representation in order to locate the given spatial coordinates: “the reader of a literary map also envisions a space, plots a trajectory, and becomes orientated to and within the world depicted there” (Tally, Spatiality 79). In the process of generation of their own map, the author transfers their personal motives and perceptions which endow the chart with subjective meanings. Such meanings will be part of the reader’s reception of the place in question, and will provide them with the instruments to understand “the literary map in such a way as to present new, sometimes hitherto unforeseen mappings” (Tally, Spatiality 79). Thus, the modality and the object of representation will enact an endless generation of significance, which will provide the narrative with a “multifocal dynamic” (Westphal, Geocriticism 199).

6 In her works Munro “reveals a concern with the implications of space for identity formation and knowledge acquisition” (McGill, “Distance” 9). She portrays landscapes which possess a certain typicality, or which may be defined as typically Canadian, or typical of Ontario. In The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Finley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje (1996), John Cooke deals with the creation of national myth around Ontario between 1900 and 1965, which has made this area emblematic of Canadian identity: “the most powerful images of Canadian identity, most obviously those provided by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, have been provided by visual art” (Painting 2). As the art critic Joan Murray remarks, the members of the Group, J.E.H. Macdonald, Arthur Lismer, Frank Johnston, F. H. Varley, Frank Carmichael, A. J. Casson, Tom Thomson, Laurence Harris, “became the catalyst for a long revolution in Canadian art” (Northern Lights 11). They considered themselves to be rebels, and were considered as such by their public. In a manner similar to the writers and the poets of their days, they tried to distance themselves from the influence of English tradition. In the imaginative sense, the Group of Seven engaged with the landscape and assimilated it to their artistic forms. In fact, instead of merely transfiguring Nature, they selected its peculiar features and endowed it with mythic qualities. The challenge for these artists was to replace images of an assimilated land, Frye’s “predigested picturesque”, with images consistent with their personal experience. They translated the elements of physical landscape into imaginative forms, which corresponded with the painters’ experience of them. If, on the one hand, it is true that art can be a mirror of the world, on the other hand it is also true that art reflects, primarily, the inner places of the artist. As Murray notes, their “key ideas were

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grandeur and beauty, a sense of the sublime, vastness, majesty, dignity, austerity, and simplicity” (Northern Lights 12). They focused on the topographical shapes of the natural environment and tried to remove the vision of Canadian land as a hostile and unfamiliar environment.

7 Cooke detects in Munro a certain fondness for Alex Colville, Jack Chambers and other members of the Magic Realist school of painting, which, however, does not originate any “specific painterly style” (Painting 82) in her writing, which is much more oriented towards the world of photography. If we cannot speak of a pictorial manner emerging in her work, we can certainly discuss her practice of a “geographical meta-fiction” (McGill, “Distance” 10); according to Robert McGill “her stories meditate on their own strategies and implications in fictionalizing place, and they pay attention to the situated-ness of authors and readers, as well as to the ways in which one might come to learn about place through fiction” (McGill, “Distance” 10). The reference to specific areas and landscapes in her oeuvre has a double function: on the one hand, the presence of national traits in her settings orients the reader towards the Canadian collective identity. On the other hand, the sense of belonging to Ontario, which has an autobiographical origin, highlights the characters’ individual feelings and their struggle for self-perception.

8 In ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’, narration starts in medias res: the reader observes the life of a family after dinnertime. The unnamed protagonist, who will appear as Del Jordan in Munro’s short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women (1971), accepts her father’s provocative invitation for a walk to the lake, in order to verify its effective existence. Such an uncertainty towards the presence of the lacustrine element can be ascribed to the crisis of values provoked by the advent of the Great Depression. Chronologically, ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ is set in the 1930s: “The nineteen-thirties. How much this kind of farmhouse, this kind of afternoon, seem to me to belong to that one decade in time, just as my father’s hat does, his bright flared tie, our car with its wide running board” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 8). After the crash of the American Stock Market in 1929, the world was afflicted by a severe economic crisis, referred to as the “Great Depression”. Canada suffered from the crisis as well:very high levels of unemployment, a fall in the value of money, high taxes, and lowprices and wages. A general sense of discontent and displacement affected the individual, due to the collapse of all established principles, beliefs and ideals which had been a sort of collective heritage. Such insecurity is translated in this short story through the reference to a generic geographical location, the lake, which proves to be an evanescent entity. Tuan ascribes the naming process the power to transform a space into a place. At the beginning of narration, the action focuses on the movement towards an indefinite destination which configures as a space: “Space is given by the ability to move. Movements are often directed toward, or repulsed by, objects and places. Hence space can be variously experienced as the relative location of objects or places, as the distances and expanses that separate or link places, and – more abstractly- as the area defined by a network of places” (Tuan, Space and Place 12).

9 Later on the protagonist becomes more precise in her spatial description, and provides each place with proper names: “This is in Tuppertown, an old town on Lake Huron, an old grain port” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 1); “we lived at Dungannon” (‘Cowboy’ 2); “Sunshine, Boylesbridge, Turnaround – that is all his territory” (‘Cowboy’ 3). Apart from Lake Huron and Dungannon (a small village in the Huron county), none of the above-

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mentioned locations exist. This marks a clear separation between a past based on security and wealth, and a present which sees both the Jordans and the country as a whole struggling with precarious life conditions. Before the crisis, the family lived in Dungannon and Ben, the narrator’s father, was a fox breeder who “sold their pelts to the people who make them into capes and coats and muffs” (‘Cowboy’ 4). With the advent of the Depression, the Ben’s fox fur business has collapsed. On the textual level, this present time of shattered dreams is reflected in the impoverished conditions of Tuppertown, now the Jordan family’s hometown: “The street is shaded, in some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk” (‘Cowboy’ 1); “we pass a factory with boarded-up windows […] Then the town falls away in a defeated jumble of sheds and small junkyards” (‘Cowboy’ 2). The town, like the whole of Canada, is going to ruin, and the displaced individual, essentially powerless, can only witness this disintegration. The “immanence of space’s past in the present” (McGill, “Distance” 12) is represented by the harbor: “[…] the docks where we would go and look at the grain boats, ancient, rusty, wallowing, making us wonder how they got past the breakwater” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 2). This image of the grain merchant ships in decaying conditions exemplifies the impact of the Great Depression on the agricultural sector, which had seen a period of prosperity before the crisis. Such a decline also interests part of the population; as it emerges from the text, the harbor area is crowded with vagrants, who represent a destitute and drifting humankind: “Tramps hang around the docks and occasionally on these evenings wander up the dwindling beach and climb the shifting […] and say something to my father which, being frightened of tramps, I am too alarmed to catch. My father says he is a bit hard up himself” (‘Cowboy’ 2).

10 The main core of ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ is represented by the complex relationship between the protagonist’s parents; the unresolved conflicts within and between Ben and his wife, generate a series of negative emotions (resentment, anger, indifference, frustration) which involve their children as well, and in particular their pre-teenage daughter. The mother blames her husband for the failure of the fox breeding business, which has causedthe family to ‘come down’ the social ladder: “We poured all we had into it, my mother says, and we came out with nothing” (‘Cowboy’ 3). It seems that nothing can placate her dissatisfaction: “No bathroom with a claw-footed tub and a flush toilet is going to comfort her, nor water on tap and sidewalks past the house and milk in bottles, not even the two movie theatres and the Venus Restaurant and Woolworths” (‘Cowboy’ 4). She experiences the family poverty with great discomfort and opposes it through a total closure towards her husband, whom she generally ignores, and towards the rest of the society that shares their same destiny: “Many people could say the same thing, these days, but my mother has no time for the national calamity, only ours” (‘Cowboy’ 4). She uses a strategy of control on her children, and in particular on her daughter. Ildikò de Papp Carrington distinguishes Munro’s characters into the controllers and the controlled, who are involved in situations which expose their “physical and psychological vulnerability” (Carrington, 99). As a reaction, the latter try to free themselves by “splitting […] into two personae: the detached watcher and the experiencing participant” (102). In her relationship with her mother, the protagonist of this story acts as an uninterested watcher, who endures with scant patience her mother’s attempts to mould her, since she is “her creation” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 5): “She has ripped up […] an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful” (‘Cowboy’ 1). According

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to Deborah Heller, one of the most recurring themes in Munro’s writing is that of “a young daughter’s failure, or inability, to meet the demands of a mother” (Heller, 7). Ddespite the girl’s attempts to mirror the image of doll-like perfection that her mother aims for, represented by “wretched curls and flaunting hair bow, scrubbed knees and white socks” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 5), she feels she will never satisfy her mother.

11 By contrast, her relationship with her father allows her to express her real self. She has, compared to her younger and querulous brother, a privileged relation with her father. She considers him to be a leading figure able to educate her, much more than her mother, who rather forces her to observe annoying and boring actions and rituals. According to Robert T. Tally Jr, narrative is “a form of world-making” (Tally, Spatiality 49), and as “narrators or writers survey the territory they wish to describe, they weave together disparate elements in order to produce the narrative” (Tally, Spatiality 49). In this short story, Munro gives to Ben the role of map-maker, since in his account of the origin of the Great Lakes he combines historical, geographical and even geological elements, associated with mimic movements. The girl-narrator reports: He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the north, pushing deep into low places. Like that – and he shows me his hand with his spread fingers pressing the rock-hard ground where we were sting. His fingers make hardly any impression at all and he says, “Well, the old ice cap had a lot more power behind it than his hand has.” And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 3)

12 Caitlin Charman, comments on the autobiographical element which emerges in this passage, by highlighting the fact that “in this piece, and in later stories, Munro is still connecting her personal experience of the landscape” (Charman 272) to social and environmental questions: “She moves from an anthropocentric understanding of the region and its timescales to a glacial sense of time and place” (273). The movement which had triggered the two characters crossing of space is now blocked by this narration, which turns cartography into “a subject for storytelling” (Tally, Spatiality 51). It represents the suspension, the rest, the “pause”, as Tuan puts it, which allows the transformation of a space into a place. After her father’s narration, the protagonist’s perception of time becomes gloomy and she feels profoundly unsettled: “The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility. […] I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 3).

13 At this point, the narration concentrates on the family background and life. After the collapse of the fox breeding business, Ben reinvents himself as a door-to-door salesman, a “pedlar knocking at backwoods kitchens” (‘Cowboy’ 4), who sells diverse items for the Walker Brothers company: “cough medicine, iron tonic, corn plasters, laxatives, pills for female disorders, mouth wash, shampoo, liniment, salves, lemon and orange and raspberry concentrate for making refreshing drinks, vanilla, food colouring, black and green tea, ginger, cloves and other spices, rat poison” (‘Cowboy’ 3-4) The description of her father’s job and her observation of one of his working days, underline the protagonist’s admiration towards him; he shares with the figure of the cowboy, a sort of nickname he attributes to himself, a very strong relationship with the area he crosses during his daily paths: “Sunshine, Boylesbridge, Turnaround – that is all

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his territory” (‘Cowboy’ 3); “his Walker Brothers route” (‘Cowboy’ 6). Like the cowboy, he has his typical garment, which, in his daughter’s words, should make him recognizable: “He wears a white shirt, brilliant in the sunlight, a tie, light trousers […] and a creamy straw hat. His salesman’s outfit, with pencils clipped in the shirt pocket” (‘Cowboy’ 6). He is a very creative person, who, during his solitary ways, entertains himself with songs he has invented: “My father sings most of the time while driving the car” (‘Cowboy’ 7) .

14 In this short story, music is strongly related to the crossing of spaces; as Tuan states “[s]ound itself can evoke spatial impressions” (Tuan, Space and Place 15). As a matter of fact, Ben admits that, while driving, the songs function as a palliative: “[…] it gives me something to do, making up rhymes” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 15). The act of singing works as a background to the description of the changing landscape during the work trip with their father, which the protagonist and her little brother undertake: “Even now, heading out of town, crossing the bridge and taking the sharp turn onto the highway, he is humming something, mumbling a bit of a song to himself, just turning up, really, getting ready to improvise […]”(‘Cowboy’ 7).

15 During narration, there are three samples of Ben’s songs; the first one represents a sort of sung advertisement for his commercial activity: “And have all linaments and oils,/ For everything from corns to boils” (‘Cowboy’ 4) . The second and the third show his comic abilities: “Old Ned Fields, he now is dead,/ So I am ridin’ the route instead…/ Wisht I was back on the Rio Grande, plungin’ through the dusky sand” (‘Cowboy’ 7); “Where are the Baptists, where are the Baptists,/ where are all the Baptists today?/ They’re down in the water, in Lake Huron water, / with their sins all a-gittin’ washed away” (‘Cowboy’ 7).

16 Music, however, appears in the final and most decisive part of ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’. After a long day of visits to potential costumers, Ben pauses at the house of Nora Cronin. Different from what happens the rest of the day, when the children are obliged to wait in the car, this time they enter the house of this particular ‘customer’. Nora at first appears as a strange person in her tone (“[she] comes across to us and says in a flat voice, neither welcoming nor unfriendly, “Have you lost your way?”” (‘Cowboy’ 10) ) and in her apparel (“She is wearing a farmer’s straw hat, through which pricks of sunlight penetrate and float on her face, a loose, dirty print smock and running shoes” (‘Cowboy’ 11) ). Her attitude is a bit too affable towards a salesman. During the narration Munro “emphasizes [the girl’s] peripheral position, her innocent eye’s incomprehension of the most powerful facts of life” (Carrington, 72) presenting her as a naïve young girl. She does not realize completely the kind of relationship between her father and Nora. But the reader assumes there has been a youth love between them or an affair. The protagonist sees this unconventional woman “as a sort of exotic Other” (McIntyre, 53) whose eccentricity causes some astonishment and perplexity in the narrator. Eventually noticing the picture of the Blessed Virgin on the kithchen wall, the girl realizes that the Cronins must be Catholics—for her, very much ‘the Other’. She recalls a relative’s euphemism for this religious ‘impairment’: “She digs with the wrong foot” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 14).

17 Her father’s behavior when he is with Nora unveils to the young girl some unknown aspects of his personality: “She and my father drink and I know what it is. Whisky. One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names I

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have never heard before” (‘Cowboy’ 15). Such an observation intensifies “the child’s sense of darkness and mystery in her father’s life” (Carrington, 73). The fact that Nora suddenly changes her apparel and makes her appearance more pleasant, and her request to Ben to dance with her, do not seem to appall the protagonist, who, instead, “concentrates on her sudden sense of strangeness in a very familiar figure” (73). When Nora turns off the gramophone after Ben’s refusal to dance, the narrative tension decreases and the story quickly comes to a conclusion. The pervading atmosphere of the returning journey is of disenchantment, characterized by an absolute silence: “My father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from the thoughtfulness […] that there are things not to be mentioned” (Munro, ‘Cowboy’ 17-8). Silence, after all, is the absence of noise, which, in the musical context serves to make more evident the sounds which follow or precede it. It constitutes a sort of white space, without a precise outline, which alternates between one place and another. In this short story, the return journey represents a “soundless space” (Tuan, Space and Place 16) in which the protagonist acquires a maturity (and maybe also a mischievousness) represented by her self-imposed silence regarding certain events. She has already crossed the boundaries of childhood.

18 In ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy” the spatial perspective coincides with the creation of the narrative universe. Physical space, at first an indefinite and undetermined entity, acquires the connotation of a place when, during narration, Munro avails herself of a specificity both in relation to the topographic and the toponymic element. The spatial axis intersects with the temporal one, in accordance with Westphal’s notion of ‘spatiotemporality’ , in two cases: through the presence of the autobiographical element, exemplified by the representation of Ontario, which permeates the Munro oeuvre; and through the references to and the representation of the dramatic conditions of Canadian society after the Great Depression. The images of decay, despair and desolation belong also to the individual, who feels completely displaced in a hopeless present made of shattered dreams.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHARMAN, Caitlin. “Secretly Devoted to Nature”: Place Sense in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock”. Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Ed. Charles E. May. Ipswich: Salem, 2013. 259-275.

COOKE, John. The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Finley, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996.

CARRINGTON, Ildikò de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable. The Fiction of Alice Munro. Decalb: Salem, 1989.

HELLER, Deborah. Daughters and Mothers in Alice Munro’s Later Stories. Seattle: Workwomans, 2009.

HONES, Sheila. Literary Geographies. Narrative Space in Let the Great World Spin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

HOWELLS, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998.

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McGILL, Robert. “Somewhere I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Alice Munro’s Fiction of Distance”. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.1 (2002): 9-29.

McINTYRE, Timothy. “Doing Her Duty and Writing Her Life: Alice Munro’s CVultural and Historical Context”. Critical Insights: Alice Munro. 52-67.

MUNRO, Alice. “Walker Brothers Cowboy”. Dance of the Happy Shades. 1968. London: Vintage, 2000.

MURRAY, Joan. Northern Lights: Masterpieces of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Toronto: Key Porter 1994.

NISCHICK, Reingard M. “(Un-) Doing Gender: Alice Munro, “Boys and Girls” (1964)”. The Canadian Short Story. Interpretations. Ed. Reingard M. Nischick. Rochester: Camden, 2007. 203-218.

PRIETO, Eric. “Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond”. Geocritical Explorations. Space, Place and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 13-27.

TALLY Jr, Robert T. Spatiality. London/New York: Routledge, 2013.

THACKER, Robert. “Connection: Alice Munro and Ontario.” American Review of Canadian Studies 14.2 (1984): 213-226.

TUAN, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974.

TUAN, Yi-Fu. Space and Place. The Perspective of experience. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1977.

WESTPHAL, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

ABSTRACTS

In ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ the motif of identity intersects with the notions of space and place through the story of the Jordan family, which has fallen into disgrace after the Great Depression. Munro portrays both the individual and the collective displacement in Canada during the economic crisis. The purpose of this essay is to discuss, through the lens of Geocriticism, the story’s continual reference to the geographical dimension.

INDEX

Mots-clés: Munro (Alice), space, place, identity, geocriticism

AUTHOR

GIUSEPPINA BOTTA Giuseppina Botta (PhD, Salerno) is currently Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities of the University of Salerno, Italy. She has been part-time Lecturer at the University of Salerno between 2008 and 2010. In 2010 she took a Postgraduate Master in Translation Studies at the University of Siena. She has published articles on Margaret Atwood, Steven Heighton, Carol Ann Duffy and book reviews. Between 2010 and 2011 she has been Research Fellow at the Department

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of English Language and Literature of the University of Reading (UK) with a grant from the University of Salerno. She also translated into Italian with Eleonora Rao Atwood’s collection of poems The Door (2007) for Le Lettere (La porta, Firenze, 2001).

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“Here was no open straightforward plan”: Jumbled Space in “The Shining Houses”

Eleonora Rao

1 In this essay I shall look at Alice Munro’s use of place and space in “The Shining Houses”, the second story in Dance of the Happy Shades. Compared to the other stories in the collection and to Munro’s subsequent work, “The Shining Houses” is unusual for its brevity, with almost no events, but very dense in its treatment of place, space and landscape as it portrays a wilderness city transformed into a residential, sort of suburbia, subdivision. In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan proposes a specific differentiation between space and place. He considers space as an area of freedom and mobility, while place is seen as an enclosed and humanized space: “Compared to space, place is a calm center of established values” (Tuan 1977, 54). Munro’s story devotes special attention to both space and place, in a manner similar to Tuan’s conceptualization of them, and also shows their interaction and metamorphosis.

2 This essay considers space and landscape in the story not as inert empty containers; it looks instead at their function as metonyms. As a consequence, space is not subsidiary to plot and character but interconnected with them. Traditional notions of space see it as a kind of stasis, characterized by neutrality and passivity, where nothing really happens. Since the 1970s, a new approach to geography has questioned these concepts and has initiated the so called “spatial turn” within the human and social sciences.1 This new branch of the discipline known as human geography or radical geography sees space as a social construct and therefore constituted through social relations and material social practices. To summarize the main points about space and place in human geography relevant to the analysis carried out in this article, it should be considered, first of all, that space is the product of interrelations, constituted through interactions. Secondly, space should be conceived as the “sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting

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heterogeneity.” (Massey (2005), 2007, 9). Space must be predicated upon the existence of plurality. Thirdly, space must be regarded “always under construction […] always in the process of being made […] never finished; never closed.” (9). Tuan also links space to movement and place to pauses: “From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa” (Tuan 1977, 6).

3 A scenario of outsiders and /or strangers populates Munro’s macro text. Critics have discussed this at length2. This essay examines corollary aspects related to the outsider condition. “The Shining Houses” revolves around the transformation of a rural area into middle class suburbia. An inhabitant of the old rural neighborhood, Mrs. Fullerton, refuses to sell her property, which in the minds of the new residents has some disconcerting qualities: it is dilapidated and smelly, possibly because of the chicken she keeps in her yard. Mrs. Fullerton thus turns into an outsider, and her house and the land surrounding it become the locus of eccentricity in the newly created residential area. The new owners try to find legal ways to force her to sell, and eventually succeed. The story shows how the creation of place by necessity involves the definition of what lies outside. As cultural geographer Tim Cresswell observes, “the ‘outside’ plays a crucial role in the definition of the ‘inside’”. The term place suggests “a tight connection between geographical place and the assumptions about normative behavior. People and practices […] can be ‘in-place’ or ‘out-of-place’”(103).

4 In the story the subdivision called “Garden Place” is meant to provide comfortable dwellings at reasonable costs. Those homes “were for people like Mary and her husband and their child, with not much money but expectation of more” (23). The houses in “Garden Place” with their “vivid colours” and their “geometrical designs” (29) are intended for middle class young families. Here the symmetrical roads are named after flowers and the “ingenuously similar houses” look “calmly at each other, all the way down the street” (23).

5 The story thus encapsulates three figurations or themes that are dear to Munro. First, the representation of an outsider to the community; second, the attention to the representations of homes; the third element, the landscape, is constantly linked to the other two, the houses and the outsider. Furthermore, the landscape at the end of the story metamorphoses and assumes the role of character. This article will look at the spatial dimension of the story intended here not merely as setting. In order to do so, I rely on the work of human geographers such as Doreen Massey and Gillian Rose who see space as something in constant process. Traditional conceptualizations of time and space –Massey argues – see the two opposed to each other where time is the one which matters and out of which History (with capital H) is made. As she puts in plain words: “Time Marches on but space is a kind of stasis, where nothing really happens” (Massey 1994: 253). On the contrary, for radical geographers, “far from being the realm of stasis, space and the spatial are also implicated […] in the production of history” (Massey 1994: 254). Radical geographers speak of space/time and consider the dimensions of space and time “inextricably interwoven” (Massey 1994: 261). Space – they argue – must not be conceptualized in terms of absence or lack. In their positive definition both space and time should be inter-related and as a result an “absolute” dimension of space does not exist: “space is not absolute, it is relational” (Massey 1994: 261). In this perspective space becomes “the perfectly obvious, manifest fabric of social existence, not its mysterious underside” (West-Pavlov 2009: 23).

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6 Many of Munro’s characters pursue an unrelenting search for comfort and security in a house / home and sooner or later discover its elusiveness and precariousness. As, for example, in “Oh, What Avails”: Far back in the house, Joan’s mother is singing along with the radio. She doesn’t know of any danger. Between the front door, the scene outside and their mother singing in the kitchen, Joan feels the dimness, the chilliness, the frailty and impermanence of these high half-bare rooms – of their house. It is just a place to be judged like other places –it’s nothing special. It is no protection. (Friend of My Youth 193).

7 “The Peace of Utrecht” from Dance of the Happy Shades represents homecoming as an impossibility: “I have been at home now for three weeks and it has not been a success” (190). From this opening onwards, home and family fail to provide the comfort and the stability that is traditionally associated with them; what they offer instead is “the dim world of continuing disaster […] home” (191). The sense of bounded reassurance will be shattered, albeit subtly. In actual fact, as the story closes, it is a glass bowl, a “heavy and elaborate old bowl” which will slip out of one of the protagonist’s hands and smash on the floor (210).

8 The power, often negative, that places or houses can have on the subject is beautifully established in “Who Do You Think You Are?” The protagonist makes this painful recognition after having spent some time in the mansion of her very rich prospective parents in law: “She had never known before how some places could choke you off, choke off your very life” (112). This episode shows how place and / or space becomes an agent in ways that could be tyrannical and hard to pin down (Gordon 2000); of how it can elicit desires, then disappoint or reapportion these desires and camouflage the ache of disappointment. There is a kind of unrepresentability about that particular oppressing space, a pressure that has to do not only with social maps but also with what is repressed, hidden, encrypted or unspoken. Space “exerts its own variety of agency, modeling the human actors who have configured it” (West-Pavlov 2009: 19). As Robert McGill argues in his excellent article “Where do you think you are? Alice Munro’s Open Houses”, to “notice when landscape functions as metonym and not as metaphor is to be aware that space is not subordinate to character but interconnected with them” (2002 4 b). In this respect, Munro herself has remarked: “Fiction is all bound up with the? local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place […] The truth is fiction depends for its life on place” (in Rasporich: 122). “In other words – McGill observes – physical space does not dissolve but is all the more important as space because of its relationship with human mental life” (4).

9 In “The Shining Houses” Mrs. Fullerton’s home is first described by Mary, one of the newcomers to “Garden Place” and the only person sympathetic towards the elderly woman. When the story opens she is at Mrs. Fullerton’s to buy fresh eggs. Mary engages in conversation and learns that the older woman has lived alone since her husband walked away without explanation twelve years before. However, the experience of visiting Mrs. Fullerton’s place is far from ordinary. When Mary steps into this property she feels as if she is crossing an invisible boundary to enter alien territory. In particular, the surroundings of the house are baffling to her, in their display of an accretion of old and discarded objects mingled with vegetables and flower beds – all in the most unusual and startling array. This is the dwelling place of an old lady who is definitively perceived by the new community as an eccentric, in a derogatory sense.

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When Mary came out of this place, she always felt as if she were passing through barricades. The house and its surroundings were so self-sufficient, with their complicated and seemingly unalterable layout of vegetables and flower beds, apple and cherry trees, wired chicken-run, berry patch and wooden walks, woodpile, a great many roughly built dark little sheds, for hens or rabbits or a goat. (22)

10 Many of Munro’s protagonists aspire to the solace of home and community which is constantly denied them. However, hard they cling to that idea of the home as place of safety and protection, the reality keeps escaping them. They show a strong need to be part of a collective identity – be it the rural village or a larger town, or even just a “subdivision” (22), as in “The Shining Houses”. The function of the community in providing the reassurance these characters very much need, can be found in what Hannah Arendt calls “The Common”: “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves” (50). The way some of these stories develop, however, shows at the same time also a radical undoing of this common world or community. The world around these characters at somee point in these stories ceases to offer the “comforting illusion of dwelling in common” (Yeager 1996: 10). In “The Shining Houses”, for example, the “community” of the new subdivision establishes its cruel supremacy at the expense of older residents of the place, Mrs. Fullerton in particular. The newcomers in the subdivision strongly need to fulfill their sense of community. As the narrator comments: “But these are the people who win, and they are good people; they want homes for their children […] they plan a community – saying that word as if they found a modern and well-proportioned magic in it, and no possibility anywhere of a mistake” (DHS: 29).

11 In the story “The Office” the feeling of being “sheltered and encumbered […] warmed and bound” (DHS: 61) in one’s home, is set against moments in which the protagonist steps “out of the darkness of sheltered existence” (Arendt: 51); as a result meaning- filled places change into “derangements of anonymous space” (Yeager: 10). This causes the protagonist to feel “exposed” and to experience both freedom and loneliness in such a “harsh” way that they are impossible to bear (DHS: 61). In the end she will renounce freedom and opt for the bounded and reassuring familiar space of home. A more fundamental and encompassing sense of uncertainty and loss of reference points can be found in the story “Images”. Here disorientation and insecurity are connected to one of the characters’ home: “’Whose house is that?’ my father said pointing./ It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come round in a half-circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in the winter, the front door that went unopened from November to April and was still stuffed with rags around its edges, to keep out the east wind ” (DHS: 42).

12 Lorna Hutchinson has effectively summed up Munro’s writing complexity: “Munro deals with the intricacies of human nature and a realism that develops through the extraordinary detail of place and person amidst a mire of ambiguity”. In her stories “the familiar world is inextricably linked to the unfamiliar; it exists only through its darker sphere, and vice versa” (189, 194). It is worth emphasizing that in Munro’s texts, as Robert McGill reminds us “the realist plea is for verisimilitude […] Munro’s concept of what is ‘real’ is more complex than one might first suspect” (2002: 11 a). In “The Shining Houses” as well as in the first story in the collection, “Walker Brothers Cowboy” place and landscape undergo transformations like “a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it,

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but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine” (WBC 18).

13 In addition, the persistent representations and detailed descriptions of houses in Munro’s fiction emphasize the limit (limen) between inside and outside, an edge that promotes dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, as well as acts of trespassing (see Martin and Mohanty 1986). In doing so the story establishes the role of place in the constitution of the normal and the ‘pathological’, the ‘in-place’ and the ‘out-of-place’. To quote Crosswell again, “Place as home thus plays an active role in the constitution of the normal, the natural and the appropriate […] deviation from the expected relationship between place and practice [leads] to labels of abnormality and inappropriateness” (122). As a consequence, when “something or someone has been judged to be ‘out-of-place’ they have committed a transgression. Transgression simply means ‘crossing a line’ [and is] an inherently spatial idea. The line that is crossed is often a geographical line and a socio-cultural one. It may or it may not be the case that the transgression was intended by the perpetrator. What matters is that the action is seen as transgression by someone who is disturbed by it” (103).

14 In the story “The Shining Houses” an imaginary border separates two adjacent areas: the old settlers’ houses and the newly-built “Garden Place” subdivision. The new community’s defense of their secure place is bought at the price of exclusion, denial and blindness. The invisible border between the new and the old area grows more powerful as the story progresses and towards the end transformations occur. Here landscape bounded and unbounded metamorphosize more than once, swapping roles: the supremacy of the new Garden Place is decidedly subdued at night time. Once more space and time are represented as inextricably linked. In the darkness the border between the new and the old areas becomes fluid and indefinite: Mary went out and walked […] up the street. She saw the curtains being drawn across living-room windows; cascades of flowers, of leaves, of geometrical designs, shut off these rooms from the night. Outside it was quite dark, the white houses were growing dim, the clouds breaking and breaking, and smoke blowing from Mrs. Fullerton’s chimney. The pattern of Garden Place, so assertive in the daytime, seemed to shrink at night into the raw black mountainside (DHS: 29).

15 One of the oldest houses, Mrs. Fullerton’s, is surrounded by heaps of debris and relics, in addition to the plants, likewise arranged in no apparent order. The array of the plants and of the old objects do not follow any planned pattern, in clear contrast with the symmetry of the front and back yards of the houses of the subdivision, with their straight edges and perfect flower beds. Here was no open or straightforward plan, no order that an outsider could understand; yet what was haphazard time had made final. The place had become fixed, impregnable, all its accumulations necessary, until it seemed that even the washtubs, mops, couch springs and stacks of old police magazines on the back porch were there to stay (22).

16 For anthropologist Marc Augé, the act of looking at ruins does not involve a journey into history; it implies instead a different and peculiar experience of time, of what he calls “pure time” (36). According to Augé ruins exist through the gaze of the onlooker. Between the multiplicity of their past, however, and their lost functionality, what one is left with is a sort of “time outside history” (41), de-historicized, a-temporal. It is thanks to this pure time – this time without history – that the onlooker is able to achieve a greater awareness and understanding; it is thanks to this moment that the

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spectacle of ruins can offer “a brief rapture of intuition” (38). In “The Shining Houses” Mary, one of the newcomers, who is here the onlooker, perceives the long rows of white houses in construction (she notices they are “not entirely white”) as cause, as she puts it, of “the wound of the earth” (DHS: 23), thus suggesting a slanted critical stance. Mary alone among the newcomers has sympathy for Mrs. Fullerton and does not want to see her forced out.

17 Héliane Ventura has discussed Munro’s landscapes in terms of the ephemeral and of the fragment with special reference to the short story “Vandals” in the collection Open Secrets (1994). Ventura’s argument is pertinent also to the story discussed here: The ‘other country’ which is conjured up in Alice Munro’s writing evidences a mythic and mystic landscape of origins strewn with aesthetic traces which belong in the temporal category of the ephemeral, the half-glimpsed, the transient, such as footprints dissolving on sand, or mist burning away in the sunshine. Munro creates a territory which relies on flux density, on energy and forces. Her ephemeral traces […] move along lines of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that belong in the machinery of desire, on the surface of fluid planes. They repudiate heaviness to suggest the inchoate, transient stuff that dreams are made of [….] In her ironically chiasmatic aesthetics, Munro uses de-vastation as the foundational moment of her writing [and] makes a case for the poetics of the fragment, the scattered bits and pieces, the vanishing, the irretrievable, half-glimpsed, and ephemeral revelations of the minor genre […] called the short story (309; 320).

18 The characteristic of this kind of ephemeral landscape in “The Shining Houses” is suggestive again of dark corners, slanted walls, wild uncut bushes, and of a disordered accretion of discarded objects that characterizes Mrs. Fullerton’s property: And under the construction of this new subdivision, there was still something else to be seen; that was the old city, the old wilderness city that had lain on the side of the mountains […] But houses like Mrs. Fullerton’s had been separated from each other by uncut forests and a jungle of wild blackberry and salmonberry bushes; these surviving houses, with thick smoke coming out of their chimneys, walls unpainted and patched and showing different degrees of age and darkening, rough sheds and stacked wood and compost heaps and grey board fences around them – these appeared every so often among the large new houses of Mimosa and Marigold and Heather Drive -- dark, enclosed, expressing something like savagery in their disorder and the steep, unmatched angles of roofs and lean-tos; not possible on these streets but there. (DHS: 24).

19 The whole scenario evokes Conradian images of an inviolable, jungle-like, heart of darkness, albeit with a fluctuating border. Space and landscape are thus represented as both chaos and order, jumbled and linear: as places that are continually disaggregated and re-sutured. As Martin Heiddegger writes: “A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins its presencing” (153).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARENDT, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

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AUGE, Marc. Le temps en ruines. Paris: Galilée, 2003.

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

CRESSWELL, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

DELEUZE Gilles and GUATTARI Felix. A Thousands Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, 1987.

DVORAK, Martha and NEW W.H. eds. Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context. Montreal: McGill University Press, 2007.

GORDON, Mary. Seeing Through Places. Reflection on Geography and Identity. London: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

HEIDEGGER, Martin. « Building, dwelling, thinking ». Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and Raw, 1971, pp. 151-153.

HOWELLS, Coral. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

HUTCHINSON, Lorna. “Uncovering the Grotesque in Fiction by Alice Munro and Gabrielle Roy”. Studies in Canadian Literature, 33 , 1 (2008): 187-210.

LYNCH, Gerald. The One and the Many: English Canadian Short Story Cycle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

MARTIN, Biddy and TALPADE MOHANTY Chandra. “What’s Home Got to Do with It?”, in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa De Lauretis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 191-212.

MASSEY, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.

MASSEY, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.

McGILL, Robert. “Somewhere I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Alice Munro’s Fiction of Distance.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37.1 (2002): 9-29 a

McGILL, Robert. “Where do you think you are? Alice Munro’s Open Houses.” Mosaic, 35, 4 (2002): 103-120. b

MUNRO, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). New York: Vintage, 1998.

MUNRO, Alice. Who Do You Think You Are? (1978). Toronto: Penguin, 1991.

MUNRO, Alice. The Moons of Jupiter (1982). Toronto: Penguin, 1986.

MUNRO, Alice. Friend of My Youth (1990). Toronto: Penguin, 1991.

MURPHY, Georgian. “The Art of Alice Munro: Memory, Identity, and the Aesthetics of Connections” in Canadian Women Writing Fiction. Mickey Pearlman ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1993, pp. 12-23.

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

SMITH, Rowland. “Rewriting the Frontier: Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice Munro” in Alice Munro. Harold Bloom ed. New York: Infobase Publishing 2009, pp. 153-166.

THACKER, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Life. A Biography. Toronto: Emblem McClelland & Stewart, 2011.

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VENTURA, Héliane. “Aesthetic Traces of the Ephemeral: Alice Munro’s Logograms in ‘Vandals’”, in Tropes and Territory, pp. 308-322.

TUAN, Yi- Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

WEST-PAVLON, Russell. Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.

WILLIAMS, David. Confessional Fictions: A Portrait of the Artist in the Canadian Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

YEAGER, Patricia ed. The Geography of Identity. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

YEAGER, Patricia. “Narrating Space”, in The Geography of Identity, pp. 1-39.

NOTES

1. See in particular Henri Lefèbvre, La production de l’espace (1974), Paris: Anthropos, 2000 (4th ed.), transl. by N. Donaldson-Smith, The Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991; Tuan, Place and Space; Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London & New York: Verso, 1989. 2. Robert Thacker. Alice Munro: Writing Her Life. A Biography. Toronto: Emblem McClelland & Stewart, 2011. Rowland Smith. “Rewriting the Frontier: Wilderness and Social Code in the Fiction of Alice Munro” in Alice Munro. Harold Bloom ed., New York, Infobase Publishing, 2009, pp. 153-166. G. Balestra, L. Ferri, C. Ricciardi eds. Reading Alice Munro in Italy. Toronto: The Frank Iacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, 2008. Gerald Lynch. The One and the Many: English Canadian Short Story Cycle. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Georgian Murphy. “The Art of Alice Munro: Memory, Identity, and the Aesthetics of Connections” in Canadian Women Writing Fiction. Mickey Pearlman ed., Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, pp. 12-23. James Carscallen. The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993. David Williams. Confessional Fictions: A Portrait of the Artist in the Canadian Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Coral Ann Howells, Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

ABSTRACTS

This essay discusses the role of place, space and landscape in Alice Munro’s “The Shining Houses”, a short story from the collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). It takes into consideration the theories of cultural geographers who consider place as a social construct and always in process, in order to illustrate Munro’s skillful treatment of space. In looking at the creation of ‘place’ in the story the essay analyzes the dynamics of being ‘in-place’ and of being ‘out-of-place’ and their implications in the creation and the definition of what is left outside. In addition, the border between the inside and the outside proves porous and generates eerie transformations.

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INDEX

Keywords: space, place, landscape

AUTHOR

ELEONORA RAO Eleonora Rao teaches English Literature and Literatures in English at the University of Salerno, Italy. She has written extensively on Margaret Atwood and on contemporary Canadian women writers in international journals (Daphne Marlatt, Joy Kogawa, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Smaro Kamboureli). Her other research interest is British modernism. She is the editor (and translator with G. Botta) of Margaret Atwood’s 2007 collection of poetry, The Door (La porta, Firenze, Le Lettere, 2011). She is on the advisory board of Aigne, Italian Americana, and Literary Geographies.

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“The text, the image and the implicit in Alice Munro’s ‘Images’ and ‘Postcard’”

Linda Collinge-Germain

Il me semble qu’il y a des tableaux dans l’œuvre de Munro et des photographies qui essaient d’aller au delà des mots, vers un indicible de l’intériorité. Héliane Ventura, La Casa di Parole–Alice Munro, April 2007

1 The two short stories chosen for this critical study of the text and the image are the two stories in the collection Dance of the Happy Shades whose titles explicitly refer to a visual genre or form–“Images” and “Postcard”–though other titles in the collection could be considered as images or visual, especially “Red Dress–1946” or “The Shining Houses.” Liliane Louvel has observed that many writers make such references to the visual arts: Many writers have expressed a nostalgia for their “sister art,” communicating their desire to create a painting-infused work […]. A mere observation of writers’ discourse on their work or even from within their work reveals a fascination for painting, photography or the image, or a repeated use of vocabulary related to art techniques, practices or history. (Louvel, Le tiers pictural, 84, my translation).

2 Mary Condé, in her inventory and analysis of photographs in Munro’s short stories, has noted how Munro, in a striking self-conscious excipit on the writing of the story itself, refers to the visual arts: Munro herself explicitly compares storytelling and photography within her own fiction. The narrator of “The Ottawa Valley” assesses her achievement at the end of the story, the last in the volume: “Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots” (98)

3 And Munro expresses a sensitivity to the visual in the 1994 Paris Review interview: When I was writing that story I looked in a lot of old newspapers […] I got very strong images of the town, which I call Walley. I got very strong images from newspaper clippings.

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4 Liliane Louvel’s theoretical studies on the text and the image and more particularly on the possible particular relationship between the short story and the image posit that the “unity of effect” proposed by Poe in his definition of the short story is also characteristic of the visual arts, especially painting and photography: Is the short story the perfect locus for “the infinite dialogue” between word and image? In terms of instant effect as defined by Poe, as a “detachable” piece entirely grasped as a whole as a painting or a photograph apparently are, it may be so. (2011a, 19)1

5 The unity of effect in the short story genre is obtained in part by the respect of classical theatre’s three unities: of space, of time and of action, but also by the condensed style, pleasantly described by Hemingway as being the emerged eighth of an iceberg. This metaphor is particularly tempting to refer to in the case of Alice Munro as she has specialized not only in the condensed emerged eighth, but also in making the submerged seven-eighths a very important part of her oeuvre: secrets, hidden lives, “something I’ve been meaning to tell you” but didn’t. The “politics of silence and the poetics of silence,” as Corinne Bigot puts it,2 are at work, and the reader is consistently faced with reading the implicit as well as the explicit in Munro’s stories. In her analysis of Munro’s early fiction, Dahlie Hallvard refers to Munro’s use of the short story form in terms reminiscent of Hemingway’s metaphor: Though [Alice Munro] has said that she is “very, very excited by what you might call the surface of life,” the substance of her fiction to date suggests that this excitement must also derive in part from her intuitive feeling that there is something else of significance just below that literal surface. This may be one reason why to date she has been more attracted to the short story than to the novel, though as she has stated in an interview, “I don’t feel that a novel is any step up from a short story.” Nevertheless, that more concentrated fictional form probably allows her to explore in a more imaginative and intense way the intangible aspects of her world: those shadowy and shifting areas between the rational and the irrational, between the familiar, comfortable world and sudden dimensions of terror, and between various facets of uncertainty and illusion. (57)

6 The hypothesis of this essay is that the dynamics of text, image and the implicit is a part of this “imaginative and intense way” in which “Images” and “Postcard” “explore the intangible aspects of [Munro’s] world” (Hallvard 57). More specifically, this study aims at answering these questions: what are the visual elements or images in the two stories, how do they function, and how do they resonate in relation to the text’s implicit and contribute perhaps to a “poetics of silence?”

7 Because the titles of these stories are the first site of visual reference, they will be the first object of closer analysis, beginning with their construction. Neither of the titles “Images” or “Postcard” is determined grammatically, a factor of indeterminacy compounded for the first story by the fact that the word “images” does not appear in the diegesis. This extradiegetic title can then be considered as a tool to be used by the reader to interpret the story and as such, sets the reader at a critical distance from it, clearly what Michelle Gadpaille conceives when she says that the title “Images” “suggests a story with an episodic quality that will unfold in a set of stop-action photographs” (qtd. Condé, 98, my emphasis).

8 The title of “Postcard” also lacks grammatical determination. The title is not “A Postcard” as in “A Trip to the Coast” or “The Postcard” as in “The Office” or “The Shining Houses,” designating the particular, but at the same time it remains in the

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singular, as opposed to “Images,” therefore not designating the general either, as would the title “Postcards.” And indeed “a postcard” appears in the diegesis on the very first page of the story. Nevertheless, the abbreviated form of the title, without grammatical determination, significantly evokes, like “Red Dress–1946,” the style of painting titles, making of the title “Postcard” a “pictorial marker” (Louvel, 2008, 190) both in its content and its form: the story is about a pictorial form, just as the story itself is assimilated to a painting. So though the two titles are not constructed in precisely the same grammatical mode, they both are somewhat atypical in their relation to the diegesis and in programming the reading to follow.

9 “Images” is the third short story in the collection Dance of the Happy Shades. In it, the first person unnamed narrator confides the story of the early spring her mother was bed-ridden and looked after by Mary McQuade, a “big and gloomy” cousin of her father’s who had taken care of her dying grandfather the previous summer. It was during that “cold March” that the young narrator and her father ventured out to “look at the traps” set by her father and encountered the terrifying, axe-bearing Joe Phippen along the river. Wary at first, Joe invites the narrator and her father into his primitive dwelling which the narrator discovers for the first time, just as she discovers the story which haunts him and subsequently re-evaluates her image of Mary McQuade.

10 The tenth story in the collection is “Postcard” and its position in the collection after “Images” creates a resonance which suggests that the postcard can now belong to the series of “images” proposed to the reader of the collection. The young woman protagonist narrating the story recounts what has happened in her life since “yesterday” when she received a Florida postcard from Clare MacQuarrie, a man twelve years older than her whom she hopes to marry but maybe not. Helen Louise, as her “Momma” calls her, learns from her well-informed newspaper-reading friend Alma that Clare is returning from Florida with his new bride, shocking news for Helen in spite of her ambiguous treatment of Clare, both as narrator and protagonist.

11 As if to confirm their initial reference to the pictorial in their title, both of these stories are indeed “pictorially saturated,” to use Louvel’s expression (2011a, 20); they contain numerous and striking allusions to the visual arts, some explicit, others implicit. Héliane Ventura has remarkably demonstrated how the pictorial in the incipit of Munro’s “Boys and Girls” announces in a very condensed form the story of the young female protagonist that follows.3 The ekphrasis of the heroic calendar hung by the kitchen door in the young protagonist’s house and depicting “plumed adventurers” and “magnificent savages” in the Canadian landscape implicitly foregrounds the story’s topos of stereotypical role-playing, and especially that of “boys” and “girls.” The entire story, Ventura posits, comes back repeatedly to and resonates with that initial image.4 I argue here that in “Postcard” Munro uses a very similar technique. The incipit of “Postcard” introduces the eponymous object in two pictorial forms, first that of the still life, and then in the form of ekphrasis, before confronting the ekphrasis with the written message on the back of the postcard.

12 Liliane Louvel has identified the still life as being one of the pictorial genres used by writers attracted to the visual arts (2011a, 33). The second paragraph of “Postcard” begins as follows, mentioning the postcard for the first time: It being Wednesday the wickets in the Post Office were closed, but I had my key. I unlocked our box and took out the Jubilee paper, in Momma’s name, the phone bill and a postcard I very nearly missed. (128)

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13 The second sentence is constructed on an enumeration and perhaps even a gradatio as the postcard, the final element in the enumeration, is simultaneously the element which most responds to the reader’s expectation (created in the title) and the element which was the least visible to the protagonist who “nearly missed” it. This juxtaposition of static elements is precisely the technique of the still life, an aesthetic arrangement of objects, just as the pictorial effect produced by the sentence is of a still life: an open box5, the Jubilee paper, the phone bill and a postcard. The reader may well be tempted to entitle this still life Postcard and if we consider the remarks made earlier on the title of the story and its proximity to painting titles, we could then consider that the story’s (picture) postcard is embedded in a still life called Postcard, itself embedded in a story/painting entitled “Postcard”/Postcard. This mise en abyme is also a pictorial device and one which operates on density, a characteristic of the short story genre, by creating multiple dimensions in a limited space.

14 But not only does the syntax of the sentence produce a pictorial effect, the still life produced contains in a condensed form the entire short story (just as the post-office box contains the three elements). The story centers on a misunderstanding between Helen and Clare: indeed, Helen’s mother expresses her surprise when Helen suggests that she and Clare will be married: “Is that what he told you?” (132) and Helen’s answer, “It’s understood,” focuses on the potential for Helen’s misunderstanding of the implicit message. The elements of the still life are then ironical in the context of a breakdown in communication for they are all, albeit in one case metonymically, means of communication: a newspaper, a telephone (bill) and a postcard. They ironically and economically foreshadow the events to come. The three elements named also structure the story in its stages of revealing the truth to the protagonist, though in reverse order: the postcard is received (128), the telephone call is made: I did go back and I heard her [Momma] using the phone, probably calling one of her old cronies about some news in the paper, and then I guess I fell asleep. (136) and finally the newspaper is shown to Helen, revealing the facts: [Momma] was holding the paper and she spread it out for me to read. “It’s in there,” she said, probably not realizing she was whispering. “It’s written up in the Bugle-Herald.” (137)

15 In her study of “Boys and Girls,” Héliane Ventura uses the term “pictorial cryptogram,” (157)6 a concept which functions well in the analysis of “Postcard”: the pictorial, here the still life as I call it, contains within it the secret of the story (Clare’s relationship with Margaret Leeson) and it both reveals and conceals the content of the story (Helen’s discovery of this). In this context, it is interesting to turn again to the passage quoted above containing the still life: It being Wednesday the wickets in the Post Office were closed, but I had my key. I unlocked our box and took out the Jubilee paper, in Momma’s name, the phone bill and a postcard I very nearly missed. (128, my emphasis)

16 For though the narrator claims she had a key to unlock the box, it eventually becomes clear to the reader that in this case of almost tragic irony she did not have the key to unlock the mysterious cryptogram within the box. On the other hand, though this still life is a pictorial cryptogram, it is simultaneously the pictorial key to the story for the reader. One might even add that the signifier “still life” is also a possible key to the story, for when Clare “did what he did on top of [her]” (145), Helen, though she “never wanted to be a heartless person” (135, my emphasis), implies that inertia, both physical and emotional, is her modus operandi with Clare, that her sexual life with Clare is still:

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silent, motionless, dead. The image resonates here with the implicit and one of the possible interpretations of the implicit is that Helen’s still life determined Clare’s decision to marry another woman.

17 In the story, once Helen does take the postcard out of the box, she looks carefully at it. Her perception of the picture postcard appears in the text in the form of an ekphrasis, the description of a work of art, another pictorial marker in the story: I looked at the picture on it first and it showed me palm trees, a hot blue sky, the front of a motel with a sign out front in the shape of a big husky blonde creature, lit up with neon I suppose at night. She was saying Sleep at my place–that is, a balloon with those words in it came out of her mouth. (128, 129)

18 In his semiological study entitled “The Best of Both Worlds: Home and Mobility in Motel Postcard Iconography,” Keith A. Sculle identifies such a view of the motel amidst “languid palms” and the “ubiquitous blue sky” as belonging to “pictorial conventions in motel postcards” (37, 30), which implies that Clare is conventionally predictable. But also, this particular picture signifies perhaps that Clare has “the best of both worlds,” as Sculle puts it, the “big husky blonde creature […] [s]aying Sleep at my place” providing during his “mobility” the “hot” intimacy which Helen provided (or not) at “home.” And yet, though the narrator says the picture “showed [her],” it did not tell her the full story of Clare’s travels to Florida, something she was always anxious to know. “Tell me about your trip,” the narrator would say when Clare returned from his travels, “and he would say what do you want me to tell?”(129).

19 Or, “I used to say to Clare, write me a letter while you’re away, and he would say, what do you want me to write about? So I told him to describe the scenery and the people he met” (129). Ironically, the narrator’s own ekphrasis is a condensed way of “describing the scenery and the people he met,” but it remains elliptical and enigmatic. Additionally, the narrator only “suppose[s]” that the neon sign of the motel is “lit up […] at night.” In other words, she attempts to fill in the blanks left in the picture, to decipher the implicit. Clearly, though the pictorial reveals, it also conceals.

20 Perhaps hoping to have the blanks of the postcard’s picture filled in by the message on the back, Helen “turned it over and read” Clare’s message: I didn’t sleep at her place though it was too expensive. Weather could not be better. Mid-seventies. How is the winter treating you in Jubilee? Not bad I hope. Be a good girl. Clare.” (129)

21 Sculle refers to a study by Baeder who considers “the postcard sender’s written message as surrogate for traditional documents such as letters and journals” (22) and indeed this message with its truncated sentences is an inferior substitute for a more informative letter. The first sentence of the message both refers to the picture, and in so doing is an instance of dialogue between text and image, and, in its ambivalent agrammatical form which blurs comprehension, is also a proposed mode of communication. The agrammatical absence of the comma which could have been placed either before or after “though” creates confusion, I would suggest intentionally. The dialogue between text and image begins first with the erotic image of the “husky blonde creature” whose implicit is indeterminate: is Clare implying that he has found another lover (an incarnation of the “blonde creature”) in this exotic/erotic place or is he implying that this erotic life is one that he would like to share with Helen as she is the recipient of the card and often “sleeps at his place”? The text on the back neither confirms nor contradicts either of the hypotheses about the implicit message. Though

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he assures Helen that he “didn’t sleep at her place,” he does not, in this negative construction, say where he did in fact sleep. That the implicit of the text/image of the postcard is open to interpretation is what Helen understands. On the one hand she suspects perhaps that this card signals the end of their relationship as she shows the postcard to her mother saying “Clare sent you a postcard” (130), seeming to admit it lacks any sentimental value. On the other hand, she twice relies on the postcard as proof of Clare’s devotion to her after the newspaper has finally objectively provided the information about Clare’s travels: “A quiet ceremony in Coral Gables, Florida, uniting in marriage Clare Alexander MacQuarrie […] and Mrs. Margaret Thora Leeson” (137): “I just today got a postcard from him as Momma well knows.” (136) “I just had a postcard from him. Momma– ” (137)

22 If the plot in “Postcard” develops from a compact initial image, “Images”, I will argue, accumulates the eponymous images throughout the story which lead to a final revelatory moment. Indeed, an initiation story is a story of revelation, therefore the visual is inherent in the initiation story and so not surprisingly present in this one. As mentioned previously, the word “images” does not appear in the diegesis of the short story, an absence which generates a multitude of questions. What constitutes an image in the text? Whose images are they? How are they formed? What is their function? Do they evolve? As Ajay Heble has pointed out, critics often interpret this story as dealing with the narrator’s confrontation with death as she meets Joe Phippen (30). Not an uncommon plight for young protagonists of initiation stories and the case for example in Hemingway’s “Indian Camp” or McGahern’s “Korea,” the narrator’s confrontation with death in “Images” is nevertheless only a part of her initiatory experience, for as we shall see, she will also come to better understand images.

23 Stylistic devices of imagery are used abundantly in the first pages of the story by the young narrator/protagonist to qualify Mary McQuade or immediate surroundings associated with her. Stylistic devices of condensation are more frequently used in modernist short stories than devices of expansion or repetition. The short-story theorist Suzanne Ferguson identifies simile and metaphor as devices used by modernist writers or “impressionists” in their “attention to stylistic economy” (21). Essentially, they show rather than tell: Mary McQuade […] was the other island in the room, and she sat mostly not moving where the fan, as if it was tired, stirred the air like soup. (30, my emphasis) I could look up and see that emptiness, the stained corners, and feel, without knowing what it was, just what everybody else in the house must have felt––under the sweating heat the fact of death-contained, that little lump of magic ice. And Mary McQuade waiting in her starched white dress, big and gloomy as an iceberg herself, implacable, waiting and breathing. I held her responsible. (31, my emphasis) Out in the daylight […Mary] turned out to be freckled all over […] as if she was sprinkled with oatmeal (31, my emphasis) [Mary] was always waiting for [my father], some joke swelling her up like a bullfrog (34, my emphasis)

24 The noticeable accumulation of vivid and often amusing metaphors and similes in these passages attests to the narrator’s perception of the world in images.

25 The initiatory journey the narrator takes is instigated by her father’s invitation: “Do you want to come with me and look at the traps?” (35, my emphasis), a binary construction which very economically summarizes the initiatory story genre by pointing to its stages: a journey (“come”) and a revelation (“look”). At the end of the

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journey, the day is summarized by Mary McQuade in a similar economical binary construction: “all she’s been and seen” (43, my emphasis), the difference in Mary’s remark being that it draws attention to the multiple visual experiences of the protagonist, which result in “her eyes dropping out of her head.”

26 Liliane Louvel suggests that “strong images” in short stories are “short cuts to reach meaning more quickly and more efficiently” (2011a, 25). The strong images in “Images” are the series of images which strike both the protagonist and the reader, leading both to an epiphanic moment of “meaning.” Michelle Gadpaille, as mentioned previously, noted that the title “Images” “suggests a story with an episodic quality that will unfold in a set of stop-action photographs.” In what appears to be an objective correlative of this series of images, the narrator recounts: “My mother crocheted squares for an afghan, in all shades of purple” (33). An objective correlative is another device of economy, used to show rather than tell, leaving the implied message for the reader to decipher, here, that “squares […] in all shades” are diverse images meant to be brought together to form a coherent whole, a textual “afghan,” a “unity of effect.”7 It is also interesting to note that in the free association which follows this sentence in the story, the narrator equates the afghan squares with stories, reinforcing the hypothesis that squares/images contain and condense content to tell: [The squares] fell among the bedclothes and she did not care. Once they were finished she forgot about them. She had forgotten all her stories which were about Princes in the Tower and a queen getting her head chopped off while a little dog was hiding under her dress and another queen sucking poison out of her husband’s wound. (33, my emphasis)

27 Returning to the father’s invitation–“Do you want to come with me and look at the traps?”–, which is the starting point of the accumulation of initiatory images, we can notice that this invitation is in fact metonymically euphemistic, for though the father invites his daughter to “look at the traps,” he is well aware that she will see not only the traps but the dead animals caught in them. And she does: At first I saw [the muskrat] waving at the edge of the water, like something tropical, a dark fern. My father drew it up and the hairs ceased waving, clung together, the fern became a tail with the body of the rat attached to it, sleek and dripping. Its teeth were bared, its eyes wet on top, dead and dull beneath, glinted like washed pebbles. (36)

28 The pictorial markers in the passage are numerous. The narrator “saw” the muskrat, the father “drew it up” to isolate it as if framing it, the hairs “ceased waving” as if to fix the image, and stylistic devices of imagery are used: “waving […] like something tropical, a dark fern” and “its eyes […] glinted like washed pebbles.” The father draws attention to the muskrat as pictorial when he says “This is a big old king rat. Look at his tail!” (36, my emphasis), as does the narrator: “He put the rat’s body in a dark sack which he carried slung over his shoulder, like a pedlar in a picture.” She explicitly associates this first initiatory image with death: “I did not understand [how the trap worked] or care. I only wanted but did not dare, to touch the stiff, soaked body, a fact of death” (36).

29 A second striking image the narrator encounters on her journey is that of the ominous Joe Phippen and especially the axe he carries. Unlike the muskrat’s, this image is not one the father had planned for his daughter to encounter, which is no doubt why the axe is not to be mentioned at home on their return. Joe appears to the narrator initially in a rather long passage which could be considered filmic as the narrator first “see[s]

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his head and the upper part of his body”, then “the rest of him” and finally “what he carried in his hand, gleaming where the sun caught it––a little axe, or hatchet” (37). The structure of both the passage and the final sentence draws attention to the axe by delaying its appearance. The axe will then be further isolated as a strong image in Joe’s cellar which the narrator discovers as she descends the steps and walks through the door: It was not completely dark. There were the old cellar windows, letting in a little grimy light. The man lit a coal-oil lamp, though, and set it on the table. (40)

30 The text simultaneously (so economically) identifies this place as a locus of initiation and fixes this scene as a vivid image. The contrast between light and dark marks this place as one in which the character will become enlightened. At the same time, the dark rustic interior with a table, a coal-oil lamp and a single figure as its focal point is reminiscent of a 17th-century painting whose chiaroscuro effect is obtained by candlelight, an overall pictorial effect which heightens the intensity of the moment. Then with no transition the hatchet enters the painting as the focal point: But I was wary, sitting on the dirty couch, pretending not to look at anything. [… Joe] sat by the table, and there the hatchet lay. (40)

31 Though the narrator “pretend[s] not to look at anything,” the thematization of the hatchet in the syntax of the sentence makes it the focal point of the “painting,” marking it as the object of her mesmerized gaze. Earlier “gleaming where the sun caught it,” the hatchet is now illuminated by the “coal-oil lamp.” The Silases “chop [...] trees and pull […] down fences,” Joe Phippen “chops down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth,” no doubt reminders to the narrator of the queen in her mother’s story “getting her head chopped off.” These death threats, metonymically crystallized in the image of the hatchet, along with the image of the dead muskrat, eventually lead the narrator to her epiphanic moment at the end of the story as Mary bends over her: “I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her” (43).

32 It should be remarked however that this epiphanic statement makes no mention of death, does not establish a cause for the effect obtained (not being afraid) and does not link Mary explicitly to the initiatory images. Indeed, these gaps are sites of the text’s implicit. The logical chain of events must be reconstructed by the reader and the content of these gaps appears in this text primarily in the form of images. That she associated Mary with death is apparent in the previously quoted similes, both using ice imagery: “the fact of death-contained, that little lump of magic ice. And Mary McQuade waiting in her starched white dress, big and gloomy as an iceberg herself” (my emphasis). Then, when the narrator sees the dead muskrat, she concludes: “I only wanted but did not dare, to touch the stiff, soaked body, a fact of death.” The “fact of death” has now become more real for her, something she wants to touch, and the use of the term in both contexts consolidates the link between Mary, death and the possibility to transcend it. Interestingly, Suzanne Ferguson has identified this modernist text/image/ implicit dynamics and names it “metaphoric plot”: [T]here are stories in which the elements of the hypothetical plot are represented at the surface level by sets of images or events–often […] unrelated to each other–that are analogous to and substitutes for events in the hypothetical plot; that is, they stand in relation to the theme of the story as the chain of events does in a normal plot, and the chain of events is left implicit. These I call “metaphoric” plots.” (18, my emphasis)

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33 Just as seeing frightful images has transformed the narrator, those same images will in the end be transformed, and this second transformation is a new stage in her initiation. The narrator has been instructed by her father not to mention the axe and he himself leaves it out of the story of Joe Phippen told to Mary. The pact of secrecy between the two is sealed when “[her] father looked steadily down the table at [her]” (43). The images, which were so striking for the narrator, are now covered with a veil of secrecy, tainted by the unsayable. Indeed, each of the father’s answers to the young initiate’s questions about Joe was a negation: “Why did he have an axe? […] “He don’t mean any harm with that axe. […] “Who is going to burn him and his bed?” “Nobody.” Who is the Silases?” “Nobody,” my father said. Just nobody.”

34 The young initiate has learned that along with knowledge comes the weight of secrecy, of what must remain unsaid. After seeing the images, the young girl “[fell] asleep with [her] eyes open” (41), an apt means to express here the mode of perceiving, to express how memories have been imprinted, blurred by lack of knowledge. Munro draws attention to the young girl’s visual memories of childhood and her coming to understand the ways of the adult world: there are things to understand and things which remain obscure, mysteries or secrets, ambiguous implicit which adults (and short-story writers) will not elucidate, those “shadowy and shifting areas,” those “various facets of uncertainty,” as Dahlie Hallvard puts it.

35 In a construction very similar to the still life of “Postcard,” “Images” nears its completion: [Mary] served my father his supper and he told her the story of Joe Phippen, the roofed cellar, the boards across the dirt floor. He left out the axe but not the whisky and the cat.

36 Once again the enumeration evokes a still life which contains and condenses a story, but significantly, whereas the hatchet abruptly entered the painting earlier, it now exits the painting just as abruptly, leaving a hole in its place. This is perhaps a paradigm of the dynamics between text, image and the implicit in these two stories: a striking pictorial effect is produced (a still life) whose individual visual components each concentrate an event, a story to be told, and one missing element exemplifies the blank or the gap: the painting’s blank, the story’s blanks that remain silent, that will “never sa[y] a word.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALBERTAZZI, Silvia. “A Comparative Essay on the Sociology of Literature: Alice Munro’s Unconsummated Relationships.” Journal of the Short Story in English Special Issue The Short Stories of Alice Munro 55, Héliane Ventura, guest editor, (Autumn 2010): 37-54.

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BIGOT, Corinne. Alice Munro: Les silences de la nouvelle. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2014.

COLLINGE, Linda. “Foreword.” Journal of the Short Story in English, Special issue The Implicit and the Short Story in English 40 (Spring 2003): 11-15.

COLLINGE-GERMAIN, Linda. “Foreword.” Journal of the Short Story in English, Special issue The Image and the Short Story in English 56 (Spring 2011): 11-17.

CONDÉ, Mary. “‘True Lies’: Photographs in the Short Stories of Alice Munro.” Etudes canadiennes 32 (1992): 97-110.

FERGUSON, Suzanne. “Defining the Short Story: Impressionism and Form.” Modern Fiction Studies, 28:1 (Spring, 1982): 13-24.

HALLVARD, Dahlie. “The Fiction of Munro.” Ploughshares, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1978): 56-71.

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

LEPALUDIER, Laurent, ed. L’implicite dans la nouvelle de langue anglaise, Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005.

LOUVEL, Liliane. “A Skilful Artist has Constructed a Tale”; Is the short story a good instance of word/image? Towards Intermedial Criticism” Journal of the Short Story in English Special issue The Image and the Short Story in English, 56 (Spring 2011a): 19-38.

LOUVEL, Liliane. Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, Trans. Laurence Petit, Burlington, VT, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011b.

LOUVEL, Liliane. “Telling ‘by’ Pictures: Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fiction.”Journal of the Short Story in English 50 (Spring 2008).

LOUVEL, Liliane. Le Tiers pictural. Pour une critique intermédiale. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010.

LOUVEL, Liliane. “Les Voix du voir, illusions d’optique et reflets sonores.” Journal of the Short Story in English 41 (Autumn 2003): 41-54.

MUNRO, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. (1968). London: Vintage, 2000.

SCULLE, Keith A.. “The Best of Both Worlds : Home and Mobility in Motel Postcard Iconography.” Material Culture, Vol 31 (1999) No.3: 21-52.

SIMPSON, Mona and Jeanne McCulloch. “Alice Munro: The Art of Fiction.” The Paris Review 137 (1994)

VENTURA, Héliane. “L’implicite dans l’ekphrasis ou le cryptogramme 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.

NOTES

1. This is also the basis of a discussion in Louvel’s article “Les voix du voir: illusions d’optique et reflets sonores” in JSSE 41, Autumn 2003 in which she refers to Valerie Shaw’s essay The Short Story, a Critical Introduction and writings of Henry James on short fiction.

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2. See her very recent essay entitled Alice Munro: Les silences de la nouvelle. See also the JSSE Special Issue The Implicit in the Short Story in English, 2003 and L’implicite dans la nouvelle de langue anglaise, ed. Laurent Lepaludier, 2005. 3. Héliane Ventura. “L’implicite dans l’ekphrasis ou le cryptogramme 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. The title of the article draws attention to the manner in which image, implicit, and text are articulated in the story. 4. Liliane Louvel writes: “[M]any writers construct their worlds from a seminal image which, by triggering off a reverie, structures the work by representing its aura, a sort of creative horizon.” (The Poetics of the Iconotext, 17). On the other hand, Mary Condé observes: “[Munro’s stories] frequently end on a photographic image which encapsulates, in a self-consciously subjective way, the experience of the story” (99). “Postcard” and “Images” provide examples of each configuration, as we shall see. 5. The open box functions simultaneously as object in the still life and as container/frame of the painting. 6. A “cryptogram” is “a message or writing in secret letters.” 7. Though in her article “A Comparative Essay on the Sociology of Literature: Alice Munro’s Unconsummated Relationships” Silvia Albertazzi interestingly remarks “[I]n an almost Eliot-like way, Munro substitutes the description of experience with its image, its objective correlative” (44), she does not illustrate or expand on this idea.

ABSTRACTS

The titles of “Images” and “Postcard” suggest that the visual is an important element of the stories and indeed these stories are pictorially saturated, to use Liliane Louvel’s expression. A short story is composed of words not pictures, but words can produce pictorial effects. These images appear in Munro’s two stories as devices of intensity; they contain and condense either elements of the story or the story itself, contributing to the “unity of effect” which is characteristic of the short story genre. Because the images show rather than tell, but also because they both reveal and conceal, they function in relation to the implicit.

INDEX

Keywords: Images, Postcard, text/image, implicit

AUTHOR

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN Linda Collinge-Germain is an Associate Professor at the University of Angers where she teaches English language and literature and is a member of the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Langue Anglaise. Her areas of interest and publication are the bilingual works of Samuel Beckett, reception theory and more recently, the poetics of short story writing, and film

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adaptations of short stories as a form of translation. She has been an active member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Short Story in English since 1997 and is currently Director of Publication.

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“What do you want me to tell?” The inferential texture of Alice Munro’s ‘Postcard’

Billy Clark

1. Introduction

1 In this paper, this paper, I discuss Alice Munro’s story ‘Postcard’. The repetition of the noun phrase this paper here is deliberate. It echoes the repetition of the word yesterday in the opening sentence of ‘Postcard’, a salient feature of the text which is discussed again below. If current pragmatic theories are right, then the repetition here should have caused you to consider what effects it was intended to give rise to which would not have arisen if you had read the sentence with no repetition (‘In this paper, I discuss…’). I am expecting that most readers struggled to see why I would have repeated this noun phrase and possibly decided that it must be a mistake. By contrast, there are relatively accessible possible explanations for the repetition in the story and some readers might even struggle to remember later that the repetition was there.

2 One aim of this paper is to consider how helpful ideas from pragmatic stylistics can be in developing understanding of the production, interpretation and evaluation of this story and of other texts. Naturally, we expect pragmatic theories to account for the interpretation of local phenomena such as repetitions. Discussions of pragmatic phenomena tend to focus on how hearers and readers understand them. This paper suggests that pragmatic theories also have something to say about the production and evaluation of spoken and written utterances. It considers what is likely to be a central focus of inferential activity for many readers: attempting to understand the narrator of this story and her relationships with others in the story. Finally, it considers whether a focus on inferential processes can help to account for what Stockwell calls ‘texture’, i.e. ‘the experienced quality of textuality’ (Stockwell 2009: 1).

3 Section 2 of the paper offers some general thoughts about pragmatic stylistics, understood here as work in stylistics which focuses on inferential processes. Section 3

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summarises the plot of the story ‘Postcard’ and discusses some features of the story which we would expect a pragmatic stylistic approach to account for, starting from the repetition at the beginning and moving on to consider other inferences about the narrator and her relationships with others. Section 4 focuses specifically on the notion of ‘texture’ (in Stockwell’s sense) and considers how work on inference can contribute to accounts of it.

2. Pragmatic Stylistics: Exploring Inferences

4 Since the focus here is on a literary text, this work falls within the realm of ‘pragmatic literary stylistics’ as discussed by Chapman and Clark (2014; see particularly the introduction, pp. 1-15). The particular variety of post-Gricean pragmatics applied here is based on relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Clark 2013; for discussion of relevance-theoretic pragmatic stylistics in particular, see Clark 2014a, 2014b; MacMahon 2006).

5 There is space here only for the briefest mention of some of the key points of the relevance-theoretic approach adopted in the discussion below. It is a post-Gricean approach in that it follows from and is influenced by the work of Paul Grice (1989). It does not, however, fall within the group of approaches termed ‘neo-Gricean’ since the pragmatic principles it assumes are not similar to Gricean ‘maxims’. Rather, pragmatic inference is seen as being governed by two law-like generalisations. One of these is a generalisation about human cognition:

First, or Cognitive, Principle of Relevance: (1) Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.

6 The other is a generalisation about communication:

Second, or Communicative, Principle of Relevance (2) Every ostensive stimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance.

7 To understand these, we need to know what the technical term ‘relevance’ refers to within this approach. Keeping things simple, a stimulus or other phenomenon is relevant to an individual to the extent that it gives rise to positive cognitive effects (roughly, changes in that individual’s cognitive environment which are worth having) and to the extent that the effort involved in arriving at these is small. If I become aware now that:

(3) The current draft of the paper I am working on is 1,000 words over the word limit.

this is relevant to me since it enables me to become aware of things it is worth my while to know, such as that I will need to reduce the length, that I can modify assumptions about how long it will take to finish the article, and so on. Suppose, by contrast, that I notice that:

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(4) The current draft of the paper I am working on is 10,000 words over the word limit.

8 Assuming that (4) refers to the same paper as that referred to by (3), this will be more relevant as it has a greater number of effects. It will be much harder for me to reduce its length. Finishing the article will take me lots of time. I might not manage it in time. And so on. In other words, (4) is more relevant than (3) because it has more cognitive effects for me (‘positive’ in that they are worth having, despite many of these being ‘negative’ in other ways!)

9 Now suppose I consider two ways of informing you of (3), either by uttering (3) itself or by uttering (5):

If I wrote 6,000 more words, the current draft of the paper I am working on would be 7,000 (5) words over the limit.

10 If nothing follows for you from (5) that would not follow from (3), then (5) is less relevant to you than (3), since it puts you to greater effort than (3) without this effort resulting in increased effects.

11 This characterisation of ‘relevance’ is used in each of the two principles mentioned above. The Cognitive Principle claims that our cognitive system tends to be geared towards ‘maximising’ relevance, i.e. deriving as many cognitive effects as possible for as little effort as possible. The Communicative Principle says that communication gives rise to expectations of ‘optimal’ relevance, i.e. (roughly) to finding an interpretation which leads to enough effects to justify the effort involved in deriving them and without putting us to effort which could have been avoided. In work since 2004 (see, for example, Wilson and Sperber 2004; Sperber and Wilson 2005) claims about how interpretation processes work which follow from the general principles of the theory have been presented with reference to a ‘Relevance-Guided Comprehension Heuristic’ (stated simply here):

Relevance-Guided Comprehension Heuristic (6) a. Follow a path of least effort in deriving cognitive effects b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.

12 This leads to surprisingly precise predictions about how we will understand particular utterances. One way to see this is to compare utterances which are minimally different, e.g. (7) and (8):

(7) He will.

(8) I’m saying he will.

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13 Suppose someone asks you whether I will cut the number of words in my article to the required length and so be ready to submit by the deadline. If you reply by uttering (7), you will be taken to be saying that I will succeed. There is, then, no need to include the words I’m saying at the start of your utterance. However, relevance theory predicts that the extra effort involved in processing the two words in utterance (8) must lead to more effects and so you must arrive at an interpretation which is different from what you would have arrived at on hearing (7). A likely interpretation here is that not everyone would say that I will succeed and so it is relevant to indicate explicitly who is saying it here. This suggests that there is some doubt about whether I will manage and that others would give a different answer. Relevance theory accounts for examples like this with reference to the Communicative Principle of Relevance and the comprehension heuristic which follows from it. Other approaches use different kinds of principles. ‘Neo-Gricean’ approaches such as those developed by Horn (1984, 1987, 2004, 2007) and Levinson (1987, 2000) use principles which have more in common with Grice’s maxims (for introductions to various neo-Gricean and other approaches to pragmatics, see Birner, 2012; Chapman 2011).

14 Relevance theory and other approaches to pragmatics have been applied in a number of ways in work on stylistics. The majority of work has focused on accounting for how audiences develop interpretations of texts. More recently, there has been increased interest in how texts are produced and evaluated. Clark (2012), for example, considers the effects of editorial interventions in a short story by Raymond Carver and so considers inferences authors and editors make about what readers will infer. Clark and Owtram (2012) consider techniques used with writers to encourage them to think explicitly about how different formulations of texts will be likely to give rise to different kinds of inferences in readers. Clark (2014c) makes some suggestions about how inferential processes before, during and after reading a text can make it more or less likely that an individual will come to value a text. However, pragmatic stylistic work on production and evaluation is at an early stage and the vast majority of work from this perspective continues to focus on interpretation (work in literary criticism, by contrast, has often focused on questions about evaluation). The rest of this paper also focuses mainly on interpretation but it includes some remarks about production and evaluation as well as about how inferences involved in production, interpretation and evaluation are connected.

3. ‘Postcard’ and Pragmatics

15 There is, of course, far too much to be said about ‘Postcard’ and about inferential processes involved in producing and responding to it, for this paper to come close to covering it all. Instead, the aim here is to give a flavour of what a pragmatic stylistic approach could say about the story, identifying just a few key features of the story and saying something about a few things which a pragmatic stylistic account might develop.

16 Like other stories in Dance of the Happy Shades, ‘Postcard’ shares features common to many examples of Alice Munro’s writing. It presents events from what we might think of as ‘ordinary’ life in a small town (called Jubilee) in Canada, gives readers a sense of having a fairly rich and full sense of what the world it presents is like and how it feels to its characters. A key feature of this story is that it encourages us to think about the

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emotional life of the first person narrator, Helen, and of the people she interacts with. It encourages us to consider not only what happens in the story but why it has happened and how we feel about this. This section begins with a brief summary and then says a little more about key features of the story (identified here simply from my own intuitions, backed up with reference to discussion by others) which we might expect a stylistic analysis, and a pragmatic stylistic analysis in particular, to say something about.

3.1 What’s in ‘Postcard’

17 The story begins one morning in late winter when the first-person narrator, Helen, goes to the post office and collects a postcard from Florida from her lover, Clare MacQuarrie. We learn that he has been gone for three weeks and will be back in a few days. This is the only card he has sent. It features ‘a motel with a sign out front in the shape of a big husky blonde creature’ with a speech balloon saying ‘Sleep at my place’. Clare’s message contains a jokey remark about not taking up this offer and some comments on the weather. It closes: ‘Be a good girl. Clare’. We follow Helen home from the Post Office, learn more about her life at work in ‘King’s Department Store’ and with her mother, about her relationships with Clare, her mother, and an earlier lover, Ted Forgie, and her friend Alma. The most significant event in the story comes when Helen’s mother discovers from the local paper, and her friend Alma confirms, that Clare is returning a married man. Alma then informs Helen that Clare and his new bride have already returned to Jubilee. We see Helen, her mother and Alma reacting to the news, culminating in Helen driving to Clare’s house that night, honking her horn repeatedly and calling out to Clare. A local policeman, Buddy Shields, comes to calm Helen down and take her home. While he is there, Clare comes out of the house and advises Helen to go home. She describes him as ‘an unexplaining man’. Buddy Shields drives Helen home, advising her that she just has to accept things and telling her a story to illustrate his point. The story is about two local people caught in a place where ‘they had no business being . . . together’. The woman’s husband had reported her missing and of course they are embarrassed. But the next day Buddy sees them shopping together, showing that they had decided to carry on with their life together despite how unhappy they were about the situation. In the final paragraph of the story, Helen begins by acknowledging that things will continue but says that she can’t understand why seeing Clare there ‘as an unexplaining man’ made her want to reach out and touch him.

3.2 Inferences in production, interpretation and evaluation

18 As mentioned above, pragmatic stylistics should be able to say something about the inferential processes involved in production and evaluation as well as interpretation. The discussion here does not go into great detail on any of these areas and focuses mainly on interpretation. However, each of the inferences discussed could be described with reference to Munro’s inferences (and those of any editors involved) about what readers would be likely to infer before, during and after reading, and about how these inferences might contribute to evaluation of the story. In other words, this discussion assumes that all three of these processes interact to some extent.

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19 A key feature of this story is that it encourages us to make inferences about the main character Helen, about the other characters she tells us about, and about her relationships with them. The key other characters are: her mother, Alma, Clare, Buddy Shields and, more indirectly, Clare’s sister Porky (Isabelle), Porky’s husband, and Clare’s new bride. Arguably, one reason for the sense of richness and of our involvement in a fairly realistic work is that we discover quite a lot about these characters in a short space of reading time and that these inferences are ‘sticky’ (in that we keep returning to think about them) and open-ended (to the extent that we cannot say we have ever finished thinking about them and that we can continue to derive more conclusions over an extended period). This could be a key feature in accounting for how the story is evaluated. Clark (2014c) suggests a number of factors which might contribute to positive evaluations. These include ease of representing the text or aspects of it as a whole, the extent to which relevant inferences follow from the text, and the extent to which relatively complex inferential processes lead to relatively rich cognitive effects. The possibility of thinking about the central event in the story, what we can infer from it, and our ongoing consideration of the nature of Helen, her situation, and her relationships, are likely to lead to relatively positive evaluations of the story.

20 It is of course a key feature of many texts which are positively valued that they leave questions unanswered. We cannot decide for certain what we think about Helen and her relationships and the inferences we make about these are complex and ongoing. Part of my own early response to the story was to focus on the sadness of how things had turned out for Helen and to think about why things had turned out this way. I had a fairly negative view of Clare and thought that in some ways he had ‘used’ and misled her. I then thought about Helen’s attitude to him and others. As discussed below, some of Helen’s comments suggest an element of superiority and possibly a lack of warmth. I then began to think more fully about this central relationship and a lack of warmth in both directions. This led me to think further about Helen’s relationship with her mother and others. There is not enough in the story to provide definitive answers to these questions and so readers can continue to make inferences about them after having read the story. Some of the pleasure from this story surely comes after reading as new ideas occur to readers developing their interpretation. Using relevance- theoretic terminology, the story warrants the derivation of a relatively wide range of weak implicatures (for discussion of the application of the notion of weak implicatures in accounting for literary, or aesthetic, effects, see Pilkington 2000).

21 A very striking example of this complexity and open-endedness comes at the very end of the story. The final paragraph is: Oh, Buddy Shields, you can just go on talking, and Clare will tell jokes, and Momma will cry, till she gets over it, but what I’ll never understand is why, right now, seeing Clare MacQuarrie as an unexplaining man, I felt for the first time that I wanted to reach out my hands and touch him. (Munro 1968: 146 [italics in original])

22 The key question this raises, of course, is why exactly Helen felt that she wanted to reach out and touch Clare. Readers might think of fairly clichéd explanations such as that she wants him more now that she can’t have him. They will, of course, notice that she felt this ‘for the first time’, suggesting that she had little or no interest in him physically before this moment. Perhaps readers will think about the phrase ‘as an unexplaining man’. Does the fact that he is ‘unexplaining’ make him more attractive?

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This is also likely to confirm the sense of coldness in Helen’s attitude to Clare. Perhaps we will think she has indeed been, as she wondered about herself earlier, ‘a heartless person, just to lie there and let him grab me and love me and moan around my neck and say the things he did, and never say one loving word back to him?’ (Munro 1968: 135). We are hardly likely to be convinced that she is not heartless because ‘I was never mean to Clare, and I did let him, didn’t I, nine times out of ten?’

23 One intriguing thing about this final paragraph is that at least once Munro omitted it when reading the story in public. Douglas Kneale (2013) reports Munro reading the story when visiting his class at Western University. He reports that she announced that she was going to read it ‘the way she would have written it if she were writing it today.’ She then read the story exactly as published until, at the end, she did not include the final published paragraph. She gave a reason for omitting it, saying: ‘"A good short story should say everything it has to say before the final paragraph." (As one reviewer commented, this idea is one that ‘presumably cannot apply recursively’!) This raises another possible way of finding out more about the story and how it works, namely to consider how interpretations would be likely to change if the final paragraph were not there and the story simply ended after Buddy Shields has delivered his mini-sermon, advising Helen at the end to ‘just be a good girl’ (echoing the comment near the end of Clare’s postcard message), to ‘go along like the rest of us’ and concluding that ‘pretty soon we’ll see spring’ (Munro 1968: 146). (Susan Lohafer has carried out a significant body of research exploring questions about how and why stories end where they do. See, for example, Lohafer, 1983, 2003)

24 My intuition is that the omission leaves things more open for readers to make inferences about the story, and its ending, with less guidance than is provided by the final paragraph. While Helen’s reported desire to touch Clare is puzzling and raises unanswered questions, this paragraph nevertheless creates a focus on Helen’s mind at this precise moment and raises questions about this one line of thinking she is experiencing. Without this paragraph, a wider range of possible directions are open for reader inferences. Whether or not the final paragraph is included also has implications for the balance between the extent to which the story can be understood as involving ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. While Helen as narrator tells us things, we can understand the story as a case of showing since it shows us this character telling us what she chooses to tell. At the same time, her report of Buddy Shields is telling us what he did and said, leaving us to make inferences about what Helen is feeling and revealing about herself by telling us this. Her telling is simultaneously a case of Munro showing. There is a significant difference, even within this complexity, between readers making inferences about what Helen is feeling based on what is shown by the rest of the story and making those inferences based on what she chooses to tell us about her mental state. The complex relationships among various ways of thinking about showing and telling in the story are mentioned again in section 4 below.

3.3 Inferences about Helen

25 This subsection considers some of the inferences we make as we work through the story, and think about it afterwards, beginning by considering the repetition in the first sentence. This is just one of a number of individual, and in some cases quite local, features of the text which give rise to interesting inferences. There is no space to do

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justice to these here so instead this subsection considers just a small number of inferences which the text suggests. Each of these contributes to broader aspects of interpretation, including the characterisation of Helen and our developing understanding of her and her relationships.

26 Starting at the beginning, then, we have already mentioned the repetition of yesterday in the first sentence: Yesterday afternoon, yesterday, I was going along the street to the Post Office, thinking how sick I was of snow, sore throats, the whole dragged-out tail-end of winter, and I wished I could pack off to Florida, like Clare. (Munro 1968: 128)

27 What is a reader likely to make of this? Pragmatic theories predict that the repetition will give rise to a pragmatic effect. For relevance theory, the extra effort involved in processing the repetition gives rise to an expectation of further effects which would not have followed without the repetition (for discussion of the stylistic effects of different kinds of repetition, and relevance-theoretic predictions about them, see Sperber and Wilson 1995: 217-224). A likely hypothesis here is that the author is representing a narrator as if talking to someone. Conventions of prose fiction writing mean that we do not need to decide who they are speaking to. We might not make a decision between, for example, the thought that the narrator could be talking to herself, talking to a friend, or that this is just a novelistic/prose fiction device not reflecting any real conversations the narrator might have had. Still, without resolving this, we can make inferences about why a narrator might repeat the word yesterday here. A likely one is that the narrator is checking we have fixed the intended time reference (this hypothesis is arguably supported by the repetition occurring as a parenthesis here rather than the arguably more fluent repetition yesterday, yesterday afternoon). Another is that the narrator thinks their addressee is not very attentive and needs repetition to make sure they understand. Another is that there is something significant or surprising about the fact that it was yesterday when these events happened. Sperber and Wilson (1995: 219) suggest that repetition can give rise to inferences about the speaker’s attitude illustrating with an utterance of There’s a fox, a fox, in the garden indicating excitement; we can imagine different prosodic cues when reading the story aloud which would support various assumptions to varying degrees. A reader is likely to make some tentative hypotheses along these lines and then confirm or disconfirm them as they read further. My own assumption having read and thought about the story is that the interpretation most consistent with my other assumptions about Helen is that the repetition suggests that she is confident in her own ability to understand things but less so in that of her mother and other people. For Helen, the repetition largely functions to help a less insightful addressee to keep track. For Alice Munro, it functions to help us understand what kind of person Helen is.

28 This is part of the beginning of the complex process of developing a sense of this character. Reading on, the reader will find various kinds of evidence which support particular hypotheses more strongly than others. Helen seems to think she understands the world better than other people and can see through things which other people can’t. Later on the first page she points out that ‘King’s Department Store’, where she works, ‘is nothing but a ready-to-wear and dry goods, in spite of the name.’ This, and the omission of a noun phrase such as store after dry goods, might reinforce the idea that she thinks she understands things better than other people.

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29 Carrying on, we see that Mr. King used to make a fuss of her when she was young. Giving her raisins, he would say that ‘I only give them to the pretty girls’. We infer that she enjoyed receiving this compliment and perhaps felt special because of it.

30 She thinks of herself as a strong and special person pointing out that the manager ‘doesn’t pick on me, knowing I wouldn’t take it if he did’. (Munro 1968: 128)

31 A key theme running through the story, contributing significantly to the characterisation of Helen, concerns her attitudes to class and her own social status. While Clare’s family are not members of one of the highest classes in Canadian society at the time, they have higher social status than Helen and her mother. Helen’s attitude to this shares properties with other attitudes. She seems to be resentful that others have higher status than her, to suggest that the higher status is not meaningful or deserved, but also to want to move up to that status. Feeling like ‘a thief’ as she looks at the linen, china and silver in the MacQuarrie dining room, she says, ‘But ... why shouldn’t I have the enjoyment of this and the name MacQuarrie since I wouldn’t have to do anything I’m not doing anyway?’ (Munro 1968: 133).

32 We see that Helen is intimidated by the higher social status of the MacQuarries when she says that she ‘thought about it afterwards and burned’ whenever she made a mistake such as producing irrevelant rather than irrelevant when talking to Clare’s sister Porky. She goes on: ‘I know it serves me right for trying to talk the way I never talk in Jubilee. Trying to impress her because she’s a MacQuarrie, after all my lecturing Momma that we’re as good as them.’ (Munro 1968: 130)

33 Questions about class and Helen’s attitude to her own and other people’s social position run in parallel and also interweave with questions about her relationships, in particular those with Ted Forgie and Clare MacQuarrie. The parallelism and the connections add to the complexity and also the interest of the inferential processes which the story gives rise to.

34 Putting just these few things together, we are beginning to develop a sense of Helen’s character. She is strong and sees herself as special and, in some ways, superior. She resents others being seen as belonging to a higher class, or having higher social status, than herself and she does not see why she should not be entitled to the same things as other people. At the same time, she is to some extent intimidated by the higher social status of others.

35 In her relationships with men, we see Helen as potentially being in a victim role but refusing to accept this and retaining a sense of superiority to her lovers. Her knees went hollow when she went to look for mail from her earlier lover, Ted Forgie, and she wonders whether being in ‘a stupor’ over him affected her relationship with Clare. Before she has heard about Clare’s marriage, she tears up the final letter she had received from him, one which has had a powerful effect on her every time she has looked at it (‘a feeling of love, if that is what you want to call it’ – a phrase which is telling, revealing her ability both to be moved and to disparage that feeling at the same time). Tearing up the letter suggests that Helen is moving through a process of getting over her relationship with Ted Forgie, perhaps moving towards a more positive stage in her relationship with Clare as she comes out of her ‘stupor’. Of course, this turns out to be too late when we discover that Clare is married and, later, are presented with her view of him as an ‘unexplaining man’.

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36 Also contributing to our understanding of how Helen responds to what might be seen as her victimhood, there is a recurring sense that Helen is at home in her environment (using phrases like ‘It being Wednesday’ which suggest a calm sureness in her everyday life) and that she remains confident despite what she has gone through. She responds to what we assume must be emotional turmoil by doing something, even if this can be seen as ineffective with regard to her social standing or her relationship with Clare. She drives to Clare’s house, honks her car horn repeatedly and calls out to Clare. The final paragraph of the story suggests that she is strong and resolved even after this embarrassment.

37 Despite her air of being aware and having a sophisticated understanding of things, we see that Helen has been most unobservant in some aspects of her relationship with Clare. He sends her just one postcard in three weeks away. He goes to Florida every year but never invites Helen. He refuses to tell her much about his time away (aggravating Helen by asking her ‘What do you want me to tell?’) Readers will assume that Helen has misunderstood the nature of her relationship with Clare in some fundamental ways.

38 The discussion so far has not involved any technical notions from pragmatic theory. Instead, it has indicated some of the kinds of inferences which readers are likely to make when reading. It has not explored the complexity of these inferences but the fact that this discussion has only scratched the surface suggests the complexity of the inferential processes involved in reading a story (or any other text). The next section considers some ways in which thinking about this complexity can help us to understand the ‘texture’ (in one sense) of the reading experience.

4. Inferential ‘Texture’

39 The discussion above, while very partial, suggests how reader inferences contribute to an emerging understanding of a text, developing and revising hypotheses as they go, during and after reading. This section suggests that exploring inferential processes which happen before, during and after reading can contribute to an account of ‘texture’ in the sense used by Stockwell (2009).

40 Traditionally (since the beginning of the twentieth century), the term ‘texture has been used to describe how various linguistic elements are interconnected (‘woven’ together, metaphorically). Nørgaard, Busse and Montoro (2010: 157-158) discuss this sense and explain its etymology. On this view, they say, a text is ‘a stretch of sentences . . . linked together by various means to form a unified whole’ (Nørgaard, Busse and Montoro 2010: 157).

41 Stockwell (2009) explores ‘texture’ in a different sense which he describes as ‘the experienced quality of textuality’ (2009: 1). In fact, the history of both terms (‘texture’ and ‘textuality’) is slightly confusing and different authors have used them in different ways. Stockwell uses ‘textuality’ to refer to the property of being a text (‘woven together’, as suggested above) and ‘texture’ to refer to what it feels like to experience a text. Stockwell is not the first to discuss this topic but his books applies ideas from cognitive poetics to this topic in an extended discussion which has not been attempted in this way before.

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42 Stockwell discusses how we can account for this experienced quality (or qualities) from a number of perspectives, including the application of a range of ideas from cognitive linguistics and cognitive science more generally. He considers aspects of meaning but does not apply ideas from the post-Gricean pragmatic perspective adopted here. The previous discussion here suggests that accounts of pragmatic inference can play an important role in accounting for the ‘experienced quality’ of this story and other works. This section begins to address this more explicitly by considering two aspects of relevance-theoretic pragmatics: the notion that implicatures can vary in strength; the showing-meaning continuum, and the notion that interpretative processes can be more or less spontaneous. The aim here is not to suggest that these are the only relevant ideas or that they are privileged in some way. The more modest aim is simply to make a start in thinking about inferential texture by considering these.

4.1 Strength of implicatures

43 Relevance theory assumes that implicatures can vary in strength. Put simply, the more confident an addressee can be that a particular inferential conclusion was intended, the more strongly it is implicated. Consider, for example, (9), Clare’s habitual response when Helen asks him to send letters when he’s away to describe what things are like on his travels:

(9) I can tell you just as well when I get back.

44 This provides some evidence (to Helen from Clare’s utterance and to us from Alice Munro showing us Clare’s utterance) for each of (10a)-(10f):

a. Clare will not write Helen a letter. b. Clare does not see the point in writing letters. c. Clare’s relationship with Helen is not strong. (10) d. Clare’s relationship with Helen will not last. e. Clare does not want to tell Helen about his travels. f. Clare does not find what he encounters on his travels very interesting.

45 We would not think that Helen had understood Clare or that we had understood Munro unless she and we understood that his utterance was communicating (10a). This means that (10a) is strongly implicated. We can be much less sure of (10f). Clare’s utterance provides some evidence for this but we cannot be sure that it follows. Perhaps, for example, he finds what he sees very interesting but does not want to tell Helen about it for other reasons. In fact, (a)-(f) are roughly ordered with regard to strength of implicatures.

46 We could, of course, have come up with a longer list of potential conclusions from Clare’s utterance and we could have included some which are so weakly implicated that we might not want to describe them as implicatures. Clare’s utterance, for example, shows that his lungs are working (since the utterance requires movement of air caused by them) but we would not suggest that the utterance communicates this.

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47 It is typical of utterances, in general as well as in fiction, that they provide evidence which supports to greater or lesser degrees a range of possible conclusions. It is also typical of both utterances in general and, arguably more strongly, of fictional utterances, that we continue to assess evidence as we go so that the strength of evidence for particular conclusions is continually adjusted. We are less likely to think that Clare finds little of interest or worth reporting on his travels once we discover that he is married. The news of his marriage also, of course, provides evidence to support or disconfirm to varying degrees a range of other conclusions we might have been tentatively considering. This pattern of constantly emerging ranges of potential inferential conclusions and their ongoing adjustment is typical of inferential processing, is arguably more marked in many cases of reading prose fiction, and is surely an important feature of what readers experience in their encounters with a text.

48 Related to this, we can consider the well-known observation that there are different communicative relationships involved in a work of prose fiction. Authors produce their utterances to communicate with readers. Authors show characters producing utterances. The utterances and other behaviours of the characters convey meanings to other characters. The author gives rise to meanings for readers by showing the communicative and other behaviour of characters. When Helen tells her mother that ‘It’s understood’ that Clare and Helen will marry after his mother dies, her mother infers that Helen thinks she and Clare have an agreement. This is an implicature of Helen’s utterance for her mother. If we assume that her mother thinks of herself as worldly-wise and believes that Helen is no more than an easily-available mistress for Clare, she might also infer that Helen has not understood properly and that Clare and Helen will not get married. This is a non-communicated implication for Helen’s mother but Alice Munro is providing evidence for this to us and so this is an implicature of the story for us.

49 The relationships among various parts of the text and the status of various conclusions as implicatures of varying strengths, as non-communicated implications, as cases of showing or meaning, add to the complexity of our experience of reading and to its texture in the sense used by Stockwell (2009).

4.2 (Non-)Spontaneousness

50 Furlong (1996, 2001, 2007, 2011, 2012) has developed an account of literary interpretation which sees non-spontaneousness as playing a key role. Furlong suggests that interpretations can vary in how spontaneous (in a specific sense) they are. A relatively spontaneous interpretation is one which, in relevance-theoretic terms, follows the general comprehension heuristic mentioned above until it finds an interpretation consistent with the communicative principle of relevance. A relatively non-spontaneous interpretation is one which involves devoting more time to exploring possibilities, considering a range of evidence for and against particular conclusions, perhaps never deciding that enough evidence has been considered and so never considering that the interpretation process is complete.

51 Certain texts are more likely to be the objects of fairly spontaneous interpretations, e.g. an everyday utterance such as (11) uttered in response to a question about when the speaker finishes work:

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(11) I’ll be home in time for tea.

52 The addressee will be likely to conclude that the speaker will not be held up for a long time at work, that the speaker and addressee can eat together, perhaps that the speaker won’t be too tired this evening, and not much else.

53 Literary texts are likely to be the object of relatively non-spontaneous interpretations. Shakespeare’s works, for example, have been the object of extended interpretation processes by many people over many years. Other texts lie at various places along the continuum from fairly spontaneous to fairly non-spontaneous.

54 Some texts encourage interpretations which are less spontaneous than might have been expected. A filmgoer who has just seen a David Lynch movie might well be seriously puzzled by what they have seen. They might spend considerable time thinking about it. They might ask friends what they thought, or consult websites. To the extent that they do this, they are developing fairly nonspontaneous interpretations. On the other hand, some viewers might just ‘give up’ and decide that they can’t make sense of what they have just seen.

55 What about ‘Postcard’? Again, the option is there for readers to decide how spontaneous or not they will be. Consider the repetition of yesterday discussed above. Some readers might barely register this repetition, carry on reading and focus mainly on what the story reveals, developing an understanding of the events narrated, the characters, and what they think of the story. Others might notice the repetition and think about its effects more fully. Professional writers might well focus on details of particular texts far more closely than other readers. No doubt stylisticians also have different reading practices from other readers.

56 We might also map out the story with regard to how likely particular parts are to give rise to spontaneous or non-spontaneous interpretations. Readers will vary in the extent to which they think about what kinds of evidence various parts of the story provide about Helen, her life and her relationships. Some parts of the text, however, are likely to encourage more inferencing. The final paragraph, for example, is likely to encourage readers to think about why Helen felt she wanted to touch Clare and perhaps to think back to the rest of the story looking for more evidence.

57 Exploring the puzzle of why Helen now wants to touch Clare is a good example of an open-ended interpretation process which we can think about without ever being sure we have come to a conclusion about it. There are notions of ‘texture’ involved here in the non-technical sense of what it feels like to touch something as well as what it feels like to have an emotional response to something. We can think about what it would feel like for Helen to touch Clare and for Clare to be touched by Helen. We can think about why people touch each other in general (love? more general empathy? to convey emotions?) And of course there is a poignancy in thinking about this while knowing that Helen will not now be touching Clare. The feeling that she wants to touch him has emerged too late for it to be realised. Helen has gone through an emotional process which includes the moment when she becomes able to destroy Ted Forgie’s letter and which leads her to an emotional state where she feels something like love or empathy (with a physical aspect) for Clare. The process was happening while Clare was away getting married and is possibly entangled in complex ways with Helen’s coming to terms with the fact of his marriage.

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58 We can explore these questions more or less spontaneously and feel that we are developing our understanding of the story while never becoming confident that we have reached the end of this process. Variations in spontaneousness of interpretative processes contribute to the texture of the story and accounting for this will help us to understand how the story is experienced by various readers.

5. Conclusion

59 The above discussion has only scratched the surface of what we might achieve by considering the inferential processes involved in producing, interpreting and evaluating a text, and of what we can discover about ‘Postcard’ in particular. Clearly, pragmatic stylistic approaches have a role to play in the stylistic analysis of texts. This paper has argued that they also have an important role to play in accounting for ‘texture’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIRNER, Betty J. 2012. Introduction to Pragmatics. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

CHAPMAN, Siobhan. 2011. Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

CHAPMAN, Siobhan and Billy CLARK (eds.) 2014. Pragmatic Literary Stylistics. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

CLARK, B. 2012. “Beginning with One More Thing: Pragmatics and editorial intervention in the work of Raymond Carver”. Journal of Literary Semantics 41.2: 155-174.

CLARK, B. 2013. Relevance Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

CLARK, B. 2014a. “Pragmatics and inference”. In Stockwell, P. and S. Whiteley (eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 300-314.

CLARK, B. 2014b. “Stylistics and relevance theory”. In Burke, M. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Routledge, London: 155-174.

CLARK, B. 2014c. “Before, during and after Chekhov: Inference, literary interpretation and literary value”. In Chapman, S. and B. Clark (eds.) Pragmatic Literary Stylistics. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke: 55-69.

CLARK, B. and OWTRAM, N. 2012. “Imagined inference: Teaching writers to think like readers”. In Burke, M., Czabo, S., Week, L. and J. Berkowitz (eds.) Current Trends in Pedagogical Stylistics. Continuum, London: 126-141.

FURLONG, Anne. 1996. Relevance Theory and Literary Interpretation. PhD. Thesis. University College London.

FURLONG, Anne. 2001. “Is it a classic if no-one reads it?”’ Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistics Association (APLA). Université de Moncton, Moncton NB.

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FURLONG, Anne. 2007. “A Modest Proposal: Linguistics and Literary Studies”. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 10.3: 325-347.

FURLONG, Anne. 2011. “The Soul of Wit.” Language and Literature 20: 136-150.

FURLONG, Anne. 2012. “‘It’s not quite what I had in mind’: Adaptation, faithfulness, and interpretation”. Journal of Literary Semantics 41.2: 175-191.

GRICE, H. Paul. 1957. “Meaning”. Philosophical Review 66.3: 377-388.

GRICE, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University press, Cambridge MA.

HORN, Laurence R. 1984. “Towards a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q- and R-based implicature”. In Schiffrin, D. (ed.) Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University Press, Washington DC: 11-42.

HORN, Laurence R. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL.

HORN, Laurence R. 2004. “Implicature”. In Horn, L.R. and G. Ward (eds.) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford: 3-28.

HORN, Laurence R. 2007. “Neo-Gricean pragmatics: a Manichaean manifesto”. In Noel Burton- Roberts (ed.) Pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke: 158-83.

KNEALE, Douglas. 2013. “Alice Munro’s Nobel: Did I have a role in it?” CBC News website. 25 December, 2013. Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/alice-munro-s-nobel-did-i-have-a-role-in-it-1.2474732 Accessed 19 February 2015.

LEVINSON, Stephen C. 1987. “Minimization and conversational inference”. In J. Verschueren and M. Bertuccelli-Papi (eds.) The Pragmatic Perspective. John Benjamins, Amsterdam: 61-129.

LEVINSON, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

LOHAFER, Susan. 1983. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge LA.

LOHAFER, Susan. 2003. Reading for Storyness. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD.

MACMAHON, Barbara. 2006. “Relevance theory: Stylistic applications”. In Brown, E.K. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition. Elsevier, Oxford: 519-522.

MUNRO, Alice. 1968. Dance of the Happy Shades. McGraw-Hill-Ryerson, Toronto.

NØRGAARD, Nina, Beatrix BUSSE and Rocio MONTORO. 2010. Key Terms in Stylistics. Continuum, London.

PILKINGTON, Adrian. 2000. Poetic Effects. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

SPERBER, Dan and Deirdre WILSON. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

SPERBER, Dan and Deirdre WILSON. 2005. “Pragmatics”. In F. Jackson and M. Smith (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 468-501.

STOCKWELL, Peter. 2009. Texture: A cognitive aesthetics of reading. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

WHARTON, Tim. 2009. Pragmatics and Nonverbal Communication. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

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WILSON, Deirdre and Dan SPERBER. 2004. “Relevance theory”. In L.R. Horn and G. Ward (eds.) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford: 607-632.

WILSON, Deirdre and Tim WHARTON, 2006. “Relevance and prosody”. Journal of Pragmatics 38.10: 1559-1579.

ABSTRACTS

This paper considers some of the ways in which ideas from pragmatic stylistics (based here on relevance theory) can be applied in exploring aspects of the production and interpretation of Alice Munro’s story ‘Postcard’. It identifies some features of the story, considers the role of inferential processes in reading, writing and evaluating texts in general, and considers how focusing on inference can help in understanding specific effects of the story on readers. Finally, it considers how focusing on inference can help to account for what Stockwell (2009) terms the ‘texture’ of the story, i.e. what it feels like to engage with the story during and after reading it.

INDEX

Keywords: inference, pragmatics, relevance, texture, characterisation, production, interpretation, evaluation

AUTHOR

BILLY CLARK Billy Clark is Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics at Middlesex University in London. He has published research in a wide range of topics connected with linguistic semantics, pragmatics and stylistics. His book Relevance Theory was published in 2013 and his collection “Pragmatic Literary Stylistics”, co-edited with Siobhan Chapman, in 2014. His current research focuses on pragmatic stylistics, writing and intonational meaning.

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Teenage in the Ironic Mode: A Study of the Drafts of “Red Dress–1946” by Alice Munro

Christine Lorre-Johnston

AUTHOR'S NOTE

A different version of this article, focusing on the theme of “growing up” rather than on genetic criticism, is included in Chapter 4 of Ailsa Cox and Christine Lorre-Johnston, The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (Paris: Fahrenheit, 2015).

1 Several stories in Dance of the Happy Shades are connected by a protagonist presenting recurring traits: a girl who lives in Tuppertown, has a younger brother, a dominating mother, and a father, Ben Jordan, who is first a fox-farmer then a salesman. These stories include “Images,” “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” “Boys and Girls,” and “Red Dress —1946.” Considered together, they trace a girl’s development from the age of about five to thirteen and evoke various experiences and discoveries: fear and anxiety (“Images”), grown-ups’ secret past lives (“Walker Brothers’ Cowboy”), the constraints of gender roles as the teenage years arrive (“Boys and Girls”), the rituals of boy-girl relations in a context of budding sexuality, and the need to move away from a dominating mother (“Red Dress—1946”). As is well known, relations between men and women, and between mothers and daughters, became two of Munro’s favourite topics. As she gets closer to these subjects in this collection, she deploys a subtle form of irony in this story (the other childhood stories focus instead on the child’s sensations, instincts, curiosity and imagination). Calling on the ironic mode is an early sign of the “battle for authenticity” Munro would wage “in the field of sex,” to quote Margaret Atwood (Atwood 2008 np). Here the battle isin the field of mother-daughter relations: it aims at getting to the core of the protagonist’s inner feelings and motivations, peeling off the outer layers of theatricality needed in social context. At the same time, the girl is still between

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childhood and teenage, so the viewpoint also reflects a growing girl’s sensitive emotions, and Munro’s gently ironic style reflects this liminal position.

2 In her theoretical work, Linda Hutcheon has observed that irony is often defined as “involving saying one thing and meaning another” (Hutcheon 1994: 37), but that it is more complex than that. Hutcheon points out how “irony happens as part of a communicative process; it is not a static rhetorical tool to be deployed, but itself comes into being in the relations between meanings, but also between people and utterances and, sometimes, between intentions and interpretations.” (13) She sees it primarily as “the mode of the unsaid, the unheard, the unseen” (9), and insists that “there is an affective ‘charge’ to irony that cannot be ignored and that cannot be separated from its politics of use” (15). All these factors give irony what Hutcheon calls its “edge,” that is to say its critical potential. This paper aims at examining the emergence and functioning of irony as discursive practice in “Red Dress—1946” by comparing the drafts of the story which are available in the Special Collections of the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary,1 and the version first published in The Montrealer in 1965, and then collected in Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).

3 The different versions of the text are typewritten and archived in seven files (numbered 37.6.41, 37.6.42.1, 37.6.42.2, 37.6.43.1, 37.6.43.2, 37.6.44 and 37.6.45; the pages of each draft are also numbered: f1, f2, etc.). 2 The texts are not dated so the numbers of the folders do not correspond to a clear chronological order, but there is a sequential arrangement to their numbering, with a rough progression towards versions of the text that are fuller and closer to the published one. The texts certainly give us an insight into the writing as process (De Biasi 11), which we will aim at interpreting by comparing the various versions of the text, following the principles of genetic criticism. This study will focus on the most significant variations in the text, which illustrate two main points: the dress as source of irony, and narrative voice (together with characterisation, setting, and ending) as a factor of reflexivity.

The dress as source of irony

4 The dress the mother makes for the girl is foregrounded in the title as a central element in the story. As often with a Munro story, a protagonist’s garment acts as a metonym, telling the reader about the person’s character as well as about her social and, in this case, filial relationships. The dress is the mother’s creation in a way that reflects the fact that she would like to shape the fate of her daughter as a young woman, for she has romantic scenarios in mind for her. This is clear in draft 37.6.42.1, where we read about the mother’s life prior to her marriage: “My mother remembered dresses. The story of her life – I mean of the romantic and interesting part of her life before she married – was told to me serially on Saturdays when she was in a good mood, and she always paused to describe a dress […].” And it is explicit in draft 37.6.43.1.f5: “She could still remember every detail of [her dress], even the mother-of- pearl buttons. Those were the happiest days of her life, as she expected these to be of mine.” The mother’s nostalgia for her youth and the fine dresses she used to wear means that she has hopes and expectations for her daughter.

5 In the published text the mother’s stories no longer interest the girl, for they “had begun to seem melodramatic, irrelevant, and tiresome” (Munro 1968: 149); an emotional gap is growing between the two of them, reflecting the gap between the

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mother’s memories of youth and the girl’s experience of it. The mother is presented as a fairly hard, quick-tempered person, who complains indirectly in the presence of Lonnie about her daughter’s ingratitude. This signals a more antagonistic relationship, while also emphasising the girl’s docility, although she is fuming inwardly. The mother is meaner, less complicit with the girl than in the two drafts quoted above, paving the way for the girl’s reticence when she comes back from the dance.

6 The mother is also figuratively trying to corset the girl, although the mother herself wears “no corset or stockings at home” (148), much to her daughter’s embarrassment at her aging body in front of Lonnie. In some drafts the dress is very tight: “Half an inch more around the middle would be your ruination, it fits you like a glove.” (37.6.41.2) – or even too tight – “‘I like it,’ I said. ‘Its just the armholes are too tight.’” (37.6.43.1.f4) – so the mother has to adjust it. In nol version of the text are her ideals of feminine elegance and beauty adapted to the changing body of her daughter, so those ideals are bound to make the girl feel worse about a physical reality that she is obviously not yet used to and not comfortable with.

7 All this is seen retrospectively, something the title hints at. The phrasing “Red Dress– 1946” is blunt in style, a bluntness that is emphasised if we compare this title to the slightly different one given to the story in three of the drafts: “A Red Dress, 1946.”3 In both cases the title reads somehow like a label for an object in a museum, casting the remembered dress into historical perspective, in the immediate post-World War II period, inscribing it in a context that has since undergone many transformations. It also conjures up a visual image, a memory that the narrator has, which is associated with that time, and with many other memories that are described in the story. So the dress as object and its colour act as triggers for the narrator’s remembrance – visual, sensual, emotional. This is a well-known creative writing device, sometimes used in workshops, as Wayson Choy recalls from his course with Carol Shields in the Creative Writing programme at the University of British Columbia in 1977, when she asked her students to start a story from a colour they picked at random.4 The title “Red Dress— 1946” thus casts the narrator into a position of reminiscence and narration, that is to say the position of a storyteller. Had Munro used the indefinite article in the draft title, followed by a comma rather than a dash before the year, it would have made the dress more generic and anonymous, less sharp in the storyteller’s memory. Alternately, Munro could have used the definite article – “the red dress” – which would have made the dress the explicit focus of the story, but it is not: it is only a starting point, the visible sign, to be deciphered, of the girl’s feelings at the time, and of the social rituals that she had to go through. The choice of a dash rather than a comma in the published title makes it more abrupt, less narrative; the material for narrative is just put there in front of storyteller and reader, so the story can start.

8 Munro’s treatment of the dress, and through it of the girl’s feelings, is ironic in a way that makes the viewpoint simultaneously compassionate and humorous. She could have opted for a more dramatic approach, as shown in an early draft in which the third- person narrative starts with a description of the dress: When she opened the wardrobe in her room, no matter what she came to get, it was always that dress she saw, hanging alone in the ghostly folds of the plastic bag her mother had bought for it, and she flapped it back with her hand but couldn’t stop seeing it, until one day she made herself take it right out and move it back behind everything else she owned, including her winter coat; this was an improvement but the bottom of the plastic bag was still visible. She just blinked and pretended she

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hadn’t seen it. Sometimes she thought her mind was furnished with nothing but trap-doors, insecurely fastened, and she had to keep running around jumping on them so things wouldn’t pop up on her. Things she had pushed down there to get them out of the way. (37.6.41.f2)

9 This passage is Gothic in tone: the dress is like a skeleton in the closet, “a secret source of […] pain […]” (OED). The plastic bag, instead of sealing it away, only enhances its ghostly nature. The shift from actual vision, in the sense of eyesight, whereby the protagonist sees the dress every time she opens the wardrobe, to mental vision, whereby the dress obsessively haunts the girl’s mind, signals her inability to discard the old dress, and with it the unpleasant memories and feelings it evokes. The image of the trap-doors suggests the permanent danger of living with her past weighing over her and preventing her from moving on. The final sentence, about “things she had pushed down” under trap-doors, unambiguously evokes the failed repression of old emotions from consciousness, into the subconscious. Altogether, this passage makes for a more dramatic and painful evocation of emotions linked to adolescence, with the narrator less distant from them. Such an opening would certainly preclude the ending of the story as we can read it in the published version, which focuses on the girl’s successful distantiation from her mother.

10 By contrast with the Gothic tone of the first paragraph in the draft previously quoted, the dress in the published version is described in humorous terms: My mother, never satisfied, was sewing a white lace collar on the dress; she had decided it was too grown-up looking. […] The dress was princess style, very tight in the midriff. I saw how my breasts, in their new stiff brassiere, jutted out surprisingly, with mature authority, under the childish frills of the collar. (Munro 1968: 151, 152)

11 The clashing styles of the childish collar and the tight midriff signal the mother’s contradictory double impulse, to acknowledge and underline the femininity of her daughter’s figure, and also to protect her like a child. It echoes the girl’s feeling, who dreads the school dance and “longed to be back safe behind the boundaries of childhood” (151), while being aware of the failure of the dress. This awareness is a sign of her maturity, and contrasts with the time when she wore clothes made by her mother “with docility, in the days when I was unaware of the world’s opinion” (148). The description of the outfits the mother made before this dress is comic, first of all through an effect of accumulation, and then, because of the mother’s pretention to styles that are outmoded. She made: “a flowered organdie dress with a high Victorian neckline edged in scratchy lace, with a poke bonnet to match; a Scottish plaid outfit with a velvet jacket and tam; an embroidered peasant blouse worn with full red skirt and black laced bodice” (147-8). The child is like a doll the mother dresses, and her outfits look like costumes rather than children’s clothes, especially with the matching hats that are from another time (the poke bonnet, which became fashionable in the early 19th century) and another place (the Tam O’Shanter or Scottish bonnet, named after the eponymous hero of Robert Burns’s 1790 poem). The first dress sounds particularly uncomfortable, with the stiff cotton of the organdie and the “scratchy lace.” The third outfit, which one pictures as traditional central European in style, seems out of place.

12 Altogether these clothes signal the mother’s nostalgia for a Victorian culture in which children were meant to be “seen and not heard,” and for her presumably Scottish origins. They contrast with the physical reality of the girl’s body, which makes her

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uncomfortable, especially at school. The irony of these descriptions thus derives from the implied discrepancy between the mother’s idea of style and the reality of her adolescent daughter’s life, but also from the discrepancy between the mother’s tastes and those of the times, as reflected in Lonnie’s bought dress, which the narrator admires and envies her. It is a case of “a double significance which arises from the contrast in values associated with two different points of view” (Leech and Short 278), repeated twice. Irony is based not on antiphrasis (saying one thing and meaning its opposite), but on the interpretation by the reader of the meaning implied by the narrator; it is therefore relational, to use Linda Hutcheon’s terminology (Hutcheon 58), and based on the presence of a strong first-person narrative voice.

Narrative voice, characterisation, setting, ending, and reflexivity

13 Like the other stories dealing with a similar narrator, “Red Dress—1946” is a first- person narrative. However, two of the drafts reveal that Munro started by telling the story in the third person. In draft 37.6.41.1 the mother, called Adelaide, walks into the house, bringing a box that contains a dress she has bought off someone. This opening foregrounds the mother as a theatrical woman who bosses around her daughter Lois and another character called Frank, presumably her son, so the daughter is out of the limelight for a whole page—this is probably not the effect Munro wanted to achieve. It is worth noting that the names chosen here are the same as those of two characters in “Thanks for the Ride”: Lois and Adelaide are the two friends who go out with the narrator and his cousin, and they are sexually promiscuous in a way the girl in “Red Dress—1946” is unlikely to become. What the two stories have in common though is a mother flaunting her daughter’s youthful figure, but the mother in “Red Dress—1946” is virtuously proud of her sewing skills and thrift, while the one in “Thanks for the Ride” is hoping to obtain some benefit from her daughter’s encounters, so the two are morally contrasted. The fact that both mother and daughter are unnamed in the published version of “Red Dress—1946” lays the emphasis on their respective roles as relatives rather than on their individuality.

14 In a second draft also in the third person (37.6.41.2), the opening paragraph is a description of a dress that has been put away in a wardrobe (see the passage quoted above, starting with “When she opened…”), and it is followed by the scene of the mother, Adelaide, entering the house with the box containing that same dress, calling for the attention of her daughter Robina and of two other characters called Frankie and Theo (probably Robina’s siblings). This opening, with a shift back in time between the first two paragraphs, sets up a retrospective perspective on the dress, establishing links between the girl’s present obsessions and memories linked to the dress (which are not developed in this unfinished draft). This retrospective outlook is maintained in the published version of the story, where it is reinforced by the use of the first person, as it gives the story resonance, but now in a reflective rather than a dramatic or sentimental way (as in draft 37.6.41.2). The use of the first person here implies access to a greater variety of confusing inner feelings in the girl, and, combined with the retrospective perspective, leads to “a complex weighing up of one attitude against another, especially of sympathetic identification [with the girl narrator] against ironic distance” and complicity with the adult narrator (Leech and Short 283).

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15 For instance, while the (adult) narrator’s listing of the outfits her mother made her over the years has a distancing ironic effect, as we saw earlier, her mentioning the discomfort she feels at school (as a girl), fearing she may have stained her skirt when she has to go to the blackboard, or having sweaty hands when she has to use the blackboard compass, lead to a form of sympathetic identification on the part of this reader. Irony can also be directed at herself: this is the case in the passage where she relates her various failed attempts at getting sick or incapacitated to attend the dance, and which ends in an ironic oxymoron: “Every morning, including the day of the dance, I rose defeated, and in perfect health” (Munro 1968: 151). This type of irony is a form of self-protection through self-deprecation (Hutcheon 1994: 47); as the narrator remembers her young self, she gives the remembrance comic relief, while also implying that as adult narrator she is now at ease with her own body, and is able to laugh at her own failings.

16 Lonnie plays an important role in the definition of the narrative voice, which turns into the plural “we” when the two girls retire to the narrator’s bedroom to discuss boys and sexuality. The anaphoric accumulation of the plural pronoun in this passage creates an atmosphere of complicity and gives the narration univocality, but that is undermined by the end of the paragraph, when the narrator reveals something she has kept secret from Lonnie about the high school Christmas Dance: “I did not want to go […]” (Munro 1968: 149). The intimate friendship between the two girls emphasises the narrator’s feeling of alienation. This is different from draft 37.6.42.2, in which the friend is called Irene Dark; the draft starts with the girl narrator setting off to walk to Irene’s place before the dance. When the girl gets to their place Irene reads her “Do’s and Don’ts for Dance-time Fun.” This characterisation takes the focus away from the girl and shifts it to Irene and her house. Draft 37.6.43.1 is overall closer to the final version but in it the girl also goes to pick up her friend, now called Lonnie, on the way to the dance, instead of Lonnie coming to pick her up. Lonnie’s family is described as being two-faced, which puts the girl in a more vulnerable position and brings complications to a different aspect of the plot.

17 By contrast with these scenarios, the published version establishes an intimate friendship between the narrator and her friend Lonnie, one in which the narrator nonetheless has secrets that she keeps from Lonnie, and in which Lonnie is deceitful in that she knows how to flatter adults. The girls’ complicity is also reinforced by the fact that they read together the dance-attendance advice given to girls in a magazine, rather than Lonnie reading instructions to the narrator about do’s and don’ts. In the draft, this passage is more didactic, a comic piece in six points, a parody of girl’s magazines inserted in the text, juxtaposed to rather than worked into the narrative (37.6.43.1.f8-f9). By contrast, in the published text, the girl remembers similar advice in situ, as she is confronted with the fact that no boy has invited her to dance yet. The process of remembering the article is brief and limited to about two lines in italics in the text: “Be gay! Let the boys see your eyes sparkle, let them hear laughter in your voice! Simple, obvious, but how many girls forget! (Munro 1968: 154) The advice is condensed and graphically stands out (with the italics), so it is identifiable as echoing the voice of girls’ magazines. The ironical critique is more powerful and comical than in the longer version of girls’ magazine parody, as the discrepancy between the magazine’s advice and the girl’s experience undermines its relevance on the spot, in action. The girl-

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narrator is left to her own judgment, which leads to situational comedy, complete with the girl absurdly smiling at no one.

18 By having a relationship in which differences between the two girls are not foregrounded but minimised, Munro chooses to have a tighter unity of character as well as place (the girls meet in the narrator’s room, in the house where all other personal events happen, the other, public location being the dance hall). But this is only to emphasise the girl’s distress: she cannot confess her fear to her friend, because she is acting a part; even the house is a place for theatricality and role-playing.

19 Unity of setting and location also reinforces the identity of the kitchen as a gendered space. It is the room where the mother does the sewing, where the girl has a bath before the dance in some of the drafts, where her friend and mother interact in an overall atmosphere of female complicity; it is where the female body is being prepared for the ritual of the dance. While waiting, the girl lies on the kitchen couch, above which she can see the marks of old games she played with her brother, and she thinks: “I looked at them and longed to be back safe behind the boundaries of childhood” (151). The kitchen thus acts as a diachronic place, where the various stages of the girl’s life, and even, through reminiscence, her mother’s, can be envisioned all at once, syncretically. It is also where the mother waits for her at the end, drinking tea, and the girl, seeing her from outside, envisions their future relationship.

20 The importance of the feminine ritual of preparing for the dance is emphasised by the absence in the published version of the father, or even of the brother, who is only mentioned and relegated to the world of remembered childhood and the times when the narrator played Xs and Os with him. In one of the drafts, the father is more present: My father was a fox farmer. That is, he raised silver foxes and sold their pelts to the Montreal Fur Auction or the Hudson’s Bay Company, and they sent us every year a magnificent calendar, showing some scene out of the imagined past of this country. […] I had what may have been my first premonitions of nostalgia. The kitchen seemed to me blessedly familiar, warm and sheltering. My father was in the cellar. Christmas was also pelting time, and he worked in the evenings, as he had worked most of the day, skinning foxes and stretching their skins inside out on long boards, to dry. The smell of blood and animal fat, as well the scent of the fox itself, rose in our house, reassuringly seasonal as the smell of figs and oranges and drying pine needles. My father had taken the radio down to the cellar and was listening to the hockey game. I almost wept with my longing to stay home with them. (37.6.42.1.f2- f3)

21 In this draft the girl’s perspective, as reflected in her description of the family environment, is more childlike than in the published version. Her worldview is based on sensations, on familiar seasonal smells that convey the reassurance of repetition, regularity and homeliness. The whole passage is nostalgic and sentimental in a way the published version is not: there, the girl is already at odds with her mother, although she does not verbalise it. And the fox-farmer father in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Boys and Girls” is not even mentioned in the final text of “Red Dress—1946,” so the focus is on the mother-daughter relationship and on the feminine world. The paragraph quoted above was used though, after some reworking, as the first two paragraphs of “Boys and Girls”: they refer to the fox-farmer father, the fur trade companies and their calendars, the cellar where the pelting goes on, the seasonal smells. But there is no mention at all of nostalgia: the girl is eleven at the time of the story, and very much part of her father’s world still, although on the point of being excluded from it. By the end of “Boys and Girls”, this has taken effect: Laird has become

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“a real help” (Munro 1968: 117), while she is “only a girl” (127). By the time of “Red Dress—1946,” two years later, the girl, willy-nilly, has become part of the mother’s sphere, whom she perceives as “my enemy” (117) in “Boys and Girls.” By the time the girl is thirteen, there is acceptance and docility on her part, but also repressed frustration.

22 The variations on the ending of the story are revealing of Munro’s uses of irony in the narrative voice. In draft 37.6.46 an unnamed, unknown Grade Ten boy, after dancing with the narrator twice, walks her home. He talks to her about hockey, she shares a piece of Kleenex she has for them to wipe their noses with – a more modern, anticlimactic, and less romantic item than the “handkerchief soaked in Violets” she puts in her pocket before the dance in another version (37.6.43.f7). Then they say goodbye: We faced each other across a couple of feet of snow. At such times did people kiss. Nothing seemed more improbable. “Good night.” “Yeah, good-night.” I went around the house to the back door, thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy walked me home. It was true. My life was possible.” (37.6.44.f12)

23 Even though the thought of a predictable kiss crosses her mind, she is not disappointed that it does not happen, and considers the evening a success even so. So what did Munro add to the scene in the published version by turning the anonymous boy into a boy from the girl’s class, Raymond Bolting, whom she has never talked to, and by having him kiss her rather than not? She added irony, with Raymond being “the boy next door” rather than an older, stranger, therefore more glamorous boy. And the kiss is a quick one: Raymond “kissed me, briefly, with the air of one who knew his job when he saw it, on the corner of my mouth” (Munro 1968: 160). He is performing his role, following an established ritual of courting. The kiss is a chaste one, and the girl need not think about “what to do when a boy tried to go too far” (149), as she and Lonnie have been reading about in magazines. But she feels rescued and brought back into “the ordinary world” of boys and girls her age. Affectionate irony is found here in the gap between the imagined kiss and the actual one, which to the girl at the time nonetheless performs its role of making her feel normal.

24 We saw that the unpublished drafts had the narration in the third person with a dominant mother, or foregrounded the dress as a key element in a Gothic atmosphere. In the published version the story opens and closes with a vision of the mother, so structurally she really frames the narrative, suggesting that the girl cannot escape her presence or influence, or the type of female condition that the kitchen suggests. However, a lot happens between these two scenes, and this is reflected in the focalisation. In the opening, the mother is seen making the girl’s dress in the kitchen, as the girl comes home from school. The mother is by the window for the light, and to look out at passers-by. In the final paragraph, the girl walks past the kitchen window and sees her mother. The fact that the mother is seen from outside, framed by the kitchen window, rather than from inside, establishes a distance between her and her daughter’s perspective, whereby the mother appears as in some sort of tableau, and the girl is in observer position; the mother is seen, and no longer sees; she has lost that kind of control.

25 The insistence on the mother’s sitting and waiting lays the emphasis on her immobility, as well as her confinement to the kitchen, which culminates in the hypallage found in

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the phrase “the waiting kitchen” (160), with the transfer to the kitchen of the epithet linked to the (waiting) mother. The mother thus becomes the kitchen that she belongs to, in a metonymic process that definitely binds her to the home, in a suspended state of expectation rather than action, by contrast with her more commanding self, the self which earlier made the dress in which her daughter willconfront the larger world.. Focalisation is perceptual, relating what the girl sees, but from “And I would not do it, I never would,” it is also explicitly psychological (Toolan 72-74), as the girl evaluates the situation and makes a resolution for the future that will define her relationship with her mother, this girl who hitherto has been mainly passive while the mother was pinning her and making the dress. Through her future silence she will deliberately withhold information, rather than simply being forced to be silent and to keep her feelings in check, as when she tries the dress on: “She [my mother] enraged me […]. My head was muffled in velvet” (Munro 1968: 148). It could even be argued that focalisation here is ideological (Toolan 74), in the sense that by deciding not to tell her mother about her encounters with boys in future, the girl raises the possibility of defeating her mother’s expectations regarding her daughter’s future happiness; perhaps in her future she will be happy in ways that her mother cannot imagine. She may thus be able to escape the traditional notion of female happiness, which in the mother’s mind, as in many people’s, hinges on conventional marriage (Ahmed 7).

26 “Red Dress—1946” is a successful experiment for Munro in a style that is simultaneously subtly ironic, comic and tender. By choosing the first-person narration, she puts the narrator in charge of her own story, giving her the means to deal retrospectively with her younger self and with her mother. This is achieved through the creation of a dual ironic tone, whereby the narrator looks back at her awkward teenage self in a gently self-mocking way, and reassesses her relationship with her mother, retrospectively, identifying what it is that happened at that time. The story thus ends with the narrator’s becoming aware of her decision that night not to tell her mother about her encounters with boys, and thereby to retain her privacy. In doing so she protects both of them: she spares her mother possible disappointment, and spares herself her mother’s necessarily inadequate comments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AHMED, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University, 2010.

ATWOOD, Margaret. “Alice Munro: an appreciation by Margaret Atwood.” The Guardian 11 October 2008. www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/11/alice-munro. Accessed 21 December 2014.

DE BIASI, Pierre-Marc. Génétique des textes. Paris: CNRS éditions, 2011.

HUTCHEON, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

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LEECH, Geoffrey N., and Michael H. SHORT. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Harlow: Longman, 1981.

MUNRO, Alice. Alice Munro fonds, Special Collections, Taylor Family Digital Library, University of Calgary. Files 37.6.41, 37.6.42.1-2, 37.6.43.1-2, 37.6.44, 37.6.45.

MUNRO, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. 1968. London: Vintage, 2000.

SELLERS, Scott. “Discovering What Matters: An Interview with Wayson Choy.” Read 5.1 (2004): 35-38.

TOOLAN, Michael J. Narrative: Critical Linguistic Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1988.

NOTES

1. Warmest thanks to Annie Murray and Allison Wagner at the Special Collections of the University of Calgary for their precious help during my visit there in April 2014. I also wish to acknowledge the financial support of LabEx TransferS (ENS / CNRS / Collège de France) for that research trip, and the help of Josette Rio at ARIAS in managing the archival material. 2. File 37.6.45 is a photocopy of the story published in The Montrealer in 1965, which is almost strictly identical to the 1968 published version. (The only changes concern some words that were capitalised in The Montrealer and that were then lower cased in the collected version – high school, principal, physical education – the italicisation of The Last Days of Pompeii, and minor aspects of punctuation that do not alter the style or meaning.) Because the 1965 published version is not significantly different from the 1968 one, this study will ignore it and refer to the 1968 text in the comparison of the versions. 3. The drafts in the first three files have no title; the next three read “A Red Dress, 1946.” The seventh file has the final title given to the Montrealer version: “Red Dress—1946.” 4. “For one assignment, she tore up pieces of paper, each marked with a colour, and set the rule: whichever colour you picked up, that colour had to become a major part of your next short story assignment.” (Sellers 36) This led to Choy writing “The Jade Peony,” which was published first as short story and then as novel (1995). American-born Carol Shields (1935-2003), one of the major Canadian women writers of the last third of the 20th century, is best known as the author of The Stone Diaries (1993), which won the US Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Governor General’s Award in Canada.

ABSTRACTS

Through a study of “Red Dress–1946,” this article aims at showing how Munro in her first collection develops an ironical style through which the narrator humorously looks back at her awkward teenage self and, in a more deeply affecting way, at her changing relationship with her mother. This work is based on a comparative study of the drafts of the story which are available in the Special Collections of the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary, and the version collected in Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, after being first published in 1965 in The Montrealer. The analysis will focus on two main aspects of the evolving and published texts: the

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dress as source of irony, and narrative voice (together with characterisation, setting, and ending) as a factor of reflexivity.

INDEX

Keywords: Red Dress – 1946, genetic criticism, irony, narrative voice, happiness, mother and daughter relations, gender relations

AUTHOR

CHRISTINE LORRE-JOHNSTON Christine Lorre-Johnston is a senior lecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3). Her research is in postcolonial literature and theory, focusing on women short story writers (Janet Frame, Alice Munro), the literature of the Chinese diaspora, and the links between postcolonial studies and other contemporary theoretical perspectives such as gender and globalisation studies.

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“Bizarre but Somehow Never Quite Satisfactory”: Storytelling in “The Office”

Ailsa Cox

1 Identifying tendencies in the modern short story since Chekhov, Charles E. May discusses the implications of a particular interest in subjective points of view: […] a basic impressionistic apprehension of reality itself as a function of perspectival point of view. The ultimate result of these characteristics is the modernist and postmodernist focus on reality itself as a fictional construct and the contemporary trend to make fictional assumptions and techniques both the subject matter and theme of the novel and the short story. (May: 199)

2 ‘The Office’ is the first of Alice Munro’s stories to address ‘fictional assumptions and techniques’ explicitly through the figure of an author. The question of how reality is transmuted into fiction becomes an important theme in her next book, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), one she returns to in many subsequent stories, including ‘Material’ (Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, 1974) and ‘Family Furnishings’ (Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage, 2002). These stories shed light on her own creative practice, investigating the ethics of authorship. They also use the figure of the author to explore the wider question of the relationship between the self, identity and external reality. How can the complexities and contradictions of lived experience be contained within conventional narrative patterns?

3 As Munro has disclosed in several interviews and an essay on the story, ‘The Office’ draws on her own experience, when she rented a place to write outside the home, away from the distractions of domesticity. The story, recounting the author-protagonist’s lack of progress because of interruptions from the landlord, is, she says, the only piece of writing she managed to complete there. The text appears deceptively simple, yet contains many contradictory voices within the first person narration. The writer confesses her vulnerabilities with self-deprecating irony: ‘if cowardice and insincerity are big vices of mine, curiosity is certainly another’ (Munro 2000: 66). This ironic, even

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jaunty, style, inviting intimacy with the reader, comes close to journalism, especially in the punchy opening paragraphs: The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, ‘I think I ought to have an office.’ (59)

4 Indeed, the generic husband, who makes several appearances, but, in contrast with the other characters, is never described, is reminiscent of similarly anonymized figures in newspaper columns or feature articles. However, many other voices and types of discourse are interwoven as the story becomes an exercise in different modes of storytelling, and hence an investigation into the fiction-making process. I shall examine the interplay of these different modes through a close reading of the text.

5 The first sentence, quoted above, is hyperbolic and startling, juxtaposing the grand statement, ‘the solution to my life’, with the mundanity of the domestic chore. The parodic tone and choppy syntax continues in the paragraphs that follow, the fragmented sentences and colloquial language also suggesting the spontaneous flow of thought. The Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin claims that we all ‘author’ ourselves through inner speech in dialogue with a putative other. The narrator is addressing that internalized other when she asks: ‘What do I want an office for?’ (59). The sequence of responses to her question strive to create a satisfactory self-image, switching between the self-defining noun ‘writer’ and the more nebulous ‘write’ and ‘try to write’: [...] here comes the disclosure which is not easy for me: I am a writer. That does not sound right. Too presumptuous; phony, or at least unconvincing. Try again. I write. Is that better? I try to write. That makes it worse. Hypocritical humility. Well then? (59)

6 This passage also challenges the reader by addressing her directly, ‘disclosing’ the shameful fact of literary aspiration. The sequence of question and answer becomes a rhetorical defense of her own status for the benefit of an implied reader.

7 Munro has often spoken about an inherent distrust of artistic endeavour in the small town community where she grew up. Writing is regarded as narcissism, without practical value, and related to an unhealthy introspection. In this story, ‘people are kind’ (59), their suspicion is tempered by ‘the solicitude of friendly voices’, ‘ready and tactful voices’ (ibid), as if writing might be some form of debilitating illness. These disembodied voices might be read as those of friends, family or neighbours - perhaps those suburban women who are so unsettled by the piano playing in ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’. But they are also internalized voices who sabotage the narrator’s attempts at autonomy. Accusations of self-centredness are directed away from the act of writing itself and projected onto the office: ‘I was at once aware that it sounded like a finicky requirement, a piece of rare self-indulgence’ (60).

8 The narrator often invokes the discourse of the second wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s, seeking equal rights for women. She makes sociological comparisons between male and female attitudes to domestic space, justifying her need for an office as a way of freeing her from responsibility and also aligning her work as an author with a professional male world, marked out by clear boundaries. Her struggle for agency through an autonomous space of her choosing is placed in opposition to the stereotyped objects of female desire: ‘I could almost more easily have wished for a mink coat, for a diamond necklace; these are things women do obtain’ (61). She contrasts the male ability to compartmentalize, closing the door behind him within the space of the

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house, with a woman’s unending responsibility: ‘She is the house. There is no separation possible’ (60). This overtly political discourse is, however, intercut with another voice, more langorous and diffuse: At certain times, perhaps on long spring evenings, still rainy and sad, with the cold bulbs in bloom and a light too mild for promise drifting over the sea, I have opened the windows and felt the house shrink back into wood and plaster and those humble elements of which it is made, and the life in it subside, leaving me exposed, empty-handed, but feeling a fierce and lawless quiver of freedom, of loneliness too harsh and perfect for me now to bear. Then I know how the rest of the time I am sheltered and encumbered, how insistently I am warmed and bound. (60-61)

9 This epiphanic moment is itself ‘bound’ within parentheses, separated from the account of her negotiations with her husband and the acquisition of the office. It evokes a liminal state of consciousness, in the first stirrings of spring and close to the sea. The house is restrictive, yet because it is animate, it is also a fluid and a boundless space. The almost oxymoronic pairings of ‘harsh and perfect’, ‘sheltered and encumbered’, ‘warmed and bound’, reveal the contradictions of the existential freedom that she longs for and, temporarily, obtains.

10 ‘To write, as everyone knows, you need a typewriter, or at least a pencil, some paper, a table and a chair’ (60). But the process of writing entails something beyond the purely mechanical. The mysteriousness of the creative process, ‘a woman who sits staring into space, into a country that is not her husband’s or her children’s’ (60), might explain her own anxieties and the resistance of others. Throughout the text, concepts of a heterogeneous, indefinable creativity are placed in dialogue with the discourse of logic, boundaries and positions. We might even identify these modalities with the ‘semiotic’, maternal modality and the paternal ‘symbolic’, that Julia Kristeva regards as the essential components of the signifying process.

11 Once the decision is made to rent the office, another kind of storytelling is brought into play, packed with the descriptive detail we might expect from conventional fiction. The narrator provides a character sketch for Mrs. Malley, who, along with her husband, owns the block where the office is situated. Their apartment is crammed with model ships, potted plants and kitsch, including a gilt-framed photograph of Mr. Malley himself. Mr. Malley regards the narrator’s writing as more of a hobby than a profession, referring to his own model-building as a cure for the nerves.

12 Mr. Malley is a fat man, moving with ‘a ponderous matriarchal discomfort’ (63-4). His offer to help feminize the empty space of the newly rented office with a carpet, curtains and ‘a nice easy chair to sit in, while you’re waiting for inspiration to hit’ are rebuffed (64). By maintaining a sterile, empty space, the narrator is shedding domestic responsibility; without ornaments, there is no need for dusting. Mr. Malley presents her with a house plant, a teapot, a waste paper basket, a cushion, disturbing her solitude with this parade of superfluous objects. He is an utterly grotesque figure; through him Munro parodies Philistine attitudes towards creativity: ‘if you ever run out of things to write about, I got a barrelful’ (66). Through his rejected gifts he is also implicating her in an inescapable emotional exchange, encroaching on the self- contained, autonomous subjective space reserved for the writing process. The more she rebuffs these attempts, the harder he tries, confiding the tribulations of his own life story, in the unspoken belief that she might write it down. Coming back unexpectedly to the office at night, she discovers him secretly reading her work.

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13 She does not tackle Malley. Throughout the whole saga, she resorts to hints and subterfuge, only occasionally making herself plain in ‘a cold voice that is to be heard frequently in my thoughts but has great difficulty getting out of my cowardly mouth’ (65). After she catches him snooping, she keeps her door locked from inside, typing loudly when he comes near: ‘He called my name, as if I was playing a trick; I bit my lips together not to answer’ (69). Only now does she have the strength of will not to water the plant that he gave her. Finally, he leaves a note, calling her into his office, where he speaks with ‘a rather stagey reluctance’ (69) about his tolerance in renting the room to a writer: ‘I didn’t let that worry me, though I have heard things about writers and artists and that type of person that didn’t strike me as very encouraging. You know the sort of thing I mean’ (ibid.). As he continues his monologue, his insinuations echo and exaggerate the negative voices she has internalized: That’s not a normal way for a person to behave. Not if they got nothing to hide. No more than it’s normal for a young woman, says she has a husband and kids, to spend her time rattling away on a typewriter. (70)

14 He questions that she really is a writer, since he has never heard of her; we might remember, the definitions and redefinitions of ‘writer’, ‘I write’, ‘try to write’, in the opening page (59). Malley’s speech resembles that of a fictional detective, a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, confronting a suspect. Munro implies that both characters stage and rehearse their speech; both the writer and the landlord apply the techniques of fiction to experience, constructing narratives around their own lives and those of others. Earlier, the narrator describes herself ‘trembling with anger and gratification’ because Malley’s snooping in the office at night has given her ‘just cause’ for resentment (69).

15 Malley follows up his allegations with a series of notes accusing her of various kinds of anti-social behaviour: As the notes grew more virulent our personal encounters ceased. Once or twice I saw his stooped, sweatered back disappearing as I came into the hall. Gradually our relationship passed into something that was entirely fantasy. He accused me now, by note, of being intimate with people from Numero Cinq. This was a coffee-house in the neighbourhood, which I imagined he invoked for symbolic purposes. (71)

16 Eventually there is a final face-to-face encounter. This time Malley’s demeanour resembles that of religious zealotry, ‘another face, remote and transfigured, that shone with the cold light of intense joy at discovering the proofs of sin’ (71). The lavatory attached to the office she is renting has been covered in lipsticked graffiti: he accuses her of being responsible, along with ‘your friends’ (72). When she blames bored teenagers, he begins to threaten her right to creative practice from a new perspective: It’s a shame the kids get blamed for everything, when it’s the elders that corrupts them. That’s a thing you might do some thinking about, you know. There’s laws. Obscenity laws. Applies to this sort of thing and literature too, as I believe. (72)

17 Until this point, as I have suggested, the narrator has repressed her anger, preferring to counter Malley’s interference with the traditionally feminine tactics of avoidance and appeasement. Now there is a change: This is the first time I ever remember taking deep breaths consciously, for the purposes of self-control. I really wanted to murder him. I remember how soft and loathsome his face looked, with the eyes almost closed, nostrils extended to the soothing odour of righteousness, the odour of triumph. If this stupid thing had not happened, he never would have won. But he had. Perhaps he saw something in my face that unnerved him, even in this victorious moment, for he drew back to the wall, and began to say that, actually, as a matter of fact, he had not really felt it was

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the sort of thing I personally would do, more the sort of thing that perhaps certain friends of mine- (73)

18 ‘I remember’ frames this description as a reconstruction, but it also foregrounds the intensity of an impression which has lodged itself in the writer’s memory. The narrator’s fury is driven partially by an ideological resistance to censorship, but the intellectual element is subsumed by a visceral, even phobic, disgust. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva analyzes the nature of phobias and taboos through the concept of abjection. That which is abject, for instance, bodily fluids and faeces, can never be fully expelled from the self, yet is simultaneously outside the unified subject, the ‘own and clean self’ (65). The abject is that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (4).

19 In her study, Mothers and Other Clowns, Magdalene Redekop relates the narrator’s difficulty in repelling Malley’s unwanted ministrations to a difficulty in shedding the maternal, caring role even in the masculine space of the office. Malley’s ‘soft and loathsome’ features (73) could be read as those of the surrogate child whose needs cannot be expunged from the narrator’s psyche. His assumptions about writing and sex are ‘so wistful, so infantile’ (67). Her response to his neediness, in the early days of his present-giving and his ‘eatin’ into her time’ (66) is that of the guilty mother: ‘I did not even really pity him. It was just I could not turn away, I could not turn away from that obsequious hunger’ (66). Yet the mother/child roles are constantly shifting. Malley, with the ‘ponderous matriarchal discomfort’ of his gait (63-4) also assumes a maternal position. The love of gossip is a conventionally feminine attribute, along with the quasi- maternal attempts to nurture the narrator, and then to police her behaviour. Magdalene Redekop points out the importance of these shifting identities for the central themes of the story: ‘The kaleidoscopic reversals expose the patterns of family behaviour as human constructs open to change. What holds the kaleidoscope still for the space of this story is the focus on the act of writing’ (49). We can relate the narrator’s phobic reaction to Malley to her own ambivalence about the confined space of the office and the psychic boundaries that it represents for the female writer. In this light, those office walls ‘cold and bare, white with a little grey’ (63), stand for the blank page facing all of us who, metaphorically speaking, pick up the pen.

20 In her Paris Review interview Munro describes the difficulties of trying to write at home: Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that. Not that I neglected them, but I wasn’t wholly absorbed. When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. (McCulloch and Simpson)

21 These comments echo the narrator’s in ‘The Office’: ‘Imagine (I said) a mother shutting her door, and the children knowing she is behind it; why, the very thought of it is outrageous to them’ (60). The children’s persistent, almost, willful interruptions also recall another story, ‘My Mother’s Dream’ (The Love of a Good Woman, 1998) in which a small baby starts her screaming every time the mother picks up the violin to practice. Biographical studies by Catherine Sheldrick Ross and Robert Thacker, and a memoir by Munro’s daughter Sheila, refer to a painful and frustrating period in Munro’s writing life, which we can see reflected in ‘The Office’. The conflict between artistic dedication and maternal duty is ultimately irreconcilable, as the story demonstrates, and as Munro’s regretful comments make be taken to imply.

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22 When Malley withdraws from the final confrontation, another gender reversal takes place, as he adopts the narrator’s own appeasement and avoidance strategies, eventually taking to his bed. The narrator goes into the office, closes the door for one last time, and packs her things to leave. She regrets giving up her office. In the coda at the end of the story, she says, ‘I think that I will try again some day, but not yet’ (73): I have to wait until at least that picture fades that I see so clearly in my mind, though I never saw it in reality - Mr. Malley with his rags and brushes and a pail of soapy water, scrubbing in his clumsy way, his deliberately clumsy way, at the toilet walls, stooping with difficulty, breathing sorrowfully, arranging in his mind the bizarre but somehow never quite satisfactory narrative of yet another betrayal of trust. While I arrange words, and think it is my right to be rid of him. (73-4)

23 The contrast between the long, ruminative sentences of the closing paragraph and the punchy, journalistic opening indicates a shift in mood and attitude. The qualified statement, ‘I think that I will try again some day but not yet’ (my emphasis), communicates uncertainty and hesitation. This paragraph foregrounds the story’s self- reflexivity; the story the narrator is writing is the story we have now finished reading. The ambiguities are obvious, though they are not entirely new to the attentive reader.

24 The narrator still yearns for that space behind a closed door, where clear boundaries are laid between an autonomous self and the outside world; where the professional and the maternal are divided from one another. Most writers, male or female, share an insatiable longing for the time and space to concentrate entirely on their work; this is the reason behind artists’ retreats, such as the prestigious Yaddo residencies in the USA. The division between the professional self and the maternal in ‘The Office’ stands for a wider struggle, both practical and psychological, to reconcile living a life with making art. It is possible to read ‘The Office’ as a parable about the obstinacy of patriarchal values, and the enduring relevance for women writers of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. However, a more nuanced reading explores the breaching of fixed boundaries, including gender roles, and an ambivalence towards the sealed space of the office. There can be no ‘solution to my life’ (59). Munro’s response to the clash between art and living is to embrace an approach to storytelling that incorporates disruption at its source.

25 Storytelling in ‘The Office’ is not confined to a dedicated space or to the professional artist. Malley is a skilled oral storyteller, dramatizing his own life and those of others. One of his stories concerns the previous tenant, a chiropractor: The only trouble was, he gave more adjustments than was listed in the book of chiropractory. Oh, he was adjusting right and left. I came in here after he moved out, and what do you think I found? Soundproofing! This whole room was soundproofed, to enable him to make his adjustments without disturbing anybody. This very room you’re sitting writing your stories in. (66-7)

26 Like other authors, Malley builds up suspense, controls the pace of the narrative and even plays with words to comic effect (‘chiropractory’ is a neologism.). The narrator observes that his pleasure in offering this story to her as raw material for fiction derives not merely from the frisson of gossip, but also from a ‘vague delicious connection’ between ‘writing and lewdness’ (67). She dismisses that notion as ‘infantile’ (67) Yet it is not entirely ridiculous. Many of Munro’s later stories, including ‘Meneseteung’ (Friend of My Youth, 1990), ‘Carried Away’ (Open Secrets, 1994) and ‘To Reach Japan’ (Dear Life, 2012) draw connections between creativity, sexuality, inebriation and altered states of consciousness. The liminal state of consciousness

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evoked parenthetically on pages 60-61 is not directly sexual, but it is sensuous and intuitive. The obscene graffiti on the lavatory wall might be seen as an eruption of the Dionysian drives that the narrator has repressed in the sterile space of the office.

27 In ‘On Writing the Office’, Munro describes herself feeling blocked, ‘staring at the walls and the Venetian blinds’ for hours on end (259). During those long hours, external intrusions are clearly not the problem. The door is firmly shut and the blinds, we may infer, are closed, excluding the outside world completely. The Paris Review interview, along with other interviews such as that with Harold Horwood, confirms that, being inside any space dedicated purely to writing has a ‘paralysing’ effect on Munro’s creativity; since the experiment represented in ‘The Office’, she has written mostly at home. ‘On Writing the Office’ reveals that what Munro was failing to produce during those wasted hours staring at the walls was in fact a novel. I would suggest that the story she eventually completed articulates a poetics of distraction, which is related to Munro’s choice of form and her ongoing exploration of the interaction between fiction and reality.

28 In ‘The Office’, as we have seen, Munro rehearses varieties of storytelling, including autobiographical and oral forms of discourse. Both the narrator and her landlord stage their own realities and ‘arrange’ lived experience within narrative patterns. The repetition of ‘arrange’ in the final paragraph draws an obvious parallel between Malley ‘arranging in his mind the bizarre but somehow never quite satisfactory narrative of yet another betrayal of trust’ and the narrator’s compositional process (74). The focalization blurs in the key phrase, ‘bizarre but never quite satisfactory’; are those tales deficient from their author’s point of view, or from the listener’s? Of course, the image of Malley scrubbing the walls is also a speculative reconstruction, and we have been reminded throughout the narrative that the events in the text are recollected from hindsight.

29 As the narrator prepares to leave the office for good, she comes across Mrs. Malley. Earlier, Mrs Malley is introduced through a densely descriptive character sketch: Mrs. Malley was a black-haired, delicate-looking woman, perhaps in her early forties, slatternly but still faintly appealing, with such arbitrary touches of femininity as the thin line of bright lipstick, the pink feather slippers on obviously tender and swollen feet. She had the swaying passivity, the air of exhaustion and muted apprehension, that speaks of a life spent in close attention on a man who is by turns vigorous crotchety and dependent. (62)

30 Mrs. Malley is presented as the ‘round’ character of realist fiction. In this type of storytelling, the accumulation of specific visual details, such as the lipstick and the feather slippers, build a vivid impression of a character whose internal motivations are linked to what may be observed externally. The narrator notes the ‘swaying passivity, the air of exhaustion and muted apprehension’ that defines a whole lifestyle. The narrator undercuts this confident rendition of Mrs. Malley with the reflection that her observations have been shaped by hindsight: ‘How much of this I saw at first, how much decided on later is of course impossible to tell’. However she does re-instate some of her authority as a trustworthy reader of character: ‘I did think that she would have no children, the stress of her life, whatever it was, did not allow it, and in this I was not mistaken’ Mrs. Malley is also a character in her husband’s melodramatic ‘stories of himself’ (68), in which her health is described as poor and her temperament unstable. But she herself disappears until the final pages when she quietly helps the narrator carry her bags to the car. She is no longer a colourful character, merely ‘practical and

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resigned’ (73): ‘she was so still I felt my anger leave me, to be replaced by an absorbing depression’ (73.).

31 The figure of Mrs. Malley, presented initially through the vivid lens of fiction, then as a character so ‘still’ she becomes virtually invisible, demonstrates an ambivalence towards conventional modes of storytelling. Dense descriptive passages are far from infrequent in Munro’s first collection, but in ‘The Office’ the Malleys and their apartment have clearly been appropriated for their value as fiction. Mr. Malley, hyperbolized by his physique, the gilt-framed portrait and his exaggerated stories, is aligned with excess and ornamentation. When Mrs. Malley re-appears, it is as if the nondescript ‘real’ person from ‘real life’ has stepped on stage, foreshadowing the anxiety of that final fragmented sentence: ‘while I arrange words, and think it is my right to be rid of him’ (74). Mr. Malley dominates the story, just as his portrait dominates his apartment, but it is Mrs. Malley, the more peripheral and mysterious character, who prefigures Munro’s approach in her later fiction.

32 If the narrator’s anxiety derives at all from ethical concerns about using real people as models for fictional characters, this is overshadowed by the stronger suggestion that the distractions they provide might generate a different kind of storytelling. The narrator conceals which type of fiction she is writing, just as she hides ‘the manuscript’ from Malley (70), but the reader might wonder if, like Munro, she is trying to write a novel. As a fragmented, elliptical genre, the modern short story is able to build seemingly random digressions into an image-based structure. Its resistance to closure means that the incomplete, contradictory and ‘never quite satisfactory’ are more easily assimilated than in the conventional novel.

33 By the end of the story, ‘I try to write’ is no longer an expression of ‘hypocritical humility’ (59) but a recognition of storytelling as a provisional reworking of an elusive reality. The doors are left open between art and life; autobiography, fiction and the fiction-making process cross back and forth. ‘She is the house. There is no separation possible’ (60). Munro’s well known analogy between a story and a house in her essay, ‘What is Real?’, gains extra resonance when we consider the house as not just a metaphor for narrative structure but the creative environment in which the writing is produced: ‘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’ (224). In that same essay, Munro recognizes the inevitability: ‘Every final draft, every published story, is still only an attempt, an approach to the story’ (225). The coming to terms with failure finds its perfect form in the short story, and in an aesthetic which accepts distractions and digressions as a stylistic necessity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

KRISTEVA, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.

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McCULLOCH, Jeanne, and Mona Simpson. ‘The Art of Fiction No. 137: Alice Munro.’ The Paris Review 194 (Summer 1994). http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the-art-of-fiction- no-137-alice-munro. Accessed: 12th Oct. 2014. Web.

MAY, Charles E. ‘Chekhov and the Modern Short Story.’ The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1994. pp.199-217. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. 1968. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. Dear Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 2012. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. Friend of My Youth. 1990. London: Vintage, 1991. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. London: Chatto & Windus, 2001. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. 1971. London: Penguin, 1984. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. The Love of a Good Woman. London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. ‘On Writing the Office.’ How Stories Mean. Ed. John Metcalf. Erin, Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill, 1993. 192-94. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. Open Secrets. 1994. London: Vintage, 1994. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. 1974. London: Penguin, 1984. Print.

MUNRO, Alice. ‘What is Real?’ Making it New: Contemporary Canadian Short Stories. Ed. John Metcalf. Auckland: Methuen, 1982. 223-226. Print.

MUNRO, Sheila. Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. Print.

REDEKOP, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

ROSS, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW, 1992. Print.

THACKER, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing her Lives. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005. Print.

WOOLF, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin, 2002. Print.

ABSTRACTS

With her story ‘The Office’, Alice Munro begins an investigation into the fiction-making process that has continued throughout her later career. The autodiegetic narrator’s attempts to resolve the clash between dedication to her art and the demands of motherhood parallel the evolution of Munro’s own aesthetic. ‘The Office’ rehearses various styles of storytelling, including conventional literary discourse, oral storytelling and autobiography, displaying an ambivalence towards the conventional techniques of fiction and the division between life and art. The story articulates a self-reflexive poetics of distraction which may be related to fragmentation, digression and ellipsis in the short story genre as practised by Munro across her oeuvre.

INDEX

Keywords: Munro (Alice), authorship, genre, abjection, autobiography, motherhood

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AUTHOR

AILSA COX Ailsa Cox is the author of Alice Munro (Northcote House 2004) and has contributed essays on her work to many volumes of criticism, including Critical Insights: Alice Munro (ed. Charles E. May, Salem Press 2012). She is the co-author, with Christine Lorre-Johntson, of The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, from Fahrenheit Editions, Paris. Her own short fiction has been widely published. Ailsa Cox is Reader in English and Writing at Edge Hill University, UK.

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The Scream in Alice Munro’s “The Time of Death”

Catherine Delesalle-Nancey

1 As several critics have pointed out, paradox is central to Alice Munro’s fiction, and “The Time of Death” is no exception as signaled by its very title and its incipit. Indeed, despite its bold-faced and unflinching title, the “time of death” is precisely what the text will carefully avoid depicting, although it informs the whole story. The very first word of the short story, “Afterwards”, suggests an event significant enough to be a watershed while it remains in the prehistory of the text, placing the reader in the uncomfortable position where he feels he ought to know something about which he has not yet read. The time of death is somehow taken for granted, at once natural, decisive and unaccountable. The text deals with the “before” and the “after,” but through several ellipses the time of Benny’s death as well as his funeral are left untold, haunting the typographic breaks on the page. This narrative silence is in stark contrast with Patricia’s scream, a belated reaction to her little brother’s death for which she is, however unwittingly, responsible. However this scream, towards which the whole short story seems to move as tension unrelentingly builds up is – by its very textual nature and its evolution from an articulated expression of hatred to pure sounds,1 to a purely visual deformation of the face – a silent scream, a scream we read about but can only hear in the private recesses of our minds. This, I feel, is very close to the experience one has in looking at Edvard Munch’s famous 1893 painting, The Scream¸ which likewise creates a visual, and therefore silent, auditory impression in a moment suspended in time. In both Munch’s painting and Munro’s story, the silent explosion echoes long after the viewer of the painting has gone and the reader closed the book, its paradoxical nature making it all the more potent and suggesting unbearable horror and pain, the cause of which remains unrepresentable. What “The Time of Death” and The Scream give us are the effects on people of what escapes definition or description, and how this in turn affects their and our vision of the world around. The paradoxical nature of the short story therefore appears as partaking of its very essence as it makes us experience the epistemological dead-end death confronts us with.

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2 Although it does not show the time of death, Munro’s short story presents us with the times of death, each person involved reacting in their own way and differently in time. None of these reactions however seems to be appropriate. It is somehow Patricia’s scream which appears adequate in its very inadequacy as it disrupts the appearances which everybody, Patricia included, has tried to keep up; it reveals an animality in man which civilization desperately tries to elide. As in Munch’s painting, the world’s solid reality seems to melt away, distorted by the deafening silent sound waves. Even though the short story ends on the snowflakes that do not melt on “the rock of the earth” and seem to cover up and silence the scream, Munro’s narrative technique does not allow such fake firmness as it deprives the reader of any solid ground on which to base an interpretation, creating a similar experience to that of Munch’s painting.

1. The times of death

3 Placed straightaway in the aftermath of Benny’s death, the reader is first presented with Leona’s reaction, her overpowering presence somehow already erasing the boy whose existence is only implied in the mention of “the mother, Leona Parry,” the absence of the possessive adjective “his” redoubling as it were that effacement. Leona, the figure of the bereaved mother, indeed occupies center-stage as all the women circle around her and she uncomprehendingly goes over the moments that just preceded Benny’s death, trying to exculpate herself from responsibility: “I wasn’t hardly out of the house, I wasn’t out of the house twenty minutes-” (89). The double negation foreshadows Allie McGee’s aside, calling into question the truth of the statement. The latter’s remembering of the time just before the accident again focuses on Leona, who invades both Allie’s domestic space and the space of the narrative. When mourning the loss of her child, Leona seems to value his effacement mostly, as if the child were already an absence even before his death: “He was so good, too, you never would of known you had him in the house. I always said, that’s the best one I ever had” (92). Her hysterical reaction to Benny’s death, screaming that she does not want to set eyes on her daughter Patricia, held responsible for the little boy’s death, thus appears somewhat overdone, almost theatrical. This is corroborated by her later instant reconciliation with Patricia when the young girl is offered an opportunity to sing in a concert. Leona is shown to project onto her daughter the singing career she might herself have hoped for2, and what she says about her actually reflects on herself: “[…] it just comes natural to her to perform” (90). The paradoxical wording that qualifies the idea of authenticity is confirmed in the next few lines where Leona prides herself on Patricia’s “natural blond hair”, the genuineness being guaranteed by a long lineage of natural blondes in the family and by the pleonastic use of adjectives: “ that real natural blonde is a lot scarcer than natural curly” (90) (my emphasis), while the artificiality of the whole process is emphasized by the tedious routine performed every night to make Patricia’s hair curly. Therefore Leona’s attempt at restoring her self-image as a good mother intuitively attuned to her children cannot but raise the reader’s suspicions: And I went out the door and down the steps and down to the end of the garden and just as I took the hook off the gate something stopped me, I thought, something’s wrong! […] and Allie says, Leona, what’s the matter with you, you look so white, she says— Allie McGee heard this too and said nothing, because it was not a time for any sort of accuracy. (90-91)

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4 Allie McGee’s unvoiced inconspicuous comment3 is scathing and destroys whatever credibility might have been granted to Leona’s self-reported premonition. Allie’s reserve is instantly filled in by Leona’s frantic cries. From the start, the grieving mother’s reactions –the hysterical screams, the rambling talk, the self-justification, the isolation in her bedroom for weeks or the trite comfort of “You gotta go on” (98) – are stamped with inauthenticity.

5 So is the consolation brought by the mourning women of the village who gather around Leona after the news of Benny’s death. Forming a protective circle around the mother and insulating her from Patricia, their silhouettes are vaguely disquieting and almost witch-like: And the women in the kitchen would crowd around the couch, their big bodies indistinct in the half-light, their faces looming pale and heavy, hung with the ritual masks of mourning and compassion. Now lay down, they would say, in the stately tones of ritual soothing. Lay down, Leona, she ain’t here, it’s all right. (91 – my emphasis)

6 The repetition of the word ritual, associated with masks, and the iterative would, empty these conventional expressions of mourning of any meaning or true compassion. The words of religious solace uttered by the two Salvation Army women are likewise stilted, mechanical and insensitive to Leona’s grief: “In the garden of heaven the children bloom like flowers. God needed another flower and he took your child. Sister, you should thank him and be glad’’ (91). Out of touch with the actual suffering of the mother, the religious cliché is all the more cruelly ironical as it clashes with the sterility of Leona’s garden: I stood there and I looked back at the garden and all I could see was the cornstalks standing and the cabbages there frozen, we never got them in this year […] and the yards all empty, it was cold I guess and no kids playin’ out– (90)

7 As the official language of religious authority, it silences the women placed in the position of children meant to believe what they are told, even against their better judgment: “The other women listened uneasily while these spoke; their faces at such words took on a look of embarrassed childish solemnity”4 (91). The support brought by the female community thus appears contrived, artificial, an impression also prompted by the narrator’s use of parallel structures for the opening lines of two successive paragraphs: “And the women in the kitchen would crowd […]” followed by “And the girl from the Salvation army would say […]” (91), the very repetitive structures adding to the use of and and would to make the actions appear automatic. Furthermore, the recurrence of the verb say, four times in the span of a few lines across these same two paragraphs, becomes self-destructive, increasingly suggesting that nothing of importance is actually uttered and no authentic message conveyed. Finally, in such a context, the reader is likely to intuit that, although the women weep with Leona, their compassion is tainted with contempt and petty jealousy, a point confirmed at the end of the story; indeed, a few weeks later, all traces of sympathy are gone, leaving only spite: “That is a prize kid of Leona’s, the neighbors said to each other as they went home. That singer, they said, because now things were back to normal and they disliked Leona as much as before” (99).

8 As for Allie McGee who first appears as the helpful and efficient neighbor, offering the shelter of her house to Leona and to the three children whom she gets ready for the funeral, her generosity also appears fake, as her disparaging comments to the store-

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man about the children’s uncleanliness or Patricia’s insensate reaction reveal. Thus, what could be thought of as the only appropriate reaction turns out to be mere hypocrisy.

9 Faced with the inauthenticity of female solidarity, the men’s reaction is one of escapism. Excluded from the domestic sphere and the mourning rituals, the father, together with the other men of the community, is made to feel inadequate. He therefore rejects those ritualistic expressions of grief and finds refuge in drink. The men’s absence from the mourning scene, a result of both exclusion and escapism, is matched by the peripheral space the text devotes to them.

10 Only the children, in their innocence, speak out what the other characters do not allow themselves to voice, and confront their elder sister with the horror of Benny’s death and her responsibility: “Is he going to die?” (95) George says, “He cried awful, Irene said, her face in the pillow.” (96) It should be noted that the children’s dialogue (95-96) is presented in indented lines which suffice as markers of direct speech and of change of speaker. Because all the previous direct speech verbal exchanges between adults until this point in the text have been integrated within the narrative discourse, neither inverted commas nor paragraphing working as demarcation between quoted discourse and reporting discourse, the children’s dialogue is endowed with a special status. The visual difference, because it corresponds to a return to more conventional speech presentation, seems to make the dialogue appear far more real, retrospectively confirming that no authentic communication has taken place between the protagonists until that stage in the short story. The dialogue concludes on a paragraph where direct speech is again narrative-integrated as it introduces Allie McGee back into the conversation: “He did so die, he did so! Patricia did not answer. It’s her fault, George sobbed, and Mrs McGee said, Oh, no, oh, no!” (96): the children’s sincere and immediate reaction is a foil to Ali McGee’s disingenuously orthodox protestation, but they cannot get the full meaning and implication of their words.

11 Patricia, on the other hand, is old enough to understand, but her attitude is one of denial. She cannot face Benny’s death, and even less so her own instrumentality in that death. Her reaction is thus first to refuse to consider the very possibility of his dying and to play down the suffering he must have endured, taking refuge in outrageous fantasy which she needs to assert very authoritatively: “[…] I never in my life heard of anybody that died of a burnt skin. Your whole skin could be burnt off it wouldn’t matter you could just grow another. Irene stop crying or I’ll hit you” (96). When Benny’s death has become a fact, she behaves as though nothing had happened. Her complete indifference, the fact that she does not manifest any kind of grief and keeps paying attention to her own appearance (her shoes, her hair) and reading magazines, or continues her public singing, turn her into a kind of monster. Her complete insensitivity creates an uncanny atmosphere as she seems to live in a parallel world, cut off from reality. Time is suspended, like the snow which, throughout the short story, is about to fall but does not. The scream that suddenly breaks out thus almost comes as a relief, easing the tension that has been building up as Patricia, it seems, suddenly gets the full implications of Benny’s death and of her own guilt. Although both Patricia’s reactions – her denial that makes her keep up appearances as well as her insane scream – first appear as utterly unacceptable responses, their very inadequacy makes them perfectly adequate in response to a situation so horrible and monstrous that it precludes any idea of normality. There can be no rational and adequate response

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to the death of a child, and this is what Patricia’s extreme reactions show as they shatter the world of appearances set up by the little community.

2. Shattered appearances

12 Patricia’s scream indeed disrupts the “return to normal” which the short story stages. The delayed shock of recognition breaks up the surface of everyday routine as the apparition of the old scissors-man, whom Benny used to run to – his name being one of the few words the cognitively-impaired child could pronounce –, has a punctum effect on Patricia. The punctum is defined by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida as: “[…] this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” Karen Smythe, taking up Barthes’ analysis, writes: In Munro’s stories, then, the studium is that which produces the ‘reality effect,’ while the punctum produces the surprise, the shock of revelation. The punctum is therefore that which is unnamable, since, Barthes writes, ‘what I can name cannot really prick me’. [Smythe: 1991 495]

13 She further links this to Walter Benjamin’s analysis which associates the punctum with Freud’s exploration of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his discovery of the protective shield: “Benjamin suggests that ‘shocks’ are unconscious impulses which break through the protection of consciousness” [Smythe: 1991 495]. Patricia’s scream indeed breaks through the protective screen she has been painstakingly building, imitating and carrying to the extreme the system of values the whole community sets up as a defense against its instinctive nature and animality.

14 Patricia’s scream is indeed one of anger and hate: “I hate that old scissors-man! I hate him! She screamed” (98). In the chapter he dedicates to the analysis of anger in La Chair envisagée, Denis Vasse points out that a fit of anger is usually a reaction to something that destabilizes the ego ideal, that is, the narcissistic image one has of oneself, the model one tries to conform to: Elle apparaît souvent et avec une violence inouïe dans les moments de fausse sérénité qui précèdent la déconstruction de l’image de nous-mêmes centrée sur nous-mêmes au lieu d’être ouverte à l’altérité qui nous constitue comme sujet. La colère annonce, en le dénonçant comme excessif ou insupportable, le signifiant qui décale l’image spéculaire et la fait choir, le signifiant du manque en tant que, dans l’économie du même, il est signifiant de l’ouverture et de l’Autre. [Vasse 78] En nous faisant sortir de nos gonds, l’affect de la colère protège ou restaure un sentiment de plénitude ou de justice de nous-mêmes attaché à un objet que nous ne voulons pas perdre ou à une situation, un manque que nous ne voulons pas voir ou savoir. [Vasse 81]

15 The scissors-man, an avatar of the Grim Reaper, appears as punctum in the blind spot of Patricia’s self, that part of the self and of reality she has steadfastly tried to ignore. The presence of the scissors-man suddenly brings to the fore the moments of communion Patricia used to share with Benny, moments of simple sincerity, unmediated by language, which contrast with her usual escape into the world of magazines that provide her with a model. His shabby appearance – “he wore the same stained brown overcoat, with the hem hanging ragged, and the same crownless felt hat” (98) – is also a reminder of the putrescent corporeal nature Patricia is desperately trying to fight. He thus shatters the perfect self she has been creating: the gifted girl with blonde curly

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hair, always clean and well-mannered. Patricia does not make any distinction between the ego ideal and her real self: She did things the way a grown-up does; she did not pretend things. She did not play at being a singer, though she was going to be a singer when she grew up, maybe on the movies or maybe on the radio. She liked to look at movie magazines and magazines with pictures of clothes and rooms in them; she liked to look in the windows of some of the houses uptown.5 (92)

16 It cannot be forgotten that Benny dies from scalding precisely because of Patricia’s obsession with cleanliness, her desire for a house as perfect as those she sees in glossy magazines or as Allie McGee’s own house: I’m going to clean this place up, she said. It never gets cleaned up like other places. The first thing I’m going to do I’m going to scrub the floor and you kids have to help me– She put the pail on the stove. That water is hot to start with, Irene said. It’s not hot enough. It’s got to be good and boiling hot. I seen Mrs McGee scrub her floor. (94)

17 Allie McGee as the embodiment of the veneer of civilization is here designated as indirectly responsible as well for Benny’s death, and with her, it is the whole society with its prescriptive norms and attachment to appearances which, we contend, is indicted. Indeed, from the start, Leona’s slovenly appearance is insisted upon: her coming to Allie’s place in her nightdress, her clumsy handling of Allie’s sewing machine, her unkempt house and children. First anchored in Allie’s perception, these judgments betray the attitudes of the women of the community at large: “Leona […] threw her head down and then back (showing, as some of them noticed with a feeling of shame, the dirty lines on her neck)” (92). It is this sense of shame which is infused in Patricia as her reactions show when she washes her feet at the shoe shop for fear of the adults’ comments–which indeed they do not fail to make about the younger children-- or again when she insists on good manners while the children are staying at the McGees’s. Patricia’s absence of reaction at Benny’s death could actually be interpreted as a corrective to her mother’s lack of restraint, another instance of the latter’s indecorous attitude. There is indeed a form of indecency in exhibiting what ought to remain private, whether it be your daughter’s singing, your body or your suffering, and this early description of Leona symbolizes her general attitude: “Her kimona fallen open revealed her lean chest, her wilted breasts with their large blue veins sloping into the grey-pink nightgown.” (90)

18 The flesh here appears as faded, an intimation of death, crudely revealing man’s carnal nature. It is this carnal dimension which society tries to keep at bay by erasing any reminder of its lower nature. Thus Patricia tries to discreetly dispose of George’s urine as Allie McGee’s sophisticated mauve and yellow guestroom does not allow room for a “stinking old pot” under the bed (95). Once again, the children’s spontaneous and unaffected reactions reveal the artificiality of society and its unhealthy relationship to the body and to waste, although – significantly – education prevents any direct wording. Allie McGee’s house appears as the epitome of such artificiality: “it was covered on the outside with imitation brick and inside it had an imitation fireplace” (95). The balanced repetition of the word imitation points to the fake harmony that is sought after and proves as inauthentic as Leona’s outbursts, or rather makes the latter appear more sincere. Patricia finds herself caught between the standards of good society which require the erasure and disposal of anything considered dirty and too

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corporeal, and the reality of her life at home where bodies and refuse are not hidden.6 Her monstrous denial of Benny’s death therefore exposes the denial at work in the whole of society which keeps upholding the lie of its ideal image while refusing to acknowledge the body.

19 However, thus denied, the animal body comes back with a vengeance in Patricia’s scream which turns the blonde-haired soft-spoken girl into a wild animal with a voracious mouth: She screamed, standing stock-still in the yard with her face looking so wizened and white. […] Her eyes were screwed up tight and her mouth wide open; her tiny pointed teeth were almost transparent, and faintly rotten at the edges; they made her look like a ferret, a wretched little animal insane with rage or fear. (99)

20 Patricia seems to lose her humanity. The mask of civilized attitude falls down with her distorted face which may recall Munch’s barely human character whose face is reduced to its orifices – the eyes, the nostrils and the mouth – and whose whole body seems to be dissolving. Whereas the body was denied by language, it here seems to become one with it in this unarticulated form of language.

21 The clear-cut, neat appearances which Patricia was attempting to keep, symbolized in her painstakingly cutting the white edges around the paper clothes her little brother and sister were cutting out so that they may “stay on” (92), have melted away precisely with the arrival of the scissors-man. The game, consisting in cutting out a model family, as well as clothes for them from a catalogue, reveals the fantasy at work in society, a fantasy which covers up anything that may recall the corporeal nature of humanity. The schizophrenic dichotomy between body and language ultimately brings Patricia, and with her the whole of society, to the verge of insanity as all borders and limits eventually dissolve. Benny’s scalded skin may stand for this utmost loss of protective barriers between self and world which cannot but lead to death.

22 Thus Patricia’s insane, and therefore completely inappropriate scream, can be seen as doubly appropriate: it first shows how the death of a child remains far beyond the pale of human understanding and it reveals the impossible lie society forces upon its members in upholding an ideal image which cancels the reality of the body. The fact that it echoes Benny’s awful animal cries precisely at the time of death confirms this adequate inadequacy. The mirror is shattered when reality can no longer be escaped. Yet, the scream which distorts Patricia’s face, as in Munch’s painting, also twists and deforms the world around, forbidding the grasping of any definite shape. The short story likewise does not allow any firm hold, and interpretation sways, wavers and vacillates when faced with the short story’s unresolved tensions.

3. The whirling world of the short story

23 As pointed out in the introduction, the paradoxical nature of the silent scream, central to the short story’s interpretation, suggests an unresolved tension between voice and sight which translates in the ungraspable shifts in point of view and voice to be found in the short story. Indeed, the opening pages of the short story seem to posit Allie McGee as a reliable focalizer whose sensible practical point of view accessed through Free Indirect Thought is a corrective to Leona’s small arrangements with the truth in her discourse. Allie’s silent voice is superimposed on Leona’s vocal story which it consistently debunks. The two voices run parallel, Allie’s story providing a negative

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evaluation of Leona, an evaluation which we tend to take at face-value. The contest between the silent and the vocal voices of the two women is consistently emphasized, with no ambiguity as to who gets the upper-hand: Allie McGee did not say, and Leona caught her breath and plunged on: Twenty minutes. (90) Allie Mc Gee heard this too and said nothing, because it was not a time for any sort of accuracy. Leona’s voice had gone higher and higher as she talked and any time now she might break off and begin to scream: Don’t let that kid come near me, don’t let me see her, just don’t let her come near me. (91)

24 The contest is all the more insidiously biased as, although Allie McGee’s thoughts appear in parentheses, seemingly secondary to Leona’s voice, the latter is embedded in Allie’s point of view: the long stretch in parentheses (89-90) is indeed mostly made up of Leona’s rambling talk (while at Allie McGee’s house at the time of Benny’s death) as remembered by Allie, this remembered monologue filtered through an ironical perspective postponing, as it were, the present one actually delivered by Leona. Besides the bias may be traced as early as in the description of the voice “ragged and insistent, but not yet hysterical” (89) (my emphasis), a comment which we are retrospectively tempted to interpret as originating in Allie. Thus the first section of the short story is used to orient the reader’s control of sympathy. However the end of the section introduces unobtrusive comments that instill in the reader some misgivings about Allie McGee’s reliability. As the women gathered around Leona start crying, we are for the first time offered an outside description of the sensible neighbor: “She was stout, placid-faced, big-breasted; she had no children” (91). It is not so much the unflattering physical description that strikes a blow to the image of the competent woman as the mention of her childlessness. This sets her apart from the other mourning women, and suggests incapacity to empathize with the bereaved mother, questioning the legitimacy of her point of view: “In the dark overheated kitchen the women felt the dignity of this sorrow in their maternal flesh, they were humble before this unwashed, unliked and desolate Leona” (92). Her never having experienced in her flesh the bond of love may partly explain why Allie McGee cannot but look with contempt upon Leona’s untidy body; her reaction to Leona’s heartbreak is one of sympathy and falls short of true empathy. From then on, Allie McGee’s point of view can no longer be considered as reliable, her hypocrisy being underlined when Patricia overhears her disparaging remarks to the shoe shop assistant, whether it be about the children’s uncleanliness or Patricia’s completely inappropriate pride in her new shoes. This invites us to return to the beginning where some phrases take on a more malicious turn than had initially been perceived: “Allie McGee thought, but she did not say so, not at the time” (89). The last phrase, suggesting later unkind gossip, further contributes to a reevaluation of Allie McGee who becomes part of the meanness evinced in the neighbors’ comments. However, this does not completely erase her remarks about Leona, and the reader is left with no safe ground for evaluation.

25 The second section is an analepsis which places the reader with Patricia and the children in the Parrys’ house just before the accident. Point of view oscillates between the third person narrator and Patricia, allowing both proximity with the young girl and critical distance, thereby creating a form of superior understanding that leads the reader to feel some sympathy and compassion towards Patricia. Hence, when we move to Allie McGee’s house in the next section as the narrative shifts forward this time, to the night just after Benny’s accident but before his death in hospital, we are led to feel

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some sympathy again for Patricia, even though her behavior becomes increasingly awkward, revealing her inability to face the reality of the accident. It is to be noticed that the third section calls into question the temporality of the first for it covers a period starting from the immediate aftermath of the accident to the children’s return home and Patricia’s concert a few days after the funeral, implying therefore that the events in the first section must have been part of the time span covered by this third section. Temporal shifts thus blur landmarks, as do the shifts in point of view. Indeed in this section, point of view and voice fluctuate between the narrator, the children, Patricia and occasionally Mrs McGee, though some sentences cannot be ascribed with certainty to any particular speaker: Mrs McGee took them downtown to buy them all new shoes for the funeral. Patricia was not going to the funeral because Leona had said she never wanted to see her again as long as she lived, but she was to get new shoes too; it would have been unkind to leave her out. (97 – my emphasis)

26 Whether the last sentence is Leona’s or Allie McGee’s seems impossible to decide. As Patricia closes in upon herself, living in her own parallel world cut off from reality, point of view becomes more and more detached, with the section ending on a terse statement: “Patricia did not cry” (98).

27 The scream episode is likewise described through external focalization, as though the narrator were trying to withdraw emotionally from an unsettling scene. About one of her characters in “An Ounce of Cure”, Alice Munro writes: When the girl’s circumstances become hopelessly messy, when nothing is going to go right for her, she gets out of it by looking at the way things happen – by changing from a participant to an observer. This … is what a writer does. … I made the glorious leap from being a victim of my own ineptness and self-conscious miseries to being a godlike arranger of patterns and destinies, even if they were all in my head. [Metcalf 125]

28 When Patricia’s defensive emotional insulation from reality collapses, the protective shielding is somehow transferred onto the narrator. As Karen Smythe points out: “the role of observer allows Munro (as model reader) to employ the ‘twentieth century hybrid’ of ‘sympathetic identification and aesthetic detachment’ of which Lorraine York speaks” [Smythe 497]. Emotional detachment comes to a height in the last section with its impersonal outside description of the neighborhood which contrasts with the end of the previous section, an overhearing of the neighbors’ nasty gossip. As opposed to this meanness – the only real target of Munro’s condemnation – the plurifocalized and plurivocal narrative thwarts any clear-cut, side-taking judgment on the characters’ behavior, leading the reader into a position of tolerance where, along with Munro, he becomes an observer of man’s aspirations, limitations, and infinite complexity.

29 Denied the stability of point of view, the reader may also feel at a loss to give a coherent interpretation to the rich network of images and echoes that sometimes resists interpretation. The recurring presence of windows is one such instance. Indeed, Patricia is said often to carry Benny to the window, the 18-month-old baby enjoying to be thus held, looking out for hours at the dog and repeating “bow-wow”, his only feeble grasp on language. Conversely, Patricia uses windows to look inside the houses uptown, prolonging the magazines exposition of rooms. Each time, we seem to be looking with the characters, be it inside out or outside in. The last image of the short story however places us outside looking at children behind the windows looking at us, their faces pressed against the windows. These children cannot but remind us of Benny, but the

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impression conveyed here is one of children caged in, as though we were the powerless witnesses to the antics of people trapped in their everyday environment. This placing of the reader on either side of windows is an apt metaphor for the handling of point of view in the short story with its constant shifts from internal to external focalization to eventually lead to a more remote overview.

30 In a similar way, the variation in voices is given a literal yet complex diegetic expression, from the awkward silence in the neighborhood just before the accident and at the very end of the short story, to the screams: Leona’s hysterical shriek, Benny’s atrocious squeaks, and Patricia’s scream. In between are the whispers Patricia requires from the children at Mrs McGee’s, the soft voice of Mrs McGee, thus described when she slanders the children with the shop clerk, and the “stately tones of ritual soothing” of the mourning women, together with the “gentle unchanging voice” and the “almost masculine voice” (91) of the two women from the Salvation Army. These controlled monotonous voices thus appear as insincere and artificial, without any anchoring in the body. They are to be contrasted with Patricia’s strong voice and her beautiful singing, a perfectly controlled voice but modulated and given resonance by her body, and of course with her scream, all the more striking since, as the uncharitable neighbors are quick to point out, she is destined to be a singer. As expressions respectively of culture and animality, the singer’s voice and the scream are completely at odds, yet both are connected to the body. And so is the scissors man’s dirge which elicits Patricia’s scream, “his unintelligible chant, mournful and shrill, and so strange you would think, if you did not know it was the scissors-man, that there was a madman loose in the world” (98). This inarticulated chant appears as the authentic expression of mourning, devoid of the deceptive trappings of language, and at odds with the fake and artificial songs Leona chooses for Patricia’s concert after Benny’s death: “May the Circle Be Unbroken” and “It Is No Secret What God Can Do” (98). Both songs are a far cry from the experience of grief: all protective circles, that of the community, the family or the self are shattered by Benny’s death, and God’s designs when it comes to the death of a child remain far beyond human understanding, bringing the survivors close to madness, as the scissors-man unintelligible song aptly reveals. Besides, because of its inarticulateness and because of the connection between Benny and that man, we may be led to link this dirge with Benny’s own modulations of his voice: “he would stand for hours just looking out a window saying Bow-wow, bow-wow, now in a low questioning tongue, now crooningly, stroking his hand down the windowpane” (93), the crooning also evoking Patricia. Thus a whole network of echoes, counterpoints is created, each with its own interest but almost to the point of saturation, which partly accounts for the fact that no consistent interpretation of the network as a whole is possible and Munro’s figure in the carpet remains a secret.

31 This is no better evinced than precisely in her treatment of what could be seen as the epiphanic moment of the scream. Indeed the arrival of the scissors-man and Patricia’s scream appear as a moment of revelation for Patricia: the sudden and violent facing of Benny’s death and of her own responsibility. As suggested earlier, the fact that the snow – which is expected throughout the short story, as though time were arrested because of Patricia’s unnatural behavior – starts falling right after the episode, could seem to point to a restoration of the cycles of the seasons and of time, as Karen Smythe points out while immediately questioning this assertion7. However, the last paragraph undermines, without completely invalidating it, such an interpretation. Patricia’s scream is indeed silenced and erased in the insentient description of the topography of

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the hamlet whose unchanging features are emphasized with the repetition of the existential phrase “there was” (99). The impression of stasis thus created seems to cancel the epiphanic moment of the scream, the release of tensions and return to normal. The snow does not melt on the “hard rock of the earth”, which therefore cannot be seen as welcoming back Benny’s dead body and turning it into one of the flowers in God’s garden. The epiphany is also derided by the Star-of-Bethlehem quilt at Mrs McGee’s, for the traditional design is part of her doll’s house, and has lost all spiritual and religious meaning. The emphasis on this design comes besides as a cruel irony since what the children learn at her place is the death of their young brother. But conversely, it could also be argued that the first scene when the women are gathered around “the mother” could be seen as a scene of birth rather than of death: Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on. (89)

32 The indefinite nature of the afterwards, Leona’s position, the hot kitchen, and the plaid – which we could imagine to be the Star of Bethlehem one – create confusion which, though soon dispelled, is nevertheless part of Munro’s strategy to refuse the reader the comfort of a stable ground for interpretation. That the writer should apply this strategy of blurring and opacification to the time of mourning depicted immediately after the title, is telling of the extent to which she is bent on building a dense and elusive world around a central hole, a world which, like the liquefying world of Munch’s painting, wavers and melts.

33 The scream does not bring any kind of resolution on the diegetic or the textual level, and cannot be explained; nor can Benny’s death. This makes Munro’s domestic Gothic stories - as she called them in an interview with Harry Boyle in August 19748 - truly fantastic, to take up Todorov’s definition. Indeed though steeped in everyday reality, describing events which were often reported in local newspapers of the time, the stories restore to these events their mysterious aura and prevent their being dismissed as banal. Though the insentient earth seems to silence the scream, the scream echoes and resonates in the reader’s ears. The short story presents at once the times of death and the time of death, understood as an everlasting present, for nothing can ever erase the grief. Munro does not judge the characters and simply observes people trying to cope as they may with the unimaginable. The time of death, and the experience of the bereaved is a mystery which forever lies beyond the scope of language, be it rational or religious, and can only be approached through a poetic language which leaves tensions unresolved and obliquely suggests the horror and beauty of our mortal life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

COX, Ailsa. Alice Munro. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004.

McGILL, Robert. “Where Do You Think You Are? Alice Munro’s Open Houses”, Mosaic, 35.4, December 2002, 103-119.

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MUNRO, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). London: Vintage, 2000.

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

SMYTHE, Karen. “Sad Stories: The Ethics of Epiphany in Munrovian Elegy.” University of Toronto Quarterly, 60.4, Summer 1991, 493-506.

SMYTHE, Karen. “Shapes and Shades of Death: the Meaning of Loss in Munro’s Early Stories.” Wascana Review, 25:1, Spring 1990, 41-52.

THACKER, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives.Toronto: Mc Clelland and Stewart, 2005.

VASSE, Denis. La Chair envisagée. Paris : Seuil, 1988, 2002.

NOTES

1. This is emphasized by the repetition of the word scream four times within the space of six lines. 2. Although Patricia’s name appears no less than five times in the space of a single paragraph, making her as obtrusive a presence as her mother, it is most of the time caught up in structures that turn her into a passive object in the hands of her mother: “Patricia was supposed to have the outfit for that night”, “Patricia was introduced as the Little Sweetheart of Maitland Valley” (89), “Leona had started her singing in public when she was three-years old” (90). She is besides netted in her mother’s discourse, with no voice of her own at this stage in the narrative. 3. Though the last sentence starts with narration, the second part seems to translate Allie’s thought process in what comes close to Free Indirect Thought. 4. As for Leona, she somehow reverts to an infant sate, rocking herself back and forth. 5. One may note here that the use of repetitions ironically saps any idea of progression and thus of growing up. 6. Even Benny, her retarded brother with limited access to language, somehow reveals this animality since one of the two words he can pronounce is “bow-wow” in imitation of the dog’s bark. The description given when he is scalded to death, brings to the fore this animality: “[…] Benny was making a noise not like crying, but more a noise like they had heard a dog making after its hind parts were run over, but worse and louder–“ (92). Patricia feels slightly ashamed and unsuccessfully tries to teach some words to her brother, trying to bridge the gap between language and body. Benny’s death may therefore be interpreted as a form of symbolical murder from society at large, an ultimate denial of the body to keep up the lie of perfect appearances. 7. “Though the snow falls, suggesting a normal continuation of the life cycle and a release of repressed grief for Patricia, the lack of any acceptable adult reaction to the original accident, or to Patricia’s emotional condition, eliminate any sense of consolation and places the reader in a continuing condition of suspended emotion, caught between different ways of seeing, and grieving”. [Smythe 1990: 46] 8. This interview is mentioned by Robert Thacker in his biography where he says that both Boyle and Munro feel there is an element of the macabre, what Munro calls “a Canadian gothic”, in the life of rural southwestern Ontario. As she points out, people were always being maimed by horrible accidents, living with untreated disease, singling themselves out by some excessive behavior.

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ABSTRACTS

In spite of its title, “The Time of Death” is built around a central ellipsis – the time of Benny’s death – while it presents the reader with “the times of death”, that is the different ways the characters experience and react to that death, reactions which all appear inappropriate. What we are made to see is what surrounds the gaping hole of death. This gaping hole around which the world is built may be linked to Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, which immediately comes to mind since the whole short story builds to a climax: Patricia’s wild scream. Although apparently a belated and completely inadequate response to Benny’s death, Patricia’s scream proves perfectly adequate, breaking through the polished surface of civilization to reveal the animality society tries to erase. However, the short story defies any clear-cut interpretation as the complex handling of point of view and voice as well as the dense network of images refuse the reader any solid ground on which to base a secure interpretation, creating a world which, as in Munch’s painting, wavers and melts, an apt rendering of “the time of death”.

INDEX

Keywords: Munro (Alice), Munch (Edvard), point of view, voice, evaluation, death, bereavement, authenticity, epiphany

AUTHOR

CATHERINE DELESALLE-NANCEY

Catherine Delesalle-Nancey is Professor of English Literature at the University of Lyon (Jean Moulin – Lyon 3) and specializes in 20th and 21st century British Literature. She has published extensively on Joseph Conrad and Malcolm Lowry, to whom she has devoted a book entitled Répétition, ressassement et reprise dans l’œuvre en prose de Malcolm Lowry, published by Michel Houdiard in 2010. She has also published on Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Janet Frame and A.S. Byatt, and in the last few years has been particularly interested in short fiction.

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The Butterfly Effect in Alice Munro’s “Day of the Butterfly”. Chaos, Empathy and the End of Certainty When Literary Discourse Analysis Meets Chaos Theory

Claire Majola-Leblond

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet, I, 5, 174-5

1 It started as a joke. Edward N. Lorenz, Professor of Meteorology at the M.I.T. was late giving the title of his communication; the organizer of the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science invented one: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”, which Lorenz humorously accepted. On December 29, 1972, at 10:00 a.m in the Wilmington Room of the Sheraton Park Hotel, the “Butterfly Effect”, one of the most popular features of chaos theory, was born. To some, connecting chaos theory with literary discourse analysis and reading theory might look like a joke too.

2 This paper nevertheless aims at opening some privileged space where science and literature can be reconciled for a while, following an intimate belief that, in Siri Hustvedt’s words, “no single theoretical model can contain the complexities of human realities” (2012, X) nor provide a satisfactory way of interpreting a work of art.

3 First, a brief presentation of chaos theory1 will reveal surprising and meaningful correspondences with the ways literary discourse is created and interpreted. And, although it was written a few years before “the Butterfly Effect” was given its name, a story called “Day of the Butterfly” seems a privileged object of focus. Furthermore, all Alice Munro’s stories are intricately complex systems, and this early work is no exception. It is therefore my hope to offer useful if slightly unusual instruments to help the reader become more aware of reading trajectories, to decipher the mysteries of a writer who reveals complexity as part of her most intimate being, and who once

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described herself as “a friendly person who is not very sociable”2, and powerfully asserted, when questioned by Paula Todd: “writing seems to be the best thing you can do with your life – telling the truth as near as you can do it – tackling the experience of being alive as best you can”, before modestly adding, “I don’t know”.

A glimpse of chaos theory, butterflies and attractors

4 In Chaos, Making a New Science, James Gleick tells of how Lorenz, methodically studying weather prediction in his office at the M.I.T, for once entered rounded-off numbers in his computer. Instead of the six decimals (.506127), he entered three (.506), assuming that in his modelling of the earth’s weather, the difference would be negligible. He let his enormous Royal McBee computer do its work, got himself a cup of coffee to get away from the noise of the gigantic machines, and came back some time later to read the results – which were astonishingly different from those expected. “That first day, he decided that long range weather forecasting must be doomed” (Gleick, 2008, 17). But Lorenz was also a mathematician; he therefore pursued his studies of what he described as dynamical aperiodic systems3, simplifying his weather model to a system of three non-linear equations4. And, in spite of the fact that, as Gleick pursues, “analyzing the behaviour of a non-linear equation […] is like walking in a maze whose walls rearrange themselves with each step you take” (22-24), he nevertheless established a link between aperiodicity and unpredictability and was able to evidence “Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” (SDIC) the more serious-looking – though much less poetic – name for “the Butterfly Effect” and a defining feature of “unstable aperiodic behaviour in non-linear dynamical systems”, to take up the concise definition of chaos given in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

5 “But Lorenz saw more than randomness embedded in his weather model. He saw a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading as randomness” (Gleick, 2008, 22). Seemingly random and unpredictable behaviour does follow precise rules. And it is a major feature of chaotic dynamics to be confined to what is known as an attractor, revealing and structuring folding and stretching of trajectories. In a seminal paper published in 1963, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow”, Edward Lorenz drew a fragment of the trajectory of a point to illustrate the chaotic behaviour of a fluid as modelled by his three equations for convection:

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6 “To plot just these seven loops required 500 successive calculations on the computer” Gleick explains, pursuing “because the system had three independent variables, this attractor lay in three-dimensional phase space. Although Lorenz drew only a fragment of it, he could see more than he drew: a sort of double spiral, like a pair of butterfly wings interwoven with infinite dexterity [….] those loops and spirals were infinitely deep, never quite joining, never intersecting. Yet, they stayed inside a finite space” (2008, 139-41). Eventually, Lorenz’s strange attractor would look somewhat like the following image5

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7 It thus appears that chaotic systems are dynamical, non linear systems which exhibit Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions and whose apparently erratic behaviours in fact trace precise trajectories that fold and stretch along underlying structures known as strange attractors6.

Literary chaotic systems: dynamism, non-linearity and SDIC

8 In Prospecting, From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, Wolfgang Iser asked two essential questions that seem to echo Lorenz’s concerns: “how shall we then describe the dynamic character of a text? Can one, in fact, assess the keen disturbance so often experienced in reading serious literature?” (1989, 3, emphasis mine). Should we pay close attention to words, it naturally follows that literary texts in general, and short stories in particular, are complex7 chaotic systems.

9 First and foremost, they are dynamic, non linear systems. To exist, they combine writing and reading, two intensely dynamic processes. Michael Toolan, in Narrative Progression in the Short Story calls readers “prospectors”, trying to understand how it is that great writers fashion stories in ways that lead us on, sometimes leads us astray, draw us in, take up all our powers of attention and concentration, and induce in us that whole gamut of reactions and emotions- including desire, revulsion, inspiration, grief and fear.” (2009, 12)

10 Although at first sight, it might seem slightly provocative to describe a piece of writing as non-linear, we only need to consider the eye movements on the page to see horizontality and verticality combine to draw serpentine lines – and that in most languages, albeit not from the same starting point. Furthermore, reading itineraries are known to imply tracing cohesion networks that involve jumping over bits of text, making anaphoric or cataphoric moves, drawing oblique lines to make connections inside a textual space turned chess-board. They might also possibly even entail exophoric excursions ti the real world to make better sense of words on a page, identifying potentially enlightening referents in the case of autobiography or symbolism for instance. We trace “chaotic lines” over the text, reminiscent of Deleuze’s “lignes d’erre” (1996, 155), following some strange and intimate design which yet remains to be identified.

11 Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions is another essential feature of reading literature. In a short story, the first “initial condition” a reader encounters is the title; Munro’s initial title to “Day of the Butterfly” was “Good-by Myra”. In terms of framing and raising expectations, the difference is radical. “Good-by Myra” merely leads the reader to expect a linear story about separation, possibly death. “Day of the Butterfly” is more demanding in terms of interpretation. We have to make hypotheses and multiply prospecting directions. “Day of” suggests it is a special day, possibly a birthday, or else, because of the collocation, Day of Judgement, Doomsday, Day of Wrath. “Butterfly” evokes metamorphosis and ephemerality because of our knowledge of the world and butterflies. To poetry lovers, it might evoke Robert Frost’s poem “Blue-Butterfly Day”8: It is blue-butterfly day here in spring, And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry There is more unmixed color on the wing

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Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing: And now from having ridden out desire They lie closed over in the wind and cling Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire

12 Or indeed any butterfly poem that they might know, like Emily Dickinson’s From cocoon forth a butterfly As lady from her door Emerged- a Summer Afternoon- Repairing Everywhere –

Without Design - that I could trace”9

13 Symbolically, the butterfly is often associated with the soul, the Other World, death and resurrection. As is often the case with intertextuality and symbolism, although definite connections with the author’s intentionality are impossible to make, the richness of echoes and associations is complex and dynamic – possibly chaotic. The title might indeed, as it did for me, evoke the “Butterfly Effect”; how a tiny detail might have unfathomed consequences. Initial enigma creates defamiliarization that inevitably generates a profusion of meanings and defines the reading pact as interpretative quest. It places the reader in the position of co-creator of sense, and because we stand on the textual threshold of the paratext, in a privileged relationship with the author herself, tightly secured by Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle. There is meaning in that title, and it is our role to let it resonate.

14 The readers’ relative autonomy in this non-linear and dynamic deciphering process eventually also signs a difference in literary category. Barthes, in S/Z, opposes “readerly texts” to “writerly texts”. “Readerly” texts are linear, unidirectional, relatively simple to understand, they make easy, pleasurable reading; “Good-by Myra”, originally published in July 1956, in a Canadian woman’s magazine Chatelaine, in columns framed by advertisings for “Viceroy Household Gloves”, “Pink Ice” washing up liquid, “Princess Pat Hair Nets”, next to the detailed answer to a Reader’s Question about how “to remove machine oil from a man’s white shirt?” would belong to that category10. A “writerly” text is more complex; it requires dynamic understanding and interpretation which, in Barthes’s words, means “apprécier de quel pluriel il est fait” (1970, 10); as such, it is potentially chaotic and is defined as texte de jouissance.11 “Day of the Butterfly”, revised to be part of Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, would belong to that last category, as a comparison between the two versions of the last paragraphs shows. The first version reads: “You take it” said Myra, in such a soft voice that I could hardly hear her. But I still felt her touch, not with my mind but with the nerves of my skin. I understood the demand that made. And it was too much. The nurse came back, carrying a glass of chocolate milk, and she said: “What’s the matter, didn’t you hear the buzzer?” “All right” I said. I said to Myra, “Well, thank you for the –thing. Thank you”. I hesitated, trying to think what else I could say. “Thank you. Good-by”. At the door I had to pause some more and look back at her sitting in the high hospital bed. I thought that soon I would be outside. So I called back quickly, treacherously in fact [ corrected in Munro’s hand – the original can’t be read]. ‘Good-by”.

15 The final one: “You take it”. She put it into my hand. Our fingers touched again. [….]

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“The nurse came back, carrying a glass of chocolate milk. “What’s the matter, didn’t you hear the buzzer?” So I was released, set free by the barriers which now closed about Myra, her unknown, exalted, ether-smelling hospital world, and by the treachery of my own heart. “Well thank you,” I said. “Thank you for the thing. Goodbye.” Did Myra ever say goodbye? Not likely. She sat in her high bed, her delicate brown neck, rising out of a hospital gown too big for her, her brown carved face immune to treachery, her offering perhaps already forgotten, prepared to be set apart for legendary uses, as she was even in the back porch at school. (110)

16 The disappearance of all the inquits and the slipping into Free Indirect Style foreground interiority and offer unmediated blurred clear-sightedness to the reader. The interweaving of viewpoints -- Myra’s interpreted viewpoint embedded in Helen’s, “her offering perhaps already forgotten”, Helen’s remembering “as she was even in the back porch at school” interweaving with the adult’s enigmatic wording of the child’s perspective “prepared to be set apart for legendary uses” – all these create a complexity and a demand for interpretation that is totally absent from the first, much more explicitly descriptive, version. In “Good-by Myra”, we are told by the retrospective narrator about the character’s ambivalence: “I understood the demand that made. And it was too much”, “I thought that soon I would be outside”, “treacherously in fact”. In “Day of the Butterfly” we experience ambivalence, we feel it. It leaves us perplexed rather than evaluative; it remains interpretatively unsolved. Munro’s revised story, like all “writerly texts” whose meaning is not immediately given, can thus be described as a non-linear dynamic system sensitive to initial conditions; as a chaotic system.

Strange textual attractors?

17 One of Lorenz’s major discoveries was that chaotic dynamics is characterized by folding and stretching of trajectories that are confined to some strange attractor. If the complex dynamics constituted by “Day of the Butterfly” and its reader qualifies as chaotic, it necessarily supposes the existence of such an attractor.

18 In the context of literary discourse analysis, reader-response theory focuses energies around a multi-tiered system that is deeply sensitive to initial conditions too, the empathy system12. At reader level, we have already seen how Munro’s final title triggers a chaotic reading process. Yet, initial conditions are not limited to the paratext; they also concern the incipit of the short story 13, the initial paragraph, and might even be thought of as part of the thematic structure at paragraph and sentence level.

19 The initial paragraph of Munro’s story reads as follows: I do not remember when Myra Sayla came to town, though she must have been in our class at school for two or three years. I start remembering her in the last year, when her little brother Jimmy Sayla was in Grade One. Jimmy Sayla was not used to going to the bathroom by himself and he would have to come to the Grade Six door and ask for Myra and she would take him downstairs. Quite often he would not get to Myra in time and there would be a big dark stain on his little button-on cotton pants. Then Myra had to come and ask the teacher: “Please may I take my brother home, he has wet himself?” (100)

20 The opening, “I do not remember”, creates tension based on paradox and reveals complexity; the narrative is established as retrospective while memory is said to fail.

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What then follows is a name “Myra Sayla”, which might stop the reader because of its phonetics. The first name is unusual; we are not quite sure about the pronunciation of the second: /sai/ for assonance reasons, or /sei/. We are not now, nor will we later be, given any information about the geographical origins of the girl. Her name poetically chimes, ra / la, Myra rimes with “admire”14, but also, potentially ominously with “mire”, the final word in Robert Frost’s Blue-Butterfly Day. Sayla, depending on the pronunciation chosen might evoke “saying” or “sighing”. We might also be sensitive to vocalic echoes between Myra and butterfly and possibly between S ayla and day, initiating a privileged network between Myra and the butterfly15. Once more, the puzzled, meditative reader wanders on interpretative uncertain pathways. Although it might seem futile, this has major consequences on our positioning with respect to the narrator and a character we presume is going to be central in the story.

21 Kuno and Kaburaki (1977, 627-672) were the first to systematize an empathy hierarchy in interaction, stating three major rules16: • Surface Structure Empathy Hierarchy It is easiest for the speaker to empathize with the referent of the subject ; it is next easiest for him to empathize with the referent of the object [... ] it is next to impossible for the speaker to empathize with the referent of the by passive agentive. • Speech Act Participant Empathy Hierarchy It is easiest for the speaker to empathize with himself; it is next easiest for him to empathize with the hearer; it is more difficult for him to express more empathy with third persons than with himself or with the hearer. • Topic Empathy Hierarchy It is easier for the speaker to empathize with an object (e.g.person) that he has been talking about than with an object that he has just introduced in the discourse for the first time.

22 In a literary narrative, it therefore follows that the speaker/narrator primarily empathizes with herself, then possibly with the referent of the subject, all the more so if it corresponds to a person/character she has been talking about, in other words, that she knows well. A rather easy translation to the other side of the interaction relation enables us to postulate that for the reader, empathy is easiest with the subject of the speech act, i.e. with the speaker/narrator, then possible with the referent of the subject, i.e. possibly a character – all the more so if the character is well known, due to narratorial choices of foregrounding. In our story incipit, empathy with the narrator is problematic since she “do[es] not remember”; Myra Sayla, whose name is doubly foregrounded, and who is the next “subject” we meet, is the most immediate next candidate, but she is a third person. The epistemic modality “she must have been” nevertheless seems to elicit double empathy from the start: with the narrator who is interpreting, and indirectly with the character whose unexplained transparent presence implicitly becomes a problematic object of focus17. The next sentence starts with the same theme: “I start remembering her”, tilting the empathy balance back on the side of a narrator resuming her full narrative power. The themes of sentences four and five are temporal: “Quite often” and “Then”, the latter being tinged with a sense of inevitability, confirmed by the deontic modality “Myra had to come and ask”, the result of Helen’s deciphering of the situation.

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23 At the end of the first paragraph, the reader is therefore faced with three variables that define the three dimensions of the complex textual attractor: • a retrospective self-conscious narrator who is reporting fragmented memories while trying to make sense of her position, • a central object of focus, Myra, who, at the outset of the text, is defined by her role as her little brother Jimmy’s helper, sees herself and is seen as marginal, inevitably trapped in embarrassing situations because of him, • and another character who emerges as a textual watermark, the narrator’s younger self, a witness of Myra’s predicament whose degree of emotional involvement is rather difficult to identify (whom we shall, for the sake of clarity, call Helen, although we do not learn her name until quite late in the story).

24 This snapshot of initial conditions makes it rather easy to predict that the short story is going to be about relating; relating with the other as individual and with the others as group (I/ Myra/ our class), relating with the self, but also relating as telling, logically developing into the problematics of reading as relating. Yet, what is much more difficult to predict, although it is clearly dependent on those initial conditions, is the evolution of the reader’s position in this relational interlace – which supposes a closer investigation into the structure of what can now be defined as a multidimensional “empathy attractor”.

Folding and stretching trajectories

25 The major consequence of the ambivalence of the narrator’s position, which mimetically reflects and articulates the complexity of the characters’ relations and predicaments, is the complexity of the folding and stretching of reading trajectories; the reader inevitably finds themselves looking for elements that concentrate and momentarily stabilize meaning.

26 Miss Darling, the teacher, can be thought of as a possible origo for the empathy attractor. Although she is not a major anchor for empathy in the story - she is caricatured at the beginning, described by a narrator who chooses to remain close to the perspective that was hers at the time of the story - she remains a figure of reference for the reader, a stable point, albeit a complex one. She is an oxymoronic character, “a cold, gentle girl”, displaying “stiff solicitude” (101). She focuses on the importance of formulation, offering as an alternative to the embarrassing “Please may I take my brother home, he has wet himself?” the euphemistic “My brother has had an accident, please, teacher” which is obviously more ‘politically correct’, but primarily meant to work as a strategy against mockery. This thereby clearly signs her positioning on Myra’s side, in keeping with the semantics of her name, and foregrounds what will be a major thematics of the short story, the articulation between feeling and telling18. She becomes a main actor, a main helper, in the narration, structuring the narrative plot around key moments. First, she draws attention to Myra, and on her problematic exclusion from the group: “Well, why is she never playing with the rest of you? Every day I see her standing in the back porch, never playing. Do you think she looks very happy standing back there? Do you think you would be very happy if you were left back there?” (102)

27 Interestingly, Miss Darling uses empathy and mirror situations as argument; although, as the narrator recalls, it is cruelly counterproductive at the beginning, giving an

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ironically condescending tinge to her name: “We had not paid much attention to Myra before this. But now a game was developed; it started with saying, ‘Let’s be nice to Myra!’” (102), it creates awareness conditions for the privileged encounter between Helen and Myra.

28 The “complicating action” of the story19 constitutes another major complex space of the attractor: One morning in the winter I was walking up the school hill very early; a neighbour had given me a ride into town. I lived about half a mile out of town, on a farm and I should not have been going to the town school at all [….] I was the only one in the class who carried a lunch pail and ate peanut butter sandwiches in the high, bare, mustard-coloured cloakroom, the only one who had to wear rubber boots in the spring, when the roads were heavy with mud. I felt a little danger, on account of this; but I could not tell exactly what it was. I saw Myra and Jimmy ahead of me on the hill; they always went to school very early- sometimes so early that they had to stand outside waiting for the janitor to open the door. They were walking slowly, and now and then Myra half turned around. I had often loitered in that way, wanting to walk with some important girl who was behind me, and not quite daring to stop and wait. Now it occurred to me that Myra might be doing this with me. I did not know what to do. (103-4)

29 Helen and Myra have their difference to share, parallel constraints to bear, and discover they have the same reading references; although the encounter is strangely dissonant at the beginning: “‘Have some more Cracker Jack’, I said. ‘I used to eat Cracker Jack all the time but I don’t anymore. I think it’s bad for your complexion.’” (104), it develops into a privileged instant of intimacy crystallizing around the discovery of the butterfly: Myra looked into the box. “There’s a prize in there”, she said. She pulled it out. It was a brooch, a little tin butterfly, painted gold with bits of coloured glass stuck onto it to look like jewels. She held it in her brown hand, smiling slightly. I said, ‘Do you like that?” Myra said, “I like them blue stones, Blue stones are sapphires”. “I know. My birthstone is sapphire. What is your birthstone?” “I don’t know.” “When is your birthday?” “July.” “Then yours is ruby.” “I like sapphire better,” said Myra. “I like yours.” She handed me the brooch. “You keep it,” I said. “Finders keepers”. Myra kept holding it out, as if she did not know what I meant. “Finders keepers,” I said. “It was your Cracker Jack,” said Myra, scared and solemn. “You bought it.” “Well you found it.” “No –“said Myra “Go on!” I said. “Here, I’ll give it to you.” I took the brooch from her and pushed it back into her hand. We were both surprised. We looked at each other; I flushed but Myra did not. I realized the pledge as our fingers touched; I was panicky, but all right. I thought I can come early and walk with her other mornings. I can go and talk to her at recess. Why not? Why not? (105-6; italics are in the original)

30 The power of the scene rests in tiny details. Myra and Helen have an equal share in the description of the butterfly. Myra discovers it, reveals it as a treasure in her “brown hand” - the darkness20 of her skin, mentioned here for the first time, possibly giving an odious reason for her being ostracized at school. The narrator partly describes the

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brooch, but it falls to Myra to add the touch of colour, expressing a liking for blue sapphire21 that subtly metamorphoses into a deep longing for the Other: “I like them blue stones”- “I like yours”. Paradoxically, though very realistically, her desire manifests itself through stupefaction (“Myra kept holding it out, as if she did not know what I meant”) and awe (“scared and solemn”). The emotional interlace reaches a climax when the two girls’ fingers (the first person plural appearing for the first time in the story: “our fingers”) touch in a gesture interpreted by Helen as sacred22. Fear is another feeling they share, though “scared” and “panicky” are differently connoted. But the full epiphanic dimension of the scene is reached in the repetition of the “Why not?”, whose first instance could be attributed to the character’s Free (in)Direct Thought23 and the second to the retrospective narrator’s, the italics being a written, therefore also potentially an authorial manifestation of subjectivity and emotional involvement24. Why not indeed, the reader might wonderingly echo.

31 Even if they eventually clearly structure around the gift of the butterfly, which could also be identified as the “magnet” Munro refers to in the interview with Geoff Hancock25, empathy trajectories become increasingly complex. They can be seen as folding, without ever exactly corresponding, recalling Deleuze’s analyses of Baroque aesthetics, “le pli qui va à l’infini” (1988, 5), “le pli du monde et de l’âme” (37). Helen and Myra first appear to be enclosed in the same narrative perspective; the use of Direct Style with minimal framing of speech ensures transparency and V+ing forms, observability. We are clearly in the “showing” mode. They are close to each other, though not exactly in unison, and we follow their perspectives on the butterfly. When the narrative voice does transmit interpretative positioning, it concerns Helen’s reading of the situation and is presented in a consonant way, without any evaluative distancing. The reader is therefore led to empathize with all three instances without any clear guiding hierarchy, which makes the position slightly unstable and might consequently account for a stretching impulse out of the three folding trajectories, out of the empathy entanglement.

32 It is one of the mysteries of intertextuality to have narrative elements reverberate over time and memory, back to another short story by another writer, which presents a very similar narrative situation: Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House”. In a small, closed New Zealand community, the Burnell girls have been given as a present a beautiful doll’s house and they invite all their school friends to come and see it26. Two young girls, Lil Kelvey and her little sister, “Our Else”27, are excluded from the group. The younger Burnell daughter, Kezia, who is particularly fascinated by a little lamp in the doll’s house, feels uncomfortable about the situation: ‘Mother’, said Kezia, “can’t I ask the Kelveys just once?” ‘Certainly not, Kezia’ ‘But why not?’ ‘Run away, Kezia; you know quite well why not.’ (341)

33 The little girl will get no further explanation. One afternoon, as Kezia identifies the Kelveys walking past their house28, she decides to invite them in: ‘Hullo’, she said to the passing Kelveys. They were so astounded that they stopped. Lil gave her silly smile. Our Else stared. ‘You can come in and see our doll’s house if you want to,’ said Kezia, and she dragged one toe on the ground. But at that Lil turned red and shook her head quickly. ‘Why not?’ asked Kezia.

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Lil gasped, then she said, ‘Your ma told our ma you wasn’t to speak to us’ ‘Oh well,’ said Kezia. She didn’t know what to reply. ‘It doesn’t matter. You can come and see our doll’s house all the same. Come on. Nobody’s looking.’ But Lil shook her head still harder. ‘Don’t you want to?’ asked Kezia Suddenly there was a twitch, a tug at Lil’s skirt. She turned round. Our Else was looking at her with big imploring eyes; she was frowning; she wanted to go. For a moment Lil looked at our Else very doubtfully. But then Our Else twitched her skirt again. She started forward. Kezia led the way. Like two little stray cats they followed across the courtyard to where the doll’s house stood. ‘There it is’, said Kezia. There was a pause. Lil breathed loudly, almost snorted; our Else was still as a stone. (342-3)

34 They are suddenly chased away by Kezia’s aunt, but the story ends with the two sisters and the shared mystery of revelation: Presently our Else nudged up close to her sister. But now she had forgotten the cross lady. She put out a finger and stroked her sister’s quill; she smiled her rare smile. ‘I seen the little lamp’, she said sofly. Then both were silent once more. (344)

35 Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House”, like Munro’s “Day of the Butterfly”, unites young girls that are poles apart socially, having them share a central epiphanic experience which revolves around a tiny detail, a little tin blue butterfly, a tiny lamp in a doll’s house. The subversive question is the same: “Why not?”; the moment of communion, preceded by a moment of stupefaction results in the same smile. Kezia is more determined, more openly transgressive and less ambivalent than Helen, and the reader’s position in “The Doll’s House” is clearly on the side of the children, and more particularly Kezia and our Else, against the prejudiced world of adults.29.

36 Another “stretching trajectory” might extend to autobiographical reference and partly explain the complexity of the narratorial positioning. In her talk with Paula Todd (2010) Munro tells about her dreams: “I would go to England and meet Laurence Olivier [….], and I would have a wonderful blue velvet ball gown “, and recalls: “I had a long walk home from school and it was quite a brutal walk but I made up stories all the way and did that every day, and I would be very annoyed if anybody picked me up and gave me a ride and took away that time. Because I wasn’t brought up in a community that thought what we now call creativity was sort of normal”.

37 The blue gown connects her with Myra; the long walk to and from school and the sense of difference, to Helen. In “Dear Life”, she recalls her brief “friendship” with a girl she calls Diane, which seems a distant echo of Helen and Myra’s relationship: “A girl whom I’ll call Diane arrived partway through my second year [….] We went to her place after school […] my mother […] discovered my whereabouts. On the way home, I was told that I was never to enter that house again. (This proved not to be a difficulty, because Diane stopped appearing at school a few days later – she had been sent away somewhere)” (301).

38 She later learns “that Diane’s mother had been a prostitute and had died of some ailment it seemed that prostitutes caught” (303). The metamorphosis of reality also is a dynamic, multifarious and mysterious process indeed, involving endless stretchings and foldings of empathy trajectories too. Far from simplifying the picture, the sequel of the narrative questions to the very end the possibility of resolution.

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The unsolved question of homeostasis

39 The emotionally intense and complex experience of the gift of the butterfly is followed by Myra’s absence from school. She is ill. Miss Darling decides to go with some of her pupils to visit her in the hospital and organize a birthday party, on the 20th of March, although her birthday is in July, “Because she’s sick” she insists “with a warning shrillness”, paralinguistically foregrounding deficiency in intuitive understanding of the implicit. The relationship between the two girls is a secret they share with the reader, who is sensitive to echoes that take us back to the butterfly episode: “I said, ‘Her birthday is in July’” (107), “Myra said ‘My birthday is in July’” (108). Helen, whose name is revealed by Myra to us for the first time in this second half of the story seems to understand her friend; the epistemic modality has disappeared: “Myra did not look at us, but at the ribbons, pink and blue and speckled with silver, and the miniature bouquets; they pleased her, as the butterfly had done. An innocent look came into her face, a partial, private smile” (109). Myra is now in the same position as Helen was when she insists on her taking accessories that are symbolic of womanhood and a clear object of desire for Helen: “You take something” […] “Well you take something,” Myra said. She picked up a leatherette case with a mirror in it, a comb and a nail file and a natural lipstick and a small handkerchief edged with gold thread. I had noticed it before. “You take that,” she said. (110)

40 The same gesture is repeated, with the same consequence: “She put it into my hand. Our fingers touched again.” Some kind of equilibrium – homeostasis, seems to be reached through the interlacing of echoing and the acceptance of an invitation that resonates for the reader, who deciphers “Akemia”(107) as leukaemia, as a way of conjuring death: “When I come back from London” Myra said, “you can come and play at my place after school.” “Okay,” I said. (110)

41 Yet, dissonance wins over: Outside the hospital window there was a clear carrying sound of somebody playing in the street, may be chasing the last snowballs of the year. This sound made Myra, her triumph and her bounty, and most of all her future in which she had found this place for me, turn shadowy, turn dark. All the presents on the bed, the folded paper and ribbons, those guilt-tinged offerings had passed into this shadow, they were no longer innocent objects to be touched, exchanged, accepted without danger. I didn’t want to take the case now but I could not think how to get out of it, what lie to tell. I’ll give it away, I thought. I won’t ever play with it. I would let my little brother pull it apart. (110, emphasis added)

42 The reader is left puzzled and unsettled by the violence of Helen’s feelings, once more truthfully transmitted by the narrator, while acknowledging that indeed the offerings qualify as “guilt-tinged” and accepting the impossibility of objects being touched, exchanged or accepted without inciting danger. But Helen’s clear-sightedness and unmitigated self-indictment, implied by the slipping into Free Direct/Indirect Thought30 remains highly disturbing; it is both jarring and inevitably stretches out to “the treachery of [our] own heart[s]”. Ending the short story on Helen’s enigmatic final sight of Myra, intimately interlacing this with the narrator’s no less enigmatic retrospective interpretation, leads the reader on the path of remembrance too in an ultimate quest for equilibrium; the text almost folds back on itself, but not quite. “[Her]

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brown carved face immune to treachery”(110) evokes “They were like children in a medieval painting, they were like small figures carved of wood, for worship or magic, with faces smooth and aged, and meekly, cryptically uncommunicative” (101, emphasis mine) while “as she was even in the back porch at school”(110) takes us back to “So Myra and Jimmy spent every recess standing in the little back porch between the two sides”(101). The interpretative process is pertinently close to what Guillemette Bolens described as reading a medieval interlace: La répétition des signifiants et de leurs synonymes dessine des lignes qui s’entrecroisent pour ensuite disparaître et refaire surface plus loin, semblables aux entrelacs picturaux des enluminures médiévales […] Lire un entrelacs consiste à porter attention à des signifiants dont la réitération indique qu’ils jouent un rôle distinctif dans la construction de la narration (2008, 36-7).

43 There is a tiny difference between now and then, which, once more, has immense consequences: Myra is all alone now. Emotion is intense and one more time, closure refused. The ultimate question to be solved then is why narrative framing and stylistic near-symmetry are here unable to secure a cathartic sense of equilibrium in the reader, why the story remains to the very end “cryptically uncommunicative”.

Concluding trajectories: Mirror Neurons, Far-From- Equilibrium Systems and the end of certainty

44 Using Lorenz’s weather model as a toy-model for understanding “Day of the Butterfly” revealed that literary text reading means tracing empathy trajectories in a chaotic system, deterministic, dynamic and non-linear. As readers we strongly depend on initial conditions that embark us on multidirectional trajectories that are eventually revealed as following and tracing complex interlacing patterns intricately structured around some central, seminal moment of experience. In Munro’s story, reading trajectories, as is to be expected in an autodiegetic narrative, follow the double empathic threads of Helen the narrator and Helen, her former self, a character in the diegesis. Yet, the ambivalence that characterizes their interaction with the surrounding textual world further complexifies the position of a reader who, in his quest for equilibrium (and hence understanding), develops an intertextual and symbolical trajectory around the episode of the little tin blue butterfly. The insistent uneasiness the story creates in us leads us to question a positioning we cannot doubt is voluntary on the author’s part. In the case of an autodiegetic narrator, because of commonly accepted empathy rules such as the ones developed by Kuno and Kaburaki, we tend to think that empathy naturally is with the first person, including in the complex although frequent case of a split between younger and older self. It is more difficult to imagine that empathy could in fact also be organized around a third person, whose point of view we might intuitively follow. In “Day of the Butterfly”, the character of Myra, although she is clearly not a reflector, seems to attract and concentrate empathy in a way that almost overpowers the empathic compound of the narrator-character. But to evidence that, we need to turn to what might be the most fascinating discovery of neurosciences for stylisticians with a special interest in reader- response theory, the existence of Mirror Neurons.

45 In the 1990s, a team of scientists working at the University of Parma, discovered the existence of Mirror Neurons in the cortical motor system of macaque monkeys: the

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same neurons fire when a monkey grasps a peanut as when it watches another monkey (or a human) grasp another peanut31! Hence their name. The research team then went on to evidence the presence of those Mirror Neurons in humans before addressing the question of emotions and discovering another “Mirror Mechanism embedded inside our emotional centres”, which, in Rizzolatti’s words, “is extremely interesting because it is another way in which we communicate, given that communication is understanding the others from the inside”32. Other scientists then chose to investigate the question of mirror mechanisms in art, the question of what happens when we are watching a character in a painting doing something, feeling an emotion, or when we are reading about such events. Wojciehowski, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, and Gallese, Professor of Physiology in the University of Parma Department of Neuroscience, and a member of Rizzolatti’s team, set out from their different backgrounds to trace “one important level of our relationships with narrative – namely, our empathic co-feeling with others activated by writings and registered within our bodies” (Wojciehowski and Gallese, 2011). The study, they claim, takes us beyond intentionality and what is traditionally known as Theory of Mind (ToM) to what they call “Feeling of Body (FoB)33. When we read a text, scientists tell us, we experience in our body what we are reading about, and this, independently of any empathy hierarchy, and also irrespectively of the sacred frontier erected by generations of narratologists between reality and fiction.

46 Unlike Helen, who mostly observes and describes, Myra often acts. The narrative of the discovery of the little tin butterfly follows her actions: she looks into the box, pulls the prize out, she holds it in her hand, she smiles. Given Mirror Mechanisms and Embodied Simulation, we look, we pull it out, we hold it in our hands, we smile; Myra’s actions find an echo in our brains without any intermediary (while obviously physical action remains inhibited – except maybe the smile, which might find its way on our lips). This contributes to the building of a privileged, quasi autonomous relationship with the character that develops independently from the narrator’s mimetic reporting of Helen’s ambivalent relation with Myra; we are therefore able to disengage momentarily from what we feel to be an uncomfortable narrative mode and reading position. The major problem raised by Mirror Mechanisms in literature is that they potentially concern all characters, irrespective of their role in the story. Far from simplifying the picture, they add a multiplicity of possible empathic reading trajectories to the already complex interlacing in textual strange attractors. This might ultimately take us beyond chaos, to Far From Equilibrium Systems, powerfully eschewing all form of resolution, irremediably marking the end of certainty.

47 As Siri Hustvedt notes: It isn’t easy to make forays out of one’s own discipline. The experts lie in wait and often attack the interlopers who dare move onto their sacred ground […] To my mind conversations among people working in different areas can only benefit everyone involved, but the intellectual windows that belong to one discipline do not necessarily belong to another. The result is a scrambling of terms and beliefs, and often a mess is made. The optimistic view is that out of the chaos come interesting questions, if not answers. (2012, 124).

48 This modest excursion into scientific fields which were, until recently, thought of as irrelevant to literary analysis might hopefully offer a replicable method to address in any short story Iser’s compelling question of how to account for the dynamic character of a literary text, and how we “can assess the keen disturbance” one feels when reading

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serious literature. Myra was a lover of Art and Arithmetic; this tiny detail might be invitation enough to multiply perspectives with the hope of elaborating a clearer mental representation of the mystery of “Day of the Butterfly”, and beyond it, of our world and our relation to it, a mystery that, Iser says, fiction endlessly and inevitably probes: If the borderlines of knowledge give rise to fictionalizing activity, we might perceive an economy principle at work: namely what can be known need not to be staged again, and so fictionality always subsidizes the unknowable (1997, 5).

49 What might therefore forever remain untouched is the ultimate mystery of being moved by words. In her Nobel Interview, Alice Munro, when asked about the impact she hoped to have on her readers, made the following answer: I want my stories to move people […] to be something about life that causes people to feel some kind of reward from the writing […] everything the story tells moves the writer34 in such a way that you feel you’re a different person when you finish.

50 What strange attraction phenomenon makes her say “writer” where we expect to hear “reader”? What infinite respect for readers, invited to be the creative writers of the stories they read…

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MUNRO Alice. [1968], 2000. Dance of the Happy Shades. London, Vintage.

MUNRO Alice. 2013. Dear Life. London, Vintage Books.

Paris Review, The Art of Fiction N°137 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the-art- of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro

Alice MUNRO talks with Paula TODD Archive TVO Nov 14, 2010, http://archive.tvo.org/video/ 163742/interview-alice-munro

Alice MUNRO, In Her Own Words: 2013 Nobel Prize Interview, http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2013/munro-lecture.html

BARTHES, Roland. 1970. S/Z. Paris: Points, Seuil.

BIGOT, Corinne and LANONE, Catherine. 2014. Sunlight and Shadows, Past and Present, Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades. Paris : PUF, CNED.

BOLENS, Guillemette. 2008. Le style des gestes. Corporéité et kinésie dans le récit littéraire, Lausanne: BHMS.

BONHEIM, Helmut. 1982. The Narrative Modes – Techniques of the Short Story, Cambridge: DS Brewer.

COX, Aisla. 2004. Alice Munro. Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers Ltd.

DELEUZE, Gilles. 1988. Le Pli. Leibnitz et le Baroque. Paris : Editions de Minuit.

DELEUZE, Gilles, PARNET, Claire, 1996. Dialogues. Paris : Champs, Flammarion.

FROST, Robert. 1923. New Hampshire.

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GLEICK, James. 2008. Chaos, Making a New Science. New York: Penguin.

HUSTVEDT, Siri. 2012. Living, Thinking, Looking, New York: Picador.

ISER, Wolfgang. 1989. Prospecting, From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

ISER, Wolfgang. 1997. “The significance of Fictionalizing”, Anthropoetics III, n°2 (Fall 1997/Winter 1998) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0302/iser_fiction.htm

KUNO, Susumu and KABURAKI, Etsuko. 1977. “Empathy and Syntax”, Linguistic Inquiry, vol 8, Number 4, Fall 1977. (627-672)

LABOV, William. 1972. “The Transformation of experience in narrative syntax”, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

LORENZ, Edward N. 1963. “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow”, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, volume 20. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/ 10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020%3C0130%3ADNF%3E2.0.CO%3B2

LORENZ, Edward N. 1972. “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”, 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29, 1972, http://eaps4.mit.edu/research/Lorenz/Butterfly_1972.pdf

McCAIG, JoAnn, 1997. Beggar Maid, Alice Munro’s Archive and the Cultural Space of Authorship, a dissertation submitted to the faculty of graduate studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ ftp05/nq20754.pdf

MANSFIELD, Katherine. 1953. “The Doll’s House”(1922), Selected Stories. Oxford, OUP.

MORIN, Edgar. 2005. Introduction à la pensée complexe. Paris : Seuil.

RIZZOLATTI, Giacomo and SINIGAGLIA, Corrado. 2008. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience. Oxford: OUP.

STANFORD ENCYCLOPAEDIA of PHILOSOPHY, http://plato.stanford.edu/

TOOLAN, Michael. 2009. Narrative Progression in the Short Story, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

WOJCIEHOWSKI, Hannah and GALLESE, Vittorio. 2011. “How Stories Make us Feel : Toward an Embodied Narratology, University of California, California Italian Studies, 2(1). http:// escholarship.org/uc/item/3jg726c2

APPENDIXES

Diagram of empathy attractor in “Day of the Butterfly”

Below is a possible simplified representation of what a strange attractor in “Day of the Butterfly” might eventually look like; you have to imagine all arrows as developing into folding and stretching trajectories.

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NOTES

1. Inevitably entailing simplifications which I hope the physicists coming across this article will forgive; my only defence being that Lorenz himself used simplified models of the weather to theorize his findings. 2. Paris Review, The Art of Fiction N°137 3. i.e. “systems that almost repeated themselves but never quite succeeded” (Gleick, 2008, 22) 4. “Meaning that they expressed relationships that were not strictly proportional”. (Gleick, 2008, 23) 5. To be found in Larry Bradley’s site, Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University: http://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/attractors.html 6. Some attractors are called “strange attractors” when they have a fractal structure, which is very often the case in chaotic systems. Although this probably opens innumerable interpretative possibilities, it would require more than the limits of this paper to develop them in an intellectually honest way. 7. Edgar Morin also reminds us that “la complexité est un tissu (complexus: ce qui est tissé ensemble) de constituants hétérogènes inséparablement associés: elle pose le paradoxe de l’un et du multiple.” ( 2005, 21). Therefore, text and complex share the same Latin etymology of textus, woven; by nature, texts are complex systems. 8. Originally published in The New Republic, March 16, 1921. 9. See Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, Faber and Faber, 1970, n°354 10. A facsimile of the original publication is to be found in JoAnn McCaig, 1997, 252. 11. For a synthetic vision of the opposition between texte de plaisir and texte de jouissance, see the brief interview of Roland Barthes: http://www.ina.fr/video/CPF10005880 12. Empathy in literary discourse analysis exclusively concerns the capacity to adopt a point of view and must clearly be dissociated from the more subjective notion of sympathy.

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13. For a precise definition and classification of incipits, see Bonheim, 1982. 14. And as we shall see later meaningfully with “sapphire” in the epiphanic scene 15. Which will indeed be pursued in the course of the story, in particular through the colour blue, associated to the butterfly and Myra’s dresses: “she glimmered sadly in sky-blue taffeta” (106) 16. And 3 main principles : • The Ban on Conflicting Empathy Foci A single sentence cannot contain logical conflicts in empathy relationships • Word Order Principle If you are going to introduce anew into the discourse an object A (e.g. John) and another object that is defined with respect to its relationship with A (e.g. John's brother) introduce them in that order. • Syntactic Prominence Principle Of the people whom you are describing, give prominence to the one you are empathizing with. 17. There are many, more explicit, occurrences of this phenomenon of embedded perspective: “Perhaps they watched the baseball games, the tag and skipping and building of leaf houses in the fall and snow forts in the winter; perhaps they did not watch at all.” (101), or “Perhaps she thought I was playing a trick on her” (104) 18. Which also concerns Helen; see for example “I felt a little danger,[….]; but I could not tell exactly what it was.” (103) 19. This refers to Labov (1972) defining six stages in oral narratives: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, coda. 20. Dark hair is also mentioned in the story. 21. Sound indeed enhancing some mysterious correspondence with Myra. 22. Which, interestingly, is an anagram of scared. 23. There being no conjugated verbal forms, opting for Free Direct Style or Free Indirect Style is here impossible. 24. The same analysis could be made of the other phrase in italics, “all right” 25. Quoted in Bigot and Lanone (2014, 19) “I have this picture. It generates some other images and attracts them like a magnet. Things stick to it, anecdotes and details”. 26. Katherine Mansfield (1953, 337-344); all page references are to this edition; emphasis is mine. 27. A rather unusual name, though an extremely meaningful one in the economy of the story. Our Else indeed is the figure of the Other. 28. The description is like a mirror scene to the encounter scene in Munro’s story. “Presently looking along the road, she saw two little dots. They grew bigger, they were coming towards her. Now she could see that one was in front and one close behind. Now she would see that they were the Kelveys.”(342) 29. There is a teacher in Mansfield’s story, but, unlike Miss Darling, she is as prejudiced against the Kelveys as the rest of the adult community. 30. The first person points to FDT whereas the use of “would” points to indirectness. 31. Rizzolatti explains the discovery of mirror neurons in the following video: http:// www.gocognitive.net/interviews/discovery-mirror-neurons-1 32. The same on Mirror Mechanisms; http://www.gocognitive.net/interviews/emotional-mirror- mechanism 33. “Frequently...[…] cognitive literary theory draws on so-called ToM, the notion that we can reconstruct the minds and intentions of other people through our own mental meta- representational processes[…] what we shall ultimately propose, then, as a complement to ToM, is the Feeling of Body (FoB), its possible links to the experience of narrative[…] We will argue that FoB is the outcome of a basic functional mechanism instantiated by our brain-body system, Embodied Simulation, enabling a more direct and less cognitively-mediated access to the world

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of others.[…] According to this hypothesis, intersubjectivity should be viewed first and foremost as intercorporeity”. Wojciehowski and Gallese, 2011. Emphasis is mine. 34. Emphasis mine.

ABSTRACTS

This paper aims at including in the stylistician’s tool-box possibly less familiar tools, borrowed from the scientific domains of chaos theory and neuroscience to develop a comprehensive analysis of literary texts. A close reading of Alice Munro’s “Day of the Butterfly” reveals the short-story to be a chaotic system, a dynamical, non linear system sensitive to initial conditions – to what is commonly known as the “butterfly effect”. Reading such texts involves tracing precise trajectories that fold and stretch along underlying structures called attractors in chaos theory. Literary discourse analysis leads to analyzing attractors in close connection with empathy, a notion whose infinite complexity is now being further revealed by the recent discoveries around mirror neurons and the role of mirror mechanisms in the way we relate to the “real” world and art. Although following the itineraries of complexity tends to produce more questions than answers, and leave the reader in a challenging state of uncertainty, it meaningfully echoes our experience of Alice Munro’s work.

INDEX

Keywords: Munro (Alice), Day of the Butterfly, butterfly effect, chaos theory, sensitive dependency on initial conditions, empathy, homeostasis, mirror neurons, reader response

AUTHOR

CLAIRE MAJOLA-LEBLOND Claire Majola-Leblond, professeur agrégée, is Senior Lecturer in Stylistics at Lyon 3 University, France, where she teaches literature, discourse analysis and a course on contemporary Irish short-stories. She is the author of a Ph.D thesis on point of view in Dylan Thomas’s Collected Stories and has published articles on the art of short-story writers such as Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Bernard MacLaverty, John McGahern, Colum McCann or William Trevor. Her current research interests are situated at the intersection between stylistics, arts and science with a special focus on the interconnection between the recent discoveries in neurosciences and the way we read and interpret fiction.

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Girl power in ‘A Trip to the Coast’

Michael Toolan

1. Some background about the Dance of the Happy Shades collection

1 Although Alice Munro had previously written individual stories for radio broadcast and magazines, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) was her first book publication, and her first presentation to a wider, international readership. She was a writer from childhood; but the account of her difficulties in finding the time and space to write in Victoria, British Columbia, having married right after university and now with commitments as a wife and mother is well known. Mr Malley, in the story called ‘The Office’ in the collection, is in addition to his other qualities perhaps also a metaphor for all the kinds of needy encroachments of others that prevented Munro progressing with a big, novel-length project—and forced her to accommodate to a stop-start work rhythm and the production of shorter fictions. These factors lie behind the Dance of the Happy Shades collection (which, we should note, Munro dedicated to her father Robert E. Laidlaw, aged 67 when it appeared). In her 1994 Paris Review interview, Munro reveals how in 1967 a publisher advised her that if she could write three more stories ‘we’d have a book’; and so she wrote ‘Images,’ ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’ and ‘Postcard’ during the last year before publication, and these were added to the dozen written, Munro says, up to fifteen years earlier: ‘The Day of the Butterfly’ was the earliest one. That was probably written when I was about twenty-one. And I can remember very well writing ‘Thanks for the Ride’ because my first baby was lying in the crib beside me. So I was twenty-two. (McCulloch, Jeanne, and Mona Simpson. 1994: 228)

2 So while Dance of the Happy Shades is the first mature flowering of this major writer, it is also work from a significant span of the young author’s life, from age 21 to 36. Given that span of crucial, technique-perfecting years, the stories are remarkable for their collective coherence, with minimal disparity of style and tone.

3 In them, the twenty-something and then thirty-something Munro by no means writes about everything she knows: there is relatively little in them about young couples,

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consummated sexual relationships, babies, or affairs and infidelity. Instead she mostly writes about those things she has known about for a decade or two, and now has some distance from: the lives of girls, their mothers, their grandmothers, and the unmarried, in varied situations of emotional, intellectual, or material confinement, in small-town Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s.

4 What are the stories’ themes? Most centrally I believe they are about struggle and hostility between a girl approaching puberty or emerging into adulthood and her mother or grandmother. Generally, these older female ‘opponents’ present models of the feminine which their reluctant protegées find entirely uncongenial. At the same time no radically alternative female role-models seem available: the lives of the wives and mothers are seen by the girl narrators-focalisers as mostly repellent, but worse are the lives of the women who are not wives or mothers. Even a story that does not have this as a main topic, like ‘Images’, conveys this message. In ‘Images’ the young narrator accompanies the father she is devoted to when he goes to check the traps which he sets in the river to catch and kill muskrats for their fur. Escaping the house for the day gets the girl away from the hearty Mary McQuade, an unmarried cousin of her father’s, mature in years and rough in manners, who has descended upon the family to tend to the girl’s mother, who is evidently dying. Of her father’s side of the family, the narrator comments: A bad thing… was to have them say you were sensitive, as they did of my mother. All the aunts and cousins and uncles had grown tremendously hardened to any sort of personal cruelty, reckless, even proud, it seemed, of a failure or deformity that could make for general laughter. (35)

5 There is no shortage of meanness and cruelty and petty sadism in these stories, born presumably of crushed hopes and frustrated ambitions—or resentment of others’ successes.

6 Towards the end of their long day checking the traps, father and daughter encounter the crazed-seeming and easily-misinterpreted loner called Joe Phippen (faint echoes here of ‘eccentrics’ in the first two stories in the Dubliners collection). Or rather, Joe creeps up on the father, wielding an axe and failing to recognise him, while the girl says nothing, as if to observe her father pass a test of masculine coping with violent danger. He does, and they visit with Joe in his shack long enough to watch him feeding toxic moonshine whisky to his cat. This in turn provides material for the father’s joshing of his spinster cousin, when they get home: ‘We found the one for you today, Mary!’, he begins. In such ways, we and the witnessing girl are to understand, men and women in this part of rural Ontario rub along toward the grave.

7 Like all Munro stories, ‘Images’ has many layers. At one level it is about a young girl coming to terms with the approaching death of her mother—although the mother, suffering from an unspecified condition, is only briefly described: a powerful absence. At another level it is about the curious, quasi-marital relation that the girl sees emerge ‘naturally’ in the temporary co-habitation of her father and Mary McQuade. It is also about her seeing that this is an option or privilege sometimes available to men, but never to women (another, altogether more poignant, developed, and erotic version of an alternative but denied pairing, again briefly glimpsed by a focalising daughter, appeared in the opening story, ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’). At yet another level the story is a day-long venture into real-world education, paradoxically characterised in the final paragraph as almost fantastical, from which the girl returns ‘dazed and

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powerful with secrets’. At least two of those words—power, and secrets—resonate through the entirety of the Munro oeuvre. But it is useful to think of all these stories as empowering their young female narrator-focalisers with secret knowledge, or of them cumulatively empowering a composite female young adult consciousness that emerges in the course of the sequence of stories. A consciousness that is wise and mature enough both to be Helen and to understand Maddy, at the end of ‘The Peace of Utrecht’.

2. ‘A Trip to the Coast’ in the context of the collection

8 ‘A Trip to the Coast’ has been described by Munro as her least favourite story in the Dance of the Happy Shades collection. It has certainly been overshadowed by the more powerful and nuanced final stories, ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ and the title story ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’, masterpieces in different ways. But there are many wonderful things in ‘A Trip to the Coast’ which make it worthy of the closest reading. It is the kind of story that, given its place in the sequence of this collection, makes you think how carefully Munro and her editors have planned that ordering, and the concomitant thematic progression that is detectable (again, Joyce’s Dubliners is just one of the precursors that may have influenced Munro). The age of the female protagonist or observer, broadly speaking and with admitted exceptions such as ‘Thanks for the Ride’, gradually advances as the stories proceed. And likewise the age of the female antagonist, broadly, moves from younger to older: in the final three stories, for example, the antagonists are the grandmother, on her last day alive, in ‘A Trip to the Coast’; the recently-deceased mother of Helen (the narrator) and Maddy in ‘The Peace of Utrecht’; and the soon-to-be deceased Miss Marsalles in ‘Dance of the Happy Shades’. Each of the fifteen stories is at the same time different from the others, and certainly the first six in the collection are absorbingly varied in topic, age of protagonist, and setting. But the next triple, the seventh to ninth stories placed at the middle of the collection (‘The Time of Death’, ‘Day of the Butterfly’, and ‘Boys and Girls’), display linkages: in each we witness a young girl react to a death (of a sibling, caused by negligence; of a classmate, by illness; and of a loved horse, by commercial necessity, respectively). In two of the following three stories, ‘Red Dress’ and ‘Sunday Afternoon’, a late-teenage protagonist is about to embark on a sexual life of their own. And chronological age and sexual experience notwithstanding, there is something of the naïve teenager in Helen, the jilted mistress who imagined she was an undeclared fiancée, in the third, ‘Postcard’.

3. Smells, Tastes, Shapes

9 There is another preoccupation of these stories, again perhaps indicative of the focalisation repeatedly coming from a young female narrator who (whether she likes it or not) is ‘sensitive’ to such details: body smells, and the body shapes of men as well as women. So strong are these preoccupations that in effect Munro has the senses do part of the telling: time and again, an individual’s smell, or shape, or colouring, or the feel of their skin, or what they sound like (their body noises as well as any speech and accent idiosyncrasies) is remarked upon. Even, in some cases, a taste is attributed to a character: the girl narrator in ‘Images’ recalls not only Mary McQuade’s unwelcome smell, but also an alien taste in all the food she prepared ‘and perhaps in all food eaten

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in her presence…--something foreign, gritty, depressing’ (32). Here, and generally, the smells, sounds, and tastes of these Others whom Munro’s narrators comment upon are almost always unpleasant -- a reflex, perhaps, of the focalisers’ heightened pubertal sensitivity to everything emanating from the body.

10 One implication of the intense narratorial awareness of sense impressions is that this assumes an exceptional implied proximity of the narrator, and by extension of the reader, to the character depicted. We can contrast this with a narration of characters’ words and actions that includes little or no mention of their smells, or the little sounds they make—a silence about such matters which could be entirely reasonable, for example if such physical details are not deemed relevant, or if the narrator simply lacks such proximate and even intimate knowledge of the characters. You can hear what someone says, and report it in a narrative, without being close enough to them to be able to describe their visible detail, or their smell, or the feel of their skin. But there is no such character-narrator distance in these Munro stories.

4. Grotesques

11 Narrative preoccupation with characters’ shape, appearance, and presentation to the senses easily develops into an emphasis on the grotesque, and there is an element of the latter in character-descriptions in several of the stories, introduced for different thematic purposes. Characters in the early stories who shade towards the grotesque—a kind of representation of any difference or unconventionality or eccentricity as a cause for general censure, or even societal expulsion—include Mrs Fullerton in ‘The Shining Houses’ and Joe Phippen in ‘Images’. In ‘The Office’ the description of Mr Malley, the man who rents a room for the narrator-writer to work in, moves in the direction of the grotesque too. His appearance in the narrative present of the story is contrasted unfavourably with his slimmer self seen in a grandly framed photograph, taken a dozen years earlier (63). Now he is heavy around the hips and thighs, and described as ‘matriarchal’ (gender is never far from the forefront of these narrators’ minds) in ways that are impliedly unsettling. Most striking of all, however, is the physical description of the grandmother in ‘A Trip to the Coast’: Things dangled on her in spite of her attempts to be tidy and fastened up; it was because there was no reasonable shape to her body for clothes to cling to; she was all flat and narrow, except for the little mound of her stomach like a four-months’ pregnancy that rode preposterously under her skinny chest. She had knobby fleshless legs and her arms were brown and veined and twisted like whips. Her head was rather big for her body and with her hair pulled tightly over her skull she had the look of an under-nourished but maliciously intelligent baby.

12 The grandmother is presented as an object of derision, an uncanny or impossible combination of features that is the essence of the grotesque: her bulging stomach would suggest she is carrying a baby, but her head if that of a baby. This is gratuitously cruel, even if we speculate that the assessment is largely May’s, the teenage focaliser (it may well not be). The mocking and critical evaluations are loaded, or unreasonable: why should intelligence ever be characterised as malicious? It is interesting writing since it is memorable and funny, but it invites us to laugh at the character and, I suspect, is writing that in her later maturity Munro would eschew.

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5. Shadows, foreshadowing, and prolepsis

13 At the end of the ominously titled ‘Day of the Butterfly’, the terminally-ill child Myra makes a generous gift to the narrator, Helen, and also invites her to come and play at her house at some future time when Myra has returned from the hospital she is to be moved to, in the city. These kind offers, received by the girl narrator who clearly grasps that Myra will not be returning from the hospital and who can also hear vigorously noisy children playing snowballs outside, have an unsettling effect: This sound [of the children] made Myra, her triumph and her bounty, and most of all her future in which she had found this place for me, turn shadowy, turn dark. (110)

14 A shadow frequently serves as an emblem of death or the spirit, the reduction of body to a ghostly presence. But a shadow can also come before the thing it represents, e.g., when the sun is behind the entity; such literal foreshadowing is the source for uses of shadowing expressions to denote presaging, prolepsis, and premature glimpses of future plot developments. A further characteristic of one’s own shadow is that you can never shake it off: it is always there beside you, this attendance usually being understood as a burden rather than a comfort.

15 But the shadow motif is just one of the means by which prolepses are woven into these stories – including prolepses concerning minor but indicative characters as well as major ones. Examples of these can be found early in ‘The Office’. Within just two paragraphs on page 62, the narrator provides a brisk evaluation of the lives and natures of Mr and Mrs Malley, the couple with whom she intends to make the purely business arrangement of renting an office to write in. Mrs Malley is described comparatively directly: ‘She had the swaying passivity, the air of exhaustion and muted apprehension, that speaks of a life spent in close attention on a man who is by turns vigorous, crotchety and dependent.’ And this we find is the case, and continues to be the case. As for Mr Malley, he is rather interpreted by means of a portrait of him, hanging on the wall, ‘with its own light and a gilded frame’. In the portrait, our writer-narrator judges, Mr Malley is uneasy in his prosperous businessman role, perhaps inclined to be intrusive and insistent. But, she continues sharply, ‘Never mind the Malleys. As soon as I saw that office, I wanted it.’ (63). Everything foreshadowed here about Mr Malley is confirmed as the next weeks go by. The writer discovers that she cannot have the office without also ‘minding’ Mr Malley, with his ‘accusing vulnerability’ (65) and his ‘craving for intimacy’ (66). Never minding the Malleys is the one thing the writer-narrator is not allowed to do, in this almost-inversion of Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ story.

16 Turning to ‘A Trip to the Coast’, we find just one use each of the words shade, shady, and shadowy. Most interesting of these is the last, which occurs when May gets up exceptionally early and imagines the day to be still pure and untainted by her mother and grandmother, since, she assumes, they are still asleep. ‘The back yard at this time of day was strange, damp and shadowy’, we are told, and May’s imagining is called ‘a delicate premonition of freedom and danger’. But in one of those moments of dry humour that Munro does so well, May is soon disabused of her romantic fancy: her grandmother comes around the side of the house carrying kindling, evidently having been up and out for some time. May suffers ‘a queer let-down feeling that seemed to spread thinly from the present moment into all areas of her life, past and future.’ Her

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grandmother is for her the worst kind of shadow: ‘It seemed to her that any place she went her grandmother would be there beforehand.’

6. Prominent phrases and keywords: a corpus stylistic foray

17 In the latter half of this chapter I would like to take further the attention to specific word choices begun in the first half, by using simple corpus-stylistic methods to highlight some important kinds of lexical repetition or patterning. Single lexical words that are repeated many times in a story may be noticeable and noteworthy; but sometimes even more noteworthy are those few multiple-word phrases found to occur three or more times, either in the narrative (non-direct-speech) part of the text, or in the direct speech part. It is important to separate out the searching of the narrative and the direct speech (dialogue) sections, since their narratological status of each is normally quite distinct. By and large the narrative text is attributable to an author- narrator, who in principle may have different values and perspective from each of the characters and their ostensibly faithfully reported speech. By the same token, if a particular character is found to use a particular phrase several times over in their directly-reported speech, this is chiefly indicative of that character (they ‘own’ that speech) and may tell us little about the narrator and their stance. In ‘Images’, for example, Joe Phippen is reported saying ‘I never knew it was you’ twice over, and then ‘I didn’t know it was you, Ben’, and these are indicative of his character and mindset; but they seem to have no resonance with larger themes in the story. With that qualification noted, we can say that paying attention to any simple multi-word phrases that recur three times or more in a story of the size of ‘A Trip to the Coast’, may help to alert us to kinds of emphasis and characterisation that might otherwise go unnoticed.

18 With a digitised and searchable version of the story, and using the N-gram function of the free online text analysing programme called Antconc or of such programmes as Wmatrix or WordSmith Tools, the recurrent multi-word phrases can be quickly identified. (An n-gram is a sequence of words of any number, ‘n’. Thus a 7-gram is a sequence or ‘string’ of seven words, and free software will enable you to indentify in a text all occurrences of the same seven words in exactly the same sequence. In actuality, it is quite rare for a text to contain even a second occurrence of any of its seven-word sequences—unless that sequence is a quoted title, phrase, or proverb.) In the event, the most repeated multi-word phrases in ‘A Trip to the Coast’ are only of limited interest. As it happens, all three occur in the direct speech of the travelling salesman who performs to deadly effect in the final pages of the story.

19 Using Antconc’s N-gram or word clusters function, and setting the N-gram size at 5 words, we find that there is just one 5-word n-gram, which is used only by the salesman, a remarkable six times: nothing to be afraid of. This is the mantra that the salesman uses over and again to the grandmother, as he hypnotises her with a metal bottle-opener. It is to her that he repeats this mantra that we can see, with hindsight and in the circumstances (it turns out that she is dying) as quite poignant. The salesman also asks the grandmother three times to [just] keep your eyes on the bottle- opener he is holding out in front of her; and, after she has ‘gone under’, he three times asks whether she can still see. But by this point the old woman has definitively gone under – the text describes ‘enormous cold eyes and its hard ferocious expression’ – so

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that his final repeated expression, ‘wake up. Wake up’, has no effect. We should not make great claims for this n-gram evidence, but it does clearly show that the one speaking character in the story who repeats themselves in multi-word phrases is the salesman; such repetition is in his character, and perhaps part of what makes him a salesman and a hypnotist.

20 N-gram searches have to be post-processed carefully, so as to set aside the relatively uninteresting but repeated phrases. Consider the repeated sequences of three words. As is to be expected, there are plenty of these, but some of the most frequent may not be of much stylistic importance. Thus by far the most frequent is the old woman (27 uses), followed by her grandmother said and she did not (9 occurrences of both these). In a story with a grandmother as one of the two main characters, none of these is unexpected or revealing. But the next 3-gram in the list, arguably, is. This is as if she, which occurs 8 times, always in the narrative text (i.e., not in the direct speech), mostly with the grandmother as the referent of the pronoun she: . Her grandmother looked at her as if she were a stove pipe and came ahead with its stained walls and calendars as if she had to keep it all in sight ; want-ad section of the city paper , as if she had no store to open or breakfast Candy Apples lipstick on and it looked as if she shaved her legs. ‘We go to the in this same loud monotonous voice as if she were talking to a deaf person or held her head between her two hands, as if she were pressing something in . and then she ran out after him, as if she wanted to call something , as if as if she wanted to call something, as if she wanted to call ‘ Help ‘

21 Among these, the fourth example should also be distinguished as quite unlike the other seven in structure and effect (looked as if, paraphraseable as ‘seemed, appeared’), which are all adjuncts describing the manner of a preceding process.

22 Colligationally, as if she predicts a following finite predicate or verb phrase, one that describes a state, action or event which is not actually or certainly the case. That is to say, the sequence as if she predicts a following predicate like had won the lottery or knew the bus-driver personally; but the two examples also imply that it is not at all certain that the person denoted by she has in fact won the lottery or is acquainted with the bus- driver. Where literal factuality is concerned, if the narrator were certain, there would be no point to their hedging with the as if construction (it would be misleading). But often enough the construction is used in non-factual and figurative uses, as in the first example above: May incontrovertibly is not a stove pipe, but the way her grandmother looks at (or through?) her, it is as if she were no more than one. The as if she [Predicate] formulation, high frequency in this story’s narration, draws our attention to a particular kind of distancing or negative-mode narration (Simpson 1993: 46-85; Toolan 2001: 68-76) that Munro resorts to quite extensively: the narrator cannot describe the situation in full and with certainty, but makes a defeasible suggestion which, once made, the reader cannot ignore.

23 Reflecting on the prominence of this construction in the narrative can inform evidence-based interpretation, even though we should recognise that the list above derives from the (frequent) instances of the specific sequence as if she in the narrative. For example, a fuller search of all instances of as if, followed mostly by other definite or indefinite pronouns, confirms that this distancing-but-interpreting narrative mode is even more extensive in the story. (But ‘as if’ only the twentieth most frequent two-word sequence in the text, so much less prominent than as if she, which ranked fourth). Narratologically it is an appropriate construction to use, where a narrator wishes to maintain a degree of mystery or uncertainty about actions, motives, and story

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trajectory. Every as if stimulates in the reader’s mind the thought that, while the situation has been described in one way, the narrator seems to be conceding that a different explanatory description would be more accurate. By the end of the story, for example, we might want to revisit the description of how the grandmother ‘held her head between her two hands, as if she were pressing something in’ and wonder whether, unbeknownst to the narrator, she is actually suffering a cerebral aneurysm or stroke at this point.

24 Also useful for its focussing function, as one embarks on interpretation, is the Keyword function (available via all three of the text-analysing packages recommended above). The Keyword function is a mathematical calculation that identifies those words in a text which, relative to a comparable body of texts (e.g., other modern narrative fiction), are disproportionately frequent or infrequent in the text under scrutiny. In the case of ‘A Trip to the Coast’, of course, various words such as character names (grandmother, May) or means of referring to characters (old, woman, she) turn out to be Keywords, but for the obvious reason that they denote central characters. Because these serve to name characters, they are not fully lexical or content items: they mainly refer, rather than carrying much meaning (of course names carry some meaning: most readers will have multiple associations with a word/name like grandmother, and the name May might also carry associations, being the name of a tree and of the Northern Hemisphere month when spring approaches summer, suggesting a burgeoning and blossoming and youth).

25 Slightly less predictable is the fact that store and stove are also Keywords; but store is the setting of much of the story, while stove occurs 8 times only: perhaps just enough to be noticeably prominent in the story. The stove seems to be the object around which the grandmother’s life revolves: she cooks her food on it, spits into it, looks at May ‘as if she were a stove pipe’, sits for hours ‘looking with concentration at nothing but the front of the stove’, and describes her dream (a premonition of death, we assume) in which she is visited by ‘the biggest bird you ever saw, black as that stove top there’. Most elliptically Munrovian is the grandmother’s seemingly throwaway remark ‘I don't want to keep the stove on today any longer'n I can help.’ Perhaps she says this simply because the coming day promises to be even hotter than usual; but later, with hindsight, the reader may wonder if the grandmother foresees her own death, and the need for her body to be kept in a room as cool as possible prior to burial. The grandmother is nothing if not practical, brutally practical even: were she to die on the mooted trip to the coast to see her son, she suggests, ‘They could put me in that [train] car with the lettuce and tomatoes … and ship me home cold.’

7. Key Semantic Domains

26 Wmatrix’s ability to identify not only keywords but also key semantic domains in a text provides useful confirmation of what was noted on an intuitive basis earlier, about the stories’ attentiveness to bodies, and the senses with which we apprehend bodies (sight, touch, smell, hearing, etc.). If a calculation of the story’s semantic domains is performed, the following categories are noted as ‘most key’:

Freq in and % of story Freq in and % of ref. corpus Keyness Semantic category

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T3+ 43 0.74 300 0.13 +72.23 Time: Old; grown-up

T1.3 91 1.57 1424 0.64 +53.30 Time:Period

O2 74 1.27 1045 0.47 +52.22 Objects generally

I2.2 29 0.50 221 0.10 +44.88 Business:Selling

B1 141 2.43 3057 1.37 +36.90 Anatomy, physiology

W2 5 0.09 0 0.00 +36.71 Light

Q2.1 142 2.44 3216 1.45 +32.12 Speech: Communicative

X2 9 0.15 22 0.01 +29.86 Mental processes

T1.1 5 0.09 4 0.00 +24.55 Time: General

F1 51 0.88 906 0.41 +22.87 Food

S2.1 37 0.64 586 0.26 +21.17 People: Female

27 As in the case of several of the highest-ranked Keywords, and for the same reason, a closer look at the text confirms that most of the above semantic categories listed here as key are not really so on semantic grounds. Take the most key category, Time: old. A quick click on the Concordance lines for these 43 instances reveals that the vast majority of them are simply uses of the phrase the old woman to refer to the grandmother. In the case of the second most key semantic domain, Time: period, again a click on the Concordance lines shows that the programme has classified every use of the girl’s name, May, as a ‘Time: period’ instance, and this is the cause of this domain’s high frequency. With the third most key semantic category, Objects generally, the analyser has more usefully highlighted the prominence of ‘things’ in this story. The importance of some of those Objects has already been noted above: the stove, the bottle- opener.

28 Still, the anatomy/physiology domain, although ranked fifth here, is reflected in a striking 141 words in the story (more than 2% of the whole text). As the label suggests, it is a hybrid category: it includes all mentions that someone slept (5), or was asleep (3) or woke up (3), along with single occurrences of sleeping, yawning and tired, i.e. bodily states and processes. But it also includes many mentions of body parts, in particular someone’s face (14), head (10), hand (8), hair (6), feet, legs, hands eyes, body, mouth, arms, shoulder, elbows, or stomach (to list only those items occurring more than once). In fact the 141 tokens come from 59 different types (thus, along with the body words listed above that occur several times over, there are plenty more that occur once only, but add to the ‘body’ emphasis in the story: knee, chin, thumb, ankles, belly, fingers, etc). The sheer diversity of these body words is important to the argument about semantic prominence; it is the opposite of semantic prominence created by the use, over and over again, of just one or two words. (As elsewhere, and being an automatic classifier, the software makes some mistakes, such as misclassifying several locative uses of back -- the back yard, the back of the store -- as though they were the body part.)

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8. Conversational uncooperativeness

29 Many of the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades involve a humiliation, a defeat, or a victory, and these usually unfold in an environment of explicit competition and wilful hostility (cf. the grandmother in ‘A Trip to the Coast’, who from May’s point of view forbids her from going swimming chiefly just to upset her, confronting her with hollow reasons and ‘flourishing them nastily, only to see what damage they could do’). The milieu is one of struggle to be fit to survive and flourish. Indeed there is an element of Social Darwinian struggle in many of the stories. The struggle may be for survival, or for peace, or for a longed-for trip (to the coast or elsewhere), or for a boyfriend, or some other transitional experience, with its possibilities of escape from the entrapment felt by these girls going through puberty, or by these women resisting the conformities of motherhood and wifehood in small town Canada in the 1960s.

30 In ‘A Trip to the Coast’ there are some echoes of other distinguished short-story fiction (e.g, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find collection), but there is also abundant narrative originality and stylistic accomplishment – especially in the three vividly-drawn figures of the grandmother, 11-year-old May who focalises the story, and the hypnotising travelling salesman. Even in the fairly conventional-seeming opening paragraph, which ironically takes half a page to describe the story’s setting as a place with ‘nothing there’, it is the local turns of phrase that take the writing – not the setting itself – out of the ordinary. Those passing through the crossroads called Black Horse (it is implied that everyone who sees it is only passing through) may notice worn elbows of rock and harmonious woodlots giving way to the less hospitable scrub-forest¸ where the trees seem to be retreating into the distance, like a company of ghosts. This last image, which ends the story’s opening scene-setting paragraph, invites thoughts about its similarity to, and differences from, the title of the final story and of the collection as a whole.

31 The story is structured around a series of engagements with a winner and a loser, like a female domestic counterpart to a sequence of clashes between two rutting bucks, compelled to seek dominance. Unlike the bucks, however, the motivation is not directly a matter of breeding and sexual priority, but rather concerns grandmother and granddaughter keeping (or making) their own living space, in the face of familial constraints and obligations; so, territory-marking in a broad figurative sense.

32 May’s first ‘victory’ is her excitement at having awoken and started the day (as she imagines) while her mother and grandmother are still asleep, and the ‘freedom and danger’ she feels. But as noted earlier, victory turns to defeat as she discovers her grandmother is already up and outside collecting kindling. Small skirmishes follow, woven into their dialogue (insofar as it is a dialogue: May’s grandmother only answers when she feels like it, we are told). If May wants coffee, she must get her own cup, her grandmother announces. She responds in hostile kind by choosing to drink from a ‘good cup with green birds on it’. No further textual explanation is given, but the reader is trusted to invoke background cultural knowledge about saving the ‘good china’ for use with ‘company’ and special occasions, proprieties which May calculatedly defies. All this the readers knows might have triggered a reproof from the grandmother, although on this occasion she chooses to say nothing.

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33 Throughout this section of the story, charting May and her grandmother’s interaction, asynchrony and a refusal to coordinate turns of talk are uppermost. An examination of the awkward relations between one turn and the next could be undertaken, showing how each speaker in turn seems bent on disregarding what conversational analysts call ‘recipient design’. But equally we can bring out some of the evidence of hostility and disharmony by invoking Grice’s idea that, other things being equal, we try in conversation to interact cooperatively with fellow conversationalists, composing our contributions so that they will be true, suitably informative, relevant, and orderly (these four adjectives are rough glosses of Grice’s four conversational maxims). By the same token, when we produce conversational responses that an interlocutor judges to be deliberate departures from what would be truthful, informative, relevant and orderly, then that interlocutor is entitled and expected to calculate what covert message is being conveyed. In the language of Gricean pragmatics, breaches of the maxims trigger the deriving of implicatures. Many such implicatures can be derived by the reader, as ‘overhearer’ of the conversation between May and her grandmother.

34 A glaring example is that of May announcing (‘conversationally’) that Eunie Parker’s cousin, Heather Sue, will be coming that day. Not only does this elicit no conventional acknowledgement from the grandmother, the latter instead embarks on an entirely unrelated topic, challenging May to guess her age. When May does guess, the grandmother withholds the normal teacherly third move (usually comprising a ratification and an optional evaluation: e.g., Correct. Well done!); she remains silent ‘for so long that May thought this was only another of her conversational blind alleys’. Thus the grandmother has embarked upon what Sinclair & Coulthard long ago identified as a classic IRF exchange (elicit-answer-feedback), only to breach her own interactional undertaking, in blatantly uncooperative fashion. Veering away from what she suspects is a blind alley, May can be forgiven for trying again with her own previously-launched topic of Heather Sue Murray: now she tells of Heather’s prowess at Highland dancing. We are unsurprised when this draws from the grandmother the reply ‘Seventy-eight’, and the added remark that ‘Nobody knows that’, which, as noted earlier, casts in an odd light her previous question to May about her age: if nobody knows her age, the earlier question clearly was not asked in good faith or a spirit of cooperative sharing. We hardly need to infer this, since the contrariness is embedded in the language of the exchange: ‘Do you know [X]?... Nobody knows that, I never told.’ The women are sitting at the same table, and talking to each other, but it is recurrently clear that there is no shared or ‘accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange’, to use Grice’s characterisation of the cooperative principle that he argued guides ordinary conversation.

35 Now the old woman’s talk turns to the financing of a headstone, at which May understandably protests ‘What do you want a headstone for?’, only for this to be nicely trumped by the old lady’s rejoinder ‘I never said I wanted one’. But before we are told of this reply, May’s memory of an earlier occasion is recounted, when she came home from school to find her grandmother laid out on the couch, as still as a corpse. This had prompted fear and crying in the girl, at which, still without moving, the grandmother had opened her eyes to remonstrate, faux innocent but also with ‘a curious spark of triumph’ in her look.

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9. Victory and defeat

36 The previous section began the exploration of the May-Grandmother relationship as a kind of struggle for supremacy, with regard to conversation; in this final section I wish to show how this theme of struggle, victory and defeat extends into the narrative and the action. If, as a fairly ordinary reader of Munro’s story I have the impression that there is rather a focus on conflict, struggle, winning and losing in this story—that May, or the narrator insofar as the narratorial role can be distinguished from May’s focalisation, sees relations between herself and her grandmother as shaped by competition (rather than love, affection, respect, mutual tolerance, or other desiderata of well-functioning family life) – is there some way in which corpus stylistic analysis can help confirm that impression? I believe there is, if we exploit the semantic tagging function of Wmatrix. This can be used to uncover how the semantic tagger classifies those words in the story that one instinctively notices as having to do with competition, defeat and victory. Hopefully, several of these words—such as defeat, triumph, victorious – will be tagged as belonging to the same semantic category. If they are not, we have to explore the implications of the automatic semantic classification diverging from the more situated and context-sensitive informal semantic classification of this real reader: one or other process may be faulty, or both may be.

37 We can begin with the word triumph from the phrase quoted at the end of the previous section (a curious spark of triumph): this word is classed as a X9.2+ item, semantically, in Wmatrix’s UCREL semantic tagging system. The next word whose classification I will check is the near antonym of triumph, namely defeat, found in this sentence near the story’s close: Now for the first time it seemed to her she saw the possibility of her grandmother's defeat. Very satisfactorily, for our purposes, this is classified as X9.2- in the tagging system. What about the story’s final word, victorious? This is X9.2+ also. What do these classifications denote? The UCREL semantic tagset labels state that X9.2 words concern ‘Success and failure’ in combination, with the plus and minus sub-types (X9.2+ and X9.2-) expressing success and failure respectively, taken separately.

38 At this point the corpus stylistician can simply reverse the procedure, and focus on the semantic class rather than any particular word. Thus one can ask the computer for a list of all the words in the story that are automatically classified as X9.2, X9.2+, or X9.2-. It transpires that no words are classified as of the higher X9.2 category (presumably because there are no joint mentions in the text of winning and losing, success and failure, or similar). Just two words in the story are classified as X9.2-: defeat and lose, while six words are classified as X9.2+: triumph; came through; flourishing; prevailed; success; and victorious. Now we must consider these eight instances in contexts, to see just how revealing they are in the flow of the text.

39 Of the two X9.2 ‘failure’ examples, the one concerning defeat was noted above and is central to the idea that the story focusses on a struggle to ‘win’; the second instance, the use of lose in lose her breath a moment, at first sight and in that truncated co-text appears inconsequential to the ‘struggle for victory’ thesis. But consider the fuller co- text. The grandmother has just taken up the challenge, from the hypnotising salesman, that he can put her to sleep (she, of course, is confident that he cannot). Now the salesman suggests she lie down, to relax better; but she replies: ‘Sitting down--’ she said, and seemed to lose her breath a moment—‘sitting down's good enough for me.’

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40 In this context, the seeming to lose her breath might be an actual losing of breath, the reader surmises. As such, it is another proleptic hint of what is about to happen; it foreshadows the grandmother permanently losing her breath.

41 As for the six X9.2+ instances, all but one support the ‘struggle for victory’ thesis, if we note their immediate cotexts (all of which are inspectable in the Concordance function of Wmatrix), with the ‘success’ word itself in bold: 1. innocence and a curious spark of triumph. ‘Can't a person lay down around here 2. a hot, creeping wind came through the country grass. Because it 3. same reasons out of the bag, flourishing them nastily, only to see what 4. soft, and it penetrated and prevailed over the more commonplace odours 5. of it. I’ve had pretty good success with some insomnia cases. Not 6. grandmother lay fallen across the counter dead, and what was more, victorious.

42 Instances (1) and (3) and (6) I have discussed earlier; they clearly support the general thesis. Example (4) refers to the ‘sweetish and corrupt’ smell, as May registers it, of her grandmother’s flesh. This is part and parcel of the grotesque or alienated description of the grandmother, and one has to remind oneself that the grandmother is very much alive at this stage, even though the phrase smell of corruption, which the text’s phrasing skirts around but avoids actually using, often collocates with references to dead bodies. Again it is hard not to think of prolepsis at work here. Example (5), spoken by the hypnotist, would be an unremarkable turn of phrase in normal circumstances, but against the background here of competitive judging and scorning, and introduces a mildly disturbing complication, the voice and actions of a third party, volubly confident of their success—and a third party whom in a sense May deploys in her battle of wills with her grandmother.

43 The one instance that must be set aside as irrelevant—indeed as mis-classified—is example (2). Came through is plausibly classified as a single but multi-word expression. When used intransitively it often has the idiomatic meaning that a positive outcome has transpired—my promotion finally came through—but in the story it is used transitively —a hot creeping wind came through the country grass—so the automatic classification has erred in grouping it among the success/failure words. This is another reminder that the semantic tagger is an imperfect instrument: it may err in including a phrase as carrying a success/failure meaning when it does not. The tagger can also err in failing to identify a success/failure meaning in the text, particularly in a multi-word expression, where no single word carries the full success or failure sense. Thus the narrative reports that time and again May had hitherto ‘watched her grandmother's encounters with the outside world’, convinced ‘that the old woman would get the better of it [sc., the world]’. The ‘success, prevail’ meaning here of get the better of it is not identified by the tagger, although in fairness it does classify the phrase as S7.1+, words with meanings of ‘in power’. Likewise we might regard the text’s use of the word capitulated at the story’s high-point (If her grandmother capitulated it would … crack the foundations of her life) as clearly lexicalising the success/defeat/conflict theme; but again it is not grouped with the ‘success and failure’ words by the automatic semantic tagger. Not entirely unreasonably, it is classed as a G3 item (Warfare, defence and the army; weapons), the only item so tagged in the story. But these examples demonstrate the need to supplement any automatic search for instantiations of a more complex theme with further review from a human interpreter.

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44 What I have hoped to show is that with the assistance of some quite simple text- analysing resources—principally, an application of Gricean conversational norms to the abnormality of the grandmother-granddaughter dialogue, and some use of corpus- linguistic searches--the stylistically-minded reader can not only find some degree of corpus-linguistic confirmation of readerly intuitions about the story, but may also find their attention directed to details of the text that they had to some degree overlooked. In the latter function, the searching and sorting arguably stimulate a fuller appreciation of the story’s narrative texture.

45 Several of the stories in this collection are focalised from the perspective of a teenage girl—younger, and approaching puberty, or older, already physically a woman and now negotiating the complex business of establishing her own identity, values, and independence. This pre-occupation is summarised in this article’s title as ‘girl power’, a provocative phrase. In an early wave of feminism that Munro certainly lived through, girl power was a still-patronising description of the assertion of kinds of independence by young western women: it was as if patriarchal society conceded to females that they should have some freedom and independence—but that they were still ‘girls’ after all. But this is not what girl power is about in the Happy Shades collection: for Munro, the first obstacle confronting girls is the women who raise them, and who would have their daughters confine themselves to the same circumscribed man-servicing arenas (the kitchen, the secretary’s desk, the marriage bed) that the older women have accepted. So the power seized by the girls in these stories is a rejection of the attenuated power offered them by their female elders.

46 In the struggle not only to survive but to make a mark, to be a self— free enough to know and express their own wishes and seek to fulfil them—these girl-women must first fight their families, then their school-friends, and later sometimes their work or social acquaintances. ‘A Trip to the Coast’ is one such fight story, at the early, intra- familial phase. Also striking is the intimacy of the setting, and the proximity of May’s implied horizons. Everything is quite close: she sees, smells, hears nearby things (her grandmother especially, but also the house, her friends, the salesman, the surrounding scrubby hills) and these are what predominate in her thoughts and therefore the narrative. Only at the very end of the story does May become aware that she could take to the road and walk ‘in any direction she liked’, and that the world is now ‘flat and accessible’ to her. She has an intimation of such possibility at just about the point that the salesman appears: she is reported seeing a ‘new light’ in the world, and a power in herself, ‘like the unsuspected still unexplored power of her own hostility’. This last phrase is a brilliant, disturbing encapsulation of May’s situation, but has to be read carefully: it frankly recognises her hostility towards her grandmother (this is presupposed); it then asserts that there is a power in that hostility, which has not until now been recognised and therefore not yet explored and tested. Again the reader is given a glimpse of the narrative future, since we are here invited to expect that before long May will put her powerful hostility to the test, in some clash with her grandmother, which she does when she sides with the salesman and declares, concerning the question whether he could hypnotise her grandmother or not, ‘I bet he could’. Of course there is irony and cold comfort in the grandmother lying dead but ‘victorious’ at the story’s end; but it does at least leave open the possibility that she ‘defeated’ the salesman, by dying before his technique could take hold.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

McCULLOCH, Jeanne, and Mona Simpson. 1994. ‘The Art of Fiction No. 137: Alice Munro.’The Paris Review (vol. 36: 131, Summer ), 226-264. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the- art-of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro.

MUNRO, Alice. 2000 [1968]. Dance of the Happy Shades. London: Vintage.

SIMPSON, Paul 1993. Language, ideology and point of view. London: Routledge,

TOOLAN, Michael 2001. Narrative: a critical linguistic introduction. London: Routledge.

ABSTRACTS

Focussing particularly on stylistic tendencies in ‘A Trip to the Coast’, this article situates that story within the collection as a whole, and discusses the interests of the story and the collection in the struggles of girls and women, and of girls against women, in a world often controlled by men. The girl vs woman fights are neo-gothic in intensity, and, figuratively or otherwise, ‘to the death’. For the girl to become a free and independent person, the matriarch’s power must be broken. While there is a mythic or folktale core to this story arc, this is submerged in the absorbing physical and psychological depiction of the girl, her grandmother, and a travelling salesman, and the women’s conversational ‘wrestling’, full of feints and blocks and traps, as they strive to emerge from life’s inconsequentialities unvanquished. My article introduces some simple corpus linguistic methods for extracting, with a degree of objectivity, words and meanings that are prominent in the story text; these stylistically prominent features are then used in story interpretation. Several of the narrative preoccupations of ‘A Trip to the Coast’, which is focalised by the teenage girl, are discussed at length: body shapes and smells, conversational resistance, and uncertainty of narrative interpretation.

INDEX

Keywords: Munro (Alice), collocation, semantic keywords, conversational conflict, girl power

AUTHOR

MICHAEL TOOLAN Michael Toolan is the author of many books and articles on topics in stylistics, narrative, and language studies, including Language in Literature (Hodder Arnold 1998) and Narrative: a critical linguistic introduction (Routledge 2001). He is Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham.

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Style and Blending in ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ by Alice Munro

Craig Hamilton

1. Introduction

1 When Margaret Atwood was once praised for being a great writer, she reportedly deflected the compliment by saying, “You call this writing? Alice Munro! Now that’s writing” (Economist 2009: para. 7). Munro modestly told The Montreal Gazette in 2013, “When I began writing there was a very small community of Canadian writers and little attention was paid by the world. Now Canadian writers are read, admired and respected around the globe” (qtd. in Medley 2013: A2). Munro obviously played a role in that change of affairs. Her talent has been recognized for decades, and no critic today would challenge the claim that Munro is a master of the short story. The long list of awards she has won, including the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, demonstrates the respect her work commands. But to understand her development as an artist, it is fitting to read her first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades. Of particular interest in that volume is the penultimate story, “The Peace of Utrecht,” which my article here will focus on.

2 In 1950 when Munro was 19, she published her first short story, “The Dimensions of a Shadow,” at the University of Western Ontario (“Profile” 2005: 61). Yet Dance of the Happy Shades was published in 1968 when Munro was already 37 years old. Soon after her mother died in early 1959, she began writing “The Peace of Utrecht,” first published in mid-1960 in The Tamarack Review (Howells 1998: 14). Eight years later, it reappeared in Dance of the Happy Shades. “The Peace of Utrecht” is set c.1960 in the fictional Southwestern Ontario town of Jubilee, some thirty miles east of Inverhuron, a real town on Lake Huron mentioned in the story (1998: 192). In the story, two adult sisters in their early- to mid-thirties spend several weeks together, in the summer following the death of their invalid mother the previous winter. Maddy, the elder, single and without children, works for the town clerk and lives alone in the family house. Helen, the younger sister, is also the story’s narrator; she is married and has

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lived away in the Toronto area for many years. She has brought her two small children (a girl and a boy) with her for this visit, “on the last lap of a twenty-five-hundred-mile trip” by car (Munro 1998: 196). “The Peace of Utrecht” is an important story for Munro. She once said it was “the first story I absolutely had to write and wasn’t writing to see if I could write that kind of story” (qtd. in Howells 1998: 14). Indeed, for Munro the story was “a breakthrough: confronting the fact of her mother freed her into autobiographical fiction (or ‘personal stories’, as she calls them), into her particular voice and material — though it did not free her from her mother, who remained a fraught presence” (Edemariam 2003: para. 12).

3 Much of what has been written about “The Peace of Utrecht” discusses its autobiographical content. Munro was the eldest of three children; she had a younger sister (by five years) and a younger brother. Her mother suffered from a severe form of Parkinson’s disease from 1943 until her death in 1959; “The Peace of Utrecht’ was the first story where Munro wrote about this subject (Thacker 2005: 150). While Munro and her sister did look after their mother, they both eventually left home. The sisters in the story are their mother’s primary caregivers; no father is ever mentioned. Caregiving can have long-lasting adverse effects on caregivers, and Munro has explored this theme in other stories too. According to DeFalco, “Throughout her early work, in stories like ‘The Peace of Utrecht’ [1960], ‘The Ottawa Valley’ (1974), ‘Winter Wind’ (1974), ‘Spelling’ (1978), and ‘A Queer Streak’ (1986), one finds caregiving roles, young women saddled with the responsibility to care for older family members” (2012: 380). This is the situation both Maddy and Helen were in for several years before Maddy’s “ten- years’ vigil” alone with the mother (1998: 195). Having to care for their mother seems to have made the sisters love her, and each other, less.

4 In the story, Helen feels her visit is a failure even though the sisters seem friendly at times, for example, while smoking cigarettes and drinking gin together during the hot and humid summer nights. But according to Dahlie, “For the two sisters … neither life, nor childhood memories of Jubilee, nor the death of their mother is sufficient to create a bond between them” (1978: 58). This is the sad story Munro tells. While many critics have discussed the autobiographical nature of “The Peace of Utrecht,” few seem to have discussed its style. As Jeffries and McIntyre (2010: 172) recently stated, “a general question about style may be followed by particular questions about formal features … or by questions about the kinds of conceptual metaphor, blending or other cognitive aspects of the texts concerned.” In this article I shall therefore explore some formal and cognitive features of Munro’s style in order to shed some light on how she tells this unhappy tale.

2. Style

5 “The Peace of Utrecht” contains two parts. Part I is roughly thirteen pages long and has five subsections. Part II is roughly eight pages long and has two subsections. Although using Roman numerals to divide stories into parts is highly unusual for Munro, according to Zetu, “The two parts correspond to two sets of problematic relationships: the unresolved mother-daughter relationship and the bond between siblings” (2012: 363). That said, the way both parts begin offers strong evidence that this story is like a diary entry. Part I begins with Helen writing, “I have been at home now for three weeks and it has not been a success” (1998: 190), while Part II begins with Helen writing, “I

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have been to visit Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou” (1998: 202). Helen records conversations she remembers from the recent or the distant past, events during her visit (e.g. by using the present perfect here), and she reflects on what she is writing as she is writing it. For example, after describing Maddy’s odd friendship with Fred, Helen writes: “Now thinking of Fred Powell I admit that my reaction to this – this situation as I call it – is far more conventional than I would have expected; it is even absurd. And I do not know what situation it really is” (1998: 193). In the same passage, Helen writes of how Maddy teases Fred: “He allows it. (And this is what frightens me, I know it now; he allows it; she needs it.)” (Munro 1998: 193-194). Here and elsewhere, evidence of self-conscious narration suggests that the story is a kind of highly polished diary entry. Munro may be writing for us, but Helen is arguably writing for herself.

6 Munro’s style here is marked by many other features as well. Syntactic variation is one of them, as we can see in the very opening paragraph: [1] I have been at home now for three weeks and it has not been a success. [2] Maddy and I, though we speak cheerfully of our enjoyment of so long and intimate a visit, will be relieved when it is over. [3] Silence disturbs us. [4] We laugh immoderately. [5] 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 that 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 (1998: 190).

7 There are 141 words but only 5 sentences in this paragraph, yielding an average sentence length of 28.2 words. However, only sentence [2] comes close to the average length established within this paragraph (24 words vs. 28.2 words). Just as sentences [3] and [4] are surprisingly short (3 words each) within the context of sentences [1] and [2], so too is sentence [5] surprisingly long (95 words) within the context of this paragraph. There is thus internal deviation within the opening paragraph, although readers will see that sentence lengths vary throughout the story. As for external deviation, while sentences [1] and [2] are not far from the Ellegård norm of 17.8 words per sentence (Leech & Short 2007: 90), sentences [3], [4], and [5] deviate substantially from that Ellegård norm. If variety is the spice of life, Munro’s sentence lengths embody that proverb.

8 Subordination is another interesting feature of Munro’s style here. While sentence [2] could be a simple declarative sentence of 10 words, it gets interrupted and made complicated by a subordinate clause of 14 words. Sentence [2] is also iconic since its forms mimics its content. Just as Helen might feel “relieved when it [the visit] is over,” the reader may also feel “relieved when it [the sentence] is over.” The same is true of sentence [5], where subordinate clauses defer explaining clearly what it is that the sisters fear. Indeed, subordinate structures in sentence [5] iconically create distance between the sisters and what they fear.

9 Careful readers may also notice Munro’s intriguing use of the semicolon. This is true in Dance of the Happy Shades in general, and in “The Peace of Utrecht” in particular. In his recent study of style in another story by Munro, Toolan also noticed her use of the semicolon in compound sentences (2010: 324). In general, correctly using the semicolon in modern English is a sign of formal syntax and erudition, which is another reason why this story seems like a highly polished diary entry. Munro uses the semicolon so

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extensively that it is a foregrounded feature of her style. This can be seen in the first paragraph of part I subsection 2 (1998: 194): [1] The rhythm of life in Jubilee is primitively seasonal. [2] Deaths occur in the winter; marriages are celebrated in the summer. [3] There is good reason for this; the winters are long and full of hardship and the old and the weak cannot always get through them. [4] Last winter was a catastrophe, such as may be expected every ten or twelve years; you can see how the pavement in the streets is broken up, as if the town had survived a minor bombardment. [5] A death is dealt with then in the middle of great difficulties; there comes time now in the summer to think about it, and talk. [6] I find that people stop me in the street to talk about my mother. [7] I have heard from them about her funeral, what flowers she had and what the weather was like on that day. [8] And now she is dead I no longer feel that when they say the words “your mother” they deal a knowing, cunning blow at my pride. [9] I used to feel that; at those words I felt my whole identity, that pretentious adolescent construction, come tumbling down.

10 Semicolons, when they are used at all, can separate either items in a list or grammatically independent sentences (Swan 2005: 475). As sentence [2] here shows, the semicolon contrasts two independent clauses. But that is not its function in sentence [3], where what follows the semicolon is a long explanation of what precedes it. In sentence [4], we have a more standard use of the semicolon to separate related yet independent sentences. What follows the semicolon in [4] is evidence for the claim that precedes it in the sentence. In sentence [5], the semicolon is used as it was in sentence [2], for contrastive purposes. (About sentence [7], Helen later says she had “the excuse of a blizzard” (1998: 195) for not attending the funeral.) Sentence [9], however, is similar to sentence [3]; what follows the semicolon in [9] portrays in more depth how Helen used to feel upon hearing “the words ‘your mother’”.

11 In general, semicolons are very rare. In his study of the Brown Corpus, Meyer found that semicolons were used very rarely (1986), and Cook’s more recent data confirm that finding, showing a tremendous decrease in semicolon usage in the last few centuries (2000). Munro, however, loves semicolons. Five semicolons within eight consecutive sentences is well above the average frequency in modern English, even in fiction. Munro clearly uses semicolons for many reasons, including contrast, explanation, and summarization. Furthermore, she sometimes uses semicolons emphatically, as we see at the end of part I subsection 4: “Maddy; her bright skeptical look; my sister” (1998: 202). Subordination, apposition, and semicolons all give this story’s prose a halting, uncertain, and probing quality.

12 Apart from Munro’s syntactic creativity, her semantic creativity is also noteworthy. According to Berndt, “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” (2010: para. 11). Berndt is right to mention the house, and Dahlie had noticed much the same thing: “Home, the past, family ties – forces which are conventionally interpreted as positive forces – are here dramatized as disturbing elements” (Dahlie 1978: 58). In the story, Munro uses the words home and house at least 14 times each. She uses the word houses once, and the incredibly rare word, housewifely, once as well. But how does Munro negatively depict home? The answer can be found in the co-text.

13 In the very first sentence of the story, Helen writes that her visit “home … has not been a success” (1998: 190), thus equating home with failure. When she first arrives for the visit, she describes a house that is empty and notes that “[t]he red brick of which the

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house is built looked hard and hot in the sun” (1998: 197). Helen later explains how she felt returning to Jubilee for visits when she was in college, when she “exchanged the whole holiday world of school, of friends and, later on, of love, for the dim world of continuing disaster, of home” (1998: 191). She confesses that they intentionally kept their ailing mother “at home, away from that sad notoriety” of town (1998: 195), but their home was no safe haven. Helen later says “that discouraging house” is all Maddy has left in Jubilee (1998: 195), and she also calls it “that house of stone” (1998: 199), with the deictic distance of the demonstrative (that) adding to the awful impression.

14 What is more, when Helen writes of the past and caring for her mother in part I, the word house occurs more frequently than does the word home. Compared to the word house, home has what linguist Bill Louw would call a more positive “semantic prosody” (2008: 9). But that word is seldom used in this part of the story. Additionally, in part II subsection 1, when Helen later contrasts the apparent calm of her aunts’ home in her youth with “the comparative anarchy, the threatened melodrama, of our house at home” (1998: 204), we see that Maddy and Helen’s house and home have overwhelmingly negative connotations. In short, the co-text of the words house and home tells us that these words live in a sad neighbourhood in this story.

15 Finally, as Dahlie sensed (1978: 59), Munro’s decision to use the phrasal verb deal with is also noteworthy here. In part I subsection 3, Helen remembers her mother’s plea for help, “A cry repeated so often, and, things being as they were, so uselessly, that Maddy and I recognized it as only one of those household sounds that 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” (1998: 198). In modern English usage, deal with is most often used in negative contexts about problems. We deal with issues to sort them out; we do not usually deal with loved ones. But when Helen shortly thereafter writes of “our dealings with her” (1998: 199), this choice of phrase also shows how the daughters dehumanize their mother.

3. Cognition

16 Roughly half way through the story, in part I subsection 4, Helen finds an old notebook in which she sees written, in her own handwriting, “‘The Peace of Utrecht, 1713, brought an end to the War of the Spanish Succession’” (1998: 201). This has “a strong effect” on Helen, triggering memories of high school and adolescence. Yet the reference to The Peace of Utrecht is even more significant than that, and the reason has to do with conceptual blending. Conceptual blending is a theory of cognition first presented in depth by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), and blending in narrative has been studied in detail recently (see Schneider & Hartner 2012). Munro’s explicit reference to The Peace of Utrecht is clearly intentional. It is also meaningful for it evokes a conceptual blend.

17 Many readers may know little about the War of the Spanish Succession. According to the New Standard Encyclopedia (1970: S-488; U-166), in 1690s Europe people wondered who would succeed Charles II, Spain’s childless king. Just before his death in 1700, Charles willed his throne to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. But Leopold I of Austria objected, and instead wanted his second son, Archduke Charles, to become Spain’s king. Both Louis XIV and Leopold I were grandsons of Philip III of Spain, and both were married to sisters of Charles II; both also knew that the uniting of either

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Spain and France (Philip), or Spain and Austria (the Archduke) under one crown would destabilize Europe’s balance of power. In the event, Philip of Anjou was indeed crowned King of Spain, but war followed.. Spain and France fought against an alliance that eventually included Portugal, Savoy, Austria, Prussia, Holland, and Great Britain. Battles were fought in Europe, Canada, and America from 1701 to 1713. Peace negotiations between diplomats started in Utrecht in January 1712 and ended only in April 1713. Philip of Anjou, aBourbon, was confirmed as King of Spain, but now had to stay independent of France, his ‘senior sponsor’. Meanwhile, France and Spain had to concede to the alliance many territories and trade rights in Europe and the New World. The political, military, and economical implications of The Peace of Utrecht were thus highly significant. How does all this relate to Munro’s story? In other words, how does the blend work? As in most blends, according to the model developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), we combine information from at least four mental spaces. The two main input spaces are the historical Utrecht c.1713 and the fictional Jubilee of the story, c.1960. To fully interpret Munro’s story in some detail is to run a conceptual blend based on these two distinct spaces. Each input space contains the specific information relevant to it. Abstract features that the stories have in common comprise the blend’s generic space. In that generic space, we have an event (death), an inheritor, a challenger, their sponsors or allies, a goal, and the means to obtain that goal.

18 Asymmetrical relations and selective projection are common in blending. Some elements in one input space have no counterparts in the other, and still others are not useful for the blend. The generic space provides roles that we fill with values from the input spaces. That is how we can see similarities between the two stories. For example, just as Charles II died, the sisters’ mother has died. Just as Philip of Anjou inherited the Spanish throne, despite objections from the alliance, occupying the old house is exactly what Maddy does. The sisters once dreamed of “much bigger things than Jubilee” (1998: 192), but Maddy has stayed put. Just as the French king and Austrian emperor both sponsored heirs to the Spanish throne, Helen and Maddy have their supporters. Aunt Annie openly prefers Helen to Maddy (1998: 205), and both Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou fear Maddy because she refused to bring her mother home from the hospital before she died. While Helen’s own family and the two aunts might be her allies, Maddy’s allies would include her friends at the party at the lakefront cottage, women from Jubilee who “seemed to be widowed, single, separated or divorced” (1998: 191). There is also Fred. Maddy says he “is her only real friend,” but Helen is not sure (1998: 134). Moreover, just as France and Austria coveted the Spanish Empire, both Helen and Maddy want the same thing, as we see in the story’s opening paragraph: “[…] as for that 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” (1998: 190). What the sisters want is not a throne or empire; it is their past.

19 But there may be more to inherit in Jubilee than just the past. At the end of the story when Maddy accidentally drops a big cut-glass bowl, Helen notices that “her hands had begun to shake” (1998: 210). Zetu argues that the shattered bowl symbolizes Maddy’s true self (2012: 368), but Maddy’s trembling hands might be an early sign of “the Shaking Palsy” their mother had (1998: 200). Maddy might therefore be more similar to her mother than Helen is; in fact, Helen even rejects inheriting her mother’s mended clothes when Aunt Annie offers them to her (1998: 205). Ironically, since Fred’s “wife is an invalid” (1998: 193), Maddy might never become his spouse, a mother, or an invalid.

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In contrast, Helen has two children of her own who will also inherit whatever she has one day. This may make her “claim” more legitimate in the long term.

20 To continue, the conflict between Maddy and Helen is like the conflict between Philip of Anjou and Charles of Austria: Philip and Maddy seem to have something that Charles and Helen want. Neither Charles nor Helen is the eldest, they are challengers, although Philip and Charles are not brothers. Maddy and Helen are their mother’s daughters, but the Spanish king had no children. While a war with many battles took place in the early 18th century to try to settle the dispute, in “The Peace of Utrecht” we have a story “about a woman returning home after her mother’s death from a Parkinson’s-like disease and guiltily, defiantly facing the sister who stayed…” (Edemariam 2003: para. 12). Munro called her story “The Peace of Utrecht” rather than “The War of Spanish Succession,” but why?

21 After the War of the Spanish Succession, there was The Peace of Utrecht. The winter when the mother died made Jubilee look like it had gone through a “minor bombardment.” As Helen states, “A death is dealt with then in the middle of great difficulties; there comes time now in the summer to think about it, and talk” (1998: 194). It is now summer, but Maddy will not talk; she feels that “nobody speaks the same language” (1998: 209), so talking seems pointless. The Peace of Utrecht was a series of negotiations among diplomats that lasted more than a year, and it took another treaty a year later (in Rastatt) to get Austria to accept the agreement. When Helen arrives in Jubilee and tries to make friendly overtures (1998: 202), Maddy coldly tells her younger sister, “No exorcising here” (1998: 191, 202). Silence is how Maddy maintains control. Helen reports Maddy’s remark indirectly, near the very beginning of the story (1998: 191), before describing events from the near and distant past over the course of ten pages. She then reports Maddy’s remark again, this time more fully, and in the context of Helen’s overtures (1998: 202). Thus concludes part I.

22 In part II, Helen pays visits to their two elderly aunts in town, and imagines what she and Maddy will be like when they are old. When she returns after the third visit, there is tension. Maddy senses the aunts complained to Helen about Maddy leaving their mother in the hospital. First, Helen tells Maddy she has nothing to feel guilty about. Then, after Maddy drops the bowl near the end of the story, Helen tells her, “Take your life, Maddy. Take it” and “Go away, don’t stay here” (1998: 210). The story ends with Maddy answering, “‘But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t I?’”(1998: 210). The answer is destiny. Maddy cannot leave because her destiny is fixed in stone, just like that of an heir to a throne. In a system of inheritance based on primogeniture, birth rank is destiny. This leads us to the blend’s key inference: Helen and Maddy’s emotional situation in Canada c.1960 is as complex as the political situation in Europe c.1713. Arguably, Munro could not have picked a more convoluted historical event to frame Helen and Maddy’s story.

23 Before concluding, let me say that other scholars have also noticed a blend in “The Peace of Utrecht.” Critics such as Heble (1994: 42), Zetu (2012: 368), and Berrett (2013: para. 36) have thought about the connections I have described here, yet they did so without knowing they were working with a conceptual blend. The apparent illusion is not their fault; blending is easy to “do” yet hard to explain. Munro only mentions “The Peace of Utrecht” twice (first in the title, then in the story); she never really refers openly again to that input space. But all spaces are not equal in a blend. Knowing about The Peace of Utrecht helps us understand “The Peace of Utrecht,” and that is Munro’s

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point. The connections we make between the history and the story are connections we make in our minds. Munro does not make them for us explicitly, nor does she have to. She can merely use the historical allusion as a means to an end, and count on readers to do the rest and make the inferences. The result is the emergent meaning I have discussed in this section, and it shows just how complicated Maddy and Helen’s relationship is.

4. Conclusion

24 In this article, I have argued that Munro cleverly combines form and content to probe complex feelings. While we may never be able to answer a question Helen raises in this story – “what will anyone ever know of us?” (1998: 202) – it is possible to learn how Munro tells this story. Her syntactic variations and deliberate semantic choices are noteworthy, and as the story’s enigmatic title suggests, understanding the story involves conceptual blending. Of course, in stylistics, analyses must be open to “falsifiability” (Jeffries & McIntyre 2010: 24), and only time will tell if that is true of my brief analysis here. My approach may be eclectic, but that is common in English stylistics. According to Carter (2010: 68), “The methodologies employed to advance the study of style are united by a determination to better account for the processes of meaning construction which are the basis for our understanding and interpretation of texts…. It is, as Toolan (1986) points out, the work of bricoleurs, not engineers.” Being a bricoleur can be useful in stylistics; it can show us things about Munro’s style we might have otherwise missed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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“Author Profile: Alice Munro.” World Literature Today 79.2 (2005): 61. Print.

BERNDT, Katrin. “The Ordinary Terrors of Survival: Alice Munro and the Canadian Gothic.” Journal of the Short Story in English 55 (2010). Web. Accessed 22 Oct 2014.

BERRETT, Trevor. “Alice Munro: ‘The Peace of Utrecht.’” The Mookse and the Gripes [Blog]. 10 April 2013. Web. Accessed 19 Oct 2014.

CARTER, Ronald. “Methodologies for Stylistic Analysis: Practices and Pedagogies.” Language and Style: In Honour of Mick Short. Eds. Dan McIntyre & Beatrix Busse. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010. 55-70.

COOK, Vivian. “Frequency for English Punctuation Marks.” 2000. Web. Accessed 19 Oct 2014.

DAHLIE, Hallvard. “The Fiction of Alice Munro.” Ploughshares 4.3 (1978): 56-71. Print.

DEFALCO, Amelia. “Caretakers / Caregivers: Economies of Affection in Alice Munro.” Twentieth Century Literature 58.3 (2012): 377-398. Print.

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ABSTRACTS

In this article, I discuss linguistic and cognitive aspects of Munro’s style in “The Peace of Utrecht.” First, I examine how Munro uses subordination, semicolons, syntactic variations, and creative semantic prosodies. These features give the story’s prose its halting, uncertain, and probing qualities. Second, I explain the conceptual blend Munro evokes by referring at least twice to the historical event of The Peace of Utrecht (1713) in her story. Ending the War of the Spanish Succession was complex, but the relationship between the sisters in this story is equally complex.

INDEX

Mots-clés: variation syntaxique, prosodie sémantique, intégration conceptuelle Keywords: syntactic variation, semantic prosody, conceptual blending

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AUTHOR

CRAIG HAMILTON Craig Hamilton is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Haute Alsace in Mulhouse, France. He has published extensively on cognitive rhetoric, cognitive poetics, and cognitive stylistics. He is a contributing author to Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric, 3rd edition (Palgrave 2014). His research focuses on stylistics, rhetoric, figurative language, and cognitive linguistics. His articles have appeared in many journals, including Style, Language and Literature, The Journal of Literary Semantics, and Cognitive Linguistics.

Études de stylistique anglaise, 8 | 2015