Alice Munro: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Runaway, Dear Life 9781474230995, 9781474230988, 9781474231022, 9781474231015

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Series Editor’s Introduction
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”: The Late Art of Munro
Alice Munro over Ontario
A deepening geological sensibility: “Axis”
Part 1 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Chapter 1 “The Key to the Treasure” Sex and Storytelling in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”
“Floating Bridge”
“Nettles”
“Post and Beam”
“What is Remembered”
Chapter 2 Teaching and Conflict in Munro from “The Day of the Butterfly” to “Comfort”
Classroom antics
Surviving the boss of the classroom
An ambivalent conclusion
Chapter 3 Mistaken Identities in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
Marriage and mischaracterization
The problem of names
Flowery expressions and fine distinctions
Part 2 Runaway
Chapter 4 Sibyl at the Kitchen Table, or Translating the Classics in “Hateship” and the Juliet Triptych
Chapter 5 The Lives of Women and Men: Narrative Inflection in Alice Munro’s Runaway
Narrative inflection: Readers, characters, and the control of indeterminacy
Complex inflections
The Juliet Triptych
Munro and the narrative tradition
Life, fate, and closure
Chapter 6 “Old Confusions or Obligations”: Comic Vision in Runaway
“Tricks”
“Passion”
The Juliet Triptych
“Runaway”
“Powers”
Part 3 Dear Life
Chapter 7 Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”
For my mother, Jean Laurie Bowley, October 6, 1919–July 4, 2007, on my sixty-fifth birthday, Saturday July 25, 2015
Story as autobiography
Story as metafiction
Story as metaphor
Story as allegory
Coda
Chapter 8 “Rage and Admiration”: Grotesque Humor in Dear Life
“Pride”
“Corrie”
“Dolly”
Chapter 9 “It Was[n’t] All Inward”: The Dynamics of Intimacy in the “Finale” of Dear Life
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Works Cited
Primary sources
Archival sources
Interviews with Munro
Secondary sources
Further Reading
Notes on Contributors
Volume Editor
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Alice Munro

Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction Series Editor: Sarah Graham, Lecturer in American Literature, University of Leicester, UK This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel or collection may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction. TITLES IN THE SERIES INCLUDE: Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park Edited by Naomi Mandel Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road Edited by Sara Spurgeon Don Dellio: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man Edited by Stacey Olster Louise Erdrich: Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Plague of Doves Edited by Deborah L. Madsen Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind ­Assassin, Oryx and Crake Edited by J. Brooks Bouson Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America Edited by Debra Shostak Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead, Gardens in the Dunes Edited by David L. Moore Toni Morrison: Paradise, Love, A Mercy Edited by Lucille P. Fultz

Alice Munro Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Runaway, Dear Life Edited by Robert Thacker

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Robert Thacker and contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-3099-5   PB: 978-1-4742-3098-8 ePDF: 978-1-4742-3101-5 ePub: 978-1-4742-3100-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Virginia Barber, Who Helped Make Alice Munro’s Stories

vi

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Introduction  ix Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”: The Late Art of Munro  Robert Thacker  1 Part One Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage  21 1 “The Key to the Treasure”  Charles E. May 25 2 Teaching and Conflict in Munro from “The Day of the Butterfly” to “Comfort”  Tracy Ware 44 3 Mistaken Identities in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”  Robert McGill 65

Part Two Runaway  87 4 Sibyl at the Kitchen Table, or Translating the Classics in “Hateship” and the Juliet Triptych  Julie Rivkin 91 5 The Lives of Women and Men: Narrative Inflection in Alice Munro’s Runaway  Eric Reeves 114

viii

CONTENTS

6 “Old Confusions or Obligations”: Comic Vision in Runaway  Lester E. Barber 137

Part Three  Dear Life  159 7 Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”  J. R. (Tim) Struthers 163 8 “Rage and Admiration”: Grotesque Humor in Dear Life  Ailsa Cox  184 9 “It Was[n’t] All Inward”: The Dynamics of Intimacy in the “Finale” of Dear Life  Linda M. Morra  203 Notes on Chapters  217 Works Cited  231 Further Reading  245 Notes on Contributors  247 Index  251

Series Editor’s Introduction

Each study in this series presents ten original essays by recognized subject specialists on the recent fiction of a significant author working in the United States or Canada. The aim of the series is to consider important novels or story collections published since 1990 either by established writers or by emerging talents. By setting 1990 as its general boundary, the series indicates its commitment to engaging with genuinely contemporary work, with the result that the series is often able to present the first detailed critical assessment of certain texts. In respect of authors who have already been recognized as essential to the canon of North American fiction, the series provides experts in their work with the opportunity to consider their latest novels in the dual context of the contemporary era and as part of a long career. For authors who have emerged more recently, the series offers critics the chance to assess the work that has brought authors to prominence, exploring novels that have garnered acclaim both because of their individual merits and because they are exemplary in their creative engagement with a complex period. Including both American and Canadian authors in the term “North American” is in no sense reductive: studies of Canadian writers in this series do not treat them as effectively American, and assessment of all the chosen authors in terms of their national and regional identity, as well as their race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, religion and political affiliation is essential in developing an understanding of each author’s particular contribution to the representation of contemporary North American society. The studies in this series make outstanding new contributions to the analysis of current fiction by presenting critical essays chosen for their originality, insight, and skill. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction to

x

Series Editor’s Introduction

the author by the study’s editor, which establishes the context for the chapters that will follow through a discussion of essential elements such as the writer’s career, characteristic narrative strategies, themes, and preoccupations, making clear the author’s importance and the significance of the novels chosen for discussion. The studies are all comprised of three parts, each one presenting three original essays on three key recent works by the author, and every part is introduced by the volume’s editor, explaining how the chapters to follow engage with the fiction and respond to existing interpretations. Each individual chapter takes a critical approach that may develop existing perceptions or challenge them, but always expands the ways in which the author’s work may be read by offering a fresh approach. It is a principle of the series that all the studies are written in a style that will be engaging and clear however complex the subject, with the aim of fostering further debate about the work of writers who all exemplify what is most exciting and valuable in contemporary North American fiction. Sarah Graham

Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume first came from David Avital at Bloomsbury Academic—I am grateful that he suggested it and then helped me make it happen. Throughout, he has always been interested and encouraging. So too has Mark Richardson–also at Bloomsbury— been throughout. Sarah Graham, Series Editor for Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction, has been a delight to work with too: encouraging, helpful, and precise. My planning for the volume took a great leap forward when I attended the Alice Munro Symposium sponsored by the University of Ottawa in May 2014. Most of the contributors here attended and spoke there too, so I was able to talk to them about plans, enquire about possibilities, and commission specific chapters. I am very grateful to each of the contributors here, and I especially appreciate their prompt responses to my many, many requests. I want particularly to thank Lester E. Barber who, when he learned of my difficulties in obtaining another essay, enthusiastically stepped in on very short notice with the essay included here. I appreciate his willingness, his speed, and his fine work. Among those gathered at the Ottawa Munro Symposium— stunningly planned by Janice Fiamengo and Gerald Lynch of the Department of English there—were her longtime agent, Virginia Barber, and three of Alice Munro’s editors: Ann Close (Knopf), Douglas Gibson (first at Macmillan of Canada and then, after 1986, McClelland & Stewart), and Daniel Menaker (one of several she has had at New Yorker—other longstanding editors are Charles McGrath and Deborah Treisman). The four people gathered in Ottawa offered a singular panel focused on working with Alice Munro over the years; they were a one-of-a-kind gathering, replete with wit, humor, and pleasure over having been lucky enough to have worked so closely with this great writer, Alice Munro.

xii

Acknowledgments

Acknowledging the many, many kindnesses and helps these same people have extended to me over the years of our association, I join with them, and with all the contributors gathered here, in acknowledging the profound clarity and unsurpassable artistry of Alice Munro. As I’ve written many times before and probably will write yet again beyond this volume, her work most truly is “a fine and lucky benevolence” (Something 43).

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”: The Late Art of Munro Robert Thacker

No writer of fiction of comparable genius has ­depended so much, for so long, on short stories alone . . . Randall Jarrell, “On Preparing to Read Kipling” (1961)

The fall of 2012 saw the publication of Alice Munro’s Dear Life: Stories, her fourteenth book. While such things are uncertain, just as everyone’s “dear life” is, it will likely be Munro’s last book. As has long been her practice, Dear Life is mostly made of stories that readers had seen before in periodicals—six were in the New Yorker, two in Harper’s, another two in Granta, and one each in Narrative and Tin House—but as a collection, a whole gathering, it offers a different feel. One borne of arrangement and created experience. As the tenth story, “Dolly,” ends there, its narrator speaks of the “rage and admiration” she feels toward her longtime partner, Franklin, over a detail from what has just occurred there: “It went back through our whole life together.” The reader then turns to the facing page, one headed “Finale,” and finds the following author’s comment: The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the

2

Alice Munro

first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life. (254, 255) With this coda, Munro leaves her seventy-one-year-old narrator in “Dolly” to offer another one, not a persona, apparently herself, beginning “The Eye” with these sentences: “When I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter. Then a year later a baby girl appeared, and there was another fuss but more subdued than with the first one” (257). There at the end of her last book, Munro’s “Finale” seems an audacious act. It both concludes another stunning collection of stories and is offered as the finale of a singular career, but its audacity is seen best in this transition Munro creates between the end of “Dolly” and the beginning of “The Eye.” Leaving the elderly narrator of “Dolly” behind, Munro returns to what very much looks like herself with the four “works” of the “Finale.” This is a transition, a creation, which Munro has been making since she began publishing in the 1950s. The “not quite stories” in the “Finale” take Munro back to herself as a child viewing the corpse of a person she had known for the first time (“The Eye”); back to herself as a young teenager dealing with traumatic, repellant thoughts which brought on sleeplessness (“Night”); back to herself remembering the placating voices of airmen possibly about to be lost in the war, left forever young (“Voices”); and finally, Munro moves back to herself again to memories of her mother, this time wondering what Anne Chamney Laidlaw really knew about an apparently crazy neighbor who once appeared at their house and frightened her mother when Alice was yet a baby: “Perhaps it was her daughter . . . she was looking for in the baby carriage. Just after my mother had grabbed me up, as she said, for dear life.” “Dear Life.” Dear Life. Wondering about these circumstances, Munro comments that “the person I would really have liked to talk to then was my mother, who was no longer available” (318). I begin this introduction with Munro’s audacious artifice in her last construction of her family, and especially of her mother, because the act is so very indicative, so very apt. More than that, the “Finale” to Dear Life seems an inevitability in late Munro: once again, she goes home to Ontario, to details of her own experience

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

3

there. When she got an idea for a story in something she read in the paper which actually occurred in British Columbia and set it at the heart of “The Love of a Good Woman,” the titular story of her 1998 collection and one that signals late Munro, she moved the action back to Huron County, Ontario to the time of her own birth. When she came to write “Family Furnishings” (2001), a singular story and a frightening one too, it features a clear-sighted and caustic narrator who reminds one of young Alice Laidlaw, intent on her artistic vocation, at the University of Western Ontario in 1950. That story was in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), the first of the three volumes taken up here, and there too are other narrators who remind of Alice Munro, first young mother and eventual divorced wife (“Nettles,” “Post and Beam,” “What is Remembered”). But there also are stories in that collection which offer no apparent connection to Munro’s own life: the title story, one that Mona Simpson, in an influential and retrospective review of Munro’s career to that point in the Atlantic, saw as based on a “fragile, perhaps pathetic act of hope” (134); and “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” the late story which has become something of an urtext in the depiction of dementia and which was made into a significant feature film, Away From Her (2007). With her next collection and the second volume treated here, Runaway (2004), Munro persisted in combining the discernably autobiographical (the “Juliet Triptych”—“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”) with stories that bear no such relation (“Runaway,” “Powers”) and another, “Passion,” which has received singular critical attention. Late Munro was disrupted some by her next collection, The View from Castle Rock (2006), a “family book”—as Munro once described it to her editor—which she had contemplated since the late 1970s. It too is audacious, for it combines researched family history with Munro’s own autobiography, and is also the site for memoirs (“Home” [1974], “Working for a Living” [1981]) that had appeared in print some time since but had long been held out of one of her signed collections; there too are autobiographically inflected fictions (“Hired Girl,” “Fathers,” “Lying Under the Apple Tree”). While it did not fulfill some reviewers’ expectations for Munro, and was thought for a time to be her last book, Castle Rock will likely ultimately be seen as among Munro’s most important—it offers too much of what she sees as narrative to be otherwise and shows too well what she has learned about the writer’s life. The

4

Alice Munro

next collection, Too Much Happiness (2009), saw Munro return to fiction, per se, but there again she may be seen experimenting: its opening story, “Dimension,” takes up a subject—the life of a woman after her partner killed their three children—that many have said only Munro would even attempt, let alone accomplish; and she returns to herself at the University of Western Ontario during 1949–50 in “Wenlock Edge,” a slightly bizarre erotic entanglement, a tribute to A. E. Housman, and another probing of her own ambitions and “wickedness” (Wenlock 91).1 And she persists in the long view of life which characterizes late Munro: with stories like “Face,” “Fiction,” and a much-revised “Wood” (first published in the New Yorker in 1980 and passed over in the making of her collections for almost thirty years since). Perhaps anticipating the “Finale” she would offer in Dear Life, “Wood” is in effect another Huron County, Ontario introduction to another Munrovian audacity: “Too Much Happiness” is based on historical research, but there the subject is Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenthcentury Russian mathematician. Hardly the sort of subject anyone, and most especially some of the reviewers of The View from Castle Rock, expected from Munro. Even so, Kovalevsky’s final words are reputed to have been “Too much happiness” and her story, as rendered by Munro—who concentrates on a short period before, and includes, Kovalevsky’s death—takes the reader back into the nineteenth century. Munro’s readers had been there before, but to Ontario (“Meneseteung,” [1988], “A Wilderness Station” [1992]), not to Europe. Following Too Much Happiness, Munro produced the third volume we are considering here, Dear Life.

Alice Munro over Ontario I have in my possession a photocopy of a page from a book proof which was faxed by Munro’s agent, Virginia Barber, to Alfred A. Knopf, Munro’s U.S. publisher, on October 30, 1989. It is the last page of one of the Munro stories that I just mentioned, “Meneseteung.” That story is a meditation on Almeda Joynt Roth, a nineteenth-century “lady poet” from rural Ontario whom Munro imagined and created as a separate character although she bears a relation to two historical prototypes. “Meneseteung” was first published in the New Yorker in 1988 and was just

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

5

then about to be republished in a revised version in Friend of My Youth in the spring of 1990. Meneseteung is the Ojibwa name for the Maitland River which flows past the farm where Munro was raised in Lower Wingham, Ontario and then west to empty into Lake Huron; that river has often figured in her stories. “Meneseteung” has proved to be one of the stories from the 1980s which has gotten marked critical attention and, more significantly, in its indeterminacy it points toward late Munro, the writing we take up here. In the story, Munro creates a first-person narrator who is researching Roth’s life, one bent on discovering what, in another story, Munro called “the mystery of [her] life” (Moons 33). Thus we readers discover Roth along with this person. That person, most probably, owes much to Munro herself, for she has done such research into her own family’s history and into Irish emigration to Canada (See Thacker Booming). The fax I refer to, evidently taken from Munro’s own Knopf proof, shows her rewriting the story’s ending; Munro removes a phrase and two sentences and then tries to combine their details into a final paragraph; she crosses that paragraph out, and then writes the final paragraph which closes the story in Friend: “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly” (Final page; Friend 73). The two sentences that Munro removed had been added since the story’s first publication in the New Yorker and so too have these, although they bring together the ideas expressed in the omitted passages and use some of the same language. This sort of rewriting down to the last possible moment is characteristic—all of Munro’s editors and agents have remarked on it and she, for her part, has spoofed herself by sending versions of endings which she has called “final, final, final.” During a brief period in 1973–74—just as she was leaving her marriage and youngest daughter in British Columbia and returning to Ontario— Munro experimented with metafictional techniques. In “Home,” a memoir first published then, Munro wrote of her depiction of her home in Wingham, where her father then still lived with his second wife, offering this metafictional comment as her final paragraph: “I don’t want any more effects. I tell you, lying. I don’t know what I want. I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can” (153, original emphasis). Subsequently, she has recanted these

6

Alice Munro

techniques, for the version in Castle Rock has been shorn of its original metafictional commentaries, and fair enough. Yet I do not believe that she has recanted these sentiments, her own misgivings about artifice amid her own honorable intentions. As a writer, from the very first and throughout, Munro has wanted to do what she has done with “honor.” And she has, certainly. Such ambition is seen in the perennial rewriting and doubtless stems throughout her career from her material, often autobiographical, and the ways she has approached that material. In 1987—that is, just as Munro was writing the story that became “Meneseteung”—Constance Rooke published this observation: More than any other writer I know, [Munro] has made us see how human beings turn life into anecdote—and how creatively, how perfidiously we mine our familial pasts in order to present to others a beguiling persona. She celebrates this tendency, and she castigates herself for it as well. Against her knowledge that we must construct ourselves in this fashion, Munro places her desire to be faithful to the past. She is concerned about exploiting it, about using the other to serve the self. And while she knows that art is a salvage operation, and therefore an act of love, she knows too that it lies and that we cannot finally disentangle the generous and self-serving elements of art. (158–59) Returning momentarily to the “Finale” in Dear Life, Munro herself told me that all of its events happened (September 6, 2013). Even so, the very existence of that “Finale,” and what Munro wrote in introducing it after the long career she has had, confirms Rooke’s analysis. It also suggests that, given what Munro has written about and how she writes—and here the ideas of honor and the ethical implications of autobiographical writing come directly into play—generic distinctions between and among her stories do not ultimately mean very much. As Dennis Duffy has recently written, “Munro emerges as a producer of multivalent narrative, in which the factual and imaginative exist within an equivalency. . . . That is, she emphasizes that as a writer she produces narrative, period; questions of factuality and historical reliability are not central in the stories’ presentation to the reader. Any questions raised by generic differences between narratives are sidelights, avenues to be explored once a reader has absorbed the initial impact of the story

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

7

at hand” (Alice 202). That is, in Munro, the world that the story creates for the reader is the world: that’s all there is. Duffy is writing here about Munro’s historicism in “Too Much Happiness,” and he is among those critics who have also probed her creation of a knowable sense of history, of individual biographies imbedded within that history, and of the difficulties inherent in discovering those biographies, in “Meneseteung” (See Duffy Too Little; see also Houston). Just as “Meneseteung” points toward the philosophical and technical considerations which characterize late Munro, there are other stories from the 1980s which should be seen in the same way. “White Dump” (1986), the concluding story to what has been seen as Munro’s first really coherently impressive collection, The Progress of Love (1986), is one such story. It is one of Munro’s first completely subtle stories dealing with the genesis of female adultery, noting at one point the nascent moment when the affair begins (“the way the skin of the moment can break open” [Progress 308]). In passing, Simpson quotes Allan Gurganus writing that “adultery in Munro is chaotic but usually worth it”; he goes on to call her “our greatest and most subtle surrealist,” a pointed observation that Charles E. May also draws upon here (Simpson 131). The story features a day’s birthday celebration in July 1969, the time of the first moon landing, in which family members take a ride in a small plane down the Rideau Lakes of Eastern Ontario. They are piloted, as it turns out, by the man who was about to begin an affair with Isabel, the mother, ultimately breaking up the marriage. Among other things that day, they see a “glint lake”— that is, a lake which straddles the geologic transition from the St. Lawrence Lowlands to the Canadian Shield (Progress 304). The story ends with the close of the birthday celebrations, everybody tired but happy. That evening, straightening up the family cottage, Isabel glances at the open page of the book that her mother-in-law had been reading, one that she reread every summer, The Poetic Edda; she picks it up and reads a verse on the open page: “Seinat er at segia; / svá er nu rádit. (It is too late to talk of this now: it has been decided.)” (Progress 309). Julie Rivkin also quotes this passage as she begins her analysis here of Munro’s use of the classics, also citing at the outset Horace’s famous “seize the day” ode in “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” and linking it to Willa Cather’s use of Virgil in My Ántonia (1918) before detailing, as her subject, how Munro

8

Alice Munro

works through the impact of classic literature in what has been called Munro’s “Juliet Triptych” in Runaway—“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence.” These three stories were first published together in the same 2004 summer fiction issue of the New Yorker. About this time too, Munro wrote “Wenlock Edge,” a story which implicitly deals with A. E. Housman, whose A Shropshire Lad (1896) Munro has said she has long known very well, much of it by heart. Elegizing him, W. H. Auden called Housman “the Latin Scholar of his generation,” also a poet, one who “put the money of his feelings on / The uncritical relations of the dead, / Where only geographical divisions / Parted the coarse hanged soldier from the don” (182; see Thacker One). With Housman and Auden, and with her intertextual references to classical literature, late Munro offers a long view of human existence—that to be human is to be human, regardless of where one happens to live or in which era one lives. But if such a long literary awareness is to be found in “White Dump,” so too is what should be called Munro’s geological sensibility, another long view. Ontario landforms and landscapes have featured in Munro’s writing from the beginning—there is a story published in 1955, “The Edge of Town,” in which the setting is of more importance than the characters—and a geological sensibility is readily evident in “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the first story in Munro’s first book, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). When Munro returned to Huron County in 1975 it was to reconnect with Gerald Fremlin, a physical geographer and someone she had known in university. Her first project after moving to Clinton was a series of descriptive vignettes, which she titled “Places at Home.” These were never published in the book of photographs that they were intended for, but it is clear that Munro’s work on them reintroduced her to her home place in tactile and important ways: no longer remembering Huron County through memory and over distance, as she had from British Columbia from 1952 to 1973, “Places at Home” is the text of her initial rediscovery (See Thacker Alice, 294–301).2 Many of these vignettes were incorporated into Who Do You Think You Are? (1978; published outside of Canada as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose [1979]). Throughout, this book shows evidence of Munro’s rediscovery of Huron County after her return there. More than that, it also offers larger evidence that this process was a struggle for her: very late in the publication process, Munro had her publisher take the book off the press so

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

9

that she could restructure it, rewriting significant portions; she paid for the changes herself (See Thacker Alice 348–50). Among the “Places at Home” vignettes were one titled “Pleistocene” and another called “Drumlin.” The first became a story entitled “Characters” (1978) which, though not included in either version of Who, treats of Flo and Rose and might have gone there. It focuses on a Mr. Cleaver, a teacher who was among those who “had surfaced during the war, [had] come out of bush schools and decayed branch offices, to take the jobs of the men who went off to fight.” He is introduced in this passage: “Pleistocene, said Mr. Cleaver, and wrote it on the board, as if the grandeur of that word alone could compel them. He was a teacher despised for his devotion to just such words and facts, his hysterical susceptibility.” Munro continues: “What do you see here?” he said to the senior class, and drew on the board, with startling unappreciated facility, a map of Southern Ontario. He was scooping out the shorelines with coloured chalk, in unexpected places. Here were the lakes of former time, the old abandoned shores, that they had never heard of and were not likely to remember. Lake Algonquin, Lake Iriquois. The Champlain Sea and Tara Strands. He wanted to rip the moment open for them, make them a present of the shifting startling past. (72) None of the students responds (“Nobody had respect”), so Mr. Cleaver becomes exasperated, yells at individuals, calls two “Corpulent nitwits,” but ultimately continues with his own enthusiastic fascination, as Munro paraphrases as she described Cleaver back at his map: “Here is the landscape under the one you see, he went on telling them. Here is where it changed its mind, and here, and here. All these forgotten decisions to settle us where we are today. The lakes and shores we map and name but never saw, that nobody ever saw” (73). This detail is illustrative, for “Characters” is more about how someone like Cleaver is seen, and largely unappreciated, in the nonand often anti-intellectual rural society Munro was born to. He is one of the characters Munro is describing. One Saturday, stopping by Flo’s store while Rose was studying for her exams—the pair of protagonists Munro makes central to Who—Mr. Cleaver said that

10

Alice Munro

he “was going to hike up into the drumlin field.” Flo, who Munro sets against him as a person who dismisses intellectual enthusiasms, “didn’t bother to ask what a drumlin field could be” (79). Yet Rose, who was a member of that senior class, years later, shares the forlorn memory of Mr. Cleaver when he is discussed at a school reunion she has happened upon when visiting her hometown to look after Flo. “A brilliant man in his own way,” they said, and he “is polished and regretted.” Munro concludes “Characters” as she began her first description of Mr. Cleaver, with an italicized geological term: Drumlin was a word Rose ought to have thanked Mr. Cleaver for, if she had been given to thanking. A celtic word, he said. Little hill. It made a hill sound smooth and hollow, and continued to remind her of what she used to hope for when she was little, though she never really expected to find it, at the base of hills: the little, grassy, perfectly fitted door, that can only be opened from the inside. (82) This final image—the “grassy, perfectly fitted door” at the base of a drumlin—is one that Munro would return to in “What Do You Want to Know For?,” a memoir she would publish in 1994 and include in The View from Castle Rock. There the hill with the door is not a drumlin: it is a crypt, one she and Fremlin discovered and then worked very hard to learn the provenance of—and they did so successfully, as Munro recounts. “What Do You Want to Know For?” includes an assertion, offered as the last sentence of the long quotation I am about to offer, that ought to be seen as another coda in Munro. Just as the “Finale” of Dear Life should be. That sentence is: “It’s the fact you cherish.” The two paragraphs leading up to that sentence reveal Munro explaining in her own words what I am describing here as her “geological sensibility.” Toward the beginning of “What Do You Want to Know For?,” describing the landscapes of Huron County and Southwestern Ontario, Munro concludes her descriptions by describing her favorite landform; the kame moraine, she writes, “is the one I’ve left till last,” saying that “end moraines are hilly in what seems a reasonable way, not as smooth as drumlins, but still harmonious, rhythmical, while kame moraines are all wild and bumpy, unpredictable, with a look of chance and secrets.” Just after

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

11

this, there is a break in the text, and Munro continues with two salient paragraphs: I didn’t learn any of this at school. I think there was nervousness then, about being at loggerheads with the Bible in the matter of the creation of the Earth. I learned it when I came to live here with my second husband, a geographer. When I came back to where I never expected to be, in the countryside where I had grown up. So my knowledge is untainted, fresh. I get a naïve and particular pleasure from matching what I see on the map with what I see through the car window. Also from trying to figure out what bit of landscape we’re in, before I look at a map, and being right a good deal of the time. It’s exciting to me to spot the boundaries, when it’s a question of the different till plains, or where the kame moraine takes over from the end moraine. But there is always more than just the keen pleasure of identification. There’s the fact of these separate domains, each with its own history and reason, its favorite crops and trees and weeds—oaks and pines, for instance growing on sand, and cedars and strayed lilacs on limestone—each with its special expression, its pull on the imagination. The fact of these countries lying smug and unsuspected, like and unlike as siblings can be, in a landscape that’s usually disregarded, or dismissed as drab agricultural counterpane. It’s the fact you cherish. (View 321–22)3 Reading Munro, from first to last, throughout, we may see facts being cherished. As I have said, often the facts involved are autobiographical or biographical. The death of Anne Chamney Laidlaw in early 1959 after an almost twenty-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease brought Munro to write “The Peace of Utrecht” (1960), which she once described to an interviewer as her “first really painful autobiographical story” (Metcalf 58). Her mother has been a repeated presence in many stories since, and she is still there in “Dear Life” in Dear Life, both as remembered presence and as the author of the titular phrase, repeated. So she has been throughout. So too is Munro’s father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, who figures in “Night” in the “Finale”; he has been a remembered presence since the early 1960s (“Boys and Girls” [1964] in Dance, for instance) and he too was subject to an elegy story, “The Moons of Jupiter” (1978), as well as elegy memoir, “Working for a Living.”

12

Alice Munro

Yet facts may be seen being cherished irrespective of which crux is being examined. Reading among and between and within Munro’s stories, connections are always being made. Earlier I mentioned a phrasing from “White Dump,” “the ways the skin of the moment can break open.” Following the line of Munro’s long view based on the classics and her geological sense back to “Characters”—first called “Pleistocene”—we find Munro writing of Mr. Cleaver that “he wanted to rip this moment open for them, make them a present of the shifting startling past.” That was written and published several years before “White Dump.” And the ride over the Rideau Lakes her characters take there is one Munro took herself: she wanted to see what a glint lake looked like from the air, looking down, she wanted to know and cherish that fact, before she used it in her story (June 14, 2010).

A deepening geological sensibility: “Axis” When Munro left her marriage and returned to Ontario from British Columbia in 1973, she faced several crossroads: she had never been really on her own; she had to decide where to go and what to do; and she would likely have to find different ways to go about her writing. Her relations with her daughters had to be redefined (the oldest was about twenty, the second a teenager, the third just about seven). She needed to support herself. After Lives of Girls and Women (1971), she had a sense that the type of writing she had been doing—fiction derived from memory and distance— was “sort of played out” (September 6, 2013). And Munro recalls in “What Do You Want to Know For?,” before her reconnection with Fremlin happened, she “never expected” to come back to Huron County, “in the countryside where” she “had grown up.” Yet that was what happened by August 1975. Recalling this time in 2013, Munro has said, “Well obviously I’d gone as far as I could with [her prior type of writing] and then, when I got to know Gerry . . . the world he opened up for me was just marvelous. I had never taken [geology] in school and . . . it was wonderful to me, but I didn’t think immediately of it going into my writing. . . . It was what he could teach me that was very exciting to me then” (September 6, 2013). When she described her flight over a glint lake for “White

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

13

Dump,” Munro commented, “but of course the idea of there being such things all comes from Gerry” (June 14, 2010). Thus the landforms and landscapes of Huron County, which Munro had long revered, became both a new fascination and a new direction as she returned there to live in 1975. The geological history of the region was revealed to her by Fremlin during their drives about the countryside and, almost immediately, Munro began writing differently, drawing on and elaborating what she had discovered. I have noted such concerns in “Characters” and “White Dump,” and pointed to them elsewhere, but they come together best in “Axis” (2011), an anomalous story in the late Munro oeuvre. It was published in the New Yorker but, though originally slated for inclusion in Dear Life, was ultimately left out in deference to Fremlin.4 “Axis,” once again, takes Munro back to her time at the University of Western Ontario 1949–51. It begins, “Fifty years ago, Grace and Avie were waiting at the university gates, in the freezing cold.” They were waiting for a bus, “forty miles to go for Avie, maybe twice that for Grace.” “Serious students,” they “were carrying large books with serious titles: ‘The Medieval World,’ ‘Montcalm and Wolfe,’ ‘The Jesuit Relations.’” But more than this, and more significantly, each of these characters echoes Munro herself: “They were both farm girls, who knew how to scrub floors and milk cows. Their labor as soon as they entered the house—or the barn—belonged to their families. They weren’t the sort of girls you usually ran into at this university.” Not sorority girls, bent on finding a husband in the business school, Grace and Avie are scholarship girls majoring in history, destined probably to teach: they “admitted they would hate that,” Munro writes (63). The plot of “Axis” focuses mostly on a visit that Royce—Grace’s boyfriend, a veteran, and near philosophy graduate—makes to her on the farm during the summer. Still a virgin, Grace has a plan to capitulate to his advances there while Royce is visiting. In a wonderfully comedic scene, the couple is caught in bed by Grace’s mother who is outraged at the discovery. Royce dresses and leaves, apparently scorning both mother and daughter, angry and now forced to hitchhike back to the university town where he still lives. Munro describes the moments as he takes his leave: When Grace heard him zip up his bag she turned over and put her feet on the floor. She was perfectly naked.

14

Alice Munro

She said, “Take me. Take me with you.” But he had gone out of the room, out of the house, as if he hadn’t even heard her. (67) At one point in the composition process, Munro thought of “Take Me with You” as a possible title for the story and queried Ann Close, her editor at Knopf, about the possibility. That title would have emphasized the elements of romance in the story, and there is also a subplot involving Avie and her boyfriend Hugo, with whom she gets pregnant by and marries. But the story is called “Axis.” The reference is to one of two major geological facts of Southern Ontario: the Frontenac Axis. Late in life, toward the end of “Axis,” Royce and the by-then widowed Avie inadvertently meet on a train heading east from Toronto toward Gananoque, his destination, and Montreal, hers. He tells her about his life, she hers. He taught geology, never married; she had six children, was a housewife and mother. Recalling their time together in college, Royce also tells her that, traveling on a bus on his way to visit Grace those years ago, he looked out the window and saw Avie on the street in the town where she lived; after acknowledging and dismissing his connection with Grace then, he continues: “Anyway, I saw you there on the sidewalk talking to somebody and I thought you looked just irresistible. You were laughing away. I wanted to get off the bus and speak to you. Make a date with you, actually.” Looking back now, Avie is torn; Royce wants to know if she thinks it a good thing that “we didn’t make contact?” and Munro writes “She does not even try for an answer” (68). Royce leaves this question alone and closes his eyes, telling Avie to be sure to wake him “‘before we’re into Kingston if I’ve gone to sleep,’ he says. ‘There’s something I want to be sure to show you’” (69). What Royce, the geologist, wants to show Avie is the Frontenac Axis. The train stops in Kingston and: When the train starts up again, he explains that all around them are great slabs of limestone packed in order, one on top of the other, like a grand construction. But in one spot this gives way, he says, and you can see something else. It’s what’s known as the Frontenac Axis. It is nothing less than an eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield, all the ancient combustion

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

15

cutting through the limestone, pouring over, messing up those giant steps. “See! See!” he says, and she does see. Remarkable. (69) From this scene, Munro cuts back to a letter Avie received from Grace after she had married and moved to Northern Ontario where Hugo was teaching. Grace congratulates her and then tells Avie that she has dropped out of school, “due to some troubles I have had with health and my nerves” (69). Avie recalls a conversation with Grace about colitis, but the “tone of Grace’s letter seemed off kilter, with some pleading note in it that made her put off answering.” Back on the train, wondering this over, Avie “asks Royce if he heard anything from Grace, ever.” He replies no and asks why she thinks he would have. “Axis” ends: “I thought you might have looked her up later on.” “Not a good idea.” She has disappointed him. Prying. Trying to get at some spot of live regret right under the ribs. A woman. (69) In his chapter here on Munro’s techniques and “To Reach Japan,” J. R. (Tim) Struthers argues that in Munro’s work metaphor transmutes into allegory, and her use of the Frontenac Axis in “Axis” is a vivid illustration of just what he means. Royce’s enthusiastic exclamations as he points out evidence of the “eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield” (analogous to her earlier similar phrasings, Mr. Cleaver wanting “to rip the moment open for them,” to the narrator in “White Dump” speaking of “the ways the skin of the moment can open”) points to another experience he has during his visit to Grace, whom now he little remembers. Getting out of one of the cars he had hitched a ride in, Royce experiences his first geological epiphany: Then he got out, and he saw across the road in the cut of the highway a tower of ancient-looking rock that looked quite out of place there, even though it was capped with grass and a small tree growing out of a crack. He was on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, though he did not know that name or anything about it. But he was captivated. Why had he never been told anything about this? This surprise,

16

Alice Munro

this careless challenge in the ordinary landscape. He felt a comic sort of outrage that something made for him to explore had been there for him all along and nobody had told him. Nevertheless, he knew. Before he got into the next car, he knew he was going to find out; he was not going to let this go. Geology was what it was called. And all this time he had been fooling around with arguments, with philosophy and political science. It wouldn’t be easy. It would mean saving money, starting again with pimpled brats just out of high school. But that is what he would do. Later, he often told people about the trip, about the sight of the escarpment that turned his life around. If asked what he’d been doing there, he’d wonder and then remember that he’d gone up there to see a girl. (67) Because Munro decided to withhold “Axis” from Dear Life, its final published form is that found in the New Yorker, yet there is manuscript evidence that she did considerable work revising it toward book publication. On a revision dated November 1, 2011— that is, about ten months after its appearance in the magazine— Close suggested that Munro needed something more in the ending, the same one published in the New Yorker. Munro did this, adding a discussion about Grace between Avie and Royce on the train in which Royce explains, filled with his revelation and new resolve, that he imagined himself going back to rescuing Grace from her family— this is the version entitled “Take Me With You”—in gratitude. “She was the one got me here, I thought.” He credited her as the agent of his geological realization. Here again, though, he tells Avie he did not do it: “God knows how it would have turned out anyway.” In that revised manuscript too there is a rewritten version of Royce’s realization, one that Munro followed up with new material connected to his imagined romantic “rescue” of Grace. Here Munro is more geographically specific: a driver dropped Royce in Wiarton, Ontario at the foot of the Bruce Peninsula, near Owen Sound, where he noticed the cliff running along the south side of Colpoy’s Bay—evidence of the Niagara Escarpment.5 Seeing it, he wonders over its existence, wondering where it came from. Munro writes that his sense of geography was vague but for Toronto and London and points between. He asks the next driver who picks him up, who knows the area, and who details and names the landforms Royce

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

17

noticed. As the man does this, as he identifies the striking geological forms, his descriptions create in Royce “some kind of sheer pleasure up his spine” (November 1, 2011). This feeling, this moment, is the same one that Munro describes in the published version of “Axis” as “surprise” at “this careless challenge in the ordinary landscape”: “he was not going to let this go.” His life is transformed with new purpose; this transformation is rather like the “eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield,” the making of the Frontenac Axis, he shows and describes to Avie those years later on the train (New Yorker 67, 69). On a train too in “Chance,” the first story of the “Juliet Triptych,” on her way like Royce toward the life she discovers by chance as Julie Rivkin and Eric Reeves make clear here, Munro has Juliet meditate on the greatest “great fact”6 of Canada’s geology: Nevertheless, on the train, she was happy. Taiga, she thought. She did not know whether that was the right word for what she was looking at. She might have had, at some level, the idea of herself as a young woman in a Russian novel, going out into an unfamiliar, terrifying, and exhilarating landscape where the wolves howl at night and where she would meet her fate. She did not care that this fate—in a Russian novel—would likely turn out to be dreary, or tragic, or both. Personal fate was not the point, anyway. What drew her in—enchanted her, actually—was the indifference, the repetition, the carelessness and contempt for harmony, to be found on the scrambled surface of the Precambrian shield. That shield is also called the Canadian Shield and the Laurentian Shield. Just after these lines, Juliet’s meditation on the fate awaiting her, a “shadow appeared in the corner of her eye” (Runaway 54), and that fate—the life detailed in the whole of the Juliet Triptych— really begins to be effected. Reading such a scene too, we should remember that Munro’s first transcontinental train trip through the Precambrian Shield was in late December 1951: she was twenty years old, she had just married, and she was then embarked toward the new life with her new husband in Vancouver; she had left her family farm in Wingham the site, but for her two years at university, of the only life she had ever known. The site of the crucial years of her own

18

Alice Munro

“dear life.” More particularly, Munro was leaving her mother to the Parkinson’s disease which enveloped and held her—leaving her father and her younger siblings to care for Anne Chamney Laidlaw there as the disease progressed throughout the 1950s. She was, like Juliet, embracing her own fate. Just over three years later—in 1954—she would make that same transcontinental train trip again, this time with a nine-month old daughter, and then again in 1971 with three daughters in tow, the older two of whom pretended not to know her, teen-aged as they were. By then Munro knew that her marriage was over and that it was just a matter of time before she made the trip back to Ontario again, and for good. What in “Nettles” her narrator speaks of as “a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage” (Hateship 169). Little wonder such train trips figure so significantly throughout Munro’s stories, and play so precisely into the matters of fate and chance she creates and, as Eric Reeves maintains here, inflects. “To Reach Japan” and “Train” in Dear Life draw on the details of these trips, and the latter takes Munro back to writing she did— over and over in the 1960s when nothing much satisfied her, as she writes toward the end of “Dear Life”—in abandoned stories called “The Boy Murderer” or “The War Hero” (See Alice Munro Papers 37.14.20-26). That character’s name was Franklin. A Franklin appears in “Dolly.” For a time, too, Franklin was again the name of Jackson in “Train,” but it was changed since he is not the same person as the poet Franklin in “Dolly.” Roger Angell, the New Yorker editor and writer who has been in the magazine’s fiction department throughout Munro’s career there, reputedly observed in connection with “Axis”—while it was being considered for publication—that “For Alice, geology is very sexy” (Treisman). Fair enough, but “Axis” stands at the end of late Munro confirming yet again her geological awareness—Royce might be seen as an incipient Mr. Cleaver from “Characters,” certainly—and also confirming the methods through which she has long made her stories. Through which she has made her narratives—each one, like “Axis,” a gathering of autobiography, of biography, and of imagination; each one a narrative rendering of imagined possibility. In 1997, when Munro was asked to provide an introduction to her first volume of Selected Stories (1996), she ended her own explanations (just before offering as a conclusion a quotation from Tristram Shandy on “the dark sides” of “the most obvious things”

Introduction: “Durable and Freestanding”

19

[xxi]) by speaking once more about the story not as a road to be followed but as a house: And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It has also a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. To deliver a story like that, durable and freestanding, is what I’m always hoping for. (xx–xxi)7 In the same essay—an essay which, in all likelihood, Munro did not much want to write—she describes a scene she remembered seeing when she was about fifteen, gazing out the Wingham library window: “Snow falling straight down. The window looked out on the town weigh-scales and a high board fence beyond.” Munro continues to describe the scene with precision, eventually stepping back, writing that she saw this scene as “alive and potent, and it gave me something like a blow to the chest. What does this mean, what can be discovered about it, what is the rest of the story?” The figures she has described “are not symbolic or picturesque, they are moving through a story which is hidden, and now, for a moment carelessly revealed.” Appreciating this moment of revelation, she asks, “How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating?” (xvi). So Munro has done, J. R. (Tim) Struthers tells us here, 148 times. He is writing only of the published stories: the Munro archives at the University of Calgary reveal a multitude of other stories— begun but ultimately abandoned—far extending those that have been published. And of those published, sufficient earlier versions exist (and in a few instances, later ones too) which allow scholars to trace Munro’s methods as she strove to figure out “the rest of the story.” And as she wrote emphatically about her work in the foreword to The View from Castle Rock in a single-sentence paragraph, “These are stories.” Munro italicized that last word herself in the book’s manuscript (MsC 323/1.1) and that emphasis is telling. As Duffy writes, Munro “produces narrative, period.” As the epigraph from Randall Jarrell used here implies, Munro’s genius and accomplishment rank with the likes of Kipling in her reliance on the short story. Eric Reeves in his analysis of Runaway

20

Alice Munro

observes that, in Munro, “memory itself is often a virtual character” and, in celebrating the October 10, 2013 announcement of Munro’s Nobel Prize in Literature, James Wood made a telling distinction, writing that at “the level of the sentence, her stories proceed with the grammar of conventional realism; but at the formal level, her work invents its own grammar, which is why her stories strike many readers as closer to novellas than to any idea of ‘the conventional well-made short story.’” Doing so too, as so many readers of late Munro have read and written, Alice Munro writes clearly, sharply, and often caustically about human behavior. Without sentimentality. This is, we think, truth: “durable and freestanding.” In 1992, I offered an argument that among Munro’s avowed influences is Willa Cather—K. P. Stich had made the argument before me and A. S. Byatt has noted after. With my “great fact” phrasing above, I have made another such reference. And as I have already noted, Julie Rivkin in her chapter here sees Cather’s My Ántonia as a predecessor to Munro’s “Juliet Triptych” in Runaway. Given this, it should be no surprise that Cather figures here as I conclude this introduction. When Alfred A. Knopf was publishing a collected Works of Stephen Crane in the mid-1920s, he prevailed upon Cather, whose work he had been publishing since 1920, to write a preface for Crane’s Wounds in the Rain and Other Impressions of War. Cather’s contribution is a brief essay, and in it she notes Crane’s “War Memories” from his time covering the Spanish-American war as a correspondent. Among its “most interesting things in the bundle of impressions” there is what Crane writes about Admiral William T. Sampson, commander of the North Atlantic Squadron. Crane “admired the Admiral because he wasn’t theatrical, detested noise and show,” she writes, and then quotes Crane himself: “No bunting, no arches, no fireworks; nothing but the perfect management of a big fleet. That is a record for you. No trumpets, no cheers of the populace. Just plain, pure, unsauced accomplishment.” “Anyhow, he is a great man. And when you are once started you can continue to be a great man without the help of bouquets and banquets” (73). “Just plain, pure, unsauced accomplishment”: Alice Munro.

Part one

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage The fall of 2014 saw the publication of Munro’s second volume of selected stories, those first published between 1995 and 2014, a gathering entitled Family Furnishings. So titled, the book points both to a central story from her tenth collection and, more broadly, to another great fact in her stories: like the heavy, inherited furniture that Alfrida speaks of in the story (“But it’s my parents’ stuff.

22

Alice Munro

It’s family furnishings, and I couldn’t let them go”), none of us are able to let our family inheritances go. Alice Munro has not been able to, certainly, for also in that story is a narrator who looks just like Alice Laidlaw in 1951 as she is about to leave university and go home to be married to a higher-class boy from her parents’ house in Wingham. As Munro did. Knowing all the while that her real life was to be a writer. Meditating this, alone over a cup of coffee after seeing Alfrida and realizing that her own “family furnishings” were not arranged as she had long assumed, the narrator thinks of her position and ambitions and writes “I did not think about the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories.” “This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be” (Hateship 104, 102, 117). “Family Furnishings” echo previous versions of this autobiographical narrator (in “Miles City, Montana” [1985] she speaks of her “real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself” [Progress 88]) seen, incipient and overt, throughout Munro’s oeuvre from her first book on. With this tenth collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Munro burst into what we are here calling late Munro. The long title story, its name taken from a children’s game meant to ascertain a player’s ultimate personal fate, was first published there—having been passed over by the New Yorker owing to length. As Charles E. May argues here, the story is unusual for Munro in that she depends on the workings of plot to a far higher degree than she usually does, and she ironizes the “once upon a time” of the traditional fairy tale she uses there while at the same time inverting what he calls the “great expectations” theme by the story’s ending. Edith’s realization that her actions brought about the creation of “a person named Omar” is explained by her translation of Horace’s “Carpe Diem” ode, that destiny is a matter of chance and so fate is unknowable (Hateship 52). May contextualizes “Hateship,” and the other stories he treats from the collection, by connecting Munro to the tradition of Scheherazade and the tales of Thousand and One Nights and to the evolution of the genre of the short story. Equating storytelling to sex in Munro—they both are, May argues, “powerful acts of the imagination”—he moves from the trajectory of Johanna’s trip to rescue Ken Boudreau from himself and to find fulfillment to questions of sexual and human

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

23

attraction in the story he considers. In each of them, characters experience interactions which are revelatory, meditative, and imaginative, experience each one cherishes. Focusing on each story in its turn, May defines Munro’s artistry and links that artistry to the demands of the short-story genre she has mastered supremely. May’s overview of Hateship, which treats five of the eight stories in the collection, is complemented by the other two chapters here, each of which focuses on another single story there and uses it to open up larger contexts in Munro’s art. Defining as a foundation Munro’s treatment of teaching and teachers throughout her oeuvre, and relating her renderings to the education literature defining the relation of schools to the social mores of the larger community, Tracy Ware demonstrates the imaginative and humane depth of “Comfort.” He recognizes that in her stories depicting teachers and teaching Munro drew first upon her own experiences as a student but has since defined the social relation between teacher and student, teacher and community, and especially the teacher within the family. Noting that during the late 1970s Munro became embroiled in a controversy in Ontario to ban books from the high school curriculum—she was connected to the Writers Union of Canada and was defending the books in question—Ware subtly explicates “Comfort” and defines what might be called the human position of the teacher within the classroom. Lewis in “Comfort” has been forced to resign his position as a teacher of high school biology because of attacks by Creationists and his response to them, and he also falls ill to a progressive debilitating illness, so the story begins with his suicide. As Ware sharply asserts, Munro’s story is not so much about any of this as it is about his wife Nina’s situation in the face of it all. Lewis and Nina’s long relation is laid bare; she has to discover how to continue; she is now comforted by what has happened in the story and thereby is able to continue Lewis’s legacy as both a teacher and as a human being. The third chapter on stories from Hateship is, like Ware’s, a close analysis of a single story: Robert McGill’s “Mistaken Identities in ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain.’” While the treatment Ware accords “Comfort” is warranted by the larger contexts he defines, here McGill has taken up what, as he details at the outset of his chapter, he argues is “Munro’s most celebrated story.” In the introduction I referred to “The Bear” as an urtext and so it has proved to be: by the power of the story itself, by the way it was

24

Alice Munro

singled out by Jonathan Franzen in (ironically) his review of Munro’s Runaway in The New York Times Book Review (November 14, 2004), by Sarah Polley’s 2007 film based on it, Away From Her, and most of all by its republication in the New Yorker (October 21, 2013) when Munro was announced the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Paying special attention to the workings of narrative as she defines characters in “Bear,” McGill points, as others have here, to Munro’s 1982 essay, “What is Real?,” arguing that in Munro generally, and in this story in particular, “reality” is an uneven and slippery thing.

1 “The Key to the Treasure” Sex and Storytelling in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Charles E. May

In her review of Alice Munro’s collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, American writer Lorrie Moore praises Munro’s genius as a short-story writer and asserts that the “birth and death of erotic love” is her timeless subject (41). In his review of the same collection, Irish writer John McGahern also applauds Munro’s mastery of the short-story form and suggests that no one writes as well as she does about “the hardhearted energy of sex” (23). Such linked observations about Munro’s mastery of the short-story form and her emphasis on sexuality have been made so many times over the years, especially by other short-story writers, that one might suspect a connection between sex and storytelling in Munro’s fiction. John Barth suggested the same relationship in the story “Dunyazadiad” (in Chimera), his version of the famous frame tale of Thousand and One Nights, as told by Scheherazade’s younger sister Dunyazade, sitting at the foot of the bed while

26

Alice Munro

Scheherazade engages in multiple ways of making love and myriad ways of telling stories. Sherry and the genie (playfully named “John Barth”), who appears to her from the future when both simultaneously utter the same magic words, “the key to the treasure is the treasure,” theorize about the relationship between these two “life-saving” phenomena. Barth/genie tells Scheherazade that in his own time and place there are scientists of the passions who maintain that language itself originated in infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse, by which “magic phrases” they seem to mean that “writing and reading, or telling and listening,” are “literally ways of making love” (32). Sherry and the genie talk “as if” the relationship between the teller and the told is basically erotic, in which the good reader is as involved as the author. If we are to take this analogy between sex and storytelling as more than mere Barth whimsy, then something needs to be said about the nature of the reader’s involvement in the kind of stories that Scheherazade tells and the kind of experience and talent the reader needs to engage with those stories. The following discussion is based on the premise that the key to the treasure of Scheherazade’s stories, and all short-story writers who have descended from her— including, of course, short-story master Alice Munro—is different than whatever “key” is necessary for engaging with the novel as a narrative form. Hanan Al-Shaykh, one of Egypt’s best-known writers, who has often been called “the new Shahrazad,” once said that the iconic storyteller “took the role of the artist, the creator, the story-teller who would test her own ability and rise above common artistry” (“New Shahrazad”). In her new translation of Thousand and One Nights, Al-Shaykh has restored the sexuality that the famous 1838 English version by Edward Lane deleted and has stitched the stories together so intricately that the reader is drawn so far away from the originating story that it seems only stories exist and that reality itself, if that word means anything, is always a narrative. A. S. Byatt has suggested that “the stories in Thousand and One Nights are stories about storytelling. . . . Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. . . . We are all, like Scheherazade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narrative, with beginning, middles and ends” (6). Anyone

“The Key to the Treasure”

27

familiar with the work of Alice Munro will recognize immediately that, in addition to the “birth and death of erotic love,” the way people are compelled to make stories out of their lives is also her “timeless” subject. In Stranger Magic, Marina Warner argues that Thousand and One Nights inspires a way of thinking about writing and the making of literature as forms of dreams that draw away from art as mimesis and emphasize instead the “agency of literature” (27). Warner notes that the dream quality of the Nights depends on a feature of the storytelling mode, adding, “When the stories use language to institute impossible realities, images become reality and metaphor’s status is dissolved so that any referent becomes fact” (147). This notion of images becoming reality and the figurative becoming the literal challenges our naïve assumption that story is mimetic and that plot is paramount. Like Flaubert, who once said “I don’t give a damn about the story, the plot” (Raitt), Alice Munro has always scorned realism and plot. When Geoff Hancock asked her in 1983 if the meaning of a story was more important to her than event, Munro, well aware of the tradition of the short story since Chekhov, replied, “What happens as event doesn’t really much matter. When the event becomes the thing that matters, the story isn’t working too well” (81). Munro has often said that she prefers the short story to the novel because when she writes a short story she gets a kind of tension that the novel does not provide. In her brief essay, “What is Real,” she says that she does not approach a story as if it were a road, with neat diversions along the way, but as if it were a house, with connections between one enclosed space and another: “When I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure” (224). The novel form usually gains reader assent to its reality by the creation of enough details to make readers feel they know the experience in the same way they know external reality. However, in the short story, details are transformed into metaphoric meaning by the thematic demands of the story that organize them by repetition and parallelism into meaningful patterns. The modern short story from Chekhov to Munro creates metaphorically meaningful reality by focusing on detail in a highly compressed, highly patterned

28

Alice Munro

form. Chekhov once insisted that it is “compactness that makes short things alive” (82), for he knew that what makes a short story “alive” is not that it be teeming with the details of everyday reality, but rather that it be a unified artistic entity. As many writers have noted, pattern has always dominated over plausibility in the short story. V. S. Pritchett once said, for example, that the short story “answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience” (113). Although Alice Munro has often been praised as a realist in the tradition of Chekhov, such a judgment oversimplifies the art of both Chekhov and Munro. When Chekov’s stories were first translated into English, critics argued that the most striking feature of his stories was their “naturalness” or “storylessness,” that instead of being based on artifice they were based on “life.” Gradually, however, some critics began to suspect that more “art” was involved in Chekhov’s stories than appeared on their deceptively casual surface. In addition to calling him a realist, for example, E. M. Forster suggested that Chekhov was primarily a poet (Emeljanow 138). John Middleton Murry argued that Chekhov’s stories were more “nakedly aesthetic” than those of any writer before him (Emeljanow 205), while Conrad Aiken claimed that Chekhov’s genius was primarily lyrical in his manipulation of feeling or mood rather than plot or thought (151). Recently, critics have begun to realize that Munro’s fiction is also only apparently “realistic.” Merilyn Simonds, in a review of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in Montreal Gazette, says that the structure of Munro’s stories seems haphazard and random as life, but the stories are tightly structured, “the rippling consequences of every action driving the narrative toward its surprising conclusion, one that, in retrospect, seems inevitable.” Simonds says the stories end with a shock wave like that you feel when you look in the rearview mirror and “realize the landscape you’ve just driven through is not at all what you thought it was” (11). Mona Simpson, in her Atlantic Monthly review of Hateship, approvingly quotes Alan Gurganus, who calls Munro “our greatest and most subtle surrealist. The plainest of surfaces ignite with the fugitive erotic undertow” (131).

“The Key to the Treasure”

29

“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” Although Alice Munro says she eschews plot, she has acknowledged that the titular story is the one most dependent on plot in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Feinberg), although the plot that gives it structure is not realistic but rather an ironic variation of one of the most traditional plots of the fairy tale. The story opens with the “once upon a time” fable device: “Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture” (3). It quickly establishes its central theme of “great expectations” with this unnamed woman planning for the future because she expects that certain important things are going to happen. She seems so certain about the future that when the ticket agent asks if someone is coming to meet her, she does not hesitate to say “Yes,” although she has no knowledge that this is true. In the second scene, when the woman, who is now given the name Johanna, goes to a dress shop to buy her wedding dress, she thinks that when she was younger, she could not have contemplated such “expectations,” could not have had the “preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss” (8). Thus, the story begins with what was once traditionally the most important expectation that a fair young maiden could have—marriage. However, this woman is neither young nor fair—“No beauty queen, ever.” She reminds the agent of a “plain-clothes nun” he had once seen on television, although there is nothing mild nor gentle about this woman (7). The first description we have of her is that her “teeth are crowded together in the front of her mouth, as if they were ready for an argument” (3). She has no illusions, calling herself a “sow’s ear” regardless of the “silk purse” dress she tries on (10). The sales woman identifies with Johanna and has her try on a different dress that does not make her look as she has been “stuck into the garment for a joke,” introducing the reader to the unifying joke theme that has led to Johanna’s expectations. When she recalls that marriage had not been mentioned, even in the “last letter,” she regrets that she has revealed to this woman “what she was counting on”—an

30

Alice Munro

intimation of the children’s counting game that gives the story its title. The sales woman’s lament, “Ah, well. Maybe the man in the moon will walk in here and fall in love with me and then I’ll be all set” echoes the classic fairy-tale motif of “someday my prince will come” (13). Sexuality is less actual than game and fantasy in the story. Sabitha tells Edith about her visit with her cousins, how they played games in which they pulled down a girl’s pajama bottoms to show if she had hair. They told stories about girls at boarding school who did things with hairbrush handles, and how once a couple of cousins put on a show in which one girl gets on top of the other and pretends to be the boy, groaning and carrying on. Later when they write another mock letter, Sabitha suggests that her father should say he imagines Johanna reading his letters in bed with her nightgown on and that he would crush her in his arms and suck her “titties.” Edith does not write this, but she does end the letter with Boudreau saying he imagines her reading his letter in bed with her nightgown on and crushing her in his arms. As a result of this first imaginative intimation of sexual intimacy, Johanna decides to send the furniture and go West with it. Having been brought to Boudreau’s hotel by a romantic fantasy, Johanna finds only gritty reality. Boudreau is ill and his life is in disarray. Shifting perspective immediately, she checks the color of his phlegm and changes into old clothes, taking control and referring to her and Boudreau as “we.” Because Johanna decides never to mention the letters in which he had “laid himself open to her,” neither one of them ever know how this has come about. Johanna thinks there is nothing in Boudreau that she cannot handle and is taken up with all the commotion of this relationship, all this “busy love.” Indeed, the story might well have ended with this phrase, but since it has to do with expectation and making things happen, we see the results of Edith’s story-making in a newspaper death notice for Mr. McCauley, which states that he is survived by his granddaughter Sabitha, his son-in-law Ken Boudreau, Mr. Boudreau’s wife, Johanna and their infant son Omar. Once Johanna’s “happy ending” plot story has come to a fairy-tale culmination, we shift to Edith, who is no longer afraid of being found out, although she does not know how the plot she laid ended as it did or why it has not been discovered. She senses that it all adds up to a cautionary tale about the storyteller, who risks having her story get out of hand when her characters insist on a life of their own:

“The Key to the Treasure”

31

It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her—it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar? (54) Edith’s translation of the first line of Horace’s famous ode “Carpe Diem” undercuts the “great expectations” theme announced in the first paragraph: “You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know what fate has in store for me, or for you” (54). And, just in case the reader might not “get the joke” of the story’s playful use of an Arabian Nights–type story, there’s Edith’s quizzical question about having been responsible for the existence of a person named Omar, an Arabic name meaning “flourishing,” and the name of the twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayaam.

“Floating Bridge” Just as many stories in Thousand and One Nights depend on a magical object and the compulsion to tell or write a story, “Floating Bridge” announces in its title the magical “flying carpet” type object of a bridge that floats. It opens with the central character Jinny sitting in a bus stop shelter reading the graffiti on the walls: “She felt herself connected at present with the way people felt when they had to write certain things down” (56). The need to write things down is common in Munro’s stories, for one is compelled to tell a story to control the experience, or at least to redeem it from meaninglessness and give it significance. We get some bits and pieces about Jinny’s visit to an oncologist, but we don’t know what the visit means yet, although obviously we suspect Jinny has cancer. Ironically, as we soon find out, the oncologist has told her there are good signs that the cancer has shrunk. She does not tell her husband the news, for he has brought a young woman, Helen, who they may hire to help care for her, and when he is around another person, his behavior becomes animated, enthusiastic, ingratiating. The cancer has given Jinny a feeling of an “unspeakable excitement,” for it promises to release her from all responsibility for her life.

32

Alice Munro

When Neal, Jinny, and Helen get to the mobile home of Matt and June Bergson, the man who comes out of the trailer is fat enough to have breasts “and you could see his navel pushing out like a pregnant woman’s” (69). While Neal is in the trailer eating chili and drinking beer to show that he is not “too good” for them, Jinny goes into the cornfield, thinking she will lie down in the shade of the large coarse leaves. A striking image is evoked here of each stalk having its cob “like a baby in a shroud” (73). Readers looking for a realistic explanation of the story might think that perhaps Jinny has had a stillborn child, but nothing in the story suggests such a surface interpretation. It is more apt to suggest something about Jinny’s own unexpressed desires. When eighteen-year-old Ricky, June’s son, arrives, Jinny does not know how long she has been waiting for Neal, for she does not wear a watch; nor does the young man—suggesting the timelessness of the encounter about to take place. When the boy drives Jinny home, there is no one on the road, which sustains the sense being out of time and place. When Ricky stops, Jinny realizes that she is on a narrow bridge with still water underneath. When he says he is going to show her something like she has never seen before, she thinks that if this were happening in her old normal life, she would be frightened: “If she was back in her old, normal life she would not be here at all” (82). But it is precisely the point of the story that Jinny is not in her normal life—that death and disarray have put her outside normality. Jinny walks on the planks of the bridge like the deck of a boat that rises and falls, feeling that the trees and reed beds around her are on saucers of earth and the road is a floating ribbon, underneath which all is water. This notion of being on something that has the illusion of solidity, but is shifting and insecure, is a central motif of the story’s theme. Jinny suddenly realizes she does not have her hat and her bald head is bare. And it is in this moment of vulnerability that Ricky slips his arm around her and kisses her on the mouth. “It seemed to her that this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story, all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving, a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied” (84).When Ricky says it is the first time he has kissed a married woman and she says he will probably kiss more, he is “amazed and sobered by the thought of what lay ahead,” evoking

“The Key to the Treasure”

33

the theme of the future again. Jinny thinks of Neal back on dry land having his fortune told, “rocking on the edge of his future.” She feels a “lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given” (85). Munro’s use of the final metaphor of the floating bridge is typical of her art, as well as a tendency of the short story in general to reconcile complex moral issues aesthetically since they seem to be impervious to reconciliation any other way. The story’s structure plays a balancing act similar to that required of walking on a floating bridge. The firmness of solid ground is only an illusion; all around lies the danger of loss of self. But even though the bridge seems shifting and tentative, it is sufficient if one is content to live in the realm of the unsure. Munro’s story reflects this tentative and delicate balancing. This ending is a classic short-story encounter, for it is unmotivated and unexpected, making Jinny aware of the ultimate possibilities that exist only in the imagination. She has experienced the freedom of facing death and miraculously been given back her life, and this joy of not being anchored but pleasantly adrift, between one place and another, gently swaying on instability, is a classic example of how the short story often resolves the unresolvable by metaphor.

“Nettles” The first page of “Nettles” juxtaposes three different time periods: summer, 1979, when the central character walks into the kitchen of her friend Sunny and sees a man standing at the counter making himself a ketchup sandwich; some time much later as she is driving northeast of Toronto with her second husband, idly looking for the house, but failing to find it; and the distant past, when the narrator was a child drinking from a well and thinking of “black rocks where the water ran sparkling like diamonds” (157). In this magical childhood period, the eight-year-old narrator and her nine-year-old friend Mike McCallum wash the dog in tomato soup after he was sprayed by a skunk, suggesting to the narrator the ominous notion of washing him in blood. She wonders how many people or horses or elephants it would take to supply that much blood. Familiar with animal killing, she recalls the wire shed with “the long, pale horse

34

Alice Munro

carcasses hung from brutal hooks” and the “trodden blood-soaked ground” where they had magically changed from live horses into supplies of meat (159). A future storyteller, she describes the way she sees things, such as the trees which have an attitude and presence—the elms serene, the oat threatening, the maples friendly and workaday, the hawthorn old and crabby—recognizing that her friend saw them differently than she did: “my way was by its very nature incommunicable, so that it had to stay secret” (159). Her view of reality is the view of the writer, who sees a magic world of spirit and transformations and the ideal. His is the profane, secular world of everyday reality. The childhood memory focuses on both the idyllic sense that life is an adventure that will never change and the anxiety that the future threatens unknown dangers. She and Mike wade in the river and walk to the bridge that separates the country from the town, which is a demarcation line separating two worlds. When she goes into the shadow of the bridge where she has never been before, she is frightened of this movement into a strange other country. She and Mike join the boys and girls in a game of war, using balls of clay as weapons. When Mike is injured, she presses leaves to his forehead and to his “pale, tender stomach, with its sweet and vulnerable belly button” (163). Although the emphasis here is on flesh, it is idealized flesh. When the hired man sees them after they have been rolling in the mud and says, “First thing you know you gonna have to get married,” her mother reproves him, claiming they are more like brothers and sisters. The narrator knows that the hired man is closer to the truth, adding they were more like “sturdy and accustomed sweethearts, whose bond needs not much outward expression” (164). She says she knows the hired man was talking about sex, and she hated him for it, for she knows he is wrong: “We did not go in for any showings and rubbings and guilty intimacies—there was none of that bothered search for hiding places, none of the twiddling pleasure and frustration and immediate, raw shame” (164). The narrator makes a distinction between her feelings for Mike and those specific sexual “escapades,” which she would only consider with those who disgusted her, “as those randy abhorrent itches disgusted me with myself.” She worships the “back of his neck and the shape of his head . . . his smell.” With him the “localized

“The Key to the Treasure”

35

demon was transformed into a diffuse excitement and tenderness spread everywhere under the skin” (165). The story shifts to the time of the central event when she goes to visit her friend Sunny and encounters Mike again. The early poetic images are now justified when we learn that after her divorce she lives alone, hoping to make her living as a writer: “The idea of being so far freed from domesticity enchanted me.” Idealized sexuality is an important theme in the story. She wants to brush against Mike, to lay a finger against his bare neck. When she sleeps in the same sheets he has slept in, she says she does not have a peaceful night, for it is like sleeping with a phantom, a trace of the past. “In my dreams, though not in reality, they smelled of water-weeds, river-mud, and reeds in the hot sun” (176). And as they drive to the golf course, she idealizes them as a couple with her in the wife’s seat, feeling a kind of adolescent girl’s pleasure. On the golf course, she feels all she has to do is just follow him around, give him an “amplified, an extended notion of himself.” She says a pleasure comes over her on the links. “Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back now into a tidy pilot flame, attentively, wifely” (180). An idealization, this has all the pleasures of imagining the physical, while not engaging in it. When the rain begins, they go into the tall weeds that grow between the golf course and the river, as in a childhood retreat. “It was almost as if we were looking through a window, and not quite believing that the window would shatter, until it did, and rain and wind hit us, all together, and my hair was lifted and fanned out above my head. I felt as if my skin might do that next” (181–82). This creates a magical enchanted enclosure surrounded by the storm where she is transformed into an otherworldly creature in another country. Mike covers her with his body. “Then we kissed and pressed together briefly. This was more of a ritual, a recognition of survival rather than of our bodies’ inclinations.” (182). It is as close to physical sex as they get, like the kiss on the magical bridge in “Floating Bridge.” Back at the house, they are so covered with welts and blotches from the nettles that the doctor says they must have been rolling in them—an echo of rolling in the mud when they were children. She says their adventure had caused a teasing excitement in her friends, but that if they had brought back evidence of real misdoing they would have not been so charmed:

36

Alice Munro

Love that was not usable, that knew its place. (Some would say not real, because it would never risk getting its neck wrung, or turning into a bad joke, or sadly wearing out.) Not risking a thing yet staying alive as in a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal. (186–87) This is the key passage in the story about love as an idealization. The “underground resource” echoes the deep well, the well that is not just a hole in the ground but rather a mystery and the well mentioned at the beginning of the story in which she imagines are diamonds. The final paragraph about the large plants called joe-pye weed and the stinging nettles is a coda that suggests the insignificant that is significant and the imagined that is more real than actuality. What holds novels together is more familiar to readers than what unifies short stories. In order to sustain a long narrative, there usually has to be enough “stuff” to make the narrative long—for example, social context, physical setting, multiple characters, multiple events, ruminations, ideas, etc.—all to keep things moving, one thing after another usually in a long linear line in time. In short narratives, the writerly compulsion is not to keep the whole mechanism moving, but rather to make it cohere and mean something. In a novel, what happens on page six does not have to be closely related to what happens on page two hundred and thirty-five. However, in a short story, what happens in line six should have something to do with what happens in line two hundred and thirty-five. A novel can unwind in an illusion of natural sequence, heading on into the future or recollecting the past, going on and on seemingly indefinitely. However, a short story, even if it does move onward in time or backward in recollection, seems to be compelled by some inner necessity to “signify.” Like a magic incantation that the storyteller is compelled to articulate in precisely the proper fashion, Alice Munro’s stories are always much more driven by desire and the need for meaningful narrative than by the merely “real.”

“Post and Beam” This compulsion for the short story to “mean” something—to hold together by virtue of its “theme” rather than by virtue of

“The Key to the Treasure”

37

its characters or plot—is also exemplified by “Post and Beam,” developed by an emerging pattern of repeated and related “motifs” that come together like a poem or a piece of music rather than like a mimetic mirror of so-called “real life.” This has been true for the short story since Edgar Allan Poe developed the first theory of short fiction. For Poe, the purpose of the story is not to mirror the external world but to create a self-contained realm of reality; “plot” is not merely a series of sequential events to arouse suspense, but rather overall pattern, design, or harmony. Only pattern, not realistic cause-and-effect, can make the separate elements of the work meaningful. “Post and Beam” has a thematic threshold—a brief dialogue account in which the character Lionel tells that just before his mother died, she asked for her makeup, saying, “This will take about an hour” (188). When she finishes and he says that it didn’t take an hour, she says she hadn’t meant that—that she had meant to die. Since the mother plays no major role in the events that follow, we suspect that this introit is related to the meaning or theme of the story, not simply its plot. Since Lionel has had a nervous breakdown and has had shock treatments that have impaired his memory, he wants Lorna to tell him her stories. Lorna tells him that her only memory of her mother was when they were downtown and saw on the Post Office clock that the time had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to on the radio: “She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening” (192). This motif of the mystery of what people do when you are absent, and more broadly the mystery of what “reality” actually is, is one of the central themes of the story. In another reference to the mystery of what happens when you are absent, Lionel tells a story about his own mother taking him to a museum and how he was scared of the mummies, for she told him they were not “really” dead, but could get out of their cases when everyone went home. The concept of what is “really” real echoes throughout the story, for Lorna is one of those typical Alice Munro women who has longings for another man, but does nothing about it, for she does not want Lionel “really,” but rather ideally. One of the central images in the story to suggest that Lorna’s desire for Lionel is ideal rather than real occurs when she goes to his

38

Alice Munro

room “to be for a moment inside the space where he lived, breathe his air, look out his window.” She wants to stay in this room where there was “nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle” (203). This notion of freedom from all actual connections is also central to the story “Family Furnishings.” For Munro such a deeply held attitude is one of the paradoxes of the artist, who coldly transforms the stuff of reality into the artifice of the story. Echoing those memories of the mystery of what happens when one is absent, Lorna worries what might happen to Polly while she is away from her—that she might commit suicide. Munro uses the verb tense of imaginary hypothetical events to describe her fear: “They would find the door locked. They would unlock it and try to push it open but be unable to because of the lump of Polly’s body against it” (208). Lorna imagines a story—how Polly’s body would look, what she would be wearing, “Her long pale legs dangling down, her head twisted fatally on its delicate neck” (208). This theme of mysterious, unseen, hypothetical or imaginary events continues when Lorna remembers a time when she had been alone with Polly for a day and Polly had left her to go to the store, taking her outside and telling her to stay there until she returned. When she comes back she kisses Lorna all around her head, for the thought had occurred to her that she might have been spotted by kidnappers. “She had prayed all the way back for this not to have happened” (209). Lorna thinks of this bargain she made on the drive home and realizes it is not a bargain at all, for it has no specificity; it is a promise that has no meaning. But as she tried out various possibilities, almost as if she were “shaping this story to be told to somebody . . . as an entertainment,” she thinks, “Give up reading books” (217). This story emphasizes one of Alice Munro’s central themes—the need to transform experience into narrative. Lorna sits on the bed tired by all this “sport, this irrelevance,” all these possibilities of a story. “What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen” (217–18). If one focuses only on plot and character in this story, it doesn’t seem to be about much of anything, except Polly’s unhappiness at not having what Lorna has, and Lorna’s schoolgirl crush on

“The Key to the Treasure”

39

Lionel—the stuff of popular fiction. But Alice Munro is concerned about something more profound than this. In an interview in The Atlantic, she said she is interested in how people make stories about their lives—what they put in and leave out and how they use stories to see themselves or make life bearable: “Very few people seem to want to see their lives in terms of one pointless thing after another” (Feinberg). She explores the complex human problem of not knowing what motivates the other. Only by reading the story more than once, identifying the persistent theme that keeps repeating throughout, and then reorganizing the themes in a meaningful pattern, does one begin to understand and thus appreciate the subtlety and complexity of Munro’s exploration of the universal human situation of not knowing what the other is thinking, not knowing how to make the right decisions about our behavior with the other, not knowing what is happening when we are not present—and feeling helpless in face of this lack of knowledge.

“What is Remembered” The uses of memory are the same as the uses of story, since to be meaningful memory is always cast in the form of narrative. The title of the story “What is Remembered” and its introit about a seemingly irrelevant memory introduce the reader to its theme. The central character Meriel recalls that when she was a young woman putting on white summer gloves and remembering something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand was quoted as saying in a magazine—a bit of advice from the Parisian fashion designer Balmain, who told her, “Always wear white gloves. It’s best” (219). The introit, evoking a memory within a memory, prepares us for a story about the nature and uses of memory. We then shift to some time after this introductory incident, when Meriel and her husband Pierre are getting ready to go to a funeral of Pierre’s best friend Jonas. When Jonas came to visit, he liked to talk about the past and became irritated when the conversation turned to the present. At the funeral service, the minister further suggests the theme the story develops—being caught in time in which we cannot know the future and seem dissociated from the past, comparing Jonas’s life to a baby in the womb: “If the baby could somehow be informed of what would happen to it in the near

40

Alice Munro

future, would it not be incredulous, as well as afraid. . . . The baby is lapped in its ignorance” (224). Meriel wants to visit an old woman her mother had admired, after whom she is named—a common Munro use of a folktale technique of doubling. The bush doctor, Asher, who had been looking after Jonas and has flown down to the funeral, offers to drive Meriel to visit her mother’s old friend—a gesture that Meriel senses has little to do with courtesy and something to do with her; this knowledge changes her: “Something had happened to her. She had a sudden mysterious sense of power and delight, as if with every step she took, a bright message was travelling from her heels to the top of her skull” (229). Meriel feels there is some betrayal of the past stirring in the old woman: “Some degradation was in the offing. Meriel was upset by this, remotely excited” (231). The old woman tells of her youth when she says she was a devil, and she and her friends had adventures that were rituals, all according to a script. As she tells stories that hint of sexual encounters, Meriel is “distracted, play-acting.” The doctor and Meriel give each other a stealthy, almost married glance, “its masquerade and its bland intimacy arousing to those who were after all not married” (232). There are a number of references in this section of the story to following a script, engaging in a ritual, pretending—all having to do with sex and storytelling. The motifs of masquerade and playing a role are common ones in folktale and fairy tale. When they are in regard to sex, as they often are, they suggest the magic of Carnival, or stepping outside of one’s everyday world and engaging in a fantasy world, a kind of alternate reality. In the car, Meriel and the doctor speak like “caricatures,” until, “unable to put up with this anymore,” Meriel says, “take me somewhere else.” When she remembers this moment, she believes that the phrase, “Take me somewhere else,” rather than “Let’s go somewhere else” is important. “The risk, the transfer of power. Complete risk and transfer. Let’s go—that would have the risk, but not the abdication, which is the start for her—in all her reliving of this moment—of the erotic slide” (235). The “erotic slide” exists in “what is remembered,” not necessarily in the moment. But of course the narrative moment is always in the past, is always what is remembered, and thus in the control of the one remembering, being used by the one remembering for her own purposes, and always being amended, altered, and added to, as if it were a story of her own invention.

“The Key to the Treasure”

41

When Meriel thinks back on their going to an apartment where the doctor has been staying, she says she would have wished for another scene, and so in her memory she substitutes the one that she prefers—a hotel in West Vancouver. “There she would have to cross the little lobby with head bowed and arms clinging to her sides, her whole body permeated with exquisite shame. And he would speak to the desk clerk in a low voice that did not advertise, but did not conceal or apologize for their purpose” (236). She creates a new scene using the “she would, he would” tense of what might happen but did not except in what is remembered/created: Why did she conjure up, why did she add that scene? It was for the moment of exposure, the piercing sense of shame and pride that took over her body as she walked through the (pretend) lobby, and for the sound of his voice, its discretion and authority speaking to the clerk the words that she should not quite make out. (236) The experience will take on significance for Meriel if she can set it all in order, “none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside” (237). That the key to the treasure is the memory, that is, the story itself, is echoed in Meriel’s memory of her conversation with her husband about Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, in which she argues that Anna Sergeyevna should have had the sexual encounter with Bazarov. When Pierre says she is simply wrenching things around to make a happy ending, she says that at least Anna and Bazarov would have had the memory or the story, even though nothing actually ever came of it. As Meriel goes home on the ferry, she knows that what she had to go through was “wave after wave of intense recollection. And this was what she would continue to go through—at gradually lengthening intervals—for years to come. She would keep picking up things she’d missed, and these would still jolt her” (239). Thus, the power of the encounter lies in the mind of the one remembering, and the reality of it is in the memory: “Sudden recollection of even their early, unsure, and tentative moments could still make her fold in on herself, as if to protect the raw surprise of her own body, the racketing of desire. My love—my love, she would mutter in a harsh, mechanical way, the words a secret poultice” (239–40).

42

Alice Munro

Years later when she learns that the doctor has died, this does not affect her daydreams in which she imagines a chance meeting or an arranged reunion, for they had never really a “foothold on reality,” and did not have to be revised because he was dead. On the ferry that night, she thinks: in a certain kind of story—not the kind that anyone wrote anymore—the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body pumped up with a sweet self-esteem. A romantic act that could be seen—from a forbidden angle—as supremely rational. (241) She understands the doctor’s refusal to kiss goodbye to be a kind of cautioning to save her from “false hopes and humiliation of a certain kind of mistake,” for it forces her to give up any idea of sustaining the relationship except as an idea, a dream, a fantasy, a manipulation of the past into a story. By insisting on a faithful adherence to the external world, advocates of realism allow content, often ragged and random, to dictate form. As a result, the novel, which can expand to better create an illusion of everyday reality, is the favored form of the realists, while the short story, which requires more artifice and patterning, assumes a secondary role. In her Paris Review interview, Joy Williams told Paul Winner that the short story was devious, “it pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade.” Michael Ravitch, in his Hateship review, notes that at first Munro’s stories seem plain, but over and over she uncovers in trivial events the “deepest dramas of the inner life. Her stories attain the strangeness and exhilaration of perfectly realized dreams”(161). In order to appreciate a good short story, one has to read it more than once, for it usually does not exist as a temporal, “one thing after another,” plot line in which some interesting character gets involved in a dilemma and somehow manages it. However, most people do not want to read a story more than once, for they think of a piece of fiction as an account of a temporal action that tells a story, not a work of art that is always there for further observation or deliberation. People don’t feel this way about a

“The Key to the Treasure”

43

piece of music, which they might listen to over and over again, or a painting or sculpture, which they might look at many times. Stories are more dependent on artifice, pattern, structure, language, and significance than novels, which are more dependent on “what happened”—just as paintings are more pattern, color, and design than a “mirror in the roadway.” The secret of Alice Munro’s short stories is that she is able to suggest universal, unspoken human desires—preferring meaningful fantasy to the insignificant actual, aesthetic disengagement to physical entanglement, and the memoried past to the simple present—by describing what seems to be ordinary everyday reality. An important point about the short story as a genre, from Scheherazade to Alice Munro, is that to understand a particular story the reader must have some understanding of the nature of story and storytelling, especially the fact that good short stories are most often about some universal aspect of human desire and that “realism” is never an adequate means by which to understand those mysteries. This is one of the problems readers have with great short stories, like those written by Alice Munro. Even many who like Munro’s stories like them for what seems to be their realistic focus on ordinary people and recognizable stuff, while all the time Munro’s stories subtly communicate a mysterious subterranean experience that only language—not ordinary reality—can communicate. The treasure of Alice Munro’s stories is that both sex and storytelling are powerful acts of the imagination. And the key to that treasure is that her stories, like the stories of Scheherazade, are bound together by obsessively repeated motifs that unify them—not to reflect everyday reality, but to explore the subterranean mysteries of human desire that create the alternate reality of “story” itself.

2 Teaching and Conflict in Munro from “The Day of the Butterfly” to “Comfort” Tracy Ware

Teachers have always known that it was not necessary for the students of strange customs to cross the seas to find material. Folklore and myth, tradition, taboo, magic rites, ceremonials of all sorts, collective representations, participation mystique, all abound in the front yard of every school, and occasionally they creep upstairs and are incorporated into the more formal portions of school life. —Willard Waller (103)

In The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (2014), Dana Goldstein asks, “Why are American teachers both resented and idealized, when teachers in other nations are much more universally respected?” (4). Education may be less contentious in Canada (Walker and von Bergmann 67), but if the many teachers in Alice Munro’s work are representative, the ambivalence that Goldstein regards as nationally distinctive is more profoundly rooted. Munro’s first published story, “The Dimensions

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

45

of a Shadow” (1950), concerns a young female teacher who feels “fettered . . . in the neat routine of the little town” [1]; for Ildikó de Papp Carrington, the story reveals Munro’s “fear that intelligence and imagination are the outsider’s stigmata” (Controlling 208). Other early stories emphasize the vulnerability of female students and teachers alike. In this chapter, I will discuss teachers in Munro’s earlier work in order to provide a context for “Comfort” from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001).1 Since “Comfort” concerns the suicide of Lewis Spiers, a charismatic teacher who ignites a controversy about teaching evolution, the story is unusually topical for Munro. It is focalized by his wife Nina, a former teacher who stepped down “when Latin was phased out”: “She was just as glad, secretly, to no longer be working in the same place, and at the same sort of job, as Lewis. The force of his personality, the unsettling style of his teaching, made enemies as well as friends, and it was a rest, for her, not to be in the thick of it” (128–29). That she is still very much in the thick of it is apparent when she remembers their first argument: after her choral society sang in a church, she was taken aback to learn “what a deep dislike Lewis had of these places. She argued that there often wasn’t any other suitable space available and it didn’t mean that the music was religious (though it was a bit hard to argue this when the music was the Messiah” (129). Soon they are having a “great row”: A fight like this was stunning, revealing not just how much he was on the lookout for enemies, but how she too was unable to abandon argument which escalated into rage. Neither of them would back off, they held bitterly to principles. Can’t you tolerate people being different, why is this so important? If this isn’t important, nothing is. The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. (129) Until Nina eventually resolves her feelings in a memorable ending, she is caught between Lewis and the creationists who persecute him, and part of the problem is that he is a devoted teacher: looking at his corpse, she sees “the deep-set bright eyes and the twitchy mouth and the facility of expression, the fast-changing display of creases that effected his repertoire of mockery, disbelief, ironic patience,

46

Alice Munro

suffering disgust. A classroom repertoire—and not always confined there” (123). Like Roberta in “Labor Day Dinner” and Pauline in “The Children Stay,” Nina lived with a charismatic teacher who could never really leave the classroom; she would understand Pauline’s friend’s question: “How can you stand the nonstop show?” (Love 195). In the middle of her career, Munro shifts her attention from nervous female students to charismatic male teachers, but the mixed feelings remain.

Classroom antics As David F. Labaree notes in his history of American public schools, “in many ways the school system’s greatest social impact has come from its power to allocate social access and social advantage. And this was more the result of which students entered school and which graduated from it than of what they learned in between” (Someone 3). “It was the form of schooling more than its content” that mattered (Someone 165), Labaree argues, and that causes a conflict: “Students may have to be in school and they may even want to be there, but they are not necessarily there to learn, at least not to learn the official curriculum. If they learn school subjects while attending school, it is because a teacher has actively worked to make that happen” (Someone 137). There are influential teachers throughout Munro’s work, but two early stories from Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) address problems of “social access and social advantage.” In “Day of the Butterfly,” one of Munro’s earliest stories,2 Helen remembers her complicity in the harsh treatment of Myra Sala, a poor girl who became ill in the sixth grade. Helen has her own status anxieties as someone who “should not have been going to the town school at all, but to a country school nearby where there were half a dozen pupils and a teacher a little demented since her change of life” (103); her mother, however, ambitious like Munro’s own mother (Thacker, Alice 57), “had prevailed on the town trustees to accept [her] and [her] father to pay the extra tuition” (103). So Helen feels the pressure to join the other students’ isolation of Myra, whose immigrant parents run a fruit store, leaving her to look after her little brother. Helen remains detached when her teacher, “a cold gentle girl who wore glasses with thin gold rims and in the still solicitude of certain poses

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

47

resembled a giraffe”(100),“was apt to watch us from a window and sometimes come out, looking brisk and uncomfortable, to stop a fight among the little girls or start a running game among the big ones, who had been huddled together playing Truth or Secrets” (101). “Poor Miss Darling!” exclaims Helen in retrospect, “Her campaigns were soon confused, her persuasions turned to bleating and uncertain pleas” (102). When a group of students visits Myra in hospital, Helen is uncomfortably singled out, then glad to be “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” (110). If the story provides a disturbing glimpse of Helen following her peers while recognizing their cruelty, her retrospective self-criticism implies that Miss Darling may have had some influence after all. In “Red Dress—1946,” first published in The Montrealer in December of 1964, the protagonist is older, the teacher more ineffectual, and both more vulnerable. “At high school I was never comfortable for a minute,” says the unnamed narrator (149), distressed by the sexual tensions in her class: “I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front” (150). At the worst moments, the teacher’s voice became as “unreliable” as the narrator’s, and, when she left the room in tears, “the boys made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter—oh, mine too—pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me” (150). As she explains in a passage that illuminates much of Munro’s early work, “what was really going on in the school was not Business Practice and Science and English,” but “the tension and excitement of sexual competition” (150), and most of the story concerns a dance at which Raymond Bolting becomes her “rescuer”(160). At that point, the English teacher and the curriculum hardly matter. There is a range of teachers in Lives of Girls and Women (1971), from the vulnerable Miss Farris to the oppressive Miss Forbes, with the teachers in Del Jordan’s family history complicating her perspective. Del’s maternal grandmother taught briefly (78), and Del’s mother, who would have become a teacher if she could have afforded Normal School, was inspired by Miss Rush, who gave her clothing and eau de cologne and taught her sewing and music before marrying late and dying in childbirth (78–79).3 Like Helen

48

Alice Munro

in “Day of the Butterfly,” Del is caught between town and country, going from her Flats Road home to school in Jubilee. Even at a young age she can write well enough to help Uncle Benny, who “said that the teacher at school had beat him and beat him, trying to beat writing into him, and he respected her for it, but it never did any good” (11). Del is a top student, but she is unable to please her Household Science teacher; “jolly” with other students, Miss Forbes berates Del for her sewing: “Look at the filthy work, filthy work! I’ve heard about you, you think you’re so clever with your memory work . . . and here you take stitches any six-year-old would be ashamed of” (102–03). Eventually she tells Del to clean the room, “and when you are not doing that you can sit at the table back here and—memorize poetry, for all I care”(104). Miss Forbes may have spoken too harshly, but Del feels as if her prayers to escape Household Science have been answered. Miss Forbes has learned to survive by becoming what Willard Waller calls “a despot ruling over the petty concerns of children” (59). As Waller explains, “The teacher’s personality must be a little hard if it is to survive the strain of the hard situation in which the teacher is placed” (254). With Miss Farris, a grade three teacher, the strain is fatal. Though others joke about her interest in a male colleague, Del knows that “whatever she was after, it could not be Mr. Boyce . . . it could hardly even be men” (123). To Del she “seemed dry and wooden and innocent, her skating, after all, more of a schoolteacherish display of skill, than of herself” (122). As an unmarried teacher in her native town, Miss Farris is desperately isolated, facing the “sex prejudice” that seems to Waller “almost without parallel in modern life. Women teachers are our Vestal Virgins” (45).4 Del is frightened by Miss Farris’ absorption in the annual operetta, noticing “a tiny, dangerous hum of excitement that ran through her” (128). After the performance, Miss Farris “had cornstarch spilled down the front of her cerise-pink dress, and her chest actually looked concave, as if something had collapsed inside it” (139). Eventually she drowns in the Wawanash River, a probable suicide whose memory haunts Del: “She sent those operettas up like bubbles, shaped with quivering, exhausting effort, then almost casually set free, to fade and fade but hold trapped forever our transformed childish selves, her undefeated, unrequited love” (141). Since Del’s story also transforms her childish selves into art, Miss Farris is as important for Del as Miss Rush was for her mother.5

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

49

As is often the case with these two books, the schools and teachers in Who Do You Think You Are?/ The Beggar Maid (1978, 1979) echo those in Lives of Girls and Women. In the title story, Rose provokes Miss Hattie Milton, a high school English teacher “famous for . . . keeping order” (195), by memorizing a poem without writing it out first, as instructed. Miss Hattie sounds familiar when she rebukes Rose: “You can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?” (Who 196). And much as Del recognizes that Miss Forbes is not so severe with other students, Rose understands that Miss Hattie “was not taking revenge because she had not believed Rose and had been proved wrong. The lesson she was trying to teach here was more important to her than any poem, and one she truly believed Rose needed” (196). Earlier stories in this book add a sharp sense of class differences to the familiar contrast “between town and country” (“Half a Grapefruit,” Who 38), reflecting Munro’s own painful experience of school in Wingham’s Lower Town (Thacker, Alice 56). West Hanratty, where Rose lives, “ran from factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves” (“Royal Beatings,” Who 4). Crossing the bridge from West Hanratty to Hanratty is “going uptown,” but the teacher in “Privilege” moves in the other direction when she returns to teaching “in middle age” to support a sick husband (Who 28). “She showed no love of anything she taught, or anybody,” and she seems indifferent to the squalor of her school or the cruelties of her students: “What went on in the cloakroom, what lunchpail robbing or coat-slashing or pulling down pants there was, the teacher did not consider her affair.”6 Nonetheless, Rose is too interested in all aspects of the school to be miserable, and she provides a remarkable tribute to a school system that is not seen at its best here: “In the face of all that disruption, discomfort, impossibility, some thread of ordinary classroom routine was maintained; an offering. Some people learned to subtract. Some people learned to spell” (“Privilege,” Who 27–29). Rose does much better: she “wrote the Entrance, she went across the bridge, she went to high school,” with a “young and optimistic” teacher of Health and Guidance and vastly better facilities. She still faces class issues, for “West Hanratty was not represented, except by her,” but she is even more successful than Del, winning a scholarship for university. In addition to her lessons, Rose learns that “high school

50

Alice Munro

life was hazardous, in that harsh clean light, and nothing was ever forgotten” (“Half a Grapefruit,” Who 38–39). It is not until much later, however, that she learns how to turn her origins into stories of “legendary poverty” (“Royal Beatings,” Who 5). In two stories roughly contemporary with Who Do You Think You Are?, Munro turns from students to teachers, an interest foreshadowed in her first published story. Dorothy, the protagonist of “Marrakesh” (1974), taught Grade 7 from the time of her husband’s death until her retirement (Something 158), never seeking “to know anything but whether her pupils had grasped those principles of arithmetic and spelling, those facts of history and science and geography which it was her duty to teach them” (Something 166). In her later years, she had to attend courses in Toronto that were supposed to “enable her to introduce new methods and perspectives into her classroom teaching,” but a parenthetical remark undercuts the “infinite wisdom” of the Department of Education: “Naturally, she did nothing of the sort, but went on successfully teaching just as she always had” (Something 165–66). As Labaree explains, “A key reason that teachers often resist reform efforts may be that they are trying to preserve a form of teaching and learning that seems to work and to fend off an alternative approach that might not” (Someone 135). At seventy, Dorothy is now beyond such matters, seldom thinking “of the classroom where she had spent most of her life,” but “people were apt to forget that she had any life that might be called private. . . . Seeing her on the street, truck drivers, storekeepers, mothers pushing baby carriages—now, as a matter of fact, even grandmothers pushing baby carriages—would be reminded of maps, percentages, spelling bees, the serious but not oppressive, well-run, sensible, atmosphere of her class” (Something 158). For others, she remains a teacher, whether she recognizes it or not. And there are other things that Dorothy fails to recognize. She regards her granddaughter, a college teacher, as “a problem to understand” (Something 161), and “as a shy serious girl, a bit older than her pupils” (Something 166), when Jeanette, a “thirtyish woman” (Something 159), is nothing of the sort. When Dorothy sees Jeanette and Blair King embrace on the latter’s porch, her voyeurism (Carrington, Controllling 117) undermines the moral authority that she yearns for: “If she had been able to call out to them, Stop that, stop that at once! in her old schoolyard voice, it would have been a warning she called, more than a rebuke” (Something 173). “All the

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

51

world is not a classroom,” as Hazel says in “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass” (Friend 79), but Munro’s teachers find that hard to remember. Fearing a stroke, Dorothy returns to her house and tries to regain control, for “Strength is necessary, as well as something like gratitude, if you are going to turn into a lady peeping Tom at the end of your life” (Something 174). Add to that oddly conflicted ending her sense of looking “like a character to scare children, like an old Norse witch” (Something 172), and we realize that teaching has deformed her; as Waller notes, “If the teacher is to control understandingly it must be by the sacrifice of some of [her] own adulthood” (59). In “Accident” (1977), both Frances, the protagonist, and Ted, her lover, are teachers.7 After his son dies in a terrible accident, he decides to leave his family and marry Frances. Before the accident, they are about the only ones in Hanratty who think that their affair is a secret, Frances showing in this regard “a lack of small-town instincts, a trust and recklessness she is unaware of; this is what people mean when they say of her that it sure shows that she has been away” (80). Nonetheless, she is more sympathetically depicted than most of Munro’s teachers, in part because her absorption in her affair prevents her from identifying entirely with her job. She knows that neither she nor Ted can escape a conflict that she would prefer to ignore: She likes to think of him as diligent, patient, self-contained. But she knows, word has reached her, that his classroom behavior is different from what he has led her or anyone to believe. . . . The truth is, he gets his students’ attention by all sorts of tricks and cajolery; he makes use of props such as dunce hats and birthday whistles; he carries on in a highly melodramatic way over their stupidity, and once burned their test papers one by one in the sink. What a character, Frances has heard students say of him. She does not like hearing them say that. She is sure they say it of her, too; she herself is not above using extravagant tactics, tearing her fingers through her bushy hair lamenting no-no-no-no when they sing badly. But she would rather he did not have to do such things. (Moons 79–80) Waller may be too harsh when he argues that “the teacher is imprisoned within the stereotype” (420), but Ted and Frances

52

Alice Munro

cannot escape traditional roles: he teaches science and she music, and both adopt overbearing classroom personae. Here and elsewhere Frances admits her shortcomings without dwelling on them, and that distinguishes her from the teachers previously discussed. She even “likes her own looks, is usually cheered by her own face in the mirror”; other women, “at least in books,” may think “themselves less pretty than they really are,” but she “has to admit she may have an opposite problem. Not that she thinks herself pretty; just that her face seems lucky to her, and encouraging” (Moons 78). Her tendency to move away from her more painful self-recognitions bothers such critics as Coral Ann Howells, who finds that Frances “is continually coming up against perceptions that do not bear looking into any more than the bottles of biological specimens in the science supply room at school where she and Ted make love” (Alice 77).8 But Frances has a more interesting biological specimen before her, and what disturbs Howells strikes me as pragmatic. The story ends with her returning to Hanratty for her sister-in-law’s funeral after an absence of more than thirty years: “She’s had her love,” she thinks, “her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it” (Moons 109). “Accident” does not treat her career as a music teacher at length,9 but her spirited endurance makes Frances a welcome contrast to most of Munro’s teachers, and also to most of the other female characters in The Moons of Jupiter, who, in Lorna Irvine’s words, “act out plots of female desire, masochistic and apparently victimized” (93). Irvine is thinking of such characters as Roberta in “Labor Day Dinner”: in her reading, the story “describes an affair that is about to end. It is also a dramatic analysis of female masochism” (99). In my reading, the story is less masochistic and more comic than Irvine allows, in part because, as Irvine herself notes, “the central dinner that gives the story its title—like the dinner in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—brings order to the chaos of Roberta’s life and imposes apparent narrative coherence” (99), and in part because it is not merely Roberta’s story.10 As Ryan Melsom notes, the story is “focalized through Roberta, George, and Roberta’s elder daughter, Angela” (143), and the shifting focalization, extensive conversations, and overheard dialogue complicate the perspective, which also includes a daughter’s private journal. Roberta resists her own masochistic tendencies: when she and her family drive to

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

53

Valerie’s party, she “feels herself curling up like a jaundiced leaf,” but the next sentence reveals that “she know this to be a hysterical image” (Moons 136). When she reflects on her recent unhappiness with her partner George, she thinks “with self-pity—what she knows to be self-pity—rising and sloshing around in her like bitter bile” (Moons 137). Her mood shifts when she talks with her friend Valerie, who “steadies her, as always. Valerie makes what isn’t bearable interesting” (143). Valerie challenges Roberta’s claim that George will leave her because she left her husband: “I doubt if things happen so symmetrically,” says Valerie, and Roberta agrees: “I don’t think so, either, really” (149). Because the dinner party is a success, Roberta’s spirits improve, and therefore the near-collision that ends the story is not necessarily ominous for her relationship with George (for a contrary reading, see Melsom). George’s harsh comment about Roberta’s appearance certainly upsets her before the party, but there is more to their relationship, and so she hears Valerie talk about George “with great interest and a basic disregard, because what other people knew about George already seemed inessential to her. She was full of alarm and delight. Being in love was nothing she had counted on. The most she’d hoped for was a life like Valerie’s” (140). Because it deals with the new and uncertain situations that arose after conventional understandings of marriage were questioned, this story, first published in September of 1981 in the New Yorker, is profoundly contemporary. George has his own self-doubts when he thinks about Roberta and her children: “He knows his feelings on this matter are exaggerated, even comical; that does not help him. One of the things he has never wanted to be, and has avoided being, is a comic dad, a fulminator, a bungler” (Moons 146). In addition to their problems with each other, he and Roberta must also cope with her two teenaged daughters. From what we can see, he does quite well, for “he often can’t help liking Angela and Eva. They seem to him confused and appealing” (Moons 147), though of course they are uneasy with this new father figure. Moreover, George retains his classroom persona in retirement: “Rough joking was his habit, and it had been hugely successful in the classroom, where he had maintained a somewhat overdrawn, occasionally brutal, consistently entertaining character. He had done this with most of the other teachers as well, expressing his contempt for them so colorfully that they could not believe he meant it” (Moons 145).11 Now he finds it “exhausting” to act his former role

54

Alice Munro

“on the home front” (Moons 147). Furthermore, he had “learned to outmaneuver” boys, who “were the threat in a class. The girls he never bothered much about, beyond some careful sparring with the sexy ones. That is not in order here” (Moons 147). Like Munro’s other teachers, George is unlikely to change, and so he holds forth on translation, “a subject of which George knows little but about which he is soon making sweeping, provocative statements, true to his classroom technique” (Moons 154). At the least, he is a suitable dinner guest for Valerie, thoughtfully scything her lawn before dinner and playing along with the elaborate ironies that govern the occasion. She had been a counselor at the Toronto school at which George taught art, and she claims that he and Roberta “are her creation, the result of her totally inadvertent matchmaking” (Moons 139–40). Even his dominating the conversation does not disconcert a woman who “will throw herself headlong into any conversation to turn it off its contentious course, to make people laugh and calm down” (Moons 156). Because she has precisely this effect on George and Roberta, their relationship will survive awhile yet. In “The Children Stay,” which appeared in the New Yorker, December 22, 1997, Pauline’s marriage does not survive, and her husband’s identity as a teacher is one of the reasons. Brian is thirty, “though people were apt to say he didn’t act it” (Love 185). As Carrington notes, “even though Brian is a father, he cannot detach himself from his parents” (“Recasting” 195), who join him and Pauline for summer vacations, to her annoyance. Pauline feels that Brian’s father tries to “break through the structure of some explanation he had asked her for, and she had unwillingly but patiently given, and, with a seemingly negligent kick, knock it into rubble” (Love 192). Brian is almost as oppressive as he carries his “booming schoolroom voice” (Love 191) and his classroom manner into “his everyday life” (193): “He dominated his classes by keeping up a parade of jokes and antics, extending the role that he had always played, Pauline believed, with his mother and father. He acted dumb, he bounced back from pretended humiliations, he traded insults. He was a bully in a good cause—a chivvying cheerful indestructible bully” (193–94). He is by all accounts a good teacher, but Pauline notes that the principal praises him as “Your boy” (194). Teachers “must live in a universe of adolescent attitudes and values” (59), Waller argues, and “The persons who are happiest in these roles, and perhaps most successful in playing them, are

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

55

individuals who have never wholly made the transition from their own adolescence” (60). With his “long-drawn-out antics” (183) and his desire to relive “the holidays of his childhood” (Love 195), Brian is an example of this type.12 When her friend asks, “How can you stand the nonstop show?” Pauline responds, “‘That’s not the real Brian. . . . He’s different when we’re alone.’ But looking back, she wondered how true that had ever been” (Love 195–96). It sometimes seems as if all of the characters are playing roles, but when Brian and Pauline discuss her involvement in a production of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice, he is able to drop his teaching persona after all: “They went on speculating, and comfortably arguing, in a way that was not usual, but not altogether unfamiliar to them. They had done this before, at long intervals in their married life.” (Love 199). This will be the last of these occasions, for Pauline runs off with the director, Jeffrey. Knowing that this affair did not endure, we see on rereading that Jeffrey was undermined from his first appearance, Pauline suspecting “that he was younger than he’d like to appear. . . . As it turned out, he was a year younger than she was. Twenty-five” (Love 185). Also a teacher, he is, in Carrington’s words, “not the fated lover that Pauline had once mistakenly believed him to be” (“Recasting” 202). All of Munro’s teachers pay a price for adopting a teaching persona or failing to do so, but Brian, whose angry words give the story its title, suffers more than most from identifying with his role; as Waller observes, “The teacher must always take very seriously the social system designed for the edification and control of children. . . . And it is difficult for the teacher to take such things seriously and yet keep them from entering his soul. In the main, the better a teacher becomes, the further they will enter” (60).

Surviving the boss of the classroom Unlike Brian, Lewis Spiers in “Comfort” is overbearing but not youthful, with little conflict between his private and public character: “he never suffered nerves in front of a class, or in front of any group” (Hateship 138), and his wife “would not have thought him capable of even the most useful self-deception.” When she met him in Europe, he was “a few years older” than the group of Australians and New Zealanders with whom he was traveling, and “definitely

56

Alice Munro

the one to be called on when disputes and difficulties arose” (128). After he and Nina move to Ontario, he becomes such a memorable teacher that even the embattled principal says that many students “probably don’t remember another thing about high school like they remember Lewis” (Hateship 148). As we have already noted, however, Lewis is so intolerant of religion that he is infuriated when Nina’s choral society sings in a church. Although they soon forgive each other, “That was not the last time. Nina brought up to be so peaceable [by her Quaker parents], wondered if this was normal life” (130). Subsequent events underline Lewis’ abnormality, as when Kitty Shore, an enthusiastic Anglican with a “penchant for arcane ceremonies such as the Churching of Women” (144),13 gives a talk on saints, and Lewis, who “thought she was poison,” responds, “quietly and relentlessly,” with devastating questions (146) that cause Nina to leave the room. She might occasionally tease him, “But she had to be careful not to go too far. She had to watch out for the point at which he might sense the deadly threat, the dishonoring insult” (131). As “Comfort” opens, Nina discovers that Lewis, confined to bed with amyotrophic sclerosis at the age of sixty-two, has taken a fatal overdose, but she remains concerned with his sense of threatened honor. Lewis’ downfall begins when “a new sort of sign started appearing on the roadside” (130) as part of what Lewis calls “creationist propaganda” (131). Then pamphlets appear in his mail and on his desk, and soon the issue arises in class. When it does, he “had his tried-and-true ways of dealing with this. He told the disrupters that if they wanted the religious interpretation of the world’s history there was the Christian Separate School in the next town, which they were welcome to attend” (132). If he had stopped there, he would have been in no danger, since, as Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch argue, the American National Science Teachers Association regards “the question of evolution as already settled in the relevant arena—the scientific community” (501), and it would be hard for an Ontario school to disagree. If the concept of evolution has been established for decades, however, why have attacks on it become so strong in recent years? No doubt Lewis’ antagonists respond to their more vocal comrades in the United States, where, as Garry Wills explains, “Almost every aspect of the Rights Revolution of the 1960s was offensive to Evangelicals’ values” (480). By 1979,

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

57

Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority transformed this discontent into a powerful political force. According to Wills, “When bystanders asked how Fundamentalists, quiet in the immediately preceding period, could enter politics so aggressively, Evangelicals answered that they were simply defending themselves” (481). And, Wills continues, “when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, that fall loosened the mortisings of the great Cold War consensus at home. Before then, no matter what others did, they were at least allies in the major moral and military struggle of the time. Now old allies were turning into foes” (482; Ravitch 70–71). Lewis runs into trouble not for teaching evolution, but for losing his patience in class. After referring to the Christian Separate School, he makes a fatal error: Questions becoming more frequent, he added that there were buses to take them there, and they could collect their books and depart this day and hour if they had a mind to. “And a fair wind to your—” he said. Later there was controversy—about whether he actually said the word “arse” or let it hang unspoken in the air. But even if he had not actually said it he had surely given offense, because everybody knew how the phrase could be completed. (132) As Waller notes, “Anger which goes too far defeats its own purpose; it arouses the bitterest hostility on the part of students and community alike” (207). In “Comfort,” both groups react to an attack on religion that exceeds the authority of science. Lewis’ unwise remark makes him vulnerable to the kind of counterattack made by American right-wing groups, who in Diane Ravitch’s words “attacked text books for teaching secular humanism, which they defined as a New-Age religion that ignored biblical teachings and shunned moral absolutes” (71). The next step is inevitable: “If it was acceptable to teach secular humanism, they said, then Christian teaching should have equal time” (71). When Lewis teaches his subject, he is on safe ground, but not when he implies that Christian students are unwelcome in public schools. Asking Lewis to give the creationist view “equal time,” his students bring these concerns home. Lewis errs again when he “let himself be drawn into argument”:

58

Alice Munro

“It’s because I am here to teach you science, not religion.” That was what he said he had said. There were those who reported him as saying, “Because I am not here to teach you crap.” And indeed, indeed, said Lewis, after the fourth or fifth interruption, the posing of the question in whatever slightly different way (“Do you think it hurts us to hear the other side of the story? If we get taught atheism, isn’t that sort of like teaching us some kind of religion?”), the word might have escaped his lips, and under such provocation he did not apologize for it. “I happen to be the boss in this classroom and I decide what will be taught.” “I thought God was the boss, sir.” (132–33) We may sympathize with a severely provoked teacher, but Lewis leaves himself open to the charge of teaching atheism when he mocks his students’ beliefs. In the process, he loses what Waller calls the “perilous equilibrium” of the classroom: “It is a despotism capable of being overturned in a moment, exposed to the instant loss of its stability and prestige. It is a despotism demanded by the community of parents, but specially limited by them as to the techniques which it may use for the maintenance of a stable moral order” (10). Lewis’ class is “boycotted by a minority of students,” who sing “All things bright and beautiful” outside the room, before the principal sends them to a storage room (134). The controversy spreads to the local newspaper, in which letters appear that “made the point that not all parents could afford the fees for the private Christian school, and yet all parents paid taxes. Therefore they deserved to have their children educated in the public schools in a way that was not offensive to, or deliberately destructive of, their faith” (133). Soon the letters become “wrathful,” referring to “Agents of the Anti-Christ” and the “claws of Satan” (133–34). Lewis might still expect the support of the principal and the local school board against the charge that scientific matters are “the doctrines of damnation” (134), but he makes matters worse in his intransigence. When the principal receives a petition asking “to have the Biblical version of creation given equal time,” Lewis responds, “That’s nonsense. . . . They don’t believe in equal time—they don’t believe in opinions. Absolutists is what they are. Fascists” (135). He goes too far when he brings in Fascism, but he has a point:

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

59

Stanley Fish notes that when antievolutionists shift the focus from “scientific credibility” to “the more abstract issue of freedom and openness of inquiry,” they “don’t believe it for a minute; it’s just a matter of political tactics” (125). They use the idea of “teaching the conflicts” as “a wedge for prying open the doors of a world to which they have been denied access by gatekeepers—individual scientists, departments of biology, professional associations, editors of learned journals—who have found what they say unpersuasive and beside the scientific point” (125–26).14 As Scott and Branch write, “It is unfair to pretend to students that a controversy exists in science where none does” (501). As they also write, however, “it might, on occasion, be appropriate to mention antievolutionism briefly in a science class, if only to say that religious objections exist but are not within the scope of the class” (502).15 Paul, the principal, asks Lewis to discuss antievolutionism because he needs to restore order. Lewis will have none of it: “The son of a bitch is enjoying this,” Paul thought, after Lewis dares him to hire “some stupid bugger of a creationist” (135). Lewis may be right in theory when he refuses to compromise, but his job is in peril. After he writes a letter mocking the attempt to “bring back the Old Codger and force everybody down on their knees again, to be taught and believe the old twaddle” (137), he is widely denounced, and so he writes his letter of resignation. These are important issues, but they are not usually Munro’s issues,16 and Lewis is not the protagonist of “Comfort.” Munro is less concerned with his struggles than with their effect on Nina, whose life scrolls “out over many decades” (“Intimate” 54), as Howells notes of all the stories in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Nina also has to deal with Lewis’ amyotrophic sclerosis, the main reason that he decided to retire “nearly a year ago” (120). She thinks of her friend Margaret as “another retired teacher, whose departure had been routine and ceremonious, unlike Lewis,” and the wording suggests what Nina lacks. When she discovers Lewis’ corpse, she looks frantically for a note, for “it seemed impossible that he would not still have something to say to her” (120). She knew about his plan to take his own life, but she “assumed that she would be present and that there would be some ceremonial recognition” (119), forgetting “his extreme dislike of ceremony of any sort” (121–22). Even if he wanted to protect her from the legal question of complicity, that is cold comfort for Nina.

60

Alice Munro

When his last words prove to be a poem of “scathing doggerel” called “The Battle of the Genesisites and the Sons of Darwin for the Soul of the Flabby Generation” (143), she feels “a chill around her heart” (150). She was in a similar position long before Lewis died: reading Genesis in the King James Version, “She was delighted by the majestic progress of those six days. . . . ‘This is beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’s great poetry. People should read it.’” But Lewis “was sick and tired of hearing about how beautiful it was, and the poetry” (131). Similarly, he “wouldn’t put up with fiction” (127), preferring to read science and history. As Claire LeGouic writes, Nina “occupies the middle ground with an approach neither based on belief nor on knowledge, but on poetry” (65), but that is dangerous territory while her husband is alive. When Paul and Lewis argue about how to respond to the concerns of Christian students and parents, Nina attempts to say a good word for myth, but she cannot get a hearing: “A myth after all is not an untruth, it is just—,” she starts to say, but “Paul didn’t see much point in paying attention to her. Lewis wasn’t” (136). She is further compromised when she threatens to read Lewis’ verses if Paul arranges a public funeral: Lewis had told her to “scotch it if they want to bugger around with any memorial stuff,” and therefore “it had been necessary to stop Paul somehow, but the way she had done it seemed crudely theatrical.” As she realizes, she became Lewis in a sense: “Outrage was what had been left up to Lewis, retaliation his speciality—all she had managed to do was quote him” (150). She has been faithful to her husband, then, but not to herself. “Comfort” becomes less of a topical and more of a Munrovian story when Nina discovers a way to resolve her conflicts through her encounters with Ed Shore. He begins to assume his role when Lewis confronts Ed’s wife Kitty about saints. Unable to stay in the same room with their spouses, Ed and Nina are briefly alone, their encounter resembling the beginnings of adulterous affairs in other stories. Nothing of that sort is in order here, for Nina never “had sex with any man but Lewis. Never come near it” (147). Nonetheless, she and Ed understand each other so profoundly that her focalization also speaks for him: Is that how Ed and Nina feel? Sick of those others, or at least sick of argument and conviction. Tired of the never-letting up of those striving personalities.

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

61

They wouldn’t quite say so. They would only say they’re tired. Ed Shore puts an arm around Nina. He kisses her—not on the mouth, not on her face, but on her throat. The place where an agitated pulse might be beating, in her throat. (147). When the memory of this kiss returns when she hears his tenor solos in the annual performance of the Messiah, it is “As if everything about her was recognized then, and honored and set alight” (148). Lewis provides “the sometimes harsh and bewildering, indispensable content of her life,” but he has rejected everything about a performance of Messiah. Ed embodies antithetical values that he shares with Nina: “This other thing depended on those marriages, for its sweetness, its consoling promise. It was not likely to be something that could hold up on its own, even if they were both free. Yet it was not nothing. The danger was in trying it, and seeing it fall apart and then thinking that it had been nothing”(152). Nina’s “other thing” resembles the unnamed narrator’s feelings for Mike McCallum in “Nettles,” another story from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: “Love that was not usable, that knew its place. . . . Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource” (188–87). Ed appears twice in the story’s present action. He arrives at the LakeShore funeral home when Nina is upset that the body has been prepared for a public viewing that Lewis would never have wanted. Though Ed is semiretired, he did the work because his son was busy with two deaths from a traffic accident. Ed knows how to comfort Nina, after his son has inadvertently reduced her to “uncontrollable stuttering” (141). Ed also gives her the verses that Lewis had put in his pajama pocket. Later, Nina is wondering “how she could live, with only her old pacific habits” (150) when Ed pays a visit. He seems “grotesque” and “horribly funny” with “a box of ashes and a bouquet of white roses” (150), but that is because Nina is still coming to terms with her husband’s death. Acting on “a very odd inspiration”(152) she asks about the details of the funeral business, and he is as surprised as she that this subject consoles her. Even as he speaks, Nina is “reminded of Lewis the night before last, speaking to her weakly but with satisfaction about the single-celled creatures—no nucleus, no paired chromosomes, no what else?— that had been the only form of life on earth for nearly two-thirds of life-on-earth’s history” (154). After Ed discusses the beliefs of

62

Alice Munro

the ancient Egyptians, Nina answers her question: “No chloroplasts and no—mitochondria” (154). The detail reveals that the ancient Egyptians matter less than the comfort that Ed inadvertently provides. Because he can describe the preparation of a corpse and then express his belief in the soul, Ed occupies the middle ground of myth and poetry without the stress that Lewis caused Nina. Ed then leaves, but his words prepare her for the improvised ceremony that ends “Comfort.” First she identifies the features of the landscape with precision, from the cattails “dried out, tall and wintrylooking,” to the “milkweeds, with their pods empty, shining like shells” (154). As in the elegiac tradition, the late autumn landscape, described at length earlier, seems to sympathize with Lewis’ death, with “every day a new step toward winter, an increased frugality, a withering” (121). It is also a landscape “crowded with all that specific observation, spoken or not spoken, that she had learned or absorbed from Lewis” (121). Understanding it both scientifically and metaphorically, Nina brings together what Lewis had put asunder. She is both shocked and renewed when she scatters Lewis’ ashes: “Doing this was like wading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion—calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain of the cold continued to wash into your body” (155). She could not turn to conventional religion without betraying both her husband and herself, but she nonetheless achieves the “ceremonial recognition” (121) that she has been looking for. By focusing on Nina’s fitful movement from grief to acceptance, Munro joins the poets described by Diana Fuss in her study of the modern elegy: “Far from constituting an unethical response to mourning, poems that seek to acknowledge or redress loss continue to perform a vital function, reconstructing, repairing, and reinventing sundered lines of contact and communication” (107). Lewis’ scientific curiosity lives on in his widow.

An ambivalent conclusion “Between good teaching and bad there is a great difference where students are concerned,” Willard Waller argues, “but none in this,

Teaching and Conflict in Munro

63

that its most pronounced effect is upon the teacher. Teaching does something to those who teach” (375). When I started to write this chapter, I thought that Munro’s various representations of teachers confirmed Waller’s sense that “teaching is a boomerang that never fails to come back to the hand that threw it” (375). If they are not destroyed by their work, like Miss Farris in Lives of Girls and Women, they are deformed by it, like Dorothy in “Marrakesh.” They are overbearing in and out of class, struggling with personal anxieties and unresolved conflicts as they attempt to maintain order in the school. From Miss Darling in “Day of the Butterfly” to Lewis in “Comfort,” they are sometimes exasperated and ineffectual. If no one is free of anxieties, conflicts, and occasional shortcomings, however, teachers are not so different from others after all, though their lapses are more likely to be memorable. Reading the studies of schools and teaching by Willard Waller, Sybil Shack, Dan C. Lortie, David F. Labaree, and Dana Goldstein has made me more sympathetic toward teachers in and out of Munro. Teachers, Labaree writes, must play “a role, but they need to play it in a thoroughly convincing manner, to come across to their students as fully authentic” (Someone 147). Unlike other professionals, Labaree argues, teachers depend on the cooperation of their clients: They must devote enormous amounts of skill and effort to the task of motivating the client to cooperate, and still the outcome is far from certain. The client may choose to spurn the practitioner’s offer of improvement—out of apathy, habit, principle, spite, inattention, or whim. In such a field, success rates are likely to be low, and the connection between a practitioner’s action and a client’s outcome is likely to be at best indirect. Therefore the effectiveness of the practitioner becomes difficult to establish. (Trouble 41) If the demands seem overwhelming, Labaree reminds us that it is “the form of schooling more than its content” that matters (Someone 165). But the content also matters. My attitude changed when I reconsidered the extraordinary passage about Rose’s squalid school in West Hanratty, based as it is on Munro’s own painful experience: “In the face of all that disruption, discomfort,

64

Alice Munro

impossibility, some thread of ordinary classroom routine was maintained; an offering. Some people learned to subtract. Some people learned to spell” (Who 29). Finally, there are worse attitudes to face than ambivalence. Lewis may have feared that his enemies had triumphed, but his wife and most of his students remember his virtues as well as his defects.

3 Mistaken Identities in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” Robert McGill

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” first published in the New Yorker at the end of 1999, has arguably become Alice Munro’s most celebrated story. When the American novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote an appreciation of Munro’s work for the New York Times Book Review in 2004, he was ostensibly reviewing her recently published collection, Runaway, but he gave over much of his article to commenting admiringly on “The Bear,” which had been collected as the final story in her previous book, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. “The Bear” has since been adapted for the screen by Sarah Polley as Away from Her, a film that garnered two Oscar nominations after its release in 2006, and the story has been collected in three recent volumes of Munro’s selected fiction—No Love Lost, Carried Away, and New Selected Stories—while appearing as the sole text by Munro in two major anthologies of Canadian literature.1 Most recently, when Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, not only did the New Yorker’s books critic, James Wood, mark the occasion by singling out “The Bear” for praise, but the magazine also honored Munro by republishing that story. In other words, it is rapidly becoming a consensus choice as the representative Munro text.

66

Alice Munro

The story’s popularity is surely due in part to its resonant plot, which involves the testing of a marriage by challenges that are, in certain ways, traditional but that also have uniquely contemporary qualities. In the story, Fiona, a woman married almost fifty years, develops what appears to be Alzheimer’s disease. Because of worries about her health and safety, she moves into an assistedliving facility called Meadowlake. Her husband, Grant, a retired professor of Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature who has never wanted to be “away from her” (276),2 thus finds himself apart from her in multiple senses, as her cognitive impairment means that the two of them no longer share memories of their life together—a life that has been particularly dyadic, not least because they do not have children. Moreover, Fiona seems to forget Grant entirely, and she falls in love with another resident, Aubrey, whom a virus has left mostly unable to speak and to walk. When Aubrey’s wife, Marian, removes him from Meadowlake, Fiona slips into a depression, and her physical health begins to deteriorate. In response, Grant attempts to convince Marian to return Aubrey to Meadowlake. Grant fails at first, but then, apparently on the strength of Marian’s attraction to him, succeeds in bringing Aubrey to visit Fiona. Readers are left to imagine exactly how far Grant has gone to gain Marian’s permission for the visit, but it is clear that some decades earlier, during Grant’s professorial career, he was unfaithful to Fiona with several of his students. In a final twist, when Grant returns Aubrey to Meadowlake, Grant discovers that Fiona seems to have forgotten Aubrey but to remember Grant again. Accordingly, while “The Bear” revisits well-established literary themes involving love, loyalty, and infidelity, the story is decidedly modern in dramatizing how these elements of a relationship are affected by phenomena that distinguish the present era: companionate marriage, low fertility rates, extended longevity and institutionalized care for those with dementia. In particular, the story foregrounds the crisis of identity that Alzheimer’s creates not only for people with the disease but also for their spouses,3 whose relations to their partners substantially transform and who, as a result, are liable to find their own identities destabilized. For Grant, Fiona’s memory loss and move to Meadowlake force him into a radically new mode of daily living and a new orientation toward his wife. That much is obvious in the text. Less obvious is the story’s suggestion that Alzheimer’s is not the beginning of Fiona and

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

67

Grant’s problems and that neither are Grant’s adulteries. Rather, the story shows the couple’s marriage to have long been dogged by Grant’s unfortunate interpersonal and linguistic habits—habits exposed and disturbed by Fiona’s development of Alzheimer’s and by her relocation to Meadowlake. As Fiona’s identity shifts with these changes, it becomes clear that Grant, for all his intimacy with her and presumptions to know her, has never been sufficiently attentive to Fiona or to nuances of their relationship to claim an authoritative knowledge regarding her identity. In this way, “The Bear” demonstrates how long-term monogamy can perpetuate rather than rectify problematic beliefs about one’s partner, not to mention other blind spots in one’s worldview. Thus, although the crisis facing Grant and Fiona might seem unique to those dealing with Alzheimer’s, Munro’s story suggests that the bad habits foregrounded by the crisis are ones that obtain with regard to a variety of everyday social relationships. Notably, those relationships include the ones that readers have with texts. In this respect, Grant is conspicuously not just a flawed partner but also a flawed reader, a cautionary figure whose insensitivity to the complexities of language and identity is counterpointed by a more ironic, figurative approach to them—precisely the approach that “The Bear” itself models and demands of its audience.

Marriage and mischaracterization As Fiona mourns Aubrey’s departure from Meadowlake, Grant tries to comfort her by reading aloud from “old novels about chaste love, and lost-and-regained fortunes.” Reflecting on these narratives, he thinks that there has “been no attempt, apparently, to keep the contents of the reading room . . . up-to-date” (309). Grant’s “lack of awareness regarding the novels’” thematic pertinence to his and Fiona’s situation is striking. At the same time, his observation stands as a suggestion on Munro’s part that her own narrative is, in fact, concerned with “updating” these themes. “The Bear” modernizes the love story by considering what happens when you build your identity around intimate cohabitation and ostensible monogamy with another person and then, after half a century together, find your relationship utterly transformed by the privations of Alzheimer’s. In Marya Schechtman’s words, Alzheimer’s can change a person

68

Alice Munro

“in such fundamental ways that it is natural to ask whether we are dealing with the same person” before and after the disease’s onset (66). Moreover, the partners of those with Alzheimer’s face significant challenges to their own identities,4 and Grant’s unsettled equilibrium after five decades of marriage to Fiona makes him exemplary in this respect. With no children, no other close family and, seemingly, no close friends, Fiona and Grant have enjoyed a particularly intimate relationship. Munro illustrates that intimacy during a scene in which the couple drive to Meadowlake to admit Fiona: Before they reached the highway the country road dipped through a swampy hollow now completely frozen over. The swamp-oaks and maples threw their shadows like bars across the bright snow. Fiona said, “Oh, remember.” Grant said, “I was thinking about that too.” “Only it was in the moonlight,” she said. She was talking about the time that they had gone out skiing at night under the full moon and over the black-striped snow, in this place that you could get into only in the depths of winter. (280) In this moment, the couple share such an intimacy that the referent of “that” and “it” need not be uttered aloud. Instead, it subsists in the pair’s common memory. By dramatizing the moment, the story emphasizes that Fiona and Grant’s relationship is distinguished, not least, by a way of speaking—a way dependent on the two of them sharing a frame of reference. The moment also demonstrates how, in companionate marriage, each member serves as a guarantor of the other’s identity by corroborating the other’s memories. As Hilde Lindemann puts it, personal identity is “a tissue of stories, constructed from not only first-person but also many third-person perspectives” (417). In a spousal dyad, joint retrospective narration involving second-person descriptions is key to that identity, as well; individuals become defined, in part, by what their spouses remember of them. Accordingly, Fiona’s development of Alzheimer’s and move to Meadowlake inaugurate a crisis of identity for Grant. Marian eventually remarks to him: “I realize you’re not a single” (318). But for many intents and purposes, the situation has made him one. As he either spends time hermetically at home or follows Fiona and Aubrey around Meadowlake, Grant comes to live a very

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

69

different life than earlier in his marriage. If, at the start of “The Bear,” it is Fiona who repeatedly loses herself geographically and linguistically—she has trouble finding her way home while out on a walk, for example, and she forgets the name of Meadowlake (279–80)—Grant also loses himself in various ways. During a visit to Meadowlake, he becomes literally lost in the building, even though he has been there repeatedly (298–99); moreover, during his visits there, “he sometimes saw a woman at a distance that he thought was Fiona, but then thought it couldn’t be, because of the clothes the woman was wearing” (299). After decades in which Grant’s idea of Fiona and of their life together has been a cynosure for him, her entrance into Meadowlake is disorienting. Thus, when he insists to her at the end of the story that there was “not a chance” of him forsaking her in Meadowlake, he is not simply identifying his marital devotion (323). He is also, intentionally or not, gesturing to a more compulsive need to maintain his identity. The story further ironizes Grant’s insistence on his commitment to Fiona by suggesting that the couple’s dyad has long been fractured and partly illusory. That is the case, not least, because although the couple has shared a common frame of reference, Grant has also consciously or unconsciously elided or ignored various aspects of their relationship, with the result that he and Fiona are “lost” to and “away from” each other even before Alzheimer’s becomes a factor. In this regard, the story insists, the blame falls substantially on Grant for failing to perceive Fiona sensitively. Indeed, if Héliane Ventura is right that Grant can be identified with the bear of the story’s title (para. 15), then one might see the title as gesturing more particularly to Grant’s failures of perception, given that the title is taken from a folk song, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” that features the following lyrics: The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see. And all that he could see, and all that he could see Was the other side of the mountain, the other side of the mountain. The other side of the mountain was all that he could see.5 The lyrics’ emphasis on limitations in vision points readers toward noticing Grant’s own limitations in that regard. And while Andrea F. Szabó characterizes him as having “misinterpreted others” (111),

70

Alice Munro

his misinterpretations are most prominent with respect to Fiona. As Amelia DeFalco observes, Grant’s “knowledge of his wife is significantly limited” (75). He not only misinterprets her but also mischaracterizes her—something suggested figuratively by those times at Meadowlake when he believes he has spotted her but then second-guesses himself. The story implies that such cases of possible mistaken identity correlate with other, less obvious instances of mistaken identity in which Grant is culpable. In particular, Grant shows himself to be someone who—to use a phrase that his name pointedly evokes—has taken Fiona for granted. In that regard, he has a foil in Fiona, who, with the onset of Alzheimer’s, finds that she can take little for granted. Alzheimer’s is, among other things, a disruption of linguistic habit: one forgets which words go with things, as Fiona does at one point regarding the word “Iceland” (304–05). Her move to Meadowlake, her forgetting of Grant, and her relationship with Aubrey all similarly threaten to disrupt Grant’s habitual orientation toward her. While Grant adapts to the new situation in remarkable ways, particularly by relinquishing his claim to standing first in his wife’s affections,6 his struggle to reconcile himself to Fiona’s new identity exposes the flaws in his understanding of her old one—an understanding that is suspiciously both assured and hazy. Grant initially dismisses Fiona’s lapses in memories by saying “She’s always been a bit like this” (278), but the story throws his characterization of her into question. Especially conspicuous is his selectivity in terms of what he notices and remembers about her. For instance, he cannot recollect why, precisely, she was unable to have children; he recalls only “something about her tubes being blocked, or twisted” (278). This ignorance regarding Fiona’s infertility suggests that he has claimed a patriarchal prerogative to remain aloof regarding female reproductive matters.7 Likewise, he remains unsure about her exact awareness with regard to his affairs, apparently never having tried to determine it. Such complacent ignorance suggests that, throughout Grant and Fiona’s marriage, he has failed to reckon carefully with her thoughts and feelings. Grant’s ignorance is further indicated by the comment that a nurse at Meadowlake, Kristy, makes at the beginning of Grant’s first visit to see Fiona: Kristy promises him that by spending time in the place, he will “get to know who everybody is” (291). The story’s implication is that Grant does not already fully know who Fiona is.

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

71

As the question of Fiona’s state of mind becomes pressing with her development of Alzheimer’s, Grant gains a dim apprehension that he has long mistaken Fiona for someone she is not. For instance, although he has previously thought Fiona to have kept her youthful beauty “whole, though shadowy,” he reassesses that impression when he considers that someone less beholden than he is to an image of Fiona formed half a century earlier might see her present self differently (314). To demonstrate further how Grant’s idea of Fiona in the present is based problematically on a lasting impression of her youthful self, the story leaps from an opening recollection of Grant and Fiona’s early romance to the moment, five decades later, in which Fiona is about to move to Meadowlake (276). This leap does not merely serve, as Wood observes, to make more “devastating” the depiction of Fiona’s “decline.” Because the opening section is, like the rest of the story, focalized through Grant’s perspective, its appearance also implies that his view of Fiona is anchored in a view of her as she was early in their relationship. But if Grant wont to see continuity in Fiona over the course of their marriage, he has fleeting realizations that she has transformed. One such realization occurs in the story’s final scene, as he perceives that she smells different than she once did; her new smell, he thinks, recalls “the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water” (323). While the comparison creates an ominous, deathly association with Fiona, it also provides a figure for Grant’s own stagnated characterization of his wife. “The Bear” suggests that Grant’s misinterpretations of Fiona are at least partly the result of narcissism. It is not just that the flowers he brings her on his first visit are Narcissus (288); his narcissistic tendencies are further evident in his desire to read Fiona’s forgetting about him as a perverse sham on her part, perhaps to punish him for his past infidelities. With such thoughts, Grant makes her illness all about him, and he attributes to her the same deceptiveness that he himself maintained while carrying out his affairs. Grant’s picture of Fiona, then, relies on dubious identifications with her. A similarly questionable identification occurs in a rare moment when, considering a young version of her on a date with a teenage Aubrey, Grant attempts to imagine himself into Fiona’s subjectivity. It may be, as Grant conjectures, that Fiona did feel a certain “lust” for Aubrey as she sat next to him during a baseball game (296). However, readers might wonder whether Grant is simply projecting

72

Alice Munro

his own characteristic lustfulness onto the young Fiona, not taking her for granted so much as taking her for Grant. Such attempts on Grant’s part to put himself in another’s place are infrequent, and “The Bear” repeatedly suggests that Grant takes understanding people to be too difficult to attempt in earnest. After trying to persuade Marian to let Aubrey visit Fiona, for instance, Grant recognizes his inability to imagine Marian’s perspective, admitting to himself: “He had not had any idea of the way she might be looking at things” (316). Despite such self-consciousness, Grant seems content to go on holding the belief that other people are inexorably enigmatic. This conception of others is further evident when he remembers Fiona describing skunk lilies: “Rummaging around in one of her concealed pockets of information, she said that you were supposed to be able to put your hand inside the curled petal and feel the heat. She said that she had tried it, but she couldn’t be sure if what she felt was heat or her imagination” (317). The heat inside the lilies echoes Fiona’s own “concealed pockets of information,” which, when they involve her apparent forgetting of Grant, he seems keen to penetrate, but which he otherwise appears satisfied to leave undisturbed. Although he thinks that “trying to figure out Fiona had always been frustrating,” there is little evidence of his ever having made a concerted effort to do so (318). In this way, “The Bear” suggests that the ostensible intimacy of the romantic couple does not necessarily foster greater mutual understanding. Similarly, it is notable that when Grant observes Aubrey acting in a “husbandly” manner around Fiona, Grant also characterizes the other man as preferring “to ignore her as long as she stayed close” (295). Here, the story condemns Grant along with Aubrey, insofar as Grant appears similarly to have ignored Fiona during the years of his infidelity while congratulating himself for not having separated from her outright. It could be said that “The Bear” is concerned with identifying problems in Grant that make him a poor partner for Fiona in terms of helping her to manage after the onset of Alzheimer’s. That is true, at least, if one accepts the argument put forward by Lindemann that when someone is suffering from dementia, it is the role of family members to “hold” her identity for her; in other words, they must preserve a coherent story about her of which her own grasp has grown precarious. As Lindemann recognizes, one way in which family members can fail to hold such a person’s identity for her

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

73

is if they have previously failed to see the person accurately (420). “The Bear” shows Grant to be at risk of failing precisely in this manner. Equally striking, though, is the story’s insistence that his failures impinge on his marriage even before Fiona’s development of Alzheimer’s. In contrast, the story presents seemingly successful efforts on Grant’s part to imagine others—in particular, as he pictures Marian waiting for him to return her calls (319–20). We do not know how accurate he is as he imagines her in her home, but his conjectures have a certain acuity and plausibility, as when he thinks: “She would be sitting in her house now. . . . Or probably not sitting. Doing things to keep herself busy. She seemed to be a woman who would keep busy. Her house had certainly shown the benefits of nonstop attention” (321). Likewise, contact with Marian allows him to start seeing himself differently, imagining a critique of himself with regard to the possible egotism of his “fine, generous schemes” to reunite Aubrey and Fiona (318). Earlier, too, Grant has flashes of self-awareness, as when, at Meadowlake, “every once in a while it came to him how foolish and pathetic and perhaps unhinged he must look, trailing around after Fiona and Aubrey” (296–97). By depicting Grant’s occasional successes alongside his failures to understand others and himself, “The Bear” challenges readers similarly to recognize Grant for what he is, in all his complexity, rather than the conventionally loving, self-redeeming husband they might like him to be.

The problem of names Beyond foregrounding Grant’s limited perspective and testing readers’ ability to characterize others more sensitively than he does, “The Bear” attends to aspects of language that contribute to mischaracterizations. In this respect, the story suggests that there are important connections between failing at intimate relationships and being a poor user of language. In particular, “The Bear” dramatizes the common but pernicious danger of assuming a straightforward relationship between words and what they represent—the relationship, that is, between signifiers and their referents. As the story demonstrates this danger, it emphasizes risks that obtain specifically with regard to names. The emphasis is signaled early on in a passage that was not included in the New Yorker version

74

Alice Munro

of “The Bear” but that appears in the version later published in Hateship: Grant, seeing that Fiona has started putting labels on kitchen drawers to identify what they contain, recalls an anecdote “about the German soldiers on border patrol in Czechoslovakia during the war.” According to Grant’s recollection of the anecdote, “each of the patrol dogs wore a sign that had said Hund. Why? said the Czechs, and the Germans said, Because that is a hund” (277). The story suggests that for the fascist mind, an appeal of labels is that they facilitate a fantasy of control over others’ identity. By assigning labels to a fellow creature, one can embrace the illusion that one has contained and established authority with respect to the creature. At the same time, the soldiers’ desire to label the dogs with signs expresses a fear that the dogs could otherwise slip free of their names and be something other than “hunds.” Thus, the act of labeling shows the fascist mentality reacting to its own horrifying awareness that the signifier and signified are tethered to each other only contingently and that language does not provide the stable order a fascist might prefer. The soldiers, for all their insistence that a dog is a “hund,” have an implicit fear of linguistic habit breaking down and of signifiers detaching from what they usually denote. In Fiona’s case, the fear is realized, as Alzheimer’s produces just such a breakdown. That much is clear in a moment at which she hears the word “Iceland” and seems to have no association with it whatsoever; when she pronounces the word, she says it as though it were two: “Ice-land.” Grant observes that the “first syllable managed to hold a tinkle of interest” for her, “but the second fell flat” (305). The toponym has become a free-floating signifier, serving as a reminder that if names promise to divulge identity, they often actually do little, per se, in that regard. Kristy makes the same point when she says rather unhelpfully in answer to a question from Grant about Aubrey’s identity: “That’s who he is. Aubrey. [Fiona’s] friend” (292). Kristy’s refusal to attach any further qualities to Aubrey is, perhaps, a way for her to say what she phrases differently a moment later with regard to the residents of Meadowlake: namely, “Things change back and forth all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it” (292). An implication is that the continuity of identity suggested by names is a false one, and its falsity is exposed by illnesses such as Aubrey’s and Fiona’s. Accordingly, Kristy’s refusal to provide background information about Aubrey is a gnomic response to Grant’s question but, in a

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

75

sense, an accurate one: Aubrey is who he is now, not the person he once was, and not necessarily the person he will be in the future. In contrast, Grant’s fixation on names as guarantors of identity is evident figuratively when he discovers Fiona’s name on the door to her room in Meadowlake but does not find her inside (288). When he finally locates her and says “I went to your room, but you weren’t there,” she replies: “Well, no . . . I’m here” (290).8 As though to highlight the implication in her response that her name does not, strictly speaking, stand in for her, Grant then apprehends Fiona’s “newly fattened face” (291). She has undergone a change that her continuing name does not reflect. The possibility Grant refuses to acknowledge fully is that “Fiona” has become a name detached from its referent; that the person whom it once denoted is no longer “there.” Nevertheless, “The Bear” itself implies that names fail to account for the protean aspect of personal identity. In that regard, it is significant that Grant never speaks aloud or even thinks the word “Alzheimer’s.” Although he tells himself of Fiona’s condition that “it hardly mattered what label was put on it” (279),9 his refusal to use the label shows that it does matter. On the one hand, his avoidance of the term grants him the opportunity to avoid buying into stereotypes of the disease and, instead, to deal with Fiona’s situation in all its particularity.10 On the other hand, avoiding the term also permits him to perpetuate his fantasy that she is the same Fiona she has always been, someone simply playing a trick on him rather than manifesting symptoms of a transformative disease. Grant’s problems with names also include failures to know the words for things. In this regard, as Ventura has observed, his troubles parallel Fiona’s as she deals with Alzheimer’s (para. 16). But while Fiona’s loss of words is instigated by a disease, it is Grant’s patriarchal position in his relationship with Fiona that seems to have perpetuated a limitation in his vocabulary. For instance, as he first enters Meadowlake to visit her, he watches Kristy turn on the light in what is, as he thinks of it, “a closet, or sort of kitchen”; then he goes back with her “to the nurses’ station, or reception desk, or whatever it was” (288). Later, in Marian’s kitchen, he notices “contrivances and appliances—coffeemaker, food processor, knife sharpener, and some things Grant didn’t know the names or uses of” (311). Notably, these failures to know the names for things occur in the stereotypically “feminine” spaces of the kitchen and the reception area—sites that are, moreover, constitutive of gynocratic spaces,

76

Alice Munro

insofar as it is Marian who makes the decisions at the home she shares with Aubrey, while women such as Kristy and her supervisor run Meadowlake.11 Grant’s failures of vocabulary in these places signal his alienation from them and suggest the degree to which he has depended in the past not simply on his relationship with Fiona but also on a traditional gender dynamic between them. His reliance on Fiona with regard to stereotypically female, domestic matters is once more evident when he notices a “sort of swooping curtains” in Marian’s house and thinks that “Fiona had a word for” them that he cannot remember (311). In such moments, Grant’s failures of language echo his failure to remember accurately—and perhaps ever to have understood properly—the medical situation with regard to Fiona’s infertility. In that regard, Grant observes that he “had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus,” more or less admitting to a sexist indifference to the particularities of a woman’s life (279). At Meadowlake and in Marian’s kitchen, though, Grant is unable to count on Fiona attending to “female” matters in his stead. What is more, he finds himself a supplicant before Kristy— on whom he is dependent for information about Fiona (282)— and before Marian. In these situations revealing Grant’s lack of a vocabulary for what he sees, “The Bear” marks the importance of gender to one’s perception of the world. The story implies that within the patriarchal dyad of the heterosexual married couple, in which Grant has counted on Fiona as a traditional helpmate, he has long been able to ignore entire areas of life. Now, without her, he faces a crisis of meaning-making. The signifier-signified relationship has become destabilized not just with regard to Fiona’s name but also with respect to the world that she used to mediate for him. Further complications of names arise in virtue of Grant’s tendency to use Fiona’s name in broad, connotative ways rather than merely denotatively. For him, the name “Fiona” refers not merely to a person but to a whole set of concerns. For instance, he considers at one point that his philandering “might eventually have cost him Fiona” (287). Here, the name is a metonym for various things: not only a marriage, but also the love, trust, and support that the marriage involves. An emphasis on the connotative quality of Fiona’s name recurs when Grant returns home from his trip to Marian’s and finds “the light blinking on his answering machine. He thought the same thing he always thought now. Fiona” (319). Here, “Fiona” connotes a cluster of worrisome possibilities. Such

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

77

attention in “The Bear” to the ways in which names become placeholders for certain concerns is also evident earlier with the introduction of Marian, whom Grant knows at first only as “Aubrey”s wife”—and, indeed, this relational element of Marian’s identity is the principal one that Grant takes to be relevant when seeking to secure her permission for him to reunite Aubrey with Fiona. At Grant and Marian’s first meeting, Marian shows herself to be equally concerned with relevant relations, asking: “What’s your wife’s name? I forget” (314). If Marian has forgotten Fiona’s name, she has not forgotten her marital status. Once reminded of Fiona’s name, though, Marian says, “I don’t know if [Aubrey’s] still so stuck on seeing your—on seeing Fiona” (315). Her selfcorrection suggests a desire to speak of Fiona in terms other than that of someone tied to Grant, perhaps to avoid emphasizing the adulterous quality of Aubrey’s and Fiona’s interest in each other, or perhaps in recognition that Fiona’s identity is not defined by her marriage in the way it once was. After this initial meeting, the attention to names recurs, as Grant thinks: “He had failed with Aubrey’s wife. Marian” (317). Grant’s reminder to himself of Marian’s name suggests a similar desire to individuate her, in part by decoupling her from Aubrey through the abandonment of the epithet “Aubrey’s wife.” In contrast with this epithet, Marian’s proper name implicitly connotes for Grant an autonomy that, as the story continues, morphs into an availability. Indeed, later on the phone, Marian’s clumsy expression of romantic interest in Grant is coupled with equally clumsy but suggestive attempts to insist upon the importance of her name. Having left one message, she calls back to leave another in which she says: “I just realized I’d forgot to say who it was. Well you probably recognized the voice. It’s Marian.” She goes on to repeat, “It’s Marian speaking. I guess I already said that” (319). While she might appear simply to be clarifying that it is she who is calling, the seemingly compulsive repetition of her name signals that she is not just identifying herself in an innocently denotative fashion. Rather, there is an implied hope that she can establish with Grant an identity independent of her marriage, a role in Grant’s life that exceeds mere instrumentalism to him—or, for that matter, to Aubrey.12 At the same time, Marian’s repetition of her name might manifest a desire for the solace of stable identity—a desire not so different from that of the German soldiers in the anecdote—precisely at the moment

78

Alice Munro

in which Marian’s admission of romantic interest is unsettling her sense of herself. If that is the case, then there is a subtle but incisive irony in the fact that Marian’s name echoes the word “marrying,” suggesting that Marian cannot so easily slip her marital identity as she might hope or fear.13 Instead, a name can end up having unexpected connotations that, however unintended in the act of naming, come to inflect understandings of a person. What is more, a person’s name can likewise inflect others’ identity: Aubrey’s name, for instance, provides an intertexual hint that readers of “The Bear” should treat Grant critically. The name, short for “Auberon,” recalls Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Shakespeare’s play, Oberon’s wife, Titania, becomes enchanted and falls in love with Bottom, a man who—due to a further enchantment—has gained a donkey’s head. Insofar as Marian, Aubrey’s wife, falls for Grant in “The Bear,” Munro’s story would seem to be suggesting through Aubrey’s name that Grant is something of an ass.14 The conflict between names’ promise of reference and their more complicated nature is alluded to in Munro’s story “The Love of a Good Woman” when one of the characters, Enid, looks at another and thinks that “whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been just the same old trouble—the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name that people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know” (Love 47–48). In “The Bear,” Grant’s knowledge of Fiona is problematized by his use of her name to essentialize her, assigning to her a stable identity that fails to engage with her in her diachronic multiplicity. It is not simply, then, that “The Bear” demonstrates, as DeFalco puts it, Munro’s “preoccupation with the inadequacy and duplicity of language” (77n21). Rather, by focusing on Grant’s and others’ deployment of names, “The Bear” underscores the relationship between the careful use of language and ethical interpersonal relations. If the meanings of names and other words refuse to remain stable, Munro’s story insists that such instability is all the more reason for one to approach words in a sensitive manner.

Flowery expressions and fine distinctions In contrast with Grant’s problematic use of names, “The Bear” suggests another approach to language, an ironic one that treats

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

79

the signifier-signified relationship as labile and figurative rather than merely denotative or straightforwardly referential. Such an approach is modeled by Fiona, who seems to delight in figures of speech and other wordplay. As a young woman, for instance, she describes a man who is courting her as a “Visigoth” (275). Years later, she remarks that a fur coat she has abandoned is “like a sin she was leaving behind” (278). Similarly, she shows linguistic playfulness with regard to Meadowlake, renaming it “Shallowlake,” “Shillylake,” and “Sillylake” (280). And she surprises Grant by addressing Aubrey as “dear heart.” It is, surely, the affect intimated by the sobriquet as much as her use of the particular term that shocks Grant, but he notably focuses on the latter, reflecting that he has “never heard her use this flowery expression before” (305). Grant’s condescension in referring to the language as “flowery” allows him to mask whatever jealousy and anxiety he may be feeling, but his phrasing also identifies—and, in a pointedly cliché manner, replicates—Fiona’s figurative terminology. Moreover, his use of the word “flowery” anticipates a moment later in the text when he recalls Fiona examining a skunk lily, reflecting on the plant’s generation of heat to attract insects, and remarking: “Nature doesn’t fool around just being decorative” (317). If Fiona’s statement invites readers to think about the other kinds of decoration that Grant notices throughout the story—from the fountain and other “decoration” at Meadowlake to the pink and blue hyacinths at Marian’s house (297, 307)—it also draws attention to the uses and meanings of decorative language.15 There are further instances in which Grant thinks figuratively but, just as the adjective “flowery” is a dead metaphor, his other uses of figures tend to be uninventive and, often enough, sexist. For instance, when he brings flowers for Fiona on his first visit to Meadowlake, he compares himself to “a hopeless lover” and “a guilty husband in a cartoon.” Then, upon seeing Kristy, he thinks that her hair has “all the puffed-up luxury of a cocktail waitress’s style, or a stripper’s” (288). A metaphor becomes dead once its usage has become conventional; the metaphor dies when the connection it establishes between two things becomes no longer surprising but something taken for granted. After that point, to resort to the metaphor is a sign of linguistic and conceptual laziness. In the same way, Grant’s reaching for conventional figures such as the “hopeless lover,” the “guilty husband,” and the stripper demonstrates his indolence in

80

Alice Munro

terms of his self-characterization and his understanding of others. Even more damningly, the figures betray his readiness to fall back on stereotypes drawn from patriarchal narratives of gender relations. A similar readiness is evident when he recalls the “loose wives” of the 1970s without using such judgmental language about the men who—by his own account—were equally promiscuous (287). And Grant’s deployment of stereotypes is further evident when he dismisses a former lover’s hostility toward him by diagnosing her as a “latent lesbian,” applying a sexist label that functions to pathologize and dismiss her feelings (284). Accordingly, Grant’s use of language once more positions him as a cautionary figure. This positioning is significant insofar as “The Bear” tests its readers’ relationship to names and language in various regards. The story’s own name stands as one such test. It is not a trivial matter that, while the text is called “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” it has no bear in it and no mountain—at least not literally. The story does not even feature any diegetic reference to the song from which the narrative takes its title. Instead, the title floats relatively freely as a signifier, detached from any clear intratextual referent, such that it is a semantic irritant for readers just as “Iceland” is for Fiona. Because the title carries no literal relationship to the diegesis, readers are encouraged to treat the titular statement as figurative—for example, by identifying Grant as the bear. In doing so, they move away from the treatment of names as reductively referential that the story models and condemns most explicitly through the anecdote of the German soldiers.16 Meanwhile, if “The Bear” repeatedly exposes the sexism of Grant’s vocabulary and lack thereof, the story also tests readers’ potential gender bias. Early in the story, Grant interacts with Meadowlake’s supervisor, whose gender is not mentioned (280–81). Only much later is it revealed that the supervisor is a woman, forcing certain readers, no doubt, to revise their assumption about the gender of someone in a supervisory position (309). Munro goes about administering this test of readers’ assumptions with a pointed, self-reflexive humor: the supervisor’s final words in her first encounter with Grant are “I just like to make everything clear at the outset,” even as the story itself is leaving the supervisor’s gender anything but clear (281). The final scene of “The Bear” presents another ambiguity that warns readers against carelessness in terms of identifying people. Appearing at Fiona’s room in Meadowlake and finding her sitting

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

81

with a book, Grant tells her: “I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?” The story continues: She stared at him for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags. “Names elude me,” she said harshly. Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to him like that of the stems of cut flowers left too long in their water. (323) Because the proper name preceding the sentence that begins “She stared at him” is “Aubrey,” readers can be forgiven if they momentarily take the “him” at whom Fiona stares and whom she embraces to be Aubrey, not Grant. Accordingly, there is an arresting irony in the phrase “Names elude me,” for names are, in a sense, eluding readers, too. It is only with the phrase “a smell that seemed to him” that the scene identifies the “him” as Grant, given that he is the story’s center of consciousness. Indeed, it is notable that the identity of the “him” in question becomes clear at the very moment that a matter of similarity arises, for the matter of how Grant and Aubrey might seem like each other to Fiona is key in the passage. Throughout the story, the two men have stood to varying degrees as rivals for her affection. In the final scene, the notion of rivalry is undermined by the revelation that Fiona is not even able to identify either of the men consistently. The use of the ambiguous pronoun “him” to create a confusion in readers analogous to Fiona’s own confusions works to suggest that the situation of different people confusingly occupying similar places in another person’s mind is hardly limited to people with Alzheimer’s. Psychoanalytic theory, for instance, stresses the existence of transference in interpersonal relationships, observing that people bring to bear on their acquaintances unconscious wishes and fantasies that they have had with regard to prior loved ones.17 Transference, psychically speaking, is a case of mistaking one person for another—of failing to make certain fine distinctions in order to apprehend people in all their individual complexity.

82

Alice Munro

If “The Bear” advocates that readers adopt a more sensitive, nuanced approach to understanding others than Grant evinces, it endorses a similar approach with regard to language, and not only in terms of names. Rather, the story repeats various words that carry multiple, sometimes ironic valences and repay careful attention to their shifting meanings. One such word that echoes through “The Bear,” picking up connotations as it goes, is “fine.” Conspicuously, the word resembles Fiona’s name—and from the story’s outset, Grant is concerned in multiple senses with knowing whether Fiona is “fine.” Is she physically healthy? Is she—to draw on the etymological root of the word, “finere”—finished? The story plays with other echoes of the word, too: for instance, “fine” resembles “Fenris,” the name of one of the mythological wolves about which Grant is writing a book. In Norse mythology, Grant observes, it is Fenris who “swallows up Odin at the end of the world” (284). The apocalyptic pairing of Fenris and Odin not only evokes Fiona’s possible demise but also parallels the twin deaths of the Russian wolfhounds who were once Grant and Fiona’s companions and who, Grant believes, “made a fine match” for Fiona (279). But “The Bear” is as much concerned with the ways in which Grant is “fine” as it is with Fiona’s state—something hinted when he first visits her at Meadowlake and responds to her suggestion of tea by saying “I’m fine” (291). He is clearly not fine in all respects—something that the story once more encourages readers to consider when, soon after Fiona’s solicitation about the tea, Kristy says of Aubrey, “He was a fine person,” and Grant finds that he “did not know whether this meant that Aubrey was honest and openhanded and kind to people, or that he was well spoken and well dressed and drove a good car. Probably both” (293). Later, the matter of the word’s meaning arises again when Grant imagines Marian dismissing his plans to bring Aubrey for visits to Fiona as “fine, generous schemes” (318). Here, the word “schemes” works to undermine the positive valence of “fine.”18 As it does so, the story foregrounds a lack of stability around the language of moral appraisal. Just as two people might both refer to “Fiona” but differ in their respective conceptions of the person to whom they are referring, people might agree that something is “fine” without agreeing about what fineness entails. Because of the word’s multiple meanings, the use of it is often less elucidative than obfuscatory; for instance, the words “I’m fine” in answer to the question “How are you?” can constitute a

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

83

starkly ambiguous answer. By calling attention to such ambiguity, “The Bear” once more underscores the importance of a sensitivity to words’ multiple meanings. Another word that echoes through the story is “silly,” a word that seems paired with “fine” not only in its recurrence but also insofar as it is another evaluative adjective with several meanings. The word first appears in “The Bear” as Fiona plays with language, renaming Meadowlake “Shallowlake” and “Shillylake” before settling on “Sillylake.” This proliferation of names for Fiona’s new home calls attention to Meadowlake’s own multiple incarnations and valences, which Grant recognizes to some extent when considering the changes that the institution has undergone over the years (281– 82). To be silly with language, then, can be to undertake serious work in terms of recognizing complexity. Conversely, an attempt to reduce and stabilize the world through language is evident in Grant’s dismissal of a former lover as a “silly girl” (287). The sexist nature of his derogatory phrasing is corroborated later when he sees Fiona “wearing a silly woolly hat and a jacket with swirls of blue and purple, the sort of thing he had seen on local women at the supermarket” (299). Meanwhile, at a moment in which Fiona tells Grant that Aubrey expects her to sit beside him while he plays bridge, she adds, “It’s silly, I hardly know the game anymore” (291). If she is using the word “silly” to mean “ridiculous,” she is also using it somewhat ironically, since she clearly feels a serious compulsion to join Aubrey. But one might recall, too, that “silly” has historically meant not just “lacking sense”; it has also meant “deserving of pity or sympathy,” as well as “innocent” and “feeble.” Moreover, the word’s Middle English root, “seely,” means “happy.” As Fiona is about to return to the bridge game, she may well fit any or all of these descriptions, such that being called “silly” turns out to be a much richer characterization than Grant’s use of the phrase suggests. Later in “The Bear,” Grant connects silliness to literature when he attributes to his extended family a belief that “literary people,” among others, have “lost touch with reality” due to “an unmerited good fortune or an innate silliness.” He goes on to imagine that Marian must see him similarly as a “silly person” with his “fine, generous schemes” (318). It is striking here that even as Grant recognizes how “literary people” might be written off as “silly,” he returns to using the word “fine,” a word that he has earlier deployed,

84

Alice Munro

not least, when referring to “fine nineteenth-century novels.” The fact that Grant sees these same novels as “rather similar” to each other suggests, again, his failure to make fine distinctions (283). In contrast, “The Bear” itself, with its fine, flowery, figurative language and its careful elucidation of character, models a sensitivity to particularity and to semantic complexity, including the ironies and divergent meanings that words can hold. Consequently, while “The Bear” dramatizes the sort of crisis that Alzheimer’s disease and residence in a care facility can introduce to a long-term relationship, it is equally concerned with identifying the sorts of linguistic and interpretive habits that Alzheimer’s disrupts, and with recognizing the problematic nature of such habits even for people who are not dealing with the disease. If this recognition emerges through a critique of Grant’s practices, it has significant implications for readers’ hermeneutic practices. The story challenges its audience not to rehearse Grant’s limited, sometimes hackneyed notions of himself and of others, but, instead, to be careful in assessments of characters—and of character. In that regard, it is a key feature of “The Bear” that its narratorial perspective is focalized through Grant. This focalization happens so pervasively and so subtly, with Grant’s thoughts often not explicitly tagged as his, that readers might be drawn into accepting Grant’s way of seeing things as authoritative rather than highly subjective and problematic. Indeed, the story’s focalization through Grant’s perspective distinguishes Munro’s text significantly from Away from Her, the cinematic adaptation of the story. Away from Her neither uses voiceover to present Grant’s problematic thoughts nor, for the most part, relays those thoughts through added dialogue. The result is that viewers of the film are much more licensed than are readers of the story to see Grant in a sympathetic light. The story’s audience, for its part, is repeatedly encouraged not to take Grant’s characterizations of himself and others at face value. If “The Bear” were a more conventional narrative, it might endorse Grant’s notion of himself as an essentially loyal husband who is out to redeem himself by putting Fiona’s affection for another man ahead of his own egoistic desires. But it is precisely the problem of treating things conventionally that the story seeks to expose as flawed, whether those conventions involve metaphorical language or patriarchal representations and expectations of gender. In contrast, Munro’s story vaunts and nurtures a supple, dexterous

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

85

relationship to others and to language—the sort of relationship that is necessary in order to apprehend the various nuances of “The Bear” itself, from its “silly” title to its ambiguous pronouns and its proliferating repetitions of ordinary words that turn out to be anything but straightforward.

86

PART TWO

Runaway Writing about Robert McGill’s chapter in the introduction to Part One here, I mentioned Jonathan Franzen’s review of Runaway in the New York Times Book Review. Appearing on the cover of the November 14, 2004 issue, it is called “Alice in Wonderland” and is singular by its beginning (“Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working North America”); by its imperative (“Read Munro! Read Munro!”—Franzen calls this a “simple instruction”); and most of all by his method: he fulfills his “reviewerly duties” by analyzing “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” rather than any story in Runaway. That book, he says, “is so good that I don’t want to talk about it here. Quotation can’t do the book justice, and neither can synopsis. The way to do it justice is to read it.” Once Franzen concludes his comments on “Bear,” he writes that “there are stories in ‘Runaway’ that are even better than this one—bolder, bloodier, deeper, broader . . .” (1, 15, 16). There too Franzen makes wry comment on how Munro was then being seen by the Swedish Academy. This cheeky review, assertive and pointed, captures the effect that Runaway had at publication and also suggests something of the critical reputation that the volume has achieved in the decade since it appeared. The title story and also the Juliet Triptych—published together in a single issue of the

88

Alice Munro

New Yorker—have gotten much of the volume’s critical attention along with “Passion,” a story in which Munro depicts her bright young central character in ways which many find disturbing, even frightening. “Bolder, bloodier, deeper, broader” in fact, and as Eric Reeves demonstrates here in his analysis of narrative indeterminacy, Runaway rewards readers wherever we look. This collection begins with “Runaway” and ends with “Powers,” another story that vied to serve as title story for the volume. Franzen was right saying that these stories cannot be readily quoted from or summarized, but even so a passage toward the end of “Runaway” warrants comment: “It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.” This fact catches a moment of this character’s being—Carla’s—and this metaphor confirms what each reader of “Runaway” knows: Clark’s actions in the story threaten Carla in profound, but in largely inexplicable, ways. Readers just know: we can feel it. In some of the same ways, “Powers” achieves Munro’s “profoundest narrative indeterminancy,” Reeves explains; for there, as the story and Runaway ends, Munro focuses on the key moment in the long and complex story she has told, leaving her character Nancy hoping for a reprieve from the action of the crucial moment but, regardless, the “known future” of that moment impinges, “Gently, inexorably leading her away from what begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash” (Runaway 46, 335). Her life. In an early story, “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection” (1978), Munro ends the action by transforming the final line of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” into an inevitable threat; the narrator recalls by then long-gone visiting relatives singing it, the remembering narrator interjecting and shaping her memory: “Then one voice alone, one of them singing on, gamely, to the finish. One voice in which there is an unexpected note of entreaty, of warning, as it hangs the five separate words on the air. Life is. Wait. But a. Now, wait. Dream” (Moons 18). When Munro published it, that ending was both effective and disconcerting, but read now alongside the ending of “Powers,” it seems both overt and too baldly direct. In “Powers,” she is at an altogether different level of presentation. So too all of Runaway. What Julie Rivkin, Eric Reeves, and Lester Barber demonstrate in their chapters here is that in Runaway Munro followed on

Runaway

89

Hateship into a greater complexity and a deeper profundity. Treating Munro’s use of the classics in the Juliet Triptych, Rivkin details the continuities from “White Dump” and “Hateship” in her references to classical literature and shows the ways in which they inform “Chance,” its opening story, and to a lesser degree the other two stories there. Taking up the implications of the trip to visit Eric which begins the story and which Juliet refers to as “a little detour,” and to its meaning as a way of understanding her character, Rivkin explicates “Chance” at the level of diction: phrases like “a little detour” resonate, opening up to connect to classical ideas of fate, destiny, and chance. Munro signals this through the book Juliet is reading on the train, E. R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), which Rivkin uses to gloss the detail of Juliet’s story. These classical resonances, she shows, look forward as well as backward in Juliet’s life, Eric’s comments over the suicide on the train played ahead in the triptych to apply to his own death later, once he and Juliet have a relationship and a child, Penelope; Juliet’s reference to “putting” “her Greek vocabulary” “away” (Runaway 83) playing forward to the same phrasing used in “Soon,” though there the reference is to Sara, her dying mother. Rivkin demonstrates the complexities of Munro’s classicisms, subtly integrated so as to be almost silent, but inexorably there as Juliet takes her “little detour” in “Chance”: Her life. Life is but a dream. Isolating narrative technique and connecting Munro to Conrad, Eric Reeves sees the whole of Runaway as singular, writing that its stories are unequaled in their intimacy and compassion, that they are stories which are “powerfully paradoxical.” Focusing on what he calls Munro’s “inflections”—“her narrative maneuvers, modulations, shifts, and ironies”—Reeves builds a persuasive case that these inflections “are always in service of representing her characters, their lives, perceptions, and choices.” Seeing memory itself as a “virtual character” in these stories, Reeves makes a salient distinction about the third-person narration in Runaway: “Munro may be omniscient but her narrative voice is not.” Knowing is not the same thing in this story as apprehending or, as he says, “what can only be gestured toward.” Thus the ending of “Powers.” Lester Barber follows another arc in Runaway, but one that echoes Reeves’s, asserting Munro’s use of what he calls the comic vision. He begins with the Shakespearean subtexts in “Tricks,” tracing numerous ways in which echoes of the comedic drawn from the stage inform

90

Alice Munro

the volume’s stories. “Passion,” “Chance,” and especially “Powers” then come in for analysis with the latter offering a “comedic vision of life,” as he concludes, that “is both muted and dark.” Like Rivkin, Barber sees the Juliet Triptych as central to Runaway and, like Reeves, he sees “Powers” as especially disquieting. Altogether, these three chapters make a case for Runaway as a singular reading experience which encapsulates late Munro at her most profound and imaginatively demanding.

4 Sibyl at the Kitchen Table, or Translating the Classics in “Hateship” and the Juliet Triptych Julie Rivkin

It is no accident, as they say, that Munro’s stories of fate and chance, determinism and coincidence, engage with classical and ancient literature. The sense of life stories played out against the backdrop of prophecy is as old as Homer, and classical allusions wed contemporary lives to the resonant stories of antiquity. Lapidary phrases from ancient languages—the Old Norse cited at the end of “White Dump” “seinat er at segia/svá er nu rádit” (“It is too late to talk about this now: it has been decided”) (Progress 411), the Latin at the end of “Hateship” “Tu ne quaesiris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi” (“You must not ask, it is forbidden to know— what fate has in store for me, or for you—”) (Hateship 54)—seem to set characters’ lives in stone, marking the limits of their agency and knowledge.1 My title “Sibyl at the Kitchen Table” pays homage to the figure of classical translation in Munro, a phrase intended to evoke both her stories’ omnipresent intertextuality with classical texts2 and a particular character who translates a poem at the end of “Hateship.”3 A bored high school girl doing her Latin homework,

92

Alice Munro

Munro’s translator Edith encounters the stern warning cited above about foreknowledge of one’s fate. The lines from Horace that she translates (“You must not ask, it is forbidden to know—what fate has in store for me, or for you—”) seem to reprimand her for her own games of prediction—the “hateship, friendship, loveship” game that gives the story its title—and her wanton play with the fates of others. With her talent for forging love letters, Edith even oversteps the role of Sybil, going beyond prophecy to active intervention. Yet perhaps more potent than this cited taboo on tampering with fate is the uncited injunction at the heart of the Latin poem, a phrase so familiar it needs no translation. Edith’s homework assignment is Horace’s “carpe diem” ode, and if the well-known words never appear, it may be because they find their best translation in the equivocal events of the story itself. “Hateship” itself is a translation of the Horatian ode, its “seize the day” unlikely love affair as brazen as anything proposed by “carpe diem” poets Donne or Marvell. As such, it offers an emblem of Munro’s mode of classical translation. Her sibyls are high school girls, her Delphi an ordinary kitchen table, and the field of action they oversee the houses and streets of small-town Ontario. But that makes them no less the site for the staging of classical dramas and the summoning of reflections on fate and foreknowledge.4 Just as the famed kitchen linoleum of Lives of Girls and Women becomes the stage for legendary familial conflict in “Royal Beatings,”5 the kitchen table of “Hateship” offers a place for the powerful stories of Greece and Rome to touch down in the lives of Munro’s “girls and women.” Munro’s mode of classical translation, the way in which she locates the resonant old stories in familiar domestic settings, owes a debt, I believe, to Willa Cather, and to the understanding of translation articulated by classical scholar Gaston Cleric in My Ántonia (1918).6 The signature of Cleric’s classical instruction is its chiastic design. His gift for “bring[ing] the drama of antique life before one out of the shadows—white figures against blue backgrounds” is to make it local, and the effect is also to infuse the local landscapes of Nebraska with the “drama of antique life.” Performing the first half of the chiastic figure, Cleric introduces protagonist Jim Burden to a Virgil who inhabits a “little rural neighborhood” like Jim’s own; this comparison then allows Jim to recognize his own world and experience as Virgilian. As in Munro, there is a literal translation scene at the heart of this instruction.

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

93

Cleric cites a line from Virgil’s Georgics—“Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam Musas”—and follows it first with a literal translation (“for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country”) before offering a gloss on the particular word “patria” that will make Virgil’s world recognizable as a version of Jim’s own: “Patria” here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little “country”: to his father’s fields, “sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.” (256) This gloss shows the workings of the chiastic translation: if Virgil’s “patria” is a humble local place of sloping fields and broken beech trees not entirely unlike the Nebraskan “country,” then Cather’s own “country” can be a Virgilian patria. Like Virgil, Jim—or actually Cather—will also be the first to bring the Muse into a local patria; Cather too can write her Georgics. For Jim, this translation brings an incandescence of classical meaning to the most local of rural figures: “The places and people of my own infinitesimal past . . . stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun” (254). Classical allusion backlights the local and renders it heroic; it also gives the classical old figures and stories the immediacy of people living in the neighborhood. The effect is like what happens when Jim’s grandfather reads from the Bible: “It all seemed like something that had happened lately, and near at hand” (81). Like Cather, Munro can make classical stories feel “like something that happened lately, and near at hand,” both turning epic poets and their characters into neighbors and familiars, and tracing in local stories the arc of myth and legend. But the effect is not to “strengthen and simplify” the local and render it heroic. If anything, the reverse: in Munro’s “translations,” Milton Homer can be the “village idiot” (“Who Do You Think You Are?”); Flora, the Roman goddess of spring, a pet goat (“Runaway”); and faithful wife Penelope a daughter gone missing (“Silence”). The cited figures and stories seem subject to the most ironic of

94

Alice Munro

revisions. Yet like the fragments of ancient languages with which I began, these allusions also exert a force of their own, inserting their narratives into Munro’s stories like a kind of fate—or even foreknowledge—for those whose lives they touch. Given the general intertextuality of Munro’s fiction, is there a particularity to her classical allusions? If Munro, like Cather, sees classical figures and stories living among us, what exactly is the effect? In pursuing these question of how classical translation works in Munro, I began with the emblematic figure of the translator in “Hateship,” but the questions of classical translation actually develop with greater complexity in Munro’s subsequent volume of stories, Runaway. If “Hateship” features a high school girl doing her Latin homework, the protagonist of the Juliet Triptych in Runaway is a doctoral student in classics. As befits her more advanced level of study, the focus shifts from Latin to Greek, and over the course of the triptych, from Homer and Ovid in the first story to the obscure fifth-century Greek novelist Heliodorus in the last. The triptych could be seen as a kind of sequel to the “seize the day” story “Hateship,” pursuing its themes of fate and foreknowledge at a higher level, and presenting the next stages in the life journey of a classicist. True to its classical origins, the first story “Chance” opens in medias res, but with a journey that its protagonist characterizes as “a little detour” (48). She is going to pay a visit, unannounced, to a man she met on a train six months earlier. Cutting back and forth between this bus journey and an earlier train journey that gives rise to it, the story raises questions about what constitutes a “detour” as opposed to a true direction in one’s life’s journey. Is it intention? What governs intention? And if intention, what is the place of “chance”? The story’s title, hovering in its meanings between accident and opportunity, underscores this question, as do the classical texts that accompany and gloss Juliet’s reflections on her journey. The narrative itself, aligned for much of the story with the train on its tracks, nonetheless emphasizes those moments where the journey encounters an obstacle, where it might go differently, where something happens that occasions a stop, a turn, a shift in direction. What is choice and what is chance? How much responsibility do we bear for what follows from our actions? If there is blood on the tracks—as there is in this story—whose blood is it

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

95

and what are its consequences? What are the lines of causality that link the characters’ fates to one another? The first choice that puts Juliet on a track is a curricular one— her decision to study classics. Others, she knows, see only “the oddity of her choice of Classics . . . its irrelevance, or dreariness,” but Juliet, whose intelligence has marked her as a small-town misfit much as if she had “a limp or an extra thumb,” reassures her parents that classics is not a detour: “In the Classics Department I fit in. I am extremely okay.” She is surprised, then, at the reason offered when her professors urge her to take a substitute teaching position that will carry her far from the classics department: “Get out into the world a bit. See some real life” (53–54). “Real life” is a familiar phrase in Munro’s fiction—as in the story of that title (“A Real Life”), where it is summoned up in defense of marriage as a woman’s destiny (Open Secrets). But if her professors seem to harbor a similar view, locating “the world” and “real life” as what await Juliet outside the classics department, Juliet does not share their perspective. The book she carries on the journey, E. R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, provides a “Classics Department” frame for the world she sees, one that she attempts to align with what she observes through the train window and beyond. Reading about maenadism in preparation for a class she will teach on Greek Thought, for example, Juliet learns of how “would be maenads [are] brought down [from Mount Parnassus during a snow storm] with their clothes stiff as boards, having in all their frenzy, accepted rescue,” and thinks, “This seemed rather like contemporary behavior . . . it somehow cast a modern light on the celebrants’ carrying-on.” In her view, what Dodds describes as taking place on Mount Parnassus some twenty-five hundred years ago sounds like it could be happening in the 1960s on the grounds of a girls’ private school in Vancouver.7 Yet Juliet also realizes that her students would resist the identification of classics with “real life,” “armed against any possible entertainment, any involvement, as students were. And the ones who weren’t so armed wouldn’t want to show it” (59). “Fitting in” to the classics department may be evidence of Juliet’s handicap, an experience of identification with classical texts that most girls are “armed” to repel, but that may make her all the more like a flawed classical hero herself. Juliet’s practice of finding direction in her reading turns her journey into a kind of translation exercise, with repeated attempts to

96

Alice Munro

find the right language for the new things she encounters. The word that will eventually set things straight for her at the story’s close will come from Homer, but the first of her foreign words is actually Russian—or so Juliet thinks—as she tries out a literary reference somewhat afield of her expertise. “Taiga,” she ventures, looking out the window at this unfamiliar landscape, before questioning if it is “the right word for what she was looking at”: She might have had, at some level, the idea of herself as a young woman in a Russian novel, going out into an unfamiliar, terrifying, and exhilarating landscape where the wolves would howl at night and where she would meet her fate. She did not care that this fate—in a Russian novel—would likely turn out to be dreary, or tragic, or both.8 But she quickly revises her allusion, setting the Russian novel’s conception of fate aside: Personal fate was not the point, anyway. What drew her in— enchanted her, actually—was the very indifference, the repetition, the carelessness and contempt for harmony, to be found on the scrambled surface of the Precambrian shield (54). What replaces personal fate is randomness; Juliet finds enchantment in having entered the landscape of chance. Fate or chance: as if to put this conceptual opposition to the test, an obstacle immediately inserts itself into Juliet’s vision, derailing her course of thought. What appears as “a shadow . . . in the corner of her eye” quickly turns into an invasive “trousered leg,” an inquiring voice, an ill-fitting suit of clothing, and eventually an unattractive middle-aged man in the seat across from her who wishes to be her travel companion. Juliet repels his claim on her journey, insisting: “I really do want to read. I think I’ll go to the observation car.” This small skirmish, which leaves Juliet with a guilty sense of “victory” over an “opponent,” draws attention in its martial metaphors to her combative claim of agency over her own journey, metaphors that will make further sense in the light of later allusions. But when she moves to the observation car, she encounters a larger impediment to her vision—“the intrusion of the train itself, in front of [her]”— which reminds her of something more powerful that controls her

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

97

direction and at the same time prevents her from seeing what is ahead. Perhaps because of the way in which the train intrudes on her reveries about the enchantment of randomness, foregrounding instead her absence of control or foreknowledge, Juliet finds this view from the observation car “less satisfying” (56–57). When the train later comes to an abrupt and shuddering halt, and the unseen obstacle on the tracks turns out to be the body of the man she rebuffed earlier, all of the questions of fate and foreknowledge, agency and chance, come crowding forward with new urgency. Suspecting a connection, Juliet quickly becomes preoccupied with her own sense of culpability for this unknown man’s suicide. But before she discovers what has caused the train to stop, at the time of the event itself, the narrative sequence invites the exploration of a different causality. Juliet has been reading the previously mentioned discussion of maenadism when a “lurch or shudder . . . seems[]to pass along the whole train,” rocking the cars and then bringing them to “an abrupt stop” (56). The convulsive motion seems to pass from the pages of Dodds into the train that carries her, infecting it with its own maenad-like frenzy.9 Collective in nature, this spirit then moves through the passengers, giving rise to “a spreading feeling of fright and agitation.” “A voice of authority” speaks but remains inaudible, and instead Juliet hears only the murmur of superstitious premonitions: “I felt there was something going to happen,” a woman says, “I didn’t want to start up again, I thought something was going to happen” (59–60). Just as Juliet’s earlier reflections on fate versus randomness seem to put this man in Juliet’s vision, her reading in The Greeks and the Irrational seems to conjure his extreme act. What might Dodds have to do with the man’s suicide? Up to this point, I have rather casually treated Juliet’s reading of The Greeks and the Irrational as mere evidence of her classical study, but Dodds’s book is not that of any classicist. Interested in how Greek literature depicted “the springs of human behavior” (2), he departs from a commonly held view of ancient Greek culture as eminently rational, and instead investigates those moments when characters do something unfathomable, impossible to justify or explain in purely rational terms. An epigraph from William James—“The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in which we catch real fact in the making” (cited in Dodds 1)— captures this focus. For Ruth Scurr, reviewing Munro’s New Selected

98

Alice Munro

Stories, Dodds’ epigraph might well be Munro’s, as her fiction penetrates to those same “darker, blinder strata of character” that Dodds traces in the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks attribute the acts that emerge from such “recesses of feeling” to divine or daemonic intervention; the Homeric term for this altered state is atē, which is not exactly possession, but nonetheless a condition in which one is not oneself.10 Dodds’ own perspective, as one might guess from the William James epigraph, is resolutely psychological, though he is quick to point out a consequence of the ancient Greek conviction in divine intervention: if the unexpected acts that arise from the “darker, blinder strata” of the psyche are evidence of the divine or daemonic, then the unfathomable or surprising becomes part of design, something that, because it happened, “had to be.”11 Dodds runs deep in Juliet’s consciousness and in this story. If the suicide is maenadic, or attributable to atē, it enters everything that Juliet experiences. After the suicide, Juliet attempts to resume her journey, but everything that has grounded her is disrupted. I would like to focus closely on the particular sequence that follows the interruption of her reading, as the transitions from one event to the next seems to follow the “darker, blinder” logic of the unconscious.12 Wanting to communicate what happened, Juliet first attempts to write to her parents. But her attempt to narrate it as an “entertaining stor[y]” in the arch and superior tone established by family convention is halted when her memory hits the obstacle of the body on the tracks; after writing the coy phrase “a sort of Awful Thump . . .” she puts down her pen, unable to continue. Her attempt to resume her window gazing is similarly baffled; the landscape has changed and in place of “enchanting” randomness offers “black water, black rocks, . . . air [filled] . . . with darkness.” Her reading of Dodds also undergoes its own metamorphosis. Since she has read the book before, she trusts to its familiarity and thinks that she can “open it anywhere” and find her way. While “every few pages” show “an orgy of underlining”—a phrase that captures the maenadlike nature of her reading—when she reads the passages that she once found so important, she finds “that what she had pounced on with such satisfaction at one time now seem[s] obscure and unsettling” (65). Juliet’s old experience of passionate connection with her reading—evidenced in that “orgy of underlining”—has been dislodged by the “obstacle on the tracks,” its meaning gone obscure.

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

99

In this unsettled condition, Juliet finds a single phrase from Dodds rising to the surface, the sole direct quotation included in the story, one Munro italicizes: . . . what to the partial vision of the living appears as the act of a fiend, is perceived by the wider insight of the dead to be an aspect of cosmic justice. . . . (Munro’s ellipses 65) The surfacing of this phrase after the trauma suggests that it has been called up by the event, or by Juliet’s response to it, and that it speaks to Juliet now in a way that those phrases underlined earlier no longer do. Appearing in a chapter entitled “From Shame Culture to Guilt Culture” that documents a historical change in Greek consciousness after Homer, the phrase captures a new desire to find justice in the universe, even in the face of the most irrational of acts. In the example from which the cited phrase is taken, a character in the Aeschylus play Persae who seems to be randomly tempted by an “evil daemon” is actually being punished for hubris. Its application to Juliet’s own case is disturbing—to what degree was she guilty of hubris in her rebuff?—and even more so when one considers the consequences that the passage underscores. The quoted phrase draws attention to a belief that accompanies this new conception of cosmic justice, one designed to address the absence of immediate consequences for good or bad acts: the wheels of divine justice turn slowly, taking place over the course of generations. A character will only have “partial vision” of his actions; it will take the “wider insight” that only comes at the end of a lifetime (or the panoptic vision of the author) to reveal how an apparently “daemonic” act is actually just. In addition to subjecting characters to a disturbing degree of dramatic irony, as Dodds notes, this particular conception of “cosmic justice” also opens the way to “the idea of inherited guilt and deferred punishment” (33), with the frightening consequence that one need not have actually done something to be contaminated by guilt. There is an easy slide, Dodds points out, from “inherited” to “infectious” “pollution”: “Therein lay its terror: for how could any man be sure that he had not contracted the evil thing from a chance contact, or else inherited it from the forgotten offence of some remote ancestor” (36). The cited phrase reverberates ominously forward; in Juliet’s relation to this man’s death, what kind of moral debt might

100

Alice Munro

she have incurred, and how will it be collected? Or, in the more anthropological language also used by Dodds, to what kind of “pollution” has she been exposed through this “chance contact,” and to whom might she pass it on? The idea of guilt and pollution by “chance contact” is particularly suggested by the story’s treatment of the figure of blood, and I will follow its path shortly. This also seems like a moment to point out how the trilogy form, which Munro adopts from the Greek dramatists, with Aeschylus its first practitioner, works well for the enactment of cosmic justice, guilty acts finding punishment over the course not only of generations but of subsequent plays or stories. The familial dimension of cosmic justice will be important to Munro’s generational stories, as will this idea of guilt as pollution. But before following either of these paths that comes out of Dodds—the path of blood or of the trilogy form—I want to follow the immediate reverberations of the cited phrase, which bury themselves in Juliet’s unconscious mind and then rise to the surface in the form of a dream. It seems appropriate that Dodds enables a turn into dreams. Freudian that he is, Dodds writes about what we know as the royal road to the unconscious, and Juliet’s dream seems to come from the page before her as well as the trauma that has preceded it. As “the book slip[s] out of her hands,” we slide imperceptibly into this account: she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of them beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of the ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it. (65–66) The dream conveys Juliet’s unease about what she has grounded herself on as she and her perhaps students make their progress across the uncertain surface of a frozen lake. In typical dream fashion, recent experience supplies the content: the frozen lake comes from the landscape out the window, while the students belong to an anticipated teaching scenario probably associated

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

101

with her reading. When the ice cracks under their feet, Juliet does not seem to fear any danger and confidently insists on the sustaining power of classical form. Good student that she’s always been, she has the right word at hand: it is “iambic pentameter.” This response suggests that Juliet is familiar with converting disruption into form; the cracks are, in fact, the source of the pattern.13 Interestingly, the connection Juliet makes between her passage across the lake and the verse form might come from the page in Dodds that she had just been reading: the phrase “a passage in iambics” appears just above the quoted lines about cosmic justice. But the phrase has disturbing associations: the “passage in iambics” speaks of how daemonic possession can cause a man’s good understanding to vanish and be replaced by bad judgment (Dodds 39). The laughter that greets Juliet’s response, along with the widening of the cracks, casts doubt upon her judgment; her confidently produced answer was the wrong one, and unless she finds the right word—which she cannot—she will not be able to “save the situation” (66). The man’s death has put Juliet’s journey at risk, and she does not have a sense of how to move forward. The problem conveyed by the image is that form and its disruption are not antithetical to one another, but inseparable; this is not new to Juliet—she is familiar with converting cracks into five-sided tiles—but her passage has just created cracks that are larger than her ability to project order. The word she seeks is one that will stretch her vocabulary. As before, the transitions are key; she will wake to find a man sitting across from her, sitting in the seat once occupied by the dead man, and this second man will by the story’s end become her lover. He will, in fact, be the destination for the “little detour” with which the story begins. What might he have to do with her quest for the “right word”? And if that quest is inflected by her reading of Dodds, how might Dodds inform the chains of causality that will eventually lead to their union? This man—she will later learn his name is Eric—has already crossed paths with her, first in the observation car as a fellow reader who looked up from his book and met her gaze but importantly did not interrupt her reading, then as a rescuer seen out the window carrying the body, and then, as a possible informant whom she approached in the train corridor to find out about the man who killed himself. Now he sits across from her because he is ready to answer the question she asked

102

Alice Munro

earlier. But his arrival also seems designed to answer the unasked question left to her by her dream. Pursuing the lines of causality that connect Juliet to these two men involves following a figure mentioned earlier: the path of blood. When Juliet awakens to this man’s presence, she makes an immediate trip to “the Ladies Toilet,” one necessitated by “the bane of her life . . . her monthly bleeding” (61). This trip replicates the earlier trip she made when the train was halted for the “obstacle on the tracks” (60). Reading a warning not to flush when the train is in the station, Juliet closes the lid. Soon the train begins to move, and when they come to the fatal spot, Juliet looks but finds “no blood to be seen.” However, what seems to be the man’s blood appears in a surprising place. Juliet overhears a conversation between two women in the corridor: “Full of blood,” one of them says. “So it must have splashed in when the train went over—” And in reply, the other says, “Don’t say it” (63). The blood the women take for that of the suicide is, of course, Juliet’s, though its mention, along with its abject location, is unspeakable. The blood seems the flow of an unmentionable contamination, though whether it comes from Juliet or the unknown man is rendered indeterminate by this confusion. When Juliet poses questions about the unknown man’s identity, she worries that she comes across as “full of disgusting curiosity,” a sense of herself that she associates with the remembered words of that overheard conversation: Full of blood. That was disgusting, if you liked. She could never tell anyone about the mistake that had been made, the horrid joke of it. People would think her exceptionally crude and heartless, were she ever to speak of it. And what was at one end of the misunderstanding—the suicide’s smashed body—would seem, in the telling to be hardly more foul and frightful than her own menstrual blood. (64) The confusion of blood that connects Juliet to the man’s smashed body seems to evoke the kinds of uncertain transmissions of pollution discussed by Dodds in this study of “guilt culture.” That chance contact might pass on some infection from another’s life story seems too fearful to contemplate; this fear intersects with taboos about menstruation and excretion to make the mingling of blood that mixes Juliet with this unknown man truly unmentionable.

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

103

The transmission of pollution and the transmission of narrative seem directly at odds with one another; Juliet’s first thought is “Never tell that to anybody.” But what follows immediately, though parenthetically, is the acknowledgment that she will, in the future, pass on this secret: “(Actually she did tell it, a few years later, to a woman named Christa, a woman whose name she did not yet know)” (64). To what degree does the transmission of the story produce contact with the pollution? Will Christa, the woman she does not yet know, also be touched by blood? This bit of narrative prolepsis produces the dramatic irony evoked by Dodds (and familiar to readers of Munro); the narrator has a “wider insight” that Juliet lacks. The kind of “cosmic justice” that might be visible from that “wider insight” is rather frightening to contemplate, though the fact that there are two stories ahead in the triptych suggests that we will arrive at the future alluded to here. For the moment, though, the recipient of Juliet’s overflowing need to tell the story is the man who carried the body and who now sits across from her in the seat the other man once occupied.14 The need to tell seems to manifest itself as a kind of physical overflow that Juliet fears is disgusting; she awakens with “a dribble [of saliva] at the corner of her mouth,” immediately recognizes the flow of blood that sends her to the “Ladies,” and eventually succumbs to an “overflow” of “tears” (66).15 But Eric’s response to this potentially contaminating overflow is acceptance: “It’s okay” (67), he tells her when the tears come. Previously Juliet had found herself “extremely okay” only in the classics department; his use of the same accepting phrase promises a similar fit. The conversation that follows helps Juliet understand this overflow; as Dodds might have predicted, the right word is “guilt.” Juliet fears that her response is excessive— “You think feeling guilty is just an indulgence?” (68), she asks him—but he, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, invokes the coming of what Dodds calls a “wider insight”: What I think is— . . . I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life—things will probably happen in your life—that will make this seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about. (68) Eric’s casual and rather halting delivery might make this statement seem minor, but it has the quiet force of a prophecy. His gesture

104

Alice Munro

of containment for Juliet’s guilty feelings—“this is minor”— nonetheless evokes a future expansion; without specifying anything, he prophesies that the guilt won’t stop here. As if to confirm his prediction of things happening, Juliet senses a different feeling taking form behind this abstract though passionate discussion of guilt. Having made a case, “rather well, she thought—for the necessity of some feelings of guilt both in public and private life,” Juliet realizes that “she had stopped feeling any, for the moment. You might even say she was enjoying herself” (69). The new “things” predicted by Eric are already starting to happen; behind this discussion of guilt there are new feelings of pleasure, attraction, desire. It turns out that the feeling of desire rising between the two of them will move forward over not only one but two dead bodies; later, when Juliet completes the “little detour” that brings her to Eric, it will be just after his wife has been buried. This disturbing though advantageous coincidence is not entirely unpredictable, as her death follows from an accident that Juliet had learned of on the train journey—an accident some eight years earlier that had left her severely impaired and in decline. But just as Eric prophesied that things would happen would make the unknown man’s death seem minor, he warns Juliet off labeling his wife’s accident a “tragedy.” Instead, he invites her to see it as “a lot more complicated . . . something you got used to, . . . a new kind of life” (70). Eric’s formulation, that accident or chance can lead to “a new kind of life,” fits the story not only of his marriage but of his union with Juliet, echoing his earlier response to Juliet’s professions of guilt. Yet the “new kind of life” that follows a trauma, if we follow the Dodds passage that manifested itself to Juliet after the man’s death, may not exactly leave traces of the old behind. The “blood on the tracks” may be transmitted, the guilt passed on, and future generations may be drawn into the narrative in order to arrive at what might be “cosmic justice.” Suggesting that transmission, the figure of blood recurs in Eric and Juliet’s sexual union, following a pattern of displacement similar to the one that occurs between Juliet and the unknown man. Juliet’s blood is first an obstacle to the consummation of their desire, and then its absence an exposure of a small sexual deception. When Eric embraces Juliet on the train, she fears his discovery that she is menstruating and stops him by saying that she is a “virgin.” The revelation six months later that this is untrue—no blood—is treated as unimportant, yet it establishes a

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

105

link between the concealment of blood and concealment of sexual relations. Later Eric will conceal his resumed affair with a former lover, and the revelation of that deception will be linked with his death. If Dodds provides an interpretive context for the figure of blood in the story, a figure that links the death of the unknown man to both the formation and the demise of Eric and Juliet’s union, he also provides yet another reference that frames their union, one that initially seems more propitious yet that also harbors its own ominous potential. This reference picks up on Juliet’s quest for the “right word” for her experience—since it is not taiga or iambic pentameter—and thus foregrounds the motif of translation. The word she seeks, it turns out, comes from the first book of The Iliad, which happens to be the textual example featured in the first chapter of The Greeks and the Irrational. This first chapter, titled “Agamemnon’s Apology,” explores the Greek hero’s irrational behavior in the opening book of the epic, acts that leave a trail of damage in their wake. After Achilles delivers a divine message directing Agamemnon to give up a mistress captured as the spoils of battle, Agamemnon insists that he will do so only if Achilles is forced to do the same. Agamemnon will accept the return of his mistress Chryseis to her Trojan priest father, but only if he is given Briseis, Achilles’s mistress, in her place. Achilles agrees, but does so with an anger that causes him to withdraw from battle and costs the lives of countless Greeks, including that of his beloved Patroclus. Dodds raises the question of what possesses Agamemnon that causes him to set this train of anger and damage in motion. The answer—āte, that altered psychic state in which one performs surprising acts—is where his exploration of the irrational begins. The Homeric story of Chryseis and Briseis is the one that comes to Juliet when she reaches the destination for her “little detour.” Juliet has traveled to Eric’s home in Whale Bay after receiving a letter from him recalling their time together on the train. Arriving to discover herself mistaken for a belated funeral guest, she then learns from Ailo, the woman keeping the house for him, that there is yet another woman in Eric’s life. Eric is with her now, with Christa. Juliet takes in this discovery—“Eric has a woman. Of course he has. Christa. Juliet sees a younger, a more seductive Ailo” (81)—and thinks of The Iliad:

106

Alice Munro

Two other women come into her mind. Briseis and Chryseis. Those playmates of Achilles and Agamemnon. Each of them described as being “of the lovely cheeks.” When the professor read that word (which she could not now remember), his forehead had gone quite pink and he seemed to be suppressing a giggle. For that moment, Juliet despised him. So if Christa turns out to be a rougher, more northerly version of Briseis/Chryseis, will Juliet be able to start despising Eric as well? (81) Why do Ailo and Christa make her think of Chryseis and Briseis? Why does she recall this story of women as the spoils of battle, of male competition, of an irrational demand that gives birth to an anger so damaging that it sweeps through an army? Juliet’s memory of her professor’s inadequacy in the face of female beauty offers a clue: this association might allow her to “despise” Eric as well, who also fails to meet her expectations. Denied her desire, Juliet may have in her an anger to match that of Achilles—or if not quite of that scale, still sufficient to do some damage. The vehemence of this feeling is just visible in her response to Ailo as an obstacle; “With Ailo out of the way,” Juliet realizes when the woman leaves, “it is easier to discover her own intentions” (81–82). The phrasing recalls Juliet’s treatment of the man who mistakenly put himself in the path of her intentions on the train. What Juliet discovers is that “she never intended to get on that bus” back to Vancouver; this journey to Eric is not “a little detour” but the track of her intention. Confirming her discovery that she is on track, Juliet remembers the forgotten word and, with it, the whole “bright treasure” of her classical knowledge: Kallipareos. Of the lovely cheeks. Now she has it. The Homeric word is sparkling on her hook. And beyond that she is suddenly aware of all her Greek vocabulary, of everything which seems to have been put in a closet for nearly six months now. Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away. That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

107

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. That is what happens. (84) But while Juliet celebrates the recovery of her “bright treasure,” she realizes how common it is to become accustomed to its absence; putting something in the closet is allowing one’s life journey to become “a little detour,” a detour that all too easily can last a lifetime. Juliet’s vehemence about reclaiming her own intention, evident in her response to those like Ailo and the unknown man who attempt to make her go off track, also expresses itself as an act of translation, of finding the right talismanic word. Importantly, Eric has a role in the recovery of Juliet’s treasure: the phrase for Juliet’s verbal recovery—“the Homeric word . . . sparkling on her hook”—makes remembering an act of angling, and Juliet’s silvery capture metaphorically dependent on Eric, the fisherman. This figurative collaboration recalls an earlier experience on their train journey: his knowledge of celestial navigation and hers of classical mythology came together in their reading of the stars. (His recollection of their stargazing is featured in his letter, though it also contains a typo—“stairs” for “stars”—that suggests that he too could go astray.) “Pleased to be instructed but also . . . the instructor” (72), Juliet finds her way back to the treasure of her classical knowledge with Eric’s assistance, his fisherman’s skills of navigation helping her to recognize that what she took as a detour actually led to her destination. Eric’s role in reorienting Juliet’s journey and assisting in the recovery of her beloved classical Greek might also have been predicted when “she told him what she had always known that she should never tell any man or boy, lest he lose interest immediately”—the reason for that initial “odd choice” of classics: “Because I love it. I love all that stuff. I really do” (71). In confessing her secret love of classics, she was also revealing— perhaps before she knew it herself—her love for Eric. This conjoined love visible in the image of bright treasure invites another classical allusion, one that acknowledges the risk of loss in her feelings for Eric. “Few people, very few, have a treasure,” Juliet reflects, “and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you” (84). This fear draws on something in the Briseis/Chryseis story—both Achilles

108

Alice Munro

and Agamemnon have their prizes taken from them, both women are treated as objects of exchange—and it may explain why Juliet turns to a different story for pursuing her desire. Slightly intoxicated now—she has been drinking coffee with Tia Maria—she feels “careless, but powerful” and shifts in her identifications from the heroic to the divine. The Tia Maria “enables her to think that Eric, after all, is not so important. He is someone she might dally with. Dally is the word. As Aphrodite did, with Anchises. And then one morning she will slip away” (84). Dodds observes that alcohol is, for the ancient Greeks, one source of āte, and Juliet seems to literalize this concept when she consumes personified spirits (the Tia Maria) and comes to feel like a goddess. The word that guides her now— “dally”—fits this new sense of her own divine power, and the story it brings in its wake is of the love between goddess and mortal. In the story of Aphrodite and Anchises, told in a Homeric hymn, the goddess is infatuated with a beautiful herder and takes on human form in order to have his love. One day she reveals herself in her divine form to her lover, with the condition that he never expose her identity. Unable to keep this promise, Anchises boasts that his lover is a goddess, and he is punished for his betrayal. The story’s appeal is evident: if Juliet is Aphrodite, she will have the power to command Eric’s love, free to “dally” with him and “slip away.” Other elements of this story—Anchises’ betrayal of his promise to Aphrodite, the birth of a child Aeneas with a unique destiny of his own—don’t register for Juliet at this time, though they linger at the edges with some narrative weight of their own. Is Eric Agamemnon or Anchises? Is Juliet Briseis or Aphrodite? The stories that hover behind her union with Eric register shifts of power and agency—struggles that will, in fact, manifest themselves in the connection they will form. After envisioning herself as Aphrodite, Juliet feels at the moment of Eric’s actual arrival not like a goddess but like a school girl: it is “like the moment at school before the winner of the prize is announced. Only worse, because she has no reasonable hope. And because there will never be another chance so momentous in her life.” It’s important to note that “chance” here means not “accident” but “opportunity,” just the kind of thing you seize when you “seize the day.” That Eric is like a school prize underscores the way her love of classics and love of this man come together in the figure of the “bright treasure.” Eric’s entrance also evokes the Homeric hymn, the meeting of god and

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

109

mortal, though the properties of divinity seem to shift back and forth between them: he is “laughing in triumph and admiration, as if at a most spectacular piece of impudence and daring”; his open arms are like “a wind . . . blown into the room” and he “advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness” (84–85). The language of storm and war also resonates with The Iliad, the ransacking and assault reminding us that a capture of a woman is at the center of the Trojan War. But the story ends—as so many Munro stories do—with a qualifier: Juliet was wrong about Christa; she is nothing like Ailo. She will “become Juliet’s great friend and mainstay during the years ahead—” (86). In fact, we already know that she is the one to whom Juliet will tell her most unspeakable story of blood. But what does that do to the Briseis and Chryseis allusion? Was Juliet completely off track in thinking of The Iliad? In fact, I quoted only the first half of the story’s final sentence; it continues: “Though she will never quite forgo a habit of sly teasing, the ironic flicker of a submerged rivalry” (86). Briseis and Chryseis is a story of not so submerged rivalry, and the “ironic flicker” of its presence promises to make itself felt in Juliet’s future. The story of exchanged women and epic anger that brings Juliet her “bright treasure” also contains the germ of its loss. There may be a danger in finding one’s treasure at the outset of a war epic, a necessary premonition that difficult things will follow in its wake. Juliet may have translated the right word, as Dodds found his opening example of āte, in the first book of The Iliad, but as The Greeks and the Irrational predicts, it may require attaining an unusual perspective to understand the events that follow from such stormy passions as “cosmic justice.” The final section of my chapter is a kind of coda, one that reaches forward into the two other stories of the triptych and pursues some Dodds-derived reflections, particularly on cosmic justice, although only in the most telegraphic of forms. The title of the second story appears, somewhat ominously, in italics in the “bright treasure” passage of “Chance,” part of Juliet’s reflection on how the treasure gets lost: That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something

110

Alice Munro

that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all. (83) The word she uses, “soon,” names the accommodating process by which we accept putting aside what we treasure. “Soon” is a promise we make ourselves, but is it the false hope by which we deny what we’ve lost, pretending that it is retrievable. It’s the “da” of the “fort-da” game, the pretense that loss can be managed, that the art of losing is not too hard to master. In the second story in the triptych, the metaphor is literalized and the bright treasure gets put in the attic. The story opens with a description of a Chagall painting, “I and the Village,” that Juliet is purchasing to send her parents, an image, for her, of their lives. The print of two facing profiles, one human, one heifer, features fanciful colors, “shining” eyes, and “an exuberant branch, fruited with jewels” (87); it is not hard to see it as a folkloric version of “bright treasure,” replete with motifs from the classical stories that Juliet loves. When she (accompanied by Christa) selects this gift, Juliet herself is a “fruited branch,” “three months pregnant with the baby that would turn out to be Penelope,” “suddenly free of nausea [and] subject to fits of euphoria” (88). But when Juliet arrives for a visit, this offering has been set aside, much in the way the bright treasure is put in the closet.16 When Juliet goes back to her parents’ home, a thirteen-month Penelope in tow, she discovers a set of disturbing displacements and betrayals. Her mother Sara is ill; her father Sam has become infatuated with the young woman he has hired to care for her mother; and her mother has found comfort in the friendship of a young minister. Even worse, what she thought of as their “broadminded,” inventive, and unconventional life is beset by provincial narrowness. Her parents treat her unmarried state, her daughter born out of wedlock, as a topic of shame. Sam gave up his teaching job at the local school because of the scandal; they pick her up at the train station of a neighboring town not because of a change in the train schedule but because of their own embarrassment. What has happened to her parents who once represented their religion as druidism? To a father who once was able to define “thaumaturgy” for Juliet?17 Juliet had been planning to consult with her father about returning to her PhD thesis in classics, her beloved Greek

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

111

temporarily put in the closet; what she discovers instead is that he’s the one who put the “bright treasure” of her gift in the attic. If the story derives its title from that act of deferral and rationalization, the term acquires further meaning when it is spoken by Sara in the final scene. Trying to explain the strange fact of the minister’s visit, she uses a word that has been alien to their family culture—“faith”—and then links her daughter to that word through the titular word “soon.” My faith isn’t so simple. . . . I can’t describe it. But it’s—all I can say—it’s something. It’s a wonderful—something. When it gets really bad for me—when it gets so bad I—you know what I think then? I think, all right. I think—Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet. (124) Juliet’s mother, grasping, cannot name what she believes in, what her treasure is. She is at the end of her life, and she still does not have the right word. And then she does; her something is Juliet. The moment resembles that in the first story when Juliet finds her Homeric word sparkling on her hook. (Her mother’s word is Shakespearian rather than Homeric, the generational sequence of Biblical [Sara], Shakespearian [Juliet], and Homeric [Penelope] names saying something about changing visions of treasure.) But Juliet, unlike Eric, does not affirm the claim made on her, and in her refusal to say “yes,” she resists serving as her mother’s “bright treasure.” Puzzled at her own inability to respond—“Could it not have been managed? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say Yes.” (125)—Juliet’s “silence” offers a title for the next story and a conundrum for it to pursue. What Juliet does offer in the story, however—a glass of sugary grape soda to the minister having a diabetic crisis—suggests something inauthentic about the offerings she might have made because of the needs (her mother’s as well as this man’s) that drive such requests. Although the grape soda produces a “quick and apparently miraculous . . . recovery” (123), it does not convert Juliet into a believer. Instead, the would-be communion seems fraudulent, the man of faith exposed: But before he was quite recovered, or quite himself, while he was still holding his head at a slant, he met her eyes. Not on purpose, it seemed, just by chance. The look in his eyes was not

112

Alice Munro

grateful or forgiving—it was not really personal, it was just the raw look of an astounded animal, hanging on to whatever it could find. (123) The “chance” crossing of glances with a desperate man recalls the first story, its tracing of such accidental contacts and potential contaminations. As if to ward off such effects, Juliet’s final gesture—which provides the story’s last word—is to wash that glass along with the cups for their shared tea and “put everything away” (125). But what is Juliet putting away when she “turns away” from her mother in silence? It will only be years later when Juliet comes across a letter to Eric “saved . . . by accident—it had no particular importance in their lives” that she interprets the pain of that visit: “Some shift concerning where home was. . . . Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can” (124–25). Juliet did not protect her mother, but she might have been attempting to protect herself from something contaminating in this visit; frighteningly, her ability to clean up and “put everything away” predicts her daughter’s ability to do the same in the next story. What might Juliet have been seeking to protect and how might it cast light on not only her own but her daughter’s “silence”? The narrative sequence at the end of “Soon” offers a clue, particularly in the way it takes the reader back to the “bright treasure” story that undergirds Eric and Juliet’s union. While what follows the mother’s utterance of her daughter’s name in story time is Juliet’s silence, what fills that silence in the narrative sequence is Juliet’s letter to Eric.18 Written in the arch style she once adopted in letters to her parents (“Dreaded [Dearest] Eric” (124)—it opens), the letter makes Juliet wonder when she finds it years later at its tone, the “sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories” (125). The pain was of a discovered betrayal, her parents not the people she believed them to be, not valuing the things that she thought were their shared treasure. And unfaithful, ultimately, to one another, their desire turned toward the most unworthy of rivals. (Juliet has a dream of her father’s sexual attraction to the young woman, a dream that exposes the “sticky horror” produced by this specter of parental infidelity [116]). What Juliet did not know when she wrote that letter, though, what she only discovered more than a decade later, is that the same infidelity she found in her parents’ home was

Sibyl at the Kitchen Table

113

also occurring with Eric. During her absence, he rather casually resumed his relationship with Christa. The Chryseis-Briseis story was, apparently, not quite over, the “submerged rivalry” between the two women not quite buried. In fact, the surfacing of that story produces new battles, the “bright treasure” carrying in its wake an Iliad-like trail of conflict and loss. In “Silence,” then, although Juliet returns to her classical study, she does so with a difference. Not only has she turned from Homer to the fifth-century Greek novelist Heliodorus, but also her concept of translation has changed.19 She plays with the idea of a genre adaptation—turning Heliodorus’ novel The Aethiopica into a musical—and is also “secretly drawn to devising a different ending” (152). The motive for Juliet’s secret revision is no mystery; she seeks to recover her “bright treasure,” her Homeric-named daughter Penelope. In her revision, what the daughter “is really looking for . . . [is] reconciliation, at last, with the erring, repentant, essentially good-hearted queen of Ethiopia” (152). Juliet’s fantasy of adaptation acknowledges that the old stories are in our lives, but maybe, just maybe, we get to rewrite them. Adaptation is not exactly a counter-move to fate, but a hope that, in translation, one might still get the right word: She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort. (158) The Dodds passage that arrested the attention of the young Juliet spoke of the revelation of “cosmic justice”; this older Juliet knows that what she hopes for is “undeserved” rather than just, at best a “remission” of her fate. “Hope” is the word she balances against the causality that leads from the capture of “bright treasure” to its loss. But even if Dodds might have predicted these devastating losses, the trail of blood from that first sacrifice never dissipated, Juliet does not abandon her classical study. Juliet’s “real-life” job gives her “a good balance for her involvement with the old Greeks” (158), her existence not a tragedy, as Eric would say of his wife’s accident, but a new sort of life.

5 The Lives of Women and Men: Narrative Inflection in Alice Munro’s Runaway Eric Reeves

a mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing effects by means impossible of detection . . . is the last word of the highest art. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Conrad’s effort to characterize “the highest art” has found any number of echoes in critical commentary on the fiction of Alice Munro—efforts to account for the ineffable, inexplicable, uncanny qualities of her writing, the experience of readers that no word in a story could be replaced, no phrase altered without diminishing the quality of the narrative: Her prose has the economy and perfect pitch of good poetry, where everything depends on judgment, balance and an ear for how words move and interact. (Alvarez, 23–24)

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

115

[Munro’s stories] compress entire decades into a series of strobe-lighted moments connected underneath in a troubling, satisfying, necessary, indescribable way. (Kakutani) But most of these generalizations, whatever we might make of them, tend to be more oracular than critically helpful. One either accepts them as heuristically useful—or not. Rarely is there any accompanying or sustained effort to parse and analyze her prose carefully, to articulate patterns in her narrative reach that extend toward the ineffable in human experience—in short, reading it as “poetry,” with all the demands of explication de texte. Despite Munro’s suspicion of criticism, and especially “theory,” explication is as important to understanding the “necessities” of her narrative movements as it is to an interpretation of the poetry of Stevens, Dickinson, or Donne. Still, one must have not only a sense of Canadian context, but biographical knowledge as well as a larger sense of development in work that now extends to well over half a century; comparisons of theme, subject, and narrative technique in earlier and later work are inevitably suggestive. This seems especially so with Runaway (2004), which as much as any volume amply rewards close analysis of narrative strategy, modulations in voice, and points of significant transition—which, however subtly rendered, may lead to abrupt upheavals, with enormous consequences in the lives of the women and men she writes about. As Kakutani’s “strobe light” metaphor suggests, for all Munro’s apparent rhetorical restraint, an almost placid verbal surface, there are sharp, sometimes brutal shifts in the lives of her characters. Munro gives some sense of this in a muchcited passage from an interview she gave in 1982: I like looking at people’s lives over a number of years, without continuity. Like catching them in snapshots. And I like the way people relate, or don’t relate to the people they were earlier. . . . Something happens (in the gaps between the scenes) that you can’t know about. And that the person themself [sic] doesn’t know about. I just see people living in flashes. (Hancock Interview, 89) This seems an apt account of Runway, a volume that may seem at times deceptively accessible, at least if we judge the volume as a whole by the title story. For the stories pose some of the most interesting questions about narrative art that we find in any of the

116

Alice Munro

later volumes, and much of this derives from the technique that Munro describes, although the “snapshots” vary considerably and are related in quite different ways. As readers we are constantly challenged to fill in the narrative interstices, sometimes with only the most subtle or oblique guidance from Munro.

Narrative inflection: Readers, characters, and the control of indeterminacy One way of thinking about the challenge we face as readers is to make the question about narrative, and ultimately readerly, “access” to characters: what do we know at any point in the story, and how do we know it? How is our understanding of character shaped, what “snapshots” are displayed, and what do we make of these narrative choices? How do we go about understanding what occurs between “flashes”? What does it mean for us to discover only with the story’s closure some defining phrase or image or judgment? Why did we not know until that final moment? Another way to reflect on the issue is to ask how “close” the narrative voice is to the thinking and feeling of a character—what degrees of intimacy does narrative decorum and logic permit? This varies quite considerably, and these variations have always been one of the most suggestive ways of comparing Munro’s stories. How intimate is that voice with a particular character’s deepest thoughts, impulses, and desires? Conversely, does the narrative suggest sufficient perspective to reveal the defects or changes in memory that increasingly haunt Munro’s later fiction, where memory itself is often a virtual character? In short, the acute sense of readerly challenge occasioned by these stories often comes as we attempt to gage just how fully and intimately the narrator knows the characters she reveals. Paradoxically, Munro’s pellucid narrative descriptions often reveal shifts or changes in the lives of women and men that have no ready explanation. Munro’s narratives raise questions about the very nature of our access to human lives, experience, and memory. Parallel to our everyday sense of the frailties of our insight into what occurs around us and within us are the various limitations that Munro carefully orchestrates throughout her narratives—in ways that may leave us unsure of ourselves as readers, but nonetheless

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

117

convinced of a powerful design that compels our most vigorous interpretive engagement. Narrative uncertainty and indeterminacy are features of Munro’s fiction that go back to her earliest work, but in Runaway they figure more prominently than in any previous volume with the possible exception of Open Secrets (1994). At the end of the volume’s title story, “Runaway,” Munro finds a peculiarly apt metaphor suggesting that Carla’s existence will remain inescapably uncertain, indeed dangerous; she confronts a future that is tenuous and haunted by doubt. Although life with Clark seems to have resumed a kind of normalcy, Carla feels caught: It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there. (46) Such precariousness would seem unsustainable, and yet Munro concludes the story with Carla’s determination not to know, not to resolve the ominous fate of the goat Flora. The needle in her lungs will remain poised, as she refuses to examine the site where Flora’s remains would seem to lie: “The days passed and Carla didn’t go near that place. She held out against that temptation” (47). And to “hold out” is to allow the indeterminate to prevail. Although all the stories in Runaway are told in the third person— unusual for Munro—this hardly limits her control of how she reveals (and withholds) the implications of events, and especially human decisions and recollections. Munro may be omniscient but her narrative voice is not; we are frequently unsure about just what is knowable within the narrative confines of a given story, and what can only be gestured toward. A revealing example is provided by the teenage narrator of “Dance of the Happy Shades,” Munro’s breakthrough achievement in her first volume of fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). The story concludes with an intimation that suggests recollection by a much more mature woman, looking back over many years to a moment of uncanny significance: But then driving home, driving out of the hot red-brick streets and out the city and leaving Miss Marsalles and her no longer possible parties behind, quite certainly forever, why is it that we

118

Alice Munro

are unable to say—as we must have expected to say—Poor Miss Marsalles? It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is that one communiqué from the other country where she lives. (Dance 224) The tense is present, but the narrative has become first-person plural. To be sure, the unnamed teenager has been accompanied by her unhappy mother, but the observation here, in these particular terms, is unlikely to be one that is silently shared. We have seen something of the terrain of the “other country,” but we cannot explain the extraordinary virtuosity of the Greenhill School girl, or Miss Marsalles’s restrained, if vaguely beatific, appreciation. The narrator declares, again with an intellectual and emotional range quite impossible for a teenager, You would think . . . she would light up with the importance of this discovery. But it seems that the girl’s playing like this is something she always expected, and she finds it natural and satisfying; people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one. (223) The narrative leads us to apprehend the possibility of a belief in “miracles”: the narrator is convinced that she has been witness to “that one communiqué from the other country” where Miss Marsalles lives. But this is as close as we—the narrator and her readers—can come to fathoming what has occurred.1 I dwell on “Dance of the Happy Shades” because I think versions of this limitation on narrative revelation—of what is actually being suggested, adduced, intimated, or attenuated—appears in a great many of Munro’s stories. Of course nothing is being withheld in the sense that Munro deliberately means to leave us ignorant about key elements of a story. The modulations, the almost imperceptible whelming that occurs, and the abrupt shifts that distinguish all these stories are what I’ll call Munro’s narrative inflections. And just as words may be variously grammatically inflected—profoundly if we think of the difference, say, between passive and imperative voices—so at key moments Munro’s narratives shift in inflection, and attention to these shifts offers one way of apprehending these remarkable stories. Of course, gender is a primary source of inflection, in grammar and Munro’s narratives. One could argue that it is, in

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

119

fact, the primary source in many stories for changes in narrative inflection—even as Munro’s career as a writer has been defined by her extraordinarily persuasive inflection of stories to reflect in a wide range of ways the perceptions, intimacies, intuitions, and sense of order that are distinctly those of girls and women of all ages. In Runaway there are defining, if unresolved, gender tensions in every story: Clark and Carla; Juliet and Eric, Juliet and her father. The last of these is further inflected by the roles of two other key women in the triptych: Irene and Christa; and of course Juliet’s relationship with her mother Sara reflects powerful tensions between their views of women in marriage. The hideous marital war of attrition that Harry and Eileen wage in “Trespasses” is not so much gender inflected as coolly observant of the sexes in combat; young Lauren in turn is emerging as a young woman in the heat of this doomed battle. The most complexly inflected male/female relationship is that involving the very young Grace and the young middle-aged Neil in “Passion,” and Grace emerges in the story by way of what we discern in her rapidly changing sense of herself as a woman. In “Tricks,” Robin’s powerful need for the man that was Daniel is overwhelming, and it defines her very notion of what kind of man a woman such as herself can love. This is so much so that at the very end of the story, when she asks herself to whom she would like to “tell” all this, we have another extraordinary shift in pronouns, “Him” (Daniel) . . . the last word of the story, and uttered as if by Robin herself, overwhelmed by a flood of emotion. “Powers” can’t really be understood without accommodating the fact that there are two paradoxically contradictory narratives within the story speaking of Tessa’s fate: Tessa’s own and Ollie’s. But even here, where gender might be thought to inflect most powerfully, the ultimate narrative focus is Elizabeth, and her dream of how she might “be reprieved.” In the end, however, we have only a past that has turned into “something like soot and soft ash” (335). Many of the stories in Munro’s other volumes actually turn on the question of gender inflection. Of many examples, I might point to “A Wilderness Station” (Open Secrets, 1994), “The Progress of Love” (The Progress of Love, 1985), “What is Remembered” and “Nettles” (both from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001). Even if we think of gender as a key source of narrative inflection, constantly at play, typically with great subtlety, we may still feel that Munro in her narrative shifts is after more

120

Alice Munro

than what can be accommodated by inflections of gender, and it is these that I mean to explore further here.

Complex inflections The extreme example of this in Runaway is the last, very long story “Powers,” in which we are presented with three distinct narrative inflections of Tessa’s travels with Ollie. Nancy herself seems to provide what we might think of as a narrative center of gravity, but with no fixed location, even in her dream at the story’s close. Her diary is the only first-person narrative in any part of Runaway, but gives way relatively early on to an extraordinarily flexible thirdperson voice. The narrative is sharply inflected by circumstances as an institutionalized Tessa offers Nancy, visiting from Canada, an account of her life—and a perplexing account of Ollie’s “murder.” She is uncomfortable talking about her former “powers,” but still possesses in her smile “an extraordinary, unwarranted benevolence” (311). That benevolence would seem to allow for no motive for deception, despite the brutal electro-shock and other medical treatment to which she was initially subjected. But there is another, radically different inflection of the story in the form of Ollie’s account of Tessa’s fate—several years after Nancy has visited Tessa at the Michigan mental institution. As Tessa speaks of witnessing Ollie’s “murder,” so Ollie sadly recalls the circumstances that brought their scientific, and then entertainment, careers to an end—and Tessa to her death. They are each, in very different ways, running away from a past that is in some sense intolerable to each.2 The shifts in narrative inflection have left us with incompatible accounts of the past: neither Tessa nor Ollie has told the truth about the death of the other, as the very fact of their living makes clear. What brings these various narrative inflections (and there are many) into a powerful and suggestive (if evanescent) “syntactical” coherence is Nancy’s perhaps partly senescent dream on Grey Cup day, the occasion for yet another social gathering she has declined at the last minute. The narrative, however, still does not permit us either to choose definitively between the two versions of the central story or, to harmonize them fully. There is and can be no final

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

121

narrative inflection for the story of Tessa and Ollie, and Nancy’s role in that story. Ambiguity remains. Even so, Munro offers us something else in place of a narrative reconciliation. In the closing section, Nancy “doesn’t believe she is sleeping”; however, circumstances make any other account of what follows impossible. The dream has at once a peculiar certainty and specificity, even drawing on some elements of the two stories; but most of all it seems an effort to rescue both Ollie and Tessa from the fates—and unaccountably variant memories—that have left Tessa forever institutionalized and Ollie an entirely “new man.” In Nancy’s dream, Tessa recovers her powers and is overjoyed; and in understanding the implications of this recovery, Ollie hopes that she won’t divine the implication of the papers in his coat pocket by which the process of her institutionalization will begin, crackling as Tessa hugs him in joy. “Yes. Yes. Tessa feels all the menace go out of the faint crackle under her cheek” (333). But this momentary dream of a rescue can’t last—and simply can’t be true, can’t be reconciled with the differing accounts of Ollie and Tessa. A momentary sense of reprieve vanishes: The sense of being reprieved lights all the air. So clear, so powerful that Nancy feels the known future wither under its attack, skitter away like dirty old leaves. But deep in that moment some instability is waiting, that Nancy is determined to ignore. No use. She is already aware of being removed, drawn out of those two people and back into herself. It seems as if some calm and decisive person—could it be [the deceased] Wilf?—has taken on the task of leading her out of that room with its wire hangers and its flowered curtain. Gently, inexorably leading her away from what begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash. (335) There is no holding on to the sense of “reprieve” for Nancy, or even reaching further into her imagination in a bid to remain with Tessa and Ollie and their irreconcilable stories. The room in which Nancy has imagined Tessa finding her powers again, discerning flies on a hidden windowsill, has begun to “crumble and darken tenderly,” has become mere ash and soot. “Tenderly” here seems

122

Alice Munro

a remarkable adverb, and we are left to surmise that there is a mercy in Nancy’s being led out of the room of clothes hangers and hidden flies. But however merciful, her fate is one that cannot fully escape the impossible contradiction that the narrative has created. The artfulness, and finally the mystery of this contradiction, the means by which it is narratively created, would seem to belie the intemperate conclusion of Kakutani’s review—that in Runaway Munro has chosen “to clumsily stage-manage her characters’ fate.” In fact, what we see consistently in this volume of stories is precisely not narrative “clumsiness” or “stage-managing” of characters, but characters confronting a world that is variously cruel, imperious, unpredictable, and filled with threatening twists of fate and uncertainty. Indeed, in “Powers” Munro has left us with her profoundest narrative indeterminacy. There is no single note sounded, nor is there a single bedrock narrative inflection, as many seem to insist: A. Alvarez in his lengthy review of Runaway in The New York Review of Books focuses on “Passion,” a remarkable depiction of a man on the verge of vehicular suicide, attracted by and to his young companion Grace: “All Munro’s stories rest on this bedrock of depression.” But the passage that might support this conclusion in “Passion” has no resonance in “Tricks,” for example, or the Juliet Triptych. Nor is there really justification for Rosellen Brown’s claim that in Runaway “as usual the dominant emotion is regret.” Only if the word is expanded excessively, to the point of banality, is “regret” the dominant emotion in the stories of this volume. Even where the case can be made most compellingly, the word is simply too flat, too bald. In “Tricks,” for example, the final, shockingly belated discovery that Daniel/Danilo has a deaf/mute twin brother is so powerful that Munro’s narrator can render it only by abruptly shifting narrative inflection, from the third to second person, or at least to a narrative directed at readers in newly conscious fashion. The almost incomprehensible coincidences and timing of events may all have a certain intelligibility when considered retrospectively, but this is simply not enough. “Regret” doesn’t begin to do justice to what Robin experiences. She asks herself whether things hadn’t worked out for the best with the quick, unspoiled—if brutal—turn of events that forty years earlier has separated her from Daniel. But no—the narrative is inflected away from this facile condolence with a shearing pronoun shift:

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

123

But you don’t really take that view, not for yourself. Robin doesn’t. Even now she can yearn for the chance. She is not going to spare a moment’s gratitude for the trick that has been played. (italics added) (268) Yet further narrative inflection—now of tense—offers another narrative perspective, more abstract, more like a profound conclusion about human psychology: But she’ll come round to being grateful for the discovery of it. That, at least—the discovery which leaves everything whole, right up to the moment of frivolous intervention. Leaves you outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame. (268–69) As in all her volumes of fiction, Munro is a brilliant anatomist of human shame, particularly the shame of girls and women. Thus it is not nothing if Robin will come to feel “clear of shame.” Even so, she wonders at the story’s conclusion about why she “wore the wrong green dress. She wished she could tell somebody. Him.” Forty years—a “gap in the scenes” Munro could hardly exceed—are not enough to ease sufficiently the pain of fate’s “frivolous intervention,” however well Robin has managed her life into retirement. This is more than “regret” occasioned by an exceedingly cruel twist of fate; it is the expression of a longing that gains dimension by the repeated invocations of Shakespeare, particularly in the ironic prelude to the inward outburst of the above passages: Shakespeare should have prepared her. Twins are often the reason for mix-ups and disasters in Shakespeare. A means to an end, those tricks are supposed to be. (268) But the end to which Robin has been led of course has more to do with the painful sadness of Shakespeare’s tragedies than the comedies in which twins are deployed. It can hardly be accidental that the play Robin had seen the year she met Daniel was Antony and Cleopatra, filled with the excruciating excesses of love. Robin’s fidelity to the opportunity represented by Daniel—“even now she can yearn for the chance”—is an ironic echo of Cleopatra’s “I have/Immortal longings in me” (V.ii.182–183), lines that come immediately after the exit of the Clown who has provided

124

Alice Munro

Cleopatra the asps for her suicide, the one feature of the play that Robin discusses with Daniel. The equivalent moment of shifting narrative inflection in “Passion” occurs much earlier in the story, and is utterly without preparation. Following a domestic accident at the home of the Travers, and vaccination against tetanus in the local hospital by Neil—whose younger step-brother Maury is Grace’s fiancé— Grace is asked leadingly by Neil, with Maury waiting in front of the hospital, “You didn’t really want to go home yet, did you?” (282). Grace’s reply signals how profoundly inflection has changed in the narrative: “‘No,’ said Grace, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she was having her eyes tested.” They exit through the rear of the hospital as Neil had planned. Rarely does Munro call such attention to such a powerful change in narrative inflection, but it is the only basis on which to make sense of Grace’s perception as rendered in the following paragraph: Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her . . .” (182) Grace discerns this during their extended, back-country, alcoholfueled road expedition. The import of her precipitous and overwhelmingly intense response to Neil, an intuitive experience of passionate love and sexual desire, comes paradoxically with her understanding and acceptance of his despair: “you’d try to tell me why I was wrong” [Neil says about there being nothing besides drinking for him]. “No,” said Grace, “I wouldn’t.” When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him with these answers, trying to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope—genuine, reasonable, and everlasting. (192) There is to this rendering of Grace’s conclusion an authority that is as great as its abruptness, if fully continuous with her similarly

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

125

abrupt declaration that “No,” she did not want to go home. And in the wake of Neil’s vehicular suicide, her powerful experience has nowhere to find legitimacy within the Travers’s household, and certainly not with Maury. Her eroticized appreciation of the “passion” she sees in and feels through Neil makes life of the sort she would have had with Maury not only inconceivable, but sufficiently repulsive that she cannot offer an apology for her behavior: She did not want to have to deal with Maury face-to-face. He wrote her a letter. Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go. She wrote back five words. I did want to go. She was going to add I’m sorry, but stopped herself. (196) The story concludes with Mr. Travers giving her one thousand dollars—and Grace entertaining the possibility of “tearing up” the check. “But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life”—a life that will have little to do with the life she and Maury would have led. Grace’s return to the lakeside cottage that is the ironic source for whatever life she now leads in her late fifties is guided initially by the question, “What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition?” (161). The narrative that follows suggests that she has already answered the question in its deepest form, but her posing it shows us the distance between the vagueness of narrative representation in this present quest and the searing, defining insight she experiences with Neil.

The Juliet Triptych A comparable shift in narrative inflection occurs in “Soon,” set in the conservative Huron County, Ontario community where, like Munro, Juliet has grown up. Juliet’s mother, whose health is rapidly declining, imposes at the end of the story a finally selfish emotional burden on Juliet, switching from a discussion of religion and faith to “faith” of a very different, finally deeply manipulative sort: “My faith isn’t so simple,” said Sara . . . I can’t describe it. But it’s—all I can say—it’s something. . . . When it gets really bad for

126

Alice Munro

me, when it gets so bad I—you know what I think then? I think, all right. I think—Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet. (124) But while recognizing this as “strategically pathetic,” Juliet—when years later she comes upon a letter in which much of this is related for the benefit of her deceased partner Eric Porteus, father of her child—her reaction seems paradoxical, finding not Eric’s Whale Bay (British Columbia) to be home, but this town of her upbringing, her mother’s town. In fact, the paradoxical relation of mother and child is one that Munro’s own biography clearly reveals she herself lived. Her own mother, whose advancing Parkinson’s disease made for an increasingly demanding presence, figures prominently in stories throughout most of her career, with a wide range of narrative inflections. Reading the letter years later, Juliet’s memories of that time with her mother—the last time she would see her alive—are painful but revealing. The narrative voice moves to its most powerful, which is to say most intimate inflection, even as the language is deliberately made both mundane and deeply symbolic: Then she thought [on the occasion of reading her letter to Eric] that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before. Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can. But she had not protected Sara. When Sara had said, soon I’ll see Juliet, Juliet had found no reply. (125) It would “have meant so much” to Sara, but Juliet had “turned away and instead carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she washed and dried the cups. . . . She had put everything away”—as has the narrative that at this moment is concluding. The following and last story of the Juliet Triptych, “Silence,” moves almost twenty years forward, as an anxious Juliet takes a ferry to a religious retreat where her daughter Penelope has spent the past six months, without communicating with Juliet. Narrative inflection of the mother-daughter relationship has profoundly shifted, with any number of attendant ironies. The third person

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

127

now focuses on Juliet as mother, not daughter, and on the darker possibilities of the free and “secular” life that Juliet lived with Eric in Whale Bay, and after Eric’s drowning in a fishing outing, in Vancouver. The lifestyle that so scandalized her parents that they drove to a more distant train station to pick up Juliet on her return home in “Soon” now haunts Juliet in a very different way. We don’t know why Penelope isn’t there to greet her mother—or why she doesn’t communicate with her subsequently, but sends Juliet only a few cryptically noncommunicative birthday cards on her (Penelope’s) birthday. We have only the words of the unctuous Joan, the figure of authority at the “Spiritual Balance Center” where Penelope has gone on her retreat. Joan and Juliet quickly develop a strong and mutual disapproval of one another, although Joan has the advantage of knowing the Penelope of the past six months. Joan uses this authority to humiliate Juliet, smiling widely when Juliet mentions Penelope’s possessions: “Her possessions? . . . Penelope is not very concerned right now about her possessions” (italics in original) (131). But for all the presumption and delight in Juliet’s discomfort, and eventually desperation, we are given no clearer or better answer than Joan’s in the course of the story as to why Penelope keeps her “silence”: “Whereever she has gone, whatever she has decided, it will be the right thing for her. It will be the right thing for her spirituality and growth” (130; italics in original). The presumption in this emphasis on Penelope’s doing the “right thing for her spirituality and growth” must grate on any mother; but as unctuous and passively aggressive as Joan may be, certain questions can’t be evaded: “The spiritual dimension— I have to say this—was it not altogether lacking in Penelope’s life? I take it she did not grow up in a faith-based home” (131). This lack of a “spiritual” life is of course precisely what has appalled the minister Don in her Ontario hometown, and the possibility that he may have been even partially right in his condemnation of Juliet’s avowed atheism—“We don’t go to church. . . . We don’t believe in God” (“Soon” 119)—is an excruciating irony, if this is indeed why Penelope has cut off all communications with her mother. The fact remains salient throughout this concluding story, and the narrative inflection changes to accommodate Juliet’s evolving response to the inescapable fact of “silence.” It is in the course of this final story that the narrator gives an account of Juliet’s jealousy— still holding against Eric his infidelity with her friend Christa twelve

128

Alice Munro

years earlier—as well as Eric’s death and funeral, and her own difficulty in accepting, fully accepting, his death. It is at the moment of this full and decisive emotional comprehension of Eric’s death that we catch a decisive glimpse of Penelope. As Juliet struggles in vain to maintain her composure, “Penelope came around the table and pried her hands open. She said, ‘It’s Dad, isn’t it?’ ” Juliet afterwards told a few people—such as Christa—that these seemed the most utterly absolving, the most tender words that anybody had ever said to her (147). And yet there is an evident callousness, or perhaps self-protectiveness in Penelope as well. Juliet hears her say to a visiting friend, at the house of her friend Heather shortly after Eric’s death: “Well, I hardly knew him really” (145). How does the narrative account for Penelope’s desire to follow the life of her fisherman father? Juliet finds it all “strange”: “He who had filled her life. She dismissed him” (145). And as the strangeness persists, Juliet is driven further and further from the life and friends she had first developed when moving to Vancouver from Whale Bay. The narrative is inflected to accommodate this “new Juliet,” increasingly renewing her classical studies, if in highly idiosyncratic fashion. Her romantic life tails off, and her life—economically and otherwise— attenuates. But through it all the narrative stays inflected in ways that capture Juliet’s painful perplexity, her restlessness with the question that neither permits an answer nor becomes less exigent: why is my daughter completely silent? Even the clue provided by an accidental meeting with Heather, a youthful friend with whom Penelope had stayed following Eric’s death almost twenty years earlier, provides no real clarity. Heather has seen Penelope in a mall in Edmonton, but Penelope has indicated that she lives to the north (“Whitehorse or Yellowknife,” Juliet wonders), with five children. There are other glimmers of clues—Heather hasn’t recognized her immediately—but nothing that would allow Juliet to pursue her daughter. And should she in any event? In the final pages of “Silence”— before the final paragraph, which speaks of a time some years hence—the narrative inflection is urgently interrogatory. Juliet asks a host of questions, offers partial answers, rejects them or finds them unanswerable. It is here that we see her pain in its final stages, Juliet at her most self-accusing, concluding, Penelope does not have a use for me. Maybe she can’t stand me. It’s possible. (158; original italics)

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

129

To have reached such a conclusion is to have reached into selfreproach and despair as fully as any mother can bear. There is no way to carry a narrative with such painful interrogatory inflection further. And Munro doesn’t try, but rather begins by describing Juliet’s life “now,” some years after the encounter with Heather. She has friends, though few; she continues with her Greek studies, although she concedes that “investigations” would be the better word. The extraordinary last paragraph of “Silence” I think is best discussed in the context of an exceedingly brief overview of a persistent issue in the tradition of narrative art in English.

Munro and the narrative tradition With the stories of Runaway, particularly the Juliette Triptych, “Passion,” and “Powers,” modern fiction continues to move further away from the narrative aesthetic of a previous literary epoch. Indeed, one way of thinking about the collective uncanniness of the stories in Runaway is to note how far they are from the confident ironies of an earlier age of fiction, in which, for example, it is possible for Jane Austen’s narrative voice in Emma (1815) to withdraw discreetly at a moment that seems too intimate for her sense of fictional decorum, here on the occasion of Emma responding to Mr. Knightley’s marriage proposal: Her way was clear, though not quite smooth.—She spoke then, on being so entreated.—What did she say?—Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. (431) Austen’s enormous confidence that her readers will know enough about such occasions, and what a “lady” of Emma’s standing “ought” to say, is evident in countless moments throughout her fiction. It is this presumption that animates so many of her ironies, dependent as they are on an understanding of conventions of class, wealth, land tenure, primogeniture, and rural village life in late eighteenth-century England. Of course such confidence was doomed to vanish, if only because a larger and more insistently urban and commercial world, and sexual frankness, came to dominate fiction. Moreover,

130

Alice Munro

English fiction in particular by the turn of the twentieth century was beginning to explore the limits of narrative power, and how to convey or intimate what exceeds our ability to say or make clear. Conrad in his fiction of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently gestures toward this inability to render a full narrative account; in Heart of Darkness Marlow asks his old acquaintances on board the sailboat Nellie about the intelligibility of the Mr. Kurtz he is approaching so slowly and circumspectly, both on the Congo River and in his narrative: Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, the commingling of absurdity, surprise and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt. . . . No, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence. . . . We live, as we dream—alone . . . (Kent 82) This sense of that which surpasses narrative reach, of experience that can’t find words that are sufficient, has of course become a literary commonplace. But a passage such as Conrad’s would have been quite impossible a century earlier, at least in prose. One means of speaking the unspeakable is the deployment of elaborate narrative tricks, misdirection, even creation of the impossible (Borges comes to mind here). Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the most skilled of many fiction writers in constantly creating narrative devices that upend expectations of how a story is or should be constructed (Pnin, [1957], for example, is built on such narrative tricks, and Pale Fire [1962] seems almost a touchstone in this regard). But I believe no writer of English fiction has offered us stories as deeply intimate, compassionate, and yet powerfully paradoxical as Munro’s. What seems most remarkable is that her narrative maneuvers, modulations, shifts, and ironies—collectively, her “inflections”—are always in service of representing her characters, their lives, perceptions, and choices. Narrative technique never comes at the expense of the richest possible characterization of experience, but inevitably serves to augment that characterization. As Kenneth Burke argued long ago, “an artist’s means are always tending to become ends in themselves” (Burke, 121). If this is true for Munro, it must be said that as “ends,” her narrative “means”

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

131

are as humane, sympathetic, and as intelligent as any we find on the literary scene today. In short, the lives and hopes in Austen’s Highbury could hardly be more remote from the vague but powerful suggestion of human hope that lives on to torture Juliet, if with a merciful mildness, at the end of “Silence”: She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remission, things of that sort. (158) “Things of that sort.” As the conclusion of a “trilogy” extending over more than 100 pages—beginning with a young and largely naïve Juliet at age twenty-one, riding across Canada by train—this might seem to provide insufficient closure for a narrative about Juliet in her sixties. But in fact the note of desultory narrative inflection, at this moment, captures Juliet’s emotional ambivalence about waiting, about the meaning of Penelope’s silence—a silence, as we’ve seen, never explained, however tantalizing the various clues we get. Her life at the end of “Silence,” her peculiar re-engagement with classical literature in the form of Greek romances, her highly ambivalent love life: all these seem to emerge with an intelligibility that connects all three stories in the “trilogy.” But in closing, the narrative voice—coming as close to Juliet as Munro thinks possible, given the circumstances of the story—can offer only “things of that sort.” While the mature Munro of Runaway may share Austen’s large confidence, including her narrative tact and precision, and certainly much of her ironic sensibility, hers is an entirely different world, if often one revealed with the intimacy that Austen is able to exploit brilliantly in her fiction. The worlds of Runaway are represented without the clear dimensions and social distinctions of a Highbury, but social standing and religion are often strikingly important; narrative pace, even disjuncture, is also much more highly variable. If, however, Munro presents a world that is often neither so clear nor intelligible as Austen’s, it is not less fully articulated—and in this respect, much more like the lives of the people Munro chooses to write about. Moreover, sometimes the force of human experience or discovery is simply shocking, overwhelming whatever narrative

132

Alice Munro

“decorum” has preceded. Munro’s superbly intelligent articulation of the human scene seems to me clearest if one thinks about the role of fate in the characters of Runaway, and does a great deal to give us a sense of the uncanny appropriateness of the endings of her various stories.

Life, fate, and closure The often perverse role of mere circumstances, of “fate” in human lives, is an ongoing fascination for Munro, and her deepest meditations on the subject seem to me to begin with “Accident” (The Moons of Jupiter, 1982). The consequences of the sledding death of the male protagonist’s son ramify steadily and relentlessly, until lives in the town of Hanratty are reshaped into entirely new forms. Munro seems fully at ease with the power of the accidental, and the workings of fate—or the accidental—that can have no ultimate explanation, only the various narrative inflections we encounter in a wide range of stories. This is a far cry from Kakutani’s belief that in Runaway Munro is “clumsily stage-managing her characters’ fates.” Perhaps a more suggestive way of putting this is to assert that Munro is fascinated with the intersection of fate and character, as has been true in the Western literary tradition since the Greek tragedians whose works are so familiar to Juliet. And all the stories in this volume develop in some sense under the aspect of the tragic. Munro’s genius lies in knowing just how to inflect the narrative to give the precise features of these “tragedies”: Carla left paralyzed by the terror of the needle in her throat; Juliet left waiting for Penelope; Neil’s death and his family’s inevitable suffering; the loss for Delphine of any possible hope of even meeting “her” Lauren; the emphatic inversion of the Shakespearean twin motif to create the tragic loss that defines Robin’s life; and the merely dreamlike rescue of Nancy from the hopeless collision of narrative accounts from Tessa and Ollie. In “Powers,” the narrator has earlier emphasized that if Nancy hadn’t crossed the street to avoid another unpleasant encounter with the hippies she’s tried to engage earlier, “if this had not happened, the meeting would never have taken place” (315). It is of course during this meeting that the overall narrative inflection of the story

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

133

changes profoundly. During the course of the dinner conversation Ollie claims that Tessa had died of leukemia during their travels to the west coast, and gives a detailed account of releasing Tessa’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean, wading into the water on a chilly, foggy morning, the gulls calling. In short, without Nancy’s chance encounter with Ollie the narrative simply doesn’t exist. At the same time, we would do well to bear in mind a comment Munro made in 1994: The older I get, the more I see things as having more than one explanation. I see the content of life as being many-layered. And in a way, nothing that happens really takes precedence over anything else that happens. (Smith Interview 24) This might almost serve as an ironic epigraph to “Powers,” but it is difficult to take the last sentence of this quoted passage at face value, except as the implicit claim that it is art, narrative art, that infuses what “happens” with greater “precedence” in our lives. But Munro’s comfort with things having more than one explanation certainly competes with any mechanical fatalism or intrusive narrative orchestration of events. There are a great many “accidents” in Runaway, but every day in the majority of ordinary human lives might be thought of as a concatenation of accidents. Without the salience provided by literary art, such accidents pass easily into the continuous texture of ordinary experience. But Munro is interested in those accidents that do become salient, and often chooses to make the salience of the accidental emphatically clear. The Juliet Triptych is set in motion by a series of “accidents,” in a first story appropriately titled “Chance”: that Juliet is inappropriately sought out by an older, overly friendly male fellowtraveler on her long train ride—as a potential “chum”; that Juliet, accustomed to accommodating such advances, makes this occasion the “first time” she has the nerve simply to walk away; that Eric Porteus, with some medical training, is on the train and one of those who responds to the train’s crushing of Juliet’s rejected and in turn suicidal “chum”; that he should return after rejecting Juliet’s initial inquiry about the victim; that Eric’s very imperfectly addressed letter to Juliet somehow reaches her at the school where she is teaching Latin—these are the unexpected steps in an extended redirecting of Juliet’s life—to Whale Bay, motherhood, the scandalizing of her

134

Alice Munro

hometown in rural Ontario, and ultimately to a painful, fruitless wait for word from Penelope. Her name is deeply if accidentally ironic, given Penelope’s role as the one who waits so long in the Odysseus myth. We might think of all the stories in Runaway as explorations of the workings of “fate,” the name we give to patterns of events, “accidents”—typically retrospectively—that shape our lives, and may do so with great power and what we construe as perversity. This is certainly so in “Tricks,” where an almost incomprehensible set of coincidences and timings of events all come to have a certain intelligibility when the facts of Daniel’s brother become clear some forty years after Robin has met Daniel in Stratford and fallen immediately in love with him. But as I’ve suggested, there is something intolerable about this concatenation of facts and circumstances, and thus the remarkable shift in narrative inflection, from the dominant third person to the second person. It is a difficult transition from “Tricks” to “Powers”—from a perverse, indeed intolerable clarity to a radical indeterminacy. Notably, the first part of “Powers” is the only section in the volume that is in the first person, and this is designed to give us access to the rather immature Nancy, and allow us to see the features of her early life (marriage to Wilf, ambivalent friendship with Ollie). This in turn makes the visit to Tessa appear not the product of a guileful woman (she can’t even bring off an April Fool’s joke with Wilf before they marry), but someone earnest, perhaps credulous, certainly credible. All this stands in stark contrast to competing narrative renderings of the fates of Ollie and Tessa, as they seek first to exploit scientifically Tessa’s remarkable “powers,” but then are forced by the depression into a traveling entertainment spectacle. Accidents function very differently in these stories, and are given correspondingly various narrative inflections. In “Trespasses” the bitter, brittle lives and marriage of Harry and Eileen collide with the hopes of the pathetic, hardluck—though nonetheless insistent—Delphine. The child Lauren is their point of intersection, and Munro works to inflect the narrative so that it stays very close to what Lauren understands or intuits—until yet another fight between Harry and Eileen (over what Harry has revealed to Lauren of her birth) reveals the grim truth about their first-born child. By inflecting the third-person narrative to remain as close as it does to Lauren’s emotions and uncomprehending efforts to make sense

NARRATIVE INFLECTION IN RUNAWAY

135

of her parents’ fighting, the eventual revelation comes as a shock, even as we realize that if this child had not also been named Lauren, the events of the narrative could never have occurred. The last image—following Eileen’s fumbling, truncated speaking of the Lord’s Prayer and Harry’s pathetically uninspired “committing” of the first Lauren’s ashes to the snow, and the depositing of Delphine at the hotel—is Lauren’s discovery of “whole clusters of burrs” clinging to her pajama pants (235). Although she furiously attempts to pull them off, they simply attach to her fingers. And as the story “Nettles” in Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Marriage demonstrates, such botanical nuisances can have strong, if not fully accessible symbolic or metaphoric meaning: Lauren “was so sick of these burrs that she wanted to beat her hands and yell out loud, but she knew that the only thing she could do was just sit and wait” (235). In subtle ways, the fate Lauren feels during her struggle with the clinging burrs is the closest we come to understanding the challenges she feels in living her present life, in dealing with the regular drunken screaming matches between her parents. She is an adolescent too young to leave home but who knows far too much about what unpleasantness, indeed pain, that home will occasion for the foreseeable future. The proleptic burr imagery is consistent with Munro’s explanation of why she is drawn to the short story, with the lack of requirement for “development” in the novelistic sense. I note that “Trespasses” is not the first time Munro has used offensive plant life as the source of closure in a story. In “Nettles,” the story actually returns in a kind of epilogue to the precise nature of what has afflicted Mike and the female narrator: “Those plants with the big pinkish flowers are not nettles. I have discovered that they are called joe-pye weed” (187). This brief correction might seem puzzling. But not only does the revision reveal something of the narrator’s memory of the amatory moment (such botanical research must have been done later), but is a measure of Munro’s precision in her “tour of the house” that is, metaphorically, the story.3 The door to the last room visited needs to be shut with care, and indeed sometimes reveals the need for yet another door. The title story in Friend of My Youth (1990) offers another dramatic example of a radical shift in narrative inflection in its final paragraph, given over by the daughter/narrator to a short, brutally graphic vignette of the Cameronians of the seventeenth century. The last sentence gives

136

Alice Munro

a sense of the hard, unyielding devotion and faith of the central figure, Flora: “One of their ministers, in a mood of firm rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world” (26). Sometimes it is the profundity and density of the language of a story’s ending that works to shut a final door, as is the case in “Powers.” Another example occurs at the end of “The Progress of Love” (1985), as the first-person narrator wonders, in what seems to her the present era of merely casually bonding marriages, whether something has been lost of what she discerns in the marriages of her family past, particularly her own parents’ marriage: Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later. I wonder if those moments are more valued, and deliberately gone after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in the old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever. (Progress 30–31) Rarely are such rhetorical skill and emotional intelligence so fully harmonized in contemporary fiction. It is hardly accidental that in attempting to give accounts of narrative inflection in the stories of Runaway I have already adduced the various elements of closure in all the stories but “Chance,” which ends flatly only if we don’t think about where it leads. Narrative inflections vary in the movement from room to room in the “house” that is a Munro story; and we may be sure that however oblique the path, however abrupt the move from one room to another, the key door always clicks tightly shut. No volume in the Munro canon demonstrates this more revealingly than Runaway.

6 “Old Confusions or Obligations”: Comic Vision in Runaway Lester E. Barber

Nearly all of Alice Munro’s stories, and certainly those in Runaway, are essentially character studies. They brim with small but telling events, along with efforts by characters to understand or avoid understanding, as well as with sentiments that can occasionally choke a reader with compassion. There is an almost “infinite variety” of specificity in place and event, of complexity in perspective, and of delicacy in tone that defies explication, even seems to forbid it. The stories are so full and rich, so perfectly designed, as to be wholly sufficient unto themselves, thus making it almost sacrilegious to parse or critique them. Yet those very qualities in Munro’s work create an irresistible temptation to understand and explain more fully.1 For example, one aspect of most of the stories in Runaway particularly invites the reader to generalize about Munro’s overall view of the world. This feature is an extended life arc, reaching from youth to older age, in the main characters. Such an arc is either present or strongly suggested in the Juliet Triptych and in three of the other five stories, “Trespasses” and “Runaway” being the only exceptions. The presence of this arc makes it tempting to

138

Alice Munro

ask what sort of overall worldview or vision of human life Munro may be expressing in her works.

“Tricks” Surprisingly perhaps, Shakespeare may be a starting point. Munro knowingly and repeatedly places herself within the Western literary tradition with many allusions to classic works and authors in Runaway. “Tricks,” for example, is very specific in its references to Shakespeare. Munro doesn’t write drama, obviously, and her plots and characters are not dependent on our knowing Shakespeare’s plays. However, if one looks at her stories with his plays in mind, it seems fair to say that Munro’s works express a comic view of life, a worldview that is somewhat akin to Shakespeare’s and to that of many other Western authors who write in the comic tradition.2 A comic worldview may be defined as one in which human life is seen as full of mistakes, confusions, missed obligations, mischief, threats to life, and even evil. The comic worldview, however, ultimately expresses faith that human life is capable of self-correction, that threats or evil may be overcome, that even though individuals are generally little, foolish people (although often likable), life can and will renew itself, usually via marriage and procreation, after the mistakes, confusions, evil deeds are found out and corrected. Life is seen as ongoing for the ordinary people and/or for their heirs. At the same time, there are no larger-than-life figures in comedy, certainly no heroes of the sort found in works expressing a tragic worldview, that is, individuals whose defiance, heroic stance or achieved self-knowledge—in the face of a world replete with mistakes, confusions, and evil deeds that cannot be corrected—must be admired, even as fate leads them inexorably to destruction and death. “Tricks” illustrates several of these points. Part of the story is set in Stratford, Ontario, home of the Stratford Festival (until recently titled the Stratford Shakespeare Festival), North America’s premier repertory theater emphasizing the plays of Shakespeare. The main character, Robin, is described as traveling twice to Stratford by train, from her home town some thirty miles away, to see a production: As You Like It in the story’s present and Antony and Cleopatra one year earlier. During her visits, she experiences the city of Stratford

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

139

as any good theatergoer will do to this day, walking along the Avon River from the Festival Theater building in the east part of town to the downtown area for dinner, observing swans on the water, noticing the shops as she passes by. It should be noted that Munro grew up in an Ontario town north of Stratford and currently has a home in the same area.3 As is characteristic of her work in general, Munro roots her story firmly in specific details of its environment. Even Robin’s hometown, described elsewhere in the story, seems recognizable as Goderich, directly west of Stratford on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. Finally, Munro includes a reference to the Stratford Festival’s rival repertory theater in Ontario, the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. Munro openly references devices from Shakespeare’s romantic comedies in “Tricks.” Robin’s thoughts after she learns that it was not Danilo who rejected her in the clock shop years ago, but rather his twin brother Alexander, include this observation: Shakespeare should have prepared her. Twins are often the reason for mix-ups and disasters in Shakespeare. A means to an end, those tricks are supposed to be. And in the end the mysteries are solved, the pranks are forgiven, true love or something like it is rekindled, and those who were fooled have the good grace not to complain. (268) This is a perfect description of the usual course of a romantic comedy. Plus, the mix-up involving twins is right out of the New Comedy of the Roman dramatist Plautus, specifically his Amphitryon and Menechmus Twins. Interestingly, the mistaken twin device does not appear in As You Like It itself, being prominently used instead in both Comedy of Errors (where the device is doubled, as in Amphitryon) and Twelfth Night. In general, the story lines of romantic comedies and the story line of “Tricks” depend on accidental occurrences or twists of fate—which can also occur in tragedies, by the way, most aptly as they do in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. That Munro had drama specifically in mind as she composed “Tricks” is made even clearer when one remembers the final paragraph of the story, whose first lines are: That was another world they had been in, surely. As much as any world concocted on the stage. Their flimsy arrangement, their

140

Alice Munro

ceremony of kisses, the foolhardy faith enveloping them that everything would sail ahead as planned. Move an inch this way or that, in such a case, and you’re lost. (269) Any world concocted on the stage! Here, of course, Robin is thinking of the “tragic” portion of her story, the part that is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, where the lovers’ deaths are the result of a miscarried letter from Friar Laurence. There is another dramatic reference in “Tricks” as well. As an older woman, perhaps in her late 50s, Robin had played the title character in a local Players Society production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. The general response was that it was an unpleasant play but that she played Hedda splendidly. An especially good job as the character—so people said—was so much the opposite of herself in real life. (263) This is no accidental reference, and the comparisons and contrasts between Hedda and Robin that it suggests will be dealt with later. So “Tricks” contains a Romeo and Juliet-like “tragedy” of loss, a partial action within its whole. But in Munro there is no tragic ending for Robin and Danilo. Neither dies as a result of fate’s cruel trick, and one of the pair simply disappears from the action. Robin continues on with a somewhat drained but, nevertheless, full life. There is a genuine sadness in this tragic/comic situation, of course, but Munro’s tone keeps the story rooted in a practical, realistic understanding that life does go on after mistakes and confusions are recognized and absorbed—essentially expressing the comic vision of life. The view that “Tricks” should be understood as comic in its pattern and vision is underscored by Munro’s use here, as elsewhere in Runaway, of a life arc imbedded in her story. The “tragedy” of Robin’s youthful experience of loss in Stratford is filtered through her memories of that time from a much later period in her life. She was twenty-six years old when the story that Munro relates began, but Robin’s perspective is that of a woman in her mid-sixties when the story concludes about forty years later. We are made to understand that the mistake in the clock shop, the nasty trick of fate that prevented a possibly happy, loving life together for Robin

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

141

and Danilo, was only one part of a larger story. The phrase “old confusions or obligations” in the title of this chapter comes from a passage in “Passion,” the final line of which reads, “But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?” (161). These words suggest the sentiment of comedy in a nutshell. Old confusions or mistakes do get wiped away by the passage of time. At the very least, they fade. In a parallel way, old obligations—which may have seemed necessary and pressing at some part of one’s life—fade or disappear with age. In “Tricks,” the obligations constraining Robin have mostly to do with her sister, who was: “Stunted, crippled in a way, by severe and persisting asthma from childhood on. You didn’t expect a person who looked like that, who couldn’t step outside in winter or be left alone at night, to have such a devastating way of catching on to other, more fortunate people’s foolishness” (237). Robin’s obligation to care for Joanne cramps and twists her life to some extent, but, as in real life, things change with time. Joanne dies, and Robin’s life arc continues. Robin lived on in her hometown; she escaped the stultifying presence of Joanne and Willard; she became a successful psychiatric nurse; she took lovers; she reached a state of self-knowledge and self-control that were beyond her in her youth. In other words, Robin has changed a good deal since the accident of forty years ago. Robin talks about it specifically. In speaking of her married lovers, for example, there are these lines: “Not that she regrets it. There’s very little now that she regrets” (266). And, a little earlier, speaking of her experiences as a psychiatric nurse, there is this: Sometime after she came back from Stratford, not having seen As You Like It, she had begun to be drawn to this work. Something—though not what she was expecting—had changed her life. (265) Robin seems to understand, as an older woman looking back on her life, that the same error or trick of fate, the same “chance,” that caused her loss and heartache is the very one which also changed her life in a positive way. Ironic, but also consistent with the point of view of comedy. Robin’s reference to having played Hedda Gabler is relevant here. She notes with understanding, as well as with rather pointed

142

Alice Munro

satire, that people of the town misunderstood her relationship to the role. They thought that in her quiet, withdrawn spinsterhood she had no relationship to the tense, excitable Hedda. Robin knows that none of this is true; but in quite a different way, we understand that it is absolutely true. She is far from the repressed, uninvolved, lonely female the townspeople think they see, but in a broader sense she is the opposite of Hedda. So extravagant and unconventional on the outside, Hedda really is self-centered and cowardly at core. She chose the respectable Tesman over the artistic Lovborg for appearances’ sake and is trapped in a desperately boring and frightening marriage, pregnant and hating the very thought of that pregnancy. She has no motivation to help her husband in any way with his life or work, and she had no selfless instinct to do any of that with Lovborg either. Robin is clearly her opposite in these respects. Munro is surely aware that Robin’s real similarity to a character in Hedda Gabler is to Mrs. Elvsted. John Gassner describes this character well in his introduction to the play for his anthology of modern drama: The sophisticated Hedda is cowardly, whereas the “unemancipated,” feminine Mrs. Elvsted behaves like a brave “new woman.” She leaves husband and children in order to protect the man she saved from drink and despair and inspired to write an important book. It is the “bourgeois” Mrs. Elvsted, who, moved by love, is the free person. . . . Hedda can only die. (Gassner 37) This sounds rather like Robin. It’s what she would have done; it’s what she does. No suicide for her, but a continuing life of service to others. It may be hard-fought in “Tricks,” but that’s the vision of comedy. Pick yourself up, recover, and go on to whatever life has in store. A small detail from the story emphasizes this comic perspective. “I’ll die, said Robin . . . I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready” (236). These are the opening lines of “Tricks,” and it’s no accidental beginning. Munro wants us to recognize not only the comic exaggeration in these words, but also, by the end of the story, the irony that Robin did not die as a result of the role the missing dress may have played in her life. The point is stressed. Robin didn’t die; she went on with her life, went on to fulfill the comic pattern of the story.

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

143

A discussion of comic vision in “Tricks” would be incomplete without comment on the language and tone that Munro uses in this story, as well as the others in Runaway. Robin is presented to us in a manner characteristic of Munro in a great many of her stories. Robin regularly describes herself as undeserving and regularly uses language of self-deprecation in characterizing herself. Munro makes her, in other words, one of the small, ordinary people of the world. Munro’s habit of undercutting sentiment with colloquial phrases or practical details also underlines this aspect of character, as well as providing an all-out comic effect in some instances. One example may suffice. After the presumed Danilo has rejected her in the shop, Robin imagines what Danilo was thinking: If he had thought of Robin it would be in fear of her doing just what she had been doing—dreaming her dreary virginal dreams, fabricating her silly plans. Women had probably made fools of themselves over him before now, and he would have found ways to get rid of them. This was a way. Better cruel than kind. No apologies, no explanations, no hope. Pretend you don’t recognize her, and if that doesn’t work, slam a door in her face. The sooner you can get her to hate you, the better. Though with some of them it’s uphill work. (260) That final sentence is openly funny. Its colloquial, down-home tone punctuates the sentiment of the scene and makes readers laugh in spite of themselves. Taking the idea a step further, it appears that Munro consciously arranges things so that she can infuse “Tricks” with high sentiment, even sentimentality, without risking excess and without taking her story too far away from a comic vision of life. The life arc of the story, in conjunction with this habit of language and tone, allows Munro to place a Romeo and Juliet-like tragedy in the middle of her tale, without bending the force of the story away from the essential comic pattern that she expresses. This may be why we can feel such intense sympathy for Robin, without ever losing sight of the fact that her situation is part of a larger, more forgiving, picture. Finally, one should notice the way Munro uses one of the most time-honored devices of comedy to support the comic pattern of her piece. In the broadest sense, “Tricks” is not satiric, but there is telling satire in it. It can be seen especially in her treatment of Joanne and

144

Alice Munro

Willard throughout the story, as well as in her presentation of the citizens in Robin’s hometown, with their willful and condescending attitudes. People [in her hometown] . . . knew that the Shakespeare plays were being put on in Stratford, but Robin had never heard of anybody going to see one. People like Willard were afraid of being looked down on by the people in the audience, as well as having the problem of not following the language. And people like Joanne were sure that nobody, ever, could really like Shakespeare, and so if anybody from here went, it was because they wanted to mix with the higher-ups, who were not enjoying it themselves but only letting on they were. Those few people in town who made a habit of seeing stage productions preferred to go to Toronto, to the Royal Alex, when a Broadway musical was on tour. (238) These are, indeed, the “little” people of comedy.

“Passion” On first reading “Passion,” a reader may focus on the seeming darkness of Neil’s agonizing alcoholism and his suicide as somehow representing Munro’s central interest. Grace’s flight with Neil through the back roads of rural Ontario and the automobile crash which kills him could be the basis for a bleak vision of selfknowledge on Grace’s part and a larger understanding of life’s tragic potential. None of this proves to be the case, however, and in many ways, ironically, “Passion” is the most thoroughly comic of the stories in Runaway. “Passion” masquerades as an elegy for Neil’s tormented self and his death. It is not merely incidental that Munro includes a line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (ca. 1749). Mrs. Travers is thinking of Neil’s intelligence and his problems when she quotes Gray’s poem: “Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear” (174). She is praising her son as an example of the quiet, obscure man whom Gray exalts and, unknowingly, offering an elegy in advance of his death. However, it is not the case here that Munro is channeling her own thoughts and feelings,

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

145

or even Grace’s, through Mrs. Travers. It is much more likely that Munro offers this quotation ironically, as an example of romantic sentimentality on Mrs. Travers’ part. The rest of the story bears this out. The key to understanding Grace’s experiences as a young girl is a paragraph near the beginning in which the older Grace, now in her sixties, tries to understand her motives in returning to see the Travers’ summer home, which had seemed so important to her in her youth: Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. . . . Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. . . . And what if you find it [the house] gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody has come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions and obligations wiped away? (161) Whatever the events were from long ago, they clearly involve confusions and obligations on Grace’s part, which have not left her mind forty years later. Indeed, she is still wishing she might bury them. We don’t know much about Grace as an older woman, only that she’s aged, that her memories of Little Sabot Lake make her regret the contemporary chic physical development of the place, and that she has had some worldly experience since her youth, as suggested in the references to the time spent in Australia and to herself as “an engaging talker” (168). In addition, we may surmise that she is well educated, partly from the details about the extra high school classes she chose to take, partly from her total absorption in the reading opportunities at the Travers’ house, and partly from the statement at story’s end that the money that Mr. Travers gave her was enough to give her a “start in life.” The challenge is to interpret the events that Grace recounts in the light of her later feelings about personal “confusions and obligations.” The “confusions” mostly relate to Grace’s feelings about her own sexuality, about how to deal with boys and about her own self-worth. She presents herself most often as uncertain, rustically unprepared and undeserving. In this respect, she is like other women characters in Runaway, as noted earlier. But at least once she breaks

146

Alice Munro

out of this confining self-image and goes into a feminist rant at Maury, in a temporary rage over the way “Father of the Bride” portrayed women as lesser beings, existing mainly to satisfy male expectations—where they remain “. . . pea-brained. . . . Forever” (164). At the same time, however, she lives in an imagined world of newly found sexual urges. In this world, she sees herself romantically dependent on the special man who will sweep her off her feet and deliver her to “Pleasurable physical intimacies . . .” (173). Later on in the story, recalling what she thought about in the car with Neil: what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like . . . the nearly silent flight in which she herself would figure more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, flesh nothing now but a stream of desire. (183) In other words, Grace is in a recognizable state of youthful, confused exuberance about her own desires and sense of self. The “obligations” are recognizable too. First of all to Maury, whom she has treated dishonestly all along, allowing him to fall in love with her “because he had believed—instantly—in the integrity and uniqueness of her mind and soul” (164). She permits him to create a whole scenario of their future wedding and married life together, even though she feels none of the same love for him and admits to herself that she is stringing him along. There’s an unmistakable clue to this in the line: “In fact she fell in love with Mrs. Travers, rather as Maury had fallen in love with her” (165). Later on, she admits, “None of this seemed at all real to her” (172). The older Grace presumably feels some guilt at having been so casual about her obligations to Maury. However, the main guilt she must feel is over the obligation she failed to fulfill for Mrs. Travers and for Neil. In the scene where Neil was about to take Grace to the hospital for a tetanus shot, Mrs. Travers unexpectedly spoke to Grace in a manner quite different from that to which the girl was accustomed. It came as a wake-up call, although Grace only dimly understood at the time that it was a call to adulthood: “Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it” (181). Grace recognized a sudden change in Mrs. Travers, to something far less appealing, but she had yet to register the real import of what

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

147

the older woman was saying. Later on, driving with Neil, she seems to understand more fully, but chooses not to try in any way to stop his drinking. Full of herself and her notions about “passion,” she fails utterly in the obligation that had been assigned to her and which, had she been a more mature person, she might have assigned herself. All of this leads to a perception of the story as essentially comic in content and form. The older Grace helps us to see her younger self through an ironic and satiric lens. Young Grace is viewed as shallow, foolish, confused. We are not without sympathy for her, certainly. But, in mistaking or fumbling so often, she comes across as rather silly. She is selfish and uncaring toward Maury, and she is selfish again with Neil. Shallow, too, in the way she reinvents her relationship to and understanding of Neil: She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now. What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was. It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else. (193) This is the over-dramatization of a teenage mind. Cheap philosophy. Cheap pessimism. We shouldn’t judge too harshly perhaps, because we’ve all been there ourselves, but this is really a comic perspective on youth’s extravagance and foolishness. The form of comedy is present as well. The life arc of Grace’s story—from youth to old age—demonstrates once again the comic vision of life as one in which obstacles are overcome, foolishness resolved, knowledge gained, and life goes on. In addition, the presence of the much older Mrs. Travers, playing against the young Grace, suggests this same life arc. She provides the perspective of age and a comic view of how things change in the course of a life.

148

Alice Munro

Speaking to Grace about Anna Karenina, Mrs. Travers describes how her sympathies have changed over the years, having first identified with Kitty and later with Anna. Then she adds: you know, the last time I found myself sympathizing all the time with Dolly. Dolly when she goes to the country, you know, with all those children, and she has to figure out how to do the washing, there’s the problem about the washtubs—I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs. (172) This last is a funny line, but her whole point about shifting attitudes over a life span is a perception of the comic nature of things. The very end of “Passion” reinforces its comic form. It starts with one more mistake; clearly Mr. Travers thinks that he needs to bribe Grace, buy her silence about the little escapade with Neil prior to his death, appearances being important, after all. We sense, however, that Grace is not the sort of person to have gossiped about her supposed fling with Neil. Either way, the final paragraph concludes with the usual promise of a comic vision of life: “It was enough money to insure her a start in life.” (196). A new start is what comedy provides, after all, and we already know that Grace has made use of it.

The Juliet Triptych The richest, most complex character study in Runaway is the socalled Juliet Triptych—“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”—because Munro here chooses to follow a single character through three full stories. Juliet’s thoughts, her fears, her hopes, her feelings of guilt are traced from her youth to older age. Yes—the life arc is clearly present in the triptych, although Munro’s presentation of it is different from that in other Runaway stories. She typically presents the life arc via her main character’s memories of her youth, but in these Juliet stories there is only one clear instance of Juliet as an older woman looking back on a key event in her younger life. At the end of “Soon” Juliet finds a letter she had written to Eric from Ontario, while visiting her parents when Penelope was thirteen months old: “When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

149

past fabricated self” (125). Immediately then, she thinks about her mother and about how typical it is in humans to want to protect their memories of home: But she had not protected Sara. When Sara had said, soon I’ll see Juliet, Juliet had found no reply. Could it not have been managed? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say Yes. To Sara it would have meant so much—to herself, surely, so little. But she had turned away, she had carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she washed and dried the cups and also the glass that had held grape soda. She had put everything away. (125) This is an incredibly affecting self-condemnation on Juliet’s part, very revealing of her character and quite moving to the reader. However, this scene of memory is only a tiny part of the triptych. Elsewhere, the life arc is presented continuously in the three stories, with the action moving chronologically, for the most part, from Juliet’s younger self to her older one. In a way, this makes it the truest, most literal life arc in the whole collection. The triptych, like “Tricks,” presents the overall view of comedy; that is, the idea that life goes on past the mistakes, the broken obligations, even the downright horrors that continue to play in Juliet’s memory. Her life is much changed by the end of “Silence,” but she continues with a kind of quiet acceptance of the way things are. We are far from the joy of romantic comedy, for sure, and the comic life arc is scarcely the most important aspect of this story and its two sisters. The arc’s presence, however, demonstrates that Munro’s vision is for the long run, accepting darkness and happenstance as just parts of an ongoing whole. Life is unfair, the stories suggest. Juliet was unfair to her mother, and Penelope is unfair to Juliet. Juliet overcomes the death of Eric, she copes with the accident of meeting Heather—thus learning about Penelope’s “normal” life as a mother herself—and she learns to endure the total loss of Penelope. She misunderstands her parents; she misunderstands Penelope; she refuses to countenance any part of Eric’s view about his fling with Christa. However, she endures—somewhat stoically perhaps, but she does endure. This seems to be mankind’s fate as Munro portrays it—to continue with both the small and the big things of life, regardless. Knowledge and acceptance of one’s situation, of one’s self, may or may not come with it, but continuation is an absolute.

150

Alice Munro

The overall pattern of the Juliet Triptych is that of comedy, as described above, but the recovery, the continuance after the mistakes and confusions are understood and corrected, is one that fully records, accepts, and even embraces the incredible loss which has occurred. As was also true in “Tricks,” no one in these two story arcs “gets over it.” Life does go on, but a sense of loss accompanies it permanently. The word “tragicomedy,” complicated as its use has always been in literary criticism, may be a suitable descriptor for the three Juliet stories, and perhaps for “Tricks” as well. “Chance” deserves special further mention in the context of this chapter. Most interestingly, it is a reverse image of that part of “Tricks” which is a mini-tragedy. “Chance” is a fully realized romantic comedy, reminiscent in its way of As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just as “Tricks” can seem reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet.4 Ironically enough, given its comic shape, the most prominent literary allusion in “Chance” is not to comedy, but to tragedy, perhaps as a precursor of what happens to Juliet beyond this particular story. On the train six months earlier, heading west to Vancouver, Juliet thinks of the word “taiga” as she observes the countryside of Northern Ontario. Taiga, she thought. She did not know whether that was the right word for what she was looking at. She might have had, at some level, the idea of herself as a young woman in a Russian novel, going out into an unfamiliar, terrifying, and exhilarating landscape where the wolves would howl at night and where she would meet her fate. She did not care that this fate—in a Russian novel—would likely turn out to be dreary, or tragic, or both. Personal fate was not the point, anyway. What drew her in— enchanted her, actually—was the very indifference, the repetition, the carelessness and contempt for harmony, to be found on the scrambled surface of the Precambrian shield. (54) With this allusion to tragedy in a story of comic resolution, it appears that Munro is openly playing, at least a little bit, with questions of literary genre. Put another way, Munro has Juliet looking at the randomness of the Precambrinan shield—lakes, trees, rocks then trees, rocks, lakes: Taiga—and, in effect, acknowledging the interplay of both genres—comedy and tragedy—in its very randomness.

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

151

Despite Juliet’s reference to dreary or tragic fate, it’s the romantic comic pattern that dominates “Chance.” All of the usual paraphernalia of comedy is present, just as it was in “Tricks”: the presentation of Juliet as rather undeserving and a little pretentious; the self-denigrating habit of thought; the satiric jabs at fellow passengers on the train, as well as at Juliet’s professors; the use of language and tone to punctuate seriousness of situation or thought. More importantly, there are the typical mistakes, confusions, misapprehensions, and the workings of chance, especially on Juliet’s part, which have to be overcome and corrected. In “Chance” the correction comes relatively easily, and Juliet is released into the luxurious, warming embrace of mutual love with Eric: She can tell by his voice that he is claiming her. She stands up, quite numb, and sees that he is older, heavier, more impetuous than she has remembered. He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing this is. How close to dismay. (85) This is the ultimate feeling, the desired end, of romantic comedy. It is stressed in the final paragraphs of the story by references to the joy that both Juliet and Eric feel and to the prospect of a happy life ahead. Marriage and children are implied, and the pattern of romantic comedy seems complete. The romantic comic vision of “Chance” is, of course, an outlier, because the story does not stand alone, being only the first chapter of Juliet’s story. In addition, two deaths figure prominently in “Chance,” a motif unlikely, even if not totally unknown, in romantic comedy. Also, there is the final sentence in the quotation given above. How close to dismay. This is absolutely characteristic of Munro. In the very act of describing a scene of total happiness, she adds a word, a hint, of its opposite. Come to think of it, for what it’s worth, this is also a notable characteristic of Shakespeare’s plays.

“Runaway” Like “Chance,” “Runaway” has the shape of a romantic comedy. At the story’s end, Carla and Clark are in love again; the sex is

152

Alice Munro

good; and life should go on happily forever. An environmental motif that frames the story also suggests a romantic comic vision: “This was the summer of rain and more rain” (4). All of nature is disturbed as the story begins, with the horse trails wet and muddy, the grass soaking, the clouds dark and the leaves drenching passersby with their showers of water. Humankind is badly affected as well. Business is bad. Clark and Carla are either angry or despondent, and they fight. Flora has disappeared. Their debts pile up. The blackmail scheme looms. But then, while Carla is riding the bus to Toronto, the weather changes: “Summer clouds, not rain clouds, were scudding across the sky. The whole countryside was changing, shaking itself loose, into the true brightness of a July day” (31). Regeneration in nature is a common trope in the literature of comedy, betokening qualities of forgiveness, reconciliation, and happiness in human beings.5 All of this could denote a simple romantic comedy,6 except that Munro injects references to a “murderous needle,” to “knowledge” and to “temptation” near the end of the story, so that everything becomes a bit ambiguous. Carla is left, at the end, uncertain as to whether to act or not. She has some reason to think that Clark has betrayed her by killing the little goat she loves: It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there. (46) She remains drawn to a mental image of a clearing in the nearby woods where buzzards may have feasted on Flora’s remains, leaving only, perhaps, some bones and a skull, “A skull that she could hold like a teacup in one hand. Knowledge in one hand.” But she remains undecided: “The days passed and Carla didn’t go near that place. She held out against the temptation” (47). With these words, we end up with a very different feeling from that which is common at the conclusion of most romantic comedies. What Carla seems really to be facing is not a “happy ever after” but a life of continuance in which she can only “endure” with Clark and with her own thoughts—given what she knows and guesses, and given the “murderous needle” poised to pierce her at any time.

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

153

Munro has a habit, seen here and in the other stories, of offering balance in her point of view. Things may end happily this time, or at the moment, but dark forces are suggested which might turn things in a totally different direction. Balance and counter balance. The balance may tilt overwhelmingly in one direction, as it often does in the history of comedy in the West.7 Or, the balance can be precarious, as it seems to be here in “Runaway.”8 The weight of this story seems to tilt strongly in favor of the view that Carla will not hold out forever against the “temptation.” Not so much that she will eventually go to the woods for proof, but that the “murderous needle” will eventually provoke her to take action to free herself from Clark, to gain self-confidence and to seek self-knowledge. Either way, the sense of anticipation that Munro builds so strongly into the ending of “Runaway” suggests that the story is ongoing beyond the confines of the short story itself. There is just a hint here of a life arc to come and the new perspectives it will bring. The presence of the older Mrs. Jamieson, with her more mature perceptions, hints at a life arc as well, much as was the case with Mrs. Travers in “Passion.” Perhaps, in the future, Juliet’s perspectives will change and become more like Mrs. Jamieson’s. In all of this, “Runaway” seems to express the vision of comedy.

“Powers” In “Tricks” and “Passion,” an older persona of the main character looks back on events of her earlier life, implicitly judging and accepting them; and, in the three Juliet stories taken together, we follow Juliet from youth to older age. In each case, the main character’s stance as a more mature individual reinforces the comic vision of the stories. The mistakes and confusions, which have caused disruption and pain in the past, are seen in a comic perspective—having been overcome, or at least endured, so that life could go on. This retrospective aspect is not fully present in “Powers,” even though there are brief passages where Nancy looks back on her younger self, as, for example, in the section titled “A Square, A Circle, A Star” where Nancy is judging Ollie for having described his life to her as one of “lessons learned.” She says: “He was truly not the same. And what about her? Oh, the trouble there was that she was quite the same” (320). That is, she

154

Alice Munro

found herself talking on and on, getting all “keyed up” and enjoying “listening to herself” (320). A little later, reacting to Ollie’s refusal of her impending invitation to join her in her hotel room, she is described this way: She knew the danger of anything she might say. The danger of her own desire, because she didn’t really know what sort of desire it was, what it was for. They had shied away from whatever that was years ago, and they would surely have to do so now that they were old. . . . And unfortunate enough to have spent their time together lying. (329) The older Nancy seems to recognize here that she was mistaken and confused years before in not acknowledging the real feelings she had for Ollie. Despite these and a few other examples, however, “Powers” tends to avoid retrospection as such and proceeds in a chronological way, with Nancy’s experiences presented directly and sequentially. In addition, this story is unique in Runaway in offering one section from the point of view of a male character—Ollie’s in the “Girl in a Middy”—thus further reducing any sense that the story as a whole is filtered through Nancy’s memories of the events of her youth. The comic arc is clearly present in “Powers,” with many errors, mistakes, confusions, obligations, and bits of mean-spiritedness left behind, as life has continued for Nancy and Ollie. But the comic arc is not reinforced in this story by the implied judgment and acceptance of memory. As a result, the comic emphasis of “Powers” tends to fall more squarely on the presentation of the “mistakes” of the main characters and much less on recognition of life’s continuing pattern beyond them. When looked upon as a comedy in the sense used in this chapter, “Powers” seems quite dark, arguably the darkest in Runaway. In large part, it’s a comedy of satiric exposure. Ollie’s penance for his cruel act of entombing Tessa in a mental hospital is unconvincing, and Nancy fails to punish herself in any meaningful way for her hard-hearted desertion of Tessa when the institution to which she has been committed is threatened with closure. These are only the most dramatic of the many, many examples throughout the story of Nancy’s thoughtless character and, to a lesser extent, Ollie’s. Nancy occasionally sees herself as someone seeking self-knowledge, as someone who wishes to have a special,

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

155

unusual destiny, but she is largely to be known for her shallowness, for pettiness and for willful blindness to her own selfish and impetuous actions. In Nancy’s diary entries, Munro presents her comically, and Nancy is, indeed, an essentially comic character who blunders along quite thoughtlessly. She has some self-awareness of her selfish behavior, to be sure, but mostly she proceeds in her life with a self-centered disregard for the feelings of others. Her early, schoolgirl treatment of Tessa as merely an object of curiosity is a major case in point. There are hints in “Powers” that Munro had the idea of a comedy openly in mind as she wrote. There are her references to staging The Gondoliers and to reading The Divine Comedy (“not much of a comedy”), for example (273). More significant is Nancy’s judgmental description of Ollie’s account of his life when they meet by accident in Vancouver: Plenty of men never had a word to say about their lives, beyond when and where. But there were others, more up-to-date, who gave these casual-sounding yet practiced speeches in which it was said that life was indeed a bumpy road, but misfortunes had pointed the way to better things, lessons were learned, and without a doubt joy came in the morning. (319–320) These lines are reminiscent of Robin’s description in “Tricks” of Shakespeare’s usual comic pattern. Finally, there is a line of Nancy’s after Ollie has finished his account of Tessa’s death and his descent into alcoholism. “I suppose you found that life goes on, Nancy said” (328). It’s an ironic, sarcastic remark, and Ollie acknowledges that. Still, it serves as a reminder of that very basic tenet of the comic vision of life. The story that Munro relates in “Powers” revolves around Tessa, a figure with special psychic powers, described by Nancy as someone with “an extraordinary, unwarranted benevolence” (311) and by Ollie as offering “warmth, some easy spirit” (292) and as “dishearteningly straightforward and self-contained” (290). She is seen as almost otherworldly in her difference from those around her. There are echoes of Christian religious belief (an essentially comic pattern, by the way) in some of this. In the mental institution where she has remained for a decade or more, Tessa feeds the other inmates with her baking; and her assistant Elinor, the meekest

156

Alice Munro

of that lowly group, loves her unequivocally. Both Nancy and Ollie selfishly use Tessa—Nancy by treating her as a curiosity, something to be shown off, and Ollie by using her as a ticket to his ambitions for a journalistic, scientific career. Eventually, both Ollie and Nancy betray Tessa savagely. Ollie abandons her when she loses her special powers, committing her to a mental hospital of questionable reputation. When Nancy learns of that situation many years later and chooses to visit Tessa at the institution in Michigan, she opts not to rescue Tessa from that place and fails even to write to her later, as she promised to do. The theme of betrayal is quite strong in “Powers,” with both Nancy and Ollie being exposed for their behavior and with both feeling abiding shame and guilt for their actions. Ollie sinks into alcoholism and runs away to the coastal wilds of the Pacific Northwest in an attempt to escape his memories. Nancy appears to seek a kind of reversal of the past or even absolution when she dreams in the “Flies on the Windowsill” section. Meanwhile, Tessa has forgiven everything and everybody. Tessa tells Nancy, when the latter visits her in Michigan, that she believes Ollie to be dead because, if not, “why wouldn’t he have come here and got me? He said he would” (312). Minutes earlier, Tessa has also sought to absolve Nancy of any responsibility when she says, “I knew you haven’t come to take me away. How could you?” (311). These submerged echoes of the Christian story are brought even closer to the surface with the references to The Divine Comedy and with the names Munro gives to the young Vancouver hippies, Adam and Eve, who sell Nancy a “tiny scroll” containing her “fortune” or “wisdom” (313). “The road is easy if you know enough to travel light.” (329) These are the casual, but ironic, words of wisdom in the scroll. Nancy and Ollie have certainly traveled light in their relationships with other people, Tessa especially. But, their road has not proved easy in the end. They live on with the weight of their guilt and shame. As an elderly woman in the story’s final section, Nancy responds in her mind to her children’s rather impatient advice that she not live in the past: “But what she believes she is doing, what she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it” (330). This seems an apt summary of the human condition we all share in this comedy of life. That is, we continue on, past our mistakes and misdeeds, searching for understanding and, by

“Old Confusions or Obligations”

157

implication, absolution. This could suggest the Purgatory of The Divine Comedy, perhaps; if so, heaven does seem a long way off. One’s fate is only to endure, trying to understand the past and one’s place in it. “Powers” doesn’t let Nancy or Ollie off the hook for their smartalecky, pseudo-intellectual shallowness, for their mistakes and for their meanness to Tessa. It is the darkest, the most satirical of Munro’s stories in this collection. The “Flies on the Windowsill” section is especially significant in this regard. As she wakes from the dream in which she has “willed” Ollie and Tessa into reconciliation and willed a return of Tessa’s “powers,” Nancy is initially determined to believe that her vision is true, but that determination is undermined almost immediately: The sense of being reprieved lights all the air. So clear, so powerful, that Nancy feels the known future wither under its attack, skitter away like dirty old leaves. But deep in that moment some instability is waiting, that Nancy is determined to ignore. No use. She is aware already of being removed, drawn out of those two people and back into herself. It seems as if some calm and decisive person—could it be Wilf?—has taken on the task of leading her out of that room with its wire hangers and its flowered curtain. Gently, inexorably leading her away from what begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash. (335) This passage is recognizably ambiguous, with the poetic quality of the final sentence especially suggesting that Nancy may have achieved some meaningful self-knowledge, some understanding of her complicity in Tessa’s fate. However, a different reading of the passage is much more damning. It would suggest that Nancy is still just as selfish in her unsupported fantasy as she has been throughout her life. Her dream would represent the easy road once again, an attempt to deny what really happened and to absolve herself of guilt. Either way, this is a dark and satirical ending. Whether or not Nancy has achieved some sort of self-recognition, the dream has been a defensive one, an attempt to get past old confusions and obligations. Munro refuses to let Nancy off the hook for her mistakes and insensitivities in life.

158

Alice Munro

“Powers” shares the life arc and comic pattern of several other stories in Runaway, but its expression of the comic vision of life is muted and dark. This is not necessarily uncommon. The comic vision of life can take many forms. Popular romantic comedy is at one extreme; ironic, and even bitter, comedy lies at the other end of the spectrum.9 The story of Nancy, Ollie and Tessa is enormously complex in presentation and rich in character. Its most essential powers probably lie elsewhere, as they may do in Munro’s other stories as well, but recognition of the comic pattern underlying them serves to enhance our understanding of Munro’s overall vision visà-vis her creations.

PART THREE

Dear Life After Runaway was published in 2004, Munro turned her attention to family history—particularly the knowable history of her father’s family, the Laidlaws—and to integrating her own personal history into theirs. Drawing upon new research into the Laidlaws, drawing as well upon a series of revised but previously published memoir stories and autobiographically inflected fictions, and drawing upon newly written nonfiction and fiction, Munro produced The View from Castle Rock (2006). This was the family book she had been contemplating since the late 1970s and, when it appeared, some reviewers were dismayed by its differences from the Munro they had come to know. With her next collection, Too Much Happiness (2009), Munro appeared to be returning to herself—its stories focus on Munro-type characters from Ontario in Munro-like circumstances—but there again there is a difference: the title story is about a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician and fails to even use the word “Ontario.” “Too Much Happiness”—the story— is preceded by a revised and expanded version of “Wood,” a story which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1980 and was held out of the collections since. More complexity in late Munro. With Dear Life (2012), the third volume treated here, Munro may be seen returning to herself in numerous ways and ultimately.

160

Alice Munro

Owing to health issues, there is ample reason to expect that Dear Life will prove to be Munro’s last—her finale. All the more so because Dear Life ends with four pieces, as I indicated in the introduction here, that she literally called a “finale” and said that “they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life” (Dear Life 255). Throughout Dear Life too there are numerous Munrovian echoes: “To Reach Japan” draws upon people Munro knew and things she did when she lived in Vancouver in the 1950s and early 1960s. Its train trip east took place in 1954. The story “Train” draws upon material that Munro labored over in the 1960s and early 1970s and never brought to publication. The characters in “Dolly” sound rather like Munro herself living with Gerald Fremlin in recent years. And the stories without much biographical resonance—“Amundsen,” “Leaving Maverley,” “Gravel,” or “Corrie,” for instance—all each remind of other stories. As ever with Munro, they seem similar and they echo but they are not at all the same—they offer singular characters in singular situations, living their lives, grappling with their mysteries. J. R. (Tim) Struthers opens this section and continues the detailed analysis of the workings of narrative begun by Reeves. He takes up the opening story, “To Reach Japan,” keeping the ideas of travel and exploration in view while recognizing the importance of the train trip as a trope in Munro. He extends them further by tracing Munro’s imaginative movement in her stories from autobiography to metafiction, and then from metaphor to allegory. Seen through the allusive contexts that Struthers offers, “To Reach Japan” emerges within Dear Life as an opening story setting an imaginative tone for the whole collection. For her part, Ailsa Cox takes up humor in Dear Life and use Bakhtin’s theories of carnival to probe Munro’s presentation of the self in that collection in “Pride,” “Corrie” and, especially, “Dolly.” Seeing apt continuity between “Face” (2008) and “Pride,” Cox notes the ways in which the earlier story presages the latter. In “Pride,” the story ends with the two central characters gazing out, mesmerized, at one of Munro’s telling images; its meaning in the story is not completely clear yet its actuality is unquestionable. The vision of baby skunks frolicking in a birdbath leaves the characters, as the story’s final line says, “as glad as we could be.” There is an ironic finality in this line which seems to permeate the whole of the collection and, as well, the whole of late

Dear Life

161

Munro—her stories get at the limits of gladness. “Corrie,” Cox continues, is a carnivalized text which ultimately moves beyond its joke in the reversal which ends the story, and it too reaches a point of what might be called wise equilibrium. Realizing what has really happened in her life, in her longtime adulterous relationship with another character, Howard, and in that ongoing relation once the story’s revelation has emerged, Corrie acknowledges that “there could have been worse, much worse.” In each of the stories that Cox treats, Munro is elaborating the mystery of longtime relation and intimacy. That is especially clear in “Dolly,” which ends with the narrator acknowledging “What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel, at [her partner’s] being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together” (Dear Life 153, 174, 252). The narrator has imagined asking Franklin to tear up a letter she has sent through the mail should she not be there; it is a letter she wrote in anger in the midst of an argument that they were having during the story. Closing her chapter with the story’s ending, Cox points to the ways in which such endings as this send Munro’s readers back to the beginning of each story. To savor our experience of its complex mysteries again, and anew. To rediscover each story. This discussion of endings leads to the finale stories in Dear Life, the subject of Linda Morra’s final chapter here. Using theories of intimacy to examine the four autobiographical pieces in the finale, Morra posits what she calls a “dynamic of intimacy” which is central to the telling of those familial stories. She notes as she concludes her discussion that the final lines in “Dear Life” are couched in an empathetic “we”—that is, through a narrative point of view which acknowledges our shared complicity in questionable behaviors; in Munro’s case, her decision not to fly home in February 1959 to attend her mother’s funeral. Morra notes as well that this point of view differs markedly from that seen in “The Eye,” the first of the finale stories and one taking up incidents which occurred when Munro was nine or ten. There the “we” was one of authority, not empathy. Moving toward a final articulation of her own dear life in “Dear Life,” Munro ends Dear Life with a meditation on her mother’s funeral. She almost ended with a reminder that, as she was dying, her mother escaped from the hospital (that harrowing fact was in the New Yorker version of “Dear Life” and, set in type in the book, almost appeared there too). An intimate dear life in fact: Alice Munro, Dear Life: her own finale.

162

7 Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan” For my mother, Jean Laurie Bowley, October 6, 1919–July 4, 2007, on my sixty-fifth birthday, Saturday July 25, 2015

J. R. (Tim) Struthers

Allegory is to narrative as metaphor is to language. The former in each instance is the archetype of the latter. —Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

Each traveler or explorer, including those seemingly charting their magnificent courses only geographically, in fact represents—like

164

Alice Munro

writers such as Alice Munro and readers such as ourselves—part of what I call “A Visionary Tradition.” Whether actual explorers seeking to discover and to map the full extent of the unknown and uncharted globe, as in the case of the man said to have discovered the North and South Poles whose name Alice Munro borrows for the title of the story that is placed second, right after “To Reach Japan,” in her fourteenth and latest volume, Dear Life (2012): “Amundsen.” Or writers seeking to discover and to map the heights and the depths, the longitudes and the latitudes, of human experience. Or readers, too, seeking to understand existence in general and their own lives in particular—if we choose to consider reading, not just writing, as an at least unconscious, perhaps half-conscious, or sometimes wholly conscious form of what Paul John Eakin in his book Fictions in Autobiography calls “the autobiographical act” (6). Very possibly the most common metaphor for the stories of our lives is “The Journey,” to cite the title of a chapter in the novel The Innocent Traveller (1949) by one of Alice Munro’s favorite writers, Ethel Wilson (Struthers Interview 18). A journey made by one or another possible vehicle—each representing a confined space like the form of the short story itself, a confined space that paradoxically enhances the temporarily contained but soon to be released power of the short story. In a car, for example, as in “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the opening story of Munro’s first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). Or on a bus: in one instance, at the beginning of Munro’s story “Home” in The View from Castle Rock (2006), a series of three different buses—a trip representing not only a movement back through different spaces but also a movement back through different times, comparable to the journey imagined in Stephen Leacock’s “L’Envoi: The Train to Mariposa” in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912). Or indeed a train, as is the case with the trip from Vancouver to Toronto that Greta makes with her young daughter, Katy, in “To Reach Japan.” Or the vehicle may be a boat, as in the transatlantic voyage that Munro’s paternal Laidlaw ancestors take from Scotland to Canada in the title story of The View from Castle Rock. Or an airplane, as in two works from The Progress of Love (1986). One story, “Eskimo,” is set entirely on a jet flight to Tahiti, another of the islands that seem to fascinate Munro—in part because I think she

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

165

might view both the place where she grew up (and lives now) and the form of the short story, metaphorically, as islands. Another story, “White Dump,” features a richly descriptive local flight arranged to celebrate a character’s birthday, a second more eventful ride taken by that character’s wife with the same pilot, in addition to a depiction of the then-new reality of space travel beginning with the first manned moon landing on July 20, 1969, which several characters watch on television. Looked at from a different perspective, the word “vehicle” that I have used here proves to be especially interesting—and even humorous—when we recall that it’s the word commonly used to speak of the first of the two parts of one of literature’s most essential components, metaphor: namely, the “vehicle,” or the sign, as distinguished from the “tenor,” or what’s represented by the sign. That is, the vehicle is the means by which a metaphor affects a reader or listener, the means by which the metaphor creates tenor. In any story by Alice Munro we might first regard the mental traveler, to echo the title of a poem by William Blake, as being the writer Alice Munro (as distinct from the person Alice Munro). Hence the first part of this chapter’s title, “Traveling with Munro.” Or we might regard the mental traveler as being the narrator of the story (never to be confused, however identical they may sometimes seem, with Munro the writer, for a narrator is always a device). Or very possibly we might consider the mental traveler to be the protagonist of the story (though the narrator and the protagonist may be the same person or else different individuals who start to merge): the protagonist in “To Reach Japan” being the wife, mother, and poet Greta. And of course we must not forget the reader, who is treated to the pleasures of “Traveling with Munro.” Beginning with just one of Munro’s stories—such as my selection here, “To Reach Japan”—we might see how much can be brought to, and derived from, reading it. And having done so, we might continue and eventually revel in all 148 of Munro’s collected stories (Struthers, “Book by Book” 139): or, as Balachandra Rajan, thinking of W. B. Yeats, would have seen her stories, as 148 segments forming the great wheel of her oeuvre. Which brings me to “Story as Autobiography,” the first of the four subtopics of this chapter: “Story as Autobiography”; “Story as Metafiction”; “Story as Metaphor”; “Story as Allegory.”

166

Alice Munro

Story as autobiography Critical writing on Alice Munro, as so effectively documented by Robert Thacker in “Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography” (1984) and by Carol Mazur and Cathy Moulder in Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism (2007), now has a history extending for more than forty years. A still highly illuminating essay written not much more than ten years into this history is Thacker’s “So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life: Autobiography in Alice Munro’s Stories.” Here Thacker observes that “the autobiographical impulse is at the core of Munro’s art” and that “autobiographical theory seems particularly apt when applied to Alice Munro’s work” (157). Indeed, as he emphasizes, “Munro’s narrative focus on self-definition and its attendant and growing uncertainties conforms almost exactly to the shape defined by several theorists of autobiography” (156). Thus Thacker argues that from the vantage point of Munro’s then newly published sixth volume, The Progress of Love—the volume that I believe represents Munro’s big breakthrough story collection—we can see a “movement” or a “progress” by Munro away from the more traditional, more simplistic efforts that she made to create an impression of unity and conclusiveness in designing many of her stories from the 1950s and the 1960s collected in her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, toward a more experimental, more complex narrative stance (157)—and, I would add, a more experimental, more complex narrative form. In Thacker’s view, “now instead, Munro’s narrators stand back and stare at the mystery of being just unfolded, approached, and recognized—either loath or unable to tell what it all means” (157). As one can with hindsight appreciate of the critic who, less than two decades later, in 2005, would publish the standard biography of Munro, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, Thacker does not elect to explore more closely matters of form and technique and style in Munro’s stories but instead chooses to stress that “at the bottom of this movement . . . are Alice Munro’s experiences” (157). All of this is incontestably true—that is, as far as it goes. For I cannot help but wonder: Might we not understand in some other manner what Paul John Eakin, in a phrase cited by Thacker, identifies as “the autobiographical act” (Eakin 6, Thacker

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

167

“So Shocking” 157)? Do we need to regard autobiography as a single notion or entity? Might we not consider autobiography as being divisible into two categories called, let us say—with a nod to discussions of “facticity” and “ficticity” in Harold Bloom’s essay “Criticism, Canon-Formation, and Prophecy” and Daphne Marlatt’s essay “Perform[ing] on the Stage of Her Text” and candidly admitting that the terms I’m proposing here are far from euphonious—“Autobiography as Facticity” and “Autobiography as Ficticity”? Might we not think of autobiography as being capable of performing two significantly different functions and therefore as being capable of interpretation in two significantly different ways? The first represents a fictive portrait of and commentary on the experiences of Alice Munro. This approach in turn invites a mode of interpretation emphasizing the stories’ “facticity”—what Marlatt characterizes as “the very feel and smell of a place, the kinetics of an event, the actual words said” (200). The second representing a fictive portrait of and commentary on the experiences of Alice Munro’s characters, with “Characters” being a distinction that Munro herself elected to stress through using that word as the title of an uncollected story published in 1978. This approach in turn invites a mode of interpretation emphasizing the stories’ “ficticity”—what Marlatt characterizes as “that luminosity of an emotionally authentic telling” (212). More simply expressed: Might we not introduce a distinction— both in terms of how autobiography can be written and in terms of how autobiography can be read—between a work that is autobiographical in content and a work that is autobiographical in form? The former type or emphasis being what Munro focused on when asked in an interview by John Metcalf in 1972 “How far is your work autobiographical?” (58): “Oh. Well. I guess I have a standard answer to this . . . in incident—no . . . in emotion— completely. In incident up to a point too but of course, in Lives of Girls and Women which is a . . . I suppose it could be called an autobiographical novel . . . most of the incidents are changed versions of real incidents. Some are completely invented but the emotional reality, the girl’s feeling for her mother, for men, for life is all . . . it’s all solidly autobiographical. I would not disclaim this at all” (Metcalf Interview 58). The latter type or emphasis being what Munro stressed on the back of the title page of Lives of Girls and Women about that book: “This novel is autobiographical in form

168

Alice Munro

but not in fact. My family, neighbours and friends did not serve as models.” A comment no doubt made to avoid possible personal or even legal difficulties as a result of people from her home town of Wingham not understanding the fictional nature of her imagined town of Jubilee, yet nevertheless a comment that offers an insight of considerable significance in terms of how readers in general need to comprehend the nature of her entire body of work. Munro’s statement to Metcalf no doubt provides support for those intent on speculating about the factual components of her stories. But more importantly, her statement establishes considerable room for those intent on analyzing the fictional components of her stories. Contemplating the possible “facticity” of “To Reach Japan,” we might, for example, ask ourselves: “Was The Echo Answers, the literary magazine in which Greta has published two of her poems, modeled on the important Canadian literary magazine The Tamarack Review, where Munro originally published three of the stories later collected in her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, stories written while Munro herself, like Greta, was living in British Columbia?” Or instead of speculating about the “facticity” of such a detail in “To Reach Japan,” perhaps we would be better to concentrate on analyzing the story’s “ficticity”—in this instance, asking ourselves why Munro named the fictional literary magazine The Echo Answers. Might we perhaps consider, though few critics of Munro besides James Carscallen have paid much attention to the uses of myth in Munro’s writing, the word “Echo” to be an allusion to the name of the infatuated but rejected lover of Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses? To return to the possible “facticity” of “To Reach Japan,” we might ask ourselves: “And when Munro separated from her husband in Victoria, did she take her youngest daughter with her and ride the train from Vancouver to Toronto?” Or, in a moment of riotous fancy, some readers might speculate: “And at one time or another while travelling on a train did Alice Munro herself actually engage in dirty stuff like what she describes Greta as doing?” At this point I cannot resist repeating a statement Munro made to me in that same interview in 1981 when I noted that “there is a satiric reference in Lives of Girls and Women to the sort of writer who would compare sex to a train entering a tunnel instead of describing sex as it really is” and then asked her, “Did you have a specific author and book in mind?” (Struthers Interview 36). To which Munro—partly

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

169

good-humoredly, partly pointedly, perhaps partly despairingly— replied, “I had no writer or passage in mind. I made that up. I make a lot of things up, though nobody seems to think so” (Munro in Struthers Interview 36). Here Munro makes a crucial observation, rightly directing our attention away from her stories’ possible “facticity” toward her stories’ indubitable “ficticity.” Might we not, therefore, draw a very different inference from the opening words of another statement that Thacker makes in his essay: “Most specifically, autobiography is to be seen in the way Munro writes her stories.” To quote his position more fully: Most specifically, autobiography is to be seen in the way Munro writes her stories since she sees her writing as an “art of approach and recognition,” a way of looking at and evaluating life’s confusions. She goes on to say that she believes “that we don’t solve” the mysteries surrounding the sorts of incidents she uses in her stories: “in fact, our explanations take us further away.” Nevertheless, as Thacker stresses, “By approaching the mystery she finds inherent in her own life, she has forged an art which offers not understanding but momentary glimpse, fleeting insight” (156). All well and good, though not, I believe, what is most important to consider about the art forged by Alice Munro. For what interests me—and what I believe should be of principal interest to all readers of Munro—is a significantly different meaning that the opening words of Thacker’s statement can be said to acquire, a meaning that can be clarified by emphasizing just one word—writes. Hence: Most specifically, autobiography is to be seen in the way Munro writes her stories. That is, autobiography is to be seen, indeed should be seen, first and foremost in the form, structure, technique, language, and style in which Munro writes her stories. Not in terms of the facts of Munro’s life or her perceptions about life: the stories’ “facticity.” Not even in terms of the facts of her characters’ lives or their perceptions about life: the stories’ “ficticity.” But in the way Munro writes her stories. As Paul John Eakin argues in his study of the fictional dimensions of autobiography: “the autobiographical enterprise” consists preeminently in “the act of composition” through which we not only reach “back into the past” but also reach “forward into the future” (226). “To Reach Japan,” if you

170

Alice Munro

will. To allow us ultimately, as Eakin stresses, “to fix this structure of identity in a permanent self-made existence as literary text” (226). As literary text. As language and form. As writing. Which brings me to my second subtopic, “Story as Metafiction.” A subject that I would like to argue could be viewed as an extension of my first subtopic, “Story as Autobiography,” simply if we were to reconceive my previously expressed view of autobiography as being capable of performing two significantly different functions and therefore as being capable of interpretation in two significantly different ways—what I labeled “Autobiography as Facticity” and “Autobiography as Ficticity”—and expand that pairing to include a third term: namely, “Autobiography as Metafiction.” Metafiction representing a subject that Robert Scholes delineated in Fabulation and Metafiction, that Patricia Waugh subsequently considered in Metafiction and that I have long regarded as important to both the writing and the reading of Munro’s work (Struthers, “Alice Munro’s Fictive Imagination” 103, 106).

Story as metafiction In “Alice Munro’s Fictive Imagination,” I contended that starting with a number of stories in her third volume, Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You (1974), including that book’s opening and closing stories, “Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You” and “The Ottawa Valley,” Munro began to write “not just complex psychological fiction but fiction that investigates itself, self-referring fiction, stories about storytelling—metafiction” (103). Furthermore, I argued, the style of these stories was designed to emphasize that she was writing in this fashion and that readers needed to view her stories accordingly. “Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You” indeed! Looking ahead from this third volume through Munro’s next eleven books of new work, we find that very possibly the funniest instance of metafiction comes in a passage from a much later story, “Fiction,” in Too Much Happiness (2009), where the protagonist, Joyce (whose first name surely is meant to echo the surname of the author of Dubliners), is walking by a bookstore, sees a poster advertising a new book, goes into the store, and buys the volume. At this point Munro wryly and self-consciously writes: “How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

171

is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside” (52). The metafictional element in the passage quoted here from “Fiction” allows Munro to comment on her own career, on how her work, like that of other short-story writers, has been received by some parties with a degree of condescension. The passage allows Munro to poke fun at any readers who mistakenly consider the short story, in comparison with the novel, to be a lesser form of art rather than a form that is written, that needs to be read, differently. In stories such as the wittily titled “Differently” in Friend of My Youth (1990), the metafictional element allows Munro to comment on her own style. Here the story’s protagonist, Georgia, is described as once having taken a creative-writing course in which the instructor criticized her work for elements that readers of Alice Munro might well regard as qualities that make her stories uniquely laudable: “Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people” (216). We then learn of further admonishments that Georgia’s instructor directed at her: “Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think” (216)—advice, not to mention an attitude, that readers might well imagine Alice Munro dismissing at least as forcefully as Georgia did. Next we proceed to the second paragraph of “Differently” and the quintessential Alice Munro combination of honesty and humor there: “Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out” (216). Our worlds, our lives, involve degrees of intricacy and sophistication that, as Georgia and Munro appreciate, need to be matched in intricacy and sophistication by any art that seeks to represent and to illuminate them. Or as Munro reminds us metaphorically at the end of “Differently,” our lives are such that what we customarily see are “complicated reflections in the windows” and what we occasionally are granted is “accidental clarity” (243)—a description that serves both realistically to describe the nature of our lives and metafictively to describe the nature of Munro’s stories.

172

Alice Munro

Metafictively, too, the notion of “accidental clarity” (243) both echoes and refines the traditional modernist approach to the form of the short story involving a structure that builds sometimes to a successful, sometimes to a failed, quasi-religious epiphany for the story’s protagonist and/or narrator and/or readers: a view developed by James Joyce, whose collection Dubliners (1914), very interestingly, is cited by name in “Differently” (219). Here Munro again makes her work more complicated, more mysterious, more engaging, more playful by having Georgia not able to remember the title of the particular story by Joyce that her husband reads to her—“It was about a timid poetic sort of young man, with a mean pretty wife” (220). In this way Munro renders the texture of the metafictional puzzle that she creates in “Differently” even more tantalizing, requiring readers first to identify the story by Joyce to which she alludes—“A Little Cloud,” scrupulously examined by Margot Norris in her book Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners (109–21, 246– 48)—and then requiring us to try to achieve some clarity of our own about its possible significance to her story. “The accidental clarity” (243) that Georgia, in the final words of “Differently,” is described as remembering herself attaining while watching the light in the street as she sat near the angled display windows on the two sides of the old-fashioned entranceway to the store where she worked most evenings (a bookstore, very appropriately for a decidedly metafictional story) is precisely what Munro provides for readers of her stories. At such very special moments, Georgia was delighted to find herself, mystic-like, “in a finely balanced and suspended state” (231)—another description that serves, metafictively, to describe the nature of Munro’s stories and the experience they offer us. The metafictional element of the following passage from the story “Hired Girl” in The View from Castle Rock again allows Munro to comment on her own style. Thus in “Hired Girl” the narrator explains of the chores she did one summer as a teenager when employed by a rich couple at (very interestingly) their island home, chores which included (especially interestingly) polishing a big glass door: The work that I had to do here was not hard for me. I knew how to bake, and iron, and clean an oven. Nobody tracked barnyard mud into this kitchen and there were no heavy men’s work clothes to wrestle through the wringer. There was just the business of putting everything perfectly in place and doing quite

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

173

a bit of polishing. Polish the rims of the burners of the stove after every use, polish the taps, polish the glass door to the deck till the glass disappears and people are in danger of smashing their faces against it. (236) Or in Munro’s case, we are no doubt meant to infer from this passage, “putting everything perfectly in place” in every story she writes and polishing the style until it’s so clear that, like any newly arrived house guests looking through a glass door, we are unconscious of its presence until it forcibly confronts us—that is, unless we learn to see it first for ourselves. Turning to the beginning of “To Reach Japan,” what we find ourselves invited to focus on—much as our attention was directed to the bookstore windows in “Differently” and the glass door in “Hired Girl”—is a train window, through which Greta, presumably thinking that she does not love her husband, Peter, anymore, looks out at Peter as she sits inside the train and he stands outside looking in at Greta and their young daughter, Katy, as the train prepares to depart from the Vancouver station. The train window functions as a metaphor for seeing—in this instance, very interestingly for ourselves as readers, from two different directions, from inside the train looking out and from outside the train looking in. In addition, the train window serves as a metaphor for readers’ ability (or inability) to perceive and to understand. And it serves as a metaphor calling attention to the sorts of metaphysical questions explored imaginatively by Munro in works like “What Do You Want To Know For?” in The View from Castle Rock and the title novella in Too Much Happiness and “To Reach Japan” in Dear Life and discussed theoretically by Charles E. May in his seminal essay “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction.” Like the bookstore windows in “Differently” and like the glass door in “Hired Girl,” the train window in “To Reach Japan” functions metafictively to represent Munro’s sense of her own style: that is, to represent how her stories are written and how they need to be read. In yet another respect—metafictively—we might regard the name The Echo Answers that Munro invents for the literary magazine in “To Reach Japan” as a clue to her desire to write back against the literary tradition from which her writing evolved—specifically the concluding masterwork, “The Dead,” of Joyce’s Dubliners. Munro, having told me in an interview in 1981 that she had read

174

Alice Munro

Joyce’s “The Dead” “a couple of times but not over and over” like other favorite stories of hers, then stated revealingly, “I don’t like Dubliners as much as I admire it” (Struthers Interview 36). Indeed, we might view the name The Echo Answers as a clue to her desire to write back against Joyce with arguably greater force than she had previously revisited and rewritten various classic works by him— including “The Dead” and other stories from Dubliners. A decision on Munro’s part that may be observed from the beginning of her career, with stories such as “The Time of Death” in Dance of the Happy Shades and its echoes of “The Dead,” as both W. R. Martin and I have discussed (Martin 124–25; Struthers “American South” 105), and continuing on to what I think a publisher, issuing it now, might call a “novel-in-stories,” Lives of Girls and Women, and its links most importantly to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as I originally discussed and as W. R. Martin has also noted, but also to Ulysses (Struthers “Reality and Ordering” 32–34, 36, 41, 43–46; Martin 125–26). In sum, what earned Alice Munro a Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, 2013 had little to do with the facts of her life. Nor did that extraordinary achievement have much to do with the facts of her characters’ lives. What earned Alice Munro a Nobel Prize in Literature was the sophistication, the fierceness, the originality of her writing. Which brings me to the third of my subtopics: what Northrop Frye calls “The Expanding World of Metaphor,” what Peter Turchi calls “Metaphor: Or, the Map,” what Charles E. May calls “Metaphorical Motivation in the Short Story”—what I term “Story as Metaphor.” But not without noting Paul John Eakin’s observation that for the pioneering theorist of “autobiography” James Olney, author of Metaphors of Self and other standard volumes, “the dominant trope of autobiography is metaphor” (Eakin 187). And not without confiding that I have no doubt been using “metafiction” if not as a metonym, then certainly as a metaphor.

Story as metaphor In an interview with Clark Blaise by Geoff Hancock for Canadian Fiction Magazine, when Hancock asked “Is every story an allegory about reality, in quotes, or a metaphor for some aspect of reality?” (56), Blaise provided an answer that strikes me as a highly

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

175

appropriate and highly suggestive description of much of the very best story-writing, including Blaise’s and Munro’s. Thinking perhaps of the title story of Hugh Hood’s first collection Flying a Red Kite, which is structured to parallel the progression in Dante’s The Divine Comedy from the Inferno through Purgatory to Paradise, Blaise declines to see his stories as “an allegory in the sense that, say, Hugh Hood’s stories are” (Blaise in Hancock 56). He states that “I don’t have the moral patience or the scruples for allegory,” but then acknowledges of his stories that “I would imagine they are all metaphors” (Blaise in Hancock 56). Elaborating, Blaise remarks: I think of a story as essentially a single metaphor and the exfoliation of a single metaphor through dense layers of submetaphors. My test, as I’m rewriting stories, is that every sentence in some way be a part of that metaphor. I try to understand what the largest metaphor that contains that story is, and that’s my principle for cutting out things, that certain details may be well and good in themselves . . . but not really part of its central metaphor. (Blaise in Hancock 56) Indeed this statement is brilliantly suited to describe the metaphorical nature and power of Alice Munro’s story writing. To quote William H. Gass from the third and final essay, “Metaphor,” of “The Biggs Lectures in the Classics”: Metaphors will possess scope and depth; they will be condensed or expansive; and they will exhibit those qualities of perception, emotion, thought, energy, and imagination that every consciousness enjoys when it is fully functioning. They will sense something; they will feel something; they will think something; they will want something; and they may imagine almost anything. (287–88) Following a reading, or multiple readings, of “To Reach Japan,” then, if we were to try to identify what Clark Blaise calls “the largest metaphor” governing the story’s “dense layers of submetaphors,” if we were to try to identify the “central metaphor” governing the story’s design, focus, style, and impact, what might we choose? Would we say “the train trip,” the journey that Greta and Katy take from Vancouver to Toronto? Or perhaps we might refine “the train

176

Alice Munro

trip” and say “departures and arrivals”? Or to select a phrase that gets at not only key events of the story but also key aspects of its form, “endings and beginnings”? Or perhaps as the “central metaphor” of Munro’s story we might choose not “the train trip” but “the train window” through which, as the story commences, we find ourselves focusing with Greta while she looks out at Peter as she sits inside the train and he stands outside looking in at Greta and their young daughter, Katy. An opening scene that I believe echoes the final scene of Joyce’s “The Dead,” where we find ourselves focusing on the husband, Gabriel Conroy, while he stands looking out a hotel room window, thinking that he is not truly loved by his wife, who lies asleep in the bed nearby. Munro having, I believe, chosen the name of her protagonist in “To Reach Japan”—Greta—as a gesture toward the name, and the very poignant but all too briefly told story, of Gabriel Conroy’s wife: Gretta. The different spelling of “Greta” in Munro’s story—versus “Gretta” in Joyce’s—serving as Munro’s way of marking the intended contrasts in design, focus, style, and impact between her story and “The Dead.” To my mind, the image, or, rather, the metaphor, of the train window used here by Munro recalls not only the hotel window in “The Dead” (and no doubt the use of windows in possibly Munro’s favorite literary work of her lifetime, Emily Brontë’s gothic romance Wuthering Heights [1847]) but also the “central metaphor,” as Blaise terms it, of the story “The Window” by the Vancouver, British Columbia author, Ethel Wilson. Munro was excited to discover Wilson in Vancouver soon after she, at age twenty, had moved there with her then-new husband, James Munro, in 1952 (Ross, “Chronology” 10). Munro commented to me about the importance of Wilson’s writing to her in our 1981 interview, saying that she was “enormously excited by her work because the style was such an enormous pleasure in itself. . . . You know I don’t mean style in the superficial sense, but that a point of view so complex and ironic was possible in Canadian literature” (Munro in Struthers Interview 18). Another story by Wilson, the eerie “A Visit to the Frontier,” in fact employs in its opening sentence the metaphor of the train window that Munro uses at the start of “To Reach Japan.” Moreover, a train window also figures repeatedly in the chapter “The Journey” in Wilson’s novel The Innocent Traveller. For Munro, the train window in “To Reach Japan” functions in multiple ways: as a metaphor for seeing, as a metaphor for readers’

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

177

ability (or inability) to perceive and to understand, as a metaphor calling attention to the sorts of metaphysical questions that she ultimately wishes us to explore with her. In starting to read any of Munro’s stories, or in starting to read each new book by her beginning with a story such as “To Reach Japan,” we face the challenge and the responsibility of preparing ourselves both psychologically and aesthetically for what we are about to read. However, the fact remains that the intensity of Munro’s stories—specifically her use of what Clark Blaise describes as “the exfoliation of a single metaphor through dense layers of submetaphors”—is so formidable, so unrelenting, that we can never prepare ourselves adequately for the fiercely demanding, farreaching, life-transforming travels that Munro invites us to take— that she insists we take—with her. “To Reach Japan”: yes, if we, like Munro, possess the courage and the strength and the imagination required. What confronts us so forcibly in “To Reach Japan”—what I believe represents the story’s “central metaphor”—is the scene on the train when Greta first is overcome with fear at discovering that Katy is missing, then is overcome with relief at discovering that Katy is unharmed. Yet to view the scene in this way, we eventually realize, is to ignore the point of Munro’s metaphor of the train window, which is meant to remind us that we need to look not only one way but also the other—an approach that generates an altogether different sense of what, or perhaps who, we should be most concerned about in a story. Thus in responding to this scene we ultimately need to see it, to experience it, not only from Greta’s vantage point—as the “third-person-limited” narrative point of view here, focusing on Greta, or focused through Greta, invites us to do, but also to see it, to experience it, from Katy’s vantage point, which, as we come to imagine that fully, strikes us as being even more intense, indeed far more troubling, than Greta’s. Commenting on the literally disturbing and, especially, metaphorically disturbing walkways between different railway cars such as the place where Greta finds Katy huddled all alone in terror but apparently safe, the narrator reflects—or considering this story as an example of what Philippe Lejeune calls “autobiography in the third person” (31–51), we can almost say Greta reflects—how You always hurried through these passages, where the banging and swaying reminded you how things were put together in a

178

Alice Munro

way that seemed not so inevitable after all. Almost casual, yet in too much of a hurry, that banging and swaying. The door at the end was heavy even for Greta. Or she was drained by her fear. She pushed mightily with her shoulder. And there, between the cars, on one of those continually noisy sheets of metal—there sat Katy. Eyes wide open and mouth slightly open, amazed and alone. Not crying at all, but when she saw her mother she started. (25) “Katy was not hurt at all” (25), the narrator adds (or, we might say, the narrator adds on Greta’s behalf, or, even, Greta adds). Then a little later, we get this reaction from the narrator, or from the narrator on behalf of Greta, or we can almost say from Greta: “This was so terrible, her thoughts of what might have happened so terrible” (26). Yet both of these responses are mistaken—as are our own responses if we accept rather than question these. For Katy, though she has not been physically harmed, has undoubtedly been badly shaken emotionally; and far worse than that, it is highly likely that Katy has not yet begun to feel much of the true trauma of her justcommencing situation. Munro’s description of the scene where Katy is lost then found on the walkway between the two railway cars has the intensity, the metaphoric quality, the poetry, of the darkly recollective and darkly prophetic style of a description by Freud of some patient’s unrelentingly reoccurring, unrelentingly distressing dream. Undoubtedly we are meant to interpret the scene in which Katy is trapped alone between the separated railway cars in the way that Freud would interpret a dream or “primal scene”—I employ Freud’s term not in the sense in which he later used it to designate a time when a child witnesses sexual intercourse between the child’s parents, but rather in the sense in which he first used it to designate, in the words of John Fletcher from Freud and the Scene of Trauma, “the originary moment of an excessive implantation or inscription regardless of the protagonists involved” (135). The scene in which Katy is trapped alone is a metaphor for the traumatic position in which she will find herself for the foreseeable future and perhaps forever: not between two railway cars, but between her two temporarily separated and very possibly soon to be permanently separated parents. Munro’s “primal scene” in “To Reach Japan” thus imparts the stunning desperation of “The Horror! The

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

179

Horror!” experienced by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness (Norton 69). A feeling that Munro increases many times over by having Greta and the narrator and very likely us initially—and entirely mistakenly—think it’s “what might have happened” (emphasis added) to Katy that is “so terrible” (26). No. For as we slowly and therefore with far greater emotional force come to realize—devastatingly for ourselves, as it is for the story’s three main characters—it’s what will very likely happen to Katy, what is already happening to Katy, what has already happened to Katy that threatens to be “so terrible” (26). What will very likely happen to Katy in the months or years after Katy at story’s end got her hand free of her mother’s but “She didn’t try to escape. She just stood there waiting for whatever had to come next” (30). That is, waiting like the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1953) for whatever the forces that govern life might decide maliciously or whimsically or perhaps benevolently should inevitably come next for Katy. Possibly some emotionally crushing equivalent to the horrific escape stories that Greta near the beginning of “To Reach Japan” recalls having read: stories in which “the baby would start to cry and invariably had to be smothered or strangled so that the noise did not endanger the whole illegal party” (4)—a description that can be viewed as a sinister suggestion of what, metaphorically speaking, the future might hold for Katy. Not to ignore what will very likely happen, what is already happening, what has already happened to Greta and to Peter. And to us—to start, mere readers of “To Reach Japan”; but by this point, full participants in it.

Story as allegory And now to turn from “Story as Metaphor” to “Story as Allegory”— though, as we do so, bearing in mind C. S. Lewis’s observation in The Allegory of Love that “every metaphor is an allegory in little” (60), along with Judith Anderson’s definition of allegory, at a panel on close reading and the poetry of Edmund Spenser that I attended at Dublin Castle on June 20, 2015, as “continued or moving metaphor.” In the view of Jeremy Tambling, and as we ourselves come to realize, the term “allegory” may be seen to apply to “all literature, . . . all writing” (2). And while we may initially

180

Alice Munro

regard allegory as a form or way of writing that we identify as literature, it’s just as important to consider allegory as a form or way of reading that leads to another form or way of writing that we identify as criticism. In each instance—creative writing, reading, or critical writing—what’s at the bottom (or perhaps we should say what’s at the top) is a way of thinking, and of using language, that determines how we envision, comprehend, appreciate the nature of both art and life. But first to revisit the sequence of terms that I am utilizing in this chapter—“Story as Autobiography”; “Story as Metafiction”; “Story as Metaphor”; “Story as Allegory”—and to adjust that picture: namely, to perceive this group not as a sequence or line but as a set of concentric circles. This is the metaphor used by the protagonist/ narrator, Erika, of Mavis Gallant’s story “An Autobiography” to describe the design of the village in Switzerland where she teaches: a village comprising concentric circles but with a single road running through it. A story in which the first word of the title, “An,” may well deserve as much weight as the second word, “Autobiography.” A story in which the road or line running through the circles of the village serves as a metaphor for the individual narrative—“An Autobiography,” as the title says—that Erika, and equally each reader of her story, constructs out of the circles of her life. Thus we may perhaps see “Story as Autobiography” and “Story as Metafiction” and “Story as Metaphor” and “Story as Allegory” not as terms forming a simple line but as terms forming a complex set of concentric circles. And with the line running through the circles being a metaphor for, to echo Freud again, “interpretation” perhaps?—for the personal allegory that every interpretation represents? Indeed let us imagine that line or road (noting the travel metaphor, as Alberto Manguel’s study The Traveler, the Tower and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor would have us do) as the individual interpretation each reader develops of a story. A reading that itself—uniquely personal as it is to each individual—could well be described as an allegory informed by each reader’s autobiography and as an allegory informing each reader’s autobiography, indeed as an allegory for each reader’s autobiography. As is, no doubt, at levels largely uncomprehended by me, this chapter—completed (at least its first full draft) on the morning of my sixty-fifth birthday. A work that I have come to appreciate should be dedicated to my mother not just because I wouldn’t be without her, but because I wouldn’t

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

181

be what I am without her. Having herself dreamed of becoming a United Church of Canada missionary and having herself possessed a touch of the poet, my mother, from very early on in my life, dearly hoped that I would become a teacher—and, if I could, a writer, perhaps one with a touch of the poet like her. In Alice Munro’s stories, we may ask, could the outlines of allegory be comparable to the view conveyed by Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when he reflects: “Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets” (Norton 69–70)? Is Greta, whose name very possibly evokes the word “regret,” meant to be viewed at story’s end as having her dream fulfilled when her fantasy lover Harris Bennett receives the poem-like letter that Greta had sent to him—an action which she has likened to placing a note in a bottle (another container, like the form of the short story) in the hope that it would make its way to Japan or at least to Toronto—and comes to meet Greta and Katy when they disembark from the train at (a further joke, I believe, by Munro) Union Station? “To Reach Japan”: to attain our greatest desires. Or might that dream-fulfilled state be only fleeting? Might the “unextinguishable regrets” pondered by Marlow in Heart of Darkness still await Greta? And is it not likely that “unextinguishable regrets” still await Greta’s husband, Peter, too? Has Munro structured “To Reach Japan” in such a way as to defer any realization by Katy or Greta or Peter—or by ourselves— so that it will occur only, and therefore most powerfully, “beyond the ending” of the story, to employ a phrase used by Rachel Blau Duplessis? While Munro takes—and invites us to take, once we’ve prepared ourselves to recognize it, to withstand it, and perhaps somehow to revel in it—whatever satisfaction can be found in what Marlow describes as “that supreme moment of complete knowledge” (69). Indeed, has Alice Munro in a single short story boldly, breathtakingly, permanently redefined the possibilities of the genre of autobiography from “a story, a recollection, of the past” to “a story, a vision, of the future”? In such a context, where we may at times find ourselves wondering if the deity presiding over Munro’s fictional universe is some equivalent power to the uncaring God of the Book of Job—a

182

Alice Munro

work that I view as the ur-form of the modern short story—it is interesting to review a selection of story titles that Munro has chosen over the years: “Providence” from Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) or The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose (1979, 1980); “Accident” from The Moons of Jupiter (1982); “Fits” from The Progress of Love (1986); “Goodness and Mercy” from Friend of My Youth (1990); “Chance” from Runaway (2004); “No Advantages” from The View from Castle Rock (2006); and “Haven” from Dear Life (2012). Reading these in chronological order, we may ask: What sort of “meditation”—to borrow the term introduced by Margaret Gail Osachoff to discuss what she defines as “reflections on moral and spiritual topics” (82) in her early essay on three types of form, memoir and confession and meditation, in Munro’s work—can be found in this group, and arguably everywhere, in Munro’s 148-part oeuvre? What sort of allegory do these story titles describe? Where do they leave us? As witnesses to, or, worse, as participants in, “The Horror! The Horror!” of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Norton 69)? Or perhaps proceeding like Dante in The Divine Comedy beyond some individual Hell, beyond some personal Purgatory, until, as suggested by the title of the last story by Munro just listed, we’re only one letter short of “Heaven”—which surely, in this world, would be a very good place to reach.

Coda At this point it occurs to me that there might be a different way of thinking about the relationships among the four subtopics or categories that I have been discussing in this chapter. These four categories, I realize as I am writing, line up closely with the four kinds of language (pertaining to four different ways of thinking) that Northrop Frye presents in the opening chapter of The Great Code: The Bible and Literature—what Frye terms description (the literal level), metonymy (the allegorical level), metaphor (the poetic level), and proclamation (the visionary or mythic level). That is to say, these four levels or kinds of language or thinking also represent four levels or kinds of form, four means of expression or interpretation, four ways of writing as well as four ways of reading. And realizing that, on this latest trip with Alice Munro, is how I came to reach Japan. A moment characterized by the sort

Traveling with Munro: Reading “To Reach Japan”

183

of excitement that Munro in her brief essay “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing” (2006) describes as the best part of such creative acts. “Isn’t the really good time when you are just getting the idea, or rather when you encounter the idea, bump into it, as if it has always been wandering around in your head? There it is, still fairly featureless, but shapely and glowing” (300).

8 “Rage and Admiration”: Grotesque Humor in Dear Life Ailsa Cox

Alice Munro’s later collections have shown an increasing engagement with encroaching mortality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the stories in Dear Life, which, as the author herself has declared, brings her career to a close and may be seen as its summation. In this chapter, I shall discuss Munro’s life-affirming, but utterly unblinkered, approach to aging, mortality, and the material body, an approach that is essentially tragi-comic in nature. As Magdalene Redekop demonstrated in her analysis of the earlier collections, Munro has always used carnival humor to subvert gender expectations and to stretch our definitions of the real. Carnival humor, according to Bakhtin, mocks death and temporarily suspends rules and hierarchies, including those of age. Carnival ambivalence is invoked in a text through parody, word play, intertextuality, and grotesque realism, in which representations of the human body play a crucial role. In this chapter, I shall consider Munro’s depiction of the grotesque body in “Pride” and “Corrie” before moving on to a more detailed reading of “Dolly,” making comparisons with the version published previously in Tin House magazine. Throughout my analysis, I shall discuss Munro’s presentation of the self as something that is staged or improvised; and the importance of comic display, performance, and spectacle in Munro’s work.

“Rage and Admiration”

185

Images of chronic illness, disability, and disfigurement recur throughout the collection; “Amundsen” is set within a wartime sanatorium, and the protagonist in “Leaving Maverley” is married to a chronic invalid. Her characters are clearly not in possession of the static, idealized bodies that Bakhtin associates with postRenaissance art. Speaking of representations of the body in an older, popular tradition he claims that: “The grotesque body . . . is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (From Rabelais 233). Grotesque realism reinstates the materiality of the human body, drawing attention both to the fragility of the human condition and its endurance. Flawed from the very outset, the individual body is prey to the damage of time, but as part of nature is self-generating. As Bakhtin puts it, the grotesque body “is a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception” (234).

“Pride” The narrator of “Pride” is born with a harelip; the eponymous “Corrie” has been lamed by childhood polio. These disabilities in the stories’ protagonists are initially markers of difference, isolating these characters within their communities; but in the course of the story, the reader’s perceptions of “otherness” are challenged, the disability standing for a shared humanity that is predicated on difference rather than similarity. Munro reminds us, always, that we are embodied subjects, and that lived experience is intrinsically corporeal. As the town’s local history expert, the narrator in “Pride” adopts a dispassionate view of its inhabitants, chronicling social change and provincial attitudes. His exemption from active service during the war is a logical extension of the social exclusion that he undergoes in peacetime; yet, paradoxically, wartime experience erases the difference between “normal” and abnormal. Following the news of a tragedy at sea, he pictures the ordinary people who have lost their lives: “I had a very strange feeling that was part horror and—as near as I can describe it—a kind of chilly exhilaration. The blowing away of everything, the equality—I have to say it—the equality, all of a sudden, of people like me and worse than me and people like them” (139).

186

Alice Munro

The urgency and fractured syntax of this passage may incline the reader to accept this passage as unmediated confession, straight from the heart: “I have to say,” Elsewhere we might wonder how far we can trust a narrator who, by his own account, suppresses words and feelings. Speech and silence are important currencies in this small-town community, where knowledge is transmitted through “word of mouth” (134). “Pride” contains a great deal of reported speech, where information is told or withheld; or where speech is hedged with multiple negatives and conditionals, as when the narrator comments that “I may have told my mother to be quiet on certain matters but what she said did not usually carry much weight with me” (138–39). In the context of the narrator’s disability, “word of mouth” becomes a kind of pun. Munro draws attention, throughout the story, to the imagery of mouths and speech, often to comic effect. Bakhtinian theory gives special prominence to the mouth in the grotesque body, as the site of both ingestion and expression, and as a meeting point between the self and the outer world. The narrator’s harelip has been stitched, leaving him with “a voice that sounded somewhat peculiar but was capable of being understood” (138). The detachment of the voice from the speaker, along with that of the lip, along with the description of the lip “decently if not quite cleverly tidied up” (138) like an external object, suggests prosthesis, identified by Bakhtin as another indicator of the grotesque body. “Pride” is largely concerned with the narrator’s relationship with Oneida, the daughter of the local bank manager, who is disgraced in the 1930s. Much is made of the father’s great white beard, another species of prosthesis, especially in the narrator’s comment when he ridicules the old man riding in a carriage: “maybe the beard needed space” (137). Anachronistic in those pre-war days, the heavy beard has lost whatever patriarchal authority it once conferred. A beard also obscures the mouth, symbolically obstructing communication; these two disempowered male figures seem very different to each other, but they are aligned through these images of mouths, speech, silence, and the theme of “pride” that gives the story its title. They are also, of course, linked through the figure of Oneida. But, unlike the canny narrator, both father and daughter keep their misguided faith in an outmoded oral culture based on “word of mouth.” The scheme to revive the steam-driven car, leading to the old man’s suspected embezzlement, is based on public speculation,

“Rage and Admiration”

187

rumor, and informal agreements. Even his misdeeds seem to leave little evidence in writing. Years later, Oneida ignores the narrator’s advice, selling her house at below its market value to a buyer who promptly breaks his promise to preserve the old building, knocking it down and building an apartment block in its place. The narrator is employed as a bookkeeper, not because he cannot speak but because no one is willing to listen to his voice. He is infantilized by the entire community, including Oneida: “I was neuter to her, or an unfortunate child” (147). Like many of Munro’s female protagonists, this male character survives through collusion and compromise, rather than outright revolt. As he says in the opening passage, “Good use can be made of everything, if you are willing” (134). Following this strategy, feelings are suppressed, and speech made elliptical or euphemistic. In that opening passage, he claims that “in a town like ours . . . nothing is forgotten,” but if things are not forgotten, they are nonetheless concealed or evaded. Later in the story, age becomes a leveler, as the war once was: “Just living long enough wipes out the problems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been, just living till now wipes them out, to a good measure. Everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours” (150–51). As the narrator becomes weaker with old age, Oneida decides that they need to move in together for mutual support. Just as disability supposedly rendered the narrator “neuter,” so age, it is assumed, exempts the pair from accusations of sexual misconduct: We had a certain feeling for each other, she said. We had a feeling which was not just the usual thing. We could live together like brother and sister and look after each other like brother and sister and it would be the most natural thing in the world. Everybody would accept it as so. How could they not? (148) The narrator is terrified by this threatened intimacy, evading Oneida’s plan by instantly putting his house up for sale, and eventually taking an apartment in Oneida’s block, the very same apartment block that stands on the ground of her old home. Charles E. May’s discussion of this story on his blog relates the story’s title, very carefully, to the narrator’s drive toward autonomy and self-sufficiency (Munro’s “Pride”). However, his reading, and the subsequent comments on the blog, overstate, in my view, the narrator’s asexuality. The story is

188

Alice Munro

deeply ambiguous, told by an unreliable narrator who says he is too proud “to admit that I was wishing for something I hadn’t got” (151). The companionship with Oneida reenacts the narrator’s relationship with his mother, as they watch TV together, and as Oneida nurses him through sickness. But the infant’s experience of the maternal is grounded in corporeal drives that are also experienced in adult sexuality. The narrator struggles to be independent, but he also calls out Oneida’s name in a fever. In the story’s closing pages, speech is again suppressed. The narrator is preparing to move house, while Oneida is leaving for a short trip. They make small talk, without mentioning his move, and when the narrator feels he should say “something more” (152), what he has in mind is questions on the weather. These remarks are pre-empted as Oneida “gave a most unusual little shriek or cry, and then put her hand to her mouth and moved with large cautious steps to my window” (152). She has seen something in the birdbath, something which turns out to be not birds at all but a crowd of baby skunks. This spectacle brings the story to an end in carnival mode, Oneida’s theatrical gestures signaling the suspension of speech and logic. Creatures that are normally considered unattractive are made beautiful as they play together and seem to parade themselves: how beautiful. Flashing and dancing and never getting in each other’s way, so you could not tell how many there were, where each body started or stopped. While we watched, they lifted themselves up one by one and left the water and proceeded to walk across the yard, swiftly but in a straight diagonal line. As if they were proud of themselves but discreet. (153) This description, metamorphosing the birds into skunks, and transforming the one into many, encapsulates the concept of a protean, uncontainable reality, a reality that transcends speech and offers the hope of constant change. “Discreet” signals separation, and also “discretion,” in the sense that the narrator and Oneida herself behave discreetly, guarding the words they say out loud. The passage also suggests that self-containment and community are not incompatible, and the story’s final sentences celebrate a shared experience: “I thought she might say another thing, and spoil it, but no, neither of us did. We were as glad as we could be” (153).

“Rage and Admiration”

189

The theme of spectatorship in this story’s closing pages is reminiscent of Munro’s earlier story, “Face” in Too Much Happiness (2009), also narrated by a male character with a facial disfigurement. The opening lines of that story suggest the inadequacy of the superficial glance: “I am convinced that my father looked at me, stared at me, saw me, only once. After that, he could take for granted what was there” (138). The patriarchal gaze in “Face” is all-powerful, controlling the character’s childhood, yet it never penetrates beyond outward appearance. The word “face,” of course, has associations with “face value” and connotations with “pride,” The narrator in “Pride” does not “lose face” either by admitting to sexual appetites or by agreeing to having his face altered by cosmetic surgery. When a woman he is attracted to suggests such a procedure he asks “how could I explain that it was just beyond me to walk into some doctor’s office and admit I was wishing for something I hadn’t got?” (151). In both stories, spectatorship becomes an ongoing process, rather than a single act of mastery. The reader is encouraged to look again, to read beneath the surface and to resist judgments based on “face value.”

“Corrie” Spectatorship and performance also play an important role in “Corrie.” Corrie is introduced first, through her father’s direct speech, in terms of her marriage prospects; and then reassessed, using free indirect discourse, through the eyes of a male dinner guest: “Not much meat on the bone, which was the sort of thing her father might find to say next. Howard Ritchie thought of her as the type of girl who spent a lot of time playing golf and tennis. In spite of her quick tongue, he expected her to have a conventional mind” (155). Howard has not yet noticed a disability that might limit Corrie’s athleticism. The grotesque evocation of cannibalism in the hackneyed phrase “meat on the bone” is intensified by the dinner-table setting (the food, we are told, is also substandard). However, all is not as it appears. Howard is the butt of a double act between father and daughter, consisting of energetic clowning and self-parody. Corrie’s proclamation that “Daddy’s a Communist” (156), on the basis of a liking for the jokes of a left-wing politician, seems like a well-rehearsed routine that has found its audience. It is

190

Alice Munro

the humorless Howard who is revealed as somewhat conventional, when he silently objects to Corrie’s smoking during dessert and a lack of respect when she tells him “Don’t mind Daddy” (156). Nonetheless, there are limits to the father’s ability to take a joke, as Corrie discloses privately to the young architect, warning him not to mention the damaged leg: “Once he fired not just a kid who teased me but his entire family. I mean, even cousins” (157). Curiously, as we learn later in the story, the considerable family wealth comes from a shoe factory. Corrie is a mischief-maker and prankster, sending Howard silly notes on postcards. She is constantly giggling in the earlier part of the story. The smoking, like Gwen’s cigarettes in “Dolly,” signals a rebellious hedonism, contrasting with Howard’s outward respectability and his secretly held religious beliefs. During their subsequent affair, Corrie jokes that “she herself never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with” (159). Even the story of a sexual assault from a piano teacher is disguised as a humorous anecdote. In bed, Howard regards Corrie’s damaged foot as “more appealing, more unique, than the rest of her” (158). As the years go by, Corrie’s disability also acts as camouflage on their trips to motels and restaurants: “Who would have gone after a middle-aged mistress with a dragging foot?” Like Oneida in “Pride,” Howard believes that any onlooker will see a family relationship, “his cousin, maybe” (166). Halfway through the story, the focalization switches from mostly Howard to Corrie’s point of view. Corrie’s former maid servant, Lillian Wolfe, sends a blackmail letter, written with its own brand of sarcastic humor: “I would hate to have to break the heart of such a nice lady with a big silver-fox collar on her coat.” Corrie’s attitude toward the blackmailer is typically sardonic: “I guess killing her is not an option?” (160). An arrangement for Corrie to send Lillian money at regular intervals continues for years, until Corrie discovers that she has died prematurely and attends her wake. The pious, simple character she hears about at the reception seems incompatible with the woman who wrote the letter. Corrie starts drafting a comic account of the occasion for Howard, making fun of the church she belonged to and declaring, parodically, that “The days of the Blackmail are over. The sound of the cuckoo is heard in the land” (172). She does not finish this version of her letter; when she wakes up the next morning, all the inconsistencies

“Rage and Admiration”

191

in the blackmail story have fallen into place. She now believes that the blackmail was a hoax, perpetrated by Howard for some (in her terms) relatively small financial gain. Corrie the joker appears to have been outperformed. In his analysis of grotesque humor, Bakhtin stresses the “universalism and freedom” conferred by laughter, and “the victory of laughter over fear” (209). According to this theory, authoritarian cultures try to prohibit laugher because of its liberating qualities. However, as this story shows, certain types of laughter may impose an orthodoxy or serve as a cover for those who do not conform to social ideals. Corrie’s constant laughter is frequently subversive, but it is also a mask for feelings that, following the same instinct as the disabled narrator in “Pride,” she has learned to suppress. Howard ventriloquizes his own resentment at his wife through the invented letter from Lillian, which he claims to have burned. The wife likes to make fun of others “on political grounds” (160), just as she would laugh at Howard’s religious faith if it were ever disclosed. The point about the coat with the fur collar is that among her leftwing peers the wife goes to elaborate lengths to explain that it is inherited, not bought; mingling with high society, she likes to show it off. Through the satirical text of the letter, Howard takes revenge on liberal hypocrisy, while also disguising his own double-dealing. Bakhtin warns against confusing forms of satire with carnival humor, which is essentially a communal impulse grounded in a folk tradition: “the satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it. The wholeness of the world’s comic aspect is destroyed, and that which appears comic becomes a private reaction” (201). Howard never laughs at himself, though he sneers at others. Perhaps his taking-up of piano lessons after hearing about Corrie’s traumatic experience with a piano teacher is some kind of joke; or perhaps he is simply without empathy. This is a story full of carnival ambivalence and grotesque humor, as is evident from the parodic tone of the nonexistent letter, and even in the wordplay of Lillian Wolfe’s surname,1 reminding us of that all-important fox fur collar, and suggesting the figure of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Lillian’s funeral may remind us of Mona’s funeral in “Haven,” in that both occasions give the small-town community permission to indulge in their own minor carnival: “people were always saying that this town was like a funeral, but in fact when there was a real funeral it put on its best show of

192

Alice Munro

liveliness” (“Corrie” 168). In “Haven,” the young narrator pictures the corpse hidden inside the coffin. In “Corrie,” the protagonist misses the service itself, but follows some of the mourners into the church kitchen while the body is taken for burial. The juxtaposition of death and food, the corpse and the spice cake, is an affirmation of the life force, in Bakhtinian terms, marking the victory over the terrors of the grave. Although “Corrie” is a carnivalized text, punctuated by grotesque humor, its ending shows Corrie putting aside her comic persona. (Things have gone, we might say, beyond a joke). Rejecting her previous drafts, she writes Howard a simple note, dispensing with humor, informing him only that Lillian is dead and buried. He replies, equally succinctly: “All well now, be glad. Soon” (174). An accommodation seems to have been reached. Physical adjustments have been called for, with the passing of the years, the couple making love “with caution, avoiding a sore shoulder, a touchy knee” (166). Now both have come to terms with what they do, or do not, know about each other: “So that’s the way they’re going to leave it. Too late to do another thing. When there could have been worse, much worse” (174). These lines echo an exchange between the two, when Howard discloses the contents of the fake “letter.” He says, “It’s the worst. . . . It’s the worst that could happen” (161), but Corrie disagrees, deciding at once to hand over the money. For her, “the worst” would be the end of the affair. He seems to concur: “I could not stand for there to be an end of you and me” (162). The sincerity of this speech is undermined by later events. The initial hesitancy about paying off the blackmailer seems to be play-acting, but it is not impossible that Howard is genuinely fond of his mistress. Corrie reads his somber demeanor as a sign of repentance, projecting her own guilt onto his reluctance to touch her. Perhaps this reading is not wholly mistaken. Because the story is now focalized entirely through her consciousness, we have no direct access to Howard’s state of mind, and can only guess his motivations. As Munro says in her PEN/O. Henry commentary, “It would be too boring to make him an utter stinker” (427). The ending of “Corrie” has gone through two revisions since its first publication in 2010; unusually Munro expands the New Yorker ending for the PEN/O. Henry version with additions to Corrie’s internal debate following the observation that “the introduction

“Rage and Admiration”

193

to the current reality has to be done all over again” (Dear Life 173; PEN/O. Henry 409). The first two versions describe a logical decision-making process, emphasizing Corrie’s agency and control: “She is capable, still, of shaping up another possibility” (PEN/O. Henry 409). In the New Yorker version, she has not yet made her mind up, but the closing lines of the second version indicate a resolution to make a break with Howard: She has calmed down mightily. All right. But in the middle of her toast and jam she thinks, No. Fly away, why don’t you, right now? Fly away. What rot. Yes. Do it. (PEN/O. Henry 409) There are still grounds for ambiguity; the fragmented internal dialogue evokes divided emotions, undermining the certainty expressed in the final sentence. It is not clear whether “you” stands for herself or for Howard, with all of his “rot.” The imagery of flight recalls the earlier reference to the cuckoo, and to migration, in a line that represents sudden, almost epiphanic, insight: “There’s always one morning when you realize that the birds have all gone” (Dear Life 173; PEN/O. Henry 408). The repeated “Fly away” might even suggest the nursery rhyme, “Two Little Dickie Birds” (“Fly away Peter, fly away Paul/Come back Peter, come back Paul”). But, despite its contradictions and reversals, the PEN/O. Henry version shows an attempt to explain Corrie’s reasoning, an attempt that is ultimately abandoned in favor of the more elliptical ending published in Dear Life. This ending, the brief note followed by Howard’s cryptic reply, is the most satisfactory because it is the most mysterious. Does Howard know that Corrie knows? Should we take his “soon” at face value, as Corrie seems to do? (It is worth noting that “Soon” is the title of one of the “Juliet” stories in Runaway, where it stands for consolation, hope, and yearning.) Corrie’s judgment of Lillian’s innocence is based purely on instinctual evidence. There is no proof of Howard’s guilt or innocence in the blackmail plot. On the day of Lillian’s funeral, Corrie has been reading The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of adultery, corruption, and mistaken identity.2 Perhaps we could read Howard intertextually, as a Nick Carraway figure, negotiating the decadent world of the

194

Alice Munro

rich. After all, assuming his guilt, Corrie can spare the wealth that he, in a perverse configuration of socialist ideology, redistributes to the Ritchie family (once again, note the surname). We necessarily confine Howard within the single role of villain or limit his range of motivations. Many of the gestures and speeches in the story are pre-rehearsed; others, such as Corrie’s final dashed note, appear more spontaneous. He might have departed from his script when he said “I could not stand for there to be an end of you and me” (162). The internal rhyme sounds like something borrowed from a sentimental love song. But sentimental love songs are not always insincere. The words in his response to Corrie’s note, “All well now, be glad. Soon.” These are not the story’s last words, for the narrator tells us Corrie’s thoughts, reading this note: “there could have been worse, much worse” (174).

“Dolly” “Dolly” opens with the blunt declaration: “That fall there had been some discussion of death” (233). The elderly narrator is a biographer and former maths teacher, whose partner, a poet, is a few years older than her, in his eighties; this “discussion of death” involves arrangements for burial and even a potential suicide pact, when they chance upon a woodland spot that is not too isolated to leave their bodies undiscovered. Rather like a couple planning their perfect wedding, they have a minor falling-out over the details, in this case the advisability of leaving a note of explanation. The narrative takes an unexpected turn with the introduction of a third character, Gwen, who sells cosmetics door to door. Although they have little in common they become friendly, and when Gwen’s car breaks down she is invited to stay overnight. Suddenly, there is a moment of mutual recognition between the saleswoman and the poet husband, Franklin, in which both perform pantomime gestures “as if they had to look all around them in order to be sure this was reality. Also repeating each other’s names in tones of some mockery and dismay” (242). If the opening passage evokes the wedding day, this sequence is even more parodic, evoking the collision of starstruck lovers in a Shakespearean comedy. Gwendolyn and Franklin reveal themselves as “Dolly” and “Frank” (242), throwing off the disguise of age to reveal their hidden identities. Frank/Franklin’s

“Rage and Admiration”

195

wartime romance with Gwen/Dolly formed the basis of his bestknown poem, work that is considered “pretty raw” (236). As Gwen outstays her welcome, the narrator is increasingly threatened by the relationship between the poet and his former muse. This story is very much concerned with the uneasy relationship between reality and make-believe. The “discussion of death,” crossing between practical agreement and mutual fantasy, anticipates the more overtly comic performance between “Frank” and “Dolly,” a charade in which the narrator is, initially, a not altogether unwilling participant. Redekop notes Munro’s widespread use of dolls, doll-like figures, and variations on the name “Dolly” as a reminder that femininity is learned through play in childhood and practiced through adulthood as a masquerade: “To be all dolled up or to be a real doll may suggest, as it does with some women writers, that women are like robots or mannequins. It may also, however, be a camouflage that can be used to a woman’s advantage” (11). When they first meet, Gwen claims that she only wears makeup because of her job, and expresses some disdain for those who get married for “the thought of getting dolled up in the white dress” (239). Though our perception of this character is dominated by the title of the story, she is no longer known as Dolly, and her face, in fact, shows no traces of cosmetics: “bare, sallow, and with an amazing nest of wrinkles round the mouth. Glasses that magnified her eyes which were the lightest blue. The only blatant thing about her was brassy thin hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs” (237). Gwen is not “dolled up,” but she is turned into a “dolly” by the narrator, in her need for company, and she entertains Franklin when he comes home by telling him all about her. In the version of “Dolly” published previously in Tin House (2012) the childlike aspects of Gwen’s appearance are more explicit, the bangs “in the style of a four-year-old.” The glasses, it is said, “made her expression alert and game-in-spite-of-everything” (Tin House 69). Gwen as Dolly is that horrifying figure, the doll that comes to life. Freud’s analysis of the uncanny highlights the disturbing properties of the automaton, and especially the fears associated with the eye. The uncanny, according to Freud, is often linked with secrets coming to the surface, such as concealed love affairs. Dolly, reanimated out of Franklin’s past, runs out of control not only in the revived relationship, but also through her interference with the household chores. Having done

196

Alice Munro

the dishes before her hostess is even out of bed, she usurps her role still further by cleaning a neglected row of storage jars. This story is full of comic incongruity, not least in the geriatric love triangle that ensues. Gwen’s childish bangs are a clear instance of this incongruity between age and expectation; the Tin House description, “game-in-spite-of-everything” (69) underlines associations with playfulness, juvenility, and childhood. There are several overlapping versions of the Dolly who met Frank. There is the account that Gwen herself gives about her job as a nursemaid; there is the eroticized creature in the poem; and there is her real-life model, as discussed privately by Franklin and the narrator. Franklin’s name may echo that of Frankenstein, another male figure whose creature who resists his control. But Dolly is, essentially, the narrator’s plaything, or even her playmate. After the initial recognition, Franklin drops the pantomime manner, though “Dolly’s or Gwen’s voice insisted on the enormous or even supernatural joke of their finding each other” (242). Franklin does not drink; so, over a glass of wine, “it was up to Gwen and myself to chatter and explain, in our newly discovered high spirits” (243), the chattering and “high spirits” suggesting childish excitement. The narrator has been a skeptical reader of Franklin’s poem, and has brought to it her own construction of “Dolly,” forged through a combination of her own assumptions and what Franklin has told her about this figure in real life. She tells us that she has been “privately un-enthralled” by his tales of her superstitious nature, for instance, the magic tooth she gave him for protection. Nonetheless, she has “badgered him” for the details. The “high spirits” are more than camouflage; she is as much compelled as repelled by “Dolly” in all her incarnations. In her eyes, the younger Dolly herself is someone who has donned the mask of femininity, a mask the narrator herself refused, as a teacher of mathematics: I had thought how men are charmed by stubborn quirks if the girl is good-looking enough. . . . All that delight in the infantile female brain. . . . Of course that girl, that charmer I had badgered him into telling me about, might be generally made up. She might be anybody’s creation. But I did not think so. She was her own sassy choice. She’d loved herself so thoroughly. (244)

“Rage and Admiration”

197

There is a buried pun in “made up,” when we remember that Gwen is a cosmetics saleswoman, and that, despite her generally grotesque appearance, her makeup is so subtle it appears natural. But the most striking phrase here is “she’d loved herself so thoroughly,” as if the imaginary Dolly has turned herself into a doll of her own. This phrase is echoed when, Franklin and Gwen having left to sort out her broken-down car, the narrator thinks “they are so full of themselves . . . an expression that came from I don’t know where” (246). The colloquial expression is scarcely unusual, so perhaps it is the unworthy feeling, rather than the words themselves, that comes from nowhere. But the phrase repeats the idea of the self as a narcissistic love object, and of self-creation. On the morning after Dolly/Gwen’s overnight stay, when the narrator wakes to find her laughing with Franklin’s conversation, she is unable to join in the game, and her own attempts at humor pass them by. A state of “grievous excitement” takes such a hold on her that she promptly leaves Franklin, stopping to compose him a note in which she sets him free to do as he pleases. In the note, she makes the rather clichéd observation that “the only thing that was unbearable to me was the deception” (246). Writing that “no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves, and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough” (247), she decides, understandably, that the note needs another draft before she sends it. The image of the “puke” being both ejected from the body and consuming it from within, suggests the devouring belly of grotesque realism, especially since the words themselves are symbolically vomited, an uncontrolled stream of invective (relatively mild though it may seem to most of us). A more prosaic interpretation of the protagonist’s disorientation, nausea, and exhaustion might suggest that she is, unsurprisingly after the night’s merriment, suffering a hangover. But symbolically she is entering Hell. Bakhtin describes debasement as “the fundamental artistic principle of grotesque realism” (239). The human body is also the cosmic body, and the lower bodily stratum is aligned with the depths of the earth. The narrator is, indeed, going underground, hiding herself in an anonymous motel in the unfamiliar town of Coburg, snoozing for a while and then wandering the streets. In Dear Life, “Dolly” follows directly after “In Sight of the Lake,” another story

198

Alice Munro

where a disoriented protagonist roams streets that are at once familiar and strange. Both stories re-envision the typical Ontario town that Munro has mapped in her previous collections, marking in those stories (as she does again in “Pride”) the changes brought by the passing of time to both the place itself and the perceiver. In “Dolly” and “In Sight of the Lake,” these changes are compounded by the character’s inner sense of dislocation; the unnamed narrator of “Dolly” is undergoing “grievous excitement” (246), while Nancy is suffering from some form of dementia. Nancy finds the oddly named town of Highman weirdly depopulated, the landscape mirroring, unknown to her, the ellipses in her own consciousness. The narrator of “Dolly” is in a hyperactive state, walking the streets at high speed, frustrated when her progress is impeded by the traffic. If Nancy’s inner/outer landscape is under-inhabited, this character’s world is clogged with surplus population: “the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed it, more of life” (248). The repetition of the word “life” in this passage from “Dolly” resonates against the volume’s title, Dear Life. Ironically, the narrator is a biographer of neglected Canadian authors. Lives are her business. The narrator has also been a schoolteacher, and it is the groups of schoolchildren, in particular, that she finds objectionable: “why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence.” Since there is no mention of any family in the “discussions of death,” it is safe to assume that the narrator is childless, though Gwen has children and grandchildren; and when the narrator recollects that she has been in Coburg after all, many years before during an illicit affair, she remembers the dismissive attitude she had then toward her lover’s wife and family: “lives to be tampered with. She mustn’t know, it would break her heart.” Recalling herself then, the narrator says, “I didn’t care in the least. Let it break” (248). Her misanthropic comment, “as if we needed it, more of life,” is of a piece with her previous distain and that attitude takes on another dimension coming from a childless woman. It also contributes to the discourse of childhood and childish behavior running through the whole story. Slowed down by these vague memories of her time as one of its “afternoon sinners” (248), the narrator finally enters a basement restaurant:

“Rage and Admiration”

199

I went into the washroom and was surprised how much like myself I looked. I wondered if it was possible that some man— some old man—would ever think of picking me up. The idea was grotesque—not because of his possible age but because there could be no thought in my head of any man but Franklin, ever. (249) The colloquial expression, looking “like myself,” has overtones of masquerade and performance in the context of this story. This passage also reminds the reader that romantic love, along with a capacity for sexual intrigue, is, contrary to social expectations, not the preserve of the young and conventionally attractive. The stay in Coburg is a temporary madness, like a carnival itself, a suspension of logic and everyday norms that eventually reassemble as the narrator drives back to Franklin. She tells herself that Gwen is a “caricature” that she should not have taken seriously, and expects her to be gone, someone who “after the first disturbance could not maintain herself as a character in our lives” (250). She is startled to find the interloper’s car still parked outside the house and Franklin coming out to meet her. The lovers’ reunion seems to be thwarted, as he silences his partner and sits with her in the car. Franklin begins his explanation with “Life is totally unpredictable” (251), a truism that might serve as an epigram for this volume and for Munro’s entire oeuvre. His confession parodies the compulsiveness of adulterers in Munro’s previous stories, referring to a “spell,” something that “just strikes like an eclipse or something.” She takes him at his word, until he makes it plain that the very notion of adultery with Gwen is farcical. Yet even while she is fooled by his hushed voice and exaggerated gestures—staring out of the window, bowing his head—she evaluates his performance, assessing his “enchantment” as “dreary” and noting that “this spiel was surely something that would have made him sick, normally” (251). (Nausea, as we have seen, recurs frequently in “Dolly”; even the texture of a silk scarf is sickening in Coburg.) But any spell or enchantment is cast on the narrator, not on Franklin, and it is only broken when he abruptly drops the mask: “Christ, I’m kidding . . . I thought you’d catch on” (252). Even then, she cannot completely let go of the doll she has invented, still speculating privately about whether Gwen has read the poem, and what her response might have been.

200

Alice Munro

The first thing the narrator imagines when she thinks that Gwen has taken her place is the sparkling jars in the kitchen. Once back in the house, she immediately puts them back on the top of the cupboard, where, no doubt, they will gather dust again. Those familiar with Munro’s work might wonder if those jars were stored for making “marvelous clear jelly,” the metaphor Munro uses for fiction in her story “Material” (Something 43). It is while Franklin is handing her those jars that she suspects him of lying when he denies telling Gwen about the “Dolly” poem. The narrator’s speculations are to some extent a response to the mystery of the transformation of life into art, and the unaccountable nature of artistic creation, something that is suggested much more strongly in the Dear Life version than in Tin House. These inward speculations also derive from an ongoing contest to control the shared narrative of the couple’s lives, first manifested in the disagreements about the suicide note. The letter the narrator drafted, and eventually posted, unrevised, itself resembles a suicide note; and she even considers writing a second note asking him to destroy the letter, should she die before its arrival. She secures a promise from Franklin not to open this draft, a promise she knows she would not be able to keep if the positions were reversed. It is the poet who stands for the virtues of silence and self-restraint, while, throughout the story, the biographer and mathematician, with her capacity for anger, regrets the absence of drama in their lives, a point made in her earlier complaint that their argument is “too polite” (235). The concluding lines pay tribute to these qualities of selfrestraint, in a significant addition to the Tin House version. The earlier version ends thus: Of course, I would have to be on the lookout for the letter I had written him. What a joke it would be—well, hardly a joke—if I should die in the meantime. That made me think about the conversation we’d had earlier in the fall and our notion of being beyond all savagery and elation. (80) In the final version, there is no explicit reference to the earlier disagreement, and the emphasis is on Franklin’s difference to the narrator rather than a shared assumption:

“Rage and Admiration”

201

The thing was, he would do what I asked. I wouldn’t, in his place. I would rip it open, no matter what promises had been made. He’d obey. What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel, at his being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together. (254). The staccato rhythms of the final version add to the emotional intensity and the urgency of the Dear Life version. In both versions, time’s arrow moves irresistibly forward with increasing speed but limited predictability. Franklin’s truism, “Life is totally unpredictable” (251), translates into the narrator’s anxiety that death might intervene to cut short the narrative that she has constructed. The Bacchanalian overtones of “savagery and elation” in the Tin House version evoke carnival, the communal mockery of death. They also echo the phrase that the narrator uses, a few paragraphs previously, when she regrets the loss of her earlier friendship with Gwen “because I was a perfectly ordinary and savage woman” (Tin House, 80). However, the key word in this Tin House passage is “woman.” Despite her resistance to gendered identity, she is forced to admit to conventional female attributes, linked to irrationalism and to primitive drives. These lines have been excised from the Dear Life ending, which foregrounds the relationship between the couple, putting Gwen/Dolly, figuratively speaking, back inside the cupboard. One obvious difference between these two versions is a change of name from “Jackson” to “Franklin,” Once again, a name is changed for practical reasons; the rootless protagonist in “Train” is also called Jackson. But for readers familiar with the author’s biography, the name recalls that of Munro’s own partner, the poet and geographer Gerald Fremlin (1924–2013). In both versions, the narrator concurs with Franklin/Jackson’s suggestion that at their age time is too precious to squander on rows. But the characteristically oxymoronic “rage and admiration” is a dynamic expression of contradictory internal drives that can never be resolved, but may happily coexist. At the end of this parodic romance, the heroine may not have been completely tamed; the “ordinary and savage woman” in the Tin House version lingers in her readiness to “rip open” any similar message from Franklin “no matter what promises had been made” (254). With or without

202

Alice Munro

the biographical context, the elegiac closing lines in the Dear Life version bring to an end not only the story but also Munro’s fictional output, since they are immediately followed by the autobiographical “Finale” sequence. Simultaneously analeptic and proleptic, they reflect back on an enduring partnership and also, by implication, on their author’s long career, leading us back to the unwritten beginning of the story even as we reach its end. Above all, the story celebrates human fallibility, and the ability to reconcile opposites without denying difference.

9 “It Was[n’t] All Inward”: The Dynamics of Intimacy in the “Finale” of Dear Life Linda M. Morra

Many critics read the four stories of “Finale,” the last and selfadmittedly autobiographical section of Alice Munro’s Dear Life (2012),1 as an expression of the “irreducible complexity of human experience” and the entire collection of stories as a tribute to the value of life itself, to the “complex of emotions” that also undergird these stories (Awano 180–81). In particular, these four stories show how, on the one hand, intimacy is either used or refused by the narrator to locate and protect her rich imaginative life, her personal freedom, and her “dear life” from the clutches of conventionality or sociopolitical determination, even from her own impulses to destruction; as Amy Frykholm notes, the stories render how she largely seeks to escape a “sense of limitation” (40).2 On the other hand, such intimacies also paradoxically allow the narrator to know her place, to feel even reassured both by such a place in the community and by the very sociopolitical determination from which she seeks freedom. If local knowledge and affiliations limit patterns of behavior, relationships, and career paths, they also paradoxically provide the narrator with sources of identity and the meaningful connections that allow her to escape the alienation that would otherwise curtail a more complete sense of self-understanding.

204

Alice Munro

This “complex of emotions” that informs these stories and so much of Munro’s work, however, is rendered further problematic by the fact that “Finale” follows, as Ailsa Cox has argued, “the trajectory of [the author’s] own life, tracing the experiences of girlhood, maturity and old age” (239). In other words, a dynamic of intimacy is also created between the narrator and the reader, who is at times given privileged access to information about the narrator’s thoughts and actions. How the reader is engaged is further distinguished from the dynamic between the narrator, her family, and the community at large. In particular, the narrator takes the reader into her confidence at certain narrative junctures and is instructed about how to approach and engage with narrative disclosures; in other words, the reader is invited into a privileged relationship, which may be denied to other members of her family and community when the narrator’s personal freedom is at stake. More generally, these forms of intimacy eventually provide a framework for understanding, not only for the characters in the last section of Munro’s short-story collection, but also for human nature in general. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed argues how intimacy is an expression of the “process of taking an orientation” toward objects or toward others: “affective economies,” she notes, are not the result of “feelings [that] reside in subjects or objects,” but rather “are produced as effects of circulation” (8). Emotions are therefore “relational,” that is, they “involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects” (8). Even a sense of “interiority” is the result of what Ahmed calls the “sociality of emotion,” a register of social and cultural practices from which one expresses difference or to which one conforms. She concludes that feelings are thus a form of “social presence rather than selfpresence” (10) and “produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects” (10). Lisa Lowe argues that, although closeness has typically been regarded as important to “conjugal and familial relations in the bourgeois home” and as “distinguished from the public realm of work, society and politics,” it is in fact instrumental to the production of both spheres (195): like Ahmed, she suggests that intimacy generates the very boundaries of identification by which we even determine those spheres. On the one hand, intimacy may thus be

“It Was[n’t] All Inward”

205

used to assert social presence, to induct members of the community into its social mores, to offer and emphasize the importance of participation in its moral codes of conduct. Expectations of conformity—and more largely, affective economies—are produced by a communal understanding that all members, perhaps by virtue of birth and geographical proximity, would apparently desire such participation. However, such closeness also engenders, as Ann Laura Stoler observes, “isolation and estrangement” when certain members either do not wish to participate in such codes or refuse to accept the codes and terms that such communal intimacies offer, what Ahmed would refer to as a reaction to “social presence” (91). In other words, intimacies showcase the “conditions of possibility” and the “forces of production” at work in forging identities and relationships (Stoler Haunted 13, italics in original).3 There are four stories in the last section of “Finale,” each of which explores the “conditions of possibility” generated by various levels of intimacy and the processes by which they are used to induct the narrator into familial and communal values, or by which she expresses herself against or within those values. The first story, “The Eye,” concerns an adult narrator who looks back on her life as a young woman and her first attempts to differentiate herself and to “untangle[e] her own reality” from that of her mother (Frykholm 41). The story opens with her mother’s ideas about what and how her daughter must think and feel and, as it proceeds, registers the narrator’s growing independence from her mother’s assumptions.4 That growing independence is featured primarily in her relationship with and attachment to Sadie, the young woman hired to help with the family when her mother is overburdened with two young children and a household to manage. The young narrator’s inner life, which she does “not speak about . . . to anybody,” revolves around Sadie and is clearly demarcated from her mother’s ideas about what the narrator must have and “had always wanted”: “She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter” (Dear Life 258, 257). With the introduction of Sadie, the narrator learns “how largely my mother’s notions about me might differ from my own” (258). She learns to resist her mother’s “towardness” by refusing to disclose private “notions” about herself, a form of resistance that contrasts with that of Sadie, who is considerably more willing to share what she thinks and feels. In this sense, Sadie explicitly

206

Alice Munro

registers difference, an “awayness” from prevailing communal values that threaten to undermine her assertions of autonomy and agency. She not only declares “more than once that she was not in any hurry to get married,” but she also attends dances in town every weekend, where she went “by herself and for herself” (261). Indeed, sometimes, Sadie admits, she even “danced by herself—which was what she liked to do anyway,” if she was unhappy with her male companion or if he tried to grab her “with his sweaty big meat of hands” (261). The dances are held out of town, at the Royal-T, which is apparently a place of greater risk, where: they wanted to get hold of you. Sometimes she had to read them the riot act and tell them what she would do to them if they didn’t quit it. She let them know she’d come there to dance and paid her own way to do it. . . . She wasn’t like some, she said. She didn’t mean to get caught. (262, italics mine) The “you” suggests a broadening of the possible subject: not that Sadie alone is threatened, but that “you,” the narrator and perhaps even the reader, are implicated in the risk. Sadie does not specifically articulate how she would be caught or by what means, or even what the risk is, except to suggest that it would involve economic dependence: she thus “paid her own way.”5 The vagueness of the “you,” moreover, allows for the association—or even complicity— between her and the narrator to be underscored. Directly on the heels of this passage related to Sadie’s refusals to be “caught” follows another related to the narrator’s mother and her concerns about her daughter’s alliance with and proximity to Sadie. In realizing that her daughter “worshipped” their sitter, she redirects her daughter’s attention to her siblings, who are infants at the time. She asks, “But we do love them, don’t we?” (262). The question suggests how the narrator’s mother turns her children into what Ahmed would call “objects of emotion” and the narrator into an “object of feeling” (11). She attempts to shape the boundaries of emotion and, in so doing, locates herself as a custodian or guardian of her daughter’s friendships, figured in her use of “we.” The pronoun “we” not only contrasts with the “you” deployed by Sadie earlier, but also inserts the narrator unwillingly into a dynamic that conveys the means by which she can at least be

“It Was[n’t] All Inward”

207

“caught”: a form of intimacy her mother calls upon by which she implicitly denies her daughter agency or, at least, one she invokes to transfer her daughter’s attention from Sadie to the babies as legitimate “objects of emotion.” The narrator recognizes that her mother was not “going to stop” probing her daughter until she performed her “towardness,” that is, her sense of devotion to her siblings, by articulating her love for them—a means by which she must assert her fidelity to and association with the family unit and claim a “proper” sense of identity. Nonetheless, the narrator only verbally accepts the invitation to align herself with her mother and the family. She otherwise refuses a close connection to her, and, although she believes it “turn[s her] traitorous” (263), she specifically withdraws from her mother in ways that are both figurative and literal. In terms of the latter, for example, on several occasions she refuses holding hands with her: “[My mother] touches my hand to give me a chance to hold hers, but I pretend not to notice and she takes her hand away” (264). Crucially, this moment is reiterated after Sadie’s death, when her mother takes her to see the body laid out in a casket. She clutches her daughter’s “hand tightly held in hers” and releases it only when she reaches for a tissue from her purse. The narrator observes: She had to get her hand in there, so her hold on me weakened and I was able to get myself free of her. She was weeping. It was attention to her tears and sniffles that had set me loose. (268, italics mine) In a moment that is revealing about her mother’s response—and, more largely, that of community—to Sadie’s body as the object of emotion, the narrator is “set loose” from her mother. When she is thus freed to look “straight in the coffin,” she too responds to Sadie as the object of emotion, but with a radical difference: after a moment, she sees “her eyelid” move. The moment is translated by the narrator as part of “whatever special experience was owing to myself”: “I did not dream of calling anybody else’s attention to what was there, because it was not meant for them, it was completely for me” (269). Once the moment passes, her mother clutches her hand again and seems to expect her daughter to “say something . . . but I didn’t do it” (270). Such withholding—of her hand, of her thoughts—allows the narrator to locate a sense of independence

208

Alice Munro

that bears similarity to that of Sadie, although she does not publicly divulge what she thinks. Only the reader has such access, although even the reader is reminded that such access is a privilege: Sadie’s death, for example, is not immediately disclosed, but rather a fact that the reader learns only well into the narrative. In this particular instance, however, the reader is allied with the narrator, who shares such admissions and subtle acts of rebellion with the reader alone and who thereby registers difference from an affective economy that ultimately comes to see Sadie’s body as an object of derision. The narrator does share with Sadie the desire for and impulse to locate independence by wresting it away from those who would impinge on it: for Sadie, it was the men at the dance hall, and for the narrator, it is her mother from whom she would “get herself free.” There is a key difference in their expression of those desires, or, more specifically, the lack thereof, since the narrator consistently refuses to speak openly about her yearning for independence: such a refusal registers the sociality of emotion, how “social presence” determines and shapes the surfaces and boundaries of legitimately expressed identities. The narrator thus appreciates the dangers inherent in making declarations like those of Sadie. As Munro’s editor at the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, notes, a larger pattern in Munro’s fiction suggests that “a stigma” would be “attached to any girl who attracts attention to herself—individualism, for women, is seen as a shameful impulse”: these “women in some way shake off the weight of their upbringing and do something unconventional— and are then, perhaps, punished for it, by men who betray them or abandon them at their most vulnerable” (np).6 The community thus reacts to Sadie as an object of derision, punished for her nonconformity: a “girl without a boyfriend going to dances on foot” was “asking for trouble” (267). For the narrator, however, Sadie represents “awayness,” an increasing distancing from and disregard for emotional entanglements that restrict one’s personal freedom. Even then, however, Sadie’s importance as a figure of “awayness” from communal expectations is undermined when the narrator discovers that Sadie lied to both the narrator and her family: her decision to forfeit her position as a caregiver in their household was not, in fact, the result of being obliged to “stay home . . . to look after her father and mother,” which would have appeared to be a legitimate reason, but rather to pursue another position at the creamery—a position that would have certainly paid her more money

“It Was[n’t] All Inward”

209

and afforded her greater independence (270). The narrator thus discovers that her reaction and attachment to Sadie was not mutual, that the intimacy she believed she shared with her was merely the product of her own imagination. Thereafter, she sees Sadie as having lost “some of her importance” (270): the intimacy she believed to be mutually constitutive was a fiction she created that allowed her to express difference and wrest control from her mother. In “Voices,” the narrator continues to seek such freedom, but in more generally expressed terms: not only from her mother but also from communal values and expectations. Both the narrator and her mother attend a party, where initially it seems that the narrator’s mother is not so different from Sadie. Her mother explicitly desired to live in town, to identify with a community that was not her own: She was living in the wrong place and had not enough money, but she was not equipped anyway. She could play euchre but not bridge. She was affronted by the sight of a woman smoking. I think people found her pushy and overly grammatical. . . . She sounded as if she had grown up in some strange family who always talked that way. And she hadn’t. They didn’t. Out on their farms, my aunts and uncles talked the way everybody else did. And they didn’t like my mother very much, either. (287) Such expressions of difference suggest that, in some ways, the narrator’s mother is not so distinct from Sadie: her disavowals of social forms of interaction (playing bridge or smoking) and particular speech patterns are refusals to participate in activities that would otherwise clearly register her membership in the farming community. As becomes clear later in the story “Dear Life,” she tried to convince “herself that certain boundaries were not there” (304) and that “she would be welcomed anywhere” if she were educated, if she changed her speech, if she adopted new modes of social conduct. In so doing, however, she betrays the very farming community of which she remained a part, if only geographically: “Her fault was that she did not look like what she was. She did not look as if she had been brought up on a farm, or as if she intended to remain on one” (312). She is disappointed in her daughter, because the latter refuses to conform to her mother’s values; her mother wondered why her daughter would not bring home “the right kind of friends, or any

210

Alice Munro

friends at all, home from the town school” (287). Her daughter’s sense of allegiance, however, is at this moment with her “school fellows” (289), who live just outside the town. In attending the dance, the narrator is also quick to notice and is embarrassed by how her mother fails to adapt to local conversational idioms, to which her father would have certainly conformed: “Whatever she said, it did not sound quite right. I wished then for my father to be there. . . . He slipped into whatever exchange was going on—he understood that the thing to do was never to say anything special” (290). In this instance, the narrator’s sense of shame marks the limit of communal understanding. To stand out—as her mother had and as Sadie had— was to adopt an orientation toward the community that betrayed its dynamics and, ultimately, to reject a sense of belonging. It yet becomes clear that one’s sense of belonging can shift according to the context and in relation to the competing demands of family and community. At the same party, the narrator observes that there is another woman who, in being ostracized, also demonstrates the limits of communal belonging and the moral politics of the period: the figure of the prostitute. The narrator’s misrecognition of this figure in the moment showcases that she was not a member of the town at that time: “if I had lived in town . . . I might have known that she was a notable prostitute” (292). She also acknowledges that her vocabulary and understanding would have been shaped by her context, not only the naiveté related to her age: “And I would not have used the word prostitute. Bad woman, more likely. I would have known that there was something disgusting and dangerous and exciting and bold about her, without knowing exactly what it was” (292–93). With time, the narrator learns that “she really did the things I could not believe she did”: the refusal to name “the things” in itself suggests how a sociopolitical sense of shame determines and regulates her own behaviors and speech (293). Shame produces the “very surfaces and boundaries” of communal associations and affiliations, as the narrator comes to understand when her mother obliges her daughter to respond as an object of feeling to the prostitute and insist they leave the party together. Her mother’s reaction to the prostitute, the object of emotion, determines that a “nice decent dance” was contaminated by her presence; this gesture is reiterated in “Dear Life” when she forbids her daughter from associating with Diane, a young girl whose mother “had been a prostitute” (295; 302).

“It Was[n’t] All Inward”

211

As the narrator retrieves her coat from an upper room, she encounters yet another young woman, Peggy, who apparently accompanied the elder prostitute to the dance, in addition to two young men from the Air Force. The latter two strive to comfort Peggy after members of the community have seemingly shunned her. These men are “entrancing” for the narrator, in part because they transcend the stigma with which Peggy is associated and, in so doing, demonstrate how one might either overcome or bypass shame and communal prejudices: I had never in my life heard a man speak that way, treating a woman as if she was so fine and valued a creature that whatever it was, whatever unkindness had come near her, was somehow a breach of law, a sin. (296) For the narrator, the moment becomes emblematic, not of Peggy’s “tears” because they “reminded me too much of myself” (297), but rather of “her comforters” and how they “seemed to bow down and declare themselves in front of her” (297). The ephemeral nature of their comfort, however, is registered by the title of the story itself: the “voices” of these men are what the narrator conjures up in subsequent fantasies related to how she too “was worthy of love” (298). As with the moment related to Sadie, she realizes that the very intimacy of that moment may have offered her a sense of escape from communal indictments and strictures, but also that it was ultimately illusory: the Air Force men who had come to Port Albert for training were quickly gone and some, “many, gone for good” (298). The contrast between those fantasies that sustain her—her purported shared intimacies with Sadie and her illusory one with the Air Force men—and “real life” are not those of the narrator alone, as the last story of the collection, “Dear Life,” reveals, but rather are more largely shared. So the narrator observes that she could develop for herself a “scene” about the geographical context in which she lived, one “that was purified to resemble something out of the books I liked, such as Anne of Green Gables or Pat of Silver Bush” (305). These narratives, however, contrast with the realities of farm life: that there was, in fact, “quite a lot of killing going on” (305). Old horses were “turned into meat” and “fur-bearing animals” were “culled every fall” (305). Indeed, “[f]resh manure

212

Alice Munro

was always around, but I ignored it, as Anne must have done at Green Gables” (305). As her mother begins to show the onset of Parkinson’s disease, the narrator began to turn to “big novels” that she “borrowed from the town library”: the first, Independent People, which showcased a lifestyle that may have been “harder than ours” but that still had a “hopeless grandeur to it” and The Magic Mountain, which conveyed a “dark and somehow thrilling despair” (310). Again, the romance and fantasy of hard lives are contrasted with the unvarnished details about the lives and characters that populated her adolescent life. As the narrator observes, these details may be included in her narrative because “this is not a story, only life” (307). These narratives are key, however, in that they also allow her to locate the very moments, the very stories that provide identification and affiliation. One of these crucial moments involves Mrs. Netterfield, a “crazy old woman” who reacted unpredictably to a mistake in a grocery delivery and whose onset of dementia initially renders her a figure of abjection. The narrator reflects back upon a story in which she too was involved, one that presented Mrs. Netterfield as a menacing specter for the narrator’s mother and that suggests how intimacies may be both unpredictable and yet necessary to identity and communal belonging. Her mother recounts how she was home alone with the narrator, a baby at the time. Without a proper invitation, Mrs. Netterfield appeared at the door. Perhaps because of the earlier anecdote related to the mistaken grocery delivery, this gesture is initially perceived as threatening for the narrator’s mother: she ran from the kitchen, removed her baby from the carriage on the porch and secured the doors. Her mother clearly did not believe that the “old woman might just be paying a neighborly visit” (313), a fact confirmed by “[n]o decent knock on the door” (314); rather, she “walk[ed] around the house, [took] her time and [stopped] at every downstairs window” (314). In subsequent versions, the narrator observes, Mrs. Netterfield was characterized as not only “pressing her face and hands against the glass while my mother hid,” but also “rattling” and “banging” against the doors while the narrator’s mother “grabbed [her] up . . . for dear life” and hid, until she at last “gave up” (315, 318, 315). Although the narrator’s mother reacts defensively at the time, the narrator learns much later that their house “was where the Netterfield family had lived” and that the “old woman was

“It Was[n’t] All Inward”

213

looking in the windows of what had been her own home” (318). As Miroslawa Buchholtz adds, “the old woman had a reason to approach the house . . . because she also had a baby once”: “Her sudden interest arises from (con)fusing her own life with the lives of others” (73). In fact, as Buchholtz observes, the figure of Mrs. Netterfield also merges “with the figure of the narrator’s mother,” who suffered from Parkinson’s disease and whose memory was equally affected: “the mother figure is mediated by the crazy old woman, who in retrospect becomes unsurprisingly familiar” (73). Indeed, as Thacker notes, the ending of the New Yorker version of “Dear Life” confirms this connection: in the final paragraph, the narrator remarks upon, “[w]hen my mother was dying, she got out of the hospital somehow, at night, and wandered around town until someone who didn’t know her at all spotted her and took her in.”7 This original ending and, more largely, the story itself are evidence that there is an “existence of a network of invisible links” that connect characters intimately, even if they do not immediately perceive the connections that engender such proximity (73). If the “The Eye” demonstrates the need to accept and refuse such intimacies and “Voices” showcases how intimacies forge relationships and larger communal networks, “Dear Life” offers a reminder that even figures that seem strange, inexplicable, or outright bizarre may be intimately connected and integral to one’s life. However threatening Mrs. Netterfield appeared, she was ultimately searching for the very place, the very source of identification that once provided her with a sense of belonging; the act simultaneously demonstrated her own affiliation with the narrator’s family. So it is that the narrator learns that seemingly irrational behaviors such as that of Mrs. Netterfield—even that of her own— become coherent within a social context. Elsewhere, I have argued about how “the dignity of self” in Munro’s work is tied to family and community, and that “disengaging from such a network or a familial context is thus not only rash but also destructive, for one’s self and for those by whom one is surrounded.” The “sociality of emotion,” however it is negotiated, also determines identity and the dignity of self. In “Night,” the narrator thus gains insight into her own conduct, when she understands it within a larger context. Therein, the narrator reflects upon a period of convalescence when she was liberated from the mundane chores with which she had otherwise been burdened as a teenager. Although she relished

214

Alice Munro

such freedom and the fact that she “could spend part of the time wandering about like a visitor” (275), she increasingly suffered from bouts of insomnia. She accounted for this unusual occurrence by admitting that “it was all inward—this uselessness and strangeness I felt” (275, italics mine). This moment registers a crucial disjuncture between her self-identified interiority, that is her internal sense of “strangeness,” and the exterior world or “social presence” from which she feels estranged. In her nocturnal wanderings in the house, the general familiarity of household objects shifts: it became a stranger place in which people and the work that dictated their lives fell away, their uses for everything around them fell away, all the furniture retreated into itself and no longer existed because of anybody’s attention. (276) Rather than feeling “liberated” by freedom from recognition, from her displacement from a system of recognizable objects, the narrator is alienated by the “strangeness” of the situation. Coherence is provided by the recognition imparted by others onto such objects. Even the recital of rhymes, an activity that would ordinarily locate her within communal contexts of understanding, is “turned into absurdity, into the silliest random speech” (277). Beyond the comprehension of communal understanding, the narrator feels unmoored, such that she questions her own identity: “I was not myself” (276). She learns to orient herself spatially, to become familiar with navigating around objects in such darkness, and yet even the “inside of the rooms,” which she apparently knew so well, remained “more strange” to her (280). The narrator realizes that it is not the lack of familiarity with these objects, which have stories attached to them about her childhood, such as the “northern window frame partly chewed away by a dog that had been shut inside” (280). Neither is it the lack of sleep that so disorients her, but rather the fact that “something was taking hold of me”: “Whatever it was was trying to tell me to do things, not exactly for any reason but just to see if such acts were possible” (276). The precise act was that “I could strangle my little sister,” a violation of the “worst” order because it would take place “[h]ere in the most familiar place, the room where we had lain for all of our lives and thought ourselves most safe” (277). This kind of violation is telling: her sense of estrangement from the ordinariness of life tempts her

“It Was[n’t] All Inward”

215

to destroy what is most intimate, most familiar, most definitive of family interconnection. These “night difficulties,” as she characterizes them (279), plague her until one night she meets “nobody but her father” who was also “sitting on the stoop looking towards town” (281). The nonthreatening presence and familiarity of her father contrast with the unfamiliarity of the situation—that they are both awake at an unusual hour—and his unfamiliar greeting (“We weren’t accustomed to giving such greetings in our family” [281]); however, the recognizable elements allow her to speak more openly about the strange interior life that compelled her “to get out of bed and walk” (282). The narrator learns that her father has been aware of her peregrinations for some time and that, however alone she may have felt, she was in fact not so. The realization facilitates her disclosure: her fears that she “would hurt” her sister (283). Her father’s response is telling. Rather than heighten her sense of “awayness” or her “strangeness,” he responds “without any sense of alarm or jumpy surprise” and reconfigures her response within decipherable affective economies: “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes” (283). It is a moment that conveys that her “strangeness” was not in fact “all inward,” but rather located within larger, recognizable patterns of conduct and emotion. She was not alone, he reassures her, in this capacity: “People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life” (284). His response to his daughter is pivotal to understanding how another form of intimacy works in the novel: it allows others to find their place, their actions, and even a sense of themselves within affective economies. In this case, his observation that her feelings are explicable helped to “set [the narrator] down, but without either mockery or alarm, in the world we were living in” (284). The narrator’s self-articulation is thus mapped against and within a longer communal narrative. Even as the narrator’s interior world and carefully governed intimacies initially seem to provide a means of escaping these limits, Munro ultimately reminds the reader of the necessity of those limits and the need for forging intimate relationships. Ultimately, the narrator’s disclosures also remind readers that we too participate in such affective economies. Just as we might conclude that one’s conduct, such as that of the narrator, might be restricted to one figure, to one’s “internal sense of strangeness,” she enlarges that assessment so that no one is excluded from its

216

Alice Munro

seemingly limited range. In the last few pages of “Dear Life,” for example, the narrator observes that, as an adult, she did “not go home for my mother’s illness or for her funeral” (319). On the one hand, she again refuses the possibility of an emotional connection with her mother well into adulthood. On the other hand, in offering insubstantial reasons for this decision, she adds, “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time” (319). The use of “we” in this instance is vastly different from how it is used by the narrator’s mother in “The Eye.” Rather than asserting a sense of authority, it expresses compassion—and not simply for her mother and for herself. All humans are complicit in behavior that is questionable, strange or morally questionable, and therefore partake in the “sociality of emotion.” In including the reader in this “we,” she implies not only that intimacy is pivotal to the shaping of identities and relationships, but also that it is fundamentally what makes us human, what connects and defines us.

Notes on Chapters

Introduction 1 The word, “wickedness,” appeared in the New Yorker version of the story, is cited here. Munro rephrased this into “On their ways to deeds they did not know they had in them” in the final version of “Wenlock Edge” (Too 94). 2 A reasonably complete manuscript of “Places at Home”—called “Photo album text” in the published archival catalog—exists in the Alice Munro Fonds in the Special Collections Division, University of Calgary Libraries. See MsC 37.13.7-14 and Alice Munro Papers: First Accession. 3 Munro added the parenthetical detail, “oaks and pines . . . limestone” to her first set of proofs of Castle Rock dated April 27, 2006; once again, still rewriting. These proofs are in the Alice Munro Fonds, Special Collections Division, University of Calgary Libraries. See MsC 323/1.2. 4 “Axis” was ultimately withheld from Dear Life either because of Fremlin’s objection after he read it—as Munro told me on September 6, 2013—or because she did not want him to read it—apparently he did not regularly read her stories in magazines, instead waiting for the book. The story clearly draws on his life, although just how precisely or how extensively is not clear. 5 While Munro is more precise about geography in this revision, naming Wiarton as the place where Royce notices the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment and also indicating that Royce drove taxis in and around London, she collapses distances from London. All versions of the story begin by indicating that Avie is from a town forty or fifty miles from the university town, Grace about twice that. Those distances are well short of the Bruce Peninsula—Wiarton is about 140 miles from London. The distance from London to Wingham, Munro’s hometown, is about seventy miles.

218

Notes on Chapters

6 In what she saw as her “real” first novel, O Pioneers! (1913)—actually it was the second—Cather writes early on “But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes” (21). Here she is teaching her readers how to understand the prairie landscape as setting. “The great fact” was a phrasing she was drawn to, one she used in other novels as well. 7 I say “once more” here because Munro made the same point, that a story is not a road to be followed but a house to enter, in her 1982 essay “What is Real?” There is a direct relation between that essay and the Introduction to her Selected Stories. When that volume appeared in 1996, some reviewers—most notably John Updike in the New York Times Book Review—decried the absence of an introduction or other rationale for the volume. Perhaps leaned on a bit to do something she did not much want to do, Munro sounds a bit miffed at the beginning of the introduction she produced (See Thacker Alice 463–74, 489–91).

Chapter 2 1 The story first appeared in the New Yorker, October 8, 2001. 2 Munro told J. R. (Tim) Struthers that the story, one of her “exercise stories,” was written in 1953, after “The Time of Death,” the “earliest story” in Dance of the Happy Shades (Struthers Interview 19–20). Robert Thacker calls it “the first story which reveals a remembering narrator actively shaping the stuff of her memories in a somewhat covert manner, presenting an impression of immediacy and a detached understanding to the reader” (“Clear” 43). 3 By 1870, women outnumbered men in American schools; by 1930, Dan C. Lortie continues, “there were five times as many female as male teachers, and the men who did teach taught primarily in the higher grades” (8). Labaree finds that “At the point in American educational history when the goal of universal enrollment first emerged (in the middle of the nineteenth century), teaching came to be defined as women’s work, and it has largely remained so ever since” (Trouble 36). Munro’s mother, Annie Chamney, whose mother had been a teacher, attended Ottawa Normal School in 1916 and then taught until she married in 1927. Munro writes that “she had become a schoolteacher by her own desperate efforts. The only reason she had stopped there was that school teaching was the best thing for women that she had come across so far” (“Working”

Notes on Chapters

219

138–39). As Thacker notes, “Women predominated in the teaching ranks and held special sway in rural schools; in 1918–19—the first year Annie Chamney taught full-time—of 111 teachers in the Carleton West-Lanark East district, only three were men who, given the war, were in short supply” (Alice 34). For this and other points, I am indebted to Thacker for his generous comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 4 Waller writes in 1932, just before Munro’s school days; discussing Canadian schools in 1965, Sybil Shack states that “Women teachers are now permitted to smoke in public, and may even be permitted an alcoholic beverage, but we are still expected to conform rather closely to the mores of our society, and of the more conservative elements of that society” (9). The unnamed narrator of “Hired Girl” provides a regional elaboration: “it was generally held to be more suspect for boys to be smart than for girls to be, though not particularly advantageous for one or the other. Girls could go on to be teachers, and that was all right—though quite often they became old maids— but for boys to continue with schools usually meant they were sissies” (231). According to Jo Keroes, “One of the patterns to emerge most consistently from images of teachers in fiction and film is that men routinely succumb to the erotic temptations teaching affords . . . while the erotic impulses of women teachers are usually suppressed, disguised, or demonized” (15–16). 5 For Magdelene Redekop, “The death of Miss Farris and her obvious limitations cannot eliminate the redemptive energies released in her vision of theatre. . . . Miss Farris is a kind of literary mother; in the telling of her life, Del can briefly confront the horrifying possibility that the sacrifice of the mother is necessary for the life and writing of the daughter” (78). 6 Munro told Thacker that this school is “the school I went to. It’s the most autobiographical thing in the book” (Alice 56). To Eleanor Wachtel she said, “I described that school because it was a pretty horrific place—and it was so richly interesting” (“Life” 275). As Thacker notes, Munro did not have to wait for high school to get out of Lower Town, since her mother “saw to it that beginning with the fall of 1939, when Alice would be in Grade 4, she would attend school in Wingham” (Alice 57). 7 “Accident” appeared in Toronto Life, November, 1977, and was included in early versions of the sequence that became Who Do You Think You Are? (Thacker, Alice 339, 342). 8 For Ajay Heble, “The fact that Frances is unwilling to admit what she believes to be true suggests that her disruptive way of thinking—her

220

Notes on Chapters

implicit recognition of the role of chance—will never be fully played out” (138). Skeptical that such disruptive thoughts are ever “fully played out,” I find Frances less evasive than pragmatic. 9 At least two other stories involve music teachers. In “Dance of the Happy Shades,” from Munro’s first collection, both the narrator and mother condescend toward Miss Marsalles, but the end of the story suggests that “at the very end of her life she has found someone whom she can teach—whom she must teach—to play the piano” (223). In “Fiction,” from Munro’s penultimate collection, Joyce envies her husband’s work restoring furniture: “How much better to work with wood and by yourself . . . than with the unpredictable young” (52). Their very unpredictability takes an ironic turn when her former student Christie O’Dell publishes a story, based on her relationship with Joyce, about a girl who works hard “for the love of the teacher, nothing else” (52). 10 Irvine argues that “Because she is unable to tell her own story, the narrator takes over Roberta’s space, objectifies the character, makes it difficult for the reader to hear Roberta at all” (99). So “the narrator separates from the character she writes about, thereby achieving distance. The story is an illustration of the very problem it dramatizes” (100). Except for the ending, however (Melsom 143), the story is less narrated than dramatized in the present tense, with shifting and sometimes intimate focalization; the other characters qualify and even undermine Roberta, who qualifies and even undermines herself. 11 James Carscallen notes that George “is a peasant Hungarian from wild northern Ontario, Ted Makavala [in ‘Accident’] a peasant Finn from the same area; and . . . both have much the same abrasiveness . . .” (309). 12 As is Arthur Comber in “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” with his “school-teacher’s games” (3) and “clumsy, excited manner” (15). 13 The “churching of women” means to “bring (esp. a woman after childbirth) to church for a service of thanksgiving” (Canadian Oxford Dictionary). In a sense, Handel is associated with the churching of Nina: she sings in a Choral society (127) and fondly remembers Ed Shore’s solos in the annual performances of the Messiah (146). On the day of Lewis’ suicide, she arrives home whistling “See the conquering hero comes” (119), from Handel’s 1747 oratorio, “Judas Maccabeus.” 14 For Fish, “It is more than a little ironic that these bad ideas—turned to political advantage by the right—often have their home on the left. When, for example, George W. Bush said that evolution and

Notes on Chapters

221

Intelligent Design should be taught side by side so that students ‘can understand what the debate is about,’ he probably didn’t know that he was signing on to the wisdom of Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and founder of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, an organization dedicated to ‘combating conservative misrepresentations’ of what goes on in college classrooms. . . . Although Graff makes his case for teaching the controversies in a book titled Beyond the Culture Wars (he wants partisan posturing to be replaced by rational debate), the culture wars have now appropriated his thesis and made it into a weapon in the arsenal of the Intelligent Design warriors. From Bush on down to every foot soldier in the army, ‘teach the controversy’ is the battle cry” (124–25). 15 In “Soon,” Sam “never rebelled at having to read the Bible and say the Lord’s Prayer every morning. . . . ‘There’s time for sticking your neck out and times not to,’ he had said. ‘You satisfy them this way, maybe you can get away with telling the kids a few facts about evolution’” (119). But even Sam runs into problems when his daughter Juliet has a child out of wedlock. He is not fired, but he gets into an argument and quits. On returning home for a visit, Juliet is upset to find that he shares some of his community’s moral views after all. 16 Munro rarely expresses her political commitments in her fiction or elsewhere, with one exception: as Thacker writes, “In 1978 she spoke out against attempts to ban three books from the grade thirteen curriculum in Huron County high schools. They were [Margaret] Laurence’s The Diviners, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. She was publicly outspoken and drew considerable press attention to herself as she helped lead the opposition of the Writers’ Union against this attempt.” “Munro’s position in this debate was especially precarious,” Thacker adds, “since she was living among the very people who were bent on banning the three books” (Alice 332, 333). No doubt this experience is remembered in “Comfort,” though it is typical of Munro’s fiction that she emphasizes the intolerance of both Lewis and his attackers.

Chapter 3 I am grateful to the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University for inviting me to speak on Munro’s work; my lecture there in April 2014 was a springboard for me to return to “The Bear

222

Notes on Chapters

Came Over the Mountain.” Thanks also to Magdalene Redekop and Dennis Duffy for their insightful feedback on a draft of this chapter. 1 The anthologies are Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars’s Canadian Literature in English and Robert Lecker’s Open Country. 2 All quotations are taken from the version of “The Bear” published in Hateship. 3 L. Syd M. Johnson and Timothy M. Krahn make a similar point with regard to Away from Her, noting that the film addresses “how the unmooring that accompanies dementia . . . affects not just those whose memories are lost, but also those whose memories remain intact, or, at the very least, much more secure and stable” (1). 4 For a discussion of actual cases involving such challenges, see Skaff and Pearlin. 5 I have silently corrected irregular punctuation in the lyrics as published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. 6 For a discussion of Grant’s adaptation in this regard, see McGill, “No Nation” 100–01. 7 In Munro’s story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” Mr. McCauley shows a similar attitude, remembering how his daughter Marcelle “went away to London to have some female thing done and died in the hospital” (Hateship 21). More broadly, as I have observed elsewhere, “Solipsistic men who lack empathy are recurring figures in Munro’s fiction” (“Daringly” 877n2). 8 This discovery is paralleled by Grant’s discovery, years earlier, of the word “RAT” written on his office door after an affair with a student soured (284). If the fact that Fiona is not inside her room suggests figuratively that she does not quite match her name, readers are left to decide for themselves whether Grant really is a “rat.” 9 Grant may also be alluding to the difficulty that medical professionals have in definitively distinguishing Alzheimer’s from senility and senile dementia—a difficulty that further underscores the point made in “The Bear” about the slippery relationship between names and their referents. For a discussion of this difficulty, see Gravagne 134–38. 10 I am indebted to Magdalene Redekop for this view of the matter. 11 For a further discussion of gendered spaces in Munro’s fiction, see McGill, “Where” 104–07. 12 Marian’s self-individuating strategy echoes that of Beryl in Munro’s story “The Progress of Love,” who asks her niece not to call her

Notes on Chapters

223

“Aunt,” explaining: “I’m not used to being anybody’s aunt, honey. I’m not even anybody’s momma. I’m just me. Call me Beryl” (Progress 14). 13 Marian’s name also recalls Maid Marian, an allusion hinting at the possibility that Grant is an ironic Robin Hood. The irony is especially strong given that Robin Hood is famous for stealing from the rich, and given that in “The Bear,” Marian—from whom Grant hopes to steal Aubrey, as it were—complains about her lack of money (314). 14 The possibility that this Shakespearean intertext is operative in “The Bear” finds corroboration in the fact that Munro has alluded to the play elsewhere, referring to Oberon and Titania in her story “Carried Away” (Open 29). 15 Notably, the passage involving the skunk lily appears only in the Hateship version of “The Bear,” not the New Yorker version. Presumably, the passage is absent from the magazine version because it is not strictly necessary to the story; it is what narratologists call a “catalysis” or “free motif” (Prince 36). Several such catalyses are absent from the New Yorker version of “The Bear” but present in the Hateship version; another example is the passage involving the German soldiers. While the appearance of a relatively short version of the story in the New Yorker might suggest that such passages are merely decorative, not sufficiently crucial to the text for inclusion, Fiona’s observation that “Nature doesn’t fool around just being decorative” might be taken to imply that neither does Munro; the catalyses in her story do significant thematic work, even if they do not always develop the plot. 16 In that regard, it may be notable that the title “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” refers to each of two slightly different narratives by Alice Munro, given that the story originally appearing under that title in the New Yorker is substantially shorter than the version later published in Hateship. The two texts’ shared title elides their differences from one another, with the result that readers who refer to “The Bear” as though there were only one version of it are, in a sense, rehearsing Grant’s failure to acknowledge changes in Fiona. 17 For a fuller account of transference in psychoanalytic theory, see Laplanche and Pontalis 455–62. 18 As I have noted elsewhere (“No Nation” 101), the phrase echoes one used by the narrator of Munro’s story “Material,” who describes her ex-husband’s fictional representation of their former neighbor as manifesting a “fine and lucky benevolence” (Something 43). For a discussion of this praise’s ironies, see McGill, “Daringly” 877–79.

224

Notes on Chapters

Chapter 4 I would like to thank Robert Thacker and Steve Shoemaker for reading and responding to this essay; it has benefited from their suggestions. 1 Redekop comments on “the exaggerated fatalism of the quotation” from The Poetic Edda, calling its citation “ironically hopeful” and suggesting that it “invites repudiation” (206). She captures the tension between such pronouncements about fate and the improvisational lives lived in relation to them. 2 Critics and reviewers have noted this turn to the classics in Munro’s works of this decade. For example, see Moore and Rae. Lorrie Moore, in speaking of “the myth-inflected world of Alice Munro’s recent fiction,” plays with her capacity for revision: “when a daughter disappears, the mother’s crops are not left to wither as she searches. Instead the mother is more likely to stay put and now, with more time on her hands, actually begin a garden at long last, the plants taking hold rather nicely, though they be, to a large extent, forget-menots, bittersweet, or rue.” 3 This figure of classical translation can be traced back to “Who Do You Think You Are?” Rose’s classmate Ralph defaces the title of Keats’ famous sonnet about translation, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” replacing Chapman’s with Milton to make fun of a local eccentric. But he has not so much eliminated the figure of the translator as copied him, for his gesture allows Rose to see epic poetry in the names of the quirky Milton Homer. Ralph has done for Rose what Chapman did for Keats, given her access to Homer, something that he also does in his mimed performances of eccentricity. His carnivalesque translation might feel remote from Juliet’s more scholarly undertakings, but the two Munrovian translations of Homer each work to situate the epic in the domestic and the local. 4 For further reflections on the Horatian ode as an entrance into Munro’s treatment of fate, see Thacker, “Evocative.” 5 The famous phrase from Lives of Girls and Women is: “People’s lives . . . [are] dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum” (249). But the kitchen linoleum makes notable appearances in other stories, particularly in “Royal Beatings,” where the emphasis is on its complicity in what occurs in its presence, as well as on its patterns: “How can this go on in front of such daily witnesses—the linoleum, the calendars . . ., the old

Notes on Chapters

225

accommodating pots and pans? . . . They turn bland and useless, even unfriendly. Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness” (Beggar 18–19). For suggestive articles on linoleum and its patterns, see Francesconi and Ventura. 6 For a more extended treatment of the Cather influence on Munro, and particularly the story “Dulse,” see both Stich and Thacker. 7 This is, in fact, Dodds’s own view, his argument being that the ecstatic dance rituals of maenadism, like the other forms of irrationality addressed in his book, are not confined to the ancient Greeks but “still [have their] votaries or victims, though we call them by other names; and [still pose] . . . a problem which . . . civil authorities have had to face in real life” (278). The sentence above, the last in this chapter on maenadism, even concludes with that telltale Munrovian phrase “real life.” 8 Cather might be relevant here as well; this story seems to resemble the Russian story told in My Ántonia of Pavel and Peter who throw a bridegroom to pursuing wolves and then tosses his bride after to save themselves. 9 I’d like to thank Steve Shoemaker for this observation. 10 The Oxford English Dictionary defines āte: “Infatuation, mad impulse; personified by the Greeks as goddess of mischief and authoress of rash destructive deeds.” 11 According to Dodds, people spoke of any unaccountable personal disaster as part of their “portion” or “lot.” . . . since it happened, evidently “it had to be”:  o ask whether Homer’s people are determinists or libertarians T is a fantastic anachronism: the question has never occurred to them, and if it were put to them it would be very difficult to make them understand what it meant. What they do recognize is the distinction between normal actions and actions performed in a state of āte. (7) 12 Scurr also follows this same textual sequence in her review, granting it an emblematic status in Munro’s fiction. 13 This reading of patterned surfaces is familiar from her treatment of patterned linoleum and carpet. Both Francesconi and Ventura discuss a Jamesian “figure in the carpet” dimension to these patterns. In these other instances, there is also a relationship between crack and pattern. For example, in “Royal Beatings,” the “crack of pain” produced by the beating seems to cause the “patterns of linoleum [to] leer up” at her (Beggar 19).

226

Notes on Chapters

14 In carrying the man’s dead body, which he does, he carries an emotional connection to her. This scene resembles the one in “Carried Away,” in which Arthur carries the emotional charge of another man by carrying his decapitated head. The description also resembles one in “Miles City, Montana,” in which the narrator remembers (though inaccurately) her father carrying a dead body. 15 This sense of the woman’s body as overflowing resembles that in “Meneseteung,” in which there is an overflow of blood, sweat, grape jelly, and the river itself as poetic source. “There goes your dead body,” the man says of the woman whose revival from apparent death is associated with these flows. 16 I am grateful to Robert Thacker for drawing my attention to the biographical source for this incident. In Writing Her Lives, he points out the importance of the print to Munro. Her own copy of the Chagall was exiled by her husband from the dining room to her daughter’s bedroom, and its fate, reflected on in draft fragments for “The Moons of Jupiter,” offers a portrait of her marriage. See Alice 140–42 and 226–27. Sheila Munro also presents her memory of the print in her bedroom (201), and Francesconi gives a more detailed reading of the painting’s relation to “Soon” in “I and the Village.” 17 This Greek term means “the working of wonders; miracle-working; magic” (OED). Juliet’s father apparently used to be good at translation, able to find the right word. 18 Thacker points out that Munro revised the original order and inserted the retrospective reading of this letter between the mother’s speech and the story’s concluding paragraph. See Alice 524–25. 19 Rae offers a reading of the Heliodorus allusion, drawing on the work of classicist Anne Carson. See Rae 147–51.

Chapter 5 1 See also in this connection Robert Thacker, “‘Clear Jelly’: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics.” 2 Several observers, including Munro herself, have noted that the theme of “runaway” weaves through a number of narratives besides the title story. In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel in 2005, Munro responds to the question, “The theme of ‘runaway’ fits many of your stories . . . did you feel that undercurrent here?” by saying: “No, I didn’t feel that. I had another title picked. I was going to call the book Powers, which was a title I liked very much and the title of the last story. And

Notes on Chapters

227

then it occurred to my editor, Doug Gibson—and then to me—that Runaway had more life in it, and it did relate to each of the stories, which I hadn’t noticed before” (266). 3 For my term “narrative inflection” we might in fact substitute, mutatis mutandis, Munro’s well-known metaphor of the “house” as a useful way of thinking about her narratives (Alice Munro, “Introduction,” Selected Stories, xx), with the move from room to room, wandering around in each—of describing her sense of narrative wandering, rather than a simple linear route. Munro continues to believe in the power of this metaphor: I remember that when I wrote the bit about the “house” I thought “they’re going to say ‘how tiresomely female’,” but I don’t care! I still think there are these two types of stories—the have-to-find-out and the wander-around-inside type, and I’m happy to think of this interesting students (Letter from Alice Munro, February 24, 2012; emphases hers). The metaphor works especially well if we think of the flexibility of word order in a highly inflected language such as Latin.

Chapter 6 1 For a different approach, as well as a more general overview of the entire collection of stories, see Lester E. Barber, “Alice Munro: The Stories of Runaway.” 2 The earliest extant examples of comedy in the Western tradition are Greek: Aristophanes’ satiric or “Old” comedy and Menander’s “New” comedy of youth and love/sex. The latter’s most direct descendants are the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence. See Duckworth. In the English Renaissance, Ben Jonson may be clearly seen as following in the Aristophanic, satiric tradition, while Shakespeare bends “new” comedy into a romantic, festive cast that has remained immensely popular ever since. See C. L. Barber and Frye “Argument.” 3 See Thacker, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. 4 Shakespeare may have been lightly in Munro’s mind when she wrote “Chance.” Dare one think, for example, that the name “Juliet” is deliberate? Also, there is actually a direct reference to Shakespeare, albeit to Henry V with Sir Laurence Olivier, when Juliet is thinking about handsome movie heroes whom she has admired. And, there’s the allusion to Chryseis, one of the playmates of Achilles

228

Notes on Chapters

and Agamemnon, thought by some to be the woman from whom Chaucer’s Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Cressida are derived. 5 Here there is also a tempting parallel to Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It would be only a parallel, of course; there’s no evidence that Munro is evoking it deliberately. It does not seem preposterous, however, to recall Titania’s famous description of nature’s disruption in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (II.i.88ff). “Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, /As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea/Contagious fogs; . . . The fold stands empty in the drowned field, /And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; . . . The human mortals want their winter here; /No night is now with hymn or carol blest.” The chaos and trouble stem from the quarrel between the king and queen of fairies and is only resolved and reversed when their spat is over, helped along by Puck’s magic, near the play’s end. Only then is order restored, the lovers properly paired, with all ending well. The parallel between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “Runaway” isn’t exact, of course, but seems close enough to warrant remark. It suggests the possibility that Munro is once again playing with the concept of genre. 6 At the risk of pushing possible literary connections too far, it can be noted that the lost goat Flora, who reappears to Clark and Mrs. Jamieson in a mysterious, almost magical circumstance—and who may have gotten pregnant, as Mrs. Jamieson suggests in her letter to Carla—functions something like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In her reappearance, Flora is presented as a nonrealistic agent in conjunction with the end of the rain, with the restoration of order in nature, as well as with the emotional reuniting of Carla and Clark. So, too, with Puck. White magic is seen as serving its special function in both works. 7 Muriel Resnick’s popular 1964 drama Any Wednesday, along with its Hollywood adaptation starring Jane Fonda and Jason Robards, may serve as a perfect illustration of the full-blown, wholly sentimental romantic comedy. The mistakes are funny and trivial; the happy ending predictable, easy, and unambiguous. 8 Such ambiguities are also very typical in Shakespeare’s comedies. There are almost always hints in language or circumstance of a dark underbelly, some looming threat beyond the joyous mirth of the happy endings. Actually, these are more than just hints in the socalled problem comedies, as well as in the late romances. In the case of Troilus and Cressida, for example, Shakespeare pushes the balance so far in the direction of irony and satire that the comic worldview is scarcely present at all.

Notes on Chapters

229

9 It may be illuminating to recognize in “Powers” a certainly unintended parallel to one of Shakespeare’s darkest comedies, Troilus and Cressida, one of three plays sometimes labeled “problem comedies” or satires. Of the three (All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure being the other two), Troilus and Cressida is the most ironic and the most cynical. Neither of the lovers is likable or admirable from beginning to end. No character in the play acts with anything other than self-interest in mind. Language throughout the play is bitter and deflating. “Powers” seems often to share these qualities. Comedy in form, yes; comic in effect, often; but lacking conviction in vision for a better or, at least, a tolerable future.

Chapter 8 1 Lillian’s first name has been changed from “Sadie,” in earlier versions, avoiding confusion with another hired girl, “Sadie” in “The Eye.” 2 Gatsby is murdered because he pretends to have been at the wheel of a car involved in a fatal accident, which was in fact driven by his former sweetheart, Daisy. The victim, Myrtle, is the mistress of Daisy’s husband. Myrtle’s husband, Gatsby’s killer, falsely presumes Gatsby to have been her lover.

Chapter 9 I am grateful to Robert Thacker for his invitation to submit an essay to this volume of papers and for his thoughtful remarks upon its submission. 1 “Finale” is identified by Munro herself as uniquely autobiographical, as a “conscious working with memory” (184): as such, these stories are also seemingly the most intimate of the book, offering some degree of seeming access to the author’s own private life. Barbara Love and Chloe Schama have identified these stories as the “most autobiographical” work she has written (65; np), although, as Robert Thacker notes, generally, the “place of autobiography in Munro’s work, especially after Castle Rock, is inarguable” (551). Thacker confirmed by email, however, that, in interview with Munro in Bayfield on September 6, 2013, she admitted that the “‘Finale’ stories . . . ‘all happened’” (from Thacker to Morra, “Re: Alice Munro

230

Notes on Chapters

Paper–‘It Was[n’t] All Inward’: The Dynamics of Intimacy in the ‘Finale’ of Alice Munro’s Dear Life” April 11, 2015, 8:25 a.m.). 2 As discussed in a review for Publishers Weekly, another possible interpretation of the title, Dear Life, is “its harried restlessness—as in, ‘holding on for dear life’” (161). 3 See also Stoler’s Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, in which she addresses the “fierce clarity of intimacies” that “refused or refuted colonial appellations” (1). 4 The narrator’s withdrawal from her mother is closely linked to Munro’s own relationship with her mother. As she notes in interview with Lisa Allardice, her “feelings about her mother are ‘probably the deepest material of my life. I think when you are growing up you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs, you’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did’” (np). 5 In interview with Lisa Dickler Awano, Munro notes that “sex was the enemy, because getting married would put an end to all that [ambition]. I mean, the worst thing that could possibly happen to a woman, as they used to say, is to have to get married, and that is having sex. So having sex was something you had to be very sure to keep control of” (184). 6 As Munro herself has admitted in an interview, “I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart’” (Treisman). 7 I am grateful to Robert Thacker, for pointing out this link to the other ending that appeared in the New Yorker. To this paragraph, Munro adds, “[i]f this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.” Thacker added that in “2013 I asked her about this paragraph and its omission from the book and she told me that she and Ann Close decided that it was too late to introduce this harrowing piece of information,” and also that “here she’s changed the facts, since she told me in 2003 that her Mother found a nurse who’d been looking after her and arrived at her home after her escape from the hospital. That woman approached Munro to tell her about the incident the day the Munro Literary Garden was being dedicated in Wingham” (From Thacker to Morra, “Re: Alice Munro Paper–‘It Was[n’t] All Inward’: The Dynamics of Intimacy in the ‘Finale’ of Alice Munro’s Dear Life” April 11, 2015, 8:25 a.m. See also Thacker, Alice 149).

Works Cited

Primary sources Munro, Alice. “Axis.” New Yorker January 31, 2011: 62–69. Munro, Alice. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” New Yorker December 27, 1999 and January 3, 2000: 110–27. Reprinted October 21, 2013: 72–85. Munro, Alice. The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose. New York: Knopf, 1979. Munro, Alice. Carried Away: A Selection of Stories. Introd. Margaret Atwood. New York: Everyman’s/Knopf, 2006. Munro, Alice. “Characters.” Ploughshares 4, no. 3 (April 1978): 72–82. Munro, Alice. “Corrie.” New Yorker October 11, 2010: 94–101. Munro, Alice. “Corrie.” In The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, edited by Laura Furman, 392–409, 427. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. Foreword Hugh Garner. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968. Munro, Alice. Dear Life. New York: Knopf, 2012. Munro, Alice [Laidlaw, Alice]. “The Dimensions of a Shadow.” Folio 4 (April 1950): n.p. Munro, Alice. “Dolly.” Tin House 13.4, no. 52 (2012): 65–80. Munro, Alice. “The Edge of Town.” Queen’s Quarterly 62 (1955): 368–80. Munro, Alice. Friend of My Youth. New York: Knopf, 1990. Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. New York: Knopf, 2001. Munro, Alice. “Home.” In New Canadian Stories 74, edited by David Helwig and Joan Harcourt, 133–53. Ottawa: Oberon, 1974. Munro, Alice. “Introduction.” Selected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1997. xiii–xxi. Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971. Munro, Alice. The Love of a Good Woman. Toronto: McClelland, 1998. Munro, Alice. The Moons of Jupiter. New York: Knopf, 1983. Munro, Alice. New Selected Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 2011.

232

Works Cited

Munro, Alice. No Love Lost. Afterword Jane Urquhart. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. Munro, Alice. Open Secrets. Toronto: McClelland, 1994. Munro, Alice. The Progress of Love. New York: Knopf, 1986. Munro, Alice. Runaway. New York: Knopf, 2004. Munro, Alice. Selected Stories. New York: Knopf, 1996. Munro, Alice. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974. Munro, Alice. Too Much Happiness. New York: Knopf, 2009. Munro, Alice. The View from Castle Rock. New York: Knopf, 2006. Munro, Alice. “Wenlock Edge.” New Yorker December 5, 2005: 80–91. Munro, Alice. “Wenlock Edge.” In Too Much Happiness, 64–94. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009. Munro, Alice. “What is Real?” In Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stories, edited by John Metcalf, 223–26. Toronto: Methuen, 1982. Munro, Alice. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan, 1978. Munro, Alice. “Working for a Living.” Grand Street 1, no. 1 (1981): 9–37. Munro, Alice. “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing.” In Writing Life: Celebrated Canadian and International Authors on Writing and Life, edited by Constance Rooke, 297–300. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006.

Archival sources Munro, Alice. Final page of “Meneseteung” by Alice Munro. Facsimile October 30, 1989. Virginia Barber Papers. Alice Munro Fonds. Special Collections Division. University of Calgary Libraries. MsC 883/11.5. Munro, Alice. Manuscript versions of “Axis.” Private Collection. Munro, Alice. The View from Castle Rock. First Pass Knopf Proofs. Alice Munro Fonds. Special Collections Division. University of Calgary Libraries. McC 323/1.1-2.

Interviews with Munro Munro, Alice. “Bringing Life to Life.” Interview with Cara Feinberg. The Atlantic.com/magazine/print/2001/12/bringing-life-to-life/303056/. Munro, Alice. “A Conversation with Alice Munro.” Interview with John Metcalf. Journal of Canadian Fiction 1, no. 4 (1972): 54–62.

Works Cited

233

Munro, Alice. Interview with Alice Munro. With Lisa Allardice. The Guardian December 6, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2013/dec/06/alice-munro-interview-nobel-prize-short-storyliterature (accessed March 30, 2015). Munro, Alice. Interview with Alice Munro. With Lisa Dickler Awano. Virginia Quarterly Review 89 (2013): 180–84. http://www.vqronline. org/vqr-portfolio/interview-alice-munro (accessed March 30, 2015). Munro, Alice. “An Interview with Alice Munro.” With Geoff Hancock. Canadian Fiction Magazine 43 (1983): 74–114. Munro, Alice. Interview with Robert Thacker. Unpublished. June 14, 2010. Munro, Alice. Interview with Robert Thacker. Unpublished. September 6, 2013. Munro, Alice. “Layers of Life.” Interview with Stephen Smith. Quill & Quire August 1994: 1, 24. Munro, Alice. “A Life in Writing: A Conversation with Eleanor Wachtel.” Queen’s Quarterly 112 (2005): 267–80. Munro, Alice. “On Dear Life.” Interview with Deborah Treisman. New Yorker November 20, 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/books/ page-turner/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro (accessed March 30, 2015). Munro, Alice. “The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro.” J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Probable Fictions. 5–36.

Secondary sources Ahmed, Sara. The Cutural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Aiken, Conrad. “Anton Chekhov.” In Collected Criticism. 1921, 148–53. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. The Alice Munro Papers: First Accession. Edited by Apollonia Steele and Jean F. Tener. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1986. Al-Shaykh, Hanan. “The New Shahrazad.” Sweet Briar College World Writers Series, March 15, 2000. Gifts of Speech. http://gos.sbc.edu/a/ Al-Shaykh.html. Al-Shaykh, Hanan. One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling. New York: Pantheon, 2013. Alvarez, A. “Life Studies.” Review of Runaway by Alice Munro. New York Review of Books (October 2, 2004): 23–24. Anderson, Judith. “Close Reading.” The Place of Spenser / Spenser’s Places. The Fifth International Spenser Society Conference. Dublin Castle, Dublin. June 20, 2015. oral address.

234

Works Cited

“Ate, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. http://www. oed.com/ (accessed August 30, 2015). Auden, W. H. “A. E. Housman.” In Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, 182. New York: Modern Library, 2007. Austen, Jane. Emma. The Novels of Jane Austen, vol. 4. Edited by R. W. Chapman. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Away from Her. Dir. Sarah Polley. Screenplay by Polley. Capri, 2007. Bakhtin, M. M. “From Rabelais and His World.” In The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, edited by Pam Morris, translated by H. Iswolsky, 194–244. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959. Barber, Lester E. “Alice Munro: The Stories of Runaway.” In ELOPE: Literary Criticism as Metacommunity: A Festschrift for Meta Grosman, edited by Smiljana Komar and Uros Mozetic, 144–56. Ljubljana: Slovene Association for the Study of English, 2006. Barth, John. Chimera. Greenwich: Fawcett Press, 1973. “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. http://www.niehs.nih.gov/ (accessed July 30, 2014). Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. New York: Grove, 1954. Blake, William. “The Mental Traveller.” In The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman. Commentary by Harold Bloom. Revised ed., 483–86. Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1982. Bloom, Harold. “Criticism, Canon-Formation, and Prophecy: The Sorrows of Facticity.” In Poetics of Influence: New and Selected Criticism, edited by John Hollander, 405–24. New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988. “The Book of Job.” In The Holy Bible, 653–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, n.d. Authorized King James Version. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights: The 1847 Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition. 4th ed. Edited by Richard J. Dunn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Brown, Rosellen. “Rural and Restless.” Review of Runaway by Alice Munro. New Leader (November to December 2004): 31–33. Buchholtz, Miroslawa. “Alice Munro’s Ecosophy: From Walker Brothers Cowboy (1968) to Dear Life (2012).” Le Simplegadi 12 (2012): 66–75. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Works Cited

235

Byatt, A. S. “Justice for Willa Cather.” Review of Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism by Joan Acocella. New York Review of Books (November 30, 2000): 51–53. Byatt, A. S. “Narrate or Die.” New York Times (April 18, 1999): 6. Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989. Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. “Recasting the Orpheus Myth: Alice Munro’s ‘The Children Stay’ and Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice.” The Rest of the Story. 191–203. Carscallen, James. The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro. Toronto: ECW, 1993. Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. 1918. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Edited by James Woodress, Charles Mignon with Karl Ronning. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! 1913. Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Edited by Charles W. Mignon, Susan J. Rosowski, and David Stouck with Kathleen Danker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Cather, Willa. “Stephen Crane’s Wounds in the Rain and Other Impressions of War.” 1926. Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Foreword by Stephen Tennant. 1949. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Chekhov, Anton. Letters on the Short Story the Drama and Other Literary Topics. Edited by Louis S. Friedland, 2nd ed. New York: Dover, 1966. Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” In Youth, and Two Other Stories. Complete Works. Kent ed, vol. 16, 45–162. Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1926. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition. 4th ed. Edited by P. B. Armstrong. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Cox, Alisa. “‘Almost Like a Ghost’: Spectral Figures in Alice Munro’s Short Fiction.” In Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian and British Writing, edited by Jochan Achilles and Ina Bermann, 238–50. New York: Routledge, 2015. Dante. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, 3 vols. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1949–62. DeFalco, Amelia. Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. Duckworth, George E. The Nature of Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.

236

Works Cited

Duffy, Dennis. “Alice Munro’s Narrative Historicism: ‘Too Much Happiness’.” The American Review of Canadian Studies 45 (2015): 196–207. Duffy, Dennis. “Too Little Geography; Too Much History: Writing the Balance in ‘Meneseteung’.” In National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada, edited by Andrea Cabasky and Brett Josef Grubisic, 197–213. Waterloo: Wifrid Laurier University Press, 2010. Duplessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of SelfInvention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Emeljanow, Victor, ed. Chekhov: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner’s, 2004. Fletcher, John. Freud and the Scene of Trauma. Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2013. Francesconi, Sabrina. “Alice Munro and the Poetics of the Linoleum.” In The Inside of a Shell: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, edited by Vanessa Guignéry, 86–97. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015. Print. Francesconi, Sabrina. “I and the Village: Locating Home and Self in Munro’s ‘Soon’.” In Reading Alice Munro in Italy, edited by Gianfranca Balestra, Laura Ferri, and Caterina Ricciardi, 71–81. Toronto: Frank Jacobucci Centre for Italian Canadian Studies, 2008. August 20, 2015. Franzen, Jonathan. “‘Runaway’: Alice’s Wonderland.” Review of Runaway by Alice Munro. New York Times Book Review (November 14, 2004): 1, 14–16. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Edited by Angela Richards. Translated by James Strachey. Penguin Freud Library, vol. 4. London: Penguin, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’.” Edited by Albert Dickson. Translated by James Strachey. Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14. London: Penguin, 1990. Frye, Northrop. “The Argument of Comedy.” In English Institute Essays 1948, edited by David Allen Robertson, 58–73. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. Frye, Northrop. “The Expanding World of Metaphor.” In Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988, edited by Robert D. Denham, 108–23. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

Works Cited

237

Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic, 1982. Frykholm, Amy. Review of Dear Life by Alice Munro. Christian Century (March 20, 2013): 40. Fuss, Diana. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Gallant, Mavis. “An Autobiography.” In The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories, 101–29. New York: Random House, 1973. Gass, William H. “Metaphor.” “The Biggs Lectures in the Classics.” In Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts, 267–88. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Gassner, John and Bernard F. Dukore, eds. A Treasury of the Theatre Volume II: From Henrik Ibsen to Robert Lowell, 4th ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Goldstein, Dana. The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. New York: Doubleday, 2014. Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Gravagne, Pamela H. The Becoming of Age: Cinematic Visions of Mind, Body and Identity in Later Life. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. http:// www.mcfarlandbooks.com/ (accessed July 31, 2014). Hancock, Geoff. “An Interview with Clark Blaise.” Canadian Fiction Magazine 34–35 (1980): 46–64. Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Hood, Hugh. “Flying a Red Kite.” Flying a Red Kite. 1962. Introduction by Hugh Hood. The Collected Stories, vol. 1, 185–96. Erin: The Porcupine’s Quill, 1987. Houston, Pam. “A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Metonymic Meaning in Munro’s ‘Meneseteung’.” Kenyon Review 14, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 79–92. Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Contemporary World Writers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Howells, Coral Ann. “Intimate Dislocations: Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” In Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction, 53–78. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler. In Treasury of the Theatre Volume II: from Henrik Ibsen to Robert Lowell, edited by John Gassner and Bernard F. Dukore, 4th edn, 38–70. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Irvine, Lorna. “Women’s Desire/Women’s Power: The Moons of Jupiter.” In Sub/version, 91–110. Toronto: ECW, 1986.

238

Works Cited

Jarrell, Randall. “On Preparing to Read Kipling” (1961). In Kipling, Auden, & Co.: Essays and Reviews 1935–64, 332–445. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. Johnson, L. Syd M. and Timothy M. Krahn. “Intimate Relationships and Dementia—An Extended Commentary on Away from Her.” Journal of Ethics in Mental Health 5, no. 1 (2010): 1–11. http://www.jemh. ca/ (accessed August 2, 2014). Joyce, James. “A Little Cloud” and “The Dead.” In Dubliners: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Margot Norris, 57–69, 151–94. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by John Paul Riquelme. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986. Kakutani, Michiko. “Realizing that Certainty is Inevitably Uncertain.” Review of Runaway by Alice Munro. New York Times (December 7, 2004): E1. Keroes, Jo. Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Labaree, David F. Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Labaree, David F. The Trouble with Ed Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973. Leacock, Stephen. “L’Envoi: The Train to Mariposa.” In Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. 1912, 237–47. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2013. Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2008. LeGouic, Claire. “The Myths We Live By in Alice Munro’s ‘Comfort’.” Open Letter 13, no. 2 (2007): 62–71. Lejeune, Philippe. “On Autobiography.” In Theory and History of Literature, vol. 52. Edited by Paul John Eakin. Translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. 1936. New York: Galaxy, 1958. Lindemann, Hilde. “Holding One Another (Well, Wrongly, Clumsily) in a Time of Dementia.” Metaphilosophy 40, nos. 3–4 (2009): 416–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable24439793 (accessed August 2, 2014).

Works Cited

239

Lortie, Dan C. School-Teacher: A Sociological Study, With a New Preface. 1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Love, Barbara. Review of Dear Life by Alice Munro. Library Journal (November 1, 2012): 65. Lowe, Lisa. “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by A. L. Stoler, 191–212. Durham: Duke University of Press, 2006. Manguel, Alberto. The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm: The Reader as Metaphor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Marlatt, Daphne. “‘Perform[ing] on the Stage of Her Text.’” In Readings from the Labyrinth. The Writer as Critic VI, 200–12. Edmonton: NeWest, 1998. Martin, W. R. “Alice Munro and James Joyce.” Journal of Canadian Fiction 24 (1979): 120–26. May, Charles E. “Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction: ‘In the Beginning Was the Story’.” In Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, edited by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey, 62–73. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. May, Charles E. “Munro’s ‘Pride’: A Life Well-Lived.” http://may-on-theshort-story.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/pride-alice-munro-harpersapril-2011.html (accessed July 15, 2015). May, Charles E. “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 21 (1984): 327–38. Mazur, Carol and Cathy Moulder. Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2007. McGahern, John. “Heroine of Their Lives.” Times Literary Supplement (November 9, 2001): 23–24. McGill, Robert. “‘Daringly out in the Public Eye’: Alice Munro and the Ethics of Writing Back.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76 (2007): 874–89. McGill, Robert. “No Nation but Adaptation: ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’, Away from Her, and What It Means to Be Faithful.” Canadian Literature 197 (2008): 98–111. McGill, Robert. “Where Do You Think You Are? Alice Munro’s Open Houses.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 35, no. 4 (2002): 103–19. Melsom, Ryan. “Roberta’s Raspberry Bombe and Critical Indifference in Alice Munro’s ‘Labor Day Dinner’.” Studies in Canadian Literature 34 (2009): 142–59. Moore, Lorrie. “Artship.” Review of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro. New York Review of Books (January 17, 2002): 41–42.

240

Works Cited

Moore, Lorrie. “Leave Them and Love Them.” Review of Runaway by Alice Munro. The Atlantic (December 2004): 125–28. Morra, Linda. “‘Don’t Take her Word For It’: Autobiographical Approximation and Shame in Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.” In Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art, edited by Janice Fiamengo and Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2016. Moss, Laura and Cynthia Sugars, eds. Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, vol. 2. Toronto: Pearson, 2009. Munro, Sheila. Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001. Norris, Margot. “Men Under a Cloud in ‘A Little Cloud’.” In Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners, 109–21, 246–48. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. O’Connor, Flannery. “Revelation.” In Everything That Rises Must Converge, 191–218. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Olney, James. Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Osachoff, Margaret Gail. “‘Treacheries of the Heart’: Memoir, Confession, and Meditation in the Stories of Alice Munro.” Probable Fictions. 61–82. Ovid. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Translated by Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1955. Plautus. “Amphitryon and The Menaechmus Twins.” In Six Plays of Plautus, edited and translated by Lionel Casson, 1–65, 180–248. New York: Anchor, 1963. Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Revised ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pritchett, V. S. “Short Stories.” Harper’s Bazaar 87 (1953): 31, 113. Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts. Edited by Louis K. MacKendrick. Downsview: ECW, 1983. Rae, Ian. “Runaway Classicists: Anne Carson and Alice Munro’s ‘Juliet’ Stories.” Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle, Journal of the Short Story in English 55 (2010): 141–56. Raitt, A. W. “Flaubert and the Art of the Short Story.” In Essays by Divers Hands. New Series, vol. 38, edited by John Gust, 112–26. London: Oxford University Press, 1975. Rajan, Balachandra. W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965. Ravitch, Diane. The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. New York: Knopf, 2003. Ravitch, Michael. Review of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro. Yale Review 90 (2002): 160–70. Redekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. London: Routledge, 1992.

Works Cited

241

Resnick, Muriel. Any Wednesday. New York: Dell, 1964. The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro. Edited by Robert Thacker. Toronto: ECW, 1999. Review of Dear Life by Alice Munro. Publishers Weekly (September 24, 2012): 161. Rooke, Constance. “Between the World and the Word: John Metcalf’s ‘The Teeth of My Father’.” In Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing, 157–62. Toronto: Coach House, 1989. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. “Chronology.” In Alice Munro: A Double Life, 9–13. Toronto: ECW, 1992. Schama, Chloe. “Not Quite Stories—Alice Munro’s Almost Autobiography.” Review of Dear Life by Alice Munro. New Republic November 14, 2012. http://www.newrepublic.com/book/review/notquite-stories-alice-munro-almost- autobiography (accessed May 4, 2014). Schechtman, Marya. “Getting Our Stories Straight: Self-Narrative and Personal Identity.” In Personal Identity and Fractured Selves: Perspectives from Philosophy, Ethics, and Neuroscience, edited by Debra J. H. Mathews, Hilary Bok, and Peter V. Rabins, 65–92. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Scott, Eugenie and Glenn Branch. “Evolution: What’s Wrong with ‘Teaching the Controversy’.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18 (2003): 499–502. Scurr, Ruth. “The Darkness of Alice Munro.” Review of New Selected Stories by Alice Munro. Times Literary Supplement (October 4, 2011). http://www.the-tls.co.uk/ (accessed August 20, 2015). Shack, Sybil. Armed With a Primer: A Canadian Teacher Looks at Children, Schools, and Parents. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra, The Comedy of Errors, The History of Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Simonds, Merilyn. Review of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro. Montreal Gazette (September 29, 2001): 11. Simpson, Mona. “A Quiet Genius.” Review of Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro. Atlantic (December 2001): 126–35.

242

Works Cited

Skaff, Marilyn M. and Leonard I. Pearlin. “Caregiving: Role Engulfment and the Loss of Self.” Gerontologist 32, no. 5 (1992): 656–64. ProQuest. http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/ (accessed August 2, 2014). Smee, Sebastian. “The Dangerous Edge of Things.” Review of Runaway by Alice Munro. Spectator (January 22, 2005): 32. Stich, K. P. “The Cather Connection in Alice Munro’s ‘Dulse’.” Modern Language Studies 20, no. 4 (1989): 102–11. Stoler, Laura Ann. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Stoler, Laura Ann. “Genealogies of the Intimate.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 87–109. Stoler, Laura Ann. “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, 1–22. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Struthers, J. R. (Tim). “Alice Munro and the American South.” 1975. Rev. and enlarged in Short Story Criticism: Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers, vol. 208. Edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, 99–117. Farmington Hills: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2015. Struthers, J. R. (Tim). “Alice Munro’s Fictive Imagination.” In The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, edited by Judith Miller, 103–12. Waterloo: University of Waterloo Press, 1984. Struthers, J. R. (Tim). “Book by Book: A Checklist of Alice Munro’s 148 Collected Stories, 1968-2012.” In Alice Munro and the Souwesto Story. Edited by J. R. (Tim) Struthers. Short Story New Series 21, no. 1 (2013): 139–43. Struthers, J. R. (Tim). “Reality and Ordering: The Growth of a Young Artist in Lives of Girls and Women.” Essays on Canadian Writing 3 (1975): 32–46. Struthers, J. R. (Tim). “A Visionary Tradition.” In The Visionary Tradition in Canadian Writing, edited by Russell Morton Brown and J. R. (Tim) Struthers. University of Toronto Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2001): 947–48. Szabó, Andrea F. “Munro’s Auden: Letters from Iceland.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 14, no. 1 (2008): 105–15. http://www.jstor.org/ (accessed February 18, 2014). Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory. The New Critical Idiom. Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2010. Thacker, Robert. “Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography.” In The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors, vol. 5, edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, 354–414. Downsview: ECW, 1984.

Works Cited

243

Thacker, Robert. “Alice Munro’s Willa Cather.” Canadian Literature 134 (1992): 42–57. Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography. A Douglas Gibson Book. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005. Updated ed. Toronto: Emblem, 2011. Thacker, Robert. “A ‘Booming Tender Sadness’: Alice Munro’s Irish.” In Canada: Text and Territory, edited by Elizabeth Tilley and Máire Áine Ní Mhainnin, 132–40. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Thacker, Robert. “‘Clear Jelly’: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics.” Probable Fictions. 37–60. Thacker, Robert. “‘Evocative and Luminous Phrases’: Reading Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” The American Review of Canadian Studies 45 (2015): 187–95. Thacker, Robert. Interview with Deborah Treisman. July 19, 2010. Thacker, Robert. “‘One Knows It Too Well to Know It Well’: Willa Cather, A. E. Housman, and A Shropshire Lad.” In Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century. Cather Studies 10, edited by Anne L. Kaufman and Richard Millington, 300–27. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Thacker, Robert. “So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life: Autobiography in Alice Munro’s Stories.” In Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature, edited by K. P. Stich. Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 14, 153–61. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988. “thaumaturgy, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. http://www.oed.com/ (accessed August 30, 2015). Tolan, Fiona. “To Leave and to Return: Frustrated Departures and Female Quests in Alice Munro’s Runaway.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 4 (2010): 161–78. Turchi, Peter. “Metaphor: Or, the Map.” In Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, 11–25. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2004. Ventura, Héliane. “The Relevance of the Chimera: Ekphrasis, Anamorphosis and Phantasy in ‘Runaway’ by Alice Munro.” The Relevance of Theory. Tropismes 16 (2010): 239–260. http://revues.uparis10.fr/index.php/tropismes/article/download/409/497 (accessed August 20, 2015). Ventura, Héliane. “The Skald and the Goddess: Reading ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ by Alice Munro.” Journal of the Short Story in English 55 (2010). http://jsse.revues.org/ (accessed February 18, 2014). Walker, Judith and Hsing Chi von Bergmann. “Teacher Education Policy in Canada: Beyond Professionalization and Deregulation.” Canadian Journal of Education 36, no. 4 (2013): 65–92.

244

Works Cited

Waller, Willard. The Sociology of Teaching. 1932. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961. Warner, Marina. Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New Accents. London: Methuen, 1984. Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” Intentions. 1891. Rpt. in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellmann. 1969, 290–320. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Wills, Garry. Head and Heart: A History of Christianity in America. New York: Penguin, 2007. Wilson, Ethel. “The Journey.” In The Innocent Traveller, 91–122. Toronto: Macmillan, 1949. Wilson, Ethel. “A Visit to the Frontier.” The Tamarack Review 33 (1964): 55–65. Wilson, Ethel. “The Window.” The Tamarack Review 8 (1958): 3–16. Winner, Paul. “Joy Williams: The Art of Fiction no. 223. The Paris Review Summer 2014, No. 209. http://www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/6303/the-art-of-fiction-no-223-joy-williams (accessed November 1, 2015). Wood, James. “Alice Munro, Our Chekhov.” New Yorker (October 10, 2013). http://www.newyorker.com/ (accessed August 11, 2015).

Further Reading

Because Munro writes short stories only, and because those stories are daunting in their complexities, her work has proved elusive in the hands of those attempting comprehensive scholarly monographs. Several appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s, but since then most analyses have been through critical articles, so readers are directed to the MLA International Bibliography and other databases to examine the full extent of critical work on Munro. Since she was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, there has been increased publication of special journal issues focused on her work—that trend had begun in North America before the Nobel, but it has increased worldwide since. The following is a short selection of significant biographical and critical works reflecting the whole of Munro’s career. My most recent book, Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013, is a selection of my own essays on Munro, reprinted and contextualized; it is intended to track the growth of her critical reputation from the 1950s to the present. Blodgett, E. D. Alice Munro. Twayne’s World Authors Series. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alice Munro. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009. Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989. Carscallen, James. The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro. Toronto: ECW, 1993. Cox, Ailsa. Alice Munro. Writers and Their Works. Horndon, Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House, 2004. Duncan, Isla. Alice Munro’s Narrative Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Contemporary World Writers Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. MacKendrick, Louis K., ed. Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts. Downsview, ON: ECW, 1983.

246

Further Reading

May, Charles E., ed. Critical Insights: Alice Munro. Ipswich, MA: Salem, 2013. Munro, Sheila. Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001. Redekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. London: Routledge, 1992. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW, 1992. Thacker, Robert, ed. The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro. Toronto: ECW, 1999. Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography. Revised ed. Toronto: Emblem, 2011. Thacker, Robert. Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016.

Notes on Contributors

Volume Editor Robert Thacker is Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University. Beginning in the 1970s, he focused much of his scholarly attention on Alice Munro and her work as she emerged as the major Canadian writer of her generation. Writing an early M. A. thesis on Munro (1976), Thacker has continued to publish critical essays and reviews since then. A selection of these essays, newly contextualized, was published in 2016 by the University of Calgary Press: Reading Alice Munro, 1973–2013. In 1984, he defined the landscape of Munro Studies with the first annotated bibliography of her work and this volume is the third edited collection of Munro essays by various hands: his The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro (1999) is a noted collection and, more recently, he has edited a special issue on Munro of The American Review of Canadian Studies (2015). He is also Munro’s biographer, having published Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005, revised 2011), a book written with Ms. Munro’s cooperation. After she received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, Munro asked Thacker to write her biography for the Nobel Foundation. It is available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2013/munro-bio.html.

Contributors Lester E. Barber is trustee professor of English emeritus at Bowling Green State University, where he taught Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and modern drama. He was a two-term department chair

248

Notes on Contributors

and served for seven years as executive assistant to the president and secretary of the Board of Trustees. His earlier essay on Runaway appeared in ELOPE (Slovene Association for the Study of English, 2006). He is author of Misogonus: Edited with an Introduction (Garland, 1979) and has published essays in Shakespeare Quarterly and English Language Notes. He taught American literature as a foreign expert/professor at the Xi’an Foreign Languages University, China; was a Fulbright professor of American literature at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; and was visiting professor of English at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Ailsa Cox is professor of short fiction at Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom. Her books include Alice Munro (Northcote House), Writing Short Stories (Routledge), The Real Louise and Other Stories (Headland Press); and (with Christine Lorre-Johnston), The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (Fahrenheit, Paris). Essays and book chapters on Munro’s work have also been widely published. She is the editor of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice published by Intellect Press. Charles E. May is professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of The Reality of Artifice: The Short Story¸ The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and I Am Your Brother: Short Story Studies. He is the editor of Fiction’s Many Worlds, Short Story Theories, The New Short Story Theories, Critical Insights: Flannery O’Connor and Critical Insights: Alice Munro. He has published over three hundred articles and reviews on the short story and maintains a blog, Reading the Short Story, at may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com. Robert McGill is the author of two novels, The Mysteries and Once We Had a Country, as well as a book of literary criticism, The Treacherous Imagination: Intimacy, Ethics, and Autobiographical Fiction. His articles on Alice Munro have appeared in a/b: Auto/ Biography, Canadian Literature, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Mosaic and University of Toronto Quarterly. He is an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto. Linda M. Morra is an associate professor in the English Department at Bishop’s University, where she teaches Canadian, American, and

Notes on Contributors

249

Indigenous literatures. She published Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship (University of Toronto Press, 2014), coedited Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), and produced an edition of Jane Rule’s memoir, Taking My Life (Talonbooks 2011), which was shortlisted for the LAMBDA prize. Eric Reeves is professor of English at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and began teaching at Smith the same year. He has written on a wide range of literary figures, and his literary research over the past fifteen years has focused on Alice Munro. He has regularly taught a seminar on the “Fiction of Alice Munro,” which has become increasingly popular among Smith students. He plans to extend the central argument of the essay in the present volume to several other of Munro’s collection of stories. Julie Rivkin is professor of English at Connecticut College. She is the author of False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction and is now editing the critical edition of What Maisie Knew forthcoming in the Complete Fiction of Henry James from Cambridge University Press. Rivkin is also coeditor (with Michael Ryan) of Literary Theory: An Anthology (1998, 2004), and has given several papers on Alice Munro, most recently at the University of Ottawa’s 2014 Munro Symposium. J. R. (Tim) Struthers—a bibliographer, interviewer, critic, editor, and small-press publisher—has been publishing on the short story for four decades, including two of the first articles on Alice Munro in 1975. To date he has edited or coedited some twenty-five volumes of theory, criticism, autobiography, fiction, and poetry. His recent writing includes four other studies of Munro: a first essay on “Meneseteung” in Charles E. May’s Critical Insights: Alice Munro (2013); the partly bibliographical, partly critical, partly creative “Song for Alice Munro” in a special Alice Munro issue of Short Story (Spring 2013) that he edited; a second essay on “Meneseteung” in a special Alice Munro issue of Windsor Review (Fall 2014) that he coedited; and a much-expanded version of his pioneering “Alice Munro and the American South” published in Short Story Criticism

250

Notes on Contributors

(Vol. 208, 2015). An enthusiastic teacher, Tim has taught full-time at the University of Guelph for more than thirty years. Tracy Ware has been teaching Canadian literature at Queen’s since 1994, after teaching Romanticism for seven years at Bishop’s University. He is the reviews editor for Canadian Poetry, and has published on Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Poe, Trilling, Keneally, Naipaul, and various aspects of Canadian literature. This latter work includes essays on Munro’s “The Ottawa Valley” and “Meneseteung” and, forthcoming in The Miraculous Art of Alice Munro from the University of Ottawa Press in 2016, one on “Jakarta.”

Index

Achilles  105, 107, 227 n.4 The Aethiopica (Heliodorus)  113 Agamemnon  105, 108, 227 n.4 Ahmed, Sara  204, 206 Aiken, Conrad  28 Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Mazur and Moulder) 166 “Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography” (Thacker) 166 “Alice Munro’s Fictive Imagination” (Struthers) 170 Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (Thacker) 166, 226 n.16, 227 n.3, 229 n.1, 230 n.7 The Allegory of Love (Lewis)  179 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare)  229 n.9 Al-Shaykh, Hanan  26 Alvarez, A.  122 Alzheimer’s disease  66–73, 75, 81, 84 American National Teachers Association 56 Amphiryon (Plautus)  139 Anchises 108 Anderson, Judith  179 Angell, Roger  18 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)  148

Anouilh, Jean  55 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)  123–4, 138 Any Wednesday (Resnick)  228 n.7 Aphrodite 108 As You Like It (Shakespeare)  138, 139, 150 Atlantic Monthly  3, 28, 39 Auden, W. H.  8 Austen, Jane  129, 131 “An Autobiography” (Gallant) 180 Awano, Lisa Dickler  230 n.5 Away From Her (Polley)  3, 24, 65, 84 Bakhtin, M. M.  160, 184–5, 191, 197 Barber, C. L.  227 n.2 Barber, Lester E.  88–90, 227 n.1 Barber, Virginia  4 Barth, John  25–6 Beckett, Samuel  179 Blaise, Clark  174–5, 176, 177 Blake, William  165 Bloom, Harold  167 Branch, Glenn  56, 59 British Columbia  3, 5, 12 Brontë, Emily  176 Brown, Rosellen  122 Bruce Peninsula (Ontario)  16 Buchholtz, Miroslawa  213

252

Index

Burke, Kenneth  130 Byatt, A. S.  20, 26–7

Duffy, Dennis  6–7, 9 Duplessis, Rachel Blau  181

Canadian Fiction Magazine 174 Canadian Literature in English (Moss and Sugars)  222 n.1 Canadian Shield  7, 17–18, 150 Carried Away (Munro)  65 Carrington, Ildikó de Papp  45, 50, 54 Carscallen, James  220 n.11 Carson, Anne  226 n.19 Cather, Willa  7, 20, 92–4, 218 n.6 Chekhov, Anton  27–8 Chryseis and Briseis (Homer)  105–7, 108, 113, 227 n.4 Clinton, Ontario  8 Close, Ann  230 n.7 Colpoy’s Bay (Ontario)  16 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) 139 Conrad, Joseph  114, 130, 179, 182 Cox, Ailsa  160–1, 204 Crane, Stephen  20 “Criticism, Canon-Formation, and Prophecy” (Bloom)  167 The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Ahmed) 204

Eakin, Paul John  164, 169, 174 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray) 144 Emma (Austen)  129 Eurydice (Anouilh)  55 “The Expanding World of Metaphor” (Frye)  174

Dante Alighieri  175, 182 “The Dead” (Joyce)  173–4, 176 DeFalco, Amelia  70, 78 Dickinson, Emily  115 The Divine Comedy (Dante)  155–7, 175, 182 Dodds, E. R.  89, 95, 97–105, 108, 109, 113, 225 n.7, 225 n.11 Donne, John  92, 115 Dubliners (Joyce)  170, 172, 173–4

Fabulation and Metafiction (Scholes) 170 Falwell, Jerry  58 Fathers and Sons (Turgenev)  41 Fictions in Autobiography (Eakin)  164, 166 Fish, Stanley  59, 220 n.14 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  193 Flaubert, Gustave  27 Fletcher, John  178 Flying a Red Kite (Hood)  175 Forster, E. M.  28 Francesconi, Sabrina  225 n.13, 226 n.16 Franzen, Jonathan  24, 65, 87–8 Fremlin, Gerald  8, 12–13, 160 Freud, Sigmund  178, 180 Freud and the Scene of Trauma (Fletcher) 178 Frontenac Axis  14–15, 17 Frye, Northrop  174, 182, 227 n.2 Frykholm, Amy  203, 205 Fuss, Diana  62 Gallant, Mavis  180 Gass, William H.  175 Gassner, John  142 geological sensibility (Munro)  7, 8–11, 12, 13–16 Goderich, Ontario  139 Goldstein, Dana  44, 63

Index

The Gondoliers (Gilbert and Sullivan) 155 Granta 1 Gravague, Pamela H.  222 n.9 Gray, Thomas  144 The Great Code (Frye)  182 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) 193, 229 n.2 The Greeks and the Irrational (Dodds)  89, 95, 97–105, 108, 109, 113, 225 n.7, 225 n.11 Gurganus, Allan  7, 28 Hancock, Geoff  27, 174 Harper’s 1 Haunted by Empire (Stoler)  230 n.3 Heart of Darkness (Conrad)  130, 178–9, 181–2 Heble, Ajay  219 n.8 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen)  140–2 Heliodorus  94, 113 Henry V (Shakespeare)  227 n.4 Homer  94, 99, 105, 111 Hood, Hugh  175 Horace  7, 31, 92 Housman, A. E.  4, 8 Howells, Coral Ann  52, 59 Huron County (Ontario)  3, 4, 8, 10, 12–13, 125 The Iliad (Homer)  105–6, 109, 113 The Innocent Traveller (Wilson)  164, 176 Irvine, Lorna  52, 220 n.10 James, William  97 Jarrell, Randall  1, 19 Johnson, L. Syd M.  222 n.2 Joyce, James  170

253

Kakutani, Michiko  115, 122 Keroes, Jo  219 n.4 Khayaam, Omar  31 Kipling, Rudyard  1, 19 Knopf, Alfred A.  20 Kovalevsky, Sophia  4 Krahn, Timothy M.  222 n.3 Labaree, David F.  46, 50, 63 Laidlaw, Anne Chamney  2, 11, 18, 218 n.3 Laidlaw, Robert Eric  11 Laidlaw Family  159, 164 Lake Huron  5, 139 Lane, Edward  26 Laplanche, J.  223 n.17 Leacock, Stephen  164 Lecker, Robert  222 n.1 LeGouic, Claire  60 Lejeune, Phillippe  177 Lewis, C. S.  179 Lindemann, Hilde  68, 72 “A Little Cloud” (Joyce)  172 Lortie, Dan C.  63, 218 n.3 Love, Barbara  229 n.1 Lowe, Lisa  204 Lower Wingham, Ontario  5 McGahern, John  25 McGill, Robert  23–4, 87, 222 n.6, 222 n.11, 223 n.18 Manguel, Alberto  180 Marlatt, Daphne  167 Martin, W. R.  174 Marvell, Andrew  92 May, Charles E.  7, 22–3, 173, 174 Mazur, Carol  166 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare)  229 n.9 Melsom, Ryan  52, 53, 220 n.10, 222 n.11

254

Index

The Menaechmus Twins (Plautus) 139 Metafiction (Waugh)  170 Metamorphoses (Ovid)  168 “Metaphor” (Gass)  175 “Metaphoric Motivation in the Short Story” (May)  174 “Metaphor: Or, the Map” (Tuchi) 174 Metaphors of Self (Olney)  174 Metcalf, John  167 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare)  78, 150, 228 n.5, 228 n.6 The Montrealer 47 Moore, Lorrie  25, 224 n.2 Moral Majority  56 Morra, Linda  161 Moss, Laura  222 n.1 Moulder, Cathy  166 Mount Parnassus  95 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)  52 Munro, Alice Laidlaw  2–20, 22, 27, 39, 49, 63, 88–9, 115, 123–4, 139, 144–5, 167, 168–9, 183, 201–2, 219 n.6, 226 n.2, 227 n.3, 229 n.1, 230 n.4, 230 n.5, 230 n.6, 230 n.7 works The Beggar Maid  8, 9–10, 49–50, 63–4, 182, 219 n.7; “Half a Grapefruit” 49–50; “Privilege” 49; “Providence” 182; “Royal Beatings” 92, 224–5 n.5; “Who Do You Think You Are?” 93, 224 n.3 Carried Away 65 Dance of the Happy Shades  8, 11, 46, 117, 164, 174; “Boys and Girls” 11; “Dance of the Happy Shades” 117–18,

220 n.9; “Day of the Butterfly” 44, 46–7, 63; “The Peace of Utrecht” 11; “Red Dress—1946” 47; “The Time of Death” 174; “Walker Brothers Cowboy” 8, 164 Dear Life  1–2, 4, 6, 11, 18, 159–61, 164, 173, 182, 184, 197, 200, 201–2, 203; “Amundsen” 160, 164, 185; “Corrie” 160–1, 184, 189–94; “Dear Life” 11, 161, 209, 210, 211–13, 216; “Dolly” 1–2, 18, 160, 161, 184, 194–202; “The Eye” 2, 161, 205–9, 211, 213, 229 n.1; “Finale” 1–2, 6, 10, 11, 202–16, 229 n.1; “Gravel” 160; “Haven” 182; “In Sight of the Lake” 197–8; “Leaving Maverley” 160, 185; “Night” 2, 11, 213–16; “Pride” 160, 184–9, 191, 198; “To Reach Japan” 15, 18, 160, 164, 168, 169–70, 173–9, 181–3; “Train” 18, 160; “Voices” 2, 209–11, 213 Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995–2014 21 Friend of My Youth  5, 135, 171, 182; “Differently” 171–3; “Friend of My Youth” 135–6; “Goodness and Mercy” 182; “Hold me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass” 51; “Meneseteung” 4–5, 6, 7, 226 n.15 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage  3, 21–4,

Index

25, 28–43, 45, 59, 61, 65, 74, 89, 135; “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” 3, 23–4, 65–85, 87; “Comfort” 23, 44–6, 55–63, 220 n.13, 221 n.16; “Family Furnishings” 3, 21–2, 38; “Floating Bridge” 31–3, 35; “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” 7, 22, 29–31, 89, 91–2, 94, 222 n.7; “Nettles” 3, 18, 33–6, 61, 119, 135; “Post and Beam” 3, 36–9; “What is Remembered” 3, 39–42, 119 Lives of Girls and Women  12, 47–9, 63, 92, 167–8, 174, 224 n.4 The Love of a Good Woman “The Children Stay”  46, 54–5; “The Love of a Good Woman” 3, 78 The Moons of Jupiter 52, 132, 182; “Accident” 51–2, 132, 182, 219 n.7, 219 n.8, 220 n.11; “Chaddeleys and Flemings 1. Connection” 88; “Labor Day Dinner” 46, 52–4, 220 n.10; “The Moons of Jupiter” 11, 226 n.16 New Selected Stories 65, 97–8 No Love Lost 65 Open Secrets  117; “Carried Away” 223 n.4; “A Real Life” 95; “A Wilderness Station” 4, 119 PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 192–3

255

The Progress of Love 7, 164, 166, 182; “Eskimo” 164; “Fits” 182; “Miles City, Montana” 22, 226 n.14; “The Progress of Love” 119, 136; “White Dump” 7, 8, 12–13, 15, 89, 91, 164–5 Runaway  3, 8, 19, 20, 87–90, 94, 114–15, 117, 119, 120, 122, 129, 131–2, 134, 136, 137–8, 143–5, 148, 154, 158, 159, 182, 193; “Chance” 3, 8, 17–19, 89, 90, 94–110, 131, 133, 136, 148, 150–1, 182, 227 n.4; “Juliet Triptych” 3, 8, 17, 20, 87–90, 91, 94, 122, 125–9, 133–4, 137, 148–51; “Passion” 2, 88, 90, 119, 122, 124–5, 129, 144–8; “Powers” 3, 88–90, 119, 120–2, 129, 132–3, 134, 136, 153–8, 229 n.9; “Runaway” 3, 88, 93, 117, 137, 151–3, 228 n.5, 228 n.6; “Silence” 3, 8, 93, 113, 126–9, 131, 148; “Soon” 3, 8, 110–13, 125–6, 148–51, 193, 221 n.15, 226 n.16, 226 n.18; “Trespasses” 119, 134–5, 137; “Tricks” 89, 119, 122–4, 134, 138–44, 150–1, 155 Selected Stories 18–19, 218 n.7, 227 n.3 Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You  170; “Marrakesh” 50–1, 63; “Material” 200, 223 n.18; “The Ottawa

256

Index

Valley” 170; “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” 170, 220 n.12 Too Much Happiness 4, 169, 170, 173, 189; “Dimension” 4; “Face” 4, 160–1, 189; “Fiction” 4, 170–1, 220 n.9; “Too Much Happiness” 4, 159, 170, 173; “Wenlock Edge” 4, 8, 217 n.; “Wood” 4, 159 Uncollected Works “Axis” 13–16, 18, 217 n.4, 217 n.5; “Characters” 9–10, 12, 13, 18, 167; “The Dimensions of a Shadow” 44–5; “The Edge of Town” 8; “What is Real?” 24, 27; “Writing. Or, Giving Up Writing” 183 Unpublished Works “The Boy Murderer”  18; “Drumlin” 9; “Places at Home” 8–9, 217 n.2; “Pleistocene” 9, 12; “The War Hero” 18 The View From Castle Rock  3, 5, 10, 19, 159, 164, 172, 173, 182; “Fathers” 3; “Hired Girl” 3, 172–3, 219 n.4; “Home” 3, 5–6; “Lying Under the Apple Tree” 3; “No Advantages” 182; “What Do You Want to Know For?” 10–11, 12, 173, 217 n.3; “Working for a Living” 3, 11, 218 n.3 Who Do You Think You Are?  8, 9–10,

49–50, 63–4, 182; “Half a Grapefruit” 49–50; “Privilege” 49; “Providence” 182; “Royal Beatings” 92, 224–5 n.5; “Who Do You Think You Are?” 93, 224 n.3 Munro, James  176 Munro, Sheila  226 n.16 Murry, John Middleton  28 My Ántonia (Cather)  7, 20, 92–4, 225 n.8 Nabokov, Vladimir  130 Narrative 1 “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction” (May) 173 New Yorker  1, 4, 5, 8, 16, 22, 24, 53, 54, 65, 73, 88, 159, 161, 208, 213, 218 n.1 New York Review of Books 122 New York Times Book Review  24, 65, 87, 218 n.7 Niagara Escarpment (Ontario) 15–16 Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario 139 Nobel Prize in Literature  20, 24, 65, 174 Norris, Margot  172 Norse Mythology  82 Odysseus Myth  134 Olivier, Sir Laurence  227 n.4 Olney, James  174 Ontario  2, 3, 5, 7–8, 10, 12, 14, 17–18, 23, 159 Open Country (Lecker)  222 n.1 O Pioneers! (Cather)  218 n.6 Osachoff, Margaret Gail  182 Ovid  94, 168 Owen Sound, Ontario  16

Index

Pale Fire (Nabokov)  130 Paris Review 42 “‘Perform[ing] on the Stage of Her Text’” (Marlatt) 161 Plautus 139 Pnin (Nabokov)  130 Poe, Edgar Allan  37 The Poetic Edda  7, 224 n.1 Polley, Sarah  24 Pontalis, J.-B.  223 n.17 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)  174 Prichett, V. S.  28 Publisher’s Weekly  230 n.2 Rae, Ian  224 n.2, 226 n.19 Rajan, Balachandra  165 Ravitch, Michael  42 Redekop, Magdalene  184, 195, 219 n.5, 224 n.1 Reeves, Eric  17, 18, 19, 88–90, 160 Resnick, Muriel  228 n.7 Rideau Lakes (Ontario)  7, 12 Rivkin, Julie  7, 20, 88–90 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)  139–40, 143, 150 Rooke, Constance  6 St. Lawrence Lowlands  7 Sampson, William T.  20 Schama, Chloe  229 n.1 Schectman, Mary  67 Scheherazade  22, 25–6, 43 Scholes, Robert  170 Scott, Eugenie  56, 59 Scurr, Ruth  97–8, 225 n.12 Shack, Sybil  63 Shakespearean  89, 111, 138–41, 155, 194, 227 n.4, 228 n.5, 228 n.8 Shaw Festival  139

257

A Shropshire Lad (Housman)  8 Simonds, Merilyn  28 Simpson, Mona  3, 7, 28 “ ‘So Shocking a Verdict in Real Life’: Autobiography in Alice Munro’s Stories” (Thacker)  166, 169 Spenser, Edmund  179 Stevens, Wallace  115 Stich, K. P.  20, 225 n.6 Stoler, Ann Laura  204, 230 n.3 Stranger Magic (Warner)  27 Stratford, Ontario  138–9 Stratford Festival (Ontario)  138–9 Struthers, J. R. (Tim)  15, 19, 160, 218 n.2 Sugars, Cynthia  222 n.1 Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Leacock) 164 Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners (Norris)  172 Szabó, Andrea F.  69 The Tamarack Review 168 The Teacher Wars (Goldsteine)  44 Thacker, Robert  166, 169, 213, 218 n.2, 219 n.6, 221 n.16, 224 n.4, 224 n.6, 226 n.1, 226 n.16, 226 n.18, 227 n.3, 229 n.1, 230 n.7 Thousand and One Nights (Scheherazade) 22, 25–7, 31 Tin House  1, 184, 195–6, 200–1 The Traveler, The Tower and the Worm (Manguel)  180 Treisman, Deborah  208 Tristram Shandy (Sterne)  18–19 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare)  228 n.8, 229 n.9

258

Index

Turchi, Peter  174 Turgenev, Ivan  41 Ulysses (Joyce)  174 University of Calgary  19 University of Western Ontario  3, 13 Updike, John  218 n.7 Vancouver, British Columbia  17, 216 Ventura, Héliane  69, 225 n.13 Virgil  7, 92–3 “A Visit to the Frontier” (Wilson) 176 Wachtel, Eleanor  219 n.6, 226 n.2 Waiting for Godot (Beckett)  179 Waller, Willard  44, 48, 54, 55, 57, 62–3, 219 n.4

Ware, Tracy  23 Warner, Marina  27 Waugh, Patricia  170 Wiarton, Ontario  16 Wilde, Oscar  163 Williams, Joy  42 Wills, Garry  56–7 Wilson, Ethel  164, 176 “The Window” (Blaise)  176 Wingham, Ontario  5, 17, 19, 22 Winner, Paul  42 Wood, James  20, 65 Woolf, Virginia  52 Wounds in the Rain and Other Impressions of War (Crane) 20 Writers Union of Canada  23 Wuthering Heights (Brontë)  176 Yeats, W. B.  165

260