The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence 9781442682474

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Disruption of Writing
1. Early ‘Signs of Invasion’: Dance of the Happy Shades
2. ‘So Many Created Worlds’: Lives of Girls and Women
3. The Politics of Deferral: Power and Suspicion in Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
4. Acknowledging the Nether Voices: Signs of Instability in Who Do You Think You Are?
5. Towards a Poetics of Surprise: ‘Change and Possibility’ in The Moons of Jupiter
6. ’It’s What I Believe’: Patterns of Complicity in The Progress of Love
7. (Re)construction and/as Deception in Friend of My Youth
Conclusion: The Problem of an Ending
Notes
Works Consulted
Index

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THE TUMBLE OF REASON: ALICE MUNRO'S DISCOURSE OF ABSENCE

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AJAY HEBLE

The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-0617-5

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Heble, Ajay, 1961The tumble of reason : Alice Munro's discourse of absence Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-0617-5 1. Munro, Alice, 1931- - Criticism and interpretation, etc. I. Title. PS8576.U57Z66 1994 PR9199.3.M85Z66 1994

C8i3'.54

C94-931395-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

For my parents

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Contents

PREFACE ix

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 3

i Early 'Signs of Invasion': Dance of the Happy Shades 19

2 'So Many Created Worlds': Lives of Girls and Women 43

3 The Politics of Deferral: Power and Suspicion in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You 74 4 Acknowledging the Nether Voices: Signs of Instability in Who Do You Think You Are? 96 5 Towards a Poetics of Surprise: 'Change and Possibility' in The Moons of Jupiter 122 6 'It's What I Believe': Patterns of Complicity in The Progress of Love 143

7 (Re)construction and/as Deception in Friend of My Youth 169

viii Contents Conclusion: The Problem of an Ending 185 NOTES 189 WORKS CONSULTED 2O1 INDEX 207

ABBREVIATIONS

DHS LGW SIB WdY M] PL FOMY

Dance of the Happy Shades Lives of Girls and Women Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

Who Do You think you ARe?

The Moons of Jupiter The Progress of Love Friend of My Youth

Preface

The title for this study alludes to a passage in 'Royal Beatings' where the protagonist, Rose, is engaged in the exhilarating, if necessarily dangerous, activity of rehearsing and conceptualizing a nonsense rhyme: 'Two Vancouvers fried in snot! / Two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!' 'You're going to get it!' cried Flo in a predictable rage. 'Say that again and you'll get a good clout!' Rose couldn't stop herself. She hummed it tenderly, tried saying the innocent words aloud, humming through the others. It was not just the words snot and arsehole that gave her pleasure, though of course they did. It was the pickling and tying and the unimaginable Vancouvers. She saw them in her mind shaped rather like octopuses, twitching in the pan. The tumble of reason; the spark and spit of craziness. (WDY 12)

The constraints and initiatives signalled in this passage point tellingly to what I take to be the distinctive character of Alice Munro's fictional world: its engagement with the unimaginable and the unreasonable, its fascination not simply with a world 'out there' which we are invited to recognize as real and true, but also with that which cannot be said or sometimes even written. Refusing, in various ways, to conform to what is expected or called for, Munro's texts, like her characters, repeatedly insist on the abandonment of reason as both an arbiter of truth and a measure of what is real or valuable. My title thus constitutes an attempt to orient the ensuing investigation in what might be called a theoretically inflected manner, to shift the focus a little away from the prevailing tendency to emphasize Munro's realistic presentation of lives and events, and to attend, instead, to those shadings

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Preface

and absences which, however problematically and provisionally, illustrate the impossibility of taking anything in life, or in fiction, for granted. As a kind of plea for a recognition of the possibility of wonder in our everyday lives, this study evolved out of a set of personal interests and investments. Preliminary among these there was a simple question: why is Alice Munro such a compelling writer? There was, in addition, my desire to convey some of the enthusiasm that I have continued to experience and encounter over the years in teaching Munro's fiction. Along the way, I have made many discoveries, some inhibiting and others enabling. Munro, for one, is a difficult writer. Despite her popularity - which itself is an interesting phenomenon: how can she be both a best seller and a difficult writer? - she does not seem to me to be the kind of author one turns to for a quick and easy read. Far from attempting to offer determinate meanings or authoritative explanations - or even to suggest that such things can be accomplished routinely or unproblematically - what I offer here is a detailed, and necessarily personal, response to a rewardingly complex oeuvre. Reading Munro has been, and continues to be, a process of discovery for me. My hope is that this study will serve to facilitate an analogous process both for the general reader and for the seasoned critic. Writing this book has also been a process of discovery and I am grateful to have had the benefit of a great deal of emotional and intellectual support and guidance. Indeed, all those who have helped me to improve this book will, in one way or another, find themselves inscribed, in the text of my study, as traces, as absent voices involved in the production of meaning. Perhaps most absent - since I'm not supposed to know who they are - are my readers (for the University of Toronto Press and the Canadian Federation of the Humanities). I'd like to thank both readers for their genuinely helpful comments and suggestions. Of those many other absent voices, those who read or listened to a reading of the manuscript, or in some other way helped in the preparation of this book, I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to Russell Brown for his guidance and support, WJ. Keith for being an attentive reader, Andy Wainwright for comments on an early version of my chapter on Lives of Girls and Women, Robert Lecker for making me think more rigorously about my use of the term 'paradigmatic/ and Tom Friedman, John Adames, and Charmaine Eddy for offering

Preface

xi

advice and reassurance at various stages in the writing of the study. Sam Solecki deserves special thanks for his insights, for his inspirational classes on Munro, and for his many helpful suggestions on drafts of the early chapters. For helping in ways too numerous to be mentioned here, I want to thank my friend Ron Cooley. I am especially grateful to Linda Hutcheon, whose encouragement, enthusiasm, and critical acumen sustained me throughout this project. During the time I spent revising this study, I received constant encouragement from my colleagues at the University of Guelph. In particular, I would like to thank Constance Rooke for her continuing support, Diana Brydon for her many productive suggestions, Tim Struthers for taking the time to read and comment on drafts of revised material, and Donna Pennee for advice and solidarity. Thanks also to my editors at the University of Toronto Press, Gerry Hallowell and Agnes Ambrus, for their support, and to my copy-editor, Kathleen Fraser. Finally, and most importantly, I offer to my parents, Madhav and Sushila Heble, my sister, Sucheta Heble, my wife, Sheila O'Reilly, and my daughter, Maya, for their love and support, an appreciation beyond words.

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THE TUMBLE OF REASON: ALICE MUNRO'S DISCOURSE OF ABSENCE

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Introduction: The Disruption of Writing

II n'y a jamais au fond, dans le monde, que 1'ecriture d'une ecriture: une ecriture renvoie toujours finalement a une autre ecriture, et le prospect des signes est en quelque sort infini. Roland Barthes, 'L'analyse structurale du recit a propos d'actes X-Xi'

Over the years, Alice Munro's art has been stretched to accommodate various trends in literary studies. It is perhaps not surprising that much of the criticism which has evolved around her writing has, at least until fairly recently, sought to situate her work within a realist tradition.1 Munro's fiction invites such categorization because it is rife with surface details, because it faithfully explores a world of social relationships and inner experiences. But, as Munro's later critics are fond of suggesting, this realistic dimension in her work usually operates in a qualified manner. These critics thus speak of the ways in which Munro 'has deepened the channel of realism' (Mukherjee 31); they formulate categories such as 'magic realism' (Woodcock 133), 'heightened realism' (Moss, 'Introduction' 9), and even 'hyper-realism or super-realism' (Moss, Reader's Guide 215) in an effort to acknowledge some of the other levels of experience at play in Munro's texts.2 Although they want to hang on to the, albeit modified, realist tag, what these critics force us to recognize is the extent to which Munro's fiction utilizes the conventions of realism in some newly articulated manner. My concern here, however, is not so much with Munro's involvement in extending the category of realism, as with the ways in which she subverts and self-consciously renders problematic the very conventions within which her fiction operates. This is not to suggest that

4 The Tumble of Reason Munro necessarily belongs in the company of such contemporary experimental writers as Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, or Audrey Thomas; it is, though, to signal what I take to be the most compelling feature of her work: the tension between her interest in delineating a surface reality - a world 'out there' which we are invited to recognize as real and true - and her fascination with the very limits of representation, especially in language. In his monograph on Munro, Hallvard Dahlie observes, quite correctly I believe, that Munro's 'fiction is tangibly rooted in the social realism of the rural and small-town world of her own experience, but ... insistently explores what lies beyond the bounds of empirical reality' (5). The lists of ordinary details in her work are thus important not only for what they show us, but also for what they may not always show or tell. On the surface, these details adhere to a kind of 'reality effect' - to borrow Roland Barthes's phrase.3 By listing trivial details, Munro grounds the reader in a surface reality, in a safe, recognizable, and knowable world which presents itself as real and true. Munro herself has commented on this aspect of her work. In an interview with Graeme Gibson, she explains: 'I'm very, very excited by what you might call the surface of life ... It seems to me very important to be able to get at the exact tone and texture of how things are' (Gibson 241). Munro, then, would seem to be fulfilling our mimetic expectations - confirming our ability, as readers, to make sense of the reality of her texts - by suggesting that we can, as it were, make the leap from language to reality, from words to things, in order to 'get at' the way things are. By adhering to a 'reality effect,' in other words, Munro appears to construct a world which we, as readers, accept as intelligible. What becomes increasingly evident as we read her texts, however, is that the world which Munro constructs is not as transparent as it may at first appear; it is not simply something we can take for granted. It is only by first grounding the reader in a seemingly knowable world that Munro can deconstruct the intelligibility of that world. Her writing, when examined more closely, reveals itself to be maintaining and undoing reality at one and the same time, operating as both an instance and a criticism of fictional representation/ Ordinary objects in Munro's world can, at any moment, become sinister or threatening; they can become charged with possibilities taken from what we might call a potential or absent level of meaning: Tots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 5 of dailiness' (WDY 16). Drawing on a set of distinctions from linguistic theory, I shall refer to texts which have this potential or absent level of meaning - which manifests itself variously throughout Munro's fiction - as examples of 'paradigmatic discourse/ My use of the term 'paradigmatic' in the present context clearly represents a departure from the ways in which the words 'paradigm' and 'paradigmatic' are most commonly employed. While conventional usage defines paradigms as exemplary patterns or archetypes, the definition that evolves out of the highly influential theories of language developed by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson resonates in very different ways.5 Following these thinkers, I will use the phrase paradigmatic discourse to describe a domain of language use in which, as Jonathan Culler explains, 'the meaning of an item depends on the difference between it and other items which might have filled the same slot in a given sequence' (13; emphasis added). The important words here are 'might have' because they suggest the emphasis on possibility, on the way things might have been as distinct from the way things necessarily are. In a moment that gets replayed throughout Munro's fiction, the protagonist in the story 'Accident' considers what might have happened had the incident to which the title refers not taken place. She realizes that she 'would not live in Ottawa now, she would not have her two children, she would not have her life, not the same life' (M] iog). Similarly, in 'Miles City, Montana,' the narrator is compelled to think about what might be the case had her daughter not narrowly escaped drowning. Paradigmatic discourse, therefore, operates by referring to a series of meanings which signify through their absence. While many critics tend to treat Munro's work as an example of syntagmatic discourse - discourse which, operating on the level of presence, fosters the illusion of stable meanings in narrative - what a closer examination of her writing reveals is that Munro continually invests her realism with displaced possibilities from various paradigmatic chains.6 Paradigmatic discourse plays an important role in Munro's work because it enables her to examine language in two contradictory yet complementary ways: language as a form of representation and language as a limited system of signs. Although it asserts the ability of the writer to posit a world of possibilities, paradigmatic discourse paradoxically serves as a reminder of the unresolvable gap between all writing and the reality which that writing attempts to re-present. While Munro clearly remains attracted to language because of the possibility

6 The Tumble of Reason that words can reflect meanings which already exist 'out there' in the world, she is also painfully aware of the fact that writing can never simply be an unquestioned means for 'getting at' real life. As Del, Munro's narrator in Lives of Girls and Women, notes, 'It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there' (LGW 251). Rose, in Who Do You Think You Are?, makes a similar discovery about the limitations of acting: 'The thing she was ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn't get and wouldn't get' (WDY 205). Any attempt at representation, whether it be by fictionalizing or through acting, is inevitably part of a larger endeavour to master the world, to reduce life to a rational set of codes or systems.7 For Munro, paradigmatic discourse is important, in fact necessary, because representationalism blinds us to the way things really are. I use the term 'really' advisedly here: the whole question of what is real, as Munro herself has pointed out, involves not only something which is 'really there and really happening in the world, as most people see it,' but also something that is really there and really happening in her stories ('What Is Real' 226). Though this may seem a subtle distinction, it is important because it alerts us to a recurrent feature in Munro's later prose: characters, particularly in The Progress of Love, find themselves believing in the stories they have constructed about their pasts - accepting these constructed pasts as real and true - even though they recognize that their perception of the past does not correspond with what actually happened. Here, then, we are moving away from what conventionally might be seen as the project of realism, from, as Northrop Frye puts it, the desire 'to come to terms with things as they are and not as the story-teller would like them to be for his convenience' (Fables 27). Munro's desire to work within yet go beyond the inherited conventions of realistic fiction reflects her conception of the dual nature of reality. For Munro, human lives are, at once, ordinary and mysterious, and for us to be unable to see this is one of our greatest impoverishments. In her texts, then, reason gets a 'royal beating' precisely because it evokes a blindness to the mystery that is all around us. It goes a-tumbling because finally it cannot 'get at' the complexities of human experience. As a result we find Munro abandoning a kind of rational discourse - which assumes that reality is stable, intelligible,

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 7 and masterable - and replacing it with an equivocal discourse which signifies on the level of paradigm. The question of how best to define paradigmatic discourse may be approached in many different ways and from a variety of different angles. I should perhaps acknowledge here that the phrase, as I am using it, is, at least in part, a kind of theoretical extension of what we have traditionally meant by terms like latent meaning, subtext, implication, irony, and symbolic dimension. Despite certain similarities - insofar as they show us that what any given text says is not necessarily what it means, all these terms deal with various kinds of meanings in absentia - paradigmatic discourse is not simply a new way of naming a familiar critical landscape. The difference, I think, resides primarily in the fact that paradigmatic discourse questions the relationship between language and meaning in a new way: it forces us to recognize the extent to which meaning itself depends on and is determined by traces of absent and potential levels of signification. What seems most important, for the purposes of this particular study, is that paradigmatic discourse enables us, as it often enables Munro's characters, to imagine possible correlations between sets of phenomena and to consider how 'reality' might be different if something absent or potential were substituted for the way things are.8 In making use of this kind of discourse, Munro will substitute direct referentiality with what contemporary critical theory might call 'textuality.' Her fiction, in part, attempts to force us to reconsider the metaphysical category of reality in textual terms.9 The world of facts, details, and objects, which, at first, serves to ground the reader in a safe and recognizable reality, is suddenly called into question as Munro makes us aware that we are reading only an attempt to represent these things in fiction, that language is being used to re-present reality. Our hold on reality thus becomes, at best, precarious and tentative, as referents become signs, things become words, and signifieds become signifiers.10 This is, in part, what happens in an uncollected Munro story called 'Home/ This story, which is written in the first person and narrated in the present tense, focuses on the protagonist's trip from the city in which she now lives to the small-town home where she grew up. The piece is divided into a number of sections and at the end of each section we find italicized comments in which the narrator explicitly calls our attention to the fact that what we are reading is, indeed, a text rather than real life. In these italicized passages, the narrator comments on the writing of this story, which is still being written, and

8 The Tumble of Reason confesses her inability to 'get at' that which she is attempting to represent: A problem of the voices, the way people talk, how can it be handled? It sounds like parody, if you take it straight, as out of a tape recorder ... 1 would like you to see through this parody, self-parody, to something that is not lovable, not delightful. I can't get it, I can't quite bring it out. ('Home' 142) 1 don't know how to end this. (151) I don't want any more effects,

I tell you lying. 1 don't know what 1 want. 1 want to do

this with honour, if 1 possibly can. (153)

The awareness, here, that writing cannot finally 'get at' real life implicitly leads to a kind of admission that writing may only be about itself. By submitting her narrative to the pressure of her insistence that any attempt to write about something 'out there' in the world is, in and of itself, problematical, this narrator lays bare the process of artistic creation, alerting us to the fact that a created world can never be fully independent of its creator. With this kind of selfreflexive gesture, the whole notion of a 'creator' is made problematic, as we find ourselves confronted with a rearrangement of the traditional proximity between author and narrator. In a story such as 'Home/ as well as in some of her other stories, Munro forces us to recognize the extent to which a textual world, as represented, is inevitably conditioned by a writer's own tricks and effects with language. The moment during which the whole notion of a sustained representational geography is called into question, during which we, as readers, are no longer interpolated into the world of the fiction - this moment I shall call the disruption of writing.11 An explicit awareness of writing as writing disrupts the experience of the reader by discouraging strict correspondence between text and reality.12 This moment of disruption, in Munro's work, is at once frustrating and exhilarating. It is frustrating because the person telling the story is compelled to admit that the story cannot finally be told, that language is an inadequate medium for 'getting at' the mystery of how things are. Thus in 'The Ottawa Valley/ the narrator explains, 'I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same' (SIB 246). This narrator will never finally be able to capture in writing - and therefore make sense of

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 9 - her mother's life. In 'Home/ the narrator does not know how to finish her story because she realizes that any ending she concocts will not finally be an accurate representation of the way things are. But the moment of disruption is also exhilarating, even liberating, because we, as readers, suddenly find ourselves released from the web of verisimilitude, explicitly made aware, as it were, that this is not reality but rather a text. The moment writing declares its own inadequacy in Munro's fiction, we are confronted with a kind of paradox whereby the everyday world of facts, details, and objects which we have been invited to accept as real and true is suddenly revealed to be a fictional construction of the narrator's. By bringing textuality to the fore in this manner, Munro disrupts the traditional discourse of realism in order to show us that we cannot take everything we read for granted. Throughout her work, Munro continually forces us to acknowledge what she calls 'nether voices,' to look below or beyond the surface of everyday life. By moving us away from a realm of rational discourse - where reality remains stable, comprehensible, and, to a certain extent, predictably safe - Munro leads us into another realm of discourse. To put it another way, Munro seems to be drawing a distinction between the world 'out there,' the 'real' world where intelligibility proceeds according to certain rules and expectations, and a world of textuality, where all signs have, as it were, a right to be there, where, to use the words of the narrator in 'Dance of the Happy Shades/ things can get 'out of hand, anything may happen' (DHS 212; emphasis added). This latter realm seems to be in keeping with Northrop Frye's conception of literature. In literature, Frye contends, 'questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs' (Anatomy 74). For Frye, literature remains a hypothetical 'verbal structure' suspended from a world in which words necessarily describe actual things or states. The distinction with which Munro appears to play, then, can, to continue with Frye's terminology, be expressed in terms of 'whether the final direction of meaning is outward or inward' (74; emphasis in original). For Frye, literary meaning is essentially inward. The language of Munro's texts, however, clearly wants to move outside the boundaries of her work, to point to things which can be experienced in the actual world. Munro thus seems to be interested in the relationship between words and things, attracted to the pos-

io The Tumble of Reason sibility that a correspondence might exist between the two. There is, however, also a sense in which the language of Munro's texts is inwardlooking and seems to refer to nothing outside of itself. This becomes evident in passages such as those I quoted from 'Home/ where the narrator foregrounds the process of writing and questions the extent to which language will ever be able to 'get at' the way things are. By calling our attention to the fact that we are reading a text, Munro suddenly reveals her interest in both the relationship between words and things and the one between words and words. While the critical approach to Munro's fiction admittedly has changed over the years, much of the early criticism tends to have been accorded something of an axiomatic status, both in terms of the ways Munro's stories are often taught and in the more general context of the codification and distribution of knowledge 'about' Alice Munro. Convincing and influential as the critiques of thematic criticism in Canadian literature may be, I think a few words are nevertheless in order here about what, until very recently, served as a critical commonplace in Munro studies. Much early Munro criticism (and indeed some of the recent criticism) tends to treat the movements I have been discussing (inner and outer) as two distinct realms of experience: a normal, rational world of everyday life and an irrational 'other' world where 'anything may happen/ In an article published in 1976, Rae McCarthy Macdonald insists that 'the essential tension between two sets of values, two ways of seeing, two worlds, is always apparent, as central in [Munro's] last book as her first' (365). Macdonald, enlarging on Frye's conception of the 'garrison' culture in Canada and D.G. Jones's notion of 'alienation from a vital community/ sees the tension between 'the world' and the 'other country' as an opposition which informs all of Munro's fiction. In an article published the same year, Beverly Rasporich examines 'the grotesque and hysterical reality of Munro's "other" world which constantly challenges the quiet and often nostalgic calm of what appears to be a fiction of simple observation' (5). Similarly, B. Pfaus, in a more recent publication, suggests, 'All of Munro's short stories present the reader with Munro's vision of two worlds which she sees as having an essential and irreconcilable tension between two sets of values inherent in each world: the chaotic, natural world or "other country" and "the world" or social garrison of conventionality, terms of the Munro canon supplied by the title story in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades' (7). The opposition which these critics have posited between Munro's 'other country' and

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 11 the 'real world' seems to be analogous to the inner/outer (centripetal/ centrifugal) distinction which Frye raises in his Anatomy of Criticism the 'inner' corresponding to the realm of the text, the 'other country' where anything can happen without regard for questions of truth or fact, and the 'outer' being the world of material reality. Munro, however, sets up these dichotomies (other country/world, inner/outer, text/world) not in order to preserve them as self-cancelling opposites, but rather to call their alleged completeness into question, to show us that real life (by which I mean both the real-seeming world of her texts and the world of material reality) operates not only according to the principles of rationality that we impose on it, but also according to the kinds of principles which govern the reading and writing of texts. The tendency to set up opposing tensions between the 'two worlds/ to separate the 'normal' world from the 'other country/ thus leads those critics who maintain such a distinction to neglect the complexity of vision which makes Munro such a compelling writer.13 The point here is that the 'real' world - whether it be the real-seeming world of the fiction or the world of material reality - is itself always other-than-real. The real-seeming world of the fiction, the world which conforms to the conventions of naturalistic writing and which these critics, in some sense, confuse with the world 'out there/ is already other-thanreal because it is textual. This is an obvious point, but one which, I think, needs stating because the critics who posit the other country / world distinction omit to mention the fact that what they call Munro's 'world' is still part of a text. Hence when Del Jordan, at the end of 'The Flats Road' section of Lives of Girls and Women, says she remembered Madeleine, Uncle Benny's mail-order bride, 'like a story' (LGW 27), we probably find ourselves protesting: 'Wait a minute. This is a story!' The simile 'like a story' is striking because it allows the story to confer a curious double status (of art and life) upon itself. By employing the simile, Del seems to imply that although the story which she has told is real, it is one which reads like a fiction. The appeal here is to a certain kind of reality, a reality which is, in a sense, so strange that it could be a story. But the intrusion of the simile also serves, as I have already suggested, to call our attention to the fact that this is a story, not real life. The world of material reality, for Munro, is also textual, though its textuality is perhaps not as self-evident as the textuality of the real-seeming world of her fiction. Though Munro does not subscribe

12 The Tumble of Reason to the experimental narrative techniques employed by writers like John Earth, Jorge Luis Borges, and Michael Ondaatje, she remains interested in and fascinated by some of the same problems which are raised in their texts. Despite Munro's insistence that she is an 'old-fashioned' writer (Connolly n. pag.), there is a sense in which she, like the aforementioned writers, questions the assumption that language can transparently represent reality. What Munro shares with these writers, however, does not stop there. Like them - and like thinkers as diverse as Thomas Pynchon and Richard Rorty - Munro seems to be rebelling against the notion that knowledge itself can become a kind of representation. In an interview with Geoff Hancock, Munro has said of her own writing, 'What I like is not to really know what the story is all about. And for me to keep trying to find out' (Hancock 84). Munro's comment attests to her desire to replace the syntagmatic dimension of discourse with a set of paradigmatic possibilities even as she writes. This is important because, for Munro, life does not operate according to an orderly sequence of events which can ever simply be known. It perhaps comes as little surprise, then, that chronology and the progression of time are continually disrupted throughout Munro's fiction. What Munro attempts to demonstrate through her fiction is that the world of material reality is not a repository of objective meanings. Instead, it is a kind of text which affirms the fundamental undecidability that inhabits every system of communication, 'a polysemic space/ to borrow Roland Barthes's words, 'where the paths of several possible meanings intersect' ('Theory' 37). The real world constitutes a field of signification; like the text it is something to be deciphered and interpreted rather than known and understood (see Jameson 205). Like the writers just referred to, Munro seeks to call into question the epistemological division between subject and object. By bringing to the fore the process of writing, by having her narrators (as in 'Home' and The Ottawa Valley') comment on their ultimate inability to write the story which we are reading, Munro forces us to recognize the extent to which the subject is implicated in any attempt to know what is 'out there' in the real world. To be more precise, what she demonstrates in her stories is that language is the process by which we come to 'know' anything. Any attempt to say or know something about something else is already implicated in what structuralism describes as a system of differences, a system which undermines all claims to objectivity. All representation is mediated because we never experience anything except through what Jacques Derrida and others have called

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 13 deferred traces. As Derrida notes, 'Whether in the order of spoken or written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each "element" ... being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system' (Positions 26). What Derrida, by way of Saussure, is suggesting here is that any element means what it means only by referring to other absent or potential elements (similar to and/or different from it). Meaning, then, is continually deferred, eternally suspended. Whenever a sign or name 'stands for' a thing, the present understanding of the thing itself is put off. What we know when we say we know or understand something in the world is always the sign of the thing rather than the thing itself. I raise these matters here not to suggest that Munro is on the cutting edge of literary theory, but rather to call our attention to the fact that Munro's stories are not simply fictionally realistic narratives. In one way or another, her stories themselves signal to us that they are moving away from the myth of the transparency of linguistic representation, that what we are reading is a verbal structure which bears no necessary relation to anything outside of itself. At issue here is Munro's insistence that simple acceptance of the reality of the world means ignoring the problem of how we come to know anything about the world. By raising the question of whether it is even possible to write about 'real life/ by thematizing the inadequacy of her own language, Munro alerts us to the fact that every utterance constitutes an attempt to frame the world. While most attempts refuse to admit that the utterer (or subject) is inside the frame as well as outside it, Munro's reworking of the subject/object division reveals the extent to which all metalanguage, all language about language, is motivated. By foregrounding writing and making us aware of a writer's 'tricks' and 'effects' - the words appear strikingly often in her stories - Munro seems to be insisting on the autonomy of the text. But to stop here, to say that this is what her stories are 'about/ would, of course, be to do Alice Munro a severe injustice. The direction of meaning in her stories is clearly both inward and outward. Munro's texts, in other words, are engaged in two simultaneous but seemingly contradictory discourses. While Munro wants, on the one hand, to look inward to the fact that she is writing a text, she wants on the other to move outward, outside the boundaries of her fiction and into the world of material reality, to suggest that this world, the world

14 The Tumble of Reason of life and lived experiences, conforms somehow to the account of life given in her stories. This move, unstated but always implicit in her fiction, bespeaks a desire, on Munro's part, to reclaim the realm of reality precisely by demonstrating the extent to which it is textual - something to be interpreted and deciphered. So when Del Jordan remembers Madeleine 'like a story/ Munro seems to be assigning lifelike validity to both Madeleine and 'The Flats Road' story in which she appears. More precisely, the simile provides the impression that Lives of Girls and Women is not fiction, but rather life. But, as I have already mentioned, the simile also calls our attention to the fact that this is a story, this is a text. What I would like to suggest here is that the leap which Munro implicitly wants us to make is a leap back into the world of material reality. Madeleine is not real, because she is only a character in a story, but she simultaneously is real because she adumbrates what another contemporary Canadian writer, Michael Ondaatje, has called 'the truth of fiction' (acknowledgment page). The point here is that the writer of fiction can, by means of a curious paradoxical reversal, provide a truer-to-life description of the 'real world' than most writers of history, biography, or documentary. The implication of this is that things in the world are not so easy to 'get at' as empirical or rational approaches to life might suggest. Not much time is devoted to Madeleine in Lives of Girls and Women. In fact, once 'The Flats Road' story ends, Madeleine is not mentioned again. But she remains important because she is a fictional character who, by virtue of her storylike unreality, becomes all the more realistic. I will later, especially in my chapter on Lives of Girls and Women, be concerned with demonstrating the way Munro insists that fiction, despite its limitations and inadequacies, can 'get at' real life better than history or documentary. At this point, however, let it suffice for me to say that Munro's awareness of the textual dimension of material reality constitutes an attempt to show, as Roland Barthes would have it, that 'all signifying practices can engender text' ('Theory' 37). For Munro, however, nowhere does this manifest itself as a radical critical presupposition. Neither does it necessarily reflect any well thoughtout or highly informed theory about the relationship between art and life. Instead, I would argue, Munro's awareness of this textual dimension of the world is simply part of an attitude towards life which acknowledges the importance of examining how it is that we can claim to know something. Munro shows us, in her fiction, that the way we come to know

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 15 things is through language, but not through a language which unproblematically makes meaning present at the moment of utterance. It is by engaging in a kind of writing which examines meaning in its paradigmatic form - that is, as if all possible meanings were, at all times, paradoxically present and absent - that Munro demonstrates the extent to which language offers us control over things in the world only at the cost of distancing us from these things. While Munro herself may not evince any particular theoretical interest in these sorts of issues, her stories invite analysis along the lines I am proposing because they show us that the world of material reality in which we live is finally as paradigmatic - as full of absent and potential meanings - as the world presented in her texts. This study will therefore examine the theoretical implications of Munro's use of paradigmatic discourse in order to show how her fiction can provide insights into our own lives, particularly into the processes by which we come to gain knowledge about perception or ideas, the ways we express relationships between situations, and the possibilities of human communication. If, as I said earlier, Munro's stories are challenging in themselves, then the act of writing on these stories ought perhaps to be the source of some critical trepidation. When I began this study, the small body of critical writing which had evolved around Munro's work tended, as I have indicated, to privilege her realism. Now, as I revisit my work - as indeed the extraordinary richness of Munro's fiction invites me to do - I have seen the emergence of a substantial body of critical work on Munro. Of the numerous books and articles recently published, there are, in particular, a few revisionist studies which I think warrant consideration in the present context. As the first sustained attempt to acknowledge Munro's departure from traditional mimetic realism, E.D. Blodgett's Twayne study, Alice Munro, offers some areas of general overlap with the theoretical framework of my own study. Focusing largely on the way in which Munro narrates her stories, Blodgett posits and theorizes a split in many stories between narrator and narrated self (or narrator and protagonist), arguing that the separation between the two exemplifies how hard it is to speak of the presence of the real in Munro's writing. While our studies are similarly animated by an impulse to interrogate Munro's engagement with the conventions of realism, I suspect that I am more willing than Blodgett to consider the extent to which Munro cannot simply deny the real. Although the themes and general problems that concern us are indeed similar, our theoretical formulations lead us in very differently focused, though

16 The Tumble of Reason perhaps complementary, critical directions. Blodgett is primarily interested in problems of narration, 'the inadequacy of depictive power' (121), and the way in which processes of mediation in Munro's stories reveal the illusoriness of the past; my attempt to theorize paradigmatic discourse forces me to negotiate between the inward and outward pulls of meaning in Munro's texts, to explore the inseparability of fictionmaking and experience, and, especially in my discussion of power, complicity, and deception, to attend to what illusoriness and mediation tell us about the enunciating self. Other, more recent, revisionist studies include books by Magdalene Redekop and Karen Smythe and articles by David Williams and Helen Hoy. While Redekop's Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro might also be said to engage in an exploration of the implications of absence in Munro's work, the absences are specifically interrogated within the context of a feminist critical framework. Arguing that 'the erasure of women's lives in the histories written by men forms an implicit but powerful feature of Munro's fiction' (29), Redekop traces what she sees as 'an evolving and constantly revised aesthetic in Munro's fiction' (212). As she puts it near the end of her study, 'Munro's fiction ... re-presences the absent mothers [in the stories] and shows that they can construct themselves as subjects with their own stories to tell' (219). By exploring the ways in which Munro's women are engaged in the process of 'learning to be "resisting readers" of the stories that constrict their lives' (165), Redekop manages to give new meanings to the agency of Munro's narrators and characters. Hoy, in 'Alice Munro: "Unforgettable, Indigestible Messages,"' similarly remarks on how, 'not unexpectedly for a woman writer, Munro gives voice to what is muted, unremarked, or silenced in society' (5). Exploring some of the ways in which Munro 'works to challenge narrow conceptions of reality' (20), Hoy attends to the unexpected and disconcerting moments which run through Munro's stories. While Hoy's article, in a general way, may well come closest to my own attempt to suggest that Munro's stories repeatedly problematize our understanding of their involvement with the conventions of realism, it does not seek specifically to theorize the relation between Munro's absences and the complex but systematic formation of a discursive trajectory which operates as both an instance and a criticism of representationalism. Smythe's figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy uses trope of consolation 'as a point of departure for an exploration of

Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 17 the process of writing and of mourning' (153; emphasis in original). In her chapters on Munro, Smythe, by focusing specifically on the importance of elegy, also expresses an uneasiness with Munro's involvement with the conventions of realism: 'In Munro's poetics realism alone is deemed an inaccurate method for representing the world and our experiences in it' (141). Unlike Williams, whose consideration of the problem of photographic truth in Lives of Girls and Women and metafictional processes in W/zo Do "You Think You Are? encourages him to align Munro with practitioners of postmodernism, Smythe remains committed to her assertion that Munro, a late-modernist, is different from her 'postmodern contemporaries whose frequent aim is to subvert the conventions of writing, often in parodic ways, in order to expose as illusory the differences between fiction and truth (or fiction and history), language and reality' (154). Although I cannot pretend to have any easy answers about what kind of writer (realist, modernist, latemodernist, postmodernist) we ought to call Alice Munro, this study will attend to some of the theoretical issues which emerge out the critical space where Munro's varied commentators might be said to engage one another in debate. What some of the recent criticism on Munro - with its renewed take on Munro's commitment to realism - foregrounds, of course, is one of the difficulties (more on another difficulty later) of writing on an author whose works have become such topical subjects for contemporary critical inquiry. On the one hand, I ought, perhaps, to feel inconvenienced by the fact that I am no longer the only one to respond to Munro's fiction in the context of this renewed critical framework. On the other hand, of course, I am pleased to see that Munro's stories are finally beginning to receive the kind of critical attention that they deserve. The changing nature of the critical commentary14 signally forces me to re-contextualize the present study in a manner which suggests not only the temptation of deferral, of putting off closure in favour of a recognition of the inevitability of endless revisions and readjustments, but also the paradigmatic nature of my own critical enterprise. For, if as Redekop's book, in particular, has taught me, there are many aspects of Munro's texts which I have not even begun to consider, then perhaps an appropriate point of departure for developing a theory of paradigmatic levels of meaning is to acknowledge the absences in my own critical discourse. In the chapters that follow, then, I will not be discussing Munro's role as a woman writer. Nor will I pay much attention to her enormous

i8 The Tumble of Reason contribution to the development of the short story or to her ability to force us into a reconsideration of our notion of genre. I shall instead direct my attention specifically to the ways in which Munro uses paradigmatic discourse to reveal varying degrees of possibility: the unreal or fantastic, the hypothetical, the potential, and the impossible. I shall also show how Munro's involvement with paradigmatic discourse can take the form of a double time-frame (the then-and-now structure which appears again and again in her stories), how it enables her to demonstrate 'that the qualities of legend were real, that they surfaced where and when you least expected' (SIB 6), and how it allows her to incorporate into her writing 'the whole business of how life is made into a story by the people who live it' (Struthers, 'Real Material' 33). In addition, I will suggest that paradigmatic discourse manifests itself through Munro's preoccupation with deferred meanings: as the title of her 1974 collection, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, indicates, the central drama of her stories is often precisely that which cannot be recuperated. Furthermore, I will demonstrate how Munro conveys a sense of uncertainty through her use of paradigmatic discourse, how she repeatedly, through a 'hermeneutics of suspicion/ asks us to question whether or not certain events (like the so-called minister's seduction of Rose in 'Wild Swans') are actually taking place. In the chapters on her more recent volumes, I shall suggest that these various instances of paradigmatic discourse are consolidated in Munro's involvement with three exemplary narrative strategies: surprise, complicity, and deception. Having introduced these matters for consideration, I would like to turn now to Munro's first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, a collection which shows early signs of an involvement with absent and potential levels of meaning.

1 Early 'Signs of Invasion7: Dance of the Happy Shades

I am writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way, the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what History is to the other. An impossibility. Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Chris Marker, Sans soleil

Munro's first published collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, introduces to the reader many of the central concerns which are developed in her later work. Although an initial reading might suggest that Dance of the Happy Shades has little to do with the theoretical framework that I have sketched in the introduction, a careful investigation of some of the stories in this volume reveals the extent to which Dance is not such an unlikely candidate for a discussion of paradigmatic discourse as it may at first appear. While the stories here are more accessible, more conventional than the stories which appear in her recent collections, while the plots may be more easily discernible and the strategies of narration more straightforward, there are, even in these early stories, suggestions of absent and potential relationships that violate presuppositions we may have of the world around us. Already apparent in the fifteen stories which make up this collection is an interest in possible correlations between sets of phenomena, an interest in hypothetical and virtual situations. Also apparent in these pieces is Munro's fascination with the ways we tell, understand, and make use of stories, and her awareness of the extent to which the life we live conforms to the principles which govern the reading and writing of texts. In short, what we find in Dance of the Happy Shades is what

2O The Tumble of Reason we find everywhere in Munro: an awareness that for any utterance, for any claim to be inhabiting a particular realm of meaning, there are always potential or absent levels of meaning, and alternate ways of formulating ideas and ordering experiences, that must inevitably come into play. THREE STORIES OF INITIATION

'Walker Brothers Cowboy' operates, in many ways, as a microcosm for the whole of Munro's work. The concerns which run throughout her fiction are presented in this piece, which opens her first collection of stories. The story chronicles the sense of mystery and wonder which an unnamed narrator experiences as she accompanies her father on an afternoon drive to visit his old girlfriend. It is a representative story because, like other Munro pieces both in this volume and in later collections, it encourages us, as readers, to probe beneath the realistic surface, to be suspicious of everything we read, to question those things we normally take for granted both in fiction and in life. 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' begins with a characteristic Munro gesturing towards uncertainty. The young narrator tells us, 'After supper my father says, "Want to go down and see if the Lake's still there?"' (DHS i). The father's question, however offhand and colloquial, already indicates the sense of uneasiness which Munro herself will express when she, in her fiction, questions how it is that we gain knowledge about the 'real' world. By beginning the story which opens her first collection (and which therefore has come, in some sense, to represent her formal point of departure) with this peculiar lack of assertion, Munro is already questioning the assumption that reality is stable and fixed - that it is something we can ever fully know. In presenting us with this first sentence, posed as an indirect question asked by the father, Munro prepares the reader for the possibility that the worlds we encounter in her fiction may be more slippery than they might at first appear. The hypothetical position hinted at in the father's initial question - the possibility that the lake might not be there - reveals Munro's own interest in what I am calling paradigmatic discourse. In this first sentence Munro's fascination with absent or potential levels of meaning is already apparent. As the story unfolds, of course, we are reassured that the lake z' still there, yet this does not lessen the importance of the father's opening line. When he explains to his daughter 'how the Great Lakes

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 21 came to be' (DHS 3), she becomes aware of the changes that may come with the passing of time, changes which she seems, at this point at least, somewhat reluctant to accept: The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive - old, old - when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown. (DHS 3)

Here, the narrator is initiated into an awareness that there is an alternative way that things may be or might have been. Suddenly, she is confronted with the possibility that the lake might not always be there as it is now. In larger terms, what she is learning is that things cannot simply be taken for granted. This somewhat unsettling notion helps establish the tone of ontological and epistemological uncertainty that will come to dominate the rest of the story. The apparently genial and familiar beginning to 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ then, reveals itself to be more tentative, more threatening, than a first reading might suggest. By showing a young narrator who attempts to come to terms with certain large issues - time, memory, how things come to be - Munro is herself grappling with the problem of how it is that we gain knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. One of the ways we try to gain knowledge, of course, is through language, and part of what Munro is doing in 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' is attempting to investigate the extent to which the young narrator's cognitive abilities are linguistically realized. The fact that the narrator, like her father, does not remember, does not know a time when automobiles and electric lights did not exist, suggests that this past remains inaccessible to them both, except, in part, as it is held in language. Munro, then, renders problematic the activity of knowing by showing us that even those things we think we know, may, in fact, contain dimensions, histories, and potentialities which we can never fully recuperate. When the narrator accompanies her father on an afternoon drive while he is on his salesman's route, this sense of uncertainty becomes

22 The Tumble of Reason even more apparent. After spending the first few pages of the story on the young narrator's initiation into the world of adult problems and after showing us how there is often more to these problems than may initially meet the eye, Munro now presents us with another example of something that - or in this case someone who - cannot be taken for granted. Munro, of course, has prepared us, as she has prepared her narrator, for the lesson which is in the offing. The narrator's father is a travelling salesman for Walker Brothers. 'This is a firm/ we are told, 'that sells almost entirely in the country, the back country' (DHS 3). The main action of the story takes place when the narrator and her brother go with their father on his route, and they stop in unexpectedly to pay a visit to his ex-sweetheart and her blind mother. But even before this trip with their father, certain oppositions are established, oppositions which, significantly, will reappear in other Munro pieces. The young narrator in 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' makes it clear that she feels more at home with her father than she does with her mother. In her mother's world, where she feels as though dirty words chalked on the sidewalk are laughing at her, she has become an object of ridicule. She even loathes the sound of her own name - a name to which we are never privy - when it is spoken in public by her mother 'in a voice so high, proud and ringing, deliberately different from the voice of any other mother on the street' (DHS 5). In her father's world, however, she feels comfortable; she remains enthusiastic about accompanying him on his salesman's route despite the fact that she can expect only 'hot hours in stricken farmyards, perhaps a stop at a country store and three ice cream cones or bottles of pop, and [her] father singing' (DHS 6). As the story progresses, what Munro goes on to reveal is how much the young girl's sense of affinity for and closeness to her father is illusory. There is much about her father that the daughter will never know. The comfort which she takes in leaving her mother behind and going out with her father - who knows 'the quick way out of town' (DHS 6) - gives way to the same kind of uneasiness which she felt when he spoke to her about how the Great Lakes came to be. Suddenly this familiar man reveals dimensions to his character which his daughter has never before seen. Like the mysteries of time into which she has recently been initiated, the mysterious nature of her father's hitherto-unmentioned personal past confronts her in the present. Her father's ex-sweetheart, now 'outside' his territory, is part of

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 23 this unmentioned past. During their unexpected visit with Nora and her mother, the narrator catches a tantalizingly brief glimpse of this past which she will never know, this elided history which to her must remain forever indeterminable. Here, as elsewhere in Munro's fiction, the central drama of the story will never be fully played out; it can only be inscribed in a kind of absence. 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' provides a superb example of Munro's involvement with paradigmatic discourse precisely because it turns on such absent and potential levels of meaning. Somewhere, in a past which can signify now only through its very inaccessibility, there may have been potential for a fulfilling relationship between Ben Jordan and Nora Cronin. It is characteristic of Munro to leave this possibility undeveloped, to allow us to speculate on what might have happened had Nora not been a Roman Catholic. The point here is that this potential situation remained potential, has been deferred, was never fully present. Ben and Nora continue to be engaged in a potential if problematic relationship. Their meeting here in the present, before the narrator's impressionable eyes, forces Ben's daughter into an awareness that the full meaning of her father's situation will never simply present itself to her; there will always be histories to come to terms with, nuances to pursue, unimaginable dimensions of character to take into account.1 Although the narrator has been told, for example, that her father never drinks whisky, she soon sees that 'he drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names [she has] never heard' (DHS 15). By the end of the story she comes to the realization that the ordinary and familiar life of her father can, at any moment, threaten to turn into something strange and mysterious: 'I feel my father's life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine' (DHS 18). The realization that unfolds here, at the end of 'Walker Brothers Cowboy,' is one which will reappear continually in Munro's writing. Indeed, its variant manifestations in Munro's stories have prompted several critics to explore the nature of Munro's use of dualities and oppositions. What interests me here is that Munro, by showing us the doubleness of reality, by showing us that life is at once ordinary and mysterious, familiar and strange, alerts us to the fact that confidence or trust in any fixed or stable object of knowledge is, at best,

24

The Tumble of Reason

provisional. Although Munro, in an interview with Tim Struthers, indicated that she would now do away with such a summary paragraph if she were to revise the story ('Real Material' 9), its attempt to negotiate a necessarily problematic rapprochement between strange and familiar domains of experience, while perhaps too comfortably articulated, is already indicative of the zones of dislocation that, in increasingly complex ways, will constitute Munro's involvement with paradigmatic levels of meaning. Given the story's view of things in the world as provisional, it is not surprising that Ben's relationship with Nora itself remains precarious, part of an untold past, one of those 'things not to be mentioned' at home (DHS iB). When Ben is taking leave of Nora, he tells her that he has 'taken a lot of [her] time' (DHS 17). Her response is telling: '"Time," says Nora bitterly. "Will you come by ever again?"' (DHS 17). It is a poignant reminder of the story's opening pages, of the young narrator's trip down to the lake, her initiation into the world of adult experience, and her reluctance to accept the tentative nature of all things in the face of history and time. Now, the narrator sees in Nora another individual who is reluctant to accept the changes that come with time. Nora's bitterness is fitting because she is undoubtedly thinking about how her life might have been different if things had turned out other than the way they did. Of course we can only speculate on what Nora may be thinking, but her feelings of loss and rejection are adroitly conveyed in her comment to Ben - 'I can drink alone but I can't dance alone' (DHS 17) - after he refuses to dance with her. Beneath the genial and familiar surface of 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ then, Munro has written a story about loss and separation, about potential relationships that cannot finally come together, ordinary lives that cannot be fully understood, things in the world that are rendered unstable and unknowable in the face of time and history. By returning us to what I am calling the textual dimension of reality, life as something we read and interpret rather than something we know or understand, Munro undermines our confidence in our ability to understand certain things - people's lives, things in the world, the notion of time - thus preventing us from treating these things as though they were stable or reliable entities. The epistemological issue - the problem of what we know and how we know it - thus leads to a kind of ontological questioning. 2

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 25 'Images' is another story in Munro's first collection which concerns itself with a young girl's initiation into the paradigmatic realm of everyday experience. Like 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ this story begins with a description of the narrator's familial surroundings, but here the description explicitly denies the expectations of domestic comfort often associated with a child's family life. As we have seen, the young narrator's security is potentially, but only implicitly, disrupted at the beginning of 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' when Ben Jordan, albeit jovially, raises the possibility that the lake might not be there when he and his daughter go down to look at it. Ben's jocular question, though it may be initially dismissed by the reader (as it surely was by the narrator) as mere teasing, gains force when we return to it after a completed reading of the story, and when we reread it, we realize that it is part of a larger suggestion that truth or certainty about anything in the world may never be entirely true or certain. The implications of this suggestion for the narrator's relationship with members of her family, particularly with her father, are traced out only in her subsequent discovery of her father's unmentioned personal past: he too, familiar as he may seem, is discovered to be someone she will never fully know. In 'Images/ a similar kind of discovery takes place, only now the movement is reversed. Here, the initial disruption is not from without - not the threatening possibility that something like the lake might no longer be there - but rather from within the family setting. While 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' begins with a potentially disruptive situation from outside the family and moves, in its second part, to a realization of the implications in the narrator's own life of such disruptions, 'Images' begins with disruption within the family setting and moves, in its second part, to the implications of such a disruption outside the young girl's family. To put it another way, if 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' appears to modulate from a strange, hypothetical situation to a more familiar context, 'Images' seems to move from a familiar setting to a strange and mysterious one. But perhaps this is to oversimplify, because what Munro shows us, at the outset of both stories, is that the strange is always already familiar and the familiar is always already strange. In 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ for example, the strange and abstract issues which the father attempts to convey to his daughter are presented in familiar terms. The simplicity of her father's question - 'Want to go down and see if the Lake's still there?' - makes the

26 The Tumble of Reason largest, most abstract of issues seem tangible and colloquial, somehow real and true. At the same time, as the narrator discovers in the second part of the story, even the most familiar-seeming of things, such as her father's life, has always already been strange and mysterious.3 In 'Images/ the narrator, whom we are in some respects invited to perceive as the same narrator who narrates 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' and who is later identified with Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women,4 finds the familiarity of home threatened at the very start of the story by the presence of her cousin Mary McQuade: In the house I could always smell her, even in the rooms she seldom entered. What was her smell like? It was like metal and like some dark spice (cloves - she did suffer from toothache) and like the preparation rubbed on my chest when I had a cold. I mentioned it once to my mother, who said, 'Don't be silly, I don't smell anything/ So I never told about the taste, and there was a taste too. It was in all the food Mary McQuade prepared and perhaps in all food eaten in her presence - in my porridge at breakfast and my fried potatoes at noon and the slice of bread and butter and brown sugar she gave me to eat in the yard - something foreign, gritty, depressing. How could my parents not know about it? But for reasons of their own they would pretend. This was something I had not known a year ago. (DBS 32)

Mary's presence in the house causes the young girl to intuit the threatening possibilities that surround her in her everyday life. At once, the narrator senses that Mary is an invader, an uninvited force, who, by her intrusion, has violated the comforts of home: 'I doubted that she was asked to come. She came, and cooked what she liked and rearranged things to suit herself, complaining about draughts, and let her power loose in the house. If she had never come my mother would never have taken to her bed' (DHS 32-3). The narrator's father, we soon learn, has also taken on a new kind of role as a result of Mary's presence in the house: When he came in for meals she was always waiting for him, some joke swelling her up like a bullfrog, making her ferocious-looking and red in the face. She put uncooked white beans in his soup, hard as pebbles, and waited to see if good manners would make him eat them. She stuck something to the bottom of his water glass to look like a fly. She gave him a fork with a prong missing, pretending it was by accident. He threw it at her, and missed, but startled me considerably. My mother and father, eating supper, talked quietly and se-

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 27 riously. But in my father's family even grownups played tricks with rubber worms and beetles, fat aunts were always invited to sit on rickety chairs and uncles broke wind in public and said, 'Whoa, hold on there!' proud of themselves as if they had whistled a complicated tune ... So with Mary McQuade my father returned to family ways. (DHS 34)

As James Carscallen has pointed out, Mary McQuade, who 'has the power of "unmarrying" people, turning them from adults into childish practical jokers and senile invalids/ has invaded Ben Jordan's marriage ('Shining House' gi). Ben's daughter is confronted with the dangerous possibility that much of what surrounds her - family life, smells, tastes, shadows cast against the wall - may suddenly take on a life of its own. Sensing that things are somehow amiss, she remains caught up in 'trying to understand the danger, to read the signs of invasion' (DHS 35). These signs of invasion, of course, all stem from the realm of discourse which I have been calling paradigmatic. The signs are disturbing because they violate the expectations we have of the things which surround us in our everyday life. If, as Munro puts it in a later volume, 'treachery is the other side of dailiness/ then even the most familiar and comfortable of spaces is always on the brink of being transformed into a spurious, unfamiliar realm. The theoretical implications of this kind of transformation are potentially unsettling. Part of what is at issue when the narrator of 'Images' attempts to interpret these 'signs of invasion' is an evolving process of defamiliarization, a growing awareness of the potential for surprise in everyday acts of perception. Although the narrator in this story may be too young to follow the evidence of her discoveries through to a fully articulated conclusion, we as readers are invited to recognize the narrator's tentative handling of a new way of reading. No longer able to see signs as being attached to stable and familiar referents, she intuitively stumbles across the workings of what I am inclined to see as a provisional analogy. When smells, tastes, shadows, and family behaviour all suddenly take on a life of their own as a result of Mary McQuade's presence in the household, what Munro seems to be suggesting is that these signs have ceased to provide spontaneous access to the knowledge of things and have become 'signs of invasion.'5 When grown-ups play tricks with rubber worms and beetles, when uncooked beans find their way into soups, and foreign smells and tastes begin to insinuate themselves into a familiar household, our confident knowledge of things

28 The Tumble of Reason (and their representational value) becomes hard to take for granted. Indeed, the breakdown of the representational powers of these signs is roughly analogous to the process I spoke of earlier, where writing disrupts the experience of the reader by declaring itself as writing. As Munro, through her narrator, shows us that reading is not a habitualized process, we find ourselves in a realm where anything might happen. Lurking somewhere below the surface reality of everyday life in Munro's stories is always already a sense of uneasiness. In 'Images' this sense of uneasiness is registered in the way the narrator intuits things about her familial life. Her intuitions about the signs of invasion which surround her take on another form when she leaves the family setting and goes out with her father to look at his muskrat traps. The question her father asks at the beginning of the story's second section - 'Do you want to come with me and look at the traps?' (DHS 35) - reminds us of the question he asks at the beginning of 'Walker Brothers Cowboy.' (In both stories the father is identified as Ben Jordan.) Here, however, there is no hypothetical position suggested; it is simply an invitation for the narrator to go out walking with her father.6 What the narrator discovers on her walk with her father is revealing. In a scene which anticipates Del's encounter with the dead cow in Lives of Girls and Women, the narrator says of a trapped muskrat which she and her father find that she 'only wanted, but did not dare, to touch the stiff, soaked body, a fact of death' (DHS 36). Her fascination and fear are both apparent. It is worth noting, at this point, that death, in Munro's stories, tends to involve a number of complex and interconnected associations. Here in 'Images,' for instance, the death of muskrats which the daughter witnesses is connected, in part, with the father's livelihood. This kind of connection is made more explicit in 'Boys and Girls/ where the death of animals enables the family to make its living. But in 'Images/ the narrator also identifies death with Mary McQuade - big and gloomy Mary, whom the young girl holds responsible for 'the fact of death-contained' in the house (DHS 3i). Mary, however, is more than simply an invader who brings on death and causes illness. Her presence in the household, this time around, is occasioned by the fact that she is helping the narrator's mother, whose body 'had changed into some large, fragile and mysterious object, difficult to move' (DHS 33), during what seems, if only implicitly, to be a pregnancy. Munro, of course, never tells us that the mother

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 29 is pregnant; we are only provided with a rather vague suggestion that something large and fragile is becoming part of her. Indeed, the noncommunication of the mother's pregnancy aptly illustrates Munro's involvement with a discourse of absence. Mary, who is explicitly connected with death, is thus implicitly associated with birth - two processes, one as mysterious as the other, which the young narrator must learn to recognize as part of ordinary experience. Ordinary experience, to put it another way, is never entirely ordinary, and what the narrator learns from her dealings with Mary McQuade is the extent to which everything in life has 'its own invading shape' (DHS 37). Invasion, it seems, has become almost second nature to the narrator. Hence when she encounters a strange axe-wielding man moving through the bushes she is not surprised: I never moved to warn or call my father. The man crossed my path somewhere ahead, continuing down to the river. People say they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed, as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does not surprise you, the thing you have always known was there, that comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hurry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying. All my life I had known there was a man like this and he was behind doors, around the corner at the dark end of a hall. So now I saw him and just waited, like a child in an old negative electrified against the dark noon sky, with blazing hair and burned-out Orphan Annie eyes. The man slipped down through the bushes to my father. And I never thought, or even hoped for, anything but the worst. (DHS 38)

The daughter's 'recognition' here alerts us, yet again, to the possibility that the strange has always already been familiar. Even Joe Phippen, another invading shape, a crazed hermit with an axe who patrols the neighbourhood on the lookout for alleged enemies, is 'the thing you have always known was there.' Old Joe is an externalization of the worst that the narrator can imagine; he is an invader from the paradigmatic realm who causes the familiar landscape to open up and reveal, as Munro puts it in 'Characters/ an uncollected story, 'the landscape under the one you see ... the lakes and shores we map and name but never saw' (73). As if to signal such a landscape under the familiar one, Munro has Old Joe lead the narrator and her father to the cellar where he has been living since his house burnt down: 'We

3O The Tumble of Reason came out in a field of dead grass, and took a track across it to another, wider, field where there was something sticking out of the ground. It was a roof, slanting one way, not peaked, and out of the roof came a pipe with a cap on it, smoke blowing out. We went down the sort of steps that lead to a cellar, and that was what it was - a cellar with a roof on' (DHS 39). For the narrator, this descent into Joe's complex subterranean world is not only a confrontation with death, as commentary on the story has often suggested,7 but, perhaps more importantly, a confrontation with a world of absent, potential, and unrealized levels of meaning. Although the narrator has always suspected such levels of meaning to be 'around the corner at the dark end of a hall/ she has not yet had direct contact with them. Joe's axe, his whisky-drinking cat, and his hole-in-the-ground home constitute, in some sense, more tangible versions of the 'signs of invasion' which the narrator associates with the presence of Mary McQuade. The narrator, who, in her dealings with Mary, has developed an unformed, inchoate sense of life's paradigmatic dimensions, is here, in her encounter with Joe, initiated into a more fully developed awareness of the potential terrors which lie below the surface of her everyday life. As one critic has noted, the narrator makes her 'legendary journey' to Joe's world 'without going farther than the bush which is visible from her own yard' (Ross 114). This again suggests the extent to which the new insights that the narrator gleans from her encounter with Joe are part of her ordinary everyday life. But there is something else which the narrator intuits during her encounter with Joe. She is not afraid of Joe when she sees him emerge through the bushes with his axe presumably because, at some instinctual level, she realizes that they are akin. Not only is Joe 'the thing you have always known was there/ but he is also the thing 'that comes so naturally ... as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying.' What such a 'wish' or 'hope' suggests is that the narrator herself houses powerful instinctual desires whose fulfilment, because forbidden, must remain absent or potential. The narrator is not afraid of Joe because she understands that this man with the axe is perhaps a kindred spirit. He is not only an embodiment of the worst she can imagine, but also an externalization of the worst that she can hope or wish for. Both the narrator and Joe seek to liberate powerful instinctual desires. The narrator, seeing the axe-wielding stranger, 'never thought, or even hoped for, anything but the worst'; her deepest wish is that

Early'Signs of Invasion' 31 Joe will strike. Joe, similarly, seeks to liberate his own instinctual desires. He does so by attempting to burn down his house. The difference between these two characters lies in the way they deal with their respective primitive impulses. Joe Phippen invents (or appears to invent - because the extent to which Old Joe may actually be telling the truth is never fully clear) the Silases, his alleged enemies, and thus distorts and represses the reality of his desires. The narrator, on the other hand, learns from her encounter with Joe. James Carscallen says that in this story we witness a movement from 'the immediacy of confrontation ... to a region not of action but of reflection - the questioning and answering that turns children into adults' ('Shining House' 99). After her encounter with Joe, the narrator returns home initiated, grown-up, perhaps better able to deal with things at hand. She also returns home to discover that she is no longer afraid of Mary McQuade. The final paragraph of 'Images/ like the next-to-last paragraph in 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ sums up the movement contained in the story: 'Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after - like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word' (DHS 43). Here too, Ben's daughter knows that there are things not to be mentioned at home. In this story, the girl keeps her promise to her father by remaining silent, and is led to the conclusion that 'our fears are based on nothing but the truth.' But this knowledge is accompanied by an awareness of the ordinary world of knives and forks and its proximity to the fairy-tale world from which she has just escaped. Put another way, what the narrator learns here is that Joe's world, the dark, secret world of danger, fantasy, and fairy tale, is inseparable from her own world, the ordinary everyday world of knives, forks, humility, and good manners. The final paragraph, moreover, invites us to posit a connection between the narrator's world - which, as we have just seen, encompasses both the ordinary and the unfamiliar - and her mother's forgotten legendary childhood and the stories she, the mother, used to tell 'about Princes in the Tower and a queen getting her head chopped off while a little dog was hiding under her dress and another queen sucking poison out of her husband's wounds' (DHS 33). The stories of her

32 The Tumble of Reason mother's childhood - itself 'a time as legendary ... as any other' (DHS 33) - anticipate the narrator's own initiation into a world that continually challenges our common assumptions and intuitions. In a sense, what Munro gives us in the young girl's encounter with Joe Phippen is another version of the kind of story Mrs Jordan might once have told her daughter, the kind of story that, despite appearances, cannot simply be dismissed for being untrue or impossible. The encounter with Joe serves an important and indispensable function in the narrator's life because it shows her that the world is not made up of fixed or stable meanings. Paradigmatic discourse imposes its mark on every detail; a man with an axe is always potentially lurking behind bushes or in dark hallways. Any familiar space, even home, is always potentially unfamiliar, always potentially on the brink of becoming strange and mysterious. The implications of such a discovery are, of course, numerous. Once initiated into the paradigmatic dimensions of life, we approach the world with new insights, able, now, to entertain possibilities, to consider different versions, to ask questions, as the narrator does - 'Who is the Silases?' (DHS 43), 'Who is going to burn him and his bed?' (DHS 42) - rather than forever proposing answers as if the actual world were something that could be explained, coded, and mastered. It is worth noting that 'Images/ like 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' and many other Munro stories, is narrated retrospectively. The narrator of these stories is an adult looking back on her childhood. The writing, however, is, as one critic has pointed out, 'intended to suggest a young girl's voice and sensibility' (Maitland 186). While this sensibility is conveyed in 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' through the constant use of a present tense, there is in both stories a continuous hesitation between two points in time, between the child's experience at the time of the events being presented, and the adult narrator's ability to shape these recollections for us. Both stories, as we have seen, end with the narrator's awareness that there are things not to be mentioned at home. The narrator complies by not telling about Joe's axe in one case, and not telling about the whisky and dancing at Nora's in the other. By telling us the story, however, she breaks the promise which she had kept as a child. In her act of telling the story, the adult narrator reveals her involvement in the paradigmatic realm. By telling part of a story now which she would not tell then, during the time of the story's events, she is, in part, enacting an alternative possibility. By substituting her

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 33 telling in the present for her silence in the past, she makes us aware of a central strategy in Munro's fiction, a strategy which, as I shall show in more detail in later chapters, constitutes one of the forms that paradigmatic discourse can take in Munro's stories. The shifting between then and now, which appears here primarily as a result of Munro's retrospective technique, will become more developed and pronounced in her later collections of stories. 'Boys and Girls' is another story about a young girl's initiation into the world of adult experience. In this story of a father who is a fox farmer in the town of Jubilee, Munro again anticipates details which become prominent in her next book, Lives of Girls and Women. Many familiar Munro situations reappear in this story: the separation of the mother's world from the world of the father and children, the presence of the younger brother, and the young girl narrator's explicit rejection of her mother and attraction to her father. The mother, we are told, 'disliked the whole pelting operation - that was what the killing, skinning and preparation of furs was called' (DHS 111). The narrator, however, seems to find her father's work comforting; for her, 'the smell of blood and animal fat' is 'reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles' (DHS 112). She feels 'that work done in the house/ work associated with her mother, 'was endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in [her] father's service, was ritualistically important' (DHS 117). The story, then, seems to follow on the basis of a series of oppositions between the narrator's father and mother. The 'ritualistically important' male-centred world of work which she associates with her father is clearly the world she prefers. She turns 'red in the face with pleasure' when she is introduced to a feed salesman as her father's 'new hired man' (DHS 116; emphasis added). The salesman's response - 'Could have fooled me ... I thought it was only a girl' (DHS 116) - is not acceptable to the narrator. Another opposition which attests to the gap between the father's world and the mother's world is that made between her father's predilection for silence and her mother's willingness to engage herself in the act of telling: 'My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing. In this he was quite different from my mother, who, if she was feeling cheerful, would tell me all sorts of things - the name of a dog she had when she was a little girl, the names of boys she had gone out with later on when she was grown up, and

34 The Tumble of Reason what certain dresses of hers had looked like - she could not imagine now what had become of them. Whatever thoughts and stories my father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions/ (DHS 115). The narrator, in this respect too, seems to prefer her father's way. She also is someone who will try to keep things private, to retain and respect secrets and promises by remaining silent. After she prompts her brother Laird to join her in watching the shooting of a horse, she makes him promise not to tell what he has seen. Later, she will learn that such complicity between brother and sister is not always possible. Despite the young girl's explicit desire to be part of her father's world, however, Munro, throughout the story, seems to suggest that it is not enough for the narrator simply to understand the elements present in her everyday life; she must also become aware of paradigmatic relationships, relationships of absence, which reveal her latent desire to align herself with her mother, to be precisely that which she has been rejecting all along. The stories which the narrator tells herself before she falls asleep at night, during 'the most perfectly private and perhaps the best time of the whole day' (DHS 113) - a phrase which again seems to link her with her father's ways - suggest something about her desires and wishes. These stories, of course, belong to what I am calling the paradigmatic realm because they allow the narrator to imagine herself in alternative versions of her own life: These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little older; they took place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one that presented opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice, as mine never did. I rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that the real war had gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my back). I rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople's gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-out piece of heroism (nobody ever rode a horse there, except for King Billy in the Orangemen's Day Parade). There was always riding and shooting in these stories, though I had only been on a horse twice - bareback because we did not own a saddle - and the second time I had slid right around and dropped under the horse's feet; it had stepped placidly over me. I really was learning to shoot, but I could not hit anything yet, not even tin cans on fence posts. (DHS 113-14)

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 35 These stories about imagined acts of rescue and heroism seem, at least in terms of their content, quite clearly to place the narrator precisely where she would like to be: in the male-centred world of work which she associates with her father. The stories recall the 'heroic calendars' supplied to her father by the companies to whom he sells his fox pelts (DHS in). The fact that her stories always contained riding and shooting anticipates the actual shooting of horses which will come to mark a turning-point in the narrator's development. These stories which the young girl tells herself are important because they enable her to think about and to imagine various possibilities in her own life. Later, when she attempts to free the horse Flora from the inevitable fate that awaits her, the narrator is simply enacting on another level a slightly different version of the kind of rescue she saw herself performing in her paradigmatic imaginings. Here, we catch a glimpse of another form of paradigmatic discourse which will recur throughout Munro's fiction. By having the stories which the narrator tells herself 'come true/ so to speak, in a different form, Munro evinces her own interest in the place of paradigmatic discourse in everyday life. Munro's writing thus comes to challenge the conventional notion that things in the world somehow always logically exist prior to the stories which recount these things. To put it another way, Munro, even as early as in her first collection of stories, finds herself questioning the extent to which stories can be seen as signs for referents in the 'real world/ In 'Boys and Girls/ Munro already seems to be suggesting that the stories we tell, either to ourselves or to others, are an important part of our everyday experience. Rather than being abstractions which have little or no bearing on our lives, such stories enable us to enter into a paradigmatic realm and to begin to recognize the extent to which the reverse holds true, that is, to recognize that events and experiences in the world may somehow be abstractions from the stories we tell.8 But the stories we tell can reveal other paradigmatic dimensions, and in 'Boys and Girls' the stories the young girl tells herself alert us to yet another absent level of meaning. In addition to anticipating the narrator's attempt to set Flora free - an attempt which constitutes the first time the young girl consciously disobeys her father - the telling of these stories of rescue and heroism alerts us to the possibility that the narrator is already aligning herself with her mother and her mother's world. Munro suggests that the narrator, on an unconscious, absent level of meaning, has always already been part of the world

36 The Tumble of Reason which she appears so vehemently to be rejecting. Put another way, the story's turn of events is set in motion long before the narrator is consciously aware of the fact that she has disobeyed her father. One of the ways in which Munro hints at the narrator's latent desire to be part of her mother's world is by having her tell herself stories. Various forms of the word 'tell' occur throughout Munro's work and her choice of the word in this context, given Munro's meticulousness, is something that, like the world of her fiction in general, should not be taken for granted. The fact that the narrator is involved in 'telling' herself stories from night to night indeed reminds us of someone else who likes to 'tell ... all sorts of things' (DHS 115). Munro, in a characteristically subtle and indirect fashion, reminds us that there is already a bond between mother and daughter. Despite the fact that the act of telling is, for the narrator, linked with a need for heroism, excitement, and content,9 we should also not lose sight of the fact that, according to the set of oppositions which the story posits, the narrator has inherited her impulse to tell from the world of her mother. By telling these stories of heroism, then, the narrator, if only implicitly, already begins to reveal the extent to which she has an affinity for her mother's world. This affinity, as we shall see in a moment, becomes fully explicit in the shift which takes place in the narrator's stories around the time she attempts to set Flora free. There are two other passages in the story, both of which come before the incident with Flora, that already call into question the narrator's loyalty to her father. The first is a passage which suggests the young girl's sympathy for the foxes which her father raises: 'They were beautiful for their delicate legs and heavy, aristocratic tails and the bright fur sprinkled on dark down their backs - which gave them their name - but especially for their faces, drawn exquisitely sharp in pure hostility, and their golden eyes' (DHS 115). The narrator's attraction to these foxes who are soon to be killed and skinned, suggests, in part, that she feels a kind of sympathy for them. Her attraction to the animals, moreover, looks ahead to her attempt to free Flora - another animal destined for slaughter - and suggests that her loyalty to her father's world of work is already subject to a closer scrutiny. The other incident which alerts us to the possibility that the narrator has not always been on her father's side is the killing of Mack. Mack is another horse that, like Flora, has been kept on the farm to be slaughtered for fox food. When she learns Mack is going to be shot, she confesses that it 'was not something [she] wanted to see; just the

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 37 same, if a thing really happened, it was better to see it, and know' (DHS 121). The narrator, with her mixed feelings of fear and fascination, here reminds us of the little girl who confronts the dead muskrat in 'Images/ Mack's death is important because it hints at the narrator's connection to her mother's world. The shooting of this first horse does not initially appear to trouble her, but she says, 'Sometimes, when I was busy, working at school, or standing in front of a mirror combing my hair and wondering if I would be pretty when I grew up, the whole scene would flash into my mind. I would see the easy, practised way my father raised the gun, and hear Henry laughing when Mack kicked his legs in the air. I did not have any great feeling of horror and opposition, such as a city child might have had; I was too used to seeing the death of animals as a necessity by which we lived. Yet I felt a little ashamed, and there was a new wariness, a sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work' (DHS 123-4). This juxtaposition of the young girl wondering what she will look like when she grows up with a scene associated with her father's world of work adroitly conveys the narrator's own uncertainty about her loyalty in particular her future loyalty - to her father. The 'new wariness' which comes as a result of Mack's death suggests that the young girl's attitude towards her parents and what they represent may not be as fixed or stable as she might like to think it is. As the story progresses, the narrator becomes increasingly aware of her own sense of insecurity. Early on, we are told that she is afraid of the room in which she and her brother sleep. The room, as she apprehends it, is charged with all sorts of threatening possibilities: We were afraid of inside, the room where we slept. At this time the upstairs of our house was not finished. A brick chimney went up one wall. In the middle of the floor was a square hole, with a wooden railing around it; that was where the stairs came up. On the other side of the stairwell were the things that nobody had any use for any more - a soldiery roll of linoleum, standing on end, a wicker baby carriage, a fern basket, china jugs and basins with cracks in them, a picture of the Battle of Balaclava, very sad to look at. I had told Laird, as soon as he was old enough to understand such things, that bats and skeletons lived over there; whenever a man escaped from the county jail twenty miles away, I imagined that he had somehow let himself in the window and was hiding behind the linoleum. (DHS 112-13; emphasis in original)

38 The Tumble of Reason Here, as elsewhere, the threatening possibilities operate on a potential or absent level of meaning. In imagining escaped convicts hiding behind a roll of linoleum, the narrator brings together the ordinary and the dangerous in a characteristically Munrovian fashion. The passage is also important because, once again, it shows us that paradigmatic, absent levels of meaning play a significant role in everyday life. It is not a coincidence that the young girl imagines escaped convicts hiding in her room. Her thoughts here - paradigmatic because absent and unactualized - reveal her own interest in the need to escape, the need to be free. This interest in freedom is, for the most part, associated with another kind of insecurity that she feels growing up on the farm: 'I no longer felt safe ... The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened, like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become' (DHS 119; emphasis in original). Becoming a girl, of course, would mean accepting the world of her mother, giving in to someone who 'was plotting ... to get me to stay in the house more, although she knew I hated it (because she knew I hated it) and keep me from working for my father' (DHS 118; emphasis in original). Far from being innocent and unburdened, the word 'girl' becomes what Derrida would call a conflictual site. The narrator is scorned by her mother and grandmother for not being enough of a girl and she is ridiculed by the men in the family for being too much of a girl. As a result, she finds herself going deliberately out of her way - slamming doors, sitting as awkwardly as possible, doing things that girls are not supposed to do - in an effort to repress or ignore her girlhood, thinking that by taking such measures she can keep herself free. This desire for freedom culminates in the turning-point of the story, the moment where, although she makes no conscious decision to do so, the narrator opens the gate wide and allows Flora temporarily to escape the fate that awaits her. In doing this, she has explicitly disobeyed her father's orders to fasten the gate. Although she cannot understand why she acts the way she does, her impulse for freedom does seem to shed some light on her motives. It is also interesting to note that she finds herself wanting to tell her mother about what she has done. It is almost as if the act is somehow not complete unless she can tell about it. She too is tempted by telling as a way of maintaining control over secrets, even if these secrets are her own. She ends up remaining silent, perhaps still clinging to the hope that her

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 39 brother, who saw the incident, might not mention anything to her father, clinging to the hope that her loyalty to her father's world might remain intact. It is at this point in the story, however, that certain changes begin to take place. Like the narrator in 'Images/ who returns home after her encounter with Joe Phippen to discover that she is no longer afraid of Mary McQuade, the young girl in 'Boys and Girls' now discovers that neither she nor her brother is any longer afraid of the room where they sleep: 'We knew it was just old furniture over there, old jumble and confusion' (DHS 126). The barricade she wants to set up between her bed and Laird's testifies to the increasing separation between brother and sister or, to use the story's title, between boys and girls. The narrator begins 'trying to make [her] part of the room fancy, spreading the bed with old lace curtains and fixing [herself] a dressingtable with some leftovers of cretonne for a skirt' (DHS 126). She realizes also that although she still tells herself stories at night, 'even in these stories something different was happening, mysterious alterations took place' (DHS 126). These alterations explicitly reveal how much the narrator finds herself understanding that she belongs as much in her mother's world as in her father's: 'A story might start off in the old way, with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild animals, and for a while I might rescue people; then things would change around, and instead, somebody would be rescuing me. It might be a boy from our class at school, or even Mr. Campbell, our teacher, who tickled girls under the arms. And at this point the story concerned itself at great length with what I looked like - how long my hair was, and what kind of dress I had on; by the time I had these details worked out the real excitement of the story was lost' (DHS 126). The shift which takes place in these stories reveals the narrator's increasing sexual awareness, her awareness of the fact that she is more of a girl than she might previously have liked to admit. As her stories become more and more concerned with what she looks like and what she is wearing, we, as readers, are encouraged to see a close connection between these stories and the stories her mother would tell when in a cheerful mood. The fact that she, the narrator, is now the object of rescues rather than the person doing the rescuing suggests that she has a markedly different attitude towards herself. This shift from being a hero to being the object of someone else's attention is part of a larger shift that takes place in the impression which the narrator seeks to engender by her imagined performance in these stories.

4o The Tumble of Reason Initially, the narrator seems to be taken in by the part she plays in her own stories, by the impression she projects through her heroic performances. There is little doubt, in her mind, about the psychological validity of what is being staged. When she imagines herself saving lives and riding spiritedly down the main street in Jubilee, she is attempting to incorporate and exemplify certain characteristics of life - excitement, heroism - which she has come to associate with the world of her father. At this stage, the narrator appears to accept these characteristics as the reality of her own life. What Munro suggests throughout the story, however, is that there are always paradigmatic relationships at work, absent levels of meaning that come into play, latent desires that cannot finally be ignored. The latent becomes manifest in the later versions of the stories which the narrator tells herself. There we notice the use of modal auxiliaries, words like 'might' and 'would/ which not only replace but also undermine the sense of certainty and confidence which characterized the language of the narrator's earlier versions. As the narrator finds herself becoming the centre of attention and the object of rescues, her own vulnerability is brought to the fore. Her secure-seeming position from the previous stories - linked with a vision of herself as heroic and capable - is called into question. She shifts from being the hero of the earlier stories and becomes the object of someone else's attention, someone else who inevitably happens to belong to the opposite sex - a boy from school or a teacher who tickles girls under the arms. The story ends with Flora being captured and Laird telling the family at dinner that his sister was responsible for letting Flora get away in the first place. Laird's telling is itself an act which challenges the completeness of any opposition between father's world and mother's world, between boys and girls.10 When the narrator begins to cry, her father simultaneously absolves and dismisses her by saying that she is 'only a girl.' The narrator does not protest. She accepts her girlhood and allows her implicit desires finally to become explicit. As this reading suggests, then, 'Boys and Girls,' far from tracing what Blodgett sees as the complex process of 'a fate not to be wished for' (Alice Munro 34), is not simply a story about a young girl who wants to be a boy and who discovers, in the end, that she is 'only a girl.' It is, instead, a story about a young girl who has always been, and, at some instinctual level, has always wanted to be, a girl. Despite the narrator's attempts to renounce her girlhood and identify herself with her father, the shards and scattered remnants of a repressed and

Early 'Signs of Invasion' 41 denied girlhood which appear paradigmatically throughout the story force us to recognize the extent to which the narrator has always already been a part of that world she seems continually to reject. THE MAKING OF LEGENDS

These three stories of initiation, 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ 'Images/ and 'Boys and Girls/ furnish us with exemplary instances of Munro's interest in and promotion of what I have been calling paradigmatic discourse. Although I have restricted detailed analysis to these three pieces, Munro's involvement with absent and potential levels of meaning manifests itself in various ways throughout several of the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades. Perhaps the most common way she makes use of this realm of discourse in this first collection is through an examination of what, in an interview conducted several years after the publication of Dance of the Happy Shades, she called 'the whole business of how life is made into a story by the people who live it' (Struthers, 'Real Material' 33). Throughout Dance of the Happy Shades, characters are continually turning their knowledge and experience of the world into stories and legends. In 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ as we have seen, Ben Jordan attempts to convey something of his awareness of the mysterious nature of life, the tentativeness of all things in the face of time and history, by telling his daughter a story of how the Great Lakes came to be. Similarly, in 'The Peace of Utrecht/ the past becomes manageable only when it is made into the subject of the stories that Helen and Maddy tell. In an effort to compensate for the 'desert that is between [them]' (DHS 190), for the guilt that one feels for leaving Jubilee, and for the sense of resentment that haunts the other for staying behind, the two sisters attempt to preserve their past in legendary anecdote by entertaining Fred Powell with stories of their childhood: '[We make] this strange man a present of our childhood, or of that version of our childhood which is safely preserved in anecdote, as in a kind of mental cellophane. And what fantasies we build around the frail figures of our child-selves, so that they emerge beyond recognition incorrigible and gay. We tell stories together well' (DHS 193). Telling stories, here, becomes a remedy, a means of dealing with the past which enables Helen and Maddy better to come to terms with their current relationship. As the sisters relive their past in memory, what Munro seems to be getting at is the extent to which memory can only engender

42 The Tumble of Reason 'versions' or 'fantasies' - textual accounts - of the way things were. Helen and Maddy's mother, now dead, becomes, in the present, 'one of the town's possessions and oddities, its brief legends' (DHS 194). By turning their mother into a legend, into a character in a story (Osachoff 75), the sisters are engaging in a gesture of paradigmatic substitution, where 'versions/ 'legends/ and 'fantasies' replace the actual events of the past. As Linda Hutcheon has suggested in her recent book on postmodernism, 'The real exists (and existed), but our understanding of it is always conditioned by discourses, by our different ways of talking about it' (Poetics 157). Talking about the past in anecdote, then, becomes a way for Helen and Maddy to transform experiences 'which seemed not at all memorable at the time ... into something curiously meaningful ... and complete' (DHS 201-2). By engaging in this act of paradigmatic substitution, the sisters attempt to simulate a diplomatic gesture of peace, a kind of Treaty of Utrecht between siblings. Like Helen and Maddy, who are caught up in attempting to make their experience of life into the subject of stories and legends, other characters throughout the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades find themselves involved in similar paradigmatic pursuits. Mrs Fullerton, in 'The Shining Houses/ Lois's mother, in 'Thanks for the Ride/ and Mr Mailey, in 'The Office/ all use stories as a way of dealing with events in their lives. Mrs Fullerton, whose husband simply walked away one day never to return, tells stories in a manner which invites her listeners to substitute potential and absent meanings for fixed and stable ones. Listening to Mrs Fullerton's stories, Mary, for example, pretends to know less than she does: 'This way, remembered episodes emerged each time with slight differences of content, meaning, colour, yet with a pure reality that usually attaches to things which are at least part legend' (DHS 19). What is of interest here is not only Munro's fascination with the way memory or the imagination can take hold of an incident and make it legendary,11 but also her awareness of the possibility that the opposition between the actual world of lived experiences and the world of the text (stories, legends, versions) has become untenable. Although the stories in this first collection lack the self-reflexive questioning that goes on in many of her later volumes, we already begin to see traces of Munro's uneasiness with the completeness of the real life / fiction opposition. It is somehow not surprising that the original working title for her next book would be Real Life.

2

'So Many Created Worlds7: Lives of Girls and Women

Words too have their lives, their histories, their biographers. Mark Frutkin, The Growing Dawn

There is something particularly problematic about a fiction which proposes to call itself Real Life. Far from simply appealing to and consolidating a kind of transparent reality, Munro's initial title for Lives of Girls and Women also announces a hesitation that runs throughout the course of her fiction. The title Real Life poses difficulties because it simultaneously effaces and calls attention to the textual dimension of Munro's art. Such a title confirms the mimetic tradition, but it does so only by challenging it, by reminding us, as readers, of the fact that what we are reading is, in fact, a text and not real life. Although this text was finally published as Lives of Girls and Women, Munro's proposed title already reveals an implicit awareness that the opposition between what is real and what is other-than-real is something we cannot take for granted. In Lives of Girls and Women, this opposition is constantly thwarted and challenged from various sources. Despite Munro's realistic presentation of lives and events, despite her surface desire to provide a true-to-life picture of the world as it really is, her text is all the while engaged in a re-examination of the conventions of realism, a rethinking of the extent to which the life we live 'writes itself,' to borrow Gayatri Spivak's phrase, 'with the many-leveled, unfixable intricacy and openness' of a text (Spivak 75). Lives of Girls and Women begins in an out of the way place called The Flats Road,' neither part of the country nor part of the town, with an uncle who is not an uncle. Uncle Benny, who 'was not [Del's]

44 The Tumble of Reason uncle, or anybody's' (IGW i), inhabits a world which, as we soon discover, offers a metaphor for the structural and thematic organization of the novel as a whole.1 Benny's world, his home, is awash with trivial everyday objects: 'a wealth of wreckage, a whole rich dark, rotting mess of carpets, linoleum, parts of furniture, insides of machinery, nails, wire, tools, utensils' (LGW 4). While this accumulation of common household items serves the mimetic function of orienting us, as readers, to reality, of persuading us that what we are reading is, in fact, part of real, ordinary life, it is not long before we learn that Benny's world, with its common everyday items, is not so common after all. The description of trivial objects, then, which seems to function metonymically - Munro's descriptions represent a selection from a whole which is, indeed, the real world - is counterpoised with other descriptions, other types of description, which, in various ways, alert us to the possibility that Munro is not interested simply in capturing the immediacy and presence of things in the world. Early on in 'The Flats Road/ Munro poses a subtle challenge to the ordinary assurance we have of things and people in the 'real' world by relying upon a conditional expression to 'get at' Uncle Benny's character: 'If he had lived in a city he would have run an enormous junk shop; he would have spent his life among heaps of soiled furniture and worn-out appliances and chipped dishes and grimy pictures of other people's relatives' (LGW 4). Speculating on what Benny would have done, if he had lived in the city, is an appropriate paradigmatic gesture for Munro because it hints at Benny's own predilection for absent and potential meanings. Throughout this opening story, Uncle Benny's ability to envisage states of affairs that may or may not correspond to the way things operate in real life is amply documented. The impression that he, as a storyteller, leaves on Del is especially significant: He told stories, in which there was nearly always something happening that my mother would insist could not have happened, as in the story of Sandy Stevenson's marriage. Sandy Stevenson had married a fat woman from down east, out of the county altogether, and she had two thousand dollars in the bank and she owned a Pontiac car. She was a widow. No sooner had she come to live with Sandy, here on the Flats Road twelve, fifteen years ago, than things began to happen. Dishes smashed themselves on the floor during the night. A stew

'So Many Created Worlds' 45 flew off the stove by itself, splattering the kitchen walls. Sandy woke up in the night to feel something like a goat butting him through the mattress, but when he looked there was nothing under the bed. His wife's best nightgown was ripped from top to bottom and knotted in the cord of the window shade. In the evening, when they wanted to sit in peace and have a little talk, there was rapping on the wall, so loud you couldn't hear yourself think. Finally the wife told Sandy she knew who was doing it. It was her dead husband, mad at her for getting married again. She recognized his way of rapping, those were his very knuckles. They tried ignoring him but it was no use. They decided to go off in the car for a little trip and see if that would discourage him. But he came right along. He rode on the top of the car. He pounded on the roof of the car with his fists and kicked it and banged and shook it so Sandy could hardly keep it on the road. Sandy's nerves collapsed at last. He pulled off the road and told the woman to take the wheel, he was going to get out and walk or hitchhike home. He advised her to drive back to her own town and try to forget about him. She burst into crying but agreed it was the only thing to do. (LGW 9; emphasis added)

What is important here is that the story Uncle Benny tells anticipates what will happen when he himself marries Madeleine, his mail-order bride. When Benny answers the advertisement in his newspaper for a potential wife, he ends up getting much more than he bargained for.2 Rather than simply driving out to Kitchener and 'lookin' her over' (LGW 13), as he had intended, Benny ends up returning to the Flats Road married to a woman who later threatens to set his house on fire because he brought her the wrong brand of cigarettes (LGW 17). Madeleine, we also learn, hurls a box of Kotex at the local store owner, throws a kettle out the window because it contains no water, and takes the scissors to Uncle Benny's wedding suit. These violent and unpredictable actions establish a connection between Benny's marriage to Madeleine and Sandy Stevenson's marriage to 'a fat woman from down east' (LGW 9), a connection which seems to suggest that Benny's 'real' life is the stuff of which stories are made. By having a seemingly unbelievable story come true in a different form, Munro, in a characteristic manner, hints at the ways in which ordinary life is embedded in mystery. She shows us that life, no matter how thoroughly grounded - as Benny's is - in the mundane and the ordinary, cannot be understood according to a rational discourse, according to a discourse which assumes that reality is stable, safe, and even predictable. Benny's tales, in other words, are not to be dismissed

46 The Tumble of Reason simply for being untrue as Del's mother urges. Del's mother, a lover of maps, a rationalist who wants to reduce the world to facts and deny everything else as fancy, tries to maintain an opposition between the factual and the possible. Benny, on the other hand, problematizes our understanding of the relationship between the world of fact and the world of fiction. The chaotic, unpredictable realm which Benny inhabits is, as the older Del, looking back on her childhood realizes, 'the same but never at all the same' (LGW 25) as her own world. Although Benny's world is 'unlike the one [Del's] parents read about in the paper, or heard about on the daily news' (LGW 5), although the headlines in his sensationalist newspapers are unambiguously and fundamentally different from assertions made in the 'real world,' the older Del, by acknowledging the sameness and otherness of this uncle who is not an uncle, seems to understand the importance of alternative modes of inquiry, that is, what I am calling paradigmatic discourse. What she learns from Uncle Benny, more precisely, is the importance and the necessity of making recourse to a world of possible and potential meanings. Benny's 'concentrated passion' (LGW 2), his wild faith, his abandoned scheme and business ventures, his attraction to the 'precarious and unusual/ to 'some ... never realized, hope of fortune' (LGW 4) - all provide the impetus for the young Del to recognize how difficult it is to speak of 'real life/ how difficult it is to posit an unproblematized split between phenomenal reality and the wild, unpredictable world which Benny represents. Throughout this opening story, then, Munro attempts to steer us away from a straightforward consideration of the way things are. Uncle Benny, whose triumph, as the older Del realizes, was 'to make us see' (LGW 25), opens up a world of alternative perspectives, teaching us, as he teaches the young Del, to play out possible versions of things and events in the world. His marriage with Madeleine provides an outstanding instance of Munro's involvement with the paradigmatic realm because it too turns on tropes of supposition. Just as the fellow who was supposed to turn Benny's turtles into soup for Americans may have been 'no more than a rumour in the first place' (LGW 3 so Madeleine, the child-beater, is remembered on the Flats Road as though she were a product of Uncle Benny's storyteller imagination: 'Uncle Benny could have made up the beatings, my mother said at last, and took that for comfort; how was he to be trusted? Madeleine herself was like something he might have made up. We remembered her like a story, and having nothing else to give we gave her our

'So Many Created Worlds' 47 strange, belated, heartless applause' (LGW 26-7). I have already alluded, in my introduction, to the way in which the striking simile 'like a story' conveys the impression of both real life and textuality. I would like to point out here the way in which the central event of this opening story, Uncle Benny's marriage to Madeleine, is itself rendered somewhat unstable through Munro's use of epistemic modals.3 Although Mrs Jordan's suppositions and doubts are perhaps more readily dismissed by the reader than are Uncle Benny's stories and protestations of faith, the passage asks us to think about the extent to which truth or certainty about things in the world may never be entirely true or certain. In asking us to entertain the possibility that Uncle Benny might have made up the beatings, might have, in fact, made up Madeleine, Munro, of course, is not entirely serious; the implications of Mrs Jordan's unwillingness to accept Benny's account of things, however, gain significance as they are played out in various ways throughout the course of the novel. We return, then, to the kind of hypothetical position registered in the opening sentence of 'Walker Brothers Cowboy.' Madeleine, of course, is made into the subject of stories long before she disappears from the Flats Road. As Del tells us, 'stories of Madeleine were being passed up and down the road ... After a while [Uncle Benny] started telling stories himself (LGW 17). Del's initial encounter with Benny's 'bride' is itself presented in such a manner that we begin to realize the action being described may not simply be a fait accompli: 'I thought I would knock on the door and ask, in a very polite way, if it was all right for me to read the newspapers on the porch. But before I got to the steps the door opened and Madeleine came out with a stove-lid lifter in her hand. She might have been lifting a stove lid when she heard me, she might not have picked it up on purpose, but I could not see it as anything but a weapon' (LGW 16-17; emphasis added). Here again, Munro's use of expressions such as 'might have been lifting' and 'might not have picked it up on purpose' alerts us to the possibility that events depicted in the narrative or, in this case, intentions governing those events, may be sketchy and tentative rather than definitive and final. Instead of simply legitimizing her discourse by reference to the real and tangible, Munro, through Del, tries to 'make us see' that experiences in the world are not necessarily as clearcut as they might initially appear. Another way in which Munro commonly employs paradigmatic discourse in Lives of Girls and Women is through her double time-scheme.

48 The Tumble of Reason From the opening story, we realize that the narrator, Del Jordan, whose growth we follow, exists within two time-frames. On the one hand, Del partakes of the syntagmatic day-to-day time of the events being described in the narrative. On the other hand, however, Munro also gives us Del's older point of view, looking back on the past. The following passage, which appears towards the end of 'The Flats Road/ makes both points in time evident: So lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny's world like a troubling distorted reflection, the same but never at all the same. In that world people could go down in quicksand, be vanquished by ghosts or terrible ordinary cities; luck and wickedness were gigantic and unpredictable; nothing was deserved, anything might happen; defeats were met with crazy satisfaction. It was his triumph, that he couldn't know about, to make us see. Owen was swinging on the screen door, singing in a cautious derogatory way, as he would when there were long conversations. Land of Hope and Glory Mother of the Free How shall we ex-tore thee Who are bo-orn of thee?

I had taught him that song - that year we were singing such songs every day at school, to help save England from Hitler. My mother said it was extol but I would not believe that, for how would it rhyme? (LGW 25-6)

This passage begins with the language and sensibility of Del Jordan as an older woman. However, when Del tells us about the song she had taught her brother, we realize that both tenses, then and now, are implicit here. The question 'how would it rhyme?' shows us that Del, as a young child, is already sensitive to linguistic usages. It shows us that she exhibits a willingness to subordinate what is 'true' or 'proper' to the requirements of her own aesthetic sensibility, to transform 'real life' into stories or narrative. Munro, then, takes us back and forth, between Del in grade four and Del as an older woman, between the protagonist who is caught up in the events being described and the mature narrator who, with the benefit of hindsight, is able to compare her relationship with Benny's world to a 'troubling distorted reflection.'4 Because of this double time-scheme, what is offered is not only a story, not only a body of material and a set of events, but also a response by a narrating consciousness to that material and to those

'So Many Created Worlds' 49 events. Lives of Girls and Women thus presents events as they unfold (with Del growing up) - the syntagmatic disposition of events suggesting a temporal development - while also giving us Del's paradigmatic evaluation of those events. The older Del, like several of Munro's characters, is clearly someone who is re-experiencing, reminiscing about, and reshaping her past.5 Ultimately, however, we read Lives of Girls and Women not only to discover how the older Del responds to things that have happened to her, but also, as many critics have noted, to see how she will write about them. Uncle Benny poses the central question early in the text when he asks Del, 'Can you write?' (LGW 10). Although the immediate reference is to the letter that Benny wants Del to write for him, the question and the allusion to Joyce that follows signal to us that Lives is going to be a kind of reworking of the classic Kiinstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young woman.6 The allusion itself invites us to raise questions not only about the role played by the reader in producing potential meanings in Munro's text, but also about writing as the liberation of Del's potential. By having Del rewrite the past, by having her turn her experience of life into a story, Munro challenges the view that lives and events presented in the narrative can be taken for granted. Munro's use of the double time-scheme and her constant recourse to expressions of supposition, possibility, and even intention7 (think, for instance, of Uncle Benny's seemingly endless schemes and ventures) disrupt our conventional patterns of perception by alerting us that details, lives, and events depicted in the text as 'real life' are often other than they seem. 'The Flats Road,' then, serves as a kind of introduction, both for us as readers and for the young protagonist, to the world of possible and potential meanings. Although various ways of 'getting at' people's lives will be chronicled throughout Lives of Girls and Women, it is Uncle Benny's world of vision and story, and his faith in the paradigmatic realm, which are perhaps most influential in paving the way for Del's development as a creative writer. The second chapter, 'Heirs of the Living Body,' seems, at first, to have little to do with the story of Madeleine and Benny that precedes it. It is not long, however, before we recognize that Del's Uncle Craig (a real uncle this time)8 is, as Del will become, a writer. We are told that when Craig was 'not working on the Township's business he was engaged on two projects - a history of Wawanash County, and a family

5O The Tumble of Reason tree, going back to 1670, in Ireland' (LGW 30-1). Craig's history represents another way - the first way, as we have seen in 'The Flats Road/ is through story, and, by implication, through fiction9 - of coming to terms with the lives of people in Jubilee. After Uncle Craig dies, Del inherits his manuscript because she is said to be the one with a 'knack for writing compositions' (LGW 61). Del's response, when her aunts hand over the box containing Craig's manuscript, is central to her own development as a writer: When I left I carried the box with me, awkwardly under my arm. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as if I were a ship with their hopes on it, dropping down over the horizon. I put the box under my bed at home; I was not up to discussing it with my mother. A few days later I thought that it would be a good place to keep those few poems and bits of a novel I had written; I would like to have them locked away where nobody could find them and where they would be safe in case of fire. I lifted the mattress and got them out. That was where I had kept them up to now, folded inside a large flat copy of Wuthering Heights. I didn't want Uncle Craig's manuscript put back with the things I had written. It seemed so dead to me, so heavy and dull and useless, that I thought it might deaden my things too and bring me bad luck. I took it down to the cellar and left it in a cardboard box. (LGW 62)

The fact that Del reads Wuthering Heights, and in fact inserts her own story between its pages, is significant; it is Munro's way of commenting on the sensibility of her protagonist. Bronte's passionate text in many ways stands in radical opposition to Craig's dead, heavy, dull, and useless history. Towards the end of the chapter, we are given a sample of Craig's writing: During the spring, summer and, early fall of that year a large amount of building went forward in Fairmile, Morris, and Grantly townships. On the corner of Concession Five and the River Sideroad, in Fairmile, a Methodist Church was erected to serve a large and growing congregation in that area. This was known as the White Brick Church and unfortunately it was only to stand until 1924 when it was destroyed by fire of unknown origins. The drive-shed, though built of wood, was spared. On the opposite corner Mr. Alex Medley built and opened a General Store but died within two months of the opening of a stroke and the operation was continued by his sons Edward and Thomas. There was also a blacksmith shop in operation further along the Fifth Concession, O'Donnell being the name of the people

'So Many Created Worlds'

51

that had it. This corner was known either as Hedley's Corners or Church Corners. There is nothing in that location at the present time but the building of the store, which a family rents and lives in. (LGW 61)

His factual historical writing, which Del by the end of the novel sees as Voracious and misguided' (LGW 253), attempts to deal with people's lives on a syntagmatic level of understanding. We are told of his project that 'it was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past' (LGW 31). This syntagmatic impulse to go back through history and write down 'in order' the names and dates of family members, to make lists of 'the most ordinary facts' about the county, cannot yield a meaningful representation of either Craig's family or the history of the township. Blodgett suggests that Uncle Craig's text is 'metonymy with a vengeance: one fact leads to another and concludes in a clause that contains nothing new for anyone who was familiar with the township' (Alice Munro 42). Del's recognition of the extent to which her Uncle's approach is incomplete is made most evident in a later, oftcited, passage which appears in the 'Epilogue': 'And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together - radiant, everlasting' (LGW 253). What Del the writer is after, then, is precisely what Uncle Craig, in his fact-gathering approach to history, cannot provide. While the meaning of his projects lies in genealogical relationships, relations of contiguity or succession, Del's desire to be able to capture 'every last thing' suggests that, for her, the individual names are important. In contrast to Craig's accurate writing of history, Munro, two chapters later, gives us her own version of a kind of historical writing.10 Like Uncle Craig, Munro also tells us about churches; instead of telling us when they were built, however, Munro writes about the different kinds of people who go to different kinds of churches. The implication is that what seems to be fiction gets one inside history more than Uncle Craig's writing does. The paradigmatic discourse of fiction turns out to be more 'true' than an empirical or documentary approach to the past: The United Church was the most modern, the largest, the most prosperous church in Jubilee. It had taken in all the Methodists and Congregationalists

52, The Tumble of Reason and a good chunk of Presbyterians (that was what my father's family had been) at the time of the Church Union. There were four other churches in town but they were all small, all relatively poor, and all, by United Church standards, went to extremes. The Catholic church was the most extreme. White and wooden, with a plain mission cross, it stood on a hill at the north end of town and dispensed peculiar services to Catholics, who seemed bizarre and secretive as Hindus, with their idols and confessions and black spots on Ash Wednesday. At school the Catholics were a small but unintimidated tribe, mostly Irish, who did not stay in the classroom for Religious Education but were allowed to go down to the basement, where they banged on the pipes. It was hard to connect their simple rowdiness with their exotic dangerous faith. My father's aunts, my great-aunts, lived across from the Catholic church and used to make jokes about 'nipping in for a bit of confession' but they knew, they could tell you, all there was beyond jokes, babies' skeletons, and strangled nuns under the convent floors, yes, fat priests and fancy women and the black old popes. It was all true, they had books about it. All true. (LGW 93 -4)

This passage begins with an imitation of the kind of writing we saw in Uncle Craig's manuscript. The narrator, seemingly omniscient, starts with facts - The United Church was the most modern' - and slowly modulates into a discussion of what happened at school. Del, then, begins to talk about her great-aunts. Here, Munro moves into the realm of paradigmatic discourse - 'but they knew, they could tell you, all there was beyond jokes, babies' skeletons, and strangled nuns under the convent floors, yes, fat priests and fancy women and the black old popes. It was all true' - capturing by repetition the voices of those aunts and the nuances of their speech. In this paragraph, then, Munro shifts from an imitation of historical writing to an indirect paradigmatic narrative which seems to give a more true-to-life description of Jubilee's religious life than Uncle Craig's meticulous account. We move, then, from the syntagmatic presence of history's rational, factual discourse to the absent speeches of great-aunts. This movement away from an empirical approach to history seems in keeping with Michel Foucault's remark about the contemporary need to alter our notions of history or historiography: 'The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled' (Language 153). Del, then, will do what Uncle Craig has done - they are both 'heirs of the living body' of history and they are both, in different ways, concerned with the importance of daily life - but

'So Many Created Worlds' 53 she will do it in a different way. Del's attempt to explore the nature of people's lives and experiences will, like Munro's attempt, take the form of fiction. Despite the fact that Craig's syntagmatic writing proceeds on the basis of predication, Munro suggests that paradigmatic relationships also play a vital role in his life. Craig, in his home out at Jenkin's Bend, is flanked by two purveyors of absent and potential meanings. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace, who both like to tell stories, are continually engaged in a discourse very different from Uncle Craig's straightforward factual one. Del tells us, 'There was a whole new language to learn in their house. Conversations there had many levels, nothing could be stated directly, every joke might be a thrust turned inside out' (LGW 37). What Del describes as the 'nimble malice that danced under their courtesies to the rest of the world' (LGW 39) suggests a gap between the performative level of present utterance and the cognitive one of absent intention, a gap which attests to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of taking the aunts' kindness and deference at face value. Even Uncle Craig, it is worth noting, is described by Elspeth and Grace in paradigmatic terms, in terms of what he has chosen not to do: 'Your Uncle Craig ... could have been elected to the legislature. He could have been in the cabinet, if he'd wanted.' 'Didn't he get elected? Uncle Craig?' 'Don't be silly, he never ran. He wouldn't let his name stand. He preferred not.' There it was, the mysterious and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed, in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them. They liked people turning down things that were offered, marriage, positions, opportunities, money. My cousin Ruth McQueen who lived in Tupperton, had won a scholarship to go to college, for she was very clever, but she thought it over and turned it down, she decided to stay home. 'She preferred not.' Why was this such an admirable thing to have done? Like certain subtle harmonies of music and colour, the beauties of the negative were beyond me. Yet I was not ready, like my mother, to deny that they were there. (LGW 38; emphasis added)

Here, Munro explicitly signals the importance of absence, of things not done. The passage suggests that the history of Jubilee, to a certain

54 The Tumble of Reason extent, is a history of things not done, thus turning Uncle Craig's factual account on its head. It is also worth noting that a thing not done can also be a thing done: absent events are somehow simultaneously present. Munro's recurrent interest in the paradigmatic realm, then, is not reserved simply for eccentrics like Uncle Benny. Even Mrs Jordan, the rationalist par excellence who tries desperately to deny the value of elements in absentia, cannot fully escape the world of possible and potential meanings. In fact, Munro's use of paradigmatic discourse in Lives of Girls and Women emerges most clearly in the context of a speech which is delivered by Del's mother. The speech is worth quoting at length because its theoretical implications are important for an understanding of the way Munro's fiction works. Enlarging on the chapter's central subject of death, Del's mother sets off on the following tangent: 'Well, first off, what is a person? A large percent water. Just plain water. Nothing in a person is that remarkable. Carbon. The simplest elements. What is it they say? Ninety-eight cents worth? That's all. It's the way it's put together that's remarkable. The way it's put together, we have the heart and the lungs. We have the liver. Pancreas. Stomach. Brain. All these things, what are they? Combinations of elements! Combine them - combine the combinations - and you've got a person! We call it Uncle Craig, or your father, or me. But it's just these combinations, these parts put together and running in a certain particular way, for the time being. Then what happens is that one of the parts gives out, breaks down. In Uncle Craig's case, the heart. So we say, Uncle Craig is dead. The person is dead. But that's just our way of looking at it. That's just our human way. If we weren't thinking all the time in terms of persons, if we were thinking of Nature, all Nature going on and on, parts of it dying - well not dying, changing, changing is the word I want, changing into something else, all those elements that made the person changing and going back into Nature again and reappearing over and over in birds and animals and flowers - Uncle Craig doesn't have to be Uncle Craig! Uncle Craig is flowers!' (LGW 47-8; emphasis in original)

Del's mother, here, in spite of herself, is moving towards a realization that life is paradigmatically determined. What starts off as a scientific, rationalist speech on combination ends up being a discourse on the importance of transformation and substitution. If Uncle Craig can be transformed into flowers, if he no longer has to be Uncle Craig, if

'So Many Created Worlds' 55 a new form of life can be substituted for death, then nothing is certain because it is possible for almost anything to happen. Although Mrs Jordan does not go quite this far, the implications of her speech should take us back to one of the central concerns of Munro's first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades: the extent to which even those things or people we think we know or can take for granted may be charged with dimensions or possibilities which we can never entirely recuperate. If Uncle Craig can be flowers, then, as E.D. Blodgett suggests, 'none of us is who we appear to be: we are all potentially something else. It is this potentiality that we all possess that makes almost anything possible in Munro's world' (Alice Munro 41). While Blodgett acknowledges the power of metaphor in Addie's demonstration (41), noting how the speech is 'a discourse according to the axis of selection' (Configuration 74), he neglects to examine the ways in which the passage signals the contradictory nature of Addie's logic. For if, as Saussure, Jakobson, and others have taught us, every linguistic message is a product of both combination (words going together to yield meaning) and selection (words potentially being substituted for one another to yield association), significantly Addie's speech reminds us of both of these constitutive elements. Perhaps even more significant, at least in terms of the interests of this particular study, is the positioning of these elements in Addie's speech. In shifting from an interest in combination to an interest in substitution, Addie, despite herself, moves away from the syntagmatic emphasis on meaning as presence to a paradigmatic concern with absent and potential meanings. In other words, Addie's speech ends up being concerned not simply with reality, but with a world she constantly seeks to deny: a world of meaning which is otherthan-real. Death, of course, is the means by which Munro, in this chapter, brings Del to an awareness of absent and potential meanings. Del's first encounter with death occurs when she confronts the physical presence of a dead cow, an animal which, only in its death, leads Del to wonder, 'why should there be a cow? Why should the white spots be shaped just the way they were, and, never again, not on any cow or creature, shaped in exactly the same way' (LGW 44-5). Del sees the cow as a kind of map, a referential tool which, when studied, will yield information and meaning. Del tells us, 'I paid attention to its shape as I would sometimes pay attention to the shape of real continents or islands on real maps, as if the shape itself were a revelation beyond words, and I would be able to make sense of it, if I tried

56 The Tumble of Reason hard enough, and had time' (LGW 45). The cow's hide, however, turns out to be a map which yields no such revelation; it is not the kind of map which Del's mother likes. The other part of the cow that fascinates Del is its face, and although she is shy about doing so, she finds herself instinctively wanting to examine its eye: The eye was wide open, dark, a smooth sightless bulge, with a sheen like silk and a reddish gleam in it, a reflection of light. An orange stuffed in a black silk stocking. Flies nestled in one corner, bunched together beautifully in an iridescent brooch. I had a great desire to poke the eye with my stick, to see if it would collapse, if it would quiver and break like a jelly, showing itself to be the same composition all the way through, or if the skin over the surface would break and let loose all sorts of putrid mess, to flow down the face. I traced the stick all the way round the eye, I drew it back - but I was not able, I could not poke it in. (LGW 44)

Del, here, tries to comprehend death by straining to discover what it is that might be located below or beyond the surface of the dead cow's skin. The implications of this passage are picked up a few pages later at Uncle Craig's funeral. Blodgett (Configuration 74) has noted the way in which the image of the eye returns as Del tells us her uncle's 'eyelids lay too lightly on his eyes' (LGW 58). The connection between Craig and the dead cow also gains force when we recall that Del's uncle is half-blind. Unlike Uncle Benny, the storyteller, whose function is to make Del see, Uncle Craig has impaired vision, a symbol of the limitations of his historical endeavours. Despite her fears, Del, at Craig's funeral, finds herself wanting to touch her dead uncle - to poke a finger into him, as it were, just as she had wanted to poke a stick into the dead cow. Craig, however, in his 'terrible, silent, indifferent' condition, will finally, like the cow, remain untouchable and unknowable. In the following chapter, 'Princess Ida/ we become aware of the extent to which Del, despite differences in outlook, is greatly indebted to her mother. Although she feels 'the weight of [her] mother's eccentricities, of something absurd and embarrassing about her' (LGW 64), Del also shares her mother's intense appetite for knowledge. In this chapter, we are unexpectedly told that Del and her mother no longer live out on the Flats Road with Mr Jordan. Mrs Jordan, we now suddenly learn, has moved to the town of Jubilee with her children, leaving her hus-

'So Many Created Worlds' 57 band and Uncle Benny behind on the farm. It is worth noting here that Del, unlike the protagonists in Munro's earlier fiction - protagonists who seem influenced mainly by their fathers - begins to admit her mother's influence. 'I myself was not so different from my mother/ Del says, 'but concealed it, knowing what dangers there were' (LGW 81). We, as readers, may suddenly become aware of a shift in Munro's strategy, a shift whereby the marginal female characters of the earlier Munro collections are now replaced by marginal male characters, by weak or absent father figures.11 Although Lives of Girls and Women provides little information as to how or why the separation between Del's parents has come about, Del continues to search for some indication of her mother's love for her father. At one point, Del thinks of a picture painted by her mother, a picture that hangs above the couch at the farm on the Flats Road: 'I wanted [my mother] to say she had left it [on the Flats Road] for my father. I remembered she had said once that she had painted it for him, he was the one who had liked that scene' (LGW 72). Mrs Jordan, however, fails to yield the response that Del seeks. Instead, she tells her daughter that she painted the picture only because she had nothing better to do. The picture, then, which reminds Del of the connection between her parents, now serves as a reminder of a past that can only be seen as an absence. Del's attempt to rediscover her mother's painting as a locus of ideal meaning fails because Mrs Jordan refuses to acknowledge the origins and the bonds which Del wants to uncover. For Del, this process of marginalization, of relegating previous relationships to a forgotten, now absent, past, is largely connected with the stories that her mother tells. In these stories, Del becomes aware that something central is missing: 'I was troubled here by a lack of proportion, though it was hard to say what was missing, what was wrong. In the beginning of her story was dark captivity, suffering, then daring and defiance and escape. Struggle, disappointment, more struggle, godmothers and villains. Now I expected as in all momentous satisfying stories - the burst of Glory, the Reward. Marriage to my father? I hoped this was it. I wished she would leave me in no doubt about it' (LGW 80). Addie's resentment of the dependency which women have traditionally had on men is more fully expressed a few chapters later - in her 'There is a change coming ... in the lives of girls and women' speech (LGW 176) - but we already catch a glimpse of her de sire for female independence in her refusal to satisfy Del's expectations

58 The Tumble of Reason of how stories should end. What is left out of Mrs Jordan's stories, what is notably absent, what seems to have been forgotten in her quest for knowledge, social respectability, and independence, is the central fact of her love for her husband. Del's mother, then, in spite of herself, is caught up in a network of absent and potential meanings. Mrs Jordan's neglect of her husband finds a parallel in the neglect Addie suffers at the hands of her own mother, a religious fanatic who was too busy with her faith to devote much attention to her children. But Addie's stories about her Bible-belting mother receive a new twist when Del's Uncle Bill unexpectedly stops by for a visit in Jubilee. Although Del has heard all about this Uncle Bill, her mother's younger brother, the 'cruel fat boy' who fed firecrackers to cats and who, as a child, 'tortured' Addie, she is surprised to discover that he is not quite what she expected. Here again, there seems to be an implicit awareness on Del's part that certain realities of experience have been repressed, altered, made absent, in her mother's narratives. Uncle Bill's most memorable moment in the text occurs when he tells his story of the caterpillar that his mother, Addie's mother, brought into the house. While Addie seems not to remember or be interested in her brother's story, while she seems not to share in what is apparently a common past, Uncle Bill's story enables us, as it enables Del, to realize that something else has been left out of Mrs Jordan's narratives. Bill's story appears to function as a kind of counternarrative to Addie's stories of their mother, the religious fanatic. It is tempting to see Bill's tale about the butterfly that was hatched on Easter Sunday as a story which, as W.R. Martin suggests, shows up Addie's 'rationalist, aggressively anti-religious' tendencies. According to Martin, Addie 'lacks altogether a sense of mystery and the capacity for religious experience' (Paradox 65). But what Martin sees as an alternative to Del's mother's way of thinking, I would suggest, actually turns out to be a kind of curious extension of her speech on substitution and transformation.12 Uncle Bill's butterfly story provides a literal example of the way in which new life can emerge out of death, an example of the way in which the living body is continually pulled out of itself, thus allowing what is new to substitute for, take over, and ultimately leave behind what was there in the first place. Although Bill's cherished moment of caritas, of his mother's infectious and unselfish love, seems to contrast sharply with the account given by Addie of the 'religious fanatic/ his memory also exemplifies Addie's assertion that Uncle Craig can

'So Many Created Worlds' 59 be flowers. The butterfly story, then, reminds us that Del's mother, in spite of herself, is able to think paradigmatically. Her failure to recall the incident speaks not so much of an obtuseness as of a desire to forget. Her commitment to the world of rationality inhibits her ability to comprehend how the significance of her brother's story might play over her own life and her own way of looking at things. Lest I seem too eager to embrace Bill's version of things, I might add here that Munro characteristically leaves open other possibilities. As I have argued throughout, Munro's fiction attests to the signifying force in exclusions and potentialities, and it is in this context that Bill's story ought to be read. He too, after all, may well have edited the past, perhaps leaving out the sexual abuse of his sister. The image of the butterfly that was hatched on Easter Sunday leads nicely into the following segment, 'Age of Faith/ in which Del's quest for proof of the existence of God ends with her realization that the meaning which people derive from religion involves relationships between elements in absentia. Although Del's initial attempt to elicit a direct response from God seems to prove successful when her prayer about Household Science class is answered, Del is nevertheless quick to consider other possibilities: 'I thought at first that what had happened was plainly miraculous, an answer to my prayer. But presently I began to wonder; suppose I hadn't prayed, suppose it was going to happen anyway? I had no way of knowing; there was no control for my experiment. Minute by minute I turned more niggardly, ungrateful. How could I be sure? And surely too it was rather petty, rather obvious of God to concern Himself so quickly with such a trivial request? It was almost as if He were showing off. I wanted Him to move in a more mysterious way' (LGW 104). What, for Del, seems to be an answer to her prayer not to have to thread the sewing machine in Household Science class, what initially seems to offer her proof positive of the existence of God, leads, upon Del's closer inspection, to her recognition that the whole incident may, in fact, be seen in another light. As she speculates on the possibilities, as she tries to sort out in her mind whether the same outcome might have been reached even if she had not prayed, Del is beginning to understand that faith does not conform to the requirements of ordinary reference. Although Del's initial goal, during this phase of her life, is to legitimize God by trying to elicit a direct response from him in the 'real' world of tangible things and people, to get a picture of him that was as 'clear and uncomplicated as [her] picture of ... burglars' (LGW

60 The Tumble of Reason 93 )/3 by the end of the chapter she sees that the meaning which faith provides is embedded in the realm of absence and possibility rather than in the realm of present events and utterances. When Owen asks Del to help him pray to save their dog, Major - who has taken to killing sheep in his old age - from the fate which they both know awaits him, Del realizes that praying will not prevent Major from being shot: Why not? Because, I could have said to him [Owen], we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting in the car and driving out the Flats Road and getting his gun and calling, 'Major! Here, Major -' Praying would not alter that. God would not alter it. If God was on the side of goodness and mercy and compassion, then why had he made these things so difficult to get at? Never mind saying, so they will be worth the trouble; never mind all that. Praying for an act of execution not to take place was useless simply because God was not interested in such objections; they were not His. (LGW 115; emphasis in original)

Del's realization that praying will not alter Major's outcome, will not make things happen or not happen, is, in part, a realization that faith relegates its central moments of revelation or intervention to an absent or potential level. Owen's request reawakens Del's capacity for understanding the significance of possible and potential meanings. In this passage, Munro characteristically expresses Del's moment of awareness in paradigmatic terms, in terms of what Del could have said, but does not say, to Owen. The fact that Del does not tell her brother what she later tells us, that we pray for the 'strength and grace' to bear what happens rather than for things to happen or not happen, indicates Munro's involvement in the paradigmatic realm.14 Similarly, the chapter ends without playing out its central drama: we never find out whether Major is shot or saved. Here, as so often in Munro, the dramatic centre of the text is displaced. The next chapter, 'Changes and Ceremonies/ explicitly introduces Del to two new realms of experience which will, in part, form the basis for her path to self-realization in the chapters that follow. These two realms of experience, art and romance, are delineated through Munro's

'So Many Created Worlds' 61 presentation of Miss Farris, a grade three teacher who, once a year, takes on the special task of being in charge of the school operetta. Miss Farris, who 'during the rest of the year did nothing special' (LGW 121), holds a certain kind of fascination for Del because she, like Uncle Benny, introduces her protegees to a world of possible and potential meanings. What Del learns from Miss Farris is an extension of the kind of lesson she received out on the Flats Road. For Del, Miss Farris becomes the point of intersection of several threads of association. Perhaps most remarkable about the teacher is her ability to bring about transformations in her pupils, her ability to take her students out of their old selves and to allow them, for however short a duration, to engage in new roles. As Del says, it was 'as if she could pull out of us what nobody else, and not we ourselves, could guess was there' (LGW 130). Although the chapter begins with a statement telling us that 'boys' hate was dangerous' (LGW 117), before long we are informed that 'ritualized hostility between boys and girls was cracking in a hundred places' (LGW 133) under the influence of Miss Farris and the operetta (Tausky 54). Miss Farris disrupts the ordinary routine of the classroom by inspiring her pupils with her romantic idealism. She makes a particularly significant contribution to Del's understanding of 'real life' by fostering, as Del says, 'devotion to the manufacture of what was not true, not plainly necessary, but more important, once belief had been granted to it, than anything else we had' (LGW 129). In keeping with their devotion to the not true, their albeit short-lived preference for the legendary, the students, every year, build up a hypothetical romance, or scandal, between Miss Farris and Mr Boyce. The invented romance is evidence of the kind of power Miss Farris possesses over these pupils, who, although ordinarily accustomed only to the world of 'factual, proper questions' and details (LGW 119), now suddenly feel the urge to create legends, to make stories out of their experience. In Del's case, this propensity for story-making is certainly wellfounded. From the very first chapter of Lives of Girls and Women, we have been made aware of Del's sensitivity to linguistic usages, her interest in words and fiction, and her fascination with possible and potential meanings.15 Here, in 'Changes and Ceremonies/ Del revels in the paradigmatic realm. She explains, 'I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds - this was a comfort to me' (LGW 116). Realizing that the world of art and the world of romance permit new openings in her life,16 learning to believe,

62 The Tumble of Reason primarily through Miss Farris's magical promptitude, that life, both Del's own and that of others, could be other than it is, Del begins to rehearse possibilities, to play out potential versions of events. This becomes most evident when Del imagines herself in a potentially romantic situation with Frank Wales, a classmate who gets chosen for the leading role in the operetta: What I wanted from Frank Wales I did not really know. I had a daydream about him, often repeated. I imagined he walked home with me after a performance of the operetta. (It was becoming known that boys - some boys - would walk home with girls - some girls - on that night, but Naomi and I did not even discuss this possibility; we were chary of voicing real hopes.) We walked through the absolutely silent streets of Jubilee, walked under the street lights with our shadows whirling and sinking on the snow, and there in the beautiful, dark, depopulated town Frank would surround me, either with real, implausible, but cool and tender, singing, or, in the more realistic versions of the dream, simply with the unheard music of his presence. (LGW 132)

Del, here, engages in a kind of paradigmatic wish-fulfilment, imagining, as it were, how nice life would be if things turned out the way she imagines them. Later, of course, when Del is confronted with even the slightest possibility that her dream might, in some form, come true, that Frank Wales might walk her home after the performance of the operetta, Del tells us 'it was too much, too dangerous, to be flung like this into the very text of [her] dream' (LGW 135). Del, who at this time enjoys seeing an idealized, romanticized image of herself, feels threatened by the possibility that the boundaries between the concrete world of real things and people and the textual world of her romantic longings may no longer hold. Perhaps sensing a danger in her assurance of the way 'real life' operates, Del wants instead to keep the two worlds separate, at least at this point in the narrative. Similarly, immediately after the operetta, Del, opting for a return to safety, takes comfort in the daily routine. Now, Mr McKenna's trite and predictable expressions suddenly seem 'oddly satisfying' (LGW 137). The chapter ends with the older Del's account of Miss Farris's death. The death, which remains unexplained, seems characteristic of Munro's overall attempt to reveal the mystery inherent in everyday life. The cheerfulness and ebullience which seem to have characterized Miss Farris are now shown to have concealed a suicidal despair. Del's final

'So Many Created Worlds' 63 summation of her teacher is worthy of note. After listing the operettas performed over the years under Miss Farris's direction, Del tells us, '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' (LGW 139). Munro's language, here, as always, is extremely telling. In one word, 'bubbles/ Munro calls to mind Miss Farris's death by drowning as well as her ebullient, effervescent character. Her use of the word 'exhausting' is equally fitting because it simultaneously gets at Miss Farris's creative nature and her self-destructive tendencies. While the word clearly conjures up a sense of the using up or wearing out of energy, of breath, it also serves to remind us of the simile 'operettas like bubbles' and of the effort involved in blowing bubbles. While breath or blowing are not directly mentioned in Del's summation of Miss Farris's character, this passage becomes clearer when examined in light of what has been left out. Breath, the source of Miss Farris's 'exhausting effort/ the want of which is the final cause of her death - she dies, after all, by asphyxiation - has traditionally been linked with creativity, with the spirit.17 Contained in Del's elegiac summation, then, is a suggestion which turns on an absent word, 'breath/ a suggestion that, for Miss Farris, making and destroying come ultimately from the same source, or perhaps more correctly, a suggestion that Miss Farris's creativity is ultimately self-destructive.18 Munro's recurrent presentation of the dissatisfied lives of the girls and women who surround Del provides a link with the following chapter. At the end of 'Changes and Ceremonies/ Munro presents us with a disquieting ambivalence, never really telling us whether Miss Farris's suicide was actually brought about by her unrequited love for Mr Boyce. We do, however, get a sense that the word 'unrequited/ in Del's summation, might also refer to Miss Farris's past students, those children on whom she bestowed the gift of imagination and the power of transformation. These children, while she was alive, never showed their gratitude, never demonstrated any form of love towards their teacher. The word 'undefeated/ here, seems, at least on a first reading, rather peculiar. The conventional view of someone who commits suicide over an unrequited love would be that he or she is giving up, finally admitting defeat. The word is ambivalent in this context and, as such, it suggests Munro's attempt to capture the lingering effect the teacher has had on Del's life. Miss Farris's love, perhaps, is 'undefeated/ at least from the older Del's point of view, because, despite

64 The Tumble of Reason the fact that bubbles fade and, like Miss Farris's energy and ebullience, do not last forever, these children retain a memory, 'trapped forever/ of their own transformed childish selves, thanks to their teacher. Such a reading rescues Miss Farris from the pathetic fate to which she might otherwise be condemned. Munro, as I have mentioned, characteristically leaves Miss Farris's death unexplained, and, although suggestions continue to proliferate, the possibility that she suffered from an unrequited love links her with Del's mother's boarder, Fern, another musician and failed artist, a singer now reduced to performing in the church choir. In the next chapter, 'Lives of Girls and Women/ Del, through her interactions with Mr Chamberlain, Fern's apparent lover, discovers that the world of the text and the real world can no longer be kept entirely apart. The dreams she constructs around Mr Chamberlain recall her imaginary exploits with Frank Wales: I imagined that Mr. Chamberlain saw me in my mother's black flowered dressing gown, pulled down off the shoulders, as I had seen myself in the mirror. Then I proposed to have the dressing gown come off, let him see me with nothing on at all. How could it happen? Other people who would ordinarily be in the house with us would have to be got rid of. My mother I sent off to sell encyclopedias; my brother I banished to the farm. It would have to be in the summer holidays, when I was home from school. Fern would not yet be home from the post office. I would come downstairs in the heat of the late afternoon, a sulphurous still day, wearing only this dressing gown. I would get a drink of water at the sink, not seeing Mr. Chamberlain sitting quietly in the room, and then - what? A strange dog, introduced into our house for this occasion only, might jump on me pulling the dressing gown off. I might turn and somehow catch the material on the nail of a chair, and the whole thing would just slither to my feet. The thing was that it had to be an accident; no effort on my part, and certainly none on Mr. Chamberlain's. (LGW 151)

Here, in rehearsing possibilities, playing out various versions of an imagined event, trafficking in the conditional, and even introducing a dog ex machina, Del is engaged in a realm of potential and absent meanings and relationships. But unlike the innocent, romantic 'ideas of love, consolation, and tenderness, nourished by [her] feelings for Frank Wales' (LGW 159), Del's fantasies about displaying her body

'So Many Created Worlds' 65 to Fern's alleged suitor are more explicitly sexual. Later on, when Del is doing her seal imitation, Mr Chamberlain makes his move: 'Then with the other hand he did something nobody could see. He rubbed against the damp underarm of my blouse and then inside the loose armhole of the jumper I was wearing. He rubbed quick, hard against the cotton over my breast' (LGW 157-58). Mr Chamberlain's move, however, as Del later learns, is designed with a specific purpose in mind. He seeks to engage Del to search for and confiscate his old love letters to Fern, whom he plans to leave. But when he takes Del for a drive one day after school, the countryside she is accustomed to is 'altered by his presence' (LGW 165). The whole of nature/ she tells us, 'became debased, maddeningly erotic' (LGW 165). Del, suddenly, is forced into an awareness of the extent to which 'events were becoming real' (LGW 165). No longer able to keep 'real life' apart from the world of her imagination, Del watches as Mr Chamberlain masturbates in front of her: 'Not at all like marble David's, it was sticking straight out in front of him, which I knew from my reading was what they did. It had a sort of head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee ... Raw and blunt, ugly-colored as a wound, it looked vulnerable, playful and naive, like some strong-snouted animal whose grotesque simple looks are some sort of guarantee of good will ... It did not seem to have anything to do with me' (LGW 169-70). Mr Chamberlain's 'performance' constitutes a kind of ironic inversion of Del's earlier fantasy of self-revelation, or, perhaps more appropriately, of her revelation of self. In the passage just quoted, language is of special interest; the way Del narrates the event reveals much about Munro's involvement in the paradigmatic realm. Consider, for instance, the various similes that are employed in this section. As Blodgett notes, 'it is characteristic of the narrator's discourse that she cannot see it [Mr. Chamberlain's 'performance'] entirely for what it is (whatever that may be), but continually transposes it into simile' (Alice Munro 52). Mr Chamberlain's penis, thus, which is initially described in terms of its dissimilarity to that of Michelangelo's David, is successively redefined through a comparison of items that are similar to but distinct from it. We are told that it had a head like a mushroom, that, unlike fingers or toes, or even an elbow or a knee, it looked 'blunt and stupid/ that it was 'ugly-colored as a wound/ and that it looked 'vulnerable, playful and naive, like some strong-snouted animal.'

66 The Tumble of Reason Through each of these comparisons between what Del later calls Mr Chamberlain's 'thing' and the various terms used to describe it, Munro alerts us to Del's disengagement with the real, the thing itself. Already apparent in the fact that Del does not name the penis, that 'it' remains a pronoun with a clear yet absent antecedent, is a suggestion that reality has somehow been appropriated, a suggestion - to use the terms traditionally used in the analysis of metaphor - that an absent or abandoned tenor has been replaced by a series of successive vehicles. Mr Chamberlain's penis, then, proves exemplary because, like all signifiers, it can be described in terms not of what it is, but only of what it is or is not like - that is, in terms of what it is not. The passage with Mr Chamberlain reinforces Del's, and Munro's, participation in the paradigmatic realm. In writing about Mr Chamberlain's sexual 'performance/ the older Del is trying to find a way to deal with what she has witnessed. The application of language to the physical aspects of life constitutes a central part of her education as a growing artist. By redefining this past experience through her successive use of similes, Del inscribes Mr Chamberlain's act within an absent or potential network of meanings. That she, herself, is at least implicitly aware of her disengagement with the reality of the whole scene becomes evident when she stresses the 'theatrical, unlikely' nature of Mr Chamberlain's 'performance' (LGW 170). In the following chapter, 'Baptizing,' Del continues her quest for selfawareness and fulfilment through an explicit entry into the realm of sexuality. While the sexual realm has, in part, already been inaugurated by Mr Chamberlain in the previous chapter, Del's affair with Garnet French forms the basis of her actual initiation. As the title of this section suggests, Del's search for faith is not quite at an end. In the figure of Garnet, an ex-drinker and fighter turned Baptist, two important thematic impulses of the novel, the sexual and the religious, are brought together. When Del first encounters Garnet at a revival meeting, she feels as if she has 'come out on another level of existence' (LGW 213). When they next meet, Del sees his reappearance as a 'solid intrusion of the legendary into the real world' (LGW 215). The words that Del chooses to describe her initial meetings with Garnet seem to be signals that she is leaving the ordinary world behind and moving into what seems to represent a new realm of experience. In her relationship with Garnet, Del is engaged in a retreat from the sources of meaning that

'So Many Created Worlds' 67 have hitherto interested her. This relationship is primarily physical, and Del's awareness of her own body, of her own physicality, seems almost entirely to dislodge her previous interest in and sensitivity to language. She tells us that 'words were our enemies. What we knew about each other was only going to be confused by them' (LGW 221). Similarly: 'The world I saw with Garnet was something not far from what I thought animals must see, the world without names' (LGW 221).

The attempt to go beyond words and names into an unfettered, instinctual level of discourse - a level of discourse suspended from a world in which words name, describe, and appropriate things - appears to constitute a complete disengagement from the world of language, and a movement into a realm of pure physical or sensual experience. Although the 'world without names' which Del enters into with Garnet might seem to be a totally new experience for her, it is also clearly part of a continuum that goes back to her earlier revelations of the arbitrary nature of the relationship between words and things, between language and experience.19 What Del, through the course of the chapter, comes to recognize, however, is that a complete disengagement from the world of language is finally inadequate. Her foray into the physical cannot be sustained because her relationship with Garnet is, in spite of itself, already caught up in a recourse to language. Thus when their relationship is consummated, Del 'had to mention it to somebody' (LGW 227). The need to tell, as we have seen from Dance of the Happy Shades, is apparent everywhere in Munro, and here, in 'Baptizing/ the impulse arises paradoxically as a response to an initiation into a non-verbal, nonlinguistic union. Del's account of the experience is, in itself, a superb example of the very poetic sensibility that she has apparently been denying in her affair with Garnet. As Smaro Kamboureli suggests, Del needs 'to re-enact the event in the order of the imaginary' (37). Del, then, turns not only to language, but to metaphor, to an act of paradigmatic substitution: she tells her mother that the blood on the peony border is there because a tomcat killed a bird. Although Del's mother is unable to make sense of the metaphor, to discover its reallife implications, Del's imaginary re-enactment nevertheless serves as a reminder that Del's narrative is largely about her attempt to find an appropriate language to deal with what has happened to her. After failing to win her coveted scholarship, after refusing to be baptized, by Garnet, into his church and his life, Del returns home

68 The Tumble of Reason and repossesses the world: 'Trees, houses, fences, streets, came back to me, in their own sober and familiar shapes. Unconnected to the life of love, uncoloured by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance' (LGW 2,40). The chapter ends with Del considering other possibilities for the future: I opened it [the paper] up at the want ads, and got a pencil, so I could circle any job that seemed possible. I made myself understand what I was reading, and after some time I felt a mild, sensible gratitude for these printed words, these strange possibilities. Cities existed; telephone operators were wanted; the future could be furnished without love or scholarships. Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life. (LGW 242)

Del's return to language, her gratitude for 'these strange possibilities/ constitutes part of her repossession of the world. The passage is in some ways exemplary because it illustrates Munro's ability to sustain two opposing tendencies, an outward pull and an inward pull. Del clearly takes comfort here in the possibility that the words she reads point to things outside of language: cities, telephone operators. However, there is also an implicit recognition of the extent to which 'real life/ as Del puts it, is constituted in and by language. To put it another way, Del needs 'these printed words/ needs language to tell her that cities exist and that telephone operators were wanted. The affair with Garnet, therefore, plays an important role in Del's education as an artist because it teaches her that experience is embedded in language. At the end of the chapter, Del does not actually leave Jubilee; she only 'supposed' she would get started on her real life (see Blodgett, Alice Munro 37). In the novel's final section, 'Epilogue: The Photographer/ Del is still, perhaps more than ever, engaged in an attempt to sort out the real from the illusory. Here, the motifs of the earlier stories are recalled and integrated into a fitting conclusion for the novel. If we can assume that the world which Del inhabits with Garnet French represents part of what I have been calling the paradigmatic realm - the realm of pure experience as a repository of possible and potential meanings, of things bearing no necessary connection to the words we use to describe them - then another part of the paradigmatic realm - the textual realm, the realm of pure language - is made ac-

'So Many Created Worlds' 69 cessible through Del's encounter with Bobby Sherriff. Bobby, who appears at the end of the Epilogue, is a characteristic Munrovian figure who, like Ralph Gillespie at the end of Who Do You Think You Are?, serves as a kind of catalyst for the protagonist's culminating discovery. The Epilogue itself is an exploration into the nature and scope of art, an examination of the relationship between art and life. Here, we are introduced to a character from Del's imaginary novel, a character she calls The Photographer: He had no name in the book. He was always called The Photographer. He drove around the country in a high square car whose top was of flapping black cloth. The pictures he took turned out to be unusual, even frightening. People saw that in his pictures they had aged twenty or thirty years. Middle-aged people saw in their own features the terrible, growing, inescapable likeness of their dead parents; young fresh girls and men showed what gaunt or dulled or stupid faces they would have when they were fifty. Brides looked pregnant, children adenoidal. So he was not a popular photographer, though cheap. (LGW 246-7)

Although Munro does not show people as they will be twenty or thirty years later - except, of course, Del herself - the double time-scheme that she employs throughout the novel is like the double-exposure of Del's photographer's photos. The Photographer is someone who, in other words, leaves a double image; he provides an impression of temporality in much the same manner that Munro does as a novelist. By revealing subjects not only for what they are but for what they might become, his photographs - supposed images of the real world - cannot be understood according to the ordinary conventions of realism. Like Munro's fiction, his photos, by working paradigmatically to reveal a world of potential meanings, testify to the mystery which exists in the mundane processes of life. What we find in the story of The Photographer is Munro's most explicit declaration of the fact that Del is going to be a writer. As a record of failure, the Epilogue provides an example of the struggle involved in the process of writing. Here, Del's own attempt to write fiction is most clearly delineated. Having decided 'that the only thing to do with [her] life was to write a novel' (LGW 244), Del concocts in her mind a Gothic tale set in Jubilee, based on the tragedies of members of the Sherriff family. The heroine, named Caroline, is based on Marion Sherriff, who, like Miss Farris, committed suicide by drown-

7O The Tumble of Reason ing herself in the Wawanash River. Del, in trying to work the drowning episode into her novel, wonders how she will bring together fact and fiction: Tor this novel I had changed Jubilee ... or picked out some features of it and ignored others ... The season was always the height of summer - white, brutal heat, dogs lying as if dead on the sidewalks, waves of air shuddering, jelly-like, over the empty highway. (But how, then - for niggling considerations of fact would pop up, occasionally, to worry me - how then was there going to be enough water in the Wawanash River? Instead of moving, head bowed, moonlight-naked, acquiescent, into its depths, Caroline would have to lie down on her face as if she was drowning herself in the bathtub.)' (LGW 247-8). The Epilogue simultaneously provides us with a glimpse into Del's struggles and failures and her ability to see through the problems in her own work, and moves us towards Del's moment of discovery. During her visit with Marion's brother Bobby, who is temporarily home from the asylum, Del becomes surprisingly aware of the 'ordinariness of everything' (LGW 250). This awareness consequently leads Del to abandon the fictional strategies of her 'black fable/ her Gothic tale of Marion and The Photographer, and instead to turn back towards the ordinary. What Bobby and his family represent to Del, at least initially, is the opposite of what Garnet French represents: the autonomy of language, the possibility of creating a fiction which bears no necessary connection to the external world.20 The novel Del plans around the Sherriffs differs markedly from 'real life': 'I did not pay much attention to the real Sherriffs, once I had transformed them for fictional purposes' (LGW 248). Del's novel, of course, is so purely fictional, so purely textual, that it cannot even be put down on paper. It exists only on an absent and potential level. Del tells us, 'I saw that it was a mistake to try to write anything down; what I wrote down might flaw the beauty and wholeness of the novel in my mind' (LGW 245). This novel in her mind, however - this text whose final direction of meaning, to return to Frye's centripetal/centrifugal distinction, is almost exclusively inward - is found by Del to be wanting. During her encounter with Bobby, she discovers that the tales she has constructed around the Sherriffs have been 'unreliable' (LGW 251). Just as Mr Chamberlain showed Del, in his own extraordinary manner, that text and reality could not be kept forever apart, so Bobby leads Del to a similar conclusion. As Bobby talks to Del, in an ordinary

'So Many Created Worlds' 71 way, about rats, white flour, and undernourishment, Del understands that the stories she has fashioned around his family have been false representations. She now recognizes that 'People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum' (LGW 253). Del's recognition here of the 'doubleness of reality ... the illusoriness of either the prosaic or the marvellous in isolation' (Hoy, '"Dull, Simple, Amazing and Unfathomable"' 101), is embedded in a larger recognition of the ultimate failure of her attempt to separate the world of language from the world of experience. As she learned from her plunge into the realm of experience with Garnet French that language was indeed inescapable, now, through Bobby, she makes a corollary discovery concerning both the limitations of language21 and the importance, in fact, the necessity, of returning outward into the world of experience. The two discoveries, taken together, mark a significant breakthrough for Del's education as an artist, suggesting that she is now ready to write Lives of Girls and Women, the novel that we have been reading. Bobby, therefore, implicitly shows Del the inadequacy of any attempt to separate the world of words from the world of things. While this may not seem entirely in keeping with what I have been calling Munro's involvement with the paradigmatic realm, Munro is not advocating the notion of a fixed or stable relationship between words and things. Unlike Uncle Craig, who presumably would adhere to just such a notion, and who is unexpectedly alluded to in the novel's final pages,22 Del recognizes the extent to which each of her recent endeavours her movement with Garnet away from language and into experience, and her accompanying return to language at the cost of experience - reveals its dependency on the other in a fluid, unresolvable alternation. As if to corroborate Del's discovery, Bobby, in the novel's final scene, performs an implicit gesture of representation that simultaneously posits and displaces meaning: Bobby Sherriff spoke to me wistfully, relieving me of my fork, napkin, and empty plate. 'Believe me/ he said, 'I wish you luck in your life.' Then he did the only special thing he ever did for me. With those things in his hands, he rose on his toes like a dancer, like a plump ballerina. This action, accompanied by his delicate smile, appeared to be a joke not shared

72

The Tumble of Reason

with me so much as displayed for me, and it seemed also to have a concise meaning, a stylized meaning - to be a letter, or a whole word, in an alphabet I did not know. People's wishes, and their other offerings, were what I took then naturally, a bit distractedly, as if they were never anything more than my due. 'Yes/ I said, instead of thank you. (LGW 253-4)

Nowhere in Lives of Girls and Women is the paradigmatic as incisively registered as in Bobby Sherriff's gesture. His dance, which springs up out of one of Munro's reservoirs of possible or potential meanings, provides a fitting conclusion to Del's story because it confirms the 'dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable' hypothesis that she has just made.23 The gesture is also fitting, however, because, at the very moment during which its 'meaning' is being conveyed, Del senses something of its unreality, its artifice. Del's comparison of Bobby's action to a letter or a word with a 'concise meaning, a stylized meaning,' exemplifies my contention that the direction of meaning in Munro's stories is finally both inward and outward. On the one hand, the meaning contained in Bobby's gesture is 'concise.' Concision, here, would seem to suggest the enabling powers of language, a brevity and directness of expression, of representation. On the other hand, Del's use of the term 'stylized' to describe the same gesture asks us to consider the extent to which Bobby's dance is itself something not real but perhaps artistic, a kind of text which needs to be deciphered and interpreted. Like the simile which is used at the end of 'The Flats Road' to confer both textuality and lifelike validity to Madeleine, the terms employed here to describe Bobby Sherriff's dance suggest both the inward and the outward pulls of language. The force of Bobby's gesture, we should also recall, resides in the fact that its meaning, which takes place, so to speak, in an alphabet that Del does not understand, remains perpetually unfulfilled. Bobby Sherriff's equivocal dance tellingly declares Munro's paradigmatic allegiances because it turns on a potential or absent meaning, a meaning both 'concise' and 'stylized,' but one which Del will never know. The deferral of meaning, the postponement of revelation with which Munro ends her text, provides a nice point of transition into her next volume, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, a collection of stories which, as the title suggests, is largely concerned with telling and deferral. Lives of Girls and Women thus ends with an equivocal gesture that recapitulates the paradigmatic bias of the novel. For Munro, language -

'So Many Created Worlds' 73 which is, after all, what Bobby's dance is compared to - is finally both a source of potential meaning and a system of signs that renders problematic any message we attempt to get across through its use. Far from being an intelligible action which conveys any kind of readymade meaning, Bobby's dance turns back on itself and asks that we consider it as an example of what happens when we use language as a vehicle for representation or expression. For Munro to end the novel with such a comparison between Bobby's dance and language seems particularly appropriate since language is, in many ways, what Lives of Girls and Women is ultimately about. The stories that make up the novel are largely presented in terms of Del's attempt to discover an appropriate language to deal with the various phases of her life. Del, we discover by the end, will bear her past within her. The novel is a story of withdrawal, rejection, and return, a story of a young girl who outgrows Jubilee, but who will return in order to write about it. The discoveries this young girl makes as she grows up, we realize, are not so much discoveries about a town on a map as they are discoveries about the places we all inhabit on the linguistic map.

3

The Politics of Deferral: Power and Suspicion in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

What is there here that is not being told? Alice Munro, 'Marrakesh'

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You is a collection of seemingly unrelated stories which both develops and breaks with the central preoccupations of Munro's previous volumes.1 The collection bears witness to a development in Munro's prose, a development that arises out of a deeper interaction between Munro's predominant narrative concerns and her manipulation of narrative technique. Although Munro has, from her first volume, evinced an interest in the limits of representation, although she has always been fascinated by the strategies people use in their attempts to recover the past, new to this collection is an explicit interest in the way meanings are constructed through relations of power. Something is Munro's most experimental work to the date of its publication (1974), and in it Munro clearly broadens the scope of her narrative. Along with the gradual movement away from a tendency to rely on first-person narrators and young female protagonists, and in addition to an expansion in her use of setting, Munro brings to this volume a new-found interest in and suspicion of telling as a source of power. Bobby Sherriff's dance at the end of Lives of Girls and Women signalled the advent of Munro's explicit engagement with the strategy of deferral. The stories in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You develop out of the kinds of issues that Bobby's dance helped to inaugurate, but they do so in a manner which is often deeply suspicious of both the tools and the results of their own craft. While the stories in Munro's

The Politics of Deferral 75 previous collections threaten in various ways to break out of the constraints of realism, many of the pieces in Something take a further metafictional step by explicitly questioning the very assumptions that make realism possible. No longer content to sum up the movement of a story in a concluding paragraph, Munro now moves increasingly towards tales that turn on what has been left out, on what cannot be told or written. TELLING AND NOT TELLING

The title story of Munro's third collection, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, serves as a revealing instance of the general procedures we encounter throughout much of Munro's writing. Here, as so often in Munro, the relationship between the past and the present becomes both the subject of the narrative and the process through which that subject is presented (see New 208). Rather than setting out the story in a linear fashion, Munro uses a series of melding and overlapping events, subtly undermining the distinction between past and present, and bringing to the fore the distinction between chronological and narrative order. 'Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You' begins not quite in the midst of things, but rather at a point when the story's events are almost at their end chronologically. The story focuses on the lives of two sisters who have what appear to be contrasting personalities: Et, who 'didn't like mysteries or extremes' (SJB 7) and Char, who 'was above, outside, all ordinary considerations - a marvel, a mystery. No one could hope to solve her, they were lucky just being allowed to contemplate her' (SIB 17). The reappearance of Blaikie Noble, Char's ex-boyfriend - 'if that was what he was' (SIB 8) - whose 'name ... had not been mentioned between them for thirty years' (SIB 4), sets the story in motion by repeating a disruptive situation from the past. Like 'Walker Brothers Cowboy,' 'Something' begins with a seemingly offhand statement that gains force when we return to it after a completed reading of the story: '"Anyway he knows how to fascinate the women," said Et to Char. She could not tell if Char went paler, hearing this, because Char was pale in the first place as anybody could get. She was like a ghost now, with her hair gone white. But still beautiful, she couldn't lose it' (SIB i). The 'he,' we soon discover, is Blaikie, and the fact that Et is trying to see whether Char turns pale suggests that Et's statement is not entirely unmotivated. Et's inability to tell -

76 The Tumble of Reason that is, discern - not only refers to the situation at hand, but also prepares us for the dramatic moment, never finally played out, to which the story's title alludes. We realize from the start, then, that this is a story about more than one kind of telling, and, more precisely, about wanting but not being able to tell. Telling, of course, has far-reaching implications throughout Munro's work. Here, for instance, Et's attempt to 'tell' if Char went paler upon hearing this pronouncement about Blaikie, suggests an attempt to ascertain fact through observation. Telling, then, is connected with knowledge: Et wants to know if Char went pale. Elsewhere in the story, the connection and the barrier between telling and knowing is addressed more explicitly. Et is Mock Hill's perpetrator of delay; it is because of her that the 'something' promised by the title - a something which is not really one thing at all, but any of several possible things - is forever delayed. At one point in the story, we learn that Et almost told Arthur, Char's husband, about Char's suicide attempt: 'Et was on the verge of saying, "She [Char] swallowed blueing once over a man that wouldn't have her," but she thought what would be the good of it, Char would only seem more splendid to him, like a heroine out of Shakespeare' (SIB 17). The man, of course, is Blaikie, and the fact that Et can only remain 'on the verge' of explaining this past incident to Arthur, that she cannot, in other words, close the gap between her intention to speak and the act of communication, reveals the extent to which Et's inability to tell is largely conditioned by her own flows of desire. Rather than permitting Char to 'seem more splendid' to Arthur, Et, who has always fought to attain the kind of recognition that her sister enjoyed, puts off giving an account of Char's past behaviour because such an account might cause Char to rise even higher in Arthur's estimation. Later, when Et recalls the event, when she tells Arthur and reminds Char of Blaikie's elopement with the lady ventriloquist, 'remembering even the names of the dolls' (SIB 21), she omits to mention Char's reaction to the incident. This recollection about Blaikie's first elopement comes immediately after Et's deliberate lie about Blaikie's second elopement: 'She never knew where she got the inspiration to say what she said, where it came from. She had not planned it at all, yet it came so easily, believably' (SIB 21). She intimates that Blaikie has 'taken up with a well-to-do woman down at the hotel' (SIB 21) and this becomes part of a story that repeats itself from the past. Once again,

The Politics of Deferral 77 after Char is informed that Blaikie has taken up with another woman, she attempts suicide; this time, however, Char's attempt is successful. Although the 'something' which Et longs to tell has to do initially with Char's earlier incident with the laundry blueing, its focus shifts as the story progresses. After the initial incident, Et discovers a bottle of rat poison in one of her sister's kitchen cupboards. She toys with the possibility that Char is trying to poison Arthur, her invalid husband, but quickly dismisses the idea as 'awful nonsense. Like something you read about, Agatha Christie' (SIB 13). She plans to ask Char about the bottle and even tries to invent excuses 'to be alone in the kitchen, so that she could open the cupboard and stand on tiptoe and look in ... to see that the level had not gone down' (SIB 14) but she never manages to translate desire into accomplishment. Although Et wants to tell Arthur about the bottle of poison, this 'something/ as with all the other somethings she means to tell, can only remain absent and potential. Munro's narrative technique adroitly reveals her involvement in the paradigmatic realm. Because we are propelled through the story on the basis of a narrative order rather than a chronological one,2 because events unfold in the story not as they do in time, but rather as they do in memory, Munro is able to emphasize how much present events are contaminated by traces of absent possibilities. That which seems 'present/ in other words, is 'haunted' - the word 'haunted/ which appears in connection with Blaikie (SIB 5), harks back to the opening description of Char as a 'ghost' (SIB i) - by absent traces of what has come before, and by deferred meanings sketched on the horizon of possibility. Thus Munro, by refusing to give us a logical progression of events, a sequence of facts following one after the other, shows us that meaning is a function of telling (Blodgett, Alice Munro 61), that every gesture of representation, every attempt to make present, is intimately connected with a history of prior events and a possibility of future repetitions and re-presentations. Char's death and the missing bottle of rat poison recall not only her previous incident with the laundry blueing, but also the story Blaikie tells on his bus tour about a woman who used a slow poison to kill her rich husband (SIB 2). Blaikie's story, which is immediately qualified as 'hearsay, all local gossip' (SIB 2), serves an important function within the context of the story's unfolding because, like Uncle Benny's stories out on the Flats Road, it too comes true in another form. Char's death, like Benny's

78 The Tumble of Reason marriage, is the stuff that stories are made of, and throughout 'Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You/ characters repeatedly seek refuge in the world of story and legend.3 Et's discovery of the legendary dimensions of everyday life comes early on in the story. Et remembers 'the first time she understood that Char was beautiful' (SIB 5). Char's beauty, we recall, has already been alluded to in the story's opening paragraph. Here, after Et looks at a photograph of 'Char and herself and their brother who was drowned' (SIB 5), she goes into the kitchen and finds Char 'bending over the starch basin, silent and bad-humored' (SIB 5). Her discovery that Char's 'real face' showed 'the same almost disdainful harmony' (SIB 6) that she saw in the photograph leads Et to realize, 'in some not entirely welcome way, that the qualities of legend were real, that they surfaced where and when you least expected' (SIB 6). An awareness of the legendary quality of everyday life, as we have seen from Munro's previous collections, is a recurrent concern in her fiction. Et's discovery in this story becomes a kind of signal which alerts her to the possibility of absent and potential meanings. Blaikie's story about the slow poison is thus more than just hearsay; it is an example of the way in which experience can come out of narrative. While Munro may not attempt to directly imply any kind of cause and effect relationship between Blaikie's story and Char's death, she demonstrates an interest in the way memory gives meaning to the past. Through an act of narration that stresses repeated similarity in varying contexts, Munro attempts to get at the transforming, mythmaking power of memory, the way in which memory orders events according to its own flows of desire. Desire, in fact, is the absent meaning on which the title story turns. The 'something' which Et means to tell Arthur - a 'something' which, by the end of the story, takes on new implications - seems to have the potential to elucidate the source, the origin, of Char's motivation for suicide: 'Sometimes Et had it on the tip of her tongue to say to Arthur, "There's something I've been meaning to tell you." She didn't believe she was going to let him die without knowing. He shouldn't be allowed. He kept a picture of Char on his bureau. It was the one taken of her in her costume for that play, where she played the statuegirl. But Et let it go, day to day. She and Arthur played rummy and kept up a bit of a garden, along with raspberry canes. If they had been married, people would have said they were very happy' (SIB 23). Et's inability to tell, both here and throughout the course of the story,

The Politics of Deferral 79 reveals how much the origin she seems to want to elucidate is a function of her own discourse. To borrow Derrida's terminology, she is the supplement which already inhabits the source. What I mean by this is not only, as Blodgett suggests, that Et will always be close to the scene of the accident (Alice Munro 80), but also that the 'something' which could supply what is missing from Arthur's knowledge of things has to do with the hidden use of power in her own discourse. We see now that Et's initial comment about Blaikie was calculated. From the very beginning, Et has sought to insinuate herself in the place of her sister, whether out of an unspoken love for Arthur - as one critic puts it, 'the innocuous-seeming Et has had a crush on Arthur all along' (Gadpaille 64) - or out of a jealousy of Char. When we return to the story after a completed reading, then, we begin to recognize the extent to which its central meaning, that which must remain untold and absent, is not so much Char's legendary death, but the way in which meaning defers to discourse. Just as telling, in Munro's first collection of stories, is a way of maintaining power and control over shared secrets, here, in her third collection, not telling has become an equally potent source of power. Although the message that Et means to tell is forever delayed, this overt denial of expression is a reflection of a covert imposition of power. Et, then, with her predilection for absent and potential meanings, for things not said, turns out, despite her dislike of mysteries, to be more mysterious than her mysterious sister. From the start, Et has been engaged in a gesture of supplementation. Her name, in fact, indicates her role in Char's life. Et, as Blodgett has noted, is 'Latin for the conjunction "and," a word that couples, links, and supplements. It is the sign of deferral, of never quite delivering the message that will clarify' (Alice Munro 82). As supplement, as 'and,' Et is an addition to something that is already complete, a role that becomes quite evident given Et's proximity to the lives of the married couple, Char and Arthur. As an addition, however, Et's role is far from placid. She threatens to become a replacement, and the fact that she ends up living with Arthur, the man she seems to have loved all along, suggests that she is fulfilling a necessary and perhaps inevitable role by making the transition from addition to substitute. It is worth noting here that Et's role as Arthur's absent wife is inscribed in the very structure of the story. Nothing we are told about Char can in the end be viewed as independent of Et's own motivations.

8o The Tumble of Reason The reference in the opening paragraph to Char's beauty, for instance, a beauty, we are told, 'she couldn't lose' (SIB i), is already an indication of a jealousy that we will never be fully permitted to see, an absent signifier which confers meaning on the story's main turn of events. Why are we told that Char 'couldn't lose' her beauty? The statement becomes curiously meaningful if we consider it an indictment of the narrator's complicitous stance. In other words, this narrator tends to be in league with Et from the very start of the story.4 The statement about Char's unfailing beauty, then, voiced here as what appears to be a fact, reveals more about Et than it does about Char; the narrator's comment reflects Et's own flows of desire. Et, by implication, is already a part of everything we know about Char; structurally, she threatens to usurp her sister's role in life from the story's very first paragraph. 'Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You' inaugurates many of the central concerns that reappear throughout the stories in the collection. Here, through her violent juxtaposition of time sequences, Munro engages us in an examination of the extent to which meaning can never be fully played out. She shows us that the meaning of any event depends largely on its associations with other events which it recalls and to which it looks forward. So in 'Tell Me Yes or No,' another story about invention, about the process of telling, Munro shows us that what seems to be present, what seems, in the fiction, to be taking place, may never really be present at all. The first-person narrator in this story is someone who, like Et, 'is also adept at using stories to enact scenes of jealousy and revenge' (Gadpaille 65). Here too, we are aware of the way in which invention may be motivated by a deep psychological need or desire. The story takes the form of a kind of unwritten letter - unwritten letters and unspoken words pervade the collection, epitomizing Munro's recurrent concern with the pattern of deferral - from a woman who seems for a number of years to have been carrying on a longdistance relationship with a married man. I say 'seems' because we are never entirely certain how much of what we are told has been invented and how much of it has actually occurred. The story begins with the narrator cryptically remarking to her lover, 'I persistently imagine you dead' (SIB 106), and ends with an admission that virtually everything between beginning and end has been an imaginative reconstruction: 'Never mind ... I invented you, as far as my purposes go. Invented you and I invented your death. I have my tricks and trap doors, too. I don't understand their workings at the present moment,

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but I have to be careful, I won't speak against them' (SIB 124). The beginning and the end of the story both appear to suggest the hegemony of the imagination in the narrator's reconstruction of the past. This, of course, raises a fundamental problem: why has this story been written, or, more precisely, just why has this 'you' been invented? The answer to this question returns us to a notion we have encountered already in the volume's title story, the notion of memory as a kind of motivated discourse. When the narrator in 'Tell Me Yes or No' remembers meeting the story's 'you' on campus on a hot spring day, we are inclined to accept this recollection as a reliable version of a meeting that actually took place sometime in the past. Following her description of this meeting, the narrator explains how she was informed of her lover's death: Would you like to know how I was informed of your death? I go into the faculty kitchen, to make myself a cup of coffee before my ten o'clock class. Dodie Charles who is always baking something has brought a cherry pound cake. (The thing we old pros know about, in these fantasies, is the importance of detail, solidity; yes, a cherry pound cake.) It is wrapped in waxed paper and then in a newspaper. The Globe and Mail, not the local paper, that I would have seen. Looking idly at this week-old paper as I wait for my water to boil I see the small item, the modest headline VETERAN JOURNALIST DIES. I think about the word veteran, does it mean a veteran, someone who fought in the war, or is it a simple adjective, though in this case, I think, it could be either, since it says the man was a war correspondent - Only then do I realize. Your name. The city where you lived and died. A heart attack, that will do. (SIB 109)

Despite the narrator's attempt to foster the illusion that her story is real and solid, she cannot, as her parenthetical intrusion makes clear, suppress the role of discourse in her construction of the event. Her explicit use of the word 'fantasies' forces us to recognize the extent to which memory is constructive, rather than simply mimetic.5 The 'solid' detail of the cake, initially used by the narrator as a device of verisimilitude, masking the 'constructive' element of memory, serves to bring to the fore that same process of construction when used as a metafictional device. In a piece written for John Metcalf's collection The Narrative Voice, Munro has revealed her interest in the relationship between memory and invention. 'The kind of remembering I mean,' Munro writes, 'is

82 The Tumble of Reason what fictional invention is; but I wanted to show, too, that it is not quite deliberate' ('Colonel's Hash' 183). In 'Tell Me Yes or No/ Munro's fascination with the transforming, fictionalizing power of memory results in the reader's inability to determine whether or not events presented in the fiction have actually, within the context the story provides, taken place. By invoking a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, a poetics of mistrust, Munro suggests that nothing in her fiction is as stable or transparent as it may seem. The explicit moments of disruption in 'Tell Me Yes or No,' the metafictional gestures which call attention to the act of creation and the process of invention, render problematic our attempt to fix a stable point of reference: How much of this story are we supposed to accept as real, and how much of it should we see as a construct of its narrator? By playing off the gap between actual incident and imagined event, Munro carves an uncertainty which becomes something of her personal signature. This uncertainty, which we encounter throughout her work and which becomes most pronounced in a story such as 'Wild Swans,' here serves to interrogate the status of anything which, in the fiction, presents itself as transparent. This story of a woman who laments her absent lover is, in some ways, a story about itself. The split between T and 'you' on which the tale appears to be premised turns out to be not so much a split after all, but rather a contamination: when writing disrupts the experience of narrative, as it does so often throughout this collection of stories, we recognize the extent to which T is implicated in everything we have come to know about 'you.' 'Windows which hosted your reflection,' the narrator discovers, 'give me back mine' (SIB 115; emphasis added). The force of Munro's recasting of the subject/object divide resides in the implication that the solid world 'out there' is not a repository of objective meanings, but rather a kind of text or story whose direction of meaning is shaped by the 'tricks and trap doors' of the narrator's motivated discourse. What is important about this particular story is that it has been fashioned in response to the narrator's pain. She has been told that 'pain was only possible if you looked backward to the past or forward to the future' (SIB 117). As Munro's complex interaction between past recollection and future invention seems to suggest (Gadpaille 65), the project "this narrator is engaged in constitutes an attempt, to borrow the formulation of another Munro narrator, 'to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, [and] to get rid of (SIB 246) her lover. Here, the creative

The Politics of Deferral 83 act and the act of annihilation become one and the same: the narrator's gesture of invention is simultaneously an act of wiping out or killing off. She invents her lover's death as a way of getting over being jilted by him; in order to deal with his silence, his unresponsiveness, what she calls 'the permanent absence of you' (SIB 117), she creates a story which is simultaneously an enactment of revenge. The impediment to this scheme, however, is the very uncertainty which allows the scheme to thrive in the first place. The power of her story about her lover's death lies precisely in its ambiguity: we are never entirely certain whether the narrator's account is an accurate depiction of things that happened or an invented story. When at the end of the story the narrator admits making up not only her lover's death but, in fact, his very existence, we find ourselves confronted with a more extreme version of Del Jordan's remark about Madeleine as 'something [Uncle Benny] might have made up' (LGW 27). While Madeleine, as we have seen, both was and was not made up, while she was an invented character who, within the logic of the fiction in which she appeared, did exist, the narrator's lover's status in 'Tell Me Yes or No' remains somewhat more ambiguous. By claiming to have invented him, the narrator suddenly renders her scheme of revenge meaningless. At the end of the story, we are left uncertain whether 'you' exists. We do not know if the letters which the narrator claims to have received from her lover's widow - letters to her lover which she thought were her own but which turned out to be from another woman were actually her own after all. Her claim to have invented loving the story's 'you,' to have, in fact, invented the whole story, suggests that she, like many of Munro's narrators, is insistently engaged in the process of story-making. Whether she turns her experience of life into a story in order to cope with rejection or whether she does so out of a kind of wish-fulfilment, the narrator's transformation fails to distinguish between the real world and the world of her imagination. Events are robbed of their status as events as they get caught up in a network of possible meanings. As memory and story meld and overlap, we again recognize the extent to which Munro's fiction is forcing us to look below or beyond its realistic surface. 'Material,' another story about stories, interrogates the relationship between real lives and events and the writer's attempt to transform these lives and events into 'material' for fiction. The narrator's reaction

84 The Tumble of Reason to a story by her ex-husband Hugo, and to the biographic description of him which accompanies the story, gives rise to a meditation on both the value and the limits of recreating the past in art. She deplores 'the lies, the half-lies, the absurdities' (SIB 29) associated with Hugo, knowing full well that his actual circumstances were and are quite different from those the remarks on his book seem to suggest. As an account of Hugo's life, these remarks, the narrator realizes, are wildly inaccurate: He lives on the side of a mountain above Vancouver. It sounds as if he lives in a wilderness cabin, and all it means, I'm willing to bet, is that he lives in an ordinary comfortable house in North or West Vancouver, which now stretch far up the mountain. He has been sporadically affiliated with various academic communities. What does that mean? If it means he has taught for years, most of his adult life, at universities, that teaching at universities has been the only steady well-paid job he has ever had, why doesn't it say so? You would think he came out of the bush now and then to fling them scraps of wisdom, to give them a demonstration of what a real male writer, a creative artist, is like; you would never think he was a practicing academic. (SIB 29-30)

This first section of the story concerns itself with the ways in which even Hugo's biography - which purports to offer an accurate account of his life - becomes an exercise in the creation of personal myths, legends, and fictions. The second section more explicitly takes up the problem of translating the real 'into Art/ The 'real/ in this case, is Dotty, the one-time 'harlot-in-residence' (SIB 31) out of the narrator's and Hugo's past. The narrator had once told Hugo, who was then her husband, that 'he ought to pay more attention to Dotty if he wanted to be a writer' (SIB 32). Although Hugo's reaction at the time was simply to ignore Dotty altogether, the story which he does write about her, many years later, results at least initially in the narrator's desire to write to her ex-husband: 'I did think that I would write a letter to Hugo ... I was thinking of a letter. I was thinking I would tell him how strange it was for me to realize that we shared, still shared, the same bank of memory, and that what was all scraps and oddments, useless baggage, for me, was ripe and usable, a paying investment, for him. Also I wanted to apologize, in some not-outright way, for not having believed he would be a writer. Acknowledgement, not apology; that was what I owed him. A few graceful, a few grateful, phrases' (SIB 43). The passage

The Politics of Deferral 85 is interesting for several reasons. It articulates once again Munro's interest in things not told, letters not written: the narrator only thinks about writing to her ex-husband. Like many of the characters throughout this volume, she too has 'something' that she means to tell, but that 'something' finally remains untold, its meaning never played out.6 This narrator is on the threshold of communication, on the verge of reasserting 'in some not-outright way' her connection with the past. What emerges out of this passage, however, is not the narrator's potentially moving tribute to a shared history, but a sense of her own rhetorical mastery. More precisely, we realize that she too is a writer; like Hugo, she has turned their experience of the past into the subject of a story. As W.H. New has pointed out, Hugo is the narrator's subject just as Dotty is Hugo's (202). 7 That she is indeed a skilful manipulator of words and phrases is clear in the kinds of figurative devices she employs. Her ostensible pose of artlessness, then, her attempt to deliver a message in 'some not-outright way/ turns out to be an artful ploy. Like Bobby Sherriff's dance at the end of Lives of Girls and Women, the narrator's message in 'Material' reveals itself to be stylized, to be not simply real, but artistic. Already apparent in the passage I have quoted, a passage which seems to suggest a moving response, is an artfulness which requires us to amend our attitude towards this response. Even before her sudden change of heart, before the intrusion of the 'short jabbing sentences that [she] had never planned' (SIB 44), we realize that the narrator, like Hugo, is endowed with her own 'bag of tricks' (SIB 27). Her use of anaphora - 'A few graceful, a few grateful phrases' - reminds us that her gesture of gratitude is discursively produced. The repetition of words in succeeding clauses ('I was thinking of a letter. I was thinking I would tell him,' 'we shared, still shared') suggests not only an accretion of emotion but also a self-conscious manipulation of language. Both tropes, anaphora and conduplicatio, call our attention to the fact that what presents itself as natural, 'not-outright,' and real, actually relies upon the same kinds of 'tricks' that Hugo employs in his fiction. The narrator's motivated discourse, however, gives way to the short jabbing sentences that I mentioned a moment ago, sentences that she had never planned to write: 'This is not enough, Hugo. You think it is, but it isn't. You are mistaken, Hugo' (SIB 44). Although these italicized lines run counter to the letter of gratitude she had been meaning to write to Hugo, her dissatisfaction with Hugo's story can also only be expressed in terms of absent and potential meanings. Because, as the

86 The Tumble of Reason narrator realizes, her comments constitute 'an argument [not] to send through the mail' (SJB 44), her sense of bitterness becomes the basis for yet another unwritten letter. What is written instead of her letter to Hugo is, typically, a story. The piece which ends the volume, The Ottawa Valley/ is perhaps the most explicitly self-conscious story in Something I've Been Meaning To Tell "You. It has in common with the group of stories I have been examining an interest in telling and in the way memory can transform and give meaning to the past. The story takes the form of a series of anecdotes which come to a focus in the narrator's impression of a childhood trip to her mother's childhood home. The narrator, we learn as the piece unfolds, is telling this story in an attempt not only to come to terms with her mother, but also to make sense of her own experience of life. In telling her mother's story, the narrator reveals the extent to which she is really telling a story about her own inadequacy, about her own unsuccessful attempt to purge herself of the past through the process of storytelling. Her failure is most clearly expressed in the final paragraph of the story: If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn't stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents' old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena, even her children, come out clear enough ... The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of, her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same. (SIB 246)

Here, the narrator explicitly shatters the illusion of referentiality by interrogating the authenticity of her account and by questioning the capacity of her story to purge her of the past. Her recognition that

The Politics of Deferral 87 she is unable to tell the story properly, unable, as she puts it, to 'get rid of her mother, suggests, in part, that this story is as much about the narrator as it is about the mother. As if to corroborate this suggestion, the narrator tells us that her mother, during the time of this remembered visit to the Ottawa Valley, 'would have been forty-one or forty-two years old ... somewhere around the age that I am now' (SIB 237; emphasis added). The childhood narrator's trip to her mother's old home constitutes a trip into the realm of song and story, an excursion into a world of absent and potential meanings. As in 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ where the narrator's outing with her father proves unexpectedly revealing, here too we have a narrator whose trip leads to the discovery of a hitherto unknown past. In visiting her mother's childhood home, the narrator begins to understand that there are dimensions to her mother's personality which will never be fully recuperated. Aunt Dodie, who, recalling Uncle Benny, is not a 'real' aunt at all, introduces the narrator to new versions of the past, threatening, with her stories, 'to let out more secrets than [the narrator] could stand' (SIB 243). Dodie functions as a kind of counterweight to the narrator's stern and proper mother: 'My mother had not led me to believe we were related to people who dressed like [Aunt Dodie] or who used the word bugger. "I will not tolerate filth," my mother always said. But apparently she tolerated Aunt Dodie' (SIB 229). This toleration is only the first in a series of contradictions which the young narrator begins to perceive in her mother's personality. Later she learns that Uncle James, her mother's brother, is allowed to drink without apology despite the fact that her father, a figure who remains conspicuously absent except in this one detail, had promised before getting married that he would never drink. Recognition of contradictions leads the narrator to an implicit understanding of her inability to fix an unequivocal point of reference. Even before the explicit metafictional intrusion at the end of the story, the narrator questions how it is that she can know anything about the past. What she has heard from her mother about Aunt Dodie's tragic past, for example, turns out, when mentioned by Dodie herself, to be not a tragedy at all, or if a tragedy, then one about which Dodie can speak 'proudly,' almost casually in the midst of doing dishes (SIB 230). The narrator, who has been told 'never to mention' the fact that Dodie had been jilted (SIB 230), is surprised to discover Dodie's own eagerness to mention the event. The section about the jilting is im-

88 The Tumble of Reason portant not only because it gives us two versions, two stories, which deal with the same event, and not only because it points to a crucial difference between Dodie and the narrator's mother, but also because it introduces the narrator to the power and the limitations of narrative. Its power here lies in its therapeutic possibilities. Just as Dodie has, in an attempt to get over her jilting, turned a central experience from her past into the kind of story which she can tell while doing the dishes, so the narrator will also try to tell a story about the past as a means of, among other things, coming to terms with her relationship with her mother. Dodie's story about the jilting, however, also implicitly renders problematic the whole notion of the representation of reality. While Dodie insists that, unlike other girls, who would have cried at being jilted on their wedding day, she laughed at the experience, the narrator's mother, 'telling the same story/ offers a different version: '"I used to wake up and hear her crying in the night. Night after night"' (SIB 230). The difference in versions indicates the extent to which memory is a process of assigning meaning to the past. It shows us, as it shows the narrator, that meanings are far from fixed and stable, that the past is subject to a perpetual reinterpretation. Another one of Dodie's stories, the humorous anecdote about Allen Durrand and the overalls, serves a similar function. It alerts the narrator to the possibility that her mother and Dodie are not as unalike as they may initially appear. Through Dodie's anecdote, the narrator is able to catch a quick glimpse of an absent history, of a dimension to her mother's past which does not seem to square at all with her mother's uncompromising conformity to sanctioned and respectable modes of behaviour. The recollection of the prank that Dodie and the narrator's mother played at Allen Durrand's expense ends with disagreement as the mother attempts to deny the full extent of her complicity in the event. Once again, Munro uses different versions of the same event to suggest the narrator's inability to locate a determinate source of meaning. The implication, here as elsewhere in Munro, is that the event loses its status as an event as it gets caught up in a network of possible meanings. The episode at St John's Church, where the mother sacrifices her appearance in order to give the narrator a safety pin to hold together her underpants, makes evident both the double time-scheme of the story and the older narrator's realization that she is now not so unlike the way her mother was then, at the time of their visit to the Ottawa

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Valley. She realizes that her mother 'must have planned this [her church outfit] and visualized it just as I now plan and visualize, sometimes, what I will wear to a party' (SIB 241). While the young protagonist is unable to express her gratitude when her mother makes the sacrificial gesture, although she remains 'too deep in [her] own misfortune and too sure of [her] own rights' (SJB 241), the older narrator is engaged in an attempt to compensate for her selfishness by writing about the episode, by trying to comprehend her mother's action. The mother, of course, poses particular problems because of her illness. During the trip to the Ottawa Valley, the narrator becomes increasingly aware of her mother's condition. When confronted with the possibility that she may have to look after her mother as an invalid, the narrator demands of her mother that she get better. The story about her mother, in some ways, represents the narrator's own story, her own attempt to purge herself of guilt, to retell the past in a new light. Like the other stories about telling in this volume, 'The Ottawa Valley' ends in deferral (here it is the ending of the story which is put off) and is layered with absent and potential meanings. Dodie's stories, in particular, allow that which was left out to re-infiltrate the past, and thereby suggest that the past we now know only through memory is not a repository of objective meanings but rather a personal story which is continually being rewritten. THE RHETORIC OF MISTRUST

'Walking on Water' is one of few Munro stories in which the protagonist - in this case Mr Lougheed - is a male character.8 Although the main focus of this piece might seem to be Eugene's attempt to walk on water, it is Mr Lougheed's desire to understand Eugene which reveals Munro's central narrative interest. The story, in fact, is as much about the elderly Mr Lougheed as it is about Eugene. Like 'Tell Me Yes or No,' and particularly like 'Walker Brothers Cowboy,' 'Walking on Water' is marked by a fundamental uncertainty. The story, which has aspects in common with both the others, seems primarily to enlarge on propositions contained in the opening story of Munro's first collection. Unlike the uncertainty in Tell Me Yes or No' - an uncertainty which manifests itself as a potential crack in the facade of verisimilitude - the uncertainty in 'Walking on Water' springs from Munro's questioning of how we gain knowledge about the world. As I have sug-

90 The Tumble of Reason gested earlier, a similar kind of questioning takes place in 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ and in both stories the thematic interest in uncertainty is paralleled by a use of language that refuses to allow ostensible statements of fact to be taken at face value. Although both stories are governed by modes of possibility, 'Walking on Water' overtly addresses an issue that has implicitly fascinated Munro from her first collection: the importance of looking below or beyond the surface of what we see. It is possible to read 'Walking on Water' as a kind of reworking of 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ but a reworking informed by Munro's more recent involvement in a discourse dominated by suspicion.9 The earlier story, in its depiction of the narrator's increasing awareness of a hitherto unknown past and of changes that come with the passing of time, introduces the general concerns that are more fully integrated into the narrative of 'Walking on Water.' While suspicion in 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' is presented as a kind of passing moment of recognition for the narrator, in 'Walking on Water' the narrative evinces a suspicion that is deep-rooted and lasting. Suspicion begins with the disruption of everyday routine: a revealing drive into new and unexpected territory, a proposition which poses a challenge to the way we routinely, ordinarily, look at and experience things in the world. Eugene's proposition is initially presented to us in an indirect manner: '"Says he can walk on water'" (SIB 67). '"It's all in the way of thinking your weight out of your body, according to him. There's nothing you can't control if you set out to. So he says'" (SIB 68). Phrases such as 'says he can/ 'according to him/ and 'so he says' call attention to the fact that Eugene's radical proposal is mediated and surrounded by an air of uncertainty. Before we even meet Eugene, we are implicitly invited to doubt what it is that we are being told. When Eugene himself confirms what we have been indirectly told, that he is, in fact, going to attempt walking on water, we realize that even his confirming statements are loaded with tropes of supposition, with words or phrases such as 'it may be/ 'suppose/ and 'there is a possibility' (SJB 77). It is worth remarking that Eugene's discours turns out to be replicating rather than opposing Mr Lougheed's way of looking at things. The opening paragraph presents what appears to be a routine description of Lougheed's everyday life and attitudes. Here too, what seems to be a kind of knowing description is marked by supposition and qualification:

The Politics of Deferral 91 This was a part of town where a lot of old people still lived, though many had moved to high-rises across the park. Mr. Lougheed had a number of friends, or perhaps it would be better to say acquaintances, whom he met every day or so on the way downtown, at the bus stop, or on the walks overlooking the sea ... He belonged to a lawn-bowling club and to a club which brought in travel films and showed them, in a downtown hall, during the winter. He had joined these clubs not out of a real desire to be sociable but as a precaution against his natural tendencies, which might lead him, he thought, into becoming a sort of hermit. (SIB 67; emphasis added)

Lougheed's attempts to avoid becoming a hermit are here described in much the same language that Eugene uses, a few pages later, to discuss his own proposal to walk on water: 'It could be/ 'If that is possible' (SIB 74). Because both their discourses, Lougheed's and Eugene's, are engaged in a recourse to possible and potential meanings, what might initially seem an opposition between the youthful Eugene and the elderly Mr Lougheed reveals itself to be something of a similarity. Although the story seems to proceed on the basis of an opposition between Lougheed on the one hand and the youthful generation represented by Eugene and the hippies downstairs - on the other, 'Walking on Water' is not so much about an old man's attempt to understand a younger generation with whom he feels out of touch, as it is about the 'confusing and deflecting invisible forces' (SIB 82) that make it difficult to take people and things in the world at face value. In this context, Eugene's demonstration seems designed to pose a deliberate challenge to our modes of perception: '"The world we accept - you know, external reality," Eugene was saying comfortably, "is nothing like so fixed as we have been led to believe. It responds to more methods of control than we are conditioned to accept"' (SIB 75). Some pages later we learn that Mr Lougheed has in common with Eugene this mistrust of the stability or fixedness of things: 'Mr. Lougheed riding on a bus through city streets or even through the countryside would not have been amazed to see anything you could name - a mosque, for instance, or a white bear. Whatever it looked to be, it would turn out to be something else. Girls at the supermarket wore grass skirts to sell pineapples and he had seen a gas station attendant, wiping windshields, wearing on his head a fool's hat with bells. Less and less was surprising' (SIB 83-4; emphasis added). Lougheed's statement of mis

92 The Tumble of Reason trust - that things are not what they seem - arises out of the context of a dream 'which he had dreamed on and off since middle age' (SIB 81). The dream, we are told, is based on a real incident, but 'the facts' are available to him now only through the agency of memory. As Mr Lougheed's dreams and memories merge and overlap, we are unable to determine just what is meant to be part of his dream and what is part of reality. The passage describing Lougheed riding on a bus, for example, is presented with a characteristic Munrovian uncertainty which makes it difficult to determine whether what we are reading is reality or dream. Alice Munro's own artistic hesitation - a distrust of artifice and authoring which we also see in stories like 'Material' and 'The Ottawa Valley' - is reflected in Lougheed's dream: 'This dream always left some weight on his mind. He supposed it was because he was still carrying around, for part of the day, the presences of dead people, father and mother, brother and sister, whose faces he could not clearly remember when he was awake. How to convey the solidity, complexity, reality, of those presences - even if he had anybody to convey this to? It almost seemed to him there must be a place where they moved with independence, undiminished authority, outside his own mind; it was hard to believe he had authored them himself (SIB 83). Munro's artistic crisis, which reaches a (for her) new level of self-consciousness in stories like 'The Ottawa Valley' and 'Winter Wind,' is here implicitly captured in Mr Lougheed's comment about the limits of representation. The dream itself is connected to the main movement of the story by a kind of unconscious connection, by means, in other words, of what has been left out. Towards the end of the story, after Eugene's unsuccessful attempt to walk on water,10 we are informed that Mr Lougheed had something come to him, something 'which he took to be the ending of his dream' (SJB 89). Subsequently, we learn that the scene which comes to him has been 'effortlessly retrieved from somewhere - either from the dream or from his memory, and he did not see how it could have come from his memory' (SIB 90). In the next paragraph, a qualifying phrase referring to the dream, 'if that was what it was7 (SIB 90) - a phrase which recalls the narrator's description of Blaikie Noble as Char's boyfriend in 'Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You' - suggests that this scene may not have come from Mr Lougheed's dream either. The scene that Mr Lougheed envisages as the ending to his dream

The Politics of Deferral 93 finds him - 'a child of course in this scene' (SIB 90) - discovering through the floor of a bridge 'a boy's body spread out, face down' (SIB 90). Although he does not appear to recognize the image immediately, Lougheed later speculates that this drowned boy might be Frank McArter, the same 'mad boy' for whom the young Lougheed has been searching in his dream. He wonders whether McArter, after killing his parents, 'had actually thrown himself into the river. There was no way now of finding out' (SIB 90)." What is left out here, what can only be expressed as a kind of unconscious connection, is the relationship between the drowned boy of Lougheed's dream and the fact that Eugene, after his unsuccessful attempt to walk on water, has mysteriously disappeared. Just as Lougheed has been dreaming of his search for the mad boy, he has also been engaged in a search for the missing Eugene. The ending to his dream suggests the possibility that Eugene might have killed himself by going into the water again. The end of the story is loaded with conjectures, with speculations as to what Eugene might have done. The final paragraph recapitulates the theme of uncertainty by returning us to where the story began, to a description of Mr Lougheed's thoughts: 'Mr. Lougheed thought for the first time ever that he might not be able to get to the top of the stairs. He doubted his powers even for that. It was possible that he would have to go into an apartment building, like the rest of them, if he wanted to continue' (SIB 92). Munro brings us back into the realm of everyday concerns, but reminds us that even Lougheed's everyday life is marked by doubt and uncertainty. The story's opening and closing paragraphs, with their tropes of doubt and supposition, serve as parts of a framing unit which enables Munro to begin and end with everyday concerns and occurrences. Placed between these framing paragraphs are sections dealing with Eugene's proposal and demonstration, and Lougheed's dream. Munro shows us that finally all three, everyday life, Eugene and his proposal, and Lougheed's dream, are inhabited by 'confusing and deflecting invisible forces/ by varying degrees of doubt and uncertainty. The mystery of Eugene remains unsolved just as the real ending to the search for Frank McArter can be played out only under the provisional rubric of a dream. 'Marrakesh' is another story which ostensibly deals with an elderly protagonist's attempt to understand someone from the younger generation. Dorothy strains to comprehend her granddaughter Jeanette,

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who is described as 'a hieroglyph' (SIB 166), 'a problem to understand' (SIB 161), a text that needs to be deciphered. The title refers to a story within the story, to Jeanette's conversation with Blair King about being robbed in Morocco. After Jeanette tells her story, Dorothy begins to suspect that something has either been changed or left out of her granddaughter's account: 'What is there here that is not being told? thought Dorothy. She had had a great deal of experience listening to the voices of children who were leaving things out. Maybe she [Jeanette] slept with the blue-eyed Arab when she got him back to the hotel. Maybe she slept with both of them in the Arab house. Something more than that. Maybe the whole story is made-up' (SIB 171). The last sentence restates a problem that runs throughout Munro: an awareness of the possibility that what is presented as 'real' may turn out to be 'made-up.' Dorothy's suspicion that something is not being told puts us in mind of Munro's own interest in the discourse of absence. If we return to Jeanette's Marrakesh tale after we finish reading Munro's entire story, we begin to realize that the passage about being robbed in Morocco is a kind of abbreviated story whose implications can be recovered precisely only by reference to what is left out. 'Marrakesh' ends with Dorothy seeing Jeanette make love to a neighbour, Blair King, whom her granddaughter has just met - a scene which recalls Mr Lougheed's similar voyeuristic experience in 'Walking on Water.' Furthermore, as James Carscallen points out, the glassedin lighted porch where Jeanette and Blair King make love is like the distant room at the heart of Marrakesh, the 'little bare room with a couch and a bright bulb' (SIB 170) into which Jeanette is led by two Arab men ('Three Jokers' 129). The absent but implicit connection between Jeanette's Marrakesh tale and the love-making scene is enough to allow us to infer that what, if anything, has been left out of Jeanette's story of her travels, probably has something to do with her sexuality. Earlier on, while watching Jeanette and Blair King conversing over a bottle of gin, Dorothy, for whom 'there was in everything something to be discovered' (SJB 163), wonders, 'What was Jeanette up to? Was this flirtation, some new style of it?' (SIB 169). By the end of Munro's story, what Dorothy suspects may be a new style of flirtation reveals itself to be a message - like the one Bobby Sherriff delivers to Del at the end of Lives of Girls and Women - in a language she is unable to comprehend. Dorothy's speculations, however, constitute not a 'discovery' of Jeanette's potential sexuality, but rather an implicit awareness

The Politics of Deferral 95 of the possibility that that sexuality is itself a discourse capable of producing and transforming meaning. Throughout the stories in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, Munro examines various ways in which meanings are produced and transformed. Often, as we see in the title story, and in pieces like 'Material/ 'How I Met My Husband/ 'The Spanish Lady/ 'Walking on Water/ and 'The Ottawa Valley/ the force of this production and transformation resides in information that is withheld, in experiences which remain unarticulated or unexplained. Nominally these stories suspend the fulfilment of communication or defer the accomplishment of a 'proper ending/ but perhaps more significantly, they force us to understand that what has been left out is, in its absence, the indication of an imposition of power. If, as Linda Hutcheon has suggested, postmodern art and theory teach us that the act of saying is inherently political (Poetics 185), then Munro's fiction shows us that the act of not saying similarly involves a recourse to strategies of appropriation. As characters and narrators in Munro's stories strive to attain this power, however, they seek to obscure more than only crucial secrets about the past; on another level, they also attempt to conceal the fact that their imposition of power involves an implied perception of deprivation. The motives for power, throughout these stories, stem from issues such as jealousy ('Something')/ desire ('Something/ 'Tell Me'), revenge ('Tell Me'), and bitterness ('Material') - issues which involve an attempt to usurp something that someone else has but which Munro's narrators and protagonists often feel they are lacking. The other stories with which I have been concerned12 - stories which address the notion of suspicion - adumbrate a similar conception of powerlessness. The suspicion in these stories comes out of a sense of inadequacy ('The Ottawa Valley'), distrust ('Winter Wind'), uncertainty ('Walking on Water/ 'Marrakesh/ 'Tell Me'), and shame ('Memorial').13 Efforts at understanding - both ours and those of the characters involved - continually come up short and we find ourselves confronted with new examples of elements in absentia, with stories that, in their refusal to produce determinate meaning, question the ability of words to re-present experience. Both sets of stories, those concerned with power and those which deal with suspicion, mark a pivotal point in Munro's career because they represent new directions for her involvement with the discourse of absence.

4

Acknowledging the Nether Voices: Signs of Instability in Who Do You Thin You Are?

How will the tales change in the telling? Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

With Who Do You Think You Are?, Munro returns to the story-cycle format she employed in Lives of Girls and Women.1 Despite oft-noted similarities in both structure and theme, however, many of the central issues in Lives are now altered as a result of Munro's increasing involvement with a poetics of uncertainty and a rhetoric of mistrust. Several of the familiar motifs are here - the protagonist's fascination with what goes on below the surface, her interest in things that remain untold, her inability to reconcile incompatible tendencies - but Munro reworks these motifs in an effort to emphasize both the problem of identity posed by the title of the collection,2 and the ways in which an ostensibly 'realistic' story-line is thrown into question and rendered unstable by disruptive patterns, gaps in time, and discontinuous histories. In 'Royal Beatings,' the narrator's attempt to tell a story is continually disrupted by a hermeneutics of suspicion, by an awareness that this account of Rose's childhood is not as transparent and clear-cut as it may appear. The story of Rose's childhood beatings begins with and would seem to proceed on the basis of a distinction between the way things happen in 'real life' and Rose's ability to create imaginative worlds. Rose's childhood musings on the meaning of words, her interpretation of Flo's phrase 'Royal Beating,' alerts us to her penchant for invention and speculation: 'Rose had a need to picture things, to

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 97 pursue absurdities, that was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of taking this threat [of Flo's] to heart she pondered: how is a beating royal? She came up with a tree-lined avenue, a crowd of formal spectators, some white horses and black slaves. Someone knelt, and the blood came leaping out like banners. An occasion both savage and splendid' (WDY i). The next sentence tells us that in 'real life/ the beatings Rose received never approached such dignity (WDY i), thus suggesting that Rose, in pursuing absurdities, is engaging in a discourse that runs counter to the way the real world operates. As we read on, however, we begin to realize that the speculative method of looking at things established at the outset and associated with Rose, is precisely the method that the story's far-from-omniscient third-person narrator uses to tell what appears to be a straightforward realistic narrative. After giving an account of Rose's mother's death, the narrator explains that 'Rose was a baby in the basket at the time, so of course could not remember any of this. She heard it from Flo, who must have heard it from her father' (WDY 2). This process of mediation, of distancing from an origin, not only suggests that Rose's knowledge of the past has been acquired through the passing on of an oral history, that her memories have come out of the process of sharing and interpreting narratives; it also asks that we consider closely the relationship between narrator and protagonist. By including an explanation of where Rose's knowledge of the past comes from, by telling us that the description of Rose's mother's death does not simply come out of Rose's firsthand knowledge, Munro reveals the extent to which the story, despite its third-person narrator, is primarily filtered through Rose's perspective. Already, then, we begin to recognize through this process of mediation that we are not simply dealing with a conventional third-person narrative. The fact that Rose's personal recollection of her mother's death stems not from having witnessed the event, but from stories that have been told about it, alerts us to an uncertainty associated with her memory of things. This uncertainty carries over into the story's main focus: the description of Rose's childhood beating. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, the veracity of the narrator's account is suspect. In answer to the narrator's question (perhaps Rose's question to herself) about how the royal beatings were started, we are offered what seems to be a factual replaying of the events that led up to the beating, a replaying, however, that abounds in suppositional expressions, conjee-

p8 The Tumble of Reason tural phrases: 'Suppose a Saturday, in spring' (WDY 10), 'Saturday, then. For some reason Flo is not going uptown, has decided to stay home and scrub the kitchen floor. Perhaps this has put her in a bad mood. Perhaps she was in a bad mood anyway, due to people not paying their bills, or the stirring-up feelings in spring' (WDY 11). It is worth noting that the actual beating that Rose receives at the hands of her father is similarly tinged with shades of uncertainty: 'He throws Rose down. Or perhaps she throws herself down. He kicks her legs again. She has given up on words but is letting out a noise, the sort of noise that makes Flo cry, Oh, what if people can hear her? The very last-ditch willing sound of humiliation and defeat it is, for it seems Rose must play her part in this with the same grossness, the same exaggeration, that her father displays, playing his. She plays his victim with a self-indulgence that arouses, and maybe hopes to arouse, his final, sickened, contempt' (WDY 17). This passage, like so many passages in Who Do You Think You Are?, forces us to recognize the degree to which nothing is certain in Munro's fictional world. As if to warn us that we should not trust everything we read, the narrator employs a rhetoric of supposition ('Or perhaps she throws herself down/ 'and maybe hopes to arouse') that is clearly at variance with the seemingly straightforward, realistic movement of the story. The sense of uncertainty conveyed through this rhetoric is enhanced by the suggestion that Rose is playing a part, a suggestion which, in addition to anticipating Rose's career as an actress, may serve to temper the severity of the beating she gets from her father. Acting, in fact, is a metaphor that informs the entire text, and it serves to undermine the distinction between that which is genuine and that which is merely an imitation. Consider the following description of Rose's father as he prepares to inflict punishment upon his daughter: 'He is coming over to Rose. He pushes her off the table. His face, like his voice, is quite out of character. He is like a bad actor, who turns a part grotesque. As if he must savor and insist on just what is shameful and terrible about this. That is not to say he is pretending, that he is acting, and does not mean it. He is acting, and he means it' (WDY 16). Rose's father, in simultaneously playing a part and meaning it, leads us into the kind of ontological questioning that the title of the volume proposes. Although he is acting, Rose's father is not pretending, and the fact that he 'means it' renders unstable our perception of just what it is that is real. Worth noting here is Munro's linguistic indicator of this instability: Rose's father is acting, and he

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 99 means it. The use of the conjunction 'and' rather than the expected 'but' exemplifies Munro's interest in questioning the completeness of the opposition between seemingly disparate terms, in this case between acting as an imitation of the real and the real itself. That Rose's father's actions should lead to such a blurring of distinctions is, of course, hardly surprising in light of what we come to know about him. In the woodshed where he spends much of his time, where he works 'at his furniture repairing and restoring' (WDY 2), Rose's father retreats into isolation: From the shed came not only coughing, but speech, a continual muttering, reproachful or encouraging, usually just below the level at which separate words could be made out. Slowing down when her father was at a tricky piece of work, taking on a cheerful speed when he was doing something less demanding, sandpapering or painting. Now and then some words would break through and hang clear and nonsensical on the air. When he realized they were out, there would be a quick bit of cover-up coughing, a swallowing, an alert, unusual silence. 'Macaroni, pepperoni, Botticelli, beans -' (WDY 3-4)

A moment later, we learn of something else Rose has overheard her father say: 'The cloud-capped towers, she heard him say once' (WDY 4). This allusion to The Tempest reveals much about the central concerns of Munro's story. One critic, W.R. Martin, has correctly commented on the fact that Rose's father quotes from what is Shakespeare's most unrealistic play (Paradox 103), yet Martin fails to go beyond that observation into an examination of the context of the quotation. '"The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces'" (WDY 4) is a line out of a celebrated speech that Prospero gives after the masque for Ferdinand and Miranda in Act IV of The Tempest. The speech, appropriately, is a meditation on reality and illusion, and in it Prospero compares real life to the world of the stage, to acting. It would appear, then, despite the randomness of 'Macaroni, pepperoni, Botticelli, beans -/ that Rose's father's allusion to The Tempest is far from haphazard. Like Prospero, who is a victim of banishment and whose isolated island represents more a state of mind than a place on a map, Rose's father is a kind of bricoleur who, in the isolation of his shed, is forced to make do with what is at hand. What is at hand, of course, is old furniture, and his ability to craft remnants of prior constructs, to restore them into items which have some sense of in-

ioo The Tumble of Reason tegrity, is analogous to Prospero's similar making-do, his creation of a community out of fragments and found remnants. What Munro seems to be getting at by alluding to The Tempest, by asking us to draw an implicit connection between Rose's father and Prospero, is that both characters are engaged in the creation of fictional worlds. But just as the dissolution of Prospero's masque leads to a questioning of the opposition between reality and illusion, to a suggestion that life itself may be a dissolving fiction, so Rose's father, conscious, during the beating episode, of playing a role in which he believes, collapses the distinction between real and invented worlds. In doing so, he becomes a symptom of Munro's larger discourse, his undecipherable words an indication of a tension that is always there in her fictional world, lurking below and beyond the surface of everyday life. Hence, Rose has trouble reconciling the father who, from his shed, utters 'clear and nonsensical' words with the father of her everyday domestic life: 'The person who spoke these words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space' (WDY 4). The connection with Prospero, with The Tempest as a whole, serves as an entrance to Munro's central concerns. Rose's father, by way of Shakespeare, becomes an emblem of the inseparability of fictionmaking and experience. The problem that arises from Rose's recognition of the incompatible tendencies in her father - the everyday father and the mysterious voice from the woodshed - is explicitly linked with the noises that come out of the bathroom: This was something the same as bathroom noises. Flo had saved up, and had a bathroom put in, but there was no place to put it except in a corner of the kitchen. The door did not fit, the walls were only beaverboard. The result was that even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. They were all familiar with each other's nether voices, not only in their more explosive moments but in their intimate sighs and growls and pleas and statements. And they were all most prudish people. So no one ever seemed to hear, or be listening, and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out. (WDY 4)

Although this passage seems to be a kind of response to Addie Jordan's comment in Lives of Girls and Women about toilets and literature (LGW

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 101 175), it also announces one of Munro's recurrent interests: the importance of acknowledging what she, in general, calls nether voices. Here, the difficulty of reconciling public life with what is said or done in private applies to both Rose's father and the bathroom noises. Nether voices are rampant in Who Do You Think You Are?, and part of what Munro's fiction seems to be asking is that we recognize how much these voices form an integral part of everyday life. Although Munro's characters may attempt to separate the private from the public, the nether voices from the socially accepted ones, there is always an implicit recognition that such a separation is finally impossible. Nether voices reveal themselves in various ways in Munro's fiction. They can take the form of an indecipherable speech, like Rose's father's, a speech that occurs 'just below the level at which separate words could be made out.' Rose's father, in fact, proves exemplary because he functions as a model for the discoveries that his daughter makes through the course of the novel. His private mutterings from the woodshed are emblematic of the aporias that continually emerge in these stories, of those moments that repeatedly throw the storyline open to question. Such moments, of course, are everywhere in Munro. In Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, the nether voice manifests itself primarily in the rhetoric of deferral, in what is not told or written, in secrets and silences (see Howells 74). In Who Do You Think You Are?, the nether voice is usually a subversive voice of uncertainty or instability, a voice that structurally and thematically threatens to distance us from the reality of what is being presented. We have seen how this uncertainty has already been established in the description of Rose's childhood beatings. The narrator's use of suppositional phrases warns us that the accuracy of the account given of Rose's past may indeed be suspect. What seems implicit in this story is that the uncertainty associated with the description of Rose's beatings is an uncertainty that has, at least in part, been cultivated through Rose's interactions with her stepmother, Flo. Like Del in Lives of Girls and Women, Rose is influenced by the stories she hears, and many of these stories come from Flo. Of particular interest is a story Flo tells about Becky Tyde: The story being that the father beat them, had beaten all his children and beaten his wife as well, beat Becky more now because of her deformity, which some people believed he had caused (they did not understand about polio). The stories persisted and got added to. The reason that Becky was kept out of sight was

io2

The Tumble of Reason

now supposed to be her pregnancy, and the father of the child was supposed to be her own father. Then people said it had been born, and disposed of (WDY 7). As with the description of Rose's beating, this description of Flo's presentation of Becky's beating is marked by supposition, by a repeated interest in what is supposed to be the case. The recurrence of suppositional phrases here alerts us to the fact that Flo's stories are about the transforming, myth-making powers of memory, that her tales evolve out of a local community of gossip. Flo's version of the incident, with the narrator's emphasis on what might have happened between Becky and her father, reveals itself to be an artifact that has been fashioned out of what she, Flo, takes to be the raw material of Becky's life.3 Her account of the horsewhipping of Becky's father similarly shows us that Flo's memory of the past is based on legend or hearsay, on what 'everyone knew' (WDY 6). We get the impression that Flo's memory of the horsewhipping of old man Tyde, like Rose's memory of her mother's death, has been acquired through the passing on of narratives. As Martin suggests, Flo's 'tale is a possession of the folk and has become a legend, with the simplifications, exaggerations, sensationalism and melodrama that come to colour thrice-told tales' (Paradox 105). Rose, of course, falls under the sway of Flo's tales and, a few chapters later in 'Half a Grapefruit,' we discover that 'Flo and Rose had switched roles. Now Rose was the one bringing stories home, Flo was the one who knew the names of the characters and was waiting to hear' (WDY 40). Like Flo, Rose too seeks to transform daily life into the world of legends and stories. Her predilection for stories works in part to undermine our confidence in the veracity of what we are reading. In fact, Rose's interest in storytelling, though perhaps not fully explicit in 'Royal Beatings,' figures prominently in our understanding of both the opening piece and the collection as a whole because it shows us that what we are reading is not as fixed and stable as it might appear to be. One of the ways that Munro's text, early on, signals its own instability is through a curious structural lapse. I implied earlier that the narrative perspective employed in Who Do You Think You Are? is a kind of limited third person point of view. Despite the use of the third-person, the narrative of Who is made up of Rose's memories; it does not offer an omniscient account of lives and events in Hanratty. Although the novel, in other words, is narrated in the third person,

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 103 we see the world primarily through Rose's eyes. As a result of using this limited point of view, Munro has created a fiction which makes it difficult, if at times impossible, to separate the narrative voice from Rose's perspective. Given this difficulty, 'Royal Beatings' invites us to be suspicious not only of Flo's stories, but, as I have been arguing, of the narrator's presentation of events. If the narrator can tell us only what Rose knows or has heard, then the stories in this volume are effectively Rose's perceptions, and, as such, they force us to recognize the extent to which we learn how to behave from the stories with which we have grown up. Since Rose grows up surrounded by stories, it is little wonder that she tries to transform her past into narrative. In addition to the implicit suggestion that Rose's fascination with stories has led her to tell her own story through a third-person narrator, there is a moment in 'Royal Beatings' which urges us to read the whole of Who as a reworking of a first-person narrative. Consider the following passage: The wrangle with Rose has already commenced, has been going on forever, like a dream that goes back and back into other dreams, over hills and through doorways, maddeningly dim and populous and familiar and elusive. They are carting all the chairs out of the kitchen preparatory to the scrubbing, and they have also got to move some extra provisions for the store, some cartons of canned goods, tins of maple syrup, coal-oil cans, jars of vinegar ... Brian who is five or six by this time is helping drag the tins. 'Yes/ says Flo, carrying on from our lost starting-point. 'Yes, and that filth you taught to Brian.' (WDY 11; emphasis added)

The fact that Rose's brother is either five or six suggests the incapacity of the narrator to recall the past with unerring precision. It also seems to imply that the narrator here is actually an older version of Rose, a Rose who, in remembering the episode, is unable to summon forth its exact details. As if to corroborate this possibility, Munro defies narrative convention with her use of the first-person plural: 'our lost starting-point.' On an initial reading, this 'our' might seem unobtrusive, might even go unnoticed, as it clearly seems intended to refer to Rose and Flo. When we do notice it, however, 'our' raises a problem because it is out of place in what otherwise presents itself as a thirdperson narrative. The use of the first-person plural in this passage alerts us to the

io4 The Tumble of Reason possibility that Rose may be telling her own story. Although, for the most part, Rose seems to be maintaining a kind of critical distance by writing about herself in the third person, in this passage she slips and reveals the extent to which she, as narrator, is not in complete control of her utterances. This, albeit brief, lack of control suggests the possibility that the third-person narrator in Who Do You Think You Are? is really a kind of disguised first-person narrator, is, in short, Rose: a narrator who writes about herself from a distanced point of view in order to lend credibility to her tale. If this is the case, however, the credibility that Rose covets is undermined when she inadvertently lets fall the distance that she works so hard to maintain. When the first-person plural intrudes into this third-person narrative, we find ourselves confronted with one of 'those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question' (WDY 172). The narrator, whom we are, by convention, inclined to trust, turns out to be every bit as fictional as the characters in the story. Even as Rose is offered to us as a fictional creation, the narrative voice reveals itself to be a fictional construct of Rose's. Each reveals and stands in the way of the other, suggesting the kind of inescapable circularity that characterizes the fiction-making process. A number of issues raised in the 'Royal Beatings' segment reappear in 'Privilege,' the following chapter, but are altered as a result of new ways of looking at things. The notion of a performance, for example, takes on a curious new meaning as a result of Flo's use of the word: 'That was Flo's word for it: perform. Back in the country, back on the hill farms she came from, Flo said that people had gone dotty, been known to eat boiled hay, and performed with their too-close relations. Before Rose understood what was meant she used to imagine some makeshift stage, some rickety old barn stage, where members of a family got up and gave silly songs and recitations' (WDY 25). Unlike the speculations prompted by Flo's earlier phrase, 'royal beating/ Rose's imaginings here might be said to represent the outward pull of Munro's fiction. Whereas the phrase 'royal beating' gives rise to Rose's translation of a 'real life' event into an abstract or hypothetical situation, Flo's use of the word 'perform' forces Rose to make the opposite move, to translate Flo's figurative phrase back into its literal, more familiar usage. That Rose should move both ways - inward with 'royal beating' and outward with 'perform' - exemplifies Munro's own involvement

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 105 with both directions of meaning, her interest in both the realistic surface of things and the creation of invented worlds. 'Performance' is the word Flo would apply to the incestuous activity of Rose's fellow students, Shorty and Franny McGill. Franny, we are told, 'had been smashed against the wall, by her father, drunk, when she was a baby. So Flo said' (WDY 26). The qualifying phrase here - 'So Flo said' - is part of a pattern that we have seen already whereby the narrator acknowledges the fact that this history of West Hanratty comes out of an oral tradition, out of a telling and retelling of narratives. Such an acknowledgment tends to render uncertain the accuracy of Flo's account of what happened to Franny when she was a baby. A further undermining of Flo's version of things takes place in the following sentence, where we get a different account of the incident: 'Another story had Franny falling out of a cutter, drunk, kicked by a horse' (WDY 26). In giving us different versions, possible explanations, of what happened to Franny McGill, the narrator fails to tell us which of these explanations, if either, is accurate. This again is part of the ongoing pattern of suspicion that we have already discerned. The problem that Franny poses for the older Rose who looks back on her childhood is a problem of representation: 'Later on Rose would think of Franny when she came across the figure of an idiotic, saintly whore, in a book or a movie. Men who made books and movies seemed to have a fondness for this figure, though Rose noticed they would clean her up. They cheated, she thought, when they left out the breathing and the spit and the teeth; they were refusing to take into account the aphrodisiac prickles of disgust, in their hurry to reward themselves with the notion of a soothing blankness, undifferentiating welcome' (WDY 26). This would seem to be a kind of statement about the limits of art, about the failure of writers and moviemakers to acknowledge nether voices, to take into account such 'prickles of disgust.' By leaving out the disgusting side of Franny-like figures, these artists, according to Rose, have been unfaithful in their attempts to transform life into art. The second part of 'Privilege,' which comes to a focus in Rose's childhood infatuation with Cora, plays on the problems of representation raised in the story's first section. Here, Rose's schoolgirl infatuation gives rise to fantasies about her involvement with Cora. After an initial stage of attempting to imitate Cora, 'trying to walk and look

106 The Tumble of Reason like Cora, repeating every word she had ever heard her say' (WDY 32), Rose then realizes that 'imitation was not enough' (WDY 32), and constructs fantasies of danger and rescue, of 'night-time cuddles, strokings, rockings' (WDY 32). After a game, organized by the older girls, in which participants take turns playing dead, Rose piles up details to be remembered later: The color of Cora's hair. The tinder-strands shone where it was pulled up over her ears. A lighter caramel, warmer, than the hair on top. Her arms were bare, dusky, flattened out, the heavy arms of a woman, fringe lying on them. What was her real smell? What was the statement, frowning and complacent, of her plucked eyebrows? Rose would strain over these things afterwards, when she was alone, strain to remember them, know them, get them for good. What was the use of that? When she thought of Cora she had the sense of a glowing dark spot, a melting center, a smell and taste of burnt chocolate, that she could never get at. (WDY 33-4)

Despite Rose's desire to remember these details, to 'get them for good/ she remains aware that there is a part of Cora 'that she could never get at/ Rose is unable to translate her catalogue of details into an enactment of the day's events with Cora because her catalogue leaves unanswered the problem of accuracy. Like those artists who, according to the older Rose, misrepresent the Franny-like saintly whore figures in books and films, the younger Rose is guilty of a similar act of misrepresentation. Rose idealizes Cora as a source of meaning by bestowing upon her a false materiality. For Rose, Cora represents a kind of antithesis to Franny. The contrast, unstated but implicit, hinges on our interpretation of a curious passage that describes the captivating pictures of birds above the classroom blackboard: A red-headed woodpecker; an oriole; a blue jay; a Canada goose. The colors clear and long-lasting. Backgrounds of pure snow, of blossoming branches, of heady summer sky. In an ordinary classroom they would not have seemed so extraordinary. Here they were bright and eloquent, so much at variance with everything else that what they seemed to represent was not the birds themselves, not those skies and snows, but some other world of hardy innocence, bounteous information, privileged light-heartedness. No stealing from lunchpails there; no slashing coats; no pulling down pants and probing with painful sticks; no fucking; no Franny. (WDY 29-30)

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 107 This transitional passage comes at the end of the section on Franny and just before the section on Cora. Cora, it would seem, is an extension of what the birds represent, an opposition to the realm that Franny inhabits. The unstated connection between Cora and the pictures of birds turns on the story's title, 'Privilege/ which refers both to what the birds represent, and, as Blodgett has noted, to the brief entry into the world of the older girls that Cora grants Rose (Alice Munro go). If what the birds represent is a kind of bounteous information, then the attraction that Cora holds for Rose is similarly based on an image of plenitude. Rose, however, in her idealization of Cora, fails to see Cora for what she is. Just as the artistic representation of Franny-like characters is suspect, according to the older Rose, so the young Rose's own perception of her childhood idol, Cora, turns out to be based on a materiality that Cora does not possess: "'What is so wonderful about her?" asked Flo, and immediately answered herself. "Nothing. She is a far cry from good-looking. She is going to turn out a monster of fat. I can see the signs. She is going to have a mustache, too. She has one already. Where does she get her clothes from? I guess she thinks they suit her"' (WDY 35-6). That some of Flo's predictions about Cora end up coming true prepares us for the central turn of events in 'Wild Swans.' The story originally appeared in the April 1978 edition of Toronto Life,4 Munro's revision of 'Wild Swans' for publication in Who Do You Think You Are? tells us much about the story's central preoccupations. By speculating, where possible, why certain changes might have been made and how these changes influence our reading of the story, we come to recognize the extent to which Munro's mode of presentation is increasingly marked by levels of uncertainty. Aside from the most obvious change - the change in the name of the protagonist from Nadine to Rose - the other central change to the Who Do You Think You Are? version involves the removal of a subtitle. The subtitle of the earlier version, 'Touched on the Way to Toronto by the Dirty Old Man of the Imagination/ calls attention to the possibility that the main turn of events in the story may be imagined rather than real. Whether or not the subtitle is Munro's, its removal from the later version of 'Wild Swans' enhances the story's sense of uncertainty. The later version of the story is compelling precisely because of its ambiguity: we are never sure how much of what we are reading is made up and how much of it is real. While the subtitle

io8 The Tumble of Reason in the Toronto Life version urges us to read the encounter between Rose and the 'dirty old man' on the train as a product of Rose's imagination, the absence of a subtitle in the Who Do You Think You Are? version means that we have no preconceptions - or fewer preconceptions, at any rate - of how we should approach the story. By removing the subtitle Munro takes away what might be seen as a way into the story. The main focus of 'Wild Swans' is the protagonist's first trip alone to the city of Toronto. Prior to her departure, she has been warned by her stepmother to watch out for White Slavers, in particular 'for people dressed up as ministers. They were the worst. That disguise was commonly adopted by White Slavers, as well as those after your money' (WDY 55). After she boards the train, a man claiming to be a United Church minister sits down beside her, and before long, under cover of a newspaper, he begins groping, touching, subtly investigating Rose's/Nadine's body. What makes the story particularly interesting is the manner in which it is presented. Munro's use of qualifying phrases and her shifts in tense render it difficult to determine for certain whether or not the scene is actually taking place. We are told that Rose's/Nadine's 'imagination seemed to have created this reality' (WDY 61), thus making us aware that the 'dirty old man' may be a product of the protagonist's imagination. While the subtitle in the Toronto Life version of 'Wild Swans' essentially asks us to read the minister's gropings as a product of Nadine's imagination, its absence in the later version invites us to be somewhat more uncertain about the status of the event. Many of the changes made to the later version - even seemingly minor alterations - contribute to this sense of uncertainty. In the first paragraph, for instance, we find a small, but curious change in Flo's description of the White Slavers. The Toronto Life version reads as follows: 'They kept you a prisoner in the White Slave place (to which you were transported drugged and bound so that you didn't even know where you were) until such time as you were thoroughly degraded and in despair, your insides torn up by drunken men and infested with vile diseases, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out' (53; emphasis added). The version of this passage that appears in Who Do You Think You Are? is essentially the same, save for the curious substitution of 'invested' for 'infested.' Given Munro's meticulousness, her carefully crafted prose and her sense of precision, why would she make this change? Or are we dealing here with a simple typographical error? Even if the latter were the case, the appearance of what seems a con-

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 109 textually inappropriate word (invested) in connection with 'vile diseases' still reveals much about Munro's method. Whether or not 'invested' has been chosen by Munro may not finally be all that important since the substitution seems to work here: it fits not only because of its meaning, but also because of its sound-value, because it sounds like 'infested.' Even though the later version of the passage reads 'invested with vile diseases/ the word 'infested' still resounds because it is the word that we expect to hear in the context. The text thus becomes a kind of palimpsest in which traces of an earlier draft are retained in the final version. The thematic implications of the change from 'infested' to 'invested' seem to be in keeping with the story's involvement with uncertainty. Clearly there is an ironic disproportion between the elitist connotations of a word like 'invested' (with its implied expectation of a reward, of a profitable return) and the experience of having these vile diseases. By registering an irony here, the narrator, though perhaps in spite of herself and in spite of Munro, is already showing us that we cannot be certain about everything we read, that words may not mean what they seem to say. Another significant change that Munro makes to the later version of 'Wild Swans' is the addition of Flo's undertaker story. Offered as an example of Rose's distrust about anything Flo said on the subject of sex, the story tells the tale of a now retired undertaker who drives his hearse all over the country 'looking for women. So Flo said. Rose could not believe it. Flo said he gave them the gum and the candy. Rose said he probably ate them himself. Flo said he had been seen, he had been heard' (WDY 57). The song he allegedly sings, which Flo imitates - 'Her brow is like the snowdrift / Her throat is like the swan.' (WDY 57) - clearly anticipates the 'snows' and 'swans' that become prominent in the minister's conversation with Rose on the train to Toronto. The fact that Flo tells this story, imitates this song, coupled with the fact that she has warned Rose to be on the lookout for people pretending to be ministers, invites us to see Rose's encounter with a minister - whose words seem to come straight out of Flo's imitation of the lecherous undertaker - as more than simply a coincidence. Throughout W/to Do You Think You Are?, as I have been suggesting, there is an emphasis on the stories that people tell and on our inability to determine whether these stories are accurate. The recurrence of the phrase 'so Flo said,' which we have already encountered in 'Privilege/ here serves to render suspicious Flo's account of the under-

no

The Tumble of Reason

taker's lewd intentions. Munro presumably includes this story of Flo's in the later 'Wild Swans' not only because it anticipates, in its uncertainty; the central encounter of the story, but also because it shows us how experience - or, at least, what ostensibly presents itself as experience - can come out of narrative. Another passage added to the Who version of 'Wild Swans' is the concluding section about Flo's friend Mavis. The passage deals with the issue of role-playing, with the notion of trying to find an answer to the question of identity posed by the volume's title: '[Mavis] went off for the weekend to Georgian Bay, to a resort up there. She booked herself in under the name of Florence Farmer. To give everybody the idea she was really the other one, Frances Farmer, but calling herself Florence because she was on holidays and didn't want to be recognized' (WDY 64). The story ends with Rose thinking that 'it would be an especially fine thing, to manage a transformation like that. To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named skin' (WDY 64). The notion of transformation, of course, is important to the collection as a whole because Rose is an actress (whereas Nadine of the earlier 'Wild Swans' is not, as far as we can tell). Mavis's impersonation of the actress Frances Farmer is an impersonation of someone who is already an impersonator, and thus reminds us 'of the problem of who one really is' (Blodgett, Alice Munro 94). To complicate the problem, Mavis signs in not as Frances, but rather as Florence - another Flo - a disguise which she believes will foster the impression that she is actually Frances. Mavis impersonates Frances Farmer by pretending to be Florence Farmer, and thus recalls Rose's earlier ruminations about the 'dirty old man' on the train who, as Stephen Scobie puts it, 'says what he does not appear to be' (266): 'Was he a minister really, or was that only what he said? Flo had mentioned people who were not ministers, dressed as if they were. Not real ministers dressed as if they were not. Or, stranger still, men who were not real ministers pretending to be real but dressed as if they were not' (WDY 64). The man on the train and Flo's friend Mavis both serve - as does Rose's father in 'Royal Beatings' - to problematize the notion of reference, to call into question the notion of who one really is. They force us to recognize the extent to which what is invented may seem real. Rose is attracted to the transformations these individuals are able to effect because such transformations remind her of the power of imitation and role-playing to create alternative worlds.

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 111 In the next story, The Beggar Maid/ we learn that Rose, now in university, 'wanted to perform in public.5 She thought she wanted to be an actress but she never tried to act, was afraid to go near the college drama productions' (WDY 69). Rose's desire to perform in public is, at least in part, a response to Dr Henshawe's insistence that Rose be a dedicated scholar, an insistence that finds a parallel in the role of Beggar Maid that Patrick designates for her. Although Patrick's designation may allow Rose the possibility of entering into the kinds of preposterous adventures that Mavis's transformations permitted, Rose runs a certain risk by transforming herself into Patrick's Beggar Maid. As she discovers when she takes him to visit her family in Hanratty, her relationship with Patrick has led her astray from her origins: 'With Patrick there, she couldn't slip back into an accent closer to Flo's, Billy Pope's and Hanratty's. That accent jarred on her ears now, anyway ... And the things people said were like lines from the most hackneyed rural comedy. Wai if a feller took a notion to, they said. They really said that. Seeing them through Patrick's eyes, hearing them through his ears, Rose too had to be amazed' (WDY 86-7). Seeing her family through Patrick's eyes and hearing them through his ears, Rose reveals how much her sense of identity has been appropriated by a role that someone else has designed for her. Living with Dr Henshawe has a similar kind of effect: 'Dr. Henshawe's house had done one thing. It had destroyed the naturalness, the taken-for-granted background, of home. To go back there was to go quite literally into a crude light' (WDY 67). Dr Henshawe and Patrick both subvert the taken-forgranted background of Rose's origins by forcing her to see things anew. Their commitment to a process of defamiliarization indicates another role which nether voices play in Munro's fiction. The nether voice, here, the voice of subversion, serves to undermine Rose's notion of who she is, a notion that is linked with her sense of family and origin. The process of subversion is somewhat analogous to Munro's own subversion of the principles of realism. She too is challenging just what it is that is real by inviting us to see things from new and different perspectives. The story ends with an epilogue or coda, as do most of the other stories in the volume. Rose's marriage with Patrick has ended, has been over for some nine years, and Rose accidentally encounters Patrick in the Toronto airport: 'He made a face at her. It was a truly hateful, savagely warning, face; infantile, self-indulgent, yet calculated; it was a timed explosion of disgust and loathing. It was hard to believe.

112 The Tumble of Reason But she saw it' (WDY 96). Patrick's 'explosion of disgust and loathing' leads Rose to consider her own experience as a television interviewer. From her interviews with 'all sorts of people' - politicians, bishops, housewives, humanitarians, and workmen - Rose realizes that they were all 'longing to sabotage themselves, to make a face or say a dirty word' (WDY 97). Patrick's 'explosion/ then, becomes indicative of the kind of nether voice that threatens, at any moment, to break through the veneer of a civilized discourse. Just as, in the previous story, the minister's gropings take place under cover not only of a newspaper, but of a civilized profession, so here Patrick's display of animosity reveals his own involvement in a similar kind of incompatibility. Patrick, who, as Blodgett suggests, has for so long concealed his 'hateful' face under cover of being a 'protector of the innocent' (Alice Munro 96), now momentarily reveals what has perhaps always been potential and absent. In doing so, his role as the man who rescued Rose from a leg-grabber in the library is implicitly called into question, and the comment Rose has made earlier, though only in jest, about the possibility that it was actually Patrick who grabbed her leg may now warrant more serious consideration. The next chapter, 'Mischief/ deals with Rose's attempt at an affair with Clifford. Rose, we now learn, is not only 'very adaptable/ but also 'deceitful' (WDY 99). 'Deceitfulness, concealment, seemed to come marvelously easy to her; that might almost be a pleasure in itself (WDY no). Rose feels an affinity for Clifford because they were both 'shifty pieces of business' (WDY in), as opposed to Patrick and Jocelyn, Clifford's wife, who, despite their dislike for one another, were both serious and predictable (WDY in). It is worth remarking that Rose falls in love with Clifford after he rescues her from a potentially embarrassing social situation. Like Patrick, who rescues Rose from a leggrabber in the library, and Simon, who steps in to break up another potentially disruptive situation in 'Simon's Luck/ Clifford plays the role of someone who offers to protect and console Rose. Rose, however, wants Clifford for something other than his protection: 'She wanted tricks, a glittering secret, tender celebrations of lust, a regular conflagration of adultery' (WDY 112). The words used here to describe what Rose seeks from Clifford are telling. 'Celebration/ for instance, is a term that appears throughout Who Do You Think You Are?, and its usage is often connected with sexual experience. In 'Wild Swans/ the term appears at the end of a surrealistic passage

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 113 during which Rose reaches a kind of metaphorical climax: 'They glided into suburbs where bedsheets, and towels used to wipe up intimate stains flapped leeringly on the clotheslines, where even the children seemed to be frolicking lewdly in the schoolyards, and the very truckdrivers stopped at the railway crossings must be thrusting their thumbs gleefully into curled hands. Such cunning antics now, such popular visions. The gates and towers of the Exhibition Grounds came into view, the painted domes and pillars floated marvelously against her eyelids' rosy sky. They flew apart in celebration' (WDY 63). In both cases, with Clifford and with the minister on the train, Rose is engaging in the creation of alternative worlds, and 'celebration' is based on an imagined demonstration of satisfaction or fulfilment. After Rose's many unsuccessful attempts to consummate her affair with Clifford, we realize that 'tender celebrations of lust' are precisely what Rose has been denied. Another word that appears in the description of what Rose seeks from Clifford is 'tricks.' Tricks, of course, are everywhere in Munro, but the word especially seems to recall self-conscious stories like 'Material' and 'The Ottawa Valley.' The connection with 'Material' is particularly apt because 'Mischief too ends with an unwritten letter. Rather than conclude with Clifford's rejection of Rose at their appointed rendezvous in Powell River, the story ends with an epilogue which depicts a period later in time: 'Jocelyn and Clifford are living in Toronto. They are not poor any more' (WDY 125). Despite the shift into the present tense, the narrative reverts back into the past, two paragraphs later, to tell us that 'Rose used to go to see them sometimes' (WDY 125). The implication here seems to be that for Munro there is no discrete entity we can call the present: the present is rather another level of the past. During one of Rose's visits to the transformed Clifford and Jocelyn, the three of them engage in a three-way sex scene, thus shedding new light on the story's title. Having finally consummated her affair with Clifford, however, Rose 'began to get very angry. She was angry at Clifford and Jocelyn. She felt that they had made a fool of her, cheated her, shown her a glaring lack, that otherwise she would not have been aware of (WDY 132). She plans to write the couple 'a letter in which she would comment on their selfishness, obtuseness, and moral degeneracy' but ends up deciding 'not to write it' (WDY 132). Rose's relationship with Clifford, despite its eventual consummation, turns out to be part of a pattern of disillusionment that is played out

ii4 The Tumble of Reason in the following two stories. As Hallvard Dahlie notes, 'it is as though Rose is forever condemned to inhabit a world whose reality she is unsure of (37). Dahlie suggests that this instability stems from both Rose's own personality and the unpredictable nature of the real world (37). In 'Providence/ Rose's relationship with another married man, Tom, is complicated by precisely this kind of unpredictability. By this point in the narrative, Rose has left Patrick and taken up a job in a mountain town 'because she liked the idea of being closer to Calgary' and Tom (WDY 135), with whom, we are told, she was 'a little bit in love' (WDY 135). Unlike Clifford, Tom is experienced by Rose primarily as an absence. Because they reside such a distance apart from one another, their relationship is carried on largely by mail, much of their correspondence being concerned with the logistics of how, when, and where they will be able to meet. Plans, however, are repeatedly frustrated by unpredictable events; Tom, it turns out, can only be sketched on the horizon of possibility. The final frustration, brought on by a snowstorm, is accompanied by Anna's discovery of a broken telephone whose coin box empties out a wealth of change into her hands. The juxtaposition of Anna's luck with Rose's loss suggests that the termination of Rose's relationship with Tom is a providential act (Blodgett, Alice Munro 99). Despite Rose's momentary alleviation from the burden of relationships, the story ends with a kind of analogue for the unfulfilled nature of Rose's affair with Tom. We are told of the letters that Anna writes, letters 'begun - mostly at Rose's instigation - and never finished, never mailed' (WDY 151). Rose's daughter's unsent, unfinished letters nicely encapsulate the issue of deferral that lies at the heart of the story. The next story, 'Simon's Luck,' replays the juxtaposition of luck and loss presented in 'Providence.' Simon is introduced into the narrative as yet another person who rescues Rose - in this instance from a drunken boy who verbally assaults her at a party. We then abruptly shift from Rose's attraction to Simon, at the party, to a passage describing an incident from Simon's past that would appear to lend the story its title. Simon's memory of his childhood escape from occupied France is introduced in order to emphasize the good fortune he feels has attended him: 'Simon said that when he realized they were safe he suddenly felt that they would get through, that nothing could happen to them now, that they were particularly blessed and lucky. He took what happened for a lucky sign' (WDY 160). Unlike Rose,

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 115 who repeatedly seeks to abandon, or at least repress, her origins, Simon articulates his experience of the past as a determining factor in his life: were it not for his lucky escape, he would probably not be alive to recount the event. The fact that the following two chapters deal with Rose's return to Flo and Hanratty suggests that Simon's story has perhaps taught Rose the importance of acknowledging her origins. Rose waits for Simon to return the following weekend, and as she waits she understands that 'she had turned Simon into the peg on which her hopes were hung and she could never manage now to turn him back into himself (WDY 166). When he fails to show up, Rose occupies herself by speculating on what will happen over the next few days: Then a further time of waiting ... Putting her hand into the mailbox and drawing the mail out without looking at it, refusing to leave the college until five o'clock, putting a cushion against the telephone to block her view of it; pretending inattention. Watch-pot thinking. Sitting up late at night, drinking, never getting quite sick enough of the foolishness to give up on it because the waiting would be interspersed with such green and springlike reveries, such convincing arguments as to his intentions. These would be enough, at some point, to make her decide that he must have taken ill, he never would have deserted her otherwise. She would phone the Kingston Hospital, ask about his condition, be told that he was not a patient. After that would come the day she went into the college library, picked up back copies of the Kingston paper, searched the obituaries to discover if he had by any chance dropped dead. (WDY 167)

As if seeking to undo the preparations she had made in expectation of Simon's arrival, Rose constructs a series of scenarios that will allow her to block herself off from anything that might remind her of him. She then imagines that he might be ill, and sees herself checking to find out if Simon might be dead. All of this, however, is a function of Rose's imagination, and is introduced by an expression of possibility: 'she foresaw would could happen' (WDY 166; emphasis added). Recurrent use in this passage of the conditional 'would' reminds us that Rose's mode of thought here is marked by a fundamental uncertainty. Her way of coping with Simon's failure to turn up is to play out alternative situations, to construct imaginary correlations, to create, in short, a hypothetical model for what might be the case. This, of course,

n6 The Tumble of Reason is a kind of extension of her penchant for role-playing.6 The important point here, however, is that what Rose imagines might be the case turns out, as we discover at the end of the story, to be not so unlike what really is the case. Rose's problem, at the time of her speculations, is her failure to make this connection, her failure to acknowledge the importance of these absent and potential levels of meaning. As one critic puts it, 'The cutting irony of the chapter is that while Rose had been imagining herself searching the obituaries to discover if Simon "had by any chance dropped dead," writing a letter to the college saying she had been "called to Toronto by the terminal illness of a dear friend" ... Simon was dying of cancer of the pancreas' (Warwick 218). Insofar as Simon's memory of his lucky childhood escape has the effect of projecting a sense of his own invulnerability, other features of Munro's story function to cast doubt upon this projection, to jeopardize Simon's blessed condition. Rose's retreat into the conditional mode, for instance, serves as a kind of linguistic indicator of the uncertainty that marks Simon's life. Although Rose fails to act upon the scenarios she engineers in her mind, the fact that she imagines Simon might be dead implicitly calls into question Simon's claim to be blessed with good fortune. Simon himself casts doubt upon his projected image of invulnerability during his presentation of the 'Old Philosopher' figure, a character 'who bowed low to [Rose], Japanese style, as he came out of the bathroom, murmuring memento mori, memento mori' (WDY 161). Simon, like Rose, likes to play roles, and the role of the Old Philosopher is particularly revealing. 'Memento mori,' a Latin admonition meaning 'Remember that thou must die,' turns out to be more than a kind of mocking slogan. The phrase significantly reappears after Rose, driving off in a westerly direction, ponders the possibility that Simon 'might be turning into her driveway at that very moment' (WDY 168). Juxtaposed with an image of hope, then, is a reminder not of Simon's luck, but of his mortality. The Old Philosopher's reminder becomes part of a disruptive pattern that culminates in the story's ending. Rose is now living in Vancouver where, we are told, 'luck was with her' (WDY 171). Her luck is to find a job acting in a television series, and while filming the series she encounters a woman she had met earlier at the same party where she first met Simon. The woman, who at the time was writing a paper on suicide, now informs Rose that Simon has died of cancer. Rose is then called back to the set, where her role is to prevent a young

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 117 girl from committing suicide. Rose's 'real life' discovery of Simon's death is thus played out in juxtaposition with a staged attempt to protect a fictional character from suicide, a character who, as it turns out, does not try to commit suicide after all: The girl didn't throw herself in the sea. They didn't have things like that happening in the series. Such things always threatened to happen but they didn't happen, except now and then to peripheral and unappealing characters. People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate unforgettable scenery. Simon's dying struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement. It was preposterous, it was unfair that such a chunk of information should have been left out, and that Rose even at this late date could have thought herself the only person who could seriously lack power. (WDY 172-3)

Part of what Rose realizes here is that 'real life' can be less realistic than fiction must be. While verisimilitude demands that viewers of a television series be protected from those 'shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question,' real life, as Rose discovers, is full of precisely these kinds of shifts. Rose's own story is a similar kind of discontinuous history with its own missing chunks of information. By refusing to fill in gaps in time, by leaving out whole sections in the chapters that constitute Rose's life, Munro leaves much unexplained. Thus Patrick's right-wing tirade at the party in 'Mischief,' his explosion of 'disgust and loathing' at the end of 'The Beggar Maid,' and, in fact, much of his behaviour after he and Rose are married are all inconsistent with Patrick the graduate student of history, Patrick who rescues Rose from a leg-grabber in the library. Similarly, the Jocelyn and Clifford who indulge in a menage-a-trois with Rose at the end of 'Mischief,' are radically inconsistent with Jocelyn and Clifford as they appear earlier in the story. Once again, the chunks of information that might enable us to make sense of these changes are left out of the narrative. The text is marked by an absence that encompasses worlds of meaning, an absence that - like Munro's rhetoric of supposition and her use of the acting metaphor - lends thematic and structural instability to the stories in the collection. The instability in this instance serves once again to complicate the ontological problem. By refusing to construct narratives of continuity, by, as it were,

ii8 The Tumble of Reason letting the absences speak, Munro reformulates the volume's central question: just what or who is real? The two final stories in the collection deal with Rose's return to her hometown. In 'Spelling/ Rose receives a letter explaining that Flo 'has got past where she can look after herself (WDY 177). Thus she comes back to West Hanratty, and after meeting with Brian and his wife, she decides to place Flo in the Wawanash County Home. During a preliminary visit to the Home, Rose encounters an old blind woman who participates 'in the life of the world' only through the act of spelling out words doled out by nurses and visitors (WDY 183). Rose finds it difficult 'to make out what the old woman was saying, because she had lost much of the power to shape sounds. What she said seemed not to come from her mouth or her throat, but from deep in her lungs and belly' (WDY 183). Recalling Rose's father, who spoke from his woodshed 'just below the level at which separate words could be made out' (WDY 3), this old woman in 'Spelling' adumbrates what I have suggested is a central concern throughout this collection: the importance of acknowledging nether voices. The woman's voice comes from within, from 'deep in her lungs and belly.' Her act of spelling out words leads Rose to speculate on the possibility that there may be no necessary relationship between the words the old lady spells out and the reality to which these words would usually seem to refer: 'Rose wondered what the words were like, when she held them in her mind. Did they carry their usual meaning, or any meaning at all? Were they like words in dreams or in the minds of young children, each one marvelous and distinct and alive as a new animal? This one limp and clear like a jellyfish, that one hard and mean and secretive, like a horned snail. They could be austere and comical as top hats, or smooth and lovely and flattering as ribbons' (WDY 184). The old woman in the Home embodies the aporia that lies at the heart of Munro's writing. In her spelling of random words, she comes to signify the kind of undecipherable discourse that has hovered at the margins of the novel from the very outset, the instability that we have, for example, associated with the text's various instances of role-playing and fiction-making. In 'Spelling/ this instability is once again signalled by the inseparability of seemingly contradictory tensions: here, language as an arbitrary system of signs (the mechanical exercise of spelling out a word without any thought to what the word might mean or suggest), and language

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 119 as a vehicle for the expression and representation of imaginative worlds. Shorn of their usual content, the words this woman so faultlessly spells out may, as Rose considers, carry no meaning at all. But accompanying this speculation concerning the old woman's retreat from meaning is Rose's opposing tendency to revel in the power of language to create imaginative worlds. Michael Taylor suggests that 'the elaborate playfulness involved in imagining words to be jellyfish, snails, top hats, and ribbons points to the emptiness of the rhetorical question, "Did they carry their usual meaning, or any meaning at all?"' (134). Although the question is far from empty, and far, in fact, from rhetorical, Taylor's suggestion that 'the words that the old woman spells enable her to live beyond the privations of senility in a private, festive wonderland of the imagination' (134) seems to be a useful point. The passage which gives the story its title deals not only with the inability of language to refer to anything outside itself, but also with its capacity to create imaginative worlds. The old woman spelling out words in her crib serves as an emblem of the co-existence of opposing tendencies in Munro's fiction. We are here at the crux of a problem that is played out throughout the novel - indeed throughout much of Munro's writing - where the inward and outward pulls of the fiction are, often by means of a single emblem, joined together in a kind of unresolvable tension. The final story in the collection replays this tension in slightly varied terms. In 'Who Do You Think You Are?' the problem of identity posed by the story's title is examined by way of Rose's memories of childhood. The story deals primarily with Milton Homer, a village idiot of sorts from Rose's past. Milton, 'a mimic of ferocious gifts and energies' (WDY 192), is of particular interest to Rose because he represents something of a mythology of the past. His achievement, as Blodgett notes, is to become 'the subject of various stories, true and false, the subject of legendary discourse at a point where the real and legendary blur' (Alice Munro 105). As he is presented to us, Milton seems to have evolved largely out of the process of sharing and interpreting narratives. Rose's memories of him are based not so much on firsthand knowledge as, once again, on a community of local gossip. When Rose tells Brian that Milton Homer came and picked him up when he, Brian, was a baby, she is unable to determine whether she really remembers such an event taking place or if she has been told about it. Similarly, when Rose, years later, does her imitation of Milton Homer for Brian

12 o The Tumble of Reason and Phoebe, we discover that her imitation is based not on Milton's actions but on Ralph Gillespie's imitation of Milton's actions: '"I didn't see him [Milton] do it. What I saw was Ralph Gillespie doing Milton Homer. He was a boy in school. Ralph"' (WDY 191). Milton Homer, then, already a mimic, is mimicked by Ralph Gillespie, whose imitation is, in turn, mimicked by the older Rose. This movement away from a sense of an origin is re-enacted many years later when Rose meets up with Ralph at the Legion Hall in Hanratty. Ralph, we discover, still carries on his old way, doing imitations, although now his imitations are not quite so popular. As Flo tells Rose, '"half the time he's imitating somebody that the newer people that's come to town, they don't know even who the person was, they just think it's Ralph being idiotic'" (WDY 202). The fact that Ralph still does Milton Homer creates a problem for the newer people in Hanratty because, never having known Milton, they see Ralph's carryings-on as part of his own personality rather than as an imitation of the town's old village idiot. Beneath the roles one plays, there is always the possibility that one's 'real' identity may get lost. Ralph's imitation of Milton thus stands near the end of a line of incidents which all involve subtle and implicit variations on the problem of just what it is that is real: Rose's father in 'Royal Beatings' playing a part in which he believes; Mavis in 'Wild Swans' impersonating another impersonator, Frances Farmer, by pretending to be not Frances but Florence; the 'dirty old man' in that same story, claiming to be a minister but dressed as if he is not. All these individuals serve, by means of their actions or their claims, to problematize the notion of reference, to make unstable the notion of a fixed and knowable reality. Ralph's acting, at least to the newcomers of Hanratty, ceases to be acting. To them, his imitation of Milton refers to nothing outside itself, is no longer, in fact, seen as an imitation. When Rose recalls her conversation at the Legion Hall with Ralph, she feels a sense of shame: 'The thing she was ashamed of, in acting, was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics when there was always something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn't get and wouldn't get. And it wasn't just about acting she suspected this. Everything she had done could sometimes be seen as a mistake' (WDY 205). What Rose fails to get at, during her conversation with Ralph, is a potential level of meaning which she feels must lie below the surface of Ralph's personality. Although she wishes Ralph 'would speak to her from that level' (WDY

Acknowledging the Nether Voices 121 205), she later comes to the realization that there are 'feelings which could only be spoken of in translation; perhaps they could only be acted on in translation; not speaking of them and not acting on them is the right course to take because translation is dubious. Dangerous, as well' (WDY 205-6). Rose, then, at the story's - and indeed the novel's - end, decides not to tell anybody about Ralph's death, 'glad that there was one thing at least she wouldn't spoil by telling' (WDY 206). What her acting has been, up until now, is dubious, so she chooses not to act out what Ralph represents. Opting for silence for things not said or done - becomes Rose's way of acknowledging that she must learn to live in the world rather than simply fictionalize it. Although this might seem to suggest that the novel ends by valorizing its outward direction of meaning, the point here is that the fictional, the other-than-itself, is already there in Ralph Gillespie, a figure who neatly combines reality with acting. Like Rose's father, the old woman in 'Spelling/ and the 'dirty old man' on the train, Ralph Gillespie becomes another emblem of the inseparability of fictionmaking and experience. The problem posed by the title of Munro's fourth volume is thus played out through a series of interconnected incidents which collapse the distinction between role-playing and identity. The issue of who Rose is remains a central question throughout the text - and even perhaps when it ends - predominantly because she continues to be attracted to the possibility of creating new selves, rather than of accepting a fixed identity. By the end of the novel, however, Rose seems to have attained a new level of self-understanding, an awareness of the fact that playing roles can inhibit, as well as facilitate, the production of meaning. But if Rose's moment of insight is paradoxically expressed as a moment of loss, if her decision not to tell is an indication of a growth in sensibility, then what she seeks to acknowledge by opting for silence is that any gesture of 'translation' - as Munro puts it also involves a kind of loss. That which is left out when an experience gets translated into acting is precisely what interests Rose: those shades of meaning that, for example, remain absent from the surface level of a conversation. In an effort to preserve the integrity of those shades of meaning, those untranslatable nether voices, Munro ends the text with Rose's recognition of the value of a discourse of absence.

5

Towards a Poetics of Surprise: 'Change and Possibility7 in The Moons of Jupiter

Connect nothing Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

What on earth is this feeling that somehow things have to connect? Alice Munro (Hancock interview) From the publication of her first volume of stories, Munro has been fascinated by the unpredictability of everyday life. In The Moons of Jupiter, this fascination continues, but the level at which the tension between the unforeseen and the expected - between the alien and the proper - is played out, suggests that Munro may now be formulating her interest with an eye to developing what I shall tentatively call a poetics of surprise. 'Surprise/ as Jerome Bruner tells us, 'is a response to violated presupposition' (46). Munro's fiction, as I have tried to show in the preceding chapters, invites this 'response' because it repeatedly teaches us that we can take nothing for granted. Particularly felicitous for a reading of The Moons of Jupiter - a text whose stories might be read as meditations on 'change and possibility' (MJ 29) - surprise, to develop the terminology that I have used throughout, is in its disruptiveness an exemplary paradigmatic phenomenon. One of the ways that surprise manifests itself in The Moons of Jupiter is through the collapse of connections. As if to signal the importance of this collapse, Munro begins her volume with a piece whose title is suggestive of the familial, linguistic and temporal bonds which are undermined - or which remain absent - throughout the stories in the collection.1 In Munro's fiction, as indeed in our own lives, these

Towards a Poetics of Surprise 123 bonds function as a kind of syntax, guiding our expectations (and those of her characters), and fostering an illusion of continuity and pattern. When, however, the bonds are broken, and the connections are rendered tenuous, the disruption that results causes a moment of surprise. 'Connection. That was what it was all about' (MJ 6). So reflects the narrator in the volume's opening story. This story, 'Connection/ is the first of two pieces grouped together under the title 'Chaddeleys and Flemings.' Concentrating on the narrator's maternal relations, on the Chaddeley side of her family, this first piece is occasioned by a summertime visit from her mother's cousins, four women - 'Maiden ladies, they were called' (MJ i) - who disturb the routine of everyday life in Dalgleish with their interest in 'movement, noise, change, flashiness, hilarity, and courage' (MJ 16). Along with the narrator's mother, these cousins provide a connection to a reputedly illustrious lineage, 'to England and history' (M] 7). They all 'believed ... that there had been a great comedown, a dim catastrophe, and that beyond them, behind them, in England, lay lands and houses and ease and honor' (MJ 8). England is perceived to be 'that ancient land of harmony and chivalry, of people on horseback, and good manners ... of Simon de Montfort and Lorna Doone and hounds and castles and the New Forest, all fresh and rural, ceremonious, civilized, eternally desirable' (M] 10). Constantly harking back to this land of honour 'which of course she had never seen' (MJ 6), the narrator's mother speculates that her family may be connected to the British aristocracy. Affiliation with the upper class, or at least belief in such a connection, instils in the narrator's mother not only a sense of pride (see York, 'Gulfs' 142), but also a desire to maintain the veneer of a civilized discourse. 'Talk in our house was genteel' (MJ 3) explains the narrator.2 But such pretensions to civility are shattered when the cousins' funloving attitude towards life suddenly becomes an infectious part of the narrator's household.3 Even the narrator's mother, 'most amazingly,' puts on a pair of her husband's trousers and stands on her head (MJ 4). Despite the fact that their visit provides the occasion for much talk about the family's connection with the British upper class, the cousins themselves enable the narrator to regard this connection with a certain amount of distance. Thus it is of little importance to her when, years later, she receives a letter from the Chaddeley family in England informing her that her great-grandfather, who was thought to have been

124 The Tumble of Reason 'a gentleman' (MJ 9), had actually been apprenticed to a butcher before coming to Canada. While, at one time, she 'would have been shocked to discover this, and would hardly have believed it/ and, at a later time, she 'would have been triumphant/ at the time the narrator receives the letter which shatters the family connection with the British aristocracy she no longer cares, 'one way or the other' (MJ 10). Here we see the way in which Munro's involvement with then and now has been expanded to show us that her narrator's interpretation of the past is a continually changing process. Surprise, in this context, is a structural matter, a trope of change and discovery which plays off early and later responses in the narrator and thus affords her the opportunity to consider her past from new angles of vision.4 The reason she no longer cares can perhaps be attributed to the narrator's discovery that her connection with the past has been severed. When Cousin Iris comes to visit the narrator in Vancouver, the narrator is torn between a loyalty to her past and a desire to promote her own current affluence. Iris's visit, however, permits neither: connections with both past and present turn out to lack substance, to be based on false mythologies. Thus despite her conscious effort to counteract the wishes of her affluent husband - who desires that she cut herself off 'from that past which seemed to him such shabby baggage' (MJ 13) - the narrator realizes that her connection with the past is, in fact, marked by contradictory impulses. Although she wants to promote Iris 'as a relative nobody need be ashamed of (MJ 11), she ends up instead revealing her own sense of shame, admitting her own dishonesty in thinking she might have appreciated her cousin more had they met in another setting: 'But had she always been like this, always brash and greedy and scared; decent, maybe even admirable, but still somebody you hope you will not have to sit too long beside, on a bus or at a party? I was dishonest when I said that I wished we had met elsewhere, that I wished I had appreciated her, when I implied that Richard's judgements were all that stood in the way. Perhaps I could have appreciated her more, but I couldn't have stayed with her long' (MJ 16-17). But if Iris's brief stint in Vancouver fails to permit a connection with the narrator's past, her visit also renders dubious the narrator's present connection with her husband, Richard (see Blodgett, Alice Munro no). As a kind of proleptic sign that their marriage may be in jeopardy, and in an attempt to reaffirm her bond with the world

Towards a Poetics of Surprise

125

of her cousins, the narrator hurls a Pyrex plate at Richard's head when he launches into a criticism of Iris's behaviour. The narrator's admission of dishonesty in thinking about Iris resembles the passage in which she comments on the past from different points in time. With both passages, continuity is undermined as we witness the narrator undergoing a process of self-correction. The same kind of self-corrective gesture takes place when she ponders her own ambivalent attitude towards her newly acquired state of affluence. Asking herself if she is the sort of person who feels possessions are the sign of 'a civilized attitude to life,' she provides an answer which reveals contradictions in the critical stance she seems to want to take: 'No, not at all; not exactly; yes and no' (MJ 12). This movement from an unambiguous negative ('No, not at all') to first a statement of possibility ('not exactly') and then an ambiguous assertion ('yes and no') reveals the narrator's inability to connect herself with either past or present. What is stressed instead of connection is the way meanings change with the passing of time, the way one's interpretation of both past and present is a process subject to continual alteration. A similar kind of self-corrective act occurs at the end of 'The Stone in the Field/ the second section of 'Chaddeleys and Flemings.' Reflecting this time on her paternal relations, the Fleming side of the family, the narrator closes the piece - and thus both pieces, because taken together they form one - by not drawing the connection she might have drawn had she been younger: If I had been younger, I would have figured out a story. I would have insisted on Mr. Black's being in love with one of my aunts, and on one of them not necessarily the one he was in love with - being in love with him. I would have wished him to confide in them, in one of them, his secret, his reason for living in a shack in Huron County, far from home. Later, I might have believed that he wanted to, but hadn't confided this, or his love either. I would have made a horrible, plausible connection between that silence of his, and the manner of his death. Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize. I don't believe so. (M] 35)

This passage, which recalls the endings of both The Ottawa Valley' and W/zo Do You Think You Are?, shows us again that one's interpretation of the past changes with the passing of time. Like the other instances

126 The Tumble of Reason I have been considering, this example enables us to consider meanings which are not simply present at the moment of utterance. By telling us what she would have done had circumstances been other than they are at present, she engages in a discourse of absent and potential meanings. The connection the narrator might have drawn, the story she might have made up, involves a relationship which might have existed between one of her aunts and the hermit, Mr Black. Characteristically, Munro denies her narrator the satisfaction of making this connection. The symbol for this failure to connect is the stone marking the grave of the mysterious Mr. Black, a man of unknown origins who was allegedly buried in a corner of a field on the farm formerly owned by the narrator's father's family. The narrator's vague childhood recollection of the stone in the field is triggered years later when she visits her father in the hospital and he talks to her 'about his life and his family' (M] 29). Some time after this, and by sheer coincidence, she comes across an old newspaper story on Mr Black, a story which inspires her to go back to the farm once owned by her father's family to see if the stone marking Mr Black's grave is still there. The stone, which is offered as a point of focus for the central issues raised by the story, an image of the narrator's connection with the Fleming farm, is, however, nowhere to be found. In its place the narrator can discover only a lacuna, an absent symbol of a hidden past, a missing gravestone of a mysterious but now forgotten figure. Instead of making connections with her past, then, the narrator abandons her role as a storyteller and tells us that she is unable to draw the connections she might once have drawn. It is worth noting that the home in which the narrator grows up is itself unstable: 'Our house was full of things that had not been paid for with money, but taken in some complicated trade, and that might not be ours to keep. For a while we could play a piano, consult an Encyclopaedia Britannica, eat off an oak table. But one day I would come home from school and find that each of these things had moved on' (M] 19). Like the stone in the field marking Mr Black's grave, household commodities may, as the young narrator discovers, also disappear. The story is marked with such images of instability, of unexpected change; in short, it abounds in what might be called moments of surprise. The narrator remembers watching one of her aunts making clothespeg dolls for her while they sat together on the back steps of the farmhouse. She remembers the tales this aunt made up about the

Towards a Poetics of Surprise 127 dolls: a proud doll who goes to church wearing a wig which gets blown off by the wind, another doll whose leg is blown off at the battle of Waterloo. There is something incongruous about the fact that one action (blowing off) here governs and thus yokes together both wigs and legs. While the story of the one-legged soldier doll clearly recalls the one-legged Mr Black, the two doll stories taken together also serve to alert us that the aunts, ostensibly opposed to any sort of change, do at least nourish the capacity to imagine change, to imagine apparently stable objects like wigs and legs being blown off. The aunts, the narrator's father's six sisters, live together in the house where they were born. They were leftovers ... they belonged in another generation' (MJ 22). Despite being 'so perfectly encased in what they had and were' (MJ 29), however, they manage to reveal an absent but implicit interest in 'change and possibility' (MJ 29), an interest which links them, albeit tenuously, with the narrator's mother, who sees life completely in these terms. The third story in this sequence of three is the story with which Munro closes the entire collection, the story which, in fact, appropriately lends its title to the whole book. In 'The Moons of Jupiter,' the nameless narrator of the opening 'Chaddeleys and Flemings' reappears, but she is now given a name: Janet. The title of the story indicates once again the text's involvement with 'change and possibility,' for it comes out of Janet's visit to the planetarium, a visit during which she discovers that information presented to her as fact when she was a child has since been modified: A model of the solar system was spinning away in its elegant style. A bright bug took off from the earth, heading for Jupiter. I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly to recording facts. The mass of Jupiter two and a half times that of all the other planets put together. The Great Red Spot. The thirteen moons. Past Jupiter, a glance at the eccentric orbit of Pluto, the icy rings of Saturn. Back to Earth and moving in to hot and dazzling Venus. Atmospheric pressure ninety times ours. Moonless Mercury rotating three times while circling the sun twice; an odd arrangement, not as satisfying as what they used to tell us - that it rotated once as it circled the sun. No perpetual darkness after all. Why did they give out such confident information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong? (MJ 231)

Later, when Janet returns to the hospital and asks her father to tell her the moons of Jupiter, his initial response is in keeping with the

128 The Tumble of Reason discovery Janet has made at the planetarium: '"Well, I don't know the new ones. There's a bunch of new ones, isn't there?"' (MJ 232). Her father's response, his reminder that Jupiter had a different number of moons when he was younger, confirms what she has already knows, that even the world of science - which seems to concern itself with measurable facts, with reality - can open up to new possibilities, to alternative versions. Thus, this episode, which tells of the changes that take place with respect to scientific information, constitutes a kind of replaying of the process of self-correction which we have already witnessed in the narrator. The emphasis, here, is once again on a new way of looking at things which renders unstable what we think we know about the scientific world. The central matter of the story, however, is not the world of science, and it is characteristic of Munro to employ a title which deliberately scants the occasion which gives rise to the story in the first place. We discover from the outset that Janet's father is in the heart wing of the Toronto General Hospital, awaiting surgery. Although the central focus of human mortality remains poignantly underplayed, Munro never allows us to forget that Janet's father's life is both literally and metaphorically on the line. The discussion about the moons of Jupiter and the issue of Janet's relationship with her daughters - themes which seem to be at the forefront of the story - in fact serve to comment on her father's situation. The questions about science and astronomy initiated by Janet's trip to the planetarium, and the problems she has with her daughters - Nichola, who has gone 'incommunicado,' has cut herself off from her mother, and Judith, who lights out for Mexico upon her mother's arrival - constitute more abstract versions of the kinds of life-and-death issues that Janet wants desperately to avoid thinking about in relation to her father's condition. While her father remains in a kind of threshold state in the hospital, Janet grapples with issues that warn her of the tentative and unstable nature of things in the world. Like the quince tree which is no longer there when her father takes her to see it - yet another absent marker, another version of the stone in the field - science too is subject to change and possibility. In asking her father to tell her the moons of Jupiter, Janet seeks to put off not only the subject but the very fact of human mortality. The central matter of the narrative - her father's vulnerable condition - is, at least temporarily, displaced, just as the outcome of the surgery will remain deferred when we complete our reading of the story. The act of not saying - or attempting, more pre-

Towards a Poetics of Surprise 129 cisely, to find ways not to say what is actually at stake - does not, however, make one less vulnerable. The story is also about the uncertain nature of things that have once been accepted as fact, and about the tenuous nature of human relationships, and thus reminds us of the inescapability of change. This inescapability is reflected in various ways throughout the story. At the beginning of the narrative, for instance, Janet compares the 'bright jagged line' on the screen that monitors the behaviour of her father's heart to a kind of writing (MJ 217). Because this writing dramatizes 'what ought to be a secret activity' (MJ 217), she realizes that there is a danger involved in putting that activity on public display. 'Anything exposed that way/ she remarks, 'was apt to flare up and go crazy' (MJ 218). What her comment seems to suggest is that the behaviour of her father's heart is not only reflected in the 'bright jagged line' on the screen, but somehow motivated by the very fact that it has been transformed into a kind of writing. Because Janet feels that this writing may contain the potential to disrupt the ordinary activity of her father's heart, she seems at least implicitly aware of the potential for surprise in everyday life. It is this sense of possibility, of the tentative and unstable nature of things in the world, that confronts Janet when she reads the writing on the screen. Absence becomes another marker of the tentative and unstable nature of things in the world. In this context Janet, in a passage recalling the elusive stone in the field, tells us about a quince tree that her father once discovered: 'Somewhere along the track he found a quince tree. Quince trees are rare in our part of the country; in fact, I have never seen one. Not even the one my father found, though he once took us on an expedition to look for it. He thought he knew the crossroad it was near, but we could not find it' (M] 220). The fact that she and her father are unable to find the quince tree offers yet another variation on a problem that occupies Munro's attention throughout the course of the volume. This problem - the inescapable nature of change and possibility - is here played out with respect to an inaccessible connection between Janet and her father's past. By the end of the story both Janet and her father move tentatively towards an understanding of the limited validity of all systems of thought. This understanding is, for the father's part, signalled by a shift in his use of language. Though seemingly drawn primarily to the language of science - '"The moons of Jupiter were the first heavenly bodies discovered with the telescope"' he explains, as if repeating

130 The Tumble of Reason a line from an old book (MJ 232) - Janet's father finds himself, by the time of his final statement, deploying, as Blodgett reminds us (Alice Munro 128), a language of myth: "'Ganymede wasn't any shepherd. He was Jove's cupbearer"' (MJ 233). The shift from science to myth registered in the father's language reflects his own acknowledgment of the unfinalizability (to borrow Bakhtin's term) of that which may appear, on the surface, to be fixed and stable. The implication here is that even the language of science, which at a given time was able to pose as knowledge, may itself be subject to a radical upheaval. Janet's related discovery turns on her willingness to entertain the possibility of the 'unfinalizability' of even something as finite as death. After spotting somebody who reminds her of her daughter Nichola, Janet tells us that even if she did see Nichola she might not make known her own presence: 'If I did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided. I felt like one of those people who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death. A relief, while it lasts. My father had chosen and Nichola had chosen. Someday, probably soon, I would hear from her, but it came to the same thing' (MJ 233). By comparing herself with those individuals about whom her father had been reading - individuals who, medically speaking, had died, but who miraculously came back to life and were able to recall the period when they were dead - Janet posits herself as being simultaneously connected and unconnected with the world around her. The comparison seems to suggest that although she is able to see what takes place before her, in front of her own eyes, she, like the dead who 'float up to the ceiling and look down on themselves to see the doctors working on them' (MJ 226), is unable to do anything. This implicit recognition of her own powerlessness - made specifically with regard to her role as a parent, but with implications for her role as a daughter - testifies to her growing awareness of the tentative nature of things in the world. Many of the stories in The Moons of Jupiter are permeated with a sense of this tentativeness, and part of what makes the design of these stories more complex than that of some of Munro's earlier stories is her refusal to draw connections for the reader. Like the narrator at the end of 'The Stone in the Field,' other narrators at various points throughout the collection yield to the demands of their respective stories.* Absence of connection thus becomes both a theme and an important part of Munro's narrative method. In 'Dulse,' for instance, the formal presentation of the story provides a clue as to its broader thematic considerations. Although the story is told from a third-person per-

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spective - a perspective which, by its very convention, seems to imply that the world can be known, described, and articulated in language - the situation at hand remains curiously unclarified. 'Dulse' tells the story of Lydia, a woman who desperately wants to forget her recent past. While the story is set in a guest-house on an island off the coast of New Brunswick, references to experiences from Lydia's past continually impinge upon her present. What makes the shifts between past and present in this story characteristic of Munro's more recent writing is the deliberate lack of transitional devices (Blodgett, Alice Munro 112). Rather than signal the shifts in time, Munro allows the flow of Lydia's mind to dictate the structure of the narrative. The sense of unconnectedness that results from this failure to provide transitions becomes a kind of structural correlative for Lydia's own isolation, her own sense of being estranged from things and people around her. The island to which she withdraws serves as an apt metaphor for this absence of connection. Lydia herself sees her trip to the Atlantic coast as an opportunity to 'cut [herself] off from everything she had done before' (M] 37). What becomes apparent, however, is that Lydia's disconnectedness in the present stems largely from her inability to shut out the past. Despite conscious efforts to begin her life anew - she considers becoming a cleaning lady and abandoning her poetry - Lydia finds herself involved in a relationship from the past which can now signify only through its absence. Her attempts to discover ways to deal with her broken relationship with Duncan, the man she lived with, find a parallel in the curious quest of one of the other visitors to the guest-house where Lydia spends the night. Mr Stanley's worship of the American writer Willa Gather - who, as Lydia learns, spent summers on the island - might also be termed a relationship of absence. Just as Mr Stanley's quest involves an absent, because now dead, writer, so Lydia too seeks to come to terms with an absent figure. But if absence is what, at least implicitly, brings together Lydia and Mr Stanley in their respective quests, then the relationship between Lydia and the three workmen who are also staying at the guest-house might best be described as a relationship based on possibility. In thinking about what each of these men 'would have been like as lovers' (M] 51; emphasis added), by constructing a series of narratives in which she imagines the kinds of relationships she might have had with Lawrence, Eugene, and Vincent, Lydia reveals the source of her own malaise. Of the three workmen, Vincent emerges as the only one 'whom

132 The Tumble of Reason she could think of ... with real interest' (M] 51). Lydia, however, is aware of both the costs and the benefits of what a relationship with Vincent would imply. On the one hand, she is able to imagine Vincent as someone who might offer her the opportunity to recapture the world of love that she once knew: 'With him she could foresee doors opening, to what she knew and had forgotten; rooms and landscapes opening; there. The rainy evenings, a country with creeks and graveyards, and chokecherry and finches in the fence-corners' (M] 52). Despite being attracted to the possibilities that Vincent comes to embody, Lydia is simultaneously aware of the limitations of her imagined relationship. Realizing that 'he was the sort of man she had known when she was a child living on a farm not so different from his, the sort of man who must have been in her family for hundreds of years' (MJ 52), she understands that the world Vincent would offer her is a world she already knows all too well. A relationship with Vincent cannot finally be desirable for Lydia because what she seeks is not the world she knows but rather the world she cannot predict: 'Should she have stayed in the place where love is managed for you, not gone where you have to invent it, and re-invent it, and never know if these efforts will be enough?' (MJ 52). Though ostensibly posed by the narrator, the question has an air of self-justification about it as though it is not entirely a question; rather, it may be Lydia's way of legitimizing her decision to reject the solace that a fellow human being might, at least in her imagination, offer her.6 What poses as a question, then, can function as a kind of statement, a statement which, in turn, may lead us to recognize what it is that Lydia, through the course of the story, is seeking to discover. What Lydia lacks, what she needs to learn, seems to be a capacity for surprise. Early in the story, we are told that Lydia 'was not surprised' to discover that 'she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become another' (MJ 36). Although the lack of surprise here refers specifically to Lydia's response to the transformation she perceives in herself, her inability to be taken unawares is an important part of her characterization throughout the story. After, and perhaps as a result of, her breakup with Duncan, Lydia gets locked into a kind of routine: After Lydia's last attempt to call Duncan, the man she had been living with in Kingston, she had walked along the street in Toronto, knowing that she

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had to get to the bank, she had to buy food, she had to get on the subway. She had to remember directions, and the order in which to do things: to open her checkbook, to move forward when it was her turn in line, to choose one kind of bread over another, to drop a token in the slot. These seemed to be the most difficult things she had ever done. She had immense difficulty reading the names of the subway stations, and getting off at the right one, so that she could go to the apartment where she was staying. She would have found it hard to describe this difficulty. She knew perfectly well which was the right stop, she knew which stop it came after; she knew where she was. But she could not make the connection between herself and things outside herself, so that getting up and leaving the car, going up the steps, going along the street, all seemed to involve a bizarre effort. She thought afterwards that she had been seized up, as machines are said to be. (M] 41)

Through this objective representation of her character's inner voice, Munro reveals that Lydia has become self-directed to the point of collapse. The unnatural diction of the passage, the repetition of what Lydia 'had to' do, what she 'had to' remember, suggests a mechanicalness which precludes the element of surprise. Lydia thus goes to the Maritimes in search of the new and unexpected. But even 'the Atlantic coast, which she had never seen before, was just as she had expected it to be. The bending grass; the bare houses; the sea light' (M] 37). Her encounter with Mr Stanley, however, does turn out to violate some of her expectations. She is 'startled' when he asks her if she is familiar with Willa Gather, 'because she had not seen anybody reading a book for the past two weeks; she had not even noticed any paperback racks' (M] 38). That Mr Stanley is able, albeit inadvertently, to evoke in Lydia precisely the response which she appears to be lacking, makes us aware that Lydia's patterns of response may indeed be susceptible to transformation. In fact, the very design of the narrative might lead us towards the same conclusion. If, as I suggested earlier, the formal presentation of the story - with its shattering of time sequences, its disruption of linear narrative is indicative of Lydia's disordered state of mind, then, perhaps more importantly, it becomes an enactment of the very pattern of response that appears to be missing from Lydia's life. As an objective representation of Lydia's internal perspective, the narrative shows us that Lydia already has what she appears to lack. Lydia's capacity for surprise, in other words, turns not simply on her discoveries of the external world, but also on her implicit discoveries of the potential of language.

134 The Tumble of Reason Because the story has been arranged according to the flow of Lydia's mind, and because this flow is marked by unexpected shifts and disruptions - by, in effect, moments of surprise - Munro seems to be suggesting that the way Lydia arranges the story enables her to discover what is ostensibly absent from her life. Lydia's capacity for surprise, then, is embedded in language.7 The following story, The Turkey Season/ also, to a certain extent, deals with the issue of surprise, but here it is a sense of wonder at the 'impenetrable mystery' in the world that occupies the narrator's focus of attention (M] 68).8 This sense of wonder, we are led to believe, has been inspired in the narrator by Herb Abbott, the foreman at the Turkey Barn where she worked during the Christmas season when she was fourteen years old. The story is a first-person recollection of her experiences at the slaughterhouse, and, in particular, of her attempt to come to terms with a part of Herb's personality that remains secret and mysterious both to herself and to the others at the Barn. Although her discourse is directed towards the process of understanding Herb's behaviour, although, as she puts it, she 'would ... like to know things' (M] 74), precisely what it is that she seeks to know about Herb is put into question when she informs us that neither facts nor theories will satisfy her. Like Mr Black, the mysterious hermit in 'The Stone in the Field,' Herb Abbott becomes the subject of a story which the narrator can never properly finish. While the narrator of the earlier piece renounces the kind of fiction-making impulse that might have compelled her younger self to create a story out of Mr Black's supposed love for one of her aunts, the narrator in The Turkey Season' undergoes a similar process of self-correction based on her continually changing interpretation of the past. Like Janet in The Stone in the Field,' thus, she comes to understand that people's secrets are far from defined and communicable: 'I don't want to go into the question of whethe Herb was homosexual or not, because the definition is of no use to me. I think that probably he was, but maybe he was not. (Even considering what happened later, I think that.) He is not a puzzle so arbitrarily solved' (M] 65). Speaking here with the benefit of hindsight, the narrator raises the question of Herb's homosexuality only to tell us that it is of no importance to her. What is important is the fact that definitions will not help her understand Herb's hidden life. When events in the Turkey Barn culminate in a crisis involving Herb, Gladys

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- a worker rumoured to be 'after Herb Abbott' (M] 64) - and Brian the new gutter who was staying with Herb - the narrator responds by examining the way in which her interpretation of the situation looks different from different points in time. Although 'at the time' of the crisis, she thinks primarily about Herb's shame (M] 74), her subsequent reaction testifies to her ability to revise and reassess her interpretation of the past: 'Later, when I knew more, at least about sex, I decided that Brian was Herb's lover, and that Gladys really was trying to get attention from Herb, and that that was why Brian had humiliated her - with or without Herb's connivance and consent. Isn't it true that people like Herb - dignified, secretive, honorable people - will often choose somebody like Brian, will waste their helpless love on some vicious, silly person who is not even evil, or a monster, but just some importunate nuisance? I decided that Herb, with all his gentleness and carefulness, was avenging himself on us all - not just on Gladys but on us all - with Brian' (MJ 74). Even this interpretation, however, turns out to be subject to revision and reassessment: 'Later still, I backed off from this explanation. I got to a stage of backing off from the things I couldn't really know. It's enough for me now just to think of Herb's face with that peculiar, stricken look; to think of Brian monkeying in the shade of Herb's dignity; to think of my own mystified concentration on Herb, my need to catch him out, if I could ever get the chance, and then move in and stay close to him' (MJ 74). By abandoning the idea of attempting to explain what she does not know, the narrator moves towards an acceptance of the value of indeterminacy, of what I have been calling paradigmatic discourse. Her changing assessments of her experiences at the Turkey Barn serve as a reminder that attempts to represent the past can, at best, result in perspectives. To put it another way, her interpretation of Herb can never be anything more than an interpretation. The story thus operates on a metadiscursive level. Alongside her recollection of events at the Barn, the narrator engages us in a rethinking of the very possibilities of her ever being able to understand these events. As a kind of commentary on the impossibility of a masterable discourse, The Turkey Season' suggests that personal development or understanding is a matter of process rather than a fixed and attainable condition. By repudiating the validity of any enterprise which might seek to attain a knowledge of character through 'facts' or 'theories,' the narrator discovers the importance of not taking things for granted.

136 The Tumble of Reason Part of what not taking things for granted means, for the narrator, is an ability to look back on her life with a sense of wonder, with a freshness of appreciation. Thus the mystery at the heart of the story remains a mystery, even for the older narrator remembering her stint at the Turkey Barn and revising her interpretation of the past. Because no final explanation of Herb is reached, the narrator must yield to a kind of absence. 'How attractive/ she tells us, 'how delectable, the prospect of intimacy is, with the very person who will never grant it' (M] 74; emphasis added). The fact that intimacy with Herb remains a 'prospect' implies that whatever it is the narrator 'would ... like to know' (M] 74) may only find expression on the horizon of possibility. By thus subordinating truth to a continuing process of inquiry, the narrator in 'The Turkey Season' sustains her ability to experience surprise. In the next story, 'Accident/ Munro approaches the topic of surprise from very much an opposite direction. Here, as the title seems to indicate, the story's main turn of events involves an unexpected incident, a road accident which kills a young boy. The accident, however, is not entirely an accident, and the title also refers to the way in which the boy's death becomes a determining factor in the lives of Frances and Ted, the two protagonists. After the death of his son, Ted decides to leave his wife and to marry Frances, to do what he insists '"would have happened anyway"' (MJ 106). Frances similarly sees the boy's death and Ted's subsequent proposal as being parts of 'a long chain of things, many of them hidden from her' (MJ 106). The emphasis here is not on the occurrence of unexpected events, but rather on the way in which Bobby's accident functions as a moment in a process which evolves towards an endpoint, a telos. Both Ted and Frances, in other words, undercut the contingency of Bobby's accident by suggesting that it is part of an unalterable destiny. The story, then, turns what appears to be a cause for surprise into something which, although not quite expected, adheres to Ted's and Frances's notion of the way things should be between them. The narrative method employed by Munro in 'Accident' is in keeping with this movement away from surprise. Despite the fact that the story is replete with questions, these questions serve not to promote inquiry as a process for coming to terms with things, but rather to provoke answers. Like Ted, a science teacher whose low voice can be heard 'answering, explaining' (M] 79), the third-person narrator in this story - at times aligned with Frances, at times with Ted - repeatedly gives in to an urge to answer and explain. The questions that are scattered

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throughout the story, then, appear to be raised in pursuit of some attainable truth which the narrator seeks to impart. After asking why Frances, for instance, had 'not had sense enough to put down her boots and her coat' in preparation for her rendezvous with Ted in the supply room, the narrator promptly tells us that 'the truth was she had not expected so much or such purposeful embracing. She had thought he wanted to tell her something' (MJ 84; emphasis added). Later, when the narrator describes two workmen putting up Christmas lights and asks why they were doing it at such a late hour, we are given an immediate answer from this same narrator: 'They must have got started before the accident, then had to leave it. They must have spent the time off getting drunk, at least one of them must have' (MJ 95). Unlike The Turkey Season,' which puts into question the notion that true meaning is immediately accessible to the interpreter, 'Accident' appears to reverse this process of questioning by implying that answers can be attained. This ostensible declaration of a kind of certainty, however, cannot sustain itself throughout the entire narrative. Although it seems committed to putting forward a teleology which precludes the element of surprise, the story, in spite of itself, makes allowances for the unexpected and the uncertain. Thus even the passage quoted above, the passage in which the narrator explains why the workmen are putting up lights at such a late hour, turns out to be not as certain as it might appear. The modal phrase 'must have' expresses not so much what actually did happen, but rather what might have happened. It is an example of a false sense of certitude on the part of the narrator, an expression of probability rather than one of certainty. Frances too, at least in the narrator's description of her inner voice, engages in a kind of thinking which betrays her paradigmatic bias: she wonders how things might have been different if Fred Beecher, the driver of the car that inadvertently killed Ted's son, had not left his house that day: 'If he had not gone out in the snow that day to take a baby carriage across town, Frances would not live in Ottawa now, she would not have her two children, she would not have her life, not the same life. That is true. She is sure of it, but it is too ugly to think about. The angle from which she has to see that can never be admitted to; it would seem monstrous. And if he hadn't gone out that day - Frances is thinking as she talks to him [Fred] - where would we all be now?' (M] 109). Although ultimately committed to

138 The Tumble of Reason what is 'true/ Frances, in revealing her ability to think conditionally, to speculate, seems willing to acknowledge, albeit briefly, the possibility that her present condition has not arisen simply out of a logical progression of predictable events. The fact that Frances is unwilling to admit what she believes to be true suggests that her disruptive way of thinking - her implicit recognition of the role of chance - will never be fully played out. Just as, according to the narrator, there is, amidst order and acquiescence, a 'strange lump of something you can feel sometimes in music or a landscape/ a lump that promises 'to burst and reveal itself but which instead 'dissolves and goes away' (MJ 79), so the story, while admitting a passing glance at these alien moments of disruption, appears to end up promoting a sense of order. But the story's attempt to promote a sense of order - an order which militates against the possibility of surprise, of unexpectedness - is ultimately unsuccessful because Frances realizes that what is 'true' about her life is that it might have been other than it is. Admitting the truth, in other words, involves, for Frances, an acceptance of the role of unexpected change, of possibility, of disruptive moments in the order and acquiescence of her life. What she thinks is the truth, however, can never be admitted, and can be inscribed only in a discourse of absence, because it poses a threat to the pattern and continuity - the propriety - she wants to impose on her life. Frances, then, despite thinking about how things might have been, presents, to the world, a facade of order, just as the narrator presents, to the reader, this very same facade. In 'Bardon Bus/ Munro's division of the story into thirteen numbered sections suggests that order has given way once again to an interest in fragmentation. The comforts of sequence and connection have been abandoned here in favour of the surprises that come out of secrecy.? The narrator, like the narrator of Munro's earlier Tell Me Yes or No/ is lamenting the loss of her lover. She begins her tale with a rather curious section in which she fantasizes about lost love. In thinking about 'being an old maid, in another generation' (MJ no), the narrator uses fantasy as an attempt to compensate for an absence, for what is lacking in her life: 'He could be anybody. A soldier killed at the Somme or a farmer down the road with a rough-tongued wife and a crowd of children; a boy who went to Saskatchewan and promised to send for me, but never did, or the preacher who rouses me every Sunday with lashings of fear and promises of torment' (MJ no).

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Whether the explicit fantasy with which the story begins serves as a kind of justification for the relationship which the narrator describes in the following sections, or whether it, in fact, determines her telling of this relationship, what is important is that this opening passage already advertises the narrator's preoccupation with absence, loss, and deferral. As we read through the remaining numbered sections of the narrative, we begin to get the impression that her preoccupation with what is missing has led the narrator to mark her story with deliberate gaps and silences. By concealing her own name and the name of her ex-lover (who must be designated as X for reasons which become clear at the end of the story), the narrator revels in a kind of secrecy which permits her to invest the story with an element of surprise. The main surprise in the story, of course, comes at its end when we discover both the name and the whereabouts of the narrator's exlover. The fact that she chooses to call him X suggests not only that he has, in Blodgett's formulation, come to figure as 'ex, a sign of disconnection' (Alice Munro 116). The narrator's designation, in addition to calling to mind a lost love, serves also to indicate her own sense of power over both X and her readers. Although she refers to her ex-lover as X because the letter, in its expansiveness and secrecy, 'seems to suit him/ she also reminds us that 'X is a letter in his name' (MJ 112), thus suggesting that she too, in inviting us to play out her personal mystery, is drawn to secrecy. The exigency which compels the narrator to refer to the man she loves as X, to cross him out, so to speak, to place him 'sous rature/ stems, however, not only from this interest in secrecy, but also from the tension between her desire to restore what is lost and her desire to wipe out her memory of this lost love. Referring to the man she loves as X, then, becomes an act which symbolically enables the narrator to write about and erase her love at one and the same time. In 'Visitors,' Munro again invites us to see surprise as a kind of trope which turns on what remains untold. The story is rife with contrasts: Wilfred and Albert, two brothers who meet for the first time 'in more than thirty years' (M] 199), are different in almost every way imaginable. Wilfred is a large man who looks and acts as though he 'put a high value on joking and chatting' (M] 200), while his brother, thin and uncommunicative, is the sort of person who, as Wilfred notes, would remain silent even if he were sick. The difference between Wilfred and Albert is further emphasized by the way in which they

140 The Tumble of Reason tell stories (Blodgett, Alice Munro 121; Martin, Paradox 156). Wilfred is a natural raconteur whose tales involve a kind of syntagmatic progression towards an end point. His stories about lunch-box socials, bets, and bottles of whisky all turn on a movement from the condition of potential loss or insecurity to a condition of mastery or security. The value he ascribes to narrative has much to do with his faith in the possibilities for closure. Albert, on the other hand, who, during his entire visit, says very little indeed, manages, when he deigns to tell a story, to reinforce the kind of paradigmatic bias which has been evident from the opening story in Munro's volume. After Albert cryptically remarks that '"a man went into the Hullett Swamp and remained there"' (MJ 213), both Wilfred and his wife Mildred attempt to tease out of him some explanation for this mysterious occurrence. '"Well, there must be some explanation/" exclaims Mildred (MJ 214). But Albert, who only 'grudgingly/ and with promptings from the others offers details about the incident, remains uninterested in the kind of ready-made explanations that Mildred and Wilfred desire. In this he is a little like Prue, the title character of another story in the volume. Prue, we are told, is someone who 'presents her life in anecdotes, and ... it is the point of most of her anecdotes that hopes are dashed, dreams ridiculed, things never turn out as expected, everything is altered in a bizarre way and there is no explanation ever' (MJ 129). Like Prue, who yields to what Blodgett calls 'configurations of the discontinuous' (Alice Munro 109), Albert too gives us a kind of narrative of surprise. Instead of ending in closure, his narrative can only offer a deferral of meanings. His story - which he insists is '"not a story. It's something that happened"' (M] 215) - remains incomprehensible to the others because it poses what Roland Barthes calls the 'threat of an uncompleted sequence' (Image 119). Despite their inability to make sense of Albert's cryptic and incomplete account of 'something that happened/ Mildred and Wilfred each end up revealing dimensions to their personality which suggest that they are not as unlike Albert as they might think. In considering how the story of Lloyd Sallows's disappearance into the swamp might have been different had Wilfred been its narrator, Mildred inadvertently brings to the fore her own ability to subordinate meaning and explanation to possibility: If Wilfred had been telling that story, Mildred thought, it would have gone someplace, there would have been some kind of ending to it. Lloyd Sallows

Towards a Poetics of Surprise

141

might reappear stark naked to collect on a bet, or he would come back dressed as a millionaire, maybe having tricked some gangsters who had robbed him. In Wilfred's stories you could always be sure that the gloomy parts would give way to something better, and if somebody behaved in a peculiar way there was an explanation for it. If Wilfred figured in his own stories, as he usually did, there was always a stroke of luck for him somewhere, a good meal or a bottle of whiskey or some money. Neither luck nor money played a part in this story. She wondered why Albert had told it, what it meant to him. (MJ 215)

Like Albert, whose account of what happened offers no certainty, whose cryptic remarks cannot, as it were, be made to 'go someplace/ Mildred too, in spite of herself (and in this she will perhaps remind us of Frances in 'Accident') engages in a way of thinking which betrays not so much her desire to obtain an explanation, as her capacity to construct virtual situations. In other words, by utilizing a conditional construction here, by moving outside the syntagmatic realm, Mildred aligns herself with Albert. Similarly, Wilfred, whose own stories thrive on the syntagmatic impulse to explain and order, reveals himself to be not quite as 'way different' (MJ 205) from his brother as he seems to believe. After his visitors have left, Wilfred wakes Mildred by crying in his sleep. Uncertain of ever seeing Albert again, Wilfred reveals a dimension to his personality which is absent from his everyday jovial self. His dreams and his crying at night, marked as they are by incompleteness and uncertainty, suggest his own involvement, not with closure, but rather with a world of provisional and open-ended meanings. Albert, then, like Uncle Benny in Lives of Girls and Women (Benny also has something mysterious to say about swamps), plays an important role in Munro's fictional world because he introduces a world of potential and absent meanings. He functions as an exemplary character in The Moons of Jupiter, an emblem for the trope of surprise, for a number of discrete yet interconnected reasons. In addition to bringing out unexpected dimensions in Wilfred and Mildred, he also, as Martin notes, springs a surprise on the reader by unexpectedly launching into his mysterious story. 'We think that we have got Albert sized up, then we find we have not/ writes Martin (Paradox 156). More importantly, however, Albert accomplishes the very idea of surprise by the manner in which he presents his narration. Refusing to make concessions to his listeners, making no attempt to fill in gaps or to offer explanations, Albert, in his story of Lloyd Sallows's disappearance,

142 The Tumble of Reason notions of intelligibility. His refusal to deliver what Wilfred and Mildred expect from a storyteller suggests, in part, that surprise has to do not so much with the kinds of twists that come at the end of Wilfred's stories - twists which themselves can become predictable10 - but rather with a world of absent and potential meanings towards which one can only gesture. As the stories in The Moons of Jupiter reveal, surprise operates for Munro as both a structural principle and a thematic concern. Like her narrators, who, in yielding to enigmas, either admit or demonstrate their incapacity to tell stories in the 'proper' way, Munro generates surprise not solely by shocking her reader with unexpected twists, but, perhaps more importantly, by withholding (or denying) the kind of information (or knowledge) which her stories may lead us to expect. This denial seems in keeping with a comment I quoted earlier, a comment made by Munro in a 1983 interview: 'What I like/ she says, 'is not to really know what the story is all about. And for me to keep trying to find out' (Hancock 84). What this process of 'trying to find out' suggests is that the experience of surprise in Munro's stories applies not only to her readers and characters, but to Munro herself.

6 'It's What I Believe7: Patterns of Complicity in The Progress of Love

I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that's how it happened. Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children So that's life, then: things as they are? Wallace Stevens, 'The Man with the Blue Guitar'

The stories in The Progress of Love play out what perhaps is Alice Munro's most cogent challenge to the tradition of realist fiction. Although the pieces collected in this volume are not, for the most part, overtly metafictional, although they do not engage in the kind of self-consciousness that one finds, for example, in The Ottawa Valley/ 'Winter Wind/ and 'Home/ they do nevertheless render problematic our ability to keep apart experience and narration. Like so many of Munro's stories, these pieces promote and undo reality at one and the same time; they tease us with expectations of accuracy, objectivity, truth, and linguistic transparency, only to show us that events which pose as accurate, objective, true, and transparent are fictions of self-knowledge, narratives constructed by a narrating figure whose authorial subjectivity can no longer go unquestioned. In 'The Progress of Love/ Munro continues to probe the problems that have fascinated her from the start of her career. Of particular interest in this title piece is the way in which its narrator, Phemie, engages in an examination of the powers and the limits of storytelling. Abandoning the notion of truth as correspondence between story and

144 The Tumble of Reason event, the narrator instead presents her version of the past in a manner which suggests she is less interested in getting the facts straight than she is in coping with the world. The narrative that results is, like much of Munro's recent fiction, marked by a discontinuity, by an uneasiness which, in this case, reflects the narrator's own reluctance to get to the point of her story. As Blodgett points out, 'The story, simply by the way it is begun, suggests the narrator is hesitant to take the reader to the core of a matter whose truth she herself appears somehow unsure of (Alice Munro 145). The story begins with the narrator receiving a phone call from her father announcing her mother's death. While the subsequent sections seem to offer an account of her mother's life, what is worth noting is that many of the details presented by the narrator implicitly take up another issue: her mother's hatred of her own father, Phemie's grandfather. Thus the information we are given about such things as the colour of her mother's hair and the fact that Phemie's father had to wait to marry her mother turns on a hatred which will only be brought to the fore later in the story. The narration, in other words, is proleptic in its structure. Prolepsis, of course, is a trope of deferral, of putting off, of holding in a kind of suspension. Phemie's reason for putting off discussing what seems to be at the core of her narrative involves not so much an aversion to confronting what she does not want to know as an unstated but implicit desire to challenge the importance of foundations and origins. What seems to be at issue here is the problem of truth, and Phemie's narration, rather than separating truth from falsehood, serves to conflate the two. When Phemie finally arrives at what appears to be the heart of the matter - her grandmother's suicide attempt - the prominence of the event is diminished by the fact that it is framed by another event: Aunt Beryl's visit. Although she 'said not to call her Aunt' (PL 14), Beryl, unlike Uncle Benny in Lives of Girls and Women, is a real relative, and this - perhaps - lends her a certain air of credibility. Beryl's visit occupies a central place in Phemie's narration because it functions, in effect, to put matters into perspective. We first hear of the grandmother's near suicide from Phemie, but her narration is presented, as Mark Levene suggests, 'from her mother's point of view as though she [Phemie] were omniscient and the story a self-contained whole because of its dark impact on their lives' (8). In the extended passage describing the event (PL 9-13), the telling 'I/ the story's first-person narrator, suddenly disappears from the nar-

'It's What I Believe' 145 rative. This shift from a first-person narration to the privileged position of omniscience fosters the illusion of - to adapt Emile Benveniste's distinction - historical utterance rather than discourse. Whereas discourse, for Benveniste, designates 'every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker the intention of influencing the other in some way' (209), historical narration is marked by the absence of the T who tells the story: 'No one speaks here; the events seem to narrate themselves' (208). Historical narration, he writes, is a 'mode of utterance that excludes every "autobiographical" linguistic form "I"' (206). This exclusion, this absence, in Munro's story - or at least in the extended passage describing the near suicide of Phemie's grandmother - seems to constitute an attempt by Phemie to relive the original event, to experience what her mother, Marietta, went through - in short, to achieve a kind of hermeneutic empathy.1 Beryl's visit, however, illustrates the impossibility of such an empathy. Despite Phemie's attempt to recount, and by implication relive, what her mother went through upon discovering her own mother's near suicide, her version is called into question when Beryl - who, unlike Phemie, actually witnessed the event - turns up and insists that the whole incident was something of a joke designed 'to give Daddy a scare' (PL 21). Beryl further downplays the seriousness of the event by claiming that the rope her mother used to try to hang herself was not even tied to a beam: '"My eyes followed that rope up and up and I saw it was just hanging over the beam, just flung there - it wasn't tied at all! Marietta hadn't noticed that, the German lady hadn't noticed it. But I just spoke up and said, Mama, how are you going to manage to hang yourself without that rope tied around the beam?"' (PL 22). Beryl's version of the incident suggests that Phemie may not be remembering the past with complete accuracy. Although Phemie stands, for some time, by her mother's version of the episode, the opposing accounts of the story ask us to ponder the ultimate inaccessibility of a privileged founding moment of knowledge. The notion of truth is further undermined by means of another story which sheds light on this first. Because Phemie's mother hated her own father for the way he treated his wife, Phemie, in an effort to be rid of this inheritance of hatred, modifies an important part of a story concerning another kind of inheritance. Like Phemie's account of her grandmother's near hanging, this story too - which we are inclined to accept as accurate - will be challenged later in the narrative.2 While visiting the farm where she used to live, Phemie, now an older

146 The Tumble of Reason woman, remarks to a friend that her mother once burned her paternal inheritance in the wood stove. The point of this story, for the narrator, is not so much the hatred which Marietta felt towards Phemie's grandfather, but rather the fact that Marietta's husband presided over the burning: '"My father letting her do it is the point. To me it is. My father stood and watched and he never protested. If anybody had tried to stop her, he would have protected her. I consider that love"' (PL 26). The next section of the narrative, however, takes us back to the time of Beryl's visit, and here the narrator, still a child, listens to a conversation in which her mother and Beryl discuss the ways in which they have dealt with their respective inheritances. Phemie's mother talks about burning her share of the money, but we learn that Phemie's father was not present to witness, let alone approve of, the incident. Why, then, has Phemie presented us (and her friend) with the other version? As it turns out, the next segment of the narrative takes up precisely this question: 'My father did not stand in the kitchen watching my mother feed the money into the flames. It wouldn't appear so. He did not know about it - it seems fairly clear, if I remember everything, that he did not know about it until that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Florence's Chrysler, when my mother told them all together. Why, then, can I see the scene so clearly, just as I described it to Bob Marks (and to others - he was not the first)?' (PL 29). Here, the olde Phemie admits that she has, in her narration, tampered with the past. Despite this admission, however, she has trouble believing that her account of the event is a fabrication. Of her version of the incident she says, 'how hard it is for me to believe that I made that up. It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it's what I believe' (PL 30). Here, Phemie appears to be appealing to the truth of created memory, to 'the truth of fiction/3 Ondaatje's phrase, I think, aptly gets at Phemie's desire to supplant conventional notions of truth as correspondence with a paradigmatic notion of truth as a need to be narratively or discursively faithful to the way things might have or ought to have been. In the story Phemie twice supplies us with evidence to discredit the stories she has presented to us. In the second instance, however, despite open acknowledgment of her fictionalizing impulse, she clings to her initial version because, as Levene points out, 'even through distortion she wants to be assured of [her parents'] love' (8). As if to justify her practice of distortion, Phemie ends her narrative by ex-

'It's What I Believe' 147 plaining how she has told Bob Marks another lie in order to avoid disagreement: 'It was just as well to make up right away. Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if parting has to come sooner or later. I wonder if these moments aren't more valued, and deliberately gone after, in the setups some people like myself have now, than they were in those old marriages, where love and grudges could be growing underground, so confused and stubborn, it must have seemed they had forever' (PL 30-1). The story, then, in playing out what might be called a range of narrative attitudes, brings together two of Munro's central preoccupations: the problem of truth and the power of language. In telling her story, Phemie, to return to Benveniste's distinction, moves from a history - with its absent interlocutor - to a discourse in which the T not only returns, but also explicitly declares its own involvement in constructing the narrative. In other words, Munro, rather than maintain a distinction between history and discourse, shows us that events cannot be narrated independently of a speaker. Having abandoned the notion of truth as correspondence to reality, Phemie comes to the realization that truth is largely a function of what she wants to believe. The 'progress' to which the story's title alludes thus becomes manifest, at least on a structural level, in Phemie's movement from an attempt at a kind of empathy - an attempt to enter into the experience and understanding of her mother - to her realization that any such attempt to experience what the 'original' mind went through is always subject to her own desires and motivations. By the time her narrative ends, Phemie's faith in the possibility of an objective ground for knowledge has diminished: rather than relive the past, she wants now to rewrite it to suit her own purposes. Throughout the stories in this volume, Munro's protagonists frequently display a penchant for invention, for reshaping or fabricating events to accord with their own aspirations. In 'Jesse and Meribeth,' for instance - a story which, perhaps more than any other story in this volume, recalls Munro's earlier writing4 - Jessie, the protagonist, lies to her friend MaryBeth by telling her that she is having an affair with her employer, Mr Cryderman. Jessie tells us, 'I had been planning to tease [MaryBeth] for a little longer, then to tell her that it was all a joke. I did not even have anybody's name in my head, in the beginning. I did now, but it was too outrageous. I couldn't believe that I would ever say it' (PL 177-8). After naming Mr Cryderman as her secret lover, Jessie feels 'wonderfully lightened, not burdened, by

148 The Tumble of Reason [her] lie' (PL 178). She then interrupts the narrative of her imaginary affair to offer, from what is presumably an older perspective, a kind of commentary on her behaviour: Once, I knew an old woman who said to me, when talking about her life, that she had spent three years having an affair with Robert Browning. She was not in the least senile; she was a very competent and straightforward old woman. She didn't say she loved Browning's writing, or spent all her time reading about him. She didn't say she had fantasies. 'Oh, yes,' she said, 'and then there was the three years' affair I had with Robert Browning.' I waited for her to laugh or add some little explanatory word, but she did not do so. I have to think, then, that the affair she conducted in her imagination was so serious and strenuous that she forbade herself to describe it as imaginary. (PL 178)

Like Phemie, in the title story, the old woman to whom Jessie refers clings to a notion of truth which is clearly divorced from the actual events of her life. Unlike Phemie, however, she seems unaware of the extent to which her story is a constructed one. In refusing to acknowledge the imaginary status of her affair with Browning, she presents her story as a kind of truth; but, as Jessie realizes, the story is based on an invented rather than an experienced relationship. Does the old woman actually believe that she has had this affair?* It would appear that Jessie, at least during the time of her talk with the old lady, wants to maintain a distinction between truth and fiction, between narrative and experience: she expects the woman 'to laugh or add some little explanatory word.' What is interesting, however, is that Jessie - chronologically though not narratively speaking - has already confronted the impossibility of maintaining such a distinction. Even before her talk with the old woman, Jessie has been initiated into an awareness of the inseparability of truth and fiction. We, however, have yet to learn of Jessie's initiation; this information has been deliberately withheld from the narrative. Once again, progress, for Munro, is a matter of structure, a kind of language-game in which narrative must 'catch up' to chronology. In 'Jesse and Meribeth/ the narrative does its 'catching up' when the protagonist of the story's time-frame - the young girl who invents stories about her affair with Mr Cryderman - reaches the level of awareness of a retrospective narrator who recognizes the seriousness and strenuousness of paradigmatic relationships.6 Like Mr Chamber-

'It's What I Believe' 149 lain, about whom Del, in 'Lives of Girls and Women/ fantasizes, Mr Cryderman engages in behaviour which leads the young Jessie to understand that the real world and the world of her imagination cannot be kept apart. 7 'Miles City, Montana' is another story in which the completeness of the opposition between these two worlds is called into question. The story begins with what appears to be an objective (or at least reliable) account of an event: My father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who had been drowned. There were several men together, returning from the search, but he was the one carrying the body. The men were muddy and exhausted, and walked with their heads down as if they were ashamed. Even the dogs were dispirited, dripping from the cold river. When they all set out, hours before, the dogs were nervy and yelping, the men tense and determined, and there was a constrained, unspeakable excitement about the whole scene. It was understood that they might find something horrible. (PL 84)

The narrator then proceeds to give us details about the drowned boy: 'The boy's name was Steve Gauley. He was eight years old. His hair and clothes were mud-colored now and carried some bits of dead leaves, twigs, and grass. He was like a heap of refuse that had been left out all winter. His face was turned in to my father's chest, but I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud' (PL 84). What poses as an accurate representation, however, reveals itself to be a constructed memory. After describing 'the whole scene,' the narrator suddenly steps in and admits her own involvement in shaping what we have just been reading: 'I don't think so. I don't think I really saw all this. Perhaps I saw my father carrying him, and the other men following along, and the dogs, but I would not have been allowed to get close enough to see something like mud in his nostril. I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it' (PL 84). Here, as elsewhere throughout the volume, we are asked to recognize the extent to which the subject - as the source of meaning - is always implicated in any attempt to tell about the past. In imagining mud in the drowned boy's nostril, the narrator shows us that her account of the incident belongs more to Benveniste's realm of discourse than to his realm of historical narration. This insistence on reintroducing the subject into what appears to

150 The Tumble of Reason be an objective account is in keeping with Munro's movement away from a straightforward, unquestioned realistic discourse, one which posits a world of fixed, stable, and recuperable meanings. Richard Rorty has suggested that 'we do indeed need to give up the notion of "data and interpretation" with its suggestion that if we could get to the real data, unpolluted by our choice of language, we should be "grounding" rational choice' (325). Although Munro may not be entirely giving up what Rorty calls 'data and interpretation,' her fiction does illustrate the difficulty of articulating a founding moment of knowledge. Like Phemie, who, by the end of the title story, abandons the notion that the hermeneutic enterprise should be grounded on stable origins, the narrator of 'Miles City, Montana' shows us that any attempt to relive an experience from her past is always subject to her own motivated discourse. In the second part of the story, Munro, in characteristic fashion, replays the first section, only now it is one of the narrator's own children who is in danger of drowning. The narrator, in the story's second section, is driving from British Columbia to Ontario with her husband, Andrew, and their children, Meg and Cynthia. 'We were driving back from Vancouver, where we lived, to Ontario, which we still called "home," in our new car,' she explains (PL 87). When the family stops at a pool in Miles City, Meg's near-fatal accident clearly recalls the Steve Gauley drowning with which the story begins. Worth noting here is that Meg's near drowning is presented as a memory which, like the narrator's recollection of the earlier drowning, is, to some extent, discredited by her own admission that she has altered certain details. Hence, when she remembers calling out to Cynthia to ask where Meg was, the scene she comes up with contains the kinds of details which might lead us to accept it as an accurate representation of what happened: 'It always seems to me, when I recall this scene, that Cynthia turns very gracefully toward me, then turns all around in the water - making me think of a ballerina on point - and spreads her arms in a gesture of the stage. "Dis-ap-peared!"' (PL 100). After telling us this, however, the narrator then corrects herself: 'She did say "Disappeared" after looking all around the pool, but the strangely artificial style of speech and gesture, the lack of urgency, is more likely my invention' (PL 100). Despite her use of details to summon up this event, the narrator understands that her memory of Meg's near drowning has been largely a product of her imagination. Once again the past - or at least the past as it is initially presented to us, as readers - turns

'It's What I Believe' 151 out to be subject to revision and reinterpretation. The narrator's willingness to recognize her own position as subject in language suggests the extent to which the past she wants to recover is intelligible only through discourse. By demonstrating an awareness of the context in which her account of the past is being constructed, she raises a problem that runs throughout Munro's writing: the problem of whether one can be narratively faithful to what happened in the past. The narrator thus situates both memories - the childhood recollection of Steve Gauley's drowning and the near drowning of Meg, which, in fact, triggers the earlier memory - within a discursive context. The story's structural preoccupation with patterns of complicity may, at some level, be aligned with its thematic investigation of an analogous issue. As a child at Steve Gauley's funeral, the narrator understands for the first time that her parents have been complicitous in the boy's death: 'I was understanding that they were implicated. Their big, stiff, dressed-up bodies did not stand between me and sudden death, or any kind of death. They gave consent. So it seemed. They gave consent to the death of children and to my death not by anything they said or thought but by the very fact that they had made children - they had made me. They had made me, and for that reason my death - however grieved they were, however they carried on would seem to them anything but impossible or unnatural' (PL 103). After Meg's near brush with disaster, however, the narrator, now herself an adult and a parent, engages in a kind of speculative discourse which reveals her own complicitous behaviour. Although, on the surface, the narrator wants to promote a sense of luck - 'That was all we spoke about - luck' (PL 102) - what she is compelled to picture is precisely the opposite. On an absent and potential level of meaning, she plays out what might have happened had her daughter drowned: 'At this moment, we could have been filling out forms. Meg removed from us, Meg's body being prepared for shipment. To Vancouver where we had never noticed such a thing as a graveyard - or to Ontario? The scribbled drawings she had made this morning would still be in the back seat of the car. How could this be borne all at once, how did people bear it?' (PL 102-3). Realizing that 'there's something trashy about this kind of imagining' (PL 103), the narrator implicitly admits that she has been engaging in the very behaviour that she, as a child, resented in adults. Thus, at the end of the story, she holds out the hope that, in time, she will 'be forgiven ... for everything that had first to be seen and condemned by those children: whatever was

152 The Tumble of Reason flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous - all our natural, and particular, mistakes' (PL 105). What I have been suggesting is that 'Miles City, Montana' turns on the recognition of complicity on two discrete yet interconnected levels: the level of the subject represented in the fiction, and the level of the subject who narrates. The distinction here is between what, in Benveniste's terminology, we might call the subject of the enonce (the protagonist caught up in the events of the story) and the subject of the enunciation (the retrospective narrator who calls attention to the fact that she has fabricated a past). Just as the protagonist comes to understand that she herself is, though perhaps inadvertently, giving consent to the death of her children, so, as a narrator, she undergoes a parallel process of discovery when, in the midst of her recollections, she intervenes and allows the story to define itself as discourse. Like those self-corrective moments in The Moons of Jupiter, moments I have discussed in the previous chapter, this intervention is also a kind of backing off from what cannot finally be known. Although the story begins in a manner which seems to suggest the possibility of an accurate representation of the narrator's past, it ends up, like so many of Munro's stories - in particular, the more recent ones - unable to offer a guarantee of its own truth. Patterns of complicity emerge more indirectly in 'Fits/ yet another story which examines the implications of an altered detail in a reported event. At the centre of this story about a murder-suicide is Peg Kuiper's discovery of the dead bodies of her neighbours, the Weebles, and her unwillingness to talk about the incident. Although 'Peg was the one who found them' (PL 108), the story is told from the third-person point of view of her husband, Robert, who, as Ildiko de Papp Carrington notes, 'does not observe the violence' (52). In an attempt to reconstruct his wife's experience, Robert pieces together bits of information which he gathers from various sources. Robert's attempt to reconcile the story as his wife finally tells it with the version presented to him earlier in the day by the constable leads us to an implicit recognition of a hidden level of unconscious motivation in Peg. Although Peg appears essentially unshattered by her discoveries of the dead bodies, although she continues the day almost as if nothing extraordinary happened, her overt disinterestedness conceals a covert sense of morbid fascination. In thinking about 'one discrepancy, one detail - one lie - that would never have anything

'It's What I Believe' 153 to do with him' (PL 130), Robert moves towards an awareness of the possibility that Peg's account of the incident has been motivated by a sense of self-interest. Sensing that Robert would 'want to know' (PL 124) what happened, Peg tells him 'her part of the story' (PL 124). As with 'Miles City, Montana/ 'Jesse and Meribeth/ and the title story, here, once again, we are provided with an account which, chronologically, has already been rendered tenuous. Like the other stories, however, 'Fits' delays our discovery of the possibility that we have been presented with an impossible, because constructed, memory. Robert has already heard the constable's report of the Weebles' murder-suicide, but Munro puts off giving us Robert's memory of this report until the end of her narrative (see Carrington 54). By doing so, she generates surprise on the level of plot, but she also suggests that Robert, despite the evidence of two contradictory versions, does not himself recognize the implications of the discrepancy between these versions until he goes out for his long walk after dinner. In telling her story to Robert, Peg says she 'knew there wasn't anybody but me alive in the [Weebles'] house. Then I saw his leg, I saw his leg stretched out into the hall, and I knew then, but I had to go on in and make sure' (PL 125). Later, during his after-dinner walk, Robert tries to understand why Peg has lied to him. The story ends with Robert's memory of the constable's account: At noon, when the constable in the diner was giving his account, he had described how the force of the shot threw Walter Weeble backward. 'It blasted him partways out of the room. His head was laying out in the hall. What was left of it was laying out in the hall.' Not a leg. Not the indicative leg, whole and decent in its trousers, the shod foot. That was not what anybody turning at the top of the stairs would see and would have to step over, step through, in order to go into the bedroom and look at the rest of what was there. (PL 131)

Only at the end of the story, then, do we realize that we have not, in fact, been given the whole story. In distorting this one detail, Peg seeks to appropriate the violent origins of the incident with her own metalanguage. Her distortion - her lie - forces us to recognize the extent to which Peg, despite appearances to the contrary, is riddled with a kind of curiosity that is not unlike that of her neighbours, who come 'poking around in a brutally curious way' (PL 126). Just

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as these neighbours drive by the scene of the incident in the hopes of 'getting a look' (PL 126), so Peg wants to get a good look at what Walter Weeble had done. So, as Carrington puts it, 'instead of screaming and running away, she stepped through whatever remained of Walter's exploded head and entered the bedroom to look at Nora's corpse' (55). Another critic, Charles Hanly, makes a similar point. He claims that the 'story hinges upon an implicit yet powerful motivation in Peg to witness such a scene' as the one she discovered in the Weebles' bedroom (171). In leading us to recognize Peg's 'intense curiosity to see something forbidden' (Hanly 171), these critics alert us to the possibility that her lie to Robert is itself an attempt to conceal her own self-interest. Peg, however, is unsuccessful in her attempts at concealment because we, like Robert, have access to alternative versions, to other histories. The story, in fact, is rife with other histories, with loosely connected details from various pasts. Clayton, Peg's son from a previous marriage, reminds his mother about the fights she used to have with her ex-husband: '"When you used to have those fights, you know what I used to think? I used to think one of you was going to come and kill me with a knife"' (PI 126). Later, when he is out walking, Robert finds himself remembering violent scenes from his own previous relationship with Lee, and this memory from his past compels him to think about Peg and her ex-husband Dave, who suddenly left his family one day and headed off for the Arctic: 'A man doesn't just drive farther and farther away in his trucks until he disappears from his wife's view. Not even if he has always dreamed of the Arctic. Things happen before he goes. Marriage knots aren't going to slip apart painlessly, with the pull of distance. There's got to be some wrenching and slashing. But she didn't say, and he didn't ask, or even think much about that, till now' (PL 129). It is this sense of 'wrenching and slashing/ of eruptions of violence, which implicitly brings together not only Robert and Peg, but also Robert, Peg, and Walter Weeble. Unlike Peg, however, who wishes not to speak about either the violence from her past or the scene she discovered in the Weebles' bedroom - who, in fact, seeks to transform her own self-interest and fascination into a seemingly objective and distanced account - Robert, by the end of the story, gravitates towards an awareness of how much both he and Peg have been implicated in gestures of violence not entirely unlike those of Walter Weeble.

'It's What I Believe' 155 In the novella 'A Queer Streak/ Munro once again turns her attention to the ways in which the past can become the subject of stories.8 Like The Progress of Love/ 'A Queer Streak' also concerns itself with the distance between generations and 'the possibility of bridging [that distance] through storytelling' (Gadpaille 74). Although the form of a novella may be new to Munro, the territory is familiar. A kind of variation on Peg's distortion of facts in a reported incident, the story dramatizes what happens when a family history is appropriated by a metalanguage. That family history is an important issue is announced at the outset. The narrative begins with a description not simply of Violet's past, but of a past that she never experienced, a past to which she now has access only through the agency of other peoples' memories: 'Violet's mother - Aunt Ivie - had three little boys, three baby boys, and she lost them. Then she had the three girls' (PL 208). Just as Violet's knowledge of the brothers she never had is based on the stories that she is told - her meditations on the word 'lost' reinforce the fact that the term has been supplied by somebody else, undoubtedly her mother - her knowledge of her father's past is similarly based on the process of sharing and interpreting narratives. Consider, for instance, the following story about her father: He had gone to a dance, when he was a young man, up on the Snow Road, where he came from. Some other young fellows who were there had insulted him, and he had to take their insults because he did not know a thing about fighting. But after that he got some lessons from an old prizefighter, a real one, who was living on Sharbot Lake. Another night, another dance - the same thing as before. The same kind of insults. Except that this time King Billy lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one. Lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one. No more insults of that kind anywhere up in that country. No more. (PL 210)

The repetition of 'lit into them and cleaned up on them, one by one' and 'no more' suggests that Violet's knowledge of this incident from her father's past has come out of an oral reshaping of the past. As with Rose's knowledge, in 'Royal Beatings/ of her mother's death, Munro here calls our attention to the fact that Violet's knowledge of her family history is based on the kinds of stories that have been

156 The Tumble of Reason handed down to her.? Munro's work, as we have seen from other stories in this volume and in her earlier collections, is riddled with the problem of mediation. Her fiction is awash with constant reminders of gaps in time, of discontinuous histories, of distances from an origin. 'A Queer Streak/ as its opening scenes make clear, is no exception. The structure of the novella - with its two parts and its two perspectives from different generations - is itself indicative of the text's involvement with what philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has called Zeitabstand, 'temporal distance.' For Gadamer, temporal distance is the gap which separates the interpreter from the object of interpretation, a gap which he sees as being a productive basis for the hermeneutic process. 'Time/ he writes, 'is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates, but it is actually the supportive ground of process in which the present is rooted' (264). In 'A Queer Streak/ this concept comes into play in various ways. The second part of the novella is told primarily from the point of view of Dane, Violet's nephew; hence we can speak about the temporal distance of generations. But it is also through the characters of Heather and Gillian, two young women (one of whom claims to be a distant relative of Violet's) who show up at Violet's door, that Munro explores the implications of the gap between an interpreter and the object of interpretation. What Heather and Gillian want, according to Violet, is information about her past: '"They are interested in our family and what I can remember about what it was like/" she tells Dane (PL 246) But, as we have seen elsewhere in Munro, the apprehension of facts is a function of what one wants to believe. As if to highlight the point, Munro has Heather and Gillian send Violet a card with the following message: 'Thank you a million, million times for your help and openness. "You have given us a wonderful story. It is a classic story of anti-patriarchal rage. Your gift to us, can we give it to others? What is called Female Craziness is nothing but centuries of Frustration and Oppression. The part about the creek is wonderful just by itself and how many women can identify!' (PL 248). By responding to Violet's story of her past in these terms, Heather and Gillian seem to be promoting the productivity of the concept of temporal distance. The past to which they are responding is the past that formed the basis of the novella's first section. In this first section, we learn about the 'queer streak' in Violet's family. As a young girl, Dawn Rose Violet's sister (later to become Dane's mother) - sends anonymous threatening letters to her father while Violet is away at school in Ot-

'It's What I Believe' 157 tawa. 'Violet's absence/ as Carrington notes, 'is crucial because she has been mothering her two younger sisters ever since their mother, with whom the "queer streak" begins, was unhinged by the deaths of her first three children' (177). When Heather and Gillian receive this information about Dawn Rose, they seek immediately to make it correspond with their own ideological perspective. Thus, like Peg in Tits,' they too are implicated in gestures of appropriation. In 'A Queer Streak/ these gestures serve to remind us that re-presentations of the past inevitably involve a reconstruction of events not as they really were, but rather as we have been led to see them from our own perspective in the present. Like Gadamer, then, Heather and Gillian would probably subscribe to the idea that 'every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way' (Gadamer 263; emphasis added). Unlike Phemie, who, in 'The Progress of Love/ attempts to relive what her mother went through, Heather and Gillian do not appear to be interested in attempting a complete and wholesale recovery of the past. For them, Violet's information about the family past is 'a wonderful story/ a transmitted text which interests them only insofar as they can interpret it in terms of the present. Thus Dawn Rose's threatening letters to her father are seen, by Heather and Gillian, as a classic example of 'anti-patriarchal rage.'10 Munro, however, while clearly recognizing the difficulty of separating history from narration, remains suspicious of all such unproblematized attempts to reclaim the past from a motivated perspective. For one thing, King Billy, as he is presented to us, could hardly be the object of anyone's 'anti-patriarchal rage' because he is not a father in the traditional sense (see Carrington 179). Given that 'it was Violet who ruled in the house' (PL 213), the interpretation offered by Heather and Gillian is clearly inadequate. In wanting to give Violet's gift to others, to dramatize Violet's memories for the women's theatre to which they belong, Heather and Gillian desire to re-enact what they see as a subversion of patriarchal authority. What I am suggesting is that their attempt to reinterpret Violet's painful past in terms of their own political agenda, to make the 'queer streak' from Violet's family history into a play about 'anti-patriarchal rage/ is itself a rehabilitation of structures of authority. Unlike Phemie at the end of the title story, these two characters lack a critique of their own metalanguage, an awareness that they too are implicated in a discourse of power and appropriation. As if to symbolize both their power and their insensitivity, Munro has Heather and Gillian precipitate Violet's

ij8

The Tumble of Reason

death with their curiosity to see old documents from her past (see Carrington 182). Heather and Gillian, then, are engaged in an attempt to reclaim the origin of the 'queer streak' in Violet's family. Their reshaping of Violet's memories nicely illustrates Gadamer's dictum: 'understanding is not merely a reproductive, but always a productive attitude as well' (264). The novella, however, with its constant reminders of mediation, asks us to recognize the extent to which the queer streak of the title refers not only to Dawn Rose's threatening letters, but also to an origin that is already beyond recovery. That Munro begins 'A Queer Streak' by emphasizing the mediated nature of Violet's knowledge about her past suggests that Heather and Gillian can only fail in their endeavours because the origin they seek is already distanced from itself. While Munro's novella functions as a kind of implicit critique of systems of thought which, at the expense of trying to understand particular instances, seek to posit general principles, the closing piece in the collection, 'White Dump,' explicitly forces us to acknowledge the importance of individual points of view. Told from the perspective of three different women - Denise, Sophie, and Isabel Vogelsang - who correspond roughly to the story's tripartite structure, 'White Dump' is without doubt one of Munro's most challenging stories, both structurally and thematically. With its emphasis on different points of view, the story recalls earlier pieces ('Accident,' 'Labor Day Dinner') in which Munro employs a somewhat similar method; in 'White Dump,' however, Munro's involvement with overlapping scenes and perspectives lends her fiction a new level of complexity. Her strategy in this piece seems to be an extension of the kind of circling round an event that takes place in The Progress of Love/ except that there - and this, to me, seems to be the point to the title piece - we are confined to the point of view of the first-person narrator, Phemie. Although her representations of the past may, at least initially, seem accurate, we are repeatedly urged to see Phemie's complicity, to recognize the extent to which she has constructed these representations according to her own needs and desires. In 'White Dump,' the problem of complicity is addressed only peripherally, but then the story, insofar as it refuses to offer a unified centre of consciousness, is concerned with precisely that: the periphery. I say this not because the narrative takes up the plight of marginalized peoples, but rather because it is engaged in an investigation of a series

'It's What I Believe' 159 of what might loosely be called colonizing (and decolonizing) moments. Part of the difficulty of the story stems from our inability to determine precisely whose story we are reading. By using overlapping points of view, Munro displaces the notion of a centre, thereby rendering unstable our reading of events in the narration. As Thomas Friedman points out in an unpublished paper, 'our perceptions, as readers, are being perpetually de-centered as the connections between the three generations of women are being broken and re-formed, deconstructed and reconstructed' (7). In addition to posing the problem about whose story we are reading, 'White Dump' also renders problematic our attempt to fix any kind of determinate meaning, to say what the story is about. Although much of Munro's recent writing might accurately be discussed in terms of its refusal to offer a readily definable plot or story-line, the plot of 'White Dump/ by comparison, seems even more elusive. Perhaps the best place to begin a discussion of the story is through an analysis of a number of its specific details. Although the narration begins in the present tense, with Denise as an older woman visiting her father, Laurence, and Magda (to whom he is now married), the story continually slips back into the past, in particular, into various recollections of Laurence's fortieth birthday, which, we discover, happened to fall on Bastille Day, 1969. The date, as anyone familiar with Munro's meticulousness would undoubtedly surmise, is far from incidental. Lest we forget, Laurence hastens to remind us that this was 'the year of the moon shot' (PL 278), an occasion which, although seemingly peripheral to the story's main sequence of events, acquires significance when read with other peripheral details in the text. Similarly, the fact that Laurence's birthday falls on Bastille Day is not as random as it may at first appear. The moon shot and Bastille Day - what do these two historic occasions have in common? Or, given the story's rejection of a unified subject position, perhaps the more appropriate question would be, what sets the two apart? While the Apollo 11 space flight and moon landing will undoubtedly go down in the history books as 'a triumph for American science and technology,' as the fulfilment of an 'ageold dream of mankind' (von Braun 357), another way of looking at the July 1969 landing - in fact at the entire American space program - would be to see it as part of a larger colonial enterprise. One only need recall the rhetoric that surrounded the Apollo mission to see the program in these terms. In his comments to the astronauts on

160 The Tumble of Reason board the historic flight, President Nixon said, 'Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man's world' (quoted in von Braun 360-1). His comment is telling because it reveals how the exploration of other worlds is itself a colonizing gesture. 'Man's' quest for knowledge - to know what is 'out there' not just in the world, but in the universe - is part of a larger desire to appropriate the unknown, to bring it into 'his' domain." Bastille Day, by contrast, is a national holiday in France commemorating the freeing of prisoners. According to popular thought, the storming of the fortress and state prison in the eastern district of Paris on 14 July 1789 was aimed at liberating the many prisoners who were being held captive within its walls. Traditionally seen as a symbol of the arbitrary power of the monarch to arrest and detain individuals without a trial, the Bastille, however, turned out to be housing only seven prisoners when it was captured. Furthermore, as David Thomson points out, the purpose of the attack was not so much to liberate prisoners as to capture more arms for revolutionary movements in Paris (696). The celebrated seizing of the state prison by a French mob, then, was partly motivated by a desire to replace the ancien regime with a new one. Although peripheral to the story's main actions, these two experiences, the moon landing and the storming of the Bastille, serve implicitly to define the trajectory of the narrative in 'White Dump/ Moments of colonization and liberation (or at least what seemed to be liberation, thus making the Bastille reference doubly significant) punctuate the story. To put it another way, the story is marked by the interplay of these two discrete but interconnected experiences: freedom and colonization. 'White Dump/ as I noted earlier, begins with Denise's point of view. Although her narration offers hints about what transpired on Laurence's fortieth birthday, we do not really get a sense of what happened until the picture is somewhat filled in later by other perspectives. Denise, we are told in the first section, 'runs a Women's Centre in Toronto. She gets beaten women into shelters, finds doctors and lawyers for them, goes after private and public money, makes speeches, holds meetings, deals with varied and sometimes dangerous mix-ups of life' (PL 276). From this we gather that she is committed to liberating oppressed and victimized individuals. But she herself, we begin to realize, is trapped: she is 'too mired in a past that everyone else has abandoned'

'It's What I Believe' 161 (PI 288). 'Unfair, unbidden thoughts' (PL 288) can strike her unexpectedly. What her section of the narrative suggests is that she cannot escape the guilt she feels for, in some sense, being responsible for the end of Laurence's marriage to her mother, Isabel. Thus when Magda asks Denise why her mother did not make the cake for Laurence on his birthday, Denise, in a 'voice gone cautionary and slightly regretful/ replies by saying that 'the oven wasn't working' (PL 279). The fact that Denise, unlike her mother, has regrets is significant because, although we have no way of realizing this until we complete the story, she is compelled to feel as though she set a whole series of unwanted events in motion by trying to surprise Laurence on his birthday. Denise's present to her father is a trip in a small plane, flown by a local pilot who subsequently - we discover only near the story's end - has an affair with Isabel. While Denise may not tell us as much in her section of the narrative, we surmise that she is burdened with the guilt of having, as it were, introduced this pilot into the picture. Thus her comment about being an 'awful stage manager' (PL 279) take on an additional meaning. While the immediate referent for her remark is the confusion that reigned during her attempts to surprise Laurence with the plane ride, when we return to it after a completed reading of the story we realize that the comment also carries a latent suggestion of Denise's own responsibility for initiating her mother's subsequent affair with the pilot. Denise, then, despite her commitment to liberation, reveals herself to be trapped by an inescapable link to her past. Or, to put it differently, she herself lacks the freedom which she seeks to bestow on the oppressed and the victimized. With this in mind, we can return to the passage about Denise's involvement with the Women's Centre in Toronto, and see that shades of a kind of (albeit ambiguous) colonizing impulse may already be evident in her attitudes and gestures. Although 'she gets beaten women into shelters, finds doctors and lawyers for them, goes after private and public money,' although she does, in other words, help other people, the description implies that she fails to help other people help themselves. Because the passage is worded in such a way as to emphasize Denise's actions (getting, finding, and going after), Munro calls our attention to the fact that attempts to liberate and help the oppressed can themselves hinge on colonizing impulses. As Linda Hutcheon has suggested in a recent article, 'the precise point at which interest and concern

162 The Tumble of Reason become imperializing appropriation is a hotly contested one' ('Circling' 153-4)The second section of 'White Dump/ told from the perspective of Sophie, Denise's grandmother (and Laurence's mother), more explicitly examines this problematic interplay between colonizing and liberating gestures. Isabel, in the story's first part, has informed us that 'Sophie is such a pacifist and Socialist' (PL 281), and Sophie's own section of the narrative, at least ostensibly, appears to bear this out. In response to 'The Property Owners' Newsletter [which] had proposed a ban on long hair and "weird forms of dress"' (PL 291), Sophie had written in opposition: 'She stated in her letter that this entire side of the lake had once been Vogelsang property, and that Augustus Vogelsang had left the comparative comfort of Bismarck's Germany to seek the freedom of the New World, in which all individuals might choose how they dressed, spoke, worshipped, and so on' (PL 291). Sophie's tolerance for long hair and weird forms of dress, like her refusal to lie about not being married - about having conceived Laurence out of wedlock - suggests her own liberal perspective: she too wants to promote 'freedom' as a central fact of life. Yet after her 'bad experience ... with the hippies' (PL 279) - whom she initially greeted 'in a cheerful, hailing tone' (PL 291) - Sophie is compelled 'to compose herself (PL 292) with scenes from the past which undermine her libera outlook. These scenes involve the Bryces, a family who owned the farm down the lake where Sophie, as a child, used to row to get milk. This is what Sophie recalls about the Bryce children: 'They were always pale children, in spite of the summer sun, and they bore many bites, scratches, scabs, mosquito bites, blackfly bites, fleabites, bloody and festering. That was because they were poor children. It was because they were poor that Rita's - or Annie's - eyes were crossed, and that one of the boys had such queerly uneven shoulders, and that they talked as they did, saying, "We-ez goen to towen," and "bowt," and other things that Sophie could hardly understand' (PL 293). The young Sophie is attracted to the Bryce children because they belong to a world so completely alien from the world that she knows and inhabits. She likes to talk to them, to 'ask them questions and tell them things' (PL 293). But we quickly discover that Sophie's fascination with these neighbours from across the lake is tied to her desire to make them the recipients of her good will:

'It's What I Believe' 163 She dreamed of giving them baths and clean clothes and putting ointment on their bites, and teaching them to talk properly. Sometimes she had a long, complicated daydream that was all about Christmas for the Bryce family. It included a redecoration and painting of their house, as well as a wholesale cleanup of their yard. Magic glasses appeared, to straighten crossed eyes. There were picture books and electric trains and dolls in taffeta dresses and armies of toy soldiers and heaps of marzipan fruits and animals. (Marzipan was Sophie's favorite treat. A conversation with the Bryces about candy had revealed that they did not know what it was.) (PL 294)

In wanting to help the Bryce children, Sophie is engaged in an act of colonization: she wants to convert the Other into the Same. The fact that she dreams of bestowing upon them her favourite treat, marzipan, reinforces the notion that even the activity of giving is not innocent or value-free. Something is expected in return (thus even the Christmas setting for the daydream is not incidental). What Sophie expects in return for her good will is precisely that these children will become more like her. Her charity is problematic because it conceals a covert complicity. When Sophie, 'in time/ does get her mother's permission to invite one of the Bryce children to her house, she has trouble understanding the girl's lack of preference: 'She wouldn't say what sort of sandwiches or cookies or drink she wanted, and wouldn't choose to go on the swing or the teeter-totter, or to play by the water or play with dolls. Her lack of preference seemed to have something superior about it, as if she was adhering to a code of manners Sophie couldn't know anything about. She accepted the treats she was given and allowed Sophie to push her in the swing, all with a steadfast lack of enthusiasm' (PL 294). What the young Sophie, here, perceives as the Bryce girl's lack of preference and enthusiasm, stems from her inability to conceive of a 'code of manners/ a system of signification, which is different from her own. The fact that she encodes and interprets the Bryce girl's hesitation in terms of superiority suggests that Sophie's own discourse is operating within this meta-level: to be in a position to give and offer is to maintain a position of superiority. By projecting her own sense of superiority onto the Bryce girl, Sophie sees her neighbour's lack of preference and enthusiasm as a rejection of the things that she has to offer.

164 The Tumble of Reason If we examine this passage from the perspective which is not presented to us - the perspective of the Bryce girl - Sophie's position of authority becomes even clearer. By failing to indicate a preference, the Bryce girl wants to remain within a system of signification where all the choices presented to her by Sophie are available. To not choose between different types of sandwiches, cookies, and drinks is to remain within a system of infinite possibility, a system which the Bryce girl has never known at her own home. Unlike Sophie, who, given her position of power, can always choose any one of these things, the Bryce girl is hesitant to make decisions because, for her, to choose would be to limit freedom and desire to a single object. Not knowing what else to do with this neighbour whom she cannot assimilate into her own system of signification, Sophie takes the Bryce girl down to the water and initiates 'a program of catching frogs. Sophie wanted to move a whole colony of frogs from the reedy little bay on one side of the dock, around to a pleasant shelf and cave in the rocks on the other side ... By the end of the day, the colony had been moved' (PL 294). While the new space 'on the other side' may be 'pleasant/ what we do not know is whether it will contain the same requirements for living and spawning as 'the reedy little bay.' The fact that Munro uses the term 'colony' hints at the problem involved in Sophie's project. Even if the moving of the frogs is done with the frogs' best interest at heart (at least in the mind of the colonizer), Sophie's efforts replicate the project of the colonizers who, at their own whims, come in and move native inhabitants to reserves. As with Denise's efforts to liberate oppressed women, here too we see a potential problem with the project of good will. The passage, more precisely, asks us to recognize the extent to which colonies are inevitably victims - even of good will. In addition, it asks us to think about the ways in which space and location are perceived in terms of ownership and control. The 'reedy little bay' and the 'pleasant shelf and cave in the rocks' are - like the sandbox and the dollhouse - spaces that this little girl owns. The very fact that Sophie, in the first place, can think about moving the frogs implies that she considers this a space over which she has power and control. These scenes from Sophie's childhood, scenes with which she composes herself, serve to undermine the liberal attitudes which she appears to espouse at various points in time in the story. Towards the end of her section of the narrative, Sophie, now a grandmother hovering in the air in a small plane, understands that the odd 'shrinking feeling'

'It's What I Believe' 165 she is experiencing at the moment is a feeling she had known when she was young: This feeling - Sophie was realizing - wasn't new to her. She'd had it as a child. A genuine shrinking feeling, one of the repertoire of frightening, marvellous feelings, or states, that are available to you when you're very young. Like the sense of hanging upside down, walking on the ceiling, stepping over heightened doorsills. An awful pleasure then, so why not now?' (PL 296). The answer Sophie provides to her own question again poses a challenge to her liberal attitudes: 'Because it was not her choice, now. She had a sure sense of changes in the offing, that were not her choice' (PL 297). Although Sophie may indeed be sensing an intimation of her own mortality here, the fact that she wants to avoid change may also indicate her resistance to accepting the possibility of new and unexpected avenues of experience. Unlike Lydia in 'Dulse' - who understands that what she desires is not the world she knows but rather the world she cannot predict - Sophie, despite her apparent openness and free-mindedness, reveals herself in this passage to be opting for the safe and predictable world in which she is already comfortably ensconced. Sameness and routine, thus, are valorized at the expense of difference and possibility. The third and final section of the narrative deals with Isabel's quest to liberate herself from the routine of her everyday life. When the section begins, Isabel is sitting 'in the shade of some scrawny poplar trees' thinking 'that this day, a pleasant family day, had been full of hurdles, which she had so far got over' (PL 297). The day, we realize, is Laurence's fortieth birthday, and while Laurence, Denise, and Sophie are flying above the Rideau Lake system in a small plane, Isabel takes the opportunity to evaluate the day's events. Already implicit in her description of the day as a series of hurdles to be got over is a sense that she is unhappy - or at least bored - with the way things are. A few pages into Isabel's section, we come across a passage which corroborates our suspicions about Isabel's problem: 'Not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well, good, now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?' (PL 303). Later, we are told that Isabel sees her husband as someone who 'had to be propped up, kept going, by constant and clever exertions on her part, by reassurance and good management; he depended on her to make him a man' (PL 304). Isabel, we gather, feels trapped within her marriage; she wants to be free from Laurence. Thus, when the pilot remarks that perhaps Isabel could come out for her own flight the next

166 The Tumble of Reason day, Isabel sees this as an opportunity for liberation. She translates her own desire into the context of Sophie's episode with the hippies earlier that morning: 'It was the idea of herself, not Sophie, walking naked out of the water toward those capering boys. (In her mind, she had already eliminated the girl.) That made her long for, and imagine, some leaping, radical invitation. She was kindled for it' (PL 305). The 'leaping, radical invitation' which she longs for and imagines presents itself as a fantasy involving the pilot: 'She imagined that they turned at the same time, they looked at each other, just as in some romantic movie, operatic story, high-school fantasy. They turned at the same time, they looked at each other, they exchanged a promise that was no less real though they might never meet again. And the promise hit her like lightning, split her like lightning, though she moved on smoothly, intact' (PI 305). Although 'in the years ahead' Isabel 'wouldn't be so astonished at the way the skin of the moment can break open' (PL 307-8), here she is astonished. The possibility which a relationship with the pilot offers her constitutes precisely what she feels has been missing in her relationship with Laurence. Many years afterward, when discussing her affairs with 'her grownup daughter Denise/ Isabel explains, '"I think the best part is always right at the beginning"' (PL 308). Then, in a manner reminiscent of many of the narrators in The Moons of Jupiter, she corrects herself: '"Perhaps even before the beginning," she said. "Perhaps just when it flashes on you what's possible. That may be the best"' (PL 308). The comment recalls a memory of Isabel's which has been presented to us a few pages earlier, a memory from which the title of the story is taken. On the night of Laurence's fortieth birthday, after the plane ride and the tantalizingly brief glimpse of a possible relationship with the pilot, Isabel remembers a childhood scene of promise, which now, as one critic has suggested, 'serves as a projection of her excitement at what may happen in the future, as an adult' (Friedman 13): '"You know we used to have the White Dump? At the school I went to - it was behind a biscuit factory, the playground backed on to the factory property. Every now and then, they'd sweep up these quantities of vanilla icing and nuts and hardened marshmallow globs and they'd bring it in barrels and dump it back there and it would shine. It would shine like a pure white mountain. Over at the school, somebody would see it and yell, 'White Dump!' and after school we'd all climb over the fence or run around it. We'd all be over there, scrabbling away

'It's What I Believe' 167 at that enormous pile of white candy"' (PL 306). As a child, Isabel perceived this dump not as a dump, but rather as 'white and shiny. It was like a kid's dream - the most wonderful promising thing you could ever see' (PL 306). Even as an adult, looking back on this scene, she remembers her sense of intoxication; she is captured once again by the illusion of surfaces. The passage urges us to recognize the extent to which Isabel, from her childhood, has willingly suspended her disbelief. In looking for freedom and possibility, she has repeatedly been persuaded by surfaces. By interpreting the white dump within a kind of transcendental structure of imagery (candy as promise), Isabel diverts our attention from the fact that - as the word 'dump' suggests - this 'pure white mountain' is made up of somebody's garbage. The force of Isabel's white dump recollection resides in the lesson which she fails to draw from it. When she comes to interpret other things in her life - the encounter with the pilot, for instance - she uses the same paradigm that she used as a child to interpret the white dump. Thus her initially romanticized view turns into a 'sordid' affair (PL 308), an affair which, furthermore, results in the end of her own marriage. What she fails to learn is explicitly introduced to us in the form of an omniscient commentary that comes prior to her recollection of the childhood memory. Immediately after Isabel, in her brief encounter with the pilot, experiences a sense of promise which 'split[s] her like lightning/ we are told that 'it isn't like lightning, it isn't a blow from outside. We only pretend that it is' (PL 305). This intrusive commentary from a first-person plural, omniscient 'we' - a 'we' which, in Gerald Prince's terminology, constitutes a 'sign of the "I"' because it refers to a narrating self (8-9) - undermines the sense of freedom and promise which Isabel thinks she is embracing. The liberation Isabel thinks she attains by having an affair with the pilot, accordingly, turns out to be illusory. In fact, far from liberating herself, she ends up temporarily appropriating someone else's place and position. This, it seems to me, is where the scene with the catering woman - also the pilot's wife - crying in the dining room fits in. 'The spurts of sound' (PL 288) that Denise hears from this woman are a response to a kind of colonizing act, to a moving in and taking over which can occur only at someone else's expense. Along with the allusion to the storming of the Bastille, therefore, various moments in the text alert us to the possibility that projects which appear to promote the goal of freedom can themselves be implicated in acts of appropriation and domination. Freedom, we may

168 The Tumble of Reason thus infer, is a kind of myth. But while the story thematically leads us to recognize the illusoriness of freedom, its structural configuration seems to take us in another direction. If, as I have suggested, Munro's de-centring strategy in 'White Dump' - her refusal to offer a unified centre of consciousness - is a kind of extension of her desire to examine the implications of complicity, then structurally the story seems to be getting at the fact that its writer too wants to break the shackles of an authoritarian discourse. While Munro clearly is not an overtly political (or post-colonial) writer, she remains engaged in an investigation of the relationship between form and ideology which leads us to suspect that 'White Dump' is, at least structurally, about the possibility of freedom. Like many of the stories in Munro's earlier volumes, the stories in The Progress of Love render unstable what we think we know about Munro's fictional worlds. In explicitly declaring that we cannot take everything we read for granted, these stories - to return to the terminology I used in the previous chapter - clearly contribute to Munro's evolving poetics of surprise. What is new to these stories, however, is a more fully developed recognition of the impossibility of an unmediated access to reality. Thus, accounts which wear the mask of truth, which pose as direct representations of events, reveal themselves to be constructed memories or mediated narratives. Although much emphasis is placed on moments of revelation or awareness, the pieces collected in this volume ultimately leave us thinking not so much about the way 'the skin of the moment' appears to break open as about the way in which that breaking open shows the inseparability of language and discourse.

7

(Re)construction and/as Deception in Friend of My Youth

It is sometimes said that the aim of the historian is to explain the past by 'finding/ 'identifying/ or 'uncovering' the 'stories' that lie buried in chronicles; and that the difference between 'history' and 'fiction' resides in the fact that the historian 'finds' his stories, whereas the fiction writer 'invents' his. This conception of the historian's task, however, obscures the extent to which 'invention' also plays a part in the historian's operations. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

In Friend of My "Youth, perhaps more so than in her previous collections, Alice Munro presents us with characters who, in various ways, insist on the value of what might be called a discourse of dissimulation. While patterns of deception have provided Munro with points of departure for stories in her earlier volumes1 - most notably in The Progress of Love - here these patterns re-emerge as part of an intricate network of disjunctions and resistances which subtly interrogate the admittedly complex relationship between autobiography, history, and story. Of the ten pieces collected in Friend of My Youth, only two are narrated in the first person: the title story and 'Meneseteung.' In both these stories, the first-person narrators - different first-person narrators are engaged in an attempt to reconstruct a past on the basis of, among other things, photographs, newspaper clippings, and stories. What is particularly interesting in these two pieces - which are, in some sense, structural models for the volume as a whole - is the position of the narrator in the investigative enterprise. Although Almeda Roth, the nineteenth-century poetess whose story forms the main focus in 'Meneseteung/ is a fictional creation, history

170 The Tumble of Reason is nevertheless encoded in this story, both as part of its thematic framework and as the very activity of attempting to figure a past - even if not an actual one - in language. 'Meneseteung' consists of two parallel narratives of artistic creation. It tells of two artists: Almeda Roth, the ostensible subject of the story, and the narrator, who frames Almeda's story within the context of her own first-person narration. From the outset, we recognize the extent to which the narrator's strategy in reconstructing Almeda's past involves a deliberate alternation between modes of presentation, between what might loosely be called description and ecriture: 'Offerings the book is called. Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover. The author's full name underneath: Almeda Joynt Roth. The local paper, the Vidette, referred to her as "our poetess." There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt, both for her calling and for her sex - or for their predictable conjuncture. In the front of the book is a photograph, with the photographer's name in one corner, and the date: 1865. The book was published later, in 1873' (FOMY 50). An initial reading of this passage, with its emphasis on names, dates, and other factual details, would seem to attest to the narrator's predilection for description, for an objective, unadorned account of the facts. This description might even seem to offer a kind of substantiation for Hayden White's assertion that 'most historians' concern with language extends only to the effort to speak plainly, to avoid florid figures of speech, to assure that the persona of the author appears nowhere identifiable in the text' (Tropics 127). Despite the descriptive and factual emphasis in this opening passage, however, Munro, even here, is signalling the subjective and fictional matrices which enable the narrator to engage in a reconstruction of Almeda Roth's past. The sentence describing the mixture of respect and contempt which the Vidette's designation for Almeda 'seems' to bespeak is a moment of ecriture, a moment which corresponds to a series of parallel disjunctions and divisions that are played out through the course of the entire volume. Already evident in this passage, in other words, is someone's interpretation: far from appearing nowhere in the text, the writer's own persona is intermittently permitted to prevail. That someone is reconstructing Almeda's past, in fact, becomes explicit in the second paragraph of the story: The poetess has a long face; a rather long nose; full, sombre dark eyes, which seem ready to roll down her cheeks like giant tears; a lot of dark hair gathered

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around her face in droopy rolls and curtains. A streak of gray hair plain to see, although she is, in this picture, only twenty-five ... She also wears a hat, which might be made of velvet, in a dark color to match [her] dress. It's the untrimmed, shapeless hat, something like a soft beret, that makes me see artistic intentions, or at least a shy and stubborn eccentricity, in this young woman, whose long neck and forward-inclining head indicate as well that she is tall and slender and somewhat awkward. (FOMY 50-1)

Again, this paragraph seems predominantly descriptive, but its objective quality is somewhat undermined by an implicit rhetoric of personal involvement and interpretation. Almeda's hat, we are told, 'might be made of velvet/ The uncertainty here reminds us that we are dealing with a speculative reconstruction. Moreover, Almeda's history, in this passage, is openly interrupted by a first-person narrator's involvement not only in explaining, but also in constituting and interpreting that history: 'It's the untrimmed, shapeless hat ... that makes me see artistic intentions.' As the first overt indication that Almeda's story is being framed by a first-person narrator, this 'me' is somewhat startling, for it forces us to recognize the extent to which this account of Almeda's life is based on interpretative and inferential strategies. In the second section of the story - 'Meneseteung' is divided into six parts - Munro continues to signal the fact that Almeda's story is being recreated as part of an autobiographical act in the present. Intermittent allusions to the gap between a past, when Almeda lived at the corner of Pearl and Dufferin streets in 'the house her father built for his family/ and the present - The house is there today; the manager of the liquor store lives in it' (FOMY 53) - serve to call our attention to the story's dual focus, and, by extension, enable us to recognize how much the narrator's own subjectivity is encoded in this account of Almeda's life. Despite its concern with a figure from the past, in other words, the story asks us to realize that what we are reading has been written after the fact. Although the first-person narrator does not explicitly enter into the narrative at this particular moment, the contrast between things as they are now and things as they were in Almeda's day allows us to infer the presence of an interpreting subject. The first paragraph in this second section ends with a description of the town in which Almeda lived. Following the description, the narrator does step into the story, alerting us to the source for this information: 'I read about that life in the Vidette' (FOMY 54). Far from

172 The Tumble of Reason trafficking in the realm of objective facts, however, the Vidette, as we later learn, is 'full of shy jokes, innuendo, plain accusation that no newspaper would get away with today' (FOMY 57). In addition to providing us with yet another example of some of the changes between then and now, this comment tacitly confirms Hayden White's insistenc that 'there is no value-neutral mode of emplotment, explanation, or even description of any field of events ... the very use of language itself implies or entails a specific posture before the world which is critical, ideological, or more generally political: not only all interpretation, but also all language is politically contaminated' (Tropics 129). Just as the local paper has constructed rather than simply reported a history, so the narrator too is engaged in constituting another's past on the basis of speculatory procedures. What is interesting here is that by the end of the story's second section, there seems to be a shift, away from this awareness that events do not simply narrate themselves, to the deployment of a mode of presentation which effaces the role of the teller, or, in Benveniste's terms, away from discourse towards history. In the following passage, for instance, the absence of an explicit narrating perspective fosters the impression of valueneutral information: 'Almeda sleeps at the back of the house. She keeps to the same bedroom she once shared with her sister Catherine - she would not think of moving to the large front bedroom, where her mother used to lie in bed all day, and which was later the solitary domain of her father. From her window she can see the sun rising, the swamp mist filling with light, the bulky, nearest trees floating against that mist and the trees behind turning transparent' (FOMY 56). Leading us to forget that Almeda's history has already revealed itself to be a function of the narrator's frame of reference, this passage reorients us by providing a seemingly unadorned, authentic description of a set of events. By using the present tense, Munro may be emphasizing habitual actions in Almeda's life, but she simultaneously effaces the story's interaction between the present time-frame of the narrator and Almeda's past. Thus when Munro uses the word 'now' at the beginning of the story's third section, the term is not coextensive with the level of temporality with which it previously corresponded. In section two, for instance, we are told that 'the population [in Almeda's town] was younger than it is now' (FOMY 54; emphasis added) and the word 'now' here refers to what might be called the discursive site of the narrating present. When section three commences, however, 'now' takes on a very different frame of ref-

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erence, indicating not the narrator's domain, but rather the nineteenthcentury time-frame associated with the protagonist: 'One of the strangers who arrived at the railway station a few years ago was Jarvis Poulter, who now occupies the next house to Almeda Roth's' (FOMY 56-7; emphasis added). While Munro will, through the course of the story, continue to shift between these moments of ecriture (narrator's domain) and description (Almeda's domain), the effect of this particular shift is to move away from an emphasis on the narrator's imaginative reconstruction of Almeda's life to an account of that life itself. The gradual disappearance of the story's first-person narrator suggests, at least structurally and within the logic of the fiction, an attempt, on the part of this narrator, to present as history that which is autobiography, or, to put it another way, to disguise an interpretation of the past with a seemingly unadorned, objective, and impersonal description. Despite the gradual effacement of the first-person narrator, however, the story cannot wholly suppress the site of its production; it repeatedly threatens, in various ways, to break out of its mode of description into both a critique of that mode and an acknowledgment of the narrator's artistic and interpretative role in the construction of Almeda Roth's (hi)story. Consider, for example, this description of Jarvis Poulter, Almeda's would-be suitor: 'This is a decent citizen, prosperous: a tall - slightly paunchy? - man in a dark suit with polished boots. A beard? Black hair streaked with gray. A severe and self-possessed air, and a large pale wart among the bushy hairs of one eyebrow? People talk about a young, pretty, beloved wife, dead in childbirth or some horrible accident, like a house fire or a railway disaster. There is no ground for this, but it adds interest. All he has told them is that his wife is dead' (FOMY 57). This passage, also taken from the story's third section, is followed by a statement of description: 'He came to this part of the country looking for oil' (FOMY 57). What is interesting, though, is the narrator's willingness to relinquish her hold on the facts and to signal the extent to which she is uncertain about the accuracy of her account. The question marks which follow the description of various features associated with Jarvis implicitly signal a return of the first-person narrator.2 In effect, these question marks - marks of uncertainty - serve as reminders of a narrator who cannot remain detached or absent. They force us to recognize the extent to which 'Meneseteung' is not simply the tale of a nineteenthcentury poetess and her potential, but thwarted, relationship with an

174 The Tumble of Reason enterprising neighbour, but also a story about the impossibility of erasing the site of production in the writing of history. Just as the rumours surrounding Jarvis's dead wife have been circulated less in the name of accuracy than in the name of 'interest' - as though Jarvis himself were some kind of commodity in which the townspeople had a share of ownership and control - so the narrator, as the question marks in this passage suggest, is engaged in an activity which subjects Almeda Roth to a process of creative refurbishing. The final section of 'Meneseteung' marks the return of the firstperson narrator and thus makes explicit the points of intersection between history, autobiography, and story. After italicized passages describing the Vidette's account of Almeda's death in 1903 and Jarvis's death in 1904, the narrator reveals the extent to which Almeda's history (with which we have just been presented) has been subjectively constructed. 'I looked for Almeda Roth in the graveyard' (FOMY 72; emphasis added), the narrator explains. The return of the T here at the end of the story alerts us to the fact that this is the narrator's tale as much as it is Almeda's. More significantly, the story ends on a note of uncertainty: 'I may have got it wrong. I don't know if she [Almeda] ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don't know if she ever made grape jelly' (FOMY 73). This is, of course, a startling admission in light of what has preceded. Recalling The Ottawa Valley,' the narrator's confession about possibly having 'got it wrong' works to undermine the presentation of Almeda Roth and to call into question some of the central events in the story. The ending of the story thus reaffirms Munro's involvement with a kind of autobiographical art, at least insofar as she invites us to recognize the subjective nature of historical inquiry. In other words, I am not making the claim here that Munro is writing autobiographical fiction. Instead, I am attempting to explore the extent to which Munro's narrators, in telling stories, are fostering a deceptive objectivity. Despite repeatedly concentrating on figures and events from the past, these narrators ultimately cannot let the facts speak for themselves. In Barbara Herrnstein Smith's words, 'a subject's experience of an entity is always a function of his or her personal economy' (31). By ending 'Meneseteung' with an open acknowledgment of the narrator's personal economy, Munro turns what might, after the fashion of 'Walker Brothers Cowboy,' be a story about an unfulfilled relationship into a meditation on the intricacy of exchange between history and autobiography.

(Re)construction and/as Deception 175 Like 'Meneseteung/ the title story in this volume suggests Munro's evolving interest in what, in chapter six, I called patterns of complicity. In 'Friend of My Youth/ many familiar patterns and situations return: the figure of the mother afflicted with Parkinson's disease; the Ottawa Valley setting; a fascination with unsent, unfinished letters. The main focus of the story is the narrator's attempt to reconstruct part of her mother's past, to retell the tale that she has heard from her mother: the tale of Flora, Ellie, and Robert, with whom her mother had boarded during her stint as a teacher in a one-room school in the Ottawa Valley. In a manner reminiscent of sections of 'Meneseteung' and, more generally, of many of Munro's other stories, the narrator's reconstruction of her mother's past is marked by expressions of uncertainty. We are, for instance, told that 'the story of Flora and Ellie and Robert - or all that people knew of it - had been told in various versions' (FOMY 8). Qualifying phrases proliferate as the narrative continues: 'nobody knew how it was' (FOMY 9), 'it would have been' (FOMY 10), 'no doubt' (FOMY 14). Despite these sorts of qualifications, however, the narrator 'believed that [she] could see into [her] mother's mind' (FOMY 19). What seeing into her mother's mind seems to indicate, here, is an ability to put in what she feels her mother has left out: 'I had my own ideas about Flora's story/ she tells us (FOMY 20).3 The opening sequence of the story anticipates this act of substitution, of daughter-narrator retelling and reinscribing a story told to her by her mother. 'I used to dream about my mother/ the story begins, 'and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same' (FOMY 3). The surprise to which the narrator refers is the change that she imagines in her mother's condition: 'She would be looking quite well - not exactly youthful, not entirely untouched by the paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better than I remembered that I would be astonished' (FOMY 3). From the outset, then, we see that the options and possibilities ascribed to the mother in this sequence are available only through the agency of dream, are only, in other words, part of the narrator's memorialization of her mother's life. Engaged in an attempt to comprehend the meaning of events in the past from a perspective in the present, this narrator - like narrators in other stories by Munro - openly acknowledges that she is using the imaginative mode as a way of compensating for deficiencies in the past: 'I recovered then what in waking life I had lost' (FOMY 4).

176 The Tumble of Reason In addition to declaring the narrator's involvement in reconstructing her mother's past, this opening sequence also works to problematize our understanding of the ontological status of an encounter which is initially presented as part of a dream. The narrator allows her story to unfold on the basis of a distinction between, on the one hand, a dream state, an imaginative playing out of the way things might be rather than the way things are or were, and, on the other hand, a waking state which corresponds, within the logic of the fiction, to a world which presents itself as real and true. Before long, however, the line of demarcation between these alternative modes of experience is somewhat obscured as the narrator refers to a moment in her dream as 'reality': 'How could I have forgotten this, I would think in the dream - the casual humour she had, not ironic but merry, the lightness and confidence? I would say that I was sorry I hadn't been to see her in such a long time - meaning not that I felt guilty but that I was sorry I had kept a bugbear in my mind, instead of this reality' (FOMY 4). Although the reference to reality occurs within the context of the dream itself, it nevertheless serves as an indication of the story's concern with the collapse of the distinction between real and invented worlds. Munro thus begins 'Friend of My Youth' by elaborating a structure which reflects the narrator's complicity, and which, furthermore, undermines that narrator's ability to keep separate the domain of imaginative inquiry and the realm of experience. The narrating 'I/ prominent at the outset of the story, never completely disappears; phrases like 'my mother' serve to remind us that this story is, in fact, presented from the perspective of a first-person narrator. But as the tale progresses, that which is being narrated - the story of Ellie, Robert, and the twice-betrayed Flora - is told in such a manner that we tend to see it as though from the perspective not of the narrator but of someone who actually witnessed and was involved in these events. While much of the narrative is focalized in the mother - 'Returning in the fall of her second year, my mother learned what was the matter with Ellie' (FOMY 8) - the description of Robert's engagement to Flora and his subsequent marriage to Ellie, Flora's sister, fosters the impression that these events are being narrated from a more neutral perspective: the story, in short, appears, at times, to narrate itself. The scarcity of personal pronouns in this description, or, more precisely, the scarcity of references either to the narrating T or to 'my mother/ is crucial in terms of the orientation the narrator seeks for her story. Like the

(Re)construction and/as Deception 177 narrator in 'Meneseteung/ this narrator, at various points in the narrative, seeks to approximate an objectivity by annihilating awareness of the narrating self, or, to put it slightly differently, by disappearing into a realm of implicit meaning. As the intermittent allusions to the narrating T remind us, however, such an orientation cannot be sustained through the course of the story. Scattered throughout the narrative, as we have seen, are expressions of uncertainty which emphasize, among other things, the various versions, the possible alternative readings of Flora's story. More suggestively, when the narrator confesses that she 'had [her] own ideas about Flora's story' (FOMY 20), the statement constitutes a recognition by the narrator that she has been elaborating a story which perhaps tells more about her than it does about Flora. As in 'Meneseteung,' then, the narrator here is forced to abandon her concern with historical exactitude in favour of what might be called the autobiographical imperative. The narrator's own 'ideas' result in an interpretation of Flora radically opposed to the interpretation offered by the narrator's mother: 'What made Flora evil, in my story, was just what made her admirable, in my mother's - her turning away from sex' (FOMY 22). While her mother had grown up seeking protection from sex, the narrator 'grew up in horror of that very protection' (FOMY 22). For the narrator, the story of Flora as it is reconstructed and interpreted by the narrator's mother may really be a story not about Flora at all; rather it seems to be a story about the narrator's own relationship with her mother, especially as that relationship is played out in terms of attitudes towards sex and sexuality. The way in which the story of Flora gets told reveals an attitude or a position, and it is clear that the narrator and her mother have very different attitudes. In this context, it is interesting to note that the same proposition - Flora's turning away from sex - thus comes to have very different meanings depending on who is doing the interpreting. Here, once again, we see Munro's fascination with patterns of complicity, her awareness of the way in which meanings are a function of what one wants to believe. Even the notion of holding 'progressive' ideas turns out to be discursively produced. 'The odd thing,' the narrator tells us, 'is that my mother's ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in my time' (FOMY 22-3). Her comment alerts us to the fact that, in Michel Pecheux's terms, 'words, expressions, propositions, etc. change their meaning according to the positions held by

178 The Tumble of Reason those who use them' (in). To use the terminology I used earlier, Munro renders problematic the very idea of an objective account of things by showing us that the subject is always implicated in any attempt to posit meaning. Towards the end of the story, the narrator explicitly reinscribes Flora's story within the context of her own relationship with her mother. Having abandoned her mother's version of Flora's story, she imagines going into a store and finding Flora as she would be now: 'Suppose I had gone into a store ... I would have wanted to tell [Flora] that I knew, I knew her story, though we had never met. I imagine myself trying to tell her. (This is a dream now, I understand it as a dream.) I imagine her listening, with a pleasant composure. But she shakes her head ... She is not surprised that I am telling her this, but she is weary of it, of me and my idea of her, my information, my notion that I can know anything about her' (FOMY 25-6). The weariness which here, in the dream, is ascribed to Flora may serve as a critique of the narrator's own reinscription of Flora's story, an implicit acknowledgment, on the part of the narrator, of the limits of her own representational powers. As she moves towards a recognition that her version of Flora's life story may be as suspect as her mother's, the narrator suddenly realizes that 'it's my mother I'm thinking of, my mother as she was in those dreams, saying, It's nothing, just this little tremor' (FOMY 26). There are, no doubt, various ways of interpreting this equation, this point of intersection between the story of Flora and the story of the narrator's mother. Just as Flora's weariness may indicate the narrator's own willingness to acknowledge and identify the imaginative element in her own discourse, to gesture towards a critique of her own meta-story, the identification of the narrator's mother with Flora might serve a corollary function: like Flora, the narrator's mother may also be uncertain about the narrator's versions of things. Suspicion thus becomes a multi-faceted element in the story: the narrator remains unconvinced by Flora's story/ her mother's reconstruction of that story, and, finally, her own attempt to retell the story of Flora as told by her mother; Flora, in the narrator's dream, questions the narrator's knowledge, perhaps recalling Flora's actual indictment of the narrator's mother's 'unjustified conclusions' (FOMY 19); and, finally, the mother too - at least insofar as she is equated with Flora - may well be weary of her daughter's ability to see into her mind. In addition to exploring events from the past, 'Friend of My Youth'

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and 'Meneseteung' interrogate the ways in which a reconstruction of the past takes place within the context of an autobiographical act. The other stories in the collection are told from a third-person point of view, but the interest in reconstructing the past remains. We see this, for instance, in 'Five Points' as Neil reconstructs for Brenda the story of Maria, distorting the history of his own involvement in that story. In 'Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass,' Hazel tries to reconstruct Jack's past, to understand or find out more about his affair with Antoinette, the hotel-keeper's daughter. The people Jack was supposed to have known during his wartime stay in Scotland, however, claim not to remember or to have known him. Trying to reconstruct her dead husband's past, Hazel can turn up only absences. The question of whether Antoinette is lying, is being deliberately deceptive when she says she did not know Jack, provides a point of connection not only with the first-person stories, but also with stories like 'Five Points,' 'Oranges and Apples/ 'Differently,' 'Wigtime,' and 'Goodness and Mercy' stories, that is, which are awash with various forms of lies, deceptions, distortions, and even disguises. Here, in 'Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass/ the 'blatant, smooth-faced, deliberate' deception attributed to Antoinette (FOMY 85) functions as a stumbling-block, a discursive strategy which renders impossible any kind of wholesale recovery of the past. As it is suggested through the play of narration in the two firstperson stories, the structural interest in patterns of deception, in the production of a deceptive objectivity, thus finds a parallel in the thirdperson stories which formulate and contain deception as part of their thematics. 'Pictures of the Ice' provides an exemplary instance. Many of the now-familiar motifs and strategies reappear here: an emphasis on what characters could have or should have said or done, but did not say or do; an interest in photographs (recalling, for instance, the 'Epilogue' in Lives of Girls and Women); shifts in points of view and time; a fascination with the impulse to fictionalize, to turn one's life into a kind of story. 'Pictures of the Ice/ moreover, is explicitly about surprise, an issue which, as I suggested in chapter five, has gained prominence in Munro's oeuvre in recent years. What is interesting, however, is that the surprise - or at least one of them, for the story has many - seems to be announced at the story's very outset: 'Three weeks before he died - drowned in a boating accident in a lake whose name nobody had heard him mention - Austin Cobbett stood deep in the clasp of a three-way mirror in Crawford's Men's Wear' (FOMY 137).

i8o The Tumble of Reason On the basis of this introductory information, we expect, as the story proceeds, to be told more about Austin's death. Upon a completed reading, though, we discover that the story's surprise is not what we first took it to be - Austin's death - but rather the fact that Austin does not, as both characters in the text and readers are invited to believe, retire to Hawaii and remarry. Like the two first-person stories, which involve alternating and sometimes overlapping modes of presentation (an interplay between description and ecriture, or put slightly differently, between a confidence of telling and a discourse of suspicion), 'Pictures of the Ice' explores roughly similar terrain. Early on we are told that 'Austin was going to be married in Hawaii, where his wife, his wife-to-be, lived' (FOMY 138). Austin's future, his retirement and marriage in Hawaii, is presented as fact, as 'real life/ as what is going to happen. A little later in the story, Austin shows Karin - a woman who 'spends a lot of her time over at Austin's, cleaning out his house, getting everything ready for his departure to Hawaii' - a photograph of 'the woman he is to marry' (FOMY 139). He also shows her a postcard picture of the town where Sheila, his wife-tobe, lives: 'The town where he will live in Hawaii ... Where Austin Cobbett would walk with friendly Sheila' (FOMY 140). The conditional construction, 'would walk,' seems to me to warrant some consideration here. While its use in this passage fosters the impression, once again, of what will happen and thus serves descriptively to suggest correspondence with some extra-textual domain of reference, it is also worth noting that Munro does not use the future tense at this point in her narrative. Given that 'would' expresses possibility rather than certainty, Munro, by choosing 'would' rather than 'will' at this particular juncture, seems already, if only subtly, to be interrogating the apparent accuracy of these descriptive statements. As if to encourage us in this kind of questioning, to be suspicious of everything we are reading, Munro, in one of her next descriptions of Austin's plans to go to Hawaii, employs a more explicitly suppositional phrase: 'On Monday of Austin's last week - he was supposed to fly to Hawaii on Saturday - the first big storm of the winter began' (FOMY 149; emphasis added). The story's shift in language from the future tense to a conditional expression to an overtly suppositional phrase may already indicate one of the ways in which Munro is inviting us to question a series of descriptive assertions which, at least at first glance, appear to present themselves as facts. Indeed, throughout the story, Munro's use of language signals to us that events as they are described should not simply be taken at

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face value. Austin, in particular, is presented as someone whose very habits of speech are variously questioned and problematized: what he says is not always what he means. By emphasizing what Austin could have or should have said or done, Munro warns us that what actually gets said does not necessarily reflect what Austin means. On a few occasions, Austin, 'instead of saying' what he is thinking, comes out with something else entirely (FOMY 138). The disparity between his spoken words (which foster the illusion of meaning as being present in language at the moment of utterance) and absent or potential meanings (things which are not said but which could or should be said) once again serves to remind us that we cannot take the events in this story for granted. Even before we learn, near the end of the story, about Austin's deception, Munro is alerting us to the possibility that what Austin is saying needs to be questioned because he is not saying what he means. What presents itself as 'real life,' we discover by the end of the story, turns out to be a kind of ecriture. Like the title story, 'Pictures of the Ice' concerns itself with a certain fascination with the impulse to fictionalize, to turn one's life into a story. The surprise here is not that Austin never makes it to Hawaii, but that he never planned to go there in the first place. Austin's participation in an act of fictionmaking serves to mask his grief (we are told that his wife died 'about a year ago' [FOMY 137]); the rhetoric of a new life in Hawaii conceals his loneliness, a loneliness which we are never permitted to see, but which may well be an absent meaning on which the story turns. The story, in fact, is riddled with absent meanings. Karin, for instance, is convinced that Austin is there in the photographs he took of the ice formations, but he is there as a blank, as an absence. As Lorraine York points out in The Other Side of Dailiness, photographs offer a point of departure for many, like Munro, who wish to question the notion of objectivity, to query what E.H. Gombrich calls the 'innocent eye' (9). It might be tempting to see a link here between the so-called 'innocent eye' of the photographer and the narrating T of some of Munro's stories. Specifically, I am thinking of stories such as 'Friend of My Youth' and 'Meneseteung,' which demonstrate the impossibility of objective or 'innocent' representation: all representation, as Munro shows us, is motivated, conditioned by particular subject-positions, and determined by various flows of desire. Munro's fiction, as I have emphasized throughout this study, is particularly compelling for the way in which it teaches us to mistrust, to be suspicious of, anything which uncritically presents itself as true

i82 The Tumble of Reason or objective. Munro similarly wants us to question any image, such as a photograph, which purports to capture forever, or fix, something in a kind of perfect state. As Karin discovers when she looks at the pictures of the ice which Austin has left behind, photographs do not simply provide an accurate representation of life: 'So she has ended up with a whole roll of pictures of the ice, along with all those other things that she had her mind set on. The pictures show the sky bluer than it ever was, but the weaving in the fence, the shape of the organ pipes are not so plain to see' (FOMY 155). Photographs too can be duplicitous: like narrative reconstructions of the past, photos, for Munro, offer yet another form of deceptive objectivity. One of the reasons photographs may traditionally have been seen as forms of objective representation is that they usually allow the photographer to conceal the site of production: photographers rarely appear in their own pictures. Just as the first-person stories in this collection illustrate the impossibility of erasing one's own subjectivity from any attempt to posit meaning, here too, in 'Pictures of the Ice/ objectivity is problematized, only now it is the innocent 'eye' of the photographer rather than the innocent T of the narrator which is being called into question. Looking at the pictures of the ice, Karin is initially convinced that 'there needs to be a human figure ... to show the size that things were. She should have taken the camera and captured Austin - who has vanished' (FOMY 155). Gradually, however, Karin begins to see that Austin is in these pictures after all; she understands that his subjectivity is encoded in them: 'He's a blank in them, but bright' (FOMY 155). In short, Karin understands that she has been deceived by these photographs, deceived into thinking that Austin was not in them. Similarly, at least until she takes the phone call from Shaft Lake, she is deceived by Austin's story. Like the others, she believes and accepts as fact Austin's assertions about retiring and remarrying in Hawaii. When she does take that phone call, when she discovers that Austin has been lying all along, she decides to help him perpetuate his fiction. By not letting on that she knows that he is lying, she is in a way deceiving him. But near the end of the story, looking at the photographs of the ice, Karin seems pleased when she entertains the possibility that Austin may have one-upped her in this game of deception: 'She thinks now that he knew. Right at the last he knew that she'd caught on to him, understood what he was up to' (FOMY 155). The story ends with Karin mailing these photographs to her ex-

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husband, Brent - who was responsible for Austin being 'shifted out' (FOMY 142) of the halfway house that he started when he was a minister - and to Austin's two children. The fact that 'she doesn't write anything on the pictures or enclose any note' (FOMY 155) seems to suggest that in mailing these photos, Karin does not even say who is sending them.5 Like the first-person narrators in what I have called the two model stories, Karin wants to efface her own subjectivity. In this she is a little like Austin, who appears not to be in the pictures he took and who disappears without telling anyone where he has gone. At the end of the story we are left with the impression that Karin is planning her own disappearing act: 'She won't be bothering any of these people again. The fact is, it won't be long till she'll be leaving here' (FOMY 155). In sending the photos and in planning to disappear, Karin, it seems to me, is engaged in duplicating Austin's own strategies of deception. In both instances, the art of deception becomes a way of masking grief; it offers some form of consolation for a loss. As Austin's fiction-making enables him to cope with the loss of his wife, so Karin's deception may be her way of coping with Austin's death. But Karin, we are also told, is sending these pictures because she wants to make certain people 'wonder' (FOMY 155). In refusing to provide Austin's family or friends with any kind of firm or determinate knowledge (the story does not tell us whether anyone other than Karin ever learns about Austin's death), Karin manifests what Linda Hutcheon, writing in another context, has called the 'postmodern urge to trouble, to question, to make problematic and provisional' (The Ca nadian Postmodern 2). What Karin is doing here, in other words, is refusing to offer closure. In wanting to make people wonder, she is refusing to close off Austin's story. Such resistance to closure becomes a symbolic form of resistance to death. One of the story's central concerns - forms of consolation for a loss - in fact finds a rough parallel in the way in which Munro, with her deliberate juxtaposition of time sequences, her distortion of linearity and order, writes 'Pictures of the Ice/6 The story's thematic insistence on resistance fits in neatly with Munro's own disruptive style of storytelling: she refuses to tell this story in a conventional way. In fact, Munro begins, as it were, at the end, with Austin's death. Her deliberate manipulation of chronology at the story's very outset may be proleptic in that it announces from moment one the story's refusal to offer traditional closure, its resistance to conventional patterns of ordering.

184 The Tumble of Reason If in a first-person story like 'Friend of My Youth' reconstructions of the past are shaped not so much by something we might conventionally call reality, but, perhaps more importantly, by a repertoire of practices which, to borrow Herrnstein Smith's words, reflect 'the subject's engagement with his or her environment under a particular set of conditions' (31-2), the third-person stories, like 'Pictures of the Ice,' explore an analogously organized ensemble of discursive moments. In both the first- and the third-person stories in this collection, characters are repeatedly engaged in the activity of 'making [themselves] moment by moment and using whomever [they] could find in the process' (FOMY 167). While I have sought to situate my discussion of Munro's thematic and structural involvement with forms of deception primarily within the context of a detailed reading of three specific but highly resonant stories from the volume, I think that the active process of (re)construction as deception is at play throughout Friend of My Youth.7 Taken together, the stories in this collection, though often putting off the question of the legitimacy of such deceptive practices, offer a meditation on the constructedness of self-consolidating forms of knowledge. As a product of multiple, repeatedly changing, and sometimes overlapping economies, deception provides the narrators and characters in these stories with various possibilities for balancing loss and frustration with forms of empowerment and resistance. Not all such possibilities successfully translate into accomplishments - in fact they frequently, as in 'Meneseteung' and 'Friend of My Youth,' point to the limits of representation - but, whatever the outcome, these texts all impress upon us the need to attend to the constitutive and complicitous role of the subject in the organization and regulation of (hi)stories.

Conclusion:

The Problem of an Ending

The moments we call crises are ends and beginnings. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

To conclude a study on a writer very much in mid-career, a writer whose latest story may well be seeing its way to publication in The New Yorker at the moment that I put down these sentences, whose new collection of stories might, in fact, arrive in the bookstores before the publication of this book, is a difficult, if not impossible, task. Like several of Munro's narrators, who come to recognize that they cannot properly finish the stories they are telling, I too am tempted to confess: J don't know how to end this. But this, of course, is something of a critical ploy, a 'trick'- to use one of Munro's favourite words - for, like Munro's stories, which, despite confessions of inadequacy, do get written, do get told, this book, my protestations to the contrary, will come to an end. As I have tried to indicate in the preceding chapters, much of the force of Munro's writing resides in the way in which her stories articulate and play out the tension between variants on these positions, between what we might loosely call telling and deferral, or, put differently, between 'real life' and ecriture. Despite Munro's attraction to and fascination with the powers of storytelling, with the ways we use stories to make life more bearable, recovery of the past in her fiction is, as we have seen, repeatedly complicated either by the fact of language itself or by signifying practices through which characters are able to suppress or exclude certain areas of meaning. A recent uncollected story, 'Carried Away' (The New Yorker 21 October

i86 The Tumble of Reason 1991), suggests that Munro's writing may well continue to engage in an exploration of this problematic site of interaction. When the story begins, Louisa, a librarian in a small Ontario town during the First World War, receives overseas letters from a soldier, Jack Agnew, who claims to remember her 'from when he used to go into the library' (38-9). Though Louisa is unable to remember him, she encourages him in his correspondence, and, before long, he declares his love for her. Consequently, Louisa comes to anticipate - indeed to expect some sort of relationship to develop between them when he returns home. When the war ends, however, she continues to wait: like the narrator in 'How I Met My Husband/ Louisa 'went on expecting a letter every day, and nothing came' (39). Later, she comes across a short notice of Jack's marriage and learns that he was already engaged before he went overseas. More than simply a story about a potential, but unfulfilled, relationship, 'Carried Away' is an exploration of the way in which writing is literally a disruptive force in Louisa's life. The exchange of letters between Jack and Louisa generates expectations of meaning, but these expectations are repeatedly frustrated. Throughout the story, Louisa is haunted by an absence, by a self - Jack's - constructed only in language. Evincing, in various ways, a desire for an originating presence, she attempts to recover the past (by remembering Jack), and, failing that, to recast and reinscribe the (present and future) narrative of her own life. In his refusal to present himself to Louisa, to emerge as presence outside the language of representation, Jack enacts an unresolvable tension that runs through the course of Munro's fiction: poised alongside the expectation of meaning as presence is an awareness of the limits of representation, of the incapacity, in this particular case, for writing to be anything other than writing. When, near the end of the story, Jack does seem to present himself to Louisa, the episode, as Louisa realizes, is some kind of trick: 'Oh, what kind of trick was being played on her, or what kind of trick was she playing on herself! She would not have it' (58). What is interesting here is not so much the question of whether the episode actually takes place - even as she is caught up in a conversation with Jack, Louisa harbours a suspicion that this scene cannot really be happening - but the fact that it functions as a repetition, a rewriting, of a disruptive event in her life. Indeed Munro, in this story, continues to be fascinated by the way things might be or might have been. Through its exploration of concealments, nostalgias, distortions, si-

Conclusion: The Problem of an Ending 187 lences, hopes, and discontinuities as forces of signification, the story has considerable implications for our understanding of Munro's involvement with a discourse of absent and potential meanings. Given the kind of self-conscious questioning of the relationship between real and invented worlds which we see both in 'Carried Away' and in much of Munro's fiction in general, the title of another recent story, 'A Real Life' (The New Yorker 10 February 1992), is particularly interesting. Unlike 'Carried Away/ 'A Real Life' focuses on the enabling powers of language: here Dome's 'real life/ as it is envisioned, articulated, and, in part, constructed by Millicent, emerges - in a manner superbly befitting Munro's evolving insistence on the inseparability of experience and narrative - largely as a consequence of writing, of 'letters [that] had gone back and forth between' Dorrie and Mr Speirs (35), a man she had met only once at one of Millicent's dinners. Instead of the disappointment and frustration which Louisa experiences as a result of her epistolary relationship with Jack Agnew in 'Carried Away/ Dorrie's exchange of letters with Mr Speirs turns eventually into 'happiness, or something close' (40) as the two of them settle together in Australia. Another recent uncollected story, 'The Jack Randa Hotel' (The Ne Yorker 19 July 1993), uses epistolary relationships to explore the disruptive powers of writing, and to interrogate the processes through which identities are constructed and mobilized. Made to feel 'useless' not primarily because she has been abandoned by Will, but rather because she is confronted with his 'writing' (64), Gail, the central figure in the story, follows Will to Australia, where, through her own act of writing, she constructs for herself a false identity in an effort to compensate for his absence in her life. If, in Munro's earlier collections, letters often remain unsent, or even unwritten, here Munro reinvestigates the possibilities of the epistolary form. In this story, letters become a vehicle for an exploration of the complex linkages between strategies of representation and questions of power, and a means for a consideration of the extent to which invention and/as deception may be motivated by a desire to turn absent relationships into potential ones. These stories, as I have tried to suggest in my summary discussions of them, indicate that Munro will likely continue to explore and develop a number of the issues that have held her interest throughout her writing career. Having alluded to a few such issues, particularly those which have unfolded in her fiction in more recent years - concealments,

i88 The Tumble of Reason deceptions, and the role of language in various kinds of (re)constructions - and having, throughout this study, given some prominence to the evolving nature of Munro's fascination with these and other related issues, I want finally to acknowledge a problem inherent in my own critical methodology. Although I have repeatedly sought to emphasize how Munro's involvement with paradigmatic discourse has developed through the course of her writing career, I realize that the concept of 'development' may seem somewhat out of place in an analysis of a writer whose stories, as I argue, are marked by discontinuities, by the absence of connections. Am I, then, imposing a false sense of coherence on Munro's oeuvre? Surely not, because Munro's writing has developed. Or perhaps, in better keeping with the nature of Munro's stories, I ought to correct myself and answer yes and no, true and false, and thus bring to the fore my own inability to settle at a final resting point.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 For a useful discussion of some of this criticism, see Struthers, 'Some Highly Subversive Activities/ and Daziron (5-7). 2 Mukherjee's comment is taken from a review of Munro's 1990 collection, Friend of My 'Youth. 3 See Roland Barthes, The Reality Effect.' 4 Perhaps this accounts, in part, for the curious dual appeal of Munro's stories. She is, on the one hand, a 'popular' writer whose books are international best sellers, and on the other a writer whose work is currently receiving much serious critical attention. 5 Though there may well be a point of overlap if we think of paradigms as declensions, as attempts to set forth a word in all its possible forms. 6 A useful definition of these terms is that offered by Roland Barthes in his Critical Essays (243): 'The syntagm is the connection and combination of signs on the level of actual discourse (for instance, the linear sequence of the words); the paradigm is, for each sign of the syntagm, the reservoir of related yet dissimilar signs from which it is chosen.' 7 See also D.G. Jones, Butterfly on Rock. In a chapter entitled 'The Dictatorship of Mind/ Jones maintains that attempts to reduce life to a rational or mechanical system lead ultimately to a destruction of the human spirit. 8 Classic examples of paradigmatic discourse can be found in the films of Woody Allen. Consider, for instance, the following passage from Annie Hall, where Alvy Singer imagines how reality would be different if he could literally pull Marshall McLuhan out from nowhere: ALVY (sighing and addressing the audience) What do you do when you

190 Notes to pages 7-8 get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you? I mean, it's just maddening! The man in line moves toward Alvy. Both address the audience now. MAN IN LINE Wait a minute, why can't I give my opinion? It's a free country? ALVY I mean d - He can give you - Do you hafta give it so loud? I mean, aren't you ashamed to pontificate like that? And - and the funny part of it is, M - Marshall McLuhan, you don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's ... work! MAN IN LINE (overlapping) Wait a minute! Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called TV Media and Culture'! So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan - well, have a great deal of validity. ALVY Oh, do yuh? MAN IN LINE Yes. ALVY Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So ... so, here, just let me - I mean, all right. Come over here ... a second. Alvy gestures to the camera, which follows him and the man in line to the back of the crowded lobby. He moves over to a large stand-up movie poster and pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind the poster. MAN IN LINE Oh. ALVY (To McLuhan)

Tell him.

McLUHAN (To the man in line) I hear - I heard what you were saying. You - you know nothing of my work. You mean, my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing. ALVY (To the camera) Boy, if life were only like this. (16) 9 The distinction here is between a reality which we know and a text which we interpret. See Fredric Jameson (205). 10 Donna Bennett refers to Munro's art as an example of 'deceptive realism.' In discussing The Progress of Love, Bennett writes, 'Because such writing always calls into question preconceived notions and ideas, because its contrast between what is real and what is false is unstable, its realism is a guise, a trick with a pen that is not retrograde or regressive. Instead, deceptive realism provides us with complex responses to the nature of the Canadian society and the context in which it exists' (24). 11 The phrase is Jacques Derrida's (Of Grammatology 18). 12 Realism, as George Levine admits, 'is a mode that depends heavily on our commonsense expectation that there are direct connections between word and thing' (6).

Notes to pages 11-26 191 13 One critic who has intelligently discussed the complexity of Munro's vision is Helen Hoy, '"Dull, Simple, Amazing and Unfathomable/" 14 Neil Besner's helpful survey of the critical reception of Lives of Girls and Women (16-31) provides a valuable starting-point for understanding and contextualizing the changing trends in Munro criticism. CHAPTER 1 1 The songs her father sings on his route already remind us of another dimension to his life, a dimension which we can also call paradigmatic. His ability to improvise, to make up stories and imagine hypothetical situations, suggests, in part, an attempt to affirm the possibility of being reconstituted anew at every instant, an attempt to live here and now in the present by shutting out the past, or, if not by shutting it out, by rewriting it as if it were something which could be invented at every step. It is significant, however, that the father is unable to sing, that he is 'fresh out of songs' (DHS 18) after he has paid his visit to Nora. In addition to the obvious implication - that Ben cannot entirely cut himself off from the past Munro seems to be suggesting that Ben's paradigmatic behaviour, his attempt to refashion the reality of his own life into songs and stories for the entertainment of others, cannot in the end compensate for the disappointments in his life. The fact that he does not now sing, does not now buy the expected ice cream and pop, indicates something of his poignant, albeit momentary, acceptance of the way things are. 2 The title of Munro's fourth volume, Who Do You Think You Are?, explicitly asks us to ponder the relationship between epistemology and ontology. Here, not knowing who one is implies a non-fixed state of being. 3 It is worth noting, however, that Ben's daughter has not known her father's life to have been this way. Once again, the epistemological issue may have ontological implications. Or, to put it differently, the narrator's sense of who her father is is determined epistemologically. In fact, the very possibility of formulating a stable distinction between epistemological and ontological concerns seems to be called into question here. In Brian McHale's words, 'intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological questions far enough and they "tip over" into ontological questions. By the same token, push ontological questions far enough and they tip over into epistemological questions - the sequence is not linear and unidirectional, but bidirectional and reversible' (11). 4 This requires some qualification. The narrator here is not given a name,

192 Notes to pages 27-42

5

6

7 8 9

but the fact that her father is Ben Jordan invites us to posit connections with the narrator of Lives of Girls and Women, Del, whose father is also named Ben Jordan. But, given the tenuousness of connections in Munro's writing (see, in particular, chapter five), and in light of Munro's own comments about the interchangeable names of her heroines (see Struthers, 'Real Material' 30), we should perhaps be reluctant to assume that such fictional cohesion need be an important part of Munro's oeuvre. See James Carscallen's comment in 'The Shining House' (93): 'In stories like "Images" we find that signs, as they withdraw from things and take on a life of their own, become the "signs of invasion" that the child senses in tastes, smells, shadows on the wall.' We should notice here that the narrator, once again, is in league with her father; the mother remains marginalized, conspicuously absent from the action of the story. See Magdalene Redekop for a valuable discussion of this kind of absence in Munro's fiction. See, for instance, Catherine Sheldrick Ross. For a theoretical discussion of the view that events are abstractions from narratives, see Louis O. Mink. That there is a link between the desire to tell and the need for excitement is evident in the narrator's memory of making her brother climb the barn ladder when he was little. She tells us she did it 'out of a need for excitement, a desire for something to happen so that I could tell about it' (DHS 122).

10 Though we might note, here, that Laird tells facts rather than fantasies. 11 This, of course, is a central concern in 'The Office.' In this meditation on the nature of story-making, Munro anticipates stories like 'Material/ 'Home,' and 'The Ottawa Valley/ by writing about a person who uses another person's life as the material for a story. In 'The Office/ both the unnamed narrator/writer and Mr Malley are involved in creating fictions. While the narrator sits in her 'office' and tries to write, Mr Malley attempts to impress upon her his stories - his legends about the scandalous behaviour of the chiropractor who rented the office before her, his fabrications with her, the narrator, as the central character. 'It was not comfortable/ the narrator tells us, 'to see how the legends of Mr. Malley's life were built up ... Gradually our relationship passed into something that was entirely fantasy' (DHS 71). At the end, the narrator is left pondering: what legitimizes one kind of story-making act over the other? What is the difference between his stories and hers? What makes her story about him any more valid than his stories about her? In prompting us, and the narrator, to ask such questions about the nature and scope of fiction and story-

Notes to pages 44-51 193 making, Munro forces us to consider the extent to which the act of paradigmatic substitution, the creation of stories and legends, is not only the privilege of a writer, but also the instinctive desire and/or need which drives people to reshape and rethink their experience of life in an effort to make reality intelligible, manageable, or simply more interesting. CHAPTER 2 1 Although Lives of Girls and Women may be read either as a novel or as a collection of linked stories - indeed as a text which questions the very distinction between novel and short story - I shall, in this study, follow Munro's lead in referring to it as a novel. 2 The fact that his marriage is set in motion through the act of writing, through the letter which he asks Del to write, is perhaps another indication of the way in which experience can come out of narrative. 3 Epistemic modals, as Jerome Bruner explains, have to do with 'matters of what could or must be' (29). 4 See E.D. Blodgett (in Alice Munro), who distinguishes between the narrator and the protagonist in an attempt to account for Munro's double timescheme. 5 The fact that Lives of Girls and Women is both a novel and a collection of linked short stories that can stand on their own suggests that Munro is interested not only in a kind of linear accumulation of facts and details, but also in segmenting those facts and details in time, and showing how they may be altered through changes in time and memory. 6 Several critics have commented on the influence of Joyce on Munro. See, in particular, J.R. (Tim) Struthers, 'Reality and Ordering/ and W.R. Martin, 'Alice Munro and James Joyce.' 7 See, for instance, Jerome Bruner's discussion of modal transformations (29). 8 The fact that Craig is a real uncle and Benny a false one reminds us of what the two represent to Del. Craig is a historian interested in realistic facts and details; Benny, though rooted in a world of real and tangible things, places his faith in the other-than-real, what Del's mother might call 'the supernatural,' what I am calling the paradigmatic (absent and potential) level of understanding. 9 The implication emerges primarily through Munro's use of a double timescheme. We realize that the older Del is a writer who has presumably written the text we are reading. 10 I am indebted to Sam Solecki for drawing this passage and its implications

194 Notes to pages 57-71 to my attention, and, more generally, for his many valuable insights, which have helped shape and direct my response to Lives of Girls and Women. 11 In an interview with John Metcalf, Munro explains, 'I found that my emphasis, my interest was shifting so much to the mother that I had to be able to deal with her alone. I couldn't deal with both parents. I have a fairly narrow focus or something so the father tended to, sort of, fade away' (Metcalf 59). 12 Addie's speech on flowers, in fact, shows that she cannot suppress her mystical tendencies, however much she attempts to do so. 13 See i Thessalonians 5:2, 'The day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night.' See also 2 Peter 3:10 and Revelation 3:3 and 16:15. 14 Del, we might note, immediately undercuts this comment about praying for 'the strength and grace to bear' what happens: 'A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat' (LGW 115). Her moment of awareness is thus doubly absent and potential - not a moment of awareness at all. 15 For some examples of Munro's recurrent interest in and fascination with words, see Michael Taylor. 16 To a certain extent, the two worlds - art and romance - are, at this point in the text, seen by Del as co-extensive. Frank Wales, the leading player in the The Pied Piper, is, for her, not only a fictional character in a drama but also the object of her romance: 'I loved the Pied Piper. I loved Frank Wales' (LGW 132). 17 I am indebted to my colleague Ron Cooley for suggesting the importance of this connection with respect to this passage in Munro. 18 For a more explicit version of this suggestion that making and destroying come from the same source, see Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, in which the jazz musician Buddy Bolden also 'blows' himself to death. 19 Del, in gradually discovering herself to be a writer, shows an awareness of the arbitrary relationship between words and things throughout the narrative. This awareness is particularly manifest in passages that deal with her attempt to tease out the implications of idiomatic words and phrases. See, for instance, her ruminations on 'heart attack' (LGW 46) and 'operating table' (LGW 77)20 See Roland Barthes's comment: 'In itself a language is not true or false; it is or it is not valid, i.e., constitutes a coherent system of signs. The rules of literary language do not concern the conformity of that language to reality ... but only its submission to the system of signs the author has established' (Critical Essays 258). 21 Part of what Del is learning here is that pure text, by itself, is of little use to her, that words have to look outward to things even if the connection between the two is arbitrary.

Notes to pages 71-90

195

22 See Thomas Tausky's suggestion: 'If the collapse of Del's fantasy indicates the dangers of ignoring reality altogether, the mere mention of Uncle Craig's name is a powerful reminder that absorption with commonplace reality can produce its own sterility' (67). 23 Munro's choice of words here is as telling as always. 'Unfathomable/ in particular, not only suggests the unknowable, incomprehensible depth of these lives, but also etymologically links back to the various characters who have committed suicide by drowning themselves in the Wawanash River. Moreover, the term invites us to return to the novel's opening pages, to the Grenoch Swamp, which, according to Uncle Benny, contains 'a quicksand hole ... that would take down a two-ton truck like a bite of breakfast' (IGW 2). CHAPTER 3 1 Although the stories seem unrelated, they are unified by common concerns and linked by the title. For an analysis of Munro's principles of arrangement in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, see W.R. Martin (Paradox Chapter 5). 2 Geoff Hancock uses a distinction between chronological time and felt time, and suggests that Munro's method of narration is closer to the latter, closer to the way time is remembered. 3 For a discussion of the ways in which characters in this story seek 'the protection of legend and fiction,' see Blodgett (Alice Munro 81-2). 4 For a useful discussion of the narrator's complicity, see Blodgett (Alice Munro 80-2). 5 See David Carroll (150). 6 A variation of this interest in deferral occurs at the end of 'How I Met My Husband.' Here, Edie allows her husband, the mailman, to preserve the fiction - the story he tells their children about how Edie went after him by sitting by the mailbox everyday - because she likes 'for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy' (SIB 66). By seeking to preserve the fiction, Edie is engaged in a gesture of deferral, of putting off giving an accurate account of how she really met her husband. 7 See also Blodgett (Alice Munro 66): 'Dotty is ... a double creation, one version of which the narrator develops for her own purposes, and another that is given to Hugo.' 8 The other stories with male protagonists are 'Thanks for the Ride' in Dance of the Happy Shades and 'Pictures of the Ice' and 'Oranges and Apples' in Friend of My Youth. 9 The fact that the titles of both stories contain 'walk' perhaps reinforces the

196 Notes to pages 92-107

10

11

12 13

connection between the stories. It is interesting, however, to note that the movement suggested by 'walk' is undercut in both cases: in 'Walking on Water' Eugene's demonstration proves unsuccessful, and the 'Cowboy' of the earlier story, Ben Jordan, drives rather than going by foot. Another story in this volume, 'The Found Boat/ presents a different treatment of a similar issue. The fact that the boat in this story initially sinks rather than floats calls to mind Eugene's unsuccessful attempt to walk on water. Mr Lougheed is unable to determine the accuracy of his ending to the dream because the act of writing to his brother, the only person who might have been able to recall what happened to Frank McArter, is forever deferred. Once again an unwritten letter, a letter that someone has been meaning to write, plays a pivotal role in the development of a narrative. There is of course quite a bit of overlap between the suspicion stories and the power stories, as Tell Me Yes or No' clearly illustrates. See Eileen's notion that 'Words are all shameful. They ought to crumble in shame' (SIB 221).

CHAPTER 4 1 Like Lives of Girls and Women, Who Do You Think You Are? forces us to reconsider our notion of genre. Although Munro chooses to refer to Who as a collection of stories, I shall use the terms 'novel' and 'collection of stories' interchangeably when discussing this text. 2 This problem of identity finds an interesting parallel in the text's history of revision. Many of the stories collected here have appeared prior to their publication in Who, and, in some of the original versions, Rose was not, in fact, named Rose. (See Struthers, 'Real Material' 29-32, and, more recently, Helen Hoy, '"Rose and Janet,"' for evidence of the complex editorial history of the collection.) It is also worth noting that the American edition of the text bears the title The Beggar Maid (another problem of identity?) because its publishers felt that an American audience would not understand the colloquial put-down of the phrase 'Who do you think you are?' 3 A related transformation takes place at the end of 'Royal Beatings' when, during the Hat Nettleton interview, the past is transformed into a kind of nostalgia. For a useful discussion of the function of this episode, see Mathews. 4 The acknowledgment page of Who incorrectly lists the original publication date of 'Wild Swans' as March 1978.

Notes to pages 111-38 197 5 Given Flo's use of the word 'perform' in 'Privilege,' we might be tempted to acknowledge a double entendre here. 6 Warwick (218) sees Rose's retreat into an imaginative world here as evidence of her 'yet-to-be-relinquished adolescent sensibility.' CHAPTER 5 1 For a discussion of the importance of connections and their absence in Munro's fiction, see York, 'Gulfs.' 2 That the narrator herself is, as a young girl, similarly attracted to the genteel life is evidenced by the fact that she 'used to apprehend a life of elegance and sensibility' (M] 17) through magazine advertisements showing ladies in chiffon dresses. 3 The continuity that the mother postulates between the British aristocracy and her own immediate family is, moreover, rendered tenuous by the fact that none of the cousins are able to agree on her speculations. 4 I have borrowed the phrase 'angles of vision' from the title of Heliane Daziron's dissertation on Munro. 5 See E.D. Blodgett's review of The Moons of Jupiter. 6 Indeed, in its first magazine publication (The New Yorker 21 July 1980), 'Dulse' was a first-person narrative. While this detail seems to corroborate my claims about the se//-justifying qualities of the question, the fact that the quotation did not appear in the New Yorker version complicates the argument somewhat by alerting us to the possibility that the question (in the later version of the story) really is posed by the narrator. The story's textual history itself thus problematizes our ability to understand the play of narration in the collected version. 7 What I am suggesting, that is, is that Lydia, in a curious sense, exists prior to Munro. The way in which Lydia demands that Munro tell her story contradicts our perception of Lydia's everyday behaviour. 8 It is perhaps characteristic of Munro to have her narrator feel this sense of wonder while the young girl is on her way to the turkey barn to perform the rather grotesquely mundane task of gutting turkeys. As the narrator tells us, 'It seems unlikely that on my way to the Turkey Barn, for an hour of gutting turkeys, I should have experienced such a sense of promise and at the same time of perfect, impenetrable mystery in the universe, but I did' (M] 68). 9 'Secrets,' as Frank Kermode tells us, 'are at odds with sequence' ('Secrets' 83).

198 Notes to pages 142-7 ao This notion that twist endings may become predictable - no longer surprising - is also suggested in another story in this volume, 'Hard-Luck Stories.' When Julie wonders why this once-popular style of story has faded out of fashion, the narrator remarks, 'They got to seem too predictable ... Or people thought that isn't the way things happen. Or they thought, who cares the way things happen?' (M] 182). By airing the notion of the 'ironical-twist-at-the-end' story (M] 181), Munro, as Michelle Gadpaille suggests, 'alerts us to a pattern that will be both fulfilled and subverted' in her own story (63). Even in this story riddled with twists, in other words, Munro's involvement with surprise turns not so much on the disclosure of unexpected events, as on a kind of awareness that the complete story cannot be told because the narrator can never finally know it. Thus the narrator tells us towards the end of 'Hard-Luck Stories/ 'Something unresolved could become permanent. I could be always bent on knowing, and always in the dark about what was important [to Douglas], and what was not' (M] 197). CHAPTER 6 1 The hermeneutic context for the notion of 'empathy' comes out of Wilhelm Dilthey's discussion of empathy as the 'state of mind involved in the task of understanding.' Empathy, he writes, gives rise to 'the highest form of understanding in which the totality of mental life is active - re-creating or re-living' (226). 2 It is worth noting that what challenges Phemie's story is an episode which, although coming later in the narrative, has already taken place chronologically. This disparity between narrative and chronological order might be seen as a part of the narrator's 'deconstructive' strategy. What initially masquerades as a true account of an incident - both in this instance and in the episode involving Phemie's description of her grandmother's near suicide - is subsequently revealed to be not just a possible version, but a version conditioned by her own desire to see the past in a certain way. 3 In a recent interview with Kay Bonetti for the American Audio Prose Library, Munro has said the following about created memory: 'what we use to make our lives possible ... is the created memory or the created story or the interpretation poets and novelists make of life' (Bonetti). 4 The scenes with Mr Cryderman clearly recall Rose's encounter with the 'minister' in 'Wild Swans,' and Del's experiences with Mr Chamberlain in 'Lives of Girls and Women.' For a more detailed discussion of the way in which 'Jesse and Meribeth' echoes some of Munro's earlier stories, see Ildiko de Papp Carrington (128-31).

Notes to pages 148-75

199

5 It is worth noting that there is an ambiguity here, an ambiguity which the narrator tries to close off, but which we as readers are not entirely willing to relinquish. What the old woman does not say (that 'she loved Browning's writing, or spent all her time reading about him') may, in fact, be what she means when she says she had an affair with the poet. 6 The shift into the present tense at the end of this passage tells us that we are, at this point, dealing with a retrospective narrator, with Jessie as an older woman, looking back on and revising her interpretation of the past. 7 As Carrington (129) notes, the names (Chamberlain and Cryderman) are strikingly similar. 8 We might here recall Munro's comment to Struthers about 'the whole business of how life is made into a story by the people who live it' (Struthers, 'Real Material' 33). 9 It perhaps comes as little surprise, then, that Violet, like Rose, should herself become something of a storyteller. After Violet tells her sisters 'that sometimes the butcher's man was not satisfied with the meat on the calves and went after juicy little children to make them into steaks and chops and sausages/ we are then informed that '[Violet] told this out of the blue and for her own amusement, as far as she could recall later on when she made things into stories' (PL 212). 10 For an excellent discussion of the way in which the card that Heather and Gillian send Violet functions as a kind of ironic version of the threatening letters Dawn Rose sends her father, see Carrington (177-8). 11 In these terms, the competition between the Americans and the Russians can be seen as a race to claim space. CHAPTER 7

1 See Hoy's comment ('Alice Munro' 8):' A ... capacity to detect not only pretensions but also stratagems, concealments, self-deceptions, and evasions marks Munro's prose.' 2 Later on in the story, there is a similar moment: 'Now there is the sound of something thrown - a chair, a plank? - and of a woodpile or part of a fence giving way' (FOMY 64). Here, however, the uncertainty indicated by the question mark reflects Almeda's point of view rather than the narrator's. 3 The narrator repeatedly warns us that certain aspects of Flora's story have been suppressed in her mother's recounting of that story. Of particular interest is the role of Robert (FOMY 12). Would Robert not have been in the room when Flora was reading to Ellie? Why has he been left out of her mother's narrative? 'To me,' the narrator tells us later, 'the really myste-

2oo Notes to pages 178-84

4

5

6 7

rious person in the story, as my mother told it, was Robert. He never has a word to say' (FOMY 21). When, for instance, the narrator describes a letter which was sent to her mother by Flora, she feels that Flora is not telling all there is to tell: 'An unsettling letter, leaving so many things out' (FOMY 24). Given both the deliberate lack of information and the ambiguous nature of these photographs, it seems that Karin's mailings will make very little sense to Austin's children and to Brent. For a discussion of 'forms of loss' both as themes and as fictional methods in Munro's early stories, see Smythe, 'Shapes.' It is even at play in seemingly trivial moments, such as the following parenthetical recasting of narrative in 'Oranges and Apples' (132): 'He [Murray] went back to the kitchen. (He stumbles into the kitchen.) He poured himself half a tumbler of gin, without tonic or ice. (He pours half a tumbler of gin.)' These curious parenthetical substitutions alert us to the possibility that the posture Murray has been adopting throughout the story - as a protagonist in the fiction - is itself complicated by his own recasting of that story in the present unfolding of an autobiographical transaction. Murray, in a variation on what Philippe Lejeune calls 'autobiography in the third person,' here appears to be formulating a deceptive practice: he is writing (about) himself as if he were someone else, thus problematizing our understanding of the relationship between narrator and protagonist. (See Lejeune 31-51.)

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2O4

The Tumble of Reason

Mathews, Lawrence. 'W/to Do You Think You Are?: Alice Munro's Art of Disarrangement.' MacKendrick 181-93. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. McMullen, Lorraine. '"Shameless, Marvellous, Shattering Absurdity": The Humour of Paradox in Alice.Munro.' MacKendrick 144-62. Metcalf, John. 'A Conversation with Alice Munro.' Journal of Canadian Fiction 1.4 (1972): 54-62. Miller, Judith, ed. The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable. Waterloo: U of Waterloo P, 1984. Mink, Louis O. 'Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument.' The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Eds. Robert H. Canary, Henry Kozicki. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. 129-49. Moss, John. 'Introduction.' Here and Now: A Critical Anthology. Ed. John Moss. Toronto: NC P, 1978. 7-15. - A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. Mukherjee, Bharati. Rev. of Friend of My Youth. The New York Times Book Review. 18 March 1990: i, 31. Munro, Alice. 'Carried Away.' The New Yorker. 21 October 1991: 34-59. - 'Characters.' Ploughshares 4.3 (1978): 72-82. - 'The Colonel's Hash Resettled.' The Narrative Voice: Short Stories and Reflections by Canadian Authors. Ed. John Metcalf. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972. 181-3. - Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968. - 'Dulse.' The New Yorker 21 July 1980: 30-9. - Friend of My Youth. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. - 'Home.' New Canadian Stories: 74. Eds. David Helwig, Joan Harcourt. Ottawa: Oberon, 1974. 133-53. - 'The Jack Randa Hotel.' The New Yorker 19 July 1993: 62-70. - Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1971. - The Moons of Jupiter. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982. - The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. - 'A Real Life.' The New Yorker. 10 Feb. 1992: 30-40. - Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974. - 'What Is Real.' Making it New. Ed. John Metcalf. Toronto: Methuen, 1982. - Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan, 1978. - 'Wild Swans: Touched on the Way to Toronto by the Dirty Old Man of the Imagination.' Toronto Life April 1978: 52-3, 124-5. New, W.H. 'Pronouns and Propositions: Alice Munro's Stories.' Dreams of Speech and Violence. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987. Noonan, Gerald. The Structure of Style in Alice Munro's Fiction.' MacKendrick 163-80.

Works Consulted

205

Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. Toronto: Anansi, 1976. Orange, John. 'Alice Munro and A Maze of Time.' MacKendrick 83-98. Osachoff, Margaret Gail. "Treacheries of the Heart": Memoir, Confession, and Meditation in the Stories of Alice Munro.' MacKendrick 61-82. Pecheux, Michel. Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious. Trans. Harbans Nagpal. London: Macmillan, 1982. Pfaus, B. Alice Munro. Ottawa: Golden Dog P, 1984. Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and functioning of Narratives. New York: Mouton, 1982. Rasporich, Beverly. 'Child-Women and Primitives in the Fiction of Alice Munro.' Atlantis 1.2 (1976): 4-14. Redekop, Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. '"At Least Part Legend": The Fiction of Alice Munro.' MacKendrick 112-26. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. London: Picador, 1981. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. Scobie, Stephen. 'Amelia, or: Who Do You Think You Are? Documentary and Identity in Canadian Literature.' Canadian Writers in 1984. Ed. W.H. New. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1984: 264-85. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1921. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Smythe, Karen. Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1992. - 'Shapes and Shades of Death: The Meaning of Loss in Munro's Early Stories.' Wascana Review 25.1 (spring 1990): 41-52. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Stevens, Wallace. The Man with the Blue Guitar. New York: Knopf, 1952. Struthers, J.R. (Tim). 'The Real Material: An Interview with Alice Munro.' MacKendrick 5-36. - 'Reality and Ordering: The Growth of a Young Artist in Lives of Girls and Women.' Essays on Canadian Writing 3 (1975): 32-46. - 'Some Highly Subversive Activities: A Brief Polemic and a Checklist of Works on Alice Munro.' Studies in Canadian Literature 6 (1981): 140-50. Tausky, Thomas E. '"What Happened to Marion?": Art and Reality in Lives of Girls and Women.' Studies in Canadian Literature (1986) 11.1: 52-76.

206 The Tumble of Reason Taylor, Michael. The Unimaginable Vancouvers: Alice Munro's Words.' MacKendrick 127-43. Thacker, Robert. 'Alice Munro: An Annotated Bibliography.' The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors, Eds. Robert Lecker, Jack David. Downsview: ECW, 1984. V, 354-414. - '"Clear Jelly": Alice Munro's Narrative Dialectics/ MacKendrick 37-60. Thomson, David. 'Bastille.' Collier's Encyclopedia. 1987 ed. von Braun, Wernher. The First Men on the Moon.' Encyclopedia Americana. 1988 ed. Wallace, Bronwen. 'Women's Lives: Alice Munro.' The Human Elements: Critical Essays. Ed. David Helwig. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. 52-67. Warwick, Susan J. 'Growing Up: The Novels of Alice Munro.' Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (1984): 204-25. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. - Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Williams, David. 'Beyond Photography: Parody as Metafiction in the Novels of Alice Munro.' Confessional Fictions: A Portrait of the Artist in the Canadian Novel. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. Woodcock, George. The Plots of Life: The Realism of Alice Munro.' Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1987. 132-46. York, Lorraine. '"Gulfs" and "Connections": The Fiction of Alice Munro.' Essays on Canadian Writing 35 (1987): 135-46. - The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Laurence. Toronto: ECW, 1988.

Index

Allen, Woody, 189-90 autobiography, 169, 174, 177, 179, 200 Bakhtin, MM, 130 Earth, John, 12 Barthes, Roland, 3, 4, 12, 14, 140, 189, 194 Bennett, Donna, 190 Benveniste, Emile, 145, 147, 149, 152, 172 Besner, Neil, 191 Blodgett, E.D., 15, 40, 51, 55, 56, 65, 68, 77, 79, 107, no, 112, 114, 119, 124, 130, 131, 139, 140, 144, 193, 195,197 Borges, Jorge Luis, 12 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights, 50 Browning, Robert, 148 Bruner, Jerome, 122, 193 Carrington, Ildiko de Papp, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 198, 199 Carroll, David, 195 Carscallen, James, 27, 31, 94, 192 Gather, Willa, 131, 133 Cohen, Leonard: Beautiful Losers, 122

colonization, 159-64, 167 complicity, 16, 18, 80, 151-2, 158, 163, 168, 175, 176, 177, 195 Connolly, Kevin, 12 Cooley, Ron, xi, 194 Culler, Jonathan, 5 Dahlie, Hallvard, 4, 114 Daziron, Heliane, 189, 197 deception, 16, 18, 112, 169, 174, 179, 181-4, 187-8, 200 deferral, 17, 18, 23, 72, 74, 79, 80, 85, 89, 101, 114, 128, 139, 140, 144, 185, 195, 196 Derrida, Jacques, 12-13, 38, 79, 190 Dilthey, W., 198 Foucault, Michel, 52 Friedman, Thomas, x, 159, 166 Frutkin, Mark: The Growing Dawn, 43 Frye, Northrop, 6, 9, 10, n, 70 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 156, 157, 158 Gadpaille, Michelle, 79, 80, 155, 198 Gibson, Graeme, 4

208 Index Hancock, Geoff, 12, 122, 142, 195 Hanly, Charles, 154 history, 14, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 41, 43, 49-52, 123, 145, I47-49/ 154-6, 169-70, 172-4, 184 Howells, Coral Ann, 101 Hoy, Helen, 16, 71, 191, 196, 199 Hutcheon, Linda, xi, 42, 95, 161-2, 183 Jakobson, Roman, 5, 55 Jameson, Fredric, 12, 190 Jones, D.G., 10, 189 Joyce, James, 49, 193 Kamboureli, Smaro, 67 Kermode, Frank, 185, 197 Kroetsch, Robert, 4 Laurence, Margaret: The Diviners, 96 Lejeune, Philippe, 200 Levene, Mark, 144, 146 Levine, George, 190 Macdonald, Rae McCarthy 10 Maitland, James, 32 Marker, Chris: Sans soleil, 19 Martin, W.R., 58, 99, 102, 140, 141, *93, 195 Mathews, Lawrence, 196 McHale, Brian, 191 memory, 19, 21, 41-2, 77, 78, 81-2, 83, 84, 86, 88, 92, 102, 150, 192, 193, 198 Metcalf, John, 81, 194 Mink, Louis O., 192 Moss, John, 3 Mukherjee, Bharati, 3, 189 Munro, Alice: critical approach to, 3, 10-11, 15-16, 23, 188, 191

WORKS

-

'Accident/ 5, 136-8, 141, 158 'Age of Faith,' 59-60 'Baptizing,' 66-8 'Bardon Bus/ 138-9 'The Beggar Maid/ 111-12, 117 'Boys and Girls/ 28, 33-41 'Carried Away/ 185-7 'Chaddeleys and Flemings/ 122-7 'Changes and Ceremonies/ 60-4 'Characters/ 29 The Colonel's Hash Resettled/ 82 'Connection/ 122-5 Dance of the Happy Shades, 10, 18, 19-42, 55, 67, 195 'Dance of the Happy Shades/ 9 'Differently/ 179 'Dulse/ 130-4, 165, 197 'Epilogue: The Photographer/ 51, 68-73, 85, 94, 179 'Fits/ 152-4, 155, 157 'Five Points/ 179 The Flats Road/ 11, 14, 43-9, 72, 77-8, 83 The Found Boat/ 196 Friend of My Youth, 169-84, 195 'Friend of My Youth/ 169, 175-9, 180, 181, 183, 184, 199-200 'Goodness and Mercy/ 179 'Half a Grapefruit/ 102 'Hard-Luck Stories/ 198 'Heirs of the Living Body/ 49-56 'Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass/ 179 'Home/ 7-8, 9, 10, 12, 143 'How I Met My Husband/ 95, 186, 195 'Images/ 25-33, 37, 39, 41 The Jack Randa Hotel/ 187 'Jesse and Meribeth/ 147-9, *53

Index 'Labor Day Dinner/ 158 Lives of Girls and Women, 6, 11, 14, 17, 26, 28, 33, 43-73, 74, 85, 94, 96, 100-1, 141, 144, 179, 191, 192, 193-4, 196 'Lives of Girls and Women/ 64-6, 148-9, 198 'Marrakesh/ 74, 93-5 'Material/ 83-6, 92, 95, 113 'Memorial/ 95, 196 'Meneseteung/ 169-74, 175, 177, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 199 'Miles City, Montana/ 5, 149-52, 153 'Mischief/ 112-14, 117 The Moons of Jupiter, 122-42, 152, 166 'The Moons of Jupiter/ 127-30 'The Office/ 42, 192-3 'Oranges and Apples/ 179, 195, 200 The Ottawa Valley/ 8-9, 12, 82, 86-9, 92, 95, H3, 125, 143, 174 'The Peace of Utrecht/ 41-2 'Pictures of the Ice/ 179-84, 195, 200 'Princess Ida/ 56-9 'Privilege/ 104-7, 1°9/ *97 The Progress of Love, 6, 143-68, 169 'The Progress of Love/ 143-7, 148, 150, 153, 157, 158, 198 'Providence/ 114 True/ 140 'A Queer Streak/ 155-8 'A Real Life/ 187 'Royal Beatings/ ix, 96-104, no, 118, 120, 155, 196 The Shining Houses/ 42 'Simon's Luck/ 112, 114-17

209

- Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, 74-95, 101 - 'Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You/ 75-80, 92, 95 - The Spanish Lady/ 95 - 'Spelling/ 118-19, 121 - The Stone in the Field/ 125-7, 129, 130, 134 - Tell Me Yes or No/ 80-3, 89, 95, 138, 196 - Thanks for the Ride/ 42, 195 - The Turkey Season/ 134-6, 137, 197 - 'Visitors/ 139-42 - 'Walker Brothers Cowboy/ 20-5, 26,28,31,32,41,47, 75,87, 89-90, 174, 191, 195-6 - 'Walking on Water/ 89-93, 94/ 95, 195-6 - 'What is Real/ 6 - 'White Dump/ 158-68 - Who Do YOM Think YOM Are?, 6, 17, 69, 96-121, 125, 191, 196 - 'Who Do You Think You Are?/ 119-21 - 'Wigtime/ 179 - 'Wild Swans/ 18, 82, 107-10, 112-13, 12°, 121/ *96, 198 - 'Winter Wind/ 92, 95, 143

New, W.H., 75, 85 Ondaatje, Michael, 4, 12; Coming Through Slaughter, 194; on 'the truth of fiction/ 14, 146 Osachoff, Margaret, 42 paradigmatic discourse, 12, 15-20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 32-5, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 51-3, 54-5, 59,

2io Index 60, 61, 62, 65, 67, 68-9, 71, 72, 77, 135, 140, 146, 148, 188; defined, 5-7; and syntagmatic discourse, 5, 12, 48, 49, 51-3, 55, 140, 141 Pecheux, Michel, 177-8 Pfaus, B., 10 photography, 17, 69, 179, 180-82 postmodernism, 17, 42, 95, 183 power, 16, 74, 79, 95, 139, 157, 164, 187 Prince, Gerald, 167 Pynchon, Thomas, 12 Rasporich, Beverly, 10 realism, ix, 3-6, 9, 15, 16, 17, 43, 69, 75, 88, in, 143, 190 reality effect, 4, 44 Redekop, Magdalene, 16, 17, 192 resistance, 183, 184 Rorty, Richard, 12, 150 Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, 192 Rushdie, Salman: Midnight's Children, 143 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5, 13, 55 Scobie, Stephen, no Shakespeare, William: The Tempest, 99-100

Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 174, 184 Smythe, Karen, 16-17, 2O° Solecki, Sam, xi, 193 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 43 Stevens, Wallace: The Man with the Blue Guitar/ 143 Struthers, J.R. (Tim), xi, 18, 24, 41, 189, 192, 193, 196, 199 surprise, 18, 27, 122-3, 124, 126, 129, 132-4, 136-42, 153, 168, 175, 179-80, 181, 198 suspicion, 18, 74, 82, 90-1, 94, 95, 96, 103, 105, 109, 178, 180, 181, 186 Tausky, Thomas, 61, 195 Taylor, Michael, 119, 194 textuality, 7, 9, 10-14, *9/ 24> 42> 43/ 69, 72, 82, 94 Thomas, Audrey, 4 translation, 121 Warwick, Susan }., 116, 197 White, Hayden, 169, 170, 172 Williams, David, 16-17 Woodcock, George, 3 York, Lorraine, 123, 181, 197