The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s “Passion”

The following is my talk on Alice Munro's story "Passion" presented at the
11th International Short Story Conference: Toronto—June 17, 2010

I will give you a little report on the activities of the conference in a few days.

The Short Story’s Way of Meaning: Alice Munro’s “Passion”

Although Alice Munro has always insisted that she does not write as a novelist does, many reviewers and critics have tried to account for the complexity of her short stories by suggesting they are “novelistic.” As for me, I assent to the wise advice of C.S. Lewis, who once reminded us that, ”The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is--what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used… As long as you think the corkscrew was meant for opening tins and the cathedral for entertaining tourists, you can say nothing to the purpose about them.”

I hope today to say something to the purpose about a single Alice Munro story by demonstrating that its complexity is not “novelistic,” but rather due to its generic characteristics as a short story. Munro once said that originally she planned to write a few stories just to get some practice, but “got used seeing her material in a “short story way.” Accepting the critical assumption that every genre has its own methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, I will try to delineate the “short story way” of Alice Munro in “Passion."

I begin with a helpful heuristic distinction between two kinds of narrative styles established by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: the “Homeric,” which presents externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and place, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meaning; and the “Hebraic,” which, directed toward a single goal, externalizes only so much of the phenomena as is necessary, and is fraught with background, multiplicity of meanings, and the need for interpretation. Although there are certainly notable exceptions, it seems indisputable that generally the Homeric has given rise to the novel, while the Hebraic has primarily influenced the short story.

Also helpful to my approach to Munro’s story is the historical and formal relationship between the short story and the Romance form suggested by Boris Eichenbaum and Northrop Frye. Eichenbaum says that whereas the novel is a syncretic, secondary form, deriving from history, the short story is a fundamental, elementary form, deriving from folklore. Northrop Frye has similarly suggested that the Romance form, also directly descended from folktale, is the structural core of all fiction. The most famous author of the short story as Romance, Flannery O’Connor, to whom I will be referring several times, has reminded us that whereas the novel most often deals with the movement of social forces and fidelity to the way things look and happen in normal times, the modern Romance form leans away from typical social patterns toward mystery and the unexpected, often making alive some experience we are not accustomed to observe every day.

Alice Munro is neither realistic nor novelistic; she is the kind of Romance writer who, O’Connor says, “believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious. What such a writer sees on the surface will be of interest only as she can go through it into an experience of mystery itself…. for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology…have been exhausted.” A key founder of this conference, Mary Rohrberger, argued several years ago that short story writers adhere to a notion of reality that lies beyond the extensional, everyday world with which the novel has traditionally been concerned, sharing characteristics with the Romance form. It is as a short story in the Romance tradition that I wish to read Alice Munro’s “Passion.”

The purpose of the first half of the “Passion” is to establish the character of Grace and thus prepare the reader for her encounter with the mysterious stranger in the second half. It is a common short story convention—famously embodied in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the first half establishing the confident casuistry of Joy/Hulga, the second half her devastating encounter with Manley Pointer, and in Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” the first half developing the conventional character of Connie, the second half developing the dreamscape of her encounter with Arnold Friend.

At twenty, Grace has just finished high school--later than others because she has taken extra classes, for she says she wants to learn everything she can before she starts a career caning chairs with her great uncle. She identifies with Maury’s mother, Mrs. Travers, for her independence and the fact that only Mrs. Travers seems to understand that reading and learning has to do with life in some way other than earning a living.

The most telling aspect of Grace as a character is her love of reading. When Mrs. Travers brings her to the house during her breaks from work, she sits in a big leather chair to which, because she wears shorts, her legs become sweaty and stuck, “perhaps,” Munro notes in a line that was not in the original New Yorker version of the story, “because of the intense pleasure of reading.” On the ride back to the hotel, Mrs. Travers waits until Grace’s thoughts get loose from whatever book she had been in before mentioning she has read it herself, in this case, Anna Karenina, which Mrs. Travers says she has read many times, sympathizing in turn with Kitty, Anna, and Dolly. In discussing the passage about Dolly trying to figure out how to do the washing, Mrs. Travers provides the title of Munro’s story: “I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs.”

The romantic character of Anna Karenina with which Grace most likely identifies is described by Tolstoy in this way: “If Anna read how the heroine of her story took care of the sick, she would have liked to go with noiseless steps into the sickroom. If she read how a Member of Parliament made a speech, she would have liked to make that speech. If she read how Lady Mary rode after the hounds… and astonished every one by her audacity, she would have liked to do the same.”

When Maury takes it for granted that they will marry, Grace is more delighted with the idea of traveling to Peru, Iraq, or the Northwest Territories than with what he spoke of with pride as “our own home.” “None of this seemed at all real to her.” The idea of being a chair caner in the house and town where she grew up “had never seemed real either.” What is real to Grace is the unreal, the stuff of her reading and her imagination. She is prepared for Neil even before she meets him by literature and by Mrs. Travers, who says that whereas Maury is a “dear uncomplicated man, like his father,” Neil is deep, she says, slightly misquoting a line from “Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” to describe him: “Full many a gem of purest ray serene/The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear.” In her desire for imaginative instability, Grace is also is prepared by her knowledge that Neil’s father killed himself because he was “unstable,” and that Mrs. Travers gets into trouble now and then with her nerves and has to go in hospital until they get “stabilized.”

The second half of the story begins on Canada’s Day of Thanksgiving for which the literal translation of the French, in typical Romance fashion, is “Day of the Action of Grace.” As soon as Grace drives away with Neil, she begins a transfigurative journey into a fictive “undiscovered country.” She might well say, as Conrad’s Marlowe says of his encounter with Kurtz: "Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt. No relation of a dream can convey that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams."

When Neil asks Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?” without hesitation, she says, “No,” as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall.” Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, “Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her.” But, typical of the dream experience, there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, and the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled, for Grace has entered into an incredible world inhabited by a mysteriously motivated fictional character.

There is no way to determine whether the strange otherworldliness of this “day of the action of Grace” is characteristic of the day itself or of Grace’s memory of the day. When Neil takes the highway overpass, Grace had the “impression that the car had lifted off the pavement and they were flying.” In her recollection, there are no other cars on the highway, although she knows this cannot have been true. She knows Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages, but she has the “illusion of constant perfect speed—not frantic but miraculous, serene.”

The dreamlike experience is energized by Grace’s fantasies about what sex should be like. “The fortuitous meeting…the nearly silent flight in which she herself figured more or less as a captive.” In her “airy surrender, her flesh seems nothing but a ”stream of desire,” for in the sexual fantasy flesh is dissolved, and all is possible. When Neil licks Grace’s palm and asks, “Did you think I was abducting you for fell purposes,” she says “No,” but knows she is lying. When she tells him she is interested in what he is doing, but will not tell him he is wrong, “she saw that she’d been trying to impress him, to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope--genuine, reasonable, and everlasting.”

Grace had thought that passion would be mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. “But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how far she’d seen into him, now”. And what Grace has seen is what Albert Camus, describes in the first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus as the one truly serious philosophical question--Judging whether life is or is not worth living. Camus says all other questions are but games, child’s play. In Grace’s literary adventure, she knows it is what Hamlet poses as “the question”: “To be or not to be” “What she saw was final... It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter."

According to the World Health Organization, someone around the globe commits suicide every 40 seconds. Causes of suicidal behavior include: poverty, loss of loved ones, arguments, a family history of suicide, alcohol or drugs. But as Flannery O’Connor says, “The storyteller is concerned with what is; but if what is what can be determined by survey, then the disciples of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gallup are sufficient for the day thereof.” There are no personal, social, or psychological causes for Neil’s suicidal action, any more than there is a realistic motivation for the action of Grace in accompanying him on his journey to death.

What Grace feels at the beginning of her adventure is what Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World says is typical of all Romance. The prospect of a passionate experience seems to promise that we are about to live life more fully and more intensely. We look upon passion as a transfiguring force… Events happen as they do because otherwise there would be no story. “ As de Rougemont says, “What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. There we have the fundamental fact.” “Passion’s” exploration of such fundamental facts and ultimate questions is due to the short story’s primitive origins in folklore, which, as Marcia Elide has suggested, narrates, "all the primordial events in consequence of which man became what he is today…" Myth teaches him the primordial stories that have constituted him existentially….”

The central questions of motivation in “Passion”—why Grace goes with Neil and why Neil commits suicide cannot be answered by novelistic means of verisimilitude. Flannery O’Connor said she once lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from her, and when she returned them, she said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” O’Connor says she thought that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there—showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything.” Grace is the literary witness to an ultimate event, a fundamental fact, the question. After her encounter with the incredible, when Mr. Travers gives her the check for a thousand dollars, she considers tearing it up in true romantic fashion, but in the inevitable return from literature to life, just before the blank space at the end of the story, she keeps it, knowing it will insure her a “start in life.”

In the short story, the formal demands of the story outweigh the realistic demands of verisimilitude, both because the story's shortness demands an aesthetic rather than a natural form, and because the short story remains closer to its ancestry in myth and folklore than the novel does. In the short story, a fictional character may seem to act according to the conventions of verisimilitude and plausibility; however, since the very shortness of the form prohibits the realistic presentation of character by extensive metonymic detail, and since the history of the short story is one in which a character confronts a crucial event or crisis rather than slowly developing over time, the very form and tradition of short fiction militates against the central conventions of realism.

As Flannery O’Connor says, the problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he or she describes “reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible.” If the mystery is solved by placing the phenomenon within the framework of the natural, the psychological, or the social, then the Homeric or realistic impulse has succeeded. If the knowledge arrived at is inchoate, metaphysical, inexplicable, then we know we are in the revelatory Hebraic realm of the short story. There is a different "rhythm of reality" and a different "realm of reality" embodied in the short story than in the novel form. The question is not simply whether the technique of the novel and the short story are different in achieving the illusion of reality, but rather whether the two forms present different interpretations of what reality is.