If you love the short story and celebrate Christmas by exchanging gifts, then what better gift to give than a truly great collection of stories by one or more of the very best short story writers of the twentieth century? Or if someone has asked you for a gift idea, and you do not have all the following collections, send this list to your friend with your choice starred; you can’t lose on any of them. Short stories are truly the gift that keeps on giving, for unlike novels, you can read them again and again, year after year. My reward for posting this? Your gifting and reading pleasure.
Unless marked otherwise, the following prices are for paperbacks from Amazon, who, for my money, consistently has the best prices.
Flannery O’Connor,
Complete Stories $12.24
This is the collection that won “best of best” of National Book Awards. Challenging but unforgettable stories.
Eudora Welty
Collected Stories $10.88
Shortlisted for the “best of best” of National Book Awards. This is the one I voted for. Welty’s mythic world and unerring use of language are national treasures.
John Updike
Early Stories $13.57
A big fat book of crisp Updike stories from early in his career. Some of his best.
Alice Munro
Selected Stories $11.53
Runaway $10.20
Some of the best early Munro stories, classics of the genre, and, in my opinion, her best more recent collection.
Andre Dubus
Selected Stories $10.85
Dancing After Hours $11.76
The best of vintage Dubus and his memorable final collection.
William Trevor
Collected Stories $19.80
Selected Stories $23.10 (hardcover)
The first is a delicious fat volume of most early Trevor stories. The second includes stories from his last four collections. Not to be missed.
T. C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle Stories $13.60
Ah, he’s a lot a fun—lightweight and a showman, but still passes the time pleasantly.
Annie Proulx
Close Range $10.20
Bad Dirt $11.20
Fine the Way It Is $10.20
These are the three Wyoming Stories collections; they show what a truly great short story writer Proulx is.
Tobias Wolff
Our Story Begins $10.85
This is a selection of his vintage stories, plus a few recent ones. The early ones are better, but Wolfe is always worth reading. A master of the form.
David Means
Assorted Fire Events $5.44
The Secret Goldfish $5.58
The Spot $15.64 (hardcover)
These are David Mean’s three best books. If you haven’t read him, take advantage of Amazon’s cut-rate price on the first two.
Raymond Carver
Collected Stories $26.40 (hardcover)
This is the classic Library of America collection. Gotta read Carver again and again.
Bernard Malamud
The Complete Stories $13.60
Still one of the best short-story writers of the 20th century. Even Flannery O’Connor liked him.
Happy Holidays, whatever your holiday, and thanks for reading "Reading the Short Story"
Showing posts with label Alice Munro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alice Munro. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
One More Word (I think) on Munro's "Corrie"
Well, my friends. Thank you so much for the invigorating discussion about Alice Munro’s “Corrie.” However, I have nothing new to add to what I have said in defense of Ms. Munro's tactic in the story. I think she supports the secrecy theme with the free indirect point of view very nicely indeed. I hope some others will weigh in on this little debate. However, I leave it, at least for the time being, with this little quote I have penciled in on a 3x5 card (Raymond Carver used to do this; remember him?) from a piece by Joyce Cary (remember him?) in the New York Times Book Review way back in 1950: (I was only nine at the time, but I was precocious.)
"Every professional artist has met the questioner who asks of some detail: ‘Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?’”
I used the quote as the heading for a piece I did several years ago on Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” rebutting one critic’s claim that Hemingway had screwed up the dialogue designation in the story, thus creating reader confusion. As a result, Scribner’s actually changed the text in the next edition of Hemingway’s Collected Stories. I was outraged; I knew Hemingway was too damned careful to muck the story up and tried hard to show that he had a sound thematic reason for creating what that critic thought was a mistake. The last time I checked, Scribner’s had changed it back to the original. So it goes!
I always tried to convince my students that if they read a story and thought it was screwed up or just plan screwy, they should assume first of all that it was their fault and not the fault of the writer. I always assume, and tried to convince them to assume, that the writer knew what he or she was doing. However, if they read it several times and really gave themselves over to the work and still couldn’t come to terms with it, then, I was happy to listen to arguments. I have been happy to listen to arguments by Ed and Kseniya about “Corrie,” but I have read it again and again, and I still believe Ms. Munro has got it right here. I am not saying I can’t be convinced that Munro cheated (Heavens!) or that she did not know how to pull it off (Lord a’mercy!), just that at this point, my faith in her unerring ability at writing short stories has not been shaken. Keep those cards and letters coming!
In the meantime, serendipitously, I have been reading David Means’ new collection The Spot, which contains a story entitled “Reading Chekhov,” which is a version of Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog,” the greatest adultery story in Christendom, in my opinion. So I went back and read Chekhov's “Lady with the Pet Dog” again and was, as the young’uns like to say, “blown away.” I then looked up Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Lady with the Pet Dog,” and was so underwhelmed that I dozed off twice.
So, since with Munro, we have been talking about adultery (we have been talking about adultery, haven’t we?), I thought I would post a blog comparing the Means with the Munro with the Chekhov with the Oates. I love to bad mouth Oates about as much as I love to praise David Means.
Oh, by the way, I just got the new edition of Best American Short Stories, 2010 and am reading it dutifully. I will have a post on my progress in a couple of weeks.
And there is a new David Means story in the recent issue of the New Yorker. I will comment on it in the next week also.
I appreciate my readers and look forward to more lively responses to my humble remarks.
"Every professional artist has met the questioner who asks of some detail: ‘Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?’”
I used the quote as the heading for a piece I did several years ago on Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” rebutting one critic’s claim that Hemingway had screwed up the dialogue designation in the story, thus creating reader confusion. As a result, Scribner’s actually changed the text in the next edition of Hemingway’s Collected Stories. I was outraged; I knew Hemingway was too damned careful to muck the story up and tried hard to show that he had a sound thematic reason for creating what that critic thought was a mistake. The last time I checked, Scribner’s had changed it back to the original. So it goes!
I always tried to convince my students that if they read a story and thought it was screwed up or just plan screwy, they should assume first of all that it was their fault and not the fault of the writer. I always assume, and tried to convince them to assume, that the writer knew what he or she was doing. However, if they read it several times and really gave themselves over to the work and still couldn’t come to terms with it, then, I was happy to listen to arguments. I have been happy to listen to arguments by Ed and Kseniya about “Corrie,” but I have read it again and again, and I still believe Ms. Munro has got it right here. I am not saying I can’t be convinced that Munro cheated (Heavens!) or that she did not know how to pull it off (Lord a’mercy!), just that at this point, my faith in her unerring ability at writing short stories has not been shaken. Keep those cards and letters coming!
In the meantime, serendipitously, I have been reading David Means’ new collection The Spot, which contains a story entitled “Reading Chekhov,” which is a version of Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog,” the greatest adultery story in Christendom, in my opinion. So I went back and read Chekhov's “Lady with the Pet Dog” again and was, as the young’uns like to say, “blown away.” I then looked up Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Lady with the Pet Dog,” and was so underwhelmed that I dozed off twice.
So, since with Munro, we have been talking about adultery (we have been talking about adultery, haven’t we?), I thought I would post a blog comparing the Means with the Munro with the Chekhov with the Oates. I love to bad mouth Oates about as much as I love to praise David Means.
Oh, by the way, I just got the new edition of Best American Short Stories, 2010 and am reading it dutifully. I will have a post on my progress in a couple of weeks.
And there is a new David Means story in the recent issue of the New Yorker. I will comment on it in the next week also.
I appreciate my readers and look forward to more lively responses to my humble remarks.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Alice Munro's "Corrie": Secrecy and Point of View
There’s nothing I enjoy more since starting this blog than interacting with readers who are reading the same stories I am and have thoughtful things to say about them. Kseniya has a very insightful comment and query on Alice Munro’s “Corrie” that I think deserves a second blog entry on that story. Her question made me go back and read it twice more. So at the risk of sounding, at best, academic and, at worst, pedantic, I post the following post script to Munro’s story.
Kseniya points out that the point of view of the first part of the story seems to be that of an omniscient teller, although it stays within the perspective of Howard Ritchie. She says that when we learn about Sadie’s letter threatening blackmail, we believe the omniscient teller to be telling us the truth. Kseniya also says she takes the letter for a fact because Ritchie does not seem cunning enough to dream up this scheme. Furthermore, she says that if the letter is a lie, the reader begins to wonder what is and what is not fact in the story, thus raising the issue of an unreliable narrator. Moreover, Kseniya suggests that since we are given quite a bit of insight into Ritchie’s mind in the first part of the story, it seems manipulative of the narrator to withhold the fact that he keeps the money.
Here is my own take on the point of view issue in the story: First of all, I think that a writer of good short stories, such as Alice Munro, is very careful to make the technique of the story parallel the theme of the story. The key to the success of any affair is secrecy. And although “Corrie” embodies a complex of themes about infidelity--cheating, concealment, guilt, compensation, money, family, stasis--secrecy is the central theme. And to illuminate this theme, Munro must manipulate the point of view very carefully.
Because this is a short story concerned with the themes mentioned above, not a novel concerned with the particulars of the characters’ behavior and thoughts, what we know about Howard Ritchie in the first section of the story, even though we seem to be within his perspective, are only those things that contribute to the theme the story develops. We only need to know the following: that Ritchie is “equipped” with a “family”; that he is conservative; that he is somewhat awkward about how to respond to Corrie’s lameness; that he feels he has no time for anything but earning a living and caring for his family; and that he suspects that when Corrie goes to Egypt she will be snapped up by some creepy fortune hunter; that he finds her behavior verging on the tiresome; that he knows, from his own experience, that for some men money never becomes tiresome.
If we only seem to know a few facets of Ritchie’s feelings and thoughts, it is because we only require these to respond to the theme. And based on this knowledge, I would say there is nothing to suggest that Ritchie would not exploit Corrie for her money.
In the second section of the story, which introduces the blackmail letter from Sadie, the point of view is carefully controlled, as is the voice of the verbs. The information about Sadie working in a house in the city after leaving Corrie’s employ is revealed in passive voice. Noting that Sadie continues to do housework, the narrator says, “This was discovered on an occasion when Howard and his wife were invited to dinner, with others at the home of some rather important people in Kitchener.” Who discovers it? Ritchie, of course, since we are still within his perspective.
However the account seems to focus on this being Sadie’s discovery. This ostensible shift takes place very subtly in the following sentences: “There was Sadie waiting on tables, coming face to face with the man she had seen in Corrie’s house The man she had seen with his arm around Corrie when she came in to take the plates away or fix the fire. An unknown woman with him, who, the conversation soon made plain, was his wife. It was also made plain that his wife had not come recently into the picture. Her time had overlapped with Corrie.” This is not Sadie’s perspective, but what Sadie’s perspective might have been from Ritchie’s perspective.
There does not seem to be any question that Ritchie has actually seen Sadie at a party he and his wife attended. However, since we have been limited to Ritchie’s point of view and have no reason to think we have shifted into Sadie’s point of view, this seems clearly to be Ritchie’s account of the encounter, in which he assumes that Sadie knows that his affair with Corrie is illicit, but does not know what Sadie intends to do with the information. By the time Ritchie tells Corrie about all this, he has tentatively decided what he will do.
Ritchie has been brought up in a fiercely religious household and knows that someone must pay for breaking the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” He knows he cannot pay, for he has little money and has a family to support. And why should not Sadie pay, since she has no family responsibility, doesn’t care for money, and is crippled? This is all rather harsh when expressed so blatantly, which is one of the reasons that Munro keeps it secret. The only relationship in which we see Ritchie engage is with Corrie, and since the key to his relationship with Corrie is secrecy, what we know about Ritchie is only what Corrie knows.
When we read the line, “Sadie said that she had not gossiped about it all,” we know that this is something that Ritchie has told Corrie, not necessarily something that Sadie has told Ritchie. Ritchie’s account of the contents of the letter to Corrie is told in a coy way that, we later learn, does not sound like Sadie at all. “Would his wife be interested in getting this information?” is the way Ritchie says Sadie put it. Even more unlike Sadie is her ostensible remark, “I would hate to have to break the heart of such a nice lady with a big silver-fox collar on her coat.” Corrie wonders how Sadie would even know a silver-fox collar from “a hole in the ground,” asking Ritchie, “Are you sure that’s what she said.” The silver-fox collar, which Ritchie finds hypocritical of his wife to wear, given her left wing leanings, is a little detail of verisimilitude that Ritchie invents to make his story seem credible.
In this conversation, the point of view perspective subtly shifts to Corrie, for she wonders what if Ritchie rejects her offer to pay the blackmail, what if he thinks it is a sign that they should stop. “She was sure there’d be something like that in his voice and in his face. All that old sin stuff. Evil.” When Corrie says, “You’d feel you were taking it away from your family,” Ritchie’s face actually cleared, although Corrie fears she should never have said that word “family.” Ritchie then suddenly remembers something else from the letter—that the money has to be in bills. “He spoke without looking up, as if about a business deal. Bills were best for Corrie, too. They would not implicate her.” Ritchie is obviously thinking on his feet here. And indeed it is a business deal.
It is September when Corrie hears about the death of Sadie. She has given the money to Ritchie to deposit in Sadie’s box in August. Corrie knows that Ritchie has not heard about Sadie’s death, and she also knows that Sadie was not able to pick up the money this time because of her illness, so she wonders if Ritchie has checked to see if the money has been picked up; she thinks not since he has not contacted her.
When she wakes the next morning, “She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.” She realizes that the news of Sadie’s death that would have freed them from the blackmail and the “queasy feeling” she has always had of “the never-quite safeness of their affair is no news to Ritchie at all, because Sadie does not matter and never has. The “family” theme is echoed, as she thinks that the twice-yearly sum of money would have gone straight into his pocket, for he is a man with a family, children to educate, and bills to pay. What makes Corrie come to this realization? All the same things that have made the reader come to the realization: her knowledge of Ritchie, her knowledge of Sadie, Ritchie’s account of the nonexistent letter, his failure to contact her about the money in the mailbox.
We do not get inside the mind of Corrie in this section of the story any more than we get inside the mind of Ritchie in the first section. We have no particular information about her feelings. We only know she is trying to adjust to the realization she has come to and that she feels a sense of emptiness—“a cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest.” She then comes up with another possibility. She knows that Ritchie may never know of Sadie’s death since he has no connection with her and no connection with the family she has worked for. He will therefore expect things to go on just as they have—with Corrie giving him the money twice a year and him pocketing it.
Corrie could say something, but she knows that what they have demands payment, and she is the one who can afford to pay. And so, she will continue to pay, for what difference does it make if the money goes to Sadie or to Ritchie, for she has already made it clear that she is willing to pay. Of course, a day may arrive when Ritchie will find out that Sadie is dead. What will happen then? This just means that for Corrie, one sense of “never-quite safeness” has taken the place of another. Everything is in its proper place—in Corrie and Ritchie’s lives and in Alice Munro’s story.
Well, that’s how I read the story. I would love to hear other readings. Thanks, Kseniya, for sending me back to the story.
Kseniya points out that the point of view of the first part of the story seems to be that of an omniscient teller, although it stays within the perspective of Howard Ritchie. She says that when we learn about Sadie’s letter threatening blackmail, we believe the omniscient teller to be telling us the truth. Kseniya also says she takes the letter for a fact because Ritchie does not seem cunning enough to dream up this scheme. Furthermore, she says that if the letter is a lie, the reader begins to wonder what is and what is not fact in the story, thus raising the issue of an unreliable narrator. Moreover, Kseniya suggests that since we are given quite a bit of insight into Ritchie’s mind in the first part of the story, it seems manipulative of the narrator to withhold the fact that he keeps the money.
Here is my own take on the point of view issue in the story: First of all, I think that a writer of good short stories, such as Alice Munro, is very careful to make the technique of the story parallel the theme of the story. The key to the success of any affair is secrecy. And although “Corrie” embodies a complex of themes about infidelity--cheating, concealment, guilt, compensation, money, family, stasis--secrecy is the central theme. And to illuminate this theme, Munro must manipulate the point of view very carefully.
Because this is a short story concerned with the themes mentioned above, not a novel concerned with the particulars of the characters’ behavior and thoughts, what we know about Howard Ritchie in the first section of the story, even though we seem to be within his perspective, are only those things that contribute to the theme the story develops. We only need to know the following: that Ritchie is “equipped” with a “family”; that he is conservative; that he is somewhat awkward about how to respond to Corrie’s lameness; that he feels he has no time for anything but earning a living and caring for his family; and that he suspects that when Corrie goes to Egypt she will be snapped up by some creepy fortune hunter; that he finds her behavior verging on the tiresome; that he knows, from his own experience, that for some men money never becomes tiresome.
If we only seem to know a few facets of Ritchie’s feelings and thoughts, it is because we only require these to respond to the theme. And based on this knowledge, I would say there is nothing to suggest that Ritchie would not exploit Corrie for her money.
In the second section of the story, which introduces the blackmail letter from Sadie, the point of view is carefully controlled, as is the voice of the verbs. The information about Sadie working in a house in the city after leaving Corrie’s employ is revealed in passive voice. Noting that Sadie continues to do housework, the narrator says, “This was discovered on an occasion when Howard and his wife were invited to dinner, with others at the home of some rather important people in Kitchener.” Who discovers it? Ritchie, of course, since we are still within his perspective.
However the account seems to focus on this being Sadie’s discovery. This ostensible shift takes place very subtly in the following sentences: “There was Sadie waiting on tables, coming face to face with the man she had seen in Corrie’s house The man she had seen with his arm around Corrie when she came in to take the plates away or fix the fire. An unknown woman with him, who, the conversation soon made plain, was his wife. It was also made plain that his wife had not come recently into the picture. Her time had overlapped with Corrie.” This is not Sadie’s perspective, but what Sadie’s perspective might have been from Ritchie’s perspective.
There does not seem to be any question that Ritchie has actually seen Sadie at a party he and his wife attended. However, since we have been limited to Ritchie’s point of view and have no reason to think we have shifted into Sadie’s point of view, this seems clearly to be Ritchie’s account of the encounter, in which he assumes that Sadie knows that his affair with Corrie is illicit, but does not know what Sadie intends to do with the information. By the time Ritchie tells Corrie about all this, he has tentatively decided what he will do.
Ritchie has been brought up in a fiercely religious household and knows that someone must pay for breaking the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” He knows he cannot pay, for he has little money and has a family to support. And why should not Sadie pay, since she has no family responsibility, doesn’t care for money, and is crippled? This is all rather harsh when expressed so blatantly, which is one of the reasons that Munro keeps it secret. The only relationship in which we see Ritchie engage is with Corrie, and since the key to his relationship with Corrie is secrecy, what we know about Ritchie is only what Corrie knows.
When we read the line, “Sadie said that she had not gossiped about it all,” we know that this is something that Ritchie has told Corrie, not necessarily something that Sadie has told Ritchie. Ritchie’s account of the contents of the letter to Corrie is told in a coy way that, we later learn, does not sound like Sadie at all. “Would his wife be interested in getting this information?” is the way Ritchie says Sadie put it. Even more unlike Sadie is her ostensible remark, “I would hate to have to break the heart of such a nice lady with a big silver-fox collar on her coat.” Corrie wonders how Sadie would even know a silver-fox collar from “a hole in the ground,” asking Ritchie, “Are you sure that’s what she said.” The silver-fox collar, which Ritchie finds hypocritical of his wife to wear, given her left wing leanings, is a little detail of verisimilitude that Ritchie invents to make his story seem credible.
In this conversation, the point of view perspective subtly shifts to Corrie, for she wonders what if Ritchie rejects her offer to pay the blackmail, what if he thinks it is a sign that they should stop. “She was sure there’d be something like that in his voice and in his face. All that old sin stuff. Evil.” When Corrie says, “You’d feel you were taking it away from your family,” Ritchie’s face actually cleared, although Corrie fears she should never have said that word “family.” Ritchie then suddenly remembers something else from the letter—that the money has to be in bills. “He spoke without looking up, as if about a business deal. Bills were best for Corrie, too. They would not implicate her.” Ritchie is obviously thinking on his feet here. And indeed it is a business deal.
It is September when Corrie hears about the death of Sadie. She has given the money to Ritchie to deposit in Sadie’s box in August. Corrie knows that Ritchie has not heard about Sadie’s death, and she also knows that Sadie was not able to pick up the money this time because of her illness, so she wonders if Ritchie has checked to see if the money has been picked up; she thinks not since he has not contacted her.
When she wakes the next morning, “She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.” She realizes that the news of Sadie’s death that would have freed them from the blackmail and the “queasy feeling” she has always had of “the never-quite safeness of their affair is no news to Ritchie at all, because Sadie does not matter and never has. The “family” theme is echoed, as she thinks that the twice-yearly sum of money would have gone straight into his pocket, for he is a man with a family, children to educate, and bills to pay. What makes Corrie come to this realization? All the same things that have made the reader come to the realization: her knowledge of Ritchie, her knowledge of Sadie, Ritchie’s account of the nonexistent letter, his failure to contact her about the money in the mailbox.
We do not get inside the mind of Corrie in this section of the story any more than we get inside the mind of Ritchie in the first section. We have no particular information about her feelings. We only know she is trying to adjust to the realization she has come to and that she feels a sense of emptiness—“a cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest.” She then comes up with another possibility. She knows that Ritchie may never know of Sadie’s death since he has no connection with her and no connection with the family she has worked for. He will therefore expect things to go on just as they have—with Corrie giving him the money twice a year and him pocketing it.
Corrie could say something, but she knows that what they have demands payment, and she is the one who can afford to pay. And so, she will continue to pay, for what difference does it make if the money goes to Sadie or to Ritchie, for she has already made it clear that she is willing to pay. Of course, a day may arrive when Ritchie will find out that Sadie is dead. What will happen then? This just means that for Corrie, one sense of “never-quite safeness” has taken the place of another. Everything is in its proper place—in Corrie and Ritchie’s lives and in Alice Munro’s story.
Well, that’s how I read the story. I would love to hear other readings. Thanks, Kseniya, for sending me back to the story.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Alice Munro, "Corrie" New Yorker, Oct 11, 2010
Well, my friends, I will take “1 over 70” in preference to “20 under 40” any time, when the “1” is Alice Munro. Ms. Munro is seventy-nine and, thank heavens, still going strong. I have read her new story “Corrie” in the Oct 11, 2010 issue of the New Yorker three times now, and it gets better with each reading, which is one of my criteria for a great story. I thought too many of the “20 under 40” pieces in the New Yorker in the past months needed only a single reading. But that may have been because most of them were chapters from novels and therefore, by my definition, not as carefully written and tightly wound as short stories.
I have recently been in e-mail conversation with Ulrica, one of my readers, who has studied Munro extensively. She notes the frequent comment made by reviewers of Munro’s stories that they have the “complexity” of a novel and asks if I think that a comparison between a short story and a novel always must be aware of the genre difference. I think the genre difference is crucial and that the issue raised by reviewers’ judgment that a Munro story is “novelistic” settles on the meaning of the word “complexity.”
I tried to deal with the issue of novelistic vs. short story complexity a few years ago in an article on Alice Munro in the Canadian journal Wascana Review and would be happy to send a copy of the article to anyone who does not have access to that very fine journal. Ulrica’s question and the publication of Munro’s new story “Corrie” prompts me to visit that issue again. The very fact that “Corrie” covers a time period of over twenty years will probably raise the question for some reviewers, who may assume that the development of characters over time is a novelist notion.
However, after three, going on four, readings of the story, I would insist that ”Corrie” is a classic short story with all the virtues of that form subtly displayed. In this story there is no development over time, and that fact lies at the heart of what the story is about. I make no apologies for the following analysis being a plot “spoiler,” for, as I have said many times, the real reading of a story occurs the second or third time, not the first—which is merely an internalizing of the plot and character configuration to make the important second reading possible. “What happens next” is not so important in the short story. “What it means and how it means” is everything.
The two key words of the first sentence of “Corrie”—“money” and “family”--announces the theme of the story, but one does not know this until one comes to the end of the first reading. The first thing we notice about Corrie, who is 26 at the beginning of the story, is that she is always laughing or on the “verge of laughing.” The first thing we notice about Howard Ritchie, who is only a few years older, is that he is “already equipped with a wife and a young family.” The only thing we need to know about Corrie’s father is that he owns a shoe factory, has lots of money, and soon after has a stroke--all of which makes Corrie alone and available. Although Ritchie finds her somewhat “tiresome,” she has money, and he knows that “to some men that never became tiresome.”
Oh, one more thing about Corrie—she is slightly lame from a childhood bout with polio. Why is she lame? Well, for one thing, it makes possible this response from Ritchie, which announces the beginning of their affair: “He hadn’t been sure how he would react to the foot, in bed. But in some way it seemed more appealing, more unique, than the rest of her.” Ritchie has never had sex with anyone but his wife, and Corrie is a virgin, “a complicated half truth owing to the interference of a piano teacher when she was fifteen.” (We may or may not recall this detail later in the story when Ritchie begins taking piano lessons)
Ritchie is religious, but keeps it to himself because his wife, who is very left wing, would make a joke of it. Corrie already makes a joke of religion for herself, when she says she has never had time for God, “because her father was enough to cope with.”
Enter Sadie Wolfe, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the serpent in the garden, or maybe the red herring. Hired to help care for Corrie’s invalid father, Corrie tells her she is too smart to do housekeeping and gives her money for typing lessons. However, (and here is where the point of view of the story is handled so slyly by Munro that we are kept more than a little off guard), Sadie takes another housekeeping job and, at a party, discovers that the man who has been coming to visit her previous employer, Corrie, has a wife. Ostensibly, Sadie sends Ritchie a blackmail letter, threatening to blow the whistle on him to his wife. When he tells Corrie about this, she agrees to pay the blackmail payment (we are not told how much money, for that would elicit an unnecessary judgment on our part—how much is it worth to keep an affair secret?), which she gives to Ritchie twice yearly, which he places in a P.O. box in Sadie’s name. Then, As Corrie expresses it when she gives the money to Ritchie twice a year, “How the time goes around.”
The reason Corrie pays the blackmail demand is not only that Ritchie does not have it, but that he would feel he is taking it away from his family. “Family. She should never have said that. Never have said that word.” Ritchie’s family is the unspoken factor of the affair.
After arrangements for this on-going blackmail payment is settled, the story shifts to focus on Corrie, whose father dies, after which the shoe factory is taken over by a large firm that promises to keep it running. When the company closes it, she decides to turn it into a museum in which she will exhibit shoe-making tools. When the company tears the building down, she decides to take over an old library in town, which she opens two days a week. These two ventures would seem to be mere plot elements or place keepers for the time that passes, if it were not for her remark to Ritchie when he comes back from Spain with his family, “You’d think my place were a shine the way you carry on.” This motif of places in which the past is enshrined—the museum and the library—is also emphasized by the fact that the most prominent business in the town is a furniture store “where the same tables and sofas sat forever in the windows, and the doors seemed never to be open.”
Time seems slowed down and dusty for Corrie, while off the scene Ritchie engages in activities with his family. They continue to make love, but with caution as they grow older because of a sore shoulder or a touchy knee. “They had always been conventional in that way, and remained so, congratulating themselves on not needing any fancy stimulation. That was for married people.”
This static relationship continues until there is an abrupt shift. In September, Corrie learns that Sadie Wolfe has died and that the funeral is scheduled for a church in the town near the library. When she goes to the reception following the service, she meets the woman for whom Sadie worked, who praises Sadie, telling Corrie how much the children and later the grandchildren loved her, and how she kept her illness (probably cancer) to herself. “She was absolutely not a person to make a fuss,” the woman says. The minister agrees, “Sadie was a rare person.” “All agreed. Corrie included.” This is a restrained reference to the fact that Corrie has never had children of her own and never will have. It also suggests that Sadie may not have been the kind of person to blackmail someone. But then, who knows?
It is at this point that Munro, in classic short story fashion, begins to tighten the tension, as Corrie slowly begins to come to discovery of a secret that has controlled her life for the past two decades. She begins to compose a letter to Ritchie about how the days of the blackmail are over. She wonders if he will hear about Sadie’s death before he gets her letter, but then thinks he will not, for “He hasn’t reached the age of checking obituaries yet.” The question she asks herself now is whether Ritchie had looked in the P. O. box to see if the August blackmail payment had been picked up before he went to a vacation cabin with his family, for she knows that Sadie would have been too ill to pick the money up.
When she awakes the next morning, “She knows something. She has found it in her sleep. There is no news to give him. No news, because there never was any. No news about Sadie, because Sadie doesn’t matter and she never did.” Corrie realizes there was never a post office box, that the money was kept by Ritchie for the trip to Spain and other family expenses. “People with families, summer cottages, children to educate, bills to pay—they don’t have to think about how to spend such an amount of money.” (Now we know why “family” and “money” are the two key words in the first sentence.)
Corrie now tries to get used to this “current reality” and is surprised to discover that she is capable of shaping another reality. If Ritchie doesn’t’ know that Sadie is dead he will “just expect things to go on as usual.” Corrie thinks she could say something that would destroy them, but she does not have to. She knows that what she and Ritchie have had—what they still have—demands payment” and that she is the one who can “afford to pay.”
The last paragraph of the story, after this realization is:
“When she goes down to the kitchen again she goes gingerly, making everything fit into its proper place.”
This seems to me a wonderfully self-reflexive ending to a story in which, indeed, as is appropriate for the short story form, everything does fit in its proper place.
If this were an actual real-life situation, or a novel about a real-life situation, then we might ask the following questions:
“Why does Corrie put up with Ritchie for all these years? What kind of experience do they have together? Why doesn’t Corrie find herself a good man? Why is Ritchie such a son-of-a-bitch?” But the story is not about such issues. Corrie is not a real person; she is a paradigm of a woman having an affair. The story is about the affair as a universal, classic phenomenon. Ritchie is not a real person; we know very little about him, about what he thinks. He is a paradigmatic married man having an affair.
And what paradigmatically characterizes an affair?
Well, for one thing, the “other woman” must be an object of desire to the man, but not necessarily an object of desire to all men. That’s why Corrie is both rich and crippled. She has something Ritchie wants, but is flawed by something that other men may not want. And what is Corrie like? We know nothing about her except that she does not take things too seriously—thus often on the verge of laughing—and that she accepts her responsibility in the affair to the extent that she is willing to pay for it. And what kind of life does Ritchie have? All we know is that it is a life with his family. We do not see Corrie crying about being left alone when he spends time with his family. For after all, this is what she has bought into. What is her life like during these years of the affair? We know nothing particular about it. We just know it is static, frozen in space—like an artifact in the museum or a book in a library, or the furniture in the window of the furniture store.
The complexity of Munro’s short story is nothing like the complexity of a novel. In a novel, we are interested in particular people in a particular situation at a particular time and place. We make judgments on those people, as if they were like real people who live down the street or that we know from school or work. If she were a character in a novel, we might say to Corrie, “Stupid woman, you are throwing your life away on that self-centered man, who will never leave his wife and come marry you.” We might say to Ritchie, “You worthless bastard. How could you ruin the life of this woman, while cheating on your wife?”
But this short story does not lead us to make those kinds of judgments. Instead, it allows us to contemplate not a particular affair, but rather the quintessential meaning of “affair.” This is what Chekhov does so brilliantly in “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” a story that Munro knows is the classic “affair” story. And “affair” is about secrecy, sacrifice, selfishness, retribution, stasis. This story does not embody a novelistic complexity about the evolution of experience over time, but rather short story complexity about the revelation of a secret that has sustained an intolerable situation for which someone always has to make payment. We don’t have to get inside the head of Ritchie to see him scheme, nor inside the head of Corrie to see her suffer. We only have to stand back a bit and watch this static universal drama reveal its dusty secrets.
I would be most happy to hear from my readers about this story. There is much more to say about it, I think, but I have said enough. I look forward to hearing from you.
I have recently been in e-mail conversation with Ulrica, one of my readers, who has studied Munro extensively. She notes the frequent comment made by reviewers of Munro’s stories that they have the “complexity” of a novel and asks if I think that a comparison between a short story and a novel always must be aware of the genre difference. I think the genre difference is crucial and that the issue raised by reviewers’ judgment that a Munro story is “novelistic” settles on the meaning of the word “complexity.”
I tried to deal with the issue of novelistic vs. short story complexity a few years ago in an article on Alice Munro in the Canadian journal Wascana Review and would be happy to send a copy of the article to anyone who does not have access to that very fine journal. Ulrica’s question and the publication of Munro’s new story “Corrie” prompts me to visit that issue again. The very fact that “Corrie” covers a time period of over twenty years will probably raise the question for some reviewers, who may assume that the development of characters over time is a novelist notion.
However, after three, going on four, readings of the story, I would insist that ”Corrie” is a classic short story with all the virtues of that form subtly displayed. In this story there is no development over time, and that fact lies at the heart of what the story is about. I make no apologies for the following analysis being a plot “spoiler,” for, as I have said many times, the real reading of a story occurs the second or third time, not the first—which is merely an internalizing of the plot and character configuration to make the important second reading possible. “What happens next” is not so important in the short story. “What it means and how it means” is everything.
The two key words of the first sentence of “Corrie”—“money” and “family”--announces the theme of the story, but one does not know this until one comes to the end of the first reading. The first thing we notice about Corrie, who is 26 at the beginning of the story, is that she is always laughing or on the “verge of laughing.” The first thing we notice about Howard Ritchie, who is only a few years older, is that he is “already equipped with a wife and a young family.” The only thing we need to know about Corrie’s father is that he owns a shoe factory, has lots of money, and soon after has a stroke--all of which makes Corrie alone and available. Although Ritchie finds her somewhat “tiresome,” she has money, and he knows that “to some men that never became tiresome.”
Oh, one more thing about Corrie—she is slightly lame from a childhood bout with polio. Why is she lame? Well, for one thing, it makes possible this response from Ritchie, which announces the beginning of their affair: “He hadn’t been sure how he would react to the foot, in bed. But in some way it seemed more appealing, more unique, than the rest of her.” Ritchie has never had sex with anyone but his wife, and Corrie is a virgin, “a complicated half truth owing to the interference of a piano teacher when she was fifteen.” (We may or may not recall this detail later in the story when Ritchie begins taking piano lessons)
Ritchie is religious, but keeps it to himself because his wife, who is very left wing, would make a joke of it. Corrie already makes a joke of religion for herself, when she says she has never had time for God, “because her father was enough to cope with.”
Enter Sadie Wolfe, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the serpent in the garden, or maybe the red herring. Hired to help care for Corrie’s invalid father, Corrie tells her she is too smart to do housekeeping and gives her money for typing lessons. However, (and here is where the point of view of the story is handled so slyly by Munro that we are kept more than a little off guard), Sadie takes another housekeeping job and, at a party, discovers that the man who has been coming to visit her previous employer, Corrie, has a wife. Ostensibly, Sadie sends Ritchie a blackmail letter, threatening to blow the whistle on him to his wife. When he tells Corrie about this, she agrees to pay the blackmail payment (we are not told how much money, for that would elicit an unnecessary judgment on our part—how much is it worth to keep an affair secret?), which she gives to Ritchie twice yearly, which he places in a P.O. box in Sadie’s name. Then, As Corrie expresses it when she gives the money to Ritchie twice a year, “How the time goes around.”
The reason Corrie pays the blackmail demand is not only that Ritchie does not have it, but that he would feel he is taking it away from his family. “Family. She should never have said that. Never have said that word.” Ritchie’s family is the unspoken factor of the affair.
After arrangements for this on-going blackmail payment is settled, the story shifts to focus on Corrie, whose father dies, after which the shoe factory is taken over by a large firm that promises to keep it running. When the company closes it, she decides to turn it into a museum in which she will exhibit shoe-making tools. When the company tears the building down, she decides to take over an old library in town, which she opens two days a week. These two ventures would seem to be mere plot elements or place keepers for the time that passes, if it were not for her remark to Ritchie when he comes back from Spain with his family, “You’d think my place were a shine the way you carry on.” This motif of places in which the past is enshrined—the museum and the library—is also emphasized by the fact that the most prominent business in the town is a furniture store “where the same tables and sofas sat forever in the windows, and the doors seemed never to be open.”
Time seems slowed down and dusty for Corrie, while off the scene Ritchie engages in activities with his family. They continue to make love, but with caution as they grow older because of a sore shoulder or a touchy knee. “They had always been conventional in that way, and remained so, congratulating themselves on not needing any fancy stimulation. That was for married people.”
This static relationship continues until there is an abrupt shift. In September, Corrie learns that Sadie Wolfe has died and that the funeral is scheduled for a church in the town near the library. When she goes to the reception following the service, she meets the woman for whom Sadie worked, who praises Sadie, telling Corrie how much the children and later the grandchildren loved her, and how she kept her illness (probably cancer) to herself. “She was absolutely not a person to make a fuss,” the woman says. The minister agrees, “Sadie was a rare person.” “All agreed. Corrie included.” This is a restrained reference to the fact that Corrie has never had children of her own and never will have. It also suggests that Sadie may not have been the kind of person to blackmail someone. But then, who knows?
It is at this point that Munro, in classic short story fashion, begins to tighten the tension, as Corrie slowly begins to come to discovery of a secret that has controlled her life for the past two decades. She begins to compose a letter to Ritchie about how the days of the blackmail are over. She wonders if he will hear about Sadie’s death before he gets her letter, but then thinks he will not, for “He hasn’t reached the age of checking obituaries yet.” The question she asks herself now is whether Ritchie had looked in the P. O. box to see if the August blackmail payment had been picked up before he went to a vacation cabin with his family, for she knows that Sadie would have been too ill to pick the money up.
When she awakes the next morning, “She knows something. She has found it in her sleep. There is no news to give him. No news, because there never was any. No news about Sadie, because Sadie doesn’t matter and she never did.” Corrie realizes there was never a post office box, that the money was kept by Ritchie for the trip to Spain and other family expenses. “People with families, summer cottages, children to educate, bills to pay—they don’t have to think about how to spend such an amount of money.” (Now we know why “family” and “money” are the two key words in the first sentence.)
Corrie now tries to get used to this “current reality” and is surprised to discover that she is capable of shaping another reality. If Ritchie doesn’t’ know that Sadie is dead he will “just expect things to go on as usual.” Corrie thinks she could say something that would destroy them, but she does not have to. She knows that what she and Ritchie have had—what they still have—demands payment” and that she is the one who can “afford to pay.”
The last paragraph of the story, after this realization is:
“When she goes down to the kitchen again she goes gingerly, making everything fit into its proper place.”
This seems to me a wonderfully self-reflexive ending to a story in which, indeed, as is appropriate for the short story form, everything does fit in its proper place.
If this were an actual real-life situation, or a novel about a real-life situation, then we might ask the following questions:
“Why does Corrie put up with Ritchie for all these years? What kind of experience do they have together? Why doesn’t Corrie find herself a good man? Why is Ritchie such a son-of-a-bitch?” But the story is not about such issues. Corrie is not a real person; she is a paradigm of a woman having an affair. The story is about the affair as a universal, classic phenomenon. Ritchie is not a real person; we know very little about him, about what he thinks. He is a paradigmatic married man having an affair.
And what paradigmatically characterizes an affair?
Well, for one thing, the “other woman” must be an object of desire to the man, but not necessarily an object of desire to all men. That’s why Corrie is both rich and crippled. She has something Ritchie wants, but is flawed by something that other men may not want. And what is Corrie like? We know nothing about her except that she does not take things too seriously—thus often on the verge of laughing—and that she accepts her responsibility in the affair to the extent that she is willing to pay for it. And what kind of life does Ritchie have? All we know is that it is a life with his family. We do not see Corrie crying about being left alone when he spends time with his family. For after all, this is what she has bought into. What is her life like during these years of the affair? We know nothing particular about it. We just know it is static, frozen in space—like an artifact in the museum or a book in a library, or the furniture in the window of the furniture store.
The complexity of Munro’s short story is nothing like the complexity of a novel. In a novel, we are interested in particular people in a particular situation at a particular time and place. We make judgments on those people, as if they were like real people who live down the street or that we know from school or work. If she were a character in a novel, we might say to Corrie, “Stupid woman, you are throwing your life away on that self-centered man, who will never leave his wife and come marry you.” We might say to Ritchie, “You worthless bastard. How could you ruin the life of this woman, while cheating on your wife?”
But this short story does not lead us to make those kinds of judgments. Instead, it allows us to contemplate not a particular affair, but rather the quintessential meaning of “affair.” This is what Chekhov does so brilliantly in “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” a story that Munro knows is the classic “affair” story. And “affair” is about secrecy, sacrifice, selfishness, retribution, stasis. This story does not embody a novelistic complexity about the evolution of experience over time, but rather short story complexity about the revelation of a secret that has sustained an intolerable situation for which someone always has to make payment. We don’t have to get inside the head of Ritchie to see him scheme, nor inside the head of Corrie to see her suffer. We only have to stand back a bit and watch this static universal drama reveal its dusty secrets.
I would be most happy to hear from my readers about this story. There is much more to say about it, I think, but I have said enough. I look forward to hearing from you.
Monday, June 21, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Alice Munro's "Passion": Summary and Key Quotes
The story begins with Grace, who is now in her 60s looking for the Traverses’ summerhouse in the Ottawa Valley. Why she is looking for it is not mentioned. She has not been here in many years, and there are changes; roads that used to go straight now have curves. There seem to be too many roads with names they did not have before. She looking for the past, but is lost in the new. There is a village now or a suburb with some vacation houses and some for year-round residents. She is about to turn back when she sees the octagonal house of the Woods, an old couple, old as “Grace is now,” and the house has a “mistaken look.” She finds the Travers house with its wraparound veranda, like houses she saw later in Australia.
“What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody had come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?”
The Travers family: Gretchen—28; Neil—mid-30’s; Maury—21. Neil is not a Travers but a Barrow, for Mrs. Travers’ first husband is dead., but we do not know how at this point.
When Maury asks her out, she asks him if it is a dare, and he doesn’t know what she means. She wonders if it is a pickup to take it out to park, which is considered “rather shameful, rather had up, for a girl to agree.” When he asks “What?” painfully, she looks at him. “It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined
They see the film Father of the Bride, and she hates spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked. Maury thinks that if she had that kind of wedding, she would have to spend years saving for it and he is “stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.”
Because she wears a ballerina skirt and a blouse through which you can see the tops of her breasts, “There was a discrepancy, no doubt, between the way she presented herself and the way she wanted to be judged.” (How does she want to be judged? Not like the girl in the movie, but then she dresses to be seen a “bit ragged around the edges, in fact, giving herself gypsy airs.”
She falls in love with Mrs. Travers the way Maury had fallen in love with her.
Grace’s background: Mother died when she was three; father moved to Saskatchewan and had another family. She is raised by great aunt and great uncle; Great uncle canes chairs and teaches her how to do it. She has just finished high school, is twenty, has finished later than others because she takes extra classes, especially hard subjects for girls, like Geometry, Trigonometry, Physics. Does not plan to go to college, so principal asks her why she is doing this: She says she wants to learn everything she can learn for free before she starts a career of caning.
She gets the job at the Inn because both her aunt and uncle and the principle use the same language, believing she should get a “taste of life” before settling down.
Only Mrs. Travers seems to understand that learning has to do with life in some way other than earning a living. Mrs. Travers, who had been sent to business school was told she had to be useful, but wishes she had “crammed her mind instead, or first, with what was useless.”
Grace’s memories of parking sessions with Maury “proved to be much hazier than her memories of sitting at the Traverses’ round dinning table…”
The family plays a definitions game called Balderdash or Fictionary. Someone finds an obscure word that no one knows; each player writes a definition and gives it to the one who picked out the word. The picker writes down the correct definition. The definitions are shuffled and the picker reads them. Each player, except the picker, votes for what he or she think is the correct definition. A player gets a point if he or she guesses the correct definition and a point for each one who guesses his or her definition.
Mavis gets into an argument with Wat (Gretchen’s husband) over a definition, but when the dictionary proves it acceptable, she says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just outclassed by you people.” When she leaves, she says “I have to give you an Oxford dictionary next Christmas” with a “bitter tinkle of a laugh.” When Mrs. Travers asks Gretchen to make a pot of coffee, she goes in to the kitchen muttering, “What fun. Jesus wept.”
Mrs. Travers brings Grace to the house when she has a break of a few hours and often leaves her alone, during which time she reads. She sits in a leather chair in shorts and her legs become sweaty and stuck to the leather. “Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading.” (This line was not in the New Yorker version, but added by Munro for the book version.)
On the ride back to the hotel, Mrs. Travers waits until Grace’s thoughts get loose from whatever book she had been in and then might mention she has read it herself. The example given is Anna Karenina, which Mrs. Travers has read many times. First she sympathized with Kitty and then with Anna, and then with Dolly. She speaks of Dolly trying to figure out how to do the washing, and the problem about the washtubs. “I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs.”
Maury starts talking about marriage, taking it for granted, but the only thing Grace is delighted with is the idea of traveling to Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories, etc. She is more delighted with this than with what he spoke of with pride as “our own home.” “None of this seemed at all real to her,” but the idea of being a chair caner in the house and town where she grew “had never seemed real either.”
She has had fantasies of getting married, “and in exactly in this way, with the man making up his mind immediately.” He would be handsome like Maury. Passionate like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.”
“This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt that it was his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold—a deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not realize how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew about, in solitude and in her imagining, and she felt that it was up to Maury to take over. Which he would not do.”
“These sieges left them both disturbed and slightly angry or ashamed, so that they could not stop kissing, clinging, using fond words to make it up to each other as they said good night. It was a relief to Grace to be alone, to get into bed in the hotel dormitory and blot the last couple of hours out of her mind. And she thought it must be a relief to Maury, too, to be driving down the highway by himself, rearranging his impressions of his Grace so that he could stay wholeheartedly in love with her.”
Mrs. Travers says Maury is a “dear uncomplicated man, like his father. Not like his brother. …Neil is—he’s deep. “Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear.” She says for a long time she and Neil only had each other. “so I think he is special.” She says she does not worry about Maury, she worries a bit about Neil. Gretchen she does not worry about at all. “Because women always have got something, haven’t they, to keep them going? That men haven’t got.”
Now we find out two things: That Neil’s father had killed himself and that Mrs. Travers gets into trouble now and then with her nerves and has to go in hospital for a couple of weeks until they get her “stabilized.” Neil’s father killed himself because he was “unstable.”
Now we have the bit at Thanksgiving about no cranberry sauce, and Maury wants Grace to go with him, but the two little girls want her to swing with them. She breaks her sandal strap and takes her shows off and when she gets in the swing, she cuts her foot on a clamshell that Dana was going to use to make a house for her snail, Ivan.
When Neil arrives, Mrs. Travers says, “Now, that is what I call opportune.” Grace recognizes smell of liquor edged with mint on his breath. His hands do not feel drunk.
He suggests going to hospital for an anti-tetanus shot, which is for him a good excuse to leave. As they leave, Mrs. Travers, with that “look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her” says “This is good…This is very good, Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”
Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence. A weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. (This sentence added in the New Yorker version) And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.
Now begins the final section of the wild ride.
“There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression, at its crest, that the car had lifted off the pavement and they were flying. There was hardly any traffic, so she wasn’t frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.”
And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
“No,” Grace said, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she were having her eyes tested.
“Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, and the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.”
“Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed for a long time, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelled on. And even in some of those details she must have been wrong.”
“In Grace’s recollection, there was not another car on the highway, and their speed approached the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home from church that Sunday morning, or on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages, and around the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, taking charge of her hair. It gave her the illusion of constant perfect speed—not frantic but miraculous, serene”.
And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family had been wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message. You’ll know how to do it.
“Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself figured more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, her flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.”
When they stop at a hotel, it is not for the bed, but for the bar. Everyone fulfills her fantasies. The bar is as she would have expected. When Neil is recognized by the barman, “Grace believed it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.”
Neil asks her if she minds being dragged into any old place, and she says no. He says, “I need your company.” But why does he need her company? When licks her palm, he asks, “Did you think I was adducting you for fell purposes,” she says “No,” but she says she is lying. He says there was a time when you would have been right, as if she had said “yes,” but, he says, not today. “You’re safe as a church today.” Grace thinks the word “fell” is so like his mother.”
“The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words but not the sense of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”
“It seemed that they were up on top of the world here or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides; the trees around being only partly visible, because they grew on lower ground.”
“Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but then there was no end to the strangeness that Grace could encounter today. No end to it.”
All this strangeness is part of the fictional world she has entered.
She thinks it is a bootlegger and thinks of the bootlegger as a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious, sitting on the porch with a shotgun on Halloween.
Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable and some that were not.
Neil asks, “Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”
She said, “You do.”
“Oh. What about me interest you?” His hand slid away.
“What you’re doing now,” Grace said determinedly. “Why.”
“You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Because I know what you’d say.”
“What’s that? What would I say?”
“You’d say, ‘What else is there to do?’ Or something like that.”
“That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”
“No,” Grace said. “No. I wouldn’t.”
When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought that she was serious, but now 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. There was no comfort in what she saw, now that she could see it.
Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”
“She had thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what she’d been working toward at all. She had seen deeper, deeper into him than she could ever have managed if they’d gone that way. . [Change to book version: “But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now. ]
What she saw was final. As if she were at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and it was all there was.”
“It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else, from the thing that was waiting, no matter what, all the time.”
[Change to book version: “It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction.”]
When night comes, it becomes clear to her that “they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.”
She drives back, lost, and disoriented, not having come into Bailey’s Falls in this unfamiliar way. She becomes more frightened. “ It was one thing to drink in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.”
He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he pressed it here and there, before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt from the shot? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized that it was time to say goodbye.
As a matter of fact, she does not know, to this day, if those words were spoken or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continuous, changing pressure that it seemed as if more than two arms were needed, as if she were surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he were telling her that she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.
She hears of the car crash. It has gone directly into the bridge abutment, rammed right in, totally smashed. It is obviously not an accident.
She did not have to deal with Maury face to face. He wrote her a letter.
Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go.
She wrote back five words. I did want to go.
She was going to add, I’m sorry, but stopped herself.
The last paragraph. after Mr. Travers gives her a check for a thousand dollars, recalls the phrase earlier about her getting a taste of life.
"The check was for a thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life."
“What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody had come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?”
The Travers family: Gretchen—28; Neil—mid-30’s; Maury—21. Neil is not a Travers but a Barrow, for Mrs. Travers’ first husband is dead., but we do not know how at this point.
When Maury asks her out, she asks him if it is a dare, and he doesn’t know what she means. She wonders if it is a pickup to take it out to park, which is considered “rather shameful, rather had up, for a girl to agree.” When he asks “What?” painfully, she looks at him. “It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined
They see the film Father of the Bride, and she hates spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked. Maury thinks that if she had that kind of wedding, she would have to spend years saving for it and he is “stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.”
Because she wears a ballerina skirt and a blouse through which you can see the tops of her breasts, “There was a discrepancy, no doubt, between the way she presented herself and the way she wanted to be judged.” (How does she want to be judged? Not like the girl in the movie, but then she dresses to be seen a “bit ragged around the edges, in fact, giving herself gypsy airs.”
She falls in love with Mrs. Travers the way Maury had fallen in love with her.
Grace’s background: Mother died when she was three; father moved to Saskatchewan and had another family. She is raised by great aunt and great uncle; Great uncle canes chairs and teaches her how to do it. She has just finished high school, is twenty, has finished later than others because she takes extra classes, especially hard subjects for girls, like Geometry, Trigonometry, Physics. Does not plan to go to college, so principal asks her why she is doing this: She says she wants to learn everything she can learn for free before she starts a career of caning.
She gets the job at the Inn because both her aunt and uncle and the principle use the same language, believing she should get a “taste of life” before settling down.
Only Mrs. Travers seems to understand that learning has to do with life in some way other than earning a living. Mrs. Travers, who had been sent to business school was told she had to be useful, but wishes she had “crammed her mind instead, or first, with what was useless.”
Grace’s memories of parking sessions with Maury “proved to be much hazier than her memories of sitting at the Traverses’ round dinning table…”
The family plays a definitions game called Balderdash or Fictionary. Someone finds an obscure word that no one knows; each player writes a definition and gives it to the one who picked out the word. The picker writes down the correct definition. The definitions are shuffled and the picker reads them. Each player, except the picker, votes for what he or she think is the correct definition. A player gets a point if he or she guesses the correct definition and a point for each one who guesses his or her definition.
Mavis gets into an argument with Wat (Gretchen’s husband) over a definition, but when the dictionary proves it acceptable, she says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just outclassed by you people.” When she leaves, she says “I have to give you an Oxford dictionary next Christmas” with a “bitter tinkle of a laugh.” When Mrs. Travers asks Gretchen to make a pot of coffee, she goes in to the kitchen muttering, “What fun. Jesus wept.”
Mrs. Travers brings Grace to the house when she has a break of a few hours and often leaves her alone, during which time she reads. She sits in a leather chair in shorts and her legs become sweaty and stuck to the leather. “Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading.” (This line was not in the New Yorker version, but added by Munro for the book version.)
On the ride back to the hotel, Mrs. Travers waits until Grace’s thoughts get loose from whatever book she had been in and then might mention she has read it herself. The example given is Anna Karenina, which Mrs. Travers has read many times. First she sympathized with Kitty and then with Anna, and then with Dolly. She speaks of Dolly trying to figure out how to do the washing, and the problem about the washtubs. “I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs.”
Maury starts talking about marriage, taking it for granted, but the only thing Grace is delighted with is the idea of traveling to Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories, etc. She is more delighted with this than with what he spoke of with pride as “our own home.” “None of this seemed at all real to her,” but the idea of being a chair caner in the house and town where she grew “had never seemed real either.”
She has had fantasies of getting married, “and in exactly in this way, with the man making up his mind immediately.” He would be handsome like Maury. Passionate like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.”
“This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt that it was his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold—a deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not realize how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew about, in solitude and in her imagining, and she felt that it was up to Maury to take over. Which he would not do.”
“These sieges left them both disturbed and slightly angry or ashamed, so that they could not stop kissing, clinging, using fond words to make it up to each other as they said good night. It was a relief to Grace to be alone, to get into bed in the hotel dormitory and blot the last couple of hours out of her mind. And she thought it must be a relief to Maury, too, to be driving down the highway by himself, rearranging his impressions of his Grace so that he could stay wholeheartedly in love with her.”
Mrs. Travers says Maury is a “dear uncomplicated man, like his father. Not like his brother. …Neil is—he’s deep. “Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear.” She says for a long time she and Neil only had each other. “so I think he is special.” She says she does not worry about Maury, she worries a bit about Neil. Gretchen she does not worry about at all. “Because women always have got something, haven’t they, to keep them going? That men haven’t got.”
Now we find out two things: That Neil’s father had killed himself and that Mrs. Travers gets into trouble now and then with her nerves and has to go in hospital for a couple of weeks until they get her “stabilized.” Neil’s father killed himself because he was “unstable.”
Now we have the bit at Thanksgiving about no cranberry sauce, and Maury wants Grace to go with him, but the two little girls want her to swing with them. She breaks her sandal strap and takes her shows off and when she gets in the swing, she cuts her foot on a clamshell that Dana was going to use to make a house for her snail, Ivan.
When Neil arrives, Mrs. Travers says, “Now, that is what I call opportune.” Grace recognizes smell of liquor edged with mint on his breath. His hands do not feel drunk.
He suggests going to hospital for an anti-tetanus shot, which is for him a good excuse to leave. As they leave, Mrs. Travers, with that “look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her” says “This is good…This is very good, Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”
Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence. A weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. (This sentence added in the New Yorker version) And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.
Now begins the final section of the wild ride.
“There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression, at its crest, that the car had lifted off the pavement and they were flying. There was hardly any traffic, so she wasn’t frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.”
And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
“No,” Grace said, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she were having her eyes tested.
“Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, and the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.”
“Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed for a long time, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelled on. And even in some of those details she must have been wrong.”
“In Grace’s recollection, there was not another car on the highway, and their speed approached the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home from church that Sunday morning, or on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages, and around the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, taking charge of her hair. It gave her the illusion of constant perfect speed—not frantic but miraculous, serene”.
And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family had been wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message. You’ll know how to do it.
“Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself figured more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, her flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.”
When they stop at a hotel, it is not for the bed, but for the bar. Everyone fulfills her fantasies. The bar is as she would have expected. When Neil is recognized by the barman, “Grace believed it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.”
Neil asks her if she minds being dragged into any old place, and she says no. He says, “I need your company.” But why does he need her company? When licks her palm, he asks, “Did you think I was adducting you for fell purposes,” she says “No,” but she says she is lying. He says there was a time when you would have been right, as if she had said “yes,” but, he says, not today. “You’re safe as a church today.” Grace thinks the word “fell” is so like his mother.”
“The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words but not the sense of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”
“It seemed that they were up on top of the world here or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides; the trees around being only partly visible, because they grew on lower ground.”
“Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but then there was no end to the strangeness that Grace could encounter today. No end to it.”
All this strangeness is part of the fictional world she has entered.
She thinks it is a bootlegger and thinks of the bootlegger as a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious, sitting on the porch with a shotgun on Halloween.
Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable and some that were not.
Neil asks, “Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”
She said, “You do.”
“Oh. What about me interest you?” His hand slid away.
“What you’re doing now,” Grace said determinedly. “Why.”
“You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Because I know what you’d say.”
“What’s that? What would I say?”
“You’d say, ‘What else is there to do?’ Or something like that.”
“That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”
“No,” Grace said. “No. I wouldn’t.”
When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought that she was serious, but now 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. There was no comfort in what she saw, now that she could see it.
Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”
“She had thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what she’d been working toward at all. She had seen deeper, deeper into him than she could ever have managed if they’d gone that way. . [Change to book version: “But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now. ]
What she saw was final. As if she were at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and it was all there was.”
“It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else, from the thing that was waiting, no matter what, all the time.”
[Change to book version: “It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction.”]
When night comes, it becomes clear to her that “they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.”
She drives back, lost, and disoriented, not having come into Bailey’s Falls in this unfamiliar way. She becomes more frightened. “ It was one thing to drink in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.”
He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he pressed it here and there, before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt from the shot? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized that it was time to say goodbye.
As a matter of fact, she does not know, to this day, if those words were spoken or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continuous, changing pressure that it seemed as if more than two arms were needed, as if she were surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he were telling her that she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.
She hears of the car crash. It has gone directly into the bridge abutment, rammed right in, totally smashed. It is obviously not an accident.
She did not have to deal with Maury face to face. He wrote her a letter.
Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go.
She wrote back five words. I did want to go.
She was going to add, I’m sorry, but stopped herself.
The last paragraph. after Mr. Travers gives her a check for a thousand dollars, recalls the phrase earlier about her getting a taste of life.
"The check was for a thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life."
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
International Short Story Conference: Toronto, June, 2010
I will be attending the 11th International Conference on the Short Story in Toronto, Canada this month, speaking on a Plenary Session panel entitled “Theoretical Approaches to Alice Munro’s “Passion” with other short story theorists and critics. Michael Trussler, University of Regina, will speak on “Melancholy and Metaphysical Solitude in ‘Passion’.” Per Winther, University of Oslo will speak on “Munro’s Handling of Perspective and Descriptive Detail in ‘Passion.’” Michael Toolan, University of Birmingham, will speak on “Engagement Via Emotional Heightening in ‘Passion’.” Susan Lohafer, from University of Iowa, will speak on “Entering ‘Passion’ Empirically.” The topic of my own presentation is: “The Short Story’s Way of Meaning in ‘Passion’.”
You can find the program for the four-day conference at: http://www.yorku.ca/shortcon/
During the month of June, I plan to post blogs on my own presentation on Munro’s story “Passion,” and on the events at the conference, including summaries of the other panel presentations on the story. If you are interested in following along and making your own comments, the New Yorker version of “Passion” is available at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/22/040322fi_fiction
The story is in her 2004 collection Runaway.
The Society for the Study of the Short Story has been around for a number of years. I have made presentations at nine of the eleven International Conferences. It is the one conference I try to attend regularly, not only because it focuses on the area of my special interest, but because it is the only chance I get to see old friends from around the world.
The conference, which is held every two years, began twenty-two years ago in Paris, France. Since then, it has been held in New Orleans, Lisbon, Cork, and several times at the University of Iowa, home of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. What is unique about the conference is that it is not only a platform for literary critics to discuss the short story as a form, it also provides an opportunity for short story writers to read their stories and meet with their most dedicated readers.
Over the years, I have met John Barth, Anne Beattie, Isabelle Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Ellen Douglas, Francine Prose, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolfe, Bharata Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Edna O’Brien, Richard Ford, and many others.
Writers reading and mingling this June in Toronto include: Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Atwood, Helena Maria Viramontes, Olive Senior, Bharata Mukergee, Clark Blaise, and others.
Panels will feature presentations on Canadian short fiction, metafiction and postmodernism, the relationship between short fiction and nonfiction, flash fiction, postcolonialism, Irish short fiction, fairy tale, etc.
One panel title that gave me a laugh and that I will be sure not to miss is:
“Theory and the Short Story: Poe, Charles E. May, and Erich Auerbach”. What a hoot!
I will post some work I have done on my presentation on "Passion" in a few days. I hope you get a chance to read it before then and join with me in a discussion of it.
You can find the program for the four-day conference at: http://www.yorku.ca/shortcon/
During the month of June, I plan to post blogs on my own presentation on Munro’s story “Passion,” and on the events at the conference, including summaries of the other panel presentations on the story. If you are interested in following along and making your own comments, the New Yorker version of “Passion” is available at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/22/040322fi_fiction
The story is in her 2004 collection Runaway.
The Society for the Study of the Short Story has been around for a number of years. I have made presentations at nine of the eleven International Conferences. It is the one conference I try to attend regularly, not only because it focuses on the area of my special interest, but because it is the only chance I get to see old friends from around the world.
The conference, which is held every two years, began twenty-two years ago in Paris, France. Since then, it has been held in New Orleans, Lisbon, Cork, and several times at the University of Iowa, home of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. What is unique about the conference is that it is not only a platform for literary critics to discuss the short story as a form, it also provides an opportunity for short story writers to read their stories and meet with their most dedicated readers.
Over the years, I have met John Barth, Anne Beattie, Isabelle Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Ellen Douglas, Francine Prose, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolfe, Bharata Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Edna O’Brien, Richard Ford, and many others.
Writers reading and mingling this June in Toronto include: Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Atwood, Helena Maria Viramontes, Olive Senior, Bharata Mukergee, Clark Blaise, and others.
Panels will feature presentations on Canadian short fiction, metafiction and postmodernism, the relationship between short fiction and nonfiction, flash fiction, postcolonialism, Irish short fiction, fairy tale, etc.
One panel title that gave me a laugh and that I will be sure not to miss is:
“Theory and the Short Story: Poe, Charles E. May, and Erich Auerbach”. What a hoot!
I will post some work I have done on my presentation on "Passion" in a few days. I hope you get a chance to read it before then and join with me in a discussion of it.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Short Story Month 2010--Best American Short Stories: 2009 and O. Henry Award Stories: 2010
The Best American Short Stories 2009 came out in Oct. last year; The Pen/O.Henry Prize Stories: 2010 came out in April of this. With twenty stories in each volume and priced on Amazon at about ten bucks each for the paperback, they are the two best bargains out there for any lover of the short story form. You may not like every story in the collection, may even shake your head in wonder that a given story was chosen as one of the ”best” of the year, but you will find God’s plenty in these two books, and I guarantee it will be twenty dollars well spent.
While celebrating May as Short Story Month, doubling my blog efforts by reading the Atlantic Special Issue and commenting on stories for Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers blog from Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming, I have also been reading the new Best and the new O. Henry. I will only comment briefly on my favorites among these forty to whet your appetite, while trying to avoid spoilers.
Annie Proulx’s “Them Old Cowboy Songs” from her third (and final, she says) Wyoming Stories volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, was chosen for both volumes. Proulx bookends the stories in her book by citing its title in the first and last tale. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity. Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.” The way it was, and often still is, is vicious. Whether the story takes place in the late 19th century or the early 21st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and Rose, aged 16 and 14, try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few, and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.
Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge,” which originally appeared in The Southern Review, also makes it in both volumes. Rash says the story combines a family tale of his grandfather leading a search for an old woman who wandered away from her mountain farm in the 1930’s with an image of a man running from something, although he seemed too old to be running. Rash says he soon began to understand that the man was running from a world he no longer understood. “Into the Gorge” is a short, relatively simple story, told with just enough restraint to suggest legend, without laying on too strongly the social theme of the Appalachian Mountains being invaded by the restraints and regulations of the modern world.
One advantage the O. Henry collection has over the Best volume is that it contains a story each by the two very best short story writers still practicing that underrated art--Alice Munro’s “Some Women” and William Trevor’s “Woman in the House.”
Although Alice Munro has insisted in more than one place that she does not write as a novelist does, many critics and reviewers have tried to give her fiction the dignity they think belongs only to the novel by suggesting that her stories are “novelistic” and therefore more complex than short stories. In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.
“Some Women” begins with the narrator saying how amazed she is sometimes at how old she is, but focuses on her experiences when she was thirteen-years-old and hired to help care for a young man named Bruce, a veteran of the war, who is dying of Leukemia. He is staying in the house of his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. His wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, seems to be living on the fringes of his life and his illness. Old Mrs. Crozier’s masseuse, Roxanne, bursts into the house like a dynamo and takes an interest in Bruce, who plays the role of a kind of ailing Fisher King, a sort of sacred prize in the center of the women. A usual with the short story, “Some Women” amasses its weight on its ending when Bruce turns the tables on Roxanne and Mrs. Crozier, finding the comfort he needs in his neglected wife.
Alice Munro’s short stories are complex and powerful not because they are “novelistic” and not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination. More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today.
William Trevor, by universal critical agreement, is one of the best short-story writers practicing that underrated art form. The twelve stories in his most recent collection, Cheating at Canasta, reaffirm that he has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.
As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force.
“The Woman of the House” is about silence, about not saying, about the basic mystery of human personality, about Chekhov's famous comment that in the short story, it is better to say too little than too much, even though he admitted he was not sure why that was true. The story is a fine example of the short story form's focus on basic and universal human characteristics, even though I know that the word "universal" is not appreciated by postcolonial and other cultural critics, who seem more concerned with what separates us than what unifies us as human beings.
These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.
Daniel Alarcon has stories in both collections, “The Idiot President” in the Best and “The Bridge” in the O. Henry. I liked “The Bridge” best for its haunting exploration of the death of a blind man and his blind wife in Alarcon’s native city of Lima, Peru. Alarcon says that the story began with an anecdote of a fallen pedestrian bridge and the accidental death of a blind person, but that as he began the story he had no fixed sense of where it was going or where it might end, which, he says, he has found to be the most exciting way to write. It’s an interesting observation about the writing process that I wish others would comment on, for I have heard many writers say the same thing.
One story in the Best collection that I had read earlier is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Yurt,” from her elegant little collection Ms. Hempel Chronicles. Caught between two worlds, Ms. Hempel is young enough to understand the lyrics of her students’ favorite songs, but old enough to feel she should be shocked by them. Although she loves her job and her young charges, she fears she may be doomed to always repeat the seventh grade.
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is another one of those precocious Iowa Workshop graduates, who, like her alter ego, served a brief term teaching seventh and eighth grade before moving on to graduate school. The publishers of this, her second book, know better than to use the label “short stories” on the cover or in the promotional material, hoping readers will assume this too is a novel. But make no mistake. Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a collection of very fine stories, tightly organized, lyrical in style, metaphoric and mysterious, linked by their focus on the pains and pleasures of the young schoolteacher who gives the book its name. Ms. Hempel’s relationships with her students, her fellow teachers, her brother, and her father are all delicately drawn. Her efforts to be a good teacher, although she is never quite sure this is what she is meant to do, are heartfelt and convincing. She will make readers remember fondly one of those teachers they loved.
I thought the O. Henry volume was stronger this year than the Best volume, or maybe I just liked more of the stories in the O. Henry volume. “The Headstrong Historian” by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is wonderfully told tale in the accents of the traditional storyteller, and “A Spoiled Man” by Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a powerful story about a favorite subject of short fiction-the little man—told with such consummate control that what is classically causal sounds everyday casual. I posted a couple of blogs about Mueenuddin last year when his debut collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which has won or been short-listed for several awards, came out.
Being the old Kentucky boy that I am, I can never resist a story by Wendell Berry, and, his Atlantic story “Stand By Me” is, as always, a pleasure. It’s also a pleasure to discover a new writer, who has been around a while. James Lasdun has published several books, but for some reason I never had read him before. His story “Oh, Death,” from his most recent collection It’s Beginning to Hurt, may not have the same elegiac power as the Ralph Stanley song from which it gets its title, but it makes the heart tighten a bit for all that. That opening stanza of the Stanley song never fails to make me fear that inevitable “good night,” against which I fully intend to rage.
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
Lasdun, born in England, but living now in upstate New York, says that one element he brought to the story to give expression to the powerful emotions the event on which it is based aroused in him was the “mountain music” the narrator has become infatuated with, concluding, “I hope something of the wild energy and pathos, the joy and melancholy, of that music has found its way into the story.” I think it has. I just ordered a copy of It’s Beginning to Hurt and look forward to reading all the stories in it. That’s another wonderful thing about reading the stories in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award Stories—the discovery of great writers you somehow missed, an error that you want to correct right away.
While celebrating May as Short Story Month, doubling my blog efforts by reading the Atlantic Special Issue and commenting on stories for Dan Wickett’s Emerging Writers blog from Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Alyson Hagy’s Ghosts of Wyoming, I have also been reading the new Best and the new O. Henry. I will only comment briefly on my favorites among these forty to whet your appetite, while trying to avoid spoilers.
Annie Proulx’s “Them Old Cowboy Songs” from her third (and final, she says) Wyoming Stories volume, Fine Just the Way It Is, was chosen for both volumes. Proulx bookends the stories in her book by citing its title in the first and last tale. In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock, wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past, which she records for posterity. Even though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way it is.” The way it was, and often still is, is vicious. Whether the story takes place in the late 19th century or the early 21st, one slip-up in the rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and Rose, aged 16 and 14, try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are bitter and jobs are few, and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.
Ron Rash’s “Into the Gorge,” which originally appeared in The Southern Review, also makes it in both volumes. Rash says the story combines a family tale of his grandfather leading a search for an old woman who wandered away from her mountain farm in the 1930’s with an image of a man running from something, although he seemed too old to be running. Rash says he soon began to understand that the man was running from a world he no longer understood. “Into the Gorge” is a short, relatively simple story, told with just enough restraint to suggest legend, without laying on too strongly the social theme of the Appalachian Mountains being invaded by the restraints and regulations of the modern world.
One advantage the O. Henry collection has over the Best volume is that it contains a story each by the two very best short story writers still practicing that underrated art--Alice Munro’s “Some Women” and William Trevor’s “Woman in the House.”
Although Alice Munro has insisted in more than one place that she does not write as a novelist does, many critics and reviewers have tried to give her fiction the dignity they think belongs only to the novel by suggesting that her stories are “novelistic” and therefore more complex than short stories. In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.
“Some Women” begins with the narrator saying how amazed she is sometimes at how old she is, but focuses on her experiences when she was thirteen-years-old and hired to help care for a young man named Bruce, a veteran of the war, who is dying of Leukemia. He is staying in the house of his stepmother, Old Mrs. Crozier. His wife, Sylvia, a schoolteacher, seems to be living on the fringes of his life and his illness. Old Mrs. Crozier’s masseuse, Roxanne, bursts into the house like a dynamo and takes an interest in Bruce, who plays the role of a kind of ailing Fisher King, a sort of sacred prize in the center of the women. A usual with the short story, “Some Women” amasses its weight on its ending when Bruce turns the tables on Roxanne and Mrs. Crozier, finding the comfort he needs in his neglected wife.
Alice Munro’s short stories are complex and powerful not because they are “novelistic” and not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination. More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today.
William Trevor, by universal critical agreement, is one of the best short-story writers practicing that underrated art form. The twelve stories in his most recent collection, Cheating at Canasta, reaffirm that he has a profound understanding of the complexity of what makes people do what they do and an unerring ability to use language to suggest that intimate intricacy.
As in all great short stories, from Chekhov to Carver, there is mystery and not a little menace in the stories of William Trevor—secrets so tangled and inexplicable that efforts to explain them with the language of psychology or sociology or history are either futile or absurd. This is not accidental, but part of the short story’s historical and generic tradition, for the form originated in primitive myth, which, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for which story was the only explanatory model available. Moreover, the short story is often concerned with the enigma of motivation. Part of the reason for this is the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some mysterious force.
“The Woman of the House” is about silence, about not saying, about the basic mystery of human personality, about Chekhov's famous comment that in the short story, it is better to say too little than too much, even though he admitted he was not sure why that was true. The story is a fine example of the short story form's focus on basic and universal human characteristics, even though I know that the word "universal" is not appreciated by postcolonial and other cultural critics, who seem more concerned with what separates us than what unifies us as human beings.
These are not cultural examinations of either the old Ireland of legend or the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, but rather profoundly wise explorations of individual, yet universal, secrets and mysteries of the heart. Luminous, restrained stories, every one of them deserves to be read and reread, their motivations marveled at, their sentences savored. They fill the reader with awe at the complexity of the human experience and the genius of William Trevor.
Daniel Alarcon has stories in both collections, “The Idiot President” in the Best and “The Bridge” in the O. Henry. I liked “The Bridge” best for its haunting exploration of the death of a blind man and his blind wife in Alarcon’s native city of Lima, Peru. Alarcon says that the story began with an anecdote of a fallen pedestrian bridge and the accidental death of a blind person, but that as he began the story he had no fixed sense of where it was going or where it might end, which, he says, he has found to be the most exciting way to write. It’s an interesting observation about the writing process that I wish others would comment on, for I have heard many writers say the same thing.
One story in the Best collection that I had read earlier is Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Yurt,” from her elegant little collection Ms. Hempel Chronicles. Caught between two worlds, Ms. Hempel is young enough to understand the lyrics of her students’ favorite songs, but old enough to feel she should be shocked by them. Although she loves her job and her young charges, she fears she may be doomed to always repeat the seventh grade.
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is another one of those precocious Iowa Workshop graduates, who, like her alter ego, served a brief term teaching seventh and eighth grade before moving on to graduate school. The publishers of this, her second book, know better than to use the label “short stories” on the cover or in the promotional material, hoping readers will assume this too is a novel. But make no mistake. Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a collection of very fine stories, tightly organized, lyrical in style, metaphoric and mysterious, linked by their focus on the pains and pleasures of the young schoolteacher who gives the book its name. Ms. Hempel’s relationships with her students, her fellow teachers, her brother, and her father are all delicately drawn. Her efforts to be a good teacher, although she is never quite sure this is what she is meant to do, are heartfelt and convincing. She will make readers remember fondly one of those teachers they loved.
I thought the O. Henry volume was stronger this year than the Best volume, or maybe I just liked more of the stories in the O. Henry volume. “The Headstrong Historian” by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is wonderfully told tale in the accents of the traditional storyteller, and “A Spoiled Man” by Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, is a powerful story about a favorite subject of short fiction-the little man—told with such consummate control that what is classically causal sounds everyday casual. I posted a couple of blogs about Mueenuddin last year when his debut collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which has won or been short-listed for several awards, came out.
Being the old Kentucky boy that I am, I can never resist a story by Wendell Berry, and, his Atlantic story “Stand By Me” is, as always, a pleasure. It’s also a pleasure to discover a new writer, who has been around a while. James Lasdun has published several books, but for some reason I never had read him before. His story “Oh, Death,” from his most recent collection It’s Beginning to Hurt, may not have the same elegiac power as the Ralph Stanley song from which it gets its title, but it makes the heart tighten a bit for all that. That opening stanza of the Stanley song never fails to make me fear that inevitable “good night,” against which I fully intend to rage.
O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over til another year
Well what is this that I can't see
With ice cold hands takin' hold of me
Well I am death, none can excel
I'll open the door to heaven or hell
Whoa, death someone would pray
Could you wait to call me another day
The children prayed, the preacher preached
Time and mercy is out of your reach
I'll fix your feet til you cant walk
I'll lock your jaw til you cant talk
I'll close your eyes so you can't see
This very air, come and go with me
I'm death I come to take the soul
Leave the body and leave it cold
To draw up the flesh off of the frame
Dirt and worm both have a claim
Lasdun, born in England, but living now in upstate New York, says that one element he brought to the story to give expression to the powerful emotions the event on which it is based aroused in him was the “mountain music” the narrator has become infatuated with, concluding, “I hope something of the wild energy and pathos, the joy and melancholy, of that music has found its way into the story.” I think it has. I just ordered a copy of It’s Beginning to Hurt and look forward to reading all the stories in it. That’s another wonderful thing about reading the stories in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award Stories—the discovery of great writers you somehow missed, an error that you want to correct right away.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Alice Munro's TOO MUCH HAPPINESS
Book publishers usually consider short stories the work of the beginner—M.F.A. finger-exercises they reluctantly agree to publish only if they can promise on the flyleaf that the writer is “currently working on a novel.” This commercial capitulation to the fact that most readers prefer novels to short stories--along with the assumption that a big work of fiction is more important than a collection of small ones--is so powerful and pervasive that few writers are able to resist it.
That Alice Munro, who has been able to resist it for eleven collections of short stories, has become one of the most highly praised writers of the last half of the twentieth century should therefore go a long way toward redeeming the neglected short form. Over thirty years ago, when her one novel was called “only a collection of short stories,” she wasn’t bothered, saying she didn’t feel that a novel was any step up from a short story. To her credit, she has never wavered from that judgment.
In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.
With remarkable unanimity, reviewers, critics, and fellow authors agree that Alice Munro is the best short-story writer in the world today, (Her only competition for this title might be William Trevor) often justifying this assessment by arguing that the numerous characters and multiplicity of events in her stories make them somehow novelistic. However, Munro has always insisted that she does not write as a novelist does, that when she is writing a short story she gets a kind of tension she needs, like pulling on a rope attached to some definite place, whereas with a novel, everything goes “flabby.” Characters and events don’t really matter in her stories, she says, for they are subordinated to an overall “climate” or “mood.” In Munro’s best work, the hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere and tone, is always about something more enigmatic and unspeakable than the story generated by characters and what happens next. Her greatest stories simply do not communicate as novels do.
Munro once insisted, “I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a short story.” On another occasion, she used a metaphor to describe this short-story excitement. “I can get a kind of tension when I’m writing a short story, like I’m pulling on a rope and I know where the rope is attached. With a novel, everything goes flabby.” Munro says she doesn’t seem to be able to write in any other way. “I guess that’s why I don’t write a novel. God knows I still keep trying. But there always comes a point where everything seems to be getting really flat. You don’t feel the tension…I don’t feel this pulling on the rope to get to the other side that I have to feel.” Munro added, “People have suggested this is because I want to be able to manage everything and that I fear loss of control…. I have to agree that I fear loss of control. But I don’t think it’s anything as simple as that.”
Munro has said that when she reads a story she does not take it up at the beginning and follow it like a road “with views and neat diversions along the way.” Rather, for her, reading a story is like moving through a house, making connections between one enclosed space and another. Consequently, Munro declares, “When I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure.” She admits that the word “feeling” is not very precise, but that if she tries to be more intellectually respectable she will be dishonest. Rather than being concerned with character or cause-and-effect consequence, Munro says she wants the “characters and what happens subordinated to a climate,” by which, she says, she means something like “mood.” “What I like is not to really know what the story is all about. And for me to keep trying to find out.” What makes a story interesting, she says, is the “thing that I don’t know and that I will discover as I go along.
I have written about Munro in more detail in another place, especially the common critical view (mistaken, I think) that Munro’s stories are “novelistic’ (“Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?” Wascana Review 38 (2003): 16-28. I did a blog entry on the story “Wenlock Edge” in this new collection last February). I will thus only raise one issue about this new book—the thematic significance of the title, which originated with Munro’s discovery of the 19th-century Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky while looking for something else in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The title story focuses on the last few days before Kovalevsky died of pneumonia contracted during a cold wet trip from Paris to Stockholm, where she held a chair in mathematics, the first woman to hold such a professorship in European history. Kovalevsky’s seemingly contradictory talents led Munro to a biography by Don H. Kennedy and his wife entitled Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (1983), which quotes Kovalevsky’s last words at four o’clock in the morning on February 10, 1891: “Too much happiness.” Kovalevsky has been looking forward to the future, having received recognition for her work in an era when woman were not thought to be capable of higher mathematical thinking. She is also happily anticipating her forthcoming marriage to Maxsim Kovalesky, a distant relation and a professor of law--a great bear of a man who offers her comfort and security. Although the title of the story may suggest that Kovalevsky has so much happiness her death is a tragedy, it also may suggest her acceptance of the fact that happiness cannot be separated from unhappiness.
Indeed, the inextricability of happiness and unhappiness may be the thematic web that Munro weaves throughout many of the stories in this collection, especially since several reviewers have already suggested that there is much more violence in these stories than in Munro’s previous work: Two young girls murder an abhorred playmate; a man kills his children because he thinks his wife has walked out on him; a woman dying of cancer is threatened in her home by a man who has murdered his family. However, in keeping with the theme of “too much happiness,” or happiness bound up with unhappiness, the horror in these stories is often balanced by some compensatory acceptance. For example in “Dimensions,” although the central character’s insane bullying husband has killed their children, she understands that he knows their life and their children better than anyone else and goes to visit him in an asylum. Moreover, the story ends with a random rescue and a kind of personal salvation that seems somehow poetically just.
“Free Radicals” is also about a bittersweet confrontation that ends with poetic justice. The central character who has cancer and whose husband has recently died, has her home invaded by a man who shows her pictures of his parents and sister that he has recently murdered. In spite of the fact that she knows the cancer will kill probably her, she clings to life and tries to gain the intruder’s sympathy by telling him how she has been guilty of a crime in her past. However, the story is a lie, a fiction in which she takes on the role of her husband’s wronged first wife who is going to poison the other woman. Telling her that what he did was not so underhanded as what she did, the murderer leaves, only to be killed in a car accident.
Although in the last forty years the short story has been characterized first by experimentation and then by attenuation, Alice Munro has continued to go her own way, so confident of the nature of the short story and her control of the form that she needs to observe no trends nor imitate no precursors. Certainly she does not write in a vacuum, clearly aware of those short-story masters who have preceded her--Chekhov, Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, Sherwood Anderson--but Munro has found her own unique rhythm and controls it consummately. Although a Munro story might initially appear to be novelistic, her stories are deceptive; they lull the reader into a false sense of security in which time seems to comfortably stretch out like everyday reality, only to suddenly turn and tighten so intensely that the reader is left breathless.
The secret of Alice Munro’s short stories is that she is able to suggest universal, unspoken human desires by describing what seems to be ordinary everyday reality. Her stories are complex and powerful not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination.
More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today. If there is any justice and judgment in matters literary, she should redeem the short story from its second-class status single-handedly.
That Alice Munro, who has been able to resist it for eleven collections of short stories, has become one of the most highly praised writers of the last half of the twentieth century should therefore go a long way toward redeeming the neglected short form. Over thirty years ago, when her one novel was called “only a collection of short stories,” she wasn’t bothered, saying she didn’t feel that a novel was any step up from a short story. To her credit, she has never wavered from that judgment.
In a story entitled “Fiction” in her new book, Too Much Happiness, Munro cannot not resist a wily jab at all those critics who have trivialized the short story as a genre and chided her for not writing something more serious, namely novels. Joyce, the central character, buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party. When she opens it, she is disappointed to find out it is a collection of short stories, not a novel: “It seemed to diminish the book’s importance, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside it.” After climaxing a distinguished career of numerous awards with the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, Munro must have had a sly smile on her face when she wrote those words.
With remarkable unanimity, reviewers, critics, and fellow authors agree that Alice Munro is the best short-story writer in the world today, (Her only competition for this title might be William Trevor) often justifying this assessment by arguing that the numerous characters and multiplicity of events in her stories make them somehow novelistic. However, Munro has always insisted that she does not write as a novelist does, that when she is writing a short story she gets a kind of tension she needs, like pulling on a rope attached to some definite place, whereas with a novel, everything goes “flabby.” Characters and events don’t really matter in her stories, she says, for they are subordinated to an overall “climate” or “mood.” In Munro’s best work, the hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere and tone, is always about something more enigmatic and unspeakable than the story generated by characters and what happens next. Her greatest stories simply do not communicate as novels do.
Munro once insisted, “I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a short story.” On another occasion, she used a metaphor to describe this short-story excitement. “I can get a kind of tension when I’m writing a short story, like I’m pulling on a rope and I know where the rope is attached. With a novel, everything goes flabby.” Munro says she doesn’t seem to be able to write in any other way. “I guess that’s why I don’t write a novel. God knows I still keep trying. But there always comes a point where everything seems to be getting really flat. You don’t feel the tension…I don’t feel this pulling on the rope to get to the other side that I have to feel.” Munro added, “People have suggested this is because I want to be able to manage everything and that I fear loss of control…. I have to agree that I fear loss of control. But I don’t think it’s anything as simple as that.”
Munro has said that when she reads a story she does not take it up at the beginning and follow it like a road “with views and neat diversions along the way.” Rather, for her, reading a story is like moving through a house, making connections between one enclosed space and another. Consequently, Munro declares, “When I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure.” She admits that the word “feeling” is not very precise, but that if she tries to be more intellectually respectable she will be dishonest. Rather than being concerned with character or cause-and-effect consequence, Munro says she wants the “characters and what happens subordinated to a climate,” by which, she says, she means something like “mood.” “What I like is not to really know what the story is all about. And for me to keep trying to find out.” What makes a story interesting, she says, is the “thing that I don’t know and that I will discover as I go along.
I have written about Munro in more detail in another place, especially the common critical view (mistaken, I think) that Munro’s stories are “novelistic’ (“Why Does Alice Munro Write Short Stories?” Wascana Review 38 (2003): 16-28. I did a blog entry on the story “Wenlock Edge” in this new collection last February). I will thus only raise one issue about this new book—the thematic significance of the title, which originated with Munro’s discovery of the 19th-century Russian mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky while looking for something else in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The title story focuses on the last few days before Kovalevsky died of pneumonia contracted during a cold wet trip from Paris to Stockholm, where she held a chair in mathematics, the first woman to hold such a professorship in European history. Kovalevsky’s seemingly contradictory talents led Munro to a biography by Don H. Kennedy and his wife entitled Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (1983), which quotes Kovalevsky’s last words at four o’clock in the morning on February 10, 1891: “Too much happiness.” Kovalevsky has been looking forward to the future, having received recognition for her work in an era when woman were not thought to be capable of higher mathematical thinking. She is also happily anticipating her forthcoming marriage to Maxsim Kovalesky, a distant relation and a professor of law--a great bear of a man who offers her comfort and security. Although the title of the story may suggest that Kovalevsky has so much happiness her death is a tragedy, it also may suggest her acceptance of the fact that happiness cannot be separated from unhappiness.
Indeed, the inextricability of happiness and unhappiness may be the thematic web that Munro weaves throughout many of the stories in this collection, especially since several reviewers have already suggested that there is much more violence in these stories than in Munro’s previous work: Two young girls murder an abhorred playmate; a man kills his children because he thinks his wife has walked out on him; a woman dying of cancer is threatened in her home by a man who has murdered his family. However, in keeping with the theme of “too much happiness,” or happiness bound up with unhappiness, the horror in these stories is often balanced by some compensatory acceptance. For example in “Dimensions,” although the central character’s insane bullying husband has killed their children, she understands that he knows their life and their children better than anyone else and goes to visit him in an asylum. Moreover, the story ends with a random rescue and a kind of personal salvation that seems somehow poetically just.
“Free Radicals” is also about a bittersweet confrontation that ends with poetic justice. The central character who has cancer and whose husband has recently died, has her home invaded by a man who shows her pictures of his parents and sister that he has recently murdered. In spite of the fact that she knows the cancer will kill probably her, she clings to life and tries to gain the intruder’s sympathy by telling him how she has been guilty of a crime in her past. However, the story is a lie, a fiction in which she takes on the role of her husband’s wronged first wife who is going to poison the other woman. Telling her that what he did was not so underhanded as what she did, the murderer leaves, only to be killed in a car accident.
Although in the last forty years the short story has been characterized first by experimentation and then by attenuation, Alice Munro has continued to go her own way, so confident of the nature of the short story and her control of the form that she needs to observe no trends nor imitate no precursors. Certainly she does not write in a vacuum, clearly aware of those short-story masters who have preceded her--Chekhov, Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, Sherwood Anderson--but Munro has found her own unique rhythm and controls it consummately. Although a Munro story might initially appear to be novelistic, her stories are deceptive; they lull the reader into a false sense of security in which time seems to comfortably stretch out like everyday reality, only to suddenly turn and tighten so intensely that the reader is left breathless.
The secret of Alice Munro’s short stories is that she is able to suggest universal, unspoken human desires by describing what seems to be ordinary everyday reality. Her stories are complex and powerful not so much because of what happens in them, but because of what cannot happen except in the mysterious human imagination.
More polished and profound than she has ever been, Alice Munro is the preeminent practitioner of the short story--and one of the most brilliant writers in any genre—in the world today. If there is any justice and judgment in matters literary, she should redeem the short story from its second-class status single-handedly.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Praise for the Short Story in the Wall Street Journal: Will Wonders Never Cease?
“When Brevity is a Virtue,” an article by Alexandra Alter in today’s Wall Street Journal, (Nov. 13, 2009; online at http://online.wsj.com) throws a welcome new spotlight on the short story by noting that the form seems poised this fall to get its due with new collections from Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ha Jin.
Alter rightly points out that when great short stories are praised for having “novelistic” qualities, it is a subtle disparagement, instructing us that the novel is the highest literary achievement.
Alter suggests that changing technology and reading habits are giving the short story a boost, as readers discover the form in online literary journals and download short stories to their ipods and e-readers.
However, the article also reminds us of the prevailing opinion among agents and publishers that short stories do not sell. The fact that Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge has sold 472,000 copies after winning the Pulitzer is, according to these Nay Sayers, an anomaly. And Alice Munro’s winning the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for the body of her work is because, well, “She’s Alice Munro, and by the way, why the hell doesn’t she write a novel?” Reviewers forgive her by claiming that her stories are “novelistic.” Munro’s editor Ann Close is quoted by Alter as saying that the precision and vigor of Munro’s plotting and prose allows her to pack as much into her stories as many novels contain. Pack what stuff?
Munro’s new collection, Too Much Happiness, has been out in Canada and the United Kingdom for the past three months and will be released by Knopf in the U.S. next week. The Los Angeles Times published a review of the book this past Sunday, Nov. 8. All the stories have been published previously, mostly in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and I have read them as they have appeared. On a previous blog, I talked a bit about one of the stories, “On Wenlock Edge.”
I will post a blog on Too Much Happiness in a couple of weeks when I get the book and have had a chance to make sure that Munro has not changed the stories since their original publication in magazines. I will try to make some sense out of the frequent, somewhat disparaging claim that Munro’s stories are like novels, an accusation she knows very well, as evidenced by this wry comment from the story “Fiction” in her new collection:
“A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”
None of the short story Nay Sayers can say that Alice Munro is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, not even Oprah, who has said she does not like short stories because she “wants more.” Desiring quantity rather than quality is an Oprah problem that I wish she would not impose on the thousands of her book club members.
Alter rightly points out that when great short stories are praised for having “novelistic” qualities, it is a subtle disparagement, instructing us that the novel is the highest literary achievement.
Alter suggests that changing technology and reading habits are giving the short story a boost, as readers discover the form in online literary journals and download short stories to their ipods and e-readers.
However, the article also reminds us of the prevailing opinion among agents and publishers that short stories do not sell. The fact that Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge has sold 472,000 copies after winning the Pulitzer is, according to these Nay Sayers, an anomaly. And Alice Munro’s winning the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for the body of her work is because, well, “She’s Alice Munro, and by the way, why the hell doesn’t she write a novel?” Reviewers forgive her by claiming that her stories are “novelistic.” Munro’s editor Ann Close is quoted by Alter as saying that the precision and vigor of Munro’s plotting and prose allows her to pack as much into her stories as many novels contain. Pack what stuff?
Munro’s new collection, Too Much Happiness, has been out in Canada and the United Kingdom for the past three months and will be released by Knopf in the U.S. next week. The Los Angeles Times published a review of the book this past Sunday, Nov. 8. All the stories have been published previously, mostly in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and I have read them as they have appeared. On a previous blog, I talked a bit about one of the stories, “On Wenlock Edge.”
I will post a blog on Too Much Happiness in a couple of weeks when I get the book and have had a chance to make sure that Munro has not changed the stories since their original publication in magazines. I will try to make some sense out of the frequent, somewhat disparaging claim that Munro’s stories are like novels, an accusation she knows very well, as evidenced by this wry comment from the story “Fiction” in her new collection:
“A collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.”
None of the short story Nay Sayers can say that Alice Munro is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, not even Oprah, who has said she does not like short stories because she “wants more.” Desiring quantity rather than quality is an Oprah problem that I wish she would not impose on the thousands of her book club members.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
John Burnside's "The Bell Ringer": PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories, 2009
If you want to read a paradigmatic example of the traditional lyrical/realistic short story, innovated by Chekhov (Collected Stories) and Turgenev (Sportsman’s Sketches) and then developed by Joyce (Dubliners) and Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), take a look at John Burnside’s “The Bell Ringer.”
Burnside’s discussion of the creative origins of his story suggests that he is well aware of this tradition. He says he started thinking about the story when he thought of how important bells, usually church bells, were to the community—to announce the outbreak of war, the return of peace, marriages, deaths, and important social occasions. Since the community was often defined by the reach of the bells, with those “beyond the peal” deemed to be outside that parish, he started thinking that maybe an experienced listener could not only determine by the tenor of the bells what they signified socially, but also “the secrets of individual bell ringers—their hidden wishes, their secret desires and fears, their private loneliness.” It’s a nice trope, fanciful, but somehow believable.
The key characteristics of the Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson lyrical/realistic tradition are all here: The “loneliness” that Frank O’Connor discusses in The Lonely Voice, the “secrets desires and fears” of an individual in a small community, a central metaphor that embodies the loneliness and secrets.
I don’t want to give a plot summary here, for another element of this short story tradition is, of course, the emphasis placed on the ending of the story, what Joyce described as an epiphany. Eva, the central character, has lost her father, lives in an old family house in a village in Scotland, is often alone because her husband works in other countries. She doesn’t really mind being alone, for there is little love or intimacy between her and her husband. Her one friend is her sister-in-law, who confides in her that she is having an affair. She joins a bell-ringing club so she can meet people. She does not make friends at the club, but she does become infatuated with a young American.
What I like about the story is the fictional world Burnside creates—a kind of reality/unreality that is both the world of everyday and the world of fantasy and fairytale. The story begins with Eva thinking the landscape around her looks like a children’s-book illustration, the snow steady and insistent in a kingdom that had succumbed to the bad fairy’s spell and slept for a hundred years in a viridian web of gossamer and thorns.” When she goes to the church for the bell-ringing in the tower, she thinks of the location as a “pagan place, a dark garden of yews and straggling roses and, at its center, the stone church, with its altar and its font and, above it all, the bells, suspended in the chill air of the belfry, heavy and still, waiting to be brought to life.” I like that rhythm.
The ending is announced this way: “It was like watching a conjurer perform a magic trick, when you shouldn’t really care, because you know it’s an illusion, but you just have to figure how it’s done.” The ending is absolutely inevitable and even predictable, but still a surprise. I like it when a story does that. I like it when everything comes together in a pleasurable little gasp.
If you like this story and you have not read all your Chekhov, Turgenev, Joyce, Anderson, then you have a lot of wonderful short story reading ahead of you. And while you are at it, read the two very finest contemporary short story writers in this tradition—Alice Munro and William Trevor.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Alice Munro, "Wenlock Edge" and Metafiction
In a “comment” on the post “Do You Have to Learn to Read a Short Story,” Sandy posts a query about Alice Munro’s story “Wenlock Edge,” which appeared in The New Yorker, Dec. 5, 2005. You can find it at:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205fi_fiction
As far as I can tell, the story has not appeared in any of Munro’s books yet and will probably be in the new collection scheduled to come out later this year. I remember “Wenlock Edge,” for it is one of those stories we have talked about before that seem to haunt us—especially that strangely unsettling scene when the narrator calmly sits in the nude and has dinner with an elderly man.
Sandy asks if anyone can comment on the narrator’s emotion when she says she is on a course discovering her own wickedness. I think Sandy is right that an important element of the story is the narrator’s concern with what is real in life. For me, the issue has to do with a common theme in the short story as a genre—the blurring of the edge between reality and unreality—and a common short story technique of exploring this question in terms of the reality of unreality.
The narrator is a student of literature. In fact, I suspect that only an English major would have willingly taken her clothes off for dinner with a strange old man primarily as a challenge to the charge, “So you’re just a bookworm. That’s all you are.”
And indeed, she is a bookworm, that is, she primarily lives in books and makes adverse judgments on those, such as the two English majors who live downstairs, whose conversations and preoccupations seem hardly different from those who work in banks or offices. The narrator believes that one who studies literature should see reality differently than others.
However, the narrator admits at one point that, except in examinations, she gets many things wrong. And the main thing she thinks she may have gotten wrong is, as Sandy points out, her notion that what she is doing—reading literature—is what is real, or at least teaches us how to see the real. The other characters in the story, she comes to realize, see reading literature as only a game.
The narrator gets many of her ideas and expectations from reading. Her own experience with reality other than what she reads is sparse. For example, Nina’s story of her children, the death of one child, her life with Mr. Purvis, makes her feel like a simpleton. Still, the narrator thinks that Nina has no pegs on which to hang anything because she has not read about Victorian, Romantic, Pre-Columbian, that she could not find on the map the many countries she has visited, and that she wouldn't know whether or not the French Revolution came before the First World War. When Mrs. Winner comes to pick her up for dinner with Mr. Purvis, the woman’s platinum hair certifies to the narrator a hard heart, immoral dealings, and a long bumpy ride through the sordid back alleys of life. When Mr. Purvis takes her to his library, she has a notion of the sort of story, that few people ever get a chance to read, about a room called a library turning out to be a bedroom with soft lights, puffy cushions, and downy pillows. Obviously, the narrator’s knowledge includes not only high literature, but also pulpy, soft-core porn. When she is asked to read Housman’s “Wenlock Edge,” she feels comfortable, at peace with the familiar rhythms of the poem. She lives in fiction more easily than in phenomenal reality.
So why does she willing take her clothes off? Because, as she says, it is a challenge, a sort of Bohemian dare, a gesture to show that she is not just a bookworm, but as daring as the women in the books with which she is familiar. She tries to assume the liberal, well-read, view that we are all naked under our clothes. For the moment, she sees herself as a liberated fictional figure, and does not worry that anything will happen to her.
The fact that Plato is her favorite philosopher and that she likes his allegory of the cave is significant, for “Wenlock Edge” is filled with issues about what is real and what are misunderstandings, mere shadows, of reality.
The fact that the narrator sends Mr. Purvis Ernie’s address, knowing that he will go round and fetch her away from Ernie, is less a wicked act than it is a tampering with the lives of others as if they were not real, but rather characters in a story that she feels free to manipulate around, as if they were puppets, shadows cast on the wall of Plato’s cave.
The narrator, that is, the creator of the story we are reading, is wicked in the way that all writers of fiction are wicked—creating fictional characters, pretending they are real and then manipulating them mercilessly as merely fictional characters.
At the end of the story, the narrator says she keeps learning things, such as the Uricon, the Roman camp, is now Wroxeter, a town on the Severn River. But such knowledge, although historically accurate, and what some new historicist critics nowadays would called “context,” is not as important as the more subtle, inchoate knowledge that the short story in general and Alice Munro in particular make their own.
I have always been concerned with the basic issue of the relationship between fantasy and reality in fiction and have written about it several times. Although I think that the short story, because of its self-conscious, carefully constructed form, is more often apt to focus on its own processes than the novel is, I believe that all writers, always conscious of their craft, at times writes stories or novels that quite intentionally make the fantasy/reality mix the central subject of their work. I once wrote a paper on howTwain did this in Huckleberry Finn. I wanted to argue against those social critics who felt that the novel’s ending, in which we return to the fantasy world of Tom Sawyer, was a weakness in the work. I quote some of that piece below to provide some context for my reading of Alice Munro’s “Wenlock Edge.”
“In considering the reality-fantasy question in Huckleberry Finn, perhaps we should take a relative, that is to say, a phenomenological view and instead of asking, "What is real?" ask, as William James does in Principles of Psychology, "Under what circumstances do we think things real?" Phenomenologist Alfred Schutz has taken this approach to the
question of reality in Don Quixote, and since it is Tom Sawyer's Don Quixote world that is often objected to in Huckleberry Finn, perhaps the approach will be valuable here also.
Huckleberry Finn, like Don Quixote, directly deals with the problem of multiple realities discussed by James. Don Quixote sustains his world by appealing to the "authorities" of books of chivalry; Tom sustains his world by appealing to the "authority" of Don Quixote. Tom's hypothesis of the enchanters which make Huck see Sunday-school children instead of A-rabs is similar to Don Quixote's hypothesis of them to explain why Sancho Panza sees windmills instead of giants. However, as Alfred Schutz points out, to Don Quixote the existence of the enchanters is not a mere hypothesis, but an historical fact verified by all the source books reporting on matters of chivalry. Furthermore, Schutz reminds us, "If we examine why, within the reality of our natural attitude, we believe in historical events we can only refer to arguments similar to those of Don Quixote: to documents, monuments, authenticated accounts of witnesses, and
uninterrupted tradition." The "authorities" of Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, and other books of fantasy that Tom appeals to at the beginning and ending of Huckleberry Finn, are, within his sub-universe of fable, no less "real" than these are in the sub-universe of everyday reality. The problem critics have with Huckleberry Finn arises when they try to judge it from the perspective of the sub-universe of everyday reality, somehow forgetting that as a novel the entire book exists within Twain's sub-universe of deliberate fable.
Perhaps all literary fictions are also meta-literary, in that every artist is caught in the
conflict between seeing the activity he is engaged in as idle play and productive work at the same time. Art is a form of play that by being pushed to hallucinatory extremes masters the conflict inherent in the activity between its play nature and its work nature. Thus, although Huckleberry Finn is a serious work of art, the Tom Sawyer fantasy frame reminds us that it is also a form of play that masters its own sub-universe of fable. Mark Twain's creation of the fantasy Huckleberry Finn is similar to Tom Sawyer's fantasies, and as a fantasy the novel quite legitimately is resolved in the conclusion by a final reminder that fictional conflict can only be resolved fictionally. If the function of literature is, as Norman Holland suggests, to transform our "primitive wishes and fears into significance and coherence," its metaliterary function is to aesthetically resolve the conflict between play and work, pleasure principle and reality principle, that arises in any artistic activity. The art work manifests a compromise between the pleasure principle and the reality principle by creating out of the play of fantasy a work of literature. The compromise is laid bare in Huckleberry Finn in the relationship between Tom's fantasy play and Huck's realistic work.
The usual critical view of Tom Sawyer as a prototype of civilized hypocritical man as romantic dreamer may be simply the result of our cultural bias against fantasy, our assumption that the everyday world is the only mature reality. If we shift our focus and remember that Huckleberry Finn is an art work, a deliberate fable, instead of a social document, isn't it more likely that from this perspective Huck Finn is in some ways the prototype of modern economic man as unimaginative realist? Mark Twain may admire Huck for his realism, but as an artist twain is in the position of Tom Sawyer. Moreover, as readers, we are also in the position of Tom, fantasying that we are Huck, but desiring to maintain our freedom to play. The Tom Sawyer frame of the book provides us with a reminder of this freedom. Huck Finn may escape civilization, but Tom Sawyer, like Mark Twain, like every artist, subverts it with his play.”
Forgive me once again for referring to stuff I have done before, but I thought this little excerpt from a longer article I wrote years ago would make clearer my reading of Alice Munro’s story.
I thank Sandy for reminding me of this story. I hope she will respond with her own reading. Iwould love to hear what others think.
Please watch for Munro’s new collection scheduled to come out later this year. I will remind you of it when I get word of its publication date.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205fi_fiction
As far as I can tell, the story has not appeared in any of Munro’s books yet and will probably be in the new collection scheduled to come out later this year. I remember “Wenlock Edge,” for it is one of those stories we have talked about before that seem to haunt us—especially that strangely unsettling scene when the narrator calmly sits in the nude and has dinner with an elderly man.
Sandy asks if anyone can comment on the narrator’s emotion when she says she is on a course discovering her own wickedness. I think Sandy is right that an important element of the story is the narrator’s concern with what is real in life. For me, the issue has to do with a common theme in the short story as a genre—the blurring of the edge between reality and unreality—and a common short story technique of exploring this question in terms of the reality of unreality.
The narrator is a student of literature. In fact, I suspect that only an English major would have willingly taken her clothes off for dinner with a strange old man primarily as a challenge to the charge, “So you’re just a bookworm. That’s all you are.”
And indeed, she is a bookworm, that is, she primarily lives in books and makes adverse judgments on those, such as the two English majors who live downstairs, whose conversations and preoccupations seem hardly different from those who work in banks or offices. The narrator believes that one who studies literature should see reality differently than others.
However, the narrator admits at one point that, except in examinations, she gets many things wrong. And the main thing she thinks she may have gotten wrong is, as Sandy points out, her notion that what she is doing—reading literature—is what is real, or at least teaches us how to see the real. The other characters in the story, she comes to realize, see reading literature as only a game.
The narrator gets many of her ideas and expectations from reading. Her own experience with reality other than what she reads is sparse. For example, Nina’s story of her children, the death of one child, her life with Mr. Purvis, makes her feel like a simpleton. Still, the narrator thinks that Nina has no pegs on which to hang anything because she has not read about Victorian, Romantic, Pre-Columbian, that she could not find on the map the many countries she has visited, and that she wouldn't know whether or not the French Revolution came before the First World War. When Mrs. Winner comes to pick her up for dinner with Mr. Purvis, the woman’s platinum hair certifies to the narrator a hard heart, immoral dealings, and a long bumpy ride through the sordid back alleys of life. When Mr. Purvis takes her to his library, she has a notion of the sort of story, that few people ever get a chance to read, about a room called a library turning out to be a bedroom with soft lights, puffy cushions, and downy pillows. Obviously, the narrator’s knowledge includes not only high literature, but also pulpy, soft-core porn. When she is asked to read Housman’s “Wenlock Edge,” she feels comfortable, at peace with the familiar rhythms of the poem. She lives in fiction more easily than in phenomenal reality.
So why does she willing take her clothes off? Because, as she says, it is a challenge, a sort of Bohemian dare, a gesture to show that she is not just a bookworm, but as daring as the women in the books with which she is familiar. She tries to assume the liberal, well-read, view that we are all naked under our clothes. For the moment, she sees herself as a liberated fictional figure, and does not worry that anything will happen to her.
The fact that Plato is her favorite philosopher and that she likes his allegory of the cave is significant, for “Wenlock Edge” is filled with issues about what is real and what are misunderstandings, mere shadows, of reality.
The fact that the narrator sends Mr. Purvis Ernie’s address, knowing that he will go round and fetch her away from Ernie, is less a wicked act than it is a tampering with the lives of others as if they were not real, but rather characters in a story that she feels free to manipulate around, as if they were puppets, shadows cast on the wall of Plato’s cave.
The narrator, that is, the creator of the story we are reading, is wicked in the way that all writers of fiction are wicked—creating fictional characters, pretending they are real and then manipulating them mercilessly as merely fictional characters.
At the end of the story, the narrator says she keeps learning things, such as the Uricon, the Roman camp, is now Wroxeter, a town on the Severn River. But such knowledge, although historically accurate, and what some new historicist critics nowadays would called “context,” is not as important as the more subtle, inchoate knowledge that the short story in general and Alice Munro in particular make their own.
I have always been concerned with the basic issue of the relationship between fantasy and reality in fiction and have written about it several times. Although I think that the short story, because of its self-conscious, carefully constructed form, is more often apt to focus on its own processes than the novel is, I believe that all writers, always conscious of their craft, at times writes stories or novels that quite intentionally make the fantasy/reality mix the central subject of their work. I once wrote a paper on howTwain did this in Huckleberry Finn. I wanted to argue against those social critics who felt that the novel’s ending, in which we return to the fantasy world of Tom Sawyer, was a weakness in the work. I quote some of that piece below to provide some context for my reading of Alice Munro’s “Wenlock Edge.”
“In considering the reality-fantasy question in Huckleberry Finn, perhaps we should take a relative, that is to say, a phenomenological view and instead of asking, "What is real?" ask, as William James does in Principles of Psychology, "Under what circumstances do we think things real?" Phenomenologist Alfred Schutz has taken this approach to the
question of reality in Don Quixote, and since it is Tom Sawyer's Don Quixote world that is often objected to in Huckleberry Finn, perhaps the approach will be valuable here also.
Huckleberry Finn, like Don Quixote, directly deals with the problem of multiple realities discussed by James. Don Quixote sustains his world by appealing to the "authorities" of books of chivalry; Tom sustains his world by appealing to the "authority" of Don Quixote. Tom's hypothesis of the enchanters which make Huck see Sunday-school children instead of A-rabs is similar to Don Quixote's hypothesis of them to explain why Sancho Panza sees windmills instead of giants. However, as Alfred Schutz points out, to Don Quixote the existence of the enchanters is not a mere hypothesis, but an historical fact verified by all the source books reporting on matters of chivalry. Furthermore, Schutz reminds us, "If we examine why, within the reality of our natural attitude, we believe in historical events we can only refer to arguments similar to those of Don Quixote: to documents, monuments, authenticated accounts of witnesses, and
uninterrupted tradition." The "authorities" of Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, and other books of fantasy that Tom appeals to at the beginning and ending of Huckleberry Finn, are, within his sub-universe of fable, no less "real" than these are in the sub-universe of everyday reality. The problem critics have with Huckleberry Finn arises when they try to judge it from the perspective of the sub-universe of everyday reality, somehow forgetting that as a novel the entire book exists within Twain's sub-universe of deliberate fable.
Perhaps all literary fictions are also meta-literary, in that every artist is caught in the
conflict between seeing the activity he is engaged in as idle play and productive work at the same time. Art is a form of play that by being pushed to hallucinatory extremes masters the conflict inherent in the activity between its play nature and its work nature. Thus, although Huckleberry Finn is a serious work of art, the Tom Sawyer fantasy frame reminds us that it is also a form of play that masters its own sub-universe of fable. Mark Twain's creation of the fantasy Huckleberry Finn is similar to Tom Sawyer's fantasies, and as a fantasy the novel quite legitimately is resolved in the conclusion by a final reminder that fictional conflict can only be resolved fictionally. If the function of literature is, as Norman Holland suggests, to transform our "primitive wishes and fears into significance and coherence," its metaliterary function is to aesthetically resolve the conflict between play and work, pleasure principle and reality principle, that arises in any artistic activity. The art work manifests a compromise between the pleasure principle and the reality principle by creating out of the play of fantasy a work of literature. The compromise is laid bare in Huckleberry Finn in the relationship between Tom's fantasy play and Huck's realistic work.
The usual critical view of Tom Sawyer as a prototype of civilized hypocritical man as romantic dreamer may be simply the result of our cultural bias against fantasy, our assumption that the everyday world is the only mature reality. If we shift our focus and remember that Huckleberry Finn is an art work, a deliberate fable, instead of a social document, isn't it more likely that from this perspective Huck Finn is in some ways the prototype of modern economic man as unimaginative realist? Mark Twain may admire Huck for his realism, but as an artist twain is in the position of Tom Sawyer. Moreover, as readers, we are also in the position of Tom, fantasying that we are Huck, but desiring to maintain our freedom to play. The Tom Sawyer frame of the book provides us with a reminder of this freedom. Huck Finn may escape civilization, but Tom Sawyer, like Mark Twain, like every artist, subverts it with his play.”
Forgive me once again for referring to stuff I have done before, but I thought this little excerpt from a longer article I wrote years ago would make clearer my reading of Alice Munro’s story.
I thank Sandy for reminding me of this story. I hope she will respond with her own reading. Iwould love to hear what others think.
Please watch for Munro’s new collection scheduled to come out later this year. I will remind you of it when I get word of its publication date.
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