Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro

Amelia DeFalco, Lorraine York, Amelia DeFalco, Lorraine York

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319906430
• eBook ISBN: 9783319906447
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro explores the representation of embodied ethics and affects in Alice Munro's writing. The collection illustrates how Munro's short stories powerfully intersect with important theoretical trends in literary studies, including affect studies, ethical criticism, age studies, disability studies, animal studies, and posthumanism. These essays offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national pedagogy with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort. In Munro's fiction, unruly embodiments and affects interfere with normative identity and humanist conventions of the human based on reason and rationality, destabilizing prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. As these essays make clear, Munro's fiction reminds us of the consequences of everyday affects and the extraordinary ordinariness of the ethical encounters we engage again and again.

© The Author(s) 2018

Amelia DeFalco and Lorraine York (eds.)Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice MunroPalgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame”

Amelia DeFalco¹ and Lorraine York²

(1)

School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

(2)

McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

Amelia DeFalco (Corresponding author)

Lorraine York

End Abstract

We can pinpoint the origins of this collection with unusual precision. In 2003, in an essay entitled “The Baby or the Violin? Ethics and Femininity in the Fiction of Alice Munro,” Naomi Morgenstern observed that “Munro’s stories have much to contribute to contemporary efforts to think about literariness and ethics.” ¹ Indeed, although previous critics of Munro had by no means ignored the ethical—or the affective—dimensions of her work (Redekop , Howells , Heble ), the steadfast focus on those dimensions afforded by the affective and ethical “turns” in literary studies during and since the time of Morgenstern’s comment has allowed, and indeed called out for a dedicated analysis of Alice Munro’s stories from the intertwined perspectives of ethics and affects. Indeed, in that same 2003 essay, Morgenstern’s perception that “Munro’s stories represent the risks of the ethical” ² made it clear that the affective dimension—risk and its associated feeling of vulnerability —is fully engaged in any discussion of the ethical. The two can hardly be disarticulated for, as Brian Massumi pronounces, “Ethics are about how we inhabit uncertainty together.” ³

The title of this introduction is inspired by the story “What Is Remembered ” (2001), one of many Munro stories suffused with duplicitous, conflicting, often mysterious affects, most prominently, a seductive but unbearable, erotic, yet despicable “exquisite shame .” ⁴ The story is a compelling entry point for an investigation of affects and ethics via shame since the word itself occurs no less than five times in the 24-page story. In fact, shame is in many ways central to the story’s exploration of marriage, motherhood , and infidelity as experiences of embodiment intricately bound to affect , aging , and mortality. The story concerns Meriel, a young wife and mother chafing at the strictures of heteronormative family life: “Young husbands were stern, in those days…Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions , the babies.” ⁵ This vision of “ailments and emotions ” as the unseemly, contagious burden of cohabitation and home that masculine power erects bulwarks against is central to our collection, which considers how illness , disability , and affective embodiment destabilize the illusion of the able-bodied, masculine, rational, unaffected subject that underlies neoliberal political discourse. Meanwhile, in Munro’s work , the wives of those young husbands, thrust into the “stunning responsibility” of wifedom and motherhood succumb to, balk at, and shirk (sometimes simultaneously) the oppressive demands of femininity , indulging in “dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits” that threaten to transgress the “newspaper” barriers that their husbands have erected. ⁶ Shared, “subversive” ribaldry is just one of the many radical, even dangerous affects that permeate Munro’s fiction. In Munro’s work, affects expose and destabilize, threaten and transgress prevailing gender and sexual politics, ethical responsibilities, and affective economies. Munro’s characters grapple with the risk of emotionality, the undertow of affect that can, at its most extreme, produce selfish and cruel indulgences of desire and “ugly feelings” such as disgust , shame , and repulsion. At the other end of the spectrum is the exercise of self-effacing “prudence” that maintains affective economies, as Meriel does, despite her fleeting indulgence of extramarital desire. In the end, she pursues “some economical sort of emotional management” that carefully balances risks and rewards, forgoing the radical happiness that suffused her, momentarily, in her brief affair. ⁷ The problem of affectivity recurs throughout Munro’s oeuvre, which pays close attention to the economy of emotions . As the character Joyce muses in the more recent story “Fiction” (2009), “It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.” ⁸ Affects are never solitary, never without consequence, never apolitical. They are always shifting, transmitting, transforming, at once exposing and creating dense, unpredictable, invisible but palpable networks between bodies. Affects are, in effect, always affecting, at once noun and verb, being and doing simultaneously.

In “What is Remembered,” Meriel’s brief evasion of the “stunning responsibility” of wifedom manifests in an unexpected, thrilling sexual infidelity with a stranger she meets at a funeral. Guilt ⁹ and shame are the dominant affects associated with the “power and delight” ¹⁰ of the escapade. The association between eroticism and shame is not unusual, but Munro complicates the straightforward shameful thrill, and thrilling shame , of illicit sexual adventure with intimations of aging , disability , and death . The opportunity for infidelity is afforded by Meriel’s plan to visit her elderly namesake, Aunt Muriel, in a nursing home on her way home from the funeral. The stranger, an unnamed bush pilot and doctor who treated the deceased, offers to drive her there. Despite her cataracts, Aunt Muriel easily recognizes the frisson between the pair, responding to the invisible “transmission of affect ” described by Teresa Brennan. ¹¹ “I could tell,” Aunt Muriel tells the pair, “I used to be a devil myself.” ¹² The magnificent tension between the narration’s first description of Aunt Muriel’s pointedly ailing body—“swollen and glimmering” under her asbestos blanket, smoking a cigarette alone in a “dim corridor” painted a “liverish” color; her skin covered in “dead-white spots,” her hair “ragged, mussed from being rubbed into pillows, and the lobes of her ears hung out of it like flat teats” ¹³ —and the licentious stories she tells of sexual adventure, the wild parties where people would “Just meet for the first time and start kissing like mad and run off into the forest. In the dark,” ¹⁴ reanimates the story’s initial reference to the feminized space of the home, here transformed into the nursing home, as an unseemly space dominated by “ailments and emotion.” The concurrence of morbidity and “decline” ¹⁵ with sexual vitality and adventure asserts the persistence of affective embodiment , the often-troubling unpredictability of human embodiment as a site of combined vulnerability , power, and risk. The masculine order that seeks to disavow this precarity, to confine “ailments and emotions ” to the feminine space of the home, is a futile rejection, a false imposition of order that cannot be sustained because Meriel’s husband, Pierre, like all the story’s men, succumbs to illness in the end, though he strives to maintain masculine order throughout his illness . When Meriel reads Fathers and Sons to him during his convalescence, the couple argue over the novel’s depiction of gender and romance. According to Pierre, Anna cannot respond to Bazarov’s declaration of love because of the risk of “shame and rejection. She’s intelligent. She knows that,” argues Pierre. “Intelligence makes her cold. Intelligent means cold, for a woman.” ¹⁶ Although he clarifies that he is speaking of nineteenth-century tropes, his reading echoes the earlier description of male breadwinners seeking to protect their rational world (with newspapers, no less) from the disarrayed emotionality and embodiment of the feminized space of home, a rearticulation of the notion that rationality and embodied affects cannot cohabitate. The either/or fallacy of reason versus emotion cannot be consigned to the past, as Meriel’s story of passion and prudence makes clear.

This persistent fiction—that emotions , embodied vulnerability can, indeed should, be controlled and contained, limited to appropriate sectors and zones of life—haunts Munro’s characters, who can only experience emotions as dissonance, as the disorienting conflict of “exquisite shame ,” or “morbid, preening excitement.” ¹⁷ This dissonance and its oxymoronic stylistic vehicle are characteristic of affect as theorized by Silvan Tomkins ; shame , he observed, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame”
• 2. Ethics and Infant Feeding in Alice Munro’s Stories
• 3. The Shame of Affect: Sensation and Susceptibility in Alice Munro’s Fiction
• 4. Embodied Shame and the Resilient Ethics of Representation in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”
• 5. Alice Munro’s Dramatic Fictions: Challenging (Dis)Ability by Playing with Oedipus the King and Embracing the Queer Art of Failure
• 6. “Chunks of Language Caught in Her Throat”: The Problem of Other(ed) Minds in Alice Munro’s Stories of Cognitive Disability
• 7. Alice Munro and the Shame of Murder
• 8. Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty and Narrative Play in the Work of Alice Munro
• 9. Gravel and Grief: Alice Munro’s Vulnerable Landscapes
• 10. “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career
• 11. Life After Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction of Alice Munro
• Back Matter