Alice Munro's Miraculous Art

Janice Fiamengo, Gerald Lynch

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780776624334
• eBook ISBN: 9780776624358
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Alice Munro's Miraculous Art is a collection of sixteen original essays on Nobel laureate Alice Munro's writings. The volume covers the entirety of Munro's career, from the first stories she published in the early 1950s as an undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario to her final books. It offers an enlightening range of approaches and interpretive strategies, and provides many new perspectives, reconsidered positions and analyses that will enhance the reading, teaching, and appreciation of Munro's remarkable—indeed miraculous—work.

Following the editors' introduction—which surveys Munro's recurrent themes, explains the design of the book, and summarizes each contribution—Munro biographer Robert Thacker contributes a substantial bio-critical introduction to her career. The book is then divided into three sections, focusing on Munro's characteristic forms, themes, and most notable literary effects.

I

Forms

Living in the Story: Fictional Reality in the Stories of Alice Munro

CHARLES E. MAY

Throughout her distinguished career, Alice Munro has frequently been asked by reviewers and interviewers, “Why do you write short stories?” behind which, of course, always lurked the reproach, “Why don’t you write novels?” Although she is no longer nagged about her narrative choice of the much-maligned short story, reviewers and interviewers have shifted to a new tactic. Instead of chiding Munro for not writing novels, they now try to account for the success of her stories by claiming that they are like novels, not like short stories at all. How else to account for how great they are? Two or three such claims should be sufficient to underline the point:

“No one else quite constructs short stories that have the slow, rich emotional depth of novels.” (Lockerbie)

“You get, in fact, all the complexity and nuance of a novel, concentrated within several dozen pages.” (Springstubb)

“Each story reads like a novel; each is a vast canvas of complicated characters, tangled events and quietly turbulent revelations.” (Changnon)

Munro definitively answered the impertinent “Why do you write short stories?” question back in 1986, when she said that originally she planned to write a few stories to get some practice and then to write novels, but shrugged, “I got used to writing stories, so I saw my material that way, and now I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel” (Rothstein). And now everyone, even, I dare say, her agent and her publishers, are glad she never did.

Given my long-time interest in the genre, I have always been very gratified by Alice Munro’s suggestion that there is a “short-story way” of seeing reality and delighted with her persistent denial that her stories are like novels. She has said she is not drawn to writing novels because she doesn’t see that people develop and arrive anywhere, but rather that they live in flashes, from time to time (Hancock)—an image that echoes Nadine Gordimer’s famous argument that the short story as a form may be better equipped than the novel to capture whatever can be grasped of human reality where contact is like the “flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness” (180).

Munro has said, “I’m after the intensity of moments and layers of meaning that come from short stories. I want these moments to be bright and clear and also filled with density and mystery. I couldn’t get that from the novel form … I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come from in a novel, and I do in a short story” (Rothstein). 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” (Struthers).

Still, it seems that reviewers can find no other way to explain the complexity of Munro’s works except by lumping them together with that “flabby,” or, as Henry James once called it, “baggy,” monster—the novel. Can we blame her then for not being able to resist a sly jab at short-story naysayers in a fairly recent story in Too Much Happiness entitled “Fiction”—in which the central character buys a book written by a woman she has met briefly at a party and is disappointed to find out it is a only 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” (52).

Jonathan Franzen scolded critics and judges for the international neglect of Munro a few years ago by chiding, “The feeling in Stockholm is that too many Canadians and too many pure short-story writers have already been given the Nobel Prize.” We are all happy now that Alice Munro is safely inside the Nobel gates of Literature—even if she does only write short stories. In one of her first interviews after winning the prize, she graciously said that the award was not only a wonderful thing for her, but a wonderful thing for the short story in general, and she hoped it would bring new readers to the form (Smith).

Despite critics’ insistence on the “novelistic” nature of Munro’s stories, the qualities of her work that are so compelling are actually the very qualities that have always made great short stories so powerful: for example, the short story’s transformation of seemingly trivial and unrelated material into a tight, thematically significant pattern. Fellow short-story master Deborah Eisenberg has said that one of the joys of Munro’s writing is “the apparently casual narrative that turns out to have led inexorably to some inescapable juncture” (129). And another fellow short-story writer, Lorrie Moore, noted, “The particular and careful ways Munro’s themes are laid into her narrative trajectories cause them to sneak up on the reader” (41). As I have argued for many years, this has been one of the dominant characteristics of the short-story form since Gogol, Poe, Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Chekhov. Like the stories of her predecessors, Munro’s fictions build toward a tightly unified thematic pattern, not the construction of a mirror in the roadway.

In the story “The Love of a Good Woman,” which many reviewers have singled out as being novelistic, minor details, which in a novel would merely be part of characterization or verisimilitude, become elements of a dominant thematic/aesthetic configuration. For example, at the beginning of the story, the young boys talk about the time when one of their fathers was taken to the hospital with pneumonia and the wet sheets and towels in which he was wrapped all turned brown from the nicotine in him—traces of some secret stain manifesting itself externally. Later the boys shout at some girls passing by, “You got blood all over your arse” (24)—still another reference to the external traces of a hidden secret. This motif becomes central when the story shifts to Mrs. Quinn, whose kidneys are failing, causing a smell to come out through her skin that was “acrid and ominous.” The stains of blood that mark a hidden secret culminate in the stain of the dead optometrist’s blood on the floor and in Mrs. Quinn’s clothes, whose burning smell marks the beginning of her illness.

The novel may create a verisimilar illusion of phenomenal reality, but the short story, concerned with universal thematic significance, requires more artifice and patterning. Poe, Chekhov, Carver—indeed all great short-story writers—knew this difference between the two forms well and, consequently, by means of tight control and tension, created a self-sustained moral and aesthetic universe in what Stephen Millhauser recently characterized as a grain of sand. So does Alice Munro. What she means by a short story being “alive” is not a mimetic depiction of so-called everyday reality, but what Chekhov meant when he once said that it is unified “compactness” that “makes short things alive” (Letters).

The complexity of Munro’s short stories is not the result of multiple characters, the passage of time, or the creation of an historical/social context—all traditional characteristics of the novel—but rather the result of seeing the world in a uniquely “short story way.” To my mind, Munro’s “specific kind of creative activity”—manifesting “tension,” “control,” “mood,” “emotion,” “mystery”—underlies the complexity of short stories in general and her short stories in particular.

Critics are often puzzled by the motivation of Munro’s characters. For example, in a Los Angeles Times review of Open Secrets, Susan Heeger wonders about the story “Carried Away”: Why, she asks, would a soldier engaged to a girl back home start a mail-order romance with a woman he’s never met? Why, after the war ends, would he not contact the woman again but instead haunt her workplace surreptitiously for the rest of his life? Edith Pearlman, another one of my favourite short-story writers, who says she has a “taste for the inexplicable” and is drawn to stories that dispense with that essential quality of realistic fiction—“motivation”—agrees with the poet Amy Clampitt, who asks, “who knows what makes any of us do what we do? ”—an insight Pearlman says writing workshops should keep in mind (419).

Although the novel may focus on cause-and-effect in time, the short story accepts that what makes characters do what they do is often quite mysterious. Munro’s short stories deal with moments when people act in such a way that even those closest to them cannot understand what drove them. My favourite recognition of this mystery of motivation is from Flannery O’Connor, who once said she lent some stories to a country lady who lived down the road from her, and when she returned them the woman said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.” O’Connor agreed that when you write stories you have to show how “some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything” (90). The short story’s focus on mysteriously motivated, or seemingly unmotivated, behaviour is at least as old as Poe’s puzzling about the perverse in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” and as recent as Raymond Carver’s presentation of characters, who, scolded critic John W. Aldridge, are “impulsive and arbitrary,” sadly “lacking in realistic motivation”—a criticism which suggests that Aldridge just does not appreciate a central characteristic of the short story as a form (51–54).

When Geoff Hancock talked about this mystery of motivation with Munro and suggested that her stories “give voice to our secret life,” she emphatically agreed: “That is absolutely what I think a short story can do” (76). Part of the reason for this sense of an elusive and mysterious “secret” life of the characters of short stories derives from its origins in the folk tale and the romance form. Whereas the focus of the novel is often on the social life of as-if people in the world, characters in short fiction seem somewhat like allegorical figures because of their obsessive focus on some single experience: Goodman Brown’s journey into the forest, Old Phoenix’s trip to get the healing medicine in Welty’s “Worn Path,” Bartleby’s preference “not to,” Nick Adam’s fishing trip at Big, Two-Hearted River. Although in Joyce’s “The Dead” Gabriel’s mind wanders through a number of memories, thoughts, and tasks, there is an intensifying pattern to his preoccupations, or else the story would not end with that famous revelatory sense of transcendence and meaningful closure with snow all over Ireland, falling on the living and the dead.

The ambiguity and complexity of such early prototypes of the short story as Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” result from the fact that in these stories allegorical characters in a code-bound pattern uneasily interrelate with realistic characters in the verisimilitude of a real world. Our sense that something “unnatural” motivates Goodman Brown, Roderick Usher, and Bartleby results from the fact that they are like allegorical figures who seem to have stepped into an “as-if-real” world.

Angus Fletcher provides a suggestion about the effect created by such a juxtaposition in his book on allegory, arguing that because the allegorical figure is bound to its single role in the story in which it plays a part, if placed in the real world, the character would act like an obsessed person. For example, a character named “Faith” would act as if she were obsessed with faith and thus could not “think” of anything else. And indeed, the characters in short fiction often seem motivated by something that they cannot articulate and that those around them cannot understand.

The hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere, tone, and mood, so common to the short story, is always about something more unspeakable and more mysterious than the events engaged in by as-if-real characters in a time-bound world. The genius of Munro’s stories is that whereas they could indeed be the seedbeds of novels, they do not communicate as novels do. And if we try to read them as if they were novels, they will never haunt us with their mystery. If “The Love of a Good Woman” were a novel, for example, it would be a psychological, literary “whodunit” that would explore the lives of two women who have become victims of the social assumptions and gender differences of a recognizable social world. However, like most great short stories, Munro’s story is concerned with a much more abstract, universal, existential meaning of what it means to be human.

“The Love of a Good Woman” may begin like a novel, but instead of continuing to broaden out as it introduces new characters and seemingly new stories, it tightens up, slowly connecting what at first seemed disparate and unrelated. It is a classic example of Munro’s most characteristic technique of creating a world that has all the illusion of external reality, while all the time pulling the reader deeper and deeper into what becomes an hallucinatory inner world of mystery, secrecy, and deception. Unlike a novel, which would be bound to develop some sort of satisfying closure, Munro’s story reaches a moral impasse, an ambiguous open-end in which the reader suddenly realizes that instead of living in the world of apparent reality, he or she has been whirled, as if by a centrifugal force, to an almost unbearable central point of intensity.

The notion of a lonely secret life has a strong ancestry in the short-story form, beginning with Gogol and Poe, but it is quintessential in the stories of Chekhov. Although the theme of the secret self could be illustrated in any number of Chekhov’s short fictions, the paradigmatic statement can be found in one of his most famous stories, “Lady with the Dog.” Near the end of what seems to be merely an anecdotal tale of adultery, the central male character agonizes over the division he senses in himself:

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life, running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest, and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his “lower” race, his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—that was open. (23)

This “secrecy” that makes it impossible for us to know anyone or for anyone to know us, is, of course, the basic human condition, and it is the source of the sense of loneliness that Frank O’Connor has said characterizes the short story as a form. O’Connor argues that the short story has always functioned in a quite different way from the novel, claiming we find in it at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the long form—“an intense awareness of human loneliness” (19).

I believe that what O’Connor has perceived about the central focus of the short story as a genre is the primordial story that constitutes human beings existentially—our basic sense of aloneness and yearning for union. As British theorist Roger Poole once pointed out, the problem is the enigma of the “other,” for I can only see from the other’s point of view what I would have seen if I were there in the same place as he or she. But my “here” and the other’s “over there” are mutually exclusive. Since “There is no way of knowing what the other actually sees, feels, intends, as if I were he … we are born into solipsism” (130). As Mervyn Rothstein has said about Munro’s stories, they “deal with the utter subjectivity of truth—our inability to see things through others’ eyes.”

Thus arises, says Martin Buber, the “melancholy of our fate” in the earliest history of both the race and the individual (27). This is, of course, the reality underlying the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall. When Gogol’s Akakey Akakievitch says, “I am your brother,” or Melville’s lawyer/narrator recognizes that he and Bartleby are “sons of Adam,” the ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introductory
• I—Forms
• II—Themes
• III—Effects
• L’Envoi