The darkness
of Alice Munro
Alice Munro
NEW SELECTED STORIES
448pp. Chatto and Windus. £18.99.
978 0 7011 7988 5
“
Some years ago I was in the British Museum looking at the Parthenon sculptures when a young man came up to me and said with a worried air, ‘I know it’s an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit.’ I said that was very interesting: could he define at all the reasons for his lack of response? He reflected for a minute or two. Then he said, ‘Well, it’s all so terribly rational, if you know what I mean.’ I thought I did.”
This chance encounter set E. R. Dodds thinking and resulted eventually in his innovative book, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951). In Alice Munro’s short story “Chance” (2004), twenty-one-year-old Juliet, “not bad-looking for a scholarship girl”, is rereading Dodds in 1965 on a train from Toronto to Vancouver, where she will be taking time out from her PhD to teach Latin at a private girls’ school. She is interrupted by a man in his fifties: “I just saw you there reading your book all by yourself and I thought, maybe she’s all by herself and got a long way to go too, so maybe we could just sort of chum around together?”. At the words “chum around”, “a cold turbulence rose in Juliet”. She declines to discuss “the considerable attachment that the Greeks had to the irrational” with this weakly desperate seeming man, who a page-and-a-half later throws himself under the train, just as Juliet has turned to the part in Dodds about maenadism and frenzied women on top of Mount Parnassus. As she stands up to follow the other passengers, eager to discover the cause of the train’s sudden stop, her menstrual flow quickens and she ends up in the lavatory with a predicament: should she, or should she not, flush a toilet bowl of blood and urine on to the tracks when the train is stationary and people might see it? She decides not, then later overhears one passenger telling another that the suicide’s blood must have splashed up into the train:
“People would think her exceptionally crude and heartless, were she ever to speak of it. And what was at one end of the misunderstanding – the suicide’s smashed body – would seem, in the telling, to be hardly more foul and frightening than her own menstrual blood.”
Exhausted, Juliet settles back down to Dodds and is drawn to one of the passages she has previously marked “in an orgy of underlining”: “. . . what to the partial vision of the living appears as the act of a fiend, is perceived by the wider insight of the dead to be an aspect of cosmic justice . . .”. She falls asleep and dreams:
“She was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it.”
Dodds begins his book with a quote from William James: “The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder states of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making”. Munro centres her fiction on catching real fact in the making in precisely this Jamesian sense. Her characters are meticulously located: typically, but not exclusively, somewhere in the second half of the twentieth century in the small towns or countryside surrounding London, Ontario. Through their specific constrained lives she probes the human condition. In these New Selected Stories, drawn from her five collections since 1998, she explores the irrational states associated with dreaming, sexually desiring and murdering. Her characters are almost case studies; her artistry in creating and observing them recalls the close attention and cool detachment of a psychoanalyst.
In “The Love of a Good Woman” (1998), Enid is nursing a young mother dying at home of glomerulonephritis, or kidney failure, in Jutland in 1951. Enid is close in age to the dying woman. When she sleeps on the couch in the sickroom she has bad dreams:
“In the dreams that came to her now she would be copulating or trying to copulate (sometimes she was prevented by intruders or shifts in circumstance) with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners. With squirmy babies or patients in bandages or her own mother. She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, and she would set to work with roughness and an attitude of evil pragmatism. ‘Yes, this will have to do’, she would say to herself. ‘This will do if nothing better comes along.’ ”
Enid wakes from her dreams and lies exhausted “like a carcass until her own self, her shame and disbelief came pouring back into her”. She doesn’t dare go back to sleep and feels “insulted by her own mind”. She believes in God, but finds her religion no help in coping with these nightmares: “Her religion was hopeful and sensible and there was no room in it for any sort of rubbishy drama, such as the invasion of the devil into her sleep”. She concludes that the filth in her mind is a simple and unimportant fact: “just the mind’s garbage”.
Later in the story, Enid remembers how when she was four or five she told her mother that she had seen her father in his office with another woman on his knee. “She had told her mother about this in perfect certainty that she had seen it. She said, ‘One of her fronts was stuck in Daddy’s mouth.’ She did not know the word for breasts, though she did know that they came in pairs.” In response to this, Enid’s mother undid her own dress “and took out a dull-skinned object that flopped over her hand”:
“Like this?” she said.
Enid said no. “An ice-cream cone.”
“Then that was a dream”, her mother said. “Dreams are sometimes downright silly. Don’t tell Daddy about it. It’s too silly.”
Grown-up Enid attempts to follow the advice her mother gave her in childhood to dismiss her disturbing dreams as unimportant nonsense. The reader cannot do this. The dreams are too intriguingly described, too vivid on the page; like Lockwood’s dreams at the beginning of Wuthering Heights, they evoke moral disquiet, disgust, even terror. (When she was a child, Munro read Wuthering Heights repeatedly, until her mother hid it under the mattress in the spare bedroom.) “My Mother’s Dream” (1998) is set in July 1945, in a small town near Lake Huron. A young mother, Jill, dreams that she has fallen asleep and forgotten about her baby, left outside in the snow:
“Within her dream she awakened from a dream, to a knowledge of her responsibility and mistake . . . . She went around looking under hedges and broad-leaved plants. She foresaw how the baby would be shrivelled up. It would be dead, shrivelled and brown, its head like a nut, and on its tiny shut-up face there would be an expression not of distress but of bereavement, an old patient grief.”
Jill is suffering from post-natal depression. Her husband has been killed in the war and she is living with her sisters-in-law in the house he grew up in. One of the sisters-in-law, Iona, has developed a deep bond with the baby whom Jill has been uninterested in until the night of her dream. In the morning, Iona finds the baby with a blanket over its head and accuses Jill of having smothered it. Still bleary with sleep, Jill hears Iona’s wild shrieks and thinks she has made a mistake: “Iona has got into the wrong part of the dream. That part is all over. The baby is alright”. The suggestion that Jill’s dream is like a film, or vision, that someone else might encounter or misunderstand, recalls the Homeric description of dreams as objective fact: not something the sleeper has or creates, but something she sees, or is visited by. Jill’s anxiety dream about her inability to care for a small infant also echoes Jane Eyre’s startling dreams on the night the first Mrs Rochester visits her bedroom and tries on her wedding veil. Rochester’s injunction that Jane “forget visionary woe, and think only of real happiness”, is mere denial of the madness that restricts their lives. In Munro’s story, Jill’s dream is not only the expression of disturbance in her waking life, but also a resource for resolving it.
In The Bear Came Over the Mountain (2001), around the time that he admits his wife of many years to a home for Alzheimer sufferers, Grant, a retired lecturer, has a dream about his earlier adultery. He dreams that he receives a letter from the friend of a student he has “parted from decently”. The letter alleges that his ex-girlfriend is going to kill herself. When he starts to lecture in his dream, he notices sitting in the highest row of the theatre, “a flock of cold-eyed young women all in black robes, all in mourning, who never took their bitter stares off him and conspicuously did not write down, or care about, anything he was saying”.
When he is allowed to visit his wife, Fiona, after her first month settling into the home, he finds she has fallen in love with another patient, and scarcely recognizes her old husband. Grant’s love for his wife now takes the form of helping her to pursue her poignant new romance, despite her illness, despite the dream-like confusion of her mind. Thinking back to his philandering days he reflects on the lack of acknowledgement for the acts of generosity, even sacrifice, such relations involve: “Many times he had catered to a woman’s pride, to her fragility, by offering more affection – or a rougher passion – than anything he really felt”. In contrast, his generosity towards Fiona’s fragility is motivated by the sincere love he has always felt for her. Often Munro’s stories end disquietingly, with a paragraph-long sentence that destabilizes any suggestion of resolution, or a broken sentence, or a short repeated phrase, emphasizing uncertainty. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, unusually, ends with an affirmation of love: “Not a chance”, Grant says in reply to the suggestion he might have forsaken Fiona. This simple assertion places his commitment to her beyond the laws of probability, the ravages of irrationality, contingency, or circumstance.
In her memoir, Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing up with Alice Munro (2001), Sheila Munro recalls her mother, who was thirty in 1961, renting an office in an attempt to overcome the writer’s block that she was experiencing around the time the Vancouver Sun published an article about her with the headline: “Housewife Finds Time To Write Short Stories”. She only wrote one story in that office, called “The Office”, about a woman who rents an office but cannot write in it because the landlord keeps interrupting her with unwanted gifts and chats. Sheila Munro connects this story to Virginia Woolf’s injunction that a woman writer must first kill the Angel in the House, and then tell the truth about her “own experience as a body”. Woolf thought she had failed in the second of these objectives. Alice Munro has not. The physical needs, delights, challenges, of the female human body are documented in her fiction with a rare combination of analytical precision and imaginative sensitivity. Her premiss is a bold acknowledgement of the animal irrationality of sexual desire.
An early story, “Baptizing” (1971), describes adolescent Del Jordan dating a boy much less clever than she is, with whom she has little in common:
“Nothing that could be said by us would bring us together; words were our enemies. What we knew about each other was only going to be confused by them. This was the knowledge that is spoken of as “only sex”, or “physical attraction.” I was surprised, when I thought about it – am surprised still – at the light, even disparaging tone that is taken, as if this was something that could be found easily, every day.”
The narrator of “Lying Under the Apple Tree” (2006) is a young girl like Del Jordan, erotically drawn to the local stable boy, Russell Craik, whose family belong to the Salvation Army:
“I did not speak much about myself and I did not listen to him all that closely . . . . I was half-hypnotized, not just by the sound of his voice but by the bright breadth of his shoulders in a clean, short-sleeved shirt, by his tawny throat and thick arms.”
She is sometimes struck by Russell’s manner of talking about God, “as if God were a superior officer, was occasionally gracious but often inflexible and impatient, in a manly way”. But for the most part, her concern is simply to get at his skin. Years later, the narrator returns to her home town and sees Russell’s heavily pregnant wife out shopping with his mother. She experiences a thrill of sexual envy at the thought of what has caused this other woman’s body to become pregnant and seem so “abject but amazing”.
“The Children Stay” (1998) revisits Anna Karenina. Pauline, a housewife married in her twenties with two small children, has been persuaded to participate in an amateur theatre production of Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice, by an aspirant director called Jeffrey, whom she met at a barbecue in Victoria. They are having a gratifying affair by the time Pauline has to go on the annual beach holiday with her in-laws on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Pauline copes reasonably well with the separation: “the thoughts that came to her, of Jeffrey, were not really thoughts at all – they were more like alterations in her body”. Jeffrey copes less well, books himself into a motel in Campbell River, close to the family holiday cottage, and asks Pauline to join him.
“All she said was ‘Are you sure?’
He said, ‘Sure.’ He said sincerely, ‘I’ll never leave you.’
That did not seem the sort of thing that he would say. Then she realized he was quoting – maybe ironically – from the play.”
Pauline wakes in the seedy motel to the realization that she has become one of those people who run away: “A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave up everything. For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex”. And only then does the large bleak fact hit her: she has lost her children; they will stay with her husband, and the pain of this for her will be first acute, then chronic, “permanent but perhaps not constant”. She will need now to carry on and get used to the pain “until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and not any possible present”. The terrible epitaph Tolstoy chose for Anna Karenina, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay”, casts its shadow across Munro’s story, too. Some of her characters believe in God, but most of them are agnostic, or atheist. And yet the enormity of the human suffering these ordinary people endure keeps pulling the question of divine purpose – the Gods if not one all-powerful God – back into the frame. Munro seems a resolutely secular writer, but the Problem of Evil haunts her work.
This selection alone includes one murder motivated by erotic jealousy, two examples of triple murder, a couple of suicides, and numerous other violent deaths. “Dimensions” (2009) recasts the Medea myth, transferring the infanticide from mother to father. The chain of events that leads to the unimaginable vengeance is started when Doree, who has married Lloyd, a significantly older, very controlling man, and is raising a family with him in the countryside around the small town of Mildmay, buys a tin of spaghetti, discounted because it is dented. There is an unpleasant domestic row, of a kind there often is, which ends when Doree walks out after being accused of trying to poison her family. She spends the night crying and eating toast at her only friend’s house, then is driven back the next morning to discover that Lloyd has killed their children to spare them the knowledge that their mother walked out on them:
” ‘You brought it all on yourself,’ he said.
For some time Doree kept stuffing whatever she could grab into her mouth. After the dirt and grass it was sheets or towels or her own clothing. As if she were trying to stifle not just the howls that rose up but the scene in her head.”
Munro’s stories are never linear. They cut back and forth in time and perspective. “Dimensions” shifts between the horror of what happened and Doree’s new life: her job as a chambermaid, her visits to her therapist, her trips to see Lloyd in a hospital for the criminally insane. She starts dangerously to believe that her destiny, her reason for existence, is to try to understand him. This belief is shaken from her by a random traffic accident in which she has the opportunity to save a life.
Fate is another of the ancient preoccupations that Munro revives in a modern setting: the way human beings find meaning in sequences of seemingly random events, or come to believe, retrospectively or projectively, that their lives are following a preordained pattern. Munro’s narrative technique is subversive of any such conviction. Her stories proceed through hiatus and interruption. She lays down discrete blocks of narrative within each story, like stepping stones, requiring her reader to jump trustingly from one to another, until some surprising destination or other has been reached. These gaps are what account, in part, for the sense of interpretive freedom that her texts convey: their spaciousness and openness to the unexplained or unexplainable. The reader who is tempted to look up from one of Munro’s stories and ask: “But where is all this going, what does it mean?” should remember Edith doing her Latin homework at the kitchen table at the end of “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”:
“Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi – ‘You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know –’ She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a chill of satisfaction, ‘– what fate has in store for me, or for you –’ ”
Ruth Scurr is Fellow and Director of Studies in Politics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and the author of Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, 2006.
No comments:
Post a Comment