The Elusive Greatness of Alice Munro

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. William James

How can great literature be defined? James R. Averill claims that great literature “to

the extent that it appeals to the emotions achieves universality not simply through the

perfection or betterment of performed emotions, but rather by allowing the reader to

participate in an act of emotional creativity” (2001, 8). In this paper it is argued that Munro

writes great literature that is closely linked to the act of seeing as such a creative activity. At

the core of Alice Munro’s authorship there is a lucid recognition of the human experience that

she conveys into language that in turn demands of the reader to become a better observer.

Can short stories be great literature? In order to answer this in the affirmative, short

fiction is described in the following passages as to its distinctive merits compared to novels.

Munro’s fiction is drawn in to exemplify both general aspects of short fiction and to underline

the author’s distinctive style.

While the literary status of Alice Munro – especially after receiving the 2013 Nobel

Prize for Literature – is well established, her role in the literary canon is still debated as to

whether she truly belongs to one of the greats. Harold Bloom, for example, though

acknowledging that she is “very good”, does not include her in his very concise list of ten (all

male) great short fiction writers. Others claim short fiction as such being the issue, that in

order to be truly great, a prose writer has to write novels. Following on from a discussion on

this matter, Munro’s narrative style is analysed. The content aspect of Munro’s writing is of

course closely linked to how she tells her stories and it is through an analysis of Munro’s

narrative style that the content is seen: the how is at the centre of attention as it is the key to

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an understanding of what Munro says. Narratology takes precedence over epistemology as it

points to Munro’s great concern with perspective and thus with meta-fiction. To show this,

two of Munro’s stories are analysed in detail. These are “Passion”, first published in The New

Yorker March 22, 2004, and – in some more detail- “The Love of a Good Woman” from the

2000 collection of the same name. The latter, it is argued, is an example also of how Munro

pushes the boundaries of short fiction and refuses to be limited by fitting neatly into one

literary tradition.

In short, the aim of this paper is to describe Munro’s greatness by showing what she

does and how she does it, by drawing on a broad selection of secondary material, and by

focusing on a close reading of two of the author’s stories.

Short stories

If short stories are about life and novels are about the world, one can see Munro’s capacious stories as being a little about both: fate and time and love are the things she is most interested in, as well as their unexpected outcomes.

Lorrie Moore1

In his enthusiastic introduction to Munro’s collection Runaway (2004)2, Jonathan

Franzen quotes Charles McGrath, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, who

views young short story writers as “people who learn golf by never venturing onto a golf

course but instead practicing on a driving range” (introduction, n.pag.)3. Munro herself says

about her preference: “I’ve tried to write novels. They turn into strange hybrid stories (…) I

haven’t read a novel that I didn’t think couldn’t have been a better story” (Duncan, 2). The

                                                                                                               1  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/writers-­‐on-­‐alice-­‐munro.html  2  Franzen’s  introduction  was  originally  published  in  the  New  York  Times  Book  Review November 14, 2004.  3  Franzen’s  response  to  this  (referring  to  Munro)  illustrates  some  of  the  differences  in  approach:  “This  is  not  a  golfer  on  a  practice  tee.  This  is  a  gymnast  in  a  plain  black  leotard,  alone  on  a  bare  floor,  outperforming  all  the  novelists  with  their  flashy  costumes  and  whips  and  elephants  and  tigers”  (ibid.)  

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distinction between the two types of prose has perhaps to some extent become irrelevant

considering the many short novels or dense short stories of a considerable length published

nowadays. However, the reason why Munro prefers short fiction is worth a scrutiny.

Franzen refers to short stories’ “Cinderella status” as closely connected to their merits.

Seemingly, short stories are about very little and therefore quite a hard sell. A brief synopsis

of “Passion”, discussed below, may illustrate this: In her old age, Grace returns to a town and

a neighborhood where a life-changing event occurred back when she was in her early

twenties. However, while the plot may be summarised in a few sentences, this does not mean

that the content is not important, but rather that there is so much more going on, most of

which is difficult to paraphrase. Munro’s stories are particularly hard to review, Franzen

claims, because she “strives for, and achieves, in each of her stories, a gestaltlike

completeness in the representation of life” (2004).

According to Charles May, there are five significant issues that apply to short fiction:

“how the short story deals with the relationship between sequence and significance, how it

mediates mystery and pattern, how it constructs character, why its resolution is often

metaphoric, and why it shuns explanation” (May 2004,14). These points form the basis of the

following, as they are helpful to structure the comparison of short stories to novels and to

identify the specific traits of Munro’s fiction.

May’s first point, corncerning sequence and significance, specifies the way in which

short stories are read differently from other genres. Compared to novels that are broken up

into parts in the reading and analytical process, short stories are often read as a whole and

perceived as an entity before the reader or critic looks at its components. May credits Edgar

Allen Poe who defines plot in short fiction as “that from which no part can be displaced

without ruin to the whole”. During the reading process, the reader’s focus shifts from

“mimetic event to aesthetic pattern” (ibid) so that the story as a whole informs the detail.

Considering for example Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman” (LGW), the detail of

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the optometrist’s instrument only reaches its full level of significance once the whole story is

known. Thus, short stories in general and Munro’s work in particular demand to be re-read.

Poe put this beautifully. Once the overall design is known, the details “break out in all

directions like stars, and throw quadruple brilliance over the narrative” (ibid.). The impact of

short stories derives from the paradox of the need for events progressing in time in order to

bring the story forward and the desire by the author to tell something of importance in a

timeless theme. In short fiction this basic paradox or incompatibility becomes more visible as

“its frequent focus on a frozen moment in time seems atemporal” (ibid, 17). As readers we are

let through a sequence of temporality only to be asked toward the end of the reading to set this

aside and reflect on the atemporal dimension of theme. Or as C.S. Lewis puts it: “In life and

art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments

something that is not successive.“ (19)

May’s “mystery and pattern” refer to the genre’s focus on the significant

incident and its use of pattern at the price of realism: What often has been termed as the

“artificial patterning of the short story heightens intensity, thus creating the cryptic, elliptical

nature of the genre” (ibid, 17). Alison Lurie in “The Lamp in the Mausoleum” links the use of

ellipses to the many ways in which Munro’s stories have been read:

These narrative gaps, however, have left Munro open to a great deal of speculation and

interpretation on the part of critics. There are already over a dozen books and theses

and a clamoring clutter of scholarly articles treating her work from various fashionable

and unfashionable perspectives: religious, anthropological, sociological, historical,

biographical, psychological, structuralist, deconstructionist, symbolist, etc.” (2006,

n.pag.)

The need to put Munro in some sort of box is surprising given her preoccupation with

distorting anticipations of narration and genre, an important aspect of Munro’s work that is

illustrated in the analyses below.

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The roots of the focus on the bizarre significant event stem from the 18th century

novella. May quotes Terry Eagleton who says that realism in novels is primarily “a cognitive

form concerned to map the causal process underlying events, the short story, by contrast, can

yield us some single bizarre occurrence of epiphany of terror whose impact would merely be

blunted by the lengthy realist elaboration” (ibid). Time, for example can be stretched or

compressed to underline a certain artificiality of the genre4. This focus on mystery has to do

with the short story form and restriction in length; it has remained closer to the primal origin

of all narrative, the romance. Yet it also has a close connection to 20th century existentialism

in its focus on the epiphany.

Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman” can be used as an example for both

“sequence and significance” and “mystery and pattern”. Munro’s use of composition, time,

and the heightened experience are genre-typical. After reading the story, many of the

seemingly stray pieces of information gain significance. The local museum as such is not

interesting, but the one item that brought about Mr. Willens’ death is. This item has to do with

vision and observance, tropes that are explored throughout the long second passage that asks

the reader to delay his/her expectations concerning Willens’ death. Munro starts her story

with a languor more usually found in novels. We are given details about the boys who after

discovering Willens’ dead body all delay passing on the fact. As we move towards the end,

the story gains momentum and instead of expanding like a novel, the seemingly disparate

information is gathered together and tightened into the crucial moment at the end that we

leave before we witness its outcome. Will there be a confrontation? Will Enid decide to join

forces with Rupert instead? Has she seen through the small town’s nasty othering of outsiders

while superficially keeping up impressions of cordiality? Is Mrs. Quinn to be trusted as a

narrator at all? Is Enid? Typically for Munro, at first reading the story seems to be written in a

realist mode, concerned with ordinary people. Only towards the end of the story, and

                                                                                                               4 Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” uses the manipulation of time as its main plot device.

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especially after finishing it, the full impact of all the odd behaviours, bizarre dreams, and little

cruelties are fully realized.

May points out that the detailed descriptions in novels give the reader the illusion of

knowing the character, whereas details in short stories“ are transformed into metaphoric

significance”. Munro, it could be said, hovers at the edge of this significant difference

between the two genres. Her use of significant detail frequently serves to pull us in as

witnesses. It gives us the feeling of knowing about the protagonists when the opposite is the

case: we are at the mercy of the narrator’s fiction. Often, expectations gained from her

descriptions are overturned in little clauses and seemingly insignificant small passages that

nevertheless make us aware of the fact that the narrator, not we, has the insight and chooses to

part with information that may alter our perception. One example of this is the character of

Ken in “Loveship, Friendship, Hateship. Courtship, Marriage” (2002). He is described partly

through his father-in-law as focalizer, partly through Johanna, and to a great extent through

his actions that we only hear of through second or third hand accounts and in very few words

to create the impression of an egotistical scoundrel who tries to exploit other people. For that

reason we fearfully anticipate Johanna’s actual meeting with him: it must result in some sort

of clash. Despite her idiosyncrasies, Johanna is the closest we get to a heroine, as she is the

most frequently focalized. Yet, once Johanna meets Ken, the narrator chooses to give us more

information: Ken often acts out of loyalty to friends. He does not only owe money, but is

owed at least as much. He is not a thoroughly bad character, just as Johanna is not just a naïve

spinster who ridiculously changes her life because of some fake letters written as a cruel and

elaborate joke by two nasty teenage girls. Johanna recognizes Ken’s limits, but realizes that

she can make the most of it and that by nurturing him she might in turn achieve her –

unspoken – goal of gaining significance and of having a family. She is both a romantic and a

realist and the joke is turned against its mastermind, Edith. In this story, the narrator plays

with our expectations, for example that of the romance. Munro turns expectations around and

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gives us a surprise similar to Edith’s. The unattractive woman of low status rescues the man

in distress. As so often with Munro, we are given information that gives us an illusion of

knowing a character well, though perhaps not quite as well as a character in a novel, only to

be confronted with more facts and a different realization. While in many short stories “detail

is transformed into metaphoric significance”, in Munro’s stories it is more accurate to say that

details are closely connected to the reader’s realization and perception. It is not that Munro

never uses details as a type of metaphor, rather that she does it more vaguely and subtly while

giving an impression of being a realist writer. The “gestaltlike completeness” (Franzen, see

above) of Munro’s writing only rarely allows for metaphors to dominate.

May sketches the short story’s character as based in the tradition of the romance.

Allegorical characters act according to a pre-existent code5, the romance character acts

according to this code and in reference to a realistic sounding scenario: “The romance figure

not only acts as if obsessed because of his or her position in the story but also seems obsessed

in reference to the similitude of real life created in the work itself.” (20). This description is

very fitting to classical short story writers such as Poe in for example “The Tell-Tale Heart”,

where an obsession becomes material so that the object becomes outward, the inward turmoil

is ignored and the manifestation of the obsession becomes all-important (the eye/I). May

gives examples of other classic writers, like Hawthorne and Melville, who are seemingly very

different from Munro. And yet, obsessions are not absent or turned inward, they are just

updated. Munro’s characters are so recognizable and seemingly ordinary that they do not

seem obsessive – even when in fact they are. Munro’s use of dreams are manifestations of

obsession and repression in LGW and “My Mother’s Dream” (1998). Dismissed as “the

mind’s garbage” (51) by Enid in LGW, “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“ (Scurr, 2011, n.pag.). The

                                                                                                               5  what  May  does  not  mention  here  is  whether  they  are  really  characters  or  personifications  of  virtues  

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obsession is not only a straightforward outer manifestation of inner turmoil but evokes hints at

societal suppression and parental manipulation. In “Chance“ (2004) menstrual blood

becomes an outer manifestation of societal taboos that in the story is connected with the taboo

of human loneliness ending in suicide.

May’s “Metaphoric resolution” describes the post-Chekhovian short story’s

dependence on solving a puzzle metaphorically, aesthetically, rather than

phenomenologically, dramatically. “The short story’s most basic assumption”, May says, “is

that everyday experience reveals the self as a mask of habits, expectations, duties, and

conventions”. Short stories “can never reconcile this tension either existentially or morally,

for the tension between the necessity of the everyday metonymic world and the sacred

metaphoric world6 is one of those basic tensions that can only be held in suspension. The only

resolution possible is an aesthetic one” (22). C.S. Lewis shows the connection between stories

and real life:

I suggest that this internal tension in the heart of every story between the theme and

the plot constitutes, after all, its chief resemblance to life. (…) In real life as in a story

something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a

succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. (19)

Even for just a short moment to catch an elusive significance is by Lewis compared to

capturing a bird in a net and releasing it: “The bird has escaped us. But it was at least

entangled in the net for several chapters7. We saw it close and enjoyed the plumage. How

many 'real lives' have nets that can do as much?“ (ibid.) Elusiveness in life, strongly linked to

the eternal pressure of ever-passing time and the necessity of successive events renders a

grasp at significance next to impossible. However, C.S. Lewis thinks that “it is something

done—or very, very nearly done—in stories. I believe the effort to be well worth making.“ (20)

                                                                                                               6  this alludes to May’s previous observation on ancient texts as dealing with the tension between the profane and the sacred 7 Lewis refers to all types of prose and not specifically to short stories  

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It is interesting to look at Munro’s oeuvre in this context. There are claims that

Munro’s scope is limited as it is dominated by female characters as main protagonists and set

in provincial Ontario (Lorentzen, 2013). However, viewing these factors as limited means

viewing people’s struggle with conscience and identity as banal. Perhaps it has to do with

stubbornness in Munro’s writing that she does not venture out into the masculine world of

wars and bullfights, border crossings and base crime but insists that inner turmoil and

conflicts demand equal attention and provide inexhaustible source material. Munro looks

inward and sees vastness. Hemingway looks outward and sees vastness. It makes no sense to

claim that one view is better than the other. As Roxana Robinson8 puts it:

Like Chekhov, Alice Munro never sets out to make a political point. She isn’t sexist,

she has no axe to grind. She’s simply bearing witness to the human experience,

reporting from the front lines. Yet she is making a political point, one that’s radical

because it’s so enormous and so unsettling. The point is that girls and women, even

those who lead narrow and constricted lives, those who wield no influence, who have

a limited experience in the world, are just as significant and important as boys and

men, those who take drugs, ride across the border, drift down the river, or hunt

whales.9

May finally investigates the short story’s “refusal to explain”, its “centering on that

which can be narrated but not explained”. Referring to Walter Benjamin, May points to the

genre’s “amplitude lacking in information” (22), “characters in short stories encounter those

most basic mysteries of human experience that cannot be explained by rational means” (ibid).

Short stories, then, do not claim to be able to show the big pattern, the rational behind events

and behaviours. They focus on unresolved wonderment and people’s need to revisit, to

experience again in one form or another that which does not make sense but the significance

of which keeps demanding attention. In this way a short story asks much more of the reader

                                                                                                               8  New Yorker 10.10. 2013, 9 Robinson here seems to allude to writers like Kerouc, Cormack McCarthy, Twain, and Melville  

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than a novel does. Events are not folded out, people not really known, time not a matter of

logical sequence. “Because the reader of story is permitted to interpret things, story has an

amplitude lacking in information” Benjamin says (in May, 22). However, in Munro’s stories

the reader is not only permitted to interpret. Interpretation is demanded yet despite this

insistence it is not always made easy. In “Passion”, for example, the reader is implicitly given

a lot of information about Grace’s character, the events of the fateful day, her life-changing

decision. It is up to the reader to decide whether Grace acted in a morally justifiable way. Not

even Grace has the answer to this, it seems, even after 40 years, yet the story asks of the

reader to keep pondering the dilemma. Thus, sometimes, Munro puts the reader in a similar

position as her character not in terms of identification as in a novel - we never get close

enough to the main protagonist in terms of detail - but as a recognition of the fact that certain

events in life will remain unsolvable and lose very little of their significance.

Our interest in fictional characters, Thomas Mann claims, are always linked to finding

the answer to the Oedipal question of identity, the “who am I” and “trying to answer the

question “Who am I” by merely focusing on description of every day existence is bound to be

inauthentic” (May quoting Heidegger, “Sein und Zeit”). This is closely linked to whether we

perceive short stories in general and Munro’s stories in particular as realistic. What is more

realistic, mimetic or authentic representation? As May so eloquently puts it:

If we assume that reality is our well-controlled and comfortable self, then the short

story is neither realistic nor natural. If, however, we feel that beneath the everyday or

immanent in the every day there is some other reality that somehow evades us, if our

view is a religious one in its most basic sense, that is, if we feel that something is

lacking, if we have a sense of the liminal nature of existence, then the short story is

more “realistic” than the novel can possibly be. It is closer to the nature of “reality” as

we experience it in those moments when we are made aware of the inauthenticity of

everyday life, those moments when we sense the inadequacy of our categories of

perception. It is for this reason, I think, that short stories are essential and yet seldom

read. (24)

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A short story may leave us in limbo, make us feel uneasy and provide little escape. It

at once draws attention to itself and demand suspension of awareness of its spatial limitations.

In a classical novel we can lose ourselves as involved spectators, in a short story we are to a

higher degree asked to participate even though we are kept in the dark.

Alice Munro does par excellence what Walter Benjamin highlighted as the stories’

main difference to the novel:

What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale,

the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into

it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he

tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the

experience of those who are listening to his tale (364)

Later in the same texts, Benjamin claims that “modern man no longer works at what cannot

be abbreviated” – here he also has short stories in mind: “In point of fact he has succeeded in

abbreviating even storytelling. We have witnessed the evolution of “the short story” which

has removed itself from the oral tradition”(368). It could be claimed, though, that Munro also

in this aspect transcends the short story restraints by succeeding in writing stories of a certain

length in which the storytelling has not been abbreviated, as is shown below in connection

with “The Love of a God Woman”. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Munro often refers to

her fiction simply as stories, dropping the adjective. In an interview with Lisa Awano, Munro

points to her background in a female oral tradition and folklore and sees a link to the short

story form because “women have a tendency maybe to try to interpret life verbally. Whereas a

lot of men I know or used to know didn’t have this urge” (2013, 182). Mark Nunes follows up

on this thought and describes Munro’s writing as “postmodern piecing” (1997). Nunes’ use of

the term refers to Elaine Showalter, to whom piecing is a process of “recuperation of

fragmented traditions”. The word stems from the tradition of piecing together material in

quilting. Nunes aims to show that “Munro’s emphasis on contingencies derails the notion of

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master narratives by showing the means by which any given arrangement of facts results in

the emergence of meaning” (12) Insightful as this observation is, it seems to run the risk of

highlighting Munro as a postmodern writer of women’s literature and underlining a restricted

scope. Also, though this might be an aspect of postmodern literature that Munro explores in

her earlier writing, such as the collection Friend of My Youth (1990), it seems to limit the

perception of scope in Munro’s later work. The concern in Munro’s later stories seems less a

matter of piecing together separate contingencies than pointing to hidden ontologies.

How Munro does it is the big question and one that it nearly impossible to answer. It is

also what makes her one of the great rather than only very good writers. Despite the difficulty

of the undertaking, the pinpointing of Munro’s achievement is attempted in more detail in the

following paragraphs by looking specifically at two of her stories.

“Passion”

What should we call the combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological unearthing, precise and detailed recollection, the wallowing in the seamier and meaner and more vengeful undersides of human nature, the telling of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished miseries, and rejoicing in the fullness and variety of life, stirred all together? Margaret Atwood10

“Passion” describes Grace’s return after 40 years to the place where as a poor young

woman she was involved with Maury, a young man from an affluent family. Bonding more

with his mother than with her fiancé, she is asked to keep an eye on Maury’s older half-

brother as he in his capacity as a doctor takes her to the hospital for a tetanus injection

following an accident. Instead of returning to the family home, Grace goes off with Neil on a

fateful night of discovering what she wants from life that ends tragically with Neil’s suicide

shortly after her return to her room in the hotel where she works. Grace does not reconcile                                                                                                                10  Introduction to her “Collected Stories” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/writers-on-alice-munro.html  

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with Maury and is given money by Neil’s father- probably instigated by his mother - that

allows her to start the life she now envisages for herself rather than to return to take over her

uncle’s humble family business.

Gabriel Josopovici describes the epiphany of Proust’s Marcel as he realizes the gap

between experience and expression of it: “what we convey in normal discourse are

generalities, never our unique sensations.” (258). Marcel sets forth from this point of

realization to “draw these vague sensations of joy into his consciousness, to articulate and

therefore to master them without destroying their unique quality” (ibid.). Where Marcel is

concerned especially with intense feeling of joy, Munro is happy to scrutinize any intensity of

feeling. She attempts again and again to put into words and indeed into the gaps between

words the particular feeling of her protagonists calling on the reader to partake in the process.

A reader often starts a Munro story thinking he is an impartial observer brought along by the

seemingly distanced narrator. Yet by the end of the story some of the emotional turmoil or the

nagging conscience or the unresolved and revisited pain has seeped through the pages. We do

not completely identify with the protagonist but we recognize the experience at a different

level. Grace’s unspoken feeling of guilt and responsibility in “Passion” seems to lie like an

extra invisible layer under the story. Despite all her rationalization about the necessary break

from conventional expectation – and thereby from Maury - it becomes tangible in the ending.

Here Grace shows herself to have been acting out of a need for self-realization that becomes

so concrete that it can be expressed by the gift of a cheque and her acceptance of it. The

existential narrative that she had taken us for a ride on was her rationalization of actions that

in the end could be given a price tag. Per Winther calls this deception “the tension readers

perceive between the narrative surface and undercurrents of motifs, emotions and hidden

reality” (2012). Munro’s use of detailed surface description and imagery serve to describe

characters indirectly and often with such subtlety that critics may be forgiven for not

immediately realizing their impact. Christian Lorentzen, for example, fails to detect any

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greatness in this subtlety: “I started to think of reading Munro’s sentences as something like

walking across a field after a blizzard in a good pair of snowshoes: it’s a trudge, but when you

get to the other side your feet aren’t wet.“ (2013, n. pag.). Munro’s subtleties, it would seem,

do not work for every reader. Disagreeing with Lorentzen, I see Munro’s best stories as

precisely those that do not satisfy expectations, that puzzle me as to what they are actually

about and compel me to re-read because a residue of uneasiness or unresolved tension is left.

Reading “Passion” and many other of Munro’s subtle and seemingly unspectacular stories

may seem to the reader like being given a gift that perplexes you and the value of which you

do not immediately understand. Seemingly mundane content hides layers that may only be

discovered by re-reading the story; a process by the end of which you may still find yourself

on shaky ground. In “Passion”, this experience is mirrored in Grace’s similar experience of

not having resolved her part in an ethical dilemma that lies many years back. Munro achieves

this effect by ever so slight shifts in focalization that confuse whose viewpoint we are witness

to. The opening line in “Passion”, starting with “not too long ago” (159), may be Grace’s

qualifier, as if she were talking to herself. They may also be the narrator’s view on things, a

framing device that is echoed in the final line of the story that begins with “In those days”

(196). In this case the bracket of these two lines serve to first zoom in on the story and then

zoom out of it, thus distancing the narrator and reader from Grace. Both readings coexist. A

few pages into the text, the personal pronoun “you” appears, to Winther an indication of

Grace as a focalizer (201) and an example of “interior monologue – or rather dialogue” (ibid).

However, I maintain that the “you” also has a ring of the implied author addressing Grace, so

it could be seen as a dialogue between the artist and her object in which perversely the artist is

in the protagonist’s head (indeed she has created her) but addresses her actions as ambiguous

and revealing, the reader being present as a witness to this dialogue. The reader could even be

said to be co-addressed, perhaps the narrator is also asking us:

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And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody has come along

to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a reeling of relief pass over you, of

old confusions and obligations wiped away? (161)

Winther dismisses this dimension as belonging to a different literary era: “In a nineteenth

century text one might have read it as a rhetorical dialogue between the overbearing, overt

narrator and the reader; in a text published in 2004 that would not be a convincing reading.”

(201). Later in his eminently perceptive article, however, Winther underlines the difficulty of

identifying the voice. Drawing on Laura Buchholz, he uses the term “morphing” to describe

this multi-layeredness. Alison Lurie describes the effect that Munro’s style has: “When she

tells a story she never suggests that both author and reader are smarter and more sophisticated

than anyone in the story“ (2006, n.pag.)

The ambiguous use of a pronoun is only one of the acts of misdirection in the story.

Winther describes the effects of the “meandering” passages of immense detail at the

beginning of the story that we never return to as standing out like “a sore thumb” in a short

story. It might be seen even as bad and uneconomic writing.

However, if the main character rather than the extradiegetic narrator is perceived as

the focalizer of these descriptions, they serve nicely as an indirect way of

characterizing the protagonist and her state of mind. The meandering manner in which

these descriptive details are presented mimics the process of free association of

thoughts and impressions which dovetails with the tumbling around in Grace’s mind

of deeper questions, thus foregrounding the existential confusion behind the

protagonists need to return (…)” (201-2)

Munro’s play with focalization and misdirection asks questions of the role of the

narrator and puts a demand on the reader to reflect, stumble, re-think and re-evaluate. It also

serves as a warning not to accept any narrative as straightforward. By misdirection and

confusion, Munro makes the reader aware of his/her preconceptions and anticipations. Munro

asks the reader to participate by filling in where she leaves out only to then overturn the

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expectations raised in the reader by this process, an act of engagement that also serves to blur

the line between reader and protagonists. Sometimes we find ourselves in the same boat as the

person we read about. In “Passion”, for example, we discover that Neil is an alcoholic at the

same time as Grace. Only in retrospect are we able to find the pointers: little hints by his

mother, his wife’s frustrated behaviour. The levelling of the void between reader and

character is further explored in the analysis of “The Love of a Good Woman” in the following

section.

There is a certain paradox concerning the role of the narrator and the author. The

narrator is hard to pinpoint exactly, he/she is omniscient and then again not, he lets the

protagonist be the focalizer but it turns out she is focalized at the same time. The narrator

leads us astray, steps back, jumps in time and frustrates expectations. The effect of this

evasiveness is that the narrator seems to lose in authority compared to, say, the 19th century

omniscient narrator, whom, considering his voice, we are constantly aware of. Yet, at the

same time Munro’s narrator displays the absolute power of the author.

“The Love of a Good Woman”

“The Love of a Good Woman” (LGW) is by many regarded as a key story in Munro’s

work as it functions on many different levels of genre and is filled with ambiguities and

detours that serve as comment on the act of reading and on the merits of short stories

compared to novels. At 76 pages it is one of Munro’s longest stories and one of the most

complex ones. The core story is that of a nurse, Enid, who attends a dying farmer’s wife,

Jeanette Quinn. Mrs. Quinn is the wife of a former school acquaintance, Rupert, whom Enid

as a child used to treat with unkindness, something she later in high school tried to make up

for. The nursing job is strenuous, the household and the couple’s two children are neglected,

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and the patient is antagonistic. Enid feels repulsed by Jeanette Quinn, even though she is a

hardened nurse who has seen it all. She also develops feelings for Rupert. The long

introduction to this core story is the tale of three boys’ discovery of the town optometrist’s

body in a car in the nearby river. The boys defer telling their news when they get back home

and the reader is given detailed insight into all three home scenarios and to town life.

Eventually one of the boys tells his mother. The connection of the framing story to the core

story is found in several seemingly insignificant markers that only make sense fully at a

second reading. On a plot level, the connection is established by Mrs Quinn who claims

Rupert saw the optometrist fondle her at a home visit and killed him in a rage, after which the

couple disposed of the body and hid the crime by sloppily adding brown paint to the blood-

stained floor of the crime scene. After Jeanette Quinn’s death, Enid plans to confront Rupert

by exposing her knowledge of his deed on a boat trip on the same river, also letting him know

she cannot swim. The story ends before any resolution is established.

The structure of the story may be compared to the shape of a funnel: the wide

novelistic opening narrative of the three boys that narrows down to the core story about Enid,

re-establishing the terseness of the short story genre.

The story lends itself to be read from different angles, none of which can be totally

disputed or proved wrong but none of which are exhaustive either. This indirectly displays the

power of the storyteller and the fallacy of the indirect view. This is done by way of the

narrator exercising this power through delay, wandering of on seemingly unnecessary

tangents, and on the inclusion of symbolisms that hint at genre conventions only to overturn

the expectations raised. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, for example, highlights the Gothic

elements of the story and concludes that “generic expectations of Gothic horror and of

romance allow for double readings of almost every incident, right up to Enid’s sense that

“everything for a long way around her had gone quiet” (Ross, 808). There are certain

elements of a fairy tale used: the three boys, the three narratives of Mrs. Quinn, the promise to

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the dying father, the mother’s warning about marrying a farmer, the helpers (the mother who

phones the police, the crossing guard). Yet the story is far from a fairy tale in its narrative

style and resolution. It is seemingly based in the realist tradition: we are given facts and

details, there are no overt psychic or supernatural elements.

LGW is a story that raises questions about any narrative’s claim of truth. It is a story

that focuses very much on two types of focalization: zero focalization in the “Jutland” part

where the narrator resembles the classical omniscient narrator and knows more than the

characters. In the “Heart Failure” part, Enid is the focalizer but also the focalized: we see

things from her perspective but we also given more information, through for example the

description of her dreams that she dismisses as “garbage”but we cannot. In the “Lies” section,

Mrs. Quinn tells her three versions of Mr. Willen’s death to Enid, throughout which she holds

back and distorts facts, making both Enid and the reader question her truthfulness. This is

underlined by using the past perfect, Mrs. Quinn is focalized by Enid: “Mrs. Quinn had been

sitting in the rocker…” (56).

Along with these shifts in focalization, there is also the question of how we see in

general. How does the eye of the beholder influence the object? The story’s beginning zooms

in on the optometrist’s complicated optical instrument. Already here we have a double

viewing, the reader is asked to look at the instrument of observation.

LGW seems to ask: what do we want to see, what do we really observe and whose

testimony is this observation built on? Linked to the focus on observation, the story also

addresses blindness. Enid is blind to her mother’s motif for changing her impression that she

saw her father fondling another woman’s breasts and only realizes these many years later that

what she saw was real and that her mother distorted her observation by superimposing a

different image onto her perception of reality. Enid is also blind as to her own motives: why

does she absent herself on Mrs. Quinn’s day of dying and focus on the children’s having a

good time? Is she perhaps not so different from her mother: a manipulative seemingly good

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woman who really acts for her own benefit? It is nearly as if Susan Sontag had this story by

Munro in mind when she stated the demand on readers and critics that “what is important now

is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more and to hear more and to feel more”

(Sontag, 14).

Expectations raised are toyed with and eventually put aside: LGW is not a fairy tale, it

is not a gothic novella and it is not sufficient to look at its realistic side. Munro thus asks the

reader to engage in a meta-fictional discussion by frustrating the in-built expectations. This is

immensely elegantly done: in the end we (the readers) find ourselves in the same position as

Enid (the Enid-End analogy not lost on us): stuck, surrounded by silence, never able to reach

absolute certainty about the outcome. This is a comment about the nature of narratives, about

short stories ability to capture “the liminal nature of existence” (May, 24). Therefore it is also

a comment on the nature of our lives and the unpredictability of the outcome of any

endeavour.

LGW is a short story that has been analysed in many excellent academic articles. One

of these is John Gerlach’s “To Close or Not To Close”, in which he suggests that Gary Saul

Morson’s concept of “sideshadowing” may be the best analytic tool for it. Sideshadowing is

the term used to describe “narrative strategies which keep time and choice open and relies on

time and a concept of time as a field of possibilities” (Gerlach, 151). In LGW “we end with a

saturated awareness of presentness, the moment of thematic possibilities and choice with its

backward and forward resonances” (ibid). Enid, stuck in the mud and in total quietness at the

end of the story, is stuck in a position open to what future she may forge from the past she has

inhabited. Gerlach reads it as s certainty that she will survive and marry Rupert. I think it

likely but I also expect Munro wants us to hover in the uncertainty and stillness taking in all

the opportunities and contemplating on the nature of stories and their endings- and of life.

Typically for Munro, the prologue only gains full meaning once the story is being re-

read. It reads more like an epilogue, set as it is decades after the main events of the story. We

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are asked to keep in mind the optometrist’s instrument, just as we are asked to use our own

gift of observation. Munro questions the claim to truth of observations and even more of what

we are told. Mrs. Quinn tells a total of three versions of her encounter with Mr. Willens, one

more outrageous than the next, all of them questioning the reliability of the narrative. Daniel

Menaker, editor-in-chief at The New Yorker, describes Munro’s narrative technique as

follows:

She's a very modern and experimental writer in the clothing of a classical writer. Like

William Trevor, she penetrates through various narratives, sometimes about exactly

the same events or subjects, and she keeps on parting the curtains for you until you get

to the heart of what she's doing. You get the feeling she's trying to help you get at

some true emotional psychological insight, but that often takes the form of a kind of

philosophical surrender to the unknowability of people's motives and characters, a

dark existential uncertainty about what makes people tick. 11

However, the discovery of layers in LGW seems endless. No sooner has the reader

established that the Jutland section is an elaborate set-up for the core story and a reminder of

the merits of the story over the novel when by another look at it, the text begs to differ. Why

this sympathetic and elaborate description of the three boys’ home lives when in Jutland “any

one of at least a dozen boys could have been substituted for any one of these three” (LGW

11)? Perhaps because they embody the delicious freedom possible outside society’s

restraints:

Just the same, there were notable differences as to how they lived at home and what

was expected of them in life. But these differences dropped away as soon as they were

out of sight of the county jail and the grain elevator and the church steeples and out of

range of the chimes of the courthouse clock” (11)

The boys do not wish for the town to encroach on their free space in Jutland and delay

reporting on their discovery. They put time and action on hold because they realize the

                                                                                                               11 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview8

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connection of freedom to absence of temporal restraint. They have a haven free from

judgment by the law, the church, future job demands. At the end of the story, Enid moves

towards this space free of both societal and internalized demands. She has just discovered the

freedom of not acting according to her religious and moral sets of values: “All she had to do

was keep quiet and let it come. Through her silence, her collaboration in a silence, what

benefits could bloom. For others and for herself” (75-6). In the end the terrible restraints she

has lived under fall away because of this discovery: “everything for a long way around had

gone quiet” (78).

Conclusion The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself Walter Benjamin

I have tried to show that Alice Munro excels as a narrator of short fiction by using the

characteristics of this type of prose creatively and freely. Some of Munro’s best stories

function on many levels: as good reads, as psychological profiles, as social comments, and as

meta-narratives that demand active participation of the reader.

This paper has dealt mainly with Munro’s later work. A comparison to Munro’s earlier

stories and an analysis and discussion of the spatial expansion to quality- how the increasing

length of her stories perhaps connect to more depth- would be only one good field for further

investigation. Just as with reading her stories, one never finishes with analysing Munro’s

writing.

One of Harold Bloom’s ten great short story writers, Hemingway, in an interview with

George Plimpton 1958, described his approach to writing, his famous “top of the iceberg”

analogy, as follows:

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I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven eighths of it under

water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only

strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something

because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

(Plimpton 1974, 35)

Prompted by this, I suggest a different image. Reading Alice Munro’s stories is like trying to

cross a river by jumping from float to float; separate stories may be connected or have been

connected by way of motif, topic, or character. The reader is never on safe ground, always

aware of the movement or elasticity of time and space. Aware also, that more lies beneath the

surface of every story told. Crossing over is a shaky experience that might not take you where

you hoped to go. Nothing is quite as expected and you are likely to arrive at a different place

than the one imagined when setting off. Yet it is a risk well worth taking.

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Bibliography

Averill, James R. The Rhetoric of Emotion, With a Note on What Makes Great Literature Great. Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol. 19 (1) 5-26, 2001 Awano, Lisa Dickler. An Interview With Alice Munro. Virginia Quarterly Review, April 1, 2013. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller” from Hale, Dorothy J, Ed. The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Bloom, Harold. Introduction to Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Munro. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009. Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. “Don’t Tell (on) Daddy”: Narrative Complexity in Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman”. Studies in Short Fiction 34 (1997): 159-70 Duncan, Isla. Alice Munro’s Narrative Art. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gerlach, John. To Close or Not To Close: Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman”. Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Winter 2007) pp. 146-158) Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Josopovici, Gabriel. Surfaces and Structures” from The World and The Book. London: MacMillan, 1979. Lewis, C. S. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Florida: Harcourt, 2002. Lorentzen, Christian. Poor Rose. London Review of Books. Vol. 35, Nr. 11, 6 June 2013. Lurie, Alison. The Lamp in the Mausoleum. The New York Review of Books. December 21, 2006. May, Charles. “Why Short Stories Are Essential and Why They Are Seldom Read” in Winther, Per et al. The Art of Brevity. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press , 2004 ) . Munro, Alice: Friend of My Youth. London: Vintage, 1990. ________ The Love of a Good Woman. London: Chatto and Windus, 2001 ________ Runaway. London: Vintage 2006 ________ Dear Life. New York: Vintage, 2013.

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Nunes, Mark. “Postmodern “Piecing”: Alice Munro’s Contingent Ontologies”. Studies in Short Fiction 34, 1997: 11-26. Plimpton, George.. “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway”. In Welshimer Wagner, Linda. (ed.). Ernest Hemingway. Five Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State U. P. 1974: 21-38. Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. “Too many Things”: Reading Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman”. University of Toronto Quarterly. Volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 Scurry, Ruth. “The darkness of Alice Munro”. The Times Literary Supplement. 4. October 2011. Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation” from Against Interpretation and other Essays. New York: Picador, 1966. Winther, Per. “Munro’s Handling of Description, Focalization, and Voice in “Passion””. Narrative, Vol. 20, No. 2, May 2012.