Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro by Ildiko de Papp Carrington (review)

168 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 century women well, in much the same way that autobiographers from Augustine to Millett, caught on the cusp of great historical changes, have become representative of their times through the documentation of their own special sense of selfhood. Maynard's poetic evocation of her own lifetime dilemma of a split self powerfully expresses many women's sense of division in these times: I am conscious of having two voices. One is cool, cheerful, practical, daily- in effect, response to an assignment, with rewards changing over the years (my parents' praise, a teacher's grade, a magazine's fee). This voice I have always summoned at will. The otheris, I suppose, my singing voice. Itis the gift oflife - of my rich lonely childhood, a marriage which forced me to confront my deepest feelings, my suffering love for my children, my experiences of failure. That one I don't control: it comes and goes. Maynard's own location ofher 'singing' voice, the voice most her own, in a subjectivitythat is 'lonely,' 'forced,' and'suffering,' a partofthe selfthat experiences a continuing and unaccountable sense of failure, lack of control, and a wistful sense of fragility, will bring to many women the shock of recognition that marks the best autobiographies. (HELEN M. Buss) lldiko de Papp Carrington. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction ofAliceMunro Northern lllinois University Press. 244· us $28.00 "I want to give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that's the way I see life.' Reading these words of Alice Munro, we can appreciate why, during forty years of publishing, she has chosen to remain with short fiction. The one exceptionis her structuredearlynovel, Lives ofGirls and Women, considered by some to be a story cycle. Within her chosen genre, within the short space she allows herself, Munro has become increasingly affecting in exploring the problems of ordinary life and, in order to be so effective, increasingly complex in characterization and narratology. In Controlling the Uncontrollable, lldiko de Papp Carrington examines stories throughout Munro's career, directing attention especially to Munro's developing sophistication of narrative mode and her increasingly complex psychological probing of character. Carrington also notes relationships between stories, demonstrates how later stories illuminate earlier ones, and examines the effect of revisions of stories between their first publication and publication in a collection. Her study focuses primarily on those stories (and they are in the majority) concerned with man-woman relationships, on, in Munro's words, 'what they do to each other.' HUMANITIES 169 Controlling the Uncontrollable, Carrington's title, is Munro-like, for it is paradoxical and triply significant. Carrington attempts to exert control by organizing patterns, locating links between stories, repeated words, similarities of character and situation within Munro's writing, although, as she notes, Munro has objected to the assumption that her stories 'fit into any sort of pattern at all.' Munro's characters strive to control their situations; this, the author shows, is often impossible. Munro seeks to control her medium, but, at the same time, expresses ambivalence about the possibility of controlling her art. Munro's characters struggle to control humiliating situations, rarely, · one might add, with complete success. Sex and death are the two humiliations of the flesh they most often confront, sometimesfacing both hwniliations in the one story. Some of her protagonists accomplish their own humiliation; women do so when they 'abdicate' power to men, to use a favourite word ofMunro's. The frequency ofvoyeurism in Munro's fiction, be it willing or, like Stella's in 'Lichen,' unwilling, is usually linked with some form of sexual humiliation. It is in her exploration of such situations and of the strategies Munro uses to express such 'intense, but not connected moments of experience' that Carrington is at her most effective. Munro has developed a variety of complex narrative methods, among them the use of alternating narrators, of a narrator who both participates in the past and narrates in the present, or even the use of three narrators in one story. Carrington looks at such strategies, analysing their effectiveness in specific stories. She also discusses effectively, and at some length, Munro's various uses of the...