‘It was about vanishing’: A Glimpse of Alice Munro's Stories

MARK LEVENE 'It was about vanishing': A Glimpse of Alice Munro's Stories Some writers inspire in critics an awed silence (though rarely, of course/ a gleeful contempt), others the most carefully honed and constrained of perspectives. Others still- for me/ notably Joyce and Munro - trigger the instinct to reach, perhaps to overreach, to match their constant artistic surprises and their sheer humanity with a critical enterprise that is . commensuratelyabundant and respectful, that spins its own sorts of 'tricks' (thatsignal word from Munro's 'Materia!,' Something, 43) to mirror the ones the writer has been performing with an ever-increasing sense of adventure and gracefulness. To use another of Munro's prime words, the compulsion is to find the broadest 'fit' between the interpretation and the fiction. Since a major emphasis of this essay is the extraordinary change in Munro's conception of the later stories/ particularly 'Carried Away' and 'The Love of a Good Woman,' that is initiated by 'White Dump,' a change marked by the connection between 'vanishing' and the spatial character of the narrative, a reasonable course would have been a close reading of these few stories. But following Munro's own fascination with connectedness/ it seemed essential in this exploration of her work to trace the continuities as well as the changes, to detail (within limits) how the shadings of o'ne volume come to the edge or to the centre of another. At the same time, a brief theoretical approach to the short story also seemed desirable for the simple reason that if Munro is indeed one of its pre-eminent writers, one reason might well be that her work cataylses, in D.H. Lawrence's terms, the pure 'carbon' of the genre (183). For these interwoven ends, particular words - transience/ indeterminacy, absence, multiplicity, and space - recur throughout this inquiry, the last providing the immediate link between theory and practice. Describing his preference for 'big books/ the American novelist Robert Stone provides an evocative perspective on the connection between the fictional construct and the reader's spatial and temporal zones of response. 'I use the white space. I'm interested in precise meaning and in reverberation , in associative levels. What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information' (349). This process of habitation, with its suggestions of power, colonization, and education - an experience of absoluteness or totalization - is how novels, particularly panoramic ones UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4, FALL 1999 842 MARK LEVENE rooted in some modification of the realist tradition, establish theirpresence, their claim on the reader's attention and expectation. But 'crowding the reader out,' occupying the reader's experiential and epistemological space with your narrative dominion, with what in 'Material' Munro calls 'the marvelous clear jelly' writers spend their lives 'learning how to make' (43), is also a process that sharply marks off the novel from the short story.The imminence of the ending, of closure, has increasingly seemed one of the most fruitful areas for theorists who are concerned to go beyond the modest definition that the short story is a story that is short. Following one element in Poe's analysis of the form, Norman Friedman observes: 'Because we can complete it at one sitting, the experience of closure in a story relates differently to our other life rhythms than reading a novel or a poem. It creates a rhythm of its own which is definite enough to displace aUf life rhythm until it is over. We can enter, move through, and leave story without interruption, and thus we build the story world as we read, apart for the other claims on our attention' (27)' Apart from the issue of interruption, Stone and Friedman are paradoxically fixing their attitudes toward both the novel and the short story on the nature of emotionaland imaginative displacement. Butit seems to me more reasonable to argue that the relative brevity of the story - and, I should add, even when a story strains a quantitative boundary...