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Alice Munro and the Anxiety of American Influence ROBERT THACKER IN ONE of the interviews she gave when The Progress of Love (1986) had just been published, Alice Munro wasasked—in the usual way of such occasions—about "the effects of other writers on" her. She replied, with typical directness: "Oh, writing makes my life possible, it always has. I started serious reading and writing at about the same time, during adolescence when my life was difficult, as everybody's is, and it still makes life possible. I read something like that Chekhov story, I can't see how people get through the day without reading something like that." Taken byitself, such a comment is unremarkable: it is hardly surprising that such a fine writer as Munro would also be a frequent, sharp, and detailed reader. The implied symbiosis seems only natural. And such comments are common in literary interviews generally, and in hers in particular.Yet Munro's assertion here of reading as being is notable in another way:it raises the question of influence. She comes back to it herself later in the same interviewwhen she cites WilliamTrevor's work,sayingthat it has been "a great encouragement" to her: "I brought this up because sometimes you need—I need—reassurance. And I go to a lot of writers, I think, for reassurance , in different ways" ("Alice Munro" 8, 10). Munro's comments here and others like them elsewhere confirm that she is quite open to, and very much interested in, the work of other writers. In the course of this particular interview, in fact, she mentions many others—classical as well as contemporary—whose work is evidently very familiar to her. What is no less evident is that Munro is not shy about naming names. Yet, Chekhov and Trevor notwithstanding, these names are—and have been throughout her celebrity—mainly American ones. In 134 an early and oft-cited interview with John Metcalf, Munro says that "in terms of vision, the writers who have influenced me are probably the writers of the American South ... Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers... Reynolds Price. Another writer who's influenced me a lot is Wright Morris." She then adds a tag line which, for my purposes at least, is crucial: "I'm sorry these are all Americans but that's the wayit is" ("Conversation" 56; ellipses in original).1 Questions of 'influence' have been receiving progressively more attention in Munro criticism these days. Some critics have pursued theJoycean connection first noted byJ.R. (Tim) Struthers ("Reality");others, most notably Ildiko de Papp Carrington, have discovered and discussed a Yeats connection; Lorraine York has treated both Tennyson and Browning ("Rival"); and W.R. Martin, like Carrington and E.D. Blodgett, has noted a wide variety of connections with British and European traditions. Others have detailed Munro "s connections to the Gothic. AsJanet, the narrator of "Chaddeleys and Flemings," asserts in a much different context, "Connection. That was what it was all about" (Moons 6). So it is with Munro herself.2 While critics have not exactly ignored Munro's American connections , they have looked for them not very often or very closely. True enough, one of the first critical articles on Munro was Struthers' "Alice Munro and the American South" (1975), but apart from thispiece—which really just elaborates on the comment Munro made in the Metcalf interview —only Klaus P. Stich has sought to probe what is perhaps the deepest of Munro's American connections—that with Willa Cather, which, though unmentioned in any interview, is rather evident in her story "Dulse."3 Beyond these articles and the superficial comments offered in the critical books, no one to my knowledge has attempted to connect Munro's work with that of McCullers, O'Connor, Price, Morris, or several other American writers whom she has acknowledged as influences.4 Myfirstquestion, then, is Why is this? The omission seems odd, given Munro's acknowledgements, both about her own reading and about specific influences; it seems especially so in view of the considerable work done on her British and continental connections.5 Without question, the whole business of literary influence is a slippery slope, and taking up questions of influence in Munro's writing poses some particularly knotty problems. Although she has shown herself to be acutely attentive to the work of others, Munro has produced fictions that on the surface appear to be marvellously self-contained. There are some fairly obvious literary allusions...

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