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AND THEY MAY GET IT WRONG, AFTER ALL” READING ALICE MUNRO’S “MENESETEUNG” TRACY WARE Perhaps it is moving because it epitomises our desire to call up the past, and simultaneously the difficulty, and the fragmentary nature, of any attempt to do so. —A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories ([2000] 2002, 40) None of Alice Munro’s stories has been more quickly canonized than “Meneseteung ,” the first harvest of an interest in the nineteenth-century history of southwestern Ontario that culminates in The View from Castle Rock (Munro 2006). After it appeared in the New Yorker of 11 January 1988 (Thacker 2005, 567), the story was included by Margaret Atwood in The Best American Short Stories 1989, then by Shannon Ravenel in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties (1990), and later by John Updike and Katrina Kenison in The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). In 1992, in“A Hopeful Sign: The Making of Metonymic Meaning in Munro’s ‘Meneseteung,’” Pam Houston published the first article on the story, and because others soon followed, “Meneseteung” is now one of Munro’s most intensively studied stories. Magdalene Redekop recognizes in the narrator’s attempt to imagine the life of the nineteenth-century “poetess” Almeda Joynt Roth a “challenge” that is central to her reading of Munro: “how to affirm the lives of our mothers and our daughters when the only means available to do so return us to the fact of artifice ” (Redekop 1992, 217). Because the narrator is finally unable to meet that challenge, the last reading in Mothers and Other Clowns encounters “a grief more intense than what is felt in any other story by Alice Munro”and“a mockhistorical story resembling an elegant practical joke” (Redekop 1992, 216–17).1 In a judgment that might have to be qualified by Munro’s subsequent work, Redekop writes that “this may be the most daringly innovative 67 “ 68 A U S A B L E PA S T ? N E W Q U E S T I O N S, N E W D I R E C T I O N S story that Munro has ever written” (Redekop 1992, 221), and what is most daring is the ironic treatment of “an explicit responsibility—that of the contemporary woman writer to the voices of the past”(Redekop 1992, 228). Grief, irony, responsibility to history—these are the complexly related issues that continue to exercise readers of “Meneseteung.” According to Virginia Woolf, “we think back through our mothers if we are women” (Woolf 1957, 79), but Munro does not think like other writers, especially when she thinks of mothers , and her sense of the resistance of the past to the needs of the present is the mark of her ethical rigour. Because it represents a road not taken, I want to begin with Ildikó de Papp Carrington’s remarks on “Meneseteung” at the end of Controlling the Uncontrollable, which rivals Redekop’s as the best book on Munro. For Carrington ,“only by deliberately splitting in half can the artist try to control the frightening revelations of a world and a self that are both always liable to split”(Carrington 1989, 214). The problem with Almeda is that her split is not deliberate: “Her house on the edge of town, between the community’s respectable and disrespectable sections, symbolizes her social position as an outsider and her psychological position as a borderline case” (Carrington 1989, 214). Carrington recognizes that Almeda’s rejection of Jarvis Poulter is also a rejection of the “masochism” to which some of Munro’s “earlier heroines ” yield, but she argues that Almeda’s resolution of her erotic conflict “is once again ironic” (Carrington 1989, 215). Noting the associations among Almeda’s menstrual flow, the overflowing grape juice in her kitchen, and her vision of a great poem, Carrington argues that the“forgotten grape juice running all over the floor and ‘her escaping blood’ [Munro 1990, 71] both symbolize waste” (Carrington 1989, 215). She concludes that “Almeda’s wasted artistic potentiality is ironically emphasized by the mode of her death. She does not drown in love, but she slowly drowns in the river of her mind”(Carrington 1989, 215). Munro is also attracted to “the depths in herself,” “but there is a significant difference: by submitting herself to the destructive element , the successful artist does not drown”—she “makes the deep, deep sea keep her up” (Carrington 1989, 216). Later critics retain some...

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