Recognizing Injury in the Ordinary: Classed Trauma in the Fiction of Alice Munro

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies

—Emily Dickinson

One of the central dilemmas that Alice Munro has described as troubling her work is the question of how to aesthetically transform painful autobiographical material into fiction in ways that maintain an integrity to the truth of the experience itself. Complicating this artistic aim in Munro’s early work is a psychically split relationship with past trauma. This split reveals itself in narrative techniques used to depict trauma that obscure recognition of the event as trauma. Munro’s early stories repeatedly return to painful events but do so through narration that creates distance between the content of the incident and its emotional impact. In the last decade of Munro’s writing life, however, there has been a subtle but significant shift in Munro’s portrayal of injury. Munro’s late works do not depict a distanced relationship to trauma but rather narratively embody a recuperative process characterized by the integration of past events into a present self. The transformation is vividly illustrated through a comparison of Munro’s depiction of the same traumatic event in two stories written decades apart, “Royal Beatings,” collected in The Beggar Maid (1978) and “Fathers,” released almost thirty years later in the collection The View from Castle Rock (2006). The injury that both haunts and structures these two stories is the absence of being recognized as a subject.

Psychoanalysis offers a framework for understanding recognition failure as psychic trauma: the experience of not being seen and affirmed as an acceptable self through the reflective gaze of the parent inhibits a child from knowing the self as worthy of love. In its earliest form, recognition is facilitated by a mother’s (or primary caregiver’s) ability to accurately interpret and sensitively adapt to her infant’s psychic and bodily needs. D. W. Winnicott’s elaboration of this intersubjective dynamic contains a distinctly creative component that takes on particular significance in Munro’s fiction. In his discussion of the critical role that mirroring plays in the development of subjectivity, Winnicott underscores the importance of the mother’s capacity to affectively and imaginatively respond to and reflect back the infant/child’s creative gestures. If this exchange repeatedly fails, the child loses confidence in her ability to be imaginative toward the environment and instead develops a sense of shame and mistrust toward the libidinal, affective self. T is inner conflict between the desire to express one’s creative impulses and one’s felt sense of shame at doing so enacts a process of psychic splitting, a predicament observable both in Munro’s protagonists and in the narrative structure of the texts themselves.¹

In his elaboration of Winnicot’s work, Christopher Bollas describes that which is split off as one’s “idiom.” Bollas defines the term as “an aesthetic of being driven by an urge to articulate its theory of form by selecting and using objects so as to give them form.”² More simply, it may be understood as one’s unique creative inner complex, present at birth, that in part fashions being as it is afforded the opportunity to express itself. The concept of idiom acknowledges the existence of a genetically based individual sensibility that must be recognized and fostered within a child in order to establish his personality “in such a way as to feel both personally real and alive, and to articulate the many elements of his true self.”³

While providing a lens for understanding recognition failure as trauma, what psychoanalysis has not yet adequately explored is how this injury may be inflected by social class. In its examination of the complex intersections between recognition failure and working-class realities, Munro’s fiction offers insight into a trauma with etiological roots that are as much social as they are psychic. This is not to suggest that recognition failure occurs only or more frequently within working-class homes. Rather, what I am here positing (and elaborate more fully in a forthcoming publication) is the existence of a particular...