The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence

223 Pages·1994·10.96 MB·English

by  Ajay Heble

THE TUMBLE OF REASON:
ALICE MUNRO'S DISCOURSE OF ABSENCE
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AJAY HEBLE
The Tumble of Reason:
Alice Munro's Discourse
of Absence
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-0617-5
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Heble, Ajay, 1961-
The tumble of reason : Alice Munro's discourse of absence
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8020-0617-5
1. Munro, Alice, 1931- - Criticism and
interpretation, etc. I. Title.
PS8576.U57Z66 1994 C8i3'.54 C94-931395-5
PR9199.3.M85Z66 1994
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
For my parents
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Contents
PREFACE ix
Introduction: The Disruption of Writing 3
i
Early 'Signs of Invasion': Dance of the Happy Shades 19
2
'So Many Created Worlds': Lives of Girls and Women 43
3
The Politics of Deferral: Power and Suspicion in Something I've Been
Meaning to Tell You 74
4
Acknowledging the Nether Voices: Signs of Instability in Who Do You
Think You Are? 96
5
Towards a Poetics of Surprise: 'Change and Possibility' in The Moons of
Jupiter 122
6
'It's What I Believe': Patterns of Complicity in The Progress of Love 143
7
(Re)construction and/as Deception in Friend of My Youth 169
viii Contents
Conclusion: The Problem of an Ending 185
NOTES 189
WORKS CONSULTED 2O1
INDEX 207
ABBREVIATIONS
DHS Dance of the Happy Shades
LGW Lives of Girls and Women
SIB Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You
WdY Who Do You think you ARe?
M] The Moons of Jupiter
PL The Progress of Love
FOMY Friend of My Youth
Preface
The title for this study alludes to a passage in 'Royal Beatings' where
the protagonist, Rose, is engaged in the exhilarating, if necessarily dan-
gerous, activity of rehearsing and conceptualizing a nonsense rhyme:
'Two Vancouvers fried in snot! / Two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!'
'You're going to get it!' cried Flo in a predictable rage. 'Say that again and
you'll get a good clout!'
Rose couldn't stop herself. She hummed it tenderly, tried saying the innocent
words aloud, humming through the others. It was not just the words snot
and arsehole that gave her pleasure, though of course they did. It was the
pickling and tying and the unimaginable Vancouvers. She saw them in her
mind shaped rather like octopuses, twitching in the pan. The tumble of reason;
the spark and spit of craziness. (WDY 12)
The constraints and initiatives signalled in this passage point tellingly
to what I take to be the distinctive character of Alice Munro's fictional
world: its engagement with the unimaginable and the unreasonable,
its fascination not simply with a world 'out there' which we are invited
to recognize as real and true, but also with that which cannot be said
or sometimes even written. Refusing, in various ways, to conform to
what is expected or called for, Munro's texts, like her characters, re-
peatedly insist on the abandonment of reason as both an arbiter of
truth and a measure of what is real or valuable. My title thus con-
stitutes an attempt to orient the ensuing investigation in what might
be called a theoretically inflected manner, to shift the focus a little
away from the prevailing tendency to emphasize Munro's realistic pres-
entation of lives and events, and to attend, instead, to those shadings