possibility-space and its imaginative variations in alice munro's short stories

192 Pages·2008·0.75 MB·English

POSSIBILITY-SPACE AND ITS IMAGINATIVE VARIATIONS IN ALICE
MUNRO’S SHORT STORIES
Ulrica Skagert

.
Possibility-Space and Its
Imaginative Variations in Alice
Munro’s Short Stories

Ulrica Skagert

Stockholm University
©Ulrica Skagert, Stockholm 2008
ISBN 978-91-7155-770-4
Cover photograph: Edith Maybin. Courtesy of The New Yorker.
To the memory of my father
who showed me the pleasures
of reading.
Abstract

Skagert, Ulrica, 2008. Possibility-Space and Its Imaginative Variations in
Alice Munro’s Short Stories. Pp.192. Stockholm: ISBN: 978-91-7155-770-4

With its perennial interest in the seemingly ordinary lives of small-town
people, Alice Munro’s fiction displays a deceptively simple surface reality
that on closer scrutiny reveals intricate levels of unexpected complexity
about the fundamentals of human experience: love, choice, mortality, faith
and the force of language. This study takes as its main purpose the explora-
tion of Munro’s stories in terms of the intricacy of emotions in the face of
commonplace events of life and their emerging possibilities. I argue that the
ontological levels of fiction and reality remain in the realm of the real; these
levels exist and merge as the possibilities of each other. Munro’s realism is
explored in terms of its connection to possibilities that arise out of a particu-
lar type of fatality.
The phenomenon of possibility permeates Munro’s stories. An inves-
tigation of this phenomenon shows a curious paradox between possibility
and necessity. In order to discuss the complexity of this paradox I introduce
the temporal/spatial concept of possibility-space and notions of the fatal. I
describe the space that materializes in the phenomenal field between text and
reader, and where the constitution of possibility becomes visible. This is
typically seen in the rupture that is the event, where the event in itself offers
a moment of release and epistemic certainty to the characters. I argue that
through this release and certainty the characters obtain a radical, audacious
sense of freedom and intensity of life.
The stories examined have been grouped in a conceptual order that
brings into view the central qualities of Munro’s fiction such as lightness,
newness and sameness. These qualities are related to the act of recognition;
they are elaborated through readings of a large number of stories from all the
collections, including three stories published recently in The New Yorker.
The dissertation concludes by highlighting these qualities in the tour de force
“Post and Beam.” I argue finally that Alice Munro’s fiction recognizes life
as possibility in a moment when it shows itself in its own remarkable same-
ness.

Keywords: Alice Munro, fate, possibility-space, compellation, phenomenol-
ogy, Canadian literature, short story, realism, Alain Badiou, Maurice Natan-
son

Contents

Abbreviations...............................................................................................ix
Contents ....................................................................................................... viii
1 Introduction: “Things within Things”: Alice Munro as a Short Story
Writer ............................................................................................................. 10
Theoretical Departures .................................................................................................. 21
Phenomenological Origins ............................................................................................ 37
2 Romancing Fate: The Possibility of Love................................................. 45
3 Jolted into Lightness: Epiphany without Transcendence ..................... 61
Newness: Reorienting the Ordinary .............................................................................. 83
4 Dividing Moments: The Event as Rupture and Release .................... 103
Fatal Events: Moving Beyond Coincidence ................................................................. 123
5 Clearing a Space for Sameness .............................................................. 142
Conclusion .................................................................................................. 163
Works Cited ................................................................................................. 178
Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... 185
Index ............................................................................................................ 188
Abbreviations
DHS Dance of the Happy Shades
FY Friend of My Youth
HFC Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage
LGW Lives of Girls and Women
LG The Love of a Good Woman
MJ The Moons of Jupiter
OS Open Secrets
PL The Progress of Love
R Runaway
SS Selected Stories
SMT Something I´ve Been Meaning to Tell You
WDY Who Do You Think You Are?
VCR The View from Castle Rock
1 Introduction: “Things within Things”:
Alice Munro as a Short Story Writer
You know, we always have the idea that there is this rea-
son or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons.
And I could tell you plenty about what I’ve done wrong.
But I think the reason may be something not so easily dug
out.
—Alice Munro, “Chance”

Entering the landscape of Alice Munro’s writing is an intense experience of
the consanguinity between the fictional and the real. In her stories she dis-
plays the possibility for reality to be transformed into fictive art, but more
astoundingly she reveals how the setting of the real appears affectively mea-
ningful to us. More than drawing attention to the artifice and limitations of
fiction-making, her narratives uncover layers of the quite shocking business
of real life. This is what I understand by “the shock of recognition” that
Melville experienced in his profound awareness of Hawthorne’s genius. That
is, an appearance of something that we have been unaware of so far, but that
still lies hidden or dormant in us; it is something that we re-cognize in the act
of discovering it. “Images,” one of the most striking stories from Munro’s
first collection Dance of the Happy Shades, features a full-blown example of
the uncovering of a hidden awareness that includes not only a character and
a narrator, but also invites the reader.

People say that they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed,
as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so
much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does
not surprise you, the thing you have always known was there that
comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hur-
ry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of
something final, terrifying. (DHS 38)

This affinity and dramatic accord between the course of events and a recep-
tive mind is the crucial core of signification that finally also bears on the
reader and the world she inhabits. The idea of signification as arising out of
the close relationship between the artistry of the text and the aesthetic re-
sponse of the reader is described in Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenology of read-
ing. The claim that the constitution of meaning goes hand in hand with the
aesthetic effect resulting from a restructuring of experience, posits the lite-
rary work of art somewhere between character, narrator and reader (20–21).
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