Chapter Three
Memory and Departure
PART ONE: SYNTHESIZING MEMORY − THE ARTIST AS COMMUNITY
In her story “Home,” collected in The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro re-imagines the crepuscular journey from city centre to small-town home, a journey that occupies the final chapter of Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches and that echoes throughout much of the subsequent literature of Ontario’s small towns. Unlike Leacock’s characters, who travel by train, Munro’s narrator travels by bus; it is a long, largely inconvenient, sometimes uncomfortable ride. Like Leacock’s journey, though, this bus trip carries Munro’s narrator into the place of her childhood, a place she enters to measure the changes time has wrought. Her childhood home has been updated by her father and step-mother: old furnishings have been stored or sold at a discount, and comfortable, modern conveniences rest in their stead. While her father feels obliged to apologize for these changes to her childhood home, Munro’s narrator thinks, “I don’t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself that I loved here – some self that I have finished with, and none too soon” (231). This is the home place for the narrator, yet as soon as she encounters it, she feels no more pull towards it, no more attachment to it.
The narrator does not simply revisit her childhood home; she revisits the site of her first lucid memory. As she is completing chores in the barn (feeding sheep, in a nice pastoral twist), she enters a corner where she remembers watching her father milking cows. It could be a peaceful, comfortable scene in which the narrator feels a sense of calm while remembering the pleasant rusticity, security, and simplicity of her earlier life. However, what washes over her is not a sense of safety or peace, but rather a growing sense of panic: “the very corner of the stable where I was standing, to spread the hay, and where the beginning of panic came on me, is the scene of the first clear memory of my life” (250). What this place holds for her is neither an antidote to an adult malaise nor a restorative balm achieved through invigorating manual labour; rather this site dashes the illusion of secure place and time projected by nostalgia.
While she stands in this place, the memory cannot stand on its own, freed from context as a type of pneumonic crystal untethered from a timeline. This scene fits into a definite time and place for the narrator, the late fall of 1934 or early winter of 1935, and the harsh events that occur shortly after this scene come to shade her memory of it: the subsequent brutal winter that ravaged the area’s trees and orchards and led to the deaths of livestock and loved pets. The sense of panic the narrator feels is the result of remembering, actually recalling, the conditions she felt while growing into her remembered childhood: the sense of menace in the barn resulting from the “cobwebbed windows, the large brutal tools – scythes and axes and rakes – hanging out of my reach. Outside of that, the dark of the country nights when few cars came down our road and there were no outdoor lights” (250). Her childhood, like all childhoods, is coloured by confusion caused by the unknown and fear resulting from the glimpses into the adult world children are periodically afforded. Childhood, or rather the feeling this memory of childhood provides her, is not a safe harbour offering solace through memory, but a time just as dislocating, frightening, and threatening as anything that follows. The escape one gets through childhood memories is the result of shaping those memories into something needed in the present. Eliminating that distance between past and present through a return, or, rather, inhabiting that physical space of her past, thrusts her back into that psychological state: the uncertainty, fear, and confusion caused by the half-understood brutality that surrounds her. The memory of watching her father milk the cow, an animal soon dead from pneumonia, may be a peaceful scene when left on its own, but it cannot be recalled without embedding it into a timeline of events.
Whereas distance in time and space can render childhood memories safe, secure, charming, and harmless – and, indeed, this is the type of representation that shapes the towns of Mariposa and, at times, Deptford – Munro’s works offer a different understanding of memory. What “Home,” in particular, demonstrates is a negotiation of memory that can no longer be held at a distance and that must be negotiated with the present self. Memory is powerful, and the echoes of past experience reverberate throughout the lives of Munro’s characters; in Munro’s work, the present self must navigate the psychological and physiological effects of memories, and not simply memories of childhood, but memories of childhood in a specific place. Munro’s representation of small-town place is intricately attached to the power and inescapability of memory. Place is indelible for Munro’s characters, and memory is the main vehicle through which place is understood.
Munro does not simply chronicle the history of Ontario’s Huron County through thinly disguised fictionalizations. She constructs narratives not of people’s history in place, but of the relationship between people and place. In attempting to understand the status of small-town place and the role of memory in Munro’s fiction, this chapter focuses on two key Munro texts: Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? The chapter first focuses on the perspective of the narrator in Lives, specifically on the role of temporal and spatial distance resting between Del Jordan’s narrative’s vantage point and her narrative’s subject, and how this distance affects the nature of her small-town depiction. In the previous two chapters, this distance was shown to shape the nature of small-town retrospective according to a convention. In Munro’s text, however, there is no clear distinction between then and now, there and here. Del’s narration is a shifting mixture of past and present, and her voice seemingly disregards time and space. Del’s narrative technique is composed of different historical perspectives that she garners from her artistic and epistemological models. These influences are distinguished by their vastly different historical consciousnesses, and, while they coalesce to form Del’s voice, they are the very same forces that shape the topography of Wawanash County, Huron County’s fictional stand-in. The first part of this chapter discusses the intricate attachment and formal influence existing among the obscured boundaries of landscape, history, and artist within the text itself. Del’s exploration of her personal past reflects her present artistic technique, or, rather, the form of her narrative technique determines how she tells her own story, how she renders her experience in small-town place. The second part of this chapter focuses on the development of Munro’s representation of small-town place and a gradual distrust of memory in her latter volume Who Do You Think You Are? I argue that the representation of the small town contained in that book reveals that the nostalgic return to one’s small-town origins, as portrayed in Sunshine Sketches and Fifth Business, is a privileged act that requires a sense of, or actual distance between, remembering subject and remembered object. Revisiting the place of the past reveals memory’s misdirection, its falsity, and subsequently spurs a continued search for identity in the present.
In 1971, one year after the publication of Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women was released. The initial sales were disappointing (Metcalf 62) and might suggest that Munro’s vision of a small-town childhood, even though ostensibly patterned on an established genre of Ontarian fiction, did not suit a public’s palate more accommodated to either Stephen Leacock’s populist mixture of humour and pathos or Davies’s affectionate censure. Leacock’s and Davies’s critics often read Mariposa and Deptford as symbolic portraits of a small-town past that forms a current of national identity; their small towns appear to readers as images of a kinder, simpler Canadian self-portrait, one that is compelling in its wistful fictionalization of a national type. These national parallels are absent from Munro’s criticism; no one reads her towns as representative of anything beyond the specific region of southern Ontario in which her stories are set. This is because of the specificity with which she documents place. Munro’s use of quotidian detail, of landscapes and townscapes, of country manners, of work, recreation, and even diet, is matched by no other Ontario writer, except, perhaps, James Reaney.1 By reading Munro’s work, the reader understands the place in which it is set: its limits of economy and convention, its perverse sense of modesty, and its class system that underpins all interaction.
Even though a distinct sense of place develops in her stories, Munro resists the primacy of region in her writing, as she considers the regionalist content secondary, even unintentional: “I never think I’m writing a story about Wingham or I’m writing a story about a Southwestern Ontario small town. Ever. I just use that stuff because it is familiar to me … I’m not concerned with any kind of comprehensive picture” (Struthers “Real” 33). Yet a comprehensive picture develops nonetheless, specifically of how the unique qualities of place and character depend one on the other.
In order to construct her characters, Munro must establish the land to which they are attached. Her style of realism may accurately depict the region’s society and topography, but this realism also complicates a rural trope that in the work of Leacock and Davies provides a background for the physical and psychological journeys of the characters. The proximity of Munro’s narrators to the places they describe helps them resist the influence of an existing rural-urban associative value binary in their narratives. Her narrators see the small town for what it is, not what a small-town convention may dictate; there is no conventional way of remembering a small-town childhood in Munro’s work, since place does more than simply act as a parochial starting point for nationally symbolic characters who then imaginatively shape those origins through recall. The relationship between Munro’s characters and place is subtle, active, shifting, and symbiotic, and, despite her suggestion that regionalism is an unintended by-product of her stories, she does acknowledge that place is an important component of her texts: “I am certainly a regional writer in that whatever I do I seem only able to make things work … if I use this … this plot of land that is mine … I should be able to write a novel about somebody living in Don Mills … but I’m not” (Metcalf 56). Place is imperative for Munro’s writing, and it operates as the mortar for the pieces of her plots and identities of her characters; any study of her work must address its role and function. This first section explores the exceedingly complex influence between the narrator in Lives of Girls and Women, Del Jordan, and the place she inhabits, Wawanash County. Del remembers her childhood in this specific place, but, more than that, this place has influenced the very form of her narrative, how she remembers and tells her story.
Del Jordan(s): Narrator(s)
Critics have long discussed a sense of doubleness in Del’s narration: that there are two Dels of the text, one experiencing and one narrating. Both are difficult to distinguish from one another: where does one begin and the other end? This section begins by sketching the arguments of other critics who comment on the style of Del’s narration. I do this in order to establish a critical framework for what follows. This section focuses primarily on those theories that either locate a split in the temporal fabric of Del’s narrative or identify a dialectic in the composition of her retrospective; identifying these features helps distinguish some formal elements of Munro’s novel from those of Leacock and Davies. In Sunshine Sketches, a definitive time and place materialize from which the narrator constructs the town, and by the end of the book Mariposa is revealed to be a product of the collective nostalgic, melancholic memories of the successful businessmen who recollect what turns out to be the text’s past, Mariposa, deep in the heart of the text’s present, the city. The narrator is a companion to these men, and he instructs them in appropriate methods of retrospect, methods that utilize the temporal gap to idealize generic memories: they see things from a distance. In Fifth Business, Dunstan Ramsay reveals his temporal location, his text’s present, from the outset of the novel; he is an elderly man of cosmopolitan experience recalling significant events for the benefit of his former headmaster: the story of his past is interpreted by his present self.
The past and the present in both texts remain distinct, and, as in all retrospectives, the present holds a hegemonic interpretive position. Laurajane Smith contends that the influence of the past shifts according to the needs of the present: “it [the past] can never be understood solely within its own terms; the present continually rewrites the meaning of the past” (Uses 58); its influence, therefore, is always reinterpreted “through the dominant discourses of the present day” (58–9), often to address the “needs of the present” (58). Mariposa is a necessary counterpart to the strained and harried nature of urban life, providing the solace of an imagined stable past to the actual present; it is safe to assume that Mariposa would appear much different had it been recollected under different circumstances. Similarly, Deptford’s narrow parochialism provides Dunstan with the retrospective justification he needs when reviewing his life of solitary, idiosyncratic, intellectual pursuits, a life deemed unacceptable by Deptfordian standards. In these two texts, the present shapes the past according to the desires of those looking back across time and space. The relationship of the past and present in Del’s narration, however, is far more complex, as neither element exists as a stable narrative pole between which rests the distance between the narrated and the narrator.
W.J. Keith claims that, while Leacock and Davies write of the small town from an outsider perspective, Munro writes from a rural perspective with “total immediacy” (167). If this “total immediacy” stretches the bounds of retrospective plausibility, many critics resolve Del’s uncanny ability to remember by identifying “doubleness” in her narrative voice: that is, doubleness of perspective and time involved in Del’s autobiographical persona. Some (John Orange, John Moss, Robert Thacker, Ildikó de Papp Carrington) suggest that there are two Dels simultaneously narrating her past experience. These critics posit two intertwined narrative voices: a younger Del who experiences and an older Del who can contextualize and reflect on that experience. These voices exist simultaneously and unmediated from one another – “memory” would not be the best word to characterize Del’s narration.
This hybrid of voices would suggest Del’s transcendence of the effect of a spatio-temporal gap on memory, as there is little distance between narrator (narrating subject, or present self) and narrated (narrative object, or past self). As already discussed, the effect of this distance is central to the appeal of Mariposa, and, as the final train journey navigates the distance between present and past, the process of the town’s aesthetic shaping is revealed; Leacock draws attention to the malleability of memory, the distortion of objects when viewed from a temporal distance. This distortion appeals to Dunstan when he revisits his own hometown after extending his circle of reference to the grand locales of the wider world, but is something he ultimately rejects. In all three texts, it is possible to approximate the years in which the stories take place, but apparent only in Leacock’s and Davies’s is the duration of time that separates the narrators from their pasts. The temporal synthesis in Lives conceals the narrator’s present position, thus obscuring the growth of the child into the adult, a Bildungsroman-type growth that is commonly rendered as the journey from rural beginnings to urban achievement. Del’s past remains unenclosed by the “dominant discourses of the present day” (Smith Uses 59); her past, it would seem, is unfiltered by her present, and, because it remains unshaped by the directed retrospect of longing, it offers no solace or balm or justification to the remembering subject.
A contrastive reading helps put Del’s narrative style in relief. Consider this passage from Fifth Business in which Dunstan weighs his guilt immediately after describing the circumstances around the throwing of the central snowball: “Ah, if dying were all there was to it! Hell and torment at once … the more time that passed, the less I was able to accuse Percy Boyd Staunton of having thrown the snowball that sent Mrs. Dempster simple. His brazen-faced refusal to accept responsibility seemed to deepen my own guilt, which had now become the guilt of concealment as well as action” (55). The ironically elevated diction of Dunstan the narrator comically exaggerates and thus limits the guilt experienced during his childhood; the narrator patronizes his earlier self, mitigating his earlier shame through the context of his vast later experience. Dunstan pats Dunny on the head and clucks “there there.”
In recounting a similar instance of juvenile misbehaviour, Del does not comically exaggerate her sensations in her description of biting her cousin Mary Agnes during Craig’s funeral; rather, she renders those physical feelings through a comprehensive immediacy that accounts for momentary, shifting, and fleeting sensations:
Being forgiven creates a peculiar shame. I felt hot, and not just from the blanket. I felt held close, stifled, as if it was not air I had to move and talk through in this world but something thick as cotton wool. This shame was physical, but went far beyond sexual shame, my former shame of nakedness; now it was as if not the naked body but all the organs inside it – stomach, heart, lungs, liver – were laid bare and helpless. The nearest thing to this that I had ever known before was the feeling I got when I was tickled beyond endurance – horrible, voluptuous feeling of exposure, of impotence, self-betrayal. (57)
Del relates the intensity of the emotion through detailed simile and understanding, but there is no questioning of the depth and legitimacy of this feeling through the diminishing effects of the intervening years, those resting between event and remembrance. Instead, Del characterizes the exact nature of emotion, an understanding that could result only from contemplative distance; this retrospect does not necessarily recount but relates by translating the emotional intensity of a child into the understanding of an adult. As Thacker states, Del simultaneously “experiences and understands” (“Clear” 58).
This narrative technique complicates the idea of innocence and simplicity commonly identified with both childhood and countryside; the rural past can be simple only when looking back from a distance, which Del is not doing. While Del’s countryside accommodates complex childhood experience in which the child understands both significance and consequence through a purposeful mélange of past and present, it would be difficult to characterize that child as more innocent than an adult. Because Munro elides the stable temporal vantage points of past and present in this narrative, there is a resulting effect on her representation of landscape and small town. Jubilee and Wawanash County are not products of retrospection in the traditional sense, but they are landscapes described through Del’s ostensible transcendence of temporal and physical distance. The subject-object relationship of the city and country seen in previous texts, and an integral part of the pastoral design, is stretched beyond the point of recognition in Lives; while the book shares features with pastoral writing, the breakdown of the pastoral design within its pages makes it difficult to classify the work as such.
Del’s experience of time obfuscates the operation of an urban and rural polarity within the text, a significant break from the general trend in small-town fiction. There is little beyond the “covert” indications of Del’s adult life to suggest the presence of an urban alternative to which the rural inhabitant has gradually made her way, in terms of both geography and culture.2 With the entirety of her artistic vision comes an extra-textual tension with her literary predecessors, since Jubilee is a site that accommodates experience atypical of the small-town convention or archetype represented by Mariposa and toyed with in Fifth Business; Jubilee is not simply reconstructed through memory to address some present need. Del’s voice does not locate a divide between the rural past and urban present, as her narration obscures the line upon which those types of relations are built.
Place and Historical Perspective
The small-town idyll is constructed through the falsifying lens of retrospect. Dunstan’s “problem of perspective” is a reflection of this view, as it detracts from his ability to establish a stable and accurate version of Deptford, to resolve the Mariposan ideal with the Deptfordian reality. The associative complement that the small town of the past provides to the urban centre of the present is absent in Lives because of the distinctive perspective of the narrator. Locating the geographical and temporal source of Del’s narration is difficult, and, as her present “time and place” is concealed, a rural-urban dichotomy cannot develop through her small-town retrospective. Thus, Jubilee is constructed not as a ready contrast to urban life but as a complex place that remains uninfluenced by the enclosing conventions of those influential rural associative values.
Munro generally writes of a period after the heyday of the small town and of an area that, having experienced a flurry of activity in the late nineteenth century, had subsequently “entered its present slow decline” (Lives 31). The inhabitants of Jubilee have been left behind a generation ago by their more ambitious cousins (those perhaps likely to recall Jubilee fondly) and are more likely to hang around, mouldering in a sense of “perverse pride,” much like Del’s cousin Ruth McQueen. Leacock and Davies both write of a period before urbanization established its cultural dominance over the stagnating small towns, but also, and more importantly, they write of characters yearning for larger fortunes in the booming cities. By contrast, Jubilee is that stagnated small town, complacent, proud, slightly masochistic. It is, in fact, an unwelcome reminder of the degree to which the nation’s business is located in the urban centres. Munro offers a vision of a more recent small-town Ontario past, one set after that period in which critics locate a communal image of national import.
The specificity of place involved in Munro’s writing is another factor that resists parallels to a national past. While critics such as Coral Ann Howells and John Weaver laud Munro’s accurate vision of the local, they also offer accounts of readers within her depicted regions who feel her stories are not really so accurate after all, but rather “scandalous gossip” (Howells Alice Munro 3) or skewed versions of the past (Thacker “Connection” 215). Other critics argue that Munro’s writing possesses universal appeal, since its documentation of rural-Ontario townscapes transcends regional and national concerns: “Fairgrounds, grandstands, racetrack oval, mills, hostelries, floods, house plots – all are timeless features of human communal life; there are no garages, drive-ins, or strip malls to suggest organic discontinuity” (Martin and Ober 139). These features are hardly “timeless,” nor do they suggest “organic” features of the civilized society, and Martin and Ober seem to mistake the townscapes of yesteryear for innate manifestations of human civilization itself.
The significance of Munro’s accurate depiction of place fully develops when viewed in relation to Del’s artistic technique, since an organic continuity exists between the landscapes of Wawanash County and her narrative style – the same influences shape both artistic technique and topography. The landscapes of Wawanash have been inscribed with a language of settlement, and Del’s characteristic fusion of past and present is really a synthesis of the different historical consciousnesses that have shaped that landscape. Struthers has called the text a “portrait of the girl as a young artist” (“Real” 25), a comment signifying that this story documents the development of a life as well as of an artistic approach: a Künstlerroman. I argue that Del’s artistry emerges from her encounters with those historical perspectives that dominate the psychological and physical landscape of both Jubilee and Wawanash County.
Del’s first artistic model is her Uncle Craig, an amateur historian documenting the history of Wawanash County. His perspective on history is authoritative, and his reverence for, and solemn attitude towards, the region’s past outlines a respectful approach that he then prescribes for Del’s own relationship with familial forebears. That respect demands an accurate sense of chronology, as a precise knowledge of the linearity of events is an important component of his reverence for the past. When a young Del asks a question that betrays her ignorance of sequential time, Craig becomes irritated: “He was displeased with me not on account of any vanity about his age, but because of my inaccurate notions of time and history” (29). Craig’s written history of the region is a dry, comprehensive document that excludes nothing. The facts in his historical work tick by like seconds on a clock, with no sense of an overarching or unifying frame. When Del comes into possession of this document, she abandons it in her basement and it is ruined in a flood some years later; the document itself is washed away by one of the minor events that Craig had so diligently recorded, almost as if it was overwhelmed by the current of time it had painstakingly tried to plot.
Not only does Craig’s acute sense of chronology inform his written history, but it also overwhelms it. Craig’s methods involve simply the recording of detail, and he embodies a negative artistic example for Del. As Del describes it, Craig’s history is “a great accumulation of the most ordinary facts, which it was his business to get in order. Everything had to go into his history, to make it the whole history of Wawanash County. He could not leave anything out” (31). While Craig may not fictionalize or reconstruct the past according to his own purposes, he also fails to interpret it, and, as a result, his history lacks coherence, a sense of regional definition that his diligent recording should, at the very least, outline. His reverence for the past is rooted simply in images of precedence and does not stem from any significance or meaning within those images, as he can decipher no unifying message within his pathological recording. Craig betrays his anxiety that the potential for regional meaning and order in the past exists, but his compulsive recording has been unsuccessful in uncovering it.
John Weaver suggests that a dichotomy of “historical inquiry” exists within the text, a dichotomy composed of Craig’s and Del’s methods of understanding the past (381). Yet Del’s method does not form a total rejection of Craig’s artistic example. Rather, a constructive influence exists between uncle and niece: Del explicitly relates her attraction to Craig’s compulsive historical recording in the “Epilogue.” The covert voice of the adult Del dominates in her outline of the difference between her adolescent artistic method and that of her later life:
It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his History, I would want to write things down.
I would try to make lists. A list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them, a list of family names, names on the tombstones in the cemetery … The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy, heartbreaking.
And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls … held still and held together – radiant, everlasting. (253)
Beyond ordering the minutiae of her past life, Del wants to preserve those momentary flashes in which she perceives the order of fleeting experiences, and also to synthesize these moments to provide her past life with a sense of coherence. But this passage also marks both Del’s acceptance in principle of Craig’s project of documenting the region, and her decision to supplement his methods.
Del’s eventual artistic method contrasts sharply with the one she employs in the outline for her adolescent novel, sketched in the final chapter. This novel, while based on life in Jubilee, finds its form through Del’s thorough familiarity with genres of fiction rather than through her truthful observations of the town. The adolescent novel, constructed according to the precepts of genre, is ostensibly about the town’s noteworthy, yet collapsed, family the Sherriffs. Del, however, realizes the mimetic shortcomings of her tale: “I did not pay much attention to the real Sherriffs, once I had transformed them for fictional purposes” (248). In an instance in which her adult contemplation merges with her youthful experience, Del’s suggestion that her ultimate artistic vision will aim for an impossible accuracy comes only after a meeting with one of the real Sherriffs, Bobby, who has spent much time in a mental hospital. This meeting is an artistic revelation for Del, as she comes to reject the dishonest prerequisites of imported generic forms that direct the artistic eye and circumscribe observation (Smythe 127–8). Del’s subsequent attraction to Craig’s compulsive accuracy, his voracious veracity, is balanced by her recognition of the Sisyphean futility of simple documentation.
Craig’s approach to the past is laboured, and its drudgery registers on his body. In describing Craig’s office, Del takes special notice of a photograph on his wall, and imparts the parallels that exist between these photographic figures and Craig himself: “Several men in shirtsleeves, with droopy moustaches, and fierce but somehow helpless expressions, stood around a horse and wagon” (28). The physical exhaustion of these men’s lives is symbolized by the “droop” of their mustaches; the “helpless expressions” on their faces betray otherwise stoic countenances as only so much posturing. That physical depletion is echoed in Del’s description of Craig: “One of his eyes was blind, and had been operated on but remained dark and clouded; that eyelid had a menacing droop. His face was square and sagging, his body stout” (29). Much like his ancestors now tacked to his wall, Craig is weighed down by his task. The unselective recording of historical fact produces a weighty, voluminous manuscript constructed through the same blind work ethic required to clear land; each recorded fact is analogous to another felled tree, yet Craig fails to realize that his purpose is not to establish a field of facts. His effort exhausts and counteracts whatever artistic invigoration is required to shape his tome. Similarly, the family tree he compiles may be an “intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past” (31), but through Craig’s comprehensive methods of “historical inquiry,” it becomes a cumbersome edifice bearing down on the survivors, demanding tribute, Craig imagines, through precision.
Craig is unselfconscious enough to continue the plodding labours of his forebears, and he fails to recognize a cautionary significance in his documented litany of tragedies; emulation of the past, a past marked by failure and disappointment, is the only purpose Craig takes from his work. When Del finally provides a selection of Craig’s history at the end of “Heirs of the Living Body,” she reveals a record of futility, death, and defeat (61). Craig’s own death comes long before he completes his labour, and thus he fails at his task of ordering “a great accumulation of the most ordinary facts” (31). This pattern of failure speaks to the real lineage of the region, as the settlers’ and Craig’s task is nothing less than to establish a full external model of their comprehensive ideal of order. Craig, then, carries on a tradition in which the realization of the futility of one’s efforts is avoided only through death. Del’s ultimate refusal to continue Craig’s project is a refusal to carry out an enumerative surveying of the past. Her artistic decision at the end of the book reveals her ambivalence towards a cultural heritage for which Craig serves as a model, and this decision displays her desire to be both part of a historical tradition and also outside of it by serving as its artist. By keeping one foot along the community’s historical trajectory (or historical rut) and one foot outside of it, Del feels a part of this lineage but can also observe it from across an established distance.
“Heirs of the Living Body” is a key to understanding the origins of Del’s artistic technique. In a lecture to her daughter, Addie Jordan constructs a different understanding of our relationship with time and our surroundings: a symbolic cyclical alternative to Craig’s staunch linearity. In discussing Craig’s death, Addie states “‘[s]o we say, Uncle Craig is dead. The person is dead. But that’s just our way of looking at it. That’s just our human way. If we weren’t thinking all the time in terms of persons, if we were thinking of Nature, all Nature going on and on, parts of it dying – well not dying, changing, changing is the word I want, changing into something else’” (47). Addie’s musings propose a transcendence of death by seeing individuals not as autonomous and temporary selves, but as part of a natural world; by connecting the human to a natural cycle, she revises Craig’s linear understanding of time through which he plots human progress. While Craig remembers and reveres the dead, Addie suggests that the living embody the dead. Addie presents an alternative structure of family as an organic continuity that flourishes despite the demise of individual parts; the organic whole merges individuals through time, a notion that echoes in Del’s later decision to continue with but alter Craig’s history, to accept his project but revise his artistic methods. This image of the family as an organic whole stands in stark contradistinction to that of Craig and of Del’s aunts, as Del’s father makes clear: “they do have a different set of notions, and they might easy be upset” (49). They revere the primacy and integrity of the individual who, after death, survives in memory but also in the emulation of his or her life’s work by the living. This is something encouraged by Del’s aunts when they bequeath to her Craig’s manuscript: “‘Maybe you could learn to copy his way,’” they tell Del (62), lines that, in fact, caution Del against continuing Craig’s plodding deference to both history and family.
Craig, Elspeth, and Grace see both history and family as a linear narrative; their historical perspective has, at its core, an assumption that the trajectory of familial and regional “progress” will experience an eventual culmination, an apex that will retroactively provide meaning to all previous events and experience. This perspective is distinctly opposed to the cycles of the family body charted by Addie. The guiding principle of Craig’s history mirrors Sylviane Agacinski’s distillation of a western conception of time; epochs form only in retrospect, and it is the belief in the end of time, the millenarian design that rests at the heart of understandings of progress, that provides all preceding history with a sense of purpose (4). Historical order can form only in retrospect, and, despite Craig’s best efforts at accounting for the smallest of details, providing his regional history with a sense of meaning eludes him, since that history is ongoing; no matter how comprehensive it may be, its underlying pattern incorporates an endlessly deferred signified, only an expectation of meaning at some point in the future.
In an apparent acknowledgment of her mother’s musings on natural metamorphosis, Del is able to incorporate Craig’s method of “historical inquiry,” the “crazy, heartbreaking” “hope of accuracy” (253), into her own distinct, synthetic narrative style. Del comes to document her own life not as a linear narrative seen from a present vantage point, but as a shifting organic whole whose composite parts she can simultaneously experience and understand. Del inherits Craig’s overt concern with detail, but, to understand the entirety of her experience, its final, formal meaning, she must complement her inheritance with an alternative method of historical understanding, one that denies the primacy of linearity and allows her to perceive order within a life in progression. While Addie’s theory initially raises the spectre of a possible alternative relationship with family, temporality, and a type of genetic memory, it is only through Del’s relationship to Garnet French that she accesses that alternate understanding of time, family, and the individual.
Primitivism, Simultaneity, and Continuity
Discussions on the meaning of landscape and its connection to primitivism in Munro’s work focus largely on the divide between town and country, between “primitive” and civilized spaces (see, e.g., Rasporich, Dance; Robson). These readings tend to see the town and country in contrast to one another, as offering a counterpoint to one another’s symbolic associations: the town as civilized, ordered site; the country representing disorder, the uncivilized, and the wild. The tension within Munro’s regions occurs between this dichotomy. However, Lives of Girls and Women displays a far more nuanced influence of primitivism. Dichotomies of urban-rural, civilized-primitive, and ordered-chaotic only appear to frame Munro’s representation of landscape and town, since, on a closer look, the rural landscape surrounding Jubilee offers no symbolic counterpoint to the town itself; rural and urban associations are not bound by geography or topography.
In one sense, this complication of a spatial binary echoes what Thacker calls Munro’s narrative “dialectic” of past and present. Del’s narrative technique treats her life as a continuum that she experiences as a simultaneous whole, whereas in Sunshine Sketches a past-present dichotomy is maintained largely because of the inaccessibility of an imagined small-town past to a present urban reality. Just as Del’s narrative transcends the past-present structure of retrospective narratives, so too does she disregard the complementary spatial associations of Leacock and Davies; Munro renders experience exclusive to neither urban nor rural areas, nor to adult or childhood consciousness. And I would point out a further destabilization of the binary in Munro’s text, particularly through her depiction of Garnet French and family. This family has a greater significance in the text than to simply provide an associative counterpoint to the townsfolk of Jubilee, and, when we examine this significance in relation to that of Craig, we see emerging the influence both have on Del’s narrative technique.
What occurs beyond the boundaries of Jubilee proper, I suggest, only seems shaped by Del’s primitivism. On the Flats Road one evening during the height of her relationship with Garnet, Del notices her misshapen shadow as the sun sets behind her: “I watched this strange elongated figure with the faraway, small round head … and it seemed to me the shadow of a stately, unfamiliar African girl” (231). The shadow, or in other words the outline or shape of her body, allows for Del’s self-observation at strictly the level of form. Here, beyond the borders of the town, Del finds that form unfamiliar. This recognition alludes to her current situation with Garnet; she has temporarily abandoned a life of the mind with her friend Jerry Storey for a life of the body with Garnet, and this moment of crepuscular reflection intimates Del’s awareness of not only this migration, but also her lack of familiarity with a life ruled by physical sensation.
The shadow spread out before her offers Del an image in the abstract of the nature of the life she could expect with Garnet, in which sensation may trump thought but would constitute a type of performance for Del. Del’s primitivist use of the connotative content of “Africa” to elaborate on the primacy of the body speaks of the state of ethnographic paradigms in rural Ontario in the late 1940s. If indeed Munro locates “primal energy and sexuality” and “chaos and disorder” beyond the borders of Jubilee, as Rasporich claims (Dance 138), then she betrays her attraction to the idea of the “primitive” as a representative of the unconscious mind and the hazards of, and attraction to, human impulse. Here, Munro may be self-consciously playing with the types of primitivist notions expressed in many modernist works of the early twentieth century, notably those of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. In T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, David Chinitz suggests that, for modern primitivists, Africans were thought to be connected to those original rhythmical rituals upon which all culture and religion is based, but from which modern societies have strayed. While this fallacious expression is based on discredited notions of cultural evolution, the modernists felt that their project involved a sort of cultural triage. Del, a well-read teenager in rural Ontario in the 1940s, someone who reveals her familiarity with modernist literature (175), projects onto her shadow an image of an “African girl,” a result, perhaps, of her familiarity with modern primitivist theories and her precocious willingness to use them to self-dramatize her life. But as Del projects the “primitive” associations merely onto her shadow, onto a distorted image of herself, she is, in fact, self-consciously playing with literary self-perception, with the tendency to aggrandize personal situation and identity, which, in this case, is heavily influenced by her love affair with Garnet. She is not simply writing of her experience; she is writing about perceiving herself in the process of experiencing. Neither is it her physical location, the Flats Road, that entices these types of associations; rather, they emerge from Del’s tendency to view her life through genre precepts and literary convention. This passage begins to reveal the source of the associative qualities of the various corners of Wawanash County, as these possess only the associative connotations that have been projected on to them by their inhabitants.
Locating a primitive/modern split along Jubilee’s town line is an easy generalization of Munro’s topographies. Munro is too complex a writer to simply follow in a primitivist vein that in the 1960s and ’70s, when she was writing this book, would have been out of fashion and, more likely, challenged due to its overt racism. Beyond the “ordered” pattern of Jubilee’s streets, which in the Manichean constructs put forward by Rasporich and Robson denote order and control, rests the chaos of the French household, yet Uncle Craig also lives outside of Jubliee’s perimeter, at Jenkin’s Bend; and, if anything, Craig is a stalwart of order, control, reason, and precise (Western) chronology. Unlike the pattern apparent in the fiction of Leacock and Davies, landscape does not inform character in Munro’s text, as there are no characteristics naturalized by the discursive categories of the rural and urban; parochialism and urbanity are traits belonging to individuals, not landscape. The inhabitants of Wawanash County provide whatever associations the land and town may possess, and thus, in Lives, it is the people who shape the physical and connotative makeup of the land, not vice versa.3
This reading contrasts with those of others, such as Rasporich’s claim that a “landscape of gothic mind” related to Frye’s theory of the “deep terror in confronting the frontier and a northern land” (Dance 136) exists within the landscape of Wawanash County. However, all land in Lives has been inhabited and, in many cases, abandoned by humans, thus sketching onto the landscape the faint outlines of failed human intentions: “It was the same with the history of the county, which had been opened up, settled, and had grown, and entered its present slow decline” (31). This is no frontier, and confrontation occurs not between cowering settlers and a fearsome, inanimate landscape, but between the remaining inhabitants and the failures of their forebears; the land’s illuminating spirit emerges from its deep texture of dashed hopes. In reading Munro’s stories, we enter a landscape in which the late-Victorian optimism of Sunshine Sketches has stagnated long ago, as exuberance and hope have decayed into the melancholy of a waning stability; Munro’s Wawanash County is an old landscape, a landscape darkened by a long history of declining settlement. Here, the rural areas provide no corrective counterpoint to the fluidity, anomie, and vagaries of city life, as the rural areas themselves are shifting entities replete with their own malaise; there is no hint of Jubilee, despite its name, presenting an ideal, pastoral or otherwise.
The primitivist inflection of Munro’s characters is unconnected to topographic boundaries in the landscape. For instance, Del first encounters Garnet at a Baptist revival at the town hall, the centre of the community. The ceremony itself is characterized by its collective impulses in which the body is to be moved by the Holy Spirit and merge with the sensations of others. The rhythms of the preacher’s sermon are more important than his actual words in establishing a bodily continuity among the crowd: “‘And some of your ropes can’t take much more! Some of your ropes are almost past the point of no return. They are frayed out with sin, they are eaten away with sin, they are nothing left but a thread! Nothing but a thread is holding you out of Hell!’” (212). The sermon pulsates, and it is during this very sensual and even sexually cathartic ritual that Del is attracted to Garnet entirely through physical impressions: “I smelled the thin hot cotton shirt, sunburnt skin, soap and machine oil … He put his hand on the back of the chair about two inches from mine. Then it seemed as if all sensation in my body, all hope, life, potential, flowed down into that one hand” (211–12). Garnet’s presence takes Del out of her usual conscious activity, which would have been to analyse the words of the preacher: “Ordinarily I would have been interested in listening to this and in seeing how people were taking it … But my attention was taken up with our two hands on the back of the chair … I felt angelic with gratitude, truly as if I had come out on another level of existence” (213). These furtive movements towards romance produce physical euphoria in Del, a sensation that resists the conscious mind’s examination and limitation of its affect. Garnet’s actions constitute a surrogate proselytizing, as his body has produced in Del a feeling of spiritual transcendence that the rhythms and words of the sermon were powerless to produce. This euphoria transcends the individual and results from entering a type of “primitive cultural totality” (Chinitz 73), which the Baptist revival both represents and produces; Garnet’s touch initiates Del into this bodily collective. As they hold hands, Del may refuse the sheet music with the printed words, but her participation in the ritual is no longer subject to her conscious decision: “I remembered the words and sang. I would have sung anything” (214). Despite the appearance of initiating a romantic intrigue, Garnet’s attentions have “caught, bound borne away” (214) Del into the massed collectivity of the gathering: “Singing, people swayed together” (213).4
This first contact does not produce a verbal exchange but ends with Garnet leaving and “joining a crowd of people who were all going down to the front of the hall, responding to an invitation to make a decision for Jesus” (214). Del is left alone, but left desiring a conduit into a type of sensation that will, again, submerge the primacy of her conscious mind. This has been one of her baptisms, as the title of the chapter suggests: it is her first experience of the non-individuating passions of the collective human body, where she has felt the pull of the rhythms of ritual for which the proximity of Garnet serves as a surrogate.
What Del craves through her relationship with Garnet are the imperatives of the body, which are first presented as part of a religious ritual. Later, during their first “approaches to sex” (218), Del experiences a feeling similar to that felt during the Baptist ceremony, a “floating feeling, feeling of being languid and protected and at the same time possessing unlimited power” (218). The pleasures of the body provide this feeling of protection, as they allow Del to experience something akin to the transcendence of linear time and the individual self. While Addie stresses the importance of individual distinction and accomplishment, Del’s relationship with Garnet involves something more akin to the biological; she no longer feels the threat of remaining undifferentiated, as simply part of Jubilee. By submerging her conscious mind into the warm ocean of a gratification that can come only from the merging of one body with another, she temporarily retreats from her conscious identity; Del’s mother Addie may characterize this as a ‘“softening of the brain’” (220), but Del’s relationship with Garnet also limits the demands, perhaps even tyranny, of individual consciousness, experience, and distinction.
Soon Del is attending Garnet’s “Baptist Young People’s Society,” and her observations of those in attendance focus almost exclusively on the physical. Those associated with Garnet are defined by their physicality and provided with only a limited individuality. Caddie McQuaig is “hefty and jovial,” Ivan and Orrin Walpole are a pair of “monkey-faced brothers … who do gymnastic tricks,” “Holy Betty” is a “big-busted, raw faced girl,” and a number of unremarkable girls from the Chainway store remain indistinguishable, except for one, Del “could not remember which,” who is identifiable only for her apparent past pregnancy (216). Overtones of class taint Del’s depictions: “I smiled at everybody but was jealous, appalled, waiting only for all this to end” (217). The real difference between Del and the Baptists is that the physicality of the latter relegates them to a barely individuated and debased horde. These figures are clear examples of the “backwardness, ignorance, [and] limitation” (R. Williams 1) of the anti-idyllic rural associative values, yet their physical anomalies are equal parts town and country, not simply inbred farmers as Davies might insinuate; this “other side” of Wawanash County cannot be located geographically.
Wawanash County has been shaped by its generations of inhabitants, and the land itself does not readily reflect a complementary urban-rural binary. Even though the fringes of the county seem sheltered from the main current of modernity, the landscape simply mirrors the historical epistemology of its inhabitants. During her trip with Garnet into the depths of the Jericho Valley, Del remembers an earlier trip that she took with her mother into this isolated part of the county: “Wild roses brushed the cab. We drove for miles through thick bush. There was a field full of stumps. I remembered that, remembered my mother saying, ‘One time it was all like that, all this country. They haven’t progressed here much beyond the pioneer stage. Maybe they’re too lazy. Or the land isn’t worth it. Or a combination of both’” (221). The road to Jericho Valley is not a trip back to an earlier period of the county’s development, but a corridor offering an exit from those other parts of the county that reflect a chronological sense of progress, such as the ordered, cultivated land documented in Craig’s text; Jericho Valley has become detached from a linear sense of order and time. The field of stumps is the only indication of settlement, but even that was abandoned before it became tenable for agriculture. Apart from these echoes of a possibility, the land has, as a result of human neglect, slipped back into a pre-modern, even atemporal existence outside the dominant chronology of the surrounding land.
Members of Garnet’s family, aside from the matriarch, remain loosely differentiated. Names as markers of individual identity are unimportant to Garnet and his family. James Carscallen comments on Del’s perception of Garnet’s reality as a “‘world without names’” (45) and contrasts Garnet with Jerry Storey, who lives in a “world with names … but without things” (45).5 Del’s introduction to Garnet’s family does not involve the nominal markers needed to distinguish one member from another: “He did not introduce me to anybody. Members of his family would appear – I was not sure which were members of his immediate family and which were uncles, aunts, cousins – and would start talking to him, looking sideways at me” (222). The precision with which Craig renders his family tree is absent among the Frenches, who are numerable (“[t]here were twelve people around the table” (226)), but whose hierarchical family structure remains hazy, almost unimportant. For Craig, “it was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past” (31). While the names plotted along Craig’s family tree are secondary, its structure pinpoints the individual’s relationship to linear history, a chronology absent from Del’s impressions of the French family. Craig’s tree possesses an intricate syntax in which an individual’s position accrues meaning through its relational antecedents, and that meaning, while ostensibly precise, lacks satisfactory signification because the narrative of the family is incomplete. The lines drawn from one individual to another configure his family tree much like a linguistic analysis of grammatical structure. Indeed, the family is much like a sentence in which coherent meaning is constituted of individual parts progressing linearly from left to right, from the past into the present, a fitting symbol for Craig’s understanding of the past, which exists in language and unfolds as narrative. With the Frenches, however, no such possibility of precise meaning exists.
In Garnet’s family, structure and individuals are subordinate to a collectivized, non-hierarchical mass. In much the same way that Del’s narrative voice disregards a division between past and present, the Frenches appear unconcerned with a hierarchy of temporally bound familial sequence, of keeping precedence and subsequence separate, a situation extending into their near-primordial living arrangement. They live in a house “down in a hollow, with big trees around so close you could not get a look at it as a whole house” (221). The lack of a clear perspective renders impossible a complete survey of their physical situation. Any fields or fences, markers of historical progression that construct a temporal linearity of the land, are hidden, and the house in which the Frenches live is literally merged with the surrounding landscape; the lack of these milestones obfuscates the past, dissolving a sense of chronological progress. I am not trying to suggest that the Frenches are “one” with the natural surroundings, but rather that their relationship with both history and landscape remains undefined or, at the very least, under-defined, because they have not clearly expressed it through the articulation of the present onto the surrounding landscape. The Frenches have an unstructured, and thus an unarticulated, relationship with history and landscape in language; by language, I mean written and oral, but also the various signifiers that inscribe evidence of a presence onto the land. These inscriptions allow one to see the landscape as a text, and to read it as an unfolding narrative from the past into the present, and they also imply a future trajectory.6
As a result of their inability to maintain the temporal signifiers of inhabitation, the Frenches appear to inhabit decay: “[s]keletons of a burned-out house and barn”; the house “painted yellow so long ago the paint was just streaks now on the splintered wood”; the linoleum “black and bumpy, just islands of the old pattern left, under the table, by the windows where it didn’t get so much wear” (221–4). This is disorder only according to a historical perspective that demands the reiteration of a human presence through material growth according and in deference to historically established norms. This disorder conflates past and present by failing to maintain the rigid structures of interaction with a landscape, which establish historical texture through the chronological sediments of activity. The vitality and fluidity of the Frenches’ alternative generational interaction, reflected in the irreverent pranks of the unnamed children and the gruff self-satisfaction and competence of the matriarch, attract Del: “There is no denying I was happy in that house” (226). Her happiness results from the absence of forms that would dictate the nature of familial relationships.
Decay results from a lack of maintenance. Maintenance is the reassertion of the present moment and denies the ravages and accumulation of time; it is also an expression of deference to one’s ancestors by tending to an established order, both in terms of culture and practices of labour. Fences, orchards, and cultivated fields constitute the syntax of a community’s expression on the surrounding landscape, and thus establish the signifiers of a region’s history: a chronology of human activity on the land. Maintaining these signifiers becomes as important in revealing one’s place in a linear structure as the establishment and maintenance of a clear family tree. The lack of these expressions on the land surrounding the Frenches’ farm denotes their lack of concern for expanding or even maintaining the temporal and physical boundaries of growth. By not reasserting the present moment onto the landscape, the Frenches allow the signifiers of a Western, linear temporality to decay, and they and their belongings blend into the atemporality of a non-chronology; a trip to the Frenches is a trip out of time as it is represented by, and as it dictates the life of, Uncle Craig.7
Wawanash County: The Orchard and the Hollow
The landscape is inscribed with physical manifestations of, at the very least, two historical perspectives, two manifestly different understandings of the past and its relationship to the present. Del’s narrative is both influenced by and synthesizes the same influences, which can be termed the “orchard” and the “hollow.” The orchard behind Uncle Craig’s house at Jenkin’s Bend is a physical correlative of his consciousness of the past, a metaphor for his conception of time and history as mediated by language. While it possesses conscious synchronic order that has been grafted onto the landscape, it also exudes a Western sense of progressive chronology through its suggestion of historical texture. The orchard possesses clear boundaries and requires regular maintenance; this maintenance will, over time, increase fruition, which can also be read as increased signification potential through an accrual of facts, a defining feature of Craig’s plodding history. This symbol finds fuller expression in Craig’s and Del’s compulsion to make lists, to pile up ordinary details of which the ultimate significance can be evident only within a unifying frame, which is absent. This absence constitutes the major difference between Del’s retrospective narrative and those of Leacock’s narrator and Dunstan, as Del’s absent, under-articulated vantage point does not allow her to provide a definitive interpretation of the significance of her past for the present.
An orchard may comprise simply fruit and trees, but the formal symbol of the “orchard” is needed to unify these individual objects. It is an ideal symbol for Craig’s compulsive documentation, as it is impossible for him to actuate a framing device. He needs that symbolic purpose, that sense of anticipated culmination, to project a sense of order onto the past, yet in doing so any evident past meaning is nullified by the assertion of present intentions. Thus, there rests in an orchard a diachronic signification in which the past is layered underneath a series of successive presents, the current one holding interpretive dominance. The formal significance of the orchard, the framing symbol for Craig’s historical consciousness, can materialize only through recognition of its limitations, its boundaries, which Craig cannot or will not perceive. Del alone can do this, while her uncle, to paraphrase an old adage, cannot see the orchard through the trees: Craig cannot discern a meaning in the past despite its multitude of signifiers.
Craig’s influence on Del is reflected in her compulsion to make lists. Here is her inventory of the Frenches’ dinner: “For supper we had stewed chicken, not too tough, and good gravy to soften it, light dumplings, potatoes … flat, round, floury biscuits, home-canned beans and tomatoes, several kinds of pickles, and bowls of green onions and radishes and leaf lettuce, in vinegar, a heavy molasses-flavoured cake, black-berry preserves” (225–6). She and Owen feel compelled to list the objects in Uncle Benny’s house: “Owen and I, going home, would sometimes try to name off the things he had in his house, or just in his kitchen” (4). And then there is Del’s description of the Anglican Church: “They had no furnace, evidently, just a space heater by the door, making its steady domestic noise. A strip of the same brown matting went across the back and up the aisle; otherwise there was just a wooden floor, not varnished or painted, rather wide boards occasionally springy underfoot. Seven or eight pews on either side, no more” (97). Del’s catalogues reveal the influence of Craig, who attempts to clarify the past through compulsive list making. He believes that an understanding of the past is possible through a collection of names, a strictly linguistic understanding of the past; the signification of that accumulating plethora of words, however, remains unknown, endlessly deferred.
Del acquires a different understanding of time, heritage, and temporal relation, allowing her to form an alternative relationship with her own past, suggesting that she has escaped both from her family’s historically determined psychological ethos and from the repetition of time-honoured but inadequate customs. This other relationship is represented by the contrasting symbol of the “hollow.” The hollow in which the French homestead is built is an external metaphor for their historical consciousness; it is an unmaintained plot of land upon which any chronology that may have been sketched has been allowed to dissolve. It possesses no definite boundaries and no defined historical texture sculpted by human hands, which continuously reassert a dominant ideology of progress; it, therefore, connotes an indistinct linearity, a disorder of past and present. One’s place in the hollow is not decided by the order established by one’s ancestry, as that line from the past to the present is obfuscated; individual identity is subordinated not by the “intricate lives supporting [one] from the past” (31), but by an atemporal human collective in which relation remains undefined.
Del’s refusal to be submerged fully into this collective is literally enacted in the baptism scene involving Garnet and Del. While this violent encounter marks the end of their relationship, it also marks the culmination of Del’s artistic apprenticeship. On her subsequent walk back into Jubilee, Del reclaims the individuating intellectualism that previously characterized her personality before she “descended” into an unindividuating physicality with Garnet: “I felt my old self – my old devious, ironic, isolated self – beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss” (240). Del has been permanently altered, as her old self is newly conscious of the indelible influence of Garnet. Furthermore, the end of this affair has resulted in a new self-consciousness, one that allows her to observe herself while in the process of experiencing: “I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all; I was watching. I was watching, I was suffering” (241). While this is a fuller literary self-perception than was evident in Del’s projection of an image of an “African girl” onto her shadow, it also reveals that Del’s experiences have allowed her to enter into a life of the “self-created self,” a life that remains aware of the effect, both on the self and others, of “gesture [and] image” (184). The simultaneity of experience and understanding is the culmination of her artistic journey, as her life, now clearly the subject of her study, is rendered from a perspective that acknowledges the distance between the thinking and feeling selves but also recognizes the inherent connection between the two. The mirror scene marks her new awareness of this distance, yet also displays how one affects the other; Del’s ironic recitation of Tennyson’s “silly” poem “Mariana,” an attempt to disavow her deep sense of hurt, only makes her “tears flow harder” (242). This scene may mark a division between her thinking and feeling selves, yet, in a much more fundamental sense, they remain wholly integrated, fully symbiotic.
In recognizing the impossibility of creating the order she desires by simply making lists, Del has merged her uncle’s pedantic method of “historical inquiry” with the simultaneity of experience suggested by the disintegration of boundaries implicit in the Frenches’ familial structure and associated landscape; Del’s fluid perspective is a personal literalization of the latter’s historical consciousness. By crossing temporal boundaries to revisit earlier incarnations of her self, Del simultaneously “experiences and understands” in a type of first-person “primitivism”; she has become a collective through time, rendering all personal experience through an unmediated, organic relationship with her selves, testing the limits of the past and transcending the representational biases of the present. The formal significance of these episodes does not emerge from an anticipated but endlessly deferred culmination, as the episodic nature of Del’s autobiography lacks a conventional climax that can retrospectively integrate preceding experience. The lack of a clear, temporally stable narrative vantage point reveals little about her current, remembering self, which then prevents an interpretive projection that renders past experience contingent on present understanding. Instead, the formal significance of these episodes comes strictly from the juxtaposition of one against the other, experienced in a type of primitive simultaneity, with the significance of each event immediately understood.
If there is a climax to the story, it is in the artistic and aesthetic decisions that Del sketches in the epilogue, a point implicitly supported by Struthers when he states, “I feel that the emphasis is on a portrait of the girl as a young artist, rather than a portrait of the artist as a young girl” (“Real” 25). Del’s is not a narrative that reconstructs the past through retrospect, but one that obscures the distance between the past and the present. Her methods are fully informed by those inhabitants that shape the landscape, and thus her artistic method reflects or, more appropriately, approaches an organic continuity between the artist, her history, and the landscape upon which members of her community have sketched their lives; the artist’s technique is a manifestation of place and its people and has made the past of the artist fully available to the artist of the present.
In Lives of Girls and Women, memory does not operate across a polarized divide; rather, past and present inhabit the narrator at the same moment in a type of simultaneous experience, just as the landscape of Wawanash County exists as a reflection of both present and past influences. All time itself is reflected in the county’s landscape, and when Del looks at this landscape, she is looking both at the present and into the past. Del does not look back across time and space to render place and her experiences within it. Rather, that place has formed her artistic method, and, in that sense, place is inescapable. She will present Jubilee and Wawanash County in not simply what she creates but in how she creates it: artistic technique as an extended metaphor of landscape. In one sense, this is Munro’s attempt to transcend the problems associated with stories based on memory – that the past can never be seen in its own terms – but it is a position she comes to revise in a later collection of short stories, Who Do You Think You Are?
PART TWO: DEPARTURE, RETURN, DEPARTURE
Alice Munro has commented on the conditions under which she wrote Lives of Girls and Women. She was, at the time, living in Victoria, British Columbia; roughly twenty years had elapsed since she had first left Ontario, and thousands of kilometres separated her from this home place. She has suggested that the temporal and spatial distance that lay between her and Huron County was responsible for any nostalgia that may have influenced her depiction of the landscape. Nostalgic memories may indeed tint Munro’s depiction of her home place in her text, as she suggests in a quote from Thacker’s biography of her: “The home she wrote about from British Columbia, she recalled, ‘was just like an enchanted land of your childhood’” (Alice Munro: Writing 328). Del’s description of the landscape of Wawanash County is, no doubt, affectionate, yet it would be a stretch to suggest that the landscape is part of a nostalgic look back at a rural childhood. Segments of the landscape’s description in Lives are certainly lovingly rendered: Del’s summer evening walk back to Jubilee after her final and traumatic confrontation with Garnet at the swimming bridge and her car trips into the country with her encyclopedia-selling mother are prime examples of the narrator’s love for her surroundings. However, it would be difficult to classify these landscapes as idealized. In this text, the landscapes are not the silent screen upon which the protagonist projects her wish image. For Del, the landscapes and the people who inhabit them are intertwined, and, as argued above, the topography itself is a type of figurative pattern shaped by the same forces that have moulded Del’s artistic method.
Lives ends just as Del is on the cusp of departing from Jubilee into the wider world. If Del ever returns to Jubilee, the text never reveals that homecoming. A return is, however, a central part of a later text. In 1978, Munro published Who Do You Think You Are?8 This book follows another single, small-town protagonist, in this case Rose, and possesses a plot arc very similar to that in Lives. One of the central differences between the two texts, though, rests in Rose’s return to her small town after experiencing and succeeding in the urban world beyond her home place. The scope and theme of each text are very similar. Therefore, this section treats the later book as, in some measure, a continuation and even revision of Lives; Rose returns to the town of her youth and, in doing so, gauges the changes to both herself and her home place. This section also suggests that, whereas Lives is not a book of conventional small-town memory, as if conventional memory cannot recapture the entirety of one’s childhood experiences, Who similarly casts doubt on memory’s ability to understand the past, and Rose, at seemingly every juncture, distrusts the impressions fed to her by her own memory. Finally, this section argues that it is when one stops distrusting memory that one is enticed back to the home place, a return that subsequently allows the small town to escape the safe confines of memory and reassert control over its one-time inhabitant. Who suggests that memory should not be trusted to guide one in the present, a realization that reflects Munro’s own homecoming in the mid-1970s.
Formally and thematically, these two books are very similar, but the differences are, of course, in the details. One striking difference is in the roles the small towns play in the lives of their inhabitants. Whereas Lives ends while Del is contemplating her departure from Jubilee, Who follows Rose from Hanratty to university in the city, adulthood on the west coast, and finally back to Hanratty. She returns “home” in middle age. More importantly, Rose’s return results in an altered vision of the role the small town and rural community can play in an individual’s life. In Lives, the influence of the community may not be without tension but it is essentially productive, whereas its influence in Who is rendered as restrictive, limiting, virtually inescapable.
Significantly, these divergent representations seem influenced by Munro’s own proximity to her home place. As mentioned previously, Lives was written at a debatably affectionate distance, in both time and space, from Wingham and western Ontario. In Who, Rose’s literary return mirrors Munro’s actual homecoming to Huron County from the west coast in the mid-1970s after her marriage, much like Rose’s, fell apart. Thacker argues that Munro’s vision in the later book has darkened largely because she was writing about the place she inhabited as opposed to the place she remembered:
[T]he Huron County she had returned to and began seeing anew in 1975 was harsher and a place she saw in a more sociological way. With Huron’s people, Huron’s culture, Huron’s life staring her full in the face – no longer being remembered over time and distance – Munro saw social differences even more clearly, resulting in greater complexity from Who on. That book felt in some ways like Lives, but its longer perspective and its much more complex composition suggest a writer finding a new relation to her material. (Alice Munro: Writing 328)
Who involves a much longer temporal span. Whereas Lives is a story about a young woman and artist coming of age in a place that is in equal measure hostile to, and generative of, her aspirations, Who is a story of a woman who escapes that hostility, only to return and both see it anew and understand its real influence. Her return may engender deeper understanding of her home place, but that understanding is more knowing and, as a result, much more complex and even pessimistic than it is in Lives. Susan Warwick comments that the “bleaker and harsher vision” of the later book is because its protagonist, Rose, reaches adulthood and can thus see the community with a more holistic understanding (209). While both Warwick and Thacker observe a darker vision in Munro’s Who, Warwick sees the age of the protagonist as the root of this new pessimism, while Thacker suggests that Munro’s proximity to her subject results in this new shadow in her writing.
This darkness is reflected in what Rose recalls of the Hanratty of her youth: the violent deaths, the beatings, the terminal illness, the molestation, the poverty and want, the intractable class system, it’s all prominent in a way that it was not in Lives. Yet these are not simply present in the text as a result of memory, as memory is not the sole access that Rose has to the small town; she physically revisits the community of her birth at certain points in the text. Similarly, Munro did not write Who with the sole assistance of memory, unlike Lives, but rather she returned to the place that she was fictionalizing. What these returns, both fictional and literal, have produced is a collection of short stories in Who that casts doubt upon the ability of memory to capture the past, as those memories of the home place often clash with the reality. While Lives utilizes transcendent memory in an attempt to convey a stable and complete comprehension of place, Who questions memory’s ability to reliably reconstruct those episodes that form a vision and understanding of place; we can never understand something, the book implies, when the only way we have access to it is through our memories.
The ongoing distrust of memory in Who can relate to one of the major formal differences between the two texts: Who is written in the third person, whereas Lives is written in the first. Because Lives is very much concerned with the personal and artistic formation of Del, her first-person narration reveals those sudden flashes of insight, such as her encounter with Bobby Sherriff, or those long periods of artistic apprenticeship, such as her initial rejection and ultimate acceptance of Craig’s project of local documentation. Del’s narration offers an unmediated glimpse into this development, and the book ends just as she finds her artistic method, a method that reaffirms, indeed solidifies, the community’s place in her creative future. Who’s third-person narration implies distance between the protagonist and narrator. No longer are those two personages one and the same, and, therefore, no longer is the text subject to the limitations and aporias of the memory of a first-person narrator. The earlier book depicts the search for genuine methods of artistic expression, or rather how best to represent the community from which one emerges, but the later book examines an individual’s attempt to understand the self, as well as to come to terms with the often ambivalent role the home place has in the development of that self. By writing in the third person, Munro both sidesteps and draws attention to the practical difficulties associated with a narrative of reminiscence.9
Memory: A False Companion
Beyond merely attempting to understand the past, Who concerns, according to Coral Ann Howells, the process of “how the past is remembered and reconstructed” (Alice Munro 51). Munro’s formal method of examining this past, the third-person narrator, differs from the narrative structure of Lives, and it is a method that was made consistent throughout the book only during last-minute edits. Both Helen Hoy and Robert Thacker have detailed the hurried, dramatic revision process that came about through Munro’s insistence (for Hoy’s account, see “Rose and Janet”; for Thacker’s, see Alice Munro: Writing 344–52). The book originally consisted of stories focused not only on Rose, but also on an additional protagonist, Janet, whose stories occupied the latter portion of the collection and were written in the first person. At one point during the collection’s construction, Munro portrayed Janet as the author of the Rose stories, which are those set in Hanratty. However, Munro grew exceedingly uneasy with this structure as the book neared its printing date and subsequently edited the book so that all of the stories were written in third person and all about a single protagonist, Rose. Those Janet stories that were not rewritten as Rose stories for inclusion in Who subsequently wound up in Munro’s next collection, Moons of Jupiter.
The resulting collection in Who is formally consistent throughout. Had the Janet device been maintained, it would have further distanced Rose’s memories of Hanratty, as they would have been two steps removed from the reader: a fiction within a fiction, as if it were that structure that was needed to soften the hard realities of Rose’s rural upbringing for the reader, an escape clause for squeamish, doubtful readers. Without the Janet device, though, Rose’s memories, while still conveyed by a third-person narrator, are no longer mediated through an additional voice within the text’s form. Rather, the narrator can now highlight Rose’s struggle with the nature of memory, her ambivalence and creeping doubt about what it tells her of her own past. The Janet device presented an overly complicated method to draw attention to the fictionality of memory; in abandoning this device, Munro’s narrator acknowledges the ambiguity of memory and its imperfection in capturing the truth of a past and depicts a remembering subject in conflict with her past.
Of particular concern to the idea that memory and its nature is a central focus of the narrative is Ajay Heble’s characterization of the text as indicative of Munro’s “involvement with a poetics of uncertainty and a rhetoric of mistrust” (96). Heble’s broader argument is that Munro’s fiction “reveals itself to be maintaining and undoing reality at one and the same time, operating as both an instance and a criticism of fictional representation” (4). In much the same way, her characters rely on memory but distrust it at the same time. Throughout the text, the narrator draws attention to the failures of memory, and she shows the past that it manifests as a fickle chimera that, when used as a crutch, leaves the remembering subject without a stable ground to experience and understand the present. If memory serves as the basis for identity, then the question “who do you think you are” is a fitting title for a work that examines the glosses and misrepresentations of memory.
The first example of how memory fails to offer a stable representation of the past occurs in the story “Royal Beatings.” Towards the end of the story, modern-day Rose is listening to a radio program on which an old man from Hanratty, Hat Nettleton, is being interviewed on the occasion of his 102nd birthday. Munro’s narrator has earlier introduced Hat as part of a group that killed a man in Hanratty many years earlier. This group, assembled by some of the town’s leading citizens and spurred by whiskey, horsewhipped its victim until he was a staggering pulp, a beating that results in his death a few agonizing days later. This anecdote of viciousness would never be included within the history sanctioned by the radio program. The radio announcer, rather, celebrates the age and status of Hat by calling him “a living link with our past” (22). Rose has reservations about the manner in which the announcer uses this phrase, as expressed through the questioning repetition of the phrase in her own thoughts. By repeating the phrase “living link with our past,” Rose begins to ironize the phrase’s intention, an ironization that calls into question the nature of the past to which Hat supposedly offers a connection. The link he offers through his venerable age and his memories of the “good old days,” or at least those few carefully edited anecdotes that he shares, is one that links Rose’s present to a past constructed of half truths and distractions; yet this past becomes the accepted version, the one that has become sanctioned by public institutions.
The announcer, Rose’s thoughts suggest, has no idea about the nature of the past to which Hat supposedly links the present; the view that the announcer propagates in his program would prettify hardships, turning tough experience into a repository for charming, harmless stories. The interviewer may appreciate this comical, ornery old man’s admission to eating groundhog meat during lean times, but that appreciation is possible only because he and his listeners are so far removed from any similar experience that this distance has made Hat’s experience completely non-threatening; it is not the act of eating groundhog meat that is approved, but rather the idea of something so far removed from the comfort of modern experience. But this type of historical softening in no way lessens the severity of the experience itself, as the acute misery and pain of hunger really did drive Hat to eat groundhog meat one winter, just as he and two other men drunkenly beat another until he was a paste of raw, bloody flesh.
Furthermore, Hat himself uncomplainingly adopts the role that he is supposed to play so that the majority of his experiences relayed through the program are filtered through the announcer himself:
“You didn’t have so many strikes then, I don’t suppose? You didn’t have so many unions?”
Everybody taking it easy nowadays. We worked and we was glad to get it. Worked and was glad to get it.
“You didn’t have television.”
Didn’t have no T.V. Didn’t have no radio. No picture show.
“You made your own entertainment.”
That’s the way we did.
“You had a lot of experiences young men growing up today will never have.”
Experiences. (22)
What begins as a series of questions from the announcer turns into declarations, and Hat’s role in the interview devolves into merely confirming the announcer’s historical impressions. This version of the past is the folksy and benevolent one that is ostensibly based on Hat’s own memories, yet, in reality, it is concocted through the complicity between the announcer and Hat. More accurately, this past is a product of the present, and Hat’s memories, or at least those he shares, are channelled by the suggestions of the announcer; Hat is not simply recalling his own past but is also confirming a past that many in the present would like to imagine. As a “living link with our past,” (emphasis mine), Hat is not necessarily included in the possessive adjective “our,” but he is required to validate what is essentially a projection, a wish-image regarding how those in the present want to understand the past; the bargain struck here is that he remembers what he is required to remember and is celebrated for it. Yet what is suggested by Rose’s historical counter-narrative, a sort of underground history in the apocryphal story of Hat’s horsewhipping, is that memory often conceals and circumscribes, particularly when it is working in collaboration with the public record of authorized history, becoming sanctioned nostalgia.10
The announcer may see Hat as a “living link to our past,” but he is a link to something so distant that his recalled experiences become almost pleasant diversions fully emptied of consequence. They have become merely stories, dissociated from the corporeal reality in which we experience either pain or pleasure. Munro’s narrator reminds us, though, that that type of historical consciousness denies the reality, the actual physicality of the past, the past of blood and bone. Warwick suggests in her essay “Growing Up: The Novels of Alice Munro” that Who contains juxtaposed levels of time, a type of hierarchy of reminiscence within the book, and she points to the different time levels in “Royal Beatings” as an example. I suggest that this technique further reminds readers that there exists equivalence between past and present: the past is not merely stories relegated to the temporal distance. For example, while “Royal Beatings” ends in the text’s present, it also contains a time level of the more recent past in which the child Rose is beaten by her father. This horrendous beating becomes a type of objective correlative to the distant past of Hat, specifically the terrible beating death in which he participated and which is absent from the official historical record; the raw mental and physical impact of Rose’s beating indirectly animates those events that are fading or have disappeared from living memory, events so distant that their connection to lived reality has nearly been severed. This technique of juxtaposition reminds readers that, to understand the quotidian past of the everyday, as opposed to the lists of events in the annals of history, one needs no further knowledge than one’s own experience. What was the experience of the past like? Much like we experience the present. While the radio announcer and Hat may suggest that there exists a qualitative gap between the nature of past and present experiences, Munro’s narrator implies that “experiences” in the past and the present are effectively the same: a beating is still a beating today as it was one hundred years ago, just as victims then, as now, bleed and cry out in terror: to forget this equivalence equates to a failure of historical consciousness.
Munro’s use of memory operates in contrast to Leacock’s. In Sunshine Sketches, Leacock explores how the passage of time allows us to cast the benign light of memory onto even troubling events, yet those events are always seen from a harmless distance. In Lives, there is not a stable present, or rather an anchoring present time from which the narrator speaks; past and present become fluid temporal categories in which the first-person narrator feels and understands past events as acutely as she does events in the present. In Who, however, Munro’s use of a third-person narrator distances the text from a narrative of retrospective; Rose, in fact, cannot tell her own story, as then her narrative would be subject to the aporias and misdirections she begins to suspect are an inseparable part of memory itself.
For instance, when discussing the ignominies of her rural schoolyard with her companions in the present, Rose has to assure them that she is not relaying fabrications: “When Rose told people these things, in later years, they had considerable effect. She had to swear they were true, she was not exaggerating. And they were true, but the effect was off-balance. Her schooling seemed deplorable. It seemed she must have been miserable, and that was not so. She was learning” (28). Here memory serves as the basis for oral storytelling, just as it does during the radio interview with Hat Nettleton, yet her auditors approach her memory sceptically, thinking that it is somehow disingenuous. And Rose seems to agree with their approach to the tall tales of memory, as she doubts the impression that her own memory creates, that it is somehow “off-balance,” not capable of capturing and conveying the whole experience of the past situation; she does not trust what her own memory tells her. Just as time can have a softening effect on deeds past, or conceal those deeds altogether, it can also exaggerate the gothic malignance of difficult memories; neither method, Rose feels, adequately captures the often banal truth of an everyday, casual detail, whether it be comforting or disturbing. Rose continually questions the impressions memory creates. With this in mind, we see that the interrogative of the title can encompass this notion. If memory informs identity, how can that memory be trusted to understand one’s self? The central interrogative of the title is one that Rose asks herself, but what is suggested is that memory is incapable of revealing the answer to that question. Much like Rose’s acting profession, memory offers only a version, a re-creation, of the truth both of one’s past and of one’s self.
Are These Small-Town Memories?
Memory is particularly distrusted in the text when it functions as one of the spurs that prompt former residents back to a small town with the promise of a quiet, comfortable, known life. Throughout her career, Munro has consistently worked against any romanticized or simplified version of Ontario’s rural past or, rather, a version akin to Leacock’s popular idyll. An idealized rural childhood or rural past, Munro’s writing emphasizes, can only ever be one version of the past as opposed to a true rendering. For instance, in Lives, the stories of the rural childhood of Del’s mother, Ada, seem lifted from the pages of a gothic novel, and they clash fiercely with the insistence of Ada’s brother (who has moved to the city, it must be noted) on the healthful, moral advantages of their farm upbringing. From Munro’s later writing, “Wilderness Station” stands out as a particularly frank depiction of homesteaders’ experiences in the region of western Ontario that subsequently became known as “Munro Country,” yet the epistolary nature of that story constantly throws that harsh depiction into doubt. Her story “Chaddeleys and Flemings 2: The Stone in the Field” from The Moons of Jupiter contains a line that is a pithy synopsis of Munro’s approach to depicting the rural past of Huron County through which she consistently questions the commemorative yearning of other rural and small-town stories: “the life buried here is one you have to think twice about regretting” (35). As this passage suggests, objective knowledge of the past is hard to acquire, and those who regret the passing of the rural past may know only too little of its hardships. Memory too often circumscribes or misrepresents a rural past. After returning to small-town Ontario from her many years in Vancouver, Rose learns this truth about memory, particularly how it can function as a lure coaxing her back to her childhood home place.
Upon first arriving back in Ontario, Rose lives in a small crossroads village north of Kingston in a landscape very different from that of western Ontario. What draws her here is a preconceived notion of small-town life, which leads her to believe that she will be living among retired farmers and members of the “respectable” Protestant sects (170). The reality is far different:
“Country life,” she said. “I came here with some ideas about how I would live. I thought I would go for long walks on the deserted country roads. And the first time I did, I heard a car coming tearing along the gravel behind me. I got well off. Then I heard shots. I was terrified. I hid in the bushes and a car came roaring past, weaving all over the road – and they were shooting out of the windows. I cut back through the fields and told the woman at the store I thought we should call the police. She said oh, yes, weekends the boys get a case of beer in the car and they go out shooting groundhogs. Then she said, what were you doing up that road anyway? I could see she thought going for walks by yourself was a lot more suspicious than shooting groundhogs. There were lots of things like that. I don’t think I’d stay, but the job’s here and the rent’s cheap.” (166)
The question arises: have Rose’s memories of life in a small town failed her and subsequently led her into thinking that this life can be bucolic and peaceful, offering salve to her wounded soul, or is her surprise at the situation the result of regional differences, as eastern Ontario is a far more hard-scrabble place than is western Ontario?11 Have Rose’s twenty years away on the west coast caused her to forget or perhaps misremember the hard reality of life in West Hanratty, the reality with which she is all-too familiar at other points in the text? This single walk down the country road succeeds in dispelling the illusions that Rose has somehow acquired about rural life.
Rose tells this story to her companion, Simon, and he, in return, shares with her a similar experience. As a young boy in France, he was on the run from the Nazis. He found sanctuary in the south of France in a mountain village that was something of an isolated enclave that had changed little in hundreds of years; it remained literally untouched by the outside world. Rather than thinking that he had stumbled upon a pristine, bucolic idyll undisturbed by the raging war that had consumed the rest of the continent, Simon immediately noticed the deprivations from which these people suffered. For instance, while a veterinarian visited the community once a year to look after the farm animals, no doctor performed similar services for humans. After Simon punctures his foot with a pitchfork, he had to convince his caretakers to fetch the vet, who at that time was in a neighbouring village, in order to save his life. Simon comments: “The household was bewildered and amused to see such measures taken on behalf of human life” (167). Rose’s sardonic response, simply “Country life,” to Simon’s tale summarizes their sceptical approach to false notions of the rural idyll. Taken together, both Rose and Simon’s stories interrogate the notion of “country life” as a retreat, in reality or in memory, to escape the troubles of the contemporary world.
That phrase, “Country life,” begins and ends Rose’s and Simon’s anecdotes; the phrase functions, essentially, as bookends to their tales. While pithy, her response to Simon’s story emerges from Rose’s own buried knowledge of what country life is or, rather, what life in the country can be. Furthermore, the ironic tone of her response suggests a bitter tinge to that newly rediscovered knowledge, and it recalls for both Rose and the reader those tales of West Hanratty she relays to her companions in “Privilege”: the rape of a mentally handicapped sister by her brother in the schoolyard outhouse; the vicious, sectarian schoolyard violence to which there is no claiming neutrality; and the exhausted teacher who is powerless to prevent the older boys from their mayhem: all examples, Rose would suggest, of “country life.” Her response to Simon’s story is not simply one of recognition, but also one that reminds herself that preconceptions of the country idyll are most likely misconceptions: the often rough nature of rural life, the deprivations and haphazard lifestyle of the inhabitants are all familiar to Rose, all very much aspects of life in West Hanratty, but all things that surprise her when she makes her return to the country. It is as if her memory has excised these aspects of country life as a result of years of a very different style of life on the west coast. Both Rose’s and Simon’s anecdotes depict recklessness and disregard towards human life that, seen from a different, perhaps more distant perspective, could very easily become comical stories of blundering, ignorant rural bumpkins; when directly threatened by that recklessness, Rose and Simon both view these actions as signs of abject neglect and menacing carelessness.
Rose’s temporary residence in this eastern Ontario town serves as a type of prelude for her real homecoming to Hanratty, which is the central element of the final two stories of the collection. Gerald Lynch calls the entire collection a story cycle largely because of these return stories. Their function, says Lynch, is much like that of “L’Envoi” in Sunshine Sketches, and similar to a long line of Canadian literature stretching from Charles G.D. Roberts and D.C. Scott, in that they reacquaint the protagonist with elements of her original identity, which cause the protagonist to reflect on her growth and change that has occurred over the years (“No Honey” 90–1). Lynch also suggests that these stories “priorize” the importance of place within that identity (90–1); place is integral to the formation of the protagonist, a formation that is inescapable and irreversible. The early experience of place is central to Rose’s identity, just as it is for the club men of Leacock’s collection. Lynch has noted the similarities between Leacock’s and Munro’s texts, particularly the centrality of the small town to characters’ identities. But because Leacock’s club men never re-enter their hometown, that home place will remain largely a shifting spectre whose influence is more imagined than realized. To answer the central interrogative of Munro’s text – “Who do you think you are?” – Rose does “go home again,” but this return provides her with newfound understanding of the constricting, unforgiving role that Hanratty plays, and has always played, in the lives of its current and former inhabitants.
In commenting on the importance of her return home, Lynch states that it is “remarkable … that a contemporary short story cycle … concludes by suggesting an answer to the riddle of self-identity that priorizes the definitive power of place-as-home” (“No Honey” 91). Rose discovers the answer to this riddle only indirectly, however, through an epiphany she has regarding her friend Ralph Gillespie and his relationship with Hanratty. Ralph, a friend of Rose since high school, is another figure who has left Hanratty to pursue larger ambitions, but, unlike Rose, Ralph has permanently returned home. While still at the Hanratty high school, he was known in the town primarily as an impersonator of Milton Homer, an intellectually handicapped man who appears unsolicited at all town events. To the understanding of an outsider, Milton may be called the “town idiot,” as he is labelled by Rose’s sister-in-law (197). But Rose resists that term, as she sees Milton as much more than simply the town oddity. He is the heir to a once-influential family in Hanratty, a sort of scion of the town’s forefathers.
Ralph is not known for much beyond his uncanny impression of Milton; yet, like all jesters, Ralph’s imitative acts possess social, critical potency. Milton was a symbol of the town’s fading power structures during Rose’s teenage years, and Ralph’s impression, therefore, is at once a callous impersonation that mocks an intellectual handicap and a derisive, irreverent act that distinguishes him from the rest of Rose’s classmates: “He was so successful that Rose was amazed, and so was everybody else … She wanted to do the same … She wanted to fill up in that magical releasing way, transform herself; she wanted the courage and the power” (204). Not long after Ralph starts his imitations, he drops out of school and leaves town, as if this act of irreverence were merely the necessary precursor to his eventual rejection of the community and his enlistment in the navy. Mocking Milton is that necessary act of both defiance and rejection.
Ralph’s act is analogous to Rose’s ability to memorize poetry. In response to Rose’s ability to memorize and recite poems, her English teacher, the one who should be most encouraging of this talent, states “‘You can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?’” (200). Their transgressive acts afford Rose and Ralph a certain amount of distinction, and both share the same desire to stand out from the background of the town’s blandness, to discard the reflexive modesty that becomes second nature to those who inhabit Hanratty for any length of time. Rose leaves town for university immediately after high school; both Rose and Ralph depart to pursue what exists only beyond Hanratty’s boundaries.
While Rose goes to the west coast to assume a life of marriage and motherhood, Ralph goes to the east coast to take up a post in the navy; their paths mirror one another. Both of their lives beyond Hanratty, however, end in trauma: Ralph’s in crippling injury and Rose’s in divorce. Ralph’s traumatic accident required that he spend three years in a military hospital and, essentially, be “rebuil[t] from scratch” (205). In response to her split from her husband, Rose becomes an actor, and with each new role she assumes a new identity. Ralph’s injury and Rose’s divorce leave them bereft, without the identity that they had cultivated beyond the confines of Hanratty; the temptation, resisted by Rose but not by Ralph, is to fall back to the identities cultivated prior to their departures, those in which Hanratty is central. If the riddle of the text, that regarding identity, is reflected in the text’s title, Lynch argues that the solution to that riddle rests in the home place. Rose does eventually go home again, and there she finds that Ralph has already made that return. Their similar trajectories suggest that the titular question encompasses not only Rose’s experience, but also Ralph’s, yet the answer that Ralph has found to that question serves as a warning to Rose not to follow the same path.
When Rose does meet Ralph again, her first impression of him is of a man who, even in his mode of dress, is attempting to reacquire the status of his former self. Ralph’s sweater “seemed to Rose to speak of aging jauntiness, a kind of petrified adolescence” (208). She finds that he has largely taken up the role he had prior to his departure from Hanratty many years ago; rather than doing impressions in the classroom, he now does them in the bar of the Royal Canadian Legion. Ralph has returned to his home place because he found himself with few other options, and he is attempting to revive his previous role in Hanratty through his memories of his time in that home place. However, whereas the impressions Ralph performed as a teenager were irreverent, affording him special status, they always intimated his impending departure because they always represented his rejection of the town: they were potent mockeries of Hanratty and its inhabitants before he took his leave of them. Ralph now has nowhere else to go, and the impressions thus grow stale; so too does his status at the legion. As Rose’s stepmother Flo says, “he carries on just the same, imitating, and half the time he’s imitating somebody that the newer people that’s come to town, they don’t know even who the person was … How do they know it’s supposed to be Milton Homer and what was Milton Homer like? They don’t know. Ralph don’t know when to stop” (206). No longer do these impressions afford Ralph special status, largely because no longer do these impressions contain any notion of a transgression; rather, people are confused by them and confounded by Ralph. Try as he might, Ralph cannot regain that “power” he once acquired by mocking the town’s more colourful inhabitants. He may have returned to his home place, yet he cannot regain the identity he cultivated while a child, not only because his home place will not accept that identity, but also because his home place has changed.
In the closing lines of the final story, Rose comes to understand the parallel lives she and Ralph have led: “What could she say about herself and Ralph Gillespie, except that she felt his life, close, closer than the lives of men she’s loved, one slot over from her own?” (210). Whatever epiphany she may have about Ralph’s life can then offer clues to her own self-knowledge, and the realizations that Rose does have about the role of Hanratty in Ralph’s life, and thus her own, are not particularly positive. Ralph, essentially stuck in Hanratty, has ceased his impressions, and he has come to an uncomfortable balance in the town, a way of accepting as opposed to living life there: he is “self-sufficient, resigned to living in bafflement, perhaps proud. She wished that he would speak to her from that level, and she thought he wished it, too, but they were prevented” (209). As she talks to Ralph, she feels the conversation could be from a level she both knows that they are capable of, a level that assumes difference and distinction from Hanratty and its norms; however, this level would now further compromise Ralph’s precarious position in the town. He now needs Hanratty because there are no more departures in his future, and, by speaking to Ralph in their old manner, that which prefigured their departure from Hanratty, Rose puts at risk the identity at which Ralph grasps after his return.
This, then, begins to answer the riddle of identity that is reflected in the titular question, Who do you think you are? Hanratty has an answer to that question for its returned inhabitants, yet the answer is one that neither Rose nor Ralph want to accept. Rose’s continued mobility allows for her future departure and thus her ability to extricate herself from the restrictions of Hanratty’s answer to the question, but Ralph has no similar latitude. While Rose’s life and search for identity continues beyond the confines of Hanratty (indeed, her acting profession is, essentially, a continuous exploration of identity), Ralph, led by memory and necessity, has retreated back to Hanratty, his home place. As Lynch states, this contemporary short-story cycle concludes by “suggesting an answer to the riddle of self-identity” rests in the home place; for Ralph, at least, he sadly, if not reluctantly, resigns himself to that answer.
Hanratty is a limiting, constricting place, unaccommodating of difference, accomplishment, or idiosyncrasy. Those within its physical confines must also remain within its behavioural confines. Rose feels this prescription more strongly when in Hanratty: “she had to control what she recognized in herself as an absurd impulse to apologize. Here in Hanratty the impulse was stronger than usual. She was aware of having done things that must seem high-handed. She remembered her days as a television interviewer, her beguiling confidence and charm; here as nowhere else they must understand how that was a sham” (207). Rose experiences this revelation while sitting in the bar of the Legion with Flo’s neighbours; the whole evening affords Rose a glimpse into her possible life in Hanratty had she stayed or returned for good. While in Hanratty, though, she feels compelled to apologize for all that she has accomplished beyond the confines of her home place, what she refers to as part of the “sham” as those in the town must see it. The “sham” is Rose’s behaviour, that which has brought her a considerable degree of success in the urban sphere; the sham originates in the notion that no one in Hanratty acts in that manner, and thus by acting in this way, Rose is denying the proffered identity of her home place. While residents of Hanratty, and indeed Rose herself, feel that her “beguiling confidence and charm” is an act, this act is also a critical repudiation of the town’s limitations, limitations she feels more acutely after she has returned to Hanratty. Rose once saw Ralph as full of similar “courage and power” to do the same, but, upon her return, he is a dim shadow of his former self.
The story and, therefore, the collection end with Rose reading of Ralph’s death in the Hanratty paper: “Mr. Ralph Gillespie, Naval Petty Officer, retired, sustained fatal head injuries at the Legion Hall on Saturday night last … It is thought that he mistook the basement door for the exit door and lost his balance, which was precarious due to an old injury suffered in his naval career which left him partly disabled” (210). After she reads this news, Rose has the revelation of how close she feels to Ralph, that his life has been lived “one slot over from her own” (210). Rose understands how easily a similar fate of permanently returning to Hanratty could befall her, and, to avoid such a return, which would be a relinquishing of her precarious grip on the control over her identity, she must keep asking herself the titular question. Rose may have no answer to that question, but, unlike Ralph, she will not accept the answer that is waiting for her within the confines of her home place.
In both Who and in Davies’s Fifth Business, the protagonists make a return to their home towns, yet neither remains; in fact, both measure the small town negatively against the growth they have experienced in the larger world, a reversal of the relationship between small town and city in Leacock’s book. The small towns in these texts represent the anti-idyll, what Linda Hutcheon characterizes as a “limited and limiting society from which protagonists yearned to escape,” what she suggests is a phenomenon most particular to Canadian small-town literature in the 1970s (Canadian 197). In Sunshine Sketches, the final return journey to Mariposa is imaginary, spectral, and the town retains its aura of benignity and innocence; no actual return occurs, and so the town’s status as the idyll and the nostalgia the club men feel for it remain intact. As Ralph demonstrates, though, to make an actual return, to flee to the comforting embrace of the town itself, to re-acquire one’s status as a full-fledged member of the community, one must relinquish the status, power, and identity gained beyond the confines of the town. This is the bind in which Leacock’s club men find themselves; while lamenting the passing of so-called better days and simpler lives in places like Mariposa, they are also reluctant to relinquish all they have gained deep in the heart of the city in order to pursue what is bygone. Ralph’s actual return, therefore, is a reflection of his powerlessness, and he resigns himself to the life that Hanratty has waiting for him.
Small-town nostalgia, it would seem, can be a sensation of privilege. Acting on that impulse to return is not necessarily a reflection of powerlessness; what is a reflection of powerlessness, however, is the inability to come back to one’s current, other life, urban or otherwise. The nostalgic re-creation in Sunshine Sketches is a method of escaping into the past, but it is a safe escape, as the return to the urban present is always assured. Nostalgia requires distance, distance that remains a part of Sunshine Sketches’ entire narrative structure, but, when that distance is traversed, one discovers that the control over this wish image has dissipated; no longer is the small town a passive product of memory but an active entity with the ability to shape itself and those within its boundaries. In Who, Rose’s temporary nostalgia quickly evaporates upon her return to the country. With the limited, provisional power she does have, she decides not to imaginatively reshape her home place through memory. Because she fears that the answer to the titular question rests in Hanratty, Rose continues to trust that the solution to that riddle rests not in her known past but at some point or place in her unknown future.
1 Reaney focuses intently on elements of the hyper local – for instance, the names of local plants. In “The Wild Flora of Elgin County,” his persona advocates for knowledge of the local foliage, positing that understanding your region will make you “more serene & thoughtful / In doing so.” In the essay “Ontario Culture and – What?” he states, “I happen to believe that if you don’t know the weed that grows at your doorstep – knotweed – or the grass that grows in cemeteries – orchard or poverty grass – or the name of the tree outside your window, then you’re not rooted in your environment” (253).
2 That is, except for the university entrance exam for which Del is seen studying. At the end of the book, her attendance at university remains in question, but, while the book ends with Del’s subsequent movements remaining indeterminable, she does resolve to live a life of independence. The end of the “Epilogue” alludes to the direction of her artistic life more so than it does her thoughts on the location that can accommodate that life.
3 Further evidence of the lack of a town-country, order-chaos binary comes from Aunt Moira’s depiction of Porterfield: “not a dry town like Jubilee, it had two beer parlours facing each other across the main street, one in each of the hotels … From behind her darkened front windows she had watched men hooting like savages” (40).
4 The mention of the word “revival” suggests a return according to a cyclical rhythm and associates Garnet with something other than the linearity of Del’s relatives.
5 Carscallen’s comments on Garnet’s “world” are reminiscent of Michael Bell’s description of the primitive sensibility as an inability to make a distinction “between the inner world of feeling and the external order of existence” (8). Garnet’s impulsiveness, his history of violence, and his sensuality define his character, suggesting his inner world of feeling transcribes itself, with little filtering, into his external surroundings.
6 The patriarch of the Frenches is a symbol for their uncontemplated, unvocalized, and even unconscious relationship with history and landscape: “In the corner of the verandah sat a man in overalls, vast and yellow as a Buddha, but with no such peaceful expression. He kept raising his eyebrows and showing his teeth in an immediately fading grin … [L]ater I realized it was a facial tic” (223).
7 There is much to suggest that the rest of the county is struggling to maintain the expressions of a western chronology on the land, and particularly significant is Del’s characterization of the region in a “slow decline” (31).
8 Published as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose in the United States and Britain.
9 For instance, Del is the omniscient narrator of her prior selves, which stretches the bounds of plausible memory and sidesteps the question of what is and is not recoverable through memory. In Lives, the answer to that question is, seemingly, that everything is recoverable. In response to this memorial omniscience, critics have devised a “two-Del solution” to the narrative involving the Del who experiences and the Del who understands. By keeping the narrator of Who unnamed, however, Munro has allowed critics of the work to avoid establishing complex theories to explain the narrative structure, even though the narrator’s perspective rarely deviates from that of Rose. The narrator remains close to Rose, and Ajay Heble suggests that the narrative is a “limited third-person point of view” that rarely offers a perspective other than Rose’s (102–3).
10 This interview with Hat is reminiscent of a symposium held at the University of Guelph in 1981 called “The Country Town in Ontario’s Rural Past.” The purpose of the symposium was to understand the nature of the small town around the turn of the century. As part of the proceedings, three “old timers” were brought onstage to discuss their experiences of going to town in their childhood. This oral history component was conducted through a sincere desire of the organizers to understand the differences between how people lived in the past and in the present. The three participants readily adopted the role they were to play, and they convey personas very similar to Hat’s: eager to contradict, witty, and critical of how soft society has become (80–90).
11 Rose has entered the landscape that has been fictionalized by Matt Cohen: a rougher, harsher landscape in which people’s lives are even more precarious than they are in Huron County. Matt Cohen made a career out of writing about eastern Ontario small towns, and particularly about the lives of the type of men Rose sees in the car speeding down the country road. His Salem Pentalogy, a collection of novels centred on one small town in eastern Ontario, documents the often grim hardships of people in the towns and farms north of Kingston. The rural life depicted in the Salem novels is unrelentingly rough; in seemingly every paragraph, poor, struggling farmers or jacks-of-all-trades are either lighting yet another cigarette, resisting the urge to pour themselves another drink, or wallowing in the detritus and castaway bric-a-brac of their perilous lives.