Canadian literature – Bhaswati Ghosh

I wrote this when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

In Boys and Girls, Alice Munro accomplishes the perfect storyteller’s feat–instilling in the reader feelings of delight, shock, surprise, suspense, and dejection, all over the course of a single short story. The narrator is a young girl whose father raises foxes in a pen for selling their fur to traders in wintertime. She helps out her father with the job by bringing water to the foxes twice a day in the summer and raking the grass and money-musk that her father would cut.

As she performed these chores under his supervision, little dialogue was exchanged between the two. The girl, however, took great pride in being able to shoulder his labour, even if in a minimal way.

One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, “Like to have you meet my new hired hand.” I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure. (Boys and Girls, Alice Munro)

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Working for her father is one of the ways in which this young protagonist fights the gender stereotypes she is supposed to comply with, even as her flashes of rebellion provoke the ire of her mother and grandmother. In a clever sub-plot, Munro allows this child flights of fancy in which she rescues people in danger from a bombed building, shoots rabid wolves and undertakes other such heroic endeavours with the noble intent of saving others. These situations represent the polar opposite of her actual station in life, where her gender must always precede her will or wish.

However, a moment arrives during the imminent execution of an old (female) horse, for the purpose of its meat being supplied as food to the foxes, when our young narrator has an opportunity to live her imagination. Entrusted with closing the house gate by her father when Flora, the horse, breaks loose from the clutches of her executioners, the eleven-year-old girl lets the horse escape by keeping the gate wide open. The only witness to her defiant act is Laird, her younger brother.

At dinner that night, Laird proudly describes how he saw his father and his farm hand capture the frenzied horse after giving her a chase in their van and cut its body into pieces. He also reveals how his big sister had let the animal escape earlier in the day. The story ends with the father telling everyone present, “Never mind. She’s only a girl,” and his daughter’s ignominious acceptance of what that taunt implied.

As I delved into the universes Munro constructs with an architect’s precision and an interior designer’s aesthetic charm, her ability to zoom lens–be it on a character, situation or even the interior landscape of a person–kept me immersed in her stories, one after the other. Munro’s tales are not snapshots–seen now and forgotten then; they are alleys we have all trodden in our own lives–as perpetrators or victims of cruelty, in happiness and despair, while concealing deceit and guilt. It is this universality of her themes, despite the affectionate localization of her stories, many of them set in Southern Ontario, where I now live, that makes Munro both appealing and important.

In a true mirroring of life, Munro’s stories steer clear of delivering verdicts or solutions to predicaments and miseries. Often the one relating the agony of the victim–whether it be the schoolgirl who bullies her classmate or the husband who contemplates a new relationship even as he assumes a caregiver’s role for his dementia-afflicted wife– is the one responsible for it, usually not by design, but a strange concoction of circumstances, societal expectations and personal quirks.

When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize last week, I was delighted. Not just because she has enviably mastered the art of seizing entire universes within the scope of short fiction. Nor because of her neuroscientist-like ability to get inside the minds of young adults and their tribulations. Not because the locales in which she sets her stories are now part of my personal geography. Or because of her mature portrayal of the internal drama the human mind loves to engage in.

“Her voice on the (answering) machine was different from the voice he’d heard a short time ago in her house…A tremor of nerves there, an affected nonchalance, a hurry to get through, and a reluctance to let go.” (The Bear Came Over the Mountain, Alice Munro).

I was delighted because like her protagonist in Boys and Girls, Munro held the gate to a world she believed in–that of short stories–wide open. And won.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Alice Munro

Penguin Canada

First published in DNA

As I unroll the reels of my life’s movie, the stories of my mother and grandmother, two women who shaped my growing up unravel before me. All three of us have lives distinctly different from each other’s. Yet, when I look closely, I see we have all been shape shifters — slipping into moulds we scarcely anticipated, not necessarily with ease or delight, but always with the readiness that our circumstances demanded. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro’s collection of nine short stories, I found many of our comrades — women across small towns and big cities juggling domesticity and the rigours of the professional world — slipping into and out of moulds and bearing the consequences of their actions with or without grace.

The book derives its title from a counting game young girls play with the names of potential boyfriends. Yet time and again, Munro’s adult protagonists prove that their lives need not remain constrained within the clusters of hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship and marriage. Like an ocean’s waves that don’t adhere to a boundary while undulating, the women of Munro’s stories don’t hesitate to spill outside the defined perimeters of their existences.

In the opening story, which shares the book’s title, Johanna takes the bull by its horns, torso and tail, when unbeknownst to herself, she falls for a prank played by two young girls. The girls write her love letters on behalf of one of their fathers, who lives in a different province. Johanna finds not just emotional succour in the letters, but true to her working-class industry, she smells an opportunity to banish her status as a pitiable spinster once and for all.

Johanna’s success in achieving what she sets out to establishes the book’s tone. In Munro’s more-real-than-real-life stories, women are not always in control of their destinies — sometimes by choice and at other times, without any. But what arrests the reader is their remarkable refusal to be pathetic, sympathy-arousing creatures. And they accomplish this with utterly ordinary, non-awe-inspiring actions.

In Floating Bridge, my favourite story of the collection, Jinny, a cancer patient, steps into the light — metaphorically speaking — even as she is engulfed in darkness. Thanks to a stranger, a young man, she walks on a floating bridge for the first time while her husband socialises with the same man’s family. But that’s not all. Jinny also receives the youth’s passionate kiss as he guides her steps on the bridge — an affection without any nomenclature, a fleetingly eternal moment of breathtaking freedom.

“What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.” [Floating Bridge]

Weaving inter-generational tapestries that span not just months or years but decades isn’t an easy act to pull together in short fiction, but Munro achieves this with the effortlessness of a teenager’s unabashed giggle. Even as the characters and stories swing back and forth in time, one is left amazed and bewildered by the author’s ability to carry the innocent reader through her intricately mapped-out territories. This is brilliantly evidenced in Family Furnishings, a story that interlaces family drama, the female protagonist’s brisk, nonconformist quips clashing with the deep-set conventional thinking of other family members, and finally intrigues and secrets that make the reader see the same character in a completely new light.

In this collection, Munro explores the idea of fidelity in marriage in more than one way, with no easy answers or moral positioning for the reader. And not all trespassing, if one could call them, happen in a blatant, deliberate manner. Stories like Comfort, What is Remembered, and The Bear came over the Mountain show how ephemeral and impulsive a moment of ‘stepping out’ can be at times. And not necessarily sexual in nature either.

“Ed Shore puts an arm around Nina. He kisses her — not on the mouth, not on her face, but on her throat. The place where an agitated pulse might be beating, in her throat.” [Comfort]

Memory can be a treacherous, manipulative and even therapeutic poultice. We realize this while reading the layered narratives of Nettles, What is Remembered and The Bear came over the Mountain. In What is Remembered, Meriel cherishes the sole pulsating whiff of an extramarital affair that breezes through her long married life, yet she wants to remember things differently than the actual sequence of events that took place.

Transitions — geographical and otherwise — often form the metaphorical motif of Munro’s stories. Nettles, Queenie and Family Furnishings, chart the perplexity-ridden phase between young adulthood and grown-up in Munro’s spade-is-a-spade candour.

“I know exactly how old he was because that is something children establish immediately, it is one of the essential matters on which they negotiate whether to be friends or not.” [Nettles]

And it is this sense of negotiation, the constant trading of emotions, personal space, the necessity of belonging — that guides Munro’s characters, especially her women. This is not always easy or even plausible and must be done on the sly, but the women that we come across in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage aren’t shy of doing so.

“Young husbands were stern in those days…What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics…It was the women then, who could slip back — during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of children — into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn’t there.” [What is Remembered]

I came to Munro as a reader with her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades. Every story in that anthology charmed me as I read about young girls and women at crossroads, getting a taste of the bitter truths of life and coming of age. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, I met women who had already come of age and were mature and daring enough to dance and even miss a step or two on the paths that beckoned them.

Whenever I read Munro, I am seized with both the thrill and dread of a scientist in a laboratory, who discovers the minutiae of organic life under a microscope. Munro turns the spotlight on lives around us with such astonishing alacrity that it is but impossible not to find strains of one’s own living reality in her stories. The modern-day fables in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage hold a clear-as-daylight mirror to women’s lives — imperfect and rocky, but never without the possibility of a spark, a fresh leaf and a redeeming edge.

Tag: Canadian literature

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