By B.W. Powe
And now I’m meditating on Alice Munro’s passing. She left us at age 92, after a long period in dementia.
One of the greatest short story writers. I’ve wanted to say something about her for years.
You know—weird thing—I didn’t read her closely for a long time. Then I began reflecting on her writings when I was living in Spain. Suddenly, there, reading her when I was far away from Canada, the power of her stories and the style she embodied burst over me, occupying my thoughts.
Alone on a train, going from Barcelona to a town outside the city, reading Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, not comprehending the Castilian and Catalan spoken by other passengers, her words and sentences, her voice and characters became uncannily vivid, somehow lucidly enigmatic. What did this mean?
When I read her in Canada, she seemed a realist writer, reporting on lives in small town Ontario. When I read her in Spain, the hermetic side of her work struck me in my rootless state: I saw and felt the strangeness, how intensive her observational stances were—her narrators standing by, always outside (alone in their thoughts and contemplations) yet recording without blinkers or screens, illuminating how people and their worlds don’t and can’t abide or comprehend realities.
She was one of The Watchers—one who sees, hovers close. Her hermetic undercurrents: she never moralized, never prized style above all; the situations and conditions of lives came to her without ideology, didactic agendas, transcendental imperatives or religious creeds, satiric demolitions, or lyric exaltations. And yet she saw, and saw more, and contemplated and caught many lives unfolding. The short story was her fragment of the splendor; but the form’s condensations and strict practice meant much had to be omitted, or hidden, including any reference to that splendor.
When I was in Cordoba, I imagined a debate between Alice Munro and Don Quixote: The Watcher talking to the Mad Knight of Sorrows.
Who’s to say what’s real? Suffering imprints us with what we call reality; and the imagination provokes us into figuring there must be a transcendental or idealist purpose, somewhere.
This would be the crux of the Munro-Quixote debate. A writer from historical time arguing with a mythic character.
One who records illusions, one who champions illusions.
They could express and counter how the observer changes the observed, and how the observed changes the observer.
One saying, “Here are false hopes”, one saying, “A false hope is at least something…”
Maybe both would say, “Show me your despair, I already know about love…”
I could never imagine anything but a stalemate in their argument.
Munro evaded large metaphysical questions in story collections with titles like The Moons of Jupiter, Dear Life, The Progress of Love, and Something I’ve been Meaning to Tell You that appear to suggest the presence of those questions. Still the poetic spirit, in the ambiguities between the lines of her stories, seemed to me to be speaking of them.
I said in Canada she’s understood to be a realist; but when I continued to read her in Spain—where she’s also taken to be a realist—I sensed the mythic implications in the crucial small scale of the lives she envisioned. The ordinary doesn’t become miraculous in her writings. The ordinary becomes an intensified locus of the inexplicable, a place where our inner lives are describable but finally unknowable. The Watcher recognizes and documents how our notions of the real are wounds. Her writer-surrogates acknowledge how detached they are from…life, and yet implicated in it.
To this day I prefer reading Munro in Spain (and primarily in Andalusia, the southernmost province). This is because in another place her accomplishments seem even more memorable. Her stories, where vastness and scale implode (compress), become microcosms of an uncovering, and we witness people living in their thwarted, secretive conditions. She invites us to quieten our roaring selves, to concentrate on details and gestures we miss. The Watcher sees the turmoil of the surface and the lives within surging, leaving their traces in poised fictional expressions.
And we should recognize this sublime paradox: her seemingly real town, based on Wingham, in southern Ontario, her keenly sketched people, belong to fictive domains. She imagined it all, all of them—the historical locales and the locals themselves were subsumed into her imagining. This means her stories (always condensed to the point of almost becoming splinters—moving toward abrupt glimpses) endure in the mythic dimension where her town aligns with Flaubert’s Yonville, Joyce’s Dublin, Borges’ Buenos Aires’ streets, Hemingway’s Michigan lakeside towns and Paris arrondissements, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Dinesen’s Ngong Hills, Ferrante’s Neapolitan suburb, Cohen’s Montreal, Atwood’s downtown Toronto, and Carson’s El Camino. We’ll remember the town and the people because Munro dreamed them well and then wrote and revised them into being. In this way, her creations will, and must, stay ahead of her interpreters and biographers.
Munro with McLuhan, Frye, Cohen, Carson, and Atwood—the central imaginative poets and storytellers, mythographers, and Watchers of our climate…
And with our world environments overheating to extinguish us one day—burn us down, burn us out—I propose Munro’s collections should be set in protected sites. Like cairns. So that future entities (whatever the hybrids of AI and flesh may be) will find her work. When they do, and they’ve learned to decode her nuanced writing, they could read deeply into her stories’ brevities, and be altered by their depths. They would surely find how they show our humanity in the way it once thrived, before the extinction or before the digital transfigurations of being, in our bewildering complexities, in our gasps of living and inwardness.
The fascination with her enigmas. How her books can be easily absorbed in the immediacy of reading, when we respond to her agile and surprising stories, and yet never can we reach complete understanding. And why should we? The strangeness is all.
Post-Script to A Tribute to Alice Munro
By B.W. Powe
Once I met Munro at Albert Britnell’s Bookstore on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. Briefly. I’d been asking the bookseller about Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, which had just been published. I wanted to know how it was selling at the store. I knew his books had long languished in overlooked or forgotten margins. She said, “This one’s doing well.”
Then I turned around and saw Munro. Very affable. She said
she knew McCarthy’s books, admiring his strange eloquence and harrowing honesty. Sometimes I think she said “stranger,” not strange. And then she was gone.
BW Powe 