Reading Alice Munro, 1973-2013 by Robert Thacker

Author:Robert Thacker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: canadian literature;short story;literary criticism
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2016-01-25T22:17:41+00:00

Critical Interlude:

What’s “Material”: The Progress of Munro Criticism, Part 2 (1998)

Introducing Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. Neil K. Besner. Toronto: ECW Press, 1990.

The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro. James Carscallen. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993.

The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Ajay Heble. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Some Other Reality: Alice Munro’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. Louis K. MacKendrick. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993.

Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. Magdalene Redekop, London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Alice Munro: A Double Life. Catherine Sheldrick Ross. Toronto: ECW Press, 1992.

Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Karen E. Smythe. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992.

In one of the holograph drafts of Alice Munro’s “Dulse” (1980), the narrator meets a “Mr. Middleton from Boston,” who in the finished story becomes Mr. Stanley, the man fixated on Willa Cather’s writing, her person, and the refuge that was hers on Grand Manan Island. Hearing that Middleton has spent his life working on newspapers, the narrator says: “I was surprised, I had taken him for a university man, a professor of literature, I had thought that no other job in the world would allow him his pedantic preening[,] his serene absorption” (38.8.19.f1, 3). In what looks like a subsequent typescript in which the narrative has been shifted to third person, the now-named Lydia notes “the fact” of this man’s “admiration, his adoration, of the chosen writer. It was not faked. It was true, fervent, engrossing. She thought he could not be a teacher, such worship being too far out of style, too unlikely even in his day” (38.8.20.f3). Also among the papers held at the University of Calgary is an autobiographical note in which Munro recounts the first time she heard from John Metcalf regarding her work; his letter buoyed her because Munro was “reeling” from “a painful session with a man [at the University of Victoria] who told me that my work reminded him of the kind of thing he himself had been writing when he was fifteen and had abandoned with the first glimmerings of maturity.” This view, she writes, “was damaging only because I had a most exaggerated respect, then, for academic opinion” (6.6).

Beginning here, speaking for myself, this is the second time I have taken up a group of critical books focused on Munro’s writing. In the first review, I ended by citing a phrase from E. D. Blodgett’s Alice Munro (1988), which asserts that Munro’s “‘unassailable moral integrity’ is borne out in the fiction by the various shifts, doubts, and re-explanations she repeatedly offers, but always with an eye to discovering ‘what is real,’ and how can one really know, ever?” Concluding, I offered one of Munro’s own doubts from her uncollected story, “Home” (1974): “I want to do this with honour, if I possibly can,” and left readers with the perhaps wry, though still apt, invocation: “Go ask Alice” (Reading Alice Munro 109).

Embarking on this

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