tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post9136764737753609505..comments2024-03-09T00:19:36.011-08:00Comments on Reading the Short Story: Memoir vs. FictionCharles E. Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11642048806407593585noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-52857185075973700492009-06-17T14:37:47.704-07:002009-06-17T14:37:47.704-07:00It's about time someone said what many feel ab...It's about time someone said what many feel about Alice Munro. Her stories are terribly boring and her world is ugly. We are cheesed off with her fastidious analysis of the trivial mentalities of the petit middle class. She hasn't got Flaubert's class. She's not a patch on Doris lessing and Nadine Gordimer. It was very shocking she got the Booker before Naipaul, a genius. Her influence on the market is deadly, elbowing out authors whose style is esthetic or baroque or experimental.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-53856613040086012252009-01-15T20:31:00.000-08:002009-01-15T20:31:00.000-08:00I think that a lot of readers just don't see how "...I think that a lot of readers just don't see how "wired" some stories are (like Oates's, or A.M Homes's). They have a visceral reaction to them, just as you have to a Munro story. I've noticed that the older I get, I need stories that, as you say, don't "show their hand." I don't want to see the rigging. And so explains my greater appreciation for Munro. So, is it just an experience thing?<BR/>T.C. Boyle and Oates are read a lot in academia partly because, I think, they are so themey (like many novels?). And it's much easier to point to the fairly obvious thematic markers in their stories, and then you can feel that satisfaction of having taught your students something. And, yeah, I often sense that they started with an idea and positioned characters and plot in such a way to convey that idea. Not to say that's the wrong way to write, only that it feels to me at times, well, shrewd, rather than imaginative. I don't want to dis Oates, because I do enjoy reading her. But I don't mind taking Boyle down a few notches.<BR/>And certainly Munro does some monoeuvering of her own. She must know at some point what her story is "about" and shapes it in light of her own understanding. One point in "Some Women" the narrator tells us that she found Roxanne's flirtations "Insulting." For some reason, that stuck out to me as Munro very subtly positioning her readers. It has the effect of opening the story up wider. Exactly why, I can't say. And there are, the many repeated elements that your other commenters pointed out. It's just that she does it in such a way that we feel the story wash over us, rather than moving our way through it intellectually. Or something like that.<BR/><BR/>I'm so glad you've started a blog.<BR/><BR/>--BeckyBeckyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01394798100189563749noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-77813183555387727602009-01-10T06:05:00.000-08:002009-01-10T06:05:00.000-08:00Great having Charlene join us...a splendid author....Great having Charlene join us...a splendid author. <BR/><BR/>Alice Munro frequently turns me out of her stories in a strange state of satisfaction, yet left with open questions, an unease. I’m never sure if this is because I’m incapable of grasping the truth in her work or if it is ineffable. This is true of "Some Women" for me. <BR/><BR/>Because Charles brings it up, I’ll put my sense of--- mystery --- in the context of the memoir. I’m using the word “mystery” because I never quite get to the word I want to use about these stories of hers I find so compelling. There are a few writers who affect me this way. Not Trevor, for example. But Antonya Nelson does this sometimes. Some of Faulkner. Sometimes a guy almost forgotten, Conrad Aiken. But I find all of them still more accessible than Munro.<BR/> <BR/>I think 1st person tends to get into the clothes of memoir, or at least its underwear. But the fiction writer is declaring the story to be something beyond memoir by calling it a story. By departing from memoir, or declaring it to be so, the writer is taking events into her own hands. The story, then, reaches some greater truth or illumination out of design, rather than happenstance. In other words, in a memoir a lousy, unfulfilling outcome might be just fate. In a story, it’s all the writer’s fault. (Or intention.)<BR/><BR/>I’m just into the early reading of Some Women, and to be frank, I don’t trust myself completely with any reading of any Alice Munro story. But at this point, I think the most interesting choice made is her last line. It serves the very odd final moment of pulling me completely out of the story’s time, taking me to the mind of this adult character who observed the events. This reminds me that the key to a 1st person story is the almost always truthful statement, "An I story is about I.” <BR/><BR/>(I have a years long argument about that regarding Moby Dick, however. Is it really about Ishmael?)<BR/><BR/>In doing that, the author reminds me that everything in this story is a choice. There is no element of if that exists outside the context of the work. For example, the oddly skewed sense of eroticism in this story, the naked old woman, the coy moments in the sick room, the checkers game, the strange banishment of the step-mother and Mrs. Hoy, this is all intentional, part of the story teller’s shell game. It is not the unintentional revelation of memoir… even if it pretends to be so. <BR/><BR/>So what I’m saying, there is a rigor to short fiction one does not expect or demand in memoir. And the short story, if compelling enough, will require a reader to return to it, as I will to this very demanding and seductive story by Alice Munro. <BR/><BR/>Frankly, I never quite feel I am wise enough to get everything Munro is putting in front of me. But I suspect she may find her own best work to be a bit mysterious to herself, as mine is to me. <BR/><BR/>Nice choice Charles! And I finally realized the fiction issue was under the Mondrian cover.Rolfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10407101807209230018noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3161136885462262525.post-20377038376449393242009-01-09T10:12:00.000-08:002009-01-09T10:12:00.000-08:00Hi Charles, Here are a few of my thoughts on the m...Hi Charles, <BR/><BR/>Here are a few of my thoughts on the memoir vs. short story issue after reading “Some Women.” <BR/><BR/>In the short story, there’s an author, a narrator, and characters. The author is not the narrator. In a memoir, the author and narrator are the same. <BR/><BR/>Although the story’s details and experience read authentic, this is what a reader usually expects. I have not read enough about Alice Munro to know if she was ever a nurse. The last story of hers I read was “The Love of a Good Woman, where a young woman cares for the needs of a dying woman. I might suspect Munro had cared for someone who was sick and knew intimately of that experience, but as a reader/writer, not an academic, it’s irrelevant to my read. <BR/><BR/>What I found interesting about “Some Women” was that there was an author, an implied author (the narrator now old), the narrator at 13, and the collective women characters. The intangible qualities of this story—the dust, the stillness, the placing of the fan, the untouched books, the separateness of rooms in an old house—is what settles over me as I read, a damping down of life. For a summer, the narrator as a young girl becomes one of the women in this house, doing not a whole lot but moving a fan in and out of a room and eventually locking it off. She is an observer, not really changed at that point in time beyond a bit of wisdom she wanted to “shake off back then.” <BR/><BR/>On the girl's last day, Sylvia/the wife remarks that the air is finally moving, but the narrator feels only what she feels at the time, that it is just the car moving with open windows. It is the older narrator, grown up and quite old, who can look back and recognize the ramifications of that one act of locking the dying man’s door. Although she doesn’t tell us this outright, it is implied by the moments she chooses to narrate to us, which is so precise because of the author's skill.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for starting the blog. I come to it via Rolf. <BR/><BR/>CharleneCharlenehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16857300131449304528noreply@blogger.com