Alice Munro's "Gravel": New Yorker, June 27, 2011

I have completed my fifth reading of Alice Munro’s new short story, “Gravel,” in the June 27, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. I liked it on the first reading, although I was a little unsure about the central event of the sister’s drowning. I liked it even better on the second reading, when I could separate the “actual” from the “imaginary” in the experience of the narrator. I liked it still more on the third reading, when I understood more about the nature of the narrator’s involvement in the central event. But now that I have read it a fourth time—with highlighter in hand, followed up with a fifth reading making penciled annotations—I like it inordinately for its seemingly simple, but actually complex, literary pattern and thematic significance.

Although you can probably read the story at the following site, http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/06/27/110627fi_fiction_munro?currentPage=all
I will provide a brief summary:

The first part of the story recounts the narrator’s memory of her mother’s starting to dress like an actress and then telling her husband that the child with which she is pregnant belongs to Neal, an actor she has met. The mother’s motivation for leaving her insurance-salesman husband seems related to her desire to have a “freer,” more Bohemian, life than she has had in her conventional home.

The central incident occurs after heavy rains have filled up the gravel pit and Caro tells the narrator to run back to the trailer to tell Neal and her mother that Blitzee has fallen in the water and she has jumped in to save the dog. The narrator runs to the trailer, but sits down outside before going in. When she does go in and the mother tries to get Neal to go to the gravel pit, he fails to do so. In the third part of the story, Neal does not attend Caro’s funeral. The mother gives birth to a child named she names Brent.

In the final section of the story, the narrator learns that Neal is living near where she teaches, and her partner, Ruthann, convinces her she should go see him to help “rout her demons.” She discovers that Neal lives in a semi-respectable dump and buys his clothes from the Salvation Army—all of which he says suits his principles. He tells her how it happened—that he was stoned at the time and is not a swimmer and thus would have drowned also if he had tried to save Caro. She asks him what he thinks Caro had in mind on that day, as she has asked two others before. Her counselor has told her that perhaps Caro wanted attention to how bad she was feeling; Ruthann has said it was to make her mother go back to the father; Neal says it doesn’t matter, that maybe she thought she could paddle better or that she did not know how heavy winter clothes could be, or that there was no one close by to help her.

The story ends with Neal advising the narrator not to waste her time, not to try to get in on the guilt for not hurrying up and telling that day. He then says:

“The thing is to be happy. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and the tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.” He then says goodbye.

In the last paragraph, the narrator says:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

In the following discussion, I have isolated what I think are the most important motifs of the story, which, taken together, suggest its universal, underlying themes:

One of the first things I look for when reading a story is the motivation for its telling, especially if the story is told first person by a character in the story. Why does the teller feel the need to tell the story? At the very beginning, the narrator tells us, “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.” The problem is that we usually remember the past in isolated moments—events that happen, but we have difficulty remembering what causally connects them, what relationship one event has to another. As Neal tells the narrator at the end, “I think you might want to know how it happened.” We may remember what happened, but not how it happened, what caused it. One tells a story in order to try to understand the links, the motivation, the causes.

This need to know, to be sure of the connection of events in the misty, disconnected past, is related to the theme repeated throughout the story of solidity and security versus instability and uncertainty.

The gravel pit embodies this split between what is solid and what is uncertain: “The pit was shallow enough to lead you to think that there might have been some other intention for it—foundations for a house, maybe, that never made it any further.”

After the mother leaves her husband, she was “so happy to have shed everything connected with the house, the street—the husband—with the life she’d had before” exchanging the solidly established house for the transient trailer. The father is an insurance salesman, who sells people security against the future; Neal, on the other hand, with his concern about the atomic bomb, thinks there may be no future. “His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.” Neal accepts uncertainty, while Caro desires stability. When Neal asks Caro, what if we all disappear and Blitzee has to fend for herself, Caro says, “I’m not going to,” Caro said. “I’m not going to disappear, and I’m always going to look after her.” The narrator and the mother build a snowman and call it Neal; snowmen do not last long and soon disappear.

The narrator feel caught between stability and instability, between things that exist solidly in the world and things that are so instable they just disappear. “Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again—I just wondered where it had gone.” Indeed, after Caro drowns, Neal does in fact disappear.

When the narrator and her mother make the snowman, Neal gets out of the car mad and yells that he could have run over her. Using a significant verb, the narrator thinks: “That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.” After Caro’s death, Neal writes a letter saying, “that since he did not intend to act as a father it would be better for him to bow out at the start.”

During the central drowning event, when the narrator goes to the trailer and just sits down rather than knocking on the door, she says, ”I know this because it’s a fact. I don’t know, however, what my plan was or what I was thinking. I was waiting, maybe, for the next act in Caro’s drama. Or in the dog’s.” Munro creates this ambiguous insecurity about the nature of reality so deftly I need to quote the entire passage:

I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.

I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.
That the dog had fallen into the water.

The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.

Blitzee. Drownded.

Drowned.

But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.

She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.

I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t. I also remembered that Neal had said dogs didn’t drown.

Caro instructed me to do as I was told.

Why?

I may have said that, or I may have just stood there not obeying and trying to work up another argument.

In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned toward the trailer by then—I must have done so.

When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not toward the trailer but back toward the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming toward her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.

What I really did was make my way up the little incline toward the trailer. And when I got there I sat down. Just as if there had been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.

Next thing, I am inside. My mother is yelling at Neal and trying to make him understand something. He is getting to his feet and standing there speaking to her, touching her, with such mildness and gentleness and consolation. But that is not what my mother wants at all and she tears herself away from him and runs out the door. He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet. His big helpless-looking toes."

When the narrator is an adult, she goes to see a therapist to help her determine the links or causal connections between the events. All possible explanations from the three people she asks: therapist, companion, Neal—are hypotheses only, phrased as “must have,” “might have,” “maybe.”

When the narrator goes to meet Neal, he is still the voice of one who accepts life as it comes and refuses to feel responsibility about the past. His view about why Caro did what she did is that it does not matter: “Maybe she thought she could paddle better than she could. Maybe she didn’t know how heavy winter clothes can get. Or that there wasn’t anybody in a position to help her.”

Then Neal gives the narrator advice from his perspective: “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”

“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”

The story ends with her understanding Neal’s advice, but not her ability to follow it:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

Alice Munro's "Gravel": New Yorker, June 27, 2011

I have completed my fifth reading of Alice Munro’s new short story, “Gravel,” in the June 27, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. I liked it on the first reading, although I was a little unsure about the central event of the sister’s drowning. I liked it even better on the second reading, when I could separate the “actual” from the “imaginary” in the experience of the narrator. I liked it still more on the third reading, when I understood more about the nature of the narrator’s involvement in the central event. But now that I have read it a fourth time—with highlighter in hand, followed up with a fifth reading making penciled annotations—I like it inordinately for its seemingly simple, but actually complex, literary pattern and thematic significance.

Although you can read the story at the following site, http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/06/27/110627fi_fiction_munro?currentPage=all
I will provide a brief summary:

The first part of the story recounts the narrator’s memory of her mother’s starting to dress like an actress and then telling her husband that the child with which she is pregnant belongs to Neal, an actor she has met. The mother’s motivation for leaving her insurance-salesman husband seems related to her desire to have a “freer,” more Bohemian, life than she has had in her conventional home.

The central incident occurs after heavy rains have filled up the gravel pit and Caro tells the narrator to run back to the trailer to tell Neal and her mother that Blitzee has fallen in the water and she has jumped in to save the dog. The narrator runs to the trailer, but sits down outside before going in. When she does go in and the mother tries to get Neal to go to the gravel pit, he fails to do so. In the third part of the story, Neal does not attend Caro’s funeral. The mother gives birth to a child named she names Brent.

In the final section of the story, the narrator learns that Neal is living near where she teaches, and her partner, Ruthann, convinces her she should go see him to help “rout her demons.” She discovers that Neal lives in a semi-respectable dump and buys his clothes from the Salvation Army—all of which he says suits his principles. He tells her how it happened—that he was stoned at the time and is not a swimmer and thus would have drowned also if he had tried to save Caro. She asks him what he thinks Caro had in mind on that day, as she has asked two others before. Her counselor has told her that perhaps Caro wanted attention to how bad she was feeling; Ruthann has said it was to make her mother go back to the father; Neal says it doesn’t matter, that maybe she thought she could paddle better or that she did not know how heavy winter clothes could be, or that there was no one close by to help her.

The story ends with Neal advising the narrator not to waste her time, not to try to get in on the guilt for not hurrying up and telling that day. He then says:

“The thing is to be happy. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and the tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.” He then says goodbye.

In the last paragraph, the narrator says:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

In the following discussion, I have isolated what I think are the most important motifs of the story, which, taken together, suggest its universal, underlying themes:

One of the first things I look for when reading a story is the motivation for its telling, especially if the story is told first person by a character in the story. Why does the teller feel the need to tell the story? At the very beginning, the narrator tells us, “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.” The problem is that we usually remember the past in isolated moments—events that happen, but we have difficulty remembering what causally connects them, what relationship one event has to another. As Neal tells the narrator at the end, “I think you might want to know how it happened.” We may remember what happened, but not how it happened, what caused it. One tells a story in order to try to understand the links, the motivation, the causes.

This need to know, to be sure of the connection of events in the misty, disconnected past, is related to the theme repeated throughout the story of solidity and security versus instability and uncertainty.

During the central drowning event, when the narrator goes to the trailer and just sits down rather than knocking on the door, she says, ”I know this because it’s a fact. I don’t know, however, what my plan was or what I was thinking. I was waiting, maybe, for the next act in Caro’s drama. Or in the dog’s.” And indeed her helplessness, her failure to act quickly has to do with not knowing what her “role” is in a drama that is not of her making. Indeed, the central event—from the time the narrator is told to go to the trailer and tell Neal and her mother something, the narrator has no secure sense that the events are happening, about to happen, might have happened, or imagined happening. Munro creates this ambiguous insecurity about the nature of reality so deftly I need to quote the entire passage:

I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.

I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.
That the dog had fallen into the water.

The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.
Blitzee. Drownded.

Drowned.

But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.

She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.

I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t. I also remembered that Neal had said dogs didn’t drown.

Caro instructed me to do as I was told.

Why?

I may have said that, or I may have just stood there not obeying and trying to work up another argument.

In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned toward the trailer by then—I must have done so.

When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not toward the trailer but back toward the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming toward her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.

What I really did was make my way up the little incline toward the trailer. And when I got there I sat down. Just as if there had been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.

Next thing, I am inside. My mother is yelling at Neal and trying to make him understand something. He is getting to his feet and standing there speaking to her, touching her, with such mildness and gentleness and consolation. But that is not what my mother wants at all and she tears herself away from him and runs out the door. He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet. His big helpless-looking toes."

When the narrator is an adult, she goes to see a therapist to help her determine the links or causal connections between the events. All possible explanations from the three people she asks: therapist, companion, Neal—are hypotheses only, phrased as “must have,” “might have,” “maybe.”

Neal gives the narrator advice from his perspective: “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”

“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”
The story ends with her understanding Neal’s advice, but not her ability to follow it:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

“Pride” Alice Munro, Harper’s, April 2011.

Munro's "Pride": A Life Well-lived

Alice Munro will be eighty in July 2011. Since the 2009 publication of Too Much Happiness (her twelfth collection of short stories), she has published (at least as far as I can determine) three new stories: two in The New Yorker (“Corrie,” Oct. 11, 2010; and “Axis,” Jan. 31, 2011), and one in Harper’s, “Pride,” April 2011. I have been told that Harper’s is holding one more story that will be released in the next few months. Given the timeline that Munro has maintained throughout her career of releasing a new collection of stories every three or four years, we should expect, God willing, a thirteenth collection from her in 2012 or 2013.

I have posted blogs on the two New Yorker stories. I have now read the Harper’s story “Pride” several times and, after postponing for a few weeks, think I am now ready to essay a brief discussion of that story.

“Pride” is something of a departure for Munro, for it is told by a first-person male protagonist and narrator. I can recall one other story, “Thanks for the Ride,” in her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades, that uses a male narrator. But in spite of the male teller, in that early story, as well as in this last one, a woman is introduced immediately and usually assumes the focus of the story. In “Thanks for the Ride,” it is a teenager, Lois, who initiates the male narrator into sexuality. In “Pride,” it is Oneida, the daughter of a well-to-do family who lives in the same town as the male narrator. The story begins in the thirties and continues up to recent years. The action, such as there is, centers on the life of the narrator, who has a harelip, becoming a bookkeeper for a company in the town, and Oneida, a young woman he knows.

As in any first-person story, the first question I ask is: Why is the narrator telling the story and what stake does he have in it? Although the narrator (never named) is not a highly educated man, he is a thoughtful man. He ruminates on things and ponders them, as we can determine from the first paragraphs of the story, in which he divides people into two types: those who, regardless of their mistakes, prove themselves hearty and jovial, claiming they would not want to live any place but where they live, and others, who don’t get away from where they live, but you wish, for their own sake, that they had. “Whatever hole they started digging for themselves when they were young…they kept right on at it, digging away.” This bit of rumination establishes the general motivation for the narrator’s telling of the story. The reader is led to expect that the two main characters of the story might be representative of these two types.

Although he is driven back and forth by Oneida, the narrator notes that she did not look unhappy at the arrangement, nor did he, that he had “dignity” and plenty of it. What Oneida had was something different, he says, a kind of flustered graciousness, ready to laugh a little at her situation. The narrator says he felt sorry for her, “the way she was all on the surface of things, trusting.” Then he adds, in reference to his harelip impediment, “Imagine me, sorry.”

The next section of the story moves to the 1940’s—the war years. Because the narrator was exempted from service, he feels cut off from men his own age, although he says that is nothing new. He wonders why his harelip, which has been “decently if not quite cleverly, tidied up,” has kept him home. However, he says he doesn’t miss a father (who died before he even saw him) or a girlfriend, or “the brief swagger of walking off to war.” He spends time listening to the BBC radio and going to movies with his mother. When a ferry sinks off the Canada coast, he thinks of the people who went down and ponders that death makes everyone equal.

In the next section of the story, the narrator’s mother dies, as does Oneida’s father. When she comes to ask his advice about selling her house, he cautions her against it, but she sells it anyway and is later sorry for her action, even though she moves into an apartment later built on the site of the house. The narrator begins to spend time with Oneida in the fifties, inviting her to his own house to watch his new television. They do not go out because meeting new people is an ordeal for him. When he slips and calls her “Ida,” which is what her father called her, he apologizes, but she notes that he always preferred to call people by their old school nicknames. He feels “huffy” about this because, “The implication was that I somehow preferred to hang on to my childhood, that I wanted to stay there and make everybody else stay with me.” This implication refers to the narrator’s opening rumination about those people who stay and make the best of it and those who should have left. He says that all his school years were spent getting used to what he was like, and he considers it a triumph of sorts to have managed that feat and to know that he could stay here and make a living without having to continually break new people in to the way he looks. “But as for wanting to put us all back in grade four, no thank you.”

During the Sixties and Seventies, he thinks about Oneida, “There was still that strange hesitation and lightness about her, as if she were waiting for life to begin.” One evening he becomes ill and she settles into his mother’s bedroom to care for him. He comes to depend on her and has “spells of feeling like a small child again.” However, he realizes she is not his mother and is embarrassed that she has cared for his intimate hygiene needs, feeling that she was able to do so because of the way he looked, because he was a “neuter to her, or an unfortunate child.” He wants her to leave, and she does so, but sometime later, when she comes to watch television, she says she would like to move in with him, for she does not like living in an apartment, and if he became sick again, she could care for him. “We had a certain feeling for each other, she said. We had a feeling which was not just the usual thing. We could live together like brother and sister and look after each other like brother and sister, and it would be the most natural thing in the world. Everybody would accept it as so. How could they not?”

The narrator feels “angry, scared, appalled” at all this, “as if I had been thrown down a cellar and a flat door slammed on my head.” He does not want to let Oneida know how he feels, but to get out of this dilemma, he says he has already sold the house. Then, of course, he has to sell the house, and, because there is nowhere else, finding an apartment on the ground floor of the building where Oneida lives. When he goes to sign the lease, he meets a man who he has known for years but does not immediately recognize. When the man asks the narrator if he plays the card euchre, intimating a future companionship, the narrator ruminates about the following:

“Just living long enough wipes out the problems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been, just living till now wipes them out, to a good measure. Everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours.”

This makes him think about how Oneida has aged. He thinks if he had ever had the right to choose, he would not have chosen her, but a college girl he once knew who worked for the company that employed him. Once the girl told him that he could now get a better plastic surgery job on his face. He thinks:

“She was right. But how could I explain that it was just beyond me to walk into some doctor’s office and admit that I was wishing for something I hadn’t got.”

The story ends when Oneida shows up at his house while he is packing. Suddenly she laughs and points out the window to a birdbath that seems full of black and white birds, dashing in the water. But they are not birds, but a group of young skunks. He thinks how beautiful they are, splashing in the water, so many you could not tell how many there were. Here is how the story ends:

“While we watched, they lifted themselves up one by one and left the water and proceeded to walk across the yard, swiftly but in a straight diagonal line. As if they were proud of themselves but discreet. Five of them.
“My Lord,” said Oneida. “In town.”
Her face looked dazzled.
“Have you ever seen such a sight?”
I said no. Never.
I thought she might say another thing and spoil it, but no, neither of us did.
We were as glad as we could be.”

Other things that lead us to expect that the story means something are its title and its author. That it is titled “Pride” leads us to expect that its meaning is somehow related to that human quality; that it is by Alice Munro (if we have read her stories before) leads us to expect some thematic significance, not merely a realistic account of an historical event.

The opening two paragraphs of the story, which begins, “Some people get everything wrong,” and then reflects on two different types of people in live in towns like the one in which this story takes place, also suggests to us that the teller of the story has something in mind he wishes to explore and perhaps illustrate. The opening rumination ends this way:

“Life is harder for some, we’re told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imaginary. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non-recipient, as the case may be.
But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.”

Just as such a ruminative opening suggests some thematic significance, so also does the ending scene in which small skunks are playing in a birdbath. The incongruity of the skunks in the birdbath, combined with the fact that the sight dazzles Oneida and pleases the narrator, making them both as glad as they could be, suggests that the scene has symbolic or metaphoric significance that should make us reflect back on the whole story. The fact that the skunks, which are usually thought to be repulsive smelly creatures, here look beautiful and seem “proud of themselves” makes us reflect back on the meditative passages at the beginning, as well as the references to “pride” throughout the story. It is hard to be a skunk, one might think, hard to have any pride in yourself if you smell bad and people run from you.

I recall back in the late forties and early fifties a Warner Bros Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon character named Pepe Le pew, a male French skunk who was always amorously stalking a young female cat (who accidently got a white stripe painted on her back) who ran from his attentions because of his vile smell. But no matter how repulsive others thought Pepe to be, he was blissfully indifferent and took great pride in what he thought to be his amorous appeal.

If one were an observer of life in this small Canadian town, one might wonder why these two people never got together. Granted, the narrator’s face is marred by a cleft lip, while Oneida’s face is beautiful; she comes from wealth and privilege, while he comes from a lower middle-class background. But then this kind of difference is the very stuff of romance—Heathcliff and Cathy in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, for example.

Although we can understand why the narrator and Oneida do not get together when they are young, we might wonder why they do not get married, or at least live together, when they are older. Part of the mystery involved here is why people ever get together. As the narrator says, “good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.” The narrator does not feel slighted or snubbed; he is so used to being exempted by his looks and the way he talks that he takes it for granted and he therefore does not miss what he might have had if he had looked differently. He spent his school years getting used to what he looked like and how other people responded to his looks, and considers it a “minor triumph” to have managed to do this, to survive, make a living, live a satisfying life.

We might be temped to say that his life could not have been satisfying, for he only had his mother and then this woman who mothers him when he is ill. But if nothing in the story suggests that he is lonely or self-pitying or deprived—either sexually or emotionally, who are we to say he must have been unhappy? Does one have to love someone to live a good life? Does one have to have sex to live a good life? Does one have to have children to be fulfilled? Obviously, the answer to all these questions is “no.”

Why does the narrator react so extremely when Oneida suggests moving in with him? She does so because she thinks they need each other; he could depend on her; she could depend on him. However, this very notion terrifies and appalls him, for he has always lived his life with enough hard-earned self-pride that he does not need anyone else. To be made to feel at this point in his life that he does need someone, that he cannot live alone, would somehow suggest that all his life’s work overcoming adversity, earning self-pride, would have been wasted. Remember, when a woman suggested that he go see a doctor to get a better repair job done on his cleft lip, he says it was just beyond him to go in some doctor’s office and admit he was wishing for something he didn’t have. To be able to say, “I don’t need” to change my appearance to be accepted. To be able to say, “I don’t need someone else to depend on and reflect a positive image of me.” Both require hard-earned self-pride.

When he meets the man he did not recognize because the man has aged and thinks of Oneida growing older, he comes to realize that if you live long enough, earlier problems are eradicated. No matter what shortcomings you may have had earlier, just living long enough wipes them. When you get older, everybody’s face suffers, not just yours.

Alice Munro has lived a long, productive creative life, developing a wisdom about human nature that she will, God willing, continue to share with us for many years to come. It is well that she would write a story that reflects a life well lived. As the English metaphysical poet George Herbert once famously said, “Living well is the best revenge.”

Alice Munro's "Axis"

Alice Munro once said that originally she planned to write a few stories to get some practice and then to write novels, but “I got used to writing stories, so I saw my material that way.”

I have always argued that there is a short story way of seeing “reality” that is different than the novel’s way of approaching “reality.” But, as my current research on authors’ views of the short story suggests, the only ones who seem to agree with me are short story writers. Readers, by and large, especially academic readers, seem reluctant to make generic distinctions between the two forms.

Frank O’Connor once suggested that the short story does not deal as the novel does with problems of the moment, but with what John Millington Synge calls “the profound and common interests of life." The short story, claimed O’Connor, is a “lyric cry in the face of human destiny.”

I have suggested in other places that one of the reasons for the short story’s focus on the “profound and common interests in life” is the form’s origins in myth and folklore, which Mircea Eliade has argued, narrates, “primordial events” in consequence of which human beings became what they are today. Myth, says Eliade, teaches human beings the primordial stories that have “constituted them existentially.”

I argued in my previous post that Stephen Millhauser’s story “Getting Closer” was quite clearly a story that dealt with a primordial, universal event about the nature of “happening,” not just a story of the moment about an obsessive young boy who goes on a outing with his family.

My colleague Lee commented on my previous post that he thought “Getting Closer” was a poor story because, as he says:
1. It blasts its message at us.
2. The sensibility at the heart of the story is inauthentic. Nine-year-olds don't perceive the world in this way, seeing death under the 'shining skin of world' (ugh - trite!).

I would agree with Lee if Millhauser meant the story to be a realistic account of the boy’s mind and experience. However, as I tried to show by referring to Keats’ Ode, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (as well as Millhauser’s own opinions about the nature of the short story form), “Getting Closer” is a profound and subtle exploration about the basic notion of things taking place in time—something human beings, both through religion and through art—constantly combat.

Alice Munro’s story seems much more realistic than Millhauser’s. The characters think and act like real people in the real world; the story moves along in time quite naturally, once we move back in time to an event that occurred fifty years before. On a realistic level, “Axis” seems simple and straightforward, recounting an event of some consequence experienced by the two young women in the story.

However, it is my opinion that Munro’s story, in spite of its realistic appearance in contrast to Millhauser’s fantasy, is also about a primordial, universal event that constitutes human beings existentially. One of the things the story is about is the primordial experience of “time,” of which Munro has said:

“Time is something that interests me a whole lot—past and present, and how the past appears as people change.” “Memory,” she says, “is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories—and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing pieces of.”

“Axis,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 31, 2011, is, in my opinion, a good example of what Alice Munro calls a “short story way” of perceiving reality; it is also a good example of Munro’s typical short story concern with “the profound and common interests of life,” a primordial event, as Eliade says about story that constitute human beings existentially—a “lyric cry in the face of human destiny.”

The story begins by locating two young farm girls—Grace and Avie--in space and time--fifty years in the past, waiting for a bus to take them home from college for summer vacation. They are defined by their gender and their social class—young women, who have enrolled to find a husband, but who may become teachers, which would be a defeat. Grace is fair and voluptuous; Avie is lively and challenging

On the bus Avie tells Grace about a dream in she had a baby that cried and cried until she took her down in the basement and forgot about her; she then has another baby who is easy and delightful. When grown, the second child knows about the abandoned one, but can do nothing about it because the first child has known no other life.

Whereas Avie wants to have sex with her boyfriend Hugo because she thinks it would make him more manly, Grace keeps her virginity intact in order to keep her boyfriend Royce interested in her. Grace is in love; Avie is not. Avie is more interested in Royce.

During the summer, Royce visits Grace on her parents’ farm. On the bus he goes through the town where Avie lives and sees her on the street. She has quit college and Hugo has graduated and got a teaching job; they plan to marry. Royce sees her as lively and pretty and has the urge to get off the bus and not to get on again. But he knows that would get him in a lot of trouble.

Grace has told her parents that Royce has graduated, but the truth is, he walked out on his last exams because he through the questions idiotic.

Royce is obviously not in love with Grace. When she tells him that the Acacia is her favorite tree, he sneers, thinking, does she have a favorite fence post? He is primarily interested in getting her to bed. Royce wonders why she is willing now when earlier there were many opportunities and she drove him crazy with her “vaunted virginity.”

When the family is away from the house, Grace goes to bed with Royce.” He plans to be easy and gentle with her, but, “This notion was on the point of being left behind. She didn’t seem to require such care. When they were “far enough advanced” not to have heard the car, the mother comes into the bedroom and is shocked, but Royce tells her to shut up, gets dressed, and leaves. Grace asks him to take her with him, but he acts as if he does not hear her.

On the road, Royce thinks of what he calls the “insanity” of Grace’s family and how he let himself be drawn into it. He sees a tower of ancient looking rock, which he later learns is the edge of the Niagara Escarpment and is captivated by it. “Why had he never been told anything about this? This surprise, this careless challenge in the ordinary landscape. He felt a comic sort of outrage that something made for him to explore had been there all along and nobody had told him.” At that moment he decides to forgo philosophy and political science and take up geology. Later, he tells people how the sight of the escarpment had turned him life around and only vaguely remembers he had been there to see a girl.

In the Fall, Avie comes to school to pick up some books and runs into a young classmate named Marsha. Both Avie and Marsha had sent Grace letters but had heard nothing from her. Marsha says: “Somebody said she had colitis. That’s when you get all swollen, isn’t it? That would be miserable.” Hugo and Avie had gone camping on Civic Holiday during the first week in August, and she has become pregnant.

Now the story shifts to the present fifty years later. Avie, now in her late sixties, is on her way to visit one of her six grown children. Hugo has been dead a year and a half. Avie has led a domestic life, having skipped all the women’s liberation movement and the liberation of the sixties. “She was what she was, and reading Leonard Cohen wouldn’t be any help to her.”

She runs into Royce on the train. He has never married, is retired, and is on the way to a little fort, about which has written a book. He tells her he remembers that bus trip on the way to see Grace when he saw her on the street and she looked “irresistible.” When he tells her he wanted to get off the bus, Avie keeps repeating, “I never knew.” Royce asks her if she had known, would she have agreed to meet him, and “without hesitation,” she says yes. He asks, “With the complications and all?” and she says yes. His response is: “So it’s a good thing? That we didn’t make contact?” She does not even try for an answer. He says “water under the bridge.” He says he wants to show her something and to wake him up before they reach Kingston. “Not so far off from giving her automatic orders, like a husband.”

As they leave Kingston, Royce tells Avie that there are great slabs of limestone one on top of each other like a grand construction. But in one spot, this gives way and you can see something else. “It’s what’s known as the Frontenac Axis. It’s nothing less than an eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield, all the ancient combustion cutting through all the limestone, pouring over, messing up those giant steps.” He tells her to remember to watch for it when she comes this way. She says “Thank you. I’ll remember.” He nods again and doesn’t look at her. “Enough.”

In the last section, we move briefly back in time to when Avie’s first pregnancy was well advanced, and she got a brief letter from Grace. In the letter Grace says she has heard that Avie is married and pregnant. Grace says that she dropped out of college, “due to some troubles I have had with my health and my nerves.” She says he remembers the dream Avie told her about the cast-off baby: “It still scares the daylights out of me.”

Avie remembers the conversation with Marsha and the story about Grace’s colitis. “The tone of Grace’s letter seemed off kilter, with some pleading note in it that made her put off answering. She was feeling quite happy at the time”

She asks Royce if he has heard anything from Grace, and he says, “No, why should I?” She says she thought he might have looked her up, but he says “Not a good idea.”

The last paragraph reflects Avie’s understanding of Royce’s response:
“She has disappointed him. Prying. Trying to get at some spot of live regret right under the ribs. A woman.”

I apologize for summarizing the story in such detail, but unless you subscribe to The New Yorker, you may not have read it.

Alice Munro does not title her stories randomly. So after reading the story five times now, I have tried to understand how the title reflects the significance of the story. The usual dictionary definition of an “axis” is a straight line through a body on which the body turns. The axis mundi would, therefore, be the center of the world.

The Frontenac Axis that interests Royce in Munro’s story links the Canadian Shield with the Adirondack Mountains in New York. The Canadian Shield is part of a huge area of water, forest, and igneous rock that occupies 50 percent of Canada’s total land area, stretching in a huge crescent from the Labrador coast, through Québec and Ontario, into the Prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, all the way north to the Arctic Ocean. The most notable topographical feature of the Great Lakes Lowlands is the Niagara Escarpment, a high ridge of limestone cliffs that runs about 250 miles north from Niagara Falls through the Bruce Peninsula to the Manitoulin Islands in Lake Huron.

Archeology is, of course, concerned with spatial layers that reflect temporal events. Stories are temporal actions that reflect spatial significance. As C. S. Lewis once said, for stories to be stories, they must be a series of events; yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch something that has no sequence, but rather something more like a state or quality. As Victor Hugo once said, "Nothing sequential is applicable to God."

Munro is too smart not to be aware of the contrast between time as being marked by a series of solid layers stacked on each other in space and time being something that constantly moves. The paradox of this stillness that continually moves reminds us of the paradox of the word “still” in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Thou still unravished bride of quietness.” The literary critic Murray Krieger in a famous essay entitled “Ekpharasis and the Still Movement of Poetry” has pointed out that the word “still” means both “not moving” and “still going on.” In the artwork, a “here-and-now” unique concrete action, by means of aesthetic pattern, echo, and repetition, becomes a "forever-now motion." Thus, in the artwork, we perceive both motion and stasis at once.

Although we are temporally caught up in the turn of time, we are trapped like fossils in the spatial layers of the past. It is the short story, in the hands of great artists such as Alice Munro, who, like Stephen Millhauser, takes her cue from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” As Millhauser says, “think of it: the world in a grain of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself.

Twelve Short Story Gift or Wish List Suggestions for the Twelve Days of Christmas

If you love the short story and celebrate Christmas by exchanging gifts, then what better gift to give than a truly great collection of stories by one or more of the very best short story writers of the twentieth century? Or if someone has asked you for a gift idea, and you do not have all the following collections, send this list to your friend with your choice starred; you can’t lose on any of them. Short stories are truly the gift that keeps on giving, for unlike novels, you can read them again and again, year after year. My reward for posting this? Your gifting and reading pleasure.

Unless marked otherwise, the following prices are for paperbacks from Amazon, who, for my money, consistently has the best prices.

Flannery O’Connor,
Complete Stories $12.24
This is the collection that won “best of best” of National Book Awards. Challenging but unforgettable stories.

Eudora Welty
Collected Stories $10.88
Shortlisted for the “best of best” of National Book Awards. This is the one I voted for. Welty’s mythic world and unerring use of language are national treasures.

John Updike
Early Stories $13.57
A big fat book of crisp Updike stories from early in his career. Some of his best.

Alice Munro
Selected Stories $11.53
Runaway $10.20
Some of the best early Munro stories, classics of the genre, and, in my opinion, her best more recent collection.

Andre Dubus
Selected Stories $10.85
Dancing After Hours $11.76
The best of vintage Dubus and his memorable final collection.

William Trevor
Collected Stories $19.80
Selected Stories $23.10 (hardcover)
The first is a delicious fat volume of most early Trevor stories. The second includes stories from his last four collections. Not to be missed.

T. C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle Stories $13.60
Ah, he’s a lot a fun—lightweight and a showman, but still passes the time pleasantly.

Annie Proulx
Close Range $10.20
Bad Dirt $11.20
Fine the Way It Is $10.20
These are the three Wyoming Stories collections; they show what a truly great short story writer Proulx is.

Tobias Wolff
Our Story Begins $10.85
This is a selection of his vintage stories, plus a few recent ones. The early ones are better, but Wolfe is always worth reading. A master of the form.

David Means
Assorted Fire Events $5.44
The Secret Goldfish $5.58
The Spot $15.64 (hardcover)
These are David Mean’s three best books. If you haven’t read him, take advantage of Amazon’s cut-rate price on the first two.

Raymond Carver
Collected Stories $26.40 (hardcover)
This is the classic Library of America collection. Gotta read Carver again and again.

Bernard Malamud
The Complete Stories $13.60
Still one of the best short-story writers of the 20th century. Even Flannery O’Connor liked him.

Happy Holidays, whatever your holiday, and thanks for reading "Reading the Short Story"

One More Word (I think) on Munro's "Corrie"

Well, my friends. Thank you so much for the invigorating discussion about Alice Munro’s “Corrie.” However, I have nothing new to add to what I have said in defense of Ms. Munro's tactic in the story. I think she supports the secrecy theme with the free indirect point of view very nicely indeed. I hope some others will weigh in on this little debate. However, I leave it, at least for the time being, with this little quote I have penciled in on a 3x5 card (Raymond Carver used to do this; remember him?) from a piece by Joyce Cary (remember him?) in the New York Times Book Review way back in 1950: (I was only nine at the time, but I was precocious.)

"Every professional artist has met the questioner who asks of some detail: ‘Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?’”

I used the quote as the heading for a piece I did several years ago on Hemingway’s story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” rebutting one critic’s claim that Hemingway had screwed up the dialogue designation in the story, thus creating reader confusion. As a result, Scribner’s actually changed the text in the next edition of Hemingway’s Collected Stories. I was outraged; I knew Hemingway was too damned careful to muck the story up and tried hard to show that he had a sound thematic reason for creating what that critic thought was a mistake. The last time I checked, Scribner’s had changed it back to the original. So it goes!

I always tried to convince my students that if they read a story and thought it was screwed up or just plan screwy, they should assume first of all that it was their fault and not the fault of the writer. I always assume, and tried to convince them to assume, that the writer knew what he or she was doing. However, if they read it several times and really gave themselves over to the work and still couldn’t come to terms with it, then, I was happy to listen to arguments. I have been happy to listen to arguments by Ed and Kseniya about “Corrie,” but I have read it again and again, and I still believe Ms. Munro has got it right here. I am not saying I can’t be convinced that Munro cheated (Heavens!) or that she did not know how to pull it off (Lord a’mercy!), just that at this point, my faith in her unerring ability at writing short stories has not been shaken. Keep those cards and letters coming!

In the meantime, serendipitously, I have been reading David Means’ new collection The Spot, which contains a story entitled “Reading Chekhov,” which is a version of Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog,” the greatest adultery story in Christendom, in my opinion. So I went back and read Chekhov's “Lady with the Pet Dog” again and was, as the young’uns like to say, “blown away.” I then looked up Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Lady with the Pet Dog,” and was so underwhelmed that I dozed off twice.

So, since with Munro, we have been talking about adultery (we have been talking about adultery, haven’t we?), I thought I would post a blog comparing the Means with the Munro with the Chekhov with the Oates. I love to bad mouth Oates about as much as I love to praise David Means.

Oh, by the way, I just got the new edition of Best American Short Stories, 2010 and am reading it dutifully. I will have a post on my progress in a couple of weeks.

And there is a new David Means story in the recent issue of the New Yorker. I will comment on it in the next week also.

I appreciate my readers and look forward to more lively responses to my humble remarks.

Alice Munro's "Corrie": Secrecy and Point of View

There’s nothing I enjoy more since starting this blog than interacting with readers who are reading the same stories I am and have thoughtful things to say about them. Kseniya has a very insightful comment and query on Alice Munro’s “Corrie” that I think deserves a second blog entry on that story. Her question made me go back and read it twice more. So at the risk of sounding, at best, academic and, at worst, pedantic, I post the following post script to Munro’s story.

Kseniya points out that the point of view of the first part of the story seems to be that of an omniscient teller, although it stays within the perspective of Howard Ritchie. She says that when we learn about Sadie’s letter threatening blackmail, we believe the omniscient teller to be telling us the truth. Kseniya also says she takes the letter for a fact because Ritchie does not seem cunning enough to dream up this scheme. Furthermore, she says that if the letter is a lie, the reader begins to wonder what is and what is not fact in the story, thus raising the issue of an unreliable narrator. Moreover, Kseniya suggests that since we are given quite a bit of insight into Ritchie’s mind in the first part of the story, it seems manipulative of the narrator to withhold the fact that he keeps the money.

Here is my own take on the point of view issue in the story: First of all, I think that a writer of good short stories, such as Alice Munro, is very careful to make the technique of the story parallel the theme of the story. The key to the success of any affair is secrecy. And although “Corrie” embodies a complex of themes about infidelity--cheating, concealment, guilt, compensation, money, family, stasis--secrecy is the central theme. And to illuminate this theme, Munro must manipulate the point of view very carefully.

Because this is a short story concerned with the themes mentioned above, not a novel concerned with the particulars of the characters’ behavior and thoughts, what we know about Howard Ritchie in the first section of the story, even though we seem to be within his perspective, are only those things that contribute to the theme the story develops. We only need to know the following: that Ritchie is “equipped” with a “family”; that he is conservative; that he is somewhat awkward about how to respond to Corrie’s lameness; that he feels he has no time for anything but earning a living and caring for his family; and that he suspects that when Corrie goes to Egypt she will be snapped up by some creepy fortune hunter; that he finds her behavior verging on the tiresome; that he knows, from his own experience, that for some men money never becomes tiresome.

If we only seem to know a few facets of Ritchie’s feelings and thoughts, it is because we only require these to respond to the theme. And based on this knowledge, I would say there is nothing to suggest that Ritchie would not exploit Corrie for her money.

In the second section of the story, which introduces the blackmail letter from Sadie, the point of view is carefully controlled, as is the voice of the verbs. The information about Sadie working in a house in the city after leaving Corrie’s employ is revealed in passive voice. Noting that Sadie continues to do housework, the narrator says, “This was discovered on an occasion when Howard and his wife were invited to dinner, with others at the home of some rather important people in Kitchener.” Who discovers it? Ritchie, of course, since we are still within his perspective.

However the account seems to focus on this being Sadie’s discovery. This ostensible shift takes place very subtly in the following sentences: “There was Sadie waiting on tables, coming face to face with the man she had seen in Corrie’s house The man she had seen with his arm around Corrie when she came in to take the plates away or fix the fire. An unknown woman with him, who, the conversation soon made plain, was his wife. It was also made plain that his wife had not come recently into the picture. Her time had overlapped with Corrie.” This is not Sadie’s perspective, but what Sadie’s perspective might have been from Ritchie’s perspective.

There does not seem to be any question that Ritchie has actually seen Sadie at a party he and his wife attended. However, since we have been limited to Ritchie’s point of view and have no reason to think we have shifted into Sadie’s point of view, this seems clearly to be Ritchie’s account of the encounter, in which he assumes that Sadie knows that his affair with Corrie is illicit, but does not know what Sadie intends to do with the information. By the time Ritchie tells Corrie about all this, he has tentatively decided what he will do.

Ritchie has been brought up in a fiercely religious household and knows that someone must pay for breaking the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” He knows he cannot pay, for he has little money and has a family to support. And why should not Sadie pay, since she has no family responsibility, doesn’t care for money, and is crippled? This is all rather harsh when expressed so blatantly, which is one of the reasons that Munro keeps it secret. The only relationship in which we see Ritchie engage is with Corrie, and since the key to his relationship with Corrie is secrecy, what we know about Ritchie is only what Corrie knows.

When we read the line, “Sadie said that she had not gossiped about it all,” we know that this is something that Ritchie has told Corrie, not necessarily something that Sadie has told Ritchie. Ritchie’s account of the contents of the letter to Corrie is told in a coy way that, we later learn, does not sound like Sadie at all. “Would his wife be interested in getting this information?” is the way Ritchie says Sadie put it. Even more unlike Sadie is her ostensible remark, “I would hate to have to break the heart of such a nice lady with a big silver-fox collar on her coat.” Corrie wonders how Sadie would even know a silver-fox collar from “a hole in the ground,” asking Ritchie, “Are you sure that’s what she said.” The silver-fox collar, which Ritchie finds hypocritical of his wife to wear, given her left wing leanings, is a little detail of verisimilitude that Ritchie invents to make his story seem credible.

In this conversation, the point of view perspective subtly shifts to Corrie, for she wonders what if Ritchie rejects her offer to pay the blackmail, what if he thinks it is a sign that they should stop. “She was sure there’d be something like that in his voice and in his face. All that old sin stuff. Evil.” When Corrie says, “You’d feel you were taking it away from your family,” Ritchie’s face actually cleared, although Corrie fears she should never have said that word “family.” Ritchie then suddenly remembers something else from the letter—that the money has to be in bills. “He spoke without looking up, as if about a business deal. Bills were best for Corrie, too. They would not implicate her.” Ritchie is obviously thinking on his feet here. And indeed it is a business deal.

It is September when Corrie hears about the death of Sadie. She has given the money to Ritchie to deposit in Sadie’s box in August. Corrie knows that Ritchie has not heard about Sadie’s death, and she also knows that Sadie was not able to pick up the money this time because of her illness, so she wonders if Ritchie has checked to see if the money has been picked up; she thinks not since he has not contacted her.

When she wakes the next morning, “She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.” She realizes that the news of Sadie’s death that would have freed them from the blackmail and the “queasy feeling” she has always had of “the never-quite safeness of their affair is no news to Ritchie at all, because Sadie does not matter and never has. The “family” theme is echoed, as she thinks that the twice-yearly sum of money would have gone straight into his pocket, for he is a man with a family, children to educate, and bills to pay. What makes Corrie come to this realization? All the same things that have made the reader come to the realization: her knowledge of Ritchie, her knowledge of Sadie, Ritchie’s account of the nonexistent letter, his failure to contact her about the money in the mailbox.

We do not get inside the mind of Corrie in this section of the story any more than we get inside the mind of Ritchie in the first section. We have no particular information about her feelings. We only know she is trying to adjust to the realization she has come to and that she feels a sense of emptiness—“a cavity everywhere, most notably in her chest.” She then comes up with another possibility. She knows that Ritchie may never know of Sadie’s death since he has no connection with her and no connection with the family she has worked for. He will therefore expect things to go on just as they have—with Corrie giving him the money twice a year and him pocketing it.

Corrie could say something, but she knows that what they have demands payment, and she is the one who can afford to pay. And so, she will continue to pay, for what difference does it make if the money goes to Sadie or to Ritchie, for she has already made it clear that she is willing to pay. Of course, a day may arrive when Ritchie will find out that Sadie is dead. What will happen then? This just means that for Corrie, one sense of “never-quite safeness” has taken the place of another. Everything is in its proper place—in Corrie and Ritchie’s lives and in Alice Munro’s story.

Well, that’s how I read the story. I would love to hear other readings. Thanks, Kseniya, for sending me back to the story.

Alice Munro, "Corrie" New Yorker, Oct 11, 2010

Well, my friends, I will take “1 over 70” in preference to “20 under 40” any time, when the “1” is Alice Munro. Ms. Munro is seventy-nine and, thank heavens, still going strong. I have read her new story “Corrie” in the Oct 11, 2010 issue of the New Yorker three times now, and it gets better with each reading, which is one of my criteria for a great story. I thought too many of the “20 under 40” pieces in the New Yorker in the past months needed only a single reading. But that may have been because most of them were chapters from novels and therefore, by my definition, not as carefully written and tightly wound as short stories.

I have recently been in e-mail conversation with Ulrica, one of my readers, who has studied Munro extensively. She notes the frequent comment made by reviewers of Munro’s stories that they have the “complexity” of a novel and asks if I think that a comparison between a short story and a novel always must be aware of the genre difference. I think the genre difference is crucial and that the issue raised by reviewers’ judgment that a Munro story is “novelistic” settles on the meaning of the word “complexity.”

I tried to deal with the issue of novelistic vs. short story complexity a few years ago in an article on Alice Munro in the Canadian journal Wascana Review and would be happy to send a copy of the article to anyone who does not have access to that very fine journal. Ulrica’s question and the publication of Munro’s new story “Corrie” prompts me to visit that issue again. The very fact that “Corrie” covers a time period of over twenty years will probably raise the question for some reviewers, who may assume that the development of characters over time is a novelist notion.

However, after three, going on four, readings of the story, I would insist that ”Corrie” is a classic short story with all the virtues of that form subtly displayed. In this story there is no development over time, and that fact lies at the heart of what the story is about. I make no apologies for the following analysis being a plot “spoiler,” for, as I have said many times, the real reading of a story occurs the second or third time, not the first—which is merely an internalizing of the plot and character configuration to make the important second reading possible. “What happens next” is not so important in the short story. “What it means and how it means” is everything.

The two key words of the first sentence of “Corrie”—“money” and “family”--announces the theme of the story, but one does not know this until one comes to the end of the first reading. The first thing we notice about Corrie, who is 26 at the beginning of the story, is that she is always laughing or on the “verge of laughing.” The first thing we notice about Howard Ritchie, who is only a few years older, is that he is “already equipped with a wife and a young family.” The only thing we need to know about Corrie’s father is that he owns a shoe factory, has lots of money, and soon after has a stroke--all of which makes Corrie alone and available. Although Ritchie finds her somewhat “tiresome,” she has money, and he knows that “to some men that never became tiresome.”

Oh, one more thing about Corrie—she is slightly lame from a childhood bout with polio. Why is she lame? Well, for one thing, it makes possible this response from Ritchie, which announces the beginning of their affair: “He hadn’t been sure how he would react to the foot, in bed. But in some way it seemed more appealing, more unique, than the rest of her.” Ritchie has never had sex with anyone but his wife, and Corrie is a virgin, “a complicated half truth owing to the interference of a piano teacher when she was fifteen.” (We may or may not recall this detail later in the story when Ritchie begins taking piano lessons)

Ritchie is religious, but keeps it to himself because his wife, who is very left wing, would make a joke of it. Corrie already makes a joke of religion for herself, when she says she has never had time for God, “because her father was enough to cope with.”

Enter Sadie Wolfe, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the serpent in the garden, or maybe the red herring. Hired to help care for Corrie’s invalid father, Corrie tells her she is too smart to do housekeeping and gives her money for typing lessons. However, (and here is where the point of view of the story is handled so slyly by Munro that we are kept more than a little off guard), Sadie takes another housekeeping job and, at a party, discovers that the man who has been coming to visit her previous employer, Corrie, has a wife. Ostensibly, Sadie sends Ritchie a blackmail letter, threatening to blow the whistle on him to his wife. When he tells Corrie about this, she agrees to pay the blackmail payment (we are not told how much money, for that would elicit an unnecessary judgment on our part—how much is it worth to keep an affair secret?), which she gives to Ritchie twice yearly, which he places in a P.O. box in Sadie’s name. Then, As Corrie expresses it when she gives the money to Ritchie twice a year, “How the time goes around.”

The reason Corrie pays the blackmail demand is not only that Ritchie does not have it, but that he would feel he is taking it away from his family. “Family. She should never have said that. Never have said that word.” Ritchie’s family is the unspoken factor of the affair.

After arrangements for this on-going blackmail payment is settled, the story shifts to focus on Corrie, whose father dies, after which the shoe factory is taken over by a large firm that promises to keep it running. When the company closes it, she decides to turn it into a museum in which she will exhibit shoe-making tools. When the company tears the building down, she decides to take over an old library in town, which she opens two days a week. These two ventures would seem to be mere plot elements or place keepers for the time that passes, if it were not for her remark to Ritchie when he comes back from Spain with his family, “You’d think my place were a shine the way you carry on.” This motif of places in which the past is enshrined—the museum and the library—is also emphasized by the fact that the most prominent business in the town is a furniture store “where the same tables and sofas sat forever in the windows, and the doors seemed never to be open.”

This static relationship continues until there is an abrupt shift. In September, Corrie learns that Sadie Wolfe has died and that the funeral is scheduled for a church in the town near the library. When she goes to the reception following the service, she meets the woman for whom Sadie worked, who praises Sadie, telling Corrie how much the children and later the grandchildren loved her, and how she kept her illness (probably cancer) to herself. “She was absolutely not a person to make a fuss,” the woman says. The minister agrees, “Sadie was a rare person.” “All agreed. Corrie included.” This is a restrained reference to the fact that Corrie has never had children of her own and never will have. It also suggests that Sadie may not have been the kind of person to blackmail someone. But then, who knows?

When she awakes the next morning, “She knows something. She has found it in her sleep. There is no news to give him. No news, because there never was any. No news about Sadie, because Sadie doesn’t matter and she never did.” Corrie realizes there was never a post office box, that the money was kept by Ritchie for the trip to Spain and other family expenses. “People with families, summer cottages, children to educate, bills to pay—they don’t have to think about how to spend such an amount of money.” (Now we know why “family” and “money” are the two key words in the first sentence.)

Corrie now tries to get used to this “current reality” and is surprised to discover that she is capable of shaping another reality. If Ritchie doesn’t’ know that Sadie is dead he will “just expect things to go on as usual.” Corrie thinks she could say something that would destroy them, but she does not have to. She knows that what she and Ritchie have had—what they still have—demands payment” and that she is the one who can “afford to pay.”

The last paragraph of the story, after this realization is:

“When she goes down to the kitchen again she goes gingerly, making everything fit into its proper place.”

This seems to me a wonderfully self-reflexive ending to a story in which, indeed, as is appropriate for the short story form, everything does fit in its proper place.

If this were an actual real-life situation, or a novel about a real-life situation, then we might ask the following questions:

“Why does Corrie put up with Ritchie for all these years? What kind of experience do they have together? Why doesn’t Corrie find herself a good man? Why is Ritchie such a son-of-a-bitch?” But the story is not about such issues. Corrie is not a real person; she is a paradigm of a woman having an affair. The story is about the affair as a universal, classic phenomenon. Ritchie is not a real person; we know very little about him, about what he thinks. He is a paradigmatic married man having an affair.

And what paradigmatically characterizes an affair?
Well, for one thing, the “other woman” must be an object of desire to the man, but not necessarily an object of desire to all men. That’s why Corrie is both rich and crippled. She has something Ritchie wants, but is flawed by something that other men may not want. And what is Corrie like? We know nothing about her except that she does not take things too seriously—thus often on the verge of laughing—and that she accepts her responsibility in the affair to the extent that she is willing to pay for it. And what kind of life does Ritchie have? All we know is that it is a life with his family. We do not see Corrie crying about being left alone when he spends time with his family. For after all, this is what she has bought into. What is her life like during these years of the affair? We know nothing particular about it. We just know it is static, frozen in space—like an artifact in the museum or a book in a library, or the furniture in the window of the furniture store.

I would be most happy to hear from my readers about this story. There is much more to say about it, I think, but I have said enough. I look forward to hearing from you.

Alice Munro's "Passion": Summary and Key Quotes

The story begins with Grace, who is now in her 60s looking for the Traverses’ summerhouse in the Ottawa Valley. Why she is looking for it is not mentioned. She has not been here in many years, and there are changes; roads that used to go straight now have curves. There seem to be too many roads with names they did not have before. She looking for the past, but is lost in the new. There is a village now or a suburb with some vacation houses and some for year-round residents. She is about to turn back when she sees the octagonal house of the Woods, an old couple, old as “Grace is now,” and the house has a “mistaken look.” She finds the Travers house with its wraparound veranda, like houses she saw later in Australia.

“What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody had come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?”

The Travers family: Gretchen—28; Neil—mid-30’s; Maury—21. Neil is not a Travers but a Barrow, for Mrs. Travers’ first husband is dead., but we do not know how at this point.

When Maury asks her out, she asks him if it is a dare, and he doesn’t know what she means. She wonders if it is a pickup to take it out to park, which is considered “rather shameful, rather had up, for a girl to agree.” When he asks “What?” painfully, she looks at him. “It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined
They see the film Father of the Bride, and she hates spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked. Maury thinks that if she had that kind of wedding, she would have to spend years saving for it and he is “stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.”

Because she wears a ballerina skirt and a blouse through which you can see the tops of her breasts, “There was a discrepancy, no doubt, between the way she presented herself and the way she wanted to be judged.” (How does she want to be judged? Not like the girl in the movie, but then she dresses to be seen a “bit ragged around the edges, in fact, giving herself gypsy airs.”

She falls in love with Mrs. Travers the way Maury had fallen in love with her.
Grace’s background: Mother died when she was three; father moved to Saskatchewan and had another family. She is raised by great aunt and great uncle; Great uncle canes chairs and teaches her how to do it. She has just finished high school, is twenty, has finished later than others because she takes extra classes, especially hard subjects for girls, like Geometry, Trigonometry, Physics. Does not plan to go to college, so principal asks her why she is doing this: She says she wants to learn everything she can learn for free before she starts a career of caning.

She gets the job at the Inn because both her aunt and uncle and the principle use the same language, believing she should get a “taste of life” before settling down.
Only Mrs. Travers seems to understand that learning has to do with life in some way other than earning a living. Mrs. Travers, who had been sent to business school was told she had to be useful, but wishes she had “crammed her mind instead, or first, with what was useless.”

Grace’s memories of parking sessions with Maury “proved to be much hazier than her memories of sitting at the Traverses’ round dinning table…”

The family plays a definitions game called Balderdash or Fictionary. Someone finds an obscure word that no one knows; each player writes a definition and gives it to the one who picked out the word. The picker writes down the correct definition. The definitions are shuffled and the picker reads them. Each player, except the picker, votes for what he or she think is the correct definition. A player gets a point if he or she guesses the correct definition and a point for each one who guesses his or her definition.

Mavis gets into an argument with Wat (Gretchen’s husband) over a definition, but when the dictionary proves it acceptable, she says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I’m just outclassed by you people.” When she leaves, she says “I have to give you an Oxford dictionary next Christmas” with a “bitter tinkle of a laugh.” When Mrs. Travers asks Gretchen to make a pot of coffee, she goes in to the kitchen muttering, “What fun. Jesus wept.”

Mrs. Travers brings Grace to the house when she has a break of a few hours and often leaves her alone, during which time she reads. She sits in a leather chair in shorts and her legs become sweaty and stuck to the leather. “Perhaps it was because of the intense pleasure of reading.” (This line was not in the New Yorker version, but added by Munro for the book version.)

On the ride back to the hotel, Mrs. Travers waits until Grace’s thoughts get loose from whatever book she had been in and then might mention she has read it herself. The example given is Anna Karenina, which Mrs. Travers has read many times. First she sympathized with Kitty and then with Anna, and then with Dolly. She speaks of Dolly trying to figure out how to do the washing, and the problem about the washtubs. “I suppose that’s just how your sympathies change as you get older. Passion gets pushed behind the washtubs.”

Maury starts talking about marriage, taking it for granted, but the only thing Grace is delighted with is the idea of traveling to Peru, Iraq, the Northwest Territories, etc. She is more delighted with this than with what he spoke of with pride as “our own home.” “None of this seemed at all real to her,” but the idea of being a chair caner in the house and town where she grew “had never seemed real either.”

She has had fantasies of getting married, “and in exactly in this way, with the man making up his mind immediately.” He would be handsome like Maury. Passionate like Maury. Pleasurable physical intimacies would follow.”

“This was the thing that had not happened. In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing. He felt that it was his responsibility to protect her. And the ease with which she offered herself threw him off balance. He sensed, perhaps, that it was cold—a deliberate offering which he could not understand and which did not fit in at all with his notions of her. She herself did not realize how cold she was—she believed that her show of eagerness must be leading to the pleasures she knew about, in solitude and in her imagining, and she felt that it was up to Maury to take over. Which he would not do.”

“These sieges left them both disturbed and slightly angry or ashamed, so that they could not stop kissing, clinging, using fond words to make it up to each other as they said good night. It was a relief to Grace to be alone, to get into bed in the hotel dormitory and blot the last couple of hours out of her mind. And she thought it must be a relief to Maury, too, to be driving down the highway by himself, rearranging his impressions of his Grace so that he could stay wholeheartedly in love with her.”

Mrs. Travers says Maury is a “dear uncomplicated man, like his father. Not like his brother. …Neil is—he’s deep. “Deep unfathomable caves of ocean bear.” She says for a long time she and Neil only had each other. “so I think he is special.” She says she does not worry about Maury, she worries a bit about Neil. Gretchen she does not worry about at all. “Because women always have got something, haven’t they, to keep them going? That men haven’t got.”

Now we find out two things: That Neil’s father had killed himself and that Mrs. Travers gets into trouble now and then with her nerves and has to go in hospital for a couple of weeks until they get her “stabilized.” Neil’s father killed himself because he was “unstable.”

Now we have the bit at Thanksgiving about no cranberry sauce, and Maury wants Grace to go with him, but the two little girls want her to swing with them. She breaks her sandal strap and takes her shows off and when she gets in the swing, she cuts her foot on a clamshell that Dana was going to use to make a house for her snail, Ivan.

When Neil arrives, Mrs. Travers says, “Now, that is what I call opportune.” Grace recognizes smell of liquor edged with mint on his breath. His hands do not feel drunk.

He suggests going to hospital for an anti-tetanus shot, which is for him a good excuse to leave. As they leave, Mrs. Travers, with that “look of hazy enthusiasm that seemed natural to her” says “This is good…This is very good, Grace, you are a godsend. You’ll try to keep him away from drinking today, won’t you? You’ll know how to do it.”

Grace heard these words, but gave them hardly any thought. She was too dismayed by the change in Mrs. Travers, by what looked like an increase in bulk, a stiffness in all her movements, a random and rather frantic air of benevolence. A weepy gladness leaking out of her eyes. (This sentence added in the New Yorker version) And a faint crust showing at the corners of her mouth, like sugar.

Now begins the final section of the wild ride.

“There was a highway overpass above the railway tracks, and they took this at such speed that Grace had the impression, at its crest, that the car had lifted off the pavement and they were flying. There was hardly any traffic, so she wasn’t frightened, and anyway there was nothing she could do.”

And Neil said to Grace, “You didn’t want to go home yet, did you?”
“No,” Grace said, as if she’d seen the word written in front of her, on the wall. As if she were having her eyes tested.

“Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her. But at the time there was no clang—acquiescence simply rippled through her, and the rights of those left behind were smoothly cancelled.”

“Her memory of this day remained clear and detailed for a long time, though there was a variation in the parts of it she dwelled on. And even in some of those details she must have been wrong.”

“In Grace’s recollection, there was not another car on the highway, and their speed approached the flight on the highway overpass. This cannot have been true—there must have been people on the road, people on their way home from church that Sunday morning, or on their way to spend Thanksgiving with their families. Neil must have slowed down when driving through villages, and around the many curves on the old highway. She was not used to driving in a convertible with the top down, wind in her eyes, taking charge of her hair. It gave her the illusion of constant perfect speed—not frantic but miraculous, serene”.

And though Maury and Mavis and the rest of the family had been wiped from her mind, some scrap of Mrs. Travers did remain, hovering, delivering in a whisper and with a strange, shamed giggle, her last message. You’ll know how to do it.

“Grace and Neil did not talk, of course. As she remembers it, you would have had to scream to be heard. And what she remembers is, to tell the truth, hardly distinguishable from her idea, her fantasies at that time, of what sex should be like. The fortuitous meeting, the muted but powerful signals, the nearly silent flight in which she herself figured more or less as a captive. An airy surrender, her flesh nothing now but a stream of desire.”

When they stop at a hotel, it is not for the bed, but for the bar. Everyone fulfills her fantasies. The bar is as she would have expected. When Neil is recognized by the barman, “Grace believed it would be like this—everywhere they went, there would be somebody Neil knew already.”

Neil asks her if she minds being dragged into any old place, and she says no. He says, “I need your company.” But why does he need her company? When licks her palm, he asks, “Did you think I was adducting you for fell purposes,” she says “No,” but she says she is lying. He says there was a time when you would have been right, as if she had said “yes,” but, he says, not today. “You’re safe as a church today.” Grace thinks the word “fell” is so like his mother.”

“The changed tone of his voice, which had become intimate, frank, and quiet, and the memory of his lips pressed to, then his tongue flicked across, her skin, affected Grace to such an extent that she was hearing the words but not the sense of what he was telling her. She could feel a hundred, hundreds of flicks of his tongue, a dance of supplication, all over her skin. But she thought to say, “Churches aren’t always safe.”

“It seemed that they were up on top of the world here or on one of the tops. The field fell away on all sides; the trees around being only partly visible, because they grew on lower ground.”

“Who did he know here, who lived in this house? A woman? It didn’t seem possible that the sort of woman he would want could live in a place like this, but then there was no end to the strangeness that Grace could encounter today. No end to it.”
All this strangeness is part of the fictional world she has entered.

She thinks it is a bootlegger and thinks of the bootlegger as a raddled, skinny old man, morose and suspicious, sitting on the porch with a shotgun on Halloween.
Not that she had ever been inside a bootlegger’s house, but the partitions were thin, at home, between some threadbare ways of living that were respectable and some that were not.

Neil asks, “Tell me about what interests you, then. What interests you?”
She said, “You do.”
“Oh. What about me interest you?” His hand slid away.
“What you’re doing now,” Grace said determinedly. “Why.”
“You mean drinking? Why I’m drinking?” The cap came off the flask again. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Because I know what you’d say.”
“What’s that? What would I say?”
“You’d say, ‘What else is there to do?’ Or something like that.”
“That’s true,” he said. “That’s about what I’d say. Well, then you’d try to tell me why I was wrong.”
“No,” Grace said. “No. I wouldn’t.”

When she’d said that, she felt cold. She had thought that she was serious, but now she saw that she’d been trying to impress him, to show herself as worldly as he was, and in the middle of that she had come on this rock-bottom truth. This lack of hope--genuine, reasonable, and everlasting. There was no comfort in what she saw, now that she could see it.
Neil said, “You wouldn’t? No. You wouldn’t. That’s a relief. You are a relief, Grace.”

“She had thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what she’d been working toward at all. She had seen deeper, deeper into him than she could ever have managed if they’d gone that way. . [Change to book version: “But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now. ]

What she saw was final. As if she were at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and it was all there was.”

“It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction, like everything else, from the thing that was waiting, no matter what, all the time.”

[Change to book version: “It wasn’t the drinking that was responsible. The same thing was waiting, no matter what, and all the time. Drinking, needing to drink—that was just some sort of distraction.”]

When night comes, it becomes clear to her that “they were still in the world after all. That she had to get back to Bailey’s Falls.”
She drives back, lost, and disoriented, not having come into Bailey’s Falls in this unfamiliar way. She becomes more frightened. “ It was one thing to drink in unknown territory, another to turn in at the inn gates.”

He told her to slip her foot out of its sandal, and he pressed it here and there, before saying, “Nice. No heat. No swelling. Your arm hurt from the shot? Maybe it won’t.” He walked her to the door, and thanked her for her company. She was still amazed to be safely back. She hardly realized that it was time to say goodbye.
As a matter of fact, she does not know, to this day, if those words were spoken or if he only caught her, wound his arms around her, held her so tightly, with such continuous, changing pressure that it seemed as if more than two arms were needed, as if she were surrounded by him, his body strong and light, demanding and renouncing all at once, as if he were telling her that she was wrong to give up on him, everything was possible, but then again that she was not wrong, he meant to stamp himself on her and go.

She hears of the car crash. It has gone directly into the bridge abutment, rammed right in, totally smashed. It is obviously not an accident.
She did not have to deal with Maury face to face. He wrote her a letter.
Just say he made you do it. Just say you didn’t want to go.
She wrote back five words. I did want to go.
She was going to add, I’m sorry, but stopped herself.

The last paragraph. after Mr. Travers gives her a check for a thousand dollars, recalls the phrase earlier about her getting a taste of life.
"The check was for a thousand dollars. Immediately she thought of sending it back or tearing it up, and sometimes even now she thinks that that would have been a grand thing to do. But in the end, of course, she was not able to do it. In those days, it was enough money to insure her a start in life."

International Short Story Conference: Toronto, June, 2010

I will be attending the 11th International Conference on the Short Story in Toronto, Canada this month, speaking on a Plenary Session panel entitled “Theoretical Approaches to Alice Munro’s “Passion” with other short story theorists and critics. Michael Trussler, University of Regina, will speak on “Melancholy and Metaphysical Solitude in ‘Passion’.” Per Winther, University of Oslo will speak on “Munro’s Handling of Perspective and Descriptive Detail in ‘Passion.’” Michael Toolan, University of Birmingham, will speak on “Engagement Via Emotional Heightening in ‘Passion’.” Susan Lohafer, from University of Iowa, will speak on “Entering ‘Passion’ Empirically.” The topic of my own presentation is: “The Short Story’s Way of Meaning in ‘Passion’.”

You can find the program for the four-day conference at: http://www.yorku.ca/shortcon/

During the month of June, I plan to post blogs on my own presentation on Munro’s story “Passion,” and on the events at the conference, including summaries of the other panel presentations on the story. If you are interested in following along and making your own comments, the New Yorker version of “Passion” is available at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/03/22/040322fi_fiction

The story is in her 2004 collection Runaway.

The Society for the Study of the Short Story has been around for a number of years. I have made presentations at nine of the eleven International Conferences. It is the one conference I try to attend regularly, not only because it focuses on the area of my special interest, but because it is the only chance I get to see old friends from around the world.

The conference, which is held every two years, began twenty-two years ago in Paris, France. Since then, it has been held in New Orleans, Lisbon, Cork, and several times at the University of Iowa, home of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. What is unique about the conference is that it is not only a platform for literary critics to discuss the short story as a form, it also provides an opportunity for short story writers to read their stories and meet with their most dedicated readers.

Over the years, I have met John Barth, Anne Beattie, Isabelle Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Ellen Douglas, Francine Prose, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolfe, Bharata Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Edna O’Brien, Richard Ford, and many others.

Writers reading and mingling this June in Toronto include: Robert Olen Butler, Sandra Cisneros, Alistair MacLeod, Margaret Atwood, Helena Maria Viramontes, Olive Senior, Bharata Mukergee, Clark Blaise, and others.

Panels will feature presentations on Canadian short fiction, metafiction and postmodernism, the relationship between short fiction and nonfiction, flash fiction, postcolonialism, Irish short fiction, fairy tale, etc.

One panel title that gave me a laugh and that I will be sure not to miss is:
“Theory and the Short Story: Poe, Charles E. May, and Erich Auerbach”. What a hoot!

I will post some work I have done on my presentation on "Passion" in a few days. I hope you get a chance to read it before then and join with me in a discussion of it.