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'Every Last Thing … Everlasting': Alice Munro and the Limits of Narrative

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Last Updated August 12, 2024.

SOURCE: "'Every Last Thing … Everlasting': Alice Munro and the Limits of Narrative," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 531-41.

[In the following essay, Mayberry explores "the relationship between truth and narrative, between knowing and telling" within Munro's stories and characters.]

Storytelling is the central activity of the characters of Alice Munro's fiction. It is of course the principal task of Munro's narrators—those characters who organize and focalize the events and reflections constituting the short stories; and it is also the frequent activity of a large group of secondary characters whose storytelling is narrated by the chief narrators and thus recessed within the main narrative. Whether seeking or evading truth, all of these characters enlist narrative as the central weapon in their dogged and usually inconclusive struggle with the disturbances born at the intersection of their pasts and their presents. All are impelled to manage their pain, ignorance, and occasional glimpses of knowledge by telling. Some are more successful than others in their struggles, but success, when it occasionally comes, seems more a matter of luck than desert, and is rarely a direct dividend of the narrative act.

Eventually, most of Munro's narrators, both primary and secondary, come to recognize, if only dimly, the imperfection and inadequacy of their medium. In most cases, this inadequacy is a function of the essential incongruence between experience itself and the narrative that would render it, an incongruence complicated by the necessary mediation of memory. The uneasy relationship between language and experience is a recurring concern of Munro's work—one that she neither solves nor despairs of solving. It is stated as early as Lives of Girls and Women, where a more experienced Del judges as "crazy, heartbreaking" her earlier project of fitting "every last thing … radiant everlasting" within the narratives she would write. And with somewhat different implications, it dominates a late work like "Friend of My Youth," where the problem of narrative fidelity is confounded still further by the issue of proprietorship. As legatee of her mother's stories about her youth, the narrator insists on reshaping them into stories that will better suit her own version of the person she needs her mother to have been: "I saw through my mother's story and put in what she left out."

The 1977 volume Moons of Jupiter is one of Munro's most intensely focused examinations of the capabilities and limitations of narrative. A collection of disturbing stories about middle-aged people—mostly women—facing often humiliating uncertainties, Moons has been called "a menopausal progression" [Beverly J. Rasporich in Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, University of Alberta Press, 1990], a look at "the persistent psychological puzzle of women's masochistic complicity in their own humiliation" [Ildiko de Papp Carrington, Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro, Northern Illinois University Press, 1989], and (by Munro herself) an examination of "what men and women want of each other." But Moons is also a work about what stories can do, about the relationship between truth and narrative, between knowing and telling. Confused and uncertain, the women of this volume are groping for knowledge of an unknowable male other: Lydia in "Dulse" telling a psychiatrist about her abusive relationship with Duncan; the narrator in "Bardon Bus" talking her way through a broken affair; Mrs. Cross in "Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd" trying to devise a story about the speechless Jack. Repeatedly, it is through stories, through placing themselves and these others within narrative, that these women seek knowledge, a resolution of their confusion. To tell, they hope, is to know. While some of these characters are temporarily relieved of the pressures of uncertainty, it is not, for the most part, the narrative process that affords this relief. Countless factors conspire against the composition of narrative truth—the failure of memory, the failure of nerve, the discontinuity between past and present, the alienation of language from experience. The stories these women tell must remain incomplete and finally barren of the truths they are seeking.

"Hard-Luck Stories," the tenth story in Moons of Jupiter, is the most direct treatment of the problem of narrative in the volume. Its principal characters storytellers and its principal dramatic action their storytelling, "Hard-Luck Stories" is a supremely meta-narrative work. The story-telling characters, Julie and the unnamed narrator, are not merely accessing the past through their narrative, not merely remembering, but creating, respectively, "entertaining" and "interesting" stories for an audience of one—the silent and predatory Douglas. These characters are self-conscious storytellers, whose divergent management of the activity of telling affords a deep look into Munro's understanding of the narrative act. Through the stories of Julie and the narrator, Munro probes the impulses, varieties, capacities, and limitations of narrative, insisting once more on the uneasy, discontinuous relationship between narrative and experience, and identifying the various versions of lies and uncertainties that no narrative can escape.

Like all of Munro's work, "Hard-Luck Stories" virtually defies plot summary. The story opens in the present tense, with the narrator meeting her friend Julie for lunch. Cryptically, they refer to a day two months earlier when they had been given a ride home from a conference by Douglas Reider, a previous acquaintance of the narrator. The narrative then moves back in time to the day referred to in the first section—the afternoon of the drive. While this afternoon, which includes the drive and a lunch shared by the three, is the principal setting of the story, we are taken back still further in time by three stories told by the two women as they eat lunch with Douglas. Their stories, two by Julie and one by the narrator, relate events occurring at different points in the women's pasts; their common subject is the deceits and stratagems that men practice on women. The telling of these hard-luck stories, which is rendered in direct, quoted speech, constitutes the main action of the work.

In their confessional rendering of sexual confusion and psychological disequilibrium, Julie's stories appear to be concerned with representing difficult personal truths. As a preface to the first story, she admits to having been bulimic at the time:

I was one of those people who gorge, then purge. I used to make cream puffs and eat them all one after the other, or make fudge and eat a whole panful, then take mustard and water to vomit or else massive doses of epsom salts to wash it through. Terrible. The guilt. I was compelled. It must have had something to do with sex. They say now it does, don't they?

And she refers to her condition at the time of the second story as "Miserable [and] mixed-up." In each story, Julie represents herself as a credulous victim of the deceits of disturbed men—the first a mental patient pretending to be a graduate student, the second Julie's group therapist, pretending a passionate interest in Julie while sleeping with several other group members.

While the content of Julie's stories seems to be the stuff of wrenching confession, their manner is anything but pained. As the narrator recognizes, Julie's self-exposure is measured and self-conscious: she "set herself up to be preposterously frank. There was something willed and coquettish … about this." Julie's words have little to do with the past that they would seem to represent; they mark instead a virtual severance of past and present, experience and language. Her narrative cuts her off from the experience it is ostensibly representing. We see evidence of this in the quality of her confession about bulimia quoted above, in the yawning gap between the bulimia itself—this powerful but speechless register of miserable protest—and the spare, businesslike language with which Julie renders it. Whatever pain expressed itself in that eloquent body language of bulimia is nowhere evident within Julie's recounting of the experience. And we see the gap between language and experience again in her reference to the condition of her inmate almost-lover. When the narrator exclaims upon hearing from Julie that "He'd tried to cut his throat," Julie answers, "It wasn't that bad. He was recovering."

Julie's language here and throughout her two stories is in a dialect common to a number of Munro characters—characters whose stories, with their controlled language and tone, operate at a considerable remove from the original events. The narrative of these characters exploits the inevitable discontinuity between language and experience; for them, narrative functions as a virtual false counter, standing for something, surely, but not for the lived experience their narratives pretend to render. Though variously motivated, the narrative modes of these characters are strikingly similar, marked by flat, sparse, spare language and linear chronology. For these characters, language behaves, protecting its users from the vitality and pain that might be uncaged by a less provident use of the medium. This is the narrative method used by Prue, the title character in another story in the Moons volume, whose "anecdotes" pry the told impossibly far apart from its lived antecedent.

She presents her life in anecdotes, and though it is the point of most of her anecdotes that hopes are dashed, dreams ridiculed, things never turn out as expected, everything is altered in a bizarre way and there is no explanation ever, people always feel cheered up after listening to her; they say of her that it is a relief to meet somebody who doesn't take herself too seriously, who is so unintense, and civilized, and never makes any real demands or complaints.

This is also the method of Wilfred, the younger brother in "Visitors," whose repertoire of stories is predictable and repetitious. As his wife recognizes,

In Wilfred's stories you could always be sure that the gloomy parts would give way to something better, and if somebody behaved in a peculiar way there was an explanation for it. If Wilfred figured in his own stories, as he usually did, there was always a stroke of luck for him some-where, a good meal or a bottle of whiskey or some money.

While the careful stories of characters like Prue and Wilfred may temporarily keep deep troubles at bay by depriving them of vivid language, these troubles insist on expression, ingeniously finding translation into a different discourse. Prue's mute rage at Gordon expresses itself in her petty thefts of his belongings ("She just takes something, every now and then"), and Wilfred's unutterable sadness surfaces in crying fits deep in the night.

Given their context of psychic disequilibrium ("I felt I wasn't too far from being loony myself"), Julie's cool and breezy narratives must share some of the protective, distancing motivations impelling Pure and Wilfred. But another agenda also drives her: her stories, with their blithe and studied self-exposure, have the practical effect of attracting Douglas. Her confession to Douglas seeks neither expiation nor representation, but seduction. It is a trick of language and time that converts one thing into another (a painful experience into a "ridiculous" story), just as Julie herself can exchange her earlier "hiking boots and … denim jacket" for a pink dress and flowered hat. Her preposterous frankness, her insistent insertion of sexuality into conversation with a man she has just met, is a not-so-thinly-disguised "come-hither" strategy that meets with complete success: Douglas is attracted to her, and, as we learn from the opening of the story, they become lovers. Julie's stories do, in a sense, authorize or empower her, in that their intentions are realized.

But we cannot be sanguine for her chances for happiness, for her hopes of finding "the one kind [of love] nobody wants to think they've missed out on." For as we learn from the narrator's story, which recounts the ending of her earlier relationship with Douglas, like the inmate and the therapist, Douglas is another man who deceives and uses women. The practical effect of Julie's narrative calls into question Gayle Greene's claim that "all narrative is concerned with change … [that] there is something in the impulse to narrative that is related to the impulse to liberation." For Julie's story merely delivers her into another round of the same cycle, into an affair with a hard and voyeuristic man, about whom the best that can be said is, he "is better than crumbs."

While Munro is not being harsh or moralistic about characters like Julie and Prue, their disinclination to revive their pasts through their narratives surely disqualifies them from the ranks of her heroines. As a writer of narratives whose recurring subject is the past and the use we make of it, who stubbornly insists on a thing called truth while repeatedly despairing of our ability to reach it, Munro appears not to endorse such an ultimately barren and repetitious narrative strategy, valorizing instead those narrative strategies (like the one practiced by the narrator of "Hard-Luck Stories") more dedicated to, if not more capable of, approximating truth. And while she doesn't always reward those characters who work this way, she does present the Julie's and Prue's as trapped in the ignorance constructed by their stories, condemned to reenact rather than to understand their past.

Like Julie's stories, the narrator's single story in "Hard-Luck Stories" is about a man's manipulation of a vulnerable woman. But subject matter is the only common feature of the women's stories; the narrator's motives, methods, and intents are vastly different from Julie's. For the narrator, as for Del in Lives, words are consequential and vital, with physical properties of their own that, combined with the proliferation of associative logic set in motion by their use, are capable of sensuous, rich, sometimes uncontrollable signification. For Julie, the statement "He'd tried to cut his throat" is a cool, dry factual statement that can be easily contained and qualified by "It wasn't that bad. He was recovering." For the narrator, the statement associates itself with "suicide," a word with an almost unbearably physical reality: "Mention of suicide is like innards pushing through an incision; you have to push it back and clap some pads on, quickly." The narrator's story demonstrates repeatedly the connection between language and physical experience, the ability of a word to call up, not shut down, a reality beyond the context of its present use. We see her acceptance of this connection in her account of an earlier conversation with Douglas:

I asked him on the way up what Keith and Caroline were like, and he said they were rich. I said that wasn't much of a description. He said it was Caroline's money, her daddy owned a brewery. He told me which one. There was something about the way he said "her daddy" that made me see the money on her, the way he saw it, like long lashes or a bosom—like a luxuriant physical thing.

This somaticizing of language is necessary to any narrator who seeks to resuscitate experience through language, through stories about the past. Unlike Julie, Prue, and Wilfred, the narrator's use of language invigorates rather than vitiates her narrative. Thus it continues the experiment initiated by Del in Lives—that insistence on the physical properties of both sides of the signifying transaction—the visual, oral properties of written and spoken language and the sensuality of its referents.

We can't know, of course, how close the narrator's story comes to the events it narrates. This is a comparison quite impossible for Munro or any writer to make, as the original experience—if indeed it existed at all—is unpresentable. But all the evidence suggests that the narrator's story is a far more faithful account than Julie's stories were. Whereas Julie's stories are compact summaries of her experiences, with little attempt made to recreate conversations or the effect the events had on her, the narrator remembers the language of the conversations she had that evening, recounts carefully her reaction to the evening's events—not, as far as we can tell, her reaction as mediated by the intervening time or the present, but her reaction at the time.

Then she [the hostess] said in her wispy voice how much she loved the way it was in the winter with the snow deep outside and the white rugs and the white furniture. Keith seemed rather embarrassed by her and said it was like a squash court, no depth perception. I felt sympathetic because she seemed just on the verge of making some sort of fool of herself … the man I was with got very brusque with her, and I thought that was mean. I thought, even if she's faking, it shows she wants to feel something, doesn't it, oughtn't decent people to help her?

The most crucial difference between the stories of Julie and the narrator lies in what they are seeking. Julie's stories, though accounts of past events, are concerned with what they can effect in the present and the future; they demonstrate little concern with understanding the painful past that she rather cheerfully recounts. But the narrator does not tell her story as she would don a new dress—in order to achieve a certain effect. She is after something quite different, as she suggests when she distinguishes the effect of her story from Julie's: "It may not be very entertaining…. But it is interesting." The different roots of the two words are revealing: tenir, to hold, in the first; esse, to be, in the second. The narrator's story will have something to do with being, with essence, with experience; Julie's holds that essence back.

Not until the narrator has finished her story do we realize that the "man I was in love with" was Douglas himself, that a member of her audience is a principal character in the story she tells. It is this fact that helps us realize what she is after in giving this account: she is after no less than the actual experience itself as it was, a perfect retrieval of the past through narrative. Such a retrieval is only possible if the narrator can replace not just herself, but Douglas as well into the past. To gain Douglas's participation in the narrative would be to collapse present into past, to negate somehow the time that has elapsed between the original event and her story. If the recalcitrant present will cooperate, if Douglas will agree to be put back in the experience, the narrator stands a chance of understanding this troubling experience. And it is this desire for understanding that drives her narrative; she tells so that she may know, so that she may understand the role of the other (Douglas).

The narrator's project is more coincident with Del's ambitions than with the reminiscences of later narrators in The Progress of Love or Friend of My Youth. Neither Del nor this narrator seeks to recover a past event by demonstrating its messy amalgamation with experience intervening between past and present; both would re-create experience by excising it, perfect and whole, from the matrix of the past. But in "Hard-Luck Stories," this tactic fails; time will not be collapsed, Douglas will not fill in the blanks, knowledge cannot be achieved. Douglas neither confirms nor denies the narrator's account; he remains the other that won't be contained, re-placed, understood. His recalcitrance leads the narrator to recognize the futility of her story, its inability to freeze time by replicating the past and yielding the knowledge she seeks: "I could be always bent on knowing, and always in the dark, about what was important to him, and what was not."

While the narrator's narrative project closely resembles Del's in Lives, the stakes to be won by its achievement have increased considerably. In perfectly retrieving the past, the narrator not only could gain understanding of that past, but also could realize the virtual identity between the concepts of inclusiveness ("every last thing") and timelessness ("everlasting"). Her attempt to revive the past is also an attempt to stop time altogether, to fend off the changes overtaking her. She shares this ambition with a number of other characters in the volume—with Lydia, in "Dulse," and the narrator in "Bardon Bus," both desperately trying to understand failed relationships, and with Albert in "Visitors," stubbornly insisting on the truth of his narrative about Lloyd Sallows—"It's not a story. It's something that happened." All middle-aged, these characters are concerned with change and death; in trying to suspend the past in narrative, they are trying to stop time, to ward off the death coming nearer to all of them. But as the abrupt insertion of the graveyard at the end of "Stories" reminds us, death will not be stopped by a trick of language or by any other contrivance. As the narrator realizes, language and story-telling are mocked by the obdurate fact of death: "I heard the silly sound of my own voice against the truth of the lives laid down here."

However pessimistic "Hard-Luck Stories" may be about narrative—about its ability to retrieve the past, yield understanding, challenge the flux of time—it does not leave its struggling characters utterly hopeless. For the narrator, Julie, and Douglas (and indeed many of the characters in this and other volumes) do find solace, though not where they were seeking it, not in the stories they tell. As if to point up the inefficacy of narrative, Munro often offers its opposite as a source of comfort. Repeatedly, it is within the unmediated, unprocessed image and act that her characters find at least temporary peace. The three characters in "Hard-Luck Stories" are granted a moment of grace through the form of a trillium stitched on a foot-stool in a country church:

I was pleased with this homely emblem…. I think I became rather boisterous, from then on. In fact all three of us did, as if we had each one, secretly, come upon an unacknowledged spring of hopefulness.

The source of their pleasure in the trillium goes unidentified, the connection between the emblem and the comfort it casts remains uninterpreted, and hence, Munro seems to insist, the image is particularly powerful. A similar moment comes at the end of "Dulse," when Lydia, after desperately seeking shelter in the stories she tells her psychiatrist and her new telephone worker friends, finds relief in the seaweed left her by Vincent: "Yet look how this present slyly warmed her, from a distance." Though Munro must present these moments within narrative, they remain the most immediate, unmediated, uninterpreted moments in the stories. It is as if she is saying that peace, truth, knowledge are unavailable through discourse, intellection; that they are accessible only within the unlocked, untranslated, silent image that, like Keats's "silent form dost tease us out of thought."

Munro's understanding of the function of narrative is mordantly paradoxical. Throughout her career, she has insisted on the existence of pre-linguistic experience, of a truth that originates outside of, independent of language. This truth is wholly experiential and wholly personal, never going beyond the bounds of individual perception. Particular and circumscribed, it would seem a simple truth, though as Munro's vision matures, its constitution grows increasingly intricate, its excision from the surrounding web of falsehoods, uncertainties, silence, and alternative perceptions increasingly difficult. But simple or complex, this truth admits little access. The approaches attempted by most of Munro's characters are memory and narrative—virtually equivalent faculties in that they both order past experience, re-collect lived moments within a chronological frame. These characters attempt to understand their experience by going through it again, and only language allows this review. But as "Hard-Luck Stories" demonstrates, to go through it again is to change it utterly; there can be no coincidence between the experience itself and the language that would render it. Narrative is finally not the province of truth; to tell is at best to revise, but never to perfectly revive. The narrator's position at the end of "Hard-Luck Stories" is, for Munro, the predicament of all narrators who seek understanding through language—the predicament of being "always bent on knowing, and always in the dark."

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