"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

 

"I / eye: The Dismembered Body and the Dismembered Mind"

in Edgar Allan Poe’s

“The Tell-Tale Heart”

Source for photo

“Barrie Kosky's second appearance at the International festival could not be more different from his debut last year...his meticulous staging of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart is pitch black, tense and savage. The curtains open to reveal the apparently disembodied head of performer Martin Niedermair, hovering in an unnerving silence ...Poe's narrator claims he is not mad, but suffers an "over-acuteness of the senses". Such is the condition that Kosky inflicts on his audience. We become painfully aware of the noises that escape from Niedermair as he describes how he came to murder an old man: the slick of his tongue against his chin, the hiss he emits as he dismembers the corpse; even the slap of his hands against his thighs is discombobulating”

 https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/aug/11/theatre 

 (Edinburgh International festival 2008)

Little I remember of this performance, but one image still clings forcefully to my mind and I remember through the dust of memory, the shadow of a man, sometimes on a chair, more dramatically on the stairs, surrounded by a pitch black stage with an occassional intense light showering on him. I now fancy this silhouette cutting the empty darkness with protruding veins on his throat and raving eyes.   The oppressive animated movie narrated by James Mason and directed by Ted Parmalee in 1953 (here) has played the tune of remembrance hand in hand with this performance.

What is madness if not an over acuteness of the senses: the ticking of the clock, the beating of the heart, the creaking of doors, the prodding conscience, the eye / I, the vulture I/ eye that disturbs the narrator. It is the old man’s I/ eye that obsesses the narrator, not greed, not his wrong-doing. It is the eye/ I that triggers the murderous instinct and sets the narrator’s plan in motion: to get rid of the old man. In the process, the reader must be won over as a convinced acolyte of the narrator’s sanity and witness to his/her minute and stealthy ways.  "Excusatio non petita accusatio manifesta."

One might say that what bothers the narrator in this equation of onomatopeic resemblance between the two words eye /I might be “the otherness” of the old man. The multiple selves of the schizophrenic mind may provide grounds to read the narrator’s obsession with the old man as a possible projection of his/her own self , a self that s/he may not want to come to terms with or cannot, a self that is possessed / evilized by something larger than itself. The narrative voice states that “ this idea entered my brain.” The idea becomes bigger and more materialized than the narrator, who seems to be an unreliable bodiless mass of highly interjected words and sentences, proof of the nervous state in which this conscience flounders.

The gender identity of the narrator has also been discussed. By the end of the nineteenth century,  there existed accentuated double standards for men and women.  Women were commonly associated with roles of nurturers, caregivers and guardian angels of the hearth.  Gothic narratives and nineteenth century novels often challenged openly or more seclusively these double standards and, as a result, a paralell narrative of fallen women ensue.  Women characters were prone to appear as deranged women, suffering nervous breakdowns, torn asundered by the so called moral standards.  All of these fed the imagination and kept the guardians of the moral at bay by separating the intricacies of doublefolded nature.   A discussion of whether Poe's narrator might be a woman will certainly fuel a quarry of interpretation regarding the roles of women at the time. 

Sonia pointed out the phrase: “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing” where the diatribe about the marked gender narrator might be conclusive.

Some of the readings held in our discussion were really interesting: the “scantlings” on the floor where the narrator hides the dismembered body (Belén Tizón) have the shape of a cross, or the title has been interpreted as an onomatopeia of the ticking of the clock through the use of the alliterative “t” (Belén Tizón), the reference to the use of the word “tale” as in “fairy tales” (Liam) and its possible implications. Is the presence of the “eye” the eye that sees it all, the presence that wants to exert control...? (Begoña’s thesis).

Engage in the thread and post your insightful readings:)

Week 4: "The Turn of the Screw"

 

Last entry on Henry James`"The Turn of the Screw"

Reviewed by Cándido Pintos Andrés

and Marián Machado Panete

Source for picture

 “The Turn of the Screw”

reviewed by Cándido Pintos Andrés

After 23 chapters of intrigue , mistery and cliffhanger endings, I faced the last one with many questions and just a few pages left to find the answers. After some minutes of reading, I felt  really disappointed because there was no clear explanation for what I was looking for. Are you kidding me Henry ? After all your periphrasis and verbosity and long and intricated phrases is THIS the end? Maybe you want me to feel as lost as the governess or maybe you are The Master of Ambiguity. Perhaps you want me to think of ghosts and sex and corruption and lies at the same time. Maybe you did not finish the tale because you did not want us to gather around the fire with Douglas to find the truth. Or maybe I am losing my mind and that's exactly what you want.

  "The Turn of the Screw"

Reviewed by Marián Machado Panete

If building suspense involves withholding information and raising questions that arouses everyone’s curiosity, we are in front of one of the best examples. This psychological book grips the reader without explicit physical dangers; however the successive chain of events trigger a sense of dread all along the novella. The very end comes as a complete surprise.

Before nowadays serial “cliffhangers” and even Bluma Zeigarnik’s study on memory, in which she compared memory in relation to interrupted and completed tasks, he was able to hold the audience in thrall. Ambiguity, unfinished dialogues and lavish supply of vocabulary arranged in long sentences paved the way for this work of art. No surprise the book has been adapted several times in a variety of media: play, opera, films and a miniseries.

I highly recommend listening to the story. The sound of the words and the rhythm of the language amplifies the suspense.

Week 3: "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

 

Reviews by Belén Tizón Méndez

and Begoña Rodriguez Varela

Chapters 13-18: The Turn of the

 Screw by Henry James reviewed by Belén Tizón Méndez

 

Source for picture: here

The recurrent topics of this novel are present in these chapters. The governess’ fears for the children are a constant, and, in her attempts to prevent them from being corrupted, she overprotects them. This excessive protection turns her into a manipulative being;she instances the children to write letters to their uncle but does not allow them to send those letters under the pretence of it just being an educational task. She persistently advocates her role as Flora’s and Miles’s nurturer par excellence.

Hallucination and secrecy are also a theme in these pages. The governess finds Mrs Jessel usurping her desk and mistrusts her intentions. The desk is a symbol of power, control exerted by the governess and, Miss Jessel, for some strange reason, challenges this control by occupying it. Suspicion looms. Neither Flora nor Mrs Grose care about the governess’s absence.

The governess keeps showing her insecurity, as a stereotype of a woman of the time, in this drifting vessel commanded by obscure characters.

Towards denôument....

 A review of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw

by Begoña Rodríguez Varela

From the beginning, Douglas’ guests and we, readers alike become jurors of a story written by an unnamed (curious) governess and have to decide whether it is an eerie ghost story or a character study. Clearly, Henry James was a master of this ambiguity. Indeed, openness and ambiguity go hand in hand in this novella and it is impossible to make up our minds. So, was this the author’s main purpose?

Maybe.

In fact, one finds arguments in favour of one thesis or the other. The dialogues between the characters with constant interruptions and probable hidden secrets under carefully selected language help to accumulate tension and create a labyrinthine, claustrophobic atmosphere.

And then, the question arises; Are the ghosts real or just projections of the governess’ own fears and neuroticism? That doesn´t really matter. They are the "real" threats which make the governess shield the not-so-innocent children so obsessively that Flora ends up suffering a nervous breakdown and the governess killing Miles......from suffocation.

Week 2: "The Turn of the Screw"

Chapters VII-XII

A review by Sonia García Pérez

Source for image: click here

I am just a poor country parson’s daughter who has committed herself to taking care of the most gracious, incredibly beautiful and divine children. Little Miles is even too clever for a bad governess to spoil, but he must not return to school… not yet. I am so proud of having been chosen by their uncle; a gallant, charming and splendid gentleman who depends on me to carry on this task successfully.

I am sure that Flora also saw that pale and dreadful woman on the other side of the lake. Mrs Grose and the children know her well as she was Miss Jessel, my predecesor; the one who died. But I am getting used to my danger now and I know my duty as these children need to be saved and shielded. Otherwise, they are lost and will be taken away.

When I first met that base menial called Quint I caught my breath and turned cold. I was so afraid of him… but not anymore. Last night I saw him at the top of the stairs fixing his eyes on me as he had from the tower and the garden but, this time, I felt no terror because dread has quitted me and I have the courage to fight.

The fairy tale is over and Bly is no longer a castle of romance but a big, antique and dull house inhabited by the living and the spirits of the dead and I swear to God that I won’t fail on my duty to protect these poor children.

 

Week 1: "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

 

Mila, Marcial and Paula, members of the reading workshop,

share their first impressions, chapters I-VI

Henry James’ novel “The Turn of the Screw”

Source for Image: https://images.booksense.com/images/371/606/9781800606371.jpg

 “The Turn of the Screw,” reviewed by Mila Prol

A young woman arrives at a manor house, to take care of two children. Soon, she feels some threat looms over the innocent pupils, and her mood changes from excitement to fear, in a place full of secrets. Encounters with ghosts, secrecy about the inappropriate little boy's behaviour at school, and the illness and death of her predecessor are the breeding grounds for a supernatural and dark atmosphere that reassure her commitment to protect the children. Something sinister is growing in the caregiver's mind, who doubts about what is real or imagined. Are the angelical children so innocent…?

“Hat Trick” by Marcial Muñoz

“The story won’t tell,” said Douglas, “not in any literal, vulgar way”.

“...and there was a touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat”.

Architecture apart (I still remember Notre-Dame’s neo-Gothic spire crumbling away), just in our heads Gothic seems to linger. In mine -the turn of the screw-, it comes and goes. My hat off, spine-chilling ghosts I see. My hat on, it’s flesh and blood what scares me. Whoever you are, dear nameless governess, languish no more.Allow me to invoke, on your behalf, the spirit of Las Sinsombrero.

 “The Turn of the Screw,” reviewed by Paula Fernández Abalde

The reader is immediately thrown in the story as Douglas attempts to trigger our interest in it. In order to aim at reliability, the story is rendered from the perspective of an outsider. The atmosphere of the story, the characters, and the location, are all the ingredients of a ghost story where, to turn the screw, two apparently innocent children are at stake. The children’s governess, an eerie character itself, pivots between madness and sanity. By chapter four, we cannot still explain why she knows the character of Quint in such detail. Equally, we are left to wonder about the strange relation between her and Miss Grose:

No!” I took the good creature in my arms

and, after we had embraced like sisters, felt still more

fortified and indignant.

The governess, feeling heroine-like, believes she is the only one who can see evil souls.

"The Bear Came over the Mountain" by Alice Munro

 

The other side of the Mountain is

 all that can be seen

 Source for photo and idea: here

Note: The idea of envisioning Alzheimer’s disease as a fishbowl is indebted to a play I saw in Edinburgh in the Fringe 2023 about this disease and how one feels trapped in a relentless imprisoning circle from which there is no escape.

 “The bear went over the other side of the mountain to see what he could see, the other side of the mountain was all that he could see.” (children’s song). Alice Munro’s deploy of a children’s song line for her story leaves readers askance. What we encounter here is very disquieting -- nothing jolly nor playful -- but memory loss, infidelity, ageing. Some reviews have revolved around the idea that this is a story about how love evolves in time: love in youth, passionate love; love in middle age, empty love; retiring age, companionate love, old age, love that starts anew (Source: here). “It is never too late to be what you might have been” fades in and out in the credits of the movie based on this short story, “Away from her” (2006) directed by Sarah Polley.

George Eliot (1819), Mary Ann Evans, Victorian writer, author of well-known novels like “Middlemarch” (1871-72) or “The Mill on the Floss” (1860) among others is the penname behind this quote: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” The contextual significance of this quote, thinking of the times, and George Eliot’s fight for women’s rights and professional writing in a patriarchal society, very much stands for struggle and encouragement for women to start afresh away from the oppressive constructs that confined them.

In the light of this short story, and following the theory of the love evolving theme, one cannot be but startled to think whether this starting afresh is indeed shadowed by the fact that Fiona’s husband relapses into infidelity and starts the circle over again by “delivering” (the very word he uses) Aubrey to her, only to indulge himself in a relationship with Marian, Aubrey’s wife. The other side of the mountain is all that we can see. What first appeared to be an act of love seems to swerve in a totally different direction, however, with Munro, nothing is unidirectional, like human nature itself, always doublefolded and at crossways.

Notwithstanding, Grant is not to be trusted. His take on women makes him very unreliable as a self-giving spirit: “what was left of the more or less innocent vulgarity of a small-town flirt,” “a woman’s natural jealousy—resentment,” “she’d been appetizing enough. Probably a flirt,” “wrinkled neck, youthfully full and uptilted breasts. Women of her age usually had these contradictions” he says referring to Marian. He states and knows: “generally a woman’s vulnerability increased as time went on, as things progressed.”

But more than about love, the story strikes me as the painful deterioration of the mind, that Alice Munro renders very subtly: the flickering light of Fiona’s “spark of life.” First, the notes she leaves:

” 7.A.M. yoga, 7:30-7:45 teeth face hair.”

Then “the new notes are different, stuck onto kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dish-towels ...”

“Worse things were coming”…

Worse things are coming with the institution, indeed. One has to wait thirty days so the patient may get adjusted: loneliness. Then, the symptoms: forgetfulness, oblivion, erasing, disengagement, strangeness. Names, faces elude Fiona: she treats Grant with a slightly annoying courtesy. She falls for Aubrey to whom she refers at the end as “Names elude me.” Her life comes to rags, threads ...waves of wind, loose threads.

There is a thread left, she knows she might have been forsaken, “forsaken” in all the imaginary forms of the verb, even the non - existent ones: forsook / forsooken / forsaken. “Not a chance,” one of the two men answers…

Sofia Kovaleskaya and Alice Munro

"Too Much Happiness"

a short story 

by Alice Munro

Please click on the image

Reviewed and read by the members of the reading workshop: 

"The Word Depot" at the EOI of Vigo.

 A magnificent work of analysis and creativity!

Do not forget to activate the sound to take all the pleasure!

"Face" by Alice Munro

THE RIPPLE

in

Face by Alice Munro

 Keywords: Birthmark, drama, judgement, relationships, what if… Click here to read the story in “The New Yorker.”

“Face,” the title that the short story honours, is a decoy for a more expansive ripple (other than the visible “face”): selfhood, relationships between children, adults, peers and the muted voice of a vitriolic community .. . The narrator is physically “branded” from birth by a mark on his face. The narrator ushers us into the journey of his selfhood through the overstretched sinews of his family life. His father rejects him from birth as   “ a chunk of chopped liver,” his mother protects him by endorsing “his” birthmark as a token that will make the “white of that eye look so lovely and clear “ and which he adds,”was one of the idiotic though pardonable things my mother would say.” Rejected by his father and protected by his mother, the narrator undermines all judgement: “One side of my face was—is- normal. And my entire body was normal from toes to shoulders...My birthmark not red, but purple.” This retrospective narrator stands rationally athwart between his father’s derogatory treatment and his mother’s aegis.

His clinical incisiveness by referring to his physical appearance from a rational point of view, his right away rejection of his father’s conception, his subtle allusion to a voiceless body of an omnipresent community, as in many other Alice Munro’s stories, “a son, which is presumably what all men wanted” wage war about the expansive wave of many of the other connections that will take place in the short story. The rift between his parents is older than him:  “In all my years in the town, I encountered no one who was divorced, and so it may be taken for granted that there were other couples living separate lives in one house” (141)

In town, people said “she was beautiful, some people told me” (page 140) and also, they say  (he) ”Calls a spade a spade. That was what was said of him” (140). In this place, “hate and despise are customary.”

This is the drama of ordinary lives, children call each other names Grape-Nuts, Stink, His Grace… Pete has been to the war and he is now a gardener with a limp, who is called nazi by Nancy and the protagonist to serve their random fancies. Nancy cruelly paints her face red to imitate the protagonist, who comes to a terrible realization that his birthmark might be that red, but, who does not take it as badly as his mother who goes berserk and vents her wrath through the many tentacles of hidden pain. She snips gladiolos in a frenzy, because she cannot hold Sharon nor Nancy any longer, She cannot longer swallow the infidelity of her husband with Sharon, “Sharon dewy rose” as the hymn at school went. The birthmark expands the ripple through the innards of less visible pain. This is about the great drama of Nancy who looks for connection and cuts her face with a razor to mirror the narrator. They both had feelings, “such deep feelings. Children have,” because they have both listened to “Alice in Wonderland’s stories” and wonder about the potions that might be poisoned and make you smaller so you can fit through the hole. Nancy’s father died of blood poisoning.

This is the “Great Drama,” as he calls it, which is not really a drama, but lives, a life, a job indeed, the narrator’s job as an actor: “my voice stood me in good stead,” he says.  Another voice stands him in good stead when stang by a wasp, at hospital, and blindfolded, he listens to familiar narratives he knows, read to him by a mysterious reader.  There is only one he is not familiar with and which he finds among weathered pages, and probably "buried in a deep cubbyhole of his mind": Walter de la Mere`s.   Walter de la Mere's poem bespeaks of time that does not really heal, and absence.

You may never come across what you have left behind, but what if …. “the answer is of course, and for a while, and never”

 

Alice Munro' s "Child's Play"

 

Ring around the Rosie no More:

Alice Munro’s ghastly

Child’s Play

"Ring around the rosie/
A pocket full of posies. / Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down! "

(“Ring around the Rosie," click here to see the origin of this Nursery Rhyme

Keywords mentioned in the workshop as to the analysis of the story: relentless, ruthless, expiatory, manipulative, implacable, difference, special, safety...

“Child’s play” is a ghastly confrontation about the lack of safety in life regarding moral, physical and psychological issues. What drives us apart is the constant swirl of differences which we desperately try to surpass. Marlene and Charlene are brought together through the outside layers of their personnae: they are identified at camp as twin sisters due to the coolie hats, and the fashionable names. Soon, they trade their differences: the freckles and the tan, the averting social status to which they belong, and, later, their paths in life divert through their ideological and family commitments. Marlene is the University woman, resilient to the lack of bonds and ruthlessly determined. Charlene, on the contrary, feels the burden of guilt and needs some soothing placebo in her deathbed that may expiate her from the “trauma” of past.

Verna’s special character does not solely label her, the differance (term deployed by Jackes Derrida, click here to see the implications of the word) that sets her apart from "the ordinary"  is extended to the “differance” of the rest of mortals themselves. Their cosy lives are affected by the same lack of communication, the misundertandings and the relentless cruelty that they enact upon each other.

Marlene doubts whether fulfilling or not her friend’s mission in pursuit of peace. Marlene hesitates whether to travel to Guelph or not, whether to go to hospital or not, whether to destroy or keep the letter. She ruthlessly approaches her dying friend in hospital by referring to her as an undiscerning lump. The pomposity of the church / cathedral / undefined / unidentified building/ grand or not grand does not dazzle Marlene as the Valhalla that Charlene dreams of to alleviate her conscience, The place is unattended. Father Hofsreader is on a vacation, and the perfunctory priest does not aid much as a lot of questioning, red tape, and forgetfulness overtake the situation.

Alice Munro departs from the narrow family ambiance, the nook where children are supposed to feel safe and protected. A tiring anticipatory “I suppose” indicates otherwise the tedious cycle of ordinary lives in the face of uneventful matters. The hushing and shushing of the tragedy remains blanketed in the talk that there is afterwards, in the absence of the word “murder” or “drowning.” Again an undercurrent of ambivalence leads the reader to construct the story in their mind, what is there in the letter? Was it an accident? Did Marlene return to Toronto, her present; or did she, on the contrary, remain in Guelph that night, her past?

Charlene’s voice is described as special, Verna is one of the “Specials.” Marlene writes a book “Idols and Idiots” who wins her “a disapproval from colleagues,” and “small flurry of attention in the outside world” (page 210). Marlene is an idol with feet of clay. Charlene vividly gathers the strewn pieces of the narrative that Marlene delivers on Verna, to the point of acknowledging the presence and power the girl distills and impinges on Charlene. Marlene’s tour de force and influence on her friend is so ominous that she seems to have won her as an adept to her cruel cause. Only Charlene needs some attonement and Marlene carries on with some sublimation of the “traumatic” event in her professional pursuits. 

What are you thoughts? Please post your comments and insights!

INTRODUCTORY SESSION: READING CLUB 23_24

 

Source for Image: https://paintingz.com/media/catalog/product/cache/34bbb8696bc90914125c43a0ff3036af/5/6/561372.jpg

MULTIFACETED ALICE MUNRO

 "TOO MUCH HAPPINESS"

MULTIFACETED MUNRO

A REVIEW OF YOUR FAVOURITE STORIES

YOUR TAKE ON "TOO MUCH HAPPINESS": FAVOURITE STORIES de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera

BACK IN OCTOBER 2023!!  Have a wonderful respite!

"Fiction" by Alice Munro

 

DIEGESIS VS REAL-LIFE DRAMA 

IN “FICTION” 

BY ALICE  MUNRO

Source: “The Lovers” by René Magritte. (1928)

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist” René Magritte

 Alice Munro’s short story, “Fiction,” draws attention to how selves are contrived  through the different “realities they / we concoct for ourselves” (source here).  This is a story about multi-faceted personalities and changing relationships, new family alliances (as highlighted by Belén), memory, and loyalties. It is a story about about the perception and reinvention of the self. Riding astride these topics, a reflection on the nature of fiction through different diegetic modes can also be found. Characters are seen through different lenses.

“The play-reading group emoting in the front house while somebody spills out the details of real-life drama in the kitchen (Joyce’ s presence required in both locations” (page 45).

This quote is evocative of both life and fiction (thanks to Natalia that brought this quote forward and which is of paramount importance in the development of the narrative).

In the first part of the story, the sequence of events is filtered through the eyes of Joyce, holding viewpoints about the events narrated by means of lapses between autodiegetic and homodiegetic narrative (see here for clarification on these terms). Contrariwise, a heterodiegetic narrator, in the second part of the story presents Joyce again in an entirely different fashion. Place, setting, husband, life, connections have all been altered. Let us see the contrast between the two lenses:

“She felt herself shedding the day’s work, which was harried and uncertain, filled with the dispensing of music to the indifferent as well as the responsive. How much better to work with wood and by yourself---she did not count the apprentice—than with the unpredictable human young” // or // “She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love” (37)

 Joyce and Joy live in a forest that is described through the eyes of Joyce as “unreal,” the level of fiction already working within fiction itself (metafiction). Joyce imagines the lives of the people that she sees through the windows, “scenes that beguiled her, even if she knew things would not be so special inside”(33). Jon and Joyce have made life decisions, and debunked societal expectations in spite of their high intellectual standards: “she was expected to turn into a fine performer on the violin—that was before she gave it up for the cello—and he was to become some daunting sort of scientist whose labours were beyond description in the ordinary world” (34). Joyce pines about Jon’s infidelity, she attempts to conjure his return and liberate him from the mesmerising power of Edie, the apprentice, “a short, sturdy young woman who did not look old enough or damaged enough to have much of a career of dissipation behind her …”

“How could this have happened? Joyce asks ….Such a person has eclipsed Joyce with her long and slim waist and long silky braid of dark hair. Her wit and her musice and the second highest IQ” (38)

Joyce acts as an only catalyst of the circumstances surrounding her. We hardly hear Jon, or Eddie. The reader only has access to Joyce and Jon’s world through the eyes of Joyce. As in life, a character might be seen from different perspectives, but it is only Joyce’s view of the situation that we have access to, at first. Jon unhinges himself from this soloist vision; he bluntly says that “there is not we any more” and we land in part 2 with a totally different perspective of Joyce.

Perhaps it is Jon’s telegraphic perception “Threatened. Booze. Fragile” and not Joyce’s mental pyrotechnia that has won Eddie a place in Jon’s affections. A “tour de force” in the second part of the narrative plays the magic. Joyce appears as a different character, from a totally different perspective. She is no longer in that liminal hippie community to which she seemed to belong in a certain way, she is no longer in the forest, but in a party of seeming elitists, where new alliances have been made:  

  “ She is a lean, eager-looking woman with a mop of pewter-coloured hair and a slight stoop that may come from coddling her large instrument, or simpley from the habit of being an obliging listener and a ready talker.” (43).

Joyce has married an amateur violinist, a proffesor,  who hardly has time for her, and who does not like reading “fiction.” Again, Joyce, in spite of her discontent, shifts perspective from her inner role to the role of an outsider who might possibly see things in a different fashion: “ ...if she had time to look at it from outside. She would probably envy herself, from outside” (page 45).

The demystification of writing as external apparatus. Christie’s authorship

In this section, Alice Munro also reflects about the process of writing as a shibboleth: “I forget what it’s called. Some title like a how-to-book. You let your first book out, I guess you are hot shit for a while”(49). “How are We to Live” is the title of the book that Christie, daughter to Eddie, has written (notice the overlapping of life / fiction).  Through Joyce's thoughts on Christie's book, the omniscient narrator brings forward, from an ironic perspective, the idea of how short story writing might have been considered a lesser genre, which is not the case as it has already been proved by its art, trajectory, tradition and history,  but, by voicing out these considerations, Munro might be puzzling out the struggling obstacles some writers of short fiction may encounter or encountered in the past  in the editorial rat-race (thanks to Cándido that brought forward this metafictional reflection that the narrator makes) referred to in the following lines: 

“A collection of short stories, not a novel. This is in itself a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.” (50) 

Christie, daughter of Edie, and now author, fails to recognize Joyce. Christie elaborates the narrative of her own life which Joyce reads and which differs from her own narrative.  We have discussed the possible intentionality of this lack of anagnorisis (see here the explanation of this term from Aristotle “Rhetoric”, a term that means, “recognition”) Is Christie pulling an act? Or is there a true lack of recognition? Or is it simply a way of illustrating the different narratives that might exist in fiction and real life?

“Here was where the writer would graft her ugly invention onto the people and the situation she had got out of real life, being too lazy to invent but not to malign. For some of it was true, certainly.” (page 57, Joyce on Christine’s writing)

"Dimensions" by Alice Munro

 From the collection of short stories 

"Too Much Happiness" (2009)

Dimensions

Philomela Ovid and the Censored Voice

Dimension: Dictionary definition: measurable extent, magnitude measured along a diameter.

Doree had to take three buses on her way to the facility. Doree appears suspended, floating, in an undimensional unmeasurable referentiality. Which facility is this one? Who is Doree? She is a chambermaid who doesn’t care about waiting on a bus station for long, a girl whose friends tell her she must make progress in her work. She doesn’t like to talk to people. She is the girl on the photograph that was released on the papers, after the tragedy, we will later know about; she is the girl whose hair “had been long and wavy and brown then, natural in curl and colour, as he liked it, and her face bashful and soft—a reflection less of the way she was than of the way he wanted to see her” (page 2). But Doree’s hair is no longer brown and wavy, the way he wanted, she has cut it short, bleached and spiked it. She is no longer the girl that did not wear make up because he told her so, she is the girl who does not wear make up because she has decided so, even if this is a scar of a perfunctory act.

Doree suffers the deprecatory treatment of her husband, who abuses and maltreats her through a vicious circle of coercive control, physical and mental isolation. The acme of violence: Lloyd kills their children. The way their bodies are described constitute a suffused pulp narrative of the deaf-tone feeling that Doree will undergo after the shock.

A muteless Philomela (see here the myth of Philomela), Doree heads to the source of her pain, Lloyd, and visits him in prison, the facility which has been mentioned at the beginning of the narrative.  She lies to Mrs Sands, who is psychologically supporting her through the trauma, and, contrariwise, sneaks to see Lloyd.  First, thinking that she can reverse the situation somehow. Later, driven by that same senseless silence of unassuaged pain. Lloyd, in an epiphanic visionary frenzy,  tells her he has seen the children on a different dimension:

“I have seen the children. I have seen and talked to them….I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be that there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions, but what I know is that I have got across to whatever one they are in…They are fine. Really happy and smart. They don’t seem to have any memory of anything bad.…(page 25)

This vision sustains Doree with a sliver of hope. Doree seems to have recovered some kind of happiness,  “She still did not have that spontaneous sense of happiness, exactly, but she had a reminder of what it was like. It had nothing to do with the weather or flowers. It was the idea that the children were in what he had called their Dimension that came sneaking up on her in this way…” (page 27).  This does not bespeak of happiness, but a way to muffle and face her pain.  

Let us remember that the story “Dimensions” opens up the collection of short stories “Too Much Happiness” (2009). The title is a harbinger of negative connotations confirmed by the dark tone of the opening story. Other stories confirm that the misery of some transforms and metamorposes into the happiness of others. We should bear this in mind as we read and navigate through the different stories.  

At the end of the current story, there is a meaningful episode in which Doree,on her way to the facility, happens to resuscitate a man who has suffered an accident and is on the verge of dying, through a technique that Lloyd had taught her. One must be aware, in case of an accident, that the tongue does not block the breathing. After saving this man, Doree does not need to return to the prison.

The myth of Philomela comes to mind again, who deprived of her tongue, could not communicate the atrocious crime she had been a victim of, but she was turned into a bird by the Gods so her story could be heard through her trill. 

 To all women who are victims of violence, may your stories be heard, and your tongues let loose