"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)