"Face" by Alice Munro

THE RIPPLE

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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)