Friday, May 18, 2012
"Fiction"
Someone once said that an Alice Munro short story is as
complicated as any novel. This 2009
story is proof positive. O. Henry could
have learned a lot from her (see http://yourbrainonbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/gift-of-magi.html).
“Fiction” can be read
as the tragic story of a woman on a constant quest for ego-enhancement, for whom relationships are a means to the end
of her own fulfillment, or it can be read as a comic story of a woman who
repeatedly makes herself look ridiculous by her own self-importance.
It can be read as a realistic representation of human
experience as a maze of coincidences and intersections, a tangle of
relationships, of memories, of forgetting, of recognition and non-recognition,
of curiosity of story-telling, of manipulation, of complex motives, of
self-creation and re-creation.
It can be read as an ironic statement on the complexity of
human experience, the mixed messages, the missed messages, the strange
combination of false successes and real failures, of the reality of unreality
and the unreality of reality.
It can be read as a social commentary on the modern state of
relationship roulette, of marriage, adultery, divorce, blended families,
same-sex relationships; of individualism, the serial making, breaking and
remaking of social ties; of the fragmentation in our social fabric and the
fragility of social bonds; of the strange web of interconnectedness with its
brokenness, and its mendedness.
It can be read as the carefully crafted juxtaposition of a
story within a story and the asymmetry of two different memories of the same
episode from two different perspectives, in which what is marginal in one memory
is central in the other.
It can be read as the universal story of a failed quest for
redemption, in which we humans are doomed to a cycle of continual compensation
for our imperfections, like Sisyphus forever rolling a boulder up a hill, only
to watch it roll back down once we get it to the top.
But the story is called “Fiction,” and in the last line the
main character imagines turning her disappointing experience into a “funny
story.” Thus the story “Fiction” is
framed by references to story-telling, and at the center of the story is
another “fictional” story. Our attention
is thus drawn to the relationship between fiction and truth, unreality and
reality, to the significance of writing, reading, and the experience of
textuality.
The poet Donald Murray has said that “All writing is
autobiography,” and there is a school of literary criticism that seems to say,
by turns, that all reading is autobiography and/or that all writing is about
writing and/or about reading. This
self-reflexive approach to fiction can begin to feel like a hall of mirrors,
which is somewhat how the story “Fiction” feels.
Alice Munro, who was divorced and remarried, became a writer
and book-seller (a somewhat self-reflexive situation in its own right). Her story “Fiction” is about Joyce, a music
teacher, whose husband rejects her for the mother of one of her students. Later, after Joyce has become the third wife
of a college professor and left teaching to become a professional cellist, she
crosses paths again with that former student, Christie, who has married the
friend of Joyce’s second husband’s son by his first wife.
As if this tangled maze of relationships were not enough,
Christie has just published a book of short stories, one of which,
“Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), recounts the story of a
child whose mother moves in with her music teacher’s husband. (The title suggests a coming of age story.)
To the extent that Christie’s story is based on her own
experience, her memory of it is very different from Joyce’s memory of the same
episode. Joyce barely remembers the
details of Christie’s account (if they actually happened) and certainly had no
knowledge, much less memory, of the events from Christie’s perspective. She had no idea that Christie had been so
lovingly attached to her as her music teacher and she has no awareness of
having manipulated Christie in order to gain access to details of the
relationship between her husband and Christie’s mother, at least as Christie
tells it. The layers of complexity
continue to mount. The hall of mirrors
makes it ever more difficult to distinguish between the flesh and blood of
reality and the reflections distorted in the mirrors of memory and of fiction.
We read Alice Munro’s story about Joyce, who reads
Christie’s story about the memory of her relationship with Joyce, which Joyce
compares with her own memory of Christie.
If all reading (and writing) is autobiography, then all writing (and
reading) is memory, and all memory is a distorted mirror image of the reality
that actually took place. Thus all
fiction is memory and all memory is fiction.
In Joyce’s memory Christie is a minor character, whose name
Joyce can barely recall. In Christie’s
memory Joyce is a central character, the adored teacher. Even when, as an adult, Christie realizes how
Joyce had “used” her, she is able to forgive because of the beauty of the music
and the “love” of the teacher, however false.
“It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair
thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great
happiness—however temporary, however flimsy—of one person could come of the
great unhappiness of another.”
Joyce is so moved by the story and its conveniently self-justifying
(for Joyce) moral that she takes her copy of Christie’s book back to the
bookstore (Alice Munro was a book-seller) to have it signed by the author (Alice Munro was a published author). Despite Joyce’s attempt to draw attention to
herself, Christie is utterly oblivious as to who she is. Memory, it seems, is one thing; recognition
is another.
In the end Joyce is as unimportant to Christie as Christie
once was to Joyce. Just as Christie
salvaged her disappointment through fiction, so Joyce attempts to salvage hers
by imagining that “This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell
someday.”
Just as Joyce has used Christie to construct a mental
“story” of the life her husband was living with Christie’s mother, so Christie
uses the memory of Joyce to create her work of fiction, and perhaps Joyce will
again use Christie, this time to create her own “funny story.”
Not only are we all figments of our own imaginations, but we
are figments of others’ imaginations, as they are figments of ours. Thus does the real become unreal and the
unreal become real, the truth become fiction and fiction, the story we tell
ourselves and others, become truth.
Labels:
Alice Munro,
autobiography,
Canadian literature,
comedy,
complexity in literature,
fiction,
irony,
memory,
realism,
redemption,
short story,
story within a story,
story-telling,
success and failure,
tragedy
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Elegantly stated, I am intrigued by her writing. Thanks for the background update. Keep writing "Dr. Brain", you have an audience.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Barbara!
ReplyDelete