Class on Move - discussion of Alice Munro's short story "Passion"
25 Março 2020, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
Alice Munro’s “Passion”
Before we start discussing the questions, I presented to you in the last class we need to think about Alice Munro’s work within the context and continuum of Canadian literature and culture.
We started our classes looking at how Canadians see themselves and how the world sees Canadians. Then we looked very briefly at how the Americas were initially settled by the First Nations tribes and later by the Inuit and we also looked at how some of their traditions have been maintained. Then we looked at how New France was discovered and gradually moved to becoming the Dominion of Canada in 1867. So we looked at its aboriginal settling, French roots, the establishment of the Métis and finally the dominance the Anglo-Saxon culture and settlers. We looked at literary theories like those established by Margaret Atwood in Survival and the concepts of Canadian culture as presented by Elspath Cameron and Eva-Marie Kroller. We also looked at how the “declamatory” poetry tradition of the First Nations and Inuit seemed to lay a foundation for the Canadian long poem, which was very important in establishing/creating a sense of national identity for the new Dominion of Canada. The Confederacy poets were highly significant and also interesting because of the unifying capacity they say in Canada’s natural world. I would like to draw attention to Emily Carr here, as she not only highlighted nature in her writing and painting, she also referred to the traditions and culture of the First Nations in her work. As we entered the earlier decades of the 20th century, the long poem moved from offering a representation of nation identity to being a vehicle of personal questioning (Birney etc). Writers from all the immigrant communities picked up on this trend – enter biotext.
As Atwood pointed out in Survival, When Munro was growing up in the 1930s and 40s, the idea of a person from Canada - but especially one from small-town south-western Ontario - thinking she could be a writer to be taken seriously in the world at large was laughable. The two notable exceptions to this suggestion Martha Ostenso (we read a extract from her Wild Geese), and Mazo de la Roche’s best-selling Jalna series (1927–60). Even by the 50s and 60s there were very few publishers in Canada, and these were mostly textbook publishers that imported whatever so-called literature was to be had from Britain and the United States. There might have been some amateur theatre - high-school performances, Little Theatre groups. There was, however, the radio, and in the 60s Munro got her start through a CBC programme called Anthology, produced by Robert Weaver.
Alice Munro’s work, even though much of it was written when bio-text was also being written is nothing like biotext. It offers readers Munro’ unique view of her world, with no moral compass or questioning of personal identity. Through an “apparently” simple literary form – her stories are easy to read – Munro allows her readers to engage with the different layers of human existence, as this is lived in suburban Ontario. There is nothing “sexed up” in her work, it is life as she sees it and represents it using the most complex literary devices unobtrusively – she is not only genius, she is also generous with her readers. There is no pompous fanfare in her work, anyone can read Munro. Moreover, everyone who looks a little deeper than the surface becomes like a fly trapped in spider’s web – immobilizes, but this time not in fear, rather in awe.
Munro appears to convey no moral compass in her criticism as she draws her characters in the cold light of day. However, as Margaret Atwood pointed out when reflecting on Alice Munro and her writing in the Guardian article I sent you:
Munro's acute consciousness of social class, and of the minutiae and sneers separating one level from the next, is honestly come by, as is - from the Presbyterians - her characters' habit of rigorously examining their own deeds, emotions, motives and consciences, and finding them wanting. In a traditional Protestant culture, such as that of small-town Sowesto, forgiveness is not easily come by, punishments are frequent and harsh, potential humiliation and shame lurk around every corner, and nobody gets away with much.
But Munro presents community in her writing. Some of her work also reflects social and cultural changes in Canadian life as is the case of “Passion” whose action covers several decades as the narrators tells her story in flashbacks.
Looking specifically at this story I want you to consider:
1) The relevance of the introductory sections
The narrator, now an older woman, returns to a place where she used to live. This return journey is used as a framing story and serves to introduce the reader into main story which happened many decades before when the protagonist, Grace, was a young woman. Curiously, Grace is not looking for people initially, she is looking for a house, and this search allows Munro to introduce the people who built the house, Mr and Mrs Travers. This story starts even before the house is built, with Mrs Travers’ first husband and earlier dwellings.
The story uses the technique of tense switching to introduce layers of time. It opens with the present tense. ‘When Grace goes looking…’ This continues into the second paragraph: ‘Now there is a village’. This lends a timelessness to the place, which changes, but still exists. This is also a reflection of the changes in the Canadian landscape and way of life. As we saw in Wild Geese, in the first half of the twentieth century, the land and agriculture were vitally important, but today the structures that supported these industries, for example the grain elevators are not abandoned and have even become fire hazards, see The Guardian article in the manual “The last piece of the skyline': the battle to save Canada's ‘prairie castles’ Canada”. There are new hierarchies and power structures in this new Canada.
“Passion” opens the story with an establishing shot which zooms in slowly until we get to the level of the individual character. First, we start following a map, then we are asked to conjure up a large area: “the Canadian Shield” reduce to > lakes > lakes too small to fit on a map > the roads into the village > the village/suburb > the octagonal house > details of the materials used to build the house.
Apart from this kind of zooming in, we have a zooming in of time. Our focal character, elderly Grace, describes this lake house scene and constantly juxtaposes the modern reality against her memory of 40 years prior. By meshing time and space in this way, the reader receives an expansive sense of setting. This is partly why Alice Munro’s short stories are said to be ‘novelistic’. You feel like you really know a place, but in so few words. The house is also a great example of how a house can align with character. We could say that Grace is using the house as a proxy for her younger self:
Perhaps the worst thing would have been to find exactly what she thought she was after—the sheltering roof, the screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm-of-Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seems to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
In terms of literary writing in the story the switch to past tense is achieved smoothly using interim modals and auxiliaries. The third paragraph opens with: ‘Grace would have turned back’. After that, take note of how Munro switches from the present perfect (She has always remembered) to the present tense. Finally, the simple past and we know that the story will now unfold in the past. This all happens so seamlessly we don’t notice but takes a high-level skill.
2) Crossroads come up a lot in the text- where and why?
The symbolism of crossroads – the story opens up with Grace on the road, and she has to chose one road from “the too many” that are available. – choices.
Later, when she decides to not only go with Neil to the hospital, but to stay with him after, her cut foot has been bandaged, she makes another choice, she is at another cross roads,
— how when looking back hindsight reveals the moment everything changed: ‘Describing this passage, this change in her life, later on, Grace might say—she did say—that it was as if a gate had clanged shut behind her.’ (p15) There’s direct mention of crossroads, and emphasis on roads in general: ‘He must have got his feeling of direction back when they came to a crossroads some miles on… (p19)’
The story as an entire unit is itself a crossroad — if she had never met Maury she’d never have met Neil, and so on.
3) What is the relevance of the title?
There is not a lot of passion where it would be expected – in the relationship between Grace and Maury. Contrasting against the title of the work, their relationship is not passionate. They are both doing as expected. The climax – “passion” of the story are the choices she makes, the roads she chooses to go down – to go out with Maury – to stay with Neil when Maury goes to the hospital to pick her up – to take the money. While there are three choices, one is central and decides the rest – she turns her back on a safe, financially secure marriage to live her own life
4) What stands out to you about the relationships of Grace and Maury (childhood passion – they both thought they would meet someone, in Grace’s case (we don’t know about Maury, but the story leads us to assume), even though no one had ever dated her, she just assumed that this would happen and that she would be swept off her feet and there would be passion – there was not in the real relationship; Grace and Mrs Travers – a true meeting of souls, Mrs Travers has a passionate nature like Grace, Mr and Mrs Travers – a cautionary tale; what happens when someone with a passionate nature (Mrs T) settles for a relationship with someone, who has no stories to tell and who sees in their spouse someone they have rescued, someone who places their spouse in this type of dependency situation. A cautionary tale for Grace because Maury is like his father and their relationship could become similar.
5) What is Neil’s role in the story? Another cautionary tale – what happens when passion is not tempered with moderation.