As a fun fundraising activity, Anna’s alma mater Sarah Lawrence College stages what it
calls a “Faculty on the Road” event, in which an appropriately-sized house is
volunteered and former SLC students
and their families gather together to hear one of the school’s resident
professors deliver a lecture on some aspect of the discipline in which they specialize.
The alerting flyer announced that this year, an English professor
would be speaking on the topic: “Time in
Fiction and the Art of Alice Munro.” Dr.
M and I both really like Alice Munro, so we immediately signed up.
Jumping past the food table, which, since I had recently
returned from a Fitness Spa gave every confection the look of an individualized
pile of refined sugar, we were directed to a room full of rows of none too
comfortable folding chairs, the professor began her talk, and it immediately
felt like school.
The moment the lecture began, it appeared everyone regressed
back to their academic earlier selves.
There was:
The meticulous notes-taker, the “Teacher’s Pet”
nodder-in-constant-agreement-with- the-lecturer, there was the Class “Funny
Man” (possibly me), the forgivable slacker (“I’ve been reading the story while
you’ve been talking about it, or half of it at least.”), the hyper-confident know-it-all
peppering their definitivenesses with multiple “obviouslies”, the contrarian
iconoclast (possibly me again; you can be two
things on this list) and the cowering majority, making themselves small and
praying not to be called upon in class.
School was definitely in!
For those who are unfamiliar with her, Alice Munro is a
hugely respected, Canadian Nobel Prize Laureate who specializes in short story
writing, focusing on the areas and characters of her particular locale. We once listened to a book-on-tape of her
stories during a trip to San Francisco, and the six-hour-and-ten-minute drive
flew by, despite the cognitive dissonance of Canada in our ears and California
out the window.
The short story selected for the lecture entitled Train, however, was not to my liking. The
narrative, a series of massive, apparently unmotivated, life-altering jumps by
the protagonist – he ran into a woman whom he stayed with for years, then he
abruptly dumped her and started managing an apartment building he’d inadvertently
walked past, then he abruptly left there and moved someplace completely
different – seemed jarringly disjointed, leaving me unable to decipher what exactly
the author was trying to say.
After the lecture concluded, the subsequent “Questions and
Comments” covered numerous comments and concerns, including the observation
that the characters in Munro’s story seemed inordinately distant and sexually
repressed, and the questioner wondered why that was.
There was a momentary silence, broken when someone in the
audience offered,
“It’s Canada.”
I got a solid laugh with that one. Though I felt some regret earning it at my
Home and Native Land’s expense.
Americans laugh too easily at Canada.
The way Canadians laugh – or at least used to laugh – too easily at Newfoundland.
The second-to-the-last question was mine, now in “Contrarian
Iconoclast” mode. It went almost exactly
like this:
“If this writer were a nobody instead of a Nobel Prize
Winner, would it be possible to see this story as arbitrary?”
The professor pressed me on “arbitrary.”
“Random events,” I replied.
The professor responded that she did not believe the story
was arbitrary, because it worked as a satisfying, coherent piece of writing.
I did not believe it did.
But then I went home and that night, my mind, thinking entirely on its
own, delivered an epiphany:
The professor was right.
What I cherish most about Alice Munro is that she had made
it her life’s work to chronicle the distinctive essence of the Canadian persona. And nobody else did that. I realize there are exceptions – the two
Margarets, Laurence and Atwood – but the majority of the Canadian writers I
knew all wrote about whales.
(I love Mordecai Richler, but the only thing truly Canadian
about his characters is that they try
to act like Americans but they’re not good at it.)
The protagonist of Train,
whom I originally viewed as haphazardly jumping around, turned out to be a
person who, on every occasion in the story, was relocating himself to avoid the
discomfort a confrontational “scene.”
Upon further examination, the unwillingness to face the
uncomfortable music turns out to be the prevailing undertone in Train.
In one revelatory sequence, opening up – and, being Canadian, doing so
only because, after surgery, she is in the throes of post-anesthesial delirium
– a woman confides to the protagonist that once when she was young, her father spied
on her, standing naked in the bathroom, and on the evening after that happened,
the father was run over by a train.
The connection appeared obvious. Though there was a perfunctory “I’m Sorry” – “That’s okay” exchange between the two of them,
the story’s message was that, as opposed to working through the transgression
to an ameliorating resolution, a Canadian father would rather put himself in
front of a barreling locomotive.
And the daughter forgave
him!
“It seems to me just
now I have got a real understanding of it and that it was nobody’s fault. It was the fault of human sex in a tragic
situation. Me growing up there and
Mother the way she was {an invalid} and
Daddy, naturally, the way he would be.
Not my fault not his fault.”
Can you imagine Americans
taking it like that?
Americans would sign up immediately for “Family Counseling”,
where, after an appropriate “healing process”, they would emerge stronger and
more cohesive than ever, feeling almost grateful that the terrible incident had
occurred, since it had, as a consequence, brought this now deeply loving family
closer together.
Canadians? Not their
way. No “touchy-feely” shenanigans for
them. They would rather step in front of
a moving train.
(Or hop a train,
the piece’s now clearly accurate title.)
“It’s Canada” was a joke.
But it is also the genius of the story.
Thank you, Alice Munro, for showing the world – and Canadians
themselves – who we are.
It may not be pretty,
But it’s us.
1 comment:
Interesting. I think, though, that *some* Americans would react the same way as your Canadians: the US is a big country with a lot of regional variation, and parts of it are extremely taciturn and disinclined to have difficult interactions. Have you traveled much, for example, in Minnesota or Maine?
wg
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