In the Driver’s Seat: Alice Munro’s Deceptions and Dependencies
An Essay-Review by Michael Greenstein
Amidst the swirling controversy surrounding Alice Munro’s complicity in her daughter’s abuse, one of the factors mentioned in passing is the writer’s inability to drive, and her reliance on Gerald Fremlin to chauffeur her from place to place. In her fiction, driving plays a prominent, if overlooked, role that highlights her protagonists’ dependence on others to ferry them from isolation (the writer’s terrain) to society (the non-writing life). Modes of transportation and the psychodynamics of walking in her short stories would make for a fascinating doctoral dissertation, were it not for the fact that Munro’s writing may be shunned in the political correctness of academic circles. Her characters are driven by anxiety, ambition, and lust – their sexual drives conveyed metonymically in cars, trains, buses, boats, snowmobiles, and other libidinal vehicles. Drive and destination are of equal importance in the cubist-gothic paths of Munro’s prose, with its detours, ellipses, spatial and temporal dislocations. “I am rather surprised the sister does not mention the car in particular. It was a Stanley Steamer.” (“A Wilderness Station”)
At the end of “Walker Brothers Cowboy” the young narrator describes the uncanny experience of a family drive with its turns of phrases and personal pronouns culminating in the universal “you”: “So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.” Her later fiction darkens the drive and unimaginable distances, reversed in a rearview mirror.
Much of Munro’s traffic passes through the village of Carstairs, Ontario. The car stares in more than one sense: it may be a passing focal point in the landscape; it may shed light on its passengers or passersby on the street; it serves as a status symbol or stepping stone of upward mobility. Munro steers her prose through short cuts, U turns, and long hauls in her chosen genre. Whereas Emma Bovary gets carried away in a nineteenth-century carriage, Munro’s “Carried Away” features the story’s protagonist, Louisa, a commercial traveller who is not supposed to drive anywhere because she has “a wonky heart” and “jumpy pulse” – two conditions associated with the progress or regress of love. Munro traces her characters’ walks and talks through subtle structural adjustments and dislocations. Poised between poetry’s precision and the novel’s amplitude, her short stories are conveyors of denial, deception, and dependency.
Louisa’s career is divided between mobile traveller and stationary librarian who oversees books’ covers as coffins. The story’s opening section, “Letters,” features an epistolary exchange between Louisa and Jack Agnew, who is stationed overseas during World War I. Jack has been wounded, but considers himself luckier than those soldiers who will never walk again. He tells Louisa about his impoverished childhood when he sold potatoes from a wagon. Louisa replies that she has walked up to his house on Vinegar Hill to report that the potatoes his father grew are healthy, unlike so many of the characters plagued by the Spanish Flu at the end of the war. Louisa fills in more details during the hot summer when an ice cream cart with a little bell goes through town with children dancing behind it and a watering tank that contrasts with battle tanks across the ocean. The cart is pushed by a man who had an accident and lost his arm to the elbow. Accidents, the title of the longest section of the story, recur throughout “Carried Away” when people accidentally get carried away, only to be carried away once they are wounded or killed.
Because of the heat Louisa often walks about town till after midnight: “It was like a dream.” A sleepwalker in her midsummer night’s dream, Louisa confuses reality and her oneiric world, as if her wonky heart and jumpy pulse make her an unreliable protagonist, as well as a dangerous driver. Louisa offers a second opinion to the cardiologist’s diagnosis: she thinks that her jumpy pulse may be caused by something she reads in the doctor’s office. In any case, the reading world interferes with the mechanical world, and the protagonist is no longer the driver.
The cardiologist is not the only doctor in the story, for Louisa has had an affair with a doctor when she was a patient with tuberculosis in a sanatorium. They also exchange letters, but eventually he stops writing, “which drove her out of Toronto and made her take the travelling job.” A tragic picaresque mode joins the epistolary genre, as Louisa goes around the country, hauling “her display cases up and down the stairs of small hotels.” Like Emma Bovary, a “heroine of love’s tragedy,” she talks about Paris styles, but she “would have laughed at just that notion.” In the footsteps of Flaubert’s heroine, she “would have said love was all hocus-pocus, a deception,” yet she feels a hush, a flutter along her nerves.” With her jumpy pulse, wonky heart, fluttery nerves, and hocus-pocus deception, Louisa is condemned to walking along the street instead of driving.
In the “Spanish Flu” section Louisa tells Jim Frarey (names mangled and masked) her story from the previous section. A commercial traveller, Frarey sells stationery supplies, though his strong physique would be more suited to farm implements. He lives down the street from an undertaking establishment in Toronto where they “got out the black horses, the black carriage, the works, to bury such personages as warranted a fuss.” This black cortege sets the atmosphere of 1919, as does the winter fog pressing against the window where Frarey and Louisa converse: “You could barely see the streetlights or the few cars that trundled cautiously over the bridge.” Instead of trundling over the bridge, the two travellers go upstairs for their sexual encounter where she feels “herself whirling around in an irresistible way, as if the mattress had turned into a child’s top and was carrying her off.” Carried away, the whirligig tries to explain “that the traces of blood on the sheets could be credited to her period, but her words came out with a luxurious nonchalance and could not be fitted together.” The climax of “Spanish Flu” is anticlimactic: fitted sheets are covered with verbal patterns that cannot be resolved, no matter the punctuation. Louisa’s blood spills over to the next section in the “spurt and shower” of blood following Jack Agnew’s accident in which his head is severed from his body and cannot be fitted together.
For Jack Agnew’s funeral in “Accidents” people in neighbouring towns come by car and train, and some by horse and buggy. After the accident the owner of the factory, Arthur Doud, spends time in the library watching the main street “where the occasional brisk-looking new Ford went by, or some stuttering older-model car.” In Carstairs, as elsewhere, the car is a status symbol, for Arthur orders himself a new car – a Chrysler sedan. To carry on the Doud legacy of wealth, “he had to drive a new car. He had to drive a new car,” – as if the repetition is meant to drive home the point of novelty and continuity in a displacement of any kind of older models. And a new car echoes the fate of Agnew.
The hub of transportation appears in the final section, “Tolpuddle Martyrs,” where we learn of Louisa’s handicapped heart that effectively takes away her licence to drive. Accordingly, Louisa has to take the bus from Carstairs to London because the “passenger train had stopped running during the Second World War and even the rails were taken up. People said it was for the War Effort.” This change in transportation reminds us not only of the local situation, but also of the broader global implications of two world wars covered in “Carried Away.” A further displacement occurs when the bus depot is changed: “she had to detour, because both of these streets were being torn up, and she had almost decided she was lost when she realized she had been lucky enough to come upon the temporary depot by the back way.” The reader shares in her sense of disorientation, as Munro tears up rails and streets for stylistic detours. The temporary depot is an old house with old car seats, and this is where Louisa hallucinates. House and car form part of Munro’s interior and exterior décor, creating a gothic atmosphere that conceals and illuminates the lives of girls and women, as well as boys and men.
The story concludes on a fulcrum of houses and horses, stasis and mobility. “The houses were built for a lifetime,” containers for the ages. In these houses of Munro’s fiction, “So much that lay open now would be concealed.” Her vehicles also open and conceal in the hide and seek of fiction. Thinking of “some reasonable continuum,” Louisa imagines “Carnivals. Boats of singers on the lake.” Her carnivalesque epiphany and polyphony focus on the Tolpuddle Martyrs and local Mennonites, but also on the Methodist minister’s comic baptism in the opening section where his rowboat sinks in the river, and Franklin’s boat trapped in the ice. These puddles cross bridges and ponds since the Doud business makes radar cases for the Navy. No wonder Louisa thinks that she is going under a wave.
The coda of horses carries away the narrative towards a vanishing point beyond the immediate sounds and smells. “As evening came on, big blinkered horses with feathered hooves pulled the sleighs across the bridge, past the hotel, beyond the streetlight, down the dark side roads. Somewhere out in the country, they would lose the sound of each other’s bells.” Munro’s mood and prose drive sleighs and cars across bridges and dark side roads. Her radar detects the signals of hidden horse power, and the clear blur of open secrets.
Similarly, “Simon’s Luck” may serve as another template for other stories that feature the act of driving, as well as deceptions and dependencies implicated in that physical, psychological, and aesthetic act. Consider the bounce and balance of the semi-colon in her opening sentence: “Rose gets lonely in new places; she wishes she had invitations.” If the present tense creates a sense of immediacy, the third person filters the distance between author, narrator, and character. What drives Rose from loneliness to new places? Has she not been lonely in old places? Although she wishes for invitations, her unreliable desire is a partial deception, for “She does get asked to parties.” The second sentence replaces the semi-colon with coordinate conjunctions that take the prose to new places: “She goes out and walks the streets and looks in the lighted windows at all the Saturday-night parties, the Sunday-night suppers.” Rose is a street walker, but she is also a flaneur, who observes life in rural Ontario rather than along the boulevards of Paris. In place of metropolitan arcades, she observes the village décor of posters and lamps with Coca-Cola shades, yet she will have her weekend supper with Simon, who has lived in France.
The twentieth-century flaneuse in Canada adds another dimension to Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century flaneur in the French capital. An actress, Rose divides roles between falling street walker and watchful flaneuse. “It’s no good telling herself she wouldn’t belong inside there, chattering and getting drunk, or spooning up the gravy, before she’d wish she was walking the streets.” Her earlier wish for invitations now turns to a wish for street walking, and all of her wishful thinking is matched by her telling, for what she tells herself are stories, fictions, deceptions. “She thinks she could take on any hospitality,” just as she can take on roles as guest and host when she and Simon share hospitality for their weekend tryst. In these parties everything is “crumbly and askew,” and after the eventful weekend Rose notices that in her village surroundings, “Things were more askew here than Rose had noticed before.” It is not simply Rose’s surroundings and perceptions that are askew, but Munro’s cubist aesthetics also render the world askew – angled, foreshortened, Gothicized. Syntactically, the semi-colon after askew divides parties and “professional rooms” with lists of books, brass rubbings, and “maybe a skull or two.” Munro furnishes her sentences with lists that end in an ominous skull, hunting horns, guns. The fenestrated filter stoops to basement windows displaying “rows of beer steins, hunting horns, drinking horns, guns.” Her grotesque décor is always threatening: there are “hangings . . . of polar bears executed in brushed wool.”
Munro curates her sentences with “a costly cabinet de diplomate that ends with “badly painted purple grass,” to lead into a humbler dwelling of “a little stucco house by the bus stop.” The bus stop named desire affords one means of transportation for getting out of town or any dead-end street. Walker, teller, or passenger, “Rose is an actress; she can fit in anywhere.” That semi-colon at the end of the first paragraph balances the one in the first sentence to serve as a fitting conclusion. Rose takes on many roles, fitting in anywhere and nowhere with her dystopian persona. Rose drives, and is driven by desire and career. “She had driven down to Kingston just for this party, a fact which slightly shamed her.” She lives “up-country,” so the drive down may be shameful on more than one level. Status is central to Munro’s short stories, and her heroine is rarely in the driver’s seat.
At the party the hostess’s “mournful” voice instructs Rose on how to treat the cat suckling four kittens, and her comment reflects the author’s ambivalence toward nurturing offspring: “We can look at her kittens but we can’t touch them, else she wouldn’t feed them anymore.” Like walking and driving, the tension between observing and touching plays out in much of Munro’s fiction. On the other side of the bed a large mirror is “hung suspiciously high, and tilted” – the “askew” of Munro’s mimetic mode. Her mirror reflects and distorts décor and psyche, dramatizing and judging the protagonist’s dilemma as an outsider trying to fit into society. The mirror on the wall won’t grant her attention, for she “hadn’t penetrated the party, felt that she might be doomed to hang around on the fringes of things.” Amidst all these hangings, Rose is doomed, judging and judged, deceiving self and society. Munro pens Rose’s penetration in stages: her penetrating gaze proceeds from the glass windows at the opening until the climax of thick glass dishes in the café when she drives out west. From the moment she meets Simon and feels “familiar twinges, tidal promises,” to her realization that “Nothing would do anymore but to lie under Simon” with pangs and convulsions, to her turning Simon “into the peg on which her hopes were hung,” the protagonist penetrates herself. Linguistic projection becomes a means of authorial protection.
In the living room she uses “the newborn kittens as a springboard for her own story” – an autobiographical displacement of the author’s own treatment of her daughters. Her story involves a male cat who follows her home “and insisted on being taken in,” just as Rose takes in her listeners at the party. The cat ends up in her clothes dryer where it dies. To this story about death in a dryer, the people at the party respond “in a sympathetically horrified way,” an oxymoron which makes Rose feel more at home. The narrator comments that Rose hadn’t been very fond of the cat, and Rose repeats, “Maybe if I’d been fonder, it wouldn’t have happened.” A man at the party replies: “It was the warmth he was seeking in the dryer. It was love.” The cat fable turns from fondness and love to a vulgar student at the party who insults Rose: “Now you won’t be able to fuck the cat anymore.” The student’s insults continue, and the mood of sociability and sympathy “rolled on in spite of signs that there was plenty here it wasn’t going to be able to absorb.” The wheels and shock absorbers of the party and the psyche steer the plot, “as if the boy was telling an anecdote or playing a part.” The anecdote within the story, the part in the party, and the role playing within the drama are hallmarks of Munro’s fiction. All of this takes place on “tricky territory.”
Rose’s memory of this student is faulty, but she does remember her daughter Anna at the age of seventeen when she rode her horse daily. This intrusion of her other life makes the territory trickier.
The second section abruptly shifts to Simon’s background after Rose’s background with Anna. These abrupt cuts hasten the pace, layer the background, and set the story askew. From teenaged Anna to teenaged Simon, from automobile and bus stop to a train in Europe, Munro covers considerable space in a few lines. “When Simon was fourteen, he and his older sister and another boy, a friend of theirs, were hidden in a freight car, travelling from occupied to unoccupied France.” Simon and his sister had already been sent out of Poland at the beginning of the war to stay with French relatives. Now they had to be sent away again. “The freight car stopped.” In one suspenseful paragraph Munro packs and unpacks the history of the Holocaust, as Simon manages to escape detection by German soldiers. The train picks up speed. “Simon said that when he realized they were safe he suddenly felt that they would get through, that nothing could happen to them now, that they were particularly blessed and lucky. He took what happened for a lucky sign.” Simon’s lucky sign accompanies him to Rose’s bed, but good luck in Munro’s fiction is always fraught.
Rose’s house is on the outskirts of a crossroads village, a significant intersection for the exchange of history between her and Simon. Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, Munro employs the crossroads significantly: it is the locus where two paths of transport converge; it is associated with the cross of crucifixion; and it is the place where the fates of Rose’s automobile and Simon’s lucky train stop for a weekend. Rose muses on country life: “She thought she would go for long walks on deserted country roads,” so different from her initial street walking. During her first outing she hears shots from a car “roaring past, weaving all over the road.” The woman at the crossroads store informs her that the boys were out shooting groundhogs. The narrator crosses the Atlantic to fill in more of Simon’s background on a farm in the mountains of Provence where life had not progressed much since the Middle Ages. When Simon accidentally plunges a pitchfork into his foot, the wound becomes infected, and they summon a veterinarian from the neighbouring village. He gives Simon “a shot with a great horse needle,” that recalls Anna’s horseback riding and the shots of the boys shooting groundhogs. Simon’s wound gets better, but as luck would have it, he later develops pancreatic cancer. The colloquy begins with Rose’s “country life” and ends with Simon’s exclamation – “Country life!”
After Simon mysteriously disappears, Rose packs her car, and “she drove off in a westerly direction.” Her sunset drive maps the trans-Canada psyche. She loads her car with her (dis)possessions: “she crouched in the front seat, writing the letter.” Munro’s driving lesson is about loss – leaving a place and people: “friends who had known her twenty years didn’t know half of the flights she had been on.” Her flights of leaving are hard drives on roads that are askew between hope in the future and dread from the past, the twisting prose following a precarious path. “Here she was, she thought a bit later, driving a car, shutting down the windshield wipers as the rain finally let up, on a Monday morning at ten o’clock, stopping for gas.” The narrator’s tenses, afterthoughts, and syntax steer the reader through a cubist-gothic landscape, as the sentence heads for a dead end: “she was competent and cheery, she remembered what to do, who would guess what mortifications, predictions, were beating in her head?” In head beats and heart beats, mortification tinged with hope builds, as buried memories surface against repression; and the car, like the house, becomes unheimlich: “The most mortifying thing of all was hope, which because so deceitfully at first, masks itself cunningly, but not for long.” Munro’s cunning, deceitful masks accompany her driver who imagines that “Simon might be turning in to her driveway at this very moment.” The double drive ends in the echoing “Memento mori” – the cubist-gothic relic of the roadway.
The pull of the open road and ominous signposts: “Thinking like this, every twenty miles or so, she slowed, even looked for a place to turn around.” The emotional vehicle is caught between reverse and acceleration in life’s driving lessons: “Then she did not do it, she speeded up, thinking she would drive a little further, to make sure her head was clear.” The driver is vulnerable in her dependency, and the car’s transference registers that dependency in a rocking motion of forward and reverse: “And so it was, back and forth, as if the rear end of the car was held by a magnetic force, which ebbed and strengthened again, but the strength was never quite enough to make her turn, and after a while she became almost impersonally curious, seeing it as a real physical force and wondering if it was getting weaker as she drove, if at some point far ahead the car and she would leap free of it, and she would recognize the moment when she left its field.” The highway is an extended crossroads; the passive passenger changes places with the active driver of passion, deception, and field forces.
After her sublimated drive through Ontario, the epiphany does not occur until she reaches the prairies: “the distance, she thought afterward, would have to be covered by car, or by bus, or bicycle; you couldn’t get the same results by flying.” Almost all the modes of transportation available for the street walker turned driver, as the car covers the short story’s narrative distance. Rose has her revelation in a café in a prairie town. Having looked through her rose-coloured glasses and both sides of windows, she now sees “thick glass dishes …. that told her of her changed state.” These new lenses replace the earlier teacups of fortune. She feels the solidity of these ordinary dishes “with a convalescent gratitude.” Munro’s mundane sublime appears in the “private balance spring” of hope, luck, and “thick and plain” ice-cream dishes.
After this prairie epiphany she arrives in Vancouver – “Luck was with her”—displaced from Simon’s luck. Fortunately, she lands an acting job where she plays the role of a pseudo-mother, yet another displacement of life and art. She examines the words “fragile” and “horsehide” – the former a reminder of her fragility as opposed to the thick glass, the latter a reminder of her daughter’s riding habits, the need for thick skin that hides and protects subcutaneous truths. Rose and reader discover the truth in the final section aboard a B.C. ferry, where we learn of Simon’s death from pancreatic cancer. Passengers aboard the ferry watch Rose acting, but the reader is the passenger in Munro’s shape-shifting genre. “People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate unforgettable scenery.” Open story lines and open windows reveal and conceal open secrets. “Simon’s Luck” shifts gears, windows the unforgettable, disarranges memory and car tracks, and highlights Munro’s transportation of denial, deception, and dependency.
The final paragraph further drives home the narrative lesson. “Simon’s death struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement” – in the struggle between Eros and Thanatos. The repetition of disarrangement underscores the nature of Munro’s cubist-gothic technique of domestic and driven (dis)order. Yet disarrangement is not just the final word in the penultimate sentence. Dissimulation appears immediately after: “It was preposterous,” and Munro’s short stories are preposterous in their shifts of tenses, fore and aft, the conflicting “pre” and “post” of past – a crossroads word with contrasting prefixes. Munro opens the windows of the uncanny car and house of fiction to disarrange the décor. Simon’s train and Rose’s car travel in opposite directions, but converge in the crossroads of fiction, destiny, irony, comedy, and tragedy. Her narrator is the silent witness behind the wheel, inhaling the cold smoke and smell of horses.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Penguin Canada (May 22 2007)
Language : English
Paperback : 250 pages
ISBN-10 : 0143054996
ISBN-13 : 978-0143054993