Alice Munro and Her Art

David Staines

(Department of English,University of Ottawa,Ottawa K1N 6N5,Canada)

AliceMunroandHerArt

David Staines

(Department of English,University of Ottawa,Ottawa K1N 6N5,Canada)

導(dǎo)讀：(趙伐，浙江外國語學(xué)院教授)

本文系加拿大著名文學(xué)評論家戴維·斯特恩斯(David Staines，1946—)2014年2月7日在德國小城特里爾(Trier)舉辦的門羅小說研討會上的演講稿。斯特恩斯是門羅近40年的摯友，兩人常一起評論作品，暢談文學(xué)，曾作為加拿大吉勒文學(xué)獎(Giller Prize)的評委，一起遴選加拿大文學(xué)創(chuàng)作領(lǐng)域的年度佳作，還一起主編了集加拿大文學(xué)經(jīng)典之大成的《新加拿大文庫》(TheNewCanadianLibrary)，并為許多經(jīng)典作品親筆撰寫后記。可以說，斯特恩斯對門羅的創(chuàng)作心路了然于胸，心有靈犀。他結(jié)合自己與門羅的交往和研究對門羅小說世界的理解應(yīng)該說得上是最貼近、最權(quán)威的了。

從斯特恩斯的這篇娓娓道來、通俗易懂的演講中，我們得知門羅的小說世界形成于她對露西·莫德·蒙哥馬利《新月莊的艾米麗》的癡迷和疑惑。作為成年人的她對自己兒時疑惑的回望塑造了她眾多小說異乎尋常的敘述視角和方式。我們還了解到，門羅專注于現(xiàn)實世界中那些平淡無奇的細微末節(jié)的“厚描”背后其實蘊含著她對過往、對生活、對人性更深邃的洞察，對歷史與現(xiàn)實之間人所身處的特殊方位更透徹的理解。她是在用這種獨特的敘事方式去“接近和認可”曾經(jīng)的往事，去釋懷曾經(jīng)的不安。這種“劇透式”的評論讓我們對門羅小說復(fù)雜得近乎于糾結(jié)的敘事范式有了全新的理解。斯特恩斯的評論不拘泥于門羅的某幾部作品，而是把批評的目光投射到她創(chuàng)作的全部，高屋建瓴地概括出她的作品中那些本質(zhì)性的東西，為我們展現(xiàn)出這位“名氣老是跟不上其才氣”的“當代短篇故事大師”的真容。讀了本文之后也許會讓大家產(chǎn)生醍醐灌頂、豁然開朗的感覺。

On November 14,2004,nearly ten years ago,Jonathan Frantzen reviewed Alice Munro’sRunaway,her tenth collection of short stories,in theNewYorkTimes;his review began:“Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America,but outside of Canada,where her books are No. 1 best sellers,she has never had a large readership... I want to circle around Munro’s latest marvel of a book,‘Runaway,’ by taking some guesses as to why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.”

Two years later,Margaret Atwood opened her collection of Munro’sSelectedStorieswith the statement:“Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. She’s been accorded armfuls of superlatives by critics in both North America and the United Kingdom,she’s won many awards,and she has a devoted international readership. Among writers themselves,her name is spoken in hushed tones. Most recently she’s been used as a stick to flog the enemy with,in various inter-writerly combats. ‘You call this writing?’ the floggers say,in effect. ‘Alice Munro! Nowthat’swriting!’ She’s the kind of writer about whom it is often said—no matter how well-known she becomes—that she ought to be better known.”

On September 11,2013,the LondonGuardianheralded Munro as one of the ten finest short fiction wri-ters of all time:“Munro,” the article said,“has changed our sense of what the short story can do as radically as Chekhov and Mansfield did at the beginning of the 20th century.”

And then on October 13,2013,Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature,heralded as “the master of the contemporary short story.”

Near the conclusion of “Epilogue:The Photographer,” the final story of Munro’s second volume of collected stories,LivesofGirlsandWomen,the narrator stands back and wonders about her little town of Jubilee,Ontario. The woman—in her thirties—has been telling stories of growing up in this small town. The woman is a surrogate for the writer who is Alice Munro,for the copyright page of the first edition of the book says the book “is autobiographical in form but not in fact.” This note has been omitted from its many later editions.

In her closing comments,the adult narrator says,“People’s lives,in Jubilee as elsewhere,were dull,simple,amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” In these words Munro crystallized her vision,and her many subsequent volumes bespeak the truth of this commentary.

Alice Munro was born in 1931 and brought up near Wingham,Ontario,a rural community not far from Lake Huron. Her childhood was spent on an impoverished farm,where her father raised silver foxes;her mother fought a losing battle with Parkinson’s disease,and she looms large in some of Munro’s most complex and touching stories. For two years she attended the University of Western Ontario—she received a scholarship to go there,but the scholarship was only for two years;for men,it was for four years,since they were expected to go into the sciences. In later years,she accepted an honorary degree from Western Ontario,for she thought she deserved a degree which had been denied to her. She has steadfastly refused to accept any other honorary degrees. When Northrop Frye complained to me in the early eighties that Munro had turned down such a degree from the University of Toronto,and he was looking for an explanation,she told me later,“What good is an honorary degree?” I could not find an answer.

After her two years at Western Ontario,she married and moved to British Columbia,where she lived for twenty years. She had begun writing and publishing short stories at university,and while she raised three daughters,her work progressed very slowly. Her first collection,DanceoftheHappyShades(1968),won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction,the highest award at that time in the country. She wrote her second book,LivesofGirlsandWomen,she remembers,in the laundry room of her home,and her typewriter was surrounded by a washer,a dryer,and an ironing board;the laundry room provided warmth and peace away from a growing family. This book was hailed as an impressive achievement;the paperback cover says,“The Sleeper of the Season,” and I recall a Chinese graduate student asking me years ago why a book that puts you to sleep should advertise this negative quality on its cover.

Munro divorced her husband and returned to her area of southwestern Ontario,where she met—again—Gerald Fremlin,a senior when she was starting at Western Ontario. They married in the early seventies. Another collection of stories,SomethingI’veBeenMeaningtoTellYou,appeared in 1974 with an astonishing closing story,“The Ottawa Valley.” And a subsequent volume of connected stories,WhoDoYouThinkYouAre?was published in 1978.

It was in the spring of 1979 that,as a young professor at the University of Ottawa,I invited Munro to come to Ottawa and give a reading from her writings. When she came that fall,I went to the Holiday Inn to meet her and guide her to the reading. I still remember my astonishment. I knocked on her hotel-room door,and this strikingly attractive woman answered. As we made our way to the reading,she told me that she wanted to read “The Ottawa Valley,” a story she had never read before an audience,and she did not know if she would be able to read the entire story. She did read it,including the remarkable conclusion.

In this story,a pre-teenage girl returns with her mother and sister to her mother’s roots in the Ottawa Valley. When she is there,she is forced to confront her mother’s debilitating condition from Parkinson’s disease and also her mother’s mortality.“Is your arm going to stop shaking?” the young girl rudely asks her mother. Through memory,the adult narrator sees herself as demanding that her mother “turn and promise me what I needed. But she did not do it. For the first time she held out altogether against me. She went on as if she had not heard,her familiar bulk ahead of me turning strange,indifferent.” Then the remarkable closing paragraph:

If I had been making a proper story out of this,I would have ended it,I think,with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn’t stop there,I suppose,because I wanted to find out more,remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I’ve done and it is like a series of snapshots,like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents’ old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena,even her children,come out clear enough. (All these people were dead now except the children who have turned into decent friendly wage earners,not a criminal or as far as I know even a neurotic among them.) The problem,the only problem,is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get;it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off,to describe,to illumine,to celebrate,togetridof her;and it did not work,for she looms too close,just as she always did. She is heavy as always,she weighs everything down,and yet she is indistinct,her edges melt and flow. This means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away,and I could go on,and on,applying what skills I know,and it would always be the same.

The remembering narrator is talking about her mother,and she is also talking about the artistic process,where she cannot rid herself sufficiently of the reality to create her art. Her later volume,FriendofMyYouth(1990),would be dedicated “to the memory of my mother.”

As Munro read this story,I could not help but think—as I told a colleague then—that if there were going to be a book on the fiction of our time written a hundred years hence,the title of the chapter on the pre-sent would be,“Alice Munro and Her Contemporaries.”

Since that reading,since that time in Ottawa,Munro and I have stayed in touch,meeting infrequently in places like Norway and Sweden,where we were part of a weekend seminar in Canadian literature;in Halifax and Toronto and Calgary and Victoria,for she agreed with me to be one of three members of the Editorial Board ofTheNewCanadianLibrary;in Toronto,where she agreed to be a member of the Giller Prize jury back in 1994;and in her town of Clinton,Ontario,where we would go for a long and leisurely lunch once or twice a year. But my talk is about Munro,not about myself,though I have learned much from her and her writings. This talk,then,reflects what I have learned about her fictional world in my studies and from direct personal experience,and the talk is humbly titled,“Alice Munro and Her Art.”

Alice Munro is a remarkable writer,a remarkable woman,as strikingly attractive now as she was thirty-five years ago. She has published many collections of short stories—fifteen in all—and she has written a few short essays. She has lived in southwestern Ontario for the last forty-some odd years. And last spring cancer sadly claimed the life of her second husband.

Munro grew up a young,incorrigible teller of tales. Her childhood was a time of fantasies,though her fantasies would become more formal,more detached,less personal daydreams. She read Lucy Maud Montgo-mery first when she was nine or ten years old:she was pleased and troubled byEmilyofNewMoon,Montgomery’sbildungsroman:“I decided that it was ‘good but different.’ By ‘good’ I meant that it kept me reading at a speedy clip through a series of home-and-school adventures,provided me with a fair number of fearful thrills,and ended with upsets righted and the child-heroine vindicated after her trials,optimistically facing adolescence and a sequel. That was the kind of book I liked,and I read plenty of them. By ‘different’ I meant that there were other things about the book that got in my way,slowed me down,even annoyed me,because I sensed a different weight about them,a demand for another kind of attention,the possibility of some new ba-lance between myself and a book,between reader and writing,which took me,the reader,by surprise,and did not let me off so easily.”

Munro finds ultimately that she cannot address the essence of Montgomery’s world:“I’ve been trying to say what it was that the ten-year-old reader found that was ‘different.’ These are the same things the eleven-and twelve-and even the fourteen-year-old reader kept going back for. But I have a sense of things I haven’t said that are perhaps the most important. In this book,as in all the books I’ve loved,there’s so much going on behind,or beyond,the proper story. There’s life spreading out behind the story—the book’s life—and we see it out of the corner of the eye. The mail pails in the dairy-house. Aunt Elizabeth pouring the tallow for the candles. The slightly repulsive splendor of the parlour at Wyther Grange. The corners of the kitchen at New Moon. What mattered to me finally in this book,what was to matter most to me in books from then on,was knowing more about that life than I’d been told,and more than I can tell.”

This is Munro,looking back from her adult perspective on her earlier world as a child immersed,fascinated,and troubled by her readings. Munro read many,many other books,including,for example,Zane Grey;when she read him,she began to invent many stories in which she was a shooting-from-the-hip western showgirl. She lived in the country,and going to the local town school,she had long walks by herself when her mind fantasized about her readings and her writings.

The writers who had the strongest influence on Munro’s short fiction were the writers of the American South:“in terms ofvision,the writers who have influenced me are probably the writers of the American South... Eudora Welty,Flannery O’Connor,Carson McCullers... Reynolds Price. Another writer who’s influenced me a lot is Wright Morris. I’m sorry these are all Americans but that’s the way it is.” These writers from the American South reverberated with Munro because she recognized,as she said to the novelist Graeme Gibson in the early seventies,a similar regional terrain:“The writers who first excited me were the writers of the American South because I felt there a country being depicted that was like my own. I can think of several writers now who are working out of southwestern Ontario. It is rich in possibilities in this way. I mean the part of the country I come from is absolutely Gothic. You can’t get it all down... It’s a very rooted kind of place. I think the kind of writing I do is almost anachronistic,because it’s so rooted in one place,and most people,even of my own age,do not have a place like this any more,and it’s something that may not have meaning very much longer. I mean this kind of writing.” As she said in 1995 inTheParisReview,“The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns,rural people,and that kind of life I knew very well. But the thing about the Southern writers that interested me,without my being really aware of it,was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty,Flannery O’Connor,Katherine Ann Porter,Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish,the marginal... I came to feel that was our territory,whereas the mainstream big novel about real life was men’s territory. I don’t know how I got that feeling of being on the margins,it wasn’t that I was pushed there. Maybe it was because I grew up on a margin.” And the writer she admired the most was not Flannery O’Connor,who was a fiction writer of ideas with a strong Catholic point of view,but Eudora Welty:“The writer I adored,” she confessed in 2012,“was Eudora Welty. I still do. I would never try to copy her—she’s too good and too much herself.”

In her essay,“How I Write” (1955),Eudora Welty talked about her own vision:“The story is a vision;while it’s being written,all choices must be its choices,and as these choices multiply upon one another,their field is growing too. The choices remain inevitable,in fact,through moving in a growing maze of possibilities that the writer... has learned to be grateful for,and excited by... it is the very existence,the very multitude and clamor and threat and lure of possibility—all possibilities his work calls up for itself as it goes—that guide his story most delicately.” And then in“The House of Willa Cather” (1973),Welty writes that Cather,whom she admired immensely,“saw the landscape had mystery as well as reality... saw her broad land in a sweep,but she saw selectively too—the detail that made all the difference. She never lost sight of the particular in the panorama. Her eye was on the human being.” What better description is there of Munro’s writing?

For Munro,writing is the crucial act of recording reality. As she explains to Graeme Gibson,“I know to me,just things in themselves are very important. I’m not a writer who is very concerned with ideas. I’m not an intellectual writer. I’m very,very excited by what you might call the surface of life,and it must be that this seems to me meaningful in a way I can’t analyze or describe... Well for me it’s just things about people,the way they look,the way they sound,the way things smell,the way everything is that you go through everyday. It seems to me very important to do something with this... It seems to me very important to be able to get at the exact tone or texture of how things are.” What we have,then,in Munro’s fiction is an attempt to see clearly the reality that exists on the surface of life,to see that multicoloured surface clearly,to record it clearly and accurately,to try and probe the surface so completely that one gets somewhere near the essence of what is being described,probed,illumined. Dull,simple,amazing and unfathomable!

What is real to Munro in her fictional universe? Again,I turn to Munro herself,who comments:“Why have I described somebody’s real ceramic elephant sitting on the mantelpiece? I could say I get momentum from doing things like this. The fictional room,town,world,need a bit of starter dough from the real world. It’s a device to help the writer—at least it helps me... I do it for the sake of my art and to make this structure which encloses the soul of my story,that I’ve been telling you about... That is more important than anything.” And Munro concludes:“Yes,I use bits of what is real,in the sense of being really there and really happening,in the world,as most people see it,and I transform it into something that is really there and really happening,in my story.”

Once I was talking with Munro,and we spoke of Sheila Watson’sTheDoubleHook,a novel she had read shortly after it came out. Too complex for her,the novel was unfathomable because she could not believe that the characters got up in the morning and had breakfast. The novel lacked for her a fixed reality. This is the first step into Munro’s artistic universe:She has to paint the everyday reality of her characters,including their very breakfasts,before she can notice the unfathomable depths of her creations.

And when Munro paints her portraits,she delves deeply into the surface exteriors—she paints the streaks of the tulip so closely,so naturally,that we accept the truth of her portraits. To us students in the late sixties,Marshall McLuhan used to say that the closer an artist penetrates in his descriptions of his subjects,the closer the artist penetrates to the universal,that is the more closely the artist goes to his or her particular subject,the more universal becomes his subject. And this is the second step of Munro’s art—she moves so penetratingly to the exact depiction of her subject,however localized it is,that her stories thereby become universal in their meaning or relevance. Small towns in southwestern Ontario finally become the universal settings of major stories that happen here,there,or elsewhere.

To fashion the story so that she can see the “deep caves,” she must first depict the “kitchen linoleum” in all its detail. This pattern occurs in her first collection of stories,DanceoftheHappyShades(1968),and it continues down to her most recent collection,DearLife(2012). Whether the stories are in the first person or the third,each one usually has a retrospective narrative technique which allows the older person,usually the narrator,who was the younger boy or girl,to comment on what was back there,to comment on what happened,to wonder now about the past:“The adult narrator has the ability,” as Munro has stated,“to detect and talk about the confusion. I don’t feel that the confusion is ever resolved... And the whole act of writing is more an attempt at recognition than of understanding,because I don’t understand many things. I feel a kind of satisfaction in just approaching something that is mysterious and important. Then writing is the art of approach and recognition.”And her narrative technique,so ultimately complex,allows her to approach the past through the present situation,to try to understand the past from the present,to use the writing on the past to offer an “approach and recognition.” She plays off then and now,the past and the present,her stories moving back and forth from the past to the present and back again,reproducing the mind’s incredible capability to recover the past,to reassess the impact of the past,to discover the torturous relationship of the past to the present,and perhaps to understand to some degree the present scene,event,incident.

At the core of this technique is Munro’s realization that “all life becomes even more mysterious and difficult.” All we have is art itself to help us approach the past,to gain some understanding of where we stood in the past and where we stand now,and to bring us to some kind of increased awareness:“I believe that we don’t solve these things—in fact our explanations take us further away,” Munro concludes.

InDanceoftheHappyShades,her first collection,a story called “Postcard” is a brief vignette of a young woman who lives in the town of Jubilee. She has a rather pedestrian existence save for the attentions of Clare MacQuarrie,a man older than her by twelve years. She cavorts with Clare;she drives around the town in a small car he gave her;she looks forward to the day when they will marry. Every year Clare goes to Florida with his sister Porky and her husband Harold,sending back to her a postcard of his travels.

One day the news is posted in the local paper that Clare married a Mrs. Leeson in Florida and would be returning with his new wife to Jubilee. Infuriated,angry,deeply hurt,the narrator is beside herself. Her mother a wise older woman who always loved Clare herself,merely comments:“I am an old woman but I know. If a man loses respect for a girl he don’t marry her... You destroyed your own chances.”

Munro tells this story from retrospect—all the details are there,the cavorting,the happy encounters,the dreadful news from Florida. There Munro leaves the story,not drawing a moral,just painting the picture superbly of the town and the anguished woman. From the opening we know where we are:“Yesterday afternoon,yesterday,I was going along the street to the Post Office,thinking how sick I was of snow,sore throats,the whole dragged-out tail-end of winter,and I wished I could pack off to Florida,like Clare. It was Wednesday afternoon,my half-day. I work in King’s Department Store,which is nothing but a ready-to-wear and dry goods,in spite of the name.” And then the short conclusion:“Oh... you can just go on talking,and Clare MacQuarrie will tell jokes,and Momma will cry,till she gets over it,but what I’ll never understand is why,right now,seeing Clare MacQuarrie as an unexplaining man,I felt for the first time that I wanted to reach out my hands andtouchhim.” There is no final understanding on the part of the character,only the recognition of what has taken place. And as Munro develops,her stories become longer,more involved,always with the re-cognition of salient features of the human condition.

In “Child’s Play,” which appeared inHarper’sMagazineof February 2007 and was gathered in Munro’s 2009 collection,TooMuchHappiness,Marlene is reliving an event from her childhood. Marlene is now an older woman,an anthropologist who never married,and she remembers a scene from her young camp days when she and her childhood partner,Charlene,used to play together. Consider the opening of the story:

I suppose there was talk in our house,afterwards.

How sad,howawful. (My mother.)

There should have been supervision. Where were the Counsellors? (My father.)

Just think,it might have—it might have been—(My mother.)

It wasn’t. Just put that idea out of your head. It wasn’t. (My father.)

It is even possible that if we ever passed the yellow house my mother said,“Remember? Remember you used to be so scared of her? The poor thing.”

My mother had a habit of hanging on to—even treasuring—the foibles of my distant infantile state.

In the course of this story,we learn that Marlene and Charlene Sullivan had a riotous time at their summer camp. Then,years later,Marlene had seen a picture in the Toronto newspaper of Charlene’s wedding to a man named Christopher;she did not write to her.“Perhaps fifteen years later,” Charlene,now a published author and a retired professor,receives a letter from Charlene congratulating her on the publication of one of her books;again Marlene does not answer. She then receives a second letter,this time from Christopher,announcing that Charlene had cancer,“begun in the lungs and spread to the liver. She had,regrettably,been a lifelong smoker. She had only a short time to live.” She requested Marlene to come to see her at Princess Margaret Hospital,“only a few blocks away from my apartment building.” She goes to see her,but Charlene is hopelessly asleep. The nurse attending her gives Marlene a letter which Charlene wanted her to have,suggesting that she return the next day.

The letter asks Marlene to go to Guelph to see a parish priest,Father Hofstrader,who “knows and I have asked him and he says it is possible to save me. Only I left so late. Marlene please do this bless you. Nothing about you.” When she arrives at the cathedral in Guelph,she discovers that the priest is on vacation. Another priest promises to get in touch with Father Hofstrader. “I sat in the car without thinking to turn the motor on,though it was freezing cold by now. I didn’t know what to do next. That is,I knew what I could do. Find my way to the highway and join the bright everlasting flow of cars towards Toronto. Or find a place to stay overnight,if I did not think I had the strength to drive. Most places would provide you with a toothbrush,or direct you to a machine where you could get one. I knew what was necessary and possible,but it was beyond my strength,for the moment,to do it.”

Then follows the story’s ending,a dramatic account in the present tense of the incident at camp where Charlene and Marlene drowned that awkward other camper,Verna. And suddenly the story makes total sense,from the opening questions of the past time through Charlene’s letter to Marlene to visit this one priest. And you have to reread the story in order to understand its process. And the ending of the story—as so often in Munro—takes place after the story ends,after Father Hofstrader returns,after Marlene meets him,after... Munro is masterful,suspenseful,compassionate,and merciless. By retrospect,the narrator relives her life,starting with this one tragic incident,which is described last,and going through her whole life,wondering still—even after the story ends—what will happen because of this one incident. Munro’s philosophical bent is so much in evidence here—art allows her to approach the subject,look back on it in the past tense,then gain some insight,if this is possible. As Munro notes,“I feel a kind of satisfaction in just approaching something that is mysterious and important.”

When this story first appeared inHarper’sin 2007,I was surprised that such a powerful story did not appear inTheNewYorker,for Munro has had a contract for many years that gives this magazine the right of first refusal of all her fiction. When I asked her aboutHarper’spublication of “Child’s Play,” she replied,“TheNewYorkerbelieves that as writers get older,they should become nicer. I am becoming bleaker.”

On another occasion,years earlier,I was talking to her about a recently published story of hers which had really disturbed me;I found the woman so relentlessly trapped without,I imagined any outlets in the future.“Yes,” she replied,“I find her very sad,too.”

Let us return,then,finally,to where I began my approach,to her early but central collection,LivesofGirlsandWomenand its final story,“The Photographer.”The young Del Jordan conceives in her mind a Gothic novel,like Munro said about her area of southwestern Ontario,a Gothic novel set in Jubilee concerning the members of the Sherriff family and all their tragedies:“In my novel I had got rid of the older brother,the alcoholic;three tragic destinies were too much even for a book,and certainly more than I could handle.” Then a man comes to town,an evil-looking photographer who takes pictures which are terrifying because they somehow make people look older and reveal hidden things in their personalities. In the photographer Munro creates a person who represents her own kind of art—a documentary realism which reveals something of the mystery of the human situation.

Del visits the one surviving member of the Sherriff family,the son Bobby who is in and out of the local asylum. She is surprised by the ordinariness of the house:“The ordinariness of everything brought me up short.” They share a piece of cake. “People’s lives,in Jubilee as elsewhere,were dull,simple,amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.” Then the older narrator stands back from her earlier encounter and wonders aloud:

It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend,writing his History,I would want to write things down.

I would try to make lists. A list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them,a list of family names,names on the tombstones in the Cemetery and any inscriptions underneath. A list of the titles of movies that played at the Lyceum Theatre from 1938 to 1950,roughly speaking. Names on the Cenotaph (more for the first World War than for the second). Names of the streets and the pattern they lay in.

The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy,heartbreaking.

And no list could hold what I wanted,for what I wanted was every last thing,every layer of speech and thought,stroke of light on bark or walls,every smell,pothole,pain,crack,delusion,held still and held together—radiant,everlasting.

At present I did not look much at this town.

Then the narrator reverts to her earlier self. Before the young girl leaves Bobby Sherriff,Bobby stands on his toes for a moment like a ballet dancer and smiles knowingly at the girl. This small gesture amidst all the ordinariness of life becomes a key to the future artist’s vision:

Bobby Sherriff spoke to me wistfully,relieving me of my fork,napkin and empty plate.

“Believe me,” he said,“I wish you luck in your life.”

Then he did the only special thing he ever did for me. With those things in his hands,he rose on his toes like a dancer,like a plump ballerina. This action,accompanied by his delicate smile,appeared to be a joke not shared with me so much as displayed for me,and it seemed also to have a concise meaning,a stylized meaning—to be a letter,or a whole word,in an alphabet I did not know.

Then the older narrator concludes her story:

People’s wishes,and their other offerings,were what I took naturally,a bit distractedly,as if they were never anything more than my due.

“Yes,” I said,instead of thank you.

Alice Munro does exactly this in her fiction. She looks at life,at the human situation,in all its complexity,and she looks at it directly,mercilessly,and compassionately. She does not mince her words;she applies herself to a careful depiction of the scene,the event,the incident so that we can see it through her eyes. And more often than not,her older narrators are steadily looking back to try to understand the essence of the scene,the event,the incident. And when we look back with the narrator,we can see the scene,we can visualize the experience. We cannot know the precise meaning;we can onlyrecognizeits seeming importance.

Munro’s art reveals the hidden troubles that lurk beneath the apparent ordinariness of life. Her world is the world of kitchen linoleum,which paves over the deep caves underneath. People’s lives are,indeed,dull,simple,amazing and unfathomable,and for more than sixty years,Munro has been fashioning and developing her unique way of looking at life around all of us. All lives are simple,and unfathomable. “Yes,” we always say at our recognition of what she is showing us. “Yes,” we tend to say,instead of thank you.

I711.45

A

2095-2074(2016)01-0001-09

2014-03-03

David Staines (1946-),加拿大渥太華大學(xué)英語系教授。

編者按：作為跨文化溝通的橋梁，將國際上最新的學(xué)術(shù)研究成果介紹到國內(nèi)，并引領(lǐng)國內(nèi)學(xué)者參與國際學(xué)術(shù)交流，這是在我國哲學(xué)社會科學(xué)“走出去”戰(zhàn)略中外語院校學(xué)刊必須承擔的責任。本刊特此在本期嘗試采用“中文導(dǎo)讀+原文論作”的形式發(fā)表加拿大著名的文學(xué)評論家戴維·斯特恩斯(David Staines)關(guān)于艾麗絲·門羅(Alice Munro)的演講AliceMunroandHerArt，并邀請國內(nèi)研究加拿大文學(xué)的學(xué)者對該文進行釋解導(dǎo)讀。這不僅能加深讀者對于這篇文章的理解，了解國際上的門羅最新研究成果，更重要的是讓中西學(xué)者在同一領(lǐng)域進行直接對話交流，展現(xiàn)國內(nèi)外學(xué)者在門羅研究上視野和觀點的同異交錯，從而拓展了門羅研究的深度和廣度。