Alice Munro’s work has been repeatedly praised for its masterful realism, its true-to-life representation of everyday reality in rural Ontario; yet this is only part of the power of her oeuvre, and perhaps not the most relevant to her writing. Munro’s stories usually take place in a world where “anything may happen” (Munro, 2000, p.212) and present a realist scenario precisely in order to depart from it and to reveal the subterranean world that lies underneath it, the secret gems of extra-ordinariness embedded in the everyday. Moreover, Munro’s skillfulness in representing realistic characters should not prevent the reader from noticing and appreciating her subtle genius in employing narrative strategies and her intense interest in the workings of language. Munro’s work does not concern itself merely with mimesis; her aim is not solely that of reproducing a snapshot of reality, but rather that of interrogating the problematic relation between reality and fiction and inspecting the way in which the real world can be grasped through fiction. L. K. Mackendrick has rightly termed her stories “probable fictions” (Mackendrick, 1983, p.1), in that in reading them one should never forget that they are, essentially, texts. Intriguingly, Munro originally titled one of her collections Real Life 1 ; these words surely represent a struggle towards realism, but also prompt the reader to take into consideration the implications deriving from the fact that what has been termed ‘real life’ is, actually, a collection of stories. It is arguably her desire to trace the tenuous demarcation between fiction and reality – her interest in (hi)stories –, along with her exploration of the shades of meaning created by the convergence of past and present that confer to Munro the well-deserved title of ‘greatest living short-story writer in the world’.
The narrator of the short-story “Gravel”, like many of Munro’s characters, is a self-conscious storyteller; she attempts to make sense of real events through the act of writing. “Gravel” can be seen as a reflection on the powers and limitations of narrative as a way to come to terms with life, and, in particular, with the discrepancies between past and present. The narrator of the short-story grapples with two main problems in the written presentation of a real event: her first obstacle is represented by the fact that she2 has to deal with an event that happened in the past, and must therefore rely on her memory of childhood and on various retellings, and therefore narrative acts, of that episode. “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture” (p.1), the narrator confesses in the story. Her second impediment is represented by the medium through which she resuscitates the incident, that is to say, words. Representations of the real are always partially influenced by the medium through which they are conveyed. As L. Hutcheon has put it, “the real exists (and existed) but our understanding of it is always conditioned by discourses – by our different ways of talking about it” (Hutcheon quoted by Heble, 1994, p.42). Munro as a writer is particularly aware of the power of words to both reveal and conceal meaning; in her short-story, the misunderstanding of “atomic bomb” (p.1) as “atomic bun” (p.1) is equally playful and serious in reflecting on the delicate and easily displaced links that connect words and signification. Words can trick you, to use one of Munro's favourite words. Thus Munro’s story is “about what stories can do, about the relationship between truth and narrative, between knowing and telling” (Mayberry, 1992, p.1). Short-stories are extremely suitable in dealing with the exploration of liminal spaces, and therefore Munro’s choice of themes in the story is particularly appropriate.
The story deals with the difficult relationship between the converging spheres of past and present. Past and present are constantly enacting a discourse between each other in the story, a discourse that also goes on between the narrator as child and the narrator as adult. Whilst the present is mainly rooted in ‘reality’, the past in itself is not real, but a kind of fictional construct, a story we endlessly write in our mind. Moreover, the past seen through the eyes of a child acquires another level of separation from reality. In the world of the story, partially observed through the eyes of an infant, “the snow [dwindles] magically” (p.4) and the narrator wonders where her old house “[has] gone” (p.2) once having moved to the trailer next to the gravel pit. Memory presents us with a polysemic realm. The past is pregnant with fictions; what it mainly has to offer are performative possibilities, rather than static facts. The past is reality retold, reality made into a story. Ajay Heble has interestingly pointed out that “in her act of telling the story, the adult narrator reveals her involvement in the paradigmatic realm. By telling part of a story now which she would not tell then … she is, in part, enacting an alternative possibility” (Heble, 1994, p.32). Thus, the story is not only an attempt to reconstruct a truthful narrative by meticulously piecing together fragments of ‘gravel’ – particles of memory – eroded by the ever-streaming waters of time; it is also a drama enacted not by real persons but by acting personae with blurred identities, “solid [ghosts]” (p.2). “What happened then?” (p.2) wonders the narrator in the text, whilst struggling to process her memories; a phrase commonly voiced by enthusiastic listeners to the teller of a story.
The retelling of the accident is the part of the story that comes closer to a playful fabrication rather than to the recollection of a fractured past. A great deal of fiction is rooted in play, and Caro loves games; when asked why she once left the house with Blitzee hidden under her coat, her answer is “I did it for a trick” (p.3). The whole accident is orchestrated by her, fictionalized by her; Blitzee “wasn’t in the water” (p.4) but “she could be” (p.4, my emphasis) and “Caro could jump to save her” (p.4, my emphasis). During the completion of Caro’s ‘narrative’, the narrator finds that all she can do is “[sit] down and [wait] for the next thing to happen” (p.5), like a spectator enchanted by the action in a theatre. When the narrator dreams of the accident, she realizes that “nothing [is] required of [her], after all” (p.5); even in her dreams she contemplates but does not take action. The fact that Munro brings acting and role-playing into the story is relevant to its overall meaning; she wants to push the boundaries of experience and to inspect the relationship between performance and reality. The complex discourse between reality and fiction is a “discourse of absence” (Heble, 1994, p.95); the interplay between secure facts and conjectures creates meaning out of nothingness, out of the gaps that result from it. Meaning is thus a result of displacements and absences.
The ending of the story is marvelous and mysterious; it hovers between a sense of complete puzzlement and majestic revelation. In Wendy Martin’s words, it conveys “a sort of truth that more carefully accurate statements would find difficult to reach” (Martin, 1987, p.188). Here is the last paragraph of the story in its entirety:
I see what [Neal] meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I'm still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash. [p.7]
Before proceeding with a brief analysis of these last lines, it is intriguing to notice the short sentence which precedes them, in that it is very peculiar: the words expressed by the narrator after having listened to Neal’s advice are “now, goodbye” (p.7). Instinctively they might be perceived as spoken words uttered by the narrator when she leaves Neal, yet they are not enclosed in speech marks. Is it possible that the narrator is saying goodbye to ‘now’, the present moment? Perhaps this sentence suggests her desire to abandon her here-and-now, the material world of reality that is pictured before her. In the next and last paragraph she escapes inside “[her] mind” and thus inhabits a very different kind of reality. One might argue that she transports herself into a realm where the processing of events is an eternal operation of re-writing, symbolized by Caro’s interminable series of jumps. Perhaps the narrator is not waiting for an explanation from Neal or her mother or the other persons who try to understand what might have happened. Towards the end of the story she gives an account of external, rational ‘theories’ of how things might have gone, but is hardly satisfied with the interpretations. Like active readers of a story, “the counsellor”, “Ruthann” and “Neal” (p.7) contrive various speculations as to why the accident took place.
The narrator, nevertheless, is waiting for the fictional Caro in her head to rationalize the events, just like Caro “created her own narrative to accompany her jump” (Huber, 2014, p.61) at the time of the tragedy. Caro is the only person who could make complete sense of the narration, and is in a way the ghostly writer in the story, but she is confined to the fabricated realm of the past. Thus the narrator is trying to make sense of past events that really happened in her life through fiction. In her writings Munro is not exactly interested in capturing truth – she shows in “Gravel” that it is an impossible task to undertake. What she is trying to do is to show the interconnections between reality and fantasy, truth and fiction, and the fleeting revelations that emerge from these interconnections. Arguably the narrator is not interested in what “the right thing to do [really is]” (p. 7, my emphasis); her attempts to probe into the past take place inside her own mind – she is waiting for a ‘fictional truth’. Perhaps the narrator of “Gravel” should be reprimanded in that she appears unable to abandon the fictional world of infancy, and should “learn to live in the world rather than simply fictionalize it” (Ajay, 1994, p.121). The narrator herself states that “where the gravel pit was a house now stands” (p.6); the past is irretrievable. Yet, despite the mute desperation that veils her account, a process of healing takes place through her act of writing. She does not only dissect the past, but also partially reconciles with it, by telling a story. ♦
NOTES
1 The title Real Life was later changed by Munro into Lives of Girls and Women, a collection of short-stories published in 1971.
2 The text does not indicate if the narrator is male or female. I use the pronoun ‘she’ partly for convenience and partly because most of Munro’s central characters are women.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Huber, Bettina. ‘Gravel: (Re)constructing the Past’, For (Dear) Life: Close Readings of Alice Munro's Ultimate Fiction, pp. 57-67, ed. Eva Sabine Zehelein. Berlin: LIT VERLAG, 2014.
Mackendrick, L. K. ‘Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts’, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, pp. 1-5, ed. Louis K. Mackendrick. Downsview, Ontario: ECW PRESS, 1983.
Mayberry, K. J. ‘Every Last Thing … Everlasting: Alice Munro and the Limits of Narrative’. Studies in Short Fiction, 29:4, Fall 1992: 531-41.
Martin, R.W. Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel. Alberta, Canada: The University of Alberta Press, 1987. Munro, Alice. “Dance of the Happy Shades”, Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories. London: Vintage, 2000.
Munro, Alice. “Gravel”, Dear Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 2012.
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