By Neil Besner
Please forgive the punning title. It’s intended to point both to the improbability and to the justness of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature going to the woman often thought of in the English-speaking world and elsewhere as the finest writer of short stories in the language.And it is more remarkable in my view that the Nobel went to a short story writer than to a Canadian woman, although the two latter victories are certainly remarkable enough.
Remarkable, because over the last two hundred years the short story has rarely garnered the attention of its better-known first cousin, the novel – although Munro’s stories are read around the world. Why should this be so?
It’s a commonplace that Munro’s stories depict the lives of ordinary women in small towns – often in Southern Ontario, where Munro (nee Alice Laidlaw) grew up. But the key, I think, to understanding her stories’ enduring appeal lies not simply in their frequent subjects – her female characters’ ordinary lives – but in how Munro reveals them to be extraordinary. Here is a famous, often quoted excerpt from near the end of her 1971 book, Lives of Girls and Women — Munro’s second book, and first attempt at writing a novel that has always more properly been read as a book of linked stories. The passage is from the last story, “Epilogue: The Photographer,” in which Del Jordan, the young girl who becomes a woman in the course of these stories, reflects:
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved over with kitchen linoleum.
“Dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable”: as scholars and critics of Munro’s language have noted for over forty years, it is Munro’s distinctive use of language, first and last, that makes her stories so very good. Here, it is the striking contrast between “dull” and “simple” on one hand, and “amazing” and “unfathomable” on the other: four adjectives, all of them modifying “people’s lives”; the contradictions between the pairs of adjectives are then clarified and reinforced, driven home by the metaphor that further characterizes “people’s lives” as “deep caves paved over with kitchen linoleum,” reversing the order of the opening four adjectives. “Dull” and “simple” — that is, ordinary — like kitchen linoleum; “amazing” and, indeed, literally “unfathomable,” like deep caves.
What Munro’s innumerable stories reveal — and always in language that reads as both matter-of-fact and extraordinary and memorable — is the wonderful, plausible, amazing improbability of her ordinary character’s lives. No Munro story descends into those deep caves without pacing across the kitchen linoleum, so that her characters seem to live in both worlds at once, transparently and mysteriously. Their surface ordinariness, and those small Southern Ontario towns, are never depicted without their complexities, sudden or subtly developed over the course of a story’s intricate unfolding. That’s why we are all the richer for having read or reread any Munro story. In short, Alice Munro is a most deserving Nobelist.
The (Short) Story of Alice Munro and the Nobel Prize
Articles
By Neil Besner
Please forgive the punning title. It’s intended to point both to the improbability and to the justness of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature going to the woman often thought of in the English-speaking world and elsewhere as the finest writer of short stories in the language.And it is more remarkable in my view that the Nobel went to a short story writer than to a Canadian woman, although the two latter victories are certainly remarkable enough.
Remarkable, because over the last two hundred years the short story has rarely garnered the attention of its better-known first cousin, the novel – although Munro’s stories are read around the world. Why should this be so?
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved over with kitchen linoleum.
“Dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable”: as scholars and critics of Munro’s language have noted for over forty years, it is Munro’s distinctive use of language, first and last, that makes her stories so very good. Here, it is the striking contrast between “dull” and “simple” on one hand, and “amazing” and “unfathomable” on the other: four adjectives, all of them modifying “people’s lives”; the contradictions between the pairs of adjectives are then clarified and reinforced, driven home by the metaphor that further characterizes “people’s lives” as “deep caves paved over with kitchen linoleum,” reversing the order of the opening four adjectives. “Dull” and “simple” — that is, ordinary — like kitchen linoleum; “amazing” and, indeed, literally “unfathomable,” like deep caves.
What Munro’s innumerable stories reveal — and always in language that reads as both matter-of-fact and extraordinary and memorable — is the wonderful, plausible, amazing improbability of her ordinary character’s lives. No Munro story descends into those deep caves without pacing across the kitchen linoleum, so that her characters seem to live in both worlds at once, transparently and mysteriously. Their surface ordinariness, and those small Southern Ontario towns, are never depicted without their complexities, sudden or subtly developed over the course of a story’s intricate unfolding. That’s why we are all the richer for having read or reread any Munro story. In short, Alice Munro is a most deserving Nobelist.