LETTER FROM FLORENCE
Crazy for Alice
Why is Alice Munro a hit with European psychoanalysts?
By Megan Williams, CBCNews.ca
Often, the most intriguing aspect of academic conferences is the chance to witness the
wild stretches the human mind attempts to connect apparently unrelated things. When
I received an invitation to attend the first international conference of Italian and French
female psychoanalysts to discuss the work of Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, I
knew I was in for some weird fun.
Not that Munro’s stories and the female psyche are apples and oranges. To my mind,
few other writers have so breathtakingly navigated the hidden and ever-changing
feelings that shift beneath our everyday lives. Even fewer have so subtly and expertly
disrupted and transformed the classical narrative structure of stories about women’s
lives. What makes Munro’s writing so beguiling is that beneath the black-and-white
telling, there always lies an epiphany or revelation.
Munro is also a writer very much rooted in Canada — specifically, Ontario —with
nuanced portrayals of the Scotch-Protestant culture of the region. Many of her stories
are about people, usually women, striving to come into their own, and coming up
against the often unspoken refrain, “Who do you think you are?” — the name of one of
her early story collections. The fact that anybody in Europe was meeting to discuss her
struck me as a small miracle.
In the past five years or so, Munro has become a recognizable name among Italians who
read books — roughly equal to the percentage of the population that can run a
marathon or play the accordion. Munro’s story collections are published by the
highbrow Einaudi imprint and big review and profile spreads have appeared in the arts
sections of national papers. But as an older Canadian woman who’s lived most of her life
in a small town, her image hardly sells like hotcakes. As one youngish writer I recently
met told me with an amazed and condescending smile, “Yes, isn’t it incredible that this
simple farm woman from the Canadian north can write like that!”
The event, La Casa di Parole: Alice Munro, Convegno Internazionale, was a one-day
affair, held in the San Salvatore church beside Piazzale Michelangelo, with its vista of
Florence spread below. While the view outside couldn’t get much better, inside, the 40odd attendees sat in rows of chairs across a chilly expanse of tiled floor in a windowless
15th-century chapel. A stucco Christ-on-the-Cross with skinned knees hung under the
vaulted ceiling behind the podium. The speakers and audience were a mainly greyhaired crowd, one that favoured elegant velvet wraps, long skirts and glittery clusters of
costume jewellery. Reading glasses were donned by all. (Given the dim lighting, I wished
I’d brought my own.)
The line-up struck me as ambitious bordering on insane: 18 speakers on topics that
included everything from Munro and the domestic hearth, to female genitalia, sonatas
and finally death. An owlish man from Florence’s mayor’s office delivered the intro with
staccato gusto. He emphasized the “exploration of the meaning of death and life” and
“multi-disciplinarily nature” in the work of Munro – or “Alee-chay Man’-rrro,” as she’s
called by Italians. I might have agreed, had he not admitted to me two seconds before
taking the podium that he’d never opened a Munro story in his life.
When Florentine psychoanalyst and conference organizer Analinda Gasparini spoke
soon after, things headed decidedly uphill. Gasparini credited Munro’s writing with
helping her own work. Namely, Munro’s understanding of women’s often self-imposed
guilt when they’re not looking after others’ needs; female characters that aren’t bad or
good, but both; the “extreme lucidity” of how she sees women’s lives: the way her
stories, which jump around time, reflect the fragmentary, “multi-tasking,” foreverinterrupted female reality.
Here were woman who clearly knew their Munro, who delighted in the richness of her
stories, in the different layers of meaning, and who above all were grateful to her giving
them, as psychoanalysts, greater understanding into the disjointed, ever-shifting way
women often experience reality. As Parisian psychoanalyst Denise Sauget later put it,
“Alice Munro is testimony to how much more literature gives to psychoanalysis than
theories. And I’d go so far as to ask if the survival of psychoanalysis is not dependent on
this kind of literature.”
Then, a spike-heeled, furry-collared psychoanalyst from Milan took the stage to discuss
“Writing about Death.” She began by conjuring up the recent funeral of Luciano
Pavarotti, then segued into John Paul II’s death, and from there to Mother Teresa.
“Death,” she told us, smiling beatifically, “unites.”
Well, that depends, I thought. And where does Alice Munro fit in?
La Man-rrro eventually did fit in, or rather was made to fit into a hilariously prescriptive
lecture on the decline of family values. Comparing Munro’s recent story “Dimensions,”
about a woman whose husband kills their three children, to a litany of sensational
murder cases in Italy, the lecturer with a plea to the audience, public officials and
professionals to do everything in our power to prevent separations and divorces.
Poor Alice, saddled with all that.
The woman’s beseeching reminded me of the preface to Lolita, where Nabokov urges
parents, social workers, educators to look for lessons about paedophilia in Lolita and
“apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better
generation in a safer world.” Only his urging was satirical.
What’s less amusing and more exasperating is listening to a psychoanalyst dig her
professional knives into a story to extract case studies of “dysfunctional sibling
relations,” “the narcissistic family,” and “the symbiotic mother.” All this was gleaned
from “Miles City, Montana,” a Munro story about a young couple on holiday and the
near drowning of one of their daughters. When I’d read it, I thought it was a poignant
tale of a couple doing their best to make a go of their shaky marriage. Granted, no
family is “functional,” but this kind of clinical dissection made me want to run out of the
chapel as fast as my legs would take me. Call it projection, but even Christ up on the wall
looked freaked out.
There was one other speaker who stood out, in part because he was the only man, in
part because he arrived late, interrupted another talk with a cell phone call and
prefaced his presentation by confessing he knew little about Munro, hadn’t prepared a
talk, but would share with us some of his thoughts about the one story he had read,
Lichen. So why, he asked us, did he accept to speak about Munro? Why, indeed. He
threw around Heidegger, Freud, and the Greeks gods Hestia and Hermes for ten
minutes and then stepped down. Arrivaderci.
There was more intellectual wheel-spinning throughout the day. A lot of musing over il
sesso feminile or the female sex (what European intellectuals call vaginas a presentation
on the links between Munro and French painter Gustave Courbet and Chinese landscape
painting with some amusing wordplay thrown in; another comparing the narrative
tension in Munro to musical improvisation (think “The Munro Variations”); and another
yet on the symbolic meaning of dress in Munro stories. This last talk was given by a
Milanese “psychoanalyst of design and fashion.” Who knew such a job existed? She may
have had some interesting things to say about the symbolism of the wedding dress in
one of Munro’s stories, but it was late in the day, 16 speakers had preceded her and I
was so distracted by the huge Mini Mouse bow she wore on the side of her head – and
its psychological implications – that I didn’t retain a word.
Such are the risks of too much analysis in one day.
With a little divine intervention, the conference wrapped up early. It was time for
evening mass and the only Italians capable of sticking to a schedule – priests – wanted
us out.
On my way, I met Susanna Basso, the woman who’s translated seven of Munro’s
collections into Italian and who likely knows her work better than anyone in the country.
What was it like translating her work? I asked.
“A constant discovery,” Basso said. “With Munro, the language is very simple, but you
have to read and re-read to uncover what’s there.”
“I do Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, as well,” she added. “But there’s nobody like
Munro.”
Megan Williams is a Canadian writer based in Rome.