Lauren Porter
ENGL 206
Kenan
Alice Munro
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974)
Summaries
“Material”
“Material” is narrated by a woman whose name we never learn. It starts out
in a bookstore with her and her husband, Gabriel, who shows her a collection of
short stories that he thinks she should buy for her daughter, Clea. The collection of
short stories is written by the narrator’s ex-husband Hugo, Clea’s biological father.
This collection makes the narrator recall her marriage with Hugo, which had its own
share of passion and fun, but ultimately failed due to ‘incompatibility’. They
divorced and Hugo went to marry and remarry several times afterwards, writing all
the while. The narrator gets re-married to Gabriel, a bafflingly pleasant man, who
contrasts so greatly with Hugo’s irascibility and ‘writerly quirks’. The narrator reads
Hugo’s collection, and though she admits that it is beautiful, and begins writing a
letter to Hugo to tell him so, they also dredge up bitter emotions that spill over into
the letter, so she never sends it.
“Tell me Yes or No”
The story is narrated by a married woman who is also a student, and lives
with her husband in special married couple housing. However, the narrator begins
to have an emotional affair with a war veteran, who is also a journalist, and married.
As the affair gets more serious, he confesses his love, which she reciprocates. He
moves away for work, but they send letters back and forth, and those letters become
her world. One day she notices a headline in the paper proclaiming his death of a
heart attack, and she decides to go to the town where she had been sending her
letters. She finds his house and the bookstore his wife owns. She lurks in the
bookstore for a while, and the woman eventually notices her and says that she has a
feeling she knows who the narrator is, and gives her letters that had been addressed
to her husband, informing the narrator that the man is dead. The letters started off
desperate for a response, and only got more frantic as they went on. The narrator
denies having written them, and returns the letters to the journalist’s wife and
returns home. She writes this story to come to terms with her feelings for him as
well as his death, claiming at the end that, as far as her purpose go, she invented
him.
“The Ottowa Valley”
The story is narrated by the daughter of a woman who has Parkinson’s
disease. The story centers on one summer the girl spent with her mother and her
extended family, as well as exploring how the narrator and her mother are finding
out that the mother has Parkinson’s disease. The girl doesn’t understand at the time
that her mother can’t control the illness, but later on the narrator tells this account
of that summer to understand and to remember her mother and her illness, and to
get rid of those memories, because she can’t seem to let them go.
Biographical Essay
Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw on July 10, 1931 in Wingham, Ontario,
Canada (Duffy). Her mother, Anne Laidlaw, was a schoolteacher, and her father,
Robert Laidlaw, raised foxes and mink for their fur (Cox, 19). She published her first
short story when she was 19, called “The Dimensions of a Shadow” (Duffy). At
Western University of Ontario she met James Munro, whom she later married, and
with whom then moved to Vancouver (Duffy). In 1968 her career took off with the
publication of Dance of the Happy Shades, launching her into the beginnings of her
critically acclaimed career (Duffy). Dance of the Happy Shades won the Governor’s
General Award (Cox, viii). By the age of 30 she was juggling four daughters and her
writing, fighting the pressure to conform to the stereotype of the domestic woman
while challenging “the potent male myth of the bohemian free-spirited writer
lifestyle” (Cox, 27). Their marriage between the Munros broke up in the 1970s,
which prompted her return to Ontario (Cox, 28). Here, she received an Honorary
Doctorate from the University of Western Ontario, and married geographer Gerald
Franklin, whome she had first met at university (Cox, viii). They currently keep two
homes, one in British Columbia, and one in Clinton. With this move she also made an
international breakthrough after being published and reviewed1 in The New Yorker
in 1974 (Cox, 28). Alice Munro has won The Canadian Prize for literature in 2013,
Three Governer’s General Awards, Two Giller Prizes, the Man Booker International
Prize for lifetime achievement, the Canada-Australia Literary Prize, the
Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the O. Henry Award in the US (Duffy).
1
http://www.nytimes.com/1974/10/27/books/munro-something.html?_r=0
Sources
Duffy, Dennis. "Alice Munro." The Canadian Encyclopedia. Ed. Daniel Baird. Historic
Canada, 09 July 2013. Web. 18 Mar. 2014.
<http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/alice-munro/>.
Cox, Ailsa. Alice Munro. Tavistock: Northcote House in Association with the British
Council, 2004. Print.
Craft Analysis Paper
Alice Munro’s first short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades was
published in 1968. Ever since then, she has only continued to rise in critical acclaim
as one of Canada’s most outstanding fiction writers. Alice Munro wrote Something
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You in 1974. It was one of her collections that didn’t win an
award, but her talent is still evident in them. There is a reason for this acclaim, and
why Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You is still exemplary of Alice Munro’s
talent as a writer. Alice Munro crafts her prose, characters, and setting to be simply
presented yet densely layered with meaning and significance, communicating real
world truths about humanity and the multiplicity of reality.
Her dense and direct sentence structures, purposeful word choice, and
colloquial diction create clarity of prose which adds weight and power to her
storytelling. She is a master at layering pertinent information within a sentence, and
then building upon it with the sentences that follow. While she does vary sentence
structure, length, and maintains control over her grammar, a wealth of information
about the situation or character is conveyed in every line. In “Material”, the narrator
introduces and summarizes her opinion of and conflict with her ex-husband Hugo:
“I don’t keep up with Hugo’s writing. Sometimes I see his name, in the
library, on the cover of some literary journal that I don’t open—I
haven’t opened a literary journal in a dozen years, praise God. Or I
read in the paper or see on a poster—this would be in the library, too,
or in a bookstore—an announcement of a panel discussion at the
University, with Hugo flown in to discuss the state of the novel today,
or the contemporary short story, or the new nationalism in our
literature” (Munro, 24).
Here the narrator’s distaste for the literary world after divorcing Hugo is apparent
and built upon, from her first assertion of not keeping up with Hugo’s writing, to the
aside of “praise God” (Munro, 24). But Munro doesn’t stop there; amidst this
development of the narrator’s voice, Hugo is also characterized and built upon, as
the narrator unwittingly gives the reader insight into Hugo’s level of success. His
name is written in literary journals, on posters, and he is flown across the country to
talk at universities, and his opinion is valued.
Munro takes advantage of simple, easy to understand language and sentence
structure to illustrate these parallel realities. She gives the reader a sense that more
than what is being described or is occurring on the page is happening. Each word on
the page, too, serves this purpose to lend clarity to what is being described. To
continue with “Material”, the narrator describes men like Hugo who are writers and
literary intellectuals as “vain quarrelsome men… Bloated, opinionated, untidy men”
(Munro, 24). This gives the reader a clear image of how the narrator imagines men
like Hugo to be, but we also get the sense that the narrator feels this to be true
especially of Hugo. Once again, we see the repetition of the double meaning; she is
describing in general these ‘literary men’, but she means Hugo. Munro’s economy
with metaphor lends to clarity of understanding. Each sentence serves to move the
story forward while simultaneously conveying pertinent information. She does not
meander with ornamental descriptions or unnecessary comparison, but hones her
prose to provide clarity and to keep the pacing strong. The narrator’s new husband,
Gabriel, is “an engineer”, “born in Romania, [and] he lived there until the end of the
war, when he was sixteen” (Munro, 25). However, the real punching description that
arouses curiosity while at the same time being a pertinent character detail is that
“he has forgotten how to speak Romanian” (Munro, 25). This character is not
introduced through metaphor to illustrate what kind of person he is, but rather
through mundane, essential details, presented frankly. Much of the tone within
Munro’s work is confessional, as if the narrator is imparting necessary information,
trying to tell an important story and convey the significance through everyday
language so the importance can be easily understood.
The poignancy of the stories of the characters comes from her realistic
dialogue, which also acts as a tool for characterization, and lets the humanity of the
characters shine through her prose. Characterization is done primarily through the
thoughts and narrations of those within the story, primarily the narrator’s
judgments of other characters. For example, in “Tell Me Yes or No”, the wife of the
narrator’s lover is described as “dark, gyspyish, emphatically confident, in
comparison to the blurred and sleepy, stay-at-home wives” (Munro, 108). This is
entirely in the narrator’s voice, but it reveals much of the character being described.
Once again, Munro employs quick dense descriptions, aided here by an apt
juxtaposition, to introduce characters to readers. Munro allows the woman to be
imagined by the reader as a complex human being, not masked by metaphor or
figurative language. However, another one of Munro’s strengths in making her
characters human is through dialogue. She often uses it with great success without
stage directions, as can be seen in “Tell Me Yes or No” with the following
conversation between the narrator and her lover.
“You could take a later plane, you know.”
“I don’t know.”
“You could come to a hotel with me and phone up and cancel, and get
yourself booked onto a later flight.”
“I don’t know. No, I don’t think I can. I’m too tired.”
“I am not so strenuous.”
“No.” (112)
No setting is needed, no description of the characters’ inner thought process
is required, and yet the atmosphere between the two characters is one of deep
longing, yet uncertainty. Munro’s un-ornamented yet solid hand with dialogue
invites the readers to imagine the character’s voices, to try and get inside the
characters’ heads in order to understand their motives. This makes her writing
engrossing in a cerebral way, because the readers have to engage with the
characters through their dialogue and their descriptions in order to get a sense of
them.
Munro employs both first person and third person limited omniscient in her
collection Something I’ve been Meaning to Tell You. However, regardless of which
point of view she uses, the tone of her pieces feels confessional, or an imparting of
secrets or information of the utmost importance. When in first person, Munro’s
characters always seem to be confiding with the reader, using language that implies
openness and comfort with revealing such personal information. It also feels to be
incredibly charged with emotion. In “Tell Me Yes or No”, after the narrator and her
lover stay in a hotel together, she says this at the end:
“We both trembled. We barely managed it, being overcome—both of
us, both of us—with gratitude, and amazement. The flood of luck, of
happiness undeserved, unqualified, nearly unbelieved-in. Tears stood
in our eyes. Undeniably. Yes.” (113)
This is an incredibly short section, but one can feel the awe and love from the
narrator, and infer it of her lover because she uses ‘we’ here. Her third person
omniscient is less emotional, and utilizes dialogue to convey character traits and
thoughts. However, the human connection with the characters is not lost. In
“Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You”, Et becomes a dressmaker:
“It surprised everybody, but not Et herself. She made the change
easily, from a girl turning cartwheels to a town fixture. She drove the
other dressmakers out of business. They had been meek, unimportant
creatures anyway, going around to people’s houses, sewing in back
rooms and being grateful for meals.” (Munro, 18)
With “meek, unimportant creatures”, the readers get the sense that this is Et’s voice
rather than the narrator’s. In this way, Munro frequently allows the third person
narrator to slip into the consciousness of the characters to enhance the human
details of the story, and to further connect the readers with the characters and what
is happening.
Finally, Munro sets her stories firmly in Canada, also utilizing density of
language and characters to place the reader there. The short story “The Ottowa
Valley”, the last of Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, uses not just prose but
characters themselves, as well as their interactions with each other, to paint a rich
picture of the place. First, the narrator describes the valley with the following, not
understanding just yet that the Ottowa Valley is more than a valley, but a culture
and a history:
“It was no valley. I looked for mountains, or a least hills, but in the morning
all it was was fields and bush, and Aunt Dodie outside the window holding a
milk pail for a calf.” (Munro, 229).
Little does the narrator know that the Ottowa Valley is better personified by Aunt
Dodie and the calf. Throughout this short story Munro paints a rich picture of the
culture of this place through the songs that her extended family sings, reminiscient
of Irish drinking songs. This is particularly apt since the immigrants that settled in
the Ottowa Valley were of French, Irish, and Scottish descent (Canadian
Geographic). Through characters reminiscing about their childhood in this area, too,
readers get the feel of the countryside and farmlands found there. In this way it can
be seen that Munro uses her characters to anchor a story in place, and then to give
that place a deeper significance past setting. The Ottowa Valley for the narrator’s
mother, and her sister (Aunt Dodie) is where they grew up, where they grew close,
where they got to know their mother, and eventually where their mother died.
Munro fully exploits the characters’ deep connections with a place in order for the
readers to understand and to feel its significance as well.
Her polished prose and the glowing humanity of her characters are what
make Alice Munro’s work stand out. She utilizes simple language, which allows the
rawness of her complex characters to connect with readers on a deep human level.
Her characters and their circumstances may be ordinary, but they are still presented
in a way that honors the depth of emotion that is the undercurrent of mundane life.
Alice Munro’s honesty towards the human experience is one reason among many for
her critical acclaim.
Sources
Munro, Alice. Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You...; Thirteen Stories. Toronto:
McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974. Print.
Wallace, Jackie. "Ottawa Valley Facts - Canadian Geographic Magazine: In-depth."
Ottawa Valley Facts - Canadian Geographic Magazine: In-depth. Canadian
Geographic, n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.
<http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/so05/indepth/justthefacts.asp>.