Secret Squirrel writes about Alice Munro
is her fiction a celebration of the cruelty of the erotic?
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you to follow (the squirrel is out of the bag) —now he has written a long-form assessment of Alice Munro. He says he wants to write a book about Munro: I hope he does.
If Munro thought, as she told Barbara Frum, that “the springs of creativity and sex are all together,” and her understanding of sexuality is so tightly connected to domination and even to brutality, is her fiction, then, a celebration of the cruelty of the erotic? This would not be quite correct, because she also makes space in it for that other aspect of “the dark side of human nature,” “the impulses that make us religious.” Munro believes that to be human is necessarily to seek to make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible brutality of nature, including the brutality of our erotic natures. This need to tame by explanation is for her the shared origin of both religion and poetry, perhaps even of language.
And this.
Munro had a passion for local history, and there is a lot in her writing about salt mines and sanitariums and turn-of-the-century labor disputes and the history of Canada’s Protestant denominations.33 (The description of the Doud piano factory and its place in the evolving class structure of Carstairs in the first story of Open Secrets is masterly, more precise and less sentimental than the glove factory Philip Roth spends so many words on in American Pastoral.) Munro’s focus, however, is on family dynamics and sexual mores. She paints her fictional Winghams as quintessential closed, village-like communities in which family life is dominated by religion and inherited folkways. This allows Munro to present herself as a sort of Tocqueville of the sexual revolution. She is intimately familiar with the “archaic” old regime that existed before what she calls “the change” or “the great switch.”34 Yet the realm of freedom that opened up between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP did not come too late for her, although like so many of her characters she entered the new world encumbered by a husband and children. Existing between two worlds, she claims special insight into both, and into what has and has not changed in the transition from one to the other.
From the new issue of Literary Imagination, which seems to be dedicated, under
’s editorship, to academic criticism that you might actually want to read.