Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation and Comparison

Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation, and Comparison ed. by Mirosława Buchholtz and Eugenia Sojka (review) Grzegorz Koneczniak Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Volume 44, Issue 4, Décembre 2017, pp. 821-825 (Review) Published by Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/crc.2017.0068 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/683196 Access provided by University of California , Santa Barbara (23 Jun 2018 01:06 GMT) BOOK REVIEWS converse reactions to Persophilic European explorations of Persia reoccur throughout later chapters, during which Dabashi observes an overlap between “east” and “west,” not as binaries, but as global public spheres producing knowledge influencing one another. The epistemologies created at the site of European bourgeois public spaces do not stay within their boundaries, but rather travel to the sites of representation, wherein they precipitate the “formation of the Iranian public sphere, reminded it of its own imperial age, resolved its cultural paradox, and created a new public reason” (226). Although Persophilia is an ambitious text that by its very nature will spark debate amongst scholars specializing in the innumerable fields it discusses, it ultimately provides an alternative mode for evaluating Iranian cultural history, rendering Iranians as agents of their own epistemic legacies, rather than products of European fantasies. WORKS CITED 821 Joneidi, Khashayar. “Cyrus Cylinder: How a Persian Monarch Inspired Jefferson.” BBC News, 11 Mar. 2013, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-21747567 Pazargadi, Leila Moayeri, and Frances Terpak. “Picturing Qājār Persia: A Gift to Major-General Henry Creswicke Rawlinson.” Getty Research Journal, vol. 6, 2014, pp. 47-62. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1994. Buchholtz, Mirosława, and Eugenia Sojka, eds. Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation, and Comparison. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. Pp. 226. Grzegorz Koneczniak, Nicolaus Copernicus University Most book-form criticism on Alice Munro, notwithstanding her ultimate literary success in 2013 with a Nobel Prize in Literature, comes from the period between as early as the 1980s and as recent as 2015. Select publications include, for example, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts (1983) by Louis King MacKendrick, Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel (1987) by Walter Rintoul Martin, Alice Munro (1988) by E.D. Blodgett, Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro (1990) by Beverly Jean Rasporich, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (1992) by Magdalene Redekop, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence (1994) by Ajay Heble, Alice Munro: A Double Life (1995) by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Alice Munro (1998) by Coral Ann Howells, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (2005, 2011) by Robert Thacker, The Fiction of Alice Munro: CRCL DECEMBER 2017 DÉCEMBRE RCLC An Appreciation (2008) by Brad Hooper, Alice Munro (2009) by Harold Bloom, and Alice Munro’s Narrative Art (2011) by Isla Duncan. The list is not exhaustive; yet, it is sufficient to prove long-standing scholarly interest in Munro’s life and the issues addressed in her fiction. Of particular interest is the emphasis on the biographical aspect, bearing in mind that she is a secretive, self-effacing author, despite numerous autobiographical allusions in her work. Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation and Comparison, a volume edited by Mirosława Buchholtz (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland) and Eugenia Sojka (University of Silesia, Poland) has been an important contribution to book-form criticism of Munro since the writer received the Nobel Prize in 2013. The editors are experts on Canadian literature whose contributions to the development and promotion of Canadian studies reach far beyond the Polish borders and are international in scope. Both also share significant experience in directing Canadian research centres in Poland: Professor Mirosława Buchholtz was the director of the Canadian Resource Centre in Toruń 822 and dr hab. Eugenia Sojka has been a long-time director of the Canadian Studies Centre in Sosnowiec. Their recent co-edited contribution on Munro includes personal recollections shared by those who have met the Canadian writer (the first part, “Reminiscence”), insightful hermeneutical analyses of Munro’s short prose (the second part, “Interpretation”), critical and cross-sectional discussion of Munro’s work adapted for various media (the third part, “Adaptation”), and thought-provoking juxtapositions of Munro’s literary activity with the oeuvre and heritage of other writers and artists (the fourth part, “Comparison”). The opening article, “Intertextual Encounters with Alice Munro: Introduction,” by Eugenia Sojka and Mirosława Buchholtz” (7-14), sets the goal of examining “a critical international and intercultural standpoint on Munro’s art of short story writing that is not limited to a literary interpretation of the genre, but also gives critical perspectives on film and stage adaptations of her work” (8). The editors certainly deliver on this promise because the scope of the volume indeed extends beyond the limits of literary studies and the examination of the short story form in Parts II and III. The collection also includes “comparative analyses with Mavis Gallant’s and Eudora Welty’s writing by academics from Poland, Canada and France” with a contribution from George Elliott Clarke, informed by a postcolonial perspective; additionally, the volume features “exclusive reminiscences of encounters with the author by such Canadian writers as Tomson Highway and Daphne Marlatt” (8). These aspects of the collection are covered in Parts IV and I, respectively. The specific goals, as set by the editors, determine the order in which the essays will be reviewed here: starting with Parts II and III, then moving into Part IV, and finally to Part I. The first article in Part II is Lola Lemire Tostevin’s “A Touch of Evil in Carstairs” (35-41). Tostevin argues that Munro’s stories are about “secrets, fantasies and, ultimately, the confinement of violence found at the heart of the human condition” (35; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 10). The article, intended as evidence of the universality of Munro’s short prose, presents a convincing analysis of Munro’s characters and BOOK REVIEWS their relation to extra-literary reality (41). As Tostevin concludes, in Munro’s figures “readers may […] recognize themselves and their circumstances” (41). Kim Aubrey’s “A Process of Discovery: Exploring Narrative Structure and Tension in Two Short Stories by Alice Munro” (43-57) discusses the stories “Floating Bridge” and “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which appear in the 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Aubrey 43; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 10). Aubrey’s aim is “to track [her] own search for meaning in Munro’s arrangement and juxtaposition of separate sections of prose, and in the tension [Munro] develops between the emotional weight and emotional core of the stories” (Aubrey 45). In other words, she seeks to “explore how the stories move back and forth and around this central conflict, as the narrative alternately hints at and distracts from what lies at the centre” (Aubrey 45). Such endeavours make the article worth reading, as they imply that the two short stories do not yield themselves easily to a narratological analysis and cannot be interpreted in a straightforwardly verifiable manner, which is supported 823 by Aubrey’s discussion of Munro’s works. Corinne Bigot’s “Ghost Texts, Patterns of Entrapment, and Lines of Flight: Reading Stories from Too Much Happiness and Dear Life in Connection with Earlier Stories” (59-73; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 10) investigates intertexual influences in Munro’s work. Alicja Piechucka’s article ‘“[T]hat Embarrassed Me Considerably. As It Would Any Man’: The Masculinity Crisis in Alice Munro’s Dear Life” (75-92) offers a compelling examination of several stories from the collection Dear Life through the prism of feminism and representations of femininity (Piechucka 75-76). The author seeks “to explore a phenomenon which has psychological, social and sexual dimensions, and which, [she] would argue, may be traced in Alice Munro’s Dear Life. The phenomenon in question is the masculinity crisis, to which ambiguity is central” (Piechucka 76; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11). She acknowledges W.H. New’s observation that ambiguity is a key concept in Munro’s works in general (New 299, qtd. in Piechucka 76), while defending her interpretations of Munro’s male characters-“Alister Fox: the failed paternalist” (78), “Howard Ritchie: the cowardly crook” (81), “The narrator of ‘Pride’: the self-conscious celibate” (83), and “Jackson Adams: the traumatized runaway” (87)-through an in-depth examination of plot structure and character construction. Part III contains three articles. The first of these, Katarzyna Więckowska’s “Adaptation in Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?” (95-105), takes into account various definitions of the process of adaptation and discusses the title, the collection as a whole, and the individual stories in Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (Więckowska 96; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11). Więckowska discusses some of the key concepts related to adaptation, including “formation of identity,” “use of stories and storytelling,” “theatricality,” and “brokenness and constant interruption” (96; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11), present in Munro’s work. Each thematic, critical, social, and genre-related aspect of adaptation is carefully explored and interpreted. The second article in Part III, Shelley Scott’s “Courting Johanna: Adapting Munro CRCL DECEMBER 2017 DÉCEMBRE RCLC for the Stage” (107-27), is based on her experience directing a performance of the play Courting Johanna (2009) at the University of Lethbridge in 2014 (Scott 107; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11) and includes photographs from that production. The play, written by Marcia Johnson, is an adaptation of Munro’s story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001) that premiered in Blyth, Ontario in 2008 (Scott 107; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11). By applying “a transmedia perspective” (Scott 107; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11), Scott contends “that by its media specificity-its very nature-theatre can assist a story like this one by Alice Munro to reveal its own nature” (Scott 120). Marta Sibierska’s “Exploration-Adaptation: Towards Redefining the Relation between Literature and Film: The Case of Hateship Loveship” (129-44) concludes the discussion of adaptations of Munro’s work. The author asks whether one can “claim that Hateship Loveship ‘explores’ rather than ‘adapts’ the Alice Munro story,” and states her intent to prove “that […] indeed [one can do] so” (Sibierska 130). By dis824 cussing the origin of research into adaptation (130-33; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11-12) and its movement toward “exploration” (133-37; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11-12), Sibierska examines how Hateship Loveship “explores” Munro’s story (137-50; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 11-12). On a universal level, Sibierska’s essay, inspires one to take a critical stance on the presumed superiority of literary works over their adaptations: as the author states, “[n]ot every adaptation is an exploration” (Sibierska 142; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 12), a comment that makes Sibierska’s article itself a space for exploration. Part IV addresses comparative studies. George Elliott Clarke’s “Alice Munro’s Black Bottom; or Black Tints and Euro Hints in Lives of Girls and Women” (147-71) explores Del Jordan’s entry into adult sexuality, and then moves into the postcolonial dimensions of this collection. Małgorzata Poks’s “Impossible Escape from Jubilee and Winesburg: The Making of an Artist” (173-86) compares Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio to Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women from the perspectives of dislocation and literary development. Similarly, Agnieszka Salska’s “Place in Fiction: Alice Munro, Eudora Welty, and the Tradition of American Small-town Stories” (187-202), notes that “For all the differences of time and place, differences of style and narrative structures that separate the two authors, I cannot help hearing echoes of stories by Welty in stories by Munro” (193), convincingly exploring such “echoes,” as well as the differences between these two authors and their works, with a sense of interpretive objectivity. The final essay in Part IV, and in the collection as a whole, is Mirosława Buchholtz’s “The Canadian Junction: Mavis Gallant’s and Alice Munro’s Narrative Practice” (203-20). Where Salska uses Munro’s comment on the influence of Eudora Welty as inspiration, Buchholtz notes that comparisons of Munro and Gallant are fairly uncommon, for though “reviewers felt inclined to yoke the two Canadians together […], scholars have tended to focus either on Munro or on Gallant” (203) or to refer to Munro in passing in studies of Gallant. Buchholtz “places both Gallant’s life and BOOK REVIEWS fiction in the foreground as a lens through which Munro’s literary career might be viewed” (213), concluding that their techniques are similar in many ways, though the differences are acknowledged in the introduction and the conclusion of the essay. The “Canadian junction” of the essay’s title is Buchholtz’s analysis of the similarities and differences in the lives and works of Gallant and Munro (Buchholtz 217; see also Buchholtz and Sojka 13). I discuss Part I last, as it can be said to serve as a psychological and personal invitation to the more “inter-subjectively verified” (to draw on Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological hermeneutics) parts of the volume discussed above. Daphne Marlatt’s poem “Just before…she wrote” (17) views Munro through the lens of her fiction and gives a sense of the experience of reading Lives of Girls and Women when it was first published in the late 1960s. Marlatt’s poem concludes of Munro’s oeuvre that “the perceptions conveyed in her fiction have gained generational depth, layer on layer. Foundational” (Marlatt 7), and the articles in Parts II-IV of this collection approach that depth from various perspectives. Tomson Highway’s “Two Stories” 825 (19-20) is a personal recollection of two meetings with Munro: the first time at a party in 1975 or 1976 (19), and the second “some 22 or 23 years later” (Highway 19; see Buchholtz and Sojka 10). His reminiscence of Munro and the sources of her inspiration gives valuable insights into the person behind the Nobel Prize acclaim. In “Three Encounters with Alice Munro” (21-31), Gerald Lynch gives details of meetings with Munro through reading her story “Walker Brothers Cowboy” (21), in person at the University of Ottawa (23), and by co-organizing the Alice Munro Symposium in Ottawa in 2014, which Lynch regards “as some payment of the interest owing on a lifelong reader’s debt” (29; see Buchholtz and Sojka 10). The third encounter is a personal account of the literary development of Munro through the prism of first a reader and then a scholar, which also features a fascinating history of Munro’s childhood. The word “reminiscence” in the title of the anthology implies something individual and intimate, shared between Munro’s fellow writers, the editors of the collection, and the readers of these insightful and reflective commentaries on her life and works. Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation and Comparison fulfills the promises of its introductory chapter while also indicating new research directions. The “symphonic structure” mentioned at the beginning of the anthology becomes a logical flow of academic and personal readings, supported by textual and critical evidence, of surprising juxtapositions and appropriations of Munro’s work and its literary and cultural realities.