Dan Wickett and others are promoting May as Short Story Month. (Check the cool graphic.) The Emerging Writers Network is posting various appreciations of short stories, written by readers and other writers. Here’s my contribution, for what it’s worth. Munro’s quotes on writing are from the introduction to her Selected Stories.
Like many readers, I am always grateful to come upon the kind of story Alice Munro calls “durable and freestanding,” one that forever alters my experience as a reader. Munro has written many such stories. Her story-as-house metaphor is aptly realized in her best fiction, especially after she consciously abandoned the epiphanic shape of her earliest stories, such as those found in Dance of the Happy Shades. Her stories will endure for a number of reasons—for their complexity, yes, as well as for Munro’s willingness to construct a “house” that always reveals more rooms upon re-reading. Her awareness of readers’ expectations drives many of her most compelling craft decisions.
“Differently,” a story from Friend of My Youth, is a fair representation of Munro’s post-epiphanic work. Her stories often contain a multitude of narrative forms (shapes), in much the same way a novel can simultaneously employ various shapes. This is what we mean when we say her stories are novelistic or expansive. Many of her stories are quite long, some over forty pages. “Differently” is not one of her longest stories, however; at 28 pages in the Vintage edition, it is only the fifth-longest story in Friend of My Youth. Yet “Differently” does have the feel of a novel because there are many characters whose entire lives (or the bulk of their lives) are revealed for readers, and its shapes vary widely, from the journey to the gathering and more.
Munro is conscious of her desire to pack entire lives—not mere moments—into her stories. “Differently” opens with this paragraph:
Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.
Munro, like the creative writing instructor, realizes the importance of the reader’s expectations. Unlike the instructor, however, Munro does not hedge toward simplicity or oversimplification. Her sense is that readers can rise to meet the work on its own terms without it being “dumbed down” for them. In “Differently,” Munro is thinking about what readers should pay attention to, about what is the important thing. Her answer is simple: she asks that readers pay attention to everything, that they see the importance of each aspect of the story.
One possible reason for Munro’s decision to move away from the epiphanic structure is that, after a century of encountering them in books and magazines, readers can find the epiphanic pattern and predict, before the story’s ending, the ways in which the character will view the events in a new light. In short, readers’ expectations in an epiphanic story are not openly challenged. For a story to be “durable and freestanding,” to use Munro’s terms, for it to hold up after many and various kinds of re-reading and examination, Munro insists that the story contain “more than you saw the last time.” Epiphanic stories may have the effect of surprise during the first reading, but the epiphany is rarely as powerful the second time through, and if the story has little else but the epiphany, it will be hard for it to remain durable. That house will need to be knocked down.
The plot of “Differently” is fairly straight-forward. Georgia travels to visit Raymond. The front story—that is, the story that does not occur in flashback or memory—occurs in Raymond’s house. Georgia’s visit is the occasion for story. She and Raymond talk, remember old times, some of which were better than others. Then Georgia leaves. During the course of the afternoon discussion in the front story, which is told in the present tense, Munro weaves in decades of back story. As a result, readers are never really sure what to expect. The first section, which begins the front story, also contains numerous moments and memories of Georgia and Raymond’s pasts—shared and not. Numerous sections keep the reader guessing as to what will come next. The sections are organized only in an associative fashion. Munro navigates through time as needed, and not in any predictable way.
The second section, for example, moves one year back from the time of Georgia’s visit to Raymond, to the moment Georgia learned of Maya’s death. Maya was Raymond’s wife. Georgia’s had been angry with Maya for many years because Maya slept with a man Georgia had been having an affair with.
At this point, readers might think a pattern is developing, that Munro will return to the front story in Raymond’s living room, thus establishing an alternating pattern of sections: front story, back story, front story, and so on. Instead, the third section moves even deeper into the past, back to the time Georgia and her husband first visited Maya and Raymond’s house. The fourth section remains deep in back story, but moves forward from the third section to characterize the development of Georgia and Maya’s friendship. The fifth section continues with this, and establishes the start of Georgia’s affair; the sixth clarifies their friendship and the downfall of Georgia’s affair; the seventh section, which is longer than the previous five sections, details the emotional breakdown and distance within Georgia and Maya’s friendship.
The eighth section returns readers to the present-tense front story, the conversation between Georgia and Raymond. But quickly readers are moved through to the ninth section, to Georgia’s final memories of Maya. The tenth and final section brings readers again to Raymond’s living room, where Raymond asks Georgia how they should behave:
“Differently,” says Georgia. She puts a foolish stress on the word, meaning that her answer is so lame that she can offer it only as a joke.
The moment is like an epiphany. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would become an epiphany. But Munro moves past epiphany, as even Georgia realizes the “lame”-ness of the moment, of her answer, putting that “foolish stress” on the word.
A writer analyzing the craft of Munro’s stories can expect a long and rewarding journey. Her stories’ structures are often not easily visible. We writers examining her craft are consciously studying how the stories are put together; a reader engaged in her work simply for enjoyment will likely never know the exact reasons for its complicated construction. That is to say, such readers may read and re-read her stories only with pleasure and wonder.
“Too many things,” the creative writing instructor said. The opening is revelatory regarding Munro’s approach to craft. But what reader would expect to encounter the story that follows? Munro’s approach is in direct contrast to much of the simple Poe-derived craft advice passed among short story writers for over 150 years. Rust Hills, in Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, reminds his readers that “Poe spoke of the short story as providing ‘a single and unique effect…[and if the author’s] very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then [the author] has failed in [the] first step.’” Few of Munro’s first sentences tend to the unity of the work, yet her work is always unified.
There are other stories as intricately designed as Munro’s best work; James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is one such story. Munro’s design is responsible for its durability, and readers will always be excited about her work because our expectations are never easily met. If it’s true that we never want what comes too easily to us, then that is another reason Munro’s fiction will endure long past her lifetime. Reading her work can, at times, frustrate readers—especially students and readers encountering literature for the first time—because readers must surrender completely to her narrative control. But when readers finish her stories, we cannot deny that we’ve been permanently altered.
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