CONVEGNO INTERNAZIONALE DEL FORUM LOU SALOMÉ - DONNE PSICANALISTE IN RETE
FIRENZE, 10 NOVEMBRE 2007

La Casa di Parole - Alice Munro
A cura di Adalinda Gasparini

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Testo per l'appuntamento del 3 settembre 2007, alla Libreria Martelli di Firenze

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Alice Munro's Secret Ort

 

 

In the Introduction to A Taste for the secret entitled  “Secrétaire”, Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris start with a writing desk in which papers are locked away to elaborate on an analogy between secretary and syllabary: “But, by analogy with syllabary, secretary could also be a catalogue, even an iconography or a portfolio, or more exactly an ichnography in which one collects, writes or describes traces, which are, at bottom, secrets” (Derrida vii).

I propose to concentrate on traces as secrets in three different contexts: a snow-bound landscape in “Pictures of the Ice”, a sand-covered beach in “The Children Stay”, and a star-lit swamp in  “Floating Bridge”. These three places can be regarded as defining a series of epiphanic sites, what Heidegger calls ort in an essay entitled “To build, to live in, to think” in which he proposes the bridge as the exemplary locus of the coming into being of the self around whom a world is created, not simply a personal umwelt but also a landscape, a cosmos which brings together the four elements, called the Quadriparti: the earth and the sky, the divine and the mortals.

Starting in1990 and ending in 2001, my trajectory will mostly span three stories from the last three collections, which will be approached as emblematic of Munro’s art of writing secrets. I will concentrate on the archeology of traces and distinguish between the trace as sediment and the trace as imprint to define the writing of secrets in terms of a  hypothetic recovery. There are at least three acceptations of the word to recover: to cover again, to regain possession, and to return to health. They will be successively envisaged in the different epiphanic sites of snow, sand, and swamp.

 

In an earlier story entitled “Fits” from The Progress of Love (1986), Munro describes the snow covered landscape of  South Western Ontario in these terms:

 

You could walk over the snowy fields as if you were walking on cement. (This morning, looking at the snow, hadn’t he thought of marble?) But this paving was not flat. It rose and dipped in a way that had not much to do with the contours of the ground underneath. The snow created its own landscape, which was sweeping, in a grand and arbitrary style. (Munro 127)

Curve of Junction creek with fresh snow on shoreline Walden Ontario Canada

 

Through the analogy with marble Munro performs what the philosopher Alain Roger has called an “artialisation of nature in visu” (Roger 16). The perception of snow as marble transforms the Ontario landscape into a canonical work of art evoking the baroque as underlined by  the evaluative predicates “sweeping,” “grand and arbitrary” coupled with the noun “style”. This cultural inscription superimposed over nature also performs another task linked with the possibility of  imaginatively reconfiguring the description through the polysemy of marble. Because the snow covers the landscape in a way that is hard to trace, it delineates what Carlo Ginzburg has called  “a paradigm of the index”  and it creates in the text the conditions for a game of hide and seek, if not for a game of marbles. It sets up a new type of contract between reader and writer which is based on finding out what is concealed from sight. To look at a Munro landscape or to read a Munro text is not to participate in the decoding of photographic realism. It is to take part in an archeological process which consists of recovering traces that have been destroyed. In Munro’s stories “the snow falling faintly through the universe” covers up the contours of the world without espousing them. There is something amiss which creates mystery. Munro fabricates secrets through a conspicuous layering and non-congruence. Snow is not a trace, it is the instrument through which traces are simultaneously destroyed and defined. AG1

Consider the process of sedimentation in pictures of the ice, not the story but what is referred to in the title of the story, that is to say, the snow-covered landscape that Austin, the minister, will later capture in a series of “freezes”:

 

Austin says they’re going to go down to the lake to look at the ice. If there is a big storm like this fairly early in the year, the wind drives the waves up on the shore and they freeze there. Ice is everywhere, in unlikely formations.

Sheets of ice drop from the burdened branches of the willow trees to the ground, and the sun shines through them from the west; they’re like walls of pearls. Ice is woven through the wire of the high fence to make it like a honeycomb. (Munro 151)

 

The process of artialisation can be noticed here in the transformation of the willow trees into walls of pearls but the main function of the similes seems to be to imbue the landscape with an eerie biblical light and to conjure up intimations of paradise through reference to pearly gates and honeycomb. In other words the description of the snow and ice encrusting the landscape acts as a cover-up which simultaneously enables the reader to recover another “urgent truth”,  a mythic landscape of origins superimposed over the mundane environment. This mythic landscape is characterized by its ambivalence, as underlined by the presence of the sun and the ice, the barbed wire and the honeycomb. It acquires a more and more sinister hue as evidenced by the rest of the description:

 

Waves have frozen as they hit the shore, making mounds and caves, a crazy landscape, out to the rim of the open water. And all the playground equipment, the children’s swings and climbing bars, has been transformed by ice, hung with organ pipes or buried in what looked like half-carved statues, shapes of ice that might be people, animals, angels, monsters, left unfinished. (Munro 151)

 

This “congestion of shapes”, these “pale lumpy ice monstrosities” that Austin will make pictures of, evoke a Hieronymus Bosch painting. We reconfigure the land of milk and honey as a possible inferno as we remember that  Dante’s ninth circle of Hell is a frozen lake that has the semblance of  glass and not of water. Munro performs an artialisation of Huron County and allows language to speak. Our interest shifts from what is concealed in the landscape to what is disclosed in the language through what Jean-Jacques Lecercle, in The Violence of Language, has called “the return of the rest”, what eludes the rational construction of language and irrupts out of its opacity through its tropicity.  In the polysemy of words and the polyphony of narration, the sheet of ice, linked with the verb to bury, and associated with predicates such as shapes of people left unfinished, necessarily creates a reconfiguration of the experience described which is not the pinpointing of a climatological feature of the country but the delineation of a climactic trauma in the character’s innenwelt. The landscape is perceived through the focalisation of a middle-aged woman called Karin who happens to be the minister’s caretaker, and who never completely recovered from her baby’s death during a snow storm, when the road to hospital was blocked and her husband too drunk to pay sufficient attention to the baby’s meningitis. The elliptic and polysemic description of the landscape covered in ice makes room for the return of the missing, the effaced, and the repressed. Not only does the baby implicitly resurface through the shrouds of ice covering the children’s swings by the side of the lake, but so does Karin’s guilt in the intertextual echo to traitors hanged  and locked in the everlasting ice of Dante’s Inferno. The pictures of the ice are no ordinary site. They are indeed the place where the mortals and the divine meet, when water from the sky has crystallised on earth. AG2

Crystalisation occurs through fusion or sublimation. In both cases the process is one of concretion or amalgamation. The pictures of the ice can be regarded as representing the conglomeration at work in Munro’s fabrication of secrets. The trace that is given here is not an imprint hollowed out on the snow, it is a sediment that covers up the landscape; it is a trace that conceals and exposes other traces in such a way that it makes room for the (hypothetic) recovery of what has been covered. It is a dialectic image which opposes what is here to what is not here. It is a material sign that sub-tends a phantasmatic construction. Consider what happens to Karin  when she looks at the pictures of the ice. She cannot help imagining that Austin  hovers on this site: “He is a blank in them but bright” (155),  she says. In the glacial solitude and dereliction of these infinite spaces she seems to have recovered not only the possibility of continuing a silent dialogue with the minister but also of obtaining the long-sought absolution that he alone could provide:

 

No matter how alone you are, and how tricky and determined, don’t you need one person to know? She could be the one for him. Each of them knew what the other was up to, and didn’t let on, and that was a link beyond the usual. Every time she thinks of it, she feels approved of-a most unexpected thing. (Munro 155)

 

Through their ambivalent sedimentation, the pictures of the ice become the secret sign of a secret contract:  Karin’s fantasized covenant with a hypothetical God of redemption and his departed intercessor.

The insubstantiality of  traces and the fantasmatic construction that they engender is equally to be found in the story entitled “The Children Stay” from The Love of a Good Woman. It is a story which embeds an extended reference to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, through a specific hypotext: Jean Anouilh’s play “Eurydice”, a play which is in the process of being rehearsed within the plot of the short story. Munro’s mise en abyme of the myth of Orpheus does not read like a Canadian reiteration or a transcontextualisation of the canon. On the contrary, it reads like an anti-Orpheus since for one thing, the story finishes on “No, not Orphée, Never him” and for another, it is the story of a woman who, far from vanishing in the netherworld for good, apparently recovers the possibility of re-establishing a meaningful connection with the daughters she had abandoned when they were children. It is a story which challenges the myth in order to make the irreversible reversible and which, like “Pictures of the Ice”, is built around the dialectic image of loss and recovery or loss as recovery, but the main figure or the “main-stay” is not one of sedimention, it is clearly an imprint offered to the reader as early as the incipit:

 

What perfect weather. Every morning, every morning it’s like this, the first pure sunlight falling through the high branches, burning away the mist over the still water of Georgia strait. The tide out, a great empty stretch of sand still damp but easy to walk on, like cement in its very last stage of drying. The tide is actually less far out; every morning, the pavilion of sand is shrinking, but it still seems ample enough. (Munro 181)

 

Thanks to the analogy of sand with cement, the footprint can be successively endowed with a power of dissolution (like mist it will evaporate), and endowed  with a power of fossilization (the footprint will harden and “stay”on ). It can also emblematize both solutions at the same time. Munro’s art, as Coral Ann Howells puts it, is an “art of indeterminacy” which enables her to envisage loss and recovery as co-extensive. When Pauline, a young wife and mother, decides to cut herself off from a world of solid acquisitions and bourgeois respectability to embark on a bohemian existence with a stage-director, she realizes that she does not choose fluidity over petrification, she chooses to abandon her children to elope with her lover: “[A] fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape” (Munro 212). Pauline has chosen fluidity as petrification. To take up Deleuze’s metaphors,  the fluidity and insubstantiality of Pauline’s line of flight is weighted down by the hard and supple segmentarity of her former molar and molecular lines, by the former attachments that cannot be erased. They can be momentarily exploded (falling in love with the stage director is compared with “a radiant explosion”) but they keep reconstituting, re-forming as an unescapable solid shape, a substantial trace, an open secret.

By choosing the imprint  because of its capacity to signal a form, and to designate loss, Munro assigns to her visual mainstay the status of  a mould, which is also a matrix, a womb. George Didi Huberman has commented on this generational power of the imprint:

 

Elle assure donc le lien généalogique, puisqu’elle offre la possibilité technique de donner forme à l’absence, de transmettre son sceau depuis les êtres passés ou mieux, trépassés- les ancêtres-jusqu’aux êtres à venir que sont les embryons se formant dans une matrice à l’image de leurs ancêtres. Dans tous les cas, l’empreinte fait de l’absence quelque chose comme une puissance de forme. (Didi Huberman 39)  

 

In the case of “The Children Stay” we are no longer dealing with a sediment that simultaneously destroys and designates traces. We are confronted with a hollowed-out imprint on the sand which only abrogates itself better to return. The trace, as Derrida said, is “le devenir temps de l’espace” which I understand as an archeological and anachronic process which re-presents the trace of a trace of a trace…

Through her memory of her daughters’ footprints and their games at the water’s edge, Pauline superimposes a rhythm of recurrence over an experience of loss. To the break up with her husband she substitutes the unbreakable connection with the genealogical line. She reverses disaffection into affiliation, an affiliation with the past and the future through the female line. The sea-side resort with its shrinking pavilion of sand where she spent her last holidays with her husband and her daughters is indeed the secret site of the re-writing of a cosmogonic myth, but is not the myth of Orpheus. “Never him”.  Munro’s Eurydice does not embody the evanescence of final dissolution, she is given the name Pauline and as such she emblematizes the revelation of  the secret of resurrection, or simply  the possibility of restauration after loss,  through the principle of artistic and genetic re-production.

In the trajectory we have followed, traces on the snow have been linked with Augustinian confessions, traces on the sand with Pauline revelation. It would appear that traces in the swamp might be linked with Saint John’s Book of Revelations and the prophets’ task. The landscape around the Borneo swamp spanned by the titular Floating Bridge is repeatedly described as a wasteland. Being driven to her kitchen help’s foster parents’home, Jinny, the story’s focalizer, goes through a wrecked area with boarded-up factories, disreputable looking old duplexes, before her husband makes a final  turn at the “wrecker’s”. The foster parents’ place is itself littered with discards:

 

The trailer and its garden looked proper and tidy while the rest of the property was littered with things that might have a purpose or might just be left around to rust or rot. (Munro 67)

 

A minute description of the rubbish lying around the yard is even provided with the use of nominal sentences which reinforce their overbearing presence:

 

A dented delivery truck with both headlights gone and the name on the side painted out. A baby’s stroller that the dogs had chewed the seat out of, a load of firewood dumped but not stacked, a pile of huge tires, a great number of plastic jugs and some oil cans and pieces of old lumber and a couple of orange plastic tarpaulins crumpled up by the wall of the shed. (Munro 70)

 

The foster parents’discards are even linked with Jinny’s own rubbish which is also presented as a piling up of possessions listed one after the other like an inventory of traces:

 

What a lot of things people could find themselves in charge of. As she had been in charge of all those photographs, official letters, minutes of meetings, newspaper clippings, a thousand categories that she had devised and was putting on disk when she had to go into chemo and everything got taken away. (Munro 71)

 

Eventually, we are led to understand that Jinny  metonymically equates herself with a piece of wreckage: “hanging on to the van like this, she must look like someone who’s just come out of a wreck” (Munro 76). Jinny suffers from a malignant tumor and undergoes chemotherapy.  The obsessive presence of the semantic field revolving around wreckage can be regarded as a textual metastasis, as the metaphoric dissemination of the lethal disease which has invaded the character’s body.  The story makes us visualize the onslaught of the disease through the all-pervasive depiction of detritus: we might go as far as speaking of an extended hypotyposis based on a metonymic principle which indirectly exposes the ravages endured by the body through the depiction of a wasteland around the character. The process of sedimentation at work in “Floating Bridge” might appear as radically different from the one we discovered in “Pictures of the Ice” or in “Fits”. The sediments constituted by detritus do not simultaneously abrogate and designate traces. They are discards, pieces of wreckage which expose through displacement the secret disease that destroys the character’s body. They exhibit the secret instead of covering it up. They are also radically different from the imprint on sand in “The Children Stay”. Instead of constituting the original matrix from which a process of re-production will develop, they are set aside, set apart as deadly dross. As such, this detritus can be regarded as equally participating in the poetics of the secret as an enterprise of recovering and recovery, should we concentrate on the operation that takes place on the Floating Brigde over the dark waters of the swamp.

This event is a kiss that an eighteen-year-old waiter bestows on the forty-two-year old woman who has just learned on the same day that she was somehow responding to treatment and that she might recover fom her malignant tumor:

 

He slipped his arms around her as if there was no question at all about what he was doing and he could take all the time he wanted to do it. He kissed her mouth. It seemed to her that this was the first time ever that she had participated in a kiss that was an event in itself. The whole story all by itself. A tender prologue, an efficient pressure, a wholehearted probing and receiving, a lingering thanks, and a drawing away satisfied. (Munro 82)

 

The kiss is a defective imprint in the sense that except in the memory of the participants it will leave no material evidence of its ever having occurred so it might in this context be more adequately equated with grace than with trace. Yet the kiss has been imprinted on the lips and metaphorically equated with a story. The kiss is the story and the story is a kiss: Munro takes us from “ les lèvres” to “ le livre”. Although she does not  provide us with an imprint that is comparable with a footprint on sand, she relies on the metaphoric transformation of the kiss into a story to further extend her paradigm of the imprint into a paradigm of impression and expression. She even leaves us with a textual trace of the kiss in a chiasmatic construction  which sets off  Jinny and Ricky’s embrace. The chiasmus of their embrace is stylistically rendered in the very last words of the story which are made to resonate with the first paragraph. In the explicit,  Jinny is said to experience a swish of tender hilarity “for the time given”. In the incipit  her husband boorishly told her that he would have come after her if she had left him, “given time”. Munro’s treatment of time consists in making the present moment abrogate the past. The gift of time redeems the waste of time as litter is redeemed into letter through the intermediary of the lips.

The space that has been chosen for this secret operation is a secret ort, a floating bridge in a middle of a swamp, a swamp called the Borneo Swamp. In this secret ort, language speaks. The name of the swamp reiterates the act of  birth: “born” and “neo” which does not simply mean “new” but also “a new or revived form of” (OED). The act of reviving is reiterated through language, but language also becomes the site and the object of revival. When Ricky explains to Jenny why the water of the swamp is so black he limits himself to the use of one word: “’Tannin,’ he said, sounding the word proudly as if he had hauled it up out of the dark.” 

The word is reclaimed from the bottom of the swamp and proffered to Jinny as a harbinger of the gift to come. We might find in the choice of the word another illustration of the logic of redemption which prevails in the story since for one thing castigation (tanning) is the prelude to reward (kissing) and for another investigation, be it nautical or medical (to sound), becomes converted into a word. With this only word being hauled out of the dark and being proudly proffered in the surrounding silence we seem to be witnessing the reviving of language thematized in an operation which consists in converting a raw hide into leather. This conversion has a reflexive dimension, it suggests the enduring power of the Word but it might also allude to the process of recovery or survival that Jinny might be embarking on. Jinny Lockyer, looking and feeling like a wreck, with her hair gone and the stigma of the disease still on her body, is lifted out of the mordant and astringent tannic acid to be redeemed by the imprint of a kiss on her lips. This redemption of abjection is to be equated with the biblical kiss to the leper.  It takes place on a floating bridge, which reinforces the mystic dimension of her experience. She passes from one state of being to another, in a pre-emptive bid for eternity, which goes beyond the opposition between life and death. With the impression of the kiss which is a story in itself, she passes on to the realm of art, she impresses a secret story upon the surrounding darkness, the black water of the swamp which is echoing with sounds:

 

Then this silence was filled in, at the edges, by some kind of humming that could have been faraway traffic, and little noises that passed before you properly heard them, that could have been made by night-feeding animals or birds or bats.(Munro 81)

 

The sounds of silence that Jinny hears come from water in the reeds. The reed-beds around the floating bridge become the birthplace of the Book of Life where Jinny and Ricky have imprinted their secret traces for the [reed]er to retrieve.

Like Karin, who wants to make people wonder, like Pauline, whose eyes have been unsealed, Jinny who is similar to but distinguished from angels, is learning the art of spinning tales. On  the dark water of the swamp, on the black page of the still water, she has founded a new place for herself “to inhabit the world as poet” because she has silently been engaged in the refoundation of language through the gift of tongues:

 

Go forth to every part of  the world, and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. Those who believe it and receive baptism will find salvation, those who do not believe will be condemned. Faith will bring with it these miracles: believers will cast out devils in my name and speak in strange tongues; if they handle snakes or drink any deadly poison, they will come to no harm; and the sick on whom they lay their hands will recover. (Mark 16, 15)

 

 

 

 

Notes

I am indebted to Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s analysis of  Virginia Woolf ‘s « Kew Gardens » in « La Chair de l’escargot » for my elaboration on Heidegger’s concept.

Works Cited

The New English Bible, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Barthes, Roland. La Chambre claire. Paris: Seuil, 1980.

Dante. L’Enfer Inferno. Paris: Flammarion, 1985. [1314]

Deleuze, Gilles. Logique de la Sensation Francis Bacon. Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles et Felix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1980.

Derrida, Jacques and Maurizio Ferraris. A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.

Didi Huberman, George.  L’empreinte. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997.

Ginzburg, Carlo. « Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d’un paradigme de l’indice », in Le Débat, n°6, nov. 1980.

Howells, Coral Ann. “Alice Munro’s Art of Indeterminacy: The Progress of Love”. Narrative Strategies: Essays in American, Canadian, and British Writing. Nischik, Reingard M. and Korte, B., Eds., Koenigshauser: Neumann, 1990.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. La violence du langage. Paris: PUF, 1996.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. « La chair de l’escargot ». figuralité et cognition, Tle, 9,  automne 1991, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 171-189.

Munro, Alice. Friend of my Youth. London: Vintage, 1990.

Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2000.

Note di lettura di Adalinda Gasparini

 

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« L’implicite dans l’ekphrasis ou le cryptogramme pictural chez Alice Munro »
L’implicite dans la nouvelle de langue anglaise, Laurent Lepaludier (dir.)
Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005, 157-167.

Héliane Ventura
Università di Orléans

 

Dans son livre intitulé Ekphrasis The Illusion of the Natural Sign, Murray Krieger définit le processus de transposition du visuel en verbal en ces termes:

What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant’s vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem’s words. (Krieger vii)

L’ekphrasis initiale de la nouvelle de Munro déplie en mots une illustration de calendrier qui représente le moment mythique de la conquête du Canada, elle est donc doublement  miracle et mirage, d’abord parce qu’elle procède du désir logocentrique de représenter le monde avec des mots et ensuite parce qu’elle est la représentation verbale d’une représentation visuelle fictive,  d’un moment lui-même fictif. L’hypothèse de travail de cette communication repose sur la notion de cryptogramme inaugural, inscrit dans le lieu privilégié de l’ekphrasis, au seuil de la nouvelle, pour influer sur son mode de déchiffrement, et le programmer de façon clandestine,  en fournissant une injonction ou une instruction de lecture.

 

L’ekphrasis liminale est suffisamment brève pour pouvoir être citée dans son contexte introductif et son intégralité :

My father was a fox farmer . That is he raised silver foxes, in pens: and in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company or the Montreal fur traders. These companies supplied us with heroic calendars to hang, one on each side of the kitchen door. Against a background of cold blue sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers, plumed adventurers planted the flags of England or of France; magnificent savages bent their backs to the portage. (Munro 111)

L’ekphrasis est toujours une prouesse littéraire, un exercice stylistique de haute volée  qui combine l’amplification (rhétorique) et la condensation (thématique). Ici toute l’illustration est décrite de façon économique en une seule période ternaire formée de trois propositions: une proposition circonstancielle de lieu qui délimite le fond, une proposition principale qui met en scène les protagonistes, une proposition juxtaposée qui introduit des personnages connexes. L’on parvient donc à une triade constituée par le fond, la forme, et le foyer, pour reprendre les distinctions du groupe m dans Traité du signe visuel. Le fond est apparemment voué  à la nature,  et la forme à l’humain avec un foyer principal et un foyer périphérique. Avant de tenter de repérer le chiffrage de la description, l’on va utiliser pour appréhender cet objet visuel les paramètres qui nous sont également  fournis par le groupe m . Ils portent le nom de formèmes et ils sont au nombre de trois:

-la dimension

-la position

-l’orientation

Formème 1: la dimension qui n’est pas explicitée mais qui nous est fournie par notre encyclopédie ; la taille d’une illustration de calendrier est relativement réduite mais elle est pourtant artificiellement agrandie dans le texte pour deux raisons. D’une part l’objet visuel qui n’est décrit qu’une fois de façon générique est explicitement présenté comme existant deux fois dans l’espace diégétique, de part et d’autre de la porte de la cuisine avec laquelle il entre en relation pour créer un triptyque;  la duplication se transforme donc en triplication et le triptyque ainsi constitué peut être considéré comme une expansion d’ordre territorial, un agrandissement du statut de l’illustration qui va devenir icône sacralisée dans son déploiement trinitaire. D’autre part les deux calendriers sont renouvelés tous les ans, ce qui permet d’appréhender simultanément l’agrandissement spatial et l’agrandissement temporel. L’impact de l’illustration est assuré par son occupation d’un espace privilégié dans le monde narré comme dans l’espace du texte et par sa permanence dans le temps du récit.

 

Formème 2: la position qui concerne les figures représentées sur l’illustration. Cette position est relative par rapport au fond et par rapport au foyer et peut se laisser décrire par des axes sémiotiques, par un certain nombre de vecteurs à deux coordonnées tels  que centralité/ marginalité, élévation/latéralité, haut/bas. Prenons par exemple la figure des aventuriers. Elle occupe la position centrale dans l’énoncé comme pour suggérer qu’elle occupe la même position dans l’illustration. La figure des Indiens en est par conséquent marginalisée, tout comme l’arrière plan constitué d’éléments naturels. Le drapeau que brandissent les aventuriers s’inscrit également sur l’axe de l’élévation, pourtant il est fiché dans la terre donc il appartient simultanément à l’axe de l’élévation et à celui de l’abaissement. Il en va de même pour les canoës des Indiens qui se situeraient normalement sur un axe latéral inférieur, or ils sont ici portés sur les épaules des Indiens et se situent par conséquent sur l’axe de l’élévation.. L’arrière plan est également construit sur un système d’opposition avec d’un côté l’élévation de la forêt de pins et de l’autre la latéralisation  des rivières. Ces deux systèmes opposent donc ce qui se situe en haut, et ce qui se situe en bas et comme la gestualité n’est pas seulement un système iconique ou linguistique mais également un système symbolique ceci pourra aisément être modulé comme une opposition entre supérieur et subordonné . Retenons pour l’instant que les différentes formes, les figures centrales apparemment supérieures et les figures périphériques apparemment subordonnées participent des deux systèmes à la fois de même que le fond constitué par des rivières dangereuses peut être envisagé comme horizontal ou vertical, selon que la rivière est représentée sous forme de chute ou de canyon.

 

Formème 3 : l’orientation qui peut se définir en ajoutant aux concepts définissant la position le trait de la direction. On aura ainsi une opposition entre le mouvement centrifuge des Indiens qui transportent leur canoë sur les épaules pour contourner l’obstacle et avancer toujours plus loin  et le mouvement centripète des aventuriers qui fichent le drapeau en terre au centre même de la représentation, chacun de ces mouvements pouvant se diviser à leur tour en une série d’oppositions entre verticalité et horizontalité, montant et descendant. L’intérêt de ce dernier formème est de nous permettre de délimiter une opposition entre nomadisme et sédentarité et de découvrir que là encore les Indiens et les colons peuvent être envisagés comme participant des deux systèmes à la fois.  L’ekphrasis télescope l’avant et l’après dans l’intensité du moment et repose nécessairement sur des relations d’implication. Si les aventuriers sont représentés dans l’acte de coloniser la terre, c’est qu’ils ont d’abord traversé l’Atlantique et si les autochtones sont représentés en train de partir, c’est bien qu’ils occupaient le sol précédemment.  

 

A la systématique de la forme, le groupe m ajoute celles de la texture et de la couleur pour analyser le signe plastique. De toute évidence l’ekphrasis ne nous livre pas d’indices suffisants  pour que nous puissions utiliser à notre tour cette grille, (en termes de couleur par exemple nous n’avons que le noir et le bleu limités à la description des arbres et du ciel, quant à la texture elle forme une catégorie non pertinente) C’est donc sur la construction verbale de la forme de l’objet visuel que nous allons faire porter notre attention et d’abord sur le processus allitératif particulièrement élaboré. Dans chacune des propositions, l’on semble avoir un système de couplage allitératif avec  « blue » et  « black » dans la première, « plumed »  « planted » dans la seconde et « bent their backs »  dans la troisième qui renforce la symétrie entre les trois propositions mais l’on a aussi une allitération en  « f » que l’on retrouve du début de la période jusqu’à sa clôture comme pour établir un phénomène d’intrasonance : « forests », « flags , France », « magnificent ». Cette répétition  de la même consonne d’une proposition à l’autre fonctionne comme un glissement, un déplacement d’une proposition à l’autre qui déstabilize les signifiés en les contaminant.

Considérons les actants du tableau: les aventuriers sont en position de sujets, la conquête du pays est l’objet de leur action. Ils ont les Indiens pour adjuvants, le froid, la forêt et les rivières pour adversaires, l’esprit d’aventure et de conquête pour destinateur et les rois de France ou d’Angleterre pour destinataire. Chacun de ses actants est doté d’un ou de plusieurs adjectifs évaluatifs qui apparemment les caractérisent de façon spécifique. Pourtant le glissement des catégories à l’intérieur des formèmes et le glissement du schéma allitératif nous encourage à opérer une permutation des adjectifs; prenons « magnificent » par exemple qui peut également s’appliquer aux Indiens et à l’environnement. Cette translation engendre une déstabilisation des catégories  de l’adjuvant et de l’adversaire qui sera nécessairement renforcée par la translation inverse. Si nous associons maintenant « treacherous » à « Indians » et non plus à « rivers », nous basculons d’une représentation pittoresque et politiquement correcte à une représentation colonialiste et raciste visant  à déligitimer les peuples autochtones pour valider l’appropriation de leur terre par les colons.

La permutation est l’une des règles élémentaires de la composition des cryptogrammes . Il s’agit généralement de permutations de lettres ou de syllabes entre elles ou encore du décalage d’un rang ou de plusieurs rangs dans les lettres de l’alphabet. Si l’on veut bien considérer que le cryptogramme fonctionne ici par permutation des adjectifs évaluatifs, l’on arrive à une représentation des personnages de l’illustration extrêmement contradictoire. Considérons les personnages centraux soit les aventuriers. Leur domination est encodée de plusieurs façons, toutes plus allusives qu’explicites. Le drapeau par exemple: pour qu’il soit  fiché dans la terre, il doit nécessairement reposer sur une hampe, qui n’est pourtant ni mentionnée ni décrite; cette ellipse est significative parce que la hampe est d’abord l’emblème du pouvoir politique; elle peut se substituer au sceptre du roi et les aventuriers se trouvent alors investis de l’autorité royale en brandissant le drapeau de leur pays. Par le pouvoir métonymique de la bannière conjugué à celui du sceptre, ils s’arrogent le droit de conquérir le pays au nom des puissances qu’ils représentent; mais il y a également un pouvoir phallique qui est nettement encodé dans l’acte de ficher le drapeau dans la terre. Il y a un acte de dépossession territoriale qui est aussi un acte de possession physique que l’on peut assimiler au viol de la terre. Ce viol implicitement suggéré est néanmoins minoré par le recours à la métaphore des travaux agricoles : le drapeau est planté dans le sol et le type de domination suggéré par le verbe est d’ordre colonisateur.

Pourtant l’adjectif utilisé pour décrire les aventuriers « Plumed adventurers » déstabilise le paradigme de conquête coloniale. En mettant en valeur la plume qu’ils portent au chapeau, le descripteur opère un glissement qui est de l’ordre de la translation. Les aventuriers détenteurs des emblèmes du pouvoir impérial basculent tout d’un coup du côté des Indiens et se trouvent eux mêmes coiffés de plumes. De plus le terme d’aventuriers qui qualifie les conquérants est lui même contradictoire. Comment peut-on simultanément incarner la loi , revendiquer la légitimité de l’appropriation de la terre et occuper la position de vagabonds ou de coureurs de bois ?

Considérons les Indiens.  Là encore les termes qui les qualifient témoignent de glissement d’une catégorie à une autre. L’adjectif « magnificent » amplifie leur statut alors même qu’ils sont décrit dans une posture d’asservissement, pliant l’échine sous le poids des canoës qu’ils transportent au-dessus de leur tête, et qu’ils manifestent leur soumission à la loi des colons.  La soumission des Indiens semblent préfigurer celle de la nature puisque le terme « savage » qui est employé sous forme de nom pour les définir pourrait également s’appliquer sous forme d’adjectif à la nature avec cette fois le sens d’inculte ou de dangereux. De la même façon, par translation réciproque, d’autres permutations pourraient intervenir entre les éléments du décor naturel et les hommes. « Cold » pourrait s’appliquer à « adventurers » et « black » à « savages » comme si le processus de domestication des hommes entraînait celui de la  nature et vice versa. L’on voit que la distribution respective des adjectifs attribués aux actants peut être modifiée de telle sorte que l’entreprise des uns est déligitimée pendant que celles des autres est rendue héroïque. 

Pourquoi cette ekphrasis favorise-telle la migration des sèmes ?

C’est que peut-être plusieurs voix tentent de se faire entendre : celle de l’enfant qui admire les illustrations des calendriers et s’identifie aux héros qu’ils représentent, celle de la narratrice adulte qui contemple avec distance les clichés réducteurs qu’ils véhiculent, celle de la doxa qui les valident, celle du peintre qui le premier a organisé la scène selon les codes iconiques et idéologiques du stéréotype.

L’opération de permutation des adjectifs évaluatifs et de décodage métaphorique des verbes révèlent les représentations mentales implicites qui sous-tendent l’illustration de calendrier. Ces opérations mettent en lumière une idéologie coloniale de la domestication, domestication de la nature, domestication des sauvages, qui préfigurent la domestication des femmes dont on verra l’exemple dans l’éducation que reçoit la jeune narratrice. Il n’est pas innocent que les illustrations de calendriers se déploient sur le mur de la cuisine. La relation entre l’objet et le lieu est d’ordre métonymique. Les calendriers colonisent l’espace domestique avec la représentation de la colonisation du pays et impose leur souveraineté par la puissance de l’image. Le pouvoir de l’image est renforcé par l’image du pouvoir. Tout se passe comme si la bannière que brandissent les aventuriers garantissait la validité de ce qui est décrit. L’image du calendrier est dotée d’une valeur de vérité. Elle énonce que ce qui est est ce qui doit être. Pour reprendre Louis Marin : « L’image est dotée d’une efficacité qui promeut qui fonde et qui garantit » (Marin 14) Elle énonce la loi, qui est celle du père :

Si besoin était cette paternité de l’image pourrait être appuyée sur la relation établie par Benvéniste entre le censor (celui qui juge) et l’auctor : celui-ci détient la qualité mystérieuse de donner existence à la loi, celui-là d’énoncer que ce qui est dit est la vérité, de déclarer ce qui est en le fixant, en l’imposant comme ce qui s’impose, bref d’occuper la position souveraine de l’énonciation de la loi.(Marin 14)

 

Le pouvoir fondateur de l’image est particulièrement frappant dans cette ekphrasis précisément parce qu’elle décrit la fondation du pays. Ces calendriers illustrés nous donnent à voir la répétition de l’acte de création. Ils représentent l’image de la création du nouveau monde, l’acte de naissance du Canada. La présence des deux puissances coloniales originelles représentées par leurs drapeaux respectifs, « The flags of England or of France » renforce le sentiment d’assister à la naissance du pays. Mais de même que l’on ne naît pas femme mais qu’on le devient, on ne naît pas canadien, on le devient. C’est donc un double certificat de naissance que construit la narratrice : celui du pays et celui d’une petite fille (et accessoirement de son frère) dans une ferme de l’Ontario du Sud Ouest vers la moitié du siècle dernier. Munro décrit la construction identitaire à partir des illustrations de calendriers qu’il faut peut-être considérer comme une mise en abyme retro-prospective. Les illustrations rappellent le passé national pour annoncer l’avenir personnel.  Ils présentent l’éviction des Indiens pour que nous extrapolions l’évincement de la narratrice par ce que Dällenbach appelle une « cooptation de la prophétie par le rappel et de l’induction par la déduction » (Dallenbach 91)

Les calendriers illustrés sont avant tout un leurre et un mensonge : ils constituent un agrandissement mythique du moment supposé historique, qui est de l’ordre de l’idéalisation de l’expropriation et de la falsification événementielle et idéologique. Que les drapeaux de France et d’Angleterre soient par exemple représentés comme pouvant se substituer l’un à l’autre, présuppose  une absence de rivalité, comme si aucun conflit n’avait jamais déchiré les deux nations fondatrices. On éradique les guerres que Français et Anglais se sont livrés sur le continent nord-américain, par exemple la sanglante bataille des Plaines d’Abraham, où les Généraux Wolfe et Montcalm ont tous deux péris en 1759. Cette version lénifiante de l’histoire nationale est une utopie, un rêve d’unité illusoire qui n’a jamais existé dans le pays ; le conflit entre le Québec et le reste du Canada est aussi vieux que le pays lui-même.

Les calendriers illustrés représentent un fantasme héroïque en tous points semblables aux histoires que se racontent la petite fille avant de s’endormir :

These stories were about myself, when I had grown a little older, they took place in a world that was recognizably mine, yet one which presented opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice as mine never did. I rescued people from a bombed building (it discouraged me that the real war had gone on so far away from Jubilee). I shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard (the teachers cowered terrified at my back) ; I rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople’s people gratitude for some yet to be worked out piece of heroism (nobody ever rode a horse there, except King Billy in the Orangemen’s Day parade). There was always riding and shooting in these stories, though I had only been on a horse twice bareback because we did not own a saddle and the second time I had slid right around and dropped under the horse’s feet ; it had stepped placidly over me. I really was learning to shoot, but I could not hit anything yet, not even tin cans on fence posts (Munro 114)

 

L’on retrouve dans ces rêves diurnes le même type d’agrandissement mythique de l’expérience, favorisé par le rythme ternaire dans la construction de la période et par les couplages allitératifs binaires (bombed buildings, teachers terrified, bareback). Ces images oniriques décrivent explicitement le processus d’identification héroïque implicitement suggéré dans les calendriers illustrés. La petite fille est maintenant présente dans la scène qui figure l’accomplissement de son désir. Tout se passe comme si les calendriers ne se dépliaient pas seulement dans l’instant miraculeux de l’ ekphrasis mais également dans le continuum de l’expérience psychique de la narratrice enfant. Les images iconiques du calendrier forment avec les images oniriques une série continue ; le mirage du fantasme s’inscrit dans le prolongement du mirage de l’ekphrasis et révèle la linéarité cachée de l’objet visuel qui occupe une fonction matricielle dans le processus de la construction identitaire. C’est à partir des images des calendriers que la jeune narratrice s’inscrit sur le paradigme de la conquête héroïque. Placés au seuil de la nouvelle, ou selon les termes de Dallenbach « préposé à l’ouverture du récit », les calendriers « doublent la fiction en raccourci », en avertissant le lecteur du parcours identitaire que la jeune narratrice programme pour son développement personnel.

La linéarité cachée de l’objet visuel liminal se révèle grâce à la complémentarité des calendriers illustrés et des rêves héroïques phantasmatiques. Elle se révèle également sur l’axe des contraires grâce à deux types d’images symétriquement inversées : d’une part la seconde série de rêves diurnes, d’autres part la collection de calendriers suspendus dans l’étable par l’ouvrier agricole.

La seconde série de rêves diurnes intervient lorsque la petite fille atteint l’âge de la puberté. Il lui devient alors impossible de s’identifier à des héros masculins :

I still stayed awake after Laird was asleep and told myself stories, but even in these stories something different was happening, mysterious alterations took place. A story might start off in the old way, with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild animals, and for a while I might recue people ; then things would change around, and instead, somebody would be rescuing me. It might be a boy from our class at school, or even Mr Campbell, our teacher, who tickled girls under the arms. At this point the story concerned itself at great length with what I look like – how long my hair was, and what kind of dress I had on ; by the time I had these details worked out the real excitement of the story was lost. (Munro 126)

 

Ces images oniriques comportent encore un système d’alternance entre rythme ternaire et couplage allitératif binaire (« be a boy », « our teacher who tickled », « what I look like ») mais l’agrandissement périodique que l’on avait distingué dans les représentations iconiques ou oniriques précédentes est totalement absent. Le souffle épique fait défaut parce que les actions décrites n’ont plus rien d’héroïque. Bon gré mal gré,  la petite fille a maintenant intériorisé l’idéologie dominante en matière d’identité sexuée ou pour reprendre les termes d’Erving Goffman, elle se conforme à l’arrangement des sexes  (The Arrangement between sexes),  en sacrifiant à la « ritualisation de la féminité » . Le passage du pronom sujet (I might rescue people) en pronom objet (somebody would be rescuing me) confirme la passivisation de la jeune fille qui se soumet à la pseudo-fatalité anatomique.

Tout en étant radicalement opposées aux descriptions de ses rêves d’enfants,  ces images oniriques se situent sur le même vecteur qui est celui de la domination. Le principe de domination présuppose celui de l’asservissement et la situation de la jeune fille est simplement la conséquence d’une translation d’un pôle vers l’autre. En se positionnant d’emblée sur l’axe masculin de la domination, la petite fille a crée les conditions de son exclusion de la sphère héroïque qui  la conduisent vers l’oppression dans la sphère de l’asservissement.

Le processus de symétrie inversée entre les images oniriques de l’asservissement et celles de la domination est également présent dans le cas des images de calendriers. A l’ekphrasis liminale dont les images valorisent les conquérants du XVII siècle, il faut opposer les calendriers illustrés que l’ouvrier agricole a suspendus dans l’étable :

 

Henry was there just idling around looking at his collection of calendars which were tacked up behind the stalls in a part of the stable my mother had probably never seen (Munro 119)

 

 

Ces calendriers n’occupent pas la position du sujet dans l’énoncé, mais celle de complément d’objet direct, de même qu’ils n’occupent pas la position initiale et fondatrice dans l’énonciation, de même qu’ils ne se déploient pas sur le mur de la cuisine mais se cachent dans l’étable. Cette triple marginalisation est renforcée par le fait qu’à la description ekphrastique se substitue la désignation elliptique. Confrontés que nous sommes à un schéma qui serait parfaitement symétrique s’il était explicite, il nous faut bien saturer le vide laissé par le texte. Aux rêves de conquête s’opposent les rêves de soumission, aux calendriers héroiques s’opposent les calendriers érotiques pour ne pas dire pornographiques. De toute évidence la collection de calendriers d’Henry Bailey ne se situe pas sur l’axe de la glorification masculine mais sur l’axe de la dégradation féminine. La transfiguration des uns autorise l’absence de figuration des autres. Le nom du commis est éloquent à cet égard. « Bailee » signifie dépositaire et désigne celui qui conserve des marchandises en dépôt. Henry n’est pas un berger qui a charge d’âme ; c’est la chair et la viande qui l’intéresse. Dans la première page de la nouvelle, il frappe la jeune narratrice avec un sac contenant des carcasses de renards dépouillées de leur peau :

One time the hired man, Henry Bailey, had taken a swipe at me with this sack, saying « Christmas present ! » (Munro 111)

 

A travers le processus de linéarisation cachée engendré par le cryptogramme initial, le texte semble nous inviter à relier peut-être les carcasses de renards aux autres corps dénudés, elliptiquement suggérés dans les calendriers de l’étable. Dans Francis Bacon Logique de la Sensation, Deleuze suggère le fait commun de l’homme et de l’animal :

 

La viande est la zone commune de l’homme et de la bête, leur zone d’indiscernabilité, elle est ce fait, cet état même où le peintre s’identifie aux objets de son horreur ou de sa compassion. (Deleuze 21)

 

Du calendrier héroïque au calendrier érotique, il semblerait bien que ce soit cette zone d’indiscernabilité entre l’homme et l’animal que Munro ait tenté de représenter dans « Boys and Girls ». Dans le calendrier initial, l’adjectif qui décrit les aventuriers fait référence aux plumes d’oiseau qui ornent leur chapeau mais l’on peut également considérer que ce raccourci elliptique « plumed adventurers » ne désigne pas seulement leur panache mais transforme les aventuriers en animal fabuleux. Le sème de l’animalité relierait ainsi au fil de la nouvelle aussi bien le colon du XVII siècle et l’autochtone vêtus de peau de bête et parés de plumes que le fermier du XX siècle, faisant l’élevage du renard ou bien son commis ou encore les femmes de ses calendriers illustrés suspendus dans l’étable.

On retrouve cette zone commune entre l’homme et l’animal dans le processus d’identification héroïque auquel se livre la narratrice. En s’identifiant d’abord aux aventuriers à plumes, elle participe du sème de l’animalité mais de façon plus évidente, c’est lorsqu’elle ouvre la barrière de l’enclos pour laisser la jument s’échapper que la zone d’indiscernabilité se révèle. La jeune fille qu’elle est en train de devenir découvre le processus de différentiation de l’identité sexuée et refuse l’enfermement dans la sphère domestique. En libérant la jument, c’est elle-même qu’elle essaie de soustraire à la fatalité biologique. Mais Flora sera rattrapée et abattue pour que sa chair serve à nourrir les renards et la narratrice elle-même sera humiliée et remise à sa place par son père et par son frère, Laird, le jeune seigneur de la ferme. Peut-être faudrait-il dire de la jeune fille qui s’est identifiée à la jument qu’elle est mise au pas. Dans la deuxième série de calendriers, la place de la femme est également confondue avec celle de l’animal, dans l’étable derrière les box.

Munro ne se contente pas d’explorer l’arrangement entre les hommes et les femmes. Elle ne décrit pas les stéréotypes de l’identité sexuée pour inculper les hommes et exonérer les femmes. Dans un commentaire de sa propre nouvelle, elle écrit :

What it says is something like this : it is permissible to have fine feelings, impractical sympathies, if you are a girl, because what you say or do does not finally count. On the other hand if you are a boy, certain feelings are not permissible at all. So taking on these roles, whichever you get is a hard and damaging thing. (Metcalf 112)

 

Munro semble utiliser l’exemple de la viande de boucherie, celle littérale du corps de Flora dépecé et celle métaphorique et elliptique de l’asservissement du corps féminin dans les calendriers illustrés pour évoquer la souffrance du devenir adulte, que ce soit celle des filles ou des garçons.

 Dans son étude sur Francis Bacon, Deleuze met en lumière l’identité de l’homme et de l’animal pour aborder la même question :

Ce n’est pas un arrangement de l’homme et de la bête, ce n’est pas une ressemblance, c’est une identité de fond, c’est une zone d’indiscernabilité plus profonde que toute identification sentimentale : l’homme qui souffre est une bête, la bête qui souffre est un homme. C’est la réalité du devenir .(Deleuze 21)

 

C’est peut-être dans ce passage incessamment  réversible de l’homme à l’animal et de l’animal à l’homme que se situe en dernière analyse l’indicible secret des personnages de Munro.

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AG1  Piumati, infine, sono gli uccelli, che chiudono il cerchio del significante fallico.
AG2 Direi che i calendari erotico-pornografici dell'aiutante, nella zona della stalla dove la madre del soggetto narrante non ha mai messo piede, svelano all'intraprendenza della protagonista, identificata com'è col padre, una particolare attenzione per la donna, un segreto tra maschile e femminile.
AG3 La provocazione violenta è una modalità contadina di provocare una reazione, di turbare in senso erotico. Nella fiaba di Basile corrispondente alla  Pelle d'asino di Perrault (L'orsa) la protagonista sfugge all'incesto paterno trasformandosi in orsa, grazie a uno stecco che si mette in bocca, togliendo il quale recupera la sua bellissima forma femminile. Un principe cacciatore vedendola docile e addomesticabile se ne innamora e la porta nel suo giardino, dove viene trattata con tutti  i riguardi, e un giorno che, credendo di essere sola, si trasforma in fanciulla, il principe affacciato a una finestra se ne innamora follemente, ma quando arriva nel giardino la ritrova orsa. Allora la supplica, con un gioco di metafore del miglior stile barocco, di liberare da quel carcere di pelo l'opera d'arte che vi è rinchiusa, ecc. Occorreranno diversi passaggi perché la parte ferina della donna, legata all'incesto, sia abbandonata definitivamente. Che la protagonista viva una situazione incestuosa col padre è evidente, quando ad esempio è sosrpresa spiacevolmente per la presenza della madre fuori, a parlare con lui, e nella svalutazione del lavoro materno in confronto a quello del padre.
AG4 Quando libera Flora - fiore - la protagonista cessa la propria identificazione col padre, diventa donna lasciandosi guidare dalla sua compassione per l'animale destinato al macello, al quale si è affezionata, e aspettandosi una sanzione per la disobbedienza. La ragazzina sa che la cavalla sarà ripresa, e proprio per questo lasua scelta è radicalmente femminile, illogica, e obbediente a un comandamento diverso da quello che ha seguito fino a quel momento. La sua identità di genere è nel riconoscimento del padre, quando il fratello fa la spia, trovando finalmente un modo di prendere il suo posto accanto al padre stesso, e quando impassibile osserva che piange. Nella scena dell'uccisione del cavallo la protagonista si preoccupa per il fratello, che non sembra troppo turbato, mentre a lei torna l'immagine della morte dell'animale, della fermezza del padre che spara, e della mancanza di compassione dell'aiutante del padre. La sua compassione, all'interno di una condizione nella quale non mette in dubbio la necessità di uccidere gli animali, è l'emergere di una differenza che le apre la sfera femminile.
AG5 Non è nel finale la protagonista destinata al macello, ma Flora. Né i calendari pornografici dell'aiutante del padre, né il suo regalo di Natale, hanno solo una funzione sadica, ma di castrazione simboligena, che si è già aperta nelle storie che inventa la bambina divenendo donna. Il piacere di essere salvata subentra 'stranamente' al piacere di salvare, come la posizione ricettiva, che consente di nutrire sentimenti delicati e compassione, e immaginarsi con abiti affascinanti, senza che nessuno obblighi a farlo. Il sollievo finale, il perdono per un'azione che compiuta da un maschio verrebbe duramente punita, aprono lo spazio femminile, senza il quale Munro non sarebbe in grado di scrivere da una posizione non fallica, riconoscendo, nell'ecphrasis iniziale, di riconoscere il fascino degli avventurieri piumati come quello degli spendidi indiani, altrettanto piumati, come gli uccelli. E l'animale, in questo contesto di contadini e allevatori, è oggetto di proiezioni diverse da parte della donna e dell'uomo. Lo sguardo delle volpi, che sembrano conoscere il loro destino, senza rassegnazione, senza possibilità di scelta, non è lo sguardo della donna, come il suo destino non è quello di Flora. Il linguaggio consente alle storie inventate dalla protagonista la trasformazione, come consente a Alice Munro di raccontare tutto questo, permettendo che affiorari nel campo della parola, nella sua casa di parole, la pietà per l'animale che non implica la condanna per il padre e neppure per il volgare Bayley. La castrazione simboligena significache questa è la realtà, e che rispetto alla realtà occorre riconoscere il proprio posto. Dal proprio posto, è possibile raccontare la storia di tutti invitandoli a entrare in casa propria, ovvero di guardare le cose secondo una certa prospettiva, che è quella ricreata dalla padrona di casa. Una scrittura fallica non permetterebbe di far coesistere lo sguardo delle volpi, la storia dei due cavalli, l'acquisizione dell'identità di genere a partire da una identificazione col padre. Non ci si potrebbe liberare dal logofallocentrismo opponendosi ad esso, cosa che accadrebbe se la bambina non cedesse all'mpulso di aprire il cancello a Flora, o se il padre la punisse duramente per questo. Né bisogna dimenticare, pur tenendo conto del commento di Munro al suo racconto, che la definizione paterna "è soltanto una femmina" è liberatoria, perché questo soltanto nel gioco fra i sessi non è affatto una svalutazione, ma una esclusione dal mondo maschile, fallico. Una donna è 'solo  una donna' rispetto al mondo in cui si uccidono gli animali senza pietà, mondo che non potrebbe sussistere se non ci fosse un mondo separato e collegato a questo - la casa, della madre, e la casa di parole - a raccogliere e restituire i sentimenti non amessi nel fratello. Allo stesso modo, nel finale de "Il vestito rosso", il soggetto guadagna la propria identità di genere, che comprende la sua scelta di non può disprezzare né deludere la madre, riconoscendo il dono del vestito, anche se la figlia sceglierà per sé abiti completamente diversi.

 Héliane Ventura

Université d’Orléans

 

Ouvrages Cités

 

Lucien Dällenbach. Le récit spéculaire Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris : Seuil, 1977.

Gilles Deleuze. Francis Bacon  Logique de la Sensation. Paris : editions de la Différence, 1981.

Groupe M. Traité du signe visuel Pour une rhétorique de l’image. Paris : Seuil, 1992.

Murray Krieger. Ekphrasis The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: the John Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Louis Marin. Des pouvoirs de l’image Gloses. Paris : Seuil, 1993.

John Metcalf (ed). Sixteen by Twelve Short Stories by Canadian Writers. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1970.

Alice Munro. Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1968.

Aesthetic Traces of the Ephemeral: Alice Munro’s Logograms in “Vandals”

The “other country” which is conjured up in Munro’s writing evidences a mythic and mystic landscape of origins strewn with aesthetic traces, which belong in the temporal category of the ephemeral, the half-glimpsed, the transient, such as footprints dissolving on sand, or mist burning away in the sunshine. Munro creates a territory which relies on flux density, on energy and forces. Her ephemeral traces are not melancholy, they are cosmic, they move along lines of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation that belong in the machinery of desire, on the surface of fluid planes. They repudiate  heaviness to suggest the inchoate, transient stuff that dreams are made of.

My intention is not to provide an exhaustive survey of such loci of half-glimpsed possibilities in Munro ‘s world but to concentrate on aesthetic traces of the ephemeral in one story only, “Vandals” the last story from Open Secrets, her 1994 collection. These dissolving traces are of a specific kind, they are words written on the boards of the kitchen wall with tomato sauce which blot themselves out almost intantaneously. Because they are simultaneously of a visual and of a verbal kind, I have chosen the word logogram, borrowed from the visual artist Dotremont, to depict Munro’s use of a graphic imprint in her short story. Her accommodation of the verbal and the visual, which in that particular instance is highly dependent on the biblical intertext, stands out against a background of other artistic activities deployed throughout the story.  The presence of two types of art objects can be identified.  The first one is a nature reserve, startlingly called Lesser Dismal, and created by a taxidermist called Ladner. The nature reserve can be considered as an artistic object of its own, a construct closely linked with land art. The second element we can regard as an aesthetic object is a devastated cabin, which is located on the private nature reserve, and trashed in the climax of the story by a newly married couple, the “vandals” apparently referred to in the title. The act of devastation, what with throwing flower, alcohol and tomato sauce all over the floor and the walls, consists of a ritual activity that can be compared with action painting, informal art and Tâchisme.

These two objects, the nature reserve and the devastated cabin, stand in a dialectical relationship with each other: one  embodies the ordering of the world by the great architect, with the stabilized permanence of taxidermy as its most striking feature. The other object typifies the chaos of absolute destruction with the vanishing mark on the wall as its outstanding emblem. It will be the purpose of this paper to try and demonstrate that, as often, Munro is only pitting these dichotomies against each other in an attempt to subvert them  She accommodates in her story  an art of nature to question the nature of art. Through her exposure of the falsification of nature, she highlights the authenticity of the language of  fiction to uncover the duplicity of human nature. She uses the nature reserve as a privileged territory or a testing ground where to try and separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

Apparently standing on the side of order and permanence , Ladner’s garden evidences the process of reclamation of the bush generally taken to typify the colonisation of Canada:

 

he had bought up four hundred acres of unproductive land, mostly swamp and bush, in the northern part of the county, in Stratton Townships, and he had created there a remarkable sort of nature preserve, with bridges and trails and streams dammed up to make ponds, and exhibits along the trails of lifelike birds and animals. For he made his living as a taxidermist, working mostly for museums. (266)  

 

This reclamation is nevertheless characterized by the falsification of nature: it consists of a counterfeit, as is immediately perceptible through the predicated “lifelike birds and animals.” Ladner’s bush garden produces simulacra, duplicitous images which have the semblance of life. His garden is a deleterious fantasy which proposes stuffed animals in place of living ones, or even more curiously alongside living ones, almost as supplements to living ones. Its vicarious and deadly quality due to presence by proxy is reinforced by Ladner’s area of expertise: as a taxidermist he has made it his aim to substitute life in imago or imagines  similar to mortuary effigies.  

Ladner’s bush garden is built in the semblance of the original Garden of Eden, the enclosed garden with the apple tree, but there is something rotten in this avatar:  Eve’s offer of the apple to Adam is displaced and recontextualised into Adam refraining from offering the bounties of the earth to Eve. More specifically, Ladner picks up mushrooms which look like  decayed apples and keeps them to himself:

 

and then they were in the old apple orchard, enclosed by woods, and he directed her to look for mushrooms-morels. He himself found five, which he did not offer to share. She confused them with last year’s rotted apples. (272 )

 

This scathingly ironic reversal might also be regarded as clandestinely purveying intertextual clues, or providing evidence of what Jean Jacques Lecercle has called “the return of the rest” that is to say  what eludes the rational construction of language and erupts out of its opacity through tropes, polysemy, and unconscious slips. The name of the mushroom is morel, a word which echoes the name of a famous character in D.H.Laurence, of an infamous one in Borges “History of Infamy”, and also that of a character in an equally well known story by Adolfo Bioy Casares entitled “Morel’s Invention.” In this story,  which takes place in a desolated sea swept island, a man called Morel has engineered a trap: a machine which takes people’s lives away in order to replace them with an everlasting three dimensional smiling image in their exact likeness. This phantasy about engendering a type of eternal life totally congruent with our desire is also to be found in Ladner’s garden, where the animals from the wild have been safely embalmed within reach of man’s appreciation. With the clandestine allusion contained in the reference to the mushroom, Munro is prodding the reader to equate Morel’s and Ladner’s devices for trapping men and animals into everlasting life. She inscribes Ladner’s story on a paradigmatic axis of substitution as a story of falsification in which our experiential, living relationship with the world has been replaced with a fantasy based on eternal simulacra.

The possibility of substituting one story for another on account of the clandestine allusions encapsulated in “morel” is reinforced by the metaphor which Munro engineers for the mushroom. She makes the female character, Bea Doud, see the blossoming mushroom as a rotted apple, that is to say she creates what Paul Ricoeur calls “an impertinent association” for the mushroom at the same time as she convinces us of the pertinence of the label by assigning its creation to the  apparently perceptive and sensitive (although rather naive) female heroine. By allowing us to reduce the impertinence in the assignement of label, she helps us reconfigure Ladner’s creation of the remarkable nature preserve along the line of entropy which accommodates rottennness and corruption. Through “the impertinent metaphor” she destabilizes the dialectic of order and permanence and stability established by Ladner in his garden to pave the way for process, change, and chaos.

26 ottobre 2004

This impertinent metaphor, which transforms morels into rotten apples, also accommodates another level of significance based on the consonnance of the word mor-el in which our mor-tal condition is clandestinely encapsulated and clandestinely reverberates on the nature preserve. The name of the swamp is another reminder of the dialectic of creation and destruction, of the tension between prolonging life and arresting it for eternity that is generated by the taxidermist’s activity within his nature preserve. The name of the swamp is Lesser Dismal, an explicit allusion to another swamp called Great Dismal Swamp somewhere in the United States. The tension created by the opposition between Great Dismal and Lesser Dismal can be acknowleged in terms of an ironic cultural commentary on the difference between the United States and Canada, in which the status of Canada is simultaneouly heightened and debunked. It can also be regarded as a commentary on the taxidermist’s operation: not only is he reclaiming the bush and making it less dismal than in the United States, although of lesser extension, but he is also addressing the grim reaper, death himself,  and mitigating his devastation through taxidermy.  

Most critics analysing “Vandals” have signalled the eloquent duplicity of the wooden signs placed along the paths in the natural reserve. These signs read PDP: Proceed Down Path, but Kenny, the young neighbour who together with his sister Liza spends his holidays and week-ends on the nature reserve, fascinated by Ladner’s operations as a taxidermist, interprets these signs as Pull Down Pants. The clashing code evidenced in the acronym literally works as a dis-covery of the reason why this natural preserve is repeatedly associated with rottenness and grimness. It clandestinely levels an accusation at Ladner : he is being revealed as a PeDoPhile through innuendoes or more ambiguous cryptograms such as the wooden sign with PDP written on it.

Some innuendoes deserve elaboration because they  provide a portrait of the taxidermist as a predator.  His duplicity is visually conveyed to us through an act of mimicking he indulges in without Bea, the woman he lives with, noticing it. Ladner imitates her very gestures behind her back for the benefit of Liza, the young neighbour he is revealed to have a sexual relationship with :

 

This was thrilling and shocking. Liza’s face was trembling with her need to laugh. Part of her wanted to make Ladner stop, to stop at once, before the damage was done, and part of her longed for that very damage, the damage Ladner could do, the ripping open, the final delight of it. (288)

 

Ladner’s perversity is mediated through the metaphor of the ripping open that exposes his predatory instinct and transforms him into the very wild beast that it is his job to embalm. But through the antithetical process that Freud has shown to be operative in dreams and the psychic life, at the same time as he is transformed into a predator, he reverses into a stuffed animal disclosing his exploded innards:

 

When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires.(292)

 

The nature reserve called Lesser Dismal is a far cry from the Garden of Eden. Like the predicate morel which clandestinely reminds us of death, Lesser Dismal clandestinely encapsulates evil (mal) and paves the way for the revelation of  dis-functioning, “Dis” being the Greek name for the Land of the Underworld, the place which, in Christianity, is inhabited by the devil.  Ladner’s garden is indeed dis-mal : its lush cover-up barely conceals the frazzled wires of the waste land that lies underneath after it is repeatedly struck by a metaphoric lightning. The pole of order and permanence supposedly represented by the garden is in fact a perverted territory entirely dedicated to duplicity, simulacra, and fraud. It does not typify the imposition of civilisation over the wilderness. It rather exposes the savage, predatory, and perverse instincts of the one who set up the garden as a cover-up for the destructive forces which well up from his inner swamp.

Ladner’s predatory and perverse nature is matched by his partner’s, Bea Doud, whose instincts override her morals. Bea is first presented as a woman who, after a checkered career entailing many lovers, had settled down into “an orderly life” with a decent school teacher until she jilted him to set up home with the taxidermist. In characteristic fashion, Munro introduces Bea’s betrayal of her former partner as a return to the truthfulness of instinct:

 

 All the things that had appealed to her and conforted her about him were now more or less dust and ashes. Now that she had seen him with Ladner.

She could have told herself otherwise, of course. But such was not her nature. Even after years of good behavior, it was not her nature. (268)

 

In the nature preserve, Munro exposes simultaneously the falsification of nature through artifice and the moral failings and falsehoods of human beings who are natural. Bea’s name can be regarded as short for beata, which means at the same time happy, blessed but also naïve, and simple-minded . When living on the nature preserve with Ladner, Bea is indeed is very naïve: she turns a blind eye on his sexual perversion and depraved behaviour with the children, she refuses to “see” and to denounce. She lives a life of criminal silence in the midst of nature.

The story climaxes with a double crisis: at the time when Ladner finds himself in the neighbouring hospital for a routine operation, a bypass which results in his premature death, his cabin is trashed by Liza, who seems to take her revenge on the pedophile who abused her during her childhood. I propose to consider this double crisis, the man’s death and the devastation of his house, as a double occurrence which gives evidence of the return of symbolic forms derived from Antiquity and primitivity.

            In other words Liza’s trashing of her victimizer’s house can be regarded as a reactualisation in modern times of primitive instances of possession such as evidenced in Dionysian mania or the witches’dealings with the devil. Liza herself, who is depicted as a  dancer, capable of abandoning herself utterly to the rhythm of fierce music, can be regarded as an avatar of the Maenads from Antiquity, who seized with sacred fury, set about dismembering the men who dared interfere with them. She can also be envisaged as a sorceress having the ability to injure others through occult means. Thus the representation of Ladner’s death in the hospital at the time when his house is vandalized can be envisaged as the direct illustration of the workings of magic thought : by turning against her victimizer’s house, that is to say against a duplicate image of him, Liza indirectly hits him in the heart, causing his immediate death. Like the garden he has designed, Ladner’s house participates in the dialectics of substance and simulacra, of presence and proxy and requires of us that we interrogate the meaning of the   work of art or the magic that is encapsulated within it.

The A shaped cabin can be regarded as the place where two artistic activities are conducted: it is the place where Ladner worked as a taxidermist, embalming wild beast and ensuring their survival and it is the place which Liza devastates to ensure Ladner’s destruction. Her act of devastation bears a great likeness to Action painting : “A style  of abstract painting that uses techniques such as the dribbling or splashing of paint to achieve a spontaneous effect. In Action Painting the canvas is the arena in which the artist acts. The action of painting becomes a moment in the biography of the artist -- the canvas becomes the record of the event.”( Delahunt, Artlex.com)

When Liza sets about overthrowing furniture and spilling whisky, vinegar, or sticky crème de menthe all over the floor, she performs a gestural blotching which is in keeping with Jackson Pollock throwing, dripping, and dribbling paint onto canvases fastened to the floor.  Munro clandestinely reinforces this equation when she speaks of Liza’s husband joining in the fray:

 

Warren picked up the hassock he had been sitting on and flung it at the sofa. It toppled off. It didn’t do any damage but the action had put him in the picture. (282)

 

Through the allusion to Warren’s enlistment and the simultaneous use of the words “action” and “picture’ to describe it,  Munro provides us with “the arena in which the artists acts” and establishes the aesthetic dimension of the occurrence. Like Pollock, who was known to attack his canvas with knives and trowels and bicycle over it, Liza and Warren become the agents of a ritual ceremony, which seems to be simultaneously concerned with destruction and creation:

 

Liza took back the bottle and threw it against the big front window. It didn’t go through the window but cracked the glass. The bottle hadn’t broken-it fell to the floor, and a pool of beautiful liquid streamed out from it. Dark green blood. The window glass had filled with thousands of radiating cracks, and turned as white as a halo. (282)

 

What is at stake is the acting out of a religious mystery: the mystery of a sacrifice which brings about the radiance of regeneration.  According to the workings of magic, this religious sacrifice operates on two levels at once, the visible and the invisible. The spilling of crème de menthe in the cabin subtends the spilling of her victimizer’s blood who is dying in the hospital during a simple by-pass. The magic quality of this scene of retribution is parodically underlined by Munro, when she makes Liza take up a “magic marker” and write on the wall of the cabin “the wages of sin is death.”

As a supplementary parody which works as a carnivalisation of action, her husband, Warren, inscribes warnings on the kitchen wall with tomato sauce:

 

He found and opened a can of tomato sauce. It was thinner than ketchup and didn’t work as well, but he tried to work with it on the wooden kitchen wall. “Beware this is your blood”.

The sauce soaked into or ran down the boards. Liza came up close  to read the words before they blotted themselves out. (282 ) 

 

Far from being belittled by the recourse to tomato sauce, the writing on the wall or red logogram acquires an otherworldly dimension on two accounts. First as a reenactment of what happened during Belshazzar’s feast,  the writing on the wall is endowed with the aura of the supernatural, an aura which is supplemented through another biblical allusion, that of the Eucharist, parodically reversed here so that the Holy Communion is transformed into an act of accusation, and the blood of Christ converted into the culprit’s blood. ¹  Secondly its appearing and disappearing almost instantaneously departs from the biblical intertext but reinforces its dramatic quality. The disappearance of the sanguinary inscription confronts us with our mortality and transforms a burlesque gesture into a tragic form. To use words derived from Western theatre, we seem to be moving from the commedia dell’ arte to the Trauerspiel or to compare this process with visual artistic movements, we seem to be passing from a conception of art as a product to a conception of art as a trajectory.  The dissappearing logogram testifies to the presence of informal art in Munro’s text which can be likened to the experiments with dissolving traces such as “dew art” encountered on the comtemporary art scene. This ephemeral aesthetic trace made of tomato sauce, which relays the inscription with the magic marker and the overall action of devastating the house or action painting can be considered as a formal gesture, a formal imprint of the kind described by Aby Warburg as “pathosformel.” A formula of pathos is a primitive affective form dating back to time immemorial which has the capacity to survive throughout time and to return in the actuality of contemporary forms, laden with the energy of primitive forces.

This return or “survival of the primitive” (nachleben der antike) takes place on the occasion of a crisis, a crisis which might be similar to the ones having occured at Lesser Dismal beforehand. With the use of the comparative Munro points towards the existence of other crises which have sedimented trough time. The sack of the house can be regarded as the repetition of an orgiastic mystery which highlights the link between suffering and vitality, destruction and creation. What Munro seems to highlight is the symbolic function of images and their symbolic efficiency. With this forceful logogram, this verbal image in blood appearing and disappearing, she allows the return of the primitive in  her contemporary bush garden. She aligns Liza’s experience on a formula of pathos that links her dismembering of the house with a remembering of the self. The sack of the house by Liza can be envisaged as a performance and a psychic process very similar to abreaction, which has a cathartic power and purges her of the traumatic events which unfolded on the premises during her childhood.

The cabin becomes the ur-location of the original traumas. Not for nothing is it designated as a simple A shaped building which grew into a bigger place through adjuncts. The use of the letter A can be regarded as another polysemic cryptogram deployed by Munro. Because it refers to the first letter in the alphabet, it sets the scene for heroic beginnings but it also encapsulates the possibility of intertextual allusions.

The story by Borges entitled “The Aleph” is also about the first letter in the sacred language, which signifies according to the Cabala the unlimited and pure divinity. In Borges’short story, the Aleph becomes the place which encapsulates all other places, the secret point where the unconceivable universe can be looked at. By making her female character indulge in an act of devastation in the A shaped cabin in order to replace perverted order with organic chaos, Munro makes us participate in the creation of  a “chaosmos” to use the word coined by Deleuze. She gives her character access to the point which encapsulates all points that is to say the mythic moment of demiurgic creation that mortals can participate in, when seized by divine possession or indulging in the act of artistic expression: in the A shaped cabin, Action painting opens the way to the Aleph.

This demiurgic power is further confirmed by the closing paragraphs of the story. After her trashing of the house, Liza walks down into the snow over the nature reserve while her husband carefully puts a piece of cardboard over the window she has just smashed to literally cover up her action. In the nature preserve, after her fit of mania, she recovers her sanity and looks at one of the beech trees where her initials as well as Ladner’s and her brother’s Kenny had been carved. She, then, waits for her husband to join her in her contemplation of nature and starts naming the elements which constitute the world:

 

“Cedar,” said Liza. “You’ve got to know cedar. There’s a cedar. There’s a wild cherry. Down there’s birch. The white ones. And that one with the bark like gray skin? That’s a beech. See, it had letters carved on it, but they’ve spread out, they just look like any old blotches now.” (294)

 

The transformation of mania into sophia, of pathos into logos, confirms Liza in her demiurgic role but it also subtends another major metamorphosis. The tree with the bark like gray skin and the blotches is strongly evocative of Ladner, who had been burned on the side of his face and neck from an exploding shell during ground fighting near Caen, when he was in the Army. Through the last ironic reversal in the story, Ladner is simultaneously destroyed at the same time as his house is devastated, and allowed to be reborn as a living tree on what had been a fake nature preserve upon which wild animals were kept in glass cases.

It looks as if here Munro was again providing us with the structural and structuring polarities of her aesthetic enteprise.  She simultaneously exposes the perfection of the simulacra created by Ladner as the repository of perversions and extolls the blotches of  creation, be they the blotches of the beech on the reserve or those of action painting in the cabin. In doing this, she is not opposing the deadly perfection of artifice to the organic defects of nature, she is subverting these ambivalent categories into figures of prodigious doubling that investigate the nature of art in the artificial nature preserve. 

By finally returning Ladner to an organic life in the simulacra of his nature preserve and by condemning Liza, the new born Christian, to the duplicity of her unacknowleged devastation,  Munro is once again proffering an ars poetica based on a chiasmatic figure of  fundamental ambivalence. She is articulating the ingrown nature of artifice at the same time as the secret falsehood of truthfulness while subsuming both into the category of vandalism. Vandalism primarily refers to “wilful or malicious destruction or damage to works of art or other property” (OED) but it also encapsulates an allusion to the original Vandals, a Germanic people  that overran part of Roman Europe. 

It might be possible that this secret allusion to the invasion of a country constitutes one of the paradigms of Munro’s poetics. One of the major motifs developed in her works is that of the opening up of “another country” through the mediation of art. In “Vandals”, she has forced open a new territory, in a transgressive aesthetic gesture, the performativity of which is the subject of most postcolonial theory. Given Munro’s delectation for what Homi Bhabbha calls “the figure of chiasmatic cultural difference”(Bhabha 4), one might posit that her ambivalent representation of aesthetic imposition—the devastation of the cabin on the nature preserve—is at the the same time a repetition of colonial imposition and a liberation from it. By returning the nature preserve to its original chaos, Munro’s protagonists release the land from colonial imposition . They  simultaneouly assert the predatory nature of art and its liberating function.

But the concept of vandalism in Munro’s story should not unduly be limited  to territorial imposition. The territory that Munro opens up in story after story is a psychological and a moral one rather than a political one and her delineation of vandalism implicates a retributive justice which is not exclusively dealt for sexual mistreatment. Kenny and Liza have suffered from Ladner’s sexual perversion. They have also suffered from the passive complicity and tacit condonation of Bea, whose criminal silence might also indict her as one of the vandals in the story. The red logogram which instantly dissappears on her kitchen wall levels an accusation at her as it clandestinely encapsulates the original warning :

 

 Mene mene tekel u-pharsin; God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighted in the balance and found wanting and your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians. (Daniel 5, 6)

 

The vanishing red logogram which replaces, in Munro’s story, the biblical mark on the wall, constitutes at the same time an indictment of Bea’s base nature and an ironic metafictional commentary on scripta manent. The lethal warning which dominates the story with its powerful biblical hypotext “Beware this is your blood” is the one which only exists as an ephemeral trace in the short duration which precedes its evaporation.

 In her ironically chiasmatic aesthetics, Munro uses de-vastation as the foundational moment of her writing.  She leans on the eternal authority of the metanarrative (the creation myths and apocalyptic narratives derived from the bible) as the same time as she proffers a metafiction which self reflexively makes a case for the poetics of the fragment, the scattered bits and pieces, the vanishing, irretrievable, half-glimpsed, and ephemeral revelations of the minor genre (Lesser Dismal) called the short story.

 

 

Notes

1-In his ground-breaking essay entitled, The Violence of Language, Jean-Jacques Lecercle developed a philosophy of language based on what escapes the rational construction of language and propounded the concept of "the return of the rest" to describe the irrational phenomena such as slips
and unconscious puns which resurface in the tropes and the polysemy of literary discourse. Twelve years later, in his debate with Ronald Shusterman on literary experience entitled, "L'emprise des signes",  he uses this concept again as the fourth element in a development comprising eight theses
on the opacity and reflexivity of literary language:
"Thèse n° 4: "La littérature est donc le lieu privilégié du retour du reste
 Sous ce concept, j'ai tenté de nommer ce qui du langage échappe à la construction rationnelle de l'objet langue, qui est le travail de la linguistique. Les règles de grammaire même les plus strictes,
admettent des exceptions. Celles-ci, loin d'être des scories de l'explication rationnelle, destinées à être éliminées par le progrès de la théorie, persistent. Elles ne disparaissent en général, provisoirement, qu'au prix d'une complication de la théorie qui incitent les chercheurs à en
construire une autre. Je postule donc qu'il y a, dans le langage, du reste constitutif." (L'emprise des signes, pages 41-42)

2-Paul Ricoeur's essay on La métaphore vive proposes the metaphor as a means to redescribe reality. This redescription of reality is predicated upon an operation of resemblance or analogy. It consists in "seeing as": "le 'voir comme' est la face sensible du langage poétique; mi-pensée, mi-expérience, le 'voir comme' est la relation intuitive qui fait tenir ensemble le sens et l'image."( La métaphore vive, page 270) This possibility of seing something as something else is based on a semantic impertinence which is claimed by Ricoeur as indispensable: "En ce sens, une psycho-linguistique de la métaphore devrait intégrer à sa théorie des opérations le concept d'impertinence sémantique." (261)

3-I am indebted to Warren Carriou for pointing out to to me during a discussion at the Canadian Cultural Center Munro’s transformation of the ritualized “this is my blood” into “Beware this is your blood.” I wish to extend my most sincere thanks to him for this enlightening remark.

 

 

Works Cited

 

http://www.artlex.com copyright 1996-2004 Michael Delahunt

Bhabha, Homi, K. Nation and Narration. London : Routlege, 1990.

Bioy Casares, Adolfo. The Invention of Morel. Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms. New York : The New York Review of Books, 1964. [1940]

Buci-Glucksman, Christine. Esthétique de l’éphémère. Paris : Galilée, 2003.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Oeuvres Complètes. Paris : nrf Gallimard Pléiade, 1993.

Didi-Huberman, George. L’image survivante Histoire de l’Art et Temps des Fantômes selon Aby Warburg ; Paris : Minuit, 2002

Dotremont, Christian. J’écris pour voir. Paris : Buchet Chastel, 2004.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. The Violence of Language. New York : Routlege, 1990.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques et Ronald Shusterman. L'emprise des signes Débat sur l'expérience littéraire. Paris: Seuil, 2002.
Munro, Alice.Open Secrets. London : Chatto and Windus, 1994.

Ricoeur, Paul. La métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil , 1975.

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Crypts and Cryptonyms in Alice Munro’s “The Turkey Season”

Héliane Ventura

Forthcoming in Open Letter, Spring Summer 2007

 

            In the chapter from Capitalisme et skizophrénie Mille Plateaux entitled “1874-Trois nouvelles ou ‘Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?’” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose a well-known and deceptively simple definition for the short story : “The essence of a short story, as a literary genre is not very hard to determine: there is a short story when everything is organized around the question ‘What is it that happened? What is it that could possibly have happened?’” [1] (Deleuze and Guattari 235; my translation) 

It would seem that this definition is particularly apt in the case of “The Turkey Season,” a story which  belongs in Munro’s fifth collection from 1982, The Moons of Jupiter,  since  a secret is encrypted at the heart of the story, a secret that cannot be revealed and put into words. The plot is  built around an undisclosed incident that happened inside a gutting shed between a young employee and the boss’s sister, which resulted in the woman breaking down and the young boy being fired: “all I ever found out was that Brian had either done something or shown something to Gladys as she came out of the washroom and she had started screaming and having hysterics.” (72)

The secret lies beyond the pale of the narration  and its sacredness precludes its disclosure; it is only through oblique clues, in the polysemy of langage, its crypted, unconscious ramifications and its powerful iconicity that the secret can be indirectly and partially  revealed. This possibility of partial revelation of truth that Lacan has punningly called “the half-said” is considered the privilege of myths [2]. It will be the purpose of this analysis to demonstrate that Munro has re-written here a twentieth century nativity myth [3] about the engendering of fiction and  developed her own scenario of literary production in the turkey barn.

 

The thinly veiled secret occurrence which is withheld from the narration is sufficiently transparent for the reader to understand that it is linked with some kind of compulsion towards display of sexual organs, but despite the fact that the stakes are fairly obvious, it  remains paradoxically and profoundly connected with the unknown, the undiscernible, the unseen. It participates in the cluster of  images in the text which define an aesthetics of mystery:

 

There was the Turkey Barn, on the edge of a white field, with a row of big pine trees behind it, and always no matter how cold and still it was, these trees were lifting their branches and sighing and straining. It seems unlikely that on my way to the Turkey Barn, for an hour of gutting turkeys, I should have experienced such a sense of promise and at the same time of perfect, impenetrable mystery in the universe but I did. (68)  

 

The sighing and straining trees behind the barn in the snow covered landscape create “an effect of a painting” which partially objectify the sense of wonder to be encountered throughout the story. They conjure up an investigative mood which leads the narrator to probe the secrets of people’s lives. She ponders about  Herb Abbott, the superintendant she is in love with and whom she suspects of having a homosexual relationship with Brian, but she refrains from providing a monolithic explanation which would enable her to come to terms with his intriguing alterity:  “He is not a puzzle so arbitrarily solved.” (65) We could say of this short story, as Deleuze says of all short stories, that it is “fundamentally linked with a secret ( not with a secret matter or a secret object that one would like to discover, but with the form of the secret which remains impenetrable. ) [4] ( Deleuze 237; my translation ) 

I would like to suggest that the form of the secret that seems to be exemplified in this story is linked with the sacred. At the age of fourteen, in the time of the Advent, working as a turkey “gutter,” the young narrator is confronted with the mystery of initiation, and as befits such a sacred rite, it must remain undisclosed. Yet we are allowed to circle around the impenetrable, it even looks as if we were enabled to enter the series of literal and metaphoric crypts that are delineated in the text. There is first the Turkey Barn where three operations are conducted: the killing, the plucking, the gutting of the fowls, in three different enclosures which mark three liminal stages in the unfolding of this ritual activity. The last operation, which is the one the young narrator indulges in, takes place in the gutting shed, which is inside the Turkey Barn, and in order to perform that operation, she needs to put her hand inside the turkey’s carcass: “it was deathly cold in there, in the turkey’s dark inside.” (61)

 In addition to the gutting shed where the young girl carries out her exploration of the deadly cavern, the Turkey Barn also accommodates a smaller room, a little room called the lunchroom, where there is a table and a heater, and this is the place where the photograph is taken, on Christmas Eve, with the flash camera, so that the turkey crew is eventually captured inside the camera obscura, in the lunch room, inside the Turkey Barn. Like the picture which represents the features of the members of the crew and of the boss but conspicuouly withholds the superindentant, Herb Abbott,  who looms larger in the narrator’ mind, these series of dark rooms evidence material and organic crypts of various nature which draw our attention towards the invisible rather than the visible. Munro’s text calls for an hypogrammatic reading, it points in the direction of the implicit secret crypts which it is our task to try and apprehend. These can be regarded as falling into two categories, the psychological and the physiological: we may postulate the existence of an intra-psychic crypt or fissure in Herb Abbott’s psychological build up, which would account for his puzzling alterity just as we are allowed to posit that the insistence on the graphic depiction of interior spaces points in the direction of the original “ur” matrix which may be considered as one of the major secrets encapsulated in the story.

 In an essay entitled “Fors” Derrida has attempted to provide definitions for a crypt, beginning each new paragraph with the question: “What is a crypt?”; among these, the following one underscores the nature of a crypt as a construction: 

 

The crypt is not a natural place, but the enduring history of an artifice, an architecture, an artefact: a place set inside another but rigorously separated from it, isolated from the general space through partitions, fence, enclave. To withhold the thing from there. (Derrida 12 ; my translation)  [5]

The patronym given to the superintendant Herb Abbott is not a simple name. As demonstrated by Derrida, a patronym is also an economy of places which points in the direction of multiple places, multiple instances, and multiple interiority. An abbot is a man who is at the head of an abbey of monks. The fact that the superintendant of the Turkey Barn should have been given the name of Abbott, makes it possible to create a metaphoric equivalence between an abbey and the barn he is in charge of, which reinforces the sacredness of the enclosure where the crew works. The predicates used to describe the superintendant also highlight his sacred aura: “In all the operations at the Turkey Barn it seemed to be Herb who had the efficiency and honor of the business continually on his mind; it was he who kept everything under control.” (62) The description of the superintendant equally encapsulates the principle of contradiction as the dominant element, which evidences the splitting of the self through the cleft between outward appearances and  inner reality  :

 

His hair was dark and thin, combed straight back from a widow’s peak, and his eyes seemed to be slightly slanted, so that he looked like a pale chinese or like pictures of the Devil, except that he was smooth-faced and benign. (62)   

 

The allusion to the Devil is repeated in the text several times, with regard to the oldest member of the crew, who is pictured as “a devil for work,” despite the fact he is eighty six years old, and with regard to Brian, a supposed relative of Herb, a fiend responsible for causing disruption among the crew.  Brian is depicted as having “amazing good looks,” but being similar to a fallen angel, simultaneously “vicious” and “silly.” His status  is even reduced to being “not even evil, or a monster but some importunate nuisance.” The gutting shed itself could be regarded as some kind of Inferno, what with the unremitting hacking, plucking, and pulling out of entrails that takes place in this cold dark vault, under the guidance of the black haired superintendant. But despite his widow’s peak,  Herb Abbott does not not seem  to preside over those condemned to eternal fire: there is no sense of  burning punishment going on in this specific vault.

On the contrary, the narrator experiences a feeling of triumph at being able “not to get fired” and “to turn out clean turkeys at a rate that was not disgraceful.” (66) This place is not Dis, it is neither the Pagan underworld nor the Christian Inferno, it is not a place of dis-grace, it is a crypt which holds together through the tension of opposites: the tension between the forces of evil working towards disruption and death and the forces of redemption working towards acquisition of knowledge and dexterity.

This tension of opposites inside the Turkey Barn is embodied through the dialectic pattern of oppositions and similarities between the characters. Although Herb has the look of the Devil, he is a high-minded priest dedicated to enforcing honorability in all the proceedings in the barn, whereas Brian has the looks of an angel, and is a minor devil. Although the young narrator is clumsy and inexperienced, she learns the trick of the trade and does not get fired, contrary to Gladys, who cannot be given the sack because she is the boss’s sister but who does not show any disposition to improve. The metaphors which are used to depict Gladys show the narrator’s uncertainty as to who she really is and what she really experiences; they also bring evidence of an extended semantic field connoting the existence of smouldering crypts in the characters’ psyche:

 

It is impossible for me to tell with women like her whether they are as thick and deadly as they seem, not wanting anything much but opportunities for irritation and contempt, or if they are all choked up with gloomy fires and useless passions. (66)

 

The places that are forcefully designated throughout the story are interior places, linked with the inside of the body, not only of the human protagonists but more specifically of the animal ones whose innards are listed as they are gutted by the young narrator and her companions: the crop, the wind pipe, the gullet, the gravel, the gizzard, the gall. The vocabulary of organs and functions takes us back to a more archaic language and a more archaic awareness of a level of existence which creates a situation of indeterminacy between human beings and fowls.

This indeterminacy is reinforced by the fact that in slang a “turkey” designates a stupid or inept person.  The ambiguity of the story and its sense of impenetrable mystery may be derived from the blurring of differences between ineptness and competence, between what belongs to a supposedly lower order and what belongs to a supposedly higher level.  The narrator speaks of the shame she experiences on account of her “ineptness at manual work” (66) and she also insists on the necessity for her to test her mettle by undertaking the job of a gutter: “I had a great need to be successful in a job like this.” 

Under the guidance of Herb Abbott she develops a dexterity which enables her to surmount for a while her crisis of undifferentiated identity. By becoming a good gutter, she literally cuts herself loose from the turkey she thought she was: she “pulls the connecting tissues loose,” she “breaks the strings.” Simultaneously, she cuts herself loose from her co-workers who are “good at quilting and darning and painting and papering” while their thinking is “slapdash and clumsy.” As an educated girl who uses her intelligence to challenge the arbitrariness of the laws the other women have fallen a prey to, and through the acquiring of manual dexterity during her ordeal at the turkey barn, she seems to have successfully undergone the initiation rite in order to become a fully accredited and well-rounded member of the human tribe.

But the ambiguous system of values that Munro deploys thoughout her works as well as the particular sense of impenetrable mystery which pervades this specific story renders such univocal and  clear-cut progress  less than convincing. At the end of the story, before the workers return home on Christmas Eve, they are each given a bonus turkey by the boss, Morgan Eliott, but “each of these turkeys had a leg or a wing missing or a malformation of some kind, so none of them are salable at the full price.” (73) This final allusion to a malformation in the turkey takes us back to the way the young narrator’s father described her daughter at the beginning of the story by saying “she’s got ten thumbs” to hightlight her clumsiness.

This return to the inescapable sense of undifferenciated status between mankind and fowl is further reinforced by the chorus of women at the end of the last day of work at the barn saying “I am dead on my feet.” In an exactly symmetric but inverted manner to the dead turkeys which had been hanging by the legs before they were gutted,  the women are standing on their feet, feeling dead-tired, that is to say reduced to an undifferenciated state with fowls through their tiredness. The metaphoric equation between women and turkeys encapsulates the common fact of death which seems to crown their symmetric journey.

Men are also included in this inescapable process of undifferenciated identities.When Morgan Eliott gives the sack to Brian for having exposed himself to his sister, he curses him ferociously and threatens him with a cleaver, promising a similar fate as the one the turkeys encounter:  “And out of this town – I mean it – and don’t you wait till tomorrow if you still want your arse in one piece! Out!” (71) Whether the fact of death is inscribed in the seasonal routine of work at the farm or in a theatrical mock epic vein, it is inescapable and encrypted in the patronym of the boss and his son who are in charge of killing: the name of Mor-gan Eliott encapsulates the mortal condition of all the living beings that are under his jurisdiction.

In The Naked Man, Claude Lévi-Stauss has shown that some animals occupied a privileged position in mythic thought because they were capable of  connoting the intersection between the living and the dead, the human and the inhuman, the close and the distant, the feminine and the masculine. (539) He has given the name of “zoems” to these classes and species of animals playing the role of “binary operators.” (500-01) The turkeys which in North American Indian Mythology simultaneously embody female fecundity and male empowerment when their neck become turgid (Dictionnaire des symboles 356) could very well be considered as potent binary operators in Munro’s story on account of a powerful cryptonym  which occupies pride of place, since it is the concluding word:

 

 “Let’s sing,” Lily said. “What’ll we sing?”

“’We Three Kings’?” said Marjorie. “’We Three Turkey Gutters’?”

“’I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas.’”

“Why dream? You got it!”

So we sang. (76)

 

The word “sang”  superficially denotes the carols and profoundly connotes the sang-uinary rites that have taken place inside the bloody chamber. Under the trivial appearance of a Christmas card-like scenery, the three women who return home on Christmas Eve reenact on the parodic mode the mystery of nativity. The “blood” upon which the story cryptically closes simultaneously encapsulates the principle of life because it eventually designates the fecundity of the matrix  and the principle of death because it serves as a recapitulation of the activity that has taken place in the barn that is to say the bleeding and gutting of turkeys.The multiple crypts that have been delineated in the text are profoundly cleft and provide supplementary evidence of Munro’s aesthetics of ambiguity.

The “common facts” between mankind and animalkind is powerfully asserted as a factum brutum of existence : “Why dream? You got it!” The three women linking arms are not simply linked by the common activity they have engaged in, they are more profoundly and more archaically linked by their common sharing in a physical dimension of reality which has been repeatedly stressed in the story. In the washroom, which is another cavern off the barn, the young narrator has to listen to Gladys’ complaints about her periods which are profuse and painful and she is asked about hers. This question is another question in the story that will remain unanswered because Irene, the plucker who is heavily pregnant, makes a joke about how to get rid of periods for a while. In the co-participative strategy that Munro favours through the inclusion of crypted clues in the text, we seem to be encouraged to wonder whether “the turkey season” which is the season when turkeys are bled is not another crypted allusion to the seasons of women, that is to say the cyclical rhythm of menstruation. More specifically, although it is unspecified in the story, we are allowed to wonder whether that particular season when the young narrator was fourteen and working as a gutter at the Turkey Barn was not the season when she menstruated for the first time.

Nevertheless, the “sense of promise and at the same time of perfect impenetrable mystery in the universe” that suffuses the story cannot be reduced to the awareness of the physicality of existence. Munro’s secret is rooted in an awareness of the body as the place where meaning is inscribed and constructed but it is first and foremost a metaphysical secret, a sense of the mysterium tremendum, a sense of the hidden forces that are afloat in the universe. This secret must necessarily remain undisclosed, surfacing here and there through the iconicity of language which create openings into unexplored depths.

The Derridean “crypts” which we have circled around might be supplemented with the Deleuzian concept of “posture” in order to try and come closer to the impenetrable secret that lies at the heart of the story. Or should we say “come near”? The young narrator is partially aware of the coded language that her co-workers use to talk about sex  but does not choose to decypher their message:

 

I could see that it was a matter of pride not to let your husband come near you, but I couldn’t quite believe that “come near” meant “have sex.” The idea of Marjorie and Lily being sought out for such purposes seemed grotesque. They had bad teeth, their stomachs sagged, their faces were dull and spotty. I decided to take “come near” literally. (69)  

 

 

In this reader oriented passage in which Munro’s humor brightly surfaces, the adult narrator simultaneously highlights the young narrator’s delusions and her probable reconsideration of the matter at a subsequent stage. She tentatively, in between words, allows us to “come near” the ultimate secret, which is not simply what D.H. Laurence  calls “the dirty little secret” that is to say the secret of sex, but also the metaphysical secrets of the mystic and alchemical transmutation of the materia prima, this communion of the senses, this fusion of bodies and engendering of life that is implicated in it. Unlike D.H. Laurence, Munro does not subtend her description of this rite of initiation with philosophical elaborations. Instead of “telling” us about it, she attempts to “show” us the young girl’s dawning awareness of the mysteries of sex. To make us “see” with the power of the written word, she selects postures of the body, that she graphically imprints upon the text.

The posture of the body that graphically dominates “The Turkey Season” and creates a  mental image  is the way Herb Abbott walks. His particular gait is remarked upon by one of the young narrator’s co-worker: “Notice about Herb – he always walks like he had a boat moving underneath him,” Marjorie said, and it was true.” (62)  The same motif is taken up again at the end of the story in order to make us visualize Herb returning home on Christmas Eve: “and Herb walked off by himself, head down and hands in his pockets, rolling slightly, as if he were on the deck of a lake boat.” (76) This rolling gait is the distinctive trait of the character and it is particularly striking because it deterritorializes him in two opposed directions at the same time. On the one hand, it removes him from the world of the farm to enable him to depart on a line of flight connected with the water element, and on the other hand, it removes him from the world of men to make him re-enter the world of the farm where turkeys and other fowls are known to progress in that rolling fashion, from side to side. Herb’s alterity is thus repeatedly signalled, since he is allowed a “becoming other” (un devenir autre) and a “becoming animal” (un devenir animal) which reunites him with the women gutters, whose archaic similarity with the turkeys have also been inscribed in the story. Finally and most importantly, this archaic rocking and rolling  posture is also the posture that best emblematizes the motions of sex and as such it powerfully installs within the text a suggestive image of the secrets that we are allowed to “come near” to.

Herb’s posture reinforces his role as initiator in terms of the young narrator’s progress. Not only has he helped her overcome her clumsiness and “dithering paralysis” to acquire manual ability but he has also contributed to her sexual awakening in a sense that has endowed her awareness of sexuality with a cosmic dimension. This rolling high priest, that straddles land and lake, is the last image that the young narrator sees in her mind before she goes to sleep: “When I went to sleep at night lying on my side, I would rub my cheek against the pillow and think of that as Herb’s shoulder.” (66) By transmuting her pillow into a “soft shoulder,” the young narrator further integrates sexuality into the mysteries of the universe and converts her season at the barn into a simultaneously spiritual and terrestrial awakening.

Because of the ambiguity in the scheme of values deployed by Munro, Herb’s rolling posture can also be understood in a less transcendent manner as that of  a “sailor,”  but the possibly negative association of the word with homosexuality is  redeemed because his rolling posture stands in sharp contrast with Brian’s, the leering and vicious teen-ager who acts as his foil. Far from intimating the glory of a cosmic motion, Brian’s posture is revealed as a vulgar parody of the high minded priest’s:

 

His mouth was wet-looking and slightly open most of the time, his eyes were half shut, his expression a hopeful leer, his movements indolent, exaggerated, inviting. Perhaps if he had been put on a stage with a microphone and a guitar and let grunt and howl and wriggle and excite, he would have seemed a true celebrant. Lacking a stage he was unconvincing. (69)    

 

Brian’s cheap posture is a “turkey,” a cheap sham, it is the symmetrically inverted image of Herb Abbott’s whose name may be regarded as encapsulating another cryptonym based on a possible chiasmus with the first letter of Brian’s name. Herb Bennett is a plant which is thought of as expelling the devil because it is blessed (herb benedicta). In the young narrator’s mind, Herb’s devilish aspect, due to his widow’s peak, is reversed into that of a true celebrant, a blessed performer in an orgiastic initiatory rite, with Brian as a mean and perverted shadow that cannot be expelled from his life because he is not evil enough to reach the status of a devil.

 

In their previously quoted essay on the definition of the short story as a genre, Deleuze and Guattari propose a tripartite outline as a summary recapitulating  the development of a short story: “The concatenation of the short story is: What is it that happened? (Modality or expression), Secret (form), Posture of the body (content). [6] (Deleuze and Guattari 237; my translation). We might take up these three elements to try and summarize the story as a crypted contemporary re-writing of ancient myths. The occurrence which triggers off the childhood reminicences and the writing of the story is Brian’s exposure of his sex to Gladys as she comes out of the turkey barn washroom.

This act of exposure can be compared with a symmetrically inverted occurence in Greek mythology: at the time when the goddess Demeter was wandering across the world searching high and low for her daughter Proserpina, she stopped on her way in Eleusis at the house of Dysaules and Baubô. Because she was disconsolate she declined all food offered to her and Baubô, her hostess, lifted her skirt and exposed her sex to her in order to make her laugh and provide some comfort to her (Grimal 64). Brian is Baubô’s male counterpart exposing himself to Gladys on the parodic mode  in order to disrupt order in the barn and creating a trauma instead of alleviating one.

This exposure remains undisclosed and has the form of a secret, the content of which can only be indirectly apprehended through the postures adopted by the characters in the story. The noble and exciting posture of Herb’s body set against the obscene posture of Brian’s might be taken as yielding the last graphic clue towards an approach to the impenetrable secrets that Munro has attempted to intimate. Whereas Brian’s posture, baring himself, is immature and sterile, Herb’s posture, is initiatory and fecund; it leads the protagonist to “bear the word” and   engender the story of the Turkey Barn. By making her protagonist “bear the word,” Munro has used the contradictory nature of the symbolism of blood to impart some of the secrets of the origin of creation. She has orchestrated a sanguinary primitive scene which is also a nativity scene, in which, according to the principle of the founding murder expressed by Réné Girard, the bleeding of the turkey has resulted into the writing of the story, from the original pen, a pen which is paradoxically located in the feminine and in the sacred.

Works Cited

 

Jean Chevalier et Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles. Paris: Laffont, 1982.

Catherine Clément et Julia Kristeva, Le féminin et le sacré. Paris: Stock, 1998.

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et skizophrénie Mille plateaux, Paris: Minuit, 1980.

Jacques Derrida, “Fors” in Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok, Cryptonymie Le verbier de l’homme aux loups, Paris: Flammarion, 1976.

René Girard, Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. Paris: Pierre Grasset et Fasquelle, 1978.

Pierre Grimal, Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque et romaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951.

Jacques Lacan, L’Envers de la psychanalyse (1969-1970). Paris: Seuil, 1971.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’homme nu. Paris: Plon, 1971.

Alice Munro, The Moons of Jupiter, Toronto: Macmillan, 1982  

Redekop, Magdalene, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. London: Routlege, 1992.

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De l’image au texte : le devenir-nouvelle dans « The Beggar Maid » d’Alice Munro

 

Dès le paratexte, la nouvelle d’Alice Munro, intitulée « La Jeune Mendiante », publiée en 1979 dans le volume du même nom, [1] fait référence au  tableau célèbre d’Edward Burne-Jones  de 1884 « Le roi Cophétua et la jeune mendiante », qui est ensuite décrit dans le corps du texte sur le mode de l’ekphrasis, comme pour réfléchir l’intrigue par l’intermédiaire du dédoublement visuel. Le recours à l’hypoicône préraphaélite est susceptible d’être renforcé par d’autres allusions ou citations puisque le tableau de Burne-Jones est  notoirement  construit sur le modèle des annonciations ou des couronnements de la vierge, et qu’il est également l’illustration d’une ballade de Tennyson de 1852, elle-même inspirée par une ballade du moyen-âge.  La nouvelle de Munro accompagne cette hypoicône surdéterminée et ses hypotextes dédoublés d’une référence à une pièce de théâtre de W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire de 1894, qui elle-même cite l’un de ses poèmes : « The Stolen Child. »

Cette « fragmentation psychique » postmoderne,  pour reprendre les termes de Fredric Jameson (Jameson 90), procède d’une esthétique baroque qui  se fonde sur la prolifération de la figure à l’intérieur de la figure, c’est-à-dire sur  la logique de l’abyme, que l’on pourrait envisager en termes deleuziens comme un pli qui va à l’infini, qui se déplie et se replie sans cesse pour nous  faire passer des replis de la matière aux plis dans l’âme. Pourtant, en raison du phénomène d’inversion et de subversion qui travaille ce texte à entrées multiples,  c’est à la carte du rhizome que nous nous intéresserons plutôt qu’au sombre fond de la monade et la grille de lecture qui sera utilisée ici ne s’inspirera pas du Pli mais plutôt de Kafka. [2] Dans cette perspective, la nouvelle sera envisagée comme un agencement à double face, un agencement collectif d’énonciation et un agencement machinique du désir : le personnage éponyme de ce texte court, la jeune mendiante, ne sera pas un sujet  mais une fonction générale qui prolifère sur elle-même et qui ne cesse de se segmentariser et de filer sur tous les segments, en se connectant à tous les termes des séries par lesquelles elle passe. L’objet de ce travail sera de tenter de mettre en lumière le fonctionnement de cet agencement polyvoque à travers ses « blocs-segments » iconiques, poétiques et dramatiques pour redéfinir le processus d’auto- enchâssement narratif comme un auto-engendrement de la nouvelle. A partir de la révision métafictionnelle dans laquelle Alice Munro s’engage, on s’autorisera  à considérer cette nouvelle comme un scénario de production auto-réflexif, qui ne désigne pas seulement son propre engendrement mais, de façon plus exemplaire, les pérégrinations d’un devenir-nouvelle qui se caractériserait par un événement lié au renversement et au débordement  des hypotextes et des hypoicônes. Il se pourrait bien que l’Evénement indicible ou la fêlure,  qui sont censés se dessiner au cœur de chaque nouvelle, aient finalement  partie liée avec le recyclage et la re-fondation du visuel, ou des effets de visuel, dans un espace nécessairement trop limité pour les contenir. [3]

        Le tableau de Burne-Jones qui sert de cadre à la nouvelle peut être considéré comme la première série de cet agencement polyvoque et polyrythmique. Il dépeint le moment où un roi africain,  Cophétua, épris d’une jeune mendiante du nom de Pénélophon, fait le serment solennel de la prendre pour épouse. Sa composition met en valeur le processus d’intronisation de la jeune fille grâce à la verticalité de la perspective et l’étagement des personnages principaux. Le roi est situé sur le plan inférieur du tableau, en situation de vassalité par rapport à la jeune femme, clairement positionnée dans la partie centrale du tableau sinon en son centre, pendant que deux pages, derrière une balustrade, contemplent une partition, dans le plan supérieur du tableau. Le spectateur, comme le roi, est invité à lever le regard, di sott’in su, vers la mendiante dont l’attitude figée et hiératique semble s’inscrire dans un vitrail.

Si ce tableau  met explicitement en scène une histoire profane contée dans une série de ballades, dont une ballade du moyen âge qui semble en être l’origine,  il articule également, de façon plus implicite,  un paradigme religieux, celui de la désignation de Marie comme l’élue. Le tableau de Burne-Jones, comme le démontre Danièle Bruckmuller-Genlot, [4] est directement inspiré de la Madone au trône de Mantegna et de l’Annonciation de Crivelli. Il fait  système avec une pratique figurative chrétienne qui comprend deux moments dans l’apothéose de la Vierge Marie qui se trouvent ici condensés : celui où l’Ange Gabriel  annonce la Bonne Nouvelle à la jeune paysanne de  Palestine et celui où elle se trouve couronnée. En d’autres termes, le premier segment, celui du tableau de Burne-Jones, s’étend lui-même sur plusieurs segments contigus, celui de Mantegna et de Crivelli, ou bien se divise en segments qui sont à leur tour des « agencements. » Chacun de ces blocs-segments picturaux est  « une concrétion de pouvoir, de désir et de territorialité » (Deleuze 153) qui ne cesse de segmentariser à nouveau.

Par exemple, l’alignement de la jeune mendiante sur le paradigme religieux, qui procède du segment pictural initial, se retrouve également de façon allusive dans le poème de Tennyson intitulé « The Beggar Maid » que l’on peut considérer comme l’un des blocs-segments poétiques de la nouvelle de Munro. La Ballade décrit  la jeune fille comme auréolée de la gloire divine :  « So sweet a face, such angel grace,// In all that land had never been. »   (Tennyson 119) On l’aura compris la jeune fille aux pieds nus, dans sa robe de bure, est gratias plena. Le poème de Tennyson capte le désir, en le territorialisant, en le fixant dans un bloc théologique qui se connecte à la nouvelle par la force citationnelle.

Une autre référence, d’ordre dramatique,  fonctionne de façon similaire.  C’est une référence à une pièce de William Butler Yeats, dont tout laisse à croire qu’il s’agit de The Land of Heart’s Desire,  dans laquelle Munro introduit une citation au poème du même auteur, « The Stolen Child » :

 

She was writing an essay on Yeats’ play. In one of the plays a young bride is lured away by the fairies from her sensible unbearable marriage.

“Come away, oh, human child…” Rose read and her eyes filled with tears for herself, as if she was that shy elusive virgin, too fine for the bewildered peasants who have entrapped her. (82)

 

Là encore le destin de la jeune femme enlevée par les fées forme un bloc-segment qui se connecte au destin de la jeune mendiante parce qu’il fait filer ses énonciations et ses contenus sur la même ligne. La jeune mendiante, comme la jeune femme enlevée par les fées,  comme la paysanne de Palestine, filent sur une ligne d’intronisation qui les constituent toutes de façon semblable en « élues. »  Ces différents segments, celui de la pièce de théâtre, celui du poème, ceux des ballades et ceux des tableaux, qui représentent un transcodage dans le domaine visuel, sont les agents des rouages connexes d’un autre agencement, celui dans lequel le personnage principal de la nouvelle de Munro, Rose, va se trouver elle-même en position d’élue, intronisée sur une ligne de fuite qui converge par rapport aux précédentes et constitue une synthèse conjonctive ou connective.

L’héroïne de la nouvelle de Munro est, de façon caractéristique, une jeune fille d’origine sociale modeste, dont l’intelligence lui vaut d’obtenir une bourse pour suivre des études à l’université. Un étudiant plus âgé d’origine sociale considérablement supérieure à la sienne (il est l’héritier d’un empire commercial) devient bientôt son chevalier servant et exprime son admiration pour elle en utilisant  la comparaison qui sert de cadre à la nouvelle :  «  I’m glad you’re poor. You’re so lovely. You’re like the Beggar Maid. »    (Munro 77) On pourrait peut-être avancer ici que la comparaison posée par le jeune homme n’appartient plus à l’univers métaphysique de l’analogie mais qu’elle est un processus  artistique qui produit ce que Deleuze et Guattari dans Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? appellent des percepts : «   [E]lle est acte de création de sens comme de transmission d’affects. » Elle est « figure vitale, qui a force de métamorphose. » (Dumoulié 94)  Il semblerait bien que Munro, par le biais de la comparaison, procède à la métamorphose du personnage en s’appuyant sur le même agencement de connexion et de conjonction  que celui décelé dans le tableau de Burne- Jones. 

Pour utiliser la terminologie de Didi-Huberman, on dira qu’elle s’appuie sur un « inconscient du visible » [5] (Didi-Huberman 39) pour doubler la représentation profane d’une dimension religieuse ou sacrée,  c’est à dire voir dans la désignation de l’étudiante comme élue une apothéose de la Vierge Marie. Comme dans le tableau, l’élection se double d’une intronisation et l’énonciation d’une annonciation. Le processus de resémantisation chrétienne est rendu d’autant plus aisé  que l’onomastique porte les traces d’une charge biblique incontestable mais néanmoins décalée par rapport à la scène de l’Annonciation. La jeune fille de la nouvelle de Munro s’appelle Rose, le jeune homme Patrick.  La Rose est clairement un symbole marial mais Patrick s’il est bien un saint dûment canonisé n’est pas l’Ange Gabriel.

Ce bougé par rapport à la scène de l’Annonciation est dû au rôle ambivalent de Patrick dans la désignation de l’élue.  Patrick transporte le sens pour conférer à la jeune étudiante canadienne une dignité fabuleuse et en tant que messager, il a bien une fonction angélique ou archangélique mais la comparaison s’arrête là puisque Patrick est amoureux de Rose, qu’il se positionne en vassal de l’élue, et que l’intronisation de la jeune fille se double, pour utiliser des termes bakhtiniens, d’une détronisation du jeune homme, comme dans le tableau de Burne- Jones.

Plusieurs lignes différenciées convergent donc dans la construction de la rencontre de Patrick et Rose, qui ne sont susceptibles de faire sens qu’en fonction des autres séries construites autour des autres points et qui convergent ou divergent par rapport à elles ; la rencontre de l’héritier et de l’étudiante va faire communiquer toutes les séries ensemble, depuis la série de l’Annonciation ou l’apothéose de Marie en Palestine, jusqu’à la série de l’intronisation de Rose au Canada, en passant par l’élévation de la mendiante en Afrique. Ce sont toutes les séries du monde qui sont mises en communication les unes avec les autres en un chaos/cosmos qui s’édifie comme une instance à double face, un agencement double que je voudrais envisager ici comme filant sur deux lignes distinctes : celle de l’intronisation ou de la synthèse conjonctive et celle de la détronisation ou synthèse disjonctive.

La nouvelle est bâtie sur le renversement radical des situations initiales et finales. A l’incipit, s’affiche l’amour que Patrick porte à Rose : « Patrick Blatchford was in love with Rose. » A l’explicit s’exprime la détestation : « How could anybody hate Rose so much….? Oh Patrick could, Patrick could. » La nouvelle se déploie entre ces deux pôles dans un renversement terme à terme, qui précipite le mouvement de déterritorialisation, déforme les énonciations et les contenus précédents, pour les transformer en contre-énonciation , ou dans le cas présent en contre-annonciation. Les agencements théologiques vont se métamorphoser en agencements diaboliques et le tableau préraphaélite de la jeune mendiante va laisser la place à un effet de tableau expressionniste où s’affiche la haine comme événement pur :

 

He made a face at her. It was a truly hateful, savagely warning face; infantile, self-indulgent, yet calculated; it was a timed explosion of disgust and loathing. It was hard to believe. But she saw it. (Munro 99)

 

Cette rencontre brutale se déroule dans un aéroport au milieu de la nuit alors que Rose et Patrick sont déjà séparés depuis de nombreuses années et qu’elle est devenue journaliste, que son métier consiste à faire des interviews de personnalités canadiennes à la télévision. Rose s’apprête à saluer Patrick avec bienveillance, lorsqu’il lui adresse ce rictus haineux qu’il faut peut-être envisager comme un « effet de surface. » Un effet de surface n’est pas moins douloureux qu’une inscription dans la profondeur. On pourrait dire de Rose ce que Deleuze dit d’Alice : «  Elle sait que les événements concernent d’autant plus les corps, les tranchent et les meurtrissent d’autant plus qu’ils en parcourent toute l’extension sans profondeur. » (Deleuze 20, 1969) Cette latéralisation de l’agencement de la haine semble envahir tout l’espace de la nouvelle. En se substituant à l’amour, le rictus ridule toute la surface lisse du tableau préraphaélite, il la transforme en surface lézardée.  Il est « ce devenir-fou qui monte à la surface pour libérer les singularités de surface. » (Deleuze 166, 1969) Pour comprendre cet envahissement de l’espace par le rictus, il faut peut-être mettre en relation les deux séries qui prolifèrent de façon divergente.

Dans la première série, celle du tableau préraphaélite et de son ekphrasis, l’événement qui monte à la surface est la caritas, l’humilité, la docilité qui est attribuée à la jeune mendiante  : « She studied the Beggar Maid, meek and voluptuous with her shy white feet.The milky surrender of her, the helplessness and gratitude. » (Munro 79) Cet événement  porte déjà les traces d’une discordance syntaxique, celle de l’hypallage, ou fausse attribution qui procède à des appariements incongrus ou qui reporte la couleur et la consistance du lait sur le mauvais support.  Dans la deuxième série, celle de l’effet de tableau expressionniste, la discordance se manifeste dans l’affirmation appuyée de la détestation :

 

How could anybody hate Rose so much, at the very moment when she was ready to come forward with her good will, her smiling confession of exhaustion, her air of diffident faith in civilized overtures? Oh, Patrick could, Patrick could. (Munro 99)

 

 L’humilité apparente de la « jeune mendiante » avait engendré son apothéose par la vertu de l’amour que lui portait le prince héritier.  Vingt ans plus tard, la puissance de haine que suscite la star médiatique renverse le processus d’intronisation.  La mendiante est parvenue au sommet de la gloire professionnelle, mais elle est littéralement précipitée au sol  par la capacité de mépris que lui porte maintenant le souverain. Le renversement terme à terme des prémisses s’effectue dans un aéroport, au milieu de la nuit. Ce centre d’ébranlement devient le commutateur d’échange, dans une leçon des ténèbres, dont la force de bouleversement semble s’inscrire dans une temporalité biblique.

Au delà de l’anecdote de la vie amoureuse contemporaine somme toute assez banale, le renversement de l’amour en haine peut être reconfiguré selon les termes du sens providentiel de l’Annonciation et de sa perversion en contre-annonciation. Comme le démontre Daniel Arasse dans son étude de l’annonciation italienne,  la rencontre de l’Ange et de la vierge est simultanément un moment terminal et inaugural qui fait basculer le temps d’une ère à une autre :

 

En accomplissant les prophéties de l’Ancien Testament, l’Annonciation n’ouvre pas seulement l’ère chrétienne de la Grâce qui succède à l’ère mosaïque de la Loi ; elle constitue aussi une fin, une révélation ; elle est un événement d’apocalypse :  « La venue du fils de Dieu est l’accomplissement définitif des promesses, l’œuvre finale de l’esprit, l’acte eschatologique de Dieu. » Inaugurant dans l’incarnation la vie humaine du Christ, elle  commence en outre l’ère de l’histoire humaine qui s’achèvera avec la fin des temps. (Arasse 11)           

 

L’annonciation constitue, selon Didi-Huberman,  une  « véritable concrétion de temps sacré, (…) nœud de plusieurs temps éloignés dans l’histoire ou même disjoints dans l’ordre ontologique » où se condensent « un passé commémoré, un futur préfiguré, un présent mystérieux. » (Didi-Huberman 28) Ce phénomène de triplication temporelle est mis en scène par Munro grâce au dispositif narratif de l’intronisation de la mendiante mariale.  Au mystère de l’élection dans le présent de la narration et à la promesse de la rédemption,  Alice Munro adjoint le souvenir du paradis perdu, ainsi qu’en témoigne la série de subordonnées comparatives conditionnelles qui décrit l’agencement rêvé de la relation entre Patrick et Rose :

 

What she never said to anybody, never confided, was that she sometimes thought it had not been pity or greed or cowardice or vanity but something quite different, like a vision of happiness ; (…) Then it was as if they were in different though identical seeming skins, as if there existed a radiantly kind and innocent Rose and Patrick, hardly ever visible, in the shadow of their usual selves. (Munro 98)

 

Cette vision d’un bonheur originel que la vertu de l’amour leur ferait retrouver est de l’ordre d’une anamnèse du visible et nous conduit  au-delà de l’ère de la grâce inaugurée par la vierge. C’est en fait à un retour édénique que Munro nous convie par strates transversales superposées. Tout se passe comme si la duplication des personnages mise en scène dans les hypoicônes et les hypotextes n’était finalement destinée qu’à souligner leur duplicité constitutive et à suggérer que cette duplicité est néanmoins susceptible de se résorber dans la plénitude originelle. Le dédoublement est un redoublement qui transforme le détour en retour car la duplication de la jeune étudiante canadienne par la mendiante africaine nous guide nécessairement  vers la paysanne palestinienne, celle dont la salutation par Gabriel, « ave »,  nous ramène de façon anagrammatique à Eva, la jeune femme du commencement.

Pourtant ce que Munro met en scène dans cette nouvelle à travers ce fantôme ou ce fantasme édénique (The Land of Heart’s Desire) ce n’est ni l’avènement de l’ère de la grâce ni la possibilité d’une régrédience originaire. Le nom que Munro a choisi pour son héroïne n’est pas Eve, c’est  Rose qui est l’anagramme d’ « Eros » mais également de « sore » et la nouvelle se clôt sur un retour à l’ère de la Loi, sur une vision vengeresse et punitive de haine viscérale qui imprègne et fissure l’étendue du parcours accompli par la protagoniste. Munro nous fait passer du temps de l’amour au temps de la haine, de l’ère sub gratia à l’ère sub lege. Elle remplace l’annonciation mariale par le foudroiement de la loi du père.  Elle procède par inversion de la chronologie du temps chrétien ; au lieu de présenter le passage de la vengeance au pardon, elle inverse la trajectoire de l’annonciation pour inaugurer le temps du châtiment à la place de la rédemption dans la clôture du récit.

C’est que l’impossible résorption de la duplicité dans la fusion originelle est elle-même programmée par le redoublement de Marie par Eve. En faisant de Rose d’abord la vierge Marie puis Eve, Munro surdétermine son agencement polyvoque. Elle pré-programme  son élection, puis sa tentation et sa faute. Rose n’est pas destinée à mettre au monde le messie. La seule allusion à sa fécondité se présente comme une parodie dégradée, un simulacre de la bonne nouvelle et du vrai lieu. Munro nous donne à voir Eve au pays de l’Arctique, inapte à inscrire autre chose que les bribes d’un poème avorté sur le mur de sa chambre :

 

She took down one of those Greek photographs and defaced the wallpaper, writing the start of a poem which had come to her while she ate chocolate bars in bed and the wind from Gibbons Park banged at the garage walls.

Heedless in my dark womb

I bear a madman’s child…

She never wrote any more of it, and wondered sometimes  if she had meant headless. She never tried to rub it out either. (Munro 82-83)

 

Il faut peut-être voir ce fragment de poème comme un autre bloc-segment poétique exactement symétrique et inversé par rapport au bloc-segment iconique du tableau de Burne-Jones. Le tableau préraphaélite se présentait, par rapport à la nouvelle de Munro, comme l’hypoicône d’un  hypertexte. Le poème de la narratrice, enchâssé dans la nouvelle, se présente sous la forme de graffiti, inscrit sur le papier peint, sous une reproduction photographique. Il est donc littéralement l’hypotexte d’une hypericône et, comme elle, il véhicule une idéologie païenne. Au lieu de représenter la madone, les photographies donnent à voir les ruines de temples grecs et la matrice sombre décrite dans le poème s’inscrit au rebours de l’immaculée conception. La duplicité du langage lui-même, « headless » se superpose à « heedless » et se conjoint à « defaced », souligne bien le renversement de l’intronisation. A l’inverse d’une apothéose mariale, le poème met en scène, de façon ironique, la décapitation de l’icône.  

De la même façon, à l’explicit, lorsque Patrick ostensiblement témoigne de son courroux à l’égard de Rose, c’est à l’émergence de la faillite finale de la relation entre Rose et Patrick que nous assistons, au renversement de l’idole. Le rictus sur lequel se termine le texte ruine la pré-disposition rédemptrice de la nouvelle. Il instaure une puissance du négatif qui travaille le texte pour le renverser en son contraire et instaurer le régime de l’antithèse, celui de l’humiliation  qui se substitue à l’idéalisation.

Dans le jeu de pouvoir où la figure n’a été rehaussée que pour être finalement rabaissée, c’est le despotisme du désir, l’échec de la rencontre, la défaillance individuelle et sociale qui résument alors  la nouvelle. Comme « The Crack Up » [6] de Fitzgerald, « The Beggar Maid » d’Alice Munro incarne le thème de la fêlure et s’inscrit sur une ligne de fuite qui y est articulée.  En ce sens, elle  est emblématique de l’art de la nouvelle tel que défini par Deleuze, c’est à dire organisé autour de la question :  « Qu’est ce qui s’est passé, qu’est ce qui a bien pu se passer ? » (Deleuze 235, 1980) L’événement comme « effectuation spatio-temporelle dans un état de chose » se produit à la frontière entre plusieurs séries, les séries picturales, poétiques et dramatiques à partir desquelles la nouvelle  organise ses singularités de surface. Dans ces conditions, l’affleurement du  rictus peut être vu à la fois comme « un événement de surface » au sens proprement deleuzien du terme, mais aussi comme l’ événement anamorphotique  du récit. Comme l’apparition de la tête de mort aux pieds des « Ambassadeurs » de Holbein,  il constitue une rencontre avec la mort, l’ultime effectuation de la ligne de fêlure. Dans l’aéroport au milieu de la nuit, dans le court instant halluciné de la reconnaissance, le messager de la bonne nouvelle s’est transformé en Ange de la mort.

 

Alice Munro n’utilise pas « La Jeune Mendiante » de Burne-Jones  pour en faire  la figure emblématique de l’intronisation du genre de la nouvelle.  En la révisant de façon dysphorique, elle s’approprie la puissance de l’icône et elle s’éprouve en la renversant. Elle utilise la légende de la jeune mendiante pour subordonner les processus d’intronisation dont elle a fait l’objet à sa propre puissance de nouvelliste. Elle engage la force du retournement pour dialectiser la nouvelle au travers d’un agencement de médiations. Elle redouble l’espace textuel d’un espace visuel, qui se dédouble lui-même selon deux modalités, celle de l’indexation référentielle explicite incarnée  par le tableau préraphaélite et celle de la référentialisation implicite représentée d’abord par l’autre de la mendiante, c’est-à-dire Marie puis par Eve, et finalement par la grimace spectrale  entraperçue au milieu de la nuit. Ce passage du saisissement au dessaisissement peut être envisagé en suivant l’analyse de Didi-Huberman comme un passage de la visibilité à la visualité. En doublant le visible « d’une matière imageante lovée dans un écheveau »  Munro « ouvre le temps du symptôme », elle rend possible  « la recherche dans le visible lui-même de l’autre du visible, à savoir l’indice visuel, le symptôme du divin. » (Didi Huberman 38)

Au travers de cette ouverture qui est aussi une déchirure, elle propose l’itinéraire d’un personnage et la poétique d’un genre articulés sur le renversement de l’annonciation de la bonne nouvelle en déréliction de la  dévastation. Le genre bref qu’est la nouvelle est peut-être un genre dé-vasté qui fonde son évidement paradoxal (sa fêlure et son devenir-mineur) sur le retournement de l’image visible en image visuelle,  celle qui  livre l’accès à des virtualités imageantes,  fragmentaires et fantasmatiques, illimitées.

 

 

 

 

 

Ouvrages Cités

 

Arasse, Daniel. L’Annonciation italienne. Paris : Hazan, 1999.

Bruckmuller-Genlot, Danielle. « ‘Enquête’ autour de King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid d’E. Burne-Jones ou de la grandeur et des misères de l’historicisme anglais » Etudes Anglaises, T. XLVI, 4 (1993),  p. 456-476.

Bruckmuller-Genlot, Danielle. Les Préraphaélites, 1848-1884. Paris : Armand Colin, 1994.  

Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens. Paris : Minuit, 1969.

Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari. Kafka Pour une littérature mineure. Paris : Minuit, 1975.

Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et skizophrénie Mille Plateaux. Paris : Minuit, 1980.

Deleuze, Gilles. Le Pli Leibniz et le baroque. Paris : Minuit, 1988.

Didi-Huberman. Devant l’image. Paris : Minuit, 1990.

Dumoulié, Camille. Littérature et Philosophie Le gai savoir de la littérature. Paris : Armand Colin, 2002.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes La littérature au second degré. Paris : Seuil, 1982.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London : Verso, 1991.

Louvel, Liliane. « Figurer la nouvelle : notes pour un genre pressé », Aspects de la nouvelle Cahiers de l’université de Perpignan 18 (1995),  p. 77-122.

Louvel, Liliane. L’œil du texte Texte et image dans la littérature de langue anglaise. Toulouse : Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1998.

Louvel, Liliane. Texte Image images à lire, textes à voir. Rennes : Presses de l’université de Rennes, 2002.

Munro, Alice. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto : Macmillan, 1978.

Percy, Thomas. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, vol.1. London : Routledge, 1996 [1765].

Tennyson, Alfred. The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson Poet Laureate. London : Macmillan, 1904.
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The Story of a Freeze: Alice Munro’s “Winter Wind”

 

The presence and description of photographs loom remakably large throughout Alice Munro’s  twelve original  collections of short stories probably because photography  is an in-between art which best exemplifies a popular aesthetics, “a middle-brow art” as Pierre Bourdieu said, half-way between high culture and low culture. With her visual prose based on verbal renditions of photographs, Munro positions herself on the margin of the dominant discourse of literary and high art culture and creates a contact zone where the visual and the verbal interconnect.

The purpose of this paper is to try and argue that Munro creates an ars combinatoria or a process of cultural hybridity which is paradoxically based on the simultaneous use and delegitimation of both the visual and the literary to the benefit of the non-visual and the non written. In other words, I intend to demonstrate that Munro gives rise to a new area of negociation of meaning and representation by using the medium of the short story to point in the direction of the oral origin of the tale and the conversational mode at the same time as she simultaneously uses the description of photographs to enhance other images than the referential, indexical, or analogical ones. Her text makes room for the non written extra-text or “allographic hypotext” (Genette)  and her photographs are the place for displacement of referentiality. Together they provide an occasion for the creation of “a new discursive space” (Lyotard 179), a heterotopia (Foucault), which highlights the inscription of the invisible subtended by  “the complicity of desire with the figural” (Lyotard 271).

 

 

 

“Winter Wind,” the story upon which this demonstration is based,  belongs in Munro’s third collection of short stories Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You dating back to 1974, a collection which generally predicates the untold, the implicit, the half-said as the basis for its elaboration. It is the story of a schoolgirl living on a farm, at the edge of  town, compelled to spend four days at the house of her relatives because of  a winter storm, which blocked the way home. It is a story  built on a metaphoric axis in which the weather conditions the weaving of memories. It is a story about being ice-bound which unleashes the creation of a “freeze,” a freeze which might first  be compared with Hemingway’s iceberg. Of the art of writing, he famouly said: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eights of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strenghtens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.” (Bruccoli 125) Munro’s “freeze” derives its strength from what is concealed under water. There is a secret at the bottom which exemplifies her art of writing and is an anticipation of her later collection, entitled Open Secret, from 1994. As Munro’s freeze, in this earlier collection, develops into words, it also resemantifies and remotivates the polysemic object it derives from, that is to say the freeze itself. A freeze is “ a film shot in which movement is arrested by the repetition of a frame,” it is also  “ a state of frost: a period or the coming of frost or very cold weather.” (OED) “Winter Wind” is a paradoxical freeze.  Instead of arresting forms and movements, the short story turns into a  self-defeating process of thawing out  the past, which is precariously balanced in-between invisibility and dissolution.

 

 “Winter Wind” is narrated by an adult narrator speaking in the first person and reminiscing about her adolescence, a situation which creates a process of double enunciation that can be envisaged also as “a double exposure” in the sense that the narrator clearly sets about creating a picture of the past at the same time as she questions the validity of her representation. This double process, of creating and questioning, which suffuses the entire text, is best apprehended in the ekphrastic description of a snapshot to be found in the first pages of the story:

 

 The parents are seated. The mother firm and unsmiling, in a black silk dress, hair scanty and center-parted, eyes bulging and faded. The father handsome still, bearded, hand-on-knee, patriarchal. A bit of Irish acting there, a relishing of the part, which he might as well relish since he cannot now escape it ? When young he was popular in taverns; even after his children were born he had the name of a drinker, a great celebrator. But he gave up those ways, he turned his back on his friends and brought his family here, to take up land in the newly opened Huron Tract. This photograph was the sign and record of his achievement: respectability, moderate prosperity, mollified wife in a black silk dress, the well-turned-out tall daughters. (Munro 194)

 

This photograph, which is to be found in the dining room of the grandmother’s house where the teenager has sought a shelter for the duration of the storm, can be regarded first as an instance of self-consecration in a domestic cult and its presence in the dining room reinforces its ritualistic value in the sense that it is displayed on the family altar, after the fashion of the lares and penates, worshipped in Ancient Rome. This self-consecration provides evidence of the family social success. As demonstrated by Pierre Bourdieu in Un art moyen essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, a photograph is at the same time “an index and an instrument of integration” [1] (Bourdieu 38; my translation). {Oscar e Lucinda comincia con un quadro o una foto? Che comunque è un’impostura. I postcoloniali sanno, e questo non turba i loro sonni, che si tratta sempre di romanzo familiare, e che il Wirklichkeitsgefül attiene ad esso, purché non pretenda, mistificando, di soppiantare la verità storica, collettiva, o semplicemente il romanzo familiare di un altro membro della famiglia. E’ come se nei racconti di Munro altri potessero raccontare, o raccontassero parallelamente, e questo non impedisce alla storia scritta da lei di dispiegare il proprio fascino. Letto Proust, i Guermantes li conosciamo abbastanza, e se leggiamo qualcosa ancora su loro è per arricchire il nostro piacere di fruitori della Recherche. Letta Munro, non disdegneremmo un altro autore che scrive la stessa vicenda, non ci disturba che dallombra, come immaginiamo accadesse per un racconto orale, }

Through this photograph, the family indicates that the separation from the homeland has not resulted in dispersion and disintegration but, on the contrary, that it has resulted in a successful relocation and recomposition. The picture “solemnizes and eternizes the important moments in the family life” which  “reinforces the integration of the family unit by reasserting the sense it has of itself and of its unity.” [2] (Bourdieu 39) In that sense, the photograph is not a representation of the family, it is a representation of the family giving a representation of itself . Moreover, because the picture unites the parents and the children, it “captures and symbolises the idea of lineage”[3], it constitutes the inheritance that the children are provided with to nourish the family chronicle. It is a  fragment which paradoxically underscores the idea of continuity.

The narrator’s story, through the ekphrastic use it makes of the photograph, seems to fall similarly into the  category of a family chronicle because the narrator, by making her elaboration on the characters spring from the photograph seems to provide her assent to its historiographic role. The photograph seems to have the virtue of incitement. By being looked at and described, it is converted into a discursive practice: it sustains the narration

But the narrator’s assent to the documentary role of photography is only provisional. The reason why the narration is sustained is that no fixed meaning is ascribed to the picture: its significance is debated through the process of double exposure. The photograph is  presented as an index of the family’s sense of belonging but it is simultaneously questioned and challenged by being read as the mask put on by actors on the appropriate occasion. 

 

The figure as image is the one which can been seen on the oneiric scene or almost as a dreamlike image. In this figure as image, the rules of perception are disrupted.. The figure as image deconstructs the percept, it fulfils itself in a space of  difference. [5] (Lyotard 277)  

 

To the sense of social success that is publicly exhibited in the photograph, she juxtaposes a feeling of loss privately experienced, a sense of entrapment and interior exile which is simultaneously concealed and revealed. This opening up of a critical distance constitutes a space of difference, a space  for debate and dialogue with the past which doubles up on the analogical description of the picture and paves the way for further reconfigurations of the characters.

Munro’s use of photography is destined to authorize paradoxical and mutually exclusive interpretations. The narrator’s comment on the women’s dress in the initial “freeze” is a case in point:

 

Though as a matter of fact their dresses look frightful; flouncy and countrified. All except Aunt Madge’s; a tight, simple, high-necked affair, black with some sparkle about it perhaps of jet. She wears it with a sense of style, tilts her head a little to the side, smiles without embarrassment at the camera. She was a notable seamstress, and would have made her own dress, understanding what suited her. But it is likely she made her sister’s dresses also and what are we to make of that?

 

The use of the pronoun “we” and the recourse to unanswered questions takes the form of a co-participative hypothetico-deductive argument, but the questions that are being asked remain mostly unanswered, a mystery to ponder rather than to resolve. Their function is to dislodge the reader from his certainties and to destabilize meaning. In the case of Aunt Madge, the perception of a discrepancy between the way she is elegantly dressed and the way the other women are countrified results in a suggestion of duplicity, an implicit accusation of double-dealing, or mischievous game played at the expense of other women by the knowing seamstress. This accusation is never formulated by the narrator who limits herself to juxtaposing and underscoring clashing evidence, rendering the reader complicit in the exposure of the seamstress’s tricks. In other words, the narrator is duplicitously refraining from the responsibility of the indictment and passing it on to the reader.

The same technique is being used in the last part of the ekphrastic description of the snapshot which now concerns the grandmother’s portrayal:

 

My grandmother is done up in something with floppy sleeves and a wide velvet collar, and a sort of vest with criss-crossed velvet trim; something seems askew at the waist. She wears this outfit with no authority and indeed with a shamefaced, flushed, half-grinning and half desperate apology. She looks a great tomboy, her mop of hair rolled up but sliding forward, in danger of falling down. But she wears a wedding ring; my father had been born. She was at that time the only one married; the eldest and also the tallest of the sisters. (195) 

 

The photographic image becomes a site of exegesis, the privileged medium Munro uses for such opening up of the visible to the invisible or of the designated to the non-designated but she does not limit herself to the use of snapshots or “freeze” for this operation of double exposure. She also indulges in the creation of ambiguous verbal images to document her chronicle of family life. In other words, to continue using Lyotard’s categories, we may assert that alongside “the figure as image,”  she develops “figures as form”:

 

To her grandmother asking about her mother, the narrator tries “to present good reports.” The polysemy of the word “report” which simultaneously brings to mind the description of family scenes and the sound of an explosion conveys some of the duplicity involved in the recreation of an event and some of the trangression involved in the figure as form. Munro emphasises this sense of the unescapable duplicity of re-presentation in her transcription of the grandmother’s reaction: “My grandmother perceived the effort, and registered the transparent falsity of this picture (false even if its details were true.)” What is being articulated in this tension between authenticity and falsehood is the insufficiency of the visible to provide a coincidence between the representation and the object represented. The story operates a radical delegitimation of narration by asserting the falsity of truthful records. When the narrator tries to produce evidence of her mother’s orthodox activities, she conjures up a picture which is unconvincing, despite the fact that it is rooted in an analogic dimension. Although the mother is painting the kitchen cupboards, the report of her actual action to the grandmother is considered not truthful, since it leaves unsaid the symbolic dimension of her act : a bizarre and upsetting artistic impulse, completely disconnected from the pragmatic action alluded to by the narrator.

The deficiency of narration to express the truth of the mother’s action is even underscored when the grandmother says: “She will be painting the cupboards when she would be better off getting your father’s dinner.” Although the narrator comments on this sentence by saying: “truer words were never spoken,” it becomes very clear that the truth formulated by the grandmother also conjures up a false picture of the mother. This is all the more striking as the grandmother uses a modal form “ she will be painting” which is grammatically considered as conveying the subject’s natural propensity hence the “truth” about the subject. Despite the use of the modal form “will,” the picture is not concordant, it “sounds” fraudulent and even the narrator’s assertion about the truth of her grandmother’s words is grammatically marked by a negative form, which reinforces the feeling of incredulity towards what is asserted .

What “Winter Wind” underscores is a crisis in legitimation. Crisis is etymologically derived from krinein which means to separate; it is at the moment when she is literally separated from home by this winter storm, that the narrator becomes aware of the metaphoric difficulty of drawing near her family through the act of re-presentation. It is also the moment when the adult narrator, groping for meaning, propounds her aesthetic credo, and deliberately exposes the doubts and uncertainties of the writer as family chronicler:

 

 And how is anybody to know, I think as I put this down, how am I to know what I claim to know? I have used these people, not all of them but some of them, before. I have tricked them out and altered them and shaped them any way at all, to suit my purposes. I am not doing that now, I am being as careful as I can, but I stop and wonder, I feel compunction. (201)   

 

The narrator’s interruption of the narrative to question its validity is part of the strategy of double exposure she has specifically embraced in this particular story. It is also part of the transgression of the neo-platonic, Pythagorician, Apollinian “good form.” (Lyotard 277)   It is a dionysiac energy which now stops the flow of narrative, and now circulates throughout the entire collections of short stories, simultaneously relying on metafictional and intratextual claims. The narrator pretends to collapse the distance between narrator and author by alluding to the other stories Alice Munro has written, in particular the Del Jordan’s stories, with which “Winter Wind” entertains a relationship of close resemblance. By making a fictional narrator allude to the stories that have been published in the referential world of contemporary reality,  Munro aligns the fictional narrator on the same paradigm as the real author to collapse the difference between fact and fiction.

 She does not perform this complex operation to empower fiction with the exactitude of fact; on the contrary she dismisses facts as a misguided route to approach the art of fiction. She clearly underscores the deficiency of facts and of the visible world to propound a poetics based on the reliance on the invisible world: “without any proof I believe it, and so I must believe that we get messages another way, that we have connections that cannot be investigated, but have to be relied on.” (201)  Munro delegitimizes facts and validates faith. Paradoxically she records facts down to their most trivial details, in a painstaking effort to fit every thing in, only to throw her construction out of kilter by claiming the inessential dimension of such accomplishment; to the sustained documentation of fiction, to the power of sight and the evidence of photography,  she opposes the subliminal or unconscious fulguration of insight.

She repeatedly enforces upon the reader the idea that there is no possibility of absolute or sustained coincidence between the object and its representation. It is only through  alternative, unconscious, transgressive fulgurations that such disclosures can be at best approximated, when the verbal and the visual combine to deconstruct each other.

“Winter Wind” documents the existence of truths that are beyond understanding through its dismissal of the visible and its invocation of the invisible. The description of the insufficiency of the visible in the family photograph is destined to pave the way for the setting up of several unresolved enigmas in the rest of the story equally based on the tension between what is revealed and what must remain conjectural.

The grandmother’s picture, for instance, which suggests that something is awry in her life story is used by the narrator as the starting point for a fully developed discursive elaboration on the failings of her love life. This elaboration blurs the boundaries between chronicle and gossip. It starts from facts the narrator heard from her own mother, the fact that “she had married [her] grandfather, while still in love with, though very angry at, another man” (200) but very quickly it turns into a series of conjectures, questions, guesswork. These fanciful hypotheses constitute a violation of the cognitive historiographic documentation of fiction. They fall into the category of anecdote or gossip.

We might use Patricia Meyer Spacks’ categories to distinguish between “serious gossip” which “exists only as a function of intimacy”  and “malicious gossip” or “idle talk.” (Spacks 5) The narrator’s use and  rehabilitation of gossip as a legitimate source of information  is based on a conception of literature as a speculative activity directly derived from the oral tradition and implicating a bond of trust and interest between the members of the community: “Though I am only doing in a large and public way what has always been done, what my mother did, and other people did, who mentioned to me my grandmother’s story” (201) By claiming this activity as the basis for her writing, Munro shows that gossip is a form of the artistic that not only has a positive value, but is also a verbal performance endowed with a time honoured legitimacy, an interrelationship between actors and audience that is relayed from time immemorial and accomplishes women’s empowerment. For Sparks, gossip “embodies an alternative discourse to that of public life and a discourse potentially challenging to public assumptions; it provides language for an alternative culture… A rhetoric of enquiry, gossip questions the established” (Spacks 46) We might add that gossip questions the visible and makes room for the fanciful: it is precisely in that quality that it is claimed by Munro as the mainstay of her art of fiction.

There seems to be in Munro’s strategy a refusal of rigidity and fixity and a deliberate choice of fluid evasions. This aesthetic choice is obliquely, fluidly, made clear to the reader through the domestic choices the young narrator indulges in. Her forced stay at ther grandmother’s house confronts her with an environment that is radically different from her usual one. Everything at her grandmother’s is evocative of order, cleanliness and purposefulness, while her mother’s house is redolent of chaos, dirt and slovenliness. The verbal images that are used to evoke the difference between the two households are like the initial photographic image characterized by an opening up of representation to accommodate other data than mere analogical ones.

In her contrastive vignettes about life in her grandmother’s house and life in her mother’s, she evokes the smells of one house against those of the other house. To the lovely smell of the carrot-pudding cooking in the oven at her grandmother’s, she opposes the smells of hencoops attached to dirty boots and clothes at her mother’s. To the polished, fragant and spotless hallway at the house of the former, she opposes the tracks of dirty snow on the linoleum at the house of the latter. Her verbal images are composed on the principle of synaesthesia, a correspondence between the senses which works towards the doubling up of visual representation with other sensory elements. These synaesthesic verbal images  owe their forcefulness to the supplement  provided by multi-sensory evocation and far from disqualifying the mother’s house, they seem to reverse the balance of power so that very soon the reader is led to join the narrator in opting for the mother’s house and rejecting  the grandmother’s:

 

And comfort palls. The ironed sheets, the lovely eiderdown, the jasmine soap. I would give it all up for the moment in order to be able to drop my coat where I chose, leave the room without having to say where I was going, read with my feet in the oven, if I liked. (202)     

 

The grandmother’s house is evoked through a nominal sentence which has the authority of “a timeless absolute referent”  (Marin 75) and it is precisely this despotic authority that the narrator rejects, preferring the chaos of home, because of the unlimited possibilities it opens up:

 

The loud argumentative scandalous person I was at home had not much more to do with my real self than the discreet unrevealing person I was in my grandmother’s house, but judging both as roles it can be seen  that the first had more scope. I did not get tired of it so easily, in fact I did not get tired of it at all. (202)

 

Should we translate the role which is privileged into the aesthetic choice that is favored, we realise that Munro is here setting down the ways and processes through which her fiction is elaborated. The choice of life she is advocating commingles with the aesthetics she is proffering and are both presented as an enactment of fluidity, freedom, and waywardness. The narrator-cum-author is arguing for a metafictional self-construction, a re-presentation of the self,  based on setting oneself free from the constraining norms of the community at the same   time as she is presenting this process through the distanciation and duplicity of role-playing.

This aesthetic choice which is also a domestic choice has crucial consequences in terms of the fiction she writes and the life she leads, since it entails a rejection of her grandmother’s values, which are not only those of cleanliness and holiness but also of discretion, reticence, and moral censure. The poignancy of the short story is derived from this double exposure: by choosing an aesthetic based on fluid openness, mutual exchange and outspokenness, she sets herself against her grandmother’s tight-mouthed self-denial and modesty and proves herself to be a traitor to the family orthodoxy.   

I would like to suggest that Munro’s delegitimation of factual rigidity, decorous discretion and rational construction to the benefit of fanciful speculation, serious gossip and multi-sensory constitution of the object is taken one step further by the recourse to the implicit dominant metaphor of the thawing out of the past.  This metaphor in absentia is encapsulated in a brief allusion to dramatic events. On the very night when the young narrator stayed at her grandmother’s house in town, a tragedy occurred out in the country: an old school friend of the aunt and the grandmother’s, who lived alone out in their old line, got out of her farm, at night, to milk her cows, and lost her way back from the barn, on account of the raging storm. Her frozen body was found out the next day and the grandmother informed the narrator about this tragic occurrence to deter her from returning home.

It seems that with this low-key allusion to this dramatic death Munro was obliquely installing in the text a major element destined once more to make us ponder the ways and processes of her fiction. Instead of plunging us in the midst of tragedy through a visual description of the lame woman groping and fighting her way back to the door of her farm, she deflects and decenters dramatic interest by providing us with access to the  young narrator’s doings on the same evening. We are given the graphic and inessential details of her evening out in town with a girlfriend of hers, Betty Gosley, while Mrs Gershom Bell, a few miles away, is fighting her last combat. The chiasmus of the initial letters enhances Munro’s strategy of displacement. She documents the visible with a view to obscuring and retrospectively enhancing what is taking place behind the scene. She suppresses the narration of the old woman’s fight to make it more haunting. She surrenders the responsibility of the creation of a visual image to the addressee by refusing the fixedness, the anchoring of meaning  to be found in direct utterance.

Her strategy of implicit evocation of images, that is to say non-discursive and non- visual figure, relies on the addressee’s  “encyclopedia” and the possibility of covertly alluding to intertextuality and inter-iconicity. The frozen word trope and the consubstantial thawing out of the past is a time honoured topos which can be equally found in Plutarch, in Celtic legends and in Rabelais. As noted by Bakhtine:  “ For example, Rabelais narrates the story of frozen and thawing words, directly borrowed from Plutarch, although these images have, without any doubt, a celtic origin.”[7] ( Bakhtine 394)

The narration of death by blizzard and the motif of the frozen body, recovered after the storm has abated, is also one of the founding tropes upon which Canadian literature has been elaborated. One short story in particular, “The Painted Door” by Sinclair Ross, dating back to 1939, overtly recounts the death by blizzard of the dutiful husband, who had left his homestead to help his aging father with his chores and found himself trapped by the weather when he returned home. It also covertly encapsulates the theme of adultary and betrayal for the wife discovers on her husbanb’s frozen hand a smear of  paint which constitutes a tell-tale image and leads the reader to reconstitute the implicit scenario. The husband did not lose his way in the storm: he returned home in the middle of the night, let himself in through the freshly painted door, found his wife sleeping with their young neighbour, and went out again in the cold to commit suicide.

I would like to suggest that the smear of paint in Ross’s story is a guilt-ridden image which Munro covertly incorporates in her own story through a strategy of displacement. She makes the narrator’s mother spend her afternoon repainting the cupboard doors, an activity that the narrator evokes for the benefit of her grandmother. Through the same covert negotiation of meaning, it seems probable that Munro smuggles Ross’story into her own in order to allude indirectly to the theme of betrayal, betrayal of the mother, betrayal of the grandmother, betrayal of orthodoxy, a betrayal which is inscribed into the many layered structure of the story.

Munro is concerned about the fundamental duplicity of representation and through the covert inclusion of “The Painted Door” under “Winter Wind,”  she exemplifies a duplicitous strategy of playing a clandestine hypotext against a probable hypertext. She carries the process of duplicitous representation to its extreme limit, since she simultaneously hints at the alternative text and refrains from narration in her own evocation of a death by blizzard, just as she refrains from providing any explicit visual support or realist depiction for this tragic event. This invisible image ( the old woman groping her way back to her house in the midst of a raging blizzard)  remains undepicted. It is briefly mentioned and can only be half-perceived through the superposition of layers destined to conceal it. This repressed image may be regarded as the matrix upon which the story is elaborated and constitutes the third category upon which Lyotard’s theory of the figural is based:

 

The figure as matrix is invisible as a principle, it is the object of original repression, immediately mixed with discourse, an « original » phantasy. It is nevertheless a figure, not a structure, because it represents from the start a violation of the discursive order, a violence done to the transformations that this order renders possible. [8] (Lyotard 271)

 

 

The double censorship that Munro has imposed upon the representation of the old woman’s death provides this tragic event with reinforced authority, an authority that the narrator sets about questioning. When the grandmother says “They cannot thaw you back to life […] after you’ve been lying in a snowbank overnight in this weather,” the young girl decides against returning home and puts up with her grandmother’s oppressive house for a few more days. But the older narrator invites the narratee to understand that the type of fiction she has embarked in is in direct opposition with the grandmother’s evidential clichés: the aesthetics that are proffered are based on a thawing back of the past into life. The metaphoric equation between writing and thawing back to life can be grasped in the word “to salvage” which is used in connection with the initial photograph. After her grandmother’s death and her aunt’s removal to a nursing home, the narrator salvaged the family photograph and took it with her wherever she went.

In “Winter Wind,” the art of fiction is metaphorically presented as an art of rescuing, it consists in liberating the past from rigor mortis, in endowing it with the flowing abundance and palpitating motion of life, a tumble of words and flow of narration which is, nevertheless,  self-destructive and self-deceptive because all thawing necessarily leads to dissolution and evaporation. Munro’s poetics dissolve the site of their own inscription: they produce a paradoxical image which becomes the figuration of the paradoxes of literature and photography: photography freezes life to preserve it, literature rigidifies the oral word in an attempt to free itself from the constraints of the written. The function of the work of art is to reveal truth, as it attempts to draw near its goal, it proves to be an act of  betrayal.

As Deleuze declared in his Dialogues with Claire Parnet:

 

There is always some betrayal in a line of escape. Not cheating as a thoughtful man concerned with his future, but betraying as a simple man with no past and no future. One betrays the fixed powers, the established powers on earth which want to detain us. […]  to be a traitor to own’s realm, a traitor to own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority-is there another reason to write ? and to be a traitor to writing. (Deleuze 52-56) [9]

By delegimitizing the rigidity of fact and arguing for a a secret connection beyond the visible, in a short story which clearly revolves on the attempt to make the initial photograph come to life through covert means, Munro seems to be proposing an aesthetic lesson which falls back on the analogy between photography and magic because she shows the writer to be entrusted with the magical and deceptive act of conjuring. But she also falls back on a rehabilitation of orality as opposed to written words which dates back to the Platonic distinction between logos  (language) as truthfulness and eidolon  (written discourse) as simulacra. She articulates her poetics on the possibility for the work of art to articulate truth but she shows both photography and writing to be deficient.

Trapped in the in-betweeness of the alternative between rigidity and dissolution,  Munro invests this space of desire and denial  to enforce a symbolic exchange between the arts of the written and the arts of the visual. She draws language to a place of muteness at the same time as she renders images invisible, better to question the legitimacy of the work of art to endorse the responsibility of the faithfulfulness of the reconstructions performed by  memory. In doing this, she challenges her own loyalty in shamelessly tapping the realm of the shadows and using the dead to create living words or “words of light,” as Talbot first described photography.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. L’oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Traduit du russe par Andrée Robel. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.

Barthes, Roland. La chambre claire Note sur la photographie. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Un art moyen, essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris: Minuit, 1965.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. (ed.). Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Deleuze, Gilles et Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion , 1996. [1977]

Foucault, Michel. « Des espaces autres, » in Dits et Ecrits II, 1976-1988, Paris, 2001.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Discours, Figure. Paris: Klincksieck, 1985.

Munro, Alice. Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974.

Marin, Louis. Le récit est un piège. Paris: Minuit 1978.

Meyer Spacks, Patricia. Gossip. Knopf, 1985.

Ross, Sinclair. « The painted Door » in Canadian Short Stories, selected by Robert Weaver. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960.

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LISTE de Publications

 

Direction d’ouvrages : Actes de Colloques Internationaux

Textes réunis par Héliane Ventura et Mary Condé, Introduction par Héliane Ventura,  Alice Munro Writing Secrets, Open Letter, Ninth Series, Number 11-12, Fall-Winter 2003-2004 . 272 pages

 

Chapitres dans des Ouvrages Collectifs

« L’implicite dans l’ekphrasis ou le cryptogramme pictural chez Alice Munro » L’implicite dans la nouvelle de langue anglaise, Laurent Lepaludier (dir.), Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005, 157-167.

"The Setting Up of Unsettlement in Alice Munro's 'Tell Me Yes or No'" in Postmodern  Fiction in Canada, edited by Théo D'Haen and Hans Bertens, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992, 105-123.

Contribution à des Actes de Colloques

« Le tracé de l’écart ou « l’Origine du Monde » réinventée dans « Lichen » d’Alice Munro », Texte / Image : nouveaux problèmes,  Liliane Louvel, Henri Scetti, (dir.) Actes du Colloque de Cerisy,  Rennes : Presses de l’Université de Rennes, 2005, 269-281

"Iconography of Nationhood, Iconography of Womanhood", The Canadian Journal of Rhetorical Studies, vol. 4, September 1994, pp. 50-62.

"Alice Munro's 'Boys and Girls': Mapping out Boundaries", Commonwealth, vol. 15, 1, Autumn 1992, pp. 80-88.

"Country Girls and City Girls in Munro's 'The Progress of Love'" Etudes Canadiennes, Décembre 1990, pp. 223-233.

"Hérésie et Orthodoxie dans 'Memorial' d'Alice Munro" Etudes Canadiennes, Décembre 1988, pp. 99-107.

"'Fits': a baroque tale" RANAM, XXII, 1989, pp. 89-97.

"The Scapegoat and the pattern of Exclusion" Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle, n°5, Autumn 1985, pp. 9-22.

"Alice Munro's 'The Flats Road': Jonah and the Ogress" Canadian Women Studies, vol.6, n°1, Fall 1984, pp. 104-106.

Recensions

“ Biographing Alice Munro “: A book review of Robert Thacker, Alice Munro Writing Her Lives, Canadian Literature, Mai 2006, 3 pages.

Publications en cours (articles ou ouvrages rédigés et remis à l’éditeur)

- Palimpsestic Practices : Hypotexts and Hypoicons in  ‘The Beggar Maid’ d’Alice Munro.” Proceedings from The International Conference on The Short Story, March 2002, University of Salamanca ouvrage collectif sous la direction de Merche Penalba

- The Logogram or the Aesthetic Traces of the Ephemeral in Alice Munro’s

- Rewriting the Nativity : Alice Munro’s ‘The Turkey Season’» à paraître dans les actes du colloque sur Myths and Mystery in Canadian Literature, Cambridge Scholars Press

- “De l’image au texte: le devenir-nouvelle dans The Beggar Maid d’Alice Munro”   accepté par le comité de lectures de la revue Etudes Anglaises

- « Le pont : creusement de l’écart ou rassemblement de l’être ? deux études de cas chez Alice Munro et Elizabeth Spencer » à paraître aux Presses de l’université de Bordeaux

- "Crypts and Cryptonism in Alice Munro's 'The Turkey Season' " in Into the Looking Glass Labyrinth: Myths and Mystery in canadian Literature. Forthcoming in Open Letter Spring Summer 2007

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ultima revisione: 7 ottobre 2007