Munro and Reality: A Totality of Fragments

It is not so much a cycle of stories but a collection of fragments that Alice Munro assembles in her work, “Friend of My Youth.” This particular work illuminates the rigid social structure in which human relationships operate. Its narratives therein shift with bodies of externality that either fracture characters or bleed them together. Munro engages the social being with sensory importance, such as physical and performative barriers that range from architecture to body—barriers through which the divided domains of social interaction are manifested. There is the outside totality of appearances: the self-manipulated layer of representation and social performativity that holds society together. A domain as such is subject to public perception and misinterpretation. It mediates the second domain, which is an internal fragment of substrative actuality, the room inside the appearance, self-enclosed, inaccessible, and subjectively experienced. Munro compels her characters to clash not simply with walls and wardrobe but with this totality-fragment binary to demonstrate that as long as the totality of appearances is maintained in a social infrastructure, the shared experience of truth will always be fragmented. 

However, those who interpret and collect fragments of truth in fusional techniques make permeable the division of domains, as in no one experience of truth can self-isolate from another. The titular story, “Friend of My Youth”, is a dream-version of history in which a mother haunts a daughter, as does the past to the present, until little generational gaps are left. Surfacing instead is the pore between rumour and impenetrable truth, and the position of storyteller and its unknowable subject. “Goodness and Mercy” too centres on a daughter who develops a cohering interpretation of reality independent of her celebrity mother, who, as the primary spotlight in her life, is ailing. As they slip along oceans on a cruise ship, she slips among passengers, each a fragment whom she herself, with artistic authority, combines in her own narrative of human relationships. “Oh, What Avails” continues to explore this fragmentation between external reality and internal fantasy across, not a setting, but a timeline of the failed lives of a brother and sister. Their reality disintegrates into regrets over childhood misunderstandings and lost loves until they are isolated to the remains: their unmet desires for human connection. Common to these stories is the protagonist who embodies the Munrovian definition of truth as an internalized art, a weaving of separate people and their perceptions. Individual experiences alone are incomplete, but melded with others they create a new version of reality; they create a totality of interrelationships in which both self and world is more cohesively understood.

Munro’s figuration of a social totality is based on partition, a tacit etiquette that finds narrative metaphor in the barriers between bodies of space, which define and limit one’s accessibility to internal realities. “Friend of My Youth” deploys this idea in language that necessitates architecture as a means of distinguishing relationships, or to “build the necessary partitions” with which Flora can order the home (Munro 11). Flora, aware of her innocent position in her family’s pregnancy scandal, hints at the spatial privacy that is appropriate between herself and the two household fornicators, Ellie, her sister, and Robert, her formerly intended fiancé. Though the narrator’s retelling of Flora is not her own experience, and rather her mother’s childhood friendship, Flora refuses penetrability, not simply as a story of the past, but as a literal space. Robert, Ellie and her must coexist as a family unit, whereas her virginity, in respect to the social propriety of her present time, must be walled away from a sexual history; both courses of action she regards as necessary. It is this word “necessary” that embodies the domestic equilibrium of the family as an artificial but effective construction of constituents within the totality of relationships. As introduced earlier, this essay’s own author defines ‘totality’ as a whole structure of social relationships held together by a layer of appearances and performativity. Flora’s walls are to be interpreted as the material performance of social decorum, the civil “Reason [that] respects the differences” in a social totality and allocates individuality to organize its members (Shelly 538). It is indeed a contradiction to assert that humans can only exist together if internally divided from each other beyond psychological intimacy. However, such a contradiction is also the truth behind the structure of society.

Fragmentation in the social totality is the problematic paradox on which Munro centres the individual experience of reality and being. If society is fragmented into self-enclosed individuals, reality is not limited to one experience but instead faceted by the self-contained experiences of many. As seen in “Oh, What Avails,” siblings Joan and Morris build their lives upon a misunderstanding of neighbours, an unfulfilling marriage, and failed investments, both financial and romantic, only to realize how easily demolished their entire lives are. In revisiting both childhood memories and hometown, they find the aftermath of regret, and the desire for human connection still foundational to their sense of self. Joan’s perception of space collapses into the fragmentary-totality paradox when applied to physical matter itself. In one instance, she recognizes a particular view of the street for its “things in their temporary separateness, all connected underneath in such a troubling, satisfying, necessary, indescribable way” (Munro 208). Munro reapplies that lexical imperative, “necessary” to the appearances of partition, but with the additional adjectives “indescribable” and “satisfying” to characterize the substrative reality of appearances as an unconscious realm. For Joan to ‘thingify’ bodies of matter is for her to recognize that appearances are in fact meaningless mediations that purport to order what is beneath the surface of subjective experience: the chaos of interrelated actualities. Reality is a chaotic essence that necessitates tangible organization, such as a form or appearance, under “the impossibility of an unmediated access to reality” (Heble 168). Such an interpretation on matter applies just as meaningfully to the understanding of a social totality and its fragmented members. Joan senses that in disillusioning herself from the ostensibly separate wholeness of appearances—of “brick walls” (208) whose disintegration into rubble signifies “Passing states, a useless variety of passing states” (208)—she is experiencing a destabilized version of space. Munro is representing the social totality as the street and the objects within as the human constituents whose bodies are “perceived in terms of ownership and control” over one’s own version or ‘state’ of being in and experiencing that totality (Heble 164). De-forming the cemented space of brick wall signifies that individual, subjective realities would be meaningless if they were not attached to a wholeness of form.

It is not until “Goodness and Mercy” that this deconstructive relationship between totality and individual gains fleshier terms. On a North Atlantic boat cruise, Bugs hides her illness beneath her façade of intriguing, social phenomenon, while her daughter, Averill, pieces her own version of reality through a romantic rendezvous with the boat captain. Unlike Bugs, who distinguishes herself by caricaturing fellow passengers, Averill matures into her own mode of understanding people, diving into a heterogenous cohesion of fact and fiction.

Flesh begins to appear when the artist experiences Jeanine’s physical appearance in his own translation of the female body. While Joan dissolves the surface-view of concrete, the artist wishes to capture Averill’s appearance, but he “[doesn’t] mean with clothes on” (Munro 162). He dissolves the artificial surface of the body, and thereby de-socializing the substrative flesh. He then fragments her form into a microcosmic version of the social totality through a blazon. Blazon, a literary device popularized in Elizabethan and Petrarchan poetry, characterizes the subject, the speaker’s beloved, through a descriptive list of their physical attributes. Averill’s artist suitor echoes as such: that blazonic, male-gaze reduction of the woman to a rubble of limbs, her “big golden thighs...her long hair…her square shoulders and unindented waist” (162). Even her beauty itself he turns into a contrived appearance, and through which “he would have picked her out as a model”, providing her presence with a tangible partition from other passengers (162). More importantly, his aesthetic pleasure in contriving her form signifies the recognition of otherness that sources his own power. 

Understanding that Munro communicates the social totality-individual fragment paradox through this male-female gender binary is crucial to understanding why human relationships must be constructed upon the paradox itself. To recognize a female appearance, manoeuvre himself along its power, and feel that he is an artistic genius in contriving the female other “reverses the gaze, and contests the place and authority of the masculine position” (Butler 2489). A confrontation with Averill’s female form allows him to affirm his masculine prowess, his ego, and fundamentally, his autonomous male gendered subject. This “radical dependency” of male on female other signifies the necessity of tangible separateness between individual fragments within a structured totality (2489). Otherwise, the individual in the social totality is posed with an ontological crisis; one feels anxiety that the distinctions between autonomous states of being are in fact “illusory” in the totality of appearances (2489). In the artist’s case, a sculptural hallucination, working against what Joan feels is “The threat [that] is of change” (Munro 208). Change is Munro’s lexicon for the totality of people when it is destructuralized and without the self-enclosedness of individual fragments. It is when its separate finitudes of “fictional, dreamed, and lived [experiences] are not only blurred, but almost metaphysical…each as valid as another” (Lee 402). A social being without physical mediation of their internal reality, such as skin and clothes, not only endangers the autonomous containment of the self. It introduces to a social totality that “useless” chaos of infinite possibility, which ideally seeks a shared sense of truth (Munro 208). Munro seems adamant that this principle is a substrative crisis of being, best communicated in the infrastructure of Logan. In this town, not even the fences in “so much deliberate arrangement” (197) can impose ontological order, providing “no permanent expression of what the town could be” (196) from Joan’s childhood to present-day. Munro crafts representative appearances as a language itself that communicates the actual internalized being. Temporality equates to the “haphazard, dreamy” (196) passing of states underneath, the unbounded movement of interpretation where permeability bleeds together all possible readings of a constructed appearance. There is no truly ‘satisfying’ the human urge for a “permanent” ontological state because the understanding of an appearance is prone to change—depending on interpretation.

Permeability is indeed possible between the domain of appearances and the domain of actuality. By virtue of this fact, Munro expands this idea to the problem of shaping meaning and truth. It is true that appearances manifest distinctions in ontological states, but Munro instead characterizes this ideal as impossible by accounting for the fact that appearances can come into “very different meanings depending on who is doing the interpreting” (Heble 177). ‘Who’ is a question that makes all the difference in translating the otherness of appearance to privatized truth, and one which Munro compels her narrator to contemplate in “Friend of My Youth.” Both the narrator’s generation and her mother’s generation are each meant to be a separate ‘who’ within the constructed totality of time, however, “tendencies that seem…most private and singular, have come in as spores” (Munro 23). These “tendencies” signify the domain of actual, innate being within the autonomous fragment, and which in this case are the cultural “ideas” and beliefs associated to a respective generation (22). Against the structuredness of time, the narrator interprets her mother’s progressive cultural values by conflating ‘past’ and ‘present’ into invasive notions. Temporality becomes like a sublime natural force or a permeating “wind” (23). Munro threatens the autonomous self-enclosures of social being by revealing the holes in the performative, manifest organization of spaces that causes truth to shift beyond control. It is more accurate to say that the interactions between Munro’s characters and their physical universe shapes the relationship between the order of appearances and the disorder of interpretive experience as a language of evolution or biological transformation. 

“Goodness and Mercy” plays with states of matter as a play on the states of actuality when it is mediated by appearances. Through this play, Munro calculates the multivalence of truth within the social totality. The same physical entity may be presented before two beings, but because the cook and Jeanine are autonomous fragments, rooms are symbolically porous, allowing meaning to transform into either a hopeful prospect, or death and destruction. At Jeanine’s soirée, the coffee creamer passes from a warm room to her cabin, after which the cook claims that “It will be good on the pancakes in the morning”, whereas Jeanine claims that “when milk was sour you could suspect that there was a dead body on the ship” (173). Under the combined terms of biology and fiction, freshness and sourness signify the corruptibility of the organic state that is the ‘true narrative’ behind an appearance. Each person is then like a separately roomed context: narratives of reality seen in its outside form pass from one bounded subjectivity to another, morphing into different versions of themselves with altered significance.

Munro figures this subjectivity as though it were Shelley’s concept of “imagination,” posing the formation of personal truths as an engagement with the equal probability or “similitudes of things” (Shelley 538). It is important to the characterization of sisters in “Friend of My Youth” that Ellie is “the kind of copy you often see in families, in which because of some carelessness or exaggeration of features or coloring, the handsomeness of one person passes in the plainness—or almost plainness—of the other” (9). Ellie’s physical state of being becomes as numerous as the people who interpret her appearance, and the language of familial inheritance emphasizes the transformability of truth as it passes like a book from reader to reader. However, what is more importantly expressed is the relativity between states of being, or namely that “Ellie…[is] like a copy of Flora” (9), and not seen as having her own autonomy. If one sister cannot be defined without the other, characterization is a means of crafting the operative nature of truth: that for truth to exist, it must be based on an intertext of appearance and the interpretation of their internal narratives. Munro’s choice in framing this principle appears most clearly in a marriage-death binary of human relationships: Jeanine claims in “Goodness and Mercy” that “You can marry or bury at sea” (173), and Flora in “Friend of My Youth” writes that she wishes the narrator’s mother “all happiness in her marriage and hoped that she would soon be too busy with her own responsibilities to worry about the lives of people that she used to know” (19). Jeanine condenses the possible trajectories of human connection into ‘either-or’ versions that are “interlocking and contradictory notions”, slipping between extremes in their phrasal simultaneity (12). Flora takes this simultaneity into effect, in one moment acknowledging the marital status of the narrator’s mother to consequently bury their friendship. These symbolic juxtapositions situate interpretive truth and experiential truth on paradigmatic axes; interpreting the knowledge of another’s reality when it is mediated by appearance is to wed one’s own reality with another’s. Munro invites burial into this marital act to signal that reality exists in all its “versions, one death being the refracted mirror of others” (Lee 402). All other fragments of reality within the social totality must die so that one can live to stand as an interpreted, individual version of truth. 

Individualizing truth in this way does not necessarily intend to generate reality as it is, but seeks access to the enclosed, mediated realities that Munro has so far constructed to autonomize the individual fragment-self. Autonomizing the fragment-self within the social totality is more of a desire for omniscience, an idea which Munro develops in terms of intertextuality, including fiction, literary tradition, and weaving textual forms into a character’s reality. In “Goodness and Mercy,” Averill autonomizes herself in a process of biblical hymn: she sings while “In Presence of my Foes”, a line that recognizes forms of otherness against which she may define herself among other passengers (Munro 169). ‘Otherness’ requires fragmentation, appearing as a state of being outside the subjective viewer, who observes the Otherness both from within the Self and as different from the Self. Averill’s knowledge of the lyrics itself are fragmented, but she takes it up “blithely and securely and irrationally” (169) as though disregarding the limitations of the social fragment and asserting her own interpretative powers. Her being in relation to the world thereby settles as the hymn warrants her to be “in God’s House forevermore / [where] My dwelling place shall be” and make for herself a “barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars” (169). The lexicon of spatial vastness and celestial divinity signifies a re-application of textual fragments to her sense of being. She achieves a god-like mobility between her internal domain of actuality and the outside domain of appearances. She herself houses only a fragmented narrative of reality—her own, that is—but to delimit her knowledge she must draw from another textual authority and make it “fit around the indescribable “feeling” that is like the soul of the story” (Metcalf 224). The divine language only characterizes this act as a means of creating her own omniscience, of accessing a once inaccessible reality when it is situated on the self.

Munro’s universe is a structure of interactions between pieces and wholes, walls and rooms, individuals and total society. Tangible barriers are what perform the ontological need for autonomy, and defining the self apart from others. Under this configuration, human relationships operate in an infrastructure between the inside and the outside forms and appearances to represent an order of wholeness. However, as Munro demonstrates, that order is entirely susceptible to collapse. It is the uncontrollability of the substrate—that is, the internal reality being mediated—that causes appearances to become destructuralized, along with other factors, such as the multiplicity of interpretation, experience, and truth. The versions of reality are as numbered as Munro’s characters, all of whom walk as an individual fragment of experience within a total infrastructure of fragmented experiences. However, this is not to say that the impossibility of a whole cohesive reality holds the utmost importance in Munro’s stories. A truly Munrovian story is invested in life’s fragments, seen elsewhere not as limitations, but as jigsaw puzzles strewn before the portrait is pieced together.