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0THE IMPORTANCE OF MEMORY IN THE WORK OF ALICE MUNRO
Ibodova Maknuna Bahodirovna
Independent Researcher
Annotation: Man's relationship with the past, how it is comprehended by the mind and conveyed through language, is an early interest for Alice Munro. Since the beginning of her career as story-tellers her glance is oriented backward, to the past of her fictional characters, and inward, to the emotional and intellectual response to the act of remembering.
Key words: memory, flashback, meditation, story-making, intellectual constrictions, individual and collective response.
In Munro's first collection of stories, entitled 'Dance of the Happy Shades' (1968), an interest emerges in childhood memories and the discrepancies between youthful and mature perception. The protagonist of the story 'Walker Brothers Cowboy' at the centre of an early story by Munro shares a vision of the years of life preceding adolescence as a sphere of perception different from the adult. In early memories of life physical reality appears altered. The natural and urban landscape, the expanse of the Ontarian countryside seems to have proportions that in adulthood are proven inaccurate. The car in which the young daughter travels through the countryside in 'Walker', the width of the river and the extension of fields and meadows are examples of the alteration of space in memory registered by Munro's narrators. The child's understanding of physical reality, and the emotions that derive from it, are unfamiliar to the adult conception to the point to seem almost mysterious, and to be on the verge of yielding a message, no longer audible in maturity, on the nature of the past.
In the work of Alice Munro memories of the past, regarding specific individuals as well as geographical space, affect the characters' perception of the present. The narration of events, which attempts to follow the trajectory of the characters'
thoughts, is therefore often affected by the breach of chronological order, the frequent use of flashbacks and the proliferation of temporal perspectives. Such approach to story-telling corresponds to a specific interest frequently mentioned by Munro:
"Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories-and telling other
people a somewhat different version of our stories. We can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative. And underneath all these edited, inspired, self-serving or entertaining stories there is, we suppose, some big bulging awful mysterious entity called THE TRUTH, which our fictional stories are supposed to be poking at and grabbing pieces of. [...] One of the ways we do this, I think, is by trying to look at what memory does (different tricks at different stages of our lives) and at the way people's different memories deal with the same (shared) experience. The more disconcerting the differences are, the more the writer in me feels an odd exhilaration"[1]
Munro's observation suggests a two-fold meditation on the relationship between the individuals and their past. According to the author the existence of the 'truth,' meaning one supposedly objective version of past events, is arguable. When the individual attempts to convey fragments of the past in a linguistic form certain laws intervene, akin to the principles of story-making, to shape and alter them. The author's observations on memory seem to imply a certain familiarity of experience in the readership, evident in the use of the plural pronoun as follows: 'we can hardly manage our lives without a powerful ongoing narrative.' It is suggested, however, that the implications of the instinct to narrate are particularly evident to the artist's gaze. It is argued that 'the more disconcerting' the discrepancies in people's memories are the more the writer 'feels an odd exhilaration.' This sentence signals a connection between the act of remembering and that of writing. Mark Turner writes: 'Story is the basic principle of the mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories.'[2., p. 3] Recent cognitive studies suggest that memory is 'dynamic; elaborative; generative; transformatory; dependent on context, meaning, and emotion; biologically unique, and yet, equally, shaped by social environment.'[2., p. 4] It can be argued that memory is an altering lens through which
humans see their past and story-making as the principle that governs it. The very structure of the brain is oriented towards the production of continuous narratives: 'From the simplest quotidian acts to the most complex literary achievements, the mind relies on the concepts of parable and story to interpret the world.'[3., p. 4]
Del, the young protagonist of 'Lives of Girls and Women', struggles with the intellectual constrictions of growing up and receiving her education in a suburb of the provincial town of Jubilee, which, closely resembles the atmosphere of Wingham. He argues that 'probably no more than most professional writers of fiction, yet nonetheless very precisely and so verifiably, Alice Munro has drawn on the factual details of her life - where she has been, whom she has known, her roots, what has happened, how things have turned out - in the fiction she has published'[3., p 16]. Munro frequently delivers an acute sense of the landscape, the fascination with the nature of South-Western Ontario felt throughout her career but recoils from assuming responsibilities that exceed her competence as a fictional writer:
"I don't think of myself as being in any way an interpreter of rural Ontario, where I live. I think there's perhaps an advantage living here of knowing more different sorts of people than you would know in a larger community [...]. The physical setting is perhaps "real" to me, in a way no other is. I love the landscape, not as "scenery" but as something intimately known. Also the weather, the villages and towns, not in their picturesque aspects but in all phases."[1]
The author is particularly sensible to the richness of local folklore and is able to reflect the silent interplay between the individual and the community in a variety of characters and situations. Not always, however, does the setting of a story mirror the author's original background. A considerable body of her work reflects the spell of twenty years in which she resided in Vancouver, or even distant locations such as Scotland or Australia. The tone and atmosphere of social interaction observable in small communities is subtly rendered with various stylistic nuances, regardless of the specific setting. Munro investigates the individual and collective response to the social and geographic transformations observable in small-scale communities throughout her career, from 'Lives to Castle Rock', which seems to culminate the
author's reflection on memory. Munro's poetic is inspired by the observation that the universal need for 'stories' connects the individual to his or her past and simultaneously to that of the community.
The story 'Friend of My Youth,' published in 1990 in the homonymous collection, seems to offer a temporary closure to the exploration of the theme. Coral Ann Howells argues that 'Friend of My Youth' 'dedicated by Munro to the memory of her mother is a re-vision of that ongoing autobiographical narrative which critics have described as the ground base of her art: the writing daughter's conscious failure to understand or represent the mother remains at the heart of Munro's aesthetic'[4., p. 102]. The discrepancies between various recollections of the past regarding the maternal figure reveal that her remembrance is charged with emotional urgency. The daughter harbours a sense of guilt when she recalls the transformations caused by a degenerative illness, which gradually alters her mother's personality as well as the balance within the household. Memory, despite its unreliability, is the sole aid to preserve an image of the past prior to the onset of the illness, a task that ultimately proves unsustainable. In a process involving the reconstruction of the threads of their own identity along the way, the heroines finally come to terms with the illusion that anything can ever be preserved unaltered. They learn to accept that the figure of the mother shall be forever beyond their grasp.
References:
1. 'A Conversation with Alice Munro,' Randomhouse. 24 November 2006 <http: //www.randomhouse.com/vintage/read/goodwoman/munro .html>.
2. Mark Turner, 'The Literary Mind', 1996, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Preface.
3. Marion Joan Francoz, 'Habit as Memory Incarnate,' College English, Vol. 62, no. 1 (Sept.1999), p. 1-29.
4. Coral Ann Howells, 'Alice Munro', Manchester: Manchester University Press, p.102.
