6 - “The Emptiness in Place of Her”: Space, Absence, and Memory in Alice Munro's Dear Life

Summary

ALICE MUNRO's 2012 COLLECTION, Dear Life, revisits many places familiar from her previous work—mapping both domestic space and the semi-rural landscapes of small town Canada. “In Sight of the Lake,” “Amundsen,” and “Gravel” return to the key image of the lake, while other stories (“To Reach Japan,” “Train”) echo her use of the transitional space of the train in “Wild Swans” (Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid, 1978) and “Chance” (Runaway, 2004). Munro territory is by its nature ambiguous and multidimensional. But these later stories are especially marked by silence and absence, evoked by wintry landscapes, empty streets; or the fractured narrative viewpoint associated with memory loss or repression. Munro has declared Dear Life to be her final collection; it is a book that summarizes her career in many ways and, with the autobiographical sequence, “Finale,” closes with a statement of its origins in personal experience.

Bakhtin's well-known concept of the chronotope, the configuration of space and time that characterizes a specific text or genre, both symbolically and structurally, helps us to understand the resonance of landscape and architecture in these stories. Munro uses her characters’ perception of external space to map subjective experience, often locating her characters very precisely in relation to their immediate environment in order to register that which is not seen or not understood or placed at the periphery of the conscious mind. In this chapter I shall focus on the relationship between space, absence, and memory in two stories—“Train” and “Gravel”—the former an example of third-person narration and free indirect discourse, while the latter mimics autobiographical discourse through first-person narration.

Train

“Train,” the story of a drifter in rural Ontario, is a reminder of Munro's debt to Southern Gothic writers, so evident in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). The relationship between the protagonist, Jackson, and Belle, the isolated spinster whose farm he takes over, is especially reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor.