McClelland & Stewart, 2006
The View from Castle Rock was not one of my favourite Alice Munro collections. Although I rushed to read it upon publication, I didn’t enjoy it as much as Runaway. On rereading, I planned a different approach.
In the past, I read the collection simply as another of Alice Munro’s works. I didn’t adjust my expectations when she stated that each of the stories therein is inspired by her family history. Even though she systematically excluded these tales from previous collections, I still expected more of what I had already found there.
She must have anticipated that readers could have difficulty adjusting to this hybridization, for she is careful to explain; but, even the explanation is complex, considering truth served alongside fiction and facts in the context of narrative.
“You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative.”
Ultimately truth, life and history are wedded with fiction, elaboration and narrative. So readers are meant to look down at their feet in the river, set aside the desire to analyze, interrogate and classify; they are instructed to be content with the rush of waters, simply inhabit the channel’s flow.
“With these developments the two streams came close enough together that they seemed to me meant to flow in one channel, as they do in this book.”
Perhaps intellectualizing this process would not have resulted in a different experience with this reread. In fact, I began rereading the collection later last year and felt myself spinning towards the same arc of disappointment. I set aside the book and wondered if the next attempt would be a repeat.
This passage in the foreword swept me beyond my resistance, when I began again. But not because of what it offered about the protagonists, some of which I recalled from last year’s stalled reread.
“Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations. Their words and my words, a curious re-creation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can ever be.”
It was the last phrase which pulled me in: “as truthful as our notion of the past can ever be”. For one person’s truth is personal: not untruthful but subjective. So, we meet a narrator and spend time with her, and we think we have some basic understanding of her marriage, which we know unravelled, sometime between ‘then’ and ‘now’, but just a glimpse of the once-husband in an airport, the briefest appearance on the stage of the story, and we realize just how much we do not know, about his truth. And so many stories display this pattern, a later realization of depth miscalculated.
When first approaching this reread, my view was focussed solidly on these dozen stories in The View from Castle Rock; in my desire to revision the work as something-other-than-a-Munro-collection to make room for what seemed to be stark differences, I overlooked that one could say the same thing about many of the other stories. Consider “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” and “Tricks”, in “Spaceships Have Landed“ and “The Jack Randa Hotel”: their characters’ stories were “as truthful as [their] notion of the past can ever be”.
I remembered the author’s notes included regarding the autobiographical elements of stories like “Chaddeleys and Flemings” (“Connection”, and “The Stone in the Field) in The Moons of Jupiter (1982) and the final sequence of Dear Life (2012) (which includes “The Eye”, “Night”, “Voices” and “Dear Life”).
This fiction/non-fiction question is a thorny one. As Margaret Atwood said on NPR’s “All Things Considered” last autumn: “When you’re writing fiction everybody thinks you’re secretly writing about real people and things but if you write an autobiography they think you’re lying…as one does.”
Munro’s first story “No Advantages” pays particular attention to the truth of the lives of the men of Ettrick Parish, in the county of Selkirk, Scotland in the late 18th century, on the “high stony farm where my family lived for some time in the Ettrick Valley was called Far-Hope”.
Of considerable importance are Will O’Phaup, James Hogg and James Laidlaw. But of central importance is the idea of storytelling itself: the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves.
The author, as narrator, literally inserts herself into the narrative as well, describing her experience of visiting the parish: “Nevertheless the valley disappointed me the first time I saw it. Places are apt to do that when you’ve set them up in your imagination.”
For of course what we set up in our imaginations is of primary concern. This roots our connection to everyone else’s imagined tales. And, as such, the tales of the Ettrick men are often surprisingly familiar.
“Here is a classic story. I heard versions of it—with different names, different feats—when I was a child growing up in Huron County, in Ontario. A stranger arrives full of fame, bragging of his abilities, and is beaten by the local champion, a simple-hearted fellow who is not even interested in a reward.”
[And, as an aside, the following passage from the opening story, vividly recalls the opening scene of Michael Crummey’s Sweetland as well, as though it, too, is but a version. This is a long passage but it reveals the early stories’ tone, and I’m including it not only for all those Sweetland lovers, but to underscore the pattern of layered meaning which anchors the truths that each of us discovers in fiction, as tale connects to tale.
“As soon as he gets close enough to them he calls out.
But nobody takes any notice. And then again he calls out, but still not one of them turns around or looks towards him. He can see them plain from their backs, all country folks in their plaids and their bonnets, both men and women, and normal-sized, but he cannot get to look at their faces, they stay turned away from him. And they do not look to be hurrying, they are dawdling along and gossiping and chatting and he can hear the noise they make but not quite the words.
So he follows faster and faster and finally he takes to a run, to catch up to them, but no matter how fast he runs he cannot do that—though they are not hurrying at all, they are still just dawdling. And so busy he is, thinking about catching up to them, that it does not occur to him for some while that they are not going homeward at all.”]
There is no end to the stories; The View from Castle Rock stands as evidence. “If such a man becomes famous, of course, it is another story. Alive he is booted out, dead he is welcomed home. After a generation or two, it is another story.”
The collection contains generations of stories. “It would be a mistake to think that everybody believed these stories,” she says, which is another way of saying that at least some did believe these stories, that the set up in these listeners’ imaginations was not a disappointment.
On first reading, I was preoccupied with the sense of these stories being one storyteller’s imagination of generations past, but on this rereading, I am paying more attention to the themes which also resonate in Alice Munro’s other collections.
Take a line like this, for instance: “The past is full of contradictions and complications, perhaps equal to those of the present, though we do not usually think so.” How can one not think of “Chance” and “Soon” or “A Wilderness Station” or “Red Dress-1946”. How many members of one generation have been convinced that their own trials and triumphs were unique to their days? How many of us believe we have a monopoly on contradictions and complications? Are we contemporary readers inherently different from the men of Ettrick parish?
And so, my first approach to this collection as simply another in Munro’s oeuvre had merit, for there are more similarities than I had thought. But so, too, does the idea of expecting a slightly different slant, reading these stories in the context of a group of stories which the author has identified as having more prominent autobiographical elements. The line I am drawing to chart my path is no more definite than Alice Munro’s discussion of truth and narrative, but this second attempt at rereading is proving much more satisfying for me.
Have you read The View from Castle Rock?
Or, do you have it in your TBR?
Have you been reading any other short stories lately?
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories in The View from Castle Rock as I read through her work-to-date. She is one of my MRE authors and this is the first story in this collection. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. Next week, the title story.
Note: There are spoilers in the comments below.
[…] is the final story in this collection. The other stories in this collection appear as follows: No Advantages, The View from Castle Rock, Illinois, The Wilds of Morris Township, Working for a Living, […]
I, too, appreciate the tie-ins with other Munro stories (although I have to flip through the collections in order to keep them straight–there are so MANY stories!)
In reading the stories from The View from Castle Rock, I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s poem:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise;
As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
I love this poem because it strikes me (See what I did there? With the lightening metaphor? Haha) that not only is the “truth” subjective but that it is shifting as more memories are added or accessed. One person’s memory of an event is corrupted, supposedly, each time the event is called to mind. The most “pure” memories are the ones that we have not often pondered since the more we analyze the more we conform our memories to our ideas, interpretations and values.
The stories in The View from Castle Rock are not as interesting to me as Munro’s other stories (so far….I haven’t read them all yet) because I’m more interested in the truth of her fiction than I am in the truth of her family history. But all fiction writers mine their own experience whether they do so officially or unofficially. I think Munro is being honest with her readers in the forward and I don’t think this volume was necessarily written “for” her readers. If we enjoy these stories at all, I believe it’s because they are a part of the whole body of work of a much beloved story-teller.
It’s taking some discipline to work through the early stories in this volume but I’m not disappointed per se. I just prefer the other collections. I will continue to check in with this blog because discussion often (always?) broadens my understanding and appreciation of these and any stories.
I have read View from Castle Rock and started it a second time and have now gone back to read along with you. I just finished No Advantages so shall confine these first comments to that section.I am looking forward to the reread because I think it will be even richer for me than the first read was. I too was taken with the statement in the Foreward: “These are stories (italics). You could say that such stories pay more attention ….”etc. I welcomed this approach because I have been working on a family history document for some time and I have often pondered how one might go about fleshing out the facts and giving them more life. Munro’s statement about the “the two streams coming close enough together that they seemed… to flow in one channel” was helpful in clarifying the matter of what the truth really is that one seeks in the past.
The connection between mythology and the stories about Will O’Phaup was nicely drawn I thought and added to the earlier clarification. Putting this along with the points about Will being born in 1695 and having been alive during the Jacobite Rebellion and the battle of Culloden enriched his character for me as an historical novel might have done.
Other connections I found of considerable interest were that between the Ettrick valley and the Maitland River valley in Ontario and also that between Will’s prowess as a runner and stories Munro had heard growing up in Huron County. I remember a story about a wrestler (Tiger Dunlop I think) who came to Woodstock, Ontario and also a much later story about how a famous athlete, might even have been Jackie Robinson, who came to Woodstock had appeared on a golf course just a few doors from the family home. It is easy to see how a person could take the skimpy details and construct an actual situation which might be close to what actually happened.
I was inspired by the reference to the Antonine Wall in Scotland to look it up on Wikipedia and peruse the maps and photos there and then follow up with a little historical background.
Thus one starts to fill out the picture of some of these ancestors of ours and also start to wonder a little about how our own lives might look to a family member looking at a list of birth and death dates and one or two other bits of information.
I very much appreciate your tie-ins with other Munro stories: I think these are integral to the process in this particular book and this approach to both writing and collecting family histories. I am looking forward to this reread.
I can imagine her sitting at a table (it’s a kitchen table in my mind, because I am thinking of Bronwen Wallace speaking of the importance of conversations between women around kitchen tables, and I guess I seat myself there as a reader of Alice Munro’s stories, while I turn the pages of her collections), with the family history documents spread around. I see the photocopies of certificates and reproductions of grainy photographs of landscapes and faces, so many bleached white pages with fragmented glimpses of the past. And there is the novelist’s mind, reaching for understanding, for more fully inhabited glimpses into the past, for clues as to what remains of that past in the present day. It’s the perfect opportunity to make a narrative of those bits and pieces. Perhaps in some ways each one of us does this, but we do not have the resources to do what Alice Munro has done with The View from Castle Rock.
I’m struck by your comment on the mythologizing of Will Phaup, Sandra. (See how I did that there, Angela, borrowed your lightning reference?! *grins*) Perhaps this entire volume, then, is more about mythologizing than about fiction per se. And what does that say about our attempts to find meaning on the printed page, on whether it is truly a personal journey (so, can we, as observers removed from this process more so than Alice Munro, descendant, find meaning in these tales) or whether the road can be widened and shared (so that strangers can find truth herein, or does there even need to be an element of truth in mythology, perhaps Alice Munro is being more honest in disclosing the roots of her stories here than was necessary, as you might be suggesting, Angela).
How different might the experience of reading The View from Castle Rock have been if there had been more overt historical links, either pictorial or textual, for readers to follow along? (What a great idea, to look them up online as we read through history here.) Those of us who have had ancestors from Europe at least might feel closer to the tale-telling if some of that material had been overtly included. What if Alice Munro had included images which might not even have been from her own family’s history but other photographs reproduced (in perhaps a more random way, like the photos in Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries?
There is a novel promoted in an uncomplicated manner as fiction, but which actually contains some overt truth, for some of the contemporary photos included in The Stone Diaries are actually the author’s own children, renamed. But with Carol Shields’ novel, there are no elements of the author’s experience which could be described as autobiographical, as is explained in the NYT review by Jay Panini, on March 27, 1994.
“Although no other aspects of the novel are autobiographical, Ms. Shields, who is 58 years old, does identify with Daisy’s home-centered existence. American by birth, she married young, settled in Canada and was largely preoccupied with motherhood until, at 40, she had her first novel accepted. ‘None of the novels I read seemed to have anything to do with my life,’ she remembered. ‘So that was the kind of novel I tried to write — the novel I couldn’t find.'”
So there we have another iconical Canadian writer, seeking to find something more true in fiction than previously existed for her as a woman, as a reader, without that story having been written down. Both works are marketed as fiction but I remember The Stone Diaries feeling much more personal, more intimate, and I think that quality might be what I am longing for in The View from Castle Rock. Ironically that might also be what the author herself was longing for?
I keep telling myself that I should read more short stories but somehow never get around to it. So to answer your question, no I haven’t read this or got it on my TBR shelf. One day maybe ….
I have so many reading goals as you’ve described, in meaning to add something or other to my stacks but it never actually happens — and the years pass and I have to wonder if my intentions were ever sincere or if it was just a question of more passion being directed in some other reading directions all the way along. In the meantime, you’ve got no shortage of good books, right?!