Monroe's late style
Escape and bear
Many of Monroe's novels deal with a single theme, which is "escape." Escape from the life in front of you, escape from marriage, escape from family...... Those protagonists are always trying to break free from their current identities and roles. This is a theme that can resonate widely with readers, because people in contemporary life are bound by ethics and social responsibilities, and their personal space is becoming more and more narrow. Escape is a pursuit of freedom, but also a way to prove one's "existence".
Since it is a way to prove that he "exists", Monroe is not concerned with the outcome, in fact, some of her characters who flee eventually return to their original lives, but this does not mean that "escape" is meaningless, because they need to confirm what they really need in "escape". Escaping seems to be an exploration of the outside world, but it is actually an examination of the inner self.
The novel "Leaving Muffrey" continues Monroe's discussion of the topic of "escape". What is special is that it places its perspective on a man who has never escaped from a responsibility. This man, named Ray, falls in love with Isabel, who is older than him and is already married. Isabel divorced and married him. But soon after, Isabel contracted pericarditis and was unable to go back to work. Ray became a police officer and took on the responsibility of taking care of the family. Later, he met a girl named Leah, who sold tickets at the cinema and got off work late, and when her father asked for someone to escort her home, the owner of the cinema approached Ray, who was a police officer, to help. So Ray often walked home with Leah late at night.
One day, Leah disappeared, and everyone searched everywhere to no avail. Two days later, people received her letter, and it turned out that she had eloped with the pastor's son, a saxophonist. A few years later, Ray met Leah, who by then was already a mother of two and seemed happy. After a few more years, Isabel's health deteriorated and she was admitted to a hospital in the city. Ray decided to stay in town with his wife, so he got a job as a caregiver at the hospital and planned to sell the house in the town. When he returns to town, he hears rumors that Leah has reconciled with the town's pastor and left her husband, while the two children have been withheld by her husband's mother and can no longer see Leah.
Soon after, Ray met Leah at the hospital, where she got a job helping cancer patients recover, she was abandoned by her later lover, and custody of the child was not secured. She is now alone and has nothing, but she seems very strong, and asks how Lei is living alone, saying that she can go to Lei's house to cook or help. After they said goodbye, Ray came to the hospital room, and the nurse told him the news he had been waiting for for a long time: his wife had died. Ray walked outside, his thoughts drifting away from his wife's departure. Then he thought of the girl he had just spoken to, of the loss of her child, and then of the loss.
She can be called a connoisseur who is good at losing, compared to the fact that he is a novice himself.
Here we may be reminded of the verses from A Kind of Art, and thus discover a kind of spiritual kinship between Monroe and Elizabeth Bishop:
Lost art is not difficult to grasp / so many things seem to / deliberately disappear so that losing them is not a disaster......
The novel ends with Ray trying to recall the girl's name, and finally he remembers, Leah, which gives him a sense of relief.
In this novel, Ray and Leah have diametrically opposed values. Leah has been fleeing, and has been paying the price for it. And Ray has been taking his responsibilities and at the same time paying the price for them. The price of the two is different, Leah is the price of loss, and Ray is the price of freedom. But in the end, the two went their separate ways, and Ray also lost the person he was guarding and became nothing. And what's even more cruel is that this loss has caused Ray a lot more damage than Leah's loss. Because Leah was used to losing, and to Ray it was a terrible thing that was completely alien.
Monroe once said in an interview with The New Yorker that she admired Leah because of her courage and strength. But that doesn't mean Monroe dismisses the significance of Ray's steadfast guardianship. This guardianship is beautiful and heavy. Loyalty is a form of self-sacrifice because it involves the renunciation of freedom.
However, it should be noted that Monroe did not focus on portraying Ray as a selfless hero. Perhaps we can think about why Monroe arranged a prehistory for Ray and his wife, Isabel, so that their union would be resistant. This experience of dabbling in other people's marriages has taught us that Ray is not without moral flaws. But he and Isabel are united by love, and love contains responsibility. With the passage of time, the proportion of love decreases, the proportion of responsibility increases, and responsibility swallows love little by little.
But Ray is the kind of person who chooses the life he wants, after which he has to live the consequences. What is revealed in him is a very fatalistic outlook on life. It can also be said that it is a kind of obedience to fate. But in Leah's repeated escapes, there is a kind of rebellion against fate.
Monroe did not make a value judgment about which of these two very different lives was better or worse, and which was right and which was wrong. On the contrary, she points out to us a more brutal truth, which is that whether we flee or guard, we will eventually face loss. Because loss is an unavoidable theme in life, no matter what attitude you have towards life. Here, instead of pitting these two lives against each other, Monroe has allowed them to meet. In the huge blank space at the end, she hints at the possibility that Ray and Leah could be together. And what makes them let go of the differences in values and finally move closer to each other is the bigger proposition of that life, that is, "loss".
In Leaving Mavli, Monroe breaks down the flight/commitment binary she has established in the past, uniting the two before the larger issue of life. It can be said that this novel is a summary of the theme that the author has been exploring, and draws a beautiful and sad end to the Monroe-style "escape".
As the finale of the overture
Said pointed out in his work "On Late Style" that late style contains a kind of dissonance, restless tension, and most importantly, it contains a deliberate, non-creative, and opposing creativity. This deliberate, non-creative, and oppositional creativity is very clearly embodied in the second part of "Dear Life", which Monroe named "The Finale", with a clear meaning of curtain call and departure. The "Finale" consists of four childhood stories, "The Eye", "Night", "The Voice" and "Dear Life", with a strong autobiographical overtone, somewhere between a novel and a memoir. The author tries to blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, using the usual approach of the short story to set up suspense and construct characters, but at the same time constantly punctuating the world of the novel. Like what:
I don't think if I was writing a novel instead of remembering what happened, I would never let her wear that dress. She doesn't need such an advertisement. You may think that's too bad. The business is gone, and my mother is no longer healthy. You can't do that in fiction. But strangely enough, I don't remember that time when I was unhappy.
With these sentences, Monroe reminds us that these stories belong to her, not to her characters. These four stories contain some of the first fears and desires, but they are also the love that is difficult to extinguish when looking back at the end of life. We find that events fade in time, plots become fragmented, cause and effect fall apart, but the emotions attached to them are still so hot.
In fact, reading these four novels as separate titles, each of them seems simple compared to Monroe's previous novels, lacking the kind of layered plot setting, and if you look at them as a whole, you will feel that their emotional direction is a bit singular, and it is very similar.
However, Monroe deliberately abandoned the twists and turns of the plot and the complex transformation of time and space in these novels, and used the most simple way to hold out the crystallized objects of passion. The simplicity of simplifying the complex, the self-sufficiency of refusing to interpret, is a kind of deliberate, non-creative, and opposing creativity. And those crystallized things that have been created in this way are the greatest common divisor left after stripping away the layers of gorgeous multiplication, and they are also the hidden birthmarks hidden in the depths of Monroe's countless novels.
For readers familiar with Monroe's novels, the common heroine of these stories, the little girl, is not strange at all. She went on to walk into Monroe's countless novels, where she continued to grow and explore the secrets of herself, others, and the world. In this sense, these four stories from childhood are both finale and overture, they are the entrance to Monroe's novel, and they also close the doors of that rich world, forming a closed loop. In a sense, when future readers take Monroe's advice and enter the world of her novels from this book, they will also take the twilight Monroe to her childhood and girlhood. The life of a writer is resurrected again and again in reading.
But in her later years, Monroe did not throw herself into the creative danger of "disharmony" and "restlessness", she chose to reconcile with life. So in this book, there is no "uncompromising, reluctant, and unresolved contradiction" that Said expects to find in his late style.
If the title of the previous book, "Too Much Happiness", still has an ironic meaning, the title of "Dear Life" expresses a heartfelt praise of life. In the novel of the same name, "Dear Life", Monroe recounts that when he was born, a madwoman came to her house, put her face against every window and looked into the house, and Monroe's mother blocked the door with a chair to protect her newborn daughter, and hid in the corner with her. Years later, through a poem published in the hometown newspaper by the madwoman's daughter, Monroe knew that the house she had lived in as a child had been the madwoman's home, and that she could see through the window a bygone time, and she was rummaging through the stroller, perhaps looking for the child she had grown up and left home. In the last stanza of the novel, Monroe turns his tune and calmly narrates:
I didn't come home when my mom last fell ill, and I didn't attend her funeral. We will always say that they cannot be forgiven, or that we can never forgive ourselves. But we forgive, we forgive every time.
What this novel explores is the mother-daughter relationship, not a specific set of mother-daughter relationships, but two life roles in a broad sense, mother and daughter. One day, when a daughter becomes a mother, she will understand her mother better, but her understanding will not be turned into some kind of return. Her emotional concentration for her mother can never be compared to that of her mother. Looking back, there is always a lot of debt that makes us feel guilty.
How does that guilt torment us? Monroe didn't say a word, but skipped it and talked about forgiveness. Forgiveness for hurting and being hurt, this is a typical Monroe style of writing. Blank spaces or cutouts in important places are like in an interview, where the interviewee falls into a long silence, and then suddenly closes the distance, and talks about some emotion that confronts or cancels it out in a detached manner, but we experience how heavy the parts that have been hidden and omitted are.
At the same time, Monroe is also a reminder of the important role that time plays in it. There is a big difference between the person who is reminiscing at this time and the person who is experiencing it at that time. Monroe likes to use this difference to present the meaning of time, and in many of her novels she introduces a retrospective perspective, while also offering a way to re-see things. Monroe's understanding of plot is different from that of many traditional novelists, and she is not interested in what happens in the outside world, but how it affects her characters and how they continue to influence and shape her characters for many years after they happen.
When Monroe finally talks about forgiveness, he has already jumped out of the previous theme of mother and daughter. In a bland tone that has been years later, she tells us a motto that applies to all relationships, that is, in the end, we forgive all the people and things we once thought we couldn't forgive. This is what life has taught us, it allows us to let go of our clenched hands and return everything to the river of time, and we will have peace with it.
In this novel, titled "Dear Life," Monroe does not directly praise life, but uses this incredible forgiveness to show the greatness of life. Rather, the meaning of life comes from the eventual healing of those pains that are difficult to let go, and from the miraculous reconciliation of great contradictions and conflicts.
Monroe's characters always have a strong self-educating tinge. Much of their growth depends on them learning from their own memories, which is an important way for them to know themselves and the world. In the four novels "Finale", she turns her character into herself. She presents her knowledge and discoveries of the individual and the world in these childhood memories. Those discoveries are certainly valuable and may be hugely revealing to her readers, but more importantly, she is demonstrating to us a way of educating ourselves, that is, learning through memory.
Writing from memory may have become a cliché in the field of literature. What writer isn't using memory to write? We might say that every great writer has found his own way of using memory. Here at Monroe, memory is not just a material for writing, but also a teaching material for life. Over the years, she has studied this textbook over and over again, from the original Monroe to the final Monroe.
Alice Monroe
Alice Munro
（1931—2024）
Canadian female writer, who has devoted her life to the creation of short and medium stories, is known as the "master of contemporary short stories", has published 14 short story collections, and has won the Canadian Governor's Literary Award, the Canadian Giller Literary Award, the Canadian Bookseller Award, the Commonwealth Writers Award, the National Book Critics Association Award, the Booker International Award, etc., and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.