▲Alice Monroe (1931.7.10 — ) is a Canadian writer born in Ottawa. She is obsessed with writing short stories, mostly describing the undercurrents of ordinary people's lives, and is known as "Canada's Chekov". In October 2013, Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the author of "Open Secrets", "The Love of a Good Woman", "The Process of Love", etc.
Source: China Art Daily
Margaret Atwood
Translated by Zheng Long
Alice Munro is one of the leading writers in contemporary English-language fiction. Critics in North America and the United Kingdom gave her some top-notch reviews. She has won many literary awards; She has a loyal readership internationally. Among the writers, her name quietly circulated. She is such a type of writer: the kind of writer who is often said to be more famous no matter how famous she is.
Monroe's accomplishments did not come easily. She began writing in the sixties, and her first collection of novels, The Dance of Happy Shadows, was published in 1968. To date, she has published 10 collections of fiction, including her most recent and critically acclaimed 2004 book, Escape, with an average of nine to ten stories each. Although her novels have often been featured in The New Yorker since the '70s, it took a long time for her to rise to the international literary scene because of the form in which she wrote. Monroe writes what used to be called "short stories" but is now mostly "short stories." Although leading writers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada have written about this genre, the misconception that the length of the work is important is still widespread.
As a result, Monroe became the kind of writer who was regularly rediscovered, at least outside of Canada. It's as if she's out of a cake: a surprise! Then, she had to jump out of the cake again and again. Readers won't be able to see her name on every leaderboard. They often come across her work by chance or fate, are fascinated, and then marvel and excited, and then incredulous: where did Alice Munro come from? Why doesn't anyone talk about her? How could a writer like her come out of a crack in a rock?
But Monroe didn't pop out of the cracks in the rock. She jumped out of Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Although "popping out" is a very vibrant and indeed ostentatious word for her characters. Ontario is a large province in Canada that stretches over a vast expanse of land from the Ottawa River to the western shore of Lake Superior. It's a vast and diverse area, but southwestern Ontario is a unique place. The painter Greg Kornu called it "Sosto", and everyone has been calling the land ever since. Kearnu's opinion is that Sostowe is both a rather interesting place and a rather gloomy and eccentric place at the same time. Many agree with this view. Robertson Davis, who was also born in Sostowe, used to say, "I know the dark old customs of my countrymen." Monroe knows that too. In the wheat fields of Sowesto, you're likely to come across quite a few signs reminding you that you're ready to see God, or Death—pretty much the same.
Lake Huron
Lake Huron is located to the west of Sostowe, and Lake Erie is to the south. The area is almost flat farmland, with several wide, meandering, flood-prone rivers running through it. In the 19th century, a number of large and small towns sprang up thanks to water transport and water-powered mills. Each town has a red-brick town hall (usually with a tower), a post office building and several churches of different denominations, a main street, a residential area with many large houses, and a ghetto. Each district has a number of families with a long history and scandals.
Sowesto was also the site of the 19th-century Donnelly Family massacre. It was a time when a large family was massacred and the house burned down. It all stems from the political hatred brought over from Ireland. Lush nature, repressed emotions, respectable surfaces, unseen indulgences, sudden violence, sensational crimes, long-standing grudges, strange rumors; These are hidden or visible in Monroe's Storry, in part because real life in the area contains all of the above elements.
In the thirties and forties of the last century, when Monroe grew up, a Canadian, especially one from a small town in southwestern Ontario, thought that he could become a writer and be taken seriously by the whole world; Such a thought will make people laugh out loud. Even in the fifties and sixties of the last century, there were not many publishing houses in Canada. The few of the few publishers, which are mostly typical, only import so-called literary works from Britain and the United States. There may be a few amateur theaters: high school drama clubs, small theater organizations. But by then radio was already available. In the '60s, Monroe became known thanks to a show called Anthology produced by Robert Weaver of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
But at that time, it was rare for a Canadian writer to have an international readership. The assumption is that if a person loves to write, he would better leave Canada. At the time, it was felt that a morally trustworthy adult should not play art. People who engage in art will feel the need to defend themselves, and they will feel ashamed of themselves. Everyone knows that you can't expect to make a living from writing.
If you're one of those people, playing with watercolors or poetry might be acceptable to a few. Monroe describes this type of person in "Turkey Season":
"There are gays in town, and everyone knows who they are: a well-dressed, soft-voiced, wavy-haired paste-pastor, self-proclaimed interior decorator; The chubby only son, spoiled by the widow of a priest, he went so far as to participate in a baking and cooking contest, and even knitted a tablecloth out of crochet; A church organist and music teacher who is overly concerned about his health, he makes sure that the choir and his students sing like the sound of a screaming tantrum is made. ”
Otherwise, you can take up art as a hobby, if you are a woman and have a lot of time, or if you can support yourself with a low-paying pseudo-art job. Monroe's novels are dotted with such women. They play the piano or write gossip columns for newspapers. Or, to put it more tragically, they do have some kind of humble talent (like Almeida Rose in "The Meniston River", who published a volume of short poems called "Offerings"), but there is no possibility of success.
In Canada, if you move to a larger city, you may be able to find at least a few of the same kind; But in the small town of Sowesto, you're destined to be alone. Despite this, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robertson Davis, Marianne Engel, Graeme Gibson, and James Rainey all came out of Sowsto. As for Monroe herself, after spending some time in the West Bank, she moved back to Sostowe, and now lives not far from Winham, Ontario; Winham is where the archetypal lives of the various people in her novels, such as the Zhu Xue family, the Wally family, the Dalgeris family, and the Hanrati family.
A small town in Canada
Monroe's novel elevates Sowesto's Huron County to the same legendary status as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. This is thanks to the outstanding writing talents of the two writers and the celebration of both places. Although, for both of them, "singing" is not too accurate to say. "Anatomy" may be closer to the way Monroe's work is written, but the word is too unforgiving. How should we refer to this combination of obsessive scrutiny, archaeological excavations, precise and exhaustive recollection, the sinking of the darker side of human nature that is uglier, meaner, and more vengeful, the leakage of erotic secrets, the nostalgia for vanished suffering, and the joy of a complete and varied life, all mixed together?
At the end of Monroe's 1971 The Lives of Girls and Women (her only full-length and educational novel about her self-portrait as a young female artist), there is a very interesting passage.
Zhu Xueli's Del Jordan, who is now (faithful to her surname) has crossed into the land of hope for adult women and writers, and says of her adolescence:
"I didn't expect that one day I would be so hungry to know about the Zhu Xuli family."
"Like Uncle Craig's greed and misdirection when he wrote his own history in Jenking Bay, I wanted to put everything into words."
"I'm going to try to make a few tables. One table is about the rise and fall of all the shops and companies on that main street and all the owners, and one table is about the family names and names on the tombstones in that cemetery, and the inscriptions underneath......"
"It's crazy and heartbreaking to expect to be precise in doing all of this."
"And, there is no table that fulfills my wishes. For what I want is every thing, every aspect of words and thoughts, every stroke, every smell, every pit, every pain, every frustration, every delusion of light on the bark or the wall to be still, all combined, radiant forever. ”
Making this a lifelong plan for writing is a daunting task. But for the next 35 years, Monroe wrote faithfully according to that plan.
Alice Monroe, whose real name is Alice Ledlaw, was born in 1931. During the years of the Great Depression, she was a little baby. In 1939, when she was eight years old, Canada was involved in World War II. In the years after the war, she attended the University of Western Ontario. When Elvis Presley first became famous, she was a 25-year-old mother. She published her first book at the age of 38, just as the flower girl revolution and the women's movement of 1968-1969 were on the rise. In 1981 she was 50 years old. Monroe's novels are mainly set in these years, from the thirties to the eighties, or earlier years in the memory of their ancestors.
Monroe's own ancestors have Scottish Presbyterian roots: she traces her family tree back to James Hogg, "Etrick Shepherd"; Hogg was a friend of Robert Burns, a late 18th-century Edinburgh literati; Hogg also wrote The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The title looks like Monroe would have used. The other half of the Monroe family is Anglican, and for them, the worst sins are said to include using the wrong fork at dinner. Monroe has a penetrating understanding of social class, of the minutiae and cynicism that distinguish one class from another. This understanding, to be honest, comes from the presbyterian half. Her characters scrutinize their words and actions, their emotions, their motives, and their consciences, as well as the habit of discovering that they lack them, come from the Presbyterian Church. In traditional Puritan culture, as in the small town of Sostowe, forgiveness was not easy to obtain, but punishment was common; There is a potential for humiliation on every street corner, and almost no one can avoid it.
But this tradition also contains the doctrine of justification by faith alone: that gifts come down from heaven and do not depend on any action of man. In Monroe's work, gifts are everywhere, but they are disguised in a strange way: the world is unpredictable. sudden emotional outbursts; Preconceptions are shattered; The amazing plots are endless; The shock was terrifying. Malicious behavior may have positive consequences. The solution to the rescue comes suddenly in some special way when the reader least expects it.
But once you make such a judgment, or such an analysis, or inference, or generalization of Monroe's work, you should remember that the sarcastic critic who often appears in Monroe's novels essentially says:
"Which onion do you think you are? What makes you think you know anything about me or anyone else? ”
Or, again, to quote "The Lives of Girls and Women":
"People's lives...... It's boring, it's simple, it's magical, it's unfathomable—a kitchen covered in linoleum is like an unfathomable cave. The key word here is "unfathomable".
Monroe's fictional world is full of minor characters who hate art and craft, and who hate any pretentiousness or self-ostentation. Faced with these attitudes and the sense of self-distrust they cause, her main characters must fight against them in order to free themselves and create something.
At the same time, her writers and protagonists all have a sense of contempt and distrust for the artificial side of art. What should be written? How to write it? How much is real art, and how much is just a bag of cheap tricks: imitating others, manipulating their emotions, making faces at them? How can you be ascertained about someone (even a fictional character) without speculation? And most importantly, how does the story end? (Monroe often gives an ending and then questions or modifies it.) Otherwise, she simply doesn't trust it, as in the last stanza of "The Meniston River," the narrator says, "I may have guessed wrong." Isn't the act of writing itself an act of arrogance? Isn't the pen as unreliable as a broken reed? Several novels, such as "My Friend from My Youth", "Desertion", "Wilderness Station", and "Hate, Friendship, Courtship, Love, Marriage" contain some letters; These letters show the vanity, hypocrisy, and even malice of their authors. If epistolary writing can be so dishonest, what about the writing itself?
This tension is ever-present: as in "The Moons of Jupiter," Monroe's artistic characters are punished when they don't succeed, but they are also punished when they succeed. The female writer, thinking of her father, said:
"I can hear him say, oh, I can't find you in McColline. If he read something about me, he would say, oh, I don't think that text is good. His tone would have been humorous and tolerant, but it would have created in my mind the lifeless feeling that I was familiar with. His message to me was simple: I should work hard to earn fame; But feel sorry when you become famous. Whether I get it or not, I should be blamed. ”
"The sense of boredom" is one of Monroe's greatest enemies. Her characters struggle with this in every way they can: they struggle with suffocating stereotypes, tiresome expectations and imposed codes of conduct, as well as all possible silencers and mental suffocations. Between choosing to be a person who works well but is emotionally pretentious and insensitive, or someone who behaves perversely but is true to her true feelings and thus feels her presence, Monroe's women are likely to choose the latter; Or, if she chooses the former, she will criticize herself for being tactful, treacherous, cunning, cunning, and depraved. In Monroe's work, honesty is not the best policy: honesty is not policy at all, but an essential element like air. Monroe's characters must retain at least some honesty, whether through the right or the crooked, or they feel that they are doomed.
About the real war is most prominently expressed on the battlefield of sex. As is the norm in most societies when it comes to sexuality, Monroe's social world carries a strong current of sexuality that develops around each character something like a neon shadow, illuminating landscapes, rooms, and objects. In Monroe's writing, a crumpled bed is more expressive than any depiction of sexuality. Monroe's characters have the same keen sense of smell as a dog in a perfume shop when it has sexual chemistry in a party. This chemistry is just one of many. And they are also sensitive to their own intuitive reactions. Falling in love, falling into lust, spying on a spouse and stealing pleasure, erotic lies, shameful things driven by irresistible desires, and sexual calculations based on social desperation are few writers who have explored these processes more thoroughly and resolutely than Monroe. For many of Monroe's women, testing the boundaries of sexuality is clearly exciting and daunting. However, in order to trespass, you have to know exactly where the fence is. Monroe's universe is crisscrossed with carefully defined boundaries. Hands, chairs, and glances are all part of an intricate map of the interior; This map is littered with barbed wire and traps, as well as secret trails through the bush.
"Once upon a time, marriage was the way out. In recent years, leaving her husband has become the way out...... I don't have such a way out. In my opinion, such a way out is ridiculous. My way out is just to live and live......" is another kind of survival wisdom that Monroe has given us.
For the women of the Monroe generation, sexual expression was a freedom and an outlet. But for what is sex the way out? It's the contempt for the kind of negation and restriction of women that she so so adequately describes in "Turkey Season":
Lily said she would never let her husband come near her while drunk. Marjo said that since she almost died of massive hemorrhage that time, she has not allowed her husband to come near her, without any ambiguity. Lily hurriedly said that he would only want to make out if he was drunk. I can understand that not letting your husband near you is a matter of pride, but I can't quite believe that 'closer' means 'sexual intercourse'. ”
For older women like Lily and Marjo, enjoying sex meant being beaten badly. For women like Ross in "The Female Beggar," it's a question of pride and celebration, a question of victory. For women after the sexual liberation movement, enjoying sex became a mere obligation, and the perfect orgasm was just one on the list of achievements to be achieved. However, when enjoyment becomes obligation, we return to the realm of "lifelessness". But for Monroe's characters, in the throes of exploring sexuality, their spirits may experience confusion, shame and pain, and even cruel and sadistic pleasures (some of her spouses in her novels get pleasure by torturing each other emotionally, as in real life), but there is never a sense of boredom.
In some of her later works, the depiction of sex seems to be less interesting and more scheming. For example, in "The Bear Over the Mountain," Grant uses sex as a decisive factor in his astonishing feat of trading emotional goods. His beloved wife, Fiona, suffers from Alzheimer's disease and is in a nursing home with a man with a similar condition. When the man is brought home by his ruthless, practical wife, Marianne, Fiona stops eating and grows emaciated. Grant tries to convince Marianne to let her husband return to the nursing home, but Marianne refuses because she thinks it is too expensive. However, Grant learns that Marianne is lonely and has sexual needs. Although her face is wrinkled, her figure is still attractive. Like a shrewd salesman, Grant moves into Marianne's house to close the deal. Monroe knows it all too well: sex can be an honor, a torment, but it can also be a bargaining chip.
The society Monroe describes is a Christian one. Christianity is often not explicitly depicted, but only exists as a general context. Flo in The Female Beggar decorates the walls with "some pious, cheerful and slightly obscene aphorisms," writing:
"Jehovah is my shepherd, and if you believe in the Lord Jesus, you will be saved"
Why did Flo, who was not religious at all, have these aphorisms? Because these aphorisms are ubiquitous in Monroe's society, as common as the calendar.
Christianity is "everywhere," and in Canada, churches and governments are not separated along predetermined boundaries like in the United States. Prayer and Bible reading are daily routines in public schools. This Christian culture provided Monroe with a great deal of fodder and was associated with one of Monroe's most unique patterns of portraying and storytelling.
The central dogma of Christianity is that two fundamentally disparate, mutually exclusive elements—divinity and humanity—are crowded together, one without negating the other. The result is not a demigod, or a disguised god, but a god who has become a man completely, but at the same time retains a full divinity. Believing in Christ is only one person. Christianity thus relies on the rejection of the categorical logic of either/or and the acceptance of the mystical nature of either/or. Logic tells us that a thing cannot be both itself and not itself, and Christianity holds that this is possible. This "it is also not" formula is indispensable for Christianity.
Many of Monroe's stories reach (or fail to) a final settlement precisely in this way. The first thing that comes to mind is the example from The Life of a Girl and a Woman. In that book, the teacher who planned an operetta for that high school committed suicide by throwing himself into the river.
"Miss Farris in a velvet skating costume...... Miss Farris is full of energy...... On the Vavanas River, Miss Farris floated face down motionless for 6 days before being discovered. Although there is no reasonable way to hang these pictures together: because if the last one is true, then should the first few be changed? But they will have to stay together now. ”
For Monroe, something can be real, then fake, and still true in the end. In "Different," Georgia thinks to herself, "It's true and it's dishonest." In The Progress of Love, the narrator says, "How difficult it is to believe that it is my fiction." It looks so much like the real thing, it's the real thing. That's the part I believe. I never stopped believing in it. "The world is vulgar and sacred. You can only swallow it whole. No matter how much you know about it, there's always more to know.
In "I've Always Wanted to Tell You One Thing," the jealous Eti describes her sister's ex-lover (a very casual mass lover) as follows: the look he throws at every woman
"Make him look like he wants to be a deep-sea diver and dive down through all that void, cold and wreckage, in order to find the one thing he was determined to find, a small but precious, hard-to-find thing, like a ruby that might lie on the ocean floor."
Monroe's novels are full of such suspicious seekers and carefully arranged plots. At the same time, they are also full of the insight that in any story, in the depths of any person's heart, there may be a dangerous treasure, a priceless ruby, a heart's yearning.