There have been attempts to read the facts of the abuse backward into [Alice] Munro’s fiction, pointing out all of the ways the stories are about repression and thwarted confession and the abuse and maiming of children. What I find remarkable is that what so many of us love in Munro’s fiction is the way she reveals how common and small we all are, how at bottom, we are capable of true ugliness and viciousness, that this is not the province of sneering villains but the woman on the corner or the man in the fast car or the quiet old lady in her house in the woods—what amazes me is that we can acknowledge this and yet be confused when confronted with a real-world example of someone who seemed remarkable but who is simply selfish and small.
I have read a lot of confused tweets and articles, trying to figure out “how could she do this?” as though it is some grand mystery. It is not. At least not to me. She had a choice to believe and protect her daughter in the face of the revelations, even after her daughter, decades later, took [Gerald] Fremlin [Alice Munro's second husband] to court and won, but she chose to stay. And people seem amazed by that. What kind of mother? What kind of person? What kind of woman? etc. Well, any kind of mother. Any kind of person. Any kind of woman. She made a choice and justified it to herself through any number of inversions or self-delusions, who can say. But is this really so shocking? People do this every day. My own family did this. I saw it play out first hand. People are capable of justifying anything. Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person. To grasp for some justification as though there must be some brilliant dark inner turning of the mind that will explain it as opposed to accepting it as the everyday course of life, I mean…that, to me, betrays a lack of understanding of human nature, particularly the one advanced by Munro’s work.
Undoubtedly in the weeks and months to come, people will say “it’s complicated” and “it’s complex” and “separate the artist from the art.”
I disagree. It is not complicated. It is not complex. Alice Munro stayed with the man who molested her daughter. Not only that, but she stayed with a man who, when confronted with his information, wrote the family letters explaining how the child victim was in fact a “homewrecker” and seducer. Not only that, but she expressed a justification in choosing her own happiness because after all, what had been done had been done.
This is the most characteristic thing Munro could have said. In her stories, epiphany and revelation often take the form of accepting the crude and brutal terrain of the past for what it is and setting one’s shoulder to wheel to get on with living. What I love about her stories is that they come with an aftermath. They dare to offer the reader a glimpse into that rarely seen world to come. When the choice has been made and one has to get on with it. I was told too late. I loved him too much. Is that not the most Alice Munro thing you have ever read?
Furthermore, it’s a kind of thinking I was raised among. It’s how I got through much of the abuse and trauma of my own life. Well, that’s that. Anyway. Not a shrug. But a setting the shoulder against the stone and pushing onward. It is a kind of thinking common to the rural poor and the working poor, among whom and by whom I was raised. I have struggled for a long time in trying to explain it. It is a world without history. Not a world without a past. But a world without a history, which is a story we tell ourselves about the past. Among my people, the rural and working poor, to make a history out of the past is taboo. To speak of a thing done is to make too much of it. To be fishing for sympathy, and for what, when there’s nothing to be done about it anyway.
2087
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