The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence. - Review - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1997 by Tracy Ware

THE TUMBLE OF REASON: ALICE MUNRO'S DISCOURSE OF ABSENCE by Ajay Heble. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. xi 210 pages. $35.

There are now enough books on Alice Munro to fill a small shelf, and The Tumble of Reason is one of the better ones. Emphasizing the inadequacy of "realism" as a critical term, Ajay Heble discusses the tension between Munro's "interest in delineating a surface reality ... and her fascination with the very limits of representation, especially in language." He is most interested in what he calls (after structuralist linguistics) "paradigmatic discourse": an "involvement with absent and potential levels of meaning," and "an acceptance of the value of indeterminacy." In practice he offers fine readings that show how Munro's narrators call their own authority into question. For instance, he argues that "Meneseteung" (from Friend of My Youth) "consists of two parallel narratives of artistic creation": Almeda Roth's and the narrator's. After a subtle examination of the interplay between the two narratives, Heble concludes that the ending "turns what might ... be a story about an unfulfilled relationship into a meditation on the intricacy of exchange between history and autobiography." Throughout the book, Heble offers convincing readings and careful scholarship.

I have two reservations. The first arises with the very term "paradigmatic discourse," which seems unnecessarily confusing given the availability of alternative terms (such as "indeterminacy"). I suspect that Heble uses "paradigmatic discourse" out of a desire for theoretical elevation, and this desire leads occasionally to distractions. Thus the discussion of "Meneseteung" is interrupted by a quotation from Barbara Herrnstein Smith that adds nothing to the argument; elsewhere Foucault and Bakhtin are dragged in for desultory use. My objection is not the Heble's own use of theory--he is very good with Emile Benveniste, Roland Barthes, and Hayden White--but to his references to theorists whom he does not really engage. My discomfort increases with Heble's postcolonial reading of "White Dump" (from The Progress of Love). Misled by the story's reference to a "colony of frogs," Heble writes that Denise's involvement with a Women's Centre reveals a "colonizing impulse," while Sophie's desire to help some poor children is "an act of colonization." Heble is right to say that Sophie's "charity is problematic because it conceals a covert complicity," but it cannot be right to translate complicity as "colonization." Such language reveals little about Munro but much about the limitations of postcolonial criticism.

My second reservation concerns the self-consciousness of the book's conclusion, in which Heble worries about "imposing a false sense of coherence on Munro's oeuvre." After insisting that "Munro's writing has developed," Heble concludes: "Or perhaps, in better keeping with the nature of Munro's stories, I ought to correct myself and answer yes and no, true and false, and thus bring to the fore my own inability to settle at a final resting point." The Tumble of Reason would be an even better book if Heble's self-consciousness were more than a playful afterthought. Before emplotting Munro's career in stages of development, Heble might have paused to consider that even Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) is hardly a beginning in the conventional sense, for it is a selection of the best stories that Munro had written over eighteen years. As Robert Thacker has demonstrated, Munro's real progress occurred then. Furthermore, Heble might have asked if it is possible to develop beyond the complex self-consciousness of the stories in Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974). As it is, Heble's assumptions force him to find progress at every stage. Now that "difference" is such an important concept, it should be possible to study Munro's changes without placing them in a progressive scheme. When I read Munro's first three books, I recognize that she has changed, but I do not know how she could get any better.

TRACY WARE Queen's University