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CONNECTION
This short story was first published in the pages of Chatelaine , an English-language Canadian women magazine, founded in 1928 in Toronto and still operating. This magazine covers topics including food, health, style. Then this short story was collected in AM’s fifth collection, The Moons of Jupiter , published by MacMillan in Canada in 1982. In this presentation we’ll be first introduced to the short story, covering some elements including genre, space, time, protagonist, plot, the narrative stance and the focalizer. Then we’ll briefly revise what we have already seen, concerning dashes, use of seem and colours, with some further instances taken from this story. Then we’ll add new strategies operating a t a textual level within a cohesive aim, and these are the devices: and, or, and blank spaces. Connection and The Stone in the Field compose Chaddeleys and Flemings , the 2-part story AM has devoted to the memory of her family. The first, Connection , deals with her mother’s lively and noisy cousins, while the second tells the story of her father, sisters, and their reclusive lifestyle. Chaddeleys and Flemings was first written as a unique story and submitted to MacMillan to be included in Who Do You Think You Are? It was then divided into two, and AM herself decided to move it to another collection. The Stone in the Field appeared as a story on the pages of the journal Saturday Night , and then revised and collected in The Moons Of Jupiter and then in various anthologies. Connection , as we have said, was first published in Chatelaine. Connection is the first part of a two-part story; it has the same primary title, Chaddeleys and Flemings , but a different subtitle from the other. The two stories are independent and complete stories, and they have previously been published separately. The title, Connection , refers to:
- the connection of the individual to family history, and in particular here we have anticipated that it is the family history on the mother’s side;
- the connection of the individual to a larger social milieu, social context and dimension. The setting of the short story unfolds along an imaginary line across Canada, from rural Western Ontario, in the small town of Dalgleish, and urban British Columbia, in the city of Vancouver. So, we have movement across Canada, across the geography. As for temporality, the ss deploys a three-layered temporality.
- at first level, it shows the protagonist as a child (adolescence)
- then, as an adult woman, married with two daughters (adult life)
- finally, as a writer who is writing her story about her past (still adult life). As for the main protagonist of the story, we have this growth: a young woman in the first part who is unnamed, who becomes an adult married woman, mother of two daughters, in the second part, set in Vancouver. The plot: it revolves around a visit, paid by relatives. The first part narrates of four cousins (Iris, Isabel, Flora, Winifred) visiting the family of the protagonist; in the second part we have a visit paid by one of the cousins, Iris, to the narrator and her husband, Richard. The homodiegetic narrator makes her viewpoint explicit and visible. Frequent temporal deictic markers signal the temporal gap between the time of the story and the time of writing. The most frequent one is “now”. I couldn't understand this, at the time or later. I had too much Scottish blood in me, too much of my father. (9) I poured it into a jug like those I now see in antique stores, or on hall tables, full of ornamental grasses. (12) Now that l think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently. (14) Well, now that I think of it, what were those ladies talking about, in the balloons over their heads? (17) The first instance frames the time of writing as a time of awareness and of elaboration. She provides a reason for her incapacity to understand the attitude the mother and the cousins demonstrated towards their snobbish grand-father, that is the egalitarian approach inherited by the father. Similarly, excerpts number 3 and 4 connote the time of narrative as a
time of meditation. In instance number 3, we have a predominant boulomaic system, with the configuration through the lexical verb “ wish ”, repeated many times. So, not only is the time of writing connoted as the time of thought, it is also the time of regret. On page 16, only two pages after this regret, the narrator denies her feelings and her propositions. Not only does she admit the limits, the doubts, as we have seen in other instances. Here she designs herself as “dishonest”, so the credibly of the whole narration is questioned. I was dishonest when I said that I wished we had met elsewhere, that I wished I had appreciated her, when I implied that Richard's judgements were all that stood in the way. (16) So, here we have a very interesting passage in which the narrator questions and subverts the reliability of the narrator herself. So, this short story deploys a narrative which can be labelled as category A negative shading, reflector mode. Before considering the textual patterns, we will revise our previously discussed markers, and see how they operate in this story.
- The punctuation marker of the dash is used within the grammar of pov in a range of situations. It is a fact that Canadians of Scottish—which in Huron County we called Scotch—and Irish descent will tell you quite freely that their ancestors came out during the potato famine, with only the rags on their backs, or that they were shepherds, agricultural laborers, poor landless people. (7) The narrator is outlining an historical portrait of the social-cultural situation in Canada in the first decades of the 20th^ century. She is referring to the nationalities of the migrants. A parenthetical dash inscribes a space for the narrator, who offers a reformulation for the expression “Canadians of Scottish” descent. From a logical- semantic pov, we remember systemic functional grammar, she realizes a logical-semantic function of expansion, in the form of elaboration, reformulation. We are interested in the position of the narrator in a community of people in Huron County. This inclusive “we” plays an intersubjective function, whereby the narrator expresses not only her subjective voice, via an “I” personal pronoun, but a more extended voice, at the level of the community. If this first instance reveals an intersubjective dimension of the narrator’s voice, the second parenthetical dash manifests the focalizer. The history is not that of the community, but of the family, on the maternal side, and the “him” refers to the grandfather. This passage foregrounds the focalizer through first, the parenthetical dash, second, the repetition of his opinion, the lady being a lower-class woman, and third, the right dislocation of this repeated and embedded unit.
- The presence and influence of the community in this short story is relevant. We have mentioned its significance in the title and in the embedded “we” personal pronoun. We may now notice the intersubjective value of the “ it seems to be ” in the first instance, whereby the flourishing bodies of the women are not only perceived by the subjective focalizer, but by a more generalized glance, filter. The same is valid for instance number 3, that we can consider, together with the number 1, as integrating the framework we have outlined in the previous section. In that short story we didn’t have examples of intersubjective seem , because there the perception was subjective, while were we have the reference to a larger community and to the corresponding perspective. The second instance, instead, epitomizes the use of the seem verb as a mental process of cognition, which projects Richard’s perspective. The intense metaphor of amputation operates within the semantic field of connection, at the core of the story. Richard would like his wife to be disconnected. In those days it seemed to be the thing for women's bodies to swell and ripen to a good size twenty, if they were getting anything out of life at all; (1) He wanted me amputated from that past which seemed to him such shabby baggage; he was on the lookout for signs that the amputation was not complete; and of course it wasn't. (13) The mixture of voices and words is so complicated and varied it seems that such confusion, such jolly rivalry, will go on forever, and then to my surprise—for I am surprised, even though I know the pattern of rounds—the song is thinning out, you can hear the two voices striving. (18)
- The representation of Iris as a central character in the short story is interesting, and is also fulfilled through the language of color in this passage. I knew as soon as I saw her on my doorstep, her hair, which I remembered as gray-brown, now gilt and sprayed into a foamy pile, her sumptuous peacock-blue dress decorated at one shoulder with a sort of fountain of gold spray. (14)
These additive connectors, which should be cohesive connectors, are instead dissociative. Strategies that are meant to create cohesion are doing the opposite. In Munro, this can be envisaged in nominal groups, cloze complexes and sequential sentences, so at all ranks of the textual unit. A similar effect is generated by the coordinating conjunction “or”, which of course has a different meaning, since it provides an alternative, not an addition. The unmarked use of function of “or”, syntactically, is that it connects two elements of equal status (parataxis). Semantically it expresses and alternative, an exclusive interpretation between two competing items which are mutually exclusive. Another French scholar has also identified two other marked solutions in Munro:
- an inclusive interpretation, whereby an effect of approximation and indeterminacy is shaped
- another effect of reformulation, interpretation: rectification So, when analyzing an “or” marker in Munro, we may ask some questions:
- Does it offer an alternative, which is the unmarked solution?
- Does it add new information?
- Does it express a repair strategy of self-correction or an afterthought? Generally, in Munro, categories are not neatly divided, and this pattern creates tension between inclusion and exclusions. Let’s see some examples from the text. The unmarked solution, the exclusive interpretation, the expected one (unmarked), is the following: Richard was a lawyer. The men in his family were either lawyers or stockbrokers. (14) Here we have two equally valid options, items: lawyers and stockbrokers. Richard can be either one or the other. The plate missed, and hit the refrigerator, but the pie flew out and caught him on the side of the face just as in the old movies or an I Love Lucy show. (18) They were discussing underarm odor, or thanking their lucky stars they were no longer chafed, because they used Kotex. (17) But in Munro, very often, the border is slippery. Try and look at this instance, and try to find the meaning and the semantic relationship between the alternative options: If they didn't get any inspiration, or it was too hot to do anything, they sat on the verandah drinking lemonade, fruit punch, ginger ale, iced tea, with maraschino cherries and chunks of ice chipped from the big chunk in the icebox. (5) Here the meaning is slippery, because these are not competing items, equally valid and possible. The relationship between the fact that they didn’t get any inspiration, and the fact that it was too hot, is not mutually exclusive, because these two options are connected. One may be the reason for the other: they might not have an inspiration because of the hot temperature. So, the “or” is slippery, confusing, it creates a tension in the text. A third option seems to be more convincing for the interpretation of Munro’s use of the alternative conjunction “or”. My father would never have admitted there were inferior people, or superior people either. (9) In this passage we don’t’ have “there were either inferior or superior people”: if that was the case, we would have the unmarked use of the “or” item. On the contrary, the order in which the sentence is organized seems to show a rectification, an order organized as a repair strategy, a self-correction, an afterthought, a text constructed in the making. Perhaps she had seen something when I opened the door- some surprise, or failure of welcome. (15) What the narrator wants to express is the last one, failure of welcome. So, it seems that she’s constructing her text in the making, and she’s going towards the most appropriate solution. So, again, self-correcting her utterance. This last one is even more telling in this regard: He pretended incredulity. Maybe he really felt it. Or maybe he thought it would be a good idea to start the attack immediately, before I took him to task for leaving the room, being rude, not offering a ride to the hotel. (17)
We have the impression that the “or” doesn’t distinguish between alternative options, but it is instead introducing a more appropriate, more convincing pattern, in a crescendo. Again, in this formulaic towards repair strategy, self- correction, afterthought. In order to discuss the stylistics and aesthetic implicatures of the use of alternative and additive conjunctions in Am, which is really unmarked, we can quote a passage from Linda Pillière’s essay Alice Munro’s Conversational Style. Rather than integrating all the information, the narrator prefers a more incremental approach, layering the details, so that each piece of information is added to the clause in a loose fashion. The narrator seems to be adding information as an afterthought as if she realizes the addressee does not possess all the necessary information in order to have a clear grasp of the situation, or a clear picture of what is being described, or is in danger of misunderstanding what has previously been said. This passage perfectly described what we have noticed in the instances from Connection , with reference to additive and alternative conjunctions. And this incremental approach is perfect for describing the last instance we have read, about Richard and the use of “or”. So, here we may notice that this conversational style in Munro has been appreciated by scholars and editors. Thacker reports that Daniel Menaker, Munro’s editor from 1988 to 1994, really appreciated this aspect and he never amended her form because “her style was her voice, her natural way of speaking at its best”. So, they appreciated the freshness, the spontaneity of this conversational style in Munro. The third textual device we will address is that of ellipsis , of the blank spaces Munro scatters along her texts. AM’s stories feature a range of intersection transition ties. For example, in Carried Away , subtitles are deployed, which mainly fulfill a predominant ideational metafunction in terms of topic anticipation and summary. Elsewhere, in stories such as Meneseteung, Vandals, Fiction, The Peace of Utrecht, The Love of a Good Woman, Too much Happiness , Munro uses roman numbers as intersection transition markers. These mainly perform a textual metafunction and organizes the text following a logical progression of sequential development. Other stories show blank spaces marking letter boundaries and start a new letter with the name of the addressee. The only example for this typology is Before the change , and every letter starts with the letter R which stands for the name of the addressee. Other times we may find asterisks, used to signal a foreground section transition, with a significant disjunctive function. However, blank spaces are the most pervasive strategy, and we will discuss them here in terms of frequency, function and distribution. First of all, we can claim that white spaces in-between sections show an uneven distribution within AM’s stories. This may be related to editorial trends, to stylistic experimentations, or to the ss content and composition. Interestingly, blank spaces are less frequent in Lives of Girls and Women, the work AM launched as a novel, which contains 188?? interconnected stories. These chapters follow the growth of a female character, from her childhood in south-western Ontario to her decision of becoming an artist. In this case, AM has reduced the number of gaps in order to pursue linearity, continuity across her work. A significant percentage of blank spaces, on the opposite, can be envisaged in The View from the Castle Rock (2006), which chronicles her ancestors’ voyage from Scotland to Canada. This is another unusual work within AM’s collections: the historical concern affects stylistic choices. Considering a sample of short stories, sum up in this image, this graph shows the uneven distribution of blank spaces and a progressive increase of occurrences. In-between the two extreme works are The love of a good woman , Hateship and Runaway , the works of maturity and the highest expressions of AM’s art, which show a significant frequency of blank spaces. The blank space really expresses the peak of AM’s art and aesthetics. What are the functions of blank spaces across the stories? Overall, these white, interstitial spaces fulfill metafunctional values. They first implicitly convey meaning, they may symbolically evoke silence, death, tension, conflict. They may alternatively invite readers to fill the gap, to work at an interpersonal level. They mainly fulfill a textual function,
Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream. […] Life is. Wait_. But a._ Now, wait_. Dream._ We have that fractured last line, written in italic, oblique font, that inscribes the unexpected, ungraspable, elusive dimension of the scene. The “wait” which is repeated fractures the verse but also evokes the blank space, in an intersemiotic dimension, from the written, the graphic, the visual, to the audio dimension. Like M’s page is a deceptively simple surface, the short story is a deceptively simple text genre. This concluding line doesn’t close the story: far from that, it resists resolutions of plot, conflict, tension. As scholars who were researching on Munro claim, this story resists closure, both in terms of plot and narrative. No resolution is offered to the reader. who’s left with an open ending. As Carrington claims, readers are left with “a lingering sense of unresolved ambiguity”. We are left with doubt, possibilities, a tension which is open. Munro herself, in an interview to Struthers, admitted this problem with endings. And now, I would go back, if I could rewrite most of those stories, and I would chop out a lot of those words and final sentences. And I would just let each story stand without bothering to do a summing up, because that’s really what it amounts to. Munro herself admits that as an adult, when asked to read her stories in public reading, she constantly changed her stories and very often her ending, cutting her final paragraphs, which generally offer resolutions or at least try to do that, especially in early stories. So, ending have always been a concern for Munro. But at the same time, endings and the fact that we may manipulate, we may have open endings, has always attracted Munro. In the Nobel lecture in absentia , the author remembers loving, as a child, The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. Yet, she had always found the story “dreadfully sad”, because the prince, though deeply in love, cannot marry her because she is a mermaid. Little Alice felt that after all her pain, the protagonist deserved a happy ending, and therefore she invented one, only for herself: “it slipped my mind that it was only made up to be a different story for me”. Munro’s concern with endings is also the reason why she has been attracted by writing, narrative, and storytelling as an open, in-the-making, process. To conclude this presentation, we can go back to the main point of this story, a search for connections, both intended as subjective and intersubjective connections, with one’s past and with one’s social cultural environment, so at a family and at a social level. The plot, in order to develop this point, envisages two visits: one in the past, in rural Ontario, one in the present, in urban Vancouver. The two visits operate as triggers for establishing connections. However, the connection is made impossible by the husband’s hostility. To him, the family and social background of the wife doesn’t enable fitting in the new privileged urban society Vancouver offers. So, from a narrative pov, we have this act of rebellion. Form a narrative pov, this story can be labelled as Category A negative shading, reflector mode. However, from a stylistic and narrative pov, we can see that many devices are used in order to question this idea, this paradigm of connection. The whole story revolves around the textual metafunction and around cohesion, through cohesive devices. In particular, this story deploys a number of disconnecting connectors, considered both as additive and alternative conjunctions, and it also deploys a range of connecting disconnectors, like blank spaces. Cohesion is questioned, problematized, and devices generally labelled as realizing a particular function within cohesion, are questioned, subverted, and used in a looser fashion. In the end, connecting devices fracture and fragment the text, which resists cohesion and closure. The narrator, who is meant to control and to share the narrative, reveals not only her cognitive and emotional limits as a focalizer, which may be acceptable given a reduced maturity and experience, but also her ethical unreliability as a narrator, expressed at the age of maturity, when telling her story, sharing it. Once more, what reader are left with is an open story; our doubts are disconnected connections and possibilities for our story to be told and for endless interpretations to be shared.
