Click Alice Munro: “Haven”
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice Munro’s “Haven” was originally published in the March 5, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Click for a larger image.
I’m late getting this posted because I kept hoping to have a moment to read the story this week, and then just post here when that was done. As you can see, that time has yet to materialize. I can’t wait to read this, though, as it’s always an event when we get a new Munro story (which, these days, are coming rather frequently, despite her saying a few years ago that she was done).
Two pages into this, I thought it the best Munro story i had read in several years but for me at least it tailed off at the end..and I don’t care for the ending.
I wonder if TNY’s length restrictions are hampering Munro maybe more than others..She was known for writing long stories.
Still any Munro story is well worth reading and this is no exception.
I’m wishing for further comments on this one, or perhaps some elaborations from Jerry. As I wrote here (http://shortaday.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/alice-munro-haven/) I pretty much despised this piece. I read it several times, struggling with some of the language, and I not only don’t know what it’s about, I don’t even really know *who* it is about. Not a single character speaks to me, and I don’t think Munro plays fair, for I can’t even really guess at the motivations that she leaves so mysterious.
The ending, which tails off for Jerry, comes across as an utter cop out to me, and I find the shift into present tense (to say nothing of the intro’s disclaimers and second-hand narrative) to be jarring and unnecessary; not what you’d expect from an author of this caliber.
I wish Munro had stuck with what I thought the story was about — quiet rebellion from the seemingly happy aunt, even as the rebellious niece winds up submitting to the uncle’s version of happiness — or at least had not written this suggestion so much into my mind with that initial, on-the-nose section.
Had this been any other author, I’d have simply moved on; because it’s Munro, I’m fixated on better understanding why I don’t like this piece.
I can’t really help you I fear..I am not sure who or what it is supposed be about myself, the familiar Munro style is there, a narrator looking back on her younger years and how what she observed in others changed her life or at least helped fashion her.
It kept me interested but it’s not vintage Munro..all I can really say.
This responds to Aaron’s post. The title is often an important key in an Alice Munro story. A haven is a place of safety or sanctuary: a home, a castle, a church. In my reading the story “Haven” documents a time – not that long ago – where women were treated as a chattel, and appeared to accept the role of a serf, subject to the will of the owner, the master, the lord, who was, of course, their husband.
Dawn seems to be content in this role. Her life is devoted to her husband. Her most important job was making a haven for her man. “The house was his, the choice of menu his, the radio and television programs his”. “[T]hings had to be ready for his approval at any moment.” “[H]ousehold godliness was presided over by [Dawn] and arrived at by Bernice, the maid”.
Uncle Jasper is treated like a king. Jasper was the name of one of the Magi: one of the three kings that were said to have visited the newborn Jesus, the wise men from the East. “We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we traversed afar”.
Jasper Castle is his name and a man’s home is his castle.
After Dawn disobeys him with the little party, Jasper, as a sign of his forgiveness, gives her a pendant of bloodstone on Valentine’s Day.
Bloodstone is formed when pieces of green jasper become spotted red by iron oxide deposits.
Early Christians believed that bloodstone was created during the cruxifixion as some of Jesus Christ’s blood dropped onto jasper stones beneath the cross. Some of that blood may have come from the crown of thorns placed on his head.
Mona’s funeral was held at the Church of Hosannas.
Hosanna is a cry for salvation as well as a declaration of praise.
It was the cry of praise and adoration shouted in recognition of Jesus as the Messiah on his entry into Jerusalem. “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the lord” – Mathew 21:9 (KJV)
Dawn is inappropriately dressed at the funeral wearing a suit of soft lilac colour and a Persian lamb jacket. Is she in sheep’s clothing or is she the sacrificial lamb?
“She looked very pretty and seemed to be in good spirits that she could hardly subdue” Why?
“The thorn had been removed”.
Mona was dead.
Jasper would be relieved of his pain “and that could not help but make her happy”
The narrator has been influenced by Jasper. She was no longer so uncritical of people like Mona.
“It was the music itself and her devotion to it”.
“Devotion to anything, if you were female, could make you ridiculous”.
Jasper arrived at the funeral and removed all traces of his dead sister’s life – her music, the one thing she had devoted her life to – by stopping the music and getting rid of her musical companions. Jasper removes the pianist and seats Bernice in her place (his surrogate is on the throne). [The meaning of the name Bernice is the bringer of victory, the bearer of victory.]
Jasper then gestures the congregation to stand and sing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’.
The lyrics suggest that Mona has been the cross that Jasper has had to bear all his life. She’s the “old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame”.
The refrain they sing is, “so I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, til my trophies at last I lay down; I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it someday for a crown”.
Jasper, the king, can finally exchange his cross, his sister, for the crown.
But wait! He’s trapped. He’s stranded. “He cannot turn to face the altar”.
Everything has gone ok…but not quite as he imagined it.
Dawn doesn’t participate in the singing. The narrator says of her “…perhaps she caught that shadow of disappointment on Uncle Jasper’s face before he was even aware of it himself”.
“Or perhaps she realized that, for the first time, she didn’t care. For the life of her, couldn’t care”.
And the story ends with the minister saying ‘Let us pray’.
Dawn had arrived at the funeral dressed in the colour of a new dawn “soft lilac”. As the narrator’s parents had described funerals as a ‘celebration of life’ (meaning, of course, the life of the deceased), but Dawn is there to celebrate a new life with her husband, a post-Mona life, a life without the thorn in his side, a life without that constant pain. “She looked very pretty and seemed to be in good spirits that she could hardly subdue.”
She has been devoted to Jasper, treating him like a god. But with his final act of revenge against his dead sister, she realizes that even though the thorn has been removed the poison will always remain and the “shadow of disappointment” will forever obscure his vision. She can’t participate in the singing. She can no longer” just trail along’ with the hypocrisy. Dawn “realized that, for the first time, she didn’t care”. For the life of her, [Dawn] couldn’t care” for Jasper. All we can do for someone like Jasper is to pray for him.
I thought the ending was perfect, but so subtle that if you moved too quickly you might miss the epiphanic moment.
Bravo, John from Montreal. You may be taking up the slack of writing the kind of admirable exegesis which the, sadly missed, Betsy had been undertaking. I loved this story and I’ll agree that I didn’t quite get it, that was part of what I liked. After 3 stories-McGuane, Chabon and Boyle-lacking in any subtext or mystery, here comes Munro with a quirky, odd, ironic and mysterious little tale. Certainly it deals with patriarchy, now-abandonned gender roles, a certain type of provinicial narrow-mindedness and it also is tantalizing in dealing with a teen who instead of rebelling becomes more of a conformist. But….beyond that there is something ineffable here. John, though, helped explain what I may have vaguely sensed.