\nby Alice Munro<\/span>
\nfrom The Progress of Love<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
[\/fusion_title][fusion_text]<\/p>\n
[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]T[\/fusion_dropcap]he coda to “White Dump,” and subsequently to the whole of The Progress of Love<\/em>, is\u00a0taken from an old Norse poem:<\/p>\n It is too late to talk of this now: it has been decided.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yet, strangely, while this is the last line of the story it is not the chronological end to the story itself, suggesting, I think, that even if an event happens, it is not too late to talk about it, and its significance is never decided.<\/p>\n “White Dump” is divided into three parts, each told from the perspective of a woman from a different generation: first, we have Denise; second, we have Sophie, Denises’ grandmother; and third we have Isabel, Denise’s mother and Sophie’s daughter-in-law.<\/p>\n Let’s begin with Denise, as Munro did. She and her father, Laurence, a successful, conservative businessman, are returning to a log cabin that has been in his family for years. Along for the ride, this time, is Laurence’s new wife, Magda. As they look around the old place, Munro sheds some light on their relationships. Denise runs a center for troubled women in Toronto; her father thinks it’s a waste of tax dollars because most of the women are probably just seeking attention. Denise’s lover (though she must be in her late thirties or early forties it doesn’t appear she’s ever had a long-term relationship) is a Marxist who thinks “successful old men, in a capitalist industrial society are almost purely evil.” We learn that Isabel and Laurence separated years before, long enough that they can look back on their memories as a family in this same cabin with more humor than resentment. That’s not to say Laurence doesn’t feel resentment, but it’s become tame and constant, like his resentment for New Democrats. No, they can look back and remember the summer of 1969, when they were all there together with Sophie for Laurence’s fortieth birthday party.<\/p>\n Back in 1969, Denise was interested in what drew Laurence and Isabel together in the first place, asking her mother: “What did you think when you first met him? I mean, what attracted you? Did you know this was the person you were going to end up married to? I think that’s all so weird.”<\/p>\n At this point, Isabel is more of an enigma than a solid character. We only know really that she is now out of the picture, and with no apparent regrets. Slowly, we come to know the woman, absent most of the story, who will become the center of the final part, and, with that, the center of the prior parts as well. Isabel, it turns out, is the one who refuses to compromise, refuses to play charades.<\/p>\n Isabel, seen through the eyes of Denise and Sophie, is on the outside. They’re mostly concerned with the more boisterous Laurence and the other things that beset them during the day. Which is their right. But they don’t recognize Isabel’s quiet yearning for something else, her growing unrest:<\/p>\n Not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well, good, now that’s over, that’s over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?<\/span><\/p>\n Freedom — or not eve freedom. Emptiness, a lapse of attention. It seemed all the time that she was having to provide a little more — in the way of attention, enthusiasm, watchfulness — than she was sure she had. She was straining, hoping not to be found out.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n By the time we read those words, we know better what has happened. We’ve seen Denise dealing with it in the first section, even though “It is too late to talk of this now: it has been decided.”<\/p>\n As I looked around online for general thoughts on “White Dump” I often saw it listed as among folk’s favorite Munro stories. It’s not quite there for me, but I can see myself growing with it, seeing its depths better as time passes. It certainly is a strong story, and a fine way to end this portion of Munro’s career, right before we move on to her more famous later work of the 1990s and 2000s.<\/p>\n Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]\u201cW[\/fusion_dropcap]hite Dump\u201d gives the reader a hard time right from the title.<\/p>\n Something about this story is going to be a shitty business, \u201cdump\u201d being familiar slang for feces. White shit is shit that has somehow been prettied up, or it\u2019s been around a very long time, or it\u2019s the sign of some tremendously unhealthy situation.<\/p>\n What\u2019s white in this story? What\u2019s sick? What\u2019s been prettied up?<\/p>\n The old vacation log house on the lake that had been in Laurence\u2019s family since the twenties slowly fell on very hard times, until at least one foundation post was crumbling, until the oven didn\u2019t work, and when so little light came in the house felt terminally damp. Laurence\u2019s second wife, Magda, has redone the place, given that Laurence now has a lot of money. The veranda is gone, a glass extension has been put on the dining room, the walls are white and yellow, and things have been fixed up. The dump is gone, which is good, but a white slick has been put on the entire house, which may or may not be good.<\/p>\n That is, sometimes change is necessary, but the change we wreak may not necessarily be the right change.<\/p>\n Falsity pervades the place: Magda doesn\u2019t just have a jumble of scarves, she has a \u201ccalculated<\/i> jumble.\u201d When she gives a dinner party, the effect on the reader is that Munro took Magda\u2019s elaborately beautiful table setting straight out of a Williams Sonoma catalog. Later, we discover that Laurence\u2019s first wife Isabel had a gift for calculating not appearances but people\u2019s comfort. When Isabel left, Laurence and the kids probably missed her a lot. During Denise\u2019s visit with her father and Magda, Laurence asks about Isabel (who has been gone about fifteen years) several times.<\/p>\n The reader notices what Magda doesn\u2019t know — Isabel was a talented and wonderful wife and mother. Laurence\u2019s grown daughter Denise is amazed and slightly contemptuous of Magda\u2019s slick type of control. But Denise is at the Log House for one thing: she wants her semi — annual or quarterly check from her father for her Women\u2019s Centre. So she maintains her \u201cresolve.\u201d She keeps her anger at her father under control until he writes his check. Denise re-writes her emotions; she whites them out<\/i>. The reader gets the feeling the check is reparation<\/i> for what happened to Denise when her mother was forced to leave. Denise, after all, was a child who was likely to get in a state, as Isabel put it.<\/p>\n Immediately following the narrative set-up (the re-done house, the extortion by the daughter) is an example of how things get “whited out.” Hearing a story about how Isabel bought<\/i> Laurence\u2019s fortieth birthday cake, Magda implies that she\u2019s not much of a wife. Magda is whiting out the stove that had not worked for years, and Laurence is whiting out the care Isabel took for his every waking minute. Laurence, having inquired about and discussed Isabel (who\u2019s now living with a commercial fisherman on the west coast) ends by insisting on a distortion of her situation. She\u2019s married to a goat farmer, he says. They produce goats\u2019 milk. He makes cracks about the (lack of) money to be made in goat farming. But the truth is that Isabel and her lover only rent out the land to the goat farmer. Nevertheless, Laurence whites out her reality, as does Denise, who carefully does not refer to the fact that Isabel\u2019s affair is occasionally \u201cunstable.\u201d Much later, Denise edits her own utterances to her mother; while Isabel is describing what having an affair can be like, Denise holds her tongue.<\/p>\n Later, when we see things from Isabel\u2019s point of view, it is as if her entire self has been whited out by the expectations and rules of marriage, expectations and rules that may have been written by Isabel herself, probably based on the primer she had imbibed from society. When she volunteers to stay behind while the others go up on the plane ride, Laurence remarks, \u201cSitting by herself is my wife\u2019s greatest pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n That whites out the reality, although to be fair to Laurence, Isabel probably masked the reality from him very carefully. The reality is that she yearns for \u201cFreedom,\u201d or perhaps the more precise thing she wants is \u201cEmptiness, a lapse of [necessary] attention.\u201d Isabel whites-out herself. We hear her saying she hopes no one will ever find out how \u201ccold at heart\u201d she actually is.<\/p>\n A mere four pages into the 35-page story, the second wife senses that there are things she doesn\u2019t understand about the course of conversation between father and daughter, and she is right. They talk about the day Isabel met the pilot with whom she had a torrid affair, but they never reveal that is why the day is so compelling to both of them. That is the day they lost the person who took care of how they felt, day after day and \u201churdle\u201d and \u201churdle,\u201d to use Isabel\u2019s description of her days.<\/p>\n As for Isabel herself, Denise reveals that her mother \u201cat least, had no regrets.\u201d Denise remembers that Laurence wears a blindfold on his birthday. They put it on him, and he willingly wears it. It\u2019s a meme. There was a lot that he didn\u2019t see. For one, he never saw, in time, his wife\u2019s yearning for freedom, for another, her cold heart, and for a third, the affair with the bush pilot that went on for a year.<\/p>\n The story shifts to when Laurence\u2019s mother Sophie was alive. We learn that Sophie is from old money now lost, and we learn that fierce Sophie, a professor of Norse mythology, had Laurence out of wedlock. And we learn how Laurence made up a story about how Sophie was once married to her cousin. More white-out. Sophie is such a force that Laurence and Isabel call her \u201cOld Norse.\u201d Sophie is the kind of person who loves her mythic violence but at the same time is a pacifist and a Socialist. As a child, she was rich and privileged, and she had an ineffectual, childish dream of remaking the circumstances of some local poverty-stricken children. More white-out. Sophie\u2019s braids, as it happens, are yellowish-white.<\/p>\n Years later, Denise hears her father use the word \u201cWeltschmertz\u201d as a kind of code word; he says it as if it is in quotes; it is a kind of code communication with his dinner guests. Weltschermtz is a German term for world pain, and is in itself a kind of white out — one feels the sadness of the difference between the real world and the ideal world, but the idea is that one is not able to do anything about it. Laurence is the kind of successful man who will give his daughter a big check for her Women\u2019s Centre, but who can question the whole thing by remarking that he thinks some of the women are faking the suffering, that they are just out for \u201cattention,\u201d what with their \u201cclaims\u201d of being beaten and raped. More white-out.<\/p>\n The vacation house is located near a marble quarry; Sophie is troubled by the garish white marble scraps that have been laid everywhere in town. More white-out. Laurence makes Isabel, a redhead, lie out in the sun to get a tan. More weird white-out of reality, given that a lot of sun for redheads is not really a safe course.<\/p>\n The central event, the precipitating event, of the story is more like a nightmare or a vision than a real event, but Munro makes it work. Sophie goes down to \u201cher\u201d lake naked to take her customary and entitled swim. Some louts steal her bathrobe, and she appears in the front yard outraged and still naked. She declines any opportunity to seek a modest exit, she makes no effort to cover herself up, she disarranges the tablecloth offered to her so that she is still very naked, and generally, speaking she seems like a demented queen taking an opportunity to rage against lost power. Laurence, Isabel and the two kids are eating Laurence\u2019s birthday breakfast on the porch. Sophie approaches the veranda, raises one foot to the first stair, making herself even more naked, and she lectures everyone.<\/p>\n Isabel sees two things. One, she sees a weird power play of mother upon son — in which this reader feels a severe maternal reproach. All the money has been lost. No one has fought for her position. The son has failed to restore and protect her power. Isabel describes the old woman to herself as a \u201cstagy old show-off\u201d and a \u201c[p]erverse old fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n But the second thing Isabel sees is even more vivid; Sophie\u2019s bizarre performance is a vision of her own future:<\/p>\n All that white skin, slackly filled, made Isabel think of French cattle, dingy white cattle . . .<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Isabel saw what will be her reward for maintaining her (coldish, deadish) marriage: a sexless, \u201cslack,\u201d old age.<\/p>\n Isabel has just that morning had sex with Laurence, sex that she has had to manage just so, in order to keep the day from going wrong. I think the vision of Sophie gone to seed is like Violet\u2019s lightning bolt, or like Paul\u2019s vision on the road to Damascus. The vision of Sophie\u2019s powerlessness is a nightmare. Later that day, sitting in the bush pilot\u2019s little house on the airfield, Isabel wonders:<\/p>\n What she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n She answers her own question. She has that affair with the bush-pilot, and at his first touch:<\/p>\n She felt rescued, lifted, beheld, and safe.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So what is the meaning to be found in the very strange title of \u201cWhite Dump\u201d?<\/p>\n Isabel herself, home with the family after the plane ride, responds to Laurence\u2019s wonderment at the \u201csnowfield\u201d of the silica mine. But what is it he is seeing? Is he seeing the mineral being mined? Or is he seeing the mine dump of what they don\u2019t need or use? Whatever, the \u201csnowfield\u201d is more romantic white-out; silica also causes silicosis.<\/p>\n Isabel picks up on that idea of a mine dump and tells a story about a \u201cwhite dump.\u201d She is able to accomplish two things with this odd story. She is able to turn Laurence\u2019s snow white vision of the world on its head. And she is able to confront Sophie. Everyone probably knew that Sophie\u2019s favorite candy was Marzipan. So Isabel tells a story in which a baker throws out a mound of icing and marshmallow into the back lot, creating a mock marzipan \u201cwhite dump\u201d that the kids would climb over and eat, dirt and all. In a strange way, it\u2019s as if the sight of naked old blaring white Sophie that morning has been called what it is — a once tempting sexuality that is now just a \u201cwhite dump.\u201d<\/p>\n Isabel\u2019s having none of it. She has the affair, and many more, and never looks back.<\/p>\n The story seems to make of the old mores a \u201cwhite dump\u201d — a too sweet arrangement where men have every minute provided for them, and where women collude with the charade, but feel empty and cold inside. (Charades, by the way, is a game the family plays. Peter, Isabel\u2019s son, acts out Orion, miming drinking a glass of rye and passing out, thus another white-out turning its head on black-out. But drinking, and maybe drinking to white-out, is part of the culture.)<\/p>\n The only problem with overturning the old family dynamic (the old white dump) is the children that get left behind.<\/p>\n The children are somewhat of a mine dump themselves, being scraps of the marriage, something both the story and Munro acknowledge. Later, as an adult, Denise is not married, has no children, and takes a somewhat condescending view of both herself and her Marxist, Caribbean lover. And she, the story implies, unlike Isabel, has regrets.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s the shitty business that pre-occupies the narrator of this story? Power arrangements, especially power arrangements in family life. The old family dynamic is a shitty business, and one that\u2019s been around so long it\u2019s gone white. It\u2019s taken on a patina, but trust me, says the narrator, it\u2019s still the same old shit. And the new arrangements? The breaking the kids, hearts? The making no effort to reach a marital accommodation? The throwing the whole thing over? Probably a short-sighted, slap-dash renovation that might look good but doesn\u2019t feel good. The whole thing is still a white dump.<\/p>\n [\/fusion_text][\/fusion_builder_column][\/fusion_builder_row][\/fusion_builder_container]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trevor and Betsy share their thoughts on Alice Munro’s “White Dump,” the final story in her collection The Progress of Love<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[232],"tags":[],"coauthors":[505,504],"class_list":["post-22151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alice-munro"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/The-Progress-of-Love-FI.jpg?fit=697%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-5Lh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22151"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22190,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22151\/revisions\/22190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22151"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/The-Progress-of-Love.jpg?resize=344%2C530\")
Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n