\nby Alice Munro
\nfrom\u00a0Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
[\/fusion_title][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=””]<\/p>\n
[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]W[\/fusion_dropcap]hat an astonishing story we have here. I have read “Family Furnishings” several times since I set off to write about it a month or so ago, and each time I come away with more. I’m not entirely sure how to contain my thoughts to something that makes sense here, but I will try.<\/p>\n With “Family Furnishings” Munro once again takes a look at the life of a female writer (this first-person narrator remains nameless), of the lives that writer uses for material, the effect they have on one another.<\/p>\n Much of the first half of the story is about this writer’s early life in a provincial home with little money. It’s a life built by ceremonies (family dinners, the conversations while washing up, etc.), and one that narrator sees as apart from her. Instead, she focuses on Alfrida, an aunt who has left and who seems to be living quite the cosmopolitan lifestyle.<\/p>\n More and more, the narrator grows up to love a life that was not the life she grew up in. She sees no relationship between her and the family she leaves. Distance is easier.<\/p>\n That was the kind of lie I hoped never to have to tell again, the contempt I hoped never to have to show, about the things that really mattered to me. And in order not to have to do that, I would pretty well have to stay clear of the people I used to know.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Part of this life is her own fascination with stories that are larger than life. She is attracted to men at college who go to movies and concerts with her. She eventually marries one. In describing him, Munro once again perfectly states what I think so much of her own art is about:<\/p>\n He admired opera and Laurence Olivier’s\u00a0Hamlet<\/em>, but he had no time for tragedy — for the squalor of tragedy — in ordinary life. His parents were healthy and good-looking and prosperous (though he said of course that they were dull), and it seemed he had not had to know anybody who did not live in fairly sunny circumstances. Failures in life — failures of luck, of health, of finances — all struck him as lapses, and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ramshackle background.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Munro’s work has so often sought to look at the “squalor of tragedy in ordinary life,” and that seems to be what this narrator is attracted to as well. Later in the story, after Alfrida offers her some details about her own tragic past, the narrator walks away with an epiphany:<\/p>\n I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida — not of that in particular — but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.<\/span><\/p>\n This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted to live my life.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n She thinks back on the moment she heard Alfrida say the phrase that would set the narrator off on a life dedicated to her own kind of art:<\/p>\n And the minute I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s rather self-centered and self-gratifying. It’s a price many pay for the life of an artist. It’s a life that not everyone appreciates, of course. Alfrida, for one, resents her story’s appearance, something the narrator at first cannot understand:<\/p>\n I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think of Alfrida’s objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to do with her.<\/span><\/p>\n “It wasn’t Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. “I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that.”<\/span><\/p>\n But as a matter of fact there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And so the narrator continues to see herself as separate from the ordinary, even as she wants to convey that ordinary tragedy. She doesn’t think anyone understands her, and distance grows.<\/p>\n There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting — set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say it was worth the trouble.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So does this narrator have what she wants? She’s told off in no uncertain terms as the story comes to a close, and she learns that there is more tragedy and pain in her family that she herself didn’t see. She’s converted some of this complexity into art. This story looks at that conversion and what that perspective might feel like from the point of view of the artist. It’s wonderful.<\/p>\n Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n [fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]\u201cF[\/fusion_dropcap]amily Furnishings\u201d is notable for its exploration of the writer as a young woman.<\/p>\n Other stories also discuss the work of the writer: \u201cMaterial,\u201d \u201cMeneseteung,\u201d \u201cDifferently,\u201d \u201cLabor Day Dinner,\u201d \u201cMy Mother\u2019s Dream,\u201d and \u201cWho Do You Think You Are?,\u201d with \u201cEpilogue\u201d being chief among them all.<\/p>\n In \u201cFamily Furnishings\u201d the narrator remembers the gauzy day when she was about twenty and felt her serious writing life was about to begin:<\/p>\n When I had walked for over an hour, I saw a drugstore that was open. I went in and had a cup of coffee. The coffee was reheated, black and bitter — its taste was medicinal, exactly what I needed. I was already feeling relieved, and now I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows. To hear from the back of the shop the sounds of the ball game that the man who served me was listening to on the radio. I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida — not of that in particular — but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.<\/span><\/p>\n This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is a side of the writing life. To me, it is a stage of the writer\u2019s life, when the writer can indulge herself in the \u201cheartbeat\u201d of the world. The thought is gorgeous, but romantic. It\u2019s a twenty year old\u2019s writing — beginning with the reheated coffee and the skimpy shadows, and ending with the \u201calmost inhuman assent and lamentation\u201d of the crowd. It\u2019s a stage. It\u2019s the period of very high hopes, but it\u2019s a stage marked by a lack of experience.<\/p>\n Contrast it with Del\u2019s famous passage from the \u201cEpilogue\u201d of Lives of Girls and Women, <\/em>published almost thirty years before.<\/p>\n [. . .] what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together — radiant, everlasting.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Concision marks this passage. Note that in \u201cFamily Furnishings,\u201d in the earlier stage of the writer, the challenge of writing is to \u201c[grab] something out of the air.\u201d Later, the writer will be able to define what it is that must be grabbed: a very specific catalog of \u201cevery last thing.\u201d It\u2019s not that the writer in \u201cFamily Furnishings\u201d is no good; it\u2019s that she is at an incomplete state of development. Whereas the one writer hears \u201cheartbeats,\u201d the other, more experienced writer is after \u201cevery smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together [. . .]\u201d<\/p>\n Note that while the narrator of \u201cFamily Furnishings\u201d believes she hears heartbeats, she writes a story that hurts the woman whose story she is telling.<\/p>\n The story she wrote about Alfrida is completely incomplete, but this is something the writer would only realize later in her life. There are stages. She\u2019s young. I think that\u2019s the point. She\u2019s way beyond the point of Edith in \u201cHateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,\u201d but she\u2019s not quite yet Del. For one thing, Del has suffered.<\/p>\n I want to note that for the third story in a row, Munro says it is a hot day, this time in the section where Munro addresses her narrator\u2019s intention of becoming a writer. The point is, I believe, that the heat is a part of the writer\u2019s lot, that heat is a necessity, most likely. Munro mentions how some coffee the writer-to-be drinks was \u201creheated,\u201d much as the stories a writer tells can be served reheated. Is Alfrida\u2019s story merely reheated?\u00a0<\/em>I think, however, that Munro means that when a story is merely reheated and not actually passed through a crucible it\u2019s not going to be great.<\/p>\n But the writer\u2019s lot is, necessarily, a hot seat.<\/p>\n In the case of \u201cFamily Furnishings,\u201d the young writer has used the story of a family friend she considers only tangential to herself. Alfrida was an acquaintance of the family who very occasionally visited for dinner throughout the writer\u2019s childhood. Alfrida was a \u201cwriter\u201d for a newspaper who took an interest in the young writer\u2019s career. Alfrida\u2019s strange life made up the core of a story the young writer later sold, but Alfrida took great offense and cut the young writer dead. \u00a0It turns out that there was more to Alfrida\u2019s story than the young writer knew, a secret of substantial significance and connection to the writer of which she knew nothing. Would she have used Alfrida in the same way had she known? Would her conception of the writer\u2019s responsibilities to her \u201cmaterial\u201d have been any different?<\/p>\n One of the challenges a writer must live through is the inevitable burden of inexperience.<\/p>\n Does the writer sign a Hippocratic Oath? First, do no harm<\/em>?<\/p>\n How, for instance, does publishing fiction differ from gossip? Gossip is something which apparently serves a function in everyday society.<\/p>\n David Sloan Wilson (professor and author of Darwin\u2019s Cathedral<\/em>) says (see here<\/a>):<\/p>\n [. . .] gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Wilson\u2019s research emphasizes that gossip is how we investigate the world and its rules. In particular, gossip is how we learn what is not taught in school: how to function productively in society.<\/p>\n The problem for the writer is that gossip is private and published fiction is not. Published fiction is public. Regardless of whether a published story is instructive or not, there is a difference between stories which are complete and those which are incomplete.<\/p>\n The problem for the writer in \u201cFamily Furnishings\u201d is a life-long conundrum — whether using someone else\u2019s story was right. The problem is on a spectrum: how is the use of someone else\u2019s life instructive? Or a necessity? Or cruel? Or a violation of the person\u2019s right to privacy? Or an assault on trust? When do you have the right to use someone else\u2019s life?<\/p>\n \u201cFamily Furnishings\u201d does not answer any of these questions. It does raise them, however. It specifically raises the lesser problem of being cut dead. Munro herself suffered some significant cut dead experiences.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Hateship-Loveship.jpg?resize=343%2C530\")
Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n
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