Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro's "Carried Away"

Abstract

graphical in (Lives n. pag.), Munro tracks long, recursive passage out of girlhood in small towns along the Ottawa Valley of Canada. Marking at every turn the tangled connection between past and present, she plots the bitterness and satisfactions of family love, the inscrutability of private lives, and the stubborn calculus of social relations not only in fictional towns like Jubilee and Hanratty but later in Toronto and Vancouver, in affluent suburbs and middleclass marriages. Hers is fiction, as Ajay Heble points out, that continues both to invite and to sustain reading within realist tradition. In the last decade, however, growing body of critical work has focused attention on the ways in which Munro's stories problematize the very mode they inhabit, undoing the illusion of transparency and advancing in reflexive, opaque, often difficult ways on the unstable worlds of narrative, memory, and writing itself. Ildik6 de Papp Carrington's extensive tracking of Munro's allusions and metaphors, James Carscallen's elaboration of patterns (of names, of symbols, of tropes) across volumes, Magdalene Redekop's identification of suppressed maternal imagery, E. D. Blodgett's reasoning about narrative strategies and narrative selves, Heble's own persuasive argument for language's dual nature as a form of representation in Munro's work but also as system of signs (5)-all emphasize in