‘She would probably envy herself, from outside’: Auto-fictional narrations in Alice Munro’s ‘Fiction’

Abstract

In one of Alice Munro’s longer stories, the metafictional ‘Fiction’, readers encounter a series of contingent narratives in which characters exert explicit, self-constructing expressive labours. The text is split into two sections: in the first, the protagonist Joyce is betrayed by her husband, Jon and her life momentarily falls to pieces. In the second section, decades later, Joyce is remarried, surrounded by friends and family, her life replenished and thriving. A gamut of fictions suffuses this text, as if Munro’s scenes are case studies delivering heuristic knowledge and Joyce’s self-narrativizations act as if a generative mode of self-care (the talking cure for one, as such). At heart, Munro seems to explore for the possible functions of fiction: through Joyce’s example, it seems that part of the work of fiction remains intra-personal, in this text a means by which to switch trauma off. Joyce’s mind is shown to work in anti-repressive modes, creating clearly narrativized lines of self-understanding which, in this case, enable the protagonist to literally come to terms with a self-told story placing at the denouement her own blamelessness. Herewith, ‘Fiction’ can be read as a complexly woven narrative on modes of narrativization, Munro seemingly implying that memories retold and reframed are a functional gestalt enabling some to become more than the sum of past traumas. Through accepting that life sometimes can be as positively strange as fiction, Joyce is able finally to both rejoice and (as it were) re-Joyce.