Synecdoche and the Munrovian Sublime: Parts and Wholes in Lives of Girls and Women

Abstract

SYNECDOCHE AND THE MUNROVTAN SUBLIME: PARTS AND WHOLES IN LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN MARJORIE GARSON University o f Toronto Lives of Girls and Women is about parts and wholes. One of the text’s central images is the body and its organs, members, and fluids. One of its central themes is what it means to be “part” of a family, of a small town, of the cast of the school play, of the British empire, of the American continent, and (as a woman) of mankind. These two “parts” of the novel— the cor­ poreal imagery and the social theme— are connected through the image of the “Living Body” (28), at once the individual physical body and the social group.1The image points to a utopian dream of integrity and vitality, but the dream is never fulfilled; on the contrary, bodies in this text are continually coming apart. The body of Christ in Jubilee is comically split into four de­ nominations less along theological than along class lines; and the individual physical body seems in this text peculiarly vulnerable to violent fragmenta­ tion. Tabloid headlines scream messages like “SENDS HUSBAND’S TORSO BY MAIL” (5); women like Aunt Moira are plagued by “varicose veins, hem­ orrhoids, a dropped womb, cysted ovaries, inflammations, discharges, lumps and stones in various places” (40); menstrual blood “trickle[s] horrifyingly down the inside of the thighs” (179); tongues in kissing become “mere lumps of unlucky flesh” (203); the eye of the dead cow may “quiver and break like a jelly, . . . let loose all sorts of putrid mess” (44); Uncle Craig’s dead face, “like a delicate mask of skin . . . ready to crack when you poked a finger into it,” hides “forces that could flare up, in an instant, and burn through this room, all reality, leaving] us dark” (59); one of Del’s classmates dies of kidney disease; cancer kills Addie’s mother and taints the breath of her brother Bill with a “secret hairy foulness” (82). Jesus may believe that he is going to “rise up whole and bright and everlasting” (108) after the cruci­ fixion, but in Del’s world the vision of the Living Body can be realized only parodically, through organ transplant, a mechanical process that begins in death and dismemberment. The insistent presence of the corps morcelé in Lives of Girls and Women might suggest that Munro shares some of Lacan’s insights,2 and certain echoes and images in the text do seem to imply that the notion of the whole is a mirror-stage illusion. The novel, like The Prelude, begins at the side of a river, with Ben taking for granted that “the river and the bush and the 413 whole of Grenoch Swamp” belong to him even as he claims that there is a “quicksand hole in there that would take down a two-ton truck” (2). By the time Del turns to the church to seek a Berkeleyan God in whose mind the whole universe— “all those atoms, galaxies of atoms” (100)— could safely whirl, it already has been suggested that to seek a whole is to find a hole, that the reflecting surface of the eye gives back only the I and its narratives, that behind the mask there is nothing; and it is not long before her anticipa­ tion of a Zeus-like deity descending in “a dense bright cloud . . . on Jubilee, wrapping itself around my skull” (106), modulates into a fantasy of being seen naked by Arthur Chamberlain “humming away electrically like a blue fluorescent light” (155) and finally— in her Caroline story— into the eye of the demonic photographer’s camera. As the epiphanic fire becomes the gaze of the Other, what the adolescent took for theological desire begins to look more like specular narcissism. For Lacan, it is the inevitable breakdown of the illusion of wholeness and integrity that produces the kinds of images of the fragmented body so often found in Lives of Girls and Women.3 It is clear of course that Munro is politicizing this material: that she is interested not only in the inevitable collapse of the specular illusion but also in who has the power...