Camden House

Chapter Title: “The Emptiness in Place of Her”: Space, Absence, and Memory in Alice
Munro’s Dear Life
Chapter Author(s): Ailsa Cox

Book Title: Space and Place in Alice Munro's Fiction

Book Subtitle: "A Book with Maps in It"
Book Editor(s): Christine Lorre-Johnston and Eleonora Rao
Published by: Boydell & Brewer; Camden House

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1wx934v.12

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 6: “The Emptiness in Place of Her”:
Space, Absence, and Memory in
Alice Munro’s Dear Life

Ailsa Cox

A LICE MUNRO’S 2012 COLLECTION, Dear Life, revisits many places

familiar from her previous work—mapping both domestic space and
the semi-rural landscapes of small town Canada. “In Sight of the Lake,”
“Amundsen,” and “Gravel” return to the key image of the lake, while
other stories (“To Reach Japan,” “Train”) echo her use of the transitional
space of the train in “Wild Swans” (Who Do You Think You Are? / The
Beggar Maid, 1978) and “Chance” (Runaway, 2004).1 Munro territory
is by its nature ambiguous and multidimensional. But these later stories
are especially marked by silence and absence, evoked by wintry land-
scapes, empty streets; or the fractured narrative viewpoint associated with
memory loss or repression. Munro has declared Dear Life to be her final
collection; it is a book that summarizes her career in many ways and, with
the autobiographical sequence, “Finale,” closes with a statement of its
origins in personal experience.
Bakhtin’s well-known concept of the chronotope, the configuration of
space and time that characterizes a specific text or genre, both symbolically
and structurally, helps us to understand the resonance of landscape and archi-
tecture in these stories. Munro uses her characters’ perception of external
space to map subjective experience, often locating her characters very pre-
cisely in relation to their immediate environment in order to register that
which is not seen or not understood or placed at the periphery of the con-
scious mind. In this chapter I shall focus on the relationship between space,
absence, and memory in two stories—“Train” and “Gravel”—the former an
example of third-person narration and free indirect discourse, while the latter
mimics autobiographical discourse through first-person narration.

Train
“Train,” the story of a drifter in rural Ontario, is a reminder of Munro’s
debt to Southern Gothic writers, so evident in her first collection, Dance

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 120  AILSA COX

of the Happy Shades (1968). The relationship between the protagonist,

Jackson, and Belle, the isolated spinster whose farm he takes over, is espe-
cially reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor. Newly returned from the war,
Jackson jumps from the train just ahead of his stop:

Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused

your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You
looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An
immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in
a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just
looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you
going? A sense of being watched by things you didn’t know about.
Of being a disturbance. Life around coming to some conclusions
about you from vantage points you couldn’t see. (DL, 176–77)

This is one of Munro’s most elliptical stories, constructed as a series of

loosely connected passages, shifting abruptly in time and space. This dis-
continuity is literalized in the passage above. Jackson’s physical disorien-
tation is also represented by the destabilization of narrative viewpoint; the
exchange of positions between spectator and observed and the invocation
of “vantage points you couldn’t see.” This paragraph does not appear
in the version published in the April 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine;
its inclusion indicates the significance of spectatorship in the story as a
whole. The brief digression into second-person narration contributes to
this instability of viewpoint, and accentuates the sense of detachment.
Munro employs free indirect discourse throughout the story, focalized
mostly through Jackson, but also interweaving the speech of other char-
acters, especially Belle, making those voices vivid and immediate through
fragmented sentence structures.
In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin
discusses the significance of the chronotope of the road in works of fic-
tion, especially those where events may be governed by chance:

Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flows with it (form-
ing the road); this is the source of the rich metaphorical expansion
on the image of the road as a course: “the course of a life,” “to set
out on a new course,” “the course of history” and so on; varied and
multi-leveled are the ways in which a road turns into a metaphor,
but its fundamental pivot is the flow of time.2

Jackson is on course “to where he’s supposed to be” (DL, 177); we are
not told why he abandons his predetermined course for the open road,
the site of random encounters. He launches himself into a space which,
for him, represents contingency, but in fact consists of a different kind

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 “THE EMPTINESS IN PLACE OF HER”  121

of order, an untamed natural world encroaching on the man-made—“a

railway track that seemed to have reverted from its normal purpose of
carrying people and freight to become a province of wild apple trees and
thorny berry bushes and trailing grapevines and crows” (DL, 177), and
other, unseen, birds, and trees he is unable to put a name to.
The linear road of narrative progression is also disrupted by unex-
pected changes of direction. At this point, the focalization changes briefly
to Belle, whose cow, Margaret Rose, discovers Jackson lurking on the
tracks near her land. Belle shelters Jackson, and then takes him on to run
the dilapidated farm. Jackson has found himself in a liminal space which
seems disconnected from modernity. This estrangement is heightened
when he hears “a peculiar sound . . . a clip-clop, clip-clop. Along with the
clip-clop some little tinkle or whistling” (DL, 180):

Over the hill came a box on wheels, being pulled by two quite small
horses. Smaller than the one in the field but no end livelier. And in
the box sat a half dozen or so little men. All dressed in black, with
proper black hats on their heads.
The sound was coming from them. It was singing. Discreet high-
pitched little voices, as sweet as could be. They never looked at him
as they went by. (DL, 180)

At first the singers are invisible to Jackson; and then he is invisible to

them. These figures are in fact Mennonite children on their way to
church, and later Jackson will help their families during harvest time.
Belle is also “a grown-up child” (DL, 189): “And her talk re-inforced this
impression, jumping back and forth into the past and out again, so that
it seemed she made no difference between their last trip to town and the
last movie she had seen with her mother and father, or the comical occa-
sion when Margaret Rose—now dead—had tipped her horns at a worried
Jackson” (DL, 189). Belle’s account of her childhood brings incongrui-
ties of its own, thwarting expectations the reader might have imported
from its Southern Gothic antecedents. Belle is no more a country per-
son than Jackson himself; the farm was originally bought as a summer
retreat by her family in Toronto. Like Jackson, Belle has found herself
here through circumstance, nursing her invalid mother after her journalist
father is killed on the railway line, presumably on the same track, where,
we have been told, the train slows down.
Belle’s name suggests the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast.” Cocteau’s
dreamlike film, La belle et la bête, was released in 1946,3 around the time
when Jackson ventures onto the enchanted territory of Belle’s farm. In
most traditional versions, Beauty’s father has relocated to the country
under financial pressure, eventually journeying out in search of another
fortune. We might also remember that it is the affection between father

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 122  AILSA COX

and daughter that prompts the father’s theft of the rose and her sub-
sequent atonement in his place. Belle’s father fictionalizes Belle as
“Pussycat” in his Toronto column, reserving for his wife the nickname
“Princess Casamassima, out of a book whose name, she said, meant noth-
ing anymore” (DL, 184). There are other princesses in this story, fan-
tasized figures from the English royal family. The cow, Margaret Rose,
is named after the younger of the British princesses, Elizabeth and
Margaret Rose (the adult Princess Margaret abandoned the second part
of her name). Belle’s father has been working on a historical novel about
another royal figure, Matilda. Nonetheless, it is Jackson who plays the
role of Beauty, lingering in a realm where time seems to be suspended;
and it is Belle who, like the Beast, makes a startling revelation when she is
close to death.
As we have seen in the opening section of the story, much is with-
held from the reader. Although we are granted access to Jackson’s interior
consciousness, aspects of his thoughts and memories are excluded. The
story frequently alludes to that which is unknown or forgotten, from the
names of the trees to the book “whose name . . . meant nothing any-
more” (DL, 184). Charles E. May’s chapter on Munro in his recent vol-
ume of criticism, I Am Your Brother, restates his long-held view that in
the short story reality is ineffable, and motivation inherently obscure.4 In
an article on Richard Ford’s story “Optimists,” Joe Frank takes this point
a little further, arguing that the mysterious and indeterminate aspects of
the modern short story may be related to nescience, “the human condi-
tion of being bound by limited and imperfect knowledge.”5 The gaps in
Jackson’s knowledge are linked to its willful suppression, and also a failure
to recognize that which is at least partially familiar.
In his discussion of the chronotope of the open road in novels by
Petronius, Cervantes, Gogol, and other writers, Bakhtin argues that in
these examples “the road is always one that passes through familiar ter-
ritory, and not through some exotic alien world.”6 As we have seen, the
anachronistic rural world Jackson experiences when he jumps from the
train does, indeed, appear as alien as the forest where Beauty’s father finds
himself lost “within thirty miles of his own house.”7 When he drives Belle
to a medical appointment in Toronto, she is struck by the changes she
sees on the way: “Are you so sure we are still in Canada?” (DL, 190).
Yet she also maps her own memories onto the city, identifying her old
school and the church where her parents were married, and imagining
her father’s newspaper just as it was, with his photograph at the head of
the column. Despite the length of his sojourn, stretching into the 1960s,
Jackson has never intended to stay with Belle on a permanent basis. His
sudden resumption of his journey appears, at first sight, to be a random
decision, but is in fact linked to the impossibility of escape from the famil-
iar territory he has tried to leave behind.

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 “THE EMPTINESS IN PLACE OF HER”  123

At the hospital, Belle reveals more about her father’s death in a

lengthy analeptic passage, narrated entirely in direct speech. She describes
him looking at her naked body in the bathroom on the evening before
the accident that, in this version, is implicitly recast as suicide. Like
Jackson’s meeting with the Mennonite children, Belle’s account of her
father’s voyeurism is carefully staged. She gives an exact account of where
the bathroom was situated and how she carried the water up the stairs
and undressed:

There was a big mirror over the sink, you see it had a sink like a real
bathroom, only you had to pull out the plug and let the water back
into the pail when you were finished. . . . It must have been around
nine o’clock at night so there was plenty of light. It was summer, did
I say? That little room facing the west?
Then I heard steps and of course it was Daddy. My father. (DL,
195)

Once again, the sounds are heard from beyond a character’s imme-
diate proximity—offstage, as it were—announcing the imminent arrival
of something unseen, mysterious and disturbing. The steps are “not like
usual. Very deliberate” (DL, 196). The door opens and the father gazes
at her with a stare that is not “in any sense a normal look” and then says
“Excuse me . . . in a funny kind of voice” (DL, 196).
Belle’s exact reconstruction strains for the accuracy of a witness state-
ment, but it is also infused with a profound ambivalence. Traumatic or
violent incidents often occur in Munro’s stories, especially in the later
collections, but their significance lies not so much as plot devices as in
the way they are perceived or recollected. Belle herself downplays these
events: “It was nobody’s fault”; “It is just the mistakes of humanity” (DL,
198). Her motive for sharing her secret with Jackson is to communicate
something else, indirectly, as we shall see.
Belle’s description of “my face looking into the mirror and him look-
ing at me in the mirror and also what was behind me and I couldn’t
see” (DL, 196) leaves the reader to imagine what her father might be
doing, partially glimpsed on the threshold—perhaps masturbating.
Bakhtin ascribes an especially potent emotion charge to the threshold, as
“the chronotope of crisis and break in a life.”8 This charge is channeled
through the mutual gaze, caught in multiple reflections and refractions.
In the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which is an antecedent of “Beauty and
the Beast,” Psyche is banished by her husband, Cupid, when she defies his
order not to look at him. I am also reminded of Beauty’s magic mirror
in Cocteau’s film, which functions as a type of surveillance camera, keep-
ing Beauty informed of events in her absence. To look is to know, and to
exchange glances necessitates acknowledgment.

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 124  AILSA COX

However the young Belle does not understand what she sees; she
is blind to a crucial element in this whole scenario, the word the older
Belle pronounces for Jackson’s benefit. The word is “sex” (DL, 198).
Munro displays the utterance as a single sentence paragraph, creating a
dramatic pause in Belle’s lengthy speech, and foregrounding the break-
ing of taboos. Her revelation, dramatic yet also banal, is intended to sig-
nal complicity in male sexual needs: “There should be acknowledgement,
that’s all I mean, places where people can go if they are in a situation. And
not be all ashamed and guilty about it. If you think I mean brothels, you
are right. If you think prostitutes, right again. Do you understand?” (DL,
198). Jackson says he does, but significantly does not meet her gaze.
Bakhtin emphasizes the subtlety of the threshold chronotope as the site
of sudden breaks and crises, which may operate implicitly through imagery.
The causal link between Belle’s uncalled for intimacy and Jackson’s depar-
ture is underplayed. Once again he embraces contingency, allowing random
events to carry him once more along the open road. Taking a walk from the
hospital, he wanders the streets of Toronto, finally joining a small crowd
gathered outside an apartment block whose caretaker is being taken away
by ambulance: “Jackson was one of those who didn’t bother to walk away.
He wouldn’t have said he was curious about any of this, more that he was
just waiting for the inevitable turn he had been expecting, to take him back
to where he’d come from” (DL, 200–201).
He takes on the caretaker’s job, once again seeming to settle down
into a routine existence until another seemingly random event brings even
more narrative disruption. This event parallels the incident between Belle
and her father, in that much of it takes place “offstage.” Jackson overhears
a woman enquiring after her runaway daughter, who has been staying in
the apartment block. He is outside his office, where the conversation is
taking place, but recognizes her just by her voice as his wartime sweet-
heart, Ileane Bishop. It was Ileane he was supposed to be meeting before
he jumped the train. Further analeptic passages chart their romance and
his failed attempt at sexual consummation while on leave. That failure
explains Jackson’s first disappearance, and its memory triggers his next
departure on a train heading north.
The chronotope of the threshold is invoked symbolically through the
many references to doors opening and closing during Ileane’s fruitless
visit to the apartment block as Jackson keeps himself out of sight. In an
interview with the New Yorker, Munro has said that this story is “all about
the man who is confident and satisfied as long as no sex gets in the way.
I think a rowdy woman tormented him when he was young.”9 In the
Harper’s version the form these torments take at the hands of Jackson’s
stepmother is more explicitly sexual than in the final version: “what she
called her fooling or her teasing when she gave him a bath” (emphasis
added). This final clause is removed from the Dear Life version.

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 “THE EMPTINESS IN PLACE OF HER”  125

The critic Nicholas Royle refers specifically to Alice Munro when he

claims that “the space of the short story is closed, and in crucial ways,
blind.”10 This “blindness” is related to an instability of viewpoint, which
typically manifests itself in her work through the layering of voices and
the sudden shifts in time and space. Ellipses, silences, and omissions are all
aspects of this fundamental blindness. In “Train,” the protagonist’s iden-
tity is poised on a threshold between internal and external space, self and
other. In one of the story’s final analeptic passages, Munro describes the
night before Jackson leaves for the war, the night of his failed love-mak-
ing with Ileane, the minister’s daughter. A picture of George VI hangs on
the kitchen wall, with the excerpt of religious poetry he included in his
Christmas broadcast to the Empire in 1939:

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into
the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer
than a known way.” (DL, 213)

In the context of Jackson’s story, the morale-boosting symbolism of the

threshold and the poem’s journey into “darkness” is given a different,
personal, meaning, divested of its religious connotations. When, faced by
the prospect of reunion, made still more dreadful by the unmissable lime
green outfit Ileane has been making, Jackson chooses to remove himself:
“A person could just not be there” (DL, 214). The impersonal construc-
tion—“a person” rather than “he” or even “you”—blurs the viewpoint
between spectator and spectacle.
On the eve of his final departure, Jackson dreams about the
Mennonite boys singing in the cart. The image is uncanny, and made even
more so by its recapitulation, since, as Freud points out, the Unheimlich
is compounded by repetition. The Unheimlich is, of course, in dialogue
with the notion of “home,” and in these closing pages we may feel that
every new direction circles back on itself, returning Jackson to the very
place where he began.
Elizabeth Bowen claims that the short story’s “poetic tautness and
clarity” brings the form “to the edge of prose; in its use of action it is
nearer to drama than to the novel.”11 In his article “Theatricality in the
Short Story: Staging the Word?” Laurent Lepaludier comments on the
frequency of theatrical effects in a range of texts, identifying passages
where the dramatic mode appears to overcome the narrative modal-
ity.12 In “Train” and in “Gravel,” which I discuss next, events are often
“staged” in the telling, and this “staging” effect positions characters care-
fully in relation to a mise-en-scène.

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 126  AILSA COX

Bowen goes on to say that “the story should be as composed, in the

plastic sense, and as visual as a picture.”13 There could not be a stronger
example of this “plasticity” than Munro’s work. She arranges her words
precisely on the page, sometimes revising superficially minor details of
layout between magazine publication and a story’s appearance in a col-
lection. That truncated line, “Sex” (DL, 198), demonstrates her deploy-
ment of fractured paragraphs as a rhythmic and dramatic device. (See also
the jagged intensity of the closing pages of “Dolly,” where the abbre-
viated paragraphs speed up narrative pace; and the slower unfurling of
thoughts at the close of “Leaving Maverley”). The chronotopic proper-
ties of the short story genre in general, and Munro’s work in particular,
are grounded in fluid concepts of time and space, and in a special affinity
with the present moment. The dislocations and displacements of “Train”
are made possible by this inherent fluidity. Bakhtin says that “the chro-
notope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space,
emerges as a center for concretizing representation.”14 His analysis of
the representational significance of the chronotope stresses an increased
density of temporal markers, but we might also consider heightened
awareness of the spaces the characters inhabit, both in their fictional envi-
ronments and in the material spaces on the page, as a function of a short-
story chronotope.

Gravel
Coral Ann Howells begins her 1998 study of Alice Munro with an invi-
tation to study a map of Canada, homing in on Southwestern Ontario,
where most of the stories are set. Howells points out that while these fic-
tional mappings include social observation, they transcend external docu-
mentation, explaining that their narrators “are fascinated by dark holes
and by unscripted spaces.”15 A later Munro story is even entitled “Deep-
Holes” (TMH). “Gravel” takes its title from the unremarkable gravel pit
that serves as the closest thing to a landmark for a homodiegetic narrator
reminiscing about childhood, beginning with the simple statement: “At
that time we were living beside a gravel pit” (DL, 91). Dear Life is full of
such temporal indeterminacies: the previous story, “Leaving Maverley,”
begins with an allusion to “the old days” (DL, 67). Brief references in this
story to the atom bomb, Vietnam, dope-smoking, and Cuba suggest the
nineteen sixties or seventies. Other details, notably the narrator’s name
and gender, are also withheld in a story that is so much concerned with
secrecy, estrangement, and the unfathomable nature of another’s subjec-
tivity—including our own younger selves, concealed within an irretriev-
able past.
“The old gravel pit out the service-station road” (DL, 91) embodies
the notion of a marginal territory at the edge of town, a space that figures

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 “THE EMPTINESS IN PLACE OF HER”  127

often in Munro’s fiction. “Voices,” along with the other autobiographi-

cal pieces in the “Finale” section of Dear Life, revisits this in-between
space: “Our family was out of town but not really in the country” (DL,
287). For the characters in “Gravel” the movement out of town involves
a decline in social status. Rather like the lady in the border ballad, “The
Raggle Taggle Gypsy,” the mother has gladly forsaken her silver and her
china and her books and her silk nightdresses and her diamond ring and
her decorating scheme for a life at the margins with a feckless lover. Unlike
the fine lady in the ballad, she has taken her two children with her to live
in a trailer with Neal, a university dropout who has taken up acting.
The gravel pit stands for a life at the margins; its origins and purpose
not entirely clear. This deep hole also stands for vacancy and absence,
marking the erasure of what we might call the narrator’s pre-history,
the time before the move. “I barely remember that life,” the narrator
observes, perhaps not surprisingly as she was the younger child, not yet
old enough for school (DL, 91). Here the adult narrator is remember-
ing the act of recollection, at the prompting of the older child, Caro.
Differentiating between what he calls “pure recollection” and “habit
memory” (usually practical skills and knowledge), Henri Bergson refers
to the “radical powerlessness of pure memory.”16 Recollection of a par-
ticular event, or of a place, is involuntary, partial, and subject to change.
It cannot be willed into existence. For the narrator as a child, memories
of the old house consist of little more than the pattern of the wallpaper—
a source of frustration for Caro. The adult narrator is piecing together
fragments of involuntary memory that may also be conditioned by the
passing of time.
For the reader, the gravel pit may be a source of anxiety; despite an
emphasis on its relatively shallow depth, the careful description in the
opening paragraph seems to foreshadow disaster. We may also be unset-
tled by the attention Munro pays to the family dog, Blitzee, whose new-
found country lifestyle includes hunting for squirrels and groundhogs,
much to the distress of the older child, Caro. While the other members
of the family are displaced from their origins, Blitzee has found her true
element. When Neal chides Caro, telling her that predation is a natural
instinct, Caro responds:

“She gets her dog food,” Caro argued, but Neal said, “Suppose she
didn’t? Suppose some day we all disappeared and she had to fend for
herself?”
“I’m not going to,” Caro said. “I’m not going to disappear, and
I’m always going to look after her.” (DL, 92)

Neal is alluding to a post-apocalyptic future, after “the bomb”; the use

of the iterative in the account of this particular conversation—“Caro

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 128  AILSA COX

was quite upset by this, and Neal would have a talk with her” (DL,
92)—suggests that this is an ongoing exchange, endlessly replayed by
the two of them.
The irony of Caro’s words will be revealed at the story’s climax,
when she misguidedly stages an attempt to rescue Blitzee from the water-
filled pit. Caro does, indeed, most tragically “disappear,” and our misgiv-
ings about this pit are fulfilled by that denouement. This is far from the
first reference to drowning in Munro’s oeuvre, other examples includ-
ing “Miles City, Montana” (The Progress of Love, 1986), “Pictures of the
Ice” (Friend of My Youth, 1990) and “Child’s Play” (Too Much Happiness,
2009). In “Gravel,” the drowning completes a pattern of disappearances,
both symbolic and real. Neal is himself a spectral figure,17 his acting role
as Banquo’s ghost well suited to his penchant for “giving yourself over,
blending with others” (DL, 95).
Acting and play-acting are also favorite tropes in Munro’s fiction. In
an article on theatricality as distantiation in her earlier work, Lee Garner
and Jennifer Murray note that acting or the recasting of real life as perfor-
mance facilitates an internal split between observer and participant: “The
ironic observing distance is one from which the character/reader may feel
protected from the potential violence of certain moments of excess, but
it is equally one from which the fantastic complexity of the business of
being human may be glimpsed.”18 Neal retreats into the role of observer,
remaining entirely passive, making no effort to save Caro when the alarm
is raised; staying away from her funeral, because he “didn’t believe in
funerals” (DL, 105), and abdicating the role of father when his son is
born shortly after the child’s death. Fittingly, the family snowman is nick-
named “Neal”; we all know that snowmen inevitably melt into nothing.
Before Caro’s last, fatal act of make-believe, she stages several other inci-
dents with the dog, hiding Blitzee under her coat on the school bus and
leaving her on the porch of the old house, as if she had made her way back
of her own accord. Blitzee makes a genuine, if short-lived, disappearance,
when “another dog,” perhaps a wolf, is glimpsed by the mailbox (DL,
98); this phantom wolf also vanishes, and, according to Neal, probably
never existed. Curiously, the name originally chosen for the unborn child
the mother is carrying is rather like a dog’s name—“Brandy” (DL, 98).
This child will make its entry into the world soon after Caro has disap-
peared from it.
The ambiguities, invisibilities, and absences of the story are height-
ened by the winter landscape: “Those short winter days must have
seemed strange to me—in town, the lights came on at dusk. But children
get used to changes. Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I
didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again—I just wondered where
it had gone” (DL, 96). Landscape, weather, and the seasons evoke a lim-
inal state, in which time is suspended and actions become play-acting,

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 “THE EMPTINESS IN PLACE OF HER”  129

without serious consequences. As winter reaches its end, the pit fills with
melted snow; it has now become a lake, “still and dazzling under the clear
sky” (DL, 100). The spectacle fascinates Caro. The children’s Saturday
activities with their father have included going to the movies, eating out,
and looking at Lake Huron. Looking at this artificial lake provides the
children with an alternative source of entertainment.
As I have suggested in my analysis of “Train,” Munro often uses land-
scape to enact the erasure of memory and the absence of knowledge—or
even its suppression. Caro and Neal contest each other’s factual accuracy;
she corrects his claim that wolves hibernate and ignores his other false
assumption, that dogs are immune from drowning. Toward the end of
the story, the narrator’s crucial failure to act is recounted, along with the
various unsatisfactory explanations supplied, much later, in counseling.
Caro orders her sibling to tell the adults “that the dog had fallen into the
water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned” (DL, 102). But there is
a delay. The moment is reconstructed through that most involuntary of
memories, the dream:

When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am

running not towards the trailer but back towards the gravel pit. I
can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming towards her,
swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown
checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and
reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have
to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.
What I really did was make my way up the little incline towards
the trailer. And when I got there I just sat down. Just as if there had
been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of
these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.
(DL, 102–3)

This last phrase, “waited for the next thing to happen,” echoes the final
line of “To Reach Japan,” where another child of an adulterous mother
“just stood waiting for whatever had to come next” (DL, 30). Both
lines imply that the child is a spectator, rather than a participant, in the
events of the story; they suggest disempowerment and fatalism. I am also
reminded of a much earlier story from Munro’s first collection, Dance of
the Happy Shades. In “Boys and Girls,” the narrator recollects disobeying
her father’s instructions to close a gate to stop a horse escaping, opening
it wider instead: “I did not make any decision to do this, it was just what I
did” (DHS, 125). Here too, no rational explanation can be made for the
child’s perverse behavior.
These events are, of course, interpreted through hindsight at some
undetermined point in time, long after their original occurrence. Despite

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 130  AILSA COX

those counseling sessions, exploring various possible scenarios to account

for her silence, the anonymous narrator expresses a degree of ambiva-
lence toward “all the eviscerating that is done in families these days”; “My
mother cannot be made to recall any of those times” (DL, 106), any more
than the narrator’s younger self was able to remember the old house. But
unlike Caro, the narrator does not attempt to force those memories.
As we have seen, “pure memory” cannot be summoned at will, sup-
plying the missing links in a chain of events. According to Bergson, there
is no such thing as a self-contained present moment within the flow of
time. What we think of as the present disappears into the past as it arises,
and should be conceptualized as the intersection of memory and percep-
tion. If that is the case, then perhaps the “radical powerlessness of pure
memory”19 overlaps with the gaps in decision-making.
Once again, the threshold of the chronotope is invoked, the chro-
notope of crisis and life change, as the child lingers by the trailer before
knocking. Meeting Neal again, the narrator asks him, “What do you think
Caro had in mind?” (DL, 108). He offers some suggestions, but no con-
clusive answer, telling her not to waste her time, to just get on with her
life. The “ironic observing distance” described by Lee and Garner does
offer the potential for survival. He says: “Accept everything and then
tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there,
going along easy in the world” (DL, 109).
But his are not the story’s final words. It closes by returning to that
moment reconstructed, or partially reconstructed from memory and
recurring in dreams: “. . . in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water
and throwing herself in, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for
her to explain to me, waiting for the splash” (DL, 109). The gravel pit,
we have been told, is filled in now, with a house on top of it (the narrator
speculates that the pit might have been intended for the foundations of a
house when it is first described). We might interpret the pit’s disappear-
ance as the negation of memory; and yet every absence is in dialogue with
presence, just as silence is in dialogue with speech.
Many of the other stories in Dear Life deal with absence and bereave-
ment, marking these absences through spatial metaphors or the per-
ception of space. In “Leaving Maverley,” which immediately precedes
“Gravel” in the collection, the protagonist’s sick wife spends several years
in hospital before dying in the story’s closing pages:

Isabel was finally gone. They said “gone,” as if she had got up and
left. When some one had checked her about an hour ago, she had
been the same as ever, and now she was gone.
He had often wondered what difference it would make.
But the emptiness in place of her was astounding. (DL, 89–90)

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 “THE EMPTINESS IN PLACE OF HER”  131

The stories in Dear Life have titles as cryptic as any in the late collec-
tions—most of them consisting of a single word. If we had to choose an
alternative title for “Gravel,” “the emptiness in place of her” would serve.
Many of the stories in this collection, and in Munro’s work as a whole, are
haunted by the dead, or by characters who, like Jackson, withhold them-
selves from others. Silences and absences are made palpable, and although
the past is irretrievable, memory strives to fill both the psychic and the
spatial void.

Notes
1 The following editions of Alice Munro’s works are cited in this chapter: Dance
of the Happy Shades (London: Penguin, 1983), hereafter cited as DHS; Dear Life
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2012), hereafter cited as DL; Friend of My Youth
(New York: Knopf, 1990), hereafter cited as FY; The Progress of Love (New York:
Knopf, 1986), hereafter cited as PL; and Too Much Happiness (London: Chatto &
Windus, 2009), hereafter cited as TMH.
2M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992),
244.
3 Jean Cocteau, dir. La belle et la bête, DVD, Discina, 1946.
4 Charles E. May, “The Short Story Way of Meaning: Munro,” in I Am Your
Brother: Short Story Studies (Long Beach, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publish-
ing Platform, 2013), 235–57.
5 Joseph Frank, “American Laconic: Nescience and Realism in Richard Ford’s
‘Optimists,’” Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 4, no. 1 (2014): 25.
6 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 245 (original emphasis).
7 Iona Opie and Peter Opie, eds., The Classic Fairy Tales (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1974), 140.
8 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 248 (original emphasis).
9 Deborah Treisman, “On ‘Dear Life’: An Interview with Alice Munro,” New
Yorker, 20 November 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/
on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro.
10 Nicholas Royle, “Spooking Forms,” Oxford Literary Review 26, no. 1 (2004):

156.
11 Elizabeth Bowen, “The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories,” in The New Short

Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May, 256 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994).
12 Laurent Lepaludier, “Theatricality in the Short Story: Staging the Word?”
Journal of the Short Story in English 51 (Autumn 2008): 17–28.
13 Bowen, “The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories,” 260.
14 Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 250.

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 132  AILSA COX

15Coral Ann Howells, Alice Munro (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1998), 3.
16Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 141.
17 In my chapter “‘Almost Like a Ghost’: Spectral Figures in Alice Munro’s Short
Fiction,” in Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American,
Canadian, and British Writing, ed. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann (London:
Routledge, 2015), I discuss Munro’s use of ghost-like figures in more detail.
18 Jennifer Murray and Lee Garner, “From Participant to Observer: Theatrical-
ity as Distantiation in ‘Royal Beatings’ and ‘Lives of Girls and Women’ by Alice
Munro,” Journal of the Short Story in English 51 (Autumn 2008): 155.
19 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 141.

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