Alice Munro has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature, thus becoming its 13th female recipient. It's a thrilling honour for a major writer: Munro has long been recognised in North America and the UK, but the Nobel will draw international attention, not only to women's writing and Canadian writing, but to the short story, Munro's chosen métier and one often overlooked.
Whenever the Nobel is conferred, a deluge of media descends – like the pack of cards cascading on to that other Alice, she of Wonderland – not only on the winner, illuminated in the sudden glare of international publicity like a burglar trapped in headlights, but on every other writer who has known the chosen one. A quote, a reminiscence, an evaluation! Account for it! Why her? they clamour.
Munro herself is unlikely to say much along these lines: Canadians are discouraged from bragging – see the Munro story, Who Do You Think You Are? – so will probably spend much of her time hiding in the figurative tool shed.
We're all slightly furtive, we writers; especially we Canadian writers, and even more especially we Canadian female writers of an earlier generation. "Art is what you can get away with," said Canadian Marshall McLuhan, and I invite the reader to count how many of the murderers in Munro's stories are ever caught. (Answer: none.) Munro understands the undercover heist that is fiction writing, as well as its pleasures and fears: how delicious to have done it, but what if you get found out?
Back in the 1950s and 60s, when Munro began, there was a feeling that not only female writers but Canadians were thought to be both trespassing and transgressing.
Munro found herself referred to as "some housewife", and was told that her subject matter, being too "domestic", was boring. A male writer told her she wrote good stories, but he wouldn't want to sleep with her. "Nobody invited him," said Munro tartly. When writers occur in Munro stories, they are pretentious, or exploitative of others; or they're being asked by their relatives why they aren't famous, or – worse, if female – why they aren't better-looking.
The road to the Nobel wasn't an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero. She was born in 1931, and thus experienced the Depression as a child and the second world war as a teenager. This was in south-western Ontario, a region that also produced Robertson Davies, Graeme Gibson, James Reaney, and Marian Engel, to name several.
It's this small-town setting that features most often in her stories – the busybodies, the snobberies, the eccentrics, the cutting of swelled heads down to size, and the jeering at ambitions, especially artistic ones.
The pressure of cramped conditions may create the determination to break free, to gain some sort of mastery; but if you try this, you'd better do it well. Otherwise those who have laughed at you will laugh even harder, since an ice dancer who tries a triple axel and falls on her behind is hilarious.
Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro's characters, just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that. Munro chronicles failure much more often than she chronicles success, because the task of the writer has failure built in. In this she is a romantic: the visionary gleam exists, but it can't be grasped, and if you drivel on about it openly the folks in the grocery store will think you're a lunatic.
As in much else, Munro is thus quintessentially Canadian. Faced with the Nobel she will be modest, she won't get a swelled head. The rest of us, on this magnificent occasion, will just have to do that for her.
