Alice Munro: Runaway (and Eliot's Objective Correlative)

Girgentana Goat (Capra aegagrus hircus)
in the Lüneburg Heath wildlife park, Germany
author: Quarti
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capra_aegagrus_hircus_qtl6.jpg)
no copyright infringement intended

(click here for the Romanian version)

Another story by Alice Munro, this time Runaway. You can read it on the web (as I did):

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/08/11/030811fi_fiction?currentPage=all

It's the first story in a collection of short stories (also named Runaway) published in 2004.

There are some specifics in Munro's writing, and one of them is her way of delivering the details only when they are needed, never before. All in good time. About Carla we know from the beginning that she teaches at home. And we could assume there are lessons from school curricula, maths or something. Which makes a bit weird to see her doing daily the routine work in the stable, or the natural way she is called for cleaning at a neighbor. In good time we'll be told that Carla gives riding lessons to kids, and that's because she's good of nothing but horses. About the house where she lives with her husband Clark: the story begins there. What we'll be told only when the time comes is that it's just a trailer: the guys are of very modest condition. About Clark: his picture comes gradually, more and more we realize his absolute mediocrity. And the indigence of their sexual life, due to his indifference, his lack of imagination and libido, this comes to us also bit by bit. Everything only in good time. This economy in presenting the details gives Munro's prose a splendid minimalistic dimension.

While reading Munro's stories Chekhov comes to mind. Is she a Chekhovian? Here it should be a little discussion. Because at a second thought I'm starting to wonder if even Chekhov is so Chekhovian as it's the talk in town. Let me explain. There are authors who control the story in a demiurgical way. There are other authors (the Chekhovians) who let the story flow at its will. Instead of deciding from the beginning what will happen, they just allow their imagination to follow what's going on and sit aside enjoying the surprise. It's Chekhov, it's Jane Austen, it's Ozu, the great Japanese film director: for them inventing reality in a narrative would be a sacrilege, so deep is their respect for reality.

Question: is Chekhovianism really what we think it is? Is it not rather about the genius to create a story that only seems to be at large, while actually being very carefully crafted? After all, what's with this Chekhov's gun? Is it in the first act of The Seagull only because it happens to hang there on the wall? Or is it there because Chekhov knows exactly that someone will use it between the second and third acts? (well, one can argue that, by the contrary, the rifle was used between the second and third acts because it had happened to hang on the wall in the first act and not because the author had decided that way - I mean, it's up to you to decide what Chekhovianism really is - just kidding).

Coming now to Munro's Runaway, here Chekhov's gun is a goat, who disappears at the very beginning of the story and will reenter the picture by the end, exactly at the climax. A goat named Flora, having the duty to keep company to horses (a nanny goat, so to speak - horses love company, especially during the night - that I knew from another story, the one about McSorley's, written by Joseph Mitchell). Well, in the story by Mitchell the goat was only once mentioned, here in the story of Mrs. Munro it's different: the goat is  missing during almost all story while playing a decisive role in the economy of the narrative.

What's the role of this mostly missing goat, and why is this role so decisive? Here is a review for Runaway that I'd found on the web and I'd like to quote a little bit as it seems to me both very funny and very instructive:

So there I was, two weeks ago, lounging by the side of a pool in Punta Cana, reading Runaway, Alice Munro’s latest collection of short stories, when a woman in a bikini stopped at the foot of my chair and said, I’ve started reading that, too. Just finished the first story. So what’s with the goat? Did the husband really kill the goat? Ahhh … what a sad moment in my life! To learn that the only way I can attract the attention of a woman wearing a bikini is to sit by the side of a pool while reading a book by Alice Munro. Afterward, my sister-in-law — who had overheard our conversation from a distance — wondered what I had said to the woman. Because my sister-in-law sometimes teases me about the vocabulary I nurture, I said, I told the woman I thought Munro’s treatment of the goat was a postmodern commentary on Eliot’s objective correlative.

(http://nouspique.com/2006/01/runaway-by-alice-munro/)

Well, bringing the objective correlative in front of a nice lady in bikini can kill the conversation (and that in the best case scenario - sometimes it's much worse: imagine the lady also read Chekhov and has the nerve to trigger the Chekhov's gun). As for me, I went immediately to the web where I found some stuff about the matter, firstly Hamlet and His Problems, the essay written by Eliot in 1919, then Washington Allston and the Introductory Discourse to his Lectures on Art from 1840, then the distinction that Plato had made in the old times between mimesis and diegesis, and so on and so forth.

Says Eliot, the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked (http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html).

Let's try another way: in order to communicate to the reader an emotion, an author can either describe it in plain words (διήγησις - diegesis) or suggest it through something evolving in parallel with the story (μίμησις - mīmēsis): this something has the role of making obvious to the reader what the author would otherwise try to describe in words. This is the objective correlative. Why is it named so? Well, I think because it's not part of the story, it's correlative to the story, and also it does not share the emotions rising in the story (because it does not participate at the story), this way remaining objective. I must say it does not share the emotions while it emphasizes them.

Thus, the goat from Runaway reappears at the very moment when need is: to dissolve the tension between Clark and their neighbor Sylvia, to replace the tension by an epiphany (ἐπιφάνεια - epiphaneia). This story with mediocre characters and unresolved tensions, with great moments of suspense masterfully built on the sand, is so beautiful because the story is only a pretext, its only reason is to bring us to an epiphany. The goat reappears in a striking light (due to the car behind it, only the car doesn't matter, it is the flooding light that matters) - the light enveloping the goat's head and making everybody realize that any conflict, any drama, are meaningless in face of the Universal. A believer would see here the manifestation of the Divine. A non-believer still would have an intuition of the Cosmic. The goat, a powerful religious symbol since Biblical times, since Abraham and Isaac, and even since more ancient times.

What will further happen with the goat? Will Clark kill her? A sacrifice is always needed to accomplish the meaning of the epiphany, and as ever happens, it is Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi. Or will Clark just let her disappear again? The story doesn't tell us, because, after her striking re-apparition, the goat reenters the everyday level, the mundane, and all that happens there, among Clark, and Carla, and Sylvia, and the goat, and everybody else, doesn't matter. It is only the epiphany that matters! A brilliant story.


(Alice Munro)

(T. S. Eliot)