 |
This illustration by Raymond Verdaguer
appears beside "Train" at harpers.org |
In her interview with the Paris Review, Alice Munro
says she has worked from “a feeling that women could write about the freakish,
the marginal.” She says, “I don’t know how I got that feeling of being on the
margins, it wasn’t that I was pushed
there. Maybe it was because I grew up on a margin.” In “Train,” Jackson is a
drifter, a man who walks away from relationships, who sees Mennonite boys
singing in his dreams. He jumps off trains hoping for a “cancellation,” instead
finding “an immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for attention in a way
they never did when you were sitting on the train and looking out the window.”
Jackson, who begins a “skinny nerve-wracked soldier,” enters a strange and
wandering life, from the moment he indecisively starts back the way he came.
How is Jackson, like the narrators of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” “Friend of My
Youth,” and “Save the Reaper,” experiencing life from the margins? How does
this affect the way he reacts in situations? Do you believe his character? How
could you use Munro’s approach in your own writing?
Here's the link to the interview:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the-art-of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro
I think, in Munro's work, it's very clear how she writes about "living in the margins". Her main characters, Jackson included, are not only not the main focus of the piece, they don't seem to be the main focus of their own lives. They drift, they wander away from the general path, and they observe and passively contribute more than they act. Jackson does not plan to stay on the farm with Belle, but he ends up doing so anyway, almost as more of a coincidence than an actual decision on his part. He does not make any conscious decision to jump off the train before that, either, he simply follows it along. He does not seem to make the decision to leave Belle, he simply wanders off and finds himself on the fringe of another life, living among others who he becomes actively involved in managing and knowing the business of, but not actually being a part of. This is reminiscent of the mother in "Friend of My Youth" - it is not necessarily her own story being told, it is the story of Flora and her life. But through this story, the mother's story ends up being told. That's the crutch of Munro's writing, I think.
ReplyDeleteWe don't need Jackson to outright tell us what his issues are, or why he lives on the margins of life. Through Belle and her story, through the story of his girlfriend, we learn more about him than we ever could have through a straight narrative. We don't get to live in the moment that changed him, but we know what it was, and we know it with the perspective that other characters bring. The narrative and meaning are not necessarily hidden, but somewhere in the margins, where the main characters themselves reside. In the end, are we supposed to feel more attached to Belle and the girlfriend, or Jackson himself? Who is the story really about?
It's a tactic that I can definitely appreciate, and something I can take for my own writing. It's not a straightforward, linear narrative with Munro, and we don't always find out as much about the main characters as we may expect, but what we do learn is powerful. They live on the margins, and the reader is forced to think from the margins, and that's what ends up working the most. We as readers become so engrossed in the other characters that we almost forget these characters have stories of their own, and when we're forced to consider them, I think it says a lot about not only the meaning of the piece in particular, but in what living life "in the margins" can mean. It's powerful, sometimes confusing, and also really smart.
What puts them all on the margins in in their reserved way that they interact with others. Keeping everything in the family or closer, just to themselves. With Jackson he is reluctant to make connections to anyone and can't stay put. The story itself is also on the margins. All of the stories They have things going on that the main character observes, but they themselves are not the main focus of the bulk of the story. For much of Jacksons story we focus on Bell they when she is gone we focus on the hotel and then the ex-girlfriend. It is as though he is more a lens for us to look through then something to look at. Only touching briefly on the thing that is really troubling him. When things become to personal or to real he feels the need to recede. He retreats back to his margins and stays there so that he does not have to look at any one thing straight on for what it is. He himself never confronted his own abuse, so this wandering seems to be to be very believable to me. It is his way if coping with things. When he is confronted by Belle’s story about her father he doesn't even really think about it before he leaves and just doesn’t go back. As though to protect himself from having to confront what had happened to him he just stays there on the margins.
ReplyDeleteSomething that I would want to use that Munro does very well is to use the main characters as more of a lens then to be the center of the action. To be able to keep them there in the story there and to let there view tint the scene but not take it over. To let them almost be as much as an observer as the read. Then at the same let them have there own character and story. To let it seep through the cracks and be scribbled in the margins. Let it give them a character and at the same time not makes them the focus of the story only the lens to look through. That the view that they have gives them character without having them be directly involved with the real friction of the story. To be able to craft a character well enough that I don't need to even have then in a scene, only have the impression of it, would be a great skill to have. Munro does it so well that you feel as though you know them, the narrator, so well it doesn’t register how little the influence they have, seeming to be more to be carried along by things instead of directing them. It is an ability I admire.
One way I feel that these narrators are experiencing life from the margins is how they aren't always the center of attention in the story, and sometimes they aren't even the ones telling us a story. Instead, they feel more like an engrossed observer, taking it all in as we are though they have the option to insert themselves when they wish. I started with "Walkers Brothers Cowboy," which featured the narrator of a daughter watching as her father reconnects with a former friend and probable lover. The girl doesn't give us much about herself, or at least not so much that we focus more or her than on her father. It feels like she's on the sideline watching her father and Nora examine pictures and talk of people she has never heard of. In "Train," we also get a sense of narrator on the margin. Until the end, we don't get much personal information about him. It's more observed details of his time with Belle and his work in the apartment building.
ReplyDeleteI almost feel as if it puts some distance between the narrator and I. Usually, we talk about this like it's a bad thing, but I like the way Munro does it. I feel that it's because she doesn't want us to get distracted by the narrator and not focus on the other stories and the other characters she is talking about. It's almost like she gives us just enough about the narrator to satisfy us long enough to get through the initial story before she gets to the narrator's story. I've never seen anyone else do anything like it in their writing. Waiting until the end to tell the main character's story is usually a big no-no, but the way Munro does it is smart. She chooses a story to begin with that, although it might not be mostly about the narrator, the story and the narrator's reaction to it reveal something to us about the narrator. Something that we then need to understand the narrator's story. It goes against so many rules, but yet it works so well.
By the time, I get to Jackson's flashbacks about Ilene, I believe his character because I've seen how he reacted to Belle's cancer and to her revealing to him information about her father, I almost feel that he runs because he is meant to stay on the margins. It's where he is comfortable. I can see this when he goes shopping in town, and he doesn't like that people notice him for riding a horse. He's not someone who wants to be noticed. Before that, we learn later, that he was the shy kid in school. In both his relationship with Ilene and with Belle, it fits with his margin tendencies. With both he became a good friend and started to become something more, and right at that point, he seems to realize that he's stepping out of the margins where people will see him. .he knows it's time to move on and move back into the margins where no one notices him.
I think it would be interesting to try to write a story with the narrator in the margin. It would be a challenge to not tell the narrator's story, but to somehow show his or her character through another character's story first. Though challenging, I think it would be a good strategy to try because it could help us work on characterization and train us on how to really get to know a character. We would have to know our narrator well enough to show their character through another character, but in a way that when we do go into more detail about the narrator, the reader is not surprised.
The simple fact is that Alice Munroe's stories are never actually about the narrator. They are always the outsider, the observer seeing someone else go through their lives and absorbing the story, then in turn passing it on to a reader. It's a fascinating style because it manages to take a character and make the reader truly see the world through his or her yes, without ever actually telling that character's story. They truly 'live in the margins' because they are always moving, always slightly separated from the rest of the world, or at least from the characters that surround them. Jackson is a great example, but I find that her settings have an interesting way of reflecting the feeling she tries to portray with her work. Each piece is set in a mostly rural area. In the big city or a highly populated area, someone like Jackson could simply disappear among the countless individuals. But in a small rural community that Jackson wandered into, with the Mennonites and people still traveling by horseback, or in the small valley where Flora and her family lived, one person can observe and absorb the life of someone else, to actually function as the sort of 'in the margin' narrator without seeming unrealistic.
ReplyDeleteIn many ways, the characters show less of a reaction to the events that the observe and report to the reader. Their drifting nature means that they aren't quite attached to the stories as they might be if someone else had told them. I would say the Flora telling her own story would be quite a different tale than hearing it as it is. Yet that's part of what makes it fascinating. They can be almost objective, telling a story from an unemotional standpoint, but still show us the emotions present within a piece. It's honestly more interesting than just hearing the story outright from someone involved in it.
I feel that I would do poorly at writing something in this kind of style because of how it requires a certain amount of leeway for a character to remain detached. I like for my stories to feel a bit in the moment, with the narrator being truly involved in how his life progresses through a story, or even one scene. I can see the benefits of a narrator telling another character's story, but I feel that I would begin to drift into the territory of a tall-tale, with the narrator adding his own experiences or opinions into a piece rather than staying 'in the margins' like Munroe masterfully achieves. Still, I find it an intriguing style and would be eager to take up the challenge to try and imitate Munroe's skill.
I wasn’t sure at first if Jackson as a character was a believable one. After all, I didn’t think it was entirely plausible that a drifter stopping at a house for a meal and fixing a horse trough in exchange would end up staying for months, fixing up the rest of the house and doing odd jobs for the Mennonite neighbors. He goes from someone who hitches rides on trains to anywhere after the war to a person who is “going to get his hair cut when he needed to and buying his tobacco when he ran out” in town. And then just when it seems that he has really settled down with Belle and the point of the story is how he will cope with her cancer, she tells him a story about the time just before her father died that he saw her naked. This makes Jackson uncomfortable and he wanders away again, picking up another job (it seems almost instantly) as a landlord for an apartment building. Again, he seems to settle in relatively well, and again, he takes off after he encounters something that upsets him – in this case, an old classmate/love of his who is looking for her runaway daughter.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as the story continues, Jackson’s characterization seems to make more and more sense. Especially since we learn that he was painfully shy in school and not very good with women, probably due to the (hinted at) fact that his stepmother sexually abused him as a kid. It makes sense that Jackson would withdraw and be more comfortable with watching the goings-on in life from the margins. He does seem to want more – to be comfortable with his surroundings and the people in them, as shown when he stays with Belle for so long even though he really doesn’t have to. But the margins are safer, and that’s where he retreats to whenever he feels threatened. Once I read the whole story, Jackson felt like a more believable person to me.
I think Munroe’s way of writing this story – with the main character observing other people’s problems from the sidelines, and it is only at the end that his own problems are revealed – is an interesting one. It’s also one I’m sure I would have some difficulty trying to imitate. We are taught to reveal the main problem pretty early on so that we can work on solving it or coming to some sort of closure. In “Train” we wander around until we get to the source of Jacksons problems in the second to last section. It would be something I’d be willing to try – I’m just not sure how well it would turn out.
The narrators in Alice Munro’s stories always seem to maintain a level of distance from the actual characters and the narrative itself. In Walker Brothers Cowboy, the narrator observes her father’s work and meets his old friend Nora. But we don’t get the experience of Ben and his emotional responses or reasons explained to us directly, we only get to see them filtered through the narrator, and understand them as she understands them. It’s the same as well in Friend of My Youth, where the narrator is telling a story about a story that was told by her mother. The events of the story are twice removed from the central characters and we again get that narrative distance. The narrators themselves describe to us that life on the margins through this detached lens.
ReplyDeleteIn Train, Jackson is much the same way. He feels like a character very far removed from the events of the story. Though he is more involved than those narrators, he still rarely has dialogue, his speech relayed in a matter-of-fact summary of his language rather than the full dialogue that other characters enjoy, such as Belle in the hospital talking about the day her father died. Jackson provides us a sort of lens into that life on the margins, the way he bounces around from relationship to relationship, never getting too involved in them. Much like the narrators from Munro’s other stories, he gives us that same detached perspective.
As for utilizing Alice Munro’s technique in my own stories, I think that it could be done. I like the way that telling the story through a more detached narrator can color the story a certain way, and how it also makes the reader almost feel even closer, the way it entices us to become the narrator and an observer of the story, making discoveries on our own.
"The nurse took him to sign something before he left. He hesitated where it asked for what relation. Then he wrote "friend" (156). That line for me encapsulated Jackson, the narrator. I liked how New Amanda put it, about the narrator not being the center of attention, and it's true. In "Train" Jackson keeps going from place to place, and the people he interacts with, where he drifts to--Belle's house, the hospital briefly, and the apartment. Until he gets to Ilene, his past is left unsaid, and because of his knack for wandering that mystery is what makes him all the more interesting, what is it that he's running from, or what is it that he's trying to find.
ReplyDeleteAnother aspect to this writing style let me as the reader discover things as he did, and to observe them from the same distanced point of view that I have. One particular thing that was a progressive element was the sense of time. Starting off at Belle's farm, with all the carriages, Amish, and absence of a car, it took a while to pinpoint just where the story was located. It had said about him coming home from Germany from the war, so I knew then the time, somewhere after WWII. But then it got even more intriguing when I finally realized they were in Canada when she mentioned Toronto several pages in. My whole perception changed from the setting being Pennsylvania Amish land to being the unfamiliar territory of Canada. It felt very put together though, and the subtle tactics to mentioning place and time were direct and deliberate. This compliments his sense of drifting--not really having a commitment to any of the places he goes to, just things being as they are, and not trying to form a connection, even though he does against what he portrays.
This style, of having the narrator be distanced from the rest of the characters and story, and having only a minimal role in some regards gives extra emphasis to the surroundings, to the other characters, and to giving a very different perspective than if he were getting all of the attention. And that Jackson is able to take himself out of one situation and go into another broadens the world within the story, and things that any other story might have not even got into, Munro takes it into the unpredictable, making us a wanderer with the narrator. That's when you know a story is engaging, when you are discovering and exploring with the story, not just being told. It creates this very different experience of a story, making the reader a participant. A very intriguing style to say the least.