"What Is Remembered"
by Alice Munro
fromHateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Trevor

Boy, between "What Is Remembered" and the concluding story we did, "Postal service and Beam," I notice myself working a lot harder than usual to pull thoughts together for these posts. It seems that every insight I call up I accept amounts to only a tiny fraction of what the story is well-nigh, making it unsatisfactory, but I tin can't seem to put one insight together with some other to corporeality to anything greater. Don't go me wrong, the work has been adept. It'south invigorating. Though, I admit if these were my first Munro stories I might accept a different stance of her work. However, I'm almost done with everything she published, then I'm in a place where I can sit down back, have a jiff, and dig in to meet what riches there are to discover.

I actually liked "What Is Remembered," particularly as what I got out of it is a new perspective on Munro'southward assay of a life that is mundane on the surface, but which has tumult threatening to erupt just below.

In this story Meriel, our narrator, is an old widow looking dorsum on the first years of her marriage. Already at that fourth dimension, with two children, she and her husband, Pierre, settled into roles they weren't too happy with but were playing anyhow. In that location was naught uniquely wrong with Pierre. It'due south just that their life together was by and large without a spark, and it seems to be due to the roles they adopted. They were living it because it was the rut they settled in:

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Only a short fourth dimension before, they had been suitors, virtually figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every forenoon, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home once again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the paper, hold information technology up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to acquire, so apace. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manages wives. How to be authoritative virtually mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, likewise as almost the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. Information technology was the women, then, who could skid back — during the daytime hours, and e'er allowing for the stunning responsibleness that had been landed on them, in the matter of children — into a kind of second adolescence.

That's a devastating paragraph. Two unique individuals putting on new roles. Putting on roles, play-acting, is a large part of this story, I recall. For, you run across, the way that Meriel and Pierre sparked their marriage a time or two before was by running into each other at a political party and pretending they were strangers, meeting and flirting for the showtime fourth dimension.

For Meriel, though, those are non enough, and she gets a run a risk for something more than soon. When the story begins, Meriel and Pierre go to a friend's funeral. This friend never married and seemed to live a hot life, but he has died young. Pierre even wonders if his death was suicide. Afterwards the funeral, Meriel has decided to visit her mom'south onetime friend, Muriel (after whom Meriel was named, though Meriel inverse the spelling of her proper name in college, perhaps another fashion to attempt on a new role). Aunt Muriel, as she is called, is in a rest home that is far enough abroad Meriel rarely visits any more than. This funeral got her close enough she thinks she should make the remainder of the trip. However, she admits to herself that this selfless visit also has a selfish desire: she wants some time away from her family.

A doctor at the funeral offers to accept Meriel so she doesn't accept to ride the bus. One affair leads to some other. They accept a loveless, practically meaningless 1-dark stand up. I say practically meaningless because it doesn't change Meriel's life on the exterior at all. She and the doctor never see each other again. Past the cease of the story, he has died, and she doesn't care.

The fact that he was dead did not seem to have much outcome on her daydreams — if that was what you could call them. The ones in which she imagined adventure meetings or even desperately arranged reunions, had never had a foothold on reality, in whatever example, and were not revised because he was dead. They had to wear themselves out in a manner she did non command and never understood.

She stays with Pierre until he besides dies. Still, this fling with the doctor changes Meriel'due south ability to live in her life. She feeds on it, makes the memory (and all kinds of elaborations) her ain, fits it to her needs, even changes the locations, etc. She is surprised when a new bit of the memory surfaces, and how that scrap might assistance her through something else.

It affects the way she sees herself. It affects, I think, the fashion she sees her role. This retention, modified and kept inside, is, afterwards all, a chip of imagination that has a slight link to reality, and it becomes useful to her self-perception. When the story ends, nosotros run across information technology might nonetheless be of some use:

She wondered if he'd stay that way, or if she had some new role waiting for him, some use yet to put him to in her heed, during the fourth dimension ahead.

Betsy

At the end of "What Is Remembered," widowed Meriel considers her memories. She remembers not just her husband but also a take chances episode of a day spent in sexual liaison with a human being she met at a funeral. The significance of the retention is that it is all she has of the lover. Their liaison lasted only that ane day. Meriel indicates that the day was vivid and important in the extreme. Upon leaving, she knew she would never run into the man once more:

The task she had to practice, as she saw it, was to remember everything — and by "remember" she meant experience it in her heed, one more time — and and then store it abroad forever. The day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, gear up bated.

The thing is, Meriel also remembers her hubby from this very same period.

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a brusk time before, they had been suitors, near figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving . . . What a lot they had to learn, so chop-chop. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.

How easy information technology is for the reader to predict the matter. How specifically fifties the story is.

The story has numerous small observations nearly retention: how Meriel  ofttimes reconsiders the 24-hour interval spent with the lover, how things might take been different, how she might have refused to have been brushed off.

When she remembers the day of the assignation, she ofttimes remembers a new particular or applies to the lover another use than that of the day itself.

What is clear is that the memory has been just every bit she thought — a "treasure" to sustain her through the long years with her husband, as if it had been this one intense day that had allowed her, during her long matrimony, to "keep her balance."

That was the fifties. Does the story still obtain?

These days, people surely yet accept affairs. Merely tin one argue that more than women now have more ways to "keep their balance"? A life in the arts? In politics? In education, business, medicine?

Note: This is another one in a series of stories where suicide is a subject. "Floating Bridge," in which 42-year-old Jinny is facing a death judgement from cancer. "Comfort," in which Lewis, with his pills, dispatches the locked-in agony of dying from ALS. "Nettles", in which the reader cannot imagine going on after running over a child. "Post and Axle," in which Lorna'south subjection feels like the ante-room to suicide. Fifty-fifty the very first story, the championship story, has a whiff of suicide surrounding Marcelle's death from an operation for female troubles in London. And now "What is Remembered," in which Pierre assumes that it is suicide that caused his friend'south death, a death which had been preceded by the somewhat dramatic ministrations of a bush-league-pilot doctor.  Only with this last story, we know very footling well-nigh what actually caused Jonas's death. What the reader does know is that suicide has been a running topic in this entire book.

The key to these suicides is that phrase (which Munro does not apply) that describes the final agonies of ALS: that the patient is locked in. One has lost all physical power to exercise anything, fifty-fifty swallow or talk, simply one'southward mind is completely alive to register the loneliness.

Locked in. This is a category of suffering to which Munro is acutely sensitive.

Images of jail thread through these stories likewise. Jinny in her cubicle bus-stop reading most Amanda W who is in jail. Jinny, lying downwards in a cornfield. "Nettles," in which the writer and Mike shelter from a storm by lying down beside the stalks of joe-pye weed. The title story, in which the teenaged Edith feels that for her sins, "her by [would] shut off her future." Lewis, who will soon exist locked in for real. Alfrida, who is a real prisoner of her past, having had and given up a baby at 16. Lionel, who has had daze treatments and lost his memory. Lorna and Queenie, whose husbands are their jailers, the one worse than the other. The last story in the volume, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," features Fiona, the elegant, well to do woman with the philandering husband, cantankerous-country skiing at night, passing through the black barred shadows of the birch copse. Only we take the feeling that Fiona is escaping her prison.

What is the underlying idea? That people have choices to brand, that people can choose to alter their lives, that "bargains" can exist fabricated, that people tin can change, that they tin run away and even disappear, that they can open the prison door. I is put in heed of Hester Prynne, who spent some time in jail before she freed herself through art and effort.

2nd note: Compare Meriel in "What is Remembered" to the young wife in "The Children Stay." Meriel's unabridged life is not wrecked by her affair. At the same fourth dimension, however, 1 wonders at the blazon of prison her spousal relationship might have been, save for the memory.

Third Note: Munro was around lxx when she published this book. The whole book is an exploration of what women accept to exercise when they find themselves trapped in a l's marriage. Although they flirt with it, they don't observe the reply in philosophy. Their situations are dire — they are most death. If they are able, information technology is paying attention to the feel of life that saves them. (Simply not all of them. Marcelle, in the championship story, dies in London after or during a mysterious and possibly imposed "surgical procedure". Something was not correct.)

4th annotation: Is Meriel's solution for equanimity what a adult female should teach her daughters? Possibly what should be taught is that if you lot find yourself in a human relationship to life that is like existence in jail, you lot are going to need a memory similar this. Better, though, to find yourself some authority, some agency, and a life partner who recognizes you. Meriel is and so fifties.

It's a tardily summer afternoon in 1959, and I am in my all-time friend's living room. One of the neighbors, a young woman of 30 or so, is langorously waiting in the living room, smoking and talking, waiting to become to a cocktail party with my friends' parents. Her husband is not present, or is at home, or at work, or traveling, or much older. She has left the kids with a sitter. I am mesmerized past her. She's alpine and long legged, and she'south wearing a sophisticated bright patterned summer dress, cinched at the waist, the total skirt draped over her knees. She is smoking. She has very curt dark hair, like Audrey Hepburn. She fits right in at my friend's business firm; they are like martinis — extremely dry out. My friend'southward witty and handsome parents doted on her wit and dazzler. The immature woman says something most her husband, something clever and wry and ironic and dismissive.

To me, at 15, she is very cute, very alluring, very powerful.

Now, what I think is this — she was someone looking for a memory which would keep her alive despite the bargain she had made to make of her life a living prison house.

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