Out Of Loss:Alice Munro’s Elegiac Fiction

Alice Munro,the nationally and internationally renowned Canadian short story writer and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature,ingeniously explores human complexity and the transience of life in a revolutionary short story format,set in the grey world of the universal(Canadian)dreary small town.Since the 1980s,Munro has won substantial international attention.Scholars abroad have attempted to unlock the secrets of Munro’s art with reference to its themes and artistry from a wide range of perspectives such as narratology,anthropology,sociology,and psychology etc.Chinese research on Munro and her works,however,has had a late start.Before Munro won the Nobel Prize,she and a few of her stories had been slowly and sporadically introduced into China.The past three years have witnessed a rapid increase in the study of her fiction.Lamentably,the methodological approaches in China are mainly confined to feminism,narrative art,or textual analysis.Hence,the scope of Chinese Munro studies is badly in dire need of extension.One element worthy of further exploration is Munro’s creation of a complex fictional world of loss.It is acknowledged that Canadian scholar Karen Smythe has studied Munro’s early works from the perspective of fiction-elegy,emphasizing the narrative process of how to mourn.However,she has focused more on generic and narratological orientations and Munro’s work has been only one part of her study.To date,little attention has been paid by Chinese scholars to Munro’s elegiac-themed writing.Therefore,this dissertation will further investigate Munro’s works from the perspective of elegy by analyzing a number of specific stories selected from her oeuvre.Elegy as a literary genre dates back to ancient Greece,through the Roman period,on into the medieval age,the Victorian era,and into modern times.The genre may be found in many expressions of mourning,namely,poetry,prose,epigrams,rites,and fiction,etc.Its subject matter ranges from funeral lamentation to unrequited love to political/cultural satire to melancholic survival.Loss and consolation constitute the key issues for elegiac writing.Alice Munro,born and bred in a post-colonial country and an era of atrocity,deliberately creates her elegiac landscape.With Gothic vision and sensibility,Munro represents a dark world filled with Gothic loss,shown by gloomy places—Gothic "Munro Country",depressed figures—outsiders in alienation,and funereal thematic presentations of photographic death.Confronting traumatic loss,Munro seeks ways out of grief.By means of escape from their painful past,spiritual survival with relief,and roaming in a fantasy world,Munro’s characters gain power and consolation to some extent.However,as a writer who maintains a thorough and philosophical insight into human nature,Munro is clearly aware that the absolute withdrawal from loss is difficult or even impossible due to the slow or complicated process of purging.Thus,some loss is beyond solace.Revolving around the three detailed types of relationship,specifically,hapless women vs.dark lovers,rejected mothers vs.lost daughters,and familiar self vs.uncanny inner other,Munrovian melancholy is further analyzed.For Munro,real life is far from perfect.Her attachment to inconsolable sadness is also a call for confrontation,acceptance and survival.In a word,taking loss in Southern Ontario’s Gothic "Munro Country",literal or figurative,as her point of departure,Munro thinks deeply about how to accommodate loss in life in terms of paradoxical consolation:healing through detachment from a painful past as well as attachment to present melancholy,in the hope of helping contemporary readers confront and survive in a dangerous and menacing world.Munro’s elegiac fiction can be called a "witty creation",for she has pondered over the human existential predicament with sharp insights and shown deep and probing concern for the fate and living state of humankind.Reading her stories,one does not only obtain aesthetic enjoyment but also gain spiritual nourishment.Munro,the talented observer of loss,has been nourished by rich literary traditions,and has in return nurtured elegy,world literature and above all,the human mind.