The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

If Alice Munro’s fiction had any need of explication, this would be an
ideal explication de text. I do not say this facetiously. Alice Munro
is, in the best sense of the word, a popular writer, read and enjoyed by
thousands of readers outside the halls of academe, without recourse to
critical commentaries. And there is a danger that such secondary
analyses may very subtly transform Munro into “academic
property”—seemingly to be read and studied only by university
professors and students. And even when the writers are, like Heble,
devotees rather than critical observers, that danger is still a very
real one.

Having said that, however, and knowing full well that scholars will
always want to “have their say,” I can only admire Heble’s work.
This is a thorough, lucid, convincing, and extremely readable
examination of Munro’s fiction, proposing the idea that we need to pay
as much attention to what Munro does not say as to what she says: “the
distinctive character of Alice Munro’s fictional world [is] its
engagement with the unimaginable and the unreasonable, its fascination
not simply with a world ‘out there’ which we are invited to
recognize as real and true, but also with that which cannot be said or
sometimes even written.” In seven chapters, each dealing with a
specific novel (from Dance of the Happy Shades to Friend of My Youth),
Heble concludes that one of the fascinations in reading Munro is in the
ways her “characters are able to suppress or exclude certain areas of
meaning.” While it is too much to hope that this study will encourage
the general reader to undertake an “analogous process,” it is
certain that many CanLit specialists will find much here to enhance
their own reading of Munro and much to inform their classroom
discussions.