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3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
Short stories. 3.5. Some of these are just disturbing. But beautifully written.
4.5 stars. I always devour Munro, my favorite author. There were a couple of stories in this anthology I had read before (some I skipped, others I reread) but hardly any misses. I’ll never fully grasp how she does what she does, creating worlds that are so intimate and familiar and yet universal. So explicitly of the place where she and I both grew up and yet of a place we all occupy. Peace of Utrecht was my favorite. Absolutely destroyed me in the best way possible.
My thoughts on this book are much too long and discursive to post here, but here is the link to my blog with my full thoughts: http://thegreatramble.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/on-alice-munro-reading-empathy-and-dance-of-the-happy-shades/
Or, in brief, here is a excerpt of my key thoughts about one of the stories in the collection (a collection that I overall love, and recommend to anyone who likes short stories, or who likes people):
.............
I finally finished reading Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro’s first collection of stories, and it was gorgeous. Reading this book, it is hard to believe that it is a first collection, and it is so obvious that Munro had been working for years in honing her craft. She had been reading and writing and rewriting, so that when this book came into the world, she immerged a master. Not that all stories in this collection are equally masterful, and not that she doesn’t get better with age, because she certainly does continue to improve, it is just that this, her first book, is already excellent. It is not the excellence of a prodigy – a genius with one great work in her. It is the excellence of a craftsmen, bent upon communicating with the world via story-telling. In this, the communication is not just one way, with Munro didactically teaching us about the world – it is communication in the sense that all great literature is communication – it is a true conversation in which we sense that Munro is learning as much about the world in writing the stories and we gain from reading the stories. These are stories that drip with honesty – with a yearning to tell the story true. As Gustave Flaubert once wrote, ““The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe,” and these stories give that sense.
The final story, and title story, of the collection is “Dance of the Happy Shades.” I had stumbled upon this story once years ago in a literary anthology, and I didn’t love it then. I was in a rush, and I was looking something to teach to my Introduction to Literature class, and as the story wanders its way into the present action, I feared the student complaints of the story being “long and boring.” I am glad I didn’t teach it then, because I got to experience the story now. It isn’t a long story at all – it is only thirteen pages, which is almost flash fiction by Munrovian standards. And yet within the thirteen pages, Munro starts in the present action of a mother’s dread of an upcoming June recital, and then careens back and forth from present to past to future in the pages that follow. There are not full, flushed out scenes in the backstory, but rather a dipping in and out of memory, in the sort of daily intersections our lives have with the past. The mother in the story is only sending her daughter for piano lessons, and attending the recital, because of an obligation to her own childhood memories of the same ritual. As the daughter observed as the story’s peripheral first person narrator, the mothers continued to send their children for lessons due to:
“a rather implausible allegiance – not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking
apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room.” (215).
That is the way that memory works – our childhoods push and direct our adult behaviors in ways of which we are both aware and unaware, and at any given moment of the day, we can have an instant, a scrap of song, an aroma floating on a breeze, and we are pulled into the past, and then are pushed back out into the present mere seconds later.
The story’s plot and characterization and setting all conspire to build the tension of embarresment in the story. The mother dreads the recital, and in her dread, we are filled in via backstory the cloying atmosphere of the recitals, the embarresing, naïve love for children of the spinster teacher, and the pity that the mother’s feel for their former teacher. There are worries for how the teacher supports herself, compounded by the teacher’s having to move to progressively smaller houses and poorer neighborhood’s, until ending up in the apartment of the present action of the book. The descriptions of the Miss Marsalles’ was almost grotesque. She is described first as:
“Miss Marsalles herself, waiting in the entrance hall with the tiled floor and the dark, church-vestry smell, wearing rouge, an antique hairdo adopted only on this occasion, and a floor-length dress of plum and pinkish splotches that might have been made out of old upholstery material.” (214)
and then later, in the present action, she is described as:
“Miss Marsalles is wedged between the door, the coatrack and the stairs; there is barely room to get past her into the living room, and it would be impossible, the way things are now, for anyone to get from the living room upstairs. Miss Marsalles is wearing her rouge, her hairdo and her brocaded dress, which it is difficult not to tramp on. In this full light she looks like a character in a masquerade, like the feverish, fancied-up courtesan of an unpleasant Puritan imagination. But the fever is only her rouge; her eyes, when we get close enough to see them, are the same as ever, red-rimmed and merry and without apprehension.” (217)
In this description, and in the couple pages that follows, Munro stirs a pity and embarrassment in the reader for Miss Marsalles. She seems a naïve, poor woman, who is ridiculed by her own guests. Usually this ridicule is done in private, at home before and after the party, but this time the neighbor is there, and makes comments about how the “poor babies” (referring to Miss Marsalles and her invalid sister) hate to “forget anything,” and worry themselves about the details of the party, putting out the sandwiches much too early, and pouring the ginger ale into the punch hours before the recital, so it has long since gone flat. In this gossiping, we feel that flush of embarrassment we feel when someone embarrasses themselves, particularly someone vulnerable. In this age of the Internet, in which people take glee over watching .gifs and videos of people’s “fails” and accidents, this story reminds us of human vulnerability. The world has always had its “weaker” or more vulnerable members, but in the Internet age, those people can be bullied online and made fun of with the ease of a fingertap. As Louis C.K. discussed in a widely shared interview, he doesn’t allow his daughters to have smartphones at their age because of this sort of cruel online bullying. That kids would be better off if they had to see the effect of their words on another. That they would realize how bad that feels.
So this story seems to be a story about that, about the painful embarrassment of feeling pity for someone, and the anger that this can also engender, at why Miss Marsalles continues to put on these parties and to act in her naïve, kind and simple way. But, that isn’t what the story ends up being about, or rather that is just one part of the story. Because, after the entrance of the narrator and her mother, the narrator observes that “Miss Marsalles was looking beyond us as she kissed us; she was looking up the street for someone who has not yet arrived.” (217) This seems to be yet another way of showing how Miss Marsalles is an object of pity, in her hoping for more arrivals, and so we skip right over the part of the description that her eyes were “the same as ever, red-rimmed and merry and without apprehension.” (217)
Just when the narrator is playing her piece, and the recital seems ready to end, “the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but miss Marsalles, takes place.” (220) A group of about ten children all come in, and as they do, there is slowing a settling awareness that these children are different. That the children share the same profile of “heavy, unfinished features, the abnormally small and slanting eyes,” and so we become aware that the children have Down’s Syndrome. (221) It is here that the story shifts, and we begin to see how we had been swept up in the same sort of judging behavior of Miss Marsalles as the narrator. We had felt pity for her earlier, in the description of her as “kindly and grotesque” (214), and with the description of her:
“idealistic view of children her tender- or simple-mindedness in that regard, made her almost useless as a teacher; she was unable to criticize in except the most delicate and apologetic way and her praises were unforgivably dishonest.” (213)
But now, when the pity and anger is now pointed toward these children, the embarrassment of not knowing where to look, because:
“For it is a matter of politeness surely not to look closely at such children, and yet where else can you look during a piano performance but at the performer? There’s an atmosphere in the room of some freakish inescapable dream. My mother and the others are almost audible saying to themselves: No, I know it is not right to be repelled by such children and I am not repelled, but nobody told me I was going to come here to listen to a procession of little – little idiots for that’s what they are” (222).
In the reaction of the women in the room, we see ourselves in an uncomfortable light. While this story was published in 1968, it is a quite fitting depiction of the reign of “tolerance” that is still practiced today. The idea of being politically correct as being enough – that having tolerance for those that are different for you is enough, even if that tolerance comes with judgment, pity or disgust (or all three). That is the same sentiment behind people saying that they don’t care what gay people do, they just don’t want it “shoved in their face,” or forced upon them. Substitute this for interracial marriage, for people of different religions, for any sort of difference you can imagine. Where there is a difference, there are people that can manufacture and perpetuate a disdain for that difference. What this sort of tolerant, intolerance overlooks is the true connecting power of empathy instead of sympathy. The act of truly trying to understand and see the world from another’s perspective is a revolutionary act. You cannot hate while feeling empathy. Empathy is a worldview that reaches beyond the black and white and good vs. evil. And this complex way of seeing and relating to the world is the domain of fiction.
Numerous articles and programs in the popular press and radio have been published about this link between empathy and fiction, all of which are based on articles like this in Science, making rather conclusive links between reading literary fiction and temporary increases in “Theory of Mind” (ToM) and “suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.” Many writers agree with this assessment of the empathy increasing powers of fiction, and while the researchers have yet to prove causation, as Albert Wendland, the director of a master’s program at Seton Hall, said in the New York Times, “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.” Basically, the more we gain practice in seeing the world through other people’s perspectives in fiction, the better we become at that work in the real world. Rather than seeing Miss Marsalles as an object of pity because she exists outside of the “normal” world of the mothers, she is a fully human woman for whom her radical love of children, seeing only their good and not their perceived flaws, is perfectly suited for her work with the kids with Down Syndrome. And this makes her suited not just for the kids who play no better or worse than the “normal” children, but also for the girl who is able to play pure Music in a way never before heard at the recital, as she plays the song that will be revealed to be “The Dance of the Happy Shades.” The narrator thinks Miss Marsalles might take special ownership of this one remarkable student, but instead:
“it seems that the girl’s playing like this is something she always expected, and she finds it natural and satisfying; people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one. Nor does it seem that she regards this girl with any more wonder than the other children from Greenhill School, who love her, or the rest of us, who do not. To her no gift is unexpected, no celebration will come as a surprise.” (223)
Miss Marsalles sees her students as the people they are, treating them the same as all the children in all of her classes. And so the mothers, the narrator, and we the reader, become ashamed, because this story isn’t, after all, about a poor old woman who embarrasses herself, it is about the smallness of the perspective of dutiful tolerance.
When the girl finishes, it is as if the spell is broken, and “The music is in the room and then it is gone and naturally enough knows what to say.” (223) This is one of those unexplainable moments that is the domain of fiction. The narrator writes that:
“For the girl’s ability, which is undeniable but after all useless, out-of-place, is not really something that anybody wants to talk about. To Miss Marsalles such a thing is acceptable, but to other people, people who live in the world, it is not” (223).
And then, in the final paragraph, the story ends with the mother and daughter driving home, and the narrator asks:
“why is it that we are unable to say – as we must have expected to say – Poor Miss Marsalles? It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is that one communiqué from the other country where she lives” (224).
And so the story ends with that epiphany ending – that understanding of what James Joyce explained to his brother as the “whatness” of a thing. The mothers and daughters all were touched by that other world, that world within Miss Marsalles and the children of the Greenhill School – a world free from judgment and pity and tolerance. And they weren’t instantly transformed into better people because of this, but they were touched – they were shifted, just a bit, from how they saw the world before the party. And we, the reader, are shifted as well.
Alice Munro accomplishes all of this in thirteen pages due to her mastery of point of view, her deftness of characterization, and use of setting in characterization, and in the way she moves plot forward and backward in time. She also achieves this because Alice Munro writes the stories about the world she inhabits, and the things she observes, and the questions that drive her. That, ultimately, is the lesson I take away from this story – that to write well, to write like a master, you need to wade into the real, awkward, sticky stuff of life, not as a voyeur, but as an engaged, non-pitying participant. That is source of truly great writing.
Or, in brief, here is a excerpt of my key thoughts about one of the stories in the collection (a collection that I overall love, and recommend to anyone who likes short stories, or who likes people):
.............
I finally finished reading Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro’s first collection of stories, and it was gorgeous. Reading this book, it is hard to believe that it is a first collection, and it is so obvious that Munro had been working for years in honing her craft. She had been reading and writing and rewriting, so that when this book came into the world, she immerged a master. Not that all stories in this collection are equally masterful, and not that she doesn’t get better with age, because she certainly does continue to improve, it is just that this, her first book, is already excellent. It is not the excellence of a prodigy – a genius with one great work in her. It is the excellence of a craftsmen, bent upon communicating with the world via story-telling. In this, the communication is not just one way, with Munro didactically teaching us about the world – it is communication in the sense that all great literature is communication – it is a true conversation in which we sense that Munro is learning as much about the world in writing the stories and we gain from reading the stories. These are stories that drip with honesty – with a yearning to tell the story true. As Gustave Flaubert once wrote, ““The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe,” and these stories give that sense.
The final story, and title story, of the collection is “Dance of the Happy Shades.” I had stumbled upon this story once years ago in a literary anthology, and I didn’t love it then. I was in a rush, and I was looking something to teach to my Introduction to Literature class, and as the story wanders its way into the present action, I feared the student complaints of the story being “long and boring.” I am glad I didn’t teach it then, because I got to experience the story now. It isn’t a long story at all – it is only thirteen pages, which is almost flash fiction by Munrovian standards. And yet within the thirteen pages, Munro starts in the present action of a mother’s dread of an upcoming June recital, and then careens back and forth from present to past to future in the pages that follow. There are not full, flushed out scenes in the backstory, but rather a dipping in and out of memory, in the sort of daily intersections our lives have with the past. The mother in the story is only sending her daughter for piano lessons, and attending the recital, because of an obligation to her own childhood memories of the same ritual. As the daughter observed as the story’s peripheral first person narrator, the mothers continued to send their children for lessons due to:
“a rather implausible allegiance – not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking
apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room.” (215).
That is the way that memory works – our childhoods push and direct our adult behaviors in ways of which we are both aware and unaware, and at any given moment of the day, we can have an instant, a scrap of song, an aroma floating on a breeze, and we are pulled into the past, and then are pushed back out into the present mere seconds later.
The story’s plot and characterization and setting all conspire to build the tension of embarresment in the story. The mother dreads the recital, and in her dread, we are filled in via backstory the cloying atmosphere of the recitals, the embarresing, naïve love for children of the spinster teacher, and the pity that the mother’s feel for their former teacher. There are worries for how the teacher supports herself, compounded by the teacher’s having to move to progressively smaller houses and poorer neighborhood’s, until ending up in the apartment of the present action of the book. The descriptions of the Miss Marsalles’ was almost grotesque. She is described first as:
“Miss Marsalles herself, waiting in the entrance hall with the tiled floor and the dark, church-vestry smell, wearing rouge, an antique hairdo adopted only on this occasion, and a floor-length dress of plum and pinkish splotches that might have been made out of old upholstery material.” (214)
and then later, in the present action, she is described as:
“Miss Marsalles is wedged between the door, the coatrack and the stairs; there is barely room to get past her into the living room, and it would be impossible, the way things are now, for anyone to get from the living room upstairs. Miss Marsalles is wearing her rouge, her hairdo and her brocaded dress, which it is difficult not to tramp on. In this full light she looks like a character in a masquerade, like the feverish, fancied-up courtesan of an unpleasant Puritan imagination. But the fever is only her rouge; her eyes, when we get close enough to see them, are the same as ever, red-rimmed and merry and without apprehension.” (217)
In this description, and in the couple pages that follows, Munro stirs a pity and embarrassment in the reader for Miss Marsalles. She seems a naïve, poor woman, who is ridiculed by her own guests. Usually this ridicule is done in private, at home before and after the party, but this time the neighbor is there, and makes comments about how the “poor babies” (referring to Miss Marsalles and her invalid sister) hate to “forget anything,” and worry themselves about the details of the party, putting out the sandwiches much too early, and pouring the ginger ale into the punch hours before the recital, so it has long since gone flat. In this gossiping, we feel that flush of embarrassment we feel when someone embarrasses themselves, particularly someone vulnerable. In this age of the Internet, in which people take glee over watching .gifs and videos of people’s “fails” and accidents, this story reminds us of human vulnerability. The world has always had its “weaker” or more vulnerable members, but in the Internet age, those people can be bullied online and made fun of with the ease of a fingertap. As Louis C.K. discussed in a widely shared interview, he doesn’t allow his daughters to have smartphones at their age because of this sort of cruel online bullying. That kids would be better off if they had to see the effect of their words on another. That they would realize how bad that feels.
So this story seems to be a story about that, about the painful embarrassment of feeling pity for someone, and the anger that this can also engender, at why Miss Marsalles continues to put on these parties and to act in her naïve, kind and simple way. But, that isn’t what the story ends up being about, or rather that is just one part of the story. Because, after the entrance of the narrator and her mother, the narrator observes that “Miss Marsalles was looking beyond us as she kissed us; she was looking up the street for someone who has not yet arrived.” (217) This seems to be yet another way of showing how Miss Marsalles is an object of pity, in her hoping for more arrivals, and so we skip right over the part of the description that her eyes were “the same as ever, red-rimmed and merry and without apprehension.” (217)
Just when the narrator is playing her piece, and the recital seems ready to end, “the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but miss Marsalles, takes place.” (220) A group of about ten children all come in, and as they do, there is slowing a settling awareness that these children are different. That the children share the same profile of “heavy, unfinished features, the abnormally small and slanting eyes,” and so we become aware that the children have Down’s Syndrome. (221) It is here that the story shifts, and we begin to see how we had been swept up in the same sort of judging behavior of Miss Marsalles as the narrator. We had felt pity for her earlier, in the description of her as “kindly and grotesque” (214), and with the description of her:
“idealistic view of children her tender- or simple-mindedness in that regard, made her almost useless as a teacher; she was unable to criticize in except the most delicate and apologetic way and her praises were unforgivably dishonest.” (213)
But now, when the pity and anger is now pointed toward these children, the embarrassment of not knowing where to look, because:
“For it is a matter of politeness surely not to look closely at such children, and yet where else can you look during a piano performance but at the performer? There’s an atmosphere in the room of some freakish inescapable dream. My mother and the others are almost audible saying to themselves: No, I know it is not right to be repelled by such children and I am not repelled, but nobody told me I was going to come here to listen to a procession of little – little idiots for that’s what they are” (222).
In the reaction of the women in the room, we see ourselves in an uncomfortable light. While this story was published in 1968, it is a quite fitting depiction of the reign of “tolerance” that is still practiced today. The idea of being politically correct as being enough – that having tolerance for those that are different for you is enough, even if that tolerance comes with judgment, pity or disgust (or all three). That is the same sentiment behind people saying that they don’t care what gay people do, they just don’t want it “shoved in their face,” or forced upon them. Substitute this for interracial marriage, for people of different religions, for any sort of difference you can imagine. Where there is a difference, there are people that can manufacture and perpetuate a disdain for that difference. What this sort of tolerant, intolerance overlooks is the true connecting power of empathy instead of sympathy. The act of truly trying to understand and see the world from another’s perspective is a revolutionary act. You cannot hate while feeling empathy. Empathy is a worldview that reaches beyond the black and white and good vs. evil. And this complex way of seeing and relating to the world is the domain of fiction.
Numerous articles and programs in the popular press and radio have been published about this link between empathy and fiction, all of which are based on articles like this in Science, making rather conclusive links between reading literary fiction and temporary increases in “Theory of Mind” (ToM) and “suggest that ToM may be influenced by engagement with works of art.” Many writers agree with this assessment of the empathy increasing powers of fiction, and while the researchers have yet to prove causation, as Albert Wendland, the director of a master’s program at Seton Hall, said in the New York Times, “Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.” Basically, the more we gain practice in seeing the world through other people’s perspectives in fiction, the better we become at that work in the real world. Rather than seeing Miss Marsalles as an object of pity because she exists outside of the “normal” world of the mothers, she is a fully human woman for whom her radical love of children, seeing only their good and not their perceived flaws, is perfectly suited for her work with the kids with Down Syndrome. And this makes her suited not just for the kids who play no better or worse than the “normal” children, but also for the girl who is able to play pure Music in a way never before heard at the recital, as she plays the song that will be revealed to be “The Dance of the Happy Shades.” The narrator thinks Miss Marsalles might take special ownership of this one remarkable student, but instead:
“it seems that the girl’s playing like this is something she always expected, and she finds it natural and satisfying; people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one. Nor does it seem that she regards this girl with any more wonder than the other children from Greenhill School, who love her, or the rest of us, who do not. To her no gift is unexpected, no celebration will come as a surprise.” (223)
Miss Marsalles sees her students as the people they are, treating them the same as all the children in all of her classes. And so the mothers, the narrator, and we the reader, become ashamed, because this story isn’t, after all, about a poor old woman who embarrasses herself, it is about the smallness of the perspective of dutiful tolerance.
When the girl finishes, it is as if the spell is broken, and “The music is in the room and then it is gone and naturally enough knows what to say.” (223) This is one of those unexplainable moments that is the domain of fiction. The narrator writes that:
“For the girl’s ability, which is undeniable but after all useless, out-of-place, is not really something that anybody wants to talk about. To Miss Marsalles such a thing is acceptable, but to other people, people who live in the world, it is not” (223).
And then, in the final paragraph, the story ends with the mother and daughter driving home, and the narrator asks:
“why is it that we are unable to say – as we must have expected to say – Poor Miss Marsalles? It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is that one communiqué from the other country where she lives” (224).
And so the story ends with that epiphany ending – that understanding of what James Joyce explained to his brother as the “whatness” of a thing. The mothers and daughters all were touched by that other world, that world within Miss Marsalles and the children of the Greenhill School – a world free from judgment and pity and tolerance. And they weren’t instantly transformed into better people because of this, but they were touched – they were shifted, just a bit, from how they saw the world before the party. And we, the reader, are shifted as well.
Alice Munro accomplishes all of this in thirteen pages due to her mastery of point of view, her deftness of characterization, and use of setting in characterization, and in the way she moves plot forward and backward in time. She also achieves this because Alice Munro writes the stories about the world she inhabits, and the things she observes, and the questions that drive her. That, ultimately, is the lesson I take away from this story – that to write well, to write like a master, you need to wade into the real, awkward, sticky stuff of life, not as a voyeur, but as an engaged, non-pitying participant. That is source of truly great writing.
Not among her best collections, although we can forgive the incomparable Alice Munro since this book was her first. "The Office," "The Peace of Utrecht," and "Dance of the Happy Shades" are some of the most notable stories in this text, at least to me.
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Diverse cast of characters:
No
http://lolantaczyta.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/taniec-szczesliwych-cieni-alice-munro/
Classic Munro - longing and discomfort, things lost, truths uncovered, melancholy. I loved reading this, though: comparing this to say, Runaway--you get a sense of how her style developed, what an exacting and unsparing editor of her work she became. There's more telling here, but boy is it some beautiful telling.
3.5. The only story that really stood out to me was Postcard.
More awesome and often heartbreaking short stories from Alice.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated