Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr Kurtz.
Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as huma n factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril.
6. Medical missionary (1875-1965), who established a hospital at Lambarene, Gabon (then in French Equatorial Africa), famous for its treatment of lepers.
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2714 / ALICE MUNRO
Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.
1975 1977
ALICE MUNRO
b. 1931 Alice Munro has become one of the leading short-story writers of her generation. Her fiction combines spareness and realism?an uncompromising look at a panorama of faltering lives?with magisterial vision and expansiveness. Munro's signature approach to the short story, in which she uses a deceptively simple style to produce complex, layered, and emotionally potent effects, has influenced many of her English- language contemporaries, both within and outside Canada. In addition to one novel, Lives of Girls and Women (1972), she has published numerous collections of short stories, including Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (1974), The Moons ofJupiter (1982), Friend of My Youth (1990), The Love of a Good Woman (1998), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), and Runaway (2004).
Many of Munro's stories are written in the first person, often from the perspective of women whose voices and experiences suggest the author's history. She was born Alice Anne Laidlaw to a poor family in Wingham, Ontario, and her parents' struggles within a variety of rural occupations continued throughout her childhood. She began writing in her teens and in 1949 enrolled in the University of Western Ontario; she left the university two years later, to marry and raise three daughters. She typically sets her stories in small towns where poverty stamps itself on all facets of life, and where women confront?often in a spirit that combines resignation with stubborn resistance?the triple binds of economic, gender, and cultural confinement. Through a precise and particular emphasis on setting and character, she evokes rural Canadian life in the decades following midcentury, when modernity and the promise of the future are often crowded out by a hardening sense of the past.
In an early writing Munro describes an approach to the outside world that effectively captures her sense of the mystery within the ordinary?the hallmark of her realist style: 'It seems as if there are feelings that have to be translated into a next- door language, which might blow them up and burst them altogether; or else they have to be let alone. The truth about them is always suspected, never verified, the light catches but doesn't define them. . . . Yet there is the feeling?I have the feel- ing?that at some level these things open; fragments, moments, suggestions, open, full of power.' This aura of openness and suggestion, conveyed through 'next-door language,' gives Munro's stories their haunting aspect, their quality of movement, rippling and widening from the small-scale to the magnificent. The story included here, 'Walker Brothers Cowboy,' exemplifies her ability to imbue 'fragments, moments, suggestions' with fullness and power, as we view through a young girl's eyes both the pathos and the degradation of men and women whose lives have fallen into a potentially deadening cycle of promise and decay.
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WALKER BROTHERS COWBOY / 271 5
Walker Brothers Cowboy1
After supper my father says, 'Want to go down and see if the Lake's still there?' We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against2 the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda, and sometimes he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, 'Bring me an ice-cream cone!' but I call back, 'You will be asleep,' and do not even turn my head.
Then my father and I walk gradually down a long, shabby sort of street, with Silverwoods Ice Crea m signs standing on the sidewalk, outside tiny, lighted stores. This is in Tuppertown, an old town on Lake Huron,3 an old grain port. Th e street is shaded, in some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards. People are sitting out, men in shirtsleeves and undershirts and women in aprons?not people we know but if anybody looks ready to nod and say, 'Warm night,' my father will nod too and say something the same. Children are still playing. I don't know them either because my mother keeps my brother and me in our own yard, saying he is too young to leave it and I have to mind him. I am not so sad to watch their evening games because the games themselves are ragged, dissolving. Children, of their own will, draw apart, separate into islands of two or one under the heavy trees, occupying themselves in such solitary ways as I do all day, planting pebbles in the dirt or writing in it with a stick.
Presently we leave these yards and houses behind; we pass a factory with boarded-up windows, a lumberyard whose high wooden gates are locked for the night. The n the town falls away in a defeated jumble of sheds and small junkyards, the sidewalk gives up and we are walking on a sandy path with burdocks, plantains, humble nameless weeds all around. We enter a vacant lot, a kind of park really, for it is kept clear of junk and there is one bench with a slat missing on the back, a place to sit and look at the water. Whic h is generally gray in the evening, under a lightly overcast sky, no sunsets, the horizon dim. A very quiet, washing noise on the stones of the beach. Further along, towards the main part of town, there is a stretch of sand, a water slide, floats bobbing around the safe swimming area, a lifeguard's rickety throne. Also a long dark-green building, like a roofed veranda, called the Pavilion, full of farmers and their wives, in stiff good clothes, on Sundays. That is the part of the town we used to know when we lived at Dungannon and came here three or four times a summer, to the Lake. That, and the docks where we would go and look at the grain boats, ancient, rusty, wallowing, making us wonder how they got past the breakwater let alone to Fort William.
Tramps hang around the docks and occasionally on these evenings wander
