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Gittings examines the Scottish elements of Canadian family histories in three short stories by Alice Munro. Munro's own interest in a network of ancestors supporting her from the past initiated her research into her father's Laidlaw family history, which found its way into Munro's "A Wilderness Station."
It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
A Scottish element of Canada's diverse ethnographic history is uncovered by transformative acts of remembering family history in Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth," "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass" and "A Wilderness Station." The speaking subjects of "Friend of My Youth" and "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass" compose their narratives from Scottish-Canadian materials, thus grounding Scottish Reformation history, the kailyard genre, and the Scottish ballad in a Canadian context. These signs of Scottish culture enclosed in twentieth-century Canadian texts are attached to a variety of Canadian signifieds by their narratees; they are translated into a Canadian ground. Let me clarify what I mean by the rather slippery term of cultural translation: translation is a polyvalent process defined in part by the Oxford English Dictionary as "to bear, convey, or remove from one person, place or condition to another." This concept of movement from one locale to another lends insight into the signs of Scottish culture in Munro's stories. Scottish immigrants did not simply transpose their culture from one surface to another; they had to reshape or translate the New World into systems of meaning by bridging the gap between the Old World and the one in which they found themselves. Through this process they could begin to recognize the familiar in an alien space. The Old World signifying systems used to enact this transformation, however, are transformed themselves in a marrying of their cultural referents to new signifieds. The act of bridging a gap between two seemingly incommensurable systems, whether linguistic, temporal or cultural, necessarily creates a new entity.1Munro exploits the gap between Scottish cultural markers and their referents in her narratees' twinning of these signs with their own personal Canadian signs to construct a world.2
Scotland's is one of the many national pasts married to Canada's through immigration, and this hybridized Scottish-Canadian past must be negotiated by the narrator of "Friend of My Youth" and Hazel, the protagonist of "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," if they are to unravel their personal histories and discover who they are. As Homi Bhabha suggests, a nexus of personal and national narratives may be read as "a national allegory" where, he writes, quoting Fredric Jameson, "the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately include the whole laborious process of the collectivity itself" (292). The Scots-Presbyterian elements of "Friend of My Youth," "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," and "A Wilderness Station" exemplify the textualization of nation Bhabha describes in his study:
The nation reveals in its ambivalent and vacillating representation, the ethnography of its own historicity and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference. (300)
Both the narrator of "Friend of My Youth" and Hazel engage in a dialogic relationship with the past to establish personal and cultural identity in the present. The narrative voice in "Friend of My Youth" reaches out toward her late mother, a woman reduced to an aberration by the unfolding of time, and her daughter's own rigid image of her. To recover her mother the narrator delves into memory and retells her mother's story of the Scots-Cameronian3 Grieves family, tethering her personal history to the Grieves narrative of immigration and the translation of their faith and culture to Canada.
A Canadian whose memories of a Scottish village and its people have been imaginatively reconstructed from the wartime experiences of her late husband Jack in "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," Hazel makes a journey of return to the Scottish community she has preserved in memory. Hazel hopes to disinter a lost fragment of her self through an inquiry into the time her husband spent in a Scottish community before they met and married. Jack's stories of his Aunt Margaret Dobie and Scotland become a part of Hazel's imaginary landscape tying her to him, just as the Grieves and Cameronianism compose the connective tissue though which the narrator of "Friend of My Youth" remembers her relationship to her mother. In both "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass" and "Friend of My Youth," transforming memories reconstruct personal and national pasts by writing back to what Del Jordan describes in Lives of Girls and Women as "the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past" (26).
Munro's personal interest in a network of ancestors supporting her from the past initiated her research into her father's Laidlaw family history. Genealogical work on the Laidlaws provoked the composition of "A Wilderness Station." "As I became middle aged," Munro explains, speaking about her developing interest in the Laidlaw genealogy, "and around the time my father died I started getting these feelings, and I think that many people do, that the time for ancestors seems to be middle age . . . and so I started to get very interested because then I found to my surprise that the [Scottish] poet [James] Hogg4 was a connection" ("Scottish Ancestor" 83-84). For the last several years Munro has been spending part of her time working on what she thought would be "a pleasant change": a nonfiction project chronicling her family history (87). As she reveals, however, this writing of history has proven problematic, sometimes merging with her fiction:
I've found it's difficult because if you're used to writing fiction, keeping oneself within the bounds of fact instead of taking that fictional germ and doing something with it is very difficult. ("Scottish Ancestor" 87)
The Laidlaw family history finds its way into Munro's "A Wilderness Station," a piece she says "takes off from my ancestors coming up to Huron county, except that I have completely invented a dreadful macabre incident that takes place, and I have no justification for this at all" (87). Transformative rememberings of the Laidlaw past run in the family. A novel by Munro's father Robert Laidlaw, The McGregor's: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family, is based on his memories of the family and was published posthumously in 1979. "A Wilderness Station" locates the construction of the ScottishCanadian ground that informs "Friend of My Youth" and "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass" in the nineteenth-century Scottish settling of Huron County bush just outside of Walley, Ontario. Walley is the town Hazel Joudry leaves for Scotland to research her husband Jack's lineage in "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," and along with Carstairs forms the landscape of Open Secrets.
"A Wilderness Station" encodes an awareness of its own narrativity in variant epistolary recountings of a death in the mid-nineteenth-century Ontario wilderness. The event is reconstructed in a newspaper article and a series of letters assembled as a text by an unknown third-person researcher/ narrator. The first letter, dated 15 January 1852, is written to Mr. Simon Herron from the Matron of a Toronto home for girls. In response to his request for a Presbyterian marriage candidate to assist him in homesteading, the Matron suggests a Miss Annie McKillop whose parents emigrated to Canada from Fife. The death of Simon and the role Annie played in that death are the subjects of a newspaper article by the deceased's brother George Herron, and letters between Simon's minister, the Reverend William McBain, and the Clerk of the Peace at Walley, Mr. James Mullen. Mullen appends to his letters a note he intercepted from Annie in which she claims Simon was murdered by George.
"Recollections of Mr. George Herron" published in the Carstairs Argus in 1907 is a pioneer history of the harsh conditions under which Huron County was settled in the 1850s. George tells of his parents' deaths from fever after the family landed in Canada from Scotland, and relates how his brother Simon was killed by a falling tree branch in April 1852 as the two were clearing their land. Fifty-five years after his brother's death, George narrates the event as a tragic accident, and explains how he and Simon's widow were forced to bury the body themselves in the middle of a blinding snow storm. The next letter in Munro's narrative, addressed to Mullen and dated 10 September 1852, is from McBain and relates the psychological and physical deterioration of Simon's widow. McBain tells the clerk to expect a visit from the distraught young woman who he believes is on her way to the Gaol at Walley (38).5
Mullen's response to McBain confirms Annie's arrival at Walley Gaol and includes the clerk's reconstruction of her confession to the murder of her husband. In this version of events Annie strikes Simon on the head with a rock to put an end to his repeated beatings. Annie's confession is a strategy she deploys to secure refuge in the gaol from her husband's murderer. The narrative of the falling tree branch became deeply embedded in the imagination of the Laidlaw family. Robert Laidlaw's novel adumbrates his daughter's emplotment of this tragic death from family history in the two brothers, Jim and Dan MacDonald, "who always worked together when they were clearing," and the novel's warning that a "loose branch or a slip of the razorsharp axe and a man could lie helplessly to die in the snow" (70). Furthermore, the death of Munro's great-uncle from a falling tree branch is considered an event significant enough to warrant recording in Catherine Sheldrick Ross' biography of the author (28). Munro acknowledges her father's 1907 accounts of this incident as the source materials for the journal sections of "A Wilderness Station."6
In ways very similar to "Friend of My Youth" and "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," acts of reading/writing encode the hybridization of Scottish and Canadian cultures and foreground an awareness of narrative construction in "A Wilderness Station." The play among the texts within Munro's narrative creates a tension between the "definitive" official story of Simon's death-as it is told by George, the church and the community-and the disruption of this singular version by the anarchic stories of Annie Herron. A similar tension between static and dynamic constructions of the past can be found in the dissolution of the constricting frame the narrator of "Friend of My Youth" builds around her mother, and the multiplicity of Jacks Hazel learns to embrace in "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass." Extremist Presbyterian theology plays a major role in the settling or ordering of the New World wilderness in which the characters of "A Wilderness Station" find themselves. The Glasgow Mission of William McBain is another mutation of the repressive Scots-Calvinism shaping "Friend of My Youth." McBain arrives in Huron county from the West of Scotland armed with the narrow settling narrative of his church. The Herron brothers' efforts to clear the physical landscape of trees-thereby imposing order and their authority on the landscape-are paralleled on a psycho-social level by the Reverend William McBain's attempts to eradicate disorder or wilderness from the social landscape by inscribing the Glasgow Mission's authority on the souls of his Huron county parish. McBain equates the oppositional forces of good and evil, sinner and saint with order and disorder.
The rigid narrative structure McBain hopes to impose on his community emerges from his correspondence with Mullen in the form of those evil entities that resist the ordering impulse of the cleric and his theology. "I am under difficulties at present," writes McBain,
not only of my wretched corpus but of being lodged in a foul and noisy place obliged to hear day and night such uproars as destroy sleep and study and intrude even on my prayers. The wind blows bitterly through the logs, but if I go down to the fire there is swilling of spirits and foulest insolence. And outside nothing but trees to choke off every exit and icy bog to swallow man and horse. (40)
Drink, immorality, the natural elements that compose the wilderness, and his own physical body are perceived by McBain as "difficulties" to be eliminated, translated into the Christian order of the Scottish Free Church in the course of his ministry. Mullen, although he is "a member of the Church of England," shares McBain's vision of the church's role in settling the wilds and writes the Scottish minister an encouraging letter communicating his "high regard for the work being done by other Protestant denominations in bringing an orderly life to this part of the world we find ourselves in" (40).
Annie Herron is an affront to McBain and the theocratic conformity his mission hopes to establish. Annie and her variant writings of Simon's death personify the wilderness McBain is committed to destroy. Although McBain's letters inscribe Annie as "a child of the Free Church and the Covenant" and claim her as "a soul in [his] charge," he also admits that she will not yield to his ministrations. "When I talked to her," he recounts, "she would not give any answer or sign that her soul was coming into submission" (38). Annie will not submit. She destabilizes McBain's Presbyterian narrative of moral and spiritual uniformity by becoming a disordering agent of the wilderness; as McBain writes,
she stopped appearing at services and the deterioration of her property showed the state of her mind and spirit. She would not plant peas and potatoes though they were given to her to grow among the stumps. She did not chop down the wild vines around her door. Most often she did not light a fire so she could have oatcake or porridge. Her brother-in-law being removed, there was no order imposed on her days. When I visited her the door was open and it was evident that animals came and went in her house. If she was there she hid herself, to mock me. Those who caught sight of her said that her clothing was filthy and torn from scrambling about in the bushes, and she was scratched by thorns and bitten by the mosquito insects and let her go uncombed and unplaited. (38)
Annie describes herself as a person at one with the wilderness, and views it as place of safety:
I didn't stay in the house where he could find me and when I gave up sleeping inside and slept outside I didn't have the dream so often. It got warm quickly and the flies and mosquitoes came but they hardly bothered me. I would see their bites but not feel them, which was another sign that in the outside I was protected. I got down when I heard anybody coming. I ate berries both red and black and god protected me from any badness in them. (45)
Annie's writing of the bush does violence to the authoritative conception of the wilderness as adversary found in the writings of McBain and George Herron. For Annie, the wilderness is a space where she is protected not only from George and her menacing dreams about him, but also from the totalizing concept of settlement espoused by Walter McBain. The cleric's narrative presumes to be all-encompassing, and refuses to accommodate Annie's fluid visions of self and the world.
McBain's fixed vision of God and His justice is also fractured by Annie who displaces the cleric and his authority when she becomes spiritual counselor to her husband's murderer. Comforting George after he has killed his abusive brother in a moment of anger, Annie reports herself as saying: I am religious too. I pray to God every night and my prayers are answered. I know what God wants as well as any preacher knows and I know that he does not want a good lad like you to be hanged. All you have to do is say you are sorry. Say you are sorry and mean it well and God will forgive you. (43)
Annie's vision of a forgiving God conflicts with the moral code of McBain's parish. There, fratricide tears a hole in the spiritual fabric of the community; such a perforation can only be repaired by the death of the murderer. As she relates to George: "If you own up, what do you think will happen? They will hang you" (42). McBain's concept of an authoritative Biblical reading is supplanted by Annie, whose interpretation of random and decontextualized passages of scripture not only mirrors the mechanics of McBain's interpretation, but reaches a conclusion antithetical to the Glasgow Mission. Drawing on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and her own invention, Annie persuades George to withhold his confession as he must survive to be a father in the future (43). The same text in the hands of McBain would be used to encourage confession and justify a killer's execution. Annie, in one version of events, further contravenes the world of the Reverend McBain by bearing false witness to corroborate George's fiction of the falling tree branch. Ironically, this version of events-established as truth by Annie and Georgebecomes the officially sanctioned story of Simon's death, the text that seeks to create narrative authority/conformity by refuting Annie's subsequent and conflicting tellings of the event. She soon collapses this account to protect herself from George, as her letter to Sadie reports:
I told them the very same lie that George told me so often in my dreams, trying to get me to believe it was me and not him. I am safe from George here is the main thing. If they think I am crazy and I know the difference I am safe. (45)
Annie's imagination will not submit to a definitive concept of narrative truth, she continues to speak her multiple reconstructions of past events. Her anarchic resistance to totalizing structure writes its way into a twentieth-century historian's research on George Herron's grandson. Dated 8 July 1959, and addressed to the historian Mr. Leopold Henry, the final document in Munro's text is James Mullen's granddaughter's first-person account of a motor trip she and Annie make to visit George Herron in June 1907. Christena Mullen figures Annie as "Old Annie," her grandparent's seamstress, a woman who refuses to be fixed, who constructs and occupies an ever shifting diegetic wilderness. Annie's representation of her marriage is indeterminate: "About being married herself, she sometimes said she had been and sometimes not" (47). Christena's letter offers yet another variation on the death of Simon Herron from the metamorphosing memory of Annie. In this fairy-tale like version Annie refigures Simon as a wealthy suitor who arrives at the Home to whisk her away in a carriage, "[t]hen she said a bear killed her husband, in the woods and [Christena's grandfather had killed the bear and wrapped her in its skin and taken her home from the Gaol" (47). As Hayden White suggests, when telling the story of our lives we, like Annie,
may seek to give our lives a meaning of some specific kind by telling now one and now another kind of story about them. But this is a work of construction rather than of discovery-and so it is with groups, nations, and whole classes of people who wish to regard themselves as parts of organic entities capable of living storylike lives. (487)
And Annie's and Munro's story is a Scots-Canadian strand of the perpetually shifting ethnographic narrating of the Canadian nation.
Annie Herron, like her creator, is a storyteller who cannot resist the fictionalizing impulse of her inventing memory; like Munro she finds it difficult to keep herself "within the bounds of fact." This is evident at the end of the story when any desire on the reader's part to fix Annie as a reliable source through which the "true" story of George Herron's death can be established is effectively subverted by Munro in Old Annie's fantastic story of the baby who, born from a boil is cooked in the oven like a gingerbread man (51). Annie, and her multiple tellings of her husband's death, provide a mimesis for the process Munro engages to fictionalize her own family history. In "A Wilderness Station" Munro selects an element of documented Laidlaw genealogy, the death of a great-uncle, and through the narrating agency of Annie proceeds to tell many other versions of that story.
Munro explodes the constricting mononarrative of a Scots-Calvinist based truth in "A Wilderness Station" by introducing a multiplicity of alternatives to that binary reading and writing. Annie, the daughter of Scottish immigrants, translates herself into a Canadian ground; she resists the totalizing system of the Free Church of Scotland to become hybridized, indigenized, Other. The codes of the.Old World cannot be written on Annie any more than McBain can write them on the New World wilderness of his parish. McBain's quotation from a sermon by the eighteenth-century Scottish minister Thomas Boston (1676-1732 Ettrick Valley) emphasizes a narrative tension between Christian order, and both a physical wilderness and the wilderness of an unfettered imagination:
Whatsoever crook there is in one's lot, it is of God's making.
This world is a wilderness, in which we may indeed get our station changed, but the move will be out of one wilderness station unto another. ("Wilderness" 40)
The Reverend Boston equates "crook" with adversity in human life precipitated by the fall (Boston 14). Annie is a crook in the lot of the Reverend McBain who seeks to straighten out: her stories and her life, contrary to the advice of the minister he quotes and reveres. Boston writes that as it is God who makes the "crook in thy lot," only God can "make it straight" (11-12). McBain, however, dies committed to straightening and ordering God's New but, for the Reverend, still fallen world. In contrast, Annie moves from one wilderness station to another by constructing what may be read as "crooks" in the context of Munro's story; she tells lies. In this manner she, not God, creates what McBain regards as adversity: her stay in Walley Gaol. However, for Annie this is not adversity, but a safe haven. Annie's actions undermine the dominant notions of adversity as these are inscribed by the Scottish Presbytery. McBain's tyrannical "true" story of predestination and the omnipotence of God is challenged by Annie's usurpation of God. Annie exercises free will; she constructs and exploits crooks in her lot to make the best of the situations she finds herself in. She tells stories received officially as "untrue." Don't ask Annie or Munro for the true story; the truths of "A Wilderness Station," "Friend of My Youth," and "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass" are multiple and contradictory, and located in the play among stories.
"A Wilderness Station" inverts a patriarchal historiographic process that displaces Annie and her stories. Annie speaks past the deaths of McBain and Mullen to visit a mute George Herron who has recently suffered a stroke; he cannot talk back to Annie, he cannot challenge her narrating voice. But as Annie says to Christena Mullen "I could talk to him" (51). Although Annie appears to be a marginal and incidental figure in the authoritative biography of Treece Herron written by Henry Leopold, Munro's history pushes Treece to the periphery; he becomes an incidental figure in the life of Annie Herron. Annie's initial corroboration of George's version of Simon's death, and her creative interpretation of scripture to save her brother-in-law's life are instrumental in creating the possibility of Treece Herron's existence, and a documentation of that existence.
Munro's three stories expose narratives of origin, marking their convergence with myth by foregrounding the processes of narrative construction that form them, and destabilizing the truth claims encoded into the master narratives of inherited Calvinist belief systems. "Friend of My Youth," "Hold Me Fast, Don't Let Me Pass," and "A Wilderness Station" reveal how a fallacious belief in an all-pervasive truth, present in the former stories in Cameronianism, and in the latter in the theology of the Glasgow Mission, becomes translated or secularized into a wider Canadian consciousness where a quest for a singular interpretation of individuals and events becomes just as tyrannical and unsatisfactory as the Calvinist interpretation of the world.
Of the Canadian interest in figuratively disinterring Old-World ancestors such as the Covenanters and McBain, and reinventing them in the unlimited plot structures of fiction, Munro says
we never really repudiated what we call the "old country" the way Americans did, and the way Australians to a later extent have. This may be a difficulty about forming a country, about our nationalism, I don't know. And when I found the Hogg connection it was especially important for me, because you would not have guessed in my family as I was growing up that there would be a poet, even though my father became a writer later on, all of this was so much buried beneath the importance of being a practical person and working hard in daily life. But it was all a great surprise to me. ("Scottish Ancestor" 96)
1See Walter Benjamin 73.
2For a sustained discussion of the cross-cultural dialogue between Scotland and Canada and methods for a comparative study of the two countries' literatures see my essay "Canada and Scotland: Conceptualizing `Post-Colonial' Spaces" in Testing the Limits: Postcolonial Theories and Canadian Literatures, Essays on Canadian Writing 56:135-61.
3The Cameronians were a splinter group of Scotland's seventeenth-century Covenanting armies. The Covenanters' attempts to liberate God's word from the dominating and definitive interpretive auspices of bishops soon became a tyrannical and self-righteous holy war waged in Scotland and England. For a history of the Covenanting armies see Furgol. See also Smout 63-66.
4James Hogg (1770-1835) was a Scottish novelist and poet from the Vale of Ettrick. The author of The Three Perils of Man and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is an ancestor figure for Munro; Hogg's mother was the sister of Munro's direct ancestor.
5All references are to The New Yorker publication of "A Wilderness Station."
6Sec the acknowledgments page of Open Secrets.
WORKS CITED
Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator." Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968. 69-82.
Bhabha, Homi K. "Dissemination: Time, Narrative, And the Margins of the Modern Nation." Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1991. 291-322.
Boston, Thomas. The Crook in the Lot: or, The Sovereignty and Wisdom of God in the Afflictions of Men Displayed Together with a Christian Deportment Under Them, Being The Substance of Several Sermons on Eccl. vii.13, Prov. xvi.19 and I Pet. v.6. Haddington, Scotland: George Miller, 1805.
Furgol, Edward M. A Regimental History of the Covenanting Armies 1639-1651. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990.
Laidlaw, Robert. The McGregor's: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979.
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: Signet, 1974. Friend of My Youth. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. . "A Wilderness Station" The New Yorker. 27 April 1992: 35-51. "The Scottish Ancestor: A Conversation with Alice Munro." With Christopher E. Gittings. Scotlands 2 (1994): 83-96. -. Open Secrets. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.
Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW, 1992. Smout, T. C. A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830. London: 1969. London:
Fontana, 1972.
White, Hayden. "Historical Pluralism." Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 480-93.
Copyright Newberry College Winter 1997