Saturday, June 16, 2007

Bargains

"Post and Beam" is another story with a tagged on disclaimer.

It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.

Lorna had tried to make a bargain with God, that if Polly was still alive when they returned home, Lorna would do whatever she had to do. She comes to realize later that "the bargain was already in force." Her promise was to accept that her life wouldn't change. The children would grow up and "she and Brendan would grow older and then old."

The Publisher's Weekly review that I quoted when I picked this book said, "Munro has few peers in her understanding of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay."

What's your take on this idea of bargaining with life?
Posted by at

3 comments:

kc said...

Oh, this "disclaimer" is precisely what I was talking about during our discussion of Edith, and "Post and Beam" really intrigued me on this score (only I couldn't discuss it because we were all in different places in the book!). So forgive me for repeating this comment, but it's one I made specifically with this story in mind while also thinking about the previous ones and how Edith's future lay before her.

She (Munro) doesn't try to artificially tie up all the loose ends at the end of a story — stories don't really end, do they, until we die? — but she does give a satisfying accounting of where characters are at that particular point and she usually intimates or outright states that even that point of view or situation will change. No emotion is the final one, to borrow from T.S. Eliot. A number of these stories span a major part of a girl's life, and we get a glimpse of her change in perspective from Point A to Point B, and often there's an implication that the hard-won wisdom of today will be even different down the road.

I think the "disclaimer" is present somehow in all of her stories, though maybe not as explicitly as in "Post and Beam."

I think it's related to the bargaining, too, but I have to mull that some more.

This omniscient narrator is really interesting. (I would love to know how and at what point Munro determines how a story will be narrated). It's almost like the narrator is casting judgment at the end — saying something like it's foolish to bargain in an ever-changing emotional landscape, but you couldn't have known that — but it's more subtle than that.

2:14 AM, June 17, 2007
Erin said...

Interesting. I see what you mean now, with that comment from earlier. Nice points.

Another thought about the "disclaimer": Maybe the narrator is saying, This was back when she thought bargaining was a big deal, before she knew that life is constant bargaining -- giving up one precious thing to gain another -- that you have to bargain because you can never have it all.

9:56 AM, June 18, 2007
cl said...

That was a hard line to read. Some of the other stories I expect a tragedy that doesn't happen or isn't much of a tragedy (like in "Comfort"), and here's a story about a supposedly happy young mom, and she's the one wrestling with tragedy. She'd sacrificed her freedom and opportunities to marry young to a man she didn't entirely like. She wasn't going to get away from that, she wasn't going to have an illicit romance with Lionel, she was just going to grow older and then old, like you quoted. From the context of the story it just sounds like punishment worse than death to me.

5:06 PM, June 19, 2007

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)