Friday, June 15, 2007

Oh wait

What do you make of the fact that the "nettles" they were in were not really nettles but the less common joe-pye weed? The narrator ends the story with this "correction."
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8 comments:

Erin said...

That was very interesting. That tacked-on "correction" made it seem more like a memoir than a short story.

Is there symbolism about the weeds that I'm missing?

2:57 PM, June 15, 2007
kc said...

I haven't figured that out. Maybe it has something to do with things being different than you thought.

She thought it was nettles, but it was something less common.

Maybe it has something to do with the experience being more special even than it seemed at the time.

I really don't have a handle on that. (But we need to make sense of this, dammit! It's the frickin' title and ending of the story!)

3:07 PM, June 15, 2007
Ben said...

They did get into nettles, but they weren't the flashy weed that she had noticed at the time.

The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, ...[and] would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow.

Their love is represented by the insignificant weed that went unnoticed in the flourishing of the waste meadow, which represents their lives, perhaps especially his.

The rash of the nettles around their ankles showed their Love that was not usable, that knew its place. It wasn't incriminatingly on the buttocks, ...thighs and belly as "usuable" love would have been.

And she had said I remembered the nettles. But it turns out that she didn't -- just like she may not have remembered her childhood accurately. Whatever it was that had happened between them as kids had sunken its barbs into them both.

11:25 AM, June 16, 2007
Ben said...

Oh, and the disclaimer is another hint, if any were necessary, that the narrator is not completely reliable.

11:32 AM, June 16, 2007
kc said...

Interesting that you find her unreliable. That didn't really strike me. I don't think failing to know the proper name of a plant is an indicator of general unreliability. I understood that as something we all as human beings are prone to: having a perception of something that turns out to be incorrect. But SHE corrected her mistake. I think if Munro had wanted us to consider the narrator as unreliable she would have had some other character point out the error.

12:58 PM, June 16, 2007
Ben said...

Well, if it doesn't illustrate unreliability, it at least shows how her viewpoint is limited -- the sentence "I remembered the nettles" and "Those plants ... are not nettles" were written from the same frame -- the time of the telling of the story. But she limited her viewpoint in the former sentence in order to make the point about the nettles being unnoticed.

3:56 PM, June 16, 2007
kc said...

Yeah, we should have a discussion about Munro's different narrators: omniscient vs. first person. I think a first-person narrator is always limited to some extent.

5:18 PM, June 16, 2007
cl said...

I guess I think of nettles as something that clings to you, like her childhood memories of Mike. Because nettles can have an unpleasant connotation, the narrator thought the correction was warranted.

10:56 AM, June 18, 2007

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