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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
des figures Adam de plus en plus dominatrices et de plus en plus violentes au
fil des récits, je montrerai comment les personnages féminins de Munro sont
tentés par le fruit de la connaissance, pourquoi ces femmes optent pour un
aveuglement intentionnel et pourquoi la protagoniste de la nouvelle la plus
récente se détache de |’Eden construit par son Adam. Les histoires illustrent
l'équilibre délicat entre continuité et innovation dans l’œuvre de Munro.
Mots-clés: Alice Munro, littérature canadienne, cécité intentionnelle, Jar¬
din d’Eden
INTRODUCTION
Based on critical discussion, Alice Munro’s short stories seem to better lend
themselves to individual scrutiny than to examination as a group of stories.
This approach is partly dictated by Munro’s own insistence recorded in one of
her few early interviews: “I see everything separate” (“An Interview” 77), the
stories do not “fit into any sort of pattern at all” (98), she even asks, seemingly
in exasperation: “what on earth is this feeling that somehow things have to
connect or ... have to be part of a larger whole?” (98). Yet, somewhat arguing
with Munro’s claim for a fragmented perception, Ildiké de Papp Carrington,
one of her most perceptive critics, noted as early as in 1989 that “[c]learly
recognizable patterns unify almost all of [Munro’s] fiction” (3). However, another
critic a few years later warned, “the relation of Munro’s stories to groups, and
these groups to each other, is a tricky matter to describe” (Carscallen viii).
These early insights notwithstanding, Munro scholarship for long has tended
to discuss her short stories individually. Even book-length studies surveying
her oeuvre have typically offered an interpretative reading of story after story
in volume after volume, even though, often, the stories are thematically linked,
and not so much comment on but rather refract one another (Trussler 183).
This is true for those collections as well that are not unified by a single char¬
acter such as Del in Lives of Girls and Women, Rose in Who Do You Think You
Are or Juliet in Runaway. Moreover, I add, it is possible to notice recurring
themes, situations, characters (besides the typical Munrovian settings) not
only in individual volumes but also across them, even if these patterns are
difficult, if not to notice but rather, to fully uncover. James Carscallen in an
early critical study explains why this is so: “The structure inherent in Munro’s
work is orderly like any structure, but in actual reading we come to it through
what in a way is its opposite: associative connections like that of similar char¬
acters” (viii—ix). That is, to notice patterns and groups or groupings in Mun¬
ro’s stories, one needs to address both surface structure and, at a further remove,
interpretation.
There is a long list of recurring themes in Munro, identified in critical dis¬
cussions such as the complexity of human relationships, the intricacies of
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