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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, Jardin 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 character 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 characters” (viii—ix). That is, to notice patterns and groups or groupings in Munro’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 discussions such as the complexity of human relationships, the intricacies of 42 ¢
