Abstract
In his introduction to Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature, Michael Gardiner argues for bringing together these two separate bodies of texts which are intimately joined. Within the context of the “‘postcolonial’ spaces of Scotland and Canada” (Gittings, 1995: 135), in this article I offer a comparative reading from the standpoint of Sara Ahmed’s affect theory of the post-millennial short stories of A. L. Kennedy and Alice Munro, based on their shared belief in a transatlantic new humanism which privileges emotions.
Keywords
Introduction
In his introduction to Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature, Michael Gardiner argues for bringing together these two separate bodies of texts which are intimately joined (2011: 12). Gardiner et al.’s (2011) volume forcefully puts forward this argument by providing a comparative analysis of Scottish and postcolonial writers as different and distant in time and background as Walter Scott and Margaret Atwood and Wole Soyinka and Hugh MacLennan, to mention but two examples. Gardiner et al.’s (2011) book is part of the emerging but rapidly growing field of postcolonial Scottish studies which includes Silke Stroh (2011, 2017) and Jessica Homberg-Schramm (2018). Both Scottish literature and postcolonial literature have the critique of imperialist ideas present in British state culture as one of their main objectives (Somacarrera, 2016), and draw on Frantz Fanon’s theories which participate in the universalist aim of a “new humanism” (Gardiner, 1996: 29).
In this article I offer a comparative reading of the post-millennial short fiction of the Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy (b. Dundee 1965) and that of the Canadian author Alice Munro (b. Wingham, Ontario 1931), based on their shared belief in a transatlantic new humanism which privileges emotional engagement, dialogue, trust, and empathy. This humanism encompasses the defence of human rights as a transatlantic and universal endeavour.
A. L. Kennedy has often defined herself as “a humanist” (March, 1999: 107; Mieszkowski, 2017: n.p.) who “believe[s] in the potential of [her] species” (Mieszkowski, 2017: n.p.). From the other side of the Atlantic and specifically in her latest fiction, Alice Munro advises us “To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities — see the humanity — in everybody you meet. To be aware” (Munro, 2006/2004: 201). The post-millennial fictions of these two masters of the short story are deeply concerned with two fundamental issues: the first is the question “What does it mean to be human?” and the second, the spelling out of repressed emotions. This concern with humanism and emotions follows a strain within Scottish and Canadian literature represented by writers like James Robertson and Janice Galloway in Scotland and Margaret Atwood in Canada.
Neither A. L. Kennedy nor Alice Munro offer simplistic notions of Scottishness or Canadianness. In relation to her Scottishness, Kennedy once stated: “I was not saying anything explicit about Scotland other than I am a Scottish writer because I live there and I was born there, and my books relate to other books that are Scottish” (Merritt, 1999: 19). However, she has recently expressed her sympathy with the new project of an inclusive and pro-European Scottish nationalism: “I would hope that Scotland would be able to break free and re-join Europe […] Its redefinition of nationalism as international self-definition with anyone welcome who wants to get aboard is hugely heartening “ (Mieszkowski, 2017: n.p.). Kennedy shares Gardiner’s (2011: 3) views about Scotland’s significant contribution to the British Empire. To the question of whether the Scottish have “the imperial guilt” (March, 1999: 113) that the English have, she replies: “As soon as we got abroad we did what had exactly been done to us […] I mean, we were the best engines of the Empire. And we made money at it all” (March, 1999: 113).
In an interview about her Scottish ancestry, Alice Munro has also emphasized Canada’s postcolonial condition: “We never really repudiated what we call the ‘old country’ the way Americans did […] This may be a difficulty about forming a country” (Gittings, 1994: 96). Munro has been instrumental in the formation of literary Canadianness but, as Katie Trumpener points out, her recent fiction pushes beyond a nationalist sense of Canadian terrain to think in more transatlantic terms (2011: 55). Many European critics (Somacarrera, 2016: 181; Ventura, 2016: 165; Wright, 2007: 308) have read Munro as a postcolonial writer of the Scottish diaspora in what one may regard as her Scottish fictions but, as Stephen Bernstein points out, it is not easy to theorize Munro’s relationship to Scotland (2014: 193).
I am going to read Kennedy’s and Munro’s post-millennial short-fiction from the standpoint of Sara Ahmed’s affect theory. To this end, I have selected short story collections focused on emotions and published during the same time span: What Becomes (2009) and All the Rage (2014) by A. L. Kennedy, and Runaway (2004) and Too Much Happiness (2009) by Alice Munro. The link between Kennedy and Munro is reinforced by their Scottish and Calvinist background. Characters in their fiction are often lapsed Presbyterians. In Munro’s case, Presbyterian theology is clearly an integral part of her fictional world (Somacarrera, 2015: 88). In a similar manner, some knowledge of the Calvinist ethos is useful to understand A. L. Kennedy’s fiction — she has acknowledged the significance of having been brought up as a Calvinist (Kennedy, 2013: 83). The “certainty of imperfection” (Kennedy, 2013: 83) affecting Kennedy’s and Munro’s characters can be traced back to the Calvinist obsession with original sin which inevitably produces the “fear — indeed, the certainty — of Hell” (Munro, 2007/2006: 41), even if it is a secular hell existing within us or prompted, as Sartre famously asserted, by the proximity of the other. The emphasis that Kennedy and Munro place on emotions contrasts with the rationalistic anti-emotional attitude of Calvinist “religious observances [which] were dutiful but not in any way emotional” (Munro, 2007/2006: 118). In her study of the transatlantic transmission of Puritanism, Susan Manning defines the Calvinist as an obsessive rationalist, whose reason is constantly at work, ordering, constructing, and giving up explanations (Manning, 1990: 159). From a literary vantage point, Alice Munro explores this Calvinist tradition of “agonized self-scrutiny” (Hadley, 2007:18) in her protracted autobiographical meditation on her Scottish inheritances, The View from Castle Rock (2006). In this volume, she looks back in time to reach her ancestors the Laidlaws, shepherds in the Ettrick Valley in Scotland (Thacker, 2011: 537) who emigrated to Canada in 1818. Their Presbyterian values — “fortitude, self-reliance, hard work” (Munro, 2007/2006: 129) — travelled with them and shaped their lives in the new country, as did the theology of disputation and doubt they learned from the rigorous Scottish eighteenth-century minister Thomas Boston, thus making the affect generated by these Calvinist doctrines transatlantic. The Laidlaws’ experience in Canada is marked by the contrast of their Presbyterian faith and its doctrine about predestination, and the religious scepticism of the Scottish Enlightenment which impelled them to question their religion. 1 Like Munro’s earlier Scottish stories from Friend of My Youth (1990), The View from Castle Rock (2006) “destabilizes the truth claims encoded in the master narratives of inherited Calvinist belief systems” (Gittings, 1997: 36).
Returning to consider my chosen theoretical framework, affect theory is a productive and vast field of critical enquiry which has been thriving for almost two decades. In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader (2010), Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg attempt a definition of affect which is particularly useful for my analysis of Kennedy’s and Munro’s short fiction: Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage […] of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body […], in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds […]. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces — visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing. (2010: 1; emphasis in original)
Seigworth and Gregg define affect as a kind of force and emphasize its in-betweenness and dependence on body to body relations. In their definition, the transatlantic, transnational dimension of affect is conveyed by the emphasis on in-betweenness and the passage of forces. Connecting affect to bodily change distinguishes Sara Ahmed from other theorists such as Brian Massumi (2002: 25), who believes affect to be autonomous. For Ahmed, emotions 2 are socially produced in the contiguity of other bodies. In what she calls “a most affective decade” (2014/2004: 205), Ahmed published Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000), dealing with the issue, most pertinent to postcolonial studies, of why some bodies are recognized as strangers, as bodies out of place, as not belonging to certain places (Ahmed, 2014/2004: 211). In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014/2004), she fully articulates her thesis that affect is related to the experiential. Finally, in The Promise of Happiness (2010b), she relates the positive emotion of happiness to the contingency of what happens. As I analyse Kennedy’s and Munro’s stories, I will draw on Ahmed’s views on emotion and move between the two authors’ texts following thematic links without necessarily keeping the chronological order in which the stories were published. I would like to stress that, like Ahmed, I do not consider that any emotion is essentially “positive” or “negative”, which is why these words are used in quotation marks in the titles of the following sections of this essay.
“Negative” emotions: Anger, guilt, and grief
Although anger has been considered by philosophers like Martha Nussbaum as “a stupid way to run one’s life” (qtd. in Jamison, 2018), affect theorists and feminist critics like Sara Ahmed have emphasized the potential of anger to effect change. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s 1981 seminal essay “The Uses of Anger”, Ahmed argues that this affect “is not simply defined in relationship to a past, but as opening up the future” (Ahmed, 2014/2004: 175). Setting out from the view that anger is loaded with information and energy (Lorde, 1984: 127), in this section I am going to look into negative emotions (anger and guilt) in A. L. Kennedy’s and Alice Munro’s recent fiction.
I will begin by looking at Kennedy’s “Baby Blue” from All the Rage, a story about a woman who feels inferiorized and almost infrahuman because of her feelings of guilt. This is a formally challenging and highly ambiguous story which depicts the emotional reaction of the nameless narrator after she breaks up with her lover, in which guilt has the effect of triggering her anger: Anger is always a second emotion, something else having always been there first. I wish I’d never learned that. Fear and pain being the most usual precursors. (Kennedy, 2015/2014: 29)
The narrator’s interpretation of anger as an effect of fear and pain is confirmed through affect theory. Anger is often motivated by a desire not to experience the distressing emotions of hurt and fear (Seltzer, 2013: n.p.). In children’s emotions anger occupies a prominent place but the study of Kennedy’s and Munro’s stories about children’s emotions remains outside the scope of this essay which deliberately focuses on adult, heterosexual relationships. Still, in order to illustrate the transference of emotions from anger to fear which takes place in Munro’s fiction, it is useful to consider a description of hatred from the story “Child’s Play”, in Too Much Happiness, about two girls who commit a murder out of fear. The story contains a lucid description of what lies behind the feeling of hatred experienced by children: “Children use the word ‘hate’ to mean various things. It means that they are frightened […] It is not physical harm that is feared […] so much as some spell, or dark intention” (Munro, 2010/2009: 194–95). As Ahmed points out, emotions are relational and involve affective forms of reorientation (Ahmed, 2014/2004: 8). One emotion can develop into another, as I shall demonstrate in the analysis which follows.
From the psychological point of view, Leon Seltzer (2013) also connects anger and guilt insomuch as a great deal of anger is caused by the desire not to experience guilt. From a religious standpoint, guilt is an emotional response to a mistake or wrongdoing which relates theologically to sin, remorse, penance, and forgiveness (Arel, 2016: 4, 8). Culpability is also a double-edged feeling which appears simultaneously attractive and repulsive. As Austin, the preacher in Munro’s story “Pictures of the Ice” observes, “Guilt is a sin and a seduction” (Munro, 1991/1990: 146). Human beings have a tendency to indulge unrestrainedly in guilt which can inevitably lead to depression and resentment. In “Baby Blue” the narrator has to deal with her guilt at having “gone to trouble” (Kennedy, 2015/2014: 32; emphasis in original) to break up with her lover and then find a substitute for his physical presence at a sex shop. She wonders if she is depressed (2015/2014: 23) and confesses to “love and resent” (2015/2014: 27). Her “uninterrupted fury” (2015/2014: 30) generated as an emotional transference of her guilt explodes at the sight of the sex gadgets, and the shop assistants’ comments about wanting her
In contrast with the elliptical — if no less powerful — way in which Kennedy tackles the topic of culpability in “Baby Blue”, Munro deals extensively with the interface of guilt and grief in the three connected stories of Runaway known as the Juliet triptych — “Chance”, “Soon”, and “Silence”— which assess “the necessity of some feelings of guilt both in public and private life” (Munro, 2006/2004: 69). Spanning over 25 years in Juliet’s life, the stories delve into the guilt provoked by certain events, such as the suicide of a stranger she met on a train; her having lived with a man without being married; the death of Eric, her first partner and father of her child; her mistreatment of her mother; and, most importantly, the long absence of her daughter Penelope. In “Chance”, Juliet’s guilt over the man she snubs on the train probably has to do with her age at the time, but foreshadows “other things she will feel guilty about” (2006/2004: 68), as Eric predicts in an ominously Calvinistic manner. In addition to guilt, “Chance” debunks another theological principle of Calvinism, that of predestination, since Juliet’s life is set in motion by a series of “accidents” (Reeves, 2016: 133) instead of by a fate previously designed by the divinity.
“Soon”, the next story of the triptych, offers further valuable information about Juliet’s religious and cultural background as she returns to her parents’ home in Huron County, Ontario (Alice Munro’s place of birth), an area largely populated by Scots in the nineteenth century where the Scots language is still spoken — one of the women in her village uses the Scottish word “wee” (Munro, 2006/2004: 113). Juliet’s maiden name “Henderson” is a Scottish name meaning “son of Henry” and Eric’s last name “Porteous” (a name from the Scottish Borders) — adopted by Juliet despite her not being married to him — is originally a term from Scots Law referring to the names of indicted offenders prepared by the Justice Clark, further underlining the protagonist’s sense of culpability. Given Juliet’s Scottish background by upbringing and marriage, her guilt may be associated with her Calvinist “certainty of imperfection” (Kennedy, 2013: 83). Asked by her mother if she is happy, Juliet answers: “As happy as is consistent with living in sin” (2006/2004: 116). This Calvinist sense of scandal at Juliet’s having had a daughter with a man who is not her official husband stopped Juliet’s father from picking her up at the station closest to the town where she had grown up. Furthermore, the allusions in the story to Chagall’s painting “I and the Village” suggest Juliet’s sense of not belonging to this town of Scottish ancestry, heightened by her Calvinist habit of “[making] herself a rather superior, invulnerable observer” (2006/2004: 65). Juliet’s being out of place and her aloofness can be read under the lens of Ahmed’s theories on the stranger — to recognize somebody as a stranger is an affective judgement (Ahmed, 2014/2004: 211).
As its title suggests, in the concluding story of the triptych Juliet has to face the inescapable fact of “silence” (Reeves, 2016: 127). The narrator provides an account of Eric’s death for which Juliet also blames herself because she had felt jealous and outraged by Eric’s fling with an lady friend of old just before he set out on his last fishing trip. Like the other stories, it begins with a journey, to the Spiritual Balance centre on an island off the west coast of Canada where her daughter Penelope has spent the past six months, without communicating with Juliet. On her arrival, Juliet is shocked to learn that Penelope is not at the centre, and does not even want to see her. Joan, the “unctuous” (Reeves, 2016: 127) but manipulative woman who meets her — later ironically known as “Mother Shipton” after a famous English soothsayer — claims that Penelope has missed out on a “spiritual dimension […] because she did not grow up in a faith-based home” (Munro, 2006/2004: 131). Juliet had in fact avowed her atheism to minister Don in her Ontario hometown in “Soon” — “We don’t go to church […] We don’t believe in God” (2006/2004: 119) — introducing an excruciating irony if this is indeed the reason why Penelope has cut off all communications with her mother (Reeves, 2016: 27). Later on in “Silence” Juliet wonders whether she should have provided Penelope with some moral training: “Should I have talked to her about a noble life?” (2006/2004: 153). Despite her doubts, Juliet continues to endure. Endurance, or to use the Christian term, perseverance, seems to be humankind’s fate, as Munro portrays it (Barber, 2016: 149). In Juliet’s case, knowledge and acceptance of one’s situation come with endurance because she finally learns to question her guilt and her Calvinist tendency to rationalize everything. As she reflects: “we always have this idea that there is this reason or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons” (2006/2004: 158; emphasis in original). At the end of the story, Juliet rejects rationalism and organized religion and falls back on a new faith leading her to hope “for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort” (2006/2004: 158), a kind of secular grace which will allow her to continue living.
Grieving women who run away from their homes often people Kennedy’s and Munro’s fiction. Sometimes, like the narrator of “Baby Blue”, they run away from themselves; on other occasions, they escape from scenarios of physical and/or psychological violence. “Runaway”, the first story in Alice Munro’s collection of the same title, concerns three runaways. The first is Carla, a “naturally happy” (Munro, 2006/2004: 18) young woman whose abusive husband, Clark, inspires her to run away to escape from “her seesaw misery” with him (2006/2004: 16). The second is Sylvia Jamieson, the neighbour whose husband Carla used to look after. The third runaway is Flora, a pet goat, with whom Carla had a connection of “comradeship” (2006/2004: 9), unlike the one she had with her husband. The goat, possibly killed by Clark, mysteriously vanishes and returns as an apparition at a scene in which Clark threatens Sylvia physically. In “The Practice of Mercy”, from A. L. Kennedy’s All the Rage, Dorothy, the protagonist, “got scared” (Kennedy, 2015/2014: 71) of the violence of her marital life and the capacity of each of them to hurt the other, and fled to a resort. Dorothy’s anger explodes at any trivial incident, and she is aware “that every human body hid a pastel shade of outrage no one should view without safety glasses, or else protective screens” (2015/2014: 63). Clark from “Runaway” “flare[s] up” (Munro, 2006/2004: 6) constantly and attributes anger to his gender (“That’s what men do”), but Munro’s and Kennedy’s fiction illustrates the anger of which both men and women are capable, albeit with different effects. Both Munro’s “Runaway” and Kennedy’s “The Practice of Mercy” end with the husbands travelling to fetch their wives, but neither text offers an unambiguous happy ending as their protagonists’ existence remains inescapably uncertain. Carla confronts a future that is tenuous and haunted by doubt (Reeves, 2016: 117), in which dark forces might turn things in a totally different direction (Barber, 2016: 153). Kennedy also closes “The Practice of Mercy” ambiguously, with a dialogue between Dorothy and her husband opening up the possibility of establishing their relationship in new terms but rejecting any certainty of a definitive reconciliation: “And there is a way of saying this which means we can’t continue and way of saying it which means we can keep on and manage and we can be all right” (2015/2014: 72; emphasis in original). Kennedy’s conciseness — her story is only ten pages long — contrasts with Munro’s lengthier extension (44 pages) but both stories forcefully capture the sense of doubt and anxiety in an estranged couple’s apparent reconciliation.
In her collection What Becomes, A. L. Kennedy portrays the psychological conflicts generated by the silencing of emotions. The title story is an extremely well-crafted map of affect between a married couple, in this particular case under the effects of trauma. As the precise nature of the traumatic event — the death of a daughter in an accident — is obscured by the couple’s stubborn refusal to speak about it, the reader needs to unearth it from under the disjointed form of the story. As in “Baby Blue”, different settings highlight the internal dislocation of the characters as the story alternates between two different places: the small, battered cinema Frank used to run, and the couple’s home where he tries to come to terms with his wife’s negative emotions against him. In fact, much of the plot of “What Becomes” revolves around a minor mishap — Frank cutting himself while making supper for his wife — which acts as correlative of the fatal accident which caused the death of his daughter. In both cases, Frank is affected by guilt and believes that “he hadn’t been paying attention and so he’d got what he deserved” (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 6).
Frank’s and his wife’s reactions during the episode of his injury do not develop as expected. Rather, the “unwilled adjacency” (Butler, 2012: 134) between the spouses triggered by the crisis of their marriage sets off unusual behaviours. Instead of worrying about Frank’s wound, his wife blames him for the domestic accident, just as she blames him for their daughter’s death. In the light of affect theory, Frank’s wife’s anger can be read as a side effect of grief because she swears and blasphemes: “Jesus Christ, Frank. What have you done. What the fuck are you doing” (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 8), and her verbal anger is immediately followed by physical assault as she slaps him and throws kitchen utensils. Despite his wife’s violent behaviour, Frank tries to reach out to her in order “to apologise and uncover how she was feeling” (2010/2009: 8), but he finds himself unable to give a name to “the large emotion” (2010/2009: 16) she is going through. In the vicious circle of negative affect the couple is engaged in, Frank always ends up taking all of his wife’s grief onto himself. Unable to continue in this situation, he leaves his domestic realm for his former work environment at the cinema where he feels empowered and finally able to unleash his anger. This affect — anger — saves him from his condition of being a victim because, as Lorde points out, anger is visionary, and the transformation of anger into silence is a turning away from the future (Lorde, 1984: 127). The characters of Munro’s and Kennedy’s post-millennial fictions have a tendency to silence the grief generated by loss, which is sublimated into anger. The unnamed protagonist of “Baby Blue” “would rather not notice the signals that prove [she has been] hurt or frightened” (Kennedy, 2015/2014: 29). In “What Becomes”, Frank’s capacity for empathy reveals itself in his being too worried about his wife’s feelings to take any notice of his own grief, until he finally realizes that if he takes on more pain he “won’t be able to breathe and [he’ll die]” (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 17; emphasis in original). In Munro’s “Silence”, Juliet takes a long time to acknowledge the grief produced by Eric’s death but when she finally does, she describes it as physical sensation, “like a sack of cement which has been poured into her and quickly hardened” (Munro, 2006/2004: 147), which must be repressed.
“Positive” emotions: Love and happiness
Love is crucial to the formation of subjectivity and sociality. According to Sigmund Freud, whose work is foundational to many contemporary theories on affect, we live in a civilization which places the search for happiness and love at the centre of everything, constantly looking for satisfaction in loving and being loved (Freud, 1961/1930: 29). However, while love may be crucial to the pursuit of happiness, it also makes the subject vulnerable, exposed, and dependent upon another, who in “not being myself”, threatens to take away the possibility of love (Freud, 1961/1930: 48). Love can only exist in the context of contiguous bodies, because the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us (Butler, 2012: 141). The following definition of love from Kennedy’s “Baby Blue” is concomitant with Butler’s description: The real experience of love is of having unreasonably lost all shelter, […] there really is, that initial loss. Sudden. And you cling to whoever is with you for sheer safety, beyond anything else. You cling to whoever has robbed you and they cling back because they are equally naked — you have stripped them to their blood. They are your responsibility, frail and skinless. It can’t be helped. (Kennedy, 2015/2014: 27)
The “initial loss” refers to “the loss of the self” involved in love. Dying to oneself is an indispensable condition of loving other people. The repetition of the verb “cling” suggests that emotions (including love) are only experienced in contiguity with other human beings.
Kennedy’s “Edinburgh” from What Becomes deals with an attempt at contact between human beings that ends up being unsuccessful. Peter, the protagonist, as the owner of a grocery store who has not been emotionally involved with anybody for a long time, is placed in a situation of in-betweenness, always in contact with other people. As expected in a romance plot, he falls in love with one of his customers, Amanda (a name meaning “worthy of love”), despite his fear of being hurt. As Ahmed observes, happiness turns us towards objects and implies three dimensions: affect (to be happy is to be affected by something); intentionality (to be happy is to be happy about something), and evaluation (to be happy makes something good) (2010a: 20). Amanda becomes the object of Peter’s happiness, and his being intent on falling in love with her is acknowledged because he defines himself as a happy man beyond rational considerations. However, Peter also knows that being happy and in love is not always the best option: Because it’s always better to be contented than in love. But when you’ve had nothing for so long, you get greedy and confused. You want to be more than contented, you want to be burned up alive and made again. You want always to have a loved face. (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 48; emphasis in original)
Accepting that love is not necessarily better than contentment and that it can be a harrowing experience, Peter carefully considers the advantages and disadvantages of “falling in love”, a phrase he connects to the other meanings of “fall” as “to be brought down to the ground” and “to surrender to an attack”. In Munro’s story “Fiction” from Too Much Happiness, the narrator reflects that the word “falling” in “falling in love” suggests “a speeding up, a moment or second when you fall” (Munro, 2010/2009: 37), often involving physical and emotional pain. Just like Frank in “What Becomes”, Peter wounds himself and starts bleeding, a physical wound that foreshadows the pain provoked by the fiasco of his relationship with Amanda, who does not have the same feelings for him. The story ends with the disappointed and hurt Peter concluding, as he is solicited by one of the spiritual gurus who frequent the shop, that “We are not all connected. We are bags of skin. We are all separate bags of thinking skin” (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 54). While Peter acknowledges the essential bodily nature of the human condition, his disappointment at being jilted by Amanda leads him to abandon his faith in the possibility of connection between human bodies.
In contrast with the pessimism about human relationships of “What Becomes”, in many of the stories of Kennedy’s subsequent collection All the Rage, connection between human beings — which often seems impossible in the beginning — does end up taking place. In “Because It’s a Wednesday”, where the title already points to a routine relationship, Philip who lives in an “
“That Man” recounts another meeting of a couple who barely know each other. This story displays an unusual narrative technique whereby the narrator addresses the unnamed protagonist in the second person singular. Through this strange narrating voice the reader finds out that the woman is “ugly” (Kennedy, 2015/2014: 210) and that she is afraid of the possible psychological harm the stranger might inflict on her by humiliation. She considers “that [she] may have to be angry with him soon as a matter of sheer self-defence” (2015/2014: 210). Once again, anger is shown to have the performative role Ahmed assigns to it. In the beginning the female protagonist behaves as the Calvinist rational observer, until an unexpected passionate kiss does away with her earlier misgivings about her companion: “You do not know him, this man. He is practically a stranger. Only he’s not” (2015/2014: 211). This last sentence of All the Rage can be read through the prism of Ahmed’s views about the stranger, who should be socially constructed as somebody we already know (2000: 3). The stranger is the one whom we have already encountered, or already faced (2000: 23). The kiss between the participants in this blind date does away with their condition of being strangers to one another.
Recognizing the stranger is also a central motif in Munro’s Juliet triptych, in which two encounters with unknown men shape the protagonist’s life. The first encounter is the one with the stranger on the train which provoked a feeling of guilt in Juliet, impelling her to find refuge in a second stranger, Eric, who becomes her partner and father of her daughter, and thus no longer susceptible to the label of “stranger”. In “Tricks” from the same collection, Robin, another of Munro’s lapsed Calvinists lacking sexual experience, discovers love with Danilo, a Serbian man she accidentally meets on a day out at the theatre. Disregarding her sister’s belief that “Foreigners pick up girls that nobody else will have” (Munro, 2006/2004: 253), she kisses him on a train platform. The word “foreigner” can be read as a synonym of Ahmed’s “stranger”: the foreigner is the one who seems suspicious, dangerous, the one who lurks (2014/2004: 211), another way to refer to the postcolonial “other”.
Usually understood as a feeling state of well being which encompasses living a good life, Ahmed defines happiness as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, what gives purpose, meaning, and order to human life (2010b: 1). A person cannot be considered fully human if she does not have a certain degree of happiness. Happiness as a transatlantic affect is central to the modern world, since the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America famously includes “the pursuit of Happiness” as one of its “unalienable Rights” (Jefferson, 1974/1776: 307). Happiness demands certain conditions, such as the absence of risks and problems: “Human beings, they need to be safe: no tragedy, no oncoming car, just you with your own name and no worries, happy” (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 78). As Kennedy’s and Munro’s stories demonstrate, however, this ideal scenario hardly ever exists in real life.
Munro’s and Kennedy’s Scottish backgrounds should be taken into account when exploring their approaches to happiness. As Carol Craig notes, Scottish culture has the reputation of encouraging negative feeling (2011/2003: 319). Munro’s ancestors, the Laidlaws, were raised in the teachings of Thomas Boston, according to which, as she writes in her story “A Wilderness Station”, the state of suffering is the normal one: “The Lord is strict in his mercies and we are bound to receive his blows as signs of his care and goodness for so they will prove to be” (Munro, 1994: 198). In James Robertson’s novel The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), the protagonist’s father — a strict Presbyterian minister — defines happiness as “the flicker of a struck match in the vast expanse of God’s creation” (2007/2006: 118). These quotations, from a real eighteenth-century minister and from a fictional twentieth-century one, speak of the peripherality of happiness to the Calvinist tradition. It is perhaps in reaction to this fact that Kennedy’s and Munro’s stories constantly refer to happiness. Kennedy attaches a degree of irrationality at odds with the Calvinist tradition to her idea of how happiness is experienced. In “Edinburgh” Peter is happy “beyond any capacity for thought” (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 46; emphasis in original). In “Baby Blue” the narrator also abandons rationality when she links happiness with touching her lover: “Am I mistaken in thinking that when I touch the man I love […] the point is that I’m touching him and it’s love and the whole of him and I am happy with the whole of him and my aim is to produce an increase of happiness in both parties” (Kennedy, 2015/2014: 28). In Kennedy’s stories, happiness is experienced in the contiguity of the lover and has a very tangible and interactive dimension. By contrast, Munro imparts a mystical dimension to sexual intercourse combined with a sense of loss of the self in the description of Juliet’s and Eric’s second sexual encounter in “Chance”: “He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing is this. How close to dismay” (Munro, 2006/2004: 85). Munro is in fact ambivalent and sometimes comical about the narcotic and violent aspects of erotic love. In “Dolly” from Dear Life, a story about an elderly couple in which the woman briefly runs away, the husband teases the wife over a former love, thus parodying the usual depiction of an all-consuming erotic drive which no longer makes sense in old age — “I had forgotten how old we were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain” (Munro, 2013a: 253).
In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed undertakes a cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. In the sex shop episode from “Baby Blue” it is assumed that an adult, liberated woman will be seeking sexual satisfaction — and by extension, happiness — through the use of sex toys. This is the rationale behind the shop assistant’s exclamation “
The typographical experimentation of “Baby Blue” — use of bold and italics — which Kennedy shares with other contemporary Scottish writers (Mitchell, 2008: 19) offers information about the workings of the mind of this psychologically unstable narrator. In addition, Kennedy’s highly conversational and mocking style can be related to her career as a stand-up comedian, which she sees as a necessary antidote to her writing life (Mitchell, 2008: 40). Whereas Kennedy presents dislocated portraits of her characters through her use of ellipsis and fragmentation, Munro provides an exhaustive history of hers as well as a projection into their future, because, as Barber (2016: 36) points out, most of her stories are character studies. Such is the case of Doree in “Dimensions”, from Too Much Happiness: she is traumatized by the triple murder of her children, committed by her husband Lloyd, and has stopped feeling the superficial happiness provoked by “nice weather and flowers in bloom or the smell of a bakery” (Munro, 2010/2009: 27). Led by a mixture of belief in predestination and the need to talk about her children, she continues to visit her husband in prison. Lloyd tries to manipulate her through letters imbued with an odd combination of spiritual maxims from classical Greece (“Know thyself”) and Calvinist dogmas (original sin): “What I Know in Myself is my own Evil” (2010/2009: 23; emphasis in original). He tries to convince Doree that their children exist in their own “dimension”, where they are “happy and smart […] and don’t seem to have any memory of anything bad” (2010/2009: 25; emphasis in original). Showing a high degree of resilience, Doree holds on to these irrational thoughts in order obtain some relief from her pain (2010/2009: 27). It is only in the final scene of the story when Doree gets off the bus on her way to visit Lloyd again and saves a boy’s life that she manages to shake the addiction of visiting her “terrible” and “insane” husband (2010/2009: 27). Providing the young boy with first aid and staying to look after him, as the Good Samaritan in the Gospel, symbolically evokes the after-life of her children and helps her overcome her feelings of guilt about their death. This ending shows Munro’s profound belief in humanity by presenting the redeeming power of empathy for other human beings in a woman who has been psychologically hurt.
The titular and final story of Too Much Happiness indicates the significance of this affect to Munro’s work. With this collection, she seems to return to her fiction about Huron County characters, but the research-based title story about a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician makes it an unusual text in her narrative corpus and offers an interesting transnational perspective. Unlike the perception of happiness in “Deep Holes”, another story from the collection, that “There is only outside, what you do, every moment of your life” (Munro, 2010/2009: 113), the final story describes this coveted state of the human mind as something interior, a kind of mystical experience, as an “enchantment of her mind and body” (2010/2009: 300). Munro re-imagines the life of a historical figure, Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician and novelist. “Too Much Happiness” is the story with the clearest feminist overtones in the collection, setting out to refuse the common belief that a woman’s emotions always revolve around loving a man. In addition, it debunks the notion that women cannot excel at mathematics because, as the narrator of “Dolly” puts it, “Weakness of intellect prevented it” (Munro, 2013a: 244). Sophia has a detached approach to her relationship with her fiancé Maxsim, “balancing signs of affection against those of impatience, and indifference against a certain qualified passion” (Munro, 2010/2009: 254). The word “happiness” is pervasive in the story, in relation to the state of Sophia’s mind. When Maxsim suggests a delay in the date of the wedding so Sophia can work on her equations, she writes to her friend Julia saying “it is to be happiness after all. Happiness after all. Happiness” (2010/2009: 253), leaving it unclear whether the happiness comes from being given more time to work on her research, or from the prospective marriage. As Ahmed points out, one of the primary happiness indicators is marriage, a state which could be defined as “the best of possible worlds” as it maximizes happiness (Ahmed, 2010b: 6). In the hours prior to her death, Sophia feels an unexpected flow of “excitement” (Munro, 2010/2009: 300) and “hope” (2010/2009: 301) not attributed to her marriage but, rather, to the “new mathematical work she was planning” (2010/2009: 300). The cryptical oxymoron Sophia enigmatically utters before her death — “Too much happiness” (2010/2009: 302) — can be interpreted as an ellipsis of the sentence “Too much happiness [now that I am dying]” which bears out the story’s feminist tenet that a woman can experience more happiness due to intellectual activity than to marriage.
Conclusion: “The emotional housekeeping of the world”
In his essay “Peripheries”, Cairns Craig advocates the comparative study of Scottish and Canadian literatures, both of which he situates on the margins of literary discourse because they both exist in the periphery of a dominating culture (1981: 3). Gittings also advocates a cross-cultural dialogue between Canada and Scotland based on the postcolonial counter-discourse that marks Canadian and Scottish literatures (1995: 4). Although they are two very different writers, A. L. Kennedy and Alice Munro belong to these Scottish and Canadian peripheries and share a concern with postcolonial issues. The two authors have different degrees of political involvement: throughout Kennedy’s work there is a strikingly visible concern with the ethical and the political (Bell, 1998: 12), which evokes that of Margaret Atwood, whereas Munro has declared that “she is not a political person” (Munro, 2013b: n.p.) Nevertheless, they both believe in a transatlantic humanism which offers a new meaning to a term (humanism) discredited because of its being complicit with projects of patriarchal domination, the expansion of colonialism, the growth of imperialism, and now the domination of global capital (Karavanta and Morgan, 2008: 1). In the official interview Alice Munro granted when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, she reflected: “I want my stories to move people” (Munro, 2013b: n.p.). In fact, one of the key features of this transatlantic humanism is the vindication of the moral value of emotions or, as Munro puts it in her story “Fiction”, “the emotional housekeeping of the world” (2010/2009: 58). Likewise, Kennedy connects the emphasis on emotions and sincerity to humanism: she is certain that “an emotional truth, a psychological honesty […] will create a fabric which can contain the uncontainable — those parts of us which are most human and most beyond the reach of words” (Kennedy, 1997: 10).
As I have demonstrated in this essay, affect theory as articulated by Sara Ahmed sheds light on the complex emotional labyrinths of Kennedy’s and Munro’s characters. Three main conclusions can be drawn from applying Ahmed’s theory of affect to the analysis of these Scottish and Canadian stories. First, stories like Kennedy’s “Baby Blue” and “That Man” and the ones in Munro’s Juliet triptych show that for these writers, as Ahmed observes (2014/2004: 8), emotions are not static but relational, and are permanently being reoriented. Second, in both authors’ work anger is not always a negative emotion but, according to Ahmed, can imply connection and survival — anger allows the narrator of “Baby Blue” and Frank in “What Becomes” to stop being victims and move forward. Third, in their literary imaginaries happiness is an extremely complex emotion, often socially manipulated by what Kennedy calls “fantasy and commercial projections”. True happiness, as suggested in several of the stories I have discussed but especially in “Too Much Happiness”, is a condition of inner contentment depending on contingency, not always implying good feelings.
Another shared concern of A. L. Kennedy’s and Alice Munro’s post-millennial fiction, skilfully spelt out in stories such as “What Becomes” and “Silence”, is the devastating effect of being “emotionally inaccessible” (Munro, 2006/2004: 267), which for some of the characters of these stories can be attributed to their Calvinist beliefs. What Kennedy writes in her review of the film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp can be applied to the characters in the stories I have analysed. “If he is unaware of his passions”, she writes of Clive Candy, the film’s central figure, “this is because his pains have become a part of his personality, and because he was never taught a language that could speak of emotions like pain” (Kennedy, 1997: 15). These “emotionally inaccessible” characters — human beings trying to come to terms with feelings of grief they cannot confess even to themselves — include Kennedy’s narrator of “Baby Blue” and Frank from “What Becomes”, and Juliet in Munro’s Runaway. The characters inhabiting Kennedy’s and Munro’s fictions are in desperate need of “a small transfer of emotion” (Kennedy, 2010/2009: 5). Emotions involve the confrontation of human beings with the world and with themselves (Stein, 2012: 771), 3 so that a person who does not feel emotions is condemned to a life of “loneliness” and “unhappiness”. The feeling of guilt concomitant to Kennedy’s and Munro’s “contentious and cranky Presbyterian faith”, as described in The View from Castle Rock (Munro, 2007/2006: 119), looms large in their characters’ lives. Whereas there is no evidence that the characters in Kennedy’s stories will ever be able to get rid of their guilt, Munro’s fictional world offers more possibilities for escaping this negative feeling, at least temporarily.
Contact with the other is a central motif of the new humanism proposed by A. L. Kennedy and Alice Munro in their twenty-first century fiction, a position also put forward by Ahmed in her book Strange Encounters. In the stories I have explored, Kennedy never completely excludes contact with other human beings despite difference and despite “the difficulty, if not seeming impossibility of connecting with other people” (Shriver, 2014: n.p.). This approximation between unknown human beings is superbly articulated by Munro in “Runaway”, in a letter Sylvia writes to Carla about the impact of the supernatural appearance of Flora the goat: In a sense her return has no connection at all with our human lives. Yet her appearance at that moment did have a profound effect on your husband and me. When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified — no, frightened — by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity — that is the only way I can describe it. (Munro, 2006/2004: 45; emphasis in original)
In times of hatred and vulnerability, Munro’s and Kennedy’s appeal to be true to emotions, leave behind hostilities, and be united by humanity is, undoubtedly, a very powerful message.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.