When Canadian writer Alice Munro's Scottish ancestor James Laidlaw looked out, inebriated, over Edinburgh's Castle Rock in the early years of the 19th century, he saw not Fife on the distant side of the bay, but the fabled land of America in his mind's eye. And what was he to care that the real America lay in a different direction?
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This incident forms the title for Munro's collection of factual and fictional short stories about her family history, The View from Castle Rock, and exemplifies its inclusion this year as one of the texts to be studied under the rubric theme of "the Imaginative Landscape". For the mind's eye is where imaginative landscapes first reside.
In one common sense it is the task of the artist – writer, painter, cinematographer – to reconstruct a landscape (and those who inhabit it) in ways that render meaning and feeling from it, and to set a spur to the audience's imagination. So-called regional writers – of which Alice Munro, from western Ontario, is counted among their number – are renowned for producing works that derive intensively, in varied ways, from the localities in which they were raised or have chosen to settle, yet are of universal appeal. Think, for instance, of Harper Lee in the American south, the Bronte sisters in Yorkshire, or even of Raymond Chandler's murky vision of Los Angeles.
In the story titled Home, Munro refers directly to her own personal history, or trait, of writing about the region she knows. On a visit to her ageing father, she describes driving him into the local town via "that old, usual route ... The town ... stays much the same ... Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up. Here are more or less the same banks and hardware and grocery stores ... but all their secret, plentiful messages for me have drained away."
What is the relevance to us of this bitter quote? For me, having attempted in the past to write short fiction stories about my own home town, it means that Munro has dug, mined for literary gold, probed, plundered her own places of the barely comprehensible past (and of her heart) for her own creative purposes. Drawing upon them, she has reimagined and built internalised landscapes, people-scapes, in words on paper.
Only in writing about the town, the locale, the past, can it be corralled, contained, revealed and ascribed some degree of comprehension. And now the very existence of that landscape in a real, physical bricks-and-mortar sense, is but a bare skeleton to the writer; for sitting at her writing desk she has sucked its reality and her image of it dry of meaning, poured it into her art – and moved on to the next project. It is what these writers do, most seeking a closure that never comes, where the next project is likely a continuing variation on the same imagined landscape, the same theme.
As a corollary to Munro's observations of her role as writer, there are also examples in The View from Castle Rock where she imagines herself as "almost useless", a dreamer, a reader of fanciful fiction (perhaps, in part, a training ground for life as a writer). That is, having descended from a class of rural working stock, of being born and raised into a community of taciturn and practical folk who labour hard with their hands, she accuses herself, surrounded by this company, of being "mysteriously incompetent".
And yet, as a minor anecdote testifies, we see the extent to which the imaginative life residing within might suggest something very different, a mysterious competence of seeing – perhaps a gift.
At 17, shortly before leaving home for the first time, Munro is given a tour of the local foundry by her father. But is she really interested, he wonders, in "green sand" and its bonding qualities? "I said yes ... I didn't want to seem like a stupid girl. And I was interested, but not so much in the particular explanations ... as in the general effects – the gloom, the fine dust in the air, the idea of there being places like this all over the country ... Places with their windows painted over ... Something that took over the whole of peoples' lives ..."
This is the stuff out of which both fiction and documentary non-fiction may be wrought, a landscape imagined to a wider audience in terms of a greater truth far beyond her father's description of the processes of factory production: the apocalyptical vision of the "foundry disease", the "killing dust" destroying lives, silently wrecking families across the land. Also implicit is the eye of a commentator recording her contemporary times fading into history: "Much that I saw that night was soon to disappear ... The processes I saw were probably closer to those of the Middle Ages than to those of today."
The penultimate story of Munro's book is the aptly titled What Do You Want To Know For? It begins to pull together the many threads of an excursion into her Scottish ancestry, the research into her family history, her own place within it, and of those terrains that have informed and shaped it from the 18th century through the generations of pioneers, to the present day in the rural counties of Ontario. "It is difficult to make such requests in reference libraries," she writes, "because you will often be asked ... what do you want to know it for? ... But what if you are just interested? ..... Just interested ... makes you run the risk of being seen as an idler ... with no proper direction in life, nothing better to do."
It is precisely the questing nature of being "just interested" that opens the writer's way towards the possibilities of what might be discovered and melded into a unified vision, where the past, present and future coalesce, and you stand at that meeting point. For all the desperate hewing and hacking of the early settlers, who "hated the very sight of a tree" and sought to submit the landscape to their will, Munro contemplates, "The wooded areas – the bush – are making a strong comeback ... Perhaps there will be bears soon ... Perhaps they are here already."
The book's final image is of a seashell. From it, she hears the sea and the "tremendous pounding" of her blood, connecting the living with the dead, joining those forebears from Scotland's Ettrick Valley, who may have once looked out over Castle Rock, dreaming of future landscapes across the sea.
Further reading and viewing:
Harold Bloom (ed.), Alice Munro, Bloom's Literary Criticism, New York, 2012
Robert Thacker, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2005
Recent films based on works by Alice Munro:
Hateship, Loveship (drama, 2013)
Away From Her (drama, 2006)
The following may be of wider interest in studying the theme of the Imaginative Landscape:
Graeme Harper and Jonathan Raynor (eds.), Cinema and Landscape, Intellect, Bristol, Chicago, 2010.
Websites:
Alice Munro biography:
Two recent interviews:
Roger Stitson is a former secondary teacher, a freelance writer, and developer of online material.
