'The tumble of reason': Paradigmatic reservoirs of meaning in the fiction of Alice Munro

While Alice Munro's writing has often been praised for its realistic presentation of lives and events, Munro's texts confer their meaning not simply by reference to an outer reality, but also by bestowing upon the reader a stimulating wealth of possibilities taken from what we might call a potential or absent level of meaning. What makes Munro such a compelling writer, in fact, is the way in which her stories articulate and play out the unresolvable tension between variants on these positions, between, on the one hand, her delineation of a surface reality--a world "out there" which we are invited to recognize as real and true--and, on the other, her involvement with a "paradigmatic" realm of absent meanings, a realm which challenges and renders problematic the very conventions within which her fiction operates. By using "paradigmatic discourse" to reveal varying degrees of possibility (the unreal, the hypothetical, the potential, the impossible), Munro enables us to see how "reality" might look different if something absent were substituted for the way things are. Her stories frequently turn on what has been left out, on what cannot be told or written; meaning is repeatedly inscribed in a kind of absence: the emphasis is not on what happens but on what might have happened. This discourse of absent and potential meanings manifests itself in various ways through Munro's writing. It can take the form of a fascination with the ways we tell, understand, and make use of stories, a recognition of the limits of representation (especially in language), a self-conscious questioning of the relationship between real and invested worlds, an interest in deferred meanings, and an involvement with patterns of instability, surprise and complicity. Common to all of these is Munro's insistence on the inseparability of narrative and experience.