INTERVIEWER
Do you ever revise a story after it’s been published? Apparently, before he died, Proust rewrote the first volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.
MUNRO
Yes, and Henry James rewrote simple, understandable stuff so it was obscure and difficult. Actually I’ve done it recently. The story “Carried Away” was included in Best American Short Stories 1991. I read it again in the anthology, because I wanted to see what it was like and I found a paragraph that I thought was really soggy. It was a very important little paragraph, maybe two sentences. I just took a pen and rewrote it up in the margin of the anthology so that I’d have it there to refer to when I published the story in book form. I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again it seems a bit obtrusive. So I’m not too sure about this sort of thing. The answer may be that one should stop this behavior. There should be a point where you say, the way you would with a child, this isn’t mine anymore.
Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137
ISSUE 131, SUMMER 1994
Canadian short-story writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro has died aged 92.
Margaret Atwood once called her “among the major writers of English fiction of our time,’’ while Jonathan Franzen once wrote: “[Munro] is one of the handful of writers, some living, most dead, whom I have in mind when I say that fiction is my religion.”
Born in 1931 to a family of fox and poultry farmers living outside Wingham, Ontario, Munro went to university on a scholarship and studied for two years before moving to Vancouver with her first husband, James Munro, in 1951.
During this time – when she had to ask her husband for money to buy groceries – Munro began to write whenever her daughters were asleep, keeping the pieces short because it was too hard to concentrate for extended periods.
Her stories were soon being published in Canadian magazines and in 1968 the New York Times used them as evidence that the short story was “alive and well in Canada”.
Dance of the Happy Shades was praised for its “sympathetic vibration with the farmers and townspeople who live there”, and for Munro’s “refreshing strategy” of providing more questions than answers.
For Atwood, “few writers have explored such processes more thoroughly, and more ruthlessly” than Munro: “Hands, chairs, glances – all are part of an intricate inner map strewn with barbed wire and booby traps, and secret paths through the shrubbery.”
AS Byatt, a longstanding admirer, described how Munro stretched and challenged the genre. ‘’Not only does she consistently wrongfoot the reader, overturning our expectations of characters and their actions, but she melds several narrative strands together, bringing into one tale several plots.’’
Munro’s reputation continued to grow as her stories grew in scope and complexity and she won the Man Booker International prize in 2009 and the Nobel prize in literature in 2013.
‘’I have been writing personal stories all my life. I hope they are a good read. I hope they move people. When I like a story it’s because it does something … a blow to the chest.”
圖片來源：王竹君
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