Robert McGill, Oxford University Performing Rurality: Tourists and Topology in Alice Munro’s “Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You”

Like many of Alice Munro's texts,¹ the title story of her 1973 collection Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You begins with a guided tour, as Blaikie Noble takes tourists visiting a lakefront Ontario town to see the local sights, with lifelong area resident Et Desmond along as silent auditor. As she listens to Blaikie's stories of "local gossip", Et's reaction is pronounced: "Local my foot" (2). Et takes a realist's position that there is a truth about her region to which Blaikie is failing to adhere. Later, Et's sister Char marvels that Blaikie Noble "should know so little about Mock Hill people" (6), and the further distinction is made: "He did not know the real people there as well as he knew the regular guests at his father's hotel" (6, emphasis added). Et believes that there is a divide in the town between the "real" year-round inhabitants and the incursive tourists. According to this perspective, Blaikie has two choices: to tell the truth, as mundane as Et herself finds it, or to make up things that will please his tour group but obfuscate the authentic character of the place. He chooses the latter option, and Et declares, "I only hope the poor things aren't taken in by it" (1). Indeed, a fear running throughout this story is of being "taken in." It is a telling figure of speech.² In one context, to be taken in means to be shown something interior and possibly secret. But it also implies passivity, and that is of course what makes people at risk of being "taken in" in the second sense: that of being deceived. Et is preoccupied with various forms of "taking in" throughout the story, whether it be taking in and letting out dresses, taking in her dress from a clothesline, taking in Char with an invented story about Blaikie Noble, or simply taking in sights. But Et thinks that being an "insider" presents one with a special authority, and that only those who are outsiders are always at risk of being taken in by something when they believe they are being taken in to something.
The story evokes a modern society already caught up in a tourist industry, where a rural community can benefit economically from playing up to urban expectations about rural difference, as Blaikie does by invoking a gothic narrative in his tours. Accordingly, because of this economic relationship, tourists always enjoy a degree of protection and distance, even when (or especially when) aspire to achieve the "native" experience. Their experience is constrained by the fact that they are consumers whose business is needed by those telling the story. Accordingly, they participate in the production of the very space they are to consume, since the experience is tailored for them. As Et says, a tour guide like Blaikie "knows how to fascinate" his clients with the right stories (1). To use another recurring word, Et is concerned about fit-explicitly in the case of her tailoring, but implicitly with regard to the tour. She senses that the story Blaikie tells his clients does not fit with her own sense of place, but it does fit with what they want to hear, especially urbanites from places like Toronto, "where, from what Et had seen on the streets, nobody knew a good fit from a bad" (14).

II. The Illusion of Insider Authenticity

But as Munro demonstrates, the corollary is that the native experience is also constructed. Stories that the rural tells about itself cannot be entirely detached from the lived experience; telling stories is part of the rural experience, and thus must be partly authentic itself. In this regard, Et recognizes that she has an uneasy relationship to the tour. "I'm not a tourist" she hisses at Blaikie (2). And indeed, the tour becomes a business enterprise for her, as she ends up soliciting tailoring business from other people on the bus. The possibility seems to be that her own relationship to Mock Hill is not so unmediated as she would like to think. Her situatedness in Mock Hill means she cannot comfortably play the tourist role; there is a tension when she attempts to enact a consumptive role in a space where she is not identified as a consumer. For instance, she has never heard the stories that Blaikie tells to romanticize a bootlegger's mansion, yet she cannot discredit it: "Et had no way of knowing how much of it was true" (2). Et understands her life through a set of stories just like the tourists, but a different one.
In contrast to the peripatetic Blaikie, Et has seldom left her home, and her behaviour is particularly circumscribed by her surroundings. Even if she sometimes flaunts herself in the face of being watched, she is always conscious of performing under the scrutinizing local gaze, of being seen and interpreted by watchers, whether it be when Blaikie Noble kisses her on the forehead (4) or when she turns cartwheels on the lawn after her brother's drowning (6). Char, too, demonstrates that identity forms through performance of it in a particular place: "She learned to smoke, because of having to do it onstage." (12). It is not a coincidence that Munro uses "onstage" to indicate that Char does it while acting; the location of a performance informs the character of it. Consider the letter-game that Char, Et, Arthur and Blaikie play, which takes the form of a statement "I love my love with an X, because he is X. His name is X, and he lives in an X"-X being a word starting with the same letter as the other X words. The game insists on the linking of identity with habitat. It is important, then, that Et maintains "her own place on the Square" (17), since it allows her to perpetuate a particular role for herself. Et's dressmaking business acumen involves belittling women when she has taken them in: "Ladies who looked quite firm and powerful, outside, were here immobilized" (15). Munro again links space and social relations.

III. Urban-Rural Relationships

Et's identity also depends for its construction on its opposition to the tourist stories. There needs to be an element of difference in order for the "inside" story to gain the appearance of authenticity. Et and Char's childhood journeys to see people disembark from the tourist excursion boat are themselves excursions wherein both "local" and "outsider" identities established and reinforced by the mutual gaze. Ironically, there is enforced compartmentalization even as the periphery and centre are most closely integrating: "Girls from Mock Hill, if they had mothers to tell them what to do, were told not to walk out there [near the beachfront cottages]" (7). Urban incursion reinforces the need for a rural identity that can express difference. Toronto becomes the threatening place offstage from which people come and to where they disappear. Blaikie's sojourn there allows Et to tells stories about why he's disappeared. Arthur's job is also affected by the centre-periphery dialectic: "Twice the school board passed him over and brought in somebody from outside" (15). People from beyond Mock Hill-the "people from Toronto" who've taken over the hotel (4), the anonymous ventriloquist (6), and the faceless voices from within vacation cottages (7)-seem unknowable, distant and dangerous. But this story reminds us that the rural does not have to travel to see or know the city, for the city is in the country. The weekly variety show that Blaikie organizes notably has "a mixture of local talent, recruited guests, and singers and comedians brought in especially for the performance" (7). Everyone is involved in the performance. As Raymond Williams argues in The Country and the City, they are part of one system. Williams is speaking largely of urban material dependency on an agrarian rurality, but in Munro this dependency is at the same time more leisure-oriented and just as profound.
The fate of the Nobels' hotel is notable. "There was a story that it was going to be opened up and used as a rehabilitation center for drug addicts, but the town got up a petition and that fell through" (17). To have accepted the project would have been for the town to redefine itself in terms of its socio-economic relations. Mock Hill's prosperity hinges on offering a space where urbanites can escape their social identities, but a rehabilitation centre would only remind them of those. Moreover, the town establishes its own identity based on whom it takes in and whom it keeps out. It does not want to allow in drug addicts. The irony is that Char, a local, exhibits characteristics that might warrant the need for such services. And Char's funeral is on Labour Day, a key date in cottage country: the day when the vacationers go home: although predating the official turn of the seasons, it is the true death of summer and the symbolic final interstice of rurality and urbanity. Of course, the term "Labour Day" is itself ironic since it is supposed to be a day of rest from labour, but normally rural people work: Blaikie, for instance, has to cancel his bus tour (18).
Linda Hutcheon has generalized that in the period when this story was written, "the small town in Canadian fiction came to represent a limited and limiting society from which protagonists yearned to escape" (197). This story, though, shows the facts to be more complicated than that. One's perspective is not informed simply by one's spatial situatedness but by one's social and economic relationships in space. Travel, then, becomes a means not only to change location but also to change the nature of one's performance of identity. When we hear that "Char and Arthur had been planning a trip that summer to see Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon" (2), it is no small thing that Char and Arthur are going to "see" something, since at home they are notably characters who have failures of vision. While Char fails to see that Et is lying to her about Blaikie, Arthur "knew about history but not about what went on, in front of his eyes, in his house, anywhere." (11). His lack of awareness of the space around him leads to clumsiness, so that he "knocked a bottle of ink off his desk and permanently stained the History Room floor" (12), symbolic of the perils of neglecting geography.

IV. Reading The Text as a Tourist Experience

So far I've been tracking what the story shows us about rural-urban relations and the performance of place. Now we need to consider some implications for the acts of reading and writing place. The tour, in other words, is a metonym for the fiction itself.³ Hutcheon has used the term "historiographic metafiction" to refer to those texts which self-consciously explore the way we write history, even as they themselves write it. Analogously, in "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You" Munro is practising a geographic metafiction. Rather than simply representing space under the rubric of realism, she explores the way we write and read the land, struggling against the difficulties of achieving what Edward Relph calls "the geographic imagination": "a way of thinking that seeks to grasp the connections between one's own experiences of particular landscapes and the larger processes of society and environment, and then seeks to interpret these in a manner that makes sense for others." (158).
Indeed, the story's preoccupation with many kinds of creating and fictionalizing-drama, tours, ventriloquism, gossip, tailoring, poems, musicals, photography-signals anxieties about the text's limitations in telling a story. For instance, Blaikie-as a tour guide who ventriloquizes place for the sake of an "outside" audience-has affinities with Munro. Yet Et soundly condemns his brand of storytelling. She appears as the silent auditor that Munro herself seems to fear; the local reader over Munro's shoulder who tells her she is not getting things right. This is a writer's fear about the authenticity of her fiction's mimesis, one that is echoed in other of Munro's stories, perhaps most memorably in Lives of Girls and Women, where Del Jordan describes trying to write down the "truth" of her home town : I would try to make lists. A list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them. . . . Names of the streets and the pattern they lay in.
The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy, heartbreaking. (249)

But "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You" is not simply a realist story, nor does it aspire to be one. This is not geographical roman á clef. Even though at times it may achieve a documentary effect, it undercuts that effect with toponyms like "Mock Hill",⁴ or comments like "What awful nonsense. Like something you read about, Agatha Christie" (10), which remind us that we are reading. But Munro is still aware that readers inevitably will associate her stories with the "real" world.⁵ Indeed, she is keen that we will, since to emphasize only the fictive and not the referential aspect of her story would be to distract us from the recognition that there is no ultimate, referential authenticity to which a writer can aspire; there is no simple choice between fact and fiction. There are only versions of truth, in part circumscribed by different geographical perspectives.⁶ One can view space not only as a scientist, a tourist or a working countryman as Williams argues (20), but also as a colonizer, or a cottager, or a capitalist. To see Munro as a tour guide is to emphasize that both tours and stories involve a narrator with a limited perspective who is nonetheless directing the reader's experience of a place, telling necessary fictions to keep interest and to make connections. Both are acts of ventriloquism, of speaking for people and place. The tour guide is not simply a detached storyteller, but is necessarily complicit in the story herself, vouching for its "authenticity" and responsible for mediating between different interpretations, even in choosing which ones to disclose.

V. Ex-cursive Writing

Excursion is another recurring word in "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You". Literally, it is a journey with a return to a starting point. But etymologically it derives from ex-currere: to run out. Blaikie Noble enacts both senses of the word. The "local" judgement is that Blaikie should not have been "taken to California, let mix with all sorts of people" (9); export is seen as dangerous. However, excursions have the ability to change us: "Ever since I went on that excursion, I hear things," says Et (16). The story emphasizes the ex-cursive possibilities of reading. Cursive writing is one of joined characters; Munro suggests that we can extend our connections through readings. Et's name itself recalls the Latin for the conjunction "and", and its ability to join two people together-at the same time that it stands between them spatially ("Char Et Blaikie", for example). An excursion is by definition a journey that finishes in the same place that it began, and Munro's story indeed refuses to pretend that it will forever transport us to some other destination. This is emphasized by the short story format: reading a Munro text is a series of excursions. J. Hillis Miller has defined "topology" as "topographical study of a particular place." Munro stories, then, are always engaged topologically.⁷ But the ways in which Munro carries out such a study bear consideration, since they indicate to what extent any community is knowable. Williams writes: "Most novels are in some sense knowable communities. It is part of a traditional method-an underlying stance and approach-that the novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways" (165). Munro does not have a straightforward relationship to this tradition, and challenges it continually in her fiction.

Innumerable popular reviewers and critics alike have cited the "universality" of Munro's fiction.⁸ This attribution of "universality" usually takes one of two forms. In the first, it insists that her fictive Southwestern Ontario small towns are familiar to anyone who has experienced small towns. In this case, the emphasis is on the homogeneity of places. Alternatively, it asserts that the fiction appeals to us because it taps into situations or emotions that occur universally despite regional geographical differences: Linda Hutcheon, for example, says that fiction like Munro's has the possibility of "transcending geography" (195). In this second instance, the emphasis is on both the heterogeneity and the ultimate subordination of place. Coral Ann Howells captures this double-pronged reaction, writing that Munro "creates locations and characters so exactly. Yet at the same time, these stories could be anywhere-any small town" (3).

The topography of a Munro text may not be familiar to someone who has never been to Huron County, but the story gives the illusion of familiarity. Munro maps the region with apparent casualness, the illusion at all times being that she assumes we know the town in which this story is happening.⁹ If Miller is right that "many novels assume a shared topographical inner space in the community of their readers" (105), then a fascinating aspect of Munro's texts is that they only seem to make this assumption. But they also undercut this apparent familiarity, revealing it as illusion. In "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You" this revelation is achieved through a repetition of phrases, the second time with supplemental information that shows us we didn't really understand the reference the time. For instance, Blaikie Noble's name has appeared many times already in the story when he is referred to by the narrator (which seems more or less to share Et's consciousness) as "Blakie Noble, the hotel owner's son" (6). And the "old monstrosity of a house built with liquor money" is later more precisely called "the Gothic stone mansion, built by a Toronto distiller and known locally as Grog Castle" (7). We realize that we've been taken in, in both senses. Although we thought we've been inside the insider, we recognize that we in fact need help to understand.

VI. Conclusion

Alice Munro's texts are examples of stories that are, as Miller would say, "not so much placed against the background of the scene as generated by it." (18). In other words, this reading of Munro has attempted to rescue topography from mere realism or instrumentality, and to demonstrate that geography matters when we read literature. The characters in "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You" story at one point play a "geography game" but Munro's fiction insists time and time again that she takes geography very serious indeed. It may be a game insofar there are rules, performance, and winners and losers, but never is it frivolous or esoteric.

Munro's fiction stubbornly resists conclusions. Critics like Howells have marked this trait as characteristic of Munro's recent work, but it is clearly evident even in this 1974 story: the second sentence begins "She could not tell" (1), and at the end of the story we hear that Et could never know the cause of Char's death (18). However, that is not to say that Munro makes place or community unknowable. The fact that we do seem to learn, and to share experiences, is what Gaston Bachelard calls the mystery of "transsubjectivity" (xix). And while Munro's texts do not offer conclusions, there are at least implications in this direction. One is that achievement of the "existential insider"'s position is a myth, whether it be sought through tourism or literature. But this in itself does not mean that people should not travel, or read. It may be important to leave one's usual space and role to enter another, even if we will only be taking on yet another perspective, with all its concomitant blindspots and distortions.

Notes

¹ In Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You alone, besides the title story, consider that the following scenarios form notable parts of the openings of each successive story: Hugo is on a book tour in "Material"; Chris Watters arrives to offer airplane tours in "How I Met My Husband"; Mr. Lougheed is on a walking tour of the city in "Walking on Water"; there is a reference to "young girls . . . travelling through Afghanistan" (86) in "Tell Me Yes or No"; children leave town to play in "The Found Boat"; a girl is harassed as she walks home at the start of "Executioners"; a woman heads west from Calgary on a train in "The Spanish Lady"; the protagonist describes her journeys into town in "Winter Wind"; and "The Ottawa Valley" features a manner of sightseeing trip to the titular region.

² Like Margaret Atwood, Munro devotes considerable attention to exploiting and reinvigorating cliché, commonly by placing it in dialogue where the character uttering it does not recognize its irony or implications. Unlike Atwood, this is nearly always done without editorial comment-yet another element of Munro's apparent "artlessness," which a careless reader may simply pass off as realist dialogue or, worse, lazy cliché itself.

³ I believe "metonym" is more appropriate than "metaphor" here, since the relation between the two is one of similarity, and therefore horizontal rather than hierarchical. The vehicle is not subordinate to the tenor, but rather there is mutuality; one illuminates the other.

⁴ The explicit fictiveness of "Mock Hill" is further enhanced by the fact that the original publisher of Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You was McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Yet a further coincidence: there is a hamlet named McGaw overlooking the lakeside town of Goderich in Huron County. For Munro to exploit the phonic affinities of these words would not be unusual; many of her invented place names have similar-sounding correlatives in southwestern Ontario. Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the similarity of Munro's Wawanash County with Huron County's East and West Wawanosh townships. But her towns almost always resist reduction to a one-to-one relationship with any Huron County location; there are topographical or other features that do not historically exist there. Munro's fictive terrain resembles Huron County-or more precisely, it resembles a depiction of Huron County-in some ways, but it is emphatically fictive.

⁵ Although Mock Hill is invented, other place names in the story-Yellowstone Park, the Grand Canyon, Banff, Florida, California, Toronto-are not made up. The realist assumption is that since we don't know the map that well, it can afford to fictionalize a small town. Immediately the text positions the reader as an outsider. In other words, the paradoxical cornerstone of creating a fictive topography and toponymy is realist plausibility. Munro can keep one foot within the realist frame in virtue of the fact that most people do not know there is no place called Mock Hill.

⁶ I say ", gender and religion do not fundamental roles in shaping identity-in fact, geographical considerations are inextricable from these. But geography must also always be considered an influence.in part" since I am not arguing that factors like class, ethnicity.

⁷ This is not that other writers' stories are not, but simply that readers tend to notice it more in Munro.

⁸ And the jacket blurbs of Munro's collections often encourage this kind of comment. The 1996 Penguin edition of Who Do You Think You Are? (titled The Beggar Maid outside of Canada) declares "Munro explores the universal story of growing up", while the 2000 Vintage edition of Dance of the Happy Shades concludes that "in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations."

⁹ In Dance of the Sexes, Beverley Rasporich does a commendable analysis of Munro's techniques for achieving this effect, which Rasporich calls one of "being there" (125).

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---. Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You. Scarborough, Ont.: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974.

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