Fleeing horse sketch12/5/2023 ![]() Heble relates these fraught paradigms to the archetypal myths which Northrop Frye saw as creating literature's infrastructure, but notes that in Munro's stories there is often an unresolved and thus destabilizing tension between “inward” and “outward” directions of meaning (Frye 9-10) Heble further notes that outward “reality” is itself infused with latent paradigms thus here too, meaning is always deferred and open to possibility (Heble 10-12). Heble, in The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence, argues that Munro's stories have “paradigmatic dimensions” which make present mysterious realms of meaning seemingly absent from the surface (Heble 15-18, 32-35), undermining or supplementing the project of realism. She opens wide interpretive gates for her readers which we pass through with pleasure even if we do not know where we are going.ĢMy treatment of Munro's work is particularly indebted to the provocative criticism of Ajay Heble and Héliane Ventura. Munro's poetics are also engagingly metafictional, inviting us, challenging us, to participate in the unfolding of her narratives. ![]() The three Flora stories offer an intriguing example of what Robert McGill terms Munro's “recursive poetics” (McGill 48) which entice readers to ponder interconnections among Munro's 200 plus stories. Munro is too crafty a writer, and has too much fun with textual cross-referencing, for this recurrence to be fortuitous. Surely this repetition of a name is not happenstance. In “Friend of My Youth” (1990), Flora is the friend mentioned in the title in “Runaway” (2003), she is a goat. This is the first of three stories, spanning five decades, with a character named Flora. 1The narrator of Alice Munro's early story “Boys and Girls” (1964) tells us that as a girl of eleven, when ordered by her father to close a gate, she instead opened it “as wide as she could” for a horse named Flora, allowing her temporarily to escape her fate as food for foxes on her family's fox farm.
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