"If I had been making a proper story out of this,I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture."
So begins the last paragraph of this altogether Munro-ish story, "The Ottawa Valley," and if you stayed with the story all the way through, you might be a little resentful because she's telling us--last darn paragraph--what this trip to the Ottawa Valley was all about--it was about this unnamed woman who is a ton like Alice Munro, taking us along on a nostalgic trip into her mother's past in order to write a story? Are you kidding me?
Well, let's start here. To Munro, writing a story is a calling . Furthermore, she most certainly wants us to take to heart what her narrator is undertaking--it's a quest, on her part, for understanding, for understanding herself in fact, by understanding her mother. She believes that writing about her mother will further advance her own understanding of herself--and so do I, by the way.
She goes on thusly:
That would have done. I didn't stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents' old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena, even her children, come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children; who have turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal among them).
And that's what she's done in the story--given us pictures--postcards--little narratives that open up a image of her mother that her daughter hadn't before seen or examined.
Like the central comedy of "The Ottawa Valley," a darling little anecdote about Aunt Dodie and her mother pulling a fast one on Allen Durand (who has become a somebody in town) by, when they were just kids, sewing up his fly, then feeding him a half gallon of lemonade (he was in the mow during haying), then waiting from behind a wall with a knothole, until nature drew its course. Aunt Dodie thinks the whole revealing event an absolute hoot; the narrator's mother isn't quite so coarse, she giggles and claims she didn't look. Aunt Dodie tells her she laughed just as hard and looked just as long as her cousin did.
What has that whole long and delightful story have to do with "The Ottawa Valley," the story itself? For the narrator, who, at the end of the story tells us she's trying to understand her mother, the trip was a treasure because it offers her another view of her mother, not just the do-good sister or Aunt Dodie, a ball of fun, but also someone who had a past that included enjoying full frontal nudity of a man worth looking at. That "mom" has not been a mother she knew. And she is dying.
With what purpose," Alice Munro's narrator says in that surprising last paragraph. "With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did."
To understand her mother--and her own relationship to her--is something that seems beyond the story-teller. She goes home with her, meets her sister whose shenanigans are nothing at all like her stoic mother, then comes back to a typewriter and confesses that all that new info, those new images she's collected haven't really helped her understand.
She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet--she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to all away and I would go on and on, applying what skills I have, u sing whatever I know, and it would always be the same.
It seems to me that what Alice Munro is saying here is she'll never pin her mother down as grade-schoolers pin down spiders and grasshoppers. She'll never understand her fully, which is to say, by extension, that she'll really never quite get the whole of humanity in one of the snapshots she takes--why? because her mom is too complex, which is to say, all human beings are.
As true as that may be, it's really worth the chase. She still writes the story, and we know more about "The Ottawa Valley."
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