Cool Announcement: Nobel Prize Winner Alice Munro and Her "Experiential Haiku"

Canadian author Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy announced the decision today, calling the 82-year-old author from Wingham, Ont., a "master of the contemporary short story."

Below is excerpted from Mark Levene's  "It Was About Vanishing: A Glimpse of Alice Munro's Stories," Alice Munro edited by Harold Bloom, Infobase Publishing, 2009, p. 96.

The apparent alternation between fantasy and fact is among the many brilliant elements of 'The Albanian Virgin.' Within this movement is the counterpoint between the insistent clues that connect the two romances -- the priest's moustache and crucifix, the same details connected with Gjurdhi, Charlotte, and Claire in the present -- and the narrative's unresolved, open-ended multiplicity. Whether the couples are actually the same is inconsequential, since, despite another severed head, the danger again is in our 'frayed ... almost lost' connections, where 'views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin' (127). In story, in fact, or in both connections can be made to seem endless. When Claire, providing a parallel story to that of Lottar, the Albanian virgin, invokes Munro's version of entropy, that 'it was about vanishing' (126), she immediately imagines ' a destiny,' a brief narrative of life with Nelson, her former lover, only, it seems, to discover him at her bookstore. 'For this really was Nelson, come to claim me. Or at least to accost me, and see what would happen' (127). What happens is recorded as a sort of experiential haiku, notes towards parallel lives -- 'We have been very happy. I have often felt completely alone' (128) -- which serve as ellipses to the lush, cinematographic details of Lottar's rescue by the Franciscan and the limitless extension of their story:' She called him and called him, and when the boat came into the harbor at Trieste he was waiting on the dock' (128)

We have been very happy.
I have often felt completely alone

Alice Munro,  "The Albanian Virgin," Open Secrets, p.128

I agree with Mark Levene's  comment. The "poem" above could be read as a "two-dimensional" haiku (coined by Ryusaku Tsunoda) where Munro "deliberately shifts the direction of an emotion into which the reader has been led" (Henderson, p.130).  Some of the most famous haiku by Issa were written in this style, such as the following ones (translated by Harold G. Henderson):

Snow melts,
and the village is overflowing --
with children

The first two lines lead the reader to a picture of disaster; however, this calamitous image is "suddenly -- and delightfully -- smashed by the last line"  (Ibid.).

Thanks to cherry bloom,
in its shadow utter strangers --
there are none!

In the first two lines, Issa gives the reader time to visualize the strangers, which is indicated by a cutting word ("wa,"  which is translated as "--" ), and the last line reveals that "there is  a pleasing unexpectedness about the ending"  (ibid.).

To conclude today's post, I would like to share with you  my haiku below, which is written in response to Alice Munro's short story, titled "The Albanian Virgin,"  and her vision:

cathedral music

in an autumn afternoon

the air grows thin


Updated, Oct., 11

A Conversation with Alice Munro, Nobel Prize Winner (45-minute interview with Paula Todd, the co-producer/host of the TVO program Person 2 Person, and I, the series producer)


References

Harold Bloom, ed., Alice Munro, Infobase Publishing, 2009.

Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho and Shiki, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.