Losing Your Head in Alice Munro’s “Carried Away”

Jack, a Canadian soldier recuperating in a European hospital during World War I, begins a correspondence with Louisa, the librarian in his hometown whom he has only seen and loved from afar. Their letters turn romantic. But when the war ends and he returns home, Jack never shows his face to Louisa and marries another woman, leaving Louisa to wonder if she’s been the victim of some diabolical trick. Then Jack becomes the victim of an accident at the local factory. Wes & Erin discuss Alice Munro’s short story “Carried Away” and ask how the unforgiving machinery of a factory might mimic the so-called machinery of courtship, and how being carried away, whether by love or by ideas, might prove dangerous. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: Jack, a Canadian soldier recuperating in a European hospital during World War I, begins a correspondence with Louisa, the librarian in his hometown, whom he has only seen and loved from afar. Their letters turn romantic, but when the war ends and he returns home, Jack never shows his face to Louisa and marries another woman, leaving Louisa to wonder if she's been the victim of some diabolical trick. Then Jack becomes the victim of an accident at the local factory. Today we're discussing Alice Munro's short story Carried Away and asking how the unforgiving machinery of a factory might mimic the so called machinery of courtship. And how being carried away, whether by love or by ideas, might prove dangerous. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 0:58 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan. 0:59 Erin: And you're listening to Subtext. 1:02 Wes: So, Erin, you suggested this reading and I don't think I've read anything by Alice Munro before. We think you were reading this for school, Right? I'm curious about what prompted you to suggest it. 1:16 Erin: I'd never read any Alice Munro either. And what was really curious is that I encountered this book, Open Secrets, from which we're reading Carried Away, which is the first story in this collection. I encountered it in an experimental forms class that I took this past semester. I read this whole book of stories, which I was just totally knocked out by, especially the first. I guess, you know, I went to class thinking to myself, like, okay, how is this? I mean, there were certainly lots of like, surprising twists. Like the way that the stories move is really unusual and unexpected. And, you know, I had some, some hints as to why this might be included in an experimental forms class. But then when I got to the class, I was really surprised by, by my professor, Kate Coles, who's brilliant. I was really surprised by the reason why she had included it. But I'm curious to know before I tell you why she included it in the class. If you have any idea as to why, why specifically Carried Away would qualify as being experimental, There's a softball to throw at you. 2:23 Wes: Yeah, that's a difficult question. I didn't think of it as experimental. It's literary fiction, so I don't expect it to be plot driven exactly. Although there is a. This is actually plotted and each section kind of ends with a plot point and does go back and forth in time. And there's an omniscient narrator who takes different character perspectives. Her perspective, then Jim Fraley's, then Arthur's, and then back to her in the end, which is interesting, but yeah. So give me the answer. Why is this experimental? The pulp fiction of short stories? 3:07 Erin: Sorry, no. Well, you know, I was thinking this was relatively straightforward compared to some of the things that we were reading in that class, as you suggest. So I was thinking, like the letter writing or these time jumps which happen and are really destabilizing. There's one story in the collection which is really fabulous. Lots of stories kind of pull the rug out from under you narrativistically, where you're reading something. In one of the stories in particular, you're reading something going along with the story. And. And next thing you know, someone says, well, that's the story that so and so told me. You don't realize, like, sometimes they do this in movies or TV shows where you think that what you're seeing is the actual movie or TV show. But then it's sort of like you realize that you've been watching the movie that the other characters are watching. You know, it sort of pops out of the movie. So it's sort of that kind of effect. So there are lots of really interesting things that happen in this whole collection. But anyway, I went to class and come to find out that Kate Coles. She thinks that the story functions on a kind of a lyric principle where the movements that happen in the story operate according to lyric functions rather than to narrative functions. And so she talks about how the story basically operates according to this metonymic principle of someone losing their head. And in each one of the stories, sort of sections, someone literally or figuratively, you know, sort of metonymically. Right. Loses their head or is carried away is a synonym for that, of course. And so each of the plot points in the story, you know, she thinks, reflect that principle or happen according to that principle. Whether it be Jack obviously literally being beheaded by the machine, which is an incredibly shocking moment in the story, or Louisa sleeping with Jim Frarey and is reeling after that experience and sort of loses her head in that moment. Or when she sees Jack later on in the story. Lots of other instances in which we can note that one or another character is carried away. You know, at one point, I think Jim Frarey says that Jack was just carried away and that's why he wrote those letters when he had a fiance at home. You know, Louisa being carried away by potentially seeing him when he comes into the library, et cetera, et cetera. So, anyway, I really liked that idea. And I thought it was a really fascinating way to look at the story as functioning according to. And this is something we talk about a lot in my grad program about the lyric and how lyric works as compared to narrative. And so this is something that's of particular interest to me and my field of study. This is going to be like a plot point that I'm going to have to. Is ironic, but this is going to be a question that I'm going to have to answer. For instance, on my. My big exams that I take at the end of my reading year. 5:53 Wes: Yeah, I think you're making me think of a word that Arthur uses to describe Jack. And that word is careless. So they have this really, she and Arthur, while they're getting to know each other. And really, they're getting to know each other right through Jack. He's the martyr, in a way that brings them together because it's his death that becomes the topic that they initially discuss. Anyway, so Arthur mentions the public's endless appetite for horrific details. And we do get a lot of horrific details in the story itself, right? The precise location of the cut through Jack's head. And Louisa defends that and says, it's natural. People want to picture it. And then she asks about the machinery. Did the machinery do something unexpected? Which later on Arthur is going to think, huh. She'll also make a comment about, you know, isn't there anything you can do to protect the workers? Which he reflects on later as perhaps a criticism. But here's what Arthur says. No, Arthur said it wasn't the machine grabbing him and pulling him in like an animal. He made a wrong move, or at any rate, a careless move. Then he was done for. So later on he reflects on the fact that Jack has been stealing books from the library. That's the reason that again, this prompts the meeting. He's taking those books back to the library for Jack's wife, Grace. He'll think this not stealing, except temporarily harmless behavior, but peculiar. Was there any connection between thinking you could do things a little differently that way and thinking you could get away with a careless move which might catch your sleeve and bring the saw down on your neck? And of course, Jack's first act of carelessness is the way he treats Louisa with the letters. And then there's a suggest, I think there's the further suggestion that it's not just stealing books that's careless, but maybe even reading books, right? There's something aspirational about it. Jack is working in a factory, but he's reading these books. And later on, in Louisa's hallucination of Jack, the specter of Jack will tell her that's what got him started, in a way. And thank her for that. Even though. Did it really get him started? He didn't go anywhere, of course, and he died. But could it have gotten him started? Could it have led to something else? But anyway, what I'm trying to point out is, yes, I think this thematic thing of being carried away, which is perhaps related to carelessness in the sense of, in each case, losing one's head, not being careful, maybe falling in love, writing letters to someone even though you know you're engaged, or, you know, the example in the end when whatever is happening to Louisa, maybe a stroke or maybe it's her, these are her dying moments, but there's a vision, right? That's another form of being carried away. I think that accounts for what's so powerful about the story, which is. Which I find hard to account for. Like in the last section, I started feeling really mournful and sad without quite knowing why. Because she's so. So in the details of things, right? So. So in. Into the concrete reality. And she's conveying all these emotions indirectly, but it builds up to something really powerful. 9:12 Erin: Yeah, I really like what you say about this connection between carelessness and being carried away. I'm thinking about the fact that several. Several men are pretty careless with Louisa's feelings, right? We have this relationship mostly carried out via letters with a doctor who was treating her for tb. And you learn only in the last pages of the story how really terribly sick she was. I mean, she was in the sanatorium for four years and this doctor was married and, you know, obviously got Louisa's hopes up or, you know, did something he was not supposed to do and ended up having to leave. Thinking about Jim Frarey, when Louisa sleeps with him and loses her virginity. And he's obviously been careless in his sort of understanding of her, right? He thinks he knows her really well. He thinks he knows women really well. And he's full of these trite little phrases that he assigns women where he's obviously, on some fundamental level, distrustful of them somehow, and thinks that because Louisa lives in the. In the hotel and, you know, dines by herself and has a glass of wine with her meal, that somehow that means that she's, by the standards of the day, some sort of loose woman. And so he thinks that it's. 10:24 Wes: Drink upsets women in a radical way, so they have to confess things. 10:28 Erin: That's why. 10:29 Wes: Insights. 10:30 Erin: And when she tells him the story of Jack's letter, she asks, and this is not the first time she asks if some diabolical trick has been played on her by Jack, if she's the victim of some kind of really perverse and extended practical joke. And Jim makes the comment that no, no, no, he doesn't think so in any way. It's women who are the type to play that kind of joke. And this kind of makes maybe a parallel between the machinery of the factory, maybe and the machinery of courtship, you know, to coin a phrase or something in which one is expected to take necessary precautions to guard one's body, one's heart. And if one is hurt, the person who's hurt them somehow isn't to blame. Like you're to blame for not taking the proper precautions. So I think that what happens is this really interesting blending between what I'm seeing as a story that's very, very concerned with class, right? I mean, the fact that we never see Jack's face, the fact that he then loses his head and has really no face. And that Arthur, who owns the factory and who picks up his head, cannot give a physical description of this man, right? So I think there's something about Jack's class that makes him faceless, that steals his identity or something. So I think the story is very concerned with class and with these, very subtly, with these issues of unionization. Who is to blame when these types of accidents happen at the factories, if they're accidents at all, if not enough care is taken for these workers? And there's a connection between that, I think, and some sort of statement, not in any heavy handed way, but I think the story is also interested in the plight of women like Louisa and what happens to women like that. She, who's sort of equally downtrodden at the beginning of the story, you know, she's an orphan, has had to work for a living and the sort of uncomfortable situation in which women are placed in this time where they have to make a living and support themselves. And that very necessity to keep them alive somehow places them within the realm of suspicion. So I guess I'm trying to tie those things together. I think they do sort of tie together, though I'm not quite seeing all the threads right between this sort of, what I'll call loosely, a sort of feminist concern about women in this time and a sort of interesting concern with class and labor and all of these other things that are coming together, I think quite rightfully in this time in Canadian history, between the world wars. 13:10 Wes: Yeah, it's very, it's very subtle, but I think I had a similar idea. She says she's very ignorant of machinery. And, you know, he gives that line about he made a careless move. So the machine is not like an animal is Arthur's idea. It's not like an animal that's just bitten him, attacked him and then grabbed him and pulled him into the machine. He had to do something to get pulled into the machine. The machine is not nature. And in that sense, it's not fate. It's not just the machinery of fate doing what it's going to do to you. It really depends on your choices. This becomes a way of expressing a conflict between free will and determinism, but also between the social conditions that put people where they are and keep them where they are, and then the possibility of them transcending those social conditions and doing something aspirational, right? Writing or reading, having a life where books are involved or education. And that's the way Jack puts it in her fantasy, right? This got me. The books got me started. It's not something that ever comes to fruition. But in reality, the other thing that Arthur says is a machine is your servant and it is an excellent servant, but it makes an imbecile. Master Arthur may be right about this connection between Jack's carelessness with the books, you know, not checking them out, which is probably right, we can surmise, is because he doesn't want to interact with Louisa. But also between that and what would happen with the machine, there may be an element in which Jack is at fault, right? Because again, there's something careless in the way he treated Louisa initially. But that carelessness is also how love is founded, perhaps in a way, right? And Arthur himself talks about when him and Louisa fall in love at the end of the section, or seem to fall in love, he describes it as a compulsion. Is that lover that isn't? Then maybe we can discuss that. But there's a question here in parallel, between whether love is imposed on you or whether it involves some sort of free choice. And then there's a question of different types of love, right? Her movement from this idealized relationship with someone she's never seen, right? She's just contacting him. They're having an exchange through letters. And then this more grounded relationship with Arthur, which she describes to fantasy Jack later on as having to do with her wanting to have a normal life, wanting to get married and having a normal life. Not the most exciting, ecstatic sounding form of love, not the same idealized form of love that she can have with Jack. And similarly, in. In parallel, there's this transition historically to the power of unions, which I think is more grounded as well. So Arthur describes his father as someone who ruled by whim. Right. Go on home now. When he didn't have work for people, he could just treat them how they wanted. That was changing even at the point where Arthur is taking over. And then Louisa in her 80s is encountering union activism and associating that with Jack and that there's a. The whole Tolpuddle Martyrs thing. And they were champion, early champions of unionization, but imprisoned. Right. I think they were. That was. Their martyrdom, was an imprisonment. So there's a parallel there to what I think of as Jack's martyrdom and the kind of martyrdom that leads us from love as an idealized fantasy to love in reality. Right. I think that's part of the transition that's going on in this story. So a free for all and again, parallel economically, an economic free for all versus something more constrained. 16:44 Erin: Well, it's interesting. I'm really liking what you're saying about a certain carelessness even in being someone who uses the library. Right. In the story, there's going to be sort of a line drawn between people who are library users and people who aren't. When Jack, when his engagement or his marriage is announced in the paper to Grace, Louisa will see her name and recognize her as not a library user. Right. It's a small town and she knows those who go to the library and those who don't. What's interesting is that somehow Jack gets away with like being a library user without being a capital L capital U library user. Right, because he goes in and steals things, you know, so he's not officially on the books, if you will, but he is in the books. So there's an interesting distinction that's being drawn there in Louisa's generation. And if we consider Arthur to be part of her generation, though he must be a. A little bit older, maybe by 10 years or so. He also seems to have become more practical, I think, is what you're saying. Right, than his father. And there's the suggestion that his father was a library user and Arthur is not. And I wonder if why is that? Well, the father's portrait is in the library and he's noted as being a particular benefactor of the library. And it's suggested that he was maybe the one who gave the money to set it up. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that he used the library, but I think there's some. Let's see, he says the pictures inscription says A.V. Doud, founder of the Doud Organ Factory and patron of this library. A believer in progress, culture and education. A true friend of the town of Carstairs and of the working man. That's an interesting blend to be. 18:29 Wes: Yeah. Somewhat ironic given the character as described by Arthur, which is dictatorial and even talks about his impudent nose, I think is the word. 18:39 Erin: Sure. 18:40 Wes: Impudent face. So, yeah, at the very least that's the way Arthur's father wants to present himself. Right. As someone who cares about education and the well being of the people, even as he's laying off people carelessly without any real care. 18:56 Erin: But I think there's also, maybe I was misreading this too, that the father does seem to know the workers by name. Right. Wasn't it that he called them by name when he was laying them off? Like he seemed to be more invested in. Right. Arthur has. There's more of a division between him and the workers. So the nature of the labor is changing because how I was reading the. I believe at one point the factory is described almost as being like a medieval rampart, right. That runs alongside the town. And because of the fact that, you know this, practically the entire town of three to four thousand people ends up going to work for Douds. You know, there's really a suggestion that there's a serfdom going on, right. That. 19:35 Wes: Yeah, exactly. It's basically feudal. 19:37 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And what I'm sort of interested in, maybe in connection with what you're saying is this idea that the elder Doud was sort of more invested, like by the very nature of that kind of a system with its many, many flaws. Right. He's somehow more invested in what's actually going on there in the factory. The suggestion is that Arthur is not. And I'm wondering if the fact that Arthur is not a library user, you know, here his father is in the library, right. Like his image is in the library. There could be a tremendous amount of irony in that. But I take Arthur's like sort of finally coming into the library after all of those years of sort of rejecting it almost as, therefore, as being an expression of the fact maybe that as a modern man he's moved away from the sort of whims of in the library that his father was involved with. I see Louisa and Jack's interest in the library and their interest in education as being part of what is condemning them in a way. Right. Like Jack will remark to Louisa, I wondered what brought you there. He's talking about Louisa's arrival in Carstairs. I wondered what brought you There you were an educated person. This idea that, like Jack says this to Louisa. Yes. That no one in Carstairs seems to be educated. And yet I'm very interested, for instance, in the images, the very educated images that are hanging on the inside of the walls of the Commercial Hotel and of the library, the prints that hang there. In addition to the portrait of Arthur's father. There almost seems to be a suggestion that progress means moving away from the library and being more concerned with practicality, strict standards of comportment when it comes to our relationship with these machines, a strict division between labor and management, and somehow a less humanistic or sort of holistic understanding of the relationship between sort of all of these moving parts, if you will. Even if that holistic understanding also has a tremendous amount of flaws. Right. It's a feudal system. I guess what I'm saying is that the past almost seems to be a state of more education, but it's education to, I don't know, particularly unuseful ends, perhaps. And what marks Louisa and Jack for their sort of individual martyrdoms? If we can argue that Louisa is sort of martyred in the process of this love affair and sort of emerges maybe as a different character, what marks them is perhaps their clinging to a certain education or to certain cultural mores of a previous era. 22:28 Wes: I think it's complicated. 22:30 Erin: It's very complicated because Jack's education is. He's much more progressive, I think, inherently than Louisa is. So his education is tending him towards being propelled into the future. These things are very. I think by trying to tease them out, in a way, I'm doing them a disservice. 22:45 Wes: No, I think you're getting at some important points. I just. I'm. I'm trying to think them through in real time. Like I said, I think it's complicated. So let me try to articulate my thoughts and maybe we can. We can reconcile. So I'm thinking, all right, it's basically a feudal system, and you have the lords of the manor running things. And he's the rich kid, son of the father who's taken over the business. And he thinks of himself as more progressive. So this is the way he puts it. And by the way, I can understand why he wouldn't want to go into the library if the father set this up as a kind of way of glorifying himself. Right. Putting his portrait up, saying, oh, I'm such a progressive guy, when he wasn't. Right. So it's a simple. Library, in that sense, becomes a symbol of hypocrisy. And then when he finds himself going into the library, quite a bit, you would think, right, it's because of Louisa. I mean, initially it's to return Jack's books, but. And then it. And he finds himself going there and it's like, okay, come on. He's going there because of Louisa, but. And they're going to get together. But he denies that, right? So from his perspective, Arthur found himself thinking of the library. And he would often end up there, sitting in the spot he had chosen on his first visit. And he would read Illustrated, London News or the National Geographic, some other magazines. And these were magazines that he subscribed to and had at his house and would actually read at his house. But now he preferred to read them out there in public. And he has a bunch of different rationalizations for why he's doing this. He preferred the view of Main street to whatever the view from his house is. And then here's another. It was not that he felt the need of sociability. He was not there for a chat. And then he really wouldn't talk to Louisa that much at this point. And then instead, he rationalizes this in terms of his philanthropic impulses, the ones that supposedly the father is trying to represent with the library. So he'll say he seemed himself to be providing something. People could count on it, seeing him sitting there, right? So he's thinking of himself as kind of royalty out in public, the guy who basically runs the town and takes care of the town. As he'll say later on, people expected everything to be provided for. He's basically like the Mafia boss of the town that people look to for things. And he's sitting out there in public, being visible to the people. And then there was an expression he liked, public servant. Then he contrasts himself to his father, the old man's petulant mouth, ruling by whims and decrees. Go home. And how workers would joke about that. But now things had already changed. They were not prepared to take the same treatment today. His way of proceeding was quite the opposite of his father's. And then he describes himself as someone who has to think about everything over and over again and wants to stay in the background, wants to keep his dignity, wants to always try to be fair. So you get the sense. And then there's the stuff about the whole town being provided for. You get the sense of. He's kind of like the Michael of the family. Thinking of the Mafia again. Sorry. Yeah, you get the sense of someone who's more educated and cerebral. So this is where I'm trying to work through what you were saying because I got the sense of someone who's more educated and cerebral and less impulsive than his father. But, yeah, not really a book reader. And so he doesn't have that same aspiration as Jack. And there's not that lightning rod type of tension, right, where there's a working class guy who has become interested in education and it's a source of longing and yearning. It's not just the ordinary thing that upper class people at this time might be used to. And not many people were going to college right at this time. And still the majority of people don't go to college today. But his interest in education, that kind of aspiration is something unique. It. It represents not just a desire to do something other than be a worker in a piano factory, but some higher aspiration that is associated with his passionate nature in general and his idea that he has fallen in love with Louisa because she's associated with that. So this transition from working class to an interest in education is quite fraught. I'm familiar with it in my own family. I feel like I still live with the consequences of it. I have these two warring sides. The practical side that's very suspicious of books and ideas and thinks that they just are a distraction from trying to survive and have a normal. Right. Is that Louisa's word? Normal life and the dangerousness of being distracted by ideas and by education. Of course, today, and maybe in the case of Jack's father, there's this. You can easily combine the two. You can go to Harvard and then become a management consultant. You get your education, then you use it to make lots of money. It's very practical and keeps you part of the upper ruling class. But for someone who's a working class person who discovers an education like my mother and father both did late in life, although Jack. It's not late in life for Jack, but someone who. For whom it's discovery. It becomes a kind of religious moment that can unfortunately turn the next generation into fanatics. But anyway, I don't know if I successfully connected that to anything. You were? 28:13 Erin: No, I think you did. I think you've illuminated a lot for me because I think I was reading the description of Arthur's father with far less irony than I should have been reading it. I guess I was seeing Arthur's sort of rejection of the library as being indicative of the fact that though he may be in many ways more educated than his father, you know, I saw it as a kind of symbolic. 28:33 Wes: I Think that's a possible reading? I think that's a legitimate, legitimate reading. 28:37 Erin: By the way, what's happening that's so interesting? And, of course, I believe this story, I believe Carried Away first came out in the New Yorker in the 90s, I want to say. So, you know, and the story ends one, I think. Okay. And the story ends in the 50s. And I do read a lot of hypocrisy in Arthur's position. Kind of in the way that. Right. That Michael is a much more hypocritical character than his father and the Godfather. Right. Because he comes in and he basically becomes exactly like his father by sitting there and feeling himself to be a public servant just by his reassuring presence. 29:09 Wes: He becomes ruthless, Right. He doesn't observe the whole business. It's just business thing. It gets personal, Right. 29:17 Erin: Well, by that same token, I think the town sort of becomes more feudal before it can become less like a feudal system. It seems to become more so under Arthur. He's detached himself. And also, there's a suggestion that. Because. And maybe this was always the case, but it seems to me that there's the suggestion that as especially the First World War is sort of evacuating the churches because people are becoming disillusioned with religion in light of, you know, the 20th century's advancements and the horrors of World War I. In the time between the wars and Maybe into the 50s, 60s, the businesses are taking up the mantle of sort of community support that was previously held by the churches or other kinds of, you know, voluntary associations like the Elks Club or, you know, the Women's League or. Right. All of those things that are kind of falling out of favor over the course of the first half of the 20th century. So Arthur finds himself in the position of supporting the church when it needs repairs. Right. Of supporting the Little League teams, right. So it's this strange. What Arthur seems to be doing is he has sort of one foot in the past and one foot in the future and in progress. And the position of the factory at this time is one of tremendous change in which it's sort of like on its way to becoming a more modern workplace. But in the course of this change, it's looking maybe more like a feudal system than ever before. 30:46 Wes: Yeah, well, he's still lord of the manor, and he may be enlightened, Right? He may be an enlightened dictator, so to speak. But politically, we ought not to rely on that. Right. We ought not to rely on the detached benevolence of the boss's Son. And you need a system in which the workers have actual power, right? And that's where the union comes in. And then there's the question Louisa asks, which is, isn't there a way to make people safe? They. Is this a function of Jack's carelessness or the lack of care taken in ensuring workplace safety? It could be a combination of both, of course. And that's something, right? That also, you can't just depend on the benevolence of the factory owner for that. Even if they're well intentioned. There has to be something that happens at a system level. And with regulation and enforcement, even the best of intentions aren't necessarily going to rise to that level. And his detachment plays out very interestingly in the accident. He doesn't know Jack's name, for instance, initially has trouble thinking of it. And he's up in his office, I think, when the accident happens. In his dreams of an accident, there was a spreading silence. Everything was shut down. Every machine in the place stopped making its customary noise and every man's voice was moved. And when Arthur looked out of the office window, he understood that doom had fallen. He could never remember any particular thing that he saw that told him this. It was just the space, the dust in the factory yard that said to him, now, then later on in the actual account of the accident, you know, he hears. Saw someone saying. Saw someone saying head, someone saying Jesus. Repeatedly. Arthur could have wished for the silence, the sounds, sounds in the objects drawing back in that dreadful but releasing way to give him room. It was nothing like that yelling and questioning and running around himself in the midst, being propelled to the sawmill. One man had fainted. So there's an interesting contrast between the silence of the dreams, which perhaps says something about his detachment, right? And then he wishes for that silence. The wish that plays out in the dream, he actually wishes for, in the actual account for that silence. But instead it's chaos and noise. And then there's that act of putting his coat over Jack and getting the blood all over it, which, right, is almost religious in its significance because he gets marked with the blood of the martyr. And of course, again, Jack is the mediating agency of him and Louisa getting together, their love. So I wouldn't write a whole paper on the religious significance of the story, but there's that illusion. I think there's a fundamental psychological observation being made there as well. This is why I think your reading is also apropos. His detachment is actually really important. And his father was not detached, was probably more on the Floor probably knew everyone's names, like you said, and was ruled on a whim and was not benevolent, but also was not detached. 33:45 Erin: I quite like Arthur as a character. I mean, I think they're all interesting characters, but Louisa will interpret his actions in that moment as being, I think her word is remarkable. What he did by picking up the head when we're in his. 33:58 Wes: Oh, I forgot about the fact that he picks up the head. 34:01 Erin: Right, right. Well, when we're in his thoughts, if you will, you know, through that sort of free indirect discourse that happens over the course of the story, you know, he does so very automatically and it's noted that he covers Jack's body with his jacket because he's the only one in the space who's wearing a jacket, which is a really interesting class distinction there. Right. He's the only one with a jacket 34:22 Wes: to offer and he's trying to make up for his detachment. 34:25 Erin: I'm thinking too, as it says in the story, the reason no one else had done this would be simply that no one else was wearing a jacket. And so, you know, Louisa is impressed by the fact that he picks up the head and puts it on the body. I don't know that we can fault him for not being able to give Louisa a physical description after carrying Jack's head in his arms. I can't imagine anything more intimate. 34:47 Wes: Right. But he doesn't know Jack. You know, he doesn't know Jack. He owns the factory with all the workers and he doesn't yet. Right. He doesn't know Jack. Obviously he's not interacting very much with his work. 34:56 Erin: Right. But he has a sense of knowing what to do when we're in his mind. There's a sense that this is all rather automatic, but anyone would know what to do in a circumstance like that. Maybe is remarkable, to use Louisa's word upon rereading the story, because I read it for school and then it been a couple of months now and I was really ill and everything, so I really had to go back and reread it closely. It's amazing what happens rereading this story, how much foreshadowing you see. I mean, talk about machinery. It is just such a tightly plotted, just really magnificent story. And I just noted on the very first page of the story that in the description of the commercial hotel where Louisa is taking her dinner, the white tablecloths were changed every week and in the meantime were protected by oil cloth mats. Louisa has her glass of wine every day with dinner. And so there's this sort of, like, faint trace of red that follows her, which is really apropos, maybe, right? Because in the eyes of the town, she's a scarlet woman. And when we see the narrative jumps from Arthur holding Jack's head and staining his shirt front just with blood, it jumps to Louisa in the library wearing that scarlet blouse and having her hair bobbed so that she's. You know, the effect of a bob is that it kind of. It shows your neck, right? Your head becomes, if you will, you know, sort of more detached, part of part of your body. You know, you don't have the hair going all the way down your back or something like that, right? So the head becomes more of a separate entity. The oilcloth mat stuck out to me this second read. Because in thinking about, was it Jack's fault? Was it not Jack's fault? You know, what does fault even mean when we're talking about machinery? Are we allowed to. We have to be so vigilant and not slip up for a moment or else be beheaded. You know, it's a terrible thought, but the idea that the mats protecting the tablecloth, that stuck out to me, it seemed to me that there was more care being taken over the tablecloths than there is over the human life in this story, the tablecloths are being protected. They have a system of protection, but the workers in the factory don't. I'm muddying all that up by at the same time talking about this connection between Jack and Louisa. But I'm thinking about. Louisa does pay a blood price in the story when she sleeps with Jim Frarey, and she attributes the blood on the sheets to her period. And he soon realizes, right, that he's taken her virginity. And, you know, the connection between the two of them and the fact that both of these figures are people for whom those around them seem to take as less care and concern for their welfare than people take for these tablecloths is really interesting. Like, Louisa can sort of bloody things, Jack can bloody things. But the tablecloths have to be pristine. I don't know. It just took on a tremendous amount of pathos for me, is what I'm saying. 37:47 Wes: Yeah, there's something about, you know, she's a traveler. And this word traveler will come up in various places. And the suggestion is not just geographical travel, but traveling in love in some sense, you know, and this is probably not unconnected to the. The idea of being carried away, her travel in the beginning. One of the climactic things that she'll say in the story is that fantasy Jack. Right. When he leaves again, he was not with them or anywhere in sight. A traitor, helplessly, a traveler. The idea is that this. It's not fickleness in love exactly, but the inability to settle down, let's say, into ordinary, normal love, marriage, whatever, I think, is partly represented by travel. And she starts traveling after the breakup with the doctor at the sanatorium. But in the midst of that, there's something kind of homey about the hotel, even though it's called the Commercial Hotel. Right, right. And it's got a Frarey is, who she hooks up with as a traveling salesman, basically. And you'd think they would not be particularly homey, but she's. In a way, she's kind of made it that way in a comforting. Eating her steak and potatoes and having her usual glass of wine. But, yeah, I was struck by that description of the tablecloths changed every week, protected by oilcloth mats. And then in the winter, the dining room smelled of these mats wiped by a kitchen rag, and of the cold fumes from the furnace and the beef gravy and dried potatoes and onions. A smell not unpleasant to anybody coming in hungry from the cold. So a sort of homelike quality to the hotel. Even though she's a traveler. By the way, you also mentioned her neck being exposed, right? 39:30 Erin: Mm. 39:31 Wes: It also reminded me of something that, again, she says in the final section here, when she's older, she's talking about Arthur to Fantasy Jack, and he's just given this platitude about love never dying. She's thinking, well, this is what speech making turns you into. Right. Because in his fantasy version, he's a union organizer, a person who can say things like that love dies all the time. Or at any rate, it becomes distracted, overlaid. It might as well be dead. Arthur used to come and sit in the library. She said, in the beginning, I was very provoked with him. I used to look at the back of his neck and think, ha, what if something should hit you there? None of that would make sense to you. It wouldn't make sense. And it turned out to be something else entirely that I wanted. I wanted to marry him and get into a normal life. We get this. This idea of something hitting him in the back of the neck, which is obviously related to Jack getting decapitated, and it being presented as a sort of dilemma, a decision between these two things. Does he get hit on the back of the neck, or do you marry and get, quote, unquote, get into a normal life? Which is a way of saying, get away from Being the traveler get away from being the one who's carried away. Even though I think you could argue that in each stage. Right. With. With Arthur as well. It's a very romantic. The way they get together is very romantic. And there's the wind blowing. 40:52 Erin: Oh, it's such a romantic feeling, the 40:54 Wes: wind and the compulsion. So, you know, I don't want to downplay that. Right. There's something in here about the temporality of love, what happens when time passes and it gets more and more ordinary and it becomes a different sort of bond that it is in the exciting beginning. So the only way to sustain that excitement, and we saw this in Joyce's the Dead too, right. Is if the beloved is martyred quickly enough that you don't get used to them, that it doesn't become habitual. And so that's the dilemma. Do you cut it off early and have this fantasy image of the beloved that you can preserve as an ideal, or do you get into the normal life and the ordinariness of it? But the final thing I wanted to say here is that the ideal always informs the ordinary and perhaps sustains it. I think we talked about that with the dead and also in Annie, believe it or not, our Annie hall episode, about the way in which nostalgia, including nostalgia for past loves or lost loves, can sustain a current love and the way this ends and it ends so powerfully. I think we should talk about this ending and how she accomplishes such a powerful effect with a. But anyway, the way it ends. I think it's something about the importance of this really almost imaginary love with Jack and how that has been transformed and become the relationship with Arthur. And now, as perhaps she is dying. I don't know. I'll get your. See what your opinion is on that. Having a stroke or dying or whatever it is. But I like to think that it's her dying. There's a significance to that. But she's reflecting not on. In her last moments, she's thinking about an interaction with Jack in which she describes her relationship with Arthur. So the two again. Jack is sort of the ideal medium through which the relationship with Arthur is established. There's a getting carried away, and she's being carried away again in the end. If it's death or hallucination. But there's getting carried away. But somehow that can serve the purpose of something that's more grounded, let's say. 43:00 Erin: Just to briefly go back to what you were saying before about a traveler. I had this idea now of a librarian as like a travel Agent transporting people through books. The books, you know, come and go. And she's sort of, you know, helping people with their travel plans, if you will, by being the way station through which. 43:18 Wes: That's great. 43:20 Erin: Yeah. And. Well, then there's. Even Arthur kind of recognizes that the librarian is not really part of the town or that she's a sort of agent of travel. Right. Because he remarks that she's known for not having the best reputation, not having a spotless reputation, though she doesn't have an expressly bad reputation. He says that this is okay because she's not a schoolteacher. So she's not really responsible for setting an example or something like that. Right. So she's not really part of the fabric of the town. Even as the librarian, she stays apart. Of course, she'll become enmeshed in the fabric more than anyone. Right. By marrying the guy who's. Who's the head of everything that happens in the town. But I'm thinking about a librarian as a traveler or a travel agent. And also a soldier. Right. As in both world wars, you know, a soldier gets his free trip to Europe. And the sort of romantic death of the soldier, it's in no way romantic, but, I mean, in the popular conception of the. I'm thinking of my grandfather, who had a very long decline before he died. And I think, you know, death makes one feel really powerless. And he many times remarked to me that he wished that he had died in the war, you know, that he had felt, I think, so upset over the fact that he could see, you know, the evidence of his own failing health and his, you know, the lack of power in his body and all of that, that he kind of, you know, romanticized dying in the war. Of course, if he had, then, you know, none of us would have been there. But you know what? You point out where Louisa is looking at the back of Arthur's neck, as you're kind of suggesting there's a sort of transposition going on there where she's hoping that the saw is going to come. Like, I see that as evidence that Louisa is falling in love with Arthur in the same way that Arthur's not really aware why he's. I don't think he's aware why he's coming to the library fully. Right, right. Yeah. And I don't think that. I think that Louisa, by wanting to kill him. And I think your comment is getting at this. Maybe I'm just saying it a little bit differently than you are. Right. That she's actually falling in love with him by wanting to cut his head off. She's going, arthur, Jack. Arthur, Jack. By cutting his head off. Jack is in the hospital during the war, and there's lots of foreshadowing about the idea that there's a guy in hospital with him who dies of a heart attack in the middle of the war rather than getting killed by a 45:39 Wes: bullet, which is ironic. And then later on, the newspaper mentions the irony of Jack's death similarly. 45:47 Erin: That's right. And yet he manages to die in a rather sensational way. Right. It's noted in the story that because of the tragic and sensational way in which he died, people come from all over the area to go to his funeral. It's a huge funeral. Even though he has, as he notes in his letters, he has no family. And in fact, the one family member he does have, his father, doesn't even go to the funeral. But. But there are presumably hundreds of people there because he does get, in the end, a sort of fantastic martyrdom in the way that, you know, even a soldier wouldn't get that kind of fanfare. Right. Because their death would be overseas in some battlefield. Right. And so no one really would be able to kind of properly mourn them, except probably en masse, you know, for. For whoever would probably get a memorial service. Yeah. So what am I trying to say about all that? 46:34 Wes: Were you thinking about the neck thing and. As a manifestation of love. 46:39 Erin: Yes. And also of. 46:40 Wes: But also your grandfather's. Yeah. 46:43 Erin: Yes. Also of. You know, literally of transport. Like a romantic figure in the order of books and literature and. Right. Someone who dies tragically in some sort of great heroic escapade or something like that. Someone who, like, travels into the realm of fantasy or into the realm of death. Like, for Louisa, Jack is dead, really, from the beginning of the story. Right. Like, she never meets him. And whether he's murdered in the factory or not, or killed in the factory, he is dead in a way, because he will never show himself to her and he never materializes. And so I guess I'm thinking about death as. Or someone dying as becoming a traveler as well. And the difference between dying and, like, staying put, if you will. Anyway, this isn't quite coming to fruition. I had a better. I had a better way of tying it together in my head that I now can't think of. 47:40 Wes: Well, yeah, she's transported in the end. She's being transported to. What is it she says in. At the very end? What is this place? 47:48 Erin: That's right. That's what I was going to Say, I like this idea that she's dying out of town at the. You know, I like the idea that as you're suggesting, that she's dying in those final moments, the dying is itself kind of a flight of fancy. It's a fantasy. So those two threads sort of of traveling, of, like literal, physical traveling around and not being rooted and being free to go wherever, and that sort of. It's not really a fantasy, right. None of these. Dying in war certainly isn't a fantasy, right? But the sort of symbolic significance of that is then twinned or wedded to this idea that she is literally physically dying and having a hallucination at the same time. 48:25 Wes: Her death is somehow a recapitulation of love. And both are ways of being carried away and transported. 48:33 Erin: Right. 48:33 Wes: The idea of hitting him in the neck, you could think of that as we kind of want to kill the beloved, right. And take them inside us and just have them and not have them separate at one level. That's the aggressive part of it. But on the other hand, our love is. If it's intense and ecstatic, we lose ourselves, right? And we want to be. We want to go the opposite direction and get merged into them. So clearly there's this relationship between the transport of dying and the transport of falling in love. She managed to time it right, to have a life and to have an ordinary life and ordinary love and not die before her time. There's something about the intensity with Jack and the carelessness and the contrast between. So for ordinary life for Jack is not the way to put it. It's more compelling in the wrong sense. It is more of a compulsion, right. Why doesn't he look her up when he gets back? In the end, he's afraid of not playing by the rules. He's going to marry the person to whom he was engaged. He's not going to do something that reckless, but he's got a little bit of the reckless in him, which is almost worse. Right. Louisa's willing to pick up and move to a new town. He's not willing to do that. He's trying to, in a way, have it both ways, which is how you get your neck caught in a machine. 49:53 Erin: Oh, that's good. 49:54 Wes: He's working in a factory, but reading these books. So there's an intense conflict, but that conflict is also a social conflict. And then the question is, what are your progressive hopes for the worker? Because Jack, in a way, is emblematic of these higher hopes that are cut down by the drudgery of the factory and that may be the thing that is distracting him. Right. He may be thinking about something he read in Russell's book on Bolshevism. Or hopefully maybe it was Chesterton's book what is Wrong with the World? 50:25 Erin: Right. 50:26 Wes: Which I looked up. I had to read a little bit of that. 50:29 Erin: Chesterton's so great. 50:30 Wes: Yeah. Is he distracted by the little injection of bookishness? What do we want for the worker? Do we want a better education for all? Not everyone is going to be a white collar worker, Right. There's always going to be blue collar workers. Or the alternative is the more grounded alternative that recognizes that and creates unions. It's kind of a middle ground in the way that her love for Arthur is a middle ground. So there's not going to be a Marxist utopia. And again, the reference to Bolshevism. So there's not going to be that more ecstatic, exciting version, revolution, cut off people's heads, blah blah, blah. There's going to be a. An acceptable homeostasis. There's gonna be a capitalist society in which a union functions. It's not gonna be the case that everyone is a poet, as Marx puts it, in the evening, because they only have a little bit of factory work to do during the day. It's just not gonna happen. 51:22 Erin: Well, I like this question for Jack. I'm wondering, before we do get to that final scene, you know, I'm wondering if we like this life for Louisa. Like I think that in the end I'm ambivalent about what happens to her, even at the same time as I feel that in, in the end she gets a pretty good life. Right. Which I think that we are set up to feel that she deserves. Right. She's a kind of an exceptional person and we want her to. She's had a raw deal from a lot of different people. Right. And we want her to succeed. We feel that she's exceptional because of her intelligence. Right. We never get a real physical description of her, but we know from other people that she's beautiful. Right. And that maybe she kind of stays on the shelf too long. Right. She's rather older than she could be. 52:05 Wes: Frarey describes her. She's attractive but not young is the way he puts it. 52:10 Erin: Right. 52:11 Wes: In this ending, there's a 40 year old woman who seems to resemble her younger self who. She describes this woman's face as being worn, but we could get to that. That may be her describing herself is what I'm saying. 52:24 Erin: Right. But she's had her youth stolen from her a bit Right. She's had these exceptional experiences. I like what you say about the fact that Jack is trying to have it both ways, because I think you're pinpointing something I wasn't able to express about the sort of unfairness. Right. Of the way that he is operating. Whereas she is willing to take the risks, she's willing to go to the new towns, she's also had this. Right. She's had this experience of illness. She just all around seems to be an exceptional person for whom we want some good ending. In a way, it's ironic that, you know, and maybe this is the situation with women where they have this unique ability through marriage to be able to transcend their social class that men don't have. Right. So she ends up making this good marriage in terms of. It seems like it's a happy marriage. Right. And also it's a good marriage in terms of the fact that she's able to get into a comfortable situation for herself. Socioeconomically, though, it's not without hardship. And she goes through hard times during the Depression. Right. But she has a good house, and she has. She's now in this position of going from someone who's pretty ostracized from the life of the town to becoming someone who's maybe the most important woman in the life of the town. 53:33 Wes: Right. He dies, and she's the one running the piano factory, trying to keep it afloat, as she puts it. Yeah. 53:39 Erin: Right. So I guess Jack doesn't have the ability to realize his educational ambitions and sort of leapfrogging his station through marriage. I mean, I suppose he could if he, you know, if some, like, countess fell in love with him. I suppose that would be possible, but it's more possible for women. And so I think in the end, what I'm trying to ask is, are we satisfied with the life that Louisa has had for herself? You know, we find out that she has a son. There's something very bittersweet and sort of melancholy about the ending and the fact that, you know, it all kind of comes down to this temporary bus depot. Yet at the same time, I feel sort of satisfied for her as a character. Are we supposed to feel satisfied, or are we supposed to feel as though there was always this. Of course, there's always going to be longing and regret. Right. But does she get a good deal in the end, is what I'm curious. 54:28 Wes: Yeah, I didn't think she got a bad deal. It sounds like she's had a good life to me. And it's such a poignant ending. It's so, for me, just emotionally affecting. And yet I was also puzzled why, what's going on here that I'm this touched by the ending, the sense of mourning and reflection on love in the final moments of one's life. And maybe we can try to. I think a lot of it is in these very, very subtle details. Just things that seem insignificant, like being in the coffee shop getting a Coke and the papers blow off the desk and a girl says, oh, shit, and stamps on them. Things like that are actually speaking to the emotional engine of the story. And this is what I think makes her so great. From what I understand, this is something she does. This is, I mean, this is not just the story, but this is Alice Munro in general making these, these details. So, so let's talk about that in the, in the postscript. All right, thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. 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