3 - Mapping the Vernacular Landscape in Alice Munro's “What Do You Want to Know For?” and Other Stories

Summary

IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PIECE entitled “What Do You Want to Know For?” (The View from Castle Rock, 2006), the narrator, whom I propose to call Munro, since she refers to Sheila Laidlaw as her sister and Bob Laidlaw as her father (VCR, 330), encourages her readers to read the landscape with her as she and her husband drive through the Ontario countryside with “special maps” (VCR, 319). These maps show both the usual towns, roads and rivers, and geological features of the Ontario countryside. With the maps, Munro points to visible features of the landscape and conjures up the hidden features of the glacial landscape the maps help her to identify; she describes actual landscape and recalls absent landscape. In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari oppose tracing (le calque) and the map: “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.” As she reads her maps and the landscape, claiming to uncover realities or pointing to disregarded features, it is soon quite clear that Munro is not simply depicting a landscape; she is instead engaging in an experiment in contact with the real. In spite of the emphasis on the trope of the journey with a map that suggests one can read and interpret the landscape, Munro does not engage in any realistic description of the landscape in “What Do You Want to Know For?” For Munro, who describes kame moraines as “wild and bumpy with a look of chance and secrets” (VCR, 321), acts as a “geomancer,” one who composes the landscape as she maps it. Mapping is a creative activity, where memory and imagination occupy center stage. The map, Deleuze and Guattari insist, “fosters connections between fields.” As she maps the landscape, Munro is also exploring connections, such as a character's connection with space, and through space, the past, either her personal past or her family's. To understand the landscape that Munro is mapping, I will refer to the concept of the “vernacular landscape” developed by American geographer John Jackson.