The view from the castle rock

Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

The view from the castle rock (in the original The View from Castle Rock , 2005/2006) is a short story by Alice Munro , in which a part of a family consisting emigrates from three generations of Scotland to Canada and the narration is addressed by history.

action

Some years after Andrew age of ten with his father on a visit to Edinburgh on the castle has heard of concrete from the father's wish to go to America, leaving Old James and three of his children, Mary, Andrew and Walter and Andrew wife Agnes and son James , Scotland by ship in 1818. On the drive, the role of Mary also becomes clear for the third generation: as the oldest of the second generation and unmarried, she is the guardian of the youngest children. She loves Young James very much, especially his curiosity and receptiveness. Her sister-in-law Agnes gives birth to her daughter Isabel during the trip and is amazed when the doctor present shows her appreciation. Mary's youngest brother Walter notes everyday and exciting things in his diary, which become the subject of cross-class encounters on deck, where not even a young rich man and her father seem to be able to escape the storyteller Old James. Only the narrator believes she is at a sufficient distance from this source and her own narration is explicitly exposed shortly before the end. Finally, on the occasion of a visit to the cemetery, the further life of the named in Canada is outlined.

interpretation

It is told from a homodiegetic , changing perspective in the present tense, occasionally in free indirect speech , writes Uwe Zagratzki in a 2010 article. Current events mix with anecdotes from the past and what is likely to happen. According to Zagratzki, this prediction by the authorial narrator turns out to be true, because Munro confesses that a lot of what is told in the story is certainly a lie. She admitted it and was referring to the distrust of the writer James Hogg expressed by Old James . Zagratzki quotes the following passage: "Except for Walter's journal, and the letters, the story is full of my invention. The sighting of Fife from Castle Rock is related by Hogg, so it must be true." Zagratzki says that, "in fact", Walter's diary and Andrew's comments complement each other and that the first letter from Old James was published in Blackwoods Magazine , at the instigation of the poet James Hogg, the second some Time later in The Colonial Advocate . Then suddenly the "cacophony of voices" ends, which is told about by means of tombstone inscriptions in Canada. Gaps in knowledge would be filled by reading letters that relatives in Scotland and Canada write to each other, so Zagratzki concluded on this work.

History of origin

The dedication in Munro's collection of short stories of the same name, The View from Castle Rock, reveals a detail on the genesis of the title story: “Dedicated to Douglas Gibson [...] whose enthusiasm for this particular book has even sent him prowling through the graveyard of Ettrick Kirk, probably in the rain. "

Editions and versions

Alice Munro: "The View Fom Castle Rock" (2005/2006), version differences according to sections

The first version of the work was published on August 29, 2005 in The New Yorker , the second version was included as the cover story with a length of 50 pages in the anthology of the same name from 2006, which is in German with the title Why do you want to know? (2008) has been published. This work can also be found in English in the New Selected Stories (2011).

In the 2005 version, the story consists of 24 sections, and in the 2006 book version, 31 sections. Only three of the thirty-one sections have remained virtually unchanged (namely, the eighth, fourteenth, and fifteenth). All others have been expanded or are completely new. The content of the first section has been retained, but has been almost completely reformulated. The nineteenth section has been expanded to include a cross-class encounter in which an exchange takes place about a story that has just been told and about what is worth mentioning in a diary.

Some sections of the book version were created by combining several sections of the magazine version. If, then three times two sections have only been changed linguistically (1, 2, 14, 15, 23, 24). The 2006 version consists of two sections, sections 3 and 9, sections 20 and 27 have been merged from almost three sections. The remaining aspects of the third of those sections can now be found in sections 21 and 28. Since the later version has six more sections, there must have been branches. In the first version, these are sections 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 20, 23, and 24, each of which branches into two new sections; On the one hand, section 17 makes up a third of an assembly and also branches three times itself. In the 2005 version, this section begins with “This is the day of wonders.” It ends with “In the thick of so many bodies [Mary] is helpless, she cannot pause - she has to stamp and wheel to the music or be knocked down. ”In the 2006 version, this marks the end of the 22nd section.

The shortest section is the twentieth in the magazine version. In it, the young rich reads to the diarist Walter from The Scottish Chiefs . In the book version, the 28th section is the shortest. It is created by separating the last part of section 23 of the magazine version and reads: "Old James has sensed defection, and begins to lament openly. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" "

Three new sections have been added: the seventh, the thirteenth and the 29th section. Two were placed between existing sections, one, the seventh, was inserted into an existing section, the other two parts of which now frame the new seventh section. In this section the daughter-in-law defends herself against instruction, excessive homeland love and sexism of the father-in-law and insults him in silence. The new thirteenth section is about how the eldest son who emigrates understands his role and that his responsibility is a burden that he would not call love. The new section before penultimate tells about what the grandfather, Old James, wrote to his eldest son in Scotland, which is presented as a historically documented source of an ego who speaks here for the first time and in the present and questions everything that has been told with one exception represents.

literature

• Uwe Zagratzki, Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock . Looking from Canada to Scotland and Vice Versa, in: Literature on the Move. Cultural Migration in Contemporary Literature , Michael Heinze (ed.), Trier: WVT, 2010, 41–48.
• Tessa Hadley , Dream Leaps. Alice Munro , lrb.co.uk , January 25, 2007 (opening the story)

Individual evidence

1. ^ "And I am surely one of the liars the old man talks about, in what I have written about the voyage." (Section 29).
2. ↑ The narrative voice here refers to what was previously related from Old James' second letter in quotation form: "Hogg poor man has spent most of his life in conning lies [...]" (second letter text in section 29).
3. ^ Uwe Zagratzki, Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock . Looking from Canada to Scotland and Vice Versa, in: Literature on the Move. Cultural Migration in Contemporary Literature , Michael Heinze (ed.), Trier: WVT, 2010, pp. 41–48, therein pp. 43–44.
4. ↑ "Dedicated to Douglas Gibson, whose enthusiasm for this book even led him to roam Ettrick Kirk's cemetery, probably in the rain."
5. ↑ Alice Munro: "The View from Castle Rock" (2005)
6. ↑ "This is his burden — it never occurs to him to call it love." (End of the new 13th section)