Alice Munro is Dead

In early 2021, when the world was still 2020ing, I made a mistake: I engaged politically with that which had been intended emotionally. I treated feelings as if they were politics. There was a lot of that going around.

I was unemployed and still almost entirely stuck at home. The rules about what you were actually prohibited from doing and what you were merely socially discouraged from doing, at that point in the pandemic, were vague and shifting but no less powerful for it. I had no job and I had no money, only time. Despite having nothing to do but read all day, I was increasingly unsure of what was happening politically, of what people wanted and how they thought they might get it. This was when both the George Floyd era and the Covid era were in the late stages of their full bloom - the radlib control of the national narrative was still powerful, but no longer total. Far-right discursive spaces had rejected Covid precautions and calls for racial justice from the beginning, of course, but this was the beginning of a thaw in spaces that were not explicitly right wing. Though I couldn’t see it yet, the tide was already receding. The social justice yelling crowd clutched more and more tightly, but their grasp was slowly loosening.

I found myself reading a lefty listserv that I had been on, at that point, probably for 15 years or so, since before I ever wrote a word for a public audience. I was signed up for the digest form, meaning I got one email a day rather than every email sent, and even then I rarely read it. I had never been a big listserv guy, though it’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been signed up for dozens in my life, thanks to my professional and activist responsibilities. (I use the passive voice carefully, there.) I was not active at that time in particular because my relationship to a lot of the lefties I knew was still complicated because of, uh, reasons. I was not particularly interested in reminding people that I was receiving those emails. But that particular day seemed like an opportunity to get some clarity on what were rapidly-coalescing questions, for me, questions I couldn’t stop turning over in my head. There were still street protests going on, at this point. Biden had recently been sworn in. No one was breathing a word about corruption in charities aligned with BlackLivesMatter. Magazines had just dedicated their 2020 year-end issues to wince-inducing efforts in theatrically thanking Black people for existing. The general sentiment on this listserv was passionately in favor of abolishing the police and dismantling the prisons, as was nearly universal in left-left spaces at the time.

And yet the sentiment being shared on that day was the sense that Covid was not being taken seriously enough; people were moving on too fast, mentally, and we needed to return to the initial rush of concern from a year prior. In practical terms, several people were arguing, to general assent, that we should have been locking down in the style of China and “zero Covid.” Zero Covid, zero tolerance, zero excuses. So I asked what seemed like a natural and obvious question: if we’re abolishing the police, who enforces these “near-total” Covid lockdowns?

There were a few answers proffered. The most popular was one you heard occasionally on the rare occurrence that this kind of question came up - “we’ll do it ourselves.” I acknowledge that this has a certain verve to it, and at least expresses some vague reference to the idea of community policing or similar. What I thought, but kept to myself, was “no, no you won’t,” because of course they wouldn’t and of course they didn’t and of course none of them really thought they would, deep down inside. Even if they did, they’d have to grapple with a stubborn fact that kept cropping up: once you’ve declared that there will be a citizens constabulary force that has been endowed by society with a monopoly on violence to preserve public order, you have… reinvented the police. But mostly it didn’t get that far. The general response was, instead, that I was missing the point (they didn’t say how) and that I was guilty of a lack of solidarity (they didn’t say why) and that I was revictimizing someone or another (they didn’t say who). To be honest, I don’t entirely blame them. Their impatience was the impatience of those who believed, not incorrectly, that they are operating under a tacit social compact not to identify the elephant in the room. These people weren’t stupid. They were just playing by rules I wasn’t. They knew it was nonsensical to demand that the state employ its apparatus for violence to lock us all down at the exact same time they were demanding that said apparatus be dismantled. But they were relying on the assumption that everyone present knew better than to bring it up.

One way to summarize all of this is to say that they wanted to be taken seriously, but not literally. And my mistake, my entire life as a socialist, has been to assume that taking someone literally is a prerequisite of taking them seriously. (Taking people seriously who do not wish to be is a very 21st-century crime.) Another way to express this is to say that, on that listserv, I had taken as a matter of politics that which was really a matter of feelings. They were sincerely moved by the death of George Floyd, and the social conditioning and path dependence of lived politics had compelled them to invest those feelings in the idea of abolishing the police, which probably seemed like as good an idea as any. And they were sincerely moved by the death toll of Covid, to the point that they wanted to embrace extreme action like harsh lockdowns. To recognize that those two simultaneously-embraced policies were the negation of each other was to fail to understand that they were meant only to be felt, not thought, much less to be implemented. All of this on a forum of educated lefties, activists and writers and critics who ostensibly wanted real changed but had lived in our rumpled margins their whole lives. Which is probably why they didn’t want to be taken seriously, not in any real way. I suspect they knew from bitter experience better than to take themselves seriously, let alone literally. That is why their politics was all a kind of feeling - because it didn’t make a difference whether it was.

This is an anger I encounter again and again. I will look at some political idea or philosophy, identify core failings in it and, because I take the people who express it seriously, point out those failings. And the negative response that’s reflected back, often, is not premised on the idea that my analysis is wrong. It’s premised on the idea that the purpose of finding your political tribe is precisely to spend time among those who know well enough not to question ideas that cannot survive questioning.

I’ve said this before, but I really do think it’s worth repeating, because it’s core to understanding the past five years: what struck me most about the reaction to my last book was not the liberals and lefties that resisted its conclusions, but the ones that didn’t. Which is to say that, after the heights of emotion and passion and excess that had attended the George Floyd moment, I expected to get a lot of sincere and angry rejection of my perspective. And I did get some. But what I got much more often was an exhausted unhappiness about having to talk about such things at all. There was this sense of harried grievance, from people who had so recently been using the word “reckoning” without guile or irony, over being asked whether any reckoning had occurred. The book was sold to the publisher in spring of 2022 and was out of date by publication day in late summer of 2023. Not because of events that had occurred, but because the ambient spirit of unguarded belief in that which no one should have believed had crumbled, fallen away in a matter of months. Nobody rang a church bell for The Reckoning, but the savvy knew the moment it had died, the way on-trend people know when it’s time to transition to a different style of jeans. My book was not wicked for opposing the moral truth but gauche for reminding people of a period they were busily trying to forget, like an unfortunate haircut, that summer you decided to be a YouTuber, a brief and stupid love affair. The book would have sold better, maybe, had a muscular and unironic expression of those social justice values still been in fashion, if defending them was still the thing to do. But I think we’ve learned that, these days, cringe is more salient than justice.

People did feel those things, though. They still feel them. I would say that feelings are persistent things, but then feelings, like wishes, are not things at all.

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So, Alice Munro.

The salient fact, the one that ultimately matters, is that she’s dead. The beatified Canadian short story writer Alice Munro died a couple months ago. Some disturbing behavior on her part has come to light that’s resulting in a kind of internet moment that we now all know by heart, the communal disavowal, the mass mutual distaste, a directionless expression of condemnation. And it all makes sense, given how awful the story is, how sympathetic the victim. In the [edit] mid-1970s, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner was sexually assaulted by Munro’s husband, her stepfather, who was arrested and convicted on a minor charge. Skinner told her mother in the 1990s. Munro ultimately stayed with him despite his misdeeds, which naturally constitutes a great betrayal of her daughter. The husband died in 2013, the same year Munro won the Nobel prize. Now that Munro is gone, Skinner has shared her story. Understandably, it’s generated a lot of feelings. And the feelings, as feelings, are certainly justified. That’s an incredibly ugly thing to happen to anyone, a deep and lasting trauma. It’s natural for people to feel hurt and anger in sympathy with that pain. And child sexual abuse is something that can get better, that we can fight and reduce over time. To the extent that a story like Skinner’s perhaps makes that a little easier, I’m grateful that it’s emerged.

In general, I think the most important thing is a sense of solidarity for people like Skinner, which includes recognizing their pain and anger and their legitimacy.

Like I said, though, the salient fact for the public is that Munro is dead. Salient, principally, because it means that you can’t hurt her. She was beyond the reach of your good feelings when you eulogized her in May and she is beyond the reach of your anger now. Just like her husband, the man actually guilty of the assault, is beyond the reach of all of our feelings. The utility of anger about sexual assault is evergreen, but the utility of anger against a person always has an expiration date. Munro’s has come and gone.

People get this, on some level, and so the conversation naturally turns to Munro’s legacy, her reputation, her place in the canon. This is, as is so often the case in matters of public morality, a situation where people lash out at what and who is available to be lashed out at; a writer’s legacy appears to be something that can be controlled by the decent people of the world. “This will be remembered forever and always be a stain on her legacy!,” they say. I don’t know; I think one thing that the past decade has shown is that these crowdsourced justice campaigns are relentlessly arbitrary in terms of who they hurt, how, and how much. But certainly, it may be that Munro’s books start getting printed with a large asterisk on the cover.

The real question is, what do you really hope to accomplish in attacking her legacy? I certainly have no interest in defending it. It’s just a question of what people are really trying to accomplish. I think if you prod around in what people are saying, you’ll find that they’re still hoping to get to her, to Munro herself somehow, under the belief that attacking her legacy is a way to enforce some sort of justice on her. But you can’t get to her, with justice or retribution or anything else, because she’s dead. Your anger towards Skinner’s stepfather is something you are certainly allowed to feel, but you cannot tell yourself that it matters for him because there is no him left. And this isn’t just me being a bitch, here. This is important. It’s important for precisely the same reason that it’s important that we recognize that the brief flash of social justice rage in 2020 was never an instrument of change: because we must know the difference between feeling and doing. Being mad at Alice Munro is feeling. The doing of ridding the world of childhood sexual abuse, I pray, is not a matter of feeling and continues on. One has just about nothing to do with the other.

You might identify several different culprits in the modern political era’s triumph of feeling. The system is so sclerotic and undemocratic that people feel there’s nothing material that they can change. The locus of injustice has moved from people’s material reality as a product of injustice (having food in their bellies or not) to their emotional relationship to that injustice (generational trauma over someone not having food in their bellies once). Consumerist society places customer satisfaction at the heart of human relations and convinces people that how they feel is coterminous with who they are. Therapeutic culture naturally conditions people to think of all of the world as a therapist’s office and all of moral action as a fundamentally therapeutic effort. Endless online connectivity obscures the difference between the self and the world, smudges the border that separates expression and action. Doing is hard and feeling is easy. Take your pick. One way or another, we’re left in a world where natural and profoundly human revulsion to both a great crime and a great artist’s willingness to look away becomes immediately enmeshed in a fundamentally inhuman matrix of attitudes, ideas, arguments, hot takes, all of which ultimately serve to obscure the profoundly mundane horror of childhood sexual assault. That is what we do: we take those awful crimes we cannot stop and those awful tragedies we cannot solve and we run them through a wash cycle of this, of discourse, as a way to hide and deny them.

And so childhood sexual assault becomes a topic best approached through a discussion of literary legacy. Because that is easier. That is the triumph of feelings.

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The notion that attacking a dead artist’s legacy amounts to some sort of meaningful attack on them is a good example of feeling over thinking, and it springs from the same bad logic that causes people to revere artists instead of art in the first place. (That’s bad, I mean, you should break up with the idea of loving artists entirely, love only art, never love artists, they will always hurt you.) Here are some quotes from the above-linked NYT story.

“Alice was always kind of Saint Alice,” said Martin Levin, the former editor of the books section at The Globe and Mail.

Why? Why would Alice Munro be a saint? She wrote some excellent stories. That is a very important thing, if you have my weird values. But it’s the height of moral error to mistake the ability to perform the fundamentally practical task of artistic craft with the ability to live a life of personal integrity or ethical behavior. It’s like I always say, Ty Cobb had a hell of an on-base percentage. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you made JK Rowling your guru, and feel that she’s betrayed you, that sense of betrayal should come packaged with asking yourself why you would have ever thought that she was more to you than a wands-and-wizards merchant. Where did you make this mistake, to see Woody Allen as your personal friend? How did you get to the point that you mistook Michael Jackson for a moral force in your life, instead of a purely artistic one? Did you really think Junot Diaz was, in any way that mattered, your ally?

Jessica Johnson, a journalist in Canada who has covered the literary world, said some celebrities — including literary celebrities — are seen as pristine. “We live in a world of celebrity that tends to see figures like Munro as unimpeachable,” she said.

Maybe “a world” sees celebrities as pristine or unimpeachable, but then it’s a deeply stupid world, isn’t it? I will never understand why the endless parade of celebrity cancellations never impels people to make the obvious conclusion - that there’s a lot of bad behavior out there and no possible way to live in a bubble of perfect moral hygiene. You cannot live that pure clean untouched life. All of our lives are lived within technologies that were developed by awful people. The conclusion should not be to excuse the bad behavior but to recognize that you can ultimately only be responsible for your own bad behavior and for the intimate associations you keep with people you actually know. (Indeed, this is precisely why Munro is guilty of something.) If you want to morally censure a living person, absolutely, go ahead. But I’m frequently told that many people survive cancellation. As I’m forever saying, this is an odd defense; it’s not often that people defend a political tactic by insisting on its impotence, but that has become a stock attitude about canceling. Again, what is doing, and what is merely feeling?

“These revelations not only crush Munro’s legacy as a person, but they make the stories that were, in retrospect, so clearly about those unfathomable betrayals basically unreadable as anything but half-realized confessions,” [novelist Rebecca] Makkai said in an email. “To me, that makes them unreadable at all.”

I think this will certainly be true for some and untrue for many. Most people would appear to have a great ability to either remain ignorant about the bad behavior of artists they love or to simply ignore it. Some will really be bothered enough to disavow Munro and some will maintain the ruse that they are. Disavowing great artists and their work after these sorts of allegations has become just another station on the cross of the educated and upwardly mobile, after all, a costless demonstration of fealty to a particularly influential vision of how to be a member of polite society in good standing. I never really buy it. The guy who ostentatiously tells you that he’ll never be able to enjoy Chinatown again has always struck me as being motivated by the dual impulse to convince both others and himself that he is indeed the person he’s trying to appear to be. Really? You’ll never watch The Usual Suspects again? You can’t bear to let your children get into Harry Potter? I dunno. I’m skeptical. And I’m skeptical not because I particularly doubt that you feel so bad but because I think you know that you bad feelings make no difference, that whether you put a movie on or not does not amount to the creation of a moral fact in the corporeal universe, that there’s nothing to be done about this. Are you doing or are you feeling?

Of course you can and should avoid that art which troubles your moral intuitions. Those are understandable feelings. But I think this authentically happens to far fewer people than we’re meant to believe. The hoary old question “Can you separate the art from the artist?” is a ridiculous contrivance - not only can you, you have to, because they arrive pre-separated. Neil Gaiman is a living artist, recently accused of awful deeds. I was never a big fan, though his Sandman comics had a lot of verve. Can I separate him from his art? Yes, because he is a human being, flesh and blood, water and carbon, and his books are bound paper and ink, words words words. Again, I’m not being cute; I mean that this is the actual, literal and most important answer to “Can you separate the art from the artist?” They’re already separated, by reality, by physics. The fact that there was a time when a given piece of art moved you before you knew of its creator’s misdeeds suggests that there is some objective fact of the matter about whether that art moves you. I understand that you can’t unlearn that an artist whose work you love is a bad person, but you also can’t unfeel the things that you felt for that work before you knew.

People who want to respect both science and religion sometimes call them “non-overlapping magisteria.” And it’s the same way with “the art from the artist.” They’ve just got nothing to do with each other. The pretense that they are inextricable is, again, a way to manage bad feelings that is then presented as a way to do, as a way to be moral. Who gives a single fuck if you can still enjoy Good Omens or not? What on earth does that have to do with sexual assault?

Can you, personally, overcome bad feelings about an artist sufficiently to continue enjoying their work? I don’t know. That’s a you question. If not, you have my solidarity. But only you know if those feelings are real or performance. Can I judge Neil Gaiman and read his books without the former influencing the latter? Yeah. What I think people really want is for it to necessarily be the case that we can’t, that the art is permanently ruined for everyone. That’s why there’s all the yelling, to try and establish that reality. But Wagner still sells a lot of records. It is a genuinely tragic habit of thought that’s overtaken our culture: someone did something really bad, and so something must happen. Attention must be paid. But nothing ever has to happen. Usually nothing much happens at all. Alice Munro’s reputation will rise and fall with the same tidal forces that afflict all artist reputations. Most everyone is forgotten in fairly short order, and you can perhaps draw a little satisfaction from that. But that’s the whole thing, right - what happens to her reputation is, I guess, of most interest to her heirs, her estate? Gaiman, you can potentially hurt, because he’s alive, though he’ll most likely be canceled to a vast country estate somewhere. Munro you can’t hurt.

Constance Grady asks “What do we do about Alice Munro now?” Ms. Grady, she is dead. Whatever moral relevance her character had died when she ceased to exist as a being that possessed a character.

When people get angry at the dead I often think of Aribert Heim. He was a Nazi concentration camp doctor, very similar to Josef Mengele. He committed horrific atrocities, “experimenting” on defenseless prisoners, operating on them without anesthesia, removing vital organs and watching them die, making knickknacks out of their remains. Like a lot of Nazis, he attempted to flee abroad when the war was over. Unlike a lot of Nazis, he succeeded. Heim fled to South America and eventually to Cairo, changed his name, had a family, lots of friends, hobbies, was a well-known member of the community. Died a contented old man at 78. And we can’t get to him now. In any way. He got away with it; he won. The Holocaust-enabling sadistic Nazi torturer and murderer won. The Nazi hunters at first refused to believe he was dead, I’m guessing because that possibility was so awful, that he never paid a price. Of course, no one thinks Alice Munro was like Aribert Heim. So why’s he in this paragraph? Because, in death, they are joined in being beyond our judgment, in a way that renders that judgment impotent and sad. She’s not offended to be compared to Heim. I promise.

To the extent that Skinner’s story inspires positive change regarding childhood sexual assault, it’s important and beneficial. I am not at all sure that what the campaign against sexual misconduct needs in 2024 is more publicity; in 2017 and the years immediately following that campaign attracted worlds of publicity, and yet many would tell you that we’re now moving backwards. I guess more attention can’t hurt, though. What’s definitely needed is a relentlessly self-critical dedication to separating feeling from doing. Being mad at Alice Munro, while an emotional response I completely understand and don’t question, does nothing for the cause of fighting childhood sexual assault. And if we are to do that kind of work better, we should learn the lesson that people are conspicuously not taking from the past fifteen years or so of progressive politics: that a bunch of people getting together and feeling the same things together might feel like everything but actually is nothing. Being angry together is nothing. It means nothing and it changes nothing. I winced, every time people used the word “catharsis” to describe the George Floyd protest moment. Catharsis has nothing to do with change. The same applies here. Feel what you feel. But if this is supposed to be something more than an emotional reaction, you must look past feeling, which means looking past Alice Munro, past “the art from the artist.”

There will, of course, be literary questions to come, and those are all fine so long as they’re understood in that way, as literature, as questions of paper and not of people. Perhaps you feel like Alice Munro pulled the wool over your eyes. You’re in good company. Many seem to be taken aback by the fact that a writer whose work spoke to them so deeply was one who could live with this kind of darkness. That attitude, I’m afraid, demonstrates an inability to understand that every artist is first and fundamentally a liar, in fiction or non. That was Munro’s great skill, and that is why you feel betrayed. A writer for The Indian Express says, “I will always question her motivations behind writing what she wrote and wonder if she actually felt this deeply or just knew how to lie with great finesse.”

But that’s the thing about great artists, darling; for them, there’s no difference.