Last year, I was rummaging through a used bookstore to see what titles would catch my eye. Somewhere among the endless titles was the author Alice Munro, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning anthology “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You” was staring back at me. With curiosity, I bought it with intent on seeing if there was something about her prose that spoke to me. With phenomenal blurbs on the back, I’ve taken up the challenge of working my way through these pages to see if I have found a new favorite. Given that she has a fascination with time and interpersonal relationships, I’m sure this will be a fulfilling journey. The only way to find out is to dive right in.
There are a handful of reasons that this entry of Short Stop was delayed. Part of it is simply a busy life, but it’s also the fact that the further away from reading this that I got, the more difficult it was to really comprehend what “Marrakesh” even was. Now I know that Munro in general has a cryptic undertone in most of her work and you can’t exactly read her with a passive eye. You need to dedicate yourself to playing detective and trying to make sense of what the point even was. Whereas I could conjure up some meaning in most stories, this one even upon a second read was very difficult to piece together. Not sure if it’s just that I’m rusty, but it’s probably the one that I’ve thought the most about in order to make sense of it. I would also like to quickly give special thanks to the writing on The Mookse and the Gripes for providing their insight because it allowed me to get past the shrugging stage of this essay.
So “Marrakesh.” Upon initial reading, I was assuming that the title’s location would be more central to the story. Something major would happen there that would unlock the rest of the narrative’s wider appeal. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t. After all, most Munro stories are puzzles unto themselves. However, it’s a story relayed to the protagonist about a relationship that doesn’t sound like it ultimately matters to the one speaking. Still, it’s a thrilling story that has many high points. The best that can be said is that its use in the story functions like every other story in this anthology since the first. Maybe it holds the truth or maybe it’s complete fiction. Whatever the answer is, I do believe that it reveals some greater truth about the protagonist.
Her name is Dorothy. As a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher, she has had her best years behind her. Munro details how she was good with students, specifically the kids whom she could observe and mold her perspective to. There’s no denying that she was good at her job and probably would make for a fun dinner conversation if you asked her about what education was like 30 years ago. Still, it’s an innocuous detail to begin with because everything around school is presented in the past tense. That’s just how things are as the years wear on and even the potential relationships she had acquired were reaching their ends simply due to mortality. Whereas most of the women in Munro’s stories so far owe some conflict to the men in their life, it does feel like Dorothy is beyond that. If anything, she’s the potential troublemaker.
A detail that I find amusing is how she opens with a discussion on how the school board wants her to quit smoking. Why? It’s bad for her health. Given that the perspective on anti-smoking evolved over the 20th century, it’s easy to believe that she doesn’t see the problem in her “vice” and that the potential danger is fictional. Still, she gives it up out of necessity and instead hops around to other vices. As anyone familiar with addict behavior will know, most will end up adopting some new behavior in order to scratch that itch. It could be something so mundane that it seems ridiculous. However, I think that on some level, Dorothy’s unspoken vice was more vicarious in nature.
Maybe she’s been irritable since she quit smoking. Maybe there’s some regret about how she spent her relationships throughout her life. To have her sister Viola there is only a reminder of the likelihood of dying alone. While this dynamic recalls the opener “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” the conflict is less between sisters and more a delusion that is going on in Dorothy’s life. Whatever the elderly version of the midlife crisis is, Dorothy probably has it. She’s cloistered about what is making her insecure, but it can arguably be seen in her relationship with her granddaughter Jeanette.
Munro’s writing is clever in the sense that Jeanette feels like she’s written as a perpetual child. At one point she’s even described as having the body of an 11-year-old despite being much older and in college. She looks youthful, and it’s a quality that many become envious of the older they get. To think of Dorothy vicariously living through Jeanette isn’t all that implausible. She’s a free spirit that loves to explore the nuances of life. It’s unclear whether she’s straight or gay, but there’s questioning on whether she’s a hippie. Given that they’re known for free love, Dorothy maybe oversteps her boundaries in the matchmaker department, believing that she might be able to fulfill some perverse fantasy that she failed at in youth, whether because of personal failure or social expectations.
That is the major difference between Dorothy and Jeanette. One grew up in a more conservative time, likely when modesty was expected of women. I’m unable to place a point where Dorothy would be “young” necessarily, but it does feel like it would’ve been a time when The Great Depression occurred and World War I was in action. There is this sense of destruction that keeps her from feeling like she could be an individual. She had to constantly please others. While Jeanette is likely growing up in a time of The Vietnam War, their approach is more rebellious, less willing to embrace national unity just because it’s what the propaganda says. Dorothy wants that liberal freedom. She wants to be part of the next wave of the women’s movement because of the opportunities it could give, even though she’d be much too old to enjoy them without a whole lot of regret.
So she lives through Jeanette. She has her whole life ahead of her. She deserves to have the happiest life imaginable, and to Dorothy that is seen as being something sexual. Again, maybe this is all repressed fantasy on the elder’s part, but it still becomes curious how innocuously Munro writes this story. Nothing really feels like it happens. Jeanette is somehow immobile and Dorothy is more observant. When you incorporate the idea of her being a teacher who observed students, it begins to make sense. It’s the one way she can live in the past without it seeming problematic. They can take away her smoking, but she was always encouraged to give students advice. What is a granddaughter but a pupil to teach?
As a result, Dorothy hooks her up with her neighbor Blair, whose wife is dying. It’s the idea that sex will make everyone happy. Even Dorothy, who is passive in this department, would get pleasure out of seeing them have sex. She admits that she is a septuagenarian voyeur who enjoys this experience. Maybe it’s mostly to fulfill her fantasy and think that she is young again. It could be that she is ultimately seen as a teacher who passes on information but never action. Whatever it is, Munro perfectly captures the ending by suggesting that she is overcoming health struggles to watch this moment. Much like how “Marrakesh” opens with her quitting smoking, the choice to replace it with another vice shows that it’s damaging to her. She keeps her struggles with this one private, likely because she knows that if it’s taken away she’ll have nothing. Still, she is growing frail. It’s hard to not believe that she is going to impact their lives in some meaningful way. However, as the text will be quick to point out, nobody involved will care come sunrise. This was all kind of pointless.
To back up for a minute, there is a major question that emerges: why bring up Marrakesh at all? Dorothy is not involved. None of the characters other than Jeanette will be seen after that section. What gives? An important thing to recall is that Jeanette’s sexuality is ambiguous and thus her story hides potential truths. Whom did she travel with to Marrakesh? The lover’s identity is never revealed. However, the news of her luggage being stolen is there. The news of having to visit someone’s mother after the traumatic event suggests a romantic “meet the parents” type situation. Most of all, it’s the one time where Jeanette’s personal desires aren’t controlled by Dorothy’s perspective. It’s maybe not romantic at all or hiding some truths. Maybe Dorothy is making it up to imply a romantic fantasy. Whatever it is, the correlation between disaster and love is striking and shows that Jeanette is capable of more complicated emotions. Had it been absent, there’s a good chance that the hook-up with Blair would seem different somehow, whether suggesting the lack of passion means she’s apathetic about sex or a bit too keen on free love.
Again, ambiguity plays a big part in “Marrakesh” and it’s not entirely clear what it’s all supposed to mean. I personally struggled with connecting the dots because of how the story ends. It’s a passive story and one that doesn’t really provide a conclusive ending. At most, Dorothy seems a bit weird. In hindsight, she might be a tragic figure, another example of Munro reflecting on aging and having regrets. There is the sense that women are repressed by society and even within Jeanette’s hippie era, it wasn’t exactly the most progressive time. Women’s rights were still being fought for. Maybe Dorothy was attracted to the Marrakesh story because it connected to certain limitations in her own life by men and greater society, where she felt alien from the community. Either that or she’s delusional enough to compare quitting smoking to being robbed in a foreign country. Who knows.
On some level, this is an interesting mirror of the more quixotic work “Walking on Water.” That story was more focused on a hippie commune as it related to spirituality. However, the central search for a relationship meant that it still had this implicit need for desire, to conform to expectations and be normal. It was also one that Munro was very critical of and considered a failure. “Marrakesh” is relatively simpler and drawn from more personal experience. I think it has just as many questions asked but does so in a manner that encourages a closer read. I argue “Marrakesh” is a bit more beguiling at first, but it does eventually reflect how different generational views can be.
As a whole, this isn’t one of my favorite stories and I think even with a closer read it still doesn’t feel as satisfying. While I appreciate Munro for exploring similar themes of manipulation and desires in a different way, it ultimately feels understated and unclear by the end. I recognize now that it carries a lot of tragedy with the humor and that Dorothy is a complex figure that’s likable and annoying depending on the section. She could be seen as dumb despite being a teacher, but then again she has lost most of her social life, so evolving skills is out of the question. What she has left is what she was praised for, and that is her ability to observe others. Values change and each generation finds new lessons they must learn. Why force the past to conform to how they see the world? It’s going to leave most people unhappy and screwed over.
Coming Up Next: “The Spanish Lady"
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