Canadian author Alice Munro, the unlikely focus of a recent conference of French and Italian psychoanalysts. (Paul Hawthorne/Associated Press)

Often, the most intriguing aspect of academic conferences is the chance to witness the wild stretches the human mind attempts to connect apparently unrelated things. When I received an invitation to attend the first international conference of Italian and French female psychoanalysts to discuss the work of Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, I knew I was in for some weird fun.
    
Not that Munro’s stories and the female psyche are apples and oranges. To my mind, few other writers have so breathtakingly navigated the hidden and ever-changing feelings that shift beneath our everyday lives. Even fewer have so subtly and expertly disrupted and transformed the classical narrative structure of stories about women’s lives. What makes Munro’s writing so beguiling is that beneath the black-and-white telling, there always lies an epiphany or revelation.
    
Munro is also a writer very much rooted in Canada — specifically, Ontario —with nuanced portrayals of the Scotch-Protestant culture of the region. Many of her stories are about people, usually women, striving to come into their own, and coming up against the often unspoken refrain, “Who do you think you are?” — the name of one of her early story collections. The fact that anybody in Europe was meeting to discuss her struck me as a small miracle.

In the past five years or so, Munro has become a recognizable name among Italians who read books — roughly equal to the percentage of the population that can run a marathon or play the accordion. Munro’s story collections are published by the highbrow Einaudi imprint and big review and profile spreads have appeared in the arts sections of national papers. But as an older Canadian woman who’s lived most of her life in a small town, her image hardly sells like hotcakes. As one youngish Italian writer I recently met told me with an amazed and condescending smile, “Yes, isn’t it incredible that this simple farm woman from the Canadian north can write like that!”

The Alice Munro conference promised to examine "the anatomy of the spirit," as demonstrated in this image from the conference programme. (Analinda Gasparini /La Casa di Parole: Alice Munro)

The event, La Casa di Parole: Alice Munro, Convegno Internazionale, was a one-day affair, held in the San Salvatore church beside Piazzale Michelangelo, with its vista of Florence spread below. While the view outside couldn’t get much better, inside, the 40-odd attendees sat in rows of chairs across a chilly expanse of tiled floor in a windowless 15th-century chapel. A stucco Christ-on-the-Cross with skinned knees hung under the vaulted ceiling behind the podium. The speakers and audience were a mainly grey-haired crowd, one that favoured elegant velvet wraps, long skirts and glittery clusters of costume jewellery. Reading glasses were donned by all. (Given the dim lighting, I wished I’d brought mine.)

The line-up struck me as ambitious bordering on insane: 18 speakers on topics that included everything from Munro and the domestic hearth to female genitalia, sonatas and finally death. An owlish man from the mayor’s office delivered the intro with staccato gusto. He emphasized the “exploration of the meaning of death and life” and “multi-disciplinarily nature” in the work of Munro — or “Alee-chay Man’-rrro,” as she’s called by Italians. I might have agreed, had the man not admitted to me two seconds before taking the podium that he’d never opened a Munro story in his life.

When Florentine psychoanalyst and conference organizer Analinda Gasparini spoke soon after, things headed decidedly uphill. Gasparini credited Munro’s writing with helping her own work. Namely, Munro’s understanding of women’s often self-imposed guilt when they’re not looking after others’ needs; female characters that aren’t bad or good, but both; the “extreme lucidity” of how she sees women’s lives: the way her stories, which jump around time, reflect the fragmentary, “multi-tasking,” forever-interrupted female reality.

Here were people who clearly knew their Munro, who delighted in the richness of her stories, in the different layers of meaning and who above all were grateful to her giving them, as psychoanalysts, greater understanding into the disjointed, ever-shifting way women often experience reality. As Parisian psychoanalyst Denise Sauget later put it, “Alice Munro is testimony to how much more literature gives to psychoanalysis than theories. And I’d go so far as to ask if the survival of psychoanalysis is not dependent on this kind of literature.”

Then, a spike-heeled, furry-collared psychoanalyst from Milan took the stage to discuss “Writing about Death.” She began by conjuring up the recent funeral of Luciano Pavarotti, then segued into John Paul II’s death and from there to Mother Teresa. “Death,” she told us, smiling beatifically, “unites.”

Well, that depends, I thought. And where does Alice Munro fit in?

La Man-rrro eventually did fit in, or rather was made to fit into a hilariously prescriptive lecture on the decline of family values. Comparing Munro’s recent story Dimensions, about a woman whose husband kills their three children, to a litany of sensational murder cases in Italy, the lecturer concluded with a plea to the audience, public officials and professionals to do everything in our power to prevent separations and divorces. Poor Alice, saddled with all that.

The woman’s beseeching reminded me of the preface to Lolita, where Nabokov urges parents, social workers, educators to look for lessons about paedophilia in Lolita and “apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.” Only his urging was satirical.

What’s less amusing and more exasperating is listening to a psychoanalyst dig her professional knife into a story to extract case studies of “dysfunctional sibling relations,” “the narcissistic family,” and “the symbiotic mother.” All this was gleaned from “Miles City, Montana,” Munro’s story about a young couple on holiday and the near drowning of one of their daughters. When I’d read it, I thought it was a poignant tale of a couple doing their best to make a go of their shaky marriage. Granted, no family is “functional,” but this kind of clinical dissection made me want to run out of the chapel as fast as my legs would take me. Call it projection, but even Christ up on the wall looked freaked out.

There was one other speaker who stood out, in part because he was the only man, in part because he arrived late, interrupted another talk with a cellphone call and prefaced his presentation by confessing he knew little about Munro, hadn’t prepared a talk, but would share with us some of his thoughts about the one story he had read, Lichen. So why, he asked us, did he accept to speak about Munro? Why, indeed. He threw around Heidegger, Freud and the Greek gods Hestia and Hermes for 10 minutes and then stepped down. Arrivederci.

There was more intellectual wheel-spinning throughout the day. A lot of musing over il sesso feminile, or the female sex (what European intellectuals call the vagina); a presentation on the links between Munro and French painter Gustave Courbet and Chinese landscape painting with some amusing wordplay thrown in; another comparing the narrative tension in Munro to musical improvisation (think The Munro Variations); and one on the symbolic meaning of dress in Munro stories.

This last talk was given by a Milanese “psychoanalyst of design and fashion.” Who knew such a job existed? She may have had some interesting things to say about the symbolism of the wedding dress in one of Munro’s stories, but it was late in the day, 16 speakers had preceded her and I was so distracted by the huge Mini Mouse bow she wore on the side of her head — and its psychological implications — that I didn’t retain a word.

Such are the risks of too much analysis in one day.

With a little divine intervention, the conference wrapped up early. It was time for evening mass and the only Italians capable of sticking to a schedule — priests — wanted us out.

On my way, I met Susanna Basso, the woman who’s translated seven of Munro’s collections into Italian and who likely knows her work better than anyone in the country.

What was it like translating her work? I asked.

“A constant discovery,” Basso said. “With Munro, the language is very simple, but you have to read and re-read to uncover what’s there.”

“I do Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, as well,” she added. “But there’s nobody like Munro.”

Megan Williams is a Canadian writer based in Rome.

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