by Peter Turchi
9. Finally, we return to the royal beatings. We see one illustrated: a petty dispute between Flo and Rose leads to Flo’s anger and Rose’s defiance; Flo calls for Rose’s father; and, almost reluctantly, he beats her, hitting her with his hands, whipping her with his belt, and kicking her. The buildup, the beating, and the aftermath constitute the largest section of the story.
10. We see an evening when the family is something like happy together.
11. Then we leap to a day, many years later, when Rose hears a man interviewed on the radio. He’s 102 and is being asked about the old days. At the end of the interview, we learn that the man was one of the three who beat Becky Tyde’s father to death. Rose imagines Flo would like to hear about it, but Flo is now in a nursing home, and has succumbed or nearly succumbed to dementia. The End.
Or at least that’s the end if you believe a story begins at the beginning and ends at the ending, like a piece of string. And if we’re inclined to look for a simple progression from beginning to end in a story, “Royal Beatings” is not very satisfying—in fact, to the reader looking for an emphatic conclusion, a “catastrophe,” an epiphany, or a “point,” “Royal Beatings” is deeply frustrating. It might seem to be told by someone who has a story in mind but gets distracted, or who puts the pieces in the wrong order and leaves some out.
Rather than leading directly to a particular event or moment of insight, a type of dramatic climax familiar from fiction but not so common in life, Munro’s story circles something dark and confounding, a difficult truth beneath the surface. If we feel a bit lost, it’s because we aren’t sure quite what story we’re meant to pursue. Initially, the narrator seems intent on explaining the “Royal Beatings” of the title, but that doesn’t justify all the other information we’re given.
The first clue—the piece of thread we need to recognize and follow— is in that title, which is repeated, in italics, as the story’s first sentence: Royal Beatings. We’re told this is Flo’s term and that it evoked images of grandeur in Rose, as if it were “an occasion both savage and splendid,” with “formal spectators”—a dramatic performance. But “in real life [the beatings] didn’t approach such dignity.” The story opens, then, by directing our attention to the gap between appearance and reality. Once we recognize that, we start to see this thread everywhere.
In an apparent aside, what might seem to be a dead end, we learn that after Rose’s father died, Flo went out to the shed where he worked and found a variety of notes and scraps of paper that make no sense to her:
Ate new potatoes 25th June. Record.
Dark Day, 1880’s, nothing supernatural. Clouds of ash from forest fires.
Aug 16, 1938. Giant thunderstorm in evng. Lightning str. Pres. Church, Turberry Twp. Will of God?
Scald strawberries to remove acid.
All things are alive. Spinoza.
We’re told “[Rose] had reached an age where she thought she could not stand to know any more, about her father, or about Flo; she pushed any discovery aside with embarrassment and dread.” That leads to Rose’s memory of hearing her father talking to himself, saying “words [that would] hang clear and nonsensical on the air: “Macaroni, pepperoni, Botticelli, beans—” She wonders what that might mean, but
she could never ask him. The person who spoke these words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same, though they seemed to occupy the same space. It would be the worst sort of taste to acknowledge the person who was not supposed to be there; it would not be forgiven. Just the same, she loitered and listened.
Here we’re presented with a true mystery—we will never, in this story, learn why Rose’s father said the things he did, we won’t learn anything more about the mind that kept that variety of notes, and we won’t meet a character who knows any more about him. The crucial information is not something we should deduce about Rose’s father, but rather the assertion that “the person who spoke these words and the person who spoke to her as her father were not the same.”
As if to explain her point, the narrator tells us, “This was something the same as bathroom noises.”
Flo had saved up and had a bathroom put in, but there was no place to put it except in a corner of the kitchen. The door did not fit, the walls were only beaverboard. The result was that even the tearing of a piece of toilet paper, the shifting of a haunch, was audible to those working or talking or eating in the kitchen. They were all familiar with each other’s nether voices, not only in their more explosive moments but in their intimate sighs and growls and pleas and statements. And they were all most prudish people. So no one ever seemed to hear, or be listening, and no reference was made. The person creating the noises in the bathroom was not connected with the person who walked out.
That paragraph does several things at once. It underscores our sense of the family’s living conditions in a way that we’re unlikely to forget. It focuses our attention on something we connect to our own experience that seems never to have been said before, or at least not quite this way. It suggests more than it states, through deliberate diction. Munro avoids both the vulgar and the clinical. This is important for consistency of tone, and the diction encourages us to consider the topic in a way we probably would not if she used a colloquial term like “fart” or the more objective “passing gas.” Her choices evoke the animal (“haunch”) and metaphorical (“nether voices” summons “nether world”). Finally, the passage illustrates persuasively a way in which nearly all of us turn a blind eye, or a deaf ear, to certain events, and so helps us to understand how we separate a person from some of his or her actions.
It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. . . . We live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms. . . . We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.
— Michael Ondaatje
Munro’s interest in telling this story is not to elicit our sympathy for a physically abused girl or for the adults responsible for her abuse, and it isn’t to argue that everyone aware of some wrongdoing is complicit; her interest goes beyond those commonplaces. Instead, we come to learn, she’s interested in deceptive appearances, in our sordid desire for dramatic event, no matter how ugly—and, ultimately, in the darkness that we embrace but never acknowledge. This story means to lead us to contemplate our own metaphorical “nether voices,” as they are often wordless and, like Rose’s father’s mutterings, difficult to comprehend. In the labyrinth that is the story, the paragraph about bathroom noises is not the very center, but it is a place of discovery. When we read this paragraph the first time, we can’t possibly know how important it will be, but we will not forget it.
The more closely we look, the more references to false or deceptive appearances we find. The word “Royal” on Flo’s tongue “took on trappings.” Rose likes to think that her family lives on the border between the good and bad sections of town, “but that was not true.” A sign for a tea company is in the window of a building across the street, “a proud and interesting decoration,” but there is no tea to be had. Becky Tyde, the dwarf with polio, wears “little polished high-heeled shoes, real lady’s shoes.” The men who want to beat Becky’s father hire other men to do it; those men blacken their faces to disguise themselves. The house where Mr. Tyde was beaten to death “would never look sinister, in spite of what had happened in it”—and on and on and on. Everywhere we look in this story, there’s a darkness that someone is trying to hide, suppress, or ignore.
The most obvious example of this would seem to be the beatings Rose’s father administers—but Munro does not use the longest sequence of her story simply to confirm everything she’s conveyed subtly. Instead, she’s delayed the scene because it does a great deal more than continue our journ
ey from the story’s opening lines to its final sentence.
The description of the beating is ceremonial, ritualistic. We’re told Rose “displays theatrical unconcern,” that “Flo becomes amazingly theatrical herself,” that Rose’s father seems to be “on the verge of rejecting the role he has to play.” Somehow this family has fallen into a pattern of behavior that controls all three of them. Rose’s father is “out of character . . . like a bad actor. . . . He is acting, and he means it.” Then, just before the physical beating finally begins, Rose looks “at the kitchen floor, that clever and comforting geometrical arrangement.” (That geometrical arrangement is no labyrinth, but it’s a fortuitous echo.) Rose thinks, “Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is on the other side of dailiness.” Then Rose succumbs; she “plays his victim.”
The story’s greatest surprise, perhaps its most moving insight, comes after the beating is finished. Rose goes up to her bedroom. She isn’t bleeding, no bones are broken—Munro deliberately deemphasizes the physical. Instead she focuses on Rose’s mental and emotional circumstances:
She has passed into a state of calm, in which outrage is perceived as complete and final. In this state events and possibilities take on a lovely simplicity. Choices are mercifully clear. The words that come to mind are not the quibbling, seldom the conditional. . . . She will never speak to them, she will never look at them with anything but loathing, she will never forgive them. . . . Encased in these finalities, and in her bodily pain, she floats in curious comfort, beyond herself, beyond responsibility. . . . She floats in her pure superior state as if drugged.
This is the darkness behind the darkness: the beatings, awful as they might be, do in fact give the lives of Flo, Rose, and her father a brief, theatrical grandeur. After she is beaten, when she is simply a victim, Rose “floats in curious comfort . . . [a] pure superior state.”
But nothing that good can last. Flo comes to the room with cold cream and some of Rose’s favorite foods. Rose tries to resist, but “soon, in helpless corruption, she will eat them all. . . . All advantage will be lost. . . . Life has started up again.” This is the unexpected turn, the shameful discovery: to be the victim is, in some ways, to have something to savor, and to heal is to lose the distinction that comes with being wronged.
The story continues to the day many years later when Rose hears the interview with Hat Nettleton, the murderer treated as a distinguished town elder, and ends with the information that, in the nursing home, Flo “occasionally showed her feelings by biting a nurse.” In this story, that’s a comic coda. It has nothing to do with plot; it doesn’t resolve anything. Instead, it sends us back into the story, looking for the path we might have missed. And like that first sentence, it contains a clue, a wisp of thread: “Flo occasionally showed her feelings.” That use of “show,” and the implication that her feelings are often hidden, resonates off all the other deceptive appearances, all the false surfaces. Eventually, starting at the beginning or at the end, we find our way to the heart of the story, an underworld.
NOT A LINE, BUT A WAY
Like the river itself, [Life on the Mississippi] is labyrinthine, a succession of meanders, chutes, and cutoffs; it turns digression into a structural principle.
— JONATHAN RABAN
The point here isn’t that we should use Kandinsky’s remarkable line drawings, reindeer hunters’ paths, mazes, or labyrinths as models for the structure of our stories—though we might. Munro’s gradual unwinding of information isn’t an intrinsically better structural model than the explicit three-part story of “Petie Pete,” and it isn’t better, as a general model, than Freytag’s pyramid. But it’s better for the story that she wants to tell, one that is based not on a sequence of actions leading to an ultimate dramatic conflict, not on a sequence of actions leading to a character’s epiphany or moment of insight, but on a combination of events, images, and information that the writer arranges to lead the reader to a moment of recognition in a way that seems particularly true to life.
A map of the caves of Crete, believed to be the inspiration for the labyrinth of myth.
If we want fiction to be vital—alive and changing, with the ability to surprise us, and to transcend our expectations—we need to avoid surrendering to any one sense of how a story or novel progresses, of how a narrative unfolds. “The content of a work of art,” Kandinsky wrote, “finds its expression in the composition: that is, in the sum of the tensions inwardly organized for the work.” Narrative need not be dictated by chronology, or by plot, or by a character’s movement toward insight. A story doesn’t need to take the reader where he thinks he wants to go, or where he expects to go; and as writers we need to be wary of the pressure we sometimes feel to deliver the reader to some particular kind of destination in some particular way. Truly memorable fiction often defies our notion of what a story is.
We live in an age that not only allows us to travel great distances with relative ease but often puts us in situations where we are expected to be mobile, even if we’re simply commuting to school or work. Most of the time we spend moving from place to place, we’re intent on our destination. When we’re between places, in the car, train, or plane, or on the bus or bike, we might feel we’re nowhere, we’re losing time: we’re being transported. As Tim Ingold puts it, we are simply being carried along lines. But if we take on the role of wayfarers, we are always somewhere, always inhabiting the moment.
When our son was young, he enjoyed having me or my wife read to him as he fell asleep. If, when the story ended, he was still awake, he’d ask for more. It wasn’t that he wanted to work his way through a particular number of stories, or get to the end of a book, or even, I eventually understood, that he wanted to stay awake. What he wanted was to fall asleep as we read. Or rather, he wanted us to be by his side, telling him stories, as he drifted off.
At that time I didn’t know about the Khanty people of western Siberia. Apparently, old Khanty storytellers continue their stories after dinner, late into the darkness, until everyone else is asleep. Their word for story translates as “a way,” as in a path to be followed, one that can go on indefinitely.
Everyone who’s made the voyage knows that what’s to be found in a labyrinth isn’t at the end; the power is in the passage, in the darkness and light and in the discoveries we make. When we emerge, we’re essentially in the same place, the same external world, where we began—but changed by where we’ve been.
28 A secular version of an Indian game, Ladders to Salvation, in which the ladders rewarded virtue (faith, generosity, knowledge, etc.) and the slides downward punished vice (vanity, lying, debt, lust, and so on). In England the game became Snakes and Ladders. In his novel Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie writes, “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother.”
29 In translation, via the fragments of someone’s notes that survived.
30 Petie Pete versus Witch Bea-Witch
Petie Pete was a little boy just so tall who went to school. On the school road was a garden with a pear tree, which Petie Pete used to climb and eat the pears. Beneath the tree passed Witch Bea-Witch one day and said:
“Petie Pete, pass me a pear
With your little paw!
I mean it, don’t guffaw,
My mouth waters, I swear, I swear!”
Petie Pete thought, Her mouth waters not for the pears but for me, and refused to come down the tree. He plucked a pear and t
hrew it to Witch Bea-Witch. But the pear fell on the ground right where a cow had been by and deposited one of its mementos.
Witch Bea-Witch repeated:
“Petie Pete, pass me a pear
With your little paw!
I mean it, don’t guffaw,
My mouth waters, I swear, I swear!”
But Petie Pete stayed in the tree and tossed down another pear, which fell on the ground right where a horse had been by and left a big puddle.
Witch Bea-Witch repeated her request, and Petie Pete thought it wiser to comply. He scampered down and offered her a pear. Witch Bea-Witch opened up her bag, but instead of putting in the pear, she put in Petie Pete, tied up the bag, and slung it over her shoulder.
After going a little way, Witch Bea-Witch had to stop and relieve herself; she put the bag down and went behind a bush. Meanwhile, with his little teeth as sharp as a rat’s, Petie Pete gnawed the cord in two that tied the bag, jumped out, shoved a heavy rock into the bag, and fled. Witch Bea-Witch took up the bag once more and flung it over her shoulder.
“O Petie Pete,
To carry you is a feat!”
she said, and wound her way home. The door was closed, so Witch Bea-Witch called her daughter:
“Maggy Mag! Marguerite!
Come undo the door;
Then I ask you more:
Put on the pot to stew Petie Pete.”
Maggy Mag opened up, then placed a caldron of water over the fire. When the water came to a boil Witch Bea-Witch emptied her bag into it. Splash! went the stone and crashed through the caldron. Water poured into the fire and spattered all over the floor, burning Witch Bea-Witch’s legs.
“Mamma, just what do you mean
By boiling stones in our tureen?”
cried Maggy Mag, and Witch Bea-Witch, dancing up and down in pain, snapped: