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Caliban
French Journal of English Studies

57 | 2017
La question animale dans les nouvelles d'Alice Munro
1 - Of Fowl, Fur, and Fish

Fur and Slime: Becoming-

Animal, Becoming-Child in
“Face” and “Child’s Play” by
Alice Munro CATALOGUE All
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p. 21-35
https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.2644

Abstract
Cet article se propose d’analyser les comparaisons animalières dans deux nouvelles du recueil
Too Much Happiness (2009), “Face” et “Child’s Play” où le narrateur ou la narratrice revient
sur une rencontre ayant marqué son enfance. Ces comparaisons, explicites ou implicites,
permettent d’instaurer une progression du devenir-enfant au devenir-animal qui ne se
contente pas de passer par la ressemblance. Ce devenir est une alliance qui permet aux
narrateurs et protagonistes non pas de suggérer la souffrance ou l’impuissance d’un enfant
mais de montrer l’importance des affects tout en retraçant l’enfance de l’événement qui a
ouvert une plaie dans la sensibilité.

Index terms
Keywords: affect, becoming-animal

Full text
1 In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatari argue that becoming-
animal is only one becoming among others since “a kind of order or apparent
progression can be established for the segments of becoming in which we find
 ourselves; becoming-woman, becoming-child; becoming-animal, -vegetable, or –
mineral” (Deleuze and Guattari 272). Quite a few stories by Alice Munro recall events
that occurred in the narrator’s or main protagonist’s childhood. Such stories may use
the trope of a garden where children run wild, for instance “Face” (2009) “Nettles”
(2001) or “Vandals” (1994) all feature wild gardens in which two children who are
compared to animals run, shout, and hang from trees. “Child’s Play,“ which like
“Face” was collected in Too Much Happiness, features no such garden, but the
narrator recalls how her solitary games, in her town, garden were disturbed by a little
girl who was said to be “special.” As Munro herself pointed out in an interview with
Lisa Awano, both stories are about children and children’s feelings: “we’ve got hate
among children [“Child’s Play”] and love among children [“Face”].” (Awano np)
Animal similes do unite these two stories, as, in “Face”, the narrator explains that he
believed the birthmark that disfigures his face to be ”a soft brown colour, like the fur
of a mouse” (F, 153) while in “Child’s Play”, the narrator indirectly compares the little
girl she hated to small animals, including mice: “I hated her as some people hate
snakes or caterpillars or mice or slugs” (CP, 200)1. In “Child’s Play” the comparison
foregrounds feelings, suggesting that children, who are mocked or resented because
of what makes them different, are compared to small insignificant animals. In “Face”,
the narrator metonymically compares himself to a mouse when he describes his pain
and anger after his friend Nancy painted her face red, which he thought was meant to
mock his own disfigured face. The indirect comparison, however, forces us to imagine
the fur rather than the mouse, visually creating a “zone of undiscernibility” (Deleuze
20) between man and animal, or rather child and animal.
2 In both stories, Munro aligns children with animals. In this essay, I will argue that
animal similes are part of an intricate web of references, are evidence of Munro’s
interest in affects, including hatred. They are also instrumental in creating shifts in
meaning in “Face” and “Child’s Play.” In their introduction to The Affect Theory
Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth argue that “affect is in many ways
synonymous with force or forces of encounter” (Gregg and Seigworth 2). In The
Postmodern Explained to Children, Jean-François Lyotard argues that “what makes
an encounter into an event is [that] it cut open a wound in the sensibility,” which “has
reopened since and will reopen again” (Lyotard 106). Thus, he argues that Walter
Benjamin’s childhood pieces do not describe events from childhood but rather
“capture the childhood of the event and inscribe what is uncapturable about it”
(Lyotard 106). This holds true of Munro’s “childhood stories.” I will show that by
focusing on details such as the fur of a mouse or the slime of a slug, the narrators of
“Face” and “Child’s Play” do not simply recall and relate a traumatic event that
happened in their childhood. Rather they gradually own to their having been touched
by another child, and affected by an encounter.

I know what he said. Or what she told me he said.

“What a chunk of chopped liver.” (F, 138)

3 From the very first page, “Face” suggests that the narrator’s birthmark does not
only disfigure him, it also defines him. His father’s alleged first words, as reported by
the narrator’s mother, deprived the infant of his humanity, turning him into viscera,
thus drawing the first connection between child and animal meat, between child and
a butchered animal. The narrator implies that his father’s words simultaneously
defined and defiled him, turning him into offals—maybe the offal of the earth as he
also refers to the “clean” side of his face (F, 141), suggesting that his “other” side, as
he puts it, is unclean. His father’s next words turned him into “that,” a thing, not a
child, and an outcast: “You don’t need to think you’re going to bring that into the
house” (F, 139). However, the narrator subsequently points out that his sheltered
childhood was happy. As he recalls it, from the time he was five to the time he was
eight and a half, he and Nancy (the little girl who lived with her mother on the
 narrator’s parents’ property) spent all their time together, mostly in the garden. The
description of their games turns the garden into an enchanted Wonderland or
Neverland, where the two children run and run wild. Two favorite places are
mentioned, the trashy area beyond the cottage, and the cellar, which is full of
discards—in other words, places beyond the pale, that outcasts can inhabit: “we were
constantly in and out of the berry patches and under the apple trees and in the
absolutely wild trashy area beyond the cottage” (F, 150, italics mine). The trashy
area is presented as the children’s natural habitat: the adverb “absolutely” suggests
that they express their true essence as wild creatures. The passage reveals their
becoming-animal as the story blurs boundaries between the human and animal
worlds: the children climb up trees and hang from tree branches as Nancy is said to
“hang like a monkey from [tree] branches” (F, 152).
4 Quite strikingly, the garden as the narrator recreates it seems to be peopled by
animals, or rather by people at the time when they start developing a privileged
alliance with the animal world. Nancy and her mother live in a cottage in the garden,
which, the narrator points out, used to be a “shed or a barn” (F, 146). The woman
who looks after the children is called Mrs. Codd while Nancy’s mother, Sharon, is
associated with birds. The narrator draws attention to her legs when he describes her
favorite garment: “a kimono, on which I believe there were some pale birds—storks?
—whose legs reminded me of hers” (F, 150). The point is driven home when he
evokes Sharon’s habit of sending her “feathery” slipper “flying” in the air” (F, 150). As
we have seen, Nancy is compared to a monkey (F, 152). As the name Nancy derives
from Ann, a name meaning gracious, full of grace and mercy, the comparison may
suggest that he is mocking and defiling the little girl out of spite since Nancy, who
was more fearless than him when they learnt how to swim, can also “hang like a
monkey from branches that could not support [him]” (F, 152). However, the simile
turns Nancy into the rightful inhabitant of the “absolutely wild trashy area,” which
suggests that in the wilderness differences between boys and girls are blurred, as are
the boundaries between the human and animal worlds. The narrator’s mother
eventually calls Nancy both “a nasty little beast” and “a cruel, spiteful child” (F, 154),
unknowingly emphasizing the connection between child and animal.
5 Gardens where children run wild and are compared to animals are nothing unusual
in Munro’s stories and “Face” evokes other Munro gardens. For instance, the nature
preserve in “Vandals,” the site where two children “have run and hollered and hung
from branches” (Munro: 1995, 291). The garden in “Face” is also reminiscent of the
family farm in “Nettles” (2001). There, the narrator and a little boy she was in love
with, played all summer long, climbing trees and jumping into gravel pits, “with the
shouts of animals leaping onto their prey” (Munro: 2001, 159, my emphasis). The
garden is first the happy place where the little girl feels love and, after Mikes leaves,
the place she hates because it reminds her of her loss. In “Vandals” the garden is both
the place where the children play and run wild, the place where sexual abuse is
committed, and a diorama where their abuser, who is a taxidermist, displays fake
animals constructed from skinned animals. As Carrie Dawson points out, when Bea,
the abuser’s lover, asks the children “what kind of animals they’d like to be if they
could turn into animals” (Munro: 1995, 284), she “reminds the reader of the extent to
which Liza and Kenny are ready to become animal victims like those whose “skinned
bodies” are manipulated by Ladner” (Dawson 78). The children, who are repeatedly
called “the kids,” are obviously aligned with the animals the taxidermist has skinned
to construct his diorama. The summaries suggest that Munro draws an alliance
between “kids” who suffer and animals. However, as Munro’s representations of
childhood are also disturbingly complex, it would be wrong to decide that such
comparisons simply turn children into victims. In “Vandals, ” Bea describes herself as
“slit top to bottom with jokes” (Munro: 1995, 269), which means that she is also
aligned with animals whose pelt has been slit. Furthermore, Ladner the abuser is the
 one who is explicitly compared to the pelt of an animal, not his victims. When the
memory of the rape assaults Liza who goes back to Ladner’s property some fifteen
years later, the scene is depicted from the point of view of the children who loved
Ladner and were made to feel guilty: “he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal
flung loose from his flesh and bones” (Munro: 1995, 292). So in “Vandals,” the
abuser, the woman who is complicit through her silence and the abused children are
all aligned with animals, which “prevents easy correlations,” as noted by Dawson
(78).
6 “Face” also relies on an intricate web of animal references, blurring divisions
between children and animal, challenging the very notions of innocence by
emphasizing potential violence and cruelty, as in the other childhood stories. As the
children play in the garden, violence also occurs in the midst of their games since the
narrator recalls that Nancy once bit him and drew blood (F, 150). He also confesses to
having pulled her under an incoming wave and sat on her head (F, 150). Although
Nancy kicked herself free, the scene bears a striking resemblance to the murder scene
in “Child’s Play” in which a child is drowned when two little girls place their hands on
her head when she goes underwater after an incoming wave (CP, 221-22).
7 The narrator’s happy childhood in the trashy garden comes to an end when Nancy
paints her face red in an attempt to look like him, which the boy sees as an “insult”
and “leering joke” (F, 153). It seems that Nancy, who used to be on his side (the
description of their games insists on their alliance against the adults, seen as
enemies), now sides with those who mock him. This triggers a violent reaction in the
narrator who feels the urge to bite her: “I could sink my teeth into pure hatred of her”
(F, 153). The emphasis on the boy’s teeth is all the more striking as it follows a
passage in which the narrator compares his birthmark to the fur of a mouse. They
thus effectively turn the boy into a rodent.
8 The narrator explains his reaction by his own ignorance. For the disfigured child
who has never looked at his face, Nancy’s “garish face” (F 154) acts as a glaring
mirror, forcing him to see what he has never really seen, thanks to his mother’s love.
Refusing this garish vision and version of himself, the boy withdraws into the
shadows, away from the glaring light:

I believed my birthmark to be a soft brown colour, like the fur of a mouse […]
The only [mirror] in which I saw my reflection readily hung in the front hall,
which was dim in the daytime and weakly lit at night. This must have been
where I got the idea that half my face was this dull mild sort of colour, almost
mousey, a furry shadow. (F, 153)

9 The simile,2 “a soft brown colour, like the fur of a mouse,”bears a striking
resemblance to the simile that describes the colour of a cancer patient’s hair in
“Floating Bridge,” from Munro’s 2001 collection: “brownish-gray, like mouse fur”
(Munro: 2001, 56). The similes force us to see the fur itself, rather than the mouse
and to see the animal as having been pelted or skinned.3 Interestingly, in “Face” the
narrator mentions that his father’s father owned a tannery (F, 139). At first sight, the
similes convey violence and suggest intense suffering as the protagonist or narrator
feels exposed.
10 The origin of the word “fur” suggests that the simile in “Face” and the alliance with
the mouse is a means for the narrator to deal with his own vulnerability. As both the
Oxford Dictionary and the Merriam Webster indicate, “fur” comes from the Middle
English word furren, itself from the Anglo-French verb furrer,4 meaning “to stuff,
fill, line,” and fuerre, “sheath,” of Germanic origin. According to the Merriam
Webster, this word is akin to the Old High German fuotar meaning “sheath” and akin
to the Greek word pōma, meaning lid and cover, and the Sanskrit pāti, he protects.
The fur of the mouse is also its cover, its sheath. In other words, when the word “fur”
first came into English, it was a verb, taken from a French verb that was itself formed
 from earlier words meaning a sheath. So, this means that the word fur for the hairy
coat that covers an animal traces back to a word for a sheath that encases a knife or
sword. Thus, while the fur of the mouse is what shields the narrator, the origin of the
word also alludes to the possibility of violence.
11 The simile which makes it possible for the narrator to draw his own alliance with
the mouse does not only metonymically compare the boy to a small rodent; it actually
enables the narrator to highlight the presence of affects, in other words the forces
that drove both children to act. As the narrator’s mother tells him that Nancy cut her
face after they were separated, she draws attention to the depth of Nancy’s feelings—
in the literal sense of the word—when she sighs, “such deep feelings children have”
(F, 158). The mother seems to have come to a better understanding of Nancy’s
feelings but as the plural indicates, the mother’s cliché sheds light on both children’s
feelings, or rather affects. The narrator will have to own to and reclaim these affects.
In the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory
Seigworth point out that affect is the name we give to “visceral forces insisting
beyond emotion that can serve to drive us toward movement” (Gregg and Seigworth
2). They argue that affect arises in the midst of inbetween-ness, in the capacity to act
and be acted upon (2), and is found in intensities that pass bodies to bodies (2). Sara
Ahmed describes affects as “contagious” (Ahmed 36), as bodies can catch feelings.
The short passage when Nancy paints her face in an attempt to look like the boy and
to express her love, and the boy’s violent reaction, coalescing shame, rage and fear,
illustrates Ahmed’s point that “affect leaps from one body to another, evoking
tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear” (Ahmed 36). So, it is no
surprise that the narrator wishes that he could “sink his teeth into pure hatred of her”
(F, 153, my emphasis) after she painted her face. Body language replaces words when
violent affect surfaces.
12 “Child’s Play” also foregrounds incontrollable affects, as the narrator recalls how as
a child she felt persecuted by Verna who was said to be “special” and who followed
her around. Her feelings towards Verna—hatred and revulsion—are conveyed by
animal similes: “I supposed I hated her as some people hate snakes or caterpillars or
mice or slugs” (CP, 200). Recalling how Verna used to push peppermint candies into
her mouth, she metonymically compares Verna to a slug or a snail as she remarks,
“the name Verna [...] sounds like a trail of obstinate peppermint, green slime” (CP,
196). She will also eventually compare Verna to a jellyfish (CP, 221). Such similes
turn Verna into a small insignificant animal that can be eliminated, and may
therefore suggest that by dehumanizing Verna, the narrator paves the way for
justifying the murder. Yet the narrator’s nickname, “the marlin,” suggests that, as in
“Face,” the narrator purposely conjures up a world where every child is aligned with
an animal. As the marlin is one of the biggest fish in the world, it can be called an
“anomalous” animal (Deleuze and Guattari 243-244). The anomalous animal is the
exceptional individual in the pack (ibid. 244), which therefore suggests a connection
to and a resemblance with the girl who is said to be special. It is “always with the
Anomalous,” Deleuze and Guattari claim, “that one enters into alliance to become-
animal” (ibid. 244). The narrator’s nickname, evoking a predator (marlins feed on
other smaller fish) and a monstrous animal, deflects the simplified version of events
she has recreated, casting doubt as to who the monster is, suggesting a resemblance,
while reinforcing the undercurrent of violence.
13 Both “Child’s Play” and “Face” are about being touched, in both meanings of the
word. In “Child’s Play,” physical touch is foregrounded, when the narrator compares
Verna’s fingers to snouts, a word that usually refers to the long nose of some animals
such as pigs: “her fingers like so many cold snouts” (CP, 197). In Touching Feeling
Eve Sedgwick points out that “the same double meaning, tactile plus emotional is
already there in the single word ’touching’“ and is equally internal to the word feeling
(Sedgwick 17), since ”to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle […] and always
 to understand other people“ (Sedgwick 14). The narrator defines Verna’s attitude
towards us as signalling ”an understanding between us that […] was not to be
disposed of“ (CP, 200). In Verna’s case, it was love, on her side, ”it felt absolutely like
hatred“ (CP, 200). ”Face“ and ”Child’s Play“ might be two versions of the same
encounter, or fears. Both children are confronted by another child who either
attempts to look like them—Nancy tells the narrator she smeared red paint on her
face in order to ”look like“ him (CP, 152)—or is likened to them—a school friend tells
the narrator of ”Child’s Play“ that she thought Verna was her sister (CP, 199). In both
stories, the other child tries to show that they like them, which the loved child cannot
bear, nor understand.
14 Both ”Child’s Play“ and “Face” are centrally concerned with “the force of an
encounter,” which is how Seigworth and Gregg define affect: “affect is in many ways
synonymous with force or forces of encounter” (Gregg and Seigworth 2). Forces of
encounter, they go on to explain, can refer to imperceptible intensities and ordinary
events: “it is quite likely that affect more often transpires within and across the
subtlest of shuttling intensities: all the minuscule or molecular events of the
unnoticed. The ordinary and its extra-” (ibid. 2). Forces of encounters, comprising
events of both the extra-ordinary and the ordinary, is precisely what Munro has been
exploring throughout her œuvre. What happened in the garden in “Face” is what
Jean-François Lyotard calls an event, which an encounter provokes:

What makes an encounter with a word, odor, place, book, or face into an event
is not its newness, when compared to other “events.” It is its very value as
initiation. You only learn this later. It cut open a wound in the sensibility. You
know this because it has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the
rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed sensibility. (Lyotard: 1992, 106)

15 Yet it will take the narrator a long time to own to his feelings and acknowledge the
event and the nature of the wound. After Nancy painted her face, she disappeared
from the narrator’s life, and the boy was sent to boarding school in the hope that he
should forget her. His going to a boarding school also marks the end of a childhood
where wild children entered into alliance with animals. There is much emphasis on
the fact that the school is a boys’ school (F, 156), in other words a school where
boundaries between boys and girls are safely preserved: “the memory of having had a
female playmate [grew] dim and seem[ed] unworthy, even ridiculous” (F, 156).
16 When his mother mentions Nancy again, several decades later, the narrator claims
he could not remember who she was. Furthermore, he lays emphasis on his cold,
unemotional behavior. Thus, he draws attention to his refusal to engage with his
mother, in order to remain “unmoved,“ as he himself puts it:

I must keep myself lighthearted, jokey, unmoved [...] All she wanted, possibly,
was some sign of sympathy, or maybe of physical tenderness. I would not grant
that. […] I backed off from her as if there was some danger of insistent
dreariness, a contagious mold. I particularly backed off from any reference to
my affliction. (F, 157)

17 “Contagious” echoes the questions the narrator of “Child’s Play” asks herself when
she wonders why she was afraid of Verna: “contamination? Infection?” (200) As
Munro notes that “Child’s Play” is avoiding “contagion” (Awano: 2010 np), we can
argue that the same holds true of ”Face“ as suggested by the word “contagious.” If
Sara Ahmed’s definition of affects as “contagious” (Ahmed 36) is to be believed,
Munro is therefore clearly writing about affects in both stories. From the moment he
misunderstood Nancy’s gesture, a misunderstanding that resulted in their being
separated, the narrator has tried to remain untouched, in both the emotional and
physical senses of the word, and to keep his physical distance and a disaffected
heart.5 Therefore the “Great Drama of his life” the narrator alludes to a few pages into
his narrative (F, 142) is not Nancy’s gesture. Rather it is his having misunderstood it
 —which the older narrator has to acknowledge. He does so when he uses the adverb
“generously” to describe Nancy’s painted face: “when she turned her face it was
generously smeared all over with paint” (F, 152). This suggests that the adult narrator
now sees it for what it was—a generous gesture, a gesture of love.
18 By contrast, Nancy’s capacity to be touched and to remain true to her feelings is
foregrounded. As the narrator learns on the day of his father’s funeral—some forty
years after the event—Nancy used a razor blade to “slice into her cheek” (F, 159) a few
days after they were separated. This time she gets it right as she slices the same cheek
as his. Finding paint insufficient Nancy has resorted to scarring, a form of skin-
writing. Nancy’s scarred face displays the trace of her own wound, yet this is not so
much suffering incarnate, as affects incarnate. As Lyotard sees it, an encounter is
akin to a wound, it “cut open a wound in the sensibility [that] has since reopened and
will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed
temporality” (Lyotard 106, my italics). Nancy’s scarring her face is not only a means
to convey her feelings, it is also a means to open herself to her friend. In his notes on
his translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, Brian Massumi reminds us
that affect is an ability to affect and be affected, “a prepersonal intensity
corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and
implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (Deleuze and
Guattari xvi). When you affect someone, you are at the same time opening yourself up
to being affected. Nancy has, literally, opened herself up to being affected. The
scarring, evoking an ancient form of body language and skin writing, turns Nancy’s
face into testimony incarnate, making words redundant if not useless.
19 However, my contention is that the central animal simile—the comparison of the
birthmark to the fur of a mouse—plays a crucial role in the narrator’s owning to
having been touched by Nancy. Touch is also intimated in the very description of the
birthmark as the narrator first refers to ”a soft brown colour“ and then to a ”dull mild
sort of colour, a furry shadow“ (F, 152). The description reminds us that Munro’s
“language of the senses” is used expressively, not descriptively (Francesconi 101), and
reminds us that in Munro’s stories colours are never abstract or descriptive, but are
“grounded in materiality” (Francesconi 101). First “mild” unites dullness and
gentleness, in nature or behaviour, and it is a key word that allows the narrator to
change the vision others have of himself. But more importantly, the word “soft”
introduces synesthesia—sight and touch. By imagining his birthmark to be “soft,” like
the fur of a mouse, and calling it a “furry” shadow, the narrator introduces a change
from the sense of sight to the sense of touch, which prepares us to affects. Eventually,
by calling attention to the soft fur, the narrator intimates that the birthmark can also
be touched, which means that the simile paves the way for the dream that features in
the last part. When in his old age the narrator dreams of Nancy’s cheek touching his
face, the possibility of a soft touch he suggested when describing his birthmark as soft
and furry, materializes.
20 “Face,” as the title of the story, seems to refer to the narrator’s disfigured face, yet it
may also be interpreted as a verb, alluding to the narrator’s personal journey that
brings him to face his own feelings, his having been affected, just as much as Nancy
was. In order to recover his memory and face his feelings, the narrator has first to
admit to having fallen “off his perch” (F, 142)—a cliché that may signal a return to
animal alliances—and has to be hurt by an animal he disturbs. Working in the garden
he is stung by a wasp, and is driven to hospital where he gets his eyes bandaged.
There, he will dream of Nancy who appears as both a woman and a child: the woman
reads at “a childlike speed” (F, 160), the narrator feels her “little quick hand” (F, 160)
and hears her “small, persistent voice” (F, 159). Finally, when he gets back home he
refers to her as a “determined child-phantom” (F, 161), acknowledging her
persistence and determination. The narrator does acknowledge a becoming-child that
bears witness to being true to her feelings.
21 “Face” is about childhood love, and about loss, or rather, love and loss as Munro
offers her characters the possibility to embrace both. In his dream, he feels Nancy’s
touch, so Nancy is, once more, the one who initiates the gesture of touch: “her quick
little hand was laid on my mouth. And then her face or the side of her face, laid on
mine.” (F, 162) Using “or” enables the narrator to eventually isolate Nancy’s cheek,
which a subsequent passage shows: “I wanted to go back and have her lay her face on
mine. Her cheek, on mine” (F, 163). This means that the narrator also draws
attention to his own cheek. The choice of words makes it impossible to know which
side of her face touches which side of his face. If we imagine that Nancy lays her
undamaged side on his damaged side, or her damaged side on his “clean” side, a
duplicate of his face is created, with one “good” and one bad sides. We may envision
another possibility as the title of the story denies the previous division the narrator
made between his good and his bad sides. “Face” unites the two sides of a face—
suggesting wholeness, the division between the bad and good sides mended. It also
blurs distinctions between his own face and Nancy’s face.
22 Using words such as “her cheek, on mine” makes it possible to imagine that she
lays her scarred cheek on his disfigured cheek. While we may suppose that she does
so to hide their disfigurement, this is also an attempt to have the scar and the
birthmark touch. Hence the crucial role of the simile, enabling us to see it as a caress
between a scarred cheek and a furry cheek, the fur penetrating the gouged cheek;
animal and human skins touching, blurring boundaries between the animal and
human species. The fur becomes the point of contact between bodies—the animal
simile turns the narrator’s despised birthmark and the girl’s damaged face into bodies
defined, not by an outer skin-envelope or other surface boundary, but by their
potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passages of affect.
23 Another crucial element is Nancy’s scarred cheek. In Munro’s stories, bodies often
bear witness to affects. It is uncertain whether Nancy’s cheek would be mended or
still scarred, as the narrator points out (F, 163), but this does not matter. In Munro’s
stories scars or body marks that bear witness to affect that “cut open a wound” are
either imaginary or very faint. In “Nettles,” after Mike, the boy whom the narrator
loved as a child, disappears from her life, the girl projects her silenced feelings onto
the “limb” of the maple tree in her garden which her father cuts off, and onto the
“scar that was left” (Munro: 2001, 166), suggesting that the border between the
human and vegetable worlds are blurred. Secondly, the ending foregrounds marks
left by nettles that turn into “welts.” The narrator draws attention to the real marks
nettles left on Mike’s legs and hers (they had to crouch under a tree during a storm)
and evokes the imaginary marks the nettles would have left if they had made love: “—
welts on the buttocks, red splashes on the thighs and belly)—” (Munro: 2001, 186).
The end of the story makes it clear that these imaginary welts are more meaningful to
her than real ones. They remain as evidence of her love and silenced desire. In
“Vandals” the letters-turned scar carved on the tree trunk bear witness to sexual
abuse. In this earlier story, a complex web of images links the vegetable, human and
animal worlds: “And that one with the bark like gray skin? […] See, it had letters
carved on it […]” (Munro: 1996, 294, my italics). Paradoxically, these scars, be they
faint traces on a tree trunk, an actual scar on a tree branch, or imaginary welts on
bodies do not imply cicatrisation, rather, they evoke Lyotard’s idea that we must
“fight against the cicatrisation of the event” (Lyotard 106).
24 In “Face,” this is how Munro offers her character the possibility to recover from
loss. At the end of his narrative the narrator indirectly confesses to having betrayed
Nancy and admits to his having loved her. In his dream, Nancy quotes a poem, citing
one line that clearly hints at his having forgotten her: “None will mourn for you/ Pray
for you/ Miss You” (F, 161). When the narrator comes home and finds the complete
poem, the missing first lines read: “No Loss, betrayal/ Beyond repair” (F, 163) which
indicates the possibility to repair loss. It also forces us to reconsider what happened
 back then and to re-interpret the Great Drama of his life as betrayal. The truth of the
matter is that the narrator is the guilty one, the one who betrayed Nancy and their
child-selves, while she has remained true to her feelings. It is only at the very end of
the story that the narrator admits to his feelings for Nancy. Wondering whether a
meeting with the real Nancy6 would not have resulted in meaningless conversation,
he boldly asserts,

You think that would have changed things?

The answer is of course, and for a while, and never. (F, 163)

25 He therefore chooses to assert the force of affects.

26 In “Child’s Play” the narrator claims that the murder did not change her life.
However, the force of the encounter is branded on her palm through the memory of
the victim’s swimming cap, pushing its pattern into her palm—turning a rubber
pattern that as such can leave no permanent trace into an embodied memory, and the
indelible stigma of a crime—and guilt. Secondly the story features a dead girl whose
name persists and pervades the narrator’s memory, as a trail of slime: “the name
Verna […] sounds like a trail of obstinate peppermint, green slime” (CP, 196).
Munro’s choice of foregrounding a snail’s or slug’s slime also means foregrounding a
bodily substance, a form of leakage from the animal’s body. “Slime,” which refers to a
viscous substance, can refer to the mucous secretion of animals such as slugs, and can
also refer to soft moist earth, clay or viscous mud, suggesting that Verna resurfaces as
a determined persistent child phantom in her becoming-animal and becoming-
vegetable. As Ahmed points out, affect is “sticky,” it is “what sticks, or what sustains
or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (Ahmed 29), and, one
may add, the connection between people. As the narrator of “Child’s Play” tries to
explain why she does not like the name Verna she uses the words “trail,” which can
mean that the trail of slime has been following her, and the adjective “obstinate,”
suggesting that there is no getting rid of the girl, nor of affects. In the same way, in
“Face,” there is no getting rid of the “persistent” voice of the child self. What I would
like to suggest here is the possibility to read these two stories together. Munro
mentions them together in an interview with Lisa Awano. She explains that “Child’s
Play” is about cruelty and “genuine ruthlessness in children” (Awano: 2010, np),
while “Face” is about rejection, survival and love:

I wanted to write a story about [the father’s rejection], but also to write about
how somebody survives; and he does survive. Of course it’s the love of that little
girl Nancy, that nobody expects or understands, and we don’t really know what
has happened to her. But I think she’s all right. It’s about love, and love among
children. So we’ve got hate among children and love among children. (Awano
np)

27 Munro suggests that the two stories are the two sides of the same coin. The remark
also sheds light onto her way of thinking and writing, exploring two currents
stemming from the same root, an encounter with another child resulting in fears, and
a reaction to being touched or affected. One is ultimately resolved through loss and
acceptance of love, while the other is resolved through radical violence. This shows
that Munro uses the short story form to explore variations, along rhizomatic roots.
“Face” reads as a variation on “Nettles,” adopting the point of view of the boy that
was absent in “Nettles. ” “Nettles” and “Vandals” are united by the image of the scar
on a tree, the maple tree scar bears testimony to the narrator’s love and loss of Mike,
while the letters carved on the beech tree bear witness to a complex relationship
between children and adults, including love and sexual abuse since while the narrator
of “Nettles” claims she depicts innocent childhood love, ”Vandals“ forces sexual abuse
of children upon its readers.
28 A child is drowned in “Child’s Play” while she is saved in “Face” and if one believes
 Munro, one story is about hatred while the other one is about love. Yet “Face” and
“Child’s Play” may not be that different. Somewhat similar narrative devices also
unite the two stories. In “Face,” the narrator simultaneously leads readers astray by
suggesting that Nancy’s “leering joke” was the Great Drama of his life, and points out
that this phrase might be cheaply satirical or self-dramatizing (CP, 142). He also
insists on his faulty memory and offers many detours before giving an account of
what happened in the cellar and garden. In “Child’s Play,” the narrator repeatedly
draws attention to her hatred of Verna (CP, 194; 200) but also suggests the possibility
of misunderstanding. She describes the “understanding” between them as
“something that clings, in the way of love, though on my side, it felt absolutely like
hate” (CP, 200, my emphasis). The words “felt” and “like” introduce a rift in the logic
of hatred she narrates. Both “Face” and “Child’s Play” give the lie to the opening
statement made by the narrator of “Child’s Play” that while the past “sprouts fresh”
and wants one to do something about it, it is “plain that there is not on this earth a
thing to be done” about it (CP, 189). As the story is narrated, it is revised, and affects
are accounted for.
29 Giving an account of oneself and of one’s gestures is also what these stories are
about. Adult narrators who try to give an account of themselves eventually embrace
loss and love, and love as loss when they return to their child-selves. In these stories,
animal similes and the alliance of children with animals keep pushing affects to the
fore. The narrators eventually acknowledge the stickiness of affects and own to the
persistent presence of the other one in its becoming-child and becoming animal.

Bibliography
AHMED, Sara, “Happy Objects”, in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth eds., The Affect
Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, 29-51.
AWANO, Liza Dickler, An Interview with Alice Munro, VQR, 22 October 2010.
http://www.vqronline.org/authors/interview-alice-munro last accessed 28 March 2017.
DAWSON, Carrie, “Skinned: Taxidermy and Pedophilia in Alice Munro’s ‘Vandals’”, Canadian
Literature 184 (Spring 2005), 69-82.
DELEUZE, Gilles, Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, trans. by Daniel W. Smith,
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi,
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
FRANCESCONI, Sabrina, “Dance of the Senses in ‘Red Dress-1946’” in Corinne Bigot and
Catherine Lanone eds., With a Roar from Underground: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy
Shades, Nanterre: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 97-107.
GREGG, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2010.
DOI : 10.1215/9780822393047
LYOTARD, Jean-François, The Postmodern Explained to Children, translations edited by
Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas, London: Turnaround, 1992.
MUNRO, Alice, The Progress of Love [1986], London: Vintage, 1996.
MUNRO, Alice, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, London: Vintage, 2001.
MUNRO, Alice, “Face”, The New Yorker, September 8, 2008.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/09/08/face
MUNRO, Alice, Too Much Happiness, London: Chatto and Windus, 2009.
SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky, Touching Feeling, Durham and London: Duke University Press,
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VENTURA, Héliane, “Le tracé de l’écart”, in Liliane Louvel and Henri Scepi eds, Texte/Image:
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Notes
1 In the quotations from Alice Munro’s two stories from the same collection, “Face” will be
hereafter referred to as F and “Child’s Play” as CP.
2 The simile was added when Munro revised the story for the collected volume. The first
version, published in The New Yorker simply reads, “I believed my birthmark to be a soft
brown color.”
3 The similes also recall one of Munro’s most striking similes, to be found in the earlier story
“Lichen,” in which a woman’s pubic hair that is displayed on a snapshot is likened to lichen
and then to “the dark pelt of an animal, with the head and tail and feet chopped off. Dark silky
pelt of some unlucky rodent” (Munro: 1996, 42). See Héliane Ventura’s analysis of the simile in
“Le Tracé de l’écart” (Ventura: 2005).
4 While both dictionaries agree on the origin of the word, the Oxford Dictionary gives a slightly
different spelling for these words: “fur comes from Middle English (as a verb) from Old French
forrer ’to line, sheathe’, from forre ’sheath’, of Germanic origin.” In French, fourrure is said to
come from the verb fourrer, which came from fourreau.
5 I borrow the phrase from one of Munro’s early stories, “The Shining Houses.” The final
paragraph reads: “there is nothing you can do at present but put your hands in your pockets
and keep a disaffected heart” (Munro: 2010, 29).
6 This ending is strongly reminiscent of the ending of “Nettles” (Munro: 2001, 187).

References
Bibliographical reference
Corinne Bigot, “Fur and Slime: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Child in “Face” and “Child’s Play”
by Alice Munro”, Caliban, 57 | 2017, 21-35.

Electronic reference
Corinne Bigot, “Fur and Slime: Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Child in “Face” and “Child’s Play”
by Alice Munro”, Caliban [Online], 57 | 2017, Online since 11 June 2019, connection on 05
February 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/2644; DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.2644

About the author

Corinne Bigot
Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, CAS

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