The fragmentation of history: The destabilizing effect of epigraphs in Alice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung’

In Alice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung’, there is a correlation between the story’s fragmentary narrative form and the fragmentary nature of the epigraphs within it. This article argues that Munro uses these epigraphs to destabilize our understanding of history as a means of constructing and preserving a historical subject. The story is divided into six sections, each of which contains an epigraph from the oeuvre of the fictional nineteenth-century Canadian ‘poetess’ Almeda Joynt Roth. An investigation of the epigraphs – particularly the first, third and sixth epigraphs – in relation to Almeda’s unfinished, possibly non-existent, masterpiece, ‘The Meneseteung’, reveals irreconcilable inconsistencies in the narrator’s description of Almeda’s poetry which undermine her authority as a historian. By drawing attention to the fictionality of both the story’s historical subject and the narrative itself, Munro reveals the necessary limitations of history as a discipline. The historian must justify their study by presenting their subject as one worthy of representation, necessitating the embellishment of a narrative capable of preserving the subject against the sands of time.