It’s been three days since I first read Alice Munro’s short story “Axis” in this week’s issue of the magazine, and I find myself still pondering its meaning. The story is not straightforward. There are shifting time-frames and points-of-view. I think I understand everything up to the second last section, which is about the Frontenac Axis. Munro writes:
When the train starts up again, he explains that all around them are great slabs of limestone packed in order, one on top of the other, like a grand construction. But in one spot this gives way, he says, and you can see something else. It’s what is known as the Frontenac Axis. It is nothing less than an eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield, all the ancient combustion cutting through the limestone, pouring over, messing up those giant steps.
The story takes its name from this geological formation. I assume, therefore, that Munro intends the Frontenac Axis to symbolize something. That “something” is, I think, the unconscious. The “great slabs of limestone packed in order” are the repressive, rigid layers of the conscious mind. The “eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield” is the welling up of wild, messy, not-to-be denied passion from the unconscious. Munro has expressed this geological concept of the unconscious before. For example, in her story "Fits" (included in her 1986 collection The Progress of Love), a character says, "People can take a fit like the earth takes a fit." Normally, I resist reading stories as allegories. I prefer to analyze the form and leave the “meaning” alone. But in the case of “Axis,” I don’t think we are reading too much between the lines if we interpret the Frontenac Axis symbolically. In fact, I think the meaning of “Axis” depends on it.
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