The bear climbed over the mountain

Alice Munro , Nobel Prize in Literature 2013

The bear climbed over the mountain (in the original The Bear Came Over the Mountain ) is a short story by the Canadian writer Alice Munro , which was first published in a shorter version in 1999. Commentators often refer to their title and ending. Sarah Polley filmed the original in 2006 in the feature film At Her Side .

The story is about an elderly couple named Fiona and Grant. The on dementia ill Fiona into a nursing home admitted. After being unable to see her for thirty days, Grant, who has cheated repeatedly in earlier years, now has to experience that his wife hardly seems to recognize him anymore and has turned to a roommate.

The bear climbed over the mountain is one of the author's most published works. In the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) the story in English has a length of 49 pages.

action

A new phase in their relationship begins for Fiona and Grant, who have been married for nearly 50 years, when Fiona is admitted to a nursing home because of increasing mental confusion. No visits are permitted for the first thirty days. After that, Grant is not sure whether his wife even recognizes him. She shows little interest in his visits and has turned to her roommate, Aubrey. When his wife Marian brought him home for financial reasons, Fiona suffered so much from the separation that she was threatened with bedridden. Grant tries to get in touch with Marian, who does not agree to meet her husband with Fiona, but shows interest in Grant, who has previously had several extramarital affairs and is meeting Marian. When Grant tries to surprise Fiona with the presence of Aubrey on her next visit, she recognizes her husband for the first time.

The New Yorker recap begins like this: A short story set in Canada about an aging former university professor, Grant, who has to take his wife, Fiona, to a nursing home after her memory runs out ...

characters

Fiona Parents of Fiona Grant Parents of Grant "Foreigner" / "she said he was a Visigoth" and "two or three interns" (who courted Fiona in her youth) "German soldiers" (Grant) doctor "Women of his" (Grant) police officer Mr. Farquar, Fiona and Grant's neighbor, whom they visited at the Meadowlake Nursing Home Jacqui Adams, mistress of Grant Kristy, Meadowlake nurse "Some friends" (from Fiona in Meadowlake, according to Kristy) "If anybody phoned", "not close neighbors but people who lived around the countryside" "One of his colleagues", "husband and father", "such shenanigans", "he had in fact married one of those girls" (in Grant's dream) "A girl he had not thought of in a while" whom "he had parted from decently" (in Grant's dream)

"The roommate", "a latent lesbian" (who wrote the letter in Grant's dream) "Everybody" ("was waiting there for him to teach a class") (in Grant's dream) "A flock of cold-eyed young women" (in Grant's dream) "A girl" that "had suffered from a bad crush on him" (Grant tells Fiona) "So many women so suddenly became available" (in Grant's memory) "A very disconsolate woman" (in Meadowlake) "Another woman" (in Meadowlake) Aubrey, "the man she sat closest to" (Grant sees Fiona) "All the players at the table" (in Meadowlake) Phoebe Hart, friend of Fiona "The coffee woman" (in Meadowlake) "One tough old stick" (nurse in Meadowlake) Marian, Aubrey's wife "Her sister" (Marian) "Saturday visitors" Son of Marian Wife of Marian's son

analysis

“The bear climbed over the mountain” in the 2001 version is 49 pages long and consists of 27 sections. The shortest sections are no more than half a page. The longest section is 7.5 pages long. It describes how Grant pays Marian his first visit.

This text is about the relationship between memory, fidelity and adaptation: how notions of fidelity can adapt to changing conditions, says Robert McGill in a 2008 contribution.

Fiona irritates her husband, who has cheated on her all her life, by falling in love with someone in the nursing home. The material is characteristic of Munro insofar as breaking out of one's own concept of life reveals bold moments that are perplexing. In this case, it is about repressed feelings of guilt that secretly continue to work, and relationships that are puzzling. This is told unsentimentally, according to the publisher's report on the German audio book edition from 2005.

In 2011 Markus Gasser read the end of the story in a sentimental way. He says that Fiona and Grant are a couple whose Alzheimer's disease cannot cause a separation. If you cry and smile at the end of this story, you can't be a bad person.

The end of this story is unusual because Alice Munro usually ends with a sentence that signals uncertainty and in which no solution is in sight. But this is a declaration of the sincere love Grant always felt for Fiona, wrote Ruth Scarr in her review in The Times Literary Supplement in October 2011 . "This simple assertion places his commitment to her beyond the laws of probability, the ravages of irrationality, contingency, or circumstance."

After many deceptions towards Fiona, which he had skilfully managed, Grant remained true to himself by admitting to Fiona that he was now being unfaithful on her part, in a selfless way, says Héliane Ventura in 2010. However, there is an unexpected twist at the end of the story: Fiona is mentally fully present and ruins Grant's plans with her hopes of leaving the nursing home.

This story is about the psychological and physical trauma of individuals and the social effects these impairments have on the relationship between two families who hardly know each other. A major role is played by the fact that Grant and Fiona have no children, i.e. they have no family ties, argues Mohammad Shahidul Islam Chowdhury in a 2011 article.

While the action takes place in the grammar of conventional realism, Munro would invent his own grammar on the formal level, says James Wood in 2013 in The New Yorker . On the one hand, he sees ironic symmetries at work, insofar as Grant, the philanderer, now uses precisely this habit to try to keep his wife in the nursing home the presence of her new companion so that she can continue to remain unfaithful. On the other hand, the story is told unsentimentally with great formal freedom, in that a lot of life stories are briefly sketched over long periods of time, for example in the first two sections, where several decades have passed in no time at all. Wood also points to an example of Munro's hidden humor that he finds in the opening. There it is described how Fiona's father, famous in his professional environment, at home comments on the left political tirades of his wife's guests with an absent smile.

The story is told with great restraint and from Grant's perspective, so that the reader does not learn much about Fiona's actions, which is one of the reasons why the story is masterfully moving, funny, fragile, complex and mysterious. Fiona keeps her dignity and beauty and Grant sees that too, although he has the emotional IQ of a mosquito. It develops late, but it develops.

There are amazing feats of emotional commodity trading in this story, and sex is used as a crucial element by Grant, Margaret Atwood said in 2013 in The Guardian , in her Nobel Prize statement for Alice Munro. Like a skilled salesman, Grant uses sex as play money to haggle when he tries to get Marian to bring her husband back to Fiona, thereby trying to prevent Fiona from being moved to the second, closed floor of the nursing home as a patient.

Exceptional, says Martin Gaiser in 2005, are the fine observations regarding the thoughts and feelings that can be triggered by everyday things and actions. The outer and inner world of the character Grant would rub against each other. He comes to this conclusion on the basis of a comparison by Alice Munro: A story is less a street, but a house, in whose rooms you move and discover their connections to each other. The outside world also changes when you see it through the windows of the house. Reading this story is like walking through a narrative architecture that is so artistic that you don't notice its construction.

Last but not least, Jonathan Franzen notes that Munro's short stories are even more difficult to summarize than those of other authors. Using this work as an example, he tries out why. Franzen first gives a summary as it can be read almost everywhere: Fiona with Alzheimer's in the early stages has looked for another “boyfriend” after 30 days in the nursing home and does not recognize her husband. Franzen then observed himself and, as part of his review of the subsequent Munro tape, Runaway , for The New York Times in November 2004, analyzed what he considered characteristic of Munro. Firstly, Grant had cheated himself for years and is now being cheated himself. Second, Franzen notes, he wants to tell more about what will happen next. And that he realizes at this point that the brief summary is only a prelude to the big scene in the story in which Grant visits the “boyfriend's” wife. And thirdly, that his attempt at a brief summary goes completely wrong, because the great scene has to be described and it is actually best to quote the text in its entirety in order to do justice to the work. Namely the things within things: how everything interacts with Munro, class and morality, desire and loyalty, character and fate - and how many of Grant's personality aspects have now been brought to light by Munro. How to forgive all characters and not condemn any. Otherwise, one would overlook the slightest probability that new possibilities would arise. Franzen ends his analeptically embedded review of this work by stating that this is just one of Munro's stories and that there are even better ones in the volume Runaway than this: daring, bloodier, more profound and broader.

Title: Which Bear? Which mountain?

In the English-speaking world there is a known children's song , "The Bear Went / Climbed Over the Mountain," in which a bear out of the woods (and flow) is / climbs. On the other hand, he finds: the other side.

Catherine Sustana notes that Munro changed a word in the title of her short story by changing the popular version “The Bear Went…” to “The Bear Came…” (“The bear came …") has made. “Kam” suggests the perspective that the reader is already on the other side, namely like the two main characters Fiona and Grant, who have already had most of their lives behind them. Sustana also suggests that Munro could be suggesting that things are going downhill on the other side of midlife and that, in contrast to the apparent nonsense of the repetitive nursery rhyme, aging is not exactly easy. In this reading everyone would be this bear. With the verb “kletter” in the German title, this subtlety is lost in the translation.

According to Sustana, the bear stands for Grant. If the latter had the intention, by means of another infidelity, this time with Marian, to get his companion Aubrey back to his wife, this other side of the mountain would be just the same as the one from which the bear (Grant) set off.

The bear could also stand for Fiona. Héliane Ventura finds clues for this: she too is going on a journey, to another world called Meadowlake. Munro uses word games to blur the lines between the two worlds. This happens on the level of the fictional language as well as on that of the reality, whereby the boundaries between the experience of the bear and the Fionas would be dissolved even further.

History of origin

Alice Munro has revised "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" many times. The work was first published in 1999/2000 in The New Yorker and then in 2001 in the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage . The version of the work, which was made readable online free of charge by The New Yorker in 2013 , is less elaborate than the version in the print edition from 2001.

expenditure

• "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" was first published in The New Yorker on December 27, 1999 and January 3, 2000, and this version was made readable online free of charge on October 21, 2013 by The New Yorker (without the indication that the Work was first published in this version in 1999).
• In a more elaborated version, the story is contained in: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), it was also included in No Love Lost (2003), Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (2006), Alice Munro's Best : A Selection of Stories (2008) and New Selected Stories (2011).
• In German, the version from 2001 is included in the Heaven and Hell collection . Nine stories . Translation by Heidi Zerning. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-10-048819-9 ,
  • as well as in The Bear Climbed Over the Mountain. Drei Dreiecksgeschichten (2008), German translation by Heidi Zerning. Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-8031-2593-4
• As an audio book in German: The bear climbed over the mountain. Christian Brückner reads stories from heaven and hell. 2 CDs, 120 minutes. Read by Christian Brückner . Directed by Waltraut Brückner. Translated from English by Heidi Zernig. Parlando Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-935125-45-3 . This audio book was nominated for the German Audio Book Prize in 2006 in the “Best Interpretation” category.

Versions

Alice Munro: "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (1999/2001), version differences according to sections

The 1999 magazine version has 13 sections, while the 2001 book version has 27 sections. Some of these are new, namely Sections 4, 15 and 17 or partially new, for example the beginning of Section 16. From the previous Section 10, Sections 21 and 24 were formulated differently: In what was Section 10 in 1999, In 2001, what was previously set out in Section 9 was inserted. In some cases passages have been distributed differently to sections, for example what was directly next to each other in section 8, relating to the book with the Iceland watercolors, was later published in a different order (the book purchase is now published in section 18) and spread over sections 19, 18, 20 and 18. Only four sections have been taken over unchanged in this architectural respect, namely the three sections at the beginning of the narrative and the final section.

At text passages that were already available in 1999 and that were published revised in 2001, the following should be mentioned. In section 19 of the book version a sentence has been deleted at the end of a paragraph and at the beginning of the following paragraph a statement is relativized and something new is added. "Academic parties, which used to be so predictable, became a minefield. [...] Only this time people ran after contagion, and few between sixteen and sixty seemed willing to be left out. That was an exaggeration, of course. [1999] "And then:" Fiona was [1999] / appeared to be [2001] quite willing, however. Her mother was dying, […] [2001]… Grant himself did not go overboard. ”In the 27th section, shortly before the end of the story, four relevant changes:“ You've been gone a long time. [2001 at this point instead of below] 'Are we all checked out now?' she said. "Immediately afterwards it was deleted:" He thought the brightness of her voice was wavering a little. 'You've been gone a long time.' ”Second, the passage shortly afterwards:“ She stared at Grant [1999] / at him [2001] for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything into rags. All rags and loose threads. [Italics from 1999, deleted in the 2001 version] ", and thirdly, a little later:" 'I'm happy to see you,' she said, both sweetly and formally. She pinched [1999] / and pulled [2001] his earlobes, hard [1999] ". Fourth, in the 1999 version the last words are in direct speech: "He said, 'Not a chance.'" And in the 2001 version they are in free direct speech: "He said, Not a chance."

filming

Based on "The Bear Came Over the Mountain", directed by Sarah Polley, the 2006 Canadian film At Her Side was made. Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie played the roles of Grant and Fiona .

Secondary literature

• Kim Aubrey: Driving through Munro Country: One Reader's Journey through Two Short Stories . In: North Dakota Quarterly 73: 3, 2006, pp. 82-97
• Mohammad Shahidul Islam Chowdhury: Family Bond and Traumatic Pathology in Alice Munro's “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” . Stamford Journal of English 6, 2011, pp. 103-113
• Jonathan Franzen : 'Runaway': Alice's Wonderland , nytimes.com , November 14, 2004. Also as an “Introduction” in the volume Runaway (2004, approx. 12 pages) with the title “What makes you so sure you're not the evil one yourself? "(Discusses, among other things," The Bear Came Over the Mountain ")
• Héliane Ventura: The Skald and the Goddess: Reading "The Bear Came over the Mountain" by Alice Munro . Journal of the Short Story in English / Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 55, 2010, pp. 173–85
• Agnès Berthin-Scaillet: A Reading of "Away from Her", Sarah Polley's adaptation of Alice Munro's short Story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" , Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les cahiers de la nouvelle , n ° 55, Autumn 2010 ISSN  0294-0442
• Robert McGill: No Nation but Adaptation: "The Bear Came over the Mountain", "Away from Her", and "What It Means to Be Faithful", in: Canadian Literature / Littérature canadienne CanLit, Summer 2008, n ° 197 ISSN  0008 -4360 pp. 98-111 abstract

Individual evidence

1. ↑ “ Some of Alice Munro's stories have been included in English-language collections more than three times, including 'The Moons of Jupiter' (1977/1978), 'The Progress of Love' (1985/1986), 'Meneseteung' (1988/1990 ), 'Differently' (1989/1990), 'Carried Away' (1991/1994), 'A Wilderness Station' (1992/1994), 'The Albanian Virgin' (1994), 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain' ( 1999/2001) and 'Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage' (2001). "
2. ^ Original version of the beginning of the summary in The New Yorker (version from 1999): "Short story set in Canada, about an aging former college professor, Grant, who must put his wife, Fiona, into a long-term care facility after her memory fails ... "
3. ^ Robert McGill: No Nation but Adaptation: The Bear Came over the Mountain, Away from Her, and What It Means To Be Faithful . In: Canadian Literature / Littérature canadienne 197, 2008. pp. 98–111.
4. ↑ Information from the publisher's report on the audio book 2005 ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Alice Munro: Too much luck. A form of crucifixion by Markus Gasser, faz.net , July 8, 2011
6. ↑ Literally translated this reads as follows: This simple confirmation places its strong relationship above the circumstances, the eventualities and the probability and is stronger than the ravages of irrationality. The darkness of Alice Munro ( Memento of the original from October 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , by Ruth Scurr , The Times Literary Supplement , October 4, 2011 
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Héliane Ventura: The Skald and the Goddess. Reading “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro , in: Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les cahiers de la nouvelle , ISSN  0294-0442 , n ° 55 (Autumn 2010), Special issue: The Short Stories of Alice Munro, paragraphs 5, 13, 19-20.
8. ↑ Mohammad Shahidul Islam Chowdhury: Family Bond and Traumatic Pathology in Alice Munro's “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” . In: Stamford Journal of English 6, 2011, pp. 103-113.
9. ↑ James Wood, Alice Munro, our Chekhov , The New Yorker , October 11, 2013
10. ↑ Alice Munro: “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” , by Betsy (2nd half), mookseandgripes.com , October 14, 2013
11. ↑ Alice Munro: an appreciation by Margaret Atwood , by Margaret Atwood, The Guardian , October 11, 2013; und das., Introduction , in: Alice Munro's Best. Selected Stories , Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006, pp. vii-xviii.
12. ↑ Love in the age of the old people's home. Alice Munro's story “The Bear climbed over the mountain” as an audio book by Martin Gaiser, literaturkritik.de , May 24, 2005.
13. ↑ Jonathan Franzen: Runaway : Alice's Wonderland , nytimes.com , November 14, 2004.
14. ^ ^{A b} Analysis of 'The Bear Came over the Mountain' by Alice Munro. All that We Can See , (therein from the section: What Bear? What Mountain?), By Catherine Sustana, shortstories.about.com , after October 21, 2013 (Sustana refers to making the story freely available at The New Yorker on October 21, 2013.)
15. ↑ To Appreciation of Alice Munro , by Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano, Compiler and Editor. In: The Virginia Quarterly Review . VQR Symposium on Alice Munro. Summer 2006, pp. 102-105.
16. ↑ Alice Munro: The Bear Came Over the Mountain The New Yorker, October 21, 2013, accessed September 18, 2018.
17. ↑ For the differences between the film and the short story, there is a readable contribution of Agnès Berthin-Scaillet in Special Issue on Alice Munro of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) / Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 2010 (en) Abstract (fr).