The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen.“The Bear Came over the Mountain” and <em>Away from Her</em>
10.13125/2039-6597/3486
A comparison between "The Bear Came over the Mountain" by Alice Munro and its film adaptation Away from Her.
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Héliane Ventura
Between
The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen.“The Bear Came over the Mountain” and <em>Away from Her</em>
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https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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Essay
2018-12-02
2018-11-26
2018-12-02
2018-12-02
1
Héliane Ventura
2018/12/02
10.13125/2039-6597/3486
2039-6597
16
en
The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen.“The Bear Came over the Mountain” and <em>Away from Her</em>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3486/3075
8
    The Scandal of Misprision: Alice
           Munro on Screen.
  “The Bear Came over the Mountain”
          and Away from Her


                             Héliane Ventura


      I would like to begin this essay with a reference to a title from a
chapter by Derrida in La dissémination. This title is “L’écriT, l’écrAn,
l’écrIN”, a title which deserves to be spoken aloud because of the
alliteration it creates (an alliteration which mimics and triplicates that of
the English word “screen”) but which deserves above all to be read
because of the word it embeds. Through Derrida’s purposeful
highlighting in capital letters of some of the final vowels and
consonants, the word “TAIN” is allowed to surface. It translates in
English as silvering or coating and refers to the sort of metal covered
with liquid mercury to be found on the reverse side of a mirror. Of this
coating, Derrida says that it constitutes a screen: it shelters and it
conceals at the same time, it holds in reserve and it exposes to view, thus
it also constitutes a case, a box: un écrin. The definition that Derrida
provides for a screen is based on this fundamental duality between écrin
and écran: «at once the visible projection surface for images and that
which prevents one from seeing the other side» (Derrida 1972: 350; my
translation). Derrida also suggests that the structure of this screen
mirror, this tain, entails that «it gives itself out as something that must
be broken, absolutely gone through en route to the true source towards
which it lures you for a mirror is not a source» (ibidem; my translation).


Between, vol. VIII, n. 16 (Novembre/ November 2018)
Héliane Ventura, The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen



Derrida tells us that to think of a mirror screen is to think about breaking
it or going through it, and it is this experience of going through the
mirror that I wish to pursue here.
      The experience of going through the looking glass is a recurrent one
in literature, it is an experience that a number of Alices have gone
through, starting with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and its
numerous filmic adaptations, one of the most interesting being arguably
Alice by Jan Svankmajer, moving to Lisa Genova’s Still Alice and finally
to Alice Munro, whose fugitive female characters seem to be embarked
on a journey of constant deterritorialisation. We find one such journey
in her story entitled “The Bear Came over the Mountain” first published
in The New Yorker (December 27, 1999 and January 3rd, 2000) before it
was anthologized under the same title in her tenth collection of stories,
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in 2001 and adapted for
the cinema, to great acclaim, by Sarah Polley in 2006 under a different,
shorter title extracted from the text: Away From Her. I would like to
concentrate first on the differences between the short story title and the
film title because they indicate axiological positions which are opposite
and testify to opposite interpretations of the story
      The short story title gives evidence of transemioticity because it
alludes to a well-known song from North American Folklore. The song
is entitled “The Bear Went over the Mountain”:

     The bear went over the mountain,
     The bear went over the mountain,
     The bear went over the mountain,
     To see what he could see.

     And what do you think he saw?
     And what do you think he saw?

     The other side of the mountain,
     The other side of the mountain,
     The other side of the mountain,
     Was all that he could see.



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                              Between, vol. VIII, n. 16 (Novembre/November 2018)



       This Folk Song reads like a morphological pun, a self-parodic play
on words, which relies on the opening up of expectations only to
frustrate curiosity with the platitude of a tautological closure. Because
of its contradictory relationship with language, I have elsewhere tried to
demonstrate the hypothesis that Munro’s recuperation of the folksong
in her title “The Bear Came over the Mountain” belonged in the tradition
of Nonsense as evidenced in the writings of Lewis Carroll and Lear, and
that, like Nonsense, it constituted a logician’s entertainment which
explores the limits but also the redeeming possibilities of language1.
       In this article, where I intend to demonstrate first that the story title
is in complete opposition to the film title, I wish to emphasize the refusal
to yield to emotion or become a prey to a sense of pain. This restraint
and spelling out of ordinariness in the story title stands in sharp contrast
to the sentimentality of the film title. In Away from her there is the sense
of a melodramatic parting which is heart-wrenching. In the short story
title, on the contrary, expression is reduced to tautology, and tautology
discourages melodrama. The other side of the mountain is the other side
of the mountain. The assertion is extremely sensible at the same time as
it refrains from conveying any type of supplementary information,
interpretation or judgement. It confirms the real world, the existence of
which is clearly posited: the other side of the mountain exists and the
bear has been able to find its location which is to be accepted as part and
parcel of the real world, but this real world is simultaneously questioned
because it is reduced to a self-parodic play on words. The
anthropomorphic bear indulges in a quest which reveals its self-
referential dimension: instead of killing the serpent or marrying the
king’s daughter, it comes up against “the other side of the mountain”
that is to say a self-reflexive textual construction which is the result of
the constraints of a particular fiction or self-parodic verse. The literal-
mindedness of Nonsense reinforces its fictional dimension, its being

     1 See
         – Héliane Ventura, “The Skald and the Goddess: A reading of ‘The
Bear Came over the Mountain’ by Alice Munro”, The Short Stories of Alice
Munro, Journal of the Short Story in English 55 (Autumn 2010): 173-185.



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Héliane Ventura, The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen



circumscribed by allusions to itself or to other texts. Munro multiplies
the indexes of fictionality in her own fiction and the title is a case in
point.
       In her adaptation for the screen, Sarah Polley has discarded the
allusion to Folklore. Her own title, Away from Her, is taken directly from
the male character’s discourse in the story, but it is a truncated version
of it. The sentence in the story reads: «He wanted never to be away from
her. She had the spark of life» (Munro 2001: 275). The story sentence
spells out desire, the film title spells out distress. The title of the short
story is a reference to a pun on words, which diminishes the corrosive
nature of the subject matter that is so say dementia; the title of the film
is close to despair and reinforces the pathetic nature of the disease
described. Through the intersemiotic recourse to folksong, the short
story tries to eliminate the differences between one side of the mountain
and the other that is to say it allusively undermines the differences
between the world of sanity and the world of senility.
       By discarding the title, the film discards the major trick used by
Munro to reconfigure the story of Fiona and Grant: as such it gives
evidence of what I have called in my own title the scandal of misprision.
By this, I do not mean that Sarah Polley’s transfer from page to screen is
a “tampering”, “an interference”, “a violation”, “a betrayal”, “a
deformation”, “a perversion” or “a desecration”2. I mean that her
transmedial performance is a misreading or a misprision which can be
regarded as having felicitous OR infelicitous results according to the
specific axiological code each viewer and reader applies to both works.
Harold Bloom went as far as suggesting, as early as 1982, that strong
misprision is the hallmark of a canonical interpretation:


     2 These words are listed by Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Adaptation
(2006). «In Robert Stam’s vivid terms: “infidelity resonates with overtones of
Victorian prudishness; betrayal evokes ethical perfidy; deformation implies
aesthetic disgust, violation calls to mind sexual violation; vulgarization con-
jures up class degradation; and desecration intimates a kind of religious sacri-
lege towards the sacred word (2000: 54)». (Hutcheon 2006: 85)



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        A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than
     a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender
     strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism.
     Texts that have single, reductive, simplistic meanings are
     themselves already necessarily weak misreadings of anterior texts.
     When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by
     producing other strong misreadings across several generations, we
     can and must accept its canonical status. (Bloom 1982: 285)

     We do not have the necessary distance from either Munro’s text or
Polley’s film to assess the forcefulness of the misreadings (mine
included) that have been operated. However, we can resort to the
concept of “intersemiotic translation” as derived from Jakobson to try
and assess the type of intermedial strategies both the writer and the film
director have used3.
     Take Munro first, since her work is the source text. In her story, she
introduces allusions to other stories – mainly Icelandic stories – with a
particular emphasis on one specific text: the Head Ransom by Snorri
Sturluson, which conspicuously speaks about the redeeming power of
poetry; but she also makes allusions to visual material. Grant offers
Fiona a book about Iceland: «a book of nineteenth-century watercolours
made by a lady traveller to Iceland» (Munro 299). This is a book I have
not been able to identify but Munro seems to be performing an
extremely tricky and clandestine literary allusion with this unspecified
reference. She presents this book as Grant’s response to the interest
Fiona has displayed for Iceland. Fiona is of Icelandic descent and she is
said to have read about William Morris’s trip to Iceland but never to
have travelled there herself. It so happens that at the time when William
Morris took his first trip to Iceland in 1871, he found himself in a
situation which is very much akin to Grant’s. He had been married with
Jane Burden for twelve years and his wife was having a liaison with
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris believed that emotions had to be


     3 “Intersemiotic translation (IT) or transmutation” is «an interpretation of
verbal signs by means of signs of non verbal sign system» (Jakobson 1959: 233).


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Héliane Ventura, The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen



followed where they might lead, but the affair pained him. Nevertheless,
he rented an Elizabethan house by the Thames, Kelmscott manor in
Oxfordshire in joint tenancy with Dante Gabriel Rossetti in part that
Rossetti could pursue his affair with Jane. By leaving for Iceland, Morris
left his wife and his friend to live together in Kelmscott (see Prichard
Henderson).
      No literary allusion in a work of art is innocent and the coincidence
between the similarity of Grant’s fate bearing witness to his wife’s
attachment to Aubrey and Morris leaving his house to his rival is not
fortuitous. Through the screened literary allusion deposited in the
silvering of her mirror-screen, Munro performs a complex act of
metaleptic expansion of an original kernel. The painful but fictional
betrayal performed by Fiona is reconfigured in a larger frame of
historical and mythological references to adultery. Around the
twentieth century fictional figure of Fiona are suggestively evoked the
passionate real lives of the pre-Raphaelites, whose main source of
inspiration were the Middle Ages and the Arthurian legends in which
adultery occupies pride of place. Adultery is logically necessary to the
whole notion of amour courtois and constitutes its foundation. With the
allusion to Morris’s trip to Iceland, and the name that she attributes to
her heroine whose mother was Icelandic, Munro is even going further
back into the history of adultery since she suggestively uses onomastics
to remind us of the ancient goddess of love, Freya, a goddess who, in
keeping with Venus and Aphrodite, is famous for her wanton amorous
conduct. Thus, with a single apparently contingent allusion to a book of
watercolours made by a lady traveller to Iceland, Munro conjures up
endless metaleptic ramifications which may naturally be carried even
further since she opens wide the gates for interpretation.
      The only completed easel painting that William Morris produced is
called “La Belle Iseult.” It is a portrait from 1858 of Jane Burden in
medieval dress. As highlighted by Frances Fowle: «The picture has been
identified in the past as Queen Guenevere, partly owing to the fact that
Morris published his first volume of poetry, The Defence of Guenevere, in
March 1858. However, recent research has established convincingly that
the picture is intended to represent Iseult mourning Tristan’s exile from


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the court of King Mark» (Fowle2000). The clandestine references to
Guinevere and Iseult clearly tie in with the situation Fiona finds herself
in. She is married to Grant in the same way Guinevere is married to King
Arthur, and Iseult to King Mark, but she is courted by Aubrey as they
are by Tristan and Lancelot.
      Through this deployment of latent references related to the lives of
emblematic characters in the history of British Arts in the 19th century
and directly connected to Grant and Fiona’s circumstances, there is little
doubt that Munro is playing with a screen that is very much like a tain:
it holds in reserve and it exposes to view the similarities between the
personal lives of ordinary characters in twentieth century Canada and
those of eminent artists and thinkers in Victorian Britain. Munro
conflates places, telescopes time, fuses characters.
      Through this highly duplicitous mirror effect, she broadens the
scope of her enquiry into infinity because the superimposition of a
twentieth century fiction upon a nineteenth century reality erases the
frontiers between personal history, collective history and myth. Munro
historicizes fiction and fictionalizes reality and she also mythologizes
everyday life. She transforms the senile wife of a retired Canadian
academic from a peripheric university into a pre-Raphaelite Muse, who
herself successively embodies the legendary wives of the most
celebrated kings in the Medieval history of the Western world.
       The process of reconfiguration of the self through the ages has
been completely by-passed by Canadian criticism and seems to have
been equally disregarded by Sarah Polley. Polley discards the allusion
to the American folksong in the title, she dismisses the allusions to
British Pre-Raphaelite painters, and the Western concept of courtly love
they evidenced in their Medieval paintings; she also disregards the
reference that is made in Munro’s story to the Head Ransom by Snorri
Sturluson, in the same way she disregards the allusion to the book of
watercolours by the lady traveller to Iceland. Instead of references to the
United States, Britain or Iceland, she makes marked references to
Canada and Canadian writers, with for example a shot on the cover of
the book by Alistair McCleod No Great Mischief, and a scene in which
Grant reads to Fiona a poem by Michael Ondaatje, “The Cinnamon


                                                                            7
Héliane Ventura, The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen



Peeler’s Wife”. In Polley’s adaptation, the transvaluation of values
performed by Munro has been almost completely dismissed to the
benefit of the inscription of Canadianness. The short story eliminates
references to Canada, the film is rooted in Canada, with Canadian flags
sprouting up on screen.
      Despite this major misprision of Munro’s desire to universalize her
setting and her story, the type of adaptation performed by Polley, which
is also based on transmediality, paradoxically captures some of the very
same universality achieved by Munro. Within her filmic frame Polley
introduces references to novels and poems and even non-filmic images.
More specifically she introduces drawings which can be either pen or
pencil or ink or charcoal or conté crayon drawings. I am first indebted
to Sandro Bernardi from the University of Florence for pointing out this
major intersemiotic translation and, starting from his own interpretation
of the drawings, and the felicity of their inclusion, I would like to try and
tie together Munro and Polley’s strategies.
      Bernardi compares two types of images Polley has used to conjure
up a portrait of Fiona: the filmic image of Fiona when she was a young
girl and the drawings that Aubrey produces of her in the retirement
home. Bernardi suggests that the drawings are more authentic than the
filmic images because they allow the unconscious to begin to express
itself. The drawings, according to him, allow the return of the repressed
in a manner that is worthy of Freud’s Gradiva. I subscribe to this
interpretation but I also think that the filmic image displays a certain
amount of latency and I would like to link both the filmic images and
the drawings to Warburg’s concept of Nachleben. In L’Image Survivante
Histoire de l’Art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Didi Huberman
alludes to the mythopoeic power that is encapsulated in images and he
reminds us of their primitive and pagan efficacy. Quoting Edgar Wind,
he tells us that «all attempt at suppressing the link that image has with
religion and poetry, with cult and drama is like draining it of its
lifeblood» (Wind quoted by Didi-Huberman 2002: 50; my translation).
Images are iconic: liturgical. They belong in church ritual. They make us
enter another temporality, that of Nachleben, or Nachleben der Antike, a
formula which summarizes the warburgian enterprise in its link with


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traces and imprints and the resurgence in actuality of a far removed
past.
      By endowing Aubrey with a talent to draw, Sarah Polley
surprisingly echoes the screened Morris-Rosetti-Burden configuration
which had remained latent in Munro’s story as if she had unconsciously
taken into account the role of muse that Munro had attributed to Fiona
and as if she wanted to articulate what Munro had left unspoken. In an
even more surprising manner, at the same time, as Polley makes room
for the unconscious resurgence of a screened allusion, she allows the
more individual past to surface again. Aubrey has known Fiona when
she was a young girl, and the portrait he draws of her now harks back
to the time when she was fifty years younger. The portrait conflates the
woman of today whose face is lined and wrinkled with the young girl
whose hair was gently dancing in the wind.
      Warburg borrows from Richard Semon the concept of engramme
d’énergie to articulate the idea that every event which affects the human
being deposits a trace in his memory, a trace called “engramme” which
he describes as the reproduction of an original (Didi- Huberman 2002:
241). Fiona’s face today bears the trace of the original young girl Aubrey
fell in love with but it also bears the trace of the goddess of love whose
name is embedded in hers through paronomasia. Fiona is the
reproduction of Freya, the Norse goddess of love, and there is a
haunting quality in the image drawn by Aubrey. The dancing girl of
yesteryear beckons to us in the same way she does in the filmic image of
the elderly Fiona. Of the elderly Fiona looking at Grant, Munro says:
«She stared at him for a moment as if waves of wind had come beating
into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags»
(Munro 2001: 284). Dementia and the process of aging dislocate and
destroy Fiona’s integrity, but there remains in her look a formula of
pathos, the memory of Ninfa, of Gradiva, of Freya; there is a rhythm of
recurrence, a dynamogram from antiquity that returns in
contemporaneity, there is an anachronic contretemps which is not the
return of the same but embodies the very principle of returning.
Deleuze says: «Dans l’expression éternel retour nous faisons un
contresens quand nous comprenons retour du même. Ce n’est pas l’être


                                                                            9
Héliane Ventura, The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen



qui revient, mais le revenir lui-même constitue l’être en tant qu’il
s’affirme du devenir et de ce qui passe. Ce n’est pas l’un qui revient,
mais le revenir lui-même est l’un qui s’affirme du divers ou du multiple»
(Deleuze 1962: 54-55).
      The multiplicity of being which is asserted through the principle of
return finds a surprising illustration both in Munro’s text and in Polley’s
adaptation. I would go as far as saying that in the visual and textual
portraits of Fiona that are given to us, the return of the repressed or the
return of Antiquity has to be understood literally. It is not only the
Goddess Freya, the Venus of the North, who returns under the
emaciated traits of the elderly woman; it is perhaps the phantom of the
Walkyrie Brunhild herself. Brunhild has exchanged solemn vows with
Sigurd, but Sigurd has drunk a philter and forgotten the fierce virgin to
whom he was betrothed. He has broken his vow and married Gudrun
which eventually unleashes Brunhild’s despair, furor and destruction.
Through a screen mirror filled with latent and inverted images, it is
possible that both writer and film director have unknowingly and
unwittingly provided their readership and spectatorship with the
female inverted version of Sigurd. Like the Norse hero, Fiona has drunk
the bitter philter of a degenerative disease and she has forgotten her
vows. She has reached that point of oblivion when the fact of being
married to Grant has escaped her, but she has not married Aubrey and
she is not destroying everything around her. Unlike the heroine from
the Icelandic Saga, Fiona is simply trying to repair her grammar: «You
could have just driven away» she said; «Just driven away without a care
in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me; Forsaken». Unwittingly or
unknowingly, both Polley and Munro seem to assert the reparative
dimension of language. They mix together the positive ending of the
Head Ransom, in which the skaldic poet is saved because of the beauty of
his verse, and the negative ending of the Volsung saga, in which a
broken vow leads to destruction by fire, to provide us in the end with an
ambivalent and ironic vision of love the redeemer conjoined to love the
destroyer, both surfacing through the silvering of the inverted and
transformative mirror that Munro holds up to nature.



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                             Works cited
Bernardi, Sandro. Oral Presentation of the Film “Away from Her”, Flor-
    ence, 10 November 2007.
Bloom Harold, Agon Towards a Theory of Revisionism, Oxford, Oxford
    University Press, 1982.
Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche et la philosophie, Paris, PUF, 1962.
Derrida, Jacques, La Dissémination, Paris, Seuil, 1972.
Didi-Huberman, George. L’image survivante Histoire de l’art et temps des
    fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Paris, Minuit, 2002.
Fowle, Frances, « La Belle Iseult » https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-
    works/morris-la-belle-iseult-n04999
Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, New York, Routledge, 2006.
Jakobson, Roman, “On linguistic aspects of translation”, On translation,
    Ed. Brower R., Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press: 232-239.
McGill, Robert, “No Nation but Adaptation ‘The Bear Came over the
    Mountain,’ Away from Her, and What It Means to Be Faithful”, Ca-
    nadian Literature 197 (Summer 2008): 98-111.
Munro, Alice, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Toronto,
    McClelland and Stewart, 2001.
Pritchard Henderson, Philip, William Morris, Encyclopaedia Britannica,
    https://www.britannica.com/biography/william-morris-british-art-
    ist-and-author/
Ventura, Héliane, “The Skald and the Goddess: A reading of ‘The Bear
    Came over the Mountain’ by Alice Munro”, The Short Stories of Alice
    Munro, Journal of the Short Story in English 55 (Autumn 2010): 173-
    185.




                                                                           11
Héliane Ventura, The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen




                                  The author
       Héliane Ventura

Héliane Ventura is Professor at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès.
Her area of specialization is the postcolonial short story with a special
eye on the re-writing of myths from Antiquity and the relationship
between word and image. More recently she has devoted her work to
literary migrations from Europe to North America and early narratives
on Aboriginal people as well as by Aboriginal authors from Canada.
Among many publications on Alice Munro, she has edited The Short
Stories of Alice Munro issue 55 of The Journal of Short Story in English (2010)
and authored Alice Munro: The Dance of Happy Shades (2015).

       Email: heliane.ventura@wanadoo.fr




                                   The paper
Date sent: 31/05/2018
Date accepted: 31/10/2018
Date published: 30/11/2018



                        How to quote this paper
Héliane, Ventura, “The Scandal of Misprision: Alice Munro on Screen.
“The Bear Came over the Mountain” and Away from Her”, Schermi.
Rappresentazioni, immagini, transmedialità, Eds. F. Agamennoni, M. Rima,
S. Tani, Between, VIII.16 (2018), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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