Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation
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(Guest post by Pamela Painter)
Yes, we have the musings and dreams of Hamlet, and Raskolnikov, and Scrooge, Katherine in Wuthering Heights, and Offred’s dreams and nightmares in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was the use of a dream in an Alice Munro story that provided the solution to an impasse in one of my own stories.
I was writing a long story about a couple who goes to the Cape for two weeks to try and repair their marriage. But clearly they first have to acknowledge why their marriage is in need of repair. Early on, Carson, the narrator, recalls that he did an unforgivable thing—he had an affair with his wife’s sister. They both regretted the affair, and after two stress-filled years, they ended it, still friends. Several years later, when Deidre was dying, she made Carson promise never to tell Juliet, his wife, because Deidre would not be there to plead for her sister’s forgiveness. He needs to confess to Juliet, but he feels that he can’t betray the vow he made to the dying Deidre, so he had a meaningless fling in order to have something to confess. Carson suspects, however, that his lover did indeed break her vow and told Juliet of their affair. He is desperate to know the truth, to know what he “knows” in his heart. But how? How do characters reveal the hidden parts of their lives—truths they have kept even from themselves.
Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which appears in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, gave me the key to this problem—though our narrators are made up of different stuff. Munro’s story is told from the POV of a husband who also strayed, but he would like us to think “never too far.” Early in the story, he refers to an affair with one woman, and at another time recalls that some of Fiona’s made-up voices “…had mimicked uncannily the voices of women of his that she had never met or known about.” Grant’s reference to one affair, and the casual “women of his,” however, doesn’t reveal the extent or seriousness of his philandering. Meanwhile, he goes about his solitary days, missing Fiona, who is now ensconced at Meadowlake, a care facility, and looking forward to seeing her after the obligatory separation of a month. There is a white space, and the story continues:
In a dream Grant showed a letter to one of his colleagues whom he had thought of as a friend. The letter was from the roommate of a girl he had not thought of for a while. Its style was sanctimonious and hostile, threatening in a whining way—he put the writer down as a latent lesbian. The girl herself was someone he had parted from decently, and it seemed unlikely that she would want to make a fuss, let alone try to kill herself, which was what the letter was apparently, elaborately, trying to tell him.
The dream portrays the colleague as someone who used to sleep with students and had married one, but now “took a dim view of such shenanigans.” He tells Grant that he should “prepare Fiona”—presumably for the possibility of the young girl’s suicide. Grant goes off to tell Fiona, but instead finds himself in a lecture theater, where he is met by the bitter stares of a row of young women all dressed in black, and “all in mourning.” Fiona, who had turned her first row into a corner similar to those she found at parties, is untroubled: “Oh, phooey,” Fiona said. “Girls that age are always going around talking about how they’ll kill themselves.” The dream ends with Grant thinking this: “He was afraid that she was wrong, that something terrible had happened, and he saw what she could not—that the black ring was thickening, drawing in, all around his windpipe, all around the top of the room.”
There is another white space, and the story continues.
He hauled himself out of the dream and set about separating what was real from what was not.
There had been a letter, and the word “RAT” had appeared in black paint on his office door, and Fiona, on being told that a girl had suffered from a bad crush on him, had said pretty much what she said in the dream. The colleague hadn’t come into it, the black-robed women had never appeared in his classroom, and nobody had committed suicide.
Grant goes on to acknowledge the numerous affairs he’s had over the years, but “the shame he felt then was the shame of being duped, of not having noticed the change that was going on.”
In the past the woman had been available, but somewhere along the way, the women maintained that they were “helpless and bewildered, and they had been injured by the whole thing rather than delighted. Even when they had taken the initiative they had done so only because the cards were stacked against them.” As he continues to “interpret” his dream, Grant remains blind to his misogyny and casual homophobia. He laments that he has not been given credit for his “acts of kindness and generosity and even sacrifice.” But even as he continues his self-justification he is moving closer to the final truth of the dream. He relates how he’s been careful in his affairs, and “never had any intention of throwing up work and marriage and taking to the country to practice carpentry or keep bees.
“But something like that happened after all. He took an early retirement with a reduced pension.”
So, through “separating what was real from what was not,” Grant’s dream becomes the fulcrum of the story. I was stunned by his admission, parsimonious as it is, that “something like that happened after all.” Clearly, his affairs were more than just shenanigans, because they resulted in serious repercussions: early retirement, a reduced pension, and a retreat to the farm Fiona inherited from her parents. Grant has unwittingly revealed the sad truth of his life, something he would have been able to avoid if he hadn’t had his dream. But even then, Grant is the same self-serving Grant as he sums up the effects of their move:
There were no more hectic flirtations. No bare female toes creeping up under a man’s pants leg at a dinner party. No more loose wives.
Just in time, Grant was able to think, when the sense of injustice wore down. The feminists and perhaps the sad silly girl herself and his cowardly so-called friends had pushed him out just in time. Out of a life that was in fact getting to be more trouble than it was worth. And that might have eventually have cost him Fiona.
He is still deceiving himself, but not the reader. And his comeuppance is at hand, as Fiona “leaves him” for another man.
I didn’t finish Munro’s story that day, but went straight to my own story, “Ways to Spend the Night.” I didn’t approve of Carson’s affairs—the affairs, as writer, I gave him—but I liked him as a character and I wanted to help him understand and remedy his situation. Remember, he is in anguish over his affair with his wife’s sister, and suspects that his heartsick wife actually knows about it. I gave Carson a dream. I write,
Suddenly with a vengeance, Carson’s nightmare from the last hour blossomed in his mind. In it, Deidre was dying in Mass General Hospital. Juliet was off somewhere and Carson had gone alone to visit Deidre. When he tiptoed into room 312, Deidre was wearing a red-sequined gown that kept snagging on her white hospital blanket. Holding out her thin arms to Carson, she announced that she’d made a miraculous recovery and was ready to resume their affair…. “I’ve ordered a queen-size and a hot tub. We won’t have to wait long.” Carson remembered being terrified that Juliet was going to appear any moment and discover their affair, and sure enough, her high heels were soon clicking down the hall toward them, her arms full of Carson’s clothes. The two sisters watched in their usual complicit amusement as Carson struggled to fit his suits and jackets into the room’s narrow metal closet. He realized that they must have flipped a coin for him. With a tiny dance step and wave Juliet left. Whispering his name, Deidre held out her red-sequined arms to Carson and at that point he’d woken up, chilled and sweating, pathetically relieved that it had been only a dream….But Carson’s relief drained away as he faced the dream’s kernel of truth.
And the truth is that of course Deidre told her sister about their affair even though they had vowed to each other never to tell. His newly realized knowledge permeates the story. Then toward the end Juliet says, “My sister told me everything, so I know.” And Carson thinks, “He knew it was true—from his nightmare—that his affair with Deidre was clearly a matter of record, but he hadn’t been ready to know it. Even though Juliet’s visit to the hospital to deliver his clothes had been so straightforward. Then Juliet told Carson she wanted him back. “Deidre didn’t trust you. But she said I should. So I will, if you tell me to. And so he told her.” Truth set them both free.
Our dreams, and also our nightmares, have long been recognized as rich repositories of repressed truths, disappointments, fears and desires, all ours to interpret—or not. This can also be true for our characters, as Munro elegantly demonstrates, and as writers we should allow them the same access to their interior lives that we use to navigate our own.
Pamela Painter is the author of four story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award Award for First Fiction, The Long and Short of It, Wouldn’t You Like to Know and Ways to Spend the Night. She is also the co-author with Anne Bernays of the widely-used textbook, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Five Points, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Matter Press, New Flash Fiction Review, Ploughshares and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, From Blues to Bop: A Collection of Jazz Fiction, MicroFiction, Nothing Short of 100, Love Stories for Our Time, and New Micro. She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction. Painter’s stories have been presented on NPR, and on stage by Stage Turner, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, and in Los Angeles, New York City and London by Cedering Fox’s Word Theatre Company. Two stories, “God” and “Office at Night” appear on well-known artist Anthony Russo’s YouTube channel CRONOGO.
Painter was one of three founding editors of the print literary journal, StoryQuarterly. Beginning in the late 80s, Painter was perhaps the first writer to teach a workshop entirely devoted to the short short story at Emerson College in Boston. Painter is one of five Founding Donors of the Flash Fiction Archive, established in 2020 at the Harry Ransom Center at UC Austin, Texas. She donated holdings from her collection of the work of Kathy Fish, Diane Williams, Laura Van den Berg, among other flash writers.
“Ways to Spend the Night” appeared first as an Amazon Short, was reprinted in the collection Ways to Spend the night, and appears in Painter’s new collection of stories, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories, due out from Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2020.