\nby Alice Munro<\/span>
\nfrom\u00a0Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
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When “Floating Bridge” begins, Jinny is flirting with the idea of leaving her husband. She’s not leaving him because she has found something better. She’s leaving him out of anger. To most Neal likely appears to be a good man. He engages in social causes and reaches out to troubled youth. He does this sometimes, though, by neglecting Jinny. This is what brought on her first attempt to escape: she has made a gingerbread cake for a meeting, but Neal and his Young Offenders have eaten the whole thing. So she leaves and gets as far as the bus stop. There she looks at the messages written by others — mostly vulgar messages — and recognizes an urge to express herself:<\/p>\n She felt herself connected at present with the way people felt when they had to write certain things down — she was connected by her feelings of anger, or petty outrage.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n She isn’t even at the bus stop long enough for Neal to recognize what has happened. Eventually this episode — a serious episode, where she was driven to get up and walk out to the unknown . . . even if just for a time — becomes a humorous part of their past.<\/p>\n Some years later (I don’t know how long), Jinny finds herself in a surprising state. She’s forty-two years old and has cancer. Neal, fifty-six, is taking care of her. While she’d always imagined, particularly due to the difference in age, that she’d be taking care of him, she nevertheless finds herself in another situation that could lead to an escape into the unknown. Part of her wants this. Indeed, she feels an “unspeakable excitement” because the “galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility for your own life.”<\/p>\n With the theme of escape and return established, Munro proceeds to show us Jinny at her sickest and most depressed — it happens to be on a day where she has received some potentially good news: she might live.<\/p>\n On that day, Neal has brought on board another troubled youth. The young Helen, who is a bit crass, and understandably so given her past, will help look after Jinny. But, as he’s done in the past, Neal spends all of his energetic attention on Helen and not on Jinny, eventually taking a significant detour in the hot sun so that Jinny can get her shoes at her foster parents’ home. Jinny feels terrible, but as she waits in the car while Neal charms the family with his good will, we understand that this is not just a bad day physically. Again, she’s been told that her body is responding positively to treatment. The doctor sees room for cautious optimism. Having been resigned to death — looking forward to it, even, as an escape — Jinny can hardly bear the thought of returning again.<\/p>\n This takes us to the story’s rather lovely and surprising conclusion. Ricky, a young man who lives at this home, returns from work and offers to take Jinny home. He can see she’s not happy and he is aware that she’d like to leave though her husband is in the home still. So he drives her but takes a different route, one that allows him to show off a floating bridge.<\/p>\n The imagery at the end is striking: Jinny stands on the end, under the stars, and the water is black as can be. The bridge floats up and down underneath her. It may seem obvious, and it’s been done before, but there’s something lovely about this image that is uniquely Munro’s. I think it’s because of the scene at the bus stop. We’ve already seen Jinny on the edge of something precarious before returning to something more established, to a more stable foundation, perhaps to her detriment. And here she is, under the stars, contemplating her future while her husband is likely getting his fortune told back at the new nurse’s home.<\/p>\n I’m still working out just what all of this means to me, and whether it’s a story that will stick or not. In some ways, it feels quite simple, strait forward, but there is a lot going on that complicates things. Neal, for example; it would be easy to look at him as the selfish brute — Jinny certainly does at times — but she also has tenderness toward him, as shown when she imagines herself holding his dead hand. Indeed, her tenderness toward him reminds her of her own desire to feel his tenderness toward her. It makes her wonder if he would feel the same way.<\/p>\n The precarious, but beautiful, floating bridge gives her some comfort.<\/p>\n Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n 1<\/p>\n \u201cFloating Bridge\u201d belongs to a group of Munro stories which use an unusual physical feature to govern and expand the story. Other stories such as \u201cDulse,\u201d \u201cLichen,\u201d \u201cGravel,\u201d \u201cAxis,\u201d and \u201cDeep Holes\u201d come to mind. The setting of the final scene of \u201cFloating Bridge\u201d involves uncertain footing over a responsive earth, the sight of stars reflected in the ancient tea-colored bog water, and the hum of the living earth.<\/p>\n \u201cFloating Bridge\u201d also addresses the necessity for running away, which is a repeating theme in Munro. The present story juxtaposes the idea of a floating bridge against ideas of jail and captivity, as well as concepts of past, present, and future.<\/p>\n Primarily, the floating bridge provides a frame for the access that people have for escape from captivity, especially in the sense that “being in the moment” provides both a bridge to the universal and an escape from the futility of dreaming about the future or trying to fix the past. The story does not preclude the idea that actually running away is sometimes a physical necessity, but the story does explore the mental landscape of a woman who does not yet fully understand her situation. While she might not be in physical danger, she must come to recognize that she is in emotional peril. Before she can actually escape, she must first realize that escape is necessary.<\/p>\n 2<\/p>\n Neal is a cracked version of the more nearly real saints that Munro has created: Billy Doud, the aunts, Violet, and Enid. Neal would probably be at ease describing himself as a savior of young men and women, working as he does with young offenders and waging campaigns to save rivers and lands from human spoilage. Jinny, who is either his wife or partner, sees him as the embodiment of power. The reader, however, gets the distinct feeling that Neal abuses his power. He belittles his students in private, he uses them to do his chores at his house, he appears to periodically fall in love with one or another of them, and he is distinctly abusive of his dying wife. Not only does he appear to have picked out a \u201cnurse\u201d for Jinny\u2019s last days with whom he has already begun an affair, or with whom he intends to begin one, he is also capable of refusing to take his wife directly home after a grueling oncology appointment. He also, that same day, leaves her sitting in a car that is as hot as Hades so he can cool off with a beer inside an air conditioned trailer, basking in the idea that he is saving the people\u2019s foster child by taking her on as a nurse. Images of jail and forced captivity pervade the story, and Neal, rather than being a savior, appears to be the kind of lover who enjoys and is excited by the immense power of playing the role of master. He reminds me of the mesmerizing young man in \u201cBaptizing\u201d (see here<\/a>) who almost drowns Del in a fight when he attempts to baptize her. Neal\u2019s power appeals to Jinny and makes her very angry at the same time. The reader wonders what brought young Jinny to a man so much older than she.<\/p>\n 3<\/p>\n At 42, Jinny has had cancer for a year, has had an operation and chemo, and has received a premature death sentence. One of the problems in the story is that Jinny welcomes the prospect of death.<\/p>\n And yet — an excitement. The unspeakable excitement you feel when a galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility\u00a0 your own life. Then for shame you must compose yourself and stay very quiet.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n On the one hand, the reader perceives that Neal is a kind of jailor-savior, and on the other, what the reader notices about Jinny herself is her absolute devotion to reserve, amiability, and silence. Note that the bus stop where she waits a while is like a jail cell, and the cornfield is also. To this reader, however, it is Ginny\u2019s silence, however, that is the real jail.<\/p>\n She is so filled with a unexpressed and jailed anger that she resents the nickname someone gives her of a being a Nice Nellie. Even so, she doubts the legitimacy of her own anger. She wonders if her own outrage about her situation with Neal is justifiable or \u201cpetty.\u201d The reader wonders if Jinny has been taught that swallowing her own anger is the prime \u201cresponsibility\u201d she bears in life.<\/p>\n The reader particularly notes silent Jinny\u2019s remark to herself:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Hateship-Loveship.jpg?resize=343%2C530\")
Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n
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