you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
Though Atwood’s poetry has been overshadowed, perhaps inevitably, by her prose fiction, Atwood brings to her poetry the identical sharp, acerbic eye and ear, and the identical commingling of the tragic and the farcical, that have characterized her most ambitious fiction; her prevailing concerns (sexual politics, the endangered environment), foregrounded in the cautionary dystopias The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake (2003) are sounded decades before in such mordant, bleakly funny poems as “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy” (excerpted):
Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mâché cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,
you are innocent as a bathtub
full of bullets.
Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets
and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching in the sunset.
The Animals in That Country (1968)
Curiously, and ironically, the book that in 1972 catapulted the young author to such unexpected celebrity has never been published in any country outside Canada: this is Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. (Now published in a revised edition by McClelland & Stewart, Survival was originally published by the small Toronto-based press House of Anansi as one in a series of “self-help guides” to help defray the costs of literary publishing.) Conceived as an “easy-access” book for the use of high school and college instructors of Canadian literature (a category that, in 1972, scarcely existed and was more likely to arouse derision than admiration), Survival is, as its subtitle indicates, not a survey of Canadian literature, not an evaluation of distinctive Canadian texts, nor a compendium of histories and biographies, but a taxonomy outlining “a number of key patterns [intended to] function like the field markings in bird-books: they will help you distinguish this species from all others.” Atwood’s methodology follows that of such influential critical theorists of the time as Leslie Fiedler, Perry Miller, and Northrop Frye whose student Atwood had been at the University of Toronto; her intention in Survival is to identify “a series of characteristics and leitmotifs, and a comparison of the varying treatments of them in different national and cultural environments.”
Immensely readable, entertaining, and insightful, a treasure trove for non-Canadian readers to whom such gifted Canadian poets and writers as Susanna Moodie, Margaret Avison, Margaret Laurence, Sheila Watson, Graeme Gibson, Jay Macpherson, E. J. Pratt, Tom Wayman, A. M. Klein, Anne Hébert, Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Claire Blais, Earle Birney, Sinclair Ross, Austin Clarke, W. O. Mitchell, and numerous others are likely not to be well known, Survival exudes a schoolgirl zest and playfulness rarely found in works of literary criticism, as unique in its way as D. H. Lawrence’s brilliantly cranky Studies in Classic American Literature. In her opening chapter Atwood ventures the “sweeping generalization” that each country or culture has a single dominant symbol at its core, notably The Frontier (America), The Island (England), and Survival, or la Survivance (Canada):
Our central [Canadian] idea is one which generates, not the excitement and sense of adventure or danger which The Frontier holds out, not the smugness and/or sense of security, or everything in its place, which The Island can offer, but an almost intolerable anxiety. Our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it but of those who made it back from the awful experience—the North, the snowstorm, the sinking ship—that killed everyone else. The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival.
Atwood divides her material into thematic categories that suggest an ambitious course syllabus: “Nature the Monster,” “Animal Victims,” “First People: Indians and Eskimos as Symbols,” “Ancestral Totems: Explorers, Settlers,” “The Casual Incident of Death: Futile Heroes, Unconvincing Martyrs and Other Bad Ends,” “Ice Women vs. Earth Mothers,” and, particularly appropriate in 1972 when sales of most Canadian literary novels and volumes of poetry were minuscule, “The Paralyzed Artist.” (Born in 1939, Margaret Atwood began her career like most Canadian writers of the era: traveling the vast country giving readings and toting cardboard boxes of her own books to sell afterward since there wasn’t likely to be a bookstore to supply them.) That Canadian writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Carol Shields, and Atwood herself would one day acquire critical and commercial success outside Canada could not have been predicated in a culture in which the expression “World-famous in Canada” was always good for a laugh; and in which, in academic and literary circles, it was taken for granted that the work of Canadian writers did not constitute a “literature” since it was merely colonial, derivative, and third-rate. One can see how traditional academics were roused to indignation by a “mere chit of a girl” not only venturing into their territory but approaching their subject with such panache and vernacular directness:
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Canada as a whole is a victim, or an “oppressed minority,” or “exploited.” Let us suppose that Canada is a colony…
If Canada is a collective victim, it should pay some attention to the Basic Victim Positions…
Position One: To deny the fact that you are a victim…
Position Two: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate, the Will of God, the dictates of Biology (in the case of women, for instance), the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other large general powerful idea.
Position Three: To acknowledge the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption that the role is inevitable.
Position Four: To be a creative non-victim.
Much in Survival remains provocative and illuminating, as in Atwood’s discussion of the paralysis of the artist lacking an audience (“He is blocked, he is like a man shouting to no one”) and in the chapter “Animal Victims” in which animal figures in the literatures of Britain, America, and Canada are compared:
It is true that stories ostensibly about animals appear in British literature; but…the animals in them are really, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, Englishmen in furry zippered suits, often with a layer of human clothing added on top…
Animals appear in American literature minus clothes and the ability to speak English, but seldom are they the center of the action. Rather they are its goal, as these “animal stories” are in fact hunting stories…American animal stories are quest stories—with the Holy Grail being a death—usually successful from the hunter’s point of view, though not from the animal’s; as such they are a comment on the general imperialism of the American cast of mind.
[Canadian] animal stories are far from being success stories. They are invariably failure stories, ending with the death of the animal; but this death, far from being the accomplishment of a quest, to be greeted with rejoicing, is seen as tragic or pathetic, because the stories are told from the point of view of the animal.
Published in the same year as Survival, and seemingly written with the predominant themes of the “guide” to Canadian literature in mind, Atwood’s lyric, quasi-mystical second novel Surfacing drew a good deal of attention, not all of it sympathetic. By the standards of Atwood’s carefully researched, multi-layered and often multi-narrated later novels, Surfacing is a slighter work, at times almost parable-like, or diagrammatic, in its structure: the pilgrimage of an unnamed, wounded and self-deluded young woman narrator to enlightenment in a remote wilderness setting. In this paradigm of a feminist “quest” novel, Atw
ood’s emotionally repressed narrator travels with her laconic lover and a singularly disagreeable married couple to a lakeside cabin in northern Quebec, where she’d come with her family as a child; the narrator’s friends are filmmakers, but her purpose in journeying to the cabin is to search for her missing father, who seems to have vanished into the wilderness. In the course of this minutely introspective novel, in which the protagonist examines herself as one might examine a biological specimen, she comes to terms with her distorted and self-lacerating memories: the humiliation of a failed love affair, the trauma of an abortion. Journeying into northern Quebec would seem to mimic a journey into the heart of darkness if by “darkness” is meant the demons of the self, imagined as ghosts, as in a vision of her aborted fetus glimpsed in a dive into the lake:
It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead.
The release of this blocked memory empowers the narrator to resist her lover’s crude demands for quick sex:
I didn’t want him in me, sacrilege, he was one of the killers, the clay victims damaged and strewn behind him, and he hadn’t seen, he didn’t know about himself, his own capacity for death.
What is most compelling about Surfacing isn’t the self-absorbed, rather generic young-woman narrator but the wilderness setting Atwood so vividly evokes, clearly a memorialization of the wilderness site to which her entomologist father took her and his family while Atwood was growing up: the small, simply constructed cabin where “there were always books,”2 the nearby lake, the endless, intriguing and unfathomable forest in which one could become hopelessly lost. It’s a setting that reverberates in Atwood’s fiction, with the power of recalled emotion, in stories like “Hurricane Hazel” and “In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain” (Bluebeard’s Egg, 1983), and the spooky “Death by Landscape” (Wilderness Tips, 1991) in which the wilderness setting is a girls’ camp that provides the background for an unnerving episode in a young girl’s life, from which she never fully recovers.
Where nature is sacred, the violation and exploitation of nature are sacrilege. Surfacing casts a cold, furious eye upon star-spangled intruders from south of the Canadian border: “Bloody fascist pig Yanks.” The pristine wilderness is vulnerable to invasion by American appropriation—“Rotten capitalist bastards”—and by direct assault, as in this encounter with American fishermen:
American flag at the front and another at the back, two irritated-looking businessmen with pug-dog faces and nifty outfits and a thin shabby man from the village, guiding…
“Getting any?” one of the Americans yells, teeth bared, friendly as a shark…
The other American throws his cigar over the side. “This don’t look like much of a place,” he says.
As Atwood’s narrator ruefully recalls: “We used to think that [Americans] were harmless and funny and inept and faintly lovable, like President Eisenhower.” Now, American crassness conjoined with American ingenuity inspires paranoia in the Canadian male:
“They’re running out of water, clean water, they’re dirtying up all of theirs, right? Which is what we have a lot of, this country is almost all water if you look at a map. So in a while, I give it ten years, they’ll be up against the wall. They’ll try to swing a deal with the government, get us to give them the water cheap or for nothing…and the government will give in, they’ll be a bunch of puppets as usual. But by then the Nationalist Movement will be strong enough so they’ll force the government to back down; riots or kidnappings or something. Then the Yank pigs will send in the Marines.”
Atwood’s narrator would seem to speak for Atwood herself in such melancholy observations:
In the bay the felled trees and numbered posts showed where the surveyors had been, power company. My country, sold or drowned, a reservoir; the people were sold along with the land and the animals, a bargain, sale, solde. Les soldes they called them, sellouts…
So virulent is Canadian outrage against imperialist America, even those rapacious individuals who are in fact Canadians, not Americans, are Americans:
But they’d killed the heron…It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, my head said, they’re still Americans, they’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference…If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do.
It’s significant that Atwood’s two most bleakly pessimistic novels, the dystopias The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, are set on American soil, if not precisely in the “United States” by the time of Oryx and Crake, set sometime in the near future, the rapacious Americans of Surfacing have morphed into an entire race:
Human society…was a sort of monster, its main byproducts being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain. It was like a giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet, grinding up life on earth and shitting it out the backside in the form of manufactured and soon-to-be-obsolete plastic junk.
Surfacing, published more than thirty years before Oryx and Crake, ends with a mystical immersion of its heroine in nature, and an ecstatic revelation of the primacy of her female, daughterly identity. Having hidden from her friends to remain alone at the lake, the narrator experiences a derangement of the senses of a benign, Jungian sort: she “sees” the ghost of her dead mother, as her mother would have been “thirty years ago, before I was born,” and imagines her mother as one of several blue jays; yet more dramatically, she “sees” her mysteriously missing father, and understands what has become of him:
His job was wrong, he was really a surveyor, he learned the trees, naming and counting them so the others could level and excavate…He is standing near the fence with his back to me, looking in at the garden…He has realized that he was an intruder; the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations; now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love…I see now that although it isn’t my father it is what my father has become. I knew he wasn’t dead.
Set in the near future, in a fundamentalist-Christian totalitarian state called the Republic of Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale retains the ease and intimacy of the first-person narration of Surfacing but is far more ambitious and provocative in scope. Originally published in 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale is now, appropriately for our times, reissued, with a thoughtful introduction by Valerie Martin that notes that the novel was conceived out of Atwood’s alarm at the frequency with which she heard, from her American friends, the facile expression “It can’t happen here” in response to Atwood’s accounts of “excursions into the darker side of religious fanaticism in Iran and Afghanistan.” Atwood’s ongoing views of the cultural contrasts between her native Canada and its “starspangled” neighbor underlie the grim, punitive puritanism of the Republic of Gilead:
The founding Puritans had wanted their society to be a theocratic utopia, a city upon a hill, to be a model and a shining example to all nations. The split between the dream and the reality is an old one and it has not gone away.
Canada suffers from no such split, since it was founded not by idealists but by people who’d been kicked out of other places. Canada was not a city upon a hill, it was what you had to put up with.
The historical time of The Handmaid’s Tale would seem to be 2005, no longer our uneasily shared “future.” The novel in no way resembles science fiction but rather “speculative fiction”: a psychologically “realistic” and persuasive exploration of a counterworld bearing a significant if surreal relationship to reality. In essence a Gothic tale of a young woman’s cruel imprisonment, her shifting relationship with her captor
s and her eventual escape, The Handmaid’s Tale differs from its classic dystopian predecessors in the intimacy of the protagonist’s voice and in the convincing domestic background Atwood has established for her. The ominously named “Offred” (so named by her captors, who seem to have appropriated an entire caste of fertile, breeding-age females to become impregnated by the Gilead commanders whose wives are infertile) is rendered with the admirable attentiveness to detail and psychological nuance that is the province of the realistic novel, not the fable. Where the mostly male characters of H. G. Wells’s prophetic novels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984 are primarily functions of plot, Atwood’s character is distinct and individual, with sharp, painful memories of what she has lost (husband, daughter, radical-feminist mother, college roommate). Narrated in the breathless present-tense, like Surfacing, much of Alias Grace (another captive-female novel) and The Blind Assassin as well as numerous short stories by Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale achieves the feat of rendering the bizarre, the ludicrous, and the improbable a new sort of quotidian as Offred moves through the prescribed routine of her essentially dull, housewifely day of shopping for household items (“Our first stop is at a store with another wooden sign: three eggs, a bee, a cow. Milk and Honey. There’s a line, and we wait our turn, two by two.”), a stroll to the Wall, formerly the Harvard Wall, now appropriated by the Republic of Gilead for the displaying of executed enemies of the state (“Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men’s Salvaging early this morning”), and a sly, catty peek at her sexual rival in the Commander’s household, the Commander’s middle-aged wife Serena Joy who’d been a Christian-family-values stump-speaker before the Gilead overthrow of the federal government: