Among the Intellectualoids/Atwood At Work
Marin, Richard T.
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ATWOOD AT WORK lmost a year ago Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale made an inky splash on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. A sign, clear as...
...Outraged, Atwood enlisted an attorney to extract a public apology from Northern Journey and called for the complete withdrawal from sale of the offending issue...
...Richard T Marin is a writer living in New York...
...Atwood's star was in rapid ascendant...
...These are the vivid nightmares of repression that must haunt Atwood in the small hours of the night...
...Clearly, her vision of woman-as-victim was more than mere received ideology...
...Exhibit A: a woman with a "four inch/wooden peg jammed up/between her legs so she can't be raped...
...Newly angst-ridden poets decried their native land as "a highschool land/deadset in adolescence" (Earl Birney), inhabited by "a dull people" (Irving Layton), and led by "second rate/sons of bitches" (Raymond Souster...
...Women are reduced to the status of "econowives" and "handmaids," breeders with fertile loins whose duty it is to service the patriarchy (or "penocracy," as some prefer to call it...
...they run through all her stories, short and long...
...The problem of discovering a true "Canadian Identity" has gnawed at Canadian literature since it emerged from the cloud of bad Romantic poetry that filled anthologies well into the early part of this century...
...Atwood, the victim, was vindicated...
...They all died...
...But most cutting was her remark about the imagination...
...But it was nationalism nonetheless...
...A mood of reverse nationalism gripped the land...
...Would that they were more vivid when she commits them to literature...
...In "Hurricane Hazel," a story about teenage longing and confusion in rural Ontario circa 1950, Atwood moves from romance to breakup, but skips over passion...
...Her books were translated into Italian, French, Japanese...
...It is a story about sensuality devoid of sensuality...
...Specifically, women as victims—a theme that was to become her obsession...
...Still in her thirties, she was hailed as the "queen bee" of Canadianletters and was doted upon by a host of academic drones...
...First a colony proudly singing "God Save the Queen" in its classrooms and legislatures, then a victim of television 'Houghton Mifflin, $16.95...
...Just a cold breeze...
...It seems a fairly traditional feminist tack: man, whom she once named "the hugest monster," is the oppressor, woman the victim...
...B efore Survival hit the stands the Toronto Star was already gushing over "its staggering first printing of 20,000, with college course outlines snapping it up sight unseen...
...The quote is from John Berger, used by Atwood as the epigraph for her 1981 novel Bodily Harm...
...Mary McCarthy, ruminating upon The Handmaid's Tale for the New York Times Book Review, concluded that what the book lacked was "imagination...
...Pity it hasn't been collected...
...Exhibit B: a "spiked device/that locks around the waist and between/the legs, with holes in it like a tea strainer...
...Carolyn Forche said reading Atwood's poetry is like "following the maps she wishes destroyed...
...Marrying the Hangman" catalogues more war crimes in the bloody history of the sexes: He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, knife She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood...
...So blunt is her vision of the sexes and that which passes between them, that she misses the slippery ambiguities which make the erotic complex and . . . erotic...
...Margaret Atwood would be its high priestess...
...She wrote poetry, which, shesaid in an interview, "all reads like Wordsworth and Lord Byron...
...In 1974 Atwood helped organize the Writer's Union of Canada, to protect Canadian, authors against evil American publishers...
...She also complained that the characters were dull, the language flat, and the premise untenable...
...The "women's issues" alluded to tell us to pause, pay attention—and stop laughing...
...As Canadian writing continues to diversify in the face of Atwood's monolithic victim theory, it becomes increasingly apparent that Survival is really about Atwood's own writing and her own life more than anyone else's...
...Atwood's literary career, as she describes it, began early in the pre-teen years...
...Atwood's mordant, laconic poetry—always much better than her prose—was equally redolent, ideologically...
...Consider the unsavory incident that has become known as the "Northern Journey Affair...
...It was then that the grumbling, the disaffected moaning (often attributed to the influence of T. S. Eliot) began...
...The titles of her novels quickly reveal what "the queen" was up to during that heady decade...
...The sycophantic tone of the Star's report is revealing, and typical...
...There we find her conby Richard T. Marin tributing to indigenous literary magazines, collaborating with Dennis Lee (now a famous gnome-like Canadian poet) under the pseudonym "Shakes-beat Latweed"—a moniker that must THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 35 have seemed "hep" at the time...
...More familiar names such as Mordecai Richter, Robertson Davies, Irving Layton—writers who do not appear to suffer from "the great Canadian victim complex"—were summarily ignored or dismissed...
...Atwood is at home in the sensual world, only when it is poxed somehow, diseased...
...Subsequently, Atwood demanded complete editorial control over all articles derived from interviews with her...
...The first story, "Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother," begins: "When my mother was very small, someone gave 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1987 her a basket of baby chicks for Easter...
...A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you...
...Language is not simply the rationalistic tool of man's invention, nor does man always occupy the surface of myth, woman the under-ground...
...Another strange coincidence: three of the four most frequently recommended authors in the book—Graeme Gibson, Roch Carrier, and Dennis Lee—also happened to be Anansi writers...
...The broad ironic stroke is still there, but the needling has become pointed...
...The icy hue of Atwood's latest melancholic collection of stories, Blue-beard's Egg, casts a pall over her prose from which situations, events, and characters never recover...
...The mother delights in reciting tales of unwanted pregnancies, illnesses of various horrible kinds, mental breakdowns, tragic suicides, unpleasant lingering deaths...
...In The Handmaid's Tale, her most explicit fictional study in victimology, Atwood conjures a dystopian vision of America as a puritan theocracy run by right-wing fanatics and religious fundamentalists...
...Even the humor has a grim, nervous twitch to it, like laughter in a graveyard...
...A sign, clear as a highland tattoo, that she has made it in the world of Big Publishing...
...Now that Atwood has published another book, Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories,' American readers will want to know, Who is this woman from the North...
...In a poem called "A Woman's Issue" Atwood lists several "exhibits" in her case against the patriarchy...
...By contrast a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her...
...Only a few dared voice dissent...
...Ironically her writing is, by her own standards, unquestionably "masculine"—didactic, calculating, anemic...
...Newspapers and magazines knuckled under meekly...
...At roughly the same time, a story appeared in an obscure journal called Northern Journey to which Atwood took vociferous offense...
...Like fellow Canadians Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, and more recently Robertson Davies, she has arrived in New York City—home of big newspapers, big money, and all the fruits of Yankee capitalism that Canadians so love to despise...
...Yes, she wrote about women...
...Her bizarre anti-logic was soon embraced as doctrine by CanLit functionaries while pedagogues "snapped" the book up, no doubt excited by its helpful "How to Use This Book" chapter and its ready-made reading list of "Useful Books...
...Jump from juvenalia to college days at the University of Toronto...
...The book pronounced Canadians to be a nation of victims and Canada "a collective victim," of both its harsh environment and colonialism...
...Why are people buying her books and why are so many critics fawning and scraping in the presence of her fiction...
...As Atwood's literary stock soared, so did her institutional power, culminating in 1972 with the publication of Survival—a tendentious and brutally dull critical treatise that established Atwood as the queen not only of CanLit, but also of CanCrit...
...Blurbs on an early paperback edition of her most highly acclaimed novel, Surfacing (published in 1972), pronounced it "the most shattering novel a woman ever wrote," "a woman's novel," and "a novel of woman's self-discovery...
...And so on...
...By insisting on a programmatic male-female dualism, Atwood cramps the imagination...
...Lady Oracle's heroine Joan whips up lathery visions of "knife-wielding rapists, their fangs dripping blood . . . burglars, dope-crazed and lethal . . . perverts who would chop me into pieces...
...A one-liner with a certain deadpan charm, but the comedy soon turns black...
...The story, by Wil Wigle, featured a character named Margaret Atwood feeling "just a little uncomfortable with her role as the reigning queen of Canadian literature...
...Some wondered why almost half the titles recommended by Atwood in Survival's various reading lists came from the 1972 catalogue of Atwood's own publisher, the House of Anansi, on whose editorial board she served...
...Just when most women writers had geared down from the stridently "political" literature of the sixties and early seventies, Atwood was revving up, barreling full feminist throttle into the eighties...
...Once it was Britain, now the United States...
...Atwood once confessed her frustration with one of her more virtuous, tidy characters: "I wanted her to fall into a mud puddle, have menstrual cramps,sweat, burp, fart...
...What exactly is Margaret Atwood on about...
...From 1969 to 1981 she published five novels...
...It ran much deeper...
...It is a neat epitome of her sexual politics...
...Well, it seems cramped, smelly, belching, flatulent heroines were what the reading public—and the critics—craved...
...Wigle described a poetry reading in Montreal after which Atwood received "a grand oomphment'L–a mildly pornographic remark attesting to her sexual desirability...
...The obsession with surviving can become the will not to survive," Atwood pronounced...
...It got to the heart of the matter...
...She also convinced the Writer's Union, in which she wielded considerable power, to recommend that its members not offer their work to the magazine...
...Life Before Man, Lady Oracle, Bodily Harm—these were not manuals for the Total Woman, but trenchant feminist tracts, fitted to an era of charred brassieres and unshorn legs...
...Norman Mailer, wheezing lewd approval of some graphic images he encountered in the writing of Germaine Greer, remarked that "a wind in this prose whistled up the kilt of male conceit...
...Me-generation Gothic, you might call it...
...And it came to a head in the 1960s, when writers, critics, even the government joined in a massive enterprise of cultural onanism: Canadian art, bad or good, was declared the new God...
...Atwood's best-selling prose, though less grisly than the poetry, spelled out for the masses the message of her macabre imagination...
...But these lines were written in 1978...
...imperialism, Canada has always swooned weakly under the intoxicating iconography of some other more flamboyant power...
...Wisely, she shed the black-beret image, and in 1966 published her first book of poetry, The Circle Game, which scored her the coveted Governor General's Award...
...Reading Margaret Atwood, I don my kilt but the wind never comes...
...The tone is comic, but the fears are real...
...Anorexia, abortions, mastectomies, multiple personality disorders—her characters all pay the nasty clinical consequences of their neuroses...
Vol. 20 • January 1987 • No. 1
