The Handmaid's Tale
Brien, Tom O'
Wittgenstein -- exactly the kind of people one could scarcely read without becoming disabused of the very notions Professor Miles is out to combat. It's a tangle: just enough theory-and-method...
...ous about deepening their understanding of theology, who are concerned about the direction of the Me of faith in the Church and who wish to renew themselves for the Important ministries they fuIffil...
...The idea of writing a political novel and fusing rich character presentation and real action is compelling -- almost a Promethean defiance of conventional vapid definitions of high art...
...The Handmaid's Tale fulfills this pattern of development and feeds on Atwood's strong political interests...
...It is perhaps no accident that Atwood's main location is Cambridge, Massachusetts, a one-industry, town...
...Atwood is above all a moralist, albeit of a novel kind...
...Offred remembers what life was like before the takeover, and recalls fondly her friendship with a boyfriend and their child...
...It's a tangle: just enough theory-and-method to point (a Wittgenstein term of art...
...New York, N.Y...
...Her narrator is "Offred," a handmaid whose name suggests possession by one of the male commanders of Gilead (one "Fred") and also provides an Anglo-Saxon, early medieval echo...
...Each effort would profit from treatment on its own terms...
...This above all," she resolves about her future life, "to refuse to be a victim...
...This is not only Atwood's defect...
...England BECOME A 1986 COMMONWEAL ASSOCIATE Patron Member $200 or more Charter Member $100 Sustaining Member $50 Commonweal Associates, 232 Ma~son Ave...
...In Life Before Man (1980), Atwood experimented even more: the novel has three narrators, one a man, and begins with a suicide, moving the focus away from realistic character study to more explosive action...
...Of course, business culture can include coercion, and of course it has been complicit in so many right-wing authoritarian dictatorships around the word...
...10016 Memberships are tax-deductible ogy: as in all futuristic fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale is filled with gadgets, especially computers (one franchise in Gilead is a street corner operation called Soul Scrolls, which provides computerized printout prayers...
...I don't mean technol.umb~ |lUlBUE''~lun rid 'lnnm'~|,;IEnl 4LPr~ Ib, availol b tJ~ II II IIIPJmlF_~ WI~;I I. 1411 i 9 ? _ _ . t ~ - - ' ~ , ~ , , ~ m ~ ~ ' 9 9 9 m- m---m ~ ; ; m u Please send me additional Information...
...We need more studies like Geertz's own "Art as a Cultural System" that would examine the relative and variable "meanings" of purely formal elements such as shape and line within specific cultures and times...
...J.A...
...It is a problem with most writers in the utopian genre who are never strong on the culture of production -- probably because so few writers have real experience with what it means to shape production, design, and market commodities...
...The choices are not victimization or villainy, Atwood suggests...
...Atwood even includes small topical EARN A MASTERS IN THEOLOGY DURING SUMMER VACATION...
...The Handmaid's Tale marks another attempt by Atwood to expand her range...
...This immense journey TO BE A REVOLUTIONAIY Padre J. Guad~upe Carney Harper & Row, 473 pp...
...Yet at what he correctly guesses will probably be the end of his life, before he crosses back into Honduras as a guerrilla, he engages in the most self-conscious of twentieth-century expressive forms, autobiography, and produces not simply a memoir to be xeroxed and passed around among family members and friends, but a full-scal~ book, an apologia, a message to North Americans whose culture he says he hates, about how bourgeois Christianity has failed and why only the overthrow, violent if necessary, of their capitalist system will make possible the true kingdom Christ preached...
...tn-a historical note at the end of the book (notes from a literary conference after the fall of Gilead) one professor points out that Gilead "invented nothing...
...What is a visual tradition...
...In Bodily Harm (1983), Atwood went further, positioning her heroine, a journalist on vacation, in the middle of a Caribbean coup d'6tat...
...Soon, he starts passing Offred old copies of Vogue (what Atwood calls the "subversive literature of the future") and taking her out to a secret club...
...Perhaps that is what most makes me uncomfortable...
...Alternating between lyrical memory and a laconic repressed tone, Atwood makes us feel keenly Offred's conflict and suffering...
...How does it come about...
...But all he wants is to play Scrabble, a game charged with eroticism since his wife won't talk to him and all women are forbidden to read...
...goodness and strength might be near allies...
...2) to find a way into the past as experienced by those who did not leave written records, particularly women...
...Moreover, there is little reference to industry...
...The knotty prior questions remain: what is the character of the knowledge we gain through our eyes...
...It is certainly the work of a man who did not know fatigue: he wrote it in four versions, one for campesinos, another for more literate readers, and both in English and in Spanish...
...As in all Atwood novels, humor aids survival...
...No intellectual or writer, a Jesuit who disliked and even resented his studies, a pragmatic organizer of banana-workers' cooperatives, Carney wanted nothing more than to live the life of the poorest Honduran peasant out of love for Christ...
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...It's not exactly the outlandishness of this that bothers me...
...Finally, the book is cluttered with too many agendas...
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...As Atwood notes, most of the things she depicts here have their parallel in contemporary events: in the attack on women's rights by some Protestant evangelicals and Islamic fanatics, and in the practice of government terror that she is all too familiar with as a member of Amnesty International...
...Appleyard T , HIS IS a remarkable book, not least because of the circumstances in which it came into existence...
...Dept...
...What a provocative image for contemporary Americans to come to terms with...
...Tom O'Brien l LIKE Margaret Atwood very much, but her new novel, The Handmaid's Tale, less...
...Atwood, who began as a poet, has always been able to infuse the sense of the spoken voice into her novels, a power'which makes the fantastic acceptable...
...It has yet to be demonstrated that the history of formal developments (which issue in objects) is synchronous with the history of ideas, not to mention with the vagaries of governments or with tl~e complex syntheses of cultures and religions...
...not enough to elucidate for the critical newcomer a rigorous visual epistemology...
...But I remember reading the line and being stunned by its aptness...
...But selfdepreciating, or self-destructive niceness is immoral...
...Toward the end of Surfacing, her heroine realizes that she has too long accepted bullying from others, most often in the subtle form of inculcations to humility and passivity...
...For further information and an application form, please write: The American College Theological Institute Naamsestraat 100 3000 Leuven, BELGIUM 25 April 1986:253...
...But Atwood skips on most business, thereby making her fantasy that much more fantastic...
...The Handmaid's Tale is a nightmarish exclusion of its possibility...
...Atwood hates villainy, to be sure, and vividly protests it...
...How can it be shared or passed on...
...Atwood sets this in the near future, time enough, she imagines, for a crisis in fertility caused by AIDS, new strains of syphilis, and poisoning by environmental and toxic hazards...
...If that is the case, then the relation between the history of objects and the history of thought will have to be measured with a finer gauge...
...As Offred comments, "it was too banal to be true...
...It is also well executed...
...How can it be evaluated...
...Carney, an American priest and for most of his life a Jesuit, tells us that he wrote it by candlelight, during bouts of insomnia and vigils of prayer, in a shack outside a remote Nicaraguan village where he spent the last two years of his life as a political exile from his beloved Honduras...
...something forbidden except for prescribed loveless mating sessions...
...As a result, the male oligarchy The book does not effectively address the methodological problem of safeguarding against proiection upon mute objects of the past...
...By a sad process of psychological elision we often equate, or are encouraged to equate, goodness and niceness...
...that runs Gilead turns all available women (divorcees, anyone married to a divorced man, or women who have lived with men) into second wives, handmaids, as long as they have "viable ovaries...
...At this level, as dire warning, The Handmaid's Tale is valuable...
...The archaeological method of Foucault assumes synchronicity to a sufficient degree that one can take a vertical "slice" of a culture at a moment in time, analyze it, come up with something to say...
...We need intuition, certainly...
...She has been eager, in her last works, to escape some of the restrictions on the realistic novel (usually concerned with the problems of young women) that she mastered so well in The Edible Woman (1969), Lady...
...And we need -- if we are to work across disciplines as this book attempts to do -- either to acquire fully the skills of each discipline we will engage, or to practice a deeper level of cooperation with one another so that we can avoid errors of fact and perspective that detract from our intentions...
...Siren's wail THE HANDMAID'S TALE Margaret Atwood Houghton Mifflin, $16.95, 311 pp...
...But as the plot thickens, Atwood stages a few uproarious incongruities...
...But for me, The Handmaid's Tale just doesn't match Atwood's ambition...
...It's an ambitious recasting of 1984, from a woman's point of view, positing a takeover of the United States by right-wing religious fanatics who establish a monotheocracy...
...The American College Sabbatical Program can provide a unique experience of theological renewal, enhanced by the prayerful atmosphere of the College and the cultural setting of Europe...
...She wonders what he intends, imagining something even more gothic than her imprisoned status...
...It doesn't," for example, neatly square with a tone in traditional moral teaching, particularly Christian...
...Yet the book is an immensely detailed and even documented account of his life, and especially of the twenty-plus years he worked in Central America...
...Such wisdom is difficult to put into practice...
...Is it "local knowledge," or universal, across space and time...
...Delineating that wisdom has been Atwood's life work...
...Ann Arbor, MI 48106 London, WC1R 4EJ U.S.A...
...In effect, he not only likes her, but even gets up the courage to ask for a date...
...In Atwood's view, it represents a"synthesis" or "extrapolation" of current trends, which, if unchecked, could make Gilead happen here...
...I Even the idea of the book is itself a paradox...
...Refined sensibilities and a good eye are simply not enough to produce more than intuition...
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...Rather it may be -- and I suspect is -true that formal developments have a history of their own...
...It demeans a part of God's creation that we must respect -- if not, how can we honestly respect anything else...
...She imagines that Gilead occupies most of the United States, with various regions rebelling or simply encircled (the major cities...
...A police state enforces this polygamy and general policy with ruthless terror...
...Although one accepts Atwood's point about the flexibility of history, and although there is the whiff of religious war around today, it is hard to take her distopia too seriously...
...But she is also concerned about self-victimization, about the denial of self that she feels makes good people easy prey for bad...
...The American College CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF LOUVAIN THE SABBATICAL PROGRAM The Sabbatical Program is designed for priests who are seri...
...Or perhaps Atwood has not yet found the way to apply such wisdom beyond interpersonal relations and on the broader stage of politics...
...The commander informs Offred that he wants to see her privately...
...Oracle (1972) and Surfacing (1976) -- although in the last a quasi-stream of consciousness at the Commonweal: 252close modified the realism considerably...
...Nevertheless, these pleasures of The Handmaid's Tale are offset by weaknesses...
...The texture of that culture, which surrounds us in most major urban centers in the United States, is entirely missing in The Handmaid's Tale...
...But the portrait of the national situation is skimpy, the international almost nonexistent...
...But it also includes vast numbers of people in this country whom it would be difficult to tame into cooperative roles in any planned economy...
...and (3) to propose a therapeutic ascetic remedy for our present condition of visual saturation and manipulation...
...At times the comedy emerges only in thin strokes of mordant wit as Offred scans her drab options...
...At least three purposes are maintained here simultaneously: (1) to right the balance between visual and textual sources in the history of thought...
...at all times you feel as if you're in the presence of a real person...
...then we need a fuller model to flesh out the intuitions that arise from our contacts with the past...
...Secondly: visual tradition...
Vol. 113 • April 1986 • No. 8
