Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder
Nov. 24th, 2014 02:12 amMargaret Atwood's short story collection Moral Disorder is something both more and other than a straightforward collection; many of the stories seem to be explicitly about a single main character and her friends and family - certainly the names and backstories of the characters are the same, one assumes they are about the same people. As for the other stories - they all feature a protagonist who very well could be the same woman as in the linked stories, all but one of the stories are arranged as if to tell the tale of a single life from one end almost to the other, for the stories that tells of the protagonist's twilight days is actually the first story in the book. But it's never made clear. Ursula Le Guin, writing about the collection in a review in The Guardian, comments on this quality of the stories:
Most collections of short stories by a single author are grab-bags, but some approach or achieve real unity; this is a different unity from that of the novel, and deserves some attention. The gaps between stories preclude the supporting structures of conventional plot. If the stories tell a story, it must be read in glimpses, and through the gaps - a risky gambit, but one that offers singular freedom of movement and ironic opportunity. In such episodic narratives, character, place or theme replace plot as unifying elements. Many collections that pretend to unity merely fake it, but we need a name for a book that is truly a story told in stories. Could we call it a story suite?At first I thought, as does Le Guin, that these stories do have one continuing central figure. I even thought for a while that they were semi-autobiographical, and that the figure was Atwood herself. Then I got tangled up in realising that some of these stories could have been about me, in that disguised way that fiction inspired by real events sometimes has. But then, I am, like Atwood, a woman with roots in Nova Scotia who is now planted firmly in Toronto, I spent time in Northern Ontario as a child, and so on. But surely there must be many other people who share some experiences - not necessarily the same ones - with Atwood, or with the protagonist/s of these stories. Perhaps the deeper truth is that the stories are not about one woman's life, but Everywoman's life, particularised into sketches that have some details in common with Atwood's life, or mine, or a million other peoples'.
Moral Disorder is such a suite, consisting of 11 short stories. Place, perhaps the commonest cement of the story suite, is not very important, but the stories have a single protagonist, a central character- or I think they do. She is variable, elusive, even a bit slippery. This is, after all, a book by Margaret Atwood.
And then I looked again at the first story in the collection, The Bad News. It is about Nell, she of the stories that seem fully linked, and her mate of many years, Tig. They are aging, retired, contemplating the morning news .... And suddenly time shifts, and the protagonist - still an aging woman discussing the deplorable state of the world with her mate - is living in the third century Roman town of Glanum in the south of what we now call France. And I think that Atwood is indeed slippery, and these stories are indeed about one woman, and Everywoman. And that's the point.