bibliogramma: (Default)


I must confess that I skimmed many of the early pieces in Margaret Atwood's Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960-1982, for a very simple reason - Atwood's early critical work examines a period of Canada's literary history that is well before my time. Reviews of small literary magazines that ceased publication before I was of an age to explore such things, while interesting in terms of following the development of Atwood's choices of subject, critical voice, and style, were not easy for me to sink into. Nonetheless, Atwood is always interesting, and even in her early days she had important things to say, and was on her way to developing that sly irony and trenchant wit which is such a part of her literary voice.

In one piece, while lamenting the end of one of those small Canadian literary magazines, Atwood makes an interesting observation:
Give the same poem to a model American, a model English and a model Canadian critic: the American will say "This is how it works;" the Englishman "How good, how true to Life" (or, "How boring, tasteless and trite"); the Canadian will say "This is where it fits into the entire universe."
There is something about this that rings true to me - certainly in my own modest and sporadic attempts at criticism (and not just literary criticism) I always seem to be looking for the contexts, the connections. And it is something that can be seen in Atwood's work in full measure.

The collection is divided into three sections and contains fifty short pieces, obviously not all of equal interest to me. My attention in the first part of the book (covering the years from 1960 to 1971) was particularly drawn to her analysis of the works of poets I have some familiarity with - Gwendolyn McEwan, Al Purdy - and to a fascination exploration of H. Rider Haggard's presentation of women in his novels, culminating in She and Ayesha: The Return of She.

Another of the early pieces that was more than a mere academic exercise for me was written in 1971. In "Nationalism, Limbo and The Canadian Club," Atwood talks about her memories of attending graduate school in the U.S. in the 60s, and the beginnings of the Canadian search for a unique cultural identity. How true the following observation rings, even today:
"They" had been taught that they were the centre of the universe, a huge, healthy apple pie, with other countries and cultures sprinkled round the outside, like raisins. "We" on the other hand had been taught that we were one of the raisins, in fact, the raisin, and that the other parts of the universe were invariably larger and more interesting than we were. A distortion of the truth in both cases, let us hope.

There were several disturbing corollaries. One was that we knew more about them, much more, than they knew about us; another was that they knew a lot more about themselves than we knew about ourselves. Another, related to our growing consciousness of economic domination, was that we had let ourselves come under the control of a people who neither knew nor cared to know anything about us. The most disturbing of all was the realization that they were blundering around in the rest of the world with the same power, the same staggering lack of knowledge and the same lack of concern: the best thing for the raisins, in their opinion, was to be absorbed into the apple pie.
In her introduction to the second section of the collection, containing works written between 1972 and 1976, Atwood notes that the publication of her book of Canadian literary criticism, Survival, and the growth of the women's movement had a significant influence on the nature of the requests she received for articles and speeches. Many of the collected pieces in this section are reviews of books written by women - Adrienne Rich, Audrey Thomas, Erica Jong, Kate Millett, Marie-Claire Blais, Marge Piercy - or
articles about literature or writing from an early feminist perspective. A must-read among these is "The Curse of Eve," in which almost every sentence identifies an entire library's worth of feminist cultural and literary analysis - most of which, at that time, was still waiting to be written. It concludes with this plea from a "woman writer" that is, in many ways still relevant today:
I will enter a simple plea; women, both as characters and as people, must be allowed their imperfections. If I create a female character, I would like to be able to show her having the emotions all human beings have—hate, envy, spite, lust, anger and fear, as well as love, compassion, tolerance and joy—without having her pronounced a monster, a slur, or a bad example. I would also like her to be cunning, intelligent and sly, if necessary for the plot, without having her branded as a bitch goddess or a glaring instance of the deviousness of women. For a long time, men in literature have been seen as individuals, women merely as examples of a gender; perhaps it is time to take the capital W off Woman. I myself have never known an angel, a harpy, a witch or an earth mother. I've known a number of real women, not all of whom have been nicer or more noble or more long-suffering or less self-righteous and pompous than men. Increasingly it is becoming possible to write about them, though as always it remains difficult for us to separate what we see from what we have been taught to see.
The remainder of the pieces from the second section are articles on themes in Canadian literature, or on the Canadian identity. Reading these latter pieces bring back memories of those days when we as Canadians were becoming aware of not just who we were, but how vulnerable we were to cultural and economic imperialism and exploitation.
But there's another image, fact, coming from the outside that I have to fit in. This territory, this thing I have called "mine," may not be mine much longer. Part of the much-sought Canadian identity is that few nationals have done a more enthusiastic job of selling their country than have Canadians. Of course there are buyers willing to exploit, as they say, our resources; there always are. It is our eagerness to sell that needs attention. Exploiting resources and developing potential are two different things: one is done from without by money, the other from within, by something I hesitate only for a moment to call love.
The third section, which contains pieces published between 1977 and 1982, documents an expanded range of topics and perspectives on Atwood's part, as she notes in her introduction to the final section.
I have always seen Canadian nationalism and the concern for women's rights as part of a larger, non- exclusive picture. We sometimes forget, in our obsession with colonialism and imperialism, that Canada itself has been guilty of these stances towards others, both inside the country and outside it; and our concern about sexism, men's mistreatment of women, can blind us to the fact that men can be just as disgusting, and statistically more so, towards other men, and that women as members of certain national groups, although relatively powerless members, are not exempt from the temptation to profit at the expense of others. Looking back over this period, I see that I was writing and talking a little less about the Canadian scene and a little more about the global one.
Among the articles published in this period are reviews of a variety of books, some by authors still writing, some still part of the recognisable cultural canon even though their writers are no longer with us, and some that have passed into relative obscurity. Books reviewed include: A Harvest Yet to Reap, a book documenting the experiences and activism of prairie women; a posthumously published collection of letters by American poet Anne Sexton; Timothy Findley's novel The Wars; two works by recently deceased poets, Pat Lowther's A Stone Diary, and John Thompson's Stilt Jack; Tillie Olsen's Silences, a meditation on the obstacles facing writers, particularly women writers; Sylvia Plath's posthumously published Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams; Red Dust, a collection of short stories by W. D. Valdgardson; Nadine Gortimer's July's People; Ann Beattie's Falling in Place; E. L. Doctorow's Loon Lake; Jay McPherson's Poems Twice Told; and Midnight Birds, a collection of short fiction by Black women authors (concerning this review, Atwood examines not only the work, but the reasons why she has been asked to review a collection of American authors for a magazine devoted to "third world" literature).

In addition to the reviews, the collection includes a variety of articles and speeches, primarily on aspects of writing and being a writer:

"Diary Down Under," notes and observations made during her participation in 1978 in Writers' Week, an Australian literary event;
"Witches," a brief address on the persecution of authors and books - witch-hunting - whether they be North American feminists saying uncomfortable things, or revolutionary Latin-American poets saying things that get them disappeared;
"An End to Audience?," a lecture on what it means to be a writer, as a vocation, as a profession, as an art, as a moral statement - and on the changing nature of the writing and publishing landscape and the reading audience;
"Introduction to The Edible Woman" in which Atwood briefly discusses her own first published novel and its relationship to the feminist movement (incidentally, The Edible Woman is one of my favourite Atwood novels);
An address to a meeting of Amnesty International in which Atwood speaks passionately about the responsibility of the writer in a world where oppression and political censorship have become commonplace;
"Northrop Frye Observed," a discussion of Atwood's thoughts on having been a student of Frye's;
"Writing the Male Character," in which Atwood discusses the perils and pitfalls of writing a character of another gender than one's own, from a very feminist perspective.

In what is one of the longer pieces collected in this volume, "Canadian-American Relations" - a speech given to a US audience - Atwood traces the history of the quest for a Canadian identity, and looks at the ways in which the United States has alternately ignored and influenced this. In a somewhat prescient comment, she notes that both Canada and the US must now inhabit a changing world in which the lines are being redrawn:
The world is rapidly abandoning the nineteenth-century division into capitalist and socialist. The new camps are those countries that perform or tolerate political repression, torture and mass murder and those that do not.
Reading this collection, I was reminded once more just how much Atwood's critical perspectives on both art and the world we live in are worth reading.

bibliogramma: (Default)

At one point in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, the twin daughters of one of the three main point-of-view characters insist that their bedtime story - The Robber Bridegroom - be changed because they want all the characters to be women. Not just the hero, but also the villain, and the villain's victims.

This of course is Atwood pointing out to her readers that the book they are reading is in fact such a role reversal. Oh, there are male characters, but they are all secondary, all adjuncts to the lives of the women who are the real story - Tony (Antoinette), Roz (Rosalind) and Charis (formerly Karen) and (though we never see anything from her viewpoint) Zenia. They are fathers, uncles, lovers, husbands, sons, employees - and all we see of them is the role they play in the lives of women. It's a longstanding pattern in fiction - one gender has all the agency, the full lives, the rounded characters, is the centre of the story, the other exists only through their relation to one of the important characters. Of course, we're used to seeing the stories be about men, while the women are only there to move the men's story along.

The novel itself is based on the folk tale of the robber bridegroom, a tale akin to the Bluebeard tale, of a man who proposes to young women and then kidnaps and kills them. In The Robber Bride, the eponymous villain is Zenia, a manipulative femme fatale who spins tales about herself and has a penchant for seducing men in relationships with other women, devouring their souls, then leaving or betraying them. Tony, Charis and Roz are three women, college acquaintances, who are drawn together by Zenia who, at different times, has seduced a man loved by each of them. One she either betrays or corrupts (depending on how much the reader chooses to believe of what she says), one commits suicide after she casts him aside and later fakes her own death, and one survives, wounded but perhaps wiser, to return to the woman who loves him.

At the core of the story is the friendship that grows between these women as, one after another, their lives are thrown into turmoil by Zenia's manipulations and they find the only people they can turn to are other women who have been victims. The novel fills in the life stories of these three women, each in her own way wounded by her childhood experiences, making them vulnerable as adults to Zenia's schemes and lies. Yet these women are also survivors, and it is their strengths that enable them to survive.

The theme of duplicity and duality runs through the novel in many ways, not all of them malignant. Just as Zenia constantly rewrites her life stories to take advantage of others' weaknesses, so do Tony, Karen and Roz rewrite themselves, to become more who they wish to be. In childhood, each deals with secrets and mysteries, stories and lies, in their own families. Tony, left handed mirror-writer, suspects she is the surviving half of a mirror twin pair; Charis has a repressed alternate personality created as a result of childhood abuse; Roz is the mother of twins. Each of them has kept secrets and told lies in and about their relationships with the men Zenia took from them. And in various ways, Zenia is a dark mirror to each of them.

At the end of the novel, Tony asks: "Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her?" The question may be one for all of us to consider.

bibliogramma: (Default)

Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy - consisting of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam - is a dystopic vision of monumental proportions.

I didn't get around to reading the first volume until after the third had been released; this perhaps meant that I was somewhat more fortunate than early readers of Oryx and Crake, who were faced with something very bleak, and did not then know that there would be more to come, that would at least explain and leave the reader with some sense of hope.

My first coherent thought about Oryx and Crake was to relate it to other science fiction works - I thought of it as Doctor Frankenstein meets Doctor Ain in the Garden of Eden (and if you don't know the Tiptree short story I'm referring to, shame on you). My second coherent thought was to reserve further thinking until I had finished the remaining volumes.

I enjoyed reading The Year of the Flood more than I did Oryx and Crake - possibly because I like the protagonists better, and because I liked the story of subversives and neo-hippies more than that of genetic scientists playing god - even though in this volume, the second of the trilogy, those two groups are shown to overlap.

It was most interesting seeing the events and the people of the first volume through different eyes, from different perspectives. So many gaps were filled in, and Snowman's solitary narrative from Oryx and Crake took on depth and complexity. I was quite caught up by the ending, and moved on to the third volume, Maddaddam, immediately.

And was rewarded. All the threads from the previous two novels are caught up and woven together in one final tapestry that shows clearly connections barely seen or hinted at before. So, too, the survivors of the Flood - and not just the humans and the experimental creations of Crake - come together to presage a new and very different future.

Through this layering and re-layering of perspectives, Atwood brings the reader slowly but powerfully to the conclusion you'd least expect (at least, if you were reading anything other than Atwood) and does it so beautifully that by the end I was crying.

For those well aware of Atwood's tendency to make sly references, I will simply add that the name of the final volume is a palindrome, which for some reason called to my mind the phrase from T. S. Elliot's Four Quartets: in my beginning is my end.

bibliogramma: (Default)

Margaret 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?

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.
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'.

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.

bibliogramma: (Default)

I did not read a lot of non-fiction this year, and what I did read was mostly personal narratives, biographies, and books about science fiction and fantasy.


Thelma J. Shinn, Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women
Gwyneth Jones, Imagination/space: essays and talks on fiction, feminism, technology and politics
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds

Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

Suzie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir
Nancy Mairs, Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith
George Takei, Oh Myy! There Goes the Internet

Jack G. Shaheen, The TV Arab

Alison Weir, The Princes in the Tower
Tracy Borman, Elizabeth's Women
Stacey Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

bibliogramma: (Default)


Sarah Schulman, People in Trouble
Sarah Schulman, The Child
Sarah Schulman, The Mere Future

2011 was the year in which I discovered Sarah Schulman. Her work focuses relentlessly on the lives of lesbians and gay men, and she tackles hard subjects with uncompromising honesty. Her work can be stylistically difficult, and is often controversial, but I have found the three novels I of hers that I have read so far to be both compelling and rewarding.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Winterson's classic examination of relationship did not draw me in quite as strongly as some of the other books of hers that I have read, but was still in my mind worth reading.


Laurie R. King, The Language of Bees

My Sherlock fetish, let me show it to you again. I found this volume of King's Mary Russell/Holmes mysteries to be harder to get into than earlier books in the series, but it did start to pick up at the end. And being essentially the first half of a much longer mystery, and thus incomplete, I suppose that makes some sense. On to God of the Hive!


Margaret Atwood, Good Bones

oh my, was this a fun book to read. A slim volume, full of very short fables and vignettes, all of them overflowing with Atwood's delicious and acerbic wit. There is a great deal of critical social commentary and trenchant feminist analysis buried in these small gems.

bibliogramma: (Default)

So, I took a holiday from posting in my journals. I think it's time to come back. Catching up on what I've been reading will mostly mean just listing the books I've read, with maybe a few comments about the really good, really bad, or really interesting ones.


War, Evil and the End of History, Bernard-Henri Lévy

Interesting concept, kind of hypertext, with several relatively standard reportage-style essays on various theatres of war Lévy had covered, linked by footnotes to extensive personal commentary and philosophical ruminations. Dense, but thoughtful.


Jane Austen: A Life, Carol Shields

A pleasant biographical sketch of one of my favourite authors. Worth reading.


The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Unsecure America, Susan Faludi

Fascinating analysis of how both the state and the media presented the "stories" of the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Must read.


Cheek by Jowl, Ursula LeGuin

Essays about writing by a great writer. If this is the sort of thing you like, you'll be delighted.


Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Taubes

A look at the science behind how the body utilises the energy in the food we eat, from a biochemical more than a medical perspective, which asks some very searching questions about the kinds of nutritional advice North Americans have been receiving over the past 50 years, and suggests that many of the things we've been told were good, are not so good, and many of the things we've been told were bad, may be good after all. I found the arguments compelling enough to change my way of eating, and I haven't gone back yet, after more than a year.


Payback. Margaret Atwood

Atwood looks at the concept of debt on the eve of the economic crisis and finds some quite interesting things to say about it all.
bibliogramma: (Default)

The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

In contrast to the lengthier classical Greek works The Illiad and The Odyssey that provide the context for Atwood's novel, The Penelopiad is rather short. Of course, there's a significant difference between the kinds of things that men and gods (and goddesses) can do in classical Greek storytelling and the kinds of things that women can do. Penelope survives her childhood, is married, has a child, runs a small kingdom and fends off unpleasant suitors for 20 years while her husband is out and about doing manly things, and then at some point after he comes home in a clever but still manly fashion and puts everything to rights (at least, that's how he sees it), she dies. In fact, since she tells her story from Hades, one gets the impression that she has rather more of a "life" after death than she had for much of the time she spent on earth.

This is not a criticism, by the way. It's more of a comment on how completely Atwood has incorporated into not just the narrative but the structure of her book this very feminist perspective of what women do when the heroes are somewhere else. But Atwood is not just looking at Penelope and her experiences as a wealthy ruling-class woman left behind while her man goes to war, and faces adventures which may or may not be complete fantasies invented to cover up a decade spent screwing his way from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. It is also an examination of the lives and fates of working-class women, whose lives are even less worthy of mention than those of the daughters and wives of kings and heroes in all these ancient and heroic tales.

bibliogramma: (Default)

Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982-2004, Margaret Atwood

This is, as the title suggests, a collection of critical essays and other pieces written over the past two decades. It’s Atwood’s second collection – I have not yet read her first, but there’s always tomorrow.

It’s a glorious read. Even when she’s writing about authors and works that I’m not familiar with, it’s still a pleasure to read for the quality of her analyses and her prose.

The critical pieces look at works as varied as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Gabriel Garciá Márquez’ The General in his Labyrinth, Elmore Leonard’s Tishiomingo Blues and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to name a few. Also included are introductions and afterwords to books ranging from The Canadian Green Consumer Guide to H Rider Haggard’s She. Other essays cover a range of topics, personal, professional, political. It’s a delicious smorgasbord that highlights both the diversity and intensity of one of Canada’s greatest wordsmiths.


The Language Imperative, Suzette Haden Elgin

Suzette Haden Elgin is both an artist and a linguist; her writing in both arenas is always worth reading. In The Language Imperative, she argues not just the importance and power of language and its affects on how we think, how we see the world, and how our cultures are shaped, but also the importance of understanding language and integrating that understanding into political decisions about educational and language policies.

Elgin writes from a US perspective, particularly in arguing the importance of multilingualism (something that is a fact of life in many other parts of the world), but much of the material she addresses here has implications for anyone with an interest in how language, culture and perceptions of reality interact.

Profile

bibliogramma: (Default)
bibliogramma

May 2019

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930 31 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 11th, 2025 06:36 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios