Margaret Atwood's presentation of a public self remains enigmatic, elusive and contradictory. She self-consciously refuses all the diverse personas that have been foisted upon her, working hard at escaping the net of our expectations. Her interviews are fascinating moments of flight and of flux. In part this unapproachability can be attributed to her legitimate desire for privacy and the preservation of some sense of private self, but there are other very important motives.

There can be few women writers so aware of the dangers of form, both personal and literary. In our never ending attempts to construct meaning, we must inevitably exclude, repress, oppress and ignore. Atwood, in two pieces of short fiction, twice draws attention to and highlights this process of exclusion in everyday experience, by focussing upon the inadequacies and illusions of overt fabrications. Both of these elaborate constructions are utopian.

In “Polarities”¹ Louise, a graduate student obsessed with the works of Blake, seeks after what she believes to be an all-embracing communality and wholeness. As a result of her efforts she finds herself in a mental asylum, a parallel perhaps to the exclusive nature of her visions, which are actually erecting boundaries rather than breaking them down. The realization of what Louise's vision really amounted to comes too late both for her and for Morrison, her alienated, schizoid companion.

Poor Louise, he saw now what she had been trying desperately to do: the point of the circle, closed and self-sufficient, was not what it included but what it shut out.

(p. 68)

The central character of “Dancing Girls,” who is also a detached and alienated student, this time of urban design, has her own ideas of the perfect world, so perfect that people could not live there.

She wasn't yet too certain of the specific details. What she saw were spaces, beautiful green spaces, with water flowing through them, and trees. Not big golf-course lawns, though, something more winding … surprising vistas. And no formal flower beds. The houses, or whatever they were, set unobtrusively among the trees, the cars kept … where? And where would people shop, and who would live in these places? This was the problem: she could see the vistas, the trees and the streams or canals, quite clearly, but she could never visualize the people.

(p. 227)

These flawed utopias are an important instance of a deeper level that operates in many Atwood texts. That is the tension between construction and the impulse to de-construction, a tension which Atwood occasionally even overtly articulates. In those moments often it is language, as it inevitably must be, upon which and through which the battle is glimpsed and fought. Michel Foucault is of interest here in his juxtaposition of utopias and heterotopias and of their respective relationships to language:

utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias … desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.²

Atwood's willingness to combat the categories we might wish to impose, such as nationalist or feminist, is more than a playful impulse to disorder, it is one manifestation of a project which she believes is vital to personal and societal liberation. That this sometimes latent, sometimes explicit desire to overthrow our arbitrary orderings of the world is possibly evidenced more often when Atwood is engaged as public persona has two obvious causes.

First, as a literary artist she is making and shaping literary artefacts. Texts are made of language, which inevitably commits the artist to the forces of constructed and given meanings, meanings which obscure their own arbitrary construction. Yet as I said earlier, Atwood's texts do threaten to disintegrate, to self-destruct. Atwood has no faith in the possibilities of non-illusory communication. She would rather locate meaning in whatever is not or cannot be heard, spoken or present. Of course such an intense awareness of the inherent contradictions in writing seriously affects her capacity to proceed with prose forms. In “Giving Birth,” a cry of despair is barely contained:

Words ripple at my feet, black, sluggish, lethal. Let me try once more, before the sun gets me, before I starve or drown, while I can. It's only a tableau after all, it's only a metaphor. See, I can speak, I am not trapped, and you on your part can understand. So we will go ahead as if there were no problem about language.

(p. 240)

Secondly, biography and autobiography hold out to us the possibility of an illusory form, a means to make sense of ourselves and the world, in a century where realist modes of art have been largely undermined, overthrown and replaced by endless engagements with the labyrinths of form.³ More than ever before we seek to impose on or find in the artist's life an order that we cannot attain either in art or our own lives. Atwood goes out of her way to deny such attempts. In doing so she is also vitally aware of the prevailing patriarchal critical discourse about the woman writer, perceiving that this obsession with “the life,” to the neglect of the text, may well intensify the long-standing “critical” idea that there is a necessary and determinant relationship between the woman artist's experience and her creations. The male critic says that to know her life is to know her work, and many female critics, feminist or otherwise, make sure he is not alone in this reductive and oppressive belief.

Meaghen Morris sees this as perhaps the most pervasive of the “big dichotomies” with which critics seem to feel the urge to “interrogate” women's texts. She argues that

In earlier criticism, where the life-text relation was a simple and acceptable problematic, the “speciality” of women's writing in this respect was a question of degree and of performance. Today, with this problematic largely discarded, continuing to talk of women's writing in those terms almost amounts to an admission of belief in feminine sorcery.⁴

Feminists who have sought to give this conception a positive inversion have not fundamentally altered its ideological foundations. Both critic and artist must do more than move within the boundaries of this discourse; Atwood has had the political and intellectual courage to try to move publicly beyond it, urging “the development of a vocabulary that can treat structures of words as though they are exactly that, not biological entities possessed of sexual organs.”⁵

Atwood's understanding of this biographical mode of criticism is acute. Sometimes it can lead to an unnecessary defensiveness and ambiguity, such as over the issue of feminism,⁶ yet her reluctance to commit herself publicly is understandable in the light of the rather absurd debate on the subject of her feminism or lack of it. On other occasions, though, it results in a delightful and deliberate ridicule of critical assumptions. She constantly urges us to separate the “I” of the text and herself. Her flexible narrative voice, which denies the possibility of one truth or one vision, is only one means by which our presuppositions are challenged. In the face of a widespread critical belief that the biographical element is the dominant one in women's literature,⁷ an Atwood text can contain the following passages (from “Giving Birth”), which are at least one step ahead of those critics who are constantly bemoaning recent women's fiction as a glut of feminist self-advertisement.⁸

This story about giving birth is not about me. In order to convince you of that I should tell you what I did this morning, before I sat down at this desk.

(p. 240)

By this time you may be thinking that I've invented Jeannie in order to dissociate myself from these experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth.

(p. 245)

Atwood's indulgence in such self-conscious play as part of her comic mode has parallels in the work of, among others, Kenneth Burke⁹ and Michel Foucault,¹⁰ but like Foucault she is more concerned with a level of disruption and disorder deeper than the merely incongruous or humorous. Absurdity is one term Foucault offers for this level, which he sees as destroying “the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.”¹¹

What, briefly, are some of the implications of Atwood's unwillingness to be named? One reading of Dancing Girls, her collection of short stories, could point to an absence in the text so overwhelming that it draws attention to itself. Story after story operates outside conventional geographical space. We are given the barest clues as to where these various worlds may be situated. How are we to understand these works in terms of Atwood as the passionate, articulate, and committed Canadian nationalist? Nationalism, while it works in very different ways, has been locatable in much of Atwood's prior output.

Attention has been drawn elsewhere to her continuous mocking and undermining of would-be nationalists;¹² in fact they are very often the most ludricrous and also sometimes most oppressive characters in the text. Yet more importantly, Atwood seems consciously and/or unconsciously intent on excluding any content which could provide fuel for an unthinking reductionism: “Atwood the nationalist.” Perhaps she goes too far, but then she has always been more concerned with psychic space and states of being than with the material world. For example, one critic has described the ending of “Polarities” as a surrealistic image of the land that expresses the emptiness of the central character's life.¹³ The land from which Morrison felt so excluded can only reflect his utter sterility and irrelevancy:

In the corner of his eye the old women swelled, wavered, then seemed to disappear, and the land opened before him. It swept away to the north and he thought he could see the mountains, white-covered, their crests glittering in the falling sun, then forest upon forest, after that the barren tundra and the blank solid rivers, and beyond, so far that the endless night had already descended, the frozen sea.

(p. 69)

Morrison can be situated within the political and economic debates over Canadian nationalism. He is an American academic recruited northwards by the lure of money and some undefined project of self-discovery, but these questions do not exercise Atwood. In fact once again “cheap nationalism” is the subject for attack in this story (p. 59).

Two further points could be made about this absence. First, the characters that populate these texts are by and large extremely alienated, some of them well beyond any possibility of rebirth. The texts often tell us more about states of alienation, whether it be from the character's work, body, emotions, space or time, than about its causes. Nevertheless, many of them share a rootlessness, in some cases literally, in other instances as a geographical image of their own sense of unreality.

Secondly, Atwood continues to call for the term Canada to be more than a euphemism for an American colony, while seeming to believe increasingly that Canadian nationalism is a lost cause. Thus in a world of “Americans,” “Americanization” and economic and cultural imperialism, she psychically has no country, no “primary reality”¹⁴ to which she can orientate herself. So problematic has Canada become to Atwood that the text can no longer articulate it.

If the question of Canada and its future is ever present both despite and as a result of its exclusion from these texts, then what is included in the texts is often undermined, as Atwood, particularly in the last story of the collection, allows the text free reign in its de-construction tendencies. It could be argued that in “Giving Birth,” there is an homology between the spoken and the unspoken in the text, and between Jeannie and the unnamed woman, both of whom experience labour and birth. The text's construction inevitably proceeds within the bounds of conventional discourse, putting aside or putting down the unexplainable and the unpleasant in whatever limited way it can.¹⁵

Thus language, muttering in its archaic tongues of something, yet one more thing, that needs to be renamed. It won't be by me, though. These are the only words I have, I'm stuck with them, stuck with them.

(p. 239)

So too does Jeannie separate off from herself those aspects of birth which her well-intentioned, liberal consciousness cannot come to terms with. Jeannie's imagination gives form to these repressed aspects in the image of a working-class woman to whom birth represents no more than pain, oppression and monotony: “the haggard face, the bloated torso, the kerchief holding back the too-sparse hair” (p. 245).

The homology of this separation with that which is within and that which is outside the boundaries of linguistic discourse, and further the power relations that underpin it, can be clearly located in the following two passages. Jeannie says of the other woman,

She too is pregnant. She is not going to the hospital to give birth, however, because the word, the words are too alien to her experience, the experience she is about to have, to be used about it at all.

(p. 244)

Later we are told that “the word in English for unwanted intercourse is rape, but there is no word in the language for what is about to happen to this woman” (p. 244). These split selves cannot begin to be reunited until Jeannie's experience of birth radically undermines her deeply held belief structure, a structure grounded partly in the language and ideology of fashionable birth manuals. Its apparent openness and flexibility is shown to be closed and rigid, sufficing only to alienate Jeannie from the realities of herself, the birth and her interpersonal environment. “She realizes she has practised for the wrong thing, … she should have practised for this, whatever it is” (p. 250).

The text has held in suspension the question of “giving birth,” which it explored in its opening, and puts in its place a deceptive narrative that reveals the forces against which de-construction must struggle. “Jeannie is on her way to the hospital, to give birth, to be delivered. She is not quibbling over these terms” (p. 242). As her expectations are challenged by experience, so these terms once again become problematic. “This finally, is the disappearance of language.”

Thus the ending of the text throws open even further the discursive fields Jeannie has been forced to begin to be aware of. It offers a stunning metaphor of this initial awareness but more powerfully still of the de-constructive project.

All she can see from the window is a building. It's an old stone building, heavy and Victorian, with a copper roof oxidized to green. It's solid, hard, darkened by soot, dour, leaden. But as she looks at this building, so old and seemingly immutable, she sees that it's made of water. Water and some tenuous jellylike substance. Light flows through it from behind … the building is so thin, so fragile, that it quivers in the slight dawn wind. Jeannie sees that if the building is this way (a touch could destroy it, a ripple of the earth, why has no one noticed, guarded it against accidents?) then the rest of the world must be like this too, the entire earth, the rocks, people, trees.

(p. 253)

Notes

1. “Polarities,” in Dancing Girls (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977). All further references to Margaret Atwood's short stories will be to this edition and will be incorporated in the text.

2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), p. xviii.

3. For a tentative, plausible, if overly simple explanation of this historical process from a Marxist perspective, see Terry Eagleton, “Aesthetics and Politics,” New Left Review, No. 107 (1978), p. 24.

4. Meaghen Morris, “Aspects of Current French Feminist Literary Criticism,” Hecate, 5, No. 2 (1979), 70.

5. “Paradoxes and Dilemmas: The Woman as Writer,” in Women in the Canadian Mosaic, ed. G. Matheson (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1976), p. 266.

6. Atwood's hedging on this difficult question is evidenced in her interview with Linda Sandler. See the Malahat Review, 41 (1977), 24.

7. For one instance of this belief see Patricia Spacks, The Female Imagination (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), p. 5.

8. A not uncommon complaint from the New York Review of Books.

9. Kenneth Burke, Perspectives by Incongruity, ed. S. Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).

10. See in particular John K. Simon, “A Conversation with Michel Foucault,” Partisan Review, 38, No. 2 (1971), 201.

11. Foucault, p. xvii.

12. As one critic among others to make this point, see Karl Miller, “Orphans and Oracles: What Clara Knew,” New York Review of Books, 26 Sept. 1976, p. 32.

13. P.R. Bilan, “Fiction,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 47 (1978), 331.

14. This phrase was used by Margaret Atwood in an interview. See Meanjin, 37 (1978), 195.

15. Consider for instance this passage: “Vitamized, conscientious, well-read Jeannie, who has managed to avoid morning sickness, varicose veins, stretch marks, toxemia and depression, who has had no aberrations of appetite, no blurring of vision—why is she followed, then, by this other?” (p. 245).