Versions of Reality
Jeannie isn't real in the same way that I am real. But by now, and I mean your time, both of us will have the same degree of reality, we will be equal: wraiths, echoes, reverberations in your own brain.
(“Giving birth,” DG, p. 242)
The price of this version of reality was testing the other one.
(EW, p. 271)
In an effort to distinguish between creating a poem and a novel, Atwood has remarked:
You can talk about it, but not very successfully. A poem is something you hear, and the primary focus of interest is words. A novel is something you see, and the primary focus of interest is people.1
Distinctions between poetry and prose can become gratuitous, nowhere more so than with Margaret Atwood. Her poems need to be seen on the page as well as heard, while the power of language in her best prose is fully realized when read aloud. Indeed, I am most struck with what George Woodcock calls the “capillary links between her poetry, her fiction (and) her criticism.”2
Despite the larger structure of narrative, her stories and novels resemble her poems not only in theme and symbol, but in tone, point of view and voice. As we have seen, many of the poems have a duplistic structure. A comparable sense of counter-weighted settings and the use of doubled or split characters are pervasive in the fiction as well. Atwood further neutralizes the distinction between prose and poetry by frequently writing poem sequences (as well as prose poems), thereby capturing the element of continuity expected in fiction.
On the basis of the stories and the three novels about to be considered, some generalizations can be made, however, about the type of fiction Atwood writes. The people in her fictional world are less the three-dimensional realistic characters of the traditional English novel than the types associated with romance. To some extent, this is a function of point of view, for each of the novels has a first person narrator tightly enclosed within a limited perspective. Quite naturally, then, perception of others will be one-sided. But even the narrators remain aloof from the reader and this sense of two-dimensionality results in large part from the cool, acerbic nature of the narrative itself. Atwood's stories, and even more so her novels, are highly plotted, often fantastic, her intention being to focus our attention upon the significance of event and pattern.
The importance of plot, together with the emphasis placed on symbol, is consistent with Atwood's view of literature in general, of language and her view of the self. A novel is not intended to simply reflect the objective world, but to offer us a mirror in which we may detect the shapes and patterns of our experience. Language itself is dangerous and deceptive; hence, the constant stretching and probing of words in the fiction (as in the poetry) until one senses that nothing can be assumed or taken for granted. Finally, Atwood's contention that the self is a place, not an ego, a view to which I return in subsequent discussion, rules out the portrayal of character in the Jamesian or Faulknerian sense; nowhere yet has Atwood given us a rounded personality, a firm sense of the self, such as I find in Margaret Laurence's Morag Gunn. Atwood's fiction is written in what I call a mixed style combining realist and romance elements. It is a style well suited to the exploration...
(This entire section contains 2510 words.)
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of the contingency of life, the nature of language, and the duplicity of human perception.
DANCING GIRLS
Dancing Girls is a selection of representative stories which Atwood has written over thirteen years.3 All but three of the fourteen stories have been published before; the earliest “The War in the Bathroom” appeared in James Reaney's Alphabet in 1964. “Training,” “Dancing Girls” and “Giving Birth” are new. In general, the stories are of mixed quality, but I feel that none of them places Atwood in the first ranks of modern short-story writers like Bernard Malamud, Doris Lessing, or closer to home, Sinclair Ross, Alice Munro, and Clark Blaise.
The stories lack variety as individual pieces while, at the same time, they do not cohere as a collection or a unit in the way that several other collections by Canadian writers do.4 One characteristic which they have in common is the disturbing, inconclusive ending. While this is effective, especially in “The War in the Bathroom” and “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” so many of the stories end in uncertainty that the sense of being left dangling becomes exasperating. This type of conclusion mars otherwise interesting stories such as “Polarities,” “A Travel Piece,” or “Training”—something of urgent significance, I feel, almost shines through only to be finally obscured; the irony fails.
A second quality that each story shares is the confessional/autobiographical focus, not necessarily of Atwood herself, but on the part of her fictional characters. They are, for the most part, stories of the self, involving crises of perception and identity either within the individual psyche (“The War in the Bathroom,” “When It Happens,” “Giving Birth”) or arising from encounters between men and women (“Polarities,” “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” “Hair Jewellery,” “The Resplendent Quetzal”). These problems of identity and perception are recurrent, central themes in Atwood's work, and while they have been treated masterfully in short story form—Lessing's “Our Friend Judith” for example—Atwood has greater success with these themes in her poems or in the longer novel form.
Since it hardly seems necessary, nor is there space, to discuss all eleven stories, I have decided to look at Atwood's handling of the short story form and her themes in two of the more successful stories, “The War in the Bathroom” and “Rape Fantasies,” as well as in each of the new stories.
“The War in the Bathroom” is a small tour de force in which the reader is uncertain, almost from the outset, about who is speaking. The story is written in the first person present and the tone is that of personal, direct address to the reader. The heroine of the story, however, is referred to throughout as “she,” and “I” is clearly telling us about “she's” move from one flat to another followed by the mundane events of one week in the new place, presented under daily headings from “Monday” to “Sunday.” At first, “I” seems to be separate from “she”: “I have told her never to accept help from strangers” (p. 9). But this illusion in narrative convention soon slips—not only does “I” share “she's” bed, advise her on clothing, food, mathematicians and an exotic tattooed Arab. In her own “native costume” of plain wool sweaters and skirts, Ann is not exotic. She dreams, however, of re-designing cities—“Toronto would do for a start” (DG, p. 227)—into pastoral paradises. The dancing girls of the title precipitate the overthrow of Ann's urban planning dreams and the “Arabian Nights” glamour of the foreign students.
One night the silent Arab throws a wild party with three “dancing girls.” Because she is unwilling to become involved, Ann locks herself in her room while Mrs. Nolan handles the situation by calling the police and chasing the men from her house. Consequently, Ann does not see “the dancing girls” who “were probably just some whores from Scollay Square” (DG, p. 235), and does not have to relinquish entirely her image of an exotic event. She does, however, realize that her “green, perfect space of the future” has been “cancelled in advance” (DG, p. 236). The story closes as Ann indulges herself “one last time” in her urban fantasy:
The fence was gone now, and the green stretched out endlessly, fields and trees and flowing water, … The man from next door was there, in his native costume, and the mathematicians, they were all in their native costumes. Beside the stream a man was playing the flute; and around him, in long flowered robes and mauve scuffies, their auburn hair floating around their healthy pink faces, smiling their Dutch smiles, the dancing girls were sedately dancing.
(DG, p. 236)
This time the image of a re-designed pastoral city draws together the various fantasies of the story as if in one final effort to fend off the real world of Mrs. Nolan.
There is a problem that hovers over “Dancing Girls,” however, much the same problem that vitiates “Training”: what motivates Ann's fantasies? Why is she drawn to the illusory exoticism of foreign students or pastoral visions of modern cities? It is easy to sympathize with her naive desire to replace the ugly sordidness of modern cities with open, green spaces. The sense of claustrophobia arising from cramped spaces (here, the boardinghouse room), closed circles, or rigid squares is a constant Atwood preoccupation for which Ann is an exponent. Perhaps the attraction of the students with their “native costumes” can only be explained in terms of Ann's insecure sense of her own identity. As a Canadian in the United States she is not perceived as distinct, let alone foreign; she does not have a “native costume” (DG, p. 231).
“Giving Birth” is by far the most interesting and challenging story in the collection. It is, I feel, of a quality and importance equal to Atwood's finest poems. Furthermore, it is something of a personal statement on the nature of the creative process for which the birth of a child is an obvious metaphor. What is being born, however, is more than, or other than, a baby; it is a story, and an aspect of the self. The success of this story depends in part upon the fact that the birth is both metaphor and event. Also of importance, and handled with equal skill, is the narrative voice. These two elements of the narrative are inextricably woven together.
Approximately two thirds of the way through “Giving Birth,” the first person narrator asks herself why she must try to describe “events of the body” such as childbirth: “why should the mind distress itself trying to find a language for them?” (DG, p. 249) The story is the answer. The narrator begins by questioning the language we use to describe life. Words such as “giving” and “delivering” are troublesome and inadequate because they imply an end-product, an object, whereas birth like death is an event, not a thing. In order to overcome the limitations of language, in order to understand the significance of event, the narrator must, paradoxically, use language to write about the event. Thus, the narrator/writer creates her protagonist “Jeannie,” named after the light-brown haired Jeannie of the song.
Atwood goes to considerable effort to distinguish between the “I” of the story and “Jeannie”:
(By this time you may be thinking that I've invented Jeannie in order to distance myself from these experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am, in fact, trying to bring myself closer to something that time has already made distant. As for Jeannie, my intention is simple: I am bringing her back to life.)
(DG, p. 243)
By “bringing [Jeannie] back to life” in fiction, the narrator can attempt to recapture the significance of an event for the self. The story is the writer's way of ‘bringing something back’ from her experience so that she will not forget entirely “what it was like” (DG, p. 252). Therefore, towards the end of the story, the narrator, who is still troubled by the words “giving birth” can realize that,
(It was to me, after all, that birth was given, Jeannie gave it, I am the result.)
(DG, p. 253)
The birth has been given to the narrator because it is an event that has become a part of her, that has changed her. Because the narrator is a writer, however, the reality of this event takes its final shape in language, in a story.
With the last lines of the story Atwood pinpoints the relationship between narrator/Jeannie/reader, and the nature of experience. Atwood has said that for her “the self is a place in which things happen.”5 Birth has happened to Jeannie, in the story, and through Jeannie to the narrator. The story has happened to us; it is the event we experience. Just as Jeannie's hair darkens and she “is replaced, gradually, by someone else” (DG, p. 254), so the narrator has changed. Atwood is asking us to reconsider the relationship between experience and the self. She is attempting, through language, to grasp the meaning of event and the significance of a universal human event for the individual self. Life, like birth and death, is a process, not a static thing or object. The self, Atwood claims, is not a hard fixed kernel, an ego, but a place where events happen, a place that is changed by events. In a sense, then, we the readers are changed by “Giving Birth.”
As noted earlier, the baby in the story is more than a metaphor for the creative process; the chief protagonist does have a baby. But the story is never tiresomely gynecological in the way that Audrey Thomas' “If One Green Bottle …” finally is. Through Jeannie and her other self, the woman with “the haggard face, the bloated torso, the kerchief holding back the too sparse hair” (DG, p. 254), Atwood portrays the very real sense of terror and estrangment from the self that a person can feel when facing an unknown ordeal. The woman who shadows Jeannie is not “really there,” but she is the embodiment both of fear and of the self's unwillingness to be absorbed by event. Jeannie and her other self, then, are the counter-weights in “Giving Birth.” By writing the story, the narrator is able to absorb event into the self rather than be overwhelmed by it. Through language, ‘the mind's distress,’ meaning is born.
Notes
“Interview with Margaret Atwood,” Linda Sandler, The Malahat Review, 41 (January, 1977), p. 19. For a further discussion of her fiction see her interview with Graeme Gibson in Eleven Canadian Novelists (Toronto: Anansi, 1973).
“Margaret Atwood: Poet as Novelist,” The Canadian Novel in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1975), p. 314.
Margaret Atwood, Dancing Girls (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 1977). All further references are to this text. The following eleven stories were previously published: “The War in the Bathroom,” Alphabet, 8 (1964); “The Man from Mars,” Ontario Review (Spring-Summer, 1977); “Polarities,” Tamarack Review, 58 (1971), “Rape Fantasies,” The Fiddlehead, 104 (Winter, 1975); “Under Glass,” Harper's, 244 (February, 1972); “The Grave of the Famous Poet,” Oberon Press (1972); “Hair Jewellry,” Ms. Magazine (December, 1976); Saturday Night, 90 (May, 1975); “The Resplendent Quetzal,” The Malahat Review, 41 (January, 1977); “Lives of the Poets,” Saturday Night (April, 1977).
While I do not suggest that formal and thematic unity is the best, let alone only, way to prepare a collection of stories, it has proved remarkably effective in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House, Clark Blaise's A North American Education and Gabrielle Roy's Rue Deschambault.
Quoted from Atwood's introductory remarks on the cassette by High Barnett, Toronto, 1973.
