Margaret Atwood - Negotiating with the Dead

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty works, including fiction, poetry and critical essays, and her books have been published in over thirty-five countries. Of her novels, The Blind Assassin won the 2000 Booker Prize and Alias Grace won the Giller Prize in Canada and the PremioMondello in Italy. Her eleventh and most recent novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. In 2005 she was the recipient of the Edinburgh Book Festival Enlightenment Award, for a distinguished contribution to world literature and thought. In 2008, Margaret Atwood was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in Spain. She lives in Toronto.

For more information, visit www.margaretatwood.ca

ALSO BY MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION The Edible Woman (1969) Surfacing (1972) Lady Oracle (1976) Dancing Girls (1977) Life Before Man (1979) Bodily Harm (1981) Murder in the Dark (1983) Bluebeards Egg (1983) The Handmaids Tale (1985) Cat's Eye (1988) Wilderness Tips (1991) Good Bones (1992) The Robber Bride (1993) Bones Murder (1995) Alias Grace (1996) The Blind Assassin (2000) Oryx and Crake (2003) The Penelopiad (2005) The Tent (2006) Moral Disorder (2006) The Year of the Flood (2009) FOR CHILDREN Up in the Tree (1978) Anna's Pet [With Joyce Barkhouse] (1980) For the Birds (1990) Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995) Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003) Bashful Bob and Doleful Darinda (2004) NON-FICTION Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) Days of the Rebels 1815-1840 (1977) Second Words (1982) Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996) Two Solicitudes: Conversations [with Victor-Levy Beaulieu] (1998) Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing (2005) Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) POETRY Double Persephone (1961) The Circle Game (1966) The Animals in That Country (1968) The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) Procedures for Underground (1970) Power Politics (1971) You Are Happy (1974) Selected Poems (1976) Two-Headed Poems (1978) True Stories (1981) Interlunar (1984) Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (1986) Morning in the Burned House (1995) Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 (1998) The Door (2007) MARGARET NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD virago VIRAGO Published by Virago Press in 2003 Reprinted 2003, 2005, 2007 (twice), 2008, 2009 First published by Cambridge University Press 2002 This paperback edition is published with the permission of the Syndicate of the Press of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England Copyright O.W. Toad Ltd 2002 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84408-027-4 Typeset in Adobe Garamond by M Rules Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Papers used by Virago are natural, renewable and recyclable products sourced from well-managed forests and certified in accordance with the rules of the Forest Stewardship Council. Mixed Sources Virago Press An imprint of Little, Brown Book Group 100 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DY An Hachette UK Company www.hachette.co.uk www.virago.co.uk

The Empson Lectures

The Empson Lectures, named after the great scholar and literary critic Sir William Empson (1906-84), have been established by the University of Cambridge as a series designed to address topics of broad literary and cultural interest. Sponsored jointly by the Faculty of English and Cambridge University Press, the series provides a unique forum for distinguished writers and scholars of international reputation to explore wide-ranging literary-cultural themes in an accessible manner. As they were all sitting at table, one guest suggested that each of them should relate a tale. Then the bridegroom said to the bride: 'Come, my dear, do you know nothing? Relate something to us, like the others.' She said: 'Then I will relate a dream.' 'The Robber Bridegroom,' collected by the Brothers Grimm[ ] ... I moot reherceHir tales alle , be they bettre or werse , Or elks falsensom of my mateere . And therefore, whoso list it natyheere , Turne over the leef and chese another tale ... Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales[ ] And now in imagination he has climbed another planet, the better to look with single camera view upon this earth - its total scope, and each afflated tick, its talk, its trick, its tracklessness - and this, this he would like to write down in a book! A. M. Klein, 'Portrait of the Poet as Landscape'[ ] For the others

Contents

Introduction:

Into the labyrinth

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind. Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies[ ] I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps? Mavis Gallant, Preface, Selected Stories [] Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome. Marguerite Duras , Writing [] When I was a student of English literature, in the early 1960s, we all had to read an important critical text called Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). This erudite book, it is astonishing to note, was written by William Empson when he was only twenty-three. It is also astonishing to note that when he was in the full throes of composition he was expelled from the. University of Cambridge for being found with contraceptives in his room. This is a fitting commentary on how we are all stuck in time, less like flies in amber - nothing so hard and clear but like mice in molasses; because surely nowadays he would be expelled for being found without contraceptives in his room. The twenty-three-year-old William Empson sounds like a wise and considerate youth as well as an energetic one, and one who did not give up in the face of discouragement, and so when I was requested to give the Empson Lectures at the University of Cambridge for the year 2000 - a series of six, to be delivered to an audience composed not only of scholars and students, but also of the general public -I was more than delighted. Or rather, I was more than delighted when first asked such undertakings always seem so easy and pleasant two years ahead but as the time for actually giving the lectures approached, I became less delighted by the day. The broad subject proposed was, more or less, Writing, or Being a Writer, and since I've done that and been one, you'd think I'd have something to say. I thought so too; what I had in mind was a grand scheme in which I would examine the various self-images - the job descriptions, if you like - that writers have constructed for themselves over the years. I would do this in a way that was not too technical, and would contain no more obscure references than I felt were really necessary; and I would throw in some of my own invaluable experiences and insights along the way, thereby not only striking a personal note,' as fraudulent journalists in Henry James stories used to say, but also illuminating the entire field in a striking and original way. However, as time passed, my initial grandiose but cloudy visions dispersed, leaving a kind of daunted blankness. It was like finding yourself in a great library as a young writer, and gazing around at the thousands of books in it, and wondering if you really have anything of value to add. The more I thought about this the worse it became. Writing itself is always bad enough, but writing about writing is surely worse, in the futility department. You don't even have the usual excuse of fiction namely, that you are just making things up and therefore can't be held to any hard-and-fast standards of verisimilitude. Perhaps the auditors, and then the readers - you arrogantly assume there will be some will want literary theories, or abstract plans, or declarations, or manifestos, and then you open the theory-and-manifesto drawer and find it empty. Or at least I did. And then what? I will pass over the frenzied scribblings that followed, adding only that I found myself as usual behind deadline, and an even greater obstacle in Madrid, where some of the books I had confidently expected to find in the English sections of bookstores were not there (including somewhat witheringly my own). Despite these obstacles, the lectures were stapled together somehow, and delivered. The parts where profound thought and the results of decades of painstaking scholarship were replaced by sticky tape and string are not supposed to be noticeable. This book grew out of those lectures. It is about writing, although it isn't about how to write; nor is it about my own writing; nor is it about the writing of any person or age or country in particular. How to describe it? Lets say it's about the position the writer finds himself in; or herself, which is always a little different. It's the sort of book a person who's been labouring in the wordmines for, say, forty years by coincidence, roughly the time I myself have been doing this - the book such a person might think of beginning, the day after he or she wakes up in the middle of the night and wonders what she's been up to all this time. What has she been up to, and why, and for whom? And what is this writing, anyway, as a human activity or as a vocation, or as a profession, or as a hack job, or perhaps even as an art, and why do so many people feel compelled to do it? In what way is it different from for instance painting or composing or singing or dancing or acting? And how have other people who have done this thing viewed their own activity, and themselves in relation to it? And are their views of any comfort? And has the concept of the writer qua writer, as expounded by (of course) writers, changed at all over the years? And what exactly do we mean when we say a writer! What sort of creature do we have in mind? Is the writer the unacknowledged legislator of the world,[ ] as Shelley so grandiosely proclaimed, or is he one of Carlyle's blimp-like Great Men, or is he the snivelling neurotic wreck and ineffectual weenie so beloved of his contemporary biographers? Or perhaps I intended a warning for the unsuspecting young. Perhaps I have written about the subjects in this book not only because they were things about which I was anxious at the outset of my own writing life, but because many people - judging from the questions they ask - continue to be anxious about them today. Perhaps I have reached the age at which those who have been through the wash-and-spin cycle a few times become seized by the notion that their own experience in the suds may be relevant to others. Perhaps I wish to say: Look behind you. You are not alone. Don't permit yourself to be ambushed. Watch out for the snakes. Watch out for the Zeitgeist - it is not always your friend Keats was not killed by a bad review. Get back on the horse that threw you. Advice for the innocent pilgrim, worthy enough, no doubt, but no doubt useless: dangers multiply by the hour, you never step into the same river twice, the vast empty spaces of the blank page appal, and everyone walks into the maze blindfolded. I'll begin with the standard disclaimer. I am a writer and a reader, and that's about it. I'm not a scholar or a literary theoretician, and any such notions that have wandered into this book have got there by the usual writerly methods, which resemble the ways of the jackdaw: we steal the shiny bits, and build them into the structures of our own disorderly nests. In an early short story by poet James Reaney , the narrator watches his sister feeding the hens by spelling out words with the hen-feed, letter by letter. He says, 'I often wondered to whom she was writing, up there in the sky.'[ ] 'I wonder where it all comes from?' asked Reena , a thirty-four-year-old woman who has been writing since the age of six and throwing it all into the waste basket, but who thinks she may now be almost ready to begin.[ ] These are the three questions most often posed to writers, both by readers and by themselves: Who are you writing for? Why do you do it? Where does it come from? While I was writing these pages, I began compiling a list of answers to one of these questions the question about motive. Some of these answers may appear to you to be more serious than others, but they are all real, and there is nothing to prevent a writer from being propelled by several of them at once, or indeed by all. They are taken from the words of writers themselves retrieved from such dubious sources as newspaper interviews and autobiographies, but also recorded live from conversations in the backs of bookstores before the dreaded group signing, or between-bites in cut-rate hamburger joints and tapas bars and other such writerly haunts, or in the obscure corners of receptions given to honour other, more prominent writers; but also from the words of fictional writers - all written of course by writers though these are sometimes disguised in works of fiction as painters or composers or other artistic folk. Here then is the list: To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for revenge. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct (not often found after the early twentieth century, or not in that form). To please myself. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a perfect work of art. To reward the virtuous and punish the guilty; or the Marquis de Sade defence, used by ironists vice versa. To hold a mirror up to Nature. To hold a mirror up to the reader. To paint a portrait of society and its ills. To express the unexpressed life of the masses. To name the hitherto unnamed. To defend the human spirit, and human integrity and honour. To thumb my nose at Death. To make money so my children could have shoes. To make money so I could sneer at those who formerly sneered at me. To show the bastards. Because to create is human. Because to create is Godlike. Because I hated the idea of having a job. To say a new word. To make a new thing. To create a national consciousness, or a national conscience. To justify my failures in school. To justify my own view of myself and my life, because I couldn't be a writer unless I actually did some writing. To make myself appear more interesting than I actually was. To attract the love of a beautiful woman. To attract the love of any woman at all. To attract the love of a beautiful man. To rectify the imperfections of my miserable childhood. To thwart my parents. To spin a fascinating tale. To amuse and please the reader. To amuse and please myself. To pass the time, even though it would have passed anyway. Graphomania . Compulsive logorrhoea. Because I was driven to it by some force outside my control. Because I was possessed. Because an angel dictated to me. Because I fell into the embrace of the Muse. Because I got pregnant by the Muse and needed to give birth to a book (an interesting piece of cross-dressing, indulged in by male writers of the seventeenth century). Because I had books instead of children (several twentieth-century women). To serve Art. To serve the Collective Unconscious. To serve History. To justify the ways of God toward man. To act out antisocial behaviour for which I would have been punished in real life. To master a craft so I could generate texts (a recent entry). To subvert the Establishment. To demonstrate that whatever is, is right. To experiment with new forms of perception. To create a recreational boudoir so the reader could go into it and have fun (translated from a Czech newspaper). Because the story took hold of me and wouldn't let me go (the Ancient Mariner defence). To search for understanding of the reader and myself. To cope with my depression. For my children. To make a name that would survive death. To defend a minority group or oppressed class. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. To expose appalling wrongs or atrocities. To record the times through which I have lived. To bear witness to horrifying events that I have survived. To speak for the dead. To celebrate life in all its complexity. To praise the universe. To allow for the possibility of hope and redemption. To give back something of what has been given to me. Evidently, any search for a clutch of common motives would prove fruitless: the sine qua non, the essential nugget without which writing would not be itself, was not to be found there. Mavis Gallant begins the Preface to her Selected Stories with a shorter and more sophisticated list of writers' motives, beginning with Samuel Beckett, who said writing was all he was good for, and ending with the Polish poet AleksanderWat , who told her that it was like the story of the camel and the Bedouin: in the end, the camel takes over. 'So that was the writing life:' she comments, 'an insistent camel.'[ ] Having failed on the subject of motives, I took a different approach: instead of asking other writers why they did it, I asked them what it felt like. Specifically, I asked novelists, and I asked them what it felt like when they went into a novel. None of them wanted to know what I meant by into. One said it was like walking into a labyrinth, without knowing what monster might be inside; another said it was like groping through a tunnel; another said it was like being in a cave she could see daylight through the opening, but she herself was in darkness. Another said it was like being under water, in a lake or ocean. Another said it was like being in a completely dark room, feeling her way: she had to rearrange the furniture in the dark, and then when it was all arranged the light would come on. Another said it was like wading through a deep river, at dawn or twilight; another said it was like being in an empty room which was nevertheless filled with unspoken words, with a sort of whispering; another said it was like grappling with an unseen being or entity; another said it was like sitting in an empty theatre before any play or film had started, waiting for the characters to appear. Dante begins the Divine Comedy which is both a poem and a record of the composition of that poem - with an account of finding himself in a dark, tangled wood, at night, having lost his way, after which the sun begins to rise. Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway. Margaret Laurence and others have said that it is like Jacob wrestling with his angel in the night - an act in which wounding, naming, and blessing all take place at once. Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey an inability to see one's way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing. I was reminded of something a medical student said to me about the interior of the human body, forty years ago: 'It's dark in there.' Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light. This book is about that kind of darkness, and that kind of desire.Next page