Margaret Atwood - Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

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)
Cats Eye(1988)
Wilderness Tips(1991)
Good Bones(1992)
The Robber Bride(1993)
Good Bones and Simple Murders(1994)
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)

NONFICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature(1972)
Days of the Rebels 18151840(1977)
Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 19601982(1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature(1996)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing(2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 19822004(2004)
Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 19832005(2005)

POETRY
The Circle Game(1965)
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)
Morning in the Burned House(1996)
Eating Fire: Selected Poems 19651995(1998)
The Door(2007)

FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree(1978)
Annas Pet[with Joyce C. Barkhouse] (1980)
For the Birds(1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut(1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes(2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda(2006)

Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

MARGARET ATWOOD

Copyright 2008 O. W. Toad Ltd.

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Atwood, Margaret, 1939
Payback : debt and the shadow side of wealth / Margaret Atwood. Limited ed.

(CBCMassey lecture series)
Includes index.
eISBN978-0-88784-872-8

1. Debt Social aspects. 2. Debt in literature. I. Title. II. Series.

PS8501.T86Z463 2008A 306.3 C2008-904070-8

Cover design: Bill Douglas
Cover photographs: Getty Images

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the
Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government
of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Graeme and Jess,
and Matthew and Graeme the younger

CANADIAN NATURE WRITER Ernest Thompson Seton had an odd bill presented to him on his twenty-first birthday. It was a record kept by his father of all the expenses connected with young Ernests childhood and youth, including the fee charged by the doctor for delivering him. Even more oddly, Ernest is said to have paid it. I used to think that Mr. Seton Senior was a jerk, but now Im wondering, What if he was in principle right? Are we in debt to anyone or anything for the bare fact of our existence? If so, what do we owe, and to whom or to what? And how should we pay?

THE MOTIVE FOR this book is curiosity mine and my hope is that the writing of it will allow me to explore a subject I know little about, but which for this reason intrigues me. That subject is debt.

Payback is not about debt management, or sleep debt, or the national debt, or about managing your monthly budget, or about how debt is actually a good thing because you can borrow money and then make it grow, or about shopaholics and how to figure out that you are one: bookstores and the Internet abound in such materials.

Nor is it about more lurid forms of debt: gambling debts and Mafia revenges, karmic justice whereby bad deeds trigger reincarnation as a beetle, or melodramas in which moustache-twirling creditors use nonpayment of the rent to force unwanted sex on beautiful women, though it may touch on these. Instead, its about debt as a human construct thus an imaginative construct and how this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear.

Writers write about what worries them, says Alistair MacLeod. Also about what puzzles them, Id add. The subject of Payback is one of the most worrisome and puzzling things I know: that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force.

THE THINGS THAT puzzle us as adults begin by puzzling us as children, or this has certainly been the case for me. In the late 1940s society in which I grew up, there were three things you were never supposed to ask questions about. One of them was money, especially how much of it anyone made. The second was religion: to begin a conversation on that subject would lead directly to the Spanish Inquisition, or worse. The third was sex. I lived among the biologists, and sex at least as practised by insects was something I could look up in the textbooks that were lying around the house: the ovipositor was no stranger to me. So the burning curiosity children experience vis--vis the forbidden was focused, for me, on the two other taboo areas: the financial and the devotional.

At first these appeared to be distinct categories. There were the things of God, which were unseen. Then there were the things of Caesar, which were all too material. They took the form of golden calves, of which we didnt have many in Toronto at that time, and also the form of money, the love of which was the root of all evil. But on the other hand stood the comic-book character Scrooge McDuck much read about by me who was a hot-tempered, tight-fisted, and often devious billionaire named after Charles Dickenss famous redeemed miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. The plutocratic McDuck had a large money bin full of gold coins, in which he and his three adopted nephews splashed around as if in a swimming pool. Money, for Uncle Scrooge and the young duck triplets, was not the root of all evil but a pleasurable plaything. Which of these views was correct?

We kids of the 1940s did usually have some pocket money, and although we werent supposed to talk about it or have an undue love of it, we were expected to learn to manage it at an early age. When I was eight years old, I had my first paying job. I was already acquainted with money in a more limited way I got five cents a week as an allowance, which bought a lot more tooth decay then than it does now. The pennies not spent on candy I kept in a tin box that had once held Lipton tea. It had a brightly coloured Indian design, complete with elephant, opulent veiled lady, men in turbans, temples and domes, palm trees, and a sky so blue it never was. The pennies had leaves on one side and kings heads on the other, and were desirable to me according to their rarity and beauty: King George the Sixth, the reigning monarch, was common currency and thus low-ranking on my snobby little scale, and also he had no beard or moustache; but there were still some hairier George the Fifths in circulation, and, if you were lucky, a really fur-faced Edward the Seventh or two.