Margaret Atwood

John Moss, Tobi Kozakewich

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780776608440
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Margaret Atwood enjoys a unique prominence in Canadian letters. With over thirty books to her credit, in genres ranging from children's writing to dystopic novels, she is as creatively diverse as she is internationally acclaimed. Her success, however, has been double-edged: the very popularity that makes her such a prominent figure in the literary world also renders her vulnerable to claims of being a "sell-out, " as she relates in her Empson lectures. The Open Eye negotiates the space between these positions, acknowledging Atwood's remarkable achievement while considering how it impacts on national politics and identity.

The range of perspectives in this volume is stimulating and enlightening. The Open Eye begins with a focus on Atwood as she presents herself and is presented in Canada and abroad, and then proceeds to consider, more broadly, the intersection of life and literature that Atwood's works and persona effect. It offers fresh insight into Atwood's early writing, redresses the critical void regarding her poetry and shorter prose pieces, and provides a critical base from which readers can assess Atwood's most recent novels.

A common thread throughout these essays is the recognition of Atwood's importance in the literary realm in general, and in Canadian literature more particularly.

SUBJECT/OBJECT

Margaret Atwood: Branding an Icon Abroad

LAURA MOSS

IN THE FIFTH annual LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium Lecture, “A Country Imagined: Democracy and National Identity in Global Culture,” author David Malouf spoke in detail about Australian history, the notion of “fairness” as a national governing principle, and the failure of the 2000 referendum on Australia becoming a republic. He was at once a national historian, a cultural analyst, and a political commentator as he spoke unflinchingly and without irony of “we” and “us”: “We are down-to-earth people, rooted, as most people are, in the particularities of daily living” (Malouf). At Convocation Hall on the University of Toronto campus, Malouf interpreted the democratic life of Australia for a Canadian audience. It seemed incumbent upon him to make the kinds of comprehensive statements about his nation that he might hesitate to make at home. Malouf, in Canada, was speaking as a national icon of Australia.

Malouf’s lecture reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s Clarendon lectures at Oxford. While Atwood demystifes the Canadian North in the four Clarendon lectures collected in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, she also approximates Gayatri Spivak’s notion of the “native informant,” speaking almost ethnographically about herself, her culture, and her people. Although the genre of the prestigious university lecture invites the positioning of the author as cultural guru, some writers play to expectation more than others. Margery Fee comments that in Strange Things “the lectures make it clear how nearly irresistible it is for colonials visiting England to play the colonial” (Fee 335). As she is an astute judge of audience and market, there is undoubtedly a link between what Atwood presents to a foreign audience and what she thinks they want to hear. Fee suspects that Atwood

panders to what survives in the British … of the sense that Canadians are a rough-hewn folk struggling to survive in a snow-and-bear-covered landscape. Her defence is that an account of literary uses of Canadian urban life would be boring to her audience. (335)

Un-boring Canadian literature in the Clarendon lectures is populated by the Wendigo, Grey Owl imitators, gallant exploring men, and linoleum caves. Going beyond the boring has always been important for Atwood. She speculates that “the beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not A.m I really that oppressed’ but Am I really that boring’?” (qtd. in Nischik 169). Sometimes avoiding the boring means acquiescing to expectation; sometimes it means bypassing some of the tedious details of debates that occur within Canada. As Atwood plays the role of international-national cultural commentator, she abridges some of the ongoing discussions in Canada and abbreviates their complexities for a non-Canadian audience.1 She is not at Oxford to mediate debates about Canada; she is there as a cultural ambassador of Canada—or Icon Abroad. She plays her role well. In this paper, I am interested in three interrelated ways in which Atwood and Canada are linked beyond the borders of the nation, as she situates herself as Canadian, as she is promoted as part of a Canadian global brand, and as she is read popularly and academically outside Canada.

Atwood and Malouf are not alone as creative writers who (are called upon to) represent the culture, history, politics, and values of their home nations in foreign contexts. This is part of literary celebrity culture, the endowed university lecture genre, and the promotion of authors as cultural ambassadors abroad. In an age in which universities around the world are shifting funding emphasis away from the arts in the process of “businessification,” the endowed lecture has gained prominence as a means for public institutions to publicly display support and validation of the arts. The literary celebrity puts a human face on the university’s commitment to what UBC President Martha Piper labelled the “human sciences” in her 2002 Killam lecture. The celebrity author is asked to speak across a range of subjects that illustrate the relevance of the arts in discussions of important topics such as good governance, citizenship, and civil society. The author of international stature further helps to underline the degree to which the modern university projects itself as part of a global cultural community.

The apparent desire of the university to highlight its commitment to the arts and to a global community is emblematic of a broader institutional desire to link artists and international relations. The Canadian government, for instance, is eager to capitalize on the popularity and economic success of Canadian literature and other arts abroad. A recent publication of Foreign Affairs Canada (FAC) entitled “Canada World View, As Others See Us,” packages a group of artists together as integral parts of “Canada’s global brand”:

Filmmaker Atom Egoyan, multimedia director Robert Lepage, visual artist Jeff Wall, and author Margaret Atwood have made waves in Europe with individual, even quirky visions that are resolutely made in Canada. Such cultural figures are important elements of Canada’s global brand, one that garners recognition all over the world but particularly in Europe. On a continent so deeply steeped in the arts, Canada’s credibility in the cultural arena strengthens all aspects of our country’s international relations. (FAC paragraph 4)

The image of Canada branded for export to a continent so steeped in culture is one of quirky individuality that is still resolutely Canadian. If, as Naomi Klein suggests, branding is about promoting “not a product but a way of life, an attitude, a set of values, an idea”(23), it is also about selling a product and making a profit. What is FAC promoting through Atwood, Egoyan, Wall, and Lepage? What does Canada want to sell? The literal answer (films, art, books, and photographs) meets the symbolic answer (respect, economic growth, and political strength). Canada is branded as culturally progressive and yet firmly located in a national sphere in much the same way that the endowed university lecture helps brand the university as committed to sustaining the values of culture.

Another publication, by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, “Why Trade Matters,” reinforces the strong economic motivation behind the promotion of Canada though the promotion of art:

Canadian authors, with their increasing high profile and international critical acclaim, could be described as Canada’s ‘other ambassadors.’ Through their writing, they bring a particular vision of Canada to the world, promoting an image of a dynamic, bilingual, and multicultural nation, (paragraph 2)

As one of the senior “other ambassadors,” Atwood promotes Canada promoting her books promoting Canada. It is a business relationship that is beneficial for Atwood and for Canada. Although Atwood states with characteristic bluntness that “I don’t work for the tourist board” when asked “Is it important to you in your writing to sort of promote the Canadian identity?” she does take advantage of the ways in which the tourist board works for her. The unnamed author of the FAC article focuses on the economic impact of Canadian literature globally, noting that “in 2002, the total value of cultural goods exports was 2.3 billion. Nearly half of this was publishing and printing products, with books representing nearly 500 million of this figure (paragraph 2).” The Canadian government’s commitment to “an image of a dynamic, bilingual, and multicultural nation (paragraph 20)” aside, half a billion dollars is big business. Although the article lists several writers (Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, Nicole Brossard, Timothy Findley, Anne Hébert, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Alistair MacLeod, Yann Martel, Rohinton Mistry, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Nino Ricci, Carol Shields, and Michel Tremblay, to be precise), it highlights the role of Atwood as the most accomplished and celebrated of the list: “With her books in over twenty languages, Margaret Atwood is probably Canada’s most translated author. Her novel The Blind Assassin can even be read in Bengali and Farsi!” (paragraph 10). The global reach of Atwood, extending as far as Bangladesh and Iran as FAC points out, is in part due to the quality of her work, but it is also at least in part due to the way she is marketed (by herself, her publishers, and the Canadian government) as an ambassador of Canada and an integral element of Canada’s global brand, the way she performs the role with gusto, and the way she in turn is read as both Canadian and transnational.

As an “other ambassador,” Atwood witnesses her country’s national narratives. In doing so, she comes to exemplify what I see as the paradox of transnational-nationalism. According to Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, transnationalism is defined as the “flow of people, ideas, goods, and capital, across national territory, [which] undermines nationality and nationalism as discrete categories of identification, economic organization, and political constitution”(8). However, paradoxically, transnationalism often relies precisely on the designation of individuals, often well-known cultural figures, to represent the nation categorically beyond its borders. This is clearly the case with the publications of the Department of Foreign Affairs explicitly naming Atwood as an important element of the international image of Canada it wishes to project. Atwood is both representative of a very localized, often rather neatly packaged, national identity and a global figure who is worthy of representing the local for the international community. As an “other ambassador,” Atwood is exemplary of such transnational-nationalism.

The 1970s image of Atwood as a medusa with a razorblade in her mouth has been replaced by twenty-first century images of her as the “first lady of Canadian literature” (Ferguson paragraph 2 and Queen of the Booker). As the British council website puts it, Atwood “is Canada’s most eminent novelist and poet, and also writes short stories, critical studies, screenplays, radio scripts, and books for children, her works having been translated into over thirty languages” (Holcombe paragraph 2). For the British council, she is not one of Canada’s most eminent writers; she is the most eminent writer. Although Canadians tend to avoid such absolutes, Atwood is still everywhere: locally, on the poster students put up outside my office door for the UBC student literary journal Rant: “churning out atwoods [sic] since 1918”; nationally, on the list of suggestions in the CBC search for the “Greatest Canadian” (although not one of the finalists); and globally, on hundreds of Internet web pages dedicated to her work; in newspaper articles by and about her; in megabox bookstore displays of her latest work; on high school and university course offerings in Denmark, Germany, Japan, Australia, England, the United States, China, and in Canadian studies centres around the world. More often than not, in the international references to Atwood, the word Canada and the Canadian flag are not far away. Atwood is not just an internationally recognizable icon; she is an internationally recognizable icon of Canada.

Atwood is undeniably an important writer, one who experiments with a variety of literary genres and one who comments on a range of subjects from national identity to food to war. In Canada, however, she is often discussed with ambivalence. It is just not “cool” to enjoy the works of Atwood. German critic Caroline Rosenthal asserts that “much in contrast to the United States, Canadians often treat national icons with irony and self-deprecating humour … Canada ritualizes the non-reverence of national icons and the absence of a coherent national mythology”(50). As is often the case, as a cultural figure is elevated to the level of icon nationally and then internationally, other writers, thinkers, and speakers rebel at the simplification of having one artist’s voice paradigmatically represent many. Academic ambivalence to the icon further comes out in such statements as “if only Atwood were a better writer,” as one senior colleague said to me when I told him I was going to the Atwood conference in Ottawa. Popular ambivalence is well illustrated by Will Ferguson in an article for En Route magazine on Canadians whom Canadians love to hate. Ferguson suggests that it is part of the Canadian identity to want to unsettle an icon: “it is Atwood the icon that people resent, not Atwood the Feminist … no, it’s not anything as grand as her gender politics or as petty as the tone of her voice. It is simply the fact that Atwood has become an icon, and icons were meant to be—if not toppled—at least pelted by snowballs (paragraphs 6 and 9).” Beyond fulfilling the stereotype of a national distrust of iconicity, the ambivalence with which Atwood is almost always met in Canada comes from her position as Ur-Canadian beyond Canada. Outside of Canada, snowballs tend to melt and icons tend to last.

An icon often begins symbolic life as an iconoclast.2 The challenging of accepted beliefs may be considered heretical, but if such challenging leads to a change in public opinion, or in communal conceptions of culture or art, a shift occurs where what was once considered iconoclastic becomes recognizably representative of an epoch or a nation. Subsequently, with the forgetting of the iconoclastic beginnings, the icon is emptied of a history and instead becomes something to be reacted to by another iconoclast. However, context is key. The trajectory from iconoclasm to icon sometimes stops at the symbolic stage of iconicity outside of the original context. This is the case of Atwood as an icon abroad. The iconoclasm of the “political manifesto” of Survival has been enshrined and subsequently rendered iconic in the international canonization of Atwood as the figurehead of CanLit. Atwood herself is clearly aware of the fluidity and illusory nature of iconicity. In answer to a question posed in Wollongong, Australia, about how it feels to have “spent a quarter of a century as an icon of Canadian literature,” she replied, “Well, number one, icons inspire iconoclasm; number two, I’m never around when I’m being an icon. It’s like the Virgin Mary: she’s in heaven, her picture is down here” (Canadian Studies Address 23). Self-comparisons with the Virgin Mary aside, Atwood has a point about the way that iconicity is not sought but thrust upon one.

Atwood as national icon has followed the familiar trajectory—from iconoclast to icon. Donna Bennett and Nathalie Cooke argue that “[i]ronically, today Atwood in particular, and the writers of her generation in general, are seen as embodying the authority that they saw as external and inauthentic to their experience” (41). Such irony is the basis of the trajectory. Atwood is not alone on this trajectory in Canada. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Abbreviated Titles
• Haunting Ourselves in Her Words
• Open Eyes: An Introduction
• Subject/Object
• Earlier Novels
• Short Fiction and Poetry
• The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake
• Postscript
• Index