Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

 

Surfacing is Margaret Atwood’s second novel, dating from 1972. All of the facts in that sentence are significant in defining the strengths and considerable weaknesses of a most curious novel. It reads very much as an apprenticeship novel – good, but not quite right – and it struggles to transcend the social politics of both its author and the time in which it was written. Nineteen-seventies feminism would have been all but mute without the didactic. And, despite the author’s attempts to the contrary, the didactic is the underlying tone of this novel. Overall, to be honest, it is a bit of a mess. But it’s an intriguing mess. The fine line between genius and nonsense is seldom more evident than in this novel. Thematically, it has tremendous power but in terms of writing craft it is all over the place.

An unnamed narrator, a young Canadian woman, returns to her childhood home on an island in Quebec following the unexplained disappearance of her father, a naturalist. Accompanying her are her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, David and Anna. The return to one’s roots is a familiar trope in fiction, of course, allowing protagonists to review the tracks of their lives that have brought them to the mature characters they are. Flaws can be traced, decisions or actions or events uncovered which help to explain their personalities. Ron Rash did much the same thing recently with Saints at the River, a novel which bears similar flaws to those in Surfacing. It is, one suspects, a structural fault with this type of psychological character study. It is too simplistic, perhaps, to reduce the complexity of human character into a historical recreation of past events or traumas and a concomitant extrapolation of cause and effect. We’re not that straightforward. In fairness to Atwood, there is more than that going in Surfacing,  but nonetheless it is a significant structural component of the novel.

However, you certainly can’t fault Atwood’s ambition. The novel is short – fewer than 200 pages – and yet she manages to pack in a thematic power which comes uncomfortably close to overload. There is gender, of course, as depicted by the cavalier, at times brutal ways the two women are treated by their menfolk. And there is a strong element of nationalism in the novel, particularly an aggressive anti-Americanism. All of this is quite acceptable, but when the thematic tableau extends to include specific linkages to the Holocaust, through the narrator’s Germanic origins, one feels the author is allowing herself to get carried away. Less is more.

Allied to her treatment of nationalism, there is a strong message about dispossession, the manner in which traditional Canadian ways and customs are being obliterated by incoming American culture. This is a very worthwhile thing to consider: the culture of a society is a powerful but fragile commodity and I’m certainly aware, as a Scot 250 years after the event, of the legacy of the Highland Clearances in my own country.

Therefore, this element of the novel could be intriguing, but it doesn’t work. This is because of the ridiculously cartoonish way in which the “Americans” in the novel are described. They are Beavis and Butthead on manoeuvres and as two-dimensionally obvious as it’s possible to be. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that Atwood inverts this by – shock, horror, who'd have thought it? – revealing that they are, in fact, indigenous Canadians and not Americans at all. The narrator's preconceptions about them may have been proved to be wrong, but the characterisation which brings about this revelation remains two-dimensional and over-the-top. It is, to be honest, simply a cheap trick on the author’s part, allowing her to make a thematic point that isn't warranted by the strength of the narrative.

From the start of the novel there is a sense of disconnection. The narrator cannot reconcile being back in the surroundings of her childhood while in the company of  friends from her adult life: “either the three of them are in the wrong place or I am.” The reason for her return is to seek traces of her father, who has inexplicably gone missing and may be dead or may still be alive. Back in the family cabin once more, the sound of road traffic to which she has become so accustomed is replaced by the birdsong she remembers from childhood. Past and present, nature and civilisation, ambition and fear, certainty and doubt, they begin to jostle in her mind. As is customary for this sort of “back to one’s youth” novel, the device is used to unravel the protagonist’s personality. Memories surface: family rancour, death, violence. And, in turn, more recent memories, buried deeply in her psyche, are revealed: an abortion, an affair, relationships and breakdowns.

All of this is revealed to us through the narrator – and how irritatingly postmodern is it that the central character doesn’t even have a name so she has to be referred to as “the narrator”? She is, of course, unreliable. By the end of the novel she has completely lost her senses. Or has she? Has she, in fact, regained them? Has she recovered the animal spirit that lurks within us, the gnostic spark of knowledge which modernity and its brutalising ways have extinguished? Because now the novel begins to take an ecopastoral turn. The rational world of science and machinery that we have created is in conflict with the animalism around us: this has been the Jungian rallying cry of fiction from Modernism onwards. Although it is well handled, in honesty others have done it better: Pincher Martin, The Orchard Keeper, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Housekeeping, The Glass Bead Game, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Life and Times of Michael K, the poetry of Ted Hughes. All of them explore similar territory to this, and, until the remarkable conclusion of Surfacing, all of them are superior.

Why? There are two reasons, one thematic and one craft. Thematically, there is just too much going on. There is nothing wrong, in a novel-length work, with thematic complexity, with a deep interlinking of themes and ideas. But here they don’t so much interlink as collide. It’s a dodgem car of a novel, its ideas forever careering into the buffers and crashing into one another. One minute it’s ecopastoralism, then it’s gender politics, then nationalism, then the Holocaust. And the underlying fault is that the only thing linking these strands together is the flawed and unreliable narration of the main character. At times she is clearly not sane and while it is possible to fashion a novel around the machinations of an insane protagonist, here it cannot work because the thematic targets are too varied. Crime and Punishment works because Raskolnikov’s obessions slide, in the course of the novel, from a greedy desire for both money and knowledge (specifically the knowledge of murder) into a gnawing desire for redemption. Although Raskolnikov’s sanity could be doubted, the linearity of the novel’s thematic exploration is entirely consistent. In Surfacing, that thematic exploration flails about like a woman beating off midges in the gloaming.

In terms of writing craft, the principal issue is characterisation. What do we have here? Firstly, men are shits – that old staple of feminist literature. Therefore, we have David who forces his wife to strip while he photographs her, while Joe comes close to raping the narrator. No. There needs to be a balance somewhere, a male character who is not a sexual predator. Secondly, American men are even bigger shits – that staple of leftist, anti-American writing. Thirdly, anyone embraced by modern culture is basically uncivilised, while anyone in touch with the natural wilderness has a primeval connection with some deeper spiritual knowledge. There is a ham-fistedness to much of this that is infuriating, because it damages what otherwise would be a very fine piece of writing.

Atwood’s admirers will argue that I’m simplifying what is in the text to make a point, and they may be right. The ending definitely suggests a far greater control of theme than I’m allowing. And certainly, the narrator is a remarkably complex character and it would not do to take anything she says at face value. Truth shifts and warps as the story progresses. Nothing is clearly understood. Therefore, it could be argued, some of the caricatures I complain of could, in fact, be representations of that very unreliability, and therefore inverted in meaning? Well, perhaps so, but it’s possible to make this sort of argument about virtually any novel of ideas that has ever been written. I agree there doesn’t have to be a moment when an author presents “this is what I believe” but somewhere along the line one needs to get a sense of what is being addressed. That only really emerges in the novel’s terrible and wonderful conclusion.

In this, the narrator breaks free from all shackles and reverts, briefly, to a Rousseauian state of natural savagery. The ending is far and away the most interesting part of the novel. This is where you see Atwood the novelist really beginning to emerge. All before is preliminary and, it might be argued, extraneous. William Golding would have started this novel here. It is surreal and terrifying. The narrator becomes something other – freed from rational instinct but somehow different from the wilderness dweller we might have expected. She doesn’t become some vessel for an ancient spirituality, nor does she find an animalistic core. She doesn’t become a visionary. And yet she does manage to channel some of those impulses and forces. It is a peculiar thing, and this is writing of impressive depth and complexity. It echoes Suttree’s sojourn in the mountains  in Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name but, here, the narrator finds some sense of inner truth that Suttree would not attain until his typhus attack: “I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.”

As a theme, that’s about as interesting as it gets. No man is an island. No victim can be despatched without a trace. No act, however guileless, is without consequence. No human can exist without exerting an influence – for good but also for ill – on other human beings. And for all its faults, it’s definitely worth reading Surfacing in order to come to this moment of departure.

Everyman by Philip Roth

 

Everyman, Philip Roth’s 2006 novella, is a meditation on life and death. It takes its name from the fifteenth century allegories in which a man is told by Death to prepare for judgement day. One by one his friends desert him, along with his wealth and his health and his strength and his beauty. Finally, he is alone before the almighty with only the sum of the good deeds he has done throughout his life to stand beside him as he awaits the final judgement. Such are the ways the Churches use guilt and fear to rein us in.

Roth is having none of that. His main character, an unnamed man, is approaching death – indeed we start with his funeral – but while this is indeed a novella about atonement, it is a very human atonement and it is peopled by real human beings, in all their frail, failing discomfiture. Religion, for this man, ‘was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn’t stand the complete unadultness – the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers.’

Instead of that, then, we have a study of character, and particularly of character shaped by death and the fear of death and the mourning for it. Death stalks these pages. (Indeed, possibly too much: at one point, he discovers the death of one former colleague, the terminal cancer of another and the attempted suicide of a third, all in the same morning, and later we have two members of his art class dying of cancer ‘within a week’ of one another. Pathos can easily become bathos.) But, those examples aside, death here is a powerful adversary. We are told: ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.’ And we, the readers, are placed centre stage for each enactment of this massacre, uncomfortably, unavoidably complicit.

‘Worry about oblivion when you’re seventy-five!’ the man tells us on page 32. He can swim across the bay. He is at the height of his powers. He has no need to worry. ‘The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!’ he tells us. And that is how humans live their lives, day-by-day, trying to deny the curse that is uniquely humanity’s, that we are burdened by foreknowledge of our own deaths. And so it is that, by page 161 we find, ‘It was time to worry about oblivion. It was the remote future.’

The character in this novella is a flawed individual (naturally, since he is an ‘everyman’) who has been married three times, only once to a woman he loved, and has three children, only one of whom matters to him. The plot catalogues his illnesses, from the trivial hernia for which he is treated as a child, to a series of increasingly complex problems which meant that, in later life, ‘not a year went by when he wasn’t hospitalized’ and, ‘now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.’

His story is told through his eyes and through the eyes of his family. There is the ‘incomparable’ Phoebe, his second wife, and their daughter, the ‘incorruptible’ and ‘miraculous’ Nancy. There are his sons, Randy and Lonny, the younger of the two, who, standing by his father’s graveside, ‘was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release.’ There is Merete, the third wife, a Danish model twenty years younger than him who is ‘basically an absence and not a presence.’ And there is his brother Howie, six years older, but indestructibly fit, in contrast to the increasing frailties of the younger man.

Roth doesn’t deal in black and whites. The man is neither good nor bad. The true loves in his life were his second wife, Phoebe, and their daughter, Nancy, but he deserted them both to live with the feckless Merete. Their break-up is painful, and relayed in detail. We are assured that he loved his older brother, a ‘very good man’ who had been the ‘one solid thing throughout his life’ but, as illness and fear overtook him, we are told, ‘He hated Howie because of his robust good health.’ Later, he describes his sons as ‘You wicked bastards! You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits!’

All of this could come across as unpleasantly self-pitying, but Roth is clever in the way he fleshes out the character, who at one stage calls himself a ‘cunthound’, a superbly violent demolition of his own ego, and any self-pity is immediately dissipated by the depth of his self-loathing. As his catalogue of illness unfolds, and as he becomes ‘a decidely lonelier, less confident man’ we are made to confront, with him, the nature of death. And, of course, we don’t – we cannot – approach it with equanimity. There is little honour in the way we sidle towards it. A woman weeps uncontrollably at the two funerals of the art class cancer sufferers and her husband asks the man why he thinks she is doing so. “Because life’s most disturbing intensity is death,’ the man replies. No, says the husband. “She’s like that all the time… She’s like that because she isn’t eighteen anymore.”

It is a truth, uncomfortable though it may be, that all grief is felt through the prism of our own mortality. When we mourn, we mourn for ourselves, too. All we can do, suggests Roth, is try our best and, at the end, come to an accommodation with ourselves. This is what Nietzsche was trying to tell us a hundred and thirty years ago, but we are slow learners. There is no day of judgement. Atonement is not a matter for the sky gods, but for oneself and one’s own. In a moving scene at the end of the novella, the man stands at the graves of his parents and speaks to them:

“I’m seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one.”

“Good. You lived,” his mother replied and his father said, “Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.”

It is that final statement that is so important. Make the best of what’s left, because what is done is done. Nietzsche pointed out one of the great tragedies of humanity:

The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desire – that is the will’s most lonely affliction.

Atonement is only possible in one’s own mind, as a personal act. Time cannot be recreated. The man’s treatment of Phoebe cannot be changed. He cannot undo the damage he did to her and Nancy by leaving them for Merete. Nor is there time to discover love of his sons. He has done what he has done. “There’s no remaking reality,” is his repeated stricture to his daughter and, at the start of the novel, standing by his grave, she repeats his words to him. As the novella unfolds, both the truth and the lie of those words becomes clear. The past remains, but atonement is possible, in the shape of memory.

As he leaves the cemetery, he gives some money to the gravedigger, who he knows will soon dig his own grave.  He tells him: “My father always said, ‘It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.”’ And with that one act of warmth the man finds redemption.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

 

Wise Blood was Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, a philosophical/religious allegory written in 1952 and called by the author herself her ‘opus nauseus'. As a first novel, it is remarkably assured. It is, however, an ultimately unsatisfying piece of propoganda in which she creates a Nietzschean straw man so that she can knock him down and claim victory for God.

The novel tells the story of Hazel Motes, just released from the army at the end of the war and drifting in and around his home state. In a series of encounters he repeatedly claims to believe in nothing and argues that while others are seeking redemption he is not. “I reckon you think you been redeemed,” he says to one character on the train:

 “If you’ve been redeemed,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to be…. Do you believe in Jesus? … Well I wouldn’t even if He existed. Even if He was on this train.”

To another character he asks: “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?” He continues in this vein with everyone he meets, while insisting that he is not a preacher. “You look like a preacher,” a taxi driver tells him. “That hat looks like a preacher’s hat.”  And Mrs Watts, the prostitute he visits, tells him: “Momma don’t mind if you ain’t a preacher.”

But of course he is a preacher. He is a preacher of nothingness.  “I don’t say [Christ] wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you. Listenhere [sic], I’m a preacher myself and I preach the truth…. I’m going to preach a new church – the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” Later, he rationalises his thinking:

“Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

While Haze is not seeking redemption, he is, as he repeatedly stresses, in search of truth. This is O’Connor’s take on Nietzsche’s assertion that God is dead and that man must seek instead to break free from conventional, Christian morality and move beyond good and evil. What Haze and the other characters represent is the Nietzschean will to power, as it is progressed through a search for truth. Truth, for Nietzsche, was something of a chimera: it was not an absolute or a universal, but manufactured through, by and because of the moral fashions of the time. Clearly, this is the converse of an O’Connor view of life and so O’Connor, in this novel, seeks to portray Nietzsche’s will to power in entirely negative terms. Motes tells a crowd (and us):

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!”

So Motes is a true nihilist, a believer in nothing. And thus, as Henry T Edmonson explains,  the novel: ‘illustrates the dangerous pursuit of nihilism through the rejection of God and traditional morality. Edmonson then points out that Haze’s ‘arrogance consists of his assertion that he can believe in nothing and still avoid evil.’ That, essentially, is a summary of the plot of the novel. In a series of encounters, Haze preaches nothingness and tries to prove that he neither seeks nor requires assistance from God in facing down mortal dangers. He is, of course, doomed to failure, because the human conscience will not allow such degeneracy. Of conscience, Haze says: “If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you.” This novel is the story of that hunt.

There are a number of additional characters, the most important of whom is Enoch, who becomes Haze’s only disciple and who steals for him the mummified remains of an Aboriginal from a museum, believing it to be the personification of the  ‘jesus’ of Haze’s Church Without Christ. Edmondson identifies Enoch as evoking:

nihilism’s most salient promise, the creation of a race of “overmen”, those individuals superior to the rest because of their rejection of bygone moral restraints, who by the courageous exercise of their will, lead everyone else into the promised land beyond good and evil.

Thus, we are again being encouraged to believe that Nietzsche’s search for life beyond good and evil is doomed to failure. Edmondson notes that: ‘O’Connor believed that the Nietzschean pursuit of the Overman will not be an evolutionary leap forward, but a long disastrous step backwards.’ O’Connor amplifies this graphically in Wise Blood with Enoch’s final scene, when he is dressed in a gorilla suit and creeps up on a young couple in the woods:

No gorilla in existence, whether in the jungles of Africa or California, or in New York City in the finest apartment in the world, was happier at that moment than this one, whose god had finally rewarded it.

As so often with O’Connor, her desire to deliver a message results in spectacularly unsubtle symbolism. Enoch, the supposed Overman, is here a symbol of mankind in his rejection of god, as a result of which he has become a mere animal. This, according to O’Connor is the Nietzschean future. Mankind, she is saying, in thrall as it is to nothingness and sensation and godlessness, is regressing into barbarity. No Rousseauian noble savage here, this is baseness personified.

So much for the message. Does it work? This is a fascinating novel, tussling with genuinely meaty issues, but in the end it is not satisfying. As with The Violent Bear It Away, the characters here are ciphers, objects to be played with by the author and manipulated to suit her ends. Haze is a nihilist, but he’s a very Christian sort of nihilist. True nihilism is not premised on a lifetime of denial of God: that is taken for granted. Only a Christian could draw a nihilist in such terms. And so we are told:

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

This gets to the central weakness in the story – it shows precisely where and how O’Connor is manipulating her character. He is supposedly the nihilist who determinedly believes in nothing, yet O’Connor is planting the seed of something in him, so that it can later be exploited. She is trying to have it both ways – painting him as believing nothing, yet having him know, deep down, that there is a blankness that once was something. So he is not a true nihilist, but a Christian caricature of one. He is a straw man. For this reason his downfall, although interesting, is of no philosophical consequence. Rather than a critique of nihilism or a refutation of Nietzschean beliefs, the story is ultimately a representation of Christian insecurity.

And read in that light it delivers the exact opposite message from that which O’Connor intended. And that, to me, is a delightful irony.