(An excerpt from Transposed Heads, the forthcoming collaborative art book by Lance Austin Olsen, images, and Donald Brackett, texts)
“Reality simply consists of different points of view.” M.A.
Portrait of novelist Margaret Atwood by Lance Austin Olsen
Naturally, the current attempts by reactionary conservative forces in the extremist right wing of the political spectrum to return society not just to 1955, but to 1855, occasions in us an appreciative re-approach to the awesomely prescient novel by Margaret Atwood, one that posited a semi-science fiction realm of theocracy and repression that was mind boggling in its Sinclair Lewis-shaped narrative. As far as I can tell, Atwood may well have written the scariest book in history, right up there with Zamyatin’s 1920 opus called WE, the book that inspired both of Huxley’s and Orwell’s later ruminations on psychic paralysis.
And Zamyatin’s towering WE also inspired, of course, Atwood’s own exceptional opus. In her case she delivered the fearful warning by delving further and further into herstory: her word machines, no longer drunk with poetic oxygen but with literary nightmares, were almost desperately attempting to think themselves sober. This fall, it will be as if all of western civilization will have had too much to think last night, but hopefully we’ll all avoid a hangover of epic proportions. Her emblematic characters know, more than with a mere quasar grin of entertainment, when to step deeper and deeper into their gripping misogynistic red robed saga: it’s all about rewriting the history of what has been seemingly been lost in translation. The women’s narrative, for a much needed drastic change.
Atwood was stunned by the sudden shift to a repressive theocracy in Iran in 1977, and then by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, embodying all the retro-forces lurking in America, which prompted her to commence and then release her harrowing signature novel about an American downward spiral, in the ominous year of 1984. Besides the touching and often terrifying novels she penned, she also emits a tender and swiftly flowing river of Dickinson-like poetry, starting with Double Persephone, 1961, which won the E.J. Pratt Prize. But it was with The Edible Woman, her first novel in 1969 that she really seemed to hit her stride. Clearly, a squad of the dream police is always just outside her plot doors, waiting patiently for ominously oppressive orders from home office, while the narrator spells survival backwards and contemplates the naked clothing of her struggling characters. Some things are very difficult, if not impossible, to describe in words. The smell of lilies, the taste of ginger, the bliss of brilliant jazz: one can only hope to approximate some of the more subtle experiences available to human beings. The imagination of Atwood is similarly staggering and ineffable, as is the literary skill to share it so fruitfully.
Yes, she’s still also extremely scary in her prescience, considering when her then tall-tale was composed. So it is though with certain kinds of literature, the uncertain writing that emerges from a fully illuminated but mostly hidden zone of our perception, a zone which can only be characterized as the ritual of looking far inside the darkness. Kafka and Walser actually lived there daily. This ritual is the anarchic and atavistic realm where all the best stories unfold. No amount of narratology, intellectual gloss, conceptual frameworks, postmodern theory or digital clarity can ever hope to replace the basic and palpable presence of this primary saga experience. From the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the very first book in history, to The Handmaid’s Tale, in the blink of an eye: thus our archival obsession with conserving them in our shared librarian memory like frozen music.
Via: The Screen of Mediation. Shining a bright light into the dim recesses of potential seeing: such is still the function of literature in the freaked out 21rst Century, and that aura is as secure as ever, as long as it is as authentic as it appears to be in literary rhapsodies by authors as audacious as Atwood. Beneath the contrived costumes of fiction, a new creature emerges from her closet serenade, full of woeful tales told by sleeping suburban houses. Her characters sit still on their austere azure shelves, while she takes the big walk from the writing chair out into the apparent air, as even the most tasteful linguistic gymnastics come to their eventual end, in actual reality. Her plots were sketched on a crumpled piece of dream clothing: she was always singularly devoted to the pleasant pain of inscribing the muffled animal cries contained in fine literary art. She still stuns us with her courageous capacity to explore and embrace the inconceivable. Zamyatin and Atwood: two tellers of tale-tales who are both birds of a feather, and yet also one of a kind.
Design by Jamie Drouin
You got it Pontiac !
Thanks. Margaret Atwood is certainly a voice for that which constantly waits on the outer edge of society until events unleash that which is barely strung together with hope. Frightening.