Darknessâ in the short story collection Wilderness Tips (1991).4. The themes of ..... Approaches to Teaching Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and. Other Works ...
Iconic Dimensions in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and Prose (In The Motivated Sign, Max Nänny and Olga Fischer, eds, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2001, 351-366.
Christina Ljungberg
in her close attention to words and word games, such as anagrams2 and palindromes. In her writing, which centres on the revision and exploration of myths and literary conventions, Atwood frequently inverts literary forms and received images in order to question their origins and functions. This applies to both her poetry and her prose, where she often uses form with a parodic and intertextual intent, as a means of challenging tradition by rewriting it, transgressing restrictive limitations of genres and conventions in order to open up their creative potential. At the same time, her playing with form and meaning functions as a strategy to involve the reader in the creative process.
University of Zurich 2. Iconic Dimensions in Atwood’s Poetry 1. Introduction The iconic dimensions apparent in several recent literary works suggest that, more than ever, writers are playing with the conventions of language in order to exploit the possibilities of linguistic signs and systems creatively. In particular, it is the diagrammatic aspect of iconicity that seems to attract contemporary writers, as they use form to add meaning.1 A case in point is Margaret Atwood, whose playing with the relationship between the formal and semantic aspects of language has always been a characteristic of her work. Her interest in visual perception ranges from her use of mirrors and reflections, metaphors of the fragmentation and alienation of the self, to her own production of visual artwork: her watercolours, cover designs, book illustrations and collages. It is also evident
Atwood’s dialogue with tradition is already apparent in an early poem from 1961, “Pastoral Elegy”, an ironic parody of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where it becomes doubly significant. By ordering her lines into a pattern poem, Atwood uses form not only to reflect the content of her poem, but also to subvert Eliot’s negative view of contemporary mores. At the same time, she makes a clear allusion to George Herbert, who is known as the originator of the carmen figuratum, or pattern poem, in English. In her excellent article “Back to the Primal: The Apprenticeship of Margaret Atwood”, Sandra Djwa (1995: 20) shows that Atwood, after having been heavily influenced by Eliot’s “mythical method” in her early poetry, began to distance herself from Eliot by reworking his concepts into parody and pastiche. But, as Djwa suggests, Atwood was still very intrigued by Eliot’s use of classical fertility mythology to interpret contemporary sexuality. In her poem, however, she inverts the myth:
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PASTORAL ELEGY 1 My landscape is becoming disarranged. the gardener is digging up the willows because their roots have grown into the sewers; this spring has been warmer than most, but the early burgeoning 5 is not my arrangement: I find too many flowers get in the way. The only nymphs I could obtain this year, were less satisfactory than usual: they refused to unloose their crimped hair, 10 simpered, demanded extra pay, and strewed used tissues on the lawn. Something has changed. Yesterday, I tried Hiring another musician to provide 15 the right atmosphere, but he insisted on set hours, union rates, and the saxophone, which was really not what I had in mind. Once, I seem to recall, someone died, I think. I can find no evidence of it here; 20 the clean sky denies all sense of rain; eddies of swallows swirl again into the hollow branches, and the gardener is digging up the willows.
Times have changed: in Atwood’s poem, Eliot’s departed nymphs have been substituted by wilful women who no longer comply with the (implicitly male) speaker’s desires for them “to unloose their crimped hair”; instead, they “simper [...] and demand [...] extra pay” (1961: 9, line 10). The musician the speaker tries to hire insists on “set hours, union rates, and thesaxophone” (lines 16-17), a far cry from Eliot’s romantic “pleasant whining of a mandolin” (1993: 2155, line 261).
By shaping her poem into an icon of a butterfly to evoke metamorphosis or rebirth, Atwood replaces the negative views of sexuality presented by Eliot by an abundantly fertile landscape that asserts itself against Eliot’s barren civilization. The “dull roots” of Eliot’s “dead land” (1993: 2147, lines 4 and 2) have changed into a sturdy variety of willow whose roots grow into the sewers, and the warm weather has caused the flowers to bud and multiply, so that they overpower the speaker (Atwood 1961: 9, lines 4-7). Furthermore, the butterfly shape evokes the wing shape used by the religious metaphysical poet George Herbert in his poem “Easter-wings”. The iconic form of God’s wing emphasizes the resurrection theme of the poem, as Easter is the time of death and renewal: this is one of the iconic devices pointed out by Matthias Bauer in his highly interesting essay, “Iconicity and Divine Likeness”, on the meta-iconicity used by the Metaphysical poets (Bauer 1999: 216).3 In her poem, Atwood lets the structure of the poem itself mirror the regularity of the natural cycle. It starts off with the speaker’s comment on the impact of Nature on her civilized “landscape”, where, as we have seen, the rapidly growing willow roots have secured their water supply. Then it moves on to human concerns and actions in the first ‘butterfly wing’. In the second ‘wing’, this order is inverted, reflecting the gardener’s never-ending fight against the regenerative force of Nature. Furthermore, by placing the line “Something has changed” (1961: 9, line 12) at the very centre, where it forms the butterfly’s body and the core of the poem, Atwood places particular emphasis on the act of transformation: like God’s wing, the butterfly emblem embodies rebirth and renewal. At the same time, she comments on Eliot’s metamorphoses in The Waste Land, where he alludes to the fate of Procne and Philomel (1993: 2150, line 100; 2160, line 429), who, after death, turn into a swallow and a nightingale, respectively. And, as Max Nänny kindly pointed out to me, both the swallow and the nightingale are migrating birds hence, the iconic form of Atwood’s poem, with its “eddies of swallows [that] swirl again”
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(1961: 9, line 21), could allude to swallows’ tails, which also signal the return of spring. The icon of a butterfly is also the emblem of Psyche, the allegorical figure of the soul. The tale of Psyche, which is a quest narrative, corresponds both to the initiation into the cult of Isis and to episodes of the myth of Isis itself. The Waste Land is a quest narrative, too: as Eliot points out, the theme and the structure of his poem were based on Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance (Eliot 1993: 2146). Thus, by replacing Eliot’s ‘questing knight’ by the icon of the ‘questing’ Psyche, Atwood alludes to the positive connotation of female generative and creative power associated with the Isis myth. This is something she returns to repeatedly in her fiction, for instance in the novel Cat’s Eye (1988), and in “Isis in Darkness” in the short story collection Wilderness Tips (1991).4 The themes of metamorphosis and perception reappear in Atwood’s poem “This is a Photograph of Me”, which opens both the collection The Circle Game (1966), her first award-winning book of poems, and her Selected Poems (1976). Thus, this poem can be said to have an introductory function vital to an understanding of Atwood’s poetry: not only because she places it before her other poems, but also because it concerns the reading process, with its complex relationship between reader, text and the world.5 Furthermore, it discusses the presence of the speaker (and the author) in the written work. This issue, which reappears both in her poetry and in her fiction, can be argued to lie at the centre of her work and to constitute one of her most fascinating abilities, namely to turn personal experience into art. At the same time, it is a prime example of Atwood’s uncanny power to make her readers participate in the creation of meaning: THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF ME It was taken some time ago.
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At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house. In the background there is a lake, and beyond that, some low hills.
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(The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.
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It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion but if you look long enough eventually you will be able to see me.)
The deceptively conventional beginning of the poem, which indicates the photograph’s uncertain date and comments on its poor quality, evokes a familiar viewing situation, the intimacy of which is further enhanced by the speaker addressing the
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presumed viewer of the photograph as “you”. That this intimacy could apply to the act of reading is immediately alluded to in the very first lines: the “smeared / print: blurred lines and grey flecks / blended with paper” (lines 3-5) which it “seems to be” could refer either to a smeared typographic print or to a photographic one, which the viewer/reader is invited to make sense of. Carefully guided by the speaker’s suggestions as to what he or she is supposed to see, the viewer/reader is first made aware of each item that is contained in the foreground of the photograph, and is then moved to the background, where there is supposed to be “a lake / and beyond that, some low hills” (lines 13-14). At this point, our expectations are suddenly shattered. The second half of the poem, put in parentheses despite its dramatic disclosure, undermines the first. The absurd claim that the speaker has drowned and is, in fact, “in the lake, in the center / of the picture, just under the surface” subverts the communicative discourse of the preceding lines. Furthermore, the viewer is supposed to see her in a lake which is hardly discernible in the first place, emerging from an indistinct representation of “blurred lines”, contrary to the exact rendering of reality we usually expect from an ordinary photograph. Space and time are inverted: the lake in the background is suddenly in the center, while the speaker is both in the lake and outside it, simultaneously drowned and alive. Thus, the imaginary ‘world’ the poem has constructed in its inviting first half is completely deconstructed in the second. Or is it? If we look at the literary devices of iconic representation that are identified by Max Nänny in his article “Iconicity in Literature” such as lineation, stanza breaks, sequence, iteration and chiasmus (1985: 201-207), the poem suddenly lends itself to a different interpretation. Starting with lineation, we see that, between the two parts formed by the first twelve and the last twelve lines, the two lines that introduce the lake and its backdrop of low hills do, in fact, occupy a medial position in the poem. Thus, they function as a divider, like the clear line of the lake surface, splitting the poem and the “photograph” into a conventionally perceived surface and an
underlying reality given by the speaker, ‘submerged’ within the parentheses. Furthermore, the lineation reinforces the poem’s emphasis on the process of seeing, through the irregular line breaks on the page. These mirror the movement of the eye on the (suggested) foreground of the photograph, searching for the “me” announced in the title, hesitating and trying to make sense of what it sees. In the next stanza, the eye’s scanning motion from the left “thing… like a branch” (line 8, my italics), diagonally across, meets “halfway up / what ought to be a gentle / slope, a small frame house” (lines 10-12, my italics). Here, like “seems” in line two, the words “like” and “ought to be” indicate the speaker’s hesitation and uncertainty in her identification of the objects she is referring to, signalling to us not to take anything at face value. The “photograph”, conventionally considered to be an exact representation of reality, thus opens up new and disturbing possibilities of interpretation. As we now move from the foreground to the background in the middle of the poem, still searching for the speaker, her announcement that she is “in the lake, in the center / of the picture, just under the surface” (lines 13-14) forces us to perform a parallel downward dive, in order to locate her. This cognitive effort of comprehension is again mirrored by the slow spiralling downward of the lines, until we finally discover her at the end of the poem. Or do we? As she points out, “the effect of water / on light is a distortion” (lines 22-23): her elusive image below the water surface will not allow us to locate her exactly but will fool us, owing to the refractive power of water. Only by stepping out of our own conventional perception of reality and accepting her offer to show us new and alternative ones will we be able to discover her on her terms. Thus, Atwood lets her poem enact the transformation involved in the reading process. The initial act of looking at a visual representation (in this case the photograph, or the poem) is gradually replaced by the reader’s insight into and understanding of its meaning (“you … will see me”, line 26). This transformation is further reflected in Atwood’s use of
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pronouns which refer both to the outside (exophoric) and inside (endophoric) of the text (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 33), thus mirroring the interplay between reader, text and world. Hence, in the title, “This is a photograph of me”, “this” is both exophoric and endophoric/cataphoric (referring to the following text). Atwood sets up this opposition by playing with two types of texts, one associated with the oral ritual of showing photographs and the other the written poem, as “this” simultaneously refers both to the outside, ‘real’ world and the inside, textual world. The transfer of meaning is thus effected first by “it” (line 1), which refers anaphorically to the “photograph of me”, the first visual impression. In the second stanza, the antisymmetry (cf. Nöth 1998: 650) created by the opposition between the exophoric “you” and “it”, between reader and text, reflects the reader’s initial perception of the seemingly ‘real’ world of the first half of the poem. In the second half, when this world has been revealed to be a fictional construct, the opposition changes into a relationship between the endophoric “I” (the speaker ‘submerged’ in the text) and “you” (the reader) who, by accepting her invitation, might, “eventually”, understand the dynamic complexity involved in reading and understanding poetry.
various forms. This is especially noticeable in The Robber Bride (1993), which is a frame narrative containing three different narratives, each of which forms a kind of palindrome in time and space. The main plot of the story of Zenia, the Robber Bride, and her rampage through Toronto and through the three narrators’ lives starts and ends in a restaurant called the Toxique: it is here that the three women have got together for their monthly luncheon to reminisce about the past, when Zenia, their common enemy, returns unexpectedly “from the dead” (1993: 4). Her reappearance triggers memories of the irreparable damage she once caused each of them; it also reawakens the underlying childhood traumata which made them susceptible to her powers. This forces them to relive the particular relationships they had with her, and their respective childhoods during and after World War Two. Thus, taken together, these narratives also present what Tony, one of the narrators, calls “a chart of simultaneous events” (1993: 4), since they explore various social and cultural developments over three decades, from 1960 to 1990, ranging from domestic Canadian and Torontonian matters to global events:
3. Iconic Dimensions in Atwood’s prose The craftsmanship that Atwood employs to involve the reader in the creative process also extends to her fiction, and is manifest throughout her carefully structured narratives, where form vitally contributes to meaning. From the tripartite structure of her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), where the abrupt shift in the narration from an I-narrator to a third person narrator coincides with the protagonist’s psychological development, up to the intricate, individually named patchwork patterns adorning the beginning of each section of Alias Grace (1996), in all of Atwood’s work, the design of the narrative mirrors its content in
Figure 1. The symmetrically (chiastically) ordered narrative structure of The
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information “a more prominent semantic or narrative significance” (Nänny 1997: 59). This is exactly what Atwood does: by putting each protagonist’s childhood at the very centre of her particular narrative, she lets narrative form enact meaning, iconically miming how childhood functions as a key to a person’s character. Atwood lets Tony, the narrator of the “Onset” and the “Outcome” parts and a military historian at the University of Toronto, use the figure of the palindrome, a word, phrase or sentence which reads the same backwards and forwards, to describe the relationship between events in real life and in history. Real life itself, like history, is “not a true palindrome” because, as Tony reflects, “[w]e can’t really run it backwards and end up at a clean start” (1993: 109). However, if you tell or write a story, or military history, this allows you both to come back to where you started and to reverse both time and events in your story: “any point of entry is possible, and all choices are arbitrary” (1993: 4). Contrary to real life, story-telling permits narrative control. Judging from the handwritten sketches in the original manuscripts of The Robber Bride (Figure 2), Atwood originally planned to have the main order of narration structured as a palindrome, with two main blocks consisting of the three protagonists’ narratives, first in the sequence of Tony - Charis Roz, and then reversed, with Tony as the main narrator introducing, mediating and ending the overall narration (Atwood Papers):6 Robber Bride
With this elaborate narrative structure (Figure 1), which is a symmetrical pattern of inversion (chiasmus) of temporal space, Atwood not only emphasizes the constructed nature of storytelling, but also uses this configuration as a means to focus attention on the centred part of the narrative structure. This device has also been pointed out by Max Nänny in his article “Hemingway’s Architecture of Prose”, where he draws attention to Hemingway’s use of this strategy in order to give vital
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Figure 3. The individual narratives as “box sets”
The ‘palindromic’ structure of each individual narrative, as shown below in Figure 4, mirrors the feeling of split subjectivity experienced by all three protagonists, who all have dual identities and have all changed their names: Tony (Antonia) Fremont/Tnomerf Ynot; Charis, who used to be Karen; and Roz, who grows up under the name of Rosalind Greenwood and then finds out that her “real name” is Roz Grunwald:
Figure 2.
Atwood’s first plans for the narrative structure of The Robber Bride as a palindrome, hand-drawn in the midst of Tony’s narration in the first person (Atwood Papers)
Tony: 1990 - 1960 - (childhood)>
