TY - JOUR
AU - Howells,, Coral
AB - Margaret Atwood, an enthusiast for popular fiction since childhood, has frequently described its appeal for her: “I find popular forms interesting because they are collective mythology – a wonderful compost that contains everything. It contains the cultural patterns of the society, and what novels are using are the themes of their culture. Every time” (“How to Spot a Killer” 17). Throughout her fifty-year writing career, Atwood’s wonderfully inventive use of popular fictional forms has been a consistent feature of her work. Since the first collection of critical essays in The Malahat Review: Margaret Atwood: A Symposium (1977), scholars have been investigating her subversive rewriting of popular genres as significant elements in her novels, short fictions, and poetry, seeing them variously as components of her postmodern aesthetic and her narrative experimentalism with its feminist inflections, and her critique of contemporary social and political issues. Indeed, Atwood herself has been a major commentator on genre fiction in interviews and essays and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), where she wittily distinguishes between realistic novels (“the novel proper”) and those “of lesser solemnity” called ‘genre fiction’ . . . the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction” (Other Worlds 57–58). That enthusiasm for popular forms continues undiminished in her recent fictions since the MaddAddam trilogy with Stone Mattress (2014), The Heart Goes Last (2015), and her retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Hag-Seed (2016). Now ironically describing herself as ‘an award-winning nice literary old lady’ (Angel Catbird 2016, Introduction), Atwood has shifted the emphases in her storytelling, challenging realist conventions as she revisits an array of popular genres, constructing what we might describe as transgressive entertainments. While she references the idioms and new technologies of contemporary culture, she seeks as always to engage readers with her seriously held ethical values, which are embedded in the texts themselves. “Not real can tell us about real” (Oryx and Crake 118), and it this latest stage in the evolution of Atwood’s narrative art that I investigate in this essay. It is worth considering earlier critical perspectives on Atwood’s use of popular genres in order to set my discussion in context. Lorna Irvine’s “Recycling Culture: Kitsch, Camp and Trash” (2000) foregrounds Atwood’s fascination with the material forms and fashions of contemporary culture, drawing examples from Lady Oracle through to “True Trash” in Wilderness Tips (1991),1 while Gina Wisker offers a succinct account of the variety of Atwood’s novelistic strategies of analysis and critique: “Her interventions into literary and popular fictional genres, such as Gothic romance, spy thriller, science fiction, feminist fable, comedy and crime fiction have enabled those genres to be scrutinised once more” (3). We find similar comprehensive summaries in the work of Coral Ann Howells, Sharon Wilson, J. Brooks Bouson, and Lorraine York, whose analysis of Atwood’s increasing engagement with new media technology signals her sustained attentiveness to cultural change. Atwood’s reconfiguring of popular genres – particularly Gothic romance and dystopias – has been noted by numerous critics, with an emphasis on the intersections between sexual politics and postmodernist fictional forms, emblematized in the title of Reingard M. Nischik’s Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood. Adopting a similar approach, critics such as Howells and Suzanne Becker have explored Atwood’s increasingly complex rewriting of traditional Gothic across the decades, from wilderness Gothic and parody of Harlequin romances in the 1970s through to the 1990s with The Robber Bride as a postmodern Gothic romance and the recasting of Canadian history as haunted Gothic tale in Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin. According to Howells, “Atwoodian Gothic is both sinister and jokey” (Margaret Atwood 52) in its play with Gothic conventions and its generic transgressions, producing what Becker has identified as “a feminine Gothic texture as maze” (195). But Atwood’s agenda has always included wider concerns with the workings of power in relation to human rights and environmental issues. These are the topics she explores in her dystopias, those “what if” narratives of The Handmaid’s Tale (1984) and twenty years later, the MaddAddam trilogy, beginning with Oryx and Crake (2003). In these “speculative fictions” based on scientific and social scenarios of our times, Atwood sends out her increasingly urgent warnings to readers. There has been a massive amount of critical work on The Handmaid’s Tale as feminist dystopia, confessional, and prison narrative; of this criticism, Howells’s chapter in Margaret Atwood (2005) is one example. The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy belong to different historical contexts and different dystopian traditions, and essays in the Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (2006) by Howells, Pilar Somacarrera, and Wilson analyze the evolution of Atwood’s dystopian visions up to Oryx and Crake. Bouson’s essay on The Year of the Flood continues critical discussion of Atwood’s transformations of the dystopian genre into epic. Clearly, Atwood has remained interested in popular cultural materials to which she returns again and again, reinvented afresh in different guises in every new fiction. Reflecting on cultural changes, Atwood recently remarked that this age of anxiety and uncertainty about the future is not the time for realistic fiction. The Stone Mattress stories are “tales,” removed “at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days” (Mattress 271); The Heart Goes Last is a dystopia set in the near future; Hag-Seed is her retelling of Shakespeare’s most magical play The Tempest, set in the twenty-first century. Of course, there are differences of form and focus between short stories and novels, but throughout we see Atwood’s characteristic emphasis on the relation between fictional artifice and the real world, in her brilliant mix of social observation and virtuoso handling of popular genres. Stone Mattress is a veritable sampler of genre fiction revisited, with one crime story, two vampire stories, three interconnected fantasy stories, two Gothic horror stories, and a final dystopia – though “the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from one to the other is the norm” (Other Worlds 115). These are genre fictions with a twist, where the title story, a murder mystery, turns out to be a social critique of sexual power politics, and “Torching the Dusties,” which begins as a quirky romance set in an old people’s home, changes at the end into a nightmare vision of a towering inferno; through these stories, “Socially embedded crimes are revealed” (Shead 16). Scattered throughout are references to computers, mobile phones, video clips, and Internet porn, and to the remediation of novels into TV miniseries and video games. Sometimes they add a whiff of the uncanny, which complicates generic formulas, sometimes they comment on changing literary tastes and conditions of book production and marketing. In her two recent novels, Atwood continues to explore the ways in which popular fictions “give our lives the plots they lack” (McCracken 2), while the digital revolution has become a more evident presence in her storytelling. Stone Mattress Turning to Stone Mattress, we see a marked change of scale from MaddAddam’s apocalyptic scenarios to stories that are more intimate, of individuals – mostly old people – as Atwood addresses the universal condition of ageing and mortality. She offers a devastating analysis of ageing bodies (as she did in The Blind Assassin), but her focus is on the power of storytelling; like Alice Munro, she reflects on the way that the passage of time alters the meaning of the stories we tell ourselves, as hidden details and forgotten things come to light. There is also a public dimension here beyond that of private storytelling. “Several of these tales are tales about tales,” and about their tellers, who are older professional writers whose careers began (like Atwood’s) in the 1960s. These stories are concerned with literary celebrity while giving a potted history of the rehabilitation of popular fiction since the 1980s. Atwood’s treatment of the complex relations between literary creativity and the marketplace meshes perfectly with contemporary cultural theory: “In any consideration of popular writing we must continue to attend to the shifting modes of production, distribution and consumption which put these texts into circulation and partly determine their effects for us” (Mitchell 122). In this context, I pay attention to Atwood’s refigurings of fantasy and Gothic horror fiction in Stone Mattress, with the first three related stories, “Alphinland,” “Revenant,” and “Dark Lady,” as well as “The Dead Hand Loves You.” Atwood continues to show her remarkable shapeshifting abilities, moving between the realistic world of domestic routine and the bizarre imaginary worlds lurking below everyday surfaces. Nothing is quite as it seems, and the first three stories when taken together read like a sequence, which has the moral and psychological complexity of a “novel proper.” The fantasy world of Alphinland is very lightly sketched, almost as backdrop to the multiperspective narrative, which covers a timespan of fifty years, tracing the protagonists’ lives from youthful enthusiasm to irascible old age: “Fun is not knowing how it will end” (193). The two main protagonists are writers, Constance Starr, who created the Alphinland fantasy, and Gavin Putnam, a poet who failed to fulfill his early promise; the stories revolve around a series of tangled relationships in a wide affective arc, which ends only with the death of the aged poet. Indeed, the narrative shape echoes Atwood’s description of her semiautobiographical chapters in Negotiating with the Dead (2002): “all circle around a set of common themes, having to do with the writer, her medium, and his art” (xxv). Under the guise of fantasy, Atwood explores the writer’s double consciousness and the phenomenon of celebrity, together with a historical sketch of changes in publishing and marketing in Canada since the 1960s and the rehabilitation of genre fiction in the digital age. Fantasy “Alphinland” opens with an ice storm in Toronto, where we meet Constance, an old woman recently widowed, who finds she has to go out to the corner store to buy salt as ice melt. Right from the start, there is a slippage between external reality and Constance’s inner world of imagination and memory, and the narrative shifts between parallel worlds as it moves in and out of her interior monologue. She not only hears her dead husband’s voice continually advising her, but also transforms her icy walk to the shop into a quest through her created world of Alphinland, with its villains and dragons, its trails of ashes, and its magic spells. That imaginary place is where Constance prefers to be in any crisis, and as the story segues further into her subjective world, Atwood offers a fascinating analysis of the creative process and the production history of a work of popular fiction. “Alphinland currently lives on her computer” (13), though in the past, it had been produced on a variety of typewriters as it metamorphosed from being “a clutch of ersatz fairy tales of the sword-and-sorcery variety” (92) into a book, then into a saga, more recently into an animated series, and now into a video game. “If she’d foreseen that Alphinland was going to last so long and be so successful, she would have planned it better” (27). Now Constance can switch on the computer and, like Alice in Wonderland, go through the mirror (updated to become a screensaver with a stone gateway designed by her late husband) into her secret world. Alphinland is a dangerous place of ambushes and dark woods, of prisons and punishments, for it is a refiguring of her own emotional history, which centers on her first unhappy love affair with the poet Gavin Putnam. We learn the genesis of Alphinland as Constance remembers Toronto’s burgeoning arts scene in the early 1960s, with its poets, folk singers, and jazz musicians, who congregated at the Riverboat coffee house in Yorkville (this famous downstairs music venue operated 1964–78), when the handsome Gavin took her to bed and published erotic poems on cheap mimeographed sheets addressed to “My Lady” and “my truelove.” That was when Constance began writing Alphinland stories for American magazines to make money to support Gavin. Though scorned by the male poets as “commercial trash,” her fantasy world gradually assumed an important function as her secret refuge, again the painful realization of Gavin’s infidelities, and shortly after the affair ended traumatically with her discovery of him in bed with a woman called Marjorie, she signed her first Alphinland book contract. Alphinland became the dark place of Constance’s revenge and yearning, with Gavin sealed up in a wine cask and Marjorie imprisoned in a stone beehive, stung every day by “a hundred emerald and indigo bees” (26). A fantasy land surely, but as Constance later admits, “everything in Alphinland is based on something in real life” (59). In the real world outside Alphinland, Constance married a man called Ewan and produced two sons, while continuing to write, eventually becoming a literary celebrity, “C.W. Starr, the grandmother of twentieth century world-building fantasy” (58) – though “She declines to engage in social media, despite her publisher’s constant urging” (28). And no wonder, when she thinks of the interaction between author and fans of fantasy fiction in the digital age, those “numerous fans with many bright ideas they are eager to share with Constance. How she ought to have done the dragons differently. How they would do the dragons if it was them” (11) – perhaps an oblique reference to the relationship between Atwood and her 1.3 million Twitter followers. The narrative almost imperceptibly switches back into the real world with a sudden twist in the plot as fantasy and reality blur (much as they did for Joan Foster in Lady Oracle and for Iris in The Blind Assassin). The trail of ashes leads out of Alphinland directly to Constance’s own front door, and a male figure who is not Ewan but Gavin wraps his arms around her as she sinks with him into an erotic dream. In a final showdown with Ewan’s ghost, Constance accuses him for the first time of being dead, and he vanishes – but where? The “ancient charms” may have broken, but against loss and grief, fantasy is her only escape mechanism, so Constance turns back to her imaginary world inside the computer: “She’ll have to go in and find him” (34). “Revenant” is Gavin’s story, told from his perspective as an old curmudgeon. This is really a ghost story embedded within Atwood’s satirical exposure of the man behind the trappings of celebrity, for Gavin, now a Grand Old Man, is nothing but a shell of his former dashing self and for whom the present is a perpetual reminder of his decrepitude. The story, which is filled with references to skeletons and postmortems, is focused through a disastrous interview between him and a young postgraduate student called Naveena, who is doing her thesis not on his poetry (as he had assumed), but on the fantasy writing of C. W. Starr, adding a malicious twist to this deconstruction of a male ego. The ghost of Constance returns; she is the Revenant in a haunting staged through the video clips, which Naveena shows him, as his earlier life is replayed before his eyes. Though Gavin refuses to give Naveena any clues to help her solve the mysterious private references in Alphinland, his memories of Constance float to the center of his consciousness, and when at the end of the story he dies, it is her image, “Young again and welcoming, the way she used to be,” which returns to him. As Atwood remarked, “Our earliest loves, like Revenants, have a way of coming back in other forms” (Other Worlds 2). Beyond Fantasy Though it takes place at Gavin’s funeral, “Dark Lady” reads like the final act of a late Shakespearean comedy, a time of revelation and reconciliation, when the constructions of fantasy are dismantled in the context of real life. Fifty years after the end of her affair with Gavin, Constance comes face to face with the villainess of Alphinland in the person of Marjorie (now known as Jorrie), the woman who usurped her place in Gavin’s bed and in his poems, and whom she has tormented ever since in the imaginary stone beehive. The conversation over refreshments after the funeral is a weird mixture of farce and pathos as the two old women confront each other, while Naveena the graduate student tactlessly attempts to ferret out obscure references for her thesis. Is this a funeral or is it a conference? No, it is a time of mutual confession, when ancient grudges wrongly held are settled, as both women realize that they are not antagonists but doubles, sharing the pain which each had believed was entirely her own. Together they step back into real time with an apology, an embrace, and a blessing as Atwood turns the fantasy genre inside out to reveal the tangled emotions out of which it has been fabricated. But this is also a story about writing and the power of language, with its references not only to Alphinland but to Gavin’s Dark Lady poems, to Martial’s Latin epigrams, and to doctoral theses. While Constance may release Marjorie from the beehive, Naveena is already imprisoning them in her thesis: “She’s embedding us in amber . . . Like ancient insects. Preserving us forever. In amber beads, in amber words. Right before our eyes” (107). Gothic Horror Turning to Gothic horror while bypassing “The Freeze-Dried Groom” – a female-Bluebeard story staged as contemporary urban Gothic, where the old chamber of horrors becomes an industrialized deep freeze unit – I discuss “The Dead Hand Loves You,” a curious amalgam of Gothic grotesque and sentimental romance, underpinned by an astute awareness of popular fiction as part of the commercial circuit. Like “Alphinland,” this is a tale about a tale, written by a twenty-two year old Toronto university student called Jack Dace, in the early 1960s, which started out as a potboiler and a joke, and fifty years later has become an International Horror Classic and its author a celebrity. Again, Atwood employs the trope of the Double, both in the double narrative structure, which switches between present and past time and between Jack’s internal monologue and his “Dead Hand” novel – the story within a story – that is also about doubles. The backstory tells of Jack’s frustrated desire for Irena, one of his three flat mates, and the Devil’s bargain he made. Out of desperation when he was behind with the rent, Jack signed a contract with them promising that if they let him stay, he would write a story, and they would all share equally in his royalties forever – which they have continued to do, as his story became first a bestseller, then a film, and recently a TV miniseries linked to a video game. However Jack’s substantial income, “thanks to that youthful contract, is three times smaller than it ought to be. Which rankles” (189), and he even devises a revenge plot to restore his fortunes. The narrative shifts in and out between the different stages in Jack’s life, but it is his bizarre story of the “Dead Hand” that is the center of interest. “The plot was simple” (172), and it is retold here in all its gruesome and occasionally farcical detail, interspersing passages from his novel with scenes from the film (“the original, not the remake”) for which Jack also wrote the screenplay. It is a fantasy about power and revenge, where a dead young lover’s severed hand runs amok, forging love letters, terrifying his faithless girlfriend in her bed, and strangling her wealthy fiancé in his car. We are not told how Jack’s narrative ends, at least not until the end of Atwood’s story. It is easy to see why that story would be popular with “nubile teeny girl fans with Gothic eye makeup, and stitch marks tattooed on their necks like the Frankenstein creature” (162), for the animated hand represents a terrifying invasion of intimate private spaces and the unsolicited touching of a female body. But where did this story come from? Jack supposes it arose out of childhood nightmares and old comic books, and Atwood satirically sketches conflicting Freudian and Jungian interpretations, but she had already revealed its prototype in Negotiating with the Dead in her chapter on “Duplicity: The Jekyll hand, the Hyde hand, and the slippery double,” where she refers to William Fryer Harvey’s “The Beast with Five Fingers” (Negotiating 43–44), a terrifying supernatural tale she read as a teenager. Atwood refigures this story of a vengeful dismembered hand as a fable of authorial split consciousness: “this hand is among other things a writing hand that has become detached from any writer” (44). We might also remember the severed hands in The Blind Assassin and Atwood’s Long Pen, her remote book-signing device. As she remarks, a hand must hold the pen or hit the keys, but who is in control at the moment of writing? That is the question she is exploring here. Clearly, the Hand is Jack’s Double, his writing self, which plays freely with all those conflicted emotions that remain unspeakable in real life. Unlike Harvey, Atwood gives her story a happy ending, thickening the plot to revise his obliquely homosexual narrative as a sentimental romance, for Jack finally proposes to Irena when they are in their seventies, recognizing that he is taking a risk, “But how much time does he have left in his life to worry about mistakes?” (200). Exploiting the thrill of popular Gothic horror in its variant contemporary media forms, Atwood tells an ageing writer’s tormented love story, aptly figured in her shocking metaphor for love – not a red, red rose here, but a Dead Hand that has a life of its own. The Heart Goes Last The Heart Goes Last is another distinctively Atwoodian version of a dystopia, but (to borrow Atwood’s comment on Ursula le Guin’s “science fiction”) that may be “the box in which her work is usually placed, but it’s an awkward box: it bulges with discards from elsewhere” (Other Worlds 115). Those discards are the popular genres – romance, crime fiction, spy thrillers, Gothic horror, fairy tales, and fantasy – which Atwood interweaves into her Swiftian Modest Proposal. The novel has met with mixed critical response: The Guardian critic called it “rewardingly strange” (Harrison), the TLS described it as “sly and alarming” (Clark 19), and in 2016, it won the Kitchies Red Tentacle Award for “the most progressive, intelligent and entertaining” novel of the year (Flood). However, a New York Times critic claimed, “at some point Margaret Atwood’s new novel loses control of itself,” suggesting that its genesis as an e-serial “might explain its unexpectedly uneven tone” (Lyall). Rather, I would argue, its fractured narrative form and fantastic plot twists offer an updated version of Atwood’s genre-crossing strategies, exploiting the appeal of popular cultural material in order to engage readers’ interest in her satirical analyses of North American mass consumerism and her warnings against uncontrolled corporate power. Interestingly, when Atwood was interviewed during the publication of her e-serial “Positron,” she talked more about the serial form – its nineteenth-century inheritance and her own edgy excitement at writing to the moment – than about digital publishing (Rothman). While she also mentioned the power of social media and commented on current research into online reading, there is nothing to suggest that digital publication adversely affected the novel. Certainly, the fourth Positron episode, “The Heart Goes Last,” does look different from the extensively revised printed book: there is more background information reminding readers of earlier episodes, and some events are arranged differently, but these are differences that relate not to online publication but to presentation format (serial versus novel). The e-version reads like a first draft of the novel – and an incomplete draft too, for it ends with Stan disguised as an Elvis sexbot, being shipped out of Positron in a blue satin-lined coffin. The whole final section, with the surreal Las Vegas episodes and the denouement, never appeared in the digital version.2 Dystopia Atwood’s dystopias have come closer and closer to the present, and this one, set in the rust-bucket area of northeastern USA, speculates on possible disastrous consequences of the financial crash in 2008 (the same year Payback was published), which wrecked the lives of many working-class people, leaving them jobless and homeless in a dangerous postindustrial urban landscape. The Pleeblands of the MaddAddam trilogy have acquired a specific location. In these circumstances, Atwood asks the same question as she asked in The Handmaid’s Tale: “How much social instability would it take before people would renounce their hard-won civil liberties in a tradeoff for ‘safety’?” (Other Worlds 87). The central conceit of this novel is the privatized prison, a radical solution to socioeconomic breakdown. The main protagonists, Charmaine and Stan, a young married couple in desperate circumstances, sign up to join a new social experiment called Positron, near the town of Consilience, which offers a utopian vision of safe suburban living modeled on the 1950s American Dream, “the decade in which the most people had self-identified as being happy” (41). But behind the advertising rhetoric, if they had bothered to decode the doublespeak of Positron / To Prison, this is a gated community rigidly controlled by sophisticated electronic surveillance where residents sign up to live double lives, “prisoners one month, guards or town functionaries the next” (42), sharing facilities with their Alternates with whom they are forbidden any contact. Needless to say, the Positron experiment goes wrong, corrupted by corporate greed and sabotaged from within by sophisticated digital trickery and old-fashioned blackmail. The evidence is carried out by Stan on a flash drive hidden in his silver Elvis Presley belt buckle, and the scandal of this failed utopia is exposed on the six o’clock news: “Instantly the social media sites are ablaze with outrage. Prison abuses! Organ harvesting! Sex slaves created by neurosurgery! . . . the destruction of human rights . . . bloggers break out in flames” (285). Fantasy This novel engages with serious ethical questions about institutional power versus individual freedom and free will, though it is also about the power of fantasy, for in any totalitarian system “the human heart remains a factor” (Handmaid’s Tale 323), provoking an excess which defies the rules. Once inside Positron, Atwood’s dystopia comes to resemble a darkly comic version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a place of illusion, masquerade, and mistaken identities, a dazzling example of “Atwood’s strategy of excessive doubling” (Bronfen 419), where it becomes increasingly difficult for characters and readers to distinguish between real activities and elaborate games. As Stan asks himself, “Why can’t life hand him something plausible for a change?” (271). Once again Atwood transgresses generic borders, highlighting narrative artifice in a plot that proceeds by an accumulation of sensational scenes and unexpected twists so typical of the “labyrinthine excess” of Gothic plots (Becker 185), and of which popular television serials like Game of Thrones (to which Atwood has frequently referred) are the contemporary equivalents. Finally, we realize that it is as tightly constructed as a classic crime novel, which moves in its duplicitous way from the opening chapter “Where?” to “There” at the end. As she remarked when discussing Huxley’s Brave New World, “Sex is often centre stage in utopias and dystopias – who can do what . . . and with whom being one of humanity’s main preoccupations” (Other Worlds 190). So it is here, where Atwood treats sexual desire and erotic fantasy from different angles that cut across many popular genres, from Harlequin romance and 1950s films to spooky Gothic tales of obsession, now enhanced by advanced robotics and biotechnology. In my investigation, I focus on some, but not all, of the affairs of “the heart” signaled in the novel’s title, which is itself an example of doublespeak, for what looks like a True Romance title is also the current medico-legal definition of death. Stolen kisses, bodice rippers, illicit sex, these are the fantasies of True Romance (or True Trash), which begin to breed within the confines of safe suburbia and conventional marriage as Stan and Charmaine realize after a year in Positron. Their domestic drama starts in the kitchen with Stan’s discovery of a note hidden under the refrigerator, which inflames his fantasies, “I’m starved for you!” (46), signed “Jasmine” with a lipstick kiss. So begins Stan’s impossible pursuit of his femme fatale, generating an excitement lacking in his daily life with Charmaine, who is a Doris Day kind of girl, innocent, fair-haired, and blue-eyed. “Would Doris Day’s life have been different if she’d called herself Doris Night?” he wonders (93), but is his charmingly retro Charmaine quite as innocent as Stan imagines? She too has a double life in her secret passionate affair with “Max,” which also began in the kitchen, for Max is Stan’s Alternate in more ways than one, and she does have another name; it is “Jasmine.” This narrative of fantasies and doubles plays out as edgy comedy that frequently spills over into bedroom farce underpinned by technology, with secret calls on mobile phones, electronic stalking, and hidden video cameras. However, as Charmaine and Stan soon discover, their private fantasies are not private at all, for they are caught in an intricate web of serious games, where they have no choice but to play the roles allotted to them. Romantic fantasy is ironized when Stan discovers who Jasmine really is, just as he is forced to re-enact the secretly videoed scenes of steamy sex between Charmaine and Max with Jocelyn, Charmaine’s Alternate and the “Jasmine” of his dreams, though to Stan “she looks like a dyke martial arts expert” (83).3 He is trapped, often quite hilariously, in Jocelyn’s sadistic games of kinky sex, which read like parodic versions of a porn film script. Jocelyn even appears wearing Charmaine’s nightgown: “‘Just imagine I’m Jasmine,’ she murmured. ‘Just let yourself go.’ But how could he. . . . It was such a disconnect” (102). Connections disguised as disconnections give this novel a hallucinatory quality, none more so than Stan’s assignment to the Possibilibots team in the factory, which manufactures sex robots, “exact-replica female sex aids . . . For home and export,” as Jocelyn explains (165). On the one hand, Possibilibots is a very profitable commercial enterprise that keys into the freewheeling consumerist ethic of global capitalism that Atwood is satirizing throughout: “I’m just a hired gun. I do what I’m told,” as Budge the manager spells it out (202). Stan’s tour of the different departments familiarizes him and the reader with the groundwork: “Receiving, Assembly, Customization, Quality Control, Wardrobe and Accessories, and Shipping” to amusement parks and casinos in Las Vegas and abroad (185). There is plenty of opportunity here for lewd jokes among the workmen, and for professional discussions on the finer points of assemblage, like facial expressions on a coded list, voice options, and pelvic action, with an emphasis on the mechanical and the non-human: “‘I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,’ says Gary. ‘They said that about e-books,’ says Kevin. ‘You can’t stop progress’” (179). Yet what propels this industry is the powerful force of male fantasizes around femininity and the female body, a long tradition as the epigraph from Ovid’s “Pygmalion and Galatea” reminds us, and androids are familiar figures in popular culture.4 “Maybe all women should be robots, Stan thinks with a touch of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control” (178). Atwood plays on the ambiguous relation between fantasy and reality, first of all, in Stan’s responses to the sexbots assembly line: There are moving belts conveying thighs, hip joints, torsos: there are trays of hands, left and right. These body parts are man-made, they’re not corpse portions, but nonetheless the effect is ghoulish. Squint, and you’re in a morgue, he thinks; or else a slaughter house. Except there’s no blood. (187) Gothic Horror As Atwood commented over twenty years ago, “The Female Body has many uses. . . . It sells cars, shaving lotion, cigarettes, hard liquor; it sells diet plans and diamonds, and desire in tiny crystal bottles” (Good Bones 43). The fetishized female body returns here, shadowed by its robotic double, where fantasies become more macabre and melodramatic. On his tour through Customization Plus, as Stan inspects the rows of women’s heads on the worktables, he is suddenly stopped in his tracks: “And here is Charmaine, gazing up at him out of her blue eyes from a disembodied head. A photo of her is clipped to a stand on the table” (193). No wonder a shiver runs up his spine, for this frisson of Gothic horror introduces the darker reaches of erotic fantasy through the Positron director’s obsession with Stan’s wife. This initiates an elaborate subplot of pursuit and evasion between Ed and Charmaine, but the most lurid aspect concerns Ed’s fantasies about his specially commissioned life-size facsimile of her, which reveals his power fantasy of total possession of this woman’s body. In Atwood’s parodic treatment, there is a continual slippage between horror and comedy, where Ed’s project is subverted (thanks to a secret act of sabotage by Jocelyn) and the passive body of Charmaine’s robotic double assumes a malevolent agency, threatening to castrate Ed the first time he indulges in his fantastic copulation. Frustrated desire unleashes an even more sinister fantasy, when Atwood moves into “the speculative space of the biomedical imaginary” (Luckhurst 94) with Ed’s contemplation of mind-altering laser surgery on Charmaine’s brain in a form of imprinting, which would make her his sexual slave forever; no more substitutes for him. We are thrown back from the age of advanced biotechnology to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the love-juice, which caused Titania to fall so grotesquely in love with Bottom. Atwood mischievously weaves this magical literary motif into the denouement, where in an exquisite example of poetic justice, it is Ed who undergoes the imprint operation, and the novel celebrates the multiple marriages of a series of hilariously mismatched couples in an ironic comment on lovers’ delusions, while Stan and Charmaine are reunited in what promises a future of domestic bliss. Beyond Fantasy However, happiness is “a perpetual possession of being well deceived” as Jonathan Swift rudely remarked in A Tale of a Tub (1704), and the novel stretches beyond the conventional happy ending of a Harlequin romance. It is Charmaine who has been well deceived, persuaded by Jocelyn to believe that she has had the brain-altering operation, which means that she cannot help loving Stan. A year later, Jocelyn breaks the spell when in her role as fairy godmother (as ambiguous a figure as Iris the “black-sheep godmother” in The Blind Assassin) she delivers her unwelcome wedding gift. She tells Charmaine the truth, so making a final attack on fantasies of True Love, as she drives her out of an illusory Garden of Eden with the severely liberating words of Paradise Lost (1667): “The world is all before you, where to choose” (306). That precarious freedom beyond fantasy is aptly summarized in Over Her Dead Body: “The regained order encompasses a shift . . . the recuperation is imperfect, the regained stability not safe, the urge for order inhabited by a fascination with disruption and split, and certainty emerging over and out of uncertainty” (Bronfen xii). Hag-Seed From popular fiction to Shakespeare might seem a long leap when Atwood in Hag-Seed, her contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series, stages a performance of The Tempest at a men’s prison in Canada in 2013, “doing Shakespeare with a pack of cons inside the slammer” as Felix Phillips the Artistic Director remarks to himself, wondering if he is hallucinating (54). Yet for a cultural critic who has always had a taste for a mixture of “highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow” (Other Worlds 40) the transition is simple: “The ‘low art’ of one age often cribs from the ‘high art’ of the preceding one; and ‘high art’ just as frequently borrows from the most vulgar elements of its own times” (250). Atwood is reinterpreting Shakespeare for a new generation; The Tempest remains central, for her novel retains the dramatic five-act structure and Shakespeare’s plot elements. She does not turn it into genre fiction, although she does reimagine it within the contemporary context of popular culture, recasting characters, events, and language, rewriting parts of the play to make them more understandable to a modern audience. Indeed Atwood supplements Shakespeare by slipping in a ghost story and extending the action beyond the play to consider the possible afterlives of his characters. Most significantly, she adds a whole new dimension to narrative with her use of digital media. Not only is the performance videoed and the spectacular effects of Shakespeare’s drama recreated by computer simulation as 3-D virtual reality – a kind of enhanced stage business – but here, as in the MaddAddam trilogy and The Heart Goes Last, digital technology features as a crucial agent in shifting the plot. Like Shakespeare, Atwood exploits the tricksy relationship between reality and fantasy that theatre provides, theatre being “the art of true illusions” (Hag-Seed 79), but in her narrative, those illusions become the means of disruption and mind-altering change in real lives. Shakespeare in Prison Everything that happens relates to the play production as the Prologue indicates, where the reader is plunged straight into a live theatre performance of The Tempest, with the audience watching a shipwreck on a big flat screen – but then the screen goes black and the lights go out, and we are suddenly aware that all this is taking place inside a prison: “Lockdown! Lockdown!” Though the narrative angles keep shifting in a way that only a novel can achieve with its ability to get inside the characters’ minds, it is the performance itself that structures the narrative, as the Director’s analysis suggests when he outlines the keynotes of the production, all of which are common elements of popular culture: IT’S A MUSICAL: has the most music + songs in Shkspr. Music used for what? MAGIC: Used for what? PRISONS: How many? MONSTERS: Who is one? REVENGE: Who wants it? Why? (86) Of course, there are a few things the Director does not mention, just as there is a backstory: Who is the Artistic Director? How did this prison performance originate? There is also a characteristic Atwoodian proliferation of doubles (double identities, shadowy doubles, and even a dual version of the performance in the Director’s final consummate act of double crossing). These are all woven together in the intricate novel structure. Following Shakespeare’s lead, the realistic backstory of the Prospero figure, Felix Phillips, is a tale of usurpation and betrayal when he is forced out of his job as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, by a treacherous colleague, just as he is preparing to stage a groundbreaking presentation of The Tempest. Felix’s exile takes the very Canadian form of living alone in a pioneer’s hut at the end of a dirt road under an assumed name “Mr Duke,” where for twelve years he has nurtured two obsessions: one for revenge and the other his grief for his dead three-year-old daughter Miranda, as Atwood transforms Shakespeare’s father–daughter relationship into a ghost story. Finally Felix finds a part-time job online teaching a Literature and Literacy program run by the local prison, and he launches what becomes a popular drama course, where the inmates (always respectfully referred to as his “actors”) stage an annual Shakespeare play. This is videoed and edited and then screened on closed-circuit TVs in all the cells and the Warden’s office. Just as in her acknowledgments, Atwood commented on the value of literature and drama within prisons, so Felix believes in the powers of theatre to clear a space for imaginative freedom, creating an enchanted island within the prison walls; this may be ephemeral, “but then all theatre is ephemeral” (80).5 After doing Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Macbeth, Felix decides to do The Tempest when he learns that the prison is to be visited by a party of Ottawa politicians, among whom are his archenemies. The project, secretly labeled “V for Vengeance” in his mind, is the hidden plot dynamic as the narrative moves seamlessly between the everyday lives of the protagonists and the fantasy world of the play where the performers slip out of their real-life identities as thieves, gang members, drug dealers, and computer hackers, into their alternative Shakespearean identities, adopting stage names and swearing only with Shakespearean curses, to frequent comic effect. The casting and rehearsals, Ariel’s transformation into an Alien – not to mention the introduction from outside of Anne-Marie Greenland, a professional actor and dancer, to play the part of Miranda: “What the pied ninny is this?” (100) – all add new layers of interpretation to Shakespeare’s text. Atwood also plays tricks with language as she switches between passages of Shakespeare’s blank verse and the prisoners’ street talk and their invented rap numbers, like “Evil Bro Antonio” and Caliban’s song with his Hag-Seed backup group. Shakespeare in the Digital Age Besides these very entertaining inventions, it is Prospero’s MAGIC, creatively updated through digital technology by Felix and Ariel, his “secret sharer,” that I wish to focus on here, for this innovative use of digital figuration is the new element that transforms Atwood’s storytelling as she exploits and elaborates the grand illusion that is at the center of Shakespeare’s play. As Felix explains to his cast, “Ariel performs the single most important act in the whole plot, because without that tempest there’s no play. . . . It’s Ariel making the thunder and singing the songs and creating the illusions. If he were here with us now, he’d be called the special-effects guy. . . . Lighting, sound, computer simulation. All of that” (104). Theatrical illusion yes, but the tempest has a double function in this production, being the lynchpin of Felix’s secret strategy of revenge. There will be not one play performance but two running simultaneously, the official one and its dark double: “One version would be the [already filmed] video running onscreen in the rest of the prison. The other version would suddenly have real people in it, directed and controlled by himself. Creating an illusion through doubles – it’s one of the oldest theatrical gimmicks in the box” (107–08). We watch the slow build-up of preparations for the performance through a kind of double vision, as the normal activities of rehearsals, costume buying, and set design are complemented by references to behind-the-scenes activities of Felix and his Ariel, alias a clever young computer hacker known as 8Handz. While the dancers are rehearsing, “One day 8Handz is elbows-deep in cables, the next it’s mini-cameras. After that he’s installing some tiny microphones and speakers, wireless ones: it would be contraindicated to drill holes in the walls” (169–70). Behind the TV screen in the main room is another screen and a keyboard for secret surveillance and special audio and visual effects. Surely, there is something fraudulent about Felix’s machinations, as 8Handz suspects, and he is right, for “In all such magician or wizard or illusionist figures, the question of imposture, of trickery, of manipulation for power of one kind or another, is never very far away” (Negotiating 117). The whole event is underpinned by digital technology – some of it for creating spectacular theatrical effects like Shakespeare’s celebrated vanishing masque, now computerized where “the image is doubled and redoubled and also slowed down, so it looks as if the goddesses are disintegrating in mid-air” (191) – but some of it for an ulterior purpose to be revealed only on performance day, when the official visitors arrive to watch the screening. At this point the action accelerates and disorder erupts, for this is “the big snatcheroonie” (Heart 274), Felix’s secret plan to kidnap the visiting dignitaries. It is played out in perfect synch with the official video, “so that while we’re doing our interactive theatre here with the politicos, everyone else in the place will be watching our show just the way they usually do” (202). In a series of tableaux where farce combines with melodrama in this alternative version, the abducted (and illicitly drugged) politicians imprisoned in the cells are tormented by the deafening sounds of a raging tempest, “It’s beyond a bad trip, they’re scared shitless” (230). Then, just as suddenly, the tempest subsides, the illusions vanish, and the captive dignitaries are returned to their seats in the theatre. Felix clad in his old Prospero costume now comes out from behind the screen to confront his enemies and to make his demands for recompense. Order is restored and restitution is made, though the penitence and forgiveness at the end of Shakespeare’s play are somewhat ironized, being achieved only through blackmail as Felix threatens to expose the politicians’ behavior in prison on the Internet: “I’ve got it all on video,” he asserts, including their acceptance of his bargain. The secret plot will remain secret, though the illusions will have achieved real-life results. The magic seeps away as Felix and 8Handz dismantle the technical equipment to return it to the rental agency, but Atwood now introduces an uncanny dimension when 8Handz hears faint singing over his headphones. It is the voice of Felix’s dead daughter Miranda, Ariel’s ghostly double, who has been invisibly present in her mourning father’s consciousness, like Shakespeare’s elemental spirit briefly appearing and then disappearing. “Let’s suppose that Ariel is real in some way” (103), as Felix advises. Beyond Fantasy As a novelist, Atwood is free to supplement Shakespeare’s play, returning to the real world of the prison with a post-performance cast party, and the students’ last course assignment when they present their interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters’ afterlives. The theatrical spectacle has vanished, replaced by an affective dimension, which derives from their own experiences and aspirations. Not surprisingly, it is Caliban’s story that interests them most, and the Hag-Seed Team reveal that they are working on a musical reimagining his new life as a rock star, freed from Shakespeare’s play: “Why shouldn’t Caliban have a play to himself?” (270). Their desire for a different ending might be seen as a dramatic illustration of Atwood’s concern with prison reform and possibilities of redemption: “Margaret Atwood deals constantly with social structures . . . which select insiders and outsiders, and so provides insights into what it means to be disempowered and marginalised, and how some can rewrite their own stories” (Wisker 191). Will Caliban’s play ever happen? “It’s possible. You never know” (Hag-Seed 272). At the end of The Tempest, Prospero steps forward to address the audience directly, not as a godlike magician but as a man appealing to his fellow human beings for mercy: “As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free” (274). “Prospero knows he has been up to something, and that something is a little guilt-making” (Negotiating 116), as Atwood earlier remarked. By an elegant transposition, the release that Prospero begged is granted to Felix in Atwood’s Epilogue as he moves beyond The Tempest and the emotions that drove his duplicitous performance. Finally, he is able to let go of his obsession with his dead Miranda, and in doing so, he prepares to give his own story a different ending. As Robert Fulford presciently remarked back in 1977 at the beginning of Atwood’s career, “She is endlessly Protean. There are many more Atwoods to come” (98), and looking at all the variations on genre fiction that she has been writing since 2000, it might seem that now in her mid-seventies Atwood has again reinvented herself. But we also need to consider her comment when speaking about Shakespeare’s late plays: “Age doesn’t make you a different person, or a different writer for that matter. I think it makes you a different version of who you already were” (Bunbury 25). The Atwoodian voice with its irony and humor and its serious undertones is instantly recognizable, just as the themes and topics are familiar. However, these recent fictions represent a new synthesis of her fictive artifice and moral engagement as she plays across literary tradition from fantasy and Gothic horror to dystopias to a rewriting of The Tempest. She exploits the appeal of popular genres and incorporates new narrative techniques derived from her excellent knowledge of new technologies as she reaches out to a larger reading public, astutely recognizing “the need for literary culture to keep up with the times” (York 148). These are indeed entertainments but they also carry the cultural heft of the realistic novel as they tackle serious social issues reflected through a network of contemporary human relations in all their complexity. Atwood once remarked that the novelist’s problem is always “how to make the story real at a human and individual level” (“Writing Utopia” 94). Within the fantasy genre, she may embed the mini-dramas of a creative writer’s life, or an exposure of the dangers of fantasy thinking from romance to utopianism to the dreams of science, or with Hag-Seed a celebration of the powers of theatrical fantasy to create an imaginative escape within prison walls. From “True Trash Revisited” to “Shakespeare Revisited,” Atwood the novelist continues to reinvent our world within the spaces of her fiction, while Atwood the cultural critic continues her eerily predictive speculations on “those complex interrelationships between readers, genres, media, and the culture industries in which they are embedded” (Glover and McCracken 7). Works Cited Atwood Margaret. Angel Catbird . Dark Horse Books , 2016 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC ———. Good Bones . Coach House P , 1992 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC ———. Hag-Seed . Hogarth Shakespeare , 2016 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC ———. The Handmaid’s Tale . Vintage , 1998 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC ———. The Heart Goes Last . Bloomsbury , 2015 . 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Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Glover David and Scott McCracken, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction . Cambridge UP , 2012 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Harrison John . “Review of The Heart Goes Last.” Guardian , 23 Sept. 2015 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Howells Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood . 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan , 2005 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC ———, The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood . Cambridge UP , 2006 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Irvine Lorna . “ Recycling Culture: Kitsch, Camp, and Trash in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction .” Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood , edited by Reingard M. Nischik. U of Ottawa P , 2009 , pp. 202 – 14 . 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OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Wilson Sharon R. Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison . Palgrave Macmillan , 2008 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC ———. “ Blindness and Survival in Atwood’s Major Novels .” Howells , pp. 176 – 90 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Wisker Gina. Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction . Palgrave Macmillan , 2012 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC York Lorraine. Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity . U of Toronto P , 2013 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Footnotes 1 " “True Trash” in Wilderness Tips refers specifically to trashy True Romance comics as popular women’s romance fiction, but I expand the term to refer to genre fiction in general. 2 " My thanks to Jennifer Toews, reference librarian, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, for her assistance with manuscript materials. 3 " Jocelyn belongs to the line of Atwood’s female tricksters; she is a supreme plotter, a liar, and a truth teller, one of the founders of Positron and later the chief saboteur of the project. 4 " Female sexual fantasies are catered for too, with Elvis lookalikes and Elvis bots: “We’re all for gender equality” (250), though I do not have space to deal with this alternative strand in the sex industry. 5 " We might note Hank Rogerson’s 2004 documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars, and the Taviani brothers’ film Cesare deve morire / Caesar Must Die (2012), a performance of Julius Caesar in Rome’s high-security Rebibbia Prison. © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - True Trash: Genre Fiction Revisited In Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes Last, And Hag-Seed
JF - Contemporary Women's Writing
DO - 10.1093/cww/vpx010
DA - 2017-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/true-trash-genre-fiction-revisited-in-margaret-atwood-s-stone-mattress-LEWia2lrh8
SP - 297
VL - 11
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -