signs of literary life — 3¢ Pulp
Well, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because formulas aren’t themes, subject-matter is not content (cf John Berger), and content is not a matter of paintingby-number on the grid of our supposed national neuroses. Stereotypes, as the Great Critic said (rightly, for once) aren’t archetypes. There’s not a single realized human character in the whole of Surfacing—only a crew of one-dimensional clichés wandering around acting out the parts assigned to them by some Royal Commission on the Meaning of Life in Canada. There isn’t a single insight, a single flicker of political revelation, that hasn’t been hammered into baby powder by every liberal-bourgeois publication in the country since 1967. There isn’t a glimmer of self-perception that isn’t corroded, deformed, by self-indulgence, selfpity, the cant and posturing of Pop-Psych. In place of feeling, we’re served a smorgasbord of leftover sentimentalities topped with cheap ironies like stale whipped cream; in place of thought, a catalogue of Information Canada platitudes; in place of reasoned political analysis, an undigested lump of anti-American rhetoric no self-respecting paranoiac would lay claim to. And, at the end, we have a cop-out even in terms of the novel itself: another of those weary reconciliations in which, god help us, Revolt is snuffed out in the great damp blanket of Instant Transcendence. Women take note: the message here, what Surfacing at last comes down to, is that Woman’s place really is, after all, with her Man, just as long as he’s a Canadian: “he may have been sent as a trick. But he isn’t an American, I can see that now; he isn’t anything, he is only half-formed, and for that reason I can trust him.” Surfacing? Submerging’s more like it. There’s more to complain of: secondary characters (i.e., everyone but the narrator) treated with condescension and/or contempt, prose that must have been cut with a dull knife from a mound of melting textbooks (How to Write Groovy and Influence People), scene upon scene that sinks like a waterlogged condom under the burden of enforced Significance. As a poet, Margaret Atwood has shown that she’s capable of incision and lucidity; as an editor (of bill bissett’s nobody owns th earth), that she does have an acute literary judgement. But there is no discernible incision or lucidity in Surfacing; and the wisest exercise of judgement, in this instance, might well have been to have flushed the manuscript down the drain.
But the real outrage here is that we are, as a “nation,” so obsessed with our (nonexistent) Cultural Identity that we are willing to settle for, and embrace, any sort of pretentious mediocrity which offers itself for our consumption, willing to accept any seriosity as seriousness, any topicality, however trivial, as Relevance, any narcissism as self-criticism, any thesis-izing as evidence of intelligence, any “Canadian Content”’ as actual content. Drivel like Surfacing gets touted in the press, writers of limited gifts like Margaret Atwood get transmogrified into culture-heroes (or heroines), billboards flog the New Canada (where dat?) as if it were a new brand of mouthwash, while we remain the same backwater, the same breeding-ground of pious kitsch, we always have been—and while we proceed, with murderous innocence, down precisely the same paths we’ve loved to condemn the United States for taking. If, as some suppose and Margaret Atwood apparently fears, this country will eventually be swallowed up—politically and culturally as already economically—by our more powerful neighbour, we need have no regrets: having championed, encouraged, inferiority for so long, we can scarcely consider it hardship, or change, to have another kind of inferiority imposed upon us. If a book like Surfacing is typical of what we value, then it may be that we have no sense of value worth defending, and no “identity” beyond the empty rationalizations of self-aggrandizement. In any event, I eagerly await Ms. Atwood’s forthcoming books: Simonizing, Sanforizing, Sinking . . .
president nixon meets the lone ranger, 3¢ pulp , vol. 4, no. 5 (june 1, 1977)
Fall 2011 • GEIST 82 • Page 39