Post on 22-Jan-2023
Personal and national history in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.
"It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundlydisturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity,important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what
confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question"Who am I" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?"
Northrope Frye, The Bush Garden, 1971.
History in postcolonial studies
Linda Hutcheon states that “To write either history or
historical fiction is equally to raise the question of power
and control” (Hutcheon 1988: 72). This statement can be
corroborated by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, who demonstrate
in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader that the colonial discourse of
power manipulates History as an instrument of control,
implementing the mechanism of exclusion in which societies
existing outside the “Eurocentric” frame of mind are simply
relegated to the lower status of “others”; these are the
“subaltern nations” perceived through the “Eurocentric master
narrative” as having no history.
For the emergence of history in Europeanthought is coterminous with the rise of moderncolonialism, which in its radical othering andviolent annexation of the non-European world,found in history a prominent, if not theprominent, instrument for the control ofsubject peoples. (1995: 355)
It is in this way that the process of colonial inclusion
within the imperial hegemony is legitimated. History and
legitimation are therefore closely connected with the simple
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question related to “what it means to have a history” and “what
it means to have a legitimate existence” (355).
Considered as a “scientific discipline” in the colonial
19th century, History sought to “suppress the modality of
interpretation” (355). The colonial historiographic ideology
consisted in considering History as being related to “a single
narrative truth”, a representation of events which was the
closest possible to reality (355). The suppression of
interpretation reinforced the myth of historical objectivity,
which was a way of denying the “others” the right to have
different views of the past. The postcolonial discourse
contests the traditional version of History as an objective
discipline, adopts an approach based on the heterogeneity of
historical representation, and rehabilitates interpretation as
an essential medium in reading history; it therefore opens the
scope for new voices to speak on behalf of the voiceless
through literary writing which becomes a privileged mode
operating to dismantle the objectivity of historical narrative
(357).
As a postcolonial writer, Margaret Atwood uses literary
writing to challenge historical objectivity; she questions the
authority of historical truth by means of literary writing,
which is a dynamic process involving both historical facts and
creative fiction, a writing process that calls on the
interpretative participation of the reader who becomes, to some
extent, a historian in his/her attempt to reconstruct the
character’s personal history through the fragmentation and
contradictions of the narrative text. Surfacing is one of those
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postcolonial works which, according to Michael Greene (1998:
77), “reverse the process by which traditional historical
discourse seeks to render its agency invisible and its reader
passive”. The author of Survival borrows the voice of her
anonymous female narrator in Surfacing to weave the threads of a
personal narrative that bears the traces of a national history.
In this novel the personal conflates with the national, the
private blends with the public, the fictional with the factual,
and the literary with the historical. In the attempt to
elucidate such blending, this article will first focus on the
issue of Atwood’s interest in Canadian history and national
identity before dealing with the way personal and national
histories are re-constructed in the wilderness of Surfacing.
Canadian history and cultural identity
When she was a student in the United States Margaret
Atwood was deeply concerned with her Canadian identity as she
reveals in one of her interviews.
… - it’s not that the Americans I met had anyodd or “upsetting” attitudes towards Canada.They simply didn’t have any attitudes at all.They had a vague idea that such a place existed– it was that blank area north on the map wherethe bad weather came from – but if they thoughtabout it at all they found it boring. Theyseemed to want to believe that my father was aMounted Policeman and that we lived in igloosall year round. (Ingersoll 2006: 47)1
1 Quoted by Paul Goetsch in “Margaret Atwood: A Canadian Nationalist” inReingard M.Nischik (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. New York: CamdenHouse, 2000, 169.
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This quotation is interesting to examine as a starting point
for two reasons: the first reason is related to the perception
of one particular country – with its culture and history – by
people belonging to another economically and politically more
powerful nation; here, it is Canada viewed through the eyes of
American people. This partly raises the question of cultural
stereotypes connected with the differences existing between the
United States as an “imperial center” and Canada as a former
colonised country (Goetsch 2000: 168). This serves as a
transition leading to the second point concerned with the vague
idea Americans had of Canada at the time when Margaret Atwood
was a student in Boston. It is most interesting to notice that
Canada as a place, and therefore as a history of a nation, was
a vague idea in the perception of the Americans during Atwood’s
student life. Strikingly enough, this was a common attitude in
the colonial period when the potentially conquerable
territories were perceived in the eyes of the colonisers as
empty places without history or identity; history being, as a
matter of fact, embedded in place. Canada, as a former
colonised territory, is a “cultural place,” to put it in Paul
Carter’s words, a space endowed with a history (Ashcroft,
Griffiths & Tiffin 1995: 377).2
2 Quoting theorists such as Michel Foucault, Frederic Jameson and HenryLefebvre, Tim Woods highlights the fact that space is a key concept inrecent cultural theory due to its importance in historical analysis. “Onecan no longer practice a historical analysis without taking account of thepolitics of spatialization embedded within the production process.Geography, place, space, locale, location – such terms form one of thelexicons gaining ascendancy within cultural analysis.” (Woods 105)
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Atwood’s reaction in defence of Canadian history, identity
and culture reflects Canadian nationalism which fed on anti-
American feelings in the 1960s and 1970s. In those decades the
Canadians became aware of “the Americanization of Canadian
culture” and “the neglect of Canadian culture at the
universities.”3 This awareness was fuelled by a clear “upsurge
of nationalism”, according to Paul Goetsch who adds that
Cultural nationalism was further intensified bypressing economic and political problems,particularly by Quebec separatism and by USimperialism, which had shown its ugly face inVietnam and seemed to threaten Canada with aneconomic and political takeover. (169)
Paul Goetsch quotes one of the Canadian philosophers who warned
against “the Canadian sell-out to the States” (169); the United
States being also considered by a well-known Canadian historian
as “the greatest threat to the nation” (170). In one of her
questions addressed to Margaret Atwood in an interview
conducted in 1978, Joyce Carol Oates sheds light on the fact
that
In recent years Americans have become aware, attimes to their chagrin, that Canadiannationalists are extremely anti-American andvery much resent American “influence” in Canada
3 In one of her interviews, Atwood confirms that “Canadian literature wassimply not taught in high schools and universities in Canada” at the timeshe was a student in the United States (Ingersoll 2006: 47). In anotherinterview, she iterated that Canadians “were taught very little Canadianwriting or history in school”, adding that this was “probably whynationalistic consciousness emerged.” (Ingsoll 2006: 66)
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as well as American economic exploitation.(Ingersoll 2006: 41)
To Oates’s question, Atwood reacted by stating that “if you’re
saying that Canadians have no reason to resent the foreign and
trade policies of the United States, I’d have to disagree”
(Ingersoll 2006: 41). Canada’s economic dependence on the
United States is fact not fiction for Margaret Atwood.
We are dominated by American unions. I didn’tinvent these facts; they are part of thesociety in which I live … Of course, I’m takinga position by choosing to describe thatreality, rather than some other reality.However, I did not invent the reality Idescribe, and I cannot make it go away.(Ingersoll 1990: 138)
The Canadian-American relationship is a major concern in
Survival where “Atwood lists a number of works treating the
American threat”, according to Paul Goetsch (174) who recalls
Atwood’s propensity to “identify the American as male and the
Canadian as female” focusing on Atwood’s stress on “the woman-
as-victim theme” (174). Paul Goetsch continues his
demonstration by quoting a few lines from Atwood’s poetry where
the author of Surfacing “dramatizes the power games between men
and women as a battle for dominance between two nations” (174).
So now you trace me Like a country’s boundary … And I am fixed, stuck Down on the outspread map Of this room, of your mind’s continent4
4 Margaret Atwood. Selected Poems. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976, 19.
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Atwood’s interest in the Canadian-American relations is
most striking in Surfacing where anti-Americanism as a historical
fact is fictionalised. Written in 1972 and referred to as
postcolonial, this novel is replete with references to anti-
Americanism in Canada. David, who hates Americans, incarnates
the Canadians’ awareness of the United States as a threatening
economic, political and cultural power; he also could be
considered as embodying probably the Canadian “paranoid
schizophrenia”, a phrase used by Atwood herself (Goetsch 173).
The following extracts illustrate the anti-American sentiment
in Canada in the sixties and seventies; the reading of these
extracts reveals that anti-Americanism in Canada springs from
nationalism and also from simple paranoia.
I warned them not to say anything about thefish: if they do, this part of the lake will beswarming with Americans, they have an uncannyway of passing the word, like ants about sugar,or lobsters. (Surfacing, 65)5
Then the Yank pigs will send in the Marines (…)They’ll hit the big cities and knock outcommunications and take over, maybe shoot a fewkids, and the Movement guerrillas will go intothe bush and start blowing up the waterpipelines the Yanks will be building in placeslike this, to get the water down there. (91)
It wouldn’t be a bad country if only we couldkick out the fucking pig Americans, eh? Then wecould have some peace. (83)
5 See also the following pages: 3, 33, 60-61, 65, 91, 95, 106, 110-111, 115-6, 122-123, 126, 143, 177-178.
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If you look like them and talk like them andthink like them then you are them (…) Are the Americans worse than Hitler? (123)
I heard the thin dentist’s-drill sound of apowerboat approaching, more Americans; (…) Icrouched and watched, at first I thought theywere going to land: but they were only gazing,surveying, planning the attack and thetakeover. (143)
Then back to the city and the pervasive menace,the Americans. (183)
One might deduce that anti-American feelings in Canada
contributed to the upsurge of nationalism and vice versa; the
rise of Canadian nationalistic awareness fuelled the hatred and
the paranoid fear of the United States. At the end of Surfacing,
it is ironically some “American guys” who discover the body of
the heroine’s drowned father, putting an end to her
investigation (151). If we agree that the father in this novel
is the symbol of Canadian identity, then the existence of the
threatening Americans as the Other, represented by the people
who discover and hook the drowned body while fishing in the
lake, should be interpreted as useful in helping the Canadians,
represented by the heroine, in their quest for a national
identity. The idea of a foreign threat has always been
instrumental in strengthening nationalism.
In a more recent interview conducted in 1995, Atwood
continued to believe that Canada was still a “terra incognita”,
while confessing that Canadian cultural nationalism “came from
a desire simply to have its existence recognized, even within
the country itself” (Ingersoll 2006: 208), without dwelling on
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the anti-American sentiment in the Canada of the sixties and
seventies. This is in line with her argument that “The
beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism” stems from the fact
that Canadians “had never been taught much about our (their)
own history or culture” (Ingersoll 2006: 48).
Atwood’s fight for Canadian identity, a fight most
explicitly voiced in Survival, springs from the conviction that
having “a legitimate existence” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin
1995: 355) amounts to having a history, particularly when the
country is felt as being under the threat of what is known as
cultural imperialism. In Survival Atwood demonstrates that “for
the members of a country or culture, shared knowledge of their
place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without
that knowledge we will not survive” (19). Atwood uses space in
its metaphoric implications, comparing literature as a cultural
means of expression with the map of a territory; for her the
knowledge of one’s literature and culture is as necessary as a
map for someone who is geographically lost.
What a lost person needs is a map of theterritory, with his own position marked on itso he can see where he is in relation toeverything else. Literature is not only amirror; it is also a map, geography of themind. Our literature is one such map, if we canlearn to read it as our literature, as theproduct of who and where we have been. We needsuch a map desperately; we need to know abouthere, because here is where we live. (18-19)
Atwood’s statements in Survival corroborate the implication that
a place is a historical space, that the knowledge of one’s
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place is coterminous with the awareness of one’s history. This
awareness is achieved through the knowledge of one’s culture,
according to Atwood, who believes that Canadians should be the
masters of their “own space, physical as well as cultural”
(Atwood 1972: 244). This might probably help to understand why
Survival was initially meant to be a guide to Canadian
literature; it is, additionally, clear evidence that literary
writing could be deemed as not only a quest for identity, but
also an existential act for survival, particularly within the
context of a History where there is no room for subaltern
histories.
The Canadian wilderness as spatial history
The phrase spatial history refers to the close connection
between the concept of space with its sense of place and the
importance of history. This connection is of paramount
importance for Margaret Atwood as testified in Surfacing, a novel
that deals with many of the concerns in Survival. In this novel
the concepts of trace and origin are used in close relationship
with identity and history. If history is embedded in place,
then Canadian history and identity are deeply rooted in the
wilderness of Canadian geography. As Coral Ann Howells attests,
“writers are rooted in a particular place, and Atwood’s place
is Canada”. In one of her interviews, the writer of Surfacing
stresses the importance of origin, roots and the sense of place
by stating that
You come out of something, and you can thenbranch out in all kinds of different
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directions, but that doesn’t mean cuttingyourself off from your roots and from yourearth. (Ingersoll 1992: 143)
Coral Ann Howells, who quotes this statement (1996: 20),
relates the “emphasis on location” to the concept of wilderness
which is “the most significant element in Atwood’s construction
of Canadian Identity” (Howells 1996: 20-21). Howells insists on
Atwood’s treatment of wilderness as a “distinctive national
space” for the Canadians. The Canadian wilderness, which is
treated as a cultural myth, a myth connected with national
identity, is associated with the unknown, the “terra incognita”
that the Canadians themselves ignore and therefore should get
hold of and control (Ingersoll 1992: 244). Without knowledge of
one’s place, there is no physical or cultural control over
one’s country and, therefore, no chance of survival (Atwood
1972: 19). As a postcolonial writer, Atwood urges Canadians to
go back to their roots in the wilderness, the symbol of both
their national identity and their resistance to cultural
imperialism and to economic and political hegemony.
Having traced a Canadian literary traditionwhich is dominantly Anglophone from the earlynineteenth century to the 1970s, Atwood movesat the end of her account (Survival) beyondliterary history to wider questions of culturalpolitics, urging her fellow Canadians torehabilitate themselves in a postcolonialcontext, resisting both their European ‘mothercountries’ and the United States by takingcontrol of their own country. (Howells 1996:24)
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Seen under the light of postcolonial studies, the myth of
wilderness, which is associated in the collective Canadian
unconscious with wide unexplored spaces, is, for Coral Ann
Howells, a white myth. Wilderness was for the white explorers
of the colonial period, that virgin territory of the Unknown,
the land of the strange, the wild and the uncivilised.
The important question for any narrative ofCanadian identity is the way in which, and bywhom, these unexplored spaces have beenappropriated as popular cultural myth. The mythof wilderness as empty space is of course awhite myth, for the wilderness was not reallyempty; it was only indecipherable to Europeans,who came to the New World as explorers,traders, soldiers, missionaries and settlers.Within colonial discourse wilderness waspresented as a space outside civilised socialorder and Christian moral laws, the place ofmysterious and threatening otherness. (Howells1996: 21)
Wilderness is indeed associated with strangeness and seems
to reflect the Canadian peculiar, somewhat ambivalent
attitude to the vast unknown territories that have grown to
become part of their history and national identity. There is
a sense of place associated with displacement, an ambivalent
feeling of repulsion, rejection – even fear – and
attraction; an attraction that is probably connected with
the call of origin and roots. Such mixed feeling is perhaps
natural for a nation made up of people who are mostly
descendants of immigrant ancestors. Atwood, who seems to be
aware of this particular Canadian peculiarity, states that
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We are all immigrants to this place, even if wewere born here: the country is too big foranyone to inhabit completely, and in the partsunknown to us we move in fear, exiles andinvaders. (Atwood. The Journals of Susanna Moodie.1970: 62)
The paradox and ambivalence connected with wilderness,
which is history for Atwood just as much the sea is history
for Derek Walcott, is dramatised in Surfacing where the
protagonist feels at home, and yet, seems to suffer from a
sense of displacement and dislocation when she equates the
home land of her childhood with the idea of foreign
territory. “‘Now we’re on my home ground, foreign
territory’”(5). Surfacing, which is often quoted in close
connection with Survival, is entirely set in the Canadian
wilderness, offering thus the possibility of an exploration
of the concept of wilderness in its association with
Canadian history and identity.
Surfacing begins and ends with the forest, forjust as wilderness is significant in Atwood’sversion of literary history, so is it in thestory of one woman’s quest to find anappropriate language in which to write abouther changing perceptions of her own identity asCanadian and female. (Howells 1996: 24)
The choice of wilderness, with its implication as spatial
history, as a setting for a novel telling the story of a
female heroine who embarks on a journey back to the place of
her childhood, looking for a lost father in the middle of
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the forest, is clear hint at the author’s intention to
conflate the personal history of the fictional protagonist
with a real interest in Canadian History.
Reconstructing personal and national histories
It might be interesting to interpret Surfacing in a
contrapuntal way, a way which should start with the end of
the novel where the heroine undergoes a rather strange
experience in which she seems to perform a bodily merging
with the natural environment of wilderness.
I lie down on the bottom of the canoe andwait. The still water gathers the heat; birds,off in the forest a woodpecker, somewhere athrush. Through the trees the sun glances; theswamp around me smoulders, energy of decayturning to growth, green fire. I remember theheron; by now it will be insects, frogs, fish,other herons. My body also changes, thecreature in me, plant-animal, sends outfilament in me; I ferry it secure between deathand life, I multiply. (161-162)
I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing inwhich the trees and animals move and grow, I ama place. (175)
This mystic-like union (reunion) with the natural
environment of wilderness marks the end of the heroine’s
quest which is both the culminating point and the denouement
of the narrative. It occurs at the end to mark the
protagonist’s great discovery of her own Self which is
organically rooted in the Canadian wilderness, in the middle
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of the forest, in the heart of darkness. Her merging with
the natural environment of the forest and lake is of great
significance as it marks her return to her Canadian roots
and origins. The heroine’s highly symbolic transformation
enacts the cultural myth of Canadian wilderness in its close
connection with national history and identity. The heroine
becomes therefore the symbolic incarnation of the myth of
the wilderness when she declares that she has become not “an
animal or a tree”, but the very place where “the trees and
animals move and grow” (175).
As her body seems to undergo a process of metamorphosis in
which she gradually dissolves into the natural elements, in
the depth of the wilderness, marking the final stage of her
journey back, not only to her childhood, looking for her
lost father, symbol of Canadian history and identity, but
also, back to the country’s prehistory; the heroine at the
end of the novel identifies with the prehistoric inhabitants
of Canada. “I stay on the bank, resting, licking the
scratches; no fur yet on my skin, it’s too early.” (180) The
father, the object of the heroine’s quest that offers the
narrative structure of the novel, is himself closely
connected with the primitive history of Canada as he is said
to have drowned while contemplating prehistoric inscriptions
on the rocks, the rock paintings by the lake.
The heroine returns to the prehistoric origins of her
birth place in the wilderness, invoking the sacred space of
primitive gods, goddesses and old beliefs.
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Inside me it is growing, they take what theyrequire, if I don’t feed it will absorb myteeth, bones, my hair will thin, come out inhandfuls. But I put it there; I invoked it, thefur god with tail and horns, already forming.The mothers of gods, how do they feel, voicesand light glaring from the belly, do they feelsick, dizzy? Pain squeezes my stomach, I bend,head pressed against knees.
She seems to be undergoing a “sea change”, or, rather, a
wilderness change, a change into a third self; a hybrid being,
half woman, half animal-plant, water and earth. The fluid
imagery used to describe her bodily transformation contributes
to build up an atmosphere of transparency evoking the idea of
birth/rebirth, birth of something new.
Slowly I retrace the trail. Something hashappened to my eyes, my feet are released, theyalternate, several inches from the ground. I’mice-clear, transparent, my bones and the childinside me showing through the green webs of myflesh, the ribs are shadows, the muscles jelly,the trees are like this too, they shimmer,their cores grow through the wood and bark. The forest leaps upward, enormous, the way it
was before they cut it, columns of sunlightfrozen; the boulders float, melt, everything ismade of water, even the rocks. In one of thelanguages there are no nouns, only verbs heldfor a longer moment. The animals have no need for speech, why talk
when you are a word.I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning.
Such powerful poetic passages are deployed at the end of the
novel to dramatise the idea of change, metamorphosis, rebirth,
hinting, metaphorically, at the Canadian cultural revival, a
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revival and rebirth achieved through the return to the past, to
the origins and roots of the nation. The heroine’s trip back to
the place of her childhood to search for her disappeared father
is then revealed to be a metaphoric quest for a new identity;
what she finally discovers is, not only a lost self, but also a
new personality, a personality that incarnates the revival of
Canadian culture, history and identity.
The father6 in Surfacing is a great symbol which conflates
the personal and the national dimensions of the heroine’s
narrative. At the end, he becomes a ghostly presence,
suggesting that the private place of personal history is
haunted by the father as a symbol of identity, just as much as
it haunts the forest, the wilderness, the space of collective
history. The Father is implemented as a symbolic association,
an idea associated with connotations of metamorphosis, revival
and rebirth as the heroine identifies with her father after
undergoing her symbolic change, her re-union with the
wilderness. Such identification and re-union occurs at the
poetic level of language, symbol and myth, suggesting perhaps
that the cultural revival could be felt in these very passages
that illustrate Atwood’s attempt to revive Canadian culture by
inventing a new poetic way of literary writing, a type of
writing that is deeply rooted in historical fact.
I say Father. 6 Spivak (1988: 47) relates paternity (the father) to the concepts oforigin, trace and history. “The acknowledgement of paternity is apatriarchal social acknowledgement of the trace, of membership in whatYeats has called “those dying generations”. Through this acknowledgement,the man admits that his end is not in himself. This very man has earlieraccepted sonship and admitted that his origin is not in himself either.This makes it possible for the man to declare a history.”
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He turns towards me and it’s not my father. Itis what my father saw, the thing you meet whenyou’ve stayed here too long alone. (…)I am part of the landscape; I could beanything, a tree, a deer skeleton, a rock. I see now that although it isn’t my father it
is what my father has become. I knew he wasn’tdead.
From the lake a fish jumpsAn idea of a fish jumpsA fish jumps, carved wooden fish with dots
painted on the sides, no, antlered fish thingdrawn in red on cliffstone, protecting spirit.It hangs in the air suspended, flesh turned tothe water. How many shapes can he take. (…)
When I go to the fence the footprints arethere, side by side in the mud. My breathquickens, it was true, I saw it. But the printsare too small, they have toes; I place my feetin them and find that they are my own. (180-181)
The footprint is a powerful image that evokes the idea of
trace, opening possibilities of interpretation where the
narrator’s progress in the heart of the wilderness bears the
trace of a sacred journey in search for a new self. The
heroine’s search for her father stems from a deep sense of
loss. To put it in Spivak’s words, she feels “a stranger to her
(own) country, language, sex and identity” (Spivak quoted by
Bhabha 1995: 140). In the beginning of the novel she feels that
her home ground is a foreign territory; later on she compares
herself to a word in a foreign language. Her return to the
landscape of her rural childhood, her search for her personal
identity springs from a destabilising sense of loss, the loss
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of her identity as a woman in a patriarchal society and as a
citizen living in a big industrial modern metropolis.
In her treatment of the Derridian concepts of trace and
origin, Spivak defines the “trace-structure” as follows
In our effort to define things, we look fororigins. Every origin that we seem to locaterefers us back to something anterior andcontains the possibility of somethingposterior. There is, in other words, a trace ofsomething else in seemingly self-containedorigins. (Spivak 46)
The footprints on the mud evoke the idea of a pilgrim’s
progress that goes full circle, reaching the end of the
spiritual journey which is also a rebirth and a beginning of a
newly born self. Such interpretation may be enriched by the
following quotation from Mark Currie’s Postmodern Narrative Theory:
The meaning of a word is context-bound in thesense that it bears the trace of other words inthe sequence to which it belongs. (…) it isonly as part of combinative sequence that theword accrues meaning, so that it is marked bythe temporal process of the discourse of whichit is part. And it is marked by the trace ofwords which are not part of the discourse athand, like the structuralist difference, whichare ghostly intertextual presences inhabitingthe word. (…) a word is not simply a free formor the bearer of meaning as presence, sincethat presence is always contaminated byabsences, traces of context, both immediate anddistant. (Curie 1998: 81)
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Among the ghostly intertextual presences inhabiting the word
footprint are the concepts of trace and origin as implemented
by Jacques Derrida who “devotes so much of his writing to the
deconstruction of origins” (Currie 1998: 82). If an “origin is
the first moment in an historical sequence” (Currie 1998: 82),
then in Surfacing the heroine returns to the origin of her
personal history, as an historical sequence, which bears the
trace of the origin of Canadian history. Homi Bhabha quotes
Frederic Jameson’s remark that “the telling of the individual
story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately
involve the whole laborious telling of the collectivity itself”
(Bhabha 1994: 140).
In his deconstruction of origin, Derrida focuses on speech
as the origin of writing in the sense that it precedes and
comes before writing; speech comes first in the childhood of a
person or in the infancy of humankind (Currie 1998: 82). Spivak
in her In Other Worlds, states that “speech is a direct and
immediate representation of voice-consciousness and writing an
indirect transcript of speech” (212), focusing on the
implication that dialogue involves “immediate unpremeditated
utterance.” The use of the present tense in the narrative of
Surfacing reinforces the impression of immediacy that
characterises speech and orality. The oral style of language
used to narrate the story in this novel favours speech as “the
immediate expression of the self” (Spivak 213). We are made to
live the present of the heroine’s return to the place of her
childhood to capture the present moment of her origin, the
genesis of her personal history.
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According to Spivak (84), “a narrative history is a
structure of exclusion in the sense that it bears the traces of
other stories, stories that are not told, stories that are
excluded, stories of the excluded.” Surfacing is a narrative
history whose structure is that of exclusion; it is a narrative
that bears the traces of other excluded stories. It is the task
of the reader to spot the signs that might bear the traces of
untold histories, histories other than the story at the surface
narrative. The heroine returns to the roots of the Canadian
people, by merging with the primitive life of the forest with
its rock paintings which represent the first inhabitants of
Canada. Her personal history conflates thus with the excluded
history of the indigenous people of Canada. Such interpretation
may be corroborated by the use of the oral style which
highlights orality as a distinctive characteristic cultural
feature of the indigenous identity.
Furthermore, the heroine takes us back, through the
Canadian wilderness, into the mythical space of prehistory,
which is also a sort of linguistic prehistory, where language
was still in its infancy as the following lines might suggest.
In one of the languages there are no nouns,only verbs held for a longer moment. The animals have no need for speech, why talk
when you are a word.I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning.
To put it in Mark Currie’s words, here we are at a moment of
“mythical purity”, a moment before the fall into history and
temporality; history is discussed by Mark Currie as “a fall
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from some mythical purity” (Currie 1998: 83); it is the genesis
of language when the boundaries were blurred between the word
and the thing it refers to, between the subject (the heroine)
and the object (a tree). Like a historian, the reader is
invited to “trace culture backwards in time to a moment of pure
nature, before its adulteration by human history” (Currie 1998:
83). In Surfacing Atwood dramatises the origin, that moment of
“mythical purity” when man, language and nature melt and fuse
into oneness.
Closing remarks
Atwood demonstrates her strength as a postcolonial writer
who re-appropriates her national history and identity by
choosing a purely literary mode of fictional writing, a
subjective mode of writing that relies on symbols and images,
in order to be able to rewrite the personal history of a
fictional character who, through her enactment of the Canadian
cultural myth of wilderness, reveals herself to be the
embodiment of national history as being made up of both fact
and fiction. In this highly poetic novel, Atwood blurs the
boundaries between the past and the present, the real and the
imaginary, the factual and the fictional, the human and the
animal, man and nature, reason and madness, creating, thus, a
third textual space, a hybrid discursive construct whose
richness relies on the reader’s active involvement as a voyager
into the intricate universe of interpretation. It is in this
way that the postcolonial rehabilitation of interpretation in
the rewriting of history is seen at play in Surfacing which is
22
more powerful than Survival in expressing Atwood’s concern with
Canadian cultural identity.
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Colonial Studies Reader.
London: Routledge, 1995.
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Jersey: Ontario
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- -------------. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.
Toronto: Anansi, 1972.
- -------------. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford
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1998.
- Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak. G. (1976)
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1, Autumn 1998, 73-82.
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1996.
- Hutcheon, L. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-
Candian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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- Hutcheon, L. (1989). “Circling the Downspout of Empire :
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modernism” Ariel 20 (4) in Ashcroft, B.,
Griffiths,G. and Tiffin, H. (eds.) (1995)
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