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

1

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

2

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.

3

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)

4

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)

5

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.

6

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.

7

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

8

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

9

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

10

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)

11

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

12

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

13

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

14

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.

15

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

16

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.”

17

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

18

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)

19

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.

20

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

21

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.

References:

- Ashcroft, B., Griffiths,G. and Tiffin, H. (eds.). The Post-

Colonial Studies Reader.

London: Routledge, 1995.

- Atwood, M. Conversations. Ingersoll, E.G. (ed). Princeton, New

Jersey: Ontario

Review Press, 1990.

- -------------. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.

Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

- -------------. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford

University Press, 1970.

- Bhabha, H. The Lacation of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

- Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. London: Macmillan,

1998.

- Derrida, J. Of Grammatology. Trans. Spivak. G. (1976)

Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1967.

- Greene Michael. “'A Real Historical Fiction’: Allegories of Discourse in

Canadian Literary Historiography”. Commonwealth. Vol.21, N°

1, Autumn 1998, 73-82.

- Howells, Coral Ann. Margaret Atwood. London: Macmillan Press,

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 :

Post-colonialism and Post-

modernism” Ariel 20 (4) in Ashcroft, B.,

Griffiths,G. and Tiffin, H. (eds.) (1995)

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London :

Routledge.

-Ingersoll, Earl G. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with

Margaret Atwood.

Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 2006.

- Kermode F. and C.Norris (eds.) Derrida. London: Fontana Press,

1987.

- Reingard M.Nischik (ed.) Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. New

York: Camden House,

2000.

- Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds. New York: Routledge, 1988.

- Woods, Tim. “‘Looking for signs in the Air’: Urban Space and

the Postmodern in In the

Country of Last Things” in Dennis Barone ed. Beyond the Red

Notebook:

Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1995,

105-128.

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