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| John Thieme |
John Thieme
When Margaret
Atwood published her second novel Surfacing in 1972, environmental
fiction was already an established genre, but awareness of the extent to which anthropogenic
activity was damaging the planet was in its infancy. For pioneering nineteenth-century
North American environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold and John Muir, who strove
to combat attitudes that saw wilderness as a site for exploitation, the natural
world had been a tangible constant, and for the most part the traditions of
ecological writing that followed them concerned themselves with addressing
local eco-systems. Thus, in the twentieth century, while seminal fictional and
non-fictional works such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) demonstrated the injurious
consequences of particular farming practices, they stopped short of suggesting
that human activity was fundamentally changing the composition of the planet. Arguably
Surfacing goes further, because it offers a radical critique of human exclusivity
and as such invites being read as a brilliantly conceived harbinger of twenty-first
century novels such as Wu Ming Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011;
trans. 2013) and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) that offer a thorough-going
interrogation of the Anthropocene.[1]
As I write, scientists continue to
debate when the Age of the Anthropocene, the age in which human actions have
become the most important single determinant of the condition of the earth’s
eco-systems and atmosphere, began. The term has been bandied about for some
four decades, and various moments have been put forward as candidates for its inception.
These have ranged from the beginnings of the Agrarian Revolution more than ten
millennia ago to the peak in nuclear fallout in the 1950s or 1960s, after the
detonation of the first atom bombs in 1945. Between these extremes come the
suggestions that the Industrial Revolution’s adoption of fossil fuels makes the
eighteenth century a more obvious terminus ad quem for the Age of the
Anthropocene, and the proliferation of the carbon economy after World War II
signals a moment when the descent to the bottom accelerated at a hitherto
unparalleled rate. So, while there is a fairly general consensus that the Age
of the Anthropocene is more than just a sub-division of the Age of the
Holocene, as yet the jury has remained out on the question of when it began and
whether it constitutes a new geological era. 
Margaret Atwood
Just at the moment, though, as I
write – in July 2023 – the Anthropocene Working
Group has proposed Crawford Lake in
Ontario as a site that represents the beginning of the proposed new era and has
dated it as having begun in the 1950s, since that was when the lake showed an increase
in levels of plutonium from hydrogen bomb tests, along with an upsurge in carbon
particles and nitrates, from fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers
respectively. The Group’s proposal awaits ratification, but, if it is accepted,
the Anthropocene era will officially be approved next year.
What, one may ask, does this have to
do with Surfacing? When Atwood wrote the novel just over half a century
ago, she could hardly have foreseen that the current debates about the case for
the instatement of the Anthropocene as a distinct geological epoch would be
argued on the basis of evidence drawn from a Canadian lake. Yet, the setting
for the novel is just such a lake, a lake located in a wilderness environment that
is showing signs of the damage caused by anthropogenic encroachments and so,
coincidentally, this location is very appropriate, since Surfacing stands
at the headwaters of novels that critique human exclusivity.
At first glance Surfacing is
a highly personal story. The introspective unnamed narrator/protagonist, who is
a commercial artist, journeys from the city into the Quebec woods, an
environment where she has lived as a girl. She goes back with three companions
– her lover Joe and another couple, David and Anna – to search for her father,
a retired arborist who has gone missing from the remote island cabin where he
has been living alone. Interspersed with her account of this present-day
journey, the narrator revisits episodes from her past, recalling them in an
associative stream-of-consciousness manner that particularly focuses on her
childhood and her relationship with her supposed ‘husband,’ who turns out to
have been a married man with whom she was having an affair. The d├йnouement of
the present-day action begins when she discovers her father’s drowned body,
though initially she displaces this onto her brother, whom readers have earlier
been told drowned as a child, only to have this subsequently corrected; the
d├йnouement of the past action begins when she reveals that she has had an
abortion and readers realize that she has displaced details from the day when
this took place onto references to her imagined wedding day, which never took
place.
So, while initially the plot seems
to revolve around the disappearance of the narrator’s father, it quickly
becomes clear that she is engaged on a parallel quest to find herself – a quest
to unravel suppressed aspects of her past, on which she has superimposed a
fictionalized version. Her companion Anna occupies herself with reading
detective stories and Surfacing itself emerges as a kind of detective
story: a detective story of consciousness, in which the unreliable narrator is
both the object of investigation and the detective who unravels the mystery of
her dissociated consciousness, as she gradually discloses the truth about her
past. Her unreliability functions on various levels with readers being treated
to more of her back story than she reveals to the various people in her life,
her present companions included. Ultimately, though, she is a victim who has
estranged herself from the reality of her past and in the latter stages of the
novel she undergoes an extended epiphany, in which she strips away the layers
of her false self and resolves ‘to refuse to be a victim’ (Atwood [1972] 1979: 185),
a condition which she has associated with her being a woman and a Canadian.[2]
Surfacing
is, then, ostensibly a very personal story, in that it is an account of one
woman’s struggle for authenticity. However, at the same time, the narrator’s
surfacing from the false version of her past that she has constructed has broader
significance, since she comments extensively on language, landscape, gender, nation,
and society in a manner that makes her consciousness a crucible for many of the
most debated issues of the period in which the novel is set, the early 1970s.
She sees life in terms of a series of oppositional binaries, which include
Canadian/American, female/male, wilderness/city, organic/mechanic, conception/abortion,
sanity/madness, and Native/settler. Above all, she mistrusts the ‘human’ and
affiliates herself with the non-human animal So what may initially seem to be a
tightly written account of an aberrant psychology has much broader resonance. While
it may be reductive to read the narrator as a Canadian Everywoman, the text
lends certainly itself to being read as a study of a Canadian Anywoman’s
psyche – her being left unnamed lends credence to such a reading – and beyond
this as a probing investigation of fundamental existential issues that have ever
increasing relevance, as, half a century later, geologists move toward
ratifying the era in which we are living as the Age of the Anthropocene. Germane
though the issues foregrounded in Surfacing were to the North American counter-culture
of the 1970s, the novel anticipates the contemporary growth of awareness that
anthropogenic activity is threatening the future of the planet.
So, although on one level, Surfacing
can be read as an interesting early 1970s period-piece, it is also a forerunner
of Atwood’s post-millennial ecologically committed fiction, particularly her MaddAddam
trilogy, and in many ways it is her finest work in this genre. The three MaddAddam
novels – Oryx and Crake ([2003] 2004), The Year of the Flood ([2009]
2010) and MaddAddam ([2013] 2014) – move between a chilling near-present
and a dystopian future to show, over the course of some 1,700 pages, how Anthropocene
activity is contributing to the destruction of life on Earth as we know it. Surfacing,
which is only a tenth of the length of the trilogy, may seem slight in
comparison, but it is a tightly written masterpiece that has few rivals among
the growing group of novels that are addressing the impact of human behaviour
on the planet’s climate, biodiversity, and resources. While its main action
takes place within the mind of its narrator, its themes encompass most of the issues
that have subsequently come to be associated with the Anthropocene. The
relationship between human and non-human animals is central, but from the
opening sentence, where the narrator says ‘I can’t believe I’m on this road
again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the
disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have sea-planes
for hire’ (Atwood [1972] 1979: 1), onwards, it is clear that the environment
more generally is under threat, as Canadian wilderness space is invaded by
forces associated with Canada’s powerful southern neighbour. And along with this physical invasion, the
narrator takes the view that Canada is threatened by American psychological
colonization:
They
spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells
and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell
the difference. Like the late show sci-fi movies, creatures from outer space,
body snatchers injecting themselves into you dispossessing your brain […].
(123)
The tension
between American materialism and Canadian reverence for Nature runs throughout
the novel. In its starkest form, it is articulated by David, who glibly sees
their temporary stay in the Canadian bush as offering an escape from American-led
capitalist culture, at one point saying, ‘We ought to start a colony, I mean a community
up here, get it together with some other people, break away from the urban nuclear
family. It wouldn’t be a bad country if only we could kick out the fucking pig
Americans, eh?’ (83). Earlier, when the narrator suggests they should use their
time away from urban civilization to read, he replies, ‘Naaa, why read when you
can do that in the city?’ (33), but at the same time as he says this, he is twiddling
the knob on his transistor radio to try to get the latest baseball scores. And
the narrator, who distances herself from David’s rhetoric, nevertheless takes a
similar view of Americans, when she sees two fishermen in a powerboat, who have
wantonly slaughtered and strung up a heron, as the epitome of that kind of
Anthropocentric exclusivism that arrogates to itself the right to brutalize and
kill the non-human:
The
innocents get slaughtered because they exist, I thought, there is nothing
inside the happy killers to restrain them, no conscience or piety; for them,
the only things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human, framed in
the proper clothes and gimmicks, laminated. It would have been different in
those countries where an animal is the soul of an ancestor or the child of a
god, at least they would have felt guilt. (121-2)
The powerboat
fishermen turn out to be Canadians not, as she has assumed, Americans, and it
transpires that they have taken David and Joe to be Americans because of their
long hair. So rigid national stereotyping is undermined, but the broad contours
of two diametrically opposed views of existence continue to be signified by the
terms ‘American’ and ‘Canadian’ and in tandem with this the narrator equates
the American with the ‘human,’ which she distrusts, and the Canadian with the ‘animal’.
This is a dichotomy
that runs through much of her work. In the same year as Surfacing
appeared, Atwood published her critical book, Survival: A Thematic Guide to
Canadian Literature (1972), a surprise best-seller (Atwood [1972] 2012:
v-xii) whose popularity has outlasted that of many of the literary works it
discusses. Survival includes a chapter
on the way animals are represented in classic British, American and Canadian
animal stories, which provides an interesting companion-piece to the
representation of animals in Surfacing.[3]
Atwood takes the view that British animal stories are not really about animals
at all, but ‘like the white rabbit in Alice
in Wonderland, Englishmen in furry zippered suits, often with a layer of
human clothing added on top,’ and goes on to say that the animals ‘speak fluent
English and are assigned places in a hierarchical social order which is
essentially British (or British-colonial; as in the Mowgli stories): Toad of
Toad Hall is an upper-class twit, the stoats and ferrets which invade his
mansion are working-class louts and scoundrels’. She notes that these stories ‘invariably’
have ‘happy endings’ ([1972] 2012: 73-4).
In contrast, according
to Atwood, American examples of the genre are hunting stories, and she cites Moby-Dick,
the bear in Faulkner’s story of the same name, the lion in Hemingway’s ‘The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, the grizzlies in Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? and the deer glimpsed in James Dickey’s Deliverance as evidence of animals that
are the prey of human hunters. In each case, she says. the animals concerned are
‘endowed with magic symbolic qualities’:
They are Nature,
mystery, challenge, otherness, what lies beyond the Frontier: the hunter wishes
to match himself against them, conquer them by killing them and assimilate
their magic qualities, including their energy, violence and wildness, thus
‘winning’ over Nature and enhancing his own stature. American animal stories
are quest stories – with the Holy Grail being a death – usually successful from
the hunter’s point of view, though not from the animal’s; as such they are a
comment on the general imperialism of the American cast of mind. (Atwood [1972]
2012: 74)
Having identified what
she sees as the dominant mythology of American animal stories, Atwood goes on
to contrast this with Canadian examples of the genre. She sees the Canadian
animal story, as pioneered by Ernest Thompson Seton and Sir Charles G. D.
Roberts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a genre which offers
insight into the Canadian psyche and says that ‘Those looking for something
“distinctively Canadian” in literature might well start right here’ (73). She
finds the Canadian stories very different from their British and American
counterparts:
The animal stories
of Seton and Roberts are far from being success stories. They are almost
invariably failure stories, ending with the death of the animal; but this death,
far from being the accomplishment of a quest, to be greeted with rejoicing, is
seen as tragic or pathetic, because the
stories are told from the point of view of the animal. That’s the key:
English animal stories are about ‘social relations,’ American ones are about
people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as
felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers […]. (74-5; italics in
original)
And this is followed by the remark:
‘Moby-Dick as told by the White Whale would be very different (“Why is that
strange man chasing me around with a harpoon?”)’ (75).
In
Surfacing, the American attitude she identifies in Survival comes
through particularly forcefully when the narrator describes her response to the
dead heron:
Why had they strung
it up like a lynch victim […]. To prove they could do it, they had the power to
kill. Otherwise it was valueless: beautiful from a distance, but it couldn’t be
tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a
thing like that was to destroy it. Food, slave or corpse, limited choices;
horned and fanged heads sawed off and mounted on the billiard room wall,
stuffed fish, trophies. It must have been the Americans. (Atwood 1979 [1972]: 110-11)
The heron represents ‘Nature, mystery,
challenge, otherness’, the ‘magic symbolic qualities’, which, as Atwood sees
it, have to be destroyed in American animal stories, and later in Surfacing,
the narrator invests it with a particular spiritual meaning, when, she links it
with Christ and the Christian doctrine of the vicarious atonement: ‘anything
that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ […]. The animals die that we may
live’ (134).
On
one level, then, the representation of animals in Surfacing encourages reading
the novel as national allegory, but such a reading is delimiting, both because the
supposed Americans prove to be Canadians, but also, and more significantly, because
the narrator’s equation of the American with the human moves this dichotomy
onto a more fundamental ontological plane. Numerous details relate the
specifics of her situation to concerns that interrogate the Enlightenment
privileging of the Anthropocene. Thus the passage that opens the second of the
novel’s three sections goes to the heart of the Cartesian separation of mind from
body, and in so doing foregrounds and criticizes ways in which humans
distinguish themselves from animals on the grounds that they have reasoning
capacities:
The
trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or
the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are
separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn’t have different words for them. If
the head extended directly into the shoulders like a worm’s or a frog’s without
that constriction, that lie, they wouldn’t be able to look down at their bodies
and move them around as if they were robots or puppets; they would have to
realize that if the head is detached from the body both of them will die. (70)
And in this
section of the novel, the narrator journeys back into the past – personal,
national and prehistoric – and rediscovers a conception of self that existed
before language created this duality. This journey is enacted on several
levels. Initially it is signalled by a change in tense: hitherto she has been
telling her story in the present; now the narrative moves into the past, and as
she gradually uncovers buried aspects of her personal past, the novel engages
in a similar process of excavation as it digs into the pre-Columbian past of
Canada, a past which is particularly associated with animals and Native
Canadian culture. One reading of her journey has seen it as a shamanistic rite
(Pratt 1981) and certainly the narrator enters into a mindset which is remote from
the norms of Western Anthropocene thinking.
Pursuing
her quest to locate her father, the narrator looks for clues in his papers and comes
across some apparently insane drawings that he has made. They include a figure
that seems to combine alligator-like animal features with human attributes, and
this therianthropic amalgam leads her to conclude that her father has become
totally deranged, with the figure he has drawn possibly representing ‘what he
thought he was turning into’ (95). Her father has been the epitome of reason to
her, even though she has discovered that the ‘eighteenth century [sic] rationalists’
(32), personifications of the Enlightenment Anthropocene, that he admired were
afflicted with a plethora of mainly psychological problems. Consequently she is
particularly shaken by what she views as his insane drawings. However, when she
realizes that he has been pursuing an interest in Native rock-paintings, there
is a sea change in her attitude. What appears mad as the product of a
supposedly rational, modern mind takes on different connotations when it is
associated with an animist Indigenous view of experience. So she goes in search
of her father in places where his papers suggest the rock-paintings are located
and gradually her identity as a woman from contemporary consumer society is
stripped away, as she travels back into a world where the norms of the
Anthropocene no longer obtain.
She
dives into the lake at a spot where her father has been looking for the Native
paintings and surfaces having
experienced the central epiphany of the novel. This is the discovery of her
father’s drowned body, and after initially displacing this onto her brother, she
conflates what she has seen with the central trauma in her past: the repressed
knowledge of a child she has aborted:
I knew when it was, it was in a bottle
curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled; it had huge jelly eyes and
fins instead of hands, fish gills, I couldn’t let it out, it was dead already,
it had drowned in air. It was there when I woke up, suspended in the air above
me like a chalice, an evil grail and I thought, Whatever it is, part of myself
or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn’t a child but it could have been
one. I didn’t allow it. (137)[4]
So the shock of
seeing her father dead brings her own aborted parenthood to mind and she likens
the foetus to an animal that may or may not be part of herself. The feminist
aspects of the text make it clear that patriarchal repression has been a major
factor in her alienation and her father’s death releases her from one kind of
male logic, even though he has been less rational than she has assumed. More
significantly, she emerges as the victim of her married former lover, who has coerced
her into an abortion she hasn’t really wanted, telling her the child ‘wasn’t a
person, it was only an animal’ (138; my italics).
She has come to regard herself as
the murderer of this animal, and traumatic though the abortion has been for
her, this takes on resonances that go far beyond her personal angst, since,
along with wilderness space and Indigeneity, animals represent a prehistoric, extra-Anthropocene
order of existence, which is being destroyed by contemporary ‘civilization’. There
are several allusions to prehistoric species – mammoths (3), pterodactyls (57),
and mastodons (138) among them – as well as numerous references to the
contemporary fauna of the region. In the action that follows, as mentioned
above, she discards the trappings of such ‘civilization’ and reverts to an
animal-like state of being. Animals, in the narrator’s imagination, as she
undergoes this return to Nature, have no need of language; they represent a
pre-linguistic order, in which Anthropocene binaries such as the split between
mind and body do not exist.
After discovering her father’s
drawings, she believes that her mother must have left her a similar legacy and
she finds this in a scrapbook in the form of a picture she herself has drawn as
a child. This depicts a pregnant woman, whose unborn baby, her pre-natal self,
is ‘sitting up inside her gazing out,’ and opposite the woman is another therianthropic
being: ‘a man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail’ (152).
This is glossed as a representation of God, in which the Manichean binary that
separates God and the Devil has been broken down, but it can equally well be
seen as a transgression of the human-animal binary. Just prior to this, she says,
‘it wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and
women both’ (148) and she resolves to raise the baby she believes she may now
be carrying as an animal-like being, whom she ‘will never teach […] any words’
(156).
During this phase of the action, she
removes herself from the norms of human behaviour by identifying herself as an
animal – discarding clothes, making herself a lair, defecating like an animal –
and subsequently imagining herself going beyond this into a state of being in
which she envisages herself being absorbed into a complete hylozoist oneness
with Nature:
The
animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word
I
lean against a tree. I am a tree leaning […]
I
am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move
and grow, I am a place. (175)
The thinking seems
to anticipate James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is a
self-sustaining holistic system ‘alive: not as the ancients saw her – a
sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight – but alive like a tree’
(Lovelock 1991: 12).
Her visionary experience outside
social norms promotes a view that undermines Anthropocene notions of normality
predicated on reason: during this period she says at one point, ‘From any
rational point of view I am absurd, but there are no longer any rational points
of view’ (163). The novel concludes with her suspended between nature and
culture, being called to return to society, but not having actually done so. So
the ending leaves her in an interstitial situation. She knows that her
extra-social experience has been an interlude, but she has learnt a counter-human
wisdom from it, and as yet remains poised on the cusp between animal and human
worlds. She has encountered therianthropic figures in both her father’s sketches
of Native rock paintings and the scrapbook of her mother’s legacy, and just as
she has thought that her father’s drawings may represent what he sees himself
as turning into, she has entered into a non-human conception of self, when she has
seen herself as first an animal, then a tree, and then simply a place.
The
phase of the novel in which the narrator reverts to a non-human state may seem
like a temporary episode, but the anti-Anthropocene mindset she assumes at this
point is only an extension of her thinking throughout the novel and earlier it has
manifested itself in her response to the requirements of the commission on
which she is currently working as a commercial artist. She is illustrating a
volume of Quebec Folk Tales and is struck by the extent to which the
Disneyfied nature of its stories is at odds with the reality of the bush that
she and her companions are experiencing. Bemoaning the fact that the animals
are anthropomorphized (‘human inside and they take their fur skins off as
easily as getting undressed’ (50) in a manner similar to the English animal
stories she talks about in Survival and that there is no loup garou (werewolf)
in the collection she has to illustrate, she sets about subverting the
ethos of the tales by giving a princess she is depicting ‘fangs and a moustache
[and] surrounding her with moons and fish and a wolf with bristling hackles and
a snarl’ (51). Here, then, Gothic iconography replaces fairy tale
sentimentality and this relates interestingly to what the novel as a whole is
doing with the figure of the therianthrope. In Western incarnations such as the
werewolf and the vampire, the therianthrope is separated off from the human by
being demonized, but in the narrator’s childhood drawings that she finds in the
scrapbook, they serve to dismantle human-animal binaries, in a manner that
prefigures her assumption of a therianthropic identity when she removes herself
from the norms of human society. The ending
of the novel moves beyond this, but irrespective of whether or not she is going
to return to society, the trope of therianthropic identity, and beyond this the
narrator’s coming to terms with her suppressed past by affiliating herself with
a tree, a place, and by implication all the non-human organisms that make up
life on earth, provide a powerful argument against human exclusivism. In short,
this movement beyond the human into a hylozoist view of existence establishes Surfacing
as a classic fictional attack on the Anthropocene avant la lettre.
[1]
I discuss these two novels in Thieme 2023.
[2]
Cf. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, where Atwood
identifies four basic victim positions ([1972] 2012: 31-35). The wording here
in Surfacing seems to correlate with the fourth of these, the condition
of being ‘a creative non-victim’ (Atwood [1972] 1979: 35).
[3]
Earlier, in the title-poem of The Animals in That Country, Atwood had
contrasted the animals ‘in that country’ who have ‘the faces of people,’ with
the animals ‘[i]n this country’ who have ‘the faces of animals,’ die deaths
that ‘are not elegant’ and then are said to ‘have the faces of no-one’ (Atwood 1968:
2-3).
[4]
This is anticipated by an earlier passage, in which, speaking of her own
pre-natal experience, the narrator says, ‘I believe that an unborn baby has its
eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother’s stomach, like a
frog in a jar’ ([1972] 1979: 26).
References
Atwood,
Margaret (1968) The Animals in That Country, Toronto: Oxford University
Press.
---------------------- ([1972] 1979) Surfacing
London: Virago.
---------------------- ([1972] 2012) Survival:
A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Toronto: Anansi.
---------------------- ([2003] 2004) Oryx
and Crake, London: Virago.
---------------------- ([2009] 2010) The
Year of the Flood, London: Virago.
---------------------- ( [2013] 2014) MaddAddam,
London: Virago.
Lovelock, James (1991)
Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine, London and Stroud:
Gaia Books.
Powers, Richard ([2018]
2019) The Overstory, London: Vintage.
Pratt,
Annis (1981) ‘Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey’, in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, ed. Arnold and Cathy
Davidson, Toronto: Anansi: 139-157
Thieme,
John (2023) Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change,
London and New York.
Wu Ming-yi ([2011] 2013) The Man with the Compound Eyes, trans. Darryl Sterk, London: Vintage.
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