Margaret Atwood. Negotiating with the Dead: a Writer on Writing.
St. Andrews, B.A.
Margaret Atwood. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.
New York. Cambridge University Press. 2002. xxvii + 219 pages. $18. ISBN 0-521-66260-5
WHAT A CHILLING and enduring pleasure is here. The disembodied
voice of Margaret Atwood seems to deliver Cambridge University's
prestigious Empson Lectures right at one's ear. To hear that living
voice reach across the ether bridging the time-space continuum,
challenging the assumptions of our age--inspires those of us who need to
think about writing as an act--and a radical one at that--rather than as
a received murmuration or toothless rumination.
Negotiating with the Dead is Atwood at her most engaging: erudite
as a scholar, wide-ranging as a peregrine falcon, pitiless as a force of
nature. This book about Writing (as a process, as a life, as an elegant
and bedraggled form of self-haunting) and about Writers (as curious,
analytic, oddly caught in yet apart from time, as imaginary constructs,
and, yes, as self-haunting) is a gift you can give fellow writers and
ardent readers.
Writers--Atwood makes this case unequivocally--are cheeky and
unapologetic professionals. They are part of a long line (pun intended)
of voices who refuse to be silenced by the biblically allotted three
score and ten. Pen mongers refuse to lie down! They shun being silenced
by time, stone, moss, dirt, or the limitations of breath! They insist,
as often as they can get away with it, on uttering The Last Word!
Her references and proofs? Chaucer, D. H. Lawrence, Virgil, Lewis
Carroll, Archibald Macleish, Jane Austen, Charles Baudelaire, Chekhov,
George Eliot, Robertson Davies, Orwell, Doctorow, Emerson, Mavis
Gallant, Adrienne Rich, Sontag, Stein, Ondaatje. What a mind is in
motion here; what simplicity and complexity. Atwood can move from heady
correlations to the small, perfect apprehension that a writer's
childhood preparation best contains three elements: Books, Solitude, and
a Storyteller.
Anyone who has devoured Dorothea Brande's classic or
Rukeyser's life in poetry or Annie Dillard's musings on living
through the muse or John Gardner's ascent toward moral fiction will
grasp Atwood's offering with both hands, both eyes, and both sides
of a beleaguered brain. Nor is this book (or those mentioned) for
writers only. Many a literate witness to "the Story" wants to
assess the Understandings of Others, wants to learn the secret name of
Everything, wants an articulated Truth in each life story, wants
Meaning--beyond denotation and connotation--to be Revealed, Sanctified,
Unified, made Real.
In fine, many a witness to and reader of such lively books as these
has an urge to think in the upper case about strategic elements of being
alive: Writing, Story, Muse, Meaning, the Timely and Timeless,
Negotiating with the Dead.
Each of Atwood's lectures / essays straddles two or three
putative opposites, then provokes and insists upon synthesis:
"Apollo versus Mammon" crosses writers and money;
"Temptation" moves from Prospero to Oz to the devil;
"Duplicity" high-handedly washes "the Jekyll hand"
against "the Hyde hand"; and the luminous chapter entitled
"Communion" examines Book, Writer, and Reader as an
essential--and quite possibly blessed--trinity.
Atwood forms her own trinity, of course: as woman writer, as
Canadian writer, and as literary scholar cum fiction writer cum poet.
Nor is this work without its dangers: "All writers must go from now
to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to
where the stories are kept ... must take care not to be captured and
held immobile by the past ... must commit acts of larceny or ... of
reclamation."
She grasps precisely what the writing life requires, its dangers
and delights. The celebrated Margaret Atwood wanders through forbidding,
penumbral regions of the Underworld. Enjoy the perils with this nimble
Virgil as guide.
B. A. St. Andrews
Upstate Medical University, SUNY
