Margaret Atwood's theory of survival in Canadian literature

Margaret Atwood's Theory Of Natural Survival

Margaret Atwood is arguably one of the most influential female Canadian writers of the last four decades. Her best-selling books have one many awards and, in the case of novels such as Surfacing and Handmaid's Tale, have inspired/enraged/empowered women in several decades to seek out their own power and challenge the patriarchal domination of their lives. Surfacing, which first appeared in 1972, was particularly embraced by the feminist community, which found a sort of odd manifesto in the heroine's descent into primeval nudity and her return which rejected all forms of victimhood and colonization of the body in exchange for a new strength and innocence in her mothering and mating relationships.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim" (Atwood, Surfacing, 197) became a sort of credo for many feminists of the era. There is something vaguely ironic about the way in which that phrase was latched up, though, for Atwood herself considered a certain degree of victimhood to be that characteristic which most truly defined Canadian literature as such.

Atwood was not merely a novelist, for if she had been her impact on Canadian literature -- though nonetheless still likely to be profound-- would certainly have been less. To her credit, Atwood is also the author of one of the more formative treatises on Canadian literature. In her book Survival, she claimed that Canada did indeed have a distinct national literature which could be distinguished from that of American or British standards, and which served as a context for interpreting and understanding the work of emerging and established Canadian authors.

According to an informal interview, Atwood is said to have described the work as written "because some people said that Canadian literature didn't exist... [though] it was always out there" (Strong)

According to this work, nations tend towards having some sort of myth or metaphor which infuses their culture and is manifested in their art and literature. Canada's guiding myth is not the same as that of Britain or of America, and thus its literature may be marginalized by those who judge based on the standards of these more established bodies of work. The guiding myth of Canadian literature, Atwood proposes, is that of survival -- the protagonist who survives (or fails to survive) in the face of overwhelming odds stacked against them from nature, society, or self. Canadian literature is filled with tragic or senselessly destructive endings; its protagonists die suddenly at the hands of whimsical fate/nature, or survive alone past the destruction of all others.

A thinking critic might point out that something in this guiding myth idolizes victimhood, rather than refusing to indulge in it.

However, the key to that Canadian heroine's determination to refuse to be a victim is in its simultaneous commitment to accept responsibility for her actions and commitment to continue struggling in the human world which was so puzzling and destructive -- it is not a commitment to resist being harmed or to resist being destroyed, but rather a commitment to resist giving up in the face of adversity. It is this sort of gameness which is the core of the successful Canadian protagonist's soul, as Atwood portrays it in her defining book Survival.

Yet the key feature of survival, which Atwood claims is so typical of Canadian literature, is not enough to explain the character development and messages of Atwood's intensely alinear stories of female self-discovery and transcendence, such as those transcribed in Surfacing and (years later) Cat's Eye. These two stories (particularly the first) further depend on defining the delicate relationship between internal and external reality, and the relationship of Nature to self and to truth.

Through-out her body of work, from Surfacing to the Handmaid's Tale to Oryx & Crake, Atwood develops a subtle cosmology in which th e self must strive towards the same sort of truthfulness as the external world of Nature, and mankind's effacement of the wild is paralleled and complicit in its effacement of the self. Nature, in Atwood's works, is not merely made (as in so many other fictions) to reflect the inner state of the characters, storming when they are angry or sun-drenched when they are happy. Rather, the character is judged by the degree to which they are able to merge with Nature and coexist within its absolute truth.

Nature -- which is at once dangerous and pure -- is the truth at the core of our mammalian natures, and the degree to which the characters in a story are able to embrace that instead of turning against it with artificiality, instinct-denying logic, cold religion, commercialism, or any other such facade, is precisely the degree to which they are capable both of survival and of becoming truly themselves. In the following pages, the deep relationship between nature, self, and survival in Atwood's works will be both explicated within her written works and --as much as possible-- its experiential source within her personal life will be noted and explored.

Atwood's Career History

It seems certain that Atwood's childhood would be far more informative to the subject at hand than would a dry recital of her "long, remarkable career." (Strong) Like Stephen in Cat's Eye, one might say that Margaret Atwood needs no introduction - but she must be introduced with a long list of her qualifications nonetheless. It seems prudent to quickly survey her work, so as to give some perspective on her place in modern Canadian fiction. It is quite difficult to imagine the Canadian literary landscape today were it not for her prodigious and often formative involvement. Atwood was involved in writing from an early age, and pursued it through many years of university study. She was active in her local artist community as she pursued her doctorate which she never completed but which did give her a great deal of perspective. Within a few years of receiving her first teaching position she had completed numerous stories, a book of poems, and her first novel. At age 27 she was the youngest poet to be honored by the Governor General's poetry award. (Strong) Subsequently, she published dozens of books and received numerous awards. Her novels the Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye were both shortlisted for the Brooker Prize, and she was likewise a finalist for the Orange Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (more than once). She won the booker Prize with Blind Assassin, while the Robber Bride and Alias Grace both were awarded a Giller Prize. She has received numerous other honors, including being given the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., the Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the first London Literary Prize to be awarded to a female writer. Despite failing to earn her Ph.D in school, she has received honorary degrees from numerous universities including Oxford. She has been published in over 25 countries, and lectured across the globe. (Sciliano)

Her long and well-received career, both as an academic and as an acclaimed writer, gives Atwood a certain perspective on the subject of Canadian literature, and also prepares her to analyze her own work - which for some may seem almost inseparable from the literature of her nation.

Survival: The Theory

In her ground-breaking book Survival, Atwood argued that the central organizing metaphor or "symbol" for Canadian literature is that of survival. This survival is not merely that act of living through difficult times, but rather an entire mind-set which pervades the people and literature of the nation.

For comparison, Atwood argues that America and England also have their own symbols. England is "The Island," by which Atwood refers to a sense of isolation, self-adoration and completion, and terraced in a patriarchal way: "island-as-body, self-contained, a Body politic evolving organically with a hierarchical structure in which the King is the head, the statesmen the hands, the peasants or farmers or workers the feet, and so on. The Englishman's home as his castle is the popular form of this symbol." One can see this sense, she suggests, through-out English literature, constantly concerned with structure and the way the classes support and interact with each other. America, meanwhile, is "The Frontier." It is typified by utopias (failing and succeeding), by the restless search for something new, the conquest of virgin space, and the movement of revolutions.

For Canada, this symbol of survival is far more personal than the island of English symbolism and far more desperate and angst-ridden than the American conception of the frontier, even when that frontier is seen as dangerous or impossible. Atwood distinguishes at several sorts of survival which infuse Canadian literature: bare survival, grim survival, cultural and emotional survival are among these. Bare survival is that defined by merely "hanging on, staying alive." Canadian literature recognizes the difficulty of making it through each day and year. The obstacles to survival may be physical, based in the land and climate or the clash of needs between men, societies, and competing animals. As Canada has become less wild, many of these obstacles have been recognized by writers to exist internally, as Atwood says: "no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being."

Grim survival is that sort of survival which overcomes a specific threat which destroys everything else about one, such as a hurricane or plane crash. One supposes that survival in a war setting, or even survival of a serious personal tragedy (such as rape) might also qualify. Of this sort of survival, Atwood writes: "The survivor has no triumph or victory but the fact of his survival; he has little after his ordeal that he did not have before, except gratitude for having escaped with his life."

Cultural survival is also a vital issue. French Canadians struggled to retain their language and religion under the rule of an anglophile government. Today all Canadians are struggling to maintain their independence under the cultural and economic global hegemony of America. Survival can in this sense be either quite positive, as in the maintenance of a valued cultural integrity, or refer to what Atwood calls: "a vestige of a vanished order which has managed to persist after its time is past, like a primitive reptile..." Either way it is a typical response against colonialism.

When dealing with Atwood's writings, and it seems with Canadian writing in general, the issue of colonialism is quite important. Atwood's very existence is a protest against colonialism, because the colonial mindset rebels against the very existence of its colonies developing their own literary traditions. Atwood speaks of the way in which colonial powers and the colonized alike remain "indifferent" to the presence of great Canadian writers. " Atwood found this indifference of Canada to Canadian talent puzzling and disappointing.... she noted a tendency among Canadians to become aggressive nationalists when living [in America]. She explained the behaviour as 'The Great Canadian Lie' because urban Canadians reinvented themselves as Great White Hunters and rugged naturalists." (NiR) the idea of survival and the value of naturalism is seen as a response to colonial pressure, even as the ignorance of a nation's own literature may reflect a blind struggle to survive.

Nature and Meaning in Surfacing.

Surfacing is one of Atwood's early books, in which she begins to formulate her approach to subjects such as nature and survival. In this story, a young woman returns to the wilderness where she grew up with her family in an ultimately vain attempt to find her vanished father. While there she explores her relationship with her more "civilized" urban friends and with society at large, while reliving expanses of her childhood and past. In the isolation of these woods, the four friends who have ventured forth together find their individual relationships all decaying and falling apart.

Meanwhile, the protagonist traces her father's steps, at first thinking him mad and eventually coming to realize that he had quite sanely -if mystically-- somehow discovered a power in the woods and waters which predates the civilization of humankind and offers to give them back the truth of natural life. Under the influence of these spirits, she realizes that she has been lying to herself about her abortion, and slowly reverts to a primal state in which she lives in the woods briefly as a savage thing. In the end, she returns (one assumes) to her own humanity, carrying with her the animal determination to survive without becoming a victim or selling out to the Americanization of her soul.

This story, though it presents a sort of deification of nature, certainly does not treat the wild as Disney might, making it simple and non-aggressive. Nature, in this work, though it is worthy of reverence and represents the best of what is available to humankind on the one hand, is also shown as being capricious and capable of great harm. The narrator casually, if heartbreakingly, admits that "it's not unusual for a man to disappear in the bush... all it takes is a small mistake, going too far from the house in winter, blizzards are sudden, or twisting your leg so you can't walk out, in spring the blackflies would finish you, they crawl inside your clothes, you'd be covered with blood and delirious in a day." (Atwood, Surfacing, 43) Nature, though the ultimate shape of purity in this novel, is also a great threat to those who under-estimate it.

The idea of nature as a threat is evident in Atwood's writing on Survival, where there is an entire chapter called "Nature the Monster." In this chapter, she speaks of the death by nature (as distinguished from a natural death) which Atwood reports seems to kill more humans in Canadian fiction than in modern Canadian reality. This evil manifestation of nature occurs when "something in the natural environment murders the individual, though the author, who is of course the real guilty party, since it is he who has arranged the murder." (Atwood, Survival 54-55) in Surfacing this sort of death by nature is a constant threat. The protagonist suspects that her father may have died thus, and it is frequently recalled how her brother nearly drowned to death.

Yet it is not nature which is the greatest threat to the protagonist, in the end - it is not actually nature that she must fight against to survive, but rather it is humanity itself. She refers to being human as like being German after the war, complicitly guilty of all the crimes of her race against animals, each other, and the earth. The greatest threat to human survival is not the failure to find food, to mate and eat and survive, but the risk that as a species we will make ourselves and our environment extinct. This fear is vocalized through out the novel by different speakers, embodied in the fear that Americans will start a war to steal Canada's money, or in the threat that greedy power companies will raise the lake level and erase the protagonist's home. Even the threat of nuclear annihilation is mentioned, though it does not seem to be such a central focus compared to the threat of cultural and environmental annihilation posed by the Americans.

In the end, even more important that the developing heroine than her mere search for food. She focuses in the end, "above all" on the issue of resisting victimization by other humans. "I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone... The word games, the winning and losing games are finished; at the moment there are no others but they will have to be invented, withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death." (Atwood, Surfacing, 197)

Humanity is far more of a threat than nature could ever be - not just humanity exterior to the individual, but also the trappings of civilization which have been internalized -- and this threat will continue until the individual returns to the truth of their mammalian state. It is clear through-out Surfacing that the great problem with humanity is that it has divorced itself from nature - that its technology has made it cruel and exploitative, fencing its psyche away from the test of the world.

This forbidding is evidenced in the way in which the protagonist was slowly taught by her ancient gods, in the end, that she must not pass into the garden because it has been separated and alienated from nature by its fence. "The cabins, the fences, the fires and paths were violations: now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love." (Atwood, Surfacing, 192) This is the same law that is at play when the gods forbid her to eat out of tins and glass jars, which confine and separate food from the earth.

Even before this, however, one may see the protagonist slowly becoming aware of the way in which human separation from nature is improper. One of the first hints come in her slow rejection of fishing with hooks, "if we dived for them and used our teeth to catch them, fighting on their own grounds, that would be fair, but hooks were substitutes and air wasn't their place." (Atwood, Surfacing, 127) Yet it is not merely that technology, be that technology fences or jars or hooks, is evil. In fact, at one point in the book the gods seem to rejoice in her ritual use of clothing, whereas at another point they ask her to reject clothing - and yet still allow her to keep a blanket. So it is not the existence of technological remnants such as cloth that are a problem, but rather it is that the technology serves to distance the individual from the truth of their physicality, just as the protagonist suggests that the neck separates the intellect from the body. Thus it would be "different in those countries where an animal is the soul of an ancestor," (Atwood, Surfacing, 129) and the self was not artificially held apart.

It is significant that in plunging her entire naked body into an element of raw nature (the lake), this woman is given the power to see the truth about her own actions and history. As she becomes more mammalian, more physical and more natural, she increasingly understands those things she has repressed about herself in order to be part of civilization. Her abortion -the fact that he body had conceived and lost its progeny through violence-- was one of those repressed factors. There are other truths to be discovered as well, including the fact that she does love Joe, in that simple and deep animal way which is not verbal or intellectual, but physical.

This same sense of sinking (or surfacing) into nature is present when Atwood approaches older stories of survival. In her book of poetry based on the life of Susanna Moodie, Atwood explores this same theme. "The natural, organic self... Susanna discovers has always been a part of her. Man is originally a natural animal. But because of his exaltation of reason, he has repressed his animal qualities... [when this is freed] Plants, animals, Susanna are all becoming one. She is successfully merging with the landscape...and the merging is hastened by death...of her children." (Groening)

In an article reviewing Atwood's poetic journals, Groening describes how different Atwood's interpretation of nature and the self truly is from that of the historical Moodie. This difference is typified in the way that Atwood describes the idealized Susanna coming into one-ness with the earth. This difference ought not be considered a flaw, but rather an innovation, a salvation of the old, stripped of its fences and slashed to let enlightenment in. In these journals, Atwood describes the way in which (in death) the body becomes one with the earth:

The body dies little by little the body buries itself joins itself to the loosened mind, to the black- berries and thistles

Atwood, in Groening)

This becoming is what the protagonist of Surfacing also faces, and yet she emerges from it alive (resurrected, as it were), precisely because she is underwilling to go through this transition without the jolting spur of death. She accepts her nature, her physicality and mammalian-ness, without dying to prove it. Nonetheless, there are many connections between the way in which transcendent nature is portrayed in Susanna's poetic journals and the way it appears in Surfacing. The idea of body becoming mood and roots is closely paralleled with quotes such as "I am tree," or "I am a place." (Atwood, Surfacing, 187) One is even pushed to question whether those spots marked off with Indian runes which have the ability to grant insight and the touch of a higher consciousness, are themselves place-people, spaces of water and earth where a person has transcended reality and become one with nature. Of course, this tends a little towards the mystical, and yet such places seem to appear in other works by Atwood as well, such as Cat's Eye (under the bridge).

In Surfacing, nature is deified, but it is also used in a very realistic way. Certainly on the one hand it is the threatened god, the one that teaches the protagonist how to see again and how to emerge from her Americanized stupor. It is also the victim of mankind's violence - the heron strung up to rot, the lakes fished out and artificially redrawn, the pathways clearcut into the forest. Apart from these personifications, nature is also used to intimately and carefully give the details of the inhabitants environment and life. Nature not only is acted upon by them, it not only lies within them - it is also the backdrop and subplot to all that humans do.

Atwood certainly uses the sort of nature which surrounds a people seems to say something about that people, whether they are interacting with it poorly (and can never escape it or grasp it, and must strike out at it) or whether they somehow manage to coexist or even integrate with it.

One can see the way that nature is both threatened and controlled by humanity in the narrative of the Handmaid's Tale. One critic, writing about Gilead, describes the way in which nature is perverted within it: "the perpetually whirring lawn mowers testify that nothing natural can escape state cultivation. In fact, the 'heart of Gilead' is a sleepy suburban landscape out of Better Homes and Gardens, tidily gridded with roadblocks... But in this Gilead...our nightmares about the perils of toxic waste, radioactive fallout, chemical and biological warfare, nuclear sabotage and the building of atomic power plants along earthquake fault lines have all come true. " (Lawson) it is particularly significant that this post-apocalyptic world exists in the framework of the Handmaid's story, in which human nature is being likewise gridded and divided into tidy but unnatural categories. Here again one finds Atwood subtly linking the degradation of human life with the degradation of the environment and the denial of nature. The future portrayed in the Handmaid's Tale is precisely the future which the protagonist of Surfacing fears and to some degree foresees - a world where love has been done away with, and nature has been subsumed into American Puritanism.

In summary, Surfacing is a book which attempts to deal in truth - a truth which transcends mere logic and reason. The reason of the protagonist's father, like the faith of her friends, is not sufficient for survival. The truth which this book deals with is dangerous. This may be why it is associated with nature, as after all nature itself is dangerous and even deadly. Truth which is open about the structure of power and misery in relationships would be equally dangerous. One feels sure that (for example) in Anna and David ever became truthful, their relationship would crumble, like Anna's made-up face. Likewise it is truth that endangers the woman's relationship with Joe - the truth that she rejects marriage and love. Yet it is also truth that may enable them to begin again.

The truth which this book deals with is subversive - it is the overturning of the intellectual, patriarchal, and the capitalistic in favor of the emotional/physical, gender-equal, and communal. It is a truth which is inherent in the body, in the emotions that overcome thought, in the equal ability of male and female to give and receive pleasure and to interpret instinct, and in the need of each individual to survive. The body which moves towards its animal nature, towards a rhythm which is in sync with the earth, is a body which cannot lie. The natural body, for example, would never confuse abortion with giving birth. It would not confuse abstinence with rape, nor love and fear. These are all aberrations of the mind.

So if Surfacing makes a single use of nature, it is this: nature is the truth-teller. Nature, as it is within us and without us, is that which upholds an inconceivably high standard of real-ness. This is, in the end, what may be valued about science, that it is capable of decoding and making manifest the truthfulness of nature. What is to be devalued about science (and art) is its ability to deceive and corrupt. Nature and instinct, this book suggests, pose certain dangers to the self and to society, but they are dangers which must be embraced if one is to be fully human.

The Influence of Atwood's Life

If there seemed to be a great deal of plot overlap between Surfacing and Cat's Eye, this may be because both draw a great deal from the writer's personal autobiography. It would not be amiss to say that both protagonists are pieces of Atwood which have broken off to go pursue lives of their own, and each carries with it pieces of her history. Identifying the facts first may help in identifying which theories from her personal experience may be infusing both her own work and her interpretation of Canadian literature.

Atwood's father, the rational Entomologist, seems to surface in both novels, as does the full circumstances of her early life:

Carl [her father] did not fight in the war but his expertise was vital: he ran a forest-insect research station in North Quebec, forestry being vital to the war economy. The family (Atwood has one brother, Harold Leslie, two years older; a younger sister, Ruth, was born much later, in 1951) would set off for the northern wilderness every spring, only returning in the autumn to one of a number of different cities. "At the age of six months," Atwood has written, "I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown." (the Guardian)

The family of Cat's Eye or Surfacing it easily recognizable, with the exception of the little sister (who wouldn't have been born in either case until the older two children were practically grown). It is clear that the early association with the wild of Canada spoke to young Margaret. Her early experience with nature obviously influenced her early development, for so many of her protagonists. Like Elaine, Atwood was eventually consigned to a school, and at age eight she found herself in Toronto trying to fit in with other children. It was surely at that age she learned the terrible divide that most humans place between what is nature-based and ture, and that which is societally dictated. T

Though she reports not suffering in quite the same degree as her heroine from Cat's Eye, Atwood still speaks of the difficulties of school: "I was now faced with real life, in the form of other little girls - their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten." (the Guardian)

Atwood, through-out her early life, lived tumultuously - constantly moving, frequently alienated with other children. She speaks of having only her brother and parents with whom to play, no television or money for cinema, and of course she was home-schooled until she was eight. So imagination had to take the foreground, and she and her brother immersed themselves in books (classics, contemporary, and comic books all alike), and active "make believe" games which no doubt fed her future writing career. Atwood speaks fondly of the way her parents encouraged the children to be creative:

They weren't very actively encouraging; I think their theory was to leave kids alone... I call that encouraging. The idea of parents hovering over you the whole time, making you take lessons and occupying every minute of your time, I think is probably quite bad, because it means the child has no room to invent. I did have this older brother who was very instructive, who liked passing on to me whatever information he'd acquired; it meant we didn't play dollies a lot; we'd line up our - few, I'd have to say, because it was the war, you know - our few stuffed animals and then we'd have the Battle of Waterloo." (the Guardian)

Both Atwood and her brother grew up to be dedicated to the outdoors, both educated about it and comfortable in its lack of confines. Harold, her brother, is today alive and well, a professor of the natural sciences of zoology and physiology. Atwood, equally educated, tends towards exploring these same subjects in her daily readings, for she laughs that "usually life sciences - is my casual reading." (the Guardian)

It is interesting to note that in her novels, Atwood always focuses on assuring that her topography and descriptions are "rendered with absolute fidelity." (the Guardian) She assures that every street and store is real, and when she writes about Toronto in Cat's Eye a discerning reader might be able to carefully track the protagonist's footsteps and even locate the bridge and ravine which features so strongly in the story. The same holds true for her more exotic locations in Canada, such as the lake in Surfacing. "The places in my novels are often real. The people and the experiences are imaginary," (the Guardian) Atwood is quoted as saying. This great attention to detail is vital because it allows the meaning of Nature-as-Truth to come through undiluted. When everything else in the novels is fictional, their settings - their nature - is indisputably real. It is this sort of attention to scientific, natural, and eventually even social detail that allows such a great amount of luminescent truth into her books, so that they read more like journals, or mythic tales, than like the forced work of a common artist. Atwood is, of course, anything but common.

Like her heroines, Atwood has gone through her romantic share of life, having one divorce under her belt before becoming attached to her current mate, with whom she has cherished daughter. Though she believes that suffering is necessary for good writing, she tends to reject its presence in her life in a most natural way. She reports, "Basically, I don't like suffering very much so I evolved a rationale that permits less of it: everyone has their neuroses, granted, but the artist has a way of working them out... That's probably a lot of crap, too, but I find it more viable than the suffering one. At least you don't feel guilty if you enjoy your life or happen to have a good relationship with someone." (in: Strong) Like Elaine and her Surfacing woman, Atwood chooses to reject victimization and embrace the reproductive, mammalian nature of her life.

One final comparison that might be made is that both Atwood and the women she writes about in Cat's Eye and Surfacing are successful artists. Those two are both visual artists, while she is a writer with a certain flair for coloring and image in the text itself. Though she is not a visual artist, many of her impressions of their professional lives are very fitting, drawn not from her imagination but from living in such close proximity to artists of every sort. These stories are no doubt made even stronger by the fact that the two artist-protagonists are relatively successful. In both cases, the situation of their work - whether that be editing a children's book or sitting in on an awkward retrospective-- is one in which a thoughtful reader could easily imagine Atwood herself being placed at some point in her long path to international fame. So the struggle with inspiration, the need to be understood, and the strange quality which are gathers about it after it leaves one control all may be as relevant to Atwood's books as to Elaine's paintings.

Conclusion

Early in her career, Atwood wrote that the symbolism of survival was the guiding metaphor for Canadian literature. Looking at her own work, this certainly seems true. Yet survival in her work goes a long way beyond mere continuation of the body. Survival is the continued growth of the soul, and its struggle to reach truth. In this struggle, though the dread monster Nature which has the power to create and to kill may at times seem an enemy, yet it is also the means by which an individual may find transcendence. Nature is the repository of the spirit and of eternity, and when an individual is able to access that aspect of the natural, they find truth. In making this argument, Atwood writes from her own experience, living as a child in the deep bush, and observing the difference between what the character's of Cat's Eye would call the wild and the tame of he world, or what Surfacing would call the natives and the Americans.

Survival of the body and soul is found in the books as a nearly consistent theme. Of course it is present in Atwood's published thesis of that name, and there linked to her all of her past and previous work and reading. There is more than a mere formality of linking survival to lot in her following work, however, and more than a mere national genre. In Surfacing survival is a very real questions. The survival of the protagonist's father is always in question, as is the survival of her relationships and even her self-identity. The need to survive spiritually drives her to self-knowledge, and to her experiences with the ancient gods, but in the end her need to survive physically and to allow the child within her to survive overcomes all other obstacles. "If I die it dies, if I starve it starves with me. It might be the first one, the first true human: it must be born, allowed." (Atwood, Surfacing, 198) the triumph of the animal is actually made complete in this moment, as she forsakes the abstractions of nature for the reality of food and shelter and a warm mate. There is a triumph of humanity at that moment which is really the meaning of salvation.

In Cat's Eye, meanwhile, survival and procreation also play an important role. There are deaths (such as Stephen) and near-deaths (Elaine herself nearly dies) - but physical life is not generally in question, other than in a general cultural way, asking when the bombs will drop. The propagation of life (the giving of birth, the process of species continuation) is, however, indeed in question - the meaning and importance of having children is an issue. The most important issue of survival here is cultural: can Elaine keep her spirit alive, can she maintain her will to paint, is she capable of just drifting away now as an decrepit artist too old for public consumption?

These questions may not seem as serious as those in (for example) the Handmaid's Tale, with its threat of hangings and dismemberments - but even there, the question of fertility and continuation of the self in others is primary. Atwood's own life choices, to give birth to a daughter and balance raising "Jess" with he career as an academic and an author, displays her own commitment to the meaning of species survival, for the time being.

Yet it would be inappropriate to classify Atwood as nothing but a pronatalist and mere survivalist. Her characters are not interested only in bare survival - they are fighting for truth, whatever that may be. The meaning of Surfacing is not that a girl can go into the bush and somehow emerge pregnant and slightly deranged, but otherwise none the worse for wear! No... The meaning of this book is that one can find truth, in survival. One can look past obstacles to find truths that might be otherwise inaccessible. Survival, at least occasionally, gives way to truth. The protagonist of this story could have packed her bags and escaped on one of her father's boats at any time in the tale, gotten to the nearest town, and arranged to get home to the big city safely. Actual survival was never much in doubt so long as she acted rationally. Bare salvation from the elements was not enough - she needed enlightenment, and it is the process of finding that rare gift which this work really focuses upon. Surfacing teaches that the body, pressed to its limits and given as close to the purposes of nature as it can be given, will open up its secrets to the mind and let them be experienced there fully -- making the person at last legitimate and whole. Cat's Eye has a slightly less blatant message, but the themes still remain: Seek truth early, be faithful to what you find, but not blind. Truth about others and about one's self will overcome all hatred and all things which are impure in the soul.

Finally, these works speak of the transcendent. As the issue of truth begins to point out, these stories speak quietly of a force sleeping within the earth itself. Nature is transcendent, it is wise, it knows past and future, all without being truly personified, or personalized. Nature has an alien touch, and it is broken from us when we try with fences and doors to divorce ourselves from its nurturing. Nature is that which guides within, and when ignored leaves a person disconnected and adrift. Nature is that force of the planet that can be chained and destroyed by Americanization, technological advancement, purposeful colonization, but also that force which eventually breaks free.

In all these things - survival, truth seeking, and transcendence, Atwood seems to be speaking in large part from her own secret life mythology. Indeed, it is good to see how consistently she approaches the power and meaning of nature, for it creates a reasoned and steady worldview from which to sick, and watch the tides come in.