The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
-- John Ruskin
I keep waiting for Margaret Atwood to receive her long-awaited, well-deserved Nobel Prize. If her footprint in Western fiction is as deep as that of Jimi Hendrix in rock music, then her impact on Canadian literature has been positively seismic. Before receiving acclaim as author of The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood had already established herself as Canada's leading literary light -- inheritor and torch-bearer of the modern tradition in the mold of Robertson Davies and Margaret Laurence. With publication of her seminal Survival in 1972, she established herself as the premier chronicler and critic of Canadian literary history. Atwood's ideas and perspectives are often that of which we speak when we speak of CanLit. Her scholarship identified the themes that characterize our literature.
And so Atwood was well positioned in 1972 to deliver a novel, her second, that was at once steeped in those themes while being shockingly modern by the standards of its day. Re-reading Surfacing in 2024 is to to be immersed in the Canada of a half-century ago and find oneself simultaneously wounded with nostalgia and transported with wonder. The product of a genius at the onset of her powers, Surfacing stands unquestionably as a critical inflection point in Canadian literature.
Atwood's musical way with prose is evident even in her first novels. The language used to describe the environs of a rural Quebec that no longer exists is haunting and perfectly chosen. The unnamed narrator and her friends journey to a remote cottage where she spent summers as a child. Her parents moved there upon retirement but now her widowed father has gone missing. The protagonist of Surfacing engages in a literal encounter with the wilderness so central to the Canadian literary psyche. By journeying with her into the woods, readers experience another, contrasting wilderness: that of capitalist civilization expanding in its final grasping conquest of the wild frontier. Old traditions will be swept away, all that is vibrant and unique will fall -- not with a bang, but a whimper -- beneath the sterile hammer of modernity.
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 ...
-- Surfacing, pg. 7 (PaperJacks ed., 1973)
Positioned between two mirrors, the reflection of a single object will extend infinitely in two directions. Love in all its various dimensions shimmers prismatically at the heart of Surfacing. The central object of this novel is the narrator's heart, battered by loss -- of her child, her marriage, her parents, her trust. Now in a new romance with an uncommunicative partner, on a difficult journey accompanied by friends too shallow to fathom her pain, she is marooned in the wilderness of her own mind, isolated. Extending infinitely in two directions, the heart reflects on its own pilgrimage through childhood, youth, adult romance, motherhood and loss. As Atwood herself observed: "The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love." It is into this new awareness that Atwood's protagonist surfaces.
Lost within the context of wilderness, of Womanhood, love becomes a gesture of faith in the future. Atwood has described Surfacing as a ghost story and, in seeking out and bidding farewell to the loves of her past, her protagonist puts those ghosts to sleep before taking a chance on trust, a second pregnancy and the infinitely primal gamble of motherhood. For all Surfacing is praised (and rightly so) as a feminist novel, it retains at heart the centrality of pregnancy and motherhood as totemic and defining. Atwood's fondness for Dickens is well known. A Christmas Carol, one of the Victorian Era's finest ghost stories, finds itself echoed in Surfacing. If the protagonist's lost father is the ghost of love's past, then her unborn child is the ghost of love's future.
Which leaves us abandoned with the ghost of love's present: spreading disease and sterile uniformity, the great Unmaking of the natural world by civilization echoed by the dwindling inner wilderness of love. The narrator's boyfriend is a social hermit whose muteness isolates him from connection. Her friends are a married couple in only the shallowest and most exploitative sense of the word. All but one are artists, but the work they produce is every bit as shallow and sterile as their relationships. Love, it seems, is always something to be anticipated or remembered fondly, for it is absent in the present.
Surfacing is a beautifully executed early novel from one of Canada's greatest authors. It stands the test of time as an iconic period piece while remaining a work of timeless literary genius. The central object of Atwood's imagination, placed between two mirrors, extends infinitely in two directions. Surely her literary legacy will extend far beyond.
Comments