Before I registered for this course I had no idea who Margaret Atwood was. When I got accepted in the seminar, I ordered my copies and began reading. I started with The Edible Woman. I read the first chapter of part one and put the book aside, thinking about quitting the course. That wasn’t really an option but I wished at this point it were. So I forced myself to read on. I couldn’t put the book down, until I finished it. I fell in love.
Margaret Atwood’s unique style delivers her themes in just the right way. Especially her protagonists are unusual human to me. They are women and in every novel we read it was important that they were woman, nevertheless, they were human being in regards of their fears, wishes and dreams in the first place. The variety of themes we talked about in class show how diverse her works are. One might argue that all of them had female oppression in it but that’s only a part of it. And I personally think that it’s just the more obvious aspect, there is always pressure on male characters as well. This is another point that makes reading her works worth it. You can look at each story from different points of views and get a deeper insight of the theme.
I learned a lot about possible ways to read a novel and got a better understanding about how fiction is actually constructed. Usually, I never was interested in historical backgrounds, but reading The Blind Assassin and The Edible Woman changed my mind on this. Knowing a bit about the time actually helps enjoying the story. Furthermore, I changed my mind about female protagonists. Usually, I prefer male protagonists, but Atwood gave so good examples of good female ones that I will give novel with one a chance in the future.
Reading The Handmaid’s Tale was frightening, I have to admit. A dystopian future like the social structure of Gilead and the enslavement were too close to reality to put it aside as “simply a novel”.
Atwood states that it is just a “slight twist on the society we have now” and I think she is right. All around the world extremists are fighting for their religion and Gilead was constructed after a new religion emerged. The novel does not go into detail about this, but it can be assumed that it is close to already existing religions, conservative and patriarchic. Yet, there are not only men in charge. It’s more a caste system. The roles of men and woman are defined by their caste. As a handmaid, the protagonist Offred, the name indicating whom she belongs, a man named Fred, she has to endure ritualized rape to give birth instead of the barren wife of the commander.
The women that serve as handmaids are reduced to their ability to have children. After a war that let many man and women without this ability, I can see why it is an important aspect of this society. In the means of survival, it is understandable. But of course, it is horrible as well. Nevertheless, for “the greatest good” people have been instrumentalized since societies were build.
Unfortunately, we get little details on how this new society was build. I would like to believe that it couldn’t happen here in Europe, or elsewhere, but I think you should never underestimate people’s liking for bad choices.
Although the society of Gilead is highly structured and regulated, there are several things mentioned that flaw the base of this strict structure. As we can see with Ofglen, there is some sort of underground movement that spreads their information across the land. Then there is this brothel, where woman work rather than take up on their role in society. Many commanders and other men know about it and let it happen. So it’s not a big surprise that Gilead is, as we learn in the end, deconstructed in a way. This was not something that made me feel better though. Nowadays we talk about the dark ages or the world wars as history, but at some point it has been present. Our modern societies could turn out to be dark as well, much more than we might think now.
In preparation to a guest lecture by Alessandra Boller, which I missed, we had to read an excerpt from In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood, published in 2011. I will try to summarize the main aspects of this text and comment on them.
First Atwood discusses what the term “science-fiction” means nowadays. She describes it as something “what you definitely would not meet walking along the street”. When her own books are called science-fiction she disaffirms this. To her, science-fiction is about things that are impossible, whereas her “speculative fiction” displays things that are possible indeed. It becomes clear that the borders of genre are not very solid, as science-fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy can blend into each other.
Atwood describes her own novel The Handmaids Tale as a dystopia from the female point of view, not necessarily a feminist one. Nevertheless, she has been inspired by Orwell in many aspects, for example the review of the events of the novel within the novel, as some sort of historical view.
She comments on Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, both having foreshadowed developments around the world and both possible to become fully true. Atwood makes very clear that these novels, although exaggerated, already show our current world. Few rule, many follow, many basic needs (reproduction, food) are regulate in a way. Of course I wouldn’t say it is as harshly as in Brave New World, but there are dominant opinions on what is to do and what is to avoid that are pushed on you.
If I understood this excerpt right, then Atwood, as the title suggests, is more concerned with the “worlds” presented in speculative fiction than the time, meaning it’s not necessarily important if it’s the present or future. Different versions of our world can exists anytime in speculative fiction. It’s a way to experiment with human nature, a possibility to see “What if…”.
Another text we were asked to read was Rewriting History and Myth: The Blind Assassin (2000), The Penelopiad (2005) by Gina Wisker. The text was published in Margaret Atwood: An Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction, published in 2012.
The text deals with how meaning or truth are constructed in the narration. Like mentioned in my previous posts, there are several viewpoints in the novel, but aside from the newspaper articles, all of them are filtered through the narrator, Iris. Wisker calls the narrator the interpreter of ‘reality’ and in my opinion she is right. In case of Iris, many things happened without herself being present and thus she can only assume what happened. Aside from that, memory itself can’t be trusted sometimes. That does not mean that something one remembers isn’t happened at all, but it could have happened slightly different. I think, what we read in The Blind Assassin is above all Iris story. If we would read an autobiography written by Richard, Winifred, Laura or Alex, we might read about the same events, but they could be delivered in a different way.
Wisker compared The Blind Assassin to a Greek tragedy. I can see her point regarding the concepts of Aristotle “mimesis” and “catharsis”. The first one can mean “representation”, and I think the story of the novel represents a time and a society that works with power and the denial of power. But it can also mean “presentation of the self” and this could refer to Iris, as she writes from her point of view but in the end reveals that she left some things out throughout her autobiography (her affair with Alex Thomas and her blindness regarding the abuse Laura suffered from).
In the typical meaning of catharsis, Iris seeks some kind of cleansing. I think on the one side, she wants to tell her granddaughter why her family was so messed up and ask for forgiveness. On the other side, she might want to tell just somebody, how the way women were treated drove her sister Laura into suicide and to show that she herself felt guilty for not seeing how bad she was treated.
Wisker sees gothic novel elements in the novel as well. Laura’s story is the common gothic tale of the silenced woman. She suffers from sexual abuse and partial authority by Richard and silenced by declaring her mad and institutionalizing her.
Close to this element is the gothic marriage tale as Wisker calls Iris’s and Richard’s story. Iris is married to Richard to save the family from ruin and is very submissive to him. She suffers under Richard as well, but seems unable to do something about it.
In a way, the female characters in Atwood’s novel are portrait as weak, I agree on that. Or you could rather say, they are made weak. The two sisters grow up in a good home but are taught from an early age on, that they should hold up a certain image. This is reflected by the newspaper articles, I think. There is a public point of view that has to be hold up, even if that means that they suffer in silence and endure it.
The Narrative Structure of The Blind Assassin (Part 2)
As mentioned before, The Blind Assassin is a fragmented narrative with Iris’s autobiography as the framing story. Dancygier declares the very beginning as the opening for two narrative spaces. Iris begins her story with announcing Laura’s death. The way this information is delivered opens two spaces: “accident” and “suicide”. Iris seems to be of the opinion that her sister committed suicide, while a newspaper article suggests otherwise. Through the novel, there are many such official versions of events that are described by Iris in another way, giving the reader the idea, that the newspaper articles hide the truth.
The “suicide” space is linked to the “notebooks” space. We get to know a glimpse of their content through Iris, just enough to see the connection between those notes and Laura’s death. These spaces could be defined as incomplete and inexplicit.
The Blind Assassin is constructed with a network of narrative spaces. The novella published under the name of Laura, named The Blind Assassin, fills in some gaps and links to the final story. One of these spaces is the “photograph” that was taken at the picnic where Laura and Iris met Alex. It connects the two lovers only referred to as “he” and “she” with Alex and Iris.
Within this novella, “he” tells “her” a pulp science-fiction story, and this is another narrative space. This story reflects on the unjustly society and the imposed roles on women. The character named the blind assassin is representing Alex, who might have been hired by Richard, the lord of the underworld, to set the factory of Iris’s father, the kind, on fire. The two girl, Iris and Laura, are both mute girls, who have been sacrificed in different ways.
The different narrative spaces give different viewpoints on the story, and only if all are put together the complete story is visible.
In her conclusion, Dancygier uses a figure, which sums this analysis up.
The Narrative Structure of The Blind Assassin (Part 1)
Reading The Blind Assassin was rather demanding, especially because of the different narrative layers. To get a better understanding of how these layers work together to tell the story, I looked for some additional text and found the journal article of Barbara Dancygier Narrative Anchors and the Process of Story Construction: The Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, published in Style Vol. 41 in 2007. In this article Dancygier explains in which ways the story of the novel is put together. I will describe the different aspects in this post and link them to specific part of The Blind Assassin in the next one.
According to Dancygier the story structure of the novel is a disrupted form of narratology, which is a challenge to narrative comprehension. In classical narratology, the story can be describes by a sequence of events. In Atwood’s novel, the events are arranged differently. The reader extrapolates the story through Iris’s memory, the novel-within-the-novel The Blind Assassin in which a science-fiction narrative is told and newspaper articles. You could say, the story has to be read between the lines, that it might be more than what the text says.
The term Dancygier uses for this “between the lines” is mental spaces, a concept constructed by Gilles Fauconnier. A mental spaces are “cognitive domains activated or set up by the use of linguistic forms for the purpose of on-line meaning construction”.
Narrative anchors, like the term suggests, are necessary linguistic forms that entrench the narrative spaces and initiate linking between spaces, so the story can emerge.
When we were talking about Margaret Atwood in the seminar, we also discussed the essay written by Hélène Cixous in 1976 named The Laugh of the Medusa. In this essay Cixous deals with the position of women in literature, as they are presented in literature and how they have been prevented from making an impact on literature for a very long time.
Cixous connects the one-sided depiction of women in literature closely to their loss of self-determination. The phallocentrism domination over the linguistic and philosophical system denied women the access to knowledge and thus they didn’t know there where several way to be. In a sense, women lost themselves because of this. Cixous emphasizes the loss of the body, meaning their sexuality on the one side and the power to produce literature in the other.
She calls for women to reclaim their bodies and their own sexuality and desires by writing as women, about women, for women. The view on women was influenced strongly by literature from a very early age. The title-giving myth about Medusa, the example Cixous chose, for instance is described as a female with snakes on her head instead hair and it is said that she would turn every man that looked at her into stone. She is a monster in appearance and behaviour. Cixous takes this figure and turns it into a beautiful woman that laughs so the male-made myth is remade and influenced by a woman. And this is Cixous ultimate concern, women should re-write their own image in literature and get back their self-determination.
Margaret Atwood has experienced the difficulties a female writer is faced with and shared some of them in Mortification: Writers' Stories of Their Public Shame (2004). There she describes how during a TV show the host had asked her if she was feminine. This shows how strong the male domination of literature still was and probably still is. I personally think that Atwood did exactly what Cixous was talking about. Her female characters, although they often suffer because they are females, aren’t presented as victims only, or full of shame and the like. They feel like authentic people.
And at this point I’d like to add that usually I have a hard time enjoying a novel with a female protagonist. This is mainly because of the depiction of them, something I like to think of as “female-in-your-face”. Way too often, they don’t feel like woman, like in female person but just female. And in a rather stereotypical way for that matter. Atwood’s characters were pleasantly different, mostly because their feelings, desires, fears and so on were first and foremost human. I wouldn’t deny that the fact they are women is important but that was not where Atwood stopped fleshing out these characters.
Another seminar I visited dealt with the question whether we need feminism or not and to get a better understanding of the topic we were asked to read Feminism by Deborah Cameron. I will try to discuss the meaning of femininity as presented in The Edible Woman with the help of a short text I wrote for said seminar and that deals with Cameron’s analysis of the term.
“In the fourth chapter of her book Feminism Deborah Cameron discusses the topic of femininity. She describes femininity as something that is culturally constructed rather than a natural phenomenon. According to her, it is even a cultural imposition. So how women are, in general, is not defined by nature but by society, which has been formed by man mostly.”
Based on these assumptions we could argue that Peter, as well as Len and Joe, are used to control women, even defining them. And there are some evidences that strengthen this.
While Joe and Clara represent a nearly perfect traditional role allocation with Clara staying home and bearing children and Joe as the bread-winner, it is also presented as not well-functioning, as Clara seems depressed and having developed a drinking habit. According to Joe, this is because women are allowed to enter college and this would get ideas into their heads, like that they could be “more” than just housewives and mothers. Clara mentions at some point, that she considers taking the pill, although she fears that it might change her personality. I think it is interesting that this is mentioned in the novel in contrast to the use of condoms. That is isn't mentioned might be a hint that birth control, if it is even considered appropriate, is a woman's duty.
Len, the womanizer-friend of Marian, feels used and betrayed, when Ainsley gets pregnant after a one-night stand, which I think is partly understandable, since she planned to use him. On the other hand, he could have just not sleep with her or insist on using protection. I don't try to defend Ainsley, but Len obviously did not consider an unwanted pregnancy to happen ever, which is quite naïve. He completely freaks out about being used by a woman, ironic, if you think of his own behaviour. He seduces very young women, underage even and takes advantage of their inexperience. As long as he is in control he seems to adore women, but is enraged when he is asked to act responsible or Ainsley demanding things.
Peter's control over Marian is central to the story. He makes all important decisions and it is said, that he would allow Marian to keep working if she likes to, which is considered nice and noble. Nevertheless, he has a quite strict idea how women should be. When Marian has her first break down, he is angry at her, because she didn't behave properly, like Ainsley did at that occasion, meaning quiet, smiling and laughing at their jokes.
“ ...women are expected to look attractive, thin and young, dressed in the latest fashion. If they don’t, they are likely to be deemed less feminine and thus less desirable. And being less desirable is strongly connected to being disliked. For a man, showing too much emotion or rather the “wrong” emotions like fear, insecurity or sadness is “inappropriate”. Men are also considered strong and a certain level of aggression is expected. Cameron points out that this binary gender system of female/feminine and male/masculine is restricting and troubling for both sexes.”
This is also presented strongly through the novel. There are several occasions, in which Marian is told to dress up nicely, either by Peter or Ainsley. Looking good is strongly associated with femininity. This is shown through the office-virgins, who try to attract a possible future husband. Marian's relationship with Duncan hints at this at some point as well, but since Duncan is very different in most aspects, it's rather shown through that contrast. He never really calls her attractive but rather states, that she's okay. Marian isn't used to this and can't figure out what to do with this 'compliment'. Duncan basically ignores stereotypical gender behaviour and thus makes a strong contrast to Peter. He does show weakness, when he calls Marian at work and displays helplessness, when he is on his own at the end of the novel. The greatest amount of 'weakness' Peter displays is at the beginning, when he needs 'comfort' after his friends married and at the end, when he is scared by Marian's 'strange' behaviour.
Marian works at a market research company, shares a flat with another woman her age, and dates a young lawyer. Her life is ordinary in every aspect. Then she slowly stops eating and loses herself. Why? Because a role is forced on her. I’d like to reflect upon the role of woman as displayed in The Edible Woman, with reference to The Curse of Eve, a lecture by Margaret Atwood.
The story takes place in Canada, around the mid-20th century. Woman are allowed to go to college and have jobs on their own, living in their own. But they are expected to do otherwise. We lean this, when Marian goes to work and thinks about the ’men above’, the higher ranked employees. It’s out of question that she will ever be ‘up there’, or another woman. Then there are the ‘office virgins’. They are Marian’s unmarried co-workers and dull beyond all measure. We learn nothing about them, besides that each wants a man. They remind me of the women in myths that Atwood mentioned in her lecture The Curse of Eve, like the weird sisters or the maid, mother and crone (although they are all ‘maids’ in this sense, although they feel more like crones). This mystic number of three suggests that they function as some sort of guidance for Marian, as they usually do in myths. And I think this is true, but rather by showing her what she doesn’t want to be than anything else.
Then there is Ainsley, her roommate. She is somewhat of a feminist. In her opinion, husbands ruin a family. And this is why she conceives the plan to get pregnant and raise the child on her own. In this respect, she totally acts against what society deems appropriate. Yet, she holds the opinion that woman should give birth to at least one child, otherwise they reject their femininity.
Marian has another friend, Clara, who has married after college and has been pregnant since then basically non-stop for years. She spends her time sitting around a sipping drinks. She seems quite depressed about how her life has come out. Her husband Joe takes care of the household, which is criticized by Ainsley, Clara should be happy and full of energy, another quite conservative idea. Joe gets to the heart of the issue when he talks to Marian about Clara. The college had ‘put ideas into her head’. Instead of using her education and having a career, Clara became a wife and mother, which is what is expected of women. Atwood herself remarked in her lecture that a professor had asked her whether she really wanted to go to graduate school instead of marrying. It shows, in these times it was either-or.
When Marian agrees to marry Peter, she does so because it’s what’s supposed to happen. Then Peter takes slowly her personality away and she does nothing to stop him. She no longer makes her own decisions and is squeezed into the role of a wife. Although the stereotypes in The Edible Woman are portrayed in an exaggerated way, I think Atwood created a scenario that delivers the basic ideas of that time and the struggle especially young women had.
In another essay, Margaret Atwood addresses America directly in personalizes form and describes her concerns for the country. As the title suggests, this essay comes in form of a letter. She wrote it in 2003 and expresses her profound disappointment about the changes America underwent.
At the beginning she states that she no longer knows who America is. She then recalls the things America got famous for, like pop culture icons like Mickey Mouse. She remembers that, in her youth, her favourite writers were from America. There is also a strong emphasis on the relationship between Canada and America and Atwood lines out how America’s decisions regarding international economics affect Canada in a negative way.
Atwood uses the form of a letter to deliver a personal, intimate feeling. It resembles a letter from an old friend. Her tone changes throughout her writing. After the beloved memories follow America’s more recent actions, as for example the invasion of Iraq, and Atwood expresses her dislike for those actions, even accusing America of modifying religious values to their liking.
I think Atwood’s essay about America states what many people think. The way she simultaneously delivers concern, as one might show when a once close friend withdrawals after something bad happened (in case of America this is very likely 9/11), and her anger about the way America changed is not only very personal but also rather clever structured. She begins with general statements, then moves on to specific aspects and gives examples, often allegoric compared to history.
Besides novels, poems and short stories, Atwood published non-fictional works as well. We had the chance to read two of her essays in the seminar, both published in Moving Targets (2004). As already mentioned in my previous blog posts, the distinction between fiction and fact is not always clear-cut. Non-fictional does not mean 100% true. Atwood addresses this and other topics in her essay In search of Alias Grace: On writing Canadian historical fiction.
Fiction is constructed, as it includes and has to include pieces that can be found in reality. Otherwise the reader (and the writer as well) would be without any orientation whatsoever. By using existing aspects and making up things, you create fiction. The same is true for autobiographies, although to a lesser degree. Nobody remembers everything, so we fill in the gaps. It’s similar with history. We have to rely on old documents and findings and piece the past together like a puzzle with many missing pieces. Historians try to fill in these blanks with ideas that stand to reason, considering the aspects that are known.
And even this is something Atwood questions. If we see something on the Internet today, a short news article for example, we are advised to be sceptical about its credibility. The very same is true for every other sort of document and ever has been. Atwood tells about her experiences with historic documents as she wrote Alias Grace. As she researched on the murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, she found many inconsistencies with the witness statements and newspaper articles. She evaluated the information and still had plenty of room in her story to invent things.
Another aspect Atwood approaches is the self-awareness of Canadians in terms of their own history. She claims that when she was in school, Canadian history felt like it didn’t exist. It was only around the mid-20th century that they got more confident. So you could say, Canadian history is quite young.
I think this essay shows very clear how fragile history is and how different it is received. As for historical writings, the balance between ‘truth’ (or rather what is more likely to be true) and logical construction is crucial. I haven’t read Alias Grace yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I would like to read it not as historical truth but as Atwood’s own pursuit of truth.
To get an overview of what Atwood’s short stories are about we got to read Reingard M. Nischik’s text Margaret Atwood’s short stories and shorter fictions of the Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Nischik outlines her first three collections of short stories and I’ll try to summarize their individual themes, although it can be said that they are overlapping. Because of this, I thought it could be interesting to see if there are similar themes in a short story named Lusus Naturae, which belongs to her newest collection, Stone Mattress (2014).
Dancing Girls (1977) contains short stories about females that live in unhealthy relationships, confusing they dependence on their partner with love. There is a strong focus on the psychological problems of the characters that lead to this dependence. Atwood shows a range from slightly abnormal behaviour to outright madness in her protagonists. The stories can be seen as social criticism, as it’s delivered that it is the social concept that is sick.
In contrast, Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) displays socio-psychological themes rather than individual psychologic problems. The characters are portrayed as members of a specific group and characterized by this. There are more or less family stories as Atwood deals with relationships in crisis, for example wife and husband or mother and daughter. Other than the endings in Dancing Girls, there is a potential change for the better on the horizon.
In her next collection, Wilderness Tips (1991), Atwood’s characters are more aware of their own existential needs and able to accept them. In addition they are more capable of dealing with a crisis and overcome it. The protagonists have strong, intimate relationships that break down barriers but sadly only realize this when it’s too late.
Lusus Naturae was published in Stone Mattress (2014) and deals with a young girl that suffers from porphyria, a condition that turns her into an outcast, even in her own family. The story is set around the Early Modern Age. The protagonist hears voices during her fits and so madness is again a theme. Unlike the women in Dancing Girls, the young girl shows a strong and composed character and her madness originates from her genetic defect. Nevertheless, unhealthy relationships appear in this short story as well, as the family members distance themselves from the youngest daughter because of her illness. Her father, who is rather rational and educated, gives her a new place at the table, as far away from him as possible, which hurts his daughter’s feelings, but she shows sympathy. Her grandmother is very religious and believes in curses and demons, so she treats her like she is possessed. Even as she gets nearly drowned by her, it is said she had good intentions and the protagonists seems to hold no grudge. Her sister is worried that no man might want to marry her, as long as her ill and inhuman looking little sister is around. They decide that they would fake her death and hide the sick girl so the sister is able to move on. Her mother takes care of her but when the girl’s condition worsens she begins to resent her. The girl never seems to take offence at these emotional abuses (physical as well in case of her grandmother). The family theme is strong here, but despite the fact, that the narrator (the girl) talks about “my mother”, “my father” and so on it’s clear that she is not really part of the family. This is emphasized at the beginning where it is said that “the family discussed them (their possibilities of dealing with her condition) all”.
In the end there is no real hope, since the girl dies but she thinks about heaven and how angels might look like. The idea that angels might look just like her makes her feel good, so I think you could say she has found a way to accept her fate. In my opinion you can still see Atwood’s general style in the newer short story, although she labelled it a ‘tale’.
In the text Margaret Atwood’s poetry and poetic by Branko Gorjup the two terms The Protean Self and Violent Duality were mentioned at the very beginning, both describing Atwood’s style of writing poetry. I introduce the two concepts first, then I’ll try to find examples for this in her recent poem Update on Werewolves from September 2018.
The Protean Self is a book written by the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in 1993. In this work, Lifton describes the modern society as very flexible, using the words “fluid and many-sided”. Like the Greek god Proteus is known for shapeshifting in mythology, humans are able to re-create themselves over and over again, in a figurative way. According to Lifton, no human has a fixed character, we all play different roles in different situations, always switching between them. This is very familiar to Erving Goffman’s interaction theory, that he described in his book The presentation of self in everyday life (1959), that distinguishes between ‘onstage performance’, for example the role a person plays at work and ‘backstage performance’ someone shows at home. Lifton makes also use of the theatre metaphor, as he describes modern life a series of theatrical performances.
‘Violent Duality’ describes oppositional forces that are in contrast to each other. Gorjup names some pairs, for example civilization and nature or male and female. He adds that these forces also are presented as transcending in Atwood’s poems.
Update on Werewolves presents modern woman as predators that once have been pray of men but now are able to turn into strong creatures with fangs and claws as well and go on hunts themselves. The shapeshifting metaphor is closely connected to the protean self, as you can see in the last two lines of verse six and the first two lines of verse seven:
“bums to the wind, ripping out throats
on footpaths, pissing off brokers.
Tomorrow they’ll be back
in their middle-management black”
They are hunters at night, openly sexual and modest workers at daytime. They switch their roles back and forth and adapt themselves to the modern times, in contrast to their old victim-role. The ‘violent duality’ can be seen in the contrast between modern society and old folklore, as well as the depiction of males and females as hunter and prey. Human and animal traits are put in contrast but they also flow into each other in the metaphor of the werewolf.
‘he is the author of several books on the subject’
1.1 Someone who writes books as a profession.
1.2 The writings produced by a particular author.
‘I had to read authors I disliked’
1.3 An originator of a plan or idea.
‘the authors of the peace plan’
This definition, found on the site of the Oxford dictionary as well, seems to be straighter forward than the one of literature. Except for 1.3 I would suggest most of our course would have answered the question in a similar way. The next text we read was an excerpt of Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author.
Barthes argues that a literary work should be read without paying attention to the author. I’ll give a counter-example to this. In school, we were taught to take the personal background of the author into account. So it was inconceivable to talk about a piece of work of Bertold Brecht without talking about the Second World War and the GDR government. And this is wrong, according to Barthes, because it beguiles the reader into interpreting the text differently. To him, the author was just a ‘scriptor’ and should not be part of the interpretation, since you can’t be sure what the writer intended to say.
Barthes is of the opinion that the reader is the important role in understanding a text. Like with the definitions, the reader has a very individual look on the text and gives it a meaning. You could say he presents a more ‘reader-active’ and a less ‘author-centric’ way to engage with literature.
The last text we read was written by Margaret Atwood. The chapter with title Who do you think you are? of her non-fiction work Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. In this she explores the question what a writer is and how she became one.
First of all she describes ‘writer’ as a socially acknowledged role that comes along with certain expectations and ideas. And so a writer emerges of a specific environment himself and has thus a specific concept of what a writer is. Atwood shares some anecdotes of the early experiences she has with writing. From a child that wrote plays about a giant, laughed at by her brother and his friends, to a young woman that started publishing some poems, she tries to make out when she became a writer. In contrast, the moment that she wanted to be a writer is clear. She crossed a football field on her way home in 1956 and wrote a poem in her head, that she later wrote down. She never wanted to do anything else.
She has a rather imagistic way of explaining what the difference between a writer and a person that writes is; “everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everybody is a grave-digger.” The associations you have with an author are different, there is a hint of dedication and profession. And of course, being a writer is work.
These texts helped us to get a better understanding of literature as a whole and the (possible) role the author has. None of the texts could provide a comprehensive answer to the initial question but rather showed us how complex the topic is and that you can look at it from various angles. And although I highly respect writers and would love to become one myself, I have to agree with Barthes partly. I like to look at texts without thinking of the person that wrote it, simply because I don’t believe the person itself is as interesting as his or her work. This depends on the text though. If I read a short story that is set in WW2, I should consider the author, whether he was alive at that time, what he did and if he might write from experience. Nevertheless, I think you shouldn’t over-interpret texts, as this feels like killing the text to me, basically suffocating it with assumptions.
1. Written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.
‘a great work of literature’
1.1 Books and writings published on a particular subject.
‘the literature on environmental epidemiology’
1.2 Leaflets and other printed matter used to advertise products or give advice.
‘advertising and promotional literature’
This definition can be found in the online dictionary of Oxford. But does it answer the question? What is considered superior? Is everything published on a particular subject considered literature? And have you ever heard someone refer to advertising as literature?
Apparently, literature isn’t simple to define. In the seminar “Poet, Novelist, Essayist: Margaret Atwood” I visited at the University of Siegen we tried to grasp what literature actually is and what an author is. To do so, we engaged with some text related with the topics.
Terry Eagleton, a British literary theorist, gives several definitions of literature in his work Literary Theory: An Introduction. He begins with a definition that defines literature as fictional writing. But there are several examples that are fact based pieces of work and still are considered literature, for example the essays of Francis Bacon. Eagleton claims, that some works could actually be read as either fictional or factual, depending on the individual’s background.
Another definition he offers is that of the Russian Formalists. The Formalists, as the name says, focused on the form of a text rather than its content and meaning. The use of literary devices and its structure was relevant to determine a text as literature. In addition, the language used should be estranged from everyday language. So they had to define, what everyday language is. But as Eagleton states, “any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses, differentiated according to class, region, gender, status and so on, which can by no means be neatly unified into a single homogeneous linguistic community”, so the definition of the Formalists is insufficient.
The next definition Eagleton presents is that of a distinction between pragmatic (not literature) and non-pragmatic (literature) discourse. The way a text is written would be of greater importance than what it says. The language would make reference to itself. The problem with this definition is similar to that with the Formalist definition; the reader has a specific background that is brought to the text. And like the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, the individual distinction between pragmatic and non-pragmatic is highly subjective.
Eagleton’s next definition declares literature as texts that hold value. What ‘value’ is depends on the time period, the culture, the social structure. So it’s changing and not something that is universal.
Despite the different starting points there is something that all the definitions have in common. What literature is, seems to lie in the eye of the beholder. I’m quite familiar with this problem of various definitions since I started my studies. But this usually was the case in media studies, because it is interdisciplinary and thus the terminologies often mean a slightly different thing in a particular field. I never really thought about ‘literature’ this way. I remember a discussion in my last year of school with my teacher about the literary canon, though. There we exchanged similar arguments as Eagleton presented but we couldn’t agree on what literary canon should be like or if it should exist at all. I don’t have a problem with not finding the ‘right’ definition. I think to be able to approach written works from different perspectives is interesting, so I’ll rather accept several definitions next to each other than having one that is restrictive and exclusive.
