Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

Cover of Surfacing

I am not sure what to make out of Margaret Atwood’s books. In The Handmaid’s Tale, I like her. Other times, in The Cat’s Eye, she scares me.

Surfacing was a long, introspective narrative that made me feel as if I was getting into the protagonist’s head and then my own. Because a book is a reflection of the mirror. Whatever letters that I tongue, inhale and breathe out as words, I do so with my entire being, my entire existence weighing upon it. Our words are not light, contrary to what you may think. Our history gets in the way of each reading (and therefore, an ahistorical reading is, I think, impossible to achieve).

When the female protagonist had mood swings, I got swung around as well. Up and down. It’s never a pretty sight. I thought I left that part behind me when I was still in university, the part that’s unnecessarily deep and dysfunctional. Or did I never possess it in the first place? Reading does that to you: it turns the screw in your mind. The turn of the screw, tightening.

The book’s title may be Surfacing, instantly conjuring an image of one coming out from below the water, breaking the surface, gasping for air? but I found myself surfacing on the other side – within myself. I felt like there was a worm in my head, together with the screw. And I would never be able to get them out until I’ve come to the end of the book. Last page.

Surfacing is no narrative about a lady, a twenty-year-old who forgot her history, who denied and repressed it. Her story. History. Puns are so easy. So easy to read Surfacing as a feminist book because that was probably what it was back in 1979, when it was first written. But never mind authorial intention. Never mind that I read a book that exhibited similar themes (language, silence, returning to the animal state) before I came across Surfacing. For all I know, that author may have read Atwood and was predisposed to carry the theme forward.

But because I already have, so it became too tempting for me to not treat the book as such. It’s too easy a way out of the forking gardens. No. It’s a manual on how to fish that worm out of you. It’s catharsis.

Going through the book was, for me, tough, and in the end, the narrative becomes her story instead as all rationality break down. Near the end, I couldn’t help but fall asleep because I was so worn out from work. And on the cusp of sleep, that half-awaken state between rationality and irrationality where nightmares troll, I wrote this post.

P.S.: I’m straddling two URLs now, this and wordsbytony.wordpress.com. Thought I should let you know.

Read: Foucault’s Pendulum

Title: Foucault’s Pendulum
Author: Umberto Eco, translated from Italian by William Weaver
Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1997, 642 pages

On Metafiction

Colonel Ardenti: “Gentlemen, I will now show you this text. Forgive me for using a photocopy. It’s not distrust. I don’t want to subject the original to further wear.”

“No,” Belbo said. “I hate that. Let’s see your original copy.”

“But Ingolf’s copy wasn’t the original,” I said. “The parchment was the original.”

“Casaubon, when originals no longer exist, the last copy is the original.”

“But Ingolf may have made errors in transcription.”

“You don’t know that he did. Whereas I know Ingolf’s transcription is true, because I see no way the truth could be otherwise. Therefore Ingolf’s copy is the original. Do we agree on this point, or do we sit and split hairs?”

– p131

As people we are all copies of one another. Some call it inspiration, others call it imitation. Is there originality? Perhaps it is banal to even seek such a concept but since young, I’ve strove for it. Thinking back, I realised I never succeeded. I only managed to copy the coolest person in our class – no more. And became a simulacra of him (am I abusing the term? I cannot remember). I’ve merged his characteristics with other pop idols.  Thinking back, it is only upon adulthood, perhaps upon receiving a job, that I’ve come into my own. Granted, I still take the best characteristics of others (what was it that Confucius said about taking the best points from your friends?) but I’ve melted them down and reforged the sword.

Another quote from our protagonist:

“But most of this stuff”, I aruged, “repeats things you can find on any station newsstand. Even published authors copy from one another, and cite one another as authorities, and all base their proofs on a sentence of Iamblicus, so to speak.”

The book so reminds me of my ache for the quest of knowledge, to fill the empty vessel that is me. I am afraid of old age. I don’t want to give up my autonomy of all my senses, my bodily functions., of my knowledge. Senility…

Even as I flip the yellowed pages, the book a hand-me-down from a literature professor to her students, I realise a common denominator of all things, of all resources in the world: Time.

Everything in the world requires Time: money yet to be earned, gold yet to be mined, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, jobs, knowledge, pleasure, hate, feelings. Only with Time can these events occur. Sadly we’ve limited ourselves to twenty-fours a day. And out of those twenty-four, we willingly give up eight to ten hours for work, another eight to ten for sleep. And what do we have left?

On Cars

Belbo: “Suppose the automobile existed only to serve as the metaphor of creation? And we mustn’t confine ourselves to the exterior, or to the surface reality of the dashboard; we must learn to see what only the Maker sees, what lies beneath. What lies beneath and what lies above. It is the Tree of the Sefirot.”

pg 378

After two or three sittings, I am finally done with the book. In the end, Dr Wagner’s words for Causabon sums up an angle of the book’s narrative:

Monsieur, vous êtes fou.

N.B.: This is a sandbox for my thoughts that arise from my reading of Foucault’s Pendulum. It will be continually bumped up as my thoughts trace through the sands.

Cecilia Dies

If you already know the ending to a situation, would you have done things differently?

Cecilia commits suicide. And a little bit of me dies. She’s only thirteen and she did it twice.

I am reading The Virgin Suicides, with the ending already made known on the first page, I suppose. And as I flip each page, the words seem to become fishing nets, trawling my psyche deep and hard. Somehow, I feel exposed.

The trepidation that comes with reading the novel, the transient happiness of the Lisbon girls out on a prom dance, gleams even more brightly when I know they’re going to die soon.

Death stares at me from between the pages, playing Hide and Seek.

I feel like I’m reading from a fluorescent lamp on its last legs. More power, more power, more…before it dies and splutters into darkness. You know, the incandescence might actually engulf me before I finish the novel.

1, 2, I’ve found you

And I am only halfway through.

Theorrhea and I

“From our present standpoint, however, the ideal of an immanent analysis of the text, of a dismantling or deconstruction of its parts and a description of its functioning and malfunctioning, amounts less to a wholesale nullification of all interpretive activity than to a demand for the construction of some new and more adequate , immanent or antitranscendent hermeneutic model, which it will be the task of the following pages to propose.” Jameson in The Political Unconscious, 23

Everyone should share my pain; parse the whole quote. If you haven’t noticed it, the above quote only consists of one sentence.

Theorrhea I tell you, theorrhea.

P.S.: Diarrhoea of theories, if you didn’t get it. One week and a day to go.