The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Margaret Atwood, respected author and
icon of Canadian culture. When her heroine,
Offred, spoke into her tape recorder,
she took care to hide her words so that they
and she would not be destroyed. Atwood,
on the other hand, speaks openly and at
length from a position, not merely of freedom,
but of power and authority. Her tapes
are public acts. And it is through these
acts—the reading of her fiction and the
answering of the interviewers' questions—
that the public figure of the author is created.
The first of the tapes under consideration
here is an interview with Jan Castro, taped
in 1983. (The same interview, altered only
slightly, has been published in
VanSpanckeren and Castro's Margaret
Atwood: Vision and Form.) The second tape
is a reading of the story, "Unearthing
Suite," from Atwood's 1983 collection of
short stories, Bluebeard's Egg. The third is
comprised of a short reading from the
opening of Handmaid's Tale, followed by a
twenty-minute interview on that novel.
Since so much of this material has appeared
in printed form (the story, the novel, the
longer of the two interviews), the question
arises, why tapes at all? What do we seek in
these tapes that we feel we can't get from
the printed page? Perhaps—whether for
ourselves or for our students—we are hoping
to gain access, through the author's
voice, to the "real" person who we imagine
standing or hiding behind the fiction she
has produced. In the taped performance we
may catch a tremor in the voice, a caught
breath, or an angry or a sarcastic tone—
moments which might never appear in
print.
The voice that we hear in these tapes
employs the familiar flattened tones which,
particularly in the fiction, provide irony
and humour. At other times, especially in
the interviews, there's a testiness and an
edge to Atwood's voice. Defensive and
seemingly wary, she shows little patience
with questions she perceives to be naive or
overly critical. Such questions are met with
questions of her own. When Tom Vitale
asks about Handmaid's Tale, "Did you
mean to write a prediction of what our
society might become or was it meant as an
allegory for elements that are in our society
now?" she coolly replies, "Could it be
both?" When Jan Castro asks "Why and
when do males dominate city spaces,"
Atwood retorts, "When don't they?" It is
the tone of her delivery in each case as
much as the words themselves which stuns
the interviewers into awkward and stumbling
silence. Mildly shocking as these
retorts may be, they might nevertheless be
helpful to students tempted by overly simplistic
interpretations of Atwood's work.
At other times the voice on these tapes is
that of an exhausted teacher, her patience
worn thin by the dullness of her pupils, but
compelled to educate them nonetheless.
Tom Vitale is given a lesson on Orwell: "A
lot of people remember 1984 as ending with
Winston Smith loving Big Brother. Isn't
that how you think of it as ending?" she
asks. "Yeah, sure," he admits. "But it doesn't,"
she gleefully pronounces and then proceeds
to explain.
The pedagogic method is particularly evident
in the Castro interview. Whether the
subject is the third eye—
There actually is a physical third eye, did
you know that?
.... I can refer you to a poem.... one
meditation technique is to put ... a drop
of water, or I recommend tiger balm on
the third eye to help you concentrate on it.
literary endings—
Are you familiar with the work of
Charlotte Bronte at all? The first really
ambiguous ending is in Villette where the
reader is given a choice of two endings....
Double endings, I mean anybody who
reads nineteenth-century literature—in
any depth—knows about those....
Anybody who has studied, for instance.