A Reading Diary (19 page)

Surfacing
is the story of a woman searching for her lost father in northern Quebec, and in the process surrendering herself to the natural world. The narrator’s companions fumbling along in the bush, the member of the Wildlife Preservation Association who wants to buy her father’s property, the francophones she meets during her quest, all seem to want to own the wilderness around them, without realizing that ownership loses meaning in the Canadian landscape.

Once Atwood said to me that Robert Frost’s line “The land was ours before we were the land’s” has no meaning in Canada.

In the thirteenth century, the great mystic Rumi wrote that “to praise is to praise the act of surrendering to the emptiness.”

We walk in the garden before breakfast, discussing a wall that needs to be repaired and what to plant by the side of the church. Since the beginning, we have felt not that we own this house but rather that we have been given it in trust, to look after, as if it were inconceivable to own something centuries old, and fruit trees that have grown out of the bones of ancient dead. On the last pages of
Surfacing
, the narrator says that her father must have realized in the end that he was an intruder in the wilderness: “the cabin, the fences, the fires and paths were violations; now his own fence excludes him, as logic excludes love.”

On the radio this morning: Bush’s army is at the gates of Baghdad. The soldiers force their way into the city under the banner of “liberators,” freeing Iraq of a vicious dictator in order to install American control in the region. Under such circumstances, there is no moral distinction between figures such as Saddam and Bush; both are Agamemnon, pushing on for his own sake, confident that he is the chosen instrument of gods, who will in turn privately reward him. Agamemnon is the father willing to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, for the sake of fair winds that will allow his fleet to reach Troy. According to Ovid, “the king sacrificed his paternal love for the sake of public interest.” Scant consolation for Iphigenia.

In 1905, in a poem addressed to Roosevelt, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío accused the United States of believing that “there where you put the bullet/ You put the future.

“No,” Darío bluntly concluded.

On television, a French journalist interviews a young English soldier shortly after his first killing. “Was this your first time in armed combat?” “Yes.” “Were you frightened?” “You don’t have time to be frightened. You do what you’ve been trained to do. You don’t think about it.” Except that now nothing can be the same for him ever again, for as long as he lives.

According to Kant, Reason and Madness are two neighbouring realms whose borders are so close that it is impossible to explore one without straying into the other.

So it is in
Surfacing
. Halfway through the book, the narrator realizes that her explanation for her father’s disappearance must be mistaken; that he did not become so obsessed with his research into rock paintings that he lost his mind in the wilderness. On the contrary. “I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death. Relief, grief, I must have felt one or the other. A blank, a disappointment: crazy people can come back, from
wherever they go to take refuge, but dead people can’t, they are prohibited.”

The Abnaki people of North America believe that a special group of deities, the Oonagamessok, presided over the making of rock paintings. The Abnaki explain the gradual disappearance of these paintings by saying that the gods are angry because of the lack of attention accorded to them since the arrival of the whites. The narrator’s father (Atwood tells us) is a man riddled by stolid reason, and is less interested in the meaning of the rock paintings than in the materials with which they were created; he is someone who explains to his children that God is a superstition “and a superstition … a thing that didn’t exist. If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe you are the god, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die? Resurrection is like plants, Jesus Christ is risen today they sang at Sunday School, celebrating the daffodils; but people are not onions, as he so reasonably pointed out, they stay under.”

Some Jews put little heaps of pebbles on the tombs of their dead in memory of the burials in the desert after the exodus from Egypt, when stones were used to mark the graves in the shifting sands. “It also prevents the dead from climbing out of their tombs again,” a rabbi once told me, jokingly.
The last time I visited my father’s grave, I placed a heap of pebbles on the slab merely to mark my own passing. I now keep a couple of those pebbles in a wooden box in my library.

In Spanish,
Surfacing
translates as
Saliendo a la superficie
, or
Emergiendo
(“coming up to the surface” and “emerging”), both of which are clumsy and carry no music. Looking for a title for the Spanish translation, I suddenly think of
Alborada
, the surfacing of a new day.

What exactly is it that surfaces in
Surfacing?

C. points to a swallow flying over the garden and skimming the pool. “It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout.” I wonder how many readers would guess that these lines are by John Ruskin.

In the post today, a letter from Peter Oliva in Calgary. I think of the endless Canadian landscapes and realize that the difference between those and what lies around me now, here in France, is essentially one of dimension. Here I feel as if I could simply stretch out my arm and touch a church, a copse, a hilltop. In Canada (as in Argentina) the horizon
is always receding, what Drieu La Rochelle called horizontal vertigo.

Atwood: “We moved through flattened cow-sprinkled hills and leaf trees and dead elm skeletons, then into the needle trees and the cuttings dynamited in pink and grey granite and the flimsy tourist cabins, and the signs saying GATEWAY TO THE NORTH, at least four towns claim to be that. The future is in the North, that was a political slogan once; when my father heard it he said there was nothing in the north but the past and not much of that either.”

In the European imagination, the Canadian north is blank; it is into this blankness that Frankenstein’s Monster disappears at the end of Mary Shelley’s novel.

A large bee or a small bird flies in and out of the flowers C. has planted in the pots at the entrance. I think it’s a tiny hummingbird, but I can’t tell, it moves too fast. I need to know what it is before I can properly see it.

On one of the last pages of
Surfacing:

Earlier, as the narrator enters the northern Quebec of her childhood (“home ground, foreign territory”), she is filled with a sense of unreality: nothing seems the same as it once was. Perhaps that is our only true experience of our past: that whenever we revisit it, it (or our memory) has changed. We have as many autobiographies as moments of recollection.

In the introduction to her Cambridge lectures of last year, Atwood wrote, “we are all stuck in time, less like flies in amber—nothing so hard and clear—but like mice in molasses.”

No one gets lost in the European landscape, except in fairy tales. Maybe they did in the Middle Ages, maybe they still do in a few secret corners of the Pyrenees or the Carpathians. But in the Europe I know there is always a road, a house in sight. I remember sitting by Lake Geneva and thinking how artificial its beauty is compared to the lakes I know in Canada. In Canada, Atwood’s narrator says, “The lake is tricky, the weather shifts, the wind swells up quickly; people drown every year, boats loaded top-heavy or drunken fishermen running at high speed into deadheads, old pieces of tree waterlogged and partly decayed, floating under the surface. … Because of the convolutions it’s easy to lose the
way if you haven’t memorized the landmarks. …” And also: “The small waves talking against the shore, multilingual water.”

A poem by Gwendolyn MacEwen ends:

Grey weather. I think of staying in the kitchen after breakfast, reading, but remember that today is the deadline for the review I have to write. I can’t free myself from the conviction that I can only relax after having done my homework. The idea of spending the morning doing nothing but idling with a book which I don’t
have
to read feels slightly obscene. I felt
the same way as a child, telling myself I would only play with my toy farm after tidying my room, for instance.

I think Atwood’s narrator shares this need. Early in her quest, she realizes that whatever end she is to attain, she must attain it through suffering: “We’re here too soon and I feel deprived of something, as though I can’t really get here unless I’ve suffered; as though the first view of the lake, which we can see now, blue and cool as redemption, should be through tears and a haze of vomit.”

Saint Teresa, on the scorched soul seeking God’s rain: “Do not weaken, unless you wouldst lose everything, for tears will win you all; one water brings on another.”

First lunch in the garden this year.

Time
magazine notes that an Iraqi Reconstruction Conference will take place in which private companies will bid for contracts of $25 billion to $100 billion to “rebuild” the Iraq the Anglo-Americans have bombed. According to
Time
, the planning of this conference began months before the first attack. Jean Jacques Rousseau: “Hand over cash and soon you’ll have them in irons.”

Over the Canadian landscape of
Surfacing
the American presence looms invasively. Oddly, the resentment of the narrator’s companions against Americans borders on caricature. “David says ‘Bloody fascist pig Yanks,’ as though he’s commenting on the weather.”

More than anything else, dialogue dates a novel.

While quick to make fun of Americans, like the narrator’s companions, most Canadians are excruciatingly cautious in the criticism of others. Mostly, they seem possessed by what Carlyle called “the Pharisaical Brummellean Politeness, which would suffer crucifixion rather than ask twice for soup.”

Reports on the dead and wounded in Iraq keep pouring in. Images on television show a state of complete chaos. The Iraqi writer Jabbar Yussin Hussin describes the British tanks entering Basra and, by the side of the road, a terror-stricken young man, turning in all directions with his arms raised in sign of surrender. The tanks rumble by and the young man puts his hands on his face, as if unable to believe he has survived, as if to make sure he is still alive. “Will he be allowed the freedom he can no longer bear? Or does he read in all this the uncertainty of his future?”

The narrator in
Surfacing
to the ghosts around her: “What sacrifice, what do they want?” That is always the question.

A ghost according to Joyce:

Suddenly cool but still sunny. The cat has not come to be fed for almost three days now.

The narrator: “I cleared the table and scraped the canned ham fat scraps from the plates into the fire, food for the dead. If you fed them enough they would come back; or was it the reverse, if you fed them enough they would stay away, it was in one of the books but I’d forgotten.”

My grandmother always used to kiss the bits of bread left over after a meal before throwing them away, as if the food we hadn’t eaten belonged no longer to us but to others, to the dead perhaps, and she was required to show her respect for it. I think she felt some kind of continuity with all those who had gone before her and all those yet to come, and kissing the bread was an acknowledgment of their ghostly presence, of something or someone rooted in memory or in premonition. Perhaps she thought of this at the Passover meal, when she poured out a glass of wine for the prophet Elijah and then, according to tradition, opened the door saying the ritual words “Let all those who are hungry enter and eat.”

I show my library to the Argentine writer Alicia Borinsky. We stop at points of common recognition: early editions of Argentinian writers we both read in our adolescence—Silvina Ocampo, Cortázar, Oliverio Girondo. Then I point to Canadian writers she says she doesn’t know: Sandra Birdsell, Sharon Butala, Anne Michaels, Andreas Schroeder, Susan Swan. A confession of secret pleasures in alphabetical order.

Which of Atwood’s books will be considered classics in the future?
Surfacing, Alias Grace, The Handmaid’s Tale?
A year before drowning herself in the River Ouse, Virginia Woolf asked in her diary, “Which of our friends will interest posterity most?” I would ask instead, which among my secret writers will interest generations of readers to come? Richard Outram? Liliana Heker? Izaak Mansk? Rachel Ingalls? Phil Cousineau? James Hanley? John Hawkes?

The cat returned during the night.