An Interview with Margaret Atwood
In 1984, Scrivener’s Ting Chang spoke with Margaret Atwood. They discussed personality in fiction, the dawn of the computer age, and Canadian arts funding. The Handmaid’s Tale was to be published the following year. What follows is their conversation.
SCRIVENER
Mavis Gallant once said “anyone who says he enjoys writing isn't really a writer.” Do you share this view?
MARGARET ATWOOD
Anyone who says that he or she enjoys absolutely nothing about it is also not a writer. Mavis Gallant is not a masochist: she must enjoy something about writing. What she was really saying about it was that it was hard work, and that it often involves a lot of anxiety. But to say that writers don’t enjoy anything about writing, that they never enjoy it means that they’re all a bunch of raving masochists. If you really hate something that much, why do it? Don't let her kid you. She enjoys something about writing, she's got to. What she was saying was, “It isn't just song and dance and having fun,” which it isn't, but what is?
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SCRIVENER
I find that in your novels, the lives of your characters are often unhappy, and that in general, there is a sadness about the writing.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Does anyone have a copy of Murder in the Dark here? There’s a section on there with several different fictional possibilities. The first one is called “Ending A” and goes something like this: John and Mary fall in love and get married. They buy a charming house, they have 2 children that turn out well. They both have good jobs. They have a good sex life. They retire and pursue their hobbies. They die. I mean, the fact is that if characters are happy all the way through the book, first of all they will be unlike anyone you will ever meet and second, it will be a very boring book, won’t it? Can you think of any book that you’ve ever read that was about people being happy all the way through and nothing bad ever happens to them? Name one.
SCRIVENER
Maybe a fairy tale?
MARGARET ATWOOD
No, fairy tales are about ordeals. They’re about people getting lost in the forest, Hansen and Gretle being discovered by a horrible witch. They may have happy endings, but the middle part of a fairy tale is often quite dreadful.
SCRIVENER
Do you think life is not “dreadful,” but sad, or miserable?
MARGARET ATWOOD
Let’s talk about stories first to begin with and what kind of stories hold your attention. If Odysseus had gotten home in a three day sail, would there have been any Odyssey? If the Greeks had taken Troy in the first day of fighting, would there have been any Iliad? The answer to both is no. As one of my friends said, “I’m going to write a novel in which the hero dies on page 69 and the rest of the book will be blank.” In any story something has to happen, there has to be a payoff of some kind, there has to be a plot. Even in the simplest form of a story, which is a joke, there is a payoff. What is it? Well, let’s try. Why did the unwashed chicken cross the road?
SCRIVENER
I don’t know.
MARGARET ATWOOD
And I'm not going to tell you. So what do you do then? You get upset because by telling you the joke, I was promising you something. What was I promising you? An answer, which is, because he’s a dirty double-crosser. That's pretty terrible, but it just illustrated my point. A story is not just me writing down what I think all people will like. First of all, I would never do such a thing because people are different from one another. But I don't believe that most people in society have no stories to their lives. I don't believe that they exist in a state of unadulterated bliss all their lives, do you? No, well, there you go. Sure, people in my novels have times of sadness and times of ordeal. If I write a novel in which the person was very depressed and did nothing but sit in a room, which is what some people do, there wouldn't be any story to that either. No change would take place; they’d just sit and be depressed. That would be as boring to read about as John and Mary being happy. I mean the only equivalent to that is the Andy Warhol film about somebody sleeping. It was a funny trick when he pulled it, but how many people actually sat through 24 hours of that movie? It does not, to say the least, hold your attention. So I think if you’re writing a novel, one of the things you're doing is telling a story and I mean that in the widest sense of the word. The whole question of what art does and what it's there for... people somehow get it into their heads that at some stage and I don't know where, it may be in the classroom, that art is for “self-expression.” I just don't agree with that at all. I don't think art is for self-expression. I don't think it’s totally personal. I don't think it’s totally confined to items that can be isolated as being personal to you. I know you’re taught that way, I know you're supposed to read artists’ biographies and view their work in that light. I happen to think that it’s the wrong way. I think that the artist is a vehicle and that things go through the artist. I also have difficulty with the totally biographical approach as a way of assessing... If it were the fact that he was dropped on his head at age 3 and he is doing a particular thing, that doesn’t say anything about us. That’s just self-expression. When you really get down to it, what you should be looking at is the work. I mean, you could ask me things, like “Where did you get your hair done?” or something like that. Those are answerable questions. The other questions are maybe unanswerable or should not be answered because they divert attention from the work to the so-called personality of the so-called artist. The point is that my personality is no more interesting than yours, however fascinating you may be. If I’m interested in you, it’s going to be interest in you as a person. You know, climb a few mountains and we can talk about mountain climbing. But the artist, if you look at artists in the larger sense, some artists have led very dull lives.
SCRIVENER
How do you see the role of the artist in a computerized society?
MARGARET ATWOOD
Well, I think that if reading and writing have not been knocked out by television which is available 24 hours a day, they’re not going to be knocked out by any future technology. If anything, I see new technology as aids in making book production cheaper. Why? Because you will be able to put your manuscript on a floppy disk, you will be able to edit it on the screen, you will be able to sell the floppy disk directly to the publisher who will be able to run it on his printer. Hopefully, if you give them a disk, nobody will even touch it and you will get typo-free copy, which is what I like about the idea. But video games, we’ve had video games. People like reading. Why do people like reading? Because it’s a highly participatory thing. Your brain is more active when you're reading than when you're watching television. Why is that? Because you have to supply the inner screen, the inner son et lumière, the smelling-feeling machine... You have to supply all those things. You put in the sensory input. As I say, a writer gives you the score, but you the reader make the music. So you’re actually your own video thing, except that you're much better at it than a video. You can put in many more levels than video gives you. An image on the screen is a flat image, and it’s also somewhat limited. What's your favorite novel? Just pick one.
SCRIVENER
Pride and Prejudice.
MARGARET ATWOOD
Okay, what does Mr. Darcy look like? You have an inner picture of Mr. Darcy which is actually quite a complete picture, but it’s different from mine. They all have certain things in common, but they won’t by any means be identical. Reading as a reader, what you’re there for is to experience the book. You become co-creator with the writer. You are actually creating the book as you read it. You fill in those details that the writer hinted at but hasn’t put in.
SCRIVENER
Given the difficulty of being an artist and earning a living in the beginning, do you think that the government should give them some financial support?
MARGARET ATWOOD
In the U.S. other people subsidize artists. Government subsidizes artists too under NEH and NEA. Somebody has to subsidize artists or there won’t be any young artists. Whether it should be the government or not depends a lot on whether industry and patrons do the job. Where is our Ford Foundation? Where's our Rockefeller Grant? We don't have it. So I would be quite happy to see the government not give artists stipends if somebody else would. Why do they need to be subsidized? Well, because no young artist makes money in the early part of his or her career and it’s all very well to tell them to starve in attics but that doesn’t help them.
