Finding
It is not one thing in many disguises, but many things in many disguises" (9).
Paper
Negotiating the Nation: The Reproduction and Reconstruction of the National Imaginary in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
Abstract
[A]lthough in every culture many Stories are told, only some are told and retold, and ... these recurring Stories bear examining. Margaret Atwood, Strange Things What a society buries is at least as revealing as what it preserves. Margaret Atwood, "Mathews and Misrepresentation" IN A LECTURE DELIVERED AS PART OF THE CLARENDON LECTURE SERIES at Oxford University in the spring of 1991, Margaret Atwood discusses the building of national mythologies and prompts her listeners to re-examine a central Canadian emblem and their thoughts on Canadian national identity by provocatively questioning, "You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in the snow" (Strange Things 14). Through this simple semiological exercise, Atwood invites a radical shift in the perception of Canada's collective consciousness and a re-evaluation of what she terms "the great Canadian victim complex" (Gibson 22) in order to reveal both the capacity of Canadians to do harm to others and the violence that exists unremarked at the heart of the Canadian signature. This renegotiation of national discourses is similarly demonstrated in Atwood's use of the violent woman as a destabilizing figure who, through her brutality, points toward broader social trends and reconfigures centralized myths of Canadian identity. (1) Atwood's formulation of the violent woman as an individual who reconceptualizes the dominant national imaginary, or the limited set of ideals and images that Canadians frequently draw on to construct and maintain their sense of national identity, (2) may prima facie appear an inconvenient and anomalous configuration. Yet Atwood, through this gesture, builds upon long-established cultural frameworks linking the nation to gender and violence, not only insisting on the enduring relevance of nationalism and national conceits but also the need to see the nation's genius as a construct in constant flux. Exemplifying such matters, the frequently brutal narrator of Atwood's Surfacing (1972) uncovers how the reputed vulnerability central to the Canadian identity is open to interrogation and re-interpretation; despite her marginal status within society, the violent woman is here depicted as a meaningful and revealing figure that forces a reconsideration of Canada's central mythologies. What emerges from this critical endeavour is not a reformed or corrective image of Canada's national identity, since no singular figure can possibly signify the cultural heterogeneity existent within a country, but a recognition of the need to "look harder" and to question those national narratives that Canadians hold timeless and of themselves. Contemporary critics and theorists of nationhood have endlessly struggled against the inherent difficulties of thinking nationalistically, and Canadian scholars in particular at times contend with the self-effacing possibility that the very conceit they attempt to analyze and delimit may in fact not exist at all. (3) One of the fundamental reasons for the apprehensiveness surrounding discussions of the nation and national identity is the shifting conception of what constitutes nationhood; Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman find that the "criteria for deciding on what constitutes a nation are highly contested, involving complex issues relating to identity, culture, language, history, myth and memory, and disputed claims to territory" (2), and Michael Ignatieff adds that "There is only so much that can be said about nationalism in general. It is not one thing in many disguises, but many things in many disguises" (9). Unlike a state, which concerns matters of governmental jurisdiction, and the powers held by a polity over a defined geographic area, a nation refers to the more abstract relations between people who envision themselves as connected through time, space, and an underlying set of values and principles, thereby highlighting the complex and recondite systems of meaning that combine to create the effect of national identity. …
Authors
K. Kapuscinski
Journal
ESC: English Studies in Canada