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 spring of 1991, Margaret Atwood discusses 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 national flag was about a leaf, didn't you? Look harder. It's where someone got axed in snow (Strange Things 14). Through this simple semiological exercise, Atwood invites a radical shift in perception of Canada's collective consciousness and a re-evaluation of what she terms the great Canadian victim (Gibson 22) in order to reveal both capacity of Canadians to do harm to others and violence that exists unremarked at heart of Canadian signature. This renegotiation of national discourses is similarly demonstrated in Atwood's use of 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 violent woman as an individual who reconceptualizes dominant national imaginary, or 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 nation to gender and violence, not only insisting on enduring relevance of nationalism and national conceits but also need to see nation's genius as a construct in constant flux. Exemplifying such matters, frequently brutal narrator of Atwood's Surfacing (1972) uncovers how reputed vulnerability central to Canadian identity is open to interrogation and re-interpretation; despite her marginal status within society, 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 cultural heterogeneity existent within a country, but a recognition of 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 inherent difficulties of thinking nationalistically, and Canadian scholars in particular at times contend with self-effacing possibility that very conceit they attempt to analyze and delimit may in fact not exist at all. (3) One of fundamental reasons for apprehensiveness surrounding discussions of nation and national identity is shifting conception of what constitutes nationhood; Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman find that 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 powers held by a polity over a defined geographic area, a nation refers to more abstract relations between people who envision themselves as connected through time, space, and an underlying set of values and principles, thereby highlighting complex and recondite systems of meaning that combine to create effect of national identity. …