Postcolonial Guilt in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

Abstract

Think of being parent or child of a concentration camp guard. One would want to say: `This person is not my own,' and yet one could not. The facts of birth are inescapable. So are very facts of belonging to civilisation that has made one. is this inevitability which leads to degree of alienation and disgust which some people feel present situation. George Grant, Technology and Empire (76) In a 1972 interview with Graeme Gibson, Margaret Atwood comments of narrator's psychic trauma Surfacing that [s]he wishes to be not and prefaces statement by linking guilt and self-knowledge novel: It depends on whether you define as intrinsically innocent, and if you do, then you have a lot of problems, because fact you aren't. She wishes to be not human, because being human inevitably involves being guilty (13). What is source of this guilt? Despite many provocative and theoretically sophisticated studies of Surfacing to date, narrator's guilt remains underexamined, with critics content to assume that it stems from her abortion, a resolvable moral and textual problem.(1) Or, do they see it as part of human condition generally?(2) Yet narrator's extreme self-revulsion, which leads her to confess that trouble some people have being German ... I have being (130), is fundamental to novel's examination of what Atwood calls the Canadian stance towards world (Gibson 13). Although many critics have made connection between narrator's personal journey and Canada's postcolonial anxieties, they have not always recognized complexity of Atwood's representation of national psyche. In this paper, I will suggest some of postcolonial dimensions of narrator's guilt as it relates to Canadian predicament. Atwood has written that by discovering your place you discover yourself (Second 113) and Surfacing brings subject of Canadian national space insistently forward. The novel is filled with references to competing territorial claims. The narrator's family is located border country (26), presumably an area of northern Quebec near Ontario border, and her admission that her home ground is also foreign territory (11) alludes to Canada's history of struggle between English and French colonists. Although humorous image of her mother and Madame trying with great goodwill to make conversation (21) is a domesticated version of English-French non-communication, narrator is conscious that Quebecois resentment of [l]es maudits anglais has some justification (56). Such references indicate narrator's latent consciousness of Canadian space as fought for and conquered rather than peacefully discovered. Aware of herself as an outsider, even an intruder, Quebec society, narrator expresses no affinity for Quebec culture. In fact, just as her father scorned :irrationality of Catholicism, so narrator and her friends replay Anglophone prejudices against French, emphasizing their antiquity and simplicity: `They must fuck a lot here,' Anna says, `I guess it's Church' (13). The narrator is disappointed when she discovers that Paul's wife has traded her wood range for an electric stove (20) yet continues to insist on couple's status as living stereotypes, originals of habitant carvings sold in tourist handicraft shops (20). Moreover, as is revealed David's complacent reference to `[n]ine beavers pissing on a frog' (39), these ideas are not harmless misperceptions of one society about another, but a coherent system of beliefs to justify and consolidate anglophone dominance. As Carole Gerson notes, signs of continued territorial conquest are everywhere, improved road, commercialization, and tourism: [w]herever she looks, narrator finds signs that her childhood version of Quebec is being violated by Americans and Canadians who have assimilated `American' values of material progress and self-centred ecological destruction (118-19). …