Wilderness and the Natural Environment: Margaret Atwood's Recycling of a Canadian Theme (review)

Abstract

By these rules, too, Maxine Hong Kingston, a 'preeminent Asian American teller','recyclesalien storiesand resellsthem to Americanconsumers'(p. Io6). Amy Tan's storyin TheJoy LuckClubof how An-mei Hsu's mother cut, and cooked, her own flesh in hopes of curing her sickmother-in-law, amounts to shock-horror(not to say in-house) orientalism (p. 15). Further evidence, for Ma, includes literary representationsof pidgin English, the commodification of Asian food, and above all, perhaps, the inter-eroticizations of Asian and white bodies. Even Carlos Bulosan, for all the workerradicalismof his autobiography,American Is In TheHeart (1943;repr.Seattle:Universityof WashingtonPress, 1973)is accusinglyinvokedfor acknowledginga wish to write about Filipino-whitesexual relationship('interracial ethnicity'Ma callsit (p. 84)). In one senseyou do, or do not, go alongwith thiskindof critique:'representation' as all or nothing and up the mark or otherwise. Certainly it poses a whole slew of questions.What rightsof imaginingis the writerto be allowed?Is therealwayssome template, a quarryof sacrosanctAsian myth, which must be observed?If you read literatureas a kind of by-the-book ideological litmus test are you not in danger of forgettingall the otherfacetsof its inventing? Nor does Ma win confidenceby his own writing.He opens, dismayingly,with the following: 'In Asian American studies, few critics have engaged texts in order to construct immigrant subjectivities, which become the Other in the Manichean division to formulate the (Asian)American Self' (p. I). Is that what you do with texts?It soundslikecriticismby bottom-shelfsociologese. Barelya word is given to how Kingston, Tan, Hwang, or, among others,Bharati Mukherjee or Kazuo Ishiguro (damned, more or less, in Remains of TheDay, for depicting an end-of-empire, moribund England, as against some diasporicJapan), engage by theirfeats of imagination and voice. What would Ma make of the whole Asian American postmodern turn, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, say, or Jessica Hagedorn? Certainly Kingston's Trickmaster Monkey he reads by inflating selective (and to be sure sinophobic and debasing)images of the Asian body into the whole, yet with the barest acknowledgement of the irony, the self-irony, of Wittman Ah Sing as the viewpoint in play. These energies doubtlessmake a lesserfactorfor Ma than ideology. They should not. For they lie behind, and beyond, 'representation', Asian or otherwise, and whetherup to Ma's ideological measureor not. NIHON UNIVERSITY, TOKYO A. ROBERT LEE Wilderness andtheNaturalEnvironment: Margaret Atwood's Recycling ofa Canadian Theme. By VERENABUHLER ROTH. (Swiss Studies in English, I24) Tubingen and Basel:Francke. 1998. viii + 206 pp. DM 68. Wilderness,once the literaryemblem of Canada's distinctivenational identity, has disappearedfromMargaretAtwood's novels of the I99os, TheRobber BrideandAlias Grace.However, 'nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before' as Atwood remarkedin her short story 'WildernessTips' and as Verena Buhler Roth shows in her investigation of the returnof the wildernessmotif in Atwood's fiction from the mid I98os to the early I990S after an absence of over ten years. Her argumentis thatthisis a recyclabletheme and thatAtwood's emphaseshave shifted between I970 and I990 so that her representationsof wildernessin TheHandmaid's Tale,Cat'sEye,and Wilderness Tipsoutline a differentagenda and indeed signalsome seriouslate-twentieth-centuryanxietiesabout Canadian identity,genderissues,and ecological crises. Roth's focus is on textual representationsof wildernessas literary By these rules, too, Maxine Hong Kingston, a 'preeminent Asian American teller','recyclesalien storiesand resellsthem to Americanconsumers'(p. Io6). Amy Tan's storyin TheJoy LuckClubof how An-mei Hsu's mother cut, and cooked, her own flesh in hopes of curing her sickmother-in-law, amounts to shock-horror(not to say in-house) orientalism (p. 15). Further evidence, for Ma, includes literary representationsof pidgin English, the commodification of Asian food, and above all, perhaps, the inter-eroticizations of Asian and white bodies. Even Carlos Bulosan, for all the workerradicalismof his autobiography,American Is In TheHeart (1943;repr.Seattle:Universityof WashingtonPress, 1973)is accusinglyinvokedfor acknowledginga wish to write about Filipino-whitesexual relationship('interracial ethnicity'Ma callsit (p. 84)). In one senseyou do, or do not, go alongwith thiskindof critique:'representation' as all or nothing and up the mark or otherwise. Certainly it poses a whole slew of questions.What rightsof imaginingis the writerto be allowed?Is therealwayssome template, a quarryof sacrosanctAsian myth, which must be...