Margaret Atwood, Doughnut Holes, and the paradox of imagining.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Widdicombe, Toby
• Date: 22 September 2005

The questions have been asked: 'Can the future be imagined?'; 'If so, how?' The answer to the first of these is deceptively simple. It would seem to be an unequivocal 'yes'. If we take, for example, just the history of the future novel, then the fictional field is crowded with those who believe that the time to come can be imagined and, indeed, for various reasons needs to be. (1) Beginning with the first apocalyptic future novel, Le Dernier homme (1805), by the wonderfully named Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier Cousin de Grainville, the list rapidly becomes crowded with the famous and the forgettable: from Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895) to Alfred-Louis Auguste Franklin's Les Ruines de Paris (1875), John A. Mitchell's The Last American (1889), and--in a minor key--Lieutenant-Colonel Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871). In the 20th century, the likes of Aldous Huxley, with Ape and Essence (1949), Walter Miller, with A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Gore Vidal, with Kalki (1978), have all written memorably about the destruction of humanity.

If one casts the net a little wider and focuses on future utopias, the date is pushed back to the 1763 anonymous work The Reign of George VI. And if one takes a more flexible approach to genre, then poems, such as Eugenius Roche's London in a Thousand Years (1830) and Byron's 'Darkness' (1816); plays, such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes' unfinished The Last Man (1825) and George Dibdin Pitt's The Last Man; or, the Miser of Eltham Green (performed in 1833); and paintings, such as Joseph Gandy's 'Architectural Ruins: A Vision' (1798), need to be considered. Remarkably, even if one narrows the field to 'Last Man' poems alone, the literature is significant: Thomas Campbell's 'The Last Man' (1823); Thomas Hood's 'The Last Man' (1826); Edward Wallace's 'The Last Man' (1839); and Thomas John Ousley's 'The Last Man' (1853). And this at a time when the presses were not churning out material in anything like the volume they do today.

So, the answer is simple (we can imagine the future), but this apparent simplicity is deceptive, for the moment the need arises to define the term 'utopia', everything suddenly becomes alarmingly contingent. Imagination has its limits, and utopia becomes a term defined by absence. Lyman Tower Sargent, in his well-known essay 'The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited', defines utopia as 'social dreaming'. (2) Ernst Bloch, in his three-volume work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1952-1959), sees hope as a fundamental human drive. (3) Ruth Levitas, in The Concept of Utopia (1990), finds the desire for a better world as the central element in utopian thinking. (4) Each of these definitions has considerable merit; each renders future thinking indeterminate. Sargent implies a communal element in utopian thinking. Bloch argues for the centrality of an emotion which by definition pushes fulfilment into an ever-postponed future. Levitas grounds her definition on another human emotion that can never be satisfied.

When we look at Margaret Atwood's work as a means to ground these speculations and generalizations, we obviously move away from the first question ('Can the future be imagined?') to the second ('If so, how?') since The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Blind Assassin all create concrete worlds that trick the reader's eye into seeing them as 'real'. Yet each examines the bases of its own existence in ways that indicate that Theory's sense of future imagining as paradoxically contingent is accurate. Each of these novels provides a different answer. The Handmaid's Tale provides a socio-political answer--one which suggests that imagining utopia can only be a retrospective, archaeological act and that technology may not be essential to dystopia. Oryx and Crake offers a medicotechnological response--utopia may be imagined, but only with recourse to tinkering at the physical level with what it means to be human. The Blind Assassin develops a critical-utopian solution--utopias can only come into being by an act of lexical legerdemain, a sort of linguistic pea and shell game. All three novels provide different answers to questions of whether and how the future can be imagined; all three are unified, however, in two ways: first, utopia's reality can only be understood in present-day terms; second (as so typically with Atwood), utopia is not imagined but felt--for Atwood, in the ubiquity of dystopian, misogynistic violence.

The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

'Time's a trap, I'm caught in it.' (5) The two central claims I wish to make about the way in which Atwood imagines the future in The Handmaid's Tale are that technology is not essential to dystopia and that imagining the future can only be a retrospective act. Both can be fairly quickly dealt with before moving on to the more interesting question of why that should be the case, given that The Handmaid's Tale occurs in the future and, so, should presumably mirror our current love affair with technology.

The Gileadean empire, one part of which we observe at close hand in the novel, makes mention of some simple technological artifacts (Compubank, Identipasses, Compunumber). It is also true that this profoundly repressive society is created in part as a result of bank account numbers being gender-specific. However, the apparatus that represses women in so appalling a manner is actually extraordinarily old-fashioned, more primitive, to a marked degree, than, for instance, the social control mechanisms depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, or We--all of which were written before 1950 and the beginning of the computer age. So, order is created by Sons of Jacob Think Tanks and is maintained by a structure of Rachel and Leah Re-education Centres, Marthas, Aunts, Guardians and Eyes. There are Salvagings, beatings, Prayvaganzas, and 'particicutions', the last of these resembling nothing so much as the gruesome dismemberment in Zola's 19thcentury naturalistic masterpiece Germinal. And that seems to be enough to keep women subjugated.

It is as if Atwood does not see technology as significant even as a means to an end: enslavement of the female. What she does see as significant is the state of mind that leads to the creation of the dystopia of Gilead, and that state of mind is based on a strict but perverted interpretation of the Scriptures. It is noticeable in this regard that Atwood is also apparently uninterested in the events that led to the opportunistic founding of the Gilead empire. There are scattered references to environmental damage, nuclear-power disasters along the lines of Chernobyl, earthquakes, disease, declining birth rates, civil unrest, and some sort of military coup in which the President and key members of Congress were assassinated. (6) Atwood, however, is clearly more interested in describing the psychological horrors of Gilead. This interest flies in the face of the utopian tradition where those charged with describing a new world are expected to explain how it came about. Atwood's point is, I think, that we as readers need only follow current (1980s) trends to see the direction in which society is inexorably heading, and to realize that almost any given set of events could set off its precipitation into dystopia. Her point, too, about dystopia is that while technology may aid in its creation, old-fashioned techniques of coercion will ensure its long-term survival.

Atwood's view that imagining the future is retrospective and archaeological in direction relies upon an ontological truth: that almost nothing exists except in memory. The future, by definition, has not happened yet and, so, does not exist; the present exists only for a period of time so brief as almost to defy human notice; the past once existed as the present, but now exists only as a succession of more or less complete memories. So, in describing the Gileadean dystopia (which comes into being in the mid-1980s, apparently, and thus puts the present-day reader very much in the novel's retrospective position), Atwood sees Offred (the protagonist whose real name we do not know--she is referred to simply as 'slave') as experiencing the present only in comparison to the past, which she remembers well. So, again and again the verbal phrase 'used to be' appears along with its repeated cognates such as 'long time ago', 'long ago', 'old', 'back then', 'archaic', 'nostalgic', 'former', 'former time', 'yesteryear', 'years ago', 'in the earlier days', 'the past', 'time before', and 'long time since'. (7) As Offred puts it in summarizing her feelings during one of her odd conversations with the Commander: 'I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo'. (8)

And this retrospective impulse very much supports the continuation of the Gileadean empire. Gilead emphasizes traditional values and Offred, the Commander, his wife Serena Joy, and all the assorted support staff live in a late Victorian house as if to emphasize the similarity between the high moral values of that era and the direction and intent of the Gileadean revolution. Offred herself, too, has reactions that demonstrate the degree to which, as Ralph Waldo Emerson argued in Nature, '[o]ur age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes'. (9) And that retrospective tendency plays right into the hands of the Gileadeans. So, Offred brings up the Penelope myth (most famously spoken of in Homer's Odyssey) in connection with the work of the Commanders' Wives as they knit scarves for the Angels (or soldiers) on the front lines protecting and, possibly, expanding Gilead. (10) She also echoes Milton's 'They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait' twice, as well as Wilde's 'Ballad of Reading Gaol', Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light...