“Cat’s Eye was risky business in a way—wouldn’t I be trashed for writing about little girls, how trivial?” MA wonders aloud in a 1990 interview. “Or wouldn’t I be trashed for saying they weren’t all sugar and spice?”
But this risk is compelling, too. “I sometimes get interested in stories,” she says, “because I notice a sort of blank—why hasn’t anyone written about this? Can it be written about? Do I dare to write it?”
Surely “Metempsychosis or, The Journey of the Soul” exists on this plane.
There must have been a blank she noted, which needed filling by this story about a snail’s soul existing in a human’s body.
I’m reminded that she started university by studying philosophy (but sharply turned to English, which scratched some of the same itches for her). Because I can see there are serious matters to contemplate here…the transmigration of souls (which Wikipedia outlines as the domain of Pythagoras and Plato).
Names like these dot interviews and discussions with MA nearly as often as Grimms’ Fairy Tales and childhood summers in the northern bush. And because I’ve not read those philosophers, I tend to gloss over those references. But they’re ingrained in her thinking.
In a 1978 discussion** she references Plato in a conversation about how she learned from her brother, when they were children. The best learning situation, she says: one-on-one, gaining the information you want, being taught by someone who love, just as Plato described.
MARM 2025 PLANS
Launch (November 1)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Death by Clamshell” (November 4)
The Blind Assassin Parts I-IV (November 6)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Freeforall” (November 11)
The Blind Assassin Parts V-VI (November 13)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 86th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Metempsychosis” (November 18)
The Blind Assassin Parts VII-IX (November 20)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Airborne: A Symposium” (November 25)
The Blind Assassin Parts X-XV (November 27)
Wrap-Up (November 30)
In “Metempsychosis” readers learn what it’s like for a snail-soul to be inside a human-body. Some readers might snag on the philosophical possibilities. But I snag on the lettuce vs. slaw details (both digestible by a human, but the vinegar in the slaw would be deadly to the snail). And we’re invited to snag here. This is one doorway into the story.
Our narrator snail is a most excellent observer…instructor, even. This bit reminded me of “Hair Jewellery” from Dancing Girls (1977).
“Snails never have to worry about hair, whereas—as I was soon to discover—humans fret about it constantly. Having it, not having it, arranging it, deriding it when arranged by others, twisting it, braiding it, piling it up, cutting it off, pulling it out… In their rummaging through the distant past in search of their prehistoric origins, a thing that obsesses them, humans could do worse than hair as a leitmotif.” |
But there’s more to it than that: “There are upsides.” Snails can’t see the stars, from inside their own bodies, but this one can. Through “these borrowed eyes I have now seen them.”
And through the borrowed eyes in this story, we have seen what a snail sees too: “The stars are magnificent. Perhaps I will have memories of them when I am a snail again, if I am ever permitted that grace.”
Somewhere I read that Graeme Gibson warned (that sounds strong, maybe teased) that MA had gone too far with some aspects of The Handmaid’s Tale (I can’t recall if that was noted about her drafts or the published version) and she should expect to raise a few eyebrows.
This story is another kind of risk. Definitely the sort to raise an eyebrow (or two).
Today marks MA’s 86th birthday; CBC has published a list of 86 facts about her, and I’m planning to read 86 pages of her memoir tonight.
Happy Birthday, Margaret Atwood!
* Earl C. Ingersoll The Ontario Review 32 (1990)
**Karla Hammond Concerning Poetry (1978)
Margaret Atwood
“…I think I’m very positive. I didn’t kill everybody off at the end, you know? Some people do.”
Sixty Minutes Interview, November 9, 2025
You probably recall this from previous years, but sadly I’m not Margaret Atwood’s reader. Nevertheless, I admire the breadth and depth of her output, and it’s great to see her still producing thought-provoking work at 86. Long may it continue!
And probably I have asked this before, but I wonder if you’ve tried her poetry, particularly Dearly? You know I don’t believe anyone should force a relationship with a book/writer, when there are so many books and writers to “wxplore”. but I find myself in disbelief that you wouldn’t enjoy any of her books, specifically because I think you and I have similar senses of humour (based on many of the quotations you’ve shared from your reading over the years). Regardless, I completely agree: there are writers whom we can admire for several reasons and still not find a personal connection to their oeuvre.
I really enjoyed reading your take on this story – my snag was the pandemic setting – it switched how I was thinking about the story completely. I didn’t know that MA began her university life as a philosophy student, although it makes sense now you say it. The story also made me think of a memoir I read years ago The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating which was about a different type of encounter with a snail, but just as intimate. I guess snails are a good symbol/metaphor for slowing down, looking closely, carefully and introspection.
I loved your take and appreciated your meticulous approach to definitions (mine was the quickest search engine query and off to reading, but I would like to know all of that even though I rarely trouble). You remind me how often our surrounding reading expereinces impact our interpretations; had I not been reading her memoir this month, the idea of her being a philosophy student, originally, probably wouldn’t have been my first thought either. Quite likely I would have remembered, instead, that collection to which she contributed during Covid. I happen to be rather fond of snails (but never felt drawn to that book…it felt like more of a personal growth story than a snail story from the marketing, to me?).
It’s so long since I read it, that I cannot remember a lot of the detail in the book now, except that the snail piggybacked into her house on a potplant of violets and that she could hear it eating the leaves during the night. Which gave me one of those ah-ha moments. I’d been on a driving camping holiday many years before and a snail piggybvacked its way into my tent thanks to the road map book I was using. In the middle of the night I too could hear a chomping sound but had no idea what it was but the next day I saw an inch wide section missing from the corner of my road map. A decade later I realised it must have been a snail thanks to this book 🙂
Hah, that’s hilarious! And so illustrative of the fact that we can spend many years with unansnwered questions but, then, stumble into explanations (or, sometimes, possibilities). I myself feel uneasy when there is inexplicable chomping in my hearing. Let alone in a tent. And it’s been years since I was camping; I’m not sure I have it in me anymore.
I did a bit of camping with friends in my twenties and then again when the kids were in primary school, but very happy to never sleep in a tent on the ground again!
I know I’m reading this late, but happy birthday MA!!! Amazing what she’s accomplished in 86 years, and she doesn’t seem to be slowing down. And if GG did say that about Handmaid’s Tale, that’s quite funny 😉
I love the video she posted last year, doing a little jig after the surgery she had. I hope she has fully recovered and is feeling well.
I remember really enjoying the snail story when I read that collection.
I thought you might have, and I’m glad my hunch was correct!
I really enjoy MA’s playfulness while still exploring big ideas, and this is a perfect example! Happy MAs birthday (a day late, apologies)!
It’s also Calvin’s birthday (of Calvin and Hobbes): another fun bookish birthday to celebrate!
“Cat’s Eye was risky business in a way—wouldn’t I be trashed for writing about little girls, how trivial?” I’m an Australian so my first thought was Miles Franklin’s Childhood at Brindabella (saccharine!) and then Seven Little Australians (1894), Ethel Turner (classic!).
But of course non-Australians would go straight to Little Women.
I know I’m not a woman, and indeed thought Women’s Lib unnecessary in the face of the coming Revolution, but I’m still willing to say I think MA often overstates her firstness, for all that her works are important in second generation feminism.
My favourite part of Little Women as a girl was when Amy gets in trouble for taking the (forbidden) lime candies to school and my favourite part of Anne of Green Gables was when Anne breaks her slate over Gilbert’s head because he chided her for her red hair; I desperately needed to see that girls were not always “good” (even though neither of those girls was very “bad” and I wasn’t either).
I think her statement is evidence of the opposite; she could not have known the risk if she hadn’t witnessed the work of other women writers being dismissed or overlooked for its inconsequential themes about
women’s lives (let alone the lives of little girls). Of course that’s not the only sort of prejuedice that resulted in literature being neglected.
Writers like Hilary Mantel and Pat Barker, who have beat the odds to win some of the big lit awards, have been recognised for the books about “traditionally male” themes (war and politics); When they were writing about ordinary women’s lives in the mid-80s (HM’s Every Day is Mother’s Day and PB’s Blow the House Down), they weren’t winning any Bookers.
You’ve got me there. Miles Franklin wasn’t recognised as a serious writer until she started writing about men pioneering in the bush.