Margaret Atwood’s Survival: Themes, Monsters and Victims (1 of 4)

When Survival (1972) was published by the fledgling press House of Anansi, the print run of 3,000 copies was thought to be ambitious. Especially for a book subtitled A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. It went on to sell 50,000 copies between 1972 and 1975. Wow, eh?

Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry, The Circle Game, was one of Anansi’s four inaugural publications, when the press was founded in 1967. (Circle had been published in 1966—a run of 420 copies, with a cover designed with Letraset and stick-on red dots from a stationery shop—and was technically out-of-print via a small poetry press.)

In 1971, one of Anansi’s founders asked MA to join its board (for poetry/fiction), and that was the same year she was a substitute professor for an English class at Victoria College in Toronto, which included Canadian writers on the syllabus. Anansi was already relying on more commercial publications to fund the costs of publishing Canadian poetry, and she suggested a volume about Canadian literature, marketed to ordinary readers not academics.

She was correct to anticipate sales; she didn’t anticipate the controversy. Not from every direction, mind you: some were appreciative (biographer Rosemary Sullivan says, “delighted”, in The Red Shoes).

Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence viewed Survival as “the first attempt, EVER, to state why Can writing is not the same as Amer or Eng. I could see, finishing the book, your worry that a) teachers might think—Aha! This is Everything We Need to Know About Can Writing; and b) writers might think—Have I A Suitable Victim, Human or Animal, And If Not, What In Hell Is the Matter With Me? But worry not. These are the chances we have to take…. The book is good, provocative, and (I think) true.”

And after the critics emerged, the novelist Adele Wiseman wrote: “By the way, I hope you don’t mind my mentioning that I have been appalled at the way the pack has been snarling after you this past while. For a long time I’ve had this theory that many people, having been partially smothered themselves at some time, cannot bear having an exceptional vitality in their midst….” (This letter, too, is quoted in Sullivan’s biography.)

Laurence’s observation is easily summed up as “you can’t please everyone” and Wiseman’s as “don’t mind them, I’ve got your back”. Useful advice and consolatory remarks, from friendly folk. It seems like even the most vociferous critics’ objections boil down to the idea that they felt the emphasis should have been on a different syllable. To my way of thinking, MA is suggesting ideas, exploring them, inviting discussion, rather than lecturing—but maybe that’s more obvious decades later.

MARM 2026 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Survival: One, Two, Three (November 4)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Survival: Four, Five, Six (November 11)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 87^th Birthday (November 18)
Survival: Seven, Eight, Nine (November 18)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Survival: Ten, Eleven, Twelve (November 25)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

SURVIVAL: CHAPTER ONE

“Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Canada as a whole is a victim, or an “oppressed minority”, or “exploited”. Let us suppose, in short, that Canada is a colony. A partial definition of a colony is that it is a place from which a profit is made, but not by the people who live there: the major profit from a colony is made in the centre of the empire. That’s what colonies are for, to make money for the “mother country”, and that’s what—since the days of Rome and, more recently, of the Thirteen Colonies—they have always been for. Of course there are cultural side effects which are often identified as “the colonial mentality”, and it is these which are examined here; but the root cause for them is economic.”

Beginning with colonial power dynamics, then concepts of victimhood are outlined and positioned (Wikipedia), but the chapter ends with encouragement to have nuanced discussions and a reminder that, of course, there are exceptions (and full-on escapes!) for each of the four categories.

NATURE THE MONSTER: CHAPTER TWO

“The Canadian author’s two favourite ‘natural’ methods for dispatching his victims are drowning and freezing, drowning being preferred by poets—probably because it can be used as a metaphor for a descent into the unconscious—and freezing by prose writers. Why this should be so is evident if you think about the other methods made available by the actual environment. There is lots of water and snow in Canada, and both are good murder weapons; but other plausible weapons are few. There are no deserts and no jungles.”

She goes on to say there aren’t many poisonous reptiles here either, and then lists a few of the better known “natural” deaths in CanLit. (The most famous is probably Earle Birney’s long poem “David”, even though it doesn’t fit exactly either. Evidence, I think, that she wants readers to toy with these ideas themselves.) For every classic example, I could easily think of a more recent corollary. (But I can’t say them, without spoiling! because they all revolve around a character’s death—often suddenly and brutally!)

ANIMAL VICTIMS: CHAPTER THREE

“That’s the key: English animal stories are about ‘social relations’, American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers. As you can see, Moby-Dick as told by the White Whale would be very different. (‘Why is this strange man chasing me around with a harpoon?’)”

I wonder if this is why I have become so inordinately affected by the plight of animals in stories! Although I did not grow up reading the Canadian animal stories that MA lists; I read them after I read Survival for the first time: after we were living in Toronto and exploring the parklands named for—and featured in—some of them. They are, as she warns, tragic: their echoes reverberate in other stories, decades later.)

MY THOUGHTS: On this reread, I find it interesting to think about the little I’ve read of Australian literature, how it aligns and diverges, with this colonial perspective on CanLit. I think about how Sybylla and Anne fit together (and don’t). I think about a pair of characters stranded on a desert road, how one of them perishes. And I think of the deaths of dingos and the hunting of a turtle and the drowning of a cat (told from without, in the “American tradition”) but also a book titled for and told from a dog’s perspective (which I’ve not read) would seems to fit the Canadian tradition posited.

It’s also the first time I’ve read the book since Graeme Gibson died, so it’s interesting to see how prominently his work features in discussions about whether/how Canadians chose to set their books in Canada (his are set in southwestern Ontario towns, in the tradition of Robertson Davies—who has a character die from being hit by a snowball!—but with Gibson’s madcap, avant-garde style). When Survival was published, MA was still married to Jim Polk; she began dating Graeme Gibson in 1973.

I’m curious whether any of the Canadian books you have read resonate with the ideas in these three chapters (or, don’t). I’m thinking of internationally acclaimed novels like Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (set overtop one of the ravines in which so many of those animal stories were set) and the way that nature presses into Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel on the west coast, with the drowning death of one character; but, then, I also think about the desert scrubland in Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (Mexico, not Canada) and the nail salon in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour (which could be anywhere).

So now you know a little about how Survival came to beThe rest of the chapters are shorter and I’ve already read the fourth. Have you started to read for MARM yet?