In order to create an activist political novel the writer requires the reader's recognition of differences between political and aesthetic intent Specifically, a tension is required between political proposition and open-ended interpretation, and efforts to level any differences between them undermine both political resolve and aesthetic potential. Such a tension is maintained in the work of Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who has skillfully balanced politics and interpretation in a novel about the timeliest of American political issues, a woman's right to choose whether or not to bear an unwanted child. The Handmaid's Tale portrays a heroine's flight from political power, but this novel is not a flight from politics, since it encourages political activity in a way that All the King's Men does not. One form of this encouragement is to make literary interpretation an anti-fundamentalist political weapon, thus creating tactical alliances between political action and literary interpretation.
Why is the finest American political novel written during the Age of Reagan a Canadian import? Perhaps part of the advantage stems from the author not conceiving of herself as writing within the tradition of American Adamicism. Structured around a young American woman's (apparent) escape to Canada, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale expresses the flight from "Americanness," but, surprisingly, Atwood's own resistance to American culture has become increasingly dialogic: Atwood resists fundamentalistic notions of American identity even in an Orwellian critique of American political tendencies. Without a sense of opposition, of the world being divided into "sides," the political novel is difficult to recognize, and yet splitting the world into "us" and "them" is a risky maneuver for any novelist. Several such oppositions are at play in The Handmaid's Tale. There is a clash of world views represented by the Christian fundamentalists who have taken over America on the one hand, and there are, on the other, women like Offred who suffer the results of fundamentalist governance. There is also Atwood's inter-cultural theme of the United States in cultural opposition to Canada, which Atwood expresses in gendered terms as well, characterizing American culture as predominantly masculine with Canadian culture as a more feminine or at least a more gender-balanced culture. The Handmaid's Tale represents several kinds of political opposition but does not surrender to what Nietzsche called the metaphysician's fundamental "faith in opposite values" (10). Like The Iron Heel, Atwood's novel designates an enemy, but The Handmaid's Tale does not denounce a metaphysical opposite or "essential" enemy. Rather than name the enemy in Adamic fashion as the eternal enemy of all, Atwood carefully presents the political quest of a non-Adamic namer, one who is aware of the contingencies of her views and language at all times. In so doing, she designates an enemy without sacrificing the possibility of multiple interpretations.
The political novel must name an enemy, be it those who practice patriarchy or political correctness, fascism or Stalinism, Gingrichism or Shirley Chisholm. For a literary artist the association with political hatred is an awkward matter, and for a feminist writer this "otherization" is especially tricky, since feminist thought has strongly criticized such "otherization" as a characteristic of patriarchal ideology. Atwood's novel is carefully structured to avoid such a simplistic division of good and evil, even while it positions itself in opposition to political ideologies such as those advanced by America's Christian Right. At the beginning of this novel, Atwood's heroine Offred is a prisoner of a Christian fundamentalist regime that has violently overthrown the Constitutional government of the United States and has renamed the country "Gilead." The novel dramatizes the clash of ideologies by focusing mainly on Offred's everyday struggles for sanity and survival and by concluding with her attempt to escape, which may or may not have succeeded. The novel is clearly opposed to the political effects of religious fundamentalism, but it fashions its resistance in a manner that avoids becoming what I call "counter-fundamentalism," an equal-and-opposite rectitude and disregard for the rights of the political Other; a kind of political tunnel-vision formed as a direct result of one's resistance to fundamentalism. When Nietzsche claimed that "He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself," he was warning that in struggle we risk becoming just like our enemy. For the feminist political novel, and for the feminist struggle as it extends beyond the covers of a novel, one key problem has been to resist patriarchal discourse and policy without re-creating it in feminist form. Atwood's political novel fights a dragon without becoming one.
The Handmaid's Tale closes with the notes to a futuristic counterpart to a Modern Language Association or American Studies Association conference. Our interpretation of the main fictional narrative is held up for comparison against that of a fictional group of intellectuals who study Offred's time and the decades after the fall of Gilead. Do the Historical Notes give us an exit from politics, or does the final section return us to political questions in some final way?
In this future, Offred's story has become a text, a verbal object of study, open to multiple interpretations. As one politically trenchant article on Atwood's novel makes clear, multiplicity of interpretation and the fact of political engagement are at odds with one another within literary texts. In "Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid's Tale," Arnold E. Davidson argues that the Historical Notes function as Atwood's indictment of academic critics who enjoy word play but are obtuse to political consequences when studying literature. Davidson interprets the Historical Notes as a scholarly apparatus in such a way as to decrease the number of politically acceptable interpretations. Davidson's main point is that the Historical Notes do not, in terms of political responsibility, let readers off the hook.
Some readers might feel that the jokes in the Historical Notes are there to restore an everyday level of comfort after enduring an imaginary experience of totalitarian society. The Notes, by this way of reading, tell us that the nightmare is over, that we are "off the hook." The double entendre humor in the notes, Davidson argues, has not been included to let academics off the hook but instead unmasks the sexism of everyday society. In academic communities as elsewhere, sexism, even in the form of jokes, can work to prepare the way for Gilead, yet if academics who make sexist jokes are on the hook, then the novel operates like the Wall on which abortionists are hung in Atwood's imagined future. There are, however, serious problems with this reading. If the novel were punitive in the way Davidson suggests, it would itself be a fundamentalist (or totalitarian, or monologic) political novel because of its intolerance of opposition, but if we follow Offred's story closely, we see that Offred carefully avoids the vengeful or otherwise narrowly dualistic attitudes indicated in "Future Tense."
Davidson sees the fictional academic proceedings as marked by institutional oppression and patriarchal sexism, such as when the fictional Professor Pieixoto commits double entendre in his keynote address. Davidson writes, "A most dubious note it is. His joke turns upon a bad pun conjoining the `charming Arctic char' that `we all enjoyed' last night at dinner and the current `charming Arctic Chair' that `we are [now] enjoying.'" Through word play, Pieixoto suggests that the group is sexually enjoying the chair of the session, Professor Maryann Crescent Moon. Davidson correctly points out that the remarks are sexual. Perhaps they are also in questionable taste, but to argue that Pieixoto's reconstruction of Offred's story "duplicat[es] the suppression her society inflicted on her" (120), is to succumb to the interpretive strictness of the Gileadian functionary Aunt Lydia, "who was in love with either/or" (8). Davidson, in restrictively interpreting the meaning of the speaker's jokes, is stripping language of its play. Even if we agree with Davidson's political purposes, supposing them to include feminist goals such as equal rights for women, resistance to the idea that literary study should be apolitical, and so forth, we need not acquiesce to the implication that all sexual humor is sexist or that all sexism is equally bad.
Context is all. We should be able to recognize that Pieixoto's "chair" jokes do not make him a sexist of the Commander's ilk. We need not be "in love with Either/Or." His desire to know more about the Commander than about Offred can be interpreted as institutional sexism, but to totalize his after-dinner remarks as Gileadean-in-tendency is to ignore the freedom of the post-Gileadean world. The problems with Davidson's form of political interpretation far outweigh the possible gains. Are we to condemn Offred as "sexist" for not being as committed a feminist as was her mother (who burned fashion magazines and pornography alike)? Did Offred's political laxity bring on the Gileadean world? Such a reading, it seems to me, requires that the critic ignore those parts of the novel that warn us about ideological hardening of the arteries, and there are many such passages in The Handmaid's Tale, a novel that consistently refuses the temptations of counter-fundamentalism. Consider, in this context, Offred's own "chair" meditation:
I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself. (110)
These are the litanies through which she observes her own language, preserving its pre-Gileadian interpretive spaces. Offred does not rename the world in Adamic fashion, in a way that would signify her otherness from society. She is as politically opposed to the society that controls her every move as she can be, but she learns that she must not make the mistake of perceiving that world in a final, totalized way. Even at its political worst, the world lends itself to interpretation, at least for those who wish to preserve the difference between public and private space.
In the privacy of her room, in the "Night" sections of the novel, Offred "takes back the night" through imaginative word play. The slack in the language that she discovers, this play in the system of meaning, is certainly what the repressive Gileadian functionaries such as the Aunts, the Angels, and the Commanders struggle to eliminate when they deprive Offred of freedom of speech and movement. Granted: different contexts give the same pun different meanings, and so Pieixoto's word play is not an act of resistance against oppression in the manner of Offred's chair meditation, but this does not make him a totalitarian. "Chair" means different things in different contexts, and Atwood connects various contexts through the common node "chair" to dramatize the relational nature of meaning. This novel is a warning about the dangers of those who do not respect the importance of context, and so it is ironic that Davidson sees the Historical Notes as "fundamentally" anti-sexist. To equate the Gileadean repression of Offred's voice with Pieixoto's reconstruction of it is to narrow the set of possible meanings too much. Because he who fights a dragon may become one, political actors must resist being absorbed by the worldview they have chosen to oppose.
The Gileadean world view differs in extraordinary ways from Pieixoto's sometimes wry scholarly view, following as it does from a fundamentalist approach to language: the idea of a plurality of competing voices is inimical to the fundamentalist mode of interpretation. Gileadean geography, or world-writing, is similarly a monologic discourse. Other ways of mapping the world are forcefully repressed within Gilead, as are voices from beyond the Gileadean border. The Montreal satellite station is blocked, and the Commander is irritated when Radio Free America's broadcast gets through: "Damn Cubans, he says. All that filth about universal daycare" (209). The Commander's moral geography demonizes voices that challenge the Gileadean claims to righteousness: talk of daycare is filth and Cubans are damned.
Offred, it is true, loathes the Gileadian world view and so does not wish to reproduce it. Her desire for biological reproductive choice is directly paralleled by this desire for ideological reproductive choice. Though she is initially moved to deny she is part of the Gileadian world, she learns to "place" herself within this political context. Near the beginning of her narrative Offred says "not my room, I refuse to say my" (8), but by accepting the limited space that she is allowed as her space, Offred's commitment to survival deepens. The idea of "home," or rather the Gileadean Ideology of the Home, is a mockery to Offred, but she gradually learns that she must resist this ideology from some place. In an ironic amendment to Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," she says, "My room, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time" (50). Offred's acceptance of personal space is, in the Gileadean context, a political act. Enclosed by her Handmaid wings, and by the repressive social structure that controls all her movements, Offred must exercise her mind through scattered and seemingly insignificant observations. Much of her private word play in the "Night" sections is subversive of both Gileadean morality and geography. When Moira escapes, Offred is pleased to think that she is now a "loose woman" (133). She is also a "gender traitor" (a bi- or homosexual), and, therefore, morally "loose." When she is on the loose, she is violating the Gileadean laws that physically imprison women. Loose undergoes a transformation in the novel, since the restrictive, moralistic epithet comes to mean free. Offred's word play is the inner coefficient of Moira's outer movement. Offred's word play makes readers aware of the external language, the general language bordering all our thoughts, a language which has moralistic and political values built into it. In the context of Offred's pun, her sense of Moira as "loose woman" confronts the assumption built into our language that any woman without a male companion is morally questionable. While Offred's word play is not as daring as Moira's escape, it is integral to her survival plans that she keep her mind free, or perhaps we should say "loose."
In her resistance to the mind-constricting designs of Gileadean fundamentalism, Offred consciously avoids what I have been calling counter-fundamentalism. It occurs when one's resistance to a fundamentalism, religious or political, becomes an equal and opposite form of fundamentalism. In The Handmaid's Tale the solution to this problem is to reveal the shallowness of moral geography, especially regarding the U.S./Canadian border. The binary opposition of Canada-the-victim oppressed by the brutal Evil Empire to the south frequently surfaces in Atwood's work, certainly in The Handmaid's Tale. The binary opposition is reproduced but also called into question. In the fictional "Historical Notes" in which Pieixoto speculates on the question of Offred's escape: "Was she smuggled over the border of Gilead, into what was then Canada, and did she make her way thence to England? This would have been wise, as the Canada of that time did not wish to antagonize its powerful neighbor, and there were roundups and extraditions of such refugees" (310). Atwood complicates her moral geography by refusing a bi-polar world of moral absolutes. This is why Offred's tapes are discovered in an attic in Bangor, Maine, rather than on the Canadian side of the border: the novel subverts the facile heroic codes that would present a dashingly successful escape to free Canada. By refusing a form of closure that resolves all political tensions within the novel, The Handmaid's Tale responds to very current political contexts, and, furthermore, it engages in political struggles in a style that maintains the possibility of multiple interpretations. We may enjoy the belief that we have inherent rights, but we can only hold such truths self-evident so long as there is no strong challenge from within our community to those rights. Just as we do not know how Offred's struggle ends, reproductive rights such as abortion are currently up for grabs in the United States--which is where they should be if we do not wish to have a fundamentalist state.
In a sense the novel does allow for an escape to Canada. Recall that the Historical Notes provide a fictional transition from Gileadian totalitarianism to a post-Gileadian free (or freer) world. Although the escape into the "Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies [. . .] held at the University of Denay, Nunavit" (299) is hardly dashing, the shift into the Historical Notes does retrieve the reader from the wretched situations about which dystopian writers like Atwood warn us. The denial function of this Canadian happy ending is signalled by the Swiftian place name "Nunavit" and also by the name "Denay," which we might pronounce "deny." Still, it has to be admitted that this ending is really janiform, since the denial function is counter-balanced by the plain fact that researchers Pieixoto and Wade are, like Offred, dedicated to the reconstruction of the past. They are not regenerating Gilead, even if the main purpose of their meeting is to study it. Atwood is not proposing that academics model future MLA proceedings on the Nuremberg Trials. Rather, the Historical Notes undermine any remaining potential for counter-fundamentalism by showing that not all sexism is equal. Insisting that Atwood's futuristic, multi-cultural academics are sexist in the same way as the Commander completely overlooks Atwood's suggestion that we need not create a demon when designating a political opponent. We can choose to admit that we are composed of motives and histories in some ways similar to those that make up our opponents, and this meditation on the substance of our "enemy" can only temper our more hateful tendencies. Through its dialogic approach to communication, The Handmaid's Tale designates political opponents without declaring total war on them.
It is undoubtedly the case that Offred does not escape the Commander's house by word play alone. I do not suggest that Atwood wishes readers to substitute crossword puzzles for political action. Even so, the Historical Notes satirize academics who make professional capital out of the suffering of others while the Notes simultaneously celebrate the freedom to study odd topics and to make bad jokes. Word play may be worth struggling for, but it is not the equivalent of political action. Within the world of the novel, political activity is risky in a way we should not underestimate. Offred is never certain whom she can trust (with the exception of Moira), and the regular betrayal of trust in the Gileadian world is part of what makes the inner world of imaginative freedom attractive to her. It is a world over which she has control. Political literature, in bringing about a confrontation between our inner freedoms and the outer world, surrenders some of this freedom and thus undertakes risks that parallel the risks of political activism. As a woman in Gileadian society may be pronounced an Unwoman and sent to "the colonies" (slave labor camps), a political novel in our world may be pronounced Unliterature. Atwood is one of those writers who is willing to put her imaginary world in jeopardy for the difference it might make to readers in the real world.
Atwood's non-fundamentalist moral map is a way of knowing the world that refuses absolutist statements about that world, but is it based also upon a moral-political uncertainty principle? That is to say, in addition to being a form of communication, does dialogism also imply a political philosophy, if not a set of policies? One answer to this question is to argue that dialogism is a means but can never be an end. At several junctures in her narrative, Offred does not even say what happened but rather offers a variety of reconstructions "because what you say can never be exact, you always have too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances" (134). If "what you say can never be exact," then you cannot name the world. Taken to an extreme, this uncertainty principle would make it impossible to designate a moral or political danger. The inter-subjectivity of dialogism subverts notions of a "simple genuine self against the whole world." This is all to the good when, for strategic purposes, one wishes to challenge individualist ideologies, but, taken to an extreme, dialogism as an end in itself subverts the capacity to oppose even if it privileges the formation of an oppositional voice.
NOTES
Literary folk can of course interpret a political event until the cows come home, and there is also a form of political attack that masks itself as interpretation when in fact the interests motivating the interrogators have already determined conclusions to those "questions." Conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh have been "interpeting" President Clinton since he entered office.
The Handmaid's Tale shows up at Pro-Choice rallies and is a useful dystopian statement to political actors who wish to resist the growth of, say, Christian right-wing fundamentalists in America. This is not to say Atwood is a politician rather than a writer. In response to Linda Sandler's questions about her political activism, Atwood was quick to draw lines between what she does and what actual politicians do: "Activism isn't very good for the writer, and I'm not very good at it. I believe in saying what I think, and that's no way to be a politician" (Conversations, 56). Political activity demands stricter limits on free expression and interpretation, and Atwood is relatively more active than Warren along these lines.
When Joyce Carol Oates asked Atwood about similarities between Surfacing and James Dickey's novel Deliverance, Atwood responded by stressing gendered cultural differences between American and Canadian writing: "There's a relationship of sorts, but for me it's one of opposites. For the central figure in Dickey's book, as I recall, nature is something wild, untamed, feminine, dangerous and mysterious, that he must struggle with, confront, conquer, overcome. Doing this involves killing. For me, the works cognate with Dickey's are Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?, Faulkner's Bear, Hemingway's `Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,' and, if you like, Moby Dick, though Ahab was not seen by Melville as having chosen the right path. The books cognate with mine are Canadian and probably unknown in the United States; Howard O'Hagan's Tay John is one of them." (Conversations 76)
In This Sex Which is Not One, Irigaray articulates the feminist apprehension in which fighting the dragon of patriarchy only causes the feminist agent to be turned into a dragon: "what is important is to disconcert the staging of representation according to exclusively `masculine' parameters, that is, according to phallocratic order. It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it--that amounts to the same thing in the end--but of disrupting and modifying it, starting from an `outside' that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law" (quoted in Rigney 1). In my discussion Atwood avoids demonizing Offred's fundamentalist captors in an absolute way because Atwood is aware of that such demonization, ultimately, "amounts to the same thing in the end."
Even violence committed in self-defense can have brutalizing effects. Orwell quotes Nietzsche in an "As I Please" column on the cruel treatment of collaborators after France was liberated from Nazi domination: "He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself: and if thou gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee" (Collected III 230-31). Orwell claimed to understand the French anger at Nazi collaborators, but he interprets "too long" in this passage to mean "after the dragon has been beaten."
Davidson allows for the possibility of not being on the hook: either we read uncritically along sexist lines, or we condemn such a mode of cultural discourse. No middle ground exists.
See Schlueter's "Canlit/Victimlit: Survival and Second Words."
Offred's narrative was discovered on cassette tapes. Did she record over Elvis Presley (implying that we must change/challenge popular culture in our resistance to Gilead), or does her narrative hide under the lyrics of the King (implying that popular culture aids and abets our struggles from freedom)? In the case of the former, the point would go to Davidson, but I believe Atwood is, in the particular instance of the cassette tapes, offering an interpretive ambiguity.
The dual perspective created by the Historical Notes is similar in effect to that in The Iron Heel (1908), an effect also achieved by the Newspeak Appendix in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Or Atwood could be hinting that universities ought to "deny none of it." The novel is rife with suggestive names. Offred is of course the handmaid "offered" in the Biblical passage, but she is also "afraid." Moira is more "merry" than most, and Aunt Lydia is an example of how church "laity" function in a fundamentalist theocratic society.
Brian Walker argues in "John Rawls, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Praxis of Toleration" that "Bakhtin's polyphonic vision does not by itself constitute a moral viewpoint" (121), and Lentricchia makes similar complaints about American pragmatism in Criticism and Social Change (1-5).
