DM Fraser responds to Margaret Atwood in 1974

From 3–Cent Pulp, Vol. 2 No. 1 May, 1974

DM Fraser circa 1978, photo: John Reeves

D.M. Fraser offered one of the very few nega­tive responses to Margaret Atwood’s second novel, Surfac­ing, after it appeared in 1972. This piece appeared in the 4-​page zine published every two weeks by Pulp Press, and was appre­ci­ated widely for its scathing treat­ment of the stan­dard Canlit of the day, a critique that remains equally applic­a­ble forty years later.

By the time I came to read Surfac­ing, the novel had already estab­lished itself as some kind of Cana­dian Ur-​Myth, the Great Summing Up of All Our Seri­ous Themes. Enough to put anyone off, espe­cially some­one who suspects (as I do) that the themes Cana­dian writ­ers like best to take seri­ously are remark­able chiefly for their banal­ity, provin­cial­ism, chau­vin­ism: the awful hill­billy earnest­ness of the Offi­cial Liter­a­ture, so beloved of the Canada Coun­cil and people who write long poems about The Land and print them in sepia. It hasn’t been easy to escape Surfac­ing as the apoth­e­o­sis of the genre, the novel that finally, defin­i­tively, gets our national shit together, thereby—coincidentally?—demonstrating once again the perspi­cac­ity of Ms. Atwood’s famous Victim Thesis as expounded in Survival. Given such a context, I was prepared to be humbled—and bored.

As it turned out, I was neither humbled nor (in fair­ness) bored; it isn’t possi­ble to be humble in the pres­ence of the wilfully third-​rate, or to be bored by a book which infu­ri­ates to the point of frenzy. In fact, it was rather a lot of fun throw­ing Surfac­ing around the living-​room, defac­ing it with rude comments, pacing up and down mutter­ing curses; it’s been a long time—all the way since Beau­ti­ful Losers—since a Cana­dian novel had any effect on me at all. But I’m afraid my response wasn’t so much to Surfac­ing itself, as a piece of writ­ing neither more nor less inept than most of what gets subsi­dized and praised here, as it was to the climate in which a work of consis­tent and self-​congratulatory feeble­mind­ed­ness can be sold, bought and there­after glori­fied as an exem­plary achieve­ment, as some­thing major. This book, what­ever else it may be, is not major. It is so relent­lessly minor that you could play it at a funeral and every­one would fall asleep.

As just about every­one knows, Surfac­ing is the story of a young woman, lately city-​sophisticated, who goes home to the North Woods, in the company of some slick friends, to look for her father and ends up by Find­ing Herself, or some approx­i­ma­tion thereof, in a (pseudo-​) confronta­tion with Primeval Forces, one of which may or may not be Daddy. What an oppor­tu­nity to combine the worst of Ernest Heming­way and Doris Less­ing, and in an Authen­tic Cana­dian Setting, too! lrre­sistible .… Here are all the stan­dard contrasts: Effete City vs. Tough Exis­ten­tial Bush, Condi­tioned Sanity vs. Prim­i­tive Madness, Emerg­ing Woman vs. Oppres­sive Male, and best of all, our own very special local twist, Rapa­cious Amer­ica vs. Victim­ized Canada. Add a dollop of Post-​Hippie Coitus (see, we’ve come of age, haven’t we?), a dash of Endan­gered Scenery, a hand­ful of Hardy Quebe­cois (two cultures, right?), and several cupfuls of Grad­u­ate School lntro­spec­tion, and there you have it: yessir, the Great Cana­dian Novel itself, just the sort of thing MacLeans and Satur­day Night will lick up by the shov­el­ful. As, predictably, they did.

Well, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because formu­las aren’t themes, subject-​matter is not content (cf John Berger), and content is not a matter of painting-​by-​number on the grid of our supposed national neuroses. Stereo­types, as the Great Critic said (rightly, for once) aren’t arche­types. There’s not a single real­ized human char­ac­ter in the whole of Surfac­ing—only a crew of one-​dimensional clichés wander­ing around acting out the parts assigned to them by some Royal Commis­sion on the Mean­ing of Life in Canada. There isn’t a single insight, a single flicker of polit­i­cal reve­la­tion, that hasn’t been hammered into baby powder by every liberal-​bourgeois publi­ca­tion in the coun­try since 1967. There isn’t a glim­mer of self-​perception that isn’t corroded, deformed, by self-​indulgence, self-​pity, the cant and postur­ing of Pop-​psych. In place of feel­ing, we’re served a smor­gas­bord of left­over senti­men­tal­i­ties topped with cheap ironies like stale whipped cream; in place of thought, a cata­logue of lnfor­ma­tion Canada plat­i­tudes; in place of reasoned polit­i­cal analy­sis, an undi­gested lump of anti-​American rhetoric no self-​respecting para­noiac would lay claim to. And, at the end, we have a cop-​out even in terms of the novel itself: another of those weary recon­cil­i­a­tions in which, god help us, Revolt is snuffed out in the great damp blan­ket of lnstant Tran­scen­dence. Women take note: the message here, what Surfac­ing at last comes down to, is that Woman’s place really is, after all, with her Man, just as long as he’s a Cana­dian: “he may have been sent as a trick. But he isn’t an Amer­i­can, I can see that now; he isn’t anything, he is only half-​formed, and for that reason I can trust him.” Surfac­ing? Submerging’s more like it.

There’s more to complain of: secondary char­ac­ters (i.e., every­one but the narra­tor) treated with conde­scen­sion and/​or contempt, prose that must have been cut with a dull knife from a mound of melt­ing text­books (How to Write Groovy and lnflu­ence People), scene upon scene that sinks like a water­logged condom under the burden of enforced Signif­i­cance. As a poet, Margaret Atwood has shown that she’s capa­ble of inci­sion and lucid­ity ; as an editor (of Bill Bissett’s Nobody owns th earth), that she does have an acute liter­ary judge­ment. But there is no discernible inci­sion or lucid­ity in Surfac­ing; and the wisest exer­cise of judge­ment, in this instance, might well have been to have flushed the manu­script down the drain.

But the real outrage here is that we are, as a “nation,” so obsessed with our (nonex­is­tent) Cultural Iden­tity that we are will­ing to settle for, and embrace, any sort of preten­tious medi­oc­rity which offers itself for our consump­tion, will­ing to accept any serios­ity as seri­ous­ness, any topi­cal­ity, however triv­ial, as Rele­vance, any narcis­sism as self-​criticism, any thesis-​izing as evidence of intel­li­gence, any “Cana­dian Content”’ as actual content. Drivel like Surfac­ing gets touted in the press, writ­ers of limited gifts like Margaret Atwood get trans­mo­gri­fied into culture-​heroes (or hero­ines), bill­boards flog the New Canada (where dat?) as if it were a new brand of mouth­wash, while we remain the same back­wa­ter, the same breeding-​ground of pious kitsch, we always have been—and while we proceed, with murder­ous inno­cence, down precisely the same paths we’ve loved to condemn the United States for taking. If, as some suppose and Margaret Atwood appar­ently fears, this coun­try will even­tu­ally be swal­lowed up—politically and cultur­ally as already economically—by our more power­ful neigh­bour, we need have no regrets: having cham­pi­oned, encour­aged, infe­ri­or­ity for so long, we can scarcely consider it hard­ship, or change, to have another kind of infe­ri­or­ity imposed upon us. If a book like Surfac­ing is typi­cal of what we value, then it may be that we have no sense of value worth defend­ing, and no “iden­tity” beyond the empty ratio­nal­iza­tions of self-​aggrandisement.

In any event, I eagerly await Ms. Atwood’s forth­com­ing books: Simo­niz­ing, Sanforiz­ing, Sink­ing .…

— D. M. Fraser

Notes: Satur­day Night was a middle-​brow maga­zine of art and poli­tics, and the Great Critic was Northrop Frye.

Class Warfare, a collec­tion of short fiction by D.M. Fraser writ­ten between 1972 and 1974, will be published in a new edition this fall by Arse­nal Pulp Press.