Science for feminists: Margaret Atwood's body of knowledge

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by June Deery

As a novelist, Atwood likes to thematize and play with the space-time of the form in which she is writing. Her work reminds us that (written) literature has always spatialized time in that the book form spreads a narrative's beginning, middle, and end before its readers all at once: While the convention is to read the text sequentially, readers can dip in at any point. Atwood's narratives realize this potential for spatialization by interlacing past and present occurrences, so that even when reading sequentially the reader feels past and present events coexist (in space and time) together. In Cat's Eye, for example, we are driven through a series of temporal loops, from the fictional present back into past events that appear immediate by being described in the present tense. The Robber Bride extends this temporal spatialization to include even the future. This novel features not only prolepsis or novelistic foresight but also - contrary to current physics - a character's accurate foretelling of future events. As a child, Charis apparently could always tell when a telephone was about to ring, and she foresees both her mother's and Zenia's deaths. Her insight appears to be ratified by events in the novel, though since the narrative voice often merges with the characters' voices, it is not always easy to determine the author's opinion of these supernatural and scientifically heterodox powers.

Atwood's predominant interest is her characters' reconstructions of the past in the light of the present and their coming to understand the past's effect on their present selves. Both Cat's Eye and The Robber Bride are haunted books, books about haunting, about how space is drenched in time. In Cat's Eye, this is described in loosely relativistic terms. Elaine fantasizes about moving faster than the speed of light and so traveling backward in time, in what mathematicians as well as artists call "imaginary time" (143).(10) This is what she achieves in a sense, through memory, which allows us all to be tachyonic (faster than the speed of light).(11) In the novel's present, Elaine is in "the middle of her life," which is a time and a place (Cat's Eye 13). She is (in a variation of the French phrase) of an uncertain age. She travels back to Toronto looking for herself, for certainty, for the elusive Grand Unified Theory, or at least for the cats' eyes on the road that will provide direction. She is convinced that she will find closure when she faces her old tormentor, Cordelia, her Einsteinian "twin" (Cat's Eye 434).(12) She wants to know if Cordelia is moving through time at the same rate, or if, like Elaine's dead brother, her other twin (Cat's Eye 414), Cordelia has stopped existing in the present. In Toronto, where she and Cordelia used to exist, the past is more real than the present, more real than her present existence in Vancouver, with its unreal-because-beautiful landscape. Elaine can't believe in the latter's postmodern hyperreality. She identifies instead with the past when things weren't post this or post that because they were "real enough to have a name of their own" (Cat's Eye 90). Toronto, the old Huron Indian name for "meeting place," fails to live up to its name. The meeting with Cordelia - which Elaine's narrative projects - never happens. She does not even know if Cordelia (like Schrodinger's cat) is alive or dead.(13) If the vastness of Canada has a center, Toronto would be it. But now even Elaine doesn't feel at home there. The story ends with her literally in midair, flying back to Vancouver. The form of the novel thus remains uncertain, diffuse, and open. This lack of resolution Atwood elsewhere relates to the Uncertainty Principle in physics, which suggests to her that "There's something in the nature of things that's against closure" (Hancock 196).(14) The lack of closure has caused dissatisfaction among reviewers of Cat's Eye, but it is wholly deliberate on Atwood's part and not an indication of her inability to orchestrate a more immediately satisfying plot. As Susan Strehle asserts, Atwood's point is that "The subject - even the artist - can't find an absolute frame from which to validate its perspective but floats without attainable certainty in relative space-time" (Strehle 184).