Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood

2: Murder in the Dark Atwood’s Inverse Poetics of Intertextual Minuteness in Her Short Fictions and Prose Poems

The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. Sigmund Freud (cited in Irvine 1988, 265) The lake, vast and dimensionless, doubles everything, the stars, the boulders, itself, even the darkness that you can walk so long in it becomes light. Margaret Atwood, “Interlunar,” 103 IntroductIon T he dichotomy between small and large is a motif that recurs frequently in the works of Margaret Atwood. This is particularly evident in her various cartoons (see chapter 7), but she also makes repeated use of the small/large dichotomy in her literary texts, inverting norms to significant effect. In The Robber Bride (1993), for instance, the importance of physical size is reduced, thus implicitly increasing the value of smallness: “Tall people’s heads are too far from the ground, their center of gravity is too high. One shock and they topple” (39). In “Weight,” from Atwood’s short-story collection Wilderness Tips (1991), the reader is told that “Molly was pushy. Or you could call it determined. She had to be, she was so short. ... She’d made it on brains” 2 Murder in the Dark Atwood’s Inverse Poetics of Intertextual Minuteness in Her Short Fictions and Prose Poems 50 EngEndEring gEnrE: ThE Works of MargarET aTWood (182). Here non-physical qualities can be seen to compensate, or more than compensate, for a small physique. A similar point is made in the following fictional interview from Cat’s Eye (1988), which surely touches on Atwood’s diverse experiences in the media circus of literature:1 “I thought you would be different,” says Andrea as we settle. “Different how?” I ask. “Bigger,” she says. I smile at her. “I am bigger.” (92) This quotation indeed suggests that Atwood’s preoccupation with the small/large dichotomy may also have an autobiographical basis.2 Yet her own small stature is only a superficial explanation for the strategy of inversion present in her works. Rather, it is part of a general tendency in Atwood’s oeuvre to expose conventions (e.g., “bigger is better” or “significant is big”)—that is, the social, psychological, linguistic, and mythical structures that underpin everyday perceptions and judgments—and to question their values and functions.3 Since the 1980s, Atwood has employed new textual formats for her challenging explorations and rewritings, short texts that are hard to classify and have few genuine forerunners in Canadian literature. Texts in these hybrid genres appeared in the collections Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems, Good Bones, and The Tent (published in 1983, 1992, and 2006 respectively4 ), featuring pieces that operate within the generic parameters of the short story, yet it would be inaccurate to describe them simply as short short-story (or prose poetry) collections. Among the various “genres” they contain are mini essays, “essay-fictions,” short dialogues, dramatic monologues, and reflections, to name but a few. Atwood’s commentators have yet to discover an appropriate collective critical term, if there is one, for these highly diverse short texts (one critic simply called them “gems”). Arguably because of the category-defying originality of their forms and modes of representation—combined with a possible confusion of smallness/ shortness with minor significance (see William French’s summing up in his 1983 review of Murder in the Dark: “not quite a major work but hardly minor as its length might indicate”)—these pieces were neglected by critics for a long time.5 Murder in the dark 51 It has now been recognized, however, that, especially with Murder in the Dark and Good Bones, Atwood imported a largely unfamiliar genre into English Canadian literature: the Baudelairean prose poem.6 In addition, the short texts in these two collections constitute a radical, “postmodern” contribution to the development of generic hybridization .7 A closer evaluation of many of the texts reveals Atwood’s literary art at work in the smallest of spaces. In an intertextual manner,8 they create networks of meaning and significance despite their limited scope, frequently going hand in hand with what I would like to call Atwood’s poetics of inversion: her technique of undermining conventional thought patterns, attitudes, values, or textual norms by turning them on their heads. The result is a multifaceted interplay between explicit and implicit meaning or, to put it another way, a prismatic multiplication of sense. Since this technique is used in a very restricted space, it almost inevitably results in strongly delineated, suggestive...