Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity by Lorraine York (review)

In her book Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007), Lorraine York explored what the experiences of some of Canada’s most famous writers reveal about Canadian culture, including critical attitudes toward the publishing industry and the marketplace. In Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity, she continues her investigation by studying the multiple forms of labour supporting Canada’s most famous writer.

The book, to my mind one of the most interesting and valuable contributions to Atwood criticism in many years, opens and closes with lively and thoroughly enjoyable accounts of Atwood’s widely publicized dispute with Mayor Rob Ford and his brother, Councillor Doug Ford, over the proposed privatization of the Toronto Public Library system. When Atwood turned to social media to rally readers, the response was immediate and intense, raising tens of thousands of signatures for the petition against the proposal as well as the ire of those who supported it. According to York, it was when Doug Ford claimed not to know who she was, a failed attempt to deny Atwood her celebrity status, that her followers on Twitter first became enraged, but the further suggestion that, as an unelected person, she did not have the right to an opinion incensed readers and exposed the Fords’ general contempt for the citizens of Toronto. In 2012 the Toronto City Council reversed many, though not all, of the proposed cuts, and though York concludes that it was “a muted victory for the library system,” the incident revealed that there is at least the potential for a “literary celebrity’s influence in the civic realm.”

The incident also collapsed the distinction between celebrity and individual identity that, as York’s analysis convincingly argues, gives rise to anxieties of authenticity, that tendency to view “all celebrity production as the false manufacture of hollow goods.” York complicates and interrogates the prejudices that have prevented Canadian literary critics from gaining a better understanding of literary fame, and by extension, the culture it is part of. In this book, York analyzes Atwood’s roles as activist, citizen, and, perhaps most important in this context, as client and employer. In this respect, Atwood’s cartoon likening the author to a dead moose feeding a forest of other creatures serves as an excellent, quite literal illustration of the literary ecosystem that writing supports. York is particularly attentive to the mechanics of collaboration underlying these relationships, having studied it in her Rethinking Women’s Collaborative Writing (2002). Because she focuses on the labour supporting creative work, she is able to value the contributions of Atwood’s agents, editors, and assistants without diminishing the author or making grandiose claims about the power of the publishing industry.

The strength of the study is this “focus on the industrial relations” that produce literature. This approach prevents York from making the mistake others have made of treating real individuals as theoretical constructs. It allows York to discuss the role played by an individual in a system of production and marketing while retaining a sense that a person is fulfilling it. As she puts it, “the tendency to see individuals as separate embodiments of cultural forces in tension should be resisted and queried.” York succeeds in resisting it because she is careful not to demand too much of the evidence, especially from the archives, though she articulates well the impressive record of labour the Atwood papers represent. York’s original archival research is well grounded in the growing body of scholarship on literary production, interleaved with critical analysis of Atwood’s published essays, lectures, and fiction. In novels such as Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and prose such as Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood’s writing, according to York, accomplishes “the important cultural work of placing the labour and industry of writing into representation.” In these various ways, Atwood crafts a career as a woman of letters, and York shows readers how.