Nobody Dunit: The Loose End as Structural Element in Lady Oracle

Nobody Dunit: The Loose End as Structural Element in Lady Oracle WILFRED CUDE At the conclusion of Lady Oracle, having wrought considerable havoc in the lives of her husband and two .lovers, having stage-managed the incarceration of two friends, and having laid open the face of a visiting reporter with a Cinzano bottle, Joan Foster surveys the wreckage and murmurs to herself: "I keep thinking I should learn some lesson from all of this, as my mother would have said."1 Yea, verily. This is a novel about the learning of lessons, but Atwood does not intend her narrator to benefit from the process . We readers are the students, rather than Joan: for Joan is the illustrative example, the sometimes comic yet ultimately distressing illustra:tive example, fleshing out the lessons that Atwood has to teach. Though she is a perambulating disaster, Joan does not see herself in the slightest as such. "I wasn't at all like that, I was happy," ~he burbles in protest halfway through the novel: ''happy and inept'' (224). The ineptitude we have no difficulty accepting, by the time she comes to make the point, after all her blunderings that she brought to our attention: but the happiness we find impossible to accept, since her prevalent emotion seems inevitably to manifest itself in tears. "If you could cry silently, people felt sorry for you,'' she complains early in the novel of her chronic inability to wring sympathy out of her sorrows. 30 As it was I snorted, my eyes turned the color and shape of cooked tomatoes, my nose ran, I clenched my fists, I moaned, I was embarrassing, finally I was amusing, a figure of fun. The grief was always real but it came out as a burlesque of grief, an overblown imitation like the neon rose on White Rose gasoline stations, gone forever now....[6] Joan's failure to apply the lessons of her grief to her life is certainly instructive for us. If she cannot infer from her incessant flow of tears that she is unhappy, we can see the import of her puzzlement at the novel's end. "Because my narrator cannot get the lesson,'' Atwood in effect addresses us; ''you, my readers, must.'' And what is the lesson that we must learn? Again, the conclusion furnishes the necessary clues for us to proceed. Joan is more than a little disconcerted by the vehemence with which she had felled that hapless reporter. "It must have been a shock for him to wake up in bed with seven stitches," she says: "I feel quite guilty about that" (344). But her guilt in no way stems from a moral impulse: rather, it is a measure of her remorse at inconveniencing herself, for she is beginning to feel attracted to the only man who has really come to know her. "Maybe because I've never hit anyone else with a bottle, so they never got to see that part of me,'' she ruminates: "neither did I, come to think of it" (345). And with that insight, we glimpse something of the lesson that we must learn, the lesson that has eluded and will continue to elude our narrator. The bottle-wielding side of Joan was always there, right from the evening she whirled at age seven onto centre stage at Miss Flegg's end-of-season recital, determined to enact her role as "Mothball" to the hilt and stomp all those cute little butterflies.2 ''I threw myself into the part, it was a dance of rage and destruction.,, tears rolled down my cheeks behind the fur,'' she recalls: "the butterflies would die" (47). This was the first version of Joan's mad and comic danse macabre, but certainly not the last. Seeking her demon lover, her ''tall man in evening dress, with an opera cloak and smoldering eyes," she sweeps blindly in wild circles through the novel as through her bedroom, bumping into far more than ''the dressing table or the end of the bed" (18). With little more than the occasional twinge of telling self-analysis, a twinge she is quick to rationalize away in some fashion, she bashes about in...