“Sortir de l’Auberge”: Strategies of (False) Narration in Atwood and Triolet

"On parle sans responsabilité quand on est sans contexte autre que les rumeurs de la rue [. . .]"

["You speak irresponsibly when you have only street noise as a context [. . .]"]

Elsa Triolet, Ecoutez-voir 91

"Context is all."

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale 154

The following comparative study is born of two arguments. The first is that the philosophy espoused by feminist movements in the Western European literary world suggests that a commonality of origins, angsts, and attempts contained in feminist opposition to patriarchy should exist on at least some levels. The second is that, considering the evidence of the migration (sometimes with mutation) of literary movements in this same world, a commonality of approaches and devices would also exist. Although each of these arguments comes with its share of provisos and caveats, it can certainly be put forward that commonality—a transcendence of cultural or social differences—is attainable at some level, that "there are universal and basically human behavior patterns, concepts, and institutions, on the basis of which literary comparisons can be made" to some extent within a literary sphere such as that of Western Europe. ¹ This study offers one example of such transcendence. In the context of modernist and postmodernist writing, two women from different sides of the Atlantic and different backgrounds, living and writing at different times and without much possibility of reading each other, show a similarity of approaches and writing strategies. ²

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) and Elsa Triolet (1896-1970) are both novelists, women, and experimenters in literary form and structure. Despite their divergent backgrounds, they reveal many similar reactions to the problems of structure, point of view, and cohesion addressed in postmodern novel writing, and the questions of politics and aggression connected to patriarchal society. In particular, they share a parallel way of depicting the victimization of their characters and inventing for them the narrative strategies by which they try to cope with this condition. Such a preoccupation unites the two considerations already introduced; their victimizations primarily depict women, and the strategies adopted challenge the male world and novelistic form at the same time. Novels such as Bodily Harm, Life Before Man, The Handmaid's Tale, Le Cheval roux, Le Grand jamais, and Ecoutez-voir amply illustrate the parallel tactics of these novelists.

Certainly one cannot ignore the differences that exist in the lives and approaches of these two writers. Triolet was born Ella Iurievna Kagana, a Russian Jew, and spent her life primarily in the urban environments of Moscow and Paris. For much of her life she was a foreigner in a foreign country. Atwood has never had to live in exile, spending only voluntary visits in places like Scotland and Australia, and grew up in the Canadian forest. Triolet's literary influences are fairly male-dominated: the Russian bylina, the medieval knight's tale, the Bible, the Futurists. Atwood shows a more feminist concern in her concentration on story characters such as Persephone and Little Red Riding Hood, although one can also number Northrop Frye among her influences. ³ In addition, it must be recognized that Triolet died before the Women's Movement became the force that it was in the 1970s, whereas woman's position is one of the most problematized issues in Atwood's works. ⁴ Triolet can rather be equated with one of her characters, as Jean-Paul Sartre describes her: "Elle ne s'inquiète même pas d'être l'égale de l'homme: cette égalité-là, cela fait déjà longtemps qu'elle l'a acquise" ["She does not even worry about being man's equal; she acquired that equality already a long time ago"]. ⁵ She was a sort of de facto feminist who, instead of theorizing, acted, doing what she felt capable of. ⁶ Thus her struggles are placed at a more implicit level, whereas Atwood wrestles more explicitly with the question...