Survival

A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

Margaret Atwood

• Publisher: A List
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781770892538
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: "What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?" Her answer is "survival and victims."

Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives. This new edition features a foreword by the author.

1

SURVIVAL

When your love is a sour taste

in the mouth, become a matter

for apologies, survive.

. . .

When your face goes flat in

the silvered mirror, endure;

endure, if you can, and survive.

– John Newlove,

“If You Can”

It is the time of death

and the fear of never

having lived at all

crazes the young

when pigs that escaped slaughter

eat dozens of fermented

apples and charge drunken thru

empty woods

and huntsmen somewhere else

are learning the trade

– Al Purdy,

“Autumn”

. . . Lionel was lonely. The months passed. Lionel was lonely. The months passed. They were too close to one another. Secretly Lionel wanted to climb a tree and watch his own funeral. He did not know this. . . .

– Russell Marois,

The Telephone Pole

I’m starting to feel sentimental

only when at home

in my sixty-dollar-a-month slum,

or to feel like a Canadian

only when kissing someone else’s bum.

– John Newlove,

“Like a Canadian”

To find words for what we suffer,

To enjoy what we must suffer –

Not to be dumb beasts. . . .

. . . .

. . . We shall survive

And we shall walk

Somehow into summer. . . .

– D. G. Jones,

“Beating the Bushes: Christmas 1963”

I started reading Canadian literature when I was young, though I didn’t know it was that; in fact I wasn’t aware that I lived in a country with any distinct existence of its own. At school we were being taught to sing “Rule, Britannia” and to draw the Union Jack; after hours we read stacks of Captain Marvel, Plastic Man and Batman comic books, an activity delightfully enhanced by the disapproval of our elders. However, someone had given us Charles G. D. Roberts’ Kings in Exile for Christmas, and I snivelled my way quickly through these heart-wrenching stories of animals caged, trapped and tormented. That was followed by Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known, if anything more upsetting because the animals were more actual – they lived in forests, not circuses – and their deaths more mundane: the deaths, not of tigers, but of rabbits.

No one called these stories Canadian literature, and I wouldn’t have paid any attention if they had; as far as I was concerned they were just something else to read, along with Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe and Donald Duck. I wasn’t discriminating in my reading, and I’m still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I’m not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading – the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story – and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape or the “message” first, you might as well give up, it’s too much like all work and no play.

But then as now there were different levels of entertainment. I read the backs of Shredded Wheat boxes as an idle pastime, Captain Marvel and Walter Scott as fantasy escape – I knew, even then, that wherever I lived it wasn’t there, since I’d never seen a castle and the Popsicle Pete prizes advertised on the comic book covers either weren’t available in Canada, or cost more – and Seton and Roberts as, believe it or not, something closer to real life. I had seen animals, quite a few of them; a dying porcupine was more real to me than a knight in armour or Clark Kent’s Metropolis. Old mossy dungeons and Kryptonite were hard to come by where I lived, though I was quite willing to believe they existed somewhere else; but the materials for Seton’s stick-and-stone artefacts and live-off-the-land recipes in Wildwood Wisdom were readily available, and we could make them quite easily, which we did. Most of the recipes were somewhat inedible, as you’ll see if you try Cat-tail Root Stew or Pollen Pancakes, but the raw ingredients can be collected around any Canadian summer cottage.

However, it wasn’t just the content of these books that felt more real to me; it was their shapes, their patterns. The animal stories were about the struggle to survive, and Seton’s practical handbook was in fact a survival manual: it l...