[HONOURS] Atwood's Surfacing
Mar. 8th, 2003 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldHere's the last piece of my Honours thesis! Now all that there is to do is the tinkering. :-)
D. Atwood’s Surfacing
When Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing, was published in 1971, she wrote in the context of a burgeoning self-consciously Canadian nationalism, best exemplified by the cosmopolitan figure of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau strongly favoured the transformation of the Canadian federation into a space where both French Canadians and English Canadians could freely and harmoniously exercise their respective language rights, even as he also favoured Canadian partial detachment from the United States. In Trudeau, Canadian nationalist fears of the Americanization of Canadian culture and the Canadian economy found purchase. One theme particularly important during the 1970s was environmentalism, particularly concern for the Canadian natural environment as threatened by American economic and environmental policies. If, it was warned, American-style consumerism was practiced by Canadians, Canada risked being pulled into “the ecologically disastrous orbit of the U.S.A” (Livingston 159) with catastrophic results for the relatively unspoiled Canadian environment. Indeed, just one year after Surfacing’s publication in 1972, Margaret Atwood wrote her critical volume Survival, which explored how Canadian literature and culture were differentiated in part from their American counterparts by Canada’s primordial wilderness. As Atwood writes, for Americans “the West was something to be conquered and claimed. The West, or the wilderness, is in Canadian fiction much more likely to come through as a place of exile: there are the settlers, come from the old country with their European artifacts, building their walls within which they hope to recreate that old country” (121). American nature is emancipatory for its colonizers in Atwood’s vision, whereas its Canadian counterpart can be imprisoning.
Surfacing is a book set in the Canadian wilderness, specifically the boreal forest of the Canadian Shield. It is in the Canadian Shield, in the lake island owned by Atwood’s protagonist’s missing father where her family regularly spent their summer vacations, that Surfacing’s unnamed narrator/protagonist reaches a remarkable conclusion about this northern hinterland. She rejects not only Americans, but the Canadians of the urban south, and eventually even her fellow northern whites. People in general, in the protagonist’s view, cannot be truly indigenous to Canada unless they renounce their urbanity and their essential Americanness. The south of Canada has been contaminated; it is only by fleeing to Canada’s periphery, by searching for arcane knowledge in the mysterious north, that the protagonist can find the healing knowledge she very badly needs.
The protagonist and her three friends travel north, from the city, into the Canadian Shield, the vast rocky northern interior of Canada characterized by infertile land, dense forest cover, and harsh climate. In the 1970s, some two million people lived in the Canadian Shield, but this population was quite scattered; the Canadian Shield’s population was installed as a byproduct of southern expansion, whether in the relatively fertile southern regions, along major railways and highways, or in the more recent mining towns installed into the far north. This marginality was recognized at an early date; in Thirty Acres, Euchariste Moisan comments on the marginality of his parents’ doomed farm on the southern margins of the Canadian Shield. Although Canada might be semiperipheral, by most definitions the Canadian Shield qualifies as a peripheral hinterland:
The Canadian Shield is the immediate hinterland of the prosperous Canadian core region of central Canada, possessing an economic system highly dependent upon central Canada for investment and trade, and thinly populated by people who are both dependent upon the mass culture propagated from central Canada and suffering because of their physical distance from central Canadian centers. The Canadian Shield has, in relation to central Canada, much the same sort of dependent relationship that many Canadian nationalists in the 1970s saw existing between Canada and the United States. The Canadian Shield in Surfacing, then, can be taken to represent Canada in exaggerated form. The disparities that existed in Thirty Acres between the French Canadian-populated countryside and cosmopolitan industrial urban centers, or in Barometer Rising between Cape Breton and Halifax, are minor compared to the division between the city and Canadian Shield in Surfacing. Indeed, this division dominates Surfacing’s plot.
As David drives north, the protagonist sees a gradual deterioration of the surroundings, filled with environmental decay–”dead elm skeletons . . . and the cuttings dynamited in pink and grey granite”–and shabby human constructions. Passing across the Ontario-Québec border and arriving at the last major town before the north, the protagonist sees, in front of “a few oblong shacks further along, tar-paper and bare boards [. . .] a clutch of children playing in the wet mud that substitutes for lawns; most of them are dressed in clothes too big for then, which makes them seem stunted” (Atwood 13). Arriving at the village itself, past the paint-defaced cliffs lining the rod, they see the lake which provided the community with its initial raison d’être at the cost of destroying any possibility for a harmonious co-existence with nature:
Reality, in this community, is simulated; people migrate here only on a temporary basis to enjoy some of the transitory pleasures of rural life with as many of the benefits of urban civilization alongside as possible. Surfacing’s community is quite different from Thirty Acres’, as Euchariste Moisan’s village does possess the reality that this northern resort community lacks; from the novel’s beginning, it is apparent that there is a very real co-existence with the natural world that surrounds it–with the land, with the forest, with the St. Lawrence River. Surfacing’s village is devoid of any connection, existing only because of the negation of the natural world. The village remains infinitely dependent upon wider urban civilization, that of central Canada and the world beyond. For instance, although it is located in the countryside, “[e]verything is more expensive here than in the city; no one keeps hens or cows or pigs any more, it’s all imported from more fertile districts” (Atwood 26), and the village bar is “an imitation of other places, more southern ones” (Atwood 26). The devastation of the local ecology–the unnatural swelling of the lake, the drowning of an ancient forest–has been carried out to meet the demands of the south for resources, for recreation, in short, for central Canada’s own parochial desires, as part of a general restructuring of the entire country to serve central Canadian needs. The Canaidan Shield bears the same resource-gathering function to the Canadian centre as Canada in its whole does relative to past colonial empires; Canada, in the north, is in fact a colonial power in Atwood’s novel.
The village, unlike the communities in Thirty Acres and even in Barometer Rising, is not autonomous. At its height in the war-driven prosperity of the First World War, Moisan’s community was more or less sufficient, apparently sufficient unto itself; Cape Breton’s Gael-settled villages were, to the characters of Barometer Rising, an enduring source of spiritual strength despite their economic insufficiency. Surfacing’s village, however, is simply a place of exile for its residents, who do not share a spiritual or economic community. At the same time, the residents themselves are worryingly foreign, trapped like Paul–the protagonist’s father’s friend, a man praised as the exemplar of the simple life–by an “anachronism [that] was imposed, [. . .] never chosen” (Atwood 23), having never had the chance to gain the same experiences as the protagonist and her father. Paul’s wife Madame speaks a dialectal French that the protagonist barely comprehends, as her “memorized passages of Racine and Baudelaire are no help” in speaking with Madame (Atwood 19), while at the grocery store, the clerk mocks the protagonist’s accented French. The protagonist consoles herself with a memory:
The protagonist comes to see the village culture, seen by her in her childhood as delightfully distinct, as ultimately derivative and boring, marking the beginning of her alienation from civilization.
The village is in a “border country” (Atwood 26), on the dividing line between French and English Canada, on the fringes of the wilderness yet still fundamentally urban, trapped on the fringes of industrial civilization and thus lacking the capacity to break with modernity for more traditional subsistence, yet surrounded by the dense wilderness and unable to achieve urbanity for this reason. The villagers sustain themselves with products imported from the cities, while the apparent death of the Catholic priest has allowed the secularizing powers of the Quiet Revolution to work even in this remote district of northern Québec. It is only from the village that the protagonist, with her married friends David and Anne and her lover Joe, can venture to the island cabin where her father spent his last known days.
The protagonist’s three companions all fancy themselves, to one degree or another, political radicals and anti-Americans. For the protagonist, her memories of her summers in the wilderness are inextricability mixed with her feelings about Americans:
The belief that Americans are fundamentally predatory is echoed more strongly by Joe and David. Each man comes to see the forest wilderness as fundamentally Canadian. David proclaims that “‘This is great, . . . it’s better than in the city. If we could only kick out the fascist pig Yanks and the capitalists this would be a neat country. But then, who would be left?’” (Atwood 39) and suggests that the four should “‘start a colony, I mean a community up here, get it together with some other people, break away from the urban nuclear family. It wouldn’t be a bad country if only we could kick out the fucking pig Americans, eh? Then we could have some peace’” (Atwood 89). Joe, for his part, adopts the mein of “the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction” (Atwood 8) and echoes David‘s anti-Americanism.
Most crucially, the two men half-seriously suggest that, if the United States ever invaded Canada to try to secure Canadian national resources, the guerrilla movement should be based in the Canadian Shield. For David and Joe, the wilderness of the Canadian Shield assumes the same importance as the forests of eastern Poland to generations of Poles during the nineteenth century partition, “as a naturally fortified shelter, where the [. . .] nation had begun and to which, harried on all sides, it would finally retreat” (Schama 61). The primordial Canadian forest would shelter the guerrillas, provide a suitable base for their rearming and reorganization as a prelude to expelling the foreign dictators. This rhetoric, strongly apocalyptic in tone, is heavily influenced by the hostile and fearful reaction to United States’ contemporary military interventions in Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as by the popularity of Maoist doctrine (as expounded by Mao and similarly proposed by the Argentine-born Che Guevara), which drew from Chinese and Cuban experience in their revolutions to argue that control of rural areas and national peripheries was crucial in guerrilla wars of national liberation, indeed that controlling the cities was ultimately useless for any foreign imperialist or domestic bourgeois regimes. For David and Joe, the Canadian Shield exists as the future incubator of the Canadian nation; in their neo-Romantic view, its rugged terrain would function as the womb of a materially simple and spiritually simple Canadian nation, in much same way as the nineteenth century Romantics felt that the rugged terrain of Switzerland’s Alps would nurture a similarly moral nation (Schama 478-490).
Despite the boasting of the two men, however, the protagonist knows that their claims are ultimately hollow:
Neither man is indigenous to the forest, as each would like to believe. Indeed, they are barely distinguishable from Americans, proved when David “scrambled up and was capering on the point, shaking his clenched fist and yelling ‘Pigs! Pigs!’ as loud as he could. It was some Americans, going past on their way to the village, their boat sloshing up and down in the waves, spray pluming, flags cocked fore and aft. They couldn‘t hear him because of the wind and the motor, they thought he was greeting, they waved and smiled” (Atwood 112). They are southerners. The episode of the heron–caught and killed, either by an American or by a Canadian tourist–proves how regardless of citizenship, people can be cruel, pointlessly violent towards the symbols of the North’s spirituality. David even goes so far as to assume himself that the pair of Ontarian fishers were Americans before learning otherwise.
To be American, for the protagonist, is ultimately not a matter of citizenship. “It doesn‘t matter what country they‘re from, my head said, they‘re still Americans, they‘re what‘s in store from us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can‘t tell the difference” (Atwood 129). Urbanization, industrialization, militarization–these factors all serve to alienate people, whether American or Canadian, from the regenerative potential contained within the north. In this, Surfacing reflects a theme present elsewhere: in Barometer Rising, for instance, the younger generation was aware that their elders were cutting themselves off from this potential by their obsolete fixation upon the British Empire, even as Euchariste Moisan in Thirty Acres believed in common with his peers that northern-adapted French Canadians would play a decisive role in altering the culture of the United States. The protagonist herself, still suffering from the psychological legacies of her sexual affair with a married man and consequent abortion, can only take advantage of this regenerative potential when she renounces civilization, when she realizes that “[t]he trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human” (Atwood 130); her personal guilt is generalized to apply to the human species in general, regardless of such minor distinctions as ethnicity or citizenship. When the protagonist says that she “wanted there to be a machine that could make [Americans] vanish, a button I could press without disturbing anything else” (Atwood 154), she is as likely to be referring even to incited Canadian nationalists like David and Joe as to any actual Americans.
The First Nations serve in Surfacing as the ideal type for a culture and a people adapted to the environment of the Canadian Shield, living in harmony with the land. Her sole recollection of the now-subordinated First Nations, however, is a memory relating the terminal phase of their existence:
The culture of the local First Nations has decayed; in its place comes the protagonist, who as an adolescent “memorized survival manuals, How To Stay Alive in the Bush, Animal Tracks and Signs, The Woods in Winter, at the age when the ones in the city were reading True Romance magazines” (Atwood 48), now a woman who could claim as much a right to this, her “home ground, [their] foreign territory” as any of the non-aboriginals. In the course of her revelation, she rejects the accoutrements of civilization at the cabin, breaking breakable goods and tearing the clothing, particularly destroying her father’s books and “[e]verything from history” (Atwood 176).
The protagonist identifies the people sent to search for her alternatively as local police, tourists of indeterminate citizenship, or David’s American invaders. She hides as she renounces language and wanders naked, allows the spirits of the north–and the spirits of her dead parents–to communicate with her, to push her through her particular version of a spirit quest and to find herself. Her concern for her potential children–both her aborted fetus and her current pregnancy–plays a crucial role in her development, as her perceived fertility or lack thereof is a potent driver in her development. This concern for fertility and reproduction is equally powerful elsewhere: in Barometer Rising, the reunion of Neil McCrae and Penelope Wain with their child signals the restoration of a morally healthy life and an outlook more strongly rooted in Canada as a whole; in Thirty Acres, Euchariste Moisan’s marriage and fatherhood likewise signals what appears to be the successful reproduction of French Canadian culture even after Moisan’s childhood deprivations, although the later breakdown of his relationship with his children is a powerful signal of the impending collapse of traditional French Canada. The surfacer’s first potential child was aborted, in accordance with the wish of heroverbearing male lover, to allow his further sexual exploitation of her; her epiphany, diving under the water, communicates to her a sense that she is still fertile. In descending into the depths of the lake, she embarked on a spiritual quest; in rising up from the lake waters to the surface, against, she has been purified of her fears and anxieties, cleansed as if by baptism. The protagonist reemerges, still capable of generating new possibilities and communicating these to the broader world,
In the end, the protagonist becomes a messiah, a marginal character whose retreat into the wilderness for an intense and highly individual spiritual experience has culminated in the need for her return. After she finishes dressing herself in her torn clothing, about to join Joe on the boat back to the marginal village, she resolves that she must return “to the city and the pervasive menace, the Americans. They exist, they're advancing, they must be dealt with, but possibly they can be watched and predicted and stopped without being copied” (Atwood 189). The revolutionary potential of the margins have been fulfilled in the protagonist; from the peripheral Canadian Shield, the protagonist returns to the semiperiphery of southern Canada to give birth to her child, physical proof of the new gospel.
D. Atwood’s Surfacing
When Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing, was published in 1971, she wrote in the context of a burgeoning self-consciously Canadian nationalism, best exemplified by the cosmopolitan figure of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Trudeau strongly favoured the transformation of the Canadian federation into a space where both French Canadians and English Canadians could freely and harmoniously exercise their respective language rights, even as he also favoured Canadian partial detachment from the United States. In Trudeau, Canadian nationalist fears of the Americanization of Canadian culture and the Canadian economy found purchase. One theme particularly important during the 1970s was environmentalism, particularly concern for the Canadian natural environment as threatened by American economic and environmental policies. If, it was warned, American-style consumerism was practiced by Canadians, Canada risked being pulled into “the ecologically disastrous orbit of the U.S.A” (Livingston 159) with catastrophic results for the relatively unspoiled Canadian environment. Indeed, just one year after Surfacing’s publication in 1972, Margaret Atwood wrote her critical volume Survival, which explored how Canadian literature and culture were differentiated in part from their American counterparts by Canada’s primordial wilderness. As Atwood writes, for Americans “the West was something to be conquered and claimed. The West, or the wilderness, is in Canadian fiction much more likely to come through as a place of exile: there are the settlers, come from the old country with their European artifacts, building their walls within which they hope to recreate that old country” (121). American nature is emancipatory for its colonizers in Atwood’s vision, whereas its Canadian counterpart can be imprisoning.
Surfacing is a book set in the Canadian wilderness, specifically the boreal forest of the Canadian Shield. It is in the Canadian Shield, in the lake island owned by Atwood’s protagonist’s missing father where her family regularly spent their summer vacations, that Surfacing’s unnamed narrator/protagonist reaches a remarkable conclusion about this northern hinterland. She rejects not only Americans, but the Canadians of the urban south, and eventually even her fellow northern whites. People in general, in the protagonist’s view, cannot be truly indigenous to Canada unless they renounce their urbanity and their essential Americanness. The south of Canada has been contaminated; it is only by fleeing to Canada’s periphery, by searching for arcane knowledge in the mysterious north, that the protagonist can find the healing knowledge she very badly needs.
The protagonist and her three friends travel north, from the city, into the Canadian Shield, the vast rocky northern interior of Canada characterized by infertile land, dense forest cover, and harsh climate. In the 1970s, some two million people lived in the Canadian Shield, but this population was quite scattered; the Canadian Shield’s population was installed as a byproduct of southern expansion, whether in the relatively fertile southern regions, along major railways and highways, or in the more recent mining towns installed into the far north. This marginality was recognized at an early date; in Thirty Acres, Euchariste Moisan comments on the marginality of his parents’ doomed farm on the southern margins of the Canadian Shield. Although Canada might be semiperipheral, by most definitions the Canadian Shield qualifies as a peripheral hinterland:
Hinterlands are characterized by [. . .] an emphasis on primary resource production; scattered population and weakly integrated urban systems; limited innovative capacity; and restricted political prowess. Hinterlands, therefore, are all the regions lying beyond the heartland whose growth and change is determined by their dependency relationships with the heartland. (McCann 4)
The Canadian Shield is the immediate hinterland of the prosperous Canadian core region of central Canada, possessing an economic system highly dependent upon central Canada for investment and trade, and thinly populated by people who are both dependent upon the mass culture propagated from central Canada and suffering because of their physical distance from central Canadian centers. The Canadian Shield has, in relation to central Canada, much the same sort of dependent relationship that many Canadian nationalists in the 1970s saw existing between Canada and the United States. The Canadian Shield in Surfacing, then, can be taken to represent Canada in exaggerated form. The disparities that existed in Thirty Acres between the French Canadian-populated countryside and cosmopolitan industrial urban centers, or in Barometer Rising between Cape Breton and Halifax, are minor compared to the division between the city and Canadian Shield in Surfacing. Indeed, this division dominates Surfacing’s plot.
As David drives north, the protagonist sees a gradual deterioration of the surroundings, filled with environmental decay–”dead elm skeletons . . . and the cuttings dynamited in pink and grey granite”–and shabby human constructions. Passing across the Ontario-Québec border and arriving at the last major town before the north, the protagonist sees, in front of “a few oblong shacks further along, tar-paper and bare boards [. . .] a clutch of children playing in the wet mud that substitutes for lawns; most of them are dressed in clothes too big for then, which makes them seem stunted” (Atwood 13). Arriving at the village itself, past the paint-defaced cliffs lining the rod, they see the lake which provided the community with its initial raison d’être at the cost of destroying any possibility for a harmonious co-existence with nature:
It's the dam that controls the lake: sixty years ago they raised the lake level so that whenever they wanted to flush the logs down the narrow outflow river to the mill they would have enough water power. But they don't do much logging here any more. A few men work on railway maintenance, one freight train a day; a couple of families run the stores, the small one where they used to speak English, the other where they wouldn't. The rest process the tourists, businessmen in plaid shirts still creased from the cellophane packages, and wives, if they come, who sit in twos on the screened blackfly-proof porches of the single-room cabins and complain to each other while the men play at fishing. (Atwood 17)
Reality, in this community, is simulated; people migrate here only on a temporary basis to enjoy some of the transitory pleasures of rural life with as many of the benefits of urban civilization alongside as possible. Surfacing’s community is quite different from Thirty Acres’, as Euchariste Moisan’s village does possess the reality that this northern resort community lacks; from the novel’s beginning, it is apparent that there is a very real co-existence with the natural world that surrounds it–with the land, with the forest, with the St. Lawrence River. Surfacing’s village is devoid of any connection, existing only because of the negation of the natural world. The village remains infinitely dependent upon wider urban civilization, that of central Canada and the world beyond. For instance, although it is located in the countryside, “[e]verything is more expensive here than in the city; no one keeps hens or cows or pigs any more, it’s all imported from more fertile districts” (Atwood 26), and the village bar is “an imitation of other places, more southern ones” (Atwood 26). The devastation of the local ecology–the unnatural swelling of the lake, the drowning of an ancient forest–has been carried out to meet the demands of the south for resources, for recreation, in short, for central Canada’s own parochial desires, as part of a general restructuring of the entire country to serve central Canadian needs. The Canaidan Shield bears the same resource-gathering function to the Canadian centre as Canada in its whole does relative to past colonial empires; Canada, in the north, is in fact a colonial power in Atwood’s novel.
The village, unlike the communities in Thirty Acres and even in Barometer Rising, is not autonomous. At its height in the war-driven prosperity of the First World War, Moisan’s community was more or less sufficient, apparently sufficient unto itself; Cape Breton’s Gael-settled villages were, to the characters of Barometer Rising, an enduring source of spiritual strength despite their economic insufficiency. Surfacing’s village, however, is simply a place of exile for its residents, who do not share a spiritual or economic community. At the same time, the residents themselves are worryingly foreign, trapped like Paul–the protagonist’s father’s friend, a man praised as the exemplar of the simple life–by an “anachronism [that] was imposed, [. . .] never chosen” (Atwood 23), having never had the chance to gain the same experiences as the protagonist and her father. Paul’s wife Madame speaks a dialectal French that the protagonist barely comprehends, as her “memorized passages of Racine and Baudelaire are no help” in speaking with Madame (Atwood 19), while at the grocery store, the clerk mocks the protagonist’s accented French. The protagonist consoles herself with a memory:
I [replay] the man from the government, he was at a gallery opening, a handicraft exhibit, string wall hangings, woven place mats, stoneware breakfast sets; Joe wanted to go so he could resent not being in it. The man seemed to be a cultural attaché of some sort, an ambassador; I asked him if he knew this part of the country, my part, and he shook his head and said “Des barbares, they are not civilized.” At the time that annoyed me. (Atwood 26)
The protagonist comes to see the village culture, seen by her in her childhood as delightfully distinct, as ultimately derivative and boring, marking the beginning of her alienation from civilization.
The village is in a “border country” (Atwood 26), on the dividing line between French and English Canada, on the fringes of the wilderness yet still fundamentally urban, trapped on the fringes of industrial civilization and thus lacking the capacity to break with modernity for more traditional subsistence, yet surrounded by the dense wilderness and unable to achieve urbanity for this reason. The villagers sustain themselves with products imported from the cities, while the apparent death of the Catholic priest has allowed the secularizing powers of the Quiet Revolution to work even in this remote district of northern Québec. It is only from the village that the protagonist, with her married friends David and Anne and her lover Joe, can venture to the island cabin where her father spent his last known days.
The protagonist’s three companions all fancy themselves, to one degree or another, political radicals and anti-Americans. For the protagonist, her memories of her summers in the wilderness are inextricability mixed with her feelings about Americans:
We used to think [Americans] were harmless and funny and inept and faintly lovable, like President Eisenhower. We met two of them once on the way to the bass lake, they were carrying their tin motorboat and the motor over the portage so they wouldn’t have to paddle once they were on the inner lake. When we first heard them thrashing through the underbrush we thought they were bears. (Atwood 67)
The belief that Americans are fundamentally predatory is echoed more strongly by Joe and David. Each man comes to see the forest wilderness as fundamentally Canadian. David proclaims that “‘This is great, . . . it’s better than in the city. If we could only kick out the fascist pig Yanks and the capitalists this would be a neat country. But then, who would be left?’” (Atwood 39) and suggests that the four should “‘start a colony, I mean a community up here, get it together with some other people, break away from the urban nuclear family. It wouldn’t be a bad country if only we could kick out the fucking pig Americans, eh? Then we could have some peace’” (Atwood 89). Joe, for his part, adopts the mein of “the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction” (Atwood 8) and echoes David‘s anti-Americanism.
Most crucially, the two men half-seriously suggest that, if the United States ever invaded Canada to try to secure Canadian national resources, the guerrilla movement should be based in the Canadian Shield. For David and Joe, the wilderness of the Canadian Shield assumes the same importance as the forests of eastern Poland to generations of Poles during the nineteenth century partition, “as a naturally fortified shelter, where the [. . .] nation had begun and to which, harried on all sides, it would finally retreat” (Schama 61). The primordial Canadian forest would shelter the guerrillas, provide a suitable base for their rearming and reorganization as a prelude to expelling the foreign dictators. This rhetoric, strongly apocalyptic in tone, is heavily influenced by the hostile and fearful reaction to United States’ contemporary military interventions in Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as by the popularity of Maoist doctrine (as expounded by Mao and similarly proposed by the Argentine-born Che Guevara), which drew from Chinese and Cuban experience in their revolutions to argue that control of rural areas and national peripheries was crucial in guerrilla wars of national liberation, indeed that controlling the cities was ultimately useless for any foreign imperialist or domestic bourgeois regimes. For David and Joe, the Canadian Shield exists as the future incubator of the Canadian nation; in their neo-Romantic view, its rugged terrain would function as the womb of a materially simple and spiritually simple Canadian nation, in much same way as the nineteenth century Romantics felt that the rugged terrain of Switzerland’s Alps would nurture a similarly moral nation (Schama 478-490).
Despite the boasting of the two men, however, the protagonist knows that their claims are ultimately hollow:
[I]f the […] guerrillas were anything like David and Joe they would never make it through the winters. They couldn‘t get help from the cities, they would be too far, and the people there would be apathetic, they wouldn’t mind another change of flag. If they tried at the outlying farms the farmers would take after them with shotguns. The Americans wouldn‘t even have to defoliate the trees, the guerrillas would die of starvation and exposure anyway. (Atwood 97)
Neither man is indigenous to the forest, as each would like to believe. Indeed, they are barely distinguishable from Americans, proved when David “scrambled up and was capering on the point, shaking his clenched fist and yelling ‘Pigs! Pigs!’ as loud as he could. It was some Americans, going past on their way to the village, their boat sloshing up and down in the waves, spray pluming, flags cocked fore and aft. They couldn‘t hear him because of the wind and the motor, they thought he was greeting, they waved and smiled” (Atwood 112). They are southerners. The episode of the heron–caught and killed, either by an American or by a Canadian tourist–proves how regardless of citizenship, people can be cruel, pointlessly violent towards the symbols of the North’s spirituality. David even goes so far as to assume himself that the pair of Ontarian fishers were Americans before learning otherwise.
To be American, for the protagonist, is ultimately not a matter of citizenship. “It doesn‘t matter what country they‘re from, my head said, they‘re still Americans, they‘re what‘s in store from us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can‘t tell the difference” (Atwood 129). Urbanization, industrialization, militarization–these factors all serve to alienate people, whether American or Canadian, from the regenerative potential contained within the north. In this, Surfacing reflects a theme present elsewhere: in Barometer Rising, for instance, the younger generation was aware that their elders were cutting themselves off from this potential by their obsolete fixation upon the British Empire, even as Euchariste Moisan in Thirty Acres believed in common with his peers that northern-adapted French Canadians would play a decisive role in altering the culture of the United States. The protagonist herself, still suffering from the psychological legacies of her sexual affair with a married man and consequent abortion, can only take advantage of this regenerative potential when she renounces civilization, when she realizes that “[t]he trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human” (Atwood 130); her personal guilt is generalized to apply to the human species in general, regardless of such minor distinctions as ethnicity or citizenship. When the protagonist says that she “wanted there to be a machine that could make [Americans] vanish, a button I could press without disturbing anything else” (Atwood 154), she is as likely to be referring even to incited Canadian nationalists like David and Joe as to any actual Americans.
The First Nations serve in Surfacing as the ideal type for a culture and a people adapted to the environment of the Canadian Shield, living in harmony with the land. Her sole recollection of the now-subordinated First Nations, however, is a memory relating the terminal phase of their existence:
There weren‘t many of them on the lake even then, the government had put them somewhere, corralled them, but there was one family left. Every year they would visit the lake in blueberry season and visit the good places the same way we did, condensing as though from the air, five or six of them in a weatherbeaten canoe: father in the stern, head wizened and corded like a dried root, mother with her gourd body and hair pared back to her nape, the rest children or grandchildren. They would check to see how many blueberries there were, faces neutral and distanced, but when they saw that we were picking they moved on, gliding unhurried along near the shore and then disappearing around a point or into a bay as though they had never been there. No one knew where they lived during the winter; once though we passed two of the children standing by the side of the road with tin cans of blueberries for sale. It never occurred to me till now that they must have hated us. (Atwood 85-6)
The culture of the local First Nations has decayed; in its place comes the protagonist, who as an adolescent “memorized survival manuals, How To Stay Alive in the Bush, Animal Tracks and Signs, The Woods in Winter, at the age when the ones in the city were reading True Romance magazines” (Atwood 48), now a woman who could claim as much a right to this, her “home ground, [their] foreign territory” as any of the non-aboriginals. In the course of her revelation, she rejects the accoutrements of civilization at the cabin, breaking breakable goods and tearing the clothing, particularly destroying her father’s books and “[e]verything from history” (Atwood 176).
The protagonist identifies the people sent to search for her alternatively as local police, tourists of indeterminate citizenship, or David’s American invaders. She hides as she renounces language and wanders naked, allows the spirits of the north–and the spirits of her dead parents–to communicate with her, to push her through her particular version of a spirit quest and to find herself. Her concern for her potential children–both her aborted fetus and her current pregnancy–plays a crucial role in her development, as her perceived fertility or lack thereof is a potent driver in her development. This concern for fertility and reproduction is equally powerful elsewhere: in Barometer Rising, the reunion of Neil McCrae and Penelope Wain with their child signals the restoration of a morally healthy life and an outlook more strongly rooted in Canada as a whole; in Thirty Acres, Euchariste Moisan’s marriage and fatherhood likewise signals what appears to be the successful reproduction of French Canadian culture even after Moisan’s childhood deprivations, although the later breakdown of his relationship with his children is a powerful signal of the impending collapse of traditional French Canada. The surfacer’s first potential child was aborted, in accordance with the wish of heroverbearing male lover, to allow his further sexual exploitation of her; her epiphany, diving under the water, communicates to her a sense that she is still fertile. In descending into the depths of the lake, she embarked on a spiritual quest; in rising up from the lake waters to the surface, against, she has been purified of her fears and anxieties, cleansed as if by baptism. The protagonist reemerges, still capable of generating new possibilities and communicating these to the broader world,
In the end, the protagonist becomes a messiah, a marginal character whose retreat into the wilderness for an intense and highly individual spiritual experience has culminated in the need for her return. After she finishes dressing herself in her torn clothing, about to join Joe on the boat back to the marginal village, she resolves that she must return “to the city and the pervasive menace, the Americans. They exist, they're advancing, they must be dealt with, but possibly they can be watched and predicted and stopped without being copied” (Atwood 189). The revolutionary potential of the margins have been fulfilled in the protagonist; from the peripheral Canadian Shield, the protagonist returns to the semiperiphery of southern Canada to give birth to her child, physical proof of the new gospel.
