Dystopian feminism?
Renowned Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, spoke to an at-capacity crowd inside War Memorial Hall on Wednesday Nov. 27.
As part of a unique collaborative effort between the College of Arts, the Bookshelf, and the Café Philosophique Lecture Series, the University of Guelph presented the literary icon. Catherine Bush, a novelist, and coordinator of the University of Guelph’s Masters of Fine Arts creative writing program, hosted the event.
Atwood has penned more than 40 books, including multiple works that cross between the genres of fiction and non-fiction, essays, and poetry, even dabbling online with digital formats to reach a wider audience. Her long and extraordinary career has weaved through the Canadian social fabric for over 45 years, and judging from the event, she is still committed to social, political, environmental, and writer’s issues.
Perhaps best known for books such as Cat’s Eye, Edible Woman, and The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood was in town to promote her new book, Maddaddam. This novel is the third installment in the dystopian trilogy that began with Onyx and Crake, and Year of the Flood.
This fictional series congeals the undesirability of dehumanization, environmental catastrophe, love and evil consciousness. Maddaddam is a palindrome, which Atwood asserts (depending on your perspective) can either be interpreted as “pessimistic or optimistic.”
Atwood’s storytelling-career came to life with her quick-witted articulations and intellectual charm. She read an excerpt from her latest novel, and provided a paradoxical plethora of themes that ranged from unparalleled sexual pleasure to the annihilation of the human race.
Not unlike other dystopian novelists – such as Bradbury, Huxley and Vonnegut – Margaret Atwood instills a fear of time in the readers, with her books providing a bottleneck moment that reflects a collision course with our planet and us.
Very much an environmentalist, Atwood spoke of the destruction of oceans and rainforests, Norse cycles, and the symbolic meaning, which is very much embedded in her mordant work.
Not dissimilar to a game of “Would You Rather?” – when asked during question period what she predicts for the future, she wittily responded, “Who’s future? Yours or mine?”
Atwood said that we have a “collective future” between us, and that choice of “futures” belongs to the inventiveness of human beings. Thus, the blueprint for her dystopian novels rests on the presupposition of, “Do you want to live in this house?” as she rhetorically asked, referring to our current political climate.
For Atwood, there seems to be a correlation between the popularity of dystopian novels and youth, and a “dis-effective” populated world of diminishing opportunities. She commanded a need for us to re-imagine and appreciate a positive future, and hoped that future writers would begin to write with more “utopian” enthusiasm.
On a less related note, for those students entering into final essays, she also disclosed an anecdote for writer’s block: “Just write. Don’t edit. Produce something primary, and then improvise.”