Renowned Canadian author, poet, and critic Margaret Atwood took the stage at the University of Guelph’s War Memorial Hall on Nov. 25, 2015, to talk about her new novel, The Heart Goes Last, as part of the Café Philosophique series that brought us Naomi Klein earlier this year.
“In this book, essentially, we start with something that has already happened in 2008,” Atwood told The Ontarion, referring to the economic collapse that becomes the catalyst for the events of the novel. When asked about The Heart Goes Last’s dystopian society as compared to another of her novels, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood remarked, “The events on which The Handmaid’s Tale was based were distant in space or far away in time, and people were not as immediately aware of the fact that it could really happen. Both of these things could really happen, and in a way have already happened.”
Atwood was introduced by University of Guelph professor Madhur Anand, who also serves as a research chair in the School of Environmental Sciences. Anand’s first question focused on the title of the novel, The Heart Goes Last, citing a passage in which one of the main characters, Charmaine, uses this phrase.
“Something about the English language has given us this one word, heart, for two different things,” Atwood explained. “There is a physiological moment […] in which she’s simply describing the physiological fact that she knows that a person is dead when their heart stops beating because the heart goes last. By the time we get to the one that you’ve cited, she’s taken the same thing and turned it into a metaphor for emotion.”
“I was talking, as one does, to a room full of brain surgeons,” Atwood recalled, “I was talking about the brain as metaphor in literature, and when it comes in because it was not originally thought that the brain was where your self lived […]. The functions ascribed to various parts of ourselves have moved around through history but right now, for us, it is the heart.”
The novel is set in the twin town of Consilience/Positron—Consilience is the town and Positron is the prison, and each citizen spends one month as a prisoner and one month as a worker, ensuring jobs for everyone within the collapsed economy. The town is themed to the 1950s: “There’s a lot of Doris Day,” said Atwood. “I’m just warning you.”
“Apparently, of the twentieth century, the ‘50s is the decade in which people self-identified as being the happiest,” she explained. “They weren’t too involved, I guess, in the Cold War or McCarthyism.”
Throughout the evening’s discussion, Atwood’s quick wit and deadpan delivery kept the audience laughing. Just as in her fictional works, she tackles difficult topics with a combination of irony and serious engagement with the issues. In an interview with The Ontarion, Atwood commented on one of the motivations for this story. “There are already for-profit prisons in the States—I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while, and I’ve done a lot of research into nineteenth century prisons,” she explained.
She referred to a scandal in Pennsylvania called “kids for cash,” in which juvenile court judges were receiving bribes and kickbacks in return to sending children to for-profit juvenile detention centres.
“The downside to a for-profit prison is you have to keep it full,” Atwood remarked, “and this means creating criminals, whether making more things criminal or punishing more harshly.”
Consilience also has subtle connections to the arts and sciences debate. Consilience, Anand explained, is the agreement between approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially the sciences and the humanities. It’s the idea that you can go towards a common goal through different pathways, and, in that way, can be viewed as a bridge between the arts and sciences.
“Arts and sciences should be joined at the hip,” said Atwood. “They used to be part of human knowledge considered as a whole, and then we got more and more specialized in the twentieth century and things diverged and separated from one another. But we now live in an age of convergence, where things are coming back together and we see this particularly now in new approaches to medicine and healthcare.”
Partway through the evening, Anand showed Atwood a rare specimen of bee that had been named after Atwood’s father, who Atwood described as “meticulous about naming things accurately and also very encouraging of curiosity.”
She continued, “My dad was a great reader, number one. They always had books around the house, number two, and I was never told that I couldn’t read a book. Some of them were scientific books, so I read those; some of them were murder mysteries so I read those. My mother, on the other hand, was a great reader out loud, and she read to the kids every night and then even when we learned how to read ourselves She would continue to do this for a while, and I think that helped me understand the ear in relation to the page.”
Hearing Atwood read aloud from her novel demonstrated her deep understanding of the relationship between ear and page. Often, as readers, we imagine a certain voice or style of speaking for each character based on the way they are written, and this voice may not be the same in our heads as it is out loud. With Atwood’s work, her characters themselves and her own narrative voice came through in the text so clearly that hearing them out loud was more similar than I expected.
The Café Philosophique series is the vision of the College of Arts and an ongoing partnership with The Bookshelf and the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. “The Bookshelf is one of the great indie bookstores in Canada,” Atwood told The Ontarion.
Atwood is the award-winning author of more than 40 books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays.