S.J. COLMAN Margaret Atwood, Lucien Goldmann’s Pascal, and the Meaning of ‘Canada’ I For Margaret Atwood in Survival, Canadian writers are, as well as being private people, ‘transmitters of their culture.’ It is possible to discern in a particular literature, presumably in any identifiable literature, ‘a number of key patterns’ (p 13) that distinguish it from all other litera- tures. Each of these patterns must occur often enough in the literature asa whole ‘to make it significant,’ that is, to justify its inclusion in a collection of such patterns which, taken together, constitute the specific and definitive ‘shape’ of the literature concerned (p 13). In these assertions so far (that there are identifiable literatures that transmit cultures and that Canadian writers, in using a number of key patterns in their work, transmit the culture of which they are members) there is no assumption about the character of Canadian culture, although it is assumed that an identifiable Canadian culture exists. For Atwood’s argument to proceed it is necessary to decide whether, in speaking of ‘Canada,’ one is dealing, with ‘a country or a culture’ (p 19). This distinction of hers I take to indicate the difference between a culture in the sense of a way of thought and action of some clearly identifiable and unified national entity, and a culture in some other sense. Atwood plainly chooses, or assumes, the former. The ‘shape’ of Canadian literature reflects ‘a national habit of mind’ (p 13). This jump in her argument from writers as ‘transmitters of their culture’ to writers as reflectors of a national habit of mind makes an important addition to her assumptions, the presupposition that there exists a national cultural entity, ‘Canada,’ which, while different from other national cultures to which Atwood refers (England, usa, Poland), is nevertheless a national culture in a similar sense. It is conceivable, however, if one does not make this additional assumption, that Cana- dian writers might be transmitting their culture without its being a national culture, or without its being so in at all the same sense as the others mentioned. Medieval Europe or the Austro-Hungarian Empire might provide interesting models for comparison. But for Atwood it is true that, when a Canadian citizen reads a Canadian book, what he sees in that reflector or mirror is himself, and behind himself ‘a reflection of the world he lives in’ (p 15). That world, or culture, is a specific national culture, a national habit of mind, reflected in the shape of Canadian literature as a whole. Without such self-revelatory mirrors one has to UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVI, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1979 (0042-0247/79/0500-0245$01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1979246 $.J. COLMAN ‘travel blind’ (p 16) and is in some sense lost. According to Atwood most Canadians have in fact been lost, have had to ask Northrop Frye’s question ‘Where is here” (p 17), because they have paid no attention to the specific and defining characteristics of their own literature. ‘Canada as state of mind’ is ‘an unknown territory for the people who live in it’ (p 18). It may well be true that, to take another of Atwood’s metaphors, Canadians have not used the map of their own minds that Canadian literature provides. But perhaps that ‘geography’ (p 18) is not as national as Atwood implies. The metaphor of the map itself raises questions. Who drew it, intending to indicate what, and for whom? Is there only one map? That there might be at least two can be seen from Atwood’s admission that there is a French Canadian literature and that it is differ- ent in certain respects from the rest of Canadian literature. Although there are, therefore, as the commonplace has it, at least two cultures in Canada, for her they are both Canadian in the sense of together con- stituting a nation. She mentions another important demarcation within Canadian culture. A change has occurred, she says, quite recently. Canadian writing has started to appear that makes ‘explicit ... something that was hitherto implicit’ (p 241). It has been the tendency ‘in English Canada ... to connect one’s social protest not with the Canadian predi- cament specifically but with some other group or movement,’ but now a few writers there have become specifically concerned with ‘liberation,’ meaning ‘the freedom to live a life which realizes to the full its available human possibilities, and to live that life by participating joyfully in one’s “awn” place’ (p 242). These writers have begun ‘to voice their own predicament consciously, as French Canadian writers have been doing for a decade’ (p 245). But liberation from what? What is it that constitutes Canadian unfreedom for Atwood? It is a tradition with several intercon- nected strands, for example, ‘what it is to be a colony of the American Empire’ (p 241), having been a colony of the French or British empires; regarding Nature as ‘dead or a monster’ (p 242) - partly, then, a subjec- tion to puritanism; and failing to make the connection between indi- vidual oppression and group oppression. These new writers neither discard this tradition nor succumb to it. Hence the existence of Survival itself, which it would presumably not have been possible to write before the change. Moreover, Survival ‘is practically a community effort’ (p 5). Thus in each of these two cases of demarcation (of French Canada from the rest of Canada, and of ‘liberated’ Canadian writing from previous Canadian writing) she recognizes the importance of social groups within the alleged national culture. In the latter case the recognition is implicit. In the case of Quebec, where ‘the social group is more cohesive’ (p 218), it is explicit. On Atwood’s own account, then, Quebec and the community that practically wrote Survival are set over against the undifferentiatedMARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 247 ‘Canada’ by which she treats the books analysed in Survival as having been ‘written’ (p 12), and that constitutes the tradition that it is only now possible to explore. Perhaps the distinguishing of social groups in Canada should be carried further, as a means of articulating in greater detail the culture that Atwood calls Canadian, and as an aid in under- standing why she makes her ‘national’ assumption. It may prove useful to approach these questions by stepping aside for a moment from Canada to consider a celebrated theory of social groups that recommends itself as similar to Atwood’s general position by its manner of regarding not only imaginative literature but also other works of art, and philosophy, as expressing the social viewpoint of the group of which the artist or philosopher is a member. 0 It was Lucien Goldmann’ belief that we are in the infancy of our culture. ‘We’ in this case means the whole world as seen from the confident intellectual hothouses of Paris in 1955. His view, while consistent with Atwood’s, expresses a universal rather than a national concern. Instead of regarding ourselves as heirs or epigones of a long tradition of learning and wisdom, we should see ourselves as beginners, he believed, because hitherto we have lacked an appropriate method of study in the human sciences. Our knowledge, as a result, is fragmentary. Grappling with problems that had arisen in his researches into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy and literature had convinced Goldmann that he had found a method that not only yielded satisfying results in his own work, but also offered the way to future workers throughout the human sciences to attain results that were significant rather than frag- mented and arbitrary. Significance, for Goldmann’s ‘genetic struc- turalism,’ was the reward of a certain process. That process was dialecti- cal, the development of thought both reflecting and illuminating the articulation of social reality. Goldmann’s confidence in the general val- idity of his method was also founded on the belief that his liberal and open-minded interpretation of dialectical materialism enabled him to judge the merits and defects of possible methods more accurately than students with other outlooks had ever achieved. His method, however, is not dependent on a prior commitment to Marxism. It could sit equally well, for example, with a philosophical and historical outlook such as Hegel's, given that one reads Hegel in J.N. Findlay’s empirical and untranscendental sense.? Indeed, Goldmann records his admiration of Hegel's Aesthetics and Phenomenology,‘ and is clearly indebted to Hegel for a more profound derivation of general methodology. The intelligibil- ity of human circumstances for Goldmann, as for Hegel, is to be found in the dialectical relation of details to appropriate wholes and in the sub-248 S.J. COLMAN sequent placing of such articulated entities in progressively greater wholes which alone enablethem to be fully understood. At each stage of the enquiry there must be an interplay of discovery between whole and parts as the study of each throws light on the other. For example, Goldmann tells us, his own process of discovery began with his puzzle- ment over controversial details in Pascal’s Pensées, such as the meaning of the famous passages on the wager. To elucidate these he studied the immediate whole, that is, the collection of Pensées, then moved to the corpus of Pascalian writings and on to an exhaustive study of Pascal's life and times, including the identification of the principal social group of which Pascal was a member. In each case the new knowledge gained was reflected back upon the original puzzling details and from these he returned again to more general considerations. This procedure could be suspended when the disputed texts had been interpreted in the light of an analysis of Pascal’s and his writings’ place within his social group in seventeenth-century France, such interpretation doing no intentional violence to any of our acknowledged particular and general knowledge about Pascal, his work and his age. Essential to Goldmann’s genetic structuralist method is his theory of world-views.5 Having borrowed this term from Lukacs, he was not concerned whether his concept was exactly the same as Lukacs’, nor need we be. We can simply say here that in Goldmann’s theory the chain of significance runs from any and every detail of human behaviour to the social group of which, for the specific behaviour concerned, the indi- vidual is a member.® Thus Goldmann’s theory posits a vast number of overlapping social groups, some with unstable, others with relatively stable membership. Some of these groups, in particular those that Marx calls classes, are more important than others, in Goldmann’s view, in that they express as the form of their unity and coherence a world-view. That is, for Goldmann, in such cases significance is indissolubly related to the expression by a social group, in its art, beliefs, and general conduct, of values believed by that group to hold for all men. Some members will be more or less aware of what they believe and practise, and of the significance of their doing so, but it is in the work of artists, philosophers, and religious writers that the most complete expressions of world-views are to be found. Goldmann is not here proposing a crude reductionist theory of art, religion, and philosophy. Instead, while ad- mitting the autonomy of each member of this celebrated trio of tradi- tions, Goldmann relates the aesthetic choices made by an artist, for example, to the structure and specific character of the group of which he is part. What is also important to note here is Goldmann’s assertion that while the number of social groups is legion, there are few world-views. Since social groups, even the most stable, come into and go out of existence as circumstances change, the same world-view may be ex- pressed by groups widely separate in time and distinct in social cir-MARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 249 cumstances and composition. Thus while social groups are evanescent, a certain limited number of world-views is seen by Goldmann as con- stituting the permanent alternative structures of our moral universe. Naturally details of expression change with period and group, but a world-view remains essentially the same throughout its metamor- phoses. Although Goldmann suggested that it might be possible to draw up a typology of world-views, he devoted almost all his attention to what he called the tragic and the dialectical world-views, his own detailed re- searches being concerned predominantly with the former. He found it expressed in the seventeenth century by Pascal and Racine, and in the eighteenth by Kant. It will be sufficient here to indicate briefly its expres- sion in Pascal. For Pascal, as Goldmann interpreted him, man’s nature is such that while he is unable to discover authentic values in this world he is no more able to cease seeking them. Finding it impossible to achieve genuine happiness by settling for relative values as these shift into and emerge from what he judges evil, he must rely on those eternal values towards which God’s grace may encourage his perseverance. Yet he cannot abandon this world, but must continue to say both yes and no to it. Pascal’s account of man is, therefore, one of radical dissatisfaction with the world as at worst a succession of valueless diversions and at best an occasion for the use of intellect in science, mathematics, theology, and public affairs, such use being necessarily partial and antinomical. Like Augustine of Hippo, his great precursor, he is convinced that man’s only hope lies in the Christian religion, by which is understood seeking and hoping to find the personal and transcendent God for whose help one’s need is inescapable. But such a person, in Pascal’s theology, does not manifest himself. God chooses to remain hidden except for rare signs on miraculous and, in Pascal's own case of the night of 23 November 1654, ecstatic occasions. Pascal is like his Jansenist colleagues at Port Royal in believing that God prevents man from discovering his will, but he goes far beyond them in saying that God also prevents man from discovering his existence. About God's existence man can only hope with the ines- capable doubt within certainty, the certainty of ‘the heart’ (B282, L214)’ or synthetizing faculty that cannot still, although it may conquer, uneasy reason. Pascal’s man must remain in the world and somehow meet its demands while rejecting it. He must have faith in a God who is always absent and always present. He must seek eternal happiness without assurance of reaching it. There is no escape from the fundamental am- biguity and radical incompleteness of this position. It is in this context, then, that Goldmann has Pascal argue, not to a sceptic or an agnostic but to himself,® as representing the essential human condition, that he must reject the valueless goods of this world by placing them all on the wager that God exists and will help him to persevere towards eternal happiness. Since all men are ‘embarked’ (8233, 1343), Pascal's tragic world-view is250 3.J. COLMAN intended as a universal description of the nature of man and the character of his values and duties. The tragic view is, as Goldmann concluded, that ‘wherein man appears torn between two contradictory claims that the world prevents him from reconciling,’ and where the hidden God is the sole spectator of his actions. The social group to which Goldmann assigned Pascal and Racine is that of the gens de robe, or, as it tended to become, the noblesse de robe of seventeenth-century France, consisting of the legal and administrative professions, which found its political position fundamentally changing during Richelieu’s ascendancy. Having previously been associated with and consulted by the developing monarchy, itnow found itself frequently overridden by royal decree in the parlements and other judicial- administrative bodies in Paris and the provinces. Its powers were in- creasingly encroached upon by the newer royal bureaucracy. Unable to turn for help to its former royal ally, whom on the contrary it felt obliged to oppose, it was equally reluctant to seek assistance either among the Third Estate, from which it had originally been drawn and to many members of which it was related by ties of family and sympathy, or, apart from temporary alliances of the Fronde, among the old nobility. For members of the noblesse de robe to have turned to any of these apparently potential allies would have been to obliterate what chances they thought they had of retaining the social privileges and political powers they had purchased or inherited along with their offices and titles of minor nobil- ity. Instead, most of them preferred to cling obstinately to the diminish- ing vestiges of their power. As a social group they ceased to exist at the Revolution. Pascal’s hidden God is his statement, and the wager on his existence and helpfulness is his doubtful solution, of a problem of life experienced in innumerable personal ways, Goldmann argues, by members of the noblesse de robe as a whole, whose own ‘solutions’ must have been equally inconclusive in that they merely reflected back upon each member his inability either to solve his problems on his own or to be sure of help with them, or to escape from them. This ambiguous impotence, denying true happiness, was accepted by Pascal's extreme Jansenism as the unavoida- ble and dominant quality of this life (Augustine of Hippo’s saeculum),?° while for less gifted members of his social group it would have been experienced, no doubt, at the very least as a souring of previously enjoyable power and social position, even though for Pascal these were the common and delusive consolations of ‘l’Ordre de la Chair’ (B460, 721).11 ll Since Goldmann’s theory was intended to apply universally, it is not fanciful to look at twentieth-century Canada, or for that matter anywhereMARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 251 else, and, after allowing for differences of time and culture, to seek evidences to support it. In fact we are required by his theory to do so. Alternatively, and less ambitiously, we might here look at modern Canada through the medium of what he calls the tragic world-view in order to see if it throws any light on our present position. No doubtit will strike Canadian readers at once that the tragic view seems very promis- ing as an aid in thinking about modern Canada. As we have seen, it is an outlook rooted in ambivalence and ambiguity. Canada’s overall position during this century, as Harold Innis argued long ago, is to have ex- changed a colonial status for constitutional independence and interna- tional legal recognition, yet to find herself, while ceasing to be a British dominion, becoming as subordinated as before in finance, defence, trade, and culture by being subject to the growing but unavoidable hegemony of the United States.'? This much discussed situation, de- scribed by Margaret Atwood in Survival and accompanied as it is in the experience of certain groups by the contradictory emotions of enjoy- ment, relief, frustration, impotence, and indignation, should give rise to notable examples of the tragic view if Goldmann’s thesis is in any way accurate. On his advice let us therefore look at an outstanding Canadian work of art to see to what extent it can be interpreted, without violence to it, as expressing the tragic world-view. What better, then, than Atwood’s Surfacing? In this novel Margaret Atwood assumes the persona of a Canadian woman not yet thirty, a commercial artist or illustrator, a compromiser who can imitate anything. She works for a Canadian publisher who hopes to ‘interest the English and American publishers too.’13 She had been brought up partly in Toronto, but more extensively on a remote island in northern Quebec, in a house deliberately built by her father ‘ten miles from nowhere’ (p 58) because he wished to get as far as possible from other people, whom he regarded as irrational. Thus, when his work forced him to live in Toronto they moved frequently from apartment to apartment, and as soon as he could, during the War and subsequently, they lived on the island — in ‘two anonymities,’ then, ‘the city and the bush’ (p 59). The girl grows up on experiences and memories principally of life with her parents and brother as the only English Canadian family in a remote part of French Canada. When she is old enough she leaves home and goes off to the ‘city’ (p 23 and passim). From there she sends a postcard to her parents telling them she is married, a lie to hide from them that she is having an affair with a married man, alie that grows into self-rejection for having submitted to an abortion. She is thus estranged from herself and her family. Her brother has gone off to prospect for minerals on the other side of the world. Her mother dies. When she receives a message that her father, living alone on the island, has disap- peared, she returns to his house, travelling up from ‘the city’ in the south in company with her current lover Joe, who is an inarticulate potter252 S.J. COLMAN without talent, his colleague David, and the latter's wife Anna, whom the persona describes as ‘my best friend, my best woman friend; I've known her two months’ (p 10). It is nine years since she was last on the island. A search for traces of her father proves fruitless. When she dives into the lake to look for one of the Indian rock-paintings of which he has left records, she sees something suspended in the water, her father’s corpse become the memory of her aborted foetus." She now begins her with- drawal from the world in search of truths other than those of reason: “there are no longer any rational points of view’ (p 169). When the time comes to leave the island she refuses to go with her friends. She eludes them and stays on alone, undergoing religious experiences of absorption into the animal life of the wilderness and regulation by primitive gods and by the spirits of her parents. When a party of villagers comes out to search for her she remains in hiding, seeing them as hunters. She looks at her arm; the fur has not yet sprouted. She leaves the alien house and its stores of food. She eats roots from her parents’ overgrown vegetable garden, sheds her clothes, sleeps in the woods wrapped in a blanket, and returns to her deserted home only briefly, a dirty and destructive spirit taking vengeance on ‘le moi ... haissable’5 and the family’s past. Later she sees an old man standing outside the fence with his back to her. She calls out to her father and he turns, his eyes yellow, feral, those of a creature one sees when one has been too long in the bush, the wild spirit her father has become. She has already had a vision of her mother. Eventu- ally Joe returns, brought by an old friend of her father’s, a French- Canadian neighbour. Joe balances on the dock ‘which is neither land nor water’ (p 192) and calls to her as she peers out unseen from her hiding. The book ends with her indecision, but with the probability that she will go back to the city with him. As muchas she is drawn to the city, both now, alone on the island, and as she was when she first left her parents’ innocence, her descriptions and memories of the cities in which she has lived are all derogatory. Whether or not they are in Canada is immaterial. For her they are all ‘American’ cities, another Ordre de la Chair. Canada is merely ‘occupied territory’ (p 121) where ‘the flood would depend on who got elected, not here but somewhere else’ (p 132). ‘Americans’ (p 129), whether in the shape of tourists from the United States who roar past her canoe in their powerful launch, smiling like sharks, or in the form of the two men, in fact from Sarnia and Toronto, whom she mistakes for Americans because of their equipment and who similarly mistake her and her friends because of their long hair, are everywhere the unavoidable victims and agents of alienation. Hers is no simple-minded anti-Americanism. By ‘American,’ she comes to realize, she means ‘human beings’ generally (p 154). She hates them, men and women both (herself included — the abortion ‘made me one of them too, a killer’ [p 145]), the evil killers of animals and eachMARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 253 other, just as Pascal, as one aspect of his charity, came to detest the world and everyone in it.16 The persona’s stay on the island has brought to a head her rejection of her life in the ‘city’ of the ‘Americans,’ the modem saeculum. Yet she is forced into ambivalence by her circumstances. Al- though she rejects humanity as strongly as her father did, she can no longer accept his naive faith that withdrawal from human beings is a solution to the problems of dealing with them, any more than Pascal could seclude himself at Port Royal. The hunters and tourists push up into the loneliness of the north, replacing the old industries and way of life: ‘the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south’ (p 7), a disease of the ‘city’ that is unavoidable. On their way up, not far from the landing, they had passed a gas station decorated with four stuffed moose in human clothes, the little boy moose waving an American flag. The local people, released from the ‘anachronism’ of ‘the simple life’ that had been ‘imposed’ on them (p 23), ‘are all Americans now’ (p 169). She could continue to live alone in the wilderness only if she became a hunted animal. Human life, in the circumstances into which she was born, can be lived only in the ‘American’ city, in which she is now embarked with everyone else. It is not the twentieth century ‘here’ (p 151) by the lake. Tomorrow, she thinks, ‘we'll travel to the city and the present tense’ (p 51). Canadian nationalism, she realizes, is a false con- sciousness of the modern human situation. She sees David's anti- Americanism for the empty, misleading, and derivative posturing it is. Even his radicalism (e.g., ‘pig’) is imported from the United States. He is for kicking out ‘the fascist pig Yanks and the capitalists ... But then, who would be left?’ (p 39). In any case he has no idea how he would set about it. She knows that his scenario for a guerilla war with the United States over Canadian water is preposterous; the people in the cities ‘would be apathetic, they wouldn’t mind another change of flag’ (p97). Towards the end she sees this particular anti-American Canadian nationalist as a terrifying talking collage: an imposter [sic], a pastiche, layers of political handbills, pages from magazines, affiches, verbs and nouns glued on to him and shredding away, the original surface littered with fragments and tatters. In a black suit knocking on doors, young once, even that had been a costume, a uniform; now his hair was falling off and he didn’t know what language to use, he'd forgotten his own, he had to copy. Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mangeorlichen. (P 152) While life in the ‘city,’ then, is unavoidable, it is also inherently unsatisfying. In the cities the effort at communication with other people must be made, particularly with those one loves, but it is an effort clouded at the start by the belief that it is foredoomed to failure, or at best254 S.J. COLMAN to ambiguity. When Joe returns and she watches him on the dock, she thinks ‘what's important is that he’s here, a mediator, an ambassador, offering me something’; but what he offers is the uncertainty of ‘captivity in any of its forms, anew freedom” (p 192). Then as she watches him she expresses perfectly the unavoidable ambivalence of her probable deci- sion to return with him. Iwatch him, my love for him useless asa third eye or a possibility. If1 go with him we will have to talk, wooden houses are obsolete, we can no longer live in spurious peace by avoiding each other, the way it was before, we will have to begin. For us it’s necessary, the intercession of words; and we will probably fail, sooner or later, more or less painfully. That’s normal, it’s the way it happens now and I don’t know whether it’s worth it or even if I can depend on him, he may have been sent as trick. (P 192) She finds one reassurance as she watches him. Although earlier she had described him as like a buffalo, ‘a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction’ (p 8), or as being human and therefore a killer, she now realizes that at least ‘he isn’t an American, I can see that now’ (p 192). This recalls her earlier thought that for Joe, unlike David or Anna, ‘truth might still be possible, what will preserve him is the ab- sence of words’ (p 159). How important this is can be judged from her conviction that ‘language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole’ (p 146). If all speakers in the omnipresent, inescapable city are liars, all the more difficult will authentic communication be, and even her small hope of achieving it with Joe is immediately cast into ambiguous shadow by her next thought. If Joe is not an ‘American,’ he ‘isn’t any- thing, he is only half formed, and for that reason I can trust him.’ That this trust is far different from full confidence is revealed at once. ‘To trust is to let go. I tense forward, towards the demands and questions, though my feet do not move yet.’ To move, then, is to go forward with hope but without assurance, leaving behind the discarded possibility that the wilderness and its gods might help. ‘The lake is quiet, the trees surround me, asking and giving nothing’ (p 192). This commitment of oneself trustingly but unoptimistically (she has already said that she ‘was not prepared for the average, its needless cruelties and lies’ [p 189], and she has judged Joe to be the average, normal man) into the hands of another person is, of course, a far cry from Pascal’s wagering all the worthless goods of this world on God’s exis- tence and on the faith that he will help him. Margaret Atwood has learned her Nietzschean lessons thoroughly. The little white church in the village is already neglected, the old priest is dead. Among the mass of useful or destructive memories that the persona owes to her parents she finds their religious scepticism part of herself. It is as though she acceptsMARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 255 that, for our century, Pascal’s specific religious problematic is no longer possible. Her struggle is not with Christianity but with a late romantic revival of an alien animism which first enlightens, then fails her. Yet the agony of baffled communication to which she is committing herself, on the improbable efficacy of which she must wager in the unlikely hope of a happiness not of the ‘American city,’ is as unsatisfactory as Pascal’s unavoidable tension in this life between his certainty of ‘the heart’ and the doubts of his reason. In fact the persona is as aware of the limits of reason and the importance of self-determination as Pascal is in his attack on free-thinkers. She thinks: ‘But we refuse to worship; the body wor- ships with blood and muscle but the thing in the knob head will not, wills not to, the head is greedy, it consumes but does not give thanks’ (p 140). When she reverses this relationship between reason and belief she achieves no greater satisfaction. She has already found herself incapable of the feelings of the city. Joe had asked earlier if she loved him. ‘I want to,’ she had replied. ‘I do in a way’ (p 106). She had fruitlessly searched herself for an emotion that would coincide with what she had said. ‘I did want to, but it was like thinking God should exist and not being able to believe.’ She could not answer Joe’s request for a simple ‘yes or no’ (p 107). Nevertheless, like Pascal's mankind she is irrevocably embarked, and must wager. Although she had come to believe that political condemna- tion of ‘the city’ could not be her escape, since we are all innately barbarians, differing only in our choice of victims (all fallen, in Pascal’s terms), and that ‘redemption was elsewhere’ (p 132), she finds that salvation is not in the wilderness either, although her parents’ spirits were there, as were the Indian drawings and gods, and had spoken to her ‘in the other language’ (p 188), not that of the city and the modern market. She could not stay with them, ‘there isn’t enough food. The garden won't last and the tins and bottles will give out; the link between me and the factories is broken, I have no money’ (p 189). She turns back, but only because she must, to the other possibility. ‘Then back 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.’ On such a dubious outcome she must wager. The choices are ‘to immerse oneself, join in the war, or to be destroyed. Though there ought to be other choices’ (p 189). Yet there are not. ‘The word games, the winning and losing games are finished; at the moment there are no others but they will have to be invented, with- drawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death’ (p 191). She has already decided that she owes it to her parents to prefer life. Thus while the need for hope is clearly expressed at the end of the novel, and the determination to persevere is evident in ‘This above all, to refuse to be a victim’ (p 191), the hope is inseparable from consciousness of the256 S.J. COLMAN likelihood of failure, just as Pascal reminds his gambler that he has no right to expect that if God exists his will will be favourable to him. Her hope is a natural one arising from her thought that she may again be pregnant, this time from deliberate choice, surfacing as she is from the despair of having previously rejected child and life. Yet even the plain continuity of human life is itself expressed ambiguously and she is left wagering all the worthless goods of this world on the remote possibility that her child will be the redeemer, the first true human. But I bring with me from the distant past five nights ago the time traveller, the primaeval one who will have to learn, shape of a goldfish now in my belly, undergoing its watery changes. Word furrows potential already in its proto- brain, untravelled paths. No god and perhaps not real, even that is uncertain; I can‘t know yet, it’s too early. But I assume it: if I die, it dies, if Istarve it starves with me. It might be the first one, the first true human; it must be born, allowed. (P 191) In twentieth-century Canada Margaret Atwood has expressed Goldmann’s tragic world-view brilliantly and completely. In Surfacing man does indeed appear ‘torn between contradictory claims that the world prevents him from reconciling.’ While this is not the place for an extended analysis of The Edible Woman (1969) and Lady Oracle (1976), itis worth noticing that each of these other novels by Margaret Atwood also expresses the tragic view. In the former Marian finds she is unable to commit herself to the valueless goods of this world, in the form of marriage to the rising young lawyer to whom she has become engaged, and all the conventionality that life with him would demand. Instead, she places her bets on an indeterminate and uncertain freedom through the mediation of the unworldly, egocentric Duncan, a more ambiguous character than whom it would be hard to create. In the latter by faking her death and fleeing to Italy Joan seeks an end to the irreconcilable struggle between her various identities. The failure of her attempts leaves her intending to return to Toronto but it is not at all certain that she will doso. She is tom between more than two contradictory claims that are irrecon- cilable not only because of the world in some external sense but because, like Pascal, her own nature prevented her from settling for a limited happiness. It is tempting to regard all three novels as phases of the nameless persona of Surfacing. Marian was her first innocent rejection of conventionality, and Joan is the continuation of unresolvable dilemmas consequent upon her unavoidable but unsatisfactory commitment to life in the rejected ‘American city.’ In a recent story, ‘Lives of the Poets,’ Julia asks herself: ‘But what was her mistake? Thinking she could save her soul, no doubt. By the word alone.’!7MARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 257 Iv In Goldmann’s theory, it will be remembered, a world-view may be used by various social groups as an appropriate form with which to express themselves. It remains therefore to ask if there is a social group that is expressing the tragic view in twentieth-century Canada. To reply that the group concerned is ‘Canada’ would hardly be specific enough. For all the talk, by no means new, of a Canadian nation," the fact remains that however much Canada may be accepted both inside and outside as a state, when experienced from within it continues to exhibit its historic divisions - constitutional, ethnic, regional, linguistic, religious, eco- nomic - divisions so deep-seated and persistent that Canadian nation- hood remains a hope, at least for some, rather than an achievement. The notion of a Canadian national interest, for example, is almost as elusive today as it was for Goldwin Smith in 1891, and is without doubt as problematical as it was for Frank Underhill in 1935 and 1954.® Moreover, it would be gratuitous to underrate Margaret Atwood’s art by suggesting that her main character in Surfacing is every Canadian woman. Instead, it would be preferable to recognize that her works of art, by creating specific characters and situations, could be expressing a world-view through their moral-political-religious problems and solutions. Rather than dispersing the notion of social groups into an alleged entity so vague as to lack clear characteristics, it would be better to seek some more precise and limited group of which Atwood might credibly be thought to be a member. It might seem promising, when one notices that her characters are drawn mainly from what she calls ‘the new bourgeoisie,’2° to take the social group here concerned as ‘the Canadian middle class.’ Again, however, the suggested group lacks the specific and convincing, characteristics of coherence that would justify our calling it a social group in Goldmann’s sense. In any case, the question concerns Margaret At- wood, not her characters. Perhaps we may obtain help from Goldmann’s description of the noblesse de robe in seventeenth-century France. The essential point about this social group was that it had been enticed by the crown out of its original basis in the Third Estate, then left in an ambigu- ous position as the balance of political forces changed. Without expecting to find in modem Canada a precise match, we may ask if there is any social group that is in a particularly ambiguous position as a result of political circumstances that its members are powerless to change. One possibility is the group of Canadian intellectuals and publicists who write or speak (in print, or on radio or television) as though Canadian nationhood had been achieved, those who earn a good part of their living in this particular way in the all-pervasive market, that is in Atwood’s “American city,’ using and being shaped by a characteristic form of the258 S.J. COLMAN modern saeculum, its means of mass communication. Achieved Cana- dian nationhood they define in terms of hostility to and rejection of the hegemony of the United States. Such persons might be held to constitute a social group, admittedly small but widely audible and visible, by being similarly placed in the economy and by their relationships, on which they depend for their livelihood, of mutual reference, quotation, aid, publication, and publicity. People who write or speak in this way for a living can be thought of as a social group distinct from those who, although engaged in similar work, have not chosen to commit them- selves so explicitly or in the same terms to a belief in achieved Canadian nationhood, or those who, whatever their job or commitment, live in greater privacy. It is writing for or speaking to the various Canadian publics from a parti pris that proves untenable, which means in this case living a cruelly exposed dilemma, that marks off these intellectuals from other Canadians. It is their need as publicists to be aware of and reflect the pressing reality of a great range of conflicting circumstances that shapes the particular characteristics of this group. Forces which its mem- bers cannot control are constantly disturbing the simplicity of their commitment. If this suggestion is anywhere near the mark one would expect such persons to encounter antinomies as they face the consequences of sup- posing Canada to be more independent than it is or to possess un- equivocal national identity. At every level the language in which they express their views will be markedly ambiguous, and will conflict with experience. Since they are dependent on the very market, one feature of “America,’ whose characteristics many of them deplore, Canadians of this posited group will find themselves in a position in which, in order to define themselves and eam a living in this market, they must emphasize that they are Canadian, for such is their constitutional, geographical, and historical position, their local aspect of the market. At the same time, at every turn they will face the experience that, as Atwood puts it in Surfacing, to be anyone not ‘American’ is to be not yet anything, ‘only half-formed’ (p 192). It is a difficulty similar to that noticed by Roland Barthes when he comments on the fertility and richness of the prevalent and all-pervasive ‘bourgeois myths,’ and compares them with ‘the speech of the oppressed’ which ‘can only be poor, monotonous, im- mediate.’2! In such circumstances our postulated social group of Cana- dian intellectuals and publicists might be expected to produce a version of the tragic world-view, for like Pascal’s noblesse de robe it is a group pulled without hope of relief or resolution in contrary directions, to each of which it must continue to be committed. On the one hand is the specific American example of ‘America’ and the market, considered by members of this social group as artificial, imperialist, and unsatisfactory, yet encountered as a form of life their dependence upon which they haveMARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 259 to recognize as unavoidable. On the other hand there is ‘Canada,’ in my view realistically to be described, as Innis saw it in 1948, in terms of its historical-colonial world situation and its inner diversities, and always forcing itself into consciousness as such, yet rejected by the social group we are postulating as equally unsatisfactory in so far as, so conceived, it is ‘America.’ Consequently such Canadians are condemned to a baffling and unhappy inconclusiveness and ineffectiveness. They ‘will have to talk,’ they ‘will probably fail, ... it’s the way it happens now.’ The salvation of silence is not open to them, as it may be for some Canadian painters and sculptors, who are unencumbered with Atwood’s ‘neces- sary ... intercession of words.’2? Nor can the members of the social group 1 am suggesting be expected to enjoy the unambiguous solutions of aesthetic problems that may be available to writers who do not make their kind of political commitment. Beside the tragic world-view of this social group, of which Margaret Atwood would be an exceptional member, there lie the beliefs, interests and lifestyles of other social groups in Canada, all now ‘American’ as Atwood accurately observes, but self-differentiating in terms of, among other things, employment (e.g., the senior levels of the Public Service in Ottawa, or the cBc), location (e.g., Newfoundlanders), concept of nationhood (e.g., Quebec), commitment (e.g., the Pro-Life leadership, or the Toronto Militia regi- ments), or ethnicity (e.g., the Indians). The assumption of a Canadian national identity by the postulated social group readily fractures into many distinct searches for, and achievement of, various identities. It may be the destiny of all these groups to arrive in the next century at the realization that to have been a Canadian of any kind in this, while formerly a question of locale, family, and the inheritance and adaptation, often in remote rural conditions, of traditions from various ‘old coun- tries,’ was to have been already transcended by the dominant charac- teristics of twentieth-century North America. What these are we shall not be able to specify, as Hegel says, until that ‘shape of life’ has ‘grown old,’23 but it seems reasonable to suggest that they should not be as- sumed to be simply identical with what the condemnatory ‘America’ stands for. ‘Back to Position Two, then,’ Atwood no doubt replies.”4 Yet if1 am allowed the privilege of a final word, it must be in answer to her questions at the very end of Survival: ‘Have we survived? If so, what happens after Survival?’ (p 246). What does she mean by ‘we’? If ‘we’ refers back to her ‘national’ assumption, her question, I suggest, assumes a wider reference than it should bear. Because her art transcends her politics, her novel Surfacing exhibits the complex and baffling world- view associated with the political commitment of her treatise Survival. ‘We’ could, however, be taken to mean the constitutional collection of social groups that we are. For some, in that case, survival would have been succeeded by the tragic world-view, as in Atwood’s own brilliant260 S.J. COLMAN example; but on Goldmann’s theory we should expect to find that there are many other social groups in Canada, the rural and urban poor, for example, the various business worlds and labour unions, or the separate professions, each expressing by means of a world-view, whether de- veloped or rudimentary, its own dilemmas and solutions. But these are further questions for the sociology of Canadian culture. NOTES Iam grateful to Professors R.S. Blair, R.A. Manzer, J.M.R. Margeson, and T. Long for giving me the benefit of their comments on an early draft of this paper. 1 Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto 1972), p 12. Subsequent page references are incorporated into the text. 2 For Lucien Goldmann’s views see Le Dieu caché (Paris 1955), trans Philip Thody as The Hidden God (London 1964); Sciences humaines et philosophie (Paris 1952), trans Hayden V. White and Robert Anchor as The Human Sciences and Philosophy (London 196g); ‘Structure: Human Reality and Methodological Concept,’ in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore and London 1970); La Communauté humaine et I’univers chez Kant (Paris 1948); Pour une sociologie du roman (Paris 1964). 3 J.N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination (London 1958). 4 Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, p x. 5 Philip Thody translates Goldmann’s vision du monde as ‘world vision’ in The Hidden God. I have used instead ‘world-view,’ and ‘the tragic world-view’ or ‘the tragic view’ in place of ‘the tragic vision.’ 6 Lucien Goldmann, ‘Structure: Human Reality and Methodological Concept,’ P. 100. 7 Pascal, Pensées. The references are to the Brunschvicg and Lafuma editions. 8 A view which J.H. Broome, in his Pascal (London 1965), p 34, called ‘per- verse.” 9 Lucien Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy, p 109. 10 For Augustine's use of ‘this vital word,’ connoting ‘a profoundly sinister thing ... a penal existence, marked by the extremes of misery and suffering ... [and] by a disquieting inanity, ... all-embracing and inescapable,’ in which man’s life ‘is doomed to remain incomplete,’ see P.R.L. Brown, ‘Saint Augus- tine,’ in Beryl Smalley, ed, Trends in Medieval Political Thought, (Oxford 1965), pp 11-13. 11 Itdoes not substantially alter Goldmann’s case if we acknowledge at this point that only some of the gens de robe were Jansenist. Some in fact supported the Jesuits in that famous theological and political controversy. Moreover, some joined the new central bureaucracy, becoming commissaires or maitres desMARGARET ATWOOD AND LUCIEN GOLDMANN 261 requétes. Thus the tragic world-view can hardly be the expression of the moral outlook of the gens de robe as a whole. Perhaps it was his Marxism that misled Goldmann into saying that the gers de robe virtually constituted a class. His own theory of social groups, allowing multiple membership, should have enabled him to recognize a more complex articulation of reality. He does stress how hypothetical is his association of tragic view and gens de robe, and submits his theory to testing against historical evidence. In view of the evidence quoted above, the hypothesis is hard to sustain. His theory is too schematic. We might say instead that only a part of the gens de robe were Jansenists or Jansenist-sympathizers, or were prepared to favour the Jan- senists or offer consideration to them. It was this part that constituted a social group whose moral outlook was expressed as the tragic world-view (see Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, ch 6). The reasons for the distinction of this group are obscure. Goldmann suggests ‘that before their conversion, a number of important Jansenists were either frustrated themselves or saw the frustration of their relatives, in their attempt to make a career in the central royal bureaucracy’ (p 141). Yet ‘frustration’ covers a variety of circumstances. The positive desire that it suggests did not always exist. Moreover, full weight would have to be given to the importance of conscience. Goldmann’s conclu- sion ‘that there is not, as yet, enough evidence to support a [definitive] (‘pour établir définitivement une théorie’ [Le Dieu caché, p 156]) theory about the economic and social infrastructure of the Jansenist movement’ (p 141) is probably still valid. Harold Adams Innis, Great Britain, the United States and Canada (Nottingham 1948). ‘Canada has had no alternative but to serve as an instrument of British imperialism and then of American imperialism’ (p 4). 13 Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (Toronto 1972), p 53- References are to the hardcover edition, and will hereafter be incorporated into the text. 14 For Margaret Atwood’s account of what the persona sees underwater, see Carol P. Christ, ‘Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and Vision,’ in siGns, 2:2 (Winter 1976), 3217. 15 Pascal, Pensées (141, 8455). 16 Pascal's sister Jacqueline’s record of Pascal's feelings is quoted in Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal —Commentaires, 2nd ed (Paris 1971), p 28. 17 Margaret Atwood, ‘Lives of the Poets,’ in Dancing Girls (Toronto 1977), p215- 18 ‘A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others - which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government’ (ohn Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government [1861], in Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government [London 1910], pp 359-60). 19 Goldwin Smith, Canada and the Canadian Question (1891; re-issued with intro by Carl Berger, Toronto 1971); Frank H. Underhill, In Search of Canadian u 8262 S.J. COLMAN Liberalism (Toronto 1960), ‘The Conception of a National Interest,’ pp 172-82, and ‘Canada and the Canadian Question 1954,’ pp 214-26. 20 Surfacing, p 39. 21 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans Annette Lavers (St Albans 1973), p 148. 22 Surfacing, p 192. 23 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans T.M. Knox (Oxford 1942), p 13. 24 Survival, p37.Copyright of University of Toronto Quarterly is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.