The Books: “Surfacing” (Margaret Atwood)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Surfacing – by Margaret Atwood. This is her second novel. I don’t remember much of it. She starts to get clearer to me, as a writer, in her third novel. This one basically is about this neurotic mildly passive woman – whose father has disappeared – and she goes on a camping trip with her boyfriend and another couple – they go to an old cabin in the woods, where she used to camp with her family as a young girl – maybe it’s even owned by her family – and all hell breaks loose – and she ends up staying behind when they go back to civilization and she takes off her clothes and lives in the woods like an animal. Why she does this I do not know. I remember my friend Jackie read it, and her summing up of the whole thing was: “Your father’s dead. Put your clothes on.” hahahaha

It has something to do with the woman’s need to resist the structures that have been put into place for her in society without her permission. This woman not only resists the structures – well, at the beginning of the book – she accepts them. At the end of the book, she huddles in the woods, lying in a bed of leaves, and she has totally rejected society. She’s communing with ancestors, ghosts …they begin to “tell” her what to accept, what to reject, what is “forbidden” (that’s a big word in this last section) – it’s like she wants to become one of them … no more rules, no more passive acceptance …

This is all I remember. Weird.

I’ll post an excerpt from the “naked in the woods” section. Even though I can’t remember the details of this book – just looking at this excerpt, I can feel the Margaret Atwood of Cat’s Eye, Bodily Harm … she’s in there. The entelechy of Cat’s Eye is present, in these earlier books. Like the little section here about the frog.

Excerpt from Surfacing – by Margaret Atwood.

The light wakes me, speckled through the roof branches. My bones ache, hunger is loose in me, belly a balloon, floating shark stomach. It’s hot, the sun is almost at noon, I’ve slept most of the morning. I crawl outside and run towards the garden where the food is.

The gate stops me. Yesterday I could go in but not today: they are doing it gradually. I lean against the fence, my feet pawprinting th emud damp from the rain, the dew, the lake oozing up through the ground. Then my belly cramps and I step to one side and lie down in the long grass. A frog is there, leopard frog with green spots and gold-rimmed eyes, ancestor. It includes me, it shines, nothing moves but its throat breathing.

I rest on the ground, head propped on hands, trying to forget the hunger, looking through the wire hexagons at the garden: rows, squares, stakes, markers. The plants are flourishing, they grow almost visibly, sucking moisture up through the roots and succulent stems, their leaves sweating, flushed in the sunrays to a violent green, weeds and legitimate plants alike, there is no difference. Under the ground the worms twine, pink veins.

The fence is impregnable; it can keep out everything but weed seeds, birds, insects and the weather. Beneath is a two-foot-deep moat, paved with broken glass, smashed jars and bottles, and covered with gravel and earth, the woodchucks and skunks can’t burrow under. Frogs and snakes get through but they are permitted.

The garden is a stunt, a trick. It could not exist without the fence.

Now I understand the rule. They can’t be anywhere that’s marked out, enclosed: even if I opened the doors and fences they could not pass in, to houses and cages, they can move only in the spaces between them, they are against borders. To talk with them I must approach the condition they themselves have entered; in spite of my hunger I must resist the fence, I’m too close now to turn back.

But there must be something else I can eat, something that is not forbidden. I think of what I might catch, crayfish, leeches, no not yet. Along the trail the edible plants, the mushrooms, I know the poisonous kinds and the ones we used to collect, some of them can be eaten raw.

There are raspberries on the canes, shriveled and not many but they are red. I suck those, their sweetness, sourness, piercing in my mouth, teeth crackling on the seeds. Into the trail, tunnel, cool of the trees, as I walk I search the ground for shapes I can eat, anything. Provisions, they will provide, they have always favored survival.

I find the six-leaved plants again, two of them, and dig up the crisp white roots and chew them, not waiting to take them back to the lake to wash them. Earth caked beneath my jagged nails.

The mushrooms are still there, the deadly white one, I’ll save that till I’m immune, ready, and the yellow food, yellow fingers. By now many of them are too old, wrinkled, but I break off the softer ones. I hold them in my mouth a long time before swallowing, they taste musty, mildewed canvas, I’m not sure of them.

What else, what else? Enough for a while. I sit down, wrapping myself in the blanket which is damp from the grass, my feet have gone cold. I will need other things, perhaps I can catch a bird or a fish, with my hands, that will be fair. Inside me it is growing, they take what they require, if I don’t feed it it will absorb my teeth, bones, my hair will thin, come out in handfuls. But I put it there, I invoked it, the fur god with tail and horns, already forming. The mothers of gods, how do they feel, voices and light glaring from the belly, do they feel sick, dizzy? Pain squeezes my stomach, I bend, head pressed against knees.

Slowly I retrace the trail. Something has happened to my eyes, my feet are released, they alternate, several inches from the ground. I’m ice-clear, transparent, my bones and the child inside me showing through the green webs of my flesh, the ribs are shadows, the muscles jelly, the trees are like this too, they shimmer, their cores glow through the wood and bark.

The forest leaps upward, enormous, the way it was before they cut it, columns of sunlight frozen; the boulders float, melt, everything is made of water, even the rocks. In one of the languages there are no nouns, only verbs held for a longer moment.

The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.

I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning.

I break out again into the bright sun and crumple, head against the ground.

I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place

I have to get up, I get up. Through the ground, break surface, I’m standing now; separate again. I pull the blanket over my shoulders, head forward.

I can hear the jays, crying and crying as if they’ve found an enemy or food. They are near the cabin, I walk toward them up the hill. I see them in the trees and swooping between the trees, the air forming itself into birds, they continue to call.

Then I see her. She is standing in front of the cabin, her hand stretched out, she is wearing her gray leather jacket; her hair is long, down to her shoulders in the style of thirty years ago, before I was born; she is turned half away from me, I can see only the side of her face. She doesn’t move, she is feeding them: one perches on her wrist, another on her shoulder.

I’ve stopped walking. At first I feel nothing except a lack of surprise: that is where she would be, she has been standing there all along. Then as I watch and it doesn’t change I’m afraid, I’m cold with fear, I’m afraid it isn’t real, paper doll cut by my eyes, burnt picture, if I blink she will vanish.

She must have sensed it, my fear. She turns her head quietly and looks at me, past me, as though she knows something is there but she can’t quite see it. The jays cry again, they fly up from her, the shadows of their wings ripple over the ground and she’s gone.

I go up to where she was. The jays are there in the trees, cawing at me; there are a few scraps on the feeding tray still, they’ve knocked some to the ground. I squint up at them, trying to see her, trying to see which one she is; they hop, twitch their feathers, turn their heads, fixing me first with one eye, then the other.