Adventure classics -- Reading, writing can get you killed

The Handmaid’s Tale

by Margaret Atwood

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I wasn’t thinking about Malala Yousafzai when I chose Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, for this month’s July of science fiction classics. To my mind, Handmaid’s rigidly defined gender roles seemed more about reproductive freedom than literacy. Who could imagine a world where unauthorized possession of writing materials carried a death sentence?

Unfortunately, Malala Yousafzai can. She, of course, is the teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting education for girls in Pakistan.

In a bizarre attempt at self-justification, a Taliban leader later wrote Ms. Yousafzai, explaining that she wasn’t shot for being an advocate of education. She was shot instead for her “pen” -- for using her education to criticize them. Which didn’t stop the now sixteen-year-old from proclaiming at the United Nations, “One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.”

It’s with more subdued bravado that the heroine of The Handmaid’s Tale cherishes the message she finds in her owner’s house, “scratched with a a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

“It was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came next. It pleases me to ponder this messages. It pleases me to think I’m communing with her, this unknown woman.”

The unnamed narrator is known only as “Offred,” from the name of her owner Fred, an elite official within the near-future country of Gilead, formed from the remnants of the United States after a military coup. After murdering the president and Congress (an act
initially blamed on “Islamic terrorists”), Gileadites suspend the constitution and enforce a stringent caste system based on gender. Among these castes are the legalized concubines known as “handmaids,” assigned to produce children for childless members of the Gilead elite.

During a failed escape attempt, her husband is killed and their daughter given to a childless couple. The narrator is given the choice between accepting a handmaid’s life as a walking reproductive organ or becoming and “unwoman” exiled to painful death in “colonies” poisoned by radioactive pollution. .

She chooses life, reasoning, “all you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.” Except she only has three chances to produce a child by the elderly -- and mostly sterile -- men she’s assigned to or she’ll end up in the colonies anyway. And now she’s on that third chance.

“How did you know (in 1985) this was going to happen in the Middle East,” a listener asked Atwood at her appearance this spring in connection with the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arts and Letters program.

Atwood’s answer was that, although the novel was written shortly after the 1979 Iranian Revolutions, it’s not simply a cautionary tale about the Middle East.  The horror, she insisted, lies in “watching how quickly a country -- any country -- can change when a determined group gets into power.”

For more about Atwood and her writing -- and her insistence that The Handmaid’s Tale is not, in fact science fiction -- I like her nonfiction volume, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. It, Handmaid, and more are, for now, readily available on Amazon.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics opens an August of adventures at sea with Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World.)

Adventure classics -- In the heart of the beast

The Island of Dr. Moreau

by H.G. Wells

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In deciding to devote the month of July to a discussion of classic science fiction I find myself searching, not for the first time, how to describe this genre. Two modern practitionerst, Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, famously disagree on every criteria except one -- the ability of all not-quite-real fictions to tackle subjects too sweeping for mere realism to address.

I’m going to say I know science fiction when I read it, so I can shoehorn the social commentary of H.G. Wells’ 1896 work, The Island of Dr. Moreau, as well as dystopian near-futurism, humor, and a bit of space opera into a single category for this month’s discussions.

Wells opens The Island of Dr. Moreau with the hyperrealism beloved by writers tempting us to believe their outrageous stories -- an introduction by a supposed relative of the narrator, Edward Prendick, supplying dates, latitude and longitude, and name of the ships whose wreck opens Prendick’s adventure.

Prendick is then rescued by a sinister vessel carrying a cargo of exotic animals and two passengers -- failed medical student Montgomery and his strange companion. Once arrived at its destination, Prendick is forced to disembark also, landing on a remote island governed by the notorious Dr. Moreau.

Moreau’s specialty of vivisection -- surgery conducted for experimental purposes -- has made him persona non grata in Europe. Although Prendick professes to have studied biology with Darwin’s advocate, T.H. Huxley, at first he shows no interest in the happenings of Dr. Moreau’s laboratory, simply trying to ignore the sounds of agony from the experiments and completely failing to connect them with the island’s odd-looking inhabitants.
But when the nature of the screams changes from animal to human, Prendick believes Moreau is trying to transform human beings into beasts. Fearing he is intended as one of Moreau’s victims, Prendick flees -- and at last learns the true nature of the experiments. Dr. Moreau, like Dr. Frankenstein before him, is trying to create not beasts, but human beings, this time from surgically-modified animals. And yes, he cuts and stitches creatures who never existed, such as a mock-satyr, just because he can.

“An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters,“ Atwood writes in Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, “keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of humankind: science.”

“We do not recommend The Island of Dr. Moreau to readers of sensitive nerves,” a contemporary reviewer in April 11, 1896, edition of The Spectator magazine stated, with no apparent understanding that Wells’ book was anything more than a protest against vivisectionism. This, however, doesn't unexplain the story's power to transcend its time.
 
Atwood attempts an explanation, comparing the story to the tale of another shipwreck survivor, The Ancient Mariner, “which revolves around man’s proper relation to Nature and concludes that this proper relation is one of love.” The Island of Dr. Moreau also contemplates this relationship, but with a twist.

Prendick first saw the beast people of Dr. Moreau as degraded humans. At the end, he finds himself unable to see his fellow human beings as anything other than degraded beasts. The curse he lives under is more terrible than the Ancient Mariner’s wanderings -- the inability to love either humanity or Nature.

For a discussion of science fiction between master practitioners Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, see “Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin debate science fiction” at http://io9.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction and hubris with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon.)

Wordcraft -- Atwood's reimagined myth

“A duck, a demigoddess, and a dozen housemaids walk into a bar in Hades and --”

Wait, this is where I’m required to give the standard disclaimer for jokes -- “tell me if you’ve heard this before.” But I guarantee you’ve never heard the Odyssey the way prolific Canadian author Margaret Atwood recounted her version for a packed audience in Dallas last Friday night. Atwood’s appearance as part of the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arts and Letters Live series had to be moved from the museum to a larger venue in the sanctuary of the century-old First Presbyterian Church to accommodate demand for tickets.  

The DMA’s current special exhibit is “The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece.“ And considering that Atwood’s novella, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, is a re-envisioning of an ancient myth, it was understandable that the DMA introduced her talk as a discussion of how myths had influenced her work. Atwood tweaked that hope with a free-ranging discussion of everything from comic book superhero Captain Marvel, to her high school’s “only home economics opera” -- starring the three Fates ( make that the three Fabrics, Orlon, Nylon, and Dacron), to her love-hate relationship with technology.

The story behind The Penelopiad is the story of the Trojan War and the subsequent wanderings of the Greek warrior Odysseus. This time, it’s told from the viewpoint of Odysseus’ wife Penelope who “waited twenty years, didn’t ask a lot of questions when he got back, and did a lot of home ec,” in Atwood’s summary of the classic.

Penelope makes up for her silence in The Penelopiad, written about her life after death in the underworld; the twelve housemaids her husband hanged for consorting with his wife’s suitors during his absence; and Penelope’s detestation for Helen of Troy, fathered by the god Zeus when he took the form of a swan. (Some believe Penelope’s name means “duck,” in honor of birds who rescued her from drowning as an infant. Even after death, Helen, at least in Atwood’s telling, will refer to Penelope condescendingly as “little duck.”)

“I came to write this book because my publisher was doing a mythology series,” Atwood explained. “What should I do? Then I remembered the maids in the Odyssey.” The housemaids, understandably annoyed at being strung up, confront Penelope, chorus-like, after they all enter Hades.

To give some idea of Atwood’s quips, I’ll turn the microphone over to her.

Q. What were your childhood mythological influences? A. “The Royal Ontario Museum’s Greek and Roman collection, and its mummies. Mostly the mummies. There’s just something fascinating to children about preserved dead people. More so than pictures of naked men. Even naked men doing athletic things.”

Q. What’s your favorite quotation from a classical author? A. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. (Translation expurgated.)

Q. What’s your favorite book? A. “That’s a question I don’t answer. But it’s always the one I’m about to write next.”

Q. How do you feel about technology for writers? A. “Only do it if you’re comfortable with it. People can usually tell if you hate it. Blogging is like having your own radio show. And Twitter is like having a party. But only plugging your own books is boring and then nobody’s going to invite you to another party.”

Q. How would you teach students to write? A. “Jokes are good. A joke is probably the shortest form of story a person can tell.”

So with Atwood’s permission, I’ll end my joke from the beginning of this blog. “The duck says to the demigoddess, who’s your daddy? And the demigoddess says, Zeus if I know. Stop! say the housemaids. We’re at the end of our rope!”

For more about Atwood and her writing, see www.margaretatwood.ca/.

(Next Monday, Wordcraft returns to last week’s discussion of crime scenes and appropriate poisons and explosives.)