First published in 1972 by McClelland & Stewart, Surfacing is Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood's second novel. Already recognised by the writing and publishing community at large as a powerful and eloquent poet -- The Circle Game, a collection of poems published in 1966, was awarded the Governor General's Prize for poetic excellence - most of her early prose work is written in a style that may as well be poetry, shot through with lyrical imagery and extended metaphor.
This novel is no different. It is relatively succinct; the trade paperback version that I have, yellowed with age and worn at the edges, runs less than two hundred pages. Its concision does nothing to detract from its poignancy, or its enduring relevance.
Surfacing is Atwood at her most subtly cynical, attacking some of the most sensitive issues imaginable during the early 1970s, when Canada was gradually growing into itself as a nation and Canadians were beginning to emerge from their apathy and question what it was exactly that made them different from anyone else.
Imagine Canada in 1972. The October Crisis has left the entire country shaken, fearful of their own safety in a world where not even government officials are safe from terrorists and martial law is the only recourse. The Front de Libération du Québec is by no means defeated by the War Measures Act, invoked to quash the insurrection; the radical separatist movement goes deeper underground, and the issue of whether Québécois extremists ought to continue agitating for sovereignty (and if so, what is to come of it) is a pressing issue on everyone's mind.
The late 1960s have seen the sudden growth of public interest in the plight of Canada's First Nations peoples, many of them living in abject poverty on government-sanctioned reserves and all of them oppressed under law for nearly a century by the Indian Act. New legislation -- Jean Chrétien's White Paper on Indian Affairs, under Trudeau -- and a subsequent flood of protest seek to change the situation for the better, but it doesn't work exactly as planned: by the time the novel is published, Canadian aboriginal concerns and grievances are once again all but unheard.
To the south, the United States is still embroiled in an ugly, unjust, brutal war in Vietnam, as it has been since the early 1960s. Civil unrest is rampant, and thousands avoid compulsory military service by finding refuge in Canada. This is the social background of the novel; it weighs in heavily and finds voice in numerous conflicts that develop and resolve themselves into different conflicts as it progresses.
The plot centres around a young female visual artist, nameless and faceless, who travels with her lover Joe and a couple of friends to the back woods of northern Québec where she grew up. She is searching for her father, who has vanished without a trace. Overwhelmed by memories of her childhood, an abortion and failed marriage, and her father and his apparent death by drowning, she retreats into a dissociative dream world where her companions are her enemies and it is only through madness that she can find healing.
It is no coincidence that Atwood's protagonist is all but anonymous. In fact it's a necessary indulgence: in being no-one in particular, she can also be anyone at all, a sort of Everyman figure for anyone who's ever suddenly come to realise that they don't know who they are anymore. Of course the feeling can apply to any single person -- in this protagonist we can see every talented but burnt-out and disillusioned Toronto entrepreneur who's too tired to keep up with the competition. But we needn't restrain our vision to just individual instances; on a grander and more ambitious scale, the narrator's frustrations and hang-ups reflect those of Canada as a whole during the 1970s. She is searching for her father, and we are searching for our roots, and therein lies one of the most pressing questions that Atwood has to offer: how can anyone understand where they're going if they can't remember where they came from?
Trying to make sense of the past, it is sometimes easiest to start at the very beginning: in Surfacing this jumping-off point is Canada's First Nations peoples, viewed through the lens of the petroglyphs they left behind.
It was no easy thing to be an aboriginal in Canada in the 1960s. The Indian Act which governed the way that the First Nations had to live was outdated -- though it had seen several rounds of minor amendments, it was still nearly the same as it had been when it was passed by Parliament in 1876 -- and unjust to begin with, denying even some of the most basic human rights to the people it controlled. The White Paper on Indian Affairs, drafted in 1969, was an early attempt to address this injustice, borne of Trudeau's idealistic vision of a "just society" wherein all people are equal regardless of race or background or any other factors that might influence their social standing in a less fair world.
In a disturbingly ironic twist, the White Paper's aims were precisely the same as those of the Act that it was intended to repeal: that is, to phase out distinctions of "status" and "non-status" Indians, making everyone equal in the eyes of the law. The Indian Act proposed to do so in stages by encouraging intermarriage between whites and natives, while the White Paper suggested immediate integration, but the end result would be the same - the unique status of the First Nations and the value that their cultures hold would be lost.
There was enough public outcry from First Nations political activists that plans for the White Paper were shelved for good in 1971, but the damage had been done. Suggesting assimilation implied that the culture to be absorbed didn't warrant preservation, in much the same vein as Lord Durham's cavalier and condescending assessment of French Canada in 1848: "a people with no literature and no history." Hardly civilised; barely human at all.
This is the way in which the First Nations are portrayed in Surfacing. We don't even see any of them directly; just as in Canadian society at the time, they are mostly hidden from public view, tucked away on reserves and in residential schools, and the only evidence we have of them is older than we can imagine, dating back to before the nation was colonised. Searching for her father, the narrator follows a trail of cryptic clues left in his notes that seem to point toward cliff paintings -- but there are no people associated with them. The First Nations are belittled to an archaeological novelty, and a useless one at that: she follows the trail through to its conclusion, and finds nothing at all. The petroglyphs are static, unmoving and unmoved by the concerns of the modern age, and because of this they can hold no answers. These are not the roots we are looking for.
The tension between the English and the French in Canada has been a defining characteristic of our nation since French colonists in what had been New France fell under British rule. Mostly, it is a story of mistrust and misunderstanding: bad blood and old grudges long-held from European intrigues were brought to the colonies by French and English settlers alike, and the language and religion gap did little to help resolve their differences.
Centuries later there is still mistrust. The narrator recalls growing up Anglophone in a small town in northern Québec, a region that's almost exclusively Francophone, and the trouble that came with it -- alienation from her peers, the wrath of adults and older children when she confused the practices of French Roman Catholicism with those of English Protestantism, the frustration of being able to hear words in a different language without understanding what they mean. Returning home after years away, she finds little fundamentally different about the village nearest her home. The people are still the same, hardly visibly aged even, and their French is still inscrutable, the forest is still dark and overgrown, but somehow none of the similarities are reassuring.
The one change that matters is that her father is gone. He was able to mediate between his family's Anglophone heritage and the Francophone culture that surrounded them, negotiating an uneasy truce borne of necessity to bridge the culture gap. Now that he is gone, there is no familiarity anymore -- and so this conflict, between French and English, cannot possibly resolve itself into stability. The already-fragile protagonist is pushed even closer to madness, thrown into a panic by the precariousness of teetering on the edge of sanity with no secure identity to cling to. Evidently, there are no answers here either.
A final, desperate, and peculiarly Canadian attempt to find real self-knowledge manifests itself in the protagonist's resolute efforts to differentiate herself and her companions from the American interlopers. Ask nearly any Canadian writer to explain the difference between Canadians and Americans and they will tell you that Canadians are more sensitive to cases of mistaken identity than their American counterparts: we pride ourselves on being a gently self-deprecating and generally all-round nice people, as opposed to partaking in stereotypical American arrogance, and take deep offence at the notion that perhaps we are not so different from our southern neighbours as we might like.
This bland Canadian niceness, and its concomitant distaste for meddling in foreign affairs, dictated an almost inherent opposition to American foreign policy, namely American involvement in Vietnam. This shows itself in the novel through numerous references, laden with disgust, to the "flag-waving Americans" who would come to this remote area of the country on fishing expeditions, sometimes with paid Québécois guides to keep them out of trouble, sometimes (more disastrously) independently, and either way brashly and invasively destroying the locale for the locals.
Hurling insults at the Americans from afar is a favourite pastime of David, the protagonist's friend and the husband of Anna; he and the others can find common ground in their common hatred of all things American, no matter that it is unqualified. Thus it is almost inevitable that when another group on a fishing expedition that has been labelled and dismissed by David as nothing more than another clutch of American tourists is revealed to be in fact Canadian after all, the resulting cognitive dissonance is almost enough to knock the narrator off the precipice she's balanced on.
Trying to establish oneself in this way, by cultivating a mentality of "Us versus Them", doesn't prove anything at all about one's nature -- it is a starting point, certainly, but there's nothing to it but outline. Defining a Canadian as someone who is not an American is not a definition at all; it is tautological, circular, and can't possibly stand up to scrutiny. That the protagonist falls to pieces as soon as They are revealed to be a part of Us (or that We are the same as Them) is further proof of the illogic. With the collapse of her final effort to find a stable identity for herself, the protagonist's sanity collapses also, and she flees from her cabin and her companions into the forest.
The novel ends here, in unsolvable madness. It has to; having run through the list of possible sources for a unified, stable identity -- pre-colonial roots, too immutable to be relevant in this particular changing world, the lack of an easy resolution of Anglo-French conflict, differentiation from other cultures to prove one's own autonomy -- and found all of them wanting, Margaret Atwood hasn't got an answer to the problem of what constitutes the Canadian identity. The best that the narrator can hope for is to become familiar to and at peace with herself, on her own terms, and perhaps this can serve as a lesson for anyone seeking a similar state. Surfacing must necessarily come crashing to a conclusion exactly where it begins: alone, independent of external influences, where "[t]he lake is quiet, the trees surround [one], asking and giving nothing."
Sources:
http://www.amazon.ca
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca
Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973.