The Future of Death in the Novel: Margaret Atwood’s Post-Apocalyptic Novel

Note: The following text is a recovered transcript (mostly unedited) of a guest lecture given to students in the “Great Books” course at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen, shortly before the latest Ukrainian-Russian conflict.

The Landscape of Death

I planned for today to provide you with a lecture on some important texts by a Canadian author named Margaret Atwood. These texts are important precisely because we are often told that they are important. They are upheld by the people for whom they are intended to speak; and they are presumed to transmit something singular about what it means to be among them. We are even told that we must read them to unlock the mysteries of what it means to be Canadian. This is perhaps most true of the short story “Death by Landscape,” which you are reading alongside the book “Oryx and Crake.” These two stories were brought to my attention years ago by a professor in the Canadian Studies and Cultural Studies departments at Trent University, in Ontario, Canada. The first text really left an impression upon me, though I cannot say for what reason it has done so. This is perhaps even why it has left an impression.

Of course I do plan to discuss these texts with you. And if you are particularly attentive then you will have noticed that I’ve already been discussing them, even with some precision. I do so in my own way, which means that I make use of a style that is tragically and irrevocably my own. It is this concept of style that I aim to highlight for you. I was reminded (after reading a short text by Alasdair Duncan in The Lacanian Review) that it is a ‘technical’ rather than ‘everyday’ concept for psychoanalysts. One only ever teaches according to one’s style, and yet it is nonetheless difficult to teach the concept of style. This obviously presents us with some difficulties. Yet, it hasn’t stopped me from introducing the concept in some of my classes. Why? Because it offers a counterpoint to pedagogies that rely upon interpretations of meaning. To interpret at the level of meaning is often the temptation of students, and it is even frequently solicited by their professors. I guess that means that I’m not quite meant for the university.

The concept of style was also important in the work of Jacques Lacan. He even gave it a special place within his Ecrits, deploying it within an epigraph: “the style is the man himself.” It is a technical concept that cannot be reduced to any definition, template, or formula. It cannot be written onto a powerpoint slide and then repeated back to the professor on the test. This is what makes me wonder if the university is the best place to teach about style, particularly since students demand material — definitions, formulas, and so on — by which they themselves can be assessed. In any case, I’ll get to the point: what is a style? Well, once upon a time Lacan raised the question himself. I’ll quote him:

I have a style, one that, naturally, isn’t altogether easy. That’s the entire problem. What is a style? […] For myself, at the time when I used to speak with my colleagues, the most natural thing was to say, ‘it’s not exactly that;’ and if what I wrote after saying it, elaborating on what I said, is at all distinctive, it’s because it carries the mark of my attempt to grasp as tightly as possible what that is, exactly. Of course, it’s not easy.

He claims that it is something difficult because it’s not that. I take this expression — it’s not that — to mean that style refers to something missing. It is missing, for example, from any meaningful interpretation, any definition. Moreover, it is related to something that repeats precisely as missing, something which never ceases not to be that. This presumes that you cannot remove yourself of that which is missing, or cure yourself of it. It is something that remains with you, repeating, fixed in its place, as a remainder. To give an imprecise example: Oscar Wilde was once put in prison for sodomy, and this, of course, was related, in the minds of many, to the way he dressed — his fashion sense. The imprisonment was meant to teach him a lesson, to prohibit his mode of enjoyment. Yet on the day he left prison it was recorded that he wore a long dark overcoat and a silk hat. The prison could not take away his style.

What can be done with this remainder? Can you teach a class on it or write a short story about it? This is a question that is of interest to psychoanalysts. I want to introduce a distinction which allows us to relate the technical concept of style to the repetition of missingness. Style unfolds in relation to that which never ceases not being written. Let us make a distinction, then, knowing that it is not exactly an opposition of two concepts since these two concepts are in fact related to one another: lack and hole. The best way to introduce what is at stake in this distinction is through a structural homology that I extract from the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud made a distinction between ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholia,’ each of which are, respectively, modalities of loss: the former targets ‘lack’ and the latter targets ‘hole.’

Put simply, those who mourn have lost something, such as a toy or a loved one to whom he or she was once attached. This can only occur when you believe that there is something already there to lose, and then, for one reason or another, the object or person goes missing and it must eventually be substituted. This, precisely, is the point: a substitution is possible; or, at least, that is the belief. In this case you have already been deceived, which is not a bad thing. You believe that you had something to lose in the first place. If you believe this then it is easy enough to get something else to replace what you lack — it will never work, but you will do so. This is the process of mourning. On the other hand, ‘hole’ targets a loss of this very space of loss, the loss of the lack itself. This has profound effects of melancholia upon the subject who experiences it. In melancholia, the problem is not that the subject experiences something that has gone missing but rather that the very space of lack is lacking; which means, in a paradoxical way, that nothing is missing at all.

The hole is this type of loss that reveals an abundance. When the very space of loss is lost, there remains too much. Lack is always proof that there is not too much of something, which means that you are found wanting. But with hole, the lack itself goes missing. It is foreclosed; you do not accept the space of lack. The coordinates which would have sustained a world, a space of desire, has gone missing. According to Lacan, lack emerges within the context of a fundamental prohibition — a ‘No!’ — against too much. Where there is lack there is never enough to satisfy you, but where there is hole, it is never a question of something missing. It is rather a question concerning the pervasiveness of loss, the too much of what is missing, such that it repeats, and can be found everywhere. It follows from this that melancholia is a reluctance to lose since the prohibitions are missing: the laws of a world do not properly function to tranquilize too much.

This is why I have claimed in my other classes that you cannot have anarchism without melancholy, cannot have real love without melancholy, and, indeed, you cannot claim that there has been a formation of psychoanalysis without melancholia; in other words, no anarchism, love, or psychoanalysts without clinical depression. I have been harping on this point in a number of ways. For example, in the frequently repeated narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice, the former goes into the underworld to retrieve his lost love Eurydice. My claim has been that he never had her in the first place, and, moreover, that he had to lose her in order to convince himself that he ever had something to lose. And style has something to do with the manner in which one persists within the space of this hole, and the manner through which one invents a way of making-use of this remainder which repeats as missing. Style is always a way of making-use of the unspeakable within the context of melancholia.

It is what we see clearly in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. For example, it is what is at stake in his short story “The Purloined Letter.” Lacan took this text up as one of the central pieces in his Ecrits, “The Seminar on the Purloined Letter.” In any case, Poe wrote the Purloined Letter as one of three detective stories. The main character is an amateur detective named Dupin, who is asked to discuss a case with the prefect of police. A letter was stolen — it no doubt was filled with something perverse that, in today’s time, we would consider worthy of cancellation — from the queen’s bedroom. The letter was switched with another, and the person who stole the original has been blackmailing the queen. The story follows the letter, which, as far as I can tell, was never actually read; the contents of the letter were never revealed. Here is the point, however: the letter gets passed around in full view, and, although it is hidden in plain sight, it is never seen.

Lacan gives an example. Suppose that a book goes missing in a library, and yet it was not checked out by anybody: “when speaking of a volume lost in a library […] even if the book is on an adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visibly it may appear.” According to the library computer system, the book is still in the library. Yet, it is not in its proper place, though it is properly tagged by the Dewey Decimal System. Perhaps you therefore go looking for it. In some sense, you might begin to see it everywhere, on every shelf. I have even found myself in this situation many times. I was looking for a book, knowing that it was misplaced because the librarian informed me that it wasn’t checked out. Yet, it is not in its proper place. So, I go looking, and while looking I begin to think that I see it everywhere; I pull books out here and there, imagining that it must be there. What is missing continues to be missing, in abundance.

Okay, I will return to my thread. I would claim that Margaret Atwood also has a style. “Oryx and Crake” is a story about the end of the world. And yet, what we discover, from the vantage point of the main characters, is that, finally, the world has already ended. The very space in which hope might be found has been lost. Anybody who reads Atwood would tell you that she has a style. It is as recognizable as Chekhov or Dostoyevsky in Russia. Yet, it is difficult to state precisely what that style is; this is what nobody can say directly or easily. According to most commentators, her style is resolutely — which means irrevocably and tragically — Canadian. I see no reason to disagree with this except that I feel compelled to add that this Canadian style has nothing to do with the nation. Rather, it has something to do with this signifier, “Canada,” which is, to put it simply, a stupid sound. It is a stupid sound, and we should be prepared to take it as such: outside of its meaning. Canadians should know this better than others because we have a history which informs us of this fact: when the French explorer Jacques Cartier approached the indigenous population in a village of what is now known as Central Canada, he asked them what they called the land. He received the response: “Kanata.”

To put it frankly, Cartier’s interpretation of this sound is a testimony of European stupidity. The indigenous sound ‘Kanata’ meant something like ‘small village’ or ‘social group,’ and yet Cartier interpreted it to mean that it was the entire country, the nation. Moreover, Cartier invested the meaning ‘small village’ with metonymic power, using it to represent ‘all’ people. I would say that Cartier was a student of the indigenous population. In any case, sounds like these are evocative, in their way, and they lead some toward nationalist interpretations. This would be as much a mistake today as it was in Cartier’s time. The sound resonates and leaves its impression upon a group of people. It has been chiseled into the mental landscapes of an entire group, setting some of them to work so that they might produce cultural achievements like Atwood’s “Death by Landscape.” Yet, this achievement — is it an achievement that reduces the sound to some imaginary representation of a group of people? I do not believe so.

These achievements resonate because they transmit a style. What is at stake in Atwood’s work is not a moral lesson about climate change, or even a lesson about what it means, ultimately, to be among this imaginary social group known as “Canadian.” What is at stake is a style that we might call Canadian, which has nothing to do with any meaning that is transmitted or interpreted. We are wrong to conflate style with interpretations of meaning. What are the differences between the Russian and Canadian styles? For us, in this course, they are like bookends, since you opened the course with Anton Chekhov and you are now ending it with Margaret Atwood. Yet, in separating the two you perhaps miss the way they resonate with one another. When I read Chekhov, for example, it is as if, in some way, I have read Atwood. Yet, they tell different stories. There is certainly a darkness in each of them, a melancholia: something is missing. A vast wilderness, a limitless space, defines the Russian cultural landscape just as much as it defines the Canadian. In this, we share something important. Yet, there is an inability to express each one, something that cannot be said except in the singular style of one’s literature, painting, and so on. This darkness is threaded throughout the greatest works written, spoken, painted, orchestrated, and so on. For example, Atwood reminds us, in “Death by Landscape,” that it was already there in the paintings from the famous group of seven. These are early Canadian landscape artists who painted vast limitless terrains of Canadian wilderness. In their paintings, there were no humans, and yet, the missing humans were everywhere staring back at us: behind every rock and tree, as Atwood put it.

It is up to you to discover it. But what do you discover there? You discover something missing: the loss of the space of lack, which means that it is a limitless space of abundance. I hesitate to provide a literal reading of the text, but perhaps the following will be of some help for some of you. In “Death by Landscape,” what happens? Louis is a person who has experienced profound loss: her children have grown up and moved away, and her husband passed away. Moreover, she lost her old home and now finds herself in a new one. She looks at the wall of paintings from the group of seven, pieces which she has collected because they evoked something in her, leaving their impression. Here is a photo of the seven painters:

This photo does not show all of the painters, and there is even a person here who is not among the ‘group of seven.’ But the painters’ names are: Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley. Soon A. J. Casson, Edwin Holgate, and LeMoine FitzGerald became members. Here is a painting by Tom Thomson, who is also associated with the group, titled “The Jack Pine,” 1916–1917.

To give you a glimpse of the style of some of these paintings, in a rather quick way, look at these: https://mcmichael.com/collection/group-of-seven/

Louis is in her new place, after her husband and children have long gone missing, and she is staring at some of these paintings. She looks at them and she doesn’t at all claim that something is missing in them. Rather, she claims that something was “in them,” and, despite the fact that you might consider nature to be peaceful, she sees it as profoundly violent. There is too much to the painting. It is not that people are missing in them, but that, somehow, there are people staring back at her from everywhere in the painting. If we comb through the text we will find a surplus of evidence of the fact that the paintings were too much.

She then discusses a memory of visiting a canoe camp at the age of 13, and she was with others her age, within the “trackless wilderness.” Note this word, “trackless,” which implies that the place is so abandoned that there are not even tracks to indicate that something was ever there in the first place. The location is Camp Minatou. This is not an ordinary camp, I would say: it is a camp filled with young women. There are no men in the camp. And it is a camp that makes enjoyment unbearable, compulsory. Louis, the narrator, tells us that the compulsory enjoyment was difficult: loud cheerfulness was always required, banging spoons and singing. Once again, we can see the too much; in this case, it is too much enjoyment, too much compulsory enjoyment, and no prohibitions — no rules against behaviours, and so on.

It reminds me of an example I often give in some of my other classes: the American talk-show host Ellen DeGenerous. She comes out day after day dancing and enjoying herself. And I often claim that this must be a terrible way to live: to be forced to enjoy oneself in such a manner. It must be immensely painful. Consider, for example, that when you are in the most pain, you must go out, onto the stage, and smile as if you are enjoying yourself. There is even an entire NetFlix show about this titled “Nosedive,” an episode of the popular series “Black Mirror.” It is a story precisely about this pain of being forced to enjoy yourself. Louis, for her part, hated that she had to try to “show that you were enjoying yourself.” Yet, at the same time, as she put it, she could not complain because the camp cost too much money for her parents. This, I maintain, is how depression functions: it functions in a world where there are no prohibitions upon your enjoyment, where you are free to enjoy yourself and so you have nobody to blame. It produces terrifying situations that we must ourselves bear: nightmares, wetting the bed, crying, and so on; which is what Louis claims that she witnessed among the girls in the camp.

Lucy was her friend, and, since there was nobody to prohibit them being so close to one another — they indeed remained close. We are told that they were intertwined with one another, like a mother and a daughter; perhaps like a mother and a daughter whose father has gone missing. This missing father — this missing prohibitory function — is realized very obviously in the way Lucy rejected her own father, as well as her stepfather, belittling them: she didn’t want to live with her real father, and when she witnessed her mother disrespecting her stepfather by cheating on him with another man, Lucy even encouraged it: “it serves him right.” Yet, we are not told why it serves him right. Why this coldness and cruelty to men? Why this absence of men in the story? We must conclude, I think, that it is meant to demonstrate a lack of respect for the prohibitory function, for the father function; such that the mother and daughter are intertwined. It is not a moral position I am taking, nor am I implying that I take the side of ‘men,’ somehow. It is simply an observation.

Okay, but there is no time to develop this further today. What happened next? These two intertwined little girls go to the top of a cliff, a place named “lookout point.” It is the place from which the hole looks back at her, a place from which one dangles off of the edge of the precipice before falling. A shout was heard, and it was repeated, over and over again: it wasn’t a shout of fear, not a scream. It was a cry of surprise. This is what we are told: I would almost claim that it was meant to be a cry of enjoyment. And then Lucy disappeared: “she was not in sight.” It was at this point that Louis felt panic, anxiety: “the panic of a small child who does not know where the bigger ones are.” In other words, it is the panic of confronting the hole, where the prohibitions are not operative and lack ceases to exist. She looked over the edge, and “there is nothing.”

At this point she begins to discuss the difficulties of telling a narrative about something like this, about the ‘hole,’ precisely. The newspapers will soon write about it, she claims: “But what can be said? What can be said that makes any sense?” She needed a story about what happened, a reason, and yet, in the end, it is not possible. And then what happens? The very camp within which the loss of Lucy was made possible goes missing: the Camp itself becomes lost. It is this that stages the central question of the text: how could you ever find anything once it is lost? “Because she is nowhere, she could be anywhere. She is everywhere.” And Atwood writes: “in a landscape, there is no background or foreground. It goes on and on and on. You are everywhere and nowhere. Charged with violent color.” Suddenly, Lucy is everywhere, in every painting, in every picture, in every landscape, behind every rock: precisely as missing, she appears.

This is what happens when the loss of prohibitions occurs and we live within the reign of enjoyment, of too much. What can be said of it? Style is the ability to speak of it — and this story by Atwood certainly has a style.