En Fin

I DON'T KEEP copies of many novels around my place, they pile up and, really most of them I regret reading once.  Mostly I read fiction from the library.  I worked at a library when Handmaid's Tale came out, that's where I read it.  Even then I didn't think it was Atwood's best work. I remain uncontrite at somewhat misremembering the title of it, not being online when I wrote that and not checking when I was.  Compared to the problems with the book and, even more so, the show-biz franchise, my mistake is trivial.

Since the mid 1980s, learning more about Puritan New England, learning the difference between traditional American style liberalism, originating in the commandments of providing liberally for the destitute and poor, in the Puritan tradition of the 17th century and earlier, based firmly in the Jewish* and earliest Christian traditions, tracing the actual history of the great 19th century liberal change movements under America's would-be democracy, abolitionism, Women's suffrage, workers' rights, I saw that the Hollywood-Broadway cartoon version of Puritanism that Atwood used to create her dystopian scare story was historically misinformed.  If you, as Marilynne Robinson does, consider Quakerism as a form of puritanism, one which in the uniform garb of Atwood's novel has some striking similarities, then the difference between puritanism and the fictional future which recreates it couldn't be more apparent.

Like that other mid-to late 20th century use of cartoon puritanism, The Crucible, which I've criticized here for its grotesque dishonesty about actual history, the thing used by fiction is inapt and its danger wildly inaccurate.  In Mary McCarthy's not entirely unfavorable critique of the novel in 1986, she may have been too quick to discount the eventual power of "the Moral Majority" but even given the idea that it would gain power made Atwood's use of puritanism inapt, the Southern Baptist tradition of Jerry Falwell is quite and importantly different from Calvinism, more different than Quakerism is or was.  Its present day political power is based in racism and other forms of extreme, divisive and malignant inequality whereas in most of its present day forms, what Puritanism developed into was far less so.  The United Church of Christ - which I've seen slammed by anti-Christians for its Calvinist roots - is and has long been one of the most egalitarian and liberal (especially in that American sense of the word) institutions in the country. My point is that racism and inequality is entirely compatible with the "liberal democracy" such as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries and into today when it has used the permissions of "free speech" and even more so "free press" to weaponize and encourage racism, sexism, extreme hatred and disregard of the poor, etc. and permission to the most obvious and blatant use of sexual and other violence as "liberty".  The inaptness of believing "liberal democracy" is an adequate sanctuary for those who want what Atwood seems to is that it is exactly the thing that was harnessed by the billionaires, their fascist servants and those they've duped to get us where we are, now.  The control and use of the media is the issue, its permission to lie and promote racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry.  Preventing that is anathema to "liberal democracy" which is a powerful enough thing that Bill Clinton and his administration were chickens, afraid of the flack they would get for taking out the radio tower in Rwanda as it was telling the genocidalists where their prospective victims were hiding.  And their pious civic devotion to "freedom of the press" was the reason they gave for their malignant, amoral non-feasance.

No, my criticism of taking what should have been a scary story and making it into some kind of prophesy of a future is that it doesn't work for the future such as it has developed and it was, as Mary McCarthy pointed out, not especially revelatory of the time it was written.  I think Cat's Eye, though certainly not a spectacularly great novel (those come at a far slower rate than the publishing industry claims) is more likely to reveal something about real life.

This whole business of reading fiction and pretending it's more important than it really is is something I wish people would consider.  Perhaps it got it start among English teachers and writers of fiction, the teachers so they could do something other than teach English grammar and composition, the writers of fiction so they could pretend they were doing something more important than it is.  

If they started teaching reading using non-fiction, not stories but actually informative texts, short ones to start with, gradually longer and more challenging ones, I think we'd be a lot better off than where we are.  I like a good story once in a while but I'm not going to pretend it's important.  Marilynne Robinson's essays are a lot more important than her novels which are, certainly, better than Atwood's.  I have not read the collection of Atwood's writings that, from the review I read of it, contains a number of rather tedious speeches such as those regularly given at PEN conferences as well as some quite good pieces and passages.  I did read a number of them as published in magazines and found those generally very good and at times very insightful.  

That's my last word on this topic, for now.  I've got a feeling Margaret Atwood if she spoke about it would not welcome having become a figure of mid-brow, college-credentialed sacrosanctity.  I certainly feel no obligation to piously regard her as a frozen, plaster saint of secular libertarian liberalism.  I have more respect for her than that.  

*  Yet the stern orthodoxy of their religious practice, which seemed to isolate recent Jewish immigrants from the rest of the city, was closer than they might have thought to the Puritan orthodoxy that had defined the spiritual orientation of the Boston community from its inception.  Years later, noting that "the old Puritan and Jewish beliefs are really quite similar," Bloom appreciated the commonality of these two faiths anchored in the Hebrew Bible and the ascetic spirituality, which became sources of his inspiration.  These synagogue visits left an indelible impression on the child that would draw him back. 

From Boston Modern
Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism