[MUSIC PLAYING] BRODY: I'm Alan Brody. I'm the associate provost
for the arts at MIT. And I want to welcome the
MIT community and everyone else as well to this
2004 Abramowitz Lecture with Margaret Atwood. We're just thrilled
to have you here. And we're certainly thrilled
to have Margaret here as well. Before I begin, let me
just say, unless you are a drug dealer
or an obstetrician, please turn off your
cell phones, pagers. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] BRODY: Thank you. The Abramowitz Lecture
Series was established at MIT through the generosity
and imagination of William L.
Abramowitz, class of '35, as a memorial to his father. It's been sustained
since his death by the devoted interest
of his wife and children. And we lost Lee,
his wife, this year. She was an extraordinary woman,
dedicated to this lecture series, dedicated to MIT,
to the memory of William, and was consistently,
right up until the end, interested in this
series, and sensitive, and excited about the kinds
of things we've been doing. And I personally am going
to miss her a great deal. Since 1961, the
Abramowitz Series has brought renowned performing
artists and writers to MIT to perform, present
public lectures, and always to collaborate
with students and faculty in free programs. Is Dan Epstein here? There is-- I believe there's a
member of the Abramowitz family that we'd like to thank. But he didn't make it. So much for commitment. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: Oh, my god. AUDIENCE: You might
need an overflow room. BRODY: If you're in the
overflow room, thanks so much. [LAUGHTER] I want to introduce
Candis Callison, who was on the Abramowitz
Selection Committee. She's a PhD
candidate now in STS. And she is personally
responsible for bringing Margaret here by delivering
a hand-delivered note to her at the Giller Awards. So, Candice, you'll
speak about Margaret. [APPLAUSE] CALLISON: Yeah, they say
Canada is a small town, but I was really
surprised there's only two degrees of
separation between myself and our esteemed guest today. It's my great
privilege to introduce Margaret Atwood to you. As many of you well know,
she is the prolific author of 16 works of fiction, five
collections of nonfiction, 15 editions of poetry,
and four children's books. And those are just the
major publishers' titles. Her work has won a
long list of honors, including the Booker Prize
and the Giller Prize, Canada's top literary award. I grew up in Canada. And I have to say that the
name Margaret Atwood is and was synonymous with everything that
is great about Canadian fiction and, indeed, what puts Canada on
the map in the literary world. But during the mid-'90s, I began
to understand her as a writer who was at work both in
the so-called real world and in the fictive
worlds she was creating. At that time, as a member and
past president of PEN Canada, she spoke out on behalf of Ken
Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer who faced execution for his
writing and political action in his own country. I remember hearing on
the radio that even Margaret Atwood had spoken out
in support of this writer, who was previously an
obscure figure to me and much of the Canadian public. It was a cue that we had
better sit up and take notice of what was happening
on the other side of the world. Similarly, as the
past couple of years have seen America go to war
in Iraq and Afghanistan, her voice could be found in
newspapers and publications like The Nation, calling
readers to think and act about the events
taking place here and on the other
side of the globe. Perhaps this is why nestled
in amongst her list of prizes for literature and
writing are awards that speak on both her
affect on and involvement with the nonfictive world,
awards like Ms. Magazine's Woman of the Year,
Humanist of the Year, and the Order of Canada,
Canada's top honor to those who have immeasurably
contributed to our society. As I was preparing to
introduce her today, I went online and
read the many rave reviews for Oryx and Crake. And in amongst them
on a message board, I found a posting from an
individual with the summary line "shockingly relevant." This perhaps sums up
her work in general and specifically in
regards to Oryx and Crake. The posting went on
to praise this novel for the creation of an
all-too-recognizable world in which characters grapple with
moral and scientific dilemmas. Again, it seems that it is a
cue to sit up and start thinking with and through
science and technology about the world we are
collectively creating. And perhaps there is no
better crowd than ours at MIT that understands the relevancy
of thinking about society through this sort of lens. So without further
ado, here to talk more about her work and her latest
novel, Margaret Atwood. [APPLAUSE] ATWOOD: Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure
to be here today. I have been at MIT before. As I recall, that event
took place in a corridor, and I'm glad we all
have chairs today. I'm here to talk about my
novel called Oryx and Crake. But before I do that, I'll give
you a little bit of background because people are asking
me things like, how did you do the research? And why were you interested
in this subject, and so forth. It is a book about that
wonderful place called the future in which we can
invent because none of us have ever been there
and come back yet. And I think the
future was what we took to when we no longer sent
fictional characters to places like Hell. Now we've got the future. For a while, we sent them
to uninhabited islands, but we ran out of those. And sometimes we send
them to other universes, but I can't do other universes. So it's this universe,
a little bit further on. And as for The
Handmaid's Tale, I put nothing in it that does not
have its corresponding clipping in the ominous brown
research box in the cellar. That is, nothing is
absolutely pure invention. Although, I have to admit, I
cranked a few things up a bit. However, the spider
goat is with us today. And so is the
luminous green rabbit. I will not hear gasps
of shock from this crowd because you already know that. But some people go, oh, no. Anyway, I, in fact, grew
up amongst the scientists. My father was a biologist. He was an entomologist. These are noteworthy for
producing weird, writer offspring. And indeed, a lot of
biologists write themselves, and a lot of them actually read. And my dad was a great reader. He loved history. He loved fiction. And he was known to burst into
long snatches of memorized Sir Walter Scott poems
and also to give us quizzes on Sherlock Holmes,
as in what Sherlock Holmes story contains the bell
pull and the snake? AUDIENCE: The Speckled Band. ATWOOD: Right. So that's how I grew up. And I thought I was
going to be a biologist. I was headed in that direction. My brother actually became one. He became a marine biologist. And from there, he
went into neuroscience, and now he's pretty
much with the synapse. And when I published my
first book of poetry, he wrote me a congratulatory
letter that said, "Congratulations on publishing
your first book of poetry. I used to do that kind of thing
myself when I was younger." [LAUGHTER] So I've always kept up with
the pop-science reading. And by pop-science
reading, I mean the kind where you don't
have to do the math yourself. I like other people
to do the math and then tell me what
they've found out. But I think that growing
up with a scientist gives you a couple of things. Number one, you're
very observant. You observe details. It's not just a tree. It's a certain kind of tree. And it also makes
you quite skeptical. I don't mean that you're
a cynic or a pessimist. I mean that you question
things because, as you know, in science, an experiment
has to be repeatable and get the same results. So you are always asking
things like, well, how did they come
to that conclusion? How did they do the experiment? And since I spent some time
in market research as well, I have the same
skepticism about polls. I want to know what the
question was and also what the question was that was
asked just before that question because that can skew
the results as well. Oryx and Crake, its structure is
like that of the Iliad, a book it resembles in no other way. But that is, it begins
in the middle of events, and then we go back
in time to find out how we got to that
midpoint, and then we go forward in time to find
out what the protagonist will do next. And at the midpoint
of the story, the protagonist, who
began life as a boy called Jimmy has changed
his name to Snowman. That is not as in
"Frosty the" but as in the Abominable Snowman,
a creature that may or may not exist and may or may
not be semi-human, which is kind of the way
he's feeling about himself when the story opens. He is living in a tree
where he sleeps at night. This is because of the
new and unusual life forms that are running around
on the ground at night. And you'll be happy
to know that I've provided him with duct tape. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] There will be duct
tape in the future. It is with the aid
of this duct tape that he has constructed
the platform on which he spends his nights. He kind of wishes he might be
able to have a fire up there, but he can't. And apart from the
duct tape, he's not really a handy kind of guy. He's not a kind of Boy
Scout sort of person. He is, therefore, unable to
dig the hole in the ground with the pointed stake on
which to impale small game. He can't do that. But he is able to
wield a can opener. This is a skill I would
advise everyone to acquire. And with the aid
of this can opener, he has been opening cans that
he has found left around, and he has been
eating the contents because there are
no other people, as such, in his vicinity. Something has happened to them. We find out in the
course of the plot what, but I would never think
of blowing it for you. Because, shocking as it
may seem to me, some of you may not yet have read this book. There are, however, some
people-like creatures living nearby along with
the luminous rabbits. We've got the luminous
rabbits already, by the way, and some
other animals that have been invented. But these new people
have been improved. And I'll tell you some
of the improvements. I think some of them would be
quite good, thus disproving the question, surely,
you're against science. No. I think it's great
so long as it is for improving types of things. For instance, these people
have built-in sunblock. I think that would be good. That means they don't
need the textile industry, or Vogue magazine, or shopping. They don't need
any of those things because they don't
do any clothes. They have an extra layer of skin
on the bottoms of their feet, giving them a kind of
Birkenstock effect. And they have built-in
mosquito repellent, which I think would
also be a major plus. They do smell like
walking citrus fruits, but that wouldn't be too bad. In addition to that,
they're not only vegetarian. Better, they will
never need agriculture because they can eat
leaves, unlike you and me. We can't digest them. But these people can--
and grass as well. This means that their
digestive systems would have to have been modified. Now, there are two
possible models. One would have been
the cow, but that would have had a less
aesthetically pleasing effect, and these people are
very good looking. So instead, they've
been modified in the direction of the rabbit. If you saw the, I
think a few months ago, National Geographic
with the new, big wheel of life about who's
related to whom, you will have noted
that we are more closely related to the rabbit
than previously thought. So maybe it wouldn't
be too hard. Now, there are some side effects
to having the digestive system of a rabbit. And you will come across
those in the book. But it's a small price to pay. The other modification
they have which I think would be very useful
is that they can purr. The purring is not
to make them cuter. There is, in fact,
grounds to believe-- I did say I cranked
some things up a bit. But there's grounds to believe
that the purring of the cat has a couple of functions. We know that cats purr
when they're happy, but we also know that they
purr when they're in pain. And if you have
ever had a cat, you will know that if you
have been injured or ill, your cat is very likely
to get up on top of you and purr over your
injured part or, indeed, over your whole self if you've
got something like the flu. And you will also know
that if a person walks into your house who
hates and fears cats, your cat will go
immediately to that person. And so, possibly, the purring
is the self-healing aid, and your cat is going over to
that person out of a desire to be helpful and kind-- the only altruistic thing a
cat has ever been known to do. So the people in this book
have got purring because they don't Band-Aids or any other-- they don't have hospitals,
but they do have purring. So they can purr to self-heal. But the very, very, very best
thing of all that they have-- and I think this would
be such an improvement-- instead of being intermittently
monogamous the way we are, they are, instead, seasonal
like most other animals. So they are either in season, in
which case they're interested, or they're not in season,
in which case they're not. And to make things
even more clear, they, like many another
animal, are color-coded so that, when they're in season,
parts of them turn blue. Think how useful that would be. No more, no means
no-- no means yes. No more, I'm washing my hair. And I'll also be washing
my hair next Friday. No more unrequited love. No more pain and
anguish over this issue. You're either in season
or you're not in season. And no more, by the
way, pair-bonding. So there they are. They will never write Othello. In fact, they will
never write anything because they can't write. These people live at some
distance from our protagonist. Why is that? First of all, to them, he looks
pretty strange and monstrous. But also, for him,
they're pretty boring. So he actually doesn't want to
spend too much time with them because they don't
understand him at all, and they don't share many of
the same items of interest. This is his predicament at
the beginning of the book. The two characters
on the front, Oryx, who is a female person, and
Crake, who is a male person, are dead by the time
the book begins. I think this is a
great advantage. What it means is
that we see them only through Jimmy Snowman
and his memories of them. They happen to have
been the two most important people in his life. Oryx was the person he
loved and idealized-- he's quite a romantic-- ever since he first saw her
on an internet porn site. And Crake is his best friend. With him, he went
to high school. Now, at the end of high
school, their paths diverged for a while because
Jimmy was not a numbers person. Jimmy was a words person. Crake, on the other
hand, was good at both. So Crake got to go off to the
very well-funded Watson Crick Institute, and Jimmy was
stuck with the crumbling, falling-apart Martha Graham
Academy, the graduates of which are all going to end up in
advertising in the future. Because in the future, the
arts have somewhat diminished. There is, for instance,
no longer quite the film industry there is
now because people can make their own
films digitally on their very own computers. And Jimmy himself has made
quite an effective naked Pride and Prejudice. So to sum it up, it's a
joke-filmed, fun-packed, rollicking adventure-- [LAUGHTER] adventure story about the
downfall of the human race. Not everybody can get those two
ideas together in their heads. But I think it's a cheering sort
of book, much in the same way that a Christmas Carol is
cheering because Scrooge gets to wake up at the end,
and he gets to say, it was all a horrible dream. I'm not really dead, and
I've got a second chance. And you can wake up at the
end of the book and say, it's only a book. We're on the way. True. But we do still have time,
and we've got a second chance. And the other
reason it's cheering is that, however awful
things may be in your life, they're much worse in the book. I always preferred
that kind of book. I don't like books at all
in which everybody's happy all the time. They depress me no end. This is the only book that
has ever received a fan letter from Kermit the Frog. Kermit sent the fan letter. It's got his picture on it. And he also sent a poem
right on the fan letter. And the poem says, "Oryx
and Crake, Oryx and Crake, a frog by a lake
reading Oryx and Crake." Now, I do not lie. This is true. And I'll tell you why
I got this fan letter. The person who edits The
Sunday Times-- sorry, yes-- The Sunday Times literary
section in London, England, is a person called Erica Wagner. And Erica Wagner
grew up in New York. And her first job
at the age of eight was forging the signature
of Kermit the Frog on all of Kermit's
answers to fan letters because her parents' job was
answering all of the Muppet fan mail. This is a true story. So I think we've got-- I think we put that fan
letter on our website. I'm going to read you a
tiny bit out of the book. It's not the bit I
usually choose to read. But for you, I'll read it. And it might help
explain why Kermit was so taken with this book. It's a conversation between
Crake as a teenager and Jimmy as, now, I guess, they're
both in their early 20s, and they've got together
although they're at different colleges. "'How much misery,' Crake
said, one lunchtime, 'how much needless despair
has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a
misalignment of the hormones and pheromones, resulting in
the fact that the one you love so passionately won't
or can't love you? As a species, we're
pathetic in that way, imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond
for life like gibbons or else opt for a total
guilt-free promiscuity, there would be no
more sexual torment. Better plan-- make
it cyclical and also inevitable as in
the other mammals. You'd never want someone
you couldn't have.' 'True enough.' Jimmy
replied, or Jim, as he was now insisting
without results. Everyone still called him Jimmy. 'But think what
we'd be giving up.' 'Such as?' 'Courtship behavior. In your plan, we'd just be
a bunch of hormone robots.' Jimmy thought he should put
things in Crake's terms, which was why he said
'courtship behavior.' What he meant was the challenge,
the excitement, the chase. 'There would be no free choice.' 'There is courtship behavior
in my plan,' said Crake, 'except that it
would always succeed. And we're hormone robots
anyway, only we're faulty ones.' 'Well, what about art?' said
Jimmy, a little desperately. He was, after all, a student
at the Martha Graham Academy, so he felt some need to defend
the art and creativity turf. 'What about it?' said Crake,
smiling his calm smile. 'All that mismatching
you talk about, it's been an inspiration,
or that's what they say. Think of all the poetry. Think Petrarch. Think John Donne. Think The Vita Nuova. Think--' 'Art,' said Crake, 'I guess
they still do a lot of jabbering about that over where you are. What is it Byron said? Who'd write if they
could do otherwise? Something like that. 'That's what I
mean,' said Jimmy. He was alarmed by the
reference to Byron. What right had Crake to poach
on his own shoddy, threadbare territory? Crake should stick to science
and leave poor Byron to Jimmy. 'What do you mean?' said Crake,
as if coaching a stutterer. 'I mean, when you can't
get the otherwise, then wouldn't you
rather be fucking?' said Crake. He wasn't including
himself in this question. His tone was one of detached
but not very strong interest, as if he were
conducting a survey of people's less-attractive
personal habits, such as nose-picking. Jimmy found that
his face got redder and his voice got squeakier the
more outrageous Crake became. He hated that. 'When any civilization is
dust and ashes,' he said, 'art is all that's left over-- images, words, music,
imaginative structures. Meaning, human meaning,
that is, is defined by them. You have to admit that.' 'That's not quite all that's
left over,' said Crake. 'The archaeologists
are just as interested in gnawed bones, and old
bricks, and ossified shit these days, sometimes
more interested. They think human meaning is
defined by those things too.' Jimmy would like to have said,
'Why are you always putting me down?' But he was afraid of
the possible answers because it's so easy
being one of them. So instead, he said, 'What
have you got against it?' "Against what?' 'Art.' 'Nothing,' said Crake, lazily. 'People can amuse themselves
any way they like. If they want to play with
themselves in public, whack off over doodling,
scribbling, and fiddling, that's fine with me. Anyway, it serves a
biological purpose.' 'Such as?' Jimmy knew that
everything depended on keeping his cool. These arguments had to be
played through like a game. If he lost his
temper, Crake won. 'The male frog in mating
season,' said Crake, 'makes as much noise as it can. The females are attracted
to the male frog with the biggest,
deepest voice because it suggests a more powerful
frog, one with superior genes. Small male frogs,
it's been documented, discover that if they position
themselves in empty drain pipes, the pipe acts
as a voice amplifier, and the small frog appears
much larger than it really is.' 'So?' 'So that's what art is
for the artist,' said Craig, 'an empty drain
pipe, an amplifier, a stab at getting laid.' 'Your analogy falls down when it
comes to female artists,' said Jimmy. 'They're not in it to get laid. They'd gain no
biological advantage from amplifying themselves
since potential mates would be deterred rather
than attracted by that sort of amplification. Men aren't frogs. They don't want women who are
10 times bigger than them. 'Female artists are biologically
confused,' said Crake. 'You must have
discovered that by now.' This was a snide dig at
Jimmy's current snarled romance with a brunette poet who
had renamed herself Morgana, and refused to tell him what
her given name had been, and who was currently
on a 28-day sex fast in honor of the
great moon goddess Eostre, patroness of
soy beans and bunnies. Martha Graham attracted
those kinds of girls. An error though to have
confided this affair to Crake." [APPLAUSE] That's from Crake's past. I'll read you a small
bit from his present, and then we can have a
question-and-answer session in which you can ask me
things you are dying to know, such as, how come
you're a blonde now? [LAUGHTER] So this is from-- Jimmy is-- Jimmy Snowman
is wearing his bed sheet, and sitting on the
beach, and it's dusk. And he's remembering that little
poem he was taught as a child. "Snowman screws his eyes shut,
pushes his fists into them, clenches his entire face. There is the wishing
star, all right. It's blue. 'I wish I may, I wish
I might," he says, 'have the wish I wish tonight." Fat chance. "Oh, Snowman, why are you
talking to no one?' says a voice. Snowman opens his eyes. Three of the older children
are standing just out of reach, regarding him with interest. They must have crept
up on him in the dusk. 'I'm talking to Crake,' he says. 'But you talk to Crake
through your shiny thing. Is it broken?' Snowman lifts his left
arm, holds out his watch. 'This is for listening to Crake. Talking to him is different.' 'Why are you talking
to him about stars? What are you telling
to Crake, oh, Snowman?' 'I was telling
him,' says Snowman, 'that you ask too
many questions.' He holds his watch to his ear. 'And he's telling me that if
you don't stop doing that, you'll be toast.' 'Please, oh, Snowman,
what is toast?' Another error, Snowman thinks. He should avoid
arcane metaphors. 'Toast,' he says, 'is
something very, very bad. It's so bad, I can't
even describe it. Now it's your bedtime. Go away. What is toast?' says Snowman to
himself once they've run off. Toast is when you
take a piece of bread. What is bread? Bread is when you
take some flour. What is flour? We'll skip that part. It's too complicated. Bread is something you can eat
made from a ground-up plant and shaped like a stone. You cook it. Please, why do you cook it? Why don't you just
eat the plant? Never mind that part. Pay attention. You cook it. And then you cut it into
slices, and you put a slice into a toaster, which
is a metal box that heats up with electricity. What is electricity? Don't worry about that. While the slice
is in the toaster, you get out the butter. Butter is a yellow grease
made from the mammary glands of-- skip the butter. So the toaster turns
the slice of bread black on both sides
with smoke coming out. And then this toaster shoots
the slice up into the air, and it falls onto the floor. 'Oh, forget it,' says Snowman. 'Let's try again.' Toast was a pointless
invention from the dark ages. Toast was an
implement of torture that caused all
those subjected to it to regurgitate in
verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured
by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their
kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained
by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast." [APPLAUSE] And we can do questions by
you waving your arm around, and then I'll repeat
it into the mic so people will know
what you asked, which will also give me
a chance to reformulate the question too. Yes. AUDIENCE: I work at the
National Organization for Women. And I'm constantly
quoting The Handmaid's Tale right now,
mainly in reference to the series of
attacks on Roe v. Wade. But when I read
Oryx and Crake, it started haunting
me in another way. So I wanted to ask
you, between the two, which future do you think
is more likely right now, and which is more frightening? ATWOOD: [CHUCKLES] All right, the question was,
there is another novel called The Handmaid's Tale, which
was published in 1985 and which projects a
future in which the United States of America has become
a totalitarian theocracy. And for that-- [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] And that book came
out of my interest in world history, American
history, clothing laws, and such things, and also my
irritation when people say, it can't happen here. You know, that always
annoys me very much because anything, given
the right circumstances, can happen anywhere. What are the circumstances under
which totalitarianisms usually come in-- social disruption
often connected with economic
disruption and fear so that people are
frightened, and confused, and they are at a
point where they're willing to trade their freedoms
for something they think will be safety and security. So that is one possible
form of frightening future. And my rule for that book
was I put nothing into it that human beings hadn't already
done at some time or another. So we know that this is
behavior that we are capable of. And I also am one
of those people who believe that you should
listen to what people say they're going to do if they
get into power because they probably will do it. OK? And one of the
mistakes with Hitler was that people read Mein Kampf,
and they thought, oh, he's just fooling-- wrong. So I was born in 1939, the year
Canada went into World War II, so I've always been interested
in those kinds of histories. That's one kind of a
frightening future. And I did set it in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, which annoyed Harvard at the time. But that would be
the right place to set such a book because
"it can't happen here" should be placed in
the most extreme here. They were, I think,
somewhat perturbed that the Widener Library became
the home of the Secret Service. But they didn't
think it was funny. Oh, well. One of my friends
wrote me a letter and said, hasn't
anybody figured out yet that this book is about
the Harvard English Department, which has
changed its ways since. But at that time, it
didn't hire women. I'm really old. So, OK, between
that and this book, well, what is more frightening? I would say that this
book is more frightening because when you're talking
about political systems, we know that they can
be overcome and changed. And that's how The
Handmaid's Tale ends. It ends with a section
that takes place after the time of the book
in which that system is over. And I am, therefore,
one of those people who have always thought
that George Orwell's 1984 is a more cheerful book than
some people have supposed. Because what you
remember is the end of it, and with Winston Smith in
a comatose state, and the boot grinding into the
human face forever. But how the book really
ends is with a note on Newspeak written
in standard English in the past tense, which
means that the world of 1984 has been finished. OK, so that is a more
hopeful scenario. The one in this
book brings together environmental catastrophe,
which we're already-- excuse me-- heading towards. Not senile yet. Can still open bottle of water-- cheering. It brings together environmental
catastrophe on the one hand and our scrabbling
attempts to do something about the diminishing
food supply on the other. We are due to peak at 9
or 10 billion in 2050. We have run through the 90%
of the world's fish stocks in the past 50 years. That's why Jimmy
in the cafeteria has fish finger, 20% real fish. I'm now thinking
that 20% was high. Interesting question,
what is the other 80%? So those things are on the road. And I think we're past the
point where even governments can be global warming deniers
as they have managed to do so well for so many years. So I'd say this one is scarier
although it's not completely game over for the human
race, even in this book, as we discover with mixed
feelings towards the end. Yes. AUDIENCE: How do you see
the Crakers evolving? ATWOOD: How do I see
the Crakers evolving? Well, their creator
has tried very hard to get rid of a few
things in them without success. For instance, they still
are avid question-askers. Someone has defined human beings
as the animal that asks "why?" So they still do that. He's tried to get
rid of singing, but he couldn't do that either. Music, I think it seems
to be quite hardwired. And he's trying to
get rid of dreams, and he couldn't do that. So they still make music, have
dreams, and asked questions. And where will that lead? I certainly wouldn't want
to narrow the possibilities by giving my own opinion. Let us say that they do start
making something suspiciously-- something suspicious
towards the end of the book. Yes. AUDIENCE: Can you
tell us a bit about was it was like for you as a
new writer writing a first novel and becoming published? ATWOOD: What it was like
for a new writer writing my first novel and
becoming published-- I started writing when
I was 16 in high school because I knew no better. And I did not know actually
how hard it was going to be. I was quite sanguine
about the whole thing. I actually thought--
and this is true. I thought I could write true
romance stories in the day because you could make
money out of those, and I would sell those. And then in the evenings,
I would write my works of blazing artistic genius. And I did try a couple of
those true romance stories, but I could not do them-- not because of the plots. I was good at the plots. I know what the basic plot is. It was, in those days,
girl meets two boys. One of them works
in a shoe store. The other has a motorcycle. [LAUGHTER] She's gets tangled up with
the one with the motorcycle, and they have an
episode on the sofa. And in those days, it had
to be phrased as such-- and then they were one,
dot, dot, dot, dot. Well, that was the
part I couldn't do. I couldn't do the dots. After that, he rides
off on his motorcycle, and she has remorse. And if the story
has a happy ending, she marries the
guy from the shoe store, who forgives her
for everything or else just isn't told. So I could do those OK. So that wasn't
going to work out. So I was going to
be a journalist. My parents bit their tongues. They had seen a wonderful
career in botany for me because I was
quite good at it. And if I had gone
in that direction, I would be cloning your glow
in the dark potatoes right now. So they dredged up some
second cousin who told me, at that time, the '50s, if
you become a woman journalist and work for a newspaper, you
will only write two things, the wedding write-ups
and the obituaries-- good training for
a novelist anyway. But so I went into
honors English instead. That way, I could
teach at a university. And then in the summers, I
could write my towering works of blazing artistic genius. So I did take two
years off in the middle because I was scared of
my Latin exam at Harvard. And I worked in a
market research company and lived in a closet. And it was in a rooming house. They had those then. And I wrote my first novel,
which was rejected by everyone. I also wrote a book of
poems, and this is worse. It was accepted. I told all my friends. And then by the third member
of the small literary press, it was rejected. How depressing is that? What did I do? I got engaged. And, well, who can blame me? After that, I was going
to run off to Europe, live in a garret, and
wear black clothing, drink absinthe,
smoke cigarettes, write towering works of blazing
artistic genius while working as a waitress in the day times. Well, that plan came to nothing. First of all, I
couldn't do the smoking. It made me cough. I couldn't do the drinking. It made me throw up. I have New England Puritan
ancestors, so it's genetic. So I went to graduate school. [LANGUAGE] [APPLAUSE] That way, I could--
well, you know the story. So then I got a teaching job at
University of British Columbia. And what did I teach? I was at the lowest rung. I taught grammar to
engineering students-- [LAUGHTER] --at 8:30 in the morning
in a Quonset hut. And they had Quonset huts
left over from World War II. And we were all
asleep, so it was OK. But I did quite a
good thing for them. I made them read the
Parables of Kafka, useful to them in
their future work, and write short
prose pieces based on those, which they quite liked
doing because they had a puzzle element. And then we could work
on the grammar that way. And I also taught the
"Whistle Stop" chorus, Chaucer to TS Eliot-- whew, like that. And while I was there, I wrote
my first published novel-- not the one that was rejected. It was good it was rejected. It wasn't a very good novel-- The Edible Woman. And I wrote it on
UBC exam booklets, which have a handy lined page
down the right hand and then a place where you can do
the doodling on the left. So those were the
days before computers. I then typed all of this onto my
typewriter-- with my typewriter onto pieces of paper. I've never been able to type. I'm so glad they
invented computers because I no longer have to
use the little white bottle with the brush and
the little white lines that you can type and stick on. All of that is gone. Now I have the cheerful man
in the box who waves at me. All I need, if I'm feeling
lonely, all I need to do is pretend I'm writing a letter. [LAUGHTER] Would you like some help? I can't get Bob the paper
clip on my computer. But I've been told about him. Anyway, so that's what I did. I typed it all up. And then I sent it into
the publisher, who lost it. This is a Canadian story. I actually got an
acceptance letter, and then I heard nothing. But I was studying for my
orals, and I knew nothing about publishing
anyway, so I didn't know why it was taking so long. And by the time I came out of
my trance, my orals trance, I wrote them a letter. By that time, I had
published a book of poetry and won a major literary award. And I said, where is my novel? Then I got a letter
from them saying, we read something
in the paper about your major literary prize. And it says you've
written a novel. Could we see it? Then the publisher took
me out and had a drink. He had actually five drinks. And he told me the
most outrageous lie. He would never be able to
get away with this now. But what he told me was
that the manuscript had been in the hands of a woman
editor who had gotten pregnant, and you know how that makes
them go funny in the head. And she had left it in a
drawer without telling anyone, and that's why they hadn't
been answering my letters. What a whopper. It was all the time on his
very own floor covered up with other manuscripts. So that's my publishing
story about my first novel, which came out in 1969 although
I'd written it in '64 or '65. And I did my very,
very first book signing in the men's sock and underwear
department of the Hudson's Bay Company in Edmonton, Alberta. So there I was. It was-- AUDIENCE: Really? ATWOOD: Yes. I don't know why that happened. It was the publicist's
first week on the job. Do we-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] ATWOOD: Do we know how
long she lasted after that? Actually, no. But there I was with my little
pile of books saying The Edible Woman. And here are these guys
coming in in their galoshes because it was winter, looking
to snaffle a pair of jockey shorts during their lunch hour. And they took one look at
me and ran the other way. I think I sold two copies. And I thought, is this the
glamorous literary life? Well, it did get more
glamorous after that. I can't remember when that was. Anything else
you'd like to know? AUDIENCE: Do you have any
words of encouragement? ATWOOD: Words of encouragement--
don't throw anything out. You never know when it
might come in handy. How many manuscripts did
I submit before I finally got one published? I used to submit a
book of poems a year, and that went on for some time. So I think probably "keep at
it" is the word of encouragement you're looking for. As for the writing
part, don't look down. Just pretend you're crossing
Niagara on a tightrope. Don't look down. It's one step ahead, one
foot in front of the other. Don't worry about large issues. Worry about the page. The page is all you've got. Yes. AUDIENCE: Could you talk
about lack of closure in some of your
works, for example, in Death by Landscape
with Lois and Lucy and not finding closure-- ATWOOD: Lack of closure-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] ATWOOD: You mean not telling
people who had done it. AUDIENCE: Right. ATWOOD: Yes. Closure is very useful in
some kinds of writing-- detective stories. You would feel very
ticked off if you read through the whole thing,
and there was no answer. You know, you'd
really feel annoyed because that's the kind
of book you want to read. You want to read one with
closure, which things get wrapped up at the end. I would like to write that
kind of book, but I don't. And I think I'd like to
leave a space at the end so that the reader can. Because I think that reading
is a very participatory kind of activity. In fact, when you
wire people up when they're reading, more
of their brain lights up a lot more than when
they're, guess what, watching TV because you have to participate
in the act of creating the story. It's, I would say, reading
is to the spoken word as a musical score
with somebody playing it is to the composition
that you hear. So the page is really
just a score for voice. And when you're reading
that page, you, the reader, are the musician. You're doing the interpretation. You're also doing the
costume design, the acting. You're doing all
of those things. So I like to leave
room for that. And I like to leave
room for the reader to join in the invention. And sometimes, I just can't
think of how it would end. I don't know. Yes. AUDIENCE: How might
do you consider your stories' engagement
with the culture of power or, let's say, in a culture of
American power given that you came out of a
Canadian background? And in that regard,
which of your stories do you think feels the
most Canadian to you? ATWOOD: OK, that's
a double question. How does my-- how do I
think my writing engages with the issue of
power, specifically American power,
by which I take it you mean American power
in the world or possibly American power within
America, number one. And number two,
which of my stories appeals most to Canadians? Well, there is a shocking
piece of news for you. First of all, not all
Americans are alike. And the other thing
that goes along with that is not all
Canadians are alike. So some of them like one thing. Some like another. They tended to be quite
keen on The Blind Assassin because it had a lot of history
in it that they recognized. But similarly, they
liked Cat's Eye, but so did a lot of people. And it was a generational thing. The power question,
to get back to that, I think all narratives
include an element that has to do with
power, that is, who's got the power in the story? Who's got less power? How does the crafty
person with less power go about fooling the
person with more power, and so on, and so forth. I don't know whether
there's a direct answer to your first question because
I'm not writing a directly, small p, political
kind of book, that is, I don't write about
the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party,
and those kinds of things. I think I write about attitudes,
and what those attitudes do to people in
relationships, and when they're transferred into big-- when they become large
scale, what kinds of effects they can have on people. In The Handmaid's
Tale, for instance, there's a powerful
totalitarian government. In Oryx and Crake,
government has, more or less, as we know it today,
more or less vanished. And security issues are in
the hands of mercenary armies. Read any news lately? That's who's making a lot of
money in Iraq at the moment. They're English
mercenary armies. So that's as good an
answer as I can do. And I'll do one more, and
then we'll wind it up. AUDIENCE: I just want to ask,
what science fiction or what science fiction writers do
you think influenced you? ATWOOD: What science
fictions-- fiction writers do I think have influenced me? Funny you should ask. The list is long
because this was once part of what was going
to be my thesis topic. In fact, I got almost
through it before I realized that I didn't have
to teach in a university after all. I can write film scripts
that never got made-- so, yes, the 19th-century
ones in particular. And watch for it
coming out soon, my introduction to The
Island of Dr. Moreau. And on the stands,
even as we speak, is my introduction to
Rider Haggard's She. So that will tell you
something about that. I'm not very
current, that is, I'm not up on absolutely everything
that's being done today. But if you want to read my
review of Ursula Le Guin, it was in The New York
Review of Books last year. And that has somewhat
of an overview, you know, where did science
fiction come from, et cetera-- so all of the classics
including some of the ones you
have never heard of, such as WH Hudson and his
strange book A Crystal Age, and The Purple Cloud,
those kinds of books. I was very keen as a child on
The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle's book about discovering
a plateau full of dinosaurs. I really loved that. It's been made into
some really bad movies, but I liked it as a book. So if you want the full
reading list, we can talk. But it's long. And one of the things I probably
got from doing all of that is some ideas on what I
myself would like to avoid. You know? Because there are sometimes
parts in them that you think, we might have been
better off without. And on that note, I will
say thank you very much. You've-- great audience. [APPLAUSE]
