Margaret Atwood and the Art of Switching Heads

Some books take longer to digest than others. We read them, and something once buried gets dug up inside of us, grimy and sordid, half rotted, like a book buried in the earth for too long. Usually we cannot quite make out what it used to be, much less what it used to say. 

 

But then, a little time and a little rain later, we find the thing baked and parched in the sun, left to dry out where it was found. This time it looks more familiar. 

 

In Cat's Eye the fictional Elaine remembers; she reflects on a once forgotten childhood with all its excruciating details. Atwood etches it in deep. At times reading it was painful, particularly in the soles of my feet when I read about how Elaine used to peel the skin from them. I read, trying to rush to the adult chapters, searching for solace, for an out, or a revenge, a realization or a consoling revelation. I got none of it. 

 

Instead, Atwood lets Elaine forget. She washes away the harshness of childhood with all its articulate deep cutting details into a dim adult life and a woman who is little more than a little bit of each phase of her life, all the cutting edges softly blurred away into forgetting.

 

When I finished reading Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye I did not think I would end up writing about it. The book was far too complicated, at times as ambiguous as it was realistic.

But still, the book inexplicably and inevitably opened up in me a train of thought, first as frail as a nicked thread on an old sweater. Soon, memories started to unravel. 

 

I read the book, slowly at first, but eagerly. I knew that with Atwood all it took was one good line to twist you, or rather, to twist the book in your hand, so that suddenly one reads it out of the back of one's head, disturbed, bewitched, entranced all at once. In her books one look's into someone else's mind so closely, the words written so dark and daringly, as perfectly stitched as an incantation. 

But like a master surgeon or a trickster or some kind of wicked goddess, Atwood does a switch. It is never entirely clear when she does it, much less how. But at some point throughout, when the book is closed and you are thinking about her words and the images they have given you, you will start to wonder why looking into fictional heads makes you look so much into your own.

 

When was the switch done? Whose head is whose? When was one snipped off and replaced with another?

At some point after the book was finished, I caught myself wondering how Elaine could have forgotten Cordelia's cruelty so quickly in the adult half of the book. In the midst of it all, Cordelia felt at times like a character wrought clean from horror. 

Stephan King, I thought, would not have let Elaine forget. He would have created some terrifying means of revenge for Elaine to inflict on Cordelia later on in the plot. If anything, Cordelia should have been the one to forget. It would make the severe twist at the end of the revenge tale that much more exciting and satisfying when Cordelia remembers her sins too late for forgiveness. It would have augmented Elaine's anger that Cordelia could have forgotten when she could not.

 

But Elaine forgets Cordelia's cruelty. She never gets her revenge. Cordelia even becomes a person to pity, and it makes me pause. 

I was doing some idle task today when I wondered briefly how Elaine could have forgotten. Then, with a thought that felt like the oncoming of a scary revelation, I thought of how quick I was as a child to brush cruelty under the rug of memory in favor of an opportunity at friendship, in favor of a lighter life. When a bully's face turns friendly, there are few children who will not want to see a friend. It is easy to wish away a tormentor, and so, when a mean person starts playing nice, hesitantly and then all at once, we as children enter the path of forgetting.

Still, it was not this that disturbed me in the end. It was the memory that I had entirely forgotten. I remember only its shadow. I remember one day when, upon mentioning to my mom a friend from school whom I felt I had known for ages, she asked if I really wanted to be friends with that girl.

I was confused. I did not remember this friend being cruel to me. I still do not remember. But my mom did. She remembered me being quite distraught about it.

I remember later hints of it when I was old enough to realize it and distance myself. 

Other memories followed.

I wondered whether the reason I had always disliked a different girl in high-school was because deep down I knew that once on the playground in the second grade she had hit me with the skipping rope. 

I remembered how it felt to be horribly conscious of your body and how you were holding it when certain girls were present, in a way totally different than certain boys. With some boys, it felt more like your curves got in the way; you wanted to be smaller and stop bumping into yourself. With girls and their peering eyes it felt more like your bones were too heavy, your limbs clunky, sticking out at all your edges. It felt like you wanted to fold yourself up. 

But only with certain girls. 

Still, the strange part is I never remember them once saying anything to me to make me feel this way. I think it was their eyes that did it. But how can I know for sure?

 

 

 

How can one forget? It is not merely because we do not wish to remember, because, after all, the instances in which we felt the effects of the unremembered acts of cruelty do stay, clear and heavy, easy to recall, easy to recognize in the little things we don't like about ourselves without ever questioning why.

Everyone knows little girls can be mean. But the mean-girls depicted in most other works of fiction are so obvious, so easy to recognize, so two dimensional; not at all life-sized. In real life the mean girl's face always melds. Its all part of the head switching game that Atwood writes about so well.

A little girl can put on a new head, like a barbie doll whose head has been popped off, a new one screwed on at the plastic joint. A girl's body is already changing about her, skin shedding, personality morphing, mixing and dabbling with the ones they have seen others use. It is just like the snipping Elaine does with her friends when they cut women out of magazines, gluing in cut outs of a life around her. And, if they don't like the head, Elaine tells us, they simply cut it off and replace it with another. 

All in all, it really isn't so hard. And when one head comes off, the cruel sneer still lingering on the lips, its taunting tongue tucked away, it is hung up by the hair inside some closet. The other, new head might have downcast eyes, the suggestion of a shy countenance. Or it might have hard daring eyes, unloving to women, possessive to men, quick to rebuke and to insult. 

It is when Elaine forgets that she moves on, but it is also then that she stops understanding herself. She has removed herself just enough. She does not know why she resents Cordelia, just as she never realizes why she hates other women, even when she is kind to them, she feels a repressed contempt for them. From childhood onward, Elaine recreates herself, she watches herself from the outside just like Cordelia and her friends used to watch her so that they could correct her, rebuke her and fix her to their liking. Elaine watches herself from the outside, and she makes adjustments when she doesn't like what she sees, and so, little by little, the inside goes unnoticed. The inside, the larger than life parts of her, get ignored. 

It is hard to say when Atwood does her switching. She switches Elaine with Cordelia, and that one can follow, mostly. But perhaps that is the trick. We think we know what she is doing. 

I didn't. Until, I read about how Elaine used to peel the skin off the soles of her feet at night, biting into them just deep enough so that the peeling would hurt. No one, she says, ever looks at your feet. 

Perhaps that is where it always starts. At the soles, where no one ever looks. The skin starts to shed like an out-of-fashion outfit one no longer wears, deteriorating from your wet, growing flesh, and then the girl wonders, what else can I take off? What else can I change? 

It is like we forget with the changing. No one wants to stay nine forever, no one wants to be the always-abused. So, some shed skin, others turn to other means. The easiest way to forget is to change. The easiest way to learn is to adapt.

 

Girls change so fast, after all. It is only later that grown women look back and try to figure out what happened. What is left of the original girl and what is borrowed? Some can pinpoint it into one moment or another, one alternation in something that made them feel self-conscious, and so the cycle starts which turns them into such a capable changeling. Few can name their bully and tell what they did. 

 

Still, somehow, we know at one point in the past we all knew some form of Cordelia. 

We just lost track of her in all the head-switching.

Half-Adult

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

On the day I started rereading The Ocean at the End of the Lane something stung me beneath my right eye.

I didn't notice the stinging itself, but I did notice that my eye was itchy and puffy afterwards, and, going to look into the mirror, I saw that it was red and swollen. 

 

I was disturbed by the reflection looking back at me if only because it offered a glimpse of what my face might look like if I were old. It was as if I had suddenly become half aged. The skin beneath my one eye grew heavy and red, folding over itself like swelling wrinkles. 

I shuddered, for I knew that it was in a similar fashion that the fiend that calls itself Ursula Monkton enters the story, burrowing its way into the protagonist's foot in the form of a grey worm. The ancient and strangely powerful Hemstock's refer to its kind as a flea. I thought it a fitting picture and I in turn wondered what it was that had bitten me. 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is an amalgam of a book; only half aged; one half adult, the other a child. Indeed, it defies every attempt to force it into an age. Neil Gaiman, the book's own author, is still not certain whether it is a book for adults or for children. 

The book's child protagonist, a boy of 7, certainly makes it seem a book for young people. At first glance, at least. But, as Gaiman himself put it, if it were to be a book for children he might have had to remove the scene in which the boy's father, in a fit of unexplained madness, tries to drown him in the bath.  

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is questionable, to say the least. It is the only dark book featuring a young protagonist I have ever felt necessary to withhold from too a young a reader. Sometimes it is inappropriate; and yet, I think it is best to read it as if you were still a child. Indeed, someone too adult might try too hard to understand it. This would be a mistake, for in doing so it is likely that they will not understand it at all.

I have written before about the adult horrors in books meant for children. They are, as I point out in my post titled The Adult Shadows in the The Sisters Grimm, made more horrific because they are placed in contrast to a child's world inside a child's book, and so, they become all the more terrible because they are not supposed to be understood in the least. 

They are rendered the stuff of horror not because the adult world is necessarily horrifying, but because there is something frightful in it when seen from the perspective of a child.

 

But this is, of course, not only true in fiction. Few of us like to think about it, but the adult world once seemed just as alien and arcane to us as the dark powers inside this book do to me now.

 

 

There are moment's throughout every child's life when they realize, with a thought that feels a lot like a shudder, how little control they have over their own world. I grew up in a safe home, and my parent's tried to shelter me from the outside world like any loving parents do, giving the hard truths to me slowly and in good time at the appropriate age. They kept a close eye on the movies I watched and sometimes on the books I read, telling me just enough so that I would know what types of things to stay far away from.

Still, sometimes it scared me to know how little I knew; that life crippling mistakes could be made completely by accident, by the ignorance of trusting a stranger too well, or in messing with something dark disguised as just risky enough to be exciting. 

There remains ever on the edge of the child's life the possibility that things could fall out of control, and they, being small and mostly helpless, could do nothing about it. The idea that a child could somehow ruin their own life by not being adult enough, not knowing enough, or simply not knowing any better, makes me gulp. 

There were earlier glimpses in my own childhood before the time my parent's took a book I was reading away, telling me there were devilish themes inside of it. 

 

I was taught to be paranoid of strangers from a young age. I still have bad dreams about being taken by an unknown person sometimes, and although these dreams are nightmarish, they still do not compare with the real shuddering fear I felt when I was young and unable to judge what was dangerous and what not; such as the time an old man pulled over to talk to me when I was playing in my driveway, and I, forgetting everything I had been taught about being wary of strangers in a moment, stepped closer only to hear my dad shout my name in an alarming tone. 

 

I felt foolish afterwards and insecure, and even though he turned out to be a kind man (my dad spoke to him after I had left) I knew afterwards that there were risks out there I had no idea about. It was scary thinking that the things I read and the people I talked to could turn on me or do me ill. Worse still was the thought that I could not see it coming and so would be helpless in preventing it from happening.

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is, as I've said, half-adult. This is represented to me in the way the cover has folded over, as if someone (probably my little brother who borrowed it once and returned it in this condition) has only half looked at it, not daring to open the book all the way.

It is, after all, a book that is only ever half read; whether through the eyes of a child who does not recognize some of the adult things going on behind the windows, or an adult recalling what it felt like to be a child and have no control when their world changes, the book is designed not to be understood, or rather, to be only half understood. 

So, when the boy's father tries to drown him in the bath, we have no idea why. We know that he is not a violent man. Indeed, the story makes a point of telling us the boy's father has never once hit him. Still, any one that has ever had a short-tempered parent knows how scary it is to stand in their shadow, even if they do not touch you or hurt you, the angry look in their eye is enough to cause some level of fear. Thus, we do not need to understand why the father is harming the boy. Indeed, that is what makes it feel so scary and so very real. No child ever really knows why they are being harmed or why their parent and guardian has suddenly turned on them.

 

Having been a child once, everyone should know the fear of not being understood and of not understanding. With our limited language and perception, how can we explain when a teacher was cruel to us? When we do not really know what happened, much less how to explain; all we can really know is that something felt wrong about it. It is almost as if it is too adult for a child to talk about. They can not explain why an adult does what they do, neither can they always know exactly what was wrong about it. Children, while having a great sense for wrongness and injustice, are less than inept at explaining how they feel and why.

Furthermore, how can a child  know that, when an old man pulls over to talk to them that he might have ill intentions? How can a child even imagine what he might really be thinking? 

In The Ocean at the End of the Lane Ursula Monkton knows this, and she exploits this, turning the boy's parent's against him, making up lies about him, telling him that he will not be believed because he is a child and she is an adult. 

 

We do not know what Ursula Monkton really is, but she appears in the form of a grown-up, and the book makes this something truly horrible, telling us that "she was power incarnate.. She was the storm... she was the adult world with all its powers and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty." 

By the end of the story, the boy, now himself grown, has forgotten about the horrible events of his childhood. He does not remember Ursula Monkton. He no longer knows that his father once tried to drown him. 

This is necessary. It is necessary because, if we, like him, remembered for a second what it was like not to understand a world of change and unseen danger and out of control strangers, well, then we'd realize for ourselves what Lettie Hemstock, the eternal eleven year old of this story, said so well 

"The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." 

 

If we remembered what it was like to be so and to know oneself to be so we'd realize with horror that not much has changed now that we are older. The truth is, we are all just children who aren't young anymore, and so we are half. Half-child, half-adult, only ever half understanding, only ever half-understood; and, being so, there is still and ever the lingering possibility that our world could cut loose from our control.

 

In which case this hybrid of a book, itself something compound and cross-stitched, can only be for us half-beings. 

The Milk and Blood of Marriage

:And its Icky and Intimate Parts ad Portrayed in"The Time Traveler's Wife"

The time and place in which we read a book is hardly inconsequential to our perception of it. 

I first read The Time Traveler's Wife when I was a young girl. In many ways, I was too young to understand the novel. 

 

There is some perfect irony in this, I think. As I reread the novel for the second time, I realized things I had not before. I saw and understood the novel on a level that was far more personal. It was both more familiar and more disturbing than it was to the mind of my younger self. 

 

 

The novel's protagonist Clare experiences this same sensation within her own story. She meets her husband at the young age of 6 when he appears naked in the front yard of her house. Her husband Henry, a man who suffers from a disorder that helplessly displaces him in time (also causing him to leave anything material and otherwise behind, including his clothes), will not meet her until he is 28 and she is 20. 

 

Naturally, there are some things that Clare at the age of 6 did not understand about the strange time traveler who appeared for fragments in the meadow near her home. He is in many ways a perfect stranger with whom she slowly becomes perfectly familiar, first from the perspective of a child with an innocent crush, and then from that of a teenager who has other more sensational things on her mind. 

 

Rereading The Time Traveler's Wife now I realized that in reading this as a young imaginative girl I had dubbed it a mere romance. Thus, it lost both its strangeness and its ordinariness. Now I realize that this is not the story of two people who come together, bound by destiny and love. Neither is this a story of science fiction, the tale of a time traveler with a disorder made real in its fictional limits. 

This is the narrative of Henry and Clare who find themselves together from the start of the story, and though their lives are bound ever since that day when Clare was young and pink and innocent, they are constantly being separated, by time and space, and by each other. 

 

The imagery bestowed to the second part of the novel, titled a drop of blood in a bowl of milk, paints the perfect picture of how this novel makes one feel. There is both an ickyness and an intimacy to the image; for marriage, while beautiful and intimate, has its icky parts too. The bowl of milk in this portrait is something soft and pale and usually untouched, though nonetheless it is spoiled by a small drop of blood. In the same way, Henry and Clare's marriage is stained over time by grief, by frustration, and resentment, by an irritation with the things that keep them apart, and so an irritation with one-another. 

Love stories often forget how ugly marriage can be. It is lovely to dream of first kisses, of wedding days, and white dresses, and the perfect romance of two people finding each other in a chaotic world. But when stubbornness and dissatisfaction sears and scars a once white and perfect thing, it is easy to forget the purity it once held. 

In the end it is those images that linger; these are the details that make the novel memorable: the seared gaze of a grief stricken widower, eye whites shot and yellowed by excessive drinking; the red smudged lips of a woman discarded by love committing suicide alone in her apartment; glimpses of white bloodied sheets stained by miscarriage; blurry pictures of white crystal snow sullied with the blood of a deceased lover; all reinterpretations of that spoiled bowl of milk painted into its type-scripted pages.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a portrait of marriage, as raw and unflattering as it is idealized and filtered by fiction; and it is painted in milk and old spilled blood. It leaves neither out. Beginning with a perfect meadow and Clare in white knee socks, it shy's not from love's icky, messy, and gruesome parts by continually staining perfect white things with red and yellow blotches. 

 

 

It is a strange way to depict a marriage. Despite its elements of science fiction and literally disordered timeline, their marriage feels doggedly raw, at times as passionate as it is tedious and frustrating. But that is not the strange part: the strange part is that it is its un-ordinary details, its time travel and thus its disjointed and dislocated lives, that makes this marriage feel at all true and real.

 

After all, it is not only Henry's strange genetic disorder that keeps them apart. At times, it is their stubbornness. Sometimes, it is their own grief or personal lack, an internal dissatisfaction not even their supposedly perfect love can fulfill. 

Instead of locking himself in his study or going for a drive, Henry simply disappears entirely, escaping to some other time and space. Time travel is simply the medium, the perpetrator that makes an emotional separation literal in their marriage. In reality, such things are not necessary.

Clare, like myself, once thought that getting to Henry would be the end of it; the happily ever after, not in the sense that this is the end of their story, but in the sense that, in everything that comes after, they could be happy. 

This, of course, is not the case. Clare's deepest hurts and hardest times come after. She wept once about how lonely it was to wait for Henry. But this was before, when she still knew he would come and she still had the list he gave her telling her exactly when he would return. Later, she has only the unfilled clothing he leaves behind, and the empty time spent waiting and not knowing when he will return to her.

I myself used to think that being married meant that one never had to be lonely again. It wasn't that I actively believed this, but it was a coming disillusionment I sometimes faced snippets of. I remember a friend once telling me how lonely she was finding marriage to be. I tried not to think about it. Who wants to believe there is no perfect cure for loneliness, after all.

In this way, Clare doesn't learn what it is to be lonely until she is separated from he who is closest to her, not just by time and space, but by personal stubbornness, by internal struggles, and often trivial frustrations. 

Sometimes the space across one's bed feels further than time and space. Sometimes one feels as separated from their spouse as if they were a perfect stranger. 

But that is what marriage is about, is it not? Not that I've been married all too long, so perhaps simply take this as an insight about a book I recently reread. 

Marriage, according to this particular novel, is about time; about finding time; making time; losing time; savoring time; and yearning for more of it. It is about washing the blood out of your sheets; it is about not minding the yellowed time-stains on a once clean and perfect dress; marriage is about the messy bits more than the pretty ones, because, after the mess has been made, we only cling to each other that much harder.

 

At the end of the day, marriage is a constant losing of the other, for spaces and fragments, one or the other is gone for a day, sometimes for a week; not literally gone like Henry, but emotionally, mentally missing. 

 

Marriage is about finding your way to each other, again, and again, and again. 

Sometimes it feels like there is never enough time, like there is always something in the way, keeping you from one another; always another red drop in each new bowl you pour.

 

But the world is never as still and perfect as when you find your way back; when the space between two people suddenly falls away and all the worries melt from your mind. 

 

 

 

 

I suppose the real truth is that I, like Clare, did not think that once I had him I would still spend so much time trying to find my way back to him again. I did not think that so many date nights would be canceled; that we would agree to do our own thing most nights. I did not think I would spend so much time waiting for him to come to bed. For us, neither of us needed to be a time traveler for time to keep us apart.

My, oh my, marriage can be complicated. But sometimes, every once in a while, it is the most simple thing in the world. 

It just takes a little washing and a little time.

But that's why you promise a lifetime, I guess. And him and I, we still have it all ahead of us. 

I for one will make the time to get back to him every day for the rest of my life.