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.

The Wordless Writer's Worthless Hours

A writer walks across a field and suddenly a flash of lightening strikes them: I want to write is the only thing that remains in their mind after the shock fades. 

Their spine tingles a little with the electric snap, and their neck feels stiff. No one else around them seems to feel it. No one else seems to notice that they have come to an abrupt halt midfield. But there it is, clear as day, astounding as the clear sky above: I want to write. 

 

They leave the field, not caring which it is; soccer, football, or wheat. They leave the field, and they drive home. 

The shock seems to be the only thing that matters. They can feel it flowing through their veins, pulsating in the back of their skull. Word, words, words, they course through the awakened writer; their brain, their hands, their heart. 

Every word the world is wrapped in is suddenly at their disposal. 

 

Word. Words. Words. They flicker on their laptop's screen; writing, then erasing.

After a while their hands no longer shake. After a while their eyes become tired. Their spine aches from sitting hunched in the kitchen chair. Soon their hands start to tremble; the writer probably hasn't eaten since noon. 

They eat a quick amount of nothing. It doesn't matter what goes in their body, unless its books to fill their mind or vocabulary snacks to sink their teeth into. They browse dictionaries or an online thesaurus, glowing on their face like a fridge, searching it for something to fill themselves with.

 

Their eyes look back at the page. There is nothing on it for them to read.

The darker it gets, the brighter their screen seems to glow; words fizzle and flounder, unattainably there in the bright white page. They burn like on the sun's scorching surface. The writer blots them out as they try to grasp at the vapor before the words sizzle away and all that's left is water marks, like their dusty laptop screen.

Probably the writer will not write anything that matters that night. Their brain is tired and clumsy, and their heart is on repeat. (I want to write, it says. I know, the writer whispers.) 

 

After hours of typing and trying, they grab their laptop, and they drive back to the field. 

There, in the cold, in the same spot where the need to write struck them, the writer sits under the stars and lets their laptop glow on their face. 

The people are gone. It is only the writer and the stars now, the writer and the stars and a gaping desire within them to write something down. 

But, after hours of trying, the writer realizes that there is nothing to say. So, they close their screen just to open it again. The light of their laptop pulsates in their tired eyes, pouring its white vacancy into them. 

They realize that they are no longer looking at the screen. It is more like it is looking at them, trying to figure them out, trying to decide why they stay so long when they have nothing to say. 

 

The glow fills the writer through their pupils, like the morning sun on white sheets; it fills the writer up and smooths them out, softening all their crinkles, every wrinkle, every fold. 

 

The white page peers at them. 

 

I want to write, the writer says. 

 

Only after the screen closes its eyes and goes to sleep does the writer at last go to bed, thinking as they fall asleep about how much they'd rather be writing, and how much they might say.

The desire to write doesn't always come with the words. But the yearning makes it ache sometimes. It drains out your hours and your sleep; it makes you forget to eat sometimes. The writer spends these worthless hours writing worthless things. Words, words, words sometimes lead to pages. But there is only one thing of value on the laptops tattooed face on nights like these: Words, paragraphs, pages, filled with every word the world is wrapped in; all new ways to say with the attainable alphabet how much the writer wants to write.

 

So, as the sleepy writer slumbers, the heat fades from the tired laptop, and the books on the shelves whisper in their sleep, like distant owls in the night. The cat snores softly. 

The desire doesn't sleep, though. It is the first thing on their mind when they awake. 

I myself have spent endless hours in that field, searching for the words like a lost wifi connection and looking out for lightning, hoping that the flash will strike, and I'll be able to write at last.