November 16, 1993 The Other Press io MONTREAL (CUP) -- Margaret Atwood once compared interviewers to dancing partners — some step on your toes by mistake and others do it on purpose. I spoke with MargaretAtwood at the cafe in Paragraph bookstore amidst the whirring of cappuccino makers, the crunching of Caesar salads and chattering of students. We sat knee-to knee at a small table piled with autographed cop- ies of her latest novel, The Robber Bride. LH: In a recent interview with The Gazette you said every political group wants you to carry their banner. What ban- ners do you carry? MA: PEN - Writers In Prison is the big one. I sing for them at their benefit. I sang a duet with Robertson Davies called“ Anything you can write I can write better.” Last year, I sang satires of popular Country and Western songs withTimo- thy Finley. LH: Do you think politics has a place in your writing? MA: I'm not interested in writing billboards. I'd rather write novels. However that doesn’t mean that politics has no place in my work because we live in a political atmosphere, just as we live in a physical atmos- LH: But it’s just that there are so many different inter- pretations. For instance some critics impose Marxism on Shakespeare ... MA: They may be examining Shakespeare from a Marxist perspective which is different from saying that Shakespeare is a Marxist. One of the things that makes literary criticism interesting is that the words of the text remain the same but our view of them changes. Something can look different in different lights. The same is true even of a piece of landscape which looks different in the morning from the way it looks in the evening. It looks dif- ferent by moonlight. It looks different at noon. The Robber Bride read by a fifty year old woman is going to be different from The Robber Bride read by a twenty-year-old man. This is part of the variety of life. It should be encouraged. LH: So you think the text should be the primary basis for criticism? It's irrelevant what I had for breakfast, except to me but what my characters have for breakfast is very important. LH: Captain Crunch is a lot different from Bran Flakes. MA:That's exactly right. And therefore those things are important for them if I choose to put them in. Some authors feed their characters quite well and others never give them anything to eat at all. LH: Speaking about food, I’ve noticed that the female body is a recurring theme in your fiction. MA: The female body is a recurring theme for everybody. It’s a recurring theme for women as you can see by opening any women’s magazine. It’s very body-centered. +) Cat's Eye is just one of Margaret Atwood’s many novels What people of your age have to do is make sure those doors and windows don’t get shut again be- cause there will be ef- phere, an atmosphere of food and a society surrounded by images. I mean what's the big story today? It's not me. It’s Bourassa resigning. These are the times we live in and unless you're living in a completely closed room somewhere we take these things in. ir LH: What then is the relationship of art to daily events? MA: Well, people have been trying to figure that one out for at least two thousand years. We know it connects somehow but we aren't slow dancing MARGARET ATWOOD ~\ forts to shut them. LH: There is talk of cutting the CBC and the NEB. MA: It’s the business agenda. The business agenda would like us all to be one sure how. People Write you and say “This book changed my life.” Well, what does that mean?You don’t know what their life was like before so you don’t know how it was changed. You assume it was changed for the better, but it could be for the worst. (laughs) They don’t tell you. LH: How important do you think the author's intentions should be when a critic is analyzing fiction? MA: Well, you can never really know what the author's intention is, especially if the author is dead. But you can know what the intention of the text is and that is what you should be look- ing at. MA: It’s the only basis that there is. If you're not interested in what’s written what are you doing reading? Or let us put it another way. Presumably, the reason why we're interested in artists of vari- ous kinds is their art. LH: Does it bother you that there is an obsession with the cult of the artist's personality in terms of “What kind of dental floss do you use?” type questions? MA: I think it’s a sort of gossip fill and I suppose it helps some people to feel cozier about a work of art because they can say: “Well, that person brushes their teeth too. Like me.” Instead of thinking that the art is created by someone very different or very far above, it humanizes the artist to a certain ex- tent. I think it can be taken to a very silly extreme. LH: In 1972, you published Survival - a thematic guide to Canadian Literature. Would you write another Survival today? MA: It was a product of its historical time. When it was written most of the Canadian populace didn’t know, care, or believe that there was any Canadian litera- ture. It was very widely read, it was very influential and it made people sit up and think about their own literature and their own situation. It was addressing the person in the street who had gone to high school and had been told there was no Canadian writer except Stephen Leacock. Would I write it today? I say no because it wouldn’t be necessary. That point has been made. LH: But what about the danger of the American influence? What some refer to as the “Coca-Cola colonialization” of our culture. MA: That's where we live. We live on the fringe of an empire and we are regarded by that empire as ten percent of its market. The number of Cana- dian books written, published, bought and read has increased but so has the American ownership of Canadian companies. TheAmerican film indus- try really has a very tight stranglehold on cultural policy in this country, and it’s just by the hair of our chinny chin chins that there is a Canadian music industry. Once upon a time, Canadian art- ists were simply closed out of their own market. People who are being deprived of literacy are also being deprived of political power homogene- ous market. with no separate tastes, from shore to shore and from the Arctic to Mexico because it’s easier to distribute. They don’t want anything to exist that isn’t money-controlled and money-driven. A book I would recommend is The Gift by Louis Hyde. He suggests that the arts don’t really exist in the money economy. They exist in the economy of gift exchange. When people are talking about audience and thank-you notes they are re- ally talking about what comes back to you for passing what you have on. What comes back to you isn’t money. What comes back to you is thanks which is what you say for a gift. For a purchase you just say good-bye. LH: The word is a powerful thing. In totalitarian regimes like in The Handmaid's Tale the first thing they do is... MA: ...take control of the media. Reading still is a powerful thing. People who are being de- prived of literacy are also being deprived of po- litical power. They are easily manipulated and are just prey to the fifty-second sound byte. Li- bel is the big issue now. People are resorting to law to squash any independent commentary. I find it really ironic that veterans of World War II which was fought against totalitarianism are now trying to censor The Valour and the Hor- ror. You're the younger generation, is that the world you want to live in? A world in which you won't be able to print this interview? by Lora Hutchinson Canadian University Press