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Tome 54 2001/3

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Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye: or the trembling canvas

Marta Dvorak Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle

Résumé de l'article

Margaret Atwood’s oblique mode consisting in naming things in detail so as to suggest concepts, corresponds to the strategy that Roland Barthes has identified as the indirect language of literature. This paper will explore the doubled narrative of Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye, with its intermeshing of discursive and figural modes of representation grounded in the central “trembling” object of the canvas, in essence a reflexion on language, social conventions, power, and codes of perception. Le mode oblique de Margaret Atwood qui consiste à nommer en détail des choses afin de suggérer des concepts correspond à la stratégie que Roland Barthes a identifiée comme le langage indirect de la littérature. Cet essai étudiera le récit dédoublé de Cat’s Eye, qui tisse deux modes sémiotiques ancrés dans l’objet central, “tremblant”, de la toile, lieu de réflexion sur le langage, les conventions sociales, le pouvoir et les codes de perception.

Plan de l'article

• Trembling Meaning

• Figures and senses

• The Stage of Representation

• BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Margaret Atwood has consistently emphasized the connection between politics and poetics—the close relationship that exists between literature and the social, political, and cultural context from which it emerges. But Atwood is in fact a master of indirection who systematically resorts to an oblique mode in both prose and poetry that consists in naming things in detail so as to suggest concepts. Her strategy corresponds to what Roland Barthes has identified in his critical essay on La Bruyère as the indirect language of literature:

nommer en détail les choses afin de ne pas nommer leur sens dernier et tenir cependant sans cesse ce sens menaçant, désigner le monde comme un répertoire de signes dont on ne dit pas ce qu’ils signifient.

(1964, 232)

Cat’s Eye (1988), a Künstlerroman whose narrator-protagonist is a female painter, functions as a doubled narrative interweaving discursive and figural modes of representation. Atwood is herself a visual artist [1] who works in media not frequently exhibited in museums: sketches, watercolours, collages, linocuts. Although she downplays the value of her visual work, explaining that she “paint[s] images but [is] not a painter, if you understand the difference” (Wilson 133), with the publication of Cat’s Eye, her visual imagery and its parallels to her literary imagery began to receive critical attention. The novel is exemplary of the manner in which Atwood designates a repertory of signs but leaves open the domain of the signified, referring constantly to concrete objects rather than to concepts. The objects resonate more than any concept she or we could name, for as Barthes has noted, “le sens de l’objet tremble toujours, non celui du concept” (1964, 232).

Trembling Meaning

Cat’s Eye is a fictional autobiography, a retrospective narrative in a two-fold sense. Elaine Risley, the middle-aged narrating “I,” a painter who has achieved critical renown, has been invited back to her home town of Toronto for a retrospection of her work. Simultaneously, she carries out a retrospection of her life. The narrative voice of the older, wiser narrating “I” which crosses and overlaps the limited point of view of the narrated “I,” Elaine as child, adolescent, and young adult, creates a doubled vision in the manner of an anamorphosis, telescoping past and present, ignorance and knowledge, seeing and telling. Her early years having been spent in the backwoods of northern Canada with her entomologist father, the child protagonist suddenly finds herself projected into an alien cultural environment, simultaneously discovering urban social codes along with language, a mysterious world of cold waves that have “nothing to do with water” (54), twin sets that have nothing to do with twins, and coat trees that do not sprout coats. Choosing the particularly restricted perspective of a child carries certain advantages. It allows the author to defamiliarize and to recontextualize, to question preconceptions or conventions and transmit a fresh vision, and to create a certain complicity between the reader and the authorial presence, carried out by implying common knowledge or values with the addressee, often at the expense of the ignorant or inexperienced protagonist. But the intradiegetic child narrator does limit the writer’s field of action. Although at times Atwood superimposes the older voice in a sort of contrapuntal structure to transmit information that would be beyond the scope of the child protagonist’s experience, on the whole she adheres strictly to the stance of the naive narrator, that makes the tale of frighteningly destructive relationships, of relentless bullying and torment all the more poignant as it is imbued with helplessness. If, as Barthes argues, all truth begins with an enigma—the gap which separates the thing from its significance—then the writer’s art, in the sense of technique,

consiste à établir la plus grande distance possible entre l’évidence des objets et des événements par laquelle l’auteur inaugure la plupart de ses notations et l’idée qui, en définitive, semble rétroactivement les choisir, les arranger, les mouvoir.

(1964, 232)

Thus we are never directly told that the young Elaine is unhappy. We merely learn that she gnaws her hair, bites off pieces of her lips, and peels her feet like mushrooms. We encounter casual descriptions of innocuous objects, such as the old-fashioned toaster, only to be jolted by a matter-of-fact statement startling in its very detachment, that transforms the domestic appliance into an instrument of torture.

The toaster is on a silver heat pad. It has two doors, with a knob at the bottom of each, and a grid up the center that glows red-hot. When the toast is done on one side I turn the knobs and the doors open and the toast slides down and turns over, all by itself. I think about putting my finger in there, onto the red-hot grid.

(126)

Atwood notably uses interwoven alimentary and vestimentary motifs as intratextual signs that both codify and are codified by a given sociocultural reality. The isotopies of food and clothing function dialectically as signs of demarcation, boundary markers, or liminal spaces between two territories. When the porridge that Elaine’s mother cooks for her breakfast is “like boiling mud” (126), and when after her wholesome lunch of soup and cheese and crackers, Elaine feels as if her stomach is “full of earth” (146) and throws up what she has ingested, food, symbol of nourishment and life, has become poisonous and alien. When food is dis-tasteful, society is dys-functional. In the same way, clothing (the exterior) represents values (the interior), but can also function as concealment (the stockings pulled over the peeled feet, for instance).

By setting up these isotopies, or sets of semantic categories, Atwood both generates the text and makes a homogeneous reading of the text possible. The scattered correspondences relate to one another independently of the time-sequence of the story. By having certain images recur always in the same associative connection, the writer creates an associative force strong enough to evoke the presence of the associative value when the images occur alone, thus arriving at a personal poetic symbolism. To see how Atwood makes her objects resonate or “tremble,” we have only to look at her treatment of two humble household appliances: the toaster, seen above, and the wringer washer.

Punished for being different, the child Elaine tries to avoid the insidious torments inflicted on her by classmates, with the connivance of their parents, by finding refuge in the small enclosed laundry room, in the company of an old-fashioned white enamel wringer washer and a Javex bleach bottle “with a skull and crossbones on it, reeking of sanitation and death” (129). She watches the clothes and soapy water “boiling sluggishly, like cloth porridge” (126, my emphasis), feeling purified of her “deviance” through the graying water and the dirt coming out as if caused by the mere act of looking. Her job is to run the washed clothes through the wringer into the laundry sink full of clean water. The descriptive pause, set up through the naive perspective of the child, triggers disturbing resonances between the wringer and the body, clothes and flesh, suds and blood, concrete and abstract, purification and mutilation, self-destruction and death, pain and oblivion, violence and a troubling peace.

The wringer is two rubber rolls, the color of pale flesh, that revolve around and around, the clothes squeezing in between them, water and suds squooshing out like juice. I roll up my sleeves, stand on tiptoe, rummage in the tub and haul up the sopping underpants and slips and pajamas, which feel like something you might touch just before you know it’s a drowned person. I poke the corners of the clothes in between the wringers and they are grabbed and dragged through, the arms of the shirts ballooning with trapped air, suds dripping from the cuffs. I’ve been told to be very careful when doing this: women can get their hands caught in wringers, and other parts of their bodies, such as hair. I think about what would happen to my hand if it did get caught: the blood and flesh squeezing up my arm like a traveling bulge, the hand coming out the other side flat as a glove, white as paper. This would hurt a lot at first, I know that. But there’s something compelling about it. A whole person could go through the wringer and come out flat, neat, completed, like a flower pressed in a book.

(129-30)

Functioning here as a synechdoche of a repressive, intolerant society that grinds down elements that deviate from a pre-set normality, the wringer washer also materializes pain that is channeled inwards towards self-destruction. The domestic object reappears later on, illustrative of what Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and then Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria respectively termed the creative or secondary Imagination: a re/presentation filtered through Elaine’s mind, and graphically recreated this time to direct the resonances back outwards towards her tormentor.

I have a brief intense image of Mrs. Smeath going through the flesh-colored wringer of my mother’s washing machine, legs first, bones cracking and flattening, skin and flesh squeezing up toward her head, which will pop in a minute like a huge balloon of blood.

(193)

The image for the moment is a mental one, and the mode of representation is a discursive one, resorting for the desired effect to poetic devices of the verbal medium, namely simile, onomatopœia, alliteration and consonance. But we shall see how Atwood constructs a doubled narrative, with its intermeshing of discursive and figural modes of representation grounded in the central “trembling” object of the canvas.

Figures and senses

As a Künstlerroman, Cat’s Eye retraces the development of the young artist protagonist and her relationship to her surrounding culture and society. Through the distancing device of the restricted point of view and its ensuing structural irony, Atwood relates her dawning awareness of the arbitrary codes of language, and her gradual attraction to that parallel, alternate form of articulation, the visual arts. The vocation of the artist is already latent in the young Elaine’s verbal descriptions of objects, that reveal an acute sensitivity to light and colour and shade.

The lamps in people’s houses cast a yellowish light, not cold and greenish but a buttery dim yellow with a tinge of brown. The colors of things in houses have darkness mixed into them: maroon, mushroom beige, a muted green, a dusty rose. These colors look a little dirty, like the squares in a paint box when you forget to rinse the brush.

(59; my emphases)

We can note the remarkable precision and attention paid to hue, as well as the proleptic quality of the simile. We can also note that the visible seems to belong to the domain of the tactile, that the visible and the tangible straddle or overlap in the manner posited by Berkeley in An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Berkeley’s epistemological synaesthesia was taken up in turn by Merleau-Ponty, who argued that the visible is not a film without substance or thickness, but that latent in the precise form of all things is a certain texture. This stance finds an echo in Elaine’s comparisons (“The air in the evening lamplight is coagulated, like a custard thickening” [59]). Even in a childish experience such as that of reading the comics, the future artist not only lucidly analyzes the visual conventions of cartoons and comic strips, but interconnects the images with a total sensual experience:

in this light I spread the evening paper out on the polished hardwood floor and rest on my knees and elbows, reading the comics. In the comics there are people with round holes for eyes … others who can stretch their faces into any shape at all. Around me is the scent of newsprint and floorwax, the bureau drawer smell of my itchy stockings mingled with that of grimy knees, the scratchy hot smell of wool plaid and the cat box aroma of cotton underpants.

(59)

The verbal sense analogies culminating in the double synaesthesia “scratchy hot smell” anticipate Elaine’s future painting style, a blend of the neo-surreal and the neo-baroque, with its aesthetics of sensation, or what Gilles Deleuze in his analysis of Francis Bacon has termed “une logique de la sensation.”

As the young adult Elaine slowly builds up her skills, experiments with various materials and techniques, and gradually masters her craft, she describes to the reader the drawings and canvasses that she is working on. She meticulously reports both process and product, as she initially contents herself with mimetically sketching the live models in Life Drawing class, and finally goes on to paint “things that aren’t there” (156). What “things” does she paint?

I paint a silver toaster, the old kind, with knobs and doors. One of the doors is partly open, revealing the red-hot grill within. … I paint a wringer washing machine. The washing machine is a squat cylinder of white enamel. The wringer itself is a disturbing flesh-tone pink.

(357)

The narrative strategy consists in a conjunctive interplay between the verbal and pictorial media, the ekphrasis functioning as a shifter between different semiotic modes in particular, but also between the “real” and the representational in general. As an object that is both artificial and articulated, the fictional canvas indeed functions for Atwood as a privileged shifter “translating,” as it were, the “real” into the textual. To borrow Philippe Hamon’s term in Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (40), the descriptor, in this case also the painter and the narrator, writes what she “sees” or paints/has painted. The act of seeing gives legitimacy to the descriptive act. Whether the referent be “real” or unreal, as Philippe Hamon argues, in order to decode the message, we descriptees must read the text as if we saw the painting. Crucial to the success or failure of the ekphrasis then is our competence as descriptee, our ability to mentally represent from a verbal sequence that which is described, which, having been seen, is to be seen (Hamon 40). When picture is traded for language, and language for picture, the receiver is projected into a world of dissolved boundaries.

We can remark that the ekphrasis quoted above takes on a paratactic form that erases discursive segments whose function is to indicate relationships between syntagms. The syntactic erasure in appearance suggests a corresponding absence of ontological or logical relationships. Mere juxtaposition of syntactic elements suggests that there is no connection between the partially open door and the red-hot grill, no purpose or invitation, and that the “flesh-tone pink” of the wringer is as neutral and innocent as the preceding “white enamel.” The fallible narrator acknowledges that

these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories. They are not hazy around the edges, but sharp and clear. They arrive detached from any context; they are simply there, in isolation, as an object glimpsed on the street is there.

(357)

Atwood’s objects indeed are “simply there,” or in ontological terms, simply are. They show nothing, point to nothing beyond themselves. Yet the narrator who “has no image of [her]self in relation to them” admits that they “are suffused with anxiety.” She insists that it is not her own anxiety, but that the anxiety “is in the things themselves” (357). Atwood has indeed charged her objects with anxiety, and they “tremble.”

In a neo-baroque fashion, the writer generates sense by producing a sens/ation in readers or virtual viewers, by touching their sens/ibility. As with the art of Francis Bacon, “the meaning that survives is not in sensation; it is sensation, the sheer impact of the perceptive material” (Chézaud). In the manner of an anamorphosis, Atwood planifies the reader/viewer’s impression in an orderly process of shifting. By positioning ourselves, by adopting a particular point of view suggested by the anterior diegetic events, we “see” the sense that Atwood has superimposed or pro-vided, in the etymological sense of pro-videre, to see in advance. We see suffering. We see, or rather sense, not a washing machine or a toaster—consumer goods—, but pain and horror—sensations. In this, Atwood’s fictional art is representative of the transformation that the concept of image has undergone. Art critic Pierre Francastel argues that:

[a]u lieu d’être envisagée comme devant permettre le report sur la toile d’une réalité extérieure à l’individu — artiste aussi bien que spectateur — elle a été conçue comme liée à un phénomène de conscience et de vision inférieure, psychologique avant tout. On est passé de la vision en Dieu au Moyen Âge et de la vision dans la Nature, à la vision dans l’esprit de l’homme. Par où s’est trouvée encore ruinée l’ancienne conception du symbole. Le symbole, qui jadis était l’objet représenté, est devenu lui aussi la sensation.

(28)

But if Atwood’s represented object has become the sensation, is it not because our vision has been nourished by the verbal medium? We readers of Cat’s Eye in effect have a layered vision: we do not “see” Elaine’s canvasses as do the intradiegetic viewers in the fictional gallery. We have been trained to see the sensation behind the illusion, and the illusion behind the sensation. This would suggest a powerlessness of both text and painting to produce what could be called a “full” representation. It is in the space created, in the dialogue between text and image that a total representation of the world can be constituted. The struggle for wholeness lies in dialectic: constant referral back and forth between two imperfect media, linguistic and iconographic, whose interaction or even conjunction produces harmony. [2]

The Stage of Representation

Atwood’s represented object does indeed tremble, all the more so as it obeys not only a sensualist but also a cognitive scheme. The canvas makes us reflect upon the relationships between event and representation, between semiotic system and conceptualisation. Atwood’s fictional canvas is a remarkable illustration of the creative or secondary Imagination, which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” (Coleridge 452). Her artist protagonist demonstrates how the creative imagination reiterates, constructs, and re/presents the world, in the sense of a representation which is a mise en scène, a staging or performance. The picture of the labour-saving device offers us a simple re/presentation reduced to its basic element—the image. By mediating between “life” and conception, between experience and the art object, it self-reflexively suggests the ultimate inadequacy of a mimetic presentation and the need for a cultural dimension of thought. Our perception of the signified shifts to apperception—the attainment of full awareness of a sensation or an idea, or in other words, the perception of a perception.

In this, Atwood’s verbal and pictorial images are exemplary of an evolution in the whole of modernist production, which in turn laid the groundwork for postmodernism. Francastel argues that the shifting of the notion of object from the domain consisting in the observation of occurrences considered to be realities external to humans, to the domain consisting in the differentiation of their cerebral or psychological activities, has been the most momentous event of the 20th century. The visual arts, literature, and the humanities in general, he posits, take their subject matter no longer from the spectacle that the world offers, but from the human brain:

[elles] ont pris non pas le spectacle de l’univers mais le cerveau de l’homme comme matière de leur information. On ne cherche plus à définir, aujourd’hui, l’homme par son aventure, mais par l’évolution de son esprit.

(29)

Thus Atwood’s washing machine is a study on consciousness, memory, motive, and imagination. Her still life is set in the mind. Her other canvasses too, through their linguistic mediation, foreground the polysemy and ambivalence of words, call attention to the arbitariness of signifiers, and to the gap between signifier and referent. Without taking on the restricted point of view of the narrated I, accompanied by the use of a diegetic present tense for more immediacy, the older narrating I at one point recalls to mind “a picture [she] painted years ago” (286), an absent painting, distant in time and space. Like many of her early canvasses, Falling Women owed its origin to the young narrator’s dawning awareness of language, or initial “confusion about words.”

Falling Women showed the women, three of them, falling as if by accident off a bridge, their skirts opened into bells by the wind, their hair streaming upward. Down they fell, onto the men who were lying unseen, jagged and dark and without volition, far below.

(286)

The older narrator here describes a painting that is not there, and furthermore describes in the painting what is not there, what is invisible: the men “lying unseen,” because “far below” and outside of the frame. We descriptees understand that the painting is a reflexion on language, a play on signifiers, as well as a judgment on the ideological stances that underlie clichés, but certain elements of the ekphrasis remain obscure, notably the conceit produced by the startling association of “men” with the adjective “jagged.” There is a discrepancy between the frame of the picture and the frame of what is de/picted, or between what the picture itself depicts, and what the descriptor sees. The discrepancy corresponds to the framing process or differ/ance that Roland Barthes explores in S/Z with respect to the literary description in general, and the realist description in particular:

Toute description littéraire est une vue. On dirait que l’énonciateur, avant de décrire, se poste à la fenêtre, non tellement pour bien voir, mais pour fonder ce qu’il voit par son cadre même : l’embrasure fait le spectacle. Décrire, c’est donc placer le cadre vide que l’auteur réaliste transporte toujours avec lui (plus important que son chevalet), devant une collection ou un continu d’objets inaccessibles à la parole sans cette opération maniaque… ; pour pouvoir en parler, il faut que l’écrivain, par un rite initial, transforme le « réel » en objet peint (encadré) ; après quoi il peut décrocher cet objet, le tirer de sa peinture : en un mot : le dé-peindre (dépeindre, c’est faire dévaler le tapis des codes, c’est référer, non d’un langage à un référent, mais d’un code à un autre code).

(61, emphases in the text)

Atwood’s ekphrasis carries out most literally this process of seeing, framing, and de-picting, in that the mental image of the writer transforming and framing reality that Barthes evokes becomes a “real” painted image or canvas, evocative even of a cinematic panning technique. Yet interestingly enough, the parade of objects of the gaze (in this case three women) are not “inaccessibles à la parole.” On the contrary, it is language as parole that gives us true access to the full meaning of their representation. For prior to the description given above, Atwood exposes in great detail the intention that went into the painting, explicates the absences and thereby fills them by showing what is not there:

There were no men in this painting, but it was about men, the kind who caused women to fall. I did not ascribe any intentions to these men. They were like the weather, they didn’t have a mind. They merely drenched you or struck you like lightning and moved on, mindless as blizzards. Or they were like rocks, a line of sharp slippery rocks with jagged edges. You could walk with care along between the rocks, picking your steps, and if you slipped you’d fall and cut yourself, but it was no use blaming the rocks.

(286)

The rhetorical device of seriation structuring the similes and metaphors (the men are “like the weather,” “like lightning,” “mindless as blizzards,” “like rocks”) is elaborated into an extended metaphor that develops into an apologue that in turn prepares and anticipates the subsequent conceit of the jagged dark men. The moral of the apologue is reinforced by exegetical remarks that paradoxically and ironically predate the canvas, deriving from the superimposed restricted vision of the child narrator trying to make sense of the arbitrary codes of language and thus of the world:

That must be what was meant by fallen women. Fallen women were women who had fallen onto men and hurt themselves. There was some suggestion of downward motion, against one’s will and not with the will of anyone else. Fallen women were not pulled-down women or pushed women, merely fallen. Of course there was Eve and the Fall; but there was nothing about falling in that story, which was only about eating, like most children’s stories.

(286)

With a complex layering generated by the interweaving of voice and point of view, by the doubleness and distancing effect of structural irony which simultaneously fuses yet opposes different positions in time, the elements of exposition in the prose enable the viewer to see behind and beneath the canvas, and to arrive at a more complete view than if we saw the canvas alone. The writing elaborates on and expands on the vision of the painting, and the painting synthesizes the mixture of sensations created by the writing. The conjunction of two partial representations through two media, each inadequate on its own, generates not a “full” representation but a floating one that, in the words of Linda Hutcheon, calls attention to “the inherent slippage that is part of language and its usage, the instability of the relationship between sign and referent” (28).

By writing on painting, by joining image and acoustic image, Atwood self-reflexively insists on the sign’s lack of co-naturalness, on the dis-semblance of words and the things they name. Her trembling canvasses call attention to the multiplicity of things to be grasped by language, and to the polysemy of signs, which can never suffice to entirely apprehend reality, but which liberate the imagination and allow the artist, to borrow Foucault’s terms, to make everything speak. Both the narrator’s canvasses and the author’s novel are hymns to perception and vision, to the artist’s powers of transformation and control. They testify. Elaine’s pictures, she insists,

are not only mockery or desecration. I put light into them too. Each pallid leg, each steel-rimmed eye, is there as it was, as plain as bread. I have said, Look. I have said, I see.

(427, emphases in the text)

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

· Atwood, Margaret. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi, 1982.

· —. (1988) Cat’s Eye, Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, Seal Books, 1989.

· Barthes, Roland. Essais critiques. Paris : Seuil, 1964.

· —. S/Z. Paris : Seuil, 1970.

· Berkeley, George. 1705, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. Complete Works. Ed. M.R. Ayers. London: Everyman, 1975.

· Chézaud, Patrick. “Francis Bacon and Neo-baroque postmodern figuration,” paper given at the international conference organized by the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), Helsinki, 25-29 August 2000.

· Coleridge, Samuel. 1817, Biographia Literaria. Ed. David Perkins. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967.

· Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon : Logique de la sensation. Paris : La Différence, 1981.

· Dvorak, Marta. “Visual and Verbal Transcriptions of Alterity,” Texte, revue de critique et de théorie littéraire, Iconicité et narrativité. 21/22 (1997): 175-186.

· Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les choses. Paris : Gallimard, 1966.

· Francastel, Pierre. « Introduction ». Histoire de la peinture. Paris : Gonthier, 1983.

· Hamon, Philippe. « Texte et architecture », Poétique 73 (février 1988) : 3-26.

· —. Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif, Paris : Hachette, 1981.

· Hutcheon, Linda. Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

· Kant, Emmanuel. 1781, Critique de la raison pure. Paris : Alcan, 1927.

· Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris : Gallimard, 1945.

· —. Le Visible et l’invisible. Paris : Gallimard, 1964.

· Wilson, Sharon. “Margaret Atwood’s Visual Art,” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (Fall 1993): 129-173.

NOTES

[1]

See the reproductions of some of Atwood’s art in Sharon Wilson’s well-documented article “Margaret Atwood’s Visual Art.” Also see Marta Dvorak, “Visual and Verbal Transcriptions of Alterity.”

[2]

Atwood emphasizes the interplay between the two media by heading many of the book sections and chapters with the titles of paintings, in either analeptic or proleptic fashion.