Afterword
BY ROSEMARY SULLIVAN
On the front cover of Good Bones, a strange creature, part sibyl, part harpy, perches on a naked female leg. Her tail feathers are composed of human eyes, her wings of lipsticked mouths with smiling teeth, her head feathers of grapes under a ruby hat, and her breastplate of sunglasses. She is the muse of this shrewd, often hilarious collection of stories. Margaret Atwood has designed the cover art for a number of her books. Here the reader has only to look at her collage to be forewarned: this muse packs a scorpion sting.
Atwood was living in France as work on Good Bones was nearing completion. Because of a French postal strike, the cover had to be sent by courier, and was initially lost, with the consequence that this exotic creature was trapped briefly in some French dead letter office. Clearly, someone did not want her wisdom loosed on the world.
In an unexpected way, it helps to think of France in connection with Good Bones, for in describing the form of the stories, the closest I can come is the conte, that curious French form that is midway between parable, fairy tale, and story. The French speak of un vrai conte for an improbable story and un conte vrai for a true story. And there is the conte de bonne femme, or conte bleu, the traditional old wives’ tale, which Atwood might be said to have reinvented as the wise woman’s tale.
There has always been something of the sibylline touch about Atwood. In Good Bones there are twenty-seven stories, written mostly between 1986 and 1992. As she sent letters across the Atlantic indicating revisions and precise directions for the arrangement of stories, Atwood remarked to her editor that she had “found” “Third Handed,” the last story to be added to the collection: “I knew there was a twenty-seventh piece – I hate even numbers and much prefer multiples of nine … it goes in between Homelanding and Death Scenes.” And one feels the pungent whiff of the white witch’s magic in the brew.
If there is one book that lurks behind these tales, it is The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. As a six-year-old child, Atwood read the 1944 unexpurgated Pantheon edition of Grimm, 210 tales long, with Josef Scharl’s gothic illustrations of skulls, hangmen, witches, ogres, and other remarkable creatures. In 1983 she recalled those stories with their “barrels of nails, red-hot shoes, removable tongues and eyes, cannibalism and various forms of open-heart surgery,” noting that “the book I’ve re-read most frequently, on a lifetime count, is Grimm’s Fairy Tales.… I’ve been reading this book, cover to cover and here and there, off and on, for 37 years.” Her childhood favourites were the wonderfully grotesque “The Juniper Tree” and “Fitcher’s Bird” (an archaic version of the more familiar “Blue Beard” recorded by the seventeenth-century French raconteur Charles Perrault).
In the original Grimm, before the stories were child-proofed and the bloodthirsty bits eliminated, the females had magic powers. “The women in these stories are not the passive zombies we were at one point led to think they were,” Atwood explains. The princesses “do as much rescuing as the princes do, though they use magic, perseverance and cleverness rather than cold steel to do it.” The narrative voice in Good Bones is one of those adventurous heroines, using disguises, ambiguity, and subversion to tell her stories. They entertain but they also instruct, and, like the original Grimm, they do not always have happy endings.
In Good Bones, Atwood rewrites the traditional Grimm characters: the little hen, the ugly sister, the harpy with her “coiffeur of literate serpents,” giving them contemporary voices. She plays with fairy-tale beginnings: “There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest,” hilariously rewriting the story to meet the prescriptions of political correctness till the story disappears, as does its mystery.
Atwood creates her own contes. One of my favourites is “In Love With Raymond Chandler.” Somehow she always finds her eccentric way into the heart of the matter. Here she reminds us why we are attached to Chandler. He is not the detective writer of grisly murders and steamy sex, but the detective of furniture, of those antimacassars and mahogany desks, of bedroom suites.
Two of the contes were commissioned by Michigan Quarterly Review for special issues on the female and the male body. The first editorial inquiry to Atwood came as a request for a submission “entirely devoted to the subject of ‘The Female Body.’ Knowing how well you have written on this topic … this capacious topic.” She is so quick that she immediately picks up the kernel of her tale, telling us of the aging of her capacious topic: “My topic feels like hell.” In the course of the tale, she shows how this topic, the female body, has been exploited and misused, by itself and by society; how it is used to sell and is sold. We know and need to know these things, but it is the wit with which this often overworked topic speaks that makes it fresh and disturbing.
“Alien Territory” is the male twin to this piece, and here she returns briefly to the tale of Bluebeard. This may be the single most slippery story in the whole repertoire of fairy tales, and it holds endless fascination for Atwood. As an undergraduate at university, she was already listening to Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and drawing water colours of The Robber Bridegroom. Through decades of writing, she has continued to probe the story’s dark entrails. In “Bluebeard’s Egg,” the title story of her 1983 collection, she refers to the traditional version in which the three sisters, in sequence, discovered dismembered bodies of previous wives in Bluebeard’s castle. In the version she invents in Good Bones, the third sister finds a small dead child with its eyes wide open locked in Bluebeard’s secret room. The narrator, whose motive, like that of many modern women, is to heal Bluebeard, obviously has no idea how far down into his psyche she will have to go to do so.
Atwood insisted that “The Female Body” and “Alien Territory” were to be called not essays, but “pieces.” They are driven by a deeply moral imagination, and fraught with warnings: as a civilization we are destroying ourselves. In the tour de force “My Life as a Bat,” the narrator decides it was better to be a bat than to be human. She hopes to be a bat again. Reincarnation as an animal would be “At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.” And Atwood offers an evocative vision, through a bat’s eyes, of a world in which there are still goddesses in the caves and grottoes. When asked by The British Defense and Aid Fund for South Africa to donate a manuscript for sale at Sotheby’s to assist students in South Africa and Namibia, Atwood donated “My Life as a Bat.” It carries the full weight of her ironic vision of our collective human achievement.
Good Bones is scrupulously organized and ends with the title story about aging, a subject Atwood confronts with celebratory stoicism. Reading it, I hear W.B. Yeats’s contrapuntal voice speaking of aging in “Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aging man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick … sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” I would speculate that Atwood would not entirely approve of Yeats’s egocentric, romantic fantasy of escaping the human through the transcendence of art. Unlike Yeats, she speaks to her aging bones with affection rather than with contempt. There is good in the real, in the minimal, if we could only accept our human limitations. As she urges her bones to the top of the stairs, she speaks to them as to a faithful dog: “There. We’re at the top. Good Bones! Good Bones! Keep on going.”
In Good Bones, Margaret Atwood may insist that the reader look at hard truths, but she never forgoes her belief in magic and the transformative powers of the imagination. As she once said, we may not be able to change the world, but we can change our way of looking at it. Some of her magic is to be felt in the way she chisels her stories to an adamantine brilliance. Few modern writers are as off-beat and funny; few can orchestrate images of such stunning precision; few can be as wise.