Surfacing

Margaret Atwood’s 1972 novel Surfacing and Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin offer complementary cases of the eerie.

In Surfacing, we move from a position ambiguously “inside” to one outside; in Under the Skin the inside is apprehended from outside. The two lead characters’ problematic relationship to what Lacan called the Symbolic order (the structure through which cultural meaning is assigned, and which, Lacan said, is secured by the name of the father) is underscored by the fact that neither is named. The narrator of Surfacing comes to feel as if she is an alien who has been play-acting the role of a woman; the lead character in Under the Skin is an actual alien, who seeks to simulate human behaviour.

Surfacing turns on the enigma of a missing father. The narrator has returned to her childhood home in Quebec to look for her father, who has disappeared in the Canadian wil­ derness. The question what happened? hangs over the novel, and the ultimate lack of resolution to the mystery — not only is the father never found, but the narrator herself becomes lost, unmoored, operating without co-ordinates — means that the eerie atmosphere is never dissipated. As with Garner, in Surfacing there is a tremendous sensitivity to the power of terrain — not now the British countryside, with its vastly overdetermined history of civil war, atrocity and struggle, but the depopulated space of the Canadian bush, with its prom­ises and threats, its openness and its terrifying emptiness. It is not the spectres of history which haunt Surfacing, but the spaces outside or at the edges of the human itself. It seems, so far as we can make out, that the father has fallen prey to a fatal fascination with the wilderness, its animals and asso­ciated lore. When the narrator enters his cabin, she finds that her father has filled his papers with images of strange human-animal creatures: signs of madness, or preparations for a shamanic passage out of what passes for modern civilisa­tion? As the anti-psychiatric rhetoric of the time might have had it, is there actually a difference between these two possi­bilities? Does not any real rejection of civilisation not entail a move into schizophrenia — a shift into an outside that cannot be commensurated with dominant forms of subjectivity, thinking, sensation?

In some respects, Surfacing could be seen as registering the bitter awakening after the militant euphoria of the Six­ ties; Atwoods famously cold prose freezing over the Sixties’ heated loins, and drawing, from the semi-desolation of the Canadian bush, a new landscape as alluring and forbidding as any in literature. A conservative reading suggests itself — what surfaces here, it might seem, are the consequences that Sixties permissiveness imagined it had dispensed with. The repressed — which in this sense would mean the agencies of repression themselves — returns in the spectral form of the unnamed narrator’s aborted child, encountered in a dark lake space where excrement and jellyfish-like foetal scrapings float, the abjected and the aborted commingling in a sewer of the Symbolic. Far from enabling her to ‘regain” some “whole­ness”, the reintegration of this lost object destroys the frag­ile collage of screen memories and fantasies the narrator’s unconscious has artfully constructed, projecting her from the frozen poise of dysphoria into psychosis — which, in the con­servative reading, would constitute a proper punishment for her licentiousness.

There’s a great deal at stake in resisting this conservative reading, and the concept of the eerie can help us in this task.

Atwood’s narrator increasingly finds that there is no place for her. She lacks the capacity to feel that is supposedly con­ stitutive of 'ordinary” subjectivity. She is outside herself; a mystery to herself, a kind of reflexive gap in the dominant structure: an eerie enigma. The point is not then to too- quickly resolve this enigma, but to keep faith with the ques­tions that it poses.

The narrator experiences the counterculture as little more than a sham, its libertarian rhetoric not only serving as a legitimation of familiar male privilege but offering new rationales for exploitation and subjugation. By 1972, the coun­ tercultures dreams of overthrowing and replacing dominant structures have devolved into a series of empty gestures, a congealed rhetoric. If Surfacing rejects the facile gestures of an exhausted counterculture, there is no question of its endors­ing the (apparently) safe and settled world which the counter­ culture repudiated. That world of supposedly organic solidity — her parents’ world, where people have children who grow like flowers in their back garden, the narrator imagines — is gone, Atwoods narrator notes, with an edge of wistfulness that nevertheless stops somewhat short of nostalgic longing.

The question that Surfacing poses, and leaves hanging, is how to mobilise her discontent rather than treat it as a pathol­ogy that requires a cure — either by successful reintegration into the Symbolic/civilisation or by some purifying journey out beyond the Symbolic into a pre-linguistic Nature. How, in other words, is it possible to keep faith with, rather than remedy, the narrator’s affective dyslexia?

In some respects, Surfacing belongs to the same moment as such texts as Luce Irigaray’s Speculum: Of the Other Woman, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. These works attempt to rise to the challenge of treating discontent, abjection and psychopathology as traces of an as yet unim­aginable outside rather than as symptoms of maladjustment.

At her moment of schizophrenic break-rapture, the narrator’s vision resembles the “nonorganic life” and “becoming-animal” Deleuze and Guattari will describe in A Thousand Plateaus: "they think I should be filled with death, I should be in mourn­ing. But nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive.” Yet this febrile delirium is more in tune with what Ben Woodard has termed “dark vitalism” than with Deleuze, and what flows and stalks in the body-with- out-organs zone of animal- and water-becomings is some­thingl ike Woodard’s sinister “creep of life”: “I hear breathing, withheld, observant, not in the house but all around it.” The place beyond the mortifications of the Symbolic is not only the space of an obscene, non-linguistic “life", but also where everything deadened and dead goes, once it has been expelled from civilisation. “This is where I threw the dead things...” Beyond the living death of the Symbolic is the kingdom of the dead: “It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead.”

Surfacing can be situated as part of another fin-de-Sixties/ early-Seventies moment: the post-psychedelic oceanic.

Atwood’s lake, viscous with blood and other bodily fluids, has something in common with the “bitches brew” that Miles Davis plunges into in 1969, emerging, catatonic, only six years later; it approaches the deep sea terrains John Martyn sounds out on Solid Air and One World:

Pale green, then darkness, layer after layer, deeper than before, seabottom: the water seemed to have thickened, in it pinprick lights flicked and darted, red and blue, yellow and white, and I saw that they were fish, the chasm-dwellers, fins lined with phosphorescent sparks, teeth neon. It was wonderful that I was down so far...

But these spaces of dissolved identity are not approached from the angle of a now tortured, now lulled male on a vaca­tion from the Symbolic, but from the perspective of someone who was never fully integrated into the Symbolic in the first place.

Surfacing, like Atwoods later Oryx and Crake, is a kind of rewriting of Freuds Civilisation and its Discontents — the text with which all that early Seventies radical theory had to wres­ tle, and reckon. Just as at the end of Oryx and Crake, Surfacing concludes with a moment of suspension, with the narrator, like Oryxs Snowman, poised between the schizophrenic space beyond the Symbolic and some return to civilisation.

Perhaps what is most prescient about Surfacing is its accept­ance that civilisation/the big Other/language cannot in the end be overcome by means of libido, madness or mysticism alone — yet, despite all this, Surfacing does not recommend an acquiescence in the reality principle. "For us, its necessary, the intercession of words”, the narrator concedes — but who is this “us”? It seems at first to encompass only the narrator and the lover with which she may be about to be reconciled.

Then we might be tempted to read the “us” as humanity in general, and the novel would be ending with a fairly cheap reconciliation between civilisation and one who was discon­tented with it. Yet its more interesting to think of the “us” as indicating those, like the narrator, who do not properly belong to humanity at all — what kind of language, what kind of civilisation, would these discontents make?

Mark Fisher
The Weird and the Eerie