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

"We" - Yevgeny Zamyatin

 

INTRODUCTION

(2020)

I didn’t read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s remarkable novel We until the 1990s, many years after I’d written The Handmaid’s Tale. How could I have missed one of the most important dystopias of the twentieth century, and one that was a direct influence on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—which was a direct influence on me?

Perhaps I missed it because I was an Orwell reader but not an Orwell scholar, and a science fiction reader but not a science fiction scholar. When I did finally come across We, I was amazed by it. And now, reading it again in this fresh, intense translation by Bela Shayevich, I am amazed all over again.

So much in We seems prophetic: the attempt to abolish the individual by merging all citizens with the state; the surveillance of almost every act and thought, in part through the charming giant pink ears that quiveringly listen to every utterance; the “liquidation” of dissenters—in Lenin’s writing of 1918, “liquidation” is metaphorical, but in We it’s literal, as those to be liquidated are in fact transformed into liquid; the erection of a border wall that serves not just to prevent invasion but to keep citizens inside; the creation of a larger-than-life, all-knowing, all-wise Big Brotherish Benefactor who may be simply an image or a simulacrum—all these details foreshadowed things to come. So did the use of letters and numbers rather than names: Hitler’s extermination camps had not yet engraved numbers on their inhabitants, and we of this age had not yet become the fodder for algorithms. Stalin had yet to forge the cult of his own personality, the Berlin Wall was decades in the future, electronic bugging had not been developed, Stalin’s show trials and mass purges would not take place for a decade—yet here is the general plan of later dictatorships and surveillance capitalisms, laid out in We as if in a blueprint.

Zamyatin was writing We in 1920–1921, while the civil war that followed the Bolshevik-dominated October Revolution was still ongoing. Zamyatin himself, having been a member of the movement before 1905, was an Old Bolshevik (a group slated for liquidation by Stalin in the 1930s because they stuck to their original democratic-Communist ideals instead of going along with Comrade Stalin’s autocracy)—but now that the Bolsheviks were winning the civil war, Zamyatin didn’t like the way things were going. The original communal committees were becoming mere rubber-stampers for the power elite who had emerged under Lenin and would be solidified by Stalin. Was this equality? Was this the flowering of the individual’s gifts and talents that had been so romantically proposed by the earlier party?

In his 1921 essay, “I Am Afraid,” Zamyatin said, “True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.” In this he was a child of the Romantic movement, as was the revolution itself. But the “diligent and reliable officials,” having seen which way the Leninist-Stalinist wind was blowing, were already busying themselves with censorship, issuing decrees about preferable subjects and styles, and pulling out the unorthodox weeds. This is always a dangerous exercise in a totalitarianism, since weeds and flowers are likely to change places in the blink of an autocrat’s eye.

We can be viewed in part as a utopia: the goal of the One State is universal happiness, and it argues that since you can’t be both happy and free, freedom has to go. The “rights” over which people were making such a fuss in the nineteenth century (and over which they continue to make such a fuss now) are viewed as ridiculous: if the One State has everything under control and is acting for the greatest possible happiness of everyone, who needs rights?

We follows a long line of nineteenth-century utopias that also proposed recipes for universal happiness. So many literary utopias were written in the nineteenth century that Gilbert and Sullivan created an operatic parody of them called Utopia, Limited. A few highlights are Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (a superior human race lives underneath Norway, with an advanced technology, inflatable wings, reason over passion, and females who are bigger and stronger than males); News from Nowhere by William Morris (socialist and equal, with arts and crafts, artistic clothing, and every female a Pre-Raphaelite stunner); and A Crystal Age by W.H. Hudson, in which people not only have beauty and artistic clothing, but are rendered happy, like the Shakers, through having no interest in sex whatsoever.

The later nineteenth century was obsessed with “the woman problem” and “the new woman,” and not a single utopia—and then not a single dystopia—could refrain from tinkering with existing conventions concerning sex. Nor could the U.S.S.R. Its early attempts to abolish the family, to raise children collectively, to allow instant divorce, and, in a few cities, to decree it a crime for a woman to refuse to have sex with a male Communist (nice try, guys!) created such a farcical and shambolic misery that Stalin backpedalled furiously in the 1930s.

But Zamyatin was writing in the early, fermenting period, and it is this cluster of attitudes and policies that We satirizes. Though people live in literal glass houses, with all of their actions transparent, they lower their blinds modestly for the hour of sex, booked in advance via pink ticket and duly recorded by an older woman in the foyer of each apartment building, according to regulations. But though everyone has sex, only women who meet certain physical specifications are allowed to have children: eugenics was considered “progressive” at this time.

As in Jack London’s 1908 novel, The Iron Heel—a dystopia hoping for a utopian future—and also in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the driving forces of dissent in We are female. D-503, the male protagonist, begins as a dedicated member of the One State, preparing to send a rocket into the universe with the aim of sharing the One State’s recipe for perfect happiness with worlds unknown. Dystopian characters are prone to journal-writing, and D-503 intends his journal for the universe. But soon the plot thickens, and so does D’s prose. Has he been dipping into Edgar Allan Poe in his more lurid moments? Or the German Gothic Romantics? Or Baudelaire? Possibly. Or his author has.

The cause of this emotional disruption is sex. If only D could stick to his scheduled sexual appointments and his pink tickets! But he cannot. Enter I-330, an angular, individualistic secret bohemian and alcohol-drinking dissident who seduces him in a hidden love nest and leads him to question the One State. She is in sharp contrast to O-90, a round, compliant woman who’s forbidden to have children because she’s too short, and who is D’s registered pink-ticket sexual partner. O can stand for a circle—completion and fullness—or for an empty zero, and Zamyatin chooses both. At first we think O-90 is a nullity, but when she becomes pregnant despite the official veto, she surprises us.

Much has been written about the difference between I-cultures and We-cultures. In an I-culture such as the United States, individuality and personal choice are almost a religion. No accident there. America was initiated by Puritans, and in Protestantism it’s the individual soul vis-à-vis God that’s important, not membership in a universal Church. Puritans were big journal-writers, recording every spiritual blip and bleep: you have to believe in the high value of your soul to do that. “Find your voice” is a mantra in North American writing schools, and that means your unique voice. “Free speech” is taken to mean you can say anything you like.

In We-cultures, on the contrary, why do you need that kind of voice? It’s belonging to a group that’s valued: one should act in the interests of social harmony. “Free speech” means you can say anything you like, but what you like will naturally be constrained by the effects it may have on others, and who will decide that? The “we” will. But when does a “we” become a mob? Is D’s description of everyone going for a walk in unified lockstep a dream or a nightmare? When does the so-harmonious, so-unified “we” become a Nazi rally? This is the cultural crossfire we are caught in today.

Any human being is surely both: an I, special, discrete; and a We, part of a family, a country, a culture. In the best of worlds, the We—the group—values the I for its uniqueness, and the I knows itself through its relationships with others. If the balance is understood and respected—or so we fondly believe—there need not be a conflict.

But the One State has upset the balance: it has tried to obliterate the I, which nonetheless stubbornly persists. Hence poor D-503’s torments. D’s arguments with himself are Zamyatin’s arguments with the emerging conformity and voice-stifling of the early U.S.S.R. What was happening to the bright vision held out by the utopias of the nineteenth century, and indeed by Communism itself? What had gone so wrong?

When Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stalin’s purges and liquidations had already happened, Hitler had come and gone, the extent to which a person could be reduced and distorted by torture was known, so his vision is much darker than Zamyatin’s. Zamyatin’s two heroines are staunch, like Jack London’s, whereas Orwell’s Julia capitulates and betrays almost immediately. Zamyatin’s character S-4711 is a secret service operative, but his number gives away his alter ego: 4711 is the name of a cologne that originated in the German city of Cologne, which in the year 1288 staged a successful democratic revolt against church and state authorities, and became a Free Imperial City. Yes, S-4711 is actually a dissident, bent on revolt. Whereas in Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien pretends to be a dissident but is actually a member of the state police.

Zamyatin holds out the possibility of escape: beyond the Wall is a natural world where there are free “barbarian” human beings, covered with—could it be fur? For Orwell, no one in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four can leave that world, though he does permit a distant future in which the repressive society no longer exists.

We was written at a particular moment in history—the moment when the utopia promised by Communism was fading into dystopia; when, in the name of making everyone happy, heretics would be accused of thoughtcrime, disagreement with an autocrat would be equated with disloyalty to the revolution, show trials would proliferate, and liquidation would become the order of the day. How could Zamyatin have seen the future so clearly? He didn’t, of course. He saw the present, and what was already lurking in its shadows.

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” says Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” We was a warning to its own place and time—one that was not heeded because it was not heard: the “diligent and reliable officials” and their censorship of Zamyatin took care of that. The courses were not departed from. Millions and millions died.

Is it also a warning to us, in our time? If it is, what sort of warning? Are we listening?

Margaret Atwood 

Burning Questions