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CHAPTER III Atwood's Third Novel, Lady Oracle CHAPTER III LADY ORACLE: POSTMODERNISM AND THE BODY Atwood’s third novel, Lady Oracle (1976), marks a return to the earlier, comic tone of The Edible Woman, but the theoretical and thematic explorations that occurred in Surfacing, the intervening novel, influence the direction and the resolution of the text. Just as Surfacing examined the irreconcilable conflict between the narrator’s essentialist belief in guilt and innocence, and her growing realisation of the mutability of such truths, so Lady Oracle exposes a tension between Joan the narrator’s love of resolved plot-lines – “I longed for happy endings”,1 she says – and a growing postmodernist mistrust of metanarratives. Altogether, Lady Oracle is a more postmodern text than the previous novel. In Surfacing, Atwood had anticipated the encroaching crisis of the essentialist idea of the self that contributed to the development of postmodernist theory. However, the narrator’s reluctance to accept the inescapable nature of cultural influence meant that the novel lacked real resolution, ending on a pause: “I tense forward, towards the demands and questions, though my feet do not move yet”,2 and a sense of anxiety permeated the novel. Surfacing acts as a transitional text in Atwood’s canon, preparing the way for Lady Oracle with its self-creating narrator, in which Atwood appears to shrug off earlier anxieties and embrace postmodernism. The postmodern aesthetic Postmodernism has proven notoriously difficult to define. In his seminal 1979 text, The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard argued that “the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as 1 Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (1976), London, 1982, 320. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 2 Atwood, Surfacing, 186. 60 Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction the postmodern age”,3 and he stated: “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”4 In a later, 1984 essay, “Periodizing the Sixties”, Frederic Jameson offered the view that “Postmodernism emerges as a way of making creative space for artists now oppressed by those henceforth hegemonic modernist categories of irony, complexity, ambiguity, dense temporality, and particularly, aesthetic and utopian monumentality”. In opposition to these modernist properties, he suggests, postmodernism grew out of a number of concurrent or sequential aesthetic shifts, namely: the death of the author; what Jameson calls a culture of the simulacrum; media culture; the aesthetic of textuality; the diminishment of depth; and the appearance of pastiche and “nostalgia art”.5 With Lady Oracle, Atwood explores all of these ideas, and does so within a comic framework that is in itself particularly suited to the vaunted lack of depth of the postmodern text. Yet despite her seeming compliance with the postmodern aesthetic, Lady Oracle betrays Atwood’s underlying suspicion of, in particular, postmodernism’s acceptance of the death of the subject, which abandons the belief in an essential self. Whilst Joan rejoices in the freedoms of postmodern anti-essentialism – “I had visions of myself … carefree at last, the past discarded” (7) – she simultaneously desires the ontological security that postmodernism necessarily sacrifices. She finds this security in the conclusive stability of her fiction writing, and admits: “I needed the feeling of release when everything turned out right and I could scatter joy like rice all over my characters and dismiss them into bliss” (320). This conflict of ideologies permeates the text, and highlights a debate that continues throughout Atwood’s work, and was also to have mounting significance for feminist theory. One of the most important texts for postmodernism was Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay, “The Death of the Author”, in which he argued that “as soon as a fact is narrated … the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins”. Barthes believed that writing had what he called a “prerequisite impersonality”, that “it 3 Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester, 1984, 3. 4 Ibid., xxiv. 5 Frederic Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties”, in Modern Literary Theory, 308-309. .
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