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MARGARET ATWOOD ON WRITING AND THE WRITER:
NEGOTIATINGWITH THE DEAD
“We may come to think that nothing exists but a stream of souls, that all knowledge is
biography, and with Plotinus that every soul is unique.”
W.B.Yeats
“ Respect the page. It’s all you’ve got.”
Margaret Atwood
Gönül BAKAY *
In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood looks back at her childhood and maturity to write
about the role of the writer and the development of her writing career. She questions herself, others
as well as readers and writers on the role of the writer and the difficulties encountered on the road
to success. She also addresses heartbreaks she had to deal with along her journey. She asks: "What
is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world?” 1
Atwood’s explorations around and into these questions form the backbone of the book.
Atwood observes that "Certainly writing and art were not the foremost topics of daily
conversation in Canada when I was born in 1939. Two and a half months after the outbreak of world
War II.” 2 She mentions that there were no theaters and films in the North and the radio did not work
well. In the absence of alternative forms of entertainment, she grew into an avid reader. Her mother
encouraged her to pursue reading because she wanted children to be quiet and as Atwood aptly puts
it: "a child who is reading is very quiet.” 3
Around the age of seven, Atwood wrote a play in which the main character was a giant and the
theme was crime and punishment. She asks:
But who was to perform this masterpiece? I couldn’t be all the characters at once. My
solution was Puppets. I made the characters out of paper, and a stage from a cardboard
box. This play was not a raging success. 4
So, from an early age, Atwood stood out as a particularly imaginative child who employed various
outlets for her creativity. Later when she was grown up and her writing was first accepted to be
published, she mentions that “she walked around in a daze for a week. 5 She also reveals that when
she looks back at her life, she can not think of any particular event in her past pointing to the life of a
writer:
But when I look back over the life I led until I began writing, I can find nothing in it that
would account arre for the bizarre direction I took; nothing that couldn’t be found in the
lives of many people who did not become writers. 6
The reader –writer relationship is an important topic Atwood elaborates on in her book. She
observes that the reader can not truly know much about the author of the book because: “too much
time has elapsed between composition and publication and the person who wrote the book is now a
different person”. 7 The self is constantly changing, identity is always in flux. Thus the writer who
wrote the book is not the same one the reader encounters in the process of reading. Atwood ends
her book with Ovid’s words, giving voice to the hopes and wishes of all writers: "But still, the fates
will leave me my voice, / And by my voice I shall be known.” 8 In this sense, it is her literary output
that makes the writer immortal. Her physical body will perish but her “voice” will survive death and
will be heard by future generations. In the light of these preliminary observations and drawing on
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Bahçeşehir University, Department of American Culture and Literature.