New Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale
Being the third web paper for the class Gender and Technology at Bryn Mawr College in the state of Pennsylvania, written by Hannah Mueller, and posted to the class blog on April 3rd, 2009.
Since I am going to be considering how the Historical Notes at the end of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale illuminate how we construct or present history, it is fair that I start out by acknowledging that this essay is no more or less than one more representation. Just as Professor Pieixoto at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies constructs history by guessing at the meaning of the contents of thirty jumbled cassette tapes, I am extrapolating meaning from the text of a conference in a future society about which I know nothing. If all representation is imperfect, the meta-history at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale tells and shows us why. Explicitly, the presenter tells us that the voices from the past can only be imprecisely interpreted. Implicitly, the speaker’s tone and preoccupations show us how people “make up” history; when we reconstruct some aspects of the past, others are deconstructed or destroyed by elimination. For Offred, and by implication many others, the most likely but undesired result of the layered reconstructing of her voice is that it will lose its most uniquely female aspects.
Offred concludes her story by saying: “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light” (295). At the end of his talk, Pieixoto says, “the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes…we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day” (311). By recording her story, Offred does step out of the “darkness” of the past and into the “light” of academic history. But this “light” really only reveals a silhouette or a shadow of the person Offred was. Her real name, after all, remains a mystery, along with her physical appearance and much of her story. As the presenter says, “when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment” (311). This imperfection of representation is inevitable. In fact, the history created by the conference is completely founded on an imperfect representation from the start, which in turn is founded on yet another.
Offred names her own account as a reconstruction, as I just identified this paper as such: “When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to se this down in any form…it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove” (134). Why is Offred so concerned with the fact that she cannot ensure the clarity of her message? When she acknowledges that no one can say anything exactly, she still wants to point out one thing to her listener, “if you happen to be a man”: that is, that for a woman to forgive a man is supremely tempting (134). Offred knows that if she could represent everything else perfectly, she would still have to break through a gender barrier to express the way she experiences powerlessness as a woman in the crushing patriarchy of Gilead.
Even when a reconstruction reaches an audience’s ears or eyes, it still has to be reconstructed yet again in the person’s own mind. So, even though the Symposium on Gileadean Studies may have heard Offred express her powerlessness as a woman in so many words, it doesn’t seem to have internalized her meaning. After reading the conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale and feeling Offred’s terror and desperation, the immediate transition to the tone of the conference should be jarring the reader. The host mentions that she’s aware no one wants to miss lunch again. Pieixoto makes a lewd pun on “Tale” and “tail,” eliciting a laugh. Their representation of Offred’s story lacks all sense of urgency, which is to be expected; but in a way, with the loss of the immediate emotion of Offred’s representation, her story loses its meaning as they pick apart its origins. If Pieixoto does have a sense of Offred’s oppression, this is not what interests him most. Atwood might say that because the historian loses sight of what mattered most to his subject at the time, he does not truly understand what Offred’s representation signifies. For all his reconstructing and re-ordering of the physical evidence from cassettes, he hasn’t truly re-constructed a document but constructed a new one. Pieixoto acknowledges that this is a failure, albeit a foreseeable one, when he talks about the “light of our own day,” which always makes the past appear not as it was.
Offred has a clear understanding of how histories are created, and this comprehension can only make her afraid for how her own voice will be heard. She remembers watching a documentary with her mother, “about one of those wars,” and her most salient memory of it is the way the photos looked, the quality of the sunlight and the shadows. As a young child, she thought that it was a fiction: “If it’s only a story, it becomes less frightening” (144). The way Offred perceived this documentary as a child is similar to the way the symposium perceives her document on June 25, 2195. By concentrating on the physical remains of her voice and the academic search for clues to its origin, the presenter and his audience occlude her words and all but ignore their emotional impact. In fact, they mention how her emotions are conveyed (as if “post facto”) without entering into what emotions they are!
All history is constructed, not reconstructed, in the same way that the Symposium on Gileadean Studies constructs it. Here the distance between “history” and “the past” appears so stark because as readers of The Handmaid’s Tale, we only realize at the end that we have read a “historical document,” and that our future has suddenly become someone else’s dark past. What would we have an academic symposium do with the story we are living in our “light,” the present? Pieixoto thinks that his “job is not to censure but to understand” (302). Atwood and Offred might say that censure would follow naturally from a fuller understanding. If future historians impose a moral judgment on the Commanders and the Aunts, the Salvagings and the Colonies, then they could learn from those “echoes” from the past and prevent similar injustices. But the way to make the best moral judgment is to best reconstruct the past, including the emotions of the subject—in Offred’s case, her terror and despair because of her powerlessness as a woman. In her note to the reader (316), Atwood asserts that she drew every aspect of Gilead from societies that exist or have existed; no form of oppression came from her imagination. With the Symposium’s meta-history of Offred’s story, she asks her readers to reassess how they think about, judge, and respond to their own past as members of the human race.
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This is a lovely evocation of the repetitions echoing between Atwood’s text and the commentary she provides on it, and a lovely recognition, as well, that your own work, like hers, is itself an “imperfect representation.”
The big question that your analysis raises for me is whether the inevitable inaccuracy of representation need be lamented, or might be celebrated—particularly if, like Atwood, one is interested in the political consequences of writing fiction. You seem to opt largely for the former—>Offred’s story “loses its meaning as the academics pick apart its origin…the historian loses sight of what mattered most to his subject…he does not truly understand what Offred’s representation signifies.”
All true; but also true, certainly, is that the historian may understand a signification different from hers, that distance might give him more (or @ least a different, perhaps a larger) insight than closer involvement gives her (think: anthropology). “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how light gets in….” I quoted this Leonard Cohen line to you a year ago, in response to a paper you’d written about the “liberation that opacity can offer.” What might happen to this current project, if you resurrected that idea?
Where this question has particular valence is, again, when one looks @ the political consequences of representation. If we understand Atwood’s point–when Pieixoto claims that his “job is not to censure but to understand”–as a satire on the non-political effects of academic work, which–in attending to form over content–erases the felt immediacy of oppression, then what are our options? If representation is always opaque, always full of shadows, never crystal clear, then: how do we do politics? How can we exploit in inevitability of representation’s inexactness?
I just went to the Tobias Wolff reading, and he told a funny story about a woman who asked a poet what a certain line meant in one of his older poems. He took it over to the window and read it over for a minute or two, then said, “Madam, when I wrote this, only God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows.”
It reminded me of this conversation, because you’re right: it’s not necessarily a terrible thing that we can never return to the moment in which a representation was created. Not even its creator can ever do that, so we must all, always, deal with the problem that the futuristic conference has. Wolff’s point was that “memories are natural storymakers,” as Offred observes, leaving some things in and others out. And, as Wolff said, memories always (shockingly!) have the same protagonist.
In my Spanish class we’ve talked about this in relation to narratives of decolonization, especially “I, Rigoberta Menchu.” Instead of the old colonialist view of history as a timeline on which we can point to specific events as have “truly” come to pass, a modern view of history is that it is constantly created “a partir del momento,” in the moment of recollection. I really liked that idea and I think it influenced this paper, though I didn’t think to include it… While I still believe it might be true that the way to make the best moral judgements for the future is to best reconstruct the past by understanding the emotions of the authors of historical representation–I see how difficult/impossible that will always be. It comes down almost precisely on Spivak’s question: Can the subaltern speak? In the case of Rigoberta Menchu, I don’t remember coming to any concrete conclusions in our class.
How do we do politics, then? It’s a tough question. I would say, let everyone talk as much and as clearly as possible and see what sticks, in whose mind.