On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  When I had finished my prayers and invocations to the communities of the dead, I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench so that the dark blood poured in. And now the souls of the dead came swarming up … From this multitude of souls, as they fluttered to and fro by the trench, there came an eerie clamour. Panic drained the blood from my cheeks.27

  As well it might. Odysseus sits beside the trench with drawn sword in hand, to keep any of the souls from drinking the blood until he gets what he wants, because he’s there to do a negotiation, to make a trade. Of what he wants in return, more shortly.

  The dead, then, are fond of blood. Animal blood will do, or for very special occasions, human blood. It’s often the same thing gods want, not to mention vampires. So do think twice about Valentine’s Day. I always do – I had a boyfriend once who sent me – in a plastic bag, so it wouldn’t drip – a real cow’s heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.

  One of the first request-by-the-dead poems I was ever exposed to was the most famous poem ever written by a Canadian: we all had to memorize it in school. It isn’t usually thought of as a negotiate-with-the-dead poem – more as a pious commemoration verse; and so it duly made its appearance every year on Remembrance Day, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The eleventh month is November, and my birthday is situated in it, which used to displease me because there wasn’t anything you could put on the birthday cake, not like May with its flowers or February with its hearts; but then I found out that, astrologically speaking, November was the month governed by Scorpio, sign of death, sex, and regeneration. (This still wasn’t much help with the birthday cakes.)

  Why all three of these things together? What does death have to do with sex and regeneration? That’s a whole footnote to itself; in fact, it may be a whole book to itself, the name of which might possibly be Frazer’s The Golden Bough; but meanwhile, here’s the poem – “In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrae:

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row,

  That mark our place; and in the sky

  The larks, still bravely singing, fly

  Scarce heard amid the guns below.

  We are the Dead. Short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

  In Flanders fields.

  Take up our quarrel with the foe:

  To you from failing hands we throw

  The torch; be yours to hold it high.

  If ye break faith with us who die

  We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

  In Flanders fields.28

  Note how the living are embedded in time, between dawns and sunsets, and how the Dead, capital D, are embedded out of time. Note the deal proposed by the Dead. Note the threat of retaliation if the terms are not respected: we’d better do as requested, because we wouldn’t want any sleepless dead prowling around. You may think there’s no food in this poem, apart from the poppies – round and red, like the food of the dead – but note what the Dead want. Yes, it’s traditional: they want blood. They want the blood of the living, or at least they want that blood put at risk in behalf of their own cause.

  At the time of its first publication, this poem was thought to be about the sustaining of belligerence toward enemy aliens during World War I. However, that is now over eighty years ago, and if this were all the poem ever said, it would long ago have run out of energy. But something powerful remains, because it embodies a very old and very strong pattern. The dead make demands, says the poem, and you can’t just dismiss either the dead or the demands: you’d be wise to take both of them seriously.

  Calling up the dead, and dealing with them across the threshold – because there always is a threshold, between our world and their world, and that’s what those hex signs are doing on the old barns in Pennsylvania, and that’s why you draw a circle around yourself if conjuring up the dead, and I suppose that’s why Odysseus sat with drawn sword, because the spirits, in many traditions, can’t pass metal – invoking these spirits, then, is one thing. At least you have some control over the situation. Even when the dead arrive uninvited, as in the Hamlet’s-father and defunct-true-love scenarios, as a rule you know that if you can just last out until daybreak, they’ll be gone. But there’s something quite a lot riskier: instead of dealing with the dead on your own territory – merry middle-earth – you can cross over into theirs. You can go on a journey from this world to that. You can go down into the land of the dead, and then you can get out again, back to the land of the living. But only if you’re lucky. As the Sibyl of Cumae tells Aeneas before they begin such a journey, in Book VI of the Aeneid,

  … the way to Avernus is easy; Night and day lie open the gates of deaths dark kingdom: But to retrace your steps, to find the way back to daylight – That is the task, the hard thing.29

  In other words, this is a very tricky business – you might get stuck down there – and it’s also quite a test of your fortitude; which is probably why so many heroes and heroines in the Western tradition, and in many other traditions as well, have undertaken it. Why do these heroes do it? Why take the chance? Because the dead have some very precious and desirable things under their control, down there in their perilous realm, and among these are some things you yourself may want or need.

  What sort of things? To summarize: (1) riches; (2) knowledge; (3) the chance to battle an evil monster; (4) the loved and the lost. This list is not all-inclusive, but it includes the main aims of such journeys. You can gain more than one thing at a time, of course. You can get riches plus the loved and the lost, or knowledge plus the fight with the monster, or any other combination.

  For “riches,” I’ll just mention fairy gold, that substance with the unfortunate habit of turning to coal in the morning; and also the riches controlled by the Chinese ancestors, for whom you burn red paper money30 in return for the real money you want them to bring you. Then there are the sacrifices made so that the dead will ensure a bountiful harvest: “Give us this day our daily bread,” that simple request in the Lord’s Prayer, is a very modest version of an invocation made to the Other World in the hope of material welfare. Wealth of every kind flows from the invisible world to the visible one, and the trance journeys made by the shamans of hunting societies in search of the locations of desired animals are based on this belief: the dead control the harvests, and they can tell you where the caribou are to be found.31 The realm of the dead is a cavern of wonders, an Aladdin’s treasure-trove. Like the abode of Eric, the very weird opera monster in The Phantom of the Opera, it’s rich and strange; like the subterranean world of the not unrelated Grimms’ fairy-tale, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” down there the trees bear jewels for fruit. And like the treasure-chambers of Bluebeard, another Plutonic monster, the gold and jewels must be handled with great care, for death itself may have touched them.

  The second thing I mentioned was knowledge. Because they are outside time, the dead know both the past and the future. “Why have you called me up?” says the ghost of the prophet Samuel to King Saul, through the medium of the Witch of Endor.32 King Saul has done this thing – a thing he himself has forbidden – because he wants to know what the coming battle has in store for him. (Nothing good, as it turns out.) Similarly, it’s for knowledge of the future that Odysseus seeks out the ghost of the double-sexed seer Tiresias, and such knowledge is also the motive of Aeneas, who goes to the realm of the dead with the aid of the Sibyl of Cumae in order to learn all about the glorious future of his own descendants. (Macbeth wants the same thing, but it backfires; through the three Sibyls, now downgraded to nasty old witches, he learns all about the glorious future of somebody else’s descendants.)

  Knowledge and riches can be connected, of course – knowledge can be knowledge about how to get hold of the riches. One of the first modern short stories I ever read was D. H. Lawrence’s classic,
“The Rocking-Horse Winner,” which has haunted me ever since. It’s a complex story, but in relation to our subject it goes as follows. A beautiful woman has no luck with money, and does not really love her little boy. This little boy longs for some luck, so he can acquire the riches his mother desires; the implication is that by doing so he might also get some love from her. He has clairvoyant powers, and takes to riding his rocking-horse to put himself into a trance. When things go well, his horse takes him to “where there is luck,” and he is able to learn the names of the winners in upcoming races. By this means he becomes rich, but he still doesn’t get love. That the place “where there is luck” is also the land of the dead becomes clear at the end of the story: the boy gets to the place, all right, but this time he isn’t able to make the journey back, and he dies. Such a fate is always a possibility for journeyers to the Other World.33

  The third item I mentioned was a battle with a monster. Among the shamans, the battle was usually a battle with a spirit, and if you won, the spirit would become your familiar, and if you lost, you’d become possessed by it. Or it could be a fight with the spirits of the dead for control of the harvest.34 In myths that get into literature, things are usually narrowed down to one or two monsters per hero. There’s Theseus and his labyrinth and Minotaur, of course, and Beowulf and his dark tarn and his Grendel’s Mother. And there’s Bilbo Baggins and his underground riddle-contest in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, not to mention Gandalf and the Balrog in Lord of the Rings. And there’s Christ, who during the three days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday goes down to Hell and defies the Devil, and rescues a group of good people who have been kept down there because until Christ’s advent there hasn’t been a redeemer to redeem them.

  The fourth thing I mentioned was the quest for a lost beloved; this is an important motif when we’re talking about writers and what drives them on. At first the vanished one may have been male: one of the most ancient seekers is the Egyptian goddess Isis, who sorrowfully gathers together the scattered body-parts of her slain husband Osiris, and by doing so restores him to life.

  The Greek goddess Demeter pulls off a similar feat. She loses her daughter Persephone to Hades, the King of the Underworld; but she has a lot of bargaining power – she’s the vegetation goddess, and she decrees that nothing will bear fruit again until the lost one is restored. Hades agrees to give Persephone back, on condition that she has eaten nothing while below ground. Unfortunately the girl has taken seven seeds from a pomegranate – one of those round, red foods of the dead. The prohibition against eating the food of the dead is enormously ancient –

  They will offer water from the river,

  Do not take the water of death.

  They will give you grain from the fields

  Of the dead, do not take that seed

  says the Mesopotamian poem about the goddess Inanna’s journey to Hell.35

  In the Persephone story, as in the one about Inanna, her husband Dumuzi, and his sister Geshtinanna, a compromise is reached – part of the year in the Underworld, part above ground – and that’s why we have winter.

  Orpheus the musician and poet went in search of his dead wife Eurydice, and managed a successful negotiation with the rulers of the Underworld: he charmed them with his songs, and they agreed that he could have Eurydice back, just so long as he didn’t look at her while leading her up to the land of the living. But he couldn’t hold to his resolution, and so Eurydice went fluttering back to the dark halls. You should not eat the food of the dead, but also you should not question their take-home gifts too closely.

  To go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the land of the living someone who has gone there – it’s a very deep human desire, and thought also to be very deeply forbidden. But life of a sort can be bestowed by writing. Jorge Luis Borges, in his “Nine Dantesque Essays,”36 puts forward an interesting theory: that the entire Divine Comedy, all three sections of it – the Inferno, the Purgatorio and the Paradiso – this whole vast and intricate structure was composed by Dante mainly so he could get a glimpse of the dead Beatrice, and bring her back to life in his poem. It is because he is writing about her, and only because he is writing about her, that Beatrice is able to exist again, in the mind of writer and reader. As Borges says,

  We must keep one incontrovertible fact in mind, a single, humble fact: the scene was imagined by Dante. For us, it is very real; for him, it was less so. (The reality, for him, was that first life and then death had taken Beatrice from him.) Forever absent from Beatrice, alone and perhaps humiliated, he imagined the scene in order to imagine that he was with her.37

  Borges then comments on the “fleetingness of her glance and smile,” and “the eternal turning away of the face.” How like the story of Orpheus this is – the poet, armed only with his poetry, enters the realm of the dead, traverses the Inferno, reaches the Elysian Fields or their equivalent, and finds the beloved again, only to lose her once more, this time for ever. As Dido turns away from Aeneas, as Eurydice turns away from Orpheus, thus Beatrice turns away from Dante. Never mind that it’s toward God, never mind that she’s happy – the essential thing for him is that she is lost. But regained again. But lost again. The end of the Paradiso is a happy ending only if we squint very hard.

  And so it is with all happy endings of all books, when you come to think about it. You can’t go home again, said Thomas Wolfe; but you can, sort of, when you write about it. But then you reach the last page. A book is another country. You enter it, but then you must leave: like the Underworld, you can’t live there.

  Virgil is usually assumed to be the first writer to have given us a full account of the Underworld in his function as writer. Note his short invocation in Book VI of the Aeneid:

  You gods who rule the kingdom of souls! You soundless shades!

  Chaos, and Phlegethon! O mute wide leagues of Nightland!

  Grant me to tell what I have heard! With your assent,

  May I reveal what lies deep in the gloom of the Underworld!38

  Grant me to tell. May I reveal.39 These are the prayers of a writer, and you’d almost think he’d been there himself. This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno: in visiting a strange location, it’s always best to go with someone who’s been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.

  Rilke, in his Sonnets to Orpheus, makes the underworld journey simply a precondition of being a poet. The journey must be undertaken, it is necessary. The poet – for whom Orpheus is the exemplary model – is the one who can bring the knowledge held by the Underworld back to the land of the living, and who can then give us, the readers, the benefit of this knowledge. “Is he of this world? No, he gets / his large nature from both realms,” says Rilke of the Orpheus poet in Sonnet 6 (Part I). In Sonnet 9 (Part I), he spells this out at more length:

  You have to have been among the shades,

  tuning your lyre there too,

  if you want vision enough to know

  how to make lasting praise.

  You have to sit down and eat

  with the dead, sharing their poppies,

  if you want enough memory to keep

  the one most delicate note …

  And the world has to be twofold

  before any voice can be

  eternal and mild.40

  This poet doesn’t just visit the Other World. He partakes of it. He is double-natured, and can thus both eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale.

  I said that Virgil is usually assumed to be the first writer to make the underworld trip – that is, he makes the imaginary trip for the purpose of relating it. It, and all the other stories he gets told down there; and it’s by the inmates of the Inferno, not in the Purgatorio or the Paradiso, that Dante is told the most stories, and also the best ones. It’s somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is – possibly – the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for
ever, and Heaven is – possibly – the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.

  I would now like to propose a much earlier prototype for the subterranean adventurer as writer – the Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh. Since the epic poem which contains him was not deciphered until the nineteenth century, he can hardly have been a direct influence on either Virgil or Dante; he is even more of a test-case, then, for Dudley Young’s thesis about the essential connection between the urge to write things down and the fear of death.

  In the first part of his story, Gilgamesh – a king who is half-divine – is concerned mostly to make a name for himself, a name that will outlast him. He has a companion, a tamed wild-man called Enkidu, and together they accomplish heroic feats. But they insult the goddess Ishtar – a sex-and-death goddess, as it turns out – and thus Enkidu must die. He has to go down to the extremely unpleasant Underworld of that time, where you ate mud and were covered with frowsy bird-feathers.

  Gilgamesh is deeply distressed: he can’t get Enkidu back, and in addition he is now afraid of death. So he sets out to find the secret of eternal life, from the one mortal man who has never died. The way leads over the wilderness and through the middle of a dark mountain, and then through a garden where the trees bear jewels for fruit, and then over the water of death. He finds Utnapishtim, the immortal man, who tells him the story of the flood and then gives Gilgamesh the key to eternal life; but Gilgamesh loses it, and then he has to come all the way back to his own kingdom again. Here is the end of his journey: “He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went a long journey, was weary, worn out with labour, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story.”41