Margaret Atwood tells a whiz-bang story about a trio of Canadian women. It includes plenty of complicated family experience, sex, perfidy, and death, faked and real. Tony, Roz, and Charis are very different in their upbringing and in their pursuits. They are together in a common experience as university undergraduates living in McClung Hall in the sixties. But through their respective victimizations at the hands of the mysteriously ubiquitous Zenia, extending into middle age, Atwood offers us a speculation on their existences in their own separate worlds. She thus leads us to look at her popular novel through the spectrograph of theory on postmodernist fiction.
Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction (NY: 1987) gives us the theoretical machinery for such a look. McHale usefully holds that the dominant note of postmodernist fiction is ontological --focused on the grounds of being. It is concerned, he says, with "“examining worlds of being.”" This dominant note differs from that of modernist fiction as he reads it: modernist fiction is epistemological--focused on the grounds of knowing. Modernist fiction is concerned with the attempt to learn what the real situation is in the world, which is a given. Postmodernist fiction presents us with more than one world. It derives its narrative tension from the flickering shine of these worlds in simultaneous existence.
Science fiction, with its fantastic alternative worlds, is like postmodernist fiction. Both allow more than one reality to coexist side by side with another. By contrast, the quintessential modernist fiction is like a detective story. In fact, to McHale, the detective story is the quintessential example of modernist fiction. The modernist narrative does not attempt to figure out what world the characters are in; it seeks to reveal the truth about what happens in the only world they are assumed to occupy.
McHale is not a reductionist in offering us this approach. The epistemological raises questions about the ontological and vice versa. When we decide which one is "“dominant”" in a given work, we do not thereby ban the operation of the other in it. We see the organizational principle of the piece--its dominant note--without suffocating it in an airtight category.
As he puts the matter, "Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point ontological plurality or instability; push epistemological questions far enough and they ‘tip over’ in ontological questions."(p.11)
The Robber Bride could have been a whale of a modernist story. Indeed, in some respects it is. The characters of three interesting women unfold through the realistic portrayal of their growing up in Canada, their loves, their disappointments. Tony is a brilliant scholar specializing in the history of war. She was conceived in a war-time liaison that led to the disastrous marriage of her Canadian father and British mother. She wields her intimate knowledge of the great battles of history like a shield for the small and vulnerable person that she is. Roz is a half-Jewish, half-Catholic entrepreneur who got her wealth and business acumen from a father who trafficked underground in the goods of the persecuted in World War II. Charis’s father, too, was a soldier, but all she knows is a photo image; and her mother is a victim of mental breakdown. From her farmer grandmother she inherits the power to see and heal. She seeks peace and harmony and avoids the illusions of pain and suffering through Yoga. These three lives, woven together, give us a tapestry of the baby boom generation, its WWII parentage, its unique coming of age in the sixties, its inheritance of the age-old dilemmas of living as they become middle-aged parents.
The character Zenia could have made the story of these women into a conventional modernist detective story. Her origins are mysterious. There are several versions of her life story. Zenia has stolen each of their men at various points with the deftness and confidence of someone almost superhuman; Tony, Roz, and Charis each has the urge to avenge the harm she brings to each of them. Zenia feigns her own death for reasons she does not satisfactorily explain. She then actually dies in what might be an accident, a suicide, or a murder. If Atwood had been interested in "“whodunit,”" she could have disentangled the truth about Zenia and her motives in exciting stages. She could have re-wrapped the lives of all four women in a neat narrative bundle that would have explained each in terms of the other.
However, the truth about Zenia’s past remains shrouded at the end. We never learn exactly how or why she died in the courtyard fountain of the Arnold Garden Hotel. Her contradictory lies about her own history never are sorted out satisfactorily. Atwood’s purpose is not to reveal to us the truth of what happened to Zenia. It is not to show us the inner consistency of Zenia’s relationship with the three women and their men. These are not important fictional matters to her. Her purpose is to show us the separate worlds of different women who only appear to have had a common experience. Her use of Zenia is not to create a mystery and then to show how it is solved. She uses Zenia to create what McHale calls a “heterotopia,” the different worlds of Tony, Roz, and Charis--and that nether world from which Zenia mysteriously comes.
It is these worlds that Atwood privileges. She creates them largely through the machinations of Zenia at various times in the lives of the three women. The truth about Zenia hardly matters. What matters is that Zenia calls into being different worlds of experience for Tony, Roz, and Charis, made possible by her atavistic energy--evil, yet prior to good and evil. The dominant note of The Robber Bride, that is, is ontological rather than epistemological.
McHale holds that postmodernist fiction has a mimetic function. It imitates, mainly in its form, the reality of postmodern cultculture--"the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial cultures." (p. 38) Zenia comes from an unexplained world and enters the lives of Tony, Roz, and Charis rather like an extraterrestrial being from a fantastic otherworld of science fiction. She casts into relief by her alienness the characteristics of the worlds that each of the three occupies. By showing us these characteristics as she does, Atwood creates a novel that, in its entirety, imitates the discontinuities, the unresolved particularities, of postmodern urban life.
In the "Outcome"” at the end of the book, in the guise of Professor of Military History Antonia Fremont--Tony--the author talks about this.
Tony/Atwood gives the student of postmodern fiction a reinforcing lesson in "the new historicism" as we learn of it from H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism. From historians such as Michael Andre Bernstein, in his Foregone Conclusions, we come to suspect "apocalyptic history," that is, history that gives us definitive, grand answers. Tony agrees with the Bernstein school of anti-apocalyptic history. She even goes a step further. She no longer believes that history teaches anything.
Tony knows she could shape Zenia into a history. "“But,”" e says, "why bother in this day and age...with such a quixotic notion as the truth? Every sober-sided history is at least half sleight-of-hand: the right hand waving its poor snippets of fact, out in the open for all to verify, while the left hand busies itself with its own devious agendas, deep in its hidden pockets." (p. 461)
Tony suggests that something like magic was operating. She, Roz, and Charis saw what Zenia wanted them to see--"or else you saw what you yourself wanted to see." (p.461) Tony is solidly in the postmodern mode of sensibility. She disallows an objective vantage point from which to see the whole of the life she and the other women led. Each has a world unto herself. Magic rather than reason explains.
Tony, Roz, and Charis cast Zenia’'s ashes into the waters of the lake in a a dramatic finish on November 11, at 11:00 am--the day of armistice, the time the Great War ended. Tony, historian of war, still speculates on Zenia'’s significance. Tony thinks of the departed Zenia as a fallen warrior in a guerrilla war without a place, perhaps without sides. Her battlefield, Tony thinks, may have been "in the texture of the world itself." (p.469) Then she thinks of Zenia fallen, "like an ancient statuette dug up from a Minoan palace." But she does not reveal her secret, ever.
Tony joins the other women and they take up the telling of stories. It is just about all they can do. They become our folk around the fire. They will never unveil the whole truth about Zenia, or about themselves, for that matter. But they will have comfort from the telling.
Thanks to McHale's theory of postmodernist fiction, we thus gain an insight into the dominant note of The Robber Bride. We see Atwood's "ontological" intent. We grasp the differentness of the virtual worlds of being in which Tony, Roz, and Charis exist, worlds created by their respective encounters with that of Zenia. Nevertheless, the subordinate music of the modernist impulse to know the truth about all of them beats so loudly in the background that at times it is virtually the foreground.
The Robber Bride illustrates the porosity of the categories of fiction that seems to be postmodernist in sensibility. Atwood remains strongly urged to explicate the postwar world of experience at the apex of modernism. By inventing Zenia, she brings to her story the motives of postmodernist fiction. But at times Zenia's antics seem merely factitious, extrinsic to the inner development of three women interesting in their own right as fully developed characters. If the blend of motives--modernist/epistemological and postmodernist/ontological--had taken place successfully, Atwood might not have felt the need to write the concluding "Outcomes" chapter. The indeterminate nature of history, our inability to discover the truth of our world(s), would have emerged as the compelling impression of the story. The author would have shown us that in the action itself.
But then, in postmodernist imaginative writing, text is all anyway. The writer abandons the effort to represent a real world. It is our response, as the readers, to the text that ultimately matters. And we end with a feeling of satisfaction with what Margaret Atwood has offered up. It is something like a Red Badge of Courage for women. Tony, Roz, Charis--and Zenia too--find life to be a battle in a war that has no grand design and no apparent political end. In the heat of battle, each seeks her own zone of personal safety, such as it is, making a "world" in McHale's sense. In that zone she makes all the personal meaning she is capable of making.