Rant of the Week

Atwood Wins a Plaudit

The novelist will travel to Chicago Sunday to pick up the Harold Washington Literary Award, recognizing significant literary achievements. "Atwood was selected because we felt her work so acutely depicts relationships and human interactions in modern society," said Bonnie Sanchez-Carlson, executive director of the New South Planning Board which has presented the award since 1989." CBC, June 6, 2003

Yes indeedy, and you could add, Margaret Atwood is a quality writer.

All right-- so you have an award. The Harold Washington Literary award, named for the former mayor of Chicago, and let's hope the writers write better than the mayor governed. And let's hope the writers write better than the executive director of the New South Planning Board speaks.

I'm sure Bonnie Sanchez-Carlson is not a writer. Or maybe she is. But no writer should ever be subjected to this kind of mealy-mouthed shlop: "relationships and human interactions in modern society". As opposed to the writers who like to write about the wiper knob on the 1972 Datsun.

What writer doesn't write about relationships, and what story is not about "human interactions", and why would it be especially acute of Atwood to write about "modern" society as opposed to "ancient" society or society in 1931? Especially since she doesn't, always-- "Alias Grace" is set in the 19th century.

What this statement makes naked is how artists that become famous and successful because they wrote subversively are almost always cleverly co-opted by the very society they claimed to skewer. Atwood is known for her proto-feminism, her examinations of female identity in a world she considers hostile to women. Her heroes are edible women, murderers who defied their oppressive circumstances, or wholesome, wise women who suffer grievously at the hands of institutionalized male oppression ("Handmaid's Tale).

But you can't say that at an awards ceremony, can you? So Ms. Sanchez-Carlson makes up some wimpy generalization that sounds vaguely laudatory and vaguely profound. Then they have a catered banquet and a ceremony and a little reading and Atwood gets her money and flies off to the next award show.

This is an award for being famous for writing-- not for writing itself. I'll the first question they asked when they contacted her was, "would you be willing to attend?"