Surfacing from Six Feet Under: A Response to Burkhard Niederhoff*

Early his paper on the of the dead two novels by Margaret Atwood, Burkhard Niederhoff wisely steers clear of the old Canadian national thematic chestnut, survival. Whether survival really constitutes the central theme of Canadian literature, he writes, a question need not detain us here (60). What he redirects our attention to, instead, is the way which type of survival - or, more specifically, persistence - recurs Atwood's fictional, poetic, and nonfictional oeuvre: the of the dead from the underworld. The two novels Niederhoff carefully examines, Surfacing and Alias Grace, date from 1972 and 1996 respectively, but the fascination with voyages from Hades persists Atwood's thought, as witnessed her 2000 Empson Lectures at Cambridge, published 2002 as Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. The title neatly encapsulates Atwood's thesis: writing is a species of unworldly congress with the departed; a means of making the irretrievable potentially retrievable through the invigoration of texts by readers. Niederhoff goes further, though, than a simple tracing of this motif through two works by Atwood: my response to his further analysis, I will, first of all, think about the application of his interpretation to other works, ponder his major insights, and suggest an additional critical framework, of the postcolonial gothic, through which we might understand the implications of these ghostly encounters. Travellers from the underworld may bring us the sort of difficult knowledge embraces possibiUty as well as trauma and loss, and so the ghostly recall of the past does not need to leave Orpheus-Uke, grieving over the loss of Eurydice. Such forms of difficult knowledge may be housed not only the psyche but national acts of recalUng, such as the Canadian government's June 2008 apology to First Nations for the treatment of children residential schools; though survival may not be the litmus test of literary Canadianness, its difficult lessons are intertwined with our acts of collective historical recall.First of all, the sign of a convincing reading of selected texts by author is its capacity to Uluminate others. And this is certainly the case with Niederhoff's reading of the Atwoodian revenants of Surfacing and Alias Grace. Both of these novels are resolutely serious tone, notwithstanding the eruption, from time to time, of Atwood's characteristicaUy wry epigrammatic wit. But what if we apply this study to a comic novel such as Lady Oracle? The analysis holds, and it has the potential to deepen our reading of Atwood's comedy. As Niederhoff recaUs, the peddler Jeremiah Alias Grace tells Grace she is one of us, presumably implying she has a special telepathic gift, and later he suggests that she join him, earning a living as a travelUng clairvoyant and communicating hidden knowledge to their cUents (Niederhoff 84-85). In the world of Alias Grace, this episode prefigures the complex knowledge Grace holds as who has travelled to the underworld (of loss, murder, trauma) and brings back into (semi)consciousness during her hypnosis. But a comic register, we have Joan Foster, twenty years earUer, being told repeatedly by the spiritualist Leda Sprott she has great powers and should use rather than deny them (Lady Oracle 206). Indeed, much of the novel has to do with ghostly visitors - Joan's dead mother, her Aunt Lou, and everyone she leaves behind when she fakes her suicide and removes secretly to Italy; at point, she has a Felliniesque vision of all of them randomly congregated upon a beach, smiling and waving to her (9). This tableau, which insouciantly mixes the dead and the living neatly encapsulates Niederhoff's perception in Atwood's fiction, the spirits of the departed are much more intricately entangled with the souls of the living to whom they return (63). When Joan, the living revenant, finally emerges from her underworld, she enacts a reverse baptism of sorts, using a Cinzano bottle to brain the reporter who was nosing around her apartment (Lady Oracle 344). …

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