The Psychoanalytic Theme in Margaret Atwood's Fiction: A Response to Burkhard Niederhoff*1

TLDR: In this paper, the protagonist and narrator Jimmy persistently presses the beautiful and enigmatic Oryx for details of her exotically traumatic past; "Tell me just one thing" (114), he pleads.

Abstract: IIn Margaret Atwood's 2003 dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, the protagonist and narrator Jimmy - later known as Snowman - persistently presses the beautiful and enigmatic Oryx for details of her exotically traumatic past; "Tell me just one thing" (114), he pleads. Born into geographically un-located third world poverty and sold into child slavery - working first as a beggar, then filmed for paedophilic pornography - before entering North America as a state-sanctioned sex worker, Oryx's history is a litany of degradation and abuses. For Jimmy, this necessarily equates to trauma; Oryx has suffered, in Ian Hacking's term, a "spiritual lesion, a wound to the soul" (Hacking 4).2 Faced with her determined refusal to recover and examine further memories of her exploited childhood, Jimmy reads Oryx's reluctance as an admission of unacknowledged horror and shame; "He thought he understood her vagueness, her evasiveness. 'It's alright/ he told her, stroking her hair. 'None of it was your fault'"; but Oryx deflects his sympathy with the maddeningly ingenuous response: "None of what, Jimmy?" (114). Oryx refuses Jimmy's invitation to speak her trauma, to enact "a recovery of lost memories of pain" (Hacking 3), and thereby achieve self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Discussing the novel's interrogation of Crake's "purportedly therapeutic scientific project" (Dunning 87), Stephen Dunning suggests that, through her silence, Oryx "both secures herself against penetrating intellectual curiosity and becomes the site of perpetual mystery" (96). Despite her silent resistance, however, Jimmy simply amalgamates her reticence within a psychoanalytic narrative of repression and denial: "Where was her rage," he ponders; "how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up?" (142).In his insistence that Oryx should react 'appropriately' - with anger, hatred and distress - to her childhood trauma, and in his assumption that talking about the past will bring her greater clarity (and that such insight would be ipso facto beneficial), Jimmy casts himself in the role of psychoanalyst and saviour. He invites Oryx to enter into the "talking cure" (Freud, "Psychoanalysis" 184) - to undergo what Sigmund Freud once referred to as a "cleansing of the soul" ("Psychoanalysis" 184) - and be healed. In his pursuit of her unconscious self, vague recollections become dreamlike "memory symbols" ("Psychoanalysis" 187) with revelatory potential; chasing incidental details that resist signification, Jimmy fantasises about psychoanalytic breakthroughs: "there it would be, the red parrot, the code, the password, and then many things would become clear" (138). It is certainly a curative procedure that Jimmy himself would like to engage in. The last man standing in a post-apocalyptic world, Jimmy longs for a sympathetic ear into which he might unburden his heavy soul, and he cries out in his desolation: "Just someone, anyone, listen to me please!" (45). Atwood, however, proves sceptical of the psychoanalytic - specifically, Freudian - method. As auditor-analyst, Jimmy, who first encounters Oryx as "just another little girl on a porno site" (90), is inextricably entangled in a web of voyeurism, vicarious thrills, and pleasurable indignation. And as implied western readers of this exotically oriental misery memoir, we too are painfully, irresistibly, implicated in Jimmy's desire to plumb ever greater depths of poverty and sexual degradation. The truth, it seems, does not always set us free, and revelations of past traumas are not always productive and therapeutic. This anxiety around the efficacy of psychoanalytic practice - as Niederhoff valuably demonstrates in his article on Atwood - is a concern that the writer repeatedly returns to in her fiction.IIIn "The Return of the Dead," Niederhoff compares Atwood's 1972 novel Surfacing to the 1996 novel, Alias Grace. The former, which Niederhoff rightly notes has attained the status of a classic work of contemporary fiction, commences with its unnamed narrator heading up into northern Quebec in search of her missing father. …