Introduction: Stories of Adaptation—Changing Objects with Margaret Atwood

Abstract

The motif of metamorphosis envelops Atwood’s corpus, and as such this introduction to Atwood and her adaptations focuses on her protean nature; Atwood’s adherence to the revelatory premise of myth aptly underscores the reflexive frames that permeate her storytelling and her very identity as a novelist, poet, essayist, cartoonist, environmentalist and overall cultural figurehead. Myth provides an entry to explore not only the symbolic stage upon which imaginary landscapes unfold, bringing to the fore the vicissitudes of the psyche; it urges recognition of the lived experience of Atwood’s career as a writer participating in innumerable media and genres (from poetry, novels, biography and criticism, to comic books and apps). Though the prophetic feats expected of Proteus seem merely hypothetical in the postmodern age, as the visionary power of myth struggles to withstand the indefiniteness of experience, Atwood replicates its vital function through her involvement in adaptation. The alchemy of the writing self, a magical and intangible process, combines with that undergone by the medium of literature in the rapidly evolving landscapes of book publishing and more widely, of media production, performance and distribution. This is the same mythic intertext that helped lay the groundwork for the discussions underpinning the chapters in this volume, all of which set out to explore Atwood’s diverse corpus as a laboratory for the increasingly protean nature of adaptation.

When, at night, I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson , “Experience” in Essays. Second Series

All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more—which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change.

Margaret Atwood, “Descent: Negotiating with the Dead,” in Negotiating with the Dead. A Writer on Writing