Surfacing KINDLE MOBI by Margaret Atwood H.A.

Short Summary: Margaret Atwood's Surfacing tells the story of a woman who travels through a mostly uninhabited area in Canada to find her missing father. Accompanied by her lover and another married couple, the unnamed protagonist meets her past in her isolated childhood home, recalling events and feelings, while trying to find clues for her father's mysterious disappearance. Little by little, the past overtakes her and drives her into the realm of wildness and madness.

Themes in Surfacing Atwood was for many years seen as (and in her early writings IS) the literary descendant of Northrop Frye, who is considered one of the most important literary critics of the 20th century. In many ways criticism as a discipline separate from literature was born with Frye. A Canadian, Frye's comments on Canadian literature were that it was defined by a fear of the overwhelming force and space of the nature and environment of Canada, and a kind of "garrison mentality", as the Canadian "Great White North" experience of living remains a constant struggle against a hostile, changeable, unsettled, unsettable, and still partly unexplored country even. Despite the provisions of modern urbanization, Canadians are subconsciously and consciously aware that the warmth and protection of our small string of cities is a thin and somewhat illusory protective barrier.
Surfacing, in many ways, is an application of Frye's critical observations; Frye, best known as the author of Fearful Symmetry, a sharp and extremely influential reading of William Blake, in which he defined all forms of literature as artifacts of the imagination which derived not only from other literatures but from the pre-literary categories of ritual, myth, and folk-tale. Without such an understanding there is no ability for the literary to achieve a unified imaginary potential, or to be viewed as such. Atwood takes Frye's critiques and expectations of both the literary and of Canadian literature in particular and provides them a literary reality, a voice which, while it remains purposely un-named, exists in and portrays an internal AND external landscape that unites a singularly Canadian time and place to the eternal time and place of myth, but with a bit of a twist. In Surfacing, Atwood's application of Frye's theories goes a step further as it attempts to articulate a more "undiscovered country" (to quote Freud), a country that IS Canada but also the "Feminine" -- a less explored world of archetype, myth and symbol only now being brought to discourse through the recent fields of women's studies, and the assimilation within criticism of the French philosophy of language as derivative of a renewed and revised Platonic symbolism extrapolated in the works of philosophers like Lacan, Irigiray, de Beauvoir, and their American cousin, par excellent, Judith Butler.
As such, Surfacing, while eclipsed in popularity and acceptance by her later novels, is, contextually speaking, Atwood's literary tour de force--an amalgam of theory, philosophy, criticism, Canadian identity--and, most importantly, her best and brightest attempt to speak the unspoken language of the Feminine through the metaphorical madness of a woman searching for a missing "father". Surfacing exemplifies the loss of meaning when the opposite of the "father's language" appears -- the untamed monstrosity of the Feminine that has for so long remained as wild and unpredictable as the Canadian wilderness. (by H.A)KI