Photo by Liam Sharp
This year’s St. Louis Literary Award honoree is Margaret Atwood. The 77-year-old Atwood is a Canadian polymath responsible for novels, poetry, inventions, criticism, environmental activism, a lively Twitter feed and 1985’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, made this year into a TV series starring Elisabeth Moss and Samira Wiley for the streaming service Hulu.
The novel examines life in Gilead, formerly the United States, after an all-seeing theocracy has taken over and stripped women of all rights, reducing them to servants and breeders. Like George Orwell’s 1984, it’s started to feel uncomfortably prescient in the current tumultuous political climate.
Atwood joins an impressive roster of recipients including Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Chinua Achebe. She’ll accept her award in a ceremony this month at the Sheldon. In advance of that, St. Louis Magazine caught up with her by telephone.
The iconic Handmaid outfit, with its red cloak and white blinders, has become something of a protest uniform in the U.S. in the era of Trump. How does that strike you?
I think it’s brilliant, because it’s immediately understandable. They can’t be expelled for causing a disturbance, and nobody is going to accuse them of being improperly dressed in a sexual manner—they are very modestly covered. Now, people are exchanging custom patterns online.
Has Gileadean patriarchal puritanism resurged, or has it always been around and simply waiting to be emboldened in the US by our election of Trump?
There’s two contrary strands. One of them is puritanical, but the other one is the opposite of that. I would say pussy-grabbing is not puritanical, and neither is all the swearing and that. That’s sort of anti-puritanical. The people doing the expression and the swearing and so forth would probably say, "We want freedom for all, including ourselves." And the puritanical people would probably say, "We want to protect women from this kind of behavior by covering them up and secluding them," which has been done over time in many societies. The main thing about The Handmaid’s Tale is I put nothing in it that hasn’t already been done: women-stealing cultures, appropriating women, appropriating children, forcible removal of children. All kinds of people were appropriated, claimed, people claimed to own them, people sold them. Human trafficking—this is happening under our very noses now.
In this era of social media and constant news, people get in trouble quickly for things they say—also a real risk in Gilead. How do we negotiate freedom of speech while avoiding hate speech?
I’ve been very interested to see how people have been appropriating the term "freedom of expression." I’m Canadian, and we do have laws about that. Every society has got lines that people are more or less in agreement, that this is the line we’re not going to cross. All I have to do is say child pornography involving live children and you know what I mean—nobody’s going to say, "That’s freedom of expression." It’s a moving line, and where are you going to draw it? That’s up to each society. In a totalitarian society, you aren’t asked, you are told. In a so-called democratic society, it should be a matter of discussion. If you go back and read the history of Stalinism and the purges, they never knew what the line was. They would just disappear. They had crossed some line and they didn’t know what it is. If you want to create a state of terror, that’s what you do. Mr. Orwell in 1984 has quite a lot to say about that. It’s terrifying because you’re always asking yourself, "What if the line has changed?"
The remote signature device you conceived, the LongPen, allows a person to sign in ink from across the world. It seems like science fiction made real.
The XPRIZEs are for inventions that will improve the lot of the world. And they have recently convened an advisory panel of science fiction writers, because it is often science fiction writers who come up with these ideas: Dick Tracy and the two-way wrist watch, and now we have it. These kinds of things often appear in fictional guises first. Star Trek basically had 3D object printing long before we were doing it.
The LongPen is a "Beam me up, Scotty" device. It takes something you do on one end, your signature, and makes it turn into those little dots you remember. It’s teleportation. It’s now used in banking, business, car rentals, mortgages. All those things that require a real signature on paper but you may want to do it digitally and store it.
Can you tell us a bit about the Future Library? You are the first participant in the century-long project.
It is the brainchild of Katie Paterson, a conceptual artist interested in time. A forest in Norway that will grow for 100 years, and each year a writer is asked to submit a manuscript in a closed box. It can be one word, it can be a diary, it can be a short story, it can be an essay, it can be nonfiction, it can be a letter. Anything made of words. You take it to Norway, you don’t tell anybody what’s in the box. It’s put into the Future Library. In Year 100, all of the boxes will be opened, all the contents revealed, and enough trees cut to print them all.
But you won’t see your contribution fully realized.
There’s going to be a lot of pressure on the people in Year 95! The written word has always been a time travel device, always, when you think of it. Unlike other forms of art, for instance, opera singing. The person doing the art and the person receiving the art are never in the same place at the same time. The receiver is always later and elsewhere, so it’s always been a time travel and space travel device, and that has been commented on by writers ever since they’ve been writing. Somewhere, some time, someone else is going to be reading this. I will live forever through my words—some of them have had that fantasy. It’s like slow cooking, but the timespan is longer. This is a slow writing transmission. I think it’s quite delicious, I think it’s quite wonderful. You either were the kind of child who buried things in the backyard hoping someone else would dig it up, or you weren’t. I was that child. You put things out into the world, and you don’t know who might read them. You hope it will be a fun surprise for someone. I do have that feeling about new books when I pick them up—here’s a fun surprise for me! Writers always know what is in their own books, they don’t have that surprise. If you make your own birthday cake, it’s not the same.
An Evening with Margaret Atwood happens Tuesday, September 19 at 7 p.m. at The Sheldon Concert Hall, 3648 Washington. Here are details. Note: the concert hall seating is already sold out, but there are spaces in the ballroom upstairs, where the ceremony will be simulcast, and tickets are available ($100 per person) for a special reception with Atwood immediately following the ceremony.
