Negotiating the Nation: The Reproduction and Reconstruction of the National Imaginary in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

Discourses of antiquity are frequently utilized by nationalists in an attempt to "place their own country in an 'immemorial past' where its arbitrariness cannot be questioned" (Brennan 45) and to present national identity as that which is natural, indisputable, and self-evident. [...]this naturalization of national identity is compounded by the use of mythic narratives to perpetuate a nation's sense of itself, given that myths, according to Roland Barthes, "ha[ve] the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear external" (142), and by national emblems, such as flags, maps, uniforms, and national buildings, which work to suggest the fixity and immutability of national identity.11 In Surfacing, David's drawing attention to the hailing of Canada as "The true north strong and free" (13) inadvertently reveals how many Canadians have similarly attempted to secure their nation's legitimacy through discourses of authenticity, despite Canada's relative youth as a polity12 In moving beyond such myths of genuineness, one can begin to see the nation as endlessly emergent through process, and as a social construct of no less importance or influence for its continual reinvention. While many critics have endeavoured to question the validity, accuracy, and scope of Survival,26 little has been said of this disjunctive and uneasy relationship between the "victim theme" (111) of Survival, which includes Atwood's model of the four "Basic Victim Positions,"27 and the construction of Canadian female violence in Surfacing. [...]there appears little acknowledgement of the ways in which Atwood's critical work-which she admits was conceived as a "hundred-page leaf et squeezed from [her] lecture notes" ("After Survival" 133)-is reductive in its discussion of issues that are more adequately and thoughtfully explored in her novel.28 By allowing Canadian vulnerability and Canadian violence to share centre stage, this discussion makes apparent that what surfaces" in the novel is the ambivalent nature of the Canadian genius,2" and the need to seek an alternative third position that moves beyond frameworks of violence. Framed by such admissions, the novel's final vision becomes simultaneously optimistic and realistic, nationalistic and humanistic, and brutality is recognized as indelibly tied to the ways of human being. [...]while the narrator's violence forces a re-evaluation of the victimhood central to both the Canadian mythos and Survi