Stefanie Savva

There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story Margaret Atwood – MaddAddam

 

Creativity is defined as the ability to create something using one’s imagination or one’s original idea and is, as a concept, fairly new. The Ancient Greeks had no words or terms corresponding to the concept of creativity but rather viewed and understood art as a discovery. The notion of an original idea created out of nothingness can be traced back to the Biblical story of creation – only God could imagine a world out of nothing and he only could create such a world. Genesis begins with ‘ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς’. The word ‘ἐποίησεν’ comes from ‘poiein’ which means to make and which was for the Ancient Greeks only applied to poets (poietes) who made poetry. God is thus a poet who constructs a world full of symmetries and patterns.

Can we then imagine a world with a definite beginning? Julian in Jen Campbell’s the Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night says that ‘a beginning denotes a period in time, and, for you to pinpoint it, time must exist, and if time exists then something exists.’ There is this character, in a bedroom that might or might not exist, in a time that might or might not exist, saying that nothing is unthinkable. From the moment you think about nothing , something comes into creation.

Storytelling works in layers. A story starts in the writer’s head and it develops as it is written down. The distinction between the story and the real story is usually blurry, especially when considering point of view and voice. When a story is told in the first person it is likely that it will be biased; it will be the version of the story as seen from the perspective of a specific character. It reflects not only the character’s feelings but also his or her judgement on other characters. This is very prominent in Atwood’s MaddAddam where the main characters Jimmy, Toby, Zeb and later Blackbeard become active storytellers.

Initially Jimmy narrates the events that took place prior to the biological catastrophe described in the two previous books of the trilogy, to the Crakers. Jimmy’s stories are a story but not the real story. He alters the events and the facts to fit a biblical narrative of sorts, starting from a creation story. The importance of this is that it plays out on a basic human need; to explain how the world was created. Creation myths are narratives that are shared by every culture around the world and as Booker argues,can be placed in three categories: creation by God -or a mastermind, creation from a world egg – an object appearing the the primeval void, and the more modern creation of the Big Bang. Interestingly, even in a post-apocalyptic narrative, the need for stories that tell us where we came from appears to be prominent. The reader sees in Zeb’s words the possible adaption of his stories to a cult or religion created later in the future by the Crakers. Atwood creates this cyclical view of the world — we have always shared creation myths and we will continue sharing them in the future.

It is no wonder then that many novels make use of the form of creation myths to structure that story. One can even argue that there is a creation myth in every novel. It might not appear in the story itself but it is definitely part of it. If we take as an example a contemporary realist novel like the popular The Fault in Our Stars by John Green we can note that the characters seem to agree on a general view of how the world was created. We might not hear them narrate the creation myth but it is taken for granted. In novels such as this the reader has a clear idea of the beliefs of the characters about how their world was created. In a John Green novel set in the United States of America in the 21st century, we can safely assume that there are two views; Creationism and Darwinism. But how do we establish these `truths’ in a story that take place in fictional places such as Márquez’s Macondo or in Atwood’s post-apocalyptic earth?

A structure is a way to tell a story. It functions as a guide to where a story will begin and where it will end, and offers a completeness. Aristotle writes on the subject of completeness:

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end. A beginning is that which itself does not follow necessarily from anything else, but some second thing naturally exists or occurs after it. Conversely, an end is that which does itself naturally follow from something else, either necessarily or in general, but there is nothing else after it. A middle is that which itself comes after something, and some other thing comes after it. Well-constructed plots should therefore not begin or end at any arbitrary point, but should employ the stated forms.

Aristotle tells that the writer should not choose the beginning of the story randomly but instead it should be a beginning that sets the foundations of the story. In his latest novel, Salman Rushdie begins with the story of the children of Ibn Rushd with Dunia the Lightening Princess, a jinn. The ancestors of those children become the main characters of the novel. Rushdie makes use of folktales of jinns and builds around it the world of his novel, but there is a central character, Dunia, who through her children creates this `new’ world where magic and reality interact.

Elements of creation stories can also be found in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The opening paragraph presents a heaven like, idyllic scenery. There is something mythical about the intact natural beauty of Macondo. The clear water runs `along a bed of polished stones, which [are] white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.The egg being a symbol for fertility, of the new and the old, makes links between Macondo and a lost paradise. The world of Macondo is a world of newness, one that yet needs to be named:

The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Lorna Robinson, in her examination of One Hundred Years of Solitude in relation to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, notes on the subject of newness and naming:

“The most obvious link to a mythic beginning is the narrator’s observation that the newness of things meant that words had not yet been invented for them, a remark that inevitably invokes the biblical topos of God naming the world, and granting man the gift of naming each living creature. Fusion of art and nature, which runs as a theme throughout the first paragraphs of the novel, expands upon these implied parallels: the stones are described as `polished’, a word that suggests the conscious effort of an artistic demiurge as much as the natural and incidental actions of the environment upon the stones. This fusion foregrounds the concept of a `freshly minted’ world forged perhaps by a creating divinity, with a nod towards the creative powers of the author himself. It is a world, so far, steeped in mythical themes, giving a universal and momentous tone to the opening descriptions.”

Going back to Atwood’s Maddaddam and the ways we write, an interesting part of the novel is how Toby takes the stories narrated to her and re-makes them, re-tells them, to the Crackers. Just like post-colonial writers, she makes use of the `official’ story in order to create a narrative. Toby not only writes for the future but she is also creating new writers and new storytellers — Blackbeard being the first one. She is not only hoping that writing and storytelling will be part of a future society but also that there will be a future society to read and write. This idea ties with Atwood’s choice to participate in Katie Paterson’s 100-year artwork – Future Library– which means that her name will re-emerge in literature decades after her death.

In Nordmarka, a forest just outside Oslo, a thousand trees have been planted. They will be used to supply the paper needed for an anthology of books that are scheduled to be printed in one hundred years time. Every year during these one hundred years, one writer will contribute a text that will remain unpublished, until 2114. The writers are not allowed to expose the subject of their books. Atwood comments on the concept of the Future Library:

`I am very honoured, and also happy to be part of this endeavour. This project, at least, believes the human race will still be around in a hundred years! Future Library is bound to attract a lot of attention over the decades, as people follow the progress of the trees, note what takes up residence in and around them, and try to guess what the writers have put into their sealed boxes.’

Both artist and writer imagine physical books being made in a century from today, despite the rise of alternative reading methods. MaddAddam goes beyond the era of digitalization to a time when returning back to ink and paper would be necessary and imagines a possible world were writers and stories exist alongside physical books. As Paterson and Atwood discuss in the short film made for the purposes of the promotion of the Future Library, this is a very hopeful project because it assumes that there will be people reading in the distant future. It is a combination of the aspiration of the writer to be remembered and the hope that fiction and books will remain a part of the future humanity. George Orwell in his famous 1946 essay Why I Write touches upon this subject and names sheer egoism as one of the four motives for writing, alongside aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose.

Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death \elide. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen –in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. \elide Serious writers, I should say are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

The above gives birth to three questions? If a person is in a group of survivors of an apocalypse, like Toby, will he or she write out of egoism? Or does the fact that there is a big possibility than no one will ever read that story when the writer is gone means that the motives will change? And the main question which links to my overall argument here: how will that writer tell the story when there are no other writers in the world, no one to write a better, more creative, more experimental story?

To what extent is the structure of the story Toby writes down dictated by the conditions in which she found herself? She wonders what to write apart from `the bare-facts daily chronicle she’s begun’. As the only person writing in this post-apocalyptic world, she still finds herself facing the same questions and dilemmas of any writer.

What kind of story — what kind of history will be of any use at all to people she can’t know will exist, in the future she can’t foresee?

Later Blackbeard teaches other Crackers to write, those who were born from a human mother and Cracker fathers, in order for the story to be preserved. One can only assume that as time passes and extends outside what Atwood wrote, the writers will start not only copying those stories but changing them, adapting them and making them their own. We cannot help but wonder if amongst those hybrid human-Crackers, those with a talent towards words and storytelling will shine through as the writers of the post-apocalyptic new world; if in a way the aesthetic enthusiasm that Orwell describes, will emerge in the Cracker-writers. Will the writers of this new world develop a `pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story’?

MaddAddam is a beautiful narrative on writing. It offers a hypothetical scenario which can be used to examine not only why we write but also how we do it. It raises fundamental questions about writing as a social activity and also as an artistic expression. While reading the book I started thinking about the conscious and unconscious choices I make when writing. Length, tone, voice, all of these are as important as the story itself. I would even argue that they are the story, or at least part of it.