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What is a travel? Moving from place to place, exploring new countries, people, food, smells? Enjoying magnificent vistas, relaxing, escaping from reality, running away from everyday life? Or is it the oppositethe way to find reality, to explore and attempt to get to know one's inner self? There is no one unanimous answer to any of these questions, though. We can try to find them in little bits and pieces discovered by philosophers, poets, artists or writers. As an example we could take one very intriguing attempt made by Margaret Atwood in her short story "A Travel Piece" (Dancing Girls, pp. 10-14).
Here, the main character Annette is a professional traveler; she earns her living by writing about what she experienced during various trips offered to ordinary tourists. She happens to be on a plane, which crashes and then she ends up in a life boat with five other survivors who are waiting to be rescued and are suffering from heat, thirst and hunger in the middle of the ocean for a few days. Thus, the plot of the story is very simple. What captures the reader's interest and attention is the way Annette perceives objects and events and how this perception changes, which is very well conveyed by the language Margaret Atwood uses in the story. The author combines "minuets and madness, the mundane and the bizarre", juxtaposing Annette's "everlasting calm/numbness with the increasingly dramatic events" (Thompson, Lee Briscoe, "Minuets and Madness Margaret Atwood's Dancing Girls". The Art of Margaret Atwood).
The story is a compilation of contrary, conflicting things, yet it seems to be flowing and smooth. Annette's "job was to be pleased, and she did this well … she had direct blue eyes and a white smile and was good at asking interested, polite questions and coping with minor emergencies, such as lost suitcases, cheerfully and without becoming irritated" (DG, p. 1). She seems to be calm, even numb throughout all the events that are happening around her, yet she definitely does not have inner peace her husband, Jeff,
could not understand why she wanted to stay home more; finally he swiped the pills for her, telling her they would steady her nerves. Which they have, she supposes, but then her nerves have not been unsteady, quite the contrary. It's the unbroken calm, both within and without that is getting to her. Real events happen to other people, she thinks, why not me? And there's the conviction that they are happening, all around her, but that they're being kept from her.
Dancing Girls, p. 1
Another contradiction is her understanding of travels and home, as opposed to other people's, ordinary tourists', understanding. Traveling is calming and relaxing for us, regular travelers; it involves no danger. Plane crashes, hurricanes, earthquakes happen to others, but not us; all these unpleasant events are foreign and distant. "People … did not want any danger in the kind of articles it was her business to write…. Once, it seemed a long time ago, staying home meant safety … and going to places that were her specialty … meant adventure, threat…. Now it was the reverse, home was the dangerous place and people went on vacation to snatch a few weeks of uneventfulness." (DC, p. 11). For Annette, however, home is a haven, she wants to stay there for as long as possible, crawling "into bed and remaining there between her mock vacations, emerging only long enough to plod through the required exercises at the typewriter." (DG, p. 1). She defines us, tourists, as "those who are not responsible… those who make the lives of others their transient spectacle and pleasure" (DG, p. 1).
Moreover, she always says that she is remarkably calm, but in fact she lives with a feeling of fear of the unseen world. Her awareness of a world under the surface makes her usual world of "spectacle" (Brown, Russel, "Atwood's Sacred Wells [Dancing Girls, poetry, and Surfacing. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood)] … "come to seem like a giant screen, flat and with pictures painted on it to create the illusion of solidity. If you walked up to it and kicked it, it would tear and your foot would go right through, into another space which Annette could only visualize as darkness, a night in which something she did not want to look at was hiding" (DG, p. 1). Thus, Annette seems to be living in some sort of an endless dream, not able to wake up from a lethargic sleep. In this sense, she could be compared to the main character in Albert Camus The Stranger she does not have any real feelings, does not have a right to get sincerely angry, disappointed or distressed; the world around her seems to be unreal.
Ultimately, the hidden world that Margaret Atwood seeks has been obscured by more surfaces than just one provided by our modern condition. It has been obscured by "something more pervasive, more inevitable, and more inescapablelanguage itself" (Brown, "Atwood's Sacred Wells", p. 6). Language itself is the medium in which we are doomed to attempt our accounts of reality, and we create fictions from it when normal language does not represent our realities satisfactorily (Brown, "Atwood's Sacred Wells", p. 7). "A Travel Piece" operates in a chatty, colloquial voice, with a heavy measure of run-on sentences and comma splices presumably bespeaking a slightly mindless protagonist skimming on a surface of life" (Thompson, "Minuets and Madness", p. 116). The story begins as if it is something very familiar, like a book or a film where you can easily guess what is going to happen next. It seems as a regular narrative, a diary of some sort. However, Atwood juxtaposes the calm tone of Annette's thoughts with very dramatic events. She is experiencing a plane crash, but thinks of it as something casual, something almost unreal, something that is not happening to her. Only at the very end of the story, when she realizes that she has finally broken through the "giant flat screen" and is a part of reality now, Annette starts thinking in different terms. Drifting in a life raft after a plane crash, surrounded by masks and bloody markings which it is increasingly hard to remember are merely plastic sandwich trays and lipstick donned for protection against the sun,
Annette feels she is about to witness something more mundane and horrible, doubly so because it will be bathed not in sinister blood-red light but in the ordinary sunlight she has walked in all her life… she is …stuck in the present, with four Martians and one madman, waiting for her to say something.
(DG, p. 14)
Because of the language the author uses, the story becomes somewhat transparent. "Rather than simply seeing through the patterns of words on the page to the characters and the plot, we find ourselves seeing through those as wellto an author managing and manipulating those events, a living human being struggling to find and convey the meaning of her own human existence" (Brown, "Atwood's Sacred Wells", p. 7). This way, the story shows the surfaces and invites us to consider the unspoken words and the unarticulated reality that lie beneath. Atwood sees every act of intellection as distancing from a more primary world, and her use of language perfectly contributes to the creation of this effect. "To write is to become disinterested. There is certain renunciation in art", according to Albert Camus, but Atwood does not become disinterested in the world itself, on the contrary, she wants to draw us more deeply into it, to pull us through its surfaces and into the true and essential dimensions which have been waiting for us all the time (Brown, "Atwood's Sacred Wells", p. 8).
Thus, Annette travels through a travel she discovers what the real, the unseen world has been hiding from her. She also discovers she may be part of that unseen world, that she may be one of the "ordinary" people, who are able to feel and experience all shades and nuances of what is happening to them and around them. At the very end of the story, Annette ponders "But the sky is not flat anymore, it's bluer than ever and recedes away from her, clear but unfocused.… The quality of light has not changed. Am I one of them or not?" In one way or another, Annette discovers an unknown part in herself, and this discovery is beautifully conveyed by the language Margaret Atwood uses.
Atwood, Margaret. Dancing Girls and Other Stories. New York Simon and Schuster, 18.
Davidson, Arnold E., and Davidson, Cathy N., eds. The Art of Margaret Atwood, Essays in Criticism. Toronto House of Anansi Press Ltd., 181.
McCoombs, Judith. Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood. Boston, MA G.K. Hall & Co., 188.
"Quotes". The Existence of Albert Camus | Quotes. http//www.duke.edu/~thp/camus/quotes/bysubject.html#writing.Nov 1.
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