journey to the interior
...Atwood considers similarities and differences of the map and the inner journey • The landscape is used as a metaphor for the search and discovery of mental self • Prairie landscape o “hills become endless prairies” Of the inner mind o The search for self is infinite and never-ending o Isolation and wilderness of the mind results in a difficult journey o “the hills which the eyes make flat as a wall, welded together, open as I move to let me through” Vastness/distance of the journey • The prairie landscape is used to talk about the physical journey itself as well as the journey of self-discovery • “Tangle of branches” o Confusion, difficulties • “Trees grow spindly, have their roots often in swamps” o The things within your mind are often ‘gluggy’ • The idea of an interior journey is far less daunting and difficult that the actual process o Mapping metaphor o Parallelism o Accumulation • An interior journey may not be linear and marked by distractions, diversions and disorientation o Line-break/enjambment o Layout o Simile o Mapping metaphor o Aside in brackets o Direct address • A consideration of the nature of the interior journey may be a deliberate and rational process o Balanced structure – ‘there are similarities, there are differences…’ o Aside in brackets - shows an awareness of mental state • The interior journey of seeking to understand the self is mundane yet dangerous and challenging o Accumulation of ambiguous and everyday domestic images that are benign • The interior journey is the most fundamental or basic of all journeys – it is inevitable o All journeys contribute to the knowledge of ones self Line beat Structure • Margaret Atwood’s poem was written in the 1960’s, a time in which a significant number of American poets, led by Robert Lowell, began exploring the dark territory of mental breakdown, disintegration into madness and suicide o Other poets who became classified as belonging to this so-called ‘confessional school’ included Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W D Snodgrass and John Berryman • In the post World Ward II context with its genocide, concentration camps, atomic bombs, there was a sense that the human psyche had been so damaged, that health could only be recovered by interrogating the nightmare territory of the inner self o The poet had a responsibility to explore his or her own darkness • While the Canadian writer, Margaret Atwood, shared the interest in such inner and imaginative journeys, she had always had a secure sense of self o So her motivation was slightly different • In poems like “Journey into the Interior”, it was not personal exorcism she was after, but rather an understanding of why humans behave the way they do: why the self is a mystery even to itself; why we crouch on the edge of the psyche unwilling to enter the depths below • Atwood uses the physical terrain of the Canadian landscape as a metaphor for this psychological exploration of the self in ‘Journey to the Interior’ o It is both an imaginative and inner journey • The first lines of the first and second stanzas, “there are similarities/there are differences” imply a comparison between the landscape of interior and ‘other landscapes’ that conclude the poem o These other landscapes could be both physical and metaphorical o In either case, the journeys involve challenge and risk; however, Atwood says that in the journey to the interior it is easiest to get lost ‘forever’ • Stanza 1 o So what are the similarities that she notices between the interior journey and others? o The grammatical structure includes the repetition of clauses beginning with, ‘that’: That the hills… That the trees… That this is… That a cliff… That travel is not… But that I move… That there are no destinations apart from this. o In all ‘similar’ cases, ‘maps’ of terrains can be false or misleading Eyes make hills ‘flat as a wall’, when viewed on the square surface of a two-dimensional map The distance between and beyond them cannot be appreciated unless one ‘travels’ through them • It is only through the journey that we can move between and beyond them to realise, ‘the endless prairies’ they become o However, this is no romantic bucolic picture of nature Here the ‘trees grow spindly’; with their roots ‘often in swamps’ It is a ‘poor country’ • If this is a metaphor for her interior self, it is a cutting rejoinder to the glossy, self-help pop psychology that abounds today o Rather the interior self is vast, perhaps murky, and sometimes deficient • The juxtaposition of the industrial/urban image of ‘welded’ and ‘wall’ with hills, prairies and trees suggest the degrees to which nature itself is constructed rather than just found o The country or terrain is being constructed by the traveller; we see it ‘open up’; ‘become’; ‘grow’, rather than just awaiting discovery • If we extend the idea of nature to human nature, then it too is subject to such construction o This challenges the humanist idea that people are unified, knowing, rational selves who are unique and essentially unchanging throughout existence o Atwood is suggesting that it is almost ‘impossible’ to know you are and that our sense of ourselves is constantly being produced and constructed in different contexts These ideas about identity are important when examining the assumptions underlying the representation of journey that you are asked to consider • ‘Mostly’ she suggests that the similarity between ‘journey to the interior’ and other journeys is that ‘travel’ is difficult o It is not just a matter of going between known destinations, it is not a matter of simply ‘locating’ what is ‘plotted on a square surface’, as if it was there all the time and you just had to find it Atwood describes the obstacles as a ‘tangle/ of branches, a net of air and/alternate light and dark’ • The ‘net of air’ suggests that there are no concrete or tangible obstacles, but only the limitations of our consciousness: our fears or reluctance to explore • The ‘alternate light and dark’ suggests the contrast between the conscious waking self that is often at odds with the dark interiors of our psyches, haunted by fears or ghosts that we deny • The emphatic last line of the first stanza, ‘that there are no destinations apart from this’ reinforces the idea that the interior journey is fundamental to all other aspects of our life journeys • The second stanza ‘charts’ the differences between the interior journey and all others o Atwood continues the mapping metaphor in her reference to the ‘lack of reliable charts’ for such a journey o It is the next section of the stanza, however, that we are told of the ‘distractions’ along the way There are vignettes of domestic life that suggest a relationship, domesticity and a creative life through writing • Yet the very way in which these images of ‘your shoe among the brambles’ and a ‘sentence… sodden as a fallen log’ mix the concrete reality with the metaphorical, evoke a feeling of magical realism o Dreams and waking life collide and jostle for attention in the construction of identity • ‘As for the ego – I wonder if it really exists? Perhaps instead of an ego-egg shell containing things, one is simply a location where certain things occur, leaving trails and debris’ o The image of the shoe and the paring knife, along with the sentence are like such trails and debris; they help to locate the poet’s identity but do not define it • Rather than a linear journey of discovery, Atwood humorously depicts her interior journey as muddled and one in which she is easily distracted o The self-mocking tone of the aside ‘(have I been walking in circles again?)’ parodies the metaphor of the journey, debunking any grand claims of discovery • However, she warns in the third stanza that the journey to the interior is inherently dangerous o ‘Many have been there, but only/some have returned safely’ o This is perhaps a grim reminder of those writers like Sylvia Plath, whose journey into dark spaces of anger and revenge, led to actual suicide or in other cases to mental disintegration • Extending the mapping metaphor in the fourth stanza, she compares the futility of trying to establish some sense of order to the psyche with the uselessness of relying for direction on a compass or the erratic movements of the sun o The chaotic vastness of the psyche is evoked in the metaphor of the ‘vacant wilderness’ Words can no more map the psyche than a voice calling in the wilderness can be heard o The effect of the long vowel sounds and assonance of the line, ‘calling in a vacant wilderness’, echo the sense of futility implied • As if awaking from the hypnotic trances evoked by the previous line, the poet resolutely states her intention to keep her head o The urgency of the highly modal verb, ‘must’ betrays a fear that perhaps she wont be able to o In this last stanza the poet reveals her own vulnerability to losing her ‘way/forever here’, more than in any other landscape Perhaps this is because Atwood is such a keen observer of others. She is able to enter the minds of her characters such as ‘Offred’ in The Handmaid’s Tale and the alleged murderess in Alias Grace, that there must have been times when the division between who she really was and her characters was blurred o The precariousness of human identity is captured in the following words by Atwood’s biographer: Margaret was fascinated by the bizarre fluidity of identity. It almost seems as if we can get a fixed sense of who we are only momentarily, in our encounters with others; alone, we slide back into the dark mystery that is ourselves’ • It is this dark mystery that she attempts to chart in this poem • Techniques o Figurative image driven o Balanced structure (“there are similarities… there are differences” o Use of parentheses – awareness of mental state o How can she describe her inner journey? – map to explain – mapping metaphor (similarities/differences). Speculates on the nature of her mind. Sustained landscape metaphor – using the frontier, hills of mental lands...