AJR Conversations I The Bible and Margaret Atwood

AJR continues its #conversations series with a three-way dialogue on the 2020 Best Edited Collection on Atwood, awarded by the Margaret Atwood Society, “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?” The Bible and Margaret Atwood (Gorgias Press, 2020)

Scott: Thank you, Rhiannon and Peter, for the opportunity to speak with you about this remarkable collection of essays. Congratulations on its success! It has rightfully garnered a good deal of attention and acclaim. Margaret Atwood herself has even tweeted enthusiastically about it. You assembled a terrific group of contributors who have offered readers a dynamic range of genuinely rich and refreshing reflections on biblical literature through Atwood’s fiction, poetry, interviews, criticism, and side ventures, and who have also eloquently engaged a sizable portion of Atwood’s oeuvre through the Bible.

Sarah Emanuel, one of your contributors and an editor at AJR, has asked us to have in this interview not only a conversation about the book and the relationship between the Bible and Atwood, but also to discuss the relationship between biblical studies and contemporary critical theory that the volume taps into so deftly. To that end, I want to begin with where you yourselves begin and end: Atwood’s canon. Your Introduction and Afterword identify in Atwood’s work a canon that is at once both somewhat stable and fixed, and yet also somewhat fluid and expanding. It is closed in the sense of recurring texts and tropes peppered throughout her work, while it remains open by means of both additions of previously unused biblical texts that appear in later publications (e.g., The Testaments) and in adaptations of familiar biblical texts throughout her bibliography. I can’t help but think about this in the light of what Rhiannon says regarding the Future Library in her essay, which she describes as a “project about imagination and time, one that riffs on questions of the archive, the library, and the canon” (398). I am interested in your thoughts on what (the) Bible is vis-a-vis both Atwood and this collection of essays. What’s the “it” we’ve gotten our hands on when all is said and done?

Peter: Thanks for the kind words, Scott. Margaret Atwood tweeting about the book was definitely a career highlight, haha. I would like to address your answer by making a rather obvious first comment: for Atwood, the Bible is the Christian Bible. I do not say this in a “religious” sense, but rather mean that the Christian Bible is Atwood’s default Bible. Raised as an atheist in what was a very Protestant Canada at the time, it is more specifically a Protestant Bible, although she does occasionally comment on Deuterocanonical books like Susanna and the Elders (as I discuss in my own essay in the volume). On a literary level, however, the Bible is a more slippery and complex work in Atwood’s work. Perhaps it is best described as an “incendiary device,” to use Atwood’s own words. It can be used as a prooftext for oppressive patriarchy but also as the very text that can inspire rebellion against patriarchy; it can inspire destructive environmental attitudes (as in Atwood’s imagined Church of PetrOleum) but also radically environmentalist ones (as in Atwood’s imagined group God’s Gardeners). 

Rhiannon: For us, it was also interesting as editors to see the “canon of Atwood” that emerged in response to Atwood’s canon. Margaret Atwood is an incredibly prolific author—she’s published 17 novels, 8 short story collections, 18 books of poetry, nonfiction, graphic novels, children’s books…in fact, this project was well underway when she announced The Testaments, which is why this novel appears only in our afterword and in Hannah Strømmen’s essay, even though it’s clearly biblical. And yet a few other works by Atwood appear again and again in the collection—the MaddAddam trilogy, The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace. It seems like these works are especially “good to think with” for biblical scholars. (Of course, there are exceptions, like Sara Parks and Anna Cwikla’s essay, which focuses on Survival, Atwood’s nonfiction book about Canadian literature, and Sari Fein’s essay on Surfacing and the biblical midbar.) As biblically-saturated readers, we have a way of picking and choosing within Atwood’s works just as Atwood does with the Bible: certain stories and texts appear over and over. These include Adam and Eve, Jezebel, 1 Corinthians 13, and the Levite’s concubine.

Scott: Very nicely said. So, let me ask what I think is a related question: how does fiction particularly, but also “non-professional”/outsider/etic readings (and readers), fundamentally change the work, the effects, and the affects of biblical interpretation (and, by extension, our understanding what the Bible is)?

Rhiannon: Reception history has become such an important part of the discipline of biblical studies, which I think is wonderful. But at the same time, sometimes it seems as if reception history has become the only way to think about “the Bible and literature”—how do literary works receive and interpret the Bible, what biblical allusions and tropes can we uncover, how much does the literary “deviate” from the “original.” One thing I love about the essays in our book is the way that they insist that engagements between “the Bible” and “literature” can do so much more. Recalling again Offred’s description of the Bible as an incendiary device, Atwood’s works are also a kind of incendiary device, blowing open our possibilities for biblical interpretation. Ken Stone and Jennifer Koosed, for example, each use Atwood’s books to rethink animality and religion, but they do so in very different ways. Sean Burt uses Atwood’s poetry to rethink the thorny nexus of poetry, prophecy, and “Are the Prophets poets?”. And in my essay, I offer a new reading of the writing hand in Daniel 6 based on one of Atwood’s extra-literary inventions: the LongPen, a machine that can write at a distance.

Peter: Jorge Luis Borges describes the Bible as a “mirror of every face that bends over it.” Reception history, accordingly, is a hall of mirrors—and this fits well with Atwood’s own fascination with mirrors and eyes (Jay Twomey’s essay focuses on mirrors and doubles in Atwood). It is no coincidence that Atwood’s own biblical canon is especially focused on female biblical characters and feminist concerns and, moreover, that she persistently uses puns and humor to explore the biblical text. Some of my favorites are Offred’s remark that “there is a bomb in Gilead” or Atwood’s musing that the victim that the Good Samaritan helps robs the Samaritan in the morning, thereby showing no appreciation and repaying kindness with animosity and betrayal. So, I do indeed agree that “non-professional” outsider readings like those of Atwood’s change the effects and affects of biblical interpretation. In Atwood’s hands, for example, the Bible can be something that is laughed at and with, and laughter is not something with which biblical scholarship typically concerns itself.

Scott: I really like your responses here. The “hall of mirrors” analogy is well-suited not only to what both of you are saying but also to a number of the essays in the volume. In addition to Twomey’s chapter and your chapter, Peter, I’m thinking in various ways of those by Strømmen, Walsh, Seesengood, Burt, and Emanuel. This notion that the Bible and various receptions of it reflect back to and on one another in a never-ending reverberation would seem to highlight, if not actually reanimate, the innate fluidity of the biblical writings that is so easily overlooked when the Bible comes to us as a bound book. This is precisely one of the reasons why I often use fiction in my courses. (I’m using The Handmaid’s Tale this semester, in fact, alongside The Parable of the Sower, and assigning Minister’s essay from your volume.) So, on the one hand, the Bible is as the Bible does, and “Bible” is never stable but rather dynamic, repeatedly taking shape anew in the complex, dynamic interactions of innumerable readers. On the other hand, however, there is this theme of writing as sinful in the MaddAddam Trilogy (which Walsh notes in his essay) and in The Handmaid’s Tale (which also refers to reading as sinful). Are these prohibitions themselves biblical in some way, and does the violation of them embody something akin to Jacob wrestling with God at Peniel? Or are they a reflection of Atwood’s (and perhaps our own awareness) of the dangers of writing and reading? What exactly is the “sin,” violation, trespass, or danger of writing and reading?

Rhiannon: The dangers of reading and writing are such an Atwoodian theme! In addition to the novels that you mention (and The Blind Assassin, which is one of my favorites!), this is a major theme in Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood’s series of nonfiction essays on the craft of writing. Atwood loves to play with the idea of the “other hand,” which is so often a writing hand (but what is it writing?). I’d agree with you that these are really biblical concerns as well—especially, I think, in the prophetic literature, where there are all kinds of themes about writing and failing to understand and even, in the case of Ezekiel, literally eating words written on a scroll.

Peter: I am not sure to what extent Atwood is explicitly playing with the Bible in her writing on writing. Certainly, however, there is a connection in that both the biblical text and Atwood’s writings have complex and nuanced relationships with the medium of writing. In The Year of The Flood, for example, the God’s Gardeners memorize biblical verses and phrases so as not to rely on written texts, reasoning that books can be burned and computers can be destroyed. This reverses the idea that writing is more permanent than speech and memory. And yet, one is reading about all of this in a book! Moreover, the God’s Gardeners use the Bible as proof that material written texts do not endure while spiritual things do—so, again, the written word is used as proof that writing is an inferior medium. That Atwood and the Bible continually play with themes like this reveals how conscious they are of the benefits and pitfalls of the medium in which they are presenting themselves.

Scott: I find this all just so incredibly fascinating. Can you say more about Atwood’s insistence that she does not write science fiction but rather speculative fiction? To be sure, she and various contributors to the volume have adequately explained what she means by the distinction. But what are your thoughts on this idea of speculative fiction as opposed to science fiction? Do you think biblical scholarship itself might benefit from more speculation, more fiction? Even wild, unbridled speculation and fiction? It seems to me an intriguing prospect and yet one that’s also fraught given what we’ve seen in the States over the past four years.

Rhiannon: I would love for biblical scholarship to open itself to more speculative ways of reading—and especially to more fiction! For me at least, fiction—as a framing device, a counterpoint, even a mode of interpretation—helps me read the Bible in new ways. To connect to another part of my work, I just finished writing a book called Texts after Terror (OUP, 2021), which is about rape and the Bible, and Atwood ended up being a part of it as well. In rereading The Handmaid’s Tale for this project with Peter, I found myself stuck on a scene fairly early in the novel, when Offred is describing “the Ceremony” in which the Commander rapes her, in a scene modeled on Genesis 30, the rapes of Bilhah and Zilpah. At least, that’s how I remembered that scene—but in the novel, Offred actually states explicitly that the Ceremony, however terrible, isn’t rape. She then adds, “I didn’t have a lot of choice, but I had some, and this is what I chose.” This is a really troubling statement from the perspective of feminist reading of sexual violence—there’s such a strong and compelling desire to identify the sexual violence in Genesis, and the treatment of the “handmaids” (or slaves) in particular, as rape, just like there’s such a strong and compelling desire to describe what happens to Offred as rape. But what happens when the person at the center of the experience pushes back against this description? The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t the only text to give us such a situation; there’s a lot of work in feminist psychology, for example, that offers similar examples, as well as writings by survivors. But I found Atwood’s representation of the scene especially hard to shake, and it led me to rethink how I was framing my entire book. Atwood is a great example of a writer who can make us rethink the Bible and biblical studies—but she’s far from the only one. For me, Joanna Russ, Carmen Machado, and Anne Carson all do this; so does Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, in a really different way. And I love reading and hearing about how other people in the Bible approach the biblical texts with and through literature.

Peter: There are so many ways to address this question, and I’d like to pursue them all; however, I’ll try to refrain myself from offering a ten-page response. When it comes to the debate about whether Atwood’s work is speculative fiction or science fiction, I have no strong opinion. I would say, however, that Atwood’s insistence that her work is speculative fiction is revealing in that she wants her readers to know that the events of her dystopias are not invented but rather everything is based upon something that has already happened. Thus, works like The Handmaid’s Tale are, in a very real sense, fictionalized history.

And speaking of fictionalized history leads me to address the benefits of fiction in general. In my opinion, what we’ve seen in the States over the last four years (and more) reveals why we need fiction more than ever. The best way to understand “fake news,” I would assert, is to know how rhetoric, fiction, and falsity work. There is a lack of fictional literacy, if you will, in American society that results in people unable to make sense of the complexity of the world. It is not necessarily a case, then, of knowing what the “truth” is but of knowing how to navigate through the information with which we are constantly bombarded. In fact, I have presented a few conference papers on this issue (perhaps one day I’ll actually publish this material), arguing for the need to emphasize fiction’s role in the war against “fake news” (for fiction itself is a type of “fake news”). So, to actually answer your question, would biblical scholarship benefit from more speculative, even unbridled, fiction? Yes, definitely, and to a much greater extent than it is currently doing!

To draw all this back to Atwood, I would point out that Atwood admits that she wrote The Testaments in reaction to Trump’s presidency and thus deals with these issues throughout the book. On the surface, she offers a rather optimistic vision of how those committed to uncovering truth will ultimately prevail, citing Qohelet as evidence of this: “A bird of the air shall carry the voice and that which hath wings shall tell the matter” (Qoh. 10:20). It is ambiguous though, as to whether Atwood is aware of the larger context of the verse which warns that even confidential and secret thoughts might become known to those in power who could exploit them for their own purposes. In other words, it is ambiguous as to whether The Testaments is a book of hope or a book of despair—and in this sense it is a perfect book for our times.

Scott: Thank you both so very much for your time and for all this “bonus content.” Your remarks leave us a lot to consider. I’m looking forward to seeing how these reflections and those of your contributors ripple through the often placid (sometimes stagnant) waters of our discipline.

Scott S. Elliott is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Leadership and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Adrian College in Adrian, MI. He is the author of The Rustle of Paul: Autobiographical Narratives in Romans, Corinthians, and Philippians (T&T Clark, 2020) and co-editor with K. Jason Coker of Bible and Theory: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Stephen D. Moore (Lexington Books, 2020).

Rhiannon Graybill is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and W.J. Millard Professor of Religion at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. She is the author of Are We Not Men?: Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Oxford, 2016) and Texts after Terror: Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2021).

Peter J. Sabo is Belzberg Lecturer of Jewish Studies at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). He is co-editor of Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof: Poetry, Prophecy, and Justice in Hebrew Scripture (2017).