Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is a very good writer, and Cat's Eye is a very good book, beautifully written, marvelously observed, sometimes funny, eminently well worth reading. It is the story of Elaine Risley, a painter, who returns to Toronto, where she grew up, for a retrospective exhibition of her work. The story, all of it in the first person and the present tense, is told from two alternating perspectives: that of the adult Elaine Risley, now middle-aged, back in Toronto, seeing again her first husband, visiting neighborhoods formerly familiar, and attending the opening reception of her exhibition, and that of the young Elaine Risley, daughter of an entomologist, growing up in Toronto, accompanying her father, mother, and older brother on summer research trips to northern Canada, attending grade school, then high school, forming friendships, often stressful, with her schoolmates, intersecting with her older brother, eventually taking art classes and starting to paint. The two perspectives come together at the end.
In terms of formal construction, Cat's Eye is similar to the only other of Atwood's novels that I have read, The Blind Assassin, which is also told through two perspectives that come together at the end. In The Blind Assassin the merging of the two perspectives comes as the solution to a mystery (although one whose solution we have already begun to suspect). In Cat's Eye there is no mystery about whose life is being presented in each of the two perspectives, but there is doubt, nevertheless, about how the two relate to one another.
It struck me that as the young Elaine takes up painting there is no description of her vision of art, what it should be or do, why it might be important, why she should take it up; no account of her growth as an artist. Not that I expected a 200-page analysis of the relationship between art and experience and how that points a way for art, such as we get at the end of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Still, I thought, there needed to be something to explain or motivate Elaine's pursuit of painting. The answer to that does come and the end where, from the description of the works in the show, we realize that Elaine's painting does not grow out of an aesthetic theory or a formulated artistic purpose; it grows out of her life as a way of assimilating and dealing with her past (which by now we have read a lot about).
Thus there is an analogy after all between Atwood's account of the exhibition and Proust's theoretical analysis of literature. Proust's analysis leads us to realize that the work of art his theories point to is the very novel--In Search of Lost Time--that we have nearly finished, thus giving (or making explicit) the significance of the experiences we have been reading about for some 3,000 pages. Atwood does not offer a theory, but the descriptions of the paintings in the exhibition serve a similar function to Proust's analysis. The paintings themselves provide the link between the mature Elaine Risley and the young Elaine Risley, whose experiences fill most of the book, thus offering a kind of explanation and resolution.
In terms of formal construction, Cat's Eye is similar to the only other of Atwood's novels that I have read, The Blind Assassin, which is also told through two perspectives that come together at the end. In The Blind Assassin the merging of the two perspectives comes as the solution to a mystery (although one whose solution we have already begun to suspect). In Cat's Eye there is no mystery about whose life is being presented in each of the two perspectives, but there is doubt, nevertheless, about how the two relate to one another.
It struck me that as the young Elaine takes up painting there is no description of her vision of art, what it should be or do, why it might be important, why she should take it up; no account of her growth as an artist. Not that I expected a 200-page analysis of the relationship between art and experience and how that points a way for art, such as we get at the end of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Still, I thought, there needed to be something to explain or motivate Elaine's pursuit of painting. The answer to that does come and the end where, from the description of the works in the show, we realize that Elaine's painting does not grow out of an aesthetic theory or a formulated artistic purpose; it grows out of her life as a way of assimilating and dealing with her past (which by now we have read a lot about).
Thus there is an analogy after all between Atwood's account of the exhibition and Proust's theoretical analysis of literature. Proust's analysis leads us to realize that the work of art his theories point to is the very novel--In Search of Lost Time--that we have nearly finished, thus giving (or making explicit) the significance of the experiences we have been reading about for some 3,000 pages. Atwood does not offer a theory, but the descriptions of the paintings in the exhibition serve a similar function to Proust's analysis. The paintings themselves provide the link between the mature Elaine Risley and the young Elaine Risley, whose experiences fill most of the book, thus offering a kind of explanation and resolution.