MAKE MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN: Crowds and Fiction
By Sara Hailstone
“For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this
diary? For the future, for the unborn…For the first time the magnitude of what he
had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future?
It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in
which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his
predicament would be meaningless.”
-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 10
“MAKE MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN: Crowds and Fiction” explores
the capacity that fictive narratives like Margaret Atwood’s famous novel, The Handmaid’s
Tale and her 2019 sequel, The Testaments serve societal pockets in a way that helps give
weight to a protesting crowd. Upon examination of Chapter 5, “Make Margaret Atwood
Fiction Again!” in Srećko Horvat’s 2019 text, Poetry from the Future: Why a Global
Liberation Movement is our Civilization’s Last Chance, activist and philosopher isolates a key
moment of Trump’s inauguration in 2017 of a woman holding a sign during the 500, 000
person Women’s March that read, “MAKE MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN.”
Horvat identifies that “what was once fiction is now becoming reality, not because of a
sudden event or short circuit but through many incremental steps” (74). This analysis
examines responses to the processual nature of a creeping closed society in America built by
incremental steps amongst conversations around Atwood’s dystopian novels and how the
crowd has utilized narrative and literary motif to protest. How public demonstrations related
to Atwood's fictive universe, for instance women demonstrating in handmaid’s uniforms,
inform crowd phenomenon as outlined by Dean will be addressed. In this analysis, crowds
will be discussed from an informal methodology in relation to fictive texts from the scope of
a social analysis of crowds that refer to Atwood when protesting and the idea of literary
readership as a kind of invisible crowd that can possibly be mobilized for protest in capacities
suggested by Horvat and Dean. The idea of a community of readers as a potential site of
activation is intriguing. Traditionally, fiction is read in isolation and silently, especially the
type of fiction that Margaret Atwood writes. This methodology proposes a textual analysis of
Atwood’s novels in dialogue with Horvat’s notion of a global liberation movement while also
engaging Jodi Dean’s text, Crowds and Party and her work with crowd theory and an
alliance of a global left. Atwood’s novels were written in representation of historical facts
and events accumulating in a gripping dystopic fictive world that suggests almost prophecy
for contemporary societies. “Crowds and Fiction” argues for an understanding of how
Atwood’s narratives coalesce to join a protesting collective and give voice to a resisting
readership. This essay prompts readers and scholars of philosophy in contemplating the
function of fiction in politics, power structures and conversations of philosophical theory. In
engaging a multidisciplinary landscape when attempting to speak out against current fascist
trends, I advocate that fictive narratives like The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments
function for ‘the people’ in a way that could help build alliances with scholars like Horvat
and Dean and further help accomplish the work envisioned by these philosophers in their
respective calls to action.
___
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
It was in the air; and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in
the army cots that had been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not
talk…We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semidarkness we could
stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s
hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned
sideways, watching each other’s mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from
bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June” (Atwood HMT, 4).
Those who control means of expression also control historical narratives. History is
unrealized potentialities and subject to multiple interpretations. From Horvat the narrative he
exposes that we are served is that the rich want to feel nostalgia and safe while the rest of us
are just trying to survive. To Horvat, texts like The Handmaid’s Tale “have become our dark
documentary reality” (Horvat, x). He asks in Poetry from the Future, “What if the future is
already here? What if Donald Trump’s (or Poland’s, Hungary’s, Austria’s) evangelic
fundamentalism will lead us directly into the science-fiction autocracy of Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale?” (Horvat, 13) The protest sign that Horvat isolates, ‘MAKE
MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN!’ is followed with an analysis of Atwood’s text,
a summary of The Handmaid’s Tale while connecting fiction to current events in America.
Horvat offers how the recent tv series depicting Atwood’s dystopic novel “would only a few
months later become the series about the reality of Donald Trump’s presidency” (Horvat, 75).
Two pieces of evidence: Trump signing the reinstatement of the ‘Global Gag Rule’- the
‘Mexico City Policy,’ legislation prohibiting abortion counselling by any non-governmental
international organization that receives U.S. federal funding was signed four days after the
Women’s March and that in April 2017, Donald Trump “quietly signed a law giving states
the authority to halt federal funding of family-planning services to Planned Parenthood and
other clinics that provide abortions. In other words, the legal right to have an abortion will
soon be abolished across America under Donald Trump. Step by step” (Horvat 75-76).
Atwood and Trump are two prominent acting bodies who control variant streams of means of
expression and historical narratives simultaneously. The collision of fiction and reality is
unnerving though.
In an interview with New York Times on March 10, 2017, Atwood was asked directly
about the ‘MAKE MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION AGAIN’ protest sign. The interviewer
states, “I’m going to get right in. “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again” was a sign at the
Women’s March that resonated deeply with many people who feel that life under Trump is
something of a dystopia for women. Do you feel that way?” (DÍAZ, NY Times). Atwood
responds:
“It’s not only Trump. The general climate, in some parts of the United States, is
certainly heading in a Handmaid’s Tale direction. And that is why the recent sit-
ins in state legislatures were so immediately understandable—a group of women
in Handmaid costumes turned up, for instance, in Texas, while an all-male batch
of lawmakers were passing laws on women’s health issues. They just sat there,
they didn’t say anything, so they couldn’t be ejected, and there was a very telling
photograph of them surrounded by men with guns, which could have been right
out of the television show” (DÍAZ, NY Times).
Society is mirroring fiction.
Yet, Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale based on historical occurrences; nothing is
‘made up’: “I put nothing into the book that people had not done at some time, in some place.
And in some countries in the world, these are pretty much the realities now” (DÍAZ, NY
Times). She built her narrative on the rising fundamentalist movement in America during the
1970s and 1980s and further back with 17th-century Puritan New England. She researched the
Nazis’ Lebensborn program and public executions in countries like North Korea and Saudi
Arabia (Kakutani, NY Times). Gilead is not pure fiction. “So many different strands fed into
“The Handmaid’s Tale” — group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the
Lebensborn program of the SS and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of
slavery, the history of American polygamy . . . the list is long” (Atwood, NY Times Essay).
Despite the authentic historical trajectory, Atwood does not want to align to the dichotomy.
“Is The Handmaid’s Tale a prediction? That is the third question I’m asked —
increasingly, as forces within American society seize power and enact decrees
that embody what they were saying they wanted to do, even back in 1984, when I
was writing the novel. No, it isn’t a prediction, because predicting the future isn’t
really possible: There are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities. Let’s
say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t
happen” (Atwood, NY Times Essay).
Another question that Atwood is asked is ‘How did Gilead fall?’ This probing leads into the
most recent novel that Atwood has published in 2019, The Testaments, the same year as
Horvat’s own text. Thirty-five years later, Atwood acknowledges that societies like America
are facing realities far different than those actualized in the 80s. The Testaments was written
in response to the question of how Gilead fell. Atwood answers, “Totalitarianisms may
crumble from within, as they fail to keep promises that brought them to power; or they may
be attacked from without; or both. There are no sure-fire formulas, since very little in history
is inevitable” (Atwood, NY Times Essay). The Testaments is then a response to this question
for her readership. Atwood’s fiction neatly folds with Horvat’s philosophical scope in
identifying that totalitarian regimes are built step-by-step through a quiet normalization
process.
___
“As she looks at six new bodies hanging there, Offred remembers the unnerving
words of their warden and teacher Aunt Lydia: “Ordinary,” she said, is “what you
are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It
will become ordinary” (Kakutani, NY Times).
Writers today are asking how America has come to mirror Atwood’s Gilead. Kakutani
deconstructs the process of normalization in parallel with textual residue from the novel in a
New York Times article. “’Nothing changes instantaneously, Offred observes: ‘In a gradually
heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it’” (Kakutani, NY Times). So,
America is now a heated tub, a totalitarian state where women are “treated as ‘two-legged
wombs’; where nonwhite residents and unbelievers…are resettled, exiled or disappeared”
(Kakutani, NY Times). Trump’s Gilead “started before ordinary citizens like [Offred] were
paying attention…: ‘We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance,
you have to work at it” (Kakutani, NY Times). Horvat calls on us to not ignore what is
happening under Trump and that we need to “take responsibility for our own steps” (Horvat,
77).
“Every day we can decide whether we want to make Margaret Atwood fiction
again- or instead sleepwalk into a nightmare future in which fascism will be
wrapped in the American- or Austrian, Czech, Polish, French, German, Croatian-
flag. Every day we can decide whether we want to participate in the process of
normalization, or whether we will be one step ahead and question what is
portrayed as natural and slowly, step by step, starts to feel natural” (Horvat, 77).
In combatting regimes like Trump, Horvat professes that humanity needs to move forward
with the awareness that multiple movements “must become integrated into one single global
resistance and liberation movement” (Horvat, 122). Horvat spotlights the lack of leadership at
a transnational level and the infrastructure required to coordinate isolated protests. “How can
horizontality and verticality effectively be combined?” (Horvat, 123). He continues, “How
can a protest movement in Egypt or Guatemala reinforce a movement in Greece or Croatia,
and vice versa?” (Horvat, 123) Power lies in connecting these movements in all capacities
from local, national and international fronts (Horvat, 124). Societies are not solely dealing
with clean-cut fascist movements like Trump’s-Gilead, but power shifts that have snowballed
totalitarianism into global waves. Horvat articulates, “What we are seeing today is not so
much the rise of openly fascist political parties, but the transformation of the whole political
landscape into an extreme centre, in which the ‘Fascist International’ (with its historical
revisionism and xenophobia) and the ‘Neoliberal International’ (with its privatization of
healthcare and education, increasing debt-based economy) reinforce each other” (Horvat,
129). In creating a global community to combat this ‘Fascist International,’ this analysis
proposes how realistically fragmented populations can re-unite and overcome this ‘pedagogy
of the oppressed’?
Crowds have that kind of power. Jodi Dean’s text, Crowds and Party addresses ‘the
imperative of organization’ in discussing Dean’s stance on the need for society to reinstitute a
communist party that would dismantle capitalism, very much the core and furnace of the
‘Fascist International.’ She asks us, “crowds are forcing the Left to return again to questions
of organization, endurance, and scale. Through what political forms might we advance? For
many of us, the party is emerging as the site of an answer” (Dean, 4). An emerging party is
Dean’s main thesis to a site for birthing revolution, her focus of an idealized momentum of
lasting social change. She argues that “without the party, there is no body capable of
remembering, learning, and responding” to crimes of capitalism and the needs of the people
(Dean, 260). To Dean, the crowd is pushing for a Communist party. A global alliance of the
radical left surpasses capitalist and national borders. She envisions the party being ‘knit
together from the concentrated forces of already existing groups,’ her list includes: militants,
artists, political parties, issues groups, and mutual aid networks. In applying diverse skillsets,
task delegation and allocation of resources, Dean attempts to empower her intended audience
in accepting that the blueprints are already laid in achieving social transformation and in
achieving an egalitarian emancipation.
The crowd also creates a gap. Dean specifies that the crowd “holds open a political
space for the production of a common political will” (Dean, 253). The crowd functioning as
‘the party’ maintains this gap. In a review by Derek R. Ford, he writes that “we need the
vision, collectivity, urgency, and discipline of the Party to maintain the gap in the order of
things” (Ford, Hampton Institute). We can act from inside this gap. The gap is a space of
possibility in between. “Psychoanalysis helps us understand this gap,” as Dean states, “it can
let us see why the division between few and many should not be solidified as a division
between real and ideal, pragmatic and utopian, but acknowledged instead as a constitutive,
enabling split: impossibility is the condition of possibility for communist politics. The non-
identity between people and party is what enables each to be more and less than what they
are, for each to enable, rupture, and exceed the other” (Dean, 182). An entry point for
psychoanalysis is contemplating that the gap is an extension or representation of a collective
unconscious. The crowd is one and their unity is a psychological congruency. Those who lie
outside of socialization, those individuals who exist amongst the “tortion between the non-
identity gap and socialized- the norm,” between people and self-governance and between
people and government can be utilized and called for change (Dean, 88). The gap is
malleable.
Dean vocalizes that it is time to “take up the challenge of actively constructing the
political collectivity with the will and capacity to bring an egalitarian world into being. The
party holds open the space for the emergence of such a will. It doesn’t prefigure a new world,
but impresses upon the gap between the world we have and the world we desire” (Dean,
250). The gap then is potential for transformation in a world we know will not willingly
liberate and equalize for the masses. “Capitalists will not voluntarily reorganize processes of
accumulation so as to put an end to proletarianization. They will not simply hand over control
and ownership of the means of production. States will not just stop oppressing, arresting, and
imprisoning those who resist them” (Dean, 207). Change will happen in collective. Change
will happen with the advent of personal transformation too. “It is not the task of the working
class organized as workers…the abolition of capitalism depends on the organization of the
proletariat as a party, a solidary political association that cuts across workplace, sector,
region, and nation. The working class as a class is implicated in the success or stability of
capitalism” (Dean, 253). 2019 is a year marking an extent of mass protests that human history
has not yet witnessed globally. Shifts are happening. The crowd is agitated and making its
presence known. The crowd is palpable. The crowd is refusing to be temporary, or so it
seems in 2019. Deans writes an article about the ‘Actuality of Revolution.’ The actuality of
this revolution overlaps with Atwood’s cultural shifts. How does Atwood handle crowds in
her narratives as possible methods of resistance? How have her texts influenced crowds in
real time? How do Horvat and Dean help us to understand Atwood’s cultural vibrations in
particular and the influence of her fiction on crowds and the masses more generally?
The fascist crimes of Gilead resonate with current American society both textually
and from the 2019 tv series. As Kakutani outlines in a review, “Many American readers and
viewers of “The Handmaid’s Tale” are already heavily invested in the story of Gilead
because we’ve come to identify with the Handmaids’ hopes that the nightmare will end and
the United States — with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees — will soon be
restored” (Kakutani, NY Times). Americans identify with Atwood’s fiction because reality is
mirroring Atwood’s dystopic world. “News segments on television in 2019 are filled with
images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to
sow fear and hatred and reports of accelerating climate change jeopardizing life as we know
it on the planet” (Kakutani, NY Times). The crowd, in turn, has been activated. During the
Golden Globes in 2019, actress Wiley, who plays Moira, recalled how “there were a bunch of
handmaids outside” and “The group, calling themselves the Hollywood Handmaids, were
holding a silent protest to demand an end to sexual assaults and inequalities in the industry”
(Mulkerrins, The Guardian). The overlap between Trump’s presidency and the first and
second seasons is not surreal. With the industries watershed of the #MeToo and Time’s Up
movements, women and men are “demanding the end of widespread cultures of misogyny,
sexual harassment and abuse” (Mulkerrins, The Guardian). Moss, playing Offred refers to
Atwood’s normalization terminology, ‘the new normal.’ “It’s a line that Aunt Lydia says –
this will all be normal to you one day. That’s scary to me” Moss states and continues, “’I hate
hearing that someone couldn’t watch it because it was too scary,’ she says. ‘Not because I
care about whether or not they watch my TV show; I don’t give a shit. But I’m like, ‘Really?
You don’t have the balls to watch a TV show? This is happening in your real life. Wake up,
people. Wake up.’” (Mulkerrins, The Guardian). Despite the passion of the crowd and these
protests, as Horvat articulates, “Unless public demonstrations are part of a deeper and
structural organization capable of moving beyond large one-day events, their power remains
purely symbolic” (Horvat, 30). Fiction in alliance with philosophical theory could have the
power to deepen the structural organization of the protest.
___
“The van waits in the driveway, its double doors stand open. The two of them,
one on either side now, take me by the elbows to help me in. Whether this is my
end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into
the hands of strangers, because it can’t be helped. And so I step up, into the
darkness within; or else the light” (Atwood HMT, 339).
The power of fiction lies in Atwood’s voicing of The Handmaid’s Tale and The
Testaments as testimonies of the literary genre of ‘the literature of witness’ in connecting
with a community readership. “But there’s a literary form I haven’t mentioned yet: the
literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it
may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an act
of hope: Every recorded story implies a future reader” (Atwood, NY Times Essay). What is at
stake in publishing this story from the scope of this genre is that Atwood is sending a
message about methods of resistance while shaping identity constructs of the hero.
Essentially that, “there are other ways of defying tyranny, participating in the resistance or
helping ensure the truth of the historical record” (Kakutani, NY Times). Another layer is the
reality that both texts are in fact fiction despite having been written from the scrolls of
historical accounts.
Atwood is a conscientious fiction writer and literary theorist; she is aware and
intentional in her textual execution. In her literary text, On Writers and Writing, Atwood
reveals her approach in studying literary texts. In her chapter, “Communion: Nobody to
Nobody: The eternal triangle the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between” she asks,
“The questions I would like to pose are, first: for whom does the writer write? And, secondly:
what is the book’s function—or duty, if you like—in its position between writer and reader?
What ought it to be doing, in the opinion of its writer? And finally, a third question arising
from the other two: where is the writer when the reader is reading?” (Atwood OWAW, 126).
She further states that “The fictional writer who writes to no one is rare” (Atwood OWAW,
127). Unlike the dedication found at the front of The Handmaid’s Tale (“For Mary Webster
and Perry Miller”), there is no dedication at the front of text for The Testaments. The book
shifts directly from the Table of Contents to Chapter I ‘Statue.’ Atwood has indeed carved
out a statuesque space for the dystopic worldviews. She also accomplishes in not providing a
dedication for The Testaments to achieve a seamless transition for readers into this worldview
in which they can also try it on and look around their own reality to identify and feel out the
frightening parallel. In writing to no one, ‘which is rare,’ Atwood achieves writing to
everyone.
The second and third contextual layers in examining The Testaments is analyzing the
‘book’s function or duty,’ and where Atwood herself is positioned while the world reads her
novels. Atwood speaks to the ripples of a ‘literature of witness’ in a 2017 New York Times
essay.
“In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate.
Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for
women won over the past decades, and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive
climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for
democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a
certainty that someone, somewhere — many, I would guess — are writing down
what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember,
and record later, if they can. Will their messages be suppressed and hidden? Will
they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall? Let us hope it
doesn’t come to that. I trust it will not” (Atwood, NYTimes Essay).
Writings from the future. Atwood’s readers can access similar ripples of this voice now. Karl
Marx writing in 1852 in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte stated that “The social
revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the
future” (Marx, 149). Likewise, Horvat determines that “The problem with the poetry from the
past is precisely this: it borrows from the past” and puts forward an entire text written
towards the schematic of striving towards a global alliance within the trajectory of a future
poetics (Horvat, 131). While Atwood is present throughout the publishing and receiving of
her text in the public space, she continues to contextualize the raw trajectory of her fictitious
accounts with steeping real-world events. What if she went on with this momentum to design
the successful execution of a utopic worldview beyond Gilead that would continue to
influence the crowds reading her works? What if the same energy that propels individuals to
play on the images created in Atwood’s texts (the hooded red cloak) during protests also
could imitate the facilitation of a global alliance envisioned by Horvat and Dean? What if the
revolution spoken to by Horvat and Dean came first from fiction, literary discourse informed
by Poetry from the Future and Crowds and Party?
Can fiction withstand the platform needed to help motivate and move crowds to
revolution and alliances? First, fiction must be firmly rooted in a factual bedrock that readers
of Dean, Horvat and Atwood can be directed to and inspired from.
“In order to be viable, in order to serve its purpose, whatever that purpose may
be, a fiction must bear some resemblance to fact. If it strays too far from fact, the
willing suspension of disbelief collapses. And conversely it may collapse, if facts
stray too far from fiction that we want them to resemble. Because fictions are
necessary, because we cannot live without them, we often take pains to prevent
their collapse by moving the facts to fit the fiction, by making our world conform
more closely to what we want it to be” (Gaonkar, 5).
Oftentimes fictions fail their readers despite being necessary. To be a master fiction of
politics and revolution and to be able to connect with ‘the people’ in similar spectacular
resonances as Atwood’s dystopia, could an inverse of her fictitious worldviews result in
similar magnitudes? “One might ask whether it is viable to continue to think of politics in
our time, especially the triumphant democratic politics of our time, as something that is or
can be sustained by recourse to fictions, such as of one people united, indivisible, and
embodied in a sovereign state?” (Gaonkar, 5) Could Dean and Horvat even be on board with
a project like this; or would they even be open to such literary alliances? Perhaps Dean would
be critical of the risk of individuation: reading is a solitary and isolated acted. Yet, she seeks
to connect with her potential communist party from a textual and lecturing platform. Is
Atwood too elitist and capitalist as an author? Dean speaks to the power of the poet in
Crowds and Party. “In the elaborated myth,” she writes, “the first to break free of the group
is the poet. The poet disguises the truth of the slaying of the father, putting a hero in the place
of the crowd” (Dean, 110). Dean would be sceptical of a hero myth like Offred and other
female characters in Atwood’s novels in which “the poet gives the group an idealized
individual with whom each can identify. Each can imagine himself as the hero, acting alone
and abolishing the one who oppresses them all. The poet, an imaginary figure of imagining,
writes the individual into being” (Dean, 110). Is this the case with Atwood’s Gilead?
‘The Gap’ that Dean articulates exists between the few and the many, an enabling
condition of potential political collectivity. No party, class, or collectivity is identical with
itself. Each is ruptured by an irreducible gap. This gap is a social link or space, highlighting
the relation of transference. Transference lets us see the dynamic features concentrated in the
space of the Other” (Dean, 166). Perhaps fiction can exist within this gap and perhaps fiction
functions to create an invisible community that could potentially become aware of its’
collectivity and utilize the connection of shared reading experiences to protest, organize and
revolutionize such an individualized reading experience. Fiction enables us the possibility to
see how a world we potentially desire plays out. As Horvat calls for a global alliance, Dean
specifies that ‘the people’ need to organize themselves and that the party can accomplish this.
“We need to be a party for the people in the crowd” (Dean, 265). ‘The people’ in the crowd
are reading Margaret Atwood.
Fiction can function as a space for the crowd where conceiving can happen that
cannot necessarily occur when writing with an academic and more philosophical pedagogical
discourse. For instance, “science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the
horizons of possibility” (Csicsery-Ronay, 7 Beauties). Science fiction writers further “share
in a mass social energy and a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and
the world” (Csicsery-Ronay, 7 Beauties). Science fiction as a genre in turn does not function
solely as entertainment but is progressively becoming treated as a “mode of awareness” of
the world around us (Csicsery-Ronay, 7 Beauties). Fiction enables trial and error testing with
processes and events called for in theoretical texts like Poetry from the Future and Crowds
and Party. Science fiction allows for a checking of plot events ‘against experience’ “things
that have already happened, by contrast, can be entertained as proved, or provable, even if
they have occurred in the future, and we can relax our empiricist checking-behavior”
(Csicsery-Ronay, 7 Beauties). Science fiction allows us to respond to ‘contemporary reality.’
Possessing a forum within the gap to cultivate safe experimentation with ideas of revolution
like global alliances and communist parties enables the opportunity for readers and masses to
work through the kinks of how this organizing would work in ways that physically protesting
crowds and theoretical works do not move past to the application of ideas. Crowds can be
channeled and influenced. Fiction has the power to influence the masses.
In turning to a pivotal work on crowd theory, Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 text, The
Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, understanding how fiction can function to influence the
ebb and flow of crowds is powerful in contemplating Atwood’s handiwork providing the
masses with tools to protest. Le Bon ascertains that crowds are moved by images: “It is only
images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action. For this reason, theatrical
representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an
enormous influence on crowds” (Le Bon, 54). Theatrical representations parallel a
congruency of fictive plotlines and just how the tv show in itself provide the crowd with clear
‘motives of action’ when speaking out against current issues. “To know the art of impressing
the imagination of crowds is to know at the same time the art of governing them” (Le Bon,
58). Atwood is decisive in moving readerships with her novels. She succeeds in showing us
how “The unreal has almost as much influence on [us] as the real” (Le Bon, 55). In fact,
could fiction be a canvas for the crowd in coming to not distinguish between art and real life.
The right fictive text holds the power in not only depicting a world the crowd desires,
but also can function to expose the realities of a current worldview that could awaken the
masses to action. “Secrets give you a lot of power,” Atwood concedes in a 2019 CBC
interview on The Testaments in speaking about Aunt Lydia (Atwood, CBC). Aunt Lydia is
powerful in that she “knows what people have really done as opposed to what the facades are.
You have power through those secrets and how you use them. How you use them behind the
scenes to get what you want” grants access and the upper hand in power dynamics (Atwood,
CBC). A text could accomplish similar to what Aunt Lydia carves out for herself in Gilead. A
fictive text that exposes corrupt religious, political and economic structures while pinioning
this functionality to a plot line striving to show the outcome of a revolution and a desirable
world, could potentially offer readers and the masses a rough blueprint of action that
theoretical texts, lecturing and attempted organizing could not achieve in real time. We do
not have to entrap ourselves in views of mourning and melancholia of our future as
steamrolled out in Poetry from the Future. Horvat highlights that we “live in an age without
any big narratives- except that of ‘there is no alternative’, a negative narrative par excellence.
Instead of inhabiting the now-time, we inhabit a vicious ‘presentism’, defined pithily by Enzo
Traverso as ‘suspended time between an unmasterable past and a denied future, between a
“past that won’t go away” and a future that cannot be invented or predicted (except in terms
of catastrophe)” (Horvat, 133). Atwood’s texts hint towards the glimpse of escape from a
collapsed fascist regime and the survival of the hero protagonist. Still, Horvat seeks to
accomplish with his text that the masses could hone a global awareness about the reality of
our situation collectively. An awareness, he suggests “that might allow us to shape the
future?” (Horvat, 136). He continues,
“What if the coming apocalypse opens up a chance, maybe for the first time
(since the threat is not only the Bomb any more but a multiplicity of global
threats), not only to understand humanity as the whole, as a totality, but to create
a totality in the sense of a global community that would be structured in a
radically different way from the one we are inhabiting now? And this ‘avatar of
totality,’ which necessarily comes from the future (aus der Zukunft), is actually
our only chance to avoid the apocalypse?” (Horvat, 136).
Atwood also wants the same in putting her two novels out into the world to begin with. She
foresees humanity stepping into a ‘deep dark hole’ (Atwood, CBC). With The Handmaid’s
Tale and The Testaments she is trying to warn us about tripping into this hole (Atwood,
CBC). To Horvat, “It just depends on the gaze. And from where we draw our poetry”
(Horvat, 140). Maybe Atwood’s texts are not enough to warn us of the hole. Maybe we need
a fictive text that will get us through tripping into the hole, climbing back out and continuing
on rebuilding our lives after the fall.
Horvat’s argumentation, Dean’s crowd theory and the influence of Atwood’s dystopic
fiction are sound in providing facts that help to position their stances in a motivating
dialectic to wake us up. This emancipatory politics outlines the horizontality of the reaches of
certain oppressive systems, yet, Horvat’s text could be more forceful and successful in
gripping readers like Atwood has achieved with a fictive dystopic worldview. Horvat wants
everyone to survive an apocalypse. Dean wants us to dismantle capitalism. Horvat wants us
to view humanity as a whole and humanity vs. the apocalypse. Should our goal be a global
community? What does that community even look like and do we really want one now? Do
we merely want to survive Gilead? Do we really just want Gilead to fall? Does the idea of a
global alliance or Dean’s 21st century communist party support a ‘New World Order’ where
homogeneity and a global community is centralized as hegemony? Someone surely would
prosper from such encompassing systems, if not then that this reality is already upon us like
an invisible apocalypse or ‘waterless flood.’ Horvat is sound in speculating a long-term view
of the processual nature of revolution needed: “We already have to be the very society that
we are aiming to build. There is no ‘day after’ when the new society will be built. It must be
built even before it can exist; it has to exist before it can be built. This is what we could call
the ‘concrete universality’ of true resistance” (Horvat 125). Can there be another system we
can envision that would work beyond capitalism and communism that fiction is free to
manifest? Can fiction accomplish depicting and exploring Horvat’s ‘concrete
universality’? Can fiction be a safe, creative space to visualize? Horvat speculates that in
achieving ‘true resistance,’ we need to draw content from the future in order to easier
imagine revolution. Fiction needs to accomplish an alliance between the literary and
philosophical-political landscapes, a liason between Horvat, Deans and Atwood’s texts
(research or a collaborative writing process) that would allow readers to see a world putting
together a global alliance, or a communist party put into practise. The fictive narrative must
move beyond theoretical frameworks and calls for action. Fiction can work within this gap-
rupture of the future in providing a safe creative space to microscope the unfoldings and
visualizations of a revolution or another system that would work beyond capitalism and
communism. Can this ‘fictive imagining’ influence crowd phenomenon though?
“Did our narrator reach the outside world safely and build a new life for herself?...
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices
may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the
matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them
precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
Applause.
Are there any questions?” (Atwood, HMT 358).
——
Works Cited
-Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of
Trump.” The New York Times. March 10, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-
tale- age-of-trump.html?module=inline
-Atwood, Margaret. Margaret Atwood: on writers and writing. McClelland & Stewart.
Toronto. 2002.
-Atwood, Margaret and Junot Díaz. “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again.” Boston Review:
A Political and Literary Forum. June 29, 2017. http://bostonreview.net/literature-
culture-margaret-atwood-junot-diaz-make-margaret-atwood-fiction-again
-Atwood, Margaret and Shelagh Rogers. “Margaret Atwood on the Testaments.” CBC Radio
Canada. September 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1598454851989
-Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland & Stewart. Toronto. 1985.
-Atwood, Margaret. The Testaments. McClelland & Stewart. Toronto. 2019.
-Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University
Press: Middletown, CT. 2008.
-Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. Verso: New York, 2018.
-Ford, Derek R. “Being in the Party: A review of Jodi Dean’s ‘Crowds and Party.’” The
Hampton Institute: A Working-Class Think Tank. March 28, 2016.
<http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/crowds-and-party-book-
review.html#.Xb4fHy0ZPjA>
-Gaonkar, Dilip. “After the Fictions: Notes Towards a Phenomenology of the Multitude.” E-
flux. 58: October 2014. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/58/61187/after-the-fictions-
notes- towards-a-phenomenology-of-the-multitude/
-Horvat, Srećko. Poetry from the Future: Why a global liberation movement is our
civilization’s last chance. Allen Lane (Penguin Random House): Toronto. 2019.
-Kakutani, Michiko. “The Handmaid’s Thriller: In ‘The Testaments,’ There’s a Spy in
Gilead.” The New York Times. Updated Sept. 10, 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/books/review/testaments-margaret-atwood-
handmaids-tale.html
-Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. The Macmillan Company: New
York. 1895.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Crowd.html?id=ip03UHMK5w8C&printsec
=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
-Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Surveys from Exile, trans. P.
Jackson, Penguin, 1973.
-Mulkerrins, Jane. “Elisabeth Moss on The Handmaid’s Tale: ‘This is happening in real life.
Wake up, people’.” The Guardian. 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2018/may/05/elisabeth-moss-handmaids-tale-this-is-happening-in-real-life-
wake-up-people
Sara Hailstone’s writing is born from navigating the raw and confronting connections that living in a small-town project by scouring collapsed domestic landscapes. She is an educator and writer from Madoc, Ontario who orients towards the ferocity and serenity of nature and what we can learn as humans from the face of forest in our own lives. A graduate of Guelph University (B.A.) and Queen's University (M.A. and B.Ed.), she is currently completing her Masters in English in Public Texts at Trent University.