Devil in the details: Margaret Atwood's Payback

Margaret Atwood is nothing if not an irreverent polemicist. In the final days of a federal election so abysmally superfluous, inconsequential and lacking in dynamic options that fewer Canadians bothered to vote than during any previous election in history, Atwood announced her advocacy for the Bloq Québécois, a party that, besides not actually appearing on the ballots of the vast majority of the country’s ridings, including Atwood’s, is fundamentally committed to removing the entire province of Quebec from Canada. The point? At least they gave a shit about the arts.

To be sure, as complimented by her intelligence, curiosity and wit, Atwood’s irreverence is something to be grateful for. Her sounding off on whatever is a welcome element in the national discourse, her particular irreverence speaking to a healthy skepticism not only on the author’s part but also on that of her readers, who are encouraged to consider the merits of each of Atwood’s arguments and arrive at their own conclusion. This is especially the case with the eerily well-timed Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (House of Anansi, $18.95), Atwood’s contribution to the CBC Massey Lecture Series. It is a relatively slim volume, jam-packed with facts, proposals and surprising, insightful connections between extant myths and notions on its central topic. But if it’s final chapter feels a bit slight after all the hearty build-up, I think it’s mainly because the ball has finally been tossed in our court. It is difficult to look at a ball just sitting there, inert and waiting to be picked up.

Payback goes way back. In searching for the origins of debt, of balances and exchanges, Atwood ultimately suggests that it may be primal, citing experiments on monkeys that reveal innate tendencies resembling credit and trade negotiations. With an inevitable emphasis on literary sources however—Atwood is above all a novelist and poet, and she’s ever mindful of the practical uses of literature—she gets the best mileage out of the Devil and the myriad Fausts who’ve accepted his always popular buy-now, pay-later schemes over the years. Mephistopheles has a knack for bookkeeping, it would seem, and a dependence on the sort of binding legalities that’s been mystified everyone from illiterate farmers suffering a bad yield to gambling addicts on the lam to ordinary homebuyers from time immemorial. Debt requires an account, which is to say a narrative, and the accumulation of debt, Atwood posits, is so precariously seductive because it helps give our lives a story. Debt is drama. We are what we owe, and our stories are sometimes defined by the settling and unsettling of accounts. The great body of 19th century Western literature, as Atwood smartly observes, was always very much concerned with money and class, and in a memorable survey of some of its most famous protagonists Atwood declares that Emma Bovary in the end wasn’t punished for sex but “shopaholicism.”

It’s important to note that in exploring the idea of debt in stories, ones often featuring transactions involving spiritual, supernatural or in any case non-monetary properties, money itself is never the real issue. Currency, as the “current” part of that word implies, is fluid and merely representational. Considerations of what items we place fundamental value on are thus duly approached, especially in the final, most problematic chapter, which finds a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge realizing how closely his fortunes, both literal and figurative, are dependent on the dictates of environmental devastation. But Atwood’s engagement with the more shaded characteristics of debt collectors and their clients reaches its most satisfying depths in her analysis of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which takes into account religious and ethnic differences—Antonio, she points out, didn’t charge interest on his loans not because he was a good guy but because as a Christian interest was actually outlawed at the time—and views Antonio and Shylock as uncomfortably codependent in the development of their own stories. Antonio “has projected onto Shylock—as his Shadow—the malice and the greediness that he himself possesses but can’t acknowledge. He’s made Shylock his whipping boy.” It’s a major highlight.

Looming over Payback is the question of debt as sin, and who of the two parties it requires is the more sinful. I’m not sure this is resolved, but the question is most interestingly complicated by Atwood’s discussion of sin eaters, with Christ’s martyrdom embodying one grandiose redemption of the huge Original Sin debt. It takes time, but by the final chapter this does all slowly bring us to the fraught idea of forgiving debts, of social justice, and of one of the most troubling conundrums of the globalized economy. Atwood wastes few words on the issue, directing our attention to the “shadow side” of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose money-lending practices have fostered such abominable overspending by irresponsible leaders, leaving their desperate citizens with a bill they have no hope of being able to pay off. In the end Atwood actually says very little about the big issues we expect, mostly because the conclusions to be drawn from her study are so self-evident.

But many readers will still feel let down by Atwood’s parting tale, that new, corporate Scrooge taken on a magical mystery tour by the Spirits of Earth Day Past, Present and Future. Seriously, Earth Day. The frustrating part of this little revamp on Dickens isn’t that Atwood goes all hippy-dippy on us—her sense of humour remains firmly intact when dryly describing Scrooge’s coveting of hemp suits—but that her only prescription for resolving our economic-ecological crisis lies in dreams of sweeping, rather idealistic social change. The cynicism can be read quite easily between the lines, and our hopes of leveling our massive collective debts are left in danger of feeling all the more in vain. I guess it depends on how you read the last lines, as challenge or resignation: How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?