Moral Disorder And Other Stories (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Best (or critically important to the text) Quotes:"They always want to kill the leaders. With the best of intentions, or so they claim. The leaders have the best of intentions as well. The leaders stand in the spotlight, the killers aim from the dark; it’s easy to score.""Once, this might have been an argument. Now it’s a pastime, like gin rummy.""eerie politeness""On the other hand, it’s his general view that Rome is going to hell in a handcart, and I’ve noticed that most retired men feel like that: the world simply cannot function minus their services. It’s not that they feel useless; they feel unused.""When I wasn’t doing homework or chores or baby-tending I would lie on my bed with my head hanging over the edge, holding up a mirror to see what I looked like upside down.""It didn’t occur to me that if I’d wanted my costume to be understood immediately I should have chosen something more obvious.""The fairy child, the changeling who didn’t follow the convenient patterns of other children, who sucked up its mother’s energy in an uncanny and nocturnal manner–this is a theme with more inherent interest to it than a hamster-transmitted thyroid disease.""She was particularly apprehensive about doors, and about who might come through them.""Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister’s pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother’s best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls’ plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden’s chamber as the ultimate sexual thrill.""“You’ve had fun,” I say. “Haven’t you? There’s lots of things you like.” “That was a while ago,” she says. “It’s not enough. I’m tired of playing the game. This is the wrong place for me to be.” She doesn’t mean my house. She means her body. She means the planet Earth. I can see the same thing she’s seeing: it’s a cliff edge, it’s a bridge with a steep drop, it’s the end. That’s what she’s wants: The End. Like the end of a story.""She takes a pill every day, for a chemical imbalance she was born with. That was it, all along. That was what made the bad times for her. Not my monstrousness at all. I believe that, most of the time.""These girls were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, they weren’t up to things, they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help. Why did we have to study these hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls? I wondered. Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives? What exactly were we supposed to be learning from them? Maybe Bill was right. Maybe the whole thing was a waste of time.""They knew something we needed to know, but it was a complicated thing–not so much a thing as a pattern, like the clues in a detective story once you started connecting them together. These women–these teachers–had no direct method of conveying this thing to us, not in a way that would make us listen, because it was too tangled, it was too oblique. It was hidden within the stories.""I would welcome each new dislocation, unpack my few belongings with alacrity and even joy, then set out to explore the neighbourhood or district or city and learn its ways;""It was a similar story with men. Each one was a possibility that quickly became an impossibility.""I believed in thought rays. These rays were shooting out from my parents’ craniums, directly into mine. It was like radio waves.""My future would not be complete–no, it would not be normal–unless it contained window curtains like these, and everything that went with them.""Why should being alone–in and of itself–be such a matter for derision? But it was. The alone–the loners–were not to be trusted. They were strange and twisted.""the Noah’s ark of coupledom–in effect a glorified zoo, with locks on the bars and fodder dished out at set intervals""They wanted to live in the moment, but like frogs, not like wolves. They wanted to sit in the sun and blink. But I was raised in the age of strenuousness. Relaxation bored me.""The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn’t fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst. I knew they were worthless clutter, but they made it into the tin trunk whenever I packed up again.""I did have a lover or two during that time–temporary lovers, just borrowed–""I acted in acceptable ways. I smiled, nodded, made conversation, and so forth. I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman.""To find yourself at an early age in a universe that had demonstrated such hostility would have a dampening effect. More than dampening: crushing.""What if it’s not in the past, this other place? What if it’s still in the future? After all?""Nell liked the songs of yearning, Tig liked the songs of regret.""Nell liked to know the rules, whatever the game:""As for social interactions, she had learned only the old rules, the ones in force up to the explosive moment–it seemed like a moment–when all games had changed at once and earlier structures had fallen apart and everyone had begun pretending that the very notion of rules was obsolete.""had been something satisfying, though not enjoyable, about such scenes: after them Nell had frequently felt congratulations were in order, as if parts had been played as written and unspecified duties discharged.""she could tell that he was annoyed nonetheless. She was making difficulties where none existed. She was overstepping a line. But where was the line? She couldn’t see it.""they had been what used to be known as well brought up""So that’s who I’m supposed to be""At the end of March, when the snow was mostly gone except in the shadows, and the buds were swelling, Nell finished her bedspread and arranged it on the single bed in her study. She was pleased with the way it had turned out. She called Tig in to admire it. “Does this mean you’re here to stay?” asked Tig, folding his long arms around her from behind. Nell didn’t say anything, but she smiled. He wasn’t so obtuse after all. In April, the boys brought up one of their cats because a farm needed a cat: they’d seen some mice, or possibly rats, in the barn. The cat was a city cat. Not being used to travel, it growled and threw up in the car, and when they’d reached the farm it leapt out before anyone could grab it and ran off into the bushes and wasn’t seen for days. When it came back it was thinner and had burrs stuck all over its fur. It scooted under the bed in Nell’s study and wouldn’t come out. Evidently, however, it must have emerged at night and rolled around on Nell’s knitted bedspread, to which it transferred most of the burrs. Nell picked away at them, but she could never get out all the little hooks and prickles.""Nell didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. She hadn’t intended to say it. It had just come out of her mouth. She felt her lip trembling. This is ridiculous, she thought.""Nell felt as if they were kidnapping the lamb–tearing him away from home and family, holding him for ransom, except that there wouldn’t be any ransom. He was doomed, for no crime except the crime of being himself.""“What next?” said Nell. She felt exhausted. Treachery is hard work, she thought.""Maybe she would grow cunning, up here on the farm. Maybe she would absorb some of the darkness, which might not be darkness at all but only knowledge. She would turn into a woman others came to for advice. She would be called in emergencies. She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.""In their second year at the farm, Nell and Tig acquired a white horse. They didn’t buy this horse, or even seek her out. But suddenly, there she was.""There was no point in trying to train him, said Tig: he was too easily frightened.""Between the two of them, Nell and Gladys passed their riding time pleasantly enough. It was a conspiracy, a double impersonation: Nell pretending to be a person who was riding a horse, Gladys pretending to be a horse that was being ridden.""Perhaps. But Nell had no way of knowing. She and her mother weren’t exactly speaking. They weren’t exactly not speaking, either. The silence that had taken the place of speech between them had become its own form of speech. In this silence, language was held suspended. It contained many questions, though no definite answers.""Nell sometimes wondered how much enough would be.""“Isn’t this normal?” said Nell, meaning the ice cream, the cats, the dog, Gladys looking over the fence–the whole bucolic scene. What she meant was domestic.""It’s fun for her to be the judge, thought Nell. She’s been on the judged end enough times.""Lillie didn’t speak of him, but she kept his suits in the closet; she couldn’t bear to give them away. Dead was not an absolute concept to her. Some people were more dead than others, and finally it was a matter of opinion who was dead and who was alive""“A channel?” said Nell. “Sort of like a tunnel. A link,” said Susan patiently. “They come into our world and then they go out of it, right here.” “This is the place where somebody died,” said Nell. “In that case, they came here on purpose because they wanted to make a quick transition,” said Susan.""There was something older, something darker, something more terrible. There was something that had been stirred up; it had awakened, it had come to the surface. There was blood.""But what else could I do with all that? thinks Nell, wending her way back to her own house. All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we’ll all become stories. Or else we’ll become entities. Maybe it’s the same.""“Bad spirits live there,” says the old Indian. The white men smile and thank him, and disregard his advice. Native superstition, they think. So they go where they’ve been warned not to, and then, after many hardships, they die. The old Indian shakes his head when he hears of it. Foolish white men, but what can you tell them? They have no respect.""For the Indians it would have been the same thing, because where does food come from if not from the spirits? It isn’t just there, it is given; or else withheld""Why talk about the others, because why would anyone want to know about them? There are many plants that have no names because they cannot be eaten or used.""“Slim pickings,” he says. “They took the wrong river. Even if they’d found the right one, it was too late to start.”""How long is it before they realize they’ve gone up the wrong river? Far too long.""“I want to go home,” he says. I know there’s no point telling him that home is where he now is, because he means something else. He means the way he was before.""Why set words down, just to destroy them? Maybe she saved the diaries until Christmas so she could put the main happenings of the year into her Christmas messages. Then, on New Year’s, she might have erased the old year and started again. She burned letters too.""In those early years of her photo-pasting, she always refers to herself as “Me,” with quotation marks around the word, as if she’s citing some written opinion to the effect that she is who she is.""She’s got them back in the layer of time where they belong.""At this point in the photograph captions my mother stops being “Me” and identifies herself by her initials–her new initials. Or else she leaves her name out entirely.""All of that will give them something to do. I want them to step forward, out of the ranks of the extras. I want them to have speaking parts. I want them to shine.""There they are now, set in motion."
While reading Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder I kept remembering William Burroughs’s wish that his Naked Lunch be read in any order and direction. In his case, it was an attempt to challenge the narrative by denying chronology – no event could pretend to have happened before or after another. There is a similar attempt towards the dissolution of the novel In Margaret Atwood’s book, for every “chapter” can also be read independently, but in this case more as a suggestion that life is a series of framed events, a shot of individual scenes, than as an attempt to tame time. The narrative technique is once again the framed story, encapsulating this time other framed stories. Indeed, every one of the eleven stories is a window to another one (sometimes with a window of its own), in a skilful game of outer and inner stories mirroring themselves in an infinite mise en abîme to reveal the main theme of the book, the eternal recurrence, the curse and the salvation of mankind during the tragedies of history and personal life.In the first one, Bad News, the narrator imagines herself and her husband in a distant past however not so different from her present, given that the same indistinct danger lurked behind bad news (be it the modern killing of a political leader, or the ancient imminence of a barbarian invasion). The parallelism serves to prove that there is nothing new under the sun since humanity has always found a way of auto preservation – either in next generations’ obstinate resumption of the ancestors, or in conservation of the past in the artistic collective memory.Even if they manage to cross the Rhine, even if they aren’t slain in thousands, even if the river fails to run red with their blood, they won’t get here for a long time. Not in our lifetime, perhaps. Glanum is in no danger, not yet.Thus the theme of eternal return subtly generates another one (in a never-ending parallelism) – the literature as a mise en abîme of the real life. We are fiction, or become fiction, we imitate or reject what we’ve read, we complete or compensate the lack of information about people by imagining their destinies:All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we’ll all become stories. Or else we’ll become entities. Maybe it’s the same.Moreover, by choosing to tell, the artist within us often chooses to improve. To transform life into art. That permanent alternation between the outer and the inner stories in Moral Disorder is used to confront the character with an ideal or a feared image: the perfectly groomed servant to counteract the eleven-year-old girl’s feeling of overwhelming responsibility (The Art of Cooking and Serving); the Halloween head to conceal inner monsters (The Headless Horseman); Robert Browning’s duke to fight moral weakness (My Last Duchess); the story of the unpredictable mare to tame the spirit without breaking it (The White Horse) etc. Finally, by choosing to tell, the artist often chooses to fill in the blanks. To create a story from a name, a piece of information, a picture:I want them to step forward, out of the ranks of the extras. I want them to have speaking parts. I want them to shine. And whenever life steps into fiction it finds its reason: to create a pattern for life. The eternal recurrence through revolving doors: Now we’re at the door. The persistence of material objects is becoming an amazement to me. It’s the same door – the one I used to go in through, out through, year after year, in my daily clothing or in various outfits and disguises, not thinking at all that I would one day be standing in front of this very same door with my grey-haired little sister. But all doors used regularly are doors to the afterlife.
What do You think about Moral Disorder And Other Stories (2006)?
Atwood has a beautiful way of describing life and its experiences so accurately. On the first page she writes, "I think of bad news as a huge bird, with the wings of a crow and the face of my Grade Four school teacher, sparse bun, rancid teeth, wrinkly frown, pursed mouth and all, sailing around the world under cover of darkness pleased to be the bearer of ill tidings, carrying a basket of rotten eggs, and knowing- as the sun comes up- exactly where to drop them. On me, for one." I am amazed that she can make connections to such distant ideas in her writing while keeping a logical flow. I wanted to read this book because I am familiar with Atwood's poetry, but didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. It depicts the life of Nell through short stories- childhood through adulthood. I loved the first half of the book, (childhood- young adulthood) but wasn't too interested in the second half of Nell's life. If you want to read a great book about a girl growing up, I suggest A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
—Emily Rae
Margaret Atwood is of course, as we all know, awesome sauce. This was definitely a work in a different vein than her science fiction stuff, but it has the same dark, menacing tone that she does so well. You can feel her subconscious twisting these stories out, which are unsettlingly mundane. The book reminded me about the vague, intuitive terror of adulthood and the passing of time that I feel the edge of almost all the time these days. Here's a quote:"I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not - the tunnel was the road of going on, and there was more of the road on the other side of it - but the entrance was where [my teacher] had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn"Here's another quote:"That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow. Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.Happy is the wrong word. Important."
—Marissa
I noticed some reveiws are not so favorable for this book.As an avid Atwoodian, I was struck by the similar themes running through this collection of vignettes about girlhood and growing up, childhood perception, adulthood reflection, memory and aging that appear in her earlier work (Cat's Eye, Edible Woman, Wilderness Tips) because it seems like a return to previous ideas but from a different vantage point informed by the deaths of family members and one's own aging. At times the stories seem autobiographical in tone and then just as easily distance the reader from the characters through shifts in voice. The effect is to draw out Nell, the protagonist, more fully than might be possible if Atwood stuck to first or third person narrative. We see Nell's strengths and her fears more evenly, less clouded by a singular perspective. We are also able to move to radically disparate moments in her life without feeling too much dislocation, but I still had the sense of the vast amounts of time that separated the episodes. I felt like I sort of rollercoastered through life with this woman over the day or so it took me to read the book. It's a great one for a vacation weekend, especially if you are going to the mountains to stay in a farmhouse.
—Sarah
