MOVING TARGETS is a companion volume to Second Words, the selection of my essays and forays into journalism published in 1982. In 1982 I was forty-two; I thought of myself as quite elderly. It’s now twenty-two years later and I still think that, though — paradoxically — less frequently. The big difference between past and present is that I now know more of the plot. I suspect how all this is going to turn out for me in the long run, but if time runs true to form there are still some surprises left.
Like Second Words, Moving Targets consists of occasional pieces; that is, pieces written for specific occasions. The occasions in Second Words ranged from the appearance of a book by someone else, germinating — on my part — a review, to a public gathering — thus giving rise to a speech — to an anthology or Festschrift, for which some sort of focused observation was requested. This pattern continues in Moving Targets. Occasionally these essays have been in-aid-of: they’ve been fundraisers, they’ve been worthy-cause bandages, they’ve been dragon-slayings or Blue Fairy wand-wavings. Having had my character ruined by the Brownies and the Girl Guides in my youth, I have a difficult time resisting such lend-a-hand appeals.
A Brownie always gives in to the older folk, a Brownie never gives in to herself; but inevitably there comes a day when you gaze into the magic mirror and realize that, faute de mieux, you are the older folk, since most of the legitimate claimants to that title have died off. It’s no coincidence that there was only one obituary-like piece in Second Words, but there are — sadly — rather more of them in Moving Targets.
Being the older folks has its upside, however. You’re no longer too anxious about ruining your reputation, because it’s far too late for that. Nor do you worry much about antagonizing this or that reviewer: everything bad that can be said about you has already been said, more than once. You know that fame is a mixed blessing, because for every statue of a worthy notable such as you are said to have become, there are at least a hundred pigeons roosting on its head. You know, too, that from the point of view of the younger generations — and how many of these younger generations there seem to be! — you’re sort of dead already, because isn’t everyone whose work is studied in high school sort of dead?
But some latitude may be accorded you as well: the kind of thing that might have got you called a mean, dangerous, radical redtoothed bitch when you were thirty may now be treated as the scatterbrained utterance of a cute old biddy. I’m not quite there yet, but I can see the turnoff.
What else has changed? When I began reviewing, it was 1960, I was still at university, and I wrote for the college magazine. I moved on to small literary reviews — I wrote a lot about poetry then — and eventually I found myself appearing in larger places such as the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. This is where Second Words ended: it was 1982, the women’s movement had run through its exciting but exhausting 1970s period and was taking a breather, Canadian cultural nationalism appeared to have achieved many of its goals, post-modernism and deconstruction were the critical catchphrases of the day, the era of dot-coms was almost upon us, few people as yet had either fax machines or personal computers, and there were no cellphones. I was the mother of a six-year-old, with the laundry to show for it. I’d published five novels and a number of books of poetry, but was not exactly world-famous. I was however what Mordecai Richler used to call “world-famous in Canada,” and that status, dubious though it was, attracted a certain amount of heat and lightning.
What hasn’t changed? Looking back over this gathering of pages, I see that my interests have remained fairly constant, although I like to pretend their scope has broadened somewhat. Some of my earlier concerns — my environmental fretting, for example — were considered lunatic-fringe when I first voiced them, but have since moved to the centre of the stage. I dislike advocacy writing — it’s not fun, because the issues that generate it are not fun — but I feel compelled to do a certain amount of it anyway. The effects are not always pleasant, since what may be common sense to one person is annoying polemic to another.
I still find it hard to make speeches; I still leave the writing of them to the last minute; I still feel I’m doing a grade two show-and-tell. I’m haunted by a metaphor from Edith Wharton’s story “The Pelican,” in which a public lecturer’s talk is compared to the trick by which a magician produces reams and reams of blank white paper out of his mouth. I still find book reviewing a problem: it’s so much like homework, and it forces me to have opinions instead of the Negative Capability that is so much more soothing to the digestion. I do it anyway, because those who are reviewed must review in their turn or the principle of reciprocity fails.
There’s another reason, however: reviewing the work of others forces you to examine your own ethical and aesthetic tastes. What do we mean by “good” in a book? What qualities do we consider “bad,” and why? Aren’t there in fact two kinds of reviews, derived from two different ancestries? There’s the newspaper review, which descends from gossip around the village well (loved her, hated him, she shouldn’t wear red but what can you expect with a family like hers, and did you get a load of the shoes?). And then there’s the “academic” review, which descends from Biblical exegesis and other traditions that went in for the minute examination of sacred texts. This sort of analysis still secretly believes that some texts are more sacred than others, and that the application of a magnifying glass or some lemon juice or flames will reveal hidden meanings. I’ve written both kinds.
I still won’t review a book I don’t like, although to do so would doubtless be amusing for the Ms. Hyde side of me and entertaining for the more malicious class of reader. But either the book is really bad, in which case no one should review it, or it’s good but not my cup of tea, in which case someone else should review it. It’s a great luxury not to be a professional full-time reviewer: I’m at liberty to close books that don’t seize hold of me. Over the years, history — military history included — has become more interesting to me; so has biography. As for fiction, some of my less highfalutin’ reading preferences (crime writing, science fiction) have come out of the closet.
Speaking of these, it’s as well to mention a pattern that recurs in these pages. As one reader of this manuscript has pointed out, I have a habit of kicking off my discussion of a book or author or group of books by saying that I read it (or him, or her, or them) in the cellar when I was growing up; or that I came across them in the bookcase at home; or that I found them at the cottage; or that I took them out from the library. If these statements were metaphors, I’d excise all of them except one; but they are simply snippets of my reading history. My justification for mentioning where and when I first read a book is that I think the impression a book makes on you is often tied to your age and circumstances at the time you read it, and your fondness for books you loved when young continues on with you through life.
Second Words was divided into three sections, and I’ve kept to the same chronological plan in Moving Targets. Part One covers the 1980s, during which I wrote and published The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel of mine that is most likely to turn up on freshman reading lists. This was the period during which I graduated from being world-famous in Canada to being world-famous, sort of, in the way that writers are. (We are not talking the Rolling Stones here.) It ends with 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. Part Two collects pieces from the 1990s, culminating in 2000, when the twenty-first century began. Part Three runs from 2001 — the year of the notorious 9/11 disaster — to the present time. Not surprisingly, I found myself writing more about political issues during this last period than I had done for some time.
Why Moving Targets? As a title, that is. There are two meanings in the word moving, and one of them has to do with emotion: a moving target is one that moves you. Language cannot be separated from feeling, because language is itself a record of how we as human beings have responded to the world, not only intellectually but with what used to be called the heart. I can’t write about subjects for which I feel nothing. Thus moving.
The second meaning is the more obvious one: moving targets move. These occasional pieces take aim, but the targets they’re aiming at are far from stationary. Instead they’re like the mechanical ducks in the amusement park, visible to the naked eye but often hard to hit. They’re embedded in time, they flow along with it, they’re changed by it, and anything said about them — like anything said about the shape of an amoeba — can only be approximate. Looking back at some of these essays — essay, in the sense of attempt — I feel I might write them in another way if I were writing them today. But I would not of course be writing them today, because the targets now are different.
Think of the track in the air left by an arrow in flight. Trajectory is a word that might describe such a thing: “the path of any body moving under the action of given forces.”
Here, then, is Moving Targets: a collection of trajectories.
— Margaret Atwood 2004