Storytelling as Metaphysics in Margaret Atwood and Amy Hempel

This late night city bus is the perfect place to dig into Margaret Atwood’s tongue-in-cheek story/user-manual “Happy Endings” and Amy Hempel’s coy, spiralized “What Were the White Things?” Not only does the average bus ride take about as long as it takes to reach the “end” of said texts, the experience of the ride replicates the existential crisis inherent therein, what with its jostling, unpredictable movements; its cranky, taciturn driver who could be taking me home or to hell; its host of ever-changing apparition-riders that hover somewhere between real and unreal; and the circularity of bus routes that, if riders ride long enough, will take them back to their beginnings. Atwood’s deeply ironic choose-your-own-love-story draws readers again and again to the true “ending” of everything: Inexorable death and decay. Hempel’s carefully-crafted lacunae—literally the “white things” of the story—do everything they can not to indicate death and decay, thereby highlighting them like redacted text in a classified document. In the former, the thesis is explicit; in the latter, coquettishly implicit. But the messaging in both, while rhetorically distinct, is clear: Death and decay await us all, and despite all our attempts to circumvent the inevitable, there is no mystery in them. The true mystery lies in our lives, the “now” between birth and death. The muddle in the middle is where the story is. Thus, these two metafictional texts expose some of the pitfalls of storytelling; and these storytelling pitfalls are the same pitfalls of a life lived without a “how” or a “why.”

Both works are concerned with concealing and revealing, and one of the ways they reveal is by allowing readers a look behind the curtain (perhaps “prison bars” is a more appropriate metaphor here) at the process of writing itself. Metafictional texts—texts that self-consciously signal their status as texts—often parody the tropes and expectations of traditional literature. Atwood’s tale is “inside-out,” in that a despotic and ironical narrator takes us through a series of bulleted writing clichés. It begins:

John and Mary meet.
What happens next?
If you want a happy ending, try A. (Atwood 724).

Readers then “try A”—the first bullet in a series. They are taken through the bland lifespans of the pair; “They both have worthwhile and remunerative jobs which they find stimulating and challenging,” a home, children, a “stimulating and challenging sex life” (Atwood 724). And then, after a long and happy life, they die. The reader is invited here to consider Tolstoy’s posited analysis of storytelling that “All happy families are alike” and thus not worth our time. Though technically a “happy ending,” the fact that Mary and John’s life stories bore the reader, and that the story leads to the death of its subjects does not feel happy—its semantic meaning conflicts with its syntactic meaning. What is revealed is the plot; what is concealed is the meaning. Plot without meaning, Atwood suggests (or “life without meaningful narrative”), is less than meaningless, as she illustrates with bullets B through E, which contain less happy variants of the story, each ending with “and everything continues as in A.”

Hempel, too, betrays her preoccupation with the relationship between concealing and revealing, plot and meaning. She exposes her story’s obsession even as she seeks to conceal it. In fact, the act of concealing is itself, in a metafictional flourish, the agent of revelation. Her unnamed narrator, if we bother to disentangle the story’s confused events into a timeline, walks into an art exhibit at a church while “on my way to someplace else, an appointment with a doctor my doctor had arranged” (Hempel 343). That buried sentence is our first clue. What follows is the artist—whose exhibit is significantly titled “Finding the Mystery in Clarity”—explaining the empty spaces in his otherwise detailed canvases: The lacunae that are the first of the story’s “white things,” objects that are outlined but stubbornly featureless inside. Next, the narrator recounts the death of her mother, and how, in a rage right before, her mother gave everything away: “She told me to put a sticker on anything I wanted to keep,” says the narrator, but her mother gives all of the items to other people. “The things I wanted to keep were all white,” says goes on. “But what were the white things?” (Hempel 344). This is our second definition—a definitive link between the story’s metaphor and the emotional pain it conceals. Finally the narrator is in the radiologist’s office, having the spots on a scan explained:

The doctor told me the meaning of what we looked at on the film. He asked me if I understood what he said. I said yes. I said yes, and that I wanted to ask one more question: What were the white things?

The doctor said he would explain it to me again, and proceeded to tell me a second time. He asked me if this time I understood what he told me. Yes, I said. Yes, but what were the white things? (Hempel 245).

Like the elephant in the room, the narrator, through the story, is thinking of nothing but her own death. But everything until the final scene is concerned with not thinking about it, and the words “death,” “disease,” “decay” are never mentioned. The plot of the story (of a life) is meaningless unless one can “find the mystery in clarity.” Thus the extended (but highly unstable) metaphor that organizes the story concerns the “how” and “why,” not the “what.” The white things are not blind spots, family objects, or cancerous tumors—they are the meaning we give the events and emotions that befall our characters and ourselves. The how and why are what a plot must address if it is to have any meaning for its readers—and what we must address if we are to find meaning in our lives.

The two stories reach the same conclusion about the relationship between plot and meaning. The point of contrast between them is in the behavior and motives of their respective narrators. In Atwood’s bullet F, the final one in the series, she asks, sarcastically, “If you think this is all too bourgeois, make John a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you” (726). Many of her sentences are dares, and she scatters her prose with imperatives and wry asides. The control she exerts over the text is downright tyrannical. “The only authentic ending is the one provided here,” she says: “John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die,” and the bulleted examples that came before, we see, bear that thesis out. The final line of the story softens her messaging and makes transparent the real exigence of the story (of both stories): “That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what. Now try How and Why” (Atwood 726). The story’s crusty narrator, so highly attuned to irony, is crusty and ironical for rhetorical effect, to make the final statement contrast with the iterated bullets. Hempel, meanwhile, has a narrator who conceals her thesis even from herself. The rhetorical question—the one that is the story’s title and that peppers the narrative—is the driving force behind its unstable messaging. Hempel begins her tale with a self-correction:

These pieces of crockery are a repertory company, playing roles in each dream. No, that’s not the way it started. He said the pieces of crockery played roles in each painting. The artist clicked through slides of still lifes he had painted over thirty years (343).

This narrator is cagy, not trusting the neutrality of anything she says. She aims for precision as a means of concealment. Far from Atwood’s superciliously certain, autocratic narrator, Hempel’s is grasping for control while spinning out of control, and this sense of chaos contaminates the narrative as she tells it to herself. She wants to be an autocrat, but the wild feelings roiling beneath the story’s surface prevent it. She is John or Mary, in denial about her own eventual death and decay. Dramatized as they are in distinct ways, the two stories nevertheless lead us to the same conclusion: It is the mysteries that we must explore, not the certainties.

The stories are both metafictional in that the pulse points in each—the plot beats to which readers are attuned from centuries of literary tradition—are here red herrings. In both stories, the semantic read fails to line up with the syntactical one. In “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Paul de Man describes the postmodern critical frame that informs metafictional literature. He first describes mid-20th century’s critical inversion of the relevance of form and content:

When form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems superficial and expendable. The development of intrinsic, formalist criticism in the 20th century has changed this model: form is now a solipsistic category or self-reflection and the referential meaning is said to be extrinsic… internal meaning has become outside reference and the outer form has become the intrinsic structure (de Man 27-8).

He notes, ironically, that “Formalism… is an all-absorbing and tyrannical muse” (de Man 27) (Atwood takes this contention to absurd lengths). What the postmodern field of semiotics has done to subvert the poles of form and content is to make explicit that in any text, the relationship between syntax and semantics—de Man uses “grammar” and “rhetoric”—is unstable and often contains multiple, equally viable meanings. “Semiology…” he says, “does not ask what words mean but how they mean” (de Man 29). Atwood and Hempel, in order to force readers to explore how the stories mean rather than what they mean, create unstable frames that reveal their meaning interstitially. The meaning is there, can just be glimpsed between the bars of narrative. Readers must toggle between incompatible syntactic and semantic structures of meaning until they finally see between them. The poles of these stories—life/death, acceptance/denial, beginnings/endings—are thus revealed to be false dichotomies. The stories replicate in the reader the need to make meaning between the beats of our own plots—to examine not the what, but the why and the how. For metafiction, ostensibly about storytelling, is really about life. Atwood’s story, an instruction manual about storytelling, concerns a life well-lived. Hempel’s story forces readers to find their own definitions for the blank spaces that the story leaves out—that we all leave out in acts of denial—emphasizing that individual choices are what imbue a life with meaning.

Enough of that. I fold up the stories, put them away. The late night bus I’m riding reaches my stop. Its hydraulics whine as it lowers itself to disgorge its sleepy cargo into a surreal San Francisco night. Unseasonable warmth, Halloween decorations lighting up the block, the susurration of cars on the boulevard. One of my fellow passengers hums nervously. Another yawns. A third has eyes glued to a cell phone. Each is the narrator of his own story. I am one of the apparitions, hardly real to myself. I head toward the familiar lights of my front porch while my head un-queers itself from the reading and the bus ride. Here is my muddle of a middle, ahead of me; hearth and home, “a worthwhile and remunerative job that challenges and stimulates,” a child and pets, a constellation of friends and family, and all the messy, extravagant minutiae of a middle class American life. It is up to me to imbue this life with meaning, to light it up with decorations, to create, in de Man’s words, a “reconciliation of form and meaning” (28). It is up to me to find my own how and why.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. "Happy Endings." Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry and Drama, 6th Ed. Edited by Robert Di Yanna. McGraw Hill, 2008. 724-26.

Hempel, Amy. "What Were the White Things?" The Collected Stories. Scribner, 2007.

De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Diacritics, Vol. 3, No. 3, Autumn 1973, pp. 27-33.