In all countries, graduation from one academic level to the next is a celebrated event, and in North America, the much-awaited delivery of a so-called “commencement address” takes place on the day of the graduation ceremony. A commencement speech serves the purpose of highlighting the importance of the high school diploma or university degree, especially in the context of the futures of the eager and motivated students around whom the festivities are centered. In June 1983, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood gave a commencement address to the class graduated from Victoria College, which was Atwood's very own alma mater. Generally, commencement addresses represent the last official message to a class, and consequently, the content of that message is of great significance.
It can be argued that they ought to have an optimistic tone, incite motivation in the spectators, and hold a positive outlook on life: Margaret Atwood's rendition did all but follow that convention. Perhaps Atwood merely wanted her speech to stand out in a sea of speeches by some of the world's greatest men and women. Or, perhaps, she should dedicate her full attention to the writing of fiction novels, and spare us of her innermost woes and her hidden agenda. Indeed, with the exception of one paragraph out of the fourteen, Atwood's commencement address is a classic lament about the miserable state of the world, spoken in a tone of arrogance and moral superiority, and peppered with elements of accusatory and sanctimonious self-importance. Rather than motivating graduates to “be the change they want to see in the world” (Mahatma Gandhi) or to “Stay hungry, stay foolish” (Steve Jobs, in a Stanford University commencement address), Margaret Atwood effectively manages to deliver a speech that is largely off-topic, discombobulated and meaningless, while simultaneously exposing her closet-arrogance (and closet-sexism) and bitterness.
Atwood's arrogance is the predominant tone throughout the entire speech. At the beginning of the commencement speech, Atwood engages in a ramble of false modesty by downplaying her own intelligence, referring to her pre-university mind as “callow and ignorant” and her post-university one as “dubious”. She informs the audience of her “many overdue term papers”, her awful handwriting and her “interesting” essays, hoping somehow to convey her past rebelliousness, which, happily, she was able to overcome to ultimately become an award-winning writer, and her inherent brilliance which was impressive enough to cancel out her academic shortcomings and failings. Giving Atwood the benefit of the doubt and accepting these questionable comments as mere self-irony would quickly backfire, as the rest of the speech is saturated with hubristic assertions and predictions of the future from Atwood's part – it is beyond clear that the latter considers her own worldview to be factual, obvious and universally accepted, and leaves no room for alternate opinions or discussion. This complete imposition on her audience of her own ideas is manifested in her certainty of the fate of the world: “They will” embark on a study of this, future research “will prove me right”, and “we will soon have a state of affairs” in which, basically, everything and everyone is miserable, and human beings (herself presumably excepted) are either too lazy or too spoiled to do anything about it. In her concluding paragraphs, her last words consist of what is essentially a criticism of the human species, implying its failure, its fall from grace, its and moral degeneracy. Atwood states, “we can die with the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the death of the world was a man-made and therefore preventable event, and that the failure to prevent it was a failure of human will”, hereby discrediting the efforts, not only of the many experts studying and generating solutions to halt climate change, but of the entire institution of higher education, whose chief purpose is, surely, to educate the people who will contribute to the bettering of the world. Margaret Atwood is saying, in effect, that any occupation or pastime that is not concerned with the preservation of the rainforest or obsessive-compulsive tree-hugging, is unworthy of any praise or merit. Not only does Atwood criticize the actions of the people, she also vilifies the people themselves, in ironically mocking their response to a fatal natural disaster, claiming that they would draw from such an event a form of “satisfaction”.
At the very end, Atwood minimizes the problems and concerns of inhabitants of the Western developed world, saying that “Things are in fact a lot worse elsewhere, where expectations center not on cars and houses and jobs but on the next elusive meal.” I suppose, then, that Atwood dismisses equally Western problems such as domestic violence, child abuse, drugs and socio-economic inequalities, because God forbid we waste our time and efforts on solving those when there are people starving in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, Margaret Atwood seems to be faced – along with many other people – in a false dilemma: the existence of problems perhaps more urgently in need of solving, does not nullify the existence or importance of problems in the lives of the very people she is addressing. Both sets of problems should be addressed. Once again, Atwood attempts to toy with the moral compass and social conscience of her audience, completely invalidating their opinions and problems, and in doing so, demonstrates her holier-than-thou demeanor.
Beyond the uncomfortable ring of condescendence, Margaret Atwood's speech is irrelevant in its content. Atwood's structure of choice seems to be that of a verbalized stream of consciousness: She begins her paragraphs with “'What shall I tell them!' I thought”, “Then I thought”, “Or maybe, I thought”, and “But I then thought”, the intended effect being to capture and preserve the attention of the audience and pull them into her mind (of course, it has been established by now that Ms Margaret Atwood's mind is the place to be). The trouble with Atwood's stream of consciousness is that it makes no sense and has no meaning to anyone but herself. Nothing fruitful emanates from the dissemination of her thoughts and experiences, as they are utterly irrelevant to the event in question, that is, the joyful event that is the transition of students from the world of higher education to the professional world. She begins by telling us about her recent sea-sickness and (presumably) her experience of menopause; then, about how the four years her audience has spent in blood, sweat and tears have served them nothing – no, instead, the boys should pick up a copy of Forbes or The Economist in order to “improve their place in the power hierarchy”, and the girls should accept the cooking and cleaning tips provided by Homemakers Magazine. Atwood goes on to deliver a paragraph about the fact that she was taught that a proper meal “should consist of a brown thing, a white thing, a yellow thing and a green thing”; she speaks at length about the correlation between sturdy wrists in writers and their success, followed by the realization that, maybe, she shouldn't actually speak about creative writing and literature after all. The last paragraph in Atwood's stream of consciousness continues in much the same directionless fashion, providing the audience with irrelevant factoids and personal anecdotes, namely zinc imbalance-related post-partum hair loss. Needless to say, the topics Atwood covers hardly inspire young idealists, nor do they encourage their optimism and can-do attitude. A different manifestation of the irrelevance of the content of the speech lies in Atwood's “examples” to illustrate that “you always have a choice”. Rather than ending her speech on a positive note, she seems to be pushing her own agenda, which she parenthetically confirms herself when she “brings us to the hidden agenda of this speech”. Indeed, more than being a novelist, Margaret Atwood is a fervent environmental activist, and that is obvious in her commencement address: the final three paragraphs are essentially dedicated to an exhibition of “the catastrophe that threatens us as a species”, an exhibition which is accompanied by an accusation of man as the perpetrator in “the death of the world”.
Margaret Atwood raised important points in her commencement speech to the graduating class of Victoria College in 1983. The loom of climate change and natural disasters still ring true today, and it is a well-known reality that a university degree does less than it may claim to help us survive the trials and tribulations of life. However, there is a moment for everything, and Atwood chose the wrong moment to preach her cause and to patronize her audience. Commencement speeches exist to motivate students to be active and dynamic in embarking on their careers – not to make them feel guilty about taking one too many showers or about wishing they might own two cars one day. Commencement speeches serve to project the students into the future, perhaps demystifying it ever so slightly, if only briefly and superficially – not familiarize the audience with Margaret Atwood's cold sweats and issues with hair loss. Moreover, the overarching tone of self-sufficiency only provokes annoyance in the spectators and readers of the speech. Truly, the only valuable piece of advice lies in the last sentence of the speech: “You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it.” Alter your attitude, Atwood.
There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through
the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words,
which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of
coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people
were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun
to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel
always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance.
Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus
he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak
of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an
elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne
Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he
went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the
habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not
discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to
which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at
being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for
that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular
satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once the last
Atwood undeniably starts
and fills her speech with an account of her failures. There is a sort
of progression, where we follow the course of her life and encounter
failures at different stages. In school, she “failed to learn Anglo-Saxon
and somehow missed Bibliography entirely”. Searching for employment,
“Bell Canada, Oxford University Press and McClelland and Stewart all
failed to hire” her, leading to a “state of joblessness, angst and
comic depression”. Even the education system has failed her and itself,
where “a liberal arts education doesn’t exactly prepare you for
life” since courses like “Victorian Thought and French Romanticism”
should be replaced by “Dealing with Stress” or “Improving Your
Place in the Power Hierarchy by Choosing the Right Suit”. The words
she uses and points she makes are very raw, very sour at times, hence
the global mood of pessimism. Yet, we are not completely let down, as
we keep a sense of odd happiness.
The reason we do not feel
entirely pessimistic is that Atwood intercepts these arguments with
humor. This is where style clashes with content, creating a very divided
mood, which alternates between failure and comedy. She makes comic analogies,
juxtaposing a serious and perhaps saddening fact to a risible matter,
like in the sentence “when young people have unemployment the way
they used to have ugly blackheads”. This generates a laugh or a smile
from the audience or reader, thus lightening the mood. Atwood is also
an avid user of cynicism incorporated to complex sentences to further
humor her spectators/readers: “He thought I might have more spare
time for creation if I ran away to Boston, lived in a stupor, wrote
footnotes and got anxiety attacks, that is, if I went to Graduate School”.
Finally, her original, entertaining and often self-destructive anecdotes
increase her proximity with the audience, who can laugh at or relate
to them. For example, anyone who has done a good deal of writing will
agree with her “back and wrist exercises” need. With her style,
Atwood won’t cease to take us aback with crudely funny or mitigated
sentences. And the fact that she laughs at her own misfortune sustains
a certain hope and good humor in the general mood. In fact, her writing
style renders her content bearable.
