Making abstraction of
the first paragraph and title, this speech by Margaret Atwood, called
“Attitude” I must add, seems to be a perfect fit for a Cynics Anonymous
or Alcoholics Depressed meeting. Yet this seemingly pejorative speech
actually hides endless optimism. Incontestably, Atwood fills her content
with failure upon failure but she uses style to incorporate humor into
it, in order to combine both and transmit a profound, optimistic, and
long-lasting message: the gravity of a situation depends solely on your
attitude towards it.
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.
The way Atwood mixes content
and style that seem opposite leads us to the true intent of her speech,
made clear in the last few paragraphs. In short, failure is inevitable,
and probably takes up most of our life, so it is important to embrace
it, surmount it through humor, and attitude is the key to that. Relative
to the world, Atwood shows how there are downsides and upsides, how
the glass is both half empty and half full but it is up to us to choose
one or the other. For example, “the biosphere is rotting away”,
acid rain is killing biodiversity, but we “know what mistakes we are
making and we also have the technology to stop making them”. The tangible
failure present in her content, lightened and made tolerable by her
humorous style is the exact parallel of how we should deal with the
obstacles we face in life. In this way, she relates to even the uttermost
demoralized students. In the end, the message Atwood tries to transmit
is the most optimistic, enabling us to see a light at the end of the
tunnel: “You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your
attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality”.
Yes, the speech talks
about failure, and about everything that is wrong with the world. Yes,
even the slight optimism in content is counterbalanced by double the
pessimism in the sentence to follow. Yet Atwood’s style ennobles this
pessimism, and, with humor, she manages to make the failures seem insignificant
in the big picture. The real strength of the speech lies in Atwood’s
ability to find hope in even the worst of situations. The advice she
gives, and anecdotes she recounts can appeal to even the ones who have
been through the worst, and possibly renew their hope. With such realism
and light-heartedness at once, Atwood gives us the strength to face
reality and to face any catastrophes heading our way whilst being able
to surmount them and make the most of them.
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