Cat's Eye 
by 

Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author)

 

Pity-wanting Pain

Reading Cat's Eye is like watching a film, only with smells, and taste, and touch in addition to cinematic sight and sound. Its heroine, Elaine, has all these 'outward wits' which Atwood captures magnificently. But, although Elaine is an artist, she has almost nothing of the 'inward wits' of communal sense, imagination, fantasy, estimation or memory.

The story is three dimensional: the North/South dimension of her life with her parents who migrate every year from Toronto to the Laurentians on biological field trips; the East/West dimension of her independent life which stretches from Toronto to Vancouver; and the temporal dimension of her own maturation.

Periodically the three dimensions collapse into moments of insight and clarity that progress from childhood with age: boys are noisy and messy but essentially uncomplicated; girls are generally hateful even, especially, when they are friends; young men are superficial and boring; older men are duplicitous and domineering; motherhood is a schlep; marriage is a continuous losing battle; feminist sisterhood isn't to be trusted; art is largely pretense and scam and dates rather quickly.

Elaine's life is a tale of haplessness, of lurching from one emotional trauma to the next. There are no plans, no goals, no passions. She falls into art as she falls into bed with unsuitable men. The step by step development of her life is told is Proustian detail but without the introspective analysis. Every action is compulsive with no apparent rationale.

She knows this and learns from her traumatic experiences, but only those lessons that are relevant to the past, not to new situations. Every insight is obsolete as soon as she arrives at it. Her past persists in her feelings and her art, both inadequate for the world she inhabits now. She realizes that her life is a ruin, with no obvious cause for its ruination.

So Elaine lives in pain. "Pain is important but only certain kinds of it: the pain of women but not the pain of men. Telling about pain is called sharing." Among her feminist friends at least. She prefers men, even her ex-husband, to this therapeutic band. "There's not much time left, for us to become what we intended," she says, as if she actually had an intention. Perhaps this is the source of her pain. "Potential," she says, "has a shelf life." But Atwood isn't saying what the source of her apathetic trajectory might be. She let's the reader make her own diagnosis.