112
PARTISAN REVIEW
"1 do not believe that the kind of society 1 describe necessarily
will
ar–
rive, but 1 believe ... that something resembling it
could
arrive."
It's doubtful, however, that even the most paranoid radicals
and feminists would seriously argue that the Republic of Gilead is
whither we are drifting. Atwood is a Canadian poet and novelist
who has spent a lot of time in the United States, but she has a very
inadequate grasp of the multitudinous diversity of this country's in–
habitants and their religion, culture, and politics. Perhaps the push–
button resentment that many Canadians feel toward the United
States, along with her radical-feminist wrath, feeds Atwood's cer–
tainty that something like Gilead will exist in the foreseeable future,
but her diabolical vision has no plausible resemblance to American
reality. Nor is her case strengthened by her baffling choice of Cam–
bridge, Massachusetts, that bastion of liberal piety, as the capital of
her viciously reactionary state. Margaret Atwood has the zealous
confidence of ideology, but she lacks the sophisticated political intel–
ligence of Orwell. Without it,
The Handmaid's Tale
cannot achieve
the premonitory power of 1984. Atwood's dystopia is in the end too
whimsical to be instructive, a horror movie rather than a warning.
Politics may be a dying language in American writing today,
but it is still the lifeblood of Latin-American literature, the impor–
tunate and inescapable given of the novelist's art. Revolution, civil
war, terrorism, despotic juntas, disappearance, political murder–
these are not chance events in Latin America but the convulsive facts
of ordinary life. Perhaps this helps us understand why the novelists
of Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Peru have sought to embody the po–
litical volcano of the everyday in the dreamlike configurations of
magic and fantasy: not to deny or turn away from the violence and
brutality of politics, but to liberate the autonomous imagination
from the oppressive and literally censorious shackles of time and his–
tory. It is not just an accident of history that so many contemporary
South American novelists-Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Para–
guay's Augusto Roa Bastos, to name only a few - have written some
of their finest work in exile. Uprooted from their native ground,
carrying only the baggage of memory, these writers have drawn their
extraordinary innovative energy from the no-man's-land between the
phantasmagoria of dreams and the sobering facts of political actuality.
Mario Vargas Llosa returned to Peru in 1980 after many years
in exile, but the relentless tug-of-war between hallucination and real-
