ABSTRACT

This chapter is about a rather different form of the exotic-celebrity glamour. But celebrity glamour, as I shall argue, shares several features with other, better-known variants of exoticist discourse, among them the creation of a commodified mystique that veils the material conditions that produce it. While less ostensibly glamorous a figure than literary compatriots like (probably most notably) Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood has achieved a certain aura and a guaranteed celebrity status as far and away Canada’s best-known living writer. At first sight, there is not much mystery attached to Atwood’s remarkable success as a novelist, poet and literary/cultural critic. Phenomenally hardworking, Atwood has achieved a prodigious output-to date she has produced ten novels, ten books of poetry, and five works of shorter fiction, along with books of literary criticism, books for children, scripts for TV and radio, and numerous essays and reviews. The unusually wide-ranging appeal of her work, moreover, allied to a malleable and skilfully marketed self-image, has helped push Atwood into the front ranks of the world’s literary superstars, where she rubs shoulders with other, perhaps more obviously attention-seeking postcolonial celebrities like V.S.Naipaul and Salman Rushdie (on Naipaul and Rushdie as celebrity figures, see also Chapter 3).1 Atwood’s factfile is impressive. Her books, translated into more than twenty languages, have been published in twenty-five countries (Howells 1995). In 1997, translations of her penultimate novel, Alias Grace (1996), appeared in Italian and Finnish. The previous novel, The Robber Bride (1993), also appeared in Latvian and Korean. Atwood’s work has won the Booker Prize (for her most recent novel The Blind Assassin), the Canadian Governor General’s Award for both poetry and fiction, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, the Trillium Award (three times), and several other literary prizes. In 1996, Alias Grace won the Giller Prize

and was a runner-up for the Orange Prize and the Booker. She has been rated, perhaps disappointingly, as only the fifth most influential Canadian in history, duly taking her place behind Charles Saunders, Brian Mulroney [sic], William Lyon Mackenzie King, and the Canadian serviceman. She also rated, in a 1997 survey of 659 British MPs, asalong with Umberto Eco and Doris Lessing-the ‘world’s best living author’. To cap this, she was voted Ms magazine’s 1997 Woman of the Year. In the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations (1997 edn), she is mentioned twenty-six times. She commands a speaking fee of up to fourteen thousand dollars. In 1997, she obtained her thirteenth honorary degree from the University of Ottawa, describing herself after the ceremony as ‘like Minnie Mouse, with a lot of happy students and Moms and Dads getting busy with the flash bulbs’.