ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses of Atwood’s novella as an authorial descent into a past commemorated by the classical canon within a transcultural mnemonic hemisphere. Focussing on Atwood’s choice of the descent as a narrative dynamic for her adaptation of the Odyssey, it reads the figure of Penelope as a reflection of Atwood’s own authorial voice, descending into a postmodern version of the underworld to try and untangle a web of, at times contrasting, memories of the same story, and remaining intentionally unsuccessful at this task. Using Atwood’s critical essays in Negotiating with the Dead (2002) and her early novel Surfacing (1972) as comparative works, the chapter investigates how Atwood conceptualises the descent into the underworld as an exploration of the literary canon and its effects on transcultural memory. The format of the descent narrative is crucial to Atwood’s poetic ambitions of providing an intertextual exploration of the processes of remembering and forgetting, formulating a postmodern (re-)conceptualisation of classical sources, as well as allowing Atwood to re-define the idea of a ‘classic’ within the sphere of cultural memory.
