Life in Lead

LIFE IN LEAD
An essay about Margaret Atwood's "The Age of Lead" I wrote for my translation studies at Universidad del Museo Social Argentino (Buenos Aires, Argentina).

“...cuentos cortos,

basados en hechos periodísticos

pero redimidos de su condición mortal

por las astucias de la poesía.”

G. García Márquez, Doce cuentos peregrinos.

The unsuspected reader might mistakenly think that Margaret Atwood has read García Márquez’ words and then decided to do the same, that is, to redeem an actual piece of news by turning it into a story with some message to be conveyed. On the other hand, a better-read reader will immediately realize that this is what many writers and playwrights do, and that García Márquez just happened to provide a very poetic definition of a universal practice. Short stories, novels, plays and film scripts, all have been effective vehicles for authors whom are suddenly inspired by some piece of news that outstands from everyday deeds and stimulates memories or ideas inside their minds.

This appears to be the case of Atwood, who translated a documentary shown on television (Frozen in Time) into a story (The Age of Lead) that may have different readings, according to the reader’s concerns or experience: it can be a story with an ecologic message, a story about the inevitability of having to assume responsibilities in life and its consequences, a story about loneliness in company. There may be other readings or hidden meanings but, as I said, that depends on each reader’s personal background.

Jane, a single, middle-aged woman in the 90’s is watching television on a cold night. From this moment two plot lines appear: one, telling us about the show she is watching and the reason why she has not turned the TV set off, as she usually does after sitting for a while in front of the mesmerizing box. It is a documentary about the Franklin Expedition, called like that after John Franklin, who, in 1845, led a team of men who were looking for “the North-west Passage, an open seaway across the top of the Arctic, so people, merchants, could get to India from England without going all the way around South America.” Besides the economic benefit the success this expedition would bring –which included imperialistic pride– the search of this passage was also a romantic adventure. There is always something romantic about exploring, no matter whether it is the unknown territories in our own planet, the outer space (usually with the deeply treasured hope of finding some extraterrestrial intelligence), or that abandoned house next to the wasteland in the neighborhood of our far-away children’s years. “To boldly go where no man has gone before” was the motto that moved the characters in Star Trek, the Sci-Fi TV show that, back in the 60’s, picked up the overall optimistic sensation of welfare and technical progress that would lead humankind to new frontiers. Jane was brought up in the sixties and was, of course, influenced by this atmosphere: “…the idea of exploration appealed to her then: to get onto a boat and just go somewhere mapless, off into the unknown. To launch yourself into fright; to find things out. There was something daring and noble about it.”

Since the expedition was heading for the unmapped, they took with them food supplies for three years, preserved by the latest technology, scientific instruments for navigation and research, books, medicine and entertainment resources, among many other things.
Unfortunately, the expedition was lost and nothing was heard of them until, over ten years later, some remains were found that gave the first hints about what had happened to them.
Late in the following century, graves were found where some members of the crew lay, mummified by the extreme cold of the permafrost. One of these men, John Torrington, was dug out and his corpse studied by scientists, who tried to find out the reason of their deaths and to figure out what happened to the expedition.

"The freezing water has pushed his lips away from his teeth into an astonished snarl, and he's a beige colour, like a gravy stain on linen, instead of pink, but everything is still there. He even has eyeballs, except that they aren't white but the light brown of milky tea. With these tea-stained eyes he regards Jane: an indecipherable gaze, innocent, ferocious, amazed, but contemplative." It is the image of Torrington’s body on TV, disturbingly well preserved, what triggers the other plot line, as it makes Jane recall Vincent (and later we discover why), her one and only life-time friend (and true love, perhaps?) who has been dead for about a year now. She starts to turn over the pages of her memories starting when she and Vincent were young teenagers. As the documentary moves forward Jane keeps associating what she sees with her recollections and the two plot-lines become thus intertwined.

The expedition as an object of study at school, Torrington dug up; Vincent at school mocking at it, hanging out with Vincent, her mother approving of him, her mother disapproving of other boys, Jane and Vincent’s making fun of going out, Jane and Vincent going together to the graduation formal; Torrington being melted and his body gradually revealed; the scholarships to university, the failed attempt to try love with Vincent, the switching from “making love” to “having sex” in the late 60’s, the parting from Vincent, the several attempts to live with a man, the reunion with Vincent back in Toronto years later, the new failed attempt to become lovers; Torrington’s eyes looking at Jane and making her wonder “what did they do for love on such a ship at such time”, “who held his hand, who brought him water”, “what was killing him”; fun fleeing away from Toronto, more people, increasing poverty, people dying “too early” “as if they had been weakened by some mysterious agent... scentless and invisible”; Vincent catching a misterious disease, the view of him packed in ice in order to keep pain away, the appalling vision of life without Vincent, Vincent being dead for less than a year and probably looking worst than Torrington; technology killing Franklin’s crewmen then and, maybe, killing humankind right now?.

It was a mutated virus that didn’t have a name yet what killed Vincent and it was an (at that time) unknown agent what killed Torrington a hundred and fifty years before. The view of an old tin can on the screen and the information: scientists can tell now that it was the lead with which the cans were soldered what killed them; maybe in the future, scientists are able to confirm that it was “acid rain, hormones in the beef, mercury in the fish, pesticides in the vegetables, poison sprayed on the fruit”, “plastic drinking cups” and “take-out plates” what is killing people now. In the end, Jane switches off the television and remains alone, crying, thinking about the inevitability of death and the provisionality of life.

Through an objective narrator, Atwood tells us the story of Jane, her journey through life from the luminous 60’s through the gray 80’s and 90’s; how she regarded life then and how time and events have made her mind change. When a young girl, all that mattered to Jane was having a good time, having fun with Vincent. Though she belonged to a lower middle class, single-parent family, she was not an ambitious or snooty girl. Later she became a modern girl, adopting the trends and fashions of the 60’s and 70’s. She studied at college, perhaps economy or management, but never gave up her taste for the bohemian lifestyle of artists. She integrated that to her career and ended up running the finances of artists, actors and other people of her circle, or better said, of Vincent’s “orbits” where she herself had a place of her own.
Perhaps it was lack of commitment, perhaps it was fear of failure and coming out hurt, the fact is that, though she made many attempts, she was always ready to “do the leaving herself” and thus never engaged in a lasting romantic relationship.

By the end of the story we are presented with a Jane almost devastated by Vincent’s absence, a Jane who feels somehow threatened by the so-called progress, which may end up killing us all, a woman who regards her possessions as just waiting for her to disappear in order to assume their condition of purposeless objects.

Jane is not the only character we are introduced to. There is, of course, Vincent. Vincent was a very charismatic person, adored by everybody wherever he went. Independent like cats and always laughing at things, as if things were not the really important things, what really mattered in life. Perhaps he was too intelligent so as to be fooled by the material world. He never became Jane’s boyfriend, lover or husband but he certainly was her “significant other”. Neither are we told whether he was ever in love with anybody but we are suggested the he might be gay. His personality is so strong that his acquaintances do not make a circle but rather “orbits”. He, like Jane, belonged to the lower middle class, though he came from a typical family. He also studied at college and, besides that, he went to Europe to study film-making. Years later, when he returns to Toronto, he and Jane discover that they still have the connection they used to when younger.

Vincent died at the age of fourty three from a newly discovered virus, so new there was no name for it yet, but he kept his sense of humor right till the end.

Then there is her mother, whose name we are never told. She is a single mother who brings up Jane on her own and has to work in order to sustain the family, although, on occasions, Jane’s father sends some very meager financial aid. She works in a department store, at the jewelry section. Maybe handling jewels she would never be able to buy helped to her resentment? She also inspired a desire to run away from her and represented the “world of mothers” from which Jane wanted to break free. That world of mothers consisted of the permanent complaint against life, men and the fate of being women in a world unfair to that gender. She said that “you were young briefly and then you fell. You plummeted downwards like a ripe apple and hit the ground with a squash; you fell and everything about you fell too. You got fallen arches and a fallen womb, and your hair and teeth fell out. That’s what having a baby did to you, it subjected you to the force of gravity”. She kept repeating this to Jane, on one hand, because everyone sees things from her own point of view (here I would have preferred to use the Spanish proverb “cada uno habla de la feria según le fue en ella”, which I find far more literary than the plain, dull equivalent in English); on the other hand, because she wants for Jane a life better than the one given to her. She does not want Jane to suffer the consequences of life. “Jane herself had been a consequence. She had been a mistake, she had been a war baby. She had been a crime that had needed to be paid for, over and over.”

And we could say that, somehow, the documentary is a character itself, since it is present through the whole story and arises Jane’s deepest and saddest memories.
Jane’s story takes place in Toronto (Canada) and covers a time span that starts in the 60’s, when she is a teenager at high school, with a whole life ahead, and finishes in the mid 90’s when humankind is beginning to pay in lives the cost of the negative side effects of modern life. In the beginning, Toronto is suggested to be a small town or, at least, a city with the costumes and uses of a town, where youngsters can have fun in a naive way, where middle-class people can live worthy lives despite their having to buy second-hand clothes and where being a single mother does not appear to be a shameful condition. By the end of the story, Toronto had grown “ten times more interesting”; a place where being over thirty and single or being (perhaps) gay is not regarded as something reprehensible. However it has become a city where the evils of late-century lifestyle have arrived for good (ironic as this may sound). Pollution, acid rain and diseases derived from these are making of Toronto a not-so-fun-any-more city, where streets that have not been torn up or knocked down are clogged with fumes and cars, where “the cheap artists’ studios were converted to coy and upscale office space” after their former owners had migrated elsewhere.

As we read through the story we can feel, almost from the beginning, the melancholic atmosphere that emanates from Jane, her increasingly sad recollection of years past and experiences lived. This can be clearly seen if we trace the ideals or desires portrayed. First: “It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of mothers, the world of precautions, the world of burdens and fate and heavy female constraints upon the flesh. They wanted a life without consequences.” Later, “when she got past thirty she decided it might be nice to have a child, sometime, later”. Further on we find Jane next to Vincent’s deathbed asking him “what will I do without you?”

Near the end Jane is sitting “with tears running down her face. She felt desolate: left behind, stranded. Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all; but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done”.

Life had defeated Jane, there is no such thing as going through it unpunished, everything you do or fail to do, every decision you make, every dot you write, every attitude you adopt, it all has a consequence that will show sooner or later.

This is a story that talks about the fragility of life and the fear to death. Apparently Jane has no religious beliefs that might be of some comfort when it comes to thinking about what awaits us when we leave the world of the living. Therefore, the solid, visible, concrete elements of life are all that counts when it comes to considering existence. Heaven, Nirvana, they are all convenient constructions of the mind, the carrot that hangs from the stick, nothing soundly proven and therefore nothing that con be counted on. And there is still something else that helps to Jane’s overwhelmness: she is alone. It may have been fun to “wake up in bed or more likely on a mattress, with an arm around you and find yourself wondering what it might be like to keep on doing it”, but she has not been able to build a lasting relationship with somebody with whom grow old together, as well as neither has she become a mother, and now it is already too late. She has lost that chance to trascend through life into an offspring, someone with her own blood and flesh. The one resource equally available for the religious and non-religious, for the wealthy and the poor. A son (or daughter), someone who, in time, would return the attention received as a baby by taking care of his parents when the weight of age bends their backs down. She is alone and neither does she get along with her mother, who has moved to Florida.

Jane has a good living –she has renewed her kitchen one year earlier and owns the house she lives in– but her life is organized for one (“her toaster oven, so perfect for solo dining”). Everything she has there are things that look “ownerless”. They are “waiting for her departure” and she realizes that all her belongings are useless upon death, you cannot carry them with you and neither can they comfort you in hard times, they are just sitting there ready to “assume their final, real appearance of purposeless objects adrift in the physical world”.

So, there is Jane, left alone, in a material world that is so unable to fill in those gaps in our affections and loves, that fails so recurrently to fulfill the emotional needs everyone (as well she herself) has. Jane, with no one to take care of or whom to love, with no one to take care of her or love her. Jane, trapped in a society that permanently turns against the planet and, thus, against itself, paying in lives the cost of greed and disregard. Jane, who is not alone in being alone, the latest and most extended disease in the Western world in the late 20th century.