No Stargazing Here: On Margaret Atwood’s “Old Babes in the Wood”

Margaret Atwood is best known as the author of A Handmaid’s Tale, but she has published over forty works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, and children’s books. The Atwood stories I have read, like Oryx and Crake, take place in stark atmospheres, with characters struggling to find freedom within constricted circumstances. Her characters belong in our time, even if they are sometimes placed in dystopian futures, because they search for meaning in a post-Christian world with no particular soulful orientation. Her latest book of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, is not an entertaining book, but it is intriguing because it exposes our worst fears without trying to let us off the hook with some easy way out. If you are struggling to understand your faith, Atwood will not willingly help you figure it out. In the end, this merciless portrayal of a life and a universe stripped of any enchantment is the strength of Atwood’s writing. How the reader deals with Atwood’s provocations is the mystery.

Many stories in Old Babes in the Wood are not captivating reads, and some may best be described as kitsch. Morte de Smudgie, for example, opens with this: “When Nell and Tig’s cat Smudgie died, Nell dealt with her disproportionate sense of loss by rewriting Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur, with Smudgie in the leading role, supported by a full cast of noble cats in medieval robes and chain mail.” Granted, I am not a cat person, but it is difficult to imagine any reader caring to go on. Likewise, in My Evil Mother, Atwood attempts to portray the narrator’s mother as a type of suburban witch, but the tale is silly. The narrator muses that even when her evil mother offered to babysit, no babies were offered—neighbors may have been afraid “they’d return to find their infant in a roasting pan with an apple in its mouth.” I do not think so. The story Metempsychosis is about the soul of a snail jumping into a human body, but it simply does not work. The tale invokes Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Robert Ayre’s Mr. Sycamore, but Atwood’s version of the human person standing beside a nature of which we are a part, yet distinct from, never compels the reader to care. In part this is because Atwood choses to write from the perspective of the snail. Much as we care for all of life in its many manifestations, in the end a snail is something we know little of and therefore do not identify closely with. So it is with the story itself.

Atwood’s characters, at least as portrayed by the narrative voice, are flippant, not ironical. Irony has the potential of leading to a transformation in a character’s psychology—or their spirituality, if such a thing were ever articulated by Atwood, which it is not. There is no redemption or transformation for Atwood’s characters. They are stuck in their fate as rational, possibly cynical people. Her characters exist in a restricted space, even in the last story that takes place at a lakefront cottage. The characters look into a past grown smaller with time, with small chores to carry out for an even smaller future. Every object points backwards, hollowed out in melancholy, with little sense of beauty, or of timeless beauty.

There is a theme running through the stories, however, which bears paying attention too. Old Babes in the Wood is, at least in part, a meditation on the instability of life and the constant change we have to endure as people. In the world of biology and time, the end for all of us is death. By extension, as Atwood emphasizes, all change also brings us closer to our ultimate end. Ergo, what is the point of life? In this regard, the absurd nature of Atwood’s short stories serves a purpose. Where is the foundation of things, and what is the source by which our questions are oriented? Is this soulful longing for meaning foundational to our sense of self and our sense of eternal mystery, or is it simply a rational recognition that we are stuck without the keys to our prison cell?

Atwood’s meditative search involves a timeless past that is mysteriously present now, a past that offers perspective on the now. In First Aid she sounds like Don DeLillo when she writes, “How much waiting we used to do… So many blanks we couldn’t fill in, so many mysteries… Now it’s the first decade of the twenty-first century, space-time is denser… you can barely move because the air is so packed with this and that.” At the end of the story, we come face to face with our communal dilemma: “‘We aren’t going to make it out of here alive,’ Tig used to say as a joke, although it wasn’t one…” In light of the carefree way the characters had grown up, sometimes flirting with danger, the narrator asks, “Had they really been that careless, that oblivious? They had. Obliviousness had served them well.” Things seem better for us when we forget that all of us have only one way out of here.

As we read in Morte de Smudgie, our materialistic, middle-class society absorbs symbols of transcendent power, which disempowers us later in life when we actually need those symbols. Mexican images of death are collected on excursions meant to be “escapes from real life.” The death skeletons are placed tastefully in the bathroom. Middle-aged days became “countdown days.” In My Evil Mother, the concern is whether the universe is chaotic and unfeeling, or if there is a fate we are born with. “Life can be harsh,” we hear from the evil mother in the end, whose own life is being ground down, her hope in parenting being to protect her child, for the child to feel like “there was a greater power watching over you.” Alas, as the confession reveals, this spiritual power was a manufactured experience, guided by human ingenuity and imagination.

In The Dead Interview, which is an informative visit with Mr. Orwell, living people are referred to as being “in their meat envelope.” On the other hand, “science will never be enough,” and “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” In reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the narrator remembers reading of Winston Smith questioning, “For whom…was he writing this diary?” This reflection reminds us that human beings are not simply constrained within their biology, and that we are creative creatures who transcend our own condition. There is a sense of wonder imbued in our personhood, and there is a hint that something beyond us mysteriously draws us out of ourselves. On the other hand, explains the narrator to Orwell, our current culture, with its subservience to the internet, has led to the collapse of privacy and the erosion of the individual. Free thought is challenged by our own version of “banishments,” but now “they’re called cancellings.” How do we resist this? How do people remember themselves, and grow wiser and hopeful in the face of these challenges?

The question is whether Atwood’s writing can provide an antidote to meaninglessness, and the threats to the individual. In Death By Clamshell, human life through history is represented by the unfolding massacres in every era, one abomination after another. The religion du jour, Christianity, was as guilty of human violence as anything else. This is a serious reduction of history and culture, but in a work of fiction this is carried out without scrutiny. “Most people who have been dead for as long as I have,” says the voice from the dead, Hypatia of Alexandria, “mean absolutely nothing because no one left knows anything about them… They have melted like ice, they have drifted away like smoke.” Yet the snail-soul in Metempsychosis is not satisfied with this pronouncement. “Why must I suffer?” the snail/man wonders. “The ultimate puzzle, I suppose: to question the terms of existence… There must be a purpose. I must be learning something. I can’t believe this is all random.”

The book’s primary two characters, Tig and Nell, provide a setting we can identify with. Nell is witnessing the death of her lover, and wrestling with memory and intuitions as she struggles to find firm ground upon which to continue living. In Wooden Box Tig is grateful on his deathbed. He thanks Nell for their shared life. This is difficult for Nell to take, but it is a lingering message even after Tig is dead and she continues in conversation with him. “We had a good long run,” Tig says again, “You’ll be fine.” In the last story, Old Babes in the Wood, Nell remembers their joyful adventures at the cottage, like star gazing from the dock. She tries to re-enact this, but cannot carry on. What now? She remembers the isolation Tig lived with while waiting for his death to come. Indeed, we are alone with our fate. Yet the dead Tig visits Nell in a dream. He is simply present with her, and he smiles “as if enjoying a joke they’re sharing. See? It’s all right. It’s even funny.” The presence of her dead partner in a dream is reassuring, and leads to the final question, “What does one ever do with these cryptic messages from the dead?”

Atwood is meditating in a timeless reality, searching in a mysterious past that remains mysteriously present, seeking to understand the meaning of existence. There are no clear answers, no auditory voice of God nor miraculous vision from beyond, but there is the experience of the search itself. For the writer and the reader, the hope is that this experience of the search will protect us from despair, and allow for the hope that inevitably comes to us to be freely accepted. Atwood, like all of us, lives in an era when the majority of us do not treat life with great seriousness. The notion of pilgrimage mindfully carried out, or of meditative discipline, is virtually non-existent in our day. Why should Atwood spoon feed us hope? As it is, she matters for everyone who has especially shirked aside religious and cultural traditions for a life where one can seek to lose themselves in the material paradise provided by our shopping malls and 24/7 entertainment industry. She confronts us with the absurd in all its starkness and leaves us with the task of beginning our own meditations, if we have the capacity and the courage, spiritually speaking, to do so. Will we tremble and weep in this rigged game, or stand up straight with courage, or even find some transcendent beauty, goodness and hope to be oriented by? Or, as we read of another character, if we have no interest in gazing into the depths of eternity, will a bottle of Scotch suffice?

Old Babes in the Wood: Stories
By Margaret Atwood
New York: Penguin, 2023; 272pp

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