Why is the Wall Street Journal asking Margaret Atwood for her opinion on the market meltdown? The attention might have something to do with her new book and the subject of her 2008 CBC Massey Lectures.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth presents some big ideas: how we know when we’ve been shortchanged, the pains we inflict (or would like to) on debtors and the indebted, and the environmental balance sheet that will be presented to our species if we don’t make like Scrooge and mend our ways.
For two Massey College students were hired as Atwood’s researchers, intensive work on the lectures began posthaste at the beginning of February. Claire Battershill, who mined novels and biographies for the use of debt as a plot device, sat down with
The Varsity to talk about her experiences working with the Booker Prize winner and the anticipation for the grand finale this Saturday at U of T.—JADE COLBERT
The Varsity: What was it like putting together these lectures as the news about the financial meltdown was starting to come in?
Claire Battershill: I worked so closely on them at the start before the big drop happened. When I saw her deliver the lecture, I thought, God, there’s so many details in here that are so much more poignant now.
TV: The questions she got asked in St. John’s, Newfoundland, were really interesting. There was a guy, for example, who had just lost his small business, and a whole bunch of money, and he was asking about opportunities and how you can be hopeful. Then there was another guy, a real estate agent, who’s capitalizing on the downturn in a way, and asking her about the moral implications of that.
CB: I feel like now these are lectures that people are really going to listen to, because it really matters to their immediate lives. When I was working on it, I didn’t necessarily see that would quite be the case.
TV: It matters financially, but Margaret Atwood also talks about “Debt as Plot.” On the news the other night there was a feature on Alan Greenspan and how much he can be blamed for the financial meltdown. People want revenge for what’s happening to them now.
CB: It’s really important that these lectures are about debt as a cultural construct, because it’s not just an institutionalized economic thing. It’s something that happens on an individual level between everyone. And it’s also not new, right? It’s just that it has this new, institutionalized economic form in subprime mortgages that has suddenly exploded. All these issues of what you owe the people you know and what you owe people you don’t know and if that debt isn’t repaid, how you respond to that.
It’s a really complicated human question—but not just human question. She talks a lot about monkeys in the lectures, which was actually one of the first things she told us when we met her—this biological impulse of fairness, and the desire to have what you feel you deserve. It would be so easy to not see that whole side of the news items. It would be so easy to not think, well, this has formed our literature and our art, scientific studies, and the way that we think about interpersonal relationships.
TV: And balance, too is something that she talks a lot about.
CB: A really great question in St. John’s was from a mother of two small children: “Okay, so how do we deal with these issues for an upcoming generation who are going to grow up through this strange time?” [Atwood] responded by offering all this child-rearing advice about contracts, and children knowing that they owe something back to their parents. It’s one of those things—this is really bizarrely universal. It’s maybe not the question you would expect, but it’s really relevant still.
Atwood’s fifth and final lecture will be delivered at Convocation Hall, U of T, on Saturday, Nov. 1. Recordings of the lectures will be broadcast on CBC Radio 1’s Ideas in November. Payback, the book, is published by Anansi and is in stores now.
