31 Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth Igor Maver Abstract Margaret Atwood’s provocative book of non-fiction contains many literary references, which help to effectively highlight her points about such a topical matter as debt, debt as a philosophical, politico-economic, religious, and historical issue over the centuries. In the central chapters of the book she looks at the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of interest on loans and in this light analyzes the novels by Dickens, Irving, Thackeray and G. Eliot. Her final statement in the book is, however, about the ecological debt we all have to pay to Earth in order to ensure our existence. Keywords: Margaret Atwood, Victorian literature, Charles Dickens, debt, ecology ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.111(71).09-4Atwood M. DOI: 10.4312/an.57.1.31-38 Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 31 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32 32 Igor Maver In her creative non-fiction work about fiction and the world’s ecological debt Pay- back: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth the internationally renowned Canadian woman writer Margaret Atwood examines debt, balance and revenge in history, society and particularly in English literature, debt as a driving force in (Western) fiction. She wrote it for the 2008 Massey Lectures and each of the five chapters in the book was delivered as a one hour lecture in a different Canadian city, which were broadcast on CBC Radio One in November 2008. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) is certainly a most provoca- tive and thought-engaging book which addressed the topical matter of debt at the time of the world economic crisis. Debt is considered as a philosophical, historical, political, economic and religious issue over the centuries: in truth the author pro- vides an intellectual history of debt. It is divided into five chapters titled »Ancient Balances«, »Debt and Sin«, »Debt as Plot«, »The Shadow Side« and »Payback«. In Chapter One she clearly defines he subject-matter of her book: »… it’s about debt as a human construct – thus an imaginative construct – and how this construct mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear« (Payback 2). The writer traces from ancient history onwards the feminine prici- ple of balance/scale in the concept of justice (Iustitia), including Ma’at, Themis, Nemesis, Sekhmet, Astrea, and significantly asks herself why is it that »with the exception of the Christian and the Muslim ones, the supernatural justice figures … are all female« (34). In relation to the ancient Egyptian goddess of Ma’at she writes that it meant … truth, justice, balance, the governing principles of nature and the universe, the stately progression of time – days, months, seasons, years. …Its opposite was physical chaos, selfishness, falsehood, evil behaviour – any sort of upset in the divinely ordained pattern of things. (27) She maintains that the female Justice figures have persisted until this day, because the period of the Great Goddessess was followed by several thousand years of rig- orous mysogyny, during which goddesses were replaced by gods and women were downgraded. The ancient balance of the scales was thus broken. In the second chapter Atwood dwells on debt and sin and says that the bor- rowing and lending process is something of a shadowland transaction, partly theft and partly trade, provided that a reasonable and not exaggerated interest is paid and the money eventually returned to the lender. She refers to Christianity in the Western world and claims that in this religious system Christ is called the re- deemer, a term drawn directly from the language of debt and pawning or pledging, scapegoats, »sin-eaters« etc, because the Devil keeps his account books constantly in good order and payback time will surely arrive. Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 32 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32 33Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth … the whole of Christianity rests on the notion of spiritual debts and what must be done to repay them, and how you might get out of paying by having someone else pay instead. And it rests, too, on a long pre-Christian history of scapegoat figures - including human sacrifices - who take your sins away for you. (67) »…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…« (The Holy Father Prayer, The Bible). In the Slovenian translation of the Bible the noun »trespasses« is rendered as »debts« and consequently refers to debtors, which have to be forgiven. Forgiving the debts on the part of the lender: is there in this Christian attitude perhaps Maragret Atwood›s underlying Christian principle of a payback or a bailout (especially as regards spiritual debts, of course), payoff and primarily a generous leveling out of balances on either side in the long run? From the point of view of literary allusiveness Chapter Three »Debt as Plot« is particularly relevant, where she looks at the Protestant Reformation and the introduction of interest on loans: When Henry the Eighth ascended the throne, interest-charging was legalized for Christians in England, which gave rise the the expansion of the market and in the nineteenth century the explosion of capitalism in the West. In this light Atwood alludes to the the work of Charles Dickens, Christopher Marlowe, Washington Irving, W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and even the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Atwood’s debt-reading of the all-time classic Wuthering Heights (1847) is very much to the point here: Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights loves Cathy passionately and hates his rival, Linton, but the weapon with which he is able to act out his love and his hate is money, and the screw he twists is debt: he becomes the owner of the estate called Wuthering Heights by putting its owner in debt to him. (Payback 100) The Victorian novel Vanity Fair (1847-48) is especially about goods, material and spiritual, and, as Atwood observes, we watch the grim business of Amelia Sedley’s family bankrupcy, but we also follow the brilliant but socially inferior gold-digger, Becky Sharp, climb her way up the social ladder. Everything that can be bought and sold, rent or lent is vanitas, Thackeray teaches us. Flaubert’s bored provincial wife Emma Bovary, too, is eventually punished for her »shopaholicism« rather than extramarital sex, because her overspending and consequent debt catches up and exposes her secret life. Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s novel House of Mirth (1905) is not versed in debt-managing which brigs her down and should have known better that »if a man lends you money and charges no interest, he’s going to want payment of some other kind« (106). Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 33 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32 34 Igor Maver Millers are in folklore often rendered as thieves and cheats who supposedly steal from peasant by weighing short and use some of their flour to their own benefit, and if you are a miller’s daughter like Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss (1860) you are likely to suffer the consequences of the miller’s misdeeds. Mr. Tulliver, however, is an honest miller and finds himself in financial difficulties and because of that his adversary buys his mill: he loses his final lawsuit and runs his family into debt. Margaret Atwood turns the established »proto-feminist« readings of the novel with Maggie as a clever independent but thwarted woman born before her time upside down and asks herself: But what if we read it as the story of Mr. Tulliver’s debt? For it’s this debt that’s the engine of the novel: it shoves the plot along, changes the mental states of the characters, and determines their scope of action. (116) Tom and Maggie suffer greatly the consequences of their father’s deeds and even- tually drown in a flood, reconciled at the very end. Tulliver’s adversary Wakem is saved in the end which Atwood rightly sees as the turning-point and the proof of the emerging Victorian materialism constituted in Law: »Power has moved from those who process material goods to those who process the contracts that govern them. Hermes – god of commerce, thieves, lies, contrivances, tricks, and mech- anisms – has switched allegiances« (119). And what is the situation like today? The question clearly remains rhetorical. The novels alluded to by Atwood are thus essentially about money, debt and payback, albeit not exclusively of course, with payback not always achieved in full. The allusions to 19th and early 20th century novels she draws upon lend a totally new dimension to the notion of debt Atwood deals with in Payback. And then there is the question of gift-giving within the context of the »life games« people play. The constant give-and-take process, which is the essence of social life, cannot be aborted by either party: »/G/ifts are rendered, received and repaid both obligatorily and in one’s own interest, in magnanimity, for repay- ment of services, or as challenges or pledges« (Mauss 27, qtd in Zabus 123). In a post-colonial context, however, the concept of gift may be just the opposite of hospitality, help and generosity, it may have the meaning of »poison« (cf. the Ger- man Gift), for the debtor is expected to pay back with subordination. The main literary work of Atwood’s allusions in Payback is Charles Dickens’s extremely popular book A Christmas Carol (1843) in the 19th century criticised openly the emerging Victorian materialistic self-satisfaction and containment, which helped to establish the Western non-religious concept of Christmas and the need for the transformation of the loan-sharking lender Ebenezer Scrooge into a beneficent forgiving character, who is taken directly from the London Stock Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 34 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32 35Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth Exchange and whose main concern and value in life is business. During Christmas he is visited by a ghost and the three spirits and utterly changed thereafter. The tale is generally seen as an indictment of nineteenth century industrial capitalism and Dickens got the idea form his own humiliating experience of debt from his childhood; when his father John Dickens was arrested for debt and put in prison, he had to leave school, sell all of his books and take up a job in a blacking factory. At the beginning of the tale Ebenezer (cf. Squeezer) Scrooge’s nephew reminds him that Merry Christmas-time has come, Scrooge is very cross: ‘What else can I be,’ returned the uncle, ‘when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What a Christmas–time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer, a time for balancing your books, and having every item in’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?’ (Dickens 19) At the end of the book he is much changed, of course, ready to share money with others especially on Christmas but also helping people for a change, in Atwood’s terms one could say writing off debts: this only will make him happy and redeem him. He shouts his newfound happiness from the rooftops: ‘I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school- boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A Merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here!’ (201) Margeret Atwood claims that Dickens deliberately created a reverse Faustus from Christopher Marlowe’s figure. Scrooge had symbolically made a pact with the devil, this malevolent creditor who tempts people with material benefits in ex- change for their spitirual health and moral integrity, and Scrooge is a miser so extreme that he does not spend any money even on himself. When Scrooge at the beginning sees the ghost of his former business partner Marley, it warns him that his soul will be in fetters for eternity unless he changes his greedy behaviour and announces other ghosts to visit him that very Christmas night, which symbolizes Scrooge’s forced transformation that is ultimately seen, even today, as a blessing and more broadly the restoration of social harmony and Victorian order. Dickens’s book redefined and reintroduced the spirit of Christmas as a seasonal merriment after the Puritan authorities in the seventeenth century England and America supressed pre-Christian rituals associated with it: the religious and social impli- cations of the book helped significantly to reinvent Christmas with emphasis on family, goodwill, and compassion. In her book Atwood traces the roots of Dick- ens’s Scrooge in Goethe’s and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, where Marlowe’s character Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 35 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32 36 Igor Maver is a bonvivant, a big-spender, who shares his wealth around very much like the re- formed Scrooge at the end of Dickens’s book. Atwood likewise insightfully traces the Faustian figure who is prepared to do everything for money in Washington Irving’s story »The Devil and Tom Walker«, where Walker represents utter stin- giness, ruthlessly grinding the people in need to the ground. Scrooge in Dickens, however, after being visited by Marley’s ghost and the three spirits of Christmas is a changed man, he is …set free from his own heavy chain of cash-boxes at the end of the book, when, instead of sitting on his pile of money, he begins to spend it. …: the post-ghost Scrooge, for instance, doesn’t give up his business, though whether it remained in part a moneylending business we aren’t told. No, it’s what you do with your riches that really counts. (98) Atwood’s latter-day literary character Scrooge Nouveau in a modernized Dick- ens’s book A Christmas Carol appears in the fifth chapter of the book and he is like humanity today, at the time of global warming and ruthless depletion of natural resources, faced with two options, an eco-friendly world or a typically Atwoodian dystopian future with all kinds of disasters befalling the natural environment. It is pay-up time for humanity as a whole, Atwood warns us. As always, the author knows just how to provide the right amount of humour on the most serious of issues such as debt, sin and payback, whether we see Pay- back as, »smart, funny and clever« (Liss) or »by no means the highlight of the book« (Ashenburg). John Gray in The New York Review of Books typically reads the book against the current US recession and writes that it »can be read as a de- fense of traditional beliefs about the hazards of debt« (Gray). He is right in sur- mising that in Atwood’s book there is an implicit notion that we may now have to return to older and simpler practices of thrift and saving. However, Atwood is no economist and the solution to the problem of debt is not given, and when it is, it seems somewhat naive. Her vast knowledge and erudition is, however, al- ways formidable: she convincingly shows in the best cultural materialist fashion how debt as leitmotiv and literary figures concerned with money predominate in Western fiction, »no matter how much the virtues of love may be waved ide- alistically aloft« (100) and how in her youth she thought the nineteenth-century novel was driven by love but now that she is older she sees that it was essentially driven by money. Margaret Atwood shows clearly the perils of debt and hints at the (im)possibility of a utopian future without greed and demonstrates how debt has indeed been a driving force in Western/Anglo-American fiction. She is perhaps a more successful writer of fiction than non-fiction, as some reviewers suggest, but she certainly is always very timely in her views and captures well Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 36 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32 37Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth the esprit of the period. Louis Bayard, among others, complains in his review article of the book that Atwood never really distinguishes between »bad debt« (credit cards) and »good debt« (college loans, mortgages). The niceties of Keynesian economics, of mi- crofinancing ventures, of the ways in which financial entities act as both bor- rowers and lenders … these are either beneath or beyond her«. (Bayard, cf. also Massie) The writer’s conclusion is far from conclusive: she is nonetheless able to introduce the theme of ecopolitics and global bailout which only can ensure our physical survival on Earth, for, as Atwood declares, all wealth comes from Nature and the only »serious« debts are those humanity owes to Mother Earth, i.e. ecological debts. Green politics, or ecopolitics, is a political ideology that aims to foster an ecologically sustainable society often rooted in  environmentalism, nonviolence, and social justice, from the 1970s onwards. Consequently the planet Earth will reclaim the payback that humanity owes to it or else »Nature would be a lifeless desert… and the resulting debt to Nature would be infinite« (202). This urgent and most timely ecopolitical statement is Atwood’s strongest forte in this creative non-fiction ecocritical work (cf. Buell 2005), where especially the multiple and well-chosen literary allusions are most engaging. Not only is she its forerunner but a cobuilder as well. REFERENCES Ashenburg, Katherine. »What Atwood Knows«. Toronto Life 43/2 (2009): 54-60. Atwood, Margaret. 2008. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Bayard, Louis. »Payback’s a Bitch« http://www.salon. com/books/ re- view/2008/10/28/payback/, accessed 28 March 2010. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.  Dickens, Charles. 1843. A Christmas Carol. New York: Pocket Books, 1958. Gray, John. »The Way of All Debt«. The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56/6, April 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22556, accessed 26 March 2010. Liss, David. »Getting Even: Civilization is Built on Credits and Debits«. Wash- ington Post, November 23, 2008: T5. Massie, Allan. »Book Review: Payback«. The Scotsman, October 25, 2008, 22. Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 37 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32 38 Igor Maver Mauss, Marcel. 1925. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison. London: Cohen and West, 1954. Zabus, Chantal. »Two Colonial Encounters and the Philosophy of the Gift«. Colonies, Missions, Cultures, ed. G. Stilz. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001. 123-134. Igor Maver University of Ljubljana igor.maver@ff.uni-lj.si Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth Margaret Atwood Provokativna knjiga Margaret Atwood vsebuje veliko literarnih referenc, ki pripomorejo k učinkovitemu poudarjanju njenih poudarkov o tako aktualni temi, kot je dolg, dolg kot filozofsko, politično-ekonomsko, versko in zgodovinsko vprašanje skozi stoletja. V osre- dnjih poglavjih knjige obravnava protestantsko reformacijo in uvedbo obresti na posojila ter v tej luči analizira romane Dickensa, Irvinga, Thackeraya in Georga Eliota. Njena zadnja izjava v knjigi pa govori o ekološkem dolgu, ki ga moramo vsi plačati Zemlji, da bi si zagotovili obstoj. Ključne besede: Margaret Atwood, viktorijanska književnost, Charles Dickens, dolg, ekologija Acta_Neophilologica_2024-1_FINAL.indd 38 17. 05. 2024 12:44:32