Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings” and The Difficulty of Plots

If it were not so central to one of the more pressing questions relating to the creation of fictional literature, “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood might be considering something of a pessimist’s tale. In reality, Atwood provides through the story a glimpse into the frustrations entailed in the literary creative process, but from an unusual angle in that she engages the reader in her frustrations, and for good reason: for Atwood, the reader is partly to blame for these frustrations. As such, instead of railing against the difficulties of derivative writing styles or a post-modern dearth of originality, Atwood uses the story as an opportunity to speak to the power of the plotline to dominate the creative process, but also its capacity for frustrating it as a result of the expectations of the reader, in addition to the manner in which the reader engages with the real.

What first emerges from Atwood’s formative work of meta-fiction is that each plotline ends in death, though each death is provoked by some human act as against the deceased party. In this sense, Atwood speaks not merely to the potentiality of death as a given plot’s driving force, but also the manner in which death depends upon the plot’s constituents—the players—for purposes of progressing to its logical conclusion. Much like the storyline in her other renowned work, The Handmaids Tale, in order for this to occur, characters must be actively engaged in life, as opposed to death. In this sense, Atwood seems to suggest that a subtly refined simplicity in her conception of the construction of fiction: that all plots end in some form of death, just as do all lives in the real, which renders all fiction not merely microcosmic illustrations of daily human interactions, but microcosmic demonstrations of the human life cycle, for better or for worse. The story thus emerges as a kind of guided tour through the creative process relevant to fictional work, as Atwood exposes the reader to the full but limited range of human tropes and mores upon which the writer may draw.

In the course of making her point, Atwood distinguishes between plots designed to make life easier on the writer and those that are genuinely crafted. Her “counterespionage” plotline is admittedly “fake,” but this does not mean that it will or should be any more maligned than less contrived plotlines: “You'll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don't be deluded by any other endings, they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality” (Atwood 3). There is a kind of liberating quality inherent in this sentiment, as Atwood seems to seek to free herself from the non-creative process of adjusting plot to suit reader comfort. Indeed, for Atwood, “True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between [beginnings and endings], since it's the hardest to do anything with” (Atwood 3). As such, Atwood focuses the reader on the creative impetus of the writer, both liberating the writer from self-applied pressure and also vindicating him or her by calling the reader’s attention to the difficulty of their task.

The reader recognizes the formalist's approach in Atwood’s story a kind of re-direction of their attention from the climactic tension that engages the reader with a plot’s ultimate end and the act of creating that which allows for this end; an end that may captivate or devastate, but which is certain to have been made possible only through the work performed by the writer in the course of leading to it. In “Happy Endings,” the plot becomes a central character despite that is routinely dismissive throughout as something susceptible to contrivance, though not through its means of construction, but only by its end. Here, Atwood focuses the reader on the writer’s creative task, which she appropriates as being somehow threatened by the inevitability of its end. This frustration stems partly from the difficulty caused by post-modern existence: nothing now remains under the sun, especially in a world in which the actors are so mundanely engaged with one another. And yet, the modern reader wishes for the writer to redeem the modern existence from the temporalized existence to which he or she has fated him or herself.

To this end, Atwood’s various plotlines are each distinct from the other, though each is also entirely derived from the mundane qualities of daily existence. In other words, it is the subject matter of all fiction—namely, human existence and interaction—that places the writer at such a profound disadvantage in the post-modern era that he or she is impelled to account for this lack of inspiration through inordinately attended to a given work’s ending, as opposed to endeavoring to further engage with its middle. In Atwood’s conceptions of the plot, characters know themselves to be unhappy or unsatisfied but nevertheless persist in the ways that have allowed for their frustration. It is as though Atwood is railing not against the difficulties of crafting fictional literature, but of the hardships entailed in manipulating fictional characters to do other than what their real counterparts might do: “Mary gets rundown. Crying is bad for your face; everyone knows that and so does Mary but she can't stop” (Atwood 1). Just as Mary cannot stop her tears, neither can Atwood compel Mary to do so. Through introducing such a dichotomy, Atwood animates the creative process entailed in fictional literature.

While animating the process in which she is engaged while speaking to the larger human act of creating life from life, Atwood’s frustrations seem to also speak to the same frustrations held by most humans: the seemingly futile nature of choice and existence. Where a plotline accounts for unrequited love, death is inevitable, though when it accounts for the opposite, a tidal wave will nevertheless cause it (Atwood 2). As such, there is a kind of inevitability to a plot’s conclusion that is effectively predetermined by those from whom it operates; namely, the reader, who should not be conditioned to expect more from fiction than he or she derives from the real. “If you like,” writes Atwood, it can be ‘Madge,’ ‘cancer,’ ‘guilty and confused,’ and ‘bird watching’” (Atwood 2). Accordingly, if the reader is too conditioned to mundane reality, it is not the role of the writer to compensate for this lack of animation, but rather to engage with the real and animate that which is nearly insusceptible to animation: the human condition. For Atwood, this condition amounts to “about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another,” leaving little room for diversification.

Ultimately, Atwood’s “Happy Endings” is a testament to the challenges and frustrations of the writer and reader of post-modern fiction. For the writer, post-modern existence has interfered with the proliferation of malleable subject matter, with the subjects of fiction so immersed in a mundane real as to render themselves incapable of serving as fictional subjects. For the reader, Atwood’s frustrations are all the more frustrating, as he or she is helpless to aid in the process by which the fiction upon which he or she relies is created. In this sense, Atwood seems to suggest a kind of hyper-dependence on the part of the reader in that he or she will do little to better his or her own existence, content to simply rely on the writer, who has so many happy endings at his or her disposal. In eviscerating the mystique of the happy ending, while focusing the reader on the task of life-living that accounts for all manner of endings, Atwood challenges the reader both to understand the challenges with which she is faced, but also to understand those with which they are faced. For Atwood, if both parties rise to meet these challenges simultaneously, both will be better for it.

Work Cited

Atwood, Margaret. “Happy Endings.” Good Bones and Simple Murders. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Print.