Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth By Margaret Atwood, Anansi, Toronto (2008)

    Amid the plethora of voices analyzing the roots of the financial system's meltdown and the mechanics of various bailout proposals, a few are consistently interesting: Dean Baker, the Nobels: Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, Kevin Phillips, Simon Johnson, Matt Taibbi, William Greidner.... The occasional work will delve more deeply or attack these problems from a different angle: philosopher Andre Gorz's "Theorizing Deliverance from the Labor- and Commodity-Centered Society," demographer Emmanuel Todd's "The Specter of a Soviet-Style Crisis," Hervé Kempf's "How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet," Thomas Geoghegan's indispensable article in Harper's April 2009 issue: "Infinite Debt: How Unlimited Interest Rates destroyed the Economy." For a truly Olympian view, however, I recommend novelist Margaret Atwood's stunning "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth," the published volume of her 2008 Massey Lectures, which were broadcast over Canadian Broadcast Company Radio last November.

    A keen critical thinker who has already transmuted her finely tuned novelist's perception of the way we are now into such dazzling dystopian futures as "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985) and "Oryx and Crake" (2003), Atwood in "Payback" looks back to genetics, archaeology, history and literature to explore "that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force." [1] And, as she warns, that exploration focuses neither on the practical nor on the lurid, though both are touched on and illuminated, but on the questions, "Are we in debt to anyone or anything for the bare fact of our existence? If so, what do we owe and to whom or to what? And how should we pay?" [2]

    Atwood's method is poetic and allusive: the sum of her citations, examples, expositions, questions, etymologies, anecdotes and references far exceeds the substance of any conclusions. Moreover, the pleasure excited by her virtuoso voice - its perfect pitch and control, its apparently effortless elegance - almost undermines her enounced intention to inflict at least some pain. [3] I suspect the reason even Atwood's most acerbic commentary gave me pleasure does not derive from my taste for the mordant (especially when it happens to dovetail to my own views) but from the underlying and overarching optimism that informs her work [4] - not confidence that humans will work out the best possible future for themselves in time, but what appears a conviction worthy of the Egyptian Goddess Ma'at (who, with her balancing scales, is evoked early and often in "Payback") that justice is the equilibrium point towards which both human and natural systems tend. This, as Atwood suggests, is not necessarily reassuring for humans likely to be alive after the next twenty years.

    Atwood begins her exploration with observations on primate and early childhood behavior, inferring that a sense of fairness - as well as the ability to detect cheating and a preference for balance - is hard-wired into the human. Ma'at and the scales for weighing the hearts of dead humans is introduced, along with other ancient gods and goddesses active in the fields of debt and justice and their various symbolic accoutrements. The moral ledger, for example, seems to be as old as actual bookkeeping - the role of the divine to maintain debits and credits (two sides of the same entity) in equilibrium.

    "Debt and Sin" ponders whether it is more sinful to be a debtor or a creditor, really taking off from a deconstruction of the Lord's Prayer: is it debts or trespasses that are to be forgiven and are these literal debts, moral trespasses - or both? Pawning (including its "relationship" to the game of chess) and redemption, taking and trading, sin-eating, human sacrifice, Saint Nick-Old Nick, Polonius, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Tony Blair's postulated anti-nomianism, 1984, Dante's Inferno, and the drama of Christian life, colloquial expressions and Sumerian myth intersect and blend in a great antiphonal meander that delivers the reader to "Debt as Plot."

    The Novelist who revels in story delivers the simple, but deeply productive, insight of "Debt as Plot," referring once again to animal behavior studies and anthropology, drawing on transactional analysis and the "Games People Play" to suggest how debt must always represent a story with a plot that unfolds over time. In a chapter dense with literary references and example, Atwood's primary examples are Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge, the latter redeemed for the type of behavior that damns the former. Atwood considers the changes in economic model and social values over the centuries that separate the two works and how they might influence that difference. The implications of "ruin," the symbolic freight of the mill, the connotations of a game of "Forfeits," the exquisite possibilities of revenge as payback inform this chapter's conclusion and frame the next chapter's subject, "The Shadow Side."

    One of the great virtues of "Payback" is that it revisits commonplaces, such as "He's paid his debt to society" and "Crime doesn't pay," the point of departure for an extended consideration of what Atwood describes as "the nastier forms of debt and credit account balancing." [5] She quotes Dr. Johnson, on the subject of debtor's prison, his Eighteenth Century reflection quite suitable for a present-day editorial:

    "Those who have made the laws have apparently supposed that every deficiency of payment is a crime of the debtor. But the truth is, that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust." [6]

    Atwood's nuanced reading of "The Merchant of Venice" in this chapter alone is worth the price of admission.

    The final chapter summarizes what has gone before and continues to build upon it. Atwood observes:

    "In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly." [7]

    She returns to Dr. Faustus and Ebenezer Scrooge, postulating "Scrooge Original" and "Scrooge Lite" before she offers her own invention, "Scrooge Nouveau," whose nighttime adventures are most strongly suggestive of what Atwood believes the response to the questions that generated her book to be.

    The graceful acknowledgments section that follows the book merely makes explicit a procedure Atwood has followed throughout: recognition we owe to one another and to those who have gone before us for so much of what we think, what we know, what we understand, who we are. And this generous, resonant book makes a substantial addition to our already-significant indebtedness to Margaret Atwood.

    [1]"Payback," p.2.

    [2] Ibid. p.1.

    [3] Ibid. p.165.

    [4] Caroline Montpetit, Margaret Atwood à l'heure des comptes Le Devoir, Montreal, 16 April 2009.

    [5] Payback, p. 165.

    [6] Ibid. p.128.

    [7] Ibid. p.168.