Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [98]
“Now my proposed thesis topic,” he had begun. “They may not approve of it, they’re very conservative around here, but even if they turn it down I can always write it up for one of the journals, no human thought is ever wasted; anyway it’s publish or perish these days, if I can’t do it here I can always do it in the States. What I have in mind is something quite revolutionary, ‘Malthus and the Creative Metaphor,’ Malthus being of course merely a symbol for what I want to get at, that’s the inescapable connection between the rise of the birth rate in modern times, say the past two or three centuries, especially the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth, and the change in the way the critics have been thinking about poetry, with the consequent change in the way poets have been writing it, and oh I could safely extend the thing to cover all of the creative arts. It’ll be an interdisciplinary study, a crossing over the presently much too rigid field lines, a blend of say economics, biology, and literary criticism. People get much too narrow, too narrow, they’re specializing too much, that makes you lose sight of a lot of things. Of course I’ll have to get some statistics and draw some graphs; thus far I’ve merely been doing the groundwork thinking, the primary research, the necessary examination of the works of ancient and modern authors.…”
They were having sherry with the soup. Fish groped for his sherry glass, almost upsetting it.
Marian was now under crossfire, since as soon as Trevor had sat down again he had begun to talk at her from the other side, telling her about the soup, which was clear and subtly flavoured: how he had extracted its essences, painstakingly, moment by moment, at a very low heat; and since he was the only person at the table who was looking more or less at her she felt obliged to look at him in return. Duncan wasn’t paying any attention to anyone and neither Fish nor Trevor seemed at all disconcerted by the fact that both of them were talking at once. They were evidently used to it. She found however that she could manage by nodding and smiling from time to time and keeping her eyes riveted on Trevor and her ears on Fish, who was continuing, “You see as long as the population, per square mile especially, was low and the infant mortality rate and the death rate in general was high, there was a premium on Birth. Man was in harmony with the purposes, the cyclical rhythms of Nature, and the earth said, Produce, Produce. Be fruitful and multiply, if you’ll recall.…”
Trevor sprang up and dashed around the table, removing the soup plates. His voice and his gestures were becoming more and more accelerated; he was popping in and out of the kitchen like the cuckoo in a cuckoo-clock. Marian glanced at Fish. Apparently he had missed several times with the soup: his beard was becoming glutinous with spilled food. He looked like a highchaired and bewhiskered baby; Marian wished someone would tie a bib around his neck.
Trevor made an entrance with clean plates, and another exit. She could hear him fidgeting about the kitchen, in the background of Fish’s voice: “And so then consequently the poet also thought of himself as the same kind of natural producer; his poem was something begotten so to speak on him by the Muses, or let’s say maybe Apollo, hence the term ‘inspiration,’ the instilling of breath as it were into; the poet was pregnant with his work, the poem went through a period of gestation, often a long one, and when it was finally ready to see the light of day the poet was delivered of it often with much painful labour. In this way the very process of artistic creation was itself an imitation of Nature, of the thing