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July 05, 2007 04:18 PM EDT
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The narrators of The Diviners and Surfacing are engaged in the process of recreating their

lives or "re/membering" their identities by working through childhood memories. In both

cases, the authors have effectively used physical geography and landscape - and especially

water, to characterize the journeys of their protagonists. Water, in the form of lakes and rivers,

is used to reveal emotional states and to personify the changes the narrators experience as they

reinvent themselves.

The importance of the water motif to the novels is clear. First, both titles refer to water.

Surfacing can refer to the act of breaking the surface of water, which is a key scene in the

novel. A diviner is someone who uses a dowsing rod, usually made of hazel, to find water.

Secondly, water features are introduced in the first sentence of each book. Surfacing begins

with "I can't believe Iµm on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white

birches are dying, the disease is spreading from the south..." (Atwood, 7). The Diviners Part

One is titled "River of Now and Then", and the first sentence in the novel is "The river flowed

both ways" (Laurence, 11). By drawing attention to water from the onset, both authors inform

their readers that the use of water is key to the work. They then solidify this understanding of

the importance of the water motif through the use of repetition. Both novels include multiple

references to water features throughout. In the case of Surfacing, while the lake is the

predominant reference, there are also many other water features mentioned: rivers, a swamp, a

fountain, watercolours and rain. In The Diviners, however, the river is the dominant motif.

Most chapters begin at the river, and it is revisited at irregular intervals throughout. Laurence
carries the water theme through the Toronto section of her recollections by using "Brooke" as

the narrator's partner's name.

Water provides a means for reflection, and the narrators are clearly involved in the act

of reflecting on their lives. The unnamed narrator of Surfacing is searching for her missing

father - but also, we learn, searching for an understanding of self. She replays memories of her

childhood, triggered by the sights and smells and people of her surroundings. Her view of the

lake provides the reader with an indication of her mental state on being back in the area she

refers to as "home ground, foreign territory" (Atwood, 11). Atwood foreshadows that the

narrator has issues below the surface using descriptions of the lake (Griffith, 88). It is, the

narrator says, "tricky, the weather shifts, the wind swells up quickly; people drown every

year" and there are "deadheads, old pieces of tree waterlogged and partly decayed floating

under the surface" (Atwood, 31). Morag is less troubled by the issues beneath the surface than

the narrator of Surfacing, and this is indicated by her description of the river: Morag's river is

"moving quietly, its surface wrinkled by the breeze, each crease of water outlined by the sun"

(Laurence, 12). She also observes that "left to itself, the river would probably go on like this,

flowing deep, for another million or so years." However, Morag says, "That would not be

allowed to happen" (Laurence, 12) indicating that she is embarking on a journey of refection

and self discovery. Morag looks to the water for inspiration, and makes use of its reflective

properties to trigger her imagination.

The trees across the river were reflected in the water so sharply you could imagine it was
another world there, a treeworld in the water, willows and oak and maples, all growing there,
climbed upon by river-children, and slithered finnily through by muskie and yellow perch.
(Laurence, 106)

The reflective properties of water provide the narrators with a muse, and provide the reader

with a deeper understanding of the narrators.

Water is unreliable; it changes with the wind and with the weather. It hides things under it,

and reflects what is around it - but not always accurately. Atwood and Laurence use the

unreliable nature of water to explore the unreliable nature of the memories of the narrators. In

Surfacing, the narrator says

The sun has set, we glide back through the gradual dusk.....the shore things white-grey rocks
and dead trees, doubling themselves in the dark mirror. Around the illusion of infinite space
or no space, ourselves and the obscure shore which it seems we could touch, the water
between an absence (Atwood, 67).

Her surroundings are unreliable, and so too are her memories. One of the memories that the

narrator visits is that of her brother's near drowning experience: "It's the same dock my

brother fell off the time he drowned... my brother was under the water, face upturned, eyes

open and unconscious, sinking gently; air was coming out of his mouth" (Atwood, 33). Her

brother did not actually drown; he was saved by their mother. Although the narrator relates

this story as a memory, she goes on to explain that the event occurred before her birth

It was before I was born but I can remember it as clearly as if I saw it, and perhaps I did see it:
I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the
mother's stomach like a frog in a jar (Atwood, 33).

In another instance, the narrator catches herself in a lie: "I always felt safe here, even at

night." After examining it and recognizing it as a lie, she comes to the realization that "I have

to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they're my own" (Atwood, 73).

In The Diviners, Morag says "The river was the colour of liquid bronze this morning, the sun

catching it. Could that be right? No. Who had ever seen liquid bronze" (Laurence, 33).

Morag actively considers and questions her perception of the river - and also of her

memories. "And that is the end of the totally invented memories. I can't remember myself
actually being aware of inventing them, but it must have happened so" (Laurence, 18). She

recognizes that some memories are completely unreliable. Others are less clear:

But I remember it, everything. Somewhat ironically, it is the first memory of actual people
that I can trust, although I can't trust it completely, either, partly because I recognize
anomalies in it, ways of expressing the remembering, ways which aren't those of a five-year-
old (Laurence, 20).

In an examination of the reliability of childhood memories, Neil Sutherland observes that

memories are fallible, even in circumstances in which people have no need and not intention

to deceive (237). He also states that psychologists

explain that the shape a memory takes is as much the product of the process of the
remembering as it is of the actual characteristics of whatever it is that is being recalled. Thus
they argue that a memory is really a reconstruction of what is being recalled rather than a
reproduction of it and, further, that a succession of reconstructions of the same event form
themselves into a chain that tends to diverge more and more from the original (Sutherland,
239).

This is the process in which both narrators are engaged throughout the novels - they are

reconstructing and re/membering, pulling their memories of childhood into the words of their

present. There are, however, key differences in the process for each narrator. Morag returns

to the river. Most chapters begin at the river, and many end there as well. Morag's stories - the

memory movies and snapshots she explores throughout the novel - demonstrate the

reconstruction Sutherland refers to: the shaping of memories. The end result of the process is

increased consciousness - an increased awareness of who Morag is and how she came to be

so. In Surfacing, however, the process is less linear. The memories are raised, related by the

narrator - but before the narrator can integrate them into her self, she must not reconstruct

them but, rather, deconstruct them. The memories which the narrator of Surfacing first relates
are generally inaccurate and unreliable, coloured by her own needs, emotions and language,

or lack thereof. Repeatedly she expresses a need for more words: "Linguistics, I should have

studied that instead of art" (Atwood, 41). This process of deconstruction is exemplified by the

process the narrator goes through in remembering the experience of her abortion. Initially

when she refers to her child, it is as if she had carried it to term. "Leaving my child, that was

the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it was never really mine"

(Atwood, 29). In relating why she has not told either Anna or Joe about the baby, the narrator

says: "There's no reason to. He won't find out the usual way, there aren't any pictures...I have

to behave as though it doesn't exist, because for me, it can't" (Atwood, 48). This suggests that

in the memory she is trying to construct, the child actually does exist. It doesn't, though, and

this becomes clear when the narrator surfaces from the lake after having dived to look for her

father's found rock paintings:

"At first I thought it was my drowned brother, hair floating around the face image I'd kept
from before I was born; bit it couldn't be him...Then I recognized it wasn't ever my brother I
had been remembering: that had been a disguise. I knew when it was, it was in a bottle curled
up....it was dead already, it had drowned in air....I killed it. It wasn't a child but it could have
been one, I didn't allow it (Atwood, 143).

Water is used in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the narrator's memories and of her

self. When she dives down in the water, as she did when looking for the rock painting, there is

a letting go - in this case, of the words she has been using to protect herself. When she

surfaces, she is changed. This process, which is of major importance to the narrator of

Surfacing, is reflected through the use of the water motif. It also carries religious

connotations, evoking the image of a baptism. The narrator is redeemed by the act of

surfacing; she emerges from the water cleansed of the guilt she has carried as a result of the

abortion, and ready to face life again.

Water carries historical significance. As Maude Barlow highlighted in her presentation at

Georgian College in September, water is a finite hydrological cycle. The same water we now

use was present when the dinosaurs walked the earth, and it will be here long after we are

gone. (Barlow, 2006) Laurence uses this historical symbolism of water throughout The

Diviners. There are often oak trees, often associated with age, described in relation to the

water, and references such as:

The light-leafed willows and tall solid maples were like ancestors, carrying within themselves
the lands past. The wind skimmed northward along the water, and the deep currents drew the
river south. This was what Morag looked at every day, the river flowing both ways, and yet it
never lost its ancient power for her, and it never ceased to be new (307).

History is important to Morag, and much of the process she uses to re/member her life is to

examine stories of the past. She collects Piper Gunn stories from Christie, and Jules'

Tonnerre's stories of the Métis, Rider Tonnerre. She holds imaginary conversations with

Catherine Parr Traill. Laurence also incorporates other works into The Diviners, creating

intertextuality. At the end of the novel, Morag returns to the river, again equating the water

with historical significance:

The waters flowed from north to south, and the current was visible, but now a south wind was
blowing, ruffling the water in the opposite direction so that the river, as so often here, seemed
to be flowing both ways.

Look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence.

(Laurence, 477)

The water, again, flows both ways, as it has throughout the novel. This time, though, Morag

offers an explanation, and relates it to the process of re/membering her history which she has
been engaged in throughout the novel. She has taken the past and woven it into her present,

and it will be a part of her future. The last line also indicates that the process is incomplete,

and will continue "until the silence" or, in other words, until her death.

Morag, in The Diviners, is far more grounded, emotionally, than the narrator of

Surfacing, and this is made clear through the use of the water imagery used to reveal their

emotional states. Morag's river flows both ways. She is able to deal with contradiction, to

work with the flow of her life, past and present, and incorporate it into her sense of self. She is

reconstructing her life, re/membering it with the stories of her past, and she is able to look to

the future knowing that she will cope, and that the river which is her life and her story will

continue to flow "until the silence". The narrator of Surfacing will also go forward, but for

her, the experience has been more emotional and less balanced. She has, through the novel,

examined the swamp of her life, sifted through her stories, and let go of much that was

inaccurate. She has deconstructed her self to the point of becoming animalistic, naked in the

bush. She has, by the end of the novel, dived down deep, almost to the point of drowning,

before surfacing to begin her life anew, bringing with her new life, "the time-traveler, the

primaeval one who will have to learn, shape of a goldfish now in my belly, undergoing its

watery changes. Word furrows potential already in its proto-brain, untraveled paths...It must

be born, allowed" (Atwood, 191). The use of water imagery throughout both novels reveals

each narrator's emotional state, and clarifies the changes they have undergone as a result of

the process of re/membering their lives.

Works Cited
 Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing (1972) Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc. 1977

Barlow, Maude (2006) :
 . Presentation given September 22, 2006. Laurentian

@ Georgian Speaker Series.

Griffith, Margaret (1979) 


 Vol. 21 Issue 3. Retrieved on November 8, 2006

from <www.jstor.com>

Laurence, Margaret (1974) The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc. 1988

Sutherland, Neil. (1992) "When You Listen to the Winds of Childhood How Much

Can You Believe?" 
 


, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992). Retrieved on

November 8, 2006 from <www.jstor.com>