‘The Roar of the Boneyard’: Life Before Man

Abstract

Although written at least ten years before her novel Life Before Man, Atwood’s nightmare poem ‘A Night in the Royal Ontario Museum’ is a companion piece. Both poem and novel centre on the museum as a metaphor for modern life, which Atwood sees here as a vast tomb or an elaborate labyrinth, a maze in which human beings are lost, entrapped, looking for the EXIT sign. All the maps are obsolete, tradition is no longer a guide, and mirrors have lost their magic power to reveal truth. Pervasive in the novel, as in the poem, is a sensation of panic at the possibility of madness, of being ‘dragged to the mind’s/deadend’. And always there is the realisation of inevitable death, the sand running through the ‘glass body’ (Life Before Man, 78).

Who locked me

into this crazed man-made

stone brain

where the weathered

totempole jabs a blunt

finger at the byzantine

mosaic dome

Under that ornate

golden cranium I wander

among fragments of gods, tarnished

coins, embalmed gestures

chronologically arranged,

looking for the exit sign

but in spite of the diagrams

at every corner, labelled

in red: YOU ARE HERE

the labyrinth holds me.

and I am dragged to the mind’s

deadend, the roar of the boneyard,

I am lost

among the mastodons

and beyond.… (The Animals in That Country, 20)