In Surfacing, art is a powerful tool that can either reinforce or challenge existing social realities. The novel takes place during a trip that the narrator, her boyfriend Joe, and their married friends Anna and David make to northern Quebec after the narrator’s father disappears there. During the trip, David and Joe work on a film project called Random Samples, which reinforces existing social realities like the subjugation of animals and women. David, the film’s “director,” graduates from filming fish guts and a slaughtered heron to coercing his wife Anna to strip naked for the camera against her wishes. Similarly, the narrator—an illustrator—is working on drawings for a book of fairytales that reinforce a sexist feminine ideal according to which women are thin, beautiful princesses who never need to use the bathroom. By contrast, when the narrator discovers sketches her father made of prehistoric rock paintings, she sees in the depictions of horned and snakelike human figures a challenge to the subjugation of animals and to distaste for real human bodies, especially real female bodies. With these very different instances of art—exploitative films and princess illustrations on the one hand, prehistoric rock paintings on the other—the novel insists that art can fight for or against existing social hierarchies.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Art ThemeTracker
Art Quotes in Surfacing
They’re making a movie, Joe is doing the camera work, he’s never done it before but David says they’re the new Renaissance Men, you teach yourself what you need to learn.
For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I would be able to use because there has [sic] never been any important women artists. That was before we were married and I still listened to what he said, so I went into Design and did fabric patterns.
Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
“You’ll go in beside the dead bird[.]”
