Sipped Ink vol 6 issue 2

The Blind Assassin pp102-205

Hello friends. How are you? I trust you’ve continued to enjoy the novel this week, and that you also feel as though it’s starting to take on a determinable shape. 

Not quite knowing what to expect, I found the beginning of the novel a little surprising: the layering of different texts with their corresponding different eras and differing weights of truth within the novel… it was a lot. This week I feel as though the book settled into itself a bit, and that meant I could also relax into it a little. A few people reached out this week to say that they were struggling with one element of the text or another. The most common question was over the function of the Zycron sections, so let’s spend a moment on that. 

To those unfamiliar with Atwood’s oeuvre: it is a broad church. Even amongst just the novels there are strictly realist works in both historic (Alias Grace) and modern (Cat’s Eye) periods. There are re-writings of Shakespeare (Hag-Seed, as mentioned last week) and Homer (The Penelopiad). And there are works of speculative fiction, such as the novel for which she is most well known: The Handmaid’s Tale and it’s recent (Booker-winning) sequel The Testaments. Atwood is that rare writer who is unafraid to incorporate elements usually ghettoised as ‘genre’, or otherwise considered non-literary or unserious. Her MaddAddam trilogy (beginning with one of my favourites of her novels: 2003’s Oryx & Crake) is perhaps her furthest venture into this territory. But even those novels, with their lab-grown animal hybrids, designer pharmaceuticals, and global pandemics are extrapolated from the world we currently inhabit. 

In Laura’s novel The Blind Assassin the unnamed man composing the story set on Zycron points out that no element of his tale is made-up of whole cloth, but that everything is based in past or present cultures of Earth. This has an echo of Atwood’s own remarks when the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale (and its depiction of the United States transmuted into the authoritarian country of Gilead) was met with some consternation. Nothing about the theocracy of Gilead or its treatment of women, as depicted in the novel, is without real precedent. 

We have already noted Iris’s sections of The Blind Assassin remarking upon gender norms, and we might see the Zycron sections as doing so too. It is certainly a different angle of approach, but I believe the same subject to be under discussion. At this juncture I can only assure you that we’re all in great hands, and that the inclusion of a meta textual proto sci-fi novel within a novel within the novel is far from accidental. Even if it isn’t 100% clear to us yet, Atwood most certainly has a purpose for including this strand.

I heard from numerous people this week who did me the service of at least reassuring me I wasn’t alone in seeing references to lilies and ice all over the place. Like cats in Murakami, once you start looking for them, they’re everywhere!

OK, on to a few of my notes from this week.

It struck me when Iris again ponders on the page why she is writing her story at all (p118), that she may have provided something of an answer herself already. Iris tells us that she chooses to use the doughnut shop’s bathroom because she enjoys the asynchronous conversation played out in different inks and various handwriting on the walls. This isn’t so different from the text with which we are being presented, is it? We are also confronted with various authorial hands at work, and though the conversation between them is less direct, I think Atwood is inviting us to reflect upon the ways in which Iris’s story comments upon Laura’s. I would suggest to Iris that she is writing because she understands at some level that she carries the double gift / burden of having outlived her sister. At one level she writes her own story ‘underneath’ Laura’s simply because she is able to. Nevertheless, she is doubtless aware of the responsibility of doing so. Consider the following passage with reference to one of the statues in Port Ticonderoga: 

No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn’t erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art. (p176)

We see here Iris’s understanding of how stories work and how truths are formed. It is related to her observation earlier in the novel that people prefer simple, uncomplicated stories. But here she seems to go further, and to wonder at the manner in which stories shape our lasting understanding. At one point Iris has a similar thought regarding her mother:

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves (p116)

At other points we detect Iris’s barely veiled distaste for the way people have come to think of Laura in the wake of her death and the success of her novel. These are all stories that have become, to one degree or another, accepted truths or accepted versions of the truth. When Iris wonders at her own writing, I see her struggling with the fact that she herself is composing yet another story. Perhaps she lacks the conviction that it is any closer to the truth than the others, fearing that she has become the subject of that de Maupassant quote that Mr Erskine made her translate as a girl: 

L’histoire, cette vielle dame exaltée at menteuse (History, that excitable and lying old lady) (p199)

I am grateful this week for a note from DL, who provides an insightful reading of Laura’s apparent near-suicide as a girl: 

I note how Iris’s selection of the lines from Tennyson (‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’) following on from Laura’s attempted suicide in the waters of the Louveteau (p181), and Miss Violence’s reply to Laura’s questioning (‘It was boundless love. But it was unrequited’) echo the epigraph, ‘Inscription on a Carthaginian Funerary Urn’ - that resonant quotation which includes the phrase, ‘the sea was boundless’. The incident on the bank of the Louveteau is surely a harbinger of Laura’s doom.’

I think DL is perfectly correct here; we might add water to our list of symbols, or else consider it a form of ice. I might add that Laura’s direct inspiration seems to be the overheard discussion between Reenie and Mrs Hillcoate speculating on the disparate methods of suicide preferred by men and women. The gist of the conversation is that men prefer sudden acts of violence in which they themselves make the decisive action; whereas women prefer simply to place themselves in a position from which they have no escape: 

women like that might walk into the river upstream and then be sucked under the surface by the weight of their own clothing, so they couldn’t swim to safety even if they’d wanted to (p173)

Here again we find examination of the difference between gender roles. This is certainly one of the novel’s major themes, and one that several people wrote to say they had been keeping an eye on during the week’s reading. One thing it occurs to me that I neglected to mention last week is the way in which this ties into the depiction of war and what it does to Norval Chase (and his family). I don’t wish to backtrack too far, but I would invite you to consider the topic, and particularly what Atwood is suggesting by it regarding how society treats its men. You might take as a starting point the disagreement over the inclusion of the word ‘willingly’ on the statue of The Weary Soldier. 

I’d like to close this week with a note on another allusion. DL is quite correct, above, when they note Miss Violence’s use of the word ‘boundless’ echoing the ‘Inscription on a Carthaginian Funerary Urn’, but it’s another urn I want to talk about for a moment. Miss Violence’s final attempt at answering one and all of Laura’s questions – following from her assertion that only God and Tennyson need not explain themselves! — is to quote not Tennyson, but Keats. Specifically (at p190) she relies upon the final lines of his 1819 poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Most interestingly for our purposes, Keats’s poem — which it might be of benefit to read in its entirety – is composed primarily of two competing scenes: in one a lover is caught in a fruitless, endless pursuit of their beloved; in the other a set of villagers are preparing to carry out a ritual sacrifice. Sound familiar?

OK, I did it! I brought us full circle and back to Zycron, and that’s quite enough from me for this week. My thanks, as always, to everyone that dropped a line to @sippedink on Twitter or sippedink[at]gmail[dot]com with thoughts, feelings, and questions. I apologise if I didn’t get back to you in person — I will endeavour to do so. 

What does the week ahead hold in store? Perhaps we’ll get some greater clarity around some of the still-mysterious relationships in the novel (Iris & Aimee; Iris & Sabrina; Iris & Richard… Iris and just about anyone actually). Perhaps we’ll learn more about Iris’s present circumstances or Laura’s adult life before her suicide. I for one also want to know what happens next in Sakiel-Norn!

Have a great week, and I’ll see you here next Sunday to discuss everything up to the end of the chapter ‘The Tango’ (p300 in the Virago). 

— Adam