Sipped Ink vol 6 issue 3

The Blind Assassin pp206-300

Hello friends, and congratulations on completing another week of this summer’s read-along. I hope you’re enjoying the novel as much as I am. 

Though, of course, we’re breaking the book up into somewhat artificial chunks, you’ll have noticed that we spent this week entirely with Iris and her reminiscences. This strand has always felt like the primary one in the novel, and in Section V we find Atwood really asserting its prominence and giving it some breathing room. Looking back at this section — which begins with ‘The fur coat’ — we find it a steady project of scene setting and character development. We know a great deal more about the two sisters, the Chase family in general, and the socio-political environment of Port Ticongeroga (in the 1930s in particular). And yet there is still so much we don’t know. For a narrator temporally situated at some remove from these events Iris still plays some of her cards remarkably close to her chest. Perhaps, within the fiction of the novel, it is because she expects whomever might read what she is writing to have at least some acquaintance with certain facts. (We got what I believe might be our first indication this week that Iris supposes Myra might be an eventual audience for her prose (p224), with the insertion of an aside that speaks perfectly to Iris’s acid streak.)

At a higher level, of course, the text is structured this way so as to keep the reader engaged and wondering at eventualities. I think one of our number summed it up best in a note I received this week; my thanks to AB for this insight:

There is something in the writing that is like a really good stand up routine. You know you need to pay attention, take in the details and keep them all in your head because you’re going to need them later, for the punch line.

Indeed this week the book felt to me slightly closer to a mystery novel than it had before. We have been introduced to some of the players we knew (Richard) or suspected (Alex) were coming in some form or other, and Atwood has begun to arrange these pieces on the board in a manner such that we can guess at the developing pattern without knowing its precise shape. We see the developing of a relationship between Laura and the outsider Alex — otherised for his guessed at provenance and political views that place him in opposition to (at least the head of) the Chase family’s interests. But how does this relationship map onto the one central in Laura’s eventual novel? We find the word ‘zycron’ amongst those nonsensical others listed in the book Alex leaves behind, but how much of the rest is Laura’s invention?

We see also the beginning of the end (?) of Norval Chase: his slow personal disintegration; the economic, then political problems at the factory that result in its destruction. And, we learn, the union between Iris & Richard is a direct result. My thanks for the good notes from several readers this week who remarked upon the gender dynamics very prominently on play in this episode. One of my own highlights was the pseudo-rhetorical question Iris poses parenthetically at p264:

(Which does a man prefer? Bacon and eggs, or worship? Sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending how hungry he is.)

There is something here about the fragility of masculinity: it’s neediness both for physical and psychic nourishment that it cannot provide for itself. And yet helplessness is not inequitably distributed; we get another chilling invocation of the rushing water metaphor:

…gazing down at the black water and remembering the stories of women who had thrown themselves in. They’d done it for love, because that was the effect love had on you. It snuck up on you, it grabbed hold of you before you knew it, and then there was nothing you could do. Once you were in it – in love — you would be swept away, regardless. (p245)

This has echoes both of the passive suicide methods mentioned last week, and of Reenie’s warnings regarding men in movie theatres. It also, of course, returns us to the river and to the shadow of Laura’s own eventual suicide. How are we to read Iris’s marriage to Richard in relation to this? It is distinctly not love (at least to this juncture) as Atwood takes pains to draw it as a rather sad trap into which Iris has no real choice but to walk. She becomes in some sense an allegory of the sacrificial bride (cf. Sakiel-Norn), hoping only to secure a future for her father and sister at the expense of her own. And yet, knowing as we do that she is eventually free of at least this particular snare, how do we evaluate the inescapable finality of the suggested metaphor? Perhaps one answer lies in another metaphor suggested by Iris, with what feels like the weight of foreshadowing:

…was I that dangerous? Only in the way sheep are, I now suppose. So dumb they jeopardize themselves, and get stuck on cliffs cornered by wolves, and some custodian has to risk his neck to get them out of trouble. (p297)

A couple of notes pertaining to the relationship(s) between reality and stories, which has persisted as a theme for me. The week’s reading began with Iris comparing her elderly self to a letter: ‘deposited here, collected there. But a letter addressed to no one’ (p206). She intends it in a self-deprecating way, but I read a certain freedom in it (particularly in light of what I have discussed above). There is an echo here of her description of Laura’s face from earlier in the novel: ‘A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on’ (p57). It’s interesting to consider where the power lies in such a dynamic. It seems to me that The Blind Assassin is concerned at several levels with the freedom and power to write one’s own story instead of being written into another’s. I have noted this previously with respect to the statue of the Weary Soldier, the textual palimpsest of the donut shop’s bathroom wall, and other occurrences. One of the most striking instances this week was in relation to the unexpected (to this reader at least) incident of physical intimacy between Iris & Alex in the attic.

Did I do anything to provoke him? Nothing I can recall, but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened? 
It is now: I am the only survivor. (p266)

So Iris asserts herself as the author of her story; a stark contrast to the helplessness she later reports when it comes to her own marriage.

There is another instance of this theme during Alex’s introduction: ‘“An orphan!” said Reenie. “He could be anybody!”’ (p218). This is intended as a warning, but is distinctly readable in contrast to the Chase girls (and Iris especially) who are almost entirely constrained by the circumstances of their family. Alex sees as much himself:

What does it mean, anyway — family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I’m free of the temptation, that’s all. I’m free of the strings. Nothing ties me down. (p.231)

In closing this week’s reading we find Iris again mulling the question of her own authorship of her story, both in the living of it and its remembrance:

I say “her,” because I don’t recall having been present, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I and the girl in the picture have ceased to be the same person. I am her outcome, the result of the life she once lived headlong; whereas she, if she can be said to exist at all, is composed only of what I remember. I have the better view — I can see her clearly, most of the time. But even if she knew enough to look, she can’t see me at all. (p.292)

Iris seems to note in herself a temptation to perform upon her memories something like the procedure her sister once performed on family photos: erasing, colourising at whim, reforming. Even one’s former self is something recognised as a construction, and something which one is granted all power to judge and no power to change. Unless, of course, consolation can be found in being the last one to tell the story, uncorrected.

One final note from me this week, and I like its similarity to the way I closed last Sunday’s newsletter. I expect you all went away and read your Keats! And this week your homework is the short poem Iris is reaching to remember aboard her ocean liner. No doubt it is from her time under the tutelage of Miss Violence, for it is of course Tennyson. Of particular note for us, I think, the final stanza:

Break, break, break 
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me.

My thanks as always to those who dropped me a line this week, it’s always appreciated. Apologies if I didn’t get back to you individually - just know that I get a kick out of your insights and to see so many of you enjoying the novel. (A specific shout out to the ‘ice’ and ‘lily’ hunters amongst you who seem to be wearing out your highlighters!)

You may have noted that tomorrow we dip back into Laura’s novel. I will see you back here in a week to talk about everything up to the end of the chapter ‘Sunnyside’ (p403 in the Virago paperback).

— Adam