Sipped Ink vol 6 issue 4

The Blind Assassin pp301-403

Hello friends. I’m reliably informed by my calendar that it’s Sunday, and that means it’s time for another newsletter. Let me apologise up front if this week’s analysis is somewhat less considered than I usually aim for. I won’t bore you with excuses, save to say that amongst them is the cardinal sin of having left my reading to the last minute this week, and as such having had too little time to think towards and write this newsletter!

Following last week’s stay entirely within the realm of Iris’s narrative, we kicked off this week with a vacation to that other The Blind Assassin: Laura Chase’s novel within a novel. We did dip back into Zycron, but to me these chapters from the meta-novel felt a little more grounded, and little more interested in giving us some context around the unnamed man and woman. Indeed, this felt like the week in which quite a bit of the hazy penumbra of the text started to clear a little and we might start to guess at some of what’s still to be revealed. 

One clever aspect of the way in which Atwood has chosen to structure her novel is that each revelation in what we might consider its ‘primary’ text casts a new light upon the content of the ‘secondary’ text — and vice versa. As we have garnered more detail about Alex’s seclusion in the attic of Avilion, and subsequent disappearance, we reflect upon the manner in which the unnamed man in Laura’s novel is forced to live: always wary of pursuers. In fact, this week for what I believe is the first time, it was revealed that his fear is specifically of communists, and in particular a group of former associates (pp334-5). Enough shape and colour has accrued that we can start to see Alex’s situation may be the same, and that — if she knew where he was — continued rendezvouses between Laura & Alex might share similarities with those she depicts in her novel. What does this tell us about the rest of their relationship? Are we of the opinion that such a relationship persisted, or is it invention on Laura’s part? (Something nags at me saying that we have enough information to discern this, and yet I cannot put my finger upon specifics.)

I’d like to take a moment here to backtrack a little and interject an excellent note I received this week from SS, which I’ll reproduce a section of: 

On p268 when Iris and Laura find Alex’s notebook with an a to z listing, the p is “porphyrial”. Iris says “I thought this list looked suspiciously like a code”.

However, other than “zycron” nothing stands out, UNTIL p278 when Iris says “Porphyry is the word that springs to mind” so Atwood makes a second reference, so surely of some importance?

So far, Tennyson has turned up twice, but, does this now point us to Robert Browning, a contemporaneous poet? His poem ‘Porphryria’s Lover’, initially published as ‘Porphyria’, concerns a man who strangles his lover - Porphyria - with her hair “and all her hair, in one long yellow strand”. Laura? p288 “the wheat-coloured coil of it hung over one shoulder”. So, a poem about a man (Richard? Alex?) who responds to a beautiful woman (Laura?) by killing her?

This entirely slipped my notice, and SS does a good job of summarising why the inclusion feels important. More and more it feels as though the decision to begin the novel (indeed, its very first sentence!) with Laura’s death, lends much of the text a portentous shadow. The more we learn of Laura, the more we wish to know the precise circumstances that led to her demise. 

(Side note — we also got some Coleridge this week.)

Other secrets into which we are at least partially admitted in this week’s section are the manner in which Laura’s novel came to be published; a little more around Iris’s relationship with her deceased sister; and a teaspoonful of details about (the heretofore notably absent) Sabrina.

Numerous people sent me notes with variations on the same theme: expressing the opinion that ‘The steamer trunk’ felt like a chapter central to one’s understanding of the novel. It did feel to me as though some form of knot were being, if not untied, then loosened before us in this section. 

Let’s take another look at its opening paragraph: 

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. (p.345)

How are we to read this in relation to Iris’s own autobiographical project? We have noted previously her reticence in writing at all, and her concern with providing the truth as opposed to reductive stories. How should we relate it to the novel that Laura writes: framed as fiction, and yet – we increasingly suspect – heavily inflected with detail from her own life?

I was struck by the manner in which the image of a ‘long scroll of ink’ is mirrored, towards the end of the week’s reading, in the thoughts inspired in Iris by Winifred’s mention of attempted abortion via rollercoaster: 

…long thick lines of red, scrolling out from the roller coaster and from the girls in it like paint thrown from a bucket. Like long scrawls of vermillion cloud. Like skywriting. 

Now I think: but if writing, what kind of writing? Diaries, novels, autobiographies? (p.399)

Are these not the very texts that the Chase sisters are composing in some form or other? 

There is also, within the excerpts from Laura’s The Blind Assassin this week, a curious instance of self-censorship akin to that which Iris warns (above) will happen if one cannot believe in the ephemerality of one’s language. Fittingly it relates to water. And — adding to the layering — it is a passage that reads to me as an observation that could come straight out of Iris’s own narrative: 

Water is nebulous, it has no shape, you can pass your hand right through it; yet it can kill you. The force of such a thing is its momentum, its trajectory. What it collides with, and how fast. The same might be said about — but never mind that. (p.329)

I am particularly interested in the abrupt halt to the final thought here. The interjection, like the observation, appears to come from the unnamed man in the text. However, it is possible to read it in a couple of opposing ways. In one reading it is an innocent piece of backtracking by someone making up a story as he tells it. This appears to be the man’s compositional modus operandi, and yet it’s also true that his storytelling is elsewhere impressively fluid and full of detail. So if we’re not to read it as a storytelling misstep on his part, it is instead readable as a comment he was preparing to make outside of the remit of the story, but which he refrains from completing. Was he about to compare the woman’s personality to water? Or perhaps his own? The former seems more likely to me, and yet I’m unsure why he hesitates. He has thought and said more personal things about and to her elsewhere. 

I think perhaps the aspect which makes this observation feel so Iris-like is that very specific touch upon a theme familiar to us from her portion of the text: the implacable, irresistible nature of water. Indeed, this week we find Iris herself at it once more: 

I stood on the bridge and stared over the side, at the water upstream, smooth as taffy, dark and silent, all menacing potential. […] I became conscious of […] breathlessness, as if I were in over my head. But over my head in what? Not water; something thicker. Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond. (p.366)

This is a neat inversion of the image from the portion of Laura’s novel quoted above, and those which we have observed previously in Atwood’s novel. Here it is not rushing water (‘momentum’, ‘trajectory’) and the danger of drowning, but rather sedentary water and the danger of stagnation. 

(NB I once wrote an entire paper on water metaphors in Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of a Lion (1987), so perhaps I’m prone to placing inappropriate weight on these things — let me know if you think I’m stretching here.)

Arbitrary as our breaking up of the text is, we’ve hit upon something of a pair of cliffhangers. Richard’s duplicity in keeping Norval’s death from Iris paints him in one stroke as an unforgivable villain, and then comes Laura’s revelation that he had subverted his deal with the Chase paterfamilias in a manner directly related to the other man’s death. 

And if that wasn’t enough, we also have the reintroduction of Alex, meeting (not Laura, but) Iris in the street! 

How will these things develop? I hope you’re excited to find out. We know a little about one eventuality: AF, FN, & IM each wrote in to specifically call out the seeming importance of the detail of Richard having a copy of Laura’s novel beside him at his death. But, what I want to know is whether the boat he’s on is The Water Nixie! 

So it is that we, like Iris at the crosswalk and the assassin of her sister’s novel, proceed ‘[b]lind but sure-footed’ (p.394) into the next 100 pages! I’ll see you back here next week with notes up to the end of the chapter ‘The Blind Assassin: Union Station’: p.505 in the Virago. 

Enjoy the week’s reading!

— Adam