Sipped Ink vol 6 issue 5

The Blind Assassin pp404-505

Hello friends! Welcome to the antepenultimate newsletter of Sipped Ink vol 6, and I think you’ll agree with me that things are hotting up.

Let me start this week by saying that it was a pleasant surprise to me to find Iris doing her own analysis of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. I was not organised enough last week to look ahead at the chapter titles and even consider the possibility. If we look at Iris’s take on the poem we’re treated to a few extra nuggets that may be of interest. For instance, I found Iris’s latter insight that the poem’s ‘lover is a demon-lover because he is not there’ (p.410) to be an interesting echo of something from much earlier in the novel. You may recall that, in a passage which ended our first week of reading, Iris reflects on a childhood drawing thus:

The picture in the book is of a leaping man covered in flames — wings of fire coming from his heels and shoulders, little fiery horns sprouting from his head. He’s looking over his shoulder with a mischievous, enticing smile, and he has no clothes on. The fire can’t hurt him, nothing can hurt him. I am in love with him for this reason. I’ve added extra flames with my crayons. (pp.101–2)

Now, this was long before we had been introduced to Alex, and before we knew about the fire at the button factory. In fact Iris infers by juxtaposition Norval: the following paragraph has her father staring into the fireplace, thinking about the fire and destruction of the war from which he has returned. Let’s keep that in mind for a brief moment whilst we return to another element of Iris’s thoughts on Coleridge.

It makes sense that the older Iris reads Avilion as a fraudulent Xanadu. How else could she? Now that it is no longer her family home (you may recall, in what might be the funniest element of the novel thus far, that it is now a home for the elderly named Valhalla! (p.71)); that the family who made their home there are now dead and gone; that she looks back on her youth as a time riddled with the seeds of her life’s compromise? And, some of you will certainly have noted that in doing so Iris goes heavy on the ice imagery!:

The sunny pleasure-dome has caves of ice because that’s what pleasure-domes have - after a while they become very cold, and after that they melt, and then where are you? (p.410)

This reminds us of the imagery from much earlier in the novel, of Norval’s proposal of marriage to Liliana whilst they skated on the frozen lake at Avilion:

What did my mother do at this crucial moment? She studied the ice. She did not reply at once. This meant yes. […] Under their feet was the ice, which was white also, and under that the river water, with its eddies and undertows, dark but unseen. (p.86)

Taken as a whole, it seems to me that Iris frames her family as fated for catastrophe. She associates her mother with the ice, and her father with the fire, and calls our attention to what happens when the former is melted: anyone reliant upon it is swept away by uncontrollable forces. This marries nicely with the water imagery we have observed elsewhere in the novel, with its connotations of helplessness and even its occasional standing in for the implacable nature of time.

In all Atwood has written a lot of elemental symbolism into her novel, and for me it really started to coalesce into a whole this week in a very satisfying way.

Let me take this opportunity to draw upon material sent to me this week by some of our number who did the work of researching Emma Goldmann (mentioned on pp417–18). Over to DL for a potted biography:

Lithuanian anarchist and feminist activist, Goldmann emigrated to the USA in 1885 and was then expelled to Canada. She died in Toronto in 1940. 
Emma’s lover, Alexander Berkman, was a fellow activist, working alongside Emma in the US. He planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, a wealthy industrialist, in 1892. Frick survived; Berkman served 14 years of a 22 year prison sentence. He committed suicide in 1936.

Alongside this valuable information, DL includes two questions that the research inspired for them:

• Is ‘Alexander’ the model for Alex?

• Will Alex be responsible for the death of Griffen?

Excellent questions, and ones which Atwood is certainly keen to invite for those familiar with Goldmann & Berkman (or diligent enough to do the research — thanks DL). To these I would add a question flagged by a couple of you this week — as IM puts it: ‘what happened on the Water Nixie between Laura and Richard?’ The image, of her sister and husband sailing away from the shore-bound Iris, is a powerful one. Perhaps particularly so because Atwood takes pains not to reveal to us exactly what took place. Or is it Iris that is keeping things from us / Myra? Surely, from the vantage point at which she is writing, she knows – so what is her reason for not saying?

This brings us to a brief note I want to make this week, and which one or two of you also sounded. As MU put it: ‘I’m beginning to think I can’t trust Iris 100%’. Others of you had more developed theories about the precise nature of a possible deception, but I will keep those (and my own!) to one side for this week so as not to colour others’ enjoyment of the book. This is something to which we will need to return. For the moment, let it suffice to say that back in the first week’s newsletter I raised the question of the appropriate way to read a text comprising multiple primary and secondary sources. At that time, I remarked:

I don’t believe we’re deep enough into the novel to see what effects its shape has quite yet, but let me suggest that primary sources, a first-person narrator, and (even fictional) newspaper clippings have a gravity that even this early section of the text benefits from.

Well, now I think we’re certainly far enough into the novel that these questions have risen again in interesting new ways. One thing that a text can do in first person that it can’t do in third is to make the reader form a relationship with the narrator. One that stands the possibility of later being played upon.

This issue is already shaping up to go quite long, so let me hit two final points for the week in (slightly expanded) bullet point fashion:

Wolves

I liked very much the insistence of the unnamed man in Laura’s novel that ‘[a]ll stories are about wolves’ (p.423). It rhymed neatly for me with a subsequent passage of Iris’s text:

Into the plastic basket went my selections, and off I set, step by step, sideways down the stairs, like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and I contain my own bad wolf. (p.449)

Rewritten

It has become increasingly apparent that one could write a lengthy investigation on the theme of storytelling in The Blind Assassin. (Doubtless such papers exist.) This week we find Iris framing the bruises Richard leaves on her thus:

I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over. (p.455)

We also find an occurrence within Laura’s text, when she writes of the unnamed woman feeling like ‘[b]lank paper, on which — just discernible — there’s the colourless imprint of a signature, not hers’ (p.498). I could not help but be reminded of a passage I’ve previously noted: Iris’s depiction of Laura’s face as a ‘tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on’ (p.57).

And, importantly, Iris even casts a doubt on the verisimilitude of her own narrative. Despite (or perhaps because?) she has come to feel ‘that it’s only my had writing, not the rest of me; that my hand has a will of its own’ (p.456) she (like some of us) raises doubts about her own text:

I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light. (p.484)

Ahead, let us hope, lies illumination!

In closing, I’d like to say how much I have been enjoying all of your recent enjoyment of the novel. This is one of the real boons of reading as part of a group: my own delight at the book is mirrored and amplified in the messages I’m receiving from fellow readers. Particularly the last couple of weeks I’ve felt a real tide in this respect. Here’s a few words from SS that arrived just this afternoon:

I think that one of the reasons I am enjoying the book so much is the genius of Atwood’s structuring. As you know, I wasn’t convinced about the Blind Assassin sections for the first couple of weeks, and felt they were almost an intrusion on the “real” story, Iris’s. However, as these sections have focused more on the unnamed woman and man, and parallels appeared with Iris’ narrative, it is as if I now get the “point”.

So, on that note. Enjoy the next 7 days and I will write to you once again when the calendar next tells me it’s Sunday. On that occasion we’ll be talking all things up to the end of the chapter titled ‘Escarpment’ (p.603 in the Virago). With only 35 pages remaining beyond that I know that some of you will be unable to resist finishing the novel a little ahead of schedule. You go forth with my blessing and good wishes, but don’t you dare email me with any notes beyond p.603!

Write soon!

— Adam