Sipped Ink vol 6 issue 6

The Blind Assassin pp506-603

Hello friends, and welcome to this: our final full week of reading. There’s one more newsletter to come next Sunday, and then we’re all done. Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: I know full well that some of you have already completed the novel; it will come as no surprise to you that this issue of the newsletter will cover only up to the end of the chapter ‘Escarpment’ (p.603 in the Virago) as previously scheduled. Discussion of the novel’s denouement, as well as an analysis of the text as a whole, will wait for next Sunday. If anything that follows is proven wildly incorrect by the novel’s final pages you have my permission to tut, snicker, and / or shake your heads at my ineptitude.

I found this week’s reading to be bookended with (by now familiar) musings on what it means to write one’s truth. Iris briefly considers making an addition to the donut shop’s bathroom wall, in the form of lines from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: 

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. (p.512)

There is an echo (and an inversion) here of Iris’s earlier statement on how properly to write the truth: 

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)

Atwood, of course, would be conscious that the first line of Iris’s chosen poem also lends itself to the title of a 1943 Agatha Christie novel: siblings, lovers, murder…. I read this as Atwood winkingly casting Iris, for a moment, in the Miss Marple role. 

Skip ahead to the final passages of the week, and we find Iris again asking herself — in a fashion — why she is writing her own text. She ponders the motivations of those who would seek to read and interpret that which the dead leave behind. I detected something like a note of good-natured disapproval in this passage, which is then undercut by the final lines of the week: 

We’re all grave robbers, once we open the doors locked by others. 
But only locked. The rooms and their contents have been left intact. If those leaving them had wanted oblivion, there was always fire. (p.603)

This is something to which me may return once we’re finished reading!

Since this last passage invites it, let’s do a quick tour of some of the week’s elemental invocations. We noted last week an interesting ice / fire diptych featuring Liliana & Norval. I found a (perhaps intentionally) imperfect echo of it this week in the wedding photos Iris discovers her sister to have altered. In one Richard & Winifred are tainted green, whereas Iris ‘had been given a wash of aqua blue. Laura herself was a brilliant yellow […] What did it mean, this radiance?’ (pp.550-1)

The colouration of the other photo is equally intriguing: 

Richard’s face had been painted grey, such a dark grey that the features were all but obliterated. The hands were red, as were the flames that shot up from around and somehow from inside the head, as if the skull itself were burning. […] She’d dealt with my face, however — bleached it so that the eyes and the nose and mouth looked fogged over, like a window on a cold, wet day. (ibid.)

We know enough of Laura to know that these colours are not selected at random. Rather, she is suggesting something by them. What might we discern from the two images regarding Laura’s opinions of her relationship with her sister, and the union of Iris & Richard? 

Next let’s turn to what I found to be a very effective depiction of Laura’s death — something we have waited almost 600 pages to learn more about. It begins, in a way, a few pages earlier with what reads like Iris pondering her own mortality: 

But why bother with the end of the world? It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown. (p.583)

This is another twinning of water and time as we have noted previously. It is followed, a couple of pages later, by a depiction of Iris & Richard’s relationship that might seem familiar: 

We were still skating on the surface of things — on the thin ice of good manners, which hides the dark tarn beneath: once it melts, you’re sunk. 
Half a life is better than none.(p.585)

Firstly, it is worth comparing the above to Iris’s depiction of her parents’ young relationship: 

This was how I pictured that time, the time before Laura and I were born — so blank, so innocent, so solid to all appearances, but thin ice all the same. Beneath the surface of things was the unsaid, boiling slowly. (p.86)

Also, the last line of the later quote is intended by Iris as a consolation to herself, paraphrasable as something like: ‘my life may not be wonderful, but it’s better than being dead’. We cannot help but read it, however, as it could relate to her late sister dead at the age of 25. 

And so to Laura. I don’t know about you (and I’m perfectly willing to admit that inattention on my part may have led me to miss some detail from earlier in the novel), but I found myself awaiting the details of Laura’s death specifically to find out how they fit into the web of elemental metaphor that Atwood has been constructing in the novel. It seems to me that when one drives a car off a bridge there are several possibilities for how you might actually die. Earlier, the way Laura is depicted walking out into the river and has to be pulled out by Iris, I had considered this potential foreshadowing for a death by drowning. As the novel moves on however, Atwood twins water with time in a manner that felt at odds with Laura’s death at such a young age. It is not a surprise then, when we learn that it is sudden crush and fire that has killed Laura. On reflection, we might consider the image of her younger self wading out into the water as someone experimenting with what it would be like to surrender their will. To ‘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) – to passively accept fate in the manner that Reenie says female suicides do. Instead, when it finally arrives, it is no surprise to us to find Laura active right up to the last: hers is an explosive death on her own terms. 

A brief note in recognition of what I (and others of you) found to be bravura structuring at the heart of this week’s reading. Over the course of several successive chapters Atwood layers Laura’s story in with Aimee’s and also Sabrina’s, whilst using all of those to reveal to us more about Iris. It’s the kind of assured, skilful writing that is the province uniquely of a master in full command of their powers.

And so, treading carefully, we need to touch on what is revealed this week and what may still be. Let me state first of all that I have very much enjoyed reading all of the predictions and theories that you have sent. Suffice it to say that within our group just about every major character has been speculatively branded a murderer, a suicide, and / or a liar of every imaginable stripe. The effort has seemingly put some of us into quite a paranoid state of mind, if this note from AB is anything to judge by: 

I am obsessed. Last week, woman in The Blind Assassin buying orange sticks in the chemist to browse the magazines, this week Iris says of Laura ‘she was pushing her cuticles back with one of my orange sticks’. Obsessed. Is it relevant? I wait to see.

Atwood, of course, knows that her text invites these responses. It made me smile to find that within the text Aimee expresses her own theory of the novel: 

She’d figured it out anyway, though. She’d been robbed, she’d been deprived of her heritage, because I wasn’t her real mother and Richard hadn’t been her real father. It was all there in Laura’s book, she said. 
I asked her what on earth she meant. She said it was obvious: her real mother was Laura, and her real father was that man, the one in The Blind Assassin. Aunt Laura had been in love with him, but we’d thwarted her — disposed of this unknown lover somehow. […] Then, when Laura turned out to be pregnant by him, we’d sent her away to cover up the scandal, and when my own baby had died at birth, we’d stolen the baby from Laura and adopted it, and passed it off as our own. (p.531)

Iris immediately writes this off as an incoherent fantasy, but we do now know that Aimee is partly correct: she is not Richard’s daughter. However, we learn more than Aimee guessed: it is Iris who has long carried on a relationship with Alex. I am going to save analysis of this for next week for reasons that I believe will be more apparent then. Similarly, I would like to acknowledge the notes I’ve received from readers unsurprised to find that the unnamed man & woman of _The Blind Assassin_within The Blind Assassin are modelled after Iris & Alex, not Laura & Alex. I think we need to talk about this within the frame of the novel’s structure as a whole, and that will need to wait until everything is said and done. 

Likewise, to the reader who sent their thoughts on the contents of the notebooks Laura has left for Iris at the close of this week’s reading, I thank you for your observations; I don’t raise them here because… well, we’ve 33 pages yet to go and I believe they have a great deal more to tell us.

As those who have already finished the novel will know, the final week of reading begins with a rather apropos sentiment from Iris: 

I have to hurry now. I can see the end, glimmering far up ahead of me… (p.607)

I’ll meet you there friends, next Sunday. 

— Adam