Sipped Ink vol 6 issue 7

The Blind Assassin pp603-637

Hello friends! So here we are then: the end of our journey. My plan as I sit down to write this final newsletter of the summer is to first touch on the final section of the novel, then move into some consideration of the text as a whole. After that I have some final thoughts I’d like to include, so we’ll see what shape that takes when I get there. Without further ado….

When last I wrote it had been revealed that Iris was the model of the novel within a novel’s nameless woman, but we did not yet know that she was also the author. I touched on this a little last week and said I’d save discussion until all was said and done. Well, here we are. I had a couple of notes from readers expressing their non-surprise at it having been Iris who carried on an affair with Alex, rather than Laura. The way the text is presented up until the very end, however, it would make little sense to assume this. Unless Laura, in her youth, knew every intimate detail of Iris’s affair she couldn’t have written a thinly fictionalised account of it – and why would she? Atwood gives us breadcrumbs of the novel within a novel’s provenance (including inthe much-discussed ‘The Steamer Trunk’ chapter), and ends them with the presentation to Iris of Laura’s notebooks (at p.602). This is immediately after Laura’s death in the chronology of the narrative, which is in itself directly subsequent to Iris’s revelation to her sister that she had been carrying on an affair with (the now deceased) Alex. The reader is forced to do some mental gymnastics at this point to conceive of a way in which Laura could have told Iris’s story. The reader, therefore, is invited to beat the text to its revelation that Iris is the real author of The Blind Assassin. 

This textual sleight of hand is embodied in the text in a way I found quite brilliant: through the twin photographs, each version showing one of the Chase girls with Alex at the picnic, with the hand of the absent sister just visible. 

The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there’s a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It’s the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down. (631)

There is also a continuation of the novel’s elemental / colouration thematics at play when Iris encounters the photograph in this moment: by that point it depicts the living in blue, and the dead in radiant yellow. 

For me this raises a further question that is interesting to ponder: who is behind the composition of our own The Blind Assassin? (Five points if you said Margaret Atwood, but that’s not what I’m asking.) As presented, particularly with the inclusion of Myra’s notice regarding Iris’s memorial as the penultimate section, we are led to the conclusion that the final text as we hold it has been compiled by Sabrina. (At a very late stage in the text (p.627) Iris addresses her absent granddaughter through the page, rather than Myra as she has to that point.) If we accept this hypothesis, I find the final form of the novel quite moving. Throughout, Iris longs for reunion with Sabrina, and her final textual act is to ponder her possible return. The final structure of the text: Iris’s primary narrative of her family life, sections from Iris’s (not Laura’s) fictionalised account of her own hidden life, and contextualising contemporaneous materials, can be read as having been compiled by Sabrina in an act of remembrance and perhaps forgiveness or thanks toward her late grandmother. 

For this reader at least, it strikes a similar note to the epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale (about which I will say no more!).

In looking at the novel as a whole I’d like to go full circle and consider one final time the choice to present its primary narrative in first person. I was delighted and surprised to find (in an article sent my way by IM – my thanks to them), that Atwood’s first attempts to write the novel used other devices and tenses. When those faltered, Atwood says:

I withdrew to the starting line once more. This time I gave Iris full rein, and let her speak for herself in the first person. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me in the first place. Perhaps I was afraid of her. She does become somewhat fearsome as the book moves along.

As it stands now I can see no other way in which the novel could function. The very act of having written her own story (once in the form of the manuscript she leaves behind, and once before in the shape of the novel penned under her sister’s name) is so central to Iris’s character that it feels now as though it could work no other way. It is the device by which Iris assumes control over her own story, eschewing the narratives ascribed to her.

Nevin Koyuncu in her paper ‘Revising Scripts of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin’ has much insight on the way in which Atwood constructs her novel as an exercise in women attempting to free themselves from their scripted roles in a patriarchal society. With marriage and death as the two potential outcomes of the traditional romance narrative, we start from a position in which Laura embodies the one and Iris the other. From there, through Iris’s own telling of the story, we find the two sisters actively struggling to establish other narratives for themselves. 

Looked at in this light, we can read The Blind Assassin as a novel in which Iris conforms to the female ideals personified in her mother, espoused by Reenie, enforced by the example of Miss Violence’s having not fit in with them, and reinforced by Norval, Richard, Mr Erskine et al; and simultaneously Laura’s rejection of those scripts. In this reading Laura’s early death speaks to the perils of not following the ascribed path. It takes Iris longer, and much suffering, to subvert the same scripts by carrying on a lengthy affair with Alex, and writing her own story. 

J. Brooks Bouson in her paper ‘“A Commemoration of Wounds Endured and Resented”: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir’, argues that Iris is ‘a tormented and memory haunted woman who is driven to confess the “truth” of hidden family traumas and to acknowledge her own culpability in causing her sister’s suicide’ (Bouson 254). I read Iris’s motivations as certainly including confession and absolution-seeking, but only as part of a bundle of related impulses. The composition of the primary narrative, of course, comes in her old age and some decades removed from her original text, which is also confessional even if its efficacy is undercut by the false attribution of it to her sister. 

Consider, however, all the things that Iris is attempting in publishing a novel under Laura’s name. Amongst them: to ruin Richard, to make Richard believe that Laura had a relationship with another man, and also to rescue Laura from her early death — to make her live on. It also succeeds in making Laura into a myth, and there is certainly some tragedy in that: in seeking to free her sister from conforming to the scripted death of the romantic plot she instead ensures that no one (but her) remembers the real Laura. In her place is a mythologised version — the one to whom people leave flowers and attribute quotes on bathroom walls. Perhaps the restoration of Laura’s truth is also part of Iris’s project in composing her latter text.

There is so much more to say. We have not returned to the manner in which the novel depicts the roles of men in a patriarchal society; we have made no study of the novel’s mythological and poetic inclusions; our survey of the text’s elemental thematics is yet incomplete. We could very well re-read the novel with our new understanding of its secrets and find something else entirely. By way of defence I can say only that this newsletter and this read-along is intended primarily as a way of prompting further thought and discussion. If you’re left with ideas and questions about the novel at this stage, then I consider this a success.

In closing, thank you all for being a part of this year’s read-along. I hope that you feel you’ve gained something from it, and from the novel itself. This year in particular you will almost certainly have had bigger things on your mind, so I am grateful that you took the time to read with us. If you’d like to stay in touch, I tend to switch off the Sipped Ink accounts when the read-along isn’t in session, but you can always reach me via mail@sipped.ink – let me know what you’re reading next! For me it’s going to be either Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble (2019) or a long anticipated dive into Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Thoughts on these, and all manner of other things, may well appear on my blog.

For now, I wish you all the best.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the distinguished authors of the following papers who helped me procure copies of their work at a time when libraries were inaccessible. 

Bibliography

Bouson, J. Brooks. ‘“A Commemoration of Wounds Endured and Resented”: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Feminist Memoir.’ Critique, vol. 44 no. 3, 2003, pp.251-270. 

Koyuncu, Nevin. ‘Revising Scripts of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.’ Interactions, vol. 16 no. 2, 2007, pp.73-85.

Staels, Hilde. ‘Atwood’s Specular Narrative: The Blind Assassin.’ English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, vol. 85 no. 2, 2004, pp.147-160.