So . . . our first foray off of the Time Magazine list. And one which has some relevance to the book just finished: Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. But, to that in a bit . . .
Barthes is attempting to get at the idea of Photography or the Photograph (capitalized whenever used in that sense), the Heideggerian thing-in-itself (a variant of the Kantian Ding an Sich). It is interesting that—at least in the first several sections of the text—there is dancing all around Heideggerian ideas, yet there is no mention of him. But the same could be said for the work of the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin; his seminal piece “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is evoked (if not invoked) when Barthes notes:
The first thing I found was this. What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. [4]
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This is going to be a post that will be edited now and again as I go along with this idea, in part because I am still refining my thoughts on it and in part because I don’t have all of the materials in hand today that contribute to the critical frame from which I am working.
I think that The Blind Assassin is a particularly appropriate text to serve as the basis for any discussion about the simile form, ‘as if,’ though the discussion could apply to any of the texts we have been reading in this project. I say particulary appropriate for two reasons: (1) I get the sense that were we to count the similes used by Atwood and sort them according to form we would find that she predominantly uses ‘as if’ in this text (it certainly seems that way to me; there are many instances where she concatenates one on another, and another, and so on) and (2) imagine how the world (re)presents itself to a blind assassin who was once sighted: every physical sensation is compared to something once “seen,” every sensation is ‘as if’ referenced to some prior experience. I suspect we all are, in many ways, like the blind assassin in this last regard. Read More »
In the prologue of The Blind Assassin by Laura Chase, in The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, the ubiquitous photograph is described. Man and woman sitting under a tree, a hand cropped from the frame. The man’s face is shaded by a light colored hat, his hand outstretched (protecting himself, protecting her,) cigarette between his fingers.
The trace of brown cloud in the brilliant sky, like ice cream smudged on chrome.
Such a short and rich prologue. I don’t think I have ever seen a brown cloud but I can visualize ice cream smudged on chrome. I like that sentence and had to quote it because I was so close to it, but let’s talk about the photograph.
In the main story we finally meet the man, Alex Thomas, and get a first-hand account of the taking of the photograph. This is the eternal photograph. Taken by a newspaper man — Elwood Murray, a little too close to Edward R. Murrow, isn’t it? — and so exposes Laura and her youthful relationship. The man was right to have his hand up for the photo is later used in a wanted poster. And then the cropping of the one photo into Iris and Alex, another with Laura and Alex.
This may not be the end of the photo. It is wonderful how many masters it serves. Iris, as narrator, describes the actual event, Laura, as narrator, describes the photograph, we as readers (are we readers within readers?) are swept into both stories from different angles.
The season is turning on its hinges, the earth swings farther from the light; under the roadside bushes the paper trash of summer drifts like an omen in the snow. [p222]
I’m totally at sea about the phrase, “drifts like an omen in the snow.” This is the chapter (The Imperial Room) where Iris talks about the winter of 1935 and Atwood must have been writing during a fresh winter day. That page holds still more mysteries:
I hasten on, making my way crabwise across the paper.
Just so you know I am not complaining, I am truly enjoying Atwood’s writing style. I close the book and think: I am reading a book about the life of a button magnate’s two daughters, in which the one person who makes any sense is the family housekeeper. I want to read more but I don’t know why.
