The Author’s Note, “I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they,” is a curious tease pointing to the possibility, the opportunity to read the text as a roman a clef, a semi-autobiographical review of the author’s own experience. I have in the past read critical works that suggest it is just that: a looking back on Waugh’s own life through, of course, a fictive lens.

I am, of course, struggling NOT to hear Jeremy Irons’ voice or see his face as I read the Prologue. The PBS mini-series is remarkably faithful to the text and, even years since having seen it, prior re-readings of the book were colored, fleshed out by the wonderful characters of the series. I have a copy of the recently made movie version; I both dread and look forward to seeing it.

Among the many things seen clearly for the first time during this reading is the irony with which Ryder early on casts himself as one always caught in the middle and, in some sense, subject to the whims of those around him. Consider first Hooper’s words to (and reported by) Ryder when Hooper is late because he made up his own kit rather than having his servant do it: “But you know how it is. He had his own stuff to do. If you get on the wrong side of these fellows they take it out of you other ways” (10). Then, not more than a full page later, the sergeant-major uses exactly the same words to characterize the possible outcome of Ryder’s intentional rebuff of his superior officer: ” . . . you know how it is. If you get on the wrong side of senior officers they take it out of you other ways” (11). Charles is stuck in the middle, a Captain between the junior officers and the senior officers, in the middle class fascinated with (and in some regard wanting to be among the) landed and wealthy.

As narrator, he has effectively set the stage for us.

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]

A photograph is and is not what it (re)presents: it is an opportunity to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself, while the pointing finger and the moon are also experienced as one “event,” an inseperable lamination. One wonders if such difficulties arose in the use of other media to (re)produce images before the advent of photography; did such uncanny experiences—the disorder, dilemma, discomfort, dis-ease, defamiliarization—arise when viewing a painted portrait, for instance?

We are going to bring to our reading of Barthes the sensibilities and experiences of what he calls the Operator. We have both taken images as well as both having been taken (surprised, as Barthes has it) by images and having both been image-ed. How will this deeper perspective—Barthes is only approaching the Photograph from the aspects of Spectator and Spectrum—affect/effect our reading of his reading of the Photograph?

And speaking of reading photographs . . . let’s go back to the opening (and closing) of the embedded text of The Blind Assassin:

She retrieves the photograph when she’s alone, and lies it flat on the table and stares down into it. She examines every detail: his smoky fingers, the bleached folds of their clothing, the unripe apples hanging in the tree, the dying grass in the foreground. Her smiling face. [517]

This is the sort of experience of a photograph that Barthes is getting at in terms of his project being a working out from personal experience of a few images to some sort of general sense of the Photograph (pp. 8 and 9). I am sure that one of our topics of discussion will be whether he actually gets there.

Imagine being handed a book with a plain white cover: no text on it, no publisher information, no table of contents, no chapter “titles” or headings, nothing but the story text. How would/could that affect your reading? Are such things necessary for achieving a particular aesthetic effect? Are they necessary to the telling of the story (the mechanics of telling, I mean)?

I would suggest that at least the chapter headings are necessary for this particular book (Atwood’s The Blind Assassin). Much as with Stoker’s Dracula, which shifts from diary entries to letters to newspaper clippings, the chapter headings are necessary to identify the shifts among the diegetic levels and parallel narrative threads in the text. Without them, the reader would experience not a little cognitive overload as (s)he struggled to piece together the “story,” as a whole. But to say such a thing smacks of that old nemesis “authorial intent” or, worse, “editorial intent.” (Interestingly, there was a paper given at the SSNL (now the ISSN) Conference in Austin which intended to challenge the longstanding and related issues of Implied Author and Authorial Intent)

I will be interested to see which of the paratextual elements (words and pictures) actually stands up to MY reading of the text.

(re)Consider the opening description of Norris fumbling about his clothes, absently looking for a light apparently without realizing that that is what he is doing (or, that is the way I read the scene as described by the narrator). It is an extended, non-standard simile: the narrator is describing what the “number of flurried gestures round his waistcoat” resembled, what they were like. It is a clear comparison of what he (the narrator) observed to some other more comprehensible (?) activities. But to what end? Presuming the narrator is telling some interlocutor(s) a story, then he is obviously trying to convey his impression(s)—in a pictorial (?) sense—of the observed movements which, without such comparison, would be impossible to communicate. Or would it/they be impossible to communicate? Have you ever stopped to consider what a story might be like without figurative language? What communication amongst us human beings would be like without figurative language? This, fundamentally, is the basis behind books like Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By and Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Of course, where similes are explicit comparisons (though, apparently not all comparisons are similes), we have to account for metaphors, too, as one of the aids to communication, though they are for the most part indirect comparisons—sort of.

Consider the opening paragraphs of Goodbye to Berlin:

From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all of this will have to be developed, carefully printed, and fixed.

Again we open with an interlacing of simile and metaphor; in this case they beautifully support each other: images, not sentences; objects of attention, no movement. And the capping metaphor (“I am a camera . . .”) is carried over into analogy, suggesting (perhaps?) that the process of writing and publishing and “fixing” in history is not wholly unlike the process of open-eyed observation, recording of impressions, and later development of those impressions associated with photography.

But, where does “story” come from? Do we have “story” in these opening paragraphs of Goodbye to Berlin? Clearly there is “story” in the opening of The Last of Mr Norris. How are these openings different?