glx

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.

The diagram below is a graphic representation of some ideas about ‘as if’ that I came across in a number of articles/essays by Barry Stampfl. He is, in turn, influenced by the work of Hans Vaihinger, whose text The Philosophy of ‘As If,’ is an often unacknowledged influence in much current thinking in a variety of fields.

Stampfl, working with Vaihinger’s ideas of the ‘as if’ in aesthetics (Vaihinger’s book covers the role of ‘as if’ in virtually all fields of knowledge), divides the role of ‘as if’ in a text into two categories, the conjectural and the anti-conjectural. Let’s consider a passage we’ve looked at from other aspects:

. . . he’s holding up his hand, as if to fend her off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera, from the person who must be there, taking the picture; or else to protect himself from those in the future who might be looking at him, who might be looking in at him through this square, lighted window of glazed paper. As if to protect himself from her. As if to protect her. In his outstretched, protecting hand there’s the stub end of a cigarette. [my emphasis]

The context within which ‘as if’ appears three times here strongly suggests the ‘conjectural’ aspect of these similes; this is supported by the “or else” alternatives to the initial supposition. That is, these non-standard simile forms are ‘open,’ ‘truth-seeking.’ The speaker is clearly speculating as to various “readings” of the photograph, the scene (re)presented by it, the gesture of one of the persons depicted. While Stampfl would very likely read each individual instance of ‘as if’ in this way, taken as a whole the passage appears to me to ‘foreclose’ on the apparent truth of a defensive posture (“fend her off,” “protect himself,” etc.) taken up for some as yet unknown—perhaps never known—reason. The text elides and overwrites other possible readings of the gesture: a simple random movement, happenstance mistiming between shutter and subject, a wave to some other behind the photographer, those sorts of things.

Consider in comparison, the not dissimilar concatenation of ‘as if’ found on page 226, where Iris’ father is putting the onus of family responsibility on her shoulders:

We were in the lobby by then. I sat down. “Oh,” I said. I could suddenly see what should have been obvious for some time. I wanted to laugh, as if at a trick. Also I felt as if my stomach had vanished. Yet my voice remained calm. “What should I do?”
[ . . . ]
“Oh. I see.” I was cornered. It wasn’t as if I had any alternatives to propose.

There is no uncertainty, no speculation in these instances of ‘as if.’ These are, individually, stark and clear statements of sensation. No ambiguity here. Stampfl would read these as anti-conjectural; they do not seek truth but, rather, close down on a personal truth, a descriptive truth of sensation experienced. But into which of the sub-categories do they fall? Are they delusional or mystifying? Is Iris fooling herself about her feelings at that moment or is her reading of the situation unreliable? I am not sure I could answer one way or the other . . . and, in fact, this points up a problem with all such models that break instantiations of (re)presentation into dichotomous schema: they are limited to either/or, they are Procrustean beds of analysis that ignore or elide important aspects of the (re)presentation in the name of a theoretical position.