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.
One Comment
The photograph is a great leaping off point for a number of ‘readings,’ some of which we have discussed off-line. One of those leaps is the decision to use The Book List as a source and inspiration for other readings which will be discussed here; and the first text we have chosen comes through this photograph: Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. I think it will be a fruitful read with connections not only to this text but to some of the others we have read already and, needless to say, texts we have yet to read. I have, just this morning, stuck my nose into a related book: John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation; we can talk more about that book later.
Another leap I’d like to take from here, from this authorial reading of a saved snip-pet of a photograph, is bound up in plays on the name of the ostensible narrator: not Laura, but Iris. While Iris does everything she can to elide the relation between her own name and the aperture/leaf shutter of a camera lens or of an eye (it is the pupil that grows or shrinks in reaction to light, but it is the action of the iris that causes this), we cannot neglect that reading of her name, particularly in that everything we read is seen through her eyes. This is also a not so subtle connection back to Isherwood: I/eye am a Camera.