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.

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.

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.