In the Course of Time in Margaret Atwood's the Blind Assassin

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‘True Stories’ in the Course of Time in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

ANDREA STROLZ

ARGARET ATWOOD is not only Canada’s most eminent and versatile contemporary author, but “the most written about Cana- M dian writer ever”;1 she has long been an international celebrity and is at present translated into more than thirty languages. Like all of At- wood’s novels, The Blind Assassin offers guidelines to disentangle fiction from reality and, like all of Atwood’s female artist-protagonists, its heroine is trapped in the fictional space she has created for herself and, at the same time, haunted by the actual past. The Blind Assassin is a work of historiographic metafiction: it reflects on history and/as intertext and in the process stresses the role of the reader as the ultimate editor and re-creator of the Past. As will be shown, the female protagonist-narrator engages the reader in a continuous (re)modification of the past as she advances from protective silence to “text- ual assassination” in order to communicate her story (herstory) and share her private space of seclusion and self-imposed imprisonment with the reader. The analysis of Atwood’s multilayered novel focuses on the relation between public and private events and collective and individual memory, re- spectively; this leads to a discussion of the interrelatedness between past, present, and future time. This essay will identify two of the various blind assassins in the novel and elucidate how the concept of space–time as expres- sed in The Blind Assassin is related to the saying ‘only the blind are free’.

1 Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996): 6. 288 ANDREA STROLZ ½¾

Introductory Remarks The Blind Assassin won Atwood the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. It is a highly complex novel as regards themes, structure, and narrative technique, which led one reviewer to call it “the most writerly”2 of Atwood’s texts. In fact, the novel is a complex metaphor for writing history and a reader’s guide for making meaning of our paper-made past. The novel concerns the relationship between two sisters, Iris and Laura, who are the granddaughters of a button-factory owner in the imaginary town of Port Ticonderoga in southern Ontario, Canada. Fifty years after Laura’s death, Iris reconstructs their inter- twined pasts and re-evaluates events that made her sister drive off a bridge at the age of twenty-five, only “ten days after the war ended.”3 Her reconstruc- tion of the past is not only an investigation of Laura’s alleged suicide but also an account of how Iris comes to terms with her own past. As the sole survivor and all alone – since all her family are dead – Iris feels urged to explain the ‘true’ story about her family to her granddaughter Sabrina. However, in the course of the novel Iris realizes how difficult it is to reconstruct the ‘Truth’, since “the living bird is not its labelled bones” (395). Iris is the self-reflexive first-person narrator of The Blind Assassin. In Greek mythology, Iris, the Goddess of the Rainbow, is also a messenger of the gods, transmitting ‘Truth’. In Second Words, Atwood uses the example of the four messengers in the Book of Job to discuss the relationship between ‘eye-witness’ and literary audience:

The book of Job begins with a series of catastrophes, but for each there is a survivor. Storytelling at its most drastic is the story of the disaster which is the world; it is done by Job’s messengers, whom God saved alive because someone had to tell the story. I only am escaped to tell thee. When a story, ‘true’ or not, begins like this, we must listen.4

It seems as if Iris had been spared to tell her story. Now that all her relatives have died, Iris attempts to present her counter-narrative and point out how the Chase and Griffen families have been misrepresented by the media. Iris con- siders it her duty to note down past events to which she has been an eye- witness, but she openly admits that her account is highly subjective – as any attempt at writing history will necessarily be. When she asks herself if what she remembers is “the same thing as what actually happened,” she concludes:

2 Eileen Murphy, “The Blind Assassin” (22 November 2003): http://www.citypaper.com /arts/review.asp?id=1944 3 Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (London: Bloomsbury, 2000): 1. Further page references are in the main text. 4 Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Boston MA: Beacon, 1984): 350.