27 October 2011
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
In Margaret Atwood's novel which takes place in the fictional town of Port Ticonderoga outside of Toronto, the characters are mostly practical people who don't talk about feelings or love and barely seem to recognize these as existing. Yet, underneath this surface, feelings kept at bay wound and burn and, by the end of the novel, the reader feels the effect of emotions bared raw. Once again, Atwood uses various textual tools to shape her fictional Canada. The novel has three fictions residing within it: Iris Chase writing her autobiography, the novel The Blind Assassin, and the science fiction story told by Alex Thomas. In fact, Atwood uses a highly talented writer as her main character, just as she does in Alias Grace, who actually is either writer or collaborator to all the texts. Also included are the newspaper articles written by Elwood Murray -- all glosses or editorials. Once again, Atwood, as in Alias Grace, ponders our capability for knowing or finding truth. As Iris struggles to make sense of her history, her efforts are complicated by the falsity around her. As important as the included text is to the novel,text that is is omitted -- the letters, telegrams, information that is withheld -- is as important as the text included -- it ominously shapes events. Laura's reality reminds me of the clarity in a Sylvia Plath poem -- burning too brightly for many of us to touch. Finally, as the "older woman...with hair like burning spiderwebs," Iris, is the only person left capable of stating things as they are, or at least finally exploring them after a life of denial. Atwood's tale becomes a warning for young women - women whom Iris does not pity as she does not pity herself.
21 October 2011
Now
I am currently reading another Margaret Atwood novel -- The Blind Assassin. I am in a bit over 100 pages. Once again, Atwood layers the present by way of the past. In this novel we have the now -- the daily life of Iris (Chase) Griffen who is recounting the story of her childhood with her sister Laura. Included are other chapters of an anonymous woman's assignations with a man who orally tells her the story of the blind assassin. Interspersed are press releases about the Chase family and other events that occurred during the 1930's. We see the (maybe) downfall of this prestigious Canadian family -- but it is too early (especially with Atwood) to tell!
I plan to order Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, Julian Barne's Sense of an Ending, and for just plain fun and a theatrical lift, The Night Circus for November reading.
I plan to order Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, Julian Barne's Sense of an Ending, and for just plain fun and a theatrical lift, The Night Circus for November reading.
19 October 2011
Sidebar
I just finished reading Daphne DuMaurier's Don't Look Now for the Guardian Reading Group and I think, for me, the uncanny was not uncanny enough. The uncanny has to disturb. When I read Poe something resonates after the final sentence. His uncanny unnerves me. I am currently looking at Anthony Vidler's The Architectual Uncanny and it perfectly lends itself to the intertexuality I am experiencing and experience most of the time. Coincidences like these -- now that's uncanny.
15 October 2011
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Similar to novels such as William James’ Turn of the Screw and Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Alias Grace features as its protagonist a possible unreliable narrator who may or may not be insane. Like Oskar, she has spent time in an insane asylum. It is tempting to make the answer to the question -- is she insane? -- is she telling the truth? -- the most compelling interest. However, the sanity of the governess, of Oskar, and of Grace actually leads to more complex considerations about storytelling, memory, and performativity -- how we are all implicated in the creation of a reality we project upon the world and others. To me, this is what Alias Grace explores and illuminates.
Near the opening of Alias Grace, Grace states that, “ When you are in the midst of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or someone else.” As the narrator of her own life to Simon Jordan, Grace admits that she is in the process of shaping events into some kind of understandable form. One day she ponders what it will be that she tells him that day. In most of the storytelling, Grace’s recall of events is crystal clear and detail oriented. At other times, “I said I remembered some of the things I did. But there are other things they said I did, which i said I could not remember at all.” The reader wonders what is left out -- memory loss or amnesia has occurred to her on several occasions during the harsh life she recounts. Similar to WG Sebald, Atwood poses questions about selective memory and our ability to piece together the truth of in regard to the past. “Perhaps,” says Simon, “we are also -- preponderantly -- what we forget.” “If you are right,” says Reverend Verringer, “what becomes of the soul? We cannot be mere patchworks!...” Yet the novel seems to be saying that is exactly what we are and the most we can hope to be.
Grace pieces together her identity, through her story, noting at times how wrong others get her. Grace is called a slut from the time she is little. Yet, no character has less interest in sex than Grace, who, having seen her mother’s myriad of pregnancies and Mary’s death due to a botched abortion, naturally is put off on the subject of men on a conscious level. She is quite aware of their motives. Atwood specifically raises questions in regard to male labeling and control of females. One of the most dangerous things to be in Atwood’s novel is an attractive female --merely a projection of male desire. Each male in the novel sees Grace through his own fantasy lens. Reality is continually covered up, such as the beatings Grace’s mother endures, the cause of death of Mary, and the relationship between Nancy and her boss.
Atwood use the motif of quilting throughout the novel and, in fact, titles the chapters after quilt patterns which serve as a metaphor for the piecing of our lives. This quilting metaphor, however, presents us with overlapping concentric layers of meaning. Grace pieces her story together just as she pieces real quilt blocks. For most of the novel Grace pieces traditional quilt blocks. Although there is some flexibility when constructing a quilt square -- mostly in terms of selection of color for effect -- the traditional quilt square pattern itself is rather rigid in design. These blocks represent life as we show it to the world. At the end of the novel, after Grace is free, she is also free to design the quilt top she dreams of -- The Tree of Paradise. Grace takes exceptional liberties when she describes her plan to Simon. She subversively connects three leaves that represent her, Mary, and Nancy and she plans to include a border of entwined snakes. This recalled to me an article I read a few years ago in Raw Vision magazine entitled “Madness is Female” which explored the artwork of women institutionalized in 1920 German psychiatric hospitals. Inside garments sewn were embroidered messages. Grace intends the snakes to look like vines or a cable pattern. To her, “Such an arrangement would appear to be more the way life is.” This is like the story she tells Simon -- her attempt to construct the truth amidst all the lies surrounding her life and her trial. The quilt is an additional re-telling of her story.
Atwood skillfully weaves a sense of the age’s dangerous obsession with Romanticism related to creating a sense of identity. Running through the novel is the recurrent mention of Sir Walter Scott and his epic poem Lady of the Lake. Scott’s influence is experienced through the characters quoting his poem or referring to him. Susanna Moodie, whose account of the settling of Canada was recounted in her 1853 Life in the Clearings -- the first source Atwood discovered information about the very real Grace Marks, is known to be a Scott lover. Another character, a minister, quotes Scott freely. Atwood also uses quotations from William Morris. The referencing of these Romantics reveal this society’s yearning to be part of a bigger plot. In these early days of the settlement of Quebec and Toronto, they seem aware of being part of a bigger story, one full of significance. Atwood includes information about the Scottish rebellion in Canada that is still freshly felt, recalling Scott’s Waverley. In one of the court testimonies it is interesting that the murderer James McDermott name is misspelled Macdermot, thereby suggesting that this incindiary mistake might have brought about “Macdermot’s” hanging as a scapegoat for the Scottish rebels.
The novel is capped by Grace’s consideration of herself as the infamous “murderess.” Grace understands the romantic nature of the use of that label instead of the more mundane term “murderer.” Grace is caught up in her own celebrity, “Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” Everyone in this region of Canada is caught up in the sensationalist story of the murders. The interest and participation in the myriad occult activities is severely juxtaposed to the harsh mundane details of survival by all of these emigrants to Canada. The governor’s wife’s scrapbook detailing each of the more spectacular crimes of the prisoners in her husband’s care instead of the usual book containing snips of lace or hair reveals a society where romanticism has taken us to a dark place of the soul. At the end of the novel after Grace’s release, she writes, “It was very strange to realize that I would not be a celebrated murderess any more, but seen perhaps as some innocent woman wrongly accused and imprisoned unjustly, or at least for too long a time, and an object of pity rather than of horror and fear. It took me some days to get used to the idea; indeed, I am not quite used to it yet. It calls for a different arrangement of the face...” She seems disappointed to have her celebrity taken away.
Grace’s storytelling is a performance of her own life. Not only is she very artistic in creating a quilt top that interprets her own experience in a rather surreal way, but she is a storyteller, a writer, as good as Atwood, herself. She is the artist who, like any great novelist, creates and populates a complex reality. She is a master of the 19th century novel. In the larger box drawn outside of Grace’s story, Atwood asks the reader to ponder the work of theorists like Judith Butler on performativity and the question of how our reality is constructed.
Atwood closes the novel with two excerpts from poems that make statements about how close it is we can get to fully knowing anything:
So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be...
--William Morris, The Earthly Paradise
The imperfect is our paradise.
--Wallace Stevens,
“The Poems of our Climate,” 1938
Near the opening of Alias Grace, Grace states that, “ When you are in the midst of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or someone else.” As the narrator of her own life to Simon Jordan, Grace admits that she is in the process of shaping events into some kind of understandable form. One day she ponders what it will be that she tells him that day. In most of the storytelling, Grace’s recall of events is crystal clear and detail oriented. At other times, “I said I remembered some of the things I did. But there are other things they said I did, which i said I could not remember at all.” The reader wonders what is left out -- memory loss or amnesia has occurred to her on several occasions during the harsh life she recounts. Similar to WG Sebald, Atwood poses questions about selective memory and our ability to piece together the truth of in regard to the past. “Perhaps,” says Simon, “we are also -- preponderantly -- what we forget.” “If you are right,” says Reverend Verringer, “what becomes of the soul? We cannot be mere patchworks!...” Yet the novel seems to be saying that is exactly what we are and the most we can hope to be.
Grace pieces together her identity, through her story, noting at times how wrong others get her. Grace is called a slut from the time she is little. Yet, no character has less interest in sex than Grace, who, having seen her mother’s myriad of pregnancies and Mary’s death due to a botched abortion, naturally is put off on the subject of men on a conscious level. She is quite aware of their motives. Atwood specifically raises questions in regard to male labeling and control of females. One of the most dangerous things to be in Atwood’s novel is an attractive female --merely a projection of male desire. Each male in the novel sees Grace through his own fantasy lens. Reality is continually covered up, such as the beatings Grace’s mother endures, the cause of death of Mary, and the relationship between Nancy and her boss.
Atwood use the motif of quilting throughout the novel and, in fact, titles the chapters after quilt patterns which serve as a metaphor for the piecing of our lives. This quilting metaphor, however, presents us with overlapping concentric layers of meaning. Grace pieces her story together just as she pieces real quilt blocks. For most of the novel Grace pieces traditional quilt blocks. Although there is some flexibility when constructing a quilt square -- mostly in terms of selection of color for effect -- the traditional quilt square pattern itself is rather rigid in design. These blocks represent life as we show it to the world. At the end of the novel, after Grace is free, she is also free to design the quilt top she dreams of -- The Tree of Paradise. Grace takes exceptional liberties when she describes her plan to Simon. She subversively connects three leaves that represent her, Mary, and Nancy and she plans to include a border of entwined snakes. This recalled to me an article I read a few years ago in Raw Vision magazine entitled “Madness is Female” which explored the artwork of women institutionalized in 1920 German psychiatric hospitals. Inside garments sewn were embroidered messages. Grace intends the snakes to look like vines or a cable pattern. To her, “Such an arrangement would appear to be more the way life is.” This is like the story she tells Simon -- her attempt to construct the truth amidst all the lies surrounding her life and her trial. The quilt is an additional re-telling of her story.
Atwood skillfully weaves a sense of the age’s dangerous obsession with Romanticism related to creating a sense of identity. Running through the novel is the recurrent mention of Sir Walter Scott and his epic poem Lady of the Lake. Scott’s influence is experienced through the characters quoting his poem or referring to him. Susanna Moodie, whose account of the settling of Canada was recounted in her 1853 Life in the Clearings -- the first source Atwood discovered information about the very real Grace Marks, is known to be a Scott lover. Another character, a minister, quotes Scott freely. Atwood also uses quotations from William Morris. The referencing of these Romantics reveal this society’s yearning to be part of a bigger plot. In these early days of the settlement of Quebec and Toronto, they seem aware of being part of a bigger story, one full of significance. Atwood includes information about the Scottish rebellion in Canada that is still freshly felt, recalling Scott’s Waverley. In one of the court testimonies it is interesting that the murderer James McDermott name is misspelled Macdermot, thereby suggesting that this incindiary mistake might have brought about “Macdermot’s” hanging as a scapegoat for the Scottish rebels.
The novel is capped by Grace’s consideration of herself as the infamous “murderess.” Grace understands the romantic nature of the use of that label instead of the more mundane term “murderer.” Grace is caught up in her own celebrity, “Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” Everyone in this region of Canada is caught up in the sensationalist story of the murders. The interest and participation in the myriad occult activities is severely juxtaposed to the harsh mundane details of survival by all of these emigrants to Canada. The governor’s wife’s scrapbook detailing each of the more spectacular crimes of the prisoners in her husband’s care instead of the usual book containing snips of lace or hair reveals a society where romanticism has taken us to a dark place of the soul. At the end of the novel after Grace’s release, she writes, “It was very strange to realize that I would not be a celebrated murderess any more, but seen perhaps as some innocent woman wrongly accused and imprisoned unjustly, or at least for too long a time, and an object of pity rather than of horror and fear. It took me some days to get used to the idea; indeed, I am not quite used to it yet. It calls for a different arrangement of the face...” She seems disappointed to have her celebrity taken away.
Grace’s storytelling is a performance of her own life. Not only is she very artistic in creating a quilt top that interprets her own experience in a rather surreal way, but she is a storyteller, a writer, as good as Atwood, herself. She is the artist who, like any great novelist, creates and populates a complex reality. She is a master of the 19th century novel. In the larger box drawn outside of Grace’s story, Atwood asks the reader to ponder the work of theorists like Judith Butler on performativity and the question of how our reality is constructed.
Atwood closes the novel with two excerpts from poems that make statements about how close it is we can get to fully knowing anything:
So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be...
--William Morris, The Earthly Paradise
The imperfect is our paradise.
--Wallace Stevens,
“The Poems of our Climate,” 1938
12 October 2011
Work in Progress
Working to turn the previous into something coherent. I realize that I get a jumble down and then cut and paste(sometimes literally)and EDIT.
11 October 2011
Alias Grace unformed thoughts
Whatever may have happened through these year,
God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie.
--William Morris,
“The Defense of Guenevere.” (beginning the novel)
“Perhaps,” says Simon, “we are also -- preponderantly -- what we forget.”
“If you are right,” says Reverend Verringer, “what becomes of the soul? We cannot be mere patchworks!...” (406)
Lying/ How do you tell the truth?/ quilt patterns/quilt piecing
Sir Walter Scott/ Lady of the Lake/ dark Romanticism/quotations from Morris/
Insane asylum/being female/being an attractive female
the darker side of quilting/piecing/art/communication/
storytelling/the stories other people want to hear/storytelling and performativity
Scottish uprising and aftermath of that and the misspelling of name McDermott to Macdermot
Rachel/gratitude/Jamie/forgiveness -- role playing
Grace’s last quilt with the snakes/ the three triangles
So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be...
--William Morris,
The Earthly Paradise
The imperfect is our paradise.
--Wallace Stevens,
“The Poems of our Climate,” 1938 (taken from beginning chapter xv: The Tree of Paradise)
God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie.
--William Morris,
“The Defense of Guenevere.” (beginning the novel)
“Perhaps,” says Simon, “we are also -- preponderantly -- what we forget.”
“If you are right,” says Reverend Verringer, “what becomes of the soul? We cannot be mere patchworks!...” (406)
Lying/ How do you tell the truth?/ quilt patterns/quilt piecing
Sir Walter Scott/ Lady of the Lake/ dark Romanticism/quotations from Morris/
Insane asylum/being female/being an attractive female
the darker side of quilting/piecing/art/communication/
storytelling/the stories other people want to hear/storytelling and performativity
Scottish uprising and aftermath of that and the misspelling of name McDermott to Macdermot
Rachel/gratitude/Jamie/forgiveness -- role playing
Grace’s last quilt with the snakes/ the three triangles
So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be...
--William Morris,
The Earthly Paradise
The imperfect is our paradise.
--Wallace Stevens,
“The Poems of our Climate,” 1938 (taken from beginning chapter xv: The Tree of Paradise)
10 October 2011
Alias Grace
Completed this novel today. Have been making notes and thinking about implications. Atwood has definitely created a complex series of boxes about our representation in regard to telling truths. More soon...
07 October 2011
Atwood
I am now completely taken up with Grace's telling of her history and how she came from Ireland to Canada. Grace relates many people's stories through the telling of her own passage "crammed in like herrings in a box," amidst rats, groaning, retching sea-sick neighbors, and buckets of feces and urine. Simon Jordan, the young doctor who listens to her offer up her tale, reminds me vaguely of the young Victor Frankenstein, totally immersed in his scientific studies against the wishes of his family who just want him to return home and take his place in society. I am as equally curious as to where this study of Grace Marks will take Simon Jordan as I am in knowing whether Grace Marks is a "murderess" or insane. Right now, from hearing Grace's history she seems like one of the sanest characters in the novel. The letters from other doctors to Simon Jordan reveal quirky judgemental phrases that make Simon ponder whether a doctor here and there might not have fallen in love with this beautiful patient. And, of course, this complicates her whole existence. More to come as I move along in this fascinating novel...
01 October 2011
Atwood
I have just begun Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace and her technique of including a series of quotations, poetry, letters reminds me of the early section of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It intrigues! It introduces a variety of viewpoints. The other day I was reading Joan Didion's On Keeping A Notebook and one line caught my eye: "How it felt to me". This seems to be what the Atwood novel is about -- and is complicated by the fact that the setting is in an asylum in the 1800's and the plot involves a crime as well as a sentence for that crime. The truth is elusive -- and how does it feel to be Grace Marks?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
