2My paper will study this politically engaged novel which traces the landmarks of North American social evolution against the backdrop of a larger international stage. The text is a societal critique encompassing all fields of human experience – from the political and economic dynamics of war, class struggle, or gender and identity construction to the production of aesthetic movements and cultural phenomena as diverse as fashion columns, trade union discourse, or even washroom graffiti. I shall study the text as aesthetic object rather than mere social fresco, focussing on the manner in which Atwood re/constructs a period all the while de/constructing the cryptic codes governing all areas from the sublime to the petty, and from the factual to the fictional, I shall attempt to demonstrate how the strategy of accumulation ironically produces negation, how through saturation the author paradoxically strips away the overlapping layers of convention and lays bare their underlying codes and mechanisms. I shall argue that a powerful metalinguistic current also interrogates the ideological stances that underlie clichés, and simultaneously generates a reflection on the process of artistic production as well as on the mechanics of reception. We shall see how – paradoxically for a work rooted in postmodernism. and its interrogation of certitudes and absolutes – the dynamics are grounded in an essentialist stance seeking formal permanent features or constants, the logic underlying all signifying systems, a meta-structure, as it were.

3Atwood sets out to construct the chronicle of a society through the family history of two sisters. The main narrative of the novel contains a fragmented science fiction story-within-a-story, embedded in yet another framed and published story told, or rather suggested, hermeneutically in brief proleptic scraps. The framing narrative in the retrospective mode allows the voice of an old woman, Iris Chase Griffen, a knowledgeable narrating I, to overlap with the point of view of a narrated I that is initially a naive, inexperienced child and then a young adult. Iris seems to syncretically embody and telescope a triad: the figures of the Parcae. Making recurrent self-reflexive and metatextual references to the life that is ebbing and the tale she is spinning in a long scroll of ink, to the black thread she is spinning across the page (p. 283), she fuses the functions of Atropos, Clotho, and Lachesis who respectively spin, measure, and cut the skeins of thread that stand for human destinies. Beginning in medias res with the enigmatic death by suicide of her sister Laura in the aftermath of the Second World War, the narrator re/presents and re/constructs the scrambled threads of private and public memory making up what we call history. Through the device of hybridisation that feeds fiction with fact, her subjective voice is interrupted, fragmented, and overlaid by pseudo-factual extracts from Canadian newspapers dated from the mid 1930s to the end of the 1990s. These are variant accounts of the ‘truth’ that the reader gradually identifies as partial in the double sense of incompleteness as well as misconstruction through bias. Through bits of gossip overheard, interweaving with stories transmitted orally from one generation to the next, and local histories privately printed by nineteenth century family notables, Iris gleans and reconstitutes the texture of a time that predates her own birth.

5In the deliberately disorderly, metonymic fashion of the thought process, Iris plunges back further into the past and presents southern Ontario during the early nineteenth century colonial period when Americans poured into the province to take advantage of an expanding market alongside of cheap land, raw materials, and labour. Her grandfather was one of those who, starting with a button factory, built a commercial empire in the new dominion. The following passage is purportedly reported in The Chase Industries: A History, a book that her grandfather had commissioned to record his own achievements:

He prided himself on the conditions in his factories: he listened to complaints when anyone was brave enough to make them, he regretted injuries when they’d been brought to his notice. He kept up with mechanical improvements, indeed with improvements of all kinds. He was the first factory owner in town to introduce electric lighting. He thought flower beds were good for the workers’ morale – zinnias and snapdragons were his standbys, as they were inexpensive and showy and lasted a long time. He declared that conditions for the females in his employ were as safe as those in their own parlours (He assumed they had parlours. He assumed these parlours were safe. He liked to think well of everybody). He refused to tolerate drunkenness on the job, or coarse language, or loose behaviour. (p. 54, emphases mine)

Ostensibly an objective, official record, the passage is suffused with overlapping resonances in which markers affirming power are overlaid with markers of ideological distancing. The paratactic enumeration of transitive verbs is meant to signal power, as is the book cover itself, green leather onto which not only the title but also the grandfather’s heavy signature are stamped in gold. The seriation of verbs in the anaphoristic mode gives sole agency to the industrialist in a demonstration of the triumphant control reigning in this age of nascent Canadian capitalism. Yet it is overlaid by the voice of the narrator, which in turn overlaps with the authorial voice organising the discourse. The overlapping is at times produced in an overt manner, as with the graphic signs accompanying the rhetorical device of parenthesis, whose function is to add a new signifying segment. The ternary structure of the interpolation – ostensibly added later to the ‘found’ material of the chronicle – adds a progressive layering effect in which a narratorial distance, both temporal and axiological, filters the original proposition and colours it with a contemporary value judgment. The inserted ironic proposition foregrounds the gap between the worlds of capital and labour, and by subverting the factory owner’s ‘assumption’ that the home and the shop floor (site of ‘injuries’) are equally safe for women, also indirectly unveils the occult extratextual realities of domestic violence. The social critique unfolds along a counterdiscursive thread woven throughout the sequence. Censure of the period’s self-congratulatory paternalism is covertly appended through exegetical and deflatingly qualifying subordinate clauses (‘when anyone was brave enough...’; ‘When they were brought... Ms they were inexpensive...’). Finally, in discursive devices that foreground an authoritarian paternalism – notably polysyndeton (the grammatically superfluous repetition of the coordinators and ... and; or ... or), the voice of the author unobtrusively blends with the fictive narratorial voice to add another layer of overcoding suffused with an engaged ideological stance.

6In the later analeptic fragments of the framing tale, the account of the young Iris’s growth and maturation is also interwoven with genuine geopolitical events, from the Depression, massive joblessness and the rise of the trade unions, to the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. Onto narrative segments such as the one evoked above, disclosing the self-righteous capitalism of Grandfather Chase’s era, Atwood superscribes the socio-economic upheavals and political unrest of the 1930s. She moreover superimposes two prisms through which the advent of notions such as collective bargaining, unions, and strikes are perceived and two discursive codes through which they are represented. The first sequence presents the growing labour unrest as the work of ‘outside agitators’:

The people doing the stirring up were ruffians and hired criminals (according to Mrs. Hillcoate). Not only were they outside agitators, they were foreign outside agitators, which was somehow more frightening. Small dark men with moustaches, who’d signed their names in blood and sworn to be loyal unto death, and who would start riots and stop at nothing, and set bombs and creep in at night and slit our throats while we slept (according to Reenie). These were their methods, these ruthless Bolsheviks and union organizers, who were all the same at heart (according to Elwood Murray). They wanted Free Love, and the destruction of the family, and the deaths by firing squad of anyone who had money – any money at all – or a watch, or a wedding ring. This was what had been done in Russia. So it was said. (p. 203)

The point of view presented is ostensibly a multiple one belonging to the community at large. The ultra-conservatism of the ideological stance is emphasised and simultaneously debunked through sundry devices anchored in the grotesque – that mode of graphic caricature so favoured by satirists. We can note the systematic use of hyperbolic amplification culminating – in an absurd because excessive, even apocalyptic, manner – in the extermination of all those who happen to wear a wedding ring. Along with the plethora of value judgements presented as givens, we can note the chaotic enumeration of cultural clichés that are the staples of pulp fiction and grade B movies – one of the items even foregrounded through capitalization. The seriation combined with polysyndeton (five occurrences of the coordinator ‘and’ within a single sentence) moreover serves to suggest an infinite list of doomsday scenarios susceptible of being generated by collective hysteria. Sardonically setting off the extravagant exaggerations are the marks of enunciation establishing a discursive distance and thus fomenting doubt: the rather overt locution ‘so it was said’, and the more covert refrain-like parallelism of the parentheses that, even as they cumulate additional, precise information, deconstruct and deflate an argument based on (spurious) ‘authority’ rather than on reason.

7In an apparently syntagmatic fashion, we slide into a parallel sequence in which the newly formed union holds a meeting to discuss the closing of the father’s button factory:

a call [was] issued to all the workers to join up, because when Father reopened the factories, it was said, he would cut to the bone and they’d all be expected to take starvation wages. He was just like all the rest of them, he’d stuff money into a bank in hard times like these, then sit on his hands until people were beaten down and driven right into the ground; then he’d seize the opportunity to grow fat off the backs of the workers. Him and his big house and fancy daughters – those frivolous parasites who lived off the sweat of the masses. (p. 205)

The same distancing refrain ‘it was said’ signals to the alert reader that the axiologically antithetical discourse is a paradigmatic reconfiguration of the first sequence, and that the two are actually interchangeable. The new set of wooden slogans and readymade formulas marks the superimposition of one code upon another, one dogmatic system upon another, the one erasing what the other inscribes. Both are conventional discourses that illustrate the manipulative linguistic practices that paradoxically not only distort reality but also drain language of its substance. Neither are more meaningful than the stock phrases endlessly reiterated at rituals such as high school graduation, so overused that the ageing Iris describing the ceremony need not even bother to formulate them completely for them to be identified:

God must have heard this sort of thing before, he’s probably as bored with it as the rest of us. The others gave voice in turn: end of the twentieth century, toss out the old, ring in the new, citizens of the future, to you from failing hands and so forth. (p. 38)

One was a girl she’d gone to school with who’d married a railroad worker. He was away a lot, she said, so what did he expect? ‘Up the spout,’ she said. ‘And no excuse.’ Reenie nodded, as if this explained everything.
‘No matter how stupid the man may be, most of them can count,’ she said, ‘at least on their fingers. I expect there was [sic] knuckle sandwiches. But no sense in shutting the barn door with the horse gone.’
‘What horse?’ said Laura. (p. 141)

Like the horse, the spout as well as the knuckle sandwiches are opaque signs to the two children. The protagonists’ fallibility foregrounds the gap between signifier and signified: by learning that language is not iconic but is rather a semiotic system with arbitrary codes, the young Iris is brought to structure reality, to identify and attempt to make sense of social codes and conventions. The two abilities seem to go hand in hand: Laura continues to take locutions literally, never learning to decode linguistic conventions with their implicit and oblique dimensions, and she is the protagonist who remains socially dysfunctional. Iris, on the other hand, is Atwood’s tool to reconstruct a given society at a given period. She becomes adept at deconstructing even the micro-components of domesticity and community, such as the procedure that used to be followed for a proper engagement: the ring, the announcement, and the formal teas regulated right down to the rolled asparagus and watercress sandwiches and ‘the three kinds of cake – a light, a dark, and a fruit,’ as well as the acceptable shades of the obligatory bouquets of roses – ‘white or pink or perhaps a pale yellow, but not red’ (pp. 69-70).

8The Blind Assassin has a profoundly metatextual Russian doll story within-a-story structure. The main narrative is superscribed onto and around another novel entitled The Blind Assassin, allegedly written by the dead sister Laura and published posthumously. This novel in turn contains an unnamed lover who narrates a series of metafictional science fiction tales, the main one revolving around a blind assassin. The overlapping of the different levels of embedded narratives undermines the spinning of illusion of the macro framing narrative and exposes its codes and mechanism. The metafictional dynamics of the doubly framed tale undermine not only its own illusionist characteristics, but also those of other literary texts or even other modes of discursive representation. In the opening segment, notably, the narrator about to commence his tale offers the intradiegetic receiver – also an unnamed heroine readers are encouraged to suspect is Laura – a choice of pulp fiction sub-genres such as romance, mysteries, or science fiction:

What will it be, then? Dinner jackets and romance, or shipwrecks on a barren coast. You can have your pick: jungles, tropical islands, mountains. Or another dimension of space – that’s what I’m best at. (p. 9)

9‘The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read’ (p. 283), declares the ageing Iris. She goes on to explain: ‘You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it’ (p. 283). By making the persona of the framing narrative a writer with no addressee, recording her story with her right hand all the while her left hand is erasing it, and by blending the authorial voice with the fictive voices of the framed narratives, Atwood deconstructs both the production and the reception of the ready-made syntagmata found in literature. Her taxonomical dynamics include the classification of readerships, and this metatextual ordering process is overlaid with teleological, referential, and axiological dimensions. Alex, the left-wing union agitator hunted by the authorities for subversive activities, and beloved by both Iris and Laura, is – as we belatedly learn – the narrator of the embedded science fiction tales, which he churns out for lurid pulp magazines when in hiding. Rather than ‘crank[ing] out this junk’ (p. 280), for which he has a certain facility, Alex would have liked to write a more ambitious literary work:

To write a man’s life the way it really is. To go in at the ground level, the level of starvation pay and bread and dripping and slag-faced penny-ante whores and boots in the face and puke in the gutter. To expose the workings of the system, the machinery, the way it keeps you alive just so long as you’ve got some kick left in you, how it uses you up, turns you into a cog or a souse, crushes your face into the muck one way or another. (p. 280)

The book he would have liked to write, ideologically committed and in the mode of naturalism, is never written, for Alex realises that his targeted readership would never open such a book, preferring instead his formulaic, mass-produced pulp:

The average working man wouldn’t read that kind of thing... what those guys want is his stuff. Cheap to buy, value for a dime, fast-paced action, with lots of tits and ass. Not that you can print the words tits and ass: the pulps are surprisingly prudish. Breasts and bottom are as far as they’ll go. Gore and bullets, guts and screams and writhing, but no full frontal nudity. No language. (p. 280)

In spite of its metatextual dynamics, there is little place for ‘language’ in Alex’s ‘stuff’; nor is there in his impossibly mimetic – and suspect – ontological aspiration towards a full reproduction of reality rather than a representation. The framing tale, however, rich with imagery, is a celebration of language. In her quest for patterns, just as she exposes behavioural clichés and cultural stereotypes, so too does the narrator interrogate the codes implicitly regulating social discourse. One of its oral manifestations is small talk, whose mechanisms the authorial/narratorial voice lays bare – namely four variant greetings, one per season:

At half-past nine Walter came by to collect me. ‘Hot enough for you?’ he said, his standard opening. In winter it’s cold enough. Wet and dry are for spring and fall. (p. 36)

One of its print manifestations, strewed throughout the novel, is the press. Here too, Atwood explores the different sub-genres of journalistic writing, including the gushingly formulaic fashion columns which follow the unwritten rule of never labelling a colour by its habitual name. We also note the obligatory cacophony when the society bride-to-be, Iris, is described as wearing a ‘demure Schiaperelli creation of blistered bisque crepe’, while her future sister-in-law wears a ‘leaf-green velveteen with watermelon satin accents’ (p. 127). Then, interestingly hybrid, belonging both to the oral idiom and to the print tradition, conforming to convention but inviting linguistic play, is the incongruous sub-genre of washroom graffiti. The elderly Iris has a favourite washroom cubicle in a do-nut shop – favourite because of the inscriptions left long enough for commentary to accumulate around the text:

The first sentence is in pencil, in rounded lettering, like those on Roman tombs, engraved deeply in the paint: Don’t Eat Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Kill.
Then, in green marker: Don’t Kill Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Eat.
Under that, in ballpoint, Don’t Kill.
Under that, in purple marker: Don’t Eat. (p. 84)

The graffiti has been deconstructed and shown to have elaborate structural rules: linguistic scrambling and permutation, anaphora, chiasmus, as well as variations in the medium.