“The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s novel is difficult to classify. It is part tragedy, part love story, part mystery, and part historical fiction. On top of all of that, it also contains a science fiction novel, entirely embedded within, as part of its plot. “It was a saying among them that only the blind are free.” As such, this is an intricately told story, with multiple layers that also play with chronological order and the reader’s sense of understanding through time. The novel’s very first sentence begins with a conclusion of sorts, “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

The plot is the story of the rising fortunes and subsequent fall of the Chase family, button manufacturing tycoons from Port Ticonderoga, Ontario. The tale is told by Iris Griffin nee Chase, by 1999 the last surviving member of the clan. “Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I’ve found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.” Through chapters that alternate between her present day circumstances, flashbacks of old family secrets, historical news clippings, and excerpts of the interior sci-fi novel, the story sets out the history of the Chase’s, from the turn of the 20th century, through the Great War, the Depression, and World War II. “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.” The two Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, grow up together amidst great wealth, but also death, isolation, and responsibilities beyond their years. “Hand-kissing covered a multitude of sins. It was in Berlin that I learned to perfume my wrists.” The tone of the narrative is bitter, as is the tale. “For the children with their greedy little mouths represent the future, which like time itself will devour all now alive.”

“Sophist” by Plato (translated by Nicholas P. White)

This is a dialogue between Thaetetus and a philosopher visiting Athens from Elea, simply referred to throughout as the Visitor. It is a very civil conversation, with the two most often agreeing with one another and working together to move the arguments along. The dialogue’s main purpose is ostensibly to define what a sophist is. However, as the two men dig deeper, they must seek to parse out the natures of knowledge, being, belief, negation, sameness, and difference, all the while analyzing the meanings of forms and kinds.

The Visitor begins by explaining the difference between the educated and the ignorant. “Not knowing, but thinking that you know. That’s what probably causes all the mistakes we make when we think…. If someone thinks he’s wise, he’ll never be willing to learn anything about what he thinks he’s clever at…. [Therefore,] refutation is the principal and most important kind of cleansing.” The Visitor goes on to relate the sophist’s methods. “This appearing, and this seeming but not being, and this saying things but not true things—all these issues are full of confusion, just as they always have been.” He quotes his mentor Parmenides’ most famous dictum, “Never shall this force itself on us, that that which is not may be; While you search, keep your thought far away from this path.” The Visitor then asks of Thaetetus, “This form of speech of ours involves the rash assumption that that which is not is, since otherwise falsity wouldn’t come into being…. Do we dare to utter the sound that which in no way is?”

Thaetetus and the Visitor next explore this idea of negation in detail, first just scratching the surface. The Visitor begins, “That which is not can’t be applied to any of those which are…. We always apply this something to a being…. A person who says something has to be saying some one thing?… Someone who does not say something says nothing at all…. Therefore don’t we have to refuse to admit that a person like that speaks but says nothing? Instead, don’t we have to deny that anyone who tries to utter that which is not is even speaking?… But shall we say that any of those which are can ever belong to that which is not?… Whenever we speak of those which are not, aren’t we trying to apply numerical plurality to them?… Do you understand, then, that it’s impossible to say, speak, or think that which is not correctly by itself? It’s unthinkable, unsayable, unutterable, and unformulable in speech.” That is what the Visitor had learned from his mentor, Parmenides. However, the Visitor has already come to see how he contradicts his own thoughts. “I was the one who made the statement that that which is not should not share either in one or in plurality. But even so I’ve continued after all that to speak of it as one, since I say that which is not…. So in trying to attach being to it wasn’t I saying things that were contrary of what I said before?” He ends by challenging Thaetetus, “Try to say something correct about that which is not, without attaching either being, one, or numerical plurality to it.” The Visitor realizes that he will have to apply more scrutiny on his own accepted wisdoms. “In order to defend ourselves we’re going to have to subject father Parmenides’ saying to further examination, and insist by brute force both that that which is not somehow is, and then again that that which is somehow is not.”

Thaetetus and the Visitor continue by examining the natures of being and change. The Visitor begins, “Then both that which changes and also change have to be admitted as being…. The philosopher—the person who values these things the most—absolutely has to refuse to accept the claim that everything is at rest, either from defenders of the one or from friends of the many forms. In addition he has to refuse to listen to people who make that which is change in every way. He has to be like a child begging for “both,” and say that that which is—everything—is both the unchanging and that which changes.” The Visitor tackles this challenge by examining forms and kinds. “It takes expertise is dialectic to divide things by kinds and not to think that the same form is a different one or that a different form is the same…. So if a person can do that, he’ll be capable of adequately discriminating a single form spread out all through a lot of other things, each of which stands separate from the others. In addition he can discriminate forms that are different from each other but are included within a single form that’s outside them, or a single form that’s connected as a unit throughout many wholes, or many forms that are completely separate from others. That’s what it is to know how to discriminate by kinds how things can associate and how they can’t…. Some kinds will associate with each other and some won’t. Some will to a small extent and others will associate a great deal.”

Just when the two men feel that they have made some progress, they plunge back into the depths of confusion. The Visitor states, “The most important kinds we’ve just been discussing are that which is, rest, and change…. But that which is blends with both of them, since presumably both of them are…. But what in the world are the same and the different that we’ve been speaking of? Are they two kinds other than those three but necessarily always blending with them? And do we have to think of them as being five and not three? Or have what we’ve been calling the same and the different turned out, without our realizing it, to be among those three?… It’s impossible for the same and that which is to be one…. In fact, though, it turns out that whatever is different definitely has to be what it is from something that’s different…. It pervades all of them, since each of them is different from the others.”

Thaetetus and the Visitor hope to solve their difficulties by further examining differences along with the principle of negation. The Visitor, as usual, leads the way, “So it has to be possible for that which is not to be, in the case of change and also as applied to all the kinds. That’s because as applied to all of them the nature of the different makes each of them not be, by making it different from that which is. And we’re going to be right if we say that all of them are not in this same way. And on the other hand we’re also going to be right if we call them beings, because they have a share in that which is…. So as concerning each of the forms that which is is extensive, and that which is not is indefinite in quantity…. So even that which is is not, in as many applications as there are of the others, since, not being them, it is one thing, namely itself, and on the other hand it is not those others, which are an indefinite number.” The Visitor continues by parsing out that differences are not necessarily contrary in nature. “It seems that when we say that which is not, we don’t say something contrary to that which is, but only something different from it…. So we won’t agree with somebody who says that negation signifies contrary. We’ll only admit this much: when “not” and “non-” are prefixed to names that follow them, they indicate something other than the names, or rather, other than the things to which the names following the negation are applied.”

The Visitor concludes by trying to apply negation to the nature of being. He asks, “Should we say that just as the large was large, the beautiful was beautiful, the not large was not large, and the not beautiful was not beautiful, in the same way that which is not also was and is not being, and is one form among the many that are?” When Thaetetus agrees that this is so, the Visitor realizes that he has pushed the bounds of Parmenides’ grave warnings. However, the Visitor bravely goes on, “But we’ve not only shown that those which are not are. We’ve also caused what turns out to be the form of that which is not to appear. Since we showed that the nature of the different is, chopped up among all beings in relation to each other, we dared to say that that which is not really is just this, namely, each part of the nature of the different that’s set over against that which is…. Nobody can say that this that which is not, which we’ve made to appear and now dare to say is, is the contrary of that which is. We’ve said good-bye long ago to any contrary of that which is, and to whether it is or not, and also to whether or not an account can be given of it.”

“Repetition- A Venture in Experimenting Psychology” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This is an odd story in which Kierkegaard’s persona, Constantin Constantius, is tasked to give advice to a young romantic poet tragically in love. Kierkegaard begins, “repetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is repetition…. Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward…. It takes courage to will repetition…. [On the other hand,] recollection has the great advantage that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose.”

For the young lover enveloped in a tragic affair, “His mistake was incurable, and his mistake was that he stood at the end instead of at the beginning, but such a mistake is and remains a person’s downfall…. He began to grasp the misunderstanding himself; the adored young girl was already almost a vexation to him. And yet she was the beloved, the only one he had loved, the only one he would ever love. Nevertheless, he did not still love her, because he only longed for her…. She was merely the visible form, while his thoughts, his soul, sought something else that he attributed to her…. What traps him is not the girl’s lovableness at all but his regret over having wronged her by disorganizing her life…. Humanly speaking, his love cannot be realized. He has now come to the border of the marvelous; consequently, if it is to take place at all, it must take place by virtue of the absurd.”

Kierkegaard concludes by relating the tension between the universal and the exception. The ordinary observer will have difficulty discerning “the dialectical battle in which the exception arises in the midst of the universal, the protracted and very complicated procedure in which the exception battles his way through and affirms himself justified…. in a word, it is just as difficult as to kill a man and let him live. On the one side stands the exception, on the other the universal, and the struggle itself is a strange conflict between the rage and impatience of the universal over the disturbance the exception causes and its infatuated partiality for the exception…. Just as heaven rejoices more over a sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous, so does the universal rejoice over an exception…. The whole thing is a wrestling match in which the universal breaks with the exception, wrestles with him in conflict, and strengthens him through this wrestling. If the exception cannot endure the distress, the universal does not help him any more than heaven helps a sinner who cannot endure the pain of repentance.”

Kierkegaard continues on the theme of the poetic soul, “Such an exception is a poet, who constitutes the transition to the truly aristocratic exceptions, to the religious exceptions. A poet is ordinarily an exception…. A poet’s life begins in conflict with all life. The point is to find reassurance or legitimation, for he must always lose the first conflict, and if he wants to win immediately, then he is unjustified. My poet now finds legitimation precisely in being absolved by life the moment he in a sense wants to destroy himself…. He keeps a religious mood as a secret he cannot explain, while at the same time this secret helps him poetically to explain actuality…. For him the repetition is the raising of his consciousness to the second power…. If he had a deeper religious background, he would not have become a poet. Then everything would have gained a religious meaning…. At first sight, I perceived he was a poet—if for no other reason I saw it in the fact that a situation that would have been taken easily in stride by a lesser mortal expanded into a world event for him.”

“Outline” by Rachel Cusk

This is the first novel in Cusk’s trilogy of so-called auto-fiction. It is a loose recollection of stories about others, yet, at heart, it is the story of the self. The protagonist is a writer, on her way to teaching an amateur writing workshop in Athens. “In my experience painters are far less conventional than writers. Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better.” Her life in London has fallen apart. She was recently divorced, on uncertain terms with her children, and in search of a second mortgage to pay the bills. “I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you exactly were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.”

Cusk’s novel is structured so that a great deal of the action is in the narrator’s listening to the travails of the others she meets while on her journey. Being a writer, much of the commentary revolves around the use of language. “The best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume, so to speak; to translate them, for the simple act of translation very often renders things harmless.” The creepiest interlocutor the narrator encounters is her first, a former shipping tycoon now down on his luck. “He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was…. ‘You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,’ he added, ‘it would be much worse the other way around.’” At one point the narrator makes a remark which might be emblematic of Cusk’s whole novel, “I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.”