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The Motif of the Broken Jug in Kleist's Der Zerbrochne Krug And

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The Motif of the Broken Jug in Kleist's Der Zerbrochne Krug And Mary Helen Dupree “The Glazed Surface of Conviction”: The Motif of the Broken Jug in Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug and Ian McEwan’s Atonement Ian McEwan’s acclaimed 2001 novel Atonement strongly recalls Kleist’s 1811 play Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug) in its looping together of comic and dramatic narrative elements around the breaking of a prized earthenware vessel. In Atone- ment, the destruction of a vase sets in motion a series of “falls,” including the fall from innocence of the protagonist, Briony Tallis. Atonement, like Kleist’s play, is fractured along narrative lines, as unreliable eyewitnesses produce competing ac- counts of what took place at the scene of the vase’s destruction. In both texts, the figure of the broken jug is linked to eighteenth-century discourses of sym- pathy and virtue, figuring prominently in both authors’ exploration of the con- flict between perception, knowledge, and belief. Through a discussion of the “Kleistian” in McEwan’s text, this essay seeks to expand beyond traditional no- tions of influence and origin towards a more global understanding of intertex- tuality in the twenty-first century. Published in 2001, Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, which chronicles the dis- solution of an upper-class British family over the course of the twentieth century, has been acclaimed by turns as a triumphant return to the tradition of English realist fiction and as a wildly clever example of postmodern nar- rative. As Brian Finney has argued, McEwan’s novel uses intertextual stra- tegies to initiate a dialogue with both modernism and realism, thus high- lighting the constructedness of its own narrative.1 The long list of realist and modernist works referenced in Atonement includes, to name just a few: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, (1798/1818) quoted in the novel’s epigraph (Mc- Ewan has called the book “my Jane Austen novel”); Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749); Henry James’s realist novels What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Golden Bowl (1904); works by twentieth-century British authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, H. P. Hartley and Rosamund Leh- mann; Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929); and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922).2 Not surprisingly, most analyses of intertextuality in McEwan’s 1 See Brian Finney, “Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (2004), pp. 68–82 (p. 74). Sub- sequent citations as “Finney” with page number(s). 2 Finney, pp. 71–72. See also Anna Grmelová, “About Suffering They Were Never Wrong, the Old Masters: An Intertextual Reading of Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture, 17.34 (December 2007), pp. 153– 222 Mary Helen Dupree novel have focused on its references to works in the British and American literary traditions. For readers familiar with German literature, however, McEwan’s novel, in which the destruction of an heirloom vase signals a se- ries of metaphorical “falls,” may evoke comparisons with Kleist’s play Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug, 1806/1811). This paper is an attempt to lo- cate the Kleistian in McEwan’s work by means of an exploration of what is at stake in McEwan’s appropriation, intentional or not, of the broken jug motif. In Der zerbrochne Krug, the titular vessel is destroyed in the course of a thwarted erotic encounter between Adam, the local judge of a seventeenth- century Dutch village, and the naïve village girl, Evchen, which occurs on the way from her back garden to her bedchamber. The play centers around the subsequent trial, in which Adam sits in judgment on his own trans- gression as Evchen’s mother, Frau Marthe, attempts to recoup the damages sustained both by the broken jug and her daughter’s reputation. McEwan’s vase, on the other hand, is broken before a fountain, during a hot summer afternoon on the estate of a country house in Surrey between the wars.3 It both foreshadows the novel’s primary catastrophe and signals the beginning of an affair between two mismatched lovers. In a pairing that Vermeule Blakey has described as quintessentially “Fieldingesque,” Cecilia, the oldest daughter of the wealthy Tallis family, is slowly coming to terms with her de- sire for Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, whose ambitions to become a doctor are being supported financially by Cecilia’s father.4 The incident is witnessed by Briony, Cecilia’s thirteen-year-old sister, whose misinterpreta- tion of the scene constitutes a betrayal for which she will spend her life try- ing to atone through her writing. In both texts, the “crucial breaking of a vase” (Blakey, p. 151) or vessel occurs simultaneously with an individual fall from grace that the text links with a larger, collective one. Can one describe Atonement as a Kleistian novel and if so, what does that mean? Although McEwan himself has cited many influences from Austen to Updike, Kleist is not among them. Indeed, Kleist references are a rarity in the English-speaking literary world. It is entirely possible that McEwan has encountered Kleist via John Banville’s English-language adaptation of The 157; and Ángeles de la Concha, “Unravelling Conventions; Or, the Ethics of Decon- struction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement,” in The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960’s, ed. by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 191–208 (pp. 199–200). 3 Ian McEwan, Atonement (New York: Anchor, 2001), pp. 35–38. Subsequent citations as “Atonement” with page number(s). 4 Vermeule Blakey, “God Novels,” in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture and Com- plexity, ed. by Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 147–166 (p. 152). Subsequent citations as “Blakey” with page number(s). .
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