Ian McEwan, Atonement / Joe Wright, Atonement Communications présentées lors de la journée d’étude organisée le 12 janvier 2018 à l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 par la SEAC (Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines) et EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone), avec le soutien du Département d’anglais de l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 ; réunies par Catherine Bernard (Université Paris-Diderot) et Christine Reynier (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) Cécile Beaufils (Université Paris-Sorbonne) ‘”Moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden”: the Gardens of Atonement’ p. 2-11 Elsa Cavalié (Université d’Avignon) et Adèle Cassigneul (CAS) ‘”Unseen, from two stories up”: Watching, Seeing and Understanding in Atonement’ p.12-22 Christophe Gelly (Université Clermont Auvergne / CELIS EA 1002) ‘Intertextuality and reflexivity in Joe Wright’s Atonement’ (2007) p. 23-31 Christian Gutleben (Université Nice Côte d’Azur) ‘A Cracked Construction: Postmodernist Fragmentation and Fusion in McEwan’s Atonement’ p. 32-41 Georges Letessier (Université de Nantes) ‘”As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion”: The Sense of Destiny in Atonement’ p. 42-53 Laurent Mellet (Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès) From The Go-Between (L. P. Hartley, Joseph Losey) to Atonement (Ian McEwan, Joe Wright): Intertextual and Interfilmic Aesthetics p. 53-66 Pascale Sardin (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) ‘Heterolingualism and interpretation in Atonement : Traduttore, traditore?’ p. 67-78 Sara Thornton, Université Paris Diderot Of Attics and Mad (Wo)men: The Strange Case of the Victorian House in Atonement’ p. 79-92 Pascale Tollance (Université Lumière-Lyon2) “To everyone”, “To whom it may concern”: The letter which/for which one cannot answer in Atonement (Ian McEwan and Joe Wright) p. 93-101 1 ‘Moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden’: the Gardens of Atonement Cécile Beaufils Sorbonne Université In chapter 12 of Atonement, Emily Tallis is left alone while almost everyone else has gone to search for the missing twins. She reflects on her life, on her relationship with the conspicuously absent pater familias, and on her own capacities. In this thought process, her own point of view is drawn inwards in a surprising way: as most of the other characters have left to explore the grounds of the house physically, her own exploratory process is internal and she is led to introspection as she compares the act to the discovery of a garden: ‘no one else she knew had her knack of keeping still, without even a book on her lap, of moving gently through her thoughts, as one might explore a new garden’ (150). The simile strikes us as unusual since it is a mirror image of what is happening outside, in the garden: as we know, Emily Tallis’ introspection prevents her, among other things, from reading earlier warning signs of Lola’s abuse. With this simile, Briony Tallis—as the author of parts I, II, III—reveals a motif that is central to the first part: the English garden. But the seemingly natural artifact that constitutes the English garden is not the only iteration of the presence of nature in the novel, a preoccupation also present in Joe Wright’s 2007 adaptation. Nature, on a broader level, is present in each part of the novel, even in part III, which is set in London. In the novel, ‘nature’ is not used to refer to the natural sphere, but rather to signify ‘human nature’ in an essential capacity: ‘good-natured’ (4), ‘sweet-natured’ (49), ‘his practical nature’ (91), ‘human nature itself’ (282), etc.. It all points to an intrinsic quality, but not to the realm of the natural sphere. The reader of Atonement—and the spectator of the film—is led to explore a carefully tended garden, one meant to give the illusion of chaos, of being ‘natural’, when it is anything but. Beyond this observation of the presence of a specific cultural topos, the very presence of nature in the novel and its adaptation warrants a closer look, especially as it is used as a heuristic tool in Briony’s writing project. The presence of nature as a frequent backdrop to the plot and also as a key element in the characters’ motivations may be seen as a clue as to how to read the novel; that is, how to connect the gradual discovery process of the novel’s core and an intricate aesthetic construction rooted in the empirical tradition, which is also progressively challenged. I then propose to explore the image of the garden in the novel and its adaptation: as an empiricist device, an ode to a specific visual aesthetics, and a strong claim to connecting nature and artistic creation. Gardens all the way down: the pivotal imagery of nature 2 It is easy to forget just how pervasive nature is in the text and the film. And yet, even the way the film adaptation was marketted showcases its importance: the UK poster of the film, also used as a cover for the paperback edition of the novel re-issued in 2007, shows us Cecilia and Robbie as stereotypical ‘star-crossed lovers’, a trope foregrounded with the presence of the slogan ‘Joined by love. Separated by war. Redeemed by hope’. The background of each photograph is a natural setting: green for Cecilia (connecting her to the grounds of Tallis House), and the red of a French poppy field for Robbie (connecting him to the visual trope of war). Such use of nature leads us to consider how the two complementary colors are employed to create contrast, but also visual storytelling in a setting immediately signifying Englishness.1 In the novel, Briony/MacEwan uses it to provide a sense of place, and to give the reader elements of characterization. Nature is used to create the illusion of an English pastoral, showing the narrator’s attention to botanical precision and sometimes giving away elements of suspicious regularity to be reflected on by the attentive reader: a wealth of different plants is displayed, thus respecting the ideal of variety of the English landscape garden, from generic ‘wildflowers’ (23) to more precise designations such as a ‘rugosa hedge’ (19), or Cecilia’s bunch of flowers which is composed of ‘rose-bay willow-herb and irises’ (20). The Tallis garden contains ‘camomile and feverfew’2 (20), and Emily Tallis ponders on Robbie’s proposal to plant wisteria, ‘whose flower and scent he liked’ (151). In the first part of the novel, these recurring elements are used as Barthesian ‘effet de réel’ (Barthes 87) indications, and are already coming under scrutiny for the attentive or second-time reader since the precision of the botanical elements does not change according to the focalizer, therefore becoming elements of suspicious regularity. Vegetation, in the first part of the novel, also points to the idealized and memorialized aspects of the setting, and works as a counterpoint to the text’s manifold literary references. The cinematographic choices made by Joe Wright and his team mean to provide the viewer with a constant reminder of the importance of nature in the 1935 part, with a significant amount of screen time devoted to the grounds of Tallis House, turned into a true Eden by daylight, especially thanks to visual devices created by cinematographer Seamus MacGarvey, like his use of a silk stocking on the camera lens to create a soft-focus effect, as well as the work on color saturation (Fisher). The film does not provide a pointillist view of nature, for nature is everywhere, even within the house with its lavishly floral decoration chosen by Sarah Greenwood. Even in indoor scenes, nature (albeit a stylized, fantasized one) is everywhere present on screen. Nature is still very much present in the second section of the novel, but this time it is used to offset the contrast at work between the brutality and pointlessness of the retreat and the countryside, 1 I use ‘Englishness’ in the sense of ‘anglicité’ as defined by Cavalié (Cavalié 10-12). 2 Two plants, it should be noted, traditionally used to alleviate headaches and migraines—the Tallis garden is not purely ornamental, it is also medicinal. 3 to the point where the soldiers interpret the landscape in military terms. For instance, as Robbie catalogs the variety of trees in the French countryside, a displacement of the frame of reference used in the first part can be observed; the vegetation becomes both lush and disturbing, ‘bushes with fat shiny leaves. There was also stunted oaks, barely in leaf. The vegetation underfoot smelled sweet and damp, and he thought there must be something wrong with the place’ (194-195). The softness of the sibilants clashes with the sudden ‘hum of machinery’ (195) intervening in the following paragraph, when the soldiers mistakenly mistake the sound for that of planes, while they are in fact being attacked by bees. With such a stress on distorted perceptions, it may be relevant to point out that while the novel has a well-documented relationship to British literary history, it also borrows from British visual and pictorial history. The soldiers’ visual representation of nature as contaminated by war and machine is reminiscent of the works of British visual artists who represented the two world wars, like Wyndham Lewis or, in the passage referred to above, Paul Nash. The countryside, expected to be a form of pre-lapserian Eden, also turns into a Hell when the soldiers attempt to find water: ‘the woods were near, there would be streams and waterfalls and lakes in there. He imagined a paradise. […] All the new greenery spoke to him only of water’. (238) Such a reversal of natural tropes is echoed straightforwardly in Wright’s film with the contrast between the soldiers exploring an orchard, and their macabre discovery.