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. The intrusion of the machine is also present as vertical factories and their chimneys break the horizontal monotony of the flat landscapes, becoming elements of the countryside. Contrary to the first two parts of the novel and of the film, the last main part of Atonement contains far fewer mentions of nature; the trope is relegated to second-hand mentions and letters, thus being associated to a lost, pastoral past: in Cyril Connelly’s letter, in letters from home Briony receives, in news given to Cecilia by Briony, and a small but significant detail observed by Briony in her final confrontation with her estranged sister. The textual remoteness of these mentions, never directly given to the reader (who does not see the letters from home, for instance), is tied in with Briony’s sense of loss as she ‘felt a dreamy nostalgia, a vague yearning for a long-lost life’. (279) They also reveal the evolution of Briony as a narrator who now tells more that she shows: the apparently small signifier of nature is part and parcel of Briony’s evolution and of the novel as a Künstlerroman. Finally, the coda, in keeping with its return to realist fiction, takes stock of the evolution of the English garden first described at the beginning of the novel. The nostalgia Briony tries to keep at bay lies not only in the changes found in the house, but also in the supposedly recent intervention of man in the design of the grounds. Nature is then used as a signpost for the past, for cultural references, and it also serves the novel’s diegesis, summarizing the situation, and creating echoes. For instance, Briony immediately notices the presence of one natural trace as she visits her sister and Robbie in London in the third part:
4 the ‘jam jar of blue flowers, harebells perhaps’ (335) works as a punctum to the domestic scene since Briony’s gaze returns to it later ‘Was that where the harebells came from? Surely there had been an idyll’ (348), when speculating about the lovers’ retreat, the cottage in Wiltshire. In the film, a different sort of blue flowers is present in the domestic scene (harebells are present in the film, but they are present in the Tallis garden, when Briony is shown to be in a writing frenzy). The ‘idyll’ imagined by Briony encapsulates a link between the pastoral and the romantic plot, nature and fantasy, as it fuels Briony’s propensity to extrapolate and translate details into fairy tales. Even though Briony is reaching the end of her apprenticeship as an author, she still interprets the world in literary terms, this time using ‘idyll’ in its colloquial sense of love story and not in its literary signification, a pastoral poem. Again, nature and the pastoral are central to the writing process. The iconic function of nature also enables the narrator to create playful echoes and parallelisms already hinting at the artificiality of the retelling; the word ‘nettle’ is such a case: we see a frustrated Briony imagining a story while she is vengefully beheading nettles standing in for Lola (‘the next several nettles were Lola too’ [74]), and one of Robbie’s comrades is also named Nettle. There is no similarity between the two occurrences of the weed, which only foregrounds the resurgence of Briony’s ‘controlling demon’ (5). In the adaptation, nature alson works as a visual shorthand for culture when Robbie is shown in a field of poppies—this time using a visual signifier from another war to connote remembrance. Nature is finally included in the characterization process and in the identification of the focalizers, in their relationships with nature: the most obvious case of this process is Robbie, introduced to us as a transitory gardener/landscape designer: in Cecilia’s words, ‘Since coming down, landscape gardening had become his last craze but one’ (18). Robbie is shown as an in-between, multifaceted character, and he is often placed in nature, a reminiscence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (a novel referenced as having been read by Robbie), but also of his own uncertain social standing: ‘Beyond the compass were his copies of Auden’s Poems and Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. At the other end of the table were various histories, theoretical treatises and practical handbooks on landscape gardening’ (82). His theoretical knowledge, it should be noted, is always matched with a practical application, an engagement with the materiality of things. Robbie is a gardener as much as he is an intellectual, which provides the reader with hints of the novel’s take on the artistically classical assertion of the connection at work between gardening and literary creation. On the other hand, Emily Tallis skims the surface of the garden, like everything else, and her enjoyment of nature excludes the references to the wilderness that are present in the depictions of nature by the other focalizers; she enjoys ‘the house, the park and above all, the children’ (148) in the way eighteenth- century theorists of the English landscape garden insisted it should be enjoyed: as something both
5 stimulating and soothing, as, for instance, Sir Uvedale Price suggests when he mentions the ‘soft and pleasing repose’ (Price 115) produced by the picturesque.
Aesthetically, the novel capitalizes on Englishness, which is not exclusively related to the architecture of the house. The garden’s link to the values of Englishness is distinct from that of the house. It is of a political nature, the English garden having a history of being considered as a political expression of nationalism. From the eighteenth century onwards, it has been presented as quintessentially English (by Addison in particular, in his 1712 Spectator papers, by Horace Walpole, and even earlier by Francis Bacon), even though its origins were later proved to be the result of various influences. The novel’s fascination with the tradition of the English landscape garden should be compared to the way the film partly adheres to the conventions of the Heritage film, in its lavishness and greenness at least. In Andrew Higson’s seminal work on Heritage cinema, one of his first definitions of the genre connects architecture, literary history and landscape when mentioning ‘the luxurious country-house settings, the picturesque rolling green landscapes of southern England, the pleasures of period costume, and the canonical literary reference points’ (Higson 1). The novel uses very precise natural elements as aesthetic and symbolical markers, for instance the recurrence of the oak tree, used as an emblem of Englishness in the text: in the first part, oaks stand in for Briony’s fairy tale imagination. In a moment of self-pity she imagines her fate as the heroine of a Pre-Raphaelite painting: [H]er only reasonable choice then would be to run away, to live under hedges, eat berries and speak to no one, and be found by a bearded woodsman one winter’s dawn, curled up at the base of a giant oak, beautiful and dead, and barefoot, or perhaps wearing the ballet pumps with the pink ribbon straps… (14-15) This emblematic use is pursued in the rest of the novel, as we learn in the second part that Robbie found the twins under a giant tree, probably an oak or an elm (they are the only species of trees mentioned in relation to the Tallis estate). Oaks are also used as visual framing devices characterizing the adherence of the landscape to the two cardinal rules of the English garden, that is variety and prospect as clearly implied in the ‘oak woods’ (18), the ‘thick crested oaks’ of the ‘Surrey hills’ framing the fountain scene (38) and Emily Tallis’ view of the garden: ‘from most perspectives the row of pillars and the pediment above them were charmingly half obscured by the elms and oaks that had grown up around’ (72). The Englishness of the oaks then exists both because of their traditional symbolism, and because they are systematically connected to issues of perspectives, central to the discovery of the English garden. Robbie’s inverted progress through the French countryside is also marked by oaks, but they are described as ‘stunted oaks’ (195). The reapparence of the trees in the
6 coda marks the inherent nostalgia implicit in Briony’s return: the trees have been ‘cleared to make way for a golf course’ (363), which strengthens their emblematic function.
The precise description of the specific features of the English landscape garden is a counterpoint to the (false) Englishness of the house (see Cavalié 2009 129-131), whose artificiality is all the more striking as the original house is no longer, leading to an aesthetic disjointedness. The disjointedness is clearly underlined just before Briony witnesses Lola’s assault, ‘The bridge led to nothing more than an artificial island in an artificial lake’ (163). The structure of the sentence, hinging on ‘nothing’, provides the reader with a form of embedded artificiality; the prospect is false and our expectations of a resolution are bound to be disappointed. The text gives us to see the grounds, and nature in general, as a maze, meant to trick the perceptions of the visitor, but also to isolate the grounds from the outside world, using devices characteristic of the English landscape garden, with deceptively whimsical names. The first instance is the ‘ha-ha’, which is a sunken—and therefore invisible—wall meant to prevent livestock from entering the landscaped park. It is first mentioned at the beginning of chapter 2: Once through the iron kissing gate, and past the rhododendrons beneath the ha-ha, she crossed the open parkland—sold off to a local farmer to graze his cows on—and came up behind the fountain and its retaining wall and the half-scale reproduction of Bernini’s Triton in the Piazza Barberini in Rome. (18) The device returns in part two as Robbie revisits his past, strolling on a literal memory lane materialised by a quasi chiastic inversion of terms; he walks the opposite trajectory, using almost the same words as the ones used by Briony using Cecilia’s point of view (which is in itself already a clue as to the recursive process at work in the novel): ‘It was one of those rare mornings which declares itself […] the grand portal to summer, and he was walking through it with Briony, past the Triton pond, down beyond the ha-ha and rhododendrons, through the iron kissing gate and onto the winding narrow woodland path’ (229). The ha-ha is associated twice with the kissing gate, also a device to keep livestock out. These two devices are deceptive obstacles used to create the illusion of an unobstructed gaze, of a porous boundary with nature, but they create physical and linguistic obstacles. The garden of the Tallises is a hortus conclusus, a closed garden, supposedly offering an Edenic respite from the outside world, and as such it is defined by subtle strategies of enclosure meant to prevent the intrusion of the outside world, of livestock, that is to say the laboring country, in the idyllic garden. These enclosing devices also give the illusion of an unobstructed viewpoint, as a parallel to Briony’s manipulations as an author.
7 However, the textual and physical enclosing strategies are all a sham, as abundantly shown in studies of the novel’s relationship to modernism: Lola’s rape, and Briony’s reaction, prove there is just as much corruption inside the supposedly sheltered hortus conclusus as in the outside world. In the end, we learn from Briony’s summarized accounts of letters from home and from her conversation with Cecilia that since the house was requisitioned as part of the war effort, the borders of the garden have become permeable to the outside world (‘the cows had been moved into three fields on the north side so that the park could be ploughed up for corn’ [278-279], ‘the park’s been ploughed up for corn’ [333]) and the Meissen vase is broken for good by Betty. The artificial, mythologized vision of History is here confirmed by the house’s manufactured quality Briony observes when she returns in the coda, an artificiality also at work in the film’s use of many formal features of the Heritage film. The pastoral presented both in the novel and its adaptation is tinged with nostalgia, as we have already seen in the markers of the past. In the coda, Briony attempts to undermine her own temptation by claiming that ‘there was no need to be nostalgic’ (363), however her (re)discovery of the grounds and house is marked by loss: the island has even become a ‘barrow’ (363), a burial site for the past. She observes and evaluates the changes brought about over the years, as the pastoral has been replaced by the utilitarian, and a golf course, with open vistas, has replaced the carefully designed landscape, complete with markers of utility more than view: litter bins, benches, electric lights. In keeping with the recursive nature of the narrative and Briony’s observations about culture in the coda, the novel displays a form of mistaken nostalgia for times when categories were easier to identify, an artificial temple was an artificial temple, and an English garden, a place to be discovered gradually and which changed as it was explored.
The metaphor of the garden and knowledge: aesthetics and hermeneutics One of the central characteristics of the English garden is its manipulation of prospects, of viewpoints. Vision in Atonement has been studied on many occasions (especially regarding the connection between vision and knowledge), but I would like to return briefly to the use of sensations regarding nature, to support the analogy of the novel as a landscape garden. While the novel constantly manipulates fields of vision (and the film makes us see events, such as Briony’s belated epiphany during Lola and Paul Marshall’s wedding ceremony), it does so in a way that Peter Mathews calls ‘a complicated perspectivist structure, a tactic that requires the readers continually to revise their point of view of particular events and characters’ (Mathews 151): we are led to continually alter what we think of events, characters, as the novel unfolds. The process then imitates how ‘one might explore a new garden’ (150), gaining access to manipulated perspectives to create new points of view on picturesque elements. Such a pattern of exploration and rediscovery is present in key scenes like the
8 fountain scene or the library scene, however they also occur with the landscape, and more particularly the garden. Elements that have already been described change according to the moment of the day or night, such as the ‘bamboo tunnel’ (159), accessed several times from different points of view. In Joe Wright’s adaptation, different scenes transform the garden into an unrecognizable space, especially at night. One can only experience the English landscape garden while moving through it, hence the multiple instances of crossings, and the construction of the garden (and of nature) as a maze. And indeed, the meandering design of the garden’s paths acts as a constant reminder that the exploratory process is gradual: ‘along the path […] by the old diving pool […] before curving away through the oak woods’ (18). Even the progress of the soldiers in France is characterized by a similar process, in which the characters never seem to be able to walk unencumbered, or in a straight line when outdoors. In Joe Wright’s adaptation, this is mirrored by the placement of the camera behind obstacles, like trees (Wright 0:59) when the soldiers cross an orchard. Such a reliance on both perception and spatial movement foregrounds the primacy of experience: Briony’s project, like a landscape garden, is rooted in empiricism, with its emphasis on the senses. In the construction of the novel, sensation is a prelude to expression, in keeping with John Locke’s analysis of external stimuli. The process is similar to Briony’s desire to move through people’s lives by using their supposed point of view. Meaning is produced as one goes, bodies having to move through time and space for meaning to emerge, in a way not dissimilar to the never fully stabilized geometry of the novel’s narrative structure, its play on perceptions and the implied author. In Atonement, McEwan draws on a comparison between artistic creation and gardening: in the novel, nature is presented both as a place of artifice and creation. Such a comparison is canonical in British culture, and sheds light on the cultural heritage behind McEwan’s play on imagination and nature. This is first clear in Robbie’s attraction to landscape gardening as well as literature, pointing to the parallel with literature but also fantasy. The narrator suggests that ‘landscape gardening was no more than a bohemian fantasy’ (91), while Robbie explains his fascination with gardening as an essentially literary one caused by the so-called ‘laborer poets’: ‘the eighteenth-century poetry that had almost persuaded him he should be a landscape gardener’ (92). Chapter 8 as a whole juxtaposes cultural references, showing Robbie’s eclectic taste and how he partly fits the role of the ideal British landscape designer 3 (before switching to medicine) as he is well-versed in the humanities and interested in practical work.
3 See eighteenth-century essayist George Mason, in his Essay on Design in Gardening: the true genius of landscape must have taste, be trained in the liberal arts (and be a landowner, which makes Robbie ultimately ill-suited to that): ‘Pretending by the glance of an eye to regulate scenery, even of a moderate extent, is a downright species of quackery; and such pretensions have been one of the causes of that amazing difference between the works of the common professor, and those of proprietors of taste’. (Quoted in Bending 224) 9 Briony also connects nature and artistic creation; in the garden, she reflects on the story she just made up while attacking weeds: It is hard to slash at nettles for long without a story imposing itself […]. Then playwriting itself became a nettle, became several in fact; the shallowness, the wasted time, the messiness of other minds, the hopelessness of pretending—in the garden of the arts, it was a weed and had to die. (73) The metaphor that emerges in this passage showcases the aesthetic porosity between writing and controlling nature: Briony tries to weed out the garden, to have everything fall in line, the opposite of her sister’s attempts to achieve a bouquet of flowers with ‘a natural chaotic look’ (23); Cecilia worries that her flower arrangement might look too ‘orderly’ (45). The two sisters peroduce a form of aesthetic chiasmus, in itself a sign of symmetry for the reader, and a sign of Briony’s constant struggle with such ‘artful disorder’ (45), the disorder present in the aesthetics of the English landscape garden.
The English garden and hermeneutics: questioning empiricism? A fundamental question arises, especially in relation to the modernist intertext of the novel and its empiricist undertones: how do you make sense of things? Especially when sensory perceptions can be deceiving and when even landscapes are artificial creations meant to create predetermined effects and affect? The most common hypothesis, for Atonement, is, through writing (at least it is Briony’s option in the end as is manifest in her endless rewriting), but I propose to add that the novel’s relationship with empiricism is more complex. Like its relationship with modernism, the novel’s relation to empiricism might seem closer to instauring a dialogue. Ann Banfield has brilliantly shown, in her analysis of the last section of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, how modernism operated in the wake of empiricism, and Woolf’s articulation of the two is made possible by the way the novel plays with the British tropes of nature, and the way the characters and the narrator play with these. How do you make sense of things, then? Only as consciousness moves through things, and things change along the way, in the same way an observer discovers a new English garden. Briony’s writing project can then be seen as an attempt to make sense not only of the world, but of her past, in a process that can be likened to Emily Tallis’ analogy (which can and should also be taken as an intertextual reference to the Bloomsbury group and Bertrand Russell in particular), but in the end we are given to read a project that is deeply rooted in British intellectual history.
Atonement presents the reader with a wealth of traditions that are interwoven, borrowed from, questioned. This dialogic intention is to be found in its intertextuality (specifically its dialogue with modernism), but also in its treatment of Britain’s history of ideas. Atonement subtly asserts its debt to
10 the acquisition of knowledge as defined in empiricist thought, through the image of self-discovery as the discovery a new garden, before showing us just how tightly composed the garden is. However, and this point might help us understand the complex relationships between Atonement and its own heritage, what matters the most in the presence of nature in the novel is its dynamic aspect: one can only properly explore an English garden by doing so oneself, and by being in movement.
Works Cited
BANFIELD, Ann, The Phantom Table, Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
BARTHES, Roland, ‘L’effet de réel’, Roland Barthes, Leo Bersani, et al., Littérature et réalité, Paris: Le Seuil, coll. Points, 1982.
BENDING, Stephen, ‘Horace Walpole and Eighteenth-Century Garden History’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 209–226, last accessed at www.jstor.org/stable/751470, on January 5, 2018.
CAVALIÉ, Elsa, ‘“England is a long way off”: Historical and Ethical “Elsewheres” in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Études britanniques contemporaines 37 (2009): 129-140.
---, Réécrire l’Angleterre. L’anglicité dans la littérature britannique contemporaine, Montpellier: PU de la Méditerranée, 2015.
FISHER, Bob, ‘Seamus McGarvey talks Atonement’, Moviemaker, February 4 (2008), last accessed at https://www.moviemaker.com/articles-moviemaking/seamus-mcgarvey-atonement- cinematography-oscar-20080204/, on January 5, 2008.
HIGSON, Andrew, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980, Oxford: OUP, 2003.
MATHEWS, Peter, ‘The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, English Studies in Canada 32.1 (March 2006): 147-160.
MCEWAN, Ian, Atonement, London: Vintage, 2001.
PRICE, Uvedale, Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and The Beautiful (1794). Edinburgh: Caldwell, Lloyd & Co., 1842, last accessed at https://archive.org/details/siruvedalepriceo00pric, on January 5, 2018.
WRIGHT, Joe, Atonement, 2007. DVD Universal Studios, 82532511, 2007.
11 ‘Unseen, from two stories up’ Seeing, Watching, Interpreting in Atonement Elsa Cavalié (Université d’Avignon) and Adèle Cassigneul (CAS)
In his 1950 study of the sea and romantic imagination, The Enchafèd flood, or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, W.H. Auden notes that:
The degree of visibility= the degree of conscious knowledge I.e., fog and most mean doubt and self-delusion, a clear day knowing where one is going or exactly what one has done.4
This quote appears to be strikingly relevant to Atonement, for the following reasons: the first one is the connection to Auden, whose autographed Dance of Death lies on Robbie’s desk in the first section of the novel (93) and whose “In Memory W.B. Yeats” is quoted in the second section (203). A second, less anecdotal connection, is the relationship Auden establishes between vision and knowledge: although quite simplistic, it accurately encapsulates the gradual blurring of Briony’s vision described in Part One, but also more generally in the novel. The first section concludes with Robbie “vanish[ing] into the whiteness” (187), the third one with Briony “gliding down[ing] through the soupy brown light” (349) while the coda describes the elderly Briony “watching the first gray light bring into view the park and the bridges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away, into the whiteness” (371). One could indeed imitate Auden’s phrase and say that Briony does not know “exactly what she has done”. A third, less obvious connection, is the relationship that the novel entertains with the romantic imagination. While Atonement has often been connected to the great tradition of nineteenth-century realist novels (see Alistair Cormack, 5 for instance), the influence of the romantic imagination has generally been overlooked by the critics.
I. MATRICIAL FRAMEWORKS
1. A VIEW FROM THE NURSERY In the first part of the novel, Briony’s gaze is explicitly informed by the world of childhood. One may think, for instance, about the oft-quoted description of Briony’s bedroom (4-5), in which the
4 W.H. Auden, The Enchafèd flood, or, The romantic Iconography of the Sea, New York: Vintage Books, 1950, 74. 5 Cormack, A., "Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in Atonement" in Ian McEwan, ed. Sebastian Groes, London, Continuum Books, 2009, 70-82. 12 ostentatious exhibition of orderliness is counterbalanced by the compulsive need to hide things, although, she has, at first, nothing to hide (“But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets” 5). It is only in her imagination that the young girl senses the potential for the exhilarating thrill of secret (“But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told” 6). That being said, it is important to notice that Briony’s bedroom not only is the “shrine to her controlling demon” (5), as the famous quote goes, but also the place where she becomes a writer: a playwright at first, and then a budding novelist. As she literally moves from the bedroom to the nursery Briony simultaneously enters the realms of childhood and drama, for the nursery is the place where the rehearsals of her play, “The Trials of Arabella” are supposed to take place. It is therefore only a short step to considering that Briony’s perception of the scene she is going to watch from the nursery window is informed by the one that has repeatedly taken place in the nursery (i.e., the play): Arabella becomes Cecilia while Robbie is, interestingly enough, first “the prince” disguised as “impoverished doctor” (3) before turning into the “wicked foreign count” (3), as if both male protagonists were fused into one in her vision. It is then no wonder that what follows, Briony’s observation of Robbie and Cecilia’s meeting at the Triton fountain, is concurrently perceived as a tableau, the setting of a play (the word ‘scene’ is repeatedly used and emphasizes the artificiality of Briony’s vision) or a scene taken from a film. The description indeed seems to borrow from cinematographic techniques; it starts with an extreme wide shot on the surrounding countryside and the Surrey hills, before zooming in on the Tallis estate (“then, nearer, the estate's open parkland” 38), the garden (“closer […] were the rose gardens” 38), and eventually, the fountain (“nearer still, the Triton fountain” 38). That first “shot” is then followed by a still shot of Robbie, standing as the archetypal hero, his hands on his hips before silently, or so it seems for Briony, raising a hand to stop Cecilia. The scene thus simultaneously seems to belong to a dumb show of the pantomime sort, a melodramatic theater play inspired by The Trials of Arabella (Briony imagines stage directions such as “a proposal of marriage”) and a 1930s mock-medieval film (such as Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, for instance6). But the rub comes when Briony tries to make sense of the plot, for what she sees, and the literary framework through which she considers it, do not seem to fit. Initially envisioned as a fairytale “It was a scene that could easily have accommodated […] a medieval castle” (38) it soon becomes obvious that the scene cannot be what she expected it to be. Thus, Briony’s first judgment “it made
6 This shot, representing Sir Robin of Locksley, or Robin Hood, played by Erroll Flynn, offers an interesting echo of Robbie (“There was something rather formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back.”, “He stood with hands on his hips”) at the beginning of the scene: https://goo.gl/images/wAM5bp 13 perfect sense” is quickly replaced by an acknowledgement of failure “the sequence was illogical" (39). Briony’s position in the nursery, watching events “two stories up” then offers a nice metafictional pun on her place in the narrative. She is literally and metaphorically two stories up: watching things happen from the window of the second story of the house, but also acting as the hidden narrator of the secret story she has always wanted to write. As a result, the young girl is, so to speak, surrounded by stories: those she writes of course, but also those she reads, as the epigraph of the novel, a Northanger Abbey quote ironically commenting on the dangers of reading too much Gothic literature, reminds us.
2. BRIONY’S WHIMSICAL MIND’S EYE Just before she arrives “at one of the nursery’s wide-open windows” and contemplates the fountain scene, Briony muses on the telepathic power of stories, a “magical process” through which “you [see] the word castle, and it [is] there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it” (37). Nurtured on romances and author of melodramatic tales, the teenager believes that life, just like texts, is made of signs and symbols to be deciphered, interpreted and translated7. Confident in her judgment, Briony is convinced that she masters the secret language of courting and love affairs. In what she sees, just as in melodramas, “[t]hings cease to be merely themselves, gestures cease to be merely tokens of social intercourse whose meaning is assigned by a social code; they become the vehicles of metaphors whose tenor suggests another kind of reality” (Brooks 9). According to Briony, what is presented to her when Robbie stands in front of her sister “fitted very well. It made perfect sense”. Or rather, it makes perfect sense according to her interpretative framework: “Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance” (38). Earlier, on her return home from Cambridge, Cecilia had noticed, “Briony was lost to her writing fantasies – what had seemed a passing fad was now an enveloping obsession” (20-1). Later, when writing to Robbie, Cecilia asserts “she’s such a fantasist, as we know to our cost”. “Remember what a dreamer she is” (212). According to her big sister, Briony is a “Madame Quixote” (Doody xxii), she is a slave to imagination who turns her life into a fantasy of her own and projects her private whimsical visions onto the outside world. Indeed, the young girl appears as the contemporary avatar of Charlotte Lennox’s female Quixote, Arabella. As Kathleen d’Angelo suggests, “Briony is the Arabella figure who views the world as an extension of her literary imagination” (92). Indeed, as Briony herself remarks, “what she knew was not literally, or not only, based on the visible” (169). What she sees with her own eyes is twisted by her mind’s eye. She reasons and perceives with her imagination.
7 Cf “[…] the word was one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic...". 114. 14
When the young girl went back to the window and looked down, the damp patch on the gravel had evaporated. Now there was nothing left of the dumb show by the fountain beyond what survived in memory, in three separate and overlapping memories. The truth had become as ghostly as invention. (41)
Between vision and revision, the actual view is turned into a memory-image, which is then interpreted and blended into her fabular version of events. And because she shares her reading of romances with Arabella, her imaginings too turn upon rape and sexual assault.
As far as she was concerned, everything fitted; the terrible present fulfilled the recent past. Events she herself witnessed foretold her cousin’s calamity. […] He was a maniac after all. Anyone would do. […] That his victim could easily have been her increased Briony’s outrage and fervour. If her poor cousin was not able to command the truth, then she would do it for her. I can. And I will. (168)
Briony’s “frenetic vision” (21) fuses actual images (what she actually saw) and virtual ones (what she remembers, interprets and refashions) to create a different order of reality, a vision of her own which she imposes on everyone around her.
II. THE PARADOXES OF VISION
1. PLEASURE IN LOOKING: ON BRIONY’S VOYEURISM
“Unseen, from two storeys up” (39), Briony improves her visual powers by acting the part of the “hidden observer” (40). She is indeed an obsessional watcher who asserts herself as the sole eye witness in the family (as well as in the narrative) and remains, until old age, a voyeuse. In the coda, she keeps hidden to “manag[e] a good look” (357) at Paul and Lola Marshall whom, true to her melodramatic frame of mind, she compares to a “stage villain” (358). Through visual pleasure, or scoptophilia, Briony associates compulsive vision and desire to know (“curiosité de savoir”, Pellion 267). In Part 1, watching through the window means that she is moving out of the confined world of childhood, out of her nursery, and that she is starting to “look outside in the real world” (Pellion 270). As the demiurgic girl rules over, controls and manipulates her childish realm, her move to the open window means that she aspires to embrace and comprehend the world, to seize it at a glance. This is best illustrated by Joe Wright’s use of extreme close-ups and pieces to camera (regard camera) of
15 Briony in the fountain, library and rape scenes. Under her darting eye, we feel her active, devouring gaze8. Wright’s emphasis on the act of looking, and the scoptophilic tension it entails, also underlines the erotic pleasure that is derived from it. In the third part of the adaptation, when Briony visits her sister in Balham, Wright films the young woman’s strange fascination for her sister’s sexuality. He exposes Briony’s voyeuristic interest for Cecilia’s messy bed with a brief shot reverse shot (champ- contrechamp). A discreet pan further underlines the intensity of her indiscreet look which Wright associates with sexual frustration: "This moment of her studying their bed, of imagining the sex that happened, or imagining the smells. I don't think Briony never has much sex. She never gets married [which is false as in the novel Briony does get married to Thierry]". And when Cecilia kisses Robbie to tame his access of violence, Wright catches the sudden surge (“irruption”) of the sexual drive in Briony’s absorbed and ogling look. In McEwan's part one, the teenage girl is obsessed by marriage and love affairs, a screen fixation which hardly conceals her interest in sexuality9. Chapter after chapter, she is confronted to sex acts she identifies as “mysteries” (160) and which arouse turmoils of emotions. Briony is both fascinated, attracted (she wants to and actually sees) and shocked, confused (on screen, she trembles and cries). Wright clearly plays on this hesitation between attraction and repulsion, desire and terror by resorting to the montage of attraction10. In the rape scene, for instance, the round halo of Briony’s torch blatantly stands out in the blind darkness and turns the image into a voyeurist device, some sort of peep show, as if we were peeping through a keyhole or through the peephole viewer of a kinetoscope 11 . The alternating extreme close-ups on Briony and the emphasis on her facecam searching gaze exhibit the young girl’s desire to see and her will to know. For the third time, Briony is confronted to a primal scene: she unexpectedly discovers a naked backside and the crude vision makes her gasp of surprise and horror. Suddenly petrified, as if turned into stone, she drops her torch and is left in the dark. As Otto Fenichel points out, “to be turned into stone is, like losing [one’s] sigh, a very frequent punishment for the scoptophiliac” (389). Briony is literally blinded by what she has
8 See Fenichel. 9 A good wedding was an unacknowledged representation of the as yet unthinkable – sexual bliss” (9). 10 “[I]f you get a kid to do absolutely nothing and then cut to a shot of a couple having sex in the library, then cut back to a kid doing absolutely nothing, you're going to project all the fear and all the misunderstanding onto that kid's face. […] this was obviously also the experiments of Eisenstein and Vertov. It's montage” (Douglas). 11 Cf Duchamp, Étant donnés. 16 just seen. Just like the fountain and library scenes, the rape is beyond her understanding but she nevertheless senses its morally occult12 dimension. Throughout the first seminal part, Briony witnesses what she perceives as violent enigmatic sexual acts that she has difficulties in deciphering and comprehending. This brutal confrontation with the adult world provides her with a new, yet incomplete, understanding. As the adult Briony reflexively remarks, [t]he fairy stories were behind her, and in the space of a few hours she had witnessed mysteries, seen an unspeakable word, interrupted brutal behaviour, and by incurring the hatred of an adult whom everyone had trusted, she had become a participant in the drama of life beyond the nursery. (160)
Gazing from behind her childhood window, teenage Briony inhabits a “transitional space between the nursery and adult worlds” (141), which breeds a hybrid vision that retains blind spots.
2. BLIND SPOTS: THE FAILURE OF VISION What remains is the problematic connection between seeing and understanding or, if we use Kantian concepts, perception and understanding. Between perception and understanding, lies, according to Kant, Imagination. But what he calls productive imagination is a “synthetic act in which we combine the detached elements of perception”, that is to say, one’s capacity to “connect concept to Image” (Hume 487) so that “understanding can complete the cognitive synthesis” (487). What is depicted in the first part of the novel, is the gradual failure of Briony’s vision, and how without “the elements of perception” Kant evokes, Briony’s imagination is gradually let loose to fill the void. Again and again, it becomes obvious to the reader that despite Briony’s intense desire to watch and see things, vision fails her. First, during the fountain scene: as the episode has ended, Briony finds herself “staring unseeingly down the nursery’s length” (39): the oxymoronic phrase draws attention to the fact that although the scopic drive lingers, it clearly fails in creating a vision. Despite the fact that the following paragraph teems with verbs denoting vision, “stared”, “unseeing”, “regard”, “witness”, “tableau” (39-40), it becomes increasingly clear that Briony watches things but cannot see. However, at that point, Briony’s failure to make sense of what is going on is paradoxically counterbalanced by her awareness of that very failure. Just like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, she is epistemologically closer to the truth when she suspects that her vision of the world is lacking.
12 “[The moral occult] bears comparison to the unconscious mind, for it is a sphere of being where our most basic desires and interdictions lie” (Brooks 5). 17 As the first part of the novel unfolds, it becomes obvious that Briony’s entire reasoning process, consisting in the passage from perception to imagination and then understanding, is flawed. First because, as has already been mentioned, she does not seem to see properly. And if the seeds of cognitive blindness are already present during the fountain scene, they come to fruition in the library scene, where the text is saturated with terms that draw attention to Briony’s inability to see: “dark”, “gloom”, “at first, […] she saw nothing at all” (123). And, interestingly enough, almost the same phrase is repeated when Robbie comes back to Tallis house with the twins: “at first they saw nothing” (182): this time, cognitive, or hermeneutic blindness has apparently spread to the entire group at Tallis House, like a contagious disease. To go back to the unfolding of events in part one, as Briony enters the park in order to search for the twins, obscurity has taken over and the girl seems to be threatened by the engulfing darkness: “But there was nothing, nothing but the tumbling dark mass of the woods just discernible against the grayish-blue of the western sky” (160). At that point, Kant’s triad connecting perception to Understanding seems to be turned upside down, and truth precedes vision: “what she knew was not literally, or not only, based on the visible” (169). Visual perception has disappeared, and Briony’s “truth” is now what shapes her vision: “The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common sense. The truth instructed her eyes” (169). Briony justifying her actions because of the symmetry of events might of course remind us of Blake’s “fearful symmetry”13, and of the fact that Briony, transitioning from innocence to experience, has become as dangerous as the poem’s tiger. Still, what had until then remained virtual and unstable, that is to say, the mounting threat of Briony’s confusion between vision and truth, only becomes real when it is put into words, during her interview with the inspector: “You saw him then.” “I know it was him.” “Let’s forget what you know. You’re saying you saw him.” “Yes, I saw him.” “Just as you see me.” “Yes.” “You saw him with your own eyes.” “Yes. I saw him. I saw him.” (181, our emphasis)
In that dialogue, once can actually witness the battle between vision and understanding being transferred from Briony’s mind to the public realm that an interview with the police constitutes. As the text progressively becomes saturated with the word “see”, the verb paradoxically loses its meaning. The strikingly paratactic form of the exchange (there is only one two-syllable word: “saying”)
13 In “The Tyger”. 18 underlines the fact that language has become meaningless. The verb “see”/”saw” seems to be chanted like an incantation, displacing Briony’s testimony from the realm of reason to that of almost religious belief.
III. MAKING US SEE, THE AWESOME POWER OF WORDS
1. “IT DISSOLVES, DIFFUSES, DISSIPATES…”: BRIONY’S VISIONS AND RE(-)VISIONS Briony has difficulties in defining the verb “to see”. Opposing her interrogators’ “austere view of the visual”, she “would have preferred to qualify, or complicate, her use of the word ‘saw’”. “Either she saw, or she did not see. There lay nothing in between […]” (170). She is trapped by language, by her own words, or rather by her listeners’ inability to perceive the potential polysemy of the word and their urge to have her articulate truths and certainties. But, “[w]hen the matter was closed, when the sentence was passed and the congregation dispersed, a ruthless youthful forgetting, a wilful erasing, protected her well into her teens” (171). Rewriting her childhood story, the adult Briony plays on the “in between” just quoted. She reckons on the figurative sense of the verb – “to form a mental picture of, to visualize” – and allows for potential misrepresentations. Acknowledging the imaginative dimension of vision, she endorses its creative power, its power to “dissolve, diffuse, dissipate” the factual truth of events. What she gazes at in the dark and assumes she has seen is in fact the sheer projection of her own interpretations. Breaking down the world of everyday perception, she creates a new reality. Yet what she sees is further twisted by what she remembers to have seen.
Her memories of the interrogation and signed statements and testimony, or her awe outside the courtroom from which her youth excluded her, would not trouble her so much in the years to come as her fragmented recollection of that late night and summer dawn. (173)
Not only does vision fail as Briony does not actually see anything, but it seems that memory fails too and that the girl-turned-narrator only retains piecemeal recollections of what she thinks happened. As she acknowledges in the novel’s coda, she has had to “displace, transmute, dissemble. Bring down the fogs of the imagination!” (370), to shape her narrative. She had to shore her fragments against her ruin, to remodel experience into “some kind of whole made of shivering fragments”, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s words (PA xxv). So, to overcome the double failure of vision and memory and manage to write her novel, Briony revisions her past, that is she both sees it again through incomplete memory-images and revises it, even alters it to make her “truth” triumph. And to re-collect and compose her novelistic version of events, she fashions a virtual vision through montage. Montage, Eisenstein writes, is “an
19 idea born out of the shock between two distinct elements” (Film 49). Briony replaces what she failed to see in the fountain, the library and the rape scenes but also what she never saw (notably Robbie’s war experience in France in Part 2 and her conversation with Cecilia at the end of Part 3) by a disjunctive form which juxtaposes details, scenes and events, makes them collide and confront each other so that, from their collision, readers might make sense of what really happened and finally understand her “truth”. To quote from Eisenstein again: “an emotion, an image and its dynamic development appear when static elements, that is, given and imagined factors are juxtaposed next to each other” (Film 234). Taking her cue from Conrad14, Briony wants to make us see what happened to her and her relatives through a dynamic narrative process which builds itself up on the visual imaginary power of words.
2. "...IN ORDER TO RECREATE": THE DANGEROUS ART OF (RE-)WRITING STORIES Much has been said about McEwan’s neo-humanist stance and how Atonement may belong to the early 21st-century “ethical turn” famously mapped by Davis and Womack. Still, and against the general trend in the recent flow of literary criticism on Atonement, we would like to consider that what could be described as Briony’s ethically questionable use of history, images and real lives, and her manipulation of fictional ones15, is actually also part and parcel of McEwan’s poetics. If we take a step back and look closely at what has just been described, “le mentir-vrai”16, that is to say manipulating facts, turning them into fiction in order to reach a truth that seems ungraspable otherwise, that is precisely what McEwan does thanks to a hybrid form that borrows from historical accounts and romance, or melodrama. Those hybrid forms are indeed often connected to the performance of trauma, as Jean Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega explain it: Such a move can be seen at work in the hybrid liminal texts and genres used as instruments for the literary performance of trauma: the hybrid autobiographies in which the dialogue between referentiality and fiction is acutely at work; the liminal historical narratives, in which once again the referential and the poetic are made to collaborate without the ironic stance of historiographic metafiction. (13)
If we pay attention to how McEwan represents personal and historical traumas thanks to a hybrid form blending historical accounts and melodrama, we notice that Briony’s hermeneutically flawed but effective aesthetics of montage is indeed at the core of McEwan’s writing: it is of course true for Atonement, but also very much so for the famous opening of Enduring Love, describing a balloon
14 For more on that see Cassigneul & Cavalié (22) 15 In particular, about Dominic Head’s analysis of the ethical conundrum the novel represents, not only for Briony as a character/narrator, but also for McEwan as a novelist. See Head (172) 16 See Cassigneul & Cavalié (11) 20 crash, or the striking, to say the least, wedding night in On Chesil Beach. We are not saying that there is no ethical responsibility in McEwan’s writing, but that eventually his poetics of montage, of juxtaposing striking images in order to appeal to the reader’s imagination, affect and reason transfers the ethical responsibility to the reader. Our final question could then be: is that transfer of ethical responsibility McEwan’s very own “dereliction of duty”17 (to use his words against him), or a neo- humanist trust in the reader?
WORKS CITED Brooks, P., The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess, Yale, YUP, 1976. Cassigneul, Adèle & Cavalié, Elsa. Atonement, Ian McEwan, et Joe Wright. Neuilly: Editions Atlande, 2017. D’angelo, Kathleen. "'To Make a Novel': The Construction of a Critical Readership in Ian McEwan's Atonement". Studies in the Novel, ol. 41, n° 1, 2009, 88-105. Davis, Todd & Kenneth Womack, eds., Mapping the Ethical Turn, Charlottesville, U.P. of Virginia, 2001. Douglas, E., “Joe Wright on directing Atonement”, Comingsoon.net, 30 novembre 2007
17 In an interview, McEwan famously described modernism’s “dereliction of duty towards plot”. See “Interview Michael Silverblatt”, Bookworm, KCRW, 11 July 2002a.
21 Pellion, T., « Présentations de l’objet à l’adolescence - Le cas de la pulsion scopique » Recherches en Pyschanalyse 8, 2009, 265-281. Woolf, Virginia. A Passionate Aprentice. The Early Journals 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell Leaska. London: The Hogarth Press, 1990.
22 Intertextuality and Reflexivity in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007)
Christophe Gelly
Université Clermont Auvergne – CELIS (EA 1002)
The two terms which I have chosen as a topic for this paper are very often treated as a critical commonplace regarding postmodern writing. Intertextuality, or the very conspicuous relation a text entertains with a given literary tradition, repeatedly appears as a defining trait of post-1950 literature.
But it is also regularly associated with self-consciousness or reflexivity, in the sense that a text which conspicuously quotes may appear as a reflexive text—namely, a text that refers us not only or not mainly to the diegetic reality that is represented, but to textuality itself. My aim here is to examine more closely this specific relation between intertextuality and self-consciousness, a connection which
I believe is neither automatic nor self-evident, and to investigate the meaning this relation may take in the context of adaptation, regarding Joe Wright’s film version of Atonement. After presenting a general approach of the link between intertextuality and reflexivity, I shall first concern myself with the way intertextuality appears in the novel and in the film, using different devices and sometimes dissimilar results. Then this reading will focus on the way reflexivity operates in both works, particularly concerning images in the film. Finally, I shall assess the specific aim that is served by this reflexive trait in relation to the ethical discourse in both the source text and its adaptation.
Intertextuality versus reflexivity
Reflexivity, or metafiction, can be defined after Patricia Waugh’ influential essay, as fiction which comments upon fiction, and whose aim is to shed light on and critically approach the devices and conventions of fiction writing. To do so, metafictional texts present themselves openly as artefacts, as non-realistic expressions of a story world which is definitely presented as fictional. In Waugh’s words, metafiction “lays the device bare,” i.e. it displays the conventional nature of fiction writing and reading with a view to exploring not only the workings but also the limits of fiction.
23
In novelistic practice, [metafiction] results in writing which consistently displays its
conventionality, which explicitly and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, and which
thereby explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction […] (Waugh, p. 4)
The relation of metafiction to intertextuality can be diverse, but of significant interest is the remark by Waugh (p. 5) that novels, as a particularly dialogic genre, integrate various modes of communication (memoirs, journals, diaries, journalism, etc.) which question each other and hence account for an intrinsically reflexive quality of novels as a genre. This dialogism is treated differently in metafictional novels and realistic, non-reflexive novels.
The conflict of languages and voices is apparently resolved in realistic fashion through their
subordination to the dominant “voice” of the omniscient, godlike author. Novels which Bakhtin
refers to as “dialogic” resist such resolution. Metafiction displays and rejoices in the
impossibility of such a resolution and thus clearly reveals the basic identity of the novel as
genre. (Waugh, p. 6)
I intend to examine whether the intertextual references in Joe Wright’s Atonement can be considered in this perspective as part of a dialogic texture in the film (and in the novel) and as implementing the metafictional function of the film, through the way they question the status of fiction within fiction.
A first step in examining how intertextuality and reflexivity can account for the way both works function is to examine how the intertext appears in both novel and film. The novel announces its intertextual concern right from the beginning or more exactly before the beginning, through the paratext that spells out a moral of sorts taken from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and expounding the dangers of fiction. But this is only one part of the ‘lesson’ of the novel, and we know that much of the intertextual material in McEwan’s Atonement refers us to the early 20th century, especially with
24 the fictional letter (reproduced on pages 311 to 315), signed “CC,” sent in answer to Briony’s manuscript. This letter has consistently (Hesse 85) been identified as a fictional recreation of a letter by Cyril Connolly, the famous editor, and it mentions such prominent figures as Virginia Woolf or
Elizabeth Bowen. Hence the conclusion by critic Bastin (p. 192) that McEwan has a bone to pick with modernism primarily, and that this is what motivates the intertext in the novel. Concomitant with but not depending on these references, the novel also articulates reflexive notations which aim at a comparison between various modes of writing, as when Briony assesses the merits of drama and prose.
A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader—no
intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on
resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have
the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village streets,
no seaside. No curtain. It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of
telepathy. (p. 37)
Reflexivity thus often appears not as connected to a direct intertextual quote (except in the epigraph) but rather as a more general discourse on the nature of fiction. By contrast, the film inserts several direct quotes within its own narrative, most noticeably one extract from Marcel Carné’s Quai des brumes (1938), which appears twice—once when Robbie is visiting a cinema thronged with British soldiers during the Dunkirk evacuation, and once when he is having hallucinations in an underground shelter just before dying. However, these passages do not trigger any explicit discourse on the form and validity of the cinematic message, unlike what happens in the novel for modes of writing. Thus, reflexivity seems disjointed from the actual insertion of intertexts in both works, since indirect intertextuality in the novel does not prevent reflexivity whereas the contrary is true for the film, which includes direct interfilmic quotes but fails to voice an explicit discourse on cinematic representation.
25 This contrasted use of intertextuality (meaning here both intertextual and interfilmic devices) proceeds from an essential difference in the handling of reflexive comments on the medium—novel and film. These comments are integrated by Briony in the novel as the (hidden) author of the work we are reading, but they cannot keep the same status in the film unless Briony is presented as the
(hidden) filmmaker. Matthew Bolton (p. 34) has remarked how implausible this would have been, and shows that signs of Briony’s manipulation appear elsewhere, and in another way, in Joe Wright’s
Atonement—noticeably by inserting clues that point to the instability of narrative frontiers and that thus suggest the acting presence of an organizing consciousness behind the narrative flow (Bolton, p.
36). But the intertextual elements remain distinct from the novel to the film, since their representation can be attributed to Briony’s direct authorship only in the novel, whereas in the film they are mediated by an external enunciation. Does it mean that reflexivity functions differently in both works? And how can Briony in the film be given the full responsibility of these reflexive comments if, as Bolton argues (p. 35), she partly disappears as an author from the film?
The latter question is easily solved: even if the film cannot maintain the same degree of authorship for Briony as in the novel, we ultimately discover that as the general organizer of the narrative she may have had an influence over the very form of representation that was offered to us— hence she can be partly considered as responsible for the manipulative narrative that unfolds. She is at the origin of cinematic misrepresentation—the best proof of it is that her discourse in the end, supposedly true, triggers another representation on screen of Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths. But the former query is to be regarded more cautiously. Since Briony cannot be represented as a filmmaker in the adaptation, it means that the reflexivity of representation, the discourse held by the film on film as a medium is transposed into the filmic expression itself, noticeably through interfilmic references.
We are now to examine the specific role of these references and how they may determine the metafictional quality of representation.
Two Figures by a Fountain
26 When dealing with the relationship between intertext and metafiction in the film, it is essential to consider the status of this intertext. We have already identified Quai des brumes as a direct, explicit reference, but this is not the most frequent form inter-iconicity assumes in the film. Most frequently, the film refers to images treated as intertexts—i.e. images distinct from the main narration but inserted in it as visual quotes—by emphasizing the constructed nature of these images. These images used by the film are also reflexively pointing to the unreliability of images and to the manipulation they make possible. Two obvious examples come to mind. The first one is the scene [1’33’49] where Briony, as a nurse, watches a news report in a cinema together with wounded soldiers, and discovers that Lola is to be married to Paul Marshall; the couple being presented to Queen Elizabeth in the newsreel.
What stands out here is the paradoxical association between an obviously autonomous, seemingly realistic audiovisual piece (featuring the Queen) and the fictional value attached to it through the presence of these fictional protagonists, Paul and Lola. The contrast is all the starker as Lola watches directly into the camera as if she was staring at Briony, who is looking at the screen, thus further blurring the limits between narratives—not only between history and fiction but also between the theatre where Briony is sitting and watching, and the chocolate factory which the Queen is visiting.
Two narrative levels are being merged here, the first being the cinema where the report is broadcast, and the second the metafilm showing Paul and Lola with the Queen.18 This historical frame—the actual images of the Queen—only seemingly lends verisimilitude to the sequence; above all, it calls the viewer’s attention to the constructedness of the image and ostensibly presents it as a fake collage.
It thus associates intertextuality—the reference to a ‘real’ news report—with reflexivity understood as triggering a question on the status of this image, both true and false, history and fiction.
Another intertextual episode that is deeply reflexive is to be found in the final twist through which an aged Briony reveals the truth about Robbie and Cecilia. This episode evokes numerous other confession scenes but specifically through the fact that the role of Briony’s interviewer is played
18 This scene corresponds to what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction, i.e. a fictional development reinterpreting a historical context. 27 by Anthony Minghella, who was famous for directing another confessional narrative, The English
Patient (1996), adapted from Michael Ondaatje. This may not be a direct quotation and only an allusion, but it suggests a significant relation with a story which similarly dwells very much on reinterpretation and gradual disclosure. This hint is significantly associated in the film with a scene where Briony is confronted with the very obvious machinery of audiovisual recording and broadcast.
It thus combines the interfilmic allusion proceeding from the implicit reference to Minghella’s œuvre, with a more general question raised about the reliability of audiovisual content. Unlike what happens in the scene which features Paul and Lola (soon to be) Marshall and the Queen, the connection relies on continuity, not synchronicity, but the result is similar. The presence of Minghella blurs the narrative frontiers between diegetic content (Briony’s confession) and extradiegetic references, and it problematizes our adhesion to it. This is confirmed by the rewind of the interview scene at the beginning of the sequence, which materializes the presence of an external observer of the scene and destabilizes any definitely truthful value we may ascribe to the sequence. The very structure of the ending of Atonement thus works at keeping the viewer away from any set perspective on the denouement, with its alternation between the revisions of Briony’s manipulative narrative and a final, wish-fulfilling coda showing the survival of the two lovers in their idyllic cottage by the sea. The constructed quality of this sequence appears all the more starkly as they are preceded by this framing device that includes both a ‘real-life’ director and a rewind of the beginning of the interview.
The articulation between intertext and reflexivity appears sometimes more directly, if more fleetingly. A case in point lies in the rather obvious link the film establishes between specific shots and famous paintings. For instance, when Briony is lying awake on a sofa [47’20] just before Robbie’s arrest, the sequence slows down to tilt down on her body and present an image of her, similar to an ekphrasis, that strongly evokes John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1852), a painting that is again later evoked in the end when, in accordance with Briony’s confession, we see Cecilia’s corpse floating in the water that flooded Balham underground station (Griggs, p. 357). Numerous other pictorial references are included within the film, noticeably to Vermeer’s paintings, through the use of a lateral
28 light source—this connection being a commonplace of many Heritage films. Dealing with a post-
Heritage work—as Atonement certainly is—we should add that these references are not meant here to trigger a fetishistic, cultural revaluation of representation but to implement a reflexive move.
Although Atonement may look in this respect as part of a traditional Heritage aesthetics, the final twist is bound to lead viewers to question the source of these intertextual, pictorial references and ask who is responsible for their inclusion in the narrative. Is it Briony as an ultimately manipulative enunciator determining the form of cinematic representation and introducing these ‘embellishments’, or is it the filmic enunciation, somehow distinct from Briony’s control, which should be regarded as their source?
The use of pictorial references as part of the intertext eventually blurs the notion of authorship and reflexively destabilizes enunciation. This corresponds again to the definition of metafiction by
Patricia Waugh, as fiction questioning its own devices and development. This also reminds us that metafiction lies potentially in any sequence where a fictional character refers to fiction—here Briony as the author quoting Vermeer or Millais—because it blurs the limits between fiction and reality: if a fictional character quotes fiction, his or her status as fictional becomes dubious. But this is not systematic—realistic literature abounds with such intertextual references. What is needed for such a device to become metafictional is, as it happens here, the staging of a problematic relationship between texts which calls into question their place in the narrative structure.
Ethics and reflexivity
The general metafictional quality of Atonement can eventually be seen not only as a token of post- modernism in McEwan’s novel but also as serving a specific aim, which is not only to bare the textual devices for the reader. This quality led critics to view the novel and the film as concerned with a global distrust for representation—whether words or images. This opens the question of the ethical value of both works. About the film, one could also wonder if Joe Wright is criticizing our faith in images just as McEwan would be warning us against the power of fiction. It seems that the epigraph to the novel brings a ready answer to that question, concerning the text. The novel does not blame
29 Briony for her fascination with words and fiction but for her imprisonment in it and for the inbred quality of this fiction. This is what appears implicitly in Cyril Connolly’s critical review of a first version of Two Figures by a Fountain.
The crystalline present is of course a worthy subject in itself, especially for poetry; it allows a
writer to sow his gifts, delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylized version of thought
processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored and so on.
Who can doubt the value of this experimentation? However, such writing can become precious
when there is no sense of forward movement. Put the other way round, our attention would
have been held even more effectively had there been an underlying pull of simple narrative.
Development is required. (p. 312)
What Briony’s manuscript lacks is a story, meaning an opening onto reality that would safeguard her against the spells cast by self-introspection. This danger of self-introspection is partly expressed and partly redeemed by reflexivity, since reflexivity is both what makes Briony’s manipulation possible
(through the blurring of her real status as the author) and what denounces it, once we become aware of her manipulation through the final revelation of this reflexive status of her enunciation. But
McEwan gives ample proof that Briony’s self-obsessed narrative has cut her from the others, and maybe from her own past. In the words of Laurent Mellet: ‘it is mainly through the exclusion of sameness and the idealization of alterity that an ethics of connection can emerge’ (p.222).
Similarly, Joe Wright’s film, despite its apparent happy ending, suggests an equally critical view of Briony’s confession through the final shot on the cottage that corresponds in every detail to the postcard the two lovers cherished as a token of their future together. By focusing representation on the exact correspondence between the cottage and its photographic reproduction, the film suggests a lack of distance, and the need for meeting reality outside preconceived representations, a meeting which fails to take place in this self-same repetition from one image to another. In this final sequence, then, the film ultimately voices an ethical content similar to what is conveyed in the novel, through
30 an internal reference within the narrative. This reference—although the postcard cannot be considered as intertextual material—confirms that the reflexive slant in the film means to set us free from the fascination of images, whether they refer us to inter-iconicity or to the diegetic content of the film.
Works cited
BASTIN Giselle, ‘Precursor Texts in the Novel and Film of Atonement,’ in Diana Glenn, Md
REZAUL Haque, Ben KOOYMAN and Nena BIERBAUM (eds.), The Shadow of the Precursor,
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012, 188-201
BERTETTO Paolo, Le miroir et le simulacre. Le cinéma dans le monde devenu fable, Rennes : PUR,
2015
BOLTON Matthew, “The Rhetoric of Intermediality: Adapting Means, Ends, and Ethics in
Atonement.” Diegesis, vol. 2, n° 1, 2013: 23-53
GRIGGS Yvonne, ‘Writing for the Movies: Writing and Screening Atonement’, Deborah Cartmell
(ed.), A Companion to literature, Film and Adaptation, Oxford: Blackwell, 2012, 345-358
HESSE Beatrix, ‘Point of View in Atonement—Novel and Film’, Anglistik, 21.2 (2010): 83-91
HUTCHEON Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, New York: Routledge,
1988.
LEDOUX Aurélie, L'ombre d'un doute : Le cinéma américain contemporain et ses trompe-l'œil,
Rennes : PUR, 2012
MELLET Laurent, ‘The Political Ethics of Alterity in Ian McEwan’s Film Adaptations and
Screenwriting’, Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dirs.), Ethics of Alterity: Confrontation and Responsibility in the 19th- to 21st-Century British Arts, Montpellier: PULM, 2015, 221-232
WAUGH Patricia, Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, New York:
Routledge, 1984
31 A Cracked Construction: Postmodernist Fragmentation and Fusion in McEwan’s Atonement Christian Gutleben Université Côte d’Azur
According to Linda Hutcheon – the leading authority on the question –,within the realm of postmodernism, linked to th[e] contesting of the unified and coherent subject is a more general questioning of any totalizing or homogenizing system. Provisionality and heterogeneity contaminate any neat attempts at unifying coherence (formal or thematic). Historical and narrative continuity and closure are contested, but again, from within. (Hutcheon 12) Such a challenge to coherence, concord, continuity (formal or thematic) seems to be the purpose of McEwan’s Atonement, whose thematic concerns and structural organization reflect the ideas of fragmentation, raptures, gaps and cracks, possibly in order to explore the plurality thus generated in the aesthetic and ideological fields, but probably also to express a traumatic type of bearing-after- witness characterized by the dislocation of temporalities and perceptions. As it is generalized and pervasive, the principle of fragmentation paradoxically creates a unifying link between the various parts and sub-parts of the whole and this sense of unity is strengthened by the paradigmatic use of metafiction and inserted specular fragments. So, in spite of or because of its numerous and visible cracks, McEwan’s novel forms a strongly unified architectural whole, an aesthetic unity made up of plurality. It is the purpose of this paper to analyze Atonement’s postmodernist syncretism, its aesthetics of fragmentation, its paradoxical aggregation through division. When, early in the first chapter of Part One, the narrative instance mentions Briony’s nursery’s ‘floorboard cracks’ (11), the implication seems to be that the ground beneath her feet is unstable and these cracks can then immediately be read sylleptically, signifying literally a fractured dwelling place and implying metaphorically an endangered situation. That Briony’s circumstances are not individual but collective soon becomes evident when the newspapers of the day, the day with which Part One is exclusively concerned, mention ‘earthquakes’ (59), that is, superlative ground cracks, which reflects a general context of dislocation or disruption. The connection between Briony’s domestic situation and her historical environment is evidently strengthened by the prevalence of the theme and the mention of war. The looming figure of Hitler (50 and passim), the references to Jack Tallis working for the government in preparation for war and the fact that Paul Marshall, who sees the soldiers in terms of consumers, is called ‘a warmonger’ (50) make it unmistakable that a conflict is brewing on the global scene. The parallel with the private sphere becomes explicit when the text notifies ‘a bitter domestic civil war’ (8), a phrase which applies specifically to the Quinceys but which concerns also
32 the Tallises since in both cases husband and wife are set asunder. The idea of a rift in the diegetic units and in the international context finds then an echo in the war sections when Robbie is separated from Cecilia and Briony from her family and when soldiers and civilians are repeatedly torn apart, exploded into ‘mutilated bodies” (199). Among the various casualties Robbie witnesses on his arduous journey to Dunkirk, the following case of annihilation stands out: ‘Where the woman and her son had been was a crater. […] Mother and child had been vaporised’ (239). How could one conjure up a more striking image to convey the fissures of the war, the wholes of history into which the anonymous victims of the war disappear? This crater represents then the apocalyptic abyss in which man is engulfed by the accidents of history. Similarly, Luc Cornet’s cracked skull metonymically stands for the dismemberment of the army and even for the mutilation of man at war in general. What best encapsulates the association of war and segmentation, though, is ‘the unexpected detail’ (191), namely ‘a leg in a tree’ (192). What might look like a surrealist image turns out to be a realist description, but a description of an unnatural nature, of a deregulated reality, of an order of disorder. This incongruous image becomes then the very image of war as a time during which the order of things is overturned, the laws of nature are violated, and the extraordinary becomes ordinary. The sense of deregulation introduced by this disembodied bodily part is confirmed and heightened by the central oxymoron characterizing this section about Robbie’s war experiences: in the phrase ‘[he] was abjectly grateful’ (206), the traditional dichotomy between grace and evil is shattered and replaced by a paradoxical, unnatural combination of joy and horror because in a context of war no joy can remain unsullied. As for the truncated leg, it appears conspicuous as an outstanding synecdoche, eloquently conveying the clear-cut discontinuity between the part and the whole, the sectioning of human integrity, and the fracturing of any sense of wholeness. The transition between the sense of fragmentation within the diegetic world and the fragmentation of the extradiegetic narrative can be provided by the example of the vase with its ‘three fine meandering lines in the glaze’ (43). As an object of family pride, its splintering manifestly stands for the cracking up of the family structure and [i]f one is ready to accept that the vase – German made and given by the French to an Englishman during WWI – might be a symbol of the fragility of peace in Europe after WWI, it may not be going too far to consider that the ‘three invisible meandering lines’ are a metaphor of the conflicts silently breeding in Europe (and particularly in Germany) during the thirties that will finally lead to war and destruction. (Cavalié 132) The vase, though, is also a piece of ceramic craftsmanship, ‘the work of the great artist Höroldt’, an object of ‘great value’ (24) and as a work it can be seen as a specular double of the narrative work in
33 which it is embedded, the latter representing then a sort of ode on a broken urn, or the parable of the broken urn. Considering Atonement’s general organization, what does one notice? McEwan’s novel is divided into two distinctive parts: Briony’s three-part, nameless narrative of the events taking place in 1935 and 1940 and the coda or afterword entitled ‘London, 1999’. Atonement is then clearly not the title of any of Briony’s works, it applies specifically and exclusively to McEwan’s novel and its choice of a daring diptych. This two-sided work is monstrously misshapen, monstrously lopsided with one huge narrative part and one tiny explanatory addendum. Such architectural asymmetry constitutes in itself an unorthodox construction typical of postmodernism’s revision of traditional harmony. The monstrous nature of the amalgamation of such unequal portions is reinforced by their unlikeness. If the initial part is penned in the past tense by a third-person narrator accounting for a tragic love story from 1935 to 1940, the final part, written in the present tense and the first-person, concerns the observations from and about a seventy-seven-year-old writer suffering from vascular dementia. After a long narrative section partly romance partly historical novel, we have a fragment of autobiography. The tail (to which the coda etymologically refers) and the body are then ontologically and generically fundamentally mismatched and unalike. In other words, the body and its tail, the narrative and its epilogue, the novel and its afterword are of different natures, traditions and perspectives. This is not just heterogeneity, this is an unsettling collage, an audacious aggregation, a heteroclite and heterodox grafting worthy of a literary museum of contemporary art, worthy of the cause of postmodernism. What the ontological, generic and temporal chasm between the two parts of the whole also represents is a metaphor of, and possibly a warning against, the (apparent) gap between facts and fiction, fabulation and reality. The sense of fracture between two sections of radically unlike natures is further strengthened by the division of the first part into three sub-parts with emphatically different chronotopes. The choice of a ternary structure for what is presented as ‘the last version’ of Briony’s tale (370) may recall a triptych or a classical three-act structure with three panes or three stages corresponding to the exposition of the crime, the consequences and the expiation. Such a division may also refer to the Rule of Three, a writing principle supposedly effective to please the reader. Now this Rule of Three is conventionally illustrated by Briony and manifestly broken by McEwan who adds a final section that shatters the ternary structure. So, by breaking up the three-act structure and subverting the Rule of Three, McEwan underscores the crucial and ontological difference between the diegetic novelist and the real novelist, between a fiction following a conventional structure and a novelist infringing traditional laws and practices. The careful implementation of a three-act structure and the subsequent undermining of this structure is then also a means for McEwan to emphasize, and possibly to advertise,
34 his art of the unexpected, the unconventional, the unorthodox. What must also be stressed are the gaps between the three parts and particularly the five-year ellipsis between Part One and Part Two, a rift which conveys the brutal shift from England to France, from peace to war, from a bucolic country side to a hellish nightmare. Part One is the story of a lost paradise and of lost innocence, Part Two is the representation of hell after the original sin, the original sin being Briony’s and not the lovers’, Briony who has not eaten from the tree of knowledge, Briony whose sin derives precisely from a lack of knowledge. The crack between Part Two and Part Three is marked by a three-week analepsis, a spatial shift from Dunkirk to London and a change of focalization: from the war front to the aisles of the war, from the military operations to their consequences, and mainly from the victim of the original crime to its author and from the subject towards whom the atonement is directed to the agent of atonement. A sense of rebellion and injustice is thus superseded by a sense of guilt and contrition. The discontinuities between the three parts of Briony’s narrative reflect then at the structural level the ‘three fine meandering lines’ at the symbolical level of the vase and the broken urn represents clearly a mise en abyme of the cracked construction of the novel as a whole. Fragmentation, though, not only governs the structure of Briony’s many-layered tale, it also concerns her ideas, mainly when she grasps ‘the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution’ (17). Illustrating as it does the divergence between meaning and action, intention and reality, this ‘chasm’ finds numerous echoes in the novel’s extensive use of irony, which, according to Hillis Miller ‘exists pervasively’ in Atonement, ‘in the discrepancy between the narrator’s discreet, ambiguous wisdom and the characters’ foolishness or ignorance’ (Miller 94). When, for example, in the analeptic scene of Briony’s staged drowning, the young girl is reported to have said: ‘I want to thank you for saving my life. I’ll be eternally grateful to you’ (232), the irony is two-fold, first because the adult narrator later confesses that her ‘crash had lasted days and [she] immediately forgot about it’ (342) thus contradicting the eternal quality of her feeling, but mainly because her alleged gratefulness turns out to be of a lethal nature, Briony thanking Robbie by condemning him to prison and death. Such tragic irony is also at stake when, concerning Cecilia’s declaration of love ‘I’ll wait for you. Come back’, the extradiegetic narrator comments: ‘She meant it. Time would show she really meant it’ (265). The irony here is both subtle, the utterance being at the same time true (Cecilia did wait faithfully) and false (Robbie did not come back), and terribly cruel, the modal verb ‘would’ unambiguously designating the future in the past as if Cecilia’s rewarded patience were a narrative given, in other words, as if Cecilia and Robbie’s reunion were a part of the narrative, the future tense appearing then as the most blatant form of narrative deception and dramatic irony. Finally, ‘the chasm that lay between an idea and its execution’ may well refer to the terrible gap at the heart of the novel between the idea of or the attempt at
35 atonement and its execution or fulfilment, the failure of Briony’s undertaking being implied in the hollowness etymologically associated with the word ‘chasm’. Both structurally and ideologically, fragmentation appears then as the novel’s ruling principle and Atonement seems to exemplify a poetics of disjunction or what Laurent Mellet calls ‘a fragmented aesthetic’ (Mellet 88). Such fragmentation represents, as I have argued elsewhere ‘a sort of minimum allegiance to the postmodernist spirit’ thus evincing ‘a form of postmodernism defined as a continuation and an intensification of modernism’s dispositions’ (Gutleben 142, 139-140). The intersection with the modernist agenda is confirmed by the narrative choice of a multiple focalization and by the philosophical exploration of the concept and the reality of perception. Through the diversity and discontinuity of the diegetic points of view, Atonement highlights the lack of a comprehensive understanding of events, the fallibility of individual consciousness and the unattainability of knowledge, personal or historical, an epistemological emphasis which Brian McHale has famously identified as modernism’s hallmark (McHale 9). However, what this analysis wishes to stress is that Atonement also establishes a radical break with modernism since the modernist techniques and the modernist kinship are undermined by the revelations provided in the coda. The multiple perspectives of Part One do not only suggest the misleading nature of perception, they are misleading in themselves, being falsely multiple, all the perceptions happening to be in fact what Briony imagines them to have been. So, the modernist celebration of the idiosyncratic diversity of perception becomes a postmodernist game of deception of the reader and of retrospective reconstruction of hypothetical, that is, of fictional perceptions whose artificiality is not only acknowledged in fine but emphatically flaunted. McEwan thus seems to borrow modernist devices and to emulate the modernist spirit, but these borrowings, like the island temple described as ‘fake’ (73) and like the Tallis marriage called a ‘sham’ (148), turn out to be spurious, postmodernist hoaxes evincing Baudrillard’s ‘precession of simulacra’ and ‘age of simulation’ (Baudrillard 3). The order of simulation does not only affect the fake focalisers of Part One, it contaminates the whole of Briony’s reconstruction. In Part Two, what appears like Robbie’s impressions of and during the war happens to be the adult narrator’s conjectures about those impressions and since Briony has had no communication whatsoever with Robbie since the age of thirteen, the veracity of her assumptions seems more than questionable and unreliable. As for Part Three, everything that starts with Briony’s visit to her sister is purely invented, a fake account and narrative simulacrum, an ontological trick putting the stress on the blurring of fact and fiction – within the referential world of Briony’s tale, of course. The fascination for simulacrum or, to borrow the wonderful title of Umberto Eco’s work, the faith in fakes, affects not only Briony’s retrospective version but also McEwan’s contemporary
36 creation. Indeed, the embedded letter penned by Cyril Connolly represents an outstanding example of postmodernist pastiche. This document is a forgery, a fake, a counterfeit and appears as such as a typically postmodernist instance of the fabrication of historical documents, an ostensibly fictional recreation of history, a simulacrum which represents in itself an ideological statement about the ontological kinship between historiography and fiction. As a fake, this fraudulent letter may signal an iconoclastic rejection or challenge of the idea of an original and, quite possibly, a veiled protest against the modernist sacralization of art and the artist. As an imitation of a famous critic’s practice, this case of pastiche perfectly illustrates postmodernism’s relation to the past and the canon. The very fact of forging a text in the manner of Cyril Connolly, of using his writing as a hypostyle, implies the existence of a model to be imitated, of a prototype that is worth reproducing. So, this imitation amounts to a sort of homage, and this all the more so since the fine discriminations, the subtle criticism and the learned references at stake in the letter seem to present literary criticism as a form of art. But there are also elements in this document which are presented by McEwan, the simulator, as tokens of mistaken or ill-advised judgements, in particular the injunction to ‘ignore’ the war (314), a piece of advice which is evidently overturned or subverted in Atonement and its lengthy and serious accounts of the war. So, the canon appears as a model and a countermodel, the source of a labour of appropriation and distanciation, of imitation and transformation, of acknowledgment and adjustment: such is postmodernism’s ambiguous resurrection or ironical reuse of the past and past texts. Linking the writer in the novel and the writer of the novel, the sense of simulation creates then cohesion within fragmentation. As Mellet argues, Atonement’s ‘fragmented aesthetic’ is accompanied by ‘a possible suturing or stitching aesthetic’ (Mellet 88). The various fragments, narrative or mnemonic, are also brought together by the traumatic mode which presides over Briony’s entire text. ‘It is the persistence of trauma’, according to Georges Letissier, ‘that links together the four blatantly disjointed chunks that make up the novel’ (Letissier 214). Indeed, Briony may be said to be suffering from multiple traumas, having committed a crime, taking in the tragic consequences of her crime and witnessing the horrors of war. The layered nature of her narrative reflects then the superimposed strata of her traumatic background and the discontinuity of her fragmented account is linked to the very principle of traumatic memory because ‘if trauma is at all susceptible to narrative formulation, then it requires a literary form which departs from conventional linear sequence’ (Whitehead 6). That her ‘earliest version’ (369) was written in January 1940, namely five years after her betrayal, corresponds to trauma’s inevitable Nachträglichkeit or belatedness19, and that she has not stopped rewriting the same scenes for fifty-
19 According to Dominick LaCapra, traumatic testimony can only ‘be effected belatedly through repetition, for the numbingly traumatic event does not register at the time of its occurrence but only after a temporal gap or period of latency, at which time it is immediately repressed, split off, or disavowed’ (LaCapra 174). 37 nine years reveals ‘the haunting quality of trauma’ which continues to possess the subject ‘with its insistent repetitions and returns’ (Whitehead 12) 20 . Also, Briony’s fictionalization of Robbie’s traumatic war experience can then be read as a trace of trauma’s logic of implication, its principle of ‘entanglement’ since ‘my trauma is (tied to) the trauma of another’ (Ramadanovic 62). When she voices Robbie’s putative thoughts and feelings, Briony tries to implement an ethics of justice by paying homage to the victim of a double scandal: the scandal of an unfair condemnation to death and the ensuing scandal of the impossibility of speaking or writing his outrage. And since, according to Cathy Caruth, ‘history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, […] history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’ (Caruth 24), Briony’s vicarious traumatic reconstruction manages to fuse together the apparently disconnected narratives of the self and the other, of the personal and the collective, of the fictional and the historical. Finally, because trauma narratives are essentially performative, ‘the knowledge of trauma does not exist, it can only happen through the testimony’ (Felman and Laub 204), Briony’s fragmented parts connect with the central and unifying motif of atonement, writing meaning, in both cases, attempting to come to terms with trauma and attempting to start to atone21. That Briony turns out to be the narrative instance of all the parts and subparts of the novel eventually transforms the seemingly kaleidoscopic presentation into a single-voiced, monolingual whole. The omnipresence of a unique conductor ensures then the unity between the various narrative sections and the several generic borrowings. When Briony self-reflexively defines her novel as ‘my forensic memoir’ (370), she suggests yet additional generic grids to read her fractured narrative jigsaw. The concept of a ‘memoir’ invites the addressee to decipher the whole novel as a veiled autobiography whereas the ‘forensic’ quality signals the novel’s fundamental ambiguity. Indeed, by insisting on the legal value of her testimony, Briony seems to contradict her confession of having radically transformed reality. How can her account have a legal value if it is ostensibly fictional? How can she simultaneously insist on ‘the exact circumstances’ (369) and invent those circumstances? The oxymoronic nature of this forensic fiction echoes and perfects the ontological ambiguities and paradoxes that have pervaded her imaginative historical record. The forensic aspect of her tale points to another structural or structuring genre: the detective novel22. Reading Atonement as a detective
20 The repetitiveness of traumatic time is also something Parey, Cloarec and Fortin-Tournès have analyzed in detail (74). For a reading of traume in Atonement, see also Jean-Michel Ganteau’s article, ‘Of Wounds and Secrets: Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Études anglaises 70.3 (2017): 339-353.
21 It must be specified, though, that no literary mode is left unqualified in Atonement and much of the first part is suffused with a humorous streak which seems to belie the persistence of trauma in the adult narrator and her mischievously misleading tale of childish misapprehensions. 22 James Dalrymple goes as far as calling Atonement a metafictional whodunit and argues that the detective novel constitutes the generic frame of the novel (Dalrymple). 38 novel amounts not only to identifying the culprits of the crime, but also to distinguishing between facts and fiction, imagination and reality, and, if one accepts Walter Benjamin’s association between the detective who reconstitutes the truth of the past and the materialist historian, to reconstructing historical genuineness. Briony’s forensic memoir constitutes then yet another means to bind together her own circumstances and a whole epoch, the particular and the general, the story and its historical context. In the final analysis then, Atonement’s heterogenous architecture, like the Tallis vase which has been broken and then glued together again, displays its cracks at the same time as it strives to convey a sense of wholeness. The novel’s conspicuous fragmentation allows McEwan to suggest his skepticism towards narrative or epistemological coherence and to underline the loss of harmony and therefore the disorder, chaos and possibly entropy of a family and a world in time of war. By splitting up the structure and by multiplying the narrative scraps presenting each a fragment of truth, a disjointed portion of the tale, he also expresses, postmodern-wise, an incredulity towards grand narratives or metanarratives. Finally, the diversity of literary modes, the ellipses and sudden temporal shifts seem to point to the plurality and fallibility of hermeneutic tasks23 and, since they stem from the same narrative subject, they also redefine the postmodern subject, in the wake of Patricia Waugh, as ‘an endless gathering and interpretation of fragments of experience’ (Waugh 8). As for the labour of fusion, it is effectuated by the unifying narrative voice who is characterized by a paradoxical mixture of true traumas and fake accounts and who invites the reader retrospectively to endorse the role of the detective – and possibly of the judge. Such fragmented fusion eventually expresses postmodernism’s syncretic and synthetic principles which vindicate the inclusion and admixture of any literary tradition and which result here in the unlikely combination of the estate novel and the modernist exploration of perception, of the war novel and an exercise in simulation, of the historical novel and romance, of the detective novel and autobiography, a combination which manages to carry out the feat of bringing together Austen and Woolf, Blaxland and Baudrillard, Benjamin and McEwan.
23 Parey, Cloarec and Fortin-Tiurnès evoke ‘an ethics of deconstruction that consists in warning the reader against reductive hermeneutic approaches of the text’ (132). 39 Works cited
BAUDRILLARD, Jean, Simulations, trans. Paul FOSS, Paul PATTON and Philip BEITCHMAN, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
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DALRYMPLE, James, Jouer au détective chez Kazuo Ishiguro et dans le « whodunit » métafictionnel, Thèse Nouveau Régime, Université Grenoble Alpes, 2017.
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41 ‘As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion’ (370): the Sense of Destiny in Atonement Georges Letissier University of Nantes
In an interview for the BBC world service, Ian McEwan accounted for the genesis of Atonement in the following terms: This is one of those few novels in my writing life that really just came out of doodles. I mean, I had no real plan, I had no idea what I was doing and I found myself one morning writing a paragraph about a young woman coming into a rather elegant drawing-room with some flowers that she had just picked. I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know when it was. I didn’t know where it was going. By the end of the morning I had maybe seven hundred words, two or three paragraphs and I sat on them for several weeks, thinking who is this? Then I wrote what is now the second chapter of Atonement and I was still completely baffled. I left it, put it away for a few months and when I took it out again, I immediately found myself writing the first chapter. I thought I’m gonna give her a younger sister, and only then writing about play, writing about this overheated, rather priggish little girl, only then did it start to open up in front of me. And the first thing that gave me a source of freedom was the idea that she was going to commit a crime. And within these three or four months I knew that it was really Briony writing24. This statement combines randomness in human affairs, taking here the shape of literary serendipity and destiny, the sense that, in hindsight, a succession of haphazard steps turned out to be getting somewhere: the novel under study. Granted, destiny, implying preordination and fate, may sound a little outdated, something to be found under the appellation of Providence, in both Fielding and Richardson whose respective merits Cecilia and Robbie discuss at the beginning of the novel. Today it has been superseded by what philosophers like Slavoj Žižek call the ‘inversion of the apocalypse”,25 meaning that the apocalypse is not something that will have to be faced in some distant future, but that it has already happened. The point seems to have been ironically confirmed by the fact that Atonement came out in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, so that McEwan found himself having to make a stand on this unprecedented turn of events whilst promoting his just-released fiction. But what if a sense of destiny still lingered in many guises in Atonement, a novel that has sometimes been seen as steeped in the English literary
24 Last accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I6InqEVZE8 on December 23, 2017. 25 Slavoj, Žižek and Boris, Gunjevi, Inversions of Apocalypse. New York: Seven Stones Press, 2012. 42 canon, even if it does not cultivate any commemorative stance? To quote Geoff Dyer: ‘It is less about a novelist harking nostalgically back to the consoling uncertainties of the past than it is about creatively extending and hauling a defining part of the British literary tradition up to and into the twenty-first century’26. In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode sought to establish a bond between fiction, history, the apocalyptic and eschatology. Imagining an end of the world, or an ending for fictions, is, according to the American critic, crucial to shape a pattern for (his)story, as it allows for a ‘signifying consonance with the origins and with the middle’ (Kermode 17), so that an ontological or existential category is translated into an aesthetic tenet. In the review he later wrote on Atonement, Kermode took up the same idea of a pattern, by referring this time to Robbie Turner’s vagaries as he sees himself straddling C.P. Snow’s famous two-culture divide between science and the humanities. Robbie entertains high expectations of being this ‘kind of doctor […] alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable’ (93). This idea of inevitability is of course common to both fate and destiny, even if the former connotes death and destruction while the latter – destiny –, is linked to words like destination and as such proves more neutral by laying emphasis chiefly on a certain outcome bound to occur, whatever human attempts may be made to interfere with the course of events. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the persistence of the inscription of fate and destiny in a novel that falls within the remit of what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls ‘enlightened doom saying’27; i.e. the conviction that what might seem impossible, namely a final catastrophe (for example, ecological, see McEwan’s own Solar), a disaster that would end the present order of things, is nonetheless absolutely based on the state of actual knowledge. Two steps will be considered, firstly, patterns of fate will be envisioned within the largely metatextual format of the novel, then narrative recoil will come in for analysis.
Patterns of Fate in a Metatextual Novel The novel opens parodically on sensational, melodramatic plottings which make up the staple diet of a budding writer’s juvenilia. The synopsis of The Trials of Arabella exposes all the crude ploys of the ‘rusted machinery’ of plots, ‘whose wheels no longer turn’ (81), as Briony subsequently realizes. The one-threaded plotline triggered by the reckless passion of the eponymous, hypodiegetic Arabella is disclaimed by the whole novel as a half-baked, juvenile endeavour. Even if some generic
26 Geoff Dyer, ‘Who’s Afraid of Influence’, The Guardian, 21 st September, 2001, last accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/fiction.ianmcewan, January18, 2018. 27 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé. Quand l’impossible est certain. Paris: Seuil, Sciences Humaines, 2004. 43 allowances should be made for the fact that a play might prove temporarily anomic and escape the playwright’s control, Briony still sticks to the basic principle that it should build a foundation of good sense (3). This implies that ‘all fates [be] resolved and the whole matter sealed off at both ends’ (6). The tongue in cheek, or metatextual irony, inherent in such phrasing is soon evidenced by the many self-referential comments bearing on the inappropriate use of fate and destiny, what might be termed the fatalistic fallacy, in Atonement. To begin with, the line of argument put forward by Briony in her self-portrait as a young artist may not be fully consistent. Of divorce, as a narrative segment, she claims both that it has an implacable logic of its own that cannot be disrupted and also that it is disorderly. Such conflation of order and disorder within a single premise unwittingly anticipates on more recent Chaos Theory: ‘It [divorce] was a mundane unravelling that could not be reversed and therefore offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder’ (9). On a more serious note, Atonement, with its ‘writer in disguise’ (280) straddling the dividing line between fictitious autobiography and historiographic metafiction, propounds a number of objections to the use of fate, or destiny, ‘design’ or ‘accident’ (313), to quote Cyril Connolly, in novel-writing. Indeed, in a post-Darwinian world, ‘the thread of continuity’ (280), forming destiny as destination, is seldom, if ever, single-tracked: ‘at each turning point, at each bifurcation, there is the shadow of an alternative history, the phantom of what has never existed, but might have existed’ (Žižek 101). This is an idea shared by a host of contemporary British novelists, from Margaret Drabble to A.S. Byatt, from Graham Swift to Will Self, for example. It could be summed up through the constant presence of the ramification of plots at any point in time. The split between what actually happened and the failed alternatives that were forsaken without being totally cancelled, at least at the mental level, makes for a whole array of actualized and non-actualised destinies, precluding any sense of a single destiny. Thus Briony, whilst dreading the prospect of having to live in one room, without a door (288), in one of her Woolfian moments, simultaneously contemplates the other, alternative road she could have taken: ‘a ghostly parallel life in which she was at Girton, reading Milton’ (275). Yet, paradoxically, it is perhaps because Briony, despite her high-handed statements on the epistemological failings of destiny, also surrenders to the lure and glamour of destiny in fiction writing that she comes close to omitting the plain fact that a husband, Thierry (360), belonged to another shadow, in more senses than one, plot. A comic denial of the inevitable, no doubt, coming from the little girl who once set such great store by the ‘dizzy promise of lifelong union’ (9). There are also ghost narratives which are ramifications of unwritten plots, nipped in the bud, that haunt the narrator’s, or characters’, consciousness because they are relegated to limbos outside the template of the actualized fiction. The riddle of Ernest Turner’s destiny is hinted at through prolepses: ‘Ernest’s mind was already elsewhere, already drifting seven summers
44 ahead to the evening when he would walk away from his job as the Tallises’ gardener’ (83), before it gets bogged down in the morass of formless time, till it is granted a new lease of life in the wasteland near Dunkirk (241). A character’s erratic destiny makes for an unpredictable narrative strand that resurfaces to stir up emotional tension. Destiny may no longer be narratologically viable, nor epistemologically tenable, but it is still the stuff our minds, let alone the characters’minds, are made of. Ian McEwan, through his characterisation, illustrates Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of ‘homo narrator’ (Gould 26) to account not only for the human propensity for story-telling but the correlative tendency in human beings to turn their inner, mental film into a scripted film. Seen in this light, the characters, who are of course Briony’s playthings and as such the recipients of her own yarn-spinning passion, may be construed as so many narrative nuclei. If the whole novel is caught up in a ‘not quite not yet’ suspension, precluding any sense of finality, it is amply compensated by the yen characters have to think of their own plight in terms of destiny and fate. Interestingly, a whole range of tones and mood can be conjured up through these characters’ tendency to dramatise their own lives. Robbie Turner has all the liveliness and possibly crude psychology of a Richardson character when he pictures to himself his coming destiny like a picaresque tale: ‘There was a story he was plotting with himself as the hero, and already its opening had caused a little shock among his friends’ (91). He is like a creation hardly out of Briony’s own toolbox when he sets off with a vengeance on his way to the Tallises’ party: The hard soles of his shoes rapped loudly on the metalled road like a giant clock, and he made himself think about time, about his great hoard, the luxury of an unspent fortune. He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experience such impatience for the story to begin. (92)
The self-aggrandizing portrait condenses, in cartoon-strip fashion, the ingredients of a good eighteenth century novel, chief among them the towering presence of time, as a vector of destiny. The giant clock is a reminder of God, the clockmaker of Natural Theology and the great hoard full of bounty, an apt allusion to Providence. As any savvy reader of fiction will know such a happy-go- lucky fellow is fated to get his comeuppance. The irony being in the present case that destiny acts on a totally different scale from a retributive scenario and that in a post-apocalyptic world, what counted as fate is no longer humanly manageable or intelligible. In Atonement, perception is inflected with a sense of destiny. To the phenomenological apprehension of the present through the senses that informs consciousness, may be superadded a narrative matrix. Thus, on meeting a man for the first time, Cecilia wonders whether this encounter will remain forever sealed as a landmark memory; said differently, whether a casual, anodyne meeting
45 will morph into destiny. Gaze is seminal, as has often been shown by critics, yet to the scopic drive is appended an eerie sense of foreboding through a double temporal lens. If the June day of 1935 has to be fateful through its rootedness in the here and now, it is focalized through an odd sensation of temporal displacement and spectral persistence, which has sometimes been studied as traumatic time. Cecilia affords an example of this grasp on the present permeated with uncanny, ominous premonition ‘seeing strangely, as though everything was already long in the past, made more vivid by posthumous ironies she could not quite grasp’ (48). Atonement, the novel in the novel, is literally a palimpsestic text, as it went through no less than half a dozen drafts, and it may never get published in the end. It also elicits the impression that the reader may stumble upon different stages in the writing process within the same section, with vestigial remnants of a previous version coexisting with more recent passages. So, ultimately, what Briony labels her ‘forensic memoir’ (A 370) may be deprived of a textual destiny and merely subsist as the uncompleted assignment of a lifetime. However, Ian McEwan’s novel, through its unprecedented success belies the fate of its fictitious content. The storyline is in fact chiefly concerned with the vicissitudes of a literary adventure which, quite embarrassingly or perhaps unethically, feeds on both a personal and a collective tragedy. In this respect, the final result qualifies as a Künstlerroman. Snidely, the critics that we all are as readers could advertise Atonement as the magnus opus that never saw the light of day. Yet, even Briony, who is too clever to subscribe to any teleological success story, does not quite renounce the delusion of turning the ‘hard mass of the actual’ (A 76) into a ‘story line, a plot of her development’ (41). The novel’s artistic approach rests on the two hands writing the two authorial personae into reciprocal existence. Leaving aside the Ian McEwan/Briony Tallis dyad as a Janus authorial figure, it could be interesting to consider how young Briony Tally writes her elderly double into existence and how conversely the well-established writer recreates her juvenile other. In this respect, a parallel may be established with Pip and Mister Philip Pirrip in Great Expectations, even if in Atonement the process functions more like a mutually enriching loop. Slavoj Žižek cited Escher’s famous ‘Drawing Hands’ lithograph to illustrate the form of plot reversal at work in McEwan’s 2012 novel Sweet Tooth (Žižek 113).
46
Escher, “Drawing Hands”, 1948.
It would seem that this image is equally germane to the aesthetic process at work in Atonement. Escher was indeed fascinated by the shift from two-dimensional flatness on a sheet of paper to the production of the illusion of the three dimensional volume of a pair of hands. Form is developed as the two hands come alive before returning to the irredeemable flatness of the sleeve on the square sheet. The move is endlessly repeated in a continuous loop. ‘Threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop’ (173) is an appropriate definition for the novel’s textual destiny. It originates in the sleeve on paper, i.e. the original spurt of ink on the blank page: ‘At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. What she wanted was to be lost in the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of the scratchy silver nib and coiling into words’ (115).
Words take a life of their own and trigger destiny. A four-letter word, lending itself to a list of near anagrammatic rewritings, has a lot to answer for, and not only as ‘typographical demon’ (114). The novel’s textual destiny unfolds between The Trials of Arabella and the prospect of ‘the end of our travail’ (368), which does not spell out any plain sailing into the sunset. It is with Atonement as it is with Escher’s ‘Two Hands’: the coil of penmanship is indistinguishable from the recoil, in endless repetitions of the loop.
Narrative recoil Etymologically, fate – fatum – stems from fari: to say, to tell. Briony demonstrates that fate may be trivialized into fabula or affabulation. Her meandering, recanting narrative is proof of the sheer absence of any numenous power vested in the speaking voice: ‘how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or high form that she can appeal to’ (371). Yet, despite her attraction to the Modernists, Briony is not 47 the artist ‘paring her fingernails’28 either, she has her own axe to grind, pace James Joyce. This said, and notwithstanding its attempt to strive towards some sort of narrative achievement (witness the final birthday celebration), Atonement is constantly pulled back by a contrary recoil movement, or retroactive thrust culminating in the coda: ‘But now I must sleep’ (372), holding the promise of yet another take on the story with ‘Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella?’ (372) At first glance, the recoil movement is perceptible through the repetition of similar scenes from different points of view and angles, which incidentally liberates telling from the enslavement of a single deterministic narrative chain of causality, by positing the possibility of coexisting chains of concatenation for one single event; Two Figures by a Fountain being of course paradigmatic. Likewise, recoil is also graphically, or perhaps cinematically, used in mental, rewind scenes such as when Robbie, shortly before dying, retells the whole second section by reversing the arrow of time: ‘So he would go back the way he had come, walk back through the reverses of all they had achieved […] along the ribbon road that lay across the miles of undulating farmland […] an overnight stop at the brothers’ [The Bonnets’] farm […] And the tree. […] the shreds of his pyjamas […] the poor pale boy’ (262) and so on. But recoil is not to be solely regarded as this retroactive drive but, as Slavoj Žižek argues in Absolute Recoil, as the realization that in the end there is no firm, solid foundation to turn to. To take up Žižek’s notion of retroactivity, the outcome of downward spiralling is that something is negated, nothing is gotten. In the end, there is less than nothing: ‘a deficit or reality […] empty possibilities with no actualisation’ (Žižek 103). ‘It’s not impossible’ (372), as Briony puts it laconically in the epilogue. To return to Robbie, his hallucinatory recoil starts off with the child’s leg, then the twins under a tree, Pierrot on his shoulders, and he Robbie, on his father’s shoulders (241), the long vanished father, and it tails off with ‘the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh’ (242). Made flesh, or not, since ‘an event is not something that occurs within the world, but just a change of the frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it’, to quote Žižek once again (Žižek 92). Precisely, the whole economy of Atonement rests on such changes of frames. As Laurent Mellet convincingly demonstrates there is no tangible referential anchorage underpinning the fiction, as a result of ‘Briony’s reversal of the empiricist core logic’ (Mellet 165). ‘[W]hat she sees proves what she already knows […] and what she knows distorts her vision’ (Mellet 165). So, no knowledge of positive reality as a solid foundation may be established in the final resort. Mellet is right to recall, after some other critics, that the more plausible denouement, death by blood poisoning for one, and
28 ‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’. (Joyce 249) 48 death by drowning for the other, is just a hypothesis that is floated. It no doubt deprived some disgruntled readers of the neat sense of finality that partakes of fate and destiny. A double level of distanciation from any positive reality was in fact implied from the very beginning: with Briony’s so-called crime. Firstly, through the interference of Briony’s warped frame, and secondly through the very nature of what was at stake, or at least the little that could be gathered or inferred thereof. A sexual attack, but at one remove, because this is not Briony herself who is sexually assaulted. And to put it mildly, the victim only goes through the motions of acting the part devolved upon her: ‘Lola was required only to remain silent about the truth, banish it and forget it entirely, and persuade herself not of some contrary tale, but simply her own uncertainty’ (168). Be it as it may, what comes to be regarded as a traumatic scene serves as the novel’s trigger event; it marks the intrusion of the Real (in the Lacanian acceptation) in the neat chronology of a sultry summer day. As such, the decisive incident defies any straightforward verbal transcription, as ‘the Real intervenes through anamorphosis’ (Žižek 104). And the descriptive passages calling up the attack are indeed singularly devoid of any clear cut, fixed contours (164-165). It is of course not indifferent that the novel’s primary scene should be undermined by this ontological vacuum: ‘the distance from reality registers the Real; the Real that is the gap in reality, making it non-All’ (Žižek 106). Only the ensuing police reports fill in the blanks and adulterate hesitating statements by couching them in positivist terms: ‘either she saw, or she did not see’ (170). Žižek propounds another definition of truth than the one arrived at by establishing facts: ‘what makes a rape victim’s report (or any other trauma narrative) truthful is precisely its factual unreliability, confusion, or inconsistency’ (Žižek 105). It is indeed the absence or lack of tangibility of this original episode fraught with guilt which sparks off the recoil movement informing the whole narrative. McEwan’s achievement consists in sealing his contribution to the thriving revival of the historical novel in a fallible originary source. The lack of any firm, hard core beneath the triggering event induces a relativist approach to history whose shreds of factual truth may only be retrieved from the gaps between different narratives. Couldn’t it be said that McEwan goes one step further back in the recoil process by tackling the arcane riddle of decision making? In this he may be helped by his interest in the neurosciences, especially Antonio Damasio and the neurobiology of consciousness. If Atonement is basically about how a silly decision by a wayward pubescent girl entailed unforeseeable consequences, leading to the overlap between individual histories and grand History in the age of mass destruction, the ultimate recoil would be the attempt to come as close as possible to the instant that was to change everything. Admittedly, McEwan is concerned with what might be called the mystique of decision making. This may be seen in different cases. Moves that cannot be accounted for, which only reinforces the mystery of their having taken place retrospectively, as when
49 Briony marvels, perhaps somewhat ironically from the distance of time at her decision to go and take a glimpse through the window, precisely when Robbie and Cecilia were having their tiff: ‘Only chance had brought her to the window’ (40). Or, again, when she wonders about the precipitating factor that caused Lola to suddenly leave the room where the rehearsals were taking place: ‘There was no pivotal moment of creative difference, no storming or flouncing’ (55). Atonement is filled with such moments of decision making, even where ethical commitments may be at stake, as when Robbie realizes the catch-22 situation of coming to the rescue of the bespectacled RAF man about to be lynched, an undecidable dilemma which he articulates through an aporia: ‘It was madness to go the man’s defence, it was loathsome not to’ (252). It is of course where Briony’s decisions are concerned that the unaccountable is repeatedly evoked: ‘Briony was to have no memory of what suddenly prompted her’ (177); ‘Difficult to describe the impulsive moment’ (180); ‘Briony did not know how the decision was made’ (181). It as if in an anticlockwise movement McEwan aimed at going back to the incipient moment prior to the unleash of a set of coincidences determining a course of action. Disappointed by the hampered progress in the rehearsal of her play, Briony stares at her hands and becomes mesmerized by the time lapse between cerebral intention and its bodily enactment: ‘how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command’ (35). She then contemplates the possibility of accessing a pre-individual intensive corporeality, prior to any centred organization: ‘Or did it [the hand] have some little life of its own?’ (35) What strikes her is the possibility of a corporal life consisting in the circulation of flows of energy which are not determined by any controlling consciousness: ‘She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect’ (35). The transfer of the nervous flux comprises this moment of suspension in which bodily functions are poised in temporary inaction before organic determination fixes a course of action. McEwan propounds an etiology of the bodily process of decision implementation by touching upon this subliminal instant when the individual condition recalls Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ‘body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 9-19), which is by no means a body devoid of organs but the transmission and capture of bodily energy not yet supervised by a central, towering consciousness. This moment of introspection putting the soma rather than the cogito as the subject of metaphysical investigation may be regarded both as an attempt at self- exoneration on Briony’s part and as a way to probe into the primal cause in the chain of action: ‘she might find the secret of herself, the part of her that was really in charge’ (35). This is probably how far back a writer may go in tracing the origins of his text.
50 Destiny postulates a sense of order which is often at odds with McEwan’s own sense of disorientation in Atonement. The title in itself is an index of the impossibility of fulfilling a destiny; no atonement is indeed achieved, unless the term is construed as a trope for the endless loop of retelling. Spatial disorientation, evidenced by the failure of maps to plot out itineraries, Robbie’s ordnance survey map (191-192) or Briony’s outdated bus route map (318) as well as temporal disorientation, rendered through loss of bearings: ‘Periodically, something slipped. Some everyday principle of continuity, the humdrum element that told him where he was in his own story’ (246), would seem to disqualify destiny as a cogent category to investigate the novel. And yet, rarely do characters entertain such a superstitious relation to destiny, from Robbie who wishes to prevent his mother’s death by avoiding the pavement cracks (255) to Cecilia who sees some sort of portent in the cracking of the Meissen porcelain vase. If McEwan does not refrain from exploiting the benefits of destiny to build up suspense and prophetic revelations, in particular through the use of vaticination: ‘In the years to come he would often think back to this time…’ (90); ‘twenty years would sweep him forward to the futuristic date of 1955’ (92), or ‘It was her future self, at eighty-five, in widow’s weed’ (97) etc., he also warns future writers against any complaisance towards textual destiny. The risk incurred by letting the story ‘writ[e] itself around [one]’ (166) may prove lethal. Following Vladimir Nabokov29, McEwan values details as what he owes readers, and possibly the anonymous actors of the past too. ‘I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction’, remarks Briony who has just stood corrected for her little historical imprecisions. The question is: would Atonement stand the test of time without the lure of destiny which it also capitalizes on and which lends it the flavour of a romantic novel?
Works cited
DELEUZE, Gilles and Félix GUATTARI, ‘The Body without Organs’, in Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), London and New York: Continuum, 2004, 9-19.
GOULD, Stephen Jay, ‘So Near and So Far’, The New York Review of Books, 20/10/94: 26.
JOYCE, James, A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man (1916), London: Collector’s Library, 2005.
KERMODE, Frank The Sense of an Ending, Oxford: OUP, 1967.
MCEWAN, Ian , Atonement (2001), London: Vintage, 2016.
MELLET, Laurent, Atonement. Ian McEwan, Joe Wright ‘The Attempt was All’, Paris: Belin, 2017.
29 ‘In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected’. (Nabokov 1)
51 NABOKOV, Vladimir, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson BOWERS, New York: A Harvest Book, 1981.
ŽIŽEK, Slavoj, Absolute Recoil. Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, London and New York: Verso, 2014.
52
From The Go-Between (L. P. Hartley, Joseph Losey) to Atonement (Ian McEwan, Joe Wright): Intertextual and Interfilmic Aesthetics
Laurent Mellet
Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (CAS - EA 801)
We know how regularly essays and books on Atonement address intertextuality and its structural and metafictional roles in McEwan’s novel. Among the sources often mentioned, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-
Between features as both a thematic and generic influence. Commentators will take their lead from several interviews in which McEwan has referred to the 1953 novel, for instance here in The Guardian in 2002:
A novel that was very important in this, and I wanted to fit in, was The Go-Between, so Connolly
says, ‘I trust you’ve read The Go-Between.’ I was very disappointed when the copy editor
informed me that it was written in 1952 and I had to take it out. But what does remain from The
Go-Between is the long hot summer. (Sutherland)
Surely, Hartley’s novel instantly springs to mind when Robbie uses Briony as a messenger, and when Connolly has this sentence (not the one McEwan had first intended to write, then) in his letter to Briony: ‘Might the young couple come to use her as a messenger?’ (McEwan, 313). Joe Wright has also often alluded to Joseph Losey’s adaptation of the novel when commenting on his own work in Atonement. According to Harry Haun:
The words that Wright lives by—and films by—were first uttered at the outset of The Go-
Between, a movie made a year before he was born by director Joseph Losey and adapter Harold
Pinter from L. P. Hartley’s novel: ‘The past is a foreign country—they do things differently
there.’ The speaker was Michael Redgrave, an old and impotent man who flashbacks over a
formative summer 50 years earlier in which tragedy is triggered by his interference and
carelessness as a 12-year-old love-letter carrier between a highborn lady of the estate (Julie
Christie) and a roughhewn tenant farmer nearby (Alan Bates). (Haun)
53 Haun then quotes Wright commenting on The Go-Between, both the novel and the film, as a common influence on McEwan and himself: ‘“I think The Go-Between was a reference for McEwan as well”, injects Wright. “McEwan talks about The Go-Between when he talks about Atonement.
There are definite parallels”’ (Haun).
In this presentation I want to look at these ‘definite parallels’ between McEwan and Hartley, between Wright and Losey, but also between Wright adapting Losey adapting Hartley, with a view to better understand his own adaptation of McEwan adapting Hartley in the first place. I will examine the conclusions on this intertextuality put forward by Natasha Alden in her book Reading Behind the
Lines. Postmemory in Contemporary British War Fiction and Earl G. Ingersoll in his article
‘Intertextuality in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, and question whether they may be of any significance when considering interfilmicity in Wright’s adaptation.
Losey’s influence is more immediately formal and aesthetic, revealing a complex web of equally aesthetic correspondences between the two novels. Building on this double influence, I will analyse prominent motifs in McEwan’s book such as secrecy and memory, imagination as the vector of narration, prolepses, the metanarrative questioning of language and the tricks of responsibility. I will then turn to interfilmicity as deriving from intertextuality and look at the roles of staircases, vision and focalisation, the tableau vivant, and new distortions through editing and camerawork. Eventually, though without resorting to adaptation theory itself, I will suggest that this intertextuality taps into the logics of adaptation, and that Wright also adapts the ways Losey adapted Hartley. His formal and narrative strategies when adapting McEwan’s novel can therefore be construed differently, and this double study of intertextuality and interfilmicity throws light on adaptation as a critical outlook and the promise of a regeneration of medium-based self-reflexivity.
‘Might the young couple come to use her as a messenger?’ (McEwan 313)
Natasha Alden establishes many connections between McEwan’s novel and The Go-Between, such as the unexpected couples, the heat, and Briony’s and Leo’s unbridled imagination and thirst for
54 control (Alden 132-134). Leo and Briony are both almost thirteen (Hartley 89; McEwan 209), used as messengers by adults in love, and desperate to know and read the contents of the letters they are asked to deliver. In The Go-Between, we read just before Leo opens one of Marian’s letters to Ted: ‘a boy was punished for doing something “wrong” […]. The rules about reading other people’s letters were fairly well defined’ (Hartley 108). In Atonement: ‘It was wrong to open people’s letters, but it was right, it was essential, for her to know everything’ (McEwan 113). Earl G. Ingersoll insists on the heat and its paralysing but also liberating function in both novels (Ingersoll 249), and the children’s ambiguous desire to see and know: ‘Like Leo [Briony] is on the brink of puberty, still a child in her lack of understanding of adult experience and alternately attracted to and repelled by knowledge of sexual behaviour’ (250). In his essay ‘Pinter’s Go-Between’, Neil Sinyard has interesting comments on the coitus interruptus at the heart of the plot and its tragedy, which of course is another major connection with those of Atonement (Sinyard 22). Natasha Alden also mentions the first pages of each novel and their ‘box[es] full of treasures’ (Alden 125), in themselves not enough here for Leo to remember the past, and there for Briony to imagine the future. ‘[W]ar looms over both [novels]’ (133), in which societies and the world at large are about to be shaken to their foundations. Another basic common motif should be added, since it is to lead to specific aesthetics: the wish to be seen and observed. Regularly Atonement insists on Briony’s wish to have an audience, to the point of thinking it is sometimes not worth doing or saying something if no one is watching. Thinking about her mother’s death, or rather funeral, she pictures herself ‘watched not only by all the people she knew, but all those she would ever know, the whole cast of her life […]. It had to be witnessed. It was the pity of these well-wishers that pricked her eyes’ (McEwan 162). Not only is it not so much Emily’s death that she thinks about here, but the pain and emotion that she feels are triggered by imagining herself being watched and pitied, rather than by her loss. The same logic informs the end of part one, when she is sent to her room: ‘She turned her face into the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost, when there was no witness to her sorrow’ (184). In The Go-Between, though Leo ‘had let [him]self go on crying because it didn’t matter when nobody could see [him],
55 and [he] thought [he] could stop whenever [he] liked’ (170), then ‘[he] wanted all [his] movements to be public’ (Hartley 247).
From ‘spooning’ to ‘cunt’: from intertextuality to the adaptation of secrecy, imagination and metanarrative
These last examples testify to another set of correspondences around secrecy and imagination. Leo
‘had an instinct for secrecy and wanted nobody to see [his diary]’ (11): ‘These were joys that depended upon secrecy; they would vanish if I told them or even betrayed their source’ (12). In Atonement,
Briony fetishises about the mere structure of secrecy, having a ‘passion for secrets’ (McEwan 5) and similarly associating writing with the joys of secrecy and the risks of ‘self-exposure’ (6): ‘once she had begun a story, no one could be told’ (6). We know how this obsession with secrecy connects with the dangerous powers of imagination in Atonement. In Hartley’s novel, Leo also makes up for his deficient ‘knowingness’ of the world through imagination and fantasy: ‘My mind could not grasp it but my imagination could make play with it, for unlike the mind, which could dismiss what it did not understand, my imagination loved to contemplate the incomprehensible and try to express my sense of it by an analogy’ (Hartley 50). As will be the case in Atonement, the narrative of The Go-Between branches off into complex proleptic patterns: ‘I seemed to be living a posthumous life at Brandham, but I still took a retrospective interest in the situation, in what might have happened if I would have let it’ (204). Another motif appears at length in both novels, the repetition of words (and sometimes scenes) which in fact defies their meaning. I will not develop this aspect, but in The Go-Between we have here an interesting example of actualisation thanks to the film adaptation, which turns these repetitions into something even more comic and tragic in the way they isolate the young protagonist and his misconstruction of the whole situation.
While Briony is ‘familiar enough with the form of words’ (McEwan 323), Leo is first baffled by ‘the shape, the lettering’, and the ‘foreign look’ (Hartley 7) of his childhood diary. ‘[A] master of language’ (17), Leo shares with Briony another passion, that for ‘the magic of naming’ (McEwan
56 165), for instance when his own name proves to be ‘the combination of letters’ (Hartley 21) which will open the lock of both the diary and the journey to the past. In both novels words unfurl in some textual swirl: ‘There might even be something about me in the letter—something kind, something sweet, that would make me glow… gloat…’ (109); ‘That his protégé should turn out to be a maniac!
Lola’s word stirred the dust of other words around it—man, mad, axe, attack, accuse—and confirmed the diagnosis’ (McEwan 158). Or else one word only freezes both time and the narrative: ‘What that meant I had no idea but I knew what it might lead to: murder. The dread word shook me to my foundations’ (Hartley 165): ‘The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts’ (McEwan
114). There is to Briony another magic of naming. When driven by her own beliefs to persuade Lola that her attacker was Robbie, she can feel this urge to hear and say his name: ‘Suddenly, Briony wanted her to say his name. To seal the crime, frame it with the victim’s curse, close his fate with the magic of naming’ (165). She says it herself twice then: ‘“It was Robbie, wasn’t it?” […] Briony said it again. Simply. “Robbie”’ (166). More obviously and tragically than ever, saying ‘it’ is enough for it to become real, as writing a new fate for the lovers will be enough for it to become real. In The Go-
Between Marcus says and repeats how beautiful his sister Marian is, before Leo does the same and eventually agrees, to the point of defining further what the word ‘beautiful’ means, building on this experience of beauty itself. The word here creates the experience and becomes ‘a fact’, as we read in the novel, which brings knowledge. Leo keeps playing with words, their pronunciation and obscure meaning, for instance with the first name Hugh which he just cannot pronounce right (Hartley 73).
Yet of course it is when Leo desperately wants to know what ‘spooning with people’ means, repeatedly asking Ted to explain it to him, that Briony’s experience of another word, ‘cunt’, comes to mind. The word ‘spooning’ is scattered throughout the novel, marking Leo’s slow awareness of the relationship between Marian and Ted and of his own condition. Words have meanings as well as values in The Go-Between: ‘In a few weeks the vogue would pass and the words regain their normal value. “Vous venez sur” (you’re coming on) and “Eh bien, je jamais” (well, I never) were two of the latest’ (186). Yet Leo knows that there is more to ‘spooning’ than its literal meaning, or even
57 translation. There are so many words, so many phrases that Leo cannot understand. So, for instance, when Lord Trimingham tells him that Ted Burgess is ‘a bit of a lady-killer, but there’s no great harm in that’ (204). Leo as an adult narrator then ponders on his own responsibility in not getting the proper value of the word, elaborating instead on its literal meaning. As in Atonement, children get things and words wrong, too literally, thereby creating tragedy much more efficiently than through their rambling imagination. In his article on the picturesque in The Go-Between, Mark Broughton writes that ‘Leo has a tendency to look superstitiously beyond appearances and contingency to try to find meaning and determinism’ (Broughton 89). This surely also applies to Briony as a child and as an adult novelist, and in both novels is channelled through an interrogation of language and its slipping, or slippery, meaning. It is also similarly buoyed up by the narrative function of matter and material things. What
McEwan also revisits from The Go-Between is the way objects challenge the memory but also unbridle the imagination, leading to material pride, for instance to the pride there is in imagining one’s books published: ‘It was then that I began to cherish a dream of becoming a writer […]. I had no idea what I wanted to write about: but I composed sentences that I thought would look well and sound well in print: that my writing should achieve the status of print was my ambition’ (Hartley 17).
We will remember here the numerous passages in Atonement when Briony looks at or imagines her own beautiful letters, words, sentences and then printed novels. Both Leo and Briony move from
‘diseased imagination’ (this is from Forster’s The Longest Journey) to, here, ‘the world of facts. I accumulated facts’ (Hartley 265), and there, ‘a crammer of simple facts’ (McEwan 277).
This of course links up with metafiction and the novels’ questioning of the links between words and reality. Young Leo became famous at school after putting a curse on other boys, who then, as if by black magic indeed, fell from a roof and were badly injured. As noticed by Ingersoll: ‘Leo becomes a hero, he begins to construct himself as a “magician” whose words have the performative power to do harm to those who have harmed him, and others’ (Ingersoll 243). The very same may be said of
Briony in Atonement. As when speaking up his name to unlock the diary, Leo uses, writes and says words so that they may become real, or rather so that they may alter reality and actualise his most
58 private wishes—and so does Briony of course. This is when the narrative structures of the novels clearly look alike, with an epilogue revealing that the books have been written by Leo and Briony, though in Leo’s case, in James Palmer’s and Michael Riley’s words: ‘Only in the journey that is the narration itself does Leo Colston’s experience as both child and adult acquire meaning. Narration, then, is an act of discovery for Hartley’s Leo’ (Palmer and Riley 92). We know Briony’s narrative was perhaps not so much geared towards such ‘an act of discovery’. Yet once more, all the contradictions pertaining to atonement and responsibility in McEwan’s novel are also to be found in
The Go-Between, beyond errors and mistakes (Leo also triggers the tragedy by misdelivering a message and the time set for the lovers’ final rendezvous). Let us just compare: ‘Either you had done something, or you hadn’t’ (Hartley 109) and ‘Either she saw, or she did not see. There lay nothing in between’ (McEwan 170); ‘I saw myself entering Ted’s life, an unknown small boy, a visitant from afar’ (Hartley 264) and ‘To enter a mind and show it at work, or being worked on, and to do this within a symmetrical design—this would be an artistic triumph’ (McEwan 282).
The films’ shared aesthetics
I will now briefly look at some of the elements common to Joseph Losey’s and Joe Wright’s adaptations, before comparing their respective misleading aesthetics and what they reveal about their adaptation strategies. In Atonement, the intricate stairs and the child character taking us down to the kitchen clearly remind us of the beginning of Losey’s The Go-Between (Losey 0’06”). All through the film, and mostly so in its first scenes, Leo goes up and down these impressive stairs (0’02”, 0’03”,
0’06”, 0’07”, 0’46”). In his monograph on Losey, Colin Gardiner compares the scenes to the double staircase in The Servant, another film by Losey, and sees this one as ‘the mercurial Leo’s fluid link’
(Gardiner 163) between the rooms and the many secrets of Brandham Hall. More lighted and less ominous than the staircase in Atonement, the set adds a radical form of verticality to the very flat, horizontal and rural landscape and filmscape of the movie, which reads as a way for the young hero to look at and discover this new world, but also to try and interpret it from some vantage point. Leo
59 and Marcus are never more raucous and alive than here, in stark contrast to the other members of the family, as we shall see next. In L’Image-mouvement, Gilles Deleuze claims Losey’s films yield some of the best examples of what he calls l’image-pulsion:
Ce qui apparaît d’abord chez Losey, c’est une violence très particulière qui imprègne ou emplit
les personnages, et qui précède toute action […]. C’est une violence en acte, avant d’entrer en
action. […] les escaliers prennent une importance essentielle en tant qu’ils dessinent une ligne
de plus grande pente. La pulsion fouille le milieu, et ne connaît d’assouvissement qu’en
s’emparant de ce qui semble lui être fermé, et appartenir en droit à un autre milieu, à un niveau
supérieur. (Deleuze 191)
Yet in the two films, it is by looking and going down, Leo here or Briony when going down to the library, that the plots speed up to their tragic climaxes. In Atonement, the scene when Danny looks at his young and rich masters underlines the theatricality, pretence and ceremony of the moment
(Wright 0’15”). At the end of part one, when everybody is waiting in the house and then on the terrace for Robbie’s return, again time is frozen and space becomes ‘carved, fixed’. In his commentary,
Wright grants that ‘there is quite a lot of formal tableaus in this film’ (0’43”). These shots should be construed as persuasive adaptations of McEwan’s tableaux vivants, and offer an illustration of the influence of Losey’s film, in which Leo regularly stares out of windows at even more striking social tableaux vivants, with the members of his host family standing, sitting, lying or even playing outside but totally motionless (Losey 0’03”, 0’03”, 0’06”, 0’08”, 0’11”, 0’17”). As is the case in Atonement in the fountain and the library scenes, these shots hinge around two main thematic and formal questions—chronology and subjectivity. Three chronological patterns can be observed: either we see the tableau with the young boys, or the focalised image is delayed (0’02”: this is what they have just been looking at), or else it is edited before being actually perceived by the boys (0’03”). According to Gardiner:
60
When Leo first arrives at the house, for example, Marcus stops to show him the view from an
upper landing window. Instead of cutting to a point-of-view shot so that we can share their view,
Losey gives us a partially obscured angle down on the croquet lawn from another window,
hinting that Leo’s subjective view and the camera’s omniscient perspective are not necessarily
the same. (Gardiner 163)
This is resonant with the editing of the fountain and library scenes in Atonement and Wright’s distortion of focalisation, the better to mislead us. Losey also plays with focalisation (Losey 1’08”) and the inclusion of the onlooker(s) (0’04”), for instance with a zoom-in (0’04”), and, as in Atonement once again, with the dangers lurking in these focalised tableaux, for instance when Leo enters the shot with Marian but soon moves off-camera (0’04”), just as when the boys have to wriggle their way to avoid touching the Atropa Belladonna, another threatening beautiful lady (0’05”).
At two highly dramatic moments in Atonement, the camera pushes out on Briony, having her figure shrink and pointing at her emotional vulnerability. When she reads Robbie’s letter, the camera pushes out from an extreme close-up on her face to a much wider, distant shot, in which she really appears belittled and at a loss (Wright 0’27”). Similarly, after the episode with Luc Cornet, there is a push-out on her when she walks through the beds (1’32”). We can note here another influence of
Losey, who often zooms out on Leo (Losey 0’31”, 0’45”, 1’11”). Another similar aesthetic can be observed in the black magic scene (0’32”) and the scene when Briony is writing in her garden. And the library scene focalised by Briony (Wright 0’32”) owes much to the last scene at Brandham in The
Go-Between. Wright says in his DVD commentary: ‘Sex, to me, from a wide shot, always looks quite awkward and grotesque. […] Like two animals […] the fucking insects’ shot’. The same animal dimension is present when Leo sees Marian and Ted making love (Losey 1’48”).
The camerawork, the mise-en-scène and the editing often follow the same aesthetic options in our two films. In Wright’s adaptation, the camera’s first cut is onto a slow, cautious panning shot on
61 Briony’s nape and profile (Wright 0’01”), as if the spectators too should be in fear of the God-like author manipulating her miniature animals but also the real people around her. Then, as if retreating already, it tracks back when she almost marches out of her room. Similarly, in the first sequence
Losey’s camera stands back and afar, as if hiding, from the boys (Losey 0’02”). As Charles Shiro
Tashiro notices: ‘Doorways punctuate The Go-Between to the point of excess’ (Tashiro 33), and in both films characters are frequently framed within the frame (Losey 1’17”). Other parallels may be noticed, such as when both Marian and Cecilia literally block and freeze when mistaking a reference to a message or a letter (Losey 0’40”; Wright 0’39”), or when Leo and Briony say ‘I know’ or ‘I know who it was’ and the other characters turn around and freeze as well when looking back (Losey 1’22”;
Wright 0’42”). I am not sure I would agree with Riley and Palmer’s assessment of Losey’s ‘taut editing’ (Riley and Palmer 222), and this is not how I would describe Wright’s editing either, but I would like to quote from their monograph The Films of Joseph Losey other descriptions which are worth probing into when analysing Wright’s Atonement: ‘For some he is an allegorist detached from his characters, for others principally a stylist with a penchant for the gothic’ (Palmer and Riley 1);
‘Losey’s meticulous attention to visual detail was typically in the service not of verisimilitude but of stylization’ (12). Gardiner tags Losey’s style as ‘modernist’ and ‘baroque’ (Gardiner 3), and has insightful comments on the music which are most helpful to characterise the score—and I’m thinking of the typing sounds of course—in Wright’s adaptation:
Michel Legrand’s uncommonly loud score creates a provocative sound-image counterpoint.
With its breathless, staccato rhythm, suggesting haste and urgency […], the music draws
attention to a disjunctive, often suffocating sense of foreboding that prevents the viewer from
being lulled into a false sense of security by the film’s lush, pastoral images. (Gardiner 164)
Neil Sinyard provides another invaluable comment for us and Atonement in his essay on Losey:
Why is the music so dramatically drawing attention to an atmosphere of ominousness that is
not apparent in the images? The reason is that the score is conceived retrospectively, in the full
62 knowledge of disaster. It has the foreknowledge of the camera […]. The music’s traumatic,
passionate chords underneath the film alert an audience to the suppressed passion underneath
the surface of this society which is ultimately to erupt into hysteria and tragedy. (Sinyard 27)
Old Leo’s memory and narrative status in the film, which Sinyard deciphers in the retrospective and commenting quality of the music, might therefore easily be compared to Briony’s narrative presence in the film and its soundtrack, which is anything but neutral. This also reflects upon the autonomy of the camera, with a zoom-in onto Marian and Ted in town in Losey (Losey 0’17”), which, as has often been studied, is part of Leo’s retrospection, and in Wright these two moments when the camera slowly shifts away to signify more than it shows (Wright 0’27”, 0’45”). Another interesting common distortion is that of time: as when the film runs backwards for a few minutes when Robbie is in fact dying, Riley and Palmer argue that in The Go-Between the fact that some scenes from the present are reversed testifies to the perturbed chronology of the plot and disrupted aesthetic of the adaptation (Riley and Palmer 225).
The films as adaptations: revealing, altering, medium-based self-reflexivity, and experimenting
In his essay, Ingersoll offers this particularly original reading of Robbie’s origins in an endnote:
This narrative makes such a point of Robbie and Cecilia being siblings, psychologically, that
one may wonder if ‘The Old Man’ isn’t Robbie’s father. Both the Turner and the Tallis
marriages seem not to have been ‘made in heaven’, and there are strong implications that
Tallis is being kept away in London by more than early preparations for the war that would
break out four years after the novel begins. (Ingersoll 256)
63 He also underlines Mr Tallis’s eagerness to keep Mrs Turner at his service after her husband’s disappearance. Jean-Michel Ganteau has examined the traumatic and ethical significance of such an incestuous bond in his essay in Études Anglaises. The film suggests nothing of the sort but shifts the implicit onto the characters of Cecilia and Leon, as I have suggested in my book (Mellet 40). As for
The Go-Between, according to Sinyard, Losey’s film adds a major element to the novel, i.e. the fact that Marian’s mother may have been one of Ted Burgess’s former mistresses, and that the mother may be frightfully jealous of her daughter’s affair. Sinyard reads a climax of this possibility in the last scene, when Mrs Maudsley and Leo see Marian and Ted making love:
a scene whose tension is released by Mrs Maudsley’s anguished groan, and Leo’s cry as she
seizes him, in her confusion instinctively protecting him from a sight she has actively brought
him out to see. This gesture is echoed by Marian, who pulls Burgess towards her, and mother
and daughter face each other in mutual sexual enmity. (Sinyard 32)
Sinyard explains how this makes the end more logical, but also more traumatic. In both films, therefore, there is a shift of emphasis, perhaps the better to reveal the implicit in the novel or suggest other interpretations of the original plot. ‘One remembers things at different levels’ (Hartley
90), Leo writes—one adapts things at different levels too in these two film versions.
In the first paragraphs of his essay, Broughton reminds us that ‘Adaptation theory has moved away from the notion of a single “original” source’ (Broughton 86), to buttress his argument that
Losey’s film should also be read as an adaptation of a country estate and a particular British landscape. I will add that Wright’s film equally adapts Losey’s The Go-Between, as an adaptation but also its formal and aesthetic devices. In The Go-Between and in Atonement, neither Leo nor
Briony are writing their stories; neither is turned into a filmmaker; and yet, medium-based self- reflexivity is central—Sinyard writes: ‘the film continually compels a viewer to ponder what he is 64 seeing, and the notion of the film as mystery (rather than as, say, tragic love story) seems a crucial clue to its whole style’ (Sinyard 21)—;in both films, to continue with Hartley’s famous first words in the book, ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ (Hartley 7): the source- text becomes the past of the film which does things differently as well and alters the ending (Leo does not deliver Marian’s message to her grandson in the film, and in Atonement part four and its coda may very well be watched as not an adaptation of the book’s conclusion). Sinyard again: ‘A film adaptation of a novel, inevitably in the process of selection and emphasis, becomes implicitly a form of criticism as well’ (Sinyard 22)—it is such a form of criticism that I have been willing to propose here, be it of Hartley by Losey, of Losey by Wright, and of McEwan by Wright through
Losey. From this, and building on Deleuze’s definition of naturalism in L’Image-mouvement, may emerge a new take on adaptation, and on Atonement: ‘Ainsi s’organisent chez Losey les quatre coordonnées propres au naturalisme. […] monde originaire, milieu dérivé, images et actes pulsionnels, actions perverses dans le milieu dérivé’ (Deleuze 195). I have no time to account for
Deleuze’s conclusions on Losey’s naturalism, and will simply suggest that in the four versions of
The Go-Between and Atonement, creation and adaptation become naturalistic experiments with people, words, media, the past, and novels themselves, which undoubtedly take us back to Briony’s
‘attempt’. It seems to me that her attempt, McEwan’s playfulness with milieux and perversion, and
Wright’s self-reflexive experiments, are equally naturalistic, and that no matter how intriguing, these pages by Deleuze on Losey are a priceless source for Atonement and for all of us.
65 Works Cited
ALDEN, Natasha, Reading Behind the Lines. Postmemory in Contemporary British War Fiction, Manchester: MUP, 2014. BROUGHTON, Mark, ‘The Figure (and Disfigurement) in the Landscape: The Go-Between’s Picturesque’, British Rural Landscapes on Film, ed. Paul NEWLAND, Manchester: MUP, 2016, 86-102. DELEUZE, Gilles, L’Image-mouvement, Paris: Minuit, 1983. GANTEAU, Jean-Michel, ‘Of Wounds and Secrets: Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Études Anglaises, 2018. GARDINER, Colin, Joseph Losey (2004), Manchester: MUP, 2015. HARTLEY, L. P., The Go-Between (1953), London: Penguin, 1958. HAUN, Harry, ‘Quite Wright. British Director Eyes Award Glory with Atonement’, last accessed at http://www.filmjournal.com/wright-joe, on December 11, 2017. INGERSOLL, Earl G., ‘Intertextuality in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 40.3, July 2004, 241-258. LOSEY, Joseph, The Go-Between (1971), DVD Studio Canal, 34577638, 2007. MCEWAN, Ian, Atonement (2001), London: Vintage, 2002. MELLET, Laurent, Atonement (Ian McEwan, Joe Wright). ‘The Attempt Was All’, Paris: Belin/CNED, 2017. PALMER, James and Michael RILEY, The Films of Joseph Losey, Cambridge: CUP, 1993. RILEY, Michael and James PALMER, ‘Time and the Structure of Memory in The Go-Between’, College Literature 5:3, Fall 1978, 219-227. SUTHERLAND, John, ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting in the War’, The Guardian 3 January 2002, last accessed at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jan/03/fiction.ianmcewan, on December 12, 2017. SINYARD, Neil, ‘Pinter’s Go-Between’, Critical Quarterly 22:3, 1980, 21-33. TASHIRO, Charles S., ‘“Reading” Design in The Go-Between’, Cinema Journal 33:1, Autumn 1993, 17-34. WRIGHT, Joe, Atonement (2007), DVD Universal Studios, 82532511, 2007.
66 Heterolingualism and interpretation in Atonement: Traduttore, traditore? Pascale Sardin EA Climas, Bordeaux Montagne University
George Steiner famously defined the literary revolution of the early 20th century as ‘the emergence of linguistic pluralism’ or of the ‘extraterritorial’ (viii). The global, social and technological shifts that took place at the time had resulted in the awareness of language as an inappropriate means to express this new world, while they also brought languages more into contact and nations into conflict. This led to a new awareness of the ‘condition of Babel’ which was expressed in a variety of modernist multilingual devices taking the form of pointillist insertions of German words in Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs or of the pervasive multilingual punning of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Such experimentation enabled modernist writers to question notions of linguistic and cultural stability and also to formulate ‘redemptive ideals of poetic and transnational language’ (Taylor-Batty 3-4). Now, in the abundant criticism on Atonement revolving around its relationship to the modernist intertext (see Mitrić, Reynier, Robinson), it has been suggested that the novel presents the reader with a ‘narrow definition’ of Modernism (Quarrie 196), one which seems to ‘deliberately ignore [its] un- English model’, both ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘exilic’ (Robinson 488). If it is true that Connolly’s letter presents literary Modernism essentially as a self-contained type of writing mainly concerned with fragmented form and the representation of psychological realism (McEwan 312), the novel also fictionalizes the linguistic situation in which the Modernists found themselves in the first half of the 20th century, when Ian McEwan depicts the war and the linguistic issues emerging from the contact of cultures and the problematic encounter of the Other. As a matter of fact, in key scenes of the novel, because they have translative skills, both Robbie and Briony who are already associated paronomastically through their first names, play a mediating role as interpreters. Yet, intriguingly, such a recurrent thematization of the figure of the translator-interpreter does not lead to a transparent representation of foreignness, as the novel more often than not foregrounds exclusion and difference on the one hand, and mistranslation or missed translation on the other. So to what extent can it be asserted that McEwan reconfigures the ‘redemptive ideals of poetic and transnational language’ to be found in modernism? To answer this question, I will first focus my attention on the inherent heterolingualism of the novel, before moving on to an analysis of the representation of the figure of the translator-interpreter, which will lead to a discussion of the ethical implications of intra- and inter-lingual encounters.
The functions of heterolingualism
67 In his theorizing of fiction in the 1930s and 1940s Mikhail Bakhtin posited intra and inter-lingual diversity as fundamental to the European novel. According to the Russian thinker, all our utterances (including creative works) are filled with the words of ‘“others“ and “varying degrees of otherness” or varying degrees of “our-own-ness”, varying degrees of awareness and detachment’ (Bakhtin qtd in Eells). While he used the words dialogism and heteroglossia to designate this phenomenon of sameness and difference in any kind of speech, Rainier Grutman introduced the term ‘heterolingualism’, a translation of the French ‘hétérolinguisme’, to refer ‘to the use of foreign languages or social, regional, and historical language varieties in literary texts’ (Meylaerts 4). This term thus designates the textual insertion of speech differences in literature, a form of code-mixing seen as a literary device, rather than as only reflecting a political or social reality. In fiction, heterolingualism refers to the co-presence of one or several foreign languages, but also of vernacular languages, sociolects and idiolects next to the main language of the text (Grutman 37). Following Grutman, I would like to examine the meaning of the presence of foreign words and phrases in Atonement. Though its heterolingualism is not conspicuous, it is still quite present, and thematically strategic as it partakes in the rhetorical construction of the otherness of the Other. Maybe one of the first instances of this is to be found in the characterization of Paul Marshall who speaks in a particularly outdated and affected language: ‘I say, are we still on for some tennis tomorrow’ (McEwan 127). The idiolect here serves a satirical purpose, as it connects with the somewhat comical portrayal of the character drawn by the narrator on page 58, when the soon-to- become villain’s face is compared with ‘Desperate Dan’s’, a wild west character in a British comic magazine. Moreover, thanks to this simile, Marshall is later linked to the lynching scene that takes place towards the end of Part 2 when Mace saves the RAF man to the sound of ‘cheers and whistles, foot-stamping and Wild West whoops’ (McEwan 253). As Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes in an article entitled ‘Les mots étrangers, les mots de l’étranger’, if the foreigner or the outsider is likely to embody the buffoon and is thereby endowed with a comic potential, intimations of tragedy are often attached to him or her. This is the case in Atonement, where verbal stigmatization precedes physical chastisement when the vernacular speech of the tommies is used during the lynching of the representative of the RAF, whom they hold ‘accountable’ for the RAF’s lack of support in the retreat: ‘Oi, Brylcreem job. Where was ya?’ (McEwan 250). Such idiolects and sociolects function as mimetic class markers in a plot where class prejudice plays a central part in defining and deciding who will play the part of the pharmakos, a human scapegoat expelled from the community at times of disaster and sacrificed as an expiation in Ancient Greece. Not only do they undermine the myth of a monolingual Britain, but they also help deconstruct the myth of a classless society. ‘On the first night, when they were sheltering in the bike shed of a
68 burned-out school, Corporal Nettle said, “What’s a private soldier like you doing talking like a toff.”’ (McEwan 193) Robbie’s way of speaking is also what sets him apart from Mace and Nettle, who despite their higher ranks, look up to him and follow his lead as they call him with some mock- reverence Guv’nor (‘So, which way, Guv’nor?’, McEwan 192). Still in Part one, class prejudice is what leads to the indictment of Robbie as Lola’s rapist, and is the result of one of the many misunderstandings of the plot, which begins by Cecilia not understanding why Robbie takes off his boots before entering the Tallis House—she mistakes this for exaggerated deference, as if Robbie were ‘playacting the cleaning ladyʼs son come to the big house on an errand’ (McEwan 26). As Brian Finney puts it:
[Cecilia] has imbibed this sense of social difference from her class-conscious mother, Emily, who resents the fact that her husband has paid for Robbieʼs education, an act which she characterizes as ‘a hobby of Jackʼs . . . which smacked of meddling to her,’ that is of upsetting the ‘natural’ order of things (p. 142). The result is Emilyʼs encouragement of Briony in her childish lie. As Cecilia writes later to Robbie in France: ‘Iʼm beginning to understand the snobbery that lay behind their stupidity. My mother never forgave you your first [class degree]’ (p. 196). But tellingly, she goes on in the letter to assume that Danny, the working class son of Hardman, the handyman, must have been the real rapist. (Finney 76)
Tellingly, during the night of Robbie’s arrest, a French idiom pops up in Emily Tallis’s interior monologue. Surprisingly, she is actually quoting from someone who is in fact less educated than herself: ‘Plus ça change, PC Vockins might have said.’ (McEwan 147) Here the French cliché closes, climactically, the class-conscious condescending portrayal made of the policeman seen from Emily Tallis’s viewpoint: ‘(PC Vockins) had a sincere way with a platitude which he made resonate like hard-won wisdom in his tight-buttoned chest: it never rained but it poured, the devil made work for idle hands, one rotten apple spoiled the barrel.’ (McEwan 146) While the mention of the PC’s quirk provides some comic relief, it also makes the reader aware of Emily’s class prejudice, which is shared to a degree by her daughter. Indeed, as underlined by Finney in the previous quote, Cecilia will later assume that Danny, the working class son of the handyman, must have been the real rapist. Such class prejudice will render Robbie’s accusation and arrest all the more credible. As Finney puts it, ‘McEwan subtly suggests the invidious nature of a class system that permeates even those seeking to reverse its effects and works to protect the upper-class rapist from exposure throughout his lifetime.’ (Finney 76) Speech thus functions as class synecdoche; but more importantly, it is revealed to be the means by which the power of the elite is maintained and how the system makes possible its self-preservation.
69 As Foucault writes in the The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, ‘speech is no mere verbalisation of conflicts and systems of domination, […] it is the very object of man’s conflicts’ (Foucault 216). Furthermore, the novel shows the extent to which a rhetoric of difference is critical in times of war when ‘the “other”, the enemy, has to be narrated as radically different from ourselves if the violence of war is to be justified’ (Baker 198). To sustain a war, it is necessary to justify it discursively, and thereby to construct the figure of an enemy presented as drastically different from oneself. In Atonement, language is represented as a tool used to achieve this aim. The Germans are referred to as ‘Jerry(s)’, a term of contempt possibly coming from the shape of the German helmet, which was thought to resemble a jerry, a British slang word for ‘chamber pot.’ As Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes:
l’étranger est […] son nom, mais ce nom est ce qu’Alain Badiou appelle un ‘nom séparateur’, c’est-à-dire un nom qui assigne une identité que ni la langue dominante ni la société qu’elle transforme en nation (langue nationale contre langue maternelle) ne reconnaissent, un nom qui à ce titre définit une collectivité de suspects, comme est le nom ‘musulman’ dans notre société.
Such racial slurring and sociolectal labeling is thus a means of exclusion, which the infantrymen unsurprisingly use to construct the enemy as an Other. But what Atonement also shows is that this rhetoric of difference actually extends to one’s allies as the absurdity of the war undermines any hope of unity or salvation. Indeed to make sense of the retreat, the French are presented as traitors or defeatists; these allies-turned-enemies are either disparagingly referred to as ‘Frogs’ (McEwan 235, 239) or as ‘poilus’, a term which, being a foreignism, is flagged, thus stylistically isolated by the use of italics:
Among the British troops the view was that the French had let them down. No will to fight for their own country. Irritated at being pushed aside, the tommies swore, and taunted their allies with shouts of ‘Maginot!’ For their part the poilus must have heard rumours of an evacuation. And here they were, being sent to cover the rear. ‘Cowards! To the boats! Go shit in your pants!’ Then they were gone, and the crowd closed in again under a cloud of diesel smoke and walked on. (McEwan 234)
Earlier, the men’s hatred had even turned against their own army, as the Highland Light Infantrymen are mocked by Nettle when he quotes a famous Scottish tongue-twister:
They came upon behind some more HLI men. One of them was playing the bagpipes, prompting 70 the corporals to begin their own nasal whining parodies. Turner made as if to cross the road. ‘If you start a fight, I’m not with you.’ Already a couple of Scots had turned and were muttering to each other. ‘It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht i ,’ Nettle called out in Cockney. ‘Something awkward might have developed then if they had not heard a pistol shot from up ahead.’ (McEwan 218)
Here, McEwan undermines the myth of a unified Britain, deconstructing the British pan-nationalism that was still quite strong in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when the British Empire had reached its peak and stretched across a quarter of the Earth. Multilingualism is presented as a disjunctive symptom of fragmentation, parochialism and a failure of a translational and transnational ethos. So atonement, which etymologically means ‘to set at one’, ‘to make one or reconcile’, is in this respect represented as doomed and unachievable. In this context, heterolingualism fulfils a mimetic function as it reflects the ‘condition of Babel’, the alienating experience of the characters of Robbie, Nettle and Mace who are lost in the paronomastic ‘maze’ of the debacle, in places with unremembered names, in a Babel-like chaos of a country with its ‘French villages with Belgian names’ (McEwan 239). The linguistic vulnerability of the exile is actually suggested in the helplessness felt by Robbie when he is unable to help the Belgian woman and child he tries to protect: The woman answered but he did not understand her. […] He realised then that she wasn’t speaking French. […] She was speaking Flemish to him, soothing him, surely telling him that everything was going to be all right. Mama would see to that. Turner didn’t know a single word of the language. It would have made no difference. She paid no attention to him. The boy was staring at him blankly over his mother’s shoulder. (McEwan 236-237)
Misunderstanding and lack of identification sow hatred: ‘French, English, Belgian, German. She makes no difference. You’re all the same to her,’ the Bonnet brothers say about their mother to the English infantryman (McEwan 200).ii
The figure of the translator-interpreter Foreign idioms and sociolects do not only function as national or class synecdoches, they also fulfill a metafictional function, in that they reflect the main complication of the plot and ontological issue of the novel. Perhaps the first foreign word that appears in the text is a French Christian name, Jean, which is in fact what Cecilia hears when Briony mispronounces ‘genre’, one word she has unearthed
71 from her treasure trove of words. This happens in Part one, when Briony complains to Cecilia that she should have written a novel and not a play:
‘The whole thing’s a mistake. It’s the wrong….’ She snatched a breath and glanced away, a signal, Cecilia sensed, of a dictionary word about to have its first outing. ‘It’s the wrong genre!’ She pronounced it, as she thought, in the French way, monosyllabically, but without quite getting her tongue round the ‘r’. ‘Jean?’ Cecilia called after her. ‘What are you talking about?’ (McEwan 45)
Cecilia has mistakenly translated a word that did not need to be translated. The presence of the foreign name here is evidence of the miscommunication that has taken place between the two interlocutors and a proleptic misunderstanding between sisters, in a novel that, as a whole, problematizes the issue of the misinterpretation of reality, and to which issues of transmission, translation and interpretation are central. Decoding and interpretation are quite meaningful throughout. This especially true when Robbie is in prison, and when the two lovers can only speak in coded language which has to be translated before its full meaning can be deciphered: ‘“quiet corner in the library” was a code for sexual ecstasy’ (McEwan 204). This is even truer in a war context, when diverse narratives compete, and when the language of propaganda is to be decoded:
[Briony] knew about the breaching of the Maginot Line, the bombing of Rotterdam, the surrender of the Dutch army, and some of the girls had been talking the night before about the imminent collapse of Belgium. […] The British army in northern France was ‘making strategic withdrawals to previously prepared positions’. Even she, who knew nothing of military strategy or journalistic convention, understood a euphemism for retreat. (McEwan 284)
Briony here is able to ‘translate’ appropriately the collective narrative provided by the government- led media to legitimize their version of events. Later, to avoid a libel suit the older Briony will be advised to ‘displace, transmute, dissemble’ (McEwan 370), which she will now refuse to do. Translation had already been thematized in the first part of the novel in relation to Robbie when we learn that he has been reading pages from a book on Le Nôtre with the help of a dictionary (McEwan 84), and that among his books, can be found, besides, Freud, Keats, Shakespeare and Petrarch, Chaucer’s The Romaunt of the Rose, a partial translation of a French allegorical poem by Guillaume de Lorris, which reminds us that Chaucer, the great founding father of British letters, was first and foremost a translator and imitator. Actually these apparent details function as proleptic hints
72 signaling the importance, later in the novel, of the figure of the helpful though oftentimes mistaken translator-interpreter. Robbie’s linguistic skills will serve the war effort as mentioned in one of Cecilia’s letters: ‘I’m so glad the liaison officer has discovered your French and given you a job that makes use of it.’ (McEwan 213) He will also take advantage of his knowledge of the French language, which he has acquired thanks to his bourgeois education—a form of treason and likely self-exclusion from his working class background—to meet French people, be they the Bonnet Brothers or the Gypsy woman during his retreat to Dunkirk. In the first scene especially, Robbie’s role as an interpreter is highlighted: ‘Turner did not translate’ (McEwan 198); ‘Through Turner, Mace said’, ‘running translation’ (McEwan 199); ‘He wanted Turner to translate’ (McEwan 201); ‘The Frenchmen […] complimented Turner on his French’ (McEwan 201). Thanks to Robbie’s mediation, the dark candle-lit barn becomes a ‘translation zone’, a notion developed by Emily Apter. Apter defines such zones as ‘sites that are “in-translation”—belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication’ (Apter 6). Here it is a liminal space of exchange, not just of words, but also of gifts and experiences. The men share narratives, food and cigarettes, it is a place of ‘companionship’ (McEwan 199). But to make this possible, Robbie deliberately distorts or refrains from translating what is said when there is a risk of speech seeming offensive to their hosts; Robbie is far from embodying the usual neutrally objective interpretive figure; instead, he is a critical, discriminating intermediary:
Henri wore glasses, which Nettle said looked odd on a farmer. Turner did not translate. […] The wine was taking hold of Corporal Nettle. He began a rambling eulogy of what he called ‘Frog crumpet’—how plentiful, how available, how delicious. It was all fantasy. The brothers looked at Turner. ‘He says French women are the most beautiful in the world.’ They nodded solemnly and raised their glasses. (McEwan 198-200)
The comic potential of translation and mistranslation is also prominent in this passage, as it in the sow-chasing episode that provides much comic relief and foregrounds again the issue of interpretation in its hermeneutic sense:
He understood immediately she was a gypsy who was not fooled by his speaking French. She looked right into him and saw his faults, and knew he’d been in prison. […] ‘Bring her back,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see what I have for you.’ ‘Fuck that,’ Nettle said once Turner had translated.’ (McEwan 254)
73
‘For the rest of our lives we will remember your kindness,’ Turner said. She nodded, and he thought she said, ‘My pig will always remind me of you.’ The severity of her expression did not alter, and there was no telling whether there was insult or humour or a hidden message in her remark. Did she think they were not worthy of her kindness? He backed away awkwardly, and then they were walking down the street and he was translating her words for Nettle. The corporal had no doubts. ‘She lives alone and she loves her pig. Stands to reason. She’s very grateful to us.’ (McEwan 256-257)
In its compounding of a grotesque situation, of feelings of gratefulness and undecidability, and good sense, the humor of this passage is unmistakable. This incongruity produces a therapeutic release and foregrounds the redeeming power of humor and comedy. A form of redemption is also to be found in another emblematic scene of the novel, when Briony is chosen by Sister Drummond for her knowledge of French to sit by the dying Luc Cornet (McEwan 305). Like Robbie before with the Bonnet brothers, Brionyiii plays the part of an intercessor or mediator, accompanying Luc into death. Interestingly, this situation is originally triggered by a serendipitous mistranslation and prolonged by a lie. Because she does not know that ‘sister’ in a medical context translates as ‘infirmière’ not ‘sœur’, and because she accepts to pretend to know him, Luc is able to project onto her his memories of Millau:
She said, ‘The sister told me to come and have a little chat with you.’ Not knowing the word, she translated ‘sister’ literally. ‘Your sister is very kind.’ Then he cocked his head and added, ‘But she always was. And is all going well for her? What does she do these days?’ There was such friendliness and charm in his eyes, such boyish eagerness to engage her, that she could only go along. ‘She’s a nurse too.” […] ‘Do you remember the first time you came in our shop?’ […] ‘Luc I want to tell you where you are. You’re not in Paris…’ […] ‘What do you think of our baguettes and ficelles?’ ‘Delicious. […] The best in Millau.’ […] She knew now why she had been sent. […] ‘Do you love me?’
74 She hesitated. ‘Yes.’ No other reply was possible. Besides, for that moment, she did. He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die. (McEwan 306-309)
In this scene, Briony is made to understand the interpersonal value of fiction and imagination, as she pretends to be Luc Cornet’s fiancée in order to soothe his last moments. The fact that Briony’s redeeming scene rests first on a translator’s mistake, takes us back to her initial romanticized misinterpretation of the fountain scene; that this mistake is what leads her, with much dramatic irony, to lying blatantly, takes us back to another blatant lie, that which led to Robbie’s arrest. Both Briony’s misinterpretation and her lie are thus revised in this epiphanic scene. Here lying amounts to a good deed, and is justified by empathy for the more vulnerable person in the interpersonal relationship. Moreover engagement in this scene is central. Whereas in the fountain scene, Briony observes her sister and Robbie’s interaction behind the window, which positions her as a voyeur and eavesdropper, in the scene with Luc, she is engaged and part of the exchange. Later, the older Briony will turn to writing to atone for her sin only to realize this is a useless endeavor, as no Other is present to perform forgiveness, her sister being long dead; in this scene, on the contrary, redemption seems to be possible as there is a form of interlocution, someone to receive or at least acknowledge the act of atonement. The act of translation serves as a model for such interlocutory exchange. As Antoine Berman has famously noted in L’Épreuve de l’étranger (1984), translation does not just involve an act of mediation, it is a process by which our way of relating to the Other is at stake. For the translatologist, no ethical translation is possible without a preliminary movement towards the foreigner (Berman 16).iv Interestingly, Joe Wright chose to adapt this scene, whereas the pig-chasing one was omitted.v In his adaptation of the Luc episode, he actually visually highlights the liminality of the ‘translation zone’, as he encases the characters inside a enclosed area in the ward, creating a sort of huis clos. Moreover, the red curtain signals that something is going to be performed here in the intimacy of the dialogue. What is more, in keeping with a recent tendency in audiovisual translation to respect linguistic difference, the 5-minute long sequence is uttered in French by the actors Jérémie Régnier and Romola Garai and rendered comprehensible to non-French speakers by the use of subtitles. In a way, the film is less conventional in this respect in its use of a foreign language than the novel. In McEwan’s text, dialogues are conventionally in French, but actually most often written in English, which, as Rainier Grutman notes, was usually the case in 19th c fiction:
Dans toute œuvre, il existe une tendance à mentionner des langues sans les citer. Un exemple pris chez Balzac fera saisir l’importance de cette distinction : “Quoique Sarrasine sût peu
75 l’italien, il entendit sa maîtresse disant à voix basse à Vitigliani :-- Mais il me tuera !” Dans le récit, conformément aux canons de la vraisemblance, la phrase est énoncée en (langue étrangère) ; dans le discours toutefois, elle est rendue en français pour ne pas brusquer les habitudes d’un public présumé unilingue. (Grutman 38)
Joe Wright goes even further when he actually plays with a form of linguistic opacity in the Quai des Brumes sequence, as the dialogue between Michèle Morgan and Jean Gabin is not translated, nor is it subtitled. In the film, what is said is likely to remain unintelligible to non-French speakers. In that, they will share the experience of not understanding the dialogue, which was Briony’s own experience when she watches the fountain scene involving her sister and Robbie—so that the filmmaker achieves a sort of mise-en-abyme of this foundational situation. But what is probably even more important here is the emotional intensity of scene; the viewer has to reach out to the emotional intensity of the scene, just like Briony will reach out to Luc. Finally, in the novel, the coda leaves Briony, and the readers, in a new ‘translation zone’. Firstly, several discreet references to France place Briony in relation to France, as when we learn that she has chosen to marry a Frenchman, now deceased: ‘On my desk was a framed photograph of my husband, Thierry, taken in Marseilles two years before he died’ (McEwan 360). A number of loan words and foreignisms are also scattered throughout the coda, like the pot-pourri (McEwan 365) used to decorate the bathroom of Briony’s country-house-turned-hotel bedroom and the signifier dévoré (used in the phrase ‘black dévoré shawl’, McEwan 361) to designate the velvety fabric made in France (and popular since 1920s) that the older Briony has chosen to wear for her birthday party. Secondly, in the very taxi that drives her to the former Tallis house, the narrator is confronted with the Other in the person of her ‘cheerful West Indian’ (McEwan 362) cab driver. This character embodies a new multiethnic Britain whose class system seems to have been markedly altered since the 1930s, a fact Briony humorously acknowledges when she thinks: ‘It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual’ (McEwan 362). Though rather destabilized by—and ironic—about such changes, the older Briony has now become able to fully inhabit this liminal zone when she listens to the creole music her driven has chosen to listened to:
the thumping twangy brass noise resumed, and over it, a light baritone chanting in Carribean patois to the rhythms of a nursery rhyme, or a playground skipping-rope jingle. It helped me. It amused me. It sounded so childish, though I had a suspicion that some terrible sentiments were being expressed I didn’t ask for a translation. (McEwan 362-3)
76
This new translation zone is a reassuring, womb-like place in which the character, having accepted, contrary to her younger self, that she did not ‘nee[d] to know, to understand everything that came her way’ (McEwan 180), can now fully enjoy the opaqueness of language and her own lack of knowledge. So, if there is no apotheosis of the word in the Joycean sense in Atonement, there is nonetheless an appeased form of release from the need for interpretation in this unclear ending. This may be Briony’s idea of a ‘happy en[d]’ for herself (McEwan 370).
In Atonement, textual insertions of foreign and vernacular languages, but also of sociolects and idiolects function as signs of the novel’s preoccupation with the denaturalizing of language and with social critique; generally speaking, heterolingualism, in this respect, mainly serves McEwan’s postmodern demythologizing spirit, which is clearly a heritage of Modernism’s linguistic pluralism. The novel subtly builds a dialectical reversal thanks to which the figure of the treacherous foreigner and translator, in a novel (and a movie) based on a misinterpretation, becomes an ethical intercessor when s/he is guided by empathy and the desire to meet the Other. This representation of the figure of the ethical and critical intercessor serves as an experiential model for the reader / spectator of the work. The space of translation that the novel and the film fictionalize becomes a ‘zone of critical engagement’ (Apter 5), a fertile ground to reconfigure the Self and Other. Finally, in a novel and a film that deal with the art of narrative, McEwan’s and Wright’s heterolingualism can be read more generally in the light of Michel Foucault’s discussion of the discursive power of narratives that have a social normalizing and a legitimizing influence. Indeed it helps reveal the collective narratives we live by so as to better expose their discursive power.
Works Cited
APTER, Emily, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2005), Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.
BAKER, Mona, ‘Interpreters and Translators in the War Zone: Narrated and Narrators’, The Translator, 16.2 (2010), 197-222.
BERMAN, Antoine, L’Épreuve de l’étranger : Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique, Paris: Gallimard, 1984.
BOLTON, Matthew, ‘The Rhetoric of Intermediality. Adapting Means, Ends, and Ethics in Atonement’, DIEGESIS 2.1 (2013), 23-53.
77 EELLS, Emily (ed.), Les mots étrangers/ The Words of Others, LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], vol. XIII-n°1 (2015), last accessed at http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/8601, on Dec. 21st 2017.
FINNEY, Brian, ‘Brionyʼs Stand Against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwanʼs Atonement’, Journal of Modern Literature, 27.3 (Winter 2004): 68–82.
FOUCAULT, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
GRUTMAN, Rainier, Des Langues qui résonnent, L’Hétérolinguisme au XIXe siècle québécois, Montréal : Fides-CÉTUQ, 1997.
LECERCLE, Jean-Jacques, ‘Les mots étrangers, les mots de l’étranger’, Revue LISA/LISA e- journal [En ligne], XIII.1 (2015), last accessed at http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/8601, on Dec. 21st 2017.
LOUVEL, Liliane, Ménégaldo, Gilles and Fortin, Anne-Laure, ‘An interview with lan McEwan’, November 1994, Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines n° 8. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de Montpellier, 1995, last accessed at http://ebc.chez-alice.fr/ebc81.html, on Dec 20th 2017.
MCEWAN, Ian, Atonement (2001), London: Vintage, 2016.
MEYLAERTS, Reine (ed.), Heterolingualism in/and Translation, Special issue of Target, 18:1 (2006).
MITRIĆ, Ana, ‘Turning Points: Atonement, Horizon, and Late Modernism’, Modernism/modernity, 21.3, September 2014: 715-740.
QUARRIE, Cynthia, ‘“Before the Destruction Began”: Interrupting Post-Imperial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Studies in the Novel, 47.2, Summer 2015: 193-209.
REYNIER, Christine, ‘La citation in absentia à l’œuvre dans Atonement de Ian McEwan’, E-rea, 2.1 (2004), last accessed at http://journals.openedition.org/erea/480, on Jan. 3 2018. Robinson, Richard, ‘The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Modern Fiction Studies 56.3 (2010): 473-95.
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WRIGHT, Joe, Atonement, DVD Universal Studios, 2007.
78 Of Attics and Mad (Wo)men:
The Strange Case of the Victorian House in Atonement’
Sara Thornton, Université Paris Diderot
Guilt and the Victorian House
The Tallis home is a quinessentially Victorian home, not so much in its architecture as in its atmosphere and in the conventions of daily life practiced within it. It is part of a tradition of such houses, lost in time, but on the brink of change: Satis House in Great Expectations, Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, the exposed edifice of Wuthering Heights, the crumbling houses of Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit or Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Poe’s House of Usher, and even the home of Mrs. Dalloway, still a Victorian house even in the 1920’s, with her narrow virgin’s bed at the very top.
Each house has its attic or upper rooms, its mad men and women or gender-fluid mad persons – since Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic 71 gender possibilities have emerged. Each house, in its own way, showcases an act of atonement. Rather than enumerating the similarities between the houses and mistresses of Victorian literature and the Tallis home I would like to consider the way the house offers a setting for archetypal forms of guilt and atonement that have always haunted literature and still haunt it today. Robbie Turner is a scapegoat for the Victorian class system carrying the suffering of a generation; Emily and Briony are female vectors of guilt and atonement, a type already well known to consumers of literature and its visual adaptations. McEwan himself displays his own guilt and atonement as a modern writer fighting to get out of his own particular attic room by creating the Tallis home, his own Bleak House.
I would like to begin with a quote from a 1966 thriller written by George Sims called The Last
Best Friend. The novel is the story of an atonement on the part of the hero, Balfour, a London art dealer who doggedly seeks out the truth behind his best friend’s mysterious suicide. One scene in which the attic of a Victorian House figures prominently in a dream recounted by the hero particularly struck me:
79
‘Guilty !’ Balfour started up in a cold sweat from a vivid and humiliating dream. The verdict
boomed and echoed in his ears. In the dream he had been searching through a large Victorian
House which looked as if it had been shut up for years with sunlight coming through heavily dust-
marked windows, and the stale-smelling rooms full of grimy furniture which had to be moved
around laboriously for him even to advance a litle way from the doors. The stuffiness was
enervating and it seemed as if the supply of air was gradually being exhausted. When he had
reached the top floor the search became more urgent, though he had still not understood its purpose.
Opening a series of attic doors he found it was now twilight and the gloomy small rooms, there,
were cold and damp. Then he heard a hurdy-gurdy grinding out a waltz and clambered up on a
chair to one of the tiny awkward windows to look with difficulty on a group of men, women and
children being shepherded along a narrow street : as he stared down Max Weber and Sam Weiss
looked up and waved gaily, shouting some words he could not hear. From his vantage point he
alone could see that at the end of the street a train composed of closed goods wagons waited for
them […] In a panic, unable to think, he had charged at the locked front door to find that it opened
into a small, cowded court room with someone calling out in a deep-sounding voice ‘Wieviel
stück ?’ over and over again, despite the answering repetition ‘650 pieces in 12 wagons’. (Sims 53)
In the dream Balfour fails to save his friends and only hears « the train slowly chugging out of the station » (Sims 54). He is looking out from the upper floors of a high Victorian House reminiscent of
Miss Havisham’s Satis House, not only as it appears in Dickens’ novel, but also in David Lean’s film
Great Expectations of 1946. Pip, played by John Mills, has to negotiate the dusty rooms crowded with heavy upholstered furniture ; this is a typical gothic trope of the exploration of a shutterered, neglected room which is found in many Victorian novels including Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Balfour is frantic but cannot get out of the Victorian house in time to warn his friends. Next we see his London flat with white walls, plain blue carpet and very little furniture and
80 few possessions – an antidote to this heavy past. Paradoxically, since he is an art and antiques dealer,
Balfour has a horror of people’s clutter and the constant auctioning off of the possessions of the dead.
In the light of this trope of the house which blinds and disempowers, I would like to consider how far literature is haunted by the guilt of not waking up in time from what Walter Benjamin in his Paris–
Capital of the Nineteenth Century has called ‘the dream’ of the nineteenth century: the era in which we are all soporifically trapped. Benjamin was writing of course on the eve of fascism in the 1930s, a moment when his readings of the nineteenth century became particularly poignant signalling as they do the end of an era already half-destroyed by the First World War. Briony’s story, like Balfour’s, is the story of looking out from the Victorian house, trapped in a ruin from which she must escape, but failing to do so in time. Her story is the story of that slow awakening. What she sees from the upper windows of the house is the scene which allows her to later accuse Robbie and send him to the war. The novel is the story of her slow descent from the dream-like top of the house where rehearsals take place and fictions are born and the reaching of an outside world and the light of truth just before her death. All that is left at the end of the story, of course, is Briony’s writing, ‘nothing but a mass of typewriting’, as the narrator says at the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1897 (Stoker End note). None of it can change anything; no authentic documents remain, just the fictionalised trace of an event, an emotion, a moment in print.
Atonement is a novel about writing and being trapped in narratives. There is nothing ‘outside the text’ as literary theory and philosophy has often told us. Atonement posits that we are all mad women and men, deluded inmates of the Victorian asylum of representation, writing stories which like many
Victorian novels now span the world and have become a global phenomenon. We are confined in an ontological attic, hoping for a happy ending, a Downton Abbey denouement. How ghastly as a first-time reader to realise that Robbie and Celia never actually lived their idyll in the cottage by the sea, and even worse that they are just figments of Briony’s and McEwan’s imagination, an effect of language (not even
McEwan’s or Briony’s own for they are spoken by the ambient language of their time, mere scribes for all the narratives flowing around them). We know all this for sure and yet like Briony, we look down
81 from on high from the attic and spread our fantasies and prejudices out onto the passing scenes. We just can’t help it. It is madness to stay there however. Is it time to leave the Victorian fantasy of realism, industry and empire and to atone for all the horrors committed in the name of a Victorian ideal that had to be financed, protected, made durable at the expense of others in terms of class and race. Perhaps, thinks the reader of McEwan’s novel, it is time to atone for the whole of the nineteenth and twentieth century and for their many disasters big and small.
The Trouble with Atonement
Let us consider for a moment the nature of the atonement or more particularly the protestant atonement at work in McEwan’s story. Atonement is a lifelong act of paying back into a spiritual economy and has always been a notoriously unpopular doctrine for the middle classes who began to reject it as soon as capital started to be amassed in the mid-eighteenth-century and indeed even before this when capital meant not industry but the riches of silks and spices, cotton and cocoa brought back from overseas. Atonement is an old-fashioned doctrine, anachronistic even, and quite out of kilter with modernity as diverse works of theology constantly suggest. It seems mystical, ancient, and barbaric almost. A heavy theological notion that even the Church has trouble selling to its faithful. It is interesting that late in his career McEwan should turn to this word and notion. I would like to consider why, and why atonement is linked to the attic of the Victorian house.
Firstly, what is atonement? It is a reparation or expiation, it can, be an annual ceremony of confession and atonement for sin. Its synonyms are compensation, recompense, payment, repayment, redress, restitution, indemnity, indemnification, expiation, penance, redemption; we veer from the world of theology to finance. Strictly speaking, Christian theology defines atonement as the reconciliation of
God and mankind through Jesus Christ and his suffering. We need to consider here the theological difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. To caricature for a moment we might say that for Catholics, the Church itself plays a key role in beckoning individuals to salvation, through the sacraments. For Protestants, however, salvation and truth are attained by the individual via her or his
82 reading of the Bible; atonement is thus an individual question heavy with consequence for the self. It is unappealing, difficult to manage, too far from comfortable middle class lifestyle, too costly, radical, barbaric since linked to blood sacrifice, the body of Christ given up like a lamb to the slaughter. One’s own body swims into view when atonement is conjured up, along with sackcloth and ashes. Two books found at the British Library in London attest to this problematic nature of the doctrine. Firstly,
Evangelical Principles. A series of doctrinal papers explanatory of the positive principles of evangelical churchmanship written by Edward Garbett (London, 1875, 317 pages) and secondly, Herbert Maynard
Smith, Atonement (London : Macmillan & Co., 1925, 335 pages). One was written in 1875 (5 years after the publication of Dickens’s last novel) and in the other in 1925 (the same year asthe publication of
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway). The two moments might represent the Victorian novel and the modernist novel, yet the works tell very similar stories.
In 1875 Garbett is already trying to save the doctrine of atonement that appears to be in crisis. He tries to deflect attention from the idea of a single body which suffers for sin by underlining that Jesus suffered all his life and not only on the cross, forsaken as he was, lumped in with the sinners. Yet again and again, laments Garbett, we tend to focus on the sin in the flesh as it appears at the moment of the crucifiction: ‘vicarious suffering and substitution […] Christ made a full and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’ (Garbett 76). He continues : ‘The life of Christ, as well as the death of Christ was an atonement’. Jesus came to atone for the sinners and ‘make Him willing to pardon’. But Garbett cannot deny that atonement is first and foremost concerned with ‘the infliction of a penalty on Christ’ (73) since God ‘delivered him up for us all’ (75) and ‘God made him to be sin for us’ (77). Like a punching ball we might ask? An unpleasant image of bodily pain swims into view which
Garbett realises is the source of the problem but which, he feels, must not turn us away from atonement.
It seems we must resist siding with rationalists who believe that if God is eternal love then no act of atonement is needed. In McEwan’s Atonement, Robbie plays the part of such an embodied, walking sin, available to ‘be sin’ for the Tallis family for whom he becomes a maniac, a rapist. He must carry the deeds of others and be crucified. He submits quietly at first like a lamb to the slaughter.
83 Herbert Maynard Smith’s Atonement of 1925 wages the same war against those who find the notion of atonement, as a doctrine of the crucifixion, unacceptable. Smith complains in the following way: ‘an atonement, we are told, by our gifted journalists, is alien to the modern mind’ (Smith 2). The
‘modern mind’ is that belonging to the educated middle classes:
If the ordinary public schoolboy ‘on the classical side’ is examined on heathen mythology and
Bible history, he is almost certain to acquire more marks in the former subject. The ordinary
undergraduate is more likely to pass an elementary examination in Aristotle than in St. Paul. An
ordinary clubman may have inaccurate knowledge of evolution, but he has none on the subject of
the Atonement.
(Smith 2-3)
Smith seems to complain that for many people atonement is something for other people to do, ordinary people, ‘the publican, the sinner and the harlot’ who find ‘a new life and extended freedom after laying down their burdens at the foot of the cross’ (Smith 2). These are proper sinners of the authentic, simple, salt-of-the-earth kind who are used to suffering for their sins. In the fashionable circles, however, atonement is considered ‘alien’ and therefore, it would seem, needs to be outsourced to other people.
Journalists and privileged schoolboys know classics but not the Bible, laments Smith; the clubman knows evolution better than theological doctrine. The notion of a fallen humanity does not exist for them and they do not seek redemption because they are not aware of the consequences of sin. They simply ‘change their expectations to meet a widening field of knowledge’: the doctrine is not so much explained as ‘explained away’ (Smith 2). We might note that the ‘widening field of knowledge’ is open to the middle classes but not to the working classes who it is suggested, for want of a better idea and a better life, remain devout and still practice atonement. ‘The man in the trenches knew his need of God’, says Smith, his need to recognise sin and gain redemption, but not a banker ‘served and comforted at his club’ (Smith 3). How might Paul Marshall, the very public schoolboy imagined by Smith also ‘served
84 and comforted’ in his privileged role as a monied entrepreneur (and whose intent is to make ‘Amo’ chocolate bars to be bought by the government and shipped to soldiers) possibly imagine atoning personally for any sin? The only religion left on the Tallis estate is bestowed by the heathen Temple, vestige of a bygone era, and which bestows only ‘a faintly religious ambience’ (McEwan 73).
Atonement is a protestant or even Calvinist concept which means making up for something– trying to purge and change the world through some personal, fleshly effort. Taking something of the self to make good a lack in the world. A pound of flesh but given up willingly to make up the shortfall, the gash, the wound. It is a pay-back, a sort of check or tally. We are back to the spititual economy again.
And indeed back to the economy tout court. The theologians cited above suggest that modern society sees it as expedient to let the working classes pay. It is not for the upper classes to atone, to make the blood sacrifice of Jesus. Might we consider therefore that in McEwan’s novel Robbie pays with his flesh, his person, while Briony pays only with her writing. Her imminent death at the end of the novel does not convince the reader of suffering and no real atonement is truly offered up despite her intended letter
‘a new draft, an atonement’ (349). Robert is ‘flayed’ much as Briony is seen ‘flaying the nettles’ (a term associated with an act of contrition), early in the novel as an act of ‘self-purification’ (McEwan 74) but not of atonement.
The last work of theology we will consider is an American twenty-first century one – from the country where Christian theological thought still thrives within evangelism. Ralph F. Wilson’s Lamb of
God: Jesus’ Atonement for Sin, (JesusWalk Publications, 2011), discusses the doctrine of
‘substitutionary atonement’ where the body of another bears the brunt of the punishment. ‘Classic
Protestant Liberals’ as Wilson calls them (the equivalent of Smith’s ‘modern mind’), take issue with the doctrine of the Atonement. They tend to reject dogma and to prefer human experience and reason to divine revelation, the anthropocentric to the theocentric. God is seen to be immanent in the world, working through human experience that is at odds with the idea of Jesus' death on the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin. The latter notion of sacrifice comes from the Old Testament system of animal sacrifices to atone for sin, all part of a primitive practice of appeasing the wrath of an angry god.
85 Such atonement depicts a violent, bloodthirsty deity that seems antithetical to the God of whom Jesus speaks in the New Testament as loving and forgiving. This reasoning takes us back to both Garbett in
1875 and Smith in 1925 in which punishing one person for the sins of others is already seen to offend polite society. We might also posit that the ‘modern mind’ does not wish to be confronted with either self-sacrifice or with those that society in fact regularly sacrifices. We might add that for Protestants the idea of the body of Christ is metaphorical and not actual and that suffering to obtain graces or merit is an alien concept. In the Catholic perspective, baptism means not just metaphorically being part of the
Body of Christ, but actually being the body of Christ and therefore sharing in Christ's suffering.
How strange then that McEwan should return to such a cumbersome and even primitive theological doctrine which as we have seen has prompted so much controversy. We have looked at 136 years from
1875 to 2011, but the debate of course goes back much further and still continues. How does this affect literature? Has the repressed tradition of atonement as animal sacrifice resurfaced in fiction to plague the ‘modern mind’? Is it always there in the novel as a primitive background made of wars, suffering bodies, burned down mansions30, shattered reputations and vases that haunt the respectable houses, salons, parties and weddings of the upper classes? 31
Class and Scapegoating
Inside the Victorian house we find primitive spaces that are very far from the light of modernity.
Skeletons in cupboards inhabit this gothic hinterland. Robert may be a brilliant young student and future doctor mentored by an enlightened employer; like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847), his main role is to be a vehicle for the atonement of the sins of the household that welcomed him. Mr. Earnshaw brings
30 See chapter 7, p. 73 of McEwan’s Atonement for a description of the Temple as a vestige of the ‘original Adam House’. 31 The idea of damage and sin and responsability for broken vases is seen not only in Henry James’ The Golden Bowl of 1904 but is also in Heinrich von Kleist’s play Der zerbrochene Krug of 1808 in which a judge named Adam must atone for breaking a family vase during his attempt to seduce a young woman named Eve. Madame de la Cruchecassée appears in 1848 in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair where a minor figure honour is no longer intact bears in her name the sin of philandering and sexual licence. 86 the orphan Heathcliff back from Liverpool to his home and gives him the name of a dead son. Robbie is treated better than Heathcliff for Jack Tallis educates him just as Magwitch educates Pip in Great
Expectations (1861). Magwitch makes a gentleman of Pip and thereby redeems himself through the body of another in the eyes of society, atoning for his convict sins. Likewise, as with the flower girl in Bernard
Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914) or the monster in Frankenstein (1818), the body of another is used to atone for the sins of society allowing the master, to use Hegelian terminology, to gain redemption through his slave. In Atonement, the figure of Jane Eyre has become a young man, a servant promoted above his rank rather like Julien Sorel in Stendahl’s Le rouge et le noir (1830). Jack Tallis’s act of atonement for the sins of his socially privileged class and for his own sins as an unfaithful husband takes the form of a
‘hobby’ to raise up a lowly child32. Robbie is educated yet shunned in the end by the family. If the son of the charwoman is welcomed into the house and cherished by the father much as Heathcliff cherishes
Earnshaw, Robert’s person, and indeed body, are finally sacrificed to cleanse the crime of upperclass
Paul Marshall against Lola.
It seems that the atonement at work around the character of Robbie is the very unpalatable Old
Testament form we heard about previously; it is a blood letting which the Victorian middle classes and present-day liberal protestant humanist Christians have found so barbaric. Perhaps McEwan returns to this bitter controversy, to the utter violence of atonement to wake us up in some way from our complacent slumberings within our Victorian homes. As we turn a blind eye to the misery of industry, war, and extermination, impeded as we are by the dusty furniture of the mind, McEwan forces us to confront some sort of truth. Robbie is resented and as soon as blame can be placed and the parvenu rejected – it is done. Hands are washed, gazes averted.
In Robbie we find the sacrificial victim of the house of bleak England that has ignored and even repressed class struggle, the mess of the two world wars, the Empire and colonisation. The ‘solemn single note of the quarter hour’ of Big Ben (McEwan 283) is the Woolfian ‘hour irrevocable’ (Woolf)
32 ‘But really, he was a hobby of Jack’s, living proof of some leveling principle he had pursued through the years. When he spoke about Robbie, which wasn’t often, it was with a touch of self-righteous vindication’ (McEwan chapter 12). 87 and sounds like a death knell for those caught in its maws. There is a party at end of the novel like the party at the end of Mrs. Dalloway and ‘there she [Clarissa Dalloway] was’, like Briony, a survivor; they, like most members of her class, survive but Septimus Smith and Robbie are sacrificial victims, chosen for their expendibility. McEwan shows us that the British have not woken up from the dream of the nineteenth century and that they are still upstairs looking down. They are in the attic, the place where all the old objects are kept, the ‘cemetery of decathected object-choices’ as Leo Bersani has described them33. Among bones and cadavers we remain within our constitutional monarchy and the confines of the nation state, within a dream of Empire. The likes of Robbie must still pay for the sins of others. We continue to sacrifice the bodies of others to atone, to cleanse ourselves. In Lean’s Great Expectations the orphans at the Workhouse look like concentration camp victims with their shaven heads, hollow eyes and striped prison clothes. The pulling down of the curtains at the end of the film to let light into the
Victorian House, is a gesture of sorts to atone for the horrors of the Second World War. It prepares for the regeneration associated with the Festival of Britain which took place on the South Bank in London in 1951 at the Royal Festival Hall.
Atonement but no regeneration : Emily and Briony
Emily sits in her room at the top of the house and senses the household. She does not move :
[…] many hours of lying still on her bed, had distilled from this sensitivity a sixth sense, a
tentacular awareness that reached out from the dimness and moved through the house, unseen and
all-knowing. Only truth came back to her for what she knew, she knew […] [She] beamed her raw
attention into every recess of the house. There was nothing, and then, like a lamp turned on and
off in total darkness, there was a little squeal of laughter […] She would track down Cécilia and
make sure she had arranged the flowers as instructed […] She would soothe the household […] a
33 See Leo Bersani’s description of ‘the moribund nature of the ego’ and ‘its status as a kind of cemetery of decathected object-choices’ in The Feudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York : Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 93-100. 88 troubled sparsely populated continent […]. She could send her tendrils into every room of the
house, but she could not send them into the future. She also knew that, ultimately, it was her own
peace of mind she strove for; self-interest and kindness were best not separated. […] Rather than
risk drawing the curtains just yet, she turned on the reading light, and tentatively began the hunt
for her dark glasses. (66-71)
She senses the troubles within her own house but also within the house of England (her husband’s unpleasant tasks for the government, the unfairness of gender relations), but does nothing. Her husband is unfaithful and roves while she is left at home with the servants and chidren and is an ailing woman lying prostrated by migraine attacks. She does not run the house but feels the house. Emily is a Havisham figure: her condition and her husband’s absence stop all the clocks and she remains quite still accepting her cuckold state. She has little true insight into the truth of her household; she absorbs affect through the walls but has no logical and linear narrative to help her tell a complete story – she simply picks up on strife or harmony among a group of people between whom she can barely differentiate.
Like Miss Havisham she is a disturbed and confined woman, aware of sound and movement in her remote prison. Emily uses Briony to put into action the desires she herself has repressed or cannot act upon: Briony must make entertainment through narrative, write down and keep note, chase away intruders, the intruder who is Robbie. Emily is also like Bertha Mason whose alterego, Jane Eyre, writes and draws and loves and reconfigures the world, a sort of ‘Bertha Havisham’. Like Jane Eyre, Briony is the mistress of recording, insisting, sketching, copying, and transmitting. Briony is also Estella who goes out into the world to rewrite her mother’s story – to ‘beggar’ the men with whom she plays and to avenge male fickleness. One woman lies and suffers in the dark, a prisoner of her own body and mind (the matriach in A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects also springs to mind), while another does things, creates and rewrites. Emily’s antennae or tentacles reach her daughter and whisper a narrative to her: the former senses the horror – the latter acts on it. Briony, sous influence, misinterprets the signs and like the reader tries to grasp the meaning of the marks on her cousin’s arm. Emily is a failed Mrs Dalloway. She does
89 not buy or arrange the flowers herself and cannot regenerate her household – but like Mrs. Dalloway she tries to prepare a party. Briony must weave a narrative to make up for the shortfalls of reality; she creates different scenarios such as Arabella’s neatly linear narrative to compensate for the shattered nature of existence and its lack of logic, its cruelty and absurdity. Robbie is a pawn in both their games, moved around, a sacrificial victim, tying up loose ends and saving the day although not in the way he imagines.
Atonement, as we discover, is the novel Briony has been writing between 1940 and 1999 but no amount of writing can produce the necessary post-atonement stage of ‘regeneration’.
Atonement is one doctrine, ‘regeneration’ is another. Atonement prepares the ground for it. In
Evangelical Principles the table of contents lists ‘The Rule of Faith’, ‘Sin’, ‘Atonement’, ‘Justification’,
‘Regeneration’, and ‘Sanctification’, in that order. Garbett underlines the idea that after atonement one can be born again, and be literally re-generated into the world: ‘It is that inward change of heart and character which the Holy Ghost produces in a man when he becomes a true Christian, – a change so complete that no word could be chosen more fit to express it than the word Regeneration or new birth’
(Garbett 127). According to Garbett it is both personal and universal: ‘accompanying and instrumental to Salvation’ and involves ‘the washing of Regeneration, and renewing of the holy ghost’ (Titus iii, 4.).
It also brings to pass the ‘new order of things which will prevail at the second advent of Jesus Christ’
(Garbett 126). He quotes the Gospel of Matthew : ‘In the Regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit on His throne […]’ (Matt.xix.28).
We see little true regeneration in Atonement either in personal or societal forms. If there is some sweeping away of the Victorian cobwebs in commercial terms in the form of the new business opportunities of the war in chocolate and sugar and cocoa empires, the novel focusses more on the bankruptcy of ideals and the end of civilisation. Robbie complains of 'A dead civilisation. First his own life ruined, then everybody else's'. The same sins are committed as in all wars: sending boys to trenches or boys into planes on crutches, terrified, unable to cope. Future generations, grandsons, try to atone without knowing what they are atoning for – all they know is that there is a great sin which has been
90 committed and left unatoned. There is no opportunity for regeneration, as the prerequisite act of atonement is never performed. If Robbie’s social ascension made possible by Jack Tallis might be seen as a sign of society regenerating itself, that possibility is soon quashed by imprisonment, class prejudice and war.
Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991) looks at the uneasy way in which soldiers of the First World War were cared for and given therapy to ‘regenerate’ them for further combat. The last words of the novel are the words on the file of the character, Sassoon: “Nov 26, 1917. Discharged to duty”34. She also looks at the wasteland of British society even before the war: poverty, social injustice, violence, illness, stunted growth as the daily bread of the British working classes. Regeneration is not the same for one class as for another. How can there be regeneration in a society in which the working classes seem to be ‘a different order of being’ from the officers (Barker 143)?35 This state of affairs is the same in 1935 for
Robbie and nothing has changed.
McEwan’s atonement
Ian McEwan has been accused of the sin of plagiarism. It was said that he copied a wartime memoir called No Time for Romance written by Lucilla Andrews and published in London in 1977. McEwan admits to reading the memoir and using parts of it as research; he even thanks Andrews and references her memoir as a key influence on the conception of the book. The author insists he has done nothing wrong; like many writers and literary academics he understands the palimpsestuous nature of writing.
As we know, Thomas Pynchon even came to the defence of McEwan by publishing a letter in The
Guardian defending the writer and his influences, distinguishing the latter from plagiarism. We may also
34 Note the strange, almost oxymoronic, association of words ; discharge is liberation while duty is constraint. The language of state and of medicine conspire continue devouring its young men. 35 Class mobility meant the loss of old certainties and one father in the novel complains that since his son’s rise in society his son is ‘neither fish nor fowl’ (Barker 57). Time and space is fragmented along with minds and bodies: one character, Prior, shovels the remains of two soldiers into one sack at the Front while a trip to the seaside confirms the splitting of society. Prior says he felt he ‘came from another planet’ in comparison with the lower-class men he led (Barker 134). In a church Rivers sees ‘the two bloody bargains on which civilisation claims to be based’ (the crucifixion and Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac) (Barker 149).
91 cite Touch Not the Cat, a novel by Mary Stewart first published the year before in 1976 and one of her best-known works. Like many of Stewart's novels, the story has a supernatural element: Bryony (sic)
Ashley has the gift of telepathy and is able to communicate subliminally with a man she thinks is her lover, but whose identity she is unsure of. She learns that her secret lover is a long-standing friend to whom she is related, the odd-job man and gardener at Ashley Court, Rob Granger, whom Bryony grew up with. She is saved by Rob and plans to emigrate with him. The narrative and characters have certain links with Atonement.
What is interesesting here is not so much a particular act of plagiarism but the universal plagiarism that literature in general is guilty of. Gérard Genette posits that every act of writing allows the former texts that created it to show through like a palimpsest36. No writer is truly guilty of plagiarism because we are all, in a sense, writing the same novel again and again. McEwan perhaps wrote Atonement as his own act of atonement for the sin of not being within history early on in his career (we can think of First
Love, Last Rights or The Cement Garden which were resolutely postmodern). As we know, he slowly returned to the more conventional form of the realist novel in which he continued to study ‘remains’, although no longer human remains. The remains he increasingly studied were the remains of an era, of the novel, the remains of a day, a time, as in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day which looks at guilt, inaction, a failure to act on history’s and life’s lessons. As we wait for literary and spiritual regeneration we remain where we have always been: trapped in the Victorian attic. Does Atonement ask us to enter history once and for all, to wake up just in time from the dream of the house and shout our warning to those below? Perhaps what McEwan allows us to do is to see the Victorian house as a ruin, albeit a powerful one, and to begin ‘to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled’. 37
36 See Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré, Paris : Seuil, 1982. 37 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris –Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ first published 1939. 92 ‘“To everyone”, “To whom it may concern”: the Letter Which/for Which No One Can Answer in Atonement (Ian McEwan, Joe Wright)’
Pascale Tollance Lumière — Lyon 2 University
Among all the letters that appear in the course of Atonement the short note left by the runaway twins may be considered to weigh very little and to work mostly as a clever device, instrumental in the unfolding of the plot. Interestingly though, as Briony is about to open the envelope at the dinner table, a question is asked by the author of another letter: ‘Who’s it addressed to?’ (142). The man speaking is none other than Robbie, whose own, explosive, note has started its dangerous course at this stage. The answer is: ‘To everyone’ (142), an inscription which, in Joe Wright’s film, becomes ‘To whom it may concern’. The change can be considered as minute: the formal turn of phrase sounds amusing considering the clumsiness of the note and its spelling mistakes. But the words that appear in big, ill- formed letters on the screen also give greater resonance to the uncertainty that surrounds the act of writing. Beyond the twins’ particular plight, the phrase underlines the importance of address in the novel, of a gesture, repeated again and again, towards someone, towards anyone – another who cannot entirely be known even when the identity of the addressee is established. It raises the question of what will become of the letter, of all letters, which, despite their many shapes and forms, may be referred to as ‘the letter’ to better account for that ‘something’ they all share. The message in a bottle which the twins leave for whoever will care to pick it up can first been seen as the reflection of a situation of dereliction – a general irresponsibility and a failure of duty whose consequences are about to hit everyone full blast. As we read the words ‘To whom it may concern’ something is brought home, an echo forms in the mind of the reader: is there anyone out there who, literally, feels ‘concerned’?, ‘is there anyone who cares?’, we may ask. At the same time as two children pen their helplessness in awkward letters, Robbie is soon to be accused by a letter that a child misreads, a letter which ‘everyone’ allows to be used against him. Those who might have prevented such misappropriation are not just absent or useless; more worryingly, they are guilty of the same crime as Briony: they have decided what the letter means long before they have read it. With hindsight, Robbie appears as the perfect sacrificial victim and his letter the ideal pretext to present him with what is considered to be the true significance of his birth and to cancel the social exception he constitutes. And yet what Briony is soon to discover is that the letter resists appropriation after all, that it is and will remain fundamentally ob-scene not just because of the words it may carry but because there
93 is no way of neutralising it, domesticating it or stopping its course, even after the event. The letter takes on an allegorical dimension in the novel (another reason to use it in the singular), all the more so when set in relation with Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’, where the letter dictates everyone’s position in the story. The tragic potential of such a situation appears in the light of another major hypotext, The Go-Between, where Leo, the boy who has interfered with the letters he was meant to carry has remained maimed for life. The fact that nobody can answer for the effects of the letter makes it formidable, but it also makes it uniquely valuable. Briony is not God, mercifully, and she will never be able to put an end to the course of the letter – something which is highlighted by Joe Wright’s ending. If this means that she can never fully atone for what she did, it also preserves the possibility that the story she leaves behind can be picked up and read by ‘whoever it may concern’. Whilst the phrase can be connected with a general evasion of responsibility, it also invites us to reflect on the need to avoid a disastrous confusion between responsibility and authority and to preserve the free circulation of the letter.
Address and the failure to answer Many have noted the importance given to writing in Joe Wright’s film, the role of the typewriter and of the sound of the typewriter keys which sometimes detach themselves, sometimes blend into the musical score, or, at other times, morph into a similar sound: the staccato rhythm of footsteps for example or the thumping noise of an umbrella hitting a car. This elaborate use of the soundtrack, as has been suggested, can be heard as a sort of running commentary and marks the presence of an external voice, the authorial voice which is revealed to be none other than Briony’s in the last part of the narrative. One way or another, and whoever hits the keys, there is always something which is being written in Atonement. Although it might not be entirely explicit, there is also someone to whom or for whom one writes – even when what is being written is not a letter but a play for example. Briony entirely composes her first piece, The Trails of Arabella, with Leon in mind. Joe Wright throws into sharp relief the dense epistolary network of the book by using the power of concentration of his medium but also its ability to extract the voice from the various letters and by giving them sometimes a deeper resonance than the voice of the dialogues. Whether he makes us hear voices or makes them visible in big loud letters on the screen, it is the same urge to reach out to the other which is foregrounded. The crucial role of address can be extended to the novel as a whole: more than a fiction containing a certain number of letters, the text can be seen as one long letter. The need to take into account the existence of an addressee – be it purely virtual – in made obvious in the third part of the story: Briony’s first manuscript ‘Two Figures by a Fountain’ is not inserted in the text but is included into a pattern of correspondences. In fact it exists solely through the rejection letter that the editor of
94 Horizon sends to the author, as a sort of negative, or ghost letter. In the final part, the presence of a shadowy addressee is conjured up by Briony’s questions: ‘Who would want to believe they never met again, never fulfilled their love?’, ‘Who would want to believe that?’ (371). Joe Wright makes that addressee visible, so to speak, by introducing an interviewer of flesh and blood in the story. Finally, in that last part, we are told, among other things, that Cecilia never answered the letter in which Briony asked to see her in the hope of making reparation for her crime. It is then difficult to resist seeing the narrative we have just read as a substitute for the exchange that never happened, the account that was never given and the statement that was never changed – as one long letter to Cecilia, or to Cecilia and Robbievi. Far from the epistolary tradition that Robbie or Cecilia conjure up when they discuss Clarissa, the letters that we get to read in Atonement tend to remain unanswered – unless we get the answer without the initial letter as in Cyril Connoly’s long explicatory note. That the novel deplores this lack of reciprocity is obvious in the first part where everyone is far too wrapped up in their own concerns to pay attention to what is happening around them and to what the others may be feeling. Briony, is the one who shows the greatest frustration in front of this lack of response, but she too is totally deaf to the need of others as she pursues her obsession with her play and with the brother for whom she has written this play. Although they remain minor characters, the twins occupy a place where this general lack of concern is made most manifest: whilst one of the brothers draws attention to himself by wetting his bed, the only response he gets is punishment and humiliation. More than the plight of the children – into which we are never given a true insight – it is again the negligence of those who surround them which is brought to the fore by their note and its clumsy cry for help. The deafness which prevails is what Robbie is soon to experience as his word will carry no weight in front of Briony’s statement. The absence of fathers in the novel, the fact that Mr Tallis later simply abandons the boy he seemed at first intent to treat like his own son takes on a major symbolic significance. It is not simply the indifference of one man which is pointed out, but a more fundamental irresponsibility. The father who will remain silent allows Robbie and Robbie’s word to get sacrificed to an order that must be preserved at all costs, all the more so perhaps as Robbie is a potential exception to the rule. In fact, more than the lack of answer, the irresponsibility to which Robbie falls victim lies in the fact that the answer is produced before any question can be raised. The crime which is presented as Briony’s, that of ‘knowing’ before ‘seeing’ (170) is everyone’s crime. Not that Briony was ‘pressured’ or ‘bullied’ as she makes clear. But Robbie is made to fit a predetermined pattern, at the same time as his letter (which suffers a second appropriation as it falls into Emily’s hands) is read as a confirmation of all the prejudices associated with his low origin. We can even go further when we see Emily Tallis’s reaction after she has read Robbie’s note: the letter then appears as the pretext
95 she has been waiting for all along to get rid of Robbie and pass her ready-made sentence. In Joe Wright’s film, the close-up on her hand on Briony’s shoulder as she congratulates her daughter on her statement can be seen as a gross parody of the hand of justice; the bright-red fingernails a suggestion perhaps that she has blood on her hands. We can also say that Robbie’s sacrifice has already been written many times before if we consider the vast library in which Atonement finds its place and in particular the cross-section of English literature it conjures up. We may think in particular of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End or of A Passage to India which Atonement echoes since the novel reverberates with the malaise or discontent of a civilisation purporting to regulate the most primitive instincts whilr providing means to unleash them under the cover of propriety. If irresponsibility lies not only in the failure to offer an answer but also in the guilty attempt to replace a question by an answer, Briony’s narrative is a proof that the question cannot be so easily eliminated and comes back to haunt you. Briony seems doomed to revisit every moment of a fateful day in the summer of 1935, but the resistance of the past lodges itself in a privileged manner in the letter she steals: an ‘obscene’ letter not just because of its shocking content, but because it can be allegorised precisely as what fails to be appropriated. Joe Wright’s key choice to have the offensive words reappear again and again on the screen suggests the insistence of something that keeps writing and rewriting itself beyond Briony’s control, that keeps writing her rather than the other way round. The question for the writer who tries to atone for the past is thus not just how to answer for a mistake or a crime that is behind, but how to respond to the perpetual displacement to which the ob-scene letter subjects you.
The power of the letter A few critics have noted the relevance of Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ in Atonement and have drawn from the famous analyses made by Lacan, Derrida and other commentators. Not only is it impossible to cover all the aspects of the vast and complex debate to which Poe’s text has given rise but it may be important to stick to a few essential points if one does not want to lose sight of what is at stake in McEwan’s novel. Besides, if a number of interesting parallels can be underlined, some key differences are also to be noted. The main point of comparison between Poe’s tale and McEwan’s novel is that a letter is ‘purloined’ and used in order to wield power or at least to alter the course of events. In Poe’s tale, the brilliant thing is that the content of the letter is never revealed to the reader and that it does not matter – rather the opposite: the fact that the nature of what is written remains unknown suggests that the letter has no meaning in itself, but that its significance lies entirely in the meaning it takes as it moves from hand to hand; it lies in the effects it produces and in the place it assigns to each character in the general scheme of things. Although the content of the letter matters enormously in Atonement,
96 its function and the transformation of that function depending on who ‘it may concern’, is for a part to be considered independently from that content. The other important point of comparison is that in Poe’s tale, getting involved with the letter induces a form of blindness – a blindness which does not spare those who witness somebody else being blind to what is going on around them. It is only because he is entirely exterior to the whole affair that Dupin, the clever detective, manages to see what has been hidden in plain sight. The twist of the end nevertheless reveals that at the moment of retrieving the original letter and replacing it by a facsimile, Dupin too is guided by an ulterior motive. Nobody after all is immune to the effects of the letter. Nobody can be said to ever possess the letter, only to be possessed by it. In the light of that comparison, we can say that Briony seems to concentrate a double power in her hands: that of the criminal, the Minister who intercepts and diverts the letter from its course and that of the detective who retrieves the letter. But contrary to what happens in Poe’s tale, Briony cannot hold on to the letter and cannot really handle it. A line is crossed when at the height of the drama, she produces Robbie’s note, turns it into an exhibit and lets it pass from hand to hand. Far from Poe’s clean game of hide and seek, McEwan uses the Tallises’ drawing room to stage an act of public violation, the violation of a secret which exposes Robbie and Cecilia – but as it turns out, at that moment it is the accuser herself who might be causing the greatest violence to herself. Having witnessed a crime in the dark, Briony herself commits a crime ‘in plain sight’. Like Poe, McEwan plays on irony and reversal: the child who wields power is shown to go out of control at the moment when she assumes control. But as she stands at the centre of the stage, in the godlike position of writing everyone’s future, Briony is not only being written, she is being short-circuited by the letter – already caught in that ‘short-circuit’ of the symbolic which characterizes traumavii. For Lacan, the letter in Poe’s tale works as an allegory of the material dimension of the signifier, the signifier as resistant to the effects of the signified. Later on, Lacan also developed a notion which he called ‘lalangue’ in which the letter totally bypasses the symbolic order: it is then less to be conceived in relation to the signified as through the affect or jouissance it is loaded with. Unlike what happens in Poe’s tale, one cannot overlook that the content of Robbie’s letter is known: the words in the letter perform their power in an immediate manner; they have direct and real effects on bodies. This is something that Joe Wright repeatedly tries to convey. As Christine Geraghty points out in her discussion of the film: ‘The most powerful words are unspoken and appear as writing, typed on the page, and as cinema, in huge close-ups’ (166). In this case, as she puts it ‘words do not act simply as signifiers for some imaginative signified’. She mentions in particular the close-up that ends that passage where scenes of Robbie at the typewriter alternate with scenes with Cecilia getting ready for dinner: that close-up, as the aria reaches the top notes, ‘shows the black letters as they are typed onto
97 the soft texture of the paper, ending with a forceful full-stop’. The full stop which almost pierces the ‘soft’ paper marks a key moment in the punctuation of the narrative (without knowing it, Robbie is putting the last nail in his own coffin); but the ‘forceful full stop’ also releases the power that is going to sweep Cecilia off her feet and hit Briony in the face. In fact when Briony reads for the first time the offensive note in the film, the sound of the typewriter rises and what appears on the screen is none other than the letter being typed earlier, as if the gap between writing and reading the letter was non- existent. The destructive power of the letter lies in the fact that Briony is ‘affected’ by the letter, but ‘not properly addressed by it’ to quote Richard Pedot. The traumatic effect of the letter invites us to look at Briony’s story in the light of another fateful interference in the correspondence between two lovers, that of thirteen-year-old Leo in Hartley’s Go- Between. Unlike Leo, precocious Briony can pride herself on her familiarity and expertise with the written word and yet she is no wiser than Leo who finally resorts to his old childish magic and his spells. Like him, she gets caught at her own game and fails to see the power contained in what she is handling. The boy who fancied himself as Mercury ‘flew too near to the sun and [was] scorched’ (17). Briony too can be seen as a kind of Icarus, unless she is Prometheus, playing with fire as she steals the letter, and then eaten up by a torment which she feeds as she tries to calm it. Briony has no other means to pay for her crime than that which caused her downfall: that sense of being in a closed circle is one of the effects produced by the final twist of the novel. The main irony is perhaps that in stealing a letter that was never addressed to her, Briony ends up being stuck with it. As Richard Pedot puts it: This is what the older narrator has to atone for, as if she were the letter’s ultimate addressee, or more accurately, as if she were the addressor and the addressee of a letter which slips into the novel she is forever rewriting. The irony is also that whilst being both addressee and addressor, Briony cannot be its owner. The letter belongs to no one; its nature is fundamentally to circulate. As Lacan remarks in his comment on ‘The Purloined Letter’: ‘[…] la lettre ne comble pas son destin après avoir rempli sa fonction’. (26) The impossibility to put a stop to the course of the letter even when it has been removed from circulation implies the impossibility of closure, but it is not in closure that the possibility of atonement lies. In the last pages of the novel, old Briony makes a clear pronouncement on the matter: the possibility of atonement is denied to the author who finds herself in the godlike position of ‘deciding outcomes’. Briony only sees herself, at this point, as the addressor, when her endless rewriting of the story makes it clear that she remains in the position of the addressee – the addressee of the fateful letter that she stole long ago but also the addressee of her own text, that ‘fifty-nine-year-assignment’ which requires constant re-reading and revision and comes to an end as all things must come to an
98 end. If Briony were God, she would not need to atone for anything, now or ever. And if authority is felt to be a major obstacle to atonement, the ethical dimension of Briony’s narrative lies in extent to which her attempt to address the past responsibly resists her own answers.
‘To whom it may concern’: the message in a bottle Several critics have suggested that we read the entire novel of Atonement as a letter of sorts. For some, like Elke d’Hoker, it amounts to a confession at the end of which Briony can rest in peace as she manages to present the story as ‘her truth’ and her truth only, and thus ‘achieves a measure of self-acceptance, if not self-forgiveness’ (41). For others, namely Heta Pyrhönen, ‘Briony alleviates her sense of guilt by writing a novel’ (Pyrhönen 115) instead of making a public statement. The conclusion is that she ‘is not willing in reality to face a situation in which she would be held morally and legally accountable’ (Pyrhönen 115). We can beg to differ here and decide to lend an ear to what Briony says at the end of Part III: there is something that neither formal statement nor public confession can take care of. Something else is ‘required of her’ (349). And we can suggest that in this instance the most important thing and the most difficult thing is perhaps not to confess but to write, to go through the process of writing. First Briony’s narrative involves more than an examination of her own actions: it addresses the past beyond her own life, enables her to move from self-examination to an imaginative recreation which leads her, among other things to read the letters of others – to read them rather than to steal them. For it is not so much what Briony addresses as how she addresses it which matters: in other words, what Briony has to face is the work of writing itself – she has to put herself through the work of writing to atone for having sealed the fate of two lovers in the most brutal and shocking manner. Briony’s challenge is to bear witness to the blind and terrifying godly power of authoring the lives of two human beings, while still being the one who holds the pen. The discipline and mortification that she imposes on herself by working as a nurse (which, in the Christian ritual of penance, normally comes after contrition and confession) seems light compared to her self-inflicted ‘fifty-nine-year assignment’ (369). If her atonement is about learning the meaning of humility, the lesson proves more difficult to achieve in words than in deed. Writing becomes her long-lasting labour of love. One of the most powerful and meaningful episodes in part III is the moment when Briony sits with Luc Cornet and instead of telling him a bedside story of her own invention, lulls him to sleep – so to speak – by becoming the co-writer of a story he starts telling. That the story should stem from a misunderstanding on the word ‘sister’ makes it all the more poignant – the vagaries of the letter have such power too.
99 Answering for the past while remembering that one remains the addressee of one’s own text is also one way of reading Briony’s decision to attend the performance of The Trials of Arabella at the end of the story. Bringing out of the cupboard a text connected with so much misery and blind confidence seems an odd choice. In accepting to have the embarrassingly naive piece performed for her, Briony may be accepting another trial of sorts: that of becoming the recipient of her own text, however flawed it may be, that of listening to a voice which is hers and no longer hers. Joe Wright’s cinematic choice for the last part consists in putting Briony in the position of the interviewee, the one who answers questions. At the same time Wright allows the story to continue after Briony has finished. It is possible to look at the final images as a mere cliché that is but a thin cover for a much starker tale. But as the bunch of letters which Robbie has been holding reappear and as the cottage by the sea comes out of the frame of the postcard, one can also consider that the letter is allowed to proceed on its course beyond Briony’s control. Freed from their moorings, the words scribbled on the page become real for one moment which can be deemed purely fantasmatic but they also create a space in which the whole text that contains them is shown to exist in an after-life. The place by the sea (in contrast with the many closed bodies of water that appear in the rest of the novel) is the place where the journey merely begins for a story which is, in its own way, a message in a bottle. There the letter, which no one can put under lock and key, can follow its unpredictable course and be rescued by ‘whom it may concern’.
Works cited
D’HOKER, Elke, ‘Confession and Atonement in Contemporary Fiction: J.M. Coetzee, John Banville and Ian McEwan’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 48.1 (Fall 2006): 31-43. GERACHTY, Christine, ‘Foregrounding the Media: Atonement (2007) as an Adaptation’, ed. Deborah CARTMELL, A Companion to Literature, Film and Adaptation, Oxford: Blackwell, 2012, 359- 373. HARTLEY, L. P., The Go-Between (1953), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. LACAN, Jacques, ‘Le séminaire sur la lettre volée’, Écrits, Paris : Seuil, 1966. LETISSIER, Georges, ‘“The Eternal Loop of Self-Torture”: Ethics and Trauma in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, in Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction, eds. Susana ONEGA and Jean-Michel GANTEAU, New York: Routledge, 2013, 90-106. MCEWAN, Ian, Atonement (2001), London: Vintage, 2002. O’DWYER, Erin, ‘Of Letters, Love and Lack: A Lacanian Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Epistolary Novel Atonement’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 57.2 (2016): 178-190. PEDOT, Richard, ‘Rewritings(s) in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Études Anglaises 60.2 (April-June 2007): 148-159. PYRHÖNEN, Heta, ‘Purloined Letters in Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45.4 (Dec 2012): 103-118.
100 POE, Edgar, Allan, ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845), Selected Tales, Oxford: OUP, 2008. WRIGHT, Joe, Atonement, 2007.
i This line means: “It’s a beautiful bright moonlight night tonight.” ii Tellingly, Dunkirk beach is presented like Dante’s hell with its own ‘circles of suffering—the sea, the beach, the front’ (McEwan 249), a simile announced by the use of the Italian word for ‘promenade, stroll’ in the depiction of the aimlessness of the men who ‘wandered about the sands without purpose, like citizens of an Italian town in the hour of the passeggio.’ (McEwan 248) iii Already, in part 3, when her impossible task of carrying six bedpans at a time is humorously compared to that of ‘a busy waiter in La Coupole’, Briony is positioned in a symbolic translation zone’: ‘Briony was also aware that she had been observed by Sister Drummond carrying only three bedpans at a time, when now they were expected to go the length of the ward reliably with a pile of six, like a busy waiter in La Coupole’ (McEwan 270. iv In several interviews, Ian McEwan has likewise elaborated on the ethical value of novel writing and reading, which is an art form able to encourage empathy in the reader. To Anne-Laure Fortin he said: Our imagination permits us to understand what it is like to be someone else. I don't think you could have even the beginnings of a morality unless you had the imaginative capacity to understand what it would be like to be the person whom you're considering beating round the head with a stick. An act of cruelty is ultimately a failure of the imagination. Fiction is a deeply moral form in that it is the perfect medium for entering the mind of another. I think it is at the level of empathy that moral questions begin in fiction. v While the filmmaker was pressed to edit out the scene, which seemed digressive to his collaborators, he chose to keep it: ‘It’s an incredibly important scene, but people, during the development of the film, kept suggesting we should take it out. It seems out of the loop of the narrative.” (DVD commentary, 1:27:00) In Joe Wright’s words, it is a ‘strange scene’: I think it does something poetically and emotionally for our understanding of Briony that I think is really, really important (…) Briony understands the power of storytelling to heal. She lies to him. She pretends that she understands what he’s talking about. She concurs with his delusions, which, in a sense, is a small piece of storytelling, and it helps him. And so she learns that story telling is not just destructive; it is also a thing that can heal, as well. Or obviously it doesn’t help him physically but it can help his pain. (…) There’s an element of finding herself in this scene and that’s why she tells him her real name. (DVD commentary 1:27:11) vi This is not quite the same as calling Atonement ‘an epistolary novel’ as Erin O’Dwyer does. vii Georges Letissier talks about a ‘short-circuiting of the usual process of perception that triggers a haunting pattern of belated returns.’ (217)
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