THE ACT OF LIFELONG ATONEMENT
Atonement
is a story told to us by a seventy-seven year old Briony narrating herself as a
thirteen-year old girl with passion for writing. Atonement has a strong romantic element, historical background and
psychological subtlety that continues the empirical tradition of British
fiction, and, at the same time, questions the established values which makes it
a fine postmodern novel. As a teenager
she had one sorrow only: she had no secrets. “Nothing in her life was
sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding” (McEwan 2007, p.5). She
longed for a harmonious and organized world where you could easily make
judgments of what was right and what was wrong. Thus marriage was “of virtue
rewarded, dizzy promise of lifelong union”, whereas divorce went along with the
“betrayal, illness, thieving, assault and mendacity” (ibid., p.9). As a young
writer she had to face pretense in words and encountered the danger of
self-exposure. But then she found all the pleasures of miniaturization and
ready-made “recipes”:
A
world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model
farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a
moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence,
falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance. … A crisis
in a heroine’s life could be made to coincide with hailstones, gales and
thunder, whereas nuptials were generally blessed with good light and soft
breezes. A love of order also shaped the principles of justice, with death and
marriage the main engines of housekeeping, the former being set aside
exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the
final page (ibid., p.7).
One summer’s
day in 1935, this imaginative girl witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her
older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a housekeeper and
Cecilia’s childhood friend. Later that day Robbie asks Briony to give a letter
to her sister (that she opens), which he then realizes is the wrong one with
sexual implication. To make the matters worse, in the evening while everybody
was in the drawing room Briony finds the two in the library and misinterpreting
what she sees as physical assault linking the three events comes to the
conclusion that Robbie was ‘a maniac’.
Then the meeting between Robbie
and Cecila in the library, as it is told through a focalisation
on Robbie, is experienced as a call towards darkness/obscurity:
“He followed her across the hall into the library which was in darkness, and
waited by the door while she searched for the switch of a desk lamp”
(132). An amorous dance between the two lovers soon starts, where Cecilia seems
to disappear from Robbie’s field of vision and to vanish into the darkness:
“She moved beyond the
light, downpast the
shelves. He stepped further into the
room, not quite following her, but
unwilling to let her out of close
range” (132). Before Robbie
finally finds Cecilia, the darkness intensifies and it is in a corner
that the couple
meet “She was
moving further away, toward the
corner, into deeper shadow” (132) Choosing a corner to shelter their
encounter is significant,
for, according to Bachelard : “An imaginary room rises
up around our bodies, which think that they are well hidden when we
take refuge in a corner”24. The corner is a
“haven that ensures
us one of
the things that
we prize most highly—immobility”25.
Cecilia and Robbie indeed experience their meeting as a moment out of
conventional time. In that “sort of half-box, part
walls, part door”26 the
play between light and shadows may be
construed as symbolic of
the awkward discovery of sexuality
by the young couple.
When Briony revisits the
same scene through a
focalisation on the young girl that she was, darkness seems to dominate
the scene. The threshold therefore becomes,
as Philippe Hamon explains it a variation
of the window motif used to “frame” the description28:
At first, when she pushed open the door and stepped in, she saw
nothing at all. The
only light was from
a single green-glass
desk
lamp which illuminated little more than the tooled leather surface
on which it stood. When she took another few steps she saw them,
dark shapes in the furthest corner. (123)
Briony’s crossing the threshold is far from a cognitive epiphany. She cannot
see anything – a blindness
that might hint
at her inability to identify Lola’s ‘real’
attacker a few
hours later. As she gets nearer to the corner of the room,
Robbie and Cecilia eventually take
shape. The narrator’s
refusal to identify them by their
first names and the emphasis on vague signifiers such as
“them”, “dark shapes”
underline Briony’s lack of
visual and intellectual lucidity. although Briony seems to realize
that there is no visual illusion here, she is still tricked by her imagination
into the wrong interpretation of what
she sees.
Briony
doesn’t think highly of Cecilia’s ability to protect herself from danger. Like other young people her age who
yearn for other people’s approval and
admiration, Briony longs for someone to protect. Soon,
she hits upon her older sister – a girl whose room is a mess and who is so weak as to allow herself to be bullied
into stripping out of doors by the charwoman’s
son – as the target of her concern. Though willing
to take on an adult supervisory role towards her sister, Briony conspicuously fails to involve herself in
situations where her help is needed
“On
the day these events take place the family are being visited by their cousins
Lola, and the twins whose parents are going through a divorce. After misreading
the first stages of a love relationship between Robbie and Cecilia, Briony
mistakenly accuses Robbie of attacking Lola by the lake in the grounds of the
country house. She has observed Lola’s attacker in the half-light and because
of her feelings toward Robbie at this time mistakenly assumes that he is the
culprit (Bentley 2008, p.150)”. What she wanted was
to protect her sister and put this event as nicely as possible into “words” of
fiction.
In
spite of her willingness to judge others and to castigate villains,however,
Briony doesn’t show too great a willingness to analyse her own behaviour. In her immaturity she assumes
that her own actions and motivations must be
blameless – also, she makes no effort to predict
their consequences. On p. 174 the reader is told that she sees herself as ‘guiltless’, and her role in identifying
the rapist as ‘vital’.Considering her distraught sister after Robbie’s arrest,
she reflects that Cecilia would now need to be
consoled by her and that ‘this tragedy was
bound to bring them the two sisters closer’ (p. 186). Similarly, as she approaches the supine figure of her cousin
in Chapter 13, she is overcome by a ‘flowering
of tenderness’ for her. ‘Together’, Briony tells
herself, Lola and her ‘faced real terrors. She and her cousin were close’ (p. 165). In the light of the distance and
calculated coldness which will characterize
the two girls’ relationship in the future, this statement
is nothing short of pathetic. Briony’s self-delusion really knows no bounds.
Robbie
spends several years in prison and then is released
on the condition to fight in the Second World War. Cecilia has trained and become a nurse. She has cut off
all contact with her family because they all took part in sending Robbie to
jail. Sixteen-year-old Briony also goes for nursing and finds courage in
herself to ask for forgiveness.
As Briony becomes a nurse like
her sister, the
possibility of an escape from
the self-inflicted prison of her
guilt is evoked, for compassion for another’s suffering may be the true
“entering the minds of others”. Thus, Briony faces the gruesome death
of a young soldier, just as a half-fascinated and half-horrified Robbie had to
witness the tragic
death of a Flemish mother and her child (236-7) and this
parallel may offer a humane escape from the moral aporia of her guilt. When
Briony takes care of a wounded French private, she discovers the strange power
of his defenceless face:
It
was hard to think of him as a soldier. He had a fine, delicate face,
with
dark eyebrows and dark green eyes, and a soft full mouth. His
face was
white and had an unusual sheen,
and the eyes were
unhealthily
radiant. His head was heavily bandaged (305)
The impossibility for Briony to truly enter Robbie’s mind in order
to atone for what she has done to him is
enhanced by the elusive quality of
his physical outline
at key moments. When she sees him
near the house, at the moment whenhe
gives her the
letter, Robbie is
merely a “white shape
which seemed at first to be part of the pale stone of the parapet.
Staring at it dissolved its
outlines, but within
a few paces
it had taken on a vaguely
human form” (93). Still, as a writer, the very impossibility of ever
capturing the essence of the Other
is what makes
the attempt so captivating: “that episode in the sunlight was not
quite so as interesting as the
dusk” (115). According to critic Bernhard Waldenfels , that discovery
“does not mean that there is something behind the masks and clothes the other wears, it
rather means that the other’s otherness
eludes every qualification we may apply”33
As the 77-year-old Briony admits in the
final part of the book (the coda), which is narrated in the first person, she
has also taken it upon herself to trim inconvenient truths and uncomfortable
facts out of her narrative – she refrains from acquainting her readers with the
lovers’ deaths, for example, assuming that her audience will want to have nothing
to do with such tragedy – ‘ ‘Who would want to believe that?’, she asks, ‘except
in the service of the bleakest realism?’ (p. 371). Here Briony reverts to the
role of ‘imposer of plots’, a role she incarnates to perfection in Part I. In the coda, Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner
are referred to as ‘the lovers’. Is this, the reader of Atonement cannot
but wonder, an indication of the fact that, over the years, Briony has
persisted in seeing them primarily as latter-day embodiments of old romantic archetypes
rather than as real people? Like another well-known creation of McEwan’s, the
vain and ambitious journalist Vernon Halliday of Amsterdam, Briony is
prepared to sacrifice the private lives of her human subjects and the integrity
of their experiences, on the altar of personal vanity. Ultimately, Briony’s
great failure is the one attributed by McEwan to the perpetrators of the 9/11
attacks – a failure of empathy.21 ‘Imagining what it is like to be someone
other than yourself’, McEwan wrote in The Guardian the week after the
attacks, ‘is at the heart of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and
it is the beginning of morality.’22 McEwan’s argument is that, had the
terrorists had the empathy to imagine the suffering they would cause, they
would not have done what they did. The ending of Atonement sees Briony
still engaged in the task of trying to make the ‘unruly world’ of other people’s
lives ‘just so’ (p. 7).
To the very end,
she is incapable of seeing Robbie and Cecilia’s role in the fiction she has
spun around them for what it is. For her they are ‘the lovers’, for the reader,
‘the victims’. Like the victims of the 9/11 massacre, the only weapon Briony’s
victims can brandish in the face of her bigoted antagonism is their love. As
McEwan famously asserted with reference to Al Qaeda’s victims: ‘As for
their victims …those snatched and anguished assertions of love23 were their
defiance.
