The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ian McEwan's Atonement

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The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ian McEwan's Atonement Stefanie Albers & Torsten Caeners Published online: 25 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Stefanie Albers & Torsten Caeners (2009) The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ian McEwan's Atonement , English Studies, 90:6, 707-720, DOI: 10.1080/00138380903180892 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138380903180892

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English Studies Vol. 90, No. 6, December 2009, 707–720

The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ian McEwan’s Atonement

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Stefanie Albers and Torsten Caeners

In September 2001, the Evening Standard published David Sexton’s review of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. Its title ‘‘McEwan’s Finest Shock Tactics Yet’’ obviously alludes to the surprise first-time readers are in for once they get to the novel’s ending. Generally, Sexton states that [McEwan] wields a prose so clear and straightforward it seems almost invisible, but it’s always alive with the thoughts of the characters, as if it were a transparent medium into other minds. He makes such writing look simple but nobody else can do it so well.1

This quotation nicely captures the experience of reading the novel’s main storyline. The dichotomy that exists between the main plot and the last chapter is subliminally present in what the title of the review evokes and what is said about McEwan’s prose: the postmodern shock of the final chapter as opposed to the traditionally shaped narrative of the main plot. In fact, the reader is forced to revaluate the entire preceding narrative due to the fact that the last chapter deeply affects the main storyline. Indeed, in reading Atonement, one cannot help but notice the peculiar, complex and highly effective way the narrative evolves through the course of the story. In this context, one might approach the novel from a narratological point of view: analyse its discourse, delineate metadiegetic narratives and extradiegetic narratives, scrutinise the use and effect of the shifting focalisation, or discuss the reliability of the narrator(s). We intend not to pursue any of the above courses.2 Instead, we propose to discuss the novel in the light of previously neglected aspects of the structure of the text, its poetics, and the effects of these on the discourse and the reader, in other words its aesthetic dimension. By means of Murray Krieger’s theory of poetics, we will delineate the novel’s inherent tension between realist and postmodern narrative. In Stefanie Albers and Torsten Caeners are at the Humanities Department of Anglophone Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. 1 Sexton. 2 Of course, this does by no means imply that we will not touch upon these fields of narratology. Naturally, in discussing a novel, narratological concepts will be referred to and applied. They are, however, not at the centre of our interest.

ISSN 0013-838X (print)/ISSN 1744-4217 (online) Ó 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00138380903180892

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doing so, we will integrate these seemingly divergent narrative strains into a coherent poetics of Atonement. Then, we will analyse the discourses on aesthetics that interlaminate the novel and discuss how far these discourses affect the unity and coherence of the main storyline as opposed to the final chapter.

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The Poetics of Atonement Atonement is without a doubt a self-reflexive narrative. The novel features an abundance of narrative devices designed to draw the reader’s attention to the formal constructedness of the story’s discourse in the sense that writing is the underlying theme of the novel. The writing of fictional works and the persuasive function of narratives due to their mimetic dimensions are at the heart of Briony’s character and, consequently, it is here that the calamities of the central storyline originate. The novel’s focus on the process of writing orients it towards the message as such. According to Roman Jakobson, ‘‘focus on the message for its own sake, is the poetic function of language’’.3 This validates a certain neglect towards the common narratological approaches of interpretation and leads us to concentrate, to begin with, on what we would like to call the ‘‘poetics’’ of Atonement. In many ways, it is hard to label Atonement as either a postmodern or realist narrative, because it shrewdly plays with narrative devices which undercut classification. In many respects, the novel holds an indeterminate position between the classic, closed narrative and the open and experimental narratives of (post)modernism, a position which is similar to the dichotomy presented in Krieger’s essay ‘‘An Apology for Poetics’’. Krieger discusses the seemingly contrastive principles of New Criticism and post-structuralism. His poetics constitute a ‘‘theory between the New Criticism and certain elements of post-Structuralism’’,4 which is applicable to McEwan’s novel. Krieger’s arguments are concerned specifically with poems and poetry, but as Jakobson rightly points out: ‘‘Any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be delusive oversimplification.’’5 Therefore, Krieger’s concepts can be applied to and are valid for a poetics of fiction as well and specifically so concerning Atonement with its productive tension between realist and postmodern narrative devices. At the heart of Krieger’s agenda lies the seemingly irresolvable ontological difference between New Criticism and post-structuralism. He states that New Critical aesthetics rested totally on a prior commitment to formal closure as the primary characteristic of the successful literary object. Its dedication to organicism . . . gave the poem the objective of self-sufficiency or of microscopic perfection.6 3

Jakobson, 356. Krieger, 535. 5 Jakobson, 356. 6 Krieger, 535. 4

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In fiction, the neo-critical emphasis on closure, organicism and self-sufficiency manifests itself in the imaginary world that is created in the reader’s mind. In contrast to this, post-structuralism views the literary work as inevitably constructed from difference7 to which there cannot be any closure, formal or otherwise. The literary work is subject to what Jacques Derrida terms Diffe´rance,8 which makes all meaning slippery. Since language is based on arbitrariness and difference, every linguistic sign is a supplement of another sign and this supplementarity, or unlimited semiosis to speak in Umberto Eco’s terms,9 makes a stable, arrested meaning impossible. The question of meaning, or of truth, however, is central to the plot of Atonement. The novel’s constantly changing focalisation signifies a contingency of meaning. Krieger states that the effects of post-structuralist concepts lead scholars to apply their conclusions about the emptiness of signifiers—the absence of all signified from them—to words in poems as in non-poems. They judge . . . a privileged fullness in poetic language to be a delusion and a fetish, a mystification. In poetry as in philosophy, they would deconstruct the metaphysical assumption that ontologizes verbal meaning.10

Krieger is faced with the dilemma of post-structuralist concepts ‘‘with which [he] share[s] large areas of agreement’’11 and his reluctance to abandon the aesthetic principles of New Criticism, which he believes are essential in order to keep literature from being ‘‘level[led] into common e´criture’’.12 Coming from this line of thought, Krieger argues that, though there is no stable meaning and no closure, there is still the illusion of a stable meaning, the illusion of closure in the act of reading. This illusion, momentary as it may be, comes into being through the joint desires of author13 and reader: I have increasingly tried to dwell upon the poem as an ‘‘intentional object’’ only, an illusion of a single entity created through the complicity of the reader who, sharing the author’s habit of seeking closure, allows the work—even as he does share in creating it—to lead him towards the act of sealing it off within the aesthetic or fictional frame that his perceptional training leads him to impose.14

7

Cf. de Saussure, esp. chaps. 1, 4, and 5. Cf. Derrida, Of Grammatology and Writing and Diffe´rance, here especially chap. 10, ‘‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’’ 278–94. 9 Cf. Eco, Interpretation, Open Work, and A Theory. 10 Krieger, 537. 11 Ibid., 536. 12 Ibid., 538. 13 Both New Criticism and especially post-structuralism do not consider the author as significant in the production of meaning in literature (cf. Barthes). However, there are also strains of post-structural thinking that do regard the author as important (cf. for instance Burke). For the analysis of Atonement and in accordance with Murray Krieger’s poetics, we consider the author an important factor in the production of literary meaning. 14 Krieger, 536. 8

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Krieger proceeds from the point of view of reader-response theory. In essence, he suggests that readers of fiction delude themselves into ‘‘sealing off’’ the narrative, thus creating the illusion of a self-sufficient and closed literary object. Readers do so, Krieger explains, by willingly following the rhetorical strategies of the text, which, in turn, represent the author’s semi-conscious desire for closure. ‘‘The satisfying ending is one that fulfils internally aroused expectations that realises the purposes immanent in the story.’’15 The collaboration of the author and the reader constructs the closed literary object. The ‘‘desire for closure’’ on the part of Briony as the alleged author of the text we have been reading is present and openly stated in the final chapter of Atonement (McEwan, 371), which constitutes the entire main storyline as a conscious product of this desire. By refashioning the principles of New Criticism as an illusionary construction on the part of the reader, Krieger manages to retain the self-sufficiency of the literary object and its aesthetic qualities ‘‘in the teeth of the principle of difference’’.16 This paradoxical concept rests on a metaphorical relation, because the work of art, in its own metaphorical substitution for the world of experience beyond, is a metaphor that at once affirms its own integrity and yet, by negative implication, denies itself, secretly acknowledging that it is but an artful evasion of the world.17

The fictional text, constructed by the reader as self-sufficient, constitutes a retreat from referentiality; only by means of asserting its own fictional character can it successfully build its own imaginary world and appeal to the reader’s suspension of disbelief. This retreat, however, inevitably points it ‘‘through negative reference, to the world it so self-consciously excluded’’.18 Diffe´rance is thus still always at play in the fictional universe of the text, because the narrative is fashioned from a language that knows its metonymic condition and yet generates an internal play among its elements which appears to create a metaphorical identity that exists in the teeth of the principle of difference. It is an identity that knows the world of difference, a metaphor that has known metonymy, a spatial vision which sustains itself only through the acknowledgment that all may be finally nothing but time.19

Krieger thus articulates a poetics that is both post-structuralist and neo-critical. This has a twofold effect. Firstly, this concept of the literary object acknowledges the arbitrary nature of language and thus the fundamental openness of all texts. Secondly, the literary object, though based on post-structuralist concepts of language, is, in line with neo-critical aesthetics, accorded a privileged place among texts. This is not to claim ‘‘these special characteristics to be in literary works, so much as they are 15

Ibid., Ibid., 17 Ibid., 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 16

540. 537. 535. 537.

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products of our aesthetic habits of perception’’.20 It is thus the reader’s perception which privileges the literary text, because the literary work uses

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[l]anguage [that] is able to create itself into a self-justified fiction. . . . It permits its reader at once to cherish its creation as a closed object, one that comes to terms with itself, and to recognise its necessarily incomplete nature in its dependence on us as its readers, on literary history, on the general language system, and on the way of the world.21

Summing up, Krieger’s poetics fuse traditional principles of New Criticism with contemporary post-structuralist concepts of language and literature. Although the literary object fundamentally partakes in the arbitrariness and unreliability that is language, it manages to fashion language in such a manner—through the combined participation of author and reader—that the illusion of a self-sufficient and closed work emerges. It is this (illusionary) object which is endowed with the aesthetic and literary qualities associated with New Criticism. There are novels which are more overtly open and experimental than others. These types of novel, commonly subsumed under the term postmodern, implicitly renounce the aesthetic principles of New Criticism, and it is of little use to try and apply Krieger’s theory of poetics to an interpretation of these books. McEwan’s Atonement, though frequently labelled postmodern, does not belong to this category. Rather, the novel appears in many ways to return to techniques of classic realist fiction; it can be considered as a hybrid narrative that contains both realist and postmodern elements.22 Certainly the most pervasive postmodern element that infiltrates the narrative is a constant self-referentiality with metanarrative devices occurring in abundance throughout the novel. One should assume that these metanarrative elements not only undermine, but destroy the fictional character of the narrative. However, this is not the case—not entirely, that is. The novel basically consists of two narratives, one that presents itself very much like a traditional realist narrative (parts 1 and 2 of the novel) and a second one which is blatantly metanarrative—the final chapter. This division can also be traced formally in the novel: the last chapter is entitled ‘‘London, 1999’’, which sets it apart from the rest of the chapters.23 It completely shatters the fictional world of the main narrative by drastically shifting the reader’s perspective. The diegetic story of the star-crossed love of Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner constitutes a closed literary artefact which creates a world of itself. The final chapter transforms what has previously been thought to constitute the diegetic narrative into what is essentially 20

Ibid., 540. Ibid. 22 Cf. Wolf, ‘‘Synthese,’’ 310. 23 The chapters of Part 1 of the book are numbered consecutively, while those of Part 2 are not numbered. Still, they clearly belong together as they are parts 1 and 2 of a coherent story. ‘‘London, 1999’’ is not part of this and consequently has to be treated as separate from the bulk of the book. The sudden break in time of the plot cannot account for this, as there is also a time break between the two parts of the main story. 21

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now merely a fiction within a metafictional whole; a fictional account narrated by the fictional Briony representing her attempt at atonement. The end of the novel is thus ‘‘meta’’ in two ways: firstly, it is metafictional, pointing out the fictionality of the previous chapters. Secondly, it is a metaleptic form of metanarration; ‘‘metaleptic forms of metanarration are characterized by a transgression of borders between the extradiegetic level and the diegetic level’’.24 Metaleptic forms of metanarratives do, according to Ansgar Nu¨nning, ‘‘tend to have a potential for destroying the aesthetic illusion’’,25 and this is precisely what the final chapter of Atonement achieves. The Briony we meet at the end, who turns out to be the most unreliable of narrators for a number of reasons,26 elaborates on the genesis of the story we have just read; what she puts forward is basically a rendering of Krieger’s poetics. Krieger argues that the persistent impulse, both on the poet’s part to close the form he creates and on our part to close the form we perceive accounts for the internal purposiveness that, for Immanuel Kant, characterizes the aesthetic mode. Presumably it is this need to make or to find closure which leads us to the myth-making and, with it, the privileging of objects that recent deconstructionists would undermine.27

The Briony of 1999 clearly expresses her myth-making desire. Having just revealed the truth of Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths, she wonders ‘‘How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love?’’ (McEwan, 371). The happy ending, the final realisation of the characters’ love, is a myth without basis in the ‘‘reality’’ of the novel, but it is a myth that the story demanded. Briony’s comments here are a rendering of Krieger’s concepts of ‘‘the reader . . . sharing the author’s habit of seeking closure’’.28 Briony is aware of the reader’s desire for closure and is herself only too happy to partake in it. Based on a reality that is uncertain, she creates a story which is truly self-sufficient for it will continue without her after her death. ‘‘As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of [her] final draft, then [her] spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love’’ (McEwan, 371). While destroying the illusion of her fictional world, the appended comment of the final chapter at the same time reveals the poetics of New Criticism underlying the story of the novel. Briony says that she ‘‘has not travelled so very far after all, since [she] wrote [her] little play’’ (McEwan, 370), which suggests that she has written the novel according to the same notions of classic realism as she did her childhood stories 24

Nu¨nning, 24. Ibid. 26 Among the reasons is her mental condition. No one can be sure how far this has affected the narrative. Then there is the long span of time between the events and the final version of the story, which may have caused loss or alteration of events in Briony’s memory. Also, there is her agenda of atonement which has to be taken into consideration. 27 Krieger, 540. 28 Ibid., 536. 25

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and play. This is further supported by her conception of an author, which is far removed from any post-structuralist ideas: 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 higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. The imagination she has sets the limits and the terms. (McEwan, 371)

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This is clearly a neo-critical concept of the author; a concept Krieger elaborates as well: All borrowings from the world of actions, values, and language—as well as the borrowings from earlier poems—were to be radically transformed by the poet working in, as well as through, his medium into a world of its own finality sealed from his personal interests as from ours.29

In spite of the destructive impact of the last chapter on the main storyline, the question remains as to why the abundance of metanarrative elements within this fictional world has not led to a destruction of the illusion of fictionality even without the addition of the final chapter. The reason is that metanarrative elements do not necessarily disrupt or destroy a novel’s fictionality. Such elements only ‘‘result in the destruction of the aesthetic illusion, if they disclose the fictionality of the characters at the same time’’.30 This is not the case in Atonement. In contrast to the final chapter, which is metafictional, the self-referentiality employed in the rest of the novel is simply metanarrative, that is it deals with the process of narration. Nu¨nning observes that metanarration cannot be equated with metafiction, neither formally nor functionally, and . . . extensive metanarration does not automatically lead to a disruption or destruction of aesthetic illusion, but can have a host of other potential functions.31

In the main storyline of Atonement, the metanarrative elements do not have a destructive function, but rather the opposite effect. ‘‘McEwan’s foregrounding [this] element compels the reader to face the extent to which narration determines human life.’’32 The character of Briony epitomises this, which is why the metanarrative elements are concentrated around her. The metanarrative comments strengthen the illusionary force of the story, which, as we have established by means of the comments from the final chapter, is conceived within traditional concepts of realist narratives. They do so by taking the form of a discourse on traditional realist aesthetics. 29

Ibid., 535. Nu¨nning, 16. 31 Ibid., 48. 32 Finney, 79. 30

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The Aesthetics of Atonement Aesthetics and aesthetic discourses in Atonement play a significant role in enforcing the novel’s constructedness and, equally, in contributing to its unity and coherence. Aesthetics here function both on a constructive and reflexive level, that is they support the novel’s structure but also serve as a commentary on the meta-level. Thus, aesthetics are to some extent the novel’s syuzhet33 while simultaneously being negotiated—if implicitly—on the discourse level. This aspect becomes particularly interesting when one considers that young Briony’s notion of the aesthetic appears to follow certain classic traditions. Fundamentally, she lives in fiction or, to be more specific, in an idealised world of her own imagination and translates her aestheticised thinking on to reality, thereby ultimately confusing the two. In Briony’s mind, life is primarily supposed to imitate art.34 This rather idealised perception shows to what extent the young girl is influenced by the literature she has been exposed to: ‘‘Briony is the prime example of the way art shapes her life as much as she shapes her life into art.’’35 Here, it is not so much a question of aesthetic experience but rather one of aesthetic judgement or aesthetic attitude that comes to the fore. For Briony, life must adhere to certain rules. Her idealised vision of art forms the centre of her life. To her, art becomes an idealised objective that needs to be achieved in life. This does not only become explicit in the comments on her play but also manifests itself in Briony’s ambitions as an aspiring writer: [W]riting . . . gave her all the pleasure of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. . . . Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. (McEwan, 7)

It is conspicuous that Briony’s view goes against the grain of a Kantian understanding of the difference between ordinary and aesthetic experience: according to Immanuel Kant, the former is related to interest, while the latter is not motivated by practical ends at all.36 In Briony’s case, however, Kant’s notions intermingle, as aesthetic and ordinary experience are merged. Aesthetic experience therefore takes on an additional function, that is it assumes a practical importance in her life and provides her with a childlike, and almost utopian, image that she aims to achieve: ‘‘The young Briony suffers from an inability to disentangle life from the literature that has shaped [it]. She imposes the patterns of fiction on the facts of life.’’37 To Briony, aesthetic 33

Syuzhet shall here be seen in its typical Formalist meaning, namely that of being the plot of a story. Cf. (among others) the works of Oscar Wilde (e.g. The Decay of Lying or the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray) or Walter Pater. A good summary of Pater’s notions regarding aestheticism is provided by Wolfgang Iser’s Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Movement. 35 Finney, 78. 36 Cf. Kant, 42 passim. 37 Finney, 79. 34

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experience is ordinary experience and the equation of the two in her case illustrate the way that she perceives the world, namely as a classic literary ideal that is in fact long out-dated. Intended to cherish and celebrate her brother’s return, Briony plans to put on The Trials of Arabella, a self-composed weepy didactic play. The play is Briony’s attempt to teach Leon a moral lesson about his handling of and seriousness in relationships by presenting him with a euphemised story of love’s connection to reason:

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At some moments chilling, at others desperately sad, the play told a tale of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed. (McEwan, 3)

Again, Briony—via literature—tries to cater to what she considers to be a perfect life, both for herself as well as for the people around her. She desires to guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony’s service as a bridesmaid. (McEwan, 4)

It is blatantly obvious that Briony’s play—and thereby her aesthetic notions—reflect some of the typical concepts and themes of eighteenth-century literature or, more precisely, the sentimental novel in which the heroine is as a general rule preoccupied with love and its sufferings but is—of course—ultimately united with her ‘‘object’’ of desire.38 Briony’s perfectionism and aesthetic demands, however, prevent the play from being performed at all the night of Leon’s return. Bossy as she is, the young girl cannot get her cousins to follow her instructions—once again a lucid disruption of Briony’s artistic and aesthetic criteria—and the performance is ultimately cancelled: ‘‘Briony’s hopes for a grand performance of it by her cousins and herself are dashed by the nonromantic realities of everyday life.’’39 Briony’s play conveys the extent to which the girl is caught in her own little glossy world, in an aesthetic ideal following the ideas and visions of a literary archetype.40 Throughout McEwan’s novel, the multiple layers of the narrative keep resurfacing: not only Briony subconsciously avails herself of the aesthetic paradigms of

38

For typical examples of the love-sick protagonists longing to be with their love interests in eighteenth-century literature, cf. novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740). Interesting in this respect may also be Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) or Tom Jones (1749). Of course, the idea of two lovers being united in the end is not restricted only to eighteenth-century literature and certainly plays a significant role in the works of other periods as well. However, when looking at Atonement’s blatant preoccupation with eighteenth-century literature, this notion gains particular importance. 39 Phelan, 328. 40 Her philosophy is reminiscent of Wilde’s concept as proposed in The Decay of Lying: ‘‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the selfconscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy’’ (26).

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eighteenth-century literature; they are also picked up in a talk between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner:

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‘‘How’s Clarissa?’’ He was looking down at his fingers rolling the tobacco. ‘‘Boring.’’ ‘‘We mustn’t say so.’’ ‘‘I wish she’d get on with it.’’ ‘‘She does. And it gets better.’’ . . . She said, ‘‘I’d rather read Fielding any day.’’ . . . ‘‘I know what you mean,’’ he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the fountain. ‘‘There’s more life in Fielding, but he can be psychologically crude compared to Richardson.’’ . . . The last thing she wanted was an undergraduate debate on eighteenth-century literature. She didn’t think Fielding was crude at all, or that Richardson was a fine psychologist, but she wasn’t going to be drawn in, defending, defining, attacking. She was tired of that, and Robbie was tenacious in argument. (McEwan, 25f.)

This little debate about the aesthetic properties and value of different authors serves as a bypassing element between the story and the discourse level. What becomes evident here is a certain criticism of literary traditions, but at the same time Cecilia and Robbie, as fictitious characters themselves, stand as relatively succinct stereotypes in their own typical eighteenth-century love story: two young people whose newfound love is suddenly and unexpectedly put to the test and whose destiny is eventually left to the reader’s imagination. In these passages it eventually becomes evident that the main storyline of Atonement functions as a closed literary object or artefact since, for all the reader knows, both characters obviously share a happy ending that is typical of most of classic realist literature.41 For readers familiar with eighteenth-century literature, the stereotypicality of the couple strengthens the impression of the novel’s fictionality and contributes to the sealing off of the literary object by the reader. Cecilia and Robbie’s fate is impaired by Briony’s subconscious wish to move everyone around her like puppets on a string, a wish that eventually brings forth the tragic series of misunderstandings and misconceptions which, in the long run, destroy the lives of all people involved: Robbie, Cecilia, and even Briony herself. Finally, Cee and Rob are separated for an unforeseeable period of time, left with nothing to do but to think of the past and hope for a shared future. The chain of cause and effect—or rather misinterpretation and repercussion—that causes their dilemma is triggered by one central passage in the novel: the moment when Briony secretly opens Robbie’s letter to her sister. It is here that her aestheticised world begins to crumble. Reality turns out to go completely diametrical to all of Briony’s neat concepts and thereby, to a certain extent, it fractures her identity. Even though the young girl does not know exactly what the ‘‘evil’’ word she comes across in the letter means, it irrevocably ruptures her idealised notions of life: 41

Of course, as the reader of the novel will eventually learn, Cecilia and Robbie do not experience a happy ending as both of them die during the war. However, their basic situation certainly is reminiscent of the typical eighteenth-century literary plot. As the reader, according to Krieger, desires closure of a text, he is bound to take the first version of Cecilia and Robbie’s destiny as it is told in the main plot of Atonement to be the right and reliable version. As it turns out though, he is in for a surprise once he gets to the novel’s last chapter.

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The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams. . . . Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word’s existence, and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which—Briony was certain—the word referred. (McEwan, 114)

The letter-incident affects Briony’s interpretive, aesthetic, and ethical judgements. When, later that evening, she comes upon Lola and her attacker in the park, she immediately interprets the unrecognisable, absconding shape to be Robbie: ‘‘If only she, Briony, had been less innocent, less stupid. Now she saw, the affair was too consistent, too symmetrical to be anything other than what she said it was’’ (McEwan, 168). James Phelan argues that Briony’s judgements are, by means of narrative techniques, clearly signalled as being erroneous and that ‘‘without the linchpin of Briony’s ethical judgment, her aesthetic and interpretive judgments fall apart’’.42 By spending her life writing draft after draft of the story to ‘‘atone for her crime’’43 and the devastating effects it had on the lives of her sister and Robbie, Briony gets exactly what she wished for even before the lie was told. Eventually, it seems justified to her to try and achieve atonement through the form of fiction and thereby to a certain extent restore the world that she once believed to be her aesthetic ideal. Briefly mentioning Leon in the end and referring to the superb father he has turned out to be seems to be a weak attempt of Briony’s at dismissing her childhood ignorance and rash assumptions—a weak apology without any actual cognition on Briony’s part of her continual pattern of dramatising and controlling the lives of the people around her. By putting her story on paper, she fictionalises reality, inventing a tale from what she experienced in life by fashioning it in terms of the literary models she uses to conceptualise her world.44 Again, she aestheticises as she gives a metafictional commentary on how she has actually changed Cecilia and Robbie’s story, casting the ‘‘preceding drafts [that] were pitiless’’ (McEwan, 370) aside and proposes her ‘‘stand against oblivion and despair, to let [her] lovers live and to unite them at the end’’ (McEwan, 372). That her attempt to atone actually fails does not seem to affect or pain her too much. Even worse, it appears to fuel her belief in her godlike position of authorship. The fact that she presents a conceived ‘‘happy ending’’ for Cecilia and Robbie demonstrates that her aesthetic notions have not really changed after all.45 Even though Briony has certainly realised the mistakes she has made, her naı¨ve 42

Phelan, 329. D’Hoker, 41. 44 Cf. Finney, 78f. 45 Cf. our previous argument: Briony herself claims that she ‘‘ha[s] not travelled so very far after all’’ (McEwan, 370) from when she wrote The Trials of Arabella. Her statement suggests that she has written the novel according to the same notions of classic realism as she did her childhood stories. 43

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It [the mise en abyme] is a mirroring of the macro-structure of a literary text in a micro-structure within the same text. First, ‘‘mirroring’’ here always implies a formally isolable action, that, however, can also relate to content, and secondly—in contrast to other ‘‘textual similarities,’’ that the repetition constitutes itself on a different level from the original one.47

It is therefore evident that the two strands of aesthetic discourses here reinforce or strengthen each other by their complex interconnection and interdependence. This interrelation is necessary to affirm the novel’s shifts between diegetic and metadiegetic elements. Conclusion Ian McEwan’s Atonement combines postmodern and classic narrative techniques to the effect that the fictionality of the main storyline is simultaneously foregrounded, disrupted and sealed off. By applying Krieger’s poetics of merging neo-critical and post-structuralist concepts, we have been able to treat the novel as both realist and postmodern, employing the reader’s perceptional training as a unifying function. This way we have illustrated the complex interconnection between the various narrative layers of the novel. This, in turn, made obvious the contrastive use of metanarrative strategies, namely both as supporting and destroying fictionality. While the metafictionality of the last chapter leads to a disruption of the main storyline’s fictionality, metanarrative elements in that storyline have the opposing function, as the latter work mainly through or in conjunction with aesthetic discourses. 46

Mise en abyme signifies a form of art that shows a picture containing itself, i.e. theoretically there is an endless mirroring of the same picture within itself. 47 ¨ sthetische Illusion, 296 (our translation). The original reads: Sie [die mise en abyme] ist die Spiegelung Wolf, A einer Makrostruktur eines literarischen Textes in einer Mikrostruktur innerhalb desselben Textes. Spiegelung’’ impliziert dabei erstens immer ein formal isolierbares Vorgehen, das sich jedoch auch auf Inhaltliches beziehen kann, und zweitens im Unterschied zu den sonstigen similitudes textuelles’’, dass die Wiederholung sich auf einer anderen Ebene . . . konstituiert als der urspru¨nglich angegebenen. ‘‘

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aesthetic principles and aesthetic attitude have remained the same, and she still aims at putting life into a neat little box of art(ificiality). To put it in a nutshell, it is obvious that aesthetics and aesthetic discourses play a significant role on the story level as they are subtly incorporated as part of the novel’s syuzhet, that is they are unquestionably part of the plot. However, their impact on the metanarrative and metafictional levels should not be underestimated: as a reflexive commentary, this discourse foregrounds the novel’s constructedness, eventually underlining its being a story within a story. A certain analogy to the mise en abyme technique in heraldry and painting46 might not be coincidental as it nicely emphasises the relationship between literature and art or, to put it differently, between narrative and aesthetics. Werner Wolf’s definition supports this assumption:

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The story constructs an alternative reality which is given coherence due to the aesthetic discourses that reciprocally amplify each other. By means of constantly alluding to the stereotypical principles of eighteenth-century literary aesthetics, the reader’s construction of the fictional world is supported and guided. Only by ‘‘sealing off’’ the main plot in this manner, can the destructive potential of the last chapter come to its full effect. Finally, the careful implementation and manipulation of diegetic and, especially, metadiegetic elements and techniques as well as the fusion of postmodern and classic realist storytelling are the foundation of the novel’s effectiveness.

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