Abstract
This chapter articulates how the recognizability of Gothic conventions interrogates the ethics of writing and reading trauma fiction. Ian McEwan’s Atonement metafictionally registers the ethical issues present for writers seeking to produce an aestheticized representation of the trauma of another. Specifically, Atonement employs a “metagothic” strategy to question the validity of cultural memory of traumatic events and to cast doubt on Briony’s assertion that she has written the novel in order to atone for her false accusation of her neighbour, Robbie, of the rape of her cousin Lola. The rules of Gothic convention to which Briony’s narration of the events of part one self-consciously conforms become symptomatic of Briony’s anxious desire to circumscribe the event within the organizing (and ethically dubious) system of literary convention.
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Notes
- 1.
Athanasios Anastasiadis’s theorization of what he calls postmemorial relationships to collective trauma will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. In brief, he describes the process of historical transition from communicative memory, which is housed by first-hand witnesses to the event in question, to cultural memory, which is ostensibly more stable and mediated by institutions like libraries and archives.
- 2.
McEwan’s descriptive early nickname is explained in many critical discussions of his work, such as at literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/ian-mcewan. While most critics praise the maturity of his more recent fiction, others, perhaps distrustful of the bestseller status of Atonement, have gone so far as to dismiss the novel as mere “airport-fare” (Seal 2008).
- 3.
McEwan’s epigraph draws from a conversation between Catherine and the pragmatic Henry Tilney, who eventually teaches her to quell her overactive imagination:
Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room. (Austen 1975, p. 212, qtd in McEwan 2001, epigraph)
- 4.
Both of the Tallis parents are notably absent—a detail upon which Briony’s narration lingers in a way that casts a certain amount of blame on both of them for the circumstances surrounding Lola’s rape: “Two years ago her father disappeared into the preparation of mysterious consultation documents for the Home Office. Her mother had always lived in an invalid’s shadow land” (McEwan 2001, p. 103). The tone of doubt and resignation with which both parents’ absence is accounted for implicates them in the trauma to follow.
- 5.
As will be discussed in detail later in this chapter, it is not only the narrative of familial kinship and the safety and security that accompany it which are under threat; indeed, the eventual revelation of Briony’s authorship will cause the entire narrative to unravel, lending to this scene new meaning when re-read with full knowledge of the instability that lies at the heart of Briony’s account of the events that make up the novel’s traumatic core.
- 6.
Anastasiadis distinguishes communicative memory, which “is not institutional, but is based on everyday communication and is constituted by contemporaries of the event in question” from cultural memory, which, “in contrast, is detached from individual memory. It is a stabilized form of memory, which is symbolized and mediated by artifacts, rites or icons and preserved by mnemonic institutions like museums, libraries and archives” (2012, p. 2, emphasis added).
- 7.
Beville (2009) defines what she calls a “new genre”: that of “Gothic-postmodernism ,” which articulates “the psychological and philosophical implications of terror in postmodernist literature” as “analogous to the terror of early Gothic works” (p. 9). By “emphasizing the role of the Gothic sublime and its concern with the unpresentable as the core of the genre,” Beville’s study defines Gothic-postmodernism as “a hybrid mode that emerges from the dialogic interaction of Gothic and postmodernist characteristics in a given text” (p. 9).
- 8.
With respect to the film’s intertextuality, for example, O’Heir writes that it “is effectively an imitation of 25 different things” and that it “calls upon innumerable cultural references,” many of which could be classified as Gothic; O’Heir argues that the film is “part Mary Shelley and part Arthur Conan Doyle (both authors are specifically mentioned), but it’s also Jane Eyre and H.P. Lovecraft and Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and a little nineteenth-century American realism by way of Edith Wharton or William Dean Howells” (2015). With respect to the deliberately artificial style of the film, O’Heir writes (somewhat disparagingly) that it is “mannered and stylized and layered to deliberate but almost suffocating excess,” noting, for example, that the “garish and rambling manor house” in which the film is set “resembles the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland more than an actual English domicile of any vintage” (2015).
- 9.
I refer here to Patricia Waugh’s definition of metafiction as “a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (1984, p. 2).
- 10.
As Briony explains, “It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tried to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect means, that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year … that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister” (pp. 370–371).
- 11.
Caruth writes that the language of trauma must be literary, in that literature, like trauma is “a language that defies, even as it claims, our understanding” (1996, p. 5).
- 12.
See Crosthwaite, Trauma, pp. 159–160.
- 13.
Indeed, as Felman and Laub suggest, all testimony is subject to the limitations of perspective and can distort to some extent.
- 14.
Recall Henry Tilney’s admonition to Catherine Morland to “Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English: that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?” (Austen 1975, p. 107, qtd in McEwan, epigraph).
- 15.
Beville argues that “[r]esponding to advancements in the philosophy of history … eighteenth-century Gothic countered the insufficiencies of historical writing by working to estrange readers from the past and to challenge the authority of the historical chronicle” (2014, p. 53).
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Joyce, A. (2019). Fading Into Unknowing: Gothic Postmemory in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. In: The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26728-5_4
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