The Shared Study of
Paired Texts
Atonement and Life of Pi: narrating the Other to renovate the self
What does the pairing of these texts
reveal?
Both:
•
•
•
•
•
emphasise the tension between different versions of the truth
and ask the audience to choose
trade heavily upon the emotional engagement enacted upon the
audience by the brilliant use of prolepsis (narrative leaps in time)
are narrated by ‘survivors’ of families which have fallen apart
narrators are caught in the opposing discourses voiced by their
parents
narrators carry guilt but with quite different dynamics
What does the pairing of these texts
reveal?
• In assessing Briony Tallis’ fictional atonement, Brian
Finney concludes that “the attempt to imagine the
feelings of others is perhaps the one corrective that we
can make in the face of continuing human suffering”.
Considered in this light, Pi’s story of Richard Parker is his
fictive attempt to reimagine his own darkest feelings by
projecting them onto the animal ‘other’, against which in
childhood he had been taught to measure his own
humanity.
A KEY FEATURE OF THE PAIRED TEXTS STUDY:
how effectively does the student compare
and contrast texts to evaluate the role of
sociocultural and situational contexts?
• The sociocultural context of Atonement would
account for the influence of the British class
system and literary tradition on Ian McEwan’s
writing of the novel, whose publication at the end
of the millennium anticipated a situational
context of intense historical reflection.
A KEY FEATURE OF THE PAIRED TEXTS STUDY:
how effectively does the student compare
and contrast texts to evaluate the role of
sociocultural and situational contexts?
• The situational context of Life of Pi would
account for its success as the adaptation of an
‘un-filmable’ novel through the cinematic magic
of 3D digital technology, while the sociocultural
context of its narrative spoke to a desire for
religious pluralism and environmental awareness.
Atonement homework!
• Before Thursday, re-read chapters 2 & 3 (24p.), noting any
connections between them & to the rest of the novel
What does the pairing of these texts reveal?
The pairing of Atonement with Life of Pi enables us to focus on the themes of guilt and redemption,
conflict, coming of age,love, the power of storytelling and the resilience of the human spirit.
The options for establishing links between
these paired texts could be:
•
•
common themes, ideas, or topics
• narrative truth,
• guilt,
• redemption,
• love, etc.
historical or literary periods
• both
early 21st C. post-modern texts – one inter-textual in
literary approach, the other magic-realist
• using
different cultural settings of a nostalgic 20th C. Britain
and a pan-pacific diaspora
The options for establishing a link between
these paired texts could be:
•
•
the same genre or different genres
•
•
•
•
bildungsroman
family saga vs. lone survival tale
historical romance vs. post-colonial fable
social realist novel vs. magic realist film
similar or contrasting cultural perspectives
•
•
English vs. Chinese-American authors
European vs. global (multi-cultural Canadian) contexts
• 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.
Ian McEwan, Atonement
• ’Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the
suspicions you have entertained. What have you been
judging from? …what ideas have you been admitting?’
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Atonement: the expiation of a fearful
symmetry
• “The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a
novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power
of deciding outcomes, she is also God? … There is nothing
outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the
terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are
atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was
precisely the point. The attempt was all.”
•
•
London, 1999; p. 371
Literary models
•
Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1817); Clarissa (Samuel Richardson,
1748); What Maisie Knew (Henry James, 1897); The Go-Between (L. P.
Hartley, 1953); The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles, 1969)
Literary allusions
•
Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare, 1601); Lady Chatterley's Lover (D.
H. Lawrence, 1928); “In Memory of W. B. Yeats“ (W. H. Auden, 1940)
Life of Pi allegorises the interplay between reason and
faith, which do not necessarily contradict each other,
but are, like yin and yang forever swirling around each
other, complementary.
NB: the irrational number 𝜋 determines the relationship of a circle’s
area to its radius – a ratio of the outside world to the inner life
Tsimtsum
•
•
•
The concept of Tsimtsum is a 16th century kabbalistic explanation of how God, if
infinite and omnipresent, could form a material, physical world separate from
himself. If God is everywhere and in everything, how could he create a place
where he was not? How could God create a world infused with evil?
The kabbalist rabbi Isaac Luria first posited that God vacated a region within
himself in order to create the world. Through this act of “shrinking,”
“withdrawal,” or “contraction” (the literal meaning of the Hebrew word
tsimstum), God brought into being a vacuum in which to create something other
than Himself. He could then fill this vacuum or empty space by the simultaneous
process of self-revelation and creation.
In short, the first act of creation was, according to Luria, a self imposed exile of
God from part of Himself. God had descended more deeply into his own being
and put a limit upon Himself.
Richard Parker
•
•
•
Edgar Allan Poe's uncompleted adventure novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym (1837) is the story of four shipwrecked sailors who find themselves facing
starvation in a small lifeboat. The four draw lots to see who will be sacrificed and
cannibalized by the other three. In this fictional account, a man named Richard
Parker draws the short stick and is promptly stabbed and eaten by the surviving
trio.
Ironically, in 1884 four survivors of a factual shipwreck stood trial for the murder
of their ship's cabin boy, Richard Parker, who was killed and eaten in a true to life
version of Poe's story. This real life event occurred some 47 years after Poe wrote
his adventure novel.
Martel might be also making reference to a third allusion with his use of the name
Richard Parker. Clifford Richard Parker, 28, was a clerk from Guernsey who was
aboard the Titanic as a second class passenger. He was lost at sea and his body
was never identified.
Life of Pi: an existentialist allegory of faith
reconciled
•
Pi is an existentialist because at all times he adheres to
Sartre’s definitive, existentialist proposition: “existence
precedes essence”. Pi suffers his existential circumstance,
his shipwreck, then, after, and only after this
circumstance, he wills his own essence, after he chooses
to live and not to die — for it is a tenet of existentialism
that one has to confront absurdity to transcend it
From the blog posting “Life of Pi: Pi the Existentialist” by sincerefool
http://wasiswill.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/life-of-pi-pi-the-existentialist/
Life of Pi: an existentialist allegory of faith
reconciled
•
Pi’s essence, his way of adding meaning to his life, is to tell
the good story – the truth falls by the wayside, as does
religion, as does God, as does Richard Parker when he
doesn’t turn around to meet Pi’s gaze, the animal’s story
coming to an end, the animal losing its essence-tial
function. Pi constructs his essence, in response to his
unreasonable existence, in the very trade which Yann
Martel practises: not only is Piscine Molitor Patel an
existentialist, but quite possibly his talented creator is too.
From the blog posting “Life of Pi: Pi the Existentialist” by sincerefool
http://wasiswill.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/life-of-pi-pi-the-existentialist/
Components of the self
• The characters in The Life of Pi – like in any dream, since
film is essentially collective dreaming – are all actually
components of the self. At a higher level, the Tiger is Pi’s
primal self, the orang-utan represents universal love – as
demonstrated by a protective mother, the brutal hyena is
the malevolent cook who is the shadow, and the timid
zebra is a young sailor with a broken leg, which
represents the innocence of youth and the first to die. All
are essential for becoming who we are.
From “Meaning, Faith and the Life of Pi” by Moses Ma in The Tao of Innovation, published on
November 26, 2012 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-tao-innovation
Pi’s thirst
•
Richard Parker’s real name – lost due to a clerical error – is “Thirsty”,
and where else, beside lost in a life raft in the middle of the ocean,
can you be surrounded by water and still die of thirst? In the same
way, God is actually all around us, and still, so many of us are unable
to receive the manna of heaven. In Hindu culture, water symbolizes
the 'ocean of life,' with all living creatures existing as one contiguous
body. The sea torments Pi with waves, threatens him with sharks,
and even robs him of his family. At the same time, the sea also gives
him life. It rains flying fish upon him, it grows a magical garden of
algae, and in the end, bestows the gift of wisdom. Even Pi’s proper
name, Piscine, is after a swimming pool - an object built to hold
water, the water of spirit and God.
From “Meaning, Faith and the Life of Pi” by Moses Ma in The Tao of Innovation, published on
November 26, 2012 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-tao-innovation
The raft of faith
•
the raft… is something that [Pi] has to construct by himself, in
order to be effective. The through line – i.e. the spine of this
remarkable tale – is that it is his raft that never forsakes him.
More than any other part of the tale, it is the invisible force that
finally brings him to safety and the force that transforms him
into the individual he finally becomes. Our challenges are what
help to define us; what guides us to becoming more. What
greater challenge can there be than trapped with a ferocious
tiger? More so, if that tiger is your own fear, anxiety, depression,
desolation, and despair. It is our faith that helps us cross the cruel
and endless sea.
From “Meaning, Faith and the Life of Pi” by Moses Ma in The Tao of Innovation, published on
November 26, 2012 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-tao-innovation
Credulity
•
•
Martel proves, by skilful example, that realism is narrative’s
great master, that it schools even its own truants. He reminds
us in fact that realism is already magical, an artifice-in-waiting.
It is fine to tell contemporary readers that their God is or
should really be Story; most of them think that anyway. But
who is Pi’s God? That is the deeper, and unanswered question.
After all, it is by experiencing Pi’s credulity that our own
credulity might have been not only seduced but engaged and
challenged. I fear that Yann Martel has only seduced ours and
then in effect congratulated himself for doing it so vividly.
From James Wood’s review of the novel in London Review of Books Vol. 24 No. 22 · 14 November
2002; pages 24-25
anachrony [an-ak-rôni]
• A term used in modern narratology to denote a discrepancy
between the order in which events of the story occur and
the order in which they are presented to us in the plot.
Anachronies take two basic forms: ’flashback’ or analepsis
and ’flashforward’ or prolepsis.roflcopter lololol
• Atonement uses a combination of both methods: notably
on p.40, when the narration moves forwards (prolepsis)
from Briony’s apparent 1930’s present to the recollections
of her adult self as a writer in the 1990’s; and on p.229,
when the narration moves backwards (analepsis) from
Robbie's June 1940 present to a flashback of June 1932
Adjective: anachronic
• Life of Pi uses an anachronic narrative in the more
conventional sense of a ’framing device’ – the Canadian
context of the adult Pi recounting his tale to a writer. The
opening titles sequence of the Pondicherry zoo reveals
itself through the VO to be a flashback (or analepsis) from
the present to Pi’s birth, with which he is (chronologically)
beginning his life’s story, and the film soon establishes a
narrative pattern of movement between 1990’s Montreal
and 1960’s India.
focalisation
• The term used in modern narratology for ’point of view’; that
is, for the kind of perspective from which the events of a story
are witnessed. Events observed by a traditional omniscient
narrator are said to be non-focalised, whereas events
witnessed within the story’s world from the constrained
perspective of a single character are ’internally focalised’.
focalisation
• The nature of a given narrative’s focalisation is to be
distinguished from its narrative ’voice’, as seeing is from
speaking.
• The events of Atonement are ’internally focalised’ in incredibly
subtle ways through the many narrative voices of its
characters, particularly Briony, Robbie and Cecilia.
Paired narrative techniques
• McEwan’s use of focalisation complicates the authorial
partiality of a Jane Austen novel, when the ’omniscient
narrator’ of the older Briony-as-author, compromised by
her need for atonement, can no longer be seen as nonfocalised.
Paired narrative techniques
•
While the majority of Lee’s film is told
from Pi’s point of view, the focalisation in
Atonement has a subtle but significant
equivalent in Life of Pi when the
relationship at sea with Richard Parker
incorporates the tiger’s perspective.
Paired narrative techniques
• McEwan employs this particular ’modal determination’ for
two reasons:
•
•
to distinguish his narrative from the classic realist novel’s association
with an omniscient narrator (Briony’s lie came from positioning
herself as such a narrator in her fictionalized scenario of events)
to demonstrate Briony’s, the adult narrator’s, attempt to project
herself into the thoughts and feelings of her characters, an act crucial
to her search for forgiveness.
Metafiction: self-reflexive texts
• Fiction about fiction; or more especially a kind of fiction that
openly comments on its own fictional status.
• Atonement draws attention to its own construction as a
fictional narrative because such an awareness is crucial to its
’truths’ about the human condition.
Metafiction in Atonement
• Part Three (p.312):
•
Cyril Connolly’s letter is an odd interpolation in the narrative – the first
time the novel turns on itself, creating a sense of dislocation that
makes us pause to reflect on the process of writing and the whole
artificial construct: a product of drafting and redrafting, criticism and
adaptation. His recommendation for an ‘underlying pull of simple
narrative’ is already there in the vase episode, because Briony’s
observation of it does now lead somewhere.
Paired narrative scenes #1
• Atonement Part One Ch.7 (p.72-77):
•
‘The island temple…’ to ‘… until events, real events, not her own
fantasies, rose to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.’
• Life of Pi DVD chapters 4 – 6 (0h14m20s to 0h25m10s):
•
From Pi’s account of how he found Christ at age 12, to the aftereffects of his father’s cruel lesson in a tiger’s true nature with
Richard Parker.
Paired narrative scenes #1
Atonement Part One (Ch.7, p.72-77):
•
•
McEwan sets the scene for Briony’s first shocking discovery (Robbie’s
explicit love letter to Cecilia) of an adult world of experience for which
she has been yearning by placing her symbolically on a bridge,
between the corrupted past glory of a faux landed gentry, epitomized
by the temple folly, and her family home.
“Flaying the nettles was becoming a self-purification, and it was
childhood she set about now, having no further need for it.”
Paired narrative scenes #1
Life of Pi DVD chapters 4 – 6 (0h14m20s to 0h25m10s):
•
•
Pi’s childhood imagination embraces the wonder and hope of the
great faiths, incorporating the monotheisms of Christianity and Islam
into the pantheism of the Hindu faith. But his father’s rationalist
scepticism destroys Pi’s innocence with a lesson in experience of
nature’s raw instinctual cruelty.
“Faith is a house with may rooms … [but] doubt is useful. After all, you
cannot know the strength of your faith until it’s been tested.”
Paired narrative scenes #2
• Atonement Part I, Ch.14 (p. 176 – 187):
•
‘Word came down that Lola, sedated by the doctor, was at last
asleep…’ to ‘…and finally vanished into the whiteness.’
• Life of Pi DVD chapters 13 – 17 (0h54m57s to 1h10m32s):
•
From Pi’s SOS in a can, through consulting the Survival at Sea
handbook to the Blue Whale upsetting his raft full of the
lifeboat’s provisions.
Paired narrative scenes #2
Atonement Part I, Ch.14 (p. 173 – 187):
•
•
Briony’s key role in the tragedy of Robbie’s arrest is ironically played
out from her naïve perspective, believing in “a joyful feeling of
blameless self-love” that everything she does is directed at saving her
sister Cecilia. The blank whiteness that ends the chapter and part one
of the novel becomes the task of her adult life: to fill it with a truer
story atoning for the lies she ingenuously committed here.
“Cecilia remained where she was, facing down the drive, tranquilly
watching the car as it receded, but the tremors along the line of her
shoulders confided she was crying, and Briony knew she had never
loved her sister more than now.”
Paired narrative scenes #2
Life of Pi DVD chapters 13 – 17 (0h54m57s to 1h10m32s):
•
•
Pi’s first rational attempts at survival on the open ocean with a Bengal
tiger are thwarted in increasingly derisory ways, from the pathetic
message-in-a-bottle, through Richard Parker’s urination on his circus
act to the blue whale’s sublime destruction of his life raft. In the
process, Pi commits his first act of murderous violence for which he
seeks to atone with prayer.
“Thank you Lord Vishnu. Thank you for coming in the form of a fish to
save our lives…”
Paired narrative scenes #3
• Atonement Part II (p.226 – 234):
•
‘The road no longer had the protection of the plane trees’ to
‘That was the lasting damage.’
• Life of Pi DVD chapters 19 – 21 (1h17m25s to 1h22m55s):
•
From Pi’s acknowledgement that Richard Parker gives his life
purpose to his hallucination of the Tsimtsum on the ocean floor .
Paired narrative scenes #3
Atonement Part II (p.226 – 234):
•
•
.
“.”
Paired narrative scenes #3
Life of Pi DVD chapters 19 – 21 (1h17m25s to 1h22m55s):
•
•
Hope; reflecting on events; ‘words are all I have to hold onto”; writing
as a means of survival.
“”
Paired narrative scenes #4
• Atonement London, 1999 (p. 369-372):
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‘Now it is five in the morning…’ to ‘But now I must sleep.’
• Life of Pi DVD chapters 26 – 27 (1h45m15s to 1h55m10s):
•
The closing scenes of Pi telling the writer his alternative account
of surviving at sea that he gave the Japanese insurance
investigators in Mexico.
Paired narrative scenes #4
• Atonement London, 1999 (p. 369-372):
•
•
Being god brings no atonement.
“No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was
always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The
attempt was all.”
Paired narrative scenes #4
• Life of Pi DVD chapters 26 – 27 (1h45m15s to 1h55m10s):
•
•
.
“The one with the tiger, that’s the better story” … “And so it goes with
God.”
Worksheet for Comparative
Analysis of Paired Texts
“Grounds“ for
comparison…
Narrative POV
Revelations
Tone
Stylistic features
Narrative context
 where
does it appear in the
plot &/or narrative
structure?
References to other
works, ideas or images

literary; political; artistic
What you notice in the
Atonement passage
What you notice in Life of
Pi passage
What does the
comparison reveal?
Against Oblivion
• No late twentieth century text can subscribe to
the simplified wish fulfilments of classic realist
fiction. ’The development of nuclear weapons,’
McEwan has said, ’shows the dissociation of
science from feelings,’ of outer and inner worlds
we inhabit.
•
Interview with John Haffenden (1985), quoted in Brian Finney’s essay
“Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement“ (2002)
Against Oblivion – Atonement
• World War Two, that introduced the world to mass ethnic
cleansing, the Cold War and the permanent threat of nuclear
deterrence, appears to have brought forth mainly aesthetic
structures that reflect the complexity and horror of life in the
second half of that century. It is a time in history when the
Marshalls, who, equally guilty, lack Briony’s conscience, use
the War to make their fortune and are then treated as public
benefactors. Compared to Briony, they “have no remorse, no
need for atonement“ (McEwan, 2002 interview).
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian
Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Against Oblivion – Atonement
•Atonement ends not just with the revelation of the deaths of Robbie
and Cecilia, but with the diagnosis of Briony’s vascular dementia and
her refusal to have the lovers forgive her even in her fictional account
of their survival - proof that in her literary act of atonement Briony has
finally learned how to imagine herself into the feelings of others.
Responding to the criticism that his endings are too pessimistic,
McEwan has said, “I never did trust those novels where, for all their
dark insights, or that they ended in a funeral, there was always
someone walking away and bending to pick up a flower“ (2001
interview).
• Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
• http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
• Yet, as McEwan admits, Part Three “has about it both an
act of cowardice [. . .] but also it’s her stand against
oblivion she’s seventy seven years old, her tide is running
out very fast [. . .] She does not have the courage of her
pessimism. [. . .] She knows that when this novel is finally
published [. . .] she herself will only become a character“
(McEwan, Silverblatt).
• Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney
•
(2002)
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
• Is Briony’s work of fiction an evasion or an act of
atonement or both? What exactly does she mean
when she says that atonement “was always an
impossible task, and that was precisely the point”
(351)? Is she implicitly recognizing the contradiction
at the heart of her narrative – the impossibility of
avoiding constructing false fictions around others at
the same time as one is required to enter
imaginatively into their lives?
• Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian
•
Finney (2002)
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
• Or is McEwan suggesting that the attempt is all we
can ask for, an attempt that is bound to fail, but that
can come closer to or stray further from the reality of
others? Robbie’s and Cecilia’s happiness cannot be
restored to them by an act of corrective fiction.
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian
Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
• Nevertheless the attempt to imagine the feelings of
others is perhaps the one corrective that we can
make in the face of continuing human suffering. The
novel ends on a note of ambiguity. Yet an
appreciation of ambiguity is just what would have
prevented Briony from indicting Robbie in her first
fictionalized narration of these events.
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian
Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
What is really wrong with the
classic realist novel?
• In classic realist fiction the events seem to narrate
themselves, thus removing any sense of the literary work
as a product of a controlling voice.
• Discourse – language that draws attention to its
production – assumes a speaker and a hearer, thus
opening itself to resistance, dispute, critical questioning.
What is really wrong with the
classic realist novel?
• From his earliest collections of short stories Ian
McEwan has consistently drawn attention to the
status of his fiction as discourse by alluding to or
parodying traditional literary genres, thereby forcing
the reader to take note of the presence of a self
conscious narrator.
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian
Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel
• McEwan consciously modelled Atonement on the
work of “Elizabeth Bowen of The Heat of the Day,
with a dash of Rosamund Lehmann of Dusty Answer,
and, in [Briony’s] first attempts, a sprinkling of
Virginia Woolf” (McEwan, Begley 56). At least one
reviewer has seen a parallel between Atonement and
Bowen’s The Last September (1929) “with its restive
teenage girl in the big house” (Lee 16).
• Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian
Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel
• Elizabeth Bowen also directly influences the form the final
novel takes. After reading Briony’s first neo-modernist
attempt to give fictional shape to the events of 1935
submitted to Cyril Connolly at Horizon, Bowen reacts by first
thinking the prose “ ‘too full, too cloying,’” but with
“‘redeeming shades of Dusty Answer’” (Rosamund Lehmann’s
first novel of 1927 about a young girl’s growing up). Cyril
Connolly voices Bowen’s final criticism of the modernist
obsession with consciousness at the expense of plot by
reminding Briony that even her most sophisticated readers
“retain a childlike desire to be told a story” (296). Briony’s
rewritten Part One owes its mounting tension to Bowen’s
criticism passed on to Cyril Connolly and the example offered
by Bowen’s earlier novel.
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel
• The numerous allusions to other texts warn the reader not to
treat Atonement as a classic realist text. … Atonement offers
particularly clear instances of … the different ways in which a
text, in relating to other texts, becomes productive of further
meanings, ways such as rereading and displacement.
McEwan’s novel is most obviously a rereading of the classic
realist novel of the nineteenth century, just as it is a
displacement of the modernist novel, particularly as
instanced in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian
Finney (2002)
• http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel: Clarissa
•
Atonement makes an ironic literary allusion to the early English epistolary
novel Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson. Arabella, the melodramatic heroine
of the thirteen-year-old Briony’s playlet, shares Clarissa’s sister’s name
and thereby places “The Trials of Arabella“ within a literary tradition of
sentimentality and sensationalism, while inevitably lacking the
psychological complexity of the original. Cecilia is spending the vacation
after graduating at Cambridge by reading Clarissa, which Robbie
considers psychologically subtle and she boring. Their disagreement over
this text helps determine the reader’s response to the rape which takes
place later the same day and which is sprung on the reader with none of
the lengthy preparation that Richardson provides.
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
•
Intertextuality as antidote to the
classic realist novel: Clarissa
This example appears to incorporate the two kinds of intertextual
productivity – rereading and displacement. Seen in the perspective
of the novel as a whole, Lola’s rape, unlike that of Clarissa, which
leads to her death and Lovelace’s damnation, is the prelude to a
long and socially successful marriage cemented by Lola’s and
Marshall’s determination to keep the identity of the rapist a secret
while either of them is alive. Lola’s worldly manipulation of the
advantage the rape has given her over her rapist acts as a form of
social intertextuality, anticipating the laxer sexual morality of the
later twentieth century. An additional effect that such ironic
references to other literary texts have in McEwan’s novel is to act as
a continuous reminder that the entire book is the final literary
artifact of Briony, a professional author.
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney
(2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Paired narrative motifs
• Alongside the metafiction of his intertextuality, McEwan also
draws attention to the constructed nature of his narrative by
employing parallel or symmetrical motifs:
•
•
•
Marshall’s rape of Lola takes place by the eighteenth century, crumbling,
stuccoed Greek temple in the Tallis grounds with its ’row of pillars and the
pediment above them’ (68).
The wedding of Marshall and Lola turns out to be at a London church that
looks ’like a Greek temple,’ especially its ’low portico with white columns
beneath a clock tower of harmonious proportions’ (304). Separated by five
years, the rape and marriage are brought into shocking juxtaposition by
purely narrative means.
The last occasion on which Briony encounters the Marshalls at the end of the
book takes place outside the Imperial War Museum which echoes the other
two buildings in being based on Greek temple design and featuring columns
and a portico. Behind the neo-classical facades that come to represent the
’mausoleum of their marriage’ (307) lurk respectively ruin, a joint lie, and the
destructive memories of a war from which Marshall made his fortune. [NB:
Blake’s ’marriage hearse’]
•
Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Brian Finney (2002)
•
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html
Paired architectural motifs
Chiswick House and Gardens
•
1.
2.
3.
4.
McEwan uses very particular references to architectural & landscape
design in his characterisation of the Tallis family estate as a setting for
the novel (p.18 & pp. 68-69). In her blog, architectural writer Elizabeth
Hornbeck comments that McEwan’s elaborate description of the
island temple advances his work by:
describing the scene where the novel’s central crime(s) will take place on the night the twins run away
and managing in passing to associate it with delinquent behavior;
using architectural history to position the Tallis family within the landed aristocracy, the 18th century
patrons for these Adam style houses (though only one half of the family is aristocratic; the other
belongs to the nouveau riche, descended from a grandfather “who made the family fortune with a
series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps“ – a subtle gesture towards Briony’s fallible
desire for secrets and obsessive tidiness;
creating a metaphor for the Tallis family’s descent, being a time-honored theme in British literature:
the degeneracy of Britain’s aristocracy;
alluding to the situation of the children in the novel, who suffer because of the adults’ neglect, much
like this temple has been abandoned by its parent, the vanished Adam house.
•
Stationary Nomad: Journeys in Visual Culture, Elizabeth Hornbeck (2002)
• http://itinerantprofessor.blogspot.com/2008/03/atonement.html