Written by Giovanna Napoleone
Written for an english class her senior year of high school, Giovanna Napoleone recounts the connection of McEwan's novel Atonement to the idea of metafiction and the importance of fiction in our society today. #essay #atonement #mcewan #metafiction #literaryanalysis
From Passive to Active: Briony’s Growth in Atonement
By Giovanna Napoleone
According to Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture “Good Readers and Writers,” “every great writer is a great deceiver” (Nabokov), which character Briony Tallis recognizes herself as in the metafiction novel, Atonement by Ian McEwan. In the novel, aspiring author Briony Tallis uses her writing as a method for understanding her childhood mistakes, which she clearly only begins to atone for through McEwan’s work of metafiction. Through Atonement, Ian McEwan emphasizes that metafiction is a means for growth regarding one’s passiveness.
Metafiction in itself is a complex ideal within a work of literature, but can be characterized into two functions that make it valuable to a reader: passiveness and activeness, which begin to merge with one another through a singular medium, character Briony Tallis. In Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s Nobel Lecture “In the Forest of Paradoxes,” he defines action as “what [a] writer would like to be able to do, [rather] than to bear witness” to the mistakes and faulted world around them (Le Clezio). In Atonement, Briony Tallis wishes she could fix her past mistakes, but admits there is “nothing outside her” (McEwan) to enforce an action upon her past which would change the fate of the people wrongly accused by her. In fact, she even considers herself, as a writer, akin to “God” (McEwan), although she ultimately could not save her sister and Robbie from dying due to the war. This, in essence, is a paradox, because Briony constantly desires to be an active force of change in her life, and can only do so through the passive activity of writing. Through metafiction, passive authors are able to live in a paradox as well as become an active participant in their life, the “attempt” of it being “all” (McEwan).
Briony Tallis’ passiveness is greatly demonstrated through the first two parts of the novel, where she, as the omniscient narrator, oversees her childhood actions and articulates them in a way that conveys her regret towards them. For instance, when Briony writes about Robbie throughout the novel, she slowly allows him to “turn from villain, to an almost saintly figure” (Marsh) through contrasting her own point of view against Cecilia’s in Part I as well as Robbie’s tragic experiences with World War II in Part II of the novel. Similarly, Briony’s subtle characterizations of Paul Marshall as “cruel” (McEwan) and Lola as comparable to “Cruella de Vil” (McEwan) is present in the novel to reveal Briony’s naivety as a child to the reader when they realize the incredible mistake she has made in blaming Robbie as Lola’s attacker. Although opposite transformations, the hints of Robbie, Marshall, and Lola’s true characters in the novel are a testament to Briony’s unreliability and misconceptions as a child and both work to provide the reader with a better sense of her own regret. However, despite the mistakes Briony has made and the outrage produced by it, McEwan uses Briony and it’s metafictional nature as a vessel for Part I and II of the novel to act as a “repository of [knowledge and] wonder”(Stevens), which Briony uses to reflect on her childhood later on in her life.
After writing about the mistakes she has made throughout her childhood, character Briony Tallis begins to become more active in realizing her mistakes through Part III of the novel, as well as in the London, 1999 section. This is exemplified by her imaginary encounter with Cecilia and Robbie in their London apartment before the reader is aware that they have actually died; When Briony confesses that she “did nothing”(McEwan) and was a coward who is “hardly expected to be forgiven” (McEwan), Briony finally accepts full responsibility for her actions mentally and envisions a future course of action to alter the reality of the impact her mistakes have made. This is solidified by the “brick in place” (McEwan) metaphor given at Lola and Paul Marshall’s wedding in Part III, where Briony goes “before the altar” (McEwan) to witness the “mausoleum” (McEwan) of an unholy marriage that was only made possible because of her mistakes. It is only through this meta-fictionalized realization staring her in the face that Briony decides to start “a new draft” (McEwan) in her life that she is “ready to begin” (McEwan), which is geared towards finding peace in her life.
Since “fiction’s lack of practical usefulness is what gives it its special freedom” (Siegel) it can be said that Briony uses the freedom of Atonement to learn and grow from her mistakes by allowing Robbie and Cecilia to live in the novel as a “final act of kindness” (McEwan). In the London, 1999 portion of the novel, the dedication and effort Briony takes to tell the version of Robbie and Cecilia’s story that they deserved is evident through her “dozen long letters from old Mr. Nettle” (McEwan) as well as her “fifty-nine year assignment” (McEwan) - an obligation she feels the need to complete because it is necessary to her growth. However, what Briony learns through writing Atonement is not the forgiveness of others, but that her “crime” (McEwan) had consequences that she had to live with and try to move on from. Although Briony does not literally become active in Part III since she can not physically bring her sister or Robbie back to life, it can be said that she truly is sorry for her actions and wants “penance” (McEwan). This dramatic transformation from a naive childhood to a recognizing adult is only possible through metafiction, which McEwan hopes the reader uses to consider their own passiveness, and how they can cross the “fingertips” (McEwan) of their own desire for change. In fact, the human-finger metaphor described by both Le Clezio and McEwan highlights the connection between passiveness, will, and action which distinguishes metafiction; When a human tries to “move each finger one after the other” (Le Clezio) and “intention [takes] effect” (McEwan), it is complete “self-awareness” (Le Clezio) and the “willing it to move” (McEwan) that causes metafiction to be so significant. Briony’s internal self-perceptions and change of will are the factors that made her more active as a character in the reader’s eyes than in Briony’s childhood. In the same way that metafiction allowed Briony to actively reflect on her mistakes, McEwan urges the reader to do the same through metafiction.
In this sense, metafiction’s purpose is to “open our eyes to unknown aspects of our own condition”(Llossa) as it did for Briony. Metafiction is not only a vessel of preservation and passive remembrance, but provides the ability for one to grow though self-reflection. It is possible to have “the beginning of love at the end of our travail” (McEwan), which Briony’s character knew even while writing “The Trials of Arabella” (McEwan). The value of fiction is to make active readers, not passive ones, both on paper and in their real lives.
Works Cited
Le Clézio, J.M.G (2008). "In the Forest of Paradoxes" from his Nobel Lecture.
Llosa, V. Mario (2001). "Why Literature?" from The New Republic.
Marsh, Huw (2018). "Narrative unreliability and metarepresentation in Ian McEwan’s Atonement; or, why
Robbie might be guilty and why nobody seems to notice" from Textual Practice, 32:8,1325-1343.
McEwan, Ian (2001). "Atonement," a novel.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1948). “Good Readers and Good Writers” from Lectures on Literature.
Siegel, Lee (2013). "Should Literature be Useful?" from The New Yorker.
Stevens, Dana (2014). "Should Literature Be Considered Useful?" from The NY Times.
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