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McEwan: The Impression of a Deeper Darkness Notes for Atonement wider reading
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Just some notes I made based on McEwan's article.
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The Impression of a Deeper Darkness: Ian McEwan’s Atonement Atonement (2001) centres on the guilt felt by the protagonist, Briony Tallis, for the
consequences of her erroneous accusation that Robbie molested their younger cousin, Lola
The novel is a meditation on the act of testimony
Over the novel, Briony begins to rethink the reliability of her position as a witness.
Each new chapter forces the reader to revise his or her understanding of what was revealed
earlier
James Harold: Atonement ‘reveals that narrative imagining is not static or unified, but
dynamic and multi-polar’ as it skilfully manipulates the imprecision of language by playing
with the complicated link between knowledge and ethics.
The novel’s increasing ambiguity self-reflexively turns this logic of shame back onto the
reader, so the conclusion leaves us, as witnesses, to ponder our own ability to testify about
the story Briony has just described.
At the centre of the book’s narrative is a secret, an obscured truth which McEwan uses to
lure the reader into the story
Like Briony, the reader is pushed toward a moral judgement by this act of concealment even
though the information necessary to make an ethically informed decision is withheld
Maurice Blanchot: ‘The stratagem of the secret is either to show itself, to make itself so
visible that it isn’t seen (to disappear, that is, as a secret), or to hint that the secret is only
secret where there is no secret, or no appearance of any secret’.
The crucial quality of a secret, in other words, lies in its form rather than its content, making
the source of its attraction entirely negative
The paradoxical result is that the positive content at the heart if the secret, the evidence
that can be gathered and analysed, its effectively side-lined by the act of obscuration that
frames it.
McEwan’s awareness of this paradox is evidenced by his symbolic exploration of the empty
Briony’s fascination with story-telling is rooted in her ‘passion for secrets’.
All of Briony’s passions – her storytelling, her love of secrets, and her penchant for
miniaturization – stem from an obsession with order, in both a moral and a physical sense.
Briony’s treasures possess a symbolic value: each provides the promise of something
greater.
As Briony herself acknowledges, her secrets are not secrets unless they possess the allure of
hidden knowledge
Her secrets, like her treasures, are transparently counterfeit and thus lack the power to draw
in a sophisticated observer.
A second exploration of the purely formal secret is to be found in Mrs Tallis’ meditation on
why moths are drawn toward light
The moths capture the central paradox of the formal secret – they fly into the symbolic light
of reason, exposing themselves to a likely annihilation, all in pursuit of a deeper but illusory
darkness.
The secret, in other words, is a promise of knowledge
Atonement is built on this basic formal structure: if there appears to be a secret, even if it is
entirely illusory, the result of the authorial fabrication, the reader is nonetheless drawn
compulsively to know, to judge, and above all, to moralize
Mc Ewan thus draws a line, in ethical terms, between two manifestations of the unknown:
the mystery and the secret
, The mystery involves an unsolvable riddle characterized by its anonymity (no one knows
who is responsible for it) and contingency (no one knows how it came about).
One example of a mystery in Atonement is provided by Cecilia’s attempts to reconstruct her
family’s genealogy.
The genealogy’s status as obscured knowledge makes the Tallis family tree a mystery rather
than a secret
The secret, by contrast, is defined by the possibility of responsibility and accountability
The ‘smoothing hand of time’ that McEwan references throughout the novel, however,
eventually transforms every secret into a mystery
Briony’s manuscript is only published after her death, when she can no longer be responsible
for its implicit accusations
The secret loses the possibility of responsibility and becomes a mystery although the
boundaries between the two always remain blurry.
Knowledge is the critical factor that turns the wheel of modern ethics
Indeed, the etymology of ‘innocence’ is based on this very idea.
The Latin origin of the word is a compound of the negative prefix ‘in’ and the verb
‘agnoscere’ which translates into ‘to acknowledge, recognise’.
The relationship between knowledge and innocence cannot be broken down into a binary
relation
The Aristotelian principle of contradiction, so perfectly symmetrical in its logic.
As the uncertain line between secret and mystery demonstrates, the structure of knowledge
is less straightforward than knowing or not knowing
For example, in Briony’s case, mystery and secret are intricately interwoven: while an act of
concealment (her false accusation) takes place, Briony’s true motivations for her action
remain murky.
Briony’s story is complex in its ethical implications, for while the revelation of her secret
accuses her, the mystery of her motivations simultaneously accuses her
Like Oedipus, she is both guilty and innocent because of this asymmetry in the structure of
knowledge
The secret has the same effect on modern ethics as the ‘deeper darkness’.
The very act of concealment inscribes one into an economy of guilt.
The secret forms the paradoxical heart of the economy of guilt and innocence
Kafkaesque logic – one that cynically places the burden of proof onto the accused
Secret becomes a key strategy in the modern construction of authority
His impassive features forma kind of mask which conceals emotion
Paradoxical structure to the detective’s honesty
Whereas, the secret’s act of concealment implies guilt, denies all possibility of concealment
The detective is a character whose surface integrity serves as a guarantee to Briony that no
darker secret lies beneath
McEwan: ‘The truth was in the symmetry, which was to say, it was founded in common
sense. The truth instructed her eyes
The faulty interpretation of the situation is based on a misreading of the rhetorical surface of
things, the falsey symmetrical assumption that concealment equates with guilt and
transparency with integrity
McEwan’s novel possesses a complicated prescriptivist structure, a tactic that requires the
reader to continually revise their view of particular events and characters
Brian Finney’ The novel’s epigraph, serves as both a warning and a guide to how the
reader should view this narrative’.
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