Research Paper On Atonement

Critique, 52:74–100, 2011
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online
DOI: 10.1080/00111610903380154

Briony’s Being-For:
Metafictional Narrative Ethics in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

DAVID K. O’H ARA
ABSTRACT: This essay attempts to identify an unusual brand of self-conscious narrative by focusing on Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement (1992). What makes this minority metafictional style especially unique is not only its presence in the work of one of the late twentieth century’s preeminent British novelists, but also its ethical character. For this reason, the kind of metafiction being discussed should not be conflated with more traditionally ideological forms that attest to their own fictionality in the name of undermining
“realist” illusions.
Rather, it will be argued that self-conscious narrative, in the case of McEwan, is oftentimes utilized in order to reassert an ethical complex that lies between author and reader, text and world. The fundamental differentiation being made, then, is that between a properly postmodernist metafiction and what might be considered a restorative metafiction that works, in a self-justifying manner, toward an affirmation of narrative ethics. For this latter style of metafiction, storytelling does not mark the beginning of a free-play of signifiers or a dispersal of constituting fictions, but rather the beginning of a dialogical and ethical relationship between texts and readers; of stories not just being told from one to another, but by one for another.
Ultimately, this essay examines the way the Ian McEwan of Atonement explores the same self–Other dynamics that underpin the work of Levinas, MerleauPonty, and Zygmunt Bauman while metafictionally making claims about narrative not unlike those found in the hermeneutic philosophies of Richard Kearney
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and Paul Ricoeur. For it is precisely this same ethical propensity of narrative as understood by Kearney and Ricoeur that Atonement not only dramatizes in its plot, but self-consciously illustrates at the level of its metafiction.
Keywords: Atonement, ethics, hermeneutics, Kearney, narrative, Other, Ricoeur

A

s selves living among others, we are all put in a quandary. “The existence of other people,” as Maurice Merleau-Ponty somewhat facetiously points out, “is a difficulty and an outrage” (349). If we are able to grant that nonextended conscious subjects—“other minds”—do exist outside of our own cognition, then we must also confront something like a Copernican
Revolution of selfhood: the self is demoted, becoming just another point of view in a universe of many. Yet, by virtue of being a self, each of us remains at the center of our own experiential reality; we are irrevocably restricted by that which is not our self, by otherness. As a consequence, we are asked to manage our subjective experience in tandem with a recognition that “other people are just as real to themselves as we are to ourselves” (McEwan, Interview by
Michael Silverblatt). Merleau-Ponty refers to this as a “contradictory operation”; encountering the Other, we are compelled to both “distinguish him from [the] self, and therefore place him in a world of objects, and think of him as a consciousness” (349; emphasis added). The issue for the self is to decide how best to reckon with otherness and what credence, if any, to give those other minds. The same uncertain relationship between selves and others lies at the heart of Ian McEwan’s novel, Atonement. Over the course of McEwan’s perspectiveshifting narrative, we find characters, again and again, realizing that they are bounded by otherness, by other minds with their own plans, their own interiorities, their own ways of perceiving the world. Early in the novel, thirteen-year-old
Briony Tallis, while alone in her room, wonders whether everyone else could in fact be as “alive” as she:
If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance. (36)1

The manner in which the mind can—and is sometimes compelled to—deal with this rather daunting prospect, comes to play a crucial role in the dramatic developments of the novel. Interrelations between the self and Other, however, are not limited to the action alone. The same self–Other dynamics found in the primary “events” of the novel are metafictively woven into the fabric of the narrative. As this essay will demonstrate, the appreciation of self-and-Other dynamics is necessary to locating the ethical focus of a novel that has been alterVOL. 52, NO. 1

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natively labeled as “classic realist” and an “instance of postmodern gimmickry”
(Finney 70).
The action of the first part of Atonement, running nearly half the novel’s length, is almost entirely confined to one of the hottest summer days of 1935.
Fittingly, the overwhelming atmosphere is one of limpid oppression. Events take place in a welter of languorous uncertainty. The false grandeur of the
Tallis’s stately home with its anachronistic architecture, its dilapidated fountain, its abandoned island temple, surveys all like a silent, exhausted godhead. The whole setting—the tiredness of the house’s day-to-day ritual, the gradual slippage of old hierarchies—adds to a sense of a culture in its final days. (As in
Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, this is a pre-Second World War England still largely ambivalent about the extremity of what lay ahead.) Briony’s mother has succumbed to migraines which leave her bedridden, while her father, hardly a physical presence anymore, is away on business in London.
Left to her own devices in this slowly deflating world, young Briony Tallis takes solace in her own imagination. For her, the line between her creations and the world around her is a rather fine one. If the vignettes she writes and performs fulfill her own obsessive “passion for tidiness,” it appears they can also help her to assuage the complexities of an as yet unfathomable world (Atonement 7).
Having learned by heart the schematics of melodrama and romance, Briony’s worldview has been shaped by aesthetic expectations, “principles of justice, with death and marriage the main engines of housekeeping” (Atonement 7). The Trials of Arabella, the play that she has prepared when the novel opens, is therefore not only meant to celebrate her brother’s homecoming but to “provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who could persuade him to return to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony’s services as a bridesmaid” (4). Art, she believes, will act as a corrective to the untidiness of life.
It is important to note, in these initial stages of the novel, just how selforiented—how ordered around her self—Briony’s vision of the world really is.
An early illustration of this youthful but dangerous solipsism occurs with the arrival of her cousins to the Tallis household. For the most part, Briony sees their presence, not as the result of a failed marriage, but merely as a means to perform her play. We are told how “she vaguely knew [: : : ] divorce was an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it no thought. It was a mundane unravelling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder” (Atonement 8–9). But other people, she finds, are not as easily dealt with as the desireless dolls arranged just-so in her bedroom. During her casting of the play—when her older cousin
Lola manages to steal the part of Arabella—Briony’s carefully laid plans are upset. Her cousins do not passively keep to their prescribed roles, nor do they perform as expected. For Briony, this deviation from her narrative vision is not just an affront to art but to life as well: “she was Arabella” (12). Here again,
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we find a self trying to manage (or, in this case, stage-manage) otherness: “In a generally pleasant and well-protected life, [Briony] had never really confronted anyone before. Now she saw: it was like diving into a swimming pool in early
June; you simply had to make yourself do it” (15).2
The description of an event as unassuming as children preparing a Mansfield Park-ish family play is a subtle tactic on McEwan’s part as it ironically foreshadows far more consequential self–Other confrontations to come. For all the overt innocuousness, there is a niggling discomfort. More specifically, the scene evidences just how susceptible Briony is to conflating life and art as a strategy for coping with otherness. Aestheticising the world allows her, like the artist manqué, to fashion her life into art and “force her fantasizing vision upon reality” (Byatt 23). By reducing others to the status of artificial things, she can take the mystery out of alterity, she can accommodate chaotic reality with a tidy narrative of her own design. In fact, Briony’s aesthetic management of others very nearly parodies the more formal aspects of Fascism, which is itself looming on the horizon of the Tallis’s world. Susan Sontag has expressed how the Fascist aesthetic was predicated on “the turning of people into things [: : : and] the ideal of life as art” (91, 96). “We who shape German policy,” stated
Goebbels in 1933, “feel ourselves to be artists [: : : ] the task of art and the artist
[being] to form, to give shape, to remove the diseased and create freedom for the healthy” (qtd. in Sontag, 92). Cynthia Ozick goes right to the inhuman core of the matter, explaining, “the German Final Solution was an aesthetic solution; it was a job of editing, it was the artist’s finger removing a smudge; it simply annihilated what was considered not harmonious” (165). While Briony Tallis should hardly be seen as a proto-fascist, her artful brand of solipsism can at least be seen as symptomatic of a shared urge (of which Nazism is possibly one of the more extreme examples), that is, the need to simplify any confrontation with otherness by objectifying the Other; in effect, to say that other minds are not as real as one’s own.
The ethical subtext here is something like a repudiation of what Zygmunt
Bauman, following Emmanuel Lévinas, calls “being-for the Other,” in other words, an a priori responsibility for the Other that defines both our selfhood and the beginnings of ethical interactions. “Being-for,” Bauman proposes, “means an emotional engagement with the Other before [the self] is committed [: : : ] to a specific course of action regarding the Other” (62). According to him, there are two crucial steps in a move from solipsism (what he calls “beingwith the Other”) to responsibility (“being-for the Other”), and it may be useful to apply these requirements to Briony Tallis. First, Bauman explains, “emotion marks the exit from the state of indifference lived among thing-like others”— and, as we have seen, Briony is largely indifferent to the plight of her cousins; having preassigned them instrumental, passive roles, she is able to disengage herself from Bauman’s “responsibility” from what is, in effect, the possibility for empathy (62). Bauman further requires that “emotion pull the Other from
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the world of finitude and stereo-typed [sic] certainty, and cast her/him into the universe of under-determination, questioning, and openness”; if the self is to refrain from imposing its own vision upon the Other, the Other must remain irrevocably ambiguous (62). But this acceptance of uncertainty is precisely what Briony, in the first part of Atonement, cannot abide. Her “controlling demon” is not just an instinct for aesthetic order but is, perhaps fundamentally, a compulsion for certitude (Atonement 5). The narrative she fashions around her life and imposes on others, as we shall see, works to dismiss anything unknown by carefully obscuring the mystery of otherness.
It is interesting to note the way in which Briony does, however, vacillate between a recognition of autonomous “other minds” and an absorption in her own fantasizing vision. Otherness is forever sneaking into her constructed, orderly worldview, and she struggles to maintain her sense of authority. Watching aloft from her bedroom window as Robbie Turner and her sister Cecilia come within intimate proximity of one another, Briony is said to witness the scene like so:
There was something formal about the way he stood, feet apart, head held back. A proposal of marriage. Briony would not have been surprised. She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved the princess from drowning and ended in marrying her. What was presented here fitted well. Robbie Turner, only son of a humble cleaning lady and of no known father, Robbie who had been subsidised by Briony’s father through school and university, had wanted to be a landscape gardener, and now wanted to take up medicine, had the boldness of ambition to ask for Cecilia’s hand.
It made perfect sense. Such leaps across boundaries were the stuff of daily romance. (Atonement 38)

Note the seamless way in which this free indirect picture of Briony’s mind moves from hesitation to self-assurance. She refers to her own backlog of narrative schematics in order to interpret the ambiguous behavior of the couple.
As with Don Quixote and his infamous windmills, Briony’s vision of the scene is rendered comprehensible, it’s simply a story she knows well, a tableau. She soon finds, however, that the peculiarity of the encounter will not be so easily contained. Her interpretation of the event unfolding in the distance is complicated by what immediately follows; astounded, she watches her sister strip down and submerge herself in the fountain.
What strange power did [Robbie] have over [Cecilia]? Blackmail? Threats?
[: : : ] The sequence was illogical—the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal. Such was Briony’s last thought before she accepted that she did not understand, and that she must simply watch. (38, 39; emphasis added)

Her imaginative ability for imposing a familiar order onto reality falls absurdly short. She can only watch, no longer interpret. Afterward, she has her “first, weak
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intimation” that life can indeed work in incongruous ways, ways that transcend preconceived narratives (39). “This was not a fairy tale,” she surmises, “this was the real” (40). She decides to leave behind her melodramatic impulse in favor of “the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong” (39). She appears to recognize the self-deceit inherent in “a failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you” (40). Here is a revelation, according to
Dennis Smith, of an ethics “rooted in the autonomy of the I” (163). In Bauman’s terms, Briony is on the verge of selfhood, that is, a selfhood subsumed in a responsibility for the Other. Indeed, the narrator—the future Briony—looking back on this event, refers to it as “the moment when she became recognisably herself” (Atonement 41).
Nevertheless, it’s only a matter of time before Briony falls back upon her need to author these events, to couch things in a narrative whereby she herself can play the dramatic lead. As soon as Cecilia and Robbie have departed, she feels
“the truth had become as ghostly as invention” (Atonement 41). She is free to fill in whatever story she likes. Her realization that different minds may indeed have “equal value” is precluded by the fact that she has appointed herself an authority on the event; she is certain of what has passed between Cecilia and
Robbie. She has relapsed into her need to mask the ambiguity of otherness, no matter how procrustean the means. Once again, other minds become mere variables in her own aesthetic equation.
Briony’s greedy illusion-making of course culminates with her assertion that she has witnessed Robbie Turner raping her cousin Lola. Having in fact discerned nothing but a shadowy “vertical mass,” Briony imprints her own preconceived narrative onto the event (Atonement 164). It helps that she has earlier cast Robbie as a “maniac,” and herself as “protector” (119, 123). Her cousin’s victimization need only be made to fit with her own dramatic expectations. Bullying Lola into line with her authority, Briony hijacks an event that has nothing to do her. That her story is thereafter believed by everyone else—save Cecilia and the innocent Robbie—may have more to do with class distinctions than with
Briony’s storytelling ability. The true culprit, the future chocolate tycoon, Paul
Marshall, is never suspected. It would seem far more acceptable to put this sort of thing down to the son of a cleaner than to confront the rather more scandalous proposition that it was committed by a someone of higher stature.3 Here, in
McEwan’s dark world of “believing is seeing,” certainty is led by preconceived notions, habits of interpretation (McEwan, Interview by John Sutherland).
Brian Finney sees in Atonement a running commentary on the fact that “we all are narrated, entering at birth into a pre-existing narrative which provides the palimpsest on which we inscribe our own narrative/lives” (79). And McEwan does appreciate the written-ness of life and its constituting fictions, as should be evident from the sequence by the fountain and Briony’s Quixote-like myopia.
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However, there seems something more fundamental occurring between selves and others here, something more crucial—and perhaps more ethical—than a simple identification of Lacanian méconnaissance allows. One of the recurring themes in the novel is the way in which characters’ preconceptions of not just events but others are continually upset. Hidden perplexities are always coming to light, making a mockery of easy categorization and tidy unities.4 Just as in the nursery when Briony tries to cast her play, characters throughout the novel are surprised when others do not stick to the stock roles that have been imagined for them. For instance, Cecilia and Robbie’s initial misreading of one another is challenged by their respective declarations of self—Cecilia’s jumping into the fountain, Robbie’s accidental letter. Later, Briony’s prejudice of her tyrannical supervisor, Sister Drummond, has to be revised when “beneath the discipline,” she notices “a touch of rapport in adversity” (Atonement 302). The soldiers Nettle and Mace eventually prove themselves to be far more than the oafish hindrances Robbie presumes them to be. Even the condensing of people’s names—into Nurse Tallis or simply Turner—seems to suggest both a restriction and a dilution of identity. Nevertheless, the “messiness of other minds” will out (74). Taking into consideration the self–Other dynamics being discussed, all these surprise reassessments of characters in the novel can be seen to hinge on the realization of what Emmanuel Lévinas calls the face of the Other. In Lévinas’s terms, the face is “the way in which the Other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the Other in me” (Totality and Infinity, 50). Put another way, the face is that which transcends the self’s preconception of the Other.
The epiphany of the Other bears its own significance, independent of the signification received from the world. The Other not only comes to us from a context but signifies by itself, without mediation [: : : ] The epiphany of the face is visitation [: : : ] The epiphany of the face is alive. Its life consists in undoing form where every being [étant], when it enters into immanence— that is, when it exposes itself as a theme—is already dissimulated. (Humanism of the Other, 31)

And because the face embodies a revelation of the Other’s uniqueness—the sense that he/she is more “real,” more dynamic than the self can imagine—it is also what calls the self into moral responsibility for the Other. That very moment, in which the Other appears as more than the self’s preconceptions, is what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “primal moral scene” (64). One has the choice to neglect otherness or to be responsible for it. Dennis Smith, summing up both
Lévinas’s position via Bauman, explains:
The Other is a face in close proximity, expressing a need [: : : ] There is nothing reciprocal or contractual in the relationship between I and Other.
However, the Other’s proximity makes him or her the focus of the I’s beingfor. It stirs up moral anxiety—the need to do something to meet the Other’s needs. (163)
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There are numerous expressions of Lévinas’s “epiphany of the face” in Atonement, but the most visceral example occurs in Part II with the appearance of an
RAF pilot at Dunkirk.
Distraught and humiliated by their retreat to the beaches of France, a group of army soldiers are found loosing their frustrations on the lone pilot. We are told that “everyone had suffered, and now someone was going to pay” (Atonement 251). Bearing witness to the gradual fomentation of displaced hatred is Robbie Turner. “It was madness to go to the man’s defence,” acknowledges the narrator, “[yet] it was loathsome not to” (252). So Turner lingers at the sidelines, suppressing his instinct to intervene, to remind his fellow troops that the RAF pilot “was a man, not a rabbit to be skinned” (252). Struck by the man’s placidity in the face of danger, he finds himself wavering. The decision to act is ruthlessly left up to him.
It was eerie that the man had not shouted for help, or pleaded, or protested his innocence. His silence seemed like a collusion in his fate. Was he so dim that it had not occurred to him that he might be about to die? Sensibly he had folded his glasses into his pocket. Without them his face was empty [: : : ]
He peered around at his tormentors, his lips had parted, more in disbelief than in an attempt to form a word.
(252)

As with the doomed character of Piggy in William Golding’s The Lord of the
Flies, here is a face blankly staring at its own mortality, about to be obliterated by encroaching tribalism.
Though Turner (as Robbie is referred to throughout
Part II) feels compelled to act, he also feels the pressure of the mob to forget that mortal face and objectify the pilot. He understands their need to simplify their sorry situation by locating a scapegoat, by choosing to see the RAF man as no more than what his uniform, at that moment, represents. Turner even recognizes that he could, if he gave in to the will of the mob, “do something outrageous with his bowie knife and earn the love of a hundred men” (echoing, perhaps, a type of love Briony could not herself resist earlier in the novel)
(252). He sympathizes with their need to turn the incomprehensibility of the war into something all too comprehensible: the Other—in this case the RAF man—is stereotyped, scapegoated into being the cause of all that has been suffered. At the expense of his identity, a role has been imposed upon him.
He is not another mind, he is not a face, he is a straw man, an “it” with a preconceived role. Using what Ian McEwan, in another historical context,
has referred to as “fanatical certainty [: : : ] and dehumanising hatred,” the soldiers are able to “purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy” (“Only Love
Then Oblivion”). They are, in other words, able to ignore the face of the Other.
The nature of Turner’s predicament is summed up nicely by Emmanuel
Lévinas, here explaining what constitutes a face:
In the Face of the Other [there is] always the death of the Other and thus, in some way, an incitement to murder, the temptation to go to the extreme,
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to completely neglect the other—and at the same time (and this is the paradoxical thing) the Face is also the “Thou Shalt not Kill.” A Thou-Shaltnot-Kill that can be explicated further: it is the fact that I cannot let the other die alone, it is like a calling out to me [: : : ] For me, [the Other] is above all the one I am responsible for. (Entre Nous, 104–05)

War, however, as an exercise in killing, endorses a certain dichotomy, dividing
Us from Them. Other minds must necessarily be cheapened, and the problem of the Other is alleviated by means of a generalization: he/she is merely one of the enemy. It therefore comes as a chilling irony that these troops—confronted by an Other of their own military—fall into the same ethical disengagement they have had to enact as soldiers at war. Confronting the RAF pilot, they seek the same simplification, resorting to tribal divisions in order to determine their (ir-)responsibility for another human being. Just as Briony does earlier in the novel, they evade the ethical crux of alterity by placing the Other into a predetermined role.
Turner himself finds he is unable to disengage from empathy so easily. He cannot un-imagine the interiority of the RAF man anymore than he can unimagine the owner of the disembodied leg he finds dangling in a tree: “He was trying to push it away, but it would not let him go. A French boy asleep in his bed” (Atonement 194; emphasis added). He cannot shake off his being-for the
Other. He cannot fully repress the imaginative reflex that, again and again, kicks out toward empathy. His lack of both certainty and egotism—his recognition that human consciousness is never a banality—allows him to confront the face of the Other and, in turn, his own difficult responsibility.
Briony Tallis comes to a similar understanding in Part III of Atonement.
Having signed on as a VAD nurse, she quickly learns that uncertainty is the order of the day in pre-Blitz London. Her naïve solipsism, so easily maintained in the sheltered world of the Tallis estate, is undermined by a selfless regime in the hospital. In fact, the new convent-cum-military structure of her existence could be seen as a self-incriminating reversal of the very limits she once imposed upon others: it is now her identity that is inculcated by a stock role. She subsumes herself in her work and gives herself over to a procedural life in which she has
“no will, no freedom to leave [: : : ] no identity beyond her badge” (Atonement
276). Her controlling demon, we find, has metamorphosed itself into guilty self-effacement. All she wanted to do was work, then bathe and sleep until it was time to work again. But it was all useless, she knew. Whatever skivvying or humble nursing she did, and however well or hard she did it [: : : ] she would never undo the damage. She was unforgivable. (285)

Briony’s aesthetic tastes have also evolved in accordance with her lifestyle.
No more the self-evident certainties of melodrama. “The age of clear answers
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was over,” she affirms, and so too “the age of characters and plots” (Atonement
281). Instead, she has subscribed to the “defining uncertainty” of high modernism
(281). If she still seeks aesthetic form, it is now a form that, in the words of
Samuel Beckett, can “accommodate the mess” (“Beckett at the Madeleine”).
Artistically at least, she has dropped her procrustean impulse to impose an egocentric order onto the world. Her creations are no longer meant to tidy the chaotic ambiguousness of reality.
In life, however, she remains little more than her job. “Her worries,” we are told, “did not disappear, but slipped back, their emotional power temporarily exhausted” (Atonement 290). What results is a kind of asceticism, a relinquishing of ego for an existence “lived in one room, without a door” (288). She has wilfully “narrowed her life,” a restriction that is “above all a stripping away of identity” (275). In fact, it’s only with a detached “impersonal tenderness”— an evasion of any self–Other confrontation—that she can bear the suffering of the war’s wounded (304). As she struggles to attain an idealized, obedient professionalism, her responsibility for others becomes more procedural than ethical. According to Terry Eagleton, she has merely abandoned her “literary narcissism” for “self-oblivious” duty (3). It can also be said that central to this purging of emotional investment is a disavowal on Briony’s part of both the selfhood and the imagination necessary for empathy.
Uncertainty nevertheless breaks through even the strictest formalities of
Briony’s nursing routine, ultimately forcing her to reaffirm her self in new ways.
The codes and procedures “dinned into her” over her training, she soon finds, are useless among the chaos of the incoming wounded (Atonement 294). “She had only wanted to do what she thought was expected,” yet “how was she to know [the rules] meant nothing in fact?” (294). As with Robbie Turner in Part
II, it is Briony’s acceptance of this uncertainty that throws her into being-for an
Other. The moment arrives when she is asked to tend to a French soldier (“her own age”), named Luc (305). Briony sits at his bedside and, at first, thinks it improper to “lead him on” by agreeing to his dazed assertions that he remembers her, that she is a girl from his past, someone he once met and presumably fell in love with. She tries to explain to him that she has never been to his hometown of Millau, and that he is not now in Paris. It is only once she answers his request to loosen his bandages, accidentally revealing his “mess of brain,” that she finally relents (308). When Luc again “resumes their conversation as though there had been no interlude,” Briony finds reason to play along. Where she was once so apt to hijack the narratives of others, reconstructing them to fit her own vision, she now relinquishes her authority. She wilfully imagines herself into the foreign and uncertain terrain of an Other’s narrative world.5 When he asks her if she loves him, she says that she does: “She hesitated. ‘Yes.’ No other reply seemed possible. Besides, for that moment, she did. He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and was about to die” (309). Through her engagement with the story of an Other, she has allowed for a subtle kind
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of intimacy. Even though it breaks one of the key tenets of nursing, she makes sure to reveal her first name to him before he dies. Here, once again, we find an “epiphany of the face” calling a self into moral responsibility for another human being, making the self truly apparent. Finally admitting to Luc that she loves him, Briony manages, in Lévinas’s terms, not to let the Other die alone.6
Altogether, such moments help bring into shape the ethical focus of Atonement’s plot. The recurring “epiphany of the face” helps emphasize McEwan’s later assertion that “imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality” (“Only Love and Then Oblivion”). It is therefore self–
Other dynamics that ultimately unify the novel’s self-conscious design with its implicit ethical focus. It is no accident that the same Briony Tallis who was once so confounded by the “messiness of other minds” is in the end revealed—albeit wizened to the age of 77—as the “author” of the novel (Atonement 74, 349).
More than her self-exile in the VAD hospital or even the possibility of legally recanting her false accusations, it is Briony’s actual writing of the novel that may be her vital act of atonement. The novel form, which according to McEwan, is “supreme” at giving us an empathetic “sense of other minds,” allows Briony to give back what she initially deprived others (Interview by Silverblatt). Her novel is ultimately revealed as an apologia.
This final revelation of Atonement, in which Briony Tallis breaks the frame of the novel to tell the reader that she is in fact the “author” of the text, has, however, caused some unease in the critical reception of the novel. Where many have found this metafictional denouement to be, for the most part, unproblematic, others have been more than a little suspicious about what they see as an
“unwarranted excursion into postmodernism” (Schwartz 23). They are primarily dissatisfied with the novel’s calling attention to itself in what has otherwise been, for them, an exercise in straightforward realism. Margaret Boerner, writing of a “kind of lunacy that one supposes [McEwan] imagined was like Ionesco’s absurdity,” complains that “[the novelist] destroys the structure he has set up and tells us it was all a fiction. But we knew it was a fiction.” (43).7 James
Wood is representative of this line of criticism.
This twist, this revelation, further emphasizes the novel’s already explicit ambivalence about being a novel, and makes the book a proper postmodern artifact, wearing its doubts on its sleeve, on the outside, as the Pompidou does its escalators. But it is unnecessary, unless the slightly self-defeating point is to signal that the author himself is finally incapable of resisting the distortions of tidiness. It is unnecessary because the novel has already raised, powerfully but murmuringly, the questions that this final revelation shouts out. (34; emphasis added)

For such critics, the metafictional afflatus in Atonement cheapens what had already been thematically resolved in the novel, properly. Bewildered, they ask
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what postmodernist urge must have overcome McEwan to drive him toward modish ambivalence in the final act.8
In such reviews, Brian Finney rightly discerns a “radical misreading of the novel” (70). To criticize the novel for a presumed inconsistency in its ending, he explains, is surely to misunderstand the thematic thrust of the novel. For Finney, such reviews fail to make the same “distinction between the fictive and the real” that Briony fails to make in the first part of the novel, and he points to the epigraph of the novel which, he claims, serves “as both a warning and a guide for how the reader should view the narrative”: the quotation is from a scene in
Northanger Abbey in which the dangers of mistaking fiction for truth, or making it in any way applicable to real life, are attested to (albeit ironically) (70). From
Finney’s point of view, the mistake made by critics of the novel’s ending is their having thought that the opening sections were in fact “classic realist,” for example, unconcerned with the fictionality of the narrative itself: “the literary self-consciousness about which these British reviewers complain is present from the opening page of the novel and serves throughout the book to undermine the classic realist mode of narration” (70). In other words, they do not discern just how consistently metafiction—as a tool that differentiates and distantiates text from world—works over the course of Atonement’s pages. Tellingly, Finney turns to Catherine Belsey for support in debunking such naivety; if classic realism is a mode in which the “authority of impersonal narration springs from its effacement of its own status as discourse,” then how could any part of Atonement be mistaken for classic realism (Belsey 72)?9 The novel is just too self-aware in its relationship to its own literary heritage, too self-conscious in its dramatizations of fiction-making.
There is a coded language being used, here, however—a stock-terminology
(“postmodern,” “self-defeating,” “doubt,” “realism”)—relied upon more for its judgmental overtones than its descriptive value. It is a preconceived language shared not only by those who voice their distaste for the metafictional frame of Atonement but also those others who upbraid them for seeing the novel as anything but metafictional. On the one hand, we have those who seek to use “postmodern” in a pejorative sense, to write off what they see as soulless trickery, and, on the other, those who mock the supposed naïvety of anyone seeking “classic realist” consolations from a self-conscious novel. But a peculiar ideology, latent in the language, has preceded them; they have all presupposed the actuality of a certain conflict (entirely external to the novel): that between the apparently “postmodernist” and the apparently “classic realist” modes.10
No matter how they choose to value this conflict—either positively (Finney), negatively (Wood), or ambivalently—metafiction is seen as its modus operandi.
Subsequently, users of this presumptive language, having spotted their instance of proper metafiction, cannot help but see in the novel an embodiment of that same dichotomy. That the “postmodernist” element sets out, metafictionally, to undermine the realist one has already been taken for granted. The issue therefore
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becomes the artistic integrity of such tactics, rather than any objective sense of what the novel itself might be saying about the making of narrative. The criticism thenceforth devolves swiftly into matters of taste: “Do you or don’t you like postmodernist metafiction?” as opposed to, “What is the particular nature of the metafiction in Atonement?” Presuming that there is such a thing as a postmodernist/realist dichotomy—and holding to an ideology inherent in said dichotomy—can only occlude the novel’s treatment of storytelling.11 Hence, it is significant that from both sides of the debate, the ethical concerns of the novel appear largely incompatible with its metafictional frame. From Finney’s position, the legitimacy of such an ethics would be untenable—too affirmative, too normative, too nineteenth century—given the metafictional (e.g., postmodernist) tendencies of the narrative as a whole. From Wood’s position, the metafiction is just too postmodernist to be held in harmony with the ethical underpinnings of the plot—it functions as a limp handshake at the close of an all-embracing story. In light of such prejudicial readings of the novel, Dominic Head might be expected to be especially helpful in finding some agreement between the supposedly countervailing spirits of the novel. Head’s primary interest in
McEwan is the ethical nature of the writer’s later work, and his reading of
Atonement is no exception. Certainly, there must be some way of bringing
McEwan’s ethics and his metafiction into accord with one another, and if anyone is predisposed to do so, it would be Head. Reassuringly, he senses that, here in Atonement, “McEwan’s developing treatment of the relationship between character and moral exploration demonstrates how he partakes of, and responds to, this intellectual moment [in the field of narrative ethics]. Atonement is the creative equivalent or counterpart of this critical position” (162).
In considering the metafictional frame of the novel, however, Head is far less enthusiastic about this analogy. The metafiction has gotten in the way.
Like James Wood, he has to admit that a self-conscious disclosure of the narrative’s own fictionality can only be antithetical to the very ethical concerns he detects in the story itself. For is not metafiction supposed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the reader’s investment in a story that is, after all, just fiction?
Is not metafiction that which self-consciously reminds the reader that what they have been imagining all this time—as if it were real—has simply been made-up?
Briony, after all, confesses that she has fictionally reunited Cecilia and Robbie.
She has written what seems a revisionist history in order to atone for her crime, swapping one lie for another. She further confesses that, largely due to her own actions as an adolescent, both Cecilia and Robbie died apart, casualties of the war. This is a cause for some ambivalence on the part of Head, who has already outlined, in précis, an ethical view of McEwan’s work.
This highly inventive metafiction [would seem] to be an empathetic instance of consolation: it enacts the lifelong consolation of Briony : : : and offers a
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form of consolation for the reader [: : : ] However, this is surely undermined by the shocking disappointment of the revelation of the lovers’ deaths, that moment where our investment in the codes of realism is betrayed. (174)

According to Head, McEwan’s insistence on “the constructed nature of fiction” serves to bring into question, if not outright repeal, the ethical import of narrative
(162). In the case of Atonement, this means locating in the revelation that
Briony construed the story for her own emotional ends, a disclosure of the
“morally dubious authority wielded by the writer” (162). Where the reader had trusted the narrative’s insights into its reported events, he or she is forced, in a
“postmodernist” gesture, to distrust the veracity of that same narrative. Here, the metafictional framing functions as that which tells the reader to reconsider his or her imaginative investments because—pulling back the curtain—an author’s controlling demon, an author’s fantasizing vision, was behind the narrative all along. “In the very last chapter of the novel the realist illusions created by the preceding 350 or so pages are shattered and we are reminded of the fact that we have read a fictional account of (re)constructed events told by a narrator who is also the story’s author” (Schemberg 37; emphasis added). Thus read, metafiction works to call into question a reader’s investment in the narrative which, rather than transparently wedding text to world, openly admits to misconstruing things.
The novel form is therefore reevaluated at the close of Atonement as a sort of false prophet, having made the reader believe in an ethical complex that was not only a universe unto itself, but foundationally built upon false claims. Here is Head:
The novel form is used in Atonement to raise questions about morality and authorship in a highly self-conscious way, while simultaneously and paradoxically casting doubt on the novel as an inherently moral medium.
The novel’s ambivalence appears to signal a point of departure, in fact, from narrative ethics. (162–63)

So, McEwan’s novel can stand as analogous to narrative ethics—but only so long as we ignore the undermining of those ethics by his use of metafiction. In the end, the narrative admits to being wholly provisional in its relationship to a world outside the text. Therefore, the only proper—that is, non-illusory—stance left to take is one of ambivalence, presumably. It was all just a story, anyway.
Here again, the problem is a misreading of the metafictional device as definitively, or by definition, a postmodernist one. Describing the self-consciousness of the novel as such, is to overlook—if not to implicitly forbid—the ethical determinacy of narrative. Dominic Head and others who sense an “anxiety about the worth of fiction-making” in the metafictional elements of Atonement, do so largely because they have (whether or not they even approve of said anxiety) predefined metafiction as a necessarily postmodernist enterprise (175n). And this presumption severely limits the scope of McEwan’s work. Where both sides see
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an anxiety—a disillusioned, cautionary retreat into narratological ambivalence— they should in fact, and especially given the thematic shape of McEwan’s novel, see an instance of narrative’s own self-justifications. For it is at the metafictional level that Atonement, rather than retracting the trustworthiness of its narrative, both endorses and illustrates, explores and reinforces, the ethical essence of narrativity. There is a crucial moment in Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Seven Sisters
(2002), in which the main character, Candida Wilton, reveals that she is not in fact dead. A preceding chapter, seemingly narrated by Candida’s daughter and inscribed into the pages of Candida’s own diary, was simply a fiction.
Candida admits to writing it herself, appropriating her daughter’s voice and writing from her daughter’s assumed point of view. It was only her imagining what might have occurred had she been found drowned in a London canal and had her daughter, in turn, come to collect the personal effects she has left in the lonely studio apartment she has been renting. This feat of narrative is, however, more than just Candida’s way of hypothetically gauging the significance of her all too solitary life and death: it shows her nascent attempts to imagine what it is to be somebody other than herself. This is no small matter for a character who, following the demise of a superficial marriage, has found it difficult to stand in empathetic relation to the outside world—who, in effect, hasn’t yet the sufficient selfhood to break free of her own self-centeredness. A longstanding emotional stalemate between mother and daughter is only broken once Candida “kills” herself and imagines her daughter looking critically over the diary and reading of a mother’s failure to attain selfsufficiency.
Now certainly, killing a character off in a book and then recanting on that death is something of a metafictive game; there is a trickiness being employed by Drabble, here, and not a little dark humor too.12 But although this narrative sleight-of-hand is in many ways akin to the one found at the end of Atonement, reviewers in this case were far less prepared to turn to postmodernism to account for the story’s self-reflexive moment (“modernist,” being the farthest
Anna Shapiro was willing to go in The Observer, “a formal gesture” according to Natasha Walter in The Guardian). Part of this may have to do with Drabble’s own declaration of conservatism in the face of postwar literary experiment, having infamously set herself apart in 1967 when she stated, “I would rather be at the end of a dying tradition which I admire than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore’ (qtd. in Bradbury, 413).13 In effect, Drabble, who believes that the task of the novelist should be “the transfiguration of the everyday,” and whose work bears this out, does not fit cosily into any postmodernist paradigm
(qtd. in Bradbury, 421). Another aspect of her dissociation from postmodernist trends may be her unequivocal regard for the novels of George Eliot and Arnold
Bennett, and her thoroughly un-ironic use of this tradition as she applies it to contemporary contexts in her writing.
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But this appraisal of the metafictive conceits in The Seven Sisters is useful, as it reinforces just how much the postmodernist reading of Atonement obscures the nature of McEwan’s self-conscious fiction. What is left clear in The
Seven Sisters—Candida’s imaginative fashioning of narrative both to imagine the mental lives of others and to assert a new sense of selfhood—gets misconstrued by those who see Briony’s central conceit in Atonement to be, by definition, self-reflexively deconstructive. Their contention is that Atonement is too selfconscious about its own fictionality—of itself as a narrative—therefore, the novel must be working to dispel its own referential (e.g., “realist”) illusions.
This misunderstanding is not the fault of McEwan, but of those readings of
Atonement that have been quick either to reject or approve what they mistakenly see as a postmodernist note at the novel’s close. In other words, a narrator says it was all just a story, end of story; Atonement’s self-conscious fictionality would seem, from this approach, to harken the death knell not only to the narrative’s own claims to veracity but also the reader’s trust in said narrative. The example of Drabble’s The Seven Sisters suggests, however, that this need not be the case. Claudia Schemberg points out the extent to which Briony’s narrative-making and mimetic aims are, like Candida’s, a process of self-definition. Following the likes of Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum, Schemberg explains how “the quest for the good life is a narrative quest directed towards a telos of fullness or wholeness, towards a coherent story that makes sense of our past, present, and future” (97).
McEwan’s protagonists possess a sense of inwardness or inner depth and the related notion that they are selves. Furthermore, they aspire to unity and wholeness in their lives [: : : ] To be on [such a] quest, however, presupposes some kind of telos or aim towards which the individual is directed, i.e., it implies the positioning of the self in moral space [: : : ] McEwan’s characters are either in search of new patterns of orientation, trying to place themselves in relation to some good, or they possess frameworks of belief which, as structuring grids in their lives, [shape their experiences]. (39)

This desire to situate selfhood, to put the self into meaningful relation to the world, is shared by Briony in Atonement. She too “create[s] and recreate[s]” herself by “turning the complex, unstoried world [she] encounter[s] into meaningful narratives” (Schemberg 39). Reckoning with the contingent in this way, she can also be seen to lay claim to agency—a sense of herself that might persist over time and thereby enable her to make plans and take on (ethical) responsibilities.
As we have seen, Atonement traces this very process: the maturing of Briony’s storytelling as it relates to her own gradually expanding comprehension of a world that exists outside her own subjective experience. What begins for her as a solipsistic endeavor to stage-manage otherness and nullify the unknown becomes, in the end, “an indispensable means of connecting self and world”
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(39). Briony, in effect, learns how narrativity—that mimetic creation—can bring coherence to her experiences. “As in everyday life, narrative in Ian McEwan’s novels functions as a tool for dealing with the challenge presented to us by contingency [: : : ] In other words, patterns of meaning are not inherent in the world but narratively created and recreated” (31).
The limits of Schemberg’s reading, however, are evident when she insists that—even while taking into consideration McEwan’s accounting for the narrative composition of selfhood—the “realist illusions” of Atonement are nevertheless shattered at the close of the novel (37). The only consolation Schemberg can therefore find in Briony’s epilogue is to say: “even if the Truth cannot be told, there still exists a possibility of misinterpretation” (37). But why must we ruthlessly constrain ourselves with this contorted and negative formulation? Why not recognize the corollary possibility of an indefinite or imaginative truth— that is, a truth always open to other points of view, a truth that is never selfsufficiently the end of the story?
The fact is, Schemberg’s thesis does not go far enough in its appreciation of narrativity. Certainly, Schemberg is right to point out Briony’s “imaginatively projecting herself into the lives of Robbie and Cecilia [: : : ] making room in her imagination for emotions, beliefs, and attachments that are not her own”
(87). She does not, however, fully reckon with the integral role that otherness must play in the making of selfhood; she does not consider just how much the mimetic process from which narrative identity springs is an inextricably intersubjective one. Briony needs to imagine those other possibilities of being and to empathize with those differing points of view in order to come to sufficient self-understanding. Otherwise, her situating herself in moral space— that “positioning” Schemberg speaks of—is substandard, if not untenable. Perhaps recognizing this fact, Schemberg, toward the end of her study, allows that we might all “accept the challenge of alterity [: : : ] rather than reject it unthinkingly from the outset,” by avoiding what she calls “intellectual rigidity, narrow-mindedness, snobbishness, and self-satisfaction” (89). She also submits
Briony as an example of Richard Rorty’s “liberal ironist” who “conceives of [her] frameworks and patterns of belief as foci imaginarii, as creations or inventions, which—though not offering [her] access to some ultimate Truth or Reality— are concepts [she] needs in order to gain orientation in moral space” (89).
Absent from this reading of narrative selfhood, however, is any sense of a mimetic circularity, one that necessarily informs and elaborates the moral space in which Schemberg rightly sees Briony positioning herself.14 Schemberg, in the end, does not appreciate fully the fact that “narrative identity is invariably intersubjective”—in other words, that selfhood rendered through narrative is, by its very mimetic nature, a continual and reciprocal communing with otherness
(Kearney, Wake of Imagination 247). For this reason, she is unable finally to extricate McEwan’s self-conscious narration from preconceptions about what metafiction ought to do ideologically-speaking.15
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So the question still remains: what is McEwan being self-conscious about, precisely? Is the extreme care with which he weaves his literary allusions into the fabric of his narrative merely a means of hinting at his novel’s own constructedness? Is Briony’s revelation in the epilogue merely meant to cast doubts on the ethical thrust of the novel? And to what end, exactly?
If we want to bring the ethical focus—all those self–Other dynamics—of
Atonement’s plot into accord with the novel’s self-conscious style, we might begin by reformulating McEwan’s metafiction as a form of meta-mimesis. The differentiation is important, firstly, because it does away with the postmodernist rubric through which metafiction tends to be read and, secondly, because it broadens our scope from fiction-making alone to a circular process of texts informing the world and of a world informing texts, one enriching the other. In the case of McEwan, we find someone tracing just this process.
Our exposure to new possibilities of being [via stories] refigures our everyday being-in-the-world. So that when we return from the story-world to the real-world, our sensibility is enriched and amplified in important respects.
In that sense, we may say that mimesis involves both [: : : ] fiction and a responsibility to real life. (Kearney, On Stories 132–33)

It is no accident, then, that Briony’s evolution as an artist seems dependent upon her becoming aware of both a poetic and an ethical responsibility to difference and to otherness.
Where metafiction primarily expresses anxieties about the fabulating, illusionmaking power narrative, a term like meta-mimesis might allow for the disclosure of complementary dialogical relationships within some of these same narratives.16 Broadening the scope of self-conscious narration in this way means demarcating not only where fiction admits to its own illusions, but also where storytelling becomes self-justifying and attests to its dual poetical and ethical impetus (e.g., where it becomes meta-mimetic). This means appreciating that mimesis is a creative process through which different possibilities of being are made communicable. It also means seeing mimesis as a lifeline through which the self can feel for others (whether they be imaginary or not) and through which others can reveal of themselves. Only then might we be able to discern that McEwan’s self-conscious narration, rather than enacting any loss of faith in narrative, instead submits narrativity as that which puts the self into interactive and meaningful contact with the Other and the world-at-large.17 It is here we find the heart of McEwan’s narrative-ethics; as Richard Kearney emphasizes, the ethical imagination needs poetic license to access, as fully and as empathetically as possible, the world of the Other.18 One needs to open oneself to the uncertainty of imaginative play (poesis) if one is to actively “imagine oneself in another person’s skin, to see things as if one were, momentarily at least, another”
(Kearney, Wake of Imagination 368).
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[The ethical imagination] needs to play because it is ethical—to ensure it is ethical in a liberating way, in a way which animates and enlarges our response to the other rather than cloistering us off in dour moralism
[: : : ] The ex-centric characteristics of the play paradigm may be construed as tokens of the poetical power of imagination to transcend the limits of egocentric, and indeed anthropocentric, consciousness—thereby exploring different possibilities of existence. (366, 367)

By overtly considering the complementary interplay between text and world, self and Other, the meta-mimetic narrator discloses something more than just fictional illusions. They, instead, attest to the cathartic and ethical power of storytelling to open up new subjective worlds with which—and for which—we can thenceforth empathize. According to Paul Ricoeur, it is fiction, in fact, that makes the suffering of the other approachable, palatable, felt. It is fiction, he says, which “gives eyes to the narrator to see and to weep” (Ricoeur, Time and
Narrative III 188). The narrative understanding that is initiated by storytelling
“provides us with both a poetics and an ethics of responsibility in that it propels us beyond self-reference to relation with others” (Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur 173).
And it is this ability, made possible by the imaginative flexibility of narrative, that allows the self to appreciate just how necessary Others are to our own selfawareness. For it is only by feeling for the Other in this way that we understand what narrative identity is all about.
We might say, consequently, that catharsis affords a singular mix of pity and fear whereby we experience the suffering of other beings as if we were them.
And it is precisely this double-take of difference and identity—experiencing oneself as another and the other as oneself—that provokes a reversal of our natural attitude to things and opens us to novel ways of seeing and being.
(Kearney, On Stories 140)

It is only through an appreciation of otherness, then, that narrative imagination— and, likewise, any narrative sense of self—can proceed.19
This relationship between the self and the Other is not, however, an irrevocably imaginary one, at least not in the sense of being illusory. Throughout Atonement, the meta-mimetic frame of the novel allows us, as readers, to witness the authorial figure in Briony attending—imaginatively, poetically, ethically—to the
“reality” of others people’s lives. Robbie Turner’s experiences at Dunkirk, for instance, have been retold imaginatively by Briony much later; she was obviously not there to witness the events that make up Part II of the novel, nor was she ever able to talk to Robbie about them. But that is not to say that any story will now do, or that Briony has simply afforded herself a free-play of signification by delving poetically into otherness. In contrast with her solipsistic stage-managing of events earlier in the novel, her retelling of Robbie’s experiences now attends to Robbie as an other self, with a reality of his own. Dunkirk is an event that happened outside the context of Briony’s novel; Robbie Turner’s experiences
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there are based, we are told, upon research Briony has carried out at The Imperial
War Museum as well as upon letters she received from one of the men who followed Robbie to the beaches. Outlining, in her epilogue, the many corrections she has had to make for the sake of historical accuracy, Briony writes, “I love these little things, this pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail that cumulatively gives such satisfaction” (Atonement 359). This attention to detail, however, signals much more than metafictional illusion-making or the cultivation of a Barthesean “reality-effect.” Briony is up to more than just conjuring Arabella-like fantasies here. From a meta-mimetic standpoint, we can see just how much she is empathetically attempting to imagine the reality of an
Other’s experience.20 She is, in effect, paying testimony to Robbie, something she immaturely failed to do as a character in the first part of the novel. And somewhat paradoxically, it is her narrative imagination—led by the transfiguring nature of mimesis—that allows her to take on this moral responsibility. Her fiction, in other words—her imaginative embellishments—come to the aid of history, particularizing it, lending to it a potential for empathetic response. As
Kearney makes clear, “[t]he more narrative singularizes historical memories, the more we strive to understand them [: : : ] The refigurative act of standing for the past provides us with a ‘figure’ to experience and to think about, to both feel and reflect upon” (On Paul Ricoeur 103). It can be said, then, that Briony needs her storytelling prowess in order to grant belatedly to Robbie what she, as a wildly imaginative adolescent, deprived him of in the first place. She needs poetic license to carry out her atonement; she needs (as we all do) narrative to help close the gap between self and Other. It is, therefore, precisely within the meta-mimetic frame of the novel that the coeval link between poetic and ethical imaginations is made most explicit. Storytelling, in other words, is ultimately shown in Atonement answering the call of the forsaken, forgotten Other, be they
(like Robbie) victims of injustice, class systems, or the brutality of war.
The space of the Other, safeguarded by the ethical imagination, by no means precludes the poetical imagination. The Other [: : : ] transgressing the security fences of self-centredness, is a catalyst for poetical imagining.
Otherness is as essential to the life of poesis as it is to that of ethos. In both cases it signals a call to abandon the priority of egological existence for the sake of alternative modes of experience hitherto repressed or simply unimagined [: : : T]he poetical readiness to tolerate the undecidability of play must be considered in relation to the ethical readiness to decide between different modes of response to the other (e.g., between those that transfigure and those that disfigure, those that care for the other and his/her otherness and those that do not). (Kearney, Wake of Imagination 369; emphasis added)

It can be said that this line between transfiguration and disfigurement also marks the difference between Briony’s mature narrative identity and her immature solipsism. She is, as an adolescent, quick to subject others—in an imposition of self—to her own interpretive framework, to the certainty of her own authorial
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vision. And yet she comes, as the author of the novel, to respect the otherness of others, to repeal the primacy of her subjectivity and to imagine empathetically other, uncertain possibilities of experience. In a metafictive illustration of her nascent being-for others in the novel’s plot, Briony, now as the narrator, shows the way narrative imagination must bear witness to others, must pay them testimony. From this meta-mimetic point of view, we can see just how, in narrative form, Briony seems to enact poetically what she herself has learned over the course of her story: to transcend her own ego-centricity and heed the face of the Other. Atonement, in this way, can be said to reinforce meta-mimetically the ethical underpinnings of its plot by illustrating the ethical destination of narrativity. How, then, might Briony’s revelation that she fictionalized the idealized reunion of Cecilia and Robbie’s be a function of McEwan’s meta-mimetic style? Is this meant purely to signify the resurgence of Briony’s old passion for tidiness, or can it perhaps illuminate more?
From a meta-mimetic standpoint, we might begin by saying that such overt transfigurations illustrate to the reader the way that an author, like Briony, poetically invents, not in effort to escape reality, but to critically explore it.
“Mimesis is ‘invention’ in the original sense of that term: invire means both to discover and to create, that is, to disclose what is already there in the light of what is not yet (but is [or may have been] potentially). It is the power, in short, to re-create actual worlds as possible worlds” (Kearney, On Stories 132). By overtly dramatizing this very process, McEwan acknowledges the relationship between a writer’s imagination and raw, chaotic life, between the world of the text and the world of the writer. Moreover, he insinuates that a discrepancy between art and “reality” may not be a matter of opposition but, rather, one of mutual recreation.21
In Briony’s efforts to retell Robbie Turner’s experiences at Dunkirk, we have already noted the way in which “fiction can serve history,” and that “this service entails ethical dimensions” (Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur 101). However, Briony’s admission that she entirely invented the reunion of Cecilia and Robbie—and, therefore, her apology and prostration before them—seems to take far more artistic liberties with the “reality” we have come to feel she had, as a character and over the course of the novel, come to terms with.22 As in his earlier novel,
Black Dogs, McEwan here seems to be playing with the ambiguous power of narrative to revise, to assert control over “the facts.” Indeed, it might be possible to read Atonement entirely as Briony’s authorial bowdlerizing of the past for the purposes of her own moral well-being—in other words, Briony as vampiric narrator, Briony as looter of other people’s lives. To do so, however, would not only be stubbornly cynical, but it would also dismiss the self-incrimination implicit in Briony’s narrating Robbie’s war-time experience as well as the title of the novel itself. To take such a view is ultimately reductive in that much of the ethical drive of the story is lost, as well as the novel’s own metafictional
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commentary on the role of narrative understanding as essential to ethics (themes
McEwan himself emphasized in interviews and essays at the time of the novel’s publication). Suffice it to say that, from a meta-mimetic standpoint, it is clear Briony is not putting a revisionist polish onto the past in order to misconstrue facts or deceive her audience. Her work is not historiographic (if it were meant to be such, she would still have had to reckon with contradictions in the public record and two death certificates). It is therefore, wrong-headed to hold her to account for poetic license; she is, first and foremost, a novelist, and this—in the context of the novel’s world—is her novelization of the past.23 It is, therefore, equally wrong to question the trustworthiness of her narration by holding it up to standards of veracity. Although she has drawn liberally from her own experiences and that of others, her story is a fictionalized, imaginative, and multiperspective retelling of these individual lives—a work of art.
Consequently, it might be more useful to compare Briony’s ultimate redressing of reality (as an author) with those that she seemed so eager to make (as a character) earlier in the novel. We should ask ourselves, fundamentally, how her immature attempts at art may have evolved in order to make her the writer of the story we have read. Or conversely, how might her novel have been different had she not come to respect other people’s minds—not just Robbie’s and Cecilia’s, but the RAF pilot’s, Luc’s? How might her novel be different had she remained so resiliently unaware of her necessary being-for others, indifferent to the face of the Other?
The fact is, the meta-mimetic frame of the novel underscores the shift from the young Briony’s imaginative disfiguration of the stories of others for her own solipsistic ends, to her appreciation of imaginative transfiguration in the name of the Other. It differentiates, at the level of its narration, between a poetics that has disinherited its ethical context and a mode of narrative-identity that recognizes just how much poesis and ethos are coevals. Simply put, McEwan’s meta-mimetic style reexpresses the very ethical shape of Atonement’s plot. It gives us a narrator who, like her counterpart in the story, has come to understand that identity and creative self-expression should always be at the service of and for the sake of the Other. It also helps us to see that Briony, in the end, imaginatively alters and recreates the past in order to reconfer empathetic value on those victims of history, the forgotten and the dead. She imaginatively communes with them in the very way she admits to having failed to do as a child. Now an author, she lends them her imagination at the expense of her ego.
She resurrects, through narrative, the possible life that they were never allowed, fictionally paying it testimony. Thinking of these others, she pays her respect to the hindered, unrealized possibilities of history.
It is only through transformation that discoveries are made. Why so? Because, in the historical past, there is what is implicit, what is inchoate;
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in particular, there are those history has forgotten [: : : ] and there are also those impeded possibilities, all that history has inhibited, massacred. Here one sees how fiction comes to history’s aid; it is fiction which liberates these inhibited possibilities. What has taken place has also prevented something else from happening and existing. This was Emmanuel Lévinas’s message, that for us to be there is, in a certain way, to usurp a place. It may also be said that every event, by the fact that it has been realised, has usurped the place of impeded possibilities. It is fiction that can save these impeded possibilities and, at the same time, turn them back on history; this reverseface of history, which has not taken place, but which had been able to take place, in a certain way has been; only however in a potential mode.
(Ricoeur, “Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative” 187)

In a similar way, Briony’s fiction—finally, paradoxically, transfiguratively—is revealed as that which instantiates her atonement. And it is McEwan’s selfconscious, meta-mimetic design, that allows us, as readers, to witness all this as an example of narrative-ethics in action.

BATH S PA U NIVERSITY
BATH , U NITED K INGDOM

NOTES
1. Briony’s realization of her being-in-the-world-with-others, this moment that she herself later calls “the moment when she became recognisably herself,” follows soon after she contemplates her own hand, in whose movements she recognizes “no stitching, no seam, and yet she knew that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real self—was it her soul?—which took the decision [to move the hand], and gave the final command” (Atonement 41, 36). It bears noting that this description echoes D. H. Lawrence’s opening to his 1925 essay “Why the Novel Matters” in which he states:
Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? Or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own [: : : ] Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive. (204)
Also telling, is that Briony’s thoughts—as well as her name—glimmer with possible allusions to the work of twenty-first-century thinker Raymond Tallis, whose The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Human Being, places at the heart of human exceptionality our tactile proficiency. In other words,
“the hand” stands, for Tallis, at the root of all meaning. He has gone so far as to say,
[t]he special relationship we enjoy with respect to the material universe—which has for much of history been understood as a special relationship to God or the gods, or the numinous powers that brought us into being—is to a very great extent the result of the special virtues of our hands. Whether or not we sit at the right hand of God in the order of things, our belief that we do so [sic], and the evidence apparently justifying that belief, owes much to such seemingly unimportant facts as that the thumb has uniquely free movement. (Interview by Andrew Brown)
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2. However, this toleration of otherness does not necessarily preclude performativity. As if to underline this fact, the “diving” image here seems to foreshadow an earlier incident, remembered by Robbie Turner later in the book, when Briony feigns drowning in order to trick him into
“saving” her (see Atonement 230–32). It is also possible to see in Briony’s stage-managed dive into the water a perverse prequel to Cecilia’s later expression of self and desire before the garden fountain. 3. Not even Robbie or Cecilia would seem to be immune from such prejudice. Later, in the book, during Briony’s imagined meeting with them, both are surprised that Danny Hardman, one of the servants’ sons, is not to blame.
4. See, for instance, the less than self-evident Tallis ancestral line that is being traced by Cecilia at the opening of the novel: “She had made a half-hearted start on the family tree, but on the paternal side, at least until her great-grandfather opened his humble hardware shop, the ancestors were irretrievably sunk in a bog of farm-labouring, with suspicious and confusing changes of surnames among men, and common law marriages unrecorded in the parish registers” (Atonement 21).
5. The fact that Briony’s complicity—or, better yet, conspiracy—with Luc’s imagination/hallucination is based in part upon a lie (that Briony remembers him) is important. This falsehood, unlike the inadvertently selfish one she spins earlier in the novel, can be read as metaphor for dialogism. It symbolizes the trust—the necessary make-believe—all of us take in the reading of narratives (novels, stories, or memories) of others. She plays along, allowing her imagination to be transfigured, rather than disfiguring the Other for the sake of self-centered certainty.
6. One might even argue that her assent to Luc’s fiction is, in itself, an act of love, indeed, where the fiction of her love for Luc becomes realized.
7. Lynne Sharon Schwartz goes so far as to say that she hopes McEwan, “has not decided that realism no longer suffices” (23). Other likeminded critics include Caroline Moore in the Sunday
Telegraph and Jason Cowley in The Times.
8. By way of analogy, it might be as if John Fowles had waited until the very end of The French
Lieutenant’s Woman to regale himself in a self-conscious free play of fictionality.
9. For examples of a view that holds most, if not all, contemporary metafiction to be subversively postmodernist in motivation see Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative (1984) and Poetics of
Postmodernism (1988), Alison Lee’s Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (1990), and
Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984). See also
Colin McCabe’s James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1978, reprinted 2002) and Catherine
Belsey’s classic Critical Practice (1980, also reprinted 2002) for works that posit an insidiously hegemonic “realism” in need of overthrowing.
10. That this conflict may itself be a postmodernist justification is not, here, considered.
11. A point perhaps suggested in the underlying irony of having to discuss the prejudicial misreading of a novel that is itself about prejudicial misreadings.
12. For me, it is the most effective (and affecting) parts of an otherwise flustered and cranky novel. It should also be noted that Candida not only confesses to writing fiction from her daughter’s point of view, but also to writing all the third-person passages in the book, as well—chapters that most readers will have assumed to be separate, authorially-speaking, from her “diary entries.”
13. Originally quoted, from a 1967 radio interview, in Bernard Bergonzi’s seminal The Situation of the Novel (1970).
14. To give her credit, Schemberg does make the case that “inhabiting another mind implies
(temporarily) changing one’s accustomed perspective or ‘habitat’ and to enter into a space, the singularity of which, even if it is produced by nothing more than a slight recasting of the familiar reconfigures the self” (87). Here, I suspect Schemberg is borrowing—very tentatively—from the terminology of Paul Ricoeur, though his name is conspicuously absent in her otherwise well-cited study. That being said, she refrains from emphasizing just how essential the refigurative process is to narrative selfhood or how that refiguration applies to works of art.
15. Briony, according to Schemberg, cannot achieve her atonement because she is “a truly postmodern writer [: : : A]ll [she] can do is arbitrate between different (conflicting) versions of truth and reality without ever arriving at a final, unchallengable account” (85n).
16. This entails a creative process (mimesis) flexible enough to allow for intersubjective agency.
In other words, it implies a communicative forum in which subjective worlds—be it the writer’s, the reader’s, or a character’s—can interact and play. According to Richard Kearney,
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[W]hen we engage with a story we are simultaneously aware of a narrator (telling the story), narrated characters (acting in the story) and a narrative interpreter (receiving the story and relating it back to a life-world of action and suffering).
Without this interplay of agency I believe that we would no longer possess a sense of that narrative identity which provides us with a particular experience of selfhood indispensable to any kind of moral responsibility. (On Stories 151)
17. Following Ricoeur, Kearney states that narrative “possess[es] a singular capacity to commit us to a dimension of otherness beyond ourselves—a commitment that, in the moment of decision, invites the self to imagine itself as another and to imagine the other as another self. Were we devoid of such narrative capacity, we would be bereft of poetic freedom and also, in the long run, of ethical sensitivity and vision” (Poetics of Modernity 170).
18. Kearney, here, has in mind a more general sense of poesis, not just as artistic invention, but more generally as imaginative play, a “creative letting go of the drive of possession, of the calculus of means and ends” (Wake of Imagination 368). “Poetics,” he writes, “is the carnival of possibilities where everything is permitted, nothing censored” (368).
19. It is Briony’s narrative imagination, we can now see, that underpins the ethical awakening— her nascent being-for others—traced by the novel’s plot. The gradual letting-go of her egocentric, solipsistic worldview can, therefore, be seen as a precondition for her growth as an artist. For instance, when she, in Part III of the novel, sends Cyril Connolly a draft of her story Two Figures by a Fountain, it seems obvious to the reader—and, in fact, to Connolly—that the world of the
Robbie and Cecilia characters (they are, tellingly, nameless) has yet to be appreciated meaningfully.
They are truly just two figures by a fountain, and that is all. Briony has yet to subsume herself and provide an imaginative investment in the world of the either character. She can write sublimely of
“the look and feel of things, and [of] some irrelevant memories” from differing points of view, but she cannot, as yet, locate the differing meanings in them (Atonement 303). Moreover, by casting herself merely as a distant observer of this crucial episode, she does not implicate herself or her misinterpretation of the event, as she later will.
20. As Richard Kearney acknowledges, “the question of mimesis becomes more vexed, of course, when it comes to historical narratives [: : : ] In other words, historical narratives , unlike fictional ones hold that their accounts refer to things that actually happened” (On Stories 134). Mimesis, in such cases, reaches an ethical limit. Revisionism can only go so far. As Paul Ricoeur suggests,
If we do not resolutely maintain the difference between history and fiction, how do we answer people like Faurisson [and other Holocaust deniers : : : ] Roland Barthes’s idea of the “effect of the real” could, dangerously, support this kind of discourse which is an insult to the dead: they are killed twice. Now, with regard to them, we have a debt, I would say a duty of restitution [: : : T]hus, by means of history, a communion established between the living and the dead. If we are unable to “fictionalize” the dead, we would have to return the “having been” to them. No simple capitulation before “being no more.” The past is not just what is absent from history; the right of its “having been” also demands to be recognized. This is what the historian’s debt consists in. (“Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative” 186)
21. This link between creative recreation and world is, it should be pointed out, wholly mimetic:
[The] power of mimetic re-creation sustains a connection between fiction and life while also acknowledging their difference. Life can be properly understood only by being retold mimetically through stories. But the act of mimesis which enables us to pass from life to life-story introduces a “gap” (however minimal) between living and recounting [: : : T]he recounted life prises open perspectives inaccessible to ordinary perception. It marks a poetic extrapolation of possible worlds which supplement and refashion our referential relations to the life-world : : : (Kearney, On Stories 132)
22. It is important to remind ourselves, however, that Briony does not go so far as to have her fictionalized apology accepted by the two lovers. From her authorial standpoint, she is left wholly unforgiven. 98

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23. Incidentally, McEwan removed from Atonement a biographical note for Briony that made her career as an established novelist that much clearer. McEwan quoted it in an interview with Adam
Begley in The Paris Review in 2002:
About the author: Briony Tallis was born in Surrey in 1922, the daughter of a senior civil servant. She attended Roedean School, and in 1940 trained to become a nurse.
Her wartime nursing experience provided the material for her first novel, Alice Riding, published in 1948 and winner of that year’s Fitzrovia Prize for fiction. Her second novel, Soho Solstice, was praised by Elizabeth Bowen as “a dark gem of psychological acuity,” while Graham Greene described her as “one of the more interesting talents to have emerged since the war.” Other novels and short-story collections consolidated her reputation during the fifties. In 1962 she published A Barn in Steventon, a study of domestic theatricals in Jane Austen’s childhood. Tallis’s sixth novel, The Ducking
Stool, was a best-seller in 1965 and was made into a successful film starring Julie
Christie. Thereafter, Briony Tallis’s reputation went into a decline, until the Virago imprint made her work available to a younger generation in the late seventies. She died in July 2001.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David K. O’Hara is a writer and a recent graduate of the English Literature and Creative Writing
PhD program at Bath Spa University in the UK. His thesis, Mimesis and the Imaginable Other:
Metafictional Narrative Ethics in the Novels of Ian McEwan, examined the relationship between narrative and ethics in McEwan’s work by relating it to the philosophies of Paul Ricoeur and
Richard Kearney. More recently, he presented a paper, “From Mimesis to Ethics: The Case of Ian
McEwan’s Atonement,” for the 2009 Narrating the Human Subject Conference in Oxford.

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