War and Ward:
Trauma and Trauma-healing in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
南華大學 外國語文學系
趙美玲
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o‟er-fraught heart and bids it break.
Macbeth IV, iii.
Ian McEwan‟s Atonement (2007)—a perspectivist novel in four parts—deals
ostensibly with Robbie Turner‟s tribulation. He is first wrongly accused of a sexual
assault, later makes the devastating encounter with the Second World War, and finally
dies of septicaemia before the Dunkirk Evacuation. Robbie‟s ordeal is shared by
Cecilia Tallis, who defends him out of love and trust, becomes estranged from her
family, and dies in a German Blitz. The first part describes the various events leading
to the catastrophic sexual assault on a summer day in 1930 at Tallis country home
from various perspectives, accompanied by a bizarre atmosphere of an impending war.
The second part in which Robbie poses as the central reflector focuses on his physical
and mental struggles against the injustice and the war. The third part in which Briony
occupies the central position of the narrative reveals her gradual realization of her
crime through her first-hand contact with the impact of war at a war hospital. The
fourth part plummets temporally to 1999 to recount Briony‟s illness, her birthday
party, and her astonishing confession regarding the true authorship of the first three
parts. Briony‟s confession not only dumbfounds most first-time readers but also
negates altogether the reader‟s reading experience. Does the novel by using such a
shocking ending aim higher at featuring the much more subtle and complex
“audience‟s participation” and at revealing that “narrative imagining is not static or
unified, but dynamic and multi-polar” as James Harold observes (130)? Or is the
novel “nothing more than a complex but empty secret, designed to play on the
reader‟s compulsion to head, like one of Emily‟s moths, toward the impression of a
deeper darkness” as Peter Mathews proposes (158)? Be it what it may, the reader in
each case, as Mathews subsequently maintains, is “forced to review what she has read
thus far and think of it now in a new way” and is also “forced to consider the
protagonist in a new way, as the author of the book that she has been reading” (7). In a
word, at the very end of the novel the reader encounters a kind of narrative wreckage
that subverts all his/her previous reading experience.
The most significant wreckage that needs to be dealt with is the novel‟s form.
The new recognition of Briony as the internal writer breaks the previously perceived
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four-part structure to form a new two-part configuration: the framework (the last part
1999) and the story (the first three parts). However, a different bipartite structure can
also be discerned in terms of the reader‟s engagement with the narrative. Using
Richard Wollheim‟s distinction between central and acentral imagining, we can also
distinguish in the novel a different two-part structure. 1 According to Richard
Wolheim, when we read the novel, we either engage ourselves with central (Briony‟s)
imagining or the acentral (the editor‟s) imagining. Reading from this perspective, the
reader is engaged mostly with Briony‟s imagining but with only a small part of
acentral imagining ascribed to Cyril Connolly in his rejection letter. Be it in the
framework-story structure or in the engagement with central or acentral imaginings,
the figure that occupies the central ground of the narrative is no longer Robbie but
Briony. Here Briony the internal writer seems to play on the reader‟s affective
response by directing his/her attention not only to the fictive but also the literary
aspect of the narrative.2 In addition to the events in the narrative, the reader is
brought to an awareness of how the story is told. Such reconsideration of the novel‟s
form serves to give Briony the precedence both in the fictive as well as the literary
dimension of the novel.
On closer reading, the novel, spanning extensively from Briony‟s entrance into
adolescence to her age at 77, is to a very great extent autobiographical. In addition, it
is composed in the recognizable form of a memoir, focusing on a sin/a crime that she
precipitates and her lifelong but futile effort to atone for it. The unresolvable and the
incommunicable nature of her sin makes Briony become a kind of Geheimnisstraeger
(“bearers of a secret” never to be divulged).3 Used to bear such an unspeakable secret,
the novel therefore can also be looked at as a means of confession. The
autobiographical and confessional attributes of the novel place Briony in the central
position as both the sinner and the confessor. Furthermore, the fact that Briony is not
only the protagonist but also the novel‟s internal writer provides an extra twist to
sinner‟s relation to her sin. In addition to retelling the overwhelming event that
changes her life (and that of others), the novel is self-evidently about a writer‟s effort
to search for the right form to accommodate not only her sin but also her frustration.
To sustain her confession, Briony incorporates different forms into the novel,
including stream-of-consciousness technique through singular and multiple
perspectives, the more straightforward narration, and the form of framework story.
One of the few critics who offer insight into the nature of Briony‟s crime/sin both
1
Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (New York: Cambridge UP, 1984).
Peter Lamarque‟s terminology. See “Tragedy and Moral Value.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy
73 (1995): 239-49.
3
In analyzing the traumatic encounter of the survivors of the Holocaust, Cathy Caruth uses the term to
describe general sentiment shared by them who often claim that they belong to a “secret order” that is
“sworn to silence” (67).
2
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from the fictive and literary aspects, Peter Mathews considers the novel‟s final twist
that overturns the novel‟s formal structure a “narrative ruse” to project “the
impression of a deeper darkness” (157). He points out that Briony‟s ambivalent
participation in the process of testimony is “a reflection of her shame at being thrown
into a world over which she has no control and yet to which she must bear witness as
if it were of her own making” (159). Mathews‟s observation reveals not only the
fundamental predicament but also the absolute autonomy in Briony‟s confession: she
is the only witness to her crime. To bear witness to her crime, Briony is forced to face
her shame—the disintegration of her subjectivity. However, in reconstructing the
narrative that recounts that loss, her subjectivity is regained. Therefore, the central
issue of the novel is Briony‟s autobiographical recognition of her shame which is
achieved through the alternation between subjectification and desubjectification.
The Origin: Trauma and Narrative Breakdown
Lenore Terr offers a basic situation of psychic trauma: it occurs “when a sudden,
unexpected, overwhelming intense emotional blow or a series of blows assaults the
person from outside” (8). It is a kind of intense anxiety or dread that is very similar to
Heidegger‟s concept of Angst which David Cooper describes as like that of “a vertigo,
where a person is brought face to face with the presence of an abyss and the absence
of a supporting ground, the experience of groundlessness and the absence of anything
holding one in place and anchoring one‟s action” (qtd in Crossley 56). In this kind of
existential crisis, nothing makes sense anymore. The loss of grounding of things
making sense, according to Crossley, “highlights the way in which we routinely take
for granted the sense of implicit connection between event, people, plans, aims,
objectives, values and beliefs” (56). When it happens, it seems as if one “element” in
the chain disappears. And therefore associations, plans, hopes and fears all break like
“shards of glass—and with it our sense of who we are and why we are here” (Crossley
56). Such loss of grounding of things hits almost all the major characters and Briony
most vehemently.
The first chapter of the novel lays all the necessary groundwork of and provides
the essential elements and milieu for a crisis: a highly imaginative girl who has just
reached her teens tries to make sense out of the adult world which she is ill equipped
to comprehend. Briony enters the novel proper as a promising girl who possesses
unusual curiosity, sensitivity, and certain degree of self-reflexivity. However her
prospect is obstructed by some pre-adolescence vices, such as self-centeredness and
obstinate binary-opposition world view. Briony is a girl who has unusual passion for
order and secrets. She is described as “one of those children possessed by a desire to
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have the world just so” (4). Her love of order is demonstrated by means of her
arrangement of her room—the only tidy upstairs room in the house—which “was a
shrine to her controlling demon” (5). Her penchant for miniaturization manifests her
obsession with order: “the model farm spread across a deep window ledge . . . all
facing one way—towards their owner,” “farmyard hens were neatly corralled,” and
“Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict
instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures . . . suggested by
their even ranks and spacing a citizen‟s army awaiting orders” (5). The neat order in
Briony‟s miniature world shows that her love of order is also reflexive of a desire for
control.
Her love of secret is embodied in the thought and care she gives to her treasure
box, in which some common objects are stored and sanctified:
In a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing
against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a
diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her won
invention . . . . An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable
floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four
years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double
acorn, fool‟s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel‟s skull
as light as a leaf. (5)
As Maurice Blanchot maintains, “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 not appearance of any secret”
(137). Therefore, in Briony‟s case the quality of a secret is in its form rather than its
content. Thinking likewise, Peter Mathews discerns a paradox in Briony‟s love of
secret: “the positive content at the heart of the secret, the evidence that can be
gathered and analyzed, is effectively sidelined by the act of obscuration that frames it”
(149). Her secrets are but “transparently counterfeit” (149). Like her treasures, each
object has a symbolic value—the acorn symbolizes new life, the fool‟s gold promises
a fortune, the spell suggests magic. Each provides the promise of something greater,
but the promise is “cancelled by its own formal status” (Mathews 148). This paradox
in her love of secret foreshadows her frustration not only in her writing but also in her
life.
Briony brings her love of order and secrets into full play in writing: “writing
stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation”
(7). For her, the imagination itself is a source of secrets, and her passion for tidiness is
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also satisfied, for “an unruly world could be made just so” (7). Her masterpiece The
Trials of Arabella, a fairy-tale play about the restoration of peace of a strayed princess,
establishes her subject position in the first part as the writer, the director, and the
prerogative of the leading role. In a word, the play satisfies not only her sense of
order—justice is achieved through death and marriage, “the former being set aside
exclusively for the morally dubious, the latter a reward withheld until the final page”
(7)—but also the full execution of her imagination. Standing on the threshold between
childhood and adulthood, Briony still clings to the fairy-tale world (she needs
desperately her mother‟s appraisals), but at the same time she wishes to transcend it
(she disapproves of her sister‟s condescending, overstated enthusiasm). This
oscillation is reflected in a gap between what she wants and what she is able to
achieve. The gap is manifestly shown in what she claims to be the chief purpose of
the play. It is, as she says, for no one else but her brother Leon “to celebrate his return,
provoke his admiration and guide him away from his careless succession of
girlfriends, towards the right form of wife, the one who would persuade him to return
to the countryside, the one who would sweetly request Briony‟s services as a
bridesmaid” (4). Briony‟s paradox is shown in her intention to use a fairy tale to
change the life of an adult who no longer believes in it. Briony‟s secret wish reflects
childlike longings elevated to such a level so that her control loses its grip and her
imagination proves insufficient.
The Trials of Arabella is a folk-tale version of a child‟s naïve version of adult
sexuality, and, as it is brought face to face with the adult world, her peaceful and
self-referential world crumbles. That Part One to a very great extent chronicles
Briony‟s traumatic sexual initiation, her jolty crossing from innocence to experience,
is fully reflected in its rampant erotic content and sexual innuendoes. Lola Quincey,
Briony‟s cousin who has just reached the age of puberty, poses as Briony‟s
counterpart in sexual initiation. Lola parents‟ divorce opens Briony‟s eyes to a
destructive aspect of adult sexuality which is incompatible with and incomprehensible
to her fairy-tale world so that she can only dismiss it as disorder: “She vaguely knew
that divorce was an affliction, but she did not regard it as a proper subject, and gave it
no thought. It was a mundane unraveling that could not be reversed, and therefore
offered no opportunities to the storyteller: it belonged in the realm of disorder” (8-9).
In contrast, her simple world celebrates marriage: “marriage was the thing, or rather, a
wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry
and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union,” and “A good wedding was an
unacknowledged representation of the as yet unthinkable—sexual bliss” (8-9). As
Pilar Hidalgo observes, like Catherine Morland, Briony is a heroine “whose
perception is distorted by literature and an imperfect knowledge of the world” (83).
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Just like her passion for order, her knowledge of adult sexuality still remains at the
empty and purely formal level and a lack of the “vital knowingness” that makes her ill
equipped to advance into the adult world. And just like her heroines and heroes who
“reached their innocent climaxes and needed to go no further” (9), Briony‟s denial of
divorce is itself a deliberate rejection of the adult sexuality that prevents her from
pursuing the real secret—the vital knowledge—behind the scene only through which
safe crossing from innocence to adulthood can be promised.
In addition, in Briony sexual initiation Lola poses as a potential threat as well as
a lure. Lola‟s precocity not only lays bare Briony‟s immaturity but also threatens to
override her subjectivity. Only two years older, Lola exudes a kind of precocious
femininity that attracts and at the same time baffles Briony:
Lola had come . . . in the guise of the adult she considered herself at heart to
be. She wore pleated flannel trousers that ballooned at the hips and flared at
the ankle, and a short-sleeved sweater made of cashmere. Other tokens of
maturity included a velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses gathered
at the nape and secured with an emerald clasp, three loose silver bracelets
around a freckled wrist, and the fact that whenever she moved, the air about
her tasted of rose water. (34)
While Lola is sexually ready for romance, Briony is still too innocent to advance to
adult sexuality. This contrast is vividly exemplified in their competition for the role of
Arabella, a rivalry which contributes a lot to Briony‟s self-annihilation. Briony‟s only
recourse to clench the role (and hence to claim her subject position) or Arabella is her
authorship. Her only logic is the logic of absolutism—a power sanctified by her
family and enjoyed only in children‟s fairy-tale land: “She was not playing Arabella
because she wrote the play, she was taking the part because no other possibility had
crossed her mind, because that was how Leon was to see her, Because she was
Arabella” (13). Her absolutism is totally paled by Lola‟s sophistication. The warning
of Arabella‟s father written Briony herself turns out ironically to be a projection of her
own plight:
My darling one, you are young and lovely,
But inexperienced, and though you think
The world is at your feet,
It can rise up and tread on you. (16)
Both Briony and Lola fit the description of the first half: young, lovely, and
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inexperienced; however, their fates diverge in the second half which also predicts
Briony‟s impending crisis. While Briony‟s self-deluding authority is well protected,
Lola‟s pride is stripped naked by her parents‟ divorce and her reluctant dependence on
the tender mercies of her relatives, two important factors that not only pronounce the
end of her innocence but initiate her into the complexity of the adult world. Therefore
even though Briony claims that no one can play Arabella but she, it is Lola whose
experience makes her the better candidate. Therefore, Briony‟s play which is meant to
be used by her to bolster her subject position creates unwittingly an occasion for the
disembodiment of her subjectivity.
“The play,” the exact words that begin the novel, sets the key note of the whole
novel. Covered in a deceptive appearance of an ordinary fairy tale in which the
beautiful princess and prince charming finally get united and live happily ever after,
the play actually hides certain dark message that deconstructs itself as a fairy tale.
This note can be detected early in the prologue whose full content appears only at the
last part of the novel—a formal device used to underscore Briony‟s missed (late)
perception of its meaning:
This is the tale of spontaneous Arabella
Who ran off with an extrinsic fellow.
It grieved her parents to see their first born
Evanesce from her home to go to Eastbourne
Without permission, to get ill and find indigence
Until she was down to her last sixpence.
………………………………………..
For that fortuitous girl the sweet day dawned
To wed her gorgeous prince. But be warned,
Because Arabella almost learned too late,
That before we love, we must cogitate! (367-68)
This gap between the form of the play (a fairy tale) and its dark message is one of the
devices that the writer (or the internal writer) uses to accentuate young Briony‟s
traumatic experience. Just as the blissful atmosphere of the prologue is subverted by
two dark and grim messages—the impossibility of knowledge without the loss of
innocence and the belatedness of obtaining such knowledge, in the fairy-tale world
Briony‟s princess makes mistake but is still able to marry a gorgeous prince; by
contrast in the realistic world Briony the princess, instead of learning “almost too
late,” learns “one moment too late.”
As Briony claims, The Trials of Arabella, “at some moments chilling, at others
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desperately sad,” tells a tale “of the heart whose message, conveyed in a rhyming
prologue, was that love which did not build a foundation on good sense was doomed”
(3). However, it only shows Briony‟s limited view of love, especially in the aspect of
adult sexuality, which eventually leads to her disorientation in adult world, and as her
engagement with adult sexuality intensifies, she becomes more and more
disorientated. Briony‟s loss of direction is initially manifested in her reading of an
implicit amorous encounter between Robbie and Cecilia at the fountain on which her
Figures by the Fountain is based. Watching the scene from a window two stories up,
Briony can only resort to her limited nursery-tale knowledge for interpretation which
turns out to be just an extension of her “self-mythologising” (41). Her reading
becomes problematic when it is contrasted with Emily‟s and Cecilia‟s versions. She
admits five decades later that at that time “she had privileged access . . . to adult
behaviour, to rites and conventions she knew nothing about” (39). Robbie‟s
undisguised and salacious letter further rips Briony‟s world of non-referentiality and
lays bare more tellingly her unpreparedness for adult sexuality. This letter evokes two
different readings and thus produces two different kinds of affect. The lovers catch its
undertone. For Robbie, the letter is just a Freudian slip inspired by Grays’ Anatomy.
In spite of the fact that the letter is not the one meant to be sent to Cecilia, it
unwittingly discloses Robbie‟s carnal desire for her. To Cecilia, Robbie‟s obscene
letter, though lewd, validates his love for her and succeeds in arousing her sexually. It
terminates all her previous uncertainty and reservation and eventually culminates in
their physical consummation. Caught between the letter‟s literal meaning and its
sexual content, Briony however experiences a kind of shock which renders her
helpless and vulnerable. Known as a girl possessing a facility of words, Briony is
baffled and overwhelmed by the simple, direct, and realistic anatomical term “cunt.”
Her disorientation is fully reflected in her inability to utter the simple four-letter word
that refers to a female organ. She even has to spell it backward while sharing the
content of the letter with Lola. The letter, especially the word, not only subverts the
sense of order and neatness that she values in her well-organized world but also
throws her a kind of shock that threatens to disrupt her subjectivity: “The very
complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view that she was entering an
arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit.
What fairy tale ever held so much by way of contradiction?” (113).
In dealing with this sudden, unexpected impact, Briony resorts to the technique
of dissociation or, as Sandra Bloom puts it, a kind of “built-in safety valve” through
creating “a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory,
identity, or perception of the environment” (8).4 Briony‟s immediate reaction is a
4
It is a common measure a victim uses to protect him/herself from further damage. According to
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divorce from her fairy-tale life: “she needed to be alone to consider Robbie afresh,
and to frame the opening paragraph of a story shot through with real life. No more
princesses!” (113). However, her limited knowledge and her desperation to regain her
subject position offer her no asset in crossing this rite de passage. Her only measure is
a retraction to her well-protected world and to a clear-cut logic that she is familiar
with: “But wasn‟t she . . . supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such
nursery-tale place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each
other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their
glorious imperfection. If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it” (113-4).
Through the denial of the adult world and clinging to the nursery-tale world she relies
on detachment and alienation to transmute her confused emotions. Failing to read the
letter as an expression of purely male sexual fantasy, young Briony can only perceive
it as some wicked doings: “with the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even
criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness and even in her excitement
over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and
would need her help” (114). To hold on to her sense of order so as not to lose her
subject position, Briony backtracks to her fairy-tale world to assign Robbie the role of
the perpetrator: “A maniac. The word had refinement, and the weight of medical
diagnosis. All these years she had known him and that was what he had been” (119).
Briony‟s nursery world view is constructed within a limited sense of symmetry. Hence
the disruption of this symmetry calls for a scapegoat who can be blamed for such
disruption to fulfill her naïve assumption that if this person can be eliminated, order
will be restored. Robbie and his obscene letter provide a timely occasion for her to
reassert such symmetry. As Peter Mathews points out, “the obscene letter, coupled
with her ontological rupture, becomes the ammunition she needs to take aim at this
destroyer of the aesthetically perfect worlds of her childhood” (155). Therefore,
identifying Robbie as Lola‟s attacker demonstrates not only Briony‟s desperate need
to reassert her subject position but, more implicitly, her utter depression and
alienation.
In addition to the fictive aspect that deals with the loss and disorientation Briony
experiences in life, Briony‟s crisis and frustration are also manifested in the literary
aspect. “Part One” is to be found out later a revision of Briony‟s novella entitled Two
Figures by the Fountain, her first piece of fiction created while working as a nurse at
a war hospital. McEwan said in an interview that he wants to “use the full resources
Bloom, the victim “may dampen down any emotional experience that could lead back to the traumatic
memory,” “may withdraw from relationships that could trigger off memories,” “may curtail sensory
and physical experiences that could remind us of the trauma,” “may avoid engaging in any situation
that could lead to remembering the trauma” (9).
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of an adult mentality remembering herself.”5 Since Part One is about an adolescent
memory recollected but also re-examined through the 77-year-old Biony‟s
consciousness, it clearly represents her first attempt to clarify her confused feelings.
The stratification of Briony into different ages as the narrator remembering and
revising the same experience represents a way of reenactment, a mechanism
commonly seen in traumatic victims‟ attempt to reconstruct their own traumatic
experiences. Kathy Caruth points out that the victim‟s insistent reenactments of the
past “do not simply serve as testimony to an event, but may also, paradoxically
enough, bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred” (151).
According to Caruth, trauma does not simply serve as record of the past but “registers
the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned” (151). Through the
juxtaposition of the teenage Briony with the two older Brionys collaborating as the
narrator to restore the true situation on the summer day, the novella serves not only to
reenact a past but also to re-live the past that has never been fully understood.
Apart from the narrative aspect, Briony‟s loss and frustration is also structured
within the narrative technique. Technically, Briony in the novella applies the gimmick
of a modernist perspective novel by relating a day‟s events through various central
reflectors, including Emily, Cecilia, Robbie, and Briony herself. The
stream-of-consciousness technique itself represents a kind of narrative wreckage in
the sense that it is interrupted, repetitious, and discontinuous. As far as subjectivity is
concerned, it instigates the process of desubjectification—an abandonment of her
subject position in the narrative. As Peter Mathews maintains, by means of multiple
perspectives Briony‟s innocence is “ruptured by the realization that each person
possesses a complex individual consciousness just like her own” (156). The inclusion
of the different points of view placed side by side with her own represents a growth
out of the absolutism Briony values when she composes The Trials. Even so, the
technique at the same time connotes self-disintegration and hence underscores more
vehemently Briony‟s crisis. Narrative breakdown is in this case indicative of
psychological turmoil. The fact that “Part One” is structurally fragmented compared
to the more focused narrative perspective of the rest of the novel—the second part is
narrated from Robbie‟s point of view, and the third and four Briony‟s at different
ages—reflects to a very great extent Briony‟s disrupted psyche. Each perspective
poses as a threat to Briony‟s well-protected world and a challenge to her interpretation.
McEwan says in another interview that in “Part One” Briony is “burying her
conscience beneath her stream of consciousness,” implying that this modern stylistic
innovation has some hidden moral consequences.6 Brian Finney, who offers great
5
Ian McEwan, “A Novelist on the Edge,” interview with Dan Cryer, Newsday, 24 Apr. 2002: p. B6.
Ian McEwan, interview with Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm. KCRW, Santa Monica, California, July
11, 2002.
6
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insights into the narrative aspect of the novel, points out the limitation of such
technique: “By referring within the text to an earlier literary genre or movement,
McEwan draws attention to a continuous tension between the narrative and its
narration” (72). In the novel, the novella is credited not only as “static” but also as
lacking development by the editor C. C. to whom Briony sends her novella for review.
He praises the novella highly but still rejects it for its want of the “backbone” of a
story (314). The folly that the young Briony is blind to is finally recognized by the
elder Briony: “Did she really think she could hide behind some borrowed notions of
modern writing, and drown her guilt in a stream—three-streams-of consciousness?
The evasions of her little novel were exactly those of her life. Everything she did not
wish to confront was also missing from her novella” (320). Everything she did not
wish to confront is the “backbone” which, to be more specific, refers to a direct
confrontation with her trauma and shame. Therefore, even though the novella tells and
reenacts a traumatic experience that Briony as an adolescent is too young to own and
is the adult Briony‟s attempt to project herself into the feelings of others, it fails as the
stream-of consciousness technique fails to provide genuine intimacy to sorest point of
her experience.
The Structure of Trauma: War and Ward
If “Part One,” composed by Briony the internal author to trace the origin of her
own traumatic experience, lacks development and the backbone of a story, “Part Two”
and “Part Three” are meant to make up for the lack and to serve as the backbone.
Structurally, Briony abandons “the Bergsonian theories of consciousness” she relies
on in “Part One” (314) and replaces them with “a simple narrative” in parts two and
three (312). If part one focuses on the collapse of Briony‟s subject position (or her
desubjectification) whose upshot hits hard on the star-crossed lovers, parts two and
three serve to deal directly with this upshot and the couple‟s changed fate. If part one
deals with the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self, the later two parts are
devoted to the consequence of such instability. If in part one Biony the writer begins
to project herself into the thoughts of several others, she dwells more intently on the
consciousness of a single person in each later part. Therefore, if the first part portrays
a trauma that has never been fully owned, the second and the third parts serve to
reenact the traumatic encounter in the realm of pure materiality. Latency and
desubjectification—the two essential symptoms that characterize Briony‟s
trauma—are specifically represented through Robbie‟s war experience and Briony‟s
experience at the war hospital.
In “Part Two” Briony projects herself into Robbie‟s consciousness first through
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his time in jail both as a reinforcement of Robbie‟s suffering and as a foil to her own
traumatic experience. Jail is a place where subjectivity encounters the crisis of total
annihilation. In jail people lose their identities as individuals and are replaced by
numbers. Jail is also traditionally a locus of shame. However, unlike the other inmates
who are jailed for the crimes they committed, Robbie‟s shame consists in his inability
to locate his crime. For Robbie, jail represents the imprisonment of subjectivity:
“Three and a half years of nights like these, unable to sleep, thinking of another
vanished boy, another vanished life that was once his own, and waiting for dawn, the
slop-out and another wasted day. He did not know how he survived the daily stupidity
of it. The stupidity and claustrophobia” (202). Robbie‟s trauma is embodied in his
constant but futile resistance of being desubjectified. Repression of subjectivity is
implemented through the suppression of words. Robbie‟s only resort to sustain his
subjectivity is through writing to Cecilia: “In love with her, willing himself to stay
sane for her, he was naturally in love with her words. When he wrote back, he
pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity” (204). To sustain subjectivity
is to remain sane. However, as a result of being diagnosed by the jail psychiatrist
“with clinical precision, as morbidly over-sexed” and therefore is “not to be
stimulated” (204), both his and Cecilia‟s letters are confiscated “for some timid
expression of affection” (204). Robbie‟s surrogate measure to fight desubjectification
is through writing about literature and using characters as codes, or, in other words,
through fiction-making. This surrogate measure to regain subjectivity sinks Robbie
(and Cecilia) more deeply into the abyss of desubjectification since by turning himself
into character and his intimacy to Cecilia into fiction, he at the same time is doubly
alienated from normality.
The discrepancy between fiction and reality is tellingly manifested in the
couple‟s reunion. In their first reunion after long separation, the intimacy Robbie and
Cecilia have tried to sustain for years via words refuse to materialize: “They sat down,
looked at each other, smiled and looked away” (205). The futility of words to regain
subject position is further manifested in the lovers‟ fictive love-making: “Robbie and
Cecilia had been making love for years—by post. In their coded exchanges they had
drawn close . . . .” (205). The closeness turns ephemeral when tested in the real world:
“how artificial that closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small-talk, their
helpless catechism of polite query and response. As the distance opened up between
them, they understood how far they had run ahead of themselves in their letters. This
moment had been imagined and desired for too long, and could not measure up” (205).
By contrast, intimacy is immediately reestablished by a simple physical contact,
through which Robbie‟s subjectivity is also temporarily regained: “He kissed her,
lightly at first, but they drew close, and when their tongues touched, a disembodied
12
part of himself was abjectly grateful, for he know had now had a memory in the bank
and would be drawing on it for months to come” (206). Submerging among the
anonymous many in jail, Robbie tries to preserve his subjectivity through
fiction-making only to witness his own desubjectification. Both Cecilia‟s unfailing
calls, “I love you, and you saved my life,” and the Wiltshire dream on which Robbie
depends to sustain his will to live are simply testimonies of the ineffectiveness of
words (fiction) to regain subjectivity.
Robbie‟s trauma is more emphatically represented through his encounter with
war, especially through the impact created by the German Blitzkrieg and the mutilated
body. In the war, Robbie‟s subjectivity is furthermore deconstructed as he becomes
more anonymous in the army and later in the evacuating mass. The war is of course
the origin and the arena of the most traumatic experiences because combats are not
only characterized by fastness and unexpectedness that devastate even the most
prepared but are also occasions for the extreme ravage of the human bodies. Paul
Virillo, who offers penetrating views on wars and accidents, asserts that accidents
which happen by chance in normal life are positively embraced and cultivated in wars:
“war produces accidents. . . . What are war machines? They are machines in
reverse—they produce accidents, disappearances, deaths, breakdowns”
(“Speed-Space” 72). The intensity and speed of combat more often than not outstrip
punctual perception, apprehension, and representation. These overwhelming
experiences, according to Peter Crothwaite, “rendered many of those engaged in the
conflict incapable of fully experiencing and processing it as it occurred” (54). Felman
and Laub call this kind of psychological paralysis or numbness “crisis of witnessing”
(1992), or in Lacan‟s terminology “a missed encounter with the real” (55). The
encounter is missed partly because the real is fundamentally unassimilable to the
symbolic order that structures subjectivity, and partly because the real‟s intrusion
upon the subject “cannot be articulated or forestalled” (Bowie 100). Freud uses
different term “traumatic neurosis” to designate the condition which, for him, is “a
consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against
stimuli” (31). This breach is inflicted not simply by the intensity of the stimulus
surging in upon the subject, but also “by lack of any preparedness for anxiety” (31).
Therefore, in most traumatic situations, the encounter or the stimulus is either missed
or incompletely experienced at the time that it occurs.
In “Part Two” which is mostly devoted to present the emotional truth of Robbie‟s
war experience, the psychological quandary caused by latency and unpreparedness
that most traumatic victims undergo are fully manifested. Such purpose is plainly
stated in the first sentence of this part: “There were horrors enough, but it was the
unexpected detail that threw him and afterwards would not let him go” (191). This
13
unexpected detail is represented vividly through aerial warfare. Aerial warfare is the
most unpredictable and contingent situation, and, as Virillo points out, “The faster the
device, the greater the possibility of achieving the defeat of the unprepared adversary”
(War and Cinema 133). The Stuka or Junker 87, the German dive-bomber, of the First
World War possesses such unprecedented speed and ferocity that terrorize and
paralyze those under its attack. Therefore, through aerial attack a traumatic situation is
effectively evoked. The following passage is the writer‟s (Briony‟s) narrative
reenactment of Robbie‟s first encounter with the Stuka:
Hanging there, a long way off, about thirty feet above the road, warped by
the rising heat, was what looked like a plank of wood, suspended
horizontally, with a bulge in its centre. The major‟s words were not reaching
him, and nor were his own clear thoughts. The horizontal apparition
hovered in the sky without growing larger, and though he was beginning to
understand its meaning, it was, as in a dream, impossible to begin to
respond or move his limbs. His only action had been to open his mouth, but
he could make no sound, and would not have known what to say, even if he
could. (221)
Under the Stuka attack, Robbie undergoes a typical traumatic process of
desensitization—a numbness or paralysis that characterizes a person‟s inadequately
grasped encounter with violence. Paul Virillo has a keen observation about the effect
of weapon on human beings: “Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of
perception—that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical,
neurological procession in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting
human reaction and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects”
(War and Cinema 6). During another attack, in addition to paralysis, Robbie suffers
from a different kind of post-traumatic effect—traumatic reenactment: “Each dive
brought every man, cornered and cowering, to face his execution. When it did not
come, the trial had to be lived through all over again and the fear did not diminish.
For the living, the end of a Stuka attack was the paralysis of shock, of repeated
shocks” (239). Desensitization and reenactment are the typical fight-or-flight
protective mechanism trauma victims used to protect themselves from harm (Bloom
2). Adorno offers a similar viewpoint on this effect: “with each explosion, [the war]
has breached the barrier against stimili beneath which experience, the lag between
healing oblivion and healing recollection, forms. Life has changed into a timeless
succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals” (54). Thus the
speed of the German Blitzkrieg attack creates a kind of, in Van der Kolk‟s words,
14
“emotional memory” difficult to erase and at the same time impossible to put into
words (69).7
As the reader finds out later, this part as well as the rest of the novel is all but
Briony‟s creation. In writing about Robbie‟s suffering in the prison and in the war or,
in a word, Robbie‟s desubjectification, Briony at the same time commences her
life-long process of seeking atonement. Her atonement in this part is executed through
two major gestures: her voluntary desubjectification and her active projection into
Robbie‟s consciousness. If Briony‟s crime is committed out of her desperation to
safeguard her subject position, her journey of atonement begins when she actively
gives up that subject position. Unlike in “Part One” where her will dominates, in “Part
Two” Briony disappears almost completely in the foreground and recedes to the
background as the internal writer and only occasionally as a minor figure in Robbie‟s
memory. By yielding the central position to Robbie, Briony actively forfeits her
subject position. Moreover, she turns herself into just a functionary to reenact the
aftermath of the sexual assault, the speechless terror of war, and the unfulfilled love
by which Robbie is incessantly devastated. Through thinking vicariously for Robbie
and her active forfeit of subjectivity, Briony exhibits her readiness to enter adulthood
and her willingness to take full responsibility for her crime.
However, while becoming a witness to her own guilt and her own oblivion,
Briony is simultaneously regaining her subjectivity—a reversal of fortune that serves
only to underscore her crime more intensely. Even though in the second part Robbie
(and Cecilia) is placed in the central position, Robbie‟s consciousness is largely
imagined and for the most part invented by Briony because he died just before the
Dunkirk Evacuation and, therefore, had no chance to tell his own story. The only way
to reconstruct Robbie‟s subjectivity is for Briony to regain subject position (as the
writer), a position that hinges mainly on her words and her imagination. Words and
imagination that constitute the totality of Briony‟s collapse in “Part One” become a
means in “Part Two” for her to revamp that collapse and to regain control through
writing about Robbie‟s collapse. Replacing the fairy tale with a happy ending is the
gruesome and spirit-killing prison and war—two locations that Briony has never been
to and can only imagine. In regaining her subjectivity through restituting Robbie‟s
trauma, the impossibility of representation is exposed. That is, in writing about
Robbie‟s trauma, Briony‟s own trauma is simultaneously reenacted. Her trauma is cast
in her futile dependence on words and imagination to capture the emotional truth that
7
According to Bloom this kind of memory is not remembered in the normal way we remember other
things. Instead, the memories remain “‟frozen in time‟ in the form of images, body sensations like
smells, touch, taste, and even pain, and strong emotions” (6). In addition, Bloom also asserts that at the
time of trauma, victims have become “trapped in speechless terror” because their capacity for speech
and memory were separated (6).
15
Robbie undergoes, so is the unpreparedness she suffered in her childhood reenacted
through Robbie‟s combat experience. Therefore, even though “Part Two” is devoted
to Robbie‟s mishaps, it is actually a reenactment of Briony‟s shame that she is
consigned to a task that can never be assumed.
In addition to the application of the German Blitzkrieg to reenact the latency or
unpreparedness victims experience in overwhelming events, another motif that serves
to represent trauma is the mutilated body. The mutilated body corresponds to Julia
Kristiva‟s idea of the abject or the Lacanian real. As Paul Crosthwaite discerns, the
novel “evokes an encounter with the real amid the carnage of battle” (56). And in
presenting the abject or in evoking the real in this novel, the writer stages a violation
of the human body through “the flayed body, the palpitation of the raw, skinless red
flesh” to reveal its gross materiality (Zizek 116). The purpose of presenting the abject
or the real, according to Hal Foster, is not just an act of “tearing or peeling back—not
simply of the membrane of the body” but of the “scene,” the “screen,” or “the
schemata of representation” (149). The real, according to Foster, is presented as if
there were “no frame of representation to contain it” (149). Paul Crosthwaite notices
that the language of the novel, especially in its depiction of the warfare, is “unadorned,
simple, non-„literary‟” (56). For him, the choice of language is meant “to aspire to a
condition of transparency or self-erasure that would allow direct and unmediated
apprehension of the horrors depicted” (56).This direct mode of representation,
according to Crosthwaite, is not just to capture the reality of warfare, but, more
profoundly, it “betrays an urge to negate precisely the seething plentitude that is the
source of the real‟s threatening power” (57). Seemingly to reenact Robbie‟s trauma,
the mutilated body actually serves as a disguise for “the real‟s threatening power” and
in this case for the reality of Briony‟s trauma. Working as a probationer in the war
hospital, Briony “came the closest she would ever be to the battlefield” (304). The
connection between war and ward is established through her contact with the injured
soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk where Robbie has also been quartered: “Her secret
torment and the public upheaval of war had always seemed separate worlds, but now
she understood how the war might compound her crime” (288).
In contrast to the effect of the German Blitzkrieg which is used to evoke the
victim‟s distance from the real, the mutilated body reenacts the real‟s immediacy.
Through the ravaged bodies, the cruel and sanguinary effect of war is manifestly
exposed. In nursing the badly wounded soldiers who are on the verge of dying, Briony
comes near capturing the reality of the war: “Every secret of the body was rendered
up—bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve”
(304). Through this close contact with the abject, Briony‟s fairy-tale world is
immediately ripped apart: “From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a
16
simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is,
among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended” (304). The abject is
first graphically presented through a soldier whose cheek is badly torn: “This was all
ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and
lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long. Further up, where she
hardly dared look, were the exposed muscles around his eye socket. So intimate and
never intended to be seen” (301-2). One of the most extreme cases of the devastation
of the human bodies is shown in the young French soldier Luc‟s damaged head: “The
side of Luc‟s head was missing. The hair was shaved well back from the missing
portion of skull. Below the jagged line of bone was a spongy crimson mess of brain,
several inches across, reaching from the crown almost to the tip of his ear” (308).
Through these broken and punctured bodies, the impact of war is directly and
immediately felt.
However, as mentioned previously, the immediacy of the war graphically
presented through bodily violation in fact only serves as a disguise for Briony‟s own
traumatic experience. Becoming a nurse, one who can only go by her last name,
Briony loses her subjectivity by erasing her first name—a measure that serves not
only to erase the irreparable crime but also to evade the pain caused by the crime. She
once said, “The only conceivable solution would be for the past never to have
happened” (288). However, in her attempt to achieve self-erasure or desubjectification
by tending to the wounded and becoming a functionary, Briony is brought face to face
to her crime. Those lacerated bodies keep reminding her of Robbie, of her crime that
ruins him or, in a word, keep reinstating her subjectivity: “If he didn‟t come back. . . .
She longed to have someone else‟s past, to be someone else. . . . To Briony, it
appeared that her life was going to be lived in one room, without a door” (288). This
kind of alternation between subjectification and desubjectification is most tellingly
reproduced through Briony‟s interchange with the dying Luc. The loss of his partial
brain makes Luc lose track of the sense of time and, as a result, part of his memory. In
tending to and conversing with Luc, Briony is caught involuntarily in a shift between
desubjectification and subjectification. Even though Luc‟s partial oblivion unwittingly
allows Briony to become alternately the nurse and his lover—to become “someone
else,” yet her memory of the past is more irrepressibly evoked. The word “sister”
referring both to a family member and a title first lays bare the futility of Briony‟s
attempt for self-erasure. Briony‟s literal translation of Drummond‟s title “sister” into
French unwittingly leads Luc to strike up a conversation with Briony about her own
sister. Despite Briony‟s effort to re-orientate Luc back to the presence, she cannot help
but being led by Luc back to her past. On Luc‟s deathbed, this battle of identity
culminates when Briony tries hard to repress her subjectivity by reasserting her last
17
name but eventually forfeits her surrogate role and reinstalls her subjectivity by
whispering “It‟s Briony” into Luc‟s dying ears.
In Atonement war and ward which seem mutually exclusive owing to their
traditional roles as destroyer and healer provide a homogeneous forefront for the
interplay of the reenactment of trauma and the reconstruction of identity. Robbie goes
to the war with the purpose of reinstating his subjectivity: he desubjectifies by
becoming an anonymous soldier in order to re-subjectify. However, the
unpreparedness and the latency imposed by the atrocity and the speed of attack result
in deeper disorientation. In his sole chance to reinstate subjectivity Robbie sees
himself sink with the multitudinous soldiers who wait passively for a safe sail back to
homeland. Ultimate desubjectification occurs when Robbie dies anonymously just
hours before the evacuation with the title “governor” jokingly assigned to him by his
comrades. War for Robbie is actually a physical reenactment of the overwhelming
event he experiences in Tallis Hall. What the totality of war means for Robbie is a
way of burying his past, cleansing his imposed shame, and re-orientating his life.
Nevertheless ultimate dissolvent exists only in the fiction created by Briony. In reality,
Robbie‟s way of bypassing his trauma results paradoxically in a closer encounter with
the trauma itself. Reproduction of trauma is also attempted through ward. Forbidden
to use her first name, Briony is offered a chance to heal through oblivion—a way of
resurrection through desubjectification. However, instead of forgetting, the seriously
wounded soldiers and their ravaged bodies bring her more intimately to Robbie‟s
suffering and her trauma. War and ward are actually evocations or reconstructions of
the conditions of an encounter with the real—the trauma that Briony was incapable of
fully experiencing and processing as it occurred.
Writing as Healing
As the title suggests, the novel seems to be written by Briony the internal writer
as a measure to compensate for the crime she instigated. However, rereading discloses
“a darker secret” that it is Briony‟s confession of her trauma that can never be healed
and her guilt which is beyond the possibility of atonement. Atonement centers on
Briony‟s incompletely experienced traumatic encounter, and this experience is
belatedly manifested in war and ward. The real nature of Briony‟s trauma consists in
her confusion between real life and the life of fiction, and on a hot summer day in
1935 she inadvertently projects her trauma to her loved ones by “ruthlessly
subordinat[ing] everything the world throws at her to her need to make it serve the
demands of her own world of fiction” (Finney 69). Briony‟s only possible means to
rectify her sin would be her fiction. The novel is her attempt to right the wrong that
18
she commits when she is lost between fiction and real life. But Briony knows that her
redemption can never be achieved because her fictional reparation can best be deemed
as an attempt at atoning for a past that she cannot reverse. This secret becomes for her
an instrument of torture, “a kind of madness of the will in psychic cruelty which
simply knows no equal” (Mathews 72-73).
In the therapy of traumatic patients, being able to put experience into narrative is
considered a positive sign for recovery since most traumatizing events have the
capacity to produce, in Arthur Frank‟s term, “narrative wreckage” in the patients of
trauma. For most patients, their traumatic memories are not remembered in the way
normal people remember things. As Bloom suggests, their memories remain “„frozen
in time‟ in the form of images, body sensations like smells, touch, tastes, and even
pain, and strong emotions” (6), and therefore the traumatic victims are often “cut off
from language, deprived of the power of words, trapped in speechless terror” (13).8
And making and recreating themselves through narrative becomes an effective
healing methods supported and adopted by many therapists. Bloom maintains that
For healing to occur, people often need to put the experience into a narrative,
give it words, and share it with themselves and others. Words allow us to
put things into a time sequence—past, present, future. Without words, the
traumatic past is experienced as being in the ever present “Now”. Words
allow us to put the past more safely in the past where it belongs. (Bloom 7)
D. Spencer also asserts the positive function of narrative: “a well constructed story
possesses a kind of narrative truth that is real and immediate and carries an important
significance for the process of therapeutic change” (qtd in Polkinghorne, 178).
McAdams also proposes that “We create a narrative so that our lives, and the lives of
others will make sense” (92). Michele Crossley maintains that telling a story is a
traumatic patient‟s “reflexive temporal grasp to hold together the phases of these
longer-term phenomena and preserve their coherence,” and it is an attempt to
“envisage the coherence of a life through selection, organization and presentation of
its components parts” (50). Since the narrative has an interrelated configuration of
past-present-future, the function of narrative is “to reveal structures of meanings that
previously remained implicit or unrecognized” (Crossley 52). This process of
imposing order through narrative upon life or, in Paul Ricouer‟s terms, “the process of
emplotment” is exactly the process Briony undergoes. During this process, the
alternation of subjectification and desubjectification plays the key role in the
8
Joseph LeDoux calls it “emotional memory” and states that “this kind of memory can be difficult or
impossible to erase, although we can learn to override some of our responses” (69).
19
reenactment of trauma. In the act of telling her story Briony assumes the prerogative
of imposing order upon her as well as others‟ lives. By so doing, her self comes into
being, and her “narrative identity” is thus created (Ricoeur 132). She recreates herself
through her narrative. In the narrative Briony acknowledges her sin and tries to atone
for it by rewriting the lovers‟ ending: “It is only in this last version that my lovers end
well . . . All the preceding drafts were pitiless” (370). This process of atonement or
emplotment coincides with the process of subjectification. As Thrift maintains, “It is
through feeling ashamed and by avowing this that persons turn themselves into
subjects. The experience of shame and intimacy becomes not only „feelings‟, but
affects that could be understood as a form of thinking, a kind of intelligence of the
world” (60). However, at the same time that Briony reconstructs her subjectivity
through writing, she is also drawn back by a counter force reminding her that what
takes place in the narrative cannot serve to change life. Even though she succeeds in
creating “dynamic narratives that render sensible and coherent the seeming chaos of
human existence” (McAdams 166), she is unable to change Robbie‟s and Cecilia‟s
fate: “But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say I tried to
persuade my reader . . . that Robbie Turner died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes on 1
June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that
destroyed Balham Underground Station. That I never saw them in that year” (370).
The construction of her narrative identity actually paves the way for her own
annihilation:
The problem with these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist
achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes,
she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can
appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing
outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No
atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an
impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. (371)
A novel for atonement thus ironically becomes itself a testimony of the impossibility
for atonement. In this way, it underscores and reveals a more profound trauma that
devastates Briony throughout her life, and the only antidote for it is through total
oblivion promised by the diagnosis of vascular dementia. Therefore, to a certain
degree, Atonement confirms the function it affords for compensation, but it
simultaneously reflects the dangers of indulging too much in a fictional world and
lays bare the limitations which that world can offer its readers and writers.
20
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