Ian Mcewan
Critique, 52:55–73, 2011 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online DOI: 10.1080/00111610903380055
Who Killed Robbie and Cecilia? Reading and Misreading Ian McEwan’s Atonement
M ARTIN JACOBI
ABSTRACT: Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel, Atonement, is seen by many as a meditation on misreading, and this article argues that the author not only dramatizes misreading and implicitly warns readers against misreading, but also induces his readers into misreading. Although critics of the novel claim that Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis die during World War II, in fact the book not only offers no explicit statement of their deaths, but also offers good reasons to believe that they did not die. Readers who believe in their deaths, then, are seen to commit the same sort of misreading as does the novel’s narrator: this narrator’s misreading causes Turner and Tallis great suffering, and the misreading by readers of Atonement “causes” these characters’ deaths. Reinforcing McEwan’s warning against misreading, then, is the novel’s illustration of how easy it is to misread. Keywords: implied author, Kenneth Burke, misreading, Wayne Booth ecause of the sinister characters and plots of his early novels and short stories, the English writer Ian McEwan has been called by some reviewers and critics “Ian Macabre.” Despite in many ways being substantially different from McEwan’s previous novels, Atonement, which appeared in 2001, might be his most macabre tale. The macabre has death as its subject and produces horror in a beholder, and a central issue of Atonement has to do
VOL. 52, NO. 1 55
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with the suffering and death of two sympathetically portrayed lovers, Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis, with the former perhaps dying from wounds suffered at Dunkirk in the early days of World War II and the latter perhaps dying a few months later in an underground tube station during a German rocket barrage. There is no description of events in the tube
Who Killed Robbie and Cecilia? Reading and Misreading Ian McEwan’s Atonement
M ARTIN JACOBI
ABSTRACT: Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel, Atonement, is seen by many as a meditation on misreading, and this article argues that the author not only dramatizes misreading and implicitly warns readers against misreading, but also induces his readers into misreading. Although critics of the novel claim that Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis die during World War II, in fact the book not only offers no explicit statement of their deaths, but also offers good reasons to believe that they did not die. Readers who believe in their deaths, then, are seen to commit the same sort of misreading as does the novel’s narrator: this narrator’s misreading causes Turner and Tallis great suffering, and the misreading by readers of Atonement “causes” these characters’ deaths. Reinforcing McEwan’s warning against misreading, then, is the novel’s illustration of how easy it is to misread. Keywords: implied author, Kenneth Burke, misreading, Wayne Booth ecause of the sinister characters and plots of his early novels and short stories, the English writer Ian McEwan has been called by some reviewers and critics “Ian Macabre.” Despite in many ways being substantially different from McEwan’s previous novels, Atonement, which appeared in 2001, might be his most macabre tale. The macabre has death as its subject and produces horror in a beholder, and a central issue of Atonement has to do
VOL. 52, NO. 1 55
B
with the suffering and death of two sympathetically portrayed lovers, Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis, with the former perhaps dying from wounds suffered at Dunkirk in the early days of World War II and the latter perhaps dying a few months later in an underground tube station during a German rocket barrage. There is no description of events in the tube
Cited: Bennett, Alan. The History Boys. London: Faber, 2004. Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. . The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. 72 CRITIQUE Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 4th ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. . The Philosophy of Literary Form. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. Crosthwaite, Paul. “Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007): 51–70. Eagleton, Terry. “A Beautiful and Elusive Tale.” Lancet 358.9299 (2001): 2177. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Finney, Brian. “Briony’s Stand against Oblivion: The Making of Fiction in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Journal of Modern Literature 27.3 (2004): 68–82. Harold, James. “Narrative Engagement with Atonement and The Blind Assassin. Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005): 130–45. Hidalgo, Pilar. “Memory and Storytelling in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.2 (2005): 82–91. Ingersoll, Earl G. “Intertextuality in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40.3 (2004): 241–58. Lamarque, Peter. “Tragedy and Moral Value.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. McEwan. Ian. Atonement. New York: Anchor, 2001. Nehemas, Alexander. “The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal.” Critical Inquiry 8.1 (1981): 133–49. Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” The Ends of Performance. Eds. Nancy Phelan and Jill Lane. New York: New York UP, 1998. 73–103. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. . Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1989. Shone, Tom. “White Lies.” New York Times 10 Mar. 2002. 26 Oct. 2010. . Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Martin Jacobi is Professor of English who teaches rhetoric and literature at Clemson University. Recent publications include an article on Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in the South Atlantic Review and one forthcoming in Philip Roth Studies on fascist novels of the twentieth century. He is currently working on the relationship of rhetoric to drama in the fifth century BCE. VOL. 52, NO. 1 73 Copyright of Critique is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder 's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.