1Once known as Ian Macabre or the Clapham Shocker, Ian McEwan now has critics and reviewers wonder whether he would not have gone soft with age. Readers of his penultimate novel, Atonement (2001), may well, like Brian Finney, marvel at “the distance McEwan has traveled in the intervening quarter century [since the publication of his first stories]” (Finney 68) or concede, with Pilar Hidalgo, that perhaps “it was inevitable that, as he grew older, McEwan would leave behind the cool analysis of incest, sadism, and abjection that had gained him notoriety and would explore the power of evil in twentieth-century European history” (Hidalgo 83). Such shift, however, is not part of the critical debate around the novel. Critics on the whole are more concerned with placing it in the postmodernism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—defending it against reviewers that take it to be essentially realist while it is unmistakably metafictional (Finney, Hidalgo), reading it as synthesis of current trends in contemporary English fiction (Wolf) or as exemplary of a new self-conscious drift in the works of established postmodernists (Tönnies).

2Also of interest is the take on modernism, or rather the author’s intended “conversation with modernism and its dereliction of duty” (Silverblatt; qtd. in Finney 71). Briony Tallis, the main character, indeed is a writer whose first attempt at serious writing “owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs Woolf” (312)—as Cyril Connolly remarks in his rejection letter of Briony’s submission to the illustrious Horizon, of which he was a co-founder and editor. She will in time move away from what she learns to see as modernism’s denial of reality and evasion of responsibility—more precisely, of her own harmful errors of perception—towards a sense of the author’s “duty” as commitment to “disguise nothing” (369). But despite its centrality in McEwan’s novel, the issue of modernism is only part of a wider assessment of fiction’s moral and historical duty which is not devoid of self-reflexivity. In her study of McEwan’s “conversation” with Virginia Woolf, Christine Reynier observed that Atonement could be seen as a vindication of the author’s aesthetic choices, possibly in an endeavour to atone for his former disregard of ethics in his early career before opting for realism and commitment (Reynier 108). While I would argue that McEwan’s early works were ethical to the precise extent that they challenged and foregrounded the damaging simplicity of hard and fast moral codes, it is true that the (apparent) move towards realism—really an increasingly explicit engagement with contemporary history—suggests that Atonement’s modernist intertext is actually a pretext for self-examination, McEwan’s endeavour to come to terms with his past as a writer, or that his critical rewriting of modernism is inseparable from a rewriting of his earlier works. Eventually, then, Briony’s rewriting of her own past is inseparable from McEwan’s revisiting not only of modernism but also of his own works.

3Part One is seemingly the closest the novel comes to modernism. This first half of the novel is where the modernist intertext happens to be the richest, with many structural and thematic echoes to works by Woolf (To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts), D. H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley’s Lover), Rosamond Lehmann (Dusty Answer), E. M. Forster (Howards End), to quote but a few names and titles. It tells the story of a fateful hot summer day in 1935—a parodic hint at Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway?— when thirteen-year-old Briony, a budding writer, repeatedly misconstrues the relationship between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the son of a cleaning lady at the Tallis’ country house, as aggression on the latter’s part and, being convinced that he is a maniac, ends up accusing him on no evidence to be her cousin Lola’s rapist—upon which Robbie will serve a jail sentence before being sent to France to fight with the British Army. The kaleidoscopic representation of that day’s events as filtered through the consciousness of each main protagonist gives way in the second part to a vivid and realistic relation of one day in Robbie’s war experience during the summer 1940 Dunkirk debacle, from which, we will learn later, he will not return. Part Three is approximately contemporaneous with the previous one but is now focalised on Briony who, in an apparent attempt to expiate her crime against Robbie and Cecilia, has become a nurse in a London hospital where she tends injured soldiers. Stylistically, there is no break with part Two, but here the realistic surface begins to crack as the narrative turns reflexive, setting the story of Briony’s literary endeavours against the horrid background of a war casualties ward.

4The very title of her submission to Horizon, Two Figures by a Fountain, indicates even to the most absent-minded reader that it is an attempt at retelling part of the events of summer 1935—an incident by a fountain, involving Cecilia and Robbie, which was the occasion of Briony’s first misguided interpretation of their relationship. Moreover, Connolly’s criticism is a clear indictment of modernism for its privileging the “flow of thought” and the—presumably woolfian—“crystalline present moment” over narrative development (312). Briony will not be long to state the case for herself: nothing in her display of modernist techniques “could conceal her cowardice,” no stream of consciousness could ever hope to “drown her guilt” (320). The metatextual here is transparently ethical, but the most significant twist comes in the epilogue, situated in London, 1999, on Briony’s seventy-seventh birthday. It reveals her, now a famous novelist, as the writer of the novel we have just read, which is meant to atone for her past errors—which also involves, we discover, altering facts (like Robbie’s death or Cecilia’s) to assuage one’s sense of guilt by imagining the lovers happily re-united though not yet ready to forgive her.

5Read with hindsight, the novel’s three parts are thus more densely intertwined than assumed at first reading, despite the stylistic shifts, because they contribute as a whole to the critical rewriting of Two Figures by a Fountain, that youthful modernist evasion of guilt, of which they represent the last in a long series of drafts (369). Here, McEwan’s stance on modernism bears closer scrutiny. To put things bluntly, what is the charge? Taking Connolly’s rejection and Briony’s self-indictment together, modernism’s dereliction is, to begin with, its disregard of plot and character. Connolly, for instance, repeatedly faults Briony’s fiction for its want of “an underlying pull of simple narrative” (313) or “the backbone of a story” (314). As a matter of fact, Briony herself saw her work as a reflection of “a modern sensibility,” the “age of clear answers” as well as “the age of characters and plots” being over (281). But, as hinted earlier, she will soon enough see the relevance of Connolly’s objections and her final view is that “the only moral a story need have” was to “show how [separate minds] had an equal value” (40)—which might be McEwan’s view as well, as expressed in a radio interview: “I think that of all the artforms, the novel is supreme in giving us the possibility of inhabiting other minds” (Koval).

6If we take Briony’s evasion of guilt through formal stylistic experiments to allegorise the failings of modernism, then the latter’s lack of narrative backbone and character may serve as shorthand for a lack of interest in—or even awareness of—history and individual responsibility within history. But we may wonder, with Ch. Reynier, whether McEwan is not guilty of misreading and, more specifically, of misreading Woolf’s Between the Acts, a key intertext in Atonement (Reynier 108-10). But my focus here is on the novel’s intrinsic features. Through Briony’s constant misprision of things and events, modernism is charged with misperception and misrepresentation. As the epigraph from Northanger Abbey makes clear, McEwan found in Austen’s Catherine Morland, the young heroine whose vision of the world is distorted by literature and who is led falsely to suspect her guest, General Tilney, the model for Briony. The parallel, however, should not go unquestioned.

7For one thing, Briony’s crime is no mere extension of Catherine’s. The latter’s suspicions of General Tilney may somewhat have strained for a while her relationship with her hosts but eventually is of no tragic consequence, whereas Briony’s errors will, among other things, separate two lovers forever, send a young man to prison, break up family relationships, protect a criminal—Lola’s actual rapist—and encourage further deceit—as the rapist marries Lola. Actually, McEwan said that he wanted to take a step further the process of imagining, as Catherine Morland does, “a perfectly innocent man to be capable of the most terrible things” and “look at, not the crime, but the process of atonement, and do it through writing—do it through storytelling” (Reynolds and Noakes 20; qtd. in Hidalgo 83).

8As far as Briony’s story is concerned, it is fair enough, I think, to ignore her original crime and rather consider the intrication of the secondary crime—denial—with the process of atonement through writing. But allegorically speaking, the unpleasant implication is that modernism has committed a terrible, but unstated crime, which it remained unable or even unwilling to atone for. Furthermore, dismissing modernism’s original crime repeats the de-contextualisation that it is supposedly guilty of. In this respect, McEwan is perhaps too casually, like the seventy-seven-year-old Briony in her taxi, “cutting through the back streets of Bloomsbury” (355), as it were, and one may feel that a more intimate engagement with modernism was required than a trial in absentia. When it is not rewritten in intertexual allusions (mainly in part 1) or overwritten by realist narrative (parts 2 and 3), modernism is as a matter of fact more talked about than dramatised as a species of writing, and so we fail to see how far Briony has outgrown the modernist error because, in the first place, we have had no inkling of the depth of her previous involvement in it.

9This should add weight to the argument that McEwan is really trying to atone for the apparent lack of ethical or political commitment in his early works—trying, as the author himself puts it, “to reclaim” “all the things that I’d discarded, stripped down as a twenty-one-year-old writer” (Koval). This is why, eventually, the nature of the crime does matter, for two sets of reasons: firstly, it has a McEwanesque ring about it which is therefore worth contrasting in tenor and vehicle to the crimes depicted in the earlier stories; secondly, it originates in scenes of writing and reading—which has some bearing on the issue of re-writing as expiation.

10Briony’s error begins, as already mentioned, with her misreading of a scene between Cecilia and Robbie by the fountain into which she reads—that is to say, writes—a story of her own, but the error is compounded with her reading of Robbie’s sexually explicit letter to Cecilia. Actually, Robbie intended to write to Cecilia to apologise for his strained behaviour in her presence, but mistakenly sends the letter’s draft containing a crude addendum in which he gives vent to his sexual obsession with her: “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long” (86). To McEwan readers, this may recall Leonard’s note to Maria in The Innocent, unwittingly inviting her to a bar for prostitutes, both letters reaching their apparent addressees rather quickly, with all the efficacy of parapraxis. But while Leonard’s slip-up will, at least temporarily, have felicitous results in bringing two lovers together, Cecilia and Robbie’s reunion will be prevented by Briony’s calamitous infringement, in which the letter plays a decisive role: because of her misreading first, but also because she will choose to use it as an exhibit to indict Robbie. It is as if the letter’s addressee could not be Cecilia, in spite of her own acknowledged desire for Robbie, but everyone else, from Cecilia’s mother or her brother Leon to the police to the rapist himself, Marshall, a friend of Leon’s, between all of whom the letter will indeed circulate, on Briony’s initiative (178-79). The young girl in this respect is a misguided version of Poe’s Dupin in “The Purloined Letter”: quick to retrieve the letter in the mess of her sister’s room, but tragically using it against both addressee and addressor—or, in her reading, aggressor. This is what the older narrator has to atone for, as if she were the letter’s ultimate addressee or, more accurately, as if she were the addressor and addressee of a letter which slips into the novel she is forever rewriting.

11The scene of writing cannot be separated from this original scene of—mis- or non-—reading in which it takes root. To begin with, Briony is unable to make head or tail of what happens near the fountain: Robbie and Cecilia have been fighting over a vase of Meissen porcelain and accidentally broken it, and Cecilia strips to her underwear to enter the basin and retrieve the broken pieces that have fallen into it. Briony, who witnessed from afar only the last moments of the incident, misreads Cecilia’s behaviour as a scene of drowning and Robbie’s gesture of apology and surprise as a proposal of marriage. Only, the order of events is reversed: “The sequence was illogical—the drowning scene, followed by a rescue, should have preceded the marriage proposal” (39). It is impossible for the thirteen-year-old girl to reconcile her world of “fairy-tale castles and princesses” with “the strangeness of the here and now” (39), of “the real, the adult world” (40) whose enigmatic rites and conventions she cannot comprehend.

12In this respect, Briony is not different from the teenagers in McEwan’s early fiction, or even from an innocent like Leonard. Like them, she faintly discerns tremendous openings in this first hint of adulthood and sexuality, sensing more than she can phrase, but remains as uncomprehending about the world she is about to leave behind, “[staring] unseeingly down the nursery’s length” (39). There are striking differences, however. One is that the muddle of events is depicted by an older self, which creates a distance that was hard to come by in earlier fiction. In addition, the narrator is now a full-fledged writer, intent on looking at this moment of misreading as a turning point in her career: “Six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folk tales, through drama with simple moral intent [The Trials of Arabella, a play Briony wanted to stage for her brother on that summer day], to arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself, one special morning during a heat wave in 1935” (41). It is relevant then that, years later, the whole episode should express “nothing more than impatience to begin writing again” (40).

13The second scene of reading similarly links the impossibility to make sense of what one reads to the need—“the urge” (116)—to write. Briony’s wealth of bewildering emotions resulting from the discovery of Robbie’s note is thus understood as a boost to her writing: “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” (113). Disturbingly, reading the letter appears more of a trauma than eavesdropping on the fountain incident or the actual sexual encounter between her sister and Robbie later in the library which, by comparison, looks rather innocuous. More than the latter, it would seem, the letter reveals in her eyes the latent contents of the exchange by the fountain and with it “something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal,. . . some principle of darkness” (113). But the quintessential horror of the discovery is to be found in “The word” (114) used by Robbie, which throws Briony into a turmoil.

14The crux of the matter is that “she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks” (114) but nonetheless immediately guesses that it refers to a never mentioned part of her anatomy, so that it stands out, at once opaque and significant in its dramatic materiality: “a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams,” “at one with its meaning, and. . . almost onomatopoeic” (114). At the beginning was. . . the Word, a springboard for the writer’s fantasy. Like the elder brother and sister in The Cement Garden, nodding “knowingly, knowing nothing” at the sight of the younger sister’s “little flower made of flesh” (11), Briony seems to recognise something she doesn’t know but she tries to articulate it, actually feels the need to do it—“Order must be imposed,” “there had to be a story” (115)—and her fantastical onomatopoeic interpretation as her anagrammatic juggling are to be seen as such an attempt.

15The genesis of literary creation staged here seems to bear out Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of Emma’s case history in Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology. He reads Emma’s traumatic experience as the irruption of articulation—gendered sexuality—in a child’s universe of inarticulation (Lyotard 2000, 90-91). It is like being addressed in a foreign language that one cannot understand but to which one ascribes meaning: the child is thus affected by adult sexuality but not properly addressed by it, as it cannot translate it in its own language (91). In terms that are of primary interest for our present concern, Lyotard also refers to “[t]he encounter between phônè [unarticulated voice] and lexis [articulated voice]” [1] which “is inevitably traumatic, seductive” (Lyotard 1991, 138). Indeed, the Word manifests itself to Briony as phônè—and, similarly, as gramma—crying out for lexis. So here she is, attempting to write “a simple account of what she had seen at the fountain” (115), but finding herself attracted to the image of Robbie, “calling to her, holding in his hand the little white square that contained the letter that contained the word,” all of which immediately triggers an enigmatic question and a seemingly inconsequential literary answer of sorts:

16

. . . And what did the word contain?
She wrote, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly.”

17As appears clearly, the enigma of the word is the source of writing—inarticulation is a call for articulation—but Briony is as yet unable to translate it into an appropriate narrative, her memory and her writing being still shaped by fairy tale or nursery rhyme sequentiality as witnessed by the phrasing of her memory of Robbie and the limerick opening her first attempt. Furthermore, the young Briony can no more read the word than she can un-read it—and erase in the process her first crime: stealing a letter not intended for her. It will behove Briony the writer, draft after draft, to accomplish both, not by dismissing word and letter from her memory, but by re-writing them from the original writer’s or addressee’s perspective, as her younger self could not have done. Thus the events of that hot summer day are recast through Robbie’s and Cecilia’s eyes, and do include the letter and record its sexual impact on each character. Briony also includes in her retelling the correspondence between the lovers—courtesy of the War Museum (371)—as if to make up for her interruption of their relation or, to put things differently, of the communication that the obscene note had made possible. Ironically, however, during Robbie’s stint in jail, the letters—which might not be in the War Museum and therefore might be a figment Briony’s imagination or fantasies—had to shun “the word”: not only were the lovers reduced to “making love. . .—by post” (205), but any letter between them had to go through the prison authority’s censorship. By a further twist, Robbie and Cecilia in the said correspondence entrust literature with the expression of their desire and “use characters as codes” (204), thus mimicking literature’s alleged function to sublimate erotic wishes (indeed, a quiet corner in a library is a disguised allusion to sexual ecstasy, because of the memories attached to it).

18So the “unspeakable word” (160) plays a crucial role in the novel. Diegetically, first: it serves as an outlet for Briony’s complex feelings, at once naming the unspeakable she collides with and blurring it. On that score, the young girl is heir to a long line of characters in McEwan’s fiction whose knowing unknowingness on matters sexual verges on, and often leads to catastrophe. At the same time, the word seems to some extent to participate in McEwan’s conversation with modernism. Echoes to Conrad (Heart of Darkness) can be heard in the reference to the “unspeakable” or “some principle of darkness,” as if to oppose the crudeness of the language to Conrad’s well-known indirectness. A gibe at the prudishness of Woolf’s heroines is not to be ruled out either, in the context. But the terms of the conversation should not be overlooked. When Briony claims that her duty has been “to disguise nothing,” what she refers to is circumstantial evidence “a matter of historical record” (369), metaphorically bringing together, not for the first time in McEwan, historical and private issues. Which is, lastly, another way of saying that the offensive vocabulary should not obfuscate its self-reflective dimension, as a kind of intertextual allusion to McEwan’s early fiction. But the word, in the process, is as much written out as written off, as I will try to show.

19Briony, at first, could not bring herself to utter the word that she read in the letter—not even to herself, perhaps, as suggested by the conspicuous absence of this essential referent in the account of her reading (Part One, chapter Ten). It compels her to linguistic contortions when she nevertheless has to mention it, to Lola, for instance: “Rather than say the word out loud, which was unthinkable, she spelled it out for her, backwards” (119). So she will spell it out forward, as Briony the writer, but with a backward glance. And therein lies the main departure from McEwan’s earliest manner. In Atonement, Briony looks at her past with the benefit of hindsight—and of ulterior insight, in the passages of imagination—whereas the narratives leading up to The Comfort of Strangers inclusive, even though they were equally retrospective, as told in the past sense, left the reader with a sense of contemporaneity with the events with no such benefit to be expected. This was indeed the main source of the feeling of unease pervading the early fiction, since it contributed to the impression that the characters and narrators had no grasp on their aberrant experiences.

20One may be tempted to ascribe the change to what Brian Finney calls an “escape from an exclusively subjective narrative perspective” (Finney 69), which can be dated from The Innocent. No one would dispute Finney’s chronology, but his phrasing may be misleading. I would argue that although the stories and the first two novels are exclusive, because self-centred, narratives, the perspective cannot be called subjective in the usual sense, but rather a-subjective. Actually, subjectivity would entail the combination of the narrator and of the character of homodiegetic narrative in one entity where the experience gained by the narrating I should alter the knowledge or ignorance of the narrated-I or at least show some insight into his inner universe. Instead of that, narrator and character seem entirely opaque to each other, and thus combine the impersonality of the telling with the subjectivity of narrated experience. Conversely, the rare cases of heterodiegetic narratives in the period considered read like attempts at homodiegetic expression—this is why, I think, Finney includes The Comfort of Strangers in the same group as the collections of short stories and The Cement Garden, although it is the first serious attempt at leaving the self-enclosed universe of the previous fictions. On the whole, then, the distinctive feature of McEwan’s early works is a?subjectivity, by which I refer to his characters’ failed assumption to subjectivity due to a failure to master that tentative conjunction of distance and proximity between the object and the subject of observation that we refer to as narrated I and narrating I.

21In sum, although Briony is another McEwan teenage character caught in the maze of sexuality, there has been a shift from the characteristic a?subjectivity of earlier narratives to an apparently more objective observation of the character’s previous blindness which grants the character as observer the status of subject, at least able to say “I,” in an epilogue with “a tidy finish” (353). For instance, in one of her conspicuous narratorial intrusions, a wiser Briony can boast that “her mockery distanced her from the earnest, reflective child” (41) or take a great leap and project the budding writer sixty years ahead into the shoes of the recognised novelist summing up her career as far back as summer 1935: “Six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature. . .” (41). The self-congratulatory or self-indulgent tone of such observations suggests that their main point is to underline that Briony has found “how to do justice to the changes that had made her into a real writer at last, and to her chaotic swarm of impressions, and to the disgust and fascination she felt” (115), by imposing narrative order on all that. The real writer then has succeeded in turning disgust into palatable, digestible fiction, in rewriting that unspeakable word. Or is the vindication too pat?

22In the final analysis, the process through which the bewildered eager girl grows into the self-controlled writer is more a matter of discourse or allusion than of dramatisation. It is, at any rate, something that the distance achieved between them prevents from being entered into with sufficient subtlety. The full-fledged novelist, it is true, acknowledges that what she recalls is not so much the past events as “the subsequent accounts” of them (41), implying thus that her narrative may be at several removes from factual truth, but the extent of such interference is not made clear, let alone allowed to pervade the telling beyond passing allusions as above. Besides, the statement concerns above all Briony’s representation of her literary career from her thirteenth year, not the rewriting of the related past events. If, conversely, in the epilogue she admits to blatantly distorting facts in parts Two and Three, truth—Robbie and Cecilia are both dead, never met again either with each other or with her—is easily restored in the confession and the falsehood is so deliberate, as compared to the evasions that may define a supposedly faithful relation of real events, that it reads like an apology of fiction as a raising of the dead—and atonement.

23Briony’s novel then discloses a two-fold gap. Briony the writer is separated from Briony the child, and we have therefore little notion of her development and of the struggle it must have meant. In addition, Briony as narrator is also split between the writer’s image in her text, at any stage of her development, and the fictitious writer of the novel and the epilogue, the writing agency. In the latter case, the partition screens off the tensions and evasions pertaining to self-representation. As it happens, the break between Briony’s novel and the epilogue and the irruption of the narrator/author as a dea ex machina, or even an Agatha Christie detective, show by contrast that the gap has little been dramatised in the novel—which can explain why re-reading the novel with hindsight does not alter significantly our first perception of Briony’s experience. We may wonder whether the novel would not come off as well without the revelation of the epilogue. Indeed, whatever the amount of fabrication in the telling, the story of Cecilia and Robbie’s, and of Briony’s interference and consequent guilt is a fiction that is convincing and gripping enough to stand on its own and survive the revelation of falsehood.

24What is left out because of the narrative distance is the drama of writing, the struggle for expression and atonement through writing which is the epilogue’s main topic. The drama was also missing, as shown earlier, from the conversation with modernism which looked rather like a trial in absentia, which suggests a possible intersection between the two phenomena that I intend to study briefly with the help of Lyotard’s notion of rewriting, in his 1987 conference, “Réécrire la modernité” (Lyotard 1988). According to Lyotard, a frequent interpretation of “rewriting modernity” considers it as a process of cleaning the slate of everything that comes before, of all pre’s (pre-history, pre-judice . . .), in the illusion of breaking away from tradition. It is as if “it was all a matter of spotting and naming the crimes, the sins, the disasters” of modernity (36), with a view to atoning for them. To this common reading, Lyotard contrasts a definition of rewriting as “intimately related to writing” (35) and comparable to Freud’s working-through. In Freud, working-through belongs to the dynamic side of the cure, whose aim is “the overcoming of resistance” (“die Überwindung der Verdrängungswiderstände,” Freud 127), as opposed to the descriptive side which aims at “filling in gaps in the remembering” (“die Ausfüllung der Lücken der Erinnerung”). As it is based on free-associating, it is, Lyotard notes, “without end [fin: termination; aim], therefore without will” (39). Therefore, it can be contrasted with the two related processes of repeating and remembering that together with it define the cure. Repeating (symptoms, dreams, fantasies. . .) may be without will, but involves a compulsive relation to the past. Remembering in turn has still to go beyond resistance, that is to say, beyond purely abstract intellectual denial or acceptance of interpretation. Its relation to the past may be too dependent yet on will: “It might well be that the hidden spring of remembering as a process be will itself. . . . Remembering, one is still wanting too much” (38). That is why rewriting as working-through is required.

25Turning to Atonement now, it is easy to see that rewriting modernism belongs to a great extent to Lyotard’s first category, as an endeavour to spot and possibly atone for the sins of modernism. As to Briony’s story, similarly, it is primarily represented as remembering, based on a will to order memories into a manageable sequence. We might say that her account has rather too much backbone to allow for the end-less process of working-through, because McEwan’s end in Atonement lies elsewhere in his vindication of fiction as he has come to see it. Briony’s move away from modernism’s subtleties—that allow a writer “to delve into mysteries of perception, present a stylised version of thought processes, permit the vagaries and unpredictability of the private self to be explored” (312)—mirrors the author’s “escape from an exclusively subjective narrative perspective” or, as I argued, from the terrain of his morally equivocal self-centred fictions. If “the only moral a narrative need have” (40) is to enter the separate minds of characters and value them equally, self-enclosedness is the very dereliction of duty that the author’s youthful narratives may be said to share with modernism. It is tellingly the “self-contained world” of The Trials of Arabella that Briony sees “defaced with the scribble of other minds, other needs” (36), because of all the interruptions of the rehearsals of her play, before being able to spell out her moral view of narrative. Significant also is the rounding-off of the whole book with the belated performance of the said play, which had been cancelled decades earlier, as if to say that from the vantage point of maturity, such self-absorption can be looked at indulgently.

26The two examples of rewriting at play in Atonement thus eschew rewriting as working-through. Stressing that point, I did not mean to imply that the novel would have been better with than without it but to suggest that this common escape testifies to a shift in McEwan’s fiction towards a more explicit concern about its responsibility. He has not so much, therefore, gone soft and drawn back from earlier fascination “for the forbidden and the taboo” (Finney 69) as he has hardened his fiction’s discursive lines to prevent the danger of misprision that fascination entails, as the author learnt from the beginning of his career. With McEwan’s novel and Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans in mind, Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann wonders “whether the English historical novel would not have entered again a period of change in which solipsism, radical doubt and fundamental cynicism are overcome and replaced by a new paradigm” (“ob der englische historische Roman wieder in eine Phase des Wandels eingetreten ist, in der Solipsismus, radikaler Zweifel und fundamentaler Zynismus überwunden und durch ein neues Paradigma abgelöst werden,” Neumann 332). Such a question would have seemed amiss with McEwan’s early fiction but it is a testimony to the development of his art that it should have become relevant if impossible to answer—as yet.