Lisa Napell Dicksteen
Considering Ian McEwan’s Atonement
I particularly like the line describing Briony’s “tragic flaw,” her “failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you,” and would use it as a jumping off point for teaching this novel I think. I would teach it only to 11th and 12th graders, and even then, only to the more advanced among those grades.
In M2 last night we talked about whether or not a teacher should teach a book she dislikes, and if given no choice, if she should admit it or not. I remain of the mind that lying to kids is distasteful, and they see right through it anyway – so why bother. I might let them know in advance about my own experience with this text, telling them that I read it on the recommendation of a teacher I respected who really liked it and felt really bad that I hated it so much for so long. One reviewer said, “The opening is almost perversely ungripping,” and I agreed – even though I had not read the review at the time.
But she kept telling me to stick it out, and I did, and it got better. There really is something in there for everyone – love, drama, family dysfunction, violence, war, death, lying, truth, honor, betrayal, sex, class tensions, you name it. I think that might help those who have a hard time with the VERY SLOW (James Joycian perhaps?) first segment. It will also help those who have difficulty with the very graphic and upsetting scenes of the war itself and the human cost of all that maneuvering.
And I will be most interested to hear what they think of the endings – not a typo. I think there are several endings to this story. First the happy one we all want for the separated lovers, then the distant future reunion with everyone all happy and whole, then the last terrible “truth” – which really pissed me off at first, but which also makes sense in the larger context of the book.
This book also flirts with and abandons several different ways of writing a novel, and gives a kind of running critique on a variety of different popular types of literature. This aspect of the text would be good for students with whom I have already covered some of the books that made the types of literature referred to here famous – Austen, Woolf, Joyce, etc, as well as some of the books from which McEwan takes ideas, tropes, conceits, even events; one writer, Brian Finney, (an English major I think) said:
“it is no surprise to learn that McEwan modeled Atonement on the work of "Elizabeth Bowen of The Heat of the Day, with a dash of Rosamund Lehmann of Dusty Answer, and, in [Briony's] first attempts, a sprinkling of Virginia Woolf" (McEwan, Begley 56). At least one reviewer has seen a parallel between Atonement and Bowen's The Last September (1929) "with its restive teenage girl in the big house" (Lee 16). Elizabeth Bowen also directly influences the form the final novel takes. After reading Briony's first neo-modernist attempt to give fictional shape to the events of 1935 submitted to Cyril Connolly at Horizon, Bowen reacts by first thinking the prose "'too full, too cloying,'" but with "'redeeming shades of Dusty Answer'" (Rosamund Lehmann's first novel of 1927 about a young girl's growing up). Cyril Connolly voices Bowen's final criticism of the modernist obsession with consciousness at the expense of plot by reminding Briony that even her most sophisticated readers "retain a childlike desire to be told a story" (296). Briony's rewritten Part One owes its mounting tension to Bowen's criticism passed on to Cyril Connolly and the example offered by Bowen's earlier novel.”
I have not read all the pieces referenced in this single paragraph of an intesely long and intense essay, nor am I familiar with Elizabeth Bowen at all, but I love the idea that all these different allusions and homages are in only one paragraph of Finney’s text. It reminds me of how dense and complex McEwan’s own writing is, and how much there is to do with the text in a classroom – and I have not even touched on the discussion about how Freud would have responded to the “accidental” sending of the graphic note rather than the more restrained one Robbie “intended” to deliver. High school students have strong opinions about things like this, and are likely to have personal experiences of their own “Freudian slips” about which they can write some reflective pieces – even some fiction looking at the various ways things might have turned out.
Considering Atonement from a more specifically feminist viewpoint, one critic said, “Atonement asks what the English novel of the twenty-first century has inherited, and what it can do now. One of the things it can do, very subtly in McEwan's case, is to be androgynous. This is a novel written by a man acting the part of a woman writing a 'male' subject, and there's nothing to distinguish between them.” I think there are a number of different ways I could use this in class – considering the role and position of women in English society at the time in which the opening of the novel is set (and the way sex itself was viewed – or not).
And then there’s all that great Marxist stuff just lying around all over the pages. Robbie is the son of the maid, his father missing in action since his toddlerhood. The Tallis kids’ father is also MIA, but in a different way – he is tacitly present, but at the office or with his mistress or emotionally unavailable – and when his family (real and extended) need him most, he retreats even further. There is the whole bit about Robbie not being an officer yet being treated as such by his two sidekicks, both of higher rank. And the cross-class love between the daughter of privilege and the charwoman’s son. The list goes on and on.
Here’s another thought provoking quote I got from yet another review of this book (your oblique reference to something in some review somewhere sent me off on a cyber-chase for reviews of his work): “novels are not about 'teaching people how to live but about showing the possibility of what it is like to be someone else. It is the basis of all sympathy, empathy and compassion. Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination'. “ The speaker is McEwan. And it takes me back to where I opened this piece – the idea that other people are somehow not as alive – as real – as you are.
This is an idea that I see a lot of potential for in the high school classroom. Kids are often less sure of the boundaries between them and others, between real and fantasy, between life and fiction than they think they are – I recall thinking that romance, when it arrived, would be something like the lyrics of a love song. Not a conscious thing, just a pervasive understanding that seeped in from the culture and I had to get past in order to have a real life that wasn’t always a disappointment (even prince charming isn’t perfect). I believe this to be a more common phenomenon than I did then – kids always think they’re the only ones experiencing everything.
And, of course, there’s the language. Even when I was intensely not loving the book, I always appreciated his use of language. This is something I might use even if I don’t teach the whole book by giving out selected passages and working with the kids to dissect them – what would have happened if he’d used another word here, or here? What changes if this sentence comes before that one? Why do you think he’s telling us this? What do we know about this person from this tiny bit of text? All these things could lead to valuable discussion, interesting narrative and/or expository writing assignments, and some real learning about how writers choose the words they string together to make the sentences that form the paragraphs that make up the pages that collect together into a story readers can climb inside of and see.