Looking
for Words: From a Shattered Memory to a Reliable Account of Trauma in Ian
McEwan’s Atonement
Dr.
Naghmeh Fazlzadeh
Assistant Professor
Department of English Language &
Literature,
Azarbaijan University of Shahid Madani
Tabriz, Iran
Abstract:
This paper examines how the process of
writing can be a more effective method for trauma sufferers compared to the
“talking cure” approach. It analyzes Ian McEwan's 2001 novel Atonement, in which the protagonist
Briony Tallis moves from producing an unreliable narrative after a traumatic
event to eventually writing an authentic account of the traumatic moment. The
paper first provides an overview of the development of trauma studies, noting
how literary scholars have argued that literature can be an important means for
trauma victims to express their unspeakable pain. It then outlines the
theoretical framework, discussing concepts like testimony, bearing witness, and
the unreliable nature of trauma narratives. The core argument is that writing
can be a more reliable method for trauma treatment than the “talking cure” or
abreactive approaches. This is because traumatic experiences create an unstable
set of recollections that resist normal narrative representation, making trauma
narratives inherently unreliable. By tracing Briony's path in Atonement, the paper demonstrates how
the act of writing allowed her to gain control over the haunting symptoms of her
unresolved trauma. Overall, the analysis highlights the therapeutic potential
of literary writing for trauma survivors, in contrast to the limitations of
verbal testimony and talking cures.
Keywords: Atonement, Talking cure,
Testimony, Trauma, Unreliable narrative
“… There weren’t enough people, enough paper
and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the
witnesses and gather in the facts”
Ian MacEwan, Atonement (246)
For so long it was believed that
psychological trauma is a mere clinical case that can be scrutinized within the
framework of medical pathology. But it was in 1995 when Cathy Caruth published Trauma:
Explorations in Memory and trauma studies entered the sphere of literary
theory. She stated that the study of trauma emerged as a response to the
miseries of Vietnam War and then was given credit by American Psychiatrist Association
in 1980 under the name of PTSD. She defines trauma as “peculiar and uncanny way
in which catastrophic events seem to repeat themselves for those who have
passed through them” (qtd. in Wolfreys 134). Caruth insists on the non
referential quality of trauma and maintains that trauma resist explanation
because it is not fully registered in psyche at the moment of crisis. And
here’s where literature injects itself into the veins of trauma. Geoffrey
Hartman in his path-breaking paper “On traumatic Knowledge and Literary
Studies”(1995) emphasizes the importance of literature in trauma studies. He
defines trauma in this way: “Something ‘falls’ into the psyche, or causes it to
‘split’. There is an original inner catastrophe whereby/in which an experience
that is not experienced (and so, apparently, not “real”) has an exceptional
presence”(537). He furthers by claiming that “Literary knowledge… finds this
“real,” identifies with it, and can even bring it back” (540). One important
finding in the field of trauma is that trauma’s secrecy is devastating; like a
child who cannot reveal his failed exam paper to his parents, the traumatized
victim is in doubt and reverie. Bennett Simon states, “coerced vows of secrecy
combined with confusion about fact and fantasy often leads to incomplete or
fragmented narratives” (713) so traumatic memories which are often disintegrated,
must be encoded and encrypted in a way that is loyal to traumatic past.
Literature, music, and other visual arts can be a language to speak the
unspeakable pains of the victims and restore the broken narrative of trauma. It
is “the capacity of language to establish a bridge between the impossibility
and possibility at the heart of testimonial struggle” (Caruth, “An introduction
to Trauma” 2).
Trauma Literary scholars all believe that
literature, with its figurative and literary language, can very well be a
ground for studying and even relieving psychological trauma; “literature
in general can make people feel more empathy and thus make inroads to
understanding and healing” (Rodi-Risberg 253). Reading trauma in literary texts
has two important impacts on the society. The first aid goes to the trauma
victims because of the literary text which might be the victim’s secret story;
so, literature can provide the language with which they speak their unspeakable
pain and the reader of a literary text can be a recipient of such a pain. Nevertheless trauma cannot be cured unless it
is articulated and worked through. On the other side, later scholars in the
field of trauma narrative warned about the dangers of talking cure and
testimonial processes both for the victims and the listeners which will be
discussed later in this paper. Benefiting from the above-mentioned insights the
present study seeks to show how the process of writing can be considered a more
reliable method for trauma sufferers in comparison to the process of talking
cure. In order to highlight the significance of treatment through writing and
literature, this paper scrutinizes Ian MaEwan’s2001 coming of age novel Atonement
in which the young hero moves subsequently from producing an unreliable
narrative after experiencing a traumatic event, to soothing herself by writing
down the authentic account of the traumatic moment.
With the overflow of scholarship in 1990s
concerning trauma, came in new concepts such as testimony and bearing witness.
Traumatized victims are in desperate need to speak their unspeakable pain; they
need to bear witness to the unknown reality without distorting it. While
working with the survivors of war Dori Laub found out that “the survivors did
not only need to survive so that they could tell their story; they also needed
to tell their story in order to survive” (Felman and Laub 78). In her book, Drama
therapy and Social Theatre: Necessary Dialogues (2009), Sue Jennings argues
the therapeutic role of drama in healing psychological disorders by quoting from
Dori Laub that “Yet it is essential for this narrative that could not be
articulated to be told, to be transmitted, to be heard
. . . such endeavours make up for the survivors’ needs for witnesses, as well
as for the historical lack of witnessing, by setting the stage for a reliving,
a reoccurrence of the event, in the presence of a witness” (qtd. in Jennings
53). This is exactly what this study found in
Briony Tallis the protagonist of Ian MacEwan’s Atonement. It seems that
she wanted to write her story down in order to survive or at least to take the
control of the haunting symptoms of her unresolved trauma. However, the most
significant argument of the present study is to show how talking cure or
abreactive method of dealing with trauma is way unreliable in contrast to the
effectiveness of unique literary narrative. A traumatic experience creates a
kind of clash both in language and psyche; as Caruth clarifies “traumatic
experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves,
suggests a certain paradox: the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur
as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take
the form of belatedness” (Unclaimed Experience 92). Because of its
belatedness, such experience enters into the victim’s psyche in a different way
than a normal experience. Therefore, it creates a kind of unstable set of
recollections that resists a normal narrative representation and this makes
trauma narrative an unreliable narrative. Given the unspeakable and timeless
quality of a traumatic experience Cathy Caruth argues that “the experience of a
trauma repeats itself, exactly and unremittingly, through the unknowing acts of
the survivor and against his very will” (Unclaimed Experience 2).
Years after Cathy Caruth’s groundbreaking
insights about literary trauma and the efficiency of talking cure and
testimonial processes in healing the effects of trauma, a sort of theoretical
pluralism entered into the realm of trauma criticism. Pushing against the
traditional belief in merely pathological reasons for the unspeakablity of
trauma, this pluralistic model focuses on the variability of traumatic
representations based on external factors. In his “Landscapes of Memory:
Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation”, Laurence Kirmayer aptly puts that the
processes of memory and recollection are central in portraying the effects of a
traumatic experience. He furthers by claiming that the process of remembering
is “governed by social contexts and cultural models for memories, narratives,
and life stories. Such cultural models influence what is viewed as salient, how
it is interpreted and encoded at the time of registration” (191). By this
argument Kirmayer refutes the traditional belief in the unspeakablity of trauma
which blames neurobiological and pathological functions for a new perspective
which blames cultural and social factors in the inability of the victim to put
the experience in words. Atonement starts with the story of Briony Tallis
a thirteen-year-old imaginative girl and moves on by depicting how she was
traumatized and not being able to resolve her trauma, she unconsciously bore a
false witness and ruined lives of many of the characters around her. The novel
goes on by the portrayal of her seeking atonement for the sin and concludes,
from this paper’s perspective, by admitting to the therapeutic role of
literature and writing in healing trauma sufferers. Briony witness two scenes,
the fountain scene and library scene which traumatizes her and later she cannot
communicate these events. She is bewildered with the uncanny and unusual aspect
of traumatic event; in the unusually hot England an unusual event leads Briony
into “a situation that [she] has little capacity to imagine”(Caruth, Explorations
in Memory137). She interprets both
scenes as sexual assault toward her older sister Cecilia by their servant’s son,
Robbie. Not being able to communicate what she has seen due to “the secrecy and
extreme difficulty of telling what has gone on” (Simon 716), she internalizes
an anger towards Robbie. One night when the whole family is having dinner with
Robbie, Paul Marshal, and Briony’s cousins, they are informed that Lola
Dequincy, one of the cousins, is being raped. Briony bears a false witness that
Robbie was the rapist without knowing that Paul marshal, the chocolate magnet,
was the responsible to the bitter fates of the characters in the novel. When
giving the account of the rape to police, Briony “sat on one side of the
writing desk” (MacEwan 168). This shows that affected by external pressures
which are not all pathological, Briony was distorting truth and was giving a
false testimony; she was in fact fabricating a story “it was her own discovery.
It was her story, the one that was writing itself around her” (156). Briony was
stage-managing the traumatic event due to some external obligations as Naomi
Mandel challenges the traditional view about the unspeakablity of trauma due to
pathological processes. She asserts that when dealing with the unreperesentable
nature of trauma one must not privilege linguistic breakdown instead of
addressing “ethical obligations involved in such representations” (5). For
Mandel speaking is not merely an act of physical utterance but “the work of
representation in its various forms: historical, philosophical, and cultural”
(5) and this act of representation can be affected by myriads of factors
leading to a sort of unreliable narrative.
In contrast to Briony’s unreliable narrative
resulted from her earlier trauma, writing was a way to release her from the
effects of trauma but in a more authentic manner. Briony’s story shows the
urgent demand for a unique narrative expression for those who undergo a
traumatizing experience. Admittedly, Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman have
achieved this goal by “insisting upon the importance of finding new ways to
acknowledge the impact of events that can only be known belatedly and of
listening to the power of experiences that can only be expressed indirectly”
(Marder 2). Caruth insisted upon finding ways to listen to trauma beyond its
pathology, to express its hidden reality, to understand its impact, and to
mitigate the sufferers. At the end of her preface to her book, Trauma:
Explorations in Memory, she admits that writing about trauma, “not only ease[s]
suffering but open[s] in individual and community, new possibilities for
change, a change that would acknowledge the unthinkable realities to which
traumatic experience bears witness” (ix).
It is noteworthy to draw attention to the
unique structure of this post-modern novel in order to crystalize the way the
concept of trauma is present throughout the plotline of the novel. MacEwan’s
novel is divided into three parts and in this paper it is assumed that the
beginning pages of part one mostly foretells and portrays the arrival of an
imminent trauma, though Briony was traumatized towards the end of part one and
the aftermath is generally depicted in Part two. The narrative structure of
this post-modern metafiction leads the reader to feel “on the last page of part
3 that he or she has been deceived about the nature of the narratorial voice of
the novel” (Hidalgo 85). This can testify the presence of a sort of traumatized
unreliable narrative. In fact the first pages of the novel lays the ground for
the upcoming crisis.
As a curious and sensitive over-thinker,
Briony possesses an unusual desire for order and secrets. Her love of order is
demonstrated in the way she arranges her room and her love of secrecy is
depicted in the way she cherishes her small treasure box. Secrecy is the
fundamental feature of traumatic experience and order is the natural feeling of
a traumatized victim to eliminate the chaos and fragmentation caused by trauma.
Briony lets her desire of order and secrecy fly in the vast vista of writing.
On the other hand, there are several textual evidences in part one that
anticipates Briony’s later entangled with traumatic experience. For instance in
her childhood she was frequently “in need of a wash and change” (MacEwan 65)
and she loved order; this can be considered as a foregrounding for the belated
trauma and how it polluted her life and how it “breach[ed] the attachments of
family, friendship, love, and community”(qtd. in Duggan 46). Her mother
predicted the future traumatized state of mind of Briony when she thinks that
“[Briony] had vanished into an intact inner world … Her daughter was always off
and away in her mind, grappling with some unspoken, self-imposed problem”
(MacEwan 65). These lines of her mother foretell that Briony will wrestle with
“something that must be spoken but remains inaccessible” (Kidd 122). In her
childhood she was conscious about her negative and unacceptable attributes, and
her prophetic mind was alert that “for each she paid with a life” (MacEwan 70).
Another noteworthy point here is the way the narrative structure of a
metafiction can foreground the presence of a narrative shattered by a
traumatizing experience. Atonement is a novel of writing and narrative;
“Briony’s writing, of which we see samples at different points in Atonement,
foregrounds issues of genre and narrative technique” (Hidalgo 85). However,
this study assumes that Briony’s narrative is shattered by her traumas but her
literary written production is a release from different shackles in her life.
There is a recurrent symbol throughout this
novel that very well symbolizes the freedom and hilarity in life before trauma
and the repression and oppression imposed on the individuals after experiencing
the traumatic event. Both Briony and Robbie are described several times as barefoot
in part one whereas in part two Briony
frequently complains about the shoes “that pinched her toes” (MacEwan259) and
Robbie repeatedly suffers from blisters “swelling on his left heel which forced
him to walk on the edge of his boot” (206). They both were free and happy when
they were barefoot but Briony’s unresolved and unheard trauma caused both
suffer from the tightness of shoes, of fragility, of wound.
Trauma scholars believe
that traumatized individuals show a kind of defense against trauma by
attempting to master it. In this regard, Freud asserts that “some individuals
suffering from trauma, tend to subsequently expose themselves to situations
reminiscent of trauma with an aim to gain mastery” (qtd. in Kari Haller 13) and
through repetition they finally master their traumas. On the other hand
Shoshana Felman demonstrates another way in which victims try to gain mastery
over trauma “around and against this woundedness [trauma] survivors keep
amassing fortunes, keep erecting castles. They cannot help but keep up this
relentless, driven productivity, this fierce undoing of destruction” (Felman
and Laub 73). Thus, Briony’s attempt to nurse the wounded soldiers was a kind
of defense for undoing the destructive effects of trauma; “she was abandoning
herself to a life of strictures, rules, obedience, house work” (MacEwan 260)
with the hope of atonement for her guilt and mastery over trauma as well. But
it seems to be a futile attempt because Briony as a nurse was an alien self;
Cathy Caruth argues that “Extreme trauma creates a second self: one sense of
self is radically altered and there is a traumatized self that is created” (Explorations in Memory 137). Briony wants to hide her
true self with the hope of removing the scars of trauma but “behind the name
badge and uniform, was her true self” (MacEwan 263). But “whatever skivvying or
humble nursing she did, and however well or hard she did it… she would never
undo the damage. She was unforgivable” (269), she had to look for something
else to cope with her sense of guilt and trauma. Therefore, she seeks refuge
from the “repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility” (Caruth,
Unclaimed Experience 53) in the act of writing.
The act of writing was
of significant importance even in Briony’s childhood but its function altered
after the traumatic event and towards the end of novel. Her ability in writing
made trauma as a transition from childhood to maturity; in the past she was
writing stories in order to feel the “pleasure of miniaturization” (MacEwan 7),
she wanted to show the life of a price in some pages but towards the end of
novel she discovers that writing about Robbie and Cecilia will magnify their
love in her language of confession. Her story was a kind of autobiography,
Elizabeth Kari Haller states the reason why some authors turn to
autobiographies in her dissertation entitled “The Events of My Insignificant
Existence: Traumatic Testimony in Charlotte Bronte’s Fictional Autobiographies”
(2009) She believes that repetitive hauntings of trauma in autobiographies
“indicate that not only are the narrators discontented in their life choices
but they are writing their autobiographies as a means of providing testimony to
their continued struggle with trauma in an attempt to master that trauma and
experience a true revelation of self” (11).
In addition to that, in her childhood she was
writing whenever she was free, “the wtiting could wait until she was free”
(MacEwan 39). However, after being haunted by her trauma she was writing to
free herself from the chains of an event in which “the outside has gone inside
without any mediation” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 50).The summary of
what this paper tries to convey about the healing effect of literature and writing
is told by Briony in the beginning pages of the novel
A story was direct and simple, allowing
nothing to come between herself and her reader… In a story you only had to
wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world… By means of inking
symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind
to her reader’s. It was a magical process. (MacEwan 35)
A very important
discussion in the field of trauma studies is the necessity for testimony in the
process of trauma treatment. In 1992 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub published a
book entitled Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History in which they scrutinized testimony in wake of
trauma. Laub described the therapeutic process of testimony as
A dialogical process of exploration and
reconciliation of two worlds- the one that was brutally destroyed and the one
that is- that are different and will always remain so. The testimony is
inherently a process of facing loss- of going through the pain of the act of
witnessing, and of the ending of the act of witnessing. (91)
Through
the act of writing Briony wanted to reconcile the trauma-stained world of
fountain, library, Robbie, and Cecilia with her present tormenting world; she
wanted to confess and face loss with the hope of putting an end to lifelong act
of bearing witness. In fact she was in search of a listener, of a receiver to
relief and not re-live her trauma since “the act of telling might itself become
severely traumatizing, if the price of speaking is re-living; not relief”
(67).Without a supportive listener, the victim keeps silence who “may find that
the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially
validated reality” (Herman 9). This silence is very dangerous because it
distorts the reality of traumatic event to the extent that “the survivor doubts
the reality of the actual event” (Felman and Laub 79). Briony wanted to be
truly heard not to be rejected. She had been disappointed twice in her life
because she could not find the true audience or listener to her creations, once
in her childhood when she cancelled her play and once in her youth when a
magazine called The
Horizon rejected to publish her
story. But now in her eighties she wants to be heard by others because
“testimonies are not monologues, they cannot take place in solitude” (70).
Through the examination of Atonement,
this paper has demonstrated the power of literary writing as a more reliable
method for trauma victims to confront and work through their painful
experiences, in contrast to the limitations of the “talking cure” approach.
Briony Tallis's fraught journey from an initial unreliable narrative stemming
from her traumatic witnessing of events, to her later attempt to craft an authentic,
empathetic account of the trauma, highlights how the act of writing can provide
a vital means of processing and testifying to unspeakable experiences.
As trauma studies scholars have argued, the
belatedness and fragmentation inherent to traumatic memory makes it resistant
to straightforward narrative representation. Briony's initial fictionalizing of
the events reflects this challenge, but her ultimate decision to write a novel
that seeks to faithfully depict the truth points to the unique capacity of
literature to give voice to the unspeakable. Through the narrative form, Briony
is able to wrestle with the complexities of her own culpability and the larger
social and historical resonances of the traumatic moment.
The paper's analysis thus reinforces the value of
literary approaches within trauma studies, suggesting that the creative act of
writing can offer trauma victims a more reliable means of confronting their
experiences than the limitations of psychological therapies alone. By encoding
traumatic memories in the patterns and structures of literary art, writers like
McEwan demonstrate how the aesthetics of language can paradoxically capture the
uncanny, disruptive nature of trauma in ways that clinical discourse often
cannot. Atonement stands as a powerful testament to the restorative
potential of the literary imagination in the face of the unspeakable.
Literature can be a ground for the process of
witness and testimony. There are millions of other trauma victims like Briony
who beg literature to mollify their agonies and “to ask how we can listen to
trauma beyond its pathology for the truth that it tells us, and how we might
perhaps find a way of learning to express this truth beyond the painful
repetition of traumatic suffering” (Caruth, Trauma:
Explorations in Memory xii). The final words of Briony still emphasize on
the importance of confessional writing in freeing her mind of the symptoms of
that psychological wound when she says “now it is five in the morning and I am
still in my desk” (MacEwan 348).Confession is a kind of self-revelation so
Briony continues to tell her story; it seems that the desk, paper, and pen
function as a listener who extracts the forbidden words for the wounded psyche
and sealed mind of this exiled victim of trauma. But are there enough words and
enough listeners out there in real world?
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