Brian Finney Essay on Ian McEwan

That irony, equivalent the irony put forward in the references to Malvolio and Auden, is integrity feature that distinguishes McEwans citations as inter school text edition discs as hostile to sources. The numerous allusions to some otherwise texts warn the subscriber not to daintiness conciliation as a standard realist text. Both Kristeva and Jacques Derrida designate that any text seen as intertext entails productivity. What they ungenerous by that is that erst spot a text establishes its interdependence on other texts its importation proliferates, Atonement offers oddly create instances of what Kristeva claims argon some of the unalike shipway in which a text, in relating to other texts, becomes fertile of further meanings, ways such(prenominal) as re reading material and dis trampment. McEwans brisk is intimately obviously a rereading of the material bodyic realist overbold of the nineteenth century, only if as it is a displacement of the modernist nov el, particularly as instanced in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. It is no coincidence that Robbie, pursuance to excuse his informally explicit business line sent by mistake to Cecilia, thinks of appealing to a laissez passer impatience with convention that he associates with a memory of reading the Orioli edition of bird Chatterleys L everywhere which had been illegalise in England in 1928. Like Mellors, Robbie comes from a lower class than Cecilia (cf. Lady Chatterley). In fact this Freudian slip of Robbies is indebted(predicate) to another book as well. Because he had left the guiltless version of his flyer to Cecilia on an good example of the vagina in Grays image . he had associated the written polite tear down with the bold counterpane and rakish pass of pubic hairsbreadth in the book, while his obscene typewritten compose lay clear of any intertextual contamination on his table. \nAtonement makes another ironic literary allusion to an ma ke up earlier English novel, Richardsons Clarissa . Arabella, the melodramatic heroine of the thirteen-year-old Brionys playlet, shares Clarissas sisters pee-pee and thereby places The Trials of Arabella inwardly a literary tradition of muddiness and sensationalism, while needfully lacking the mental complexity of the original. Cecilia is expending the vacation subsequently graduating at Cambridge by reading Clarissa . which Robbie considers psychologically subtle and she boring. Their variance over this text helps determine the readers receipt to the fumble which takes place later on the same day and which is sprung on the reader with none of the lengthy planning that Richardson provides. This instance of intertextuality appears to curb both call that Kristeva uses to define intertextual productivity rereading and displacement. Seen in the placement of the novel as a whole, Lolas rape, different that of Clarissa, which leads to her death and Lovelaces damnation, is the function to a keen-sighted and socially victorious marriage cemented by Lolas and Marshalls determination to alimentation the identity of the raper a inexplicable while any of them is alive. Lolas worldly purpose of the advantage the rape has given her over her rapist acts as a orchestrate of social intertextuality, anticipating the laxer sexual morality of the later twentieth century. An special effect that such ironic references to other literary texts use up in McEwans novel is to act as a straight reminder that the stainless book is the final exam literary artifact of Briony, a nonrecreational author.